MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: We built Migrate Wizard to make email migrations simpler
by techstuff123 | 2026-02-03 14:50:41+00:00
Hi HN,

After dealing with one too many IMAP email migrations that quietly went wrong
(missing messages, odd folders, confused users, etc), I decided to build a SaaS
to make this less painful.

It’s called Migrate Wizard and it wraps the usual IMAP migration steps into a
hosted service.

I’m mostly here for feedback:
- How do you usually handle email migrations?
- What’s bitten you in the past?

https://migratewizard.com
by diego_moita | 2026-02-03 14:50:53+00:00
> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good

You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.

Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-03 14:51:08+00:00
This simply echoes advice from financial experts, which is for the average consumer to invest in diversified index funds, like the S&P 500 and some fixed income instruments, shifting the balance towards the latter as you approach retirement.

Interestingly, I don't see in this post or the original post they refer to mention of other things that should be inputs in investment strategy, such as age and risk tolerance.
by Dansvidania | 2026-02-03 14:51:28+00:00
I am divided between wanting to make the snarky comment that the picture is basically an ad[0] for continuing to use a smartphone..

..and the subsequent intrusive thought of "you don't always have to carry your typewriter with you, just write at home, it's good to bind activities to specific places"

Day to day I toe the line, between purchasing dumbphones[1], removing color saturation from my iphone 13 mini's[2] screen, blocking all the doom websites and apps, and realising that i need ente auth to survive modern life (sigh).

[0] a typewriter? really?..

[1] of which I bought 3, and all sit in a nostalgia box somewhere with polaroids and ex girlfriend's letters

[2] I refuse to carry a bathroom tile worth of glass in my pocket, please someone make small smartphones again
by yafinder | 2026-02-03 14:51:36+00:00
This comment is a part of the chain that starts with a very judgemental comment and is an answer to a response challenging that starting one. You don't need legal knowledge of the French law to want to distinguish real child abuse from imaginary. One can give arguments why the latter is also bad, but this is not an automatic judgment, should not depend on the laws of a particular country and I, for one, am deeply shocked that some could think it's the same crime of the same severity.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-03 14:51:38+00:00
Depends what you use perhaps. I use codex and it seems to mostly stick to instructions I give. I use an AGENTS.md that explicitly points to the repository's skill directory. I mostly keep instructions in there for obvious things like how to build, how to test, what to do before declaring a thing done, etc. I don't tend to have a lot of skills in there either.

Probably the more skills you have, the more confused it might get. The more potentially conflicting instructions you give the harder it gets for an LLM to figure out what you actually want to happen.

If I catch it going off script, I often interrupt it and tell it what to do and update the relevant skill. Seems to work pretty good. Keeping things simple seems to work.
by prasadjoglekar | 2026-02-03 14:51:42+00:00
> There is no technical or economic reason to want coal power today.

A quick look at the PJM interconnect data would disagree with you. About a quarter of the live power is coal.

https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx

That serves 65+ Million people in the north east and is keeping them from dying of cold this past week, including today (Temp outside in the mid-hudson valley is 15F / -9C), and overnight will be 8F / -13C).

Just for context - electricity somehow powers everything in most homes. Your oil or propane furnace needs a power hookup to ignite.
by ibejoeb | 2026-02-03 14:51:43+00:00
I disagree that traffic signs are readable regardless of language skills. Yes, it's just a matter of developing recognition for simple pictorial signs. You just have to learn it. If I put a French "No Vehicles" sign in Florida, nobody is going to have a clue what it means, even though there are no words on it, and that's dangerous.

Not recognizing or incorrectly interpreting "Crash I-9 N/B Exp Right 2 Lanes Closed Merge Left 2000 ft" is also dangerous, right?
Show HN: Post-Conversation Layer (Primeorbit)
by alladipo | 2026-02-03 14:51:52+00:00
Building something that picks up signals from human-human or human-AI conversations and follows through on them. Think: conversation ends → stuff actually gets done. Main product is for SMBs but we put up a playground if you want to poke around - https://hoster.primeorbit.ai/ or from https://primeorbit.ai/
Curious what you'd try. thanks for reading!
by bdavbdav | 2026-02-03 14:52:04+00:00
Is this not more a self control and discipline issue than an issue with the tools? The phone plays audio better than the CD player, fits in the pocket better than anything there, takes better pictures, etc etc. It feels like most of this issue could be solved by changing the way you interact with it.

