MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Fetch – A minimalistic and super fast macOS app launcher
by hackerbirds | 2026-01-12 01:16:04+00:00
Hello HN! I've been struggling using macOS in main part due to a lack of a fast app launcher. Personally, I found solutions like Alfred and Spotlight to be too slow or straight up unreliable with the searches, and wasn't satisfied with them. I just wanted something to swap between apps quickly! So I made one. Fetch is the result of my frustration.

I designed it to be simple and really fast. It only does one thing: search for apps. To try make things quick and load instantly, it uses the same native renderer as Zed, some operations are multi-threaded, apps are indexed, etc.

Despite the core of the app being minimalist, I did put effort into making sure Fetch looks and feels right to use. It's simple, doesn't get in the way, and ideally should work just as you'd expect.

It is currently not as easy to install as I'd like (I want people other than developers being able to use it), and has a few things left to implement (mainly non-macOS support), but I'm sharing this in hopes that it can help someone else as well, and am open to feedback or questions!
by dryark | 2026-01-12 01:16:31+00:00
I've been working on two projects recently. A video game titled TentFires, and letterpress book remastering.

TentFires is a variant of the puzzle game Camping / Tents-and-Trees, but with a huge overworld.

Creating the overworld led to some advancements in topology, which led to realizing those advancements can be used to accurately reconstruct a theoretical "metal die shape" that was used for a glyph to creation impressions in old letterpress books.

As a result, my current first application of that is to remaster and re-release the first book of the "Hardy Boys" series from 1927, "The Tower Treasure".

To do that, I've constructed a "macrogrammetry rig", which is essentially a 2d x y panning machine using 3d printer parts and stuff from my local hardware store, and a camera with a macro lens, in order to "scan" the pages of the book at the highest possible resolution I can reasonably do so at, which is currently around 6000dpi.
by waz0wski | 2026-01-12 01:16:43+00:00
Yes you can still update to 15.7.3 the usual way in Settings

It'll present you the Tahoe upgrade but underneath in small print it'll show other updates, which you have to then open and manually select the 15.7.3 update

And you really should keep up on the point updates because there's been a ton of major security patches since 15.4
by lurking_swe | 2026-01-12 01:16:48+00:00
that’s a lot of words to say “bad at their job”.

If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.

Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
by iamlin | 2026-01-12 01:16:56+00:00
Hey HN,

After sharing [til.re](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483121) (a minimal countdown timer) here, I built another small tool: cross-device text transfer without accounts or apps.

*How it works:*

1. Go to `tmp.tf#yourchannel` on one device
2. Paste your content
3. Open the same URL on another device — done

The channel name is the password. Use something like `#a9$Kx2m` for private transfers, or `#meeting-notes` for easy sharing.

*Features:*

- URL-as-state: the channel name lives in the URL, easy to share
- Auto-expires (no manual cleanup)
- Works in any browser
- Deployed on Cloudflare edge network

I also made a dark-themed version at *copypa.st* if you prefer that aesthetic.

Built this because I got tired of emailing myself links just to move a snippet from phone to laptop.

Would love your feedback!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-12 01:17:04+00:00
Honestly I think that there must be adapters which can use unlimited 5g sim's data plans as fallback network or perhaps (even primary?)

They would be cheaper than starlink fwiw and most connections can be robust usually.

That being said, one can use tailscale or cloudflare tunnels to expose the server even if its behind nat which you mention in your original comment that you might be against at for paranoid reasons and thats completely fine but there are ways to go do that if you want as well which I have talked about it on the other comment I have written here in-depth.
by davidw | 2026-01-12 01:17:51+00:00
I find myself seeking out non-doomer people to read, since the doom and gloom doesn't really help, it's just demotivating. "Look for the helpers" and all that.

This outlet has some good things from time to time, like https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-are-going-to-win/

That said, yeah this is really bad.
by abhishaike | 2026-01-12 01:18:05+00:00
Apologies, I do kinda auto-repost my articles here without thinking whether they are paywalled (nearly everything I’ve written isn’t)

here is an unpaywalled link that anyone can access: https://www.owlposting.com/p/8157b515-56ce-40a4-a7f0-da6d46f...

edit: please subscribe if you enjoyed this! lots of really crazy articles + podcasts in this subfield are planned for the upcoming month :) all free!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-12 01:18:08+00:00
Interesting use case for Claude Code, or any similar local executor talking to a remote AI (Gemini suggests that "Hybrid-Local AI Agent" is a generic name for these, although I've never heard it called that before).

I wonder if a local model might be enough for sysadmin skills, especially if were trained specifically for this ?

