MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built Aphel – a focus app that helps you break phone addiction
by canberkh | 2025-05-18 13:50:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I built Aphel, a focused and minimalist screen time app that helps you regain control over your phone usage and eliminate fake dopamine hits from addictive apps.

Most screen time apps are either too passive (just stats) or feel like parental controls. Aphel is built for people who want to build discipline without relying on motivation.

Key features:

Focus Timer with a strict mode that blocks selected apps until the timer ends

Automated schedules like "Work Hours" or "Night Reading"

Dopamine Load score that helps you visualize how much of your time was driven by distractions

Built using Apple’s native Screen Time API — no VPNs, no accessibility hacks

Fully private — no account required, no tracking, no ads

I built this for myself after getting frustrated with endless scrolling and losing hours of deep work. Aphel is designed to be a practical tool for self-respect and long-term focus.

You can try it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aphel-screen-time-control/id67...

Happy to answer questions or share more about how I built it.

Thanks, Can
by ksec | 2025-05-18 13:51:45+00:00
MediaTek and others using ARMv9 design and pricing, heck even Qualcomm are selling their SoC on Windows PC at cheaper price compared to Intel or AMD.

Even at a higher IP price their final product are cheaper, faster and competitive. There may be a strategy about leaving money on the table, but it is another thing about leaving TOO much money on the table. If Intel and AMD's pricing is so far above ARM, there is nothing wrong with increasing your highest performance core 's pricing.

I would not be surprised in a 2 - 3 years time the highest PC performance CPU / SoC is coming from Nvidia with ARM CPU Core rather than x86. But knowing Nvidia I know they will charge similar pricing to Intel :D
by Smaug123 | 2025-05-18 13:52:13+00:00
You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point of spaced repetition, which is that you don't memorise the same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough times to learn it, and not many more.
by foldr | 2025-05-18 13:52:51+00:00
Little Britain was always crap and completely mainstream and non-edgy. It's a series of one joke sketches based on familiar stereotypes. I don't want to 'cancel' it, and the occasional sketch gets a titter out of me. But to hold it up as an example of edgy, groundbreaking comedy is quite absurd. You can find oodles of much edgier and funnier shows on British TV today.
by blablabla123 | 2025-05-18 13:52:55+00:00
To be fair Protonmail has much more to offer than "just" privacy friendly legislation. The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads. That in my opinion already puts it ahead among the main mail providers. Also it has the Proton bridge, VPN etc. etc. I'd say it really depends on the personal threat model and willingness to DIY. My main complaint with it is bad interoperability with gpg though. (I'm not sure how anything less is supposed to help with end-to-end privacy...)
by chongli | 2025-05-18 13:53:00+00:00
Learning a language as a hobby is tough. If you don't need the language to communicate and survive in your environment then you have essentially zero real motivation to learn it.

The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a language you need to use it to communicate. That means making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming other media in that language.
by wiz21c | 2025-05-18 13:53:47+00:00
If success is not a function of quality (in general), then producers have an incentive to produce a lot of cheap stuff. It's like playing lottery more often.

In the end, there will still be quality content but it will be much more expensive, available only to an elite.

Then the elite will now what's good quality and will be able to produce more good quality. Those will be hired.

The vast majority, only exposed to bad quality, will not be able to produce quality anymore. And won't be hired anymore.

And so here is your great quality divide.
by barrell | 2025-05-18 13:54:30+00:00
I would say the implementations are time optimized, over the others. I’m building a language learning application, and have put in a lot of effort to make sure that the Spaced Repeition is motivation-optimized.

It’s centered around your performance and review times, to make sure you aren’t struggling to much; no due dates to avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics; dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.

Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and call it a day, but that’s not the only way to use it!
by pm215 | 2025-05-18 13:54:42+00:00
This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which is pretty discouraging to even start, you probably get more of them wrong than usual, so you likely do fewer reviews than you normally would, and the situation tends to get worse instead of better.

An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:

- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption

- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)
by bowsamic | 2025-05-18 13:54:57+00:00
1. Generally people using such systems to learn language only need to do so if they aren't immersed in the country where it is being spoken. I stopped using Anki for German after a while of living here, even though I'm still learning. Therefore, most language learners are doing so not because they want to live in the country but because they want to consume media written in that language

2. Japanese is becoming one of the most popular languages for foreign media, probably even surpassing English at this point. Anime is really huge now, particularly in the US. It has shifted from being a nerd thing to being of interest for the "cool kids" (if there is even such a thing now). Japan also had a huge and very interesting media industry in the 80s and 90s including some very novel video game concepts, most of which has not been translated
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-18 13:55:24+00:00
I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me, not because of gamification as a concept, but rather because of their particular implementation - with tons of clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and watching ads and shit.

I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.
by brudgers | 2025-05-18 13:55:53+00:00
there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make

Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.

$5/mo

As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.

[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…

[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.
by westurner | 2025-05-18 13:56:02+00:00
UML class diagrams in mermaid syntax require less code than just defining actual classes with stubbed attrs and methods in some programming languages.

