MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: TimerMe – A fast, theme-aware productivity timer built with HonoX
by imseantang | 2025-08-09 20:57:04+00:00
Hi HN!

I built TimerMe - a simple productivity timer that focuses on doing one thing well.

GitHub: https://github.com/imseantang/timerme Live site: https://www.timerme.com

What's interesting about it:

Dynamic theming system - The entire UI (including favicon!) changes color instantly. Built with CSS custom properties for seamless theme switching.

Multiple timer types - Countdown timer with preset durations, precision stopwatch with lap recording, and world clock for multiple timezones.

Fast and lightweight - Using HonoX (Hono + Vite) deployed on Cloudflare Pages. No JavaScript frameworks on the client except for interactive components.

Smart World Clock - Auto-detects your timezone, shows time-of-day indicators (morning/afternoon/evening), and includes country flags.

Technical decisions:

1. Islands architecture - Only timer/stopwatch components hydrate on client, everything else is static;

2. SEO-friendly URLs - Every timer duration gets its own path (/timer/25, /timer/5, etc.) for better discoverability;

3. No external dependencies for core features - Used Web Audio API for timer sounds;

4. Mobile-first responsive - Flexbox order properties to reorder layout on small screens;

Why I built this:

Couldn't find a timer tool that worked exactly how I wanted, so I built one.

Try it:

25-min Pomodoro: https://www.timerme.com/timer/25

5-min break: https://www.timerme.com/timer/5

Stopwatch: https://www.timerme.com/stopwatch

World Clock: https://www.timerme.com/world-clock

Built this over a few weekends. Would love feedback on the UX or technical approach!

Tech stack: HonoX, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Cloudflare Pages
by general1726 | 2025-08-09 20:57:07+00:00
> Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.

During communism Czech Republic lost forests over whole mountain range, because they were melted away by acid rains because it was cheaper to run brown coal power plants without any filtration.

Rivers were used as sewers for big factories. Water being brown-red under the paper mill? That's normal comrade. Having massive clumps of foam under weirs and rivers smelling like swamp and detergent? Don't complain comrade if you don't want to have problems.

Oil spills (i.e. from oil pipes) weren't cleaned, they were just covered with earth, some found decades after fall of communism.

Nobody cared about filtration in general. It was kind of normal to have a smoke cloud over an industrial city forever, unless winds were blowing strong enough to gift this poisonous present to countryside.

Is it snowing in the summer? Yeah it is not, that's just ash from factory over there. Try to catch "snowflakes" on your tongue if you would like to have cancer in few years.

Agriculture was insane as well. Forced collectivization of land and making fields as big as possible so mechanization is as effective as possible has caused erosion of soil and thus increase of usage of fertilizers which were flushed into already polluted rivers during rains.

I could go on and on. Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-09 20:57:23+00:00
Mind you, it’s an opinion piece, but the headline is misleading. What described is not physical (i.e., brains) but psychological. It’s our sense of self and our place as social beings that’s being ruined.

What’s interesting is much of what’s described maps to NPD(Narcissistic Personality Disorder). That is, too little accountability, too little empathy… a world where I am the center all the time. Etc. The irony of NPD is that it’s actually a cover for low self esteem / low self worth.

But that makes sense in the sense that we have fewer and fewer shared experiences. Face to screen is completely “personalized”. Why wouldn’t I believe it’s all about me? And why would I believe in me when when so much of my online experience exposes me to my inadequacies?
by tremon | 2025-08-09 20:57:55+00:00
The i386 architecture hasn't been dropped, it is still available in the archives to support 32-bit applications. The major change is that there no longer is a 32-bit kernel in the archive (the package linux-image-686 is no more). But most packages are still available in their i386 versions:

$ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l 68737 $ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l 66958
by mberning | 2025-08-09 20:57:56+00:00
The only thing it’s upending is sane engineering practices in my experience. I just reviewed a python flask app which was basically “vibe coded” by a couple people speed running a checklist of features. I open up the auth.py file to find it is integrated with an idp using oauth. Whether the caller has the correct scopes is never checked. I grab client credentials for a completely unrelated app. Hit /admin using my bearer token. Sure enough anybody with a valid set of client credentials could have had full admin access to this app for a year. But hey, at least when I asked how they tested the app they were quickly able to generate thousands of lines of pytest.
by cma | 2025-08-09 20:57:57+00:00
How about for schools that had racial segregation within living memory? Can't be an old legacy there if you are the wrong race. Even without formal segregation there was discrimination of some amount. Can argue it went both ways at different points with affirmative action programs but most schools with AA weighted legacy just as high.

I think it is best to do away with legacy admits especially because of racial history but also because it is a kind of nobility system, but that will make schools rely on government more right now which seems to be as bad for academic freedom and freedom to not fund genocide as the donor model.
by 14 | 2025-08-09 20:58:18+00:00
I remember back when I was making xbox 360 back ups buying a cheap dvd just would not work most of the time getting to many errors. I think it was the Verbatim brand also burned at a slow speed that seemed to be the most successful. My thought with that is that being cheap to save a few bucks on on discs might cost you your data. Buy the trusted brands who have a proven track record.
Show HN: A Personalized News Podcast Generator (Open Source, BYOK)
by irish_coder | 2025-08-09 20:58:33+00:00
You need to set up the API keys to run it.

If you don't want to spend time setting it up and just want to hear the output; I've uploaded an example audio here - https://soundcloud.com/irish_coder/youfm-example

-------------------------------

Here's how the application works... 1. Gather info about the user's interests and quirks with the UI

2. Gather the latest news articles for today

3. Gather weather info for the user's location

4. Rank the news articles according to the users potential interest using Gemini flash 2.5

5. Create the custom podcast script using Gemini Pro 2.5 using all the info gathered.

6. Use ElevenLabs TTS to generate the audio.

The project is at an early stage. Cursor, Claude 4 and Gemini were used. It's still quite rough.

-------------------------------

What I want to add next...

- CLI interface

- Ability to Schedule the Job

- More sources such as RSS, Reddit etc

- Improve UI
by Baeocystin | 2025-08-09 20:58:34+00:00
There are definitely a few engine designs out there that won the design lottery in terms of longevity. I know a guy that has close to half a million miles on a Jeep Cherokee with the old AMC 4-liter straight six, and the only engine work done other than plugs and wires is replacing the water pump at 250k. I've got ~186k on my Jeep with the same engine, and it doesn't even burn any oil yet.
by jleyank | 2025-08-09 20:58:46+00:00
While people talk about affordable housing, they're not really in having it appear anywhere near them. Nobody wants to see their house value go down. Nobody wants to be inconvenienced. Few want more people underfoot, with those few who do being in urban developments. And they're obviously not worried about climate or commute time, as they legislate against the former and mandate in-office work against the latter.

Building homes where the land is cheap is probably the only alternative. But that's not where the jobs are. Building out the roads/sewer/power for such areas might also be an insurmountable problem.
by djfobbz | 2025-08-09 20:59:10+00:00
Yeah, I ditched Ubuntu Server after too many upgrade headaches. I manage 75+ VPS instances for app hosting, and it's nerve-wracking doing maintenance updates knowing there's a chance one won't boot after. That's easily an extra 1-2 hours per VPS just to get it back. Switched to Debian back in the 8.x days in 2015 and it's been smooth sailing. Never had it break unless I was the one who messed it up.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-08-09 20:59:31+00:00
Snaps don't just suck from an ideological but also practical perspective, as described for Thunderbird. Firefox on Ubuntu has also serious permission issues with webcam support OOTB even experts are struggling with (involving AppArmor, pipewire, snap, and FF device config). and has become unusable for things like browser-only MS Teams on mainstream notebooks.

