seanlinehan

Pretty cool. Biggest thing I see in a few minutes of playing around is the "Choose Element" dropdown could benefit from implementing a search/dropdown hybrid.

Both consumers and companies like Netflix already pay the infrastructure to transport those bits. The consumers pay their ISP to send and receive bits and the companies pay their ISP to send and receive bits.

The more apt analogy would be if UPS decided to make Amazon packages ship super slow unless Amazon payed extra fees to "upgrade" the shipping speed back to average.

As a side project, I built www.99juices.com to crowd-source e-juice recipes (the liquid for e-cigs). If I did a better job at building the community, I'd be on it every day. But it's a side project, so I haven't done enough outreach. Still use it at least once a week to glance at my saved recipes anyways.

Great job. One request: Make the CMD shortcuts work for the CTRL key too. They don't seem to fire.

Either beards or full suit-and-tie a la IBM.

I was working on mobile app that helped with spaced repetition as a side project. I built a pretty good looking user interface but ran out of time to work on it between school and my company. If anybody is excited about spaced repetition and wants to join me on my side project, I'd love to try to make a little bit of extra time to get it live. I really wish that the application already existed - my midterms would be going much, much better :)

Email me at sean@einstein.com

I also quit smoking by using a vaporizer. So did my brother, my mother, my step-father, and my friends. My cigarette consumption plummeted after I started using it... but it wasn't even a tiny struggle. There are some heavy-weights lobbying against the products, which is unfortunate because my vaporizer was the only thing that actually helped me quit smoking.

[shameless plug]

I had so much success with the product that I actually started a company selling them. I found that the market was much too complicated for somebody like my parents to enter, so a partner and I focused in on one great product for new users. You can check it out... If anybody has any feedback / constructive criticism / questions, please reach out to me at sean [at] vapesecret.com

http://www.vapesecret.com

In terms of #3, it's even worse than 100,000's - for LinkedIn it would likely be millions:

"In general, online social networks had the smallest seed sets - 13 networks of this type had an average seed set size less than 2% of the population (these networks were all in Category A). We also noticed, that for most networks, there was a linear realtion between threshold value and seed size"

Though, for a company with direct access to their users via the UI, it would be a fairly trivial task to reach a significant subset. LinkedIn could reasonably push UI updates only to the target population. Given they have full access in the first place, I'm uncertain as to why they would want to engage in this form of marketing, though.

Here is a strategy that I have heard repeated a few times: When you see a rhetorical question in the title of a news article, the answer is no. The answer is always no. The article may say maybe. But the answer is no. Just like that you've saved yourself a few minutes.

In order to change the company's product trajectory, culture, and perception there are many stages that they must go through to get to the ultimate goal. At this point in time, Yahoo does not have the public perception that they are a cool company to work for, especially for engineers. This makes it a near impossible task to attract the talent necessary for internal innovation. However, if they buy cool companies, show that they are working on things internally (Flickr redesign), and prove that management is competent, they will be able to transition to internal innovation.

Of course, it is a big jump to go from buying companies to transforming their culture to match the perception that they are attempting to create. Perhaps removing the ability to work remotely was a bad first step, perhaps not. I imagine that Mayer knew what she was doing here and it will likely turn out to be a positive move. The big question is what other steps they take internally to truly change the culture. It could be a big flop, but if anybody knows a little something about company culture it would be Mayer.

Perhaps you should have read the article. It has nothing to do with manipulating your influence. At all.

48 hours indeed. I've done a lot of small side-projects so I have built up a good amount of reusable components that I can pop in on both the front and back end to push this type of thing even faster.

Presumably you are subscribed to their email list.

I was thinking the same thing. From their wording of the issue, that appears to be the case.

Imagine you had a brilliant idea to start a company which served demographically targeted advertisements to users across the web. Since you are brand-spanking-new you have very little data about users. You need to find a way to quickly and cheaply build demographic data about users so you can actually accomplish your mission.

If you launch a ton of these types of games, you could build a pretty decent database of user's browsing histories. If you are using news sites as your sites of interest, you could use that browsing history to build up demographic data about each of the people who play your game (demographics for large sites like CNN are pretty well known).

There are certainly other reasons, but this is the first one that came to mind.

I surely agree with you in the general, but I enjoy the line of the thinking that the OP is going down. The way I see it is that the language we use dictates how we think about problem solving. Even if we don't port the strict definition of a term one-to-one, we are still anchoring our approach to the mind-space that the other term occupies.

I read this post is as saying that we are no longer using the appropriate metaphors -- we are anchoring on counter-productive terms. These metaphors clearly were relevant at some point, but the field in which product developers play in has changed dramatically. If the game has changed, then it would seem that anchoring our language on new metaphors would make sense. If we use strong metaphors that more closely resemble the work we are doing, it could help us accelerate our problem solving.

