hacky_engineer

I don't feel like I made it, but I asked AI to build a cashflow manager chart thing for me. I can upload CSVs from my bank statements, and it displays my cashflow as a graph over time, and then I can put in upcoming and recurring expenses, so to see how much money I'm going to have to borrow over the next six months until my revenue catches up with all my pending liabilities. It feels like I'm in control if I can see the graph of my money, even if it goes pretty far negative.

I'm working on a book starring the 6 Simple Machines. I already did one book called "Simple Machines Made Simple." I'm now doing a follow up book that I'm thinking will likely be titled "Simple Machines Made Complicated" (or maybe Complex). Each page is a working mechanism. Kind of like a book full of fidget toys. So I want to have one page for each simple machine, and some of the progressions to complex are easy i.e. (wheel -> gears), but the one I'm currently stuck on is the pulley. My first book had a compound pulley, but now I'm struggling to figure out a more complex pulley example that I can recreate with less than 5mm for the page thickness. My first idea was to do like a roman blind mechanism with a pinch-stop type thing for the cord, but the more I played with it, the more I felt like this wasn't any different from the first book. I also like the idea of a chain hoist type mechanism, but I'm worried there isn't enough visual pay off for what you put into it. Like you move this chain thing around a bunch, but you only get a very small movement on the other end. Anyway, that's I'm working on. It might take me another 6 months, but I'm sure I'll figure something out ;)

Yeah! I worked on a baby book, Computer Engineering for Babies (https://hackylabs.com), for about 5 years before I launched it on Kickstarter back in 2021. It has two buttons and an LED to illustrate various boolean logic gates. The project surpassed all expectation, and I quite my job a year and a half later. I've launched 2 other books since then, and I'm working on a fourth.

I would suggest charging what the market will bear. If you can win clients at your old time + rate, and people are happy, then do that. But eventually, over time, you would expect you will have to lower prices due to supply and demand, as it seems you're already anticipating.

I made a book, Simple Machines Made Simple, and I got about 11k copies shipped to my house about two weeks ago. I'm now trying to fix all the books and get them shipped out. They are books with little mini demos in them, and about 80% of the books need some type of rework. So it's going to be a long few months.

I also made Computer Engineering for Babies which I've posted about on here a couple times before.

https://hackylabs.com

Sent. Thanks!!

Thanks! I'll look around and see if I can find anyone that specializes in this kind of thing.

Yeah, this would be safer, but is anyone going to find the product if it's listed as "MyBrand attachment sleeve for location sensor and TV remote control." instead of "Attachment sleeve for Airtag and Samsung Frame Remote Control?" I kind of doubt it..

Thanks! Yeah, I'll go through Brand registry. I'm guessing I need to get my account reinstated first somehow though.

I would love to hear all your thoughts. Send me an email?

In the video they mention it was painted and looked like a genuine conker.

But it's still the one we have...

If you're in firefox, try disabling Enhanced Tracking Protection.

This makes me so happy. Thanks so much for sharing!

Yeah, this is a known issue with the light flickering on the cover page. Send me an email and I can get you a replacement.

Reach out to me again and I can get you a replacement.

Hey, this is my book! Thanks for sharing! I just posted an update today to all the backers about the the sequel for Big Babies book. I'm hoping to start shipping in the next couple weeks.

This is sad.

Also, the signup flow is pretty painful. I have to upload a document, then pay, then go to my email and click on a link, that sends me another link to my email to sign in, then I complete the sign in, and it shows me the order information. And then no where does it let me chat with the robot about my doc...

Upload up to 10MB file size? How does that work if the context length is only 4097?

This should be a ShowHN. Also, requiring a login with google is a turnoff for me.

I think it's supposed to use the microphone to record your answers possibly? But it's not doing that for me either. I just get 15 seconds, and then "you failed."

It forced me to login, and I hate logging into stuff, so I didn't try it. But I like the idea. Another wrapper for GPT? Did you do any tweaking to the model? I think I've seen that developers can add training data to the model to give it more context or something"? Did you do any of that?

