jessehorne

The tool looks sick. I think the copilot vs black box approach is great. I found the demo to be enjoyable and satisfying to watch despite having no experience in the concrete estimation industry.

This is out of my wheelhouse but had a couple of thoughts. When you clicked P1, it found all of them. What happens if it doesn't? This would have been good to see in the video.

Also, I'm sure people familiar with these documents will have no trouble but was thinking it could be cool to do some effect to make references glow/be more noticeable at least temporarily when you are skipping around to them. Maybe some zoom controls too.

Anyways, good luck!

I got into riding, building and customizing motorcycles. The chopper scene could always use the creativity and skills of tech savy folks. Besides the mechanical skills you learn in moments which are as satisfying as they are frustrating, there's ways to utilize programming skills too...think performance/usage monitoring, trip cataloging software, social tools to connect bikers, camping planners, who knows.

If you don't find anything here, maybe consider checking out projects like Code4Good, Code the Dream, One Community Global, Develop for Good, or Code for America and reach out to see if they need any help. I think volunteering for a non-profit or good cause you resonate with is a good thing in general and probably also solid experience to put on your resume.

Hey!

I can speak to this a little bit as far as advice goes, as a software eng. I think a good PM is someone that works with us, advocates for our opinions, assuming they are good, and so on. Really good / quality communication between a PM and their eng's will go a long way. Being flexible and available will go a long way. I think you'll pick up on this pretty quick.

I think you should go beyond the basics of jira and probably learn other tools too at some point and aim to be a master of those. If for no other reason that you can be there as a resource if eng's need questions answered about it. It feels like every year I have to learn a new tool or get confused after some update depending on what we're using. This advice may be foo bar.

Someone else may mention this but in short, being somewhat technically knowledgeable will help a lot with understanding terms, conversely having to explain them, etc. Not all eng's are great at explaining to non-technical folks things they really need to understand sometimes. I think a PM can step in, in those instances, if done correctly.

Best of luck. Are you sending apps in currently?

Okay cool yeah. Just letting you know. I know building trust quickly is a challenge so figured I'd mention that. I'd change copy and probably add more context in general.

I could go on for hours about the $199 plan but tl;dr, I think it's a bad strategy here. As a potential user who could utilize this quite a bit, It was a turn off. Just letting you know. Probably be a good idea to switch that up. Paywalls "sound" great to you as a way to filter committed users, but to me, the potential user, it doesn't. I get where you're coming from, trust me. It's not the way imo. If it were me, I'd open this up to anyone and everyone when you launch with a free tier. Get users. Any and all of them as much as you can handle and have as much meaningful convo's with as many of them as possible. That $199 isn't going to get you "valuable" users. It's going to get you people that paid $199. I think there's a lot more value to make from this project than what you'll make from that paywall. ANYWAYS.

The website looks AI generated, which I'm not necessarily complaining about but I am noticing patterns with using claude to do similar things. Just a heads up.

I think you could make it quite a bit clearer what this actually is. It feels like it took me too long to realize it's a prompt for asking questions about your ad data.

Also, this feels like a scam, because why would there be a line for me to skip and why does it cost me $199 to do that? Seems like a weird profit strategy.

A LLM-usage observability/monitoring tool (submitted to YC F25) and random game projects. One game I'm building is a tiny IO game inspired by moomoo.io but on Luna (our moon). Once that's done I'm thinking of making something with trains.

Oof

This sucks for me because sucking up is all I feel I can do to make people like me. :p

Didn’t mean to come off rude. I do sincerely appreciate the advice. Just trying to cope with intense anxiety and stress with humor. Sry about that

Yeah it's been rough. People keep saying "it's a numbers game" who I don't think are directly connected to the issue atm due to their current employment. I appreciate your commenting and offering advice. Perhaps it is just a numbers game. Going to try to pump up the numbers and get to like 100 apps a day instead of 20.

Thanks! Very familiar with these.

Oh yeah I’ve been unemployed for months and only have been denied from one role. sarcasm I get two interviews a week. “Its a numbers game” is pretty wild. In all seriousness Ive probably put in 200 apps.

