MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MobAI – AI-first mobile automation for iOS and Android
by interlap | 2026-01-16 18:21:23+00:00
Hey HN,

I wanted to share a tool I use for developing mobile apps. I’ve spent many years as an engineer at a mobile cloud startup, so I have a solid background in mobile device automation and remote control. I thought it would be useful to have a tool that lets my Claude code see what it’s doing and also how messy it sometimes looks

I’ve seen more posts recently where people complain about the lack of tools like this or are looking for testers to test their mobile apps, so I decided to polish my tool and release it as a separate app.

Currently, it works on macOS and Windows:

- macOS: Android, iOS, emulators, simulators

- Windows: Android, iOS, emulators

I also wrote a Claude code plugin: https://github.com/MobAI-App/mobai-marketplace
And an MCP server: https://github.com/MobAI-App/mobai-mcp

Looking forward to your feedback!
by gofreddygo | 2026-01-16 18:21:25+00:00
I advocated for a SQL solution at work this week and it seems to have worked. My boss is wary of the old school style SQL databases with their constraints and just being a pain to work with. As a developer, these pains aren't too hard to get used to or automate or document away for me and never understood the undue dislike of sql.

The fact that I can use sqlite / local sql db for all kinds of development and reliably use the same code (with minor updates) in the cloud hosted solution is such a huge benefit that it undermines anything else that any other solution has to offer. I'm excited about the sql stuff I learned over 10 years ago being of of great use to me in the coming months.

The last product I worked heavily on used a nosql database and it worked fine till you start tweak it just a little bit - split entities, convert data types or update ids. Most of the data access layer logic dealt with conversion between data coming in from the database and the guardrails to keep the data integrity in check while interacting with the application models. To me this is something so obviously solved years ago with a few lines of constraints. Moving over to sql was totally impossible. Learned my lesson, advocated hard for sql. Hoping for better outcomes.
by wang_li | 2026-01-16 18:21:38+00:00
My browser on my work laptop has 219 root certificates trusted. Some of those may be installed from my employer, but I suspect most of them come from MS as it's Edge on Windows 11. I see in that list things like "Swedish Government Root Authority" "Thailand National Root Certification Authority" "Staat der Nederlanden Root CA" and things like "MULTICERT Root Certification Authority" "ACCVRAUZ1". I don't think there is any reason to believe any certificate. If a government wants a cert for a given DNS they will get it, either because they directly control a trusted root CA, or because they will present a warrant to a company that wants to do business in their jurisdiction and said company will issue the cert.

TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.
by vibedev | 2026-01-16 18:22:10+00:00
If I may suggest to start small, it doesn't have to be a group of people playing football. I personally like to just meet 1 or 2 people to which I can have interaction with all of them.

If I may I made an attempt to crack at this very problem with Tatapp (tatapp.astekita.com). Any feedback is very much appreciated.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-16 18:22:37+00:00
I've always gotten the impression that China is becoming a technological manufacturing powerhouse because of massive investment by the Chinese government, whereas America is falling behind because the government giving grants to corporations is incredibly unpopular because of the belief that the investment is just going to get pocketed by the CEO and board of directors and spent on stock buybacks rather than the development the people and the government wanted to see.

Even if the money is spent properly, it's still highly criticized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people complain that Tesla was only successful because of massive government grants.

Am I off base here?
by culi | 2026-01-16 18:23:00+00:00
Here's a video I wish I could make every American watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo

It provides a deep-dive video into the history of how we got to the situation we're in today with American cars exploding in size. It actually has its origins in Obama-era legislation for emissions standards that made an exception for "light trucks". SUVs are legally classified as light trucks so the industry has massively pushed these tanks onto the consumer promising more safety.