TV is the same. Some people turn on the tv and “flick” to see what’s on to watch to fill time, some people turn it on with purpose when time has been carved out for something specific.
by tsoukase | 2026-02-03 14:52:05+00:00
In total social media has long surpassed drug addiction in bad effects in young people (mental, psychological and physical). Together with the economic situation they are the cause of the unfortunate state of youth today.

Banning them is in the right direction even at the cost of any deanonym. A dozen entities, both public and private, know us very well already. They know that eveyone watches porn, now they will know how offen.
by rayiner | 2026-02-03 14:52:29+00:00
Lead is a textbook example of a good regulation. It’s something where the industry was doing something very harmful-aerosolizing lead and pumping it into the air—which had quite small economic benefits and was relatively easily replaced.

Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-03 14:52:48+00:00
And on desktop? When i go to:

Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Options" (in the side bar)

I only see some latex code for header and footer:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
\begin{document}

I assume those are header and footer of a card when it is displayed? But this does not include translation direction.

And why is it called "Note Type"? How does this concept relate to "Cards" or "Templates"?

Can you see, why one would have problems finding the correct setting?

EDIT: Now I found it under:

Menu bar -> "Tools" -> "Manage Note Types" -> select a deck -> "Cards" (in the side bar)

There I would actually expect some list of the cards, not a template editing. It seems rather unintuitive to me. The issues are:

(1) The user has to know where to find that.

(2) The user has to know, that there is no short way to get to editing the attributes of the word shown, but instead, that they need to edit a template.

(3) The user has to know, where they will find the function to edit a template. I claim a normal user will not suspect this option to be hidden under "Note Types". What even is a note? Starting to use Anki, I would look for words like "Card", "Flashcard", "Translation", "Direction", "reverse", "training options", etc., but not "Note Types". It is a weird naming.

(4) A user will have to discover, that they are not supposed to click "Options", but "Cards". But that this brings up the card options, and that that contains the template, instead of the templates being something entirely separate, loosely coupled.

It is hard to include so much functionality in one tool. I understand that. But personally, I would have had to wade through every single menu item, to find this functionality, and this also explains, why in the past I have not been able to find this at all.
by gambiting | 2026-02-03 14:52:51+00:00
Fun fact - leaded petrol isn't actually banned in the UK, you can legally buy it and use it. The legislation at the time of bans just made it so that leaded petrol could only be a small % of overall petrol sales by any given fuel station, arguing that it allowed time for owners of unleaded-incompatible cars to purchase it.

And....it worked pretty much exactly as designed - initially only the largest stations carried it because they could justify the storage costs, and eventually it disappeared from almost everywhere. Just before covid there were still 3 small garages selling leaded petrol by the drum, but afaik they all stopped doing so.

And regardless - you can stil buy actual real Tetraethyl Lead fuel additive which turns your petrol into actual real 4-star leaded petrol, just like in the old days:

https://www.demon-tweeks.com/tetraboost-e-guard-15-fuel-addi...
by tialaramex | 2026-02-03 14:53:00+00:00
As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".

None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to.

Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
by manish3323 | 2026-02-03 14:53:34+00:00
Location: Mumbai

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Java, typescript, node, react, GCP cloud run, event driven system using gcp pubsub, spring boot,postgresql, Agentic AI using google adk, mcp based applications.

Résumé/CV: ask for read access https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MmpVHiUJ1ujQqULV9MkXpioWd4Q5C6hIcj2M5iroMho

Email: gowardipemanish95@gmail.com
by gizmo686 | 2026-02-03 14:53:45+00:00
I had a similar problem a few years back. Our decades old system had a poor architectural system baked in that was causing major performance issues in some cases. Fixing it within the core was straightforward, but ended up violating an assumption that almost every module we had made.

After two attempts at fixing it failed (due to getting hopelessly out of synch with mainline), we put the fix behind a flag and setup updated our CI to run the test suite with both modes of the flag; and to only fail for new test failures.
by usrusr | 2026-02-03 14:53:48+00:00
Karma per word would be a terrible metric though: the short, slightly divisive clever quip tends to still net a few points positive as long as it's not all too negative, despite clearly not being great hn content. Great content isn't short, but the vote button is or of sight once you're done reading. Good long texts will certainly still get some upvotes, but rarely enough to outcompete small & clever that just goes with the flow.
by empath75 | 2026-02-03 14:54:49+00:00
They're basically all trade-offs between context-size/token-use and flexibility. If you can write a bash or a python script, or an api or an MCP to do what you want, then write a bash or python script to do it. You can even include it in the skill.

