mswen

Interesting branding. Clear value proposition. As essentially an alternate interface/version of an off-shore development agency for small tasks this will succeed or fail over the longer run based on whether the developers are competent and speedy, whether project/task management is done well.

One thing that strikes me is how well constrained and defined the micro-tasks are. I find that many of the micro-tasks are micro for someone who is already familiar with the business processes, tech stack and existing code base but as soon as you want to hand it off it becomes more complex and the hand off consumes nearly as much time and effort as just doing the task yourself.

In a larger project the cost savings in rates often justifies the additional communication and project management overhead but I wonder if that can still work at a micro level.

Thanks. My daughter is a productive novelist. She has published with 2 different independent publishers, as well as experimenting with self-publishing another series. Her current publisher signed her to a 2 year exclusive.

However, it appears that these smaller independent publishers are mediocre at generating any significant audience. It feels like it is largely up to the author to develop their own audience.

So I am always keeping my mind open to people who have overcome the starting problem in terms of developing an audience or fan base even outside of fiction.

Thank you for sharing your business journey. I am curious about whether you think the Amy Hoy course you reference would be useful for a fiction author in building their fanbase?

I have wondered the same a number of times. Enough that I wrote an article on it. Business Model Fire Insurance:The Phoenix Strategy

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-model-fire-insurance...

In short I was making the point that large corporations should deliberately invest in start-ups that directly attack their own current business model. Think of this as a way of stress testing your business model with the benefit that you own a stake if the attacker happens to succeed. Side benefit, those start-ups that fail will have small teams of technically talented people who now know your market, and are now needing an acquire-hire. Pick through and hire the best out of the failed efforts.

Yes, thank you. Practical significance. You cannot get away with just running statistical test or deep learning models. You often need to ask whether a change in product, service or process to take advantage of some trend or difference between customers segment will actually be worth doing. That involves getting your hands dirty in the business, trying to identify all the costs and side-effects of a change, and then how much of a size effect you will actually capture once the changes are made. My views in more detail [1]

[1] http://computationalimagination.com/article_practical_signif...

Having lost my own father to Parkinson's Disease (PD), my mother-in-law to a different progressive neurological disease and now watching my father-in-law walk through PD as well, your comment caught my attention. So I wondered if clinicians are doing fecal transplants to restore function in PD patients? A bit of searching and scanning found the following review

Gut microbiota: Implications in Parkinson's disease Parashar, Arun et al. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, Volume 38, 1 - 7 [1]

Key passage

"This autonomic input from the gut is connected to the limbic system of the brain, which includes the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the limbic cortex. Limbic cortex is of importance since it regulates motor functions, which are impaired in PD. The connection between the limbic system and ANS is a critical factor underlying between gut health and brain & behavior [77]. Recently, it was found that fecal transplant from PD patients exacerbated motor impairment with reduction in Lachnospiraceae and Ruminococceae in recipient mice model of PD. Interestingly, same genera were significantly reduced in fecal samples from PD patients [27] link below [2].

Several case reports of patients with PD, multiple sclerosis, myoclonus dystonia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, and autism have shown that FMT and/or antibiotic regimen was helpful in treating GIT symptoms like constipation, ulcerative colitis, and bowel disorders. Further, the therapy was helpful in relieving several non-GIT symptoms too"

[1]https://www.prd-journal.com/article/S1353-8020(17)30036-6/fu...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mds.26307

Back in 2015 I did a webinar session for CIOs titled

    Data Science: Trenches to the Boardroom (10 Lessons)

The definition I was using at the time was:

Multi-disciplinary knowledge, methods and skills for building systems that acquire, manage and analyze data to deliver insight and automate quantitative analyses like segmentation, classification and prediction in support of real-time business processes.

I focused on the building of systems that automate analysis. I did this in an effort to distinguish what I am now doing from my previous work as a "research-based consultant." In that role I would take on a business problem/question and use a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques to investigate and come to an evidence based recommendation for the client.

But now, I build systems that often automate away the work of an entry level analyst. Or, use the models to drive systems that automatically adjust prices to changes in the competitive landscape on a SKU by SKU basis. Or, build systems that create added-value data sets that are in turn sold to another company.

