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yourcousinbilly

56 karma · joined February 10, 2018

YC Badge: 0x2f0d643602a0a1cf421f674206f9e8d6fe666a1f
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yourcousinbilly··on Co-Founding Considered Harmful
Two people to do the work. A founding team that can build and sell the product alone is the ideal team. All those skills in one person are hard enough to find. But the time required to sell and market is a full time job one cofounder often dedicates themselves to
yourcousinbilly··on Ask HN: What'd be possible with 1000x faster CPUs?
Video engineer here. Many seemingly network restricted tasks could be unlocked with faster CPUS doing advanced compression and decompression.

1. Video Calls

In video calls, encoding and decoding is actually a significant cost of video calls, not just networking. Right now the peak is Zoom's 30 video streams onscreen, but with 1000x CPUS you can have 100s of high quality streams with advanced face detection and superscaling[1]. Advanced computer vision models could analyze each face creating a face mesh of vectors, then send those vector changes across the wire instead of a video frame. The receiving computers could then reconstruct the face for each frame. This could completely turn video calling into a CPU restricted task.

2. Incredible Realistic and Vast Virtual Worlds

Imagine the most advanced movie realistic CGI being generated for each frame. Something like the new Lion King or Avatar like worlds being created before you through your VR headset. With extremely advanced eye tracking and graphics, VR would hit that next level of realism. AR and VR use cases could explode with incredibly light headsets.

To be imaginative, you could have everything from huge concerts to regular meetings take play in the real world, but be scanned and sent to VR participants in real time. The entire space including the room and whiteboard or live audience could be rendered in realtime for all VR participants.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine-getting-started

yourcousinbilly··on Ask HN: App for keeping notes on friends/family?
They are called personal CRMs.

Dex is the YC company, https://getdex.com/about/

Monica is the open source tool, https://github.com/monicahq/monica

yourcousinbilly··on Nobody wants to teach anymore
“Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.”

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

yourcousinbilly··on Ask HN: Can I see your cheatsheet?
Thanks! I built this from the beginning to be public, so have got into the habit to both copy and paste whenever I learn something new and obfuscate secrets.

I have had the current problem of its so massive that finding the specific sheet can take too long. I tried Obsidian, but still look for great fast search

yourcousinbilly··on Ask HN: Can I see your cheatsheet?
I have a massive Cheatsheet for most languages and many packages- https://github.com/jsfuentes/Code-Cheatsheet

Also hosted on gitbooks: https://openai.gitbook.io/code-cheatsheets/

yourcousinbilly··on Y Combinator company “skip the interview” reaches top ten of r/recruitinghell
The way I think about it, YC funds founders very early with their current idea and traction as their resume. Founders pivoting and iterating through several ideas during and after the batch is very common. So just because something is a YC company doesn't mean its actually a good idea that was "greenlit".
yourcousinbilly··on Launch HN: Slingshow (YC W20) – Easily build custom virtual events and webinars
Hey, it’s Jorge the CTO of Slingshow here. The security claims refer to all the video/audio in the product and were passed on from our video infrastructure providers[0][1]. Unless you are recording on the Stage, the video/audio doesn’t touch our servers. The WebRTC protocol actually mandates connections and signaling are encrypted with the Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP).

But, I’ve spent the last hour reviewing the details and Daily mentions end to end encryption for P2P calls only and it seems Agora doesn’t mention it at all! It seems the WebRTC SFU servers (middlemen needed for calls greater than 4ish) require encryption and decryption server side breaking end to end encryption. This was all really concerning to me, and I think Agora used to claim they were end to end encrypted[2] and then their marketing became part of our marketing early on :(. I have removed all security claims from our website as we reevaluate how we approach security. Sorry about this HN.

[0] https://docs.agora.io/en/Agora%20Platform/security?platform=...

[1] https://www.daily.co/security

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23026101

yourcousinbilly··on Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission
Political vs apolitical is just semantics. Will companies deciding not to be socially active have a political impact? Yes. Does not engaging in political activities support the status quo? Yes. Is a particular political group more affected by a ban on activism? Yes.

