AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Top comment by jarebear6expepj

I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live.

I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe frameworks on $5 dollar VPS's and lost interest. 2021 I sold the remaining three income generating websites for just shy of 1mill US.

I started the projects with a second person but ended up buying out their interest and running solo. I consider it success because I managed to last over a decade making on avg $400,000/year gross with that business "umbrella".

Advertising and publishing changed and continues to change by leaps and bounds on a yearly schedule. A lot good a lot bad, but its the same business over the years.

2. Ask HN: What is a specific use of GPT-4 that you think is remarkable?

Top comment by yosito

I've got a thread going with ChatGPT about an app I'm building. It knows all of the libraries I'm using, and has seen the main App component, the Router and many of the key components. I'm asking it about every task I need to do, feature I need to implement, bug I need to fix. Basically rubber ducking with it and talking through everything I'm doing as if it were my coworker. It's reducing my time to solve problems by about 80%. I'm able to do 4-6 times as much in a day as I could without ChatGPT when I was stuck figuring out everything tediously on my own. For context, I'm a full stack developer with about 15 years of experience, so I know what I'm doing. ChatGPT is just taking care of a lot of the trial and error and figuring out how to use different libraries or implement certain algorithms.

3. Ask HN: How do I move forward after being laid off?

Top comment by poo-yie

Sorry to hear. I was just laid off 3 weeks ago (3rd time I've been laid off during the last 10 years). It can be very stressful.

Here's a tip from the book "How to stop worrying and start living" (Dale Carnegie): live in day-tight compartments. This means to focus on getting through one day at a time.

As others have already pointed out, you should be able to get onto your wife's insurance because you've just had a "qualifying event". In the event that you do need COBRA, you can enroll in it retroactively (just pay attention to the dates).

My current plan -- stay current on LinkedIn (indicate that you're "Open to Work", search for jobs through LinkedIn, apply to jobs, reach out to people in your network, etc.). I follow-up on emails and job search first thing each morning. Then I spend some time doing hobby software development to keep your brain fresh and maybe even pick up a new skill or 2. After that, I work outside or in my garage on other (unrelated) stuff. In my case, that's a combination of woodworking and metalworking. You need something to pass the time and ideally give yourself some exercise.

I highly encourage you to do stuff that will tire your body during the day. This will make it easier to sleep at night. You may also find that taking 5mg of melatonin may help too.

You will need to remind yourself over and over that you WILL get through it.

If you have other skills maybe try to make use of them. Did you ever do any painting or carpentry? If so, you can maybe pick up some odd jobs in your neighborhood if needed.

Good luck. Don't be too hard on yourself.

4. Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?

Top comment by rcarr

The AI/ChatGPT hype is starting to piss me off, it seems like about 50% of HN is now articles about AI. Meanwhile, stuff like the genuinely incredible Unreal Engine 5.2 demo that hit Youtube six days ago only got 14 upvotes on here. What the fuck is going on?

I've been using ChatGPT for the last week or two and it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right. Seems alright as a 'rubber duck' for generating ideas and seems okish for creative writing but for not a hell of a lot else at the minute.

The visual AI art stuff does seem worth the hype though but yeah, I'm feeling burnt out on this shit too. Based on everyone I speak to, I think the majority of people are. The pandemic probably didn't help.

5. Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

Top comment by j2kun

I'm writing a book just for you :)

It's called "Practical Math: A Tour of Mathematics in Production Software" (https://pmfpbook.org points to an announcement and mailing list)

The idea is to give a large swath of examples of math used to solve real problems, and collectively to give a good answer to your question. And to have the examples be appreciable by the average programmer, in the sense that they could reasonably expect to adapt the underlying ideas in their own work.

6. Ask HN: How do you become smarter?

Top comment by theaussiestew

The main way is increasing your general level of health. Physically, emotionally and mentally. Reading more doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes you more knowledgeable. Imagine if you had the level of acuity and liveliness you did when you were a child, but the maturity and experience you have now. People say that humans have an intellectual peak in their twenties, well that’s only because most people’s health starts going downhill at that point. Excessive stress, mental overstimulation, emotional problems, etc. You remove these, there’s no doubt you’ll have a clearer and faster mind.

7. Ask HN: How many hours do you work on a daily basis?

Top comment by throwaway777111

Throwaway, for obvious reasons:

I work in a totally chaotic, mismanaged department of a major university. The total work time is about 3-4 hours per week of a 40 hours paid job.

I did not want the job initially due to my work ethics, my need of challenges, and low learning curve.

Now I am happy I took it. Life can be good. One can be good to oneself. Turns out I am in a happy spot.

The job allowed me to start a therapy and work on myself.

And it allowed me to fight for my daughter in front of court, and stop an evil attempt of child alienation from the side of the ex wife. Super dad mode = ON.

And it will allow me to restart my life from a safe position after a brutal couple of years.

If I knew that this job would be forever ... hell ... I'd take it.

8. Ask HN: How would you build a budget CPU compute cluster in 2023?

Top comment by phamilton4

Honestly, look on ebay for used Lenovo ThinkCentre M/P "Tiny" or Dell Optiplex "Tiny" computers. They can be purchased by the lot for most of them as businesses get rid of the old ones.

I use 4 Lenovo M910x's as a kubernetes cluster and home lab. Have them all connected with a netgear switch. The whole setup costs about the same as a single new quality work station. Each has: i7 8700 (6c - 12t), 32gb memory, 1TB SSDs, <1L case, they're practically silent. easy to find parts, they even use lenovo laptop chargers. if one dies, I can easily purchase + replace in a few days.

You can even go cheaper if you don't need the absolute fastest cpus. Some of these older tiny computers can be purchased for around 100 bucks if you look for them. It has worked like a charm for me. Not sure how much horsepower you really need, but this is a cheap way to build a home cluster. I think they hover around using 40w most the time, so power isn't really too big of a cost either.

9. Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

Top comment by nickm12

Yes, I have around 100 bookmarks on my personal browser and more than 1000 on my browser at work. Bookmarks serve two functions for me, particularly at work. First, the very act of making and filing the bookmark is an aid to memory. Second, typing in the Firefox URL bar is way more valuable than using either web search or (worse) the internal search at my job, which is barely usable. People are always shocked at how quickly I can pull up relevant resources.

The most annoying thing about using browser bookmarks is that every site puts tons of crap in the title (or worse doesn't have a meaningful title). I wrote a greasemonkey script to strip the crap so my bookmarks can have clean titles.

10. Ask HN: How do you deal with entrepreneurial obsession?

Top comment by mdorazio

Here's what worked for me: stop fantasizing and actually go try to start another business around one of your ideas. In my case (and for most people) it failed and cured me of this mindset. Ideas are easy and problems are infinite. Execution is hard and unless you're really in love with the problem, it's usually not worth it.