MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: StayUp – a background desktop app for activity-based time trackers
by delusdev | 2026-01-18 13:47:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I built StayUp, a small desktop app that helps reduce friction when working with activity-based time tracking tools like HubStaff or Time Doctor.

Context:
Some teams evaluate productivity mainly through “activity percentage” (mouse/keyboard events per time window). During onboarding or deep-focus work (reading docs, reviewing legacy code, meetings), this can force unnecessary interaction with the OS and hurt real productivity.

What StayUp does
• Simulates minimal mouse movement, scrolling, and simple key presses
• Runs fully in the background (no tray, no UI)
• Controlled via global hotkeys (start / stop / exit)
• Behavior is configured remotely via a web dashboard
• Token-based auth with subscription & trial

Technical notes:
• Desktop client requests configuration from the server on startup
• Server validates subscription and returns action intervals & rules
• One active device per token
• Client sends only token, build number, and hashed device ID

Project page: https://stayup.xyz

I’m interested in feedback on:
• Product positioning
• Ethical concerns / misuse risks
• Better ways to measure productivity without activity heuristics

Happy to answer questions.
Thanks for reading.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-18 13:48:35+00:00
> That isn't how you compare things.

I compared once segment of the business to others. Several other websites had various estimates on what percentage of the business Windows took up. Most of them said 6-10%, so I took 10%. Other websites group server and cloud, A rough guesstimate for a comment on a discussion thread is good enough. I was't aware I would need to go through the 10Q filings to satisfy you.

The point being communicated (even with your ridiculous nitpicks about the stats) is that Windows isn't a cash cow it once was. Microsoft Strategy is not Windows focused like it was under Ballmer.
by chickensong | 2026-01-18 13:48:45+00:00
https://www.nps.gov/articles/hiking-in-bear-country.htm

> Bear bells may be a popular item to put on your backpack, but they don’t effectively warn a bear you’re in the area. Bears won’t hear the bells until you’re too close. Yelling, clapping, and talking are more effective ways of alerting a bear to your presence.

https://www.backpacker.com/stories/ask-a-bear-do-bear-bells-...

> In the most advanced testing, bear biologist Tom Smith jingled bear bells in varying volumes in front of brown bears in Katmai National Park. Regardless of how vigorously he shook, 15 different sets of bruins ignored the bells. And yet they snapped at attention the second he broke a pencil in half.

It's not that the bells definitively have zero value, but their effectiveness has been questioned enough that there's been a shift in opinion about them over the last couple of decades.
by geoffbp | 2026-01-18 13:49:34+00:00
I dug into this a bit (with AI ofc) and it spat this out. I found it an easy way to visualise and start to understand:

> Standard AI models (like GPT-4) treat data using Global Geometry. They imagine every word as a point floating in a massive, flat, high-dimensional room. To see how two words relate, they draw a straight line between them.

> Local Topology changes the "room" into a landscape (a manifold). Instead of a flat void, the data exists on a curved surface that has hills, valleys, and paths.
by Sammi | 2026-01-18 13:49:36+00:00
Very simple jquery implementation with all the easy apis:

(function (global) {
function $(selector, context = document) {
let elements = [];

if (typeof selector === "string") {
elements = Array.from(context.querySelectorAll(selector));
} else if (selector instanceof Element || selector === window || selector === document) {
elements = [selector];
} else if (selector instanceof NodeList || Array.isArray(selector)) {
elements = Array.from(selector);
} else if (typeof selector === "function") {
// DOM ready
if (document.readyState !== "loading") {
selector();
} else {
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", selector);
}
return;
}

return new Dollar(elements);
}

class Dollar {
constructor(elements) {
this.elements = elements;
}

// Iterate
each(callback) {
this.elements.forEach((el, i) => callback.call(el, el, i));
return this;
}

// Events
on(event, handler, options) {
return this.each(el => el.addEventListener(event, handler, options));
}

off(event, handler, options) {
return this.each(el => el.removeEventListener(event, handler, options));
}

// Classes
addClass(className) {
return this.each(el => el.classList.add(...className.split(" ")));
}

removeClass(className) {
return this.each(el => el.classList.remove(...className.split(" ")));
}

toggleClass(className) {
return this.each(el => el.classList.toggle(className));
}

hasClass(className) {
return this.elements[0]?.classList.contains(className) ?? false;
}

// Attributes
attr(name, value) {
if (value === undefined) {
return this.elements[0]?.getAttribute(name);
}
return this.each(el => el.setAttribute(name, value));
}

removeAttr(name) {
return this.each(el => el.removeAttribute(name));
}

// Content
html(value) {
if (value === undefined) {
return this.elements[0]?.innerHTML;
}
return this.each(el => (el.innerHTML = value));
}

text(value) {
if (value === undefined) {
return this.elements[0]?.textContent;
}
return this.each(el => (el.textContent = value));
}

