MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MBCompass – FOSS Android and Compass App
by nativeforks | 2025-08-08 09:44:35+00:00
Hey HN,

This is a follow-up to our original Show HN post, where I launched the first version of MBCompass.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44155741

Since then, I've added several features based on user feedback and community input...

I just released v1.1.9 of MBCompass - Minimal, FOSS compass and navigation app.

New in this version:

- Theme toggling (Dark/Light) controlled via settings - Fix current location arrow visibility - Compass accuracy alerts - Sensor status indicator - Explicit button for showing the GPS current location - Smooth transitions and many more..

Still just [1.35MB] with no ads, no IAPs, and no trackers

I’ve also:

- Moved the project repo to a github organization for easier team collaboration and governance

- Launched a dedicated website for MBCompass with feature overviews and the story behind the app:

As always, feedback is welcome. Thanks for the continued support!

https://compassmb.github.io/MBCompass-site/
by magicalhippo | 2025-08-08 09:46:26+00:00
Mostly because I had it downloaded already and I'm mostly interested in models that fit on my 16GB GPU. But since you asked, I ran the same questions through both 30B models in the q4_k_m variant, as GPT-OSS 20B is also quantized to about q4.

First the ill-posed question:

Qwen 3 Coder gave very similar answer to Phi 4, though included a more long-winded explanation in the comments. So not bad, but not great either.

Qwen 3 Thinking thought for a good minute before deciding the question was ill-posed and return the hash marks. However the following explanation was not as good as GPT-OSS, IMHO: The question is unclear because an LC circuit (without resistance) does not have a "cutoff frequency"; cutoff frequency applies to filter circuits like RC or RLC. Additionally, the inductance (L) value is missing for calculating resonant frequency in an RLC circuit. The given R and C values are insufficient without L.

Sure, an unloaded LC filter doesn't have a cutoff frequency, but in all normal cases the load is implied[1] and so the LC filter does have a cutoff frequency. So more thinking to get to a worse answer.

The SQL question:

Qwen 3 Coder did identify the same pitfall as GPT-OSS, however didn't flag it as clearly as GPT-OSS, mostly because it also flagged some unnecessary stuff so got drowned. It did make the same assumption about evenly dividing, and overall the answer was about as good. However the speed on my computer was roughly half the number of tokens per second as GPT-OSS, at just ~9 tokens/second.

Qwen 3 Thinking thought for 3 minutes, yet managed to miss the key aspect, thus giving everyone the pizza. And it did so at the same slow pace as Qwen 3 Coder.

The SQL question requires a somewhat large context due to the large table definitions, and being a larger model it required pushing more layers to the CPU, which I assume is the major factor in the speed drop.

So overall Qwen 3 Coder was a solid contender, but on my PC much slower. If it could run entirely on GPU I'd certainly try it a lot more. Interestingly Qwen 3 Thinking was just plain worse. Perhaps not tuned to other tasks besides coding?

[1]: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slaa701a/slaa701a.pdf section 3.3 page 9

[2]: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/11772
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-08 09:47:19+00:00
How much space do you realistically need high availability, redundant storage for ?

For my personal use case, that involves photos and documents, all things i cannot easily recreate (photos less so). Those are what matters to me, and storing them in the cloud means i not only get redundancy in a single data center, but also geographical redundancy as many cloud providers will use erasure coding to make your data available across multiple data centers.

Everything else will be just fine on a single drive, even a USB drive, as everything that originated on the internet can most likely be found there again. This is especially true for media (purchased, or naval aquisition). Media is probably the most replicated data on the planet, possibly only behind the bible and IKEA catalog.

So, back to the important data, i can easily fit an entire family of 4 into a single 2TB data plan. That costs me somewhere around €85 - €100 per year, for 4 people, and it works no matter what i do. I no longer need to drag a laptop with me on vacation, and i can basically just say "fuck it" and go on vacation for 2 weeks.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 09:47:45+00:00
Or people who try to send every filename on a system through xargs in a single command process invocation as arguments (argv) without NUL-terminated strings. Just hope there are no odd or corrupt filenames, and plenty of memory. Oopsie. find -print0 with parallel -0/xargs -0 are usually your friends.

