HN user

MrDunham

757 karma

Founder of HeyLois, the superconnector co-pilot that finds deals/biz dev and builds your social capital

Sometimes co-invest with some great VCs (sometimes): melzi.vc

Previously: - founded Prebacked - a startup accelerator for contracts (prebacked.com) - First EIR at Sungularity University, helped launch their first accelerator — Dressed Sir Richard Branson as a pickle

Posts25
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twitter.com 3y ago

I won a suit against a party that sent me an unsolicited text message

MrDunham
280pts139
www.pnas.org 6y ago

Researchers spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide from microdroplet H2O

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futurism.com 6y ago

Neural Implant Sends Camera Feed into Blind People’s Brains

MrDunham
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www.thestar.com 7y ago

Apollo for Reddit creator generated $27,355 in donations for his birthday

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www.business.com 10y ago

Working (Out) Your Way to Intense Productivity

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ignitethedrive.com 11y ago

Show HN: Ignite the Drive – Program to avoid burnout, survive valley of death

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blog.prebacked.com 11y ago

Health care problems worth solving: Falls in hospitals

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www.prebacked.com 12y ago

Event to start a health startup with an enterprise client baked-in

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medhack.prebacked.com 13y ago

MedHack: mentorathon for startups to land clients and VCs

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pandodaily.com 13y ago

Prebacked partners with Blue Cross to facilitate med-tech innovation

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aem.asm.org 14y ago

Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi

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www.ballmerpeakathon.com 14y ago

Ballmer Calculator: How much should you drink to reach the Ballmer Peak?

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www.kickstarter.com 14y ago

Magnifi - iPhone photoadapter case for microscope, telescope, or binoculars

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www.ballmerpeakathon.com 14y ago

Testing the Ballmer Peak: Ballmer Peak-a-Thon SF, open bar hackathon

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www.fastcompany.com 14y ago

Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods

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www.joelonsoftware.com 15y ago

Whaddaya mean you can't find developers? (2000)

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www.pnas.org 15y ago

Boosting brain matter by learning like a child.

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www.engadget.com 15y ago

China's dead affected by (paper) iPad shortages

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www.bitrebels.com 15y ago

Scientists are turning us into walking Batteries

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theweek.com 15y ago

Could thorium make nuclear power safe?

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saadlines.wordpress.com 15y ago

Building your anti advisory board

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www.fastcompany.com 15y ago

Kinect Hack Shows How You'll Wave at Your PC

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www.danmartell.com 15y ago

Lessons Skateboarding Taught Me About Business OR "Scared sh**less? Go for it"

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startupreport.com 15y ago

How Not to email an investor

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www.seanmeverett.com 15y ago

Consumer Behavior For Startups

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The iPhone camera bump is the "jumped the shark" moment for me when Apple went from unwilling to accept that level of quality to "I'm not sure... they might". Speculative to be sure, but I believe that if Jobs was alive we'd have a paper thin camera sensor because the bump would have been a nonstarter.

Same regarding your comment... I agree, the minimum QC does feel like it notched back a bit.

Siri AI 1 month ago

Agree and disagree on the "planning a trip" use case... as I'm sitting on a river cruise on an AI co-planned vacation (we found the cruise, AI set the daily itinerary).

Now the big (BIG) caveat is that I used Claude Code on my Max 20x plan from within VS Code. I have a fairly decent harness that I'd built and was sure to prompt it to run several subagents, including one that grounded walking times with Google Maps directly.

I'd say this is FAR beyond what the average person would do ("Hey Siri, plan me a trip to Prague") but also it shows that the models can do it with the right harness and guidelines. This wasn't that hard for me to do, so it seems to be more of a feature buildout ("the travel expert" AI) with a few markdown files than anything.

All told: web search for grounding times/locations, map grounding for walking paths and times, an adversarial agent to keep the model(s) honest, and a little bit of prompting and you've got a really great travel planner.

In short: the average person won't do this, but if I can build it in a few hours any of the 100% of people working at Apple/OpenAI/Anthropic who are smarter than me can build it and bake it into Siri (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc).

I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).

It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.

That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.

The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.

* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.

Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.

It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".

No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".

Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.

I love Anthropic's models but their realtime voice is absolutely terrible. Every time I use it there is at least once that I curse at it for interrupting me.

My main use case for OpenAI/ChatGPT at this point is realtime voice chats.

OpenAI has done a pretty great job w/ realtime (their realtime API is pretty fantastic out of the box... not perfect, but pretty fantastic and dead simple setup). I can have what feels like a legitimate conversation with AI and it's downright magical feeling.

That said, the output is created by OpenAI models so it's... not my favorite.

I sometimes use ChatGPT realtime to think through/work through a problem/idea, have it create a detailed summary, then upload that summary to Claude to let 4.5 Opus rewrite/audit and come up with a better final output.

"LLMs are terrible at asking questions. They just make a bunch of assumptions and brute-force something based on those guesses."

