HN user
"Join our newsletter to receive problems to your inbox" does not sound very fun. You might rephrase that to emphasize some positive outcome.
edit: I'm taking my own advice and would like to congratulate you on launching and trying to drive some social good via startups. Good luck!
Hey, that's pretty great. I didn't get a chance to test it out with another person, but I'm so happy to see WebRTC being used to keep things so simple for users. Also, nice hold music :D
Looks cool! Will remember if I'm ever needing shiny documents. I agree with those who support a one-off transaction option. (For example, I love PlaceIt and don't pay them monthly, but they might be doing good business from people like me anyway. I see those in the same boat.)
Side question: Any advice for a stats junkie wanting to transition into data science? I did graduate statistics on small data sets so I'm missing the big data piece of the puzzle.
As someone who frequently hires Wordpress freelancers, I offer this:
Don't 'sell' the client on using Wordpress relative to other frameworks. They don't need to know the complete power and limitations of the WP ecosystem; that's your job (in their eyes). Just say 'yes.'
Can I add products later? Yes. Can I add pages? Yes. Can I add coupons? Yes. Does it have SEO? Yes.
It's easy work for someone like you with sysadmin and PHP skills. Your client will love how quickly you can diagnose whatever problems they're having.
I applaud this effort! It seems to me that templating is the thing that the Wordpress ecosystem could most easily borrow from more recent development workflows. Probably makes life a lot easier for newbies to the Wordpress world, too. Cheers!
I'm tired of seeing these headlines based on one employee's departure. I'm not here to defend Valve by any means, but any sufficiently large organization will have the feature in Ellsworth's words that "it is human nature that they will minimize the work that they do and increase the control that they have," regardless of the structure. With that in mind, I think it's equally naive to think that (a) Valve has done something wrong with its organizational structure and (b) any other organization with "more" structure than Valve is doing something wrong. As much as it's become a line for dismissing people in Silicon Valley for a variety of reasons, "lack of (cultural) fit" can be a real thing.
If anyone from Stripe is watching the thread: any chance of this supporting subscriptions?
I'm super happy to see Segment go in this direction. All the e-commerce tagging was the hardest to do and yet the most valuable for analysts. And hooray for making more stuff free!
Oh wow, how fun. I learned something today; thanks!
I "see" some game images after I quit playing. I wouldn't call it "hallucinating," to use the headline's word, but I do have images of DDR or puzzle games or 2048 dance in my head after stopping playing.
Does this happen to others?
Check the footer. There are affiliate links for places to stay, cowork, exercise, etc.
I'm intuitively guessing that there's more geographic variance in rent prices than in coworking or food. Everyone will have different ameliorating factors in different cities, like friends or in-laws, and I'd argue that splitting out the NomadCost creates more mental work for a visitor than is necessary for the purposes of comparing cities to one another.
tl;dr we all have friends and fam, so chill
When you submit a comment, don't forget to click the text link "Confirm" or else your comment will be lost. It's easy to miss since the screen looks like a post-submission confirmation.
Just because Wired is reblogging Threes' own piece on 2048[1] doesn't make it any more legit.
Are there any known success cases with Reddit? The user community (at least on the subreddits I watch) seems very anti-commercial.
I am seriously pessimistic. This merger is about wireless, not wireline.
Yes, Japan has fantastic wireline broadband and Son had a lot to do with breaking open Japan's market (after NTT's lines were made the equivalent of a common carrier). However, Japan also has just 3 mobile carriers and of them, SoftBank is universally panned for the worst reception, lowest LTE speeds, and worst customer service.
There is no reason to believe Son will increase competition in wireless by reducing the US market to 3 carriers.
I bet it will. The open-source competitive shooters I can think of (Warsaw, Quake3's Challenge Pro Mode mod [in the sense that it was designed by community]) all had interesting and complex movement schemes.
And since we now have Github, all that awesomeness is just a pull request away...
A few fun ways this also looks like turn-of-the-century FPS world:
-We could see an FPS rise in eSports prominence again
-Mods built on top of one game create tons of variety accessible to one player base
-Mod developers have an easy way to become recognized game developers
Also, not related to the old Quake / UT / Half-Life scenes, but the marketplace for assets will be on top of a game that isn't Team Fortress 2, so there's much more creative latitude once mods are released (disclaimer: I love TF2).
I had this in my last apartment in Tokyo.
In Japan, water is commonly heated by gas-powered flash heaters. In that apartment, the heater was controlled digitally and there were up/down buttons that would change the temperature by 1 degree Celsius.
It would remember the most recent setting between uses, so all I had to do was remember my favorite number, ensure it was set to that number upon start, and hop in.
It was simpler in function than a Nest and much less pretty, but it was functional and got me the water temperature I wanted.
You were running a money transmitter, and once you learn the regulations and liabilities that come attached to that you'll be glad you shut it down before the gap widened any further.
