waprin

edit: made a goal to avoid pointless internet flame wars that I briefly lapsed from

I was just focusing on a few specific things in the Claude Code 2 release notes, namely they added two features /rewind and /usage, and I was disappointed in both. It's also probably a little too long as is. And yeah I've heard a lot of people complain about the Codex CLI experience though in a previous post I mentioned many Redditors like this repo to improve it:

https://github.com/just-every/code

I haven't tried Crush nor even heard of Opencode so I'll have to check them out, thanks for the feedback.

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding.

But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize. You might prefer manual coding, but you might just be bad at AI coding and you might prefer it if you improved at it.

With that said, I'm still very skeptical of letting the AI drive the majority of the software work, despite meeting people who swear it works. I personally am currently preferring "let the AI do most of the grunt work but get good at managing it and shepherding the high level software design".

It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography.

Expo is the most popular React Native framework and markets remote updates as a feature and highlights that it lets you skip App Review update and Apple hasn't stopped them (Expo updates not exactly server-side mobile UI but it's similar idea).

It's one of those things that's like "write one HTML file with zero styling, then you can have multiple different CSS files style the same content completely differently! Separation of Concern!" Sounds perfect in theory but just doesn't always work.

Having one API for web and mobile sounds good but in practice often the different apps have different concerns.

And SEO and page speed were always reasons the server never died.

In fact, the trend is the opposite direction - the server sending the mobile apps their UIs. That way you can roll out new updates, features, and experiments without even deploying a new version.

Why isn't it intended for promotion?

I find this "anti-promotion" attitude to be doing a disservice to this HN community for a few reasons.

Clearly, this whole website is funded and exists in part to promote YC's portfolio companies, as evidenced by "Launch HN" threads getting auto-front paged whereas "Show HN" plebians have to earn the upvotes from /new (which most agree required an exceptionally good post and a lot of luck to even get that goodness noticed). And we're not talking promotion of a few posts, YC is now doing multiple batches a year and has hundreds of companies per batch meaning we're seeing a LOT of promotion / advertisements on this site coming via Launch HN threads as well as jobs ad threads.

I don't think Xerox park would have done as well if 5% of the people get got the opportunity for a microphone in the auditorium every week and the other 95% did not. That would seem like a caste system. I understand that YC funds this website so the caste system is inevitable but I don't see why moderation should further stratify it - unless you're prioritizing advertising YC companies over a great community.

Next, I see this "HN is not for self promotion" do a lot of downstream damage on the community in the sense that it's much better for big, existing trillion dollar companies than smaller players. If a small bootstrapped startup writes a blog post and mentions there product, people will complain about "blogspam" and "this blog post is really just an ad for a link at the end". But if Google or Amazon have a new announcement for a new product, nobody complains that it's an advertisement, even though it's often as much or more one. The end result is that the website tends to focus more "corporate" news than "hacker" news as a downstream consequence of a well-meaning "no self-promotion" rule.

Finally, as we've discussed over email, the rules around self-promotion are extremely opaque and in many cases algorithmically enforced by closed algorithms. This leads to a lot of confusion around what's allowed and a lot of ambiguous favoritism.

I understand this site is called "Hacker" news and there's some mystique around the "hacker" building "just for fun" , the purism around intellectual curiosity that you don't want tainted by dirty commercialism. I just think that once the website has decided it's going to be the media arm of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, the ship has sailed.If people really want pure tech news, they should go to https://lobste.rs/ . I've personally found in recent years quality of interesting conversation is much higher on /r/saas, Indie Hackers board, and Small Bets campfire, as well as various Discords, all because they allow self-promotion and don't encourage the "self-promotion police" who frequently show up aghast someone would try to make money on the internet (unless it's their daddy FAANG employer).

Another rule I've seen in various places be very effective is a simple guideline to contribute 10x as much non-promotional content as promotional content. If someone only posts links to their projects and nothing else, I see how that gets spammy. But if someone regularly contributes they should get a pass. I understand that's partially how the submission system works via algorithmic enforcement, but , see above about its opaque and ambiguous nature.

Show HN is a "place" for self-promotion but it's a pretty bad place if 99% of submissions get entirely lost and ignored and I think you should encourage more places for promotion without inflicting a caste system where only YC companies and certain golden children get special rules.

