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vineet

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Currently: Salesforce, Implicit, QMocha.

Previously: PhD in CS at MIT. Worked at ACN, MSFT, MOT, etc.

Find me at https://twitter.com/VineetSinha

E-mail me at: vineet dot sinha at gmail.com

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[GET] "/api/user/vineet/stories?hitsPerPage=30&page=0": 500 Failed to fetch user stories

Nice to see more from Amazon in this space.

I had the chance to see a demo a few weeks ago and it seemed impressive. Now to actually do the challenging, and build something useful with it :-)

The interesting question is that now that things are a little bit settled what should we expect.

Some thoughts that seem obvious: - OpenAI to slow down progress with newer models and double down on AI safety. - Microsoft to boost the LLMs that it has - competing with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI.

As for which OpenAI employees leave - I imagine we will see answers in the next few days.

But what about... - Is the GPT Store going to still happen? - What is going to happen with the GPT-5 training? - Was there an AGI breakthrough?

Rethinking how tech can make learning better!

I think how we teach is stuck in the stone-ages, even though we as a society have learnt so much more of what works.

I have worked in the EdTech industry, and feel the opportunity to help individuals create incredible 'courses'.

I have built multiple tools and am especially looking to collaborate with people who want to deploy interesting things.

MVP: https://implicit.io/

I think this is a little different for those wanting to build a VC-backed business vs a bootstrapped business.

If you are getting investors, managing them is a full-time job - so you really need to quit what you are doing.

Perhaps we need a few separate lists of stupid ideas - for bootstrapped companies, for B2C companies, for disruptive companies, etc.

Overcoming this 'mistake' is very hard. I have faced it many times. As long as I am an engineer on something it is never good-enough for me.

I am now trying a different approach that seems to work - the essence is that after some time to give up ownership of the code. I am involved in day-to-day dev decisions, but play more of the role of the Product-Manager - talk to potential customers for pilots, and define tight scopes so that the pilots and subsequent launches are successful.

Violet implements the most common voice UX Patterns and makes using them be easier.

The typical enterprise web app can be said to consist of just navigation (i.e. menus, breadcrumbs, tabs, accordions) and forms (to collect data). Most voice apps can be broken down similarly, and Violet is really a great tool at supporting them.

Violet takes inspiration from HTML, bootstrap, Angular/React/Vue to make build Voice Apps as easy as web pages.

I created it because I have needed to create 12+ Voice projects a year for the last 3 years.

Would love to get your thoughts, questions, and any feedback.

I was just at a startup showcase and a common theme in many healthy startups was how much of a stress it put on the relationships of the founders.

I feel like we need more of a conversation about these indirect effects of startups on founders

I think that unfortunately, the answer to this question is: it depends!

My $0.02 is that it depends really on the market size (based on your startups focus) and its growth. If you are early to a space then trying to grow your startup full-time will burn you out, and similarly if it is a large market that is not growing much you might need to work on it with a team full-time and put in a lot of effort to get market share.

My bias is to keep it on the side until you have a certain amount of product/market understanding. Doing that and having enough insights about your industry can take time once you start playing in it. Once that happens, and if you can make it happen, do a pivot as needed and double down.

The challenges of starting a company are different form the challenges of running/growing a $25 million dollar company. That being said, you will still learn a lot from shadowing him.

I think you have a few options: a. Shadow him. This in itself will be fairly useful.

b. Shadow him plus. If you want to do this, I feel like offering to potentially sending him an end of month report later-on on a particular aspect he wants might not be a bad idea. To do this well, you might want to spend 25%-50% of your time in meetings where he is not there depending on the report topic.

c. Offer to help on a top strategic initiative of his - This is personally what I would do. You will have an awesome project under your belt and will learn from the experience.

d. Work for him - If he is paying you he will likely want you in a specific role. I feel like this might be the least helpful to you in the long term.

I love the guy challenging the big companies and so want them to succeed. But, when I look at their site I wonder about so many things:

- What do VoIP and Internet Speed Test have to do with what they do.

- I wish they have a business model that is not selling ads or my personal information to others. As long as they do that, it is hard to trust them, especially with their malware past.

- Who are their target users, is it me (a developer) or someone else?

- Why do they equate free to open source. Free means so much more in for developers. I use open source despite it being free to use, but because I know I can use it in interesting ways if I need to.

I love the idea of getting more feedback to people building things.

It will be awesome to not just provide feedback that is 'shallow', i.e. sentiment, but to make it easier to provide more constructive feedback.

Perhaps dig into the past 100K comments on Show HN's, categories them, and make it easy to put a large set of them. Leaving comments for more detailed discussions.

One challenge though is that development.kitchen is pulling content out of HN in this way. It might be handy if you had a browser extension that injected the content back into the site so that people could easily see existing feedback.

As someone else mentioned, and something that I need to remind myself often: convincing people is a very different matter from proving that you’re right. My $0.02:

- Feel free to build the huge report, but likely only show small and focused bits that will make the difference based on the details on the ground.

- Try not to just make a logical argument, but focus on the emotional and financial needs as well. Emotional needs would be thinking such as ICO is cool, but is there a lot of risk, especially when you have a business that is working.

- It is often hard to completely change people's minds. Sometimes it is better to suggest the compromise. To do ICO for our market, we will need to pivot in these ways ...

Have you thought about a few marketing side projects for your site? For example, maybe (a) showcase public lists with a count of how many people clicks on each item, (b) creating a list for entrepreneurs, parents, teachers, etc, and (c) sharing them on the respective site.

People will hopefully not just find the items interesting, but will also be curious to see what items others are looking at.

And best of all, hopefully a lot of people will find your site this way.

In particular - it helps to do your work in a coworking space. Even if the team is not people working for you or your company, it is really nice to have others that you see every day who have a similar goals as you.

Alternatively, maybe find meetups and/or online communities for other solopreneurs.

I am glad that people are using algorithms to increase efficiency. But, this seems to only save $5M out of a $120M budget - I was expecting and am hoping for more.

I feel like it would be an awesome project to dissect a large public institutions funding and to discuss ways that algorithms can help reduce costs without reducing the quality of service and agility of the organization.

The site would not allow me to read the full article, so I might have missed something.

Not on Online Education - but I have done a fair amount of work in the industry and this is one of the more referenced books: https://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/1451...

This is a good blog on the state of online education: http://mfeldstein.com/

And a really good article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3062958/how-google-is-schooling-...

To answer why top Universities bet on MOOCs: this is partly an attempt to get around Education's Iron Triangle (ref: http://www.adaptivelearningworld.com/?p=110)