mvp

For me :

1. Makes the input easy - use familiar tool of choice -> WhatsApp/Telegram/etc

2. Integrate with anything - for example gmail through gog

3. Save to memory without prompting

4. Has a Soul.md which you can customize.

5. Have a reason to use a VPS

All of these are possible with Claude Code etc, however it's the the whole package that makes it more useful.

Is this really the right paper. It's from May 2024.

Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?

It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.

I think the point was that for a lot of people the settings are more productive than if they were left to their own devices.

That sentence was followed by 'Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce.'. So, if you don't struggle for survival, and don't have to work hard, and are not hit by adversity, and not forcely married to a person you don't like, then you may be happy. That seems a reasonable assumption considering the objective of the essay.

To some people, the pain of letting the money go is greater than the perceived benefit of the product/service they get in return for the money, most of the time. You can imagine such people accumulating money all their life. For them, FIRE would be a very attractive proposition.

For a tool like that I need it to be a frictionless as possible

Friction can be at different levels. All text editors especially the ones we are used to are friction less when we want to quickly open a new file and jot down something. But then, many higher levels things you want to do with chunks of text are not straight forward. You'll have to use plugins or write your extensions which sort of do what's required, but then they become clunky.

Doing the following things in a text editor is very clunky 1. Drop files from a file browser 2. A wiki that you'll stick to and not want to switch every month. 3. Write reasonably large documents that you'd actually also read in a text editor. 4. Have the same experience on all devices 5. Tables that are pleasing to the eye. 6. Visuals cues that enhance understanding of the content. 7. Select a bunch of text and convert them into pages or todos or tickets.

Roam takes a while to startup. Once up, it's quite fast to switch between pages. A bit like an IDE. It's still browser based I think, and there are no native apps for Android and iOS. So I feel constrained when I'm not at the desktop.

Notion mobile apps are quite good, so I never have to tell myself I'll do something when I go to my desktop.

Exactly.. I was wondering the same. What notifications are these people talking about. First thing I do on my phone is to turn off all notifications.

I use Google Keep for saving anything I find interesting online. There's a chrome extension that you can use to do it from the browser. It allows you to write some text around the link/text you are saving. I write enough text so that I am able to find it by searching. I also give one standard label to these notes so these are not mixed up with other Keep notes for tasks, book notes etc.

Can you suggest some books

Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had it will be ridiculous to read.

I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.

This seems incredible even to someone living quite comfortably in London for far less. Are these figures for real?!

There are plenty of good jobs in tech companies that require highly technical people who are not great programmers, or even programmers.

It is possible that you are overestimating what's required and underestimating your own ability.

If you tell yourself (and actually do, if required) that you'll only participate as an audience and not to actually do public speaking, you may get yourself over the 'thing' that may be behind the 'procrastination'.

About £500/day is fairly common in London for contractors.

Although I can guess what this should mean, I don't think I quite understand what this actually means - "its abandoned prostitution to falsehood".

Not sure if there is one but I don't really know how it matters.

If you are a .net developer you'd work with other .net developers all will be ok with being a .net developer. OTOH, if you are not one then what you think shouldn't (and mostly wouldn't) matter to other .net developers.

If you want to know this to decide whether to choose to learn .net, then that decision should probably be based on how interesting it is to you or how useful it is to others (and therefore of economic value) and other such considerations would be worthwhile.

There is a reason and place for every widely used language.

If people have a negative opinion about a particular language, it is usually because they are not entirely acquainted with the language and the ecosystem.

Maybe they should have had another set that had their usual diet for comparison just to ensure that they are not making their observations on cannibalism. As one can take the study to mean if cannibals chose young for their dietory needs they would survive 10% longer except in the case of mice however.

Are only 'priming studies' in doubt? Or are most of the studies in social psychology in doubt today? The experiments and conclusions used to fascinate me, but once you lose trust it becomes hard to believe again.

I used to think all these experiments are conducted on people vastly different from me or the people I interact with, so those findings are not applicable to me. But now it seems that those are not applicable even to people who are a lot like the subjects of the experiments.

I'm probably having the bias where one under the influence of a single significant factor ignores all the rest :).

I alternate being a hacker and non-hacker.

When I'm in the hacker mode I read almost everything here. Then I go into non-hacker mode maybe for a few months or years when I come here to read non-programming related articles and discussions.

Whatever it is I just hang on to HN.

There's such a variety in comments that both of you could be right. And I think we unconsciously quickly skim to read the kind of comments we enjoy reading.

How do they take it? Do they accept it or show resistance?

Oh that's interesting. I remember being hooked to reddit when it launched. And then after a while it started slipping and was happy to find HN (quite possibly through reddit or maybe pg essays) which was a bit like the original reddit, but much better.

Yeah I click the comments first and then the actual link most of the time.

Just imagine a Chinese, Russian or Indian company head writes such a post.

It's talking about building global communities, so anybody or everybody could or should have such an ambition.

Does that give one a sense of unease thinking about it?

If that is the case then maybe global community in that sense may not be a popular or good idea.

In this context, I'd like to draw your attention to how developing countries viewed technologies and ideas from the developed countries until a couple of decades ago. They've copied them first and then moulded them to their specific needs.

But technologies and ideas of the last decade or so cannot be copied and moulded, instead the ideas subsume them. There's no Facebook like thing in India. They use Facebook. There's no Google like thing in India. They use Google. This is ok as long as it's affecting only a small slice of their experience. However that slice has been growing and becoming more important every passing day. More people are becoming more concerned.

That concern is a lot like the sense of unease I alluded to earlier.

Those time periods are what most tech people consider as when those technologies really took off. And therefore it makes sense to say that. If he was writing a history of computer science, I agree that it would have been inaccurate to say that.

I've noticed a pattern as well where these successful entrepreneurs also don't worry about their idea being stolen. The idea should be such that anybody with ton of money/connections wouldn't be interested in.

And if a solo developer is trying to look for prospective customers, the customer should feel exited about just hearing the product. Otherwise there is no point in pursuing the idea. So there should be no worry about the customer not being interested.

Maybe because most virtues make sense from an individual perspective rather than a group.