Also, sed and grep without LC_ALL=C can result in the fun "invalid multibyte sequence".
by vintagedave | 2025-08-08 09:49:04+00:00
This is confusing. In the screen recording, I see two popovers, _both_ of which appear when clicking.

Yet I would view a hint as one that appears simply on hover: a tooltip.

The article jumps ahead "But wait, didn’t clicking on the hint popover close the auto one? ... Because you’re inducing an action (click), it activates the light-dismiss of the auto popover. This is almost certainly not what you want when you’re creating a hint popover." but completely omits what a hint is supposed to be in the first place and whether this actually is a hint. As far as I can tell, this hint type of popover is not actually behaving like a desktop-style tooltip hint.
Ask HN: What teckstack should I use as a noob?
by Qualitywolf2 | 2025-08-08 09:49:29+00:00
Hi, I am a noob webdeveloper (only 2 projects behind my back). Question: I want to make a new "directory" site about a given niche with some new-wave visualizations (e.g. charts to visualize data), what techstack should I use in the era of AI assistants, IDEs, and easy-to-use Postgre providers? Also, do I always need a langin page (with a Hero), or should get to the point immediatelly? Thanks, Ben
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-08 09:49:48+00:00
> For my use cases it doesn't appear to be any better than o3/o3-pro.

It doesn't have to be better, it has to be "as close to those as possible", while being cost efficient to run and serve at scale.

> This probably means that we're in the "slow AI / stagnation" timeline

I'd say we're more in the "ok, we got the capabilities in huge models, now we need to make them smaller, faster and scalable" timeline. If they capture ~80-90% of the capabilities of their strongest models while reducing costs a lot (they've gone from 40-60$/Mtok to 10$/Mtok) then they're starting to approach a break-even point and slowly make money off of serving tokens.

There's also a move towards having specialised models (code w/ claude, long context w/ gemini, etc) and oAI seem to have gone in this direction as well. They've said for a long time that gpt5 will be a "systems" update and not necessarily a core model update. That is, they have a routing model that takes a query and routes it towards the best model for the task. Once devs figure out how to use this to their advantage, the "vibes" will improve.
by themafia | 2025-08-08 09:50:25+00:00
> is people committing crimes with the scanner playing waiting to see if the police are on to them

That's ridiculous. I've seen one police chief give this testimony but I've seen no evidence anywhere or charges levied anywhere showing it has actually occurred and I can't actually parse out the criminal model.

You have to assume that they _absolutely will always_ broadcast the location of burglaries on the radio. They could just not do that. Perhaps they coordinate the arrest using cellphones which is something that happens all the time already. Then your listening in has cost you a person who could otherwise be stealing things and may end up being a highly unreliable indicator of imminent capture. Then you have to be sure you leave early enough and carefully enough that no one, not even a neighbors ring camera, sees you leave the scene or tracks your travel after the crime.

That's not to say I haven't seen "criminals" use them. Street takeovers will monitor traffic to frustrate responding officers. Cannonball run players will monitor traffic to avoid speed traps. I've also used them for skip tracing when trying to find an officer who is also a debtor, ironically, they often think themselves above civil law enforcement and are notoriously hard to collect on.

Anyways, it really seems like a weak dodge from police departments that would rather not be accountable to the public. Chicago is no exception. Delays of communications put control solely in their hands. I can't imagine a worse outcome. It should be a third party non-aligned agency that performs that task and it should take a call from the governor to prevent them from doing it.
Tell HN: Thing I learned this year was keeping a work journal
by Muromec | 2025-08-08 09:50:30+00:00
I once saw a comment suggesting to keep a working journal here and I want to say it's the best thing since figuring out how and why to write unit tests.

Whenever I have to do something that involves more than one line in more than one file, I make another text file, called JOURNAL in the root of the project and write down all the things I plan to get back to.

All the side quests spawned from fixing that one bug, all the slightly obscure parts that I need to figure out what they were doing, all the missing unit tests. And then I don't publish the PR until all of them are either ticked off or transferred to whatever JIRA-hell I have.

