MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a text-based birthday reminder app
by samfeldman | 2025-08-05 13:57:15+00:00
I bought the birthdays.app domain a few years ago and decided to build a simple birthday app, just text message reminders.

I had hacked together a duct-tape version for myself a couple years prior (using zapier + google sheets), and found it useful. It was a pain sifting through Facebook birthdays (90% irrelevant), and I found the text reminders simpler than a calendar.

The app has been slowly growing since 2023, and is now up to 739 paying users (mostly on the $9/yr plan, with a few paying $3/yr).

Earlier this year, I built a Google Calendar integration to automatically sync birthdays to the app. My goal is birthday reminders without the baggage a normal "social" app would have such as ads, engagement bait, etc.

I call it an app, but there's actually no app to download. Users log in via phone number + sms login code, then input birthdays manually, via text, or via Google Calendar.

At the moment, US users receive SMS messages (which are cheaper to send in the US), while other countries receive WhatsApp text reminders.

The app uses Twilio to text users (both SMS + WhatsApp) and Stripe for payments.

I'm hoping to build more features (iPhone contacts sync, easier birthdays importing) while also making video content that celebrates strangers' birthdays (such as, going to a farmers market with an "is it your birthday?" sign).

Thank you for reading, I'm open to any thoughts or ideas around the app!
by balivandi | 2025-08-05 13:57:15+00:00
My wife and I started a children’s jewelry business, and I’ve wanted to use AI to show children wearing our jewelry. Every time I try, I get either ridiculous results or hit some artificial censorship wall about making images with children.

I would really like to find a way to do this (either online or locally) if anyone has any tips for giving a model some images of real jewelry with dimensions (and if needed even photographed or generated children) and having the model accurately place the jewelry on the kids.
by Levitz | 2025-08-05 13:57:25+00:00
"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.

This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.

Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
by morkalork | 2025-08-05 13:57:39+00:00
Some nights my cat goes absolutely ballistic running from window to window to door, meowing and scratching to get out. And inevitably if I open my camera and look I'll see something like a family of racoons walking by or a skunk in the yard. It's a little consolation that he's just hearing other animals and isn't possessed by demons at 2am.
by sgarland | 2025-08-05 13:59:02+00:00
Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was absolutely terrible, like < 1 MBps. My department had some large files, so that was fun.

One such file was an Excel file that was more script than anything else. We had to have labels in a specific format on every machine we owned in the fab, which was something like 250 of them. The normal stuff like its id number, and also which points of contact for a technician and engineer, as well as their photos and phone numbers. Manually balancing and re-balancing every time a shift gained or lost an employee would’ve been obnoxious, so naturally instead countless hours were spent coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info, extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty fun to watch, honestly. I think I also had created a floor plan map somehow, and it would do its best to group a given technician’s assigned machines such that they minimized distance traveled during inspections. Anyway, the large file size was due to it caching the headshots (might have made a hidden tab for each? I don’t remember) for better performance, as that had proven to be a bottleneck.
by KPGv2 | 2025-08-05 13:59:16+00:00
You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.

What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"

This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.

Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.
by rob74 | 2025-08-05 13:59:31+00:00
Yes - the Overton window in the US has shifted so far right that a Nazi salute is more or less mainstream, whereas democratic socialists like Sanders/AOC are now "far left". And judges who dare block Trump's actions are, of course, "radical left lunatics" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/federal-judge...).
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-05 13:59:40+00:00
It's very true that we only approximate truth with our maps. All abstractions are leaky, but that fact does not imply "catastrophic relativism" (as the grandfather post phrased it). It just implies that we need better, more accurate, maps.

Or, to return the topic of the post, it just means that our translations need to try a little harder, not that human quality translation is impossible to do via machine.

I think it's very important to remember that objective truth exists, because some large percentage of society has a political interest in denying that, and we're slipping ever closer into Sagan's "Demon Haunted World."
by achenet | 2025-08-05 13:59:57+00:00
> You remember that the american economy existed BEFORE money was minted by the government right? You read history right? So how the heck does your argument fit in the world of common sense? Like your incredible logic is Government makes money, therefore government is responsible for progress.

er... you mean when it was using money minted by the English/British government?

