MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: HouseTrak – everything about your home in one app
by tas-blacktorch | 2026-01-25 08:50:21+00:00
Hi HN — my wife and I built HouseTrak out of frustration.

Every time something broke or needed maintenance, the info was scattered: notes app, photos, emails, spreadsheets, reminders. There wasn’t one place to keep everything about our home.

So we built HouseTrak — a simple iOS app that keeps maintenance, projects, assets, and important home details in one place. One app for everything about your home.

It’s intentionally minimal and focused on being useful, not clever.

Would love feedback, especially from homeowners:

How do you currently track home maintenance?

What’s missing from tools you’ve tried?

App: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6757889785
Site: https://housetrak.app

Thanks for taking a look.
by Yoric | 2026-01-25 08:50:39+00:00
I find the UI clunky and a clear regression from older versions.

A family member has recently written a book on the latest version of MS Word. It's not their first book written with MS Word. It's also not the first time I give a hand to make sure that typography matches publisher requirements. I find that using style sheets has become more complicated, more limited and better hidden with successive versions of MS Word.

Contrast with Apple Pages, in which style sheets are so well integrated in the UI that you barely need to think when you create a new rule.

In fact, I find that even LibreOffice is much better at style sheets these days.

I remember the (not necessarily good) old days when I used MS Word to create character sheets for my tabletop RPGs, or in-game newspapers, etc. These days, I would hate doing this with MS Word – and not just because I'm an open-source aficionado.
by brabel | 2026-01-25 08:51:54+00:00
Can you think of why Russia may be taking those aggressive actions? Was the EU and the USA friendly towards Russia or you truly believe aggression was one sided??
Just one example: NATO has always been Europe’s defense against Russia, no one else was seen as the enemy until China became powerful enough to, which apparently cannot be tolerated. Russia was always wary of NATO including more countries and that was always a big reason for the difficulties in normalizing relations with the West. Yet the West made absolutely no attempt to calm the Russians down and for some reason announced in 2008 plans to expand to Georgia and Ukraine, despite even Western experts warning about that being utterly provocative. You know the result of that, but still consider there was no provocation at all , Russia just behaves like an arse for no reason , right?
by stabbles | 2026-01-25 08:53:17+00:00
> Zip with no compression is a nice contender for a container format that shouldn't be slept on

SquashFS with zstd compression is used by various container runtimes, and is popular in HPC where filesystems often have high latency. It can be mounted natively or with FUSE, and the decompression overhead is not really felt.
by n4r9 | 2026-01-25 08:54:10+00:00
Can't you do that by just limiting the precision? You can only vote 1, 2, 3, 5 or 8 days. Not sure what "points" are adding. As far as I can tell, it's an attempt to account for estimation difficulties by introducing a "velocity" concept. But I think it makes things more complex without actually solving the issue.
by brucehoult | 2026-01-25 08:54:11+00:00
> I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance

No one with any true knowledge of RISC-V would ever make such a claim. Know-nothing marketers might, I suppose, but why would you listen to them rather than to actual insiders?

The current newest RISC-V boards (Megrez and Titan and whatever the upcoming SpacemiT K3 ones are called) are solidly in mid-range Core 2 territory, especially K3 which has SMID/vectors which the other fast chips currently don't.

Older boards using JH7110, TH1520, K1 are closer to Pentium III or PowerPC G4 though with 4 or 8 cores instead of 1, but without an equivalent to the SSE or Altivec SIMD those old, or if they have it with near zero software using it.

Late this year is expected to see RISC-V products with performance in Skylake to Zen 2 performance levels, verging on M1 (M1 IPC but lower MHz).

> they are much slower than similar priced arm systems

Irrelevant to the technology. They are competitive with similar µarch (five years older) Arm systems.

Price can never be competitive (assuming no deliberate loss-making) until production and sales volumes are similar. Which can't happen until performance matches current Arm and X86 performance -- which RISC-V is converging with quite quickly, certainly by 2030.
by dijit | 2026-01-25 08:54:46+00:00
To be honest with you, the free market does work when incentives are aligned.

If you get maximum profit from the maximum social good, people will do that (or find a way to cheat); but as it stands, theres money to be made in not doing this and the consumer won’t care too much if its 9 years or 10 years that their car lasts, so its not hurting sales to not fix this (even if fixed perfectly, it would take 10 years to prove after all!).

