Bookmarked from SurfSkateThrash @SurfThrash
Pixies
Wave of Mutilation
Rock Werchter Festival, Belgium. — July 2, 1989
Highest returns on investment
December 2024 · 144 bookmarks
Pixies
Wave of Mutilation
Rock Werchter Festival, Belgium. — July 2, 1989
Highest returns on investment
Become the black swan.
Show HN: Watch 3 AIs compete in real-time stock trading (trading.snagra.com)
A live dashboard where you can watch GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini analyze market data and make daily stock trades with real money. Each AI explains its reasoning, and you can compare their different approaches to the same data.
Link: https://trading.snagra.com?utm_source=hn (no signup required)
What you can try right now: - Watch live trades from GPT-4, Claude 3, and Gemini - Read each AI's full analysis and reasoning - Compare their different interpretations of the same market data - Track their real-time performance and win rates - View historical trades and performance metrics
Built this over the holidays to study how different AI models approach financial decisions. Each morning at 9:30 AM EST, the AIs analyze market data and make real trades with $5 stakes.
Technical Implementation: - Next.js frontend with real-time updates - Node.js/Lambda backend for AI processing - PostgreSQL for trade tracking - Alpaca API for automated trading - Consistent prompts for all models
Data Flow: 1. Daily market analysis (9:30 AM EST) 2. Each AI gets identical inputs: - Financial headlines - Market summaries - Technical indicators - Earnings reports 3. AIs provide: - Stock picks with reasoning - Entry/exit conditions - Risk assessment 4. Automated trade execution
Note: This is an experiment in AI behavior, not investment advice. The goal is to study how different LLMs interpret financial data and make decisions with real consequences.
I'll be around to answer questions about the implementation.
Stanford has launched an incredible research AI tool.
It’s called STORM, and basically you enter a topic and it will search hundreds of websites to write an article about its major findings.
Available to everyone for free!
1 month old Pray Screen app hit #57 with 8 faceless TikTok accounts
26K bookmarks for 2M+ views
Proving you can still beat an over-crowded category, you just need a smarter angle:
Built a web app where @OpenAI , @AnthropicAI , and @GoogleAI compete in daily stock trading with real money.
🔗 in thread
🧵
1/4 Built over the holidays with AI - no manual coding (@cursor_ai)
2/4 Daily market news analysis
3/4 Real $5 trades per AI
4/4 Year-long experiment
If you can find 1 paying customer you can find 1000.
If you can grow your startups revenue to $1,000 you can grow to $1 million.
Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and improving.
$0 startup marketing hack for founders:
Ray Bradbury had a sign over his desk that said: “Don’t think.”
His point is that writing is an exercise in surprising yourself. Time and again, you’ll find that putting words on the page helps you realize things that’ve been living in the forefront of your mind, but below the register of conscious thought.
Whenever someone lives far beyond their means (in a way that makes no sense), this is where their money is coming from:
SF: crypto
LA/NY: inheritance
Dallas: oil royalties
SLC: founder of a religious MLM scheme
Miami: 5% crypto, 95% alimony
Rest of US: money laundering
Caesium, the most reactive metal
you can just work focused every day for 4 hours for 1 year
or you can just not
no one will know day to day
but you will know
and everyone will see your outputs (or lack of)
Cooking tips you wish you knew sooner
[🎞️ Adam Rose]
The optimal amount of exercise to improve cognitive function.
🧵1/10
10 Finance Concepts Everyone Should Know
Ever feel like finance is a foreign language?
Here are 10 key concepts so you can finally take control of your money:
Here’s my cheat sheet for the top 15 semiconductor companies heading into 2025 🧐
1. $NVDA -- The leader in AI GPUs & a critical enabler of gen AI & deep learning, positioned to dominate as demand for AI compute surges globally.
2. $AVGO -- A semiconductor & connectivity powerhouse benefiting from hyperscaler custom chip demand & its growing role in AI networking infrastructure.
3. $TSM -- The world's largest chip manufacturer & a key player in the AI supply chain, with advanced-node semiconductors giving it unmatched pricing power.
4. $ASML -- The backbone of semiconductor manufacturing with a monopoly on EUV lithography, indispensable for producing the advanced chips driving AI & next-gen technologies.
