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lowkey

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contact: alok.mohindra@gmail.com

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en.wikipedia.org 3y ago

Epistemology – how do we know what we think we know

lowkey
4pts0
www.bloomberg.com 3y ago

New Fed Bank Backstop Has Scope to Inject as Much as $2T

lowkey
2pts2
moderndiplomacy.eu 4y ago

How and why the U.S. Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine

lowkey
8pts1
finance.yahoo.com 5y ago

El Salvador to airdrop $30 in Bitcoin to up to 6M citizens

lowkey
62pts111
reclaimthenet.org 6y ago

Google Drive blocks personal copy of Plandemic at request of Washington Post

lowkey
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www.salon.com 12y ago

Linux creator admits NSA demanded backdoor

lowkey
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nextmontreal.com 15y ago

The story behind Warships - an iPhone app's path to 1 million downloads

lowkey
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noir.bloomberg.com 16y ago

Bloomberg.com - Black or White (Safari vs Firefox)

lowkey
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www.dailykos.com 16y ago

"There's something crazy going on in China" - Chinese workers go on strike

lowkey
9pts2
www.theglobeandmail.com 17y ago

(Canadian) Venture Capital Breakdown

lowkey
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www.arkalumen.com 17y ago

Any hackers in San Francisco willing to meet up? Check out our HW demo?

lowkey
2pts6
www.rollingstone.com 17y ago

Bush's Final F.U.: Bush to screw America over for years to come

lowkey
3pts0
www.arkalumen.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Feedback on my startup and advice for the big pitch

lowkey
8pts19
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Can anyone recommend simple user interface design software?

lowkey
3pts5
startupkarma.com 18y ago

Is someone censoring internet sites from Iran?

lowkey
3pts5
startupkarma.com 18y ago

Seed technology investment with a twist

lowkey
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Yes I'm sure Apple Card data is included in that dataset. That isn't the point.

And even if it's not, as long as the other side (i.e. merchants and acquirers) just collects and aggregates the same data, that's little consolation.

Respectfully disagree on this point. The issue isn't leaking anonymized aggregated data. The issue is, for example, Chase can and does personalize rewards ads based on your exact transactions internally. So when you use any Chase card, every Chase related entity has access to your non-anonymized transaction data for marketing and credit decisioning purposes.

I will cautiously watch how Apple handles this issue in the future because I don't trust Chase and my financial privacy is important to me.

The Apple card is the only credit card in the US (that I know of) which does not resell your granular transaction data to 3rd party brokers. To me that alone makes it tremendously better than existing cards.

While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living.

Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded.

Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work.

Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.

Economists look at inflation on a month/month or year/year basis. This is not an accident as it purposely ignores the destructive cumulative effect of inflation.

Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and then comes back to a moderate level, prices don’t go down regardless of what economists would have you believe. The effect of inflation has memory.

Tesla Robotaxi 2 years ago

Possible sure - just as it is possible my next startup could be the next Tesla. In reality, when Elon joined Tesla they had nothing but early concept prototypes of a high-end sports car with the name Roadster. Elon took it from concept, to launch, to production. Then he did the same with the Model S/X/3, sold 5 million electric vehicles, made them so compelling that it completely disrupted the ICE vehicle market and sparked a gold rush of elecrification in the car industry resulting in a Trillion-dollar company.

It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.

Tesla Robotaxi 2 years ago

- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.

- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public

- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible

- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times

- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day

I come from a province that is wholly owned by a billionaire family. They own all industry, all media, and basically every (barely) living wage job outside the government. Look up the Irving family.

Billionaires may not be a uniquely Canadian problem, but the lack of a wealthy middle of entrepreneurs and reasonably wealthy individuals is uniquely Canadian.

Canadians cheer at taxing the rich and as a result end up with a “middle-class” that is barely getting by, a billionaire class that rules the Kingdom, and nothing in between.

Canada is designed to support Oligopolies. It does so in the media, food distribution, telecom, insurance, banking and virtually every industry in the country. This is an intentional policy decision of punishing entrepreneurs and pushing us out of the country. Look at the recent wealth taxes and the national response to them as an example.

Tesla Robotaxi 2 years ago

Reading HN threads ranting about “manbabies” when referring to arguably the single greatest innovator and entrepreneur of our time was not on my bingo card on a site purporting to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

Amd this is why there are no mid-sized family businesses remaining in Canada, except for the occasional farm. Billionaire oligopolies are all that remain as only they are sustainable in the tax farm once known as the great white north.

Article from mcgill.ca brings you clickbait - read this article and be outraged! Science journalism.

Makes three major claims:

- AG1 is a very popular supplement powder used to make a one-a-day smoothie filled with 75 ingredients [True]

- The vitamins and minerals it contains are based on the idea that the average person doesn’t get enough of these nutrients through their diet, which contradicts scientific evidence [Maybe True, but claimed without evidence]

- AG1 also contains a digestive enzyme, adaptogens, and probiotics, despite the fact that there is no robust evidence that they offer benefits to humans [Proveably false, there is plenty of evidence for the benefits of these ingredients]

Famously the institution selling you this scary headline is the same one that brought you the CIA's MK Ultra experiments on unsuspecting suspects and never apologized and fought the victims for years.

I’ve always found it strange that BSM is used for calculating implied volatility of American style options when it was specifically designed only for European style options.

Can anyone comment if there are more suitable models for American style options?

I would recommend considering the Georgia Tech Online Masters in CS. You can manage the work at your own pace. It is extremely cost-effective, and Georgia Tech is well recognized as a tech-forward university.

Btw, I highly I applaud your decision to go deep tech mid-career. I think there's not enough strong product people in deep tech. Even if you go back to product afterwards, your strength in understanding the problem space and available solutions will serve you well.

