MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built Run for Fun to stop me from doomscrolling until I exercise
by busymom0 | 2025-04-21 17:18:30+00:00
Some of you might know me as the developer of HACK, the iOS and Android apps for Hacker News.

I spend a lot of time doomscrolling on Reddit, YouTube, and here at Hacker News. I also enjoy Powerlifting. So, I wondered whether I could use exercising as a way to reduce doomscrolling.

So, I built Run for Fun.

It helps you reduce screen addiction, end doomscrolling, practice self-discipline, and get healthy. You can privately and securely limit the usage of addictive social media apps and websites until you perform physical activity. When you walk, run, bike, climb stairs, and exercise, you gain screen time points to use those apps.

You can control how easy or hard it is to gain those points. You can choose which weekdays and between what time period restrictions apply. You can snooze restrictions, choose how long to snooze for, or disable the snooze button altogether.

I built it in Swift and according to Apple, is only 860 kB to download and 1.8 MB to install. I pride myself in keeping downloads small.

It uses Apple's Screen Time and HealthKit APIs. The physical activity and app usage data stays private and is not transmitted to me, the developer.

There are no ads and no subscriptions.

Free version is limited to restricting 1 app, 1 website, 1 category and all-day everyday schedule. A one time only in app purchase gets you lifetime access to restricting unlimited apps, websites, and categories, restrictions scheduled on specific weekdays and time, and custom screen time points calculation and snooze times.

Is this something you may find useful?
by unsungNovelty | 2025-04-21 17:19:02+00:00
> The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations

I beg to differ here. OSS and Free Software movement was conceived for the freedom to change the software to the user's needs. The entire meaning of free as is freedom means as long as I abide by the license properly, I can do whatever I want with it. Whether you like it or not, this means Microsoft can make money out of curl project if they want to. This is the same way we used to burn Ubuntu cd's and resell it back in the early 2000s. It's allowed and IIRC Ubuntu cd cover used to proudly advocate burning, sharing those cds.

This big tech and money in OSS is a new phenomenon. I am neither against them or with them. But just that it is not the reason why OSS or Free Software movement happened.
by danudey | 2025-04-21 17:20:00+00:00
This is fundamentally my thoughts on it as well.

If I write something useful and convenient for people, something that makes peoples' lives better, it's probably not going to see a lot of use realistically speaking. I'm not out there making a name for myself, I'm just doing some stuff.

If Microsoft takes my code, turns it into a separate project with a separate name, distributes it as part of their own commercial offering, uses it in their marketing... great! It means that my ideas are making people's lives better. Yes, it's enriching a giant soulless megacorp who, at a high-level, does not actually care about how people feel and only cares about making money off my work, but I care about how people feel, and if it means that my work gets to make people's lives better then that's great - I wasn't going to make money off it anyway, so I lose nothing.

Unless they take implicit or explicit credit for what I made. I don't need my name on the marketing or an invitation to a launch party, but at least make a note in the docs somewhere that "this project was forked from ...." so that I can point to it and say hey, look at this cool thing I helped make happen.

I guess what would really irritate me, when it comes down to it, is not that the giant corporation did this, but that the individual developers did this - some dev out there found my project, decided to use my code, and made the conscious decision to strip out my attribution and claim it as their own. That's what would actually hurt.
by jakobnissen | 2025-04-21 17:20:39+00:00
You mean tab completion in Rust? Otherwise, let me introduce you to:

imap(f) = x -> Iterators.map(f, x) ifilter(f) = x -> Iterators.filter(f, x) v = things |> ifilter(isodd) |> imap(do_process) |> collect
by daxfohl | 2025-04-21 17:20:47+00:00
Of course not. The visual part is window dressing on the argument. The real point is, before declaring AGI, I think the way we interact with these agents needs to be more like human to human interaction. Right now, agents generally accept a command, figure out which from a small number of MCPs that have been precoded for it to use, do that thing you wanted right or wrong, the end. If it does the right thing, huge confirmation bias that it's AGI. Maybe the MCP did most of the real work. If it doesn't, well, blame the prompt or maybe blame the MCPs are lacking good descriptions or something.

To get a solid read on AGI, we need to be grading them in comparison to a remote coworker. That they necessarily see a GUI is not required. But what is required is that they have access to all the things a human would, and don't require any special tools that limit their search space to a level below what a human coworker would have. If it's possible for a human coworker to do their whole job via console access, sure, that's fine too. I only say GUI because I think it'd actually be the easiest option, and fairly straightforward for these agents. Image processing is largely solved, whereas figuring out how to do everything your job requires via console is likely a mess.