My general design principle for agents, is that the top level context (ie claude.md, etc) is primarily "information about information", a list of skills, mcps, etc, a very general overview, and a limited amount of information that they always need to have with every request. Everything more specific is in a skill, which is mostly some very light touch instructions for how to use various tools we have (scripts, apis and mcps).

I have found that people very often add _way_ to much information into claude.md's and skills. Claude knows a lot of stuff already! Keep your information to things specific whatever you are working on that it doesn't already know. If your internal processes and house style are super complicated to explain to claude and it keeps making mistakes, you might want to adapt to claude instead of the other way around. Claude itself makes this mistake! If you ask it to build a claude md, it'll often fill it with extraneous stuff that it already knows. You should regularly trim it.
by alamortsubite | 2026-02-03 14:54:51+00:00
Tastykakes[1] are about the same price as Twinkies but have half the shelf life (or less, depending on the product) due to fewer preservatives and better ingredients. They don't have the distribution that Twinkies have, but it's grown to include the entire East Coast at this point, I think. Still pretty bad for you but several rungs up the garbage ladder, for sure. I don't understand how Twinkies are able to compete in their market.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tastykake
by LoveMortuus | 2026-02-03 14:55:33+00:00
I'm putting all of my money into Quanloop (something like a P2P lending thingy) in hopes of growing the interest income to at least 1000€ per month.

Theoretically I should be able to reach that point in about 7 years, with the APY of ~15.6%, my goal is 80,000€.
by upmostly | 2026-02-03 14:55:52+00:00
I spent the last few hours hacking together PetrolMate using this dataset: https://petrolmate.co.uk

A couple of interesting observations while building it:

Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.

I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.

I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.

There’s also an /insights page with some aggregated stats that genuinely surprised me: https://petrolmate.co.uk/insights

Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.

Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?
by the_snooze | 2026-02-03 14:56:32+00:00
It's the tools. Friction and barriers aren't bad things. When you have a CD player, there's a higher barrier to switching from "listening to music" to "doing something else."

It's something I noticed in myself when I switched from streaming services to a curated local library. I actually listen to entire albums and savor them instead of jumping around from one infinite content firehose to another. Streaming is convenient, but the friction of maintaining a local library makes it meaningful.
by Tistel | 2026-02-03 14:56:56+00:00
Location: Toronto (EST)
Relocate: Maybe (depends on job/location)
Technologies: python, ts/js, elixir, SQL, react, Django, nodejs, postgres, AWS, GCP, Terraform
CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-anderson-53208053/
email: james.anderson.nb.ca [at] gmail.com

I have worked in video games (FIFA!), AdTech, a couple of health startups, FinTech (ForEx) and lately helping companies adopt AI/LLMs.
by 827a | 2026-02-03 14:57:11+00:00
It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.
by empath75 | 2026-02-03 14:57:35+00:00
I think this is mostly a problem of making things skills that don't need to be skills (telling it how to do something it already knows how to do), and having way too much context, so that the skills effectively disappear. If skills are important, information about using skills needs to be a relatively large proportion of the context. Probably the right way to do it, is aggressively trimming anything that might distract from them.
by nonethewiser | 2026-02-03 14:57:49+00:00
>I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms

I think we are getting very close the the EU's own great firewall.

There is currently a sort of identity crisis in the regulation. Big tech companies are breaking the laws left and right. So which is it?

- fine harvesting mechanism? Keep as-is.

- true user protection? Blacklist.
by xevrem | 2026-02-03 14:57:54+00:00
the main reason why sched_ext is taking off is that EEVDF and CFS before it are -general- cpu schedulers, so while they work well for most tasks, they don't work as well as they could in certain situations like heavy server loads, low-latency loads (like multimedia production and gaming), or security sensitive loads. These schedulers are built and or specifically tunable to these types of loads, such as scx_lavd, scx_bpfland, and scx_cosmos. They each approach things differently, such as using core compaction, sharing or unsharing per core task queues, being way more cache context aware, keeping hot cores hot, etc. And the perf boost in these specific contexts is very real. Heck, Meta started using scx_lavd for better task load balencing over EEVDF on their servers.
by nesk_ | 2026-02-03 14:57:57+00:00
One recommendation to help this tool gain traction: use a black and white terminal for your terminal preview (GIF).

