scabarott

But also don't forget to subtract rent (the value of actually living in and enjoying the house or one of equivalent value). It'll probably work out to the same or a slightly higher ROI

I hear you, and appreciate your honesty. Not many founders talk a lot about the technical challenges of building the app itself. A lot of startup stories I read take this as a given, whereas I'm sure it's one of the biggest factors if not the biggest that causes many startups to fail.

This sounds like a story straight out of the Onion, or Dr. Strangelove. That must've been one kooky customer.

I didn't quite understand this. Presumably, you're developers and just created a I assume fairly complex backend product (better than Google Maps). What stopped even just one of you from picking up a book on react-native/electron/whatever and knocking out a workable front-end? Did you exceed your runway, run out of time etc? edit: to clarify, I meant after the third-party didn't work out. Also not critiquing just genuinely curious

Ironically, the founder of partpic, the acqui-hire on which this technology is based used to work for Mcmaster-Carr and started partpic as a result of customers' frustrations with McMaster's search functions. Perhaps they're aiming this product at more casual, less exacting retail customers who'll settle for only an approximate match in exchange for the convenience of snapping a quick pic. It's a shame though if they can cater to all types of customers by improving their search function.

Interesting, I always thought Android was a rip-off of iOS from the start. Didn't know it existed before iOS

The article came across to me like an attempt to talk up British inventions (and claim precedence) by the author, who is also British. It read like some Wikipedia technology articles which also have this bias.

Maybe a little harsh on youtube. Not entirely garbage. Lot's of good content actually, you just have to tune out the noise to find them.

>>It's the standard techie failure to understand average users

You mean like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, Shazam, Grubhub, Bell labs, Intel, Xerox Parc, Pixar, Amazon etc, just to name a few (and of course Twitter)? Techies have been doing just fine in the anticipation department.

Apologies. I don't usually lose it like that online but this person is an obvious troll. I like that HN is one of the more civil places online and don't intend to be the one to spoil it.

* Also please monitor this user's posts. He has a history of posting fact-free racially inflammatory comments that would be more at home on a forum like 4chan. It would be nice if someone kept an eye on this account. A few examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071344

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jogjayr&next=1744780...

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gspetr&next=16069082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624778

The entire piece could do with a serious re-edit. It left me more confused than anything. Terribly written.

"Do you even have arguments..."

Can you even read? Go away race troll. Anyone can look through your comment history and see what you are. Not even American pffft.

I think you're completely failing to get the point. It's not about statistics, it's about perception (I wonder what percentage of Black Americans actually listen to rap music or have anything to do with 'gangsta' culture). In this case your perceptions are warped because of your own biases. I'm also glad the poster above brought up the example of mass-market movies. Porn is probably another good example of something that no one conflates with 'white culture' even if there are seemingly good reasons to. There are many other aspects of mass culture in the west that are viewed very negatively elsewhere. The poster certainly makes a good point about mass shootings as well, whatever the percentages are they certainly make a huge bang on public perception. We can argue stats all day but what constitutes 'good' culture or 'bad' culture is your own subjective opinion and your (racial) bias makes you blind to one and hyper-sensitive about others

edit - Also by making that distinction btw 'jewish' and 'white' culture you're very plainly showing where you're coming from.

edit - I just took a look through your profile and now I'm not surprised at all. A very common theme emerges lol. You can disregard everything I said above since it won't make sense to you either way

Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.

*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.

>Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years.

This is entirely your own subjective opinion and a very racist one. Except you can provide definite proof that show that rap music, jazz music etc somehow lead to 'self-destruction' (or even that single motherhood is some deliberate part of the culture) all you're doing is revealing your personal dislikes and biases. It is also a very selective statement - no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.

>The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective...

This. Logged in just to upvote your comment. The broad racial categories we currently use are just idiotic. It's like using nothing but a blunt mallet for every household repair job. Some more nuance in racial categorization or even just doing away with it altogether and using something else (place of origin, ethnicity, economic circumstance) would probably be a good thing as a whole.

Woah. Haven't read the Wall St. journal in a while. Had no idea it had become so fact-free and one sided. That basically read like a Fox News bulletin

*Just noticed it was on the opinion page, thankfully. But still.

>I wasn't implying you didn't read the posts (like you implied with "If you bothered to read it")

My apologies, my tone was probably a little aggressive.

