apunic

The main reason why they are done:

- Facebook is not viral anymore and share or likes hardly bring extra traffic

- Twitter is mixed: in general you do not get decent traffic from them; but from time to time a +100K follower user either shares or retweets your thing and you get extra traffic or he/she initiate kind of virality (again this happens even for high traffic sites not very often)

- and of course they are just ugly

I can confirm this. All web projects I worked on which were minimalistic, clean and well designed had less stickiness (page impression count to visits) compared to sites stuffed with content, pics, links, extra widgets here and there.

Why is this not upvoted? Great tech demo!

A friend said: cofounders are the biggest driver before getting funded and the biggest obstacle after.

This is now the second Flappy Bird clone within 24 hours and sometimes I wonder what's going on in such people. Talented coders who can program like hell but are not able to find an own idea or at least to steal some neat idea and make it better.

Do they really think because it's open source or HTML5 makes it better?

Thanks for this tl;dr, very helpful. I read 2x the OP's tl;dr and 1x his post but didn't get his point at all.

What makes me wonder: why the author didn't it copy really 1:1?

Everything from the sounds, the proportions to the speed is slightly wrong making this thing pretty awkward.

There's no relation between 'procrastination' and 'letting go'. Procrastination is pretty much normal, everyone procrastinated once entire days on HN/Netflix/...

There are easy cures and proven techniques against procrastination and not a single one is mentioned in this write-up.

Good advice but is this 'prescription' and its explanations not obvious, long-known and could have been squeezed into one tweet instead a blog post?

"Nintendo, stop building hardware, start being a publisher."

Did you try Kii, Swiftkey or TouchPal X?

They all allow to mix multiple languages and are pretty awesome virtual keyboards. Using them with two or more languages at the same time is a very smooth experience. Couldn't imagine to go back to a single language keyboard.

A quick overview:

- Swiftkey has probably the best prediction capabilities and with its cloud sync it has many advanced features.

- Touchpad is very close to swiftkey

- Kii is the keyboard with the most configuration possibilities. You can change really everything with this keyboard, from the size of the buttons over padding, click sounds, prediction behaviors to gestures and many, many more. It's definitely the most powerful and fastest keyboard. On par with swiftkey except the cloud sync feature. Once you you set it up to your needs your type as fast as with a blackberry either with one hand (by swiping) or with two hands (by tapping). But again swiftkey and touchpad are very powerful too and at the end it's a matter of taste.

Swype is still quite popular but doesn't have good multi language support and the experience is not that smooth compared to the other ones.

> iOS permissions are more granular sometimes

Not true, http://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.perm...

Android having the most granular permission system ever seen on any operating system is already the most secure operating system.

The biggest security hole next to the baseband processor and the SIM is the user who installs every app in seconds without checking permissions.

Right!

That sounds good and I also tried once not to make a relationship my number one priority but at the end of the day I lied to myself. This might work for some time and substitutes like good friends, a challenging work will make your time easier but won't fix your real problem.

Still I agree that one needs to have daily habits even when in a relationship.

Munich is neither bad nor small but still I can imagine that finding friends there is hard: in Munich you find those networks and circles which exist for decades and over generations. The people are nice but the fluctuation is too small, the city is not dynamic, night-life is quite limited, you would need 10 years to get into the society and still some parts would not welcome you.

=> change quickly to a real capital

There's tons of good stuff out there and what I still remember are the posts from Tyler (RSD), they changed me and his works are way beyond pick-up lines, check his material and his peer group and you find many more talented guys. I'd even consider to book one of those seminars, they are incredibly expensive and look like scam (they are not) but they perfectly brainwash you, reframe your mind and this is what most need. Most concepts are so contrary to what you have been socialized with, so you desperately need this stuff to get on the right track. And more important, it's extremely motivating and eye-opening -- going through that material is like finding the error after days of debugging.

Before I got into PUA 10 years ago I did really everything wrong.

Thanks for your reply. I don't have the time to answer your post in detail, so I give some brief thoughts. I don't know how big your city is but maybe you should consider to relocate. Capitals are usually the way to go, most people, open minds. Also some countries/mentalities are more open and some not, so maybe you should change the country, too. Don't get me wrong but your post sounds pretty negative, I agree that getting out of loneliness is hard but it's not impossible. And believe me there is some life-changing pua literature out there which is very sophisticated and rather about deep psychological concepts. So, don't judge them before reading them yourself.

> it also depends on the cultural environment and the particular circumstances

Then, why don't you change them?

Loneliness is severe. Stopping this feeling is quite hard and I slightly doubt that the article's content will help but as somebody wrote, it's a great start to dig deeper.

1. What one needs: ideally, you have a significant other (SO) -- I know it's damn hard to get one but let's first understand why a SO is the number one fix for loneliness. The SO is somebody no one else can replace, even not your best friends. Why? There are many reasons but the most important is that we all require a lot of communication and interaction with like-minded people to be happy -- this is one of our core needs and if this is lacking just one (!) day we get depressed. A SO fulfills those communication and interaction needs much better than any other person because the quantity of communication with your SO can be very high while the quality can be low. So, what does it mean? You can call your SO anytime and tell her really minor stuff like 'they have awesome apples in the store, shall I get some?' or when going to bed you can talk about how the day went, that traffic today was a pain or you show her some funny posts on Reddit. Just imagine how many words of unimportant communication you exchange with an SO in a week vacation. All this sounds nitty-gritty and totally irrelevant, but the SO is 'always-on', will listen to any crap and this is something we terribly need. And you can't call or text your best friend or close co-workers before going to bed to tell them that today's apples were really juicy. Moreover, we get other amenities like sex or endearment.

