deyan

What model are you using under the hood?

Thought I'd flag that you do not have contact info in your profile!

I’ve been helping founders with fundraising for some time and compiled my thoughts here:

https://www.lore.vc/

It’s a guide explicitly written with first-time founders in mind. Hope it helps; feedback is welcome.

Regarding 7-10: any recommendations for good software wallets?

Not seeing this in any of the comments so far so logged in to say:

Hellbound was an awesome show and it is worth a watch!

It’s being advertised as a mixture between horror and action but it is neither. Instead, it’s a commentary on modern society mixed in with with mystery. And it’s excellently done (minus one-two scenes perhaps).

I was surprised when I discovered that Yandex's OCR is also better than Google's version:

https://translate.yandex.com/ocr

For example, comparing the results from pictures with Japanese or Chinese text, Yandex gives meaningful results, while Google often struggles.

Wikipedia is very easy to game unfortunately.

Mind clarifying what funds you spoke to (VC or PE, which geographies)? Curious whether your sample size is Bay Area or elsewhere.

Are there any stats on how successful / unsuccessful their store is?

Unfortunately this is highly misleading without the ability to customize (e.g. capital raised, liquidation preferences, future rounds, etc.).

I was not aware. Thanks for letting me know - will look into it. I am wondering how GitHub got around that issue.

Immediately took me back to Logo and 9 year old me trying to figure out how to move the turtle :) Great memories!

I agree with the other comments saying there is very little information and that makes it hard to understand or trust the product. I am assuming that's just because this is a brand new effort and a relatively early MVP.

It was funny to see this on the front page today because this is actually an issue I have been wresting with myself in the last couple of weeks.

A friend and I just started testing a somewhat similar product called Git Butler - https://www.gitbutler.com/. It's IFTTT for GitHub and helps automate pull request and issue workflows.

We've been wondering how much info to include, and what to say or not to say. It's a real challenge! So I've been watching this thread with great interest and really hope more comments come in.

(P.S. Any feedback on Git Butler would be much appreciated. I don't have a lot of experience with this, but this thread is also making me think we should consider doing a Show HN.)

Can someone put this into context, or share a source that does? How does this compare to other causes of death, for example?

The NYT article has comparisons on the absolute level (i.e. comparing to peak car crash deaths and HIV deaths from 20-30 years ago) - but those are outdated and misleading because they not relative and don't account for e.g. population growth.

I am just trying to get a sense for the true magnitude of the problem, beyond the scary headlines.

Medium has this option as well.

For those curious, the methodology is on slide 3 here: https://www.slideshare.net/upwork/freelancing-in-america-201...

I am genuinely surprised. 7% in 5 years is really not that much, especially given the constant media articles talking about the massive proliferation of the "gig economy."

Yet another example of the difference between reality and reporting.

Lots of negativity here, as is unfortunately typical at HN far too often these days. Especially given that this project is what HN is supposed to be about - done by a lone hacker with help from volunteers, trying to create a different and hopefully better social media. Sure, it may or may not work, it has all sorts of pros and cons, but I’d vote for being open-minded and constructive rather than cynical from the get go.

For what it’s worth, I played with it literally a couple of days ago. I found the set up very easy, the themes limited but decent, the functionality around creating posts and pages very fast and clean. It also has cross-posting to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Medium built-in. I also found that $5/mo is perfectly acceptable - many blogs charge more. I absolutely loved that you could enable a GitHub Pages integration, de facto backing up your website for free.

On the con side, there are things you can’t customize (eg their default footer that says to follow the user, or their archive page), search is only present in some themes and also can’t be customized, and there is very limited information about the project overall. The lack of ability to add an option for email subscription also is a significant issue in my opinion.

I was investigating the project from a blogging point of view and concluded it is trying to be Twitter first and foremost so not a good fit. Still, it was a pleasure to discover something new, interesting, and reasonably clean and functional.

Agreed. Poor writing and superficial (at best) thinking seem to be all too common in the vast majority of Medium articles focused on crypto.

You seem knowledgable about the space. Mind sharing examples of such features, or where you feel Discord is lacking?

Agreed.

It seems to me that a reasonable test whether these ideas make sense is to ask whether they can be done without the blockchain. Most of these seem to obviously fail this test (eg the government of Hawaii is a centralized institution that clearly does not need the blockchain to mandate a change on any of the islands).

(Just my 2 cents, your mileage might vary)

I think that in the hard sciences, things are very cut and dry - or at least that is the goal of a study. For example, in physics, the goal of experiments is to prove with a very high certainty that something is true or false.

Humans on the other hand are unpredictable. So if you run an experiment that says X, it may or may not replicate later, depending on hidden variables and assumptions.

Consider the famous marshmallow test. The latest studies suggest that it is not willpower but actually affluence that is the bigger determinant factor. [1] So that means that in future studies, they probably need to consider this variable and design the experiment in a way that they can control for it.

