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felixledemon MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

Could you add support for three languages? Gotta please the in-laws!

felixledemon Launch HN: Yotta Savings (YC S20) – Behavioral psychology to help people save

Really interesting concept! Are you planning on adding index fund investing in the future? It seems like you could incentivize investors to take a long term view with a similar, gamified approach.

felixledemon Melting Greenland Is Awash in Sand

This seems like such a negative view of the NYT's effort to showcase some wonderful photography along with a well researched article. It is in no way low quality writing.

felixledemon Earnest Capital is live

FWIW, there are other alternatives for entrepreneurs to get financing without giving up equity. MainVest offers Revenue Sharing Notes (RSN) and Equity-alternative Revenue Notes (EaRN) through Reg CF crowdfunding. Here are some examples of how they work:

RSN: A $200,000 RSN that matures in 5 years and 5% of revenue is paid back quarterly until a total 50% return (i.e. the "cap") has been hit. In this example, the business is expected to pay back a total amount of $300,000 by paying 5% of their revenue to investors over five years. If at the end of the 5-year period, the $300,000 has not been paid, then the business has to pay the remaining balance at that time.

EaRN: A $200,000 EaRN that matures in 10 years and 5% of revenue is paid back quarterly until a total 25% return (i.e. the “cap”) has been hit. Upon reaching the “1.25x cap”, the company then pays a smaller percentage (e.g. 2%) on revenue until the maturity of the EaRN is reached.

The entrepeneurs set the terms of their offering and investors in their community decide whether they would like to invest.

Source: https://mainvest.com/securities

Disclaimer: I am a CoFounder of MainVest.

felixledemon A debt-collection machine that’s chewing up small businesses across America

Unfortunately, most consumer protections for financing don't apply to businesses. Many of us here on Hacker News have benefited from seed or VC investments without having to put our house on the line, but for the majority of american entrepreneurs access to capital remains the number one issue.

I'm currently working on a startup to solve the access to capital problem for local small businesses (mainvest.com). Open to any feedback or suggestions on how we can tackle this issue. We're currently based in MA, but we're planning on bringing our product to NYS soon. Hopefully they've fixed "confession of judgement" before then.