danfang

Founder here,

Having strong friendships is one of the most important things for happiness and wellbeing. It's been especially hard to be social since the pandemic hit, and people in developing countries have become increasingly isolated.

Junto is an attempt at solving some of these huge problems - but starting small and in my own community.

Hi HN, I’m the founder of Junto.

I’ve personally struggled with maintaining close relationships in the past couple of years. With WFH becoming the norm in the tech industry, friends moving away, and the general fickleness of adulthood, I found myself deprived of fulfilling friendships that I once had.

I figured, in such a vibrant metro as SF, there must be people who I could be great friends with. Why was it still so difficult to reach them?

Meeting new people, especially as an introvert, can be a stressful experience. Not only are random meetups stressful, they’re very hit or miss in terms of compatibility.

Junto is an attempt at making the process as easy and reliable as possible. You’ll get to meet people who you’re likely to get along with, on your own terms. I chose to launch in SF, which is not only where I live, but where this problem can be felt most deeply.

If this resonates with you, consider becoming part of the first cohort of members. You can also reach out to me personally at [email protected]. Any feedback or criticism is greatly welcomed!

You may have forgotten that the purpose of a lock is not to be opened in many useful ways, but actually to remain closed when you want it.

How does this compare to https://www.warp.dev/?

For many (including me), Apple products are real pocket computers that do everything we wish. Apple products are built with a set purpose in mind. I couldn't care less about side-loading or hacking random software onto these devices. You can't expect products built for the masses to be suitable for a minority use case.

Yes, if your definition of active is that you had to make a decision, yes. Pretty much everything we do is active. In the same way that sleeping is exercise because your muscles move.

If we take the premise of the article, that Trump was anti-mask and Fauci was pro-mask (although slower than we would have liked, either by mistake or by political pressure) - I'm referring to the truth being pro-mask, what Fauci, the WHO, and the CDC ended up advocating for.

I agree. Intense political pressure from half of the country would have immense negative consequences on whatever Fauci would try to accomplish. He would have instantly lost any credibility with half of Americans who listen primarily to Trump.

If Fauci divorced himself from Trump, and the two took opposite stances on masks, can we really conclusively say the public would be more willing to listen to the truth about masks? By playing "both sides" he gets to have greater influence, maybe not in the medical community, but certainly on the public at large.

If Trump took a harder stance on HCHQ and replaced Fauci with someone who was also pro HCHQ, do you think the public would be more likely to listen to Fauci who took an opposite stance?

I'm thinking of a globally diversified portfolio of index funds based on modern portfolio theory.

You can read about the investment strategy, but basically it comes down to risk adjusted returns over long periods of time.

It will become abundantly clear why Pokemon cards are not part of that strategy.

We probably have different definitions of active investing. I take my definition from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_management

In my mind, another way to divide the two is about assumptions about efficiency. Passive investors assume that the market is generally efficient, and do not try to exploit inefficiencies to generate returns. Active investors generate returns from perceived inefficiencies (information asymmetry, etc).

All these traders are playing in a casino. Yes, the casino favors the house. Yes, people have figured out how to make big bucks by counting cards. The rules will probably change so the house keeps on winning.

To me, all this indicates that the only way to win is to not play. Passively investing in the market as a whole is the only way to win long term.

Disclosure: I work at a robo-advisor specializing in long term passive investing. My views are my own, and in no way associated with the views of my employer. This is not investment advice.

> have you tried using pen and paper for things?

Yes.

If I can express something through writing (as with the cases you mention), there is no faster, more convenient tool than a note taking app + keyboard. It's instant, archived, editable, and globally available (where there's internet of course).

If it's an idea that needs to be visually designed (shapes, graphs, space), I find that I can mostly do this by redefining the problem in a way that can be written down.

There's a small percentage of time where having a diagram is truly essential to my workflow. I'm not opposed to whiteboarding in these cases, but it's not as vital to my process as the author implies it is for them.

> indescribably helpful

I tend not to be convinced by things that are indescribable. What I'm understanding is that it's a tool that makes you happy. That's sometimes a valid enough reason to do something.

The reality is that companies at an early stage don't have validation of their idea yet. That is priority #1. The scaling part comes only after you know your idea has merit. It's also "the easy part". With the right allocation of resources and talent, most scaling challenges can be solved. The same cannot be said of creating valuable / interesting products.

The right approach is to optimize for speed and flexibility. Make it as easy as possible to validate your idea. Make it easy to tear down and rebuild in a "scalable" way if you're lucky enough to make it past step #1.

Your only metric of "good" code generation is # of bugs. My assertion was that this is not accurate.

I also disagree with the premise that code generation by AI will be very useful for programmers, for the reasons stated above.

I agree with most of the points the author makes.

> Pencil and paper are the best programming tools and vastly under used

I'm not convinced of this one. I grew up with digital tools only. Can someone give me examples where this assertion is true?

This is naive. The point is that code is a well defined system with clear rules that can be expressed through logic and mathematics. GPT is suited to approximate systems where the rules are not well defined. Until AI can actually learn the principles of logic, it may not be useful for code generation on a meaningful scale, other than things just like simple auto-completions.

Not only that, AI would also have to learn the principles of system design, performance, security, readability, maintainability. That's what makes "good" software. It's a far stretch to say that AI could achieve anything of the sort based on current abilities.

Yep, every language is fundamentally broken. Fortunately, some are useful. Go has proven to be useful in building stuff that matters, at the end of the day. This unfortunately can't be said of all the fancy languages with perfect type systems.

Right now the main use case is to share products you love by adding them to your collection.

In the future, when more users are on the platform, you can follow people you're interested in and get updates on products they add.

You can also use it to generally explore products by category, brand, etc and find the most highly recommended items.

Hey HN!

I've been hacking on Instadrop for a few weeks now. It's a platform to discover and share things you love - tech, media, apparel, etc.

It's an exploration into what product discovery might look like given that Amazon is plagued by fake reviews and we're constantly being bombarded by targeted advertising from FB, Google, etc.

I've always relied on trusted sources (e.g. Wirecutter) and word of mouth recommendations when it comes to discovering great things. This is an attempt to replicate that process on a larger scale.

Anyway, I would love to get your early feedback on the idea! It's very early days - the product database is definitely incomplete, and tons of features are missing. :)

In addition to Python format strings: Javascript template strings:

`I am ${variable.foo} ${variable.bar}.` - Life changing!

> In other words, YC got lucky on Airbnb. Because YC's first impression of hundreds (or thousands) of other founders has been wrong.

IIRC, YC has rarely rejected a company that would be valued at $1B+. Perhaps SendGrid is the only one.

> It's just kind of pitiable that YC can't do better than this.

I don't believe any seed investor has a better rate of return than YC. I don't think it's even close. Whatever you imagine as "better" doesn't exist.

> A huge improvement for a YC-like investment firm would be to do something more objective. Competent people do not hire employees on the basis of a first impression, they spend many hours assessing their skills, abilities, personality, etc.

Perhaps it's not wise to fund founders based on how companies hire employees. Companies hire for risk minimization, not return maximization - just look at your average tech interview.

I think you underestimate the value of culture fit when it comes to building successful businesses. I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your framework of objective assessment.

I built a niche site dedicated to professional e-sports streamers (mainly focused on League of Legends).

https://prostreams.gg

It just launched a few weeks ago, but is on track for ~300K page views / month. The top 5% of users spend over 8 hours / week watching content. Looking to grow the site first, then monetize through affiliates and advertising.

Nope. See the version with the lines. https://twitter.com/Jakesaurius/status/1331543133910396929

The illusion has nothing to do with the arrows, but the circles still don't move.