Some feedback: Firstly, this is loading full res photos on the homepage, which making the site extremely slow to load. You should generate some small thumbnails so that loading times aren't so terrible when looking at these gallery pages.

I would love more of a satirical approach. I would design it to be a very professional looking website, maybe knock off christie's or the louvre's design or something. Maybe have bio's about the authors (obviously keep it safe, because they're kids). And jack up the prices to be 100x what they currently are. Do really professional sounding descriptions for each piece (maybe you can use chatgpt to do this). "Art STUFF, is a still life Simeon. It's use of bright color pastel contradicts the subject matter of the piece and causes the viewer to consider the actual tools of the artist versus what the stereotypical tools that Simeon finds being pushed onto him." Or whatever...

Maybe professionally frame the pieces (or photoshop them to look professionally framed).

This seems like a fun side project. I'm also in the kid's market. I'd might be interested in partnering in some way if you're open to it.

Thanks for the tip! Everyone's been complaining about google recently about how the results are all just SEO garbage now. I could easily see ChatGPT become the goto for asking programming questions.

I pay for a budget app. https://www.monarchmoney.com/ But somehow I got in on their beta, and felt like they did a good job and wanted to continue to support them. But they've been around for quite a few years now, so I think they are pretty successful..

I was hoping smarter people than me would have responded by now; I apologize, because it kind of looks like you're only going to get me.

One strategy would be to write a blog post about how google and twitter won't approve your ads because they are too gay. Post this to Hacker News and a relevant subreddit, and hope that picks up some traction and that someone at google has the power to make things right.

After that, it's probably just keep doing what everyone else does. If you have a budget, you could try reddit ads, snapchat ads, instagram ads, etc. Although, you might have similar problems at those places as well. And you might consider hiring an ad agency that specializes in dating sites (if there are any). I work at a company that sells firearm accessories and we also had a very hard time with paid advertising.

You could go to youtubers directly, and sponsor some videos. Maybe you could find some youtubers that will partner with you and be willing to do more than just the typical sponsored segment in a video.

You could do SEO activites, like content writing for various keywords that you might be able to rank for. I'm still trying to figure this out myself, but people seem to have great success with it.

You might just try to look at what other dating sites (especially dating sites targeting LGBT) are doing/did in the early days for inspiration. I hear stories about how tinder went from campus to campus manually signing up women at all the sororities.

If you don't have a budget, then you're really really fighting an uphill battle, as a dating site is the kind of thing that needs a CONSTANT influx of users, and you can't really rely the occasional viral post if it's followed by 4 months of quiet. My guess is that you're going to need to do a bunch of things that don't scale well, while at the same time trying to raise money so that you can do more of the things that do scale.

Best of luck!

Putting up a landing page is useless, unless you are going to actively drive traffic to it. And those leads are going to convert much much better if you can deliver some value on that page. I put up a landing page 4 years before I had my product ready to go (a baby book I was making), and over four years, I gathered about 200 email addresses. Only a fraction of those convert, and they were probably worth $500 at the end of the day. Once I had the book finished and could show people how it worked, I dwarfed that by 10x in one day.

You can build a landing page. But I wouldn't let it distract you too much from the actual project, unless you are great at marketing, in which case, play to your strengths.

I was working on a NLP(ish) idea for a while and got a descent prototype put together, but haven't had time to take the project past that. The idea was to train a model to classify tone of voice (a kind voice, angry voice, whiny voice, etc). Writing this out again now. I wonder if we could train a model to predict whether a statement is sarcastic or not..

I am working on a baby book called Computer Engineering for Babies (https://computerengineeringforbabies.com). The biggest question I have is an SEO/branding one. I have about 3 brand names, and I don't know how to structure them or which ones to get rid of, and how to have a cohesive brand. Anyway, I'm looking for someone that can coach me on some SEO/branding stuff..