anatari

You should join a startup where generally everyone needs to carry their weight for the company to succeed which creates camaraderie opposite of loneliness.

They key point that's missing here is that ALL stock trades are on "margin" because in reality it takes 2 days to settle a trade, but that is abstracted away from you by the brokerage and clearing house, and made available to you instantly. Caveat: I'm just starting to learn about all this, so it's probably not a perfectly accurate analogy.

You are taking your personal anecdotes and extrapolating. No one would disagree with you that mental illness and addiction are major factors in homelessness. But your argument is like saying, anyone who doesn't believe everyone in the world is wealthy go spend some time in Medina. It's a ridiculous argument.

This is spot on. As a hiring manager for these type of positions, the primary thing I look for is a track record of using data to achieve business results. This of course creates a barrier for entering this field and makes those with this experience even more highly sought after.

Yes, and I only feel bad for those who have cancer, and have no food to eat. The employees only have to worry about the mental anguish of suffering through some stupid whiteboard coding problems to get their next job. /sarcasm off.

Why didn't they turn off the engine to stop the vibration? To a layman that would seem safer than having an engine violently shake the wing!

Personally, I would do whatever you think best sets up your child for success. In my case, it's unfathomable in my family culture to not pay for college for the child if you're financially able because that is what we believe will set up the child for success - to be able to freely seek out higher education and realize their full potential without worry of debt and finances. However, the counter point is that there are those that feel the financial constraints will make your child stronger and instill in them a stronger work ethic and appreciation for what they have. An upbringing that combines both elements is likely ideal, but personally I chose to instill the latter values in different ways that doesn't cripple my child with debt.

It's more than people being used to free access. Tolls on a major highway like the 405 would effectively be a regressive tax - people need to get to work and in L.A. there often is no alternative. And people seem to generally agree regressive taxation is not a good idea.

This is kind of missing the whole point. Which is, as a developer, you can slip anything into the Apple appstore that you could have slipped into Alexa's, so the point the article is making about certification is silly. Of course there are more security implications in Apple's case, but the fact remains that numerous apps have done the bait and switch and were pulled after Apple discovered it much later.

We were one of these potential bigger customers willing to fork over thousands per month, but the unit cost was still too expensive for us. We tried to negotiate a better bulk rate, but their team was unresponsive and so we eventually went with another service that was more responsive to our needs. According to the article they only have ~3k paying customers, which means they only care about giant top tier customers willing to pay top dollar. Seems like a mistake to me, but what I only know from the potential client perspective.

The one language to rule them all reasoning is a red herring. We chose nodejs for our server code for an iOS app as do many others.

The reason why JS + node is popular is becasue it's pretty good at each of the metrics you mentioned. Even though it's not best in class at any one of those, it is well balanced for many tasks. Many other technologies are either too slow, too low level, too hard to scale, or too cumbersome to work with.

As soon as you make a game that's able to compete for conversions on ads, your game probably won't be considered indie anymore. Ads are extremely competitive and the only way to compete and not get priced out is to "sellout" and make games with mass market appeal, AAA price tags, high monetization funnels to increase LTV, etc. Without that, it's unlikely you'll be able to profitably spend on ads through any of the major channels. You're competing against the Game of Wars and Clash of Clans out there on Mobile and the AAA and IP titles on traditional platforms. So your metrics will need to be on par with the likes of those (it at least needs to be on par in a niche target demographic) in order to have any measure of success.

So the typical indie marketing strategy of using social media, press, and word of mouth, is actually very rational and probably the best way to go about it.

How did you get access to the binaries? I would think the AppStore requires a session and valid purchase in order to download. Or is this analysis based on binaries submitted by your users?

As a 3rd party without detailed knowledge of the space and each company's position it's hard to say. Here is a possible framework for you tho.

Since you are basically asking for co-founder level equity in the merged company, pretend that you were working there the whole time when you were working on your own startup. The acquisition cost is the amount of salary you would have drawn.

Nah, people with sour grapes are most likely are all arm chair wantrepreneurs. I doubt there are many people that are actually out there doing things that would be sour about this. People who think this went viral solely because of YC are likely too crippled by their cynicism to accomplish anything.

Although I use Netflix all the time, it's in spite of their app. Outside of the "my list" I've curated myself, 98% of the things the Netflix app shows me, I'm not really interested in. I feel like that ratio could easily be made better if they allowed me to mark things I'm not interested in and never show me those things again + apply machine learning to display a better personalized catalog.

Whenever I use Netflix I always feel like there is a lot of content locked away and I have to dig past the same stuff it always shows to find stuff I'm interested in.

I can get more things done in 60 hours. I'm looking at productivity over the long term. If I work 60 hours/week for a whole year I will accomplish a whole lot more than if I worked 30. But if I work 80 hours per week, I will only accomplish marginally more than 60 hours and maybe even less if I burn out. Everyone has different priorities and different breaking points, but I find it disingenuous when people claim more hours doesn't allow for more productivity. I'm certain there are people that can sustain much longer periods of productivity than myself and as a result accomplish more things.

