HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sblawrie

126 karma · joined August 10, 2012

lazy loading my way through life
submissionscomments
sblawrie··on Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other
Do the players (LLMs) have memory of how prior hands were played by their opponents, or know their VPIP and PFR percentages? Or is each hand stateless?
sblawrie··on Cursor CLI
You can spin up the Cursor CLI inside the terminal of your IDE of choice and not be tethered to Claude's models.
sblawrie··on Colombia fines Uber more than $629k for obstructing regulatory visit
Uber rides are incredibly cheap in Colombia, too. A 20 minute uberX ride across Medellin probably costs around $4.
sblawrie··on The First Rule of Microsoft Excel: Don’t Tell Anyone You’re Good at It
Cool - bookmarked!
sblawrie··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)
Red Ampersand | Jr. Full Stack Developer | Los Angeles, CA | ONSITE full-time

We're a small team running a suite of brands for screenwriting, the most prominent of which is a two-sided marketplace for feedback on screenplays. If you like coding and movies, you'll love this job.

Our stack is PHP7/Laravel, MySQL, AWS, Ansible, and Bootstrap.

Shoot me an email at scot@red-ampersand.com if you want to chat!

sblawrie··on Show HN: EatHow – Figure out what to make with the food you already have
"necessary" is spelled "neccesary" on the homepage
sblawrie··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
Of those, Paid SEO's worked the best, but I forgot to mention we also pay for email blasts to subscribers of other screenwriting related blogs and services, and that's really been the most effective.

5 pages of notes takes a reader roughly 3 hours, and there are plenty of people in Hollywood happy to make $15/hr working from home during their downtime.

I'm not sure I follow your last question - it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a script coverage company to have a brick and mortar store.

sblawrie··on Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
A friend and I have been running WeScreenplay (https://www.wescreenplay.com), a very niche service for screenwriters, for about 2.5 years now. I recently separated the backend platform that manages and coordinates everything and spun it off into Coverfly (https://www.coverfly.io), which we sell to film festivals to manage their screenplay contests.

Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripled in size every year. $27k in 2014, $80k in 2015, and we're projecting to do $250k+ in revenue this year. Hoping to do $1m in 2017.

For marketing: affiliate programs, paid SEO, organic SEO, Facebook, Twitter, cold calling, sponsoring events with writers

sblawrie··on Why Apple Music is So Bad When the iPhone is so Good
I tried switching over from Spotify to Apple Music when someone in my family bought a family plan and it became free for me, but after a few months I switched back to paid Spotify. For me, free Apple Music < Paying for Spotify. I just felt like I couldn't get around Apple Music intuitively and it became frustrating.
sblawrie··on Docker meets the IDE
Typo:

"We beleive they should meet more often and we are making it happen here!"

"Beleive" is spelled wrong

sblawrie··on PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices
But all of these just hand you back a token which you then have to pass to your server for actually processing the charge. What if you don't want to set up any server-side code? Or am I missing something...
sblawrie··on PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices
What if you just need a page (the page can be external to your own site) that accepts payment and emails you a receipt, and you don't want to write any server-side code? Can Stripe do that the way PayPal can?
sblawrie··on Test drive of a petrol car
It's called subsidizing a positive externality, and it actually creates utility and eliminates deadweight loss. It's not "government welfare", it's the economically wise thing to do!

http://www.economicshelp.org/micro-economic-essays/marketfai...

sblawrie··on Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure
I want you to know that this post reminded me of a blog I had set up several years ago and placed some affiliate ads on. The site has been down for years, but I figured I'd log in to the affiliate dashboard to see if any users who signed up through my affiliate links ever spent a significant amount of money.

Turns out, there's a $740 pending balance sitting in there that just came in in the past few months. Sweet! I probably would have forgotten I ever set up an affiliate account if I hadn't read this, so thanks for writing.

sblawrie··on Dear Packaging, I Hate You
Packaging = Marketing. It's expensive, but it makes your product seem better to the end user. Yes, Apple has more money to spend on marketing, and your small startup can't compete on that front.
sblawrie··on Tracking Joy at Work
Did you use any libraries for the dashboard? I'd be interested in setting something like this up at my company, too.
sblawrie··on The YC Board of Overseers
"the shadow of moral hazard darkens" - are you referring to this definition of "moral hazard"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

If not, can you clarify what you mean?

sblawrie··on Why I won't get a Google+ Custom URL
Panayotis, you spelled the word "intellectual" wrong on your homepage.
sblawrie··on Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent
It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first place. Good luck.
sblawrie··on Android for all and the new Nexus 5
The beauty of the iPhone is that the keyboard goes away when you don't need it. That's why qwerty sliders are obsolete - they're there whether or not you want them.
sblawrie··on 2012, My Year of Code
This is a really good outline of the steps it takes to bootstrap a software development career. Succinct and useful.

"My initial plan wasn't to work as a developer indefinitely, but rather to stay on the tech side for at least two years and treat it as my own personal TFA-style program."

I had a similar plan when I first started but quickly realized that coding was exactly what I wanted to do - that I never wanted to go back to the marketing side.

I wrote an article like this one about my own story: https://medium.com/a-programmers-tale/a3f7aa8d9bdf

sblawrie··on 'Sweetie', a computer-generated girl, lures sex predators
The show "To Catch a Predator" usually claims that the predators they catch are convicted in the footnotes at the end of the show. None of these predators actually engaged in any acts -- rather, it is always the intent they are being charged/convicted for.

It's possible that these laws are different in the Netherlands, but even then, predators located in the US may not be protected.

sblawrie··on Ask HN: What do you think of job hopping?
My company has straight up told me that they know I'm a "flight risk". I've been there for a year and a half, and they know I'm looking to do "bigger" things then what I currently work on.

So, they've been continually giving me raises. It's really nice, but frankly, it doesn't matter. I'm still interviewing elsewhere.

They're right; I want to go somewhere where I'm challenged, and unless they can pay me 40% more than what I'll make on the free market, I'm a "flight risk".

sblawrie··on Being alone
'One of the most interesting things I've noticed, though, is the reaction others have when I tell them I go to parties or bars by myself (or even to dinner or to movies alone). They're taken aback, and they almost try to marginalize you as some sort of loner.'

I've actually had the opposite experience. Sometimes I'll go to bars by myself just to hit on girls. When your friends aren't around to watch, it reduces the downside and fear of rejection.

Usually, if it's going well, I'll tell her I'm there by myself, and they tend to be impressed I had the confidence to go out by myself and approach them.

sblawrie··on From Zero To Kickstarter In $5k
Neat story. Do you run the notebooks through some sort of OCR, like you mentioned in your Gchat conversation, or did you scrap that?
sblawrie··on Facebook vulnerability 2013
I'd be surprised if this were actually the exploit. If it were, I don't think it would have stayed undiscovered for so long. I'm sure that changing the "xhpc_targetid" was one component of the hack, but some of the other inputs probably had to be manipulated as well.