Alternatives
Products that do what Telnet lunatic.chat – A chat server for the terminal does
Hi HN, I'm working on an Erlang inspired WebAssembly runtime for the backend[0]. Recently I added TCP support and was looking for apps I could build with it. I ended up building a telnet line chat app. It was a great dogfooding experience and has a nice retro feel to it. You can access the US server with > telnet lunatic.chat or the EU one with: > telnet eu.lunatic.chat You should pick the one closer to you as all the rendering is done on the backend and lower latency will mean better UX. The server is open source[1] and written in Rust. The Rust code is then compiled to WebAssembly and runs…
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ssh [email protected] (pass: hn) I did this simple chat with Node.js. It basically consists of a server which listens on a UNIX socket and clients which can connect to it. I changed ttychat's login shell to the chat client (ttychat.js) so that anyone who SSHes into the server automatically joins the chat room. Feel free to fork on Github: https://github.com/olalonde/node-ttychat
2011
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This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
- 8CR
Hey HN, what I wanted to build here is a proper universal layer for persisted agentic sessions, that could be seamlessly interacted both via web and a messenger (Telegram). I really like what's done so far and would be nice to hear some feedback from you. The interesting thing is that I started to use Chatcode during its development as soon it was possible, so used this tool to build itself. I know that there could be trust/privacy concerns, because it relies on a gateway that you need to install on your machine in order to work, but: 1. You can use it on any machine, just have some…
Jun 2026 · chatcode.dev
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This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
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It uses WebSockets for real time messaging, so conversations appear instantly as people join and chat. The interface is inspired by a terminal, but there are no commands to learn. Just open it and start talking to people around the world. Update: The deployment issue is fixed. Open Terminal is now fully operational. If you tried it earlier and it wasn't working, it should work now. Thanks to everyone who checked it out.
17d ago · openterminal-sigma.vercel.app
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I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
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Hello HN, I want to share something that I worked on for quite a while as my side project - www.heahy.com an IRC like chat where you can share various media and even record yourself (using web MediaRecorder api). Here is a thread with short explanation on how it works: https://www.heahy.com/channel/homepage/thread/3900adb9e441a09abc757461 I am looking for any feedback and if you have any ideas, advice or questions I am eager to hear it here or on heahy!
2020
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I would love to hear what you guys think?
2013 · chatasaur.us
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A few weekends ago I was bored looking for a small project. I decided to make a small chat app that supports SSL and can be deployed easily. Front-end: ReactJS, Redux, Websockets Back End: Node.JS, Redis, Websockets Here is the source: http://www.github.com/lgse/react-chat Here is a demo: http://chat.lgse.net username: pick whatever you like! server: chat.lgse.net:1337 encryption: SSL/TLS There are still a lot of todos, but very functional for a small weekend project. Comments welcomed!
2016
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I’m building a chat-first community app that uses Bluesky’s AT Protocol for identity. Current architecture: - Electron client - Spring Boot backend (monolith) - REST for servers/channels - Planning WebSocket-based messaging As a solo builder, I’m trying to balance simplicity with future scalability. At what point would you introduce: - a separate WebSocket gateway - pub/sub (Redis, etc.) - or keep everything in one Spring app until it breaks? Curious how others approached real-time chat systems early on. Project for context:…
Feb 2026
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I'm learning Rust and put this together from sample code over a few days. Rust is incredibly fun (I normally work with Go and Swift). My goal is to see if I can put the client on a development board running xBSD and use a touchscreen for input. Client https://github.com/zkirill/thor Server https://github.com/zkirill/odin You need Rust 1.7.0 and Cargo 0.9.0 to compile. The package for FreeBSD doesn't currently go that high so you need to use a port (instructions at https://gist.github.com/zkirill/4fb42b4ba4b7cc58c4f0) Packages of…
2016
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This is far from complete, and I am far from an elisp genius, but this is an Emacs package to help you write code or text or whatever in your favourite operating system slash text editor. It's got a couple of useful functions like inserting at point with local code context, querying about something and putting the output in a temporary buffer, passing the current major mode to ChatGPT, contextual system prompts, and so on. Some small demos in the readme. Some of you may enjoy the deep magic this might unleash, so I'm posting it here. And feel free to add pull requests if you are a better…
2023 · github.com
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We have been using GPT to write code since playground days. This UI avoids logins, gpt-4 throttling and is also cheaper to use than ChatGPT Premium. We also have various features to minimize costs and speed up iteration. Furthermore html & mermaid previews are a taste of the kind of features help-yourself opensource model enables vs official UI. For backstory see our blog posts: https://blog.humphd.org/chatcraft-org/ https://taras.glek.net/post/chatcraft.org-opensourcechatgpt-...
