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avalaunch

1,989 karma · joined March 28, 2012

avalaunchit@gmail.com
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avalaunch··on Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
avalaunch··on Affordable Care
Why does your faith trump someone else's personal belief? That is, why does faith, which is a belief without any proof, often with proof to the contrary, trump a belief that might actually be grounded in some form of reasoning? In both cases it's simply what you believe vs what someone else believes.
avalaunch··on I've removed all ad network code from my blog
I'm not seeing anything, but I'm on mobile. Does it only work on desktop? That seems like a pretty big deterrent to using it if so.
avalaunch··on The Burden of Policing Walmart
Yeah, but are the decreased amount of police calls due to Target's loss prevention officers (and other such prevention mechanisms), or is it simply due to the fact that they cater to a different demographic? It would certainly be an interesting experiment - if Target removed their loss prevention officer, and/or Walmart added them, how much would change? I have no idea, but I suspect the demographic plays a pretty large role.
avalaunch··on The Burden of Policing Walmart
Response to flippant answer: I'm pretty sure the only thing Target figured out is to cater to a higher income demographic.

I'm curious if there were less disturbances before Walmart, or if they were just more distributed throughout the city.

avalaunch··on Top 1% of Income Earners pay 45% of California's Taxes
Well, despite using the term progressive, the poster I replied to was not emphasizing progressive taxes, because he used an analogy where everyone literally pays the same amount.

In any case, what I said wouldn't be covered under a flat tax percentage unless that flat tax percentage were on wealth, not income. A person making approximately 20k or less currently pays no income tax, which makes sense, because there's virtually no way they can accumulate any wealth at that income. On the other hand, as you move up each income tier, the amount of wealth you can accumulate goes up progressively. So a progressive tax is a close enough approximation to a flat tax on wealth, which is what I'm arguing makes the most sense.

avalaunch··on Top 1% of Income Earners pay 45% of California's Taxes
When two people order a steak, regardless of their income, they get the same thing. On the other hand, one of the largest services a government offers its citizens is protection of the citizens' persons and wealth, both from domestic and foreign threats. The value of that protection is relative to how much each citizen is worth. If you're in debt, like many Americans, you're basically getting protection only for your person, as you have little to no wealth to protect. On the other hand, if you're worth billions, the government is protecting your wealth as well. It only makes sense that the more you have to protect, the more you should have to pay.
avalaunch··on On asking job candidates to code
Asking to be paid during an interview seems too much but a 4-8 hour interview doesn't seem too much? The average interview length across all industries is 40 minutes. Asking interviewers to spend 4+ hours on the hope of a job offer seems a tall demand. I think asking to be paid seems a fair counter to what is otherwise a very unfair ask.
avalaunch··on Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months
I think the distinction being made is the value of the stock vs the value of the company, which is not always perfectly in sync. That's why, at any given time, a stock can be undervalued or overvalued. For example, I think you'd be hard pressed to state that the value of a stock right before a company announces unexpected losses is representative of the actual value of the company. The perceived value, prior to the announcement, is too high.
avalaunch··on Teaching a 3-Year-Old to Program Without a Computer Screen
The problem is that virtually all of the screen time studies don't apply to tablet usage as they were studying the effects of passive screen time such as watching tv. People have a tendency to group the two together as "screen time" but actively playing educational apps on a tablet is very different than passively watching tv. In time we should have a better idea what the effects are but right now tablets are still too new for any comprehensive studies to have been completed.
avalaunch··on Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test
I still want a citation.
avalaunch··on Show HN: HN Who Is Hiring Thread - Sorted, Filtered and Searchable
The page is blank for me. I see the header and footer but no content. Browsing on iPhone safari.
avalaunch··on Amazon Underground
Yes, all the time. HN advertises jobs for y combinator companies and those ads are placed in between actual news stories.
avalaunch··on Show HN: Find your competitors that Google can't
Site doesn't appear to be loading right now.

Can anyone tell me what the site does?

Thanks.

avalaunch··on “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
You're thinking of a very specific type of investment. Investment in the more generic form simply means putting in time, money, and/or effort in the hopes of some future reward. In this case, you're investing money in the hopes of a future reward that you preselected.
avalaunch··on Ask HN: Just launched. Zero users. No clue how to market. Resource suggestions?
I would advise not to iterate based off a single customer. Despite being a customer, I think there is still too great a chance that she isn't in the startup's target market. This goes 10x if the customer isn't a paying customer.

Otherwise, great advice.

avalaunch··on When It's a Crime to Withdraw Money from Your Bank
And based on the second article I posted, you also need to make sure you don't look uncomfortable while stating that you are exercising your right to remain silent.
avalaunch··on When It's a Crime to Withdraw Money from Your Bank
Except sometimes your silence will be used against you:

http://www.npr.org/2014/10/05/353893046/you-have-the-right-t...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...

avalaunch··on Why aren't you using GitHub?
It matters because he specifically mentions that the team "didn't want to have to make a business justification everytime someone wanted to fork a repository".
avalaunch··on Ask HN: Brag about open-source projects you're proud of
Django Baker

Adds a management command that generates views, forms, urls, admin, and templates based off the contents of models.py.

