mful

I've been looking for a combined task manager and calendar for a long time, and have often entertained building one for myself. Some feedback that is preventing adoption for me:

- Complex recurrence is key. I exercise 4 days per week. I only process my inbox (GTD-style) on weekdays. I triage bugs twice per week.

- Need to be able to view more than one day at a time on the calendar, and add tasks to specific days in that view — I plan out my weeks.

- Looking at future dates, it still shows my tasks scheduled for earlier dates. This makes planning difficult.

Ergonomic feedback

- Keyboard shortcuts (including arrow key navigation) does not work if you are focused on the name field of the task in the list. This means I can't really navigate, open, archive, reschdule tasks without using the mouse. Or at least I can't see how to. Might have to change hotkey scheme (use control or option?) as well, as command+A, for example, should probably still select all text in a field.

- I should be able to click out of the console — I keep trying to click or alt-tab out of it, like it’s spotlight, and it just hovers empty in front of my screen until I click to refocus on it and hit escape.

- When I've thought of building this myself, a key feature was adding tasks to the day's calendar (like, "I plan to work on X from 2-3:30pm").

Currently I use Asana for it's calendar view (note: this is not a calendar integration) and great keyboard shortcuts.

Anyway, congrats on the launch!

Modeling them as independent businesses that can decide — based on any non-protected principle they choose — to censor speech is too generic to be useful. They are closer to telephone or radio or broadcast TV companies than to private enterprise as an overarching category. Communication business are, of course, regulated around what they can and cannot say on air (the broadcast ones, specifically), and we probably need a similar approach to handling social media.

Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.

But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.

Engineering learnings at big cos vs startups are wildly different. If your goal is to learn what it takes to start your own company, you are much better off working at even a mid-sized startup, than a big tech co. There are a number of reasons for this, but a particularly consequential one is that you will learn to build/manage/deploy applications from 0, and if things go well, through a variety of scales thereafter. At a mid-size startup you'll have less of the "from 0" bit, but you are much more likely to learn to deal with the scaling issues that manifest as the software that was built in the early days starts degrade with growing load. You will also likely be using similar open source tools in both the early & middle startup stages.

Building features in a large, existing codebase, in the robust tooling context of a big company, is nothing like building services from the ground up.

The initial government was pro-American, but the consequence of pushing a country to have democratic elections is that they sometimes elect people that you don't like.

I don't the right prior here is "elections = real democracy", for cases like Iraq. The US has long history of installing "democratic" governments that are not actually democratic, but rather military states who violently suppress the people, but support US interests. The list of countries where this has borne out is long, but if you are interested, an easy place to start would be Cold War era South America (Guatemala and El Salvador being two straightforward examples).

What source would you prefer an open source UI library come from, that would avoid this concern?

Open source software lives and dies with adoption. Starting off with a (paid) development team, marketing team, and large initial user base (google internal) puts a piece of software in a good starting position, but doesn’t guarantee success.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, though not in a Flutter-related role.

It's hard to imagine you actually believe that maturity and experience are not related to job performance. Regardless, it might be helpful to think about experience as a hiring heuristic, like having a college degree: you certainly don't need it to be a good programmer, but having it is positively correlated with skill (in a way that is rationally causal, unlike, say, race). Recruiting, screening and hiring are massively expensive. Screening every inexperienced candidate who wants a senior position to find the rare gem would have an outsized cost.

One mistake founders make is thinking that they need to be finding a lead investor first. By allocating chunks of your round into portions that are available for three types of investors — lead VCs, follow VCs, and angels—you can create a lot more urgency out of the gate

...

If you talk to a VC who says they’d be interested in following if you found a lead, you should tell them that you have limited spots for follow VCs

Really interesting way to create urgency when there may not be any (yet).

Are you willing to release your code, both in the sense of putting it out into the world and emancipating it from your ownership? Do you accept that your code could be renamed, rebranded, repackaged, rented, traded or sold? Would you be happy if your code made someone else rich, famous or successful while you saw no benefit at all?

I suspect it's a lot easier to say "yes" to these questions when you're just starting out (and thus picking a license) than when you see a bunch of other co's profiting signficantly more than you are.

This seems to be an attempt to fix that mistake (I wonder if the Redis creators would call their license choice a mistake?). Like a train gone off the rails, there are probably only messy solutions that no one is super happy about at this point.

I think your edit hits the nail on the head, as we’ve clearly had different experiences.

I should clarify that a lot of the hard problems at early stage cos are around creating something that is not only new, but is also a viable business, with minimal resources and huge time pressure. Whether the technical side is hard or not is another question entirely.

Anyways, thanks for the comment — in addition to providing a good counterpoint, it’s a good reminder for me that my experience is neither universal nor even necessarily the general case. YMMV.

