MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Launched Productivity App: distraction-free to-do list and focus timer
by sreeragnandan | 2025-07-29 06:30:07+00:00
Hey HN I deployed one of projects: FocoDo.Work — a minimal, distraction-free focus timer and to-do list app.

I built this to help myself stay focused without the clutter of most productivity tools, and thought others might find it useful too. It’s privacy-first, super simple, and works right in the browser.

Features: Add tasks and track time with a built-in timer See the total time you spent working on each task All data is stored locally on your device — no sign-up needed Share your tasks with a quick link across devices or with friends/colleagues Keep the timer visible in a floating picture-in-picture window Full-screen mode for deep work

Would love to hear your feedback or suggestions. I’m planning to keep iterating on it!

Try it out here: https://focodo.work
by implements | 2025-07-29 06:30:52+00:00
> Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.

Using the word “gender” to refer to the concepts of both “reproductive sex” (chromosomes, gametes, genitals) and also “gender” (socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity) certainly makes it very complex to reason about and discuss, particularly if it feels socially distasteful to separate the two.

Without getting the soapbox out, it seems to me that there’s an infinite number of possible “genders” as each unique individual can construct whatever permutation of supposedly feminine and masculine coded things that suits them. But broadly speaking, there are two sexes - the one that went down the developmental pathway to produce and ejaculate semen, and the one that went down the pathway to be able to ovulate, incubate fertilised eggs, give birth and nurse with milk.

So in considering sport, given the physiological consequences of reproductive role causes female performance to be on average significantly lower than for males, does it make sense for sporting categories to be gendered (how people look or act) or sexed (how people are constructed)?

There’s a inclusivity argument for “yes” from the point of view of the interests of one group (transgender people), but it seems to come at the cost of preventing female athletes from doing anything other than merely participating in many competitions, rather than being able to win them.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-29 06:31:02+00:00
The point of mandatory classes isn't about respecting time or being efficient.

It's there to make 100% clear that you can't say "I didn't know" when you do something that was explicitly explained in the online class.

So now if a new middle-manager has an agendaless meeting, nobody shows up and they throw a massive fit - people can point at the class and say "It's company policy, deal with it"
by katzenversteher | 2025-07-29 06:31:32+00:00
I noticed that a lot of apps for young children seem not to test them properly with real children. Examples:

- No / bad multitouch. Children will touch the screen when holding the device and then use the other hand to perform an action. With no multitouch or focus on the first touch action the app does not register later actions and the child gets super frustrated. In addition, with very small hands it is very likely that multiple fingers touch the screen, especially the thumb if the index finger is used.

- Controls close to the edge: On many devices swiping actions close to the edge will trigger phone status menus or switching between apps. This will confuse children.
by exmadscientist | 2025-07-29 06:31:36+00:00
What a strange article. It feels like one of those cases where the author gathers so many of the pieces, then, just... fails to solve the puzzle. Or get anywhere close.

I agree that everything feels broken. I'd like to do something about it. Let me deploy my leverage to work on that. Here's my "labor leverage", right here, this comment. Check. Leverage strength... not much. Let's bring my "capital leverage" to bear... okay, done, my 401(k) is invested in my favorite companies. Did you notice? No? Okay, leverage strength... let's go with epsilon^2. And my "code leverage"... uh... I don't think I have any.

So, wait, I, personally, don't have any third-order leverage at all? How am I supposed to go up against trillion-dollar, billion-node networks, with my epsilon^3 "leverage"?

That's the real problem: I don't actually have any meaningful leverage. I'm not in the game.

Is that actually true? Doesn't matter: I believe it to be true. Sure looks like everything is broken to me.
by bornfreddy | 2025-07-29 06:32:19+00:00
Agree, except:

> ...and crypto is pretty useless as a payment method these days due to slow processing and high value fluctuations.

That is not true. For example using USDT on Polygon is cheap (~0.00 USD fee), fast (a few seconds) and not volatile (because its value is tied to USD). There are other options too, with a slightly different set of tradeoffs.

The main problems of crypto are actually scams and illiteracy of the masses on how to use it. The situation is IMHO improving on both counts, but slowly.
by ball_of_lint | 2025-07-29 06:32:33+00:00
> helping people recognize the type of power they're actually wielding and use it more consciously

lol, lmao even. I don't even think this would work if there wasn't capitalism in play.

> Most importantly, we need to redesign how we measure success and allocate resources.

Oh, they Are suggesting we dismantle capitalism.

Even if we were to dismantle capitalism in America, TikTok is a Chinese business/product. So this has to be a global solution. While we're wielding our lever that can move the globe let's fix global warming, war, hunger, etc while we're at it. No point in half measures.

