physcab

I think there’s also something else at play. Most of my friends also don’t believe for a second that a corporation has their best interests at heart. It’s not just promotions — it’s work life balance, it’s top-down decision making and political empire building, re-orgs every 4-6 months. The growth at all costs style of building companies chews employees up and spits them out.

I've been a career data analyst for 12 ish years. At first I didn't get the reference to Tableau, because I use Tableau for about 5-8 hours every day. I've played around with every new charting library since Flex because I've always wanted to create a free version of Tableau that gets me 80% of what I use Tableau for, but with 1% the frustration of using Tableau. Problem was, I could never figure out how Tableau is able to create its visualizations so easily just by drag and drop. Every library makes you think of the chart you want to make beforehand, but as an analyst, I work on the data first then spend almost equal amount of time finding the most intuitive visualization for the trend I'm trying to convey. So I've just put that idea on hold indefinitely.

I went through the tutorial and I have to say...oh man, this is amazing. Building a Tableau clone is now possible! I hope you guys don't go under because its going to take me a while, but I'm super excited!

Does this work on mobile? Also, when I click "Play" the chart takes atleast 1-2 seconds to render. Is that just your code running engine or does every visualizations have that lag?

A lot of companies will have different payment solutions to deal with fraud and rebill failures. A charge may get rejected by one gateway and then accepted by the second or third.

So a few things jumped out at me:

1) It’s going to be a grind and the fact that you increased from 200 actives to 500 actives is a good sign!

2) 10-20% trial signups conversion isn’t terrible until you’ve found the right type of customer you’re targeting. Bigger companies might be getting close to 40% but that is for a product that already has market fit.

3) second other suggestion...email and get in front of your users. Or when users file support tickets (make it super easy for them), use that as opp to get educated.

4) don’t spend money on ads to increase traffic until you are getting more of the type of customer you want and consistently converting them

5) don’t spend more time insrutmenting analytics. You already know what’s up. Just talk to users more and iterate based on their feedback

Honestly the MacBook Air is still an amazing value. I just bought another one before they discontinue it. It was just over $1k, keyboard is still the old pseudo mechanical kind before they switched to butterfly, 8gb ram and 512 ssd. 12 hours+ battery life means I only charge mine maybe twice a week between programming and browsing.

The ONLY thing I would change would be retina but I value more battery life than a better display.

This really is only one small segment of the programming population. I really hate superficial shit like this that paints tech workers in a bad light bc most have ordinary jobs and live ordinary lives and aren’t social recluses.

I work typical 9-5, wife and kids. We go grocery shopping and make dinner every night together. We live very modestly and we have lots of non-tech friends and family. It’s literaly nothing special.

We used to get Homeroom catered to our company so I'm pretty familiar.

Its pretty delicious but also really heavy. I noticed that it was difficult finding something that I'd want to eat on a recurring basis, and that must have been uniform because we stopped getting catering from them after 6 months or so.

I'm curious to know if you've seen recurring business from customers or just getting new business because its a new concept and people love mac and cheese and want to try.

While there are trends in fast casual, I'd say there are also trends in healthier eating. Have you thought about how to provide healthier / lighter options to encourage more habitual ordering from existing customers?

Also another idea is food trucks as mobile storefront. A pizza truck a block away from me bought access to an unused parking lot, and while they do provide walk-ups, the majority of orders are fulfilled by delivery companies. Since they are located in a parking lot on a busy street, I will often see 4-5 Uber / Postmates / Eat24 cars lined up waiting for their quick-fire pizzas.

- Start with your own network. Reach out to past co-workers and bosses who regarded you highly. They will pay more for known risk.

- Do not compromise on your rate. If needed, shorten scope according to budget, but do not get tricked into lowering hourly rate. One employer wanted me to work $75/hr for 9 months. I got them to $200/hr for 3 month contract. Nearly the same budget, just reduced scope to get the work done in shorter time. Both of us went home happy.

- As soon as you get your first gig, start working on your pipeline. Reach out to more ex-coworkers. Once you've exhausted your personal network, you've gotta start getting referrals. I usually use the LinkedIn leads for FTE and say "no im not interested in full time, but let me know if you have any contract opportunities". That sometimes helps.

- Start a blog, start developing a reputation, do lots of marketing. Rinse and repeat.

- Save 50% of your income to weather the lulls between gigs until you get your pipeline full.