It has led to a dramatic decrease in public safety and pedestrian deaths that is unique to the US. One contributor to these deaths is literally parents running over their own children in their own driveways. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT IS HAPPENING IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

The video goes over the visibility issues with these trucks, how our safety regulations fail to account for them (light trucks only need to be tested in collision with other light trucks) and also covers how modern trucks have the same carrying capacity as pickup trucks from 30 years ago (the main thing that's increased is the hull and cabin size) while being harder to use for actual work since the bed is higher offer the ground
by kentm | 2026-01-16 18:23:21+00:00
> I really never understood how people could store very important information in ES like it was a database.

I agree.

Its been a while since I touched it, but as far as I can remember ES has never pretended to be your primary store of information. It was mostly juniors that reached for it for transaction processing, and I had to disabuse them of the notion that it was fit for purpose there.

ES is for building a searchable replica of your data. Every ES deployment I made or consulted sourced its data from some other durable store, and the only thing that wrote to it were replication processes or backfills.
by jfengel | 2026-01-16 18:23:24+00:00
Are the Greenlanders really up for a guerilla war? Resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan was driven by a common religion and a long history of wars.

If Greenland really did become a state, they'd actually have a fair bit of political power. At least, until oil companies shipped in tens of thousands of employees. I can't see the Greenlanders laying IEDs for American troops, but I suppose I can see them making life very, very hard for civilians.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-16 18:24:03+00:00
Nope, you are spot on. The broad argument is "Engineers are in power in China, lawyers in America." I see the US as no different as when Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged; everything about making and building takes a back seat to line go up. Well, you can't eat, live in, build with, or go to war with line go up. The stock market is not the economy, nor your industrial and manufacturing base. But it keeps going up, so everything must be fine, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_Assets_Supervision...

Dan Wang: 2025 Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454413 - January 2026 (323 comments)

(Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck [https://danwang.co/breakneck/], is excellent and I highly recommend on this topic as others do in the above thread)
by Marsymars | 2026-01-16 18:24:04+00:00
You're off by a notable amount I think, but that doesn't account for the meat of the price difference anyway.

Chinese manufacturers have an average labour cost per vehicle of $585. American manufacturers have an average cost of $1341.

You can't buy an equivalent American EV for an extra $756.

Source: https://afia.pt/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/labor-cost-per-ve...
by jama211 | 2026-01-16 18:24:05+00:00
Think it through just a tiny bit more. It’s more socially acceptable to be angry back at someone who is confronting you directly than someone who may or may not be making an example of you but in a passive way. Therefore it’s less likely the other individual will confront you back, or perhaps more importantly it would make them look more unreasonable for doing so.

Social pressure is a real thing and it affects both behaviour and outcomes, it’d be silly to ignore that.
by kittikitti | 2026-01-16 18:24:50+00:00
I think it's worse that you have to behave maliciously. They have a right to make sound in public places. I'm not one of those people who plays stuff on full volume in public places but sometimes I am a bit noisy. I think back to when I'm having fun and it often involves a bunch of noise. Society is becoming way too intolerant and conformist.
by Telemakhos | 2026-01-16 18:25:01+00:00
On the other side of the fence, I enjoy the new Spotlight-for-Applications that opens when I hit the touch bar key (I still have an M1) for the old Launchpad. It seems to sort programs by frequency, so it knows that I open Ghostty far more often than Ghostery, and typing "Gh" will bring me to Ghostty instead of Ghostery. In the old Launchpad, applications were always presented alphabetically when you began typing, so Ghostery always was selected instead of Ghostty. I had to type "gh" right key enter before, but now just I just hit "gh" enter.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-16 18:25:05+00:00
> Building American cities around the whims of car manufacturers is, to my mind, as bad as any social media.

I think your framing of history is wrong. Trains, and later cars were extraordinarily convenient compared to former methods of travel. We adapted infrastructure to maximize this convenience, not to profit companies. In fact, it's the other way around: companies profited off the demand for convenience they provided.

The same could be said for social media. People wanted small, low-risk interactions with other people over the internet. Companies capitalized on this, and realized that increasing dopamine is the only way to increase capital.

