Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

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Yes...but it goes even deeper.

For example, in physics, the paradox of Maxwells Demon is resolved when you consider the cost of deleting data:

"In 1982, Charles Bennett showed that, however well prepared, eventually the demon will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase the information it has previously gathered.[8][12] Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon#Recent_progres...

It is also difficult for humans to delete information. In my humble and only a little facetious opinion this is one of the main drivers for ever new "To Do" apps: the existing app gets full because deleting is too hard, so we start fresh with a new app. The app isn't the point, the starting fresh is.

The underlying reason there being that the cost of maintaining small (to do) notes can be greater than the value of the note, which is one of the reasons we still use little scraps of paper and other mechanisms that will effectively auto-delete.

Understanding the micronote lifecycle: improving mobile support for informal note taking

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/985692.985779

Every day I’d have more and more state accumulation on my machine - open apps, unsaved changes, open tabs. I’ve tried many methods for preventing this from happening over the years, but the only and most effective solution I’ve been using for the last year - a script I wrote that just quits every browser tab and every open app (leaving unsaved apps still running) every evening. I wake up and the machine is new and fresh. It’s amazing and has benefited my productivity so much. It changes the state game to where if I have a specific task I want to resume tomorrow I have to make myself a clear note to read the next day, and if I have tabs open that I care about, I have to bookmark them. What I’ve found is that the actual info that needs to be transferred between days is very small.

I have an endless reminders app and todo list. I wonder if something similar (items expire automatically unless you flag them as permanent or something) would help keep a clearer list. Sometimes ephemerality is best!

> Every day I’d have more and more state accumulation on my machine - open apps, unsaved changes, open tabs.

I resonate with your comment.

I grew up during a time when PC state was ephemeral (DOS days). Unsaved changes essentially meant lost data. Open apps were gone once the computer was shut down (and the computer was shut down daily - a 250W power supply had an expensive power draw; in contrast a Mac Mini only sips 1W when sleeping). This helped me develop a habit of keeping only necessary things open, bookmarking what I want to keep, and of habitually pressing Ctrl+S to save data. I never keep any tabs open (my browser loses all tabs upon close anyway), and my inbox is zero.

The cost I pay for this is context recovery -- every day, I have to essentially set everything up again. I do write notes or leave comments in code to remind myself where I left off, but I essentially started fresh. But there is an upside to this: I start each day from an uncluttered slate, which leads to clarity in my head. When context is ephemeral, I'm more likely to not be beholden to an existing state.

This actually helps me increase the quality of my writing and my code. It's akin to the heuristic of "throwing away your first draft and rewriting" to achieve higher quality. Write your code once, delete it, and write it again from scratch. The next version takes a quarter of the time to write but can be twice the quality because you've prototyped it in your head but you are not bound to your crufty first attempt. There was an HN discussion on this a while ago:

https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding

If you save state, you can resume more quickly, which is great if you're on a roll, but it's also an accumulation of more clutter that blocks certain more creative thoughts.

I like the idea of a todo list that comes with a built in auto-delete.

You either do your to dos, or it auto-deletes them for you. No worry about it getting full, but also some pressure to actually get them done or they'll be wiped.

And if you're happy they're wiped, then you probably didn't need to do it at all.

I wonder if there's something like that already.

you can already do it, with Apple’s native Shortcuts app and Reminders app. You can set an automation to delete all reminders after a fixed time has passed with the ‘Remove Reminders’ action

Otherwise you can just use cronjobs with a small python snippet to parse and decide what reminders tagged with which labels to delete after X,Y,Z many days and hit the APIs of most major todo apps like todoist, asana, etc to just delete those tasks. Heck works with your local markdown based todo lists too.

This was a pretty nice feature for me in the now defunct arc browser. It simply deletes tabs that you don't interact with for 12 hours. If its important I'll open it again!

> The app isn't the point, the starting fresh is.

This is the crux of what made Google Inbox so good. The UX encouraged "deleting" and starting fresh. This was made possible not just through the controls, but also through the promise that undelete would be possible. People want to start fresh, but they also don't want to lose anything; that's the conundrum.

Just add a __delete all__ button.

My solution to most task list items is just wait long enough. Eventually the items often are no longer needed.

Yeah, that should work.

Alas, it doesn't.

We need a to-do app following these principles... then another for product management.

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