I wonder if iOS has enough hooks available that one could make a very small/simple agentic Siri replacement like this that was able to manage the iPhone at least better than Siri (start and stop apps, control them, install them, configure iPhone, etc) ?
by addaon | 2026-01-12 01:18:26+00:00
> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs.

For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer to 2-4 ns for more modern systems. With laser diode currents in the tens of amps range, producing a gaussian pulse this width is already a challenging inductance-minimization problem -- think GaN, thin PCBs, wire-bonded LDs etc to get loop area down. And an inductance-limited pulse is inherently gaussian. To play any anti-interference games means being able to modulate the pulse more finely than that, without increasing the effective pulse width enough to make you uncompetitive on range. This is hard.
by paulryanrogers | 2026-01-12 01:18:47+00:00
> The level should be completable without "trick" moves or gameplay:

Someone should have told makers of Quake Rally! Their menu level alone had a trick jump before you could do much of anything else :)

Still, I think there's a place for tricks in levels to provide novelty or sport like maps, such as jump trick levels. Ideally there would be some kind of tutorial or sign posting if it's not a commonly known trick.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-12 01:19:08+00:00
I like to wander around the cities quite a lot (still intermediate compared to others, but putting about ~10km/day for the past few years), and over the holidays, we were chatting with my friends about "places we've covered around the world together", it prompted the idea to have a co-op world tracker, with sides of city exploration. Built this iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ato-discover-compete/id6757285.... Works with Apple Workouts + Photos location data. Just a headsup, the data is stored in my servers, so it's not a local app, since my goal was to get a combined data with my friends' data.

In my old app, I was solely tracking the streets, but it became somewhat impossible to have pretty coverage after I moved cities. And it's more fun to see global coverage anyways. Over the past couple of years, I've been getting emails for similar features that would expose city/country wide stats as well. Going to share with the users of the old app once I port its features on this one.

Still actively polishing it over the weekends, but it's very fun to see all the places I've been to on a hex-based map, combine it with my friends' data, and so on. It's been a very fun project so far.
by litbear2022 | 2026-01-12 01:19:18+00:00
> On April 18, 2000, the BeiDou and Galileo systems were simultaneously declared. According to ITU rules, navigation satellites must be launched within 7 years and the corresponding frequency signals must be successfully transmitted and received in order to obtain the orbital position and frequency resources, otherwise they cannot obtain legal status.

> At 4:11 a.m. on April 14, 2007, the BeiDou satellite, which was tasked with carrying out an important mission, took off and sent back a signal at around 8 p.m. on April 17. At this point, there were less than four hours left before the ITU's "seven-year deadline."

https://en.eeworld.com.cn/news/qrs/eic475760.html
by leptons | 2026-01-12 01:19:56+00:00
Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
by Loughla | 2026-01-12 01:20:32+00:00
Is it just a cynical view that enough voters can be convinced it's the other side at fault?

Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
by martinald | 2026-01-12 01:20:53+00:00
This actually matches my experience quite well. I use vision (often) to try and do 2 main things in Claude code:

1) give it text data from something that is annoying to copy and paste (eg labels off a chart or logs from a terrible web UI that doesn't make it easy to copy and paste).

2) give it screenshots of bugs, especially UI glitches.

It's extremely good at 1), can't remember when it got it wrong.

On 2) it _really_ struggled until opus 4.5, almost comically so, with me posting a screenshot and a description of the UI bug and it telling me "great it looks perfect! What next?"

With opus 4.5 it's not quite laughably as bad but still often misses very obvious problems.

It's very interesting to see the rapid progression on these benchmarks, as it's probably a very good proxy for "agentic vision".

I've came to the conclusion that browser use without vision (eg based on the DOM or accessibility trees) is a dead end, simply because "modern" websites tend to use a comical amount of tokens to render. So if this gets very good (close to human level/speed) then we have basically solved agents being able to browse any website/GUI effectively.
by orwin | 2026-01-12 01:21:09+00:00
Most civilizations discovered. No one care about a wheel. The wheel itself is useless. Not everyone discovered the axle though, and even less created roads.

I have responded to a sibling comment with more information or examples. I hate this because I don't care about pyramids or Egypt, but I feel myself compelled to respond, I'm so sorry it's not against you, It's a recent pet peeve.
by Finbarr | 2026-01-12 01:21:23+00:00
I used Codex to set up a raspberry pi as a VPN with WireGuard. I had no similar experience before and it was super easy. I used Claude Code to audit and clean up a 10+ year old AWS account- patching security, shutting down redundant services, simplifying the structure. I want Claude Code to replace every bad UI out there. I know what outcome I want and don’t need to learn all the details to get there.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-01-12 01:21:57+00:00
Agreed (mostly, but going into the Electoral College debate is a whole other rabbit hole, and regardless a majority voted for these people at least once, with full prior knowledge), and in a democracy we get the government we deserve.

