rexreed

My point is proven. @jgrahamc never responded. Because just like all the rest of you, I'm too small and unimportant to get the attention that others have. That's why resorting to HN to get your critical support needs met doesn't work for the 99% of us.

At what point does a minimally positive income-generating concern become a hobby? I know many people who collect and sell Magic cards and make roughly the same amount net, but they wouldn't consider themselves bootstrapped founders. You can't live on $6k a year.

Judging from the decreasing quality of Google Search I'd say they've been doing it to themselves over the past decade regardless of large language models or not. However, that being said, Google is still super dominant and when people say "SEO" they generally mean Google search results. And until my mom stops using Google as the default search, I wouldn't count them out of being the dominant search engine for some time.

From an earlier comment I made regarding Stripe shutting merchants down, and those merchants resorting to posting on HN and getting someone on HN to advocate for them to resolve their problem [0]:

"The main issue is not that [COMPANY] is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but that customers feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless customer who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money or business is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the customer is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not [COMPANY] is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests.

What can you do to help empower the powerless customers when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the customer and provide some quick and direct way for the customer to feel empowered?"

Having to resort to HN to get major problems resolved that are major customer service and potential legal / liability issues causes me a lot of stress when I realize that I have don't have nearly the same sort of power or influence as some of the others here do on HN. I worry that my complaints would simply go ignored.

@jgrahamc would love you to comment on what we can do to avoid people having to resort to HN for a solution to these problems, which favors the well-connected and squeaky wheels and disfavors everyone else.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274456

So I wanted to call BS on the statement that 19th century elementary school textbooks had the & character as the final letter of the alphabet, but lo and behold: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/pho...

Now this was not universally true, but there seems to be at least some anecdotal evidence that in the mid to late 1800s some English language school age textbooks did indeed have this extra character.

I'd love to learn how you managed to scale on a single server - other than the above, any tips or tricks? I'm also a PHP guy on Ngnix with MySQL but want to know what tips you might have for a dynamic (non-static) site to handle such scale on a single server

Would an alternative to this approach be to let your customers copy a spreadsheet of yours that already has an API function connection to your data? This would avoid the need to create users and upserts and all that, no? Or am I missing something?

While this may be true, there's no practical opposition to the force of automation. What can be automated, inevitably will be automated. The efficiencies offered by machines doing what people can do is too irresistible, even to the people who consume the technology, and even more so to those that employ or implement it. People increasingly want more with less labor and consumers most often choose those things that are automated and available without human labor over those that are. There's very little that can practically counterweight the increasing automation of all the things.

How is it being fine-tuned to be able to generate relevant SQL queries on the crunchbase data set? How does this jibe with the article saying they imported 2.5m records from crunchbase? Where and how are you able to import or fine tune the API-accessible GPT-3 this way? Any pointers for where I can look to do the same?

Edit: I noticed you edited your comment above with some details. It seems that he used GPT-3 just to create the SQL statement which was then executed locally. So GPT-3 never had the actual data set, just a prompt that included some details of the schema.

As a result I think any sort of "success" here is fairly limited when GPT-3 is blind to the actual data and has limited knowledge of the schema to be able to formulate queries that imply some knowledge of the data.

The installation instructions mention Render but doesn't say what it's needed for, or if it's needed. Is only the Docker needed? Can you provide more details on the installation page?

Is this a self-hosted GPT model? One of the smaller models? Fine tuned on Crunchbase data? Any insights into how this was put together?

Incorrect numbers to use.

From the NY Times Article on this topic (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/business/jpmorgan-chase-c...):

"Mr. Salisbury, a former director of institutional research and assessment at Augustana College, estimates that two million students start college each year for the first time. Having done the FAFSA once, he figured, most families wouldn’t seek help from a company like Frank the second time they needed to and beyond. So if Frank had served five million people in just half a decade, it would have captured a sizable share of new college students who needed financial aid."

Since this has to do with financial aid applications, the number of total possible customers / students is much lower than 20 million. Which means their 5 million number is WAY exaggerated.

Syncthing doesn't support my older Mac devices anymore. I can't get Syncthing to work on Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10.5). And no, the device is not upgradable for a variety of reasons not worth going into.

Any solutions there?

How much does the typical parked domain make? What is the biggest revenue generator? Newsy seems interesting but is it really working well for your 50 domains? Is it anything more than RSS aggregator with autoposting? What else do you do to help with the passive income streams?

Is it important for podcasts to have guests? Are podcasts that provide insight or discussion or deep dives into ideas without guests not as valuable as ones with guests? Do you primarily seek out podcasts that have guests?

The "FAANGs" or "MAFANGs" of today are the Standard Oil / US Steel / Westinghouse / etc of yesterday. Bezos, Musk, Pichai, and all would fit in really well with Rockefeller, Astor, Carnegie of yesterday. With one big exception: at least Carnegie and Astor and Rockefeller created enduring arts, sciences, and public spaces of good. The billionaires of today are primarily takers, with perhaps Gates as a notable exception.

