danicgross

cs702, fantastic comment. I am sorta poking around this area too. I'd be curious what benchmark you're using to evaluate performance amongst these repos? If you're up for it, shoot me an email -- my email is in my profile.

Would turning off iMessage protect from this? Or would the iPhone still process the GIF through SMS somehow...?

Related, are there better representations for music than standard notation (or MIDI)?

I'm wondering what the higher convolution levels could look like, if this was a CNN analyzing an image. Something between a the complete Ableton/Logic export and a MIDI file. Being able to capture the "feel" of a song (or a section within a song) strikes me as an important milestone towards designing really good generative music.

Interesting.

How do you think about backtesting? There are a few short-only shops that specialize in finding frauds. If you get their historical 13-Fs, how would you score against them in terms of precision/recall?

And I guess more broadly, how does alpha with your system compare to a portfolio that holds all short positions by big long/short funds (ex thematic shorts)? Meaning, those guys have full-time humans that focus on this... can you beat them? Very interesting if so.

Anki is paid too. ($25 for the mobile app.)

Very true. I would gladly pay for a feed of financial news, but instead of "clicks" it optimizes on market movement. News articles from sources that, in the past, have predicted market activity.

I.e. "this blog mentioned NYSE:TEVA, and the next day the stock moved materially, therefore site_ranking++". (You'd probably have some TF/IDF saliency metric too, so that a site that mentions all stocks is penalized.)

That’s interesting. Can you make something that’s higher end than the most high end consumer TV?

(If Tesla had to be “a better car that’s also electric”, I think this would need to be “a better TV that’s also private”.)

You could expand the cutoff date by modeling lookalike audiences. A 2018 account that votes on similar things to a 2008 account might be admitted. This affords the moderator an easy “exploration” spigot they can tune up or down.

I don’t think quotes from Browning poems come from a PR staff. https://romantic-circles.org/editions/poets/texts/theyears.h...

It’s one thing for a startup to do this while small.

A whole other level of evolution to do it while you’re large. Imagine Apple suddenly publishing their roadmap. This type of organizational neurogenesis done as an adult is impressive.

EDIT: I am in admiration of the change, regardless of opinion on the value of public roadmaps. It’s just rare to see big companies make big changes. Sign of youthful vitality and health, in my opinion.

I used to have script that would gradually dim my display unless I typed.

The broader issue for me isn’t a particular website. It’s brain-dead consumption of feeds. Typing guarantees that you’re thinking a little.

Even with email, it made me less likely to overthink things. It gave a bias to action. Keep moving, keep typing.

I had a whitelist of exceptions (IntelliJ, Terminal, etc).

Unfortunately the script broke a few years ago. I keep on meaning to fix it but I’ve been too busy reading feeds.

Wonderful idea. These exchanges are very common in other markets. In my experience, a proclivity for equity sharing tends to have an adverse selection problem with early stage founders. The best founders are irrational, and this seems like a highly rational idea :)

But I’d imagine investors and employees would be very interested. Also worth noting tax treatment around this issue is evolving:

In particular, a senior campaign official said a Biden administration would take aim at so-called like-kind exchanges, which allow investors to defer paying taxes on the sale of real estate if the capital gains are reinvested in another property.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-21/biden-pro...

Seconded. This could have been written by Churchill.

Between this, Mastodon, Matrix, and others, I feel like we're witnessing the end of the centralized web era (everyone uses one network), and the return to a distributed Internet (lots of different services) with aggregators (Adium or NovaChat).

The recent Twitch/Reddit/Twitter bans should only magnify this effect. Congrats Eric! I'm very excited to use this.

The cross-pollination effect of Couchsurfing is so powerful. I often wonder — how could you create a digital equivalent of this?

We let strangers into our homes, but not into our superuser shell. Why?

Pioneer | REMOTE/ONSITE | Good Engineer | https://pioneer.app

Founder of Pioneer here.

