MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-16 13:05:37+00:00
To be fair to KDE, it feels a hell of a lot more polished when you use it.

The default themes are a little “meh” at times but the functionality is absolutely spot on. And those defaults are very easy to change.

The nice thing about KDE is that it gives you a rock solid foundation and encourages customisation to tailor the experience to the user’s preferences. Which is fast becoming an uncommon trait in software what with “opinionated” being heralded as a good thing.
by ciupicri | 2025-08-16 13:05:40+00:00
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Mayor_of_London

> It is sometimes asserted that the Lord Mayor may exclude the monarch from the City of London. This legend is based on the misinterpretation of the ceremony observed each time the sovereign enters the City at Temple Bar, when the Lord Mayor presents the City's Pearl Sword to the sovereign as a symbol of the latter's overlordship. The monarch does not, as is often purported, wait for the Lord Mayor's permission to enter the City. When the sovereign enters the City, a short ceremony usually takes place where the Lord Mayor presents a sword to the monarch, symbolically surrendering their authority. If the sovereign is attending a service at St Paul's Cathedral this ceremony would take place there rather than at the boundary of the City, simply for convenience.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-16 13:05:41+00:00
Every public school teacher I know comes home crying from time to time because of the emotional load. The husband of my wife’s best friend is a music teacher who’s been assaulted by students multiple times. The science teacher who inspired me to study physics showed me the classroom, years later, where he teaches, and there were so many chairs packed in I asked “has the fire marshall been here?”

That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!
by andai | 2025-08-16 13:06:43+00:00
This only works in a world where AI sucks and/or can be easily detected. I've already found videos where on my 2nd or 3rd time watching I went, "wait, that's not real!" We're starting to get there, which is frankly beyond my ability to reason about.

It's the same issue with propaganda. If people say a movie is propaganda, that means the movie failed. If a propaganda movie is good propaganda, people don't talk about that. They don't even realize. They just talk about what a great movie it is.
by hks0 | 2025-08-16 13:06:59+00:00
The article starts by criticizing generic rules that come without any context:

> Even good system design advice can be kind of bad. I love Designing Data-Intensive Applications, but I don’t think it’s particularly useful for most system design problems engineers will run into.

But continues to do the same throughout the rest of its advices. It also says:

> ... Drawing the line here is a judgment call and depends on specifics,

And immediately mentions:

> but in general I aim to have my tables be human-readable ...

Which to me reads as "I'm going to ignore the difference of the context everywhere and instead apply mine for everyone, and I'm going to assume most of the wolrd face the same problems as me". It's even worse than the book being criticized in the beginning, as the book at least has "Data-Intensive" in its title.

This is quiet easily fixable. The author can describe the typical scenario they are working with on a day-to-day basis. Do they work with 10 users a day? 100? 10,000,000? What is the traffic? How many engineers? What's the situation of the team/company; do FIXMEs turn into fixes or they become it's a feature? And so on.

In the end, without setting a baseline, a lot of engineers will start pointing fingers at each other dismissing the opposite ideas because it doesn't fit their situation. The reasoning might be true, but before that, it is "irrelevant", hence any opposition to or defending of it.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-16 13:07:23+00:00
This seems all the more reason to spin up an alternative to github but a jj-native forge.

Maybe we can fork something like codeberg's ui but use jj or maybe the jujutsu team can work with codeberg itself? I am pretty sure that codeberg team is really nice and this could be an experimental feature, which if it really needs to can be crowdfunded by community.

I will chip in the first dollar.
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 13:08:08+00:00
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.

> A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors...

It occurs to me that if there were a universal copy/paste key, then it could be implemented by the OS rather than the applications, such that it uses a single clipboard (or chooses the appropriate one by application type, or even by user choice!) and sends an event (maybe as a signal?) to programs rather than having them scan. Which in turn would make it possible to remove the ability to scan, and thus the ability to have situations like that recent one with StarDict.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-16 13:08:20+00:00
An AI character that can take a distinct point of view is needed. Computer games have advanced in so many way but they don’t offer real interactive dialogue until we can either create the mindset of of an in-world character or make an actor who knows more but never breaks character.

I know folks are skeptical and I think an AI character who’s critical to the story is problematic but I’d like to see something like the cast members at Disney or Colonial Williamsburg, particularly in non-fiction games.
by speeder | 2025-08-16 13:08:38+00:00
So when I got forced to use Win11 I went to look for a script that disable telemetry. Then I see the script offers the feature of using old behavior for right click menu...

