_xnmw

5 ms·

1.
by _xnmw 2y ago
“Defense tech” should not be a capitalist for-profit venture. The incentives are all wrong. The business model is basically “milk the government for as much money as you can get, over the longest possible time period”, which is never a good
2.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Yup and this is the reason I just use Apple devices. Google and Microsoft products are design-by-committee garbage, and most open source projects eventually devolve into a mess, unless it is tightly controlled by a single author (such as SQ
3.
by _xnmw 2y ago
No we don’t, and I’m working on solving this problem. There’s no reason for a pure SaaS company to pay these middlemen if the only thing they buy and sell is software. Software vendors can settle accounts directly like banks do, we just nee
4.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Warren Buffett has a term for this, it's called "float". At my current (active, not abandoned) startup, my guess is somewhere around 30% of active paying customers are also non-users. Lots of industries have this. The majorit
5.
by _xnmw 2y ago
You'll be surprised at how many people don't know or don't bother to refund.
6.
by _xnmw 2y ago
You can guess from the number of reviews and downloads as they change over time. Everyone says it "doesn't work" yet people still download and try it, which means they paid for it. Granted some might chargeback and refund, bu
7.
by _xnmw 2y ago
I think the Flywheel analogy is great. One of the big differences between working a regular job and running your own product/content business is that it's a flywheel - it works even you don't. Your creative/productive ou
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by _xnmw 2y ago
Ooh, I love these points of Conventional Faith presenting itself as Reason. I would argue that most true Knowledge is actually knowing what is not true, yet commonly believed. Actually, if used wisely, you can execute arbitrages on financia
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by _xnmw 2y ago
This problem is as old as time itself and a part of human nature that monotheistic wisdom (or even Buddhism) has always cautioned against. People attributing love, protection, adoration, etc. to fake images construed in their imagination is
10.
by _xnmw 2y ago
YC was always the dream for me, and I've applied about 25 times over the last 10 years. My work has been all about startups/side projects since I was about 14 years old. I live and breathe startups. But since then I've learne
11.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Who wants to bet that Google will be dead (or as about as relevant as Yahoo) in less than 5 years?
12.
by _xnmw 2y ago
I keep hearing this comment everywhere Claude is mentioned, as if there is a coordinated PR boost on social media. My personal experience with Claude 3.5 however is, meh. I don't see much difference compared to GPT-4 and I use AI to he
13.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Ok you’ve convinced me to give Aider a try. But is there a way to feed it documentation of a particular library or API? I want it to read the Stripe docs for me for example and then implement a feature.
14.
by _xnmw 2y ago
For me, Copilot and its sisters have been like self-driving cars: a slightly more advanced IDE autocomplete, analogous to a slightly more advanced cruise control. But it's far from Level 5 self driving and it's not obvious whether
15.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Sorry I meant Pushover not Pusher. https://pushover.net/ Pushover is supposedly dead simple to use, but I've been lazy to integrate it and download the apps for my system, setup the dashboard, deploy the endpoint to ha
16.
by _xnmw 2y ago
I want a webhooked Telegram / pusher bot. Email has a 2-3 second delay which is annoying for my deployment notifications.
17.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car
18.
by _xnmw 2y ago
It only took 9 years for him to get to where he is now.
19.
by _xnmw 2y ago
150k users supported by one man holy shit! This is obviously a B2C freemium app, right? Would love to see a writeup on how you handled the devops/deployment for this. Load balancers, serverless, or just one baremetal server?
20.
by _xnmw 2y ago
If anyone wants some one-man-SaaS ideas, here's a few which I desperately want. Somebody please build these and let me know! I already have my own startup so I don't have time to build these other ideas. - A cheaper and simpler ve
21.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Even Google has outages sometimes. The chances of an outage happening at that exact moment when you are "drunk and dancing at a wedding" are probably lower than "catastrophic deployment failure at FAANG, multi-hour outage&quo
22.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Only a government has sufficient power to disrupt the Visa/Mastercard duopoly as a payment network, and even then only within its borders. See what India did with UPI to mandate a single interface for bank-to-bank transfers and a singl
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by _xnmw 2y ago
Yup. Startups like GoCardless and government initiatives like UPI are all about direct bank to bank transfers to cut out the middleman by becoming the new middleman.
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by _xnmw 2y ago
This is precisely why I'm considering appending to a sqlite DB in WAL2 mode instead of plain text log files. Almost no performance penalty for writes but huge advantages for reading/analysis. No more Grafana needed.
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by _xnmw 2y ago
Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars invested in stupid marginal tech like voice assistants, or boilerplate spreadsheet replacement SaaS and wonder if capitalism has failed. Why is this money not being invested in something that
26.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Same here though my preferred tool is OmniOutliner or any similar tool with hierarchical branching. There are other tools like Roam/Obsidian but Omni has proved to the fastest offline local macOS app with the most rich feature set.
27.
by _xnmw 2y ago
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what
28.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Maybe because the revenue isn't directly attributable to AI itself, but is realized in the cost savings and productivity improvements in already existing revenue streams? That's where AI has been useful to me. I can't put a n
29.
by _xnmw 2y ago
Yeah but physical products are hard work, and cost a lot to store, move and display properly. Yet you can still sell directly to consumer if you wish. Software distribution costs basically nothing on the internet, AND Apple makes it impossi
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by _xnmw 2y ago
Apple's App Store policy is unbelievably ridiculously hubristic. Imagine if Google/Microsoft charged you 30% of your entire business just because you ran it on top of Excel/Sheets and Gmail/Outlook. Or if Adobe took a 30

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