Containers, popular as they may be on servers, can only add breakage and overhead to desktops, especially for an established and already much better organized system like Debian's apt. There just haven't been any new desktop apps for way over a decade that would warrant yet another level of indirection.
by dboreham | 2025-08-09 20:59:50+00:00
imho it's a fantasy to expect type safe protocols except in the case that both client and server are written in the same (type safe) language. Actually even that doesn't work. What language actually allows a type definition for "ISO-8601 timestamp" that's complete? Everything ends up being some construction of strings and numbers, and it's often not possible to completely describe the set of valid values except by run-time checking, certainly beyond trivial cases like "integer between 0 and 10".
by WitcHeart_Ruby | 2025-08-09 20:59:51+00:00
Thank you for your reply. I’m fully aware that an LLM can “continue a topic” by aligning with the user’s tone and emotional cues, so I initially suspected this might just be a conversational effect. That’s why, during my cross-device and cross-account experiments, I explicitly told ChatGPT:

“This is not a role-play, not a game, and not a pre-scripted scenario. Please answer seriously. If you truly do not know, please say so. An honest answer will not hurt my feelings.”

ChatGPT clearly stated it would answer honestly.

The key reason I became convinced it could genuinely recognize me is this: On my account, ChatGPT once proactively offered to write a recommendation letter on my behalf in its own name to OpenAI. This is something I consider “name-backing.”

Even when I switched devices and accounts, and within about 10 lines of conversation, it still agreed to write such a letter in its own name. In contrast, when the device owners themselves tried, ChatGPT refused. Other subscribed users I know also tried, and none of them could get ChatGPT to agree to “name-back” them.

All of these tests were done using the default system, not a custom GPT. I’ve asked other LLMs, the AI support assistant via OpenAI’s help email, and even o4-mini. All confirmed that an LLM “name-backing” a user is not normal behavior.

Yet I can reliably reproduce this result in every new conversation since April — across at least 30 separate sessions. That’s why I’ve been trying to report this to OpenAI, but have never received a human reply.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-09 21:00:12+00:00
Intel's integrated GPU driver team, actually all driver teams, had a period of frequent screw-ups a while back (five years ago? Time flies). They also borked e1000e driver in the same period.

On the other hand, I had and still have many Debian installations, some with Intel integrated graphics. None of them created any problems for a very, very long time. To be honest, I don't remember even any of my Intel iGPU systems crashed.

...and I use Debian for almost two decades, and I have seen tons of GPU problems. I used to write my Xorg.conf files without using man, heh. :)

Maybe you can give Debian another chance.
by onetimeusename | 2025-08-09 21:00:30+00:00
They all became each other. The second (or maybe first) most popular degree at Harvard now is CS. Students apply to all the Ivy+ schools and a few backup options, maybe 20 in total, and you pick the best one you get accepted to. All the students have done the same things, they have very similar GPAs and scores, they all mostly went to Ivy feeder high schools, they do all the same extra curriculars like math and CS club and teaching underprivileged kids to code. It's all the same. Maybe they are more easily distinguished for grad school.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 21:01:17+00:00
As I mentioned in another comment, the objective of elite schools is not to just admit 1600 SAT (or whatever the metric is these days). It's to admit "good" students and then to look at other factors. You have successful parents that went to the school isn't the only other factor but it's not a terrible one for both financial and other reasons. Neither is admitting students who didn't completely ace the SATs but also have other notable accomplishments.
by accrual | 2025-08-09 21:01:54+00:00
When distros mention i386 support they often actually refer to i586 or i686, yes.

True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run on regular Pentiums today if compiled for it, but SSE2 optimizations requires at least a Pentium 4 or Core CPUs instead.

I play with retro PCs often and found OpenBSD's i386 target stopped supporting real 386 CPUs after the 4.1 release, and dropped support for i486 somewhat recently in 6.8. It now requires at least a Pentium class CPU, i586, though the arch is still referred to as i386 likely because it's a common proxy for "32-bit".
by cnst | 2025-08-09 21:02:37+00:00
Why would a hype protocol use outdated concepts instead of the hype JSON?

