MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Tasklyst – A minimalist offline-first multiplatform productivity app
by zapzap40 | 2025-08-07 11:28:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Tasklyst (https://tasklyst.app), a minimalist, offline-first productivity app for Windows and Linux. I made it for myself after getting tired of bloated or cloud-dependent tools that didn’t work well on Linux.

Tasklyst is cross-platform (built with Flutter), lightweight, and private. No accounts, no cloud — just a fast native task manager that runs locally.

Key features:

- Offline-first, no forced login or sync - Native cross-platform UI - Light and dark themes - Custom task types and tags - Priorities, due/start times, completion tracking - Configurable task table (columns, sorting) - Tray icon + autostart at boot - Backup and restore support - Auto-updates

What’s new:

I just added a feature voting system using the user_oriented Flutter package. Users can now propose and vote on new features directly inside the app.

Plans:

- Always free version - PRO version (optional) to support continued development - Mobile, shared lists, reminders, local AI task entry (llama.cpp), and optional sync in the future

It's not open source right now — my main goal is to get people using it and make the PRO version sustainable.

You can try it here (no signup needed): https://tasklyst.app

Would love to hear your feedback, ideas, and whether this is something you'd use!
by account42 | 2025-08-07 11:29:29+00:00
It's also worth mentioning that real debouncing doesn't always have to depend on time when you have an analog signal. Instead you could have different thresholds for going from stat A to B vs going from B to A with enough distance between those threshold that you won't switch back and forth during an event. This can even be implemented physically in the switch itself by having separate ON and OFF contacts.
by ben_w | 2025-08-07 11:29:34+00:00
Your maths is correct.

Shame we don't have a way to efficiently convert fuel energy directly into a ship's kinetic energy, and have to go via conservation of momentum… though I suppose magnetic launch of interstellar vehicles would be a neat use for a Dyson shell or Niven ring?: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5+*+1+gee+*+%280.01c%...
by bayindirh | 2025-08-07 11:29:49+00:00
> People don’t develop video codecs for fun like they do with software. And the reason is that it’s almost impossible to do without support from the industry.

Hmm, let me check my notes:

- Quite OK Image format: https://qoiformat.org/ - Quite OK Audio format: https://qoaformat.org/ - LAME (ain't a MP3 Encoder): https://lame.sourceforge.io/ - Xiph family of codecs: https://xiph.org/

Some of these guys have standards bodies as supporters, but in all cases, bigger groups formed behind them, after they made considerable effort. QOI and QOA is written by a single guy just because he's bored.

For example, FLAC is a worst of all worlds codec for industry to back. A streamable, seekable, hardware-implementable, error-resistant, lossless codec with 8 channels, 32 bit samples, and up to 640KHz sample rate, with no DRM support. Yet we have it, and it rules consumer lossless audio while giggling and waving at everyone.

On the other hand, we have LAME. An encoder which also uses psycho-acoustic techniques to improve the resulting sound quality and almost everyone is using it, because the closed source encoders generally sound lamer than LAME in the same bit-rates. Remember, MP3 format doesn't have an reference encoder. If the decoder can read the file and it sounds the way you expect, then you have a valid encoder. There's no spec for that.

> Are you really saying that patents are preventing people from writing the next great video codec?

Yes, yes, and, yes. MPEG and similar groups openly threatened free and open codecs by opening "patent portfolio forming calls" to create portfolios to fight with these codecs, because they are terrified of being deprived of their monies.

If patents and license fees are not a problem for these guys, can you tell me why all professional camera gear which can take videos only come with "personal, non-profit and non-professional" licenses on board, and you have pay blanket extort ^H^H^H^H^H licensing fees to these bodies to take a video you can monetize?

For the license disclaimers in camera manuals, see [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254
by Taek | 2025-08-07 11:30:20+00:00
People don't develop video codecs for fun because there are patent minefields.

You don't *have* to add all the rigour. If you develop a new technique for video compression, a new container for holding data, etc, you can just try it out and share it with the technical community.

Well, you could, if you weren't afraid of getting sued for infringing on patents.
Show HN: Blueprint, a desktop app to guard against rogue LLMs
by yaoke259 | 2025-08-07 11:30:51+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been spending nights wrestling with Cursor/Cline/Windsurf on anything larger than a toy repo:

- the LLM cheerfully deletes my hand-written files - integration bugs that surface only after three merged PRs - no shared mental model between me and the agent

So I built Blueprint, a tiny desktop tool that lets humans and AIs agree on a plan before anyone touches code.

How it works

- Shared plan.md – human & LLM edit one file. - Auto-generated graph.yaml – turns the plan into boxes & arrows. - Per-component agents – each LLM only sees its slice; lock any file you want protected.

100 % local (Svelte + Tauri + Rust) and MIT-licensed. Alpha quality—expect sharp edges—but the core loop (plan → graph → generate) is functional.

