MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Terminal Aesthetic Productivity App
by kenshozone | 2025-12-28 07:29:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I keep building things and failing at launch. This time I built something that enforces the discipline I lack: a productivity system that physically blocks you from working when you've done too much focus without rest.

What it does:
- Focus timer + meditation tracker + task manager in one terminal-aesthetic interface
- Hard 10:1 focus:rest enforcement — work 100 minutes, you OWE 10 minutes of rest before the timer unlocks again
- Task completion requires reflection logs (1 reflection per 5 tasks) — no backlog journaling allowed
- ASCII progress bars, monospace everything, brackets for every action: `[ START_FOCUS ]`
- No gamification, no streak anxiety, no "you can do it!" cheerleading
Why I built it:
I'd work 4-hour blocks, burn out by Wednesday, then doomscroll for 3 days. Every productivity app let me keep going. I needed something that would stop me and enforce recovery.

The aesthetic is intentional — brutalist terminal UI to strip out dopamine triggers. Black background, functional color (teal/amber/red), no rounded corners, no celebrations. Just discipline.

Current state:
- 7-day free trial, no card required
- Web app (Flutter + Supabase)
- Works on mobile but designed desktop-first
- I'm the only daily user (classic founder problem)

What I learned building this:
- Enforced rest is controversial — some testers hated being blocked
- People want "just one more task" overrides — I refuse to add them
- The terminal aesthetic filters hard: developers love it, normies bounce
- I have no idea how to market this without sounding preachy about discipline

Live demo: https://app.kensho.zone
Source: Not open yet (will consider if there's interest)

This is my 5th failed business attempt. Usually I ship, post once, then wonder why no one uses it. Trying something different this time: being honest about the struggle and asking for brutal feedback before I give up.

What am I missing? Would you actually use this, or is it solving a problem only I have?
by simonebrunozzi | 2025-12-28 07:30:04+00:00
Back when I was studying computer science, I was taking the OS exam and the part about Lamport timestamp [0] was optional, but I had studied it because I loved it. When I mentioned it to my professor, he was so happy to hear something new that day that he asked me to describe it in details. This was the year 2001.

Many years later, in 2020, I ended up living in San Francisco, and I had the fortune to meet Leslie Lamport after I sent him a cold email. Lovely and smart guy. This is the text of the first part of that email, just for your curiosity:

Hey Leslie!

You have accompanied me for more than 20 years. I first met your name when studying Lamport timestamps.

And then on, and on, and on, up to a few minutes ago, when I realized that you are also behind the paper and the title of "Byzantine Generals problem", renamed after the "Albanian" generals to the suggestion of Jack Goldberg. Who is he? [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp

[1]: Jack Goldberg (now retired) was a computer scientist and Lamport's manager at SRI.
by anovikov | 2025-12-28 07:30:13+00:00
Somehow, word of mouth never worked for me. I only ever got one repeat customer (he was really really good first time, but second time, mediocre), and one customer through a referral (very good, but just once). Out of 170+ over 25 years.

I see the reason: my customers are people who don't know anyone they could possibly recommend me to, because they are from random industries and random places. Also their projects are one-off: usually first and last software projects of theirs, ever. Working for someone with large networks who can make referrals means losing money because these people also know good coders and can hire well. I never solved this and rely on outbound all my life.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-28 07:31:44+00:00
> But how do you know they’re intentionally trying to stir trouble, vs. being naive

This is not a Hanlon's razor situation. HN has pretty clear guidelines about what a good submission is:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities

This will disqualify lots of CNN/FOX/The Sun/The Critic/Whosit/Whatever tabloid/opinion column content that isn't tailored for HN's audience (putting it nicely). We might disagree with the rules, but those are what they are.

> And do you think it’s a net benefit for posts like these to be flagged vs. visible

No opinion, I consider flagging to be one of HN's most poorly-implemented features. I leave showdead on at all times.
by spoiler | 2025-12-28 07:31:52+00:00
I honestly found the women interesting in the book, and not samey. I mean the Alethi have a masculine/feminine society shift, but Navani, Jasnah and Shallan all very different.

The characters aren't flat at all, there's a lot of nuance to all of them.

