sampl

Think of it more like dating--it's normal to have 50 "failed" dates before you tie the knot. You don't commit until you find a great match. In business, this means the market actually cares about what you're making.

Predicting which software businesses will find this fit is extremely hard. VCs know this, and diversify their investments among many founders (knowing one big payday can make up for 10-100 failures).

Looks like this founder diversified by himself and launched small things faster. And eventually found something worth "marrying".

These are mostly failed consumber businesses until Baremetrics, which had $100k in recurring revenue last month.

https://demo.baremetrics.com/

Me too.

One possible option: no accelerator at all. YC doesn’t fund you that much, and you don’t need a demo day to pitch investors. The network and advice can come others ways too: from working for startups, and increasingly online (see YCs own startup school).

Short plug: your local library has thousands of books, all free to borrow.

Many libraries let you listen to unlimited free audiobooks using the Libby app (honestly a life-changer for me).

Love this, cheers!

For some reason, the design of this is very sweetly nostalgic to me--reminds me of the web from 10y ago (in a good way!).

Web fonts and accessibility concerns with small font size have made good ol 13px Helvetica with blue links on white bg rare.

I tried this for http://wanderkind.org/ and IMO it ended up being more than helpful.

Affiliation only seems worth it if you have a lot of traffic. Even then, maybe not--unless you're making serious money, I'd rather build genuine trust.

Does YC have any moral guidelines for the companies they fund? I was assuming there’d at least be a hand-waving “make the world a better place” or something, but I’m not seeing anything on their principles page: http://www.ycombinator.com/principles/

Would YC fund a cocaine delivery company if it was legal and profitable? A news site that fuels revenue by spreading hate? Military recruiters in poor neighborhoods as a service?

I’m assuming a giant bowl of pasta and cheese is incredibly unhealthy, even with some brocolli sprinkled on top.

Do you have any moral concerns with this company? We’re a massively obese nation...

I’m close with someone who actively keeps her address from public records to keep an old stalker from finding her.

The psychological effect of having someone treat you like an object, repeatedly hunt you down after moves, and gaslight you/landlords/cops into believing it’s not happening is harmful as it is—let alone the not-so-unlikely chance that someone with this high degree of intelligence and mental health issues will physically hurt you if they find you.

There’s not much you can do besides a paper restraining order. By the time the cops come it’s too late.

This possibility is a very real part of many people’s lives, but maybe less talked about with men like me because statistically female victims are more common.

Body shops? Does that mean staffing agencies?

Looking forward to it!

Just to be clear though - I think your current design already does a good job at this :)

Actually planning on a major update soon—lmk if you end up using it!

FWIW I think the screenshots look great.

If someone’s going to use this tool every day, you want to emphasize the videos and faces that change every day—not the buttons and links.

We maintain this list of startups in Ann Arbor :)

http://madeina2.com/

I describe myself as a Product Designer, which is both. I think there's a good trend in the industry to combine the roles under that name (with specialists still getting hired on larger teams), but it's far from being the norm still.

Reach out if you want to chat more, contact info is in my profile.

I love the HCI field (and have my degree in it)... but its academic practitioners are usually evaluative with surprisingly little generative design skill—which makes them good at finding problems in others’ work but poor at making their own :(

Very cool!

For folks with iPads, Procreate just released a similar feature (radial symmetry drawing)

I built a boilerplate for React+Firebase (including search, auth, and Stripe): http://getfirefly.org/

In product management this is often described as problem space vs solution space.

One of my biggest lessons in “managing up”: agree on the problem, and take any suggestions for a solution seriously. Then work to make the solution you present as good or better.

If you’re on the receiving end of a system that, systematically, hurts/kills you, your family, your community, and culture, storming the bastille or marching on washington or whatever for equality probably will suddenly make a lot of sense.

Gotta plug my favorite book of all time here: “A Pattern Language”, by this speaker, Christopher Alexander et al.

Tons of small, progressive, human-centered hand-drawn architecture patterns in a hard-bound brick of bible-thin pages.

The book inspired code patterns that you hear about all the time in engineering, and is a lovely way to think about better cities and homes.

Interesting point, and well put--thanks.

Maybe there's a distinction to be drawn between "inherent part of the human condition" and the "default state", as you have described it. Attempting to change something "inherent" seems worthless, but default is merely waiting to be overwritten with something better.

For ex: death is inherent in the human condition, we cannot avoid it and must deal with it. Nakedness is only the default state, and is pretty easily solved.

Back to economics: maybe scarcity is inherent, but "social tragedy" may be merely a very solvable default.

Funny, I was just reading that same example of his in his book “basic economics”, and it makes sense.

Still, couldn’t you say the same for a feudal structure? That nature has power imbalances, and the role of king only conveys that inequality?

Instead, we’ve intentionally built a more egalitarian system (and we’ve all prospered because of it), seemingly against nature.

> Pattern 5: Give a coping strategy

> Context: You are calling some other code, but you aren’t sure if the happy path will succeed.

I’d love to see some good examples of this if-less code in React.

I find myself writing conditionals in data provider component render methods for things like “isLoading”, “hasError”, and “items.length == 0”.

> A beginner's experience with learning a new technology is valuable knowledge, even if some details may not be correct.

This is so true. I think I'm a better teacher of javascript than design, simply because I'm worse at JS and find it easier to take early learner perspectives when I write tutorials (http://getfirefly.org)

Just use "they" or "she/he" instead of "she"...

The typing isn't hard, the hard part is keeping yourself from making assumptions about who people like to date. There's much more than a "tiny off-chance" that people are queer, at least where I'm from (and probably at Intel HQ too).

Nit: based on the article (as of 10a est), we don’t actually know if the subordinate was female :)

I just made the transition to contractor/consultant/freelancer. Some thoughts more on the consultant side:

- Logistics: set up a domain with a one-pager landing page[1], get some simple business cards, and get a work email. I ended up spending $50 for an LLC and getting a business bank account and card. I use Freshbooks for tracking time, expenses, and sending invoices.

- Legal: Get a lawyer (and a tax person) who understands what you're doing. It's worth the <$1000 you'll spend just for peace of mind. I found mine through a local startup incubator. Your lawyer can draw up a Master Services Agreement you sign with clients once that goes over IP etc. Then for each project, you simply sign a one-pager Statement of Work that has your rate, scope of work, duration, etc (which can be updated and expanded as you go by re-signing).

- Getting clients: this is literally a sales/marketing funnel. Share your business with your network [2], start getting incoming leads from folks, screen clients [3], closing contracts. This is actually one of the reasons I decided to consult, I want more hands on sales experience. Advice from a friend: spend min 1h each day emailing or whatever else necessary to land new clients.

- Doing work: take on a customer-facing mindset (like you would in a support role)--make them feel comfortable, make them look good, and make them successful. Obviously makes sure your work is incredibly good--your best sales channel should be referrals.

Maybe this goes without saying, but all of the above is MUCH easier if you have genuine experience and expertise. I wouldn't recommend this for someone in their first 5y of being an engineer/designer etc--build specific experience in an area and make the jump later (for ex, I lead a design team at a YC startup and taught design at UM, not sure I would have done this 5y ago).

[1] http://directedworks.com

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6401496...

[3] https://muledesign.com/designbook/screener.html (from https://abookapart.com/products/design-is-a-job)

Surprised nobody’s said Google Docs yet. It’s up on my laptop in every meeting.

It works well on every device, supports simple text notes or fancy formatting, good sharing options, good live multiuser editing, inline comment threads, free to use, works offline, keyboard shortcuts, etc...