I dog-food it on a toy collaborative editor I’m writing in C. First time I handed the repo back to the LLM without Blueprint it trashed my hand-rolled CRDT. With Blueprint it only touched the component I asked it to, left my locked files alone, and the diff actually compiled.

Would love brutal feedback or war stories from anyone else trying to get LLMs to play nicely on real projects.
by dspillett | 2025-08-07 11:31:42+00:00
> In fact, it's not even useful to say it's a "64-bit system" just because it has some 64-bit registers.

Usually the size of general purpose registers is what defines the bitness of a CPU, not anything else (how much memory it can address, data bus width, etc).

For instance, the 80386SX was considered a 32-bit CPU because its primary register set is 32-bit, despite the fact it had a 24-bit external address bus and a 16-bit external data bus (32-bit requests are split into two 16-bit requests, this was done to allow the chip to be used on cheaper motherboards such as those initially designed with the 80286 in mind).

Note that this is for general purpose registers only: a chip may have 80-bit floating point registers in its FPU parts (supporting floating point with a 64-bit mantissa) but that doesn't make it an 80-bit chip. That was a bit more obvious when FPUs where external add-ons like the 8087 (the co-pro for the 16-bit 8086 family back in the day, which like current FPUs read & wrote IEEE754 standard 32- & 64- bit format floats and computed/held intermediate results in an extended 80-bit format).
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-08-07 11:31:43+00:00
The detection of a potential giant planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A is compelling, not because we could live on the planet (likely a gas giant), but because it could host moons with the right conditions for life. If even one of those moons is Earth-sized and water-rich, it might be our nearest shot at finding another habitable world.

Still, getting there with something like David Kipping’s proposed TARS propulsion system (a solar-powered launcher that can fling tiny probes at ~40 km/s) we’d be looking at 30,000+ years to reach the star system. It’s a step forward, but for now, our best hope is to keep watching. Until someone develops fusion propulsion…
by artdigital | 2025-08-07 11:31:52+00:00
> Curious to try this against the Github (website) Agent. The website Agent is definitely dumber than the vscode agent (because it has to spend 20 minutes figuring out how to build and start my monorepo apps) but on the flip side, it doesn't take up my computer and thus any value it creates is additive.

Yeah that's on you. Add a `copilot-instructions.md` file and configure the `copilot-setup-steps.yml` workflow to setup your environment. Both are supported more or less since Copilot Agent got released (though in "preview")

Most agents read `AGENTS.md`, I just symlink it to CLAUDE.md, and do the same for GEMINI.md
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-07 11:32:04+00:00
> Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them.

How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D.

There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.
by KineticLensman | 2025-08-07 11:32:29+00:00
Looking at view #28 in the winning presentation, the system carries 200 shuttles that can each do a one-way trip to the target planet carrying 10 people and delivering 5 tons of cargo. So the overall system can deliver up to 2000 people and 1000 tons -in comparatively small pieces - to the planetary surface.

It would be good to see some discussion of how you can bootstrap a colony (let alone a civilisation) under these very tight constraints. For example, whether flight systems would be cannibalised to support the colonists, and how the colonists would establish a viable, self-sustaining tech tree (including critical life support) after landing, where there may be essentially no immediately accessible raw materials.
by blendergeek | 2025-08-07 11:32:52+00:00
> And regarding ”royalty-free” codecs please read this https://ipeurope.org/blog/royalty-free-standards-are-not-fre...

Unsurprisingly companies that are losing money because their rent-seeking on media codecs is now over will spread FUD [0] about royalty free codecs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear%2C_uncertainty_and_doubt
by eviks | 2025-08-07 11:33:12+00:00
>> Is it so complicated to make the Trello interface configurable? > Yes, it is complicated. Trello interface will not be configurable to the degree you are proposing in the observable future.

It's rather unfortunate that investing many man-years into bad-to-worse re/designs is less complicated than giving users freedom to make it better and avoid the pain
by jbverschoor | 2025-08-07 11:34:25+00:00
Jxl has been around for years.

Av1 for 7

The problem is every platform wants to force their own codec, and get earn royalties from the rest of the world.

They literally sabotaging it. Jxl support even got removed from chrome.

Investment in adopting in software is next to 0.

In hardware it’s a different story, and I’m not sure to what extent which codec can be properly accelerated
by Melonai | 2025-08-07 11:34:25+00:00
I feel like I kind of understand why they did it, it seems to come from a conference of some sort (Twitter doesn't want to show me the context) and conference videos tend to get buried on normal video sharing platforms. On Twitter you can get a wider audience by being incendiary, so perhaps it was just a way to get a wider reach...

I still don't know why anyone would wanna watch anything longer than 10 seconds on Twitter though... :)
by tovej | 2025-08-07 11:34:29+00:00
Certain parts of what we call AI will definitely be used more in the future: facial recognition, surrogate models, video generation.

