cwilson

This.

Especially if said agency can feed you work so you don't have to do any of the hustling/selling. It's a huge peace of mind and you get to stay 95% billable.

Yep, I had to do exactly this here in Austin. I literally went door to door, met many of my neighbors for the first time, and mentioned that we were only a few signatures away from fiber in our neighborhood. Even after getting all of the signatures we have to wait until June for our install, which kind of sucks, but it's better than continuing to deal with Time Warner.

I was one of those people who loved Wave and used it constantly. I was so sad to see it get shut down. Very happy to see Lars doing something new!

Wouldn't work. Shotgun shells spray in a cone shape.

I think one thing that is happening here is that certain types of startups are throwing money at problems that need to be solved in order to grow enough that raising additional funds is easy and/or not required.

An example would be that the founding team isn't skilled enough to get through the product market fit stage, so they hire in order to fill those gaps. Or maybe it's a chicken & egg problem, which often requires lots of time and luck to crack.

With the high salary requirements that engineers and designers have today, especially in Silicon Valley, this means burn-rates get very high very fast, even with only a few employees.

I remember five years ago in most cases you'd take a major salary cut (which was made up for in equity) when joining a startup as a first hire. You took a big risk to be employee number one or two. These days the landscape is so competitive you not only get equity, but a great salary as well.

I wonder if this has something to do with what you're hinting at?

I really disliked the negativity and I know many others who agreed and also deleted the app. It just wasn't worth it. I'm not at all surprised they are struggling.

Congrats to them all!

I've known Ilya as a friend for a few years now and current/future YC startups are going to be very lucky to have him around. He's an extremely intelligent and humble guy.

I traveled all around South America for six months and spent maybe 10k total on the trip and I wasn't living frugally at all. I stayed in Airbnb's over hostels, ate good food often, and went on lots of paid excursions. I probably could have spent 5k total if I did the hostel thing, ate on the cheap, and didn't pay for any tourist activities.

My point is you can travel on the cheap if you put effort into it, especially in South America. Traveling in Europe? Sure, that's going to be just as expensive if not more than simply living day to day in the states. There are definitely places you can travel without making a six figure salary however.

That's crazy that I never heard about it. Is it a recent thing? Very cool that it has taken off regardless, and I suppose serves as a proof of concept for Lyft/Uber.

The thing is, I've never heard that term until now. I lived in the DC area for two years and worked with quite a few commuters. It's cool that it's a concept but there hasn't been mainstream adoption to the point where it's as easy as an app in your pocket until now.

If a tree falls in the woods...

We use both at work (along with Pixate depending on the situation) and based on conversations I had today with our IX guys the main difference seems to be that Form makes it easy to mirror on your phone and actually play with the interactions, where as you can't do that with Quartz/Origami (the playing with interactions). I'm sure there are other differences as well (I'll see if one of our guys will come and comment here), but at the end of the day they both seem to have their place depending on the situation.

I definitely agree it's 100x better than PSD/static mocks however and I hope Google continues to put resources into this.

I think the major difference is now everyone is doing those things, not just the minority of us who knew how or cared enough to figure it out. So maybe the innovation is the refinement of all of these technologies that made them so accessible.

I really don't think being terrified of competition is a good reason to create something, so I hope that's not why they are doing this.

I'm struggling to find a reason why ordering anything via Echo is a good idea. I wouldn't use Siri to order anything, so I'm not sure why I'd want to do this either. I like to research things before I buy them and so do most Amazon users (even if it's a quick glimpse at the overall rating). Do I have to have a long Q/A session with Echo to determine which specific type of socks I'd like it to order? It seems faster to just do this myself via my phone or laptop.

I'm not going to switch to Google Shopping because I can tell my phone to order things. I use Amazon because Amazon is the best place to buy things (for numerous reasons), and until that changes talking to my phone or a device in my house ins't going to effect this decision.

This just feels like a solution that no one was asking for, and that's generally the worst kind of product.