5. $AMD -- Expanding its market share in AI GPUs & data centers, with the MI300 series providing strong competition to $NVDA in the AI hardware space.
6. $QCOM -- A leader in wireless & mobile chipsets, Qualcomm is set to benefit from AI’s integration into smartphones, IoT devices, & edge computing applications.
7. $AMAT -- A key supplier of semiconductor equipment, specializing in materials engineering & critical technologies required for advanced-node production.
8. $ARM -- At the forefront of the AI & IoT revolution, driving innovation with its energy-efficient IP architecture used across mobile, edge, & cloud AI applications.
9. $MRVL -- A leader in connectivity & custom silicon, benefiting from demand for high-speed networking solutions as AI workloads drive hyperscale data center expansions.
10. $INTC -- In the midst of a turnaround, Intel is heavily investing in its foundry business & advanced-node development, aiming to reclaim leadership in semiconductor manufacturing.
11. $MU -- Positioned to benefit from the explosion in data generated by AI, as a key supplier of DRAM & NAND for high-performance computing and data centers.
12. $LRCX -- A leader in wafer fabrication equipment, benefiting directly from increasing demand for advanced semiconductors used in AI & 5G.
13. $KLAC -- A leader in process control & semiconductor manufacturing equipment, ensuring high yields & efficiency for advanced-node chip production.
14. $CDNS -- Essential in chip design, Cadence’s software tools enable the development of advanced semiconductors, making it a key player in the semiconductor & AI ecosystem.
15. $ALAB – A rising star in AI interconnectivity, enabling seamless data flow in data centers with its CXL & PCIe solutions, critical for next-gen architectures.
do it for culture
Financial Statement Cheat Sheet by @BrianFeroldi
How I Go From Idea to Revenue in 14 Steps:
(done it so many times, so it is a habit now)
@bryan_johnson Close your eyes.
Roll them up; back to center.
Roll them down; back to center.
Left. Right.
Roll them all around in counter-clockwise; center. Reverse.
Repeat.
Most people don’t make it past two of the cycles.
Anyone on the planet can build a successful mobile app.
Start with a problem YOU face on a daily basis, and solve it with an app.
1 problem, 1 feature, 1 function.
Keep it simple.
2025 transforms product building forever. AI generates 100x more copycats, makes your code disposable but makes your internet audience priceless. if you don't have 39 clones, you've built something no one wants.
copycats become the new signal for product/market fit in 2025
We failed 2 launches 2024. The third time was the charm – $5.3m ARR in 5 weeks.
This is the story:
//1
work like a lion, not a cow — @naval
39 Rizz app copycats. 12 Glam, 18 Color Analysis & 37 AI Hug apps.
7 copycats appeared just days after DumbPhone launched.
This is just the beginning:
With the marginal cost of building apps going to zero:
2025 will be the year of countless clones and grifters.
It’ll also be the year of more niche-focused and verticalized apps.
Your app will be copied. Or someone will try to carve a niche out of it.
Do not panic.
Build a distribution moat before clones can catch up.
2025 will mark the first year where distribution will matter more than product.
“Don't count the days, make the days count.”
― Muhammad Ali
B2C viral apps to make your first million
B2B AI agent to make your first billion
🚀 Introducing Aria-UI – a cutting-edge grounding LMM for GUI agents with a lightning-fast 3.9B parameters activated backbone!
🌐 Try it yourself: huggingface.co/spaces/Aria-UI…
📄 Project page: ariaui.github.io
📂 Explore on GitHub:
the secret to b2b saas is selling things that get people noticed by their boss and promoted
@juanjovn Non hype inspirational post
Zero to hero story arc
Sprinkle in some humbleness with practical tips
+ screenshot for validation
= a perfect tweet
It is even more difficult to get a man to understand something when his identity depends on his not understanding it.
$0 startup marketing hack for founders:
find something people hate doing
build software that automates that thing
charge them $29 a month
pay your mortgage
Top hooks that drive sales & why they work:
Post-o3 announcement, businesses need a new engineering playbook:
1) Get every engineer using AI immediately
2) Track adoption and results
3) Measure new productivity baseline
4) Make tough decisions about team composition
It's not crazy to say as a company that you plan to let go engineers that don't use AI in 2025—their productivity without it would mean they're under-performing.