Note: I got opportunities both at publicly traded companies and small startups with this approach. If you are going for startups, it is sometimes easier for well-funded startups. In this market most devs are going to the big co's.

Tip: Get OnTheJob (https://stuntsoftware.com/onthejob/). You just press "Start" when working, "Stop" when not. It makes time tracking and invoicing easy. I just send the output of that to whoever pays the bills.

Good. I’m all for better and more eco-friendly forms of transport, but after seeing a number of scooters thrown into the street haphazardly, this could not make me happier. People don’t seem to respect property that isn’t theirs.

I hate these scooters with a passion. People litter them all over, I even saw one tossed into the street.

It also means your destiny is in your manager's hands, which can be unfair if you end up with a bad manager, or several new ones. And unfortunately at Amazon, this is very common (current employee here).

This was the graph api that enabled companies like Zynga to grow virally.

You used to be able to do searches on Facebook like "photos taken by friends of _____" and you could easily stalk them without being friends with them. Today that search will yield photos only if you are friends with them, or they enabled their privacy settings to public.

Amazon Prime LTV is on the order of thousands of dollars per member. If they can convert new customers to Prime for ~$100 that is pretty cheap. Of course, media is a hit driven business, so they would have to blend the cost of all the shows that don't do as well as their headliners.

I personally don't like Prime shows other than Man in the High Castle. And they are increasingly pushing down other New Releases so you only see Prime shows above the fold on TV devices (Roku etc). But I understand they are playing the long game here and quality will probably improve. I used to dislike most of Netflix original shows, but now theres a steady lineup that I could watch regularly every week.

Very similar to my use case. My parents would have a glass of wine with their dinner every night. My wife enjoys the same. I don't like wine or beer because I get a headache and it doesn't really ease stress.

Smoking (via vaporizer) a little bit before eating is awesome and good weed doesn't give you a hangover or drowsy feeling the next day. I'm so much more in the present moment, my daily stresses melt away, I can connect with my wife. When I go on camping trips or leave the hustle and bustle of the city, I don't smoke. I get peace by being out of the grind and being around people I love.

Looks like a great tool. I have a Shopify site that has a large amount of products. I've had to build a lot of backend tech to manage all the syncing of the products with the API. Making sure the products are updated with the right info, are in the right collections, are connected and visible within my SEO strategy. I've punted on the UI side and opted for just buying a nice theme and doing some basic customizations bc working within Shopify is too painful.

I like the idea of smart data collections. If you guys had direct DB connectivity, auto-populated the collections AND synced that between platforms, that would be baller. And if you offered direct FB / Google Merchant center feed control, that would be even more baller.

Would love to start a trial, but it seems daunting to figure out the migration component. If you made a tutorial video on that, I can see that easing that friction point.

The difference between aerospace and computing is that aerospace is heavily materials dependent. Getting a bad pixel in a monitor is rare but when it happens it’s not catastrophic. When you’re producing a ton of parts you have to also maintain quality. Not doing so will introduce impurities which will alter the material properties. An alloy with different material properties could potentially burn, fracture, expand etc more differently than represented in their acceptable failure models.

Customer acquisition. Once you know the LTV of an enterprise customer and you know the cost to acquire them, as well as the channel, you go to the bank, take out as much money as you can, and get as many of them as possible.

I’ve been with Kaiser for over a year after having been on One Medical which is aiming to go in the opposite direction (many small satellite offices with good tech and more personal private care).

For simple, routine needs Kaiser really does shine. Easy appointments, quick, good staff. We recently had a baby through Kaiser and pre-natal and post-partum care as well as the actual delivery was a fantastic experience. Much more so than the experiences of my peers at other non-Kaiser hospitals. Cost is all covered in employee plan.

BUT as soon as you encounter specific issues, Kaiser breaks. I’ve had persistent GI issues and was never able to find consistent specialists on Kaiser. I also lost coverage to my therapist as Kaiser only does group therapy.

I had read a lot about their synthetic process in reproducing heme, which gives meat the iron-y taste. They also had some marketing videos about how they introduce fat, because real chuck has different degrees of leanness. So I was expecting something close to meat, with maybe some weirdness in texture.

In reality, it was much closer to a Boca burger but tastier. Basically if you take a burger and remove 50% of the juice and , 25% density, the crumble, and cook it well done. If it were in the grocery store, I'd still buy it over Boca, but my expectations of it being like-meat but healthier were not met. I wouldn't serve it to real burger loving carnivores.

