MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Cronus – A Beautiful, Multilingual Cron Expression Editor
by hatsu | 2025-07-27 15:45:45+00:00
I’ve built Cronus, a tool that makes it easier to write and understand cron expressions across different languages and time zones.

It shows human‑readable explanations of your cron jobs and adapts to multiple locales and time zones. You can preview schedules, tweak them visually, and copy/paste cron syntax for various environments.

I’d love feedback from folks who deal with cron jobs regularly—what’s missing, what would make it more powerful, and whether this solves any pain points you’ve had.
by W3zzy | 2025-07-27 15:46:06+00:00
It's old stats and - coming from Android authority - the response group is literate when it comes to Android phones but from their 2020 survey 35% claimed to have auto updates of.

https://www.androidauthority.com/auto-update-apps-google-pla...

Then, on a worldwide scale, you can see that a lot of people are running unsupported Android versions.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android

Yes, there is no guarantee they a web app is more secure or up to date but tge likelyhood is far greater as it's a developer's responsibility and not the end consumer.
by monruhaqq | 2025-07-27 15:46:28+00:00
Hey, you have a github or maybe just briefly expand on something for me, I'm interested in the luckfox pico bootloader you wrote and separately using it as USB via raw gadget which are things you've talked about last year, these are things I'm actually wanting to do with my otherwise untouched LF. (was planning on writing a poc for 2024-53197 (iirc that's the cve)

I may be looking in the wrong place but your comment was one of the few things I came across referencing LF + usb gadget.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-07-27 15:46:56+00:00
Spintronics: Could diamonds be a computer's best friend?

For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire. In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire -- like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave." Spin could one day be used to transmit data in computer circuits -- and this new experiment revealed that diamond transmits spin better than most metals in which researchers have previously observed the effect.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140323151718.h...
by giantg2 | 2025-07-27 15:47:17+00:00
"As an example, they gutted NC DMV."

When did that happen? I didn't see anything saying they were taking anything away. I saw they increased pay by 5%, authorized retention bonus, and are supposed to add about a 5% increase in the number of license workers.

You could just increase pay by $20k and add another 100 workers, but that ignores concerns about operational inefficiency and outdated technology. It will be interesting to see if the privatized pilot increases efficiency or not. I wouldn't hold my breath, but we'll see.
by nine_zeros | 2025-07-27 15:47:35+00:00
> Is the privatized NC DMV any better than the public one?

Nobody knows. But the only things guaranteed are:

- service prices will rise because now shareholders will seek a return every year.

- AI powered elevator music phone service where you must wait 30 mins before reaching a human.

- Fees and costs for every interaction.

- Workers will be encouraged to do work fast - by providing less service to people, asking people to come over and over again

- More lobbying to reduce license and registration durations because they need people to constantly renew to collect fees and profits.

About FedEx, I don't know why you think US post offices are bad. I personally find USPS to be astonishingly high quality and decent humans. FedEx is decent quality but 10x higher prices than USPS.
by smeej | 2025-07-27 15:47:42+00:00
> The only reason people think otherwise is because because of alleged technical infeasibility.

Some people think otherwise because they trust each other, and understand that specialization allows efficiency and economies of scale.

Even if it's stupid easy to run five servers at home, there's sure to be one person who likes maintaining them more than the other four.

It's stupid easy to load and unload the dishwasher, but my sister didn't like handling the dirty dishes and I didn't like running around and putting them away, so I loaded and she unloaded, and we were both slightly but meaningfully better off on a daily basis because of it. Of course we could each just load and unload our own dishes, but a slight reduction in independence and freedom (counting on each other to do our part) improves things for both of us.

People often--I'd even say usually--work together because they benefit from it, not just because they lack the technical chops to do otherwise.
by westurner | 2025-07-27 15:48:00+00:00
I was looking at Radon sensors the other day. FWIU it isn't possible to detect radon with even a PM 2.5 sensor.

I bought a 10-in-1 air quality sensor with USB-C, and it won't do USB-C PD.

Batteries for when the power is out make sense.

Which air quality sensor integrates the most sensors of all?
by JCBird1012 | 2025-07-27 15:48:27+00:00
Don't picture them as OTA firmware updates. Picture them as OTA navigation data updates (i.e. maps, charts, waypoints, airport info, etc...) - that's much easier to pull off.