I'm 29 and semi-technical. Hi :D Also, you're not fucked :D
I like that people encourage you to keep searching while nudging you technically and entrepreneurially. I think you get 3 things out of that:
1. Finding your passion, or at least talent, is hugely helpful. At 25 I went to grad school, found out I'm good at statistics, and that led me into a satisfying career in analytics. School may not be for you, but what's another way for you to discover hidden talents? MOOCs? Volunteering? Being a very chatty barista? Can you do something unconventional (a "hack") to rapidly examine your own talents? Have you taken a Myers-Briggs or Strong Interest Inventory exam?
Another plus: finding talent means you can start a business that solves a significant market pain, as opposed to uploading filtered photos to Facebook or putting a confessional into a mobile app.
2. Building more technical skill never hurts, even if (like me) you won't reach the level of a CS major. For me it was a waste of time to apply to Valley analytics jobs that needed a CS major (for big data storage) and not an analyst (for analytical rigor). Still, the things I taught myself while prototyping have helped in unpredicted ways in my last two jobs. For example, I brought performance expertise to my existing frontend job just by getting them up and going with compiled assets and page caching - things that Rails peeps take for granted but a Wordpress shop wouldn't bother with. I would humbly recommend accepting that you won't be applying to HN Hiring jobs for engineers (remember competitive advantage from your IR econ classes?) but still knowing that you can boost a career with more technical knowledge.
3. I strongly agree with the advice in other comments that you don't have to build a consumer or enterprise app to be successful. Did working at the Apple Store make you happy? Do it again. There are plenty of business-y positions that do bridge disciplines, like the oft-suggested PM jobs, sales / account management, and support. The price you pay is being in the world of business. In my experience, the quality of those experiences varies more with the company than it does on the work. Boring-ass Excel number crunching in the games industry was amazing when compared to hundred-million-dollar analytics for a megacorp. I abhor phone sales, but you bet I'll do it if it's for my hypothetical family business.
Lastly, don't let HN get to you. This place is the water cooler for hackers, engineers, programmers, etc. While this place is a great learning resource, it's not your water cooler. Yours is elsewhere, and that's OK.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (based in US)
Analytics expert who speaks to both business and technical teams.
BUSINESS SIDE: Former director of international analytics for Rakuten. $100M business, 9 countries. Directed analytics design, implementation / development, business reporting & analysis, drove adoption of A/B testing. TECHNICAL SIDE: Wrote www.musivu.co (Rails, Heroku, Bootstrap, payments, video, responsive) in free time.
Certified in Adobe Digital Marketing Suite; also speaks Google Analytics.
blakeellison@gmail.com
Congrats! You need reach and retention - that is, new customers and keeping repeat ones coming back.
For reach, I like susonnahg's suggestions. Typically these are low-converting channels so try to maximize the number of eyeballs.
For retention, email email email EMAIL. Start newsletters with highlighted products as soon as you can.
You can build trust! Blogs, email, the usual advice all applies, but you may also consider getting a professional take on design or at least adopting a framework (Bootstrap/Foundation).
People can spend plenty of time arguing the merits of those frameworks, but they were pretty much built for guys like you who are programmers and could use opinionated UI that's passed review in someone's design department. Use a theme/skinning site like bootswatch.com to throw in some variety with colors/typography and still have some thought put in the small details like "what should be the relative difference between your font sizes?"
Between your personal branding and the impressions created by first glances at your product, you can have some easy wins with credibility.
This is a really unfortunate domain to click through to from work. Is there a Google cache or somesuch?
From one non-programmer to another, I highly recommend Python + Django + a CSS framework to get up and running.
Python is a great language to get started on because the code is relatively simple to write and read (for very geeky reasons), and the MIT OpenCourseWare intro to CS for non-majors class is a great way to pick up as much "core" programming ability as you need. That class is taught in Python. Underrated perk: errors are easier to diagnose relative to JavaScript.
Once you have a rudimentary grasp of Python, do the Django tutorial and build yourself a sample app. Django is the way to get up and going with a modern-ish MVC (model-view-controller; you'll see what it means) app. It's very easy to get going as a developer and the only headache you'll find is the Virtualenv thing. Easier than getting Rails (which is Django for Ruby) going for the first time, because Rails has the potential for more version conflicts.
Lastly, to build out web pages, consider Zurb Foundation or Twitter Bootstrap. These are premade CSS components that make building pages faster (thus good for "rapid prototyping"). They also bring along browser compatibility and jQuery for added UI niceness.
If you want to animate things on the page, search for animate.css.
I did this a couple years ago to build my first app and now I have a side project that I coded myself. You can do it! :D
I'm having fun with this. Thanks for sharing.
The baby-safe variety of Legos? It's hard to imagine a (healthy) case for a device with a screen at that age. But at the very least she can start building motor skills and think about building things.
I was looking to hire out some market research like this! I'll likely be a customer soon.