It's a screen time app/ app blocker that blocks distractions until certain programmable goals are met. For example:

- Block social media until you walk 10,000 steps

- Block Factorio until you physically go to the gym

- Block Netflix until you finish all your goals in todoist

The app is cross platform and available on everything (except Linux, which I'd like to change soon!).

Goals are all verified with real data from places such as your phone's GPS or fitness trackers. They can be programmed using a simple expression editor.

Right now I'm working on streamlining the plugin and goal system so that people can more easily write and share goals with one another!

I think we’re going to start seeing this happen more broadly across the industry. AI will get to a point where it becomes easy to clone any app or service. At that point software is no longer your moat. Your moat is going to be content, community and branding. This kind of makes me wonder if open source get even more popular. If software is no longer a moat, then you may as well release it for free and cash in on the goodwill and community.

My point here is that it is important to match the tech stack to the challenge you're facing. When I started thinking about how to solve this problem my first reaction was to design an overly complicated distributed message queue using PG Notify, Redis, Kafka or something along those lines. The key takeaway here is that I realized that I probably wouldn't end up with more than 1000 customers, so I just needed to design a system that could comfortably handle that level of traffic without much effort. If, by some miracle, my business goes crazy viral, I know that my cloud provider can probably handle up to 200,000 customers by just updating a slider in my dashboard, which is way more business than I want anyway.

Engineers love to fantasize about Google levels of scale, but that's just not realistic for a lot of services.

In the end, I decided to just go with the simplest solution possible. In my case it's just a barebones Go gRPC service that uses an in memory channel to send notifications between connected clients.

The reality is that this simple Go server will scale up to about 1000 simultaneously connected customers on about 2gb of RAM. I don't expect to have more than that many paying customers, and if I do I can always just throw a bigger VM at the problem.

Engineers love to over complicate things in the name of infinite scalability, when in reality you can save a lot of time and effort by just understanding the scope of the actual problem you're trying to solve. Fingers crossed that this will become an issue for me some day, but until then most of us just don't need to worry about it!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837409

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147195

Points: 3

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I assume end to end encryption would help mitigate this. Breaking E2E encryption would require a client side update that could be hard to implement if the company has already gone belly up.

For context I am the developer of an app called Digital Carrot[1] that lets users create goals for themselves that are verified by data from connected services. For example someone might create a goal to go to the gym, which the app verifies by reading GPS data from your phone. Needless to say my app handles a lot of very sensitive data and the app's privacy policy prohibits me from accessing any of this data for any reason. I've been curious if there is a way to put some kind of legally binding clause in my privacy policy that would prevent a future owner of the app from just forcing all the users to agree to a new policy that lets them harvest all of this data for nefarious purposes. Does anyone know:

1. Is this possible? 2. Has anyone done something like this? 3. What kind of mechanism would you employ to enforce this?

[1] https://www.digitalcarrot.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026654

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785038

Points: 11

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One problem I personally have here is that I write code as a way to reason through and think about a problem. It's hard for me to grasp the best solution in a space until I try some things out first.