BC ALL
Saved by @Jacobtldr

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

 As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.
It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.
And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.
(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)
I'm glad that there is some experimentation in this space, and know of at least 3 teams in the MicroConf community which are doing takes on it. It's a natural evolution for entrepreneurs after doing the bootstrap-from-nothing thing ~5 times.
You get basically 5~10 shots at building a company in your life, and a lot of my peers are discovering simultaneously "Hmm about half of my shots are spent and I want to be really selective about what I do next but oh goodness still want to be involved in ALL THE SOFTWARE."
And investing has historically been a natural next step for operators in e.g. Silicon Valley; you get to both enjoy vicariously the early days without having to be up at 2 AM anymore, and you get to give back to the community. But bootstrappers have different values/tolerances.
So I see it as a great thing that there is experimentation regarding the reinvestment and mentoring model in the bootstrapping community as well. And I can't think of anybody I'd trust more on this than Rob; he's the real deal.

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
STARTUPS
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):


Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.


"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."


Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
CRYPTO
Advertisement
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.
ALL
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
TECH

More from All

Elliot Alderson
Elliot Alderson
@fs0c131y
THREAD: I'm looking at a Huawei P20 from China, let see what can I found

The 1st app I reversed is an app called Decision

Look at the name of the files contains in the assets folder:
- airport_china.txt
- city_china.txt
- cityinfo.db
- parkinglot_china.txt
- railwayinfo.db
- trainInfo.db
- trainstation.db

Interesting, no?


For example, the trainstation database contains:
- address
- name
- latitude
- longitude
- city


In the manifest of this application, there is a GeoReceiver
ALL
STEALTH JEFF
STEALTH JEFF
@drawandstrike
One thing that makes this #Khashoggi story difficult to assess when it comes to who's responsible is that there are different factions within Saudi Arabia constantly jockeying for power. It's not one monolithic thing.

Bin Salman heads only one faction.

Mohammad Bin Salman [MbS] not only has to deal with states in the region that want to thwart his plans for Saudi Arabia [SA} & the Middle East [ME] such as Iran, Turkey, Syria, Russia, Quatar...he also has people inside SA itself that don't like his reforms or agenda.

So when the narrative gets presented that "The only way Khashoggi could end up dead is on the direct orders of MbS" you might want to keep this in mind.

There are SEVERAL ways Khashoggi could end up meeting his demise at the hands of Saudis not working on the orders of MbS.

Powerful factions within SA, several of whom do not like the Crown Prince's reforms or the fact he was promoted to his current position ahead of others in the royal family, could have done this in the hopes of pinning it on MbS.

Too many false/fake news stories came out of Turkey in the past week to say anything further. This latest news comes just after it was reported Pompeo heard an audio of the killing that was quickly walked back in less than a day.

/end
ALL
Advertisement
James Clear
James Clear
@JamesClear
My top 10 tweets of the year

A thread 👇

https://t.co/xj4js6shhy


https://t.co/b81zoW6u1d


https://t.co/1147it02zs


https://t.co/A7XCU5fC2m
BUSINESS , ALL
Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
@BillyBostickson
@fapsid @EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 1. Reversion of molecularly engineered, partially attenuated, very virulent infectious bursal disease virus during infection of commercial chickens
https://t.co/wOg1Ekl3Xp
2. Reversion to Virulence of Attenuated Canine Distemper Virus In Vivo and In

@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 3. pathogenic reversion of simian immunodeficiency virus SIVmac239Deltanef increases viral

@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 4. Genetic suppression in
reovirus: Ramig et al. 1977
papovavirus: Shortle et al. 1979
picornavirus: King et al. 1980
vaccinia virus: McFadden et al. 1980
influenza virus: Tolpin et al. 1981
herpesvirus: Hall and Almey 1982
adenovirus: Kruijer et al.

@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 5. reversion to virulence of live attenuated vaccines
1. Evolutionary reversion of live viral vaccines: Can genetic engineering subdue it?
https://t.co/9lY6ji88Gr
2. Mechanisms Causing Reversion to Virulence in an Attenuated

@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 6. reversion to virulence of live attenuated vaccines
3. The double-edged sword: How evolution can make or break a live-attenuated virus vaccine
https://t.co/jRJNTAR6tn
4. Selection Versus Mutation: Reducing the Risk of Vaccine
ALL
Calvin Chu
Calvin Chu
@calchulus
Here's the one thread you need to read on BSC to actually DYOR and stop listening to all these talking heads on Twitter:

1. last year, Binance launched a PoA-based EVM compatible chain, compatible with common tools like metamask, trustwallet, etc. It works with ur eth address

2. this point of interoperability is important, because a user doesn't need to deal with new wallets or infrastructure to use this chain, whereas past projects like Tron required you to download a new set of tools (TronLink wallet, use tronscan, etc.)

