michaelflux

- Location: Singapore - Remote: Yes - Willing to relocate: No permanently but open to regular travel - Technologies: Product, Program, Project Management, resource planning planning, remote and local team building and management, roadmapping, heavy focus on UX. - Resume/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/michaelflux - Email: michael@michaelflux.com

Summary: Product person - these days primarily in PM positions, background consists of over a decade of hands on UX and front-end dev work. Prefer to work with smaller teams and by extension love the startup hustle. Tend to be very hands on and work very closely with all teams within the company.

We have gone a full circle from having cable with a bunch of separate overpriced packages which you buy for the sake of having access to one or two shows, to having the internet where you're signing up for equally as expensive packages and services all for the sake of having access to one or two shows on their platform.

As long as the content providers continue to make it so difficult, piracy will win, if nothing else when it comes to convenience.

Oh man, so much this.

When Photos just came out and Apple was making the claims about how they've taken everything good from Aperture and stuck it into Photos I was pretty optimistic considering how solid of an app Aperture became over the years.

Now, few days down the road, pretty clear that Photos is just a marginally better iPhoto with the vast majority of features that were useful for professionals such as Stacks, never coming back.

The dumbification of professional apps to the lowest common denominator continues ...

No-one is advocating for people to be full of shit. All that is being said is that mass censorship of "offensive" words/ideas is the stupidest, most counter-productive way to do it.

> this thread has degraded extremely rapidly

The internet in a nutshell.

> people deliberately say misleading things for purpose of influencing an election

Well there goes every political campaign ever.

All jokes aside, these days it doesn't matter if it's the media, the campaigns themselves, the supporters - it's not about the facts, it's not about anything real, it's just about spreading misleading shit faster than it can be fact checked.

It's an issue on the right, it's an issue on the left. One may be worse than the other, but it doesn't mean it's better, it's just marginally less shitty.

Not unpopular opinion at all. Reckon most here would agree.

Used to be you could come here to at least slightly escape from all that shit and artificial outrage. Now I can barely tell the difference between HN and Vox.

That story just illustrates how insane things have gotten.

Maajid goes "hey I'm a member of this group, I want to improve our culture/religion" and is labeled an extremist.

Meanwhile others from this group are raping children and the only thing that is said is "oh it's their culture, don't be so racist".

Blows your goddamn mind.

I'm referring to it catching on in a political sense and becoming such a major part of the 2016 election cycle while neither the crying Jordan, the spongebob caveman, the sad ben Affleck and all else that was popular at that time didn't.

And this is really at the root of the entire culture war.

It used to be 'hey, that person said something stupid', lol ok what an idiot, anyway moving on to what we were doing'

Now instead it's 'hey that person said something stupid, I need to share it to 5000 followers to show just how stupid they are and how virtuous I am for pointing out that it's stupid, hey hey hey people look look look I'm resisting the stupid look look there's a stupid person'.

What we have is a large group of people who can only be described as professional offence takers. They wake up in the morning, and go out of their way to look though twitter what to be outraged by. They proactively seek out conflict purely for the sake of virtue signalling.

And when these people engage so consistently, after a while you get people who just post shit just for the sake of getting that emotional response out of the other side.

Exactly that.

Right: Hey you guys just keep repeating the same thing.

Left: You're a racist

Left: You're a racist

Left: You're a racist nazi

Left: You're a nazi racist

Left: You're dehumanising us you racist

Right: Well hell, make 5000 more of these if they're getting such a great engagement rate.

You're completely correct. Don't feed the trolls is exactly right. And yet every single time that the right throws out some more bait, no matter how silly, no matter how stupid, the left looses it's shit.

Take this NPC thing, it's a damn joke, just like every single meme - it may be funny, it may not be depending on your own preferences, but when it gets posted and in response you have 50 articles the next day about how it 'dehumanises' something or other ... before it even gets to NYT, the trolls are more than fed.

But with that said, what isn't 'far right' these days ...

I'm just counting down the days until Bernie is called far right because he's not throwing bricks through Starbucks' windows.

Originally yes, that was the joke, people just repeating the same buzzwords and catch phrases in response to anything as game NPCs do.

However as with all the memes over the last few days, it quickly turns from that into 'well those people are reacting exactly how we thought they would, just keep posting it if it triggers them'.

e.g. take Pepe - the only reason it caught on was because the left took the bait and lost their shit over it. The only reason this NPC thing took off was because the same people took the bait and are loosing their shit over it. It doesn't matter what the meme is, what it's about, or what it represents. The right keeps making jokes, the left keeps taking the bait, the right sees that and keeps feeding them more and more.

2-3 double shot flat whites. Typically before 2pm - most of the time with MCT or Brain Octane oil and a bit of unsalted butter mixed into the milk while steaming it.

Another 2-3 cups of black tea. No alcohol.

After having lived in metro Detroit for 16 years prior to moving in 2013, while a part of me thinks it's nice in a "better than nothing" sense, the more realistic part sees this as nothing more than a nice press release which, at the end of the day won't actually do anything for the city.

