MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a HUD-like timer for macOS that stays visible in full-screen
by tomaszsobota | 2025-09-18 10:13:53+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve just released my first Mac App Store app, Buoyant Timer (paid, no in-app purchases)

It’s a lightweight HUD-like timer that floats above everything else on macOS, even full-screen apps.

I always wanted something like a configurable HUD for macOS. An app, or set of apps that stay visible at all times: a timer, runtime notes and scriptable alert/notification display.

This app is the first item on that roadmap. Something simple for deep focus where I switch between full-screen apps a lot, and often lose track of time.

What's under the hood?

This will probably be no news to seasoned Swift developers, but I was surprised by how much can be done with NSPanel.

So, the main view is a non-activating, borderless NSPanel:

NSPanel( level = .floating, collectionBehavior = [.canJoinAllSpaces, .fullScreenAuxiliary] ) orderFrontRegardless()

This keeps it always on top. There’s also a pass-through mode (ignoresMouseEvents = true) so clicks go to the app underneath uninterrupted.

Features

- Stopwatch and adjustable countdowns

- Pass-through clicks so it won't interrupt your workflow

- Global hotkeys

- Auto-start stopwatch when countdown ends (proved helpful on occasion)

- Customizable colors, opacity, and high-contrast mode

- Minimal interactive panel when you don’t want pass-through

I’d love to hear feedback, whether on the app, feature requests or anything else :)
by maswewe | 2025-09-18 10:13:57+00:00
Most LLMs give you generic answers that miss 80% of your business context — and you keep paying subscription fees for it.

What if you could build an AI that actually speaks your language: your domain, your processes, and your data?

No prompt engineering. No subscriptions. No compromises. Just domain-specific AI that finally works for your business.

Is it time to stop throwing money at generic AI and start building your own?
by ahaferburg | 2025-09-18 10:15:02+00:00
Starts at 2:01.

Kimmel

We hit some new lows over the week end with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger pointer, there was uh grieving. On Friday the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can... see how hard the president is taking this.

Reporter

My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?

Trump

I think very good, and by the way right there you see all the trucks. They've just started construction of the new ball room for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for a 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty.

Kimmel

Yes. He's at the fourth stage of grief. Construction.

Demolition. Construction. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called their friend. This is how a four year old mourns a gold fish, ok? And it didn't just happen once.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-09-18 10:15:23+00:00
Nice, but I think the config file is a much better implementation for protecting against supply chain attacks, particularly those targeting developers rather than runtime. You don’t want to rely on every developer passing a flag every time they install. This does suffer from the risk of using `npm install` instead of `pnpm install` though.

It would also be nice to have this as a flag so you can use it on projects that haven't configured it though, I wonder if that could be added too.
by Someone | 2025-09-18 10:15:51+00:00
I think there’s plenty of evidence that they’re better in jet fighters (where users are well-trained), possible also in automotive (where they have been sold for decades; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_head-up_display), but of course, it will depend on the design of the HUD and on what it displays.

Extreme example: showing random ads every ten minutes, even if the glasses c/should suspect you’re driving a car. I have my doubts as to whether Meta will make the right choices here.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-18 10:16:03+00:00
I had a similar experience. I tried Blender for 10 minutes and the UI was unintuitive and just awful. Completely backwards from everything else.

A few years later, someone said I should try it again. It's finally good. And they were right. My whole team uses Blender now and we're very satisfied with it.

I've heard the same thing with GIMP: "Try it again. It's good now." Unfortunately, this isn't true and likely will never be.
by adastra22 | 2025-09-18 10:16:10+00:00
I have been writing code for nearly 30 years. I have my name on a couple of ingenious patents.

I have fully integrated LLMs into May daily workflow, and am routinely surprised at the innovative solutions that Claude sometimes comes up with. There is a lot of generated code that is far beyond my own capabilities, even as an expert in the field in which I’m working.
by HexDecOctBin | 2025-09-18 10:18:25+00:00
Lisp tooling is the weirdest of all. On one hand, it allows full introspection and reflection on all internal state. On the other hand, it is almost as clunky as GDB command line. Why is there no visual debugger?

Sometimes I think Emacs was the worst thing to happen to Lisp. It put the language in a "Worse-is-better" box and left it there.
by ajross | 2025-09-18 10:20:02+00:00
And the inability to reason from evidence is a big part of the disconnect here.