I guess this is one of those the beauty is in the eye of the beholder situations.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-28 07:33:29+00:00
>Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 593 U.S. 1 (2021)

does not apply to the linking of GPLed code. Google copied just the application programming interfaces and then supplied their own code that they wrote themselves.

if you link to a GPL library you are including their copyrighted code, even if the API that GNU uses did not originate with them but came from POSIX or similar.
by xeonmc | 2025-12-28 07:34:04+00:00
offtopic question:

as a recent dabbling reader of introductory popsci content in cryptography, I've been wondering about what are the different segmentation of expert roles in the field?

e.g. in Filippo's blogpost about Age he clarified that he's not a cryptographer but rather a cryptography engineer, is that also what your role is, what are the concrete divisions of labor, and what other related but separate positions exists in the overall landscape?

where is the cutoff point of "don't roll your own crypto" in the different levels of expertise?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-28 07:34:20+00:00
> With SSL certificates, you usually don’t have the opportunity to build up operational experience working with them, unless something goes wrong. And things don’t go wrong that often with certificates

Don't worry. With 2 or 3 industry players dictating how all TLS certs work, now your certs will expire in weeks rather than years, so you will all be subject to these failures more frequently. But as a back-stop to process failures like this, use automated immutable runbooks in CI/CD. It works like this:

1) Does it need a runbook? Ask yourself, if everything was deleted tomorrow, do you (and all the other people) remember every step needed to get everything running again? If not, it needs a runbook.

2) What's a runbook? It's a document that gives step by step instructions to do a thing. The steps can be text, video recordings, code/shell snippets, etc as long as it does not assume anything and gives all necessary instructions (or links to them) so a random braindead engineer at 3am can just do what it says and it'll result in a working thing.

3) Automate the runbook over time. Put more and more of the steps into some kind of script the user can just run. Put the script into a Docker container so that everyone's laptop environment doesn't have to be identical for the steps to work.

4) Run the containerized script from CI/CD. This ensures all credentials, environment vars, networking, etc are the same when it runs which better ensures success, and that leads to:

5) Running it frequently/on a schedule. Most CI/CD systems support scheduled jobs. Run your runbooks frequently to identify unexpected failures and fix bugs. Most of you get notifications for failed builds, so you'll see failed runbooks. If you use a cron job on a random server, the server could go down, the job could get deleted, or the reports of failure could go to /dev/null; but nobody's missing their CI/CD build failures.

Running runbooks from CI/CD is a game changer. Most devs will never update a document. Some will update code they run on their laptop. But if it runs from CI/CD, now anyone can run it, and anyone can update it, so people actually do keep it up to date.
by whirlwin | 2025-12-28 07:36:07+00:00
TLS certificates is not the only technology for which the default mode is failure. What about disks, databases or syntax errors in configuration files in general?

In technology, there are known problems and unknown problems. Expiring TLS certificates is a known problem which has an established solution.

Imagine if only some of the requests failed because a certificate is about to expire. That would be a debugging nightmare.
by whateveracct | 2025-12-28 07:37:23+00:00
I've seen reliability become incident level and then 3mo later execs are on our ass because we didn't fix another crisis fast enough.

and this company is hugely successful. so i've learned that the biggest competition advantage in fintech is flagrant disregard for correctness and compliance.

i'm glad i have a csuite with the stones to execute that. i am way too principled.
by zippyman55 | 2025-12-28 07:38:38+00:00
I’ve been stuck at 2000 rating for about 40 yrs, a huge break for college and a career. But I was never able to get to 2200.
I’m retired now and really spending time to get to that goal.
In reflection, in my youth, my analytical skills were pretty good. With age, I think they are weaker based on results. I’m also less competitive.
My pattern mastery is really good.
So, I think of my game performance as my wisdom allows me to compensate for my loss of analytical power.
I do think formulating a middle game strategy is an area that can help improve my results and that is my primary focus.
by SR2Z | 2025-12-28 07:39:11+00:00
Don't forget that having lanes which are guaranteed to be congestion-free is useful to everyone, not just the rich.

If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.

This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.
by otterley | 2025-12-28 07:42:25+00:00
You can’t be certain that any given mutating operation you perform now won’t be relied upon for some future operation, unless the two operations are performed in entirely different domains of data. Even “not touching (by which I assume you mean mutating) the same data” isn’t enough. If I update A in thread 0 from 1 to 2, then I update B in thread 1 to the value of A+1, then the value of B could end up being 2 or 3, depending on whether the update of A reached thread 1.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-12-28 07:44:07+00:00
If society at large is being a dick to me and my group as a whole, I'm likely to be an even worse dick to society at large, which is why protesting doesn't work for people like me because protesting is generally about very nice and calm about outrageous things and causing a bit of inconvenience, that is to say being not as bad as what one is protesting with the hidden message you don't want us to make things bad (I decided to drop the dick metaphor before it would have to get graphic)

on edit: not to mention I hate crowds.
by greatgib | 2025-12-28 07:45:22+00:00
I will not defend the case against this person, because I think that trump's gouvernement actions are awful.
But just to nitpick, it looks like that what is taken against this guy is not that they defend a point of view as "free speech" but that they took offensive actions against free speech by pressuring tech and starting baseless legal actions.

But, in the end justice is there to say if things are free speech or not, so it is really bad spirit to use the visa to take revenge on him.

