blairbeckwith

Dangerous anecdote: I put down 35% on my house, which at the time was about 20% of my net worth.

2 years later, and the stock I sold to get that 40% downpayment is now worth 8x as much – just under 3x the total value of the house.

I'd do it again because diversification is good, but hurts with 20/20 hindsight.

In regular circumstances, and if I were doing it all again, I wouldn't worry about what % of my net worth it was and put a minimum of 20% down + enough to bring the payments down to 33% of my salary.

Their about page (particularly their mission statement) provides some color: https://stripe.com/about

Stripe hasn't been "just a payment processing company" for quite some time.

An optimistic view of this move is that it fits in well with their mission: these books could, in theory, inspire, educate, and motivate people to build or grow their businesses.

A more cynical(1) view is that this is simply more elaborate content marketing – getting Stripe's name out there to people who are interested in this content, who are overwhelmingly in Stripe's target market.

(1): Cynical in that it's less feel-good, but I don't at all mean that this is a bad thing.

The books the Stripe has announced here are all pretty exciting to me – I want to read them all.

When Netflix started doing original content, "Netflix Original" was essentially a seal of quality, and I was typically excited enough to at least check out each one. As they've pumped out so much quantity lately, that quality bar has dropped significantly.

I hope Stripe Press is successful enough to keep putting out great content, but not successful enough to succumb to the same fate. Patrick's love (at least Patrick – I'm sure others) of books that he's discussed at length gives me some hope.

I’ve know the CEO of a Tiny-affiliated company for a few years and consider him a friend. In a previous role, we had a very close partnership with the company. I also worked at the company, albeit only for a few months in a leadership role.

Andrew and the rest of the Tiny crew seem to do a great job of standing behind what they say, from my limited experience.

That’s... not true. On every level.

Reminds me a lot of a Tetris-with-words game called Puzzlejuice that was put out a few years ago by the same studio that released Threes and started the 2048 craze.

Good job!

This is beautifully done. I noticed the affiliation with investmentcalculator.io - I love that you guys are working on stuff like this. Beautiful, simple products that do one thing with a focus on UX. Make more, please!

There’s a very useful service for me here beyond bookmarking. I often want do read something and wonder if there has been a Hacker News or reddit thread about it, but don’t necessarily want or need to bookmark it.

Any plans to decouple these? I feel like I remember a chrome extension from ages ago that showed hacker news comments for the current page, but I’ve searched a couple times and come up dry.

> The $150 V2s are $20 more than the old version and only available on Snap’s app and site — no Amazon, pop-up stores or vending SnapBots. And V1 owners will get a firmware update that lets them take photos.

First 20% of the article.

Lack of POP/IMAP is a big, major con. You're forced to use their web or native interfaces. They don't make this super obvious outside of an FAQ on their site. I signed up and then found out. I wonder how much churn that causes them.

This is a completely different type of device. Do you question people spending $20k on a car when they can buy a pickup truck for the same price?

That has no effect on MoviePass. As per the article, what’s “interesting” (for certain definitions of interesting) is that MoviePass pays the theatres for the full price of the tickets for each user.

I had an ex-girlfriend who was a professional athlete who had one of these that was “given to her by a friend”. She had told me a number of things that seemed like either lies or the result of being severely misinformed, so I always kind of rolled my eyes whenever she mentioned it and assumed it wasn’t real. She even called it this - a “get out of jail free card”.

Anyways, have been able to witness their use since, and it’s pretty shocking how easy and effective it is to use. Really disgusting practice.

I actually can't tell if this is useful or a parody.

I'm signing up right now; you should charge more.

Why would you allow one anecdote from five years ago stop you?

Been thinking about this at the same time I've been trying to find a use for Airtable. It seems like a great product but I've never had an obvious use case until now. Seems like it could be a great fit.

"They're Made Out Of Meat" by Terry Bisson: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

"Scroogled" by Cory Doctorow: http://www.crimeflare.com/doctorow.html

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/) leads you through Ruby, Rails, Git, and deployment to Heroku through two very small projects and one related larger project that takes up the bulk of the book.

Really wanted to get more information on this, but all of their Docs links currently 404.

I think that – sadly – a lot of people assumed that the majority of people watching the rallies and following on social media were there for the entertainment value. I think some were, but it seems like most were there sincerely.

I've known a few people involved in Bitmaker.

We had someone apply who completed Bitmaker, and she applied for a development role. I work in developer relations. She was initially rejected for a developer position because she wasn't experienced enough. She caught my eye though, and I hired her on as a developer relations intern. She quickly became my team's dedicated developer, and built us a lot of stuff to make our lives easier. I think she was really green coming out of Bitmaker, but we were able to provide her an environment where she could get acquainted with working in a larger organization and get some real world experience coding professionally while not in a developer role. She quickly became incredible, and moved off my team to be a junior developer. She's now a senior developer after a few years, and is absolutely killing it here. I'm super proud of her, and thrilled we took a chance on her.

Sample size of one, I know. And she really is exceptional, so I'm sure she would have been successful with or without Bitmaker, so take this with a large heap of salt.

I don't think this works. Presumably cash has a lot more utility than rice or shoes, for example. These people can always use more money (i.e. bank loads in your example), but once they have x shoes or y rice, the utility of new shoes or rice is very low.

Not exactly that, but this is by far the best, most thorough resource I've ever found. I don't need it much anymore, but I used to read it a ton: http://www.succeedsocially.com/

I have been, and continue to be, compensated more than fairly for my position. I don't think not going to school or anything has had any impact on my earning potential so far.

I think this is definitely true. Initially I felt like my loyalty was a result of having no other options, but it's proven untrue. I've had offers from all over the place since I've grown within Shopify, and I have no desire to leave this place. It's been fulfilling, challenging, and it will always be the place that took a chance on me when there were very few logical reasons to do so.

Yeah, had some issue with the domain this AM – fixed now. I started as an intern on the App Store team; that team was four people at the time. Through a series of internal moves, the team eventually dropped down to just me about six months after I joined.

I'm still with the same team today four years later; I lead the Developer Relations team and manage a team of five within a larger team that includes API Support and Merchant App Experience.

They, like most good companies, ended up not letting me work for free. I was paid well (for someone with, as I said, no experience and no concrete skills) right off the bat.

This is so true. It's really shocking how little effort and originality some/most people go to in getting the job they want.

I have a similar story, although nowhere near as much effort. When I was 20 and hating life in school, I really wanted to work at Shopify. At the time, they were maybe 80 people. I've never made a resume and didn't feel like that would get me noticed. Sio I simply sent a cold email to Tobi, our CEO. It was basically "Hey, Tobi. I don't know anything, and I have no skills, but I love your company and I want to be involved. Give me a chance, I'll work for free."

I got an email a week later from someone else on the team saying that I started the next week.

When I asked why, I was told "this worked because you were naive enough to think that this would work". I've been here four years now, and it's still the most important email I've ever sent. Maybe luck, maybe naivety, but I'm thrilled it's worked out.

I had to look for this too: http://blog.sunrise.am