// DOM manipulation
append(content) {
return this.each(el => {
if (content instanceof Element) {
el.appendChild(content.cloneNode(true));
} else {
el.insertAdjacentHTML("beforeend", content);
}
});
}

remove() {
return this.each(el => el.remove());
}

// Utilities
get(index = 0) {
return this.elements[index];
}

first() {
return new Dollar(this.elements.slice(0, 1));
}

last() {
return new Dollar(this.elements.slice(-1));
}
}

global.$ = $;
})(window);
by Loughla | 2026-01-18 13:49:40+00:00
My local area used to be great to find old used woodworking tools for cheap. I stocked my shop and would occasionally restore and resell a tool or two when I needed to buy something bigger for my shop.

Then somebody posted about it on fucking Facebook. Now ragged out used tools sell for more than new price, and the buyers are always from cities 5+ hours away here to take advantage of the low prices since us country bumpkins don't know any better.

Used tools were a nice way for young people to get started in the hobby. Now they're too expensive for that to be realistic.
by dijit | 2026-01-18 13:50:01+00:00
You’re not wrong.

The EU websites require the cookie consent due to this section of the cookie policy:

> Third-party providers on Commission websites

* YouTube

* Internet Archive

* ScribbleLive

* Google Maps

* Twitter

* TV1

* Vimeo

* Microsoft

* Facebook

* Google

* LinkedIn

* Livestream

* SoundCloud

* European Parliament

These third-party services are outside of the control of the European Commission. Providers may, at any time, change their terms of service, purpose and use of cookies, etc.

——

In other words, due the embeds that track users, consent is needed.

They also have their own analytics in the same section, by the letter of the rules: they indeed need explicit consent, which would be obviated if they didn’t run analytics and didn’t embed stuff.
by jgalt212 | 2026-01-18 13:50:47+00:00
> I spent a good 20 minutes yesterday watching one tie itself in knots trying to write a regex: first in Sed, then in Bash, and finally in Python (six times). By the time I pulled the plug, it had ruined all of the correct files without doing anything to fix the original problem.

If you just need a regex, why are you letting Claude Code run rampant all over your code base? Just use a web gui? Or another terminal?
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-18 13:52:23+00:00
Why is fake honey still so commonplace[1] in the EU if controls happen? Tests exists and are straightforward. The EU has been saying that they'll stop it[2], after a more than a decade of abuse, nothing happened because the fraud is so widespread but there are no systematic controls.

[1] https://eng.lsm.lv/article/culture/food-drink/03.02.2025-bee...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/olaf-report/2023/investigative-activiti...
by flowerbreeze | 2026-01-18 13:52:54+00:00
I gave it a try on my current codebase out of curiosity. Definitely useful. It worked well and fast, but it has a lot of duplicates that get rendered as exports in the NodeJS modules based codebase. I think it can sometimes be caused by me just being haphazard about re-exporting them, but other times I'm not sure.

Eg authenticatedMenu() appears 4 times in authenticatedMenu.js, only one of them is imported by 2 different files and 3 are just there alone. There's a single export in the file and a number of other files import it through an index.js that re-exports several files other files too.

In my case I think it'd help, if I could disable the duplicates as they don't really provide any useful information when exploring the codebase.

Also, if there was optionally a way to ignore the files that re-export functions/classes and collapse those paths, it'd make the graph a lot smaller and more easy to understand. Maybe it's already something that depgraph does, but the duplicates confuse things, so I'm not sure.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-18 13:53:39+00:00
If that is the only thing that you took out of that conversation, then I don't really believe that that job might've been suitable for you in the first place.

Now I don't know which language they used for the project (could be python or could be C/C++ or could be rust) but its like "python would have been good at subsets of that project", so some impact already and these python tools only get better

Did python remove the jobs? No. Each project has their own use case and in some LLM's might be useful, in others not.

In their project, LLM's might be useful for some parts but their majority of the work was doing completely new things with a human in feedback.

You are also forgetting trust factor, yes lets have your traffic lights system be written by a LLM, surely. Oops, the traffic lights glitched and all waymos (another AI) went beserk and oops accidents/crash happened which might cost millions.

Personally I wouldn't trust even a subset of LLM code and much rather have my country/state/city to pay to real developers that can be accountable & good quality control checks for such critical points to the point that no LLM in this context should be a must

For context, if LLM use can even impact 1 life every year. The value of 1 person is 7.5-13 million$

Over a period of 10 years in this really really small glitch of LLM, you end up in 10 years losing 75 million$

Yup go ahead save a few thousand dollars right now by not paying people enough in the first case to use LLM to then lose 75 million $ (on the least case scenario)
by woooooo | 2026-01-18 13:54:10+00:00
If you get all the data on fast SSDs in a single chassis, you probably still beat EMR over S3. But then you have a whole dedicated server to manage your 14TB of chess games.