We're building a fully remote online accelerator. A kind of YC-before-YC. We find people on the Internet that seem promising and give them "Silicon Valley", but on the Internet. It's a lot of gamification, Ruby software, Zoom, Slack, and fun. We've funded over 100 people around the world in 30+ countries. We direct them to YC once they graduate. (Tbc, we have no formal attachment to YC; just admiration. And a severe addiction to HN.)

We're looking for a competent software engineer that can do front and backend development. We're happy to take a bet on someone junior or senior. The interview process is much like the job: get a high level prompt, and then make a thing. That's it. Don't apply if you're looking to optimize tight C++ loops, we don't have that. Apply if you're interested in building products, end-to-end. Apply if you're energetic and excited about the idea. Apply if you can see this gig be a legitimate cornerstone of your career.

There's no formal ATS, it's a startup. Just email team@pioneer.app, mention this post.

An aside, but what do you do when your Google Sheet becomes too big?

I find things break down very quickly (based on number of collaborators or file size), and I'm writing (yet again) some type of Flask-Admin server. Retool (https://retool.com) is another option I've considered.

Any others?

This is very cool.

Relatedly: I often run while listening to podcasts. When I do, I remember much more of the material. And when I revisit certain blocks around the neighborhood, I find myself recalling what I heard during the run.

The spacial encoding of memories seems very potent and under-investigated.

Interestingly, this caused the Pixel 4 to get banned in India: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/15/india-wont-get-the-...

Pioneer founder here. As noted by almost all commenters in this thread, we do rely on expert voting. It's in our FAQ. We take pride in that! I believe mixture of moderation _and_ quantitative metrics are the correct path towards accomplishing our goal.

We've all seen what happens when you let the algorithms run free.

We've got much to fix in terms of making the game more _fun_. Point systems are best when you _understand_ the underlying mechanism. There's a tension between that and moderation. Losing should feel educational, not frustrating. We've got some ideas on how to fix this, and we're burning the midnight oil implementing them.

(BTW, we're very open to any product suggestions here! In case you're wondering what the ruckus is about: the Pioneer idea is to make an online game that rewards productive, creative behavior. Which beckons the question: how do you quantify productivity in different domains?)

Should there be a leaderboard for interaction speed? This might encourage employees to petition for speedups internally.

“We’re on track to be the slowest productivity app on iOS! Let’s prioritize those responsiveness fixes!”, etc.

1. We'll be releasing more info about our first cohort of Pioneers soon!

2. Sure! Just don't do anything you wouldn't do if you were running Pioneer :)

Pioneer | Frontend, Full-stack, Data Science | Open Source | San Francisco | Full Time | https://pioneer.app

We’re building a community of creative young people working on interesting projects around the globe. We use software and ML to find people that lack opportunity but have great talent and ambition. We give them small grants to support their work and try to use various gamification techniques to keep them motivated on their project. Our goal is to be counterfactually significant in the creation of the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie or Elon Musk.

In the short term our technical challenges are equal parts computer science and human psychology. How do you build a product that can identify greatness? How do you then motivate people to become the best version of themselves? If you were building the Harvard campus, but entirely online, could you make it work?

It requires great intuition and solid engineering. We work in Python, Ruby and Javascript.

Email us at jobs+hn@pioneer.app. Thanks!

Pioneer | Frontend, Full-stack, Data Science | Open Source | Full Time | https://pioneer.app

We’re building a community of creative young people working on interesting projects around the globe. We use software to find people that lack opportunity but have great talent and ambition. We give them small grants to support their work and try to use various gamification techniques to keep them motivated on their project. Our goal is to be counterfactually significant in the creation of the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie or Elon Musk.

In the short term our technical challenges are equal parts computer science and human psychology. How do you build a product that can identify greatness? How do you then motivate people to become the best version of themselves? If you were building the Harvard campus, but entirely online, could you make it work?

It requires great intuition and solid engineering. We work in Python, Ruby and Javascript.

