anant90

The AI-powered "replacement of engineers" that everyone keeps talking about will look less like existing engineers being laid off, and more like reduced hiring of recent engineering graduates. And, as with any large-scale technology trend, it will take a while before we can say we've come out of the innovator/early adopter phase, which we are clearly still in. In my opinion, it's always easier to invent new technology than to get people to change the ways they currently do things.

And yet, for the people using the app, it won’t look or feel much different.

Yikes. Okay, I know I'm maybe being a bit unfair here, but I'm sorry to say that this is one of the weakest engineering blog posts I've ever read. This seems to be a massive "let's end the craziness and finally pay our tech debt" effort. Good for them, but not something that excites me about working at Facebook.

I wonder how many great marketing opportunities/channels are written off because they seem to deviate from the values of focus or frugality? And inversely, how many distractions are hiding under the cover of unconventional marketing? I genuinely don't know.

I've been trying to give away ideas via a simple Twitter thread that I hope to keep updating over time:

https://twitter.com/anant90/status/1171867648285540352

Incidentally, "a platform for sharing well-researched ideas" is #11 on this list :)

Also, consider using a one-time Credit Card from https://privacy.com/

Request for feature: Chrome extension: a shortcut fills in guerillaclick+<random_hash>@gmail.com

Was the fall of Rome this embarrassing as well?

The only reason I gave up on Notion sometime last year was that it was mind-numbingly slow. Great product otherwise.

Original Medium post: https://medium.com/waymo/learning-to-drive-beyond-pure-imita...

ArXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03079

Sorry for the plug, but since others are asking for an introductory resource, I wrote a short course on UI Design myself not too long ago. They are just 17 short tutorials: https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/d5bae026ef6e4f949e63...

For me, adding a simple .m between en and wikipedia in the url does the job well enough :)

BaseCamp supposedly has a 4-day work week policy for the summers. Does anyone know of any other companies like that?

+1 for the cheeseburger analogy. I'll be using it. Thanks!

I don't understand how reports like these make sense. A mile driven by a Waymo/Cruise car on route/conditions carefully chosen to test an update, or gather data on a new type of route/conditions is way more valuable than another mile driven on the same freeway stretch/conditions that already works perfectly. Just totaling up the number of miles driven seems to be the vanity metric of the Self-Driving Car industry.

Starting Stripe Atlas, writing Guides to help entrepreneurs, acquiring IndieHackers, and now launching Stripe Press is a very well thought out growth strategy.

Stripe benefits when every new indie hacker or entrepreneur planning to start their business uses their free resources to learn how to go about doing this. The goal of marketing is to be in the mind space of your potential buyer when they feel the need your product serves. If you use Stripe's free resources to learn about building an online business, you're more likely to pick them to accept payments over Braintree/Paypal, etc.

Also, the easier they make starting a business by providing these free resources, the more smart people will take the leap to launch their startups (or side-projects) thereby expanding their overall market.

Lastly, spending your content marketing resources on evergreen content like this has very high leverage — it's a one-time investment that pays off for a very long time, unlike a blog post about a current trend that goes stale quickly.

Goes without saying, but the more businesses Stripe gets using their core product, the better the core product itself gets by amortizing development costs over a larger user and transaction base.

A for-profit business is moving levers under its control to increase its profits. Nothing surprises me about this.

I disagree with you on "Measure What Matters" book. I was really looking forward to reading John Doerr's book, and I stuck along with it longer than usual, but had to ultimately abandon it before hitting the 100-page mark. It seems that just reading GV's blog post[1] on OKR's will teach you as much as reading the whole book.

In addition, the book is one content chapter, followed by a few success stories chapters written by founders themselves. These chapters are written in a very uninspired tone (almost as if they wanted to write something and get it done for JD, not because they wanted to share their story) and barely inspire you or bring in any new insights over the meatier content chapters.

This is not a criticism of the OKR system — arguably it's one of the best goal setting systems out there. But does it need a whole book to understand? I think not. It just seems to be a vastly missed opportunity to me. John Doerr is pretty much a legend in the valley, and maybe my expectations were sky high hoping for a book on the same level as High Output Management or Hard Things About Hard Things.

[1] https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...

The public kanban board is an excellent idea! I'll probably set up one for myself this weekend.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot (yet) do so on the iOS without a native app. This is why developers ask you to install their native apps.

Opening in incognito is usually good enough to bypass Medium's paywall.

Besides everything else, Push Notifications is usually the top reason.

I read the book Startup by Jerry Kaplan, about his pen computing company called GO, and I was immediately hooked.

Incidentally, I read Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston back in my college senior year in 2012 and, as she put it, was immediately hooked.

Thanks for writing that book, and for everything else you've done for the startup world.

Check out Commonlounge: https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/8d5612f5517944059a61...

The courses have hands-on assignments that make you work through real-world problems.

I recently reviewed the Deep Work book myself here: https://anantja.in/deep-work-c4a1b7232482

The post has a collection of some of my favorite observations and quotes.

Can't recommend the book enough!

Revue is awesome! Thanks for making it.

You're absolutely correct. I'm not arguing whether it's possible to use Instagram like one would use Snapchat — it is, and my points won't make any sense from that POV.

I was laying down my observations on what's the default, and hence seemingly most common behavior for the given network. All snapchat accounts are private by default (yes, you can make stories public like on Instagram). All Instagram accounts are public by default (yes, you can make it private) The power of default has a significant role to play in how people think about and use a particular network. This is even more true for the people who are not very tech savvy, which is the majority.

Again, not arguing if Instagram is better than Snapchat, or vice versa. Instagram probably will win the majority of the market, and will have an order of magnitude, if not more, users, engagement and revenue. Will Snapchat become irrelevant and die? I'd say it's too early to make that call.

I totally see iambateman's point, and agree with it. As far as inauthenticity goes, I would say that it pervades all aspects of our lives, including real-life interactions, which we can assume to be most authentic, yet at some level inauthentic (almost everyone changes themselves a bit depending on who they're talking to).

On this spectrum, the Snapchat experience is a lot more authentic and closer to real-life interactions than Instagram/Facebook, which are a lot worse multipliers of inauthenticity.

Teenagers, and for that matter, everyone yearns for smaller private spaces where they can share whatever they want with their closest friends — without any reservations of judgement from their parents, grandmas or uncles. I used to love Instagram, until Facebook decided to make it Facebook v2 by making my entire "friend" list follow me there as well. That means that until I invest a lot of time hiding my story from everyone but my closest friends (and of course no one has time for that), I'll just refrain from posting some of my true self there.

On the other hand, the tight knit and private nature of the Snapchat network is going to keep it more attractive to me. At least for me, the amount of time spent in an app is more correlated with the depth of my relationships with other nodes on that network, and not just with the size of my audience.

I’ve loved Snap as a company for a long time, and I like their pitch of using innovation as a moat: they have consistently innovated every year since their founding (Ephemerality, Stories, AR filters, Memories, Spectacles (although this has largely been a failure)), have a core set of users who really really love them, and are now playing to their strengths by positioning themselves well as the private space for you and your closest friends.

While this doesn't provide real world examples (yet), we are trying to make a free list of short, concise, to-the-point tutorials for anyone to get familiar with the basics of Deep Learning. Best part is that each item is a wiki, so you can make it better and you'll automatically be credited in the sidebars. Leave any suggestions on the structure in the comments. Here it is: https://www.commonlounge.com/discussion/81f5bbcfea4e44b9b2bd...

Once it's published, it makes sense to just take it off either way.