a_d

congrats on the launch! .. I am loving this entire thread.

It is important for some company to make home buying better. Even outside of the pain of unaffordability, it is an utterly broken process. Advent of LLMs do give hope that this process can be imporoved signifiantly.

Fun fact: I met Raymond and Raffi a long time ago and discouraged from going into this area. But now, I am glad they did. Their conviction is inspiring.

If Turbo tax can make it possible for a person to file taxes, I am pretty sure a home can be bought online.

Best of luck to modern realty! .. and we should hang again sometime :)

I have been working on a AI "tutor" for kids (6-10) based on the constraints of - no websites, no apps, no ipad/iphone. But after this demo, I need to rethink my entire approach! Maybe these ideas I am holding on to, are just not relevant.

(For those interested in my current approach: https://robodonkey.com/)

I made a device that lets my kids engage with chatGPT without eye strain [1] and parental controls. No need to give them my phone or laptop, no more worrying about them wandering onto the internet [2]. IMO it is incredibly useful to have kids interact safely with AI.

[1] an old fashioned B&W monochrome LCD.

[2] its a stupid little dumb terminal

This is incredibly useful! Is it possible to make this into a simple (single page) shopping list? Where I type my shopping list, product recommends substitutes with lower sugar — and gives me distribution (histogram) of main ingredients for my shopping list.

That would be life changing.

Serious Question: Why are managers needed? What is the steelman argument for managers and for not having managers?

Love this, PascalPixel!

Hope you are well my friend. I smiled at this project and then saw it was made by you — it’s such a beautiful project that only you could have made :).

Great idea and execution.

It is possible that this becomes the inciting incident that leads to a viable twitter alternative.

Making many programmers and tech people annoyed at the same time isn't a wise move by Twitter.

Tarantino mentioned Godard as an influence at the beginning of the Reservoir Dogs script (Here he is talking about it: https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU). He says that the seminal moment when he recognized his key aesthetic as a director, was when he read Pauline Kael's review of a Godard film (A band apart), where Kael says in her review: "It was as if a bunch of movie mad young frenchmen had taken up a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the lines". Tarantino says that when he read that he knew that this was his aesthetic -- this is what he wanted to do as a director.

Tarantino called his production company "A Band Apart" (in my opinion) for that reason.

(Tarantino's comment: https://youtu.be/vb7oUEVjFjo)

wow! Thank you so much for a detailed response! I learned a lot from your comment.

If I may ask another question: do you think the CubeSat ‘form factor’ (10x10x10 cm-cube) can have enough propulsion (combined with some gravtiy-assist) to be able to get into an orbit around another planet or another moon in our solar system? Meaning, can a CubeSat be sent to .. say Titan, as a probe (say a ‘mini-Cassini’).

(Just curious to understand whether cheap ‘CubeSats’ can be used as tiny probes for the entire solar system)

Thank you!

Imagine if one were to launch a swarm of cubesats with cameras on them looking away from Earth —- what would you imagine those cameras would see? (Let’s say cameras allow very long exposure shots?) Another way to ask my question is: can cubesat be used as “mini-Hubbles” to get closeups of planets/moon in the solar system or nearby stars?

Second question (somewhat related to first) — can a cubesat stream video to a server on earth? (Or does one need a ‘big Sat’ to do video streaming?

Norm is the Bob Dylan of comedy.

What do you think about a recent Veritassium video that discusses the idea that ‘there is no such thing as a visual learner’ (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA)

Just curious.

One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn’t directly make it, but he spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much harder to get than the pirated copy).

Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!

Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..

A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.

Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.

I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!

It’s available here: https://www.gog.com/game/railroad_tycoon_2

You can play on macOS using parallels.

A bunch of videos come up on Google and they can quickly give a glimpse of the gameplay - although I will suggest diving it without the trailer (https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+tycoon+2)

The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...

Scientism is rampant in business thinking — especially physics envy.

“ As a result I’ve improved a number of biomarkers (e.g. resting heart rate, resting blood glucose, strength, endurance, nutritional deficiencies, etc)” — how does one measure / track these things? ESP resting heart rate, blood glucose and nutritional deficiencies.

Solution to the Byzantine General’s Problem using proof of work is possibly an example. The basic problem is: how do you make sure that multiple entities, which are separated by distance, are in absolute full agreement before an action is taken?

If one is not trying to solve it in the fastest time, then an agreed ‘truth’ can be reached after ‘some time’ without a central entity. By deciding to go ‘slow’, a solution can be found eventually.

Agree with the recommendation.

Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.

I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)

There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.

Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.

Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)

This is exactly right - infact, because some people might consider housing in Bay Area to be a good investment, we can try to make it affordable for others.

This is the project we’ve been working on for the last month or so: https://zerodown.com/