AndyParkinson

Great review/post.

Remote work is the way of the future. A recent study from of IBM employees showed that if employees have a modest commute then they only need to work 38 hours/week before they start to have work/life balance issues.

If employees work for a company that allows them to telecommute, they can work almost 60 hours per week before running in to work/life balance issues. That's a big deal.

(That's not to say you should put in 60 hour weeks if you can help it, but it highlights the negative effects a commute has on people and their happiness in life.)

What if delegation is your weakness (as it is for most of us)?

I really hope I can help. It's so important and rarely talked about in our community.

That'll change. Someone is building out the identity right now. But I have a thing for monkeys. Don't judge.

I think I answered that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600121

There are people out there who love the bloggers/writers they follow and will support them. A newsletter is a great way to trade exclusive access for money.

The kind of newsletters that publishers will use HappyLetter for aren't the marketingy kind you're used to. These publishers probably won't have a different product to sell where a newsletter is part of a lead scoring or funnel process. To them, the newsletter is the product.

I'm glad you liked it!

I have a "day job". I run another company with a dozen employees. I love creating things, too. I'm like a construction foreman that loves what he does so much that he builds birdhouses on the weekends. Most of the work was done in the morning, over the weekend or at night while watching MasterChef on Hulu with my wife.

I've been following Patrick Rhone for years. He was begging for a letter.ly replacement for a while. Each time he asked, I always thought it was fascinating that no one was taking him up on it.

I built HappyLetter for the fun and sport of it. I saw it as an opportunity to practice some things I need to do more often and better, like writing, sharing, teaching, being transparent, accepting constraints, accepting perfection isn't always necessary, etc. I'm as proud of the HappyLetter blog as I am the product. There are many hard-learned lessons buried in those posts.

I've built many things like HappyLetter that never saw the light of day. Blogging about it forced me to ship.

Live-blogging was way more helpful to the development process than I ever imagined it would be.

Even if you don't feel comfortable sharing everything in public, I'd keep a private journal and write through any issues that are stopping you from moving forward.

So far after 8 hours, one of HappyLetter's customers has 13 subscribers. They've only announced their letter on Twitter and ADN. Many of the Gruber-inspired school of bloggers try to minimize ads and rely on direct support from their readers. I think newsletters are a (classy) way that their readers can support them.

The problem is the very, very skilled hedge fund and institutional investors that are capable of moving a stock to stratospheric heights are judged on their performance on a month-to-month basis. The price action and patterns and trading Gods have lead them to believe that in the short-term AAPL is not going to go up very quickly (until it does, more on that later.)

Apple has essentially been going sideways for the last 6-7 months. While this makes Apple a bad trade, it doesn't mean Apple is bad investment. Zaky is saying that in 3 years Apple will be worth significantly more and thats hard to argue with. Those that have argued seemed to be completely out of touch with the company and focused on silly things like "Apple is not spending money on R&D because R&D expense dropping if taken as a percentage of revenue."

Speculators and traders aim to buy high and sell higher. Lots of money is sitting on the sidelines waiting for Apple to reach a new all-time high on above average volume before they pounce. Apple hasn't made a new high since February. I suspect these "very, very skilled" traders and speculators will jump back on board if and when Apple blows past $365.

If AAPL goes sideways for months at a time for months at a time, as it is apt to do, then these "skilled" pros take their money and put it in more exciting places until the stock comes back to life again.

Note that this "buy high/sell higher" is the exact opposite approach of long-term-minded Graham/Buffett value investors. While the stock is going through these periods of consolidation, it makes for a perfect time for long-term, individual investors to buy a piece of a great company at a ridiculously cheap price and not have to think about their money more than a few times a year for a very long time.

The link to the DOL is broken. Any chance you can give the name of the "smell test"?

I started doing web development as a consultant at 16. I didn't care much about going straight to a university while I was at High School and I had about a 3.0. I never bothered taking the SATs.

I went to community college just to see if I could get into the UCLA CS program after 2 years. I did, and then I dropped out after a semester to shift my consulting business to product development. This was about 8 years ago and it was the best decision I've ever made.

The main turning point for me was a) I realized anything I actually used in my business I learned on my own, and b) I never want to think I can "just get a real job" if what I'm doing doesn't work out. Incidentally, my lack of a degree has never gotten in the way of an opportunity.

One argument for going to school is you get access to people you might not get access to otherwise. I say if you know what you want, and who can help you get there, you'll find a way to get access to the people you need. Especially if you're young. Being young is a huge advantage when looking for help if you can shut up and be humble when asking for it.

That said, I think having a business degree might have been useful. The problem there is that smart people can figure out the nuts and bolts of business as challenges of running a business present themselves.

The nuts and bolts of managing/leading/inspiring others is another story. Sadly they don't seem to teach that in business school. Even if they did, it wouldn't make it much easier. You have to just do it for a while and stay committed to learning it while you go through hell for the first couple years.

It's really a personal decision. Personally, if I could do it all over again I wouldn't waste the 3 years that I did. Instead I'd get a few roommates who attend some school and a campus apartment so I can have the "social experience" while I work on my own stuff during the day.

Whether this is true or not, it's a bit nutty to risk the fate of my livelihood on Google ads because Google is saying I "can".

And in other news, my barber always thinks I need a haircut, and my mechanic always finds something wrong with my car that needs to be fixed.

Interesting.

As I explore, prompting seems > open ended for feedback. Thanks for the suggestion.

Is that people who join a beta? Or is that people who sign up to be notified of when the beta opens up (as is our case)?

