MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Let Claude Code/Cursor agents page your phone when they're finished
by compumike | 2025-08-13 17:23:37+00:00
Claude Code and Cursor can run (semi-)productively for increasingly long times without supervision (at least on side projects I don't care too much about). I built an MCP server that lets agents page your phone (free iOS and Android apps) with an alert when they're done so I could walk away from my desk.

30 second demo videos:

Cursor: https://youtu.be/Zod_1ChbqGc

Claude Code: https://youtu.be/e1HSazkcKz0

No need to host an MCP server instance: just drop a URL+token into your `mcp.json` or `claude mcp add` and you can get your first alert in under a minute. I recommend you start with a simple prompt such as: "Calculate the square root of 64 and page me with the answer" to test it out quickly before you try long-running prompts.

More info here: https://heyoncall.com/blog/mcp-server-for-paging-a-human

Curious if HN comes up with other use cases for an MCP server that can page a human! Thanks, Mike
by Mukesh_dhal17 | 2025-08-13 17:24:27+00:00
Just wrote a piece on how to grow a recruitment business

I’ve been working in AI-driven hiring, and I’ve noticed something: most recruitment agencies scale by brute force, not by design. So I dug into:

Why client trust > cold outreach

How candidate experience actually drives revenue

Where AI helps (and where it hurts)

What most recruiters get wrong when trying to grow

It’s part strategy, part reflection. If you’ve built or scaled a service business or just curious how hiring is evolving I’d love your take.

What’s the smartest (or weirdest) growth move you’ve seen in recruitment?
by steveBK123 | 2025-08-13 17:24:43+00:00
My experience with Gartner has been seeing in-over-their-head CTOs in lagging firms take their recommendations a bit too seriously.

Earnestly printing out the latest white paper and distributing it to their directs. Hiring "head of X" for whatever new X Gartner has invented.

Thinking they are getting a peak at industry best practices when in reality the industry leaders are not sharing anything with Gartner, so its blind leading blind.

This leads to a lot of self delusion that actually being a lagger is an advantage because we'll simply buy XYZ that Gartner suggested and leapfrog over the leaders who are mired in their legacy tech.

No thought whatsoever to the people, processes and institutional knowledge that got the leaders to where they are. Nor any questioning as to whether there are actual off the shelf solutions for things your better competitors built in house with many man years of effort.

So the sooner the better ..
by BizarroLand | 2025-08-13 17:24:47+00:00
I imagine they would need quite a few servers to replace their current setup.

Then there's also the overhead of setting up and maintaining the hardware in their location. It's not just a "solve this problem for ~$2,000 and be done with it".

I don't know the actual specs or requirements. Maybe 1 build server is sufficient, but from what I know there's nearly 4,000 apps on FDroid. 1 server might be swamped handling that much overhead in a timely manner.
by kccqzy | 2025-08-13 17:25:31+00:00
That's not a useful way to think. Floating point numbers are just floating point numbers. You aren't approximating floating point numbers. You are approximating real numbers.

Floating point numbers are compared against fixed point numbers where the point (the part between the integer part and fractional part) is fixed. That is why they are called floating. The nature of the real numbers is such that they can in general only be approximated, regardless of whether you use fixed point numbers or floating point numbers or a fancier computable number representation.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-13 17:25:34+00:00
I'm not saying they did... I'm simply commenting on the chilling effects portion of the post I replied to. In that becoming politically involved in a foreign nation on a temporary visa is just a bad idea. It really shouldn't be a controversial opinion.

There are a LOT of countries that have much harsher penalties for speaking out than having one's visa revoked. For that matter, I'm not endorsing one opinion or another on any given topic here, only pointing out that it's a bad idea.
by znpy | 2025-08-13 17:25:46+00:00
I wonder if the codebase will be understandable at all.

You can most often “get used” to a codebase because they authors tend to stick to the same patterns in many ways, and they are somewhat coherent across time. After a bit you can kinda guess in what file is a feature implemented etc etc.

