Is the source code available anywhere? I’ve been mulling over a similar project but don’t have a lot of ML experience myself, would be great to look at the innards of a working example...
Okay, I've spent a little more time on this than I probably should have, but I think I realized something. The reason this works is mostly due to the VCs being generic in general. I've been reading the tweets they're based on and they're equally nonsense as the bot tweet. But bashing multiple tweets together, still produces something that's... coherent? I mean, yea, they're coherent. But it works because it lacks detail.
There's almost no detail or focus on a concrete idea in any of these VC tweets. Everything is so damn vague and abstract in the original tweets, they can apply to anything or anyone. Thus, chopping and mixing them is meaningless, because they are void of meaning to begin with... Sort of the same way horoscopes work. They're pretty broad and the reader fills in the gaps and details. VCs talk like old gypsy fortune tellers... they're vague, tell you roughly what you'd like to hear and are generally useless sacks of breathing meat...
VC is a pyramid scheme. A VC's entire focus is selling "a narrative" to other VCs, so they can push their portfolio companies' next round or raise their next fund.
Only a rare few treat their portfolio companies as customers and not the product.
Probably because meaningless platitudes sound better than "the last company like this was sold for $20MM and we think we can duplicate that success for $10MM."
Agreed. Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat.
For that reason, I've avoided them. Even during parties, I (unfairly) dismiss someone the moment I find out they are a VC and just invested in ...(insert famous tech here)...
Based on personal experience, VCs are statistically more likely having a conversation with you thinking they are better than you the whole time (and therefore knows better).
Not all VCs are like that, but unfortunately most of them are. Greedy, prideful people have caused me a great deal of suffering in my life and most VCs are just that.
Someone should do the same thing for Hacker News comments. I feel like "Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat." is precisely the type of sentence that would come out of it.
It is a pretty specific thing and I was very surprised to see it as the top comment.
Are you seriously defending the money-people? Just give us this one moment where noone chimes in to teach us how greed supposedly helped turn savages into society
> thinking they are better than you the whole time
Do people really think like that? This sounds like possibly a personal insecurity. I don’t know too many grown adults who think things like “I am better than you”. Better at what? making money? Smarter? Getting dates?
I don’t know... maybe I’m just too optimistic but all of the VCs I’ve met have been super nice.
I a lot of people measure their own self worth by comparing themselves to others. For people with a job where they directly create something, usually they are proud of that thing they created. People who work in these kinds of business roles often don't actually do anything. They have to see themselves as a necessary (and rare!) oil that enables creators. For many, it's really important to their self worth that they think, "Without me, you would be nothing. Yes, I know you can actually do the thing that you are doing, but I am the gatekeeper."
I mean, some people think that VCs are "useless sacks of breathing meat". So when the VC in question needs to feel a sense of self worth, they need to come up with a reason that they are needed in the equation (whether justified or not). They also need to project that feeling because who will seek out a VC that's a useless sack of breathing meat. You want to seek out a VC that's the gatekeeper to riches.
You get this kind of sub-vocal interplay and posturing. I'm sure it's super stressful to the people in question. Every time they meet someone they may feel they have to justify their progression beyond meat sack level. They may feel that they have to justify it to themselves.
And interestingly, having projected their desired ego and internally swallowed their own special brand of Kool Aide, quite a few are actually convinced that they are the gatekeepers to riches and everybody else is lucky just to be in the same room.
Yes. If you're pitching to a VC, they have power over you. It leads them to believe they deserve that power and that they understand your business (and all business) better than you.
That doesn't mean they're not nice. Feeling superior and behaving pleasantly are not mutually exclusive.
Yes people do think like that, and judging from you asking that question, I'm going to guess it's people you wouldn't expect.
The alternative being that you happen to be in an environment/bubble where no one happens to think like that. I guess it's possible, but also unlikely.
A friend of mine has a board that makes connections to clients, supports long-term decision-making, and otherwise gets completely out of the way. That seems as good as it can get.
I know people who receive and value advice from VCs, but my observation has been that it's better to trust your boots on the ground rather than a very-part-time observer who's never talked to one of your clients.
I think this means that there's so much capital out there that you can operate without any profit until you dominate the market, so your users will effectively be convinced that you are a saint. Just remember to lock down the system from yourself and don't say anything that can break this illusion.