The "EMR over S3" paradigm is based on the assumption that the data isn't read all that frequently, 1-10x a day typically, so you want your cheap S3 storage but once in a while you'll want to crank up the parallelism to run a big report over longer time periods.
by Faizan711 | 2026-01-18 13:54:26+00:00
Hey folks, check out my weekend project Git Gandalf, this is your code reviewer which helps you detect issues in your commits before they get actually committed and breaks your project. It uses local LLMs which you can setup from apps like LM Studio but you can also use your paid LLM APIs. Check this out and let me know how is it, and how can i make it better?
Engineering a reusable insulin patch pump
by u-pump | 2026-01-18 13:54:43+00:00
We’ve been working on a reusable insulin patch pump for the past year, and I wanted to share some of the engineering lessons learned so far. Insulin micro-dosing is mechanically non-trivial: basal delivery can be fractions of a unit per hour, boluses involve larger step changes, and everything has to stay within ISO tolerances while attached to a moving human body for several days.

Some interesting constraints we ran into:

- dose accuracy limits from ISO 11608 (both basal and bolus)
- fluidic compliance and variable back-pressure under skin
- reservoir deformation and head-pressure drift over time
- motor torque margins at low battery voltages
- thermal variation (skin vs ambient) affecting fluid and mechanics
- occlusion detection without continuous pressure sensing

It’s one of those devices that looks like simple consumer hardware from the outside, but internally mixes fluidics, precision mechanics, biocompatible materials, power constraints, and regulatory requirements.

Happy to share more details in the comments about actuator choices, reservoirs, failure modes, materials, test rigs, or regulatory constraints.
by close04 | 2026-01-18 13:55:28+00:00
IPs are PII even before you inevitably link them to something in your logs. If you can make a case that you absolutely don’t store them anywhere, they’re just transiently handled by your network card maybe you get away with it but only because someone else further on the stream did it for you (your hosting provider, your ISP, etc.)

Source: I have been cursed to work on too many Data Protection Impact Assessments, and Records of Processing Activities together with actual lawyers.
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-18 13:55:39+00:00
For me it is rather determinism which invokes a paradoxon and is at odds with the Christian God. This is because of the following:

When the universe is deterministic, anything you think, is not because you recognized something to be truthful, or even reflects the truth at all, it all happens simply because that is what the deterministic rules make you think. So what you think does not imply anything about the universe at all.

That means that you can't think the universe to be deterministic and be actually right about it. Because if it would be, you couldn't be right about anything. Also along the way you throw away the post-enlightenment concept of science, because it assumes the existence of Laplace's Demon and the scientist having a share in it. Thus, when you believe in determinism, you actually place science at the same level as wizardry.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-18 13:55:53+00:00
The "Reject all" does not in fact reject all. They are taking extreme liberties with the "legitimate interest" clause to effectively do all tracking and analytics under it.

The YouTube consent screen for example includes this as a mandatory item:

> Measure audience engagement and site statistics to understand how our services are used and enhance the quality of those services

I don't believe this complies with the GDPR to have this mandatory.
by Etheryte | 2026-01-18 13:57:35+00:00
While buying an EV is a greener choice than buying an ICE, a better option still is to use the vehicle you already have for as long as reasonable. This also overlooks the fact that EVs are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of the population. It isn't the case that people aren't buying them because of preference. Nearly everyone would buy a car that's cheaper to run and maintain if they could afford it.
by eimrine | 2026-01-18 13:57:54+00:00
Wake up, please. Noone else except of white suprematist will support your protransism, think about it. Analyze what nations typically are against it and who will protect you in the special place where you have written that comment when the yellows will come. It is OK to be transgender, but only while you are protected. White suprematists may protect transgender values but they need a freedom to be free from that kind of euphemization you are spreading.
by kuschku | 2026-01-18 13:58:52+00:00
An IP address linked with the website being accessed is already PII.

When serving content, you're by necessity linking it to a website that's being accessed.

For example, if grindr.com had a display in their offices that showed the IP address of the request that's currently being handled, that's not saving or publishing or linking the data, but it's still obvious PII.
by Chris2048 | 2026-01-18 13:59:24+00:00
> You're either delusional or just being a contrarian

As _kgwgk_ points out [1], the proposition wasn't "5:30AM isn't particularly early", but rather "5:30AM isn't particularly early to visit a flea market".

Despite being US-centric, this is also an international forum, values may differ. I initially assumed the market was French/European when they mentioned looking for vintage culinary knifes.

> Since you seem to think that flipping and scalping is a valuable addition to society, we have nothing to discuss.

Not interested in good-faith discussions of differing viewpoints?

