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laurentiurad

604 karma · joined October 31, 2023

https://laurentiu-raducu.com https://bitheap.ch
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laurentiurad··on The AI Revolution in Coding: Why I'm Ignoring the Prophets of Doom
And the Final Thoughts heading. LLMs love that as well.
laurentiurad··on The AI Revolution in Coding: Why I'm Ignoring the Prophets of Doom
Sorry but this is clearly written by an LLM.
laurentiurad··on Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant
It's like any other muscle, if you don't exercise it, you will lose it.

It's important that when you solve problems by writing code, you go through all the use cases of your solution. In my experience, just reading the code given by someone else (either a human or machine) is not enough and you end up evaluating perhaps the main use cases and the style. Most of the times you will find gaps while writing the code yourself.

laurentiurad··on Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
you can just order them to your home on any of the websites selling GLP-1. Stop the propaganda inferring that the public healthcare is bad and doesn't allow people to get their medicine.
laurentiurad··on [dead]
I am collecting rare and underrated GitHub repos so I decided to create a tool for that.
laurentiurad··on Things I want to say to my boss
I believe this is also a problem that requires some introspection on your side.

Just judging by the fact that you bashed one of my side projects on another thread saying it's 100% AI-generated when it's not.

What kind of person takes the time to post something bad about a stranger? What is the benefit on your side, what satisfaction do you get from that?

I would just have ignored it if I didn't like it, but not sh*t on someone's work like that.

What you seed usually returns to you 10fold, just keep that in mind.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
You mean the frontend? What makes it entirely AI-generated in your view? Even if it were, would that be a problem for you or you're just envious?
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
No disrespect but still accuse someone of a scam, right?

I specified clearly in the description of this service that I deliver financials, historical or congress/senate trades. I think it's obvious for someone working in finance that the last two cannot be fetched from quarter or annual forms. Things like revenue, eps, ebitda, pre/post earning moves (those use last, open prices too), are strongly-related to 10Q though.

I really don't care whether you like the landing page or not. I have two B2B clients for this API and 0% churn so far, which is the best metric I need to track right now. I will stop responding to this thread since I don't think it's productive for any of us.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Thanks for that! I just checked and it seems to be working. Can you maybe try again?
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Question was about financials. The service is not only limited to q forms, obviously. Historical data or government trades are not available there. So you want me to share with the Internet all my data sources just to prove you it's not a scam?

You seem to be trying to promote a service and throw weird accusations that the service looks like a scam without even trying it, which is shameful tbh.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Computer Engineering for Babies is great! I also added on my directory of well-crafted products: https://select.supply/product/computer-engineering-for-big-b...
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I am not sure if this is a problem that should prompt an architecture change of that caliber. I use a distributed network of GPU-machines and each request is handled sequential. If all machines are busy, then the request goes into a queue already and is being picked up by the first machine that becomes available.

Also, the user got the pictures after just a few minutes and there is a clear disclaimer, and an email is being sent to the user once the pics are ready. On top of that, I have no complaints from other users about it. It's clear to me that the intent of the user was to cause some reputation harm, which I think didn't work. I also got an email from a person with the same first name (not sure if it's the same person tho) that they offer UX services for Headsnap.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
You won't get consistency between pics with nano banana. I tried using it in Headsnap and the results weren't as good. Faces change drastically between pics. Also the cost per pic with nano banana is 0.24 per pic, x 30 pictures that I generate for a pack, you would pay $7 (with big quality issues).
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Exactly, and currently I'd say that AI is not too helpful with distribution/marketing. I still do copyrighting myself as with AI it really feels impersonal and "artificial". By distribution I also refer to social media following and users that trust you to test/buy your product. IMHO this is still the most challenging part to solve, as it takes a lot of time to improve your social media presence to reach a state where it's guaranteed that you will have customers from the moment of the launch of your product.
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
anyway it's just a disclaimer. It never took more than 25 minutes and the fastest generation was 3 minutes for >30 pics.
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
thanks a lot! Will update on the main page so it matches with the actual pricing tiers.

LE: done :D

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a really good point!

When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.

Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.

Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
30 pictures? I doubt that
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
Thanks! I wanted to implement something like that, but it's difficult to predict the progress since it's depending on how many requests are being handled in that exact moment, but it never got past 25 minutes, not even during peak hours. I am thinking of adding a modal saying that you can close the page and you will get notified over email when the photo generation is ready (the email part is already there).
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.

Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.

As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.

LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.

For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.

laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs
laurentiurad··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
I built and run several SaaS platforms:

- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.

- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.

- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.

- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.

- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.

- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.

All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).

On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).

laurentiurad··on I launched a directory with well-made products because everything seems buggy
What is the issue of having affiliate links? The website itself is free, although infra, domain and my time are not. You can choose whether to buy through links or not, can't you?
laurentiurad··on I launched a directory with well-made products because everything seems buggy
I decided to collect the products and services that I love and share this with the internet. I believe that many products now are suffering from an acute lack of quality, from physical goods to online services. Everything feels rushed and buggy. That's the main driver behind my decision to build this website.
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