MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
I'm building a habit app that works without willpower – here's why
by quantummint | 2025-08-08 12:46:23+00:00
I'm an indie developer building a mobile app to help people build good habits—consistently and with as little friction as possible.

What led me to build this app was hitting a wall myself.

About 6 months ago, I started my solo founder journey. The first two months were great—I was energized and productive. But by month three, things started slipping. I was getting distracted, procrastinating, stuck in my own head.

I tried everything I could to get back on my feet:

* Working at the same time and place to reduce decision fatigue

* Breaking tasks into tiny steps, checking off each one to build momentum

* Pomodoro sessions + tiny rewards (like stretching or a sip of water) to stay focused

* Regular workouts to stabilize energy and mood

* Most importantly: shifting from willpower to systems

I realized: unless actions become automatic, it’s hard to keep going in the long run.

It took me about two months to rebuild a solid daily rhythm. These small habit tweaks had a huge impact—more focus, more clarity, way better output.

Now I’m turning that low-friction, sustainable, anti-procrastination system into a simple, practical app. No fluff, no hype—just one clear goal: make consistency easier.

Still in early development—open to feedback, ideas, or just chats.

If you're into this kind of thing, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter for updates

https://jakezhang.beehiiv.com
by antgiant | 2025-08-08 12:46:58+00:00
I’ve been working on a small browser app that is local first and have been trying to figure out how to pair it with static hosting. It feels like this should be possible but so far the tooling all seems stuck in the mindset of having a server somewhere.

My use case is scoring live events that may or may not have Internet connection. So normal usage is a single person but sometimes it would be nice to allow for multi person scoring without relying on centralized infrastructure.
by in_a_hole | 2025-08-08 12:47:44+00:00
I disagree. A keyboard enforces a clarity and precision of information that does not naturally arise from our internal thought processes. I'm sure many people here have thought they understood something until they tried to write it down in precise language. It's the same sort of reason we use a rigid symbolic language for mathematics and programming rather than natural language with all its inherent ambiguities.

Dijkstra has more thoughts on this

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-08 12:47:47+00:00
> I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will…

Completely valid point.

I have no illusions about BlueSky or literally any site on the internet where I participate. But I post on a few anyway. I suppose because I just don't feel as betrayed as apparently the author does.

It's not my "energies" I am expending — or rather instead I am getting "exercise". Posting has proven to be useful to my own desire to clarify my thoughts and allows me to stay in the game of writing my thoughts out. My wife likes Wordle in the morning, I like reading and posting.

If I approached it looking for an audience or a relationship I would be disappointed all the time.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-08 12:47:54+00:00
I find this experience a lot with a lot of Microsoft technologies. People bemoan powershell, NT, DirectX, even C# itself, and other Windows APIs but when you get to really learn them you start to miss them on Linux. I sometimes see a meme from beginner programmers lamenting how the world would be better if Windows was POSIX compliant but once you've learned a bit about some of the Windows API calls, POSIX feels absolutely ancient. Some stuff is really dated like Win32 windowing stuff
by mejutoco | 2025-08-08 12:48:43+00:00
There are MCP Servers that give access to git repo information to any LLM supporting MCP Servers.

For example:

>The GitHub MCP Server connects AI tools directly to GitHub's platform. This gives AI agents, assistants, and chatbots the ability to read repositories and code files, manage issues and PRs, analyze code, and automate workflows. All through natural language interactions.

source: https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-08 12:48:45+00:00
Year on year, progress is indeed a bit incremental. But seen over a five year period the progress is actually stupidly amazing.

In practical terms, Gpt 5 is a nice upgrade over most other models. We'll no doubt get lots of subjective reports how it was wrong or right or worse than some other model for some chats. But my personal (subjective) experience so far is that it just made it possible for me to use codex on more serious projects. It still gets plenty of things wrong. But that's more because of a lack of context than hallucination issues. Context fixes are a lot easier than model improvements. But last week I didn't bother and now I'm getting decent results.