The process right now is pulling out an SD card from your Garmin/Avidyne/BendixKing whatever every 28-days or so (that's how often the FAA updates the navigation database backing these avionics), popping it into your PC, using software/webistes that could be... much better designed (to put it lightly) and then going back again. It's not exactly the hardest thing in the world, but it's not exactly a walk in the park either (especially for less-technically inclined pilots, who just let it lapse, and click out of the big expiration warnings every time they start up their planes).
by jebarker | 2025-07-27 15:48:27+00:00
What a strange question. As a starter I’d like to see us help trees, coral, other primates and megafauna as much as possible. The former because they support so much other biodiversity and the latter because they’re nice to have in the world. Generally speaking though I favor sustainability where that means continuing to improve the quality of life for humans, especially those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, whilst trying to minimize the number of other species we drive to extinction. Again, nuance is key here - I don’t think my inability to enumerate every species worthy of help means that we should just dismiss the effort to help other species.
by holowoodman | 2025-07-27 15:50:11+00:00
The grandparent made specific claims about scenarios where Java is supposedly faster:

> Yes, Java can be faster in certain contexts: the kind of contexts Java is usually employed in addressing these days. Stuff like enterprise backend systems and big data processing, where startup time or precise memory control are not important.

The only thing that might be relevant in your list is the vectorization API.

The rest of your list is just a bunch of band-aids for the worst problems that Java specifically has, that other languages lack. That is at best playing catch-up with everything else, since in C there is no GC overhead, almost no startup time, no object overhead, no GC-induced memory hogging, no GC pauses. Yes, I agree that things did happen. But nothing in there makes Java any more desirable for relevant workloads, it just makes it less undesirable.
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-27 15:50:14+00:00
I haven't dug too much into the regulations or power requirements around running ADS-B Out purely off a battery but you can get a TSO-certified beacon https://uavionix.com/general-aviation/tailbeaconx/ and pair it with high-capacity LiFePO4 TSO battery https://earthxbatteries.com/product/etx900-tso/ for a not-unreasonable price. I don't know if that would actually be acceptable, but it's a pretty straightforward way to add that functionality to an otherwise steam-gauge-only aircraft.
by jijijijij | 2025-07-27 15:50:29+00:00
But the article paints this bacterial conversion of nitrates as beneficial. It’s unclear whether the conversion into nitric oxide implies the conversion into nitrites. To me it seems likely the NO benefit may come with nitrosamine production, which may raise colon cancer risk.

I think nitrosamines aren’t exclusively formed in the gut, but are present in cured meat beforehand, though. As far as I know, vitamin C prevents the nitrite to nitrosamine reaction, so fresh nitrate rich vegetable juices may not be inherently harmful through secondary nitrosamine production from converted nitrites. Additionally, their amino acid content is probably low, so as long as they are not consumed with a meal, production may be limited.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-27 15:51:17+00:00
Indeed. For the UK in particular you clearly can't have "What it was without people" because that's far too long ago, there aren't records so we'd only be guessing. The New Forest - near me - was built about a thousand years ago, it's not "supposed" to be like that, it was built on purpose and it takes considerable maintenance to keep it that way, felling trees, managing trails, maintaining bridges and so on. Things like "The pigs eat acorns, that way the ponies don't eat the acorns and die†" could not possibly work without humans managing the forest. Left to their own devices the pigs would destroy that forest in a few years, and then the ponies die too, humans allow pigs out for a set period, to eat lots of acorns, then bring them all back by law.

We could try to build what was there before the forest, but it would be extremely disruptive to all the people who live there, and what for? The Forest isn't very useful today, but it's pretty and we know it's stable, and it has some uses, we grow some trees there, we farm some pigs and ponies, tourists come to see it - there are many worse options.

† Acorns are poisonous. Don't eat acorns without proper preparation. Unless you're a pig or a squirrel or something. In which case how are you reading this note?
by kstrauser | 2025-07-27 15:51:27+00:00
> Republican voters would hold their representatives accountable.

I don’t think that’s accurate, unless it was for a crime they just couldn’t forgive. Debacle in the Middle East? Stay the course and re-elect Bush. Find out a senator had a gay experiment once? Out, so to speak.

You’ve been able to do what you want within the GOP for decades, so long as it’s Old Testament compliant.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-27 15:51:32+00:00
I’ve dealt with DMVs across multiple living locations and the differences are incredible.

The worst ones were a nightmare to deal with that virtually required taking a half day off work. One time I had to line up outside in the sun (I hadn’t brought sunscreen) because they decided that the line needed to be outside the building instead of inside, despite having space for it. My only guess is that they were being measured on some metric like average wait time and someone’s genius idea to game that metric was to make people in line bake in the sun so they’d rather leave than go home.

