HN user
product @ Spotify.
twitter.com/roelven
Getting so tired of the war metaphors in attempts to describe software development. We solve business problems using code, we don't make a living by role-playing military tactics. Chill out my dudes
Regardless of your job or responsibilities, if you are new to a certain domain, find users or customers to talk to. If you can't talk to them directly, find colleagues who do, and ask to be a fly on the wall. Meet at least 10. Write down their day to day jobs, their challenges and their frustrations. Even from just listening to others talk, you will get a good perspective.
To speed it up, write an interview script with a set of questions. Use an LLM to make the questions non-leading if you want, but point is to show colleagues who have customer contact your script. If you manage to do the interviews, record them, transcribe them and share them around. You are now a customer advocate who knows the customer's needs and wants.
Don't wait with doing this only after you've met the team, start immediately. Let this be your driving force to meet colleagues. It's useful, offer to share the results, or ask for question ideas to whoever wants to listen to you.
You now have laid the groundwork for your success. Now you can focus on the organisation, the team, the mission, the proposition, etc. Everyone you now meet, talk about how customers want to do A or B but can't, or about their challenges. People will appreciate your insight and you're off to a great start!
I've got two IKEA FLOAT Led panels on my ceiling, each 2400 lumen. The panels can be adjusted in Kelvin (2200 to 4000) and are dimmable, so when it's evening and I need to get some work done I turn them a lot more yellow to not mess with my sleep rhythm. I find making the room very bright helps a lot with waking up and focus, compared to when I had only one or two bulbs as lighting. It does take some getting used to as some have already pointed out here.
I've seen more people interested in this topic so I'm adding some recent links I've came across:
I've been running a pi-hole on my home network for years and I love it, it consistently blocks about 19% of outgoing requests. Some of the benefits for us are:
- It disables (and hides) the annoying ads on our Samsung smart TV
- Browsing is noticeably smoother (especially recipe websites on mobile!)
- Most front-end browser trackers are blocked
- It's now possible to see how often apps or devices tend to phone home by just logging into the Pihole web interface
- We're not giving (most of) our DNS activity to our ISP
- Updating to a newer version is a breeze with docker
- I've not locked it down further with a firewall yet to force all DNS requests to go through the Pihole, but I'm planning to.
- I won't run a Pihole container on my UDM as it will likely mess with future updates and settings, keeping things separate feels better.
- Sometimes I consider adding more blocklists but every time I do, something gets annoying somewhere and I usually end up reverting to the standard config.
(edit, formatting)
A book I keep coming back to (re-read every two years or so) and recommend others is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
It has shaped my thinking on 'what is good' or 'what does quality' mean. As an engineer it is easy to appreciate the author slowly going insane about the details he keeps coming back to, and as a human it is invaluable to have an understanding yourself of when something is 'good'.
Highly recommended.
I'd like to add https://soverin.net/features here as well. It's similar to Posteo but offers unlimited aliases and more storage. Servers hosted in the Netherlands.
Just browsing the papers linked in the article you can find some relevant things:
[Effects on trees and plants]
The microwaves may affect vegetables. In the area that received radiation directly from “Location Skrunda Radio Station” (Latvia), pines (Pinus sylvestris) experienced a lower growth radio. This did not occur beyond the area of impact of electromagnetic waves. A statistically significant negative correlation between increase tree growth and intensity of electromagnetic field was found, and was confirmed that the beginning of this growth decline coincided in time with the start of radar emissions. Authors evaluated other possible environmental factors which might have intervened, but none had noticeable effects [103]. In another study investigating cell ultrastructure of pine needles irradiated by the same radar, there was an increase of resin production, and was interpreted as an effect of stress caused by radiation, which would explain the aging and declining growth and viability of trees subjected to pulsed microwaves. They also found a low germination of seeds of pine trees more exposed [104]. The effects of Latvian radar was also felt by aquatic plants. Spirodela polyrrhiza exposed to a power density between 0.1 and 1.8 μW/cm2 had lower longevity, problems in reproduction and morphological and developmental abnormalities compared with a control group who grew up far from the radar [105].
[source] https://www.pathophysiologyjournal.com/article/S0928-4680(09...
This is an increasing problem in advertising everywhere. If we keep using attractive skinny people in our product shots, photo shoots and marketing communication, we will push a growing disconnect between that and actual, real people. When people can't identify (which is the initial goal of using people in your communication) with the messaging, they won't think it's for them.
Head of PM here. I lead 3 PMs in my current position at Styla.com and have taught product management at General Assembly courses.
I myself come from a self-taught programmer background and found myself questioning the product strategy or design decisions towards managers until I was offered a PM position. I do find the technical background enables me to level with devs quite easily but I don't think it's a requirement. A pattern that has been working very well at SoundCloud is that we liked to transition customer support people into a PM role.
Important feats or skills I additionally look for in good PMs are:
- be a users advocate. Has to be good at putting themselves into the users' position and transfer that perspective to the team.