I bought http://properprocess.com for $900 from squatters because it was an exact match. I don't think I'd pay much more than that.

I was going to go with http://properprocesshq.com (which I also own) until I spoke with some clients that use our Basecamp and Campfire. They say its near impossible for them to remember where to go. They know its (someword).campfire(something).com but have difficulty remembering someword and something if they ever need to access from home... Right then and there I bit the bullet and paid up.

Finally someone is building something that has the potential to be the next Google...

I have thought a lot about this whole email-based service thing and its viability as a business. I'm not sure its something I'd want to go into.

I made something that is uses email for 95% of my interactions with it. It allows me to remove some friction between email and other activities by setting up forwarding addresses that can be configured to do one of three things:

1) Forward a receipt to a unique address that will convert the receipt to a pdf and forward the pdf as an attachment on to our bookkeeper.

2) Forward any email to a unique address and my tool will post the email + attachments to a Campfire room that is associated with the unique address.

3) Forward any email + attachments to a unique address and the email will be converted to PDF, then posted with the attachments to a folder in my Dropbox account that I associated with the address.

It is incredibly useful. It saves me and my people minutes of time every day and I've considered releasing it to the masses.

Here's the rub...I'm not interested in just giving it away since its a set it and "it just works" solution, so advertising is unlikely to cover hosting, let alone support or ongoing development. People may pay for it, but there are too many examples of mostly email-based services going belly up.

I believe these email-type services are just hard to monetize, even if they are useful and in demand. It is hard to keep something going when each new user means more money down the tube.

I believe win for many would be to quit their job and work for themselves instead. You know.. Bunting to get to first instead of going for the grand slam. I can see how you can bunt against Amazon and make it to first. Hitting a grand slam? Not so much.

And selling squishy thingies is optional.

I follow Vuru because (I thought) they were working on some Value Investing goodness and they tend to have some good insights.

From the title of this article in particular, I thought they were actually going to rip him a new one. I kept waiting for some snarky comments or a "GOTCHA!" and was disappointed to find none.

The fact is that "fitty" convinced a group of unsophisticated Twitter followers to gamble in the market by buying a highly speculative stock that they don't understand. He shouldn't be praised for getting a 240% return for that. He's a smart guy, but this H&H thing is a terrible example of investing to inspire an article.

I doubt it. While logic might support this, the user experience won't.

The beauty of 3G iPad is the instant on, instant access nature of the connection. Currently getting a connection on my Mac via iPhone tethering takes about 20-30 seconds. I'd rather pay $14.99 and have it all the time, like I do on the iPad. The experience is far superior.

Well, thats true. And humans are loss-hating creatures, so we tend to worry about that side of things.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't care either way.

Am I the only one who thinks this is pointless? I don't trade billions of dollars of equities, but I am a long-term investor.

One of my big rules as a long-term investor is that I can't sweat the 1/8ths and 1/4ths (borrowed from Philip Fisher). The time I spend worrying about these high frequency traders getting a few extra cents out of me is time wasted finding great companies that are selling at a discount.

Sure... Its annoying, but if you really are a long-term investor a few tenths of a percent won't kill you.

https://github.com/37signals/wysihat Pretty sure thats what they use.

https://github.com/80beans/wysihat-engine might help too.

I use http://balsamiq.com and love it.

It is.

Size is Buffett's anchor now. If you give him a small amount of money, say $50Million, I think he'd do wonders with it.

I model my investing style after what he was doing about 10 years into his career and its worked out well for me with very little stress. The only reason I sell is if I find something that looks like a better value, but even if I'm right to move elsewhere the taxes make me question my decision every time.

Its a bit meta and hard to swallow for a geek like me, but somehow I actually get what he's saying.

I believe the point that Brooks is trying to make is that the package and the content come together as one to convey the message as the author intended to convey it.

I have a few places that I write and I've been going through the process of putting a lot of thought into redesigning them to better match the tone and feel that I want each place to convey. Part of that process is making sure the content is clear and easy to read. The sidebar elements are not overly distracting, yet they do not disappear, etc.

Its interesting to read the same thing I wrote in different themes as it does seem to feel different for some inexplicable reason.

I call BS on him. No way he can be as savvy a marketer as he claims and not know the implications of getting caught for what he's doing...

When I'm working on what I love when I want to and without feeling like I have to. In other words, finding freedom.

While this is an anecdotal take on the whole topic of selection, there is research out there that supports this (sort of).

Meta data analysis from thousands of studies shows that there is essentially 0 correlation between where someone went to school (or their GPA) and how well they perform on the job once hired. See https://skitch.com/andyparkinson/reqfj/emotional-intelligenc... for a table of methods of selection and their respective validities.

As you can see, the best thing you can do pre-hire is to have someone complete a work-simulation. If you're hiring a mechanic to fix transmissions, give them a broken transmission and a set time period to fix it. If you're hiring a rails developer, give them a small project that takes a few hours to do and see what happens. It is amazing how much you'll learn about that person in those few hours. You'll see how he codes, communicates, etc. The more you can try before you commit the better.

Here's a simple example... When we hire front-end developers, we have a standard PSD file that we hand applicants and give them 2 hours to slice using tableless html/css. No matter how much I fall in love someone when I interview them, the results of this simple exercise will always sober me up (or throw me head over heals). Its gotten to the point where I don't even want to spend more than a few minutes talking front-end developers until I see the results of this exercise.

Its not perfect. The correlation between results and success is still very weak, but its the best we have.