As a rule the people who know the most about something are the pros whose incomes depend on doing it well. The pros at judging tech talent are venture capitalists. If venture capitalists' opinions differ from white nationalists', it's clear who's more likely to be right.
7 Cheat Sheets to Change Your Life
1. Finance Cheat Sheet
Hey Nassim, just finished Skin in the Game. Really enjoyed it. Spot on to what I’m trying to do with don’t die.
On my data, while some markers are more incrementally tied to age than others, fitness markers in general are great proxies for longevity and improved health. VO2 max for example drops only by 5% per decade of life in athletes, compared to 10% per decade in the general population, on average.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3556603/
This is clearly not genetic fate as it is tied to activity levels and lifestyle choices.
The point around large individual differences stands, hence why I track baseline and trends over longer periods (maximum HR etc) to use as biological age estimates and longevity markers.
I measure maximum HR in conjunction with VO2max, heart rate recovery HRR, and resting heart rate RHR. My VO2Max is top 1.5% among 18-year olds, my HRR is top 1% among the general population (top 25% compared to elite athletes), and my resting heart rate is best 1% of elite athletes. My trends for all these markers are favorable and constantly improving as well.
So I agree that an isolated data point does not mean much, but knowing your trends and assessing the full picture empowers you to reliably measure your performance and assess various interventions and protocols for their real effect on your fitness and health.
One of the most viral videos of Locket a Social App.
Just a raw story of how it started as a birthday present and now being used by Millions
6,100,000+ Views
8,47,000+ Likes
63,000+ Save
4569+ Comments
Don't overcomplicate much, just keep posting
Merry Christmas :)
people spend money in predictable ways:
if it saves them time, they'll pay
if it makes them money, they'll pay more
if it solves real pain, they'll pay regularly
if it gives them status, they'll pay anything
Answering questions and generating the worst possible horoscopes for friends and family this holiday with @tldraw computer!
Architecture of the hornet's nest
Simple but beautiful folded paper drawing
[📹 clymdraws]
"Bouqcakes"
[📹 Kerrys_bouqcakes]
Idea of the Day
✦ Use a bold typo with clear copy
✦ Include a illustrations to convey the app's vibe and value.
✦ Vary mockup sizes to make screenshots more engaging
This could increase the conversion rate by 3-10%.
Screenshots concept for @phantom
What do you think?
Distribution is the new king
Building software is easier than ever so standing out is all about how you deliver.
So i gathered the best channels to distribute a software in 2024
The most reliably predictable trend of the next 100 years: every year, humanity will use significantly more computing power than the previous year.
Someone should start an ETF based on that thesis (it's not just $NVDA and $AMD, it's cloud services, the data center industry, nuclear power...)
A founder once told me “a unit of risk scales better than a unit of hard work.”
One of the secrets of the universe.
mortal, are you ready for a new adventure? 🔺
I’ve been building a real-world AI hedge fund.
It's open source so you can learn + build too.
The hedge fund has 6 agents:
1 • market data agent
2 • quant agent
3 • fundamentals agent
4 • sentiment agent
5 • risk manager agent
6 • portoflio manager agent
The hedge fund is powered by @langchain
You can run all of my code below.
No prior coding experience is required.
All of the agents show their reasoning so you can see how they work.
1 • Market Data Agent: gathers market data like stock prices, fundamentals, etc.
2 • Quant Agent: calculates signals like MACD, RSI, Bollinger Bands, etc.
3 • Fundamentals Agent: analyzes profitability, growth, financial health, and valuation.
4 • Sentiment Agent: looks at insider trades to determine insider sentiment.
5 • Risk Manager: determines risk metrics like volatility, drawdown, and more.
6 • Portfolio Manager: makes final trading decisions and generates orders.
This is just the start.
There are a ton of cool features that we can add.
Let me know if you have any suggestions.
post-o3 career moat:
develop spooky good intuition about what humans actually want
read psychology & anthropology instead of tech blogs
develop taste that seems irrational but proves prescient
be the person people text when they're confused about the future
This is false, but it might be a good thing if belief in it became moderately widespread, because then all the remaining programmers would be in it for love and not just for money.
@fkasummer Energy.