I don't, however, see LLMs as consumer products being that prevalent in the future as currently. The cost of using LLMs is kept artificially low for consumers at the moment. That is bound to hit a wall eventually, at the very least when the bubble pops. At least that seems like an obvious analysis to make at this point in time.
by roenxi | 2025-08-07 11:34:32+00:00
Because they make and sell a lot of hardware. I'm sure they do have a lot of patents and licences, but if all that disappeared today it'd be years to decades before anyone could compete with them. Even just getting a foot in the door in TSMC's queue of customers would be hard. Their valuation can likely be justified based on their manufacturing position alone. There is literally no-one else who can do what they do, law or otherwise.

If it is a matter of laws, China would just declare the law doesn't count to dodge around the US chip sanctions. Which, admittedly, might happen - but I don't see how that could result in much more freedom than we already have now. Having more Chinese people involved is generally good for prices, but that doesn't have much to do with market structure as much as they work hard and do things at scale.

> The top AI companies use very restrictive licenses.

These models are supported by the Apache 2.0 license ~ https://openai.com/open-models/

Are they lying to me? It is hard to get much more permissive than Apache 2.
by diggan | 2025-08-07 11:34:55+00:00
Maybe I'm spoiled by having great internet connection, but I usually download the weights and try to run them via various tools (llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM and SGLang typically) and see what works. There seems to be so many variables involved (runners, architectures, implementations, hardware and so on) that none of the calculators I've tried so far been accurate, both in the way that they've over-estimated and under-estimated what I could run.

So in the end, trying to actually run them seems to be the only fool-proof way of knowing for sure :)
by TacticalCoder | 2025-08-07 11:36:15+00:00
And of course governments are exempted from the mandatory scanning.

Think of the number of politicians in the UK (not the EU but still) who communicated with private messages to coordinate the cover-up about the raping gangs scandal where it's now known that thousands of young girl where gang raped in the UK?

Think of the policitians who participated in the gang rapes: yes, there are officials involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

So: "Think about the children", my FUCKING ASS.

Thankfully there are people fighting the good fight. In the UK the current government was forced to launch a nation-wide inquiry into these scandals (of course the people doing the inquiry are, themselves, corrupt but at least they cannot pretend that thousands of girls didn't get raped while the police and politicians covered it up).

But I tell you this: the people fighting the good fight and actually thinking of the children are not those putting in place these dystopian rules.
by captainbland | 2025-08-07 11:36:28+00:00
I know a bunch of people have tried to argue the toss on this one with you but I'd just like to put it out there that I can't agree strongly enough! Anyone watching can see these big companies are happy to toss developers to the side and develop social harms for profit.

All of this is built on exploiting the open source movement. Delineating between closed source ventures and Free community efforts is just good sense at this point. If they're going to take they must give back.
by vasco | 2025-08-07 11:37:06+00:00
> Even thought they have access to my Google Account and my phone, their Gemini app is useless.

This is the funniest thing to me. When you open the app, Gemini says:

"Hello, Vasco"

In the welcome screen. I then ask this amazing intelligence this question:

"What's my name?"

"I do not know your name. I am an AI and I don't have access to your personal information."

I know why it happens, but it's so funny.
by thecupisblue | 2025-08-07 11:37:37+00:00
They do, but at this point it's becoming comical, especially if they are trying to move away from search as a profit center. You need equity in people's heads if you want to conquer the market.

If instead of Google search they made 3 products each called "Google Search", "Super Search" and "YaGoo!", they wouldn't be where they're at today.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-07 11:38:22+00:00
> It's important to note that ambiguities are something which exist in service of parser generators and the restricted formal grammars that drive them. They do not actually exist in the language to be parsed

Only partially true. How do you define the language to be parsed? It's with a grammar. If the grammar can yield two different parse trees for the same input, it's ambiguous. In LR parlance, if your grammar is ambiguous because of a shift-reduce conflict, it's because you stuffed up your grammar.

That's a real problem. It the difference between parsing "1 + 2 / 3" as "(1 + 2) / 3" and "1 + (2 / 3)". The two interpretations yield very different outcomes. The reason you see so many people here say "use a generated LL or LR parser" is the generator will find and report that mistake. It's a very easy mistake to make, and you won't realise you've made it.

Then there are what LR calls reduce-reduce conflicts. Yes, that may happen because the LR parser can't look far enough ahead. Or, it may again be because you've stuffed you grammar. Or it may be because the language you have in your head really isn't context free. Perl is in the last category. They claim to have got around it by saying its a "do what I mean" language. Fine, but it turns out in some cases what they think a string obviously means doesn't agree with what I thought it obviously meant.
by smokel | 2025-08-07 11:38:43+00:00
It's slightly more complicated than that. If people work less, they make less money, and that means they can't buy a house, to name just one example. Housing is not getting any cheaper for a myriad of reasons. The same goes for healthcare, and even for drinking beer.