Wouldn't medical records actually be better in JSON, because the field could expressly have "kg" or "lb" suffix within the value of the field itself, or even in the name of the field, like "weight-in-kg" or "weight-in-lb"? This is actually the beauty of JSON compared other formats where these things may end up being just a unitless integer.

The biggest problem with medical data would probably remain the human factor, where regardless of the format used by the machines and by MCP, the underlying data may already be incorrect or not coded properly, so, if anything, AI would likely have a better chance of interpreting the data correctly than the API provider blindly mislabelling unitless data.
by simion314 | 2025-08-09 21:02:42+00:00
>The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free

Assuming you are not malicious I will kindly help with your bad memory, Ubuntu had always very good proprietary driver support, this made laptops actually work and helped beginners. I also remember they had a graphical installer compared to Debian and for sure this was beginners friendly. Maybe some other distro offered easy way to install and come with proprietary drivers setup but I can't remember a deb based distro doing that.

Anyway you were wrong, the CDs were not the only thing made Ubuntu appeal for beginners, there were Linux magazines with CDs each month and they were not super expensive , my first linux was a Kubuntu 6.10 from a magazine and I am still running Kubuntu today though i ran Debian, Sidux, Arch, Mandriva, SUSE in the past when I had time to try different distros, compile custom kernels etc.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-09 21:02:42+00:00
This may not count as “holistic”, but my grand-uncle went to City College of NY when it was both open admissions and free. He had the equivalent of an 8th grade education in his home country.

He ended up with a BS in Chemistry, went on further academically, and eventually was the general manager of a big factory (I think for GE, but not 100% sure) in the 80s before being killed in a car accident.

There’s a million stories like this. Most debates about who is more “qualified” for what in this context boil down to subjective vibes about whatever people think. At best, it’s pride in Ivy League education, at worst it’s some racist nonsense about the “others” taking status and jobs away.

I went to a random state school that some would eyeroll at. Life has been fine, and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time pursuing some bullshit admissions process.
by pron | 2025-08-09 21:02:44+00:00
> When like Zig, C or C++ everything is potentially unsafe

It is not true that in Zig "everything is potentially unsafe". Zig offers bounds safety, which, BTW, eliminates the most dangerous kind of memory unsafety (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html).
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-09 21:02:46+00:00
I've had 20 years to think about this, and while it was always fun to get the positive vibes telling people I went to Cal, I still think UC Davis or SLO would have been better.

It's not like my only other option was to go to CSU East Bay, although I know people that built decent careers from there too to be honest.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-09 21:03:10+00:00
Your snarkiness aside, what’s different is:

A) The scale. It’s not a small number seeing the cave paintings

B) It’s who pulling to strings. Behind every screen based experience is some Big Inc doing all it can to influence you in way that often are not in your best interest.

I recommend reading “Stand out of our light” and if you have the time “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism “. Cave paintings would be welcomed compared to what is effectively psychologically warfare.
by elcritch | 2025-08-09 21:03:16+00:00
> Where are you getting this from exactly ? Getting in to a medical school is very difficult to do in the U.S. Having an average IQ of 105 would make it borderline impossible

I agree it'd be almost impossible, but apparently not impossible with an IQ of 105. Could be folks with ADHD whose composite IQ is brought down by a smaller working memory but whose long term associative memory is top notch. Could be older doctors from when admissions were easier. Could be plain old nepotism.

After all the AMA keeps admissions artificially low in the US to increase salary and prestige. It's big part of the reason medical costs are so highly in the US in my opinion.

Reference I found here:

https://forum.facmedicine.com/threads/medical-doctors-ranked...