Years ago I tried ArgoUML for generating plone classes/models, but there was a limit to how much custom code could be round-tripped and/or stuffed into UML XML IIRC.

Similarly, no-code tools are all leaky abstractions: they model with UI metaphors only a subset of patterns possible in the target programming language, and so round-trip isn't possible after adding code to the initial or periodic code-generation from the synced abstract class diagram.

Instead, it's possible to generate [UML class] diagrams from minimal actual code. For example, the graph_models management command in Django-extensions generates GraphViz diagrams from subclasses of django.models.Model. With code to diagram workflow (instead of the reverse), you don't need to try and stuff code in the extra_code attr of a modeling syntax so that the generated code can be patched and/or transformed after every code generation from a diagram.

https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_mod...

I wrote something similar to generate (IDEF1X) diagrams from models for the specified waterfall process for an MIS degree capstone course.

It may be easier to prototype object-oriented code with UML class diagrams in mermaid syntax, but actual code shouldn't be that tough to generate diagrams from.

IIRC certain journals like ACM have their own preferred algorithmic pseudocode and LaTeX macros.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-18 13:56:14+00:00
I don't think that library refutes anything of what I said.

First of, that library requires you to fundamentally change the code, by moving some precomputation outside loops.

Of course I can do a similar trick to move the division outside the loop without that library using simple fixed-point math, something which is a very basic optimization technique. So any performance comparison would have to be against that, not the original code.

It is also much, much slower if your denominator changes for each invocation:

In terms of processor time, pre-computing the proper magic number and shift is on the order of one to three hardware divides, for non-powers of 2.

If you care about a fast hardware divider, then you're much more likely to have such code rather than the trivially-optimized code like the library example.
by simonw | 2025-05-18 13:56:42+00:00
I think a lot of this comes down to attitude to learning.

People respond to incentives. The incentives we have set up right now are that you should get educational certification (eg a degree) in order to unlock access to the best jobs.

People who are self-incentivized to learn - auto-didacts - see LLMs as a gift: if you are insatiably curious and are willing to put the effort in to learn an LLM is a hugely useful accelerant.

If you just want the end certification, cheating with LLMs in a way that doesn't help you learn much yourself is the path of least resistance.
by david_allison | 2025-05-18 13:56:55+00:00
Currently under debate. FSRS is likely better than SM-17. No data on SM-18

Q&A/discussion: https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS

Repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17

Discussion: https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/136895216717...
by TheDong | 2025-05-18 13:57:08+00:00
> graded by an LLM

This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good", and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".

For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".

There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on random cards of any difficulty.

I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain implants.
by wongarsu | 2025-05-18 13:57:13+00:00
You learn Japanese for the media and culture; Mandarin for the financial opportunities; Russian for the reverse-engineering community; Spanish, French or Arabic to be able to speak with large diverse groups of people, typically for travel; Klingon, Na'vi, Esperanto or Elvish to fit in certain communities

Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount of work and perseverance required
by Elaris | 2025-05-18 13:57:24+00:00
I really resonate with this. Since having a child, most of my time revolves around them. There’s no time for myself, no time for friends. The friends I used to be close with have slowly drifted away. I’ve been living like this for three years now, and while watching my child grow up fills me with happiness, there are moments when I feel lost. It’s like I’ve lost a bit of myself along the way. I wonder if anyone else has felt this way, and how they’ve managed to find balance between being a parent and staying connected to who they were before.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-05-18 13:58:01+00:00
You might be able to reduce the amount of information sent to the LLM by 100 fold if you use a stacking context. Here is an example of one made available on Github (not mine). [0] Moreover, you will be able to parse the DOM or have strategies that parse the DOM. For example, if you are only concerned with video, find all the videos and only send that information. Perhaps parsing a page once finding the structure and caching that so the next time only the required data is used. (I see you are storing tool sequence but I didn't find an example of storing a DOM structure so that requests to subsequent pages are optimized.)

If someone visits my website that I control using your Chrome Extension, I will 100% be able to find a way to drain all their accounts probably in the background without them even knowing. Here are some ideas about how to mitigate that.

The problem with Playwright is that it requires Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) which opens massive security problems for a browser that people use for their banking and managing anything that involves credit cards are sensitive accounts. At one point, I took the injected folder out of Playwright and injected it into a Chrome Extension because I thought I needed its tools, however, I quickly abandoned it as it was easy to create workflows from scratch. You get a lot of stuff immediately by using Playwright but likely you will find it will be much lighter and safer to just implement that functionality by yourself.

The only benefit of CDP for normal use is allowing automation of any action in the Chrome Extension that requires trusted events, e.g. play sound, go fullscreen, banking websites what require trusted event to transfer money. I'm my opinion, people just want a large part of the workflow automated and don't mind being prompted to click a button when trusted events are required. Since it doesn't matter what button is clicked you can inject a big button that says continue or what is required after prompting the user. Trusted events are there for a reason.