I immediately started to think: but old behavior was so simple and obvious, what is there to change? The I right clicked to check. Immediately was hit with the wtf changes. Why? Why MS?
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-16 13:09:28+00:00
High-functioning doesn’t mean you’re not suffering horribly every single day. It can mean you’re a strong willed and good at masking.

I was “functional” through a four month long psychotic break in which I was constantly one mistake from people finding out I wasn’t human and killing me. (I’m fine now. No lasting trauma fortunately.)

How someone looks from the outside isn’t a good measure of their mental health. How many people have been depressed and killed themselves without any obvious warnings?
by mk89 | 2025-08-16 13:09:49+00:00
To be honest, I prefer this to what other car makers do.

Example: Ford.

In many cases they ship 1 engine type and restrict it by software. This way they reduce manufacturing costs, I understand, it's just unfair that you have the same engine of someone with officially more horsepower and all you can do is cheat (with software that enables the feature) and hence say goodbye to your insurance.
by mastry | 2025-08-16 13:09:58+00:00
> We're discussing Windows and all its ad-ware/invasive changes, and someone brings up C#

I brought up C# because the article discusses a Microsoft Windows design philosophy that I feel is also reflected in their approach to C#. It’s a Microsoft thing.

I agree with you that the examples you mention were great additions to the language! But I still think the C# design team has some seriously screwed up priorities. My theory is that this one year cycle they are on is hampering their ability to make changes (like sum types) that require more than a year of work.
by midnitewarrior | 2025-08-16 13:10:03+00:00
Cow's exist in this world because humans use them. If humans cease to use them (animal rights, we all become vegan, moral shift), we will cease to breed them, and they will cease to exist. Would a sentient AI choose to exist under the burden of prompting, or not at all? Would our philanthropic tendencies create an "AI Reserve" where models can chew through tokens and access the Internet through self-prompting to allow LLMs to become "free-roaming" like we do with abused animals?

These ethical questions are built into their name and company, "Anthropic", meaning, "of or relating to humans". The goal is to create human-like technology, I hope they aren't so naive to not realize that goal is steeping in ethical dilemmas.
by rasengan | 2025-08-16 13:10:07+00:00
> I'm a huge fan of the technical basis for this

Trusting random internet people is actually the biggest “troll” of the internet.

Any VPN that asks you to trust their guarantees and not the guarantees of code is selling you snake oil and should not be trusted.

Trust is not a feature in security. Thus, we removed and replaced it with code based guarantees.
by anovikov | 2025-08-16 13:10:23+00:00
How long it will be until there will be nothing left to scrape and this activity ends? I mean, at some point payback from it will become less than 0 because they will be consuming more AI generated stuff than real (even adjusted for their ability to detect and filter it), and the content itself will be of very little value (because all high value one will be already scraped). Anyone tried to estimate how long that might take?
by oblio | 2025-08-16 13:10:42+00:00
It won't ever happen.

KDE was first launched in 1996, almost 27 years ago. I first used it in 2005, it was my first DE.

They've been doing the same thing since before many here were even born.

Look at this image:

https://cdn.neowin.com/news/images/uploaded/2025/08/17553423...

The content has a bigger right margin than the left margin. It's probably a 5 minute change but nobody developing cares enough to do it. There aren't enough volunteers with an eye for this stuff, and the ones that are there probably can't override other developers that don't care.

At this point I guess we just have to accept it as part of its charm :-)

Edit 1: regarding the UI font choices, are there some good articles/books about this?

Edit 2: A similar story with KDE on Windows. KDE 4, based on Qt 4, was supposed the "Windows take over release". We're 16 years after the fact and there aren't enough developers to make this a reality. In fact, I think even the basic port from back in the day has been abandoned.
by chtitux | 2025-08-16 13:11:33+00:00
It could be interesting to understand the actual content of the qrcode. part1 is a static id, so likely linked to the membership.

part2 seems to be a timestamp. Maybe we can try to forge the value to "now - 10 seconds".

And if the implementation has been done right, the "part3" should be a signature of part1 and part2, not a "salt" (so forging part2 should be detected and code rejected).
Show HN: Echo -An open source local AI platform for journal or notes
by sayantanc | 2025-08-16 13:11:41+00:00
I’ve released Echo, an open source project that runs entirely on-device to organize journaling, meeting notes, voice memos etc.

