The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants
11 by gnabgib | 1 comments
Friday, 30 January 2026
Wednesday, 28 January 2026
Monday, 19 January 2026
Sunday, 18 January 2026
Wednesday, 14 January 2026
Top News
Show HN: Digital Carrot – Block social media with programmable rules and goals
9 by newswangerd | 1 comments
Hi Everyone, Digital Carrot is a programmable and pluggable app blocker. It lets you block websites and apps on iOS, Mac and Windows until a set of conditions or goal is met. For example you can block Reddit, Instagram and Steam until your Apple Watch reports that you have walked 5000 steps. The app works by collecting data via plugins that you can use to create goals for yourself. Goals are all represented by expressions that return true or false based on the data you provide. For example, if you want to create a goal to finish all of the tasks in your to-do list you could do something like `data.apple_reminders.due == 0`. The blocking system is also pluggable. That means you can block items via DNS with services as Pi-hole[3]. It also means that the app is not just limited to website blocking! In fact you could write a plugin to control anything that is available via a REST, such as locking a smart lock on your snack cupboard or cranking up the AC in your office until you go outside. Keeping security and user privacy is a top priority for this app (given that it's literally designed to collect information about you). Because of that: - We do not collect or share any information that the app gathers. - Our sync feature is fully end to end encrypted using AES256 and the secure remote password protocol. - All plugins are sandboxed. They cannot access data provided by other plugins and have no external access unless granted by the user. - The app is transparent about the data it has. All of the data that is available to use for goals is browsable in app. Like many of you, I've been dismayed by big tech's lack of concern for our privacy, so keeping these guarantees is personally very important to me. One of the fun things about this project has been that I can kind of flip the script by taking all of the information that has been gathered about me and use it to help cut down on the distractions in my life :) Anyway, I had to walk 4km to unblock HN in order to post this, so I hope you find it helpful! [1] Technical overview: https://ift.tt/oWCIwuV [2] Plugin repository: https://ift.tt/d1Rtpz6 [3] Pi-hole plugin: https://ift.tt/PRdU7T0...
9 by newswangerd | 1 comments
Hi Everyone, Digital Carrot is a programmable and pluggable app blocker. It lets you block websites and apps on iOS, Mac and Windows until a set of conditions or goal is met. For example you can block Reddit, Instagram and Steam until your Apple Watch reports that you have walked 5000 steps. The app works by collecting data via plugins that you can use to create goals for yourself. Goals are all represented by expressions that return true or false based on the data you provide. For example, if you want to create a goal to finish all of the tasks in your to-do list you could do something like `data.apple_reminders.due == 0`. The blocking system is also pluggable. That means you can block items via DNS with services as Pi-hole[3]. It also means that the app is not just limited to website blocking! In fact you could write a plugin to control anything that is available via a REST, such as locking a smart lock on your snack cupboard or cranking up the AC in your office until you go outside. Keeping security and user privacy is a top priority for this app (given that it's literally designed to collect information about you). Because of that: - We do not collect or share any information that the app gathers. - Our sync feature is fully end to end encrypted using AES256 and the secure remote password protocol. - All plugins are sandboxed. They cannot access data provided by other plugins and have no external access unless granted by the user. - The app is transparent about the data it has. All of the data that is available to use for goals is browsable in app. Like many of you, I've been dismayed by big tech's lack of concern for our privacy, so keeping these guarantees is personally very important to me. One of the fun things about this project has been that I can kind of flip the script by taking all of the information that has been gathered about me and use it to help cut down on the distractions in my life :) Anyway, I had to walk 4km to unblock HN in order to post this, so I hope you find it helpful! [1] Technical overview: https://ift.tt/oWCIwuV [2] Plugin repository: https://ift.tt/d1Rtpz6 [3] Pi-hole plugin: https://ift.tt/PRdU7T0...
Monday, 12 January 2026
Top News
Tell HN: DigitalOcean's managed services broke each other after update
5 by neilfrndes | 0 comments
Yesterday my production app went down. The cause? DigitalOcean's managed PostgreSQL update broke private VPC connectivity to their managed Kubernetes. Public endpoint worked. Private endpoint timed out. Root cause: a Cilium bug (#34503) where ARP entries go stale after infrastructure changes. DO support responded relatively quickly (<12hrs). Their fix? Deploy a DaemonSet from a random GitHub user to ping stale ARP entries every 10 seconds. The upstream Cilium fix is merged but not yet deployed to DOKS. No ETA. I chose managed services specifically to avoid ops emergencies. We're a tiny startup paying the premium so someone else handles this. Instead, I spent late night hours debugging VPC routing issues in a networking layer I don't control. HN's usual advice is "just use managed services, focus on the business." Generally good advice. But managed doesn't mean worry-free, it means trading your failure modes for the vendor's failure modes. You're not choosing between problems and no problems. You're choosing between problems you control and (fewer?) problems you don't. Still using DO. Still using managed services. Just with fewer illusions about what "managed" means.
5 by neilfrndes | 0 comments
Yesterday my production app went down. The cause? DigitalOcean's managed PostgreSQL update broke private VPC connectivity to their managed Kubernetes. Public endpoint worked. Private endpoint timed out. Root cause: a Cilium bug (#34503) where ARP entries go stale after infrastructure changes. DO support responded relatively quickly (<12hrs). Their fix? Deploy a DaemonSet from a random GitHub user to ping stale ARP entries every 10 seconds. The upstream Cilium fix is merged but not yet deployed to DOKS. No ETA. I chose managed services specifically to avoid ops emergencies. We're a tiny startup paying the premium so someone else handles this. Instead, I spent late night hours debugging VPC routing issues in a networking layer I don't control. HN's usual advice is "just use managed services, focus on the business." Generally good advice. But managed doesn't mean worry-free, it means trading your failure modes for the vendor's failure modes. You're not choosing between problems and no problems. You're choosing between problems you control and (fewer?) problems you don't. Still using DO. Still using managed services. Just with fewer illusions about what "managed" means.
Thursday, 8 January 2026
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