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·2 min read

Traceshot: a replay of one public Hacker News thread

Traceshot follows the links in a public page and draws what it finds as a web. This is a replay: the Hacker News story Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models goes in, and a web grows from it.

The finished Traceshot web: the Hacker News story at the centre, its GitHub repository, demo page and the repositories linked in the comments around it

Watch the 21-second recording (MP4, 1.1 MB), or see it on the showcase and at getalcor.com/traceshot.

What the recording shows

  • The story links the repository KittenML/KittenTTS. From the repository the trace reaches its Hugging Face demo page, its website and two more repositories from the same organisation.
  • Five repositories that people linked in the story's comments hang off the story itself.
  • Every strand keeps the page that stated it, and says how sure Traceshot is. Observed: two different sources each state the link, as when a comment links a repository and that repository's own description says it is a Kitten TTS demo. Linked: one side declares it. Needs verification: only a name matches. One strand in the recording is the third kind: two web demos with similar names that no page links to each other.

What it is not

  • It is not a live run. The 14 steps were built by a script from public pages (the Hacker News API, the GitHub API and the repository's README), and the app played them back.
  • It was recorded in the iPhone simulator. Traceshot has not been run on a real iPhone yet. The view is a plain SwiftUI Canvas, so it should run on one, but I have not checked.
  • It reads public pages only and never writes anywhere. The repositories named in the web are public and were linked in a public thread.