travisfischer

Founding engineer here if there are any questions about the team, tech, company, etc...

We built hoop.app which uses LLMs to detect your tasks and work priorities from your chat messages, meeting transcripts and emails.

The goal is to take all of the busy work out of task management so you can always know what your focus should be on and not waste brain power worrying about missing something important.

Founding engineer here if you have questions on the engineering side of things.

Completely sincere question, how would you personally define a reasonable wage?

I spent a couple hours the other night lying awake in bed dreaming of spending one year trying to help someone new every day. I was thinking it would be cool to dedicate each work day of the year to meeting someone new and offering my hours that day to help them in whatever way I could. The help could range from washing their car, running an errand, to picking up garbage on their street, to writing some code or spinning up a website for them.

I thought it would have a really nice dual effect of pushing me to get to know a bunch of people and also teach me something about serving and helping others.

Then I started thinking about how to leverage social media to pivot it into meeting more and more interesting/important people and monetizing it. Quickly realized that would undermine the original intent of the project and make it into something else entirely that I did not like.

I don’t understand the appeal of meeting 10,000 different people as that sounds like too much quantity and not enough quality time but to each his own.

It is super interesting to see someone else living out a version of an idea that at 2am sounded like a pretty original concept.

There is an occasional event that happens to me while on HN where I see a title that catches my eye because it rings a certain bell in my mind. I click through the link and as the page loads my stomach fills with butterflies as I experience the strange sensation of finding another person has implemented an idea of "mine", at times with frightening accuracy with regards to how I conceived of it.

I use "mine" because obviously the idea is not mine. It's an idea I'm sure hundreds of us of have had.

This particular site/product was one I "dreamed up" immediately after a very disappointing interview performance. The sting of that experience made me want to fix it for other people by giving them a clear path for being prepared for "Google-esque" interviews. This particular implementation looks to be fairly well executed. I signed up and hope it works out because I think it could be useful.

What these experiences confirm for me is something we all already know. There are really no new ideas under the sun. Or at least they are very, very rare. Just pick a problem you know you can solve and then solve it the best way you possibly know how and if your best is better than anyone elses best, and it's a good idea, and the timing is right, you'll probably be successful.

On another note, I think it's interesting the creator choose the "2 egg problem" as the example problem. I believe it is the prime example of everything that is wrong with engineering interview culture. Not sure if that makes it ideal material for a site like this or pointless trivia.

Great point.

I'm not at all trying to detract from what they have chosen to spend their time building. I'm simply giving my perspective which can be taken as feedback for the builders or alternatively just sideline commentary on the problem space they are addressing and is interesting to a number of us who care about using our money to impact the world.

There is a fine balance in communities like HN between giving honest feedback/having honest discussions about a topic vs. everyone just being a negative critic and armchair quarterbacking anything anyone builds. I think it's often best to sandwich real feedback in some positive encouragement to avoid the negative critic spiral. On the other hand, sometimes I think that's the same sugar coating as "no offense but..." in which case I skip it.

I was hoping this would be implemented as:

- I sign up to donate at least a dollar a day.

- There is a growing list of non-profits supported.

- I get emails with newly added ones.

- For each non-profit I get to choose to either:

a) add a full additional dollar a day for that organization

or

b) add the new organization to a list of organizations that split my daily existing donation amount.

or

c) skip it.

I dislike this implementation for a number of reasons.

* From the non-profits perspective, re-occuring and emotionally invested donations are much more valuable than a one off big shot of money.

* From my perspective I will never donate to an unknown entity regardless of filtering criteria. I have limited resources and believe I can have the impact I want to have by chosen where to use those resources.

* If this system catches on I imagine it will result in many a controversy, which may just be the price dollaraday.co is willing to pay, but it sure seems like an unnecessary distraction.

Congrats Josh!

I think I like this model of investment a lot for a company like Stripe. Rather than trying to copy or buy Baremetrics and add that to the list of things Stripe would need to focus on, invest in someone who spend all day every day worrying about only how to make that thing the best it can be. Keeps all of the incentives nicely aligned for both Stripe and Baremetrics.

I would think Baremetrics probably should grow to include other payment system integrations. However, I think as long as Stripe continues focusing on being the best option available for what they provide, choosing to invest in the eco system around them like this seems like a great way to grow the business as a whole vs. spending the same money on making their own product bigger.

I also like it from Baremetrics point of view that Stripe is now invested in them for the obvious and already stated reasons.

I clicked through expecting an app that offered a nostalgic walk down memory lane with screenshots and features of the Windows operating system. I'm not sure why that is the first thing that came to mind, but it did.

While that would have been moderately amusing, the actual application is a much more useful and helpful concept.

Great job on launching something!