earksiinni

Bless you for responding to all these comments. The realness is amazing.

Good luck! I always wanted something like this, too.

I relate very, very hard.

Ironically, I solo-built an AI bookkeeper for solopreneurs all of last year on my own dime. Predictably, I ran out of money and had to go back to contracting.

It was incredibly hard for me and I started to lose my mental health. It was a struggle to get any positive or negative validation, to get anyone to pay any kind of attention whatsoever. It was a great luxury for me when an investor actually said "no," most blew smoke up my butt and strung me along. Even my paying users seemed to not really care one way or another.

After I ran out of money and all but abandoned the project, I had an incredible stroke of good luck when an established player in my niche out of nowhere decided to incubate a new version of my app built on their platform. For a minute, I was finally getting real traction as this company's founder started promoting me across their socials: people signing up, giving feedback, folks adding me on LinkedIn, messaging me to set up partnerships.

The deal eventually fell apart and everything went cold again, but for a second I saw how much easier this all is when you have social proof. It was frustrating. Nothing had changed in me or my product other than a famous person backing me. I was the exact same entrepreneur with the exact same offering, but somehow now I was worthy because someone else said so. Well, I guess that's how the world works.

I want to say "hang in there," but honestly for me the whole episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. After 12+ years of working for myself, I'm seriously reconsidering my life choices and whether I still want this. I'm currently focused on contracting and paying down my debt.

I think that I'm coming back, slowly, to the entrepreneurial path, shorn of many of the BS narratives the tech industry tells about startups. The loneliness is very real and I feel every inch of your pain. You are not alone.

If you ever want to share or reach out, feel free to shoot me an email: me@ersinakinci.com. I'm also trying to write more about my journey at www.ersinakinci.com, although I haven't written yet about the startup failure--too raw still, and frankly, I'm afraid of telling the whole truth.

You can pry PragmataPro from my cold dead hands.

AI bookkeeping for solopreneurs.

As a freelance web dev who also has an Airbnb side hustle, I got tired of expensive bookkeeping for a few transactions per month. I tried DIY, but my time is worth more than that.

Most importantly, both pros and DIY got subtle things wrong and caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars in deductions and credits.

So I’m making an AI bookkeeping chatbot that will handle all that for me. The aim is full automation while surfacing tax deduction and credit opportunities throughout the year. Like wouldn’t it be awesome to just have the research and tax credit or do home office deductions with zero effort?

At the end of the year, Kumbara puts together a series of financial reports that you plug into your tax software or hand to your CPA.

Working hand-in-hand with CPAs and some platform partners on this. Would love to hear from other solopreneurs or engineers who want to help build the future of financial freedom.

https://www.kumbara.money

Tucson :)

Haha. Tucson.

After seven years in San Diego, my wife and I have decided to uproot our family and move to the Bay Area. While there were many factors (a new job opportunity, family), a significant reason was finding a community of truth-seeking people.

Funny. The lack of truth-seeking and truth-telling is one of the chief reasons I moved away from the Bay Area.

Solo creator/dev/preneur here, too.

OP mentioned a Slack channel for creators in his country. I've been looking for a similar channel.

I'm in Arizona in the US. Anyone know of any similar channels that I could join?

Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.

Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).

Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.

Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.

I have no reason to doubt that this is real, and it looks amazing.

But what's with the left monitor's screen overlapping with his face? Looks kinda greenscreen-y: https://youtu.be/q3NQQ7bPf6U?t=2136

If you could pick any language to migrate these programs to, which one would you pick and why?

I've never used Java professionally, but that's probably what I'd pick. Seems to hit the sweet spot between time-tested, widely-used, enterprise-proven, performant, future-proof/portable, and well-understood. Seems from another comment that's what US DOD is betting on, as well.

Arkansas Black as one of the bad apples?

Is this a joke?

I had one for the first time from our local co-op. It was definitely firmer than any other apple I’ve had but I wouldn’t call it “teeth-shattering” by any means.

Oh, but the flavor. Exquisite. Floral, fragrant. Tasted half like a really good apple, half like a perfectly ripe Bosc pear.

Do yourself a favor and find a ripe Arkansas Black apple. Best apple I ever had.

"Holy f*ck don't use lithium"

Safety first. Ha!

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?

I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.

Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.

Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?

His most famous, and most controversial, work was “Iron John,” which made the case that American men had grown soft and feminized.

What a bizarre take on Iron John.

