- Workflowy is great for taking notes in meetings, allowing ad-hoc moving things around. It’s also great for reference material (what was that long command SQL query I use). But yes it’s also a graveyard.
- AirTable worked somewhat to keep moving projects forward, without growing unbounded. But only when there is a workflow. That looks like: dump tasks into rows, then create the steps as views of those tasks with different filters. So tasks essentially move systematically from uncategorized, no time estimate, no schedule, to getting tagged with all of that, and then I can narrow it down to see just what’s on the agenda for today’s date. I also have it show the sum of estimated time per date, because I inevitably end up scheduling 30 hours of tasks for a day, so that helps keep me honest on what’s achievable. I did the same thing in Workflowy with custom JavaScript but AirTable seemed more effective for this. Tasks also get linked to project buckets, and I basically then just try to keep every bucket moving forward (don’t let any active bucket get starved).
- I could throw all of this into an LLM and have it tell me what I should be working on, remind me about what I’m forgetting, and so on. But I’m basically not interested, because I’d have to give it additional context that would be beyond what I’m interested or allowed to share. Like, I’ll ask a generic question for advice to an LLM but if an LLM is going to remind me to ”call Robert about Project Mayhem, then it needs to know about Robert and Project Mayhem.
This is really helpful detail — and I think your Airtable description nails the core: the value isn’t “having tasks”, it’s having a workflow that progressively turns vague items into schedulable commitments, plus capacity constraints so you don’t lie to yourself about time.
On the LLM point, I agree with your hesitation. For anything that touches real people/projects, the default needs to be privacy-first: either local-only, or scoped so the model never needs sensitive identifiers. One approach I’m exploring is separating “private entities” from “public knowledge”: let the system operate on generic project states and action types, and only you see the real names. Another is: no pushy assistant at all—just a pull-based daily view that helps you move buckets forward with the workflow you already trust.
If you had to pick one improvement that doesn’t require sharing sensitive context, would you want:
1. better workflow scaffolding (turn uncategorized into scheduled + estimated + bucketed faster), or
2. a way to attach lightweight “done/decision logs” back to tasks so the graveyard stops growing?
Details in my HN profile/bio if you’re curious what I’m validating.
> Camera slider cases exist (Spy-Fy, etc.) - they block physical camera access
Do they block the front camera? I’ve only seen one case that even attempted to block it, and it was kind of flimsy and would uncover the front camera when you took it out of your pocket.
Plus you can’t block the front camera very well without impacting facial recognition.
(puts on tin-foil hat) and you’ll notice that all new models only support facial recognition and no longer offer fingerprint unlock.
> The idea that the emergency contact wouldn't answer...seems impossible to me
I can’t understand how you think this is impossible if you do things “the right way”.
Phones gets stolen or dropped in the toilet. Your contact has been taken to the hospital. Bad cell service. And so on.
These episodes of Darknet Diaries were my favorite. Very suspenseful. I also always thought the people doing the testing were insane for assuming a piece of paper keeps them from getting dragged to jail or worse.
I mean this is stuff the security people tell you not to do. If you get an email from “your bank” saying “call us at this number”, you're supposed to independently verify by calling the main number, not the number they give you, right?
Those were always my favourite episodes too! Enough to get into a career doing social engineering and physical intrusions. It's very tense! You're right to think it's insane; the nature of these jobs is that unlike most kinds of pentesting, very few people are aware that a test is occurring. We will sometimes bring a fake "get out of jail free" card to test the very thing you mention, whether people will actually verify out of band. I've been on jobs where we've been called out and they've checked our fake details and you see people's whole body language change in those moments between them figuring out you're not who you say you are and figuring out what they're willing to do about it. You absolutely see the thought "Do I need to hurt these guys? Are they going to hurt me?" go through someone's mind. It's never come to anything truly harrowing in my experience, professionalism and good communication skills go a long way, but they also can only go so far. It's much more common to have zero issues though, because as you can surmise, social engineering is extremely effective, so getting challenged at all is pretty rare.