> You realize that "money" aka gold, aka other forms of currency have existed without governments right?

The use of precious metals as currency happened after the creation of debt-based paper money, and was tightly linked to what you'd at least call proto-governmental bureaucratic institutions - the temples of Sumerian cities would decree that one talent of silver was worth a bushel of barley (so roughly a day's wages), and people would do accounting using the silver talent as a unit of value, but that only worked because there was a large temple, with plentiful talent reserves, to act a a starting point for stuff like "laborer A promises laborer B half a talent tomorrow if laborer B gives laborer A a hand on task X today", or "farmer 1 gives farmer 2 one talent's worth of barley today, with a promise that a year from now, farmer 2 will give the holder of this promissory note two talent's worth of barley or silver".

So... my suggestion that perhaps you may be drawing your conclusions based on imperfect understandings of history may not be completely out there.

> Like clearly either you're an idiot,

yeah you got me, I'm an idiot :D

> you're just treating me like one coming up with completely misguided logic to point out what? To read some book?

I apologize if you feel like I'm condescending. That's not my intention, I'm just pointing out you seem to be repeating a falsehood, albeit one that is very popular in American political discourse, that money/business/commerce can somehow happen without government.

Like this Reagan-era meme is patently false, maybe in the fucking 80s no one had internet to verify that it was false, but in 2025 I think people should realize it was bullshit made up by the neocons to cut social services, and has about as much bearing on the truth as the whole "God made earth exactly as it is 6000 years ago" myth that creationists say is just as true as the geological theories which help us find oil.

Like with all due respect, you're saying "money happens without government", I'm saying "bro, Graeber has a several thousand page book explaining exactly why that's bullshit". I do feel justified.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-08-05 14:00:07+00:00
The problem lies in forming and managing such a huge organisation that deals with the problem in an efficient and lean way, not the technical aspects.

The materials science aspect is a challenge, not to produce, but to produce with a sane cost.

The rocket science aspect of things (namely the linearisation of the booster model in order to be able to be solved in constant time by an MPC) is more or less a solved problem.

Coordinating such complex interconnected systems will always remain one.
by tomhow | 2025-08-05 14:00:23+00:00
> Oh, this is a bunch of baloney...

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by gorhill | 2025-08-05 14:00:50+00:00
> it claims to use zero CPU

There is no claim of "zero CPU". The claim is that the service worker wakes up only when necessary -- it is designed to be suspended by default from the ground up.

In Optimal and Complete modes, the content scripts will of course execute, without the service worker being unsuspended if no filtering occurs, but perform only the necessary work and bail out ASAP if not needed.

In Basic or "No filtering" modes, no content scripts are injected.

---

Edit: Sorry, I do say "uBOL itself does not consume CPU/memory resources while content blocking is ongoing". When I say "itself" I am referring to the service worker as seen in Chromium's Task Manager. The service worker isn't required for examples when navigating to `example.com` or here at `news.ycombinator.com`. All top content blockers I have looked at do require their service worker to execute, even for merely just switching between tabs. Some even use tricks to prevent their service worker to be suspended at all.
by sneak | 2025-08-05 14:01:05+00:00
> our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth

FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-08-05 14:01:14+00:00
>The issue with suspending due process is you can’t tell if any of these accusations are true.

None of the detainees are claiming citizenship. Due process is only violated if they claim citizenship and ICE ignores them. One might think that even someone ignorant of the law might start babbling "you can't do this, I'm a citizen" or similar.

They know the score. They know they're not. Now if only the left would clue in too.

>and punishment.

What punishment? Not all legal remedies are punishment. No criminal charges are levied. No one intends to incarcerate them (hell, that would mean they get to stay). They're just being deported.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-05 14:01:24+00:00
Not sure about this one. It's based on NetCoreServer which is great but it's definitely not something I'd be comfortable putting into production over kestrel or IIS.

From a performance standpoint, it is very difficult to beat kestrel now. If you don't want all the fancy Microsoft bullshit (I certainly don't), use the minimal APIs and map out routes to lightweight HttpContext handlers.
by tomhow | 2025-08-05 14:02:15+00:00
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by altairprime | 2025-08-05 14:02:27+00:00
The Windows 11 TPM push parallels macOS and the T2 chip, except years later. Once Win11 is in the majority, I imagine web attestation will start to go live in web banking, because they hate paying for fraud investigations.

