dyim

yes - when people complain about their own revealed preferences, just smile and nod!

FYI, you don't need to pay $3k - I lived in the Mission / Potrero Hill area (with roommates, mind you) for a few years, and my rent had always been between $1000-1850/mo.

Centrally located, safe(-ish), and beautiful. You can run through Bernal Heights Park, get ice cream at Humphrey Slocombe, and bike to the 24 Hour Fitness on 16th and Potrero. If you're in tech, you can definitely live well in SF :)

Shameless plug, but one of my old college friends sells gift cards at scale: https://support.priceyak.com/hc/en-us/articles/203465699-Buy...

If you're in the Amazon world I'm sure you know of them, but if not I'd be happy to put you in touch (contact info in profile)

We use Trello and it works great. Its closest skeuomorphic equivalent is... a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it.

Returnbase (reverse logistics), CropMetrics (agtech), Weather Analytics (ag. insurance), and Loop Support (customer support, shameless plug) come to mind.

It's tough to "casually observe" startups because you can't flip through their 10-Ks, but you can think of individual startups metonymously - learn more about their industries, and then try to figure out why these startups are trying to use technology to make better products.

30% doesn't sound crazy, based on this first-order-approximative data: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...

Couldn't find out from the article or the linked blog post - what were the responsibilities of the 173 laid-off employees? How many employees does SoundCloud have, and what roles do they have? Clearly they're not all devs - do they work in artist relations? customer support? content creation? marketing? etc.

I'm rooting for these guys - it looks like their COO has been in waste management since 1999 (and, from the article, his family's been in it for decades). As a casual observer of "non-sexy" startups, I've noticed that these kinds of founding teams do well.

Work with a friend that you trust! My co-founder is brilliant at using tech to optimize operations, and talented-but-indifferent when it comes to marketing. I like selling things. It works out well :)

Word, thanks for the input!

I thought the aside about NUMMI was interesting [1]. Though the difference between Dayton culture and Chinese culture might be bigger than the difference between Fremont culture and Japanese culture, it's been done successfully before.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/..., https://hbr.org/2009/09/nummi-what-toyota-learned, https://consumercal.org/toyatanummi-blue-ribbon-commission-w...

Curious about this - and I mean it in a 100% sincere way - how much waste does Blue Apron generate, and why is it unreasonable? How does it stack up to other common forms of waste generated by households?

Fun game! Just played a round - the ship that shoots a bunch of single letters is a cool mechanic. Can I see how I stack up against other users?

I also had some friends who did this around 2012-2013. It was pretty easy, and they were making 25-30% margins on the bitcoins that they sold. Sounds great!

They ended up getting scammed a few times, and they realized that it was a fairly efficient market after all. So they got out.

HN readers tend to have lots of disposable income. They also tend to fall for hobbies with lots of room for discussion, debate, and nuance.

Gourmet cuisine fits very nicely between the two :)

Agreed, 100%. My co-founder and I read all of Paul Graham's essays before starting our current company [1], and it really helped us get a good intuition for the kind of work that gets you closer to product-market fit. (Good work: direct sales, building MVPs. "Play" work: branding, getting coffee with people outside your industry, spending time on HN.)

It took us 5 pivots and a year before we saw any meaningful revenue, and it would've probably taken us three times as long w/o those essays. Three pieces of "book knowledge" really helped in making hard decisions on the journey so far:

1) As an entrepreneur, you have the ability to make excuses and, say, welch on a sales call. ("I am not feeling well; I had better sleep in.") You can exercise free will in this manner, but doing so is a complete moral failing. (Steli Efti)

2) Never buy risk unless you're being adequately compensated. Before you have product-market fit, the riskiest thing to do is to work on a project with a long feedback loop. Structure your projects so that you can learn if it's working or not ASAP. (Alfred Sloan)

3) Keep track of your runway, and don't forget to exercise :) (PG)

[1] We read them because they were super fun to read - it didn't feel like homework or due diligence! PG's Twitter is also wonderful.

I have the same problem too - I solve it by humming/singing the melody and recording it on my phone. Afterwards, I'll find nice synths, put chords to melodies, write horn arrangements, tweak drum fills, etc.

Likely because they have custom pricing based loosely on how much business value they create for the customer. E.g. if a philatelist wanted to scrape stamp catalogs, and if an industry-specific analytics platform wanted to scrape a directory of prospects - you'd want two different prices. Otherwise, you'd either 1) leave stamp enthusiasts out in the rain, or 2) leave a whole lot of meat on the bone w/r/t enterprise pricing. There might also be a consulting upsell!

I've had deeply mediocre experiences with recruiters in tech - but my girlfriend was recently looking for a private equity job. She interviewed at ~15 places, and most of these interviews were placed by "headhunters" (i.e. recruiters).

According to her, it is deeply impractical to look for a PE job without enlisting the services of a top-tier recruiting firm.

I like these recruiters! Most people in PE are looking for jobs based on 1) prestige and 2) salary, but she was optimizing for a less rat-race-y function - and they were able to help her find a job that she really likes.

I've heard finance-types use "secular" to mean "long-term" (as opposed to "non-religious")

their operational side looks/walks/quacks like a startup, so i think something important gets lost in translation if you look at the balance sheets and call OpenDoor a REIT

#16 is my personal favorite [1] - but #85 is a close second:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_85

[1] It reminds me of the spoken-word intro to "Love Sosa" :)

100% yes - and I am guilty of this myself. I've always found CSS miserable, so I'd just Stack Overflow things to "just make it work" ASAP.

Yesterday I took the time to read the specs for the flexbox feature. Spent an extra hour or two to build a cogent mental model of how to lay out various components, and voila - it's fun now; it's a brain-teaser and a game.

I also forget. Thankfully hair-washing is an idempotent operation for guys :) .

These seem like little UX things :) . It'd be tough to imagine changing their core cultural tenets in order to accommodate tourists.

Yup, you could AJAX-ily listen to the phish fields

It'd be like deploying an update before leaving for your honeymoon!

I would argue that you can combine two parts of your cynicism to create something very wholesome!

1) "It seems like a marketing photo-op for the CEO."

2) "Rockefeller would have helped his company much more by improving his own efficiency."

Surely the photo-op helped create a culture of efficiency and optimization throughout Standard Oil?

Reach out to people who leave email addresses in their HN profiles! :)

You should write that letter, and let SFMTA know that some ruffians have removed the posts ;)