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The solution seems so easy to me, just tie the API access to reddit gold. It wouldn’t be completely smooth sailing, there would still would be many upset users. At the same time though, they would pick up a massive number of subs.

The users that don’t value the apollo experience enough to pay for it would switch to the reddit app, driving more ad revenue. The users that do value the Apollo experience would still keep providing their content to the platform, in addition to becoming paid, direct, subscribers.

This really seems like an amateur strategy.. kill the massively popular apps with ridiculous pricing and unfair timelines, and hope that the users of this massive community organizing tool you control don’t use it against you? Cut off (and piss off) a big segment of your power users in hopes that a sizable chunk of them move to the native app?

Giving the founders 20-to-1 voting rights over regular investors while losing as much money as they are is insane. This really looks like a lemon, and the VC's want to cash out and leave public investors holding the bag.

I don't see how self driving cars are going to help them. Waymo and Tesla are both the farthest along, and they're going to run their own networks - competing against Lyft and Uber.

I have Google Wifi at home and a unifi mesh at my office. Unless you are covering a massive area or have more than 25 clients, I’d have a real hard time recommending unifi. It requires much more configuration and maintenance. Google WiFi you really just forget about it - handles patches automatically, finds you the best channel automatically, tests your uplink daily and logs results.

Unifi’s software is much better than any other enterprise solution, but it still has a lot of rough edges and bugs if you’re doing anything non-standard.

LegalNature | Los Angeles, CA | Rails & Vue.js Engineers | Full-Time

At LegalNature, we are in the business of automating legal documents and processes. Our mission is to make the legal system far easier to understand, far less time consuming, and far cheaper for individuals and businesses.

We are in the process of building an 'autopilot' for government forms and beureacratic processes. We want our users to fill out a simple and easy form once, and from that, we will be able to generate any documents needed, file them (snail mail, fax, or online), and handle the response. If you have experience automating manual workflows and creating API's around them, we'd love to speak with you.

We are a non-standard company by most tech standards. We’re bootstrapped and profitable. Instead of worrying about the next round or pitch deck, we are only worried about our customers and making the best product possible.

Our engineering team is currently small, and will be growing throughout the year.

You can apply at https://www.legalnature.com/careers or email me at michael@legalnature.com with any questions.

The fact that we've lost faith in humanity's ability to improve things by taking on large, ambitious projects, even if some, even if most, will fail, saddens me every day. It doesn't prevent me from trying to make the world a better place though, and I hope nobody else was discouraged by low-quality, knee-jerk thinking like this, either.

Exactly! The author pick and chose grand ideas from the past that didn’t work. We’re a nation that built the interstate highway system as well as the transcontinental railroad. Both of those ideas were considered impossible by many at the time but completely revolutionized transportation.

LegalNature | Los Angeles, CA | Rails & Vue.js Engineers | Full-Time

At LegalNature, we are in the business of automating legal documents and processes. Our mission is to make the legal system far easier to understand, far less time consuming, and far cheaper for individuals and businesses.

We are in the process of building an 'autopilot' for government forms and beureacratic processes. We want our users to fill out a simple and easy form once, and from that, we will be able to generate any documents needed, file them (snail mail, fax, or online), and handle the response. If you have experience automating manual workflows and creating API's around them, we'd love to speak with you.

We are a non-standard company by most tech standards. We’re bootstrapped and profitable. Instead of worrying about the next round or pitch deck, we are only worried about our customers and making the best product possible.

Our engineering team is currently small, and will be growing throughout the year.

You can apply at https://www.legalnature.com/careers or email me at michael@legalnature.com with any questions.

SES-10 Mission 9 years ago

Do you have an equation for easing violence? There is an equation that tells us how to get to mars - we only need to design a machine that meets the requirements.

Except as pointed out in the article, the massive increase in spending was fairly frivolous. They spent crazy money on a new huge office, threw big parties, and sent their employees traveling everywhere. They also doubled their headcount, when I think we can all agree that they haven't had a surge in volume or features that merits that many new employees.

There's no reason that GitHub couldn't be run profitably if they weren't just out there burning VC money as quickly as possible.