But. The silent looming threat I predict that few others seem to see, is that Valve will guaranteed enable TPM w/ secure boot attestation in a future Steam Deck hardware update after everyone bails from Windows 10 to Valve Linux, giving it true standing as a console and overcoming today’s multiplayer lockouts by AAA games (unattested Linux is a godsend for software cheaters compared to Windows), while having captured that market on the pretense of tinkerability with full intentions to betray that unstated assumption in favor of regaining AAA multiplayer support in games.

Similarly, that’s why so many AMD gaming processors already ship with Microsoft’s secure attestation Proton chip from the Xbox inside: if Microsoft wants to end kernel-rootkit anticheat, they have to offer another solution, or else competitive PC multiplayer online gaming dies when Microsoft slams the door on Crowdstrike. Secure attestation, coming to a Steam instance near you. (And not to single out Valve — Epic will go there too!)

Console-grade attestation is coming to computers everywhere, because just as with password theft, it uniformly prevents virtually all software-based cheating. It won’t stop hardware-based cheating, but doi:10.1109/SERE-C.2012.43 and Apple mFI already demonstrated that peripheral attestation can arrive at any time — there just isn’t any point in doing so for Win/Lin gaming when most users aren’t using attestation. Yet.

Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little trying to convey the threat to repurposeability here, but, like, this is what’s coming, because after the Crowdstrike worldwide outage, kernel rootkits are on the way out - and the side effects are going to be devastating. This is why I don’t just say, as one comment below does, “fuck you” to attestation: that approach has no effect and it’s coming for everyone unless more people than I start confronting it and understanding it.
by milanspeaks | 2025-08-05 14:02:47+00:00
I am 41 years old. I failed at almost everything till 35 in my career. I was down at my last $800 in my bank account with a dependent wife and a kid. Somehow I found a good job at 35 and I became financially stable. This stability gave me freedom to pursue few other projects and I got success in all other things. So success will definitely come to you over time if you stick and plan for it. The biggest skills you need to develop are resilience and not taking yourself too seriously. We are a very small blip in this massive Universe and our goal is just to try our best and leave the results to almighty.
by swat535 | 2025-08-05 14:02:58+00:00
Another life trick I've learned is that you are also allowed to:

1. Say no and disagree with people

2. Walk away from any relationship (personal or professional)

3. Do what you like, believe what you like (as long as you are not harming yourself or others).

4. Move

5. Hire experts to work for you (if you can afford it)

6. Spend your money as you please

7. Engage in conversation with strangers

8. Drastically change your life (new career, new field of study, etc) 9. Talk to strangers.

It took me a long time to realize that being an adult means taking control of my life, make decisions and being okay with their consequences because _I_ made them.
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-05 14:03:33+00:00
google was also accused in its early days of free riding on other people's content - google news still remains controversial. Also, in its early days, google did not have to deal with a large counter-party like cloudflare which is now a gatekeeper of sorts.

The problem I see for chatgpt/perplexity and the like is this: for good responses to many questions, they have to index the web real-time. ie, they become a search-engine. However, they cannot share revenue with the content-providers since they dont have an ad-model. I wonder how this would be resolved - perhaps thru content licensing with the large publishers.
by rightbyte | 2025-08-05 14:04:16+00:00
Well to be fair I've used some silly and expensive Meater Plus thermometer that needed an Android app just because I got is as a gift from my father in law and wanted to be able to at least tell him I used it.

It is hard to turn down present with "it will spy on me" when ordinary people think a thermometer can't. But I am quite sure I would refuse to install a SaaS CCTV.
by scop | 2025-08-05 14:05:12+00:00
This is great! Hat tip to PHP. I first came across pipes in Elixir and have ever since missed it in every other language. Two observations:

- pipes make you realize how much song and dance you do for something quite simple. Nesting, interstitial variables, etc all obscuring what is in effect and very orderly set of operations.