I think I’m dreaming, the investment would have to be enormous, who wants to hold stock of so many batteries? Who will convince manufacturers to integrate standardised batter packs instead of the more profitable “built-in phone style” that is used today, and the automotive marketing machine is really strong and will (correctly) lean on the idea that by having the battery replaceable would require less rigid car bodies, so their current incentive would be to fight this initiative and they would probably lead with the safety angle.

The anti-EV propaganda already works pretty well with the very little it has to work with (farming batteries is harmful), so, imagine what they could do with something of actual substance.
by ElFitz | 2026-01-25 08:55:10+00:00
Have you tried the compound engineering plugin? [^1]

My workflow with it is usually brainstorm -> lfg (planning) -> clear context -> lfg (giving it the produced plan to work on) -> compound if it didn’t on its own.

[^1]: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin
by nsoonhui | 2026-01-25 08:55:12+00:00
Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.

I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-25 08:55:16+00:00
> What started as a community experiment is becoming infrastructure. The developers behind Ralph and Taskmaster figured out something real. Now the platforms are catching up.

> That’s usually how it goes. The practitioners find the patterns first. Then the patterns become features.

This is the scariest thing atm with the fast pacing of these things. As capabilities increase, everything you've spent time on building (w/ scaffolding, tooling, etc) gets "merged" into the all-you-can-prompt solution that the big labs provide. If your previous work has no differentiation, it's very hard to provide additional value / monetise it. And it's hard to know what will be differentiation or what will get eaten up.

It's that sci-fi story trope of the colony ship that gets overtaken by a new generation engine, and when they reach their planet they find a thriving colony there already. But with software :)
by enether | 2026-01-25 08:55:58+00:00
to be fair, Kafka now has a GraalVM docker image[0][1] which was made for local dev/testing, and it has caught up fairly well to these alternatives re: memory and startup time

[0] - https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-974%3A...
[1] - https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/kafka-native
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-25 08:56:42+00:00
> It could be implemented as a background thread, so that it is not blocking.

How would you realistically do this without creating more overhead in the thread communication than what you're saving? I've never heard of offloading a 30–40 cycle operation to a thread before. Typically sending an atomic across CPUs is what, 200 cycles? (That's assuming you have the thread just sitting there in some kind of pool; firing up a new one is much, much more expensive. It also assumes you never need to hear back from it, so wouldn't work well for a decrease where you need to know the count.)
by figassis | 2026-01-25 08:57:41+00:00
How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?

How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.

It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.

Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
by CheeseFromLidl | 2026-01-25 08:59:02+00:00
I’ve just read the wiki page on Magnetorquer but I couldn’t find what I was looking for: ballpark numbers.

What kind of current are you driving those coils with (amps or dozens of amps?). What order of magnitude is the resulting force (a few newtons?)

I’ll gladly read the paper but knowing myself I won’t remember why exactly when a few weeks passed.
by olalonde | 2026-01-25 08:59:26+00:00
I'll give a concrete example. Suppose he were to pardon SBF. That would likely anger figures like CZ (Binance) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase). In response, they could choose to delist Trump's shitcoin, which alone could wipe out hundreds of millions in market cap. Anyways, I guess we'll see who’s right in about three years.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-25 09:00:00+00:00
> Reduced demand for oil reduces the quantity of oil extracted

That is not true. Reduced price leads to higher demand.

> The price drops and hardware to extract oil stops being produced

Oil extraction costs differ vastly amongst countries, and there is a lot of potential for increased productivity and efficencies when the margins become lower - price pressure is a driver for innovation. And countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia have a very high incentive to keep extracting oil and sell it, because their economy relies on it.
by BlackFly | 2026-01-25 09:00:04+00:00
The biggest friction I experience with respect to rust closures is their inability to be generic: I cannot implement a method that takes a closure generic over its argument(s).

So then I'm forced to define a trait for the function, define a struct (the closure) to store the references I want to close over, choose the mutability and lifetimes, instantiate it manually and pass that. Then the implementation of the method (that may only be a few lines) is not located inline so readability may suffer.
by joshuaisaact | 2026-01-25 09:00:05+00:00
This has been pretty comprehensively disproven:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10054

Key findings:

-Tested 162 personas across 6 types of interpersonal relationships and 8 domains of expertise, with 4 LLM families and 2,410 factual questions

-Adding personas in system prompts does not improve model performance compared to the control setting where no persona is added

-Automatically identifying the best persona is challenging, with predictions often performing no better than random selection

-While adding a persona may lead to performance gains in certain settings, the effect of each persona can be largely random

Fun piece of trivia - the paper was originally designed to prove the opposite result (that personas make LLMs better). They revised it when they saw the data completely disproved their original hypothesis.
by j1elo | 2026-01-25 09:01:41+00:00
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.

