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Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

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Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#81

Post by decide1000 »

binwiederhier wrote: post #56
leonidasv wrote: post #54

Kagi, a paid search engine. I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking. Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains f…

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences. I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as m…

I had the same experience. I really tried to use Kagi as my main search engine but it just was not good enough for me. I did like the feature where you can exclude domains from the results. It couild work nice as some kind of addon to Google search results.

I will give it another try in the future and hope my experience is different. I do like the company and the vision behind it.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#82

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Quicken, although I've switched to Ledger since. Being able to track my spending made it a lot easier to keep on top of my finances. It's why I was comfortable starting a business 25 years ago with two young children and why I've been able to retire at a relatively young age.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#83

Post by pronouncedjerry »

binwiederhier wrote: post #56
leonidasv wrote: post #54

Kagi, a paid search engine. I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking. Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains f…

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences. I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as m…

what does !g do?

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#84

Post by biztos »

Eggsellence wrote: post #62
eddieroger wrote: post #4

Todoist. My wife and I can share lists, assign tasks, track completion, all sorts of stuff. It’s not perfect, but I’m really mostly happy with it. Also, setting up an iCloud family. Most of the sharing stuff we can do can be done without being in a family unit, but it makes it that much easier since it makes assumptions about who I wish to share with. From there, native Notes, Calendar, all that stuff has made our li…

I've been Todoist user for many years, premium user as of this year. As well as reminders, tasks, and appointments, I use it to quickly take notes, record thoughts, etc. It's been great until this week when I hit their ridiculously low limit: 300. That's not many tasks/notes, especially as each sub task is counted individually too. Why is it so low? I'm a paying user. I'm probably burdening their servers with all of…

I recently started using Todoist (Pro account) and never heard of these limits, but indeed here they are:

https://todoist.com/help/articles/todoists-limits-for-tasks,...

I haven’t got my projects fully populated yet but 300 is definitely possible for some, eventually.

When I look at the enumerated limits I suspect a code/database issue rather than bean-counter logic… surely you can pack a whole lot of text into your cloud sync for 5 USD per month less Apple tax?

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#85

Post by adastra22 »

personjerry wrote: post #68
adastra22 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that sarcasm? I’m vastly more concerned that my kids lead fulfilling, happy lives than that they get into a top tier university. Or university at all, for that matter. But also my 12 year old daughter is working on publishing her first iOS app on her own initiative. I’m sure they’ll do fine.

Not sarcasm! I was under the impression that in the US that getting into a good uni is a big deal, and since those of us in tech have the means, then those sorts of advantages for our kids would be great investments.

The way you phrase it sounds like you’re either not American or a first generation immigrant. If so, what’s your home culture? Just curious.

My family goes back to the 1830’s on one side, and the 1600’s on the other, so I’m pretty integrated. I don’t think any of that is really in the radar for people in my family. We are relatively well off middle class, and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins went to university. But not Yale, Harvard, or MIT. We didn’t do cram schools, but did band or soccer or theatre instead. Whatever our interests were.

Cram schools and intense stress related to academic achievement is more typical of recent immigrants, and/or particularly though not exclusively East Asian and South Asian families. When I sat for the SAT I was shocked that some of the people I sat next to had been attending study schools for months to prepare. Me and my friends just sat for it and took it cold, lol. There is a much stronger drive in that culture for academic achievement and living up to your parent’s expectations. In many-generational American families, not so much (not just white, but anyone whose family has been here for a while).

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#86

Post by ShaddyDC »

pronouncedjerry wrote: post #83
binwiederhier wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences. I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as m…

what does !g do?

It lets you search the current query on Google. It's also a bang on ddg

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#87

Post by lloeki »

kstrauser wrote: post #70
simbolit wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are using FM not as an emergency tool, but generally? Does that mean in your family everyone (potentially) always knows where everyone else is? Is there a rule for when/if it's appropriate to turn FM off? Please don't read this as me judging; if that works for you, great, I'd (as far as i understand it) not want that, but it's not my life.

My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner. The other day I happen to notice that my grown kid was at a good restaurant and I texted them to be sure to try a certain dish. Another kid texted me yesterday to ask what I was doing in SF; I was running errands with a friend. For us, it’s a fun way to see what each other is up to. The reason…

> My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times.

Same.

> I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner

I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call.

> The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device.

I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you have access to all the emails but you never read them out of ethics. In that spirit: we have location-based automations set up in Home Assistant, and by default there's a geocoded location entity per tracked device, which I disabled, relying only on zone enter/leave events, carefully balancing privacy and convenience.

Now, the use case about leaving it on at all times is:

a) If you turn it off there's a chance you forget to turn it on. That's also why the new iOS check-in feature, while nice, doesn't cut it.

b) The most trivial reason: my wife frequently misplaces her phone (and other things, which recently got airtagged).

c) My wife works in a bar; let's not kid ourselves, the nightlife way back home carries additional risk: e.g bars close at about the same time, which generates a flux of drunk people in the streets, who are more prone to do dangerously idiotic or hostile things (from driving under influence to downright assault). While not frequent incidents are not unlikely either: over the course of two years there has been about a dozen, a few were life threatening; luckily she managed to either avoid, defuse, or escape such situations, but one day she might not and end up being unable to actively alert. Once while riding her bike to work she was hit-and-run by a car, dumb luck had it so that she was still conscious. Similarly I do sports like skateboarding, if by happenstance an accident happen and I'm knocked unconscious or otherwise unable to alert I can be found.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#88

Post by muzani »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28

Google photos, I have all devices syncing photos to one place and now I don’t need to worry about did in-law A remember to backup their phone when they inevitably lose it at the grocery store. Arguably the only remotely important thing we have on our phones is photos and maybe chat history but it’s not earth shattering to lose that. Despite having more photos of ourselves than any other generation ever, It’s still so…

Not clear if you use it, but there's a family setting to Google One too at no extra charge. So my wife gets the extra space for the same payment. We use about the same amount of space for photos, so it saved us from each having our own subscription.

I'm not sure if this is related to having a YouTube family subscription but it worked seamlessly for us.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#89

Post by muzani »

bilekas wrote: post #77

This is an interesting thread as a lot of the comments mention services as opposed to software straight out. That said i bought the lifetime membership of jetbrains IDE. I think it was worth the money personally. Services based i would have to say Spotify. It's been a game changer for me over the years with an unhealthy habit of hoarding music.

I was an unhealthy hoarder of music too. Went JOOX > Spotify > YouTube Music as far as it goes. YT is great as it includes songs that are only posted on YT (mainly covers), but also you get no ads on the video version of YT. I kind of want to support Spotify as the little guy but they haven't been kind to paying users.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#90

Post by wink »

KolenCh wrote: post #75

Adobe CC. This enables our family tradition to produce photo books for our important events and vacations of our life. In the past we used softwares provided by photo book companies but all of them either phased out their software or being acquired. (They might be rebranded softwares by someone else, seems to be written in Java.) Since then after I finished doing photo retouching with Lightroom Classic, my wife would…

We have this problem as well, but realistically - how often do you need or even look at the digital originals of photo books? Yes, the work invested would be lost but we let those print once and still have the original photos. As long as the service does not shut down or change software while you are working on a photo book (hey, it only happened once due to... procrastination). it shouldn't really matter.
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