mstefanko

In SF I literally walk past a grocery store every day, I enjoy the occasional grocery shopping, but I can't get enough of these services. I work long enough hours that I rarely have time during the week, so that may account for my view point. But I'll say, once you start using one, it's hard to go back. With a company like instacart, if i'm at that point in the week and I don't have what I need to make dinner, instead of getting take out on the regular, I can get what I need dropped off immediately without dropping what I'm doing. With amazonfresh, I no longer need to do a week long or two week long shopping trip. Fresh produce every day. There's way less waste, at least than what I used to go through. I do still see value in the occaisional trip to the grocery store for reasons you mentioned, but when I do stop now, it's fast, and never on one of those extremely busy weekend days where half of the trip is me standing in a line trying not to block the cereal aisle. In addition, there's one major convenience other than getting large amounts of time back, and reducing waste, I can order what I purchased previously. No thought needed, there's enough duplicate items that going through the mundane process of picking up the exact same carton of milk every week, becomes pointless.

Yeah, I agree with the consensus thus far. To me the sign-up ruins this. Anything that gets this to the point where that's not required, adds a lot of value to your service.

It is, and oddly enough they both use "4242 4242 4242 4242" as the test card number.

I completely agree with the thought process here, and changing the incentives.

Not sure why you seem so against her losing her position though. As much this is the sort of thing prosecutors do on a regular basis, they shouldn't be. Why is she more infallible than you or I. I don't think her losing her job will send a wave of change through the system, a lot more has to take place in order for any of that to come to fruition. As much as I think people are focusing on the wrong issue here, seeking retribution through ending her career. Her callous attitude toward the case and toward punishments in general has not helped. But even if all prosecutors act the same, this is just a case that opened a lot of eyes to it. Is there no grounds or merit in the thought of letting her go. If I fuck up at my job, I could be on the chopping block to. As much as letting her go will do very little in the grand scheme of things. Leaving her there and doing nothing would also send a message to other prosecutors and to the current angry mob of people.

"I refuse to live in a state with such a dysfunctional government"...so you picked Texas..hahahah

You can absolutely do tech anywhere. But it is a very different experience. I had the exact same rationale before moving to the bay area. It was a tough decision to make, even loving the city, was it really worth it. Here, you're surrounded by tech. It is literally everywhere. When you have conversations with people, you no longer have to change your stories, your talking points, your vocab, people actually understand what you're talking about here. Sitting in a coffee shop, or on the bus, almost all you hear is tech conversations. If it's a passion, if it's what you love, it's worth every single penny to be in the heart of it. I've never been more motivated in my life.

haha totally is. I moved to SF from Pittsburgh, a home of cold winters, hot summers, and greasy foods. I felt like I didn't see an obese person for the first 6 months of living here, but it was all relative to what I was used to seeing on a regular basis.

With that logic, no one should write anything. Living here for a year, I was happy to read this piece. Everyone knows the cost of living is sky high. But unless you have to pay it, research it, live it, it's higher than most people expect. I knew i'd be paying up the ass, but when i saw the 2k+ for my studio, it was still an eye opener. Things like the divisidero being the fog line is actually pretty important. Muni having to step down, and china town being a bottle neck, may be picked up quickly, but it's still nice to know if you're moving here. Majority of article is accurate, and half of it were not known to me before moving here.

I don't think it works that way, honestly. The majority of people at that level are so well off that they don't get hit that hard. They don't really get hit at all. They have a million opportunities after being let go. Even looking into someone like Nixon, where do you go from there. He received 2 millions to write his memoirs, was paid millions for interviews etc. I don't doubt it would drastically alter her career, at least from the path she was on. But she has a certain right to uphold a set of ethics, when prosecutors overstep their power, they are no more infallible than you or I. In that role, it's always on the table as a consequence. People keep referencing how she's one of the "good guys" without any real knowledge of her previous work. Her entire career may of been built on top of prosecutorial overreach. When you put away bad people, people don't care how you do it. She finally picked the wrong person to make an example of. But even if she's let go, believe me, she'll do just fine.

I definitely agree with that notion. I think the problem we're facing is that the general public at this time knows most of what was going on. She's had a good reputation to this point. But she finally picked the wrong person to make an example of. Prosecutorial overreach is a funny thing. In that, her career may have been built on it. If the number of previous people we're actually bad people, the same tactics would of been far more accepted. Since this was a clear abuse of her power, even if it's something prosecutors generally get away with. The idea of making an example out of her seems vengeful and almost hypocritical. But it's not without its grounds.