I unlocks two capabilities -- 1) I can just close my laptop at any time and whenever I get back I still remember all the half-done, to be checked later, doesnt-break-the-build-but-is-obviously-wrong things. and 2) I can open two probjects each with it's own JOURNAL and switch between them without pain.

Keeping the write ahead log to recover from memory loss isn't only for filesystems, it's for minds too. Shocker.
by yummypaint | 2025-08-08 09:50:51+00:00
It's pretty wild that software is the only "engineering" discipline without any concept of professional ethics or loyalty to human safety that superceeds the whims of the employer.

Why do people think that is? Have there been any attempts to change this from the inside over the past decade? Where are professional associations like the ACM in all of this? It's a shameful state of affairs and reflects poorly on the whole discipline.

People who design bridges and vehicles have real responsibilities and standards they are held to, yet somehow the software that actually runs these things is exempt.

This is how Boeing negligently murdered hundreds of people with MCAS. By taking responsibility for safety away from actual engineers and misplacing it with people who write software.
by addandsubtract | 2025-08-08 09:51:40+00:00
Another cheap option are Fujitsu Futro's. They're meant to be thin server clients meant to operate larger server racks (I guess?). Anyway, they come with 4-8GB RAM, an SSD (most people upgrade them), and even have a PCI-e slot (depending on the model) to use with a 2.5 or 10 Gbit ethernet card, for example. Around $50 on ebay.
by rollcat | 2025-08-08 09:52:29+00:00
You're correct. However those sound like perfectly reasonable changes to me. gets(3) is a horrible API.

As defined by POSIX.1-2001:

> If a read error occurs, the error indicator for the stream shall be set, gets() shall return a null pointer, and set errno to indicate the error.

IMHO the least-unreasonable thing to do is to behave exactly as if a read error occurred, but programs that do use gets(3) are unlikely to check for errno anyway.

> The rand() function shall return the next pseudo-random number in the sequence.

<https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904875/download/> susv3/functions/rand.html

The spec does not say what the sequence should look like, other than it's pseudorandom, so the exact sequence is implementation-dependent. You can't use it to e.g. seed a test run, a terrain generator, etc - and expect repeatable results across platforms, releases. (And I honestly can't think of another reasonable use case for deterministic output.) IMHO at that point you should define your own PRNG, it's about 8 lines of C.

But you're obviously correct, these are deviations.
by Aldipower | 2025-08-08 09:52:39+00:00
Me neither. Considered we are talking about collaborative network applications, you are loosing the single-source-of-thruth (the server database) with the local first approach. And it just adds so much more complexity. Also, as your app grows, you probably end up to implement the business logic twice. On the server and locally. I really do not get it.
Show HN: A tempmail service made with Rust
by JustSkyfall | 2025-08-08 09:53:08+00:00
Over the past year or so, I've been working on a temporary email service made with Rust and React.

The mail server is a custom-built SMTP server (written in Rust), with emails stored in Valkey. Making something similar is something I'd definitely recommend on a slow day :)
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-08 09:53:18+00:00
As a bare minimum, you should update your server and docker images daily, or at least whenever there's an update (which you won't know unless you check).

If you only access your homelab over VPN or similar, then by all means, update whenever you feel like it, but if you expose your services to the internet, you want to be damned sure there are no vulnerabilities in them.

The internet of today is not like it was 20 years ago. Today you're constantly being hammerede by bots that scan every single IPv4 address for open ports, and when they find something they record it in a database, along with information on what's running on that port (provided that information is available).

When (not if) a vulnerability for a given service is discovered, an attacker doesn't need to "hunt & peck" for vulnerable hosts, they already have that information in a database, and all they need to do is start shooting at their list of hosts.

You can use something like shodan.io to see what a would be attacker might see (can check your own IP with "ip:xxx.xxx.xxx.xx".

Try entering something like Synology, Proxmox, Truenas, Unraid, Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, or any of the other popular home services.
by imiric | 2025-08-08 09:53:19+00:00
> Unless you are running some really complicated globally distributed backend your roundtrip will always be higher than 80ms for all users outside your immediate geographical area.

