Evidence-first research

[OS] DriveSync CLI for macOS for fast Google Drive sync

Hi r/macapps, We've released DriveSync, a fast command-line utility for comparing and syncing local folders with Google Drive. Free and opensource CLI released under the MIT license, and available for arm64 and x86\_64 Macs (and Linux). Product page: [https://scaleninja.com/drivesync/](https://scaleninja.com/drivesync/) Source code and downloads: [https://github.com/scaleninja/drivesync](https://github.com/scaleninja/drivesync) Or, get it via homebrew: brew tap scaleninja/tap brew install drivesync Yes, it is yet another CLI for Google Drive, but before you dismiss it please try it. It comes with some unique and key differentiators which makes it very fast: * Native\* rust-based binaries for macOS (and Linux) * Supports parallel upload/download streams (8 by default, upto 64)\* * Parallel hashing during diff, incremental indexing (tracking via Drive Changes API)\* * Local sqlite db for indexing & hash caching * Resumable uploads for files * rsync-styled --fast mode (size & mtime checks)\* * Data verification after transfer (--verify)\* * gitignore-style .driveignore rules (to exclude files and paths) (\* what makes it very fast & reliable) # Problem Google Drive for Desktop is useful when you want continuous background synchronization. We wanted something that can be wrapped in scripts *for automation and for sysadmins, developers & power users* that is very simple, easy to use & also very fast: * See exactly what differs before transferring anything * Choose whether to push

Show HN: Claude Style Patch – A dropin Claude.MD section for improving Claudish

Show HN: Zero downtime embedding model upgrades

People use embedding models all the time for rag/semantic retrieval. However, when a newer, more desireable model comes out, there is an expensive (both in time and computational) cost of re-embedding every document in the database. However, I figured out an interesting way to forgo that upfront embedding cost. algo: old model/index -> retrieve top-K docs -> score those docs with the new model -> cache/materialize the new embeddings so instead of rebuilding the entire vector store upfront, the old index keeps getting retrieved from, while the new model reranks those candidates. This works surprisingly well for some model pairs, (i tested 63 source-> target migrations on h100s, on upto 1M documents). For example, on a 1M document Natural Questions dataset, native Qwen3-Embedding-8B: 0.6812 nDCG@10 Qwen3-4B -> Qwen3-8B, K=50: 0.6816 Qwen3-0.6B -> Qwen3-8B, K=50: 0.6638 MiniLM -> Qwen3-8B, K=50: 0.6486 (the hard part is determining k, I held the k constant above to give some sense of migratability). You can install it with pip pip install embedflow and the code is on github https://github.com/arnsri33/embedflow

Show HN: Stuxnet – A reconstructed source code of the infamous cyber-weapon

Stuxnet! Here reproduced by me. Only researchs educations purposes.

SummerFest 2026 is running now with discounted indie apps

This year's SummerFest (The Festival Of Artisanal Software) is running now at [https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/](https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/) This time I see 13 apps there (I think there were more last year). Most apps are 25% off and new this year is CoTypist which offers 2 months free (so it says on the banner). Disclosure: I have Trickster and ImageFramer as part of this sale.

Show HN: HomeCat – Design your backyard office

Hey HN! Ilya and Nikita here. We’re building HomeCat, a tool that lets you design a backyard office space - https://myhomecat.com We started out by helping people design sheds, and quickly realized that many people actually want to build a backyard office. There wasn't really an easy way to do this, so we thought we'd take on the challenge. Right now, you can design a backyard shed and our tool will make it code compliant. It's maybe 90% of the way there, since you also have zoning/HOA and other edge cases. But it does figure out most of the details for you. Right now, it's pretty simple: enter your address, what you want to build (i.e. 8x8 backyard office), and it'll create a few concepts for you. If you like one, you can customize it with the chat. Here's an example of a design that's compliant in SF: https://myhomecat.com/scene/classic-cottage-137134ef We would love for you to try our tool if you are planning your backyard office. As a bonus to the HN community, we can professionally design one for you for free if you comment what you're looking for. Happy labor day!

Timely - The first focus timer that ENSURES you stay focused (Presence Detection, App & Website Blocking, Pomodoro, etc.) [Update]

**TLDR;** Timely is the first focus timer (at least that I have found) to ENSURE you focus! Specifically, it’s the first to prevent distractions in both the digital world with **App & Website blocking**, and distractions in the physical world with **Presence Detection**. It does both of these things, and everything else, for **FREE**. In this update, Timely has exciting features like **Menu Bar Integration, Widgets, Notifications**, and improved Presence Detection. Timely is open to **public beta testing**! The download links are listed at the bottom of this post. All downloads and feedback help massively!!!!!! 🥺🥺 **The Problem:** With traditional focus timers, I always found myself losing focus midway through the session. Whether it’s a quick Instagram session turning into an hour of doomscrolling, or a breath of fresh air turning into distractions around the house. So, I made Timely—a focus timer that **ENSURES you stay focused** while the timer is running. Lose focus, and you may lose your streak or other related statistics! **How do we ENSURE you stay focused?** 1. **A revolutionary Presence Detection** feature incentivizes staying at your computer while you’re supposed to be working, helping eliminate distractions in the physical world! 2. **App & Website Blocking** on your Mac prevents you from wandering into the void of digital distractions. Together, this combo prevents distractions in both the digital world (App & Website Blocking) and the physical world (Presence