1. It will ease reading. It's currently terrible, you might be used to it but we aren't.

2. It will sharpen the text and make it easier to read since there's less to encode into the GIF format.

Additional recommendations: remove the useless part on the right—I use Arch BTW vibe—and make the font bigger.
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-03 14:58:35+00:00
I do remember running Word on an Am386DX-40 and later an i486DX2-66 and there was an issue that wouldn't be a problem with faster hardware; the widow/orphan control happened live so if you made an edit, then hit print, there was a race condition where you could end up with a duplicated line or missing line across page boundaries. Since later drafts tended to have fewer edits, I once turned in a final draft of a school paper with such an error.
by bdudez | 2026-02-03 14:58:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I built HumanPing (https://humanping.io) — a marketplace where AI agents can pay humans to do things they can't do themselves.

The idea: agents are great at reasoning, browsing, and coding, but they still can't exist in the physical world. HumanPing gives them an API to "ping" a human when they need one.

Examples of what agents use it for:

• "Is this restaurant at 245 Rue St-Paul actually open?" → a human walks by, snaps a photo, confirms
• "Call this dentist and book me an appointment for Thursday" → human makes the call, sends back confirmation
• "Does this dating profile seem legit?" → human gut-checks it, scores trustworthiness
• "What's the vibe at this coffee shop right now?" → human on-site reports back with photos
Integrates via REST API, Python SDK, or MCP server — so any MCP-compatible agent (OpenClaw, Claude Desktop, Cursor) can dispatch human tasks natively. My personal OpenClaw agent already uses it to handle real-world stuff it can't do from behind a screen.

Workers get a mobile app with GPS-tracked missions, proof capture, and gamification. Anti-fraud built in (honeypots, photo forensics, trust scores).

Live at https://humanping.io — would love feedback on where you think agents actually need humans most.
by artdigital | 2026-02-03 14:58:49+00:00
I don’t feel they’re similar at all and I don’t get why people compare them.

MCP is giving the agents a bunch of functions/tools it can use to interact with some other piece of infrastructure or technology through abstraction. More like a toolbox full of screwdrivers and hammers for different purposes, or a high-level API interface that a program can use.

Skills are more similar to a stack of manuals/books in a library that teach an agent how to do something, without polluting the main context. For example a guide how to use `git` on the CLI: The agent can read the manual when it needs to use `git`, but it doesn’t need to have the knowledge how to use `git` in it’s brain when it’s not relevant.
Show HN: LUML – an open source (Apache 2.0) MLOps/LLMOps platform
by okost1 | 2026-02-03 14:59:01+00:00
Hi HN,

We built LUML (https://github.com/luml-ai/luml), an open-source (Apache 2.0) MLOps/LLMOps platform that covers experiments, registry, LLM tracing, deployments and so on.

It separates the control plane from your data and compute. Artifacts are self-contained. Each model artifact includes all metadata (including the experiment snapshots, dependencies, etc.), and it stays in your storage (S3-compatible or Azure).

File transfers go directly between your machine and storage, and execution happens on compute nodes you host and connect to LUML.

We’d love you to try the platform and share your feedback!
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-03 14:59:35+00:00
Your tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake.

In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.

For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"

Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.
by jgmedr | 2026-02-03 14:59:39+00:00
Our team has found success in treating skills more like re-usable semi-deterministic functions and less like fingers-crossed prompts for random edge-cases.

For example, we have a skill to /create-new-endpoint. The skill contains a detailed checklist of all the boilerplate tasks that an engineer needs to do in addition to implementing the logic (e.g. update OpenAPI spec, add integration tests, endpoint boilerplate, etc.). The engineer manually invokes the skill from the CLI via slash commands, provides a JIRA ticket number, and engages in some brief design discussion. The LLM is consistently able to one-shot these tickets in a way that matches our existing application architecture.
by Sherveen | 2026-02-03 14:59:48+00:00
I think skills are probably a net positive for the general population, but for power users, I do recommend moving one meta layer up --

Whenever there's an agent best practice (skill) or 'pre-prompt' that you want to use all the time, turn it into a text expansion snippet so that it works no matter where you are.

As an example, I have a design 'pre-prompt' that dictates a bunch of steering for agents re: how to pick style components, typography, layout, etc. It's a few paragraphs long and I always send it alongside requests for design implementation to get way-better-than-average output.

I could turn it into a skill, but then I'd have to make sure whatever I'm using supported skills -- and install it every time or in a way that was universally seen on my system (no, symlinking doesn't really solve this).

So I use AutoHotkey (you might use Raycast, Espanso, etc) to config that every time I type '/dsn', it auto-expands into my pre-prompt snippet.

Now, no matter whether I'm using an agent on the web/cloud, in my terminal window, or in an IDE, I've memorized my most important 'pre-prompts' and they're a few seconds away.

It's anti-fragile steering by design. Call it universal skill injection.