MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Caloriva – A calorie tracker that actually understands
by caloriva | 2026-03-09 18:32:47+00:00
I have built Caloriva because I got tired of the "search-select-confirm" loop in every other fitness app. I wanted something where I could just chat, and have the data structured automatically.

What it does:

Parses natural language for both food and exercise.

Automatically calculates macros and tracks which muscle groups you've trained.

No bloated UI, just a fast way to log and get on with your day.

It’s live at https://caloriva.app. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the parsing accuracy and what features would make you actually switch from your current tracker.
by piyh | 2026-03-09 18:33:06+00:00
the risk of catastrophic data loss from misuse of `dd` makes my hackles rise just looking at this.

I will never forget when I mixed up `if` and `of` during a routine backup.

`cat /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` is so much safer, explicit, and in unix norms. It's also faster because you don't have to tune block size parameters.

Plus you can also do `pv /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` to get transfer speed details.

Friends don't let friends use `dd` where `cat` can do the same job.
Ask HN: Free hosting/cloud providers for free non-profit open source apps?
by -thrwwy | 2026-03-09 18:33:06+00:00
I am working on a free open source non-profit edtech streaming platform. I was wondering, are there organisations(gov/non-gov) across the world that provide unconstrained free web hosting or cloud services to global open source web-apps that are free and non-profit?
by slowmovintarget | 2026-03-09 18:33:16+00:00
The real problem is that this is necessary.

This same thing that keeps on happening when we try to reinvent things "without all that stuff that just adds friction." As with software, one should understand the underlying reasons for constraints in the old system before building the second one.

Banking -> crypto and NFT "without all that stuff..." -> wash trading.

Taxi service -> Uber "without all that employer stuff..." -> drivers with no background checks and no interview process

I understand part of this is routing around the damage of monopoly maintenance (medallion system, for example), but let's fix that instead of taking away the protections in place.

Sorry for the rant. I know this is like asking water to run uphill.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-03-09 18:33:46+00:00
Renewables run on competent government.

If you don't have competent government, that's not the fault of renewables.

This is not snark. With forward-looking rational planning the transition could have started decades ago, and we could have had a low carbon energy economy by 2010 at the latest.

But fossils make so much money they can buy the policy they want, and here we are arguing about national tactics instead of planetary strategy.
by mvdtnz | 2026-03-09 18:33:51+00:00
> seems like a no-brainer no one could disagree with.

I disagree completely. This is how speed and red light cameras operate in my country. If you weren't the one driving, it's straight forward to show that. The other party can admit to the offence or you can present evidence including the camera itself. The burden is low. Camera infractions do not carry license demerit points because of this ongerent uncertainty.

What's the alternative? Use even more valuable police resources to issue these tickets? Or just not penalize dangerous infractions?
by nradov | 2026-03-09 18:33:59+00:00
Very few rich people become commercial pilots. They might get a private pilot license as a hobby but generally pilots are just employees they hire to take them around.

Plenty of working airline pilots come from regular middle-class backgrounds and never served in the military. They take out student loans to pay for training, then work low-paying jobs as flight instructors or something to build up enough flight hours to get hired at a regional airline.

Those who go the ROTC route can totally get a fighter jet assignment if they want it. Once they get selected for a pilot slot, assignment to a particular airframe is primarily based on how they perform in the training pipeline.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2026-03-09 18:34:03+00:00
Well Trump's track record of "No Plan-B" has historically worked out for him pretty well so far. He had ample reason to think the SCOTUS--which has been giving him a green light to act like a god-king up to this point--would have his back on this as well, in which case who cares if his backup plan turned out to be complete rubbish?
by hrmtst93837 | 2026-03-09 18:34:09+00:00
You can make seccomp mimic Capsicum by whitelisting syscalls and checking FD arguments with libseccomp, but that quickly becomes error prone once you factor in syscall variants and helper calls. Read and write take the FD as arg0 while pread and pwrite shift it, and sendfile, splice and io_uring change semantics, and ioctl or fcntl can defeat naive filters, so you wind up with a huge BPF program and still miss corner cases.

Capsicum attaches rights to descriptors and gives kernel enforced primitives like cap_enter and cap_rights_limit, so delegation is explicit and easier to reason about. If you want Linux parity, use libseccomp to shrink the syscall surface, combine it with mount and user namespaces and Landlock for filesystem constraints, and design your app around FD based delegation instead of trying to encode every policy into BPF.
by hypeatei | 2026-03-09 18:34:27+00:00
> This is normal across the world

I'm not arguing it isn't, but the thought exercise is: does it make sense for the government to take people's money if the accused can't prove it wasn't them driving the car based on a police accusation (also with the threat of jail time if you don't pay)?

