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what is hacker-fables fr?

sebastiancarlos/hacker-fables — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

8HTMLAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · hard

tl;dr

A satirical cyberpunk novella paired with a custom pipeline that compiles one markdown file into a book, audiobook, video, and even a man page.

vibe map

mindmap
  root((hacker-fables))
    What it does
      Satirical novella
      Markdown publishing pipeline
      Multi-format output
    Tech stack
      Python
      Pandoc
      Docker
      Playwright
    Use cases
      Read the novella
      Study the pipeline
      Adapt for own writing
    Audience
      Developers
      Writers
    Outputs
      HTML and EPUB
      Audiobook MP3
      Man page and Info

Code map

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what do people make with this?

VIBE 1

Read the novella online in HTML, EPUB, PDF, audiobook, or even man page form.

VIBE 2

Study a working example of a single-source markdown publishing pipeline.

VIBE 3

Adapt the pipeline to compile your own writing into multiple formats with synced audio.

what's the stack?

PythonPandocDockerPiper TTSPlaywrightffmpeg

how it stacks up fr

sebastiancarlos/hacker-fablescvlab-kaist/cats-plusplus-project-pageshihanqu/video-pause-remover
Stars888
LanguageHTMLHTMLHTML
Last pushed2022-10-20
MaintenanceDormant
Setup difficultyhardeasymoderate
Complexity3/51/53/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

how do i run it?

Difficulty · hard time til it works · 1h+

Full audio and video builds need a working Piper TTS install, Playwright with Chromium, and ffmpeg on your system.

The publishing pipeline code is free to use under MIT, but the novella's text and all its compiled versions are fully copyrighted and not open for reuse.

in plain english

Hacker Fables is a satirical cyberpunk novella, and this repository is both the text of that story and the custom publishing system built to produce it in many formats. If you just want to read the book, the README points you to a hosted website where you can read it online with a synchronized audiobook player, or download it as an EPUB, PDF, MP3 audiobook, MP4 audiobook video, and even as a Unix man page or GNU Info manual, both of which can be read straight from the terminal. What makes this repository interesting from a technical side is the pipeline that turns one single markdown source file into all of those different formats. The pipeline uses Pandoc with custom Lua filters to manipulate the document's structure rather than relying on fragile text replacement, then converts that into an EPUB using a separate library, and produces an automated audiobook by stripping out visual-only content, running the text through a text to speech engine inside Docker, and mapping the generated audio timing back onto the text so the web reader can highlight words as they are spoken. It even generates a video version of the audiobook by taking screenshots of the highlighted text and stitching them together with an audio and video processing tool. The pipeline itself has its own automated test suite. To compile the book yourself, you need Pandoc and a few other command line tools installed, along with Python managed through a tool called uv. A single build script then produces the core outputs, with separate flags to generate the narrated audio version and the video version, each of which needs its own additional setup such as a text to speech installation or a browser automation tool. The license is split: the publishing pipeline code is released under the MIT License, but the actual text of the novella and all of its compiled versions remain fully copyrighted by the author.

prompts (copy fr)

prompt 1
Help me set up the dependencies to build this project's publishing pipeline myself.
prompt 2
Explain how the single markdown source file gets turned into eight different output formats.
prompt 3
Walk me through how the automated audiobook generation and word-highlighting sync works.
prompt 4
Show me how to read this novella as a Unix man page from the command line.

Frequently asked questions

what is hacker-fables fr?

A satirical cyberpunk novella paired with a custom pipeline that compiles one markdown file into a book, audiobook, video, and even a man page.

What language is hacker-fables written in?

Mainly HTML. The stack also includes Python, Pandoc, Docker.

What license does hacker-fables use?

The publishing pipeline code is free to use under MIT, but the novella's text and all its compiled versions are fully copyrighted and not open for reuse.

How hard is hacker-fables to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.

Who is hacker-fables for?

Mainly developer.

peek the repo → explain another one

This repo across BitVibe Labs

double-check against the repo, no cap.