I'd say its kinda false advertising, but I get why they did it...it definitely got us intrigued.

I’m a meat-eater but my wife is vegan. We’ve been following Impossible Foods for some time and got to finally try one of their burgers last month.

As a meat eater who is vegan at home, I think it’s a decent alternative compared to other vegetarian meat-like products, in fact far superior. But it’s definitely not a replacement for the real thing.

I have been pretty impressed with the steady innovation in vegetarian / vegan options that give me as good alternatives compared to non. For example, Miyokos cheese is incredible, and far better than any cheese I used to typically eat, and it’s dairy free.

I used to eat Boca burgers when I’ve had to and they aren’t great. I’m excited for better options to come into the market.

This is pretty fascinating. I've been mulling a change in careers bc I believe over the next 20 years this will become a massive industry. Do you see GM Cruise hitting their 2019 goals? How close are they to producing ~1k - 10k cars with this tech in multiple cities? I find the 2019 targets incredibly aggressive. 5-10 year timelines seem more practical. Also whats the alternative to ROS, why isn't it good for time critical operations?

What you are describing is essentially In App Payments in Free-to-Play mobile games. I buy bag of gems for $10, I can use gems on rare cards to continue playing and level up.

The common criticism of that business model is that the returns are disproportional to those who have money, and your livelihood is sustained by <1% of your consumers who are considered "whales" and spend very large amounts.

I just paid by PayPal. I'm reading this post on the couch relaxing and I have no desire to go get my wallet and dig out my credit card. Way easier.

Also, after watching a couple videos and reading the content, the production value and informational value of this is super high. By the time I learned what the price was, I was fairly surprised how cheap it was. $20 is what I spend on a sandwich and drink for lunch. So it was an automatic no-brainer. You could probably double or triple the price easily.

This seems like a cool product, but I'm not sure if I'm either misunderstanding how to use it or it is wildly inaccurate. I started off the questionnaire for shoulder joint pain, went through about 20 questions. the only one I answered yes to was "Does the stiffness in your joint feel better after exercise". The condition results were "Common Cold, Match: Very Low". I expected that maybe it might give me a list of chiropractors or physical therapists that specialize in sports medicine in my area, but I was definitely surprised by this outcome.

- Positive user growth numbers, not flat or negative

- Positive revenue growth numbers, not flat or negative

- New features launched and positively accepted in the market

Average revenue per customer is flat. Marketing costs increasing. Average repurchase rate seems to be flat. Yikes.

Also this:

> [W]e anticipate adding additional products and increasing the portion of our marketing expenses focused on brand awareness and customer retention in order to drive increased customer engagement and growth in our net revenue from existing customers

When marketing is for "brand awareness" and "customer retention" that reads "we don't know how to acquire new customers profitably so the problem must be our brand". And brand awareness marketing is _very_ expensive.

If Etsy wants to moderate this, they can enforce GTIN verification. Google Shopping does this so they know how to rank bids for the same items by multiple department stores. Google Shopping requires that you put in some GTIN value (they verify it) or you make up your own Manufacturer Identifier (either you control manufacturing or you have a virtual item). The downside of using your own identifier is that they penalize you with worse cost / rankings but thats the cost of not having a GTIN.

How are you interviewing? Have you tapped into your network? Do you have past co-worker friends who have left and found jobs elsewhere?

Most companies value referrals much higher than unknown applicants. If you have a friend who can vouch for your work ethic and can give you straight forward feedback, that will be the best route. You'll iterate much quicker. Also friends may give you insight on the inside of their companies about how decision-making is going. Once you have sizable work experience and sizable network, you shouldn't be doing the shotgun approach. In my very first job I reached out to a 3rd party recruiter and they helped me get a job in 2 weeks from me doing it on my own for 2 months (not a software dev). After that, my jobs have all been referral based.

"we make a lot of promotional products (event swag, trophies, memorabilia, etc.)"

Is there a gallery of products you've made? Also, do you do your own drop-shipping?

Looks cool!

I was a Physics undergrad+ Physics / Materials Science PhD and I ended up just quitting 4 years into my PhD. You can do it too. You don't owe your advisor anything and you've definitely put in your indentured servitude. I ended up getting a job as a data analyst / scientist and never looked back. You can work on interesting problems, use the same experimental design knowledge and methods, and get paid $100k more than a grad student.