giansegato

Risk-taking is very cultural dependent, in some contexts people would avoid taking risks as their default option.

That said, I feel that car shops just work because, well, it's the law, especially in some countries.

In the end "needs repair" is the same as saying "mitigating accident risk".

The Daily from the NYT had an episode a few days ago precisely on this idea. Very interesting.

So not totally far fetched I'd say.

[1] https://pca.st/episode/6deccd04-ca45-404b-8537-c4bbe73fedb9

There's no such thing as learning by reading. It's always learning by acting (as opposed to passive reception, that just doesn't stick).

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning/

Get ready to fight against anti spam like crazy, with your own server.

Email is supposedly decentralized, but under the umbrella of "anti spam" it's really an oligopoly of providers

A part from special cases (like bank apps), you have to always allow users to sign up in app. And if you allow to do that through identification providers other than email (eg. Google or FB), you have to provide Apple sign-in too.

You would need to also consistently fake location data inferred from cell towers, which I guess is a bit more difficult to spoof.

Where can I find the Svelte discord you're mentioning?

My Alma Mater! Weird to see it mentioned here.

I truly hope you make it to your seed round. I think your biz is ultra solid. Happy to chat if 1. you happen to expand in Berlin, 2. you wish to fundraise around here. I have some data [1] that you might benefit from. Also: I think you'd rock in cities like this :)

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/how-i-beat-the-berlin-rental-m...

Congrats! I thought of launching something very similar when I went through the hassle of moving to a new apartment. Honest question: why did you launch to HN, if your service is only available in Switzerland?

I don't think that GH code is easily accessible, with rate limiting and TOS forbidding it. GPT is an open model (for the most part), but its training cost is in the order of tens of millions of $

I can think of no one but a handful of companies being able to compete there. And they won't be ok with extending a Microsoft IDE, nor breaking GitHub TOS.

When you start competing on R&D costs the game changes.

There's always the chance that training costs will significantly decrease. But even at an order of magnitude less (ie. tens of Ks) it's still beyond reach for open projects and indie devs

This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have: - dataset (GitHub) - tech (openai) - training (azure) - platform (vscode)

I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting

Very interesting use of reco engines! I always thought that the current state of newsletter discovery is very poor. At the same time, I would not be ok with a product owning the full newsletter stack (like eg. Spotify with podcasts). Good luck with the project!

Thanks a lot! Great tip!

Recently, I tackled Genetic Algorithms to solve some specific NP-hard problems, and Zero Knowledge Proofs. Now I'd love to pick up Elixir and some frontend development.

I routinely keep a web page updated with all my learning projects, both the ones I did and the ones I'd like to do [1]. I found that it keeps me accountable, plus it might be useful for some.

This thread is a gold mine of ideas to expand it!

[1] https://giansegato.com/learning/

If 1. This is not fun, 2. There's no guarantee it will pay off, honestly you just shouldn't do it.

Some things need to get done, at least short term, sure. But if that's structural, some major chances should be done.

If a side project is neither a source of learning, nor fun, nor of opportunity (and thus "it doesn't pay off", in your words) - then just don't do it and find something else.

I'm a fierce believer in intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivations don't hold up. You're set to give up sooner or later.

The VC model has always flirted with being a Ponzi scheme, but ultimately some startups _do_ make money somewhat consistently, so the model is risky but fair to retail investors. But a crypto project is not a traditional scalable company. It does not make money as platforms traditionally do. It's open source and distributed. I truly cannot understand how it differs from a huge Ponzi scheme.

I don't really think you're paying for accountability. That would involve some serious risk taking on Stripe side. I see no mention of this in the marketing material.

Respectfully disagree. Being an experienced Python dev, and a total JavaScript noob, I feel exactly the same with npm.

It's ultimately just a matter of experience I guess

As far as I understand it, that's the key idea behind DAOs

That was in 2012, when they "only" had 15M users

Today, a decade later, they're at 1.074B

Neat! I wonder how it works. Does it poll every submission every set amount of seconds to check key stats over time? Looks like a huge amount of traffic. Is there any more efficient way I'm not seeing?

There are many things that bear little sense in the absolute, but are a pillar of the world we live in. IP rights are one of them.

The part that strikes me the most is the following: "proponents of IP say that without it we wouldn't have movies and medicine, but we had both for centuries without IP". That's just false.

True, we had art in the Past, but it was a different time: in the Middle Age everything was the King's property, and before him, God's. The critical point is that the business model was different: we relied on rich families to cover the costs. Dante's Commedia was covered by the pockets of the Lords of Ravenna (and the Church). Virgil? Covered by the pockets of Maecenas (and Augustus). Wanna have democracy and equality? Capitalism is the only business model proven capable of sustaining that.

Same goes for medicine, that by the way never reached any meaningful scale before science, IP and capitalism came along.

The author seems less interested in getting the facts right and more interested in pushing forward their political point of view.

If you're interested in reaching out the mainstream public to increase its exposure to a topic you care about, there's no way around YouTube and the like

It's obviously and evidently not about uploading videos, but rather to build and reach a community

Also, it's wrong to accept that these platforms have this kind of influence and we should just avoid them. They're part of the social fabric of our time, and it's our duty to make things better.

lol, that's absolutely nuts

I've heard from people that many landlords randomize viewings from the first batch of applicants - I'm actually thinking of working on a weighting system to make the whole thing a bit more meritocratic, because right now it's frustrating at best, racist at worst

So much yes. The only way to actually fix the housing market would be to just… build more houses. Increase the supply, put market pressure to the existing rents, and prices will go down eventually.

The problem is that it's a rather long-term cure, and I don't know if there's enough political capital for this. It will probably be there soon, considering how big they screwed up this time around

OP here!

Thanks for the compliment on my English skills. I'm an Italian immigrant, actually. I've been focusing a lot on my writing, and I'm part of a community of writers that help me out with that.

> it read rather like a quirky advertisement

I assure it wasn't. I mean, it was, but for something different from what you expect: I'm trying to build an audience online, and this blog post is the funnel opening to my Twitter account. [1]

That being said, I'm indeed trying to build a product out of those experiments, and maybe I will get some side money from it. It'd be awesome, but that's not my core, first goal

Happy to answer more questions if you have any!

[1] https://twitter.com/giansegato

Hey, OP here!

> what "profile" the author is referring to here?

Profile means anything that can tell the landlord if you're a trusted party that won't default on them: your income, your credit score, your perceived "safety", your language skills, but also if you own a pet, how long you've been together your partner (if any), etc. It's hard to impossible to evict someone, so they're trying to be extra sure you're a "safe bet".

> Is this considered expensive for Berlin right now?

Well, that's a Figma mockup - anyway, the data is realistic. You have to consider two things: 1. it's not about money (due to rent control), it's all about lack of supply, 2. the salaries are lower than other places - eg. for devs it's extremely hard to go over 70-80k/y

I'm more and more convinced that the iPad will become a development machine sooner than we expect. The idea of running your own IDE inside the browser would have been crazy a few years ago, but it's reality today, as JetBrains is proving. Laptops and iPads will merge as form factor. Will be interesting to see what happens to the OS (closed vs open).

Agree. I got quite interested in the topic in the past [1] — it ultimately boils down to optimizing for attention (modern YouTube) vs optimizing for data retention (traditional education).

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning/