Hacker News: davecyen

New comment by davecyen in "Angel Investors, a Field Guide"

davecyen — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:28:42 +0000

> if a VC investor is doing their job well, they will make sure to keep investing in your company until they have a good amount of ownership. This means it is against their incentives to introduce you to other investors or do anything else that interferes with their ability to buy more shares in your company for a good price.

this is only true for larger multi-stage funds who compete with each other, not for Seed or Series A-only funds

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Halluminate (YC S25) – Simulating the internet to train computer use"

davecyen — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 23:11:13 +0000

Very cool - is it possible to simulate this on a live production site (i.e. instead of Halluminate Flights, just test the agent live on Expedia)? Even though you don't have access to the backend json, presumably you could verify the right values were entered in the frontend/UI?

New comment by davecyen in "Show HN: A “Course” as an MCP Server"

davecyen — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 01:30:00 +0000

This is really cool. I used the OG Codecademy to learn how to code, this is kind of like the next-gen version of that.

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs"

davecyen — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 01:04:14 +0000

Re: 3rd party integrations, think glue code for enterprise platforms (I previously worked on the developer platform at Shopify).

For example, a guide to integrate Shopify's Storefront API with Sanity CMS. These are usually a marketing/product thing more than developer docs... and almost always become obsolete after the next release and forgotten about.

Would've loved to generate a bunch of these guides and then automatically keep them up-to-date with code examples, and help serve both purposes for growth and developer docs.

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs"

davecyen — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:04:39 +0000

Very needed! I’ve worked on platform teams and API docs were always rushed last second to push out a release—-but in many ways they are the product.

Another pain point was creating guides/examples for integrating 3rd party tools. Could be worth exploring

Show HN: Unicorn Ratio – Investing models for YC demo day

davecyen — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 15:39:56 +0000

I help run a YC alumni-led fund, and one of the questions that always comes up for our group is: What's the optimal number of YC companies to back per batch?

We built an app that uses two models for approaching this problem - we call it the Unicorn Ratio.

Live version: https://orangecollective.vc/unicorn-ratio

Repo: https://github.com/orangecollective/unicorn-ratio

The two models it uses are:

Kelly Criterion—A mathematical model that optimizes portfolio construction. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/04/091504.asp

Binomial Distribution—A probability model that predicts your chances of backing a unicorn based on portfolio size and historical success rates https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/binomialdistribution.as...

We actually learned of the Kelly model last week during a call that YC organized for a group of demo day investors (thanks YC). We built and open-sourced this in the same spirit of collaboration.

Related, on the My First Million podcast, Garry revealed some data for investors at YC Demo Day—specifically the returns for investors who consistently backed 3+ startups each batch over a two-year span. Here’s the 1 min clip.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxVnlzcslmeMCTDFc9G2R--W7pigxVe8N...

So, what’s the takeaway here?

Conventional VC wisdom is all about making a few, highly concentrated bets. But this suggests a broader, more systematic approach to YC investing could also be a viable strategy (and likely put you amongst the top returning funds).

LMK if there are other models or approaches worth considering too.

Disclaimer: don’t use these models as investment advice.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137270

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Fortress (YC S24) – Database platform for multi-tenant SaaS"

davecyen — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 06:45:29 +0000

you might consider that it's precisely your depth and breadth of experience, which isn't common across most teams, might actually highlight why a solution like Fortress is valuable

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts"

davecyen — Wed, 24 May 2023 19:53:49 +0000

A couple use cases were already listed in other comments:

1) Document search 2) Translating plain english <> Legalease

But seems like the highest leverage here is building a copilot for authoring new contract templates that Common Paper doesn't offer yet (maybe the legal advisory panel could assist with RLHF training).

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts"

davecyen — Tue, 23 May 2023 16:39:36 +0000

Love what you’re building here. How are you guys thinking about potentially integrating LLMs?

New comment by davecyen in "How we built Hydrogen, a React framework for building custom storefronts"

davecyen — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 02:29:49 +0000

Just learned that the token lasts for 6 weeks, so the issue might lie in how you’ve implemented the session.

Take a look at the hydrogen demo store, auth is implemented using the customer access token and Hydrogen’s CookieSessionStorage:

https://hydrogen.new

New comment by davecyen in "How we built Hydrogen, a React framework for building custom storefronts"

davecyen — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 17:26:08 +0000

You can use hydrogen and the storefront api to renew the customerAccessToken: https://shopify.dev/api/storefront/2022-04/objects/customera...

Show HN: Shopify's headless commerce stack now GA (Hydrogen and Oxygen)

davecyen — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 22:28:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.shopify.com/editions/summer2022/dev#hydrogen-oxygen

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31842658

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by davecyen in "Could Apple's search engine beat Google?"

davecyen — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 20:36:54 +0000

I don't personally click through on web search results from Spotlight (usually I just use Spotlight to search for an app or shortcut on my phone), but I think Siri is the biggest unlock here.

New comment by davecyen in "Ask HN: What Lived Up to the Hype?"

davecyen — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 17:05:15 +0000

Stripe

New GitHub repos to have default branches named “main” instead of “master”

davecyen — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 05:25:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-to-replace-master-with-main-starting-next-month/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24532071

Points: 63

# Comments: 116

New comment by davecyen in "Show HN: Animockup – An open-source design tool to make animated mockups"

davecyen — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 22:07:56 +0000

I’m looking into fabricJS for a project I’m working on too. Did you try other libraries like konva?

New comment by davecyen in "Launch HN: Ophelia (YC W20) – At-home recovery for opioid addiction"

davecyen — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 21:34:54 +0000

Sorry to hear about the loss of your girlfriend. This is an amazing way to honor her life, and important work you're doing to help solve a painful problem for millions of people. I've lost a family member to this disease, and have friends who have as well. I'm going to share this with someone I know who is also battling opioid addiction today. Thank you for building this.

How software is eating care delivery for healthcare (A16Z)

davecyen — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 17:32:53 +0000

Article URL: https://a16z.com/2019/07/31/how-software-is-eating-care-delivery-in-healthcare/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616179

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Erasure: a breakthrough protocol to create unstoppable data feeds

davecyen — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 17:35:44 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/numerai/numerai-reveals-erasure-unstoppable-peer-to-peer-data-feeds-4fbb8d92820a

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18141916

Points: 27

# Comments: 0

Quantum Computing in the NISQ Era and Beyond – John Preskill

davecyen — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 14:30:30 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17739799

Points: 2

# Comments: 0