Been primarily on the backend. Last couple of years have been working with Go. Before that, a lot of Python, PHP, Node etc. Laravel, flask, gin, express. The whole nine yards.

I resonate a lot with this but I think it's against my will that I feel lost. I've started little projects like 48hr.dev to try to help me just build more and to collaborate with people in the same spot. I have friends building these incredible saas apps or stuff to help in scientific research, or just really cool side projects but I struggle to find ideas that are valuable to people. I don't lack motivation or interest I just lack the luck or either skills to find (and have faith in) solid ideas.

ok I asked chatgpt to fix it and lo and behold i had to do it myself

Site is down right now. Will be back up momentarily.

https://github.com/Centrifuge-Micro/48hr.dev/graphs/contribu...

Thanks! Yeah I am working on some ideas to get more users.

Will always +1 solar punk.

Hey the longer and whiter the beard the more badass of a programmer you are. Stay awesome.

I share the frustration that we haven't discovered anything yet and honestly I didn't even think of the title being like that until you said anything. I just like the project. The more you dive into this the less shocking it is we haven't found anything and the more faith I have that we will find something, one day.

There are so many technical challenges to face with this and one of the major ones is with the software that scans the absolutely huge amounts of data. The data is available publicly so with a bit of study, the average engineer with understanding of radio waves and what not could get up to speed enough to potentially do some good.

Whether or not radio waves are even the best route to go is up for debate. There's a lot of interference and the longer they travel the weaker they are...There's some interesting techniques being used but like I said, the more I learn about how we're approaching this, the less faith I have in the project, which actually is a good thing. It means we're not doing "all that we can do" and when their 10 years is up and they haven't discovered anything, we don't have to lose hope that we aren't alone.

Congrats. Hows retired life treating you?

Perhaps it is. Never looked at it that way. I'd love to build my family a chair but will they accept the gift knowing that because I chose wood as my canvas, it will likely be 10k+ microns off on each leg?

I think the downturn observation is correct.

I'm sold. I'll dig in and look more into it. Thanks for the comment.

I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvote this a thousand times I would.

This is great feedback. I really appreciate it. I'd love to give you the short of what we're doing. If you're interested, my email is in my HN desc. Not sure what I could offer in exchange for your time but willing to figure something out.

Thanks a ton. I do have some questions based on your feedback.

What do you mean by experience? As a consumer or moreso experience that the particular solution is viable?

A story on the product or of the founder(s)? I feel like I've got the latter covered. I have plenty of stories of when the product would have been very useful and a couple friends to vouch. Does that count?

Another question. Does it look bad when you can't bootstrap? Doing development in my spare time is fine. This particular idea though can't be done totally in my spare time nor could I bootstrap unless I was a lot wealthier, although it's not as high as I make it out to be.

When is too early to plan a pilot? I've got the majority of a pilot planned already because that's just how my brain works. Designed it to be as minimalist as possible so I could test the waters. Would that be a good sign? Do they really care about this level of detail? Or does the idea of a pilot turn them off because there's no substance yet?

Basically, how can I go in with as little as possible and get enough to run that pilot? "Little" in this case being "hey, I believe in this, but there's no way to do this other than to show you".

Sorry for all the questions. :-)

Excellent advice. Thank you!

The more I think about it the more I agree that what I said isn't accurate, actually. Agents can spam too and get paid for placing "someone", not one person. Also, if everyone had an agent, we're basically at the same place. So I don't think this is the solution.

Also I generally agree with what you're saying about recruiters. Still trying to think of solutions. The problem needing to be solved is it's very hard for lots of engineers at various points in time to find work. It's a real problem because of how it affects those people in that situation.

I didn't see the problem until I decided to quit my job this year, at the height of the layoffs. I used to be able to get offers for every one out of three interviews.

That isn't the case anymore. At all. Farrrr from it.

There IS indeed a problem but I don't think the solution is becoming an agent. I'm still going to keep it open to get more inspiration and testing.