Overall, HN's guidelines against self-promotion are too rigid, there's too few opportunties for small players to promote, which makes the discussion here less egalitarian, more corporate, and less interesting. You'd be better served encouraging more self-promotion in threads like these.

It wasn’t gratuitous at all and the “self-promotion police” are an insufferable plague on this website.

"Early adopters will get discounts / free plans."

If you include this then you're not even validating to the extent that you think you are. Because you're validating that people will sign up to use it for a discount / free, which doesn't necessarily mean anyone will pay full price for it.

Looks cool I’ll keep an eye on it.

Yes indeed glad you noticed! Been too addicted to that godforsaken game at points so figured borrow some of its qualities for my studying apps...in general I'm interested in gamification + studying.

What's true is that equilibrium strategies typically converge to solutions where the better makes the caller indifferent between calling and folding. In the toy example I've given where the betters range is so strong, the caller should always fold, the better now has an incentive to add more bluffs to the range to take advantage of the folds. Then the caller will want to call more. This might converge to the MDF which might be what you're suggesting, assuming we started with ranges that could have enough bluffs given the runouts.

If you open up the solver, and give one player only Ace-Ace as their starting range, and the other player a pair of twos, and the board Ace-Ace-Three-Three-Three, then the pair of twos will fold 100% on river and will not call at MDF.

What's interesting about this is the minimum defense frequency is based on what the strongest hands you can possibly have in that situation are and the opponents possible hands do not even factor into it.

This is actually not quite true. MDF is purely a formula based on pot size and the bet size (pot size / pot size + bet size). The fact that it doesn't consider various ranges is why it's not really useful - it was a simplified formula used to try to understand the game before solvers existed.

There are situations where your opponent can bet any two cards profitably and you do have to fold - imagine they bet the size of the pot, but have the better hand 99% of the time, you're simply forced to let them bluff the 1% of the time they're bluffing. MDF is a pre-solver concept and not an especially useful concept in the modern game.

Within solvers, you can do something called "node locking", which means you "lock" a tree in the game node to play a fixed strategy. You would typically lock it to play as you suspect your opponent plays. This lets the solver calculate the optimal exploitative solution against your specific oppoents.

Piosolver, the first public solver and the one mentioned in the article, has this feature.

However, what often happens is if you lock one node, then several other nodes in the game tree over-adjust in drastic ways, forcing you to lock all of the, which may be infeasiable. As a result, Piosolver recently introduced "incentives", which gives a player in the game an additional incentive to take a certain action . For example, you may suspect your opponent calls too much and doesn't raise enough, so you can just set that incentive and it will include that in its math equations and give you something similar to an exploitative solution with a much simpler UX.

This feature was literally just introduced a few months ago so it's still very much an active area of research, both for game theory nerds, and people trying to use the game theory nerd research to make money !

I'm working on a project aiming to help pro (or serious amateur) poker players learn game theory, mostly via flashcards with spaced-repetition.

https://www.livepokertheory.com

I do personally dislike that GTO became the nomenclature , as I prefer "theory-based", since it causes this confusion, but trying to fight it at this point is hopeless because GTO is the search term people are using. And when people say they "play GTO" they usually mean "equilibrium" rather than "optimal against my specific opponents" which is "exploitative".

If you actually watch what the top players advocate for, everyone suggests you want to play exploitatively. However, there's one equilibrium solution and effectively infinite exploitative solutions, so equilibrium is a reasonble starting point to develop a baseline understanding of the mechanics of the game. It's tough to know how much "too much" bluffing is unless you know a baseline.

Furthermore, if you "exploit" people by definition you are opening yourself up to being exploited so you need to be very careful your assumptions are true.

Also, with solvers like piosolver, you can "node lock" (tell a node in the game tree to play like your opponent, rather than an equilibrium way plays), but there's many pitfalls, such as the solver adjusting in very unnatural ways on other nodes to adjust, and it being impractical to "lock" a strategy every node in the tree. There's new ideas called "incentives" which gives the solver an "incentive" to play more like a human would (e.g. calling too much) but these are new ideas still being actively explored.

Rock paper scissors is frequently used to explain GTO but it's not the best example because equilibrium in rock paper scissors will break even against all opponents, but equilibrium poker strategy will actually beat most human poker players, albeit not as much as a maximally exploitative one.

