bdm

Good to hear about your experiences with keto. I do cyclic keto, going into ketogenic diet for periods and then coming back to "normal" (still relatively low carb). Cyclic keto has shown benefits, and it doesn't have the trade-offs of going full keto.

For people who struggle with symptoms of keto flu (ie, those ~3 days ramping up to the keto diet, and blood glucose is low but the body is not yet producing ketones in high levels) the drink could help alleviate this as people transition.

Yes, this is a big part of why people like ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting. Avoiding carbs, and initiating a state of ketosis, means your brain is fueled on ketones -- many people subjectively like the feeling.

It is D-BHB, not acetone. https://help.hvmn.com/hvmn-ketone/what-is-inside-hvmn-ketone

When taken with carbs, as was done in the athlete studies, performance output increases because the body has access to both types of energy. The ketones are used first, protecting the glucose for later use.

There is some stevia in it: https://help.hvmn.com/hvmn-ketone/what-is-inside-hvmn-ketone.

Sort of! You can enter ketosis through IF and keto diet (we run WeFast, a big facebook fasting group, and I fast 36 hours every week).

What's special about HVMN Ketone is that you can get into ketosis with just a drink. And it lets you maintain carb levels at the same time, unlike keto diet & IF, which is a big plus for the sports performance gains.

Our GO CUBES chewable coffee is super popular ^_^ I personally still love a fine coffee/espresso, but what's nice about GO CUBES is they let you keep coffee in your pocket - take it anywhere, no stress no spills, etc. I end up popping a couple GO CUBES throughout the day, they are great to have around. And it's got precise 50mg caffeine + 100mg l-theanine + b vitamins, for better performance profile than normal coffee.

However today's news is much more exciting -- HVMN Ketone! It's a game changer for the sports performance world, and has v interesting implications beyond bc it affects metabolism in a fundamental way.

Hi, co-founder here.

Yes it does have a kick to it. It's made for performance (is > 98% ketone & water) not to be the most delicious thing ever.

The writer's response here is totally legit -- but we've also demo'd with pro athletes, Navy SEAL's, etc. and they just knock it back, no big deal!

I'm one of the creators of GO CUBES. I loved the point-counterpoint here. Startups often toe the line between absurd & interesting, because that's where innovation happens. Making nootropics as accessible as cup of coffee is no small feat.

Curious to hear what people think!

Nootrobox Director of Sales & Business Development

https://nootrobox.com/director_sales_bd

Then start a potato salad company :)

I think time will tell if the gamble here is correct. Currently nootropics are quite niche - a small minority of people even know what they are or take them. This is odd, given how beneficial they can be. By serving nootropics to the public on a silver platter, we hope to evangelize the benefits, assuage people's concerns, and become defacto leaders in the biohacking space.

Tylenol may be "hazardous" when abused, but doesn't it say something that it remains over-the-counter? It suggests to me that the benefits outweigh the risks, and the same could be true of a nootropic.

*

To call it a "marketing exercise" glosses over all of the important subtlety. Identifying a brand, messaging, form factor, and specific combination of ingredients to appeal to mass market is non-trivial. Isn't Red Bull just a marketing exercise? What about Chobani and Muscle Milk? The original Apple computers were just a "marketing exercise" around the Homebrew Computing Club, packaging up things that were already available, but doing so elegantly and building a trustworthy brand. There's considerable value in that.

Thanks! Good eye. The second sentence is fixed.

"Heydey" is not a typo - maybe I'm missing something else wrong in the first sentence?

[Co-author of the post here.]

Imagine a world where the boogey man has access to smart phones, encryption, and chemical weapons. Yes it's scary. Technology provides a multiplying effect on society, both the good and the bad segments. Typically the good outweighs the bad, and one has to believe that technological advancement is generally a positive thing for society.

The point about feeling pressured to use nootropics because of competitors or peers is interesting. This type of soft coercion already exists with Adderall, and you could say we are "coerced" into learning to read or getting a college degree or owning a cell phone (BTW - for all we know, cell phones give you cancer if you carry it in your pocket everyday for 30 years - no one knows the exact risk). It only feels like coercion when there are significant worries and risks, otherwise it's just a positive behavior shift. No one has a crystal ball, but I would bet that society will decide that the benefits of nootropics outweigh the risks & harms, especially if there's a nootropic that's milder, safer & more equally distributed than Adderall.

Bioethicist Allen Buchanan goes into the coercion point in more detail: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/why-co...

To invest in a startup, you need to be an accredited investor, defined here [http://goo.gl/aoKtaz].

It's brilliant. I wonder why people have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs as being "bad". Research and writing like this are quite promising.

Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.” - Why Animals Eat Psychoactive Drugs [http://goo.gl/7vB8Eu]

Drugs not only can be used responsibly, but they should be. We are needlessly Luddite about this type of stuff. I think within the next decade we'll see a paradigm shift towards a much wider societal acceptance of "brain drugs."

This is the Burning Man of the Internet.

I have #1 (compact power strip) and it's saved my butt a couple times on long layovers. And usually I make friends with someone else who also needs to charge. Cool life hack.

Correct.

We borrow this model from what camera manufacturers like Canon do. When you send something to Canon for repair/exchange, you're in charge of paying for shipping and packing it safely.

Then when the work is done, they ship it back professionally, for free, as part of the service.

Glad you like the illustrations! They are a combination of stock images and ones we did ourselves.

One of our goals here was to launch something beautiful, as quickly as possible. So it was a no brainer to pay < $100 for beautiful line drawings that are prettier (and several hours' less effort) than what we could have done ourselves.

Once we had the basic visual style established with stock drawings, I riffed to make some custom illustrations in the same style, including the logo and the instructions on the order page.

When we started scanning our own personal notebooks, we didn't realize how time consuming the process was.

A typical flatbed scanner takes about 30 seconds per page. So for a 200 page notebook, you're looking at an hour and 40 minutes that we're saving.

We've figured out a lot of optimizations to make this go way faster, but the point is that we're saving the average person an hour+ of time, and we're making sure the job gets done right :)

tl;dr 250-300 DPI

Hey! Good question.

DPI which stands for Dots Per Inch only matters when you actually print the image. You can take the scan and print it small at high DPI or large at low DPI.

Let's assume you have an 8x10" notebook.

The images we take of your notebook will be approximately 2400x3000. So if we scan an 8x10 notebook, and you wanted to take our scan and print it out at its original size, the resolution would be 2400/8 = 3000/10 = 300 DPI. Allowing for some fudge factor, we say the range is 250-300.

Make sense?

Yup, you got it.

OP here: I spent a few days working with ssong last week to create papersync.co -- a service where we scan paper notebooks and turn them into .pdf’s.

We both carry notebooks around to jot down ideas in pen & ink.

After doing this for some odd years, the downside is that they take up physical space, and we have no digital backup.

We were frustrated that the best solution out there was to spend a few hours scanning them ourselves - we couldn’t find any service that would save time & do this for us.

In typical HN style, we built a fast, hi-res, scanning setup that uses DSLR’s and some other neat hardware & software. We built a simple website in 3 days to offer this as a service to all the beautiful people of the world.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this service and how well we are presenting it on our site. What could we be doing better?

"Time" is a trivial reason - by that I mean - people who don't do X don't do it because they spend their time doing not X. This is true for any X.

The real question here is - what do people prioritize above reading? And maybe a side question is, where do they get that sense of prioritization from?