snarkypixel

I'm so tired of seeing these posts. Facebook can do whatever it wants with your account and the data you've giving them. Facebook isn't some "free speech" place or a decentralized protocol.. It's a for-profit business optimized to make, guess what, profits.

One pro-tip when building a product that you don't yet have product market fit for is to be a bit more general in your technology choices and naming conventions.

Ideally, you don't lose 100% of the work you've done in the past when pivoting. The database should ideally stay the same with the infra, deployment tools, etc. The code structure should stay similar with various internal libraries (i.e. logging, synching data, etc.)

In a way, it also help to make good architecture decisions because rather than hack a one-off, it's easier to spot the right abstractions that can be re-used across products.

Same with naming.. instead of naming all your things based on the product name, just use fun/code names, so when you pivot or re-brand, you don't have to rename everything or need to deal with legacy product names.

yes!

Both with Dropbox and Instacart, their business model didn't make sense to me. But they still became billion dollar companies that will go bankrupt in a few years after making many people really wealthy. I guess it's a different way to play the game

Because it can be copied and doesn't have a defendable business model.

For most people, consolidating many services into one is just more convenient, even if it means using a "good-enough" version of that feature.

Ironically, it's often when there's no mastery that you realize what mastery is. (I.e. when things just work, are shipped on time and are easy to maintain, there's not much fanfare about it)

> due diligence on anyone you might go into business with. > importance of operating agreements and vesting cliffs

I'd argue it's more important to work with someone you've worked with in the past and know you can trust and will work hard. The operating agreements and due diligence are there for the worst case scenario, but from your story it seems pretty clear they were questionable co-founders to start with.

> Turns out many of those ideas that seem silly actually aren't going to be that profitable!

You still want some core users that love the product, even though many bigger players dismiss it as a toy. Think Bitcoin, Google, Apple (In the very early days, it all sounded like silly/toy ideas, but a core group of users loved them)

When I see posts like this, I always think about how insane it will be in 2520 if we keep the same innovation growth (and not die to whatever)

Small anecdote. At some point I was hiring designers and had a few candidates listing MindGeek on their resumes. I didn't think too much of it.. until I saw the portfolio! It was kind of an awkward moment looking at a designer's portfolio of porn landing pages with all my colleagues/employees around, and trying to keep a straight face while evaluating the design of huge boobs taking 90% of the page. Turns out MingGeek is a big employer of junior designers. They pay well and are extremely professional.

What did you guys use on Android? Was it painful to have to maintain both apps?

One question about Airbnb.. Before covid, were people still renting to sleep on the couch? For me, Airbnb was always this "I don't want a hotel room, I'd rather have an apartment by myself". I know some people would rent a room.. but the couch..?

I'm asking because I keep hearing that at first nobody thought that renting their couch was a good business idea, and how airbnb proved them wrong, yada yada. But IMHO, if right from the bat they explained how they'd be a full blown competitor to hotels because cheaper price and more convenient, I feel like the conversation would have been different with VCs.

Hack for you: add all the books you want to read in blinkist, listen to the summary (2-10m in 2-3x mode), then you can classify them as:

A) Not interested --> nice, you saved yourself some time B) Interesting, but feel like the summary is more than good enough, so no need to read the book C) Interesting and you want to learn more because it just scratched the surface --> Read the book!

You can test this framework by listening to the summary of books you've already read that fit into these buckets.

I guess a third option would be to use an "Option" but with much more syntactic sugar. So, rather than calling func(some(3)), you'd just call func(3) and the compiler would automatically wrap it up. Func would be declared this way: def func(int?) to indicate that it's an optional type. IMO you get the best of both world. And then, in many places in the code, you'd have to do "r?.foo()" if r is an Option type. It's different than javascript where the "?" isn't enforced by the compiler.

The landing page is great too, congrats on the beta launch!

I'll go against the grain here but I think it's all fine.. it's part of the 99.9999%; we've just hit the 0.0001%. It'll get better over time and the pros outweigh the cons.