There's two other huge pieces this article glosses over:

1) It's as impossible for a human to play like a computer in poker as in chess - in fact far more impossible, because in poker you need to implement mixed strategies. In chess there's usually a best move, but in poker the optimal solution often involves doing something 30% of the time and something else 70% of the time. The problem is that, not only are there too many situations to memorize all the solutions, but actually implementing the correct frequencies is impossible for a human. Some players like to use "randomizers" like dice at the table, or looking at a clock, but I find that somewhat silly since it still so unlikely you are anywhere near equilbrium.

2) Reading someone's "tells" live is still a thing. While solvers have led to online poker to decline due to widespread "real time assistance", live poker is booming (the 2024 World Series of Poker Main Event just broke the record yet again) , and in person in live poker, people still give off various information about their hand via body language. From the 70s to the early 2000s, people were somewhat obsessed with "tells" as a way to win at poker. Since computers have advanced so much, it's fallen out of favor, but the truth is, both are useful. It's totally mistaken to think that advancement in poker AI , GTO , and solvers have rendered live reads obsolete. In fact, in 2023, Tom Dwan won the biggest pot in televised poker history (3.1 million) and credited a live read to his decision, in a spot where the solver would randomize between a call and a fold.

The technique of journaling as you work is sometimes called “interstitial journaling” and I became a big fan of it as a way to help focus as well as keeping track of what I was working on.

I made a tool to associate those notes with a color coded project and timestamp:

https://interstitch.app

It ended up being unintentionally similar to an invoicing time tracking tool a freelancer might use but the use case Im interested in is more personal productivity.

Can’t say the project has generated much interest outside my own personal use but I find it very nice to track notes as I go and then easily see how much time I spent on a given project. You can also add a #hashtag in the notes and then filter by that hashtag in the calendar view.

Completely free in case anyone else finds it helpful!

People underestimate how much cultural baggage influences things.

I'll give a very simple example. I did a few SWE interviews in 2020, and several companies did the initial screen over the phone, and the on-site over Zoom.

In both cases it was a remote interview. There was no reason not to do both over Zoom. The only reason was that the previous process was a phone interview and then an in-person onsite, and they realized they had to replace the in-person on-site with Zoom, but they didn't think to replace the phone screen. If you started from scratch it makes no sense though.

In this case, the whole origin of the Leetcode interview is "we're going to hire the smartest people in the world.". You can dispute whether that was true back in 2009 but it was certainly part of Google / Facebook's messaging. Now, in 2024, I think it has morphed much closer to a standardized test, and even if people might begrudgingly admit that, there's still the cultural baggage remaining. If a company used a third-party service, they'd be admitted they're hiring standardized candidates rather than the smartest people in the world. Which might be an "unknown known" - things that everybody knows but nobody is allowed to admit.

What’s ironic is that Michael Seibel has discussed many times on the YC podcast that you should avoid building whatever’s hot for VCs because their attention tends to change every year but you’ll be stuck building for a decade.

2020 was remote work, 2021 was web3, now we have the big LLM boom.

Honestly it seems there’s a lot of advantages to “riding a wave” and a lot of advantages to being contrarian. But if raising money is your priority I do think you should ride the wave. Being contrarian sounds romantic, but don’t expect funding from people who disagree with you.

The most charitable thing I’d say about YCs AI focus is it’s hard to think of a startup idea that couldn’t benefit from AI in some way.

So it's funny because I _set out_ to build productivity software for lots of people, I just completely failed at that goal, probably in part because I did build what I wanted, which is not what the mass market wants. Plus, design is hard and very important in the space. But I completely succeeded at building software that made my life better, at least.

I know HN sometimes dislikes relenteless self-promotion which this comment will be so I wanted to give a shoutout to two productivity apps I have no affiliation with - Inbox When Ready which lets you search Gmail without being distracted by new emails, and Unhook which lets you search Youtube without seeing recommendations, both of which I find useful for avoiding distractions.

So I made an ultimate habit tracker personalized for my desires. But I feature creeped it to death with features I want and nobody else wants. So one of the "habits" I optimize for is getting enough focused work done on any given day, which I use a time tracker for. And I like to take notes on my work as I do it so I can focus. This is called "interstitial journaling". So I refactored just the time tracking and journaling app into a new app called Interstitch

https://interstitch.app

This app _completely_ flopped on Product Hunt and Reddit as well, despite being free, for a few reasons but one is that people think "interstitial journaling" is more about journaling when its' really more time tracking.

