justinboogaard

Glad they draw attention to the difference between “healthy years” and “just more years”. From our work at GoGo (GoGoGrandparent.com) our clients specifically value more time in the community they grew old in. As you age the trip to church every Sunday becomes what you live for, and taking that away so you can live more years in a retrofitted apartment building isn’t worth it to a lot of people.

I don’t think the quote is saying objects have to obey laws because they are extreme (and therefore easy to notice) I think it’s saying all objects have to follow the established rules of physics, regardless of how unusual they are. It’s an interesting idea though! Known, “extreme” objects may be less fruitful places to study unknown forces because they have qualities that overwhelming drown out smaller less known forces.

You (me, all of us) are (indirectly) paying for Google ads in the same way that we are (indirectly) paying for merchant credit card processing fees. If you paid for search, some businesses might be able to lower the cost of their products because they don’t have to pay for advertising.

I’m not really buying this, so I thought of a way to disprove it.

This statistical outcome only holds for recessive genes on the X chromosome, but it doesn’t make men with the recessive gene “more extreme” than woman with the recessive gene. Just the number of people would be different. So if there is such a gene that makes people excel in their specific field, theoretically we could sequence the x-chromosome of the top women in that field and look for the common recessive gene. They would be more likely to share it if it mattered in that field.

This is interesting, but when you consider the scale by which men across the board receive different societal advantages over women, it feels trivial. The discrepancy should only appear at the top of every game, not with the middle management too.

Because of this I fear it is more likely other societal effects are at play. I try to be mindful of the ones I can directly control.

+1 for tactile buttons!

Through our work at GoGoGrandparent.com (a service that helps older adults and people living with disabilities use Uber/Lyft, grocery services, meal services and pharmacy services reliably without smartphones) we’ve interviewed dozens of folks living with visual impairments.

The feedback that stands out the most was from a gentlemen in his 30s or 40s living with blindness since birth. Paraphrasing: “owning a smartphone was like living in a house where every time I entered a room, it was as if someone had just rearranged the furniture. Tactile buttons give me a literal feeling of control. If I get lost I can find my way.”

I thought it was really powerful.

Disclaimer: Our current landing page gets accessibility wrong in a lot of places and we’re in the middle of a site redesign to make it more accessible.

Wow, Handprint.com is incredible.

I needed to spend some time clicking around to figure out what was where, but then just spent half an hour learning about which hue is actually the warmest (there is no universally accepted answer, but a common theme is scarlet).

I think there are some jobs where the role of the job is to - for lack of time to come up with a better phrase: "help humans struggle with human things".

Yes, a nurse's role is to heal, but also to offer comfort to a patient, a teacher's job is to instruct, but also to try different ways of connecting with a student struggling to understand an idea.

I don't know if people think those types of jobs are bad or not. I think some of my family members would have had better hospital experiences if they could have had more attention from staff, so I don't think I'd call it useless.

I think that automation could lead to a world where more of the humans-dealing-with-human-things types of jobs are being done.

I think status has as much value as what someone is willing to give you for it. If the YC “Badge” is a currency that opens doors based on its perceived status, that feels like a helpful bonus to founders. I agree that if someone is in YC for status, that trait alone is likely not sufficient to help them create a successful company. However if someone is able to get a meeting with a VC because of their enrollment in the program (or a PM with a larger company to discuss a partnership, etc) that seems helpful and worth preserving.

That being said, it’s not clear to me that YC is lowering it’s acceptance rate. By accepting companies from all around the world, it’s pool of potential applications exponentially increases. If YC accepts 100 more companies from 10,000 more applicants that still feels like a pretty exclusive acceptance rate.

What could be going on is that people are comparing the batch sizes now to the batch sizes in the past and assuming the same rate of company applications. I’m not sure if YC publishes their application data, but without it I think it’s tough to say based on batch size alone whether or not YC is statistically becoming easier to get into.

This is a shame, we had the opportunity to meet with Bryce. He comes across as someone who has thought deeply about the space and was in it for the right reasons.

I’m struggling to imagine why LPs wouldn’t want Indie.VC investing in profitable companies. I had thought LPs had different buckets they try to invest their portfolio in. It makes sense that Indie.VC wouldn’t fit the mold of the “1% chance at 100x” but you would think they’d be a great fit for the “50% chance for 5x” bucket.

There probably isn’t a single reason, but I’d be interested in learning more about the LP <> VC dynamic in general if anyone has any insights.

This is a great insight, I’m reading this from my iPhone now!

Hi Dang, I hope you're well and always appreciate the context you bring to articles like this. Is there a way to turn this into a feature where similar submissions are linked?