The bottleneck is not the roundtrip time. It is the bloated and inefficient frontend frameworks, and the insane architectures built around them.

Here's the creator of Datastar demonstrating a WebGL app being updated at 144FPS from the server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K71AyAF6E4&t=848

This is not magic. It's using standard web technologies (SSE), and a fast and efficient event processing system (NATS), all in a fraction of the size and complexity of modern web frameworks and stacks.

Sure, we can say that this is an ideal scenario, that the server is geographically close and that we can't escape the rules of physics, but there's a world of difference between a web UI updating at even 200ms, and the abysmal state of most modern web apps. The UX can be vastly improved by addressing the source of the bottleneck, starting by rethinking how web apps are built and deployed from first principles, which is what Datastar does.
by Fnoord | 2025-08-08 09:54:31+00:00
Yep, but LLMs being used as aid in writing blog posts is a relatively new phenomenon.

I'm on the fence. IMO ivape provides a hypothesis, but brings it as fact. That isn't a good starting point for a discussion (though a common mistake), but that doesn't prove they are wrong either. Btw, I believe the HN guidelines encourage you to take the positive angle, at least for comments.

As for the topic at hand local-first means he end up with a cache; either in memory or on disk. If you got the RAM and NVMe you might as well use it for performance. Back in the days not much could be cached, but your connection was often too lousy or not 24/7. So you ended up with software distribution via 3.5 inch floppies or CDROM. Larger distributions used gigantic disk cache either centralized (Usenet) or distributed (BitTorrent). But the 'you might as well use it' issue is it introduces sloppiness. If you develop with huge constraints you are disciplined into deterrence to start, failing, or succeeding efficiently. We hary ever hear about all the deterrence and failing.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-08-08 09:56:16+00:00
Local first is super interesting and absolutely needed - I think most of the bugs I run into with web apps have to do with sync, exacerbated by poor internet connectivity. The local properties don't interest me as much as request ordering and explicit transactions. You aren't guaranteed that requests resolve in order, and thus can result in a lot of inconsistencies. These local-first sync abstractions are a bit like bringing a bazooka to a water gun fight - it would be interesting to see some halfway approaches to this problem.
by trinix912 | 2025-08-08 09:56:37+00:00
> This means any Norwegian trying to start eg a fast growing software biz must relocate to Sweden if they want to be close to home, or Switzerland more realistically, as swedens top income tax bracket is >50%.

There's nothing stopping them from doing that in Norway, they just have to pay their dues. Which are nowhere near the rate of those in a real communist system that people are so quick to label it as.

I find it very selfish to think that we should optimize everything to squeeze out the remaining 1.1% of the wealth, given that Scandinavia wouldn't have such a high living standard had it not been for the welfare system.
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-08-08 09:56:53+00:00
Why are taxes so high though? Like in Sweden I'd pay literally 80% tax on extra sole trader income - 30% employer tax, 30% income tax, 20% high income tax.

But there is no Swedish moon base, or ultra high speed rail, etc. - where does it all go? We have higher taxes but less infrastructure investment than a century ago.
by onre | 2025-08-08 09:57:34+00:00
As a Northern European (Finland) I can tell you that the electricity cost here for last year was closer to 0,1 € per kWh including the transfer fee and taxes. Additionally, more than 40 % of houses here have electric heating. The heating season starts in early autumn and ends in late spring, lasting 8 to 9 months depending on the year. As the electricity used by the device is turned into heat, during the heating season running it costs nothing.
by NullifyNAN | 2025-08-08 09:58:55+00:00
OpenAI has answered your prayers.

16 hours ago the readme for codex CLI was updated. Now codex cli supports openai login like claude does, no API credits.

From the readme:

After you run codex select Sign in with ChatGPT. You'll need a Plus, Pro, or Team ChatGPT account, and will get access to our latest models, including gpt-5, at no extra cost to your plan. (Enterprise is coming soon.)

