HN user
Designer & Front end developer
Hey everyone! My name is Aaron and I'm on the team that helped put together some of the digital tools that are making this day of action possible. If you find any issues please let us know here or here: https://github.com/fightforthefuture/battleforthenet
Would love to see examples of the engine working. Poked around a bit and couldn't find any demonstration games. Am I missing something?
I worked with Steve at a company before famo.us. He's an excellent leader and really does foster team cohesion unlike anything I've ever seen. Plus he's a natural teacher and likes to involve people in the creation of the "cult"/company culture/vision.
A++ would do it again.
San Francisco, CA (South Park) - Junior and Senior developers
One Block Off the Grid makes the complicated business of going solar as a homeowner easy, by doing remote system design and comparison shopping between financing providers. Think Expedia but with an expert guide (our solar advisors) to show you the different offerings between competitors.
We're 4 years old, VC backed and making money. With over 230,000 members interested in green home improvements and thousands of systems installed, we need developers with great brains and a passion for positive impact.
Types of things you might work on:
* Building and improving on remote design tools using satellite imagery.
* Building new business units that help our members save even more money on electricity by reducing consumption (think lighting, energy retrofits, energy management systems).
* Integrating with the top installers' sales platforms in an industry where APIs don't exist.
* Building awesome analytics dashboards from scratch.
About the team
We're a small team but we're growing fast. We're hoping to add 4 developers in the next month and grow quickly over the next year and a half. Because we're small, you'll be expected to be able to take a project and own it. We deploy frequently so your code will be in the wild within the first couple days after you join us.
Our culture is fun and lighthearted, but we love getting shit done. We're right on South Park, right in the heart of SOMA. It's Twitter's first office, Instagram's first office and of course our office, so there's lots of good startup magic here.
We're offering good salaries, full benefits and equity. Also the chance to work at a company that's building awesome technological solutions that will positively benefit the planet.
If you're interested, email Jennifer Hemmings, our awesome HR manager: hr@1bog.org
The general stab of this article is great, but it's a little confusing:
The first few paragraphs bemoan people who are willing to suffer through the valleys to get to the peaks, while the middle of the article is all about how difficult it is to find rewarding experiences and how it usually takes a lot of hard work to see rewards manifest.
Despite his protestations, I think the author does have a sense of "time investment" and is probably often glad he "stuck with it."
In William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, the main character (Cayce Pollard) subscribed to this aesthetic. Her wardrobe consisted of primarily garments that could not be tied to a brand, trend or a period. This is partly a result of a upchuck reaction to fashion and is also a side-effect of her rare allergic reaction to bad branding.
Great read.
Thanks, Michael!
I get it, but he might be pretty upset when he finds his children falling in love and fooling around with higher maths or literature. Or even, god forbid, some useless skill like programming. I mean, when was the last time anyone ever had to program anything?
Delight directed education is powerful, but failing to recognize that pi can be delightful or that Shakespeare can make children excited seems to not be the best first step.
Is this how business people look at the people who actually make things? It's pretty unsettling.
Also, it's pretty ignorant: Anyone who's been to a Google office or to Twitter's or Facebook's office can tell you that what someone wears or what their BMI is has nothing to do with what makes a company scale.
At Google where you have 24,000 -- a significant number of which are engineers, you have old engineers, young engineers, engineers who have beards, engineers who happen to not even be male -- even engineers who wear skinny jeans and live in the mission.
The engineers I know at Apple are really well put together and make excellent software.
I’m not a programmer, much less a hacker, but I thought it would be interesting to find out from people that are.
The barrier to entry is sufficiently low that you should at least try to become a hacker -- or even a programmer; you have the requisite curiosity and imagination.
There are many benefits to learning how things work and what's more; you can do it!
Maybe he saw the thread? Domains are registered under a Chris Curran.
Opportunists don't bother me, but this is pretty tacky.
I suspect HTML5 won't displace flash, but standards in general eventually will. Not any time soon, mind you, but eventually.
I've been trying to come up with a way to articulate how I think about this whole non-debate and here's a first stab:
One of the primary reasons Flash will eventually be unseated is not that Flash is closed -- standards, to a certain extent, are constructed in a relatively closed manner -- but because standards and technologies built on top of standards are more agile.
