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joez

614 karma · joined July 1, 2009

Twitter: Tweetzhou
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joez··on Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
Omg! the creator of Ballionaire is a laidoff metamate?! That's so inspirational. I'm sure this will make it on Meta blind sometime.

I'm at Meta still and working on my own take on the roguelike game inspired by Balatro/Luck be a landlord and Ballionaire too. Any advice for myself and others on how to balance work/life/game?

If you're interested, I bet people would love to have you back for a tech talk. I think we should at least link this to your badge post haha.

How much time did you spend on tweaking the tutorial?

Do you use analytics to balance your game? (So Meta right?)

joez··on Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
I don't get how Robinhood can make this move. I see this move as a lose/lose. Anyone care to emphasize with them? Maybe they see themselves as saving the lay investor?

But then from a price action perspective, - If GME goes up, people are going to have the sentiment that Robinhood stopped them from making money to protect the fat cats - If GME goes down, people are going to blame RH.

joez··on Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Facial Recognition Suit
There’s 4 broad buckets of costs for most companies - g&a (general and administrative), s&m (sales and marketing), r&d, and cost of revenue.

The cost has to be classified into one of these buckets and so the CFO was probably just clarifying into which bucket they lumped it.

This is part of the point of generalized accounting is so everyone gets a similar basis compare companies.

joez··on Beyond Meat S-1
ugh, try just navigating from https://www.retailroadshow.com/
joez··on Beyond Meat S-1
Their roadshow video is up: https://www.retailroadshow.com/

I always find the video presentation more insightful.

Edit: Directly linking to the video didn't work.

joez··on Uber S-1
A Saudi Prince also invested in Lyft

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/23/saudi-prince-alwaleed-bin-ta...

joez··on Launch HN: Modern Labor (YC W19) – Paying People to Learn to Code
This is an awesome idea. Speaking from experience as someone who transitioned into engineering. I would have totally tried this if it was around 4 years ago. Good luck!
joez··on Square Service Outage
How bad is this?

Seems like they have offline mode. Do their customers know how to use this? What's the chance for increased fraudulent swipes?

joez··on Zenefits' blog – Becoming the Compliance Company
Feels like their old cultural values offers a glimpse into why they've had problems: - Ready, Aim, Fire. - Everyone's shit stinks. - Do it yourself.

Anyone able to elaborate more on what each of these mean?

joez··on I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA
Do startups, and if so how, need to execute differently in today's frothy funding environment?

What are some technologies that excite you?

joez··on Uber Drivers Deemed Employees by California Labor Commission
+1 for visibility. This comment needs to filter to the top.
joez··on Accelerate Excel – 100x faster spreadsheets
I am a heavy heavy Excel user. I use it to help run a large startup.

100x faster would be a huge win. There's always a tradeoff between design/human cycles and speed. You could even think of it as Excel technical debt. Legacy spreadsheets never get rebuilt/re-engineered because of a lack of human time. That's a large cause of spreadsheets that become unmanageable.

2 questions around this: - How do we know the data is secure? (the IT team will want to know this for sure) - How do we know the computations are correct?

joez··on Unpaid Internships: Get on the Right Side of History
It was my impression that young professional women actually made more money than young men. Ah, found the article I was thinking of: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00....

"median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group"

Their peer group being under 30, childless, unmarried, metropolitan. These are probably strongly skewing caveats but sounds exactly like the market that internmatch targets.

joez··on Fivetran (YC W13) launches spreadsheet for data analysis
Usability issues aside, there are no examples about sales or operating expenses. Sales Analytics (think: product, division, type, time) are where companies are having a ton of trouble. I would spend more time on this rather than March Madness to acquire paying users.
joez··on Philadelphia budget data visualization
Here are two similar ones:

Obama's Budget Proposal (from 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html

http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/

joez··on Satellite burns up following SpaceX rocket glitch
Actually, sounds like Orbcomm got a heck of a deal. They get insurance money and in addition to getting a few tests off on the prototype.
joez··on Yelp Files For $100 Million IPO
What seems off about the numbers?

I think the IPO is more about an exit for founders/investors than the actual 100 million amount. That's just the float that they're putting out (not a valuation). 100 million is a credible number they can say they need this amount to grow/reach breakeven.

joez··on DressRush Pitch Deck
Beautiful execution.

