20 interesting things surfaced from HN on 2026-04-19

A terminal app for following MLB games.

The Faceoff author said the project was inspired by Playball, a similar terminal application for following MLB games.

A note workspace praised for heavy use and integrations.

A commenter said they love Notion, use it heavily, and have built integrations for it.

A self-hosted Notion alternative for docs and wikis.

A commenter said Outline has everything they could ask for from a Notion alternative.

An open-source note app with SQLite and automatic backups.

The comment explicitly recommended Trilium and called out SQLite plus daily and weekly backups.

A self-hosted Notion and Confluence alternative.

The author said Docmost is open-source, easy to self-host, and feature-packed.

A laptop-to-typewriter OS for distraction-free writing.

A commenter said they flashed an old MacBook Air with writerdeckOS and it feels like a digital typewriter.

A Photoshop-like web playground for shaders.

A commenter said to check out Shader Lab and shaders.com for creative shader effects.

An ALSA utility for retasking audio jacks.

A comment said to use hdajackretask from alsa-tools to retask the jacks.

A minimal terminal coding harness with extensions and skills.

A commenter said pi-coding-agent / pi.dev is also great.

Secure cloud sandboxes for AI agents and code execution.

A commenter said they used E2B to do some basic research.

A train simulator recommended in the Japan railways thread.

The railways discussion pointed to Hmmsim 2 as a notable simulator.

Google’s open model family for lightweight AI apps.

A commenter said the Gemma models really are amazing.

A complete BYTE magazine scan archive starting in 1975.

A commenter called BYTE their favourite magazine and said they learned a tremendous deal from it.

A beginner-friendly Common Lisp book for symbolic computation.

The comment suggested starting with Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation.

A classic book for learning Forth.

A commenter named Starting Forth as an ANS-version recommendation.

Peter Norvig’s AI programming textbook and code companion.

A commenter said they would jump into PAIP, Paradigms of AI Programming.

A beginner-friendly Scheme textbook.

The comment listed Simply Scheme among the starter Scheme books.

A compiler framework for clean language implementation.

A commenter said they used the Nanopass framework and loved it.

Donald Shoup’s parking policy book and preface PDF.

A commenter pointed readers to the free preface PDF for The High Price of Free Parking.

YouTube restorations of vintage electronics and early computers.

A commenter linked CuriousMarc’s videos as a relevant follow-up.