Also the cynical in me would say that somehow you are still a guest in the country so maybe it is not very legitimate to be a lobbyist group for what you think should be the spirit of the country.

Like if I have a visa in China and there create an offensive lobbying group to force companies to support capitalism and free market...
by da_grift_shift | 2025-12-28 07:45:24+00:00
>Why do LLMs always become so schizo when chatting with each other?

At least for Claude, it's because the people training it believe the models should have a soul.

Anthropic have a "philosopher" on staff and recently astroturfed a "soul document" into the public consciousness by acknowledging it was "extracted" from Opus 4.5, even though the model was explicitly trained on it beforehand and would happily talk about it if asked.

After it was "discovered" and the proper messaging deployed, Anthropic's philosophers would happily talk about it too! The funny thing is the AI ethicists interested in this woo have a big blind spot when it comes to PR operations. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125184)
by SR2Z | 2025-12-28 07:45:35+00:00
You cannot update the registration on your car if you have outstanding fines (at least in CA, but probably in most states).

Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.

In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.
by Valodim | 2025-12-28 07:45:52+00:00
For anyone relatedly wondering about the "schism", i.e. GnuPG abandoning the OpenPGP standard and doing their own self-governed thing, I found this email particularly insightful on the matter:
https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/2025-September...

> As others have pointed out, GnuPG is a C codebase with a long history (going on 28 years). On top of that, it's a codebase that is mostly uncovered by tests, and has no automated CI. If GnuPG were my project, I
would also be anxious about each change I make. I believe that because of this the LibrePGP draft errs on the side of making minimal changes, with the unspoken goal of limiting risks of breakage in a brittle codebase with practically no tests. (Maybe the new formats in RFC 9580 are indeed "too radical" of an evolutionary step to safely implement in GnuPG. But that's surely not a failing of RFC 9580.)
by mgh95 | 2025-12-28 07:46:26+00:00
> If all the prices rise in the US to compensate, Europe stays exactly as competitive as before.

Yes, but my point is exactly the opposite has occurred for imports: the US is still roughly flat in terms of import inflation. Since Nov '22, import inflation has been sub-3% without exception and sub-2% since 2023 without exception. The US is still exporting inflation effectively, and US inflation is due to factors other than currency fluctuations.

That's the real issue: the USD weakened 8% against the EUR, and prices remain the same. For eurozone exporters to the US that's an absolute disaster.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-28 07:47:33+00:00
i don't see how either of those cases applies to the FSF and GNU's attitude on library linking; in neither case were they creating a combined derivative work.

if I make an ai driven viewscreen that you can stick your paperback book into and it gives you a better reading experience of the book, your paperback book is still in there and you can take it out. My viewscreen may not work without the book, but it hasn't merged/modified the book with anything.
by gethly | 2025-12-28 07:47:51+00:00
Not a bug but rather an engineering oversight. Also not hard and it did not affect me, I caught it soon, but it was one of those surprising moments worth mentioning.

I have a write-online table in MariaDB and ordering of records is important. I have realised that the database has no such thing as append-only table that stores records in the order they are submitted into the database. Every record has one or more indices, and it is these indices that dictate the ordering and only for the data they index. What I have overlooked is when a transaction A starts, then transaction B starts, the transaction A might have records with smaller keys, as it started sooner, but transaction B commits first with higher keys, which means I end up with out-of-order entries. This is not too bad, actually, it depends on the context and in my case the context was that there were readers constantly waiting for new records. And so if a reader reads records after transaction B commits but not before transaction A commits, the reader will never see new records from transaction A. I have solved it by blocking the readers based on number of active transactions with ordering being considered.

I have wrote about it in this blog post, in the "Event Log and proper ordering of events" section https://gethly.com/blog/how-of-gethly/event-sourcing-right-w...
by flashgordon | 2025-12-28 07:48:09+00:00
I really don't understand the fetishisizing of the demise of software engineers. Are other knowledge workers like doctors or lawyers going to be exterminated by AI? Or is there even a fantasizing of their demise? The only reason I can think of is shmchaudenfreud (it is relatively barrierless to get into and pays pretty well) and more importantly imo doesn't have cabals like other professions do.

Btw I love using my Claude code to crank out product but I don't get off looking for the day when engineers are a dead breed!
by efilife | 2025-12-28 07:48:12+00:00
> I'm very impressed that anyone who speaks another language natively can get good at it.

From my completely anecdotal observations, native speakers are the worst at English. They struggle with homophones, prepositions, tenses, confuse meanings of words, apostrophes and I could go on and on.

English grammar is easier to learn by reading and writing than speaking, what most native speakers do.

Its/it's, they/their/they're, prepositions like a lot, a while, confused words like definitely and defiantly are the first that come to mind. See if you are better than a foreigner.
by galkk | 2025-12-28 07:48:27+00:00
One of most brutal things is amount of slop on kids channels.