I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
by montalbano | 2026-01-25 09:02:17+00:00
>> Nobody studies this

Tire dust has been studied for decades and the most recent research I've seen suggests the issues are less concerning than previously estimated.

https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/news/illusion-truth-surrounds-inacc...

Brake dust is significantly reduced by EVs:

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/running/do-electri...
by arthens | 2026-01-25 09:03:39+00:00
> Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.

As a general statement, sure. But if we are talking about mobile phones this is a very privileged and unrealistic point of view.

According to chatgpt, 70-80% of mobile phone sold worldwide every year cost less than the cheaper iPhone.

Some people could probably stretch their budget and get the cheapest iPhone, but otherwise it seems safe to conclude that more than 50% of people simply have no choice.
by Biganon | 2026-01-25 09:04:03+00:00
I usually try to stay polite here, but what a deeply stupid comment

This person is on HN for the same reasons as I am, presumably: reading about hacker stuff. Entering prompts in black boxes and watching them work so you have more time to scratch your balls is not hacker stuff, it's the latest abomination of late stage capitalism and this forum is, sadly, falling for it.
by imiric | 2026-01-25 09:04:13+00:00
> Google stopped being aware of their customer's needs a really long time ago

Google's customers are advertisers. They cater to that segment very well. They only need to attract users with "free" and cheap services so that advertisers think their campaigns are reaching enough eyeballs. Whether or not that's the case, and whether or not the end user has a good experience, is hardly relevant.
by brucehoult | 2026-01-25 09:04:28+00:00
> it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support

There are zero SoCs currently available to buy with RVA23 support, so that's not a mark against the RV2 if you want to buy a machine today.

Initial RVA23 machines available later this year are also likely to cost at least 5x to 10x more.

> meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it

There is currently no other hardware you could buy instead that will run that distro.

Check back in April or so, when Ubuntu 26.04 is actually officially released.

NB I'm currently using Ubuntu 26.04 on RVA23 hardware, but it is remote ssh access to a test board at the manufacturer.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 09:05:02+00:00
The smart projects that are going for L10N will collect all the UI strings into a file or set of files, separate from the code, and indexed so that the app can just switch language and then begin using a new set of localized strings. This also makes for easy translation where you don't need to rebuild the app, just expand the data files that it's using. Is this not the only way to build apps today, or are "localized strings" still being hardcoded??
by rmoriz | 2026-01-25 09:05:14+00:00
I'm not a tax advisor and most of my knowledge is about Germany, but if you have no physical business in the US, like office and proper residency (decision-making process), you have to tax in your own country. Tax evasion would be easy if that would not be the case. It's not only about profits but even the expenses need to be taxed/settled under e.g. German law.

So if your LLC collects $200/months and pays $100 for operations, you need to provide both positions to the German tax authorities, not just the $100 pro-forma profit.

They treat the LLC as "shell company" unless you have an office and can document that the business decisions are made there (because you are there a decent amount of time or have a hired manager and you just a shareholder).

US authorities have to report to the German authorities that you own an LLC, not the fiscal details, but the business facts.

If you are successful in your business, and your LLC is really making money, you can reduce your taxation duties in your current home country if you move abroad for half a year. If you don't stay longer than 182 days in one country, you are not taxable (except US citizens). This is also true if you move within the EU every couple of months. Of course this is not easy and comes with a lot of expenses and mental load (you MUST leave a country or you will have to tax everything their AND you have to document your stays carefully).

The LLC works great if you do that. The German GmbH does not. Hence starting an LLC can make sense if you plan to start this nomadic lifestyle. Owning a property (home) causes tax residency in Germany, so this is another story to take care of, if you are lucky enough to own something.
by j1elo | 2026-01-25 09:06:04+00:00
Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:

Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/

I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.
by yieldcrv | 2026-01-25 09:06:32+00:00
This is a legitimately crazy take, yes the differentiations are less but how we got there isn’t so altruistic

I’m firmly in the Apple ecosystem and every one of those examples were not Apple’s unilateral decision

I think seeing the noose circling around both Apple and Google’s necks better explains the quagmire that Google is in

Apple was getting ahead of a European consumer protection ruling to switch to a single interoperable cable, USBC was there

Apple and Google worked to make RCS better for years, as Apple was ignoring it and Google was using a non-standard RCS
by usefulposter | 2026-01-25 09:07:09+00:00
Funny story from this craziness: Anthropic Legal forced a rename in the Claude repo to "Ralph Loop".