3. Disclaimer: This chain operates with 21 validators that have staked BNB. It is currently centralised, and can be conclusively described as permissioned (aka binance has selected who can operate these nodes and thus can have influence over this chain).

4. However, while that means the chain in theory could be manipulated by B, there are incentives to not screw over users' funds, double spend or rehypothecate anything. why? because it can jeopardise more lucrative business of

5. think of it like proof-of-staked reputation. These attacks put binance in the most likely position to be attacked by double spends or other malicious activity on chain, in which binance, which custodies the mainnet real assets of many chains, is on the hook if things go wrong.
TWITTER , ALL

You May Also Like

Miguel Luengo-Oroz
Miguel Luengo-Oroz
@litonidas
So proud of my @UNGlobalPulse team and collaborators that step by step and over the years have managed to bring 🤖 science closer to humanitarian and development work. We now have a library!! 📚 📚📚 https://t.co/rOxXQRllo5 Some peer-reviewed highlights in this thread 👇
SCIENCE
Greg Olear
Greg Olear
@gregolear
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. Let’s sort it out.

[THREAD]


1/ Two nights ago, Rupert Murdoch called on Mitch McConnell, after hours. Since then, two Fox News-related Twitter accounts have not tweeted.

2/ Trump fired Sessions on Wednesday, replacing him with human dildo/Putin collaborator Matt Whitaker. Sessions had asked to stay until Friday and was told to leave immediately. So there was clearly some urgency to install the dildo...er, puppet.

3/ The Democrats won the SHIT out of the Midterms. Come January, the House check on Trump will leave him so hobbled, he’ll be like the dude from Misery.

4/ Trump went to Paris, ostensibly for an Armistice Day centennial event. He skipped the event, and much of the dinner tonight, because of “weather,” which everyone seems to agree is a bullshit excuse.
POLITICS
Advertisement
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...


It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
TECH
Andrey \uf8ff Azimov
Andrey  Azimov
@AndreyAzimov
The best way to know if people like your product is NOT:

- Have a lot of emails in the waiting list
- Become #1 on PH
- Become #1 of HN or Reddit
- Have people that saing "I'll pay"
- Have a lot of free users

The best way to know if they're actually pay for it.

The only thing that matters is your product providing a value, and you can't know this until people will pay money for it.

We can have a first signal of a product/market fit after the launch by check how many sales we've got in the first 24h. Some scale:

200+ This has a high potential.
100+: This has a potential.
50+: Some people need it.
10+: People almost don't need it.
0+: People don't need it.

This is for a single time payment product. For a subscription probably it should be less because people hate subscription.

And obviously, you should have a lot of traffic like 3-5k+.

Here is a stat for my products (macOS apps) for the first 24h after the launch:
STARTUPS
Adam McKay
Adam McKay
@GhostPanther
1) My Stan Lee story happened when I was in 5th grade. I was visiting NYC with my Dad and had read the address for Marvel in the comics I read constantly. I begged my Dad to take me and to his credit he did. And guess what? It was just an office.

2) We were down in the lobby and I was kind of crushed. I don’t know what I expected, The Thing and the Yancy Street Gang to be sitting around smoking cigars? Anyway, my Dad was taking a beat to figure where we were going next and a guy came up to us.

3) He was wearing a white shirt and tie and said to Dad “Is he disappointed because. The Marvel offices were just offices?” My Dad said yes and then the guy who had gray around his temples and a mustache said “hold on a second” and opened one of those office mailboxes with a key.

4) He then handed me a thick stack of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL COMIC COMING OUT THE NEXT MONTH. “Here you go. Keep reading Marvel comics” he said and then walked off. I left in a daze and about 15 minutes later it hit me “Gray around the temples, mustache... That was Stan Lee!”

5) Later when I wrote on the Ant Man movie I told Kevin Feige the story, the year, look of the guy etc and Kevin said “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stan would do and he would have been there then. That was him.” Rest In Peace Stan Lee and thank you for the comics.
CULTURE