You could just pull number of google results as a proxy. You have the link to the google search now, being able to sort or filter by that would weed out a lot of junk.
Would also be nice to sort/filter by Wayback hits.
342 karma · joined February 22, 2012
Would also be nice to sort/filter by Wayback hits.
What we've settled on:
We do the video chat on an old fullscreen iMac we had lying around. My mom and each kid all have their own iPads. For the first couple of weeks we used a webwhiteboard, but the littles were having a LOT of trouble with it. It's not optimized for iPads. It's easy to click on links in the nav. Different size screens see different regions of the whiteboard. My niece and son kept clearing each other's work and causing fights.
I ended up building a little prototype for them with rails/websockets that tried to solve all the dumb stuff that makes it hard to use it on iPads. Apple really doesn't make it easy, though. You can bookmark a page to your homescreen to get rid of the Safari chrome (URL bar is the worst for 5yos), but then you can't have cookies and regular usage (maybe just while fullscreen?) will prompt you that the webpage is trying to steal your passwords (fake keyboard warning). Guided access gets rid of most of the obnoxious gestures they were triggering by accident. I disabled most of the multi-touch events in javascript.
I fixed the board size with selectable orientation (portrait/landscape) and set it to scale + aspect-fits to everyone's device. I added a simple host/guest permission model so my mom has a few teacher permissions that the kids don't have. She can either be in teacher mode (she can draw/clear, they can't), class mode (anyone can draw/clear), or student mode where each kid gets their own private board that she can swap between (she can still draw/clear on student boards).
I was starting to work on more teaching features -- the ability for her to save/load sketches so she could do lesson plans ahead of time, the ability for her to "broadcast" saved boards to the student boards so she could make assignments for each 5yo to fill out. We had kind of a rough stretch where one of the kids or the other would forget their tablet for about a week, though, and my mom got fed up and just ordered them workbooks for all 3 of them that they could do together.
It's still running on Heroku, but I haven't been working on it much lately.
http://yiayiaboard.herokuapp.com/rooms/sLZqbw2KHWi
I think this is the right model for small-class whiteboards, but I think you'd have to build a native solution to make it usable for kids that small.
When it worked, it was pretty magical!
Figured out how to properly use the bread machine (making approx 1 loaf a day, currently have carrot cake going).
Currently working on a proof of concept for a desktop version of a web business I own.
8-year-old is super obsessed with primitive tech and has been digging up clay out of the back yard. I imagine we'll be making a kiln this weekend and eventually bricks.
I get that it's trying to be "dumb components" but maybe that's an invalid starting point?
I agree with this sentiment but draw a different conclusion. Stepping outside of your comfort zone as a hunter gatherer was a lot more dangerous -- new terrains, new plants that could be poisonous, new animals that could kill you. Tipping wrong or sticking your chopsticks in your rice bowl is unlikely to lead to death or dismemberment, but it's possible our nervous system is trained to send signals that it might.
If you’re technical yourself, build it for no cost and save the $7,500. If you’re deciding between buy/build, it’s a wash on this imaginary scenario so do whatever you like better.
The broad categories I use professionally are office crap, web dev, and creative tools. Macs used to suck at the first and rule the last two, but they've really fallen behind in the last few years. The new macbook pro looks like a good machine, but I switched to a gaming laptop to get a better GPU and 64gb of RAM. This (2-year-old) machine does everything I need it to do and I'm now at a point where Macs are going to have to do something pretty spectacular to get me to switch back (or have Windows screw up in a comparable way to what Apple has done the last few years).
What's the point of all this? I think this article misses the boat pretty badly on who Micrsoft's talking to when it says it loves linux. It's talking to web devs like me who work and deploy to linux, not software philosophers who want to debate the meaning of free. From my point of view, they're doing great right now.
Currently at 8 doors (that SFH, a tri, a quad), but now that we live in the area I typically just run one or two at a time in a spreadsheet instead of cranking through 100 in one go.
I find the list much more interesting than the insurance (I'm a big boy who can do my own risk evaluation). I only invest in one market, though (Atlanta), so not sure I would pay $100 for a nationwide list.
How do your internal valuations compare to the Zestimates? Zillow's data is better than nothing, but I know a lot of folks track their net worth through things like Mint/Personal Capital who might be interested in a more accurate daily/weekly/monthly valuation tool. I feel like that's how Zillow got their initial users ("You can look up the price of any house!") and if you could figure out a way to expose that data you might be able to get good leads out of it.
