mircea_popescu: the fundamental problem here being that if your "mathematical simulations inspired by words" actually produce stuff people want to wear, then you don't need it to be an app, just build a factory ; on the other hand, if people have to design themselves, then you have the same old problem of UGC : people suck.

mircea_popescu: vocational school, it's true, but a damn sight better than the whole rest of 'em nevertheless.

mircea_popescu: i have a dog that speaks like this.

mircea_popescu: Our ongoing plan was to monetize Circa News through the building of a strategy we had spent a long time developing but unfortunately we were unable to close a significant investment prior to becoming resource constrained."

mircea_popescu: in the immortal words of seinfeld, "i give some guy the keys to my car because he's wearing a vest"

mircea_popescu: We started VATLER during the summer of 2014 as an on-demand valet service in San Francisco … We received a phone call from the police department telling us that our permits had not been granted and they gave us a warning because we were operating illegally in most of our locations…In 2 weeks, we lost major accounts and 30% of our revenue streams without any perspective of growth. We tried to make some restaurants p

mircea_popescu: any mention of "i suck as a manager" eerily absent. "i don't suck as a manager - i gave all the people who had no responsibility in the matter all the data about what a shit job i was doing. this means i wasn't doing a shit job! this is also how i went through school - i told my parents about all the Cs i got! this is actually better than getting As!"

mircea_popescu: Each member of our now pared-down team knew exactly how much runway the company had remaining, the status of our strategic talks, and the acknowledged long odds we faced as a going concern. To their credit, they remained focused, productive and on-task until our final day — a remarkable expression of dedication to the mission and to each other. Sadly, and in spite of the achievements, we simply ran out of time and ca

mircea_popescu: We had a user acquisition problem, and the best route involved a competitor…The best acquisition method I saw was tapping into an existing network of people who had filed 1099s: like Intuit’s hundreds of millions of tax returns, many with 1099 income. Unfortunately, Intuit released an identical competing product to us. It’s not ideal when your best user acquisition strategy is partnering with a company who has a

mircea_popescu: Steering the ship — handling all of the engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and retailing, even when you’re taking 90 percent of the subsequent profits — was ultimately too expensive of a proposition, especially in comparison to other, less-handholding-oriented start-ups. “The reason why Kickstarter makes a ton of money is they don’t have to do anything besides put up a website,” Kaufman notes.

mircea_popescu: ” and its unnamed acquirer a “no-show”. Adds Graj: “They backed out leaving us with a huge legal bill both for Dine In and myself personally, a huge debt to note holders, and no VCs to turn to. A hard lesson to learn and one I’ll be taking into my next venture.”

mircea_popescu: “We knew acquisition was the best course of action,” says [Evan] Graj. That eventually led to Dine In being approached in February by a major Internet company active in the online food space, and it’s my understanding that by April — and significant legal fees later — a sale had been agreed. Then at the eleventh hour the deal unexpectedly fell through, leaving the restaurant delivery startup “high and dry

mircea_popescu: but anyway, there's going to be A LOT of busting kneecaps of uppity ustard "capitalists" who imagine they actually get to have a say and whatnot.

mircea_popescu: nobody in china ever saw their faces before the day they were locked in a hut and burned alive, but hey. THEY thought they were part of the conversation.

mircea_popescu: this is a little like being a chinese diplomat reviewing the records of this obscure tribe, meanwhile crushed, that apparently thought it had sent lots and lots of ambassadors, expeditions, generals, so forth.

mircea_popescu: In the email, co-founders Karthik Balasubramanian and Brian Moyer stated their belief that the movement of investor interest away from consumer-facing applications for the technology was also a factor. Balasubramanian and Moyer wrote: ”While investment and activity continues to occur it is focused on private and alternate chains rather than bitcoin or other public chains where Bonafide operates.” As a result, the c

mircea_popescu: epic. "i am exactly who i wanted to be : a failure. unfortunately, this also means i die now. so long!" ☟︎

mircea_popescu: of only practical interest here, remember that for every $1000 added to your 401k, you can expect to buy about a cent;s worth of turkey at some point down the road.

mircea_popescu: also, seeing how InterActiveCorp ( NASDAQ: IACI ) consists of at least 10% okcupid and claims total assets of 4bn, we can estimate the value of the bezzle! if 4k worth of okcupid is perhaps 10% of the business self-valued at 4bn, then every dollar a us corporation owns is worth ~0.001 cents of actual, honest to god, turkey-buying dollars and 0.999 cents of pure bezzle.

mircea_popescu: on the other hand, of those 2-300 people, should you have the curiosity to include a link strategically in your profile, you might discover that exactly... 0%, as well as 0 per thousand actually click.

mircea_popescu: this is practically a straight advertising deal, and i have the numbers : out of the ~150-200k people onlione they claim perpetually, the 1-2 dollar thing buys you about 300 over an hour, so that's superficially 1.5-2 per thousand but i suspect might be as high as 10% given that obviously, not everyone actually pays any attention to them.

mircea_popescu: the other, and this is the lulzy part, is a "boost", where you pay them a buck or two and they "show your profile" to VERY MANY ppl!!1

mircea_popescu: but anyway. i imagine it's making a decent penny for them, being exactly the fuctarded "sit by lakeside and carefully dip toe in" thing that today's women of both sexes obsess over.

mircea_popescu: in unrelated news : okcupid makes money in two ways that i can see. one is to sell you "A list" status, which brings no obvious benefits other than "browse invisibly". they advertise the shit out of it too, "you are browsing visibly". what the fuck sort of deranged ustardian would actually make an account of a site specifically dedicated to finding people and then wanting stealth!

mircea_popescu: i do, actually. this line-at-a-time business is almost perfect.

mircea_popescu: <nubbins`> jurov seems you're making some progress << ironically, the operator= nonsense was JUST linked in a basic piece about how c++ sucks that we've all read and yet it made nobody else click.

mircea_popescu: in other news, anyone wanna do a wire for me ? ☟︎

mircea_popescu: today like in athens 3k years ago, a good chunks of "thieves" are the merchant's own adolescent sons.

mircea_popescu: tis a mystery.

mircea_popescu: deedbot-: [Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski » Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] << hey, maybe stick some more pete dushenski in there, pete_dushenski ? just in case tis not clear! ☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=16-12-2015#1344211 <<< https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/497449427460956161 being the... one guy that retweeted that selkis two bit idiot thing should count as " a blockchain subject matter expert having been involved as a core member of the bitcoin/blockchain community since 2012" wouldn't you say ? ☝︎

mircea_popescu: to shrem ? it's a verb now ?

mircea_popescu: !rate TheNewDeal 2 Put a decent chunk of change into the Bitcoin Foundation back when it wasn't fashionable yet. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: he's been doing that, has a regular stable of noobs going from what i gather.

mircea_popescu: anyway, you wanna invest in a game, why not go play eulora. danielpbarron will show you the ropes if you show him yours.

mircea_popescu: TheNewDeal eh, have some tea and relax. nobody gives a shit you went on some website and searched for shit from some other weebsite.

mircea_popescu: yeah. they do that a lot.

mircea_popescu: anyway, "hacking" is not a thing, it's the byproduct of knowing how to program computers. which you can learn, like anything else, provided you got the patience.

mircea_popescu: no, like a fuck you and your stupid shithole trip.

mircea_popescu: there's a signed thing in there.

mircea_popescu: a guy named brown.

mircea_popescu: think of it in terms of, being a very mediocre, fat woman that was writing code. lotta goto's, the ocasional for-loop-by-hand, and no passing by reference.