nbashaw

Curious what issues you ran into?

Even more significant when you take this into account:

The tool was rolled out to the agents gradually, mostly between November 2020 and February 2021.

So the 14% gain came from vastly less capable systems than what we now have today.

The example here only covers short text fields like titles — does anyone know if it performant for full body search of long documents?

Editor here, we are very aware of Betteridge’s law

Developer here, thanks for the heads up and will look into it! Probably a font bug

The universe is so big it seems highly likely

Generally I think you're right. But also I think there are a ton of edge cases we could discover based on complex interactions of genetics, environmental factors, disease history, etc.

Also there's a lot more urgency when an algorithm detects an anomaly and asks you to schedule a blood test!

Totally, but in order to benefit from this system you'd probably also need a connected mattress, watch, maybe a continuous glucose monitor, some sort of workout device, etc.

It adds up. This is a country where half the population earns $40k or less a year.

I think you're right about all of this! And to add another point, I worry the only people who will have access to this are those who can afford a bunch of health gadgets and a premium primary care provider.

But, at the same time, it's impossible to imagine our government creating such a thing :(

Well Apple Health is an open API that anyone can integrate with. So I'd assume Whoop either A) doesn't want to be modularized, or B) has a data format that doesn't fit with Apple's specification for some good reason.

Why doesn't Whoop integrate with Apple Health?

Totally agree! It's going to take a whole new sub-specialty of ML to make any sense of it. But I think there's a positive feedback loop where more data → better algorithms → more data, because more people opt into the system in order to get access to the algorithms.

Hey! I wrote this article. There is literally a description of the basic mechanics of the app starting at word 48 of the piece. I have no clue how you missed this!

"After we exchanged pleasantries, Paul explained how the app works. There’s one global “room,” and when you join you start off on mute, but anyone can unmute themselves. When you open the app, it sends push notifications to everyone on the app, so they can join you and chat if they’re free."

I'm curious why this didn't work for you and what you would have wanted instead?

For people wondering what this is (not a super descriptive title, my apologies!) it's about the new audio social app called "Clubhouse"

I love that too. It’s interesting that more notes apps don’t do this. Defaulting to the creation screen makes so much sense!

Author here! I didn’t mean to write a comprehensive overview of Roam, I was just curious about the marketing decisions of products that attain cult status. I get that this is not nearly the most important aspect of Roam. Just a little thing I was personally interested in!

Author here! The Roam part is free. This is an edition of a newsletter that has three short things - the Roam part is first and here in full.

Author here! The entire piece contains the logic that supports the conclusion at the end. You're right that the recession will hurt them, but on balance, I think in the long run the premium short-form video format will be here to stay.

A lot of this post seems to be loosely plagiarized from the "Eat Dirt" chapter of the CFAR handbook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UZYBtOJ3QZ7FTI_4eKjVzBSNUqC...

Not good!

Edit: he does link to it in the post. But if you read his post then read the CFAR "Eat Dirt" chapter it'll leave you unsettled.

Me too. The speed of using "j" and "k" to navigate articles (that load instantly) feels amazing.

I remember that app :)

Thank you! This is very thoughtful. I'm definitely taking some time and thankfully not under too much financial stress. But honestly I actually feel really fine. This happened a couple weeks ago and I have had some time to process it. Writing the post was super cathartic.

You're right that the probability of any individual "unicorn" type idea succeeding is ridiculously slim. But I think you're not appreciating the larger context. Consider this:

1) I have never had more job offers in my life than the past 24 hours. Like, really good jobs. Obviously that wasn't the goal, but it's not like I'm out on the street or really in any way worse off than I was before.

2) I learned more in the past two years than I have any other time in my working life. So again, I'm not in that bad of a spot. It wasn't a waste of time at all.

3) Even though there are very few massive hit VC successes, they do happen dozens of times a year. Just because something is low-probability doesn't make it stupid. Do you think people are dumb who write novels? Or become actors? Or open food trucks? Nobody should try anything that probably won't work?

That's a really sad life outlook.

