a_d

congrats on the launch! .. I am loving this entire thread.

It is important for some company to make home buying better. Even outside of the pain of unaffordability, it is an utterly broken process. Advent of LLMs do give hope that this process can be imporoved signifiantly.

Fun fact: I met Raymond and Raffi a long time ago and discouraged from going into this area. But now, I am glad they did. Their conviction is inspiring.

If Turbo tax can make it possible for a person to file taxes, I am pretty sure a home can be bought online.

Best of luck to modern realty! .. and we should hang again sometime :)

I have been working on a AI "tutor" for kids (6-10) based on the constraints of - no websites, no apps, no ipad/iphone. But after this demo, I need to rethink my entire approach! Maybe these ideas I am holding on to, are just not relevant.

(For those interested in my current approach: https://robodonkey.com/)

I made a device that lets my kids engage with chatGPT without eye strain [1] and parental controls. No need to give them my phone or laptop, no more worrying about them wandering onto the internet [2]. IMO it is incredibly useful to have kids interact safely with AI.

[1] an old fashioned B&W monochrome LCD.

[2] its a stupid little dumb terminal

This is incredibly useful! Is it possible to make this into a simple (single page) shopping list? Where I type my shopping list, product recommends substitutes with lower sugar — and gives me distribution (histogram) of main ingredients for my shopping list.

That would be life changing.

Serious Question: Why are managers needed? What is the steelman argument for managers and for not having managers?

Love this, PascalPixel!

Hope you are well my friend. I smiled at this project and then saw it was made by you — it’s such a beautiful project that only you could have made :).

Great idea and execution.

It is possible that this becomes the inciting incident that leads to a viable twitter alternative.

Making many programmers and tech people annoyed at the same time isn't a wise move by Twitter.

Tarantino mentioned Godard as an influence at the beginning of the Reservoir Dogs script (Here he is talking about it: https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU). He says that the seminal moment when he recognized his key aesthetic as a director, was when he read Pauline Kael's review of a Godard film (A band apart), where Kael says in her review: "It was as if a bunch of movie mad young frenchmen had taken up a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the lines". Tarantino says that when he read that he knew that this was his aesthetic -- this is what he wanted to do as a director.

Tarantino called his production company "A Band Apart" (in my opinion) for that reason.

(Tarantino's comment: https://youtu.be/vb7oUEVjFjo)

wow! Thank you so much for a detailed response! I learned a lot from your comment.

If I may ask another question: do you think the CubeSat ‘form factor’ (10x10x10 cm-cube) can have enough propulsion (combined with some gravtiy-assist) to be able to get into an orbit around another planet or another moon in our solar system? Meaning, can a CubeSat be sent to .. say Titan, as a probe (say a ‘mini-Cassini’).

(Just curious to understand whether cheap ‘CubeSats’ can be used as tiny probes for the entire solar system)

Thank you!

Imagine if one were to launch a swarm of cubesats with cameras on them looking away from Earth —- what would you imagine those cameras would see? (Let’s say cameras allow very long exposure shots?) Another way to ask my question is: can cubesat be used as “mini-Hubbles” to get closeups of planets/moon in the solar system or nearby stars?

Second question (somewhat related to first) — can a cubesat stream video to a server on earth? (Or does one need a ‘big Sat’ to do video streaming?

Norm is the Bob Dylan of comedy.

What do you think about a recent Veritassium video that discusses the idea that ‘there is no such thing as a visual learner’ (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA)

Just curious.

One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn’t directly make it, but he spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much harder to get than the pirated copy).

Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!

Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..

A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.

Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.

I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!

It’s available here: https://www.gog.com/game/railroad_tycoon_2

You can play on macOS using parallels.

A bunch of videos come up on Google and they can quickly give a glimpse of the gameplay - although I will suggest diving it without the trailer (https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+tycoon+2)

The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...

Scientism is rampant in business thinking — especially physics envy.

“ As a result I’ve improved a number of biomarkers (e.g. resting heart rate, resting blood glucose, strength, endurance, nutritional deficiencies, etc)” — how does one measure / track these things? ESP resting heart rate, blood glucose and nutritional deficiencies.

Solution to the Byzantine General’s Problem using proof of work is possibly an example. The basic problem is: how do you make sure that multiple entities, which are separated by distance, are in absolute full agreement before an action is taken?

If one is not trying to solve it in the fastest time, then an agreed ‘truth’ can be reached after ‘some time’ without a central entity. By deciding to go ‘slow’, a solution can be found eventually.

Agree with the recommendation.

Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.

I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)

There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.

Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.

Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

This is exactly right - infact, because some people might consider housing in Bay Area to be a good investment, we can try to make it affordable for others.

This is the project we’ve been working on for the last month or so: https://zerodown.com/

The first version of some astonishingly successful businesses were quite simple. Including and certainly not limited to: AirBnB, Groupon, Facebook, Zenefits, ZenPayroll (now Gusto), YouTube, Twitter etc were quite simple.