> it requires organized political and social movements, then the legislation and re-allocation of public funds for the public's good

I would reverse the first two, or maybe even remove the "political movement" part. Why is it necessary? It always starts with (a) one person taking concrete action on some principle, then (b) one small group of people joining that person on principle, then (c) this turning into a movement on principle and snowballing momentum until the change is exponentially impactful on society. Later, when the public agrees it's a good thing, they may choose to publicly fund it. Only a-c are necessary for it to make a meaningful impact.
by jmarcher | 2026-01-16 18:25:06+00:00
I have a 40in 5k (32in 4k, but wider). IMHO, 138ppi is the bare minimum, but it really depends on a person's eyesight and preferences.

I would love a large-ish ultra-wide with > 160ppi. One day, maybe, that being said, by that time those things will exist and be reasonably priced, my eyes might not be able to appreciate the difference.
by luisfkandriolo | 2026-01-16 18:25:07+00:00
Hey HN, I just launched JustMD, a free Markdown editor I built with simplicity and productivity in mind.
What is it?

A minimalist Markdown editor, perfect for writing documentation, posts, notes, or any Markdown content quickly and efficiently.

Why I built this I've always looked for a simple system/site where I could add and edit my documentation markdowns with a clean and straightforward UI. I've seen solutions like StackEdit, but sharing a URL with someone to view your doc is unnecessarily complicated. So I decided to build my own.

Key features:
- Folder organization: keep documents organized with drag-and-drop for both documents and folders
- Sharing: similar to Google Docs, you can share documents via public link or by email (view-only for now, planning real-time collaborative editing in the future)
- Optional 2FA: two-factor authentication for extra security
- Auto-save: saves automatically as you write
- Completely free: no ads, no limitations (if you want to support the project, there's a "buy me a coffee" link inside JustMD)

Would love to hear some feedbacks!
by fzeroracer | 2026-01-16 18:25:17+00:00
I think I can understand why someone from Europe or wherever else might flag these stories because they're not interested (...ignoring the whole Greenland elephant in the room for a second), but given that Scott Adams got a massive post on here despite the thread being mostly political shitflinging for obvious reasons it's really lowering my overall opinion of your average HN user. I'm increasingly inclined to say they need to show some information on who's flagging and why, especially if there's a consistent pattern and time of who is doing said flagging.

Some of the posts break thru the wave of people seemingly flagging these stories immediately like the Palantir stories but otherwise your best bet is having show dead on and looking in /Active instead.
by mmooss | 2026-01-16 18:25:35+00:00
Interesting; I wonder why the bothered to pressurize it. It would seem to add a more complexity to many things - every seal, seam, etc - plus the pressurization system. Maybe some equipment ran better with more pressure.

Even commercial passenger flights are not pressurized to sea level; I think it's something like 8,000 ft. IIRC, Boeing's 787 was designed to be pressurized a bit more which, from on-the-ground experience acclimatizing to altitude, I think could make a noticeable difference.
by fahhem | 2026-01-16 18:25:50+00:00
Bro, relax, this rhetoric and your claims are so extreme and not backed up by reality. Killed thousands? According to the "Human Rights Activists" in London? Or the ones in Washington? Because none of that has actually come from Iran, and the few videos that have come out show people hit by hunting rifles (aka, non-police weapons) or shot in the back by other "protestors". We know Mossad has armed the rioters, nobody in the "civilized world" with an IQ over 80 is falling for your propaganda anymore. Take a chill pill, and stop instigating causing everyone to hate the Iranian expats
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-16 18:26:05+00:00
The writing has unfortunately been on the wall for this, especially for free users. They want you to make choices that are in their economic interests.