But still, I saw a good clip from Bernie Sanders arguing that when people voted for Trump, they weren't really voting for giant tax breaks for billionaires, or making health care much more expensive, or kicking lots of people off food stamps (though I'd argue they should have realized these things were coming if they had paid attention). What they were voting for was a fundamental shake up of the system, and (for better or worse) Trump was the only one offering fundamental change, vs. the incremental anodyne "can't we all just get along" milquetoast plans from the Democrats (or at least the "elite" Democrats).

Also, for this imperial expansionism issue in particular, I'd argue that this really does feel like a 180 flip flop from Trump after all his "America First" and isolationist rhetoric. For a lot of other issues, for example the immigration crackdown or tariffs, I was truly baffled that some people were surprised how dumb or extreme his policies were, as he basically laid out that this was exactly what he was going to do in the campaign. But putting us in the path of more global conflict and territorial expansionism was actually the exact opposite of what he said he'd do. I'm not that surprised because he's such a transparent malignant narcissist, but again, at least on this issue he flip flopped.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-12 01:21:57+00:00
I don't know why you're being downvoted, I think you're right.

I think LLMs need different coding languages, ones that emphasise correctness and formal methods. I think we'll develop specific languages for using LLMs with that work better for this task.

Of course, training an LLM to use it then becomes a chicken/egg problem, but I don't think that's insurmountable.
by dabinat | 2026-01-12 01:22:17+00:00
I noticed Apple’s software quality decline the moment they committed to 1-year release cycles. Because an x.0 release inevitably has issues, it offers less than a year of stability (sometimes only a few months if it takes until x.4 to be fully stable) before things get broken again in y.0. And because Apple stops signing old versions pretty quickly, you’re often stuck on an unstable new version if you take the risk and upgrade.

Additionally, it is hard on all developers (Apple included) to release updates for all of its many platforms on the same day, which IMO reduces software quality across the ecosystem.

(Apple also has the luxury of only supporting the latest OS versions with its software. Customers often expect third-party developers to support a wider range of OS versions and devices than Apple does.)
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-12 01:22:42+00:00
>perf is a shell tool. iptables is a shell tool. sshguard is a log reader and ultimately you will use the CLI to take action.

Well yes, and to be honest in this case I did that all over SSH: run `perf`, generate flame graph, copy the .svg to the PC over SFTP, open it in the file viewer.

What I really wanted is a web interface which will just show me EVERYTHING it knows about the system in a form of charts, graphs, so I can just skim through it and check if everything allright visually, without using the shell and each individual command.

Take a look at Netflix presentation, especially on their web interface screenshots: https://archives.kernel-recipes.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

>look into nft - iptables is sooo last decade

It doesn't matter in this context: iptables is using new netfilter (I'm not using iptables-legacy), and this exact scenario is 100% possible with native netfilter nft.

>Finally, 13,000 address in an ipset is nothing particularly special these days

Oh, the other day I had just 70 `iptables -m set --match-set` rules, and did you know how apparently inefficient source/destination address hashing algorithm for the set match is?!
It was debugged with perf as well, but I wish I just had it as a dashboard picture from the start.

I'm talking about ~4Gbit/s sudden limitation on a 10Gbit link.
by cameronh90 | 2026-01-12 01:23:07+00:00
If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely?

Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.

Personally I don’t buy the argument that it has to be one or the other as Tesla have claimed, but between the two, vision is the only one that captures all the data sufficient to drive a car.
by crapple8430 | 2026-01-12 01:24:05+00:00
Funny, on Linux I just use the special key (normally alt or super) to do all my window moving and resizing. It requires no precision at all and works even in tiling WMs without titlebars. I always found it weird Macos and Windows don't have this and it's a little painful to need to be precise with the mouse.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-12 01:24:22+00:00
VPS's are really so dirt cheap that some of them only work because people dont use the servers 100% that they are allocated at or when people dont use the resources they have for most part because of economies of scale but vps's are definitely subsidized.