Anyone else getting a little tired of the immediate reduction of any conversation around early-stage startup job opportunities to "comp vs FAANG"? As someone who spent the last 5 years in early stage startups, before recently accepting a FAANG offer, I'm starting to realize folks who only think about comp probably aren't good fits for startups. Here are a few quick reasons to take less comp at a super early stage startup:

- You will develop a wide breadth of skills you simply can't develop at FAANG, as you will be involved in product meetings, business strategy conversations, and will regularly eat lunch with the CEO. I imagine the reverse of this is true as well, in that there are skills developed at FAANG that are hard to develop as employee <50.

- You will get to fast-track your career progression, in that you will be in line for promotions much earlier than in large companies, as opportunities emerge.

- Companies (including FAANG) will look for folks with your skillset (my startup experience was a huge plus in my recent job search).

- You will work on hard problems, with passionate people; folks aren't punching the clock here. This is fun.

Also, for folks just thinking about comp, I'd like to gently point out that a 40 hour week on work you feel "meh" about is ~35% of your waking life. That's not to say you can't find exciting work at FAANG (I hope I have), but rather that there is more to a job than comp or career progression, and working with passionate folks on hard problems can be incredibly fulfilling.

Edit: formatting

Yes, they did. It's great that they explained their config choices, so that folks with domain knowledge can evaluate reliability of their test, and report back.

For those of us without domain knowledge, however, what the ACLU published is wildly misleading, to the point of being actively disingenuous. What are folks without baseline STEM education, much less AI education, supposed to take from the ACLU article other than "Amazon AI is racist and dangerously ineffective"? Do you think they are opening up the Rekognition docs to evaluate if the default config is appropriate for this test?

(By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Rekognition is actually racially biased. I also feel a bit icky criticizing the ACLU here — they do great work, and I encourage everyone to donate.)

I can't even begin to imagine where the idea that the hour of the day matters would have come from.

Many bodily functions such as hormone production are affected by your circadian rhythm [1]. Ambient light also seems to have an effect on quality of sleep.

[1] https://www.nigms.nih.gov/Education/Pages/Factsheet_Circadia...

I've been using the pre-1.0 version for over a year, and recently switched to using the beta of the 1.0, and just want to say thanks — this is far and away the best UI kit I've come in contact with. It's well-designed, comprehensive, customizable, well-documented, and fun to work with. Great work!

God forbid someone spend thousands of hours building a free app in the tech stack they are familiar/productive with...how inconsiderate!

I don't know that this is true for all users — there is logic to asking for payment details when motivation is highest, which is often before putting in a couple hours building a page. Putting down a credit card might also improve customer success, as that will help motivate the customer to finish on your platform, rather than forgetting about it for a month before going to Squarespace because they can barely remember your where they started building the first version...

As someone who also had a longish path to learning to work hard, the answer for me was simple: practice.

Gains in focus time (for me, anyway) are incremental, so it’s not like you wake up one day and can focus for 12 hours straight. Accept that it will be a slow road, and just keep trying to stay focused longer, whenever you sit down to work.

A big part of our mission has always been helping our users achieve their missions.

Do these types of PR lines from companies that make productivity tools actually resonate with folks? At Dropbox’s scale, they probably materially increase economic productivity, which is great. Why push some narrative about helping aid workers achieve their mission?

This sort of language seems especially strange to me when announcing something that actually can make significant social impact. The juxtaposition between the Dropbox product and the work of this foundation jumps off the page.

Maybe it’s just me as I get older, but it seems so patronizing.

Anywho, this seems like a great project — great work DB, PR quibbles aside :)

First off, congrats on launching!

Second off, some website feedback:

- I'm part of your target audience (freelance consultant), yet struggled to figure out what this is/why I benefit from it. I'd change both the banner company and overall content hierarchy, as follows:

Banner: Replace headline with some form of the copy of the second section: "Convert website visitors into sales calls, when they are hot, not a week later." That's a bit too wordy for the headline, but tells me both the benefit, and why it's different than a demo request form.

Second section: How it works, framed as a benefit. Some headline like "5 mins to converting more leads". You lead with a benefit in the banner, now let me know how I can get that benefit.

Third section: Sell benefits listed under the "How it helps" sub-header. Convince me that I want/need this.

Fourth section: Testimonial — at this point I understand what it is and why it will help my business, now it's time to show me others trust you, so I can too.

Fifth section: some CTA to signup. You could include the letter to leads "Hi, we are SalezTalk..." if you like.

- I would throw out the features section entirely, or bury it on another page. It confused me — what the heck does it mean by scheduler? Mini-CRM? I thought this was a simple way to setup sales calls?

- I would also throw out the section where you say SalezTalk is for target-segment X (freelancers, solopreneurs, etc). This might be personal preference, but I find these sections condescending. Tell me the benefits, and I'll tell you if it solves a problem I have.

- Raise your prices, significantly. Running your own business, there is little difference between $59/yr and $19/year — both are going to be some of my lowest software costs. I'd make the cheapest plan $59/yr, and the more expensive one something like $179.