Ironically, their success over the last 10-15 years, has made starting a software businesses relatively simple. My bet is that in the next 10-15 years the value is increasingly going to come from harder to start businesses.

What you say may be true for almost all the products, unless when the product is 'money' itself. Something worth considering.

Easy access to low-cost loans creates the illusion of affordability and exacerbates over-consumption (over-consumption: a general malady afflicting most humans)

”But here’s where it fails”

The answer in the article is: “Products that aren’t daily, but still hugely valuable” — like a Payroll system, LinkedIn etc. (there are many!). And...yes, these businesses should not have DAU/MAU as their goal.

Andrew is quite brilliant, and recently joined A16Z as a partner — but this specific essay is quite ordinary, and lacks insight. His prior piece, which is a compendium of essays written by others on “Marketplaces” is quite good.

”funding consists of €12 million in equity and a new €25 million debt facility. Building an inventory of new tech products to rent is quite capital insensitive, after all.“

“if Grover’s subscription model becomes compelling enough, it’s hoped that purchasing many tech products will become so unattractive as to create Netflix-level changes in consumption behaviour. Or, at least, that’s the aim. In my case, that would mean spending far less time recycling things like smartphones and music technology gear on eBay as I tread a well-trodden and perpetual upgrade path.“

Questions to consider:

1) This business requires upfront capex into depreciating hardware with the hope that users are sticky. And users would be sticky partially because they would succeed in changing general attitudes towards ownership. Does this seem plausible?

2) If this works, there is going to be a gold-rush style copycats (since TAM is big). How could they fend off copycats? ie another company giving iPhone X at $x/mo, where x is 50-cents lower than Grover.

3) Out of General curiousity, does an average person have this problem? (Of wanting consumer electronics on $x/mo, so they can upgrade?).

4) All leasing businesses have an end of life value problem — I always thought that consumer electronics has a big EOL problem (worse than cars, say) in that they don’t have a second-hand market. It’s either recyclers or landfill. In that scenario, isn’t consumer electronics the worst place to start a leasing business. (They mention laptops for businesses; that makes more sense, because first, it’s B2B (TCO and cash flow matters) and there is some secondary market). What am I missing?

Kip Thorne here [1] agrees with one aspect of Bohm’s philosophy (not Physics) —- he posits that theories that explain nature’s laws with more and more precision are like Matryoshka Dolls (Greeks->Newton->Einstein->String Theory->{??}), where each new layer improves on the predictions of the previous one —- and at one point in the discussion, he says this could go on until infinity.

(Regardless, this is a great interview to watch if you are interested in physics)

In similar vein, here is Eric Weinstein [2] talking about why we can’t find the theory of everything — and has similarly...kooky...ideas as Bohm. He is short-String theory (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25547). His main critique comes from the demands that the theory starts imposing about wanting 11 or 26 dimensions.

All this in some level is super exciting and suspenseful, as I do believe Physics is on the cusp of a “new big idea from a lone genius” type revolution, that might push things forward!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJr3pJl27pItxUFeZlx9...

[2] https://youtu.be/Yw88utUCx9M

Thanks for sharing this comment!

I wonder if part of the govt’s interest comes after discovery (-ies) of backdoors in US and China based processors — a national security motivation to develop indigenous manufacturing.

Congrats to this team. Great project!

Good thought experiment. Assuming all nukes are destroyed and we achieve zero-state. From that point onward it would be hard for a rogue state/agency to develop a weapon. Because the supply-chain monitoring, which is already quite advanced, would be even more severe (since all advanced countries would be aligned). This means it would be harder to get raw materials (Eg fuel doesn’t occur naturally, and has to be manufactured), factory equipment etc.; above certain quantities drones/aircrafts/satellites are pretty decent at catching radiation signatures —- basically all the tech that used today to prevent new countries from adding nuclear capabilities, would work —- just better and more intensely, because all advanced countries would be aligned.

(I am just putting forth a hypothesis for why once we go to zero nukes, it might be possible to stay at zero nukes using existing tech)

The article’s final paragraph: >”Every robot rebel has its benevolent counterpart, such as C-3PO in the Star Wars franchise or the android child David in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Both kinds of stories, the hopeful and the fearful, reveal to us our complex emotional responses to AI. Understanding these and their deep history is crucial to making the most of life with intelligent machines.”

The authors interchangeably use robots, automata, AI (meaning AGI, I am guessing) — that makes for a confusing read. If they mean AGI, then nothing about how humans dealt with robots will likely prepare us for how to deal with an exponentially fast learning, super smart, intelligence. I would argue that learning from history would be anchoring ourselves to wrong ideas (ideas of incrementalism). To prepare for AGI, we need to think quite differently and radically, in some sense.

Maybe we come at it from a different side: what/which manmade things can cause end of the world? (I know only 2: climate change and nukes)

Really interesting bit of history. Thanks for sharing. (I remember Pirates! — what a great game that was. Vividly remember the opening graphics on my friend’s new 486 with a 16-bit VGA card. It looked stunning.)