Cheap vps servers 1 gb ram and everything can cost around 10-11$ per year and using something like hetzner's cheap as well for around 30$ ish an year or 3$ per month most likely while having some great resilient numbers and everything

If anything, people self host because they own servers so upgrading becomes easier (but there are vps's which target a niche which people should look at like storage vps, high perf vps, high mem vps etc. which can sometimes provide servers for dirt cheap for your specific use case)

The other reason I feel like are the ownership aspect of things. I own this server, I can upgrade this server without costing a bank or like I can stack up my investment in a way and one other reason is that with your complete ownership, you don't have to enforce t&c's so much. Want to provide your friends or family vps servers or people on internet themselves? Set up a proxmox or incus server and do it.

Most vps servers sometimes either outright ban reselling or if they allow, they might sometimes ban your whole account for something that someone else might have done so somethings are at jeopardy if you do this simply because they have to find automated ways of dealing with abuse at scale and some cloud providers are more lenient than others in banning matters. (OVH is relaxed in this area whereas hetzner, for better or for worse, is strict on its enforcement)
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 01:24:28+00:00
> My experience hasn't been LLMs automate coding, just speeds it up.

This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.

The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
by starkparker | 2026-01-12 01:24:46+00:00
Every 4K external display I've connected to every M1- and M2-series Mac running macOS has a known flickering issue with Display Stream Compression that Apple knows about and has been unable or unwilling to fix.

The only reliable fixes are to either disable that DisplayPort feature if your monitor supports it, or to disable GPU Dithering using a paid third-party tool (BetterDisplay). Either that or switch to Asahi, which doesn't have that issue.

The issue is common enough that BENQ has a FAQ page about it, which includes steps like "disable dark mode" and "wait for 2 hours": https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/how-to...
by LexiMax | 2026-01-12 01:25:44+00:00
> A lot of people view flagging as "that is a troll post/comment" or "that was made in bad faith". But I think another reason many people flag is "this topic is highly unlikely to generate any useful discussion" or "this topic may be fine for discussion, but not on HN".

I have seen this explanation several times, and it seems like an unfalsifiable conjecture that assumes a lot more good faith than one can expect out of a somewhat-mainstream tech-focused social media site which does not vet the users that sign up for it.

Then again, in fairness, my view is also conjecture. However, I've also noticed in controversial threads it's not uncommon to see reasonably-stated posts getting flagged/dead, and one would expect to see a lot less of this behavior if users were actually at reasonable risk of getting their flagging privileges revoked. So I at the very least feel like there's some basis to my conjecture.

Of course, the ultimate problem is that the flagging behavior seems largely absent of accountability. We don't know who flagged the post, and we also have no insight into how often the moderators of this site yank away moderation tools from their users.
by yxchen1994 | 2026-01-12 01:26:39+00:00
I’ve been studying the Matrix of Destiny for a while, mostly out of curiosity. The “karmic tail” part of the system is fascinating, but
whenever I tried to look it up online I kept hitting the same wall: either the calculator was paywalled, or it gave me a number with no
explanation. I didn’t mind paying occasionally, but the lack of clarity was frustrating—I wanted to understand the reasoning, not just
receive a result.

So I built a small tool for myself: a straightforward karmic tail calculator that takes a birth date (name optional) and returns the past /
present / future karmic tail numbers with short explanations of what each part is supposed to represent. The goal wasn’t to “gamify” it; it
was to make the result legible, fast, and free. After using it personally and showing it to a few friends, I decided to publish it as a
simple, accessible webpage.

Why it might be useful:

- Free, no login, no credit card. The first thing I wanted was frictionless access, so it’s fully open.
- Minimal input. Just a birth date (name optional); results appear immediately.
- Explainable output. Each of the past/present/future values is accompanied by a short description so you can understand what the number is
supposed to mean in this framework.
- Shareable. The tool generates a URL you can share with others if you’re comparing results.
- Multi-language structure. The site is built to support localization since this topic has an international audience.

Tech stack:

- Static site (no build step, no server)
- Tailwind via CDN for styling (kept it lightweight and easy to iterate)
- Vanilla JS for the calculation logic, shared across related tools (a common analysis.js file)
- Umami for privacy‑friendly analytics

Link: https://destiny-matrix.cc/en/tool/karmic-tail-calculator/

I’m curious if the explanations feel clear enough for someone who hasn’t seen the Matrix of Destiny before. Happy to hear feedback or
suggestions.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-12 01:26:43+00:00
I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.

Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-12 01:26:58+00:00
I hope I turn out to be wrong, but the most convincing explanation I've seen for the "why" is that the 1945-2000 period was an anomaly, and now we're reverting to the mean: despotic governments, frequent wars for territory, and massive wealth inequality leading to powerful oligarchies as the only other important political players aside from the despot. This was the norm for the overwhelming majority of human history and perhaps it was massively hubristic to think we had escaped it for good.