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Thanks. Sorry for the confusion; I have a decent understanding of when pronouns can be dropped, but my question was moreso about when particles can be dropped. For instance, from the linked article, this sentence:

Tarō wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita.

In casual spoken Japanese, can any of these particles (wa, wo, de) be dropped?

Beginner question: In casual, spoken Japanese, I've been taught that I can drop the particles (including pronouns). Hence "watashi wa tabemasu" can be colloquially shortened to "tabemasu".

Thanks to this article, I've come to understand particles much better and why they're important, but does it change in casual spoken Japanese? Are some particles okay to drop whereas others are kept? Thanks in advance.

Relax, friend. The majority of people are not freaking out over this. Surely you have better things to do than nitpick about this and call other people's products shitty. I recommend choosing to be more positive instead. Have a nice day.

No worries, thanks for taking the time to listen. Have a great day

I like your posts, but you're misinformed on this topic. The pros selected are among the best HUNL players in the world right now. Offering the top winners in a separate variant not only misinterprets how different the games are but also falsely equivocates being the best with making the most money.

If someone asked you who the best mobile app developers were in the world, your list should comprise solely of mobile app developers.

I have the same wish: A service that provides a large list of available, short, human-esque .com domain names. I wouldn't mind paying and spending hours combing over it to find ones I liked. Someone did this a few years ago and I snagged a couple neat ones including a 5 letter .com.

Anyway as for actual advice, I've built more than a handful of projects and startups at this point. The recurring theme in every project was that I'd start with something completely nonsensical to use as the name. If your cofounder likes grilled cheese sandwiches, call your project GCS or grilled cheese or whatever, including your github repo. Getting the domain has never been step 1 in anything I've ever built including my current business.

There's weeks worth of work to do before the .com is needed. In the meantime what I do is keep an Evernote of words and phrases that pertain to the industry or what my service will likely do. While we had several product hypotheses, our business model was 95% likely to end up doing some form of data sifting on behalf of customers. So I would think about words that have to do with searching or finding things and kept a log of them:

- Hound (as in the dog)

- Seek/Seeker

- Scout

- Scope

- Vision

Along with general words I liked from a linguistic standpoint: "Labs", "IQ", "Mighty", etc.

When I looked for an available .com, I mixed combinations in my word list: "ScoutIQ", "MightyScope", "HoundLabs", etc. until I found one that I liked and was available: MightyScout - and I reserved it immediately.

But to this day our Slack channel, Github repo, etc. still use the original, nonsense name :)

In my experience, it's really, really tough. To get our first customers we had to send thousands of emails, talk on the phone with dozens of prospective customers (for both customer development and actual selling). There's a reason why SDRs/Lead Gen marketers are full-time positions and it's ambitious to try and replicate a legitimate sales funnel without being able to dedicate time to it.

This isn't something I would have been able to do if I were still employed, which I assume is your situation since you refer to it as "something on the side." For instance, even getting on the phone with people can be tough, since the hours they're more likely to chat with you are the hours you're at work.

I know this isn't something you want to hear. The good news is that I'm sure it depends on the industry - we had zero connections and background in our industry when we started - and I'm sure our experience doesn't reflect _all_ companies. But I admittedly underestimated how much time/effort needed to go into selling a b2b product when I was a comfortably employed developer.

Edit: re-reading your post, I think you might be describing a consumer-facing product. In which case user acquisition is different, but I would say the challenges are the same (having built many consumer-facing side projects in the past).

That looks great! Have you ran any influencer marketing campaigns as a way to increase sales volume? I run a service that helps brands find influencers to work with called MightyScout[0]. My founder and I are working on different initiatives all the time in this space, and we'd love to partner with like-minded folks on something we're planning for the new year. If you're interested, send me an email (in my profile) - no catch (not trying to make a sale or anything), cheers!

[0] https://mightyscout.com

I don't understand the negativity. This is a Show HN. And Show HNs don't have to be completely original things that have never before appeared on the Internet.