However, it was a double-edged sword because the Reddit post I got 2 upvotes on is now the #2 Google Search result for "interstitial journaling app" which gets me about 5 new users every week. (useful lesson to be learned that sometimes the best SEO is not on your own website).

Most time tracking apps really focus on the invoicing or employee time market, understandably since it's more B2B, but I prefer my app because it's more focused on personal productivity. If you want to lose weight, track what you eat, if you want to focus more on work, track how much time you spend focusing, it keeps you honest and unveils trends. I'm also a big believer it's a helpful tool for ADHD people because "time boxing" / "calendar blocking" is very prescriptive, whereas journaling what you actually did lets you be more flexible with your specific task but still keeps you honest about your overall productivity.

Specifically, my gripe with habit trackers was:

1) They are usually optimized for tracking just a few things. But I have a _lot_ of habits I want to track - health habits, work habits, hell, giving my dog a monthly bath habit. It's not even about perfectly doing everything, it's about gathering the data so that you can view insights and understand yourself. This is also called "life logging" or "the quantified life".

2) They were too prescriptive instead of descriptive. So in my habit tracker, you can just set a goal to say "exercise every day", then if I track that I specifically lifted weights, it "bubbles up" to say that I exercised, since weight lifting is a child of exercise in a big DAG. In this big DAG, I have a bunch of "views" of different sub-trees, so my dog has his own sub-tree that reminds me to get him baths and bring him to the vet, but that's not in my daily core view.

3) I want something with both a good web and mobile experience, though there's a few other apps that do this such as Everyday, none of them also do 1) and 2). My real dream is also super slick Apple Watch integration which I started but it was too much work to build SwiftUI for mobile and Typescript for web and integrate them nicely.

So the app is called Navigoals ( https://navigoals.com ) . For reasons I still can't explain, YC actually gave me an interview to pitch it but the pitch went about as terribly as it possibly could have. Because of aforementioned feature creep, I closed signups and if I build on anything it would just be Interstitch which is simpler and more polished but Navigoals does have a Youtube demo on its landing page.

I want to say that people love to dunk on programmers building another TODO-list apps or habit tracker. I do think it's going to be a bad business strategy the vast majority of the time unless you have top notch design and marketing skills. But, I think it's a fantastic way to do things like learn a new tech stack or design stack and the end result is a tool that's optimized for your own use case. Productivity tends to be a very personalized thing without good "one size fits all" solutions , even things like Notion which try to be the kitchen sink don't have basic things like real features you need for a great habit tracker, so I highly encourage people to ignore the naysayers and build the best tool for themselves.

I can say personally that Navigoals and Interstitch both forced me to be a lot more honest about some bad habits I had and how I spent my time. For example, I was in huge denial about the impact of marijuana use on my productivity but seeing the days I used it and the clear decline in other health and focus metrics in the week I used it made me realize I had to quit partaking in it if I wanted to achieve my other goals.

That’s a fair perspective but consider that spaced-repetition can be an “MVP” of the broader concept of adaptive / personalized learning. You track some state about your knowledge of the world, in this case your performance on a flash card, and optimize the next piece of educational content around it.

It feels obvious to me that, in theory, we could do a lot more to leverage your current world knowledge to recommend the next piece of educational content, to optimize not just your understanding but also other things like how engaged you are. For example, a system could throw you an easier question if it helps you focus longer.

When I see the state of current interview prep it’s mostly “here’s a big list of questions” , perhaps tagged by difficulty and grouped under related topics such as “graph problems” or “tree problems” but I’m personally convinced a more sophisticated system could serve you the best possible next problem to stretch your brain in the right way.

Spaced rep is simply the proven starting point. The rest of adaptive learning has a bit of a troubled past because it was trendy to VCs , but pushed on educators and presented more as an alternative to a teacher rather than something to augment a teacher. I worked for a company that raised 100M+ to work on it but the CEO was great at terms sheets but uninterested in actually building a great education project.

But the reason that I joined the company was the high level idea still resonates with me. Surely many HN users have a big list of things they want to learn- perhaps about LLMs. But a typical course will have zero knowledge on where you’re starting as a student . It might bore you with stuff you know already or take for granted key prerequisites and skip them.

