MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pravj | 2025-12-15 08:48:37+00:00
Plug-That-In [https://plugthat.in] (Mac App; Paid)

An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.

---

There are times when I'm deeply immersed in focused work, a meeting, or engaging video content and end up missing the usual low-battery notifications on my MacBook.

When the laptop suddenly shuts down, it's followed by the familiar and frustrating walk to find a charger or power outlet. It can be annoying and occasionally embarrassing, especially when rejoining a session a few minutes later with, "Sorry, my battery died."

Over the past few weekends, I built Plug-That-In, an app that introduces "floating/moving notifications". These alerts follow the cursor, providing a stronger, harder-to-miss nudge regardless of what’s happening on screen.

The app also includes a few critical features:

- Reminder Mode: When the battery reaches critical levels, the app emits a configurable alert similar to a car's seatbelt warning, continuing until the battery is addressed.

- Do Not Disturb Settings: Customize alerts and sounds based on context, such as when system audio is playing, a video is active, or the camera is in use.

It grew out of a personal need, and I'm glad to see it used by over 50 people in the past month.
by asim | 2025-12-15 08:49:06+00:00
Mu - a personal app platform that includes chat with AI, news, video, posts and now mail. Solving a personal problem with ads, algorithms, tracking.

Tech is too addictive now. We need to get back to utility value. I'm trying to build an alternative with myself as user 1.

https://mu.xyz https://github.com/asim/mu
by alin23 | 2025-12-15 08:49:35+00:00
Osmo Polyx is what I already had around from other wooden furniture projects, that's all. I try to not store too many cans of unused finishes around my house so I try to use what I already have first.

Top Oil indeed seems very similar to what I did (hardwax, drying oils, driers) but half of it is still white spirit solvent, which I'm guessing will give it the same smell as Polyx.

The closest thing I found to what I want is Walrus Oil Furniture Butter (https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter) but I didn't know about it at the time.
by physicsguy | 2025-12-15 08:49:44+00:00
I think that there have always been a ton of SaaS things that are basically circular - startup company paying silly amounts per month to another startup company. I think the market for these things will drop as part of AI, but I think that was always going to be the case with higher interest rates as investors questioned the revenue/spend balance.

When it comes to SaaS that's industry specific, I just don't see it'll be that much of a change any time soon. I've worked heavily in the engineering industry and the security requirements that get put upon anything are nuts. It is difficult to enter this market, ISO compliance is important, even being in the cloud is a barrier for some customers, and often the type that you have no choice but to contract with if you want to make a profit because of their outsized importance in the market.

When I speak to customers, they actually quite often have tried to build something themselves. Usually it's been an intern or grad trying to make their life easier. Often it's spreadsheet based, but some go as far as knocking up little Python web apps. In one company I interned in they had a shadow PHP app. They often have a small 'data science' team that has struggled to get access to the data they need. While they can often get something that does the barebones of the tasks, and can do it well, where they fall down is that they're vulnerable to security issues and can't navigate their internal company politics to get permission to host things in the cloud and make their life easy, plus they don't have the experience to know what's good practice. I don't see AI changing things that much in that.
by jakewins | 2025-12-15 08:51:57+00:00
Can you give an example of a chip with software-defined IO coprocessors that is 1/4 the price? The pricing I’m getting on the RP2350 is 0.6EUR per chip.

When I’ve compared to other dual-core SoCs with programmable IO, like NXP with FlexIO (~€11) or ESP32 chips with RMT (~€1) they are much more expensive than the RP2350.. is there a selection of programmable IO chips I’m missing?
by tete | 2025-12-15 08:52:47+00:00
A lot of them are bullshit jobs though. We've yet to see "AI" do anything actually beneficial. I don't mean the stuff that was done before the AI hype like categorizing bacteria, etc.

Watch the news. One crisis after another, so maybe that freed up work force and the wealth generated by "AI" should be used to tackle at least one of them.

Huge amounts of taxes and dedication of that money could be a first step.

Alternatively don't raise taxes and use the oh so great AI to tackle these issues. Should be trivial if you have ">90%" of all work freed up.
by Bombthecat | 2025-12-15 08:53:09+00:00
I don't think either, people forget that agents are also developing.

Back then, we put all the source code into AI to create things, then we manually put files into context, now it looks for needed files on their own. I think we can do even better by letting AI create a file and API documentation and only read the file when really needed. And select the API and documentation it needs and I bet there is more possible, including skills and MCP on top.

So, not only LLMs are getting better, but also the software using it.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-12-15 08:53:17+00:00
Yeah I heard a criticism of e.g. Duolingo the other day; even after two years on it daily, you'll know plenty of words and I suppose simple sentences, but you can't actually speak or comprehend the language, not unlike what the OP mentions.