Does feel good to read though, nice and fluffy.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-29 06:33:50+00:00
> though I think in practice network latency dominates so much that this kind of optimization is fairly low impact.

In practice, no.

Network latency is the least problematic part of the stack. I consistently get <3ms. It's largely encode/decode time which in my setup sits at around 20ms meaning any work in this area would actually have a a HUGE impact.
by mandmandam | 2025-07-29 06:34:51+00:00
If you want to bomb 33 out of 36 hospitals you should need better evidence than a single photo of a tunnel near a hospital. One which Israel built themselves in the 80s btw [0].

And let's not forget that Israel were caught lying about such evidence on multiple occasions in the past. Remember "the list" that was actually a calendar? Remember the MRI room storing 5 guns - or was it 6? Only recently, we had this: [1].

All local and foreign doctors have consistently denied all such IDF claims. All we have is the word of the IDF (while countless UN, HRW, eyewitness reports etc say otherwise).

We know for a fact that Israel have repeatedly targeted medical personnel in their clearly marked vehicles, such as during the Hind Rajab incident; or when they massacred a convoy and buried them in a mass unmarked grave, then claimed that their lights weren't on to 'justify' it until a recovered phone proved otherwise [2].

And we know, without a doubt, who does embed military infrastructure under hospitals and beside civilians. Israel [3].

If you are a real person, arguing in good faith, I urge you to consider how badly you have been lied to. It's never too late to wake up.

0 - https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-israel-build-bunker-...

1 - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-16/israeli-video-claimed...

2 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2z103nqxo

3 - https://mmnews.tv/every-accusation-is-a-confession-idf-repor...
by advael | 2025-07-29 06:34:54+00:00
Yea. It's kind of the same error, in a way, as people who assume that there were no old people in the middle ages. The overwhelming majority of the increase in expected lifespan between then and now comes from drastic decreases in the infant and child mortality rates. While current medicine is only really making slow, incremental progress on letting the oldest people live longer, even if this was the bulk of the advancement you wouldn't see the kind of movement on overall life expectancy you'd get out of reducing those, and that's just on the pure statistical basis of how the metric is constructed. But on top of that, I think it's nearly impossible to understand just how many infants used to be stillborn, and how many diseases we essentially eliminated. The death of a child from an illness used to be a fairly common tragedy, now it is a rare one.

It's just a little internet toy that probably cashes out to be a slightly more impactful version of "memento mori", but you could add a little backend complexity without collecting any more demographic information and get a more accurate life expectancy given only one's current age from extant actuarial tables. If you wanted to be extra cheeky, you could have it adjust on a regional basis based on IP address too
by joshtbradley | 2025-07-29 06:35:11+00:00
Excellent observation. But I believe your proposed solutions could be strengthened. Improving “leverage literacy” may be a first step, but the fundamental mismatch in velocity will continue expanding the gap between technology and social institutions.

The question then becomes, how do we increase the velocity of social institutions to keep pace with technology? Balaji’s blockchain native societies come to mind. The comment in the thread about needing philosophical roots in engineering is interesting too. Curious what you think.
by sakoht | 2025-07-29 06:36:01+00:00
Remember that for the vent majority of human history, most people have not felt like they were truly in control of their lives. If it was not God, it was the king. Remember that nearly every animal except humans dies by being eaten. We and our pets are nearly the only creatures that die in their sleep. To suggest that the world is supposed to “work” in a way that leaves us feeling un-anxious is a modern sense of entitlement. For most animals, and most humans the only thing you were entitled to was to scrape by desperately until you finally, eventually, failed and died.

Our institutions were more stable before because people were more dedicated to maintaining them. They were created because overt pain or death was the alternative. But then they began to protect us from discomfort. Then from fear of discomfort. And for discomfort that exists in the mind. This was bound to come apart around the time some people asked to be afraid simply said “meh”

Will this go badly? Certainly from the perspective of whether people feel safe and content. But we have had 10,000 years of self generated strive from humans. It is our fuel.
by rklaehn | 2025-07-29 06:36:18+00:00
I am not one of the cryptographers on the team, but I will try to answer to the best of my knowledge.

QUIC is specifying TLS, specifically TLS 1.3 or larger. From the RFC 9001 (Using TLS to Secure QUIC): "Clients MUST NOT offer TLS versions older than 1.3.".

For the first request, brute forcing would mean guessing a 32 byte Ed25519 public key. That is not realistically possible.

For subsequent requests, even eavesdropping on the first request does not allow you to guess the public key, since the part of the handshake that contains the public key is already encrypted in TLS 1.3.