Anyway, I’m currently building my own adaptive learning platform but focused on helping professional poker players learn game theory . My idea being that it’s an easier ed tech app to bootstrap as the knowledge very directly translates to money. And really the same criticism applies because you can’t truly memorize a game tree , it’s more important that you build a high level conceptual understanding. But , as much as rote memorization deserves to be maligned when done in isolation, it’s not so bad when done as part of a broader learning strategy. For example, you can’t memorize vocab to learn Spanish but certainly knowing 5000 words in Spanish is a very nice starting point compared to not knowing any words. And tools like spaced rep have been proven by research to help with that goal and I view as a pathway to more broad adaptive learning strategies.

Ironic you post this because I just rediscovered a 20yo blog post that I remembered reading, re-read it again and found it very motivating and inspiring and submitted it.

I completely agree with the sentiment, and as someone who’s mostly focused on a startup for pro poker players to study game theory more effectively (https://www.livepokertheory.com) , I find countless parallels between poker and entrepreneurship.

Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.

I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:

https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...

With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.

There’s not much else to say other than you’re wrong. People tried their best before solvers, then solvers came along and people who didn’t keep up with them lost to people who did. I think it’s possible for people to win without studying them because of a combination of soft games and natural instincts, but the vast majority of good players these days do solver work. If your brand new, having an experienced player distill some of those concepts is helpful, but if you want to be good you might as well start doing the things good players do sooner rather than later.

The more skill you have the higher your win rate.

It’s true that playing against bad players will increase your win rate but it’s also true that if you study and improve you will also improve your win rate. It’s not true that there’s no point in studying since you should only play against bad players, because “bad player” is relative to your skill.

The podcast episode I recommended is a long time pro player interviewing another long time pro player, whose widely regarded as one of the best players ever, so I think these people know better than the HN comment section of “well 20 years ago I read one sklansky book and a year ago I played a 2/5 game and didn’t win much so poker is pointless unless you play idiots”

The problem with this advice is that solvers are one of the best ways to understand how to "exploit the shit out of your opponents".

Piosolver has several features that lets you emulate how your opponent plays, such as "node locking", that "lock" the game tree node to the strategy you suspect your opponent plays, and shows you how to maximally exploit it.

Otherwise, what is your exploitation based on? Certainly some people have great instincts for the game, but it's just untrue that solvers can't help you exploit weaker players. For example, if you're on a given board and a given river and an opponent makes a big bet, if your opponent bluffs too much you should call, if they don't bluff enough you should fold. But the solver teaches you how often they should be bluffing and thus what "too much" or "not enough" even means.

This is why I prefer the term "theory-based" to GTO, since the point of studying GTO is not to play GTO but to develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of the game.

Game selection is the most important way to make money in poker, but the stronger a player you are, the more games you can select from. Isaac Haxton is a top pro player who only plays only tournaments that cost $10k+ to buyin to, and recently discussed how this works on a recent episode of the Thinking Poker podcast by Andrew Brokos. He actually recommends against tournaments for less experienced players aiming to make money since smaller buyin tournaments have large fields and thus large variance, but the "high roller" tournaments have smaller fields which make variance more reasonable.

The bigger point is that while playing against worse players is an important skill if you want to make money, poker is still a very complex game with a high skill ceiling similar to a game like chess. If you're good enough, even pro players are "worse players" and you can "select" those games. Though admittedly even the high roller tournaments require some "recreational" businessman players for enough pros to be willing to play it for it to run.

Solver study has become essential for the vast majority of top pros, which Haxton also discusses in the podcast, and I mentioned my project in the space in my other comment.

I'm currently full-time on a project dedicated to helping people understand how to apply solver strategy to win at live games. I generally avoid the term GTO in favor of "theory-based" since GTO usually refers to equilibrium strategy, and generally you want to study equilibrium but diverge to exploit your opponents.

You can check out my project which includes a preflop trainer at:

https://www.livepokertheory.com

I also have a lot of strategy articles that explore how to use solvers to understand live cash games, and I also just started posting Youtube videos that do solver walkthroughs of high-stakes LA cash games.

I'm also doing some unique things like spaced-repetition which none of my competitors do, unfortunately very few pro poker players have heard the term so it's not a selling point to them but HN crowd tends to have heard of it.