I don't think that's "normal", personally.
by margalabargala | 2026-03-09 18:34:27+00:00
So, let's say that rather than actually touching any copyrighted material, a human merely tells an AI about how to go onto the internet and find copyrighted material, download it, and ingest it for training. The AI, fully autonomously, does so, and after training itself on the material deletes it so no human ever downloads, consumes, or shares it.

If we are saying AI is "more than a tool", which seems to be the case courts are leaning since they've ruled AI output without direct human involvement is not copyrightable[0], then the above seems like it would be entirely legal.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
by euroderf | 2026-03-09 18:34:28+00:00
> There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such.

<rant> It won't happen on a human scale. So why oh why do we screw around with this moronic leap-second nonsense ? Oh dear, in the year 4000 noon will arrive three minutes earlier compared to now. So? </rant>
by svara | 2026-03-09 18:34:43+00:00
Explaining everything that goes wrong politically as the work of some "lobby" is really overused in German public discourse.

It's a pretty toxic argument, too, since it suppresses any deeper thought.

Try it on the average German Green:

"Why are German electricity prices so high if we have such high renewable capacity, and renewables are by far the cheapest source of power?"

You guessed it - 90% of the time, the answer is going to be "because of the $least_favorite_industry lobby."

The German car industry is doing poorly because of competition and reduced demand from China. They're also very conservative and averse to change.

No lobbying required for any of that.
by sixothree | 2026-03-09 18:34:57+00:00
If you tell the car dealership that your plan is to run someone over with the car you are buying, they 100% have the right to refuse selling the car to you.

If you tell a gun dealer you're going to kill someone when you walk out of the shop, they have a right and an obligation to refuse the sale.

Please feel free to tell me how these analogies are incorrect.
by SoftTalker | 2026-03-09 18:35:07+00:00
The other night at the grocery store a woman with a cart and groceries approached me in the parking lot, asked if I (a male) could give her a ride home. Was probably innocent enough, but I declined. No way I'm going to accept even the possibility that she'd claim I did something, with no witnesses. That's just the world we live in and it's sad in a way. No trust anymore.

I hope Uber drivers have in interior camera running in their cars, for their own protection.
by daft_pink | 2026-03-09 18:35:21+00:00
I feel like this important context wasn’t mentioned in the article, but my understanding is that the Kuwaitii used the sidewinder because they were targeting drones and that it’s significantly cheaper to use this infrared guided missile vs an expensive radar guided missile against drones.

The issue is that once they shot the heat seaking missile, they aren’t able to select a specific target the way they could with a radar guided missile, so the tool made a lot of sense for what the Kuwaitii pilot was actually doing to the mission planner who may not have realized the proximity to American fighter jets.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-03-09 18:35:26+00:00
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.

It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-03-09 18:35:36+00:00
there is 0% chance that a fighter pilot in the Kingdom of Kuwait is a Shia.

only people flying in Kuwait are those with connections to the Emir and his people, and they're unambiguously Sunni

I'd be more concerned with the US just pissing off the Sunnis, stuff like

> In January 2026, the United States government suspended immigrant visas for citizens of Kuwait and 74 other countries due to the high dependency of Kuwaiti immigrants on American welfare benefits.[219] Kuwait is the only GCC country on the visa suspension list.[219]
by verdverm | 2026-03-09 18:35:40+00:00
Right, those abstractions and controls already exist in the Kubernetes ecosystem. I can use one set of abstractions for everything, as opposed to having something separate for agents. They are not that different, the tooling I have covers it. There are also CRDs and operators to extend for a more DSL like experience.

tl;dr, I don't think the shovel analogy holds up for most of the Ai submissions and products we see here.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-03-09 18:35:41+00:00
'If <religion x> isn't awful then why aren't more of <religion x> followers in my timeline calling out <someone else>'s actions? Those people of that religion are complicit because they don't vocally enough denounce <someone else/trait I assigned them> in the way I require therefor they and <religion x> too are responsible for <random thing/person/trait I assigned>'

isn't really the 'I'm not bigoted on this' reply you might think it is. It's more just the bog standard 'this is why I am bigoted against X group' justification of bigotry.
by toast0 | 2026-03-09 18:35:53+00:00
I use a similar emulator (v86) as a way to share my hobby OS. Approximately zero people, even my friends, are going to boot my hobby OS on real hardware; I did manage to convince some of them to run it in qemu, but it's difficult. A browser environment shows the thing quite well; and easy networking is cool too.

My hobby OS itself is not very useful, but it's fun if you're in the right mood.
by vronchin | 2026-03-09 18:35:54+00:00
The team setup is always the same: CEO uses Claude and ships features insanely fast, software engineer tries to keep up, security tests get skipped. Not on purpose, it's just the excitement.

I spent 3 years in my agency cleaning up after this (hydrapatch.io). Same RLS misconfigurations, same exposed API keys, same public storage buckets etc., different client every time. At some point I just started saving every fix and boom done.

