anaskar

Interesting re: Comfort in False Negative Zone

Put another way "Hire for strength not lack of weakness." Put yet another way, the strengths can yield asymmetric upside, while the weaknesses, if truly known and not deal-breakers, could have limited downsides, especially if it's a weakness like "doesn't have x years of experience"

This is awesome. Congratulations on the launch. I can see a number of use cases for Marketing, CS, and Sales orgs

love this! needed this at the last company I worked out. Was always surprised how manual and generally not secure the whole process seemed to me.

thanks! so far the companies we’ve talked to are delaying full-blown reviews as long as possible because of the stage of company they’re in.

We certainly do work very closely with each company to work through their product and integrate as seamlessly as possible. whereas we don’t offer an official security review as of now, it is something we’re considering for the future. would love to chat, DMing you now!

thank you! We’re starting out of the gate with COPPA and will fast-follow with GDPR so we currently cover the United States (in English).

re: spoofing. this is a tough problem to solve and no existing solution guarantees this. we would be able to see suspicious behavior though like multiple verification attempts, time between submission and verification, etc.

Changing regulations is tough. We work with a privacy lawyer to keep us abreast of changing policy and have researchers maintain a database of applicable state, federal, and international laws as well as recent lawsuits.

Financial KYC is interesting for sure. Right now we’re focused on child privacy and very much believe there’s a lot of work to be done there still.

thanks! the laws do change across country lines. while we’re focused on the U.S. right now, we’re actively researching applicable laws in other jurisdictions.

Hey HN! We’re Daniel and Arjun, founders of StandardCode (http://www.standardcode.io/). We make it easy for companies to comply with child data privacy laws such as COPPA and GDPR by providing APIs for collecting parental consent and ID verification of minors.

COPPA regulation makes it difficult for companies to cater to children under 13 without building in safeguards to collect and manage parental consent and to block third-party sharing of data without transparency. As a result most companies just prohibit users under 13 from signing up for their services, either as a policy or by having an age gate that prevents an under-13 child from signing up.

However, with a record number of under-13 users on the internet due to the pandemic, behavior is permanently shifting and many companies now want to cater to all audiences. By providing APIs to manage the collection of consent, we allow companies to safely acquire underage users while minimizing friction in the sign-up flow.

Our customer-facing REST API presents a few high-level resources that are needed for collecting parental consent and ID verification for children. Customers typically make 1 API call to create a profile for a child, and then 2–3 more calls to collect parental consent or verify age and ID if necessary. Afterwards, we push data to a webhook endpoint to notify the customer when consent has been collected or an ID has been verified.

Our business model is based on usage — we charge a small fee per user for whom we need to collect parental consent or verify age and ID.

We'd love to hear from you, especially if you have experience with products catering to children!

congrats on the launch! this is a really neat implementation and i'm a big fan of honey as well. really slick.

quick note. may want to clean up the testimonials. all 3 are 5 stars, have 3.4k cred, and were posted 2 hrs ago. coincidence or not, comes across as a bit fake.

I was JUST talking about how I wish it was easier to collect customer insights and share them out more broadly in internal newsletters. Kudos. Nailed a serious serious pain point.

Sounds a bit like the Lindy Effect. The idea that the future life expectancy of an idea is directly proportional to its current age.

In this case, old books that have lasted till the present day have a lot higher likelihood of having staying power in the future.

What's the service? If it's a local one, you're way better off doing it in a market that you are familiar with (your hometown). Not sure what you really mean by "not known for startups" and that shouldn't matter. If your app provides a useful service, people will use it.

There are many other unknowns launching in a city you are entirely unfamiliar with, especially if you have to move there.

It comes back to what the app actually does. Do you have to be in the city to launch it? Is there an offline component of it? If the answer is yes, stay home.

Congratulations on the launch. This is a rare instance where the combination of cost, technology, and ease of use makes this solution 10x better than the status quo and a no-brainer.

How extensible is this to other tests? Is it just a matter of pilots and trials or are there certain tests that are too sensitive for computer vision to reliably assess?

What % of the diagnostics market is urine-based versus blood-based?