As with all ideas, we will see if others agree with the OP. Personally, I think the newly proposed metaphor of composition is more descriptive than that of building.

I dropped a pin and wound up in an art gallery. Cool project and a pleasant surprise.

Amazing. I'm actually humbled for you to have responded.

Thanks. I switch between being overly concise and overly verbose. Today is an overly verbose day. I'm working on finding a cool median.

Your skepticism is understandable, yet I feel as if you are missing the core message here. The message here is not about my own journey - my narrative is a trope for the culture of Silicon Valley. Whether or not I succeed in my venture is irrelevant to the main point - entrepreneurship is not about raising money or acquiring fame; it is about building a business.

As much as I appreciate constructive criticism, your implication that I am suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect is unwelcome. You know nothing of my talents nor my mind-state and to infer that the small glimpse of my life I have provided is representative of my being is naive.

I don't write much. If you have concrete feedback, I'd appreciate the commentary!

I did some development work on the first idea but didn't get funding or media attention before a founder breakup. For the second idea I was even worse - I decided not to even attempt to build the project unless I got YC. This sounds ridiculous, but this story is so incredibly common. I talk to my peers and I read posts about people who completely abandon their projects the moment they fail to get into YC or [name incubator]. As if these fellas are legitimate gate holders.

I am admittedly fickle when it comes to startup ideas, but I must make it clear that these were not my only projects - they were the projects that I modeled my understanding of entrepreneurship on. I was the Director of Technology at Modify Watches [1] for two years and helped grow that business with the team to a pretty healthy size. I also created a coupon site that was generating about a thousands bucks a month semi-automatically which I ran for two years. These just weren't Silicon Valley opportunities... I wasn't at the helm.

My timespan for success is completely dependent on which level of success I'm looking at. With my current business, I consider the fact that I wrote software which generated revenue within an hour of turning it on to be a pretty huge success. In terms of how long I expect it to take to make the Big Bucks, I am completely realistic that this doesn't happen overnight. I plan to be in this company for the long haul.

Although I do not have the life experience of an older gentlemen, I would posit that my experience is light-years ahead of people who are my age. [1] I've literally been running companies or been deeply involved in them almost non-stop since I was 13 years old. I have real, executional experience and textbook knowledge from my Berkeley education. Not to mention, this company is not a company of one... Anywhere my team and I need help, I'm exciting to bring on somebody who does have the life experience.

I really appreciate your perspective. I love a bit a constructive criticism / interrogation... It helps with introspection!

[0] http://www.modifywatches.com/

[1] Not necessarily light-years ahead of other 20-year old entrepreneurs, but of the 20-year old public at large.

Thanks! Fixed.

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p2hVKwh...

This is awesome. I haven't touched Django even though I develop in Python on a daily basis... been meaning to but hadn't found a reason to. I've bookmarked this for when I finally get the itch.

Btw, there are some weird formatting issues in the tutorial (underscores after links?).

The point he was making is that he knows that it is possible to supply a digital download link. I think it absolutely does give him the insight into the range of things that are possible within the industry. Whether or not the company is willing to provide such a thing is a completely different question, but technical possibility is what he was attempting to communicate...

Sure, there are many examples of projects which started as a developer solving a problem for themselves. However, the ones that still exist are the ones that solved problems for other people at the same time. If you want to be successful you have to look outside the microcosm of yourself and figure out what other people's need are. If you are lucky there will be other people who have exactly the same needs as yourself.

If I am understanding the OP correctly, he is not looking to be an incredible hacker; he is looking to be an entrepreneur. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur you have to follow the market. You have to. There is no other way. If people are not willing to give you their money, you have to do something else or you fail. I completely agree that you have to be passionate about making things, but you definitely don't have to be passionate about making new things, or even exciting things. These things are awesome bonuses, but they are not requirements.

Entrepreneurship is about creating value for other people. It is often not fun and is quite often very uncomfortable. There are moments of dread, hopelessness, and fear. You can reduce the number of these moments by building a company which definitely solves other people's problems.

I cannot relate to much of the OP's story, but nonetheless you just got me so fired up. This is all such damn good advice! Thank you!

This seems to be a the type of comment that is catchy, but in truth mostly vacuous. How does one have a 'Draw Something' of email? There is no sticking power to most games. There are high switching costs (in terms of time, productivity, etc.) when it comes to e-mail. Hell, I used Yahoo Mail for years after Gmail came out because I wasn't used to its interface. If Mailbox has managed to get people to switch to their app, it is likely that they will continue to use the app... Not drop it in three months like people did with Draw Something.

This is a great answer. I think it is important to note that all of the information you have provided is already available on the web, so you aren't really revealing super secret information. You have provided a very well written and properly structured guide for information which could have been gathered anyways. I went down the dropshipping information wormhole recently it was a super annoying process. You're guide has definitely helped provide a strong structure the information I gathered.

Thanks!