Hacker News

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nea...

https://www.usecardboard.com). It lets you go from raw footage to an edited video by describing what you want in natural language. There’s a demo video at https://www.usecardboard.com/share/fUN2i9ft8B46, and you can try the product out at https://demo.usecardboard.com (no login required!)

People sit on mountains of raw assets - product walkthroughs, customer interviews, travel videos, screen recordings, changelogs, etc. - that could become testimonials, ads, vlogs, launch videos, etc.

Instead they sit in cloud storage / hard drives because getting to a first cut takes hours of scrubbing through the raw footage manually, arranging clips in correct sequence, syncing music, exporting, uploading to a cloud storage to share, and then getting feedback on WhatsApp/iMessage/Slack, then re-doing the same thing again till everyone is happy.

We grew up together and have been friends for 15 years. Saksham creates content on socials with ~250K views/month and kept hitting the wall where editing took longer than creating. Ishan was producing launch videos for HackerRank's all-hands demo days and spent most of his time on cuts and sequencing rather than storytelling. We both felt that while tools like Premiere Pro and DaVinci are powerful, they have a steep learning curve and involve lots of manual labor.

So we built Cardboard. You tell it to "make a 60s recap from this raw footage" or "cut this into a 20s ad" or "beat-sync this to the music I just added" and it proposes a first draft on the timeline that you can refine further.

We built a custom hardware-accelerated renderer on WebCodecs / WebGL2, there’s no server-side rendering, no plugins, everything runs in your browser (client-side). Video understanding tasks go through a series of Cloud VLMs + traditional ML models, and we use third party foundational models for agent orchestration. We also give a dropdown for this to the end user.

We've shipped 13 releases since November (https://www.usecardboard.com/changelog). The editor handles multi-track timelines with keyframe animations, shot detection, beat sync via percussion detection, voiceover generation, voice cloning, background removal, multilingual captions that are spatially aware of subjects in frame, and Premiere Pro/DaVinci/FCP XML exports so you can move projects into your existing tools if you want.

Where we're headed next: real-time collaboration (video git) to avoid inefficient feedback loops, and eventually a prediction engine that learns your editing patterns and suggests the next low entropy actions - similar to how Cursor's tab completion works, but for timeline actions.

We believe that video creation tools today are stuck where developer tools were in the early 2000s: local-first, zero collaboration with really slow feedback loops.

Here are some videos that we made with Cardboard: - https://www.usecardboard.com/share/YYsstWeWE9KI - https://www.usecardboard.com/share/nyT9oj93sm1e - https://www.usecardboard.com/share/xK9mP2vR7nQ4

We would love to hear your thoughts/feedback.

We'll be in the comments all day :)

I wanted to share a web game I’ve been building in HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP called LINEX.

It is primarily designed and optimized to be played in the mobile browser.

The idea is simple: you have an 8x8 board where you must place pieces (Tetris-style and some custom shapes) to clear horizontal and vertical lines.

Yes, someone might think this has already been done, but let me explain.

You choose where to place the piece and how to rotate it. The core interaction consists of "drawing" the piece tap-by-tap on the grid, which provides a very satisfying tactile sense of control and requires a much more thoughtful strategy.

To avoid the flat difficulty curve typical of games in this genre, I’ve implemented a couple of twists:

1. Progressive difficulty (The board fights back): As you progress and clear lines, permanently blocked cells randomly appear on the board. This forces you to constantly adapt your spatial vision.

2. Tools to defend yourself: To counter frustration, you have a very limited number of aids (skip the piece, choose another one, or use a special 1x1 piece). These resources increase slightly as the board fills up with blocked cells, forcing you to decide the exact right moment to use them.

The game features a daily challenge driven by a date-based random seed (PRNG). Everyone gets exactly the same sequence of pieces and blockers. Furthermore, the base difficulty scales throughout the week: on Mondays you start with a clean board (0 initial blocked cells, although several will appear as the game progresses), and the difficulty ramps up until Sunday, where you start the game with 3 obstacles already in place.

In addition to the global medal leaderboard, you can add other users to your profile to create a private leaderboard and compete head-to-head just with your friends.

Time is also an important factor, as in the event of a tie in cleared lines, the player who completed them faster will rank higher on the leaderboard.

I would love for you to check it out. I'm especially looking for honest feedback on the difficulty curve, the piece-placement interaction (UI/UX), or the balancing of obstacles/tools, although any other ideas, critiques, or suggestions are welcome.

https://www.playlinex.com/

Thanks!

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg... Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725 Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!

Vibe-coded a Chemistry Lab Simulator — open-sourcing it (alpha) Built a browser-based virtual chemistry lab using Claude Code, with the hope that it could help Cambridge AS Level (Class XI) students try experiments and attempt past paper questions without needing a real lab. Features were developed with continuous input and testing from an AS Level student. Students from other boards can also use the Free Lab section for individual chemical tests.