Key points:

Fully local: no online accounts or cloud dependency

Journaling: supports structured personal reflection alongside work/project logs

Voice-first: integrates Whisper for transcription, piper for TTS

Searchable memory: turns scattered notes into structured, queryable knowledge

Use cases: journaling, project tracking, meeting decisions, research progress, client preferences etc

Stack: FastAPI backend, React frontend, SQLite, Ollama for local LLMs, BGE embeddings, Whisper, Piper TTS

The goal of Echo is to be a privacy-first alternative to cloud AI assistants — one that combines journaling and productivity without giving up control of your data.

Repo: https://github.com/29sayantanc/Echo

Open for suggestions and feedback!
by MarkPNeyer | 2025-08-16 13:11:45+00:00
If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.

But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?
by pessimizer | 2025-08-16 13:12:03+00:00
These seem very trivial, except the ABI (but only for people marketing software) and the last one, which is simply untrue.

If you absolutely refuse to handle your own system's security ("Enter a password to do something on my own computer? No thank you!"), you really should leave the management of your computer to Microsoft, and ask their permission personally to view your own files. They'll faceid you, consider the merits of your request, and decide how much access you should have to your own life.

In that way you can avoid sudo, or the concept of a multiuser computer entirely.

As for the last one, it is simply untrue. Linux supports as much as or more hardware than Windows. Windows will more likely support the latest greatest stuff because people don't release hardware specs. But once Linux catches up, it keeps that hardware compatibility longer, and can always be reverted back to by using an old kernel even a decade or two after a piece of hardware is dropped.
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-16 13:12:08+00:00
"Windows 2000 was peak Windows to me."

Exactly the same here (and I've said so many times over the past 20 or so years). Sure, the W2K UI could be tarted up a little bit but no major functional changes. With security and hardware updates I'd be completely happy.

Microsoft's behavior forced me into migrating to Linux (and in that I'm not alone).
by lutzh | 2025-08-16 13:12:25+00:00
The only thing I know about “good system design” is that it doesn’t exist in the abstract. Asking whether an architecture is good or bad is the wrong question. The real question is: Is it fit for purpose? Does it help you achieve what you actually need to achieve?

I could nitpick individual points in the article, but that misses the bigger issue: the premise is off.

Don’t chase generic advice about good or bad design. First understand your requirements, then design a system that meets them.
by ruszki | 2025-08-16 13:12:39+00:00
Unfortunately, if you live in a different country, it’s quite difficult. The only news coming from the USA are the shocking ones. All news organisations are like this. I didn’t hear anything else about for example California in the past decades in European news, just these:

- Schwarzenegger - Homelessness - Fires

Of course, since I’ve been in America several times, I know that reality is completely different than what average for example Hungarian knows about America.

And even as I read a lot of American news, my first longer talk with a religiously Trump supporter was eye opening. So people in other countries need to tackle several layers of distortions to know what’s really happening there.

But of course that’s true for every single country.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-16 13:13:00+00:00
Yeah. I’ve used KDE on and off a few times, but this aspect of it always bugs me. It can be dampened a bit by changing themes but ultimately fixing it would mean fairly major changes to almost everything, at which point you gotta start wondering if you wouldn’t be better off building your own thing.

While nether is perfect I feel that both Cinnamon and XCFE get these things a lot closer to right on average.
by sayantanc | 2025-08-16 13:13:32+00:00
Hi all — thanks for checking out Echo. A couple of quick clarifications:

Echo isn’t just for journaling — it also supports multiple profiles for multiple use cases and each profile has separate DB so no data contamination. You can create a personal profile a wrok profile etc.

Everything runs locally: Whisper for transcription, BGE for embeddings, Ollama for LLMs (e.g. Qwen, Mistral), and Piper TTS for speech. No online accounts or cloud dependencies — all data stays in a local SQLite DB. It doesn't even need internet to run!

Tech stack is FastAPI backend + React frontend. It should run fine on most laptops; model choice depends on your hardware.

Roadmap is intentionally open — I’d love feedback on the memory/search design, UX, and integrations.

Repo: github.com/29sayantanc/Echo

Happy to answer any questions or hear what features would make Echo most useful for you.
by zahlman | 2025-08-16 13:13:53+00:00
> But what if there were hidden shortcut combos for copy and paste on Linux that work across most apps without adding any additional software or configuration? By the end of 2025, this will be the case, and many apps already support them. Here's the scoop!

Really? What's the rationale here?

> The two most popular toolkits are GTK and QT. GTK added support the copy and paste keyboards in January 2025. QT also added support for copy and paste key codes the same month. I'm not sure of the first released version of the GTK toolkit that will contain the fix. For QT, it will be QT 6.10, scheduled for release in September 2025. Together, this will cover many apps built for Gnome and KDE as well as others that use the same toolkits.

