It's noteworthy that the Washington Post sells for $250MM, compared to for example OMGPOP which sold for $200MM last year.
1,524 karma · joined February 4, 2010
twitter.com/jonas
In my experience it's easier to start something alone, especially if it's not technologically difficult (i.e. most webapps). Down the line it's important for me to have wingmen, though. Even if you can carry the load intellectually, it's nice to have somebody with skin in the game for moral support when shit hits the fan. Of course anything is better than having co-founders that don't work out for whatever reason.
That is probably a breach of contract but I don't think it should be a crime punishable by jail time (unless someone can prove that said code was used to aid another company).
One thing that helped me was to stop thinking "How can I get myself to work 8 hours a day?" and start thinking "What fun, useful things can I do with the 8 hours a day I'm not working.?" The only reason I read the internet and played flash games all day was because I was supposed to be at my computer, working. Overall that's a pretty low-fun and low-reward activity, though. If you accept that you won't work more than 3 hours anyway, you can do much more engaging/fun/interesting things with the rest of the time.
You mention that you wish you'd done more sports. Great, start doing sports. With your income, you can easily get a gym trainer or trainer in any sport you'd like to learn. Set yourself the goal to complete a mini triathlon next year, join a recreational volleyball league or anything else you like. You can also learn how to cook really well, enroll in a language school (for human languages), volunteer to teach kids how to code, etc. Those are all things that you'll probably enjoy and that I'm much less likely to procrastinate. Learn how to play an instrument or sing (again, you can afford a teacher to get off the ground) or pick up a hobby closer to your work like electrical engineering. The possibilities are endless once you accept that you're not "supposed to" work all day; unless you want to, and that day will come.
You can even take it one step further and just up and leave. Spend a few years traveling every corner of the world and earn your keep with a day or two of contracting each month. I know nobody who's done that who'd consider it a waste of time in any sense of the word.
Hope this helps and best of luck. Don't be so hard on yourself.
The basic idea is build web applications that only store encrypted data on the server. All data is encrypted and decrypted on the client using JavaScript.
I love the outdoors and I love to code as well. This sounds super fun and I'm kind of jealous of that lifestyle, but I'm not sure if it's a sound business decision.
Like others have said, this was not a difficult negotiation for Apple. Maybe Murdoch could have used the other verticals (video and newspapers) in a better way or tried to leverage an upcoming big release. I don't think they had reason to give in either way though.
I'm a software engineer dabbling in electrical engineering. A while ago an EE friend of mine showed me how to use a transistor to power a motor using a GPIO pin on my Raspberry Pi. I was so stoked when it finally worked! I could turn wheels by typing "echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio4/value" into my ssh session.
Within 10 minutes I was able to churn out a web interface that has two buttons, forward and backward, that you can access from a mobile device to drive around your raspberry pi. I had already hooked up a battery pack and webcam before. Suddenly, within minutes of "making the wheels turn from software", we had a remote controlled robot with a camera! All this is possible on an Arduino (I hear you can actually run Linux on it if you put some effort in), but it'll be much more work. For the Raspberry Pi, I simply popped in an SD card with Debian and installed all my favorite tools.
By all means, I love writing low level C code and fiddling with basic microprocessors. I once hacked a DVR frontpanel into an alarm clock that makes you do arithmetic to stop the alarm. It was super fun. The chip didn't have any memory management and if you weren't careful your stack or heap would overwrite the program in memory. Between that, displaying custom bitmap fonts, correctly addressing the LCD display etc it took about a week to finish the project. On a Raspberry Pi you could do this in one afternoon using any language/tools you like.
Slightly OT: This post could really benefit from some editing (re clarity, overall length, succinctness). I like to think a lack of editing is why some people think they "can't write". They don't realize how much editing helps, even if they do it themselves.
Next time you write something, ask a few friends to review it, especially if you intend to channel PG ;). I'd be happy to help, too (I'm by no means an expert, though. I'm not even a native speaker)
If you hit the wall with one dyno and add another one, you won't get twice the throughput even though you pay twice the price.
I've always had suspicions about this on some smaller apps but never really looked into it. You can configure New Relic to measure round-trip response times on the client side. At peak loads those would be unreasonably high. Much higher than can be explained by huge latencies even.
I grew up in Germany, went to an okay university first, then a "good" university, became a management consultant for a while, enrolled in a relatively high end business school, went to Cal to do research and finally ended up in the Bay area and went through YC a while ago.
There were very good (by some metric) people everywhere I went. I'm talking about the top of the class when I studied Math in Cologne, the 30 y/o tenured CS professor in Munich, the 22 y/o consultant who earns more than his parents etc.. Those people are often focused on achievement, grades, getting a good job, etc.
Recently, I've met a different kind of people. People that I'd consider great at what they do. The people that you can ask a stupid question and they'll give you a considerate answer, the ones that do things out of an intrinsic motivation. To find out if they want to work with you, they'll sit down with you and talk, or work a problem over. I've had to write resumes all my life and then suddenly, a few years ago I stopped maintaining one and never needed it either.
I think what I'm seeing is that at the very high end in whatever field you're in, people won't care about credentials. But unfortunately, there is a middle ground on the "slightly less high end", where it is very important. Perhaps what you can do is "keep up appearances" until you pass that stage. If there's an easy way to get credentials (i.e. I don't think I benefited a lot from any degree I have, but they were easy to get and I could do other things I liked more at the same time), go for it.
Edit: Sorry if this lacks clarity, I wrote it in a hurry. I'll come back later to edit
I thought it was well known that sharp breathing can increase strength for a short amount of time. Besides, sometimes when you're doing something really exhausting, you'll grunt involuntarily...