I am reminded of a reception at the HPC User Forum back around 2002. There were a number of people in the room from various national labs and intelligence agencies. I was part of the firm that organized and hosted these meetings. I overhear a guy from NSA kidding a guy from Lawrence Livermore Labs with the following line.

"At least I don't design weapons of mass destruction, all I do is read emails"

In truth neither one of these guys did the activities stated, both really were doing system design, optimization and resource allocation with super computers so that the intelligence analysts could rapidly search billions of emails for trigger words, cryptographers could break encryption or weapons designers could model the characteristics of nuclear weapons since we were in a weapons testing ban.

But to echo your point the amount of resources available at national labs and intelligence agencies. The supercomputing resources they had available dwarfed anything available in industry or academia at the time. Today, one might argue that industry and in particular places like Google and Facebook have computing infrastructure and support that was previously only available at national labs.

So now the Google or Facebook guy in a similar meeting will be saying "I only do the analytics that enable us to target people with ads and messages to which they are most vulnerable."

Most of us here on HN have done a startup, been an early employee of a startup or hang out here at least in part because we dream of doing a startup. Given those biases I think the default is leaning that way.

On the other hand you already appear to be living the alternate dream talked about often here on HN - good job at a tech giant at least if it is one of the FANG and not one of the older school tech giants.

My own experiences would indicate that one should not underestimate the likelihood of market failure. When we say "high risk high reward" many of us focus much more on the second half of that phrase and discount the first half. We assume that we are smart enough to avoid the risks and persevere till we reap the rewards. And, sometimes we are, but often we are not.

Just the other day I ruminated with a friend that I almost certainly would have been a lot better off financially picking a boring but useful domain and getting really good at that rather route that I did take. Focusing on R&D, innovation and a couple of versions of startups. On the other hand I feel like my life has been pretty interesting.

Big company. Large retailers have lots of data and the ability to act on your analytical insights. Fifty percent more money is significant and you should discount any promises or grants of equity from the start-up. Equity in start-ups is far from assured and will often be subject to dilution, vesting periods and other constraints even if the start-up succeeds. And, in a couple years when you are considering moving to another job for better money and more interesting problems being already located in a very large city means greater ease of connecting and finding that next position.

I have used a service from Octoparse for one of my clients. it costs them a little under $100 a month. Pretty easy to set up. Runs in the cloud and then downloads to client database 2 or 3 times a day. After a couple of problems early on it has been pretty reliable.

I know they have a trial or freemium version that might be sufficient for your brother. It won't run in the cloud but rather from your brother's local machine.

"Incorporate this however you’d like, either as some future value bonus or future discount factor risk, but the mood of the masses must to be included. And with that, what might be a good investment opportunity in isolation, isn’t."

The paragraph above is the final conclusion of the post. It strikes me this is largely a restatement the following words of wisdom attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes: The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

In some ways this is similar to being way too early with a technical innovation. The lack of traction or uptake in the market can last longer than your runway. I've been there.

Central points:

> focus time and effort on knowledge and skills that endure

> read more seriously

> think for yourself don't just take the opinions of others

> focus in a particular domain so that pattern recognition develops

> persist over time so that real knowledge has opportunity to compound

What kinds of knowledge actually compound? Are there specific kinds of knowledge that deliver value now, make it easier to acquire knowledge later, make new knowledge more valuable because of rich context, or give us new models and paradigms for thinking?

I share your perspective. He got invitations to do early application at both Harvard and Yale (and yes I know that an invitation to apply is not a promise of acceptance) but it clearly suggests that they think he could make a go of it there. I also told him that it wouldn't really matter if they didn't accept the cc credits.

I used to work remotely with firms in the Boston area. I would travel to Boston several times a year and worked with a number of Harvard and other Ivy League graduates.

I tried to convey to my son the value of the network that Harvard supplies. Not only your own student cohort, but also the uniformly high quality of world-class professors and alumni who are in positions of leadership and influence. But for some reason he wanted to go to school close to home and chose our state university. At some point I decided that me pushing was not worth the tension and that he could get a good education at a state university.

Assuming that he will go to graduate school, maybe he will try for some of the elites schools at that point.

When he and I have talked projects he has been more inclined toward something on the hardware side of things. Would you recommend the FPGA board from Digilent rather than an raspberry Pi, or other android boards?