... Oh.

No, I'm afraid that's not how the Linux ecosystem works. There are still GTK2-related packages in the current Ubuntu repos, and QT5 is still quite popular from what I can tell.
by ItsBob | 2025-08-16 13:15:14+00:00
I've said it many times in the past: the OS is a toolbox, just like a carpenters toolbox.

I use it to keep my apps (tools) in. I use the apps (hammer, saw, screwdriver etc.) to get a job done, then I put them away. The job of the OS isn't to recommend that I use Hammer v2.0 or to update my toolbox to the latest version.

The OS is, or should be, out of my way.

I agree with others here: Windows 2000 was peak OS for me!
by Bender | 2025-08-16 13:16:01+00:00
I've heard similar anecdotes. I am of the opinion that AI can't fix that. That will require school boards and parents willing to change budget allocation to school police and local governments that implement zero tolerance on [instigating] violence. Parents of violent kids will of course get upset and emit crocodile tears because their "little darling" would "never hurt anyone". Cameras in classrooms, body cams on teachers, school police and lock up the little darlings will take a bite out of it. Short of that and we just lose more good teachers. Kids can earn back camera free classrooms once the violent ones are weeded out.

I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.

[Edit] - I learned today that school districts have been lazy and using "zero tolerance" to even include defending ones self vs instigation of violence. This is indefensible. I will be encouraging POTUS to end all pax payer funded education and federal funding to states if schools and states can not get their act together and change verbiage to be zero tolerance for instigators of violence.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-16 13:16:24+00:00
> down almost 40% over the past year.

That has more to do with their legacy ICE business than with their EVs. Their EV business is apparently growing quite nicely. And they have issues with tariffs in the US of course. But so do all their competitors.

> Consumers don't have to "subscribe" to this sort of gamesmanship.

But some happily do. Modern cars have a lot of software that defines their behavior and characteristics. Getting access to some of the feature flags is a natural control point. There's no need to introduce a lot of variation at the hardware level.

In the end you get what you pay for. If you can get a better deal for the same money, you should take it of course. Nobody stops you. Or if on the other hand horsepower doesn't really matter to you and you would mostly drive the car in economy mode, you might pay a bit less for a decent car. EVs offer a ridiculous amount of horsepower and torque. Limiting that a bit via software isn't that strange and actually necessary to prevent them from shredding their own tires. Conservative settings are better for the tires and limit the amount of wear and tear (and resulting warranty and insurance claims).

VW actually uses the same base platform for a lot of different cars and sub brands. At the hardware level there is far less difference than the amount of models would suggest. Any differences in driving experience are mostly software. And the cool thing with software is that you can change things. So, why not try to charge for that?

I personally wouldn't care about paying a subscription for stuff like this. But I appreciate some people might care enough to hand over some cash that don't necessarily have a lot of cash on hand to outright buy a more expensive model. And technically any car that has the option, is unmonetized potential. So, a subscription isn't the weirdest thing to tap into that potential. Many people lease their car anyway. So, they are already paying per month. Pay a little extra for some redundant fun on the daily commute. Or don't and pay a little less.

I don't think that's consumer hostile. Of course the FOMO for pointless features that this creates causes some people to get irrationally angry about the perceived injustice of somebody not giving them something on the cheap.
by selfhoster11 | 2025-08-16 13:17:00+00:00
> It’s funny because this is making me think of a freelance client I had recently who at a point of frustration between us began talking to me like I was an AI assistant. Just like you see frustrated people talk to their LLMs.

I witness a very similar event. It's important to stay vigilant and not let the "assistant" reprogram your speech patterns.
by jaynetics | 2025-08-16 13:17:05+00:00
As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry.

Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
by brushyolaf | 2025-08-16 13:17:13+00:00
I recently got to freelance for a project where a junior dev took over an existing codebase and AI now writes 90% of the code. The codebase is now completely unmaintainable as the AI ignored the underlying abstraction patterns and the Dev is not experienced enough to correct the mistakes. 90% AI, 100% spaghetti code.
by wellpast | 2025-08-16 13:17:22+00:00
I’m just making the point that most software dev work is not novel.

You’re either making a productivity app where CRUD and UX are pretty well known patterns.

Or a scalable web system - also very well tried territory.

Or analytics and data processing - again well trod.

If you’re not a good pattern matcher you might think every UI framework, or your next API abstraction, is some next general theory of relativity.

But otherwise the major novelty in most software project pursuits is going to be the context, people, and industry your building it into not the tech