I don't really care what version number they slap on things. That is indeed just marketing. And competition is quite fierce so I can understand why they are overselling what could have been just chat gpt 4.2 or whatever.

Also discussions about AGI tend to bore me as they seem to escalate into low quality philosophical debates with lots of amateurs rehashing ancient argument poorly. There aren't a hell of a lot new arguments that people come up with at this point.

IMHO we don't actually need an AGI to bootstrap the singularity. We just AIs to be good enough to come up with algorithmic optimizations, breakthroughs and improvements at a steady pace. We're getting quite close to that and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that OpenAI's people are already eating their own dogfood in liberal quantities. It's not necessary for AIs to be conscious in order to come up with the improvements that might eventually enable such a thing. I expect the singularity might be more of a phase than a moment. And if you know your boiling frog analogy, we might be smack down in the middle of that already and just not realize it.

Five years ago, it was all very theoretical. And now I'm waiting for codex to wrap up a few pull requests that would have distracted me for a week each five years ago. It's taking too long and I'm procrastinating my gained productivity away on HN. But what else is new ;-).
by motorest | 2025-08-08 12:49:19+00:00
> Are you serious here?

I am.

If you check the definition of polyfill, you'll eventually arrive at something like the following:

> A polyfill is a piece of code (usually JavaScript on the Web) used to provide modern functionality on older browsers that do not natively support it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Polyfill

I think we would agree that foreach fits the definition, happy path, and whole purpose of a polyfill.

if you read up on forEach, you will notice that Array.prototype.forEach requires objects to be callable.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
by komali2 | 2025-08-08 12:49:44+00:00
Japan and the EU, and to a lesser extent, Korea, have actual social safety nets and their unions have the protection and support of the State.

In the USA the Union might be the only reason a certain profession has a healthcare plan at all. The relationship is so combative, unions basically have to adopt a "fuck you I'll get mine" attitude or they're passing things over the bargaining table for nothing in return.

Americans got the labor market they deserve: a transactional one.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-08 12:49:49+00:00
No, most of programming is at least implicitly coming up with a human-language description of the problem and solution that isn't full of gaps and errors. LLM users often don't give themselves enough credit for how much thought goes into the prompt - likely because those thoughts are easy for humans! But not necessarily for LLMs.

Sort of related to how you need to specify the level of LLM reasoning not just to control cost, but because the non-reasoning model just goes ahead and answers incorrectly, and the reasoning model will "overreason" on simple problems. Being able to estimate the reasoning-intensiveness of a problem before solving it is a big part of human intelligence (and IIRC is common to all great apes). I don't think LLMs are really able to do this, except via case-by-case RLHF whack-a-mole.
by partomniscient | 2025-08-08 12:50:34+00:00
Also Australian and can confirm once you get on main-ish roads a certain distance from major population areas these were a thing (at least quite a few years ago, don't drive so haven't recent data on this stuff).

It's nice to think there is some trust/faith in humanity once you get a certain distance away from the frenetic pace of life in cities.

On a related note, have recently finished (with my wife) a bottle of Adnamurchan whisky - highly recommended, although I'm more of an Islay guy.

Also spent 2.5 years living in Scotland - those blue sky photos are the exception, not the norm.
by catapart | 2025-08-08 12:51:02+00:00
Ha! That's pretty cool.

My first thought with this card was that it could be "gamified" into something that kids would probably love. A clique-y, social thing where kids could "pour" some of their fluid into another's card, with NFC or something. User preference colors that don't change when "poured" could help indicate how many different people have interacted with your card.

But enough spitballing. There's no killer idea there. Just something I'll be amused to see show up as a value-add for some other kind of toy, or whatever.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-08 12:51:09+00:00
To see this first hand try this website if you're in Europe (maybe it's also fast in the US, not sure):

https://www.jpro.one/?