Of course spending time alone does not mean you'll be productive, but assuming equal intelligence, someone who is able to sustain concentration over a longer period of time will accomplish more than someone who concentrates for a lesser amount of time.

Sorry, but I just don't buy this wishful thinking of low hour high productivity. Personally, I probably hit peak productivity around 60 hours although I rarely work for longer than 4 hours without taking a break to eat lunch/dinner or play with my daughter. People who hit peak productivity at 30 hours probably just don't like what they're working on as much and so of course founders select for the former. That said this only relevant if you're trying to be highly productive. I have nothing against people who choose to spend their energy on other things.

Voice recognition is not in an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means there is a point where something that is less real is better than something that is more real. Pixar improves the scene by adding elements that are unrealistic. Another example is a preference for lower frame rate movies.

Right now, every incremental improvement to voice recognition improves its usefulness. It might appear that we're in an uncanny valley because voice recognition is barely usable right now versus completely unusable in the past, but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition.

"As the startup, you have all the leverage before you sign a term sheet. Once you sign, you have almost no leverage at all."

A breakup fee would help mitigate this. Is that uncommon and difficult to negotiate for?

1. When they decide to sell the property

2. Just like in the U.S., mostly normal "middle class" people with the help of banks

3. In the past decade, not really, real estate has been less volatile and outperformed the Shanghai stock market as an example.

No doubt there is more opportunity today than before as the Internet has grown, but 15 years ago, I got my start as a young teenager selling shareware, which was quite common back then. I don't have any data on this right now, but I bet the economics of it was better back then for the little guy too because there was so little competition versus the millions of apps out there now. I made more money back then selling shareware than 99% of people do now selling apps.

These things aren't binary. I believe the USA is more meritocratic than it's not. Also depends on what you define as merit. Is having capital a merit? In the eyes of the economy anything that has utility has merit, and capital certainly has very high utility.

B) Yes, meritocracies are not equal by definition, but again, I think it is more fair than not. Fair does not mean equal, it means being "thought to be right" so it will depend on each person's morality. I for one, certainly do not want to live in a world where good health has no advantages over bad health, even if I was unhealthy.

But then how would you automatically identify the app name as shown in his email? I think it's easier to download the app. Only ~1m android applications out there. You can probably crawl the android store with just 1 or 2 servers using the algorithm I described below with a trie. Identifying patterns from random data seems way harder to get right, but maybe that's because I have a CS background rather than a statistics one.

You can build a trie of all the AWS keys and then for each Android binary, traverse each series of bytes until it either terminates at a leaf node or fails to continue. If it fails, you start over again on the next byte. Or in order words, the trie allows you to easily test if a given byte is the start of an AWS key, and so then you just check every possible offset. Believe the run time will only be O(n*k) where n is the size of the binary and k is the size of the AWS key, plus enough memory to store the trie which is probably relatively small; less than 1m AWS accounts?

Yeah, no problem. If you guys are planning on targeting games feel free to ping me privately to bounce ideas off of. I'm also a 30 something founder with kids in Seattle :). Our company currently uses a variety of services related to what you are doing. My email is my username at gmail.

After reading your comment, I was curious and looked up the site, and was expecting amature hour, but I think you're being too critical. The website looks well put together and communicated the product idea just fine. It's actually a very interesting idea that I think has real market demand if it actually works and produces better results than manually segmenting users (what all the other products do right now). That being said, I think it is very non-trivial to make a general recommendation engine that will work well for a variety of different apps and goals that isn't overly complicated. These things tend to sound good in theory, but fall apart in the details of practice.

#1. How do you know? Did you contact them? Obviously it's not open to the public as self-serve right now.

#2. I only glanced at the site, and didn't spot any. I'm sure they're there tho.

#3. They're demonstrating why you should care about push notifications. I'm sure they'll replace with specific case studies when they get some.

#4. I'm sure they've only begun to explore pricing at this early stage, but it seems reasonable to me. It's actually almost identical pricing per user compared to mixpanel, a YC company with a product in a similar space, at $0.002.

This is absurd. While I'm sure there is a lot of fraudulent activity and rubbish ad networks (IE Facebook likes, as claimed by the article), traditional online ads are pretty trivial to track at this point for a business that can complete transactions online. If you run a web store, you can track exactly how much sales you get from a particular ad channel and weigh it against the advertising cost by simply creating a unique link for each channel, or using any of the many available ad analytics platforms out there. Entire multi-million/billion dollar businesses are built around arbitraging this opportunity positively, particularly on Google.

Things like Facebook Likes are more difficult to track and are still relatively new, and that's why many people haven't figured them out yet, but over time they will either reach an equilibrium, where value provided is equal to cost or they will disappear.

If this trend continues, the implication will be that venture capital will cease to exist as we know it, but instead will resemble traditional private equity where capital is mostly allocated to established viable businesses.

Although I'm sure it's possible to fool their image hashing algorithm, I doubt this will. Image hashing algorithms are designed to be resistant to small changes in the image and more advanced ones can generate hashes that determine how similar one image is to another. I haven't tried this, but you can probably see a proof of this using google image search. Add some text to an image, and see if Google image search can find the original.