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alfarez

27 karma · joined December 30, 2012

Building bunni.ai - AI assistants for professionals. Personal: farez.me
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alfarez··on Ask HN: What Do You Do?
Hiking's on my list too.

Just spent 4 days in the fjords of Norway. Planning to go back for a longer stay (and hike!)

alfarez··on Ask HN: What Do You Do?
But nobody's hiring. All AI :)
alfarez··on Ask HN: What Do You Do?
Thanks for the Ask HN suggestion.
alfarez··on Show HN: I built a posture monitor for computer users
Hi all,

I built a simple posture monitor that runs in the browser. Why? Because my neck pain has gotten to epic proportions, and this not making me happy.

Finally put it online today, so if you want to try it out, here it is: https://posturemonitorapp.com.

No installation, no signup, none of that BS. Just go to the URL and start monitoring. Yeah, it's free.

If you do use it, please do let me know what you think. I'd love to know what I can do to improve it.

Thanks!

Farez

alfarez··on [dead]
3 months ago I built and launched ClarifyPDF.com, a "chat with PDF" app, mainly to learn how to build a chatbot, and to learn what's it like to launch a SaaS around this type of GPT app. I share my lessons and observations in this post.
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
Thanks for that.

What about it being $2 is going to bring abusers?

alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
Thanks everyone for your input. More than anything, it's been really great at making look at the bigger pricing picture.

My conclusion:

I'm not going to put in a free tier, because as @brudgers mentioned below, if they can't spend $1.99 to try it, then they're not my target market.

So, in words I read somewhere else before, instead of downgrading my product, I should upgrade my customers.

I will instead spend time creating a high quality product.

And slowly raise prices as I improve the product.

Thanks again, everyone.

alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
This is what I'm debating too. Thanks.
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
Thank you. That's just an off-the-shelf template from https://tailwindui.com!
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
I like the cookie idea. Thanks.
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
You've put in words what's been in my gut. Thank you.
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
Hmm, some interesting suggestions there. Thanks!

Captcha is a good one and easy to implement for now. Will do that.

alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
Sorry, to be more precise, "same document" could mean the same content but in different formats. OR just slightly tweaked to result in a different hash each time. Harder to abuse for sure, but still has holes.
alfarez··on Ask HN: Ideas for offering a free trial without users abusing it?
BTW, the web app is at https://clarifypdf.com, if you need to see what it is first.
alfarez··on Show HN: Chat with your PDF (my first AI side project)
Thanks for that feedback.

That UX flow seems strange because the screen flow should just be: 1) upload, 2) pay, 3) chat. It shouldn't have asked you to check your email for anything.

Please feel free to email me at alfarez at gmail dot com if you're still seeing this issue.

As for handling large files, I'm using a popular method of breaking down the doc into small chunks and then just sending the relevant chunks to the AI.

How to pick the "relevant" chunks? Use embeddings and search for the embeddings that are "semantically closest" to the question being asked.

I wrote up an outline of this process here: https://farez.me/how-to-create-a-chatbot-with-openais-api-a-...

alfarez··on Show HN: Chat with your PDF (my first AI side project)
Only on GPT-3.5 at the moment, so token length is only 4097. Still waiting for GPT-4 API access!

But you can upload up to 10MB in file size.

alfarez··on [dead]
A short writeup on my journey so far, on building a simple that uses OpenAI's API.
alfarez··on Bookmarking Is a Misunderstood Problem
How I'm thinking about Twitter (and general) bookmarking now, after several hundred bookmarks.
alfarez··on [dead]
A little writeup of my thoughts around collectig and consuming information. Thoughts that came out of building a bookmarking tool.
alfarez··on The idea DOES matter: How I pre-validate my SaaS startup ideas with a checklist
Agree that you should have knowledge of one or two ways make money from your idea, i.e. the "business model". This goes into criteria 4 of the "Must haves", where you basically need to work out how much profit you'll be making.
alfarez··on Are You Living in a Kettle?
After 35 years of living in London, I finally left. This post describes how I saw my old city self after a couple of years living closer to nature and in smaller places.
alfarez··on How I nipped burnout in the bud with diet, exercise, sleep
You're right, by swapping work for exercise, I did work less (and exercised more). But before I started eating and sleeping better, or exercising, I did try and remedy the negative feelings by just taking time off work (e.g. whole days off, going for walks, etc), but I did that without changing my bad diet or eating habits, and without doing any exercise. It didn't work for me. The depression and anxiety was still there.

The change came only after I improved my diet, exercise and sleep.

Of course, this isn't a scientific article about mental health :). Just what I experienced.

alfarez··on Parking Downhill: The Three-Minute Technique to Help Jump Start Your Work Day
Anyone else use techniques like this to minimise "warm up" time when starting to code/work? I've heard of code "stretching" for this purpose too. And a friend suggested answering a few StackExchange questions as another technique!
alfarez··on Open data and hacking for social good
Would love to hear from data scientists and those actually doing work with open data on this!
alfarez··on Give: the only thing you should be doing
Strong lesson from 2013.
alfarez··on The highs and lows of startup life
Joel being exceedingly candid as usual and it's great to be able to relate to stuff like this as someone who still has a lot of learning to do and going through so many unknowns. Big respect to what him and his team at Buffer are doing.