- has to be really good at email. Org/management/soft skills aside, the most powerful tool of a PM is email.
- eager to learn and apply those learnings quickly.
- be comfortable with numbers but be skeptical at the same time. Data is important but be wary of bias.
Happy to see there is an increased interest in this topic. I've been reading a bit about hydroponics lately which was sparked by IKEA's indoor gardening product line [1].
I think there are definitely technological advancements being used to make this more accessible, although most of it seems heavily focused on hydro- or aeroponics.
While Grovegrown is a super exciting product [2] it doesn't fit the yield you are looking for.
Perhaps Farmfromabox [3] is an interesting pointer, which seems closest to what you described.
[1] http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/indoor-gardening/ [2] https://grovegrown.com/products/the-garden [3] http://www.farmfromabox.com
Styla GmbH | Berlin, Germany | Full time | ON SITE
At Styla we're building an infrastructure that automatically creates online magazines. There are a bunch of challenges ahead in terms of algorithmic design, machine learning and client-side tech, and now we want to grow that product team.
Currently I'm looking for people for the following openings:
* Design lead – Someone with experience in both product and editorial design. Work with our mathematician to find constraints and develop editorial aesthetics http://bit.ly/1RRZ0qS
* Research Scientist – Prototype design algorithms, train computer vision systems to analyze pictures, work with developers and designers to implement your work in production systems http://bit.ly/1Q583a
* Full Stack Dev – Help designers and scientists to build prototypes, extend our JSON API to support your client-side apps, be rigid about TDD / BDD http://bit.ly/1GL0Idm
This is a terrible article. Meditation is a great way to get to know yourself better or solve problems, I would not compare it to "tripping balls" in any way. If you want to learn more I recommend reading about it on http://www.dhamma.org, where you can also find meditation centers near you.
Happy to see the guys behind Violet are not giving up. I believe they're on to something but the branding / language choosing is indeed poor. Whatever they launch with now will surely be extended, I'm hopeful that they've learned a great deal with the Nabaztag (which I've owned one back in the days).
I'm surprised and happy to see a big outlet like the Rolling Stone doing such an extensive feature on the meat topic. Yes, they present it completely biased and it's clear what the motivations of the publisher here are, but I think it's important to finally get visibility on what meat consumption actually means.
It's fascinating to see that people who want to eat meat are okay with the fact that we're so detached from what it actually is. The objectification of everything in this world is definitely playing a part in this, we just remove the moral context of the products we buy so we don't have to think about it, problem solved.
I eat meat, but I am struggling with where I buy it, what I pay for it and how much I eat it.
I recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Saffran Foer, where he leaves the decision up to you but is providing you with interesting thought experiments (why not eat dog meat?) and information so you can make up your own mind. It is unfortunately written about the American meat industry, I'd love to see exposure like that on European countries as well.
Is this a Lift.do viral?
Reading this article for the first time, but now I understand why it used to be mtve.com for so long...
This is hilarious, thank you.
I completely agree! Users should be better educated about the risks they put themselves to, but we all should also be aware of the crazy social engineering exploits that we expose are precious machines to.
This article made me certainly think twice about my password policies: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona...
I like the idea but I fear for the lack of quality. Whenever you have "outsourced" n-to-1 projects to platforms like Mechanical Turk you know you need something to guard the quality of the input that people are entering. It's good to get positive feedback on your work, but what do the comments mean otherwise?
"Very clean, I like it" - clean in what sense? Design-wise? Or is the HTML markup nice & tidy?
"Nice big calls to action" - Nice & big, but is bigger better? Do they work?
Etc.
I am keeping my eye on this one, could definitely evolve in something (even more) valuable. Keep it up!
+ the great thing about nzbmatrix was to use their API for the searches. You could then have a local process download the actual files after doing a request to nzbmatrix.
This is a bit of an old discussion.
I think it's a fair tradeoff for content-centric companies to have feedburner (now google) rewrite those links to get some very useful stats in return. This was already happening pre-acquisition and only got better afterwards.
Links get indexed quicker and get submitted to reader / google news for free.
Holy f this completely blew my mind
Agree, Facebook will easily recover but Zynga has a bigger blow to deal with. Already shows by their stock value dropping 13%.
I had to dig up this article again: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/142550
On how we all told each other that blowing into the cartridge actually worked, but it didn't. I used to do it as well of course, I'm amazed by how that "technique" turned into some sort of urban legend.
Me too, totally feels like the glitches are actually real, my nintendo dusty cartridges nightmares came back to life
That's possibly the lamest and poorest user experience I've ever come across.
Ha this is a great article. I too look for quietness and find myself more and more turning off music just to allow myself to think properly. And yes- one of the virtues of staying late in the office is the actual quietness, which is a shame.
Woah. Awesome story but was kinda disappointed with the ending, just leads to more riddles & codes.
Agree that the article is a bit thin. The adding more products isn't such an ingenious strategy, pretty logical if you ask me. I like the snooze function though, one of those extremely powerful ideas that make consumers happy.