The inductive charging hack is SO freaking awesome. I am going to have a base-station on my desk for it to land on and charge.
3,695 karma · joined April 11, 2009
Completely flat design has no sense of layers or depth. This is important because users need to know where they are at any given time within your application, they will feel lost otherwise.
Completely flat design is also flawed when it comes to call to actions and various controls. Sure, a big red button in a sea of gray stands out, even if flat. The problem is when you can't have just one big red button (or you don't want a rainbow of buttons, which will look awful). You need your call to actions to stand out, and a perfect method of doing this is by giving said button depth or weight. It suddenly stands out from the flat design around it.
While I love the initial Metro start screen experience, two things really drive me crazy:
1. Metro just seems tacked on. Why can't I stay within that experience all the time? Instead I'm ejected to the normal Windows desktop that is essentially what I was using on Windows XP years ago. It's like they didn't have the balls to go all the way, and coming from Apple that drives me crazy.
2. It's very easy to get lost in Metro once you start clicking around. There is generally never an obvious way to get back to where you were previously due to the absence of any depth, breadcrumbs, or even just a "back" button. Hell, you can't even right click and go back.
I never thought I'd suggest watching anime on Hacker News, but this topic proved to be the exception.
Shouldn't he have just toned down the extra lighting indoors, knowing 48FPS was going to pick up more detail?
I highly suggest giving it a a read or scan. It's very well written (fun to read, he's a great writer), short, and very to the point. He applies the 80/20 rule to working out, your body, your diet, and so forth.
My favorite section is how to build what he calls an "engineer bag", which costs a total of around $10 and replacing pretty much all gym equipment.
If Apple's marketing were not key to its business why would they have spent over $1 billion on iPhone and iPad marketing since launching the devices (Google it)? Have you spoken with a teenager lately? Every single one of my younger siblings (1 in middle school, 2 in highschool) have an iPhone. They have an iPhone because their friends all have iPhones, because it's cool to have iPhones. They don't care about anything else.
So again, while your points are solid, discounting marketing all-together is very silly.
Death can be alluded in many different ways, depending on the nature of your business, but it usually means making money, hitting a milestone that allows you to raise money, acquiring users, and so forth.
Once your company evolves, and has beaten death for the foreseeable future, a new set of metrics come into play and are now the most important. These may be similar to the death-evading set above, or they may be something new like increasing revenue, retaining users, increasing engagement, optimizing CLV, and so forth.
The point? If a metric means your company is not dying, or your company is growing, it matters. If it doesn't fit into those buckets? Probably doesn't matter.
You may already be doing this, but then you need to add/build the following:
- A way to actually take/manage payments from your neighbors.
- A way to manage access to the Wifi network (it's kind of like Lockitron for your wifi network in this way)
Once you have the idea simplified and the tools required to make this work end-to-end, as a potential user I'd rename my network to "RENT ME: Awesome Wifi Network" and see what happens.
Food for thought!
This required that another player literally GIVE me his or her items. As in, I could run off with them if I wanted. There was no trade window that allowed me to repair their items without actually taking them. They had to trust that I would give their items back after repairing them.
I found this absolutely fascinating (and still do) for multiple reasons:
1. Over time you built up a reputation of being trustworthy. At first people would only give a smith they didn't know crappy items, but as you became more trustworthy and well known they would start to hand over their rare items for repair. I was literally building a reputation in an online game, in a real community, for providing a quality service (think about the impact this likely had on a 14 year old, who at that time had no idea what having a job, or building a reputation, was like).
2. Items HAD to be repaired in UO, so this wasn't something players could get around (unless they wanted to train up that skill themselves, and you were limited on how many skills you could train to their max level at any given time). You simply had to trust a blacksmith in order to repair your items. After players came back to town after long sessions of dungeon crawling and killing monsters (in many cases because their armor was in need of repair), they would funnel back into town and the first stop was generally to get repairs.
3. For whatever reason everyone stuck to a tips based system. I don't remember a market rate at any time for repairs that players set as a community. It was just assumed you tipped your smith.
4. The better armor/weapons you personally wore while smithing, the more likely you'd get customers who had better weapons/armor, resulting in higher tips (because they likely had more money). It was my first experience with advertising and building a personal brand.
This is just a taste of why UO was such an amazing game and social experiment. It's a shame nothing has come close to recreating such an experience (EVE Online being an exception, but it still falls short in many ways).
If I had to pick a second fondest aspect of the game, I'd probably say Rune Books. You could "mark" runes in the game with a spell, which coded that rune with the location you were standing in when you marked it, which you could then place in a book. You could then travel back to that exact location at will, at the cost of a spell and its required reagents (hell, the reagents system was amazing as well!). Players made Rune Books of all the towns, dungeons, and crazy hidden locations (or their own homes, favorite shops, etc) for personal use, but also to sell so other players didn't have to make them on their own (as it would require a significant amount of traveling on foot to do so). I remember being very fond of my Rune Book collection.
What a game.
I was 14 at the time I believe. I used my dad's Paypal account that I had convinced him to get months before, so he had never used it, and then had to explain how I made $800 on the Internet selling virtual goods. My parents insisted I was actually selling drugs for a good month.
Good times.
From what I can tell, and personal experience, 3 founders seems to be a very good balance.
Very well done for a "side project".
This is nicely done. I'll be giving it a shot as a tab that never closes.
- They are both well backed (Heroku by Salesforce money/profits, Parse by great investors), have awesome founders, talented employees, and are both YC companies.
- Parse is pretty much 100% mobile focused. This is their bread and butter.
- Heroku is Polyglot and spans dozens of platforms on multiple OS's, with no real focus.
I think this comes down to where you run the rest of your stack, how tightly you want things integrated, and which service is the easiest to use and most reliable. Is mobile 99% of what you do? Parse is probably the best choice. Is mobile 25% of your business and you're already using Heroku for everything else? I could go either way here. We use Heroku and AWS to drive 100% of our platform, but we're also not mobile (yet). I personally know the Parse guys and they are outstanding at what they do and growing at a phenomenal rate, so when we do dive into mobile I'll likely be giving them a shot first.
So cool.
That said, even after his explanation of "it's kind of like amazon prime" I still don't understand what's going on here.
This community is comprised of founders (who happen to play other roles than just "hacker"), designers, developers, marketers, bloggers, risk-takers, and generally anyone who likes the idea of creating something from nothing in the tech industry. This includes reading about and discussing industry news, trends, and cult-like followings (Apple).
Regardless of the fact that this community was created with a focus on hackers is now irrelevant, it's become the beast that it now is.
Hopefully I don't have to explain further.
My point is that being an entrepreneur, regardless of your role, is not always easy. Controlling your own destiny means you get the good and the bad; you're never shielded from the stuff that's hard to swallow. While I feel for this particular situation, I don't think other roles in a startup have it any easier.
I'm also not even sure what an average oil change costs? Without that knowledge, because I haven't done it often enough to know, $40 actually seems perfectly reasonable.