I'd give people a way to print out or download your deck so that associates can hand a hard copy to the investing partner.

Edit: Also really quick, not sure if this is the correct use of market size. What is your actual segmented address market? 28k is the average wedding but that must be skewed by 500k+ weddings. Next, I'd like to know how your 2.0 products are going to be able to capture pieces of the market you're not in already (maybe this returns better margins at a higher acquisition cost? not necessarily .55 flat).

joez··on A First Look at BankSimple
I had thought that BankSimple was slimming down the traditional banking model and passing the savings (in the form of interest) to customers. I still love that they're tackling Goliaths but they need to be a little clearer on their vision and value proposition.
joez··on Diablo 3 Real Money Auction House Details
I'll be paying close attention to if this trend catches on. Blizzard is often a trailblazer in features it introduces (example: Exclamation Mark = New Quest, Question Mark = Completed Quest; Talent Trees).
joez··on An explanation of Color from Bill Nguyen
I consider myself pretty tech savvy but I didn't really get Color until I watched this interview.

What really hit home for me was the line on how Facebook is great for connecting people who are far away but Color can help connect people who are right next to each other.

joez··on Pure Genius: Southwest Airlines Baggage Strategy
I don't understand the point on hedging. Both turning an aircraft around faster and a successful hedge on jet fuel result in higher profit. But not sure how the two are related?

Regarding hedging, Southwest gets too much publicity for being so slick to hedge fuel before oil prices shot through the roof years ago. Hedging is not part of its core competency, or at least it isn't unless they are pioneering a new business model of providing a service and then leveraging for profit on the futures markets. As in, they could have lost money on the hedge as well. Unless Southwest could use their understanding of the airline industry to predict a huge rise in oil demand, hedges should only be used as a tool to smooth out expense lines.

Here's an oversimplified example to illustrate: A gas station owner hedges oil futures. Might be smart because he isn't going to change his prices every day to reflect the spot price and customers appreciate it. He has a better forecast on his profitability because his expenditures are smoother. But it isn't really his core competency to predict oil prices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_hedging

TL;DR: Hedging can really help your profits but you don't read about the companies that lost money on hedges. Maybe Southwest was able to build a team of brilliant market researchers but I'm not sure it's a good idea for every company to buy futures.

joez··on Crazy or Disciplined?
I like the quote about Warren Buffet. I sometimes wonder about how useful my current skill set would be in a world war. But I think zombie apocalypse (or, more realistically, the possibility of a startup) are reasons the to stay curious and have hobbies.
joez··on Mahalo Sells Corporate SEO Services?
I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community.

Techcrunch50

This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)

joez··on Live from the Apple 'latest creation' event
Waiting for the price. I see it as more of a toy than a tool, so a want than a need. Consumers are likely more price sensitive on toys.

I can see an amazing play for the casual gaming market and taking a cut on the distribution with the app store.

Edit: The $499/629 seems appropriate, not too high.

joez··on Ask HN: How to consistently generate traffic and new customers for Ramamia?
Just a quick thought, the holiday season (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Gifts) is when a lot digital cameras are sold (especially DSLRs this year). You might be able to get some traffic (premium) by writing a blog post on tips on taking family photos, different DSLR settings, poses to try, etc.

This is my thought on how to target consumers who just bought/received a fancy camera and need a way to share the thousands of photos they took. That's the quality traffic you want. There might be other ways to target this group?

joez··on Shit My Dad Says Gets a TV Deal after 72 tweets
I hope this guy turns out to be a smashing success and inspires more quality content on Twitter.
joez··on Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future
Oh, I was responding in general. Most articles, the one (linked included) talk about physical limitations about human pilots. I always thought it was something more gory until I found out about blackouts a few years ago.
joez··on Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future
> eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly

I think this is a common misperception. I believe the operational risk is that manuevers above 6g (varying on pilot and G-suit) reduces blood flow to the brain (by forcing it into the legs) and cause a blackout. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC Blackouts, even for a few seconds, can be devastating in the middle of a dogfight. I believe there is software in modern fighter jets for just when pilots blackout but I can't find it on google right now.

joez··on The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not
I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.
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