On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).
Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.
> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:
> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows
> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard
> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]
> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same
> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing
> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection
There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.
They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:
- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)
- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"
- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"
- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback
- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so
- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release
- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"
- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker
And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.
This is like, the least bad thing GNOME have ever done. Middle-click pasting makes no logical sense and only exists as a holdover from before copy-paste conventions were established. Nobody would design it this way today.
I would say the issue itself is almost irrelevant... I think it's mainly your dogmatism. Speaking in absolutes as if you always know everything, that there can seemingly only be one right answer and there can be no other valid perspectives or opinions. To me it just screams low emotional intelligence and a lack of critical thinking, humility and empathy.
Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
Because all of Microsoft's people secretly use linux on thier machines.
(No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
When one of the senior executives from Bing Search visited my university for a talk, they personally told the director of the computer science department that they envied the fact that the director could use a 27-inch iMac at work, whereas they could only use one at home.
The head of bing search is not ever going to be in position to issue an emergency patch for windows. They are far more likely to cause such a situation than resolve one.
They’re at the last step of their enshittification process, where the focus is to extract money from everyone, not to ship a good product or fix things.
But that's absolutely not generative AI (which bandcamp explicitly stated the policy is for) and it's not even classifiable as traditional AI. The session tracks are just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff like "play these notes in an inverted chord".
Hmm, a few years ago, such a feature would have been called "AI" in marketing materials, no? Aren't all current GenAI tools in some way "just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff" - only the 'base patterns' are some weights in a neural network.
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
There's little barrier to entry, but for the most part the community does good internal policing. Stupid emotional comments are pushed down, and the worst ones are flagged. (I've had a few moments of weakness here, so I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here)
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
Did you read the article at all? No, it was an actual catastrophe. There was damage, years of disruption for the work going on down there, a close call for the people working down there, years of cleanup running half a billion dollars.
If you talk to people who deal with inference using large fungible datasets, this is an extremely difficult governance problem. semver is incredibly insufficient and you don't have a well defined meaning of what "upgrade" even means let alone "major", "minor", and "patch".
It's a major disservice to the problem to act like it's new and solved or even solvable using code revision language.
But that's objectively not true unless you're just trolling or being sarcastic? The cost and reach of ground based systems still has a considerable amount of use, still have many projects of those types ongoing. There's been a ton of great work on things like adaptive optics and laser guides have been excellent breakthroughs in extending that reach.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
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