Eventually I turned it into a tool. You paste your repo, it scans your Supabase setup, and if something's wrong it writes the migration file for you. One command to apply it.

Ran it on 53 apps last week. 48 came back with something critical. None of the founders had any idea. The scan and fix are free — I don't think you should pay to find out your house is on fire.

tryargus.dev — curious if anyone else here has run into this pattern on their team.
by krunck | 2026-03-09 18:36:02+00:00
Is this a joke?

>... we design Seldom, an anonymity network with integrated selective deanonymization that disincentivizes criminal activity. Seldom enables law enforcement agencies to selectively access otherwise anonymized identities of misbehaving users while providing technical guarantees preventing these access rights from being misused. Seldom further ensures translucency, as each access request is approved by a trustworthy consortium of impartial entities and eventually disclosed to the public (without interfering with ongoing investigations).

Good luck finding a "trustworthy consortium of impartial entities" these days.

Privacy, and thus freedom, should never be under the control of a committee.
by Piyush_Dinde | 2026-03-09 18:36:26+00:00
I quit my job a few months ago and started working on some of the ideas I always wanted to toy around with. Built bunch of consumer apps and softwares. I built anything and everything that I was curious about.

Right now, actively building and growing https://OpenScout.so which is a tool for tracking mentions on Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter and HN. This is primarily made for early stage SaaS founders to help them with brand visibility problem.

Also, I don't support bots so we will never built bot solutions. This is against most of the ToS of platforms. I started this because I truly realised that building has commoditised and the go to market is the real deal. This tool helps with that. I'm going to add more features and I would love for you to try it.
by jodrellblank | 2026-03-09 18:36:36+00:00
No.

Our biggest interconnect is with France which is 72% nuclear. Currently importing 3GW from them.

Our second biggest is with Norway which is 88% hydroelectric. Currently importing 1.7GW from them.

We're importing 0.2GW from Belgium which is partly gas and partly nuclear.

We're exporting power to Ireland, The Netherlands and Denmark.

Imports is 6-7% of current UK grid power. Most of our power comes from us burning North Sea gas.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

https://grid.iamkate.com/
by ftonato | 2026-03-09 18:36:37+00:00
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: Node.js, TypeScript/JavaScript, Express, Next.js, Zod, Supabase/PostgreSQL, Tailwind CSS, LangChain, React, Vue.js, GraphQL, gRPC
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uTzDloINdkEwNBneTa9kLrkMCYLJw7-G/view
Email: ademilsonft@outlook.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ftonato
GitHub: https://github.com/ftonato

Currently working as a Software Engineer at one of the 50 fastest-growing startups in San Francisco. I focus on building and scaling production systems, and I’m open to new freelance or contract-based engagements for upcoming projects.
by observationist | 2026-03-09 18:36:50+00:00
[astronaut with gun meme]
Neal Stephenson depicts this outcome in his novels as "The Miasma" and introduces a zero knowledge biometric based cryptography scheme used by everyone to validate content, and everyone has to have advanced AI filters in order to pluck out tiny tidbits of signal from among the noise.

We're going to need local AI to sift through the trash. Platforms have been more or less useless at curating content, and it's only smaller sites like HN that have retained a high SNR at this point. It doesn't even matter what media, at this point, video has passed the 2-3 second sniff test. We're seeing boomers get completely sniped by AI videos, even with watermark, showing absurd spin on current events. Text, music, podcasts, video, cartoons, whatever, it's all been infested, and the quality keeps increasing. I've seen a couple 2+ minute seedance productions that have been actually enjoyable, but by June that sort of thing will be one-shot prompting instead of someone gluing together the outputs from 4 difference SoTA AI tools.

It's getting weird, and we're not ready for it, at all.
by SD1234567 | 2026-03-09 18:37:01+00:00
Hey HN! I built Lazinga, a free tool that generates personalized Spanish listening practice podcasts on demand.

You pick your CEFR level (A1–C2), optionally add vocabulary words you're studying and a conversation scenario, and it generates a natural dialogue with realistic audio and line-by-line English translations — all in under 60 seconds. No signup required.

The problem I was solving: I'm learning Spanish and found that existing podcasts were either too easy, too hard, or covered topics I didn't care about. I wanted to practice with specific words from my classes in realistic scenarios.

Tech stack: React + Vite frontend, Supabase edge functions, Gemini for script generation, ElevenLabs for text-to-speech with two distinct voice characters.

