HN user

jonathanberger

898 karma

Previously a product manager @ Stripe, Box, Google

Founder of Picurio YC W09

Feel free to message me through Twitter @jonathanberger or berger.jon@gmail.com

Posts9
Comments116
View on HN

Note that the site that generated these does not support any San Francisco Bay Area cities. I learned this only after being forced to "Sign in with Google".

Just Use Curl 9 months ago

Does anyone have suggestions for when I need to use bearer auth and the token is super long?

With curl I end up finding the command becomes hard to read, even taking advantage of backslashes. With Postman, it tidily hides the token out of the way on a separate tab and gets out of my way.

iPhone Air 11 months ago

Flat doesn't seem best to you? Next best for me would be a symmetrical bump. But the asymmetrical bump (I think) all iPhones have seems the worst of all alternatives. This results in that bad restaurant table wobble feeling.

The UX designer, Jenson, cites interesting concepts like 1+1=3 and cognitive load. But forgets an even more basic concept: design for the common case.

The common case is the driver being the owner. Tesla has real world data about how many times the defrost button is tapped. Their UX decision to make the bottom bar customizable is smart.

I personally choose to only put the defrost button in the bar during months of the year when I use that button frequently and remove it at other times. Keeps it easily accessible when I need it and out of the way when I don't. Elegant, functional.

It might even be the case that defrost is in the bottom bar by default and the owner of the Tesla he drove had removed it, I can't remember right now what Tesla does for newly shipped cars.

Does a business have to be widely deployed or profitable to be real? The public and private capital markets say "no". If you were to ignore any business that isn't widely available you'd miss the beginning of both Apple and Facebook.

Waymo is a real business serving 50,000 rides each week delivering paying customers to their destination. If you haven't tried it yet, the product is amazing. Private, doesn't cancel, safe, and smooth. I will never take Uber again if I have the choice.

One of the most surprising things about getting an EV four months ago has been how little range matters.

Since you always leave home with a full tank and it’s rare to drive more than 150 miles in a typical day any range over that is money I’d rather save buying a smaller battery.

The main place more range helps is with road trips. But even there I run into the human comfort limit before the range limit. My family needs food and restrooms more frequently than the battery needs charging.

If I were to purchase an EV again I’d ignore range and focus more on other aspects.

I'm not sure I'm understanding you when you say "definitively". Do you mean if I can't be 100% sure about my answer?

The answer to your question is: the same way you determine when it's safe to cross the road on foot. When there are no cars in sight I'm 100% sure it's safe. When there are cars in sight, I'm not 100% sure but I still cross because I've developed judgement about the situation and the risks are acceptable.

I think this is one place where this debate goes off the rails. People don't switch cars frequently and haven't experienced or studied deeply both sets of interfaces. I completely understand why because I was the same.

I only recently switched from a 20 year old car. Wipers was one of my main concerns.

Tesla, contrary to popular belief, actually has a physical button for activating the wipers. It's one I rarely use because the automatic functionality for this works so well. There's a physical control to mute sound too.

Would you acknowledge that touchscreen controls have some benefits, such as adaptability?

I can tell we're going to disagree but I love the clean look of the dashboard. As a result of Tesla's product decision I've moved anything I use on a regular basis to the two large consoles. They put the glovebox button at the top of the menu tree and this product decision tradeoff hasn't bothered me.

Since it bothers you, I'm genuinely curious, what do you store in your glovebox other than I'm guessing car registration?

One of my favorite parts from pg's What You Can't Say is The Conformist Test:

Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

Here's one of my answers if I think of HN readers as peers: Tesla made the right decision by making most of their controls touchscreen-only.

HN guidelines suggest comments should get more thoughtful and substantive as a topic gets more divisive. If you disagree with me but acknowledge thought or substance in my comment I'd love to hear why instead of garnering a downvote.

The reason I believe Tesla made the right decision is that the physical buttons on the steering wheel and stalks cover the common cases. They've made many things automatic: lights, wipers, garage door, seat heaters (edit: lights and wipers also have physical buttons). Things that aren't buttons and aren't automatic voice handles well (e.g. "set climate to 72").

And finally, and I realize most controversially, while it's still important to monitor Autopilot the technology is already to the point where it's safe in the right conditions to take your eyes off the road for some number of seconds at at time.

I love Hey (https://hey.com) for its "screener" feature. It supports custom domains but not Gmail migration.

The screener keeps new senders out of your inbox. A rich set of keyboard shortcuts helps triage new senders into one of a few categories including simply blocking them. You can choose to block at the address or the domain level.

Most product decisions represent a tradeoff. The tradeoff the author doesn't mention is one of a clean look versus ease of use. The author also doesn't mention how frequently they actually open their glovebox.

From my personal experience I probably open my glovebox four times a year. How many times do I look at my glovebox? That's much harder to estimate but I'd guess dozens. Do I like a clean looking dashboard? It was actually a major selling point for me when I recently went car shopping. People obsess about how their cars look on the outside but how things look (and thus feel) on the inside is more important.

A glovebox latch only minimally affects the look and feel but I don't find the tradeoff that automakers have chosen as obviously bad as the author.

I love this post. Thanks Ben. It's especially generous to share pageviews and revenue numbers which are so frequently kept private. I didn't though understand this point from the post:

One other weird downside is that .. I sometimes catch myself thinking "should I build something just for the upvotes".

Is the author saying the attention from social media sites like Hacker News sometimes seems like motivation enough to build the next project?

AppleCensorship 4 years ago

Why... why whoever made this page, would you choose to display a feedback modal right as first time visitors view your page? If collecting feedback is the most important thing you want someone to do make it front and center page content. And if it's not, then don't.

I was mildly curious about the site but upon seeing the modal it was an immediate back button click for me.

I had the same problem until I discovered the “Filter Unknown Senders” setting that appears about 80% of the way down the settings screen.

we can’t add Tonya’s iCloud account to the “home”

I've got the same problem with me and my partner. If any Apple engineer happens to read this this would be on my top 3 list of bugs to fix in the Apple ecosystem. The only workaround I'm aware of is creating entirely new Apple IDs.

Interesting question. I tried to introspect a bit about the reason and I'm still not really sure. Maybe an American cultural influence of things like salaries being taboo.

It means I didn't want to get too specific about the amount involved. But I can see there's lots of interest in this question.

I wonder actually if something like https://www.levels.fyi could be built or exists but for ad-supported websites (side project idea?). It'd be really useful for people to understand more broadly "if you create site of type x and it gets y amount of traffic you can expect this level of ad revenue".

One reason the amount involved in my case would only be so useful is that sites can wildly vary (by as much as 100x I'm told) in how much $ per visit is generated (the industry term is "RPM").

Try the following:

1. Have at least 3 ideally 5 text-heavy pages on your site. 500 words minimum each. Tell your backstory, explain the advantages of your product, create an FAQ, ...

2. Make sure the site has a navigation bar somewhere with links to the basics that most sites have: an About page, maybe a short privacy policy, a contact page.

3. The site can't look broken or have "coming soon" anywhere. It helps if the site has been given a "fresh coat of paint" from a designer.

I don't know for sure, but the feeling I get is some human at Google has a scorecard and they go and check your site. Google won't reveal the actual scorecard because it'd become too easy to game, but the things above are what I've learned through the process.

I had trouble getting AdSense "interested" also. Depending on what Adsense is telling you I'd have varying suggestions if ads were still the way you wanted to go.

The best ways I know to monetize something for consumers: ads, app stores, donation buttons.

I tried an iPhone app to monetize the time zone converter but in my case the ad performed better. I tried a donation button for a few weeks and it brought in more than I expected.