[0] https://github.com/andreadev-it/stacking-contexts-inspector
by binary132 | 2025-05-18 13:58:11+00:00
I hate to play Ayn Rand’s advocate here, but:

- Developing private nuclear is a good thing

- Getting giant power sinks off public grid is a good thing

- Private electrical generation doesn’t need to guarantee the same level of service as utilities depended upon by the public. Who cares if they surge or starve some hash calculator? Why not let them operate more efficiently?
by fidotron | 2025-05-18 13:58:27+00:00
To quote you elsewhere in this thread:

> Patents tend to expire at different times around the world, plus there is the possibility of submarine patents. Without a declaration from Hitachi, adopting any processor design using their ISA is likely considered a legal risk.

If you combine this with your observation that CPU patents tend to be ISA independent then surely any widespread commercial deployment of RISC-V requires an assertion from everyone else in the semi industry that they do not in fact own patents on your implementation of it or it is likely considered a legal risk.

That or you just hold some things to different standards than others.
by coffeefirst | 2025-05-18 13:59:41+00:00
Jaron Lanier had a bit that there’s a subset of the population who can’t handle social media, it totally warps their minds. There’s some famous examples, but I’ve seen in with friends.

I can’t quite relate because even a minute on TikTok makes me want to vomit. But I really dislike the idea that it’s the user’s fault for not having discipline or having some unspecified psychological quirk; the application is working on them exactly the way it was designed to.
by ecocentrik | 2025-05-18 13:59:56+00:00
They had to transfer gold, US dollars or other physical assets to finance their operations before which made them significantly more vulnerable and restricted. Sending crypto to your family is a temporary solution to the problem of the kleptocracy economically handicapping their capacity to generate and retain wealth. Crypto enables the kleptocrat to transfer the wealth they steal from their country internationally with a significantly lower transactional cost and at significantly higher volume.

By sending your family money, as crypto or US dollars, you have to assume some percentage of that money is going to end up in the kleptocrat's pocket. If the funds are eventually settled through official exchanges in the country, its very likely that the government gets a cut of the exchange transactions. If its being settled by unofficial exchanges like street exchange vendors, those individuals probably pay some bribe or tax to operate that eventually makes its way back to the kleptocrat. Additionally you are offering the kleptocrat increased liquidity by operating with crypto. Assume the kleptocrat is the largest buyer of cryptocurrencies in their country.
by covertcorvid | 2025-05-18 14:00:30+00:00
RemNote (https://www.remnote.com/) solves the problems people are mentioning about

1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format

- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog

which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.

2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.

I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
by ryao | 2025-05-18 14:01:16+00:00
There is a history of industry litigation over people implementing others’ ISAs without their full blessing. The Qualcomm ARM lawsuit was the most recent example of this. There is less litigation over people designing CPUs using ISAs whose designers permitted reuse.

You keep trying to spread FUD concerning RISC-V. The issue you are trying to raise is one that if valid, would prevent anyone from designing a CPU, yet many do without legal issues. Hence, the issue you raise is invalid (by modus tollens).
by rchaud | 2025-05-18 14:01:32+00:00
"Might makes right" is how we got here. Airbnb and Uber can break hotel and taxi regulations openly, but if you start your own ride-for-cash service, the state will shut you down for any number of by-law violations. They have law firms and lobbyists on retainer and you don't. Similarly, copyright infringement could be a jail sentence for you, but a "legal gray area" for them.
by robwwilliams | 2025-05-18 14:02:00+00:00
Just reviewed the paper. Extremely elegant flamingo dance. But let me reserve my comments to the Hacker News theme of an enlarged brain (or really an enlarged neocortex). The key panels on this topic are Fig. 1g and 1h. OMG, the dissections of these "best examples" are sad–– the olfactory bulbs are serious torn and paraflocculi are detached. The histogram that is Fig 1h has a grand total of 6 measurement for the human transgenic mouse line and 4 (four) points for the control. Hey when you have a statistically significant result why mess it up by evaluating 10 of each of the two groups. You might not get published in Nature or airplay on HN, and would that not be a shame?

As for the measurement of brain size, it is a planimetric projection of the area of the dorsal surface of the neocortex. This is a lame way to do morphometry. Squish the brain a bit and the area will expand beautifully—and by way more than 6.5%.

One last comment on the genetics of these animals. The are probably incorrectly stated to be at least F8 progeny of the mixed 129-B6N embryonic stem cells. I hope they mean N8 backcross progeny––that is to say, 8th generation congenic lines. But in this case they appear to have backcrossed weirdly to a different type of B6; the standard C57BL/6J strain. All of this means that even in the best case, they have three different genomes banging around in supposedly co-isogenic cases and their controls: 1. chunks of 129 strain chromosomes that will still be common even at 8 generations, 2. chunks of B6N chromosomes that will also be common at 8 generations, and of course the B6J background strain. You would have to carry out sparse whole genome sequencing or use the GigaMUGA array to unconfound the genetics in this study.