Archipelagia

And in mobile gaming there's also the matter of looking for "whales". Basically, while majority of people will never spend anything, there's a minority willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. Then, the difficulty comes from showing your game to enough people to find whales.

(Whether that model is ethical in the first place is a whole different matter. I don't think it is, so maybe eliminating it will be a net positive in the world.)

The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the first place.

That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

If you're trying to find a job, you're not applying for "anything and everything". You're applying for a specific role.

Strong agree.

I'd only add that you might have way better chances reaching to people personally rather than using traditional channels. It might sound obvious, but it's easy to forget that you can use the same skills you've built as a founder to find a job. Just messaging a few people working in the industry you care about and scheduling some calls can go a long way.

Eh, I might be a whiner, but I seeing that nature.com, I expected something better than a Malcol Gladwell level article.

Okay, the tip with anthropomorphisation is okay, and reminding people that you can't believe in LLMs output is always good... but, like, I'd assume an average Nature reader is smart enough to not need tips like "iterate" or "embrace change".

I didn't realize that, thank you

It kind of seems like an intimidation tactic. Not too many artists will be willing to claim copyright infringement, if they can get hit with a suit in response. And in the meantime, they cab happily continue training their model on whatever they want.

Is it legal though? Article mentioned forbidding the use of crawlers. Besides, it talks a lot how they only link to the image... but that's not how AI works, right? Maybe after incorporating the photo into its weights the model no longer needs the original, but it doesn't seem like an explicitly legal thing.

Yeah, the annoying notifications are the visible part... but as far as I know, GDPR has a pretty serious impact if you're European. It allows you to ask private companies to delete your data, which to me seems like a pretty huge privacy win.

Implementation could definitely be a lot better, but I think it protects Europe from the privacy hellscape that's currently happening in the US.

I think the entire idea behind safety is to start worrying before it becomes critical.

Similarly with Covid, the right time to start worrying (on a societal level) was before the disease becomes widespread. The tragedy of that means that if you take the correct action at the right time and succeed, you will always look like you were overreacting.

It was never considered common sense.

Some variant of what you're thinking about might've been possible in a small society (say, when the shop owner in a village knew all his customers, and was able to keep an eye on the troublemakers).

But in modern world it would basically mean that you might get banned from thousands of stores across the entire country because a cousin you barely know is an idiot. Or more likely, you'll just appear on the "do not serve" list without even knowing you're on in or finding out why.

So yeah, treating these two as the same thing is dishonest.

I think there's a massive scale blindness here.

Like, obviously I'd be in a big trouble if my password manager suddenly put all of my data online and it could lead to massive financial damage.

At the same time, there are governments that literally have the power to kill their citizens (or citizens of nearby countries). At least LastPass can't declare a war upon me.

If you want to go thay route, it might be better instead to add a % to all the prices, and then at the end give it back if someone left a clean table. Something like "as a small token of gratitude for leaving the place clean and saving us time, here's 1% of your price back!"

One is punitive, other one is rewarding.

I think both of this comment is needlessly hostile.

Like, starting the conversation with an accusatory comment of "hey, btw, did you think of this very super rare situation, or are you the evil exclusionary guy?" is kind of an asshole thing to do. Most people with sight don't encounter blindness often, so making someone feel attacked for not thinking about is just a way to generate hostility.

Having said that, I actually appreciate the content (if not the form) of this comment – it's pretty easy to accidentally block people from using your software, and accessibility reminders are an important thing. Though in this case human solution (have the waiter come and help) is probably better than software one.

Except your concern is addressed even in the part that I quoted:

"The growth factors [hormones] that are produced have a very similar structure to the human molecules and that is how perhaps by accident the human wound is stimulated to heal faster."

No idea how you got from that to "evolution can't even explain the origin of species", but it seems to me you're not exactly looking for truth here.

Here's an interesting part that's buried by the end:

Another area of research focuses on maggots’ wound-healing properties. “Clinical and anecdotal evidence suggested that maggots improve or accelerate and stimulate a wound to heal,” says Nigam. “We were really interested in why this could be possible when that’s of no evolutionary interest to the maggot at all. We’ve discovered that it’s more than likely an inadvertent happening. >“The growth factors [hormones] that are produced have a very similar structure to the human molecules and that is how perhaps by accident the human wound is stimulated to heal faster. We’re going to investigate that further.”

Hm, first, why exactly would you like to make this shift? Purely to train social skills?

If so, I'd recommend finding some small sales side-gig over the weekends instead of doing a full career change. Sales can very rewarding (both in terms of money and satisfaction), but 1. you need to be pretty good to make decent money and 2. if it doesn't suit you, it can be extremely stressful.

On the other hand doing some smaller sales on the side could be a nice way to test the waters. And if you decide to make a full switch later, having some prior experience will look nicely.

For the side gig, I'd probably look into direct sales vs phone or online. It's more stressful and the experience doesn't directly translate into doing B2B later (I'm assuming you'll want to move into tech sales down the line), but it's very much a crash course in building self confidence.