The entire thing is a JavaFX app (i.e. desktop app), streaming DOM diffs to the browser to render its UI. Every click is processed server side (scrolling is client side). Yet it's actually one of the faster websites out there, at least for me. It looks and feels like a really fast and modern website, and the only time you know it's not the same thing is if you go offline or have bad connectivity.

If you have enough knowledge to efficiently use your database, like by using pipelining and stored procedures with DB enforced security, you can even let users run the whole GUI locally if they want to, and just have it do the underlying queries over the internet. So you get the best of both worlds.

There was a discussion yesterday on HN about the DOM and how it'd be possible to do better, but the blog post didn't propose anything concrete beyond simplifying and splitting layout out from styling in CSS. The nice thing about JavaFX is it's basically that post-DOM vision. You get a "DOM" of scene graph nodes that correspond to real UI elements you care about instead of a pile of divs, it's reactive in the Vue sense (you can bind any attribute to a lazily computed reactive expression or collection), it has CSS but a simplified version that fixes a lot of the problems with web CSS and so on and so forth.
by nu11ptr | 2025-08-08 12:51:24+00:00
I have traveled a fair amount via Amtrak, and in general, I don't really like their newer cars. The old ones were fabric, huge bathrooms, spacious and comfy. The double decker ones had a feeling like you were almost in a traveling apartment. These new ones feel like the new plane interiors: more cramped, more plastic, etc. Nothing to scream at the sky about, but solidly a step down IMO. Maybe I'm just getting old lol. I suspect they are more economical though, and therefore more profitable.
by xtracto | 2025-08-08 12:51:28+00:00
>The novel describes the rise of Berzelius "Donald" Windrip, a demagogue who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force [ICE], in the manner of European fascists such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The novel's plot centers on journalist Doremus Jessup's opposition to the new regime and his subsequent struggle against it as part of a liberal rebellion.

Edited for LOLs...
by woodruffw | 2025-08-08 12:51:46+00:00
As others have noted, the bigger bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor is the tracks themselves (or more precisely, a small number of problematic old railroad bridges and tunnels). Amtrak has been moving to replace them under the Gateway project[1], but it's a significant undertaking given how critical the existing lines are.

[1]: https://amtraknewera.com/gateway/
Show HN: AI Workflows and Custom AI Consulting
by shayan-arman | 2025-08-08 12:52:37+00:00
Hey everybody! I'm Shayan, former Apple Engineer. Building out a custom AI Consulting business. If you have any ideas and want us to help you build them out for you, give us a call! We're looking for people in Real Estate, Accounting, Finance, and Sales!

-Shayan
by wat10000 | 2025-08-08 12:52:56+00:00
That’s only true with short distances or crappy trains. I’ll drive DC to NYC rather than take the train, as it’s cheaper and not much slower. If Acela were a proper high-speed line I might switch. DC to Boston is close to a toss up, ~7 vs ~9 hours, but a proper high-speed train that did it in 2.5 hours would be really attractive.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-08 12:53:34+00:00
> I can sell the real estate or I can mortgage it and borrow against its value

You make money if you sell. You don't if you use the asset as security for a loan.

This has been explained several times.

A loan is a loan, whether it is a secured loan or not. A mortgage is a secured loan whose security is real property.

You are effectively claiming that getting a loan is making money. Obviously you do not see that this is clearly not the case when thinking about it through a mortgage, but would you make the same claim with credit cards or a personal loan to buy a car, or a secured loan against, say, your car? My guess is that you wouldn't although it is the same thing as getting a mortgage.
by originalvichy | 2025-08-08 12:53:40+00:00
It honestly truly looked like that from over here. Every penny the wealthy middle class earned would go to American stocks. No one was savung money by investing in the local stock market. Business news became more about American Big Tech and less about local up and comers. It felt like everything was being made for the US or by the US. Re-starting the German war industry is something no EU politician could have achieved. We have a golden opportunity to leverage China as well as enter LatAm and African markets in the absence of US soft power.
by kreco | 2025-08-08 12:53:55+00:00
While msbuild is powerful, I strongly believe it should have been a standard C# language build system instead of a XML-based one.