That article doesn't substantiate your statement. The single quote in the charging document it's talking about is that he had become "more pro-gay and trans-rights-oriented", which is obviously not the same thing. Otherwise Thiel and Jenner would be "left wing" in your world view.

Real people's views are complicated, especially those of an insane murderer.
by defrost | 2025-09-18 10:20:19+00:00
Rereading Bliss by Peter Carey after opening a 45 year old box o' books from a back shelf in the shed.

It's a red pill fable for marketing directors (and other threads are pulled).

Later adapted for film, it saw 400 viewers walk out on it when screened at Cannes... most likely when the fish hit the floor. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifR7tsVT_-Y
by komali2 | 2025-09-18 10:20:44+00:00
> Email-based login does not require matrix.org accounts (and never did) - it sounds like there's confusion there with inviting users by email, which indeed needs you to run an email->matrix 'identity server' (which defaults to matrix.org). If you were trying to build your own matrix hosting stack, I can see why this would be painful.

Yes thank you that was what I was trying to remember. We really wanted to have the invite flow as part of the email we sent with other login details for other tooling, but we never got it working, not even with matrix's identity URL.

We were hosting through etke.cc, some issues may have been due to the specific decisions they made, however they were quite capable it seemed to me.

This was two years ago so the identity server was difficult to find, I think sydent may not have been as officially "canonical" back then or perhaps not quite so easy to set up? It could be on me but I recall it being a blocker I didn't have time to resolve after taking a crack at it.

I'm happy to hear you're working on things for element x however we recommended our members not to use the element x app since it didn't have the full featureset of element such as threading, which was critical to our usage (threads for gigs for example). Perhaps it has threads now though!

I support your project, I loved having the duplicators or whatever they're called mirroring slack messages and Instagram messages to matrix, that was part of our co-op's selling pitch for a while: "get access to a working matrix deployment running duplicators for Instagram, slack, some other things, so you can use these apps for messaging without having them installed!" I really wanted it to work but we had to choose the lame easy option with the lock in in the end. I am sure we will pay for it one day when discord enshittifies.
by dada78641 | 2025-09-18 10:21:59+00:00
It really is kind of incredible. I just saw the clip and there really is absolutely nothing there. This is not even 10% as poignant of what Jon Stewart would say in his day. He doesn't even say anything about Kirk himself, or even about the murder—he just talks about the reaction to it.

I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?

What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.
by aveao | 2025-09-18 10:22:14+00:00
Strictly speaking, unless you do destructive actions, it's not stealing, but instead unauthorized access.

If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.

This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".

---

But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.

I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-18 10:22:24+00:00
> if the signing key was stored there too (without a password), couldn't the attackers have published signed packages?

Yeah, of course. Also if they hosted their private key for the signature on their public blog, anyone could use it for publishing.

But for the sake of the argument, why don't we assume people are correctly using the thing we're talking about?
by nickjj | 2025-09-18 10:23:44+00:00
Slack lets you do a full export which even includes DMs depending on which plan you have.

https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

When the org I was at moved away from Slack (due to costs) we used this method and wrote a little Python script to convert the main channels' JSON dumps into PDFs so we had a usable backup of channels.
by serbuvlad | 2025-09-18 10:24:24+00:00
I don't understand how "multi-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for the desktop" is such a small market with so few competitors while "single-channel IRC with history, multimedia and good UI/UX for mobile" is such a saturated market.

For the latter you have WhatsApp, Instagram (yes, really, IG is the main communication app for my generation in my country), SnapChat, Telegram, Signal, Threema, Session, Briar, RCS/iMessage, etc. Each with different monetization strategies, target audiences, gimmicks/features and security/privacy profiles.

For the former you have Discord, Slack and MS Teams. And that's kind of it. Yeah, Matrix/Element exists, but I've never actually seen anyone use it "in the wild". (Whereas I've seen Signal, Session and Briar used by non-techie people with... privacy needs).

MS Teams is a really good product, but it's an org-tool. It does a thousand things very well. But it's not really for communities and individuals.

And Discord and Slack are very similar products for entirely different segments. Discord links to your Steam account, Slack links to your Jira account.

I've always liked Discord when tight opsec wasn't a concern. I find it really intuitive to use, and bots, which are cheap to host if you're serving only one server, give you an incredible amount of control over what goes on in the server (including logging everything off-site if you so wish, so you have an archive if Discord decides to nuke you arbitrarily). But you're not going to use Discord in a professional enviornment. It simply doesn't have the vibes.

