BlogViral

Show HN: Data from a mixed-brand LiFePO₄ battery bank Hi HN — I’m sharing an empirical, long-term dataset from a DIY energy-storage project that ended up testing a common assumption in battery design. Conventional advice says never mix battery brands. That guidance is well-founded for series strings, but there’s surprisingly little data on purely parallel configurations. I built a 12 V, 500 Ah LiFePO₄ battery bank (1S5P) using mixed-brand cells and instrumented it for continuous monitoring over 73+ days, including high-frequency voltage sampling. The goal was to see whether cell-level differences actually manifest over time in a parallel topology. What the data shows No progressive voltage divergence across the observation period Voltage spread remained within ~10–15 mV Measured Peukert exponent ≈ 1.00 Thermal effects were small relative to instrumentation noise In practice, the parallel architecture appears to force electrical convergence when interconnect resistance is low. I’ve been...

Show HN: DebtBomb – Make TODOs expire and automatically create Jira tickets Hi HN, In most codebases I’ve worked on, temporary hacks (“TODO: remove later”, “just for this release”) slowly become permanent. Nobody remembers why they exist, but they keep shipping to production. I built a small CLI called DebtBomb to make that explicit. Instead of free-form TODOs, you attach an expiry date to temporary code. When the date passes, CI fails until the code is removed or the expiry is intentionally extended. Recently I added integrations so expired debt bombs don’t just fail CI — they become visible and owned: When a debt bomb expires, DebtBomb can automatically create a Jira ticket with file path, owner, reason, and code snippet. It can also notify Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams. You can configure “expiring soon” warnings (e.g., 7 days before) so it’s not just a surprise break. Repo: https://ift.tt/LoHnE8d This is still early and I’m mainly trying to validate whether this actually improv...

Show HN: Sidecar – AI Social Manager (Analyzes past hits to write new posts) Hi HN, I built Sidecar ( https://sidecar.bz ) because I was having issues maintaining a social media presence for my last startup. I would spend a lot of time trying to create content, but I often froze up or burned out, and the marketing died. How it works: Instead of guessing what to write, Sidecar connects to your existing accounts (Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram) and analyzes your past posts to see what actually worked. It uses that data to generate weeks of new, text-based content that mimics your successful posts, which you can then bulk schedule in one go. I’d love to hear what you think of Sidecar. You can use code HNLAUNCH for a free month if you want to test the ai features. https://ift.tt/Pe8E7SG January 13, 2026 at 12:18AM

Show HN: AI in SolidWorks Hey HN! We’re Will and Jorge, and we’ve built LAD (Language-Aided Design), a SolidWorks add-in that uses LLMs to create sketches, features, assemblies, and macros from conversational inputs ( https://www.trylad.com/ ). We come from software engineering backgrounds where tools like Claude Code and Cursor have come to dominate, but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. In our testing, the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code, but we think they'll get a lot better in the upcoming months and years. To bridge this gap, we've created LAD, an add-in in SolidWorks to turn conversational input and uploaded documents/images into parts, assemblies, and macros. It includes: - Dozens of tools the LLM can call to create sketches, features, and other objects in parts. - Assembly tools the LLM can call to t...

Show HN: Pane – An agent that edits spreadsheets Hi HN, I built Pane, a spreadsheet-native agent that operates directly on the grid (cells, formulas, references, ranges) instead of treating spreadsheets as text. Most spreadsheet AI tools fail because they: - hallucinate formulas - lose context across edits - can't reliably modify existing models Pane runs inside the spreadsheet environment and uses the same primitives a human would: selecting cells, editing formulas, inserting ranges, reconciling tables. I launched it on Product Hunt this weekend and it unexpectedly resonated, which made me curious whether this approach actually holds up under scrutiny. I'd love feedback on: - obvious failure modes you expect - whether this is fundamentally better than scripts + formulas + copilots Happy to answer technical questions. https://paneapp.com January 12, 2026 at 10:41PM

Show HN: words.zip – Massively infinite word search Hi HN! This is a word search game I launched in the beginning of this year - didn't get much traction then, but it's been posted around a bit (right now getting some traffic from kottke.org) and now has over 12,000 words found! Now that it's a little more filled out I figured I'd share it again. Really enjoying seeing what everyone is making on it - it appears most people start by just adding a few words to the big clump in the middle, then adding to other people's projects (or ruining them) and finally working on their own little concepts. My favorite is the kitty to the north. Hope you enjoy! https://words.zip/ January 12, 2026 at 09:22PM