20 interesting things surfaced from HN on 2026-04-16

Open-source scheduling tool positioned as a Cal.com replacement.

“Our scheduling tool, Thunderbird Appointment, will always be open source” and “We’ll help you replace Cal.com”.

Small self-hosted scheduling tool built to replace a Cal.com instance.

“replace my Cal.com instance with a smaller, simpler self-hosted tool”.

The Cal.com fork commenters pointed to as the obvious alternative.

“anyone who cares would just use cal.diy as they were prior to this announcement”.

An immutable Tiny Core Linux port for Raspberry Pi hardware.

“A very clever immutable Linux distro”.

A Pi-based Squeezebox/Lyrion client/server setup that commenters love.

“the basis for the excellent PiCorePlayer, a favourite of mine to run Squeezebox clients (and/or Lyrion music server) on any Pi”.

An Android/TV YouTube client people use specifically to avoid Shorts.

“#1 reason I switched to the SmartTube app on my Chromecast. No more Shorts.”

Crowd-sourced sponsor skipping for YouTube.

“SponsorBlock - Crowd-sourced skip sponsored segments”.

A tool for making YouTube thumbnails less clickbait-y.

“DeArrow - Make thumbnails not clickbait”.

A Firefox extension for hiding Shorts and tailoring YouTube’s UI.

“I use the ‘Unhook’ Firefox extension to customize the YouTube page. You can hide shorts…”.

A uBlock Origin filter repo for hiding YouTube Shorts.

“Just use uBlock origin and this filter: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts”.

A privacy-friendly YouTube frontend used as an alternative to the main site.

“I deleted my Google account and now occasionally use Invidious with LibRedirect”.

A browser extension that redirects services to privacy-friendly frontends.

“use Invidious with LibRedirect to watch YT videos”.

An AI tool with active users saying it remains helpful and compelling.

Users said they “still use it and find it helpful” and that it is “compelling”.

An AI agent platform praised for being easier to keep working than predecessors.

“it didn’t feel like I was constantly needing to fix it, so at the moment I’m happy with it”.

A deck-generation tool praised for both content and design quality.

“I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced”.

A spreadsheet assistant commenters say is already very capable.

“Claude for excel is already amazing. Fully capable of doing junior work.”

A spreadsheet-oriented ChatGPT experience that commenters want to try and like on complex sheets.

One commenter said they were looking forward to trying it, and another said it “does really well on complex sheets.”

Google’s Gemini app on macOS drew positive comparisons to Claude.

“This is enough to make me try Gemini over Claude.”

Classic compiler text recommended as a good introductory book.

“Chapter 2 is a self-sufficient introduction into compilers” and “I found it to be a good introductory text.”

A short compiler book praised for clarity and completeness.

“Another fantastic intro to compiler writing is the short little book ‘Compilers’ by Niklaus Wirth” with “pristine clarity”.