Hacker News Reader

vu0tranon The Coming Age of Super Entertainment and Super Porn

Thanks for giving it a read! Honestly, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I think for the most part, the things that people talk about and try to predict don't usually come to fruition. It could be that I'm just completely off my rocker and absolutely wrong, in that case, great. Or, it could be that the things we talk about, people internalize which enables us to sidestep the bad reality. Who knows!

Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.

vu0tranon The Coming Age of Super Entertainment and Super Porn

Yeah you might be right. I typically am a lot more bull than my other colleagues lol. I don't think I'm far off though. I might be several years off, but definitely not 10s of years IMO

vu0tranon The Coming Age of Super Entertainment and Super Porn

Author here. Thanks for reading. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I used to work at Snapchat where a lot of the talking points were still centered around the "Social Dilemma".

As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.

From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.

When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.

What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...

vu0tranon Adam Neumann’s new company gets a big check from Andreessen Horowitz

ehh... to be fair, lots of companies did much worse. Lots of companies in Fintech during the run up.

vu0tranon A graph of tech companies' Price to Sales[1] over the last 4 years by sector

[1] Price to Sales is a company's reported last 12 months of revenue divided by their market cap at that point in time

[2] If anyone wants a weekly report, submit your email here: http://eepurl.com/h8Q-UD

From July 30th 2018 to July 30th 2022, price to sales ratio has changed accordingly:

Ecommerce: -21.4%

Travel: -23.8%

SaaS: -27.0%

EdTech: -69.6%

FinTech: -26.3%

Healthcare: +14.9%

Supplychain: -27.9%

vu0tranon The Science of Startup Valuation

It's like 95% art, which is why we got horrendous valuations like with Bolt. https://valuations.fyi/company/bolt-financial

$40M revenue, $11B valuation. What were they thinking!?

vu0tranon Instacart announces executive leadership changes amid valuation drop

https://equities.fyi/company/instacart

Uber / Lyft get a multiple of about 1x. DoorDash gets 4x. Instacart did $1.8B in revenue so even at a generous 6x multiple, it's only $11B...

vu0tranon Klarna’s valuation crashes to under $7bn in tough funding round

Buy now pay never. All of fintech is probably down by roughly 80% from highs: https://equities.fyi/company/plaid

vu0tranon Show HN: Just Another Journaling App

You can see the feature roadmap and design ideas here: https://justjournal.app/about

(FYI, your data is only saved on localstorage for now)

I basically just wanted an excuse to create something fun this weekend. I struggled to find a very simple to use app where I could just start writing for the sake of writing. Some other problems I have:

1. Full text indexing isn't great on many of these writing apps (not like I have that right now though lol) 2. Using google docs at night melts my eyes 3. Other writing apps focus too much on publishing, which detracts from writing 4. I want more tools to eventually help me write (no idea what this means)

vu0tranon Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

Thanks for the tip!

vu0tranon Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).

I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question.

There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer.

For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier?

So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero.

So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.

vu0tranon Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

Haha, thanks for the feedback. Copywriting was never my strong suit ;) Any tips on how I can improve it?

vu0tranon Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops.

I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com

I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!

Feel free to email me at vu0tran@gmail.com for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313425

vu0tranon SlideMail (YC W15) Is an Intelligent Email App for the Rest of Us

Hi guys,

Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Whenever we see a crash report, it feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!

vu0tranon [dead]

Hi guys,

Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Like whenever we see a crash report, it causes us what feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!

vu0tranon [dead]

You got me! :D

vu0tranon [dead]

If you wait on the main page for like 5 seconds and don't type anything, people's last 10 queries will start to fade in.

vu0tranon SlideMail – an email app that can think

It'll detect if IMAP IDLE is supported on the provider and use it wherever it can, so IIRC:

Gmail / iCloud: Yes FastMail: Yes Yahoo: No AoL / Exchange / Hotmail / Live: Can't remember

vu0tranon SlideMail – an email app that can think

Yeah, totally. I think with these features, one group that it has resonated with that was unexpected were college students and people that are less tech saavy like my mom and my dad.

They still use Yahoo mail so Inbox / Gmail just doesn't work for them. SlideMail sort of brings what the Gmail app has to offer, in my opinion, enhances it and provides it for IMAP in general as well as other services.

vu0tranon SlideMail – an email app that can think

Hey guys, Vu, the founder here.

I'm a developer and my email habits are absolutely horrible. Whenever I put in long hours of coding, I feel like the time it takes to context switch between development and doing email is way too high.