The best DMV I’ve been to ran like a well oiled machine. They had someone posted at the door to pre-review your goal and ensure you had the right papers with you to avoid surprises at the counter. You got a numbered ticket to hold. Signs showed your position in line and estimated wait time. There were thoughtfully placed chairs. Every time I visited I waited no more than 10 minutes. Even the Google reviews for the DMV office were great.

As far as I can tell the difference had nothing to do with staffing or headcount. The bad DMVs oddly had bigger offices, they just had people who moved at a snail’s pace and didn’t care about anything other than running the clock out until they could go home.

This is what people dislike about poorly run government offices: There’s a palpable malaise in some government interactions that is clearly not present in well run offices. I don’t think privatization is the obvious fix, but I can see why after years or decades of nothing changing at famously mismanaged offices that people would be willing to try alternatives
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-27 15:52:39+00:00
I have a theory that this is built into the American system. People are brainwashed into thinking the system of government is perfect and unimpeachable (pledge of allegiance, constitution being this holy scripture). So when the imperfect system inevitably breaks down it is regarded as an unavoidable outcome.

Because the system delivered the outcome it must be the only possibility.
by notahacker | 2025-07-27 15:53:08+00:00
He isn't an engineer but does have considerably more willingness to listen to and understand engineers than the rest of the administration.

If nothing else, he's aware that there's a bit more involved in getting humans to Mars on any timeline than just rockets, and slashing the budget of the only entity working on those problems might not speed up getting there...

If course, he also knows enough to know nobody's sending manned missions to Mars in the next launch window regardless of whose in charge, and he's been quite fond of breaking stuff recently so I'm not sure we want Elon in charge either.
by pyman | 2025-07-27 15:53:52+00:00
If you want my honest opinion, GenAI is definitely going to change how we write and consume information:

- Original, quality content will still exist, and it'll still need to be paid for, either monthly or per article.

- Right now, articles are written by journalists. In the near future, a single article might be written by several people who aren't journalists at all, but still get paid. An AI will handle fact-checking and composition. The opinions, ideas, and knowledge will come from humans, AI will just verify and stitch it together.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-27 15:54:18+00:00
> Nobody knows. But the only things guaranteed are:

Ironic that you jump from “nobody knows” to statements where you’re absolutely sure that it’s worse.

Your “guarantees” aren’t even consistent with the language of the authorization. They aren’t giving these services carte blanche to define their own laws and processes. They’re just allowing someone else to execute part of the process.

It’s hard to have these conversations when one side is arguing based on ideological abstract ideas, not the actual language of the bill.

> FedEx is decent quality but 10x higher prices than USPS.

I ship a lot of packages and use a service that quotes from USPS, UPS, and FedEx.

It’s plainly false to claim that FedEx has 10X higher prices. This is just factually incorrect. FedEx comes out as the lowest price for maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of my shipments. It’s hard to trust someone’s arguments when they’re making egregiously false claims like this.
by TXTOS | 2025-07-27 15:54:33+00:00
Totally agree, RAG by itself isn’t enough — especially when users don’t follow the script.

We’ve seen similar pain: one-shot retrieval works great in perfect lab settings, then collapses once you let in real humans asking weird followups like

“do that again but with grandma’s style” and suddenly your context window looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

That branching tree approach you mentioned — composing prompt→prompt→query in a structured cascade — is underrated genius. We ended up building something similar, but layered a semantic engine on top to decide which prompt chain deserves to exist in that moment, not just statically prewiring them.

It’s duct tape + divination right now. But hey — the thing kinda works.

Appreciate your battle-tested insight — makes me feel slightly less insane.
by fb03 | 2025-07-27 15:55:21+00:00
I'm still waiting for the apple laptop killer (a 12h+ laptop with plain Ubuntu) but it's still brittle as fuck. I'm so frustrated by the current state of the mobile computing space. I have to have an Apple locked down device, which I hate, just because I want proper battery life.

A aarch64 Ubuntu vm inside MacOS runs faster and lasts more time than a booted up Ubuntu on arm in these devices. This is how far behind these things are.

and what bums me the most is that it's all about software. The hardware is great, but software on Snapdragon is taking a lot of time to catch up and it screams M$ lobby to me
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-27 15:56:05+00:00
Without 20/20 hindsight, it's hard to be so sure about the dividing line between one epoch and another as time marches on.

For instance it took until about 2010 to confirm that we were already headfirst into the Garbaceous Period by 2005, but it was just not that obvious at the time.

