BlogViral

Show HN: No more writing shitty regexes to police usernames Every product that allows usernames eventually ships the same broken solution. Someone adds a blacklist. Then a regex. Then another regex copied from StackOverflow. It works just long enough to ship, and then `admin`, `support`, city names, brand impersonation, and obvious slurs start leaking through anyway. Everyone knows it’s fragile, but it gets ignored because "it’s just usernames". I’ve had to rebuild this logic across multiple products, and I got tired of pretending it’s a solved problem. So I built *username.dev*, an API that answers a more useful question than "is this taken?" — it tells you what a username actually represents. Instead of returning a boolean, the API classifies usernames into real categories like brands, public figures, places, system-reserved terms, dictionary words, premium handles, and offensive content, and returns structured metadata you can actually make decisions with. That m...

Show HN: Regex Man - short 3D regex game (desktop web) https://ift.tt/7bVPWvl December 24, 2025 at 11:17PM

Show HN: Master Economics Through Interactive Simulations Discover how economic forces shape prosperity. Explore 6 fundamental curves that explain everything from government spending to capitalism's wealth explosion. https://julienreszka.github.io/economic-simulator/ December 24, 2025 at 10:40PM

Show HN: Openinary – Self-hosted image processing like Cloudinary Hi HN! I built Openinary because Cloudinary and Uploadcare lock your images and charge per request. Openinary lets you self-host a full image pipeline: transform, optimize, and cache images on your infra; S3, Cloudflare R2, or any S3-compatible storage. It’s the only self-hosted Cloudinary-like tool handling both transformations and delivery with a simple URL API (/t/w_800,h_800,f_avif/sample.jpg). Built with Node.js, Docker-ready. GitHub: https://ift.tt/mQrcotP Feedback welcome; especially from Cloudinary users wanting the same UX but on their own infra! https://ift.tt/mQrcotP December 23, 2025 at 11:01PM

Show HN: A kids book that introduces authorization and permissions concepts A colleague and I made a kids' picture book that introduces authorization concepts. We work at AuthZed and explain these concepts regularly. We thought it'd be fun to put them together in a format accessible and appealing to kids and grownups alike. It would also be helpful when explaining what we do for work and make a unique gift for our families. The goal was a fun story first and foremost. We aimed to present concepts accessibly but made conscious decisions to simplify, knowing we couldn't be comprehensive in a picture book format. We also wanted visually appealing illustrations, so we built a custom tool to streamline exploring ideas with AI. It does reference-weighted image generation (upload references, weight which ones matter most), git-like branching for asset organization, and feedback loops that improve subsequent generations. It was built with Claude Code. Here's a screenshot: https...

Show HN: BBC2Podcast – Geo-unblocking proxy for BBC radio as podcasts https://ift.tt/OmNWrCR December 23, 2025 at 10:56PM