MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PeterAnderson | 2026-03-09 14:41:09+00:00
Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.

A bit more context on why I built this:

I run a few Discord communities and I kept needing to announce events across time zones. Discord timestamps solve this nicely (<t:timestamp>), but generating the Unix timestamp manually every time felt unnecessarily annoying.

So the goal of this tool was just to remove that small friction, pick a date/time and copy the correct format instantly.

I tend to like small utility tools that solve one problem well. This is similar to another small project I built earlier (the Twitter web viewer) where the goal was simply to make something easier to use. Thank you guys!
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 14:41:51+00:00
But why would you ever put that into your VCS as opposed to code comments?

The VCS history has to be actively pulled up and reading through it is a slog, and history becomes exceptionally difficult to retrace in certain kinds of refactoring.

In contrast, code comments are exactly what you need and no more, you can't accidentally miss them, and you don't have to do extra work to find them.

I have never understood the idea of relying on code history instead of code comments. It seems like it's all downsides, zero upsides.
by kushalpandya | 2026-03-09 14:41:56+00:00
Been working on Petrichor - native macOS music player [1]

This has been my side project for nearly a year, and I also shared it here in HN when it was in alpha [2] and received a ton of feedback (and stars on GitHub).

The project has evolved quite a bit since then, like having additional file format support, lyrics, Last.fm scrobbling, and more!

[1] https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515266
by spaceships | 2026-03-09 14:42:48+00:00
I'm working on a Chess improvement app https://blunders.ai.

The main goal is letting people analyze their games and improve by studying their blunders. It uses stockfish and AI for analysis. You can chat with your games like "Why would I do ___ instead of this?"

Also, there are the standard puzzles and openings type learning with improvement plans.
by bjackman | 2026-03-09 14:43:16+00:00
> I don't have any downtime except when I need to restart services

So... you have downtime then.

(Also, you should be rebooting regularly to get kernel security fixes).

> not sure why you'd need Kubernetes at all here

To get HA, which is what we are talking about.

> only serves to complicate

Yes, high-availability systems are complex. This is why I am saying it's not really feasible for a homelabber, unless we are k8s enthusiasts I think the right approach is to tolerate downtime.
by rustyhancock | 2026-03-09 14:43:44+00:00
My experience was a bit of a disaster.

It's worth noting that it's only at the end that it turns out you have 3 options for using the rows (you can't say use row 1&2 caps but row 3 lowercase)

For whatever reason it really struggled to detect the cross hairs. It thought the top left cross hair was the O.

I had intensely compress the black white range to make it detect at all.

What should it look like btw?

Also even though it detected A thru F great it kind of fell to pieces down the page suggesting that the registration isn't good enough to detect each block.

More registration marks and ones that are more distinct than cross hairs would likely help. I used a high quality scan! So registration should have been muche asier than a photo.

I don't really know what's wrong!
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-09 14:43:47+00:00
> We (Oli, Niko, and Yosh) are excited to announce the start of the Keyword Generics Initiative, a new initiative 1 under the purview of the language team

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/07/27/keyword-ge...

Maybe he's not on the language team (I haven't read enough into Rust governance structures to know definitively) but it's not like he's on some random person working on this. And yes, work takes time, I actually disagreed with his initial approach where his syntax was to have a bunch of effects before the function name, and everyone rightly mentioned how messy it was. So they should be taking it slow anyway.
by palata | 2026-03-09 14:43:53+00:00
What do you mean by "poorly documented"? I have been using it for 20 years, I have yet to find something that is not documented.

As for convoluted, I don't find it harder than the other build systems I use.

Really the problem I have with CMake is the amount of terribly-written CMakeLists. The norm seems to be to not know the basics of CMake but to still write a mess and then complain about CMake. If people wrote C the way they write CMake, we wouldn't blame the language.
by fidorka | 2026-03-09 14:44:16+00:00
MemoryLane screenshots your screen and makes it queryable via AI. All local. But it sees everything — banking, DMs, password managers.

We added a blacklist coordinator that checks four rules on every window-focus event:

- App name (1Password, Signal) — normalized across .app, .exe, bundle IDs

- Window title wildcards (*bank statement*)

- URL patterns (*://*.bank.com/*)

- Incognito auto-detection (on by default, zero config)

When anything matches, capture pauses and queued frames get flushed. Switch away, it resumes.

Surprising part: the matching logic was trivial. The annoying work was cross-platform app name normalization and making the settings UX simple enough that people actually configure it.
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 14:44:30+00:00
> Lots of comments in code is a code smell. Yes, really.