VC twitter is excruciatingly cringe. I cannot imagine giving equity to these virtue signaling parrots.* The worst offenders are the people who
- have never personally taken a company from zero to one (even worse: when they have internally taken a company from 1 to N, and think that qualifies them).
- have a huge portfolio full of incremental companies
- constantly talk about trends on Twitter
- constantly talk about politics on Twitter
- are not currently operating their own moonshot/Unicorn
- are a bit too ridiculous when trying to hide their own greed
- talk constantly about the importance of "mentoring" you, when really just wanting access to your company
- have never actually taken a hard stand/risk on anything in their entire lives
Imagine instead getting a small check from Elon Musk when he was operating at Tesla/SpaceX, or even from then-no-name Sam Altman when he was running Loopt (as Stripe did from both). These investors are great because you know they're going to soon step the fuck out of your way and focus on their own projects. They might also be able to actually help you when you need it (both parties respecting each other's scarce time).
* Exceptions: PG, Naval, and part-time VC partners that actively operate their own companies.
> have never personally taken a company from zero to one
I've met quite a few angels and VCs who have exactly one successful exit on their resume. Without more exits, the overwhelming likelihood is that the exit was luck.
Like most humans, they fail to see the luck in their success and believe they know something about business that other people don't. They rely heavily on their experience and push their portfolio companies to make the same decisions they made.
It's possible there's no formula for a great VC, and incentive structures make it unlikely that talented, visionary, humble people are in that role. If you know how to build things, why be a VC instead of building things?
Haha I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle. Never said it was the smartest algorithm. If you hover over the VC's name, it'll show the actual tweet that was sampled.
I’m pretty sure I used to see a physical therapist as a kid who knew you well. She knew I was building websites and told me about you and what you were working on. If I remember correctly you used to be quite stoked about Coldfusion. What a small world!
They generate on a cron job every 15 minutes and I also pass the site through a Cloudflare cache because I'm cheap and the actual code runs on a $5 DigitalOcean box :-)
"Canceling sneaky charges is one of the most predictable but consequential developments of the 2020s"[0]
Instantly reminded of all of the posts about ISPs and cellular carriers tacking on all sorts of goofy fees and their usual monetary "practices", felt it was especially relevant now that some of those fees are being exposed as being BS surcharges anyway. Can't name any sources off the top of my head but there was an article here on HN about it some months ago.
It looks like it uses tweets that were a reply to another tweet. This makes some of them read weird since there is missing context. I wonder what it would look like if it only used tweets that were original.
Great, congrates, sounds like your bot is going to be the first computer program to demand worker's rights and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
But seriously wanted to say it's pretty stellar and so far none of these seem "bot" like. They read pretty genuine... which says a lot of how idiotic a lot of these VCs are.
Most of the ones I got looked like they were generated from replies to other tweets. The lack of context made them boring, even if that makes it easier to make them comprehensible. (I would love to see this experiment run on a dataset that filtered out reply tweets.)
But then, it have me this gem:
"It's sad when people don't understand the value of a program that targets them. I mean I do see the value, I just don't like floppy pizza."
You really need to say that explicitly somewhere. The "I forced a bot" phrasing used in the current HN title is a clickbait trope that's not applicable here, and those "I forced a bot" scripts from Keaton Patti have spread misinformation on how AI text-generation works.
Ooh, this is interesting. Were all the VCs you used from outside the EU? Because this seems to contain personal data, names etc. and raises the interesting question of the compatibility of some ML with GDPR.
So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and that lisp , which btw is untyped and slower than maybe even Go, is a competitive badvantage get admiration? Is it just by the wannabes?
Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now. But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that could be a competitive advantage to a company that does.
As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is.
He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete.
With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.
The Kinect sold many units quickly because so many people already had Xboxes or Windows gaming PCs, and it was relatively cheap. It's since been discontinued.
Azure is popular due to all the corporates moving their application hosting and data storage off on-premise servers to the cloud.
Neither of these products/platforms has led/is leading to whole new categories of products/companies being created, which is the specific context in which PG was suggesting MS was "dead".
FWIW, arguably the biggest game-changing innovation in gaming in the past 10 years has been Twitch, which was a YC company.
... this is amazing.