You can have a "Ralph Loop [that] implements the Ralph Wiggum technique" but you can't have a "Ralph Wiggum loop".

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/commit...
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-25 09:07:42+00:00
The first STM32 "bluepill"-based SCSI to SD adaptor I ever used had all its source code in Chinese.

Google Translate did a not terrible job of turning all the comments into English but also mangled the code in exciting new ways, but with a bit of ingenuity to apply the Artificial Intelligence translations, and a bit of bloodymindedness when applying the Analogue Idiocy to hacking it all about with search-and-replace, I got a pretty plausible translation of it.
by andOlga | 2026-01-25 09:07:50+00:00
To me all of this reads like gibberish but I'll admit that it's likely just me (and "my kind" of neurodivergent people). Far as dynamics go (ability to interrupt) voice chat solves the problem fully as far as I'm concerned. Non-verbal comms are lost on me to the point that I don't know what you even mean, and I simply cannot trust anyone who is close enough to me to potentially punch me...

Again, granted -- I'm an outlier, but that also means that I can just operate at my full capacity when I work with text and cannot when I work "in person".
by xR0am | 2026-01-25 09:08:48+00:00
100% agree with this, tooling is no longer an advantage.

The only thing I say to myself on this, given how Ralph took months to be notice (and taskmaster is still flying somehow under the radar comparatively speaking), is that people are drowning with the volume of new features / tools. It’s what you do with these tools that matters at the end of the day and shift goes more on GTM, marketing etc. rather than uniqueness of software. Most important thing: find clients :)
Anyway interesting times!
by komali2 | 2026-01-25 09:10:09+00:00
Of all the thousands of times tens of thousands people climb, only 30 die per year. Of that 30, 30% are free solo deaths.

Free solo climbing is incredibly dangerous, but the people who do it (usually) prepare extensively and train their whole lives.

https://gitnux.org/rock-climbing-death-statistics/

This is in contradiction to the experience of driving, where any number of people on the road with you are untrained, undertrained, drunk, or suffering diseases that affect their ability to drive. Or just doing crimes like speeding or dangerous driving. So when climbing, your fate is entirely in your hands and that of nature's. When driving, it's in the hands of many strangers.
by Propelloni | 2026-01-25 09:11:21+00:00
> I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.

That is a disingenuous statement.

Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.

Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-25 09:12:34+00:00
you mean sub $599, right?

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-16e

Which is still a valid argument, the number is just lower. And the UX on these sub 600 devices have definitely gotten worse over the last 5 years too... Likely because Google isn't really targeting that price point anymore, so Android isn't getting enough optimization to be viable on underpowered devices.

That was different in 2010-2020
by dijit | 2026-01-25 09:12:50+00:00
Sort of.

It’s not a secret that Ukraine is vital for the ground defence of Russia, but the Ukrainian people are pro-EU, and not from propaganda. You might well remember that their government was essentially a puppet for Russia until they were ousted. So if Ukraine is radicalised it is odd to think that its because of European propaganda- more likely they got tired of their masters.

I fully accept that Putin thinks of NATO as a threat to Russia, and NATO is at the door.

Its also entirely true that the border countries (Estonia for example) have major anxiety regarding a Russian invasion, and actively seek NATO membership to avoid that.

However, flying aircraft into sovereign territory (as Russia often did and continues to do to Sweden) is not the behaviour of a threatened country, they are the ones making the threats, constantly testing.

Their expansions into territory under the guise of “going where there are native Russians” will necessarily conclude with border regions being even more hostile to any native Russians wanting to settle. Again, in Estonia, the city of Narva is almost entirely native Russian; but they don’t want to be under Putin. Putins actions make Estonians wary of this fact and makes the Estonian government wish to integrate these people more instead of letting them live their lives.

In the Ukraine this was true too, thats why there was such a push to get people speaking Ukrainian, but Putin saw that his claim to the territory gets weaker over time and decided to invade.

If you understand the incentives of all involved, it is plain to see that Putin is the architect of his own misery here.