First of all, Iron John is a work of amateur folklorology written in a poetic style. It's an extended meditation on a particular folk tale. As any student of folklore knows, the same folk narratives reappear across many time periods and cultures in different guises. That's part of what makes the field so fascinating. There's no direct reference in Iron John to "American men" or anything like that, although there are mentions of America in the same way that he also refers to medieval Norse culture, Polynesians, etc.

Second, if anything, Iron John is about recovering the divine masculine from the toxic wasteland of caricatured and commercialized masculinity. Bly's work is a complement, not a riposte, to the important work feminist writers have done in recovering the divine feminine. To reduce his work to making a case that men have "grown soft and feminized" is to fall into the same farce that Bly was fighting against.

Bly advocated for men to explore their psyches and deep feelings. Iron John connects men to eternal themes of masculinity through the lens of folk tales. Yes, some of those themes have to do with "traditional masculinity," e.g., being a warrior. But he does so with nuance and care, never by denigrating or attempting to confine women, and always while recognizing men's vulnerability.

If I were to summarize Iron John's main theme, it's that the inner child in men must eventually escape the metaphorical mother to discover the "inner hairy wild man" or "Iron John," which Bly describes as the masculine analogue to the feminine "inner hairy wild woman." It's a story about adolescence at its core. It's not even necessarily about biological sex or cisgendered identity, although Bly doesn't go out of his way to accommodate trans people or other gender expressions. (It's not exactly a work that's aged perfectly well.)

There are valid reasons why one could critique Bly's work. Some polemical claim about American men growing "soft" isn't one of them.

RIP, Mr. Bly.

I didn't give up per se, but I'm not actively checking it, either. Sometimes I get emails about matches, which I read. Haven't found any that clicked so far.

Right now, though, I'm going through a phase where I'm doubting whether I want to do a startup at all. Still fully onboard for entrepreneurship, but I'm questioning whether the startup path (especially the VC path) is right for my goals.

I am, however, interested in making organic connections with like-minded individuals. Perhaps like right here, in the comments of HN ;-)

I signed up for the platform as an engineer looking for non-engineers. Unlike some of the engineer types here, I'm of the opinion that engineering is as important (not more important) than non-technical skill sets. In some startups, it's probably less important.

The problem is that the profiles I match with read like resumes. I don't care too much that you were early employee at XYZ Corp or that you had a successful $100m exit. I care about your heart.

I've cofounded too many times with cofounders whose worldview, politics, and level of emotional empathy and openness were incompatible with mine. It sucked every time and was the #1 cause for failure.

Sometimes I feel like a vox clamantis in deserto when it comes to advocating for founders with higher emotional awareness. I'm happy whenever I read posts on HN about why neurodiversity matters in tech, but they almost always focus on folks on the spectrum. Then there are folks like me, oftentimes survivors of abuse who are neuro-atypical in a different way. We are empaths--and very much not fitting in the mold of a "typical" engineer or how non-engineers perceive typical engineers.

I don't need a fellow empath as a co-founder, but at least I need someone who understands where I'm coming from and is compatible. Brag sheets tend to drive me away, but that's the ethos we've built into our industry, so I don't blame the individuals.

Is there a particular reason why all these images were uncensored in the original broadcast?

This, along with @dang's link to his past posts about "expected value" (found in the discussion linked to above) [1], was like reading Bartosz Ciechanowski's post on internal combustion engines [2] but for HN.

Thanks for all your work, @dang. Good to see that there's a philosophical soul at the helm. Would love to meet you in person one day.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/, which I learned about from HN

Wow. That's terrifying. And you didn't even run anything!

I'm guessing that they never told you "don't browse this network drive"?

Serious question. What, if any, instruction do kids these days receive regarding what's allowed on computer systems?

I remember in high school poking around a network drive until I found an executable with the name "SEND" in the name. I had a sense that it would send some kind of message somewhere, but I honestly didn't know where or to how many people. I was quite surprised when all the screens in our computer lab froze and, five seconds later, my message appeared on all of them. (I later learned that my message appeared on every desktop screen in the school!)

I'm not sure exactly how they found me out, but I was called into the IT admin's office a couple of days later. She was furious with me. I told her the truth. I didn't know what exactly would happen when I ran that command, but she didn't buy it. Fortunately, nothing ended up happening after that.