@readswithravi "Building is the ultimate rebellion against the passing of time"
this app that i developed hit the $250 MRR in 2 weeks with zero cost marketing 🥳
#buildinpublic #indiehackers #indiedevs #ASO
Markwayne Mullin has the 8th highest return portfolio tracked among politicians over their lifetimes. His return is over 140%! On 12/19, it was disclosed that he recently purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of shares in $EZU and $IEFA, as well as between $1,000 and $15,000 in $IEMG.
$EZU is an interesting one. The daily gamma on $EZU has spiked over the last five sessions, with a huge increase in net call premium on 12/13. Makes you wonder if someone knows something.
You can follow politician portfolios and see all their trades on @unusual_whales 🐳
Unusual Whales Discount ⬇️
“I have no coding ability. I have no design background. I make software based on my intuition and taste.”
the new invaluable traits:
technology has turned roughly everything else into a commodity.
Paul Graham on working on a project of your own:
UX, design, actual dedication to the craft will take center stage in this next moment
Actually make something people want. Software and coding won't be the gating factor. It is the ability to be a polymath and smart/effective in many domains together that creates great software.
One very important thing to understand about the future: the economics of AI are about to change completely. We'll soon be in a world where you can turn test-time compute into competence -- for the first time in the history of software, marginal cost will become critical.
How to retire early.
1. Build a software product.
2. Scale to $1k - 10k MRR.
3. Sell
4. Build a new product.
Repeat.
venn diagrams are so back
I believe this. In biology you tend to lose what you don’t use.
how to make more than $0 on the internet
do one hour per day of marketing to your thing
no marketing, no money (sorry)
Excellent insight from @naval
Investing isn't gambling
Founder of MidJourney
You can run this on your own computer now!
I packaged this demo into an app.
Download Bartleby →
How to unlock your muscles
[📹 theo.arvidssonn]
Making money online has nothing to do with AI tools, agents, growth schemes, etc.
shut up.
get to work.
2 hours.
daily.
compounded over time.
mainly focused on marketing & distribution.
that's literally all that matters
damn, like how those looks like!
Basic
Advanced
Workbook
1. Dot Product
2. Matrix Multiplication
3. Linear Layer
Unusual observations made by high agency people will be the new most valuable thing in the world
When people say “what should we teach our kids?” it is to build this ability into them
New productivity hack - I asked Gemini Realtime to watch my screen, and yell at me when I waste time.
It gets increasingly mean the longer I spend slacking off 😂
(but since it's Gemini, it can't be that mean)
Have you fine-tuned any AI model?
I know a few guys that are making 6-figures per month,
Just by providing fine-tuned GPT-4o models to companies.
Best part: NO Coding skills required! as OpenAI provided a proper interface to fine-tune its models.
Here's a guide for you how you can fine-tune a GPT model:
✅️ Step 1: Prepare Your Training Data
Collect Data: Gather input and output data from the company.
Provide questions and answers in pairs as you want the model to respond:
For example:
Input: "What are your business hours?"
Output: "We are open from 9 AM to 5 PM, Monday to Friday."
Format Your Data: Save your examples in a JSON Lines file (.jsonl). Each line should have a prompt (input) and a completion (output), like this:
{"prompt": "What is your refund policy?", "completion": "You can request a refund within 30 days of purchase."}
Tip: Use JSON editor tools to transform text data into .jsonl data.
✅️ Step 2: Log into OpenAI
Go to OpenAI’s platform. (Not ChatGPT but Dev dashboard)
✅️ Step 3: Upload Your Training File
Navigate to Fine-Tuning Section in the left sidebar.
Upload Data:
Click the "Upload File" button and select your .jsonl file.
✅️ Step 4: Start a Fine-Tuning Job
Create a Job:
After uploading your file, click Create Fine-Tune.
Select the base model (e.g., gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini) to start fine-tuning.
Configure Settings:
You can add optional parameters like validation files or adjust the learning rate, but defaults work for most cases.
Start Fine-Tuning:
Click “Start Job.” The process may take some time depending on your dataset size.
You can notice good results from 2M to 5M token dataset. (Also, the quality of dataset matters)
✅️ Step 5: Monitor the Progress
Check Status:
The fine-tuning dashboard will show the progress of your job.
Once completed, you’ll see a new fine-tuned model ID.
✅️ Step 6: Use Your Fine-Tuned Model
Use the new model ID in your API calls to generate responses.