With all that being said, if you want to have a long running dumbpipe listen, you might want to restrict the set of nodes that are allowed to connect to it. We got a PR for this, but it is not yet merged.

https://github.com/n0-computer/dumbpipe/pull/68
by jaredklewis | 2025-07-29 06:36:45+00:00
Well, yea there’s a tension here.

If we want to use Gaza as a political tool to achieve some political aim (ie get my guy elected), that will be in conflict with doing something to help Gaza. Because in most countries, doing something meaningful is likely going to require cooperation between politicians from different parties. And it’s hard to get people to cooperate if you don’t plan on sharing the credit.
by rkagerer | 2025-07-29 06:37:24+00:00
That's a fair point.

Of course, once upon a time JavaScript was optional, and now it feels like half the web won't work without it. Cookies were optional but now many sites don't even bother with a "Reject All" choice. Google Play was optional on Android, now banking apps don't work without it.

Tried to do KYC with an institution in North America lately? They used to allow diverse options - eg. physically present yourself, get a notary to attest, upload signed documents & ID - but now app-based applets which offer little to no visibility into just what data they're hoovering up from your phone and no way to manually review what you're sending before submission (...to outsourced or even offshore processors) have displaced most of those alternatives due to their convenience (especially to those who don't care about privacy) and cost competitiveness (to the service providers). Filling out customs declarations when traveling is going the same way (with longer, more customer-hostile terms of service and privacy policies than came attached to the old paper forms).

The option that's most convenient to the masses tends to become defacto, and push out the last bastions of safe alternatives relied on by nerds like me - who pay attention to this stuff and try to advocate for user agency, data sovereignty for users, and the means to maintain a healthy privacy and security posture.

I would love to see some kind of attestable flavour of Android that I as a user control the keys to (in my own case I'd even be willing to provide assurances backed up by insurance, a bond, my reputation, repudiation to some degree of vendor liability if things go wrong, etc) with tooling to help me achieve a high level of security in a low-friction manner.
by elcritch | 2025-07-29 06:37:51+00:00
> I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better, and it's barely even trying to.

That would normally be a great plan, however, that doesn’t work with an enemy like Hamas. It doesn’t work with a people so thoroughly indoctrinated by Islamist extremists for decades. It’s something that us westerners just don’t comprehend readily.

It’s challenging to know what solution would work that doesn’t end up being as brutal as the Islamic countries often are to their own citizenry.

The wars in Yemen and Somalia are just as terrible as in Gaza but with 10’s of times the number of people and a fraction of the world aid Gaza gets. It shows what happens when those governments aren’t in strict control.

It’s also why almost every non-Islamic state in the Muslim world ends up being brutal military dictatorship. Hussein’s Ba’athist (atheist) party survived by being more brutal than the religious extremists. But in the west we think we can bring democracy or prosperity to such cultures and that it’ll flourish. The US spent trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan and decisively lost. Hundreds of thousands of people died and nothing changed.

Hamas literally kills and tortures any dissenters to gain power and to retain it.

Hamas infiltrated every Mosque in Gaza and installed their own clerics where they indoctrinate children from the youngest age that destroying Israel, killing Jews, and being a jihadist martyr is the loftiest goal.

Hamas isn’t shy about this either. Their original charter reads:

> The Motto of the Islamic Resistance Movement Article Eight > "Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model to be followed, the Koran its constitution, Jihad its way, and death for the sake of Allah its loftiest desire."

It states its goal is to not rest until the Quranic prophecy is fulfilled:

> the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. > The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: 'The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.' (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim)."

I watch videos from Gaza and hope and pray that the Palestinians there will realize that Hamas cares nothing for the lives of their children or them. Only for their ideology. Then perhaps Israel can do what you suggest.

Israel is in a tough place. The easiest option for them would to become what many people claim they already are and become right wing religious extremists on par with the Arab dictators. However, even now most Israelis don’t want that I believe. They’ve returned the Sinai to Egypt in the past. They withdrew from Gaza. What they got was Oct 7th.
by __d | 2025-07-29 06:38:03+00:00
I don't think you can reasonably complain that the 9fans moderators rejected your argument when they stated that the problem was that they perceived your posting as having been AI-generated.

Many forums are struggling with AI-generated slop. It's inevitable that some human-generated content will be incorrectly flagged.

Perhaps a path forward is to subscribe, lurk for a while, answer a few queries succinctly and accurately, and thus build up a profile as a real user before attempting to initiate such a conversation again?

Or, perhaps a paper at IWP9 next year?

