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rrival

714 karma · joined July 30, 2007

roddyr2

NYC -> Denver

entrepreneur/dev

startupschwag, iconmetrics, allify (betaworks), rescueid, priceadvance, maxloren, refreshthing, treetini, etc

submissionscomments
rrival··on Show HN: Too Many Business Ideas? stop choosing, launch all of them, FAST&FREE
How well is “if you build it, they will come” working for anyone else?
rrival··on Ask HN: Do you feel scummy making AI products?
With many of these solutions, there's already a there there. Middle market and larger companies are seeing dramatic efficiency improvements year 1. Making this tech so accessible, while unfortunately inviting crypto bros to add "prompt engineer" title to their linkedin, also enables POCs that deliver value, even if wildly inefficient. They're a basis.

Wrappers around ChatGPT have already provided more value generation than any prod blockchain implementation I've ever heard of that couldn't otherwise be implemented as a distributed db.

rrival··on Fossil is quitting smartwatches
Have you seen the Citizen hybrid watches? Analog hands + eink, 17+ days of battery life.
rrival··on Lidar Reveals 650-Square-Mile Maya Site Hidden Beneath Guatemalan Rain Forest
Saw Sarah Parcak speak on this at her book launch @ The Explorer's Club (https://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Space-Future-Shapes-Past/...). The current, viable remote observation approach for shipwrecks is to use satellite photos of sand plume disturbances near beaches to hint at underwater features worth further exploration.
rrival··on Ask HN: How do you recall ideas/eureka you get during walks, showers, etc.?
I run forwardapp.co for this reason - I bought it from the previous developer when they wanted to shut it down. I've used it every day since it was Jot in the early 2010s. At ~60 users who paid $2 once, it's a total commercial failure, and I'm going to keep paying for it forever.
rrival··on Ask HN: What was life like before and after a baby
Things that made year 1 tolerable:

- Understanding your time horizon just went from weeks/months to "today" for all definitions of "today" for awhile

- Boot Camp for New Dads (https://www.bootcampfornewdads.org/)

- Night nannies (~10 weeks)

- A Doona stroller

- Mom's On Call (book) - my daughter was sleeping 630pm-7am at 3.5mos

- Silver nipple cups (cracking/chafing = bad)

- Slumber Pod (for travel)

- Nest cameras (and a travel wifi hub like GL-MT1300 that acts as a wifi<>wifi bridge)

And at least in CO, daycare waitlists are a real thing. At 6 mos prego we were told we were late to register.

rrival··on Vintage Startup Employee Swag?
all credit goes to valley schwag for the original concept - they went on to better things (getsatisfaction.com) - but as a subscriber to that service, I inadvertently received a cc'd (instead of bcc'd) list of 500 of their subscribers, and when valley schwag shut down, I reached out to those past subs and TechCrunch to bring it back!
rrival··on Vintage Startup Employee Swag?
"founder" of startupschwag here ( https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/03/return-of-the-schwag/ ) - passed the torch to a guy about 10 years ago - would be happy to talk about how to bring it back, at the time the addressable market seemed... small.

I still have a few kozmo tshirts from '99 around here somewhere =)

rrival··on Ask HN: How do you take notes throughout your work day?
Text file + Forward (forwardapp.co) - bought the source for an app called Jot before it shut down and brought it back online as Forward. Totally biased and I love it, all credit to the original author Dan Hopwood.

Forward sends me an email tomorrow, next week, with all of the notes I tag for that day. Takes it off my mind until I need to think about it.

rrival··on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
Forward: http://ForwardApp.co

Quickly send yourself notes now. tomorrow. next week.

Has about 50 happy users and I'll keep it alive forever b/c I use it every day for time shifting thoughts on my mind =)

rrival··on Soviet Lun-Class Ekranoplan Ground Effect Vehicle
Hadn't heard of this type of vehicle before - this was helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x22nVFTd8nI
rrival··on Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
- Time spent working on myself (exercise, personal development) seems to improve my business

- Adding value for others is the best way I've found to achieve greater success

- (and this is very recent) consider price as a measure of value, like a liter is a measure of volume

rrival··on Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
and the rest of NIRVANAnet
rrival··on Google T5 scores 88.9 on SuperGLUE Benchmark, approaching human baseline
Where do I take the SuperGLUE test?
rrival··on Less than 6 hours of sleep a night linked to increased risk of early death
Getting ~5h for awhile now. Coffee ftw.
rrival··on Uber, Lyft drivers manipulate fares at DCA causing artificial price surges
Experienced this at LAX - another driver called my driver, commenting "It's at 3.5!!" - well played, I don't fault them for this at all.
rrival··on Microsoft is rebuilding its Edge browser on Chrome and bringing it to the Mac
Great! Let's add another MSFT browser to the regression tests!
rrival··on Ask HN: Has anyone undergone stem cell treatment for auto-immune disease?
There's a prescription discount plan - takes that $2k/mo cost down to $5.00/mo on good insurance plans.
rrival··on Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?
Make sure sales compensation is very closely tied to performance, i.e. don't put salespeople on a vesting schedule tied only to time passing.
rrival··on SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy
The Dark Forest (Three Body Problem) explores this
rrival··on Ask HN: How can I become more eloquent?
APEC - Assert thesis, Present evidence, Explain relevance, Conclude. Should include the counterargument in the explanation paragraph.

Source: my tyrant of an English professor.

Add a personal/colorful story paragraph before the A and you get the format another professor used while a professionally prolific writer.

rrival··on Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?
Mirsky's Worst of the Web, because Gabocorp and FuckedCompany were already mentioned =)
rrival··on Ask HN: How do you take idea notes / voice memos / reminders to yourself?
http://forwardapp.co/ - we bought the app 'Jot', rebranded it and brought it back for this purpose
rrival··on Ask HN: How do I share equity with a sales partner?
Make sure they're commission incentivized. I learned this the hard, expensive way. If there's a way to structure equity grants around sales performance, do it. At the very least, make sure you have minimum requirements beyond 1 year of time for your cliff on any equity agreements - ideally, attach a reasonable sales target as a schedule.

Don't let them sell you on vesting based on time - they're not adding value if they're not selling.

rrival··on Ask HN: Moving Out of Silicon Valley because of housing? Where to?
He's kidding... You must not live in CO? It's the line out here. Anti-town building, too many people are moving here already because it's so great, so spread the word that it's buried in snow, full of potheads and hippies. These are not the towns your looking for. Move along, move along.
rrival··on Cards Against Humanity’s Private Island
"Hawaii 2" is one of my favorite things from 2014.
rrival··on Show HN: Soothe – Uber for Massages
also see https://www.zeel.com/
rrival··on Neuromancer, 30 years old this month
More from Neal Stephenson: Diamond Age is good, Cryptonomicon is fantastic. Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire is interesting as well.
rrival··on Poll: Would you take $10M now or start your own company?
What's the # of exits that result in $10m for one founder?
rrival··on 2048 AI
Strange game. The only way to win is not to play.
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