leemcalilly

Every other time I buy a specific brand of cotton canvas (James Thompson), it’s fake on Amazon but close enough that it’s not worth the effort to file a complaint. And this is a brand that is supposed to be verified by Amazon’s brand registry.

As a small niche retailer that makes and sells guitar straps in Nashville I couldn’t agree more. Our experiments selling on Amazon have only hurt us, but Prime is a huge time & shipping $$ saver for re-ordering supplies for our shop and even materials used to make our products. We’ve experimented with selling on a lot of different sites (Amazon, Etsy, Reverb, etc) and have found the best way to control the brand and customer experience is selling solely on our website https://originalfuzz.com. So we both rely on Amazon to run our business, while feel we’re actively doing harm to our brand when we sell our products there. We’re giving up revenue in the short term by not taking a multi-channel approach to sales, but we think it will pay dividends over the long term because we’re able to provide a consistent customer experience with each order.

Just a more efficient way of raising money and giving liquidity to the investors that believe in the project early-on. Except, unlike bitcoin the coin has inherent value because it is the only way to access the road.

   it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. 

Classic disruption (not in the sense that it is often used) would be to start with a niche so limited that it doesn't seem useful to almost anyone, and then expand from that use case.

If you could make a Tesla owner's commute from SF to Sand Hill Road a much better experience (via autonomous-only toll road), I'd say that's one hell of a start.

  Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation?

This seems perfect for an ICO:

Use an ICO to build an autonomous vehicle-only highway stacked with sensors etc. SF to Oakland for instance. Token value increases as more people use the road. Token has inherent value because it’s the only way to access the road.

Have you seen Vice News on HBO. I'd say this is an example of this style that, no joke, works very well and is attractive.

Here's an interesting filter to apply to this map: all of the innovative music from the last 100 years originated in the triangle between Memphis, New Orleans and Nashville—blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and country. All of those genres were born in that small geographical area. It's the Silicon valley of modern music. You could also argue that hip hop is a permutation of blues/r&b.

* Sound Opinions: http://www.soundopinions.org - best music podcast on the web

* All Songs Considered: http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/ - another good music podcast

I've always thought that Apple is driven by wanting to control its own destiny and not have the short term interests of the market dictate its decisions. That's why it is stockpiling cash and hesitating to pay it out to its shareholders.

Apple and Tesla just want to make great stuff. Not just great, esoteric stuff, but products that are also accessible to the mainstream. The profits are just a way of keeping score and giving them options for the future.

They're kind of like the Beatles, who as an organization always knew how to do things big commercially. But commerce is never what drove The Beatles. They understood that winning in the marketplace gave them more leeway to dream bigger and bigger.

It's easy to say, "why would a company want to exist besides to make profit?" But I think a company can be a creative outlet for its employees and shareholders, just like any other medium. The profits just ensure they have more creative control in the future.

Yes this is a stellar idea!

Private browsing in Chrome and they still sell ads against your page views.

Your class action ad hominem attack is not constructive.

I agree with your argument, but there's no need to go in with the "hipsters" or "looking trendy" thing. I immediately get turned off when someone uses "hipster" pejoratively. You might as well have just used "millenials" or "kids these day." It ruins a perfectly cogent argument.

Apple saved the music business with iTunes. Why do they need Jimmy Iovine's connections? I don't see why they need Jimmy Iovine for anything.

I use iTunes Match and iTunes radio, and still use Spotify to be able to search and play any song I want without having to buy it.

I agree. If they can't build a streaming service on the back of itunes, why would they need beats?

I'm sure Beats, Pandora, Spotify, or any other streaming service would have killed to launch with the full support of the iTunes ecosystem.

I hope they are "doing some kind of next-level mole hunt to level-up on secrecy" here. I do not see any value in Beats other than a superficial fashion trend that has already run its course.

I think the internet is enabling this trend. It allows you to bypass the middle man. The consumer is also able to educate themself on products more easily (because of the internet). So high-quality products are more affordable, but not necessarily cheap. It's awesome. You see this happening with everything from Warby parker to Tonx coffee to clothing startups like Frank & Oak.

My company, Original Fuzz, just launched a guitar strap that uses Horween leather (http://www.originalfuzz.com/products/skinny-leather-guitar-s...), and we could have never made it with Horween 10 years ago. We're able to sell it for $48 because we can find customers from around the world through the web. You don't have to do the traditional keystone pricing and leave room for retailers and distributors if you don't want to.

This essay is a great intro to Hunter S. Thompson.

I guess I've always thought of my integration tests as the higher-level checklist. I've only done web development, so that works. I could see how if you're writing software for something as important as OpenSSL then you might need an extra set of checks, but there's still room for human error. Seems like there should be someway to automate everything required to deploy software.

But I realize this is an idealistic approach. The reality is that a good test suite with higher-level checklists is probably more practical.

With software this should be your test suite. No test is too simple. No feature or detail too small to test. Replace the line "relentless checklist" with "relentless testing" and you're good to go. Don't deploy before all tests are green and that's the same as not flying without running through your checklist.

I grew up flying with my dad in his Cesna 172 and admiring how well the pre-flight checklist worked. When I first heard about TDD, I immediately recognized it as the same process, except automated.

Perhaps the FCC could build Amazon a special road system for delivery to the last mile.

It's funny that these models all assume you have to seat first class first. Even if I'm flying first class, I still prefer to get on the plane last. The way people board airplanes seems to be the most irrational of all consumer behavior.

+1 for the old school ball

Just in time for the world cup!

The reason this book is important is that he's shown the r > g idea with data. As Picketty mentions in that article, it's a field of research that's an "academic no-man's land." It's traditionally too "economic" for history and too "historical" for economics.

Marx was espousing a theory. He wrote a manifesto. This is based on data that no one else has bothered to look into.

Working on a Shopify backend for my startup http://originalfuzz.com. We make handwoven Peruvian guitar straps.

Here's my local dev setup: http://i.imgur.com/cb0WuDH.png

New backend uses node and grunt along with the shopify theme manager. I can develop locally and keep it in git. Grunt watches the changes and the shopify theme manager uploads the new files. So I'm able to develop locally with haml and sass and deploy to my Shopify store as I work.

Also using https://github.com/toolsforliving/foundationify to integrate Foundation with Shopify. It's a good setup for anyone that needs to make an e-commerce site.

I'm wondering the same thing. Is Pixelmator + Sketch the best indie alternative to Photoshop + Illustrator?

Is this a good replacement for Illustrator? I need something that allows me to edit and create vector logos, etc.

The other option I'm looking at is iDraw.

I think the idea is that Instagram, WhatsApp & Secret grew to be huge before they were acquired. These are great examples of indie apps taking off within the context of the app store. Most people also don't know that vine is related to Twitter.