jrbapna

Chuckled a bit at this. The other way to interpret it is everything matters

The doodle is a net win, because it makes people happy (and they can skip it if it doesn’t). The latency makes everybody sad. You increased net happiness in the world.

"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over."

The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole.

An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency.

But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)

Trove Apps | Lead Developer | ATLANTA, GA OR REMOTE | North America timezone

We’re a small team building SaaS products across various platforms. Our team of 11 is distributed in North America, Europe, and Asia.

I’m the founder. I bootstrapped Trove to just under 1M ARR in 14 months. We’re positioned for solid growth over the next few years, and I’m looking for a highly skilled lead engineer who can take over all of our development efforts as well as allow me to focus on the other aspects of the business.

A couple of things I’m looking for in a candidate (in no particular order):

    - the ability to multitask in a very fast paced environment.

    - highly skilled on both the frontend and backend. our stack is React + Rails.

    - solid fundamental understanding of how quality software is built, and best practices. 

    - an understanding of UI/UX, and a keen “eye” for design.  this is difficult to gauge, but its very important that we’re on a similar wavelength.

    - The ability to put development efforts in the context of business and customer needs. must be able to distinguish between what is “fun” and what’s “mission critical”. this is harder than it sounds.. emotions have a way of clouding judgement.

    - Fast speed and a high level of output. you should be able to deliver at least 2-3x faster than most. I work extremely fast so I expect as much from our lead engineer. I value execution much more than perfection.

Salary range: 90-120k USD with possibility of significant equity after 6 months. The equity offer will be significantly higher than those offered by VC funded startups or a comparable ARR company with our growth trajectory. I understand the key role you'll play in our growth, and am looking for someone who will be in it for the long-haul.

If you’re interested, reach out via email: <hnuser>@gmail.com.

Trove, Inc. | Full Stack Software Eng. | Atlanta, GA or REMOTE

Seeking Mid-to-Senior level Rails and React Developer. Must be able to work on both front and back end of the stack. We build various micro-saas products, and move very quickly. Small team, with the opportunity to build products from the ground up, and watch as they grow to fruition.

Please contact me directly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrbapna

A quick look at humanities progress, and its fairly obvious where we're headed. there will be a day where many people won't have to work to survive. There will be an extreme amount of abundance in the economy due to technology and automation. More for everyone... :)

Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.

This also begs the question, why don't companies hire more part-time programmers? In my experience it's literally an order of magnitude easier to find a quality full time gig than a part time gig. As many of us enjoy working on side projects and don't want to work 40 hours a week for somebody else, why is nearly every hiring post for full-time?

Can these stock photos be used commercially? Can they be resold?

Many great companies can be started in 2016 as a solo founder. Not every company needs to be the next Google to be massively successful and rewarding.

Look at the Forbes 400 list. There are literally hundreds of solo founders who are the wealthiest people in the world.

Always remember, no cofounder is better than the wrong cofounder.

For those who want to understand execution, I highly recommend reading The 10x Rule by Grant Cardone

Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on platforms like FB so difficult.

I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I dove in. Good luck to you.

PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day-trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage can be found. Cheers!

I'm uncertain if this is true. The market is the market is the market. The value of a company is what investors believe it to be. In tech, unlike an industry like lets say, Automobiles, this "worth" is very difficult to quantify. Tech companies can be scaled to near infinity (Apple) or go to zero with one wrong move. Investors are placing their bets.

Whatever industry replaces "tech" as the next great revolution (perhaps AI?) will have "bubbles" orders of magnitudes greater than what we're seeing now. If you think we're in a bubble now, which we very well could be (I'm unsure), just wait for the future.

Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.

Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.

Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.

Some guidelines:

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.

3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.

Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.

As the rate of innovation continues to increase exponentially, these so called "bubbles" will only grow bigger. The future will have A LOT MORE companies valued at 1000x revenue, not less. Think about all the new industries poised to exist just in the next decade: A.R. V.R. A.I., Bionics, Space, etc etc. Exciting times we're living in.