The purpose of the paper isn't to act as a "get out of jail free" card. It's to (hopefully) prevent the handcuffs from coming out while they verify the information. They're expected to contact the appropriate people before letting anyone go. Usually the emergency contact would be nearby and come to the site to discuss the project with their security team.
> Then as a programmer, you have to find workarounds in Django instead of workarounds with programming.
The mental unlock here is: Django is only a convention, not strictly enforced. It’s just Python. You can change how it works.
See the Instagram playbook. They didn’t reach a point where Django stopped scaling and move away from Django. They started modifying Django because it’s pluggable.
As an example, if you’re dealing with complex background tasks, at some point you need something more architecturally robust, like a message bus feeding a pool of workers. One simple example could be, Django gets a request, you stick a message on Azure Service Bus (or AWS SQS, GCP PubSub, etc), and return HTTP 202 Accepted to the client with a URL they can poll for the result. Then you have a pool of workers in Azure Container Apps (or AWS/GCP thing that runs containers) that can scale to zero, and gets woken up when there’s a message on the service bus. Usually I’d implement the worker as a Django management command, so it can write back results to Django models.
Or if your background tasks have complex workflow dependencies then you need an orchestrator that can run DAGs (directed acyclic graph) like Airflow or Dagster or similar.
These are patterns you’d need to reach for regardless of tech stack, but Django makes it sane to do the plumbing.
The lesson from Instagram is that you don’t have to hit a wall and do a rewrite. You can just keep modifying Django until it’s almost unrecognizable as a Django project. Django just starts you with a good convention that (mostly) prevents you from doing things that you’ll regret later (except for untangling cross-app foreign keys, this part requires curse words and throwing things).
I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.
It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.
Spoken like someone deeply unfamiliar with the problem domain since like 2005, sorry. It's an entirely different class of problems on the front end, most of them dealing with making users happy and comfortable, which is much more challenging than any of the rote byte pushing happening on the backend nowadays.
Is it, though? That sounds very subjective, and from what I can tell 'enshittification' is a popular user term for the result, so I'm not sure it's going that great.
If you search Google Trends for enshittification, half the results contain Doctorow as well [0]. Normal people have no idea who that is. And that's just Google, which everyone on HN hates to the point of vibrating angrily because there isn't an obvious part of the name to replace derogatorily with a dollar sign. Nobody uses this term outside of Hacker News, and even on HN it's code for "this site doesn't work when I disable Javascript", which is not a real requirement real customers have.
User experience does involve a lot of subjectivity [1] and that's part of what makes it hard. You have to satisfy the computer and the person in front of it, and their wants are often at odds with each other. You have to make them both happy at 60 FPS minimum.
I've posted a lot of feedback about Claude since several months and for example they still don't support Sign in with Apple on the website (but support Sign in with Google, and with Apple on iOS!)
- Workflowy is great for taking notes in meetings, allowing ad-hoc moving things around. It’s also great for reference material (what was that long command SQL query I use). But yes it’s also a graveyard.
- AirTable worked somewhat to keep moving projects forward, without growing unbounded. But only when there is a workflow. That looks like: dump tasks into rows, then create the steps as views of those tasks with different filters. So tasks essentially move systematically from uncategorized, no time estimate, no schedule, to getting tagged with all of that, and then I can narrow it down to see just what’s on the agenda for today’s date. I also have it show the sum of estimated time per date, because I inevitably end up scheduling 30 hours of tasks for a day, so that helps keep me honest on what’s achievable. I did the same thing in Workflowy with custom JavaScript but AirTable seemed more effective for this. Tasks also get linked to project buckets, and I basically then just try to keep every bucket moving forward (don’t let any active bucket get starved).
- I could throw all of this into an LLM and have it tell me what I should be working on, remind me about what I’m forgetting, and so on. But I’m basically not interested, because I’d have to give it additional context that would be beyond what I’m interested or allowed to share. Like, I’ll ask a generic question for advice to an LLM but if an LLM is going to remind me to ”call Robert about Project Mayhem, then it needs to know about Robert and Project Mayhem.
reply