I've wondered to this day what exactly they could have done to me if they decided to press whatever legal authority they might have had to its fullest extent. I was never told "don't go to Z:\" or "don't run any program other than those on this list." Even after I was found out, I wasn't ever explicitly told that my actions constituted unauthorized access.

It was a different, perhaps more innocent (or ignorant) time back then. How much have things changed now?

Fascinating. Is there a "new" foreign...?

This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe.

First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the poles), and one uninhabitable torrid zone (basically the equatorial region). You had European textbooks being printed well into the seventeenth century describing the torrid zone's literal uninhabitability. Like, literally describing areas colonized by Europeans and integrated into European economies as unable to sustain any human life.

Second, there are many mentions in medieval European literature of pre-Columbian and, in the case of Africa, pre-Henrician explorers going beyond Europe's periphery, directly contradicting the easy school narratives most of us learned about European "discovery". E.g., the voyage of the Zeno brothers [1]. Most of these mentions are just that, mentions. The Marckalada/Markland manuscript seems notable in that it has a bit more evidentiary heft behind it, but my point is that it's not an entirely unique document.

I should add that generally speaking, there's a rich tradition in history of mercantile contact going well beyond the surviving documentary record. The ancient Romans were almost certainly in regular contact with the Indian subcontinent and possibly China through trade, even though the written record is sketchy. Archaeology has helped in this regard. Michael McCormick is the authority in this area when it comes to the early medieval period or so-called "dark ages" [2].

Edit: In history, be wary of any narrative that presupposes isolation. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that it's often written by someone long dead with an agenda. Hence medievalists' disdain for the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian Renaissance construct that got blown up by nationalist Germans in the nineteenth century.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Zeno_brothers

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communicatio...

Duh! Obviously (headdesk :-)

I guess I was thinking more of CCS, but for fuel it makes total sense.

Serious question for all atmospheric carbon capture companies:

What happens once you're super successful and atmospheric carbon densities are dramatically lower? Is there a point at which the density is too low for the economics to work?

Would be an awesome problem to have.

Hi Victor! This is such a great project. I posted a comment elsewhere about why I like it so much.

Will you be releasing more info about your research methods and pedagogical theory? Really interested to know more about how you make the sausage.

Also, wrt to Africa specifically, I do remember when I was doing history grad school about 10 years ago that one of the more provocative hypotheses at the time was that some or all tribes may be colonial constructs. Curious if you've engaged with that hypothesis, and more generally how you're going about mapping territories in Africa.

Great work, and I hope that you persevere and not let the haters get to you.

P.S.: Are you looking for any volunteers? I do full-stack web dev and have experience w/ Mapbox.

This is mapping at its best: challenging our spacial, social and temporal norms, in this case by subverting political geography.

Gone are the clear, neatly delineated boundaries of modern nation states. A new, equally clear yet very different geopolitical regime is presented. Contiguous territories that abut each other yet also kinda overlap (or sometimes really overlap). A three-part scheme that distinguishes between territory, language, and treaty.

This approach provokes so many questions. What does it mean to overlap (is it a process vs. a static reality, is it peaceful, etc.)? What is a territory and who defines it? What happens in the little slivers of land not covered by the translucent blobs? What happens in the waterways and lakes? Is the concept of "treaty land" universal in some way? What does non-treaty land mean?

We debated all these issues in grad school, and seeing it in an interactive map like this is all the more powerful. I hope that readers here see the questions that maps like this provoke as an asset rather than proof of fallibility.

Looking forward to reading more about the creator's research and pedagogical methods.

Alas, this makes sense.

Take the simple exercise of figuring out cost/revenue of an aspirin administration. [...]

In your opinion, is this something that could be exhaustively modeled in software? What would the bottlenecks be? I'm guessing probably the biggest is the fact that the necessary data isn't digitized, or if it is, it's not easily accessible.

The fact that the general public as well as journalists think this data is accurate in anyway is really funny. This an exercise of futility that only increases the overall cost and provides job security for me :)

People are literally dying out here from administrative bloat and you're joking about job security. Your comment comes across as cavalier and even a bit callous.

With that said, I respect the systemic and historical complexity of the problem and don't mean to suggest that you personally are the problem. I understand that you're pointing out the Kafkaesque futility from within the trenches; I think I get where you're coming from.

May I suggest that you rephrase your critique next time in a way that would communicate empathy so that we might in turn empathize with your situation? If these spreadsheets are feel-good window dressing (not that I agree), then state your case and let's stop wasting time on them. What do you think should be done instead?

Let us improve things together.