Excellent, well done. Looking forward to hearing a discussion about this on your podcast! Might you go chase some other startup ideas? Does this "validate" the career model of creating something new, for you? Or would you not do it again?
Readit Newsseagullriffic commented on Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN · Posted by u/refrigerator
seagullriffic commented on Lottery Simulator (2023) perthirtysix.com/tool/lot... · Posted by u/airstrike
That's kind of how I look at it, in practice. I get the mathematical reality that buying lotto tickets is a financial waste. However, if I never buy a single ticket, there is a definite 0% chance I'll ever win the big prize. Whereas if I play at all, at least there's a chance, however remote, of a quite life-changing positive event happening. So, therefore, it makes sense to put a very small amount of totally throw-away income into big-prize lotto tickets, just so you're in the game at all.
Based on this kind of thinking, my personal rules are: never spend more than 0.1% of take-home pay per time-period buying tickets, and only buy big-prize lotto tickets that have potentially-life-changing payouts.
This is almost exactly how I think about it too - a good repeatable mental model is "infinite upside / near-zero downside".
These massively asymmetric choices occur elsewhere in life, e.g. "asking them out on a date"; "asking for a raise", and are good to look out for.
The LinkedIn preview text made me laugh, thank you :)
> At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes.
Is there a recording? It's very frustrating to read things like this and not be given a link.
seagullriffic commented on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/avyfain
Key Ideas:
Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants but more dangerous for others: The weight of a vehicle is a critical factor in car crashes, with heavier vehicles causing more fatalities in other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.
The heaviest vehicles kill more people than they save: Analysis of crash data shows that for every life saved by the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks, more than a dozen lives are lost in other vehicles.
Weight advantages have changed little over time: Despite improvements in safety features, the weight advantage of heavier vehicles has remained relatively constant, with heavier vehicles still causing more fatalities in lighter vehicles.
Carmakers prioritize consumer preferences over safety: Manufacturers are producing increasingly heavier vehicles, driven by consumer demand for larger, more powerful cars, despite the safety risks to others.
Regulators are ill-equipped to address the issue: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Public awareness and concern are growing: Surveys show increasing concern about the size and safety of SUVs and pickup trucks, with researchers and policymakers starting to take notice.
Electrification may exacerbate the problem: The shift towards electric vehicles, which tend to be heavier than their internal-combustion equivalents, may increase the weight of vehicles on the road, further amplifying the safety risks.
> The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's rating system focuses on occupant safety, not the safety of other road users, and tax policies subsidize heavier vehicles.
Sociopathic. Regulations and safety standards should be updated to consider both occupants' and others' safety.
The auto manufacturers won't like this, because they are cheap and greedy.
Yes - another bit that I worked on (albeit tangentially).
The QR code stuff was an interesting one. There was a worry that people would generate fraudulent codes - hence the weird (in my opinion) signing requirements.
Similarly, with a URl there was a risk that people would open the page and think that was all they needed to do. Hence a code designed to be read by a specific app.
I think (and you'll have to forgive my slightly hazy memory of a difficult time) that it was based on the same code New Zealand were using for their check-in service.
Interesting! That article I linked had lingered in my memory for a while, so good to hear a response to it!
I love the UK Gov for being so transparent and self suficient on their digital infrastructure compared to my developed EU country where they usually just outsource it to some major consultancy, who's in bed with the politicians, which then farms it out to the cheapest bidder in Eastern Europe for 10x the amount of money it would cost to make it themselves and getting 10x worse quality, just so that taxpayer money gets funneled into the politically friendly business pockets. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses/externalities.
I remember there was a heated debate last year about greed-flation in the country as people blamed the large retailers for simultaneously jacking up prices in sync leading to much higher prices on the same goods compared to neighboring Germany and the government said "well, we could build an online price comparison system to track prices and then check the validity of these claims, but oh shucks it's probably gonna take us a few years and double digit million euros...", and then in response some guy builds it in a weekends and posts it on Github for free, showing how corrupt, clueless and scummy closed source government funded digital projects are.
Unfortunately this very application, Gov.uk Notify, is currently being used by Councils to send emails to residents directing them to an outsourced company's website, https://www.householdresponse.com, to input sensitive details about where they live.
The emails are phishy to the extreme and there's no indication or way to verify that it's an official service. See for example https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-gov-keeps-...
While some parts of Gov.uk are done well, there are still terrible practices everywhere due to cheapness and ignorance and presumably because the Gov UK people can't do everything, unfortunately, even though it would be cheaper and better if they did.
Hello. I worked on that app. You are wrong.
Firstly, "Track and Trace" is what the Post Office do. Perhaps you're thinking of "Test and Trace"?
Secondly, the UK Government hasn't had app development skills in-house for a long time - see https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/03/12/were-not-appy-not-appy-at... - so there was little choice but to use an external provider.
Thirdly, the initial version of the app was built by an external team who were already engaged with DHSC. They had won a competitive tender (which was published) but, as I'm sure you can understand, there wasn't time to run a new one for the Contact Tracing app.
Fourthly, if you have evidence that the development of the app - which was done quickly, with all source code and design documents published as open source, and which saved lives (https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-02-22-nhs-covid-19-app-saved-...) - was somehow corrupt, I'm sure we'd all like to see it.
Fifthly, if you're about to say "£37bn" - have a read of this https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio...
Did this app have anything to do with the huge QR codes which encoded far too much information? https://www.revk.uk/2020/09/how-not-to-qr-nhs-c19-app.html
>For the latter, I normally have to roll out a quote I can't remember well enough to google, that's something along the lines of "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired".
Not the quote, but there was a Farside cartoon along those lines where the dog was being berated for not doing a very good job mowing the lawn:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/22/79/222279ceaa98f293e76e...
Oh no, a really sad Far Side cartoon! Which is very closely related to a shaggy dog joke you can spin out for ages, "$5 talking dog for sale", which ends with the setup / punchline, "why so cheap?" / "because he's a goddamn liar!"
seagullriffic commented on Responses to unicycling ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
I highly recommend some of the best content on Youtube, Ed Pratt's series [0] where he unicycles around the world. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@EdPratt