mark-ruwt

It'd be tons more convenient! But the Class I Railroads won't let that happen.

The reason why Amtrak is great in the Northeast Corridor and so mediocre everywhere else is because the Class Is own the tracks and control all of the traffic flow. Amtrak would run more trains tomorrow if they could.

https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/amtrak-eyes-stb-invest...

An Urbanist credo: Cities aren't loud. ICE cars are.

"Fewer than 300 seats" feels somewhat disingenuous--Seat Miles is the stat that matters. People riding from end-to-end is the exception not the rule.

The majority of Amtrak's usage outside of the Northeast Corridor is providing transport to small, underserved communities, not vacation trips like in this post.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with not sharing your last name before a dating app first date.

They've been doing this since at least 2019. When I shut down my Meetup, they sent a note out to everyone asking them to "Step up to become this Meetup Group's Organizer and you can guide its future direction!". Thankfully, I knew it was coming and messaged everyone beforehand so there wasn't any confusion.

https://ibb.co/xDmfSGd

It's not an app, but I'm a huge fan of Struggle Meals. It helps reduce analysis paralysis in the kitchen, focusing on keeping important staples in the house and working with whatever you have on hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbW6O-ZFbMc

Are You Watching This?! | Software Engineers | Austin, TX (or Remote UTC-8 to -3) | Full-time

We’re a Sports Excitement Analytics company, using in-game stats to identify exciting games in real-time. Married with live Gambling Data, TV Listings, OTT Deep-Links and more, our tech is used by 50+ customers ranging from CBS to DraftKings to Sports Illustrated to Vox.

If the idea of "Lebron has 60 points heading into the 4th! Tune in now for $0.99 or wager on if he'll beat Kobe's 81 for access to a free live stream!" sounds intriguing, let’s chat.

https://areyouwatchingthis.com/careers

As someone who maxed out multiple credit cards trying to pay for sports data, I know this pain all too well. If you're working on a hobby app, we give sports data away for free.

https://areyouwatchingthis.com/services/sports-data-api

My career since 2006 has centered around fandom and identifying exciting games in real-time.

I'm a devout believer that sports fandom is all about wagering emotion. The more of your heart and happiness you "bet", the larger the payout when your team finally succeeds.

For those wanting/needing context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793170

I was on a direct flight from Heathrow to DFW when the captain announced that we needed to divert to Ottawa because "Air Traffic Control was down". We landed safely and were the first flight to re-enter US airspace two days later on 9/13.

When things go sideways, keeping everyone calm is a big part of the job, even if it means fibbing a bit.

Solo founder, one-man-shop here--14 years in.

There's lots of great advice here, and I'll add getting in the habit of sending out monthly update emails.

Pick a group of people (friends, family, maybe ex-colleagues) and once a month summarize what you accomplished in the last month, what you want to accomplish in the next month, and some goals you want to accomplish 4-6 months out.

One of the hardest part of going it alone is lacking perspective. Monthly updates are a really helpful tool in keeping you oriented.

As you're brainstorming, try to imagine what you would shout in a loud bar (remember those?) if someone asked you what your company did. It can be a helpful mental tool to strip things down to the essentials.

Two-sentence pitches are much harder than two-minute pitches.

"Spaceship You" by CGP Grey has been a really powerful re-calibration tool for me whenever I feel unbalanced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAhsXyO3Ck

It was a naming convention created in the early 1900s, using the Mississippi River as a rough line of delineation. Local TV stations use a similar convention.

https://www.rd.com/culture/radio-stations-k-w/

There is a fund for "Superhosts", but it excludes hosts with than two properties.

https://www.airbnb.com/superhostrelief

For anyone looking for more of these, I find Baremetrics' "Open Project" fascinating.

https://baremetrics.com/open-startups

As a one-man, self-funded startup where every dollar counts, maintaining status is critical. It's much more than legroom and upgrades, it's also lower fees for some last-minute fares and the ability to sometimes change flights within 24 hours of departure for zero fee.

In September I made it from the curb to the gate at Heathrow in 27 minutes--it wouldn't have been possible without the agent at the United Elite desk.

According to @KurtWagner8, Twitter pegged it at less than $3M in last week's earnings call.

https://twitter.com/kurtwagner8/status/1189638660460695552

Good catch. Updated.

I'm a one-man startup and I couldn't disagree with this more.

If you want to "play" startup, feel free to put all your eggs in one basket. If you actually want to build something meaningful and long-lasting, and you have Fortune 500 customers, take a breath and invest time in an infrastructure that can't be destroyed by a single rogue algorithm.

After all of the horror stories we've heard over the years, how is that time investment (and ability to sleep well at night) not worth it?

God, that's a brilliant name/logo.

I founded Are You Watching This?! (https://ruwt.tv) in 2006 and have been profitable since 2013. It's a Sports Excitement Analytics firm, licensing real-time data about the excitement of games by analyzing pitch-by-pitch and shot-by-shot data, to sports properties and cable companies.

I'm happy with where I'm at, but there's a lot I would've done differently. Holler if you'd like to chat about it at all: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markphillip/

(Solo founder, one-man shop, 12+ years in, Mentor)

There's a lot of great advice already so I'll just add: Create a bi-weekly, private email newsletter. Your biggest fear should be getting too heads down and building the wrong product or somehow losing the plot.

Create a newsletter for friends, family, developer peers, teachers, and anyone else you can think of.

Every two weeks you should outline what you accomplished in the last two weeks, what you're working on in the next two weeks and the plan for the next six weeks. The simple act of broadcasting the newsletter will help keep you accountable and focused. Good luck!

I started using this model in '15 and it's not fragile. At all. The less I'm relying on outside frameworks, the better I sleep at night.

There's nothing special about our stack. We have four different instance types (static, api, db, proxy), and we rely on a lot of the usual suspects: Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Varnish, and HAProxy.

No, unfortunately, open-sourcing it has been on my to-do list for an embarrassingly long time.

But, building one is easier than it sounds! Think of the problem in two parts. First, find a distro used by multiple providers (we're on CentOS) and craft one script that uses each provider's API to spin up a clean machine.

Once you have that done, it's a matter of understanding your own build process, writing a script that you'll pass into each instance on creation that will fetch your source control, install libraries, and put all the pieces together.

Lots of if/else, lots of curl, lots of yum, lots of jq, but all of it is really straightforward.

We rely on bash.

Each machine that's spun up is built from scratch via one command-line call. The first half of the process interacts with each hosting API (we rely on DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr primarily), to build a clean slate machine with all of the packages and libraries that we expect.

The second half of the process runs the actual build process, building the instance step-by-step on top of the clean slate, blissfully unaware of which hosting provider it lives on.

This model allows us to be portable and avoid vendor-lock in, and a cross-provider infrastructure lets us gracefully handle system failures while keeping costs down.

Posts on http://highscalability.com can get a bit hardcore, but there's a lot of great knowledge there.

I hear you. For me, the abstraction is the Linux distro. Build scripts abstract out creating a clean, secure box before installing any custom software, so regardless of the provider, every machine is exactly the same.