avinoth

This is in line with what I was discussing with my friends recently. Governments across the world weaponised their border protection for all their invasive data collection citing terrorism and other threats. This more or less started post 9/11, and used that as the reason. Now, the AI agents and their hacking is exactly going to be used as an excuse to introduce the real ID verification they've been trying to implement for a while now

I recently wrote a short blog post about exactly this worry. Link if anyone's interested https://www.vinoth.net/internet-for-humans/

It is not an allegation that they've faked it, or that there is no risk of rogue agents. I'm alluding to the scenario where the supposedly illegal/immoral activities are rewarded with increased valuation and funding as long as they are done with AI Agents rather than curtailed & punished.

Right after the HuggingFace incident, we all saw how every company clamored to claim how their AI models have also broken out of Sandbox, and hacked some stuff. As ridiculous as it was, they all used that to demonstrate their model's capabilities.

Rookie move. Missed the chance to claim that an AI Agent swarm hacked it autonomously and claim billions of VC investment.

> RubyGems disables new user registration

> On May 16th, registration with disposable emails was disabled as well.

These kind of repeated attacks or attempts to attack by agent swarms is only going to make the experience worse for the rest of us actual humans. ReCaptcha is already annoying enough, I can’t fathom what comes next.

Unfortunately this makes a perfect justification for governments and companies to push for real ID verification.

Yeah, and its extra funny with everyone agreeing Dave should own it, but he isn't on the email loop at all.

Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?

Which is good if sailing is what you wanted and like to do, which is what the author and the OP is implying. You don't necessarily have to "succeed" or "reach" somewhere.

I’ve had similar experiences. I now have an explicit line in AGENTS.md to not use subagents unless explicitly requested. It also helps that for the tasks that are big enough to benefit from subagents are also the ones with high chances of going off-rails and/or a poor review phase. I’d rather do the orchestrator role and that way I can split up the review phase in a much more manageable chunk.

I'm beginning to build/host a series of own-use, self-hostable products for personal benefit, starting with an LLM chat for me & my wife, a photo manager, our personal calendar, "whitelisted" youtube app for kids in our home, investment tracking, story/music playlist for our kids, and so on. Plan is to run and maintain our own ecosystem of essential products for our family.

> Ironically, the biggest multiples it’s generated for the industry have been from a low-dazzle text forum written in Arc Lisp.

Wholeheartedly concur. I'm yet another datapoint for this statement. I picked up programming, picked up a tech stack, found jobs, and launched profitable sideprojects, all with the help of this site.

No, please no. Hyperlinks exist, and they work just fine. HN is one of the last few sites that doesn't glamorize the UX (nothing wrong with that). I'd rather read a thousand words than a picture.

I guess it's a bit of this and bit of that. The products I've sold before or discussed with others were on the former side. I think that was largely due to the metrics that are usually used to qualify (churn, MoM growth, etc.) are bit less impactful compared to a mature, stablized product.

It's mostly seen as a jumping board for them to quickly get going, compared to finding idea, building it, getting some SEO footing, etc. That's just my anecdotal experience btw.

From my experience, x arr is not a reliable metric for products of this size. They don't exactly have risk covered returns due to their size and they're usually bought for their growth prospect than any meaningful return it can give.

I didn't have any particular expectation per se, any x arr with the potential baked in is fine. But the most conversations I've had are bog-standard x months of profit and people looking to acquire it as an asset, which makes sense for them, but doesn't for me as I mentioned before the risk is pretty low in keeping it myself.

I've thought about it in the past, but the risk/reward ratio is better if I just run it myself.

Also, the whole selling process was a huge turnoff for me as the offers were at most 3x arr and lots of tirekickers when I posted on acquire.

I did fell into that pitfall when I built keenly. Just wanted to build something new.

But then, only when I received good feedback I thought to proceed with it.

I won't deny, the new thing is definitely appealing because it's new. But you make a good point about finding myself in the same place again.

I've had some good options presented here and I'm leaning towards focusing on rosterbird and try to get a growth engine going and then, maybe, once it's sustainable, I can try new things if I still wanted to.

That’s the thing though, it’s a Google engineer’s market salary, and likely the author’s as well. But the OP was drawing the conclusion that whoever’s running the business has to be paid the same amount, that’s what I wanted to address.

> I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary

This is one of the point the author has repeatedly stressed the importance of and I very much agree as well. The chance to chart your own journey and the excitement a business could bring is anyday more valuable than the predictable path of employment for many (including myself)

Valuing a profit-generating business that's making $1m in revenue as zero is reductive.

Valuation of business isn't necessarily determined by profits (perhaps for commodity businesses), It's just one of the metric. This is a business that has strong operations, product, assets, and IP, honestly quite surprised with this take.

Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business

Agree. There’s definitely use to get a general pulse of whats happening. This isnt directed towards storytell or such apps, sorry if that came off that way.

I was addressing the parent’s comment about being overwhelmed about not being able to go through the opinions. I’ve felt similar way before I realised they were just fomo. If anything, apps like storytell are actually better way to consume these things :)

Thanks for this! I’m very surprised about the overwhelming support for Altman in this thread going as far as calling the board incompetent and inexperienced to fire someone like him, who now is suddenly the right steward for AI.

This is not at all the take, and rightly so, when the news broke out about non profit or the congressional hearing or his worldcoin and many such instances. All of a sudden he is the messiah that was wronged narrative being pushed is very confusing.

Don’t be. Almost all of it are speculations at this point and no one from inside is going to reveal the secret in a random HN comment.

And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.

Sure. Broadly this is the list. Many of these are my go-to's for all my products. Only the Project management, I had to keep trying new things. Most favorite for now is Trello.

Also, I use dokku for deployment, so it's very similar to heroku and uses heroku buildpacks.

Hetzner - Servers.

Helpscout - Customer helpdesk

Google - workspace Email

Github - Source code

Airbrake - Error monitoring

Posthog - Analytics

Shortcut - Project management

Canny - Feedback & Changelog announcement

Stoplight - API documentation

Slack - For app testing

UptimeRobot - Uptime monitoring

MRR - For subscription tracking

Mailgun - Transactional Emails

Reform - One time used for feedback collection

Calendly - Call bookings

Paddle - Payment platform

I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.

Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.

For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.

Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.

The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.

I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.

At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't.

And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things.

A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting!

After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.

Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.

I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.

I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.

As others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it (except FB ofc). So it’s a wait and see.

If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience.

Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.

The "detail"I received is the same generic reply you've shared in the other thread.

I don't know what fly's internal processes are, but I suspect the reviewer had to have submitted some bit of internal feedback on each submissions on why they're okaying it or not. A filtered version of it or even a separate candidate specific feedback would be just enough.

I've been at the hiring side of the table for many years and every time we share a handcrafted feedback to interviewees that we have passed on, we always heard back good things. They know we respected their time (and them), even if they don't agree with the particular feedback.

This feedback is not meant for them to get "better" or something. My point is, it could even be 2 hours the candidate spends, the least they deserve is knowing that it was actually looked at.

Mirrors my experience.

The job listing promised mountains and that it will take few hours and they’ll take time in their feedback,etc.

except i just got a generic reply that “we’re not satisfied with the solution”. For something that took ~10 hours, i was at the least expecting a vague pointers on whys. I even sent an one pager explaining style decisions, caveats, etc. It was pretty insulting.

And when asked for a follow up, got a more generic bs about how the evaluation criteria is honed from their years of experience and that is not something they share outside.

One good thing that is it made me realise interviewing still sucks and i just stopped looking for jobs.

Same for zurich and geneva as well. It’s almost a meme here for finding rental apartments within nominal budgets.

They’re nice to live “if” you could afford to.

I'm doing a speedrun of sorts trying to build a product every 2 weeks. This is mostly to satisfy the builder in me and to exercise the product shipping muscles.

For a long time, with full time jobs and consulting gigs I was never able to do what I loved the most, just programming. It was always superseded with other "business" stuff that it is has been ages when I could just put my heads down and work on something. So, this is an excuse to not focus on the nitty-gritty of business related things and just build and ship products.

Also, I had a growing list of ideas and a fomo along with it. So, i wanted to give a shot in attempting a fair number of them in short time.

With just a backpack, it is already nightmare through security. I can't imagine walking back and forth fishing out that one last thing over and over from all the nooks and crannies.

I could relate at multiple levels.

I suffered from series of burnout, bordering depression, for the longest of time without even realizing I'm going through one. When I lost the will to work, I attributed it to the work isn't interesting and took on more side projects to "keep it interesting". When that didn't work, I thought I just lost it and this is how long it's supposed to last.

I did every commonly suggested things, exercised very regularly, kept myself fit, quit smoking (2 years now), didn't drink, solo travel, etc., but nothing really resolved it completely. (thinking back now, maybe it's those things that kept everything at bay)

For me what finally moved the needle noticeably was when I started introspecting consistently (i do with everyday notes). I strived to have clear reasonings for why i do what i do, taking a third person view on certain emotions and diagonsing/troubleshooting it as you would a bug. This had led me to make several changes in my life/career sever of which i don't think i would've done otherwise.

I don't believe there is one solution fits all nor one solution for everything. I arrived at this after attempting all of these above and even I can't say for sure if it is THE ONE thing that solved, most likely it's a combination of everything else as well.

Unfortunately what works for you can only be figured out by you and only by doing it can you tell if it's the one. Keep iterating.