It's a bit like Rails scaffolding, but less magical. For each view it creates, for example, it will include stubbed out versions of almost all the methods and attributes you can override, in the order that they get called. The most "magical" part are the admin files that get generated, as they make use of a mixin I wrote that makes (hopefully) intelligent choices for list_display, list_filter, search_fields and automatically links to the related objects for each ForeignKey/OneToOneField. All the default choices are easily overridable.

https://github.com/krisfields/django-baker

It's not a big project but it's my first open source contribution so I'm proud of it nonetheless.

avalaunch··on Tell HN: Downmodding needs to die
Yes but at least everyone, for the most part, would be in agreement to what constitutes proper use and misuse of the buttons, which we don't have now.

More importantly, the votes could be used differently in calculating the comment display order. People could still feel they have an outlet to easily disagree without replying while not having their votes bury useful comments.

avalaunch··on Tell HN: Downmodding needs to die
No, the reply function is for when you have something meaningful to add. If all you have to say is "I agree/disagree" or "your comment was useful/not useful", the reply function is not the right function to use. But unfortunately, the up/down functionality isn't quite right either because you can't determine why the vote was cast.
avalaunch··on Tell HN: Downmodding needs to die
Up/Down voting on HN and most other sites makes me think of the Yo app, where there are simply too few choices to express what you wish to say. A simple solution which I doubt will ever be enacted would be to increase the options from 2 (3 if you count clicking the time stamp then flagging) to 5: useful, not useful, agree, disagree, flag. Then those votes could be used more intelligently to determine the best display order for comments.
avalaunch··on Show HN: Drag and drop so simple it hurts
This looks cool and works great on desktop.

Unfortunately on mobile (iPhone 6 Plus, 8.3, Safari browser) it's very buggy.

In the third example, moving an item anywhere (including in the container, even right back where you selected it) will delete it.

In the fourth example, you can't move any of the items at all. They immediately snap back to where they started.

It's a great start though.

avalaunch··on Ask HN: When generating ideas – what are the key tests you apply first?
I like to ask myself whether I would personally use this service/product if someone else released it? I started asking this after coming up with a number of ideas I thought were great only to eventually find a company already doing it and then realizing I didn't even want to be a customer. Now I only entertain ideas that I am positive I would pay to use if they existed. That way I can at least guarantee that I'm working on something I see the value in.
avalaunch··on The button: social experiment driving Reddit crazy
Yes, but it's a reputable company playing an April Fools' joke.
avalaunch··on Show HN: RentEver – Social Rental Marketplace – Rent Anything from Anyone Nearby
Selling the item each time requires each party to research the resale value based on current condition. It's easier to agree on a rental rate than a resale value. Also, the original owner might not want to sell it but instead make a little money renting it when he's not using it. I assume in a tent it forward system the original owner could request to have it returned at any point if they needed it.

The cost of space differs greatly per area. In some areas the cost of space exceeds the cost of certain items but in others not so much. In the Midwest, for example, a 2500 sq foot house only costs 200k.

avalaunch··on Show HN: RentEver – Social Rental Marketplace – Rent Anything from Anyone Nearby
I doubt you'll get many casual renters because of the friction of having to go out of your way to meet someone (that might not show up, or might show up late) for small amounts of cash. I also think not having a good conflict resolution plan (or insurance) in place is going to be a huge issue preventing people from using your marketplace. As it is now, I just wouldn't feel comfortable renting out my stuff without charging a near 100% deposit and as a rentee I wouldn't feel comfortable giving a deposit anywhere near that amount.

Some ideas:

1. Figure out a way that I can just drop off my stuff and you'll take care of renting it out for me, over and over again. I would love to make some extra cash for my stuff but I really don't want to spend the time and pain of scheduling, driving to meet the rentees, waiting for them to show up if they're running late, dealing with it when some of them invariably flake out at the last minute, ect... I would approach local consignment shops and see if they'd be interested in being intermediaries where all they have to do is act as dropoff/pickup locations for your customers. In exchange, you pay them a either percentage or a flat monthly rate.

2. An alternative might be a sort of rent it forward strategy, where instead of returning an item to the owner the rentee holds onto it until someone else rents it, and then passes it along to the next renter.

Of course, both of these ideas make it much harder to gauge whether the items are in approximately the same condition as they were when initially rented. And, at least for idea #1, you'd probably want to add a clause that any item not rented out within a month needs to be picked up, else the renter will be charged a storage fee.

3. Look on craigslist and ebay for professional sellers and ask if they'd be interested in renting out some of their stuff on your platform instead of selling it. That might be a good way to populate your inventory in various cities quickly while making them more money than they'd make by simply selling the stuff. You might also ask local thrift stores, flea market sellers, and consignment shops if there are any items they'd like to rent out on your marketplace.

avalaunch··on Show HN: Laundromatch – Community-based laundry services
Is pickup/delivery $10 per load or $10 per pickup/delivery?

What happens if the host ruins my clothes (because, for example, they didn't follow the included instructions)?

avalaunch··on Show HN: Laundromatch – Community-based laundry services
He said it's $7 where he lives; he didn't say he lives in New York.
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