aumakua

I know this is an oft-raised subject on HN but I find that none of the tools I've come across thus far have solved any of my problems. As someone with poor impulse control and decent digital literacy, I find that I ignore any tracker app that tells me I'm on my computer too often, and I will circumvent any blocker I set up to disallow me from accessing media that I had earlier decided I should consume less of.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a tool that exists that will force my devices to shut off at a certain time and cannot be disabled with a few shell commands. I know this is a bit absurd but this is the reality of my situation (working from home, sleeping at 3-4AM for no particular reason) and I can't think of any effective solution that doesn't gimp my actual work routine in the day.

I also have an issue with constant alt-tabbing and ctrl-tabbing when I'm on the internet, even when I'm literally in the process of reading an article or watching a video (both in recreational and educational scenarios). Curious as to how many others do this as well, and if there's some sort of tool that someone has written to disallow this kind of behavior (perhaps adding some sort of "cooldown" to an alt-tab or shift-tab).

Sorry for raising this topic once again but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I'm a SWE and have been interested in building something on the side, but don't have any ideas that I think are particularly brilliant at the moment. I've seen a recent trend of people building what they call 'microstartups' which seem to essentially be very small, very specific products that they've able to ship quickly.

My question is – how are you guys handling payment processing for those kinds of businesses? Presumably you're not incorporating a new business each time?

I've incorporated a Delaware S corp once before and had to be very explicit with the purpose of my business when I was filing for incorporation, and also when I was opening a bank account, and also when I was registering with a payment processor (Stripe). Thus it seems like it would be difficult to incorporate a new S corp and use it as an umbrella for a bunch of unrelated side projects, unless I'm missing something?

Bit a of newbie to all of this, so any insight is very appreciated!

As someone new to entrepreneurship, I would say 90+% of the advice I've been receiving so far is 'make sure people want your product before you build it', or various platitudes along those lines.

We're well on our way towards a polished 'beta' launch of our product, but I took this advice somewhat seriously and went ahead and developed some pre-launch marketing materials for our product that essentially give a preview of the UI and describe our various features.

However, I've realized that I have no clue what to do with these. How am I supposed to get people to care about some images and text that describe a product that they can't use? Where would I even post such materials?

More generally, I suppose, how is one supposed to test product-market fit without a product? I'm really not sure how I should be interpreting and acting upon this advice.

I spent most of my undergraduate degree (in applied math/physics) with my head down powering through courses and working a job in the evenings to pay for my education. Over that time, I met a bunch of talented people, many of whom I keep in touch with, but none of whom I could ever see myself working with. Moreover, they're also all engineers as well with skillsets that more or less resemble my own.

I'm at a FAANG company at the moment and I'm finding it quite unfulfilling (nothing new here), and for the last several months I've been hacking away on my own projects just to keep honing my skills and to try to figure out what's possible in terms of turning technical know-how into commercial products.

The last one I built felt like a relatively solid idea but I quickly realized (a) how much of the difficulty in launching the product depended on having a good network and knowing how to utilize it, and (b) how much I felt poorly equipped to do (a). Moreover, I'm also understanding how deeply reliant tech products are on domain knowledge in the industry they're attempting to push into.

The conclusion here seems to be that I'd be far more effective at reaching my goals working in partnership with someone who checks the above boxes (which, in hindsight, was incredibly obvious). The problem I'm having now, though, is that none of my friends are similarly motivated to me, and networking feels nigh-impossible with the COVID-19 situation.

Does anyone here have tips on how they meet people and feel out whether there's any professional compatibility – especially in the current situation? While I'm not opposed to just riding this out and trying to network the traditional way when the world reopens, it seems like there has to be a more effective way.