I really liked your post, especially comparison in the introvert/extrovert thinking:

Notice the difference in narrative: > “That person looks interesting, I wonder what their story is?” “Maybe that person is interested in the same things as I am, I want to go find out.” “People go out to socialize, maybe they’re just a little shy at first.” “I noticed something interesting, but I don’t have anyone to tell. Maybe that person nearby feels the same way”.

I actually noticed something similar over time as I got more outgoing. I think that internal narrative is one of the most enjoyable indicators of becoming more extroverted.

I'd like to feel more at ease with myself, feel more comfortable contributing in an authentic, confident, light-hearted way. But instead I'm often in my head over-analyzing instead of being present.

Two very important pieces of advice:

1. Feelings follow action. It's extremely difficult to "think yourself" into confidence, but if you act confident (even pretend to) you'll soon start feeling so.

2. Feeling comfortable is a result of competence. If you know you are going to do great, you will feel comfortable. So to feel at-ease, focus on building social skills.

When I was younger I realized I had mediocre social skills (I was outgoing, but also pretty awkward. One of the perks of spending too much time around computers growing up, I guess.). For a few years I prioritized fixing it, basically trying to get as much exposure to different social situations as I could (e.g. traveling internationally by myself, trying sales jobs, etc.) and got to a point where I'm usually the most social person in any group.

(Feels kinda weird writing that about myself, but we're on an anonymous forum, huh.)

I think doing something similar could help you a lot. Obviously depends a lot on where you are and what you want, but in general I think getting more experience & build competence in social skills would give you highest ROI on your time.

Happy to talk more if it's useful.

For what it's worth, my experience was opposite to yours.

Public speaking: once I built competency and realized I'm actually pretty good at it, I started enjoying it much more. Now I feel pretty comfortable presenting to a bigger group and it became my "default" – if I wanted to supress it, I'd have to actively pay attention.

It reminds me of a time when I've looked found an old password-protected .rar archive on my old computer.

It took me around a day to brute force the password and I ended up finding a bunch of old guitar tabs I completely forgot about. Fun times!

I am very grateful that the OP posted that "tone deaf comment".

I'd much rather live in a world where I can read blunt comments by developers, versus a watered-down statements written by PR firms to absolutely avoid rubbing anyone the wrong way.

This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake:

Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing?

Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed.

And this stuff is hard! There's a reason why good salespeople and marketers are paid so well!

You definitely can learn that, it's a skillset like any other. But treating it like a secondary concern is a death trap for your business.

If you are a tech founder, it's absolutely crucial you figure out a strategy for customer acquisition – find a sales co-founder, hire some good salespeople, get someone who can teach you how to do it – just do not treat it as something less important than tech, because then you are just counting on being lucky. And if you decide to sell yourself, expect that to be a difficult, time consuming job – don't be surprised if you spend more time chasing business rather than coding.

It works through a life insurance. So it's not just the subscription.

Besides that, as far as I understand, cryonics is heavily dependent on effects of scale. My hope is that by the time I'm about to get frozen, enough people will be interested in it to make it economically viable long term.

If you're in Europe – I'm signed with Tomorrow Biostasis (https://www.tomorrow.bio) and the pricing is not as bad as I expected when I initially started thinking about it.

I'm registered with a cryonics company to be frozen after death on a rare chance that it actually works.

My reasoning is that I simply like living. I think that arguments against longevity often sound deep, but if you rephrase them in more straightforward terms, they'll seem completely devoid of substance.

For example, what does "we're children of our times mean?" That once world changes too much, death is preferable to adapting? I would absolutely love to see how the world will look in a hundred years, and I sincerely hope it will be strange and unique.

Same with "death will simply take us back to where we came from"... I'm sorry, but it doesn't really mean anything. If my loved one dies, that's bad. If my friend gets sick, I hope they recover. Again, I'm sorry but once we strip the poetics, there's really nothing left here.

Sadly, Porn by Edwars Teach (better known as The Last Psychiatrist).

He has a very opinionated style, so if it doesn't work for, you'll hate it. At the same time, I've found it extremely insightful about human nature and it forced my to face some parts of myself that I wasn't aware of and didn't like.

Very much love-or-hate read, but worth trying. Just maybe check out his old blog first to see if his style is bearable for you.

If you enjoyed PHM, you might also like: - For a more horror take, "There's no Antimemetic Division" https://qntm.org/scp. Without spoiling, it's about people trying to fight against a threat that's impossible to remember about. - Ted Chiang's "Understand". Again without spoiling too much, it's about a man whose intelligence rapidly increased. - Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. Yeah, I'm serious, if you like the "smart character solves problem by thinking" it's amazing.

Likewise – it's been on my to-read list for ages, will schedule it as my Christmas reading thanks to OP's comment.

I might be stating the obvious here, but it's just sad that loud negative minority deprieved everyone else of your participation. I learned a ton from your essays and would be happy to see you actively commenting on HN.

Like, no specific solution or anything from me, I get why you make that decision and not trying to convince you to change it – just wanted to post a comment of appreciation I guess.