Because the world is incredibly complex and following great leaders is a great risk reward ratio. It's also a great way to learn

Same, give me an example, and if I don't get it I'll dig in.

The problem is many founders build things they /think/ people would want. Like "nice sounding problems" that actually no one cares about.

The great thing about building something for yourself is at least you know it's a real problem. It may potentially be too small of a market, but at least it's a real problem.

Also, it's much easier to build something that you deeply understand. Sure, you want a lot of users feedback and talk with them all the time, but deeply understanding the problem really help you focus on what's important rather than building features that users ask but that aren't that important.

Adding to that, even if you don't like negotiating, it's helpful to understand the tactics used by the other person so you can counter them (or at least be aware of it).

For instance, my favorite tactic when someone is pushing hard to sell me something or negotiate is the "Appeal to the authority" (i.e. "Let me first talk about it to my wife (or co-founder) about it."

Another popular negotiation tactic is to get asked between option A or option B, where in fact you could simply respond with "option C is more what I'm looking for".

>> The iPad has since recovered from its 2017 nadir in sales, but seems locked in at around 8% of Apple’s revenue, a far cry from the 20% share it had in its first year

For me, the reasons are that I love my current Ipad pro, I don't have a good reason to upgrade it, and the pricing isn't advantageous.

I change my Macbook often because of work-related reasons (I.e. when changing job I need to get a new one)

I change my iphone often because the new ones have a big enough differentiator (for me at least), but more importantly, the way the pricing is structured with my cellphone provider, I almost get it for free. (I.e. I had to upgrade my plan to get more gig/months and a few other features so I only had to pay $200 for the new iphone 12).

But for the iPad pro? I'd need to pay the full $1500 upfront and the new one doesn't offer a big enough value add compared to the previous ones.

>> First, to say Design is sport is stupid beyond comprehension

Agree to disagree (without calling it stupid beyond comprehension). Design is so much more than final UI. It's the whole experience, how it works and how it's distributed. And that involves a lot of stakeholders, not just one designer.

Design is a team sport, so what you need to ask yourself is does the whole team prefer to use a native mac app vs browser? RIP sketch

Yeah.. call me grumpy but I'm not a fan of sending big objects in space easily detectable by aliens.

Just as a fun thought experiment, what /new/ things could be possible if we had 1Terabit/s?

imho Slack screw themselves by not making it nice for larger communities (I.e. how they fucked over the react community). They put themselves in a "Work only" corner which is being taken over by Microsoft Team, etc. RIP Slack

Just wanted to point out that there are good SPAC too. Hyliion, OpenDoor & Virgin Galactic come to mind. If you haven't heard of HYLN, check it out. It's currently in a massive dip due to many people cashing their early SPAC price + many people associating Nikola with HYLN because they're both in the EV truck industry, but HYLN has actually amazing tech, great founder and I've talked to many truckers who cannot wait to retrofit the new engine in their old truck.

I wish more companies would separate the cost of _current revenue_ vs the growth investment of future revenue. I.e. Say it cost 30M to generate 100M, and 150M was invested in R&D and future sales. Even though it has negative revenue (100 - 150 - 30), the products that were sold are clearly profitable. Which imho is very different than saying the company is losing 80M a year.

A bit of a side question, but how slow would it be if we were to query the data without using a time-based approach? I.e. "select * from obj where parent_id = <x>" --> Imagine we had billions of obj and a few thousands matching "parent_id" added randomly during the last 5-10 years. Would there be an index on "parent_id" or would it need to read every hypertable for such a query?

Basically, I'm trying to understand if Timescale is /only/ useful for timeseries or if it has good-enough performance for other use-cases.

Yeah, compiling in Rust was the bane of my existence. I tried to stay on old versions for as long as possible to avoid compiling.

At some points, I'd basically have to wait 10-15min.. so I'd go for a walk or grab coffee. Then I'd switch to javascript and it felt like going at the speed of light. To each their own.