Edit: After multiple people pointed out that this WOULD be useful for re-ordering certain types of things (mainly food/kitchen stuff), I agree it would be useful for that purpose. That said, I think Amazon should be marketing this with that in mind, and the first place this should live is your kitchen, not your living room.

Have you taken a look at Blossom as well? A few friends were telling me they have a killer Github integration.

I just tossed out 30 because it's a nice number and seems reasonable. You are right however that 45 minutes is the standard. I think you'd actually see benefits from doing high intensity cardio for 30 minutes however. At the very least it's so much better than 7.

At the end of the day, if 7 minutes of cardio is all you can stand to do, you're screwed.

Again, the only people 7 minutes of essentially cardio is going to benefit are people who are insanely out of shape. The second you're just in "ok" shape is the second 7 minutes is basically worthless to to you.

I really hate that this 7 minute workout thing is becoming a trend. It's misleading in its benefits. If everyone writing or talking about it wants to clarify and say it's only beneficial for people who are dangerously out of shape, fine, but otherwise it's stupid. Workout for 30 minutes. Please.

The 7 minute workout is for people who want to feel like they are working out with minimal effort. It's kind of ridiculous. I tried this for a few weeks 4 times a week and saw/felt almost no benefit. Then I upped it to a 30 minute workout using the same set of exercises and saw quite a bit of progress.

That's really the difference. You need your heart-rate pumping for 30 minutes to really see benefits from this, not for 7 minutes. I doubt any "scientific" claims that 7 minutes a few times a week is all the exercise someone needs.

At the very least double it. Do 14 minutes. I remember trying this while out of shape (hadn't done any intense exercise in months) and with 7 minutes I barely broke a sweat. Unless you're morbidly obese you need to do more than this.

If you really want a god exercise buy some weights or go to the gym. Moving around really heavy objects for 30 - 45 minutes is the best bang for your buck workout you can get.

I've been using this for the last 4 hours or so. I closed the old gmail in my browser and swapped default apps on my phone.

My quick thoughts on the iPhone app:

Good overall. It's just as good as most of the new line of productivity focused apps that have been released (and acquired) over the last year.

My quick thoughts on the web interface (inbox.google.com):

This is where it's really shining for me. Finally email doesn't feel like a spreadsheet with buttons anymore. It feels like Gmail should feel in 2014. Now that I've started using this, it would feel painful to go back to normal Gmail. You just kind of have to start using it to understand, but I really like it.

All of the new features (reminders, pinning emails, bundles, and one-button archiving of bundles like promotions and forums) are great . I've used almost every new feature already and they all feel like a natural part of a flow.

The only nitpick I have at the moment is the integrated chat in the web interface. It's defaulted to the Hangouts style chat, which I'm not a huge fan of. In old Gmail you have a choice of using the normal version of chat or Hangouts chat, and I've always turned off Hangouts chat. I really wish you could do that here, but I'm not seeing an option for it and my guess is there will never be one.

Overall however I'm really happy with this new version of Gmail and will continue to use it everyday.

If you enjoyed this read you should watch the movie "Her" by Spike Jonze, as mentioned in the article. It hits quite heavily on the same theme (though more focused on romantic relationships with AI) and offers a pretty realistic glimpse of what this technology might look like in the next 20 years. Really enjoyed the movie.

On the same note, I was talking to someone a few days ago who was telling me about how many of her girlfriends use Tinder to essentially have virtual boyfriends. She explained that in many cases they meet guys via Tinder, move to text-messaging, and the relationship never progresses to in-person meetings. They simply love having someone on the other end of their phones to talk to. The knowledge that someone is there at almost all times seems to be comforting and addicting. Kinda crazy, but again this kind of thing is only going to become more and more common due to the fact that technology is in everyone's pocket from a young age now.

The question I ended the conversation with was something along the lines of, "Do you think they care that it's an actual human on the other end? Would they be ok with really convincing AI?"

Food for thought.