People could work less, but it's a group effort. As long as some narcissistic idiots who want more instead of less are in charge, this is not going to change easily.
by Twey | 2025-08-07 11:39:34+00:00
No you're totally right! In fact I think you're even more right than you said in the original post: the analogy you draw isn't just an analogy, they are in fact the exact same thing. A class is (amongst other things) a module, and a closure, and a type. In functional programming these things are (usually!) deconstructed rather than all being facets of the ‘class’ concept, but they're all still there and they all work exactly the same way as in OOP (perhaps modulo mutability, depending on choice of languages — but you can see local mutability as syntax sugar over function calls anyway).
by satyrun | 2025-08-07 11:39:41+00:00
At this point it is just straight denial.

Like when a relationship is obviously over. Some people enjoy the ending fleeting moments while others delude themselves that they just have to get over the hump and things will go back to normal.

I suspect a lot of the denial is from the 30 something CRUD app lottery winner. One of the smart kids all through school, graduated into a ripping CRUD app job market and then if they didn't even feel the 2022 downturn, they now see themselves as irreplaceable CRUD app genius. Something understandable since the environment has never signaled anything to the contrary until now.
by chongli | 2025-08-07 11:40:38+00:00
I don’t think it’s that simple. Productivity gains are rarely universal. Much of the past century’s worth of advancement into automation and computing technology has generated enormous productivity gains in manufacturing, communication, and finance industries but had little or no benefit for a lot of human capital-intensive sectors such as service and education.

It still takes basically the same amount of labour hours to give a haircut today as it did in the late 19th century. An elementary school teacher today can still not handle more than a few tens up to maybe a hundred students at the extreme limit. Yet the hairdressing and education industries must still compete — on the labour market — with the industries showing the largest productivity gains. This has the effect of raising wages in these productivity-stagnant industries and increasing the cost of these services for everyone, driving inflation.

Inflation is the real time-killer, not a fear of idleness. The cost of living has gone up for everyone — rather dramatically, in nominal terms — without even taking housing costs into account.
by anonzzzies | 2025-08-07 11:41:12+00:00
Cannot be worse than almost all human managers, so agreed. I am a terrible manager myself; i'm a good ceo/cto, making profits and keeping things running for almost no money, but managing i'm terrible at. And I haven't seen many who couldn't be replaced by a piece of cardboard. There are exceptions, but AI's can just as well do terrible team management while keeping their upper managers/c-levels busy with nonsense documents as is the standard for humans too. Indeed yesterday I wrote on HN that this is what LLMs are VERY good for; generating ENORMOUS piles of paper to give to all types of (middle) management to make them feel valued.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-07 11:41:53+00:00
There's nothing obscure about them.

His comment immediately after describes exactly what happened:

> Even before it has ceased to exists, the MPEG engine had run out of steam – technology- and business wise. The same obscure forces that have hijacked MPEG had kept it hostage to their interests impeding its technical development and keeping it locked to outmoded Intellectual Property licensing models delaying market adoption of MPEG standards. Industry has been strangled and consumers have been deprived of the benefits of new technologies. From facilitators of new opportunities and experiences, MPEG standards have morphed from into roadblocks.

Big companies abused the setup that he was responsible for. Gentlemen's agreements to work together for the benefit of all got gamed into patent landmines and it happened under his watch.

Even many of the big corps involved called out the bullshit, notably Steve Jobs refusing to release a new Quicktime till they fixed some of the most egregious parts of AAC licencing way back in 2002.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shuns-mpeg-4-licensing-t...
by gexla | 2025-08-07 11:41:59+00:00
My take on this is that Google has a bunch of "incubating" spaces where they have teams of people building things that may or may not take off. So, when something does take off, it sort of becomes a victim of its own success. It confuses people because it's not a "core" Google product that fits nicely among other Google products. NotebookLLM seems to be another example.

Personally, I would rather Google did this sort of experimentation even if it is more confusing.

Or I could be wrong about this. But following NotebookLLM, it seemed like the team developing it had a lot of autonomy.
by grafmax | 2025-08-07 11:42:21+00:00
To say it’s identical is an overstatement, but markets have been part of China’s policy, and part of the policies many other formerly impoverished counties. Without government policy intelligently choosing how to utilize markets (which is what happened in most of these formerly impoverished countries like the “Asian tigers”), markets alone could not have have brought the gains that they did. Markets have many downsides to them as well. Additionally non-government, non-market factors like unionization contributed to the rise out of poverty as well. And in the global north, “markets” have been fairly ineffective at raising the standard of living for the median worker. They have been effective at enriching the already rich however, contributing to wealth power-concentration and de-democratization.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-07 11:43:45+00:00
IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents.

The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.