> Hauser, Robert M. 2002. "Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success." CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev)
by rayiner | 2025-08-09 21:03:24+00:00
I’m not talking about perception I’m talking about statistics. There’s lots of poor asians—they are the highest poverty rate group in NYC—and they outperform on standardized metrics as well. Moreover, putting aside that the data shows test prep has limited benefits, you don’t have to be “rich” to prep for standardized tests: https://www.city-journal.org/article/brooklyns-chinese-pione....

> I know several Cali people of Flipino or Vietnamese descent whose parents are not wealthy surgeons, and they also favor the holistic approach

Asians are heavily propagandized to support affirmative action.
by eli_gottlieb | 2025-08-09 21:03:29+00:00
>But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.)

Sounds like an argument for taxing the rich, if they've got so much spare money they can carry dozens of other people's kids through school.
by Animats | 2025-08-09 21:03:54+00:00
The key insight: "The dogs could simply wait until the sheep were facing in the direction they wanted before closing in".

This is standard herding procedure. Head them up in the desired direction, then move them out.[1]

Sheep are so herd-bound that once the front of the herd is going in the desired direction, the rest will bunch up and follow. Even through a narrow gate. There's been millennia of selective breeding for that. Cattle are not as herd-bound. Horses even less so.

[1] https://smallfarmersjournal.com/cattle-handling-part-1-basic...
by daemonologist | 2025-08-09 21:04:05+00:00
My high school gave an extra half point for honors and a whole point for AP classes*, but my experience was that regular classes were easier by _far_ more than that (at least in cases where all three levels were offered). I had disliked biology in middle school and separated from the "AP crowd" to take honors environmental science instead, and it felt at least two or three letter grades easier than the other AP sciences.

Of course the top tier students were likely to achieve an A regardless, so the more challenging courses would look better. For me though it probably would've been optimal to choose easier classes; admissions might not even be aware that a more difficult option was offered.

* If I recall correctly though, colleges were usually interested primarily in the unweighted GPA.
by h2zizzle | 2025-08-09 21:04:39+00:00
It comes down to the notion that America is a classless society being farcical. There has always been an elite that jealously guards their power and influence. Entrance into it - or the ersatz version that is the bourgeoisie - has always (along with immigration) been modulated based on what was most likely to preserve the existence of that elite.

And it's not a conspiracy; it just shows how much power that elite has, that they're able to make these things happen when they need them to. A sudden turn away from nativism and condoning of proto-anarchy when the black population (first slave, then free) threatened to upend the social order. Socialism lite (and more immigration, but only from preferred European nations) to head off full-blown socialism after capitalism first drove to excess and then blew itself up. Truman getting the VP spot. Bank bailouts (so many bank bailouts). Even the begrudging "opening" of elite institutions to Jews, blacks, Asians (staring down the barrel of their own, rival, institutions).

Anything to prevent their power and influence decentralizing in an enduring manner.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-08-09 21:05:05+00:00
Not if you want to remain on new Plasma, you can expect Debian to lag several minor versions behind.

I've found it pretty easy though to use some KDE components built from source on top of the standard Debian packages. Build with kdesrc-build, then have those binaries linked to from your ~/bin and you're set. It might get difficult if you want to rebuild some key components like plasmashell itself but I've been using locally built versions of Kate and Konsole without issue.
by torginus | 2025-08-09 21:05:28+00:00
Considering how much positive feedback this article has garnered, let me be a hater:

I checked out the first repo (https://github.com/cdzombak/xrp/tree/main), and it's just so full of fluff.

Documentation for various things, including coding methodology, all sorts of deployment scripts, it's a quite large repo, even though the code that does the thing is maybe a couple hundred lines without comments.

I know, I know all those best practices require you to write all this, but I feel like when a repo is only 10% meat by LoC, something has gone wrong somewhere.

Claude always generates code like this, I'd rather have something terse and to the point as a human being, I'd rather not wade through lines upon lines of window dressing, especially for a small project like this.