Before you know it the Enshittocene crept up without fanfare but the type of extinction it foments might not have been possible without the decline in conditions that came before.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-07-27 15:57:11+00:00
My university had the same policy. Despite having swim lessons as a child, I did not learn how to swim until university. I was finally able to swim the length of the pool using the side stroke, which along with the backstroke is the only thing I can barely manage. My problem with the crawl/freestyle (or whatever it's called) is breathing -- even when I was in good enough shape to run 5-minute miles on land, I would be totally out of breath before I even got to the end of the pool.
by igregoryca | 2025-07-27 15:57:58+00:00
Hm. You and parent comment have made me realize something: as much as I dislike how many useful abstractions are missing from Go, async for blocking syscalls is not one of them, since the "green thread" model effectively makes all functions async for the purposes of blocking syscalls. So I retract my "you have to do it manually" comment in this case. I guess that's part of why people love Go's concurrency.

Of course, as you said, stackful coroutines come with runtime overhead. But that's the tradeoff, and I'm sure they are substantially more efficient (modulo FFI calls) than the equivalent async-everywhere code would be in typical JS or Python runtimes.

My "you have to do it manually" comment comes from some other peeves I have with Go. I guess the language designers were just hyper-focused on syscall concurrency and memory management (traditionally hard problems in server code), because Go does fare well on those specific fronts.
by Misdicorl | 2025-07-27 15:57:59+00:00
One way to measure this that isn't moral judgements is the ecological depth of an environment. If one part of the system is destroyed (e.g. a blight on plant A) how devastating to the rest of the system will that be?

One of the hallmarks of human engineered environments is how shallow and fragile they are. Changes, like the reintroduction of wolves, are "good" because they give us deeper and more resilient environments
by johnnienaked | 2025-07-27 15:58:17+00:00
Natural gas is burned to generate electricity in the peaker plants near Reno that supply SF with their power needs.

That's hundreds of miles of power lines running through Northern California forest to get power to SF because of state regulations. Downed power lines are directly responsible for a pretty large % of wildfires.

Same thing in LA, where a significant amount of power is sent from peaker plants near Las Vegas.

These regulations can't do anything to lower demand, they'll only serve to make things even more expensive.
by floatrock | 2025-07-27 15:58:35+00:00
Or it's a reflection on is individualism really a thing when everything is actually interconnected?

"The greater good" is a bit abstract, and your framing suggests it's somehow separate from "the people who live there". A different framing of this question is should individuals be able to degrade ecosystem wealth in order to maximize their personal wealth?

This is the climate story in microcosm. We all know burning carbon is against the "greater good", but if we can pretend that our high-energy lifestyle is somehow independent and unconnected to the planetary ecological systems that support us, then of course, why shouldn't I mortgage my descendants' future for some toys today.
by ryandv | 2025-07-27 15:59:00+00:00
My point is that most of that learning is not necessary! Does a JavaScript bootcamp developer know what the fuck a memory hierarchy is? malloc? No! Do they need to? Also no! This ignorance stops absolutely nobody from identifying as a Senior Staff Architect with 16 weeks of experience, closing Jiras at 10x the velocity as these fools with crippling debt and a computer science degree.
by jedberg | 2025-07-27 15:59:37+00:00
Same experiment from my gigabit link in Silicon Valley. Looks like Yahoo is about 3 times slower but far more consistent

--- google.com ping statistics ---

20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 6.918/23.419/294.037/62.272 ms

--- yahoo.com ping statistics ---

20 packets transmitted, 20 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 78.056/78.940/80.940/0.811 ms

Although what's interesting is that Yahoo is really more like 10 times slower (almost every ping was in the 6-8ms range), it's just that there was just that one packet at 300ms and other at 30ms that really blew out the average.
Show HN: Mencrouche – A Hackable On-Demand Homepage
by sdovan1 | 2025-07-27 15:59:48+00:00
I loved Markdown New Tab (a web extension that open an editable markdown page on new tab) but wanted to add widgets like weather, which it couldn't do since extensions can't execute userscripts. So I built Mencrouche, a hackable homepage where you can add bookmarks, markdown notes, images, or any custom widget by just pasting code into custom JS textarea. No cloning repos or installing anything.

While building this, I try not to use frameworks like React and found it's actually easier to manage state with plain variables and direct DOM manipulation. I ended up writing my own libraries for translation, DOM aliases, and undo/redo.

Currently it's just a web page since I'm struggling with manifest V3 for the web extension version.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-27 16:00:01+00:00
It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.)

Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works?

Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.