In terms of where to start, I'd recommend where the game starts, which is preflop, and incidentally where my product starts, which is a preflop trainer that helps you study equilbrium-based preflop charts using spaced-repetition. It's currently about 90% free with only one set of charts paywalled (BB defend).

I'm actively developing both postflop content and a native mobile app, though the current app is a responsive web app that should work well on your phone.

I also have a Discord with a lot of professional live players that I've attracted via my content marketing and I'm happy to answer followup strategy questions there.

Some good books I'd recommend that are more modern:

Modern Poker Theory by Michael Acevedo

Play Optimal Poker by Andrew Brokos

Grinder's Manual by Peter Clarke (pre-solver but basically the most exhaustive guide to every concept pre-solver)

for Youtube channels, my own :

https://www.youtube.com/@livepokertheory

https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingEquilibrium (Finding Equilbrium, similar content analyzing live games with solvers)

I also recommend the Thinking Poker podcast by Brokos.

(btw, Hopkins Computer Science is also my alma mater so great to see this coming from them!)

I have a similar blog / newsletter on trying to bootstrap a software business called “Road to 10k MRR” :

writing.billprin.com

I’m definitely a huge fan of mtlynch and was very inspired by his transparency especially around year 2 when he was pretty far in without much working.

I’d also recommend Jon Yongfook who bootstrapped an image generation api for social media marketing to 50k as well. Tony Dinh is also a must read. I actually have a notion database with a bunch of other bootstrapped bloggers but on the go at the moment.

For communities, Indie Hackers is the best known one, though there’s many others, Microconf, smallbets , etc

My biggest piece of advice is work backwards from where you plan to share it. If you want people to care about what you make, it needs to be built for a certain type of person, and you need a way to reach that type of person. Ideally you can repeatedly reach that audience.

Otherwise, you're going to do all this work, and then you're going to think of where to share it, and at that point you'll probably wish you had thought of this key step in advance.

Stuff built for "everyone" will rarely work because "everyone" is too broad an audience and too hard to reach.

Similarly, while Hacker News is a good place to post a project, it's very easy to get lost in the sea of /new and get zero attention, which could set yourself up for disappointment if that's your only distribution channel. It's better to have a smaller channel you have a higher probabilty of reaching -> think a small Discord, a small subreddit that's easy to get on the front page of, a small Facebook group, a small old-school forum. If you're part of any community on X/Mastodon that can work but I wouldn't stress about it if you're not, as there's many alternatives.

Hopefully, these are all communities that you want to be a part of and are active in. A lot of self-promotion can be forgiven in communities if you're otherwise an active member who contributes in many non-promotional ways.

The repeatability is important because that lets you iterate. Even if you front-page Hacker News, that's great, but you'll get a ton of traffic for a few hours but then you go an improve things and want another pass of attention, you can't really front-page again soon.

Of course, the most important thing is to stay motivated and keep pushing. I personally get motivated by other people caring about my project, paying for my project, etc and you sound similar based on your question, so that's why I'm giving you tips on accomplishing that. But many other people get motivated just because it's a really interesting challenge or it solves a huge problem in their life. Know thyself and what motivates you and pick a project you won't quit.

I will also note that you seem to want two contradicting things. You want to improve your Rust and you want to make money. For a given project, I'd focus on one goal or the other. And if you want to make money, frontend development is often important, HN condescending attitudes towards frontend notwithstanding. However, if your goal is just beer money just a popular repo might get that with Github sponsors.

Finally, you said you discard ideas because they're too simple. That is the most backwards logic you stated. You should be discarding ideas that are too complicated. Simple is great. Simple is the dream. Simple is unfortunately almost never easy. But one illuminating exercise is go back to popular Github repos and go to their very first commit and you'll see very often they started absurdly simple. As an example, DHH wrote the Rails frameworks in a couple weeks and a thousand lines of code and that became the dominant web framework for a decade. If your project gets popular , the complexity will inevitably arrive, there's no need to start looking for it from the start.

Your account is from 2021 so spare me the lecture on the rules of Hacker News. If you don’t want me to assume you have poor reading comprehension skills, don’t leave comments indicating that.

Yes I understand basic math but I would implore you to improve your reading comprehension as I used the word “probably “ (which 65% qualified as) and emphasized we can’t eliminate luck but can influence it.