So that leaves Slack. And Salesforce (what a dystopian name for a company). But why focus on $100k+ B2B deals when you could be focusing on communities and do a Slack Nitro approach. I don't think you can out-MS Teams MS Teams, but you can certainly be Discord with professional vibes if you tried.
by komali2 | 2025-09-18 10:24:26+00:00
My meaning is more like, St. Nicholas and his flying sleigh and reindeer have existed since at least the 1800s, Father Christmas as well, Sinterklaas even earlier most likely, but Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus as the world knows him in 1930s, and the USA did the same for the modern concept of "free country" or "democracy." A couple decades of radio, television, and film dominance was the method.
by Filligree | 2025-09-18 10:24:53+00:00
We've seen a lot of stunningly incompetent attacks that nevertheless get to a lot of people.

Yeah, it needs work from the language runtime, but I think even a hacky, leaky 'security' abstraction would be helpful, because the majority of malware developers probably aren't able to break out of a language-level sandbox, even if the language still allows you to do unsafe array access.

Then we can iterate.
by imiric | 2025-09-18 10:25:04+00:00
Not being able to openly criticize the US or any other government on social media is hardly important. Free speech never existed on privately run platforms to begin with. It's delusional to think that it does or to demand it, when all users must abide with specific terms and conditions. The only people who think that are those whose views happen to align with the views of companies that run the platform. The moment that changes, as we've seen from the Twitter takeover, the previous user base will denounce censorship and deplatforming, while a new user base will celebrate "free speech". It's all a circus of ignorance and disinformation.

The main problem is that allowing foreign propaganda from a political rival to influence your citizens, while giving them free reign to exploit user data, is undeniably a matter of national security. The issue is that taking over a single platform doesn't stop foreign influence and data mining, which is also happening on all other platforms, courtesy of the adtech machinery that powers all of them. We have concrete evidence of this from the Cambridge Analytica leak, which was just the tip of the iceberg of a multi-billion dollar industry.

So unless US companies are willing to take a severe hit on their revenue and drastically change their business models, which can only happen with regulation that in practice will never be enacted, none of this will change.

If you're a user of these platforms, stop worrying about what you can or cannot say, and start worrying about what you're being manipulated to think, say, and do.
by me_bx | 2025-09-18 10:25:45+00:00
Not OP, but in a similar boat. My 2 cents:

Well thought, sophisticated ways of modeling data for analytics purposes -using established approaches - are being replaced by just pulling data from the data sources - with barely any change in the source structure - into cloud data platforms.

In the past we used to model layers in a data-warehousing infrastructure each with a purpose and a data modelling methodology. For instance, an operational data store (ODS) layer, integrating data from all the sources, with a normalized data structure. Then a set of datamarts, each of them containing a subset of the ODS content, in a denormalized format, focused each on a specific functional domain.

We had rules, methods to structure data in order to get performant reporting, and a customer orientation.

Coming from this world, it seems like data governance principles are gone, and it feels like some organisations use the modern data stack same way as each analyst would be doing their own Excel files in their own corner, without any safeguards.
by komali2 | 2025-09-18 10:26:12+00:00
This is a gentle reminder that it really doesn't matter what the color of a Muslim's skin is to those who care to distinguish someone as Muslim or not-Muslim. To the racist right wing machine, those that are undeniably white (say, a blond haired blue eyed nord), will be called "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Antifa" or "queer" or "trans" and that'll be that, their whiteness is revoked.

Whiteness, like any race, is a purely cultural concept rooted in the shifting reality of day to day sociology.

A man with as-of-yet undefined politics was identified as the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. Before he was found, a governor said, "I really hope he's not one of us." When it was discovered that he was a young white male from a Mormon MAGA family, the media machine that had been calling for the elimination of the opposition party in the USA (or various minorities such as LGBT people) went silent for about a day until it was discovered that perhaps the assassin's roommate may have been trans. Immediately he was othered. Calls for prayer for a lost young man turned again into calls for violence against trans people. I imagine Governor Cox breathing a sigh of relief. Whiteness revoked!
by mu0n | 2025-09-18 10:27:08+00:00
You mean, talk like this?

