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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine

Hi All. I made this as an fun intro to help people who have zero IBM mainframe experience and no access to a modern IBM mainframe (at least, not access to do whatever you want with it). I appreciate tips, suggestions and anything that might improve the experience for someone who has no idea of how those machines operate(d).

Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine is an introductory guide for people new to IBM mainframe computing who lack access to modern systems. It offers practical activities and information about how mainframes… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

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    Finally got my hobby OS up and running on real hardware. I love the old IBM thinkpads, so thought it was the perfect machine to get it working on. Been working on it for quite some time now, but this has been a big milestone!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…

    2024 · lanparty.house · its alternatives →

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    "interesting" VM in C. Let's see how this goes. Contribute to tekknolagi/carp development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hi everyone, I'm kinda involved in some retrogaming and with some experiments I ran into the following question: "It would be possible to run transformer models bypassing the cpu/ram, connecting the gpu to the nvme?" This is the result of that question itself and some weekend vibecoding (it has the linked library repository in the readme as well), it seems to work, even on consumer gpus, it should work better on professional ones tho

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    My implementation of Thorsten Bell's book (Writing an Interpreter in Go) - actuallyachraf/monkey-giggle

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    HVM1 (2022): a massively parallel, optimal functional runtime in Rust - HigherOrderCO/HVM1

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

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    hey guys. the other day i was migrating hosting providers and i just needed something not too heavy and convenient to spin up my backups for awhile and realised there is almost nothing out there. kimchi hasn't been updated for years and cockpit is heavy. so here's something i came up with in a couple hours because of a sudden urge, nothing fancy just basic creation with cloud init, lifecycle management and image/storage, but it's modern-ish and it compiles to a 8.4mb binary inclusive of the embedded web UI, CLI and API, and only dep is libvirt.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Create microVMs from OCI images. Contribute to slp/krunvm development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Build and run tiny vms from Dockerfiles. Small and sleek. - GitHub - ottomatica/slim at 2.x

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    A demonstration of ways to implement 'threaded code,' a technique used in Forth and in virtual machines like the JVM. - shadowofneptune/threaded-code-benchmark

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12AF

    Another Sunday afternoon project: add some pizzaz to your boring bare metal or virtual machine consoles! Written as a single Go binary; no dependencies. https://github.com/Fusion/modernfbv As usual, feedback please!

    2022 · its alternatives →

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    Programming the oldschool way! Hack 1000+ Apple II apps!

    2016 · its alternatives →

  14. 14CI

    One of the most frequent questions one faces while running LLMs locally is: I have xx RAM and yy GPU, Can I run zz LLM model ? I have vibe coded a simple application to help you with just that. Update: A lot of great feedback for me to improve the app. Thank you all.

    2025 · can-i-run-this-llm-blue.vercel.app · its alternatives →

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    I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Dev's offline page is fun and we did implement it with Rust and WebAssembly. Go is simple. Can we d... Tagged with go, webassembly, showdev.

    2019 · dev.to · its alternatives →

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    Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

    2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19NP

    Since it appears to be retrocomputing day on HN, I thought I'd post my pet project. It's a collection of modern peripherals for retrocomputers. I started collecting a list of upgrades for my ideal dream Mac SE/30 and grew from there. The site is currently mostly focused on Apple II and Mac stuff since that's what I grew up with.

    Aug 2026 · newold.computer · its alternatives →

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    Just wanted to make my first post about something interesting I've been working on for some time. Any ideas/suggestions for new hardware or software I should try out are welcome, though I will only have time for a major overhaul in a month or two where I want to redo and document everything a bit better than how it is currently. Hope this can inspire someone to start their own homelab or give some ideas to already existing ones!

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!

    2025 · caniusellm.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22IM

    So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/

    2016 · its alternatives →

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    Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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