Thursday, October 31, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Shimmer – ADHD-adapted body doubling

Show HN: Shimmer – ADHD-adapted body doubling
17 by christalwang | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I’m Chris, one of the co-founders of Shimmer. In 2022, following my ADHD diagnosis, I launched Shimmer ( https://shimmer.care ), a 1:1 ADHD Coaching for adults (HN launch here: https://ift.tt/sIdSyaB ). One problem we discovered while running 1:1 coaching is that people weren’t able to actually follow through (in real life) on the ideas they came up with during their weekly sessions with their coach. There is a concept called body doubling that’s popular within the ADHD community—it’s basically getting things done in the presence of other people. The positive accountability is proven to work. However, our members told us they tried other body doubling solutions or attempted to organize it themselves in real life but none of the solutions stuck. So we reverse engineered productive moments our members described, paired with scientific backing of what motivates ADHD-ers, and designed an online body doubling experience for our coaching members that provides a safe but productive space for them to get things done between weekly sessions. A few of the motivators we infused into the traditional body doubling experience were 1) newness/novelty — each session has a different guided experience in the break like breathwork or stretching, 2) urgency — there’s a large visible pomodoro timer on the top left that counts down from 25 min, 3) community — the shared space is ADHD-friendly, and has a mood check-in & sharing functionality built in so you don’t feel alone, 4) accountability — there’s a task list where each time you check something off, it notifies the group, and you can view others’ as well if they opt in. Here’s a video walking through the product experience: https://ift.tt/XPmcuwa Our body doubling was created and iterated alongside thousands of people with ADHD on our coaching platform over 9+ months of building & iterating with them. We’re excited to unveil this experience. If you have ADHD (or executive functioning challenges), we’d love for you to check out coaching & body doubling and give us critical feedback. Shimmer’s pricing: $140/mo. for Essentials plan (15-min weekly sessions), $230/mo. for Standard plan (30-min weekly sessions), $345/mo. for Immersive plan (45-min weekly sessions); all plans start with an additional 25% off the first month, HSA/FSA-eligible. The reason why the price is so high is that this is not a self-guided app or SaaS tool. You’re matched with a real, credentialed coach (not AI) and since ADHD coaching is not reimbursed in the US, the price is hard for us to bring down because the largest cost component is the coach’s compensation. *We know these prices are still expensive for many people with ADHD. Here are the actions we’re taking: (1) we offer needs-based scholarships and aim to have 5% of members on them at any time, (2) we often run fully sponsored scholarships with our partners—over 60 full ride scholarships and 100 group coaching spots have been disbursed alongside Asian Mental Health Project, Government of Canada, and more, and (3) we have aligned our coaching model alongside Health & Wellness Coaching, which is expected to be reimbursed in the next years. If there are ways we can further drive down the cost, please reach out to me directly at chris@shimmer.care.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: AI OmniGen – AI Image Generator with Consistent Visuals

Show HN: AI OmniGen – AI Image Generator with Consistent Visuals
18 by lcorinst | 3 comments on Hacker News.
AI OmniGen is an advanced AI image generator, offering identity preservation for consistent subject representation and seamless image editing for refined, customized visuals.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Escape from TCR? Family shared SMS

Ask HN: Escape from TCR? Family shared SMS
21 by tcrhelpforsms | 22 comments on Hacker News.
My wife is a bit particular and when we moved in together want there to be a household phone. So we signed up with a VoIP service and things worked. When we bought a home together, life got more complicated. There were utilities, contractors, service people, deliveries, etc. One day we realized that some of these folks would frequently send texts to our house number instead of calling, which we would never receive. So we upgraded our VoIP service/plan with a SMS option, and it was great. We could both just keep up to date on all the various things and either of us could respond as our schedules allowed, on any of our devices. We could even send images as MMS would allow to make communication clearer ("See this is exactly where things are going wrong", etc.) And as with many things in life, human nature has pretty much ruined it. To combat SMS spam, as far as we can tell, all business SMS usage needs to be approved through https://ift.tt/WmZ2NKV now. And recent years, it has been brought to our attention that the service we are paying for is really intended for businesses. We are increasingly hitting weird blocks on messaging due to being grandfathered in before TCR. It has gotten to the point where we are on the verge of registering a business just to keep our functionality. Except even just having a registered business may not be enough because TCR requires all kinds of detailed information about your business and its practices. So we are at a bit of a loss what else to do here. We could concede and one of us gets the responsibility of the "designated" cell phone number to handle everything household related. It is further complicated by my being an Apple fanboi and her a Windows/Android zealot. If we both used Apple devices we could maybe finagle something out by buying a dedicated iPhone for the house number and then take advantage of the cross-device Messages interoperability. There is Google Voice, and even ignoring my dislike for them, I don't feel they can necessarily be trusted not to drop the product or ban us for arbitrary reasons. Additionally, when it comes to actual phone calls, while Google Voice can forward calls to a number, I am not aware of any option to use it directly with regular handsets like many VoIP providers offer. Are there really no companies in this space serving personal users? If not, that would be an excellent business niche for the entrepreneural folks in the audience.