I 100% agree with you. Ouya currently is falling in a very strange place in the market. I think they priced themselves correctly, but it falls between a roku and a toy as you mentioned. Where that leaves them is beyond me. The point that matters, is I think if someone was looking for a media device, they'd end up with a roku or apple tv. If they wanted a gaming system, right now the shield is far more appealing. A huge issue with crowdfunding these projects is keeping them relevant. If I buy something this year, and get it next year, it's very difficult to stay relevant. In order for an Ouya 2.0 to be possible, I think they will have to sell a number of post-kickstarter consoles. In order for that to happen, people are going to have to love it when it hits their door steps. They will have to get excited about it. Right now, on launch day, the ouya will not be able to play the newest games on the android market. Despite it having it's own market, if my friend is playing a better quality game on his phone next to me, there is a significant issue there. Even just a mental one, where my new shiny device, doesn't feel all that new and shiny. I don't think it's too late for the Ouya, but think a lot is going to have to go their way in the next year in order for them to succeed in that space. And I think this is going to be yet another eye opening experience for everyone with regards to crowd-funding and how it currently works--The realities of it.

I give credit to their team, I can hardly imagine how hard it is to reach goals and deliver a hardware product while driving a martetplace and partnerships to deliver content to your new device.

That being said, I think you're making too many assumptions before it exists. Hardware is expensive, I have no idea how much profit they make per device, or if all the seed money from kickstarter is completely gone. But I know that their future depends on several things. Aside from future sales being a must. In order to iterate, they need to get a lot right -- now. I don't think Ouya is that much more free than any other piece of hardware. They will not be able to iterate that fast, fix bugs that fast, push updates that fast, or sell consoles every year, easily. There's always hope that a random assortmant of people will hack it to the point it's constantly relevant, or that the games that end up getting launched on their marketplace all hit a home run. But it's completely unclear to me at this point. In the age of crowd-funding, a funny thing happens. Backers are already invested in products before they are even created. Speaking much further than just monetarily. There's a fake sense of success and security even knowing that projects can and will fail. Ouya's massive funding only proved the idea, not the implementation.

That being said, when it's finally here, it still has to get people excited. People will still have to want it when it arrives, and when they plug it in, it still has to essentially be awesome. Right now, its too much speculation, if you pick up the real thing and say -- hey, aside from the shit controller, and the lack of power, i still love it. Than, that will mean something significant. As it stands now, Ouya is kind of floating aimlessly in the market, they got too big too fast, haven't really carved out a dedicated chunk of the market. And is already falling far behind as far as the technology used. It falls between a media device and a toy, but in kind of a bad way. If I wanted a media device, i'd buy a roku or build one. If I wanted an android based gaming system in 2013, as of right now, i'd probably end up with a shield. I think that says something. I think the ouya will be a nice little device for sometime, but i'm having a lot of doubts about it's future and it's ability to grow in the competitive and expensive space they opted to jump into.

Ouya, on launch day, will not be able to handle the newest games on the android market. That is a significant issue, one crowd-funded projects are going to have to solve or abandon in the next few years.

Such a strange twist to everything. While everyone was already second guessing their ouya backing. Nvidia essentially releases a much better device months before the ouya is due out. The major complaint of everyone buying the ouya is there was no screen. Not sure why people are saying this will fail. Ouya raised 8.5 million for a non portable version of this with a worse controller. I think initially this will help out everyone, including android in general, and the ouya. The only thing that would kill this is a high price tag which i'm at this point kind of expecting. 199 or 169 the retail 3ds prices are a bit high imo. The $99 price is what sold the ouya. I'm pretty curious where this will fall in the market.

Down for me in the US as well

As much as typing one sentence and hearing the sounds wasn't bad, and thank god the toggle is actually in the sidebar already. I found it pretty ironic that a distraction free writing interface included obnoxious sound effects.

Same, too little too late for me. Kind of figured they'd find themselves in a big enough pickle to have to revert back. But the tos changes gave me the spark I needed to escape. Instagram is no where near essential enough to my life to pull shit like that. I like how everyone started posting articles like, "you wouln't do it"...About how everyone makes empty threats about quitting in times like this but never does. I found the decision easy. And i'm probably better off for it. A stack of burnt out 612x612 images was useful 10 years ago, the novelty is far past gone.

Too late.

The blogosphere will always make things sound worse than they are. But was it really that exaggerated this time. I don't think there intentions were as bad as it came off, but they made a huge mistake. There response was honestly not all that fast considering the instant shit storm this caused. If a million users complain about something immediately after it hits the feeds, and it takes them literally hours to say much of anything about it, there's an issue. The apology was not heartfelt, it wasn't sincere, and came off far more like like, "we're sorry you didn't understand."

I think instagram/facebook should be able to monetize, but I think today marks a gigantic mistake in their history, they went down in myspace fashion. Users dropping like flies, the amount of traffic on services like instaport.me and http://freethephotos.com/ is phenemonal.

In other news, flickr came back from the grave.