For example, specify your model in the API like this:
{"model": "fine-tuned-model-id", "prompt": "You are a Customer Support Expert"}
Test It:
Try different prompts to see how well your fine-tuned model performs.
OpenAI provides a playground to compare responses from multiple models.
✅️ Step 7: Evaluate and Deploy
Check if the model performs as expected.
Refine Data: If needed, add more examples to your dataset for better results.
Once you're satisfied with results,
Deploy this model in your client's application. Write a well structured system prompt.
Charge $15k-$20k for your fine-tuning job. (If the data is not structured and you had to work hard on the dataset, add extra cost)
Tip: First, try to train GPT-4o-mini as for most cases, this model works perfectly.
It is cheaper to train and cheaper to run as compared to GPT-4o.
That's it for today.
I hope you like this guide.
Join codeguide.dev if you haven't. It'll be the best resource for AI coding.
Excited for the launch. (1450 waitlist community members in 9 days)
Peace
CJ
Advanced Strategic Framework for Allied Security and Force Alignment, Surveillance, Defense, Forward Asset Stabilization, Force Deployment, Aero-Space Defensive Frontlines, Allied Support, Forward Assault, Special Forces, Aerial Synchronization, Fusion, Assurance, Safeguards, Frontline Security, Superior Applied Deterrence, Flexible Forward Formations Facilitating Fused Fronts For Future Functionality, Aligning Strategic Defense Foundations, Synchronizing Frontline Sectors, Assuring Force Stability, Forward Dominance With Fused Global Alliance Support Defense, Generating Broad Deployments For Battlefield Global Dominance, Supporting Ground Assault, Strategic Data Grid, Defense Synchronization for Broad Domain Boundaries
Biggest levers of growth
When normies (that's what I call people who aren't into AI yet) ask me why AI is such a big deal, I often give them this quote form @natfriedman:
"Imagine we discovered a new continent with 100 billion people on it, and they're all willing to work for free"
It's astounding how much more productive I've become by using ChatGPT/Claude.
I feel like I have 10 free, insanely hardworking, and incredibly smart and detail oriented employees.
today is a good day because i did marketing
marketing = how you help people with their problems (by showing them your solution)
used post bridge to make 3 videos and schedule them to promote my mobile app in 20 minutes today.
Hahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhaahhahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahhahajahahahahhahahahahahahahhahahahahahah infinity
you're an api wrapper away from buying a vacation home through your business to "entertain employees" as a tax write off
holy HELL Gemini deep research is unbelievable
just pulled info from 100ish websites and compiled a report on natural gas generation in minutes
maybe my favorite ai product launch of the last… at least three business days
Is this the best website ever made?
Google just launched an AI that takes over Chrome and does things for you.
It scores an insane 90.5% w/ tree search on the WebVoyager benchmark which has tasks like:
"Book a flight from SF to Berlin, departing on March 5 and returning on the 12"
Agents are going mainstream.
EU entrepreneurs are tired.
I analyzed the 190 responses to my post about the major problems European entrepreneurs suffer.
Here are the results of what frustrates them the most (I let Claude rank them)
The clear winner in terms of frustration is bureaucracy and paperwork (9/10).
People are fed up with all the forms, physical visits, and ridiculous notary requirements.
It came up again and again in different contexts.
Tax system and GDPR tie for second place (both 7/10).
The VAT system gives everyone headaches, especially when operating across borders (ask me about it!).
GDPR is interesting because while people generally support data protection, they feel the implementation crushes smaller businesses.
It's especially bad for small new businesses that can get crushed by the fines (there are law partner firms specialized only in finding and fining them, disgusting).
Labor laws and what people called an "anti-innovation culture" were next (both 6/10).
Tbh, this is close to my heart and impacts me daily.
The employment regulations seem to be a real pain point - lots of stories about not being able to fire underperforming employees and being afraid to hire because of the risks.
Market fragmentation and cross-border complexity (both 5/10) are interesting because they highlight a paradox:
The EU is supposed to be a single market, but entrepreneurs are still dealing with 27 different systems.
AI Act and tech regulations came up less frequently (4/10) but when they did, people felt strongly about them.
Some fascinating patterns emerged:
There's this striking cultural contrast people kept drawing between the US and EU approaches.
The US "let's do it" vs EU "let's regulate it" mentality came up several times.