New top story on Hacker News: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me
13 by 005vc16607 | 6 comments on Hacker News.


Wednesday, October 9, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: FinetuneDB – AI fine-tuning platform to create custom LLMs

Show HN: FinetuneDB – AI fine-tuning platform to create custom LLMs
9 by felix089 | 3 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! We’re building FinetuneDB ( https://finetunedb.com/ ), an LLM fine-tuning platform. It enables teams to easily create and manage high-quality datasets, and streamlines the entire workflow from fine-tuning to serving and evaluating models with domain experts. You can check out our docs here: ( https://ift.tt/idyDl9f ) FinetuneDB exists because creating and managing high-quality datasets is a real bottleneck when fine-tuning LLMs. The quality of your data directly impacts the performance of your fine-tuned models, and existing tools didn’t offer an easy way for teams to build, organize, and iterate on their datasets. We’ve been working closely with our pilot customers, both AI startups and more traditional businesses like a large newspaper, which is fine-tuning models on their articles to automate content generation in their tone of voice. The platform is built with an end-to-end workflow in mind, from dataset building, fine-tuning, serving, and evaluating outputs. The centerpiece is a version-controlled, no-code dataset manager where you can upload existing datasets in JSONL, use production data, or collaborate with domain experts to create high-quality datasets for custom use cases. We also offer evaluation workflows that allow non-technical contributors to annotate data, review model outputs, and refine responses (LLM-as-judge also available). We offer: - A free tier for developers and hobbyists who want to streamline dataset management. - Business-tier with full feature access for teams, using per-seat pricing. - A custom tier for model hosting, custom integrations, and self-hosting. Most users still use OpenAI models, but if you're working with open-source LLMs, we offer pay-as-you-go pricing for serverless inference for Llama and Mistral models with up to €100 in free credits to get started. We're in public beta right now, so any feedback—whether it’s about features, usability, or anything else—would be incredibly valuable. If you've worked on fine-tuning models before or are curious about custom LLMs, we’d love to hear from you. Our goal is to make the fine-tuning process more accessible and help more companies leverage their data and domain experts to create custom LLMs. Thanks for checking it out!

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

New top story on Hacker News: OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B

OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B
67 by gmaster1440 | 83 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$

TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$
23 by synergy20 | 24 comments on Hacker News.


New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Kameo – a Rust library for building fault-tolerant, async actors

Show HN: Kameo – a Rust library for building fault-tolerant, async actors
24 by tqwewe | 6 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, I’m excited to share Kameo, a lightweight Rust library that helps you build fault-tolerant, distributed, and asynchronous actors. If you're working on distributed systems, microservices, or real-time applications, Kameo offers a simple yet powerful API for handling concurrency, panic recovery, and remote messaging between nodes. Key Features: - Async Rust: Each actor runs as a separate Tokio task, making concurrency management simple. - Remote Messaging: Seamlessly send messages to actors across different nodes. - Supervision and Fault Tolerance: Create self-healing systems with actor hierarchies. - Backpressure Support: Supports bounded and unbounded mpsc messaging. I built Kameo because I wanted a more intuitive, scalable solution for distributed Rust applications. I’d love feedback from the HN community and contributions from anyone interested in Rust and actor-based systems. Check out the project on GitHub: https://ift.tt/0AVb7Yz Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!