Flash is an awesome platform, but you can only build on that platform. Standards are great because you can combine platforms and build things not explicitly envisioned. Flash's single-platform approach makes it so that it will eventually have to play catch-up to a whole set of features that are being built by mixing and matching standards.
CSS3 + Javascript, for instance, can be used without Canvas to build really awesome functionality.
Canvas + Javascript can be used to make really engaging content.
Flash will eventually have to compete not with another product on features, but an entire web of organic technologies that don't have to wait for other components to advance in order to release the next stable version.
Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? Frank Herbert, Dune, P.40
Restaurants have windows and post their menus. Walk-in traffic is not a segment you want to alienate.
I guess I'll wait to sign up until a user refers me to your website. As it stands, I read your article and then visited your site; I was curious about what kind of service could get away with not describing what they do.
I think relying solely on a positive k-factor is a bad customer acquisition model. Everyone wants their business to grow virally but the reality is that the reason turntable.fm grew quickly is not because of their lack of a homepage, it's because the service lends itself to virality.
I do, however, agree that you should focus on building an awesome thing that people want to use, but if you're serious about building a business you should be serious about broadening your customer acquisition channels.
I said I would pay to use it if you built it, so I've become a backer. Can I ask why you're going the open source route? I would definitely pay a premium to make sure your service stays around, is reliable and is improved over time.
Facebook: 2620::1c00:0:face:b00c:0:2
Clever.
There are serious hurdles to decoupling ourselves from coal, but none of them are insurmountable. At least not hypothetically. :)
One interesting idea I've heard in regards to storing electricity is using electric cars as batteries. Granted, this would require a massive retooling of our grid and our transportation system -- not to mention the question of where we will find all the resources to make so many batteries -- but it's still interesting.
What's troubling to me is all the sensationalism surrounding nuclear, which seems to suffer from lots of near-religious objections. Nuclear is dangerous but even in the worst scenarios (like the Fukushima Daiichi plant) the damage is far less onerous than the continued operation of coal plants.
It's expensive to make things cheap. Usually when something becomes cheap quickly it's because demand is high and producing that thing is less expensive. In the case of new energy sources, reaching parity with the grid is very difficult: Not only are technologies like coal already operating at scale, they are also subsidized by the government.
If there was a strong public demand for renewables grid parity wouldn't be that far off. Unfortunately, we're a little too obsessed with other things at the moment, like politicians posting lewd photos online or which television shows to DVR.
It's useful if you're trying to raise seed/series A. Part of due diligence is looking at not just the size of your professional network and what you've accomplished but looking at the type of people you've worked on teams with and how your work was received.
A players have a positive network effect: You'll probably be more likely to have A player associations and recommendations.
For people who already work out, this is a great tool. For people who need a starting point, this needs some work. Some suggestions that may be helpful:
Allow users to specify their starting point or class. How do you want to start exercising? Similar to how players choose classes in MMOs, users could pick a starting point. Srongman, Endurer, Ripped, Swimmer, Biker, Martial Artist, Climber... and the user can choose to start as one of these things and the quests guide the user to achieve that title by focusing on attributes like strength, endurance, tone, lower body workouts, etc.
The reason I think this would help people just starting out is that 1) It helps to have someone tell you what to do. That's why personal trainers are popular. 2) It'll confirm whatever bias/propensity a user has. Some people love to ride bikes and the prospect of riding 100 miles is less daunting than the goal of working up to running 10 miles. Likewise a person who is into cardio will be less inclined to try doing heavy weight training.
Very cool project. Good luck!
I'm becoming increasingly viral blind. In the same way banner blindness is decreasing the value of CPM and moving things towards clickthrough, I find myself not clicking on things because they seem viral in nature.
How long until viral blindess spreads to the people who play Farmville? Not long. It's a typical conditioned response; when there are enough false positives to tip your average joe off to the fact that broadcasting to your networks does not produce the desired result, then people will start ignoring hooks like these.
What always strikes me when reading articles/entries like this or the Paper Tigers article itself is how opaque the unique difficulties people in subcultures or minority cultures face. Not only that they exist, but why they exist: Usually, the issue is so nuanced as to be seemingly unalterable.