Because of this, I'm notorious for missing emails, flights even or just not responding to emails as it gets lost in my inbox forever.

I essentially started making this email app for myself and it's finally working quite well. There have been times where I've completely forgotten about a meeting and it's reminded me to show up on time. The sorting uses a lot of NLP magic and I find it to be pretty accurate too for me to take back control of my inbox. I just want to see how far I can run with it and already working on trying to suggest replies to emails.

There are a lot of email apps on the market and I think their concept is "how do we incorporate better design and work flow to solve the email problem"? My notion is rather, "how do we use technology to solve the email problem?"

Other than that, I'm also really excited with the privacy route I decided to take. The downside is that deploying across multiple platforms will be more challenging without a central server side component, but if the plus is that if one chooses the option of going "private" (essentially this turns off server side push notifications) there won't be any communication with my server at all.

It's been a real struggle these past few months so I'm super excited!!

vu0tranon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?

Here are the details of a designer friend of mine, Chris Lam:

San Francisco, CA | Local/Onsite, Full Time | Contract

Stack: Interaction Design, Visual Design, Copywriting, Usability Testing, HTML, CSS, jQuery/Javascript

Portfolio: http://whoischrislam.com/

Resume: http://whoischrislam.com/chris_lam_resume.pdf

Contact: whoischrislam@gmail.com or @whoischrislam on twitter.

I've worked at places such as Amazon and Mozilla working on products and features for Firefox OS, Amazon Cloud Player, and Amazon Prime.

I'm looking to work with passionate, humble, and fun people. Would love to work with people who believe in a culture of collaboration, integrity, empathy, and transparency.

I want to work on technology that empower/enable people to do amazing things and help them. Topics I care about: lifestyle/health/food, education, and productivity.

vu0tranon Three years since being rejected from CS

Stealth startup for stealth technologies.

I'm just playing. Honestly, I wrote the post on a whim because I just got back to my hometown of Seattle and was reflecting on where next I should go in life.

I guess inadvertently, when you think about where you want to go, you often think a lot about how you got to where you were.

I'm going to do another startup soon. If you want to know what I'm doing right now, I've just been traveling and consulting for the past six months (Amsterdam / Germany / Japan this summer). If you want to know exactly what I'm doing right now, kind of just typing this.

vu0tranon Invest in Startups

The website looks very well put together!

In case you guys missed it, the SEC in Title II of the JOBS Act rolled out TODAY. That means startups can now raise funds from accredited investors on Wefunder site itself. This is HUGE but that's not all.

Next summer SEC will roll out Title III which means EVERY SINGLE AMERICAN can now invest in startups for as little as $100. This will be a massive boost for all startups everywhere, especially for non-traditional startups that couldn't get funding before. I'm very excited to see all the new startups coming out of this.

Great job Wefunder! The website looks amazing!

vu0tranon From Learning Rails to Deploying a SaaS App in 7 Days

Ah, so you're the guy I have to thank.

I'll come back to the site eventually and finally get around to learning how to write those unit tests. :)

vu0tranon From Learning Rails to Deploying a SaaS App in 7 Days

Woot, 2.19s end user browser load time. Significantly better than crashing and burning this time around guys! Go dyno go!

vu0tranon From Learning Rails to Deploying a SaaS App in 7 Days

Yeah! Of course. Just tweet at me and I can direct message you my contact info.

@vu0tran

vu0tranon From Learning Rails to Deploying a SaaS App in 7 Days

I agree. There's also:

c) GemHell

Where you're so captivated in all the shiny Ruby Gems that you don't take the time to learn what they actually do.

vu0tranon How Patents Are Ruining the Adoption of HTML5 Video

Thanks for that information. I've corrected this and also credited you and included the link.

vu0tranon Show HN: Framebase.io, Video for Developers

Yes! We're developing SDKs for iOS right now and constantly trying to improve our mobile web experience as well. In fact, with the uploader widget, if you were to open up the page on iOS 6, it should ask you if you want to record video right from your phone. It still requires more testing though.

If you want to email us at support@framebase.io, we would love to talk to you about what you'd like to see in our future mobile SDKs.

vu0tranon Show HN: Framebase.io, Video for Developers

Hi! Thanks so much for your support.

Our recording is currently still in beta right now, but we're coding so fast that are hands our virtually bleeding. We're looking to continually improve this feature and one of the long term goals solutions we see for this is WebRTC which should be very exciting. Keep on following up and we'll be sure to have more updates soon!