But the term bubble, at least when used by the media, also seems to have a connotation of bursting in the near future. If someone told me tech was in a bubble, but the pop wouldn't be for another century, I would not define it as a bubble. Even if the future pop was enormous.

If a bubble lasts over 10 years, is it really a bubble?

You would think, but the internet speeds are an issue, which severly limits their ability to make them community spaces. At many starbucks in my neighborhood back home you can barely get a website to load. Those few that offer internet by Google, rather than AT&T, seem to be much better. Ive always wondered why they cant simply limit the time one can use the internet before making another purchase rather than capping the speeds.

SEEKING WORK: San Francisco and Remote

Mid-to-expert level Ruby on Rails developer (7+ years of experience). Currently in between my own startup projects, and looking for part time consulting work. Lots of e-com experience, including building an app used by over 7000 e-com stores. Not too concerned with pay, msg me on LinkedIn!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrbapna

As a rails / startup guy, I can run circles around developers who are using Node/Angular/React/etc. The huge open source community with the infinite number of gems and massive volume of documentation accumulated over years is unparalleled. Sure, Rails may eventually be eclipsed but I see no reason to switch now when my immediate goal is to ship fast with intense speed and fast iteration while focusing on the much more pressing business validation and business objectives of my company. Just my two cents on the topic.

Facebook didn't capture "everyone" until many years after it launched. It was limited to college campuses, and popular amongst college students.

Whatsapp replicated this growth and captured an even wider net. Especially outside of the US.

Agree that Facebook is far from irrelevant, but I'd keep an open eye on the hip new platforms. In the attention marketplace, the past is irrelevant. All that matters is the present, and the now. The network that captures the highest level of engagement wins, and amongst certain demographics, Facebook is certainly losing its relevance.

I'm curious as to why you think this is the case. For one, users are fickle and attention greatly shifts every time some new social network comes out from complete left field. Facebook got Instagram, but they lost big on Snapchat.

Additionally, Facebook isn't doing so well in emerging markets, which have by far more volume in terms of number of users and purchasing power.

Thanks

I was excited when I saw the headline but the phone teathering is a deal breaker.

I removed whatsapp from my phone precisely because it took up too much space, with all the photos and videos being shared daily. It's a shame really.. a desktop app would've been a great alternative

Good executors do whatever it takes to get them where they need to go. If the right social network is important to their success they make it happen.

There are many exceptions to this rule that make this difficult (born into poverty or third world country, etc) but the great majority of people who complain, at least in the US, spend their evenings at happy hours and their weekends at the football game. You can't do that and then blame it on luck or bad circumstance. I work with hundreds of "entreprneurs" that spend weeks and months obsessing over logo design and color and UX, when they have zero customers at their door. Execution is a skill, it can be learned, and 99% of people just don't have it.

The banks did exactly this before the financial crisis, and most of them came out of it just fine.

The reason this works in practice is because when a company becomes that big, it's impossible to place blame. Any repercussions against the company as a whole will mostly impact the honest and innocent folks.

Grit is just one quality of a good executer. Grit with poor execution doesn't yield results. Grit is not the secret to success, execution is.

What strikes me is when the clients know this to be true, but don't actually care. They have a budget and they need to spend it! Looking forward to the day when the market catches up to them.

I'm looking forward to the day when the other half of the world gets "on the grid" so to speak. The rise of other economies will greatly benefit humanity as a whole.

Great experiment. Very excited to see where this goes.

It's actually quite possible that AI and machine's will replace a lot jobs by then and there'll be a basic income guarantee for all. See https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

As the pace of innovation in healthcare continues to increase exponentially, 40 will be the new 30 and eventually the new 20. People who are 40 now might live to 120. Am I being too optimistic? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if a whole lot of us live a LOT longer than our grandparents did.

Sure, it's possible, however unlikely, that a mistake of this sort fell through the cracks, but I wouldn't place any bets on it