He finds things interesting but so far I haven't detected a real passion for any subject. I think engineering is his choice because it is at least interesting and foundations in math and science come very easily to him. So it seems logical to him to go down that path even if he isn't 'passionate' about it.

He is more on the introverted side but he has done some of the people leadership stuff as a team captain and he has developed some pretty close friends the past couple years.

Do you have any specific suggestions about activities to broaden or deepen his people skills?

I hope I am not cocky. I assume that at some point soon he will hit topics that really challenge him. From my reading and interactions here on HN I kind of assume that this level of intellectual accomplishment is pretty common even though in a broader population setting it is more rare. Also I have tried to instill in him that academics is just one phase of life. Great grades doesn't necessarily mean a great and meaningful life after academics is done.

I have a client that has a reverse logistics business buying second hand X, testing, cleaning, repackaging and then selling X as refurbished. They have been doing this a few years and created a multi-million dollar business unit with reasonable margins.

They did a trial about 3 years ago of buying separating, sorting, cleaning, repackaging and selling LEGO bricks/parts. After about 3 months they ended the trial deciding that the economics of the process just didn't work for them at any kind of scale.

What I just described is quite different than buying new LEGO sets, leaving them unopened and storing them for a few years and then selling them with the hope that some of them have appreciated so greatly that the overall collection is worth substantially more.

Yes. I mostly believe this as well. I have little or no guilt about it. Especially since the person was not yet hired. But when I think about stuff like this happening at scale across tens of thousands of small private companies it starts to add up to a lot of missing entry level jobs.

I will keep automating away the drudgery in part because it is inevitable and I might as well be someone who profits from the master trend rather than be trampled by the trend.

In a related note. I had a new client in fall of 2018. The purpose was to build a system that collected and tracked competitors prices across a portfolio of enterprise products. When we first started talking the Director of Operations indicated that they were looking at hiring an entry level pricing analyst who would track competitors prices and use that market information plus other internal information to set appropriate prices for their own company. This was across about 4000 model/part numbers.

About 40 to 50 hours into the project I have a show and tell demo on what I had developed so far. At the end of the meeting the Director of Operations leans back and says. "What I envisioned as the never ending, never caught up task of collecting and organizing competitive pricing is now going to be 1 or 2 hours a day for someone."

Developer me was proud to hear that. I heard/understood the real business requirements and developed a system that automates away 90% of the repetitive drudgery of the overall task leaving someone better able to spend time on edge cases and what is changing in the market.

On the other hand I felt slightly guilty that maybe now someone who is already too busy will get this added to their plate because it is just an hour or two a day. And, that someone else who could really use an entry level analysis job, won't get one because I automated it away before they could even get started.

In the end developer me will keep building stuff like this because that is what is valued and helps pay my bills.

There are several variations that are sometimes called intermittent fasting or IF. Daily time restricted feeding, alternate day fasting and 5:2 approach are each sometimes referred to as intermittent fasting.

I have the most experience with time restricted feeding which is a daily extension of the overnight fast until midday. Sixteen hours of fasting and a window of 8 hours for eating or 16:8. I do this nearly every day. Sometimes I will extend the fasting to as much as 22 or 23 hours and essentially eat one large meal that day (OMAD).

That practice initially helped me lose weight. It works by making it easier to eat less. I combine that practice with weightlifting 5 days a week.

I have been deliberately eating more the last year or so while lifting heavy in order to build more muscle and try to hit a certain goal. So the practice isn't exclusively for losing weight.

But doing this practice for years means that I feel much more in control of eating and my weight. When I decide to cut again it seems pretty straightforward. Extend my normal fast from 16 to 22 hours a day and eat one large healthy meal a day (OMAD) and the weight will fall back off fairly quickly.

I have, much more rarely, extended a fast to about 40 to 46 hours.

Having done a pretty fair amount of reading of scientific literature and other people's experiences along with observing my own body I am convinced that it is contributing in a very positive way to my overall health.

>"Marketers have been behind the times"

I have to laugh. I learned psychographics from Bill Wells back in the mid 1990s. He had come back into academia in after spending years at DDB Needham creating one of the first psychographic initiatives/programs that had teams of statisticians, social scientists and used mainframes for statistical analysis in support of product design, message refinement and targeted marketing and advertising based on "personas".