No, not really. It's actually a sign of devs who are helping future devs who will maintain and extend the code. It's professionalism and respect.

> If I see lots of comments in code, I'm gonna go looking for the intern who just put up their first PR.

And I'm going to find them to say good job, keep it up!
by throwaw3y | 2026-03-09 14:44:33+00:00
"Panic-free" labels are so difficult to ascribe without being misleading because temporal memory effects can cause panics. Pusher too much onto your stack because the function happened to be preceded by a ton of other stack allocations? Crash. Heap too full and malloc failed? Crash. These things can happen from user input, so labelling a function no_panic just because it doesn't do any unchecked indexing can dangerously mislead readers into thinking code can't crash when it can.
by phil21 | 2026-03-09 14:44:55+00:00
They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.

That they have the internal political means to get large infrastructure projects done is laudible - they can actually build transmission lines that make unreliable energy sources like solar and wind feasible. In the US that is effectively impossible due to the NIMBY legal situation.

That they lead in battery production is going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.

They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.

No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.
by redbackthomson | 2026-03-09 14:45:06+00:00
I'm working on a Nix-based task runner - like `just` or `mise-en-place`, but defined using a Nix flake and run using a Go CLI.

https://github.com/RedbackThomson/nix-tasks

I started this project because at my company, we're still relying on ancient Makefiles as our build system and build tool versioning. I initially looked at using other task runners but they all use some sort of DSL that I think limits their functionality and/or doesn't allow for sharing and extending templates across repos. Nix-tasks lets you use Nix flakes to share common configuration - like your company-wide build scripts - and then import it and add repo specific tasks on top of them.

The project is still very much in alpha but I am using it every day and trying to find any annoyances or bugs before I share it further.
by JasonADrury | 2026-03-09 14:45:10+00:00
In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.

In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.

The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-03-09 14:45:16+00:00
Still refining 3D metal printing slicer software for a new scalable industrial process. Focused on reducing platform cost into hobby budget ranges, improve user safety, and allow weird metal composites. Also trying to keep the heavy wear components 3d printable for home users.

Picked up some more small Xilinx Zynq 7020 dev boards for a quick micro-positioning vacuum-stage control driver. Yeah it was lazy, but I don't have time to spin a custom PCB board these days... or hand optimize LUT counts to fit smaller prototypes.

Also, doing a few small RF projects most people would find boring. =3
Show HN: Skilo – Share agent skills with a link, no repo required
by plawlost | 2026-03-09 14:45:36+00:00
I kept making GitHub repos just to share agent skills with friends. Felt like overkill for a single SKILL.md file.

Built Skilo this weekend. One command gives you a shareable link. No signup, no repo, unlike Vercel's skills.sh.

Works across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, OpenClaw, etc. You can also pack multiple skills into one link.

Source: https://github.com/yazcaleb/skilo
Show HN: A step debugger for AI agents
by sesquieu | 2026-03-09 14:46:57+00:00
I've been experimenting with OpenClaw agents that call hardware tools.

The initial goal was getting a local agent to solve a small maze using some benchtop hardware. The agent observes the maze through a webcam, decides its next move, and calls a hardware tool to move.

When something goes wrong, it's hard to understand why. You usually end up staring at a huge JSON log of prompts, tool calls, and responses.

So I started building a trace harness and an openclaw specific shim to capture structured events from the agent runtime.

Instead of just logging everything, the tool emits clean execution boundaries.

observe > reason > act > result

Once those exist, the run starts behaving like a program execution which allows things like replay-from-step, diffing two runs to see divergence, and
mutation payloads / branching from known path.

It's still early, but it's been an interesting way to think about debugging agent systems.

The repo is docs only, as I'm still in the process of migrating the codebase from a separate large project, but it explains usage well enough and has a few example provider shims (openai, langchain, openclaw) to get you started if you want to build your own.
by softwaredoug | 2026-03-09 14:47:02+00:00
I mostly worry the US will now need to constantly bomb an unstable region under Israel’s horrifying “mow the grass” philosophy[1].

Both from the fact that’s horrific cost of life in the Middle East and creates perpetual resentment making the US less safe.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
by crazygringo | 2026-03-09 14:47:11+00:00
> Number of times reading the documentation saved time and clarified why: never.

OK, so let's use an example... if you need to e.g. make a quick plot with Matplotlib. You just... what? Block off a couple weeks and read the source code start to finish? Or maybe reduce it to just a couple days, if you're trying to locate and understand the code just for the one type of plot you're trying to create? And the several function calls you need to set it up and display it in the end?