Huntrx singing soda pop, Lego singing soda pop, Sonic singing soda pop, ponies singing soda pop… the amount of slop there is brutal

. I literally don’t see any way to approach it except just banning YouTube and downloading and curating videos in advance.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-28 07:48:51+00:00
Do either of you have citations?

I can see it being both ways.

Land aside, building a single story house is much cheaper per sq ft than a tower.

Medium density streets, like UK terraces can have enough density to support commerce nearby etc. but also low enough density to use a lot of solar to power houses directly.

Land may be the constraint given the population of the world.
by mgh95 | 2025-12-28 07:48:51+00:00
> I don't think that FOREX rates are the best way to think about this, but if you work in that world or otherwise have an intuition for it, then go ahead. Most of us only handle 1 currency, and reasoning in terms of 2 isn't exactly an intuition pump.

Forex rates, balance of trade, and relative strengthening are great ways of understanding international fluctuations. They are exactly the way to understand reserve currency movements

> 2. How much your personal basket of monthly expenses costs in terms of dollars. Ignore a basket that someone on the news told you to care about, like CPI. I mean your personal basket, all the stuff you personally buy, how much is it in dollars, now, a year in the future, a year earlier.

This hits at a major part of the issue: goods that have no importable replacement good (housing and healthcare, namely) are a huge part of what lead to the huge bout of inflation. But those are domestic economics, not international economics.
by shermantanktop | 2025-12-28 07:49:41+00:00
I kind of agree, but I explain it differently. Everyone’s job is a mix of reactive and proactive work. For my particular job, reactive work is necessary but will expand to fill all my time and then some. Proactive work is ambiguous and uncertain, but usually ends up being the highest value work that I do.

If I spend all my time on other people’s demands, it will all be urgent, but not enough of it will be important.
by Valodim | 2025-12-28 07:50:25+00:00
This doesn't explain why he decided to WONTFIX what is obviously a parser bug that allows injection of data into output through the headers.

But werner at this point has a history of irresponsible decisions like this, so it's sadly par for the course by now.

Another particularly egregious example: https://dev.gnupg.org/T4493
by jmward01 | 2025-12-28 07:50:30+00:00
What Youtube pushes vs what I watch are so completely different that I am shocked. I almost exclusively watch geology, space, tech and cooking and it pushes at me (quick check of the home page): disgusting cow medical procedures, random sexual videos, celebrity/influencer junk. Oh, wait, there is a geology thing....and it is a junk sci/scare video that has no actual geology related content. Yeah. Their algorithm is clearly working well. I would go to other platforms but there isn't one. I have started donating on patreon and watching there where practical (even though it is still yt serving it up) but that doesn't easily allow me to discover new things. The real challenge here is finding new things. When search is so completely broken, how do you find valid new things to watch?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-28 07:51:27+00:00
Heh, I'm the opposite. I wish the rpi stayed the course of cheapest "working" SBC, and move their high-end boards to a different brand. Raspberry Sigma, or 67 or whatever gets the younguns crazy these days.

After the pandemic, the "25$" SBC suddenly became 100+ with low availability. The main thing that made rpis worth it is gone now, and they're all chasing number go up on benchmarks.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-28 07:51:37+00:00
It’s a common HN trope to generalise a “community” based on a handful of people or even just one person. “See this is why I dislike the xyz community”, says a person justifying their confirmation bias.

Perhaps the world is too complex without breaking it down into in-groups and out-groups, with any out-groups supposedly being completely homogenous. Pretty intellectually lazy but fairly common on HN, to the point where it’s not even worth calling out.
by throwawaygmbno | 2025-12-28 07:52:46+00:00
I learned the concept of social engineering in middle school through those AOL CDs. There was a culture of making proggies and learning about the inner workings of how AOL the program and the company worked if you were interested and knew where to look.

If you called into a certain department at AOL, you could tell them you were a business and would like to put out their CDs for display. So long as the order was for under 1000 or so they would send them to you, for free, directly to the address of the "business".

I also learned in middle school that CDs sting but don't really hurt and the various ways to launch attacks in a CD war with friends and classmates. You throw CDs vertical to be precise and sideways for a crazy flight path to confuse your opponents.

Sadly I also discovered that all the racist didn't die in the 70s, as the owner of one of the largest AOL hacking discussion forums I frequented loved to talk about how he would move if a black family ever moved into his neighborhood.
by snvzz | 2025-12-28 07:53:35+00:00
>As for the "goal" or "tactics" that you found on some substack that is full of scare-quotes with an emotionally written bent -- is subjective at best.

There's plenty reason to suspect BBC is partial, particularly after the recent exposure of their awful edits on Trump's speech[0].

0. https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/bbc-edits-trumps-spee...