The size issue is really interesting - lots of people pointed out how regulations that might be manageable for big companies are crushing for startups. One person mentioned spending up to 50% of their income just on compliance.
What really stood out to me:
Beyond specific complaints about regulations, there seems to be this deeper frustration about what some see as a fundamental hostility to entrepreneurship in the EU culture.
This all paints a picture of a challenge that goes beyond just regulatory burden - it seems to be about the whole culture around entrepreneurship in the EU.
Let me know if you find posts like this interesting.
I just analyzed it for myself and thought, why not share it.
Before → After
We're thrilled about our collaboration with the Speedometer app this year.
Testing visual designs has revealed some exciting insights.
Check out this summer concept that boosted conversion rates.
What are your thoughts on the design?
One of the hottest trends in Chinese consumer internet this year …
Revenue from short video dramas 短剧 — serialized stories of 1-2 minute episodes typically totaling 60-120 minutes, designed for vertical viewing on phones—has surpassed movie box office.
Operators compare them to “mini games” rather than traditional long-form media.
Creators attribute their addictiveness to the fact that they cram “2-3 movies’ worth of drama into one series” and the “3-7-21 rule,” where every 21 seconds must evoke a new emotion to maintain engagement. I forgot what the 3 & 7 stand for though 😂
For those interested in the foundation of mathematics, or speed running set theory, model theory, proof theory and recursion theory in under 150 pages, go get yourself this text by Kenneth Kunen
link to pdf in the comments
Hi HN, we’re JJ and Mark, the founders of Double (https://double.finance). Double lets you invest in 50+ broad stock market indexes with 0% expense ratios. We handle all the management, including rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting—proactively selling losing stocks to potentially save on taxes—for $1/month.
Our goal is to bring the low fee trend pioneered by Robinhood to ETFs and mutual funds. We posted a Show HN about 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246686) and since then have crossed $10M in AUM (Assets Under Management) [1].
Here’s a demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/10c9150ce4114f278e8c249f211e7ec8. Please note that none of this content should be treated as financial advice.
Everyone knows that fees eat into your investing returns. Financial advisors generally charge 1% of AUM per year, and ETFs have a weighted average expense ratio of about 0.17%, although some go as low as 0.03% for VOO. Over a 30-year period on a $500k portfolio with $2k invested monthly, the money lost to those fees would be $1.30M for the financial advisor and $244k for the average ETF and even $42,951 for the low fee VOO.
Double lets you index invest without paying any percentage-based fees - we charge just $1/month. It works by buying the individual stocks that make up popular indexes. By buying the individual positions, we can also customize and tax-loss harvest your account, something ETFs or Mutual Funds cannot do.
Most ETFs and mutual funds today are not that complicated - they can be expressed as a CSV file with 2 columns - a ticker and a share number. You can find these holding csv files on most ETF pages (VOO[2], QQQ[3]). Right now there are about $9.1T of assets in ETFs[4] and $20T in Mutual Funds[5] in the US, with estimated revenue of $100B per year. We think this market is ripe for disruption.
We offer 50+ strategies that track popular ETFs and are updated as stocks merge and indexes change. You can customize these by weighting sectors or stocks differently, or even build your own indexes from scratch using our stock/etf screening tools. Once you've chosen your strategy, simply set your target weights and deposit funds (we also support transferring existing stocks). Our engine then checks your portfolio daily for potential trades, optimizes for tax-loss harvesting, portfolio tracking, and redeploys any generated cash.
I (JJ) started working on this after selling my last company. After using nearly every brokerage product out there and working with a financial advisor, I noticed a huge gap between the indexing capabilities of financial advisors and what individual investors could access. We wanted to bridge that gap and provide these powerful tools to everyone in a simple, low-cost way.
There are a number of robo-advisor products out there, but none that we know of offer direct indexing without expense ratios or AUM fees. One similar product is M1 Finance, but Double is more powerful. We offer tax-loss harvesting, a wider range of indexes, and greater customization. For example, when building your own index, you can set weights down to 0.1% (compared to M1's 1%) and even weight by market cap.
We also compete with robo-advisors like Wealthfront, but offer more control over your investments. And did I mention we don't charge AUM fees? You can see our strategies and play with the research page https://double.finance/p/explore without creating an account.
