Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to My open-source liquid handler ( biohacking )
Excuse my typing, I've just been up for a few hours and I've made my deadline for SB 5.0 =] ... but for HN.. you guys get it early I present to you my fellow hackers: https://github.com/delinquentme/LH001 ....I call it the 'LH001' , it is: open source, arduino based, 96 well microplate, peristaltic pump, liquid handler running: open protocol controls ( in browser or over wire ), In Ruby on Rails And here it is in person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY5IY5CZ1es Questions? Critiques? Thoughts? So, do I have HN's permission to change my twitter bio to include "biohacker" ?
LH001 is an open-source automated liquid handler designed for laboratory work with 96-well microplates. Built on Arduino with peristaltic pump technology, it automates the pipetting process for high-throughput liquid… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. My open-source liquid handler ( biohacking ) launched in 2011; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
Aug 2026 · cactuscompute.com · its alternatives →
- 4
TensorZero▲307Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5WM
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 →
- 6

Hey HN, I'm really proud to share with you my new open source project: Kestra https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra I created a few years ago a successful open source AKHQ project: https://github.com/tchiotludo/akhq (renamed from KafkaHQ) which has been adopted by big companies like Best Buy, Pipedrive, BMW, Decathlon and many more. 2300 stars, 120 contributors, 10M docker downloads, much more than I expected. Now let's talk about Kestra, an infinitely scalable orchestration and scheduling platform for creating, running, scheduling and monitoring…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Open hardware to measure EC and pH, drive pumps, and otherwise manage a mid-size hydroponic grow over Wi-Fi. - hydromisc/hydromisc
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9BA
I'm 17 and recently launched a private beta for Biohack - a tool that scans food products and gives a longevity score based on impact on aging factors such as inflammation, omega ratio, toxins and more. Still early and a bit rough, but I'm looking for honest feedback from people who care about health span and deep nutrition. Would love your thoughts.
2025 · getbiohack.app · its alternatives →
- 10

It uses claude code with GLM-6 model which is cheap yet powerful for most of the cases. for deployment Cloudflare Workers. It is a 2 weeks of hard work! Lemme know what you think!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Hello Hacker News, I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is. In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects using HPC (with millions of jobs, thousands of them running in parallel). The major differences are that: - dependencies are automatically tracked (no need to call gcc -M and the like, no need to be tailored to any specific tool, it just works) by spying disk activity - it is…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12HC
Hi guys, long time lurker, first time (non-comment) submission. I've been working on homebrewvault.com (mostly nights) for what seems like forever. I'm just about finished with the core product and am almost ready to do some promotion. I've always followed the "Show HN" submissions because they seem to produce really valuable feedback. So before I take the plunge, I'd love to hear what you guys think. I'm also going with the "if you aren't embarrassed by your first release, you aren't releasing early enough" philosophy I first learned of here. For a little more background: As a homebrewer of…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 13

Flowpipe [1] is a new open source [2] cloud scripting engine from Turbot [3]. Some of you may already use Steampipe [4], our open-source [5] tool to live query cloud APIs. We believe DevOps teams need an easier way to orchestrate their cloud, build workflows and respond to events. But - because it's DevOps - that must be in code. In Flowpipe, pipelines are written in HCL and use simple primitives for HTTP requests, executing containers, running Lambda-compatible functions, querying databases like Steampipe and more. We have also published a large ecosystem of open source Flowpipe Mods [6].…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2019 · none.com · its alternatives →
- 15

I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16

Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17

Heya HN, after spending +1 year building an ML-driven analytics product (that didn't pan out unfortunately), I've pivoted to solving a problem my team and I found while building the previous product … why the hell is it so hard to move a model from a Jupyter notebook, to a development server, then to a production pipeline!? To solve this my team and I started the open source KitOps project under the Apache 2 license. KitOps includes the Kit CLI that uses a Kitfile manifest to create ModelKits: 1. The kit CLI packages your model, datasets, code, and configuration into an OCI compliant…
2024 · kitops.ml · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Apache Flink is a beast for heavy-duty stream processing – no doubt about it. We've used it, admired its power, and it heavily influenced our thinking. But let's be honest: for a lot of common, everyday stream processing tasks, Flink (and similar frameworks) can feel like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. The operational overhead and complexity for simpler, stateless jobs often outweigh the benefits. That's why we built ZephFlow. What is ZephFlow? ZephFlow is a stream processing framework built for lightweight operations and simplicity. It distills the core principles of…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
- 20VI
This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →
- 21

Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
Aug 2026 · toolpool.garden · its alternatives →
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Over the past few months, I have built a distillation toolkit that supports cross-tokenizer distillation (e.g., distilling from LLaMA to Qwen vocab, or others). This approach has worked well on reasoning datasets like AIME, and we’ve validated on models like Phi and Qwen. We’ve also integrated Modal for quick deployment (with $30/month credits to try it out). Would love any feedback! GitHub: https://github.com/agokrani/distillKitPlus Docs: https://distillkitplus.mintlify.app/
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- Kestra - Open-Source Airflow Alternative alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →