adamlangsner

What is the value one would get with your product over Hotjar or fullstory? I'm curious to learn more about what attracted you to this space and where you plan on positioning yourself in the market.

I have a form of synesthesia. every letter and digit has a unique color, The colors have always remained the same since as far back as I can remember.

I saw a comment in this thread about syntax highlighting and that's kinda correct, it's like having syntax highlighting in your inner eye.

I don't focus on it that much when I read, it's subtle but I think it helps me remember things and associate things in my mind. I also sometime visualize words in my mind (like one word at a time subtitles) when people talk to me and i see the colors then too. The first letter of the word usually has more influence on the overall "color" of the word than the other letters in the word.

It's not going to be successful, not because it's gonna gain a lot of traction and then go bust, but because no one's going to sign up for this. Look at the comments in this thread, read his landing page. It's obvious you wouldn't take this seriously as an incubator. It's not even an incubator, it's just google form he's using to do customer development. He'll probably have some conversations with the few people he gets to fill it out and then realize it's too much work or it's a bad fit and he'll move on to his next idea or maybe it'll morph into something else. Who knows? You make it seem like he's this charlatan peddling some false incubator product to unsuspecting founders. He's a 20 year old college student from Macedonia dipping his toe into something.

I think that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. The guy built a landing page that links to a google form. Who knows if he'll get any interest. And if he does, founders need to do due diligence on their investors too. It goes both ways, the market for private equity is relatively illiquid non-commoditized and informationally asymetric which means it requires a higher transaction cost and due diligence. I don't think it's constructive to shame someone for trying something new even if they're not super experienced in it. What is the threshold one needs to cross before they try an idea? There's a balance between gaining experience and taking action, maybe he needs to move a little to the other side of that spectrum, but he'll learn that and in the end there is no effort without error. I don't think his incubator is going to be very successful so it's no big loss to anyone

Some of the feedback here is a little harsh. This kid applied for YC when he was 18 and now he's only 20 years old. I wish I had launched something and had it fail when I was 18. When I was 18 I wasn't even finishing my software projects. It wasn't until a few years later that I would launch something, it fail and I'd realize I need to re-evaluate my approach.

He's young and making mistakes, but if he operates on a long time horizon I think he's doing pretty good. He realizes the he needs to research a market before creating a product (customers own the problem, you own the solution).

His mistake here is that he's angry about YC (which is unjustified, they were right to deny him) so he wants to make an "incubator". That's probably not a good idea, but he's only 20 so has plenty of time to fail more.

I think he knows what to do though. Research an idea first before building. So, the smart thing to do would be to find a vertical that intrigues him and start engaging with people in that industry trying to identify problems they may they need solving. B2B (specifically B2SmallB) is always easier than B2C for a solo founder.

Who is this Peter Rex? I just went to rexteams.com The site is quite vague. After doing some googling it looks like this is one of those guys that's like in the business of selling business. They do a lot of lectures and stuff.

yeah, maybe it's too silly. I've seen a peach used before to represent someone's butt. wasn't sure what to do for no. 1. no emojis really fit.

I was thinking about people overbuying toilet paper and realized that I never really think about how much I use. And the sizes are all confusing because it's like double rolls, mega rolls, super plus rolls and stuff. Toilet paper sizes are insane! It's hard to convert. So since I can't go outside I made a small calculator yesterday to help me figure out how many rolls I need per moth. Hope this is helpful to people! Also if you don't see you toiler paper in the list, my email is on the site. Email me and I can make changes.

What are the differences between this product and Auth0? Why would a dev choose one over the other? Do they target different developers / stacks. Or are they both vying for the same thing?

Washington Post, Engadget, Mac Rumors

JR by William Gaddis. It's about an 11 year old boy who creates and operates multinational conglomerate from a phonebooth in the late 60s early 70s. This book is a satire of capitalism. It has a unique writing style with no chapters or even paragraphs. It moves fluidly between narration and dialogue even within the same sentence. And it has no breaks between scenes, it's like birdman: one long tracking shot with no jump cuts. The writing style is meant to convey the chaos of capitalism and makes it really difficult to read (for example you don't always know who's talking and people talk over each other a lot). But it's totally worth it and really funny.

Despite it being a satire and taking capital allocation and tax avoidance to absurd extremes it actually imparted on me a better appreciation of what it is to run a business from a finance perspective (I have a software background and find myself too focused on product at the expense of focusing on the entire business)

I also recently read The Outsiders, that new book about 8 CEOs that are great at capital allocation and created incredibly high returns for shareholders. The Outsiders is almost like a real life serious version of JR.

Hi, I created this budget planner tool back in 2012 and haven't really added to it since, but I've found it really useful tool over the years. It projects your budget into the future and makes it easy to see if you've overspending or underspending.

I'm looking for some feedback on it:

Do you find it useful?

Are there features you'd like to add?

Are there other products that do a better job of this?

All the budget data is stored in localStorage, nothing is being tracked, there's no server just a backbone app on S3.

Thanks!

Wow! That's a GREAT article. Thanks for sharing!

would it be a bad idea to ask some of those people about 2 or 3 of the ideas assuming I think they're in the market for both or all. Does it bias them in some way? I don't know too many people

I think the extra cost is to do the quarterly tax filings, set up employee payments, handle W2s, etc at both state and federal levels

What do you currently use?

Thanks! I do have a tax consultant, but he charge's extra to do payroll, which is why I'm exploring how difficult it'd be.

Do you know if there's one time setup forms I need to file for employment at the federal level, like forms to tell the IRS that you now have an employee or register as an employer. Or do you just start paying payroll taxes each quarter?

Do you find that this workflow disrupts your flow at all when you're working? Also, do you have any difficulty keep track of all the different calculations?

Thanks! Is there anything you dislike about soulver other than the price?

what if you need do multi-step calculations? do you find wolframalpha agile enough or is it cumbersome to use for quick things?

Thanks. I'll check out soulver, it seems a bit linear though. I don't know about you but I'm looking for something that's more like plugging inputs into outputs and wiring up calcs than doing them line by line.

I should say the version I linked to, I hacked a bit to make the text fields wider to fit more text in them

What do you currently do for quick calculations?

I uploaded a copy to my s3 bucket: https://www.mindlessflash.com/FormulaCalc.wdgt.zip remove the .zip extension before opening on it.

Thanks! What type of quick calculations do you typically do in excel?

hah! I made a microsite a few years ago. it was just a big button that would unfollow him on twitter. I guess that was a bad thing to post on HN.

I’m running ads on Instagram right now. Might be fun to pause my campaign for 2 days in addition to not using social media personally

Yeah and multi platform. Obviously Apple news+ is inherently limited to the Apple ecosystem

I love this. Ironically, a great way to spread the word is via social media.

Thanks will do. I have found that if I log out of medium account or go incognito I can read all their paywalled articles for free.

I usually give up. I just don't read the article. I read the first paragraph that's visible above the subscription CTA and then I go back to binging on whatever else is on HN