Gaming is the original VR killer app intended to gin up interest and spur development but current VR offerings go beyond that. One of the more interesting applications so far is 'live events' where your digital avatar can attend live sporting events, concerts etc with other digital avatars (you have to experience this to understand what a potential game changer this is). Even watching regular (i.e 2D) movies in an immersive environment on my headset is more fun than watching it on my tv, with the drawback that as of now you can't share the experience with other people not wearing a headset. I'm just scratching the surface of content that is already available NOW (there's even porn if that's your thing, though I personally don't find this very compelling mostly because of the low resolution). Ultimately, if things go the way I think they might, your VR headset would potentially replace not just your gaming console but also your TV set and your laptop/home office (currently I can play chess in a virtual room with only primitive controllers so I don't think working while completely immersed in a virtual environment is a long way off). If you do have the chance I encourage you to take some time to catch up with the current state of the art.

I agree with you that 'boring' is good but in the world we live in unfortunately new tech has to be 'sexy' and 'exciting' to attract venture money and developer interest it needs to get to the boring stage.

>If you read the post of your GP (and that GP as well)

>Its against HN guidelines to assume and express someone else has not read your post or the content

Hmmm. Uh-huh well, if you're talking about limited AR such as in HUDs or Pokemon Go or glass, that's already here and it's cool and useful, but not very exciting (at least to me). No doubt AR will be a thing in everyday life. I don't see why people (myself included) talk about both technologies (AR & VR) as if its a zero-sum game and we'll only have one but not the other. No reason they both can't exist in the brave new future.

"It seems you and GP are confusing VR and AR" I'm doing no such thing. I don't know where in my comment you got such an impression. If you bothered to read it you'll see I mention that I own a VR rig. I certainly know the difference. Also I would have agreed with your comment about VR being nowhere ready 2 years ago. While it's not quite ready for mass market primetime it's definitely at a stage where the average Joe can get a lot of mileage out of it (unlike AR which is mostly hype at the moment). I would say it's currently at the stage that PCs where at in the mid 80's. BTW you don't need a 'big fat gaming rig' and a dedicated graphics card - I don't know where you are but here in the US you can get the Oculus Go which is a standalone unit for less than $200. It's not the full VR experience but its good enough that I would consider buying it over a gaming console or even a tablet. I think you should have more experience with VR before you make grandiose statements knocking it publicly. As for AR I haven't really had a lot of opportunity to try it out (except for Glass). It may well overtake VR at some point but at the moment most AR projects are at the concept stage or just hype.

I would say it is still early days for VR. I was a skeptic at first till I got my own VR rig, now I'm convinced it's the future even if I don't know what time-frame that is going to be. As for Google glass it was just a little ahead of it's time and it's even gaining traction on the enterprise side.

Wow, that was your takeaway

I can think of at least 2 promising areas: 1.Micropayments- currently it's very hard to charge for anything on the internet so we get ads, which everyone hates or paywalls which people hate even more. Internet money doesn't need to be decentralized but then who will issue or build it -google, facebook? So far this is the most promising. 2. Data privacy - everyone's complaining about Facebook now. So far public decentralized blockchains have offered the most promising way to build truly decentralized apps (while still providing an incentive/payment to developers). I'm pretty sure even more uses we can't think of now will open up as the technology matures

The internet as we use it today is far beyond what anyone originally envisioned. No one thought we would be using it for e-commerce or social networks or in fact anything other than for a few geeky scientists to occasionally collaborate

I sincerely hope this is a minority opinion

Huh? Part of your comments is wrong. Lyft existed before Uber as zimrides. Not only that Lyft and another competitor Sidecar pioneered ride sharing - Uber started out as a black car service and borrowed it's current business model from those two. Even more, Lyft was the first to take on city regulators, when Uber was still a black car service and Uber initially opposed the move to make ride sharing legal and only jumped on the bandwagon when it looked like Lyft was going to succeed and eat Uber for lunch. It's actually the other way around- Uber exists because of Lyft (source of all this - the Upstarts by Brad Stone which I'm currently reading). But everything else you said I agree with: Taxis were just plain awful.

Thanks. Please do share

Didn't even think of the ATS angle. Yikes, so if a cover letter doesn't have enough related keywords it might not even make it past machine filters? That makes me even more anxious - most postings, actually virtually every posting I see, the overlap btw required skills posted and my skills is rarely more than 50% or 60%.