I'm also mid-to-late career PM transitioning back into deep tech. My path is a little bit different than yours. I'm doing a hard tech startup instead.

I work out of a local Hackerspace here in Austin and we happen to have one of the core contributors to OpenSCAD here. He re-wrote much of the code in C++ to optimize the core algorithms and significantly improve performance using OpenGL.

He is actively looking for gig-work or potentially something more significant, so if anyone on HN is looking to get something 3D-cad related or even some advanced training, please reach out to me (email is on my profile). I will happily make an intro.

OpenSCAD is an ideal tool for adding flexible 3D wizardry to a website or app programatically.

authoritative source the World Bank says moderate inflation is 15-30%

I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. Think it through, are you telling me you believe that 29% year over year inflation for years on end with prices doubling every 3 years -- is moderate inflation? And do you really believe after making such a ludicrous statement that the world bank is a credible authoritative source on anything?

Do you also still believe that inflation from 2021-2024 was primarily due to COVID, the war in Ukraine and supply chain issues? Do you choose to ignore, like the government and the FED that printing 80% of all the dollars ever created between 2021-2022 was not an important or more likely the primary factor driving inflation?

You know, I co-founded a smart LED lighting company well over a decade ago and we considered this market.

It seems like the potential applications might make this viable now. Cruise ships are a tiny market when compared to all the dead commercial office space in downtown cores that people wish to convert to residential but can’t because of lack of sunlight and similar reasons.

I think we have very different definitions of moderate inflation.

Note: I don't consider CPI a good measure of inflation experienced by the average consumer. Unfortunately the measure is heavily politicized and thus highly distorted from real-world experience.

Nonetheless, using CPI as a benchmark:

- Average CPI exploded 382% between 2020 and 2021 (from 1.23% to 4.7%)

- Grew another 170% from 2021 to 2022 or 650% increase from 2020 to 2022 (2022 CPI was 8.0%)

- It subsided somewhat in 2023 and 2024 (to 4% then 3%) but remains significantly higher than historical norms.

Notably, CPI is now expected to remain at or above 3% for the foreseeable future, which is a sustained 50% increase over the previous target of 2%

The Fed is now working to normalize this new normal as there is basically no chance of us ever returning to the prior target of 2% CPI anytime soon.

Also note that the largest spikes in inflation align closely with the Feds massive money printing in 2021 and 2022.

source: https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832

The relationship between money printing and inflation is neither linear nor instantaneous, but the connection is very real.

Are you arguing that printing 80% of all the dollars ever created in a short two-year time span had no effect on inflation?

To quantify “loose monetary policy,” between 2021 and 2022 the US Fed increased the money supply by 4x. Put another way 80% of all US dollars that have ever existed were created between Jan 2021 and November 2022.[1]

Prior to this event, inflation was tame. After this event inflation exploded. Coincidence? I think not.

Notably, the government then blamed COVID, supply chain issues, and the Ukraine war as the reasons for inflation, but neglected to mention money printing.

[1] https://techstartups.com/2021/12/18/80-us-dollars-existence-...

Notably the open source foundation tried and failed to trademark the term open source in 1999.

As such “by definition a NC license can’t be open source” is true only by certain definitions. Open source is a generic term, not owned by the OSI, despite the holy wars fought over it.

I realize my post is controversial and may spur vitriol from some. It is an uncomfortable truth for many.

Respectfully disagree with this comment

“At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT that your are selling a product or service that already exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM!”

PMF is not about building something novel. It is about ensuring your product solves a real and critical problem for your target segment. Only customers are the experts on their problems and priorities. Entrepreneurs are experts on solving problems but we too often solve the wrong problems in elaborate ways.

Salespeople buy Salesforce today because everyone else buys Salesforce. CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. To find PMF for your CRM you need to niche down to find a segment that is underserved by Salesforce.

You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject. This is hard for founders as we tend to fall in love with our ideas and often slip into pitch mode mid-interview. This is a fundamental mistake.

“This article argues that PMF doesn't exist. Oh and if it does exist, it's not clear when it is achieved. And if you have it, you can lose it. Oh and even if you don't lose it, it doesn't guarantee success.”

I would argue that these claims are all accurate, but with the clarification that PMF does exist, but on a spectrum, not as a binary state”

See my comment further downthread where I lay out a framework for determining your degree of PMF ideally BEFORE building anything, so you don’t waste time/money/effort on building the wrong thing because you think you ‘know what the market needs.’

If the only way you can validate PMF is by building something and then realizing no one is using it, you have wasted time and effort that would have been better spent validating PMF before building.

I tend to agree with the autho’s point of view. PMF should be viewed as a point on a spectrum, not a binary state. You don’t achieve PMF so much as you progress from no PMF to extreme PMF with respect to progressively larger and larger target market segments.

Many pundits claim of PMF that you’ll know it when you see it because the market will suddenly be clamoring for your product faster than you can make it. This is categorically wrong to the point of being harmful advice.

You need a leading indicator of PMF so that you don’t delude yourself into believing you have achieved PMF prematurely, only to scale and find yourself in the valley of despair where customer response to your value proposition is mediocre or churn is high.

Clues you have product-market fit with a specific customer include:

1/ the prospect has the problem you think they have

2/ the problem is of critical importance for the prospect

3/ they know they have THAT problem, and not some adjacent problem or symptom

4/ they articulate the problem using the same language you use to describe it

5/ they have tried to solve the problem themselves and have allocated budget and time to solving it, but failed

Too many entrepreneurs and product managers trick themselves into believing they have PMF when they do not - because they fall in love with their particular solution and try to sell prospects on their idea instead of actually doing customer discovery interviews - unbiased interviews where the prospect tells you about their experiences in the problem space without you ever mentioning your idea.