Not sure why people think they deserve more of a chance to explain themselves. Even after they already tried. They knew what they were doing when the changed the TOS. It wasn't an overnight decision. They did not take any real blame for the stupid decision to change it. It came off as more of a, i'm sorry you misunderstood, than an i'm sorry we did this. There is a good chance there intentions were not bad, but it was a very poor decision on their part to jump to this level. They are not back peddling hard enough in my useless opinion. I don't think consumers owe it to companies to hear them out. This isn't a tiny app developer who made a mistake in legalese. A team of lawyers just tried to eat our free lunch. Even if their intentions were not evil, if it disagreed with the users, they have a right to walk away.

Your view just plain scares me, there wouldn't be so much heat over this right now if it was something the majority of people including app developers thought was the right thing to do. There's plenty of examples of things that I feel is uncool, but I can understand it from the business side. A few weeks ago, when people went nuts over the possibility of ads showing up in peoples instagram feeds, I was like, fine. In every single terms of service that I have ever read, that line, "we reserve the right to alter these terms of use at any time", appears in some form or another. That is not an end all, and it's not an important distinction. What you alter the terms to still matters, especially on this big of a scale.

You make it sound like if they did this and didn't tell anyone about it, just opted everyone in, and started selling off photos. That you'd be ok with this. Not sure where you draw the line, but facebook/instagram finally decided to cross it. Users of products do have rights, and honestly app developers should head this as an important warning/lesson. You should always have a right to protect the interest of your product, but sometimes, when you decide to monetize a service years after its conception, you mess up. Even facebook/instagram can make huge mistakes. Instagram is going to take a gigantic hit from this.

Great insight! Think you nailed everything head-on. The precise specs, I envy you on that though. I've unfortunately never worked somewhere where precise specs we're handed over. I've either had to build my own specs to the problem, or am given partially written specs and had to fill in the gaps. Which ends up in a lot of back and forth, so the point being made in the initial comment about the specs is accurate everywhere I've worked.

I think you make a lot of very valid points, and honestly I hope that companies continue to see the benefits of remotely contracting work as well as just telecommuting in general. I'm definitely not arguing with the benefits. Just offering minor support for the value of in-house talent as well. For me personally, I've worked in offices on the east coast, then moved to the bay area to follow 'that dream'. Offices on the east coast offered me little in the form of tech culture or inspiration, aside from some interpersonal relationships. Here in the bay area I found a lot of things to be worse than I idealized in my mind before moving, but one thing that has been very apparent is the culture and tech community. Even just the conversations I hear outside, on my commute to work, let alone the conversations i'm involved in at work are just so different than what I was used to. Feel like for the first time in a long time, i'm no longer just doing a job, but i'm growing, i'm getting better, i'm learning, and I'm constantly motivated. I worked for a number of years thinking the remote lifestyle was a dream come true, and for a lot of people it is. I think your point about the limited local talent pool at least for the majority of places is extremely accurate, and something that needs to be considered. But just in my little bubble, I have to say that going to the office, even despite the increase in interruptions and distractions, it's been extremely favorable for my career as well as the quality of work that i'm able to give back to the community and my job. And moving across the country, despite the hardships I faced in the few month transition, a year later it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life.

I think the cutting costs and distractions are extremely important variables when even thinking about trying to quantify the benefit of remote workers. But of course your productivity drops when you're in the office when you're not usually. People are taking advantage of one of the few times you're on-site, increased distractions already. The environment you're working in on-site is no longer what you're used to working in. Meaning you don't put up with distractions as well as you would if you worked there every day. And your body doesn't really go into 'work-mode'.

It goes the same way for someone who works in the office every day then decides to work at home. When I've had a dedicated office space in my home and worked there for an extended time, I always feel like I missed out on some social aspects that I needed from the office environment, including both productive and unproductive communication, but my productivity went up. But now that I've been working daily in an office, and I do not have a dedicated space at home, when I do end up working from home, i'm far more distracted. I think it's easy to look at either side and flail your hands attempting to qualify as well as justify what you're doing. But it's not that cut and dry. In your experience working from home may make perfect sense, but I still don't think it's easy to quantify the benefit of remote workers. For a lot of people working remotely is distracting in a different way, and you end up giving up a lot of essential in-office interactions, sometimes without ever realizing it.

I agree, there is definitely something to be said for "unproductive" communication. But I would change that to: It can potentially drive creativity. I've been in plenty of office environments where it was far more just a distraction.

I've given a lot of thought to the TL;DR approach to content digestion. It works extremely well, in a vacuum, or on the site it was made popular, reddit. Their, the original poster writes the TL;DR, which is why it works so well. If you write a large post, then immediately after summarize the post into 1-2 sentences, it becomes a very efficient message that still expresses exactly what you wanted to get across. TL;DR is the future, almost to a sad degree. A lot of time it digs deeper than just wanting to filter out the articles you have no interest in reading. But this becomes the only form of digesting news. You begin consuming a lot of news, stories, articles, but you're no longer actually informed on any of the topics, you just end up with a vague idea of what is going on around you. That's far beside the point though.