What's to stop someone from signing up for the list and just buying a property on their own? (i.e. What perks are you offering that make it worth doing the deal through you? Negotiations? Acting as a buyer's agent?)
As a data point, I used to have a ruby script that would take a bunch of MLS IDs and go pull a ton of facts from Zillow and a few other sources. I would have my realtor set up a high-level search (i.e. SFH in these areas under $500k) and then take their daily emails and run them through my script to identify potentially "undervalued" properties. I still had to hand-check them after, but it was a pretty useful second filter (the MLS search being the first).
I didn’t say it was the wrong choice or even a bad choice, just that I was surprised. Ruby and jquery are certainly modern technologies.
My surprise was more a factor that maybe I had too high of an impression of LS (and I’m still a fan!). The blogs/tweets I’ve seen from afar made it seem more like a rigorous “be a working software engineer” curriculum. If their candidates are ONLY suited for a node/react stack that seems like a pretty dangerous/inflexible hire. TBF this was for folks who haven’t graduated yet, so maybe they go wider on their final few months. As a person who hires engineers, I don’t want someone who only knows one stack. I want smart people who can solve problems in any stack that gets thrown at them (even if they’re junior and I need to hold their hands a bit).
I’ve inherited a ton of backbone, angular, react projects and it’s always a pain sourcing devs for whatever random thing a project was written in 1-8 years ago. Jquery is just jquery and you can put anyone on it.
EXCEPT I reached out to the lambda school contractor program for a work project and was pretty shocked they only do node+react.
I run a video rendering service that currently uploads previews (call it 5-10mb) to S3 for ~3 days and then deletes them. Finished renders (~50-200mb) are stored for 2 weeks. I upload 500-1000 new files a day.
Amazon just bills me for this once a month. Would I need to load up a wallet and prepay each of these contracts individually? How would I send out a download link or play a video in a browser?
Other than that I love having a big kitchen, being able to prep food + watch TV. We barely use our dining table (we have a nice bar around our kitchen).
My strategy for generating puzzles was island based. I had a board checker that would scan through the grid and place all empty spaces that could be reached contiguously into a single “island.” I would then pick a random island (the first island was always the full grid), pick a random tile in the island, pick a random number with a max value of either the puzzle’s max (up to 8), and then drunk walk outward. In the event the drunk walk got “stuck” it would just pick a different starting tile within that island.
Recompute islands and repeat until there are no spaces left. Island with only 1 square are “dead” and just get filled in with blocker tiles.
Each puzzle had many solutions, but because there was always a “right” pregenerated solution we could give hints based on the canonical solution.
How did you settle on a 3-5x return cap? Are you planning to tune that over time? Did you consider a graded return schedule? I don't know if you've published your profit share or if that varies by deal, but I'm curious if something like 25% up until 100% recoup, 10% up to 200%, 5% up to 3-5x target would compare to a flat 10-15% or whatever.
As a point of comparison, I used a portfolio loan to buy a business to run as a side project. The debt service on ~$125k is variable but roughly $500/month. At time of purchase that was about 20% of net, but that number will go down as the debt is paid and revenue grows. If I pay it off in ~5 years the total debt service will be in the range of $20-$30k... BUT that means almost all net is going to pay down the debt vs reinvesting in the business.
I know you're targeting more bootstrappers who want to go full time, but if this type of funding were available for side hustle acquisitions I'd probably consider it pretty strongly instead of taking on a bunch of personal risk (even though the rewards for me become less on paper).
Most of the competitors are SAAS and geared at agencies. I’m basically the low end of the market, but YouTubers just starting out don’t need multiple videos for $30/month.
I made about $13k off it, which sounds good but was really only about $20/hour.
Hoping to grow it quite a bit this year and then start offloading tasks. I don’t know if I can ever get it truly passive, but that’s the dream.
It's profitable month-to-month, but until it recoups the purchase price I'm thinking of it as a really expensive hobby. I recently purchased a better domain (https://intromaker.com), and at some point in the future I'm planning to build a more dynamic render engine and do some sort of subscription service (less targeted at youtubers and more geared towards agencies).
You'd almost need a skills camp before the bootcamp that would be less choosy and take the top 20-30% of those students into a further bootcamp... but at that point the economics start to break down (why it'd likely need to be pro-bono).
Anyway, that was a big tangent! I think what you're doing is interesting. Do you have a twitter account set up if we're interested in following along?