2023 · chatcraft.org
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TLDR: Check out our documentation search here: https://xata.io/docs/overview Hello HN. I'm a designer over at Xata. We build a serverless database platform on top of Postgres and Elastic-like search that provides goodies like a native TypeScript client for type support in your IDE. Long story short, we're trying to bundle all the normal stuff you need out of a database along with branching, so you don't have to glue everything together. Today we added a new /ask/ endpoint to our search product that bundles in ChatGPT support into any stored data. Why would you…
2023 · xata.io
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Hi HN! This Christmas I made `tysm`, a rust crates which simplifies using ChatGPT with Structured Outputs. Essentially you just tell it the rust type you want the output to conform to, and it handles creating the JSON Schema, passing it to ChatGPT's chat-completions API, and deserializing the response. Structured Outputs are very useful because they guarantee that the response will conform to whatever type you expect. I'm already finding my crate very useful since I love using Structured Outputs but I hate writing JSON Schemas myself. Technical details for rust heads: To generate the JSON…
2024 · github.com
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I hereby present my little tiny pet project that entertained me for the past six months. In this post, I briefly present Maginet and its technical components. It is a turn-based strategy game that is built using Rust and compiles to WebAssembly with HTML5 bindings, which works on mobile and desktop alike! It comes with many game mechanics and components, including an AI opponent and online cross-platform multiplayer. There is so much to discuss even for a project of a smaller scale, but I am nevertheless excited to share a little bit about how you can actually build a game in Rust,…
2023 · evrim.zone
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Hi HN! I recently open-sourced a project I’ve been working on over my winter break: a Solidity web framework you can use to write web apps in Solidity (and more generally, a proof-of-concept implementation of an arbitrary network protocol over Ethereum). Here’s a demo web app on the Optimism Goerli testnet: http://simple.fallback.natecation.xyz/ Running this Solidity code: https://github.com/nathanhleung/fallback/blob/main/src/examp... There’s a lightweight TCP server script that’s listening on the demo app domain that forwards requests…
2022 · github.com
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I recently finished a round of tweaks on my barebones mud-server and thought HN might be interested. https://github.com/endgame/MudCore It sits somewhere between socketmud and a full mud like tbamud in that it handles all the socket work and telnet negotiation, but it makes no assumptions about anything else. The other interesting thing is that it can talk to other services using ZeroMQ. I'm interested in reactions, particularly in terms of coding style, documentation quality and so on. It's my main "presentation piece" so far, in that it's some of the first code I actually feel proud to…
2012
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This is a userscript that you can use with Tampermonkey, or paste it to JS console. I generated it with o1-preview, simply by pasting the HTML source of a HN page to the prompt and asking it to make a comment updating script. And it worked flawlessly — great job, OpenAI! I'm impressed. What a time to be alive! The prompt: https://chatgpt.com/share/66eb36c5-a55c-8005-9ee1-d42770297d... The script fetches new comments every 10 seconds and inserts them to a proper place in the DOM, highlighting them with a nice color. With this script, HN feels like a realtime chat in busy…
2024 · gist.github.com
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