I was in a really low place a couple weeks ago, but I actually honestly feel pretty fine now. I've given myself the space I need to process it. I definitely wouldn't have been able to publish this post when it first happened.

Also, I totally get that it seems like a total waste of time to engage with the comments here. A lot of people have told me the same thing on Twitter. But the thing is: I think it's really special that someone on the other side of a computer screen read this thing I wrote and is thinking about what they would do in my shoes. Even if they express it in a way that's kind of rude or condescending, it means something to me!

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being defensive. When I think of what the word "defensive" represents, I think of someone who is totally unwilling to consider other points of view and is trying to shut out the world. I don't think that's what I'm doing. Nothing is more important to me than learning from what happened and growing into a better, smarter person. I totally appreciate the fact that I am just too close to the thing to really understand what happened. I need help from objective third parties to learn the most from this.

That's actually why I'm replying to the comments. There's the naive DHH-cheerleading reply to anyone who is "yet another dumb unicorn chaser". But I want to go one or two levels deeper than that. I don't think those replies are particularly helpful, but I think the people that write them totally could be helpful. They just need to actually have a desire to understand in more detail what my business is/was doing. I accept that most people here will never care enough to really dig in. But I think the probability is high that some people here actually might really care. So I'm engaging here while it's on the front page of Hacker News, because I won't get another opportunity like that for a long time.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think that through more. I hope it answers your question.

It's ok! And I am really sorry to hear about your dad's business. That must have felt terrible, far worse than I'm feeling right now.

We're all human and doing the best we can.

I appreciate that! I mean, obviously I was wrong about _some_ things, otherwise I wouldn't have had to write that post. So I'm super open to new ideas and learning. That's also why I'm replying to all these comments. I'd rather reply with more detail so people can give better feedback. I just wish more of the commenters here would start from a perspective of asking questions, than thinking the answers to all my problems are glaringly obvious. Reality is extremely nuanced, in my opinion! I would love if more people were asking more questions, rather than making strong claims based on a very small amount of information that was more intended to communicate a very important life event to friends and users, than to be a detailed diagnosis of everything that happened.

Actually we had a pretty detailed financial model for how we expected to get to profitability! We currently have ~1,200 subscribers, and about half are paying us $1.99/mo (our old price point) and the other half is paying $3.99/mo. Our growth model is based on people sharing our content, and so we can predict pretty well how many new customers we'll get every time we post something new. With a $15k monthly content budget (a couple writers, network of freelance designers) we were pretty sure we'd be able to bend the growth curve to the point where we'd reach profitability (~15k subscribers) in about 10 months, assuming modest improvements in conversion rates and share rates (we'd obviously be doing a ton of experiments to move these numbers).

At the end of the day, investors weren't convinced, so you certainly have a point! There may have been something seriously wrong with the plan. But I challenge your assertion that we'd need "big growth just to survive". Yeah we'd need pretty good growth, for sure. But not "unrealistic, crazy unlikely" growth.

And on the upside, once we got there, all growth would be pretty much pure margins after that! We don't think we'd need to dramatically increase our investment in content.

Basically, it might not be as dumb as it seems.

You're right -- it takes a long time for most media companies to get off the ground, and it's often near-impossible to raise money in the early days. But how many youtube channels that get ~7,000 weekly unique viewers are able to convert ~1,200 into paying monthly subscribers?

Consider this: you might not already know everything there is to know about my business by skimming one blog post!

Am I?

"Now, everyone has moved on but me, and I’m trying to figure out how to move forward. For the time being, we’re not going to be able to release any new stories (it sucks, I know), but the app and website will stay up. I am not ready to quit just yet. There probably will be some big changes, but I am not finished."

Also:

"The second option [continuing with our same model & creating all the content myself] is tempting, because I have no significant new data that changes my mind about Hardbound’s potential. Investors are wrong all the time. But if I just jumped into that, I would need to spend all my time working on new stories and I wouldn’t have very much time to learn from what just happened. So I have reservations about immediately jumping into this route."

When I reference "failure" in the post, I am referring to my failure to keep our bank account full.

It's $3.99 but yeah, we have a subscription model