Show HN: Gote – a CLI note-taking management tool for plain Markdown

Repo: https://github.com/banorton/gote I built a note taking management tool to use at work for quick note taking and searching. It is intended to be quite minimal. Another focus was to have lots of shortcuts and to keep things close to the homerow for ergonomics and speed. Notes are just markdown files in whatever directory you point it at. The only thing it keeps elsewhere is an index in ~/.gote. If you stop using it you still have all your notes. Tags go on the first line of the note, separated by periods, like .project.urgent.work. No frontmatter. Search is built into the binary, BM25 with stemming, so there's no ripgrep or fzf to set up. gote s meeting searches titles and content, gote s -t .work filters by tag, gote s -w 2412 pulls up notes from December 2024. Most commands have a two letter version that combines a list with an action. ro is recent + open, sv is search + view, tp is tag + pin. When results come up you pick one with a home row key instead of arrows or numbers. Binaries for mac/linux/windows are on the releases page, or go install github.com/banorton/gote@latest if you have Go. The goal of this project was not to learn something new or build something impressive. I simply had a need and filled it with a vibe-coded solution. I have been using it for about a year now and it does more or less exactly what I wanted. So I thought I'd share in case others are interested in using it, contributing to it, or want to use

SummerFest 2026 is running now with discounted indie apps

This year's SummerFest (The Festival Of Artisanal Software) is running now at [https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/](https://www.artisanalsoftwarefestival.com/) This time I see 13 apps there (I think there were more last year). Most apps are 25% off and new this year is CoTypist which offers 2 months free (so it says on the banner). Disclosure: I have Trickster and ImageFramer as part of this sale.

Show HN: HomeCat – Design your backyard office

Hey HN! Ilya and Nikita here. We’re building HomeCat, a tool that lets you design a backyard office space - https://myhomecat.com We started out by helping people design sheds, and quickly realized that many people actually want to build a backyard office. There wasn't really an easy way to do this, so we thought we'd take on the challenge. Right now, you can design a backyard shed and our tool will make it code compliant. It's maybe 90% of the way there, since you also have zoning/HOA and other edge cases. But it does figure out most of the details for you. Right now, it's pretty simple: enter your address, what you want to build (i.e. 8x8 backyard office), and it'll create a few concepts for you. If you like one, you can customize it with the chat. Here's an example of a design that's compliant in SF: https://myhomecat.com/scene/classic-cottage-137134ef We would love for you to try our tool if you are planning your backyard office. As a bonus to the HN community, we can professionally design one for you for free if you comment what you're looking for. Happy labor day!

Timely - The first focus timer that ENSURES you stay focused (Presence Detection, App & Website Blocking, Pomodoro, etc.) [Update]

**TLDR;** Timely is the first focus timer (at least that I have found) to ENSURE you focus! Specifically, it’s the first to prevent distractions in both the digital world with **App & Website blocking**, and distractions in the physical world with **Presence Detection**. It does both of these things, and everything else, for **FREE**. In this update, Timely has exciting features like **Menu Bar Integration, Widgets, Notifications**, and improved Presence Detection. Timely is open to **public beta testing**! The download links are listed at the bottom of this post. All downloads and feedback help massively!!!!!! 🥺🥺 **The Problem:** With traditional focus timers, I always found myself losing focus midway through the session. Whether it’s a quick Instagram session turning into an hour of doomscrolling, or a breath of fresh air turning into distractions around the house. So, I made Timely—a focus timer that **ENSURES you stay focused** while the timer is running. Lose focus, and you may lose your streak or other related statistics! **How do we ENSURE you stay focused?** 1. **A revolutionary Presence Detection** feature incentivizes staying at your computer while you’re supposed to be working, helping eliminate distractions in the physical world! 2. **App & Website Blocking** on your Mac prevents you from wandering into the void of digital distractions. Together, this combo prevents distractions in both the digital world (App & Website Blocking) and the physical world (Presence

Show HN: Gote – a CLI note-taking management tool for plain Markdown

Repo: https://github.com/banorton/gote I built a note taking management tool to use at work for quick note taking and searching. It is intended to be quite minimal. Another focus was to have lots of shortcuts and to keep things close to the homerow for ergonomics and speed. Notes are just markdown files in whatever directory you point it at. The only thing it keeps elsewhere is an index in ~/.gote. If you stop using it you still have all your notes. Tags go on the first line of the note, separated by periods, like .project.urgent.work. No frontmatter. Search is built into the binary, BM25 with stemming, so there's no ripgrep or fzf to set up. gote s meeting searches titles and content, gote s -t .work filters by tag, gote s -w 2412 pulls up notes from December 2024. Most commands have a two letter version that combines a list with an action. ro is recent + open, sv is search + view, tp is tag + pin. When results come up you pick one with a home row key instead of arrows or numbers. Binaries for mac/linux/windows are on the releases page, or go install github.com/banorton/gote@latest if you have Go. The goal of this project was not to learn something new or build something impressive. I simply had a need and filled it with a vibe-coded solution. I have been using it for about a year now and it does more or less exactly what I wanted. So I thought I'd share in case others are interested in using it, contributing to it, or want to use