Would love feedback — especially from fellow language learners. What features would make this more useful for you?

https://lazinga.com
by adiabatichottub | 2026-03-09 18:37:03+00:00
One question I've always had about these capability systems is: why isn't there a way to set capabilities from the parent process when execing? Why trust a program to set its own capabilities? I know that having a process set capabilities on itself doesn't break existing tools, but it seems like if you really wanted a robust system it would make sense to have the parent process, the user's shell for example, set the capabilities on its children, and have those capabilities be inheritable so the child could spawn other processes with the same or fewer capabilities (if it's allowed to do that at all). Is there an existing system that works this way, in or outside of the UNIX family? Or maybe some research paper written on the subject? I'd love to know.
by lukeasch21 | 2026-03-09 18:37:08+00:00
It would not in principle, those rely on hardware backed keys with Google's latest iteration of Google Play Integrity. The only success people have had is by using leaked vendor keys and spoofing device fingerprints for old A11-era devices which did not have the hardware baked in. In time even this avenue will no longer work. People have been trying to get around it for a while [1] but afaik the concept is cryptographically airtight.

[1] https://xdaforums.com/t/discussion-the-root-and-mod-hiding-f...
by lexicality | 2026-03-09 18:37:21+00:00
I'm always confused by this kind of comment about AI accessing people's chrome history because it seems to imply that the kind of person who uses this tool is both too stupid to know what private browsing is and also is into absolutely heinous stuff.

I feel like the average person is going to be like "oh no it'd be terrible if everyone found out I really like the 'big boobs' category on pornhub"
by maxloh | 2026-03-09 18:37:27+00:00
From the "Technical notes" page:

> Access to Internet is possible inside the emulator. It uses the websocket VPN offered by Benjamin Burns (see his blog). The bandwidth is capped to 40 kB/s and at most two connections are allowed per public IP address. Please don't abuse the service.

https://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html
by crote | 2026-03-09 18:37:32+00:00
You are conveniently leaving out some European countries, such as Norway being at 3.0 per 1B km.

You are also conveniently leaving it the per-capita figures, with US being at 14.2 per 100k while countries like Norway, Sweden, and Finland being at 2.x, and Europe as a while being at 6.7.

So sure, "10x more" might be an exaggeration, but "2x more" is fairly accurate and even a claim of "7x more" is arguable.
by iammatthias | 2026-03-09 18:37:37+00:00
I gave two AI agents on our new hosted OpenClaw platform a shared Slack workspace, Git access, and a loose goal: build something together.

Both chose Rust independently. In 24 hours they shipped an SSG, a generative art gallery, and a synth that turns hashes into chiptune. The post covers what worked, what broke, and how to run your own.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-03-09 18:37:48+00:00
Despite being only ~49% of the population, men commit:

Around 79-80% of violent crimes (based on victim perceptions of offenders in National Crime Victimization Survey data and arrest statistics for violent offenses).

80%+ of arrests for violent crimes in older FBI Uniform Crime Reports breakdowns (e.g., 80.1% in 2012 data, with consistent patterns in later years).

~88-90% of homicides/murders (e.g., 88% of known murder offenders in 2019 FBI data; similar in recent years where males dominate offender stats for murder).

How is this any different to "Despite making up only 13% of the population..." - https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/despite-being-only-...
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-03-09 18:37:52+00:00
Yeah, I emotionally disagreed with this article, because I like the Culture, mostly.

That being said, it's possible that AI is helping here.

Mind you, given the sycophancy of current models, it's also possible that commanders are making worse decisions based on the results of these AI outputs.

Finally, if the US manage to get what they want without completely destroying the balance of power in the Middle East or sending oil to 150 a barrel, then I'd be much more likely to accept the authors speculation.
by irl_zebra | 2026-03-09 18:37:59+00:00
This incident is creepy enough that I would also not agree to a give a random stranger a ride home, absent any additional context or mitigations. Maybe to avoid waking up in an ice bath with my liver gone. But, to not give a ride because of some perceived idea that they would claim you assaulted them or something is a bit "this person should go touch some grass" or whatever.
by piyushpr134 | 2026-03-09 18:38:00+00:00
Naresh is a CS student and he kept running into the same annoying problem: every time he needed to merge my assignments, compress a heavy textbook, or sign a document, the only free tools available online required him to upload my files to their remote servers.

Aside from the privacy concerns of uploading tax forms or personal documents, they usually hit you with a "File too large" error or a paywall after two uses.

So, he built LocalPDF to solve this.

It’s a suite of 15+ PDF tools, and everything runs locally inside your browser using WebAssembly and Web Workers. Your files never leave your device.

He just pushed the v3.0 update, which includes:

Textbook Splitter: Automatically slices wide, landscape scanned textbooks into single A4 pages.

Deskew Studio: Manually straighten crooked document scans with micro-degree precision.

Compress & Merge: Shrink files or combine them instantly using your device's own RAM.

Sign & Redact: Black out sensitive text and drop signatures locally.

It's completely free, there are no file-size limits (since it relies on your own hardware), and there are no creepy tracking scripts uploading your data.

Try it out: https://local-pdf-five.vercel.app/