I haven't learned a new language since high school, but I think to learn one you need immersion. Individual words for sure, but the focus should quickly go to reading whole sentences / paragraphs / books, listening to native speakers in their natural environment, and (probably the most difficult one to do on an app) speaking / conversation practice.

I only know English well because of daily exposure through media and twenty years of shitposting on the internet.
by AidenVennis | 2025-12-15 08:53:29+00:00
Working on a flight tracking tool that records the landing and takeoff actions of a local airfield to get insights in how they determine on which runway a takeoff or landing is assigned. Problem is that all the free aircraft api's don't register a landing or takeoff act and also not on which runway.

The airport in question has just one runway and is situated in a dense population area. Both sides of the runway are used (officially noted as two runways) for takeoff and landing causing noise complaints in the neighborhood. The airfield says it assigns a runway based on wind direction and speed, and when there is much traffic they relieve one of the two directions to prevent going over a threshold. My goals is to check if they follow their own rules and just to have a insight if my annoyance over why there are so many aircraft over my house and not on the other side is justified or not.

As a frontender this is quite challenging. I'm using Express with typescript to write the backend. Usually I get bored quite quickly because progress is not going fast enough, so I'm using a lot of AI to speed things up.

I'm checking for aircraft in a 5km circle every 30 seconds. If a aircraft is below and above x feet than I'm going to track it every 5 seconds. Between each entry I'm checking the coordinates and altitude to determine which runway (direction) is used and if it's taking off or landing. I'm also using another API to get weather data like wind speed and wind direction. Finally this is saved in a JSON file (for now) and loaded into the frontend to be displayed in a table.

I do have a working prototype, and removing a few bugs. At the moment it's checking the logs after a day of collecting to check for errors, fixing those errors and validating the fix the next day. When it's done I'm planning to open source it so that anyone can use it if needed.
by troupo | 2025-12-15 08:53:31+00:00
Reading a lot of books and watching/listening to a lot of media put me quite high: CFR C2, 19 200 word families, above 78% of native speakers, above 99.9% of non-native speakers.

However. In real life I use maybe 1% of that :D Especially in in iternational settings where you eventually end up speaking a common denominator (not necessarily lowest common denominator).

I do get by writing on HN and reading books though :)
by pbmonster | 2025-12-15 08:53:42+00:00
The German luxury brands have made the "made in Germany" shtick a core part of their marketing. So Miele, Gaggenau, Vorwerk, ect.

Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
by giolekva | 2025-12-15 08:53:42+00:00
Location: Tbilisi, Georgia (UTC+4)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Golang, C/C++, Python, Typescript, Node.js, Kubernetes

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fpPIMUM0X0EToN4-P9l8NMRN...

Email: giolekva@gmail.com

I have over 15 years of professional experience, out of which for 9 years I worked for Google. My strengths are keeping the big picture in mind and how different parts of the system affect each other. I've mostly worked infrastructure but have some experience working on front side of things as well. Since 2019 I've been teaching to over 200 students every year at the university and working on multiple side projects like dodo (PaaS) https://www.youtube.com/@dodo-oss/videos
by ETH_start | 2025-12-15 08:54:13+00:00
Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.

Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix.

On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.
by anovikov | 2025-12-15 08:54:50+00:00
But why not overpower the trend directly? That government just starts having children for itself, without getting families involved. Heavy consumption based tax that pays women (not families) a market based rate to give birth and raise children. It won't be a lot of money because opportunities will be taken by poorest, single women who will have 5-10 kids each, so perhaps the going rate will be below minimum wage. Continue payments through kids finishing high school, withdraw them if they start skipping school. This will give an army of workers and consumers to fulfil the role of a proverbial mudsill.
by alin23 | 2025-12-15 08:56:03+00:00
Author here! Since the article publishing, I have found a widely available finish that's very similar to what I'm doing called Walrus Oil Furniture Butter: https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter

It's still a combination of polymerizing oils, hard waxes and resin, it's just different plants (linseed instead of tung, pine resin instead of damar etc.) Again, no solvents, people say it smells good.

I still have way too much tung oil, wax and resin around because I could only buy high quantities, so I guess I'll keep using my own finish for a long while. But I'd love to hear from others how the Furniture Butter fares for wooden spoons and cups.
by physicsguy | 2025-12-15 08:56:26+00:00
> is that idea-guys' ideas crack when meeting reality.

This is definitely the hardest nut to crack. I worked on a product a while ago that needed to track maintenance periods on equipment quite carefully and then use that to filter data to provide insights about how it was performing. The 'user story' was light on detail. As we got into it, there were tons of questions about how to deal with source data that was often inconsistent or patchy, time zones became an issue because much of the data we received wasn't matched correctly to their local time (customers fault not ours) and our ideas guy just couldn't deal with it - "make it work" - when ultimately they were business questions that needed answering, not just pure software tasks. AI is so sycophantic it'd just go off and write something.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-15 08:56:49+00:00
>block those that don't -- such as loading a page and immediately commenting or doing things that normal humans don't do, they block IP addresses and ASNs.

