[HN Gopher] Increasing your practice surface area
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Increasing your practice surface area
Author : ChanningAllen
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-10-01 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indiehackers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indiehackers.com)
| Zambyte wrote:
| This article might be interesting, and I'm not against AI use. I
| am not interested in AI slop though, and I immediately lost
| interest in the banner photo with nonsense text in it.
| mirror_neuron wrote:
| That was my first reaction, too, but it's not actually nonsense
| - it's a depiction of Eminem practicing rhymes in a casual
| conversation.
|
| It's valid feedback for the author, though. I had to read the
| article to understand the image.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yeah, it would probably work better if that image were
| positioned after the reference to Eminem thinking of rhymes
| all day.
| NiloCK wrote:
| AI polarization is a little interesting. The AI generated
| image prompted the parent to not even consider whether the
| content was on topic. This _might_ be a decent heuristic, but
| it 's bound to throw out a lot of potentially useful stuff as
| well.
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| Author here. Good feedback: the text isn't nonsense, but it
| requires background knowledge that the man on the right is the
| rapper Eminem.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I'm an Eminem fan and didn't get that reference FWIW.
|
| I thought it was some "Silicon Valley bro" that wanted you to
| drink kelp, and build your biceps or something
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| Gotcha! Shame on me. Just slapped a "Slim Shady" label on his
| hoodie. Won't fully stop the bleeding but at least a few more
| people will get it.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Thanks for the change, sorry if I came off as too
| aggressive. I've seen some uses of AI that were very
| similar that strictly made the article worse and it would
| have been better to simply delete it. I'll concede that I
| simply didn't get it, and that's a me problem here. I'll
| give the article a more fair chance when I have some time
| later :)
| jannyfer wrote:
| I lost interest when I got to the email address box to
| subscribe. Interrupts the flow and makes me skim the rest.
| danjl wrote:
| Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and
| touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always
| distracted.
| bdangubic wrote:
| being passionate about something is not a distraction
| wiseowise wrote:
| Being passionate and obsessive are two different things.
|
| > Turn idle time into mental rehearsal
|
| Any psychologist would bash your head with a book for
| following this.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Good read, _a summary_ :
|
| When you become obsessed with A, your whole life becomes a
| practice of A.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| This is the same thing that AJATT (All Japanese All The Time or
| something) recommends to learn a new language too.
| boerseth wrote:
| I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it
| worked like a charm.
|
| Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I
| thought, "comprehensible input" won't work with dancing,
| especially not a couple's dance. Nevertheless, unable to dance
| every day due to my local scene being quite small, I instead
| consumed a boatload of YouTube videos during my spare time.
| Instructional content, performances, class summaries, and what
| have you. And I progressed super quickly.
|
| First off, as a leader, it is good to have seen competent
| dancers with good musicality and how they choose their steps to
| fit with phrases of songs. That much fits in parallel with
| input-based language acquisition techniques. But I also think I
| gained a good amound of intuition about how to move my own
| body. Not perfect intuition, but more than nothing, which was
| very much my starting point.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Watching lots of Doom videos on Youtube helped me learn some
| aspects of the game surprisingly fast. I can't control
| Doomguy as fast and as precisely as the best Doom youtubers
| but I can read a situation in the game about as fast and as
| good as they can and often come up with the plan they
| eventually follow faster than they do.
| boerseth wrote:
| I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it
| was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work
| would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the
| pros openly admitted to watching their competition while
| starting out in order to get good
| ge96 wrote:
| I wonder how the indie/entrepreneur space is doing nowadays. I
| tried to do it myself but never really got anywhere this was back
| in 2016. Whenever I go on sites/subreddits around this topic a
| lot of the posts just seem to be about generating clout/some fake
| revenue numbers/screenshot of earnings. It's like entrepreneurs
| selling to each other.
|
| I suppose nowadays it's probably around LLM wrappers, photo
| generation, video generation services... there were those niche
| ones in the past like the teacher with her bingo cards maker
|
| It's still in my mind as I don't like waiting for a paycheck,
| just wondering how the space is doing nowadays
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| It's doing better than ever! LLMs offer the equivalent of
| $500k+ in outside funding if used correctly, so there's a huge
| uptick in # of new bootstrapped startups.
|
| In fact we (the Indie Hackers founders) are bootstrapping a new
| B2B app now that Claude Code & Codex CLI (etc) are on the org
| chat.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| I hope this is a parody post and not actually the real
| exhultations of an actual founder.
| zrules wrote:
| For post-product-market-fit hires or scale-up engineering
| teams, the interview process could skip LeetCode and
| instead test how well candidates can identify and debug
| issues introduced by LLMs. Less binary trees, more LLM bug-
| hunting
| mikestorrent wrote:
| I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like
| we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new
| ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's
| HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either
| fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for
| anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and
| products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with
| gift-giving and so forth.
|
| It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to
| advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the
| greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of
| ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and
| mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is
| shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
|
| Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be
| able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
| ge96 wrote:
| Forced conscription sucks, at least a difference between real
| war and something mandatory like 2 years of reserves
| equivalent (I'm not talking about US)
| egypturnash wrote:
| Is it better or worse than when the greatest minds of our
| generation were lost to increasing user engagement by any
| means necessary?
| kalap_ur wrote:
| There is a book called "Talent is overrated" it essentially says,
| you need to 1) invest time, 2) do targeted practice, and 3) have
| a mentor, who helps you in targeted practice. Practice alone is
| not enough, it must be targeted at 1) what is relevant and/or 2)
| where your biggest weakness is at the moment.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| How is IndieHackers doing since being independent? I used to use
| it quite a bit but it seemed like recently it's focused more on
| articles, similar to Starter Story I guess, which makes a ton of
| money so I can't blame you for going that route, than the forum
| (which I can't even figure out how to get to anymore). But then
| again, the forum had quite a lot of promotion and spam that got
| boring to read after a while.
| JackFr wrote:
| > The difference between being good and being great isn't talent
| or formal training, but the invisible practice that happens when
| you're just living life.
|
| Pure nonsense.
|
| Necessary != sufficient, and honestly neither are demonstrated in
| the anecdotes.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Two things.
|
| It's possible to be great at something simply by practicing,
| assuming normal capabilities. But great here just means "better
| than virtually everyone". Being mediocre among people who
| practice regularly it makes you immediately better than
| basically everyone who has done it once or twice. By most
| definitions that's "great".
|
| Median daily StarCraft ranked player? You're great at
| StarCraft.
|
| Second, if you start young enough, you get the compounding
| effects of time. You're now "pretty good among lifelong daily
| players in their prime". That's Olympic/ world class.
|
| Like that guy who had kids just to make them Chess masters. He
| did so by making chess part of the family life, so integral it
| wasn't working it just _was_. The guy from the original post
| actually.
|
| So it's tempting to say things like TFA posits, and while I'm
| not sure it's 100% true, it's definitely not 100% false or pure
| rubbish.
| wiseowise wrote:
| This is new level of snake oil. When you're not selling your own
| snake oil, but trying to piggyback off of other people.
|
| Burn out speedrun 101.
|
| If you want to keep your sanity, you need to find your own
| passion, not try to emulate others (especially with crazy
| routines like the examples).
| bitbasher wrote:
| This article is quite shallow. It's essentially saying, in order
| to excel at something it needs to become a part of you.
|
| There's some truth there, but Charles Bukowski said it much
| better and more succinctly with, "Don't try." [1]
|
| 1: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
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