visakanv

Thanks for sharing!

you can follow 0HP on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/0x49fa98

If you look at the features pages of providers, most tools appear the same. But in practice, there are meaningful differences. Each email-sending tool has a different “product DNA”. There’s typically one thing they’re great for, and are the other use-cases are often bolted on – which is extremely frustrating for users with specific needs.

There's an interesting discussion to be had here about what are the things exactly that influence "product DNA". I'm guessing it's mostly... founder personality? And what their priorities are?

And some people will still probably die at 5mph!

Relevant XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/1227/

People making YouTube videos to teach strangers how to do things is one of my favorite things about the human species :')

I would love this

The best way to meet people is not "I'm looking to meet people" – because then those events and spaces get filled with social outcasts and creepy folks.

The best way to meet people is to look for activity groups, meetups and so on. People with common interests. I'd even argue that this is actually a better way to find romantic partners, than to signal "I am looking for a romantic partner" (unless you're above-average in attractiveness).

and the only human interaction are the cashiers at the grocery store

Why is that? Even Elon Musk spends times with his kids. What's keeping you from spending time with people you care about?

That's a really cool story. I'd love to read about your experiences in greater detail. Any chance you might have a blog?

Why don't people just explain it with actual computers instead of pizza?

People use mental models and heuristics and metaphors to make sense of all sorts of things. Very smart people do this, too.

Simplified maps can have their uses, even when you might personally be comfortable with a more complicated one.

I sell t-shirts on the side. As a person who makes/sells t-shirts and uses apps (and only occasionally pays for them), here's how I think about it:

It's not about the skills required to make a t-shirt or app. Consumers don't care about that. All they care about is whether or not they're going to be using it. I'm usually hesitant to pay for apps because I don't know if I'm going to use them more than a couple of times. (Exception: I paid like $100 for Things 2 and 3, after using them during the free trial and realizing I loved them and was going to keep using them. And I have.)

It's easy to look at a t-shirt and think "Oh golly, I'm going to wear this all the time!"

Another really common reason people buy t-shirts is as gifts. I wonder if there's any corollary to that in the app world. Can people buy apps as gifts for friends? People will definitely spend ~$10 to send a friend a download link to gag app that mocks them, I bet.

SW binge?

She was the bullet in the gun that Uber held to its own head; they could've avoided it by not being a shitty place for women to work

History is always a little murkier than stated – it probably started out as something and then found its 'product/market fit' serving Amazon.

Steve Yegge's famous essay covers it quite well, I think: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

  1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

  2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

  3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed:  no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever.  The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

  4) It doesn't matter what technology they use.  HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter.  Bezos doesn't care.

  5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable.  That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world.  No exceptions.

  6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

  7) Thank you; have a nice day!

"There will be web dialtone everywhere." – Steve Jobs, 1996

– https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/

Where's the hostility?

There was a period of time where I used both MySpace and Facebook, and preferred MySpace – but the user experience kept getting shittier, it kept getting laggier, spammier... MySpace killed itself

Damn, that's fantastic. I'm using that from now on.

The options you have in jail typically have shitty utility values, so no.

I meant boredom in a general sense, where you have control over your variables (ie you're bored by yourself, with yourself, at home).

If you're bored at work, that's a little more complicated. It depends on the context you're in. Is there "nothing to do", or is there NOTHING TO DO? (I experienced the latter context when I was in the military. In that situation, the best thing you can do is maybe read a book if you have one, or meditate and/or reflect on your life). You might have nothing to do if you were say, in some dead-end minimum wage job.

But if you're working in some sort of professional setting, there's almost always something you can do. You can learn more about the organization you're in. You can build relationships with other people. You can help other people out. You can ask your manager for more work.

In the worst case, if there's really nothing you can do, and if it's bothering you, you could quit and find a better job where there are actually things to do.

I think a lot about the inverse Hanlon's razor, which is "if you want to do something malicious, make sure you can get away with attributing it to stupidity".

I'm of the opinion that it's useful to make a distinction between boredom and idleness. Idleness can be good (Bertrand Russell wrote an essay about this, which OP might be riffing off of), but boredom, in my opinion, is almost always not.

The article also seems to imply that boredom is some sort of ineffable, indescribable thing. I think it's actually quite describable:

Boredom (often described as “I have nothing to do / wear / watch / read”) is a bug we encounter when…

1- a tired mind 2- attempts to find an optimal solution 3- in a cluttered space 4- with options that have poorly-defined utility-values.

The solution, then, is to…

1. rest 2. satisfice 3. declutter 4. define your utility-values more precisely

Nothing will change (significantly) until twitters bottom line (user engagement as a proxy for ad money) changes.

This has been a problem for media since the dawn of man, I wonder if we can really solve it within our lifetimes. Seems improbable.

Children are messy and un-Apple-like. Can you imagine an Apple-themed childcare center?

I'm trying to imagine one now, with snooty little kids in black turtlenecks.

5%? $250,000,000 a year to maintain a building? I don't know anything about building maintenance costs, but a quarter of a billion dollars a year seems a little excessive. How do you arrive at that figure?

As a 3rd party observer with no stake in either the US or China, I wonder how the USA would react if China was the #1 in the world economically, and exporting Facebook, Boeing, etc. I imagine we'd see some American protectionism.

This is part of why I'm very excited for VR. Our system of navigating the web as pages on screens is incredibly limited. Once we can navigate content in space (think video games – you could still drop me anywhere in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and I'd be able to navigate to any other point on the map from memory), we'll open up all sorts of interesting new possibilities.

he couldn’t have known how comedians would come to double, in a culture saturated with information, as journalists

Also – comedians have been truth-tellers since the days of court jesters.

If anything the case for science and facts is better than ever before in history.

Oh man, you just reminded me of this really depressing passage I read in a book about biology that I had put out of mind. A career scientist was complaining about how basically he got into science hoping to do science, but witnessed decades of academic politics hampering scientific progress. It's distressing to think about how our own nature holds us back.