We started working on customer development in May part-time (full-time starting July). It wasn't until mid-September that we actually knew what we wanted to create, and that's when we bought our domain. From there it took til early November to get our first paying customer.

Still making my way through it, but this caught my eye:

> What “material size” means to you is a great question to run by your accountant, but as a guideline, in the United States, many businesses with revenue above $100,000 choose to incorporate.

Does this mean I made a very sub-optimal play by choosing to incorporate before revenue? We have revenue now, but not very much, and the Stripe fee, lawyer fee, and soon-to-be-accountant fees definitely put us in the red.

I wrote an ebook that helps Junior Developers get jobs - it's primarily targeted at bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

In the past 8-10 months, it made about $5k+ through sales as well as partnerships with a couple online bootcamps. Not too shabby as I spent almost no time marketing it. Plus it was fun to write since I'm passionate about the topic and I've received some awesome feedback (of the "you actually changed my life"-sort). That was more than worth the hundreds of hours I spent writing it, the small bit of money aside.

One thing I'd particularly like when dealing with my parents' issues is an _easy_ way to set up remote screenshare and access. It's one thing when the problem is that their computer isn't booting (in which this site would definitely help ;)), but another if the problem is that they can't find a file they downloaded or something like that.

I'd pay for a tool like this that was easy to set up and use that didn't have to involve my parents installing TeamViewer, coordinating a channel, and so on.

Edit: Thanks for the advice all, will install one of these suggestions when I head home for the holidays.

It's a weird middle-ground. I myself constantly ask people for their recommendations on books and such. I trust them and act upon their suggestions. The only difference is that influencers are paid to suggest, and sometimes this leads to low-quality products being touted by low-quality influencers appearing in your feed. Definitely bad.

DHH suggested a book in an interview with Tim Ferriss[0]. I read what DHH says often and trust his taste - is this bad? I don't think so. Obviously DHH wasn't paid to talk about this book, but it wouldn't matter either way to me; a lot of his influence comes from the fact that I know he wouldn't willingly shill for something he doesn't believe in.

[0] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/10/27/david-heinemeier-hans...

We live in a society where, because ad dollars drive so much of online commerce, attention _is_ currency. And right now influencer marketing is outperforming many other channels, so naturally a lot of money is headed this direction, allowing many 'ordinary' people to monetize.

I don't think this is a problem - I believe in the power of the internet democratizing revenue opportunities and disrupting outdated media channels.

(Bias disclaimer: I run a startup that helps brands find Instagram influencers to work with - won't plug it here but it's in my profile).

I do peer to peer lending on an internet forum, VAs handle most of the work, ~$1k/mo passive, ~$3k/mo when active (but it's been passive for the past several months). I can try to answer what I can, but I can't divulge much more because it's not at all a defensible revenue model, and anyone with access to capital can do it.

I saw Instapainting when it was launched and casually wondered how well it would do. Years later, I have my answer. Congratulations man, this is awesome to read and I'm really happy for your success!

I don't really understand the negativity. Ideas, like advice, have intrinsic value. People are caught up with the notion of an "idea" (like 'Uber for X') and don't realize OP is discussing a market opportunity. It's very possible OP has an idea that can generate value for an obscure niche that's slow to adapt. This happens all the time - the wheel is constantly being reinvented in different industries and markets and plenty of people make a decent living doing stuff like this.

Anyway, my advice is because everyone is caught up in stigmatizing "ideas", it's likely you will not find an adequate market available to sell your idea or get paid enough for it. You're better off discussing it with people you know. Frame it like "There is an opportunity in market X that is not being pursued, likely because of reason Y. I understand this market/problem very well and could explain it to you in great detail. If you decide to pursue it, I'd like modest [advisor shares/dividends/etc.] in return" or something to that effect.