And like I said, "using the computer", whether via GUI or screen reader or whatever else, isn't going to be the hard part. The hard part is, now that they have this very abstract capability and astronomically larger search space, it changes the way we interact with them. We send them email. We ping them on Slack. We don't build special baby mittens MCPs and such for them and they have to enter the human world and prove that they can handle it as a human would. Then I would say we're getting closer to AGI. But as long as we're building special tools and limiting their search space to that limited scope, to me it feels like we're still a long way off.
by ElijahLynn | 2025-04-21 17:22:03+00:00
I've been "feed free" for over two years now. Took a while, but damn is it a better life!!!!

Didn't matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.

I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I still have to be careful about.

It's feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release which affects motivation.
by ein0p | 2025-04-21 17:22:24+00:00
Wait till they study what happens when you stop reading (political) news as well. A complete game changer for mental health. You can't really do anything about any of it, and most of it is fake either by omission or outright, yet over the past decade or so the media perfected the art of making you anxious, and getting you to constantly doom scroll so they show more ads. This isn't harmless for your well being either.
by 9x39 | 2025-04-21 17:22:38+00:00
That brings up another dimension - $/hour. Gaming IS indisputably one of the cheapest 'modern' hobbies in terms of cost over time next to reading while shooting (or fishing) daily is something you typically only see regularly in the professional circuits.

One of the things that's hard to nail down from the article's thesis is what really costs people? Initial or ongoing costs?

Not unlike what I was saying with the top end of the fishing or shooting markets skewing what 'average' looks like, consider two things I found here:

More than half of gaming revenue is microtransactions: https://insider-gaming.com/58-of-pc-gaming-revenue-came-from...

About 10% of microtransaction customers bring in the biggest share of revenue: https://www.chriskempt.com/p/how-much-do-whales-spend

I think thrifty Switch gamers and weekend warrior beginner trap shooters are both little affordable niches in the bigger landscape of the hobby, and it's hard to know what really constitutes typical.
by gspencley | 2025-04-21 17:22:42+00:00
> I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people.

I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself:

I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before.

Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing.

My operating definition of "racism" is:

"The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin."

You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely.

Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.
by projectazorian | 2025-04-21 17:22:53+00:00
I've gotten in the habit of straight out calling out these people, including throwing them out of my house when they start down this road.

They tend to have some form of serious mental illness and/or a major substance problem they're not interested in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So not exactly great people to have around anyway.

Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having no friends is better than having fake friends who undermine you.
by shrink | 2025-04-21 17:22:59+00:00
I built handles.net[1] to make it easy for organisations to manage their member's handles, I think that using domain names for identity is neat and valuable, I have a vested interest in its success as a paradigm but... domain name "verification" is not the right solution today for non-technical people. I shared this sentiment a few months ago[2] and I have only become more confident in that assessment since.

The approach they've taken ("trusted verifiers") is an approach aligned with their values, as it is an extension of the labelling concept that is already well established in the ecosystem. As an idealist, it is a shame that they gave up, I think they could have had an impact on shifting how non-technical people view domain names and understand digital identity... but as a pragmatist, this is the right choice. Bluesky has to pick their battles, and this isn't a hill to die on.

[1] https://handles.net [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749786
by dmitrygr | 2025-04-21 17:23:06+00:00
A53 is not a great core, and seemingly no compiler targets it well. Back at el goog, ChromeOS team had an intern who used a cycle-accurate model of it to find that android's AOT compiler produced shit code for it when multiplies were involved. A small patch to the AOT compiler produced measurable perf improvement in most android workloads on A53, costing no perf on A57/A72. This patch was, of course, not shipped (politics).
by consumer451 | 2025-04-21 17:23:32+00:00
I am pretty much in the same boat, although I was never that advanced a dev to begin with.

