HN user
As a non-developer, I played with rust and various copilots over the last couple of months. I ended up with a backtesting engine.
Now I figured out I want to go all in actually learning rust and doing the deep dive in crypto. Enjoy the trip.
I use ChatGPT to help study linear algebra.
It helps me a lot when I feel lost. It's often wrong in the calculations, but it's cool to have a study buddy that doesn't judge you.
If I get blocked with a problem I can't solve, I ask for assistance with my approach.
I enjoy asking ChatGPT about the context behind all that math theory. It's nice to elaborate on that as most of the math books are very lean and provide no applied context.
I find myself more and more into the CLI and recently got introduced to Neovim. Decided to start learning Neovim by simply writing markdown documentation and I'd say it's even intuitive.
That works pretty good with markdown files hosted on github pages as I don't have to move out of the CLI when pushing them online.
However, the use case that this workflow doesn't cover is when I write something that I'd like to send for a proofread to a friend of mine, who's an editor. He really loves his Word files.
As I'm a noob, I asked then ChatGPT to help me with a bash script that converts that .md file into a .doc file using pandoc. That worked pretty well.
My thought was if it couldn't be possible to use something like pandoc for converting an .md file into a templated doc with headers, footers, page numbering, even toc?
That wouldn't solve 100% of the use cases, but still could be pretty good.
As I'm still a coding noob, I don't ship code as much as I want to.
However, I make a simple bullet task list and work on it. Tasks are not necessarily related to coding. It could be a task related to image editing. Initially, I was feeling very bad if I can't finish a task within the time I've set for it.
Now I don't feel bad if I can't finish that task on time. I perceive it as a micro-iteration of the task. The trick is to iterate further, until the task is done.
While rushing to do a task within a specific timeframe, might be productive in the short-term, I don't see it feasible if you push yourself all the time doing it. I imagine it might reflect on the quality of your work and lead to a self-induced burnout.
Shipping for the sake of it, in my opinion, might create some false perception of work being done. In my experience, employers tend to reward that behavior.
So maybe the question here would be: why are you shipping in first place? To show off, to boost dopamine through gamifying yourself, or to deliver a piece of work you'll be proud of before going to bed.
What would be interesting for me is, if I can develop an app for, let's say macOS, and expose its context to Siri (with Intelligence) in an easy way.
For example:
Imagine a simple Amazon price tracker I have in my menu bar. I pick 5 products that I want to have their price tracked. I want that info to be exposed to Siri too. And then I can simply ask Siri a tricky question: "Hey Siri, check Amazon tracker app, and tell me if it's a good moment to buy that coffee machine." I'd even expect Siri to get me that data from my app and be able to send it over my email. It doesn't sound like rocket science.
In the end of the day, the average user doesn't like writing with a chatbot. The average user doesn't really like reading (as it could be overwhelming). But the average user could potentially like an assistant that offloads some basic tasks that are not mission critical.
By mission critical I mean asking the next best AI assistant to buy you a plane ticket.
I mostly use Google to search on reddit, github and hacker news with "site:github.com".
It's also somehow good to find pdf files with "filetype:pdf".
As already mentioned, the occasional currency and time conversions are also pretty nice. I admit I use their calculator too sometimes.
Essentially, Google advanced search operators have been a pretty powerful feature that I've been using since I learned about it in 2011.
Other than that, I agree the generic search result are a bloody mess.
For a lot of other searches, GPT 4 helps a lot.
Thanks for sharing this great project! Randomly browsing through the first page results, I ended up reading some of the ideas.
Reading that someone else, somewhere else, has a similar idea, has made my day. Cheers.
Location: Bulgaria, EU
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Possibly
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/angel-gpetrov
About: Strong generalist, working for the last 9 years as a business analyst and product manager. Spent 6+ years in card payments (both POS and eCommerce). I worked mostly with startups, some of them managed to scale up.
Depending on the project, product and/or team I like to:
- Facilitate ideation and discovery workshops on Figma, Miro and recently Freeform
- Build hypotheses based on market research, customer feedback, analytics
- Facilitate iterations based on the hypotheses built in the workshops
- Iterate over user personas, collect data about them and map to use cases
- Map use cases to user flows and then user stories
- Diagram and wireframe. I even tried to do the DailyUI challenge, but I gave up at day 40
- Demo and ask for feedback
Technologies: HTML, CSS, Flask,
Currently interested in building products utilizing generative AI. Questions occupying my head right now:
- Can I connect Siri to Ollama so that I can enhance my productivity?
- Can I scrape up-to-date dev docs that I feed into a local LLM and use them when needed?
If anyone wants to have a chat, feel free to text me on linkedin or spicylimer [at] gmail [dot] com
Yesterday I had the thought of what we could achieve right now with let's say 3 x A2000 leftover GPUs from a random second-hand crypto mining rig.
I think it would be awesome to be able to use GPUs from second-hand crypto mining rigs for cheaper fine-tuning research.