Instead of looking at the docs and figuring out how to do it in 10 or 15 min?

Because I am genuinely baffled here.
by tiago_sao_jose | 2026-03-09 14:47:14+00:00
The consistency problem you hit is exactly why most multi-channel AI tools fail in practice — maintaining brand voice across Instagram's casual tone vs LinkedIn's professional format while keeping visual coherence is genuinely hard. Your AI Modify agent for transforming stock photos is clever; most teams either use generic stock or blow budgets on custom shoots.

One question: how are you handling platform-specific character limits and image ratios during the generation phase rather than as an afterthought?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-03-09 14:47:35+00:00
> Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.

Back in days of yore (2006/07) I read a well-argued policy paper from a quango that no longer exists where it pointed out that Ireland was one of the most fossil fuel dependent nations in the world (particularly due to oil imports).

Our energy prices first spiked around the same time, to "incentivise competition" in the words of a minister of the time.

All the while we have vast, vast reserves of potential wind energy sitting unused because of (mostly) grid and permitting failures. This was and is entirely in our control, but the government(s) (even with the sad exception of the Greens) simply haven't put enough resources into it (although the grid is getting investment, we need a lot more).

Also the critical infrastructure bill will (supposedly) help, but I'm sceptical as none of this ever seems to help.

Which is to say, that I completely agree with you that the costs here shouldn't be born by the poorer people in Ireland, and we need a whole of government approach to driving down the price of energy. This will take time, but the best time to start doing this is now.

My personal belief is that we should also aim to drive down the price of land, as the two biggest costs (for many countries) are land and energy, as they input into almost everything, but reducing land prices is a lot more controversial than reducing energy prices so we should start there.
by coldpie | 2026-03-09 14:47:36+00:00
I've had two or three articles I've written on my blog hit the HN front page, and each time I get one or two emails from some random person about it. It's great. A little connection that some human out there read a thing I wrote and it meant enough to them to write something back to me. I put my email on my stuff because I'm happy for people to use it :)
by gus_massa | 2026-03-09 14:47:43+00:00
Kid's are too old now and we used disposable diapers. Anyway, diarrhea, accidents and just going to the park after the watering system created the cleanest mud on Earth gave us a lot of opportunities to clean cloth.

Using the water from the toilet would be considered gross here. I'm not sure if the rule make sense, but I'd prefer not to break it, so we used a small buckler instead. Filling and cleaning it each time adds some time.
by cd4761 | 2026-03-09 14:48:01+00:00
Hi HN, I built Argus as a solo developer at Tokamak Network. It's an open-source, self-hosted Ethereum attack detection tool written in Rust.

The problem: existing runtime security tools (Forta, Phalcon, Hexagate) are all SaaS. If the vendor shuts down or changes pricing, you lose your security monitoring. OpenZeppelin Defender is shutting down in July 2026, which is a real example of this risk.

Argus scans every transaction at the receipt level (<30μs/tx) and can do full opcode-level replay on suspicious ones. It's been running on Ethereum mainnet since March 2026 with zero downtime at $7/month on AWS Fargate.

Some honest caveats:
- No confirmed exploit interceptions yet. All alerts so far were false positives (legitimate DeFi activity — flash loan arb, MEV bundles)
- Single developer project (bus factor = 1)
- Ethereum L1 only — no multi-chain support
- Built on ethrex LEVM which has ~0% market share as a client (chose it for its step-by-step debugger hook that revm doesn't expose out of the box; porting to revm is on the roadmap)

The retroactive analyses (Balancer $128M, Bybit $1.5B) show what the pipeline would likely detect, but those are hypothetical.

Built with: Rust (edition 2024), ethrex LEVM, axum, tokio. MIT/Apache-2.0 dual license. ~17K LoC + 864 tests.

Happy to answer questions about the detection heuristics, the architecture, or the tradeoffs in building this solo.
I packed an Interactive 3D Encyclopedia into 1MB
by Aureon_de_Veyra | 2026-03-09 14:48:04+00:00
Greetings everyone.

I'm building Expeditione ( https://expeditione.fun ), an Interactive 3D Encyclopedia. Most of the web has gotten bloated and boring, so one of my strict constraint for this project is extreme optimization.

The core engine and landing page sit at just 1MB, utilizing only 9 draw calls. The goal is to make web-based learning immersive and purely driven by curiosity, without requiring users to download a heavy app or wait for massive assets to load.

Stack & Optimization:
-- Built with custom WebGL/Three.js and GSAP.
-- Aggressive geometry merging and texture baking in Blender to hit that 9 draw call target.
-- Custom GLSL shaders designed specifically for low latency on any device.