I'm not going to downvote you, but I think this is pretty narrow-minded for a discussion forum like this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667560
by ginko | 2026-01-18 13:59:37+00:00
> I would think they want to decouple from ARM and the west in general as a dependency.

Why would you think that? ARM is not like x86 CPUs where you get the completed devices as a black box. Chinese silicon customers have access to the full design. I guess it's not completely impossible to hide backdoors at that level but it'd be extremely hard and would be a huge reputational risk if they were found.

They also can't really be locked out of ARM since if push comes to shove, Chinese silicon makers would just keep making chips without a license.
by cudgy | 2026-01-18 13:59:43+00:00
Yes, countries are not monolithic entities. Such generalized statements don’t really mean much and don’t convey much. I doubt whether you know what self interest “China” is interested in as it would depend on context. I prefer statements like the leadership of China or the people of China or the military industrial complex of China or the Uighyrs of China. Even better it would be to provide accurate polls of the groups to determine what their self interest actually are. I think you would agree that all of these groups have different priorities and therefore different self interest.
by adora278 | 2026-01-18 14:00:06+00:00
I dove into the Blacksmith repo on GitHub over the weekend and was struck by how modular and readable it is for an automated security tool.

Instead of one big scanner, it uses a set of AI agents each responsible for parts of a penetration testing workflow from recon to exploitation to reporting all coordinated by an orchestrator. It’s all containerized and you can swap in your own AI backend rather than being stuck with a single provider.
by oug-t | 2026-01-18 14:00:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the creator of zsweep. It’s a keyboard-centric Minesweeper clone where you play entirely using Vim motions (h, j, k, l to move; w/b to skip words; etc.).

The Backstory: I wanted to build a project to get my hands dirty with Svelte 5 and the new Runes system. I also wanted a way to practice Vim muscle memory that wasn't just typing code.

Tech Stack:

Frontend: Svelte 5 (Runes) + SvelteKit

Styling: Tailwind CSS

State: Custom Finite State Machine (FSM) for the game logic

The Challenge: One of the hardest parts was getting the "chording" logic right (where you clear multiple squares at once) while keeping the keyboard navigation feeling instant and "vim-like."

It’s open source, so if you’re curious about how Svelte 5 handles game state, feel free to poke around the code: [Link to your GitHub Repo]

I’d love to hear your feedback on the controls or any edge cases you find!
by phyzix5761 | 2026-01-18 14:00:59+00:00
It’s easy to overlook how often straightforward approaches are the best fit when the data and problem are well understood. Large expensive tools can become problems in their own right creating complexity that then requires even more tooling to manage. (Maybe that's the intent?) The issue is that teams and companies often adopt optimization frameworks earlier than necessary. Starting with simpler tools can get you most of the way there and in many cases they turn out to be all that’s needed.
by kylecazar | 2026-01-18 14:01:43+00:00
Ha. Well I'm OK with being accused of bias towards biological life and intelligence.

I know Larry Page and friends think this is 'speciesist' -- I strongly disagree.

If they made a brain in a vat that had emotions and feelings I'd be more willing to have a moral crisis about it, but I'm not going to give anything running on an Nvidia GPU the same consideration I do life.
by chongli | 2026-01-18 14:02:17+00:00
You can find those things on eBay now. Yes, they’re expensive, but that’s because the exhausting work of combing flea markets and estate sales has been done for you, so that value has been priced in.

What people are really complaining about is that the hobbies of thrifting and collecting have been overrun by professionals. That’s going to suck for any hobby that involves buying and selling.
by epistasis | 2026-01-18 14:02:58+00:00
That's absolutely untrue. The majority of the environmental damage is from the ongoing use of it, not from production.

Every time you fill up on 20 gallons of gas, that is 400 pounds of CO2 that will be dumped into the air.

Used EVs are apparently very cheap. Most new cars are prohibitively expensive, but a used car. The average new car cost is something like $50k now in the US.
by jasoneckert | 2026-01-18 14:03:45+00:00
When it comes to laptops, I’ve primarily used MacBooks but really miss the excellent keyboard and TrackPoint on ThinkPads. Nothing seems to comes close.

My solution was to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II and pair it with my MacBook over Bluetooth. An added benefit is that I can keep the MacBook on a stand, avoiding the wobble you get when typing directly on it.

I also use an Apple Trackpad alongside this setup, since I find it hard to beat for certain tasks.
by irusensei | 2026-01-18 14:03:57+00:00
I feel this is becoming a bit of a tech urban legend such as ZFS requires ECC.

As far as I understand the RVA23 requirement is an ubuntu thing only and only for current non LTS and future releases. Current LTS doesn't have such requirements and neither other distributions such as Fedora and Debian that support riscv64.

So no, you are not stuck running custom vendor distros because of this but more because the other weird device drivers and boot systems that have no mainline support.