As someone who has both spent quite a bit of time writing scrapers and later lots of headache on blocking malicious bots from accessing websites, I can tell you this has become futile. Bot makers aren't stupid. If you put in a check for how fast actions are performed, they will put in a sleep timer in their script. If you start blocking residential IPs because many people use it, you are probably just blocking a school or dormitory, while the real bots will quickly move to another IP once they smell something is off. Today with modern multimodal LLMs, you can bypass almost every "human-check" imaginable. And if they can't pass something, most of your users sure as hell won't either. Not because it is too hard, but because it will take too long to solve. The sweet 3-15s actionable human intelligence threshold has been passed by now. The cats and dogs type captchas were already solved more than 12 years ago by simple CV machine learning. The tech has progressed an insane amount since then. In the end I always ended up basically doing what SoundCloud did here if my service was sensitive: Block entire countries, all tor exit nodes and all known VPN ASNs. That will get it down by like 90%. Bear in mind that anyone who wants to put in some effort will still easily bypass this, but at least the low-effort guys from third world countries will take a while before they catch on. So you can go back to doing some actual work in the meantime.
by sjducb | 2025-12-15 08:58:07+00:00
It seems surprising that IQ would not be heritable. Literally everything else is heritable.

Height, skin colour, sporting ability, body weight, eye colour, cancer risk, most disease risk, beauty.

Why would IQ be mostly random when other things are very heritable?

Occums razor says pick the simplest hypothesis that explains the data. The onus is on the blank slate crew to find some good data to demonstrate that IQ is not mostly heritable.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-15 08:59:20+00:00
Yes https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold/issues/31#issue....

This article is garbage and makes many incorrect claims, and it is clearly AI-generated. E.g. the claim that "AlphaFold doesn't simulate physics. It recognizes patterns learned from 170,000+ known protein structures" couldn't be farther from the truth. Physical models are baked right into AlphaFold models and development at multiple steps, it is a highly unique architecture and approach.
by 1_hate_you | 2025-12-15 08:59:24+00:00
Why are you google/chatGPT or any AI such stupid? Of course next year is 2026 if you live in 2025 but the problem is,there is no such problem,we now live in 2025 so basically 2 years ahead is 2026 if you live in 2024,but this is 2025 so yes,next year is 2026
by sandeepk235 | 2025-12-15 08:59:53+00:00
Show HN: StreamGate – A lock-free observability proxy in Go

Hey HN,

I built StreamGate to solve a specific problem: our observability bills (Datadog/Splunk) were scaling linearly with traffic, mostly due to low-value "noise" logs (DEBUG, health checks, etc.) that we rarely queried.

Existing solutions were either "all-or-nothing" agents or heavy Java/Enterprise pipelines. I wanted something lightweight that could sit at the network edge and act as a smart valve.

The Architecture: It uses a Split-Plane design:

Control Plane (Python): Handles config validation and API requests (FastAPI).

Data Plane (Go): Handles the hot path.

Technical Implementation Details: Instead of standard Go Channels (which I found created too much GC pressure at high throughput), I implemented a fixed-size Ring Buffer using sync/atomic primitives.

Lock-Free: The hot path uses atomic pointers to swap configuration rules, so we can "hot reload" rules without stopping the world or acquiring a Mutex.

Fail-Open: It implements a circuit breaker; if the ring buffer fills up (>80%), it degrades to pass-through mode rather than dropping logs or blocking the app.

Performance: On my local machine (M2), it handles ~200k events/sec with minimal allocation.

I’d love critical feedback on the ring buffer implementation or the split-plane approach.
by w3news | 2025-12-15 09:00:07+00:00
Thanks, I use JSDoc for several years, and also validate it with Typescript. So I just write plain Javascript with JSDoc, with no build step. Typescript only validates the types, and not transforming the code. Did you also know that you can import Typescript types/interfaces in JSDoc? So for me typescript is not a language anymore, I use only the tool to validate the types.

Best thing for me was not removing the code transformation (convert ts to js), but separate runtime code with documentation code, like the types. Gives you much more clear insight that the types you write to describe what you expect the type will be is not forced on runtime, but is just for you as developer to know it. And when you validate the input is the right type, it is much more clear that it is the runtime type validation.

You can still use JSDoc in your typescript files, but why do you want to do that? There is no reason to do that.