LegalNature | Downtown Los Angeles or Remote (US) | Salary + Equity + Full Benefits

We make it simple for consumers to create legal documents in minutes without an attorney, and are currently in the process of expanding to small businesses and law firms.

We're looking for senior full stack or front end engineers with an appetite for experimentation. We test almost everything and love trying out prototypes.

LegalNature is a bootstrapped and profitable company. Join a team that is 100% focused on building the best product possible - not working on the next round or deck!

* You can work out of our office in Downtown LA, or remotely! We're all on slack.

* Our stack is Rails & AWS

* Includes a competitive salary, the best health insurance we could find, and 401k matching

If you are interested or have any questions, contact me: michael@legalnature.com

LegalNature | Downtown Los Angeles or Remote (US) | Salary + Equity + Full Benefits

We make it simple for consumers to create legal documents in minutes without an attorney, and are currently in the process of expanding to small businesses and law firms.

We're looking for senior full stack or front end engineers with an appetite for experimentation. We test almost everything and love trying out prototypes.

LegalNature is a bootstrapped and profitable company. Join a team that is 100% focused on building the best product possible - not working on the next round or deck!

* You can work out of our office in Downtown LA, or remotely! We're all on slack.

* Our stack is Rails & AWS

* Includes a competitive salary, the best health insurance we could find, and 401k matching

If you are interested or have any questions, contact me: michael@legalnature.com

I think there's still too much social friction. It's really convenient and fast most of the time, but there are several road blocks that I've run in to that made me wish I just swiped my card. Most of these will go away with time.

1. Their hardware doesn't support RFID, or it has a RFID logo but is disabled.

2. The store owner doesn't know how it works, or is concerned and thinks it didn't work because they're unfamiliar with it.

3. The store owner or people in line think its cool, haven't seen it before, and want a demo.

4. The store owner or people in line act like I'm a techno-douche and don't understand why I didn't just swipe a card like a normal person because I'm holding everybody up trying to make it work with their busted RFID reader.

When none of those things happen, it's a great experience, especially on the watch.

LegalNature - Los Angeles, CA - ONSITE

https://www.legalnature.com

We work with Ruby & Coffeescript, and are a small, bootstrapped team located in Downtown LA. We're looking for full stack or front end engineers, as well as a designer.

We have a thriving consumer business and have just launched our Pro product targeting legal professionals.

If you've got any questions or would like to hear more, please email me at michael@legalnature.com.

It's stopping at 4 connected clients when running nginx+passenger because you are exhausting all the workers. You need to up the process limit if you are going to have workers that never complete their task for a long time, and then you need to worry about running out of memory if you have too many processes. Here's the passenger config information for that: https://www.phusionpassenger.com/documentation/Users%20guide...

I wouldn't recommend the approach you are taking if you wanted to build this in ruby. Have you looked in to Event Machine? https://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine

"Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with."

I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time getting things done as well.

In this case, the lawyer is going to try to smear Tesla, hoping that they'll settle quickly to get him to shut up. Which more or less is extortion.

This is Tesla sending a message to all lemon law lawyers that they do not negotiate with terrorists. Seems fair to me.

The problem is the massive number of shuttle busses has allowed a massive number of people that work down in the valley to live in San Francisco without the hurdle of the awful commute.

Usually this would happen with public transportation or better highways, and as a city is more able to shift people around, the city will either sprawl (SF can't, because it's a peninsula and people would rather live in the valley than South SF) or densify (SF won't, because the zoning laws prevent building of new high-rises or destruction of older buildings for more dense units.)

Because of that, you have a large shift in the supply/demand of the housing market. Since SF is unwilling or unable to increase in sprawl or density, supply is pretty much fixed. The shuttle busses open up a river of demand though, forcing the prices up and up. Removing the shuttle busses, and I agree the idea sounds ridiculous at face value, is probably the most plausible solution right now. Making it difficult for people to commute down to Mountain View and Cupertino will cause a lot of people to move closer to their jobs, and balance the market here again.

Great new practical features. I can literally use every one of these, and many of them I've already been handling by rolling my own or using a gem.

Surprised to see enum support finally come to activerecord.