This is a actually a very nice effort.

The issues I have with growth and actual value, is with how the summaries are generated. Automatic generation is fast and inaccurate, manually curated is slow and very accurate. In a world where people no longer have the time to read newspapers, their not only looking for quick news on the run, they want current news. Something that happened today, everything that happened today. But quick, not the full story, "i'll read that later." Meeting in the middle between fast and slow approaches does not work here. You're too slow, and the headlines in my RSS feed and twitter have already informed me of the news, too fast and your summary becomes a failed attempt to make twitter and RSS better quality. I have no idea how your TL;DR are currently generated. But I would think you'd have an aggregation and be doing some manual curation. To me for this to really work, you'd have to have a large group of people that read the article generating the TL;DR, constantly iterating, until you end up with an extremely efficient 2 sentence summary. Or there needs to be a project that integrates TL;DR on large scale, the publishers, news papers of the world, blogs..They submit these directly.

I think there's still a lot of value in what you're doing. I just don't think it will take off as it is now. Away from the name/marketing/novelty/social aspect not really being there. Twitter, RSS feeds, and sites like http://skimfeed.com/ end up providing me with far more day to day value. If you took this and spoon-fed me the TL;DR via my phone, i'd consider being a repeat visitor a little bit more. But you'd then be competing with a whole 'nother slice of the pie.

This is actually really nice, well done. Hard to drop the frills for thrills so to speak. This is a much more functional site than most of the similar bootstrappy approaches, despite it looking like it came out of the 90s. It's actually useful, I like.

This is my questions as well, I think the TSA at this point is far more trouble than the massive budget the government is wasting on them. I've read countless articles and watched countless videos complaining about the TSA, pointing out their flaws. But I've yet to see a reasonable plan to cut their budget. And even if someone was able to lower their budget, what happens if something does happen then. I'd love to see any plans, but just cutting the TSA budget entirely has obvious ill effects, it's definitely not as easy as saying, "The TSA is useless, get rid of them."

I also like the idea, but as nemesis1637, google doc powered forms are far too minimal. To me, the whole site, company, everything, is too minimal.

When it comes to hiring, saying something like, "These are people you will want to hire. They have been vetted by startup veterans." Is a bold statement to make. But it's not a very believable statement, not from looking at temps.io. What makes a person a startup veteran, what companies have you done this for, how many, why is temps.io uniquely qualified to determine if a resume is bs or if the individual would actually be a good fit. Are you actually doing phone interviews to screen people. Are you meeting with people in person. Are you just a service that will collect resumes and send them to companies. As i'm sure people need work, you will get contacted. As companies DO need people, you will get contacted. But if anyone put up a site that had a standard sign-up with an extremely generically awesome mission statement, they would get contacted as well. People would sign up in the small chance anything panned out. This may even result in some sort of, "what do we have to lose" scenario for companies. But if you want to grow this into an actual business, provide more info on your site. Don't just answer questions in a comment thread, tell people why they should consider using temps.io on your website, without all the marketing fluff.

May just be the way it is worded, but the spiritual section ruins this post for me. "...skills every programmer should have" being able to meditate can mean a lot of non-spiritual things. People are able to clear their head via hundreds of methods that have nothing to do with being spiritual. Even meditation I would not personally consider to having to be spiritual. But listening to music, taking walks, doing something to clear your mind from everything that is currently holding it back. This in itself is not spiritual. I agree, what it is, is an essential skill, one needed in life, not just in programming. We all have periods of losing focus. And being able to recover during these times, it's a valuable skill to have with any task. But I think using the title "every programmer" than attributing the way you personally get by is misleading.

My girlfriend had almost the exact same experience, such a scam. I was outraged when I looked through the site a year ago. In her opinion the shoes she did get we'rent even good quality, she gave them away. And when she called about the $40 charge that she knew nothing about, they told her she didn't want to cancel. When she asked why not, she was told they'd be getting some really cute shoes in next month and wouldn't want to miss out. Even after getting out of it, she was still called 3 times in future months to ask why she was unhappy with her purchase/and the membership she never knowingly signed up for. Can't stand JustFab or companies like it.

This is what's interesting to me. The concept of advertising for other companies is something the majority of people do on a daily basis. There's not many name brands that hide their logo or name on clothing. Not sure why this is getting the response it is. Are people really serious that they think they should be paid to wear these, like they are doing some great service, but a company like american eagle is for some reason entitled to peoples $30 to have you advertise their line. Or do the majority of HN readers wear completely plain shirts day in and day out. I like the idea, i'm only having trouble pulling the trigger as I don't think I'd wear a shirt for a service i've heard little about or don't even like using.