Will this still be true with ai doing most of the work?
by whimsicalism | 2025-08-13 17:25:48+00:00
> Also, there is no target salary or salary range. This is a red flag for a couple of reasons: > - It sends a message that the actual compensation is going to be rubbish. > - It sends a message (combined with the evidence from the advert spamming) that the hiring company will be paying different levels of compensation based on where the applicant lives. > That last one is particularly inexcusable. We call it a 'compensation package' for a reason: the employer is compensating the employee for using their expertise, time, and energy to make the employer money. It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.

Welcome to the world - labor is also subject to supply and demand.
by triceratops | 2025-08-13 17:25:59+00:00
> Recent analysis from Carbon Brief found the country’s emissions dropped in the first quarter of 2025 by 1.6 per cent

> China’s clean energy exports in 2024 alone have already shaved 1 per cent off global emissions outside of China

> “It drove 10 per cent of their GDP last year — just the one industry, clean energy. It’s overtaken real estate, and that says a lot because real estate was the driving force of their economy until a few years ago. But now it’s been overtaken by clean energy,”

"No point in doing anything about climate change because India and China" is in absolute shambles now.

> One of the key reasons it has pivoted to electrification is to get away from its dependence on imported fossil fuels.

> “China sees the old, the conventional fossil fuel growth model as not sustainable. And it is becoming increasingly unable to sustain long-term prosperity.”

> Last year, crude oil imports to China fell for the first time in two decades, with the exception of the recent pandemic. China is now expected to hit peak oil in 2027, according to the International Energy Agency.

Clean energy is also canny national and energy policy.

> “Even if you have pretty poor-quality natural resources, you can still squeeze quite a bit of electricity out of a solar panel. It’s really changing the geopolitics. Renewable energy is the most secure form of energy that there is because you just eliminate the need for imports."

Firefly said it best - "You can't take the sky from me".
Show HN: I wanted to reinvent programming tutorials for Gen Z people
by Zernat | 2025-08-13 17:26:12+00:00
Hi! I had a an inspiration based on jrpg video games and brain rot content on the internet.

I built a "platform" with tutorials that are spoon-feeding knowledge to people via panels that you are advancing by clicking spacebar or tapping. To make it different, I also wrote them with very "light" language and added few cringe jokes and elements.

Right now just to test the idea I added two tutorials: - Python Type Hints - Coding Interview Tips

Right now I am looking for feedback because I want to find out if this way of learning could be actually useful for anyone. Or if it's another idea of mine that fits into the category "cool, but no one wants that".

I will be really grateful for any feedback! Thank you!
by variadix | 2025-08-13 17:26:21+00:00
I don’t see how advertising is going to work with agents, especially if they’re being used by companies to replace or supplement jobs. Am I going to have comments in my code with ads for McDonalds? Will the AI support agent start trying to sell me a VPN?

I don’t think any of these AI companies can justify their expenses without meaningfully automating a significant amount of white collar work, which is yet to happen.
by jsphweid | 2025-08-13 17:26:37+00:00
Or they just wrote down what their grandma used to do and changed how much salt they put in the water.

Or they read a few recipes and made their own statistical amalgamation and said "hey this seems to work" on the first try.

Or they're just making stuff up or scraping it and putting it on a website for ad money.

"Soul" not required.

Also does an LLM give the same recipe every time you ask? I'd wager you could change the context and get something a little more specialized.
by mpyne | 2025-08-13 17:26:39+00:00
I love the vibe, this is the Web I grew up with. Not sure I agree that I want my human readers to be forced to read my Web sites with their own eyes though.

I feel like this omakase vs. a la carte and "user agent" vs "author intent" keeps coming up over and over though. AI/LLM is just another battle in that long-running war.
by overfeed | 2025-08-13 17:26:42+00:00
> In either domain, you can select where you want to go and what you want to do.

In both cases, there was a time when both were exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely absent.