This is great! This is sort of like how Clear brokers deals with airports to expedite security, except for more interesting and complicated airport processes.

Could have used this coming back from Rome to the United States via Spain. Ended up going through customs 4 times just to make a transfer.

Curious how difficult it was to do this for 500+ airports so quickly, especially since you're a private company and operating beyond security gates in an era of permanently heightened security.

from what I've seen at Google specifically, when hiring for team talent, acquihires are typically performed in a binary fashion -- they take everybody who wants to go, without going through the regular screening process.

n = 1

While this is exciting, this is not always a good thing.

Two years ago, we tried this at Homejoy as an incentives for the cleaners to get 5 stars.ie. If you get 5's on your appointment, we'll pay you out the same day. We did this manually via Stripe, of course.

Efficacy of the incentive aside (it didn't actually have an impact on 5s), we cut this program for two reasons:

1) Transaction cost, as many users pointed out

2) Unpredictability - most of the workers on our marketplace preferred the predictability of weekly or biweekly payouts, even if the size of those payouts varied. It's hard enough for people to manage personal finances on a regular schedule without the added headache of getting money instantly, or daily.

The goal/intent/promise with these companies is always train AI to automate the process. This is good for both "buzz" and cost reasons long-term.

Companies describe the AI as two-fold: 1) actual AI responding to your requests and 2) Automation making human workers' jobs much easier, ie. a really good CRM or scheduling algo.

The reality is that high growth almost always means throwing more people at the problem under the guise of being "trainers" when in reality the technology only really caters to #2 (better automation) and the company is forced to pivot before ever really getting to #1 (AI handling the requests) either due to distractions or inability to actual deliver on the promise.

awesome, thanks all! i agree with the sentiments about adding an example. i have a lot of features i want to include as I build this out.

pretty basic backstory: I read a biography every morning to inspire my day. My friends wanted me to create a newsletter about it. I don't know python or anything like that but managed to duct tape some plugins together on a static html page.

I used to run email marketing at Homejoy at one point so wanted to exercise those muscles before they atrophy (currently unemployed)

you can bump into 10 pitch meetings at The Creamery or Coffee Bar in the mission.

this is effectively what postmates did in the early days, which was to offer delivery from places without delivery mechanisms, which inherently isn't wrong. interesting approach to try and outrank the restaurants' own sites, if they have them, and charging a delivery fee. clever but HUGE copyright infringement and I can see why restaurants are upset.

reminds me when software companies in the 90s went to small businesses to digitize their menus for free and then monetize any orders that came through the site via email, fax, webform, or phone.

funny thing is, if they just went back to partnering with Philz after almost a year of not, they'd make more (at least in the short to mid-term)

Great post Tristan. Solid advice. I'd also add http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/ in the list of resources on the bottom. It forces conciseness.

Didn't know this service existed. Just registered and tossed it up onto product hunt --> http://www.producthunt.com/posts/long-bets

looking forward to see this play out.

What kind of companies are you trying to work at? I totally feel your pain. In fact many ATS's (Applicant Tracking Systems) often bounce 50% of applications without a human even looking at the app.

Hiring is hard on both sides. Many companies (understandably) need some way of filtering. That's why you shouldn't apply online or through job portals =)

The CTO of Stripe talks here about how he built a great eng team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zoq085zVhA

you can see that most are referrals vs. in-bound leads, with other channels in between.

What I'm getting at is that regardless of industry, you should do some of the following:

- contribute to the field you're applying to in other ways. Write articles, do side projects, etc. This will build up your reputation and experience in ways that a company can substitute a degree for.

- find people in the field and talk to them about what they're doing and what they'd find most helpful to study up on.

- take an internship or research position

- find people at LinkedIn who work at the company and meet up for coffee. Companies are definitely more amenable these days to hiring non-degree candidates but HR might be a bit behind the times. If you can demonstrate to hiring managers directly in-person that you're qualified, you can bypass a lot of these issues

- apply to startups / smaller companies. it's more of a meritocracy for sure and HR tends to be more hands-on.

good luck!