It's a social network based on two promises:

1. It's beautiful, which they had to add because they knew just saying "we won't sell your data" would not go far enough. They needed that extra edge. In my humble opinion, it's actually quite ugly, so I find it pretty funny they are advertising this as a selling point.

2. They don't sell your data. We all know this is flawed because there is no promise this won't happen in the future, and to boot MOST normal people do not care about this.

Their initial launch had the right elements that allowed it to go viral and non-technical people started signing up. I would LOVE to see some stats from the Ello team around retention, as I am willing to bet a large sum of money that stat is really bad.

I've had the opposite experience. The only reason anyone I know has signed up for Ello outside of the tech world is because they saw someone else sign up and don't want to miss out on something potentially cool. That's it.

I haven't used Photoshop (and will never subscribe to any Adobe software) in over a year because there are plenty of alternatives that meet my needs, and web/graphics design is my lively-hood.

Between Sketch, Pixelmator, and just designing in CSS/HTML I do not need Photoshop.

I haven't been hampered by DRM, subscriptions, or anything else with these apps/technologies and that is because personal computing is alive and well.

We implemented Trello + Github sync with Waffle.io and it was as close to perfect we could get without spending a bunch of time writing our own code to do it. It still wasn't perfect however and I spent a lot of time making sure things were in-sync, which on a normal schedule wasn't a huge deal, but when fires popped up would become a very small priority.

I'm surprised no one has built a better way to do this. We tried syncing with Zapier first (a company I absolutely love), but if I recall correctly it was a one-way sync, and we needed it to go both ways.

100% agreed. He is one of the first to inspire me at a young age to become an entrepreneur myself, and it's stuff like this that continues to inspire me:

"That architecture is all the stuff I spent ten years ranting on this blog about, but y’all don’t listen, so I’m just going to have to build company after company that runs my own wacky operating system, and eventually you’ll catch on. It’s OK to put people first. You don’t have to be a psychopath or work people to death or create heaps of messy code or work in noisy open offices."

I'm slightly surprised by the name of this product. Do you not realize this will come across as very insulting to journalists? I have a tech journalist sitting next to me and her immediate reaction was not a good one.

So for this product to succeed we're also arguing that tablets can replace laptops? I own both for totally different reasons, and I don't think that will ever change.

Or this is just a "nice to have" accessory for tablets?

My point is this isn't really something the masses will adopt, and is instead a very luxury item for wealthy nerds (myself included). Totally fine if that's the case, I just want to understand the target market.

What problem does this solve exactly? I want to think this is really cool, but I'm having trouble convincing myself why people would buy this.

My guess is yes. Uber makes it so easy to quickly and painlessly get a ride that I find myself using the service much more often than I would a normal Taxi in the past. From casual observation I find this to be true for the majority of my friends and even family members as well.

Normal Taxi services are a pain in the ass to book, not connected to my credit card (so you have to go through the whole guilt trip for not having cash, takes longer, etc), and for whatever reason I always had bad experiences with them at least half the time. None of these things are issues with Uber, leading to much more usage on my part. It's just so damn easy, and even satisfying, to tap a few times and have a car magically show up.

Agreed, both great pieces on the problems in SF at the moment, and I definitely didn't mean to discount those details as part of our reasoning for leaving. I love San Francisco and really all of Northern California, but we're getting out of dodge before things get really out of hand. I do hope to be able to return some day.

My girlfriend and I (both in tech) have also left San Francisco as of last month, but for slightly different (but related) reasons. The 75,000 mentioned people who have moved to the bay area for tech have caused rent to rise by such a large amount, that even though we can afford to pay, it feels like a huge waste of our money. We could be spending it doing other things or just saving for our future.

Instead we'll continue to work in tech doing consulting work, but we're going try our hand at being completely nomadic while doing it (starting with Central and South America, though we'll be picking a place and staying there for a few weeks to a month at minimum). We've sold pretty much everything we own and have whittled down our belongings to a large backpack and daypack each. It feels pretty amazing to be this lightweight and mobile, and our current budget has spending about 3x less than we were while living in SF (and still living very well).