The biggest tell for me lately is that if you ask ChatGPT about products or even specific items on Amazon, it will only return links to companies that partner with OpenAI. None of the companies they currently partner (affiliate link basically) with are ones I prefer to buy from. It has made ChatGPT way less useful for this kind of research now. I certainly have reasons to distrust all their shopping links.
Tell HN: HP Ultra G1a Bios Freezing Issue
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-16 18:26:16+00:00
Got hit with 3 of these yesterday.

Three HP ZBook Ultra G1a's all updated to Windows 11 25H2 yesterday and refused to progress past the boot screen.

The workaround patch for this issue is to long press the power button until it does a full reset, (20 seconds or so) and then get into the bios. Note that when you reconnect to power you should also connect a USB to Ethernet adapter.

This worked on 2 of the 3 affected devices I have.

On the third one, the only way to get into bios was to crack open the laptop, pull the battery, long press power for 20+ seconds, then reconnect.

Either way, once it lets you into the bios, go to Update System Bios > Check HP.Com for BIOS updates.

When you select this, the laptop goes black and reboots. You will then need to repeat the same process you used to get into the bios to get into the bios again, only this time it will tell you it needs to disable BDE if you have bitlocker enabled.

Then it will allow you to roll back the bios to 1.03.11. Do so.

Once the rollback is completed the laptop will boot normally.

I have reported this issue to HP Support, but wanted to share in case anyone else is dealing with the same issue. If it had only been 1 device I wouldn't have cared, but for 3 to get hit with the exact same issue at the exact same time when the exact same update with the exact same bios was applied, I figured that it would be useful for more people to know about it.

Hopefully this is somewhat helpful!
by m4ck_ | 2026-01-16 18:26:35+00:00
>Mission alignment: Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission and making AI more accessible.

Advertising and marketing kills humanity, these should be among the first industries that AI eliminates; kinda getting mixed messages here. You'd think the tech that supposedly is going to make money and all work irrelevant could figure out a way to make money without resorting to being yet another mechanism to deliver ads.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-16 18:26:40+00:00
Money talks, actual values walk. Always.

I get that this is seen as a "practical" move north-of-the-border, but understand, this is the kind of move that guys like Trump, Putin, and Xi all require. They want this kind of thing to happen, because it shows the real issue was never one of democratic values and human rights. If Canadians valued that then their PM wouldn't be inking a deal with China in response to what Trump is doing. There would be some sort of deal with Europe, perhaps, but not China.

The next time the Canadian government brings up some sort of issue with the treatment of Canadians by ICE or some other kind of issue, you can bet that the horse trading will involve a reference to the fact that this deal happened.

That's already more-or-less the rationale in Trump's dealings with Europe: for all of the complaining about Russia as a threat or the sanctity of NATO and how the Greenland affair threatens all of that, there was a solid 15-year-long run where the continent was more than happy to buy petroleum products off the Russians while ignoring escalating human rights violations in Russia along with incursions into South Ossetia and the Donbas.

He picks up on these sorts of deals as hypocrisy based in realpolitik, and will exploit it.
by culi | 2026-01-16 18:26:50+00:00
If you need to use a truck daily for work an F-150 is an awful choice. The beds of these things are the same size or smaller as pickup trucks from 30 years ago while the bed is also much higher off the ground making it more impractical to regularly load on and off. The bed is only 37% of the truck! The main thing that's increased the size of these trucks is an increase in hull width and cabin size.

According to this study, most F-150s on the road are not used for work

https://www.powernationtv.com/post/most-pickup-truck-owners-...
by xerox13ster | 2026-01-16 18:26:51+00:00
Every single one of those demons is also a chimera and so if you look, there’s a half elephant, half fish in the top left corner. If you look in the top right, there’s like a half fish half horse. So if you look at the gaping demon butthole again, and look at the rest of the features around the gaping opening. You’ll realize that it is the lower half of the creature and it is a sea creature you can see there’s like a coral tentacles thing behind it. It’s just a fish‘s mouth. That does also happen to function as the demon‘s butthole, apparently
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-01-16 18:27:25+00:00
> One final factor that can impact how long your car lasts is good, old-fashioned luck. Unfortunately, luck is one factor completely out of your control. You have control over the way you drive, but not the way others drive. Even if you are a defensive driving expert, you can still find yourself involved in a car accident.