A VC once told me that the best thing that Boston Dynamics makes are viral videos. Founded in 1992 with three major corporate owners who couldn't figure out how to monetize their R&D. As a University lab it would be grant funded.

What is your business model? How are you deciding who gets Beta access? What does the voice generation interface look like?

The average person doesn't have room for a sufficient sized chicken coop. The average person doesn't have the wherewithal to get eggs to market. The average person can't efficiently produce eggs in any sort of quantity to satisfy market demand. The average person hasn't invested in quality control nor in packaging. Simply put, the average person can't do much to take advantage of any short-term pricing issues. In the long term this will settle, so any short-term investments that the average person will make will not be recooped (see what I did there).

Cream prices have more than doubled. At Target, the 32oz Heavy Cream that was $2.99 in Oct 2021 is now $6.49. And there's a cream shortage in any case. Inflation and supply chain issues.

Thanks for the response. I understand that fraud is a very real thing and that crooks will do anything to work the system, but the crooks have very little to lose and the merchants have so much to lose, and Stripe wields a lot of power in both instances, so the power imbalance is very real.

Imagine for example that your personal bank account was closed and the moneys held by the bank and you had no recourse other than emailing a general inbox or talking to customer support who can't do anything other than sympathize. Without that bank account you can lose your house, car, and assets. It's a very scary and very real thing. The bank can say that 99% of the time, the accounts are closed due to fraud, but you're that poor 1% (according to the bank) and therefore you're just a casualty of the process. There are harms from crooks and fraudsters, but there are harms to the individuals too.

The main issue is not that Stripe is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but the merchants feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues (which might not be fraudulent) will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless merchant who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the merchant is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not Stripe is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests.

What can you do to help empower the powerless merchants when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the merchant and provide some quick and direct way for the merchant to feel empowered?

If someone is ramping up a new business, say a subscription business that will go from $0 in January to over $1M in just a few months, that would easily trigger a fraud system, but it's not fraudulent, it's just a business that's seeing success. How can the merchant work with Stripe in advance to provide signals that there's something legit happening?

For sure I read it. In fact, he defines On-Demand Learning as follows in that article:

"The second category is "on-demand learning", this is the act of acquiring knowledge when the situation demands it, not sooner nor later. "

Which seems to be the sort of learning he aspires to. Learn it when the situation demands it, not sooner nor later. Not-withstanding a definition of the term on-demand learning that conflicts with other definitions of that term.

Says the guy who right on his home page [0] says:

"I love making fun small projects and learning new things in the process. I’m interested in computer science, physics, math, and pretty much everything else."

[0] https://www.jernesto.com/

Sounds like the sort of on-demand learning he's criticizing.

It's one of those ironic Meme shirts sold on Etsy. Same dude sells Lehman Bros Risk Management (2008) shirts.

"I wasn't intending for my arrow sticking out to poke people in the eye. People are just getting taller these days"

This from a fellow who posts on Twitter using his Mastodon Social account handle. I don't get the point.

Exactly. The cloud orientation that differentiates from a non-cloud orientation is not simply a matter of execution abstraction -- that is already handled through libraries and scripts, etc. What would be cloud-oriented are the economic aspects of the cloud. I usually tell people that the cloud is really two separate ideas: the abstraction of infrastructure and computing on the one hand (what used to be called "grid computing") and the economic model of pay-per-consumption, pay-per-use, pay-per-service that shifts capital expenses (the stuff you own and have already paid for that depreciates over time) to operating expenses (stuff you have to keep paying to use). The CIOs like the technology on-demand, easy scale-up/scale-down aspects of the cloud while the CFOs like the idea of shifting CapEx to OpEx and pay as you go aspects of the cloud.

Twitter and Facebook could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care at all. Folks should rediscover the personal empowerment of blogging, and the joys of the early days of the 'net when the power was much more widely distributed. When Twitter came out it was called microblogging for a reason. I never really got Twitter and always considered myself to be a doof as a result, but maybe there's something to it. Decentralized blogging and microblogging is where it's been and is at if you want to own your own voice. Of course it's not the same megaphone as these concentrated centers of media power are, but then again, you trade off control for amplification. Those two things should be loosely coupled.

A cloud-oriented language should have a way to output for every function that has financial cost, there should be a cost estimator or inspector that provides estimated cost ranges for execution, or at least some indication of potential cost impact. The language should optimize for cost-reduction instead of performance as the cloud presents a cost / performance tradeoff.

"fine-tuned on images of spectrograms paired with text"

How many paired training images / text and what was the source of your training data? Just curious to know how much fine tuning was needed to get the results and what the breadth / scope of the images were in terms of original sources to train on to get sufficient musical diversity.