Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2023)
What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
I have a really vague toy idea of "what if ChatGPT did stuff async?". So for example you have a bot that messages you at some time of the day to start a conversation. I don't know what the practical uses are, but what got me there is having a bot to motivate you towards your goals. I don't feel I have enough of a thread on this idea yet to build something, so might let this one stew.
Another idea, somewhat validated by a recent HN post, is the idea of tools to organize your life. Specifically if you own a house, there are a bunch of things you need to do every 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, annual etc. TODO lists do the job (like Microsoft Todo) which I use now but feel a bit generic. While they are good at reminding they are not so good at the "view of what is coming up". Also they lack a certain "emotional" element that I am trying to get at (which links with the bot idea), that how do you make these things feel less like chores. Something like gamification but not quite that.
Another thing that would scratch an itch for me is 24/7 hrv monitoring (using a Polar H10 or similar). Could be done via an app, or a separate device (so spare your phone battery). Then if the device has some ideas of what you are doing (maybe it asks you an hour later if you had low HRV "what were you doing an hour ago?) you can correlate HRV to daily activity. (HRV is Heart Rate Variability. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate_variability)
So I have a few vague things stewing but not enough to even know what to code.
I also don't know if these are money ideas, or more like a Github project.
I saw in another thread somewhere, people talking about a simple cron job, checks maybe your email/calendar and has some algo for ranking "importance." If it's important enough, it writes you a notification.
The LLM doing the ranking of importance, basically.
The whole "alert me about X" but don't want alarms blaring off all day.
I find with tech problems I have at work, the way I want to solve it is to ditch all the damn complexity :-). Maybe the solution is a book on how to convince your org to KISS lol.
Making ham and wifi antennas.
Trying to figure out zfs. Seems easy, until I try to add new vdevs/drives to an existing pool/vdev(encrypted zfs on Ubuntu root drive) and change it to raidz1. Would have been nice for the Ubuntu installer to allow more zfs config at install time.
Considering making extra money selling grow your own mushroom kits since the local guy in my area closed down. Doesn't seem like it's really doable without a commercial retort for sterilization, but those are insanely expensive and they don't seem to make fairly compact ones (70-100qt).
You can help: tell me what questions you'd like a write-up like this to answer.
I thought of making a startup out of this project, but was talked out of it by several friends and acquaintances with startup experience. I still think it has potential as an open-source project, although I doubt it would be monetizable.
FWIW, there's at least one C++ project along similar lines, which is actually used in a commercial product (but is much less scalable: it uses a single R/W lock to serialize all concurrency): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k20nWb9fHj0 https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/n44...
Portfolio: https://mvpjoy.com Email: arvind@mvpjoy.com