Currently, the "Layers of Soil" expedition is live (which runs around 4MB total), and I am currently reconstructing Ancient Egypt for the next major chapter.

I'd love to hear your feedback on the performance, or how it runs on your specific hardware. Happy to answer any questions about the optimization pipeline!
by palata | 2026-03-09 14:48:11+00:00
Again, if it's a comment saying "we need this hack because the hardware doesn't support anything", I don't call it "literate programming".

Literate programming seems to be the idea that you should write prose next to the code, because code "is difficult to understand". I disagree with that. Most good code is simple to understand (doesn't mean it's easy to write good code).

And the comments here prove my point, I believe: whenever I ask for examples where a comment is needed, the answer is something very rare and specific (e.g. a hardware limitation). The answer to that is comments where those rare and specific situations arise. Not a whole concept of "literate programming".
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-03-09 14:48:30+00:00
> Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.

It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.
by drojas | 2026-03-09 14:48:40+00:00
I would NOT recommend dating apps, you will most likely not find a real connection there and given the circumstances it might give you anxiety you don't need. I have had a similar path and situation lately and some things that have helped me are group activities like playing sports (I play soccer), group gym activities (I attend a strength and conditioning class) and most recently Bible study (I became friends with a Christian group of my area and attend their meetings now). Developing a relationship with God has been a huge upgrade for my life which is hard to put into words, but we also need human contact, and I was praying for that for me last night and this morning before reading this. I will also pray for you to find someone with whom you can share your life forever and never be alone again. If I could only recommend one thing I would say start with exercise, preferably a group. You'd be amazed by how much it can help to cope with loneliness and how much it helps to improve mental health in general. God bless you.
by JasonADrury | 2026-03-09 14:48:56+00:00
Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here.

This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.

I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
by adrian_b | 2026-03-09 14:48:57+00:00
Programs whose performance is dominated by array operations, as it is the case for most scientific/technical/engineering applications, achieve a much better energy efficiency on the AMD or Intel CPUs with good AVX-512 support, e.g. Zen 5 Ryzen or Epyc CPUs and Granite Rapids Xeons, than on almost all ARM-based CPUs, including on all Apple CPUs (the only ARM-based CPUs with good energy efficiency for such applications are made by Fujitsu, but they are unobtainium).

So if you want maximum energy efficiency, you should choose well your CPU, but a prejudice like believing that ARM-based CPUs are always better is guaranteed to lead to incorrect decisions.

The Apple CPUs have exceptional and unmatched energy efficiency in single-thread applications, but their energy efficiency in multi-threaded applications is not better than that of Intel/AMD CPUs made with the same TSMC CMOS fabrication process, so Apple can have only a temporary advantage, when they use first some process to which competitors do not have access.

Except for personal computers, the energy efficiency that matters is that of multi-threaded applications, so there Apple does not have anything to offer.
by thecopy | 2026-03-09 14:49:01+00:00
Building Gatana, a platform for securely connecting an organizations agents to their services, with very flexible credential management and federated IDP trust.

Currently my mini-projects includes:

* 0% USA dependency, aim is 100% EU. Currently still using AWS SES for email-sending and GCP KMS for customer data key encryption for envelope encryption.

* Tool output compression, inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193064 Added semantic search on top of this using a local model running on Hetzner. Next phase is making the entire chain envelop encrypted.

* "Firewall" for tool calls

* AI Sandboxes ("OpenClaw but secure") with the credential integration mentiond above

https://www.gatana.ai/
by jjice | 2026-03-09 14:49:08+00:00
We have Slack Connect channels with all of our customers (we're a small company), and I've since grown to hate it. At first, it seems like a quick way to have comms with customers, but then you realize it's a quick way to have comms with customers...

Because Slack is so frictionless, there was no barrier asking anything, including questions that were answered the day prior in the main channel or questions that are right in our searchable API docs. It also allows anyone to message, which also seems nice on the surface, but again, it ends up being awful.

Another example is that one of our customer's CS folks Slacks us their questions about their internal system, which we obviously have nothing to do with. This has been consistently like once a month for 2.5 years...

Email adds friction. Even though it's not much, I've found that customers of ours that used to be very bad signal to noise ratio who we've transitioned to email support have since reached out less with more valid support requests.

Customers that always preferred email over Slack were always like that. I assume that's actually because they're bigger companies that are waiting on five internal meetings before doing anything.

I really like Slack of internal communication, but email for external all the way.