HN user

nihonjon

49 karma
Posts1
Comments30
View on HN

A bit sensationalist IMO. From my experiences costly Tokyo rentals are optional.

During college I lived in central Tokyo on a budget that was much less than what I had in the States (120,000 jpy) - working near full time mind you.

Started out by living in a few different netcafes for a month and moved into a humble flat with initial costs under 100,000 jpy.

Now with a non-Japanese wife and no guarantor, we pick places where these fees are non-existent and landlords or organizations are okay with foreigners working non-traditional jobs using guarantor companies (monthly guarantor fee of around 2600 jpy). More so than the deposits, it sucks I get discriminated against for my race.

Actually quite a few places allow you to get in without such deposits. I've lived here since my last two years of college - totaling 8 years now - and never had an issue getting in with almost zero down aside from rent and guarantor company fee. My rents have ranged from $350/month to now $1600/month.

On the private side: コンフォリア

On the public support side (subsidized housing): UR (Urban Renewal) JKK Tokyo (東京都住宅供給公社)

I've done email marketing for some pretty big companies over the last 3-4 years, as well as a few smaller ventures. When it comes to generating revenue, HTML wins across the board in my experience with general goods' EC, daily deal, education and food.

The users of this board aren't exactly the type of people who impulse buy.

Since I was downvoted please allow me to explain by expanding on that question with more questions:

What sort of license did you have on Nodester's code prior to acquisition?

You said "We also used the following open source libraries / NPM modules written by talented Node.JS / Javascript developers:"

For any open-source work you used, did you leave the original author's copyright or credit in the code?

Did you pay the original authors anything for their work?

What types of licenses were used in the code you forked?

At what point did you let everyone know you were closing the public repository and making it private so you could sell it?

I apologize if this sounds abrasive, but this smacks of getting people to work for free under the notion of a truly open-source project.

I hope this means there will be lean hookups. Anything past the first date or few drinks is really a questionable use of investor's funds.

Nice! Knew what a fullstack programner was so I was thinking it might be along those lines. As was mentioned before, more often than not, startups have limited funding and can't afford both a UX guy and designer. Full stack for the budget! FTB?

I'm talking about all these Tony Robbins wannabes and content companies using startup/entrepreneurship as an angle.

Useful voices: 37signals folks, Eris Reiss, HBR, anyone here, etc.

Not useful voices: Inc.com, Forbes.com, Random dude running on investment alone, linkbait like "<insert superlative> <noun> for <insert phrase about startups or entrepreneurship>".

I'm Not Japanese 14 years ago

Lifehacker and other multinational blogs should take note as well.

The cynic in me wants to tell you that you'll only learn Japanese better if you immerse yourself ;)

I'd sooner be called "janitor" and receive fair share than have a title and less.

But your point is depressingly common, especially with the Rocket Internet CEOs/co-founders who receive less than 5% for anything the Samwer Brothers try cloning.

CEO's join companies after they've been around for years to earn valuable sums of money for the skilled work and long hours they put in. It motivates them to turn around the company. It's not about the % they earn it's about the return they get.

You deserve just as much motivation as they do for the sacrifice you're making and asking less than 1/3 is wasting your time. The worst they can do is fire you so you can make more money. That's when you start your own clone if you didn't sign a non-compete contract. And if you did, work for what you deserve elsewhere until it ends and then invest all your newly earned savings into building the better product.

"...while the CEO(non-technical) was reading blogs and plotting strategy for a yet non-existent product." "...he would come up with strategic personal inputs to magically transform the product into a unicorn, without backing it with any arguments."

This is exactly why I will never again join a startup founded by a business guy with no technical background or willingness to learn.

"At the end of the day, their job will only be transforming my thoughts into code."

Having joined a startup and worked with an outsourced team of Indian developers I can tell you this is an inefficient way to look at things.

You'll eventually end up paying higher rates for good devs to write good code and waste valuable time and money on those transforming your thoughts into code.

I find most startup guys to be complete douchebags that just want to profit off the hard work of more competent and talented individuals. That or have the fancy title.

This is based on two experiences of being the nice guy whose skills/connections were wanted. Shame on me for being trusting, I know.

I've been doing ruby on rails development building a web app for 3 months now and use the below which weren't too hard to pickup and assist noobs like us.

iTerm2 terminal replacement http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

SublimeText editor http://www.sublimetext.com/

Solarized themes (terminal defaults burn your eyes out) http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

Keyboard-based window moving/resizing tool http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

If you're planning on doing Ruby on Rails web dev then get this 1-click installer to simplify setup: http://railsinstaller.org/