mful

Really interesting take on applying (self-described) entrepreneurial thinking to basketball.

Some of my favorite quotes:

On Intellectual humility:

> Lifelong learning is where it’s at. To walk down that path requires a deep-seated humility about a) what’s knowable, and b) what each of us know. We hire for this aggressively. We celebrate this internally. And we’ve been known to punish when we find it woefully lacking.

On Innovation:

> In most endeavors, it’s fine to be content to woodshed until you get something near perfect. You want that to be you. Grit matters. But it won’t be long until some innovation makes all that effort newly obsolete. You want that to be you, too.

On thinking long term:

> Jeff Bezos says that if Amazon has a good quarter it’s because of work they did 3, 4, 5 years ago—not because they did a good job that quarter. Today’s league-leading Golden State Warriors acquired Draymond Green, Andrew Bogut, and Klay Thompson almost 4 years ago, nearly 4 years ago exactly, and almost 5 years ago. In this league, the long view picks at the lock of mediocrity

Lots of other good gems in this piece.

The title here is misleading -- the article barely talks about Duolingo's marketing strategy, touching briefly on word-of-mouth and gamification...

This is really just a fluff piece about Duolingo and the founder...

Do you have a source for that?

My understanding is that (a) utilization of dietary vitamin D is significantly lower than naturally produced D (from sun exposure) and (b) vitamin D is one of several micronutrients produced from sun exposure.

I use Soundcloud for hours every day, and would GLADLY pay a Spotify type premium for it. As others have noted, it has an incredible amount of music that exists nowhere else (including a lot of non-EDM), but it is a great listening platform for many other reasons. The biggest, for me, is that SoundCloud has far and away the best discovery mechanisms. The 'play related tracks' feature is the most effective radio I've found (better than Pandora, light years better than Spotify) and my feed is always full of new songs that I enjoy.

But SoundCloud has one big problem holding it back, in my opinion:

Getting a great SoundCloud experience requires a lot of upfront work. To have a good feed, you need to find and follow a bunch of artists and/or 'like' a bunch of tracks (from when I first started: the default feed, or low-data feed, gets stale quickly, and had many songs that did not align with my preferences). This sounds simple, but it's not, as SoundCloud is designed for discovery rather than building/organizing your music library. For example, there is no library-like simple list view, and you can't filter/sort your 'likes' as you can in Spotify/iTunes. Also, the radio-like features are not immediately apparent, making it hard to bootstrap your SoundCloud preferences by passively listening/liking tracks as you go.

Looking to the alluded future monetization: The ads are infrequent, and not at all annoying. Unless they ramp up the ads, it will not be a big incentive to pay for premium.

There is really nothing like SoundCloud if you like EDM or EDM-influenced indie music (think Miike Snow).

By default I reach for Skeleton[1] on side projects, which is similar in a lot of ways, but I really like the way the grid looks/functions in Milligram.

Also, defining pairs of CSS classes to accommodate the user rounding in either direction made me smile (ie .column-66 === .column-67).

Definitely going to try it out on my next project.

[1] getskeleton.com

I am not in the UK, but looked through the course. The info / pictures make it look like a great intro -- do you know if the curriculum is published anywhere?

The 'Links to this post' section/feature seems to be a clear backlinks scheme. Am I missing something, or is Google condoning link trading, here?

I can't decide if this is fun, but fiscally pointless, or kinda brilliant.

It looks like a pretty simple app, which I doubt took too much time to put together, and is likely incredibly cheap to run. Assuming the most recent two hours are more representative of engagement than the previous two (not a given by any means, and no I haven't been tracking this before then), it looks like it's producing several hundred Stellars an hour minimum for the creators.

Stellars aren't worth much right now, and may never be (I'll leave that sort of speculation to those with more knowledge of the subject), but this seems like a cheap and quick way to build a stockpile.

Anyway, food for thought.

> Keeping off-the-record or confidential information (whether about YC itself or a YC company) private and secret.

If I recall correctly, Paul Graham asks the Summer 2011 class not to share tips on getting into YC at the end of Launch Pad. I wonder if this is in part a response to all the recent YC Applications/interviews going public (or at least showing up here on HN).

I don't mean to be abrasive, but landing page could not be less informative. I'm a full-time developer and a big believer in code review, but I have no interest in downloading the app based on the website -- I don't know what it is, really. I think you are going to convert a lot better by actually explaining why I should download the app, rather than just providing a link. Why is this better than current tools? Does this integrate with Github? Bitbucket?

That's exactly my point. I don't think just throttling the FCC employees is the best approach to taking a stance on net neutrality, regardless of the size of the 'key player'. I would argue that throttling consumers (with explanation) would be more effective.

I agree that this would make a lot of sense. Unless I misunderstood the OP, Neocities seems to be advocating for specifically throttling the FCC, not consumers in general. What you are describing seems to be more along the lines of Brad Feld's post[1] from the other day.

[1] http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-d...

This is a clever stunt, though I'm not sure how effective this strategy would be even on a more popular site. It seems unlikely that this form of protest would reach a large enough audience, given the relatively small number people who are directly affected, to gain any traction.

EDIT: Grammar

I wholeheartedly agree that building a project is many times more useful as a learning tool than little 'for loop' exercises, but completely disagree with the idea that you should be learning DNS/Hosting/Dev Tools as step 1.

These concepts/tools are important to learn eventually, but are not the core of building software. One of the great things about Codecademy is that it abstracts away all of the yak-shaving/ops work so you can dive into what is actually interesting. Obviously this approach can only take you so far, but from my experience[1], I can't think of anything that would motivate a prospective learner less than banging his/her head against the command line, googling cryptic error stack traces, for X hours just trying to get a dev environment setup, just to (finally) write your first line of code.

[1] Quick background: I'm a full time developer, completely self-taught (did the HTML/CSS, and basic JS track on Codecademy back in early 2012 before diving into The Hard Way series and Michael Hartl's book)

> Market cap isn't the value of a company, but rather the value investors place on the shares times outstanding shares.

What's the difference? (honest question)

My understanding is that, theoretically, share price is intended to reflect expected value of future payouts (dividends) assuming the company lasts forever. In practice, I would think share price is more likely to reflect expected value of future payouts over some fixed time period plus expected time-adjusted price appreciation over that same interval, which seems to be at least as reasonable a method.

What is the (monetary) value of a company other than return to owners?