So the numbers are calculated including traffic collisions in the life span calculation.

I wonder what the actual number is if you exclude traffic collisions? "How often should I expect to have to replace my car" and "How long should I expect a car to last" aren't quite the same question.
by Bunas | 2026-01-16 18:28:03+00:00
noted, title comes from my cofounder who's not technical, but he loved Cursor, I was convincing Serafim to try Claude Code, but he just couldn't use it. Cause it was a CLI, then I created a first alpha version of this UI for them .... and he loved it! he's now a fan of Claude Code, and that's where reasoning for "useful" coming from
by interestpiqued | 2026-01-16 18:28:29+00:00
I think people approach it wrong. The framing of solving our loneliness is kind of transactional in a way. Good relationships are not transactional. You got to work on yourself to be curious about others. If it’s genuine, people will reciprocate and relationships develop. You also won’t care as much about putting yourself out there, because the act of getting to know someone is what you like. Greatest thing that ever happened for my social life was hearing Ted Lasso quote “Be curious, not judgemental”.
by wvbdmp | 2026-01-16 18:28:30+00:00
Good, then what’s stopping browsers from shipping these standard controls? It’s ridiculous that everyone needs to invent or depend on large amounts of JS to get anything decent that goes beyond a simple textarea.

Browsers could start by simply improving the controls they do ship with, such has date pickers and selects. They’re all shit. Slightly more complex perhaps would be a combobox. LMAO, we don’t even have comboboxes.

And if you really want to get fancy, rich-text textareas that return standardized, semantic HTML. Also, decent tables with sorting/filtering wouldn’t go amiss.

Standardize some HTMX features into HTML while you’re at it, you’ve got a full-blown revolution.
by mholt | 2026-01-16 18:28:56+00:00
LE has 2 primary production data centers: https://letsencrypt.status.io/

But in general, one of the points of ACME is to eliminate dependence on a single provider, and prevent vendor lock-in. ACME clients should ideally support multiple ACME CAs.

For example, Caddy defaults to both LE and ZeroSSL. Users can additionally configure other CAs like Google Trust Services.

This document discusses several failure modes to consider: https://github.com/https-dev/docs/blob/master/acme-ops.md#if...
by palmotea | 2026-01-16 18:28:59+00:00
> Have you heard about ICE? That one's not a paranoid thought. It's a very real personal police designed for oppression.

Oh, come on. ICE may be behaving badly right now, and you might be mad at them, but that's not an excuse for flights of fancy. Stay grounded in the truth. ICE is not "personal police designed for oppression," they're police designed to enforce immigration and customs laws (ICE literally stands for "immigration and customs enforcement").

Canada and every other country has some kind of police force that serves those roles: for instance: https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/security-securite/rem-ren-eng.ht...:

> The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) removals program contributes to upholding the integrity of Canada’s immigration system by removing people who are inadmissible to enter or stay in Canada.

> ... The CBSA also prioritizes the removal of failed refugee claimants who entered Canada irregularly between points of entry. These cases are prioritized due to their significant impact on program integrity and on Canada’s asylum system.

I'm under the impression that Canada has historically actually been much more strict with enforcing immigration laws and deporting people than the US had been.
by asdff | 2026-01-16 18:29:03+00:00
You’ve built up endurance already. The hard part of working out is getting to the point you got of not being completely sore for days after a single workout. I think that puts a lot of people off from consistent routines. I remember the first two weeks of track season no one could walk up stairs we were getting worked so hard, puking after ladder workouts 5 days a week. Eventually that petered out over the season but that initial hump from insufficient activity to being active is massive, and I don’t think a lot of us on the team would have surmounted it without essentially peer pressure and mutual support in suffering.