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akshatmittal108

16 karma · joined February 25, 2022

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akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: Books for Reevaluation of Life
Courage to be Disliked Book by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

I read it sometime back. It questions the idea that our childhood events have formed our current personality and our behaviour. It asks us to reinterpret the past events from different perspective. It encourages everyone to live in the moment and form a mindset to change for better where we compare ourselves with our ideal self and look at each other as comrades and not as enemies in a zero sum game.

akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?
Is there anything on Android or any way it can be used on web? I don't have an iphone.
akshatmittal108··on How to Walk (12 miles a day)
I think the idea is to walk for a longer time rather than in chunks to engage in deeper thinking. If the purpose is fitness, then I agree it can be spread out over the course of the day. Little breaks in the middle also help in thought process but for me it usually leads to focussing only on the immediate problem at hand without allowing the thought process to meander a bit so as to gain a different perspective.
akshatmittal108··on Esports stars have shorter careers than NFL players
With starting a startup, some of the skills which you learn or demonstrate would be transferable I think. It depends on the type of startup for sure, but talking to prospective customers, design thinking for the product and getting the product to the market is something which is useful in many industries and something which companies will look for in a resume. Can't say the same thing about esports since I am not familiar with the space.
akshatmittal108··on What happened to Evernote? Where to go next?
It's a valid concern. Reasons why I continue to use it is because I like the product and I have trust in Automatic. They have a long history of supporting open source and it's far from their only product. They are making money via other products. At the same time, my life wouldn't stop if the product disappears tomorrow from the face of the earth. It would be a minor inconvenience.
akshatmittal108··on What happened to Evernote? Where to go next?
I use Simplenote. It is quite minimal and if all you require is to store some notes, then it will work great else you might be better off with some more feature rich product. It is owned by Automatic (owners of wordpress) so I have hope that they'll keep it working without much drastic changes or need to monetize it.
akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: What Happened to Evernote?
Same for me. I wanted a simple app like Google notes however a bit more suited for long form texts. Simplenote works brilliantly for me. I gave Evernote a try, however that seems to be more suited towards power users who take a lot of notes and want to capture notes in mixed medium - text, photos etc.

Also, since Simplenote is from Automatic, I am less worried about shown any advertisements or product changing radically.

akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: 3k museums submitting data. How?
Agree. DynamoDB + S3 seems like a good choice from my side. S3 will store the data - whether it is images or videos. DynamoDB can store the metadata associated with which museum uploaded the file, what date, type etc. NoSQL suits the dynamic nature of content which you are storing. You can build a website on top of it to support whatever you want.

Also a simple dropbox may also work if the goal is just to aggregate information and nothing else.

All depends on what you want to do with the data.

akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: When has “build it and they will come” worked in the startup world?
Well, to be fair many of them had some kind of prototyping to see if customers like the product or not before building the complete product and releasing it. AWS was first developed internally to solve their own developers problem. Dropbox had a very viral successful video to gauze customer interest. For Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg did develop many side projects (like gathering opinions about some historical art for class project etc) during his time in college before combining all the best features to release Facebook (which didn't have photo gallery feature at the time of release). One overlooked part I think is the network. I remember listening to interview of Stripe founder and he mentioned how that network helped in getting initial traction to the product, so it's not all about building in silos for months and hoping customers would come when the product is launched.
akshatmittal108··on Tell HN: I Need Project Ideas
I think of any tech product as a tool similar to a knife. The way knife can be used for cutting vegetables as well as for stabbing someone, similarly a technology can be used for both productive and negative use-cases. It's upto the individual on how they want to use it. Having said that I agree facebook could have done a better job at solving above difficult problems.
akshatmittal108··on Ask HN: Anyone here have good material for learning how to sketch from scratch?
Agree 100% with another comment posted in the thread - just do it. I have looked at different resources. Video series or a book both take many hours to complete. Hours which I could have spent drawing rather than just passively consuming content.

For me it works to draw what is constantly on my mind. It could be some thoughts about latest DC movie, a tv series or something going on in the news. Then I try to envision a background for example in case of Ukrain invasion, I am currently thinking of dark grey buildings in the background with smoke and ash falling from sky (scene could be inspired from something else like Chernobyl tv series). Then I introduce some story element since the point of sketch is to tell a story. I'll have a character in the foreground. That character can be sitting alone with a dog or with his/her partner to evoke feeling of tragedy and yet some hope.

In this way the thing which I sketch will be unique. It's hard to draw everything from scratch. So I think of the line from inception movie - never copy entire areas. Copy only small details like a lamp-post or a building or lighting. So I use any reference image to draw that particular detail. Even professional artists do that. Also, I post my work on instagram, this gives a finishing line otherwise I am never happy with what I have drawn.