"There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-13 17:26:56+00:00
> allowing internally-signed certificates to be valid via said Intermediary

By design, nothing is allowed to delegate signing authority, because it would become an immediate compromise of everything that got delegated when your delegated authority got compromised. Since only CAs can issue certs, and CAs have to pass at least some basic security scrutiny, clients have assurance that the thing giving it a cert got said cert from a trustworthy authority. If you want a non-trustworthy authority... go with a custom CA. It's intentionally difficult to do so.

> If your load balancer, proxy server, web server, or router appliance can’t mint me a basic Acme certificate via DNS-01 challenges, then you officially suck and I will throw your product out for something like Caddy the first chance I get.

I mean, that's a valid ask. It will become more commonplace once some popular corporate offering includes it, and then all the competitors will adopt it so they don't leave money on the table. To get the first one to adopt it, be a whale of a customer and yell loudly that you want it, then wait 18 months.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-13 17:27:08+00:00
>My concern with the Pebble Time 2 is the lower contrast that color e-ink has compared to grayscale

That's not eink technology, it's most likely Sharp Memory-in-Pixel (MIP) LCD display, where the difference between BW and color isn't as bad as in eink technology which uses actual pigment particles inside the pixel cells that "cloud" the contrast.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 17:27:39+00:00
FTA: Also, there is no target salary or salary range. This is a red flag for a couple of reasons:

- It sends a message that the actual compensation is going to be rubbish.

- It sends a message (combined with the evidence from the advert spamming) that the hiring company will be paying different levels of compensation based on where the applicant lives.

That last one is particularly inexcusable. We call it a 'compensation package' for a reason: the employer is compensating the employee for using their expertise, time, and energy to make the employer money. It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.

——-

While I mostly agree with the sentiment I think this is pretty normal and not nearly as much of a faux pas as the author is making it out to be. Kinda applies to a lot of his points - some of these aren’t unequivocally bad hiring practices, they are just polarizing or a matter of pros and cons.

Hot take: a lot of job openings for highly specialized skills or from small-medium sized businesses are not posted with specific salary bands in mind, just “as much as it takes to get a great candidate, but not more than their expected value”. In some cases you could legitimately be open to candidates costing anywhere between $80k and $500k - it looks weird to list a job that way, would you do it? Maybe it turns some candidates off, maybe it prevents scaring off candidates who would be great fits and accept the offer. Maybe it’s not worth getting upset about
by bityard | 2025-08-13 17:27:43+00:00
Maybe it's better these days, but even as an experienced systems administrator, I found certbot _incredibly_ annoying to use in practice. They tried to make it easy and general-purpose for beginners to web hosting, but they did it with a lot of magic that does Weird Stuff to your host and server configuration. It probably works great if you're in an environment where you just install things via tarball, edit your config files with Nano, and then rarely ever touch the whole setup again.

But if you're someone who needs tight control over the host configuration (managed via Ansible, etc) because you need to comply with security standards, or have the whole setup reproducible for disaster recovery, etc, then solutions like acme.sh or LEGO are far smaller, just as easy to configure, and in general will not surprise you.
by apparent | 2025-08-13 17:27:58+00:00
Would you use the silver with a contrasting band, as shown? Or would you try to get a band that roughly matches it?

It sounds like the colors don't add much complexity because it's just a polycarbonate piece that's sandwiched between the metal front and back. It does add complexity and and there are surely some fixed costs associated with making these and the matching bands. But it's kind of a neat innovation to have a pop of color on the side, matching the band. I think the red one could actually look nice with a plain black band.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 17:28:37+00:00
And if America wasn't working for you, you'd have already done it. You wouldn't be the first. In reality, you maintain ties because you see the value you get in return.

But America isn't apt here anyway. In this case, it was said that it was a city that was offering the subsidy. It isn't unusual to leave a city when it isn't working for you. People leave the city they once called home every day because it no longer meets their needs.

