Alternatives
Products that do what I build a strace clone for macOS does
Ever since I tested software on macOS, I deeply missed my beloved strace that I use when programs are missbehaving. macOS has dtruss but it's getting locked down and more unusable with every machine. My approach uses the signed lldb binary on the system and re-implements the output you are know from the wonderful strace tool. I just created the tool yesterday evening, so it may have a few bugs, but I already got quiet a few integration tests and I am happy so far with it.
- 1GO
2019 · github.com
- 2SF
I've built a thing! A few months back someone (not me) posted my Mac app Droplings to HN. It was incredibly rough around the edges back then, and in alpha. Well, it's finished now and sparkles like crazy. Please take a look! :)
2012 · servus.io
- 3RS
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
- 4IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
- 5IB
You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix? Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists. I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on. There's an IRC channel for contributors or people…
2014
- 6
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
- 7PU
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 8IB
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
- 9IR
Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 10WB
We built a fully native Swift macOS screen recorder, with a big focus on simplicity, speed and high quality output. We record the camera, screen and audio separately and composite them into your chosen layout on the fly as you record, we get you a shareable URL super quick and you can change your mind on the layout post recording. We designed our online video pipeline around Mac Mini's, processing chunks of video in real-time and the code is shared with the macOS app so we are able to fully render both online and offline. Now that we have built the baseline product we are finally ready to…
2025 · supercut.video
- 11LT
Hi HN! I'm the author of mere.run a local first inference runtime built around an installable CLI. I believe that whenever possible we should use the stuff we already own (like our Mac laptops, decent machines gathering dust, our gaming PC) and the limited electrical power we have easy access to, like the socket in the wall next to most of us. We shouldn't have to send our data to the cloud hoping some T&C will prevent it from being used in a way that we'd regret. Most of the local AI solutions are technical, involved, and land a curious body in some package hell. People are optimizing for…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 12IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 13KP
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
- 14IB
Hey HN, I built Presync.io to simplify plugin management for music producers on macOS. Presync lets you easily discover, install, and manage music production plugins. Read it as "Steam for music production software". What it has now: - One-Click Installation - 110+ Free Plugins - Video Reviews and Tutorials for plugins (in progress) - Management Stuff: delete for any plugin in your system, MVP of updates (very early stage) Backstory: I love music production and development. This past spring, I started Presync to move away from the endless methods of reading/writing PDFs and Excel files.…
2024 · presync.io
- 15KN
2015 · kronosnotebook.com
- 16AN
2017 · github.com
- 17FG
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
- 18IM
I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
May 2026 · snapname.app
- 19KS
2025 · github.com
- 20IC
Read an article about analyzing Garmin data with AI. Sounded great — except I didn't want to send my health data to any cloud service. So I asked Claude to write me 2-3 scripts and a dashboard. This escalated a bit. 30 days and 20$ later I have this: A local-first Garmin archive with interactive HTML dashboards, Excel exports, weather and pollen context, AES-256 encrypted token storage, and a self-healing data pipeline with 515 automated tests. Windows desktop app, no terminal needed. Nothing leaves your machine. I never wrote a line of Python. I understood the problems and made the…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 21PR
MicroPython (lexer, compiler and VM) on the SNES: 3.58 MHz 65816, 56 KB Python heap, 16-bit int. The REPL runs right inside the post via EmulatorJS and also works on real hardware via flashcart. I did this as a benchmark for Claude Fable. When the export ban hit, switching to Opus got the project stuck for three weeks; Fable came back and found the real bug in ninety minutes. Along the way: 23 compiler bugs and 4 MicroPython bugs, each root-caused with a minimal reproducer and filed upstream. If you run it on real hardware, I want a picture!
Jul 2026 · fabian-kuebler.com
- 22
Postgres GUI using the LLM already on your Mac. Free, open-source native macOS database GUI using Apple's on-device Foundation Model for text-to-sql. - betocmn/widen
21d ago · github.com
- 23CA
Hello HN, What is CambiOS? A microkernel OS built in Rust, that boots in QEMU under x86_64, AArch64, and RISC-V - targeting formal verification. Processes are assigned unforgeable cryptographic identity and IPC gates access to only allowed endpoints. What does it want to be? Ambitious. Cutting away latent security issues, corporate surveillance, centralized identity and data hosting, and OPEN. With the advent of the coding tools, building the things we want is a bit less of a lift. Could it replace Windows? Sure. That's where the idea was born. Secure and intuitive, in a nutshell. I've been…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 24AM
2017 · github.com
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