Any non-trivial thing to do is a pain to figure out if the documentation is not extensive enough.

I really love C#, but msbuild is one of the weak links to me, almost everything else is a joy to use.
Show HN: Synchrotron, a real-time DSP engine in pure Python
by andromedaM31 | 2025-08-08 12:54:23+00:00
Yes, Python.

I can already hear the screams from the rafters telling me how terrible of a choice Python is - but in my case, I valued modularity, extensibility, hackability over raw performance. (It was also a challenge to myself to see how far I can get without referencing existing implementations)

Synchrotron processes nodes: simple Python classes with typed I/O and a render() method for processing. It can be as concise as 5 lines:

class IncrementNode(Node): input: StreamInput output: StreamOutput def render(self, ctx): self.out.write(self.a.read(ctx) + 1)

Nodes can then be spawned and linked programmatically or in the graphical editor. Synchrotron handles the rest at runtime. Besides the web UI, you can also interact with the engine via Python, REST, DSL, or standalone TUI.

Currently you can build synths, FX chains, MIDI instruments, arpeggiators, controllers, or just mess about with sound :>

Editor: https://synchrotron.thatother.dev/ Source: https://github.com/ThatOtherAndrew/Synchrotron

It's still experimental (and my first ever shipped project), but I'd love feedback from people who tinker with audio/DSP/live coding. Docs are terrible currently, but that's my next big goal!
by alnwlsn | 2025-08-08 12:54:26+00:00
>He must have worked with a company that can do the surface mount assembly

He did (there are centroid files in the production folder, which tell the board house where to put the components), but you'd be surprised at how possible it is to assemble something like this by hand. You won't believe me, but I find it easier than through-hole soldering (because you don't have to keep flipping the board over).

But there's a 99.9% chance this was done in-house at JLC or PCBWay.
by pella | 2025-08-08 12:55:38+00:00
https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1953206064486519238

"AMD’s Q2 CY2025 earnings came in below expectations, but this was mostly expected. For the past six months, we have been highlighting that demand for the MI325X was soft, the launch was delayed and ended up landing a couple of months after Nvidia’s B200, even though MI325X was initially positioned as an H200 competitor. The MI355X was not broadly available during the quarter either, so it did not move the revenue needle much. Looking ahead, MI355X should be reasonably competitive with B200 on inference performance per TCO, but it will not match GB200, the MI355X scales to a world size of just 8, while GB200 goes up to 72. We expect AMD to close much of the system-level hardware gap by late 2026 or early 2027 with MI400 UALoE72. On the software side, there are massive improvements across training and inferencing since our December 2024 article, though there is still a long road ahead. AMD needs to close gaps around production-ready multi-node disaggregated prefill inferencing, WideEP multi-node inference, ROCm support for DeepEP MoE dispatch, and cleaning up the 100+ unit tests in PyTorch currently tagged with @skipIfRocm or @cudaOnly. AMD’s AI lead, @AnushElangovan, is actively working on this every day. Instead of previous stock buybacks, we expect AMD to continue increasing Opex as it reinvests in AI, growing software headcount, boosting talent compensation, and renting back MI325X/MI355X clusters from GPU cloud partners like OCI, Azure, TensorWave, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Crusoe for internal R&D."
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-08 12:55:49+00:00
> In practice, my number one use of a fob from a remote distance is locking, rather than unlocking, and those two operations don't have the equivalent security risk.

Yep, that's the simplest fix. Key is required in the door to open/unlock.

You'd think too that a firmware update to the car could enable that behavior. I mean most cars still have a physical lock on at least the driver's side door as a "back door" to getting into the car if the fob is non-operational.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-08-08 12:55:59+00:00
> I often really hate certain technologies like MsBuild and use them begrudgingly for years, fighting with the tooling, right up until I decide once and for all to give it enough of my attention to properly learn, and then realise how powerful and useful it actually is!