Strongly disagree that they're terrible at asking questions.

They're terrible at asking questions unless you ask them to... at which point they ask good, sometimes fantastic questions.

All my major prompts now have some sort of "IMPORTANT: before you begin you must ask X clarifying questions. Ask them one at a time, then reevaluate the next question based on the response"

X is typically 2–5, which I find DRASTICALLY improves output.

There was a great comedic bit on this:

"Thank you for flying Delta? I'd fly a kite if it was $11 cheaper"

I couldn't find the comedian, but the truth in it hits.

Side note: if I recall correctly Delta listened to their customers a decade+ back, gave more leg room, then nearly went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay more for the service.

This is the correct answer. I like to go one step further than the root comment:

Nearly all of my "agents" are required to ask at least three clarifying questions before they're allowed to do anything (code, write a PRD, write an email newsletter, etc)

Force it to ask one at a time and it's event better, though not as step-function VS if it went off your initial ask.

I think the reason is exactly what you state @7thpower: it takes a lot of thinking to really provide enough context and direction to an LLM, especially (in my opinion) because they're so cheap and require no social capital cost (vs asking a colleague / employee—where if you have them work for a week just to throw away all their work it's a very non-zero cost).

Be My Eyes 1 year ago

I was lucky enough to help Singularity University launch their startup accelerator back in 2015 and have Be My Eyes as a portfolio company.

I say lucky because they were such good people with such a great mission. Hans (founder) and Christian (co-founder) were really, really fun to get to spend ~10 weeks with.

The new CEO is fairly recent so I can't vouch either way for him. Hans and Christian were an absolute joy with incredible hearts.

Adding to the article:

I seriously HATE magic links. My email inbox is barely better a social network's time suck. Lots of urgent, little important, wrecks any flow I had.

Forcing me into my inbox is highly likely to cause me to forget about the reason I was there (to get into your app). Or, at best, it slows me way down and nearly always breaks my flow.

Perhaps this is acceptable for the security boost (?) for the average user, but man, when I get forced into magic links I sometimes just abandon the app altogether.

Disclaimer: 1. I have/pay for a password manager, which helps with the forgotten password problem a lot. It also allows me to have extremely hard-to-crack passwords.

10 years ago a post from @Bluehat for something we were working on* made #1 and generated about 7k clicks in 2 days.

Would suspect that number is much, much higher now.

* The Hacker Fair reverse job fair at the Hacker Dojo. #2 was "the CIA got hacked". Proud of that one.

Friendly correction for others because your auto correct failed you...

"predestination", pretty sure parent meant "pre-detonation"

A.k.a. Autoignition aka "it goes boom before you planned on it"

Only adding this as it's a pretty crucial word for understanding the comment.

My girlfriend, now wife of seven years, put together a Pinterest board of ring styles that she liked. It worked fantastically well… I still got to surprise her with the actual final ring and she was thrilled that it was the style that she liked and enjoyed the surprise.

Perhaps not for everyone but I certainly enjoyed having it be more thoughtful than me essentially clicking the buy button for her. She did, too.

GP's comment is flagged so I can't read it and comment directly. But there's just a... chill vibe that Jimmy managed to capture. His voice wasn't phenomenal. His lyrics were great. Music was good.

But the vibe... he really, really nailed the beachy vibe (even despise being an incredibly astute businessman)

Read every line in Jimmy's voice to the music. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Posted while drinking a (third) margarita in honor of Jimmy Buffett.

the rising difficulty many young people have finding a partner who meets all of their requirements—emotional, physical, financial, and political

Admittedly, I do many things wrong. But this is one I've done well and could be helpful for those struggling with the above ("meets ALL of their criteria")

My wife and I are far apart politically... and our marriage is something I (and I think, we) cherish.

When dating I struggled with finding someone who met ALL my criteria. In the course of it someone taught me to sit down and select your three (and ONLY three) "must-have" criteria. All other things are then negotiable.

For me, I wanted someone who was smart, who shared my religious beliefs, and who was supportive of my entrepreneurial plans/journey.

(Side note, I cheated and said I also wanted to be physically attracted to them.)

Fast forward to me meeting my wife. There are a good deal of things we disagree on — politics being towards the top. Had I let that get in the way and looked for a laundry list of must-haves I would never have married her, would never have had our two incredible children , and might possibly either still be looking or have given up on my criteria and settled.

This trick (pick 3 "non negotiables", let the rest be negotiable) served me extremely well in finding a dog after meeting ~100 (before having criteria), in my wedding (open bar, all my friends can come, no shoehorning of food by the venue), and a few other cases.

I can only speculate on why it works so well. It likely works because it forced me to really list what was crucial and to be more flexible on things I'd otherwise list as crucial.

Either way, if this helps one person to simplify, focus, and be flexible enough to find a mate theme it was worth it. Hope it helps you.

And happy Father's Day to all you other fathers out there.