What is interesting is that for all the differences and intervening variables, humans can be studied and exhibit very predictable patterns. A good example of that is the study of power. [2] The Prince was written in 1532 and its principle continue to be just as valid today!

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellianism

This is a false assumption about how social sciences work.

Like in other fields, academics are repeating experiments and trying to (in)validate results, including for SPE. [1]

That being said, social sciences != hard sciences in the sense that there are no hard laws because humans are unpredictable. That doesn't mean social sciences are worthless, but it does require that one approaches them with a different mindset than e.g. math or physics.

FWIW, I do agree that your criticism regarding the gap that exists from publication to repetition / validation has made many famous. Bombastic-sounding results -> headlines -> public perception -> increased social and academic status of the researchers. By the time the results are repeated and (in)validated it is often too late to reverse that. I don't think that pattern is unique to social sciences however - I keep seeing article after article contradicting each other - e.g. regarding drugs, food, fitness, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment#Sim...

Plus it is a grand total of 2 people making 4-5 comments. This issue seems like noise that distracts.

You probably meant top-down vs bottom-up.

An example of top-down analysis is to go to e.g. Gartner or similar research firms and read that they estimate the ridesharing market to be say $100B.

An example of bottom-up is to say, based on data from this and this article or data source, we estimate there are 1M cars doing ridesharing every year in the US. We will sell each of them a gadget for $10 so our market is $10M if we capture all of it.

Mind sharing the name of the firm?

I’ve always thought highly of Gary because he seems like a smart hustler. Then I read this:

”Anytime a company goes out of business, it’s because the founder and CEO was not good enough,” Mr. Vaynerchuk says.

Which is so obviously wrong it makes me rethink my opinion.

Oh, I am back all the time :)

Hopefully I am not misunderstanding your comment, but for the record:

Bulgaria is a small country in Eastern Europe with a population of about 7M and bordering Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Macedonia, and the Black Sea. Formed around 681. Lots of expansion, contraction, being enslaved, etc. including 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule. These days the poorest and most unhappy member of the EU according to research - but a member nonetheless! Lots of immigrants including in the Bay Area and especially Chicago.

Couple of fun facts: When the USSR was still a thing, Bulgaria was making personal computers, basically cloning Apple and IBM architectures.

Source: Bulgarian who moved to the Bay Area ~10 years ago.

When I looked at the blockchat example, I didn't feel I have enough time to read the message. It scrolled quite fast. I rewinded only to have the same thing happen. Felt frustrating.

So I thought I'd ask: is the product the .mov playing on the left side, or is that an example to help understand and ultimately get me to download the app, where the action is?

I very much appreciate the reply (only saw it now).

I honestly don't know whether I or you are right or wrong. I know I am working with a limited data set (i.e. the people I have met and what I have read and absorbed online). Sounds like your experience is much the same, with the added benefit of doing this for a living via Indie Hackers (which is awesome btw). I am not aware of good places to find solid statistical data. Even if there were any, I'd say that they may not be valid - exactly for the reasons that you mentioned such as commitment, which is impossible to measure.

I think part of the problem is one of definition - what do we mean by "risk" really? If you mean the % of companies that, say, raised VC money but did not end up succeeding in the typical goal to reach $1B in valuation, is that actually risk? I don't think so - it is an outcome in the form of statistical probability for a specific goal, but it doesn't make sense to me to think of it as risk, at least with the common definition of the word from an entrepreneur's point of view. It may be a risk from the VC point of view, but that is rather unique because most entrepreneurs can't spread their bets.

That's why perhaps I should have used a word such as "effort." Making your goals smaller definitely gives you way more options - that much I 100% agree with. There are simply more ways to make $100K than $1M than $10M than $100M. But the effort does not seem to be any different from my (limited) experience. My friends working on bootstrapped companies have different problems - but are working just as hard as those with VC backing. The former are (sometimes) more in control of their companies since their goals are lower, while the latter find themselves chasing a bar that keeps rising. But both are working their butts off on a daily basis. I am not seeing things like competition being weaker or them having an easier time (again: limited data set so beware).

Experientially, my impression is that it is all about the product market fit. If that product market fit is strong and in a great market, the business is a powerboat that you can simply pour gas in to make it go faster and farther - as much as there is potential, which sometimes turns out to be a large enough for VC. On the other hand, if the business is a sailboat, then you are at the mercy of the winds. If they are in your favor and so strong that you can't keep the boat afloat, raising VC makes sense. But if they are not, then VC backing is a poor fit - gas is useless because it is finite and the moment you run out of it (i.e. out of cash), the winds will push you back or sink you or you will sit still. Most of the drama around financing stems directly from not understanding the nature of the business and therefore financing it incorrectly (e.g. aspirationally raising a VC round for what is really a non-VC company / sailboat). That's why the best companies rarely need a lot of money to show traction - because they have great product market fit in a fantastic market, which simply pulls them.

The thing is, you can't control or change product market fit. There seems to be a good chance you can't even analyze it without doing things. You discover the type of boat you have by getting out there and sailing.