> It’s only worth pursuing an independent career path if that’s something you really want, and even if it is, I’m not promising that it’ll make you rich. Probably the reverse. For all the billionaire startup founders we read about, I can introduce you to dozens of people who, as a result of starting their own business, are the poorest they’ve ever been.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-18 10:27:42+00:00
Again this depends on the technology and, even more important, on the decision to even start using that technology. When confronted with some 'new technology you need to tiptoe around [...] and/or find ways to disable [...]' the decision should be to not use that technology. Home speakers, cloud-connected everything, data parasite owned doorbells, payment systems run by the same - don't use them. If you really want a 'home speaker' make one yourself, it won't be much worse than whatever you get when you allow one of those data parasite-produced spies into your home. Don't put a camera an microphone at your door which sends all images and sounds directly to the cloud,if you want a camera at your door make sure it only sends images to a network and storage you control.

Data technology has gone mainstream and with that it is used by adversarial actors, this was much less the case in the time of yore. There was no 'big data' because the storage and processing capacity to enable it did not exist while nowadays it is available to anyone who has the means - and those means are steadily going down. In biological terms data technology used to be a niche which was found by a group of critters which happily lived in their secluded valley until it suddenly spread over the whole world. With that came new opportunities - jobs galore for anyone who knew his way around - but also new threats, predators and parasites. That is where we are now so the name of the game is survival of the fittest. In other words, up your ante, ditch parasite technology and learn to thrive again. You'll have to swat some buzzing parasite every now and then, both the winged as well the branded variety. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.
by 47282847 | 2025-09-18 10:28:08+00:00
> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.

An explanation for that behavior is that this kind of reaction serves as protection against the contagion. It doesn’t help the depressed but the environment around them, to not join in and feel the feelings of despair and hopelessness.

According to some theories, depression means other feelings like anger and anxiety are being suppressed - resulting in transference and counter-transference.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-09-18 10:29:01+00:00
> Couple that with easily being about to `cargo add` dependencies and good language server features, and the developer experience in Rust blows C++ out of the water.

Exactly this. Regardless of safety, expressiveness, control, whatever argument someone pulls from their hat to defend C++ the simple fact of a solid dependency manager cannot be overstated.
by theodric | 2025-09-18 10:29:30+00:00
Because I spent too much time as a kid playing flight simulators, I learned it that way, and I have no interest in relearning. I found the inverted flight controls bafflingly backward when I first encountered them, but I got used to them.

Now if you'll read the article, you'll discover that apparently some asshole in a lab knows my own mind better than I do despite never once meeting me, because:

> "In short, gamers think they are an inverter or a non-inverter because of how they were first exposed to game controls. Someone who played a lot of flight sims in the 1980s may have unconsciously taught themselves to invert and now they consider that their innate preference; alternatively a gamer who grew up in the 2000s, when non-inverted controls became prevalent may think they are naturally a non-inverter. However, cognitive tests suggest otherwise. It’s much more likely that you invert or don’t invert due to how your brain perceives objects in 3D space."

To this I say: prove it.

I detest this kind of smug journalism.
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-18 10:31:44+00:00
I don't get this comment at all; you say CSS is too limiting but somehow Tailwind, which is just applying CSS using classes is liberating?

Tailwind actually complicates a lot more things, when you have to specify variants for example, there you go installing tw-variants, writing Javascript just so you can get different sorts of buttons.

This is fine for larger component libraries like shadcn-ui, but for simplicity, I'd pick up pure CSS for something like button .error; and button .secondary.

(yes I know you can just @apply whatever you want inside those blocks, but what's the benefit of tailwind then?)
by MacsHeadroom | 2025-09-18 10:31:54+00:00
From the murderer's text messages:

> Roommate: Why?

> Robinson: Why did I do it?

> Roommate: Yeah

> Robinson: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out.

Besides everyone around him testifying that he'd been left-wing ever since dropping out of college, his admission that he found Charlie's relatively moderate speech "hateful" strongly suggests the murderer was quite far to the left.
by Darmani | 2025-09-18 10:32:09+00:00
The people saying that were wrong, BTW -- Watson did have to physically press a button.

https://www.wired.com/2011/02/ibm-watson-speed/

> __Brown: __ Watson has a mechanical button-presser. It uses the same signaling device [the button] that the human competitors use in the game. Once Watson has decided that it wants to ring in because it has found an answer with a high-enough confidence, and it receives the signal that the buzzers are open and you can ring in, it then has to trigger the mechanical button presser and mechanically press the button.