realbarack

Yep, basically this $250k is on the exact same terms as $375k of the YC $500K. (The first $125k of YC is for 7%, the next $375 is uncapped mfn.)

It's on an uncapped mfn safe, so the amount of equity will be determined by your other investors.

It's really not. These bells aren't that loud, you really only hear them once the cyclist is maybe 50 yards away. It's an incredibly important safety feature on low-visibility singletracks.

A toy for speaking with a synthetic personality and generating synthetic audio: https://uberduck.ai/

It's more like 10% baked, but it sort of works. It's much better with GPT-3 but hasn't yet been submitted to OpenAI for approval, so that part is private. My priorities are improving the synthetic voices, adding additional dialog scenarios, and adding multiplayer mode either natively on the site or through bots that can be added to Discord voice channels.

I mean, the sitting president urged his followers to storm the capitol in order to reverse an election result. That's pretty much the most clearcut possible grounds for impeachment that exists.

I've been a Reddit user for about a decade and I really love RPAN, the streaming broadcast you refer to. I often find really interesting music made by talented artists, and I appreciate that the performances are done in a kind of off-the-cuff, low-key way.

I won't weigh in on your "is it better" question, but if you make 450k a year in the Bay Area you definitely do not need to commute hours each way and you can probably afford to buy a home if you want.

Because it has an offensive slur in it

I attribute it to mortality denial as well as general anti-technology sentiment across the board.

Vegas is not bad for outdoor activities either. World-class rock climbing, good hiking and mountain biking, 2 hours to the Grand Canyon, 2.5 to Zion National Park, 5 to Mammoth (not close but no worse than Los Angeles). Alex Honnold owns a house there.

If I ever achieve my dream of being a seasonal nomad, Vegas just might make the cut.

Note that "that person" is not actually a specific person, but merely your image of one.

Nice post! I love hacking around with PostGIS. While I'm not normally a huge ORM advocate I do like the GeoDjango API for this sort of thing [0].

There hasn't been enough experimentation with geospatial social applications. (There was a lot back in the early 2010s but it petered out.) I'm currently working on an experimental chat app that creates Slack-like channels associated with a topic and a location. I'm looking for collaborators on this project (primary need is for designers and community-builders, but also programmers) so if it appeals to you please get in touch (HN-facing email in profile).

[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/contrib/gis/

I don't think this has much to do with imposter syndrome. A person who can scale their knowledge across an organization is simply a more valuable employee than an equally-skilled person whose knowledge is mostly not shared.

I really appreciate posts like these that chronicle the challenges of pre-PMF life. Thanks for writing it.

Are you willing to share or privately discuss any more detail about what you're working on? I'm interested in this area as well.

This is one of the points of geohash, right?

Apparently they recently got a "$150 million cash injection": https://decrypt.co/34598/crypto-social-media-platform-voice-.... And voice.com cost $30 MILLION!

Yep, I know a number of freelance writers who pay the bills with content marketing. It's a tried-and-true path.

decomposing bodies are a critical part of the ecosystem

Is this true? Most human bodies (at least in the US) decompose in cemeteries (not exactly verdant ecosystems) or are burned. Plenty of other organisms will continue to die, there's plenty of carbon to recycle without human contribution.

If/when you have reasonable solutions for overpopulation, massive resource consumption by advanced societies, and pollution, then we can talk about longevity.

We already have to solve these problems (well, except overpopulation, I don't think this is a real problem). I think it's reasonable for us to work on longevity in parallel, just as we work on curing cancer in parallel.

Could you describe what you think the spiritual and mental costs are?

I love life (I've been fortunate to live in health and relative privilege) and would very much prefer an additional 150 years before eternal nothingness, assuming sound mind and body. It's not clear to me what spiritual downsides I would experience.

I like the idea and have also noticed the rise of the public Google doc. I see it as a part of a greater trend of people flocking to semi-private internet spaces. (I'm in various semi-public Slack channels and Discord groups.) Bringing discoverability to these spaces could be valuable.

I don't understand why a rational person would describe an astrology app as their "dream dating app," but clearly it's reasonable to allow it in the App store.

Nice piece. Not the main point, but I deeply resonate with the brief aside on in-person meeting: "I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners". There is still low-hanging fruit for software to improve in-person interactions. Much of the small-talk dance is an attempt to find common ground between two people in order to catapult into a deeper conversation or more meaningful relationship. Software could do this.

I'd certainly rather jump into a codebase with a great test suite and crappy commit messages than a crappy test suite and great commit messages. But these are apples and oranges. Keeping a great test suite is a constant fight against tech debt, and testing things properly can be harder than the actual implementation.

In contrast leveling up from the terrible "WIP WIP do the thing" to something slightly less awful takes maybe an extra 1-2 minutes per commit. And every time you do it you're doing your future self and future co-workers a huge favor.

I agree. Note that I don't want this to happen, but I don't share the GP's confidence that it's impossible.

Zuck could 100% be elected president someday. It certainly seems more plausible than I would have said about Trump in say ~2012.

- The US worships rich and successful businessmen in general.

- Facebook is the most powerful media empire the world has ever know. It could easily mobilize to support a Zuck campaign.

- His charisma and current reputation are obviously votes against him but reputation is malleable (see previous point re: media empire) and political training could probably go a long way.

Fair criticism. I don't have a confident estimate for the number of new remote employees, but here's a hand-wavy one: one third of the 130M US jobs can be done remotely [0]. 20% of CFOs expect about 20% of their workforce to be remote in the future [1]. Assuming a uniform distribution across company sizes and no other remote jobs outside of those 20%, we'd expect 1/3 * 130M * 1/5 * 1/5 = 1.75M new remote jobs.

The assumptions here are obviously strong and wrong but it does seem like "low millions" is probably the right order of magnitude.

Moreover we can expect highly-regarded companies like Facebook and Twitter to be bellwethers for the rest of industry. If their remote work experiments succeed, I suspect expansion will follow rapidly (I expect the reverse if they fail).

[0] https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-man... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ezequielminaya/2020/04/03/cfos-...

The problem is that whatever fills the void left by SAT and ACT will likely be _easier_ to game. Standardized tests are not perfect but they're a better signal than extracurricular checkboxes or professionally-edited essays.

No problem! I'm glad you found it useful.

I've added the news on Facebook's permanent WFH policy in this spreadsheet where I've been tracking WFH announcements: https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7