In fact, in many circles you are considered a bit of an odd-ball if you don't leave the place you call home from time to time in recognition that it is unlikely that the community you found yourself in (e.g. because you were born there) is the community that is actually right for you.
by 0x457 | 2025-08-13 17:28:46+00:00
I had a weird bug in elixir code and agent kept adding more and more logging (it could read loads from running application).

Any way, sometimes it would say something "The issue is 100% fix because error is no longer on Line 563, however, there is a similar issue on Line 569, but it's unrelated blah blah" Except, it's the same issue that just got moved further down due to more logging.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-13 17:29:29+00:00
I don't think installing (i.e. compiling) whisper.cpp and using it to do audio-to-text is very difficult. If the documentation is too technical I am sure you can ask some LLM to walk you through it. I have used it on Android in termux and on my FreeBSD desktop computer. Would not expect any difficulties on any modern Linux.
by dspillett | 2025-08-13 17:29:30+00:00
Feel free to provide and support a "stable" branch/fork that meets your standards.

Be the change you want to see!

Edit to comment on the edit:

> Edit: Downvote me all you want

I don't generally downvote, but if I were going to I would not need your permission :)

> that's reality folks, if you don't release v1.0.0, the interface you consume can change without you realizing it.

I assume you meant "present" there rather than "consume"?

Anyway, 1.0.0 is just a number. Without relevant promises and a track record and/or contract to back them up breaking changes are as likely there as with any other number. A "version 0.x.x" of a well used and scrutinized open source project is more reliable and trustworthy than something that has just had a 1.0.0 sticker slapped on it.

Edit after more parent edits: or go with one of the other many versioning schemes. Maybe ItIsFunToWindUpEntitledDicksVer Which says "stick with 0.x for eternity, go on, you know you want to!".
by alfalfasprout | 2025-08-13 17:30:02+00:00
FWIW I do work with the latest tools/practices and completely agree with OP. It's also important to contextualize what "large" and "complex" codebases really mean.

Monorepos are large but the projects inside may, individually, not be that complex. So there are ways of making LLMs work with monorepos well (eg; providing a top level index of what's inside, how to find projects, and explaining how the repo is set up). Complexity within an individual project is something current-gen SOTA LLMs (I'm counting Sonnet 4, Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5 here) really suck at handling.

Sure, you can assign discrete little tasks here and there. But bigger efforts that require not only understanding how the codebase is designed but also why it's designed that way fall short. Even more so if you need them to make good architectural decisions on something that's not "cookie cutter".

Fundamentally, I've noticed the chasm between those that are hyper-confident LLMs will "get there soon" and those that are experienced but doubtful depends on the type of development you do. "ticket pulling" type work generally has the work scoped well enough that an LLM might seem near-autonomous. More abstract/complex backend/infra/research work not so much. Still value there, sure. But hardly autonomous.
by notfromhere | 2025-08-13 17:30:11+00:00
Eh. They're not wrong. A lot of folks still pay Gartner money to be on their lists, but it's more of a feeling that you have to, and not because it actually leads to any results.

Having worked in both corporate and startup worlds, I've rarely seen anyone under 40 reference a Gartner report as credible or actually use that as a source of information. Everyone knows it's pay-to-play, not particularly credible, and as the younger generations age into these very senior roles, I have no doubt that Gartner will lose a lot of relevance.

Given that trust in "mainstream media" has pretty much collapsed everywhere, I don't really doubt that this will inevitably hit the obvious corporate gatekeepers as well. Enterprise/b2b is just 10-20 years behind on trends experienced elsewhere.
by rogilop | 2025-08-13 17:30:51+00:00
So... The true story is that it all started as an internal infra.

Originally, Inworld was mostly involved into gaming (read as Unreal & Unity) and therefore the choice. Yet (surprise, surprise) we want native x-platform and on-device (whose official support is coming soon).

