ksj2114

Hey all -

I started Inquiry [1] to share a thought-provoking article, podcast, video, or other link every evening that shares a new way of looking at the world.

Simply put, I try to share smart people discussing interesting things, regardless of whether or not I personally agree with them. I think there's a gap in curated content that is genuinely interesting and thought-provoking.

Over the past few weeks we’ve covered futurism, public health, charitable giving, policing, medieval warfare, cancel culture, happiness, investing, finance, geography, math, and much more.

Wanted to share with HN as well!

[1] https://inquiry.substack.com

This is an awesome video and I'd love to see more content like this. I love watching experts explain how they think

This is genius. It's a little crazy that this is what it takes though??

Btw, for those asking via text - this isn't automated for now, every question goes to a human!

This is good advice. I'm hesitant to switch to a tablet because he already knows how to use a laptop and has never used a tablet before.

I agree with you. Especially the focus on security / 2FA has made it very hard to monitor his accounts, which is good and bad I suppose. For example, I changed his gmail 2FA phone number to mine yesterday, and they changed it back today. That's already a huge task when helping him remotely.

Websites are also getting much more complex which makes everything worse. For example, the new gmail minimizes the navigation tab on the left unless you hover over it. That's awesome for me, but TERRIBLE for him.

We've built human assisted AI to understand the top 100 most common data transformations so that you never have to google "how to do X in excel" or "how to convert A to B" again. Just upload your data, describe what you want us to do with it in plain English, and we’ll email you the results.

We've spent a lot of time transforming data in complicated tools at companies like Google and McKinsey in Python and Excel. We believe transforming data should be as simple as asking for what you want.

We're still in our beta so it's a free service to use!

This is an acceptable ask in the companies I've worked in the U.S., especially for a small business. My experience is that people will email you much less than you expect, and it's just for emergencies

No, saying how did we "allow" these companies to IPO shows a misunderstanding of how markets work

How is this article on the front page of HN? It conflates cash flow with net income, and shows a lack of understanding of the business models of these companies.

Also... "why did we allow so many unprofitable companies IPO? When did losing money become acceptable and the new normal for publicly traded companies?"

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how public markets work.

This is one of the most comprehensive studies: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_2019122.p...

I've worked on many cost cutting projects in the past, in consulting and private equity where cost-cutting was the norm. These statements very easy to say in retrospect.

Many studies show that private equity owned companies, which typically run businesses the leanest, actually perform better.

I completely disagree. The new tools (bubble, zapier, airtable, webflow etc.) are an order of magnitude easier to create applications (and even relatively complex ones!)

That's why they bought OwnBackup

I guess I meant services. I meant things like "I wish updates in X system were automatically reflected in Y system"

There are a few SaaS products I've seen that do this, like https://basedash.io/

This would be nice!

I published an article on this actually: https://blog.acrossapp.com/what-do-all-those-tech-employees-...

This fee doesn't seem that unreasonable, but I do think best solution is for businesses / people to have deposit accounts at the fed

That's actually really hard. Funds sometimes take 1+ years to raise, and then they can invest over a period of 2-4 years with capital committed for 10 years. Hard to time that

It certainly was not obvious to everyone that wework was going to flop.

Exactly, its a hedge. You hope you don't make a killing on the hedge!

We were fully remote before quarantine so there was no difference, but we've had to change our marketing strategy.

Also shameless plug but we released fun side project to make us all take breaks in timed video chats: http://hallway.chat

Really cool idea. I've been thinking a lot about how to have a party online (zoom parties are inevitably terrible), and this seems like a great step towards recreating real-world social experiences

Awesome idea and execution. Congrats :)

The first question people ask is "how is this different than native Slack integrations with Zendesk, Intercom, etc?". The answer is that we've increased the functionality in these integrations significantly, and made all of them 2-way!

For example, if you use shared channels with your customers, you can create a Zendesk ticket from Slack, and then reply directly from a ticket in Zendesk and we find the right channel and thread to reply to.

Fair - SMS requires strict opt-in in the U.S., so its important that businesses don't text customers who don't opt-in.

I actually like my texting reminders.. for example I like when the pharmacy texts me that my prescription is ready, when Uber drivers text me that they have arrived, when Fedex says my package has been delivered, etc.

This is a great program, but also it is so so sad that this needs to be provided after 2 weeks of lock down. Really shows inequality in American society

Also, we haven't put pricing on the website, but we have a 7 day no CC required free trial. The reason for this is that we want to talk to you and ensure we understand your use case!

To start, I'd love for someone to make it easier to receive ISO / SOC compliance. We have customers now asking for it and we don't know how to get started

It's not just the page, which would be nice. It's also all the logic in the background that says - if I change my plans to support 3 users now instead of 5, all the product changes are abstracted away?