Take, for example, incarceration rates and the likelihood of incarceration by race. At face value it's absurd that being born a black male means you are more likely to go to jail than a white male born at the same exact instant. It's just as absurd that other minority populations are seemingly systemically disallowed from positions of executive authority in businesses.
Obviously the reasons for these difference are incredibly difficult to parse and weight; how do you go about correcting this aberration?
I guess learning things like this make me frustrated and confused.
You missed the central point of the statement:
This is what he prefers, what he stands for, and what he is selling: the courage to pursue anyone you want, and the skills to make the person you desire desire you back.
It's not wrong at all to put what you want on a pedestal. It seems pretty obvious to me that when you desire something it's because you value it.
It's really annoying whenever anyone declares a widely used platform as dead.
PHP, like most things, has a lifecycle. If we know anything about scripting languages, they're incredibly resilient. PERL, for instance -- a language nearly 25 years old -- seems to be updated with less frequency than PHP, but continues to be used and developed. Not just to maintain legacy infrastructure, but to build new products.
Even if we're witnessing the sunset of PHP's development -- which I doubt is the case -- it'll be a very long time before it dies.
Transparency would also level the playing field in terms of negotiations. Whether or not you are a good negotiator should not affect how much you get paid for most types of positions. As it stands, in most companies, negotiation is welcome and if you're savvy, you can get all sorts of perks that someone who is not savvy will be unable to get.
I'm a big fan of salary transparency -- the last startup I was a part of practiced this and I found it great for a number of reasons, primarily because anyone can say, "Hey, I'm performing at or above this person's level, I should be compensated accordingly."
Unfortunately, talking about compensation is still a pretty big taboo so I don't see this becoming mainstream anytime soon.
I think the moral of the story is that talking to your users is one of the most important things you can do during -- or even before -- development. User testing is cheap, easy and shouldn't cost you that much time -- 50 people is way more than necessary if your test is designed well. The experience is pretty magical.
For lean startup user/usability testing tips, check out Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. There's a chapter called "Usability Testing on a Shoestring Budget".
Hey James,
A few things:
- Heavy use of text shadow and box shadow makes my browser chug to a halt. Latest Chrome build on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM.
- Get rid of "What is splinch?" The paragraph there is enough, and there's no need to guide the user's eye to that.
- Header/logo are huge... I'd consider making that section 50% of it's current height.
- I'd get rid of social stuff for now: Your target audience is savvy enough to share in a smart way.
- I'd change the button text to [ Join our mailing list and get your first month free ] and make the color of the button distinct from your background color. Your button should be in the foreground, and using a similar palette as the background is visually confusing.
- The items at the bottom look more like a footer -- typically where you'd look for things like menu, about, etc.. -- and less like features/important information. I'd consider bringing them up into the lighter background so that they are visually grouped with the product
- I'd try a little bit of a different layout. Typically the top left of the screen is the most valuable real estate. I took a couple minutes and did this: http://cl.ly/3l0y1w2G2p2y1P2M1p3u
- The container is a bit weird.. Unfortunately chrome developer tools is super slow with all the text, so I'm not sure quite what's going on. What I would do is have a container with a fixed width (880px-960px) with a margin:0 auto; to center the entire page.
Great idea, and while I'm not your target audience, I think that a lot of people will get value out of what you're building.
Shoot me an email. I have at least 5 minutes to spare for pretty much anybody.
A/B testing is just one component of a good product development cycle. The easiest pitfall, though, is that the data only tells you what -- not why. This can lead you to make data-based design decisions blindly.
I think the ideal design and development cycle incorporates A/B testing at the end to spot any outliers: You should already have done in-person usability and user testing. It's extremely cheap and, in some cases, almost magical. Seeing a real person use your product will guarantee you plenty of "a-ha!" moments.
After testing with real users, I think it's appropriate to test with statistical users: You've already tackled the most glaring issues with what you're building, and the knowledge of how real people use your website can often help show you the "why" of the data, rather than just "what".
Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" has a chapter near the end on user testing on a shoestring budget. I'd highly recommend it.