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timdavila

419 karma · joined June 9, 2015

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timdavila··on Making friends as an adult is hard (2021)
> People who are married with kids are insanely busy, with a robust and built-in social network, whether it's through interactions with relatives, or even making friends with other parents through sporting events, etc.

Grass is always greener on the other side, and busy does not mean someone has friends.

timdavila··on Bing AI can't be trusted
You're holding it wrong!
timdavila··on Goodbye Spotify
Spotify allows you to block artists very easily.

https://imgur.com/wSOD8m4

timdavila··on Seeking the productive life: Some details of my personal infrastructure (2019)
Curious why you do this and what you feel like it adds to your life?
timdavila··on iPad Pro M2
> And the people who do, used to be people who don't.

Yep. Walled gardens kill curiosity.

Curiosity is what got me into this industry, way before I knew it could be a career. Playing around, messing with files that ran my games, making web forums and learning to change how they look.

timdavila··on “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”
I use iMessage. It's great, and doesn't get in the way. And as I said it's included on my phone. It also allows me to communicate with anyone and I don't have to think about if the person I'm contacting has it installed or not, it gracefully degrades to SMS when needed. That's a great messaging app!
timdavila··on “It’s time for Apple to fix texting”
So I have to replace the native messaging app that's decentralized, well proven, reliable, and pre-installed on every phone that can communicate with anyone in the world for 5 different centralized apps from the app store that may or may not exist next year and also try to move my entire network over?

No thanks, I'll stick to SMS.

timdavila··on Find a good available .com domain
> I'm surprised that someone hasn't gone ahead and taken this data and put it up on github or something; it all feels very theatrical.

It would be out of date the minute you post it.

timdavila··on The 3-2-1 Backup Rule – Why Your Data Will Always Survive (2019)
How does everyone back up their iDevices? Every article I read talks about iCloud, which is great and I use, but doesn’t follow this principle and you’re out of luck if you lose access to your Apple ID.

I’ve found some content specific solutions that will backup photos or contacts for example, but I’m looking for a fairly streamlined comprehensive solution that would back up everything-messages, contacts, photos, emails, bookmarks, basically iCloud 2 but without the Apple lock in.

timdavila··on Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival
I would say you also need Groups. But I love the idea.
timdavila··on Facebook Dating
And it looks like they're already anticipating your privacy questions: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/privacy-matters-dating/
timdavila··on Ask HN: How do you manage bookmarks and knowledge flow?
Pinboard for bookmarks, Nominal for notes, tasks, and habits
timdavila··on The New 30-Something
"Uphill both ways"
timdavila··on Amazon Personalize: Real-Time Recommendation
Sometimes it makes sense, for consumable goods or even non consumable things like storage containers, where you might buy more of the same item at different times. Other things like books I agree don't make sense.
timdavila··on I Hit $115k/Month with a Status Quo Improvement
I don't see anything wrong with posting your own content as long as it's not all you post. Way better and more honest than using a sock puppet.
timdavila··on First .dev Domains Go Live
TLDs matter, in that you want .com if you can get it. Otherwise, personally I would use something more well known, but most of the differences are vanity, unless you're using a country specific TLD such as .co.uk or .us
timdavila··on Ask HN: What do you use for notes + reminders + tasks
Just wanted to add my little app as it does all three, as well as habits.

https://www.nominal.net

Let me know if you try it out and have any feedback, it is still pretty young.

timdavila··on HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points
Your site looks great, I like the way you explain your services.

You might want to check your "blog" link at the bottom though. Gives me a 404.

timdavila··on Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
Yep, sorry that was confusing. I was comparing to previous versions of Android. It's relatively new that it's added to the app drawer.
timdavila··on Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
True, the situation on Android is much better than iOS. Also after you do this, you get an icon in your app drawer and not just the homescreen.
timdavila··on Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
I run a PWA and can track this based on the "standalone" property. But what's more telling is customer requests. It's a confusing request that it seems like many potential customers haven't seen before. Lots of people ask me to "just put it in the app store" despite having an FAQ with instructions on how to add to the home screen. Many more say they will become customers "when you have an app"

Because of this, I'm working on making my UI more app like and using Cordova to publish it to app stores.

edit: My app is still pretty small but the percentage of logged in users who have ever loaded from the PWA is < 5%

timdavila··on Google One
If they're not very clearly stating the opposite, the answer should be assumed to be yes they are monetizing it.
timdavila··on Why only 2% of Chinese pay any income tax
> People forget that we didn't have income tax in the US for much of our history and a few states still have no income tax.

Do you mean federal or state income tax? I am in one of the states with no tax paid to the state (Texas) but rest assured we still pay federal income tax as well as higher property and sales tax to make up for it.

timdavila··on Ask HN: How should a programming language accommodate disabled programmers?
It's probably just the way my brain works. After a SQL statement goes to more than ten lines or so I have to study it very hard to understand what's going on.

Maybe it's the way I was taught.

timdavila··on Ask HN: How should a programming language accommodate disabled programmers?
Yes, for me SQL is very hard to reason about just because of the way it's "phrased"

It's much easier for me to interpret JavaScript or PHP method chaining. I find myself struggling when I can't use an ORM.

timdavila··on Ask HN: What is something I should and can be automating right now?
Groceries! We don't have to go to the store anymore with Walmart + Kroger adding the ability to pick out your groceries online. You pay on the app, and an employee fetches the items, bags them, and has them ready for pick up at the time you specify.

It actually saves money because you're not buying things that you happen to see, and only getting what you need.

timdavila··on Show HN: Nominal, a to-do list, habit tracker, and notes app
Hi everyone, I have been working on Nominal the past year and am hoping I could get some feedback/critique on the product, especially the design and business side of things as those aren't my strengths.

This is a solo project, a side hustle / lifestyle business. I originally built it to solve my own problem and have decided to open it up to the public. I intend to keep it alive as long as my (currently low) hosting costs are covered.

Nominal is a progressive web app, accessed through the web but available on mobile through Add to Homescreen with "native-like" features (currently only using service worker cache and push notifications).

This is the first paid SaaS that I have ever built on my own. There are a lot of options in this space, but I feel there might be a small niche of users like myself interested in a small paid for app that respects user privacy and data ownership.

Thanks for your time!

timdavila··on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
I like it. I use both approaches, so there's individual task/habit/notes modules like you have that let you dive deeper and edit and tweak things, and then the general dashboard which is more of an overview that combines them into one and lets you get common tasks done quickly. The dashboard is date based (defaulting to today) while the modules aren't.
timdavila··on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
This is very cool! Kudos for giving back. I'm guessing this is an offline thing?
timdavila··on Ask HN: What are some of the dark sides of being in the tech industry?
Yep, this is why I'm much more inclined to go with something I know on the front end. I'm not against learning a new framework, but fighting the tooling is one of the more frustrating things.
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