Also, not a new thing, but C++ is more reliable than Python under really high concurrency, which was critical for us (a lot of people using same graphs in parallel kind of use case).
by ericmcer | 2025-08-13 17:30:54+00:00
That sounds similar to what it was doing here. It basically took a function like `thing = getThing(); id = thing.id` and created `id = getThingId()` and replaced hundreds of lines and made a new API endpoint.

Not a huge deal because it works, but it seems like you would have 100,000 extra lines if you let Claude do whatever it wanted for a few months.
by coldcode | 2025-08-13 17:31:05+00:00
I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art. I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the don't compete as much as specialize in different things. https://andrewwulf.com if interested.
by tgv | 2025-08-13 17:31:09+00:00
I switched over to caddy recently. Nginx' non-information about the http 1 desync problem drove me over. I'm not going to wait for something stupid to happen or an auditor ask me questions nginx doesn't answer.

Caddy is really easier than nginx. For starters, I now have templates that cover the main services and their test services, and the special service that runs for an education institution. Logging is better. Certificate handling is perfect (for my case, at least). And it has better metrics.

Now I have to figure out plugins though, because caddy doesn't have rate limiting and some stupid bug in powerbi makes a single user hit certain images 300.000 times per day. That's a bit of a downside.
by irusensei | 2025-08-13 17:31:18+00:00
I don't know about Illumos but setting up a Solaris 10 machine to provide block devices through multi path iSCSI was a breeze with all the tooling it had. No config files needed it was all command line.

It was for a university lab and it was the only ever contact I had with Solaris 10 and later versions or forks. I was mildly interested once since it had KVM but support was Intel only so that kept me away.

I remember some hypervisor and storage products based on Illumos like Nexenta and Soylent OS. I'm guessing those projects faded into obscurity.

Which is a shame. A lot of people was optimistic about OpenSolaris when it came out but Oracle gutted it.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-13 17:31:41+00:00
For those confused like I was:

- Pebble 2 Duo: $149, B&W, original Pebble look - Pebble Time 2: $225, color, new round square look * both with intended IPX8, 30-day battery, "e-paper" aka gameboy style LCD, suite of sensors, Pebble app compatibility
by Bender | 2025-08-13 17:32:21+00:00
What's your take on the article saying that D.C.'s crime rate is at a 30 year low?

I do not believe crime is accurately tracked [1]. Calling in the guard is not overreach when a city is demanding it through inaction.

[1] - https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
by MisterMower | 2025-08-13 17:32:54+00:00
1) Because ROI on that investment is still positive, even if it used to be “free”.

2) Endowments aren’t the only way to fund research, and not all research is equally valuable. Some is probably negative value, given the replication crisis.

3) Investment income from the endowment is taxed at a maximum of 8%. If that’s enough to break the US university research machine, I’m not sure it was ever working in the first place.
by cnst | 2025-08-13 17:33:15+00:00
It collects WiFi Radio Analytics (2.4GHz / 5GHz-Low / 5GHz-High frequency utilisation), Activity History (data usage by device, as well as "scan" and ad blocks by device).

For ad blocking and network control, it also has "Block & Allow Sites" with the blacklisted and whitelisted domain names, which you may have to use to block ads and also unblock some domains that stop working as a result of bogus entries in the ad block.

All of this information is stored in the cloud, but I found no way to export it in any way. I've actually contacted eero, asking for the export, and they've basically admitted that it's not supported.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-13 17:34:09+00:00
It still is, but at this point I'm not sure why anyone would pick it over Linux for something new. All the killer Solaris features (ZFS, dtrace, zones, SMF) have good enough Linux equivalents (OpenZFS, eBPF, containers, systemd) and I'm not aware of any usecases where illumos outperforms Linux anymore.

OpenIndiana also has the problem that every commercial illumos user is using it for some niche purpose (networking infrastructure, storage appliance, that sort of thing) so it's basically up to a few unpaid volunteers working in their free time to adapt it for general desktop use. I'm not sure what the state of stuff like audio support or accelerated graphics looks like if you're on modern hardware.