At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport. Combine that with the lack of any sort of a population within walking distance of the Q Line and the line neither going or connecting to anything meaningful, the lack of expansion plans and at the end of the day you just have a shiny train to put in a press release that won't even see enough ridership to even come close to covering it's own cost.

Have a look at the cover photo in this article - Woodward is the centre right road in that image. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda... - This is the road along which the Q Line is travelling. I think you can see exactly how much ridership one can reasonably expect.

Absolutely love that book. :)

Exactly this. Unfortunately most developers I've met, look at their jobs as little more than churning out code to meet a spec that was handed down to them.

Now if you're an early stage startup, you're putting together a team, then yes, of course you absolutely need someone who lives and breathes dev and loves every minute of it - but it's not as much about the quality of the code as it is about how that person will positively impact the overall company culture.

But majority of dev jobs ... little more than 9-5 code churning.

It depends a lot on the age of the kids of course, but as @jaakk said, play. It's hard to get kids to be interested in something if you're just sitting them down and trying to explain it to them. Get hands on. For the purpose of this answer I'm going to assume you mean "design" in the general sense of the word, not just web design.

Show them how design is responsible for every day things that they're already using. Take them to an industrial design museum, perhaps a conference that focuses on 3D printing so they can see with their own eyes how everyday things are created from scratch. Next time you drive past a stop sign, ask them why they think it's red - that alone opens up doors to discussions about everything from psychology to evolution.

You may be just making, but if you're making a good solution, does it in any way devalue it if you're not passionate about it?

Not at all. Worst case scenario even if it doesn't land you a data science job, doesn't mean that it won't greatly help in another job that you may be doing.

The question you're asking is essentially "what's the point of going to the gym if I won't ever become Mr. Olympia".

Spend a bit of money on some desk plants. My desk looks like a little rainforest. All the extra green keeps you happy, you get a bit of extra oxygen, and gives you something to take care of to distract you from staring at nothing but your screen.

Beyond that I'm shocked no-one has mentioned getting either the comfiest chair you can find, or a standing desk. Either of those two will make a night and day difference.

Came here to say exactly that. Not only is it proportional, but if anything is a sliver above average. The argument that TC is trying to make is on par with the people who advocate for workplace diversity and go on to say about how 50% of the hires should be black - without recognising that the black population makes up only about 13.5% in US, at which point what you're doing is discriminating against everyone else just to fill arbitrary quotas not grounded in real world statistics.

I think the issue stems from how this is reported. Too much focus on race and gender and not enough focus on the real world. These articles focus 100% on the racial politics rather than on why a VC would invest in a company in the first place.

Even saying "the typical startup, typically founded by a white male, that typically fails." ... The reality is, upwards of 80% of all companies, not just startups, fail within the first year of operation, it's not a black vs white, male vs female issue. It's simply a combination of questions about the quality of the founders, the quality of the product, the quality of their marketing, the overall environment and a hundred other factors.

"... examined over 60,000 startups and identified just 88 led by black women... " and then go on to complain about how little money was raised from VCs without mentioning that 99.95% of all startups period, regardless of who is in charge, gets no VC funding https://www.forbes.com/sites/dileeprao/2013/07/22/why-99-95-...

So to answer your question, first replace the "as a black female founder" with just "as a founder ...". Focus on your product 100%, focus on improving it, focus on your users. That is the only thing you should be focusing on. And only after you have a good product vision (or ideally an already built product, even if just an MVP), only after you're seeing promising growth or at least plenty of interest in your key demographics, can you start thinking about VCs.

If I was to invest in any company, the only things I would look at is their numbers, their vision, and their skillsets. Ultimately the race, gender, orientation or any other such things, would never come into the equation.

I am curious, anything you could share about your business? Anything we could read?

Cheers

Facebook is excellent for it's targeting tools however it slightly looses it's value if your product is trying to target people based on their professional work simply because most people seem to use Facebook for personal things than professional ones.

LinkedIn has reasonably good tools for targeting based on professional experiences, but I never found the quality of the users coming from LinkedIn to be that good. One thing I noticed is that the people who tend to come from LinkedIn ads, tend to be unemployed and of lower skill levels. So LinkedIn is used a lot to find good people, but not for ad dollars.

Haven't spent enough time with Twitter's marketing tools to have an opinion one way or another on them.

While not a social network, I just keep coming back to Google Adwords, tends to produce the most most reliable results.

In the article they mention that they were using A4 sheets.

Gotcha, thanks Matt :)

Fair enough, thanks for the feedback Ben, appreciate it.

Re 3) - Assuming at any one time there are two different clients with who you can work - the projects will pay the same, will take a similar amount of time etc. But you know one client will take say a month to pay, the other one a couple days after you submit your invoice.

Of course based on your answer with 2, I see it wouldn't really apply if you just take your payments upfront ... :)

Have you found any change in how people pay the invoices after you started doing the nonstandard days?