Hacker News Reader

Stowly is a home inventory app, designed originally for keeping track of your belongings and also so that, in the event of a disaster, you can easily export a list or share a link of all of your belongings for insurance claim purposes. It's turned into a lot more though with the ability to lend items to people, keep track of warranties, service history, set reminders for upcoming tasks (like changing a filter) and much more. It's ever evolving and I'm always looking for feedback / critique / suggestions.

dotfragon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Been working on a couple of things -- Stowly (https://getstowly.app) and Recoup (not yet public).

Stowly is a home inventory management app where you can record all of the things you own (from appliances to cars and more), track warranties, return periods, receipts, maintenance tasks you need to complete, service history and more. One of the big hits so far has been the insurance export and read-only share links. If you need to file an insurance claim, you can use this to submit information to the insurance adjuster so they're able to see all of the things you lost during the event. There's family sharing as well so you can share the responsibilities of recording all this information with your entire family and only have to obtain one upgraded account. The maintenance tasks are great because they send out reminders when things are coming due (change water filter on your fridge, for example). Templates, tags and much more. Free for unlimited items and lots of great features - only upgrade when you need more capabilities.

Recoup - a web app designed for ITAD (IT Asset Disposition) companies who want to easily record the assets they're picking up and then notify vendors so the vendors can bid on items. In addition, using the eBay API, it can connect to eBay and list items for you for sale -- sometimes vendors don't want to buy just a couple of laptops but you can easily sell them online. Still developing this one right now but it should be a really useful tool for my business and other ITAD businesses. If you're interested in a demo, send me a message / email (kevinw@bbg-mn.com).

dotfragon Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Stowly - https://getstowly.app - a home inventory app to keep track of all your things, maintenance tasks, service history, receipts, etc. Helps keep track of warranty information and alert you when it's coming up. Keep track of important maintenance tasks that you need to perform often, like changing the air filter, and you can keep track of service history so if your oven breaks and it's fixed, you can track that. Most importantly, in the event of a disaster, you can export a report for insurance or you can create a read-only link to share with your adjustor to show all of the things you lost, their value, etc.

dotfragon The original Quake gets a new DLC 30 years after its release

So was this developed by the id or someone at Microsoft or just a random developer? No information on who created all this, from what I can see. Also love how someone complained that it broke their installation after installing it. Reminds me of the good ol' days of Windows :D

dotfragon Astronomers capture highest-resolution image ever of the Sun's surface

In the abstract, they're stating that the magnetic field of the sun is what's causing the surface to look as if it's wind-swept -- is that right? Am I reading that correctly? So the extensive shifting of the magnetic field is causing the visual distortion?

dotfragon Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

I came here just to say I hate sites like Wired. Seriously... if you're going to post an article, don't make people pay someone to read it. It's just stupid...

dotfragon Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

Sounds like an interesting idea and I think there are things like this being done but, couldn't we accomplish the same thing on a smaller scale without all the destruction? What about fusion welding once we get that more locked in? I know it's still a WIP but if we're getting to "millions of degrees", it could speed up the process if we're able to localize the fusion. Also, what about cold fusion? The problem on any of these is the cost -- it may be quicker/better but if the cost is way too high, it's not worth it. Maybe in the future it'll be cheaper/easier.

dotfragon What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

It's basically already been said but, this seems absurd. I'm not quite sure what TRUE benefit you'd get from this but it seems more frustrating than it's worth. I can't figure out a reason to do this unless I'm just in the mood to piss myself off.

dotfragon I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux

May as well just get an old school Nokia and skip the smartphone technology all together. Get yourself a nice flip phone and go back to the early 2000's. If you need to do something online, just bring your laptop with you - some are so small that they're easy to carry around in a backpack or side bag.

dotfragon Lego deploys Hubble Space Telescope as detailed desktop model

How long do you think it'll take before they make a JWST LEGO set?

dotfragon 200 Milliseconds

With the speed of modern internet connections, I'd honestly think something were wrong if it took a couple of seconds. I'd expect almost instantaneous results. What amazes me every time is the amount of things happening in that short amount of time though. The amount of endpoints/channels the signal has to go through to go from "I want to buy this" to "You bought it!".

dotfragon I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I

Nope, not just you - I couldn't either but I only tried for a few minutes. I really hate the NYT and it's dumb paywalls. I saw the paywall and closed it immediately until I saw your comment and tried a few sites I know about and none could pull it up.

dotfragon I asked Claude Opus to recreate The Matrix opening scene in Lego

What a crazy idea, I love it. The things AI can do always amaze me. What's better is that it built it all in JS files and was able to display the entire thing like a movie. A bit jittery in some spots but that could just be my internet connection. I may have to download the source and run it on my own machine to see if it's any smoother. Either way, nice job.

dotfragon AI squad to analyze your iOS app before Apple

This is a really interesting idea. How much response have you gotten? Where are you listing the new site to get visitors? Overall, it sounds like a great idea if it truly works as mentioned. I'm sure plenty of people create apps and then they get rejected and, because of the lack-luster information from Apple, have no idea what exactly is wrong OR how to fix what they did wrong. Sounds like your site does just that, right?

dotfragon Viola – A Calmer Web Browser

Looked it over, as well as Charlie but having a hard time realizing the benefit of using this over Chrome or Edge. It makes me think of Opera which promised to be a lightweight browser that ended up turning into a resource-heavy browser. I'll have to play around with it and see if it does better than Edge or Chrome but so far it seems similar to them.

dotfragon Apple fixed Siri. So why does it feel anticlimactic?

This is par for the course with a lot of Apple features, it either falls short or comes out late. How many times have they promised some feature or function only to delay it over and over. They talked about incorporating AI for so long yet now people are just downloading Claude or ChatGPT apps to their phone and using that instead. The bonus of having an upgraded Siri is the local context but you can already do a lot of that with Gemini if you use Google. I haven't tested the beta build because I just don't trust it but it sounds like they're well on their way to implementing what they said we would get a while ago. We'll see I guess...

dotfragon Show HN: Peek-CLI: Let your front end agent see the browser

Aside from the fact that an agent can use this, how is this better than Claude for Chrome? With all the capabilities that Claude in Chrome has, it almost seems better to just have an agent come up with a prompt you can send CiC -- quickly send the prompt, get feedback and send it back to the agent. I know, it defeats the purpose of AI but seems like a bit of extra setup and I'm not finding a ton of value in it.

dotfragon Amazon's debt doubled to $129B in 6 months

So if the AI bubble pops like many predict it will, what's going to happen to these datacenters? Are they going to turn into huge abandoned buildings? I'm not saying the AI bubble is real and would pop like the dot com bubbles or the housing bubble but it seems like we're headed towards something similar. Just seems like these companies are expanding at a really fast rate and something has to give at some point. I mean, companies are considering setting up data-center's in space -- this may be a better idea in some respects but really leads to a lot of extra "junk" in space.

dotfragon Kansas home wound up with 600M IP addresses and a world of trouble (2016)

Holy cow, what a crazy story. Imagine being a small family, barely using the internet and not even knowing how to buy or assign IP addresses and suddenly you're in the middle of what sounds like a real-life horror story. Someone needs to make a movie about this :O