jpulgarin

G says: "I am not provable". As shown by Gödel, that's a true statement about G, ergo G is true. That first-order logic cannot prove it to be true is an indictment on the power of deduction, not on the truthiness of G.

We're hoping to add analytics in a future update.

Thanks for the feedback - I can definitely understand it not being intuitive. If you want to remove the alert for now you can do so from the preferences window (it's the "Mute get back to work alert" option).

Will definitely look into it!

Thanks a lot. We focused a lot on simplicity so I'm glad that shines through.

Your feedback is super useful to us. The ability to turn off the active task is probably something we will incorporate in the next release. Having the ability to add tasks without a timer needs to be thought through a bit more by us since many users use their Effortless task list as a sort of notepad. Please let me know if you have any more feedback!

There's a quick add functionality which allows you to add a task with a keyboard shortcut. Would Alfred integration still seem useful to you?

Thanks Matthew!

Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback.

Definitely! I got lucky in the sense that wanting to create Effortless forced me to learn Swift. I wanted much more control than something like Electron or BitBar could give me, and I wanted to make this app a reality. I had also been working professionally with Python for the last few years, and the codebase at my previous company was so large that I started to miss working in a statically typed language.

I didn't do anything that special to learn it. I gave the The Swift Programming Language book (1) a read and then started to get my hands dirty, using Google when needed. I had done some iOS development a long time ago, which also helped. I almost immediately found it just as easy to write as Python (and in some respects easier) but with a stronger type system. It also has a lot of great tooling like Playgrounds. So I guess my advice would be to give yourself a project which you want to use Swift for, ideally where you have no other alternatives. I've also tinkered around with using Vapor to create web servers using Swift, so that might be another option.

1. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/

There is one global keyboard shortcut that is available everywhere, and that can be changed from the preferences window. You can change this shortcut to be something that doesn't conflict with any of your existing shortcuts. The other shortcuts only work once you've pressed the global shortcut. So for example, if your global shortcut is (the default) ⌘E, to open the task list you would press ⌘E and while still holding down command press F.

No blog post yet but I'm happy to answer any specific questions here. Effortless is a fairly simple app although there were some tricky edge cases to handle like when the task name is too long for the menu bar (especially when dealing with multiple monitors), and how to update the current task in the menu bar when making large edits to the task list. Making the app simple to use and cutting down the list of features to the bare essentials was also a process that involved a lot of iterations and talking with early users.

I learned Swift and native Mac app development in order to develop Effortless and have since fallen in love with Swift. It has replaced Python as my language of choice for many tasks.

We have no trial version to download right now unfortunately. If you want to try it out feel free to send me an email at julian@effortless.app and I can send you a promo code to download it for free from the app store.

Thanks! We considered a subscription service with some added features but decided instead to focus on simplicity. Right now there is no syncing, but we will definitely consider using iCloud if we implement it in the future (and once it's back up).

Right now everything is stored locally - we don't even have a server running. An iOS app is definitely something we're thinking about, although we want to focus on improving our current Mac app first. One of the main features in our roadmap is integration with Todoist so that you can pull in tasks from your Todoist list instead of retyping them.

The task name is truncated any time the app notices that the full name wouldn't fit in the space available in the menu bar. If new menu bar space becomes available I haven't yet found a way to get notified of that, so instead I try "expanding" it once every minute to see if it will fit. If after a minute of waiting you notice the task name still hasn't expanded please let me know as it's definitely a bug.

It's definitely something we're thinking about. There have been many times when I'm not at my computer that I'd wished I had access to my task list, or had something like Effortless on my phone to keep me focused on some manual task. Right now we're focused on improving the Mac version though as an iOS version would also require us to write a backend to handle accounts/syncing, etc...

Hey HN! My name is Julian, and I made Effortless with aracena to solve a problem we were both having: how to focus on exactly one thing at a time. Effortless displays my current task, and a countdown timer in the menu bar, and although it sounds silly, it means that I have a constant visual reminder of what I should be working on. Effortless was also a great excuse to learn Swift and native Mac app development. I'm happy to answer any questions about the app or the development process, although it's my birthday so I might be a little slow to respond. If you have any feedback or want a trial code to test Effortless out feel free to write me at julian@effortless.app . Thanks!

If you're referring to real numbers, then virtually no real numbers have a name. If all real numbers had a name then you could order them alphabetically and put them in one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, which we know is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument

It's because you're underestimating the average intelligence of an HN reader. Basically everyone here knows how probability works for independent events.

Except, as the comment you responded to suggested, you would use a different email for each service.

My own attempt: http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/

"Very simple. Don't choose the type of startup that has a 3 in 10 chance of succeeding on the off chance that you are the lucky one that hit's the lottery."

That doesn't sound simple at all. What types of startups have higher success rates than 30%?

I've attended rationality sessions organized by the people behind the Center for Modern Rationality, and they do teach about how to find hidden assumptions, and judging quality of information.

That parameter is absent when you're not logged in.

The "Wifi Only" option exists.

1. Save thousands of lives by donating to charity (it costs about $2000 to save a human life: http://givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF).

2. Do whatever you wish to do, every single day, such as spending a year studying philosophy while travelling the world, or deciding to learn salsa for a year and a half.

Very risky: For the average founder, the expected utility of starting a VC funded company is around -$200k.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14219

I believe animals can "experience being killed" and justify my eating of them mostly by the fact that eating them increases my productivity which helps me work more optimally towards reducing the suffering of other sentient beings. Also, I am somewhat selfish.

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Do you have any links that backup your assertion regarding antidepressants?