I had a similar expreience with Cmake. Note, I still hate the DSL but what it can do and what you nowadays actually need to do (or how you organize it) if you are writing a new project can be relatively clean and easy to follow.

Not to say its easy to get to that point, but I don't think anyone really would say that.
by vixen99 | 2025-08-08 12:56:51+00:00
Well while celebrating, let's remember that the dream leans massively on the US. 74% of Europe's publicly listed companies depend on US-based technology services like Google and Microsoft for their core operations. And can Europe defend itself? No is the response most analysts give. It's massively under-resourced & dependent on the US. However, if Russia invades (as predicted by some), it invades Europe. So in negotiations such as they are, where are the Europeans leaders dominating (or even putting an appearance at) the discussion to try to call a cease fire to the appalling tragedy of Russia's invasion of the country adjacent to European territory? Isn't it kind of embarrassing?

Overstaying a visa is an offence and if you've gone through the efforts of getting one in the first place, you should read the regulations. Most of us do and act accordingly as I know from own situation this summer.
by esafak | 2025-08-08 12:56:55+00:00
> If AGI is ever achieved, it would open the door to recursive self improvement ...

They are unrelated. All you need is a way for continual improvement without plateauing, and this can start at any level of intelligence. As it did for us; humans were once less intelligent.

Using the flagship to bootstrap the next iteration with synthetic data is standard practice now. This was mentioned in the GPT5 presentation. At the rate things are going I think this will get us to ASI, and it's not going to feel epochal for people who have interacted with existing models, but more of the same. After all, the existing models are already smarter than most humans and most people are taking it in their stride.

The next revolution is going to be embodiment. I hope we have the commonsense to stop there, before instilling agency.
by treetalker | 2025-08-08 12:57:13+00:00
Programming does not have (but should have) licensing to ensure proper qualifications — including ethics requirements, duties to the client (end user) and the possibility of losing the license on account of malpractice (including violations of the guild's ethics requirements).

As for other comments claiming that programmers but not lawyers are logical and systems thinkers, the commenters seem to be unacquainted with the practice of law in the real world.
by matltc | 2025-08-08 12:57:27+00:00
Was looking for this too.

That said, Anthropic nerfed those plans pretty hard a few days ago. Imagine more to come, much like gh copilot is basically useless now. Literally having it write docs for a single function in an unfamiliar codebase spent 1% of my monthly "premium requests" allowance. Agent is terrible compared to Claude Code in my experience, even when using the same model (Sonnet 4)
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-08 12:57:43+00:00
All of these models generally produce hideous sites that because for some unknown reason we all decided shadcn and tailwind-with-no-design-system should define AI generated UI.

I use image generation for UI layout and have Claude implement it with an actual UI library: usually MUI with theming, but honestly anything with a sane grid system is better than loose tailwind.
by gf000 | 2025-08-08 12:57:50+00:00
It's one of the most reliably reproducible facts of science that there is no healthy amount of alcohol consumption.

Of course that doesn't mean we should 100% stop doing so, I believe that the occasional social gathering with some alcohol probably has more positives all together than staying home depressed (though of course this is not an exclusive or situation), but we should definitely not lie that it is somehow healthy. It's a risk factor, and people do regularly take risks, like driving a car.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-08 12:58:39+00:00
> If your mortgaged house depreciates while you are still paying off the mortgage, you still need to pay the original, un-depreciated amount.

Mistake in logic. The money you received as a loan doesn't depreciate in value if the underlying asset depreciates in value. And vice versa.

As for interest, if your real estate has appreciated by a factor of 9 as in the example we're discussing, then interest rates are of minor concern to get the jackpot payout. As you certainly know, you wouldn't have to take out a loan corresponding to the entire value of your asset, and neither would most banks give it.