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You cannot possibly be a full-time academic and your last name be "Papernot"!

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era

Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...

https://archive.is/D9vEN

Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED

I resolutely approve of this comment. Bravo.

This is key

We are close to landing our first customer - an enterprise-level one at that! We're Geneva Business Messaging, a tool to centralize, persist, and if necessary escalate critical interactions between large companies and their partners. For actual collaborative cross-company work in fields like engineering, logistics, or security - not spam, marketing, sales, or the other frequent purposes of B2B apps.

We're at genevabm.com if you want to check it out!

Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up:

No read receipts Need to know exact address to write to Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments) Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you) Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks

I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!

I found your comment very moving. Thank you for sharing that remarkable portrait of your father

I've always wondered about those grimy palm reading or fortune telling shops you'll find across major streets in Manhattan or New York. How are they making rent, even during the retail apocalypse?

What if superintelligence isn't even a thing? I was watching an interview with a Chinese-American specialist the other day (I'm sure it's been shared here on HN at some point) and she explained in the Chinese AI community they don't operate under the assumption that something such as AGI or superintelligence exists, and therefore don't work toward that goal. I'm sure people in this community can comment to a much more informed extent on this than I though

Seconded

Great comment - it reminded me of Seveneves

This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me).

But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!

My team and I are building a web app that enables any business to chat with any other business in any language. Details:

It's B2B only - can't register with a free email provider, gotta own a real domain -Therefore identities are collective - companies, not company employees --Therefore all interactions are persisted at the org level rather than assigned to individual inboxes

-It allows you not just to talk but also to work together on contracts. We built a contract parser that turns contract clauses into smart, plain language objects

We're calling it Geneva and doing a friends/family/acquaintances exploratory release as I type this.

http://genevabm.com http://x.com/genevab2b https://www.linkedin.com/company/genevabm/

My company is building something in the messaging/comms space, but focused on B2B rather than internal team chat like Slack/Teams. Seeing all the dislike for those two makes me wonder if we should enable intra-team messaging as a (free?) bonus feature.

As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia

A tool to address friction in B2B interactions (mostly between large companies) I've seen in my career. Main innovations are in comms and contract management. Leaning in on some hardcore dev talent in the team for the stack: there's Rust and Gemini in the mix. I'd say we're past the halfway point of MVP development

Very valuable, thanks for posting. The author understandably leaves out the dollar figures (even approximations) for what that exist looked like, but the tone suggests it's above decent. The concrete advice for startups requiring cold pitching and network effects was particularly good.

Thank you (and the whole team of course) for creating something so amazing

Fantastic, inspiring post. Congratulations x 200!

The story is great on its own, but that ending was absolutely magnificent

Don't mean to sound aggressive, but no professional organization worth its salt does systematic password sharing of any kind. Password sharing is almost always a security violation and, even if shared securely, can generate licensing complications for the product or service you're authenticating into. Better to have one account per service per person who's going to use it and systematically revoke licenses/accounts that go unused. Also use official methods for resetting passwords (email link, TOTP generated by the app itself from an admin console) rather than sharing passwords.

Lastly, of course like everyone said: SSO is your friend!

First-time founder working on a B2B comms web app. Have had trouble locking down technical co-founder but recently made great inroads with a childhood friend of all people. If an MVP comes out of it, I'll post it here!

The water cooler thing is a myth. I've spent my fair share of time in tech company offices and have never seen, nor cannot think of, anything worthwhile coming out of those encounters. Like other posters said, a shared meal with colleagues is a different story, though it will typically increase social connections rather than generate new productive/business outcomes

I used to work for a large multinational ($80b market cap; 55k+ employees) with a penchant for in-house development because vendor exhaustion is real and under-discussed in the business world.

Their trick for doing it was recruiting heavily in regions of the world with great junior dev talent at comparatively low costs (in their case Latin America, but it could be eastern Europe or elsewhere) and have them work with more senior middle and top managers to guide the architecture and technology decisions. At any given time, if you took a snapshot, you'd simultaneously have numerous SaaS subscriptions, numerous devs as described working to replace those same SaaS subscriptions, and numerous completed projects that, if purchased on the market, whether SaaS or not, would have cost exponentially more than the developers' salaries. No freelancing, no subcontracting, only proper employees - but yeah, you need to make the economics work and your milage will vary.

Full disclosure: I have since left that company and work as a consultant doing precisely that kind of work for others, it's only fair to note

What I wonder is: is this by design? ie: Amazon choosing to stop subsidizing certain types of shipments etc? Or is this still, in 2024, a result of pandemic-era supply chain strain and so forth?

I'm so glad someone else is mentioning this. Last week, on what was Wednesday July 3, I needed to order a new suitcase and I obviously went to Amazon. I'm a Prime subscriber and not a single suitable suitcase (no pun intended) could be delivered prior to the following Monday - which was too late for me, as it'd be too close a call for my trip. That had never happened to me, ever, with Amazon. They were going to be unable to deliver on any day from Wednesday to Sunday, even though I was literally in the middle of Los Angeles rather than some remote location. For the first time, I am seriously reconsidering renewing Prime. I wonder what's happening behind the scenes.

This article inspired me to check out the respective market caps for Intel and AMD. Hell of a turnaround! I remember the raging wars between the Pentiums and the Athlons. Intel won. The GPU wars between Nvidia and ATI; Nvidia won. Thereafter AMD, the supposed loser to Intel, absorbed ATI, the supposed loser to Nvidia. But I love that the story didn't end there. Look at what AMD did with Sony PlayStation (extensively discussed in this interview)...and that's without getting into the contemporary GPU AI revolution that's likely driving AMD's $250+ billion market cap. Epic!

Great, I'll write you an email later tonight