This article does a good job of covering the basics of bidding, but most of these things should be obvious. In performance marketing, the goal is to know how much money you are going to make for a given visitor before that visitor enters your site. Then, you can use any number of bidding models to reach maximum profit.

What is really lacking here, is that Adwords is not just a basic auction system. If I have a Max CPC of $1.00, and you have a Max CPC of $0.85, it is not certain that I am going to be at a higher ad space than you.

There are a number of variables that Google takes in to account to determine the order of placements in an auction, and it obfuscates all these variables in to something called a 'Quality Score', which publicly operates on a integer scale of 1-10. Google uses the quality score to manipulate auctions to perform better for google, not the advertiser. Here's some of the most important factors:

CTR: If you're holding down position one, but nobody is clicking your ad, google is not making money. Just like you as a performance marketer, Google is not trying to get the maximum profit per individual click. They are trying to get the maximum volume of profitable clicks. One key here is to not just dip your toe in to a keyword. If you overbid (usually to a loss) out of the gate, you will get substantial volume faster, thus giving you a better CTR and a higher quality score. Once you have solidified your position in the auction, you can then ratchet down your bid to a profitable level.

Page Relevancy: It is important that your landing page is relevant to both the keyword you are bidding on, as well as your ad copy that you displayed. Google AdsBot will index your landing page using algorithms similar to it's organic bot. Page load time is a major factor here as well. This is google playing the long tail. They want to make sure that whoever clicked on the ad is happy with the experience they get on the landing page, so that they will in the future click on more ads. If a user keeps ending up on junk pages, they are less likely to click on ads or use google in the future.

Account History: This is in my opinion, one of the most frustrating parts of adwords, and it's impact seems to vary wildly from vertical to vertical. The age of your account and ads can play a major role in how much you are paying. How much of an impact? I've seen ads that are 3-4 years old cost $1-2/click, and an entirely new account at a new company cost upwards of $10-15/click on the same keyword. The more volatile the space, the bigger the disparity is. There is very little information out there about how/why this is, but here is my theory: The majority of people using adwords at scale are using it entirely for performance marketing. As such, if you get knocked out of a top position on a high volume keyword, it can have a significant effect to your bottom line. If a company has consistently been on a keyword spending money every day for 2-3 years, you would assume that they are going to stay there if they keep their position. If you allow a newcomer to come in and spend to a loss for a while, disrupting the positions of established players, there is not a guarantee that the established player will ever recover on that keyword. And since this new player has been spending so much, they can't afford to keep operating and have closed up shop. The net effect is less money for google. Again, this comes more in to play in volatile markets, but is straight up market manipulation.

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As far as questions regarding technology to optimize SEM is concerned, Google has mostly prevented this from happening by having one of the worst API's I have ever worked with. They will make marginal changes and sunset the old version after only a couple months. Many of their practices seem somewhat openly hostile to developers working with their API. While being good performance marketers, data is our friend. We want as much of it as we can get. Google, however, wants us to only have just enough information to keep spending money. It is not their goal for you to have a 100% optimized campaign. They know there are junk queries that are worth less, and want you to keep blending those in with those that are performing, so that they can make more money.

Anybody that's curious about their tech should take a look in to what it takes to build something that uses the Adwords API. The fact that they can have such an awful API and tools for something that makes 70%+ of their revenue is amazing.

Perhaps the reason that the quality numbers have been mostly flat is because drivers have been pushing to get 5 star reviews.

In case you didn't know, as a customer of uber, the driver gives you a star rating just like you give the driver. A lot of people in SF have figured that out, and a lot of time I'll get an offer of "5 for 5." The drivers are letting you know that if you give them a 5 star rating they will give you one.

On top of that, drivers more and more push for a good rating, trying to make you feel bad if you don't give them 5 stars.

I can't recall these pressures in the past, and if they are working, then quality numbers staying flat actually mean they are quite down.

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That said, I am still an avid user of Uber, using it almost every day. My biggest concern is the same others have voiced, the drivers have no idea where they are in the city. I'm not talking cross streets, I'm saying a lot of time they don't even know how to get to a whole neighborhood. They also don't appear to be good 'city drivers,' and frequently seem to put bikers at risk due to that.