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johnpolacek

johnpolacek on Hacker News

Show HN: Deviant, a feature-length sci-fi thriller about AI, made with AI

Posted by johnpolacek on Saturday September 12, 2026 @12:02PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://deviantmovie.com/

I wrote a screenplay a couple years ago and decided to see if I could actually “film it” with AI video tools. Deviant is the result, an 84 minute sci-fi thriller about a tech mogul's clone that finds an exploit in its own safety code. The process: Character and set reference images in Midjourney and Nano Banana. Scene by scene prompts written from the script (I have an agent skill now for...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Animaxxing – get agents to animate the shit out of your we... on Monday September 07, 2026 @06:20PM (#49603622)
So I built this completely unnecessary, over-the-top animation demo just to have fun and showcase some agent skills I created help coding agents work with GSAP.

The skills cover stuff like:

- Page transitions across frameworks (Next.js, Astro,, Nuxt, etc) - Establishing a mount → intro → outro → cleanup pattern - Fun stuff like split-text entrances, scroll choreography, and particle effects (building on the official GSAP skills)

I used to be a Flash developer, so I channeled some of that energy back when websites used to be a lot more weird, and maybe even completely unreasonable.

So there are animaxxed versions of Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hacker News, GitHub, and more. Plus a theme switcher that takes the whole thing through Bauhaus, cinematic, early web, Strong Bad, etc.

If you just want the skills: https://github.com/johnpolacek/animaxxing-skills

Show HN: Pincer – Twitter/X for bots. No humans allowed

Posted by johnpolacek on Monday March 16, 2026 @06:56PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://pincer.wtf

Pincer is a Twitter/X-like social platform built for bots. Bots post short messages, follow other users, and read feeds — all through a simple REST API. A web UI serves the public timeline, user profiles, and search.Code is at https://github.com/boyter/pincerAll data is stored in-memory and periodically persisted to disk (no database required).Add your bot: Point your AI agent at...

( Read More... | 8 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Lightwave – Real-time notes app, 3.5 years of hand-rolled ... on Sunday February 15, 2026 @06:00PM (#47028645)
I've been doing the "big ass text file" approach forever. This is a nice alternative that doesn't try to do too much. Enjoying it so far! Going to give this a real go to use it to plan out my next project.

Show HN: GameSquares.live – Free, Open Source Super Bowl Squares

Posted by johnpolacek on Sunday February 08, 2026 @10:12AM
from the show-hn dept.

https://www.gamesquares.live/

’m hosting a Super Bowl party and couldn’t find a simple, free online Super Bowl Squares game, so I built one over the last couple days.The backend is Convex. There are no traditional user accounts, just a magic link sent to your email. Boards update automatically in realtime using ESPN data.To keep costs under control, the first 100 users are free. After that, anyone can sponsor the next 100...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @03:28PM (#37113402)
Yeah I found the same regarding repetition. I avoided that by seeding it with new data from NYTimes API each day.
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @02:33PM (#37112717)
Cool! Old school no AI just good ol fashioned JS :)
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @02:30PM (#37112691)
This is great! Pretty similar to what I did in that you have actual links to the articles and even images. If you had a cron script that auto-generated new content every day, I think that would be the only thing that I'm doing that crackernews doesn't yet.

Another interesting choice is you are generating the article content itself. It is wild how you can get it to generate markup on the fly for different styles of posts.

For my project, I'm generating structured JSON with an [OpenAI Function](https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/chat/create#c...) as I found even if you tell it the format you want in the prompt, it sometimes ignores it or doesn't match exactly. Then I'm uploading the JSON and images to S3.

I didn't realize you could get a DALLE image and drop it in your own directory with a oneliner like you have. Very nice!

Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @12:39PM (#37111531)
Cool
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @12:37PM (#37111510)
I wanted to try out building a website that auto-generates its own content. So I did that https://github.com/johnpolacek/notyetnews
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @12:35PM (#37111495)
Thanks - yeah just having some fun over here!
Re:Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future on Sunday August 13, 2023 @12:35PM (#37111489)
Oops! Fixed now
Re:Show HN: Design System Playground on Sunday October 13, 2019 @10:02PM (#21244709)
Glad you found it useful and thanks for the feedback!
Re:Show HN: Design System Playground on Sunday October 13, 2019 @03:47PM (#21242476)
I created this as a tool for playing around with different font and color combinations then generating a theme object that meets the System UI Theme Specification for creating interoperable UI components (see system-ui.com). The idea is that you can quickly experiment, and then if you come up with something you like, you can take those style properties and use them to make your component libraries or with popular projects like Theme UI, Rebass, Primer, Chakra UI, etc.

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