Important: If you've used the Codex CLI before, you'll need to follow these steps to migrate from usage-based billing with your API key:

Update the CLI with codex update and ensure codex --version is greater than 0.13 Ensure that there is no OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable set. (Check that env | grep 'OPENAI_API_KEY' returns empty) Run codex login again
by jacquesm | 2025-08-08 09:59:01+00:00
> this is a topic where LLMs can be helpful.

That's probably the very last spot where you want to use an LLM, especially not in Germany. One single mistake can cost you a fortune, and you won't be able to spot the mistake because you're not an expert. LLMs could be used to prime you for conversations with an expert (but be prepared to be corrected on points of law and fact) but they are no substitute. Corporate law is a legal minefield, tread with utmost care.

The whole proposition is in a way bizarre: if you have this problem you almost certainly can afford proper guidance and if you need to resort to an LLM for that guidance you almost certainly don't need such complex constructs in the first place!
Show HN: Moocup – open-source tool to create preety screenshots.
by jdsane | 2025-08-08 10:00:26+00:00
Moocup makes easy to create beautiful screenshots.

It's made for designers, developers, docs writers who share lots of screenshots. Simply drop the photo and it'll be styled automatically to give a good look quickly.

You can also achieve whatever look & style you wish by editing photo with lots of available options.

I made it for myself when i was working on my portfolio. I wanted to showcase my work. None of available options hit me quite right.

all of them pushed a subscription in one way or another, so i decided to build one myself. there are no subscription or popup asking for subscription or email in moocup , EVER.

for that reason, i made moocup open-source. so i can put it in good shape and make it's future better.

i use many of the tools made by very nice people that are completely free, this is my way of giving back.
by intended | 2025-08-08 10:00:31+00:00
Counter point - rich people would remain rich, and we would have an ossified society if this was true.

Intelligence is not a singular pre-requisite to wealth or “to be rich”.

People can specialize in being intelligent, educated, well read, and more - while still being poor.

And we know that most entrepreneurs fail, which is why VCs function the way they do.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-08 10:01:13+00:00
How many services do you need ? And how much CPU power do those services need ?

I've also self hosted for decades, but it turns out i don't really need that much, at least not public.

I basically just need mail, calendar, file storage and DNS adblocking. I can get mail/calendar/file storage with pretty much any cloud provider (and no, there is no privacy when it comes to mail, there is always another participant in the conversation), and for €18/year i can get something like NextDNS, Control D, or similar.

For reference, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 will use around 50 kWh per year, which (again in europe) will translate to €15/year. For just €3 more per year i get redundancy and support.

I still run a bunch of stuff at home, but nothing is opened to the public internet. Everything runs behind a Wireguard VPN, and i have zero redundant storage. My home storage is used for backing up cloud storage, as well as storing media and client backups. And yes, i also have another cloud where i backup to.

My total cloud bill is around €20-€25/month, with 8TB of storage, ad blocking DNS, mail/calendar/office apps and even a small VPS.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-08-08 10:02:13+00:00
I get the incentives for full-song generation models, but it looks like it's the only thing that pops up. Where are the audio models I can use with a positive effect while working on music? Style transfer for instruments, restoration (but not just trained on over-compressed mp3s, talking about bad recording conditions), audio-to-audio editing?

You'd think those would be easier to achieve than something that tries to just replace me completely.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-08 10:02:30+00:00
Tablet and phone users don't care, but that is a mix of bytecode based languages, forced upgrades, and shop cleanup from apps that don't want to keep up.

Unless something bad really happens on Windows land, users will care for a long time about native x86 support, Microsoft not being as hardliner as Apple, is the main reason all Windows on ARM efforts keep failing.
by motorest | 2025-08-08 10:02:37+00:00
> This is a cursed idea to begin with, so I can't fully blame PostgreSQL.

After going through the list, I was left with the impression that the "cursed" list doesn't really refers to gotchas per se but to lessons learned by the developers who committed them. Clearly a couple of lessons are incomplete or still in progress, though. This doesn't take away from their value of significance, but it helps frame the "curses" as persona observations in an engineering log instead of statements of fact.