- pipes really do have to be a first class operator of the language. I’ve tried using some pipe-like syntactic sugar in languages without pipes and while it does the job, a lot of elegance and simplicity is lost. It feels like you are using a roundabout thing and thus, in the end, doesn’t really achieve the same level of simplicity. Things can get very deranged if you are using a language in a way it wasn’t designed for and even though I love pipes I’ve seen “fake pipes” make things more complicated in languages without them.
by reginald78 | 2025-08-05 14:05:33+00:00
They're probably just trying to not get their implementation blackballed with the attestation feature like one of the FIDO devs immediately threatened to do to keepass: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

I think the dance is all for naught though, they'll end up locked out as non-standard once uptake is high enough IMO.
by debugnik | 2025-08-05 14:05:38+00:00
I've qualified with "useless" for a reason. It's cool if you've got a novel use case, but so far I think most uses of AI art are either uncanny filler for blogs and slides; or a driver for the deprofessionalization and commoditization of artworks, with AI art producers flooding art sites to fight regular artists for attention, and industry forcing artists to paint over AI generated works (already common in mobile games) until their cheaper substitutes can replace them, and their next job forces them to set art aside.
by colechristensen | 2025-08-05 14:05:43+00:00
I bet a lot of republicans wish democrats had fielded a better candidate so that their primary field would have had to demonstrate that they could beat the democrat. Instead it was a doddering old man who originally was only there to make Obama seem more conservative. Democrats have been useless and ineffective for a couple of decades now and that has in no small part helped the republican party turn towards the fascism of idiots.

I'm a democrat and I blame my own party more than republicans for the situation we're in. You can't just phone it in for decades and expect to win because you're so sure you're right. The republic needs to be and has needed to be actively defended and the people who were supposed to be doing that have been cowards.
by morkalork | 2025-08-05 14:06:17+00:00
The successful pattern I've seen is someone around VP level in an existing industry leaving their current company and grabbing some engineers to build their idea. Maybe because their idea is great, or maybe because they're stuck at that level and can't advance further without leaving. But either way, they generally have some contact with their peers at other companies in industry so when they go pitch their product, they're much more likely to succeed than any random asshole off the street.
by electroly | 2025-08-05 14:06:46+00:00
The events of my post happened in the last two months on Julia version 1.11.5, and this poster simply linked to a primer on PackageCompiler.jl which is the thing I said I was using in my post. It's not solved; at best there are complicated mitigations that let you control when the long compilation happens without avoiding it. If you try out Julia, you will run into the issue, and as a first-time user you won't be prepared to implement the mitigations, none of which are suitable for ad hoc usage. The sysimage only works for us because we rarely change our packages so we can build it ahead of time in GitHub Actions.
by rorylaitila | 2025-08-05 14:07:23+00:00
I feel I've tried them all. Echarts is the best overall charting library. Fast, complete, easy to start, advanced options, looks great by default, good examples, server and client rendering, SVG and canvas.

My only complaint is the chart-data data structures. Each chart type takes a different structure and axis data structure. They bolted on a data table feature (columns and rows), but it's not as documented and last I tried, incomplete.
by lmeyerov | 2025-08-05 14:07:43+00:00
The second link helps

It's interesting to wonder if 80% of the question answering can be achieved as a prompts/otel.md over MCPs connected to Claude Code and let agentic reasoning do the rest

Ex:

* When investigating errors, only query for error-level logs

* When investigating performance, only query spans (skip logs unless required) and keep only name, time. Linearize as ... .

* When querying both logs & traces, inline logs near relevant trace as part of an llm-friendly stored artifact jobs/abc123/context.txt

Are there aspects of the question answering (not ui widgets) you think are too hard there?
by aidev42 | 2025-08-05 14:07:52+00:00
The other day I needed someone's address to send a thank you card, which I knew I had but couldn't find. Was it emailed to me? Which email? Oh wait maybe it was in my Dropbox, but what folder? Was it a doc or excel? Shoot maybe it was Google Drive. Existing search tools weren't helping.

Most search tools are built for the web. Few help you search your own stuff.

I'm curious if others run into this or if I'm just unorganized?

I'm testing a tool with some friends to search personal data over SMS. Wondering if this is a real problem for others?