2. If no SO is present then the next thing you need to not feel lonely are good or very good friends or let's call them best friends, people who you really connect to. To find those is as hard as finding your SO and usually you don't get that a person is about to be your best friend before meeting him/her over a long period of time. But 'best friends' won't stay -- it doesn't take too long and the connection you had with them loosens up but you still stick to them (because they 'are' your best friends), so don't spend too much time on finding the 'best' friend, any friend will do. However, best friends are important but can not replace a SO.

3. The next level of people you need or are rather nice to have are close or like-minded co-workers. But this is something you shouldn't aspire for and those connections are very fragile/dynamic because work and life sometimes doesn't play well together and disappointment is hard-wired. Still, best friends can be won from co-workers.

So, we know now what we need, let's now find an answer to the question how to get there.

Finding a SO is very hard and the best way is to go out and create as many leads as possible -- very helpful is the PUA literature, just google it and find tons of wisdoms. A lot of stuff is crappy but you will find as much excellent advice there. And don't think that good looks is the key to find your SO, it makes life a bit easier but it's definitely not the key.

Similar to before you should go out and meet many, many people -- very good for this are meet-ups.

But the most important thing: you should NEVER go out and look for the SO or the best friend. This doesn't work and makes you ultra needy and people will find you awkward. Simultaneously, you will be disappointed because everybody you meet seems to be a douche, so start slowly and don't expect wonders. Connect to MANY people and try to keep relationships superficial, slowly intense those relationship which look promising but look that you still connect to MANY people because most people won't match (for being a SO or best friend). A hint: good matches are usually your close peers, people who are in similar situations, contexts and/or face same challenges. However, to have a good evening often you do not need a best friend (of course it's better and more convenient to have one) but sometimes just some random people work out too. What can also help: find a personal mission you pursue which is NOT 'finding best friends', starting a startup, a meetup, whatever -- to create a relationship you need always some hook.

And then after few months everything will come by itself. It's definitely some work involved but everybody can master it, even the introverts (which is just often a weak excuse).

To survive the lonely times before -> exercise every day, eat and live well and most important, stop any kind of drugs, they make your lonely times even worse.

A side note regarding founders, when starting their business entrepreneurs have a hard time but this struggle will be rewarded in future and feeling lonely is often part of the job.

I don't get the point of this post and I think that almost all the lessons the OP wrote down are wrong. Is this post an excuse why MS is performing that bad with Bing? Why is there no one from MS stepping forward and shouting, yes Bing is still behind but we will fight tooth and nail to crush Google -- no, instead some MS employee is writing a non-approved post where he gives 6 lessons why MS sucks and why life is so hard, wtf? Maybe this is the reason why MS falls behind year by year because people behind MS are too laid back and lack fighting spirit.

Nobody knows what MS is today, especially nowadays because MS doesn't have any CEO. We know that MS was the company which controlled the personal computer experience in large parts and we know that this experience was ruled by the web and by search for one decade and there is no excuse that MS totally forgot that search must be a integral part.

I just checked out Bing with some well known search queries and the results are very close to Google's.

What makes me slightly uncomfortable are

- the name and the branding. It sounds irrational but the name annoys me and I just do not want to type it. Bing doesn't sound sophisticated, smart or anything and the big picture on the landing page is unwanted and makes the product feel unfocussed. Maybe the reason is just that Bing never did something way better than Google and thus, there were no opportunities to load this name with a good reputation with some achievements.

- the speed: Google is (or feels) still way faster here and there (when entering something into the search it instantly switch to the SERP view)

Just put the text file on Dropbox and use any available text editor on mentioned clients. Regarding pwds: I separate pwds and todos.

The best to-do list: a raw text file

A line = a task

Deleting a line = task finished

A text file = a list of tasks related to some context

The best and fastest editor for this on a Mac: NValt

This is the most efficient and simple solution for managing plenty of todos, no cumbersome rules, check boxes, markdown, web interfaces.

> All writing, graphics, coding and publishing was done on a nexus 7

This deserves a dedicated blog post

A FE dev doesn't need to have design skills per se but it's handy and increases your market value.

How to get there: just create stuff, start with smaller things (like a simple blog design or even smaller like a page about yourself) and get inspirations from other talented designers. Maybe you just copy their stuff 1:1 in the beginning just to get some feeling for shapes and colors.

Really well designed site and buttons. Everything is fresh and clean but the buttons unfortunately require jQuery.

Thanks again for all this advice, very helpful!

Nice advice and one of the best among all replies.

Could you please elaborate on fish oil (why and did you experience any effects if not taken) and vitamin d3 (again why and what happened if you omitted it).

Caffeine as regular stimulant sound tempting but isn't the risk of slight depression higher especially in hard times?

Any tl;dr?

Your real problem lies somewhere else: You lack motivation because your work lacks a long-term perspective. Being a freelancer who sells his personal time is not what you intrinsically aimed for. You need something which is it worth to stay home alone and this is not being a mercenary selling his time for money. And the goal can not be just 'to work from home and being free' either, you goal must be way bigger and 'working from home' is a means to an end.

Once you work on something big structuring the day with all good things like exercise, good food, socializing comes by itself and you won't need a dog or any other mumbo-jumbo, though Pomodoro comes sometimes handy just to get started and getting shit done since some procrastination always happens.

This is my experience from working home for the first years of my company (which was the most productive time of my life).

> The problem is that html5 video doesn't work everywhere (we actually encode six different videos to cover the most browsers)

Six different videos?? Anyone knows more about html5 video fragmentation and why six videos are required?