wallawe

I'm not familiar with Sam's comments re: "days of these LLMs being over" - can you provide more context (or link)?

Yeah I totally agree - I wasn't clear originally. What I meant by "kids takes this feeling away" was the monotony OP experienced. My favorite time of the day is between 6pm when I stop working for a bit, and our daughter's 7:30 bedtime. Still, it's the same routine day to day, even if she has made it a much better routine :)

My wife and I felt this. Started doing "wildcard Wednesdays" where we'd do something funky/offbeat/random on Wednesday nights when we lived in NYC. It was a blast and we still look back fondly upon them, but have kids now so it's a little tougher to do spontaneous fun things. Having kids sort of takes away this feeling though not entirely.

It's clickbait because your title is about growing your app to 50k users and then you say nothing about how that happened.

There is a reason it grew quickly. You could have provided value by diving into the ways (word of mouth, articles being written about you, etc).

Or if you had just done a normal show HN and described your product, it wouldn't have come across as spam.

This is just spam. It provides no value in the form of describing how you got the 50k users and is basically just an ad. Flagged.

> Money is not cheap anymoore

This is actually working for them. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/coinbases-inter...

If this is your take, you're not being honest about the downsides of unions.

Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]:

- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.

- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.

- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.

- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).

- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.

- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958674

This is extremely helpful for me to read. I was diagnosed in high school, stopped taking meds in college because my family had the same mentality and I thought I could do without.

I've been experiencing the exact same emotions/habits you mention for the past 5 years especially, now that I have a wife and child and it's been extremely stressful and I've been less than fun to be around unless I'd found a way to be super productive that day or perhaps after a couple drinks.

I took adderall for the first time in years yesterday coincidentally, and felt like a new person. I could work through the stuff that I'd been putting off for weeks. My house wasn't a disaster zone with baby toys everywhere.

So all of this just to say, thanks for your write up. I'm going to look into CBT as well and maybe get back on the meds permanently. My only concern is the come down where I was left feeling terrible, but I hear they have better stimulants than adderall these days so perhaps I'll give another one a shot.

tweet already deleted? might have jumped the gun

This is nonsense. I lived in Vicksburg throughout my formative years and yes it has its fair share of rednecks but it's also go more diversity than most places in the US, e.g. Austin, TX.

Yes, there is a poor standard of living in many areas, but there's also an amazingly rich cultural history (not just for whites).

The problem is you are choosing to view an entire state strictly through the lens of politics when there are different groups, viewpoints, and communities to be a part of outside of the "conservative" ones you despise.

You come across as the privileged one tbh in that you can afford to leave and move on to better opportunities in different regions. Many of the poorest people in the nation live in MS and they could use our help rather than our condemnations.

There are variations in pressure that are really easy to recognize.

Not sure I understand the second question.

Edit: Do you sometimes print the same letter(or a templatized letter) 100/1000 times ?

This would have been a good optimization but we did not. Every letter generated was unique even if it was a templatized piece.

it depends on who you ask and how hard they look, but in my experience yes. i did numerous non-scientific experiments of just showing people a card and asking them if they thought it was handwritten or done by a robot. sometimes i would show them an actual handwritten card, sometimes the robotic one and for ours at least, they had a tough time telling them apart.

edit: i can't speak to the technology the company uses now, i believe they switched away from our tech to something more scalable so it's probably not as good now.

> why build out hardware vs. outsource the printing / mailing?

we wanted the handwriting to feel as real as possible. to that end, my cofounder wrote an algo that varied each character slightly, the robots held real pens, etc. We couldn't find anyone to outsource the fulfillment to that matched this level of authenticity. Some competitors used lob.com and simply print an image of handwriting which actually can work pretty well, but is definitely recognizable if you look closely.

> re: margins, you could have raised prices but that would have made you not competitive?

This was a big point of contention between me and my cofounder. We raise them towards the end some but not enough. After selling, the company that bought us raised them substantially and are doing very well from what I understand. We should have done this early on, but focused too much on winning the deal which is what burnt us out in the end (too much business too quick, lots of sleepless nights).

I replied to parent, but we built the company that shows up #3 for that query (at least on my browser) - handwrite.io. I felt that there would be a massive audience for the API so worked on building that out in the early stages while my cofounder built the hardware. It's a super costly process, requires a lot of human touchpoints even when you've automated a lot of the machinery (e.g. sealing and stamping cards). There was a decent amount of competition but even more demand. We had a couple of good sales guys working strictly on commission that got us to 40k MRR ish in a relatively short timespan but the margins were horrible. In the end we burnt out and sold to a client.

We built and sold a similar business (handwrite.io) and it was a pretty rough experience. We scaled to 40k MRR within several months (bootstrapped) but the margins were terrible and hardware is not fun, especially not being a hardware guy so I had to rely on someone else to make sure we had an efficient/quality product.

can you elaborate a little more and explain the mechanics of this setup?

very bad take. inflation hurts the lower class the most, and these are likely to be people who don't even have student loan debt because they never went to college. so you're advocating for giving the middle and upper class a break at the expense of the poorest demo in America.

Thanks for the shout out, didn't expect to see this here! It's hard to find a good data source - getting the lines is easy, but the grading part is hard (or really expensive). Any ideas?

But we can stop lying about the definition of a recession. Biden admin changing the definition to avoid loss political points is about as nonsensical as blaming inflation squarely on Putin. The disinformation needs to stop.

Awesome work! I would recommend showing a comparison table of the cost of some of your competitors and your product. I use customer.io for a side project and it's crazy expensive (I think like $150 a month), so it would (a) help showcase what products you're an alternative to and (b) show how much better priced you are. And to be honest, I don't need all their fancy features - just the ones you provide so this is great!

Random question, I noticed you are using Next for your site as well as your blog. What headless CMS are you using if any or is it just some markdown in a file?

Edit: the only downside I just remembered is that I would have to fire off separate events just for Plunk, since right now everything runs through Segment. Would be dope if you could integrate with them!

This makes a ton of sense as a browser extension, why not go that route? With this, I still have to google your site (or at least type it into the url bar if i remember the exact url)

I'm a buyer at this point. We'll see how earnings turn out tomorrow, but no matter how bad the macro environment, I think $COIN at 7 P/E is a good buy long-term.

I'm pumped for Beeper but have been on the wait list 6 months now, and am wondering if they're having implementation issues.

Where do you get your data from? I've found sports data (especially odds/lines) to be overly expensive when trying to build hobby apps.

This is perfect timing! I just launched a bootstrapped company and thought Typeform's 10 free submissions per month was kind of crazy. Look forward to trying y'all out.

Wow. Just had to say I'm turning 35 this month and had the exact same epiphany when listening to the "Time" recently. When I was young and in my 20's I would get high and listen to it and just loved the way it sounded. But now the lyrics really ring true. "And then one day you find ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun" really gets me.

I believe it was this https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/1121531/download in congruence with Poker's Black Friday crackdowns[0] where they shutdown many high profile gambling .com domains (which have since moved to .ag and .eu TLDs)

[0]: https://www.beatthefish.com/poker-black-friday/

You could put it that way. I'm a huge fan of sports betting, poker, blackjack, you name it and have been gambling for well over a decade and this is something I enjoyed back when it existed as CentSports (2008-2011 era). So I'm just building something I wished existed (and is legal), and I'll leave the morality judgements to others.

Haha exactly, actually talked to one of the cofounders before writing any code to figure out what happened to them. TLDR: when the DOJ cracked down on offshore sports books it cut off their revenue.

I just released a barebones MVP yesterday for a sports betting site with a little twist:

We give users a little bit of money each week to play with ($0.50 right now) and if they can run it up past a certain point we'll pay them out in cash. If they lose the money, we put another $0.50 in the next week. It's legal in the US since the users aren't allowed to deposit and mainly for entertainment purposes.

The plan is to make money through affiliate referrals if users want to bet with real cash.

I think sports betting is inherently social, so the end game is to create more of a social sports betting experience where you can invite friends and talk shit about their bets, have leaderboards and so on, so forth.

I'm a front-end dev / designer with some back-end chops but not great. I'd be down to chat with anyone who has a complementary skill set. Hit me up at will@pennywagers.com

Stack: Next (serverless back-end), React, Tailwind, Prisma ORM, Postgres

https://www.pennywagers.com