Email us at jobs+hn@pioneer.app. Thanks!

HN is a wonderful fuzzer on optimism, so I'm sure it'll find some negative angle here as well. HN caused us to think about it, but we made the decision after talking to applicants. Most didn't seem to mind. A few did. We figured it was worth another revision. We're a startup, too. Launch. Talk to users. Iterate. Etc. Etc.

This just looks like another VC firm

I don't think VC firms fund poets or musicians :)

communities that reward intellectual curiosity, encouraging the cultivation of ideas and potential businesses that provide value.

I agree! That's exactly what's we're trying to do. I think most people we fund will never start companies. I hope they'll become great researchers, civic activists or artists. For the fraction that do, I hope we'll be significant enough of a needle mover in moving them as a person from idea to product that we'll deserve the small amount of equity we ask for.

I agree and I disagree.

I agree if you're a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur who knows they can raise a seed round together. If that's you, you shouldn't take our offer. Raise the seed round; you'll get great terms.

There are about 7.4 billion people who aren't Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. Most of them do not have a convenient line to investors, because investors don't happily fund writing the next great American novel, working on a demo tape, trying to prototype out an undergraduate research paper, or running companies in their neck of the woods. Pioneer could potentially fund all of those things.

We're going to be making bets on folks substantially before they have the indicia of success that investors screen for... substantially before anyone could even say "This person will someday found a company." The math for this to be sustainable requires that the equity slice be higher than someone would ask for if they knew 100% of their investments were in high-potential companies.

If you have the opportunity to join other programs, go for it! Our hope is that this model enables us to reach the billions of people that are outside the network of Silicon Valley. They might not even be sure if they have a "company". They just want support on whatever project they're pursuing.

We're hoping that becoming a Pioneer vastly increases the odds that you turn your "shower-thought" into something real, even if it takes a few years to mature.

We're going to be making bets on folks substantially before they have the indicia of success that investors screen for. Before anyone could even say "This person will someday found a company." The math for this to be sustainable requires that the equity slice be higher than someone would ask for if they knew 100% of their investments were in high-potential companies.

Thank you! I wrote some more about that here: https://pioneer.app/blog/hello. Everyone needs their first stepping stone, and I'm hopeful with Pioneer that we can provide that in a much more scalable way.

(Pioneer founder here.)

Nat Friedman and I launched AI Grant last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806). The idea was to give out money to promising AI researchers around the world. To date, we've funded 50 researchers, from high school students in Hawaii to aspiring researchers in Africa. We’ve been inspired by the fellows we’ve funded all over the word. I’m following it with a new project called Pioneer.

Pioneer funds ambitious people around the world working on interesting projects. Unlike YC, this is focused on small projects, not companies. A project could be anything -- open source work, research in physics or biology, or creating art.

If one does start a company, Pioneer gets 3% of equity in it in return for the network, community and guidance it provides. But it's by no means a requirement or a goal. We're merely hoping the small fraction of companies help us fund this experiment in perpetuity.

I think the largest gift we'll give our Pioneers isn't money. It'll be non-intuitive things like a network of friends (other Pioneers), a forcing function to get that thing done and mentorship from inspiring individuals.

Unlike other grant programs, we’re trying to do most of the screening in software. Becoming a Pioneer requires winning the Pioneer Tournament -- a (hopefully) fun and interactive application process. More on that on the site.

I'm passionate about this work because I'm the beneficiary of a similar system. I wrote about my story here, if you're curious: https://pioneer.app/blog/hello.

I read HN daily. And I've lost a lot of sleep about how this comments section will react to Pioneer :)

I'm hoping you'll find this at least a worthwhile experiment to run. Do let me know what ideas or feedback you have!

P.S. This effort is unrelated to YC. If you have any complaints about it, shoot me, not them!

P.P.S. Nat remains a close friend to Pioneer but his focus is on GitHub. AI Grant will continue to run as a non-profit. More details on that soon.