Good luck! As an enthusiast who loves The Lean Startup and who recently started playing around with LLMs, I'm super stoked about Answer.AI
Yes, I love that thread. It helps me with brainstorming on new ideas.
Also, it's pretty nice to share with the small team I'm part of. We're currently working on custom client projects and we'd like to build our product. Seeing how people do it is a nice morale boost, especially for a team that lacks experience in building.
I used to struggle a lot in communication for talking to people in the authentic self way you just described. Being too direct and telling my point of view in such a way has caused tension with family, colleagues and the girlfriend.
The moment I change the way I talk and say instead of "That's bullshit, let's move away from it" to "That could be a challenging and rewarding experience", and I can already see the advantage.
I rather like to talk the way I want, but I see it as challenging and not that rewarding as people seem to get more sensitive. That made me wonder if the way GPT-style chatbots communicate with humans would make humans expect the same way of communication from other humans.
Frying rice with canned tuna and black pepper has been my life saver as a student.
If you have a rice cooker, you can use the rice from it. If not and you don't want to clean two pots, just boil the rice in a saucepan and once ready, get it out and fry the canned tuna with some chopped onion and black pepper.
Going to Indonesia, you can find out that's a variety of their national dish (nasi goreng). A sunny side up egg on top of that is an extra bonus.
As you already have a niche in mind (restaurants that are already on delivery apps), you can make a list and try to approach them.
How I'd do that (consider it a brainstorm):
- I'd build a simple prototype
- If I have friends in the niche, I'd approach them and ask for feedback
- I'll actually ask them who is managing their menus and marketing. It makes sense to try finding agencies (these could be graphic or print agencies) that print the menus. They can get you in touch with restaurant owners and maybe they know something about keeping menus up to date.
- I'd write down what their struggles are. For example - expensive to update high-quality printed menus, challenge to maintain onsite digital menu, challenge to match current availability with online platforms, etc.
- See if any of the issues they're referring to, does actually relate to the hypothesis you've built. If you're not happy with the result, iterate.
- Play around with use cases - list a couple of use cases (Client orders online, client cancels online, client orders on the phone, order is paid but no availability, out of stock, etc). Observe the business processes surrounding these use cases in the restaurants and see how your solution (or hypothesis) might fit there.
- If you don't feel threatened by the delivery apps, try approaching them. They are usually pretty well-connected with the restaurants and know a lot of their pain points.
- If you can afford it, spend some time in real observations (I'd do that by sitting around a friend who has a restaurant and accepts orders).
If you have a prototype that you believe can be validated, try it with a restaurant. If you're unsure how to approach a restaurant owner, manager or staff, just go there and order some food. Then present yourself and express curiosity. My experience is that if they are not busy and if you don't ask for money, they could be talkative. The more you order, the more talkative they get.
Be very careful what you promise for free to the restaurants. They might ask you to build them a website or help with Windows update.
Good luck! Hope you got some insights.
I'll share my strange story with The Stranger. 10 years ago I suffered from anxiety, lack of sleep and high blood pressure.
I'd been given small pink pills. Took them as prescribed. My condition didn't really change.
Then I turned to reading. After a couple of other books, I found this list [1]. I read The Stranger. I've felt sudden ease of my anxiety, I was at peace.
Two weeks after The Stranger, I read Siddhartha. Soon, my sleep turned back to normal.
I'm not praising these books, neither I'm suggesting avoiding medical advice. I'm just still excited how reading can affect someone's well-being.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Monde%27s_100_Books_of_the_...
The way I do it is the following. I daydream sometimes and paint a picture of myself where I want to be. That picture has been heavily influenced by a challenging hobby I enjoy.
Two years ago by painting that picture I realized I need a fundamental change if I want to make it happen.
I said, if you're consistent in wasting your time like that, let's see what will happen if you are consistent with not wasting your time.
I identified a couple of priorities for myself. One of them is "income". If I need to do a task that might take me an hour to finish, but a week to start, I say to myself: that's part of your income. You need it, cut the emotions, drop the ego and do it.
Surprisingly, it works for me not that bad.
On the side projects, I recently counted the folders I did in 2023 - more than 40. Nothing live, but I keep on going because the picture I painted for myself is that these projects are the beginning of something great.
I can totally relate to the author. I dropped all routine and started compare how my day evolves according to my fundamental priorities right now: health, income, hobby.
All is about the motivation. People talk about goals and outcomes, but rarely I see someone truly questioning what they really want and more important - what they really don't want. That for me is the driver behind motivation.
That's what I was thinking too. I'm pretty confident you can actually write and publish an open-source book on github.
I love how simple markdown is and how covers most of my writing use cases.
Been there, done that.
- Doing the dishes - podcast
- Walking in the lunch break - audiobook
- Cycling in the park - audiobook
After a couple of months I felt my brain is completely fried from that information overflow.
Now I don't even put my earbuds, unless I'm in a very noisy area and I need to focus on a work task.
I'd say what you describe is an active form of meditation. I do that now when swimming, walking, or simply having a coffee in the morning and looking at the ocean.