Hacker News: heresjohnny

New comment by heresjohnny in "I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt"

heresjohnny — Tue, 06 May 2025 06:47:17 +0000

As someone from Europe, I had heard before about bankrupting ambulance rides, slavery in prisons, and food deserts. I did not expect to add “lunch money humiliation ritual” to that list. I’ll think of this next time I complain about my 50% income tax.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: Create your own finetuned AI model using Google Sheets"

heresjohnny — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:51:25 +0000

Neat! Wonder though if you should be even offering the BYO option as a separate lite package. As a dev I would not buy this and as a non-tech person I would be confused by your pricing page.

But I do see the value! Think sales or marketing folks looking to get a bit more hands on. These will likely be your first visitor and be okay with your 50 dollar price. Then, their IT department will say “we want to hook up our own API key for that,” to which you can confidently say “sure, we can do that too.”

N=1, just my two cents. Good luck!

New comment by heresjohnny in "Ask HN: Can vibe coding competitions be challenging and fair?"

heresjohnny — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 22:25:24 +0000

Of course. The only thing that’s changed (raised) is the baseline. It’s still hard to come up with a winning idea that’s innovative, creative, and polished. It’s also much easier to go into a rabbit hole you shouldn’t have gone into, which can be quite costly during a competition.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: Daily Jailbreak – Prompt Engineer's Wordle"

heresjohnny — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 20:32:13 +0000

Looks like this is fully anonymous and that your auth doesn’t apply on this page (when I visit it with an active session, it doesn’t show as such). I think if you require people to be logged in you’ll already decrease malicious traffic by a lot. Love the idea btw!

New comment by heresjohnny in "Plain – a web framework for building products with Python"

heresjohnny — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:48:41 +0000

I miss a thorough explanation of how Plain is fundamentally different than Django + extensions. Good luck though

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 22:02:18 +0000

The IndexedDB API [1] is fairly easy to work with. I personally use idb [2] as a wrapper, but that's optional. The hardest part is getting it neatly integrated with whatever you're using to manage state. I use a centralized Redux-like store to push events to, which then get automatically persisted to Indexed DB. Hope this helps!

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...

[2] https://github.com/jakearchibald/idb

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 16:27:04 +0000

Thank you! So nice to see it's something others were looking into as well. And these are great ideas, I'll add them to the list. Could you specifically clarify on the grouping? I already show time spent by tag - anything you're missing? Thanks again :)

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 16:25:25 +0000

Fully agree, I dislike auth walls as well. It's also great for distribution, so everybody wins.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 16:24:47 +0000

Good one - that sounds like great optional behavior. Having said that, I consciously built it this way. I personally use simultaneous stopwatches to track a full day of work and tagged items within that day, such as a specific meeting (each another stopwatch).

The "Personal Time" option subsequently merges the overlapping hours so that on Statistics, I'm looking at time spent in real life (as a person), while still being able to zoom in on specifically tagged items.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:53:14 +0000

Great idea, thank you! Shorthands are on my list. Would it work if you could immediately start a stopwatch + assign a tag, such as “customer care” with a single click?

I preferably don’t want to include projects/folders/tickets, this is what I found cumbersome to deal with in other trackers.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:42:44 +0000

Any reason why you think it's unreliable? Note my aim is to make it a PWA in the future, meaning it would be installed on your machine and run perfectly fine without an internet connection.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:41:30 +0000

Aah love to hear that! I think you should be able to iframe it just fine unless you're using an older Safari version.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:39:22 +0000

Yeah this took quite some weekends :) Just hang in there and you'll get a project shipped too!

I'm using Angular (yes, really!), and some date-fns utils for the time-related logic. Other than that, it's all custom except for the Catalyst UI library and Frappe charts. The hardest thing to solve was the event-driven foundation (which I'll use for sync support later).

Initially, I started out with Automerge/Yjs but figured that simple event sourcing would be good enough given there's no collaborative/concurrent use case. The benefit of that is that I can actually explain the logic. Not saying those projects lack documentation (they don't), I'm just not comfortable shipping a CRDT that I can't explain e2e. Might change once I have time to dive in properly.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed"

heresjohnny — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:32:49 +0000

Ah - thanks for reporting. Any details on the device you're using? For me it's working fine on iPhone/Mac. In any case, I had to cut some corners with JS for the UI library I'm using. These should be CSS-only animations, period. Thanks.

Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed

heresjohnny — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:57:46 +0000

Hi HN,

I built TimeRetain: a time tracker for individuals that runs 100% in your browser. No sign up, no personal data stored, and free while I’m working on the beta.

Click the white demo banner to check it out quickly :)

I’m using it to track my hours at work (e.g., overtime, and what I’ve done so I come prepared for stand up).

In 2023 I launched it here [1], but with a back-end. After I became interested in local-first, I realized JS could handle everything Postgres did - so I ported it.

Time data now never leaves your browser and the app will ping you to run an export from time to time.

I also followed up on some of the feedback in the previous thread (it now has a pause button, a dedicated data export page, no longer relies on a working back-end, and I fixed the spacing in the name).

It’s not a true local first app just yet (e.g., it's not a PWA, and backing up using the File System API is on my list), but I plan on making it one should it gain some traction.

One of the other things I might add is encrypted at rest storage and sync of events, for which the foundation is done (it’s event-based and events are ordered using a HLC timestamp in IndexedDB).

I wonder, though: is multi-device sync even necessary? I would much rather prefer not to store any personal data at all, even if it’s encrypted. Do you need sync? And if so, what would be your ideal solution?

Would love to hear your thoughts in general. Thank you!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34457730

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077519

Points: 61

# Comments: 28

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: I made a online free tool to enhance and auto-crop your screenshots"

heresjohnny — Sun, 26 May 2024 11:27:54 +0000

Nice work! Smooth and local. I like it. A tip: it doesn’t detect mobile screenshots (the frame remains in landscape, causing the image to be cut off).

New comment by heresjohnny in "Ask HN: Mosquito Killing / Preventing Innovations"

heresjohnny — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 14:32:30 +0000

I think your best bet is an insect screen. I have one at home that pops right inside my window frame. Modern frames have standard dimensions, so it's likely trivial to find an insect screen that fits yours. Once you have this in place I don't think you'll be looking any longer for a solution from the Star Wars realm.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Astro: All-in-one web framework designed for speed"

heresjohnny — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 10:25:27 +0000

I am a Jekyll user that has switched to Astro. I like it a lot, since it provides me with simple templating, bundling, out of the box TypeScript, and Tailwind support. It can do much more (like embed multiple UI frameworks) but I haven’t found the need yet. For anything simple like a landing page, this has become my go to.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Ask HN: What advice do you have for new CS student?"

heresjohnny — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 17:57:09 +0000

Personally I’ve always thought that specialization is what matters. I’ve tended to look up to people who know everything about a single topic. I still do, but in my professional life I’ve come to learn that generalists with a few but limited expertise “amplitudes” do even better.

A metaphor from what I personally like: If you can make fast websites, you’re a good software engineer. If you can make fast websites with great copy and a subsequent positive effect on SEO, you could be a company.

New comment by heresjohnny in "Show HN: I made a landing page am I doing this right?"

heresjohnny — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 06:22:42 +0000

Nice first attempt! What I would try to do is find a design system and stick with that. Someone else already commented about the size of the text and elements. If you’re not designing on a daily basis, you will overlook such and many other gotchas like consistency of padding, font weight vs. font size, and so on. A great one I can recommend is TailwindUI—just make sure to give a template your own spin to prevent looking too generic.