Looks good OP - I frequently look at the stargazers list for various repos and see if there's overlap in interest between projects. I imagine this is about as good as targeted marketing as you could get for software, but I'm curious to hear if devs respond well to "hey you use/like/starred X, want to try out Y?"

The way I was approaching it was from the maintainer perspective where I want to engage with the community of stargazers. My experience with that has been fairly good and folks are responsive.

I had a friend who used the original script to reach out to a repo similar to what he was hoping to build and actually got a lot of good feedback as well, so from the small sample size it has generally been positive.

To give a way to protect against potential abuse, I created a form on the homepage where anyone can be asked to be excluded from a StarHog list. Though I am open to hearing suggestions if you might have any as well.

Please don't waste your time on this. It's emblematic of a company that doesn't know what they are doing and you probably don't want to work there. There should at least be some sort of skill-fit screening on their end (quick casual chat or specific filters on resume) that doesn't require you spending hours of your time doing unpaid work.

exactly what I was thinking even though the job is very interesting and tech recruiting is quite hard in the current environment

Prompt engineer was likely never a career path, I’d imagine most software devs knew this from the jump. I think any engineer can work with the modern LLM solutions available — considering software engineering was already a form of pseudo-prompt engineering, but the feedback loop was with yourself, google, and stack overflow.

The product I’m building is predicated on prompt engineering and it works really well for us — our results need to be as accurate and structured as possible so they can be re-used as software dependencies. We do this by auto-generating a context on the fly and tailoring it to your specific data sources (databases, APIs), sampling data, and so on. We do both manual and "auto" tuning of the context to provide the best results.

We like the “Supabase for data engineering” nomenclature — we’re a managed service that does the heavy lifting to unify your data sources. Velvet enables you to join volumes of product events (from sources like Amplitude or Snowflake) with your application database(s) and query them directly in an accessible way. Plus, use your Velvet queries as interoperable building blocks to collaborate and build features within your product via our API.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart takes place around the Berkeley area in a post-apocalyptic world. Not quite sci-fi but a fantastic read nonetheless.

Another post earlier today brought back the memory of this game. Incredible that it is still playable all these years later!

The word Snowcraft just brought me back to my childhood. I loved playing the Snowcraft Shockwave game circa 2001 (?)

I found a version of it on Archive.org [1] and a mirror on Github [2] that shockingly run perfectly!

[1] https://archive.org/details/snowcraft_game [2] https://github.com/seanpm2001/Snowcraft

I have similar thoughts on this - so few members of a team actually know what the underlying data model looks like. Gets even harder when you start trying to query across your database(s) + external sources like analytics/event systems. Natural language lets the whole team peel away at the black box of data and helps build common ground on which to improve products. I already mentioned it in another part of this thread so I won't spam my project but would love to get your feedback on my natural language to SQL tool if you're interested.

Shameless plug – we're working on this at Velvet (https://usevelvet.com) and would love feedback. Our tool can connect and query across disparate data sources (databases and event-based systems) and allows you to write natural language questions that are turned automatically into SQL queries (and even make those queries into API endpoints you can call directly!). My email is in my HN profile if anyone wants to try it out or has feedback.

I've mentored people that have wanted to change roles into product management for years. Please feel free to reach out, happy to chat about it. My email address is in my HN profile.