kohanz

What if you were having that conversation so loudly that people inside and outside the Starbucks could hear you and when you mentioned a brand's name, they were immediately notified and your conversation was permanently associated with their brand? I mean you literally see this phenomenon in public where people converse too loudly in public and strangers then do end up overhearing and feeling, rightly or not, that they can jump in because a conversation that loud is simply too inviting.

This may or may not matter to you, but there's a few startups/apps out there tackling public speaking improvement. Orai, for example. A friend of mine is in a similar space and discovers new competitors all the time.

I don't know how helpful this will be, but I was overweight (not quite obese) from about age 8 to 24. At 24 I had a major personal event (end of a long-term relationship and end of my life as I had it "planned"). I can't say this was completely a conscious choice, but I turned to exercise as a way to cope. I had always been somewhat active (into sports), but now I got into jogging,then running, then weight lifting. It was therapeutic. I lost a lot of weight. Too much, at one point (hence the weightlifting). Point being, I'm in my late thirties now and have kept it off despite that initial emotional motivation being long gone (I'm happily married with kids, love my life). I don't know that I could have done it without the initial emotional shock, but I do know that before that I thought being fat was part of who I was, and I now know that clearly wasn't true.

Unethical people come in all shapes, sizes, and ages. Youth and idealism are often associated together for a reason.

Thank you - this is useful information. This seems like something that would have a very low rate of compliance presently, is that right?

> If you're starting a company, you're fighting a long, hard battle against pessimists like me.

If you're a bootstrapped founder, but also a human, one of those pessimists will have your own voice, with a permanent address in your head.

I've done both working from home and now co-working. Currently, I prefer co-working, but that's because I've become more of an entrepreneur and less "just" developer.

Yes, the separation of work and home is nice (and I walk to work, so a beneficial commute), but the networking opportunities and ability to meet in-person that the co-working space affords is invaluable as an entrepreneur. There are so many opportunities that "just happen" when you're in a space like this that I would miss out on being at home.

They're marketing materials. They often don't represent everyone, but rather a specific set of customer demographics.

This might be a factor, but I live in a neighbourhood where there are plenty of SAHM's and it's not like kids play is flourishing like it did in my generation (and there are plenty of kids). There are multiple factors. I also think a big one that contributes to the "helicopter parent" perception. Is our towns and cities. We built them around cars. I remember reading there are 3-4x cars on the road now as opposed to in the 80s. My parents would let us wander very far from home when we were young because they knew we could bike many places without hitting a really busy or high-speed-limit street for a while. Nowawadays, there are cars everywhere and it does lead to a heightened sense of danger (real or perceived).

I think the social aspect will be extremely dependent on how much the parents put into that part. The majority of home-schooled kids (now adults) I know, were socially stunted because of it, but I don't believe this is as much a fault of homeschooling as it is a symptom of those particular families not putting enough effort into integrating social environments into part of the routine. That part comes for "free" in classroom-based education, but it doesn't meant they have a monopoly on it.

Excellent answer - I get it now. Thank you!

Nice work! As someone that uses https://github.com/sampotts/plyr in one of my projects (and react-plyr), what are the main differences between the two players & designs?

Wrote the blog about 5 years ago, to a non-existent audience. The blog writing was simply to motivate myself to complete the application, which is an arduous process and, for me, was optional career-wise. At first I did things like create a Twitter account, follow people, tweet it out, etc, but that didn't work at all. I basically had negligible traffic for the first year at least. Then Google organically started picking it up because I had written useful content in an underserved niche - one of the things that got me writing the blog was searching for free help in the first place and not finding anything. Even after a couple of years, I was earning maybe $15/month in AdSense. Then the affiliate site reached out to me out of the blue, we tried some tests, and they failed miserably (no one converted). Months later he came back to me with an actual affiliate program, we tried it and it slow started to work and has scaled up to what I described above.

So to summarize, by far most of my time was spent writing the blog posts and watching my non-existent analytics. Nothing I actively did to market the site (and I did very little) worked. It was a project that didn't intend to make money, that ended up making money.

A blog I wrote about 5 years ago on obtaining your licensing as a professional engineer includes affiliate links to a site that sells packages that help with the application process. It's a very niche area but earned me about $5k in 2018 and is what I consider passive income at this point (haven't contributed to the blog in years). That amount was about double 2017, so I'm interested to see how much growth is left.