So using JSDoc or Type Annotation, both works the same, same benefits, it is only personal preferences. Both have its pros and cons. For me the JSDoc has more benefits. Some other people prefer annotations. But there is not 1 that is better in controlling the types, has more options. (Also the enum can be done if you are using JSDoc, but is a little different)
by D-Machine | 2025-12-15 09:00:31+00:00
This article is garbage and makes many incorrect claims, and it is clearly AI-generated. E.g. the claim that "AlphaFold doesn't simulate physics. It recognizes patterns learned from 170,000+ known protein structures" couldn't be farther from the truth. Physical models are baked right into AlphaFold models and development at multiple steps, it is a highly unique architecture and approach.

AlphaFold models also used TPUs: https://github.com/google-deepmind/alphafold/issues/31#issue...

EDIT: Also annoying is the usual bullshit about "attention" being some kind of magic. It isn't even clear AlphaFold uses the same kind of attention as typical LLM transformers, because it uses custom "Evoformer" layers instead: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2_reference...
by m4rtink | 2025-12-15 09:01:00+00:00
Note all of this is mass that currently needs to be launched from Earth at significant cost - it is indeed nice this cost if finally going down thanks to partial launcher reusability (and hopefully full reusability soon as well) but I really don't see this making any economical sense unless a lot of this mass eventually comes from in situ resources you don't need to lift to orbit.
by raincole | 2025-12-15 09:01:13+00:00
(Off-topic) I'm convinced that the ideal language learning app should look like this:

1. A HUGH repository of raw materials, both in text and in audio. They are all written/recorded by native speakers, not non-native language teachers.

1.5. (Optional) The materials come with supplemental vocabulary lists and grammar guides.

2. You take a test.

3. It recommends materials for you to read/listen to, according your proficiency level shown in the test.

3.5. (Opt-in) it can read your YouTube history and social media to recommend materials that you might like.

4. Every month or every N hours of reading/listening, you take a new test to recalibrate your proficiency level.

That's it. However due to copyright issues, I don't expect to see such an app in near future. What a bummer.

(Not-so-off-topic) Personally I consider all the apps that don't resemble the above workflow "dictionary-like" (useful but as a reference tool, not a learning tool) or "Duolingo-like" (a healthier alternative to doomscrolling, but nothing more). The article sounds Duolingo-like.
by hks0 | 2025-12-15 09:01:30+00:00
I agree with your both of your observations; And I also think what's missing is the acknowledgement that connects the two. Students come with the expectation of "chew it for me" and schools have the expectation of "I'm going to throw the material at you, you can & will handle it yourself".

But it doesn't need to be that hopeless. Learning is a skill and schools can help each individual find the ways working best for them. Starting by not packing gazillion number of people in a class.
by Stratoscope | 2025-12-15 09:02:26+00:00
> I'm bad at expressing myself so I can see why I get down voted

Don't beat yourself up over it!

If it helps any, one thing I noticed is that you got some quick downvotes on your first short comment. But then you edited it to add some insightful thoughts, the kind that should be welcome here and indeed led to an interesting conversation.

If I could suggest one thing, it would be to wait until you have that insightful thought and then post it.

(Yes, I realize that the guidelines say "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." That's a good general principle, but I hope we can make an exception when someone is genuinely looking to improve their way of interaction, as you are. We can all learn from that, myself included.)
by account42 | 2025-12-15 09:02:48+00:00
> The second is places I interact with, like banks, insist on having guarantees on the devices I use to authenticate myself. Devices like a credit card. "I promise to never reprogram this card so it debits someone else's account" simply won't fly with them.

If that's the only option they have, it will fly. Just like you used to be able to use banking apps with any Android before they had the option to restrict that to only Google-controlled ones.
by alin23 | 2025-12-15 09:02:56+00:00
The problem with jojoba oil is that it doesn't polymerize or cure. It stays wet in the fibers. Nothing bad with that on wood that doesn't contact hot food and beverages.

But if you put wood treated with non-polymerized oil in a hot soup or if you pour hot tea into a cup finished with jojoba oil, the oil will get out of the fibers and into your hot liquid, the fiber will raise and the wood will start to feel rough after a few uses and start to get stained from your food and beverage.
by santiagobasulto | 2025-12-15 09:03:46+00:00
Very interesting story and well written so far, I'll finish it after work.

One very interesting thing about Xerox was not only their technology but their choice of business model. As smaller companies couldn't afford an expensive copier, they'd "rent" it and charge per copy. From the article:

> The company placed machines in well-traveled public spaces where it was on display, and in addition to sales, they also offered machine rental for smaller organizations. This was a low price for up to 2000 copies, and each copy after was 4¢. They also promised that a machine could be returned within fifteen days. The 650 pound behemoth was wildly successful.

Another similar interesting business model was pioneered by Rolls-Royce in their airplane turbine business. Instead of selling their whole turbine, they'd "rent" it and charge it "per flight hour", derisking both parts.