For instance, I'd be happy to manually designate a small number of events and properties as available for the revenue-like analysis. I could say "For all Amount properties on all Charge succeeded events, I want to be able to see the average value per user, the sum per user and the sum across all events on all users". Technically that doesn't seem much different from what you already built except I could maybe add two or three of my own events.
As for segmenting events by people properties, it seems like you already have most of the infrastructure in place. Events are indexed by distinct_id and I can use the People tool to retrieve a list of distinct_ids of people matching certain criteria. Tying that together would be huge.
The related but different functionality of segmenting events by the people properties as they were when the event occurred is less important to me (this is what I can already do by copying people properties into each event). I can see how this would be a bigger headache. On the other hand though, you're already allowing us to do this because there's no restriction on the number of properties on an event.
The one notion that always irks me though is talent. It seems to measure some combination of confidence and the amount of praise a person happens to have received in their life (i.e. how often someone told them they're talented) and is for the most part not well-defined. Yet, this article uses talent just like another credential.
I don't think talent is a thing that you either have or don't have. There's certainly some people that I'd like to hire that wouldn't with certainty say that they have talent. Vetting for confidence is a bit more interesting, but I also know plenty of confident people (i.e. that think they're talented) that can't get the job done.
The best way I've come up with to characterize what we're all looking for is people who can solve our problems/get the job done. That makes it mostly about what the applicant thinks they can do and less about the amount of praise they've received previously in live. This reminds me of how Kyle Neath posted yesterday that he thought he was not a great coder or designer but he could get the job done. When he was twenty, perhaps he didn't consider himself talented but I'm pretty sure nobody would have regretted hiring him.
1) It keeps track of a revenue property as a time series. I.e. you can later look at the changes of revenue for a user over time (in their HTTP API you use a new $append command instead of $set)
2) It allows you to look at aggregate values (such as sum and average) for all revenues of all people in a certain group
I'm curious if this is something that could be extended to arbitrary properties on users. I operate a phone service and track usage of minutes in a similar way. It'd be great if I could do a similar kind of analysis.
It would be even better, if people analytics and events tied in a little more closely. I'm already tracking a "Charge succeeded" event that's tied to a distinct_id. If I could segment events by people properties (i.e. show me the "Charge succeeded" events for all people with Source=x), I could use the aggregate functions of the segmentation screen to do a lot of what revenue analytics provides and much more. I also wouldn't have to redundantly attach people properties to all my events anymore. Currently all of my events contain all people properties (such as Revenue, Number of minutes used, etc), so that I can segment by them.
In case suhail or anyone else is following along this thread, it'd be great to hear your thinking.
It looks like `token` is the only callback you can pass to the popup and it receives nothing but the stripe token. Is there any reason not to include more information?
For comparison, this is what stripe.js gives you
{
id : "tok_u5dg20Gra", // String of token identifier,
card : { // Dictionary of the card used to create the token
name: null,
address_line1: "12 Main Street",
address_line2: "Apt 42",
address_city: "Palo Alto",
address_state: "CA",
address_zip: "94301",
address_country: "US",
country: "US",
exp_month: 2,
exp_year: 2012,
last4: "4242",
fingerprint: "BzXGiNioaEH4iECL",
object: "card",
type: "Visa"
},
created : 1358552058, // Integer of date token was created
currency: "usd", // String currency that the token was created in
livemode: true, // Boolean of whether this token was created with a live or test API key
object: "token", // String identifier of the type of object, always "token"
used : false, // Boolean of whether this token has been used,
}
I could use Stripe.getToken but I don't see why I need the extra roundtrips to the server (one for stripe.js, one for getting the info about the token)
Edit: Never mind, I didn't read the docs carefully enough. The callback receives all that, my bad. In the stripe.js docs the parameter is called response and in the new one it's called token. Sorry ;)
Re the site itself, I think it's a good idea but I agree with the meta-scoring. Add a point system that levels you up both by writing a review and later by reviewing reviews of the same site/commenting on them. The higher your level or the more points you have, the more your sites will be reviewed.
And please make https sites fail more elegantly. It's okay that you can't load them in an iframe, but make it look less broken. I submitted an https site and I doubt many people will review it when they are met with a huge screen saying "http only" through no fault of their own. Instead say "This site is using https (learn more), please click here to open the site in a new tab"
Afghanistan is a country that has been fractured by civil war or the fight against invaders for all of its living memory and is struggling to find unity.
A zombie apocalypse on the other hand is a fictional event in which a horde of brainless demons tries to kill all humans.
A recipe for coming up with good ideas is looking at something that has been around for a while and asking "What would it be like if it had been invented now?".
And if all else fails, this will be a wonderful learning experience.
I know this is a cliche, but before writing comments like this ask yourself if a) you are unnecessarily discouraging somebody for no reason and b) you would have said the same thing about successful projects when they were first started.
Finally, the one piece of advice I'd give on this project is that you shouldn't focus too much on the overly ambitious goals and don't worry if you can't accommodate for all of them just yet. The likelihood of achieving the next milestone is somewhat proportional to the number of milestones you have achieved. Get to v0.01 and take it from there.
After that, OTHER PEOPLE will find ways to monetize. People went to America because it was an untouched land of opportunity, not because somebody told them they could export furs. It was clear that there was opportunity but unclear what it might be.
I can think of many things that could make your rich on Mars. Any kind of sports/competitions in reduced gravity, space hotels/amenities (things that makes space more like home) and indeed mining of raw materials. And these are just the first things that come to mind. There's probably better ideas.