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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s2MN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s2MN
New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rVzx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rVzx
Bored of It (🔥 Score: 156+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saQj
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saQj
Build an 8-bit computer from scratch (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rTVM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rTVM
Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age (Score: 159+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8GM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8GM
A university president makes a case against cowardice (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s75H
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s75H
An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip (🔥 Score: 169+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8w6
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8w6
Curl-impersonate: Special build of curl that can impersonate the major browsers (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s7Rm
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s7Rm
AnimeJs v4 Is Here (🔥 Score: 159+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s7Ff
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s7Ff
The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly (Score: 156+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s6QD
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s6QD
Apple's Cubify Anything: Scaling Indoor 3D Object Detection (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rTyZ
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rTyZ
DIY Synths Database (Score: 150+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s5Su
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s5Su
Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming" (Score: 150+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s5Hu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s5Hu
Tech companies are telling immigrant employees on visas not to leave the U.S. (Score: 150+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s5z8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s5z8
Why I don't discuss politics with friends (Score: 152+ in 13 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s4c7
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s4c7
Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8nx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8nx
Hey HN - this is Alexander from Hatchet. We’re building an open-source platform for managing background tasks, using Postgres as the underlying database.
Just over a year ago, we launched Hatchet as a distributed task queue built on top of Postgres with a 100% MIT license (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136). The feedback and response we got from the HN community was overwhelming. In the first month after launching, we processed about 20k tasks on the platform — today, we’re processing over 20k tasks per minute (>1 billion per month).
Scaling up this quickly was difficult — every task in Hatchet corresponds to at minimum 5 Postgres transactions and we would see bursts on Hatchet Cloud instances to over 5k tasks/second, which corresponds to roughly 25k transactions/second. As it turns out, a simple Postgres queue utilizing FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED doesn’t cut it at this scale. After provisioning the largest instance type that CloudSQL offers, we even discussed potentially moving some load off of Postgres in favor of something trendy like Clickhouse + Kafka.
But we doubled down on Postgres, and spent about 6 months learning how to operate Postgres databases at scale and reading the Postgres manual and several other resources [0] during commutes and at night. We stuck with Postgres for two reasons:
1. We wanted to make Hatchet as portable and easy to administer as possible, and felt that implementing our own storage engine specifically on Hatchet Cloud would be disingenuous at best, and in the worst case, would take our focus away from the open source community.
2. More importantly, Postgres is general-purpose, which is what makes it both great but hard to scale for some types of workloads. This is also what allows us to offer a general-purpose orchestration platform — we heavily utilize Postgres features like transactions, SKIP LOCKED, recursive queries, triggers, COPY FROM, and much more.
Which brings us to today. We’re announcing a full rewrite of the Hatchet engine — still built on Postgres — together with our task orchestration layer which is built on top of our underlying queue. To be more specific, we’re launching:
1. DAG-based workflows that support a much wider array of conditions, including sleep conditions, event-based triggering, and conditional execution based on parent output data [1].
2. Durable execution — durable execution refers to a function’s ability to recover from failure by caching intermediate results and automatically replaying them on a retry. We call a function with this ability a durable task. We also support durable sleep and durable events, which you can read more about here [2]
3. Queue features such as key-based concurrency queues (for implementing fair queueing), rate limiting, sticky assignment, and worker affinity.
4. Improved performance across every dimension we’ve tested, which we attribute to six improvements to the Hatchet architecture: range-based partitioning of time series tables, hash-based partitioning of task events (for updating task statuses), separating our monitoring tables from our queue, buffered reads and writes, switching all high-volume tables to use identity columns, and aggressive use of Postgres triggers.
We've also removed RabbitMQ as a required dependency for self-hosting.
We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Hatchet.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/
[1] https://docs.hatchet.run/home/conditional-workflows
[2] https://docs.hatchet.run/home/durable-execution
Gumroad is now open source (🔥 Score: 150+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saJ9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saJ9
InitWare, a portable systemd fork running on BSDs and Linux (Score: 150+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s72Z
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s72Z
The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT Due to AI (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8BB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8BB
Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original source code (Score: 156+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s9nN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s9nN
John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change (❄️ Score: 153+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rUDt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rUDt
AI 2027 (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s86M
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s86M
Reasoning models don't always say what they think (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8g8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8g8
Overengineered Anchor Links (🔥 Score: 154+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s7Bw
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s7Bw
Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s7fg
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s7fg
Hi HN!
Today I’m excited to launch OpenNutrition: a free, ODbL-licenced nutrition database of everyday generic, branded, and restaurant foods, a search engine that can browse the web to import new foods, and a companion app that bundles the database and search as a free macro tracking app.
Consistently logging the foods you eat has been shown to support long-term health outcomes (1)(2), but doing so easily depends on having a large, accurate, and up-to-date nutrition database. Free, public databases are often out-of-date, hard to navigate, and missing critical coverage (like branded restaurant foods). User-generated databases can be unreliable or closed-source. Commercial databases come with ongoing, often per-seat licensing costs, and usage restrictions that limit innovation.
As an amateur powerlifter and long-term weight loss maintainer, helping others pursue their health goals is something I care about deeply. After exiting my previous startup last year, I wanted to investigate the possibility of using LLMs to create the database and infrastructure required to make a great food logging app that was cost engineered for free and accessible distribution, as I believe that the availability of these tools is a public good. That led to creating the dataset I’m releasing today; nutritional data is public record, and its organization and dissemination should be, too.
What’s in the database?
- 5,287 common everyday foods, 3,836 prepared and generic restaurant foods, and 4,182 distinct menu items from ~50 popular US restaurant chains; foods have standardized naming, consistent numeric serving sizes, estimated micronutrient profiles, descriptions, and citations/groundings to USDA, AUSNUT, FRIDA, CNF, etc, when possible.
- 313,442 of the most popular US branded grocery products with standardized naming, parsed serving sizes, and additive/allergen data, grounded in branded USDA data; the most popular 1% have estimated micronutrient data, with the goal of full coverage.
Even the largest commercial databases can be frustrating to work with when searching for foods or customizations without existing coverage. To solve this, I created a real-time version of the same approach used to build the core database that can browse the web to learn about new foods or food customizations if needed (e.g., a highly customized Starbucks order). There is a limited demo on the web, and in-app you can log foods with text search, via barcode scan, or by image, all of which can search the web to import foods for you if needed. Foods discovered via these searches are fed back into the database, and I plan to publish updated versions as coverage expands.
- Search & Explore: https://www.opennutrition.app/search
- Methodology/About: https://www.opennutrition.app/about
- Get the iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opennutrition-macro-tracker/id...
- Download the dataset: https://www.opennutrition.app/download
OpenNutrition’s iOS app offers free essential logging and a limited number of agentic searches, plus expenditure tracking and ongoing diet recommendations like best-in-class paid apps. A paid tier ($49/year) unlocks additional searches and features (data backup, prioritized micronutrient coverage for logged foods), and helps fund further development and broader library coverage.
I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and suggestions—whether it’s about the database itself, a really great/bad search result, or the app.
1. Burke et al., 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268700/
2. Patel et al., 2019, https://mhealth.jmir.org/2019/2/e12209/
When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI (Score: 150+ in 21 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s43u
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s43u
Show HN: I made a little puzzle game about a rogue chess knight (❄️ Score: 150+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rNaG
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rNaG
MIT 6.5950 Secure Hardware Design – An open-source course on hardware attacks (Score: 150+ in 14 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s4YP
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s4YP
How Google built its Gemini robotics models (Score: 150+ in 17 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s3t8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3t8
An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server (Score: 150+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s5pN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s5pN