> My company is bootstrapped. It isn't growing fast enough to fit PG's definition of a startup, but it's 5 years old and makes 7 figures.

Very impressive. Thanks for sharing! Is this https://interviewcake.com?

I agree it's quite high, but knowing the "baseline", whatever that is would help give some context. They give the Bush & Obama numbers for other categories, but I didn't see it for this one. But based on what's there, I don't think it'd be far off to say that, at any given time, about 1 in 4 women under 30 wants to leave the US. Some of those reasons may have nothing to do with politics. Still, the sharp increase for the current president is notable.

Walking to work.

In thinking about an answer, you made me realize one of the things I love about HN: trolling or negativity for the sake of being negative isn't allowed to accumulate attention (in general). It is dealt with swiftly and the discussion moves on.

Sure, there is negativity in the form of criticism, but that's part of a healthy discussion, IMHO.

It's not perfect, but does it a lot better than other discussion forums where people discover that negativity can give them a higher profile.

I'd say no based on the fact that you see most user-driven forums experience this problem. I can't remember how many times I've seen a pinned post or set of rules to exclaiming "use the search function before posting". Even StackOverflow has many duplicate questions despite possibly having some of the best built-in workflow to prevent that from occurring.

> paid by the company

They might be getting paid by someone else, but the comment I quoted specifically talked about getting paid by the company.

Unpaid internships are a lot more common than some people appear to believe. I initially believed it as well, because my internships were well-paid, but then I realized our industry was the exception rather than the rule.

> you can get free marketing from an apprentice as part of their training

I used serverless for the back end of VidHug (https://VidHug.com) and I've been happy with it. Was there a compelling reason to do so (other than to learn something new?)? I don't know. I also learned ReactJS, among other things.

Just be honest with yourself that learning something new and launching fast (in the interests of entrepreneurship) are not aligned with each other.

I'm sure there's a good explanation for it, but calling a conference that occurs in 2018 "CASP13" seems like an unnecessary way to create some confusion.

Which would make it even more potentially harmful in this context, if it is relied upon.

Father of 3 and a freelancer who used to work from home. The monthly fee I pay to have a spot in a co-working space is the best money I spend. I should add that my commute is a 20-minute walk each way, so I get built-in exercise as well without needing a vehicle.

As an engineer with experience in the medical devices field, my advice would be to continue to building your clinical experience (if it's in a specialization, even better) and look to establish relationships with startups in that field. They'll be very eager to partner with you as an advisor.

If you go into marketing, I'm not sure that your existing experience is anything but wasted.

I think they're saying that they are unable to meet the demand (lack of either equipment or people) for the new business those extra advertising dollars would bring in. So they can't just continually pour $ into that pump.

Although I agree it's unusual to see that metric used (revenue per ad-spend) for a product that seemingly can't be scaled very much.

I'm being a bit over-dramatic, truth be told (I never had the courage to roll my eyes at any of them). I put "smart engineer" in quotes because that was really just a label (for my MIL, it meant I was the only engineer in the family, for people in the company, I was one of many smart nerdy folk). I'm primarily a self-deprecating guy with a healthy bout of impostor syndrome once in a while.

My strong dislike from BBT comes mainly from people associating me with a show that I find wholly unfunny. Not because it makes fun of geekdom and I don't like that, but simply because I don't find it funny at all. I saw a lot of parallels in the type of comedy on BBT and that on "2 and a half men" and could never understand their high ratings.

> Big Bang Theory

Oh how I loathed that show, especially at height of its popularity. I got so tired of smiling and nodding (or rolling my eyes, depending on who it was) as non-technical people at work and even my mother-in-law made it clear they thought of me when they watched that show (simply because I was the "smart engineer", so obviously a huge nerd with no social ability). None of these people were my age though, they were all signficantly older and Silicon Valley would have likely been much too sophisticated for them.

Hard to see either solution coming into play anytime soon. Option (a) is likely out due to recent-enough-to-be-remembered tragedies pushing regulation in the opposite direction and Option (b) seems antithetical to the recently-elected government's style. Also, incorporating this promise into the NDP's election platform didn't seem to help them much. As you can tell, I'm not optimistic ;)