And I agree focus on their goal is a great, abstract guiding principle for a company. But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world? Brian believes social activism has "the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division." That might be true, but in many cases, I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy changes and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.

yourcousinbilly··on Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
Well the point of CSS separating style from structure is to be modular and useable across different websites/pages. So define a button class name I can use anyway in my HTML.

But the web environment has changed. React and Vue introduced modularity of style and structure with components. So I can just use a Button component across the website instead of a CSS class. This means CSS is mostly written only for that specific component or file. So tailwind and those other css-in-js have sprung up to bring both into one file.

And I’ve been using tailwind for about a year now and can very quickly throw together most layouts. It feels very smooth to be able to define the div and it’s style on one line at the same time. And short classnames like “m-4” and “w-full” are also more succinct than the raw html style property.

yourcousinbilly··on Intuit to buy Credit Karma for $7B
I get the sentiment for YC, but “not one” is pretty impossible. Airbnb reported a profit in 2017 and 2018. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/airbnb-sa...

It did lose money in 2019, but because of preIPO marketing and advertising. Marketplaces have great network effects and profit margins, seems like a very viable self sustaining standalone company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90418766/report-not-even-airbnb-...

yourcousinbilly··on US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries
The Onion did it better in 2008:

"North Korea has one of the largest armies in the world, but they save consumption by simply not feeding them"

"Truly elegant in its simplicity"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvz_xzaMvCQ

yourcousinbilly··on China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens
Aren't you worried the silencing of dissent will hide a very dysfunctional world from you? Aren't you worried it has happened already and your opinion has already been influenced?
yourcousinbilly··on China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens
While bad actors being punished is important, there is a constant trade-off for ensuring good actors aren't punished. Ideas like trial by jury and innocent until proven guilty try to address this because the judge of good and bad is essential. I assume you don't see government dissent as bad, because social credit and constant surveillance will discourage and punish these good actors. And with a system like this setup, more nefarious, corrupt, and oppressive uses could occur eventually. And with China known for its corruption and brutal authority, I am surprised you are so confident the government won't continuously abuse this power if not now than in the future.
yourcousinbilly··on China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens
Whoa whoa whoa, just because both systems have problems and have some similarities doesn't mean no one can complain. I'm not gonna defend the US's problems because it doesn't matter! It's easy to see the Chinese system as morally bad. Why? Because free speech and dissent are the mechanisms by which we improve our ideas and systems. This social credit system backed by the already authoritarian government will further cement the will of the party powers over the will of the people. And everyone should care about a billion people.
yourcousinbilly··on Meritocracy and its discontents: The merits of revisiting Michael Young
True, why go through the motions of taking money then giving it back. Sounds like a great way to waste money through government inefficiency. It could possibly be efficient, but we should expect it not to be.
yourcousinbilly··on Meritocracy and its discontents: The merits of revisiting Michael Young
I think we can agree meritocracy means the best people for the job get the job. But, your contention points out what factors we evaluate when we say "best". Do we take "best" to mean when they apply for the job after years of some environment? Or "best" to mean the original genetic disposition independent of environment?
yourcousinbilly··on Meritocracy and its discontents: The merits of revisiting Michael Young
UBI isn't the clear choice everyone makes it out to be. I'm all for lowering inequality and spreading out wealth. But, fundamentally, UBI is just a welfare program with way more money pouring in so it guarantees a livable income to everyone. We could achieve the same effect by just increasing the progressive welfare. We could remove those welfare cliffs where people lose money by making more money by smoothing out the curves. But, UBI does something more by taking money from those who need it and giving it to those who don't. Every dollar going to an upper middle class tech worker is a dollar not going towards uplifting the lowest of our society. We should care a little about efficiency because UBI will be CRAZY expensive and CRAZY anti-business when we increase taxes on them. There are less costly ways to achieve better income equality like better education or increased welfare which don't hurt business. Businesses could operate with way thinner profits sure, but other countries offer other options.

Here's a UBI debate for the interested: https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal-basi...