bromquinn

Hi HN,

My name is Brom, and I'm the founder of Empath Ventures. I made the linked RFS out of frustration - most psychedelic startups we're seeing are all crowding into the same problem space (generic mental health conditions).

While psychedelics are great for solving those, I think there are so many more uses for and potential business models in psychedelics!

Hopefully the RFS is useful to someone.

"if we simply could have used a smart contract where money is automatically deposited upon project completion, we would have ensured payment."

What? I didn't know this was currently possible. Maybe you should make this your product.

Weird. I’ve been using ProtonMail for years as my primary email, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a captcha. This includes when I visit ProtonMail over VPN’s or in a private window

I kind of hate the idea of encouraging young people to pursue speculation instead of building. Post-IPO investing doesn't create a ton of value for society.

This seems to be a great ‘intro to defi’ read.

Can someone with knowledge of defi point out any deficiencies or inaccuracies here? Are there better ‘intro to defi’ papers that newcomers should read?

Missing: psychedelic therapeutics

It seems like you could use this to upload a piece of media to an S3 bucket, create a link using MintGate, and boom - now you have paywalled content. This is incredibly ergonomic compared to existing monetization schemes.

This also separates the hosting of the content from the payment system for the content. Example: If you're a podcast creator on patreon, patreon can ban you, and you just have to hope that your fans will follow you to your new platform. With MintGate's solution, it seems like you could change your content hosting at any time without impacting your token holders. This makes creator's relationship with their fans more resilient to censorship, and reduces the creator's reliance on any single platform.

Holding a creator's personal token v.s. paying them a monthly subscription on patreon is an interesting proposition. It changes the relationship between fan and creator from 'customer' to 'investor' and gives token-holding fans a monetary incentive to promote the creator.

I think we're still in the early days of seeing how indie creators can make money on the internet, and projects like this are leading the charge towards new monetization schemes - very cool!

To what do you attribute this decline in social skills?

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that having a better example on the main page would be ideal! I will work on the topic adding interface to make it more intuitive :)

Self esteem is attacking the is-vs-ought problem. Sure, in the cold, social Darwin paradigm, those without ability have no worth - but this is not how things SHOULD be.

I think it’s important for people to know that they have value, regardless of their abilities. This doesn’t mean that people should not be encouraged to succeed. I think self esteem and achievement can go hand in hand. For me personally, I think believing that I was special helped motivate me to achieve more! After all, If you’re not special, what chance do you have competing against the other 7billion people in the world?

Anecdotally, I was raised by two very people-self esteem parents, and have become fairly successful compared to my peer group. I also remember the first time I heard someone say that self esteem was bad. It came from the evangelical, objectivist parents of a kid I knew in early high school. That kid ended up failing college and getting addicted to opioids.

This is slick! I could see using this for one of my own projects. How do you get the data? Are you using the official apis or are you 'scraping'?

Serious question. How does one know that any secure communications provider is secure? I use tools like Signal and protonmail, but this article has me thinking that those might as well be government ops.

Presumably the governments who purchased systems from Crypto AG had people educated in security do some due diligence on Crypto AG's products before purchasing them. If they didn't realize that the products were compromised by the US, what chance do I have?

thanks for the feedback!

TLDR: On Topic is a Chrome extension that tries to help you focus. Specify topic(s) you need to focus on, and as you browse the internet, our NLP analyzes the content of each page you view. If a page is irrelevant to your area of focus, it gets blocked!

Hi HN,

Creator of On Topic here. The idea came to me while I was a masters student in the Georgia Tech OMSCS (online masters of computer science) program. I’ve always had a hard time focusing, and studying online was very difficult for me. I would be watching my college lectures (which were hosted on YouTube) or reading some blog relevant to one of my classes, and without fail would end up going down some totally unrelated rabbit hole.

I tried using existing content blocking software and editing etc/hosts, but this didn’t work for me. Why? Well for one: My lecture videos were hosted on YouTube, so blocking YouTube was a non-starter.

I quickly realized that a truly useful focus enhancing software would need to be able to block “topics”, not just domains. Using some of the NLP techniques I learned during my degree, I hacked together the On Topic extension. It allows you to specify topic(s) you need to focus on, and as you browse the internet, our NLP analyzes the content of each page you view. If a page is irrelevant to your area of focus, it gets blocked! Right now it works on YouTube, Reddit, and most news-sites and blogs.

thanks for the feedback!

RE picking the most effective action in your to-do list: this is something I've thought quite a lot about, and is a product I'd like to make. easier said than done though :)

the extension has only been live for a week or so, and is currently bringing in $0 :)

this is interesting. theoretically, more liquidity should lead to more efficiency in the distribution of a commodity . in practice, there are obvious exceptions to this (the hunt brothers & silver, the oil markets from 2006-2010 etc).

I also wonder how a futures contract with instant liquidity interplays with standard water bills, which as far as I know are billed at rates that get adjusted yearly at most (at least here in LA).

Sorry for the late reply:

Not at the OS level, but I’ve built a chrome extension that does this.

I had a hard time focusing in grad school. I’d be watching YouTube lectures or reading a Reddit thread on a subject I was studying, and all of a sudden It was like I’d blink and be watching some comedy video or browsing r/funny.

Rather than simply blacklist sites, The chrome extension I built uses a topic model to block webpages. You input the topics you need to focus on (for me it was often computer science and math), and the extension will block webpages, YouTube vids and Reddit threads unrelated to those topics.

You can check it out at ( https://GetOnTopic.com )

Not very exotic, but I’m a fan of L-Theanine + caffeine.

Outside of supplements, I’ve created a chrome extension that helps you focus ( https://GetOnTopic.com )

Think of it as a digital nootropic ;)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and trying different things.

Something that’s really helped me is to set aside the first hour of the morning for working on my most important goal. Turn off notifications, put the phone in the other room, and just do it for an hour. (The book ‘the war of art’ has some good notes on this).

If you commit to spending an hour, the next thing you’ll have to do is fight internet distractions during that time. I’ve recently created a chrome extension that helps with this by allowing you to input topics you want to focus on, and the extension will block any unrelated content. ( https://getontopic.com )