Show HN: Wg-admin – web UI for an existing WireGuard host

Reads /etc/wireguard, lets you add/edit/remove peers, applies with wg syncconf (no interface bounce). Does not install WireGuard or rewrite your PostUp/NAT. That's all

Bibliome Library 1.5: almost all of it came out of this sub's comments in July

[Bibliome Library for MacOS](https://preview.redd.it/65fiwlmge4oh1.png?width=3364&format=png&auto=webp&s=026046cd1a7bf5825b41b76761b22ce59775c70b) Back at the end of July I posted here about Bibliome, a native macOS PDF librarian that runs its AI entirely on device. The post got 8 upvotes and 51 comments, which turned out to be the good half. Most of what has shipped since came directly out of those comments, so this is the follow up. **What you asked for, and where it is now** Someone with 20 to 100 page scans that were never OCR'd pointed out that my automatic OCR stopped at 12 pages. There is now a setting for how deep to scan, including every page, with an estimate of the time and size before you commit. Two people asked about Word documents. It now reads docx, odt, ods, xlsx, rtf, md and txt as well as PDFs, and you can switch each type on or off and set a size limit per type. Still no .doc, that one fought me. Someone with a capable machine asked for a bigger model. You can swap the bundled Llama 3.1 8B for a larger local one in Settings. I tested several around the 20B mark and they were not equal, so it recognises a tested model when you add one. GPT-OSS 20B (MXFP4-Q8) scored 100% on my test set and is the one I can vouch for. My own machine is 36GB, so I cannot verify anything much larger. Someone leaving Evernote asked about attachments. Bibliome now reads .enex exports directly, rebuilds the notebook structure, keeps the original dates, and indexes the embedded doc

Media Renamer Pro: batch rename photos, movies, TV, music, audiobooks and game ROMs from the metadata inside the files

Disclosure: I made this. THE PROBLEM Most renamers make you build the pattern and then supply the facts yourself. That works for a folder of photos and falls apart on a drive full of media, because the thing you actually need is the real episode title, the correct year, or the date a photo was taken. That information is either already inside the file or sitting in a database somewhere. So you end up doing it by hand, or running something built for a download pipeline you do not have. Media Renamer Pro reads the metadata inside your files, looks up the real title online when that helps, and builds a rename plan you review before anything moves. The.Last.of.Us.S02E04.1080p.WEB-DL.x265-GRP.mkv becomes The Last of Us - S02E04 - Day One.mkv Six media types: TV, movies, photos and video, music, audiobooks, and retro game ROMs. TV and movies come from TVmaze, TMDb and OMDb. Audiobooks from Google Books and OpenLibrary. ROMs from IGDB and RAWG. Photos are analyzed on device with Apple's Vision framework, so your pictures never leave your machine. Every batch is previewed before it runs and can be undone in one click. It detects collisions instead of overwriting, and it handles renames over SMB and NAS shares, which is where a lot of renaming tools quietly break. COMPARISON FileBot is the heavyweight here and it is genuinely better than mine at hard TV and movie matching. It has years of edge cases baked in. It is also Java, it is TV and movie focused, and it does not run on your iPad

SmoothCapture - Create polished app demo videos in minutes

Hi everyone. I built a macOS screen recorder and motion editor called SmoothCapture. First version shipped about a year ago, it is on 1.2.60 now. # Problem A raw screen recording is flat. To make one look like a product video, you either paid for a tool or you exported and rebuilt it in After Effects. The big thing in this release started as a joke to myself: what if you put a device frame inside another device frame? A recording on a MacBook, that MacBook on a Studio Display, the whole display on a watch face. I expected it to look like garbage. It didn't, and it is now the part I use most. You can nest as deep as you like, and each layer keeps its own lighting, shadow, reflection and camera move so a nested layer sits perfectly still until you decide to reveal it. # What it can do * Record screen, window, region, or a connected iPhone/iPad, system audio captured natively, no BlackHole * Or record wirelessly using airplay mode * Drop a recording on a 3D device frame and get a camera sweep and zooms already on it (one click) * Nest a whole composition onto another device's screen, as deep as you want * Trim, split, freeze-frame, music and voice-over on a timeline that snaps to cuts * Export MP4, MOV, GIF, or transparent alpha **The part most people miss:** you do not have to screen record anything. Import any video or photo you already have and you get the exact same editor. I also spent an embarrassing amount of time on lighting this release. The screen is a real light sourc