Also, you might consider posting about 9front on the 9front list, rather than 9fans, if your criticisms are specific to its development?
by Nemo_bis | 2025-07-29 06:38:19+00:00
Yes, it takes some education. I've founded a cooperative in Finland and, although the legislation here is very favourable to cooperatives, it took me months to convince PRH (the public register) to certify our bylaws which included an option for investment shares. But we did it!

Do seek professional help. It doesn't need to be expensive lawyers, there may be gratis support from the cooperative network. https://ica.coop/en
by 9dev | 2025-07-29 06:38:38+00:00
What do you mean by "needed" here? If leaders weren't needed in some capacity, they wouldn't exist. Teams definitely do need leaders, to simply agree on a direction to move into to begin with.

If you're of the opinion that management plays their politics game while ICs run the show, then I pity you for the work environment you're in. That isn't how it's supposed to work, and there are better places.
by motorest | 2025-07-29 06:38:41+00:00
> Or just use Firefox because even using chromium is empowering Google to keep playing these games.

This. People like to complain about problems, but I wonder why they don't invest half that energy in actually fixing the problems.

> Maybe you have a problem with Firefox (...)

I've started to notice there is a very vocal opposition of Firefox whose common trait is that they actually do not or cannot present any tangible argument against Firefox. They just shit talk about Firefox, and hand-wave their criticism with inane comments like "they lost the boat".

Sometimes I wonder where that absurdity comes from.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-29 06:39:26+00:00
I had a deal with one engineer on my team, when I used to do that boss crap.

Their body had to be present in the meeting, but they could keep working on their laptop.

This was because WAAAY too much of the silent information about the company products was on their mind and it was by far the fastest way to get it out.

I could just quickly refer to them for 15 seconds to clarify how something actually worked and keep on with the meeting.

...also they once got bored during a sales meeting and coded a full-ass PoC about what the customer was asking during the meeting. That kind of person.
by sudopluto | 2025-07-29 06:39:38+00:00
Almost like starting a war is risky, and that by doing so you should weigh the consequences of you losing that war. Why would Hamas leaders expect to survive this war? Are they so cowardly that they would genocide their people to escape justice? If the people of gaza are going to be sacrificed by the IDF, or sacrificed by Hamas, at what point do they turn on Hamas as the weaker of the two?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-29 06:41:03+00:00
I think you are putting too much weight on the organization rather than the idea and collective it represents. From a very westernized idealized perspective.

Hamas is not this all encompassing high communication stable organization able to surrender tomorrow.

Hamas, or rather the idea, is instead made up of everyone who had a family member, relative or friend killed by Israel wanting to live a good life without the threat or pain of past actions.

One group of a loosely connected collective surrendering won’t materially change the situation on the ground.
by xeonmc | 2025-07-29 06:41:48+00:00
You can buy a Uniball One-F (the premium body) and put Jetstream refills in there as a drop-in replacement.

Note though that for longevity in engineering notebooks I don’t like to use Jetstreams because of the yellowing seepage problem over time. But for everyday throwaway writing this setup is the ideal best of both worlds.
by maxbond | 2025-07-29 06:41:56+00:00
I think that, if a new user is going to encounter an error, it should be that SQLx couldn't talk to the database rather than that a mysterious file doesn't exist. They're going to need to connect to a dev database either way. They can learn about caching the schema information when they come to those later steps like building a CI pipeline. Early in a project, when your queries and schema are unstable, caching isn't going to be very useful anyway, since you'll be invalidating it constantly.

The sqlc authors are to be applauded for making a static analyzer, that is no small feat. But if you can get away with offloading SQL semantics to the same SQL implementation you plan to use, I think that's a steal. The usability hit is basically free - don't you want to connect to a dev database locally anyway to run end to end tests? It's great to eliminate type errors, but unless I'm missing something, neither SQLx nor sqlc will protect you from value errors (eg constraint violations).
by rklaehn | 2025-07-29 06:42:04+00:00
Nice list.

I think iroh checks all the boxes but one.

( ) Doesn't contain window logic to emulate best-effort datagrams over about 1500 bytes

So you want a way to send unreliable datagrams larger than one MTU. We don't have that, since we only support datagrams via https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9221 .

You could just use streams - they are extremely lightweight. But those would then be reliable datagrams, which comes with some overhead you might not want.

So how hard would it be to implement window logic on top of RFC9221 datagrams?
by joshtbradley | 2025-07-29 06:42:33+00:00
I think for the same reason that most people hold cash in a bank account rather than putting all of their money in ETFs/bonds. Convenience, stability, and security.

Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.

You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.