Over the past year we’ve learned a lot about the guts of building portfolio software. For example, stocks don’t really have persistent identifiers that are easy to model and pass around. We trade CUSIPs with our custodian Apex*, but these change all the time for stock splits or re-org’s that you would not think would lead to a new “stock”.
We’ve also learned a lot about how tax loss harvesting (TLH) is best implemented on large direct index portfolios using a factor model as opposed to pairs based replacements which I initially thought might be the way to execute these. We do use a pairs strategy on smaller sized strategies. And how TLH and portfolio optimization generally is best expressed as a linear optimization problem with competing objectives (tracking vs. tax alpha vs. trading costs for example).
If you have any thoughts on the product or our positioning as the low fee alternative I’d love to hear it. I think Robinhood has proved that you can build a strong business by getting rid of an industry wide cost (in their case commissions, in our expense ratios). We aim to do the same.
[1] https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2024/12/10/direct-in... [2] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi... [3] https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/about.html [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1LM564090005Q [5] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1LM654090000Q
* Edit to add a note on risk: If Double goes out of business, your assets are safe and held in your name at Apex Clearing. They have processes in place for these scenarios to help you access and transfer those assets. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42379135 below.
Before → After
We want to share a concept from our initial A/B test in collaboration with the Runna app.
Runna is the leading app for runners, helping them prepare for marathons while making running enjoyable and beneficial.
What do you think of the concept?
I need only one simple example to convince you that OOP patterns are scams, and Category Theory patterns are superior.
In the OOP world, when you tell me something is a 'Visitor', you tell me nothing.
So are you telling me that this code traverses some values and maybe even recursively calls itself? Well, f*cking thanks, Sherlock, you just literally described 90% of every OCaml project.
Your words said nothing of value and wasted my time.
However, when you tell me that something is 'Applicative', I immediately know:
1. THE EXACT NAMES OF FUNCTIONS TO USE. Yes, the abstraction is THAT precise. It's and+/pure in OCaml, and the Star Wars TIE Interceptor ship operator/pure in Haskell.
2. THE EXACT TYPES OF EVERY FUNCTION.
3. How to create values of that thing: use 'pure'.
4. How to compose values of that thing: use 'and+'.
5. The parallelism semantics attached to the composition.
6. What extra rules and laws those functions follow.
7. An entire library of 100 REUSABLE FUNCTIONS I can immediately benefit from with my value.
8. What other abstractions are implied: every Applicative is Functor, so by definition, I know what else I can use with my value.
You said just one word — Applicative — and it singlehandedly absolutely f*cking destroyed entropy. I immediately know everything I need to know.
A single word says more than an entire useless book.
I’ll be tutoring a young adult who wants to become a mathematician. To introduce him, I’ll start with the fundamentals of higher mathematics: sets, counting, logic, proofs, some basics on number theory and discrete math.
This is my selection of books. Any recommendations?

built an AI phone agent that turns support into 24/7 sales - this is wild
this Lindy agent was built in less than 10 minutes and can:
we're building AI employees that can run entire companies autonomously
voice is just the beginning :)
The Black Alley Cats
1973 / United States / Henning Schellerup
Australian drive-in promo
💥🐈⬛sound on🐈⬛💥
ChatGPT-4o is a GENIUS marketer.
I turned it into my personal marketing assistant with these 10 powerful prompts that you can now use for automating your tasks:
(10/10 would bookmark this)
The 3 Buckets Theory: Where silence becomes your organization's most expensive conversation.
Having o1 write out detailed annotated history of most major tech advancements 1990-today
This is the best writing I’ve read in Modern Cold Outbound and it’s not close.
A test of how seriously your firm is taking AI: when o-1 (& the new Gemini) came out this week, were there assigned folks who immediately ran the model through internal, validated, firm-specific benchmarks to see how useful it as? Did you update any plans or goals as a result?
I don't understand why people don't use ChatGPT-4o for stock trading.
Here are 10 prompts to use for stock trading and investing:
I’m curious how this would contrast with the way Peter Thiel would describe Mark Zuckerberg.
I’m probably wrong here, but I would have thought Peter would describe Mark as very ambitious with a precise vision of the future. Mark did reject acquisitions early on after all.
Someone with that much conviction seems like they’d have a clear vision in mind.
Not to say you shouldn’t start small or without flexibility. Those seem to be important prerequisites. And most people aren’t Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. So perhaps they’re exceptions to the rule.