It is truly amazing what a superpower these LLM tools are for me. This particular moment in time feels like a perfect fit for my knowledge level. I am building as many MVP ideas as quickly as I can. Hopefully, one of them sticks with users.
by therealpygon | 2025-04-21 17:23:36+00:00
And if they are “saving” a terminally ill patient who wanted to go peacefully rather than continuing to endure pain and suffering? So if you are suggesting that walking in, saving someone, then walking away feeling good about yourself while not caring about the pain and suffering you may have inflicted on that person by your actions is justification of morality, I’d say that is just as equally a disgusting of a display of selfishness at the expense of others. Since we are making up hypotheticals, we might as well use this one that is more similar to what happens in reality.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-04-21 17:23:40+00:00
Impressive project! We'd love to use something like this over at Delfa (https://delfa.ai). How does this hold up from the perspective of stability? I've spoken to various folks working on voice models, and one thing that has consistently held Eleven Labs ahead of the pack from my experience is that their models seem to mostly avoid (while albeit not being immune to) accent shifts and distortions when confronted with unfamiliar medical terminology.

A high quality, affordable TTS model that can consistently nail medical terminology while maintaining an American accent has been frustratingly elusive.
by ryanhecht | 2025-04-21 17:24:30+00:00
I definitely intend on playing around with this later! I see that [gzipped log archives aren't supported](https://dmitryfrank.com/projects/nerdlog/article#depends_on_...), minimizing the use case for me personally. You've at least thought enough about that to bring it up as a limitation you think people will call attention to -- any plans to eventually support it?
by cogman10 | 2025-04-21 17:24:30+00:00
> I don't see why they wouldn't pay it.

Oh I do.

The person that wanted to setup the meeting likely has no budget control. Big corps like to keep the ability to pay for stuff out of the hands of individuals and isolated in bureaucratic nightmares.

You'd be more than reasonable to demand "$1000/hr with 1 hour minimum" for such a consulting and I'd see HR in MS doing an immediate "hell no" to that.
Show HN: BioLight – Passive entropy engine: raw randomness and 0 post-processing
by ladaxia | 2025-04-21 17:24:43+00:00
BioLight is a new kind of entropy engine. It passively accumulates entropy over time, from volatile raw inputs, filtering only the statistically elite samples. No hashing, no whitening, no compression (still 7.9+ Shannon entropy). Entropy is stored and exported in raw form, transparently. Designed to run indefinitely, grows stronger and purer over time, and be verifiable by anyone. Released under the Ladaxia_Public_License. Open to all feedback: scientific and practical. Github: https://github.com/Ladaxia/BioLight Contact: ladaxia@proton.me
by Hyperlisk | 2025-04-21 17:24:44+00:00
This is my experience as well. I've been skeptical for a long time, but recent releases have changed my mind (it's important to try new things even if skeptical). Large context windows are game-changers. I can't copy/paste fast enough.

The future is coming, but you still need fundamentals to make sure the generated code has been properly setup for growth. That means you need to know what you expect your codebase to look like before or during your prompting so you can promote the right design patterns and direct the generation towards the proper architecture.

So software design is not going away. Or it shouldn't for software that expects to grow.
by fwip | 2025-04-21 17:25:14+00:00
No, I mean to illustrate that "blue" and "knowledge" have a vastly different degree in variation in definition.

Like you say, all words of course have different definitions between individuals, but you and I are obviously able to communicate without specifying every definition. There exists a spectrum between well-agreed-upon definitions (like "and") and fuzzier ones. The definition of "knowledge" is divisive enough that many people disagree vehemently on definitions, which is illustrated by the fact that there is a whole Wikipedia article on it.

If there is a "midwit trap" related to this, there is certainly a Sorites paradox trap as well - that because all words have varying definitions, that it is no use to point out that some words' definitions are more variable than others.
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-21 17:25:28+00:00
An advantage to the Monad approach is that it sugars to the try/catch approach and vice-versa (try/catch desugars to monads). JS Promises are also already "Either<reject, resolve>". In an async function you are writing try/catch, but it desugars to monadic code. You could write an alternative to a library like "neverthrow" that just wraps everything in a Promise and get free desugaring from the async and await keywords (including boundary conditions like auto-wrapping synchronous methods that throw into Promise rejections). You could similarly write everything by hand monadically/pseudo-monadically directly with `return Promise.reject(new Error())` and `return Promise.resolve(returnValue)` and everything just works with a lot of existing code and devs are quite familiar with Promise returns.

It might be nice for JS to have a more generic sounding/seeming "do-notation"/"computation expression" language than async/await, but it is pretty powerful as-is, and kind of interesting seeing people talk about writing Monadic JS error handling and ignoring the "built-in" one that now exists.

This is also where I see it as a false dichotomy between Monads and try/catch. One is already a projection of the other in existing languages today (JS Promise, C# Task, Python Future/Task sometimes), and that's probably only going to get deeper and in more languages. (It's also why I think Go being intentionally "anti-Monadic" feels like such a throwback to bad older languages.)
by Straw | 2025-04-21 17:25:42+00:00
Lisp macros allow a general solution to this that doesn't just handle chained collection operators but allows you to decide the order in which you write any chain of calls.