TLDR; conditions like depression may stem from a poor distribution of cholesterol in the neurotransmitter signaling process in the brain.

Haha awesome, if you ever have any feedback please feel free to send me an email: [email protected]. I'd love to hear how we could improve the service and/or what we could do to make it easier to adopt.

Thanks for the heads up! Had it not been for your comment this would likely have continued for a long time.

Have them try GoGoGrandparent.com! A way to use Uber and Lyft with a phone call. Call and press 1 to get picked up from home, call and press 2 to get picked up at your last location. We screen their drivers, make sure the cars aren’t too big or too small and monitor GPS and trip pickups so that if it looks like a driver is getting lost we can get them back on track. Our mission is to help people age independently in their home for as possible, regardless of their age - or sobriety!

I don’t think I would visit HN if the voting system worked like this. I like hearing the popular opinion, but I also like hearing the popular contrary opinion and very often - like with your comment - the popular contrary sits right below the popular.

What I don’t like reading is “zinger” comments - stuff like “X is bad and people that think X is good are dumb”.

From what I’ve seen - these are the comments downvoted the most. I don’t dislike these comments because they cause me outrage, they just don’t make me feel the same way that well thought out comments - popular and unpopular - make me feel.

I like to think that "ethical" bad decisions are also "short term thinking" bad business decisions.

Two small examples that come to mind:

(1) Investing in clean energy is both ethical and cheaper in the long term. This one is straightforward. (2) Apple not turning ads on in iMessage. I assume they could, they just don't. If I was them I wouldn't because then it would start degrading consumer trust in the security of their products, losing that as a differentiator in the long term despite minting money in the short term.

Happy to be wrong though. Some data that I think could weaken my argument is if there are counter-examples of large companies that have been around for a long time that have sustained ethical compromises that haven't see hits to their bottom line because of it.

I always get shaken up when I remember that at every moment, I'm just experiencing a single snapshot of time. Makes me appreciate things I otherwise take for granted. Thanks for the read!

Bezos is not a billionaire because he pays people less money than what he is able to capture from their work. He is a billionaire because he owns a lot of shares in Amazon, and Amazon is a trillion dollar company.

There are examples where a group of people came together and decided to share in the profit or loss of a venture, and worked on it as employees (REI is a popular US outdoor equipment company that was started this way).

Amazon seems to have chosen a path where instead of asking individual employees to take a loss or break even for 20 years, they paid their employees while the company absorbed those losses and scaled.

The "billionaire" bit here seems arbitrary. Bezos is a billionaire because he owns a lot of shares because he didn't have a lot of cofounders. If he had started Amazon with 20 different cofounders then he (probably) wouldn't be a billionaire. Either way, the concept of exploiting labor for profit doesn't impact his billionaire status.

I'd be open to having a separate discussion around what it means to "exploit" labor, but on this topic I think moving the conversation from the concept of billionaire founders to how the system oppresses those that fall below a certain income would be more productive.

I don't know why Paul funds or doesn't fund certain founders, but if I were Paul I would be funding those founders that I believe can start companies that will eventually have stock collectively worth a lot of money. From the stories I've read - most of the founders that Paul funded DO plan on splitting their profits amongst all their employees - purely by virtue of when he invests in a company, the founders usually were the only employees. If I was Paul my dream would be that a company started by a small group of initial founders would be able to get big without having to "exploit" (or hire) any people at all.

It could also be worth looking into GoGoGrandparent.com! 24/7 operators and they automatically monitor and file disputes if drivers go on joy rides. (Full disclosure: I work there.)

Hi folks! GoGoGrandparent is an automated hotline that lets older adults use services that will help them stay independent.​ Using the service is super simple: they call (855) 464-6872, and hear: "Please press 1 for a car to pick you up from your home, please press 2 for a car to pick you up where we dropped you off last, press 6 for a pickup from a new pickup location or zero for the operator."​

We're starting with rides but are already testing food delivery and home care services. You can learn more about our story here - we built it for our grandmas.

The service is automated, available everywhere and we have 24/hour phone support. T​hough the average age of our callers is early 80's, t​here ​are no age ​restrictions - in addition to older adults our second largest demographic is the visually impaired.

Our fares include an additional 13% + $1.80 phone service fee, which from what we've seen comes out to an average $2.50 per ride.

​​We do a lot on our end to customize the experience for older adults. ​When someone registers we'll send them a brochure about how it works and a business card with our numbe​​r​ on it.​​ ​F​amily members can get automatic text updates whenever a loved one uses the service​​.

​Check out our website and try the demo, if you have any questions​ post them here!