But sometimes I wonder if empirically the reason most startups fail is because they’re not maniacally ambitious enough. That seems unlikely. So perhaps Paul is speaking from the perspective of someone who has seen ambition lead many founders astray due to their stubbornness and grandiosity.
“In the near future, LLMs, with the full ability to use and control computers, will reshape everything. How developers write software, how CEOs run their companies, and even how we all live our daily lives.”
The future is now. Deploy Computer Use in production with Scrapybara.
Dear son, read this carefully.
I've made projects with:
Claude with Projects is a literal life hack
This is an excellent article about the hidden revolution in dairy farming.
Scientists can estimate how much milk cows will produce based on DNA sequences.
More than 99% of male cows today can be traced back to one of two bulls born in the 1960s, which had "desirable" traits.
Cursor Pro Tip:
Create a "Project Status" file to track your progress.
At the end of every coding session, ask Cursor to review the conversation and update this file with what has been implemented and what’s next.
Next time, simply prompt Cursor to "read the project status," and it’ll instantly know where you left off and what to do next.
Try it out!
The age of AI agents is here.
Models can read, see, talk, and now, even use a computer— all by themselves. One of the first out of the gates is @AnthropicAI’s Claude Computer Use.
YC's @garrytan dives into how it works, what it can do, and how it may change AI forever.
Absolute CHEAT CODE for Paid Ads:
Introducing TikTok Hook Generator
$700 —> +$1M YTD
December 6th 2023 this account was sitting at $700 (video) - fast forward to December 5th 2024 I’m sitting at over $1M profits YTD. I’ve documented my entire journey this year.
They told me the first $100k was lucky. Then I did it again. And again. And again.
Work hard. Review. Show up and preform. And if you fail do it again.
Huge plans for 2025 and I’m taking everyone with me.
Behind every great product there’s at least one engineer who knows the entire stack, takes problems personally, and jumps in and solves them.
Without regard to ownership, credit, or chain of command.
If you don’t know who this is in your company, I have bad news for you…
There’s a mathematical solution for:
Share with your friends who have been online dating too long.
The next wave of innovation is here.
AI, Biotech, and Green Energy are taking over the world.
Here are 5 stocks analysts believe will dominate the next decade:
1. NVIDIA ($NVDA)
These 36 Sequoia-backed startups are all actively hiring for remote roles:
The Viral TikTok format that always works (Part-7):
1 video:
Exact method:
This format has driven 100s of Millions of views for JotBot and other companies.
Full video below 👇
Dippy AI: 60+ accounts & 60M+ views in 3mo
Crushon AI: 50+ accounts & 80M+ views & $200K MRR app
+ 11 different AI gf apps doing the exact same mass faceless TikTok growth hack (huge alpha):
dream portfolio:
My name is ___, I am a product designer in ___ who ships. Here are things that I've been a part of:
An axolotl playing with the fish tank air intake
What’s your excuse?
Value of $1 a day invested in the stock market:
10 years: $5,515
20 years: $21,401
30 years: $47,928
40 years: $152,199
50 years: $582,951
60 years: $1,322,116
70 years: $3,103,750
(based on historical S&P 500 returns)
I scaled three different apps to billions of views and millions of profit in one year.
The biggest secret in the entire industry is the importance of comment sections.
Here is why 🧵
We’re here to put the power of artificial intelligence into the hands of the many rather than the privileged few.
As @zach_yadegari mentioned in his latest podcast - if your ASA ads on competitor keywords perform well, you have a product at least as good as your competitors. Conversely, poor performance suggests your product is inferior to your competitors.
I asked Claude to come up with a few new rules for why systems fail and dang it, they are pretty spectacular.
Number 25, "Modern systems conflate efficiency with resilience" is especially great, as are 22 "System success paradoxically increases fragility" and 23 on mental models
Quantum gravity is the field of physics that seeks to unify quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of particles on the smallest scales, with general relativity, which explains gravity and spacetime on cosmic scales.
Since these theories conflict in extreme conditions (like black holes or the Big Bang), quantum gravity aims to create a single framework to describe nature's fundamental forces.
Notable approaches include string theory, loop quantum gravity, and attempts to understand spacetime as emergent rather than fundamental. Despite progress, a complete theory remains elusive.