Anywho, congrats again!

I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations — every firm must adhere perfectly to some set ideals or else the most vocal members in the community turn the conversation into an end-of-the-internet melodrama.

We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?)

We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog.

We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.)

I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.

Do I want my team to value the number of tickets closed, or do I want them to value our critical business KPIs?

How does this look in practice, in large organizations? Is everyone empowered to freelance on whatever they think will improve said KPIs?

At some point, someone needs to have the power to decide what is being built (hopefully with an eye towards KPI-impact), and others need to fall in line and close some tickets.

I’m unable to confirm, but based on Maloney’s committee memberships, this appears to be introduced in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Here is the membership list for those who would like to to lobby the appropriate representatives:

https://transportation.house.gov/about/membership.htm

most "entrepreneurs" are not making new things, but finding new ways for others to advertise existing things

What a bizarrely reductionist lens through which to view Snapchat and I guess consumer apps in general — Snapchat is not it's business model (or lack thereof).

Snapchat clearly made a "new thing". It's just looking to an existing business model to monetize that new thing.

The 30% cap on calories from fat is pretty ridiculous in my view. Even if you don't buy into the idea that fat is healthful, there is plenty of science that indicates it is, and so at least CIFA should not regulate fat content in this way.

Sidenote: I don't drink Soylent and have no idea if it fails the fat content. I'm in the "Soylent is not healthful" camp, if it matters.

4 questions:

1. Why email-gate it? With so many UI kits out there, I won't give my email just to try another one.

2. What are you going to do with my email address, were I to sign up?

3. Can this be used via some kind of package manager? I would recommend this, as I wouldn't use anything that I have to manually download and install updates for.

4. I'm a little confused by the marketing — what makes this "for hustlers"?

Anyway, congrats on shipping!

Also full of dramatic, unsubstantiated claims such as:

Now staff morale is in the toilet, the user experience is a mess, the subscription models are unappealing, competitors are growing rapidly and musicians are fleeing to other upload platform.

I really thought TechCrunch was getting better, but man this is bad journalism. It's like a hit piece in a high school newspaper.

There may be a better solution than an independent committee, but an independent committee is far, far better than the "whoever is in power creates districts in the way that most entrenches the governing party" system we have today.

Independent committees have historically been pretty effective anti-partisan solutions. One prominent example being the CBO, which both parties like to stand up for while in the opposition, and disparage while in power.

Is there any other evidence of this? Based on this tweet + replies, there isn't sufficient evidence to say gender is the most likely cause of the price disparity. For example, it seems at least equally likely that the price disparity is due to individualized pricing, based on personal usage history, rather than some blanket gender discrimination.

There is something voyeuristic about how the creators portray the subjects in the story. For most of the subjects, they signed off the same way that anyone signs off on being portrayed in any piece journalism (I presume). But for John B, a lot was revealed about him posthumously, which I think we have good reason to believe he wanted to keep private; he explicitly glossed over (lied about?) aspects of his life, like "church", implying that he did not want to publicize this side of him.

At a higher level, I wonder if the fact that this is more narrative, more art, changes what the signoff requirements should be.

Nate Silver had an excellent response to this on one of the "Model Talk" editions of the FiveThirtyEight Elections Podcast[1]. TL;DR of the problems with Taleb's critique:

1. "Volatility" in the model is not random, as Talib asserts -- it happens at predefined points in the time. For example, the accuracy of polls jumps greatly after the conventions complete.

2. Volatility at a previous point in time does NOT mean there must be similar volatility going forward, as Talib implies.

3. Taleb's quickie models that he posted for explanation don't remotely match empirical data.

I respect Taleb, but he seems to have fallen into a trap really smart people often fall into: being right with limited data, but wrong with complete data (in this case, he creates assumptions from his knowledge in other areas like options pricing, which are wrong in this domain).

[1] Skip to 13:30 remaining http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-a-tipping-poi...

EDIT: formatting

Compass | Philadelphia, PA | ONSITE | Full-time | Full-Stack Web Developer

At Compass, we are building a marketplace that connects small business owners with web designers. Unlike a traditional marketplace, project management is handled through the Compass platform. At a high-level, we are automating the project manager.

We are a fast-growing, cash-generating business, with six figure sales volume over our first year. We are four strong, and you will be involved in meetings and discussions with all founders/team members, every day.

As the first engineering hire, you will fundamentally shape the product. Working directly with the CTO, you will create the platform that powers thousands of ongoing web design projects. You will also work on engineering as marketing initiatives.

We care about fundamental problem solving, user experience, and shipping over perfect code. We deploy multiple times per day, which we are able to do because we emphasize well-tested code, and importance of deploying incremental value, as it’s created.

Tech we use: Ruby/Rails, ReactJS, Redis, PostgreSQL, NodeJS

To ask any questions or apply, shoot me an email at matt@hellocompass.us