One of the fascinating things to me was that Bill told of doing a summer project during his own graduate school experience at Stanford in which it took him a whole summer to manually (using a mechanical calculator) calculate a Principle Components Analysis on some consumer data.

It boggles my mind in some ways that we have a bunch of CS trained start-up guys who are rediscovering both techniques and consumer behavior research that is sometimes 30 or 40 years old and think they have invented something new! OK, I am sounding like an old fart.

Now, I will admit that many marketing executives I have met over the years were not really comfortable with quantitative approaches but there is a whole subset that have been applying data science types of approaches for a very long time.

If I am hiring this sounds great. I get a test of programming skills before I invest any of my time and effort. And, the final step validates that you can absorb, learn from and apply leading edge academic findings and also talk about your work in an articulate way.

If I am on the other side this sounds very one sided. Automated tests are hard to do in a manner that is really fair and doesn't make too many assumptions. Also it seems like committing 3 high pressure testing hours before anyone from the company has even chatted with me about the position seems very odd socially.

The only way this would make sense to me as the applicant is if the job was at a highly reputable organization with compensation above market rate. And, even then I would interpret the high time commitment from me prior to even the most casual conversation and indication of interest and fit from their side as a potential red flag of corporate arrogance.

I empathize with the CEO who wrote this. Heartbreaking in many ways to let go and shut down when it seems so close to making it to profitable status.

I was an early employee of a venture funded start-up that also had to face up to the fact that it was running out of money and series B wasn't going to happen because investors had gotten spooked.

I know nothing about this start-up other than what I just read, but if the founder and early employees are on HN and reading this comment, know that you have my respect for everything you accomplished, for the seemingly straightforward way you are communicating the shutdown.

May you find your next venture or steps in life equally as rewarding in the process but more profitable in the outcome.

I came from a research background - PhD dropout and although I made money selling my time in consulting there is part of the research mindset that stuck around.

One of the best ideas that didn't really work out came out of a casual conversation with a tech friend and my statistical background combined with his programming background suggested that we should just try it. The proof of concept worked. No one else seemed to be doing what we developed and competing techniques didn't get as good of answers. The application would have been in search. But at the time no one had yet made significant money in search. Google was still burning through VC cash and the investors that we had access to just couldn't see how search would ever become a big business.

In the end, we just walked away and went back to making a living in more ordinary manner. About 7 or 8 years later the kind of techniques/technology finally became hot with VC firms but we were not in a good place to circle back around.

So that is a long answer to "making money" versus having "fun". Building the proof of concept was mostly just for fun. After seeing cool results we spent some time and effort trying to figure out if it could be a business. In retrospect it feels like we should have found a way to persist.

Edges and intersections are always more interesting. This is true across multiple domains. Coastlines, roads, music, business and academic fields to name a few.

Starting a business that relies on the edge of the frontier raises the stakes, higher risk and higher reward.

If you guess right that the market is going this direction you can get a head start on defining the new direction and you have little or no competition. However, it is very difficult to get all of the following right: technology, general market direction, timing of readiness to accept a new technology or process, brand desirability/acceptance and willingness to spend money on your innovation.

I have done some arguably cool innovative things at the edge. But here I am still selling my time. It is really tough to get them all correct.

The author makes some really good points about the complexity of the often stated goal "hiring the best." Shifting the focus toward what would it take to close the gap between candidate's current state and what the company sees as the needed role and contribution.

I think it is always useful to shift focus and ask questions in a different manner or from a new frame of reference. Here are a couple that I think about.

Can we build an organization that has training, processes and tooling that help average candidates perform in a demonstrably superior manner?

Can we find/develop leaders that are so good at leading and developing people that they can take a team made up of mostly C and D players, inspire, develop and forge them into a team that performs at A level even though the individuals making up the team seem less impressive on an individual basis?

Can we get really good at judging potential?

Some people greatly prefer the challenges and joys of building new products and companies to the challenges and joys of operating companies over the long haul.

Selling the bootstrapped company locks in a financial return for that past effort and more importantly releases their mind, emotions and time to shift back to building something new.

It is still rough around the edges but I will see if I can get it deployed in the next week or so. I will let you know when it is up.