For example, we can write: (foo (bar (baz x))) as (-> x baz bar foo)

If there are additional arguments, we can accommodate those too: (sin (* x pi) as (-> x (* pi) sin)

Where expression so far gets inserted as the first argument to any form. If you want it inserted as the last argument, you can use ->> instead:

(filter positive? (map sin x)) as (->> x (map sin) (filter positive?))

You can also get full control of where to place the previous expression using as->.

Full details at https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros
by riquito | 2025-04-21 17:26:47+00:00
For the copyright part, it wouldn't have lead to a different outcome. What could have been different is that Microsoft could have had difficulties in working on a GPL fork which is harder to resell (you can, but people are sometimes afraid for good or bad reasons) and so Microsoft could have proposed to the author to sell them a copy with a different license.

But reading the article, the author appears to be more disgruntled by the fact that a behemoth forked his project than the mishandling of the copyright that can be fixed with one PR (he is right to be pissed about that, but that's an easily solvable problem, I doubt Microsoft will stand against it).
by iLemming | 2025-04-21 17:27:42+00:00
> Handwriting activates broader brain networks than typing

No shit. My handwriting is so cryptic, I myself can't even read it. And if I have to go through my older than a few months notes - forget about it. It requires so much brain power, imagination and creativity (mostly for coming up with cursing words) that it must be not only fully activating my brain networks, but the afferent neurons up my butt.
by nu11ptr | 2025-04-21 17:27:43+00:00
Strange comment given the obvious differences in GPL vs. non-GPL regardless your personal opinion. GPL code means if I decide to distribute my project in the future, I will have to distribute my source code. That isn't a risk I'm willing to take. Some of my projects are open source, but I want to retain the option of doing what I want with my code, so I don't use GPL licensed code.
by hinkley | 2025-04-21 17:29:07+00:00
Before the economy tanked the last time I was at a couple of places that still sent people to conventions. I took a notebook and went to a mix of talks about stuff I was interested in and stuff my company was interested in. I don’t think there has ever been a conference that cost more to send devs to than what we cost the company for a day, so having us out of the office is the most expensive part of the deal (maybe that’s why some conferences go into the weekend).

I usually came back with enough notes to save me at least a couple of weeks of work. If you know how to listen, talking to an SME can save you a ton of time.

And from what I understand Microsoft is good at planning interviews to sound like they’re extemporaneous while they’ve actually worked out ahead of time what questions they need to ask you to get what they want.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-21 17:29:15+00:00
The issue for social media companies is that its dead. No one posts like they did in 2010 anymore. Go ahead and follow only your friends actual posts on fb and it is going to be pretty dead. Likewise for instagram and other platforms. They don’t want you to be able to scan an entire chronological feed in 10 mins and be updated.
by lovich | 2025-04-21 17:30:21+00:00
Yea but see, I have the benefit of having had this conversation with someone making the same argument a million times times in the past.

If you want to claim he’s going down a different path you or they could make that argument, and I am going to tell you that if you want to make a claim using the beginning of a well worn argument and not include information on why your position is materially different, then you don’t get to be upset when people make assumptions
by mrexroad | 2025-04-21 17:30:31+00:00
Yeah, majority of my comments never get submitted. I’ll type a reply, edit, challenge/research my assumptions, and then ask myself this it’s adding material value to the conversation that doesn’t need to be further explained/elaborated. Most often I’m content with having refined my thoughts on a topic and close tab without submitting. Kinda like work email chains pre-slack.
by dimonomid | 2025-04-21 17:30:57+00:00
Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah it would be great, and I do want to support it, especially if the demand is popular. In fact, even if you ungzip them manually, as of today nerdlog doesn't support more than 2 files in a logstream, which needs to be fixed first.

Specifically about supporting gzipped logs though, the UX I'm thinking about is like this: if the requested time range goes beyond the earliest available ungzipped file, then warn the user that we'll have to ungzip the next file (that warning can be turned off in options though, but by default I don't want to just ungzip it silently, because it can consume a signficant amount of disk space). So if the user agrees, nerdlog ungzips it and places somewhere under tmp. It'll never delete it manually though, relying on the regular OS means of cleaning up /tmp, and will keep using it as long as it's available.

Does it make sense?