chrisrxth

I am currently on the trip in Jeju. Hacker Paradise is great. Highly recommend.

Exciting! Curious what the future of nootropics will be.

This is the idea - we'll have to address the safety and ethical concerns of each substance individually.

Thanks for the thoughts. We've spoken with a lawyer who specializes in FDA issues. We will have informed consent waivers for participants.

Rob does have formal training in scientific ethical issues and is more than competent on the subject.

Also, L-Theanine is something that you can purchase at the grocery store as a food supplement and it has an excellent safety record and no known toxic dosage.

If it makes you feel better, we are a supplement distributor that happens to help you record whether or not the supplements actually work.

Could you elaborate?

We make no medical claims about our product either - we only reference existing science.

We're going to keep adding more trials - but there's no timeframe for when you have to start and end the trial. You can order it and start it whenever you receive it in the mail.

Not yet :( Like Steer said, you can still order Theanine independently of our company but I can let you know when we are ready for international orders if you send me your email!

Interesting. I've never heard of someone reacting to L-Theanine this way. Perhaps it could be an allergy?

Indeed it's difficult to tell - exactly the reason why a double-blinded trial on yourself can help you determine if it's making a significant difference or not :)

We chose L-Theanine because it has an excellent safety record, is well studied, and has no known toxic dose. We are very aware of safety and ethics. There are many nootropics and supplement companies safely distributing the same L-Theanine.

While we work through our protocol we will continue to dive into ethics and safety.

You bring up a good point! We will be adding some outlines about ethics soon. Thanks for reminding us of the importance!

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I totally agree about educating people on good practices. This is a big part of what I want to do over the next few years - I think educating people on the scientific method, especially in regards to self experimentation is important. We want to work to create best practices and protocols in the self-experimentation/quantified self world. We are planning on putting together some content (videos and such) on the topic and incorporating that educational aspect in our platform.

As far as the supplements go, I agree with that as well. We're planning on adding more once the L-Theanine trial is sorted out. This is just our practice round to get the protocol right. What other supplements would you be curious to see?

This won't be an issue because we are supplying the supplements which are going to come from an established and reputable supplier. This is not a platform where anyone can sell their own supplements.

We picked L-Theanine because of its safety profile and mild psychactive properties, meaning you can tell if you've taking it or not but it's not an overbearing feeling. We wanted the first experiment to be fairly predictable while we work through all the kinks of launching this.

Yeah, that would be nice. There is such thing as a Certificate of Analysis which we are going to try to get from our supplier. http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/united-kingdom/technical-service...

Are you mainly referring to it being a CYP3A4 inhibitor?

Just read through that. I agree with the points about self-reporting being unreliable.

Even with the bias of self reporting, differences between real and placebo will still be meaningful. You can't entirely deceive yourself if you don't know what you just took.

Also, there is some degree of honesty required for this experiment. If someone really wanted to, they could open up the pills and taste them to see if it's placebo or not. They could also intentionally lie. But the goal here is to learn about yourself through experimentation, so I expect most people that participate to have some level of desire for truth and honesty. I would also argue that while these biases do exist, even large randomized clinical trials have the same pitfalls, so we are not necessarily worse off than what's already out there.

This is definitely one potential path we are considering. There's a question of whether we want to keep this specific to supplements/pills or try to broaden it to other things like exercise or diet (which are not exactly double-blindable)

There are some in existence already:

- quantifiedmind.com for self-testing your mind, which has a few group experiments as well. I'm looking into integrating with them as part of doubleblinded.com.

- PACO (by Google) https://www.pacoapp.com/ Pretty cool and flexible platform, although not the most user friendly or easy to figure out. It is open source and has an app, which is cool.

- A few sites like 23andme and ubiome have a lengthy list of survey questions they ask you, which I only imagine they would pass through pattern recognition algorthms to detect correlations between whatever information you give them and your Genome (or gut genome in the case of 23andme).

So yeah, there is stuff out there. We want to do this for nootropics and supplements (and eventually much more).

That's a valid concern, and I agree that it's alarming. We will disclose where we are obtaining the L-Theanine from and provide a Certificate of Analysis.

Also, since this is a double blinded trial, if there are significant differences between placebo and real powders then that affirms that the powder was real.

Good call. consumerlab.com is good too.

Hey, yes I run it. Just set it up a few days ago. I'd love any help you want to offer as far as getting the word out and getting it started - this is the hardest part.

Also if you are interested, I'm working on a few more related projects that I'd love to chat about and am looking for collaborators on. Wanna shoot me an email? chris@cjroth.com

This is awesome - I feel like this is the future of IaaS user experiences.

I second Ankur's thoughts here. We've put a lot of time and energy into making our user experience simple and beautiful and while we take it as a compliment that you liked it enough to use our design, we would appreciate it if you came up with your own original design as to differentiate from us.

We're not just a random online education platform that popped up out of the blue - we're real people working very hard to build a quality product.

Sure there are differences. It's still a blatant clone. OP could have at least created his own UI.

The comparison of thinking small to mom and pop shops is dead on accurate. And there are probably more small-visioned entrepreneurs relative to big-visioned entrepreneurs than there have been in the past.

However, there are are a lot of people with enormous visions right now that are simply in such early stages that they appear to be small. You have to start somewhere.

There are also two reasons that many big industries are not appearing to be disrupted right now. The first reason is that many of the huge industries are backed by so much money, poltics, and legality and so ingrained into society that they are virtually impossible to disrupt. That said, there is still a slow but steady disruption attempting to take place in education... Open Courseware, Khan Academy, etc.

The second reason is that much of the "low hanging fruit" of the economy has already been picked. This one is controversial. 50 years ago, we were doing really hard things, but things that did not necessarily require as deep of an understanding of an industry or science as we do today.

There are people trying to pick the "higher up" fruit today, but their pickings are not as obvious or exiting as they may have been 50 years ago. We are not seeing startups for flying cars or capital-intensive projects, however, small, simple software startups can sometimes solve incredible inefficiencies in the economy. Example: craigslist has revolutionized the rental market simply by making information easy to transmit and access.

You deserve a scholarship.

Plus, you are obviously smart and capable enough to be fine if you didn't finish your degree. Better yet, as cantankerous mentioned, transfer.

You should not hire people that you don't trust or that are not exited about the projects.

But if you set expectations and deadlines, you can establish that it doesn't matter when they work or how long it takes - only that they get done with the necessary quality and on time.

Hey, I'm a self-taught engineer. Started programming at at 13, currently 21. My portfolio is online at cjroth.com. I created a cloud-based Desktop last year (Deskbear.com) and a university classifieds network (WolfExchange.com) that's expanding all over the country.

I'm big into UX design but I also enjoy back-end development and database architecture. I'm in Raleigh but would like to move to SF, NYC, or work remotely. I'm seeking a full time position where I can learn from the best of the best and expand my career.

Let me help you make your company even more awesome.