As a bootcamp graduate, I found that going to the bootcamp allowed me to learn in 2 months what would've otherwise taken me (at least) a year to learn by myself. I like to think I could have gotten a job self-learning, but I essentially paid my tuition to save myself (at least) 10 months of time. Worth every cent in that regard.

So yes, you could do it on your own, but I don't recommend it if you had the choice.

Hey Bemmu! A couple questions after reading your blog post:

1. Any noticeable societal differences between living in Tokushima and Tokyo?

2. Assuming you are still renting, do you eventually plan to purchase your own property in Japan?

It seems property costs outside of Tokyo are really cheap. I've been contemplating moving near Kamakura as it has a beach and it's still reasonably close to Tokyo.

> "theoretically, if there are 2 of you, we can cut the time in half".

Is antithetical to him claiming that "he knows how to manage developers." Nine women can't make a baby in 1 month.

Last year, I wrote a guide to help junior devs get their first jobs, targeted mostly at developer bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

It sold decently in 2015, and later that year I shifted sales focus to bootcamps and schools as opposed to individual students. The response has been great and earlier this year I've set up a few recurring deals for batch purchases. It's not life-changing money by any means, but it's great to see my content helping people at "scale" ;).

I can't fathom how it must feel to live each day while a cancer grows inside of me. Pieter is definitely a man of much greater fortitude than I.

I also can't get over the fact that 1 in 2 people develop cancer in their lifetimes. One would think curing cancer ought to be amongst humanity's greatest concerted challenges.

Unfortunately the first link doesn't appear to direct correctly. I'm still willing to think 500M is plausible, with Uber Black and SUV included (is it safe to say these professional drivers make more than 3000/mo on Uber?). Even if it's not quite 500M, or maybe they needed to flub the geography or numbers to get to that number, they're still generating huge sums of revenue in what is only one large metropolitan city out of hundreds around the world.

Why is that number not believable? Like the comments you pointed out mention, it's likely gross not post-driver cut, likely includes more than just the 7-mile diameter of SF, includes tourists, surge pricing can be pricy, corporate comping, etc.

I never incur surge pricing and infrequently take Uber yet I can easily pay $100-200 in Uber costs per month. Then you factor in the non-UberX options that are way more expensive, UberEATS, etc. etc...

This is a bit misleading - PayPal's 21-day hold only applies if you received the funds as payment for goods and services. Even in that case, the funds can be expedited to release in 3-5 days once the buyer marks the item as received. It's more for buyer protection than anything.

If you're in the US and receive money via a "Friends and Family" transfer, it's just as 'instant' as Venmo.

A friend of mine just published this[1], which is a quick read and inexpensive (free on Kindle Unlimited apparently). I'm not sure if I'm allowed to out where he works but he's the real deal.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Technical-Writing-Introduction-...

My parents will start with my brother's name first before getting to me, but I've also heard them make the same, inverse mistake with my brother. I have to imagine this is only a same-sex issue right? No one mixes up their daughter and son's names?

Thanks for the reminder, I actually had no idea 2.0 was out!

I spent a short amount of time experimenting with an earlier 1.x version. I personally need significantly more than 2k calories/day, and I also found that I lacked a lot of energy on days I'd go to the gym but had taken a lot of soylent beforehand.

Ultimately the best compromise for me was to take Soylent as a meal/drink in the morning when I'm less likely to typically consume food. Also maybe after a workout or something since each serving had a decent amount of protein. I'd typically also mix in chocolate whey protein as well.

I don't think I could ever fully meal-replace with it but I wouldn't mind having a serving every day, which is why I had been looking forward to 2.0 since it'd give me a very convenient grab-n-go meal whenever I wanted it.

I wrote a book that helps junior developers (e.g. bootcamp grads) land jobs: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

Decent income in 4 figures, but I didn't do it for the money (it took me hundreds of hours from start to finish). However it's a great feeling when you go out for dinner, check your email, and a new purchase essentially pays for dinner right then and there :P.