programminggeek

It's ironic that in a world that teaches and believes in relativism and no objective knowledge, truth, and morality people are all of a sudden worried about objective truth.

This is not surprising to me at all. I tried a ton of notes and todo list tracking apps and they all sucked for one reason or another and always ended up in not being the right tool for the job.

Eventually, my friend and I ended up designing our own notebooks and crafting our initial prototypes by hand until we came up with something that we use everyday.

It's up for sale on Amazon and we have a lot of happy customers. It's not changing the world and we aren't VC backed or anything fancy like that, but it's great to make something real that people love to use.

If you're curious about any of the process, I'd be happy to answer any questions and if you want to check out the notebooks they are available here... https://www.amazon.com/Unbranded-Pocket-Notebook-3-pack-Note...

Middle America wouldn't vote for Mark.

Donald Trump is both a powerful builder and very charismatic. He builds buildings and has loads of charisma.

The dichotomy between Trump and Hillary is false in this case on dimensions other than simply having charisma.

Trump had more charisma than Hillary as well as the 16 or whatever ridiculous number of GOP candidates there were at one point.

Bernie Sanders was the only candidate in this cycle with a similar level of charisma and Democrats did the thing that the GOP did the previous 2 elections - and it cost them.

Donald Trump.

He is literally off the charts both. He builds very large, impressive buildings for a living.

He is enough of a charismatic individual that through force of personality won the presidency.

The bigger problem often is...

We don't often understand what we are building most of the time.

Software is a communication tool most of the time. You are communicating between machine and user or user to machine to network of data and so on.

Most of the code is really a translation from input to some kind of command or process and outputting the result.

The more layers you add to that, the further you are from the truth and the more confusing the world truly is. For all the patterns, abstractions, and so on that we lean on, we miss out on the most important one...

input -> processing -> output

Here's my little trick...

My brother used to sell used cars and a good friend runs a couple small dealerships nearby. I call him when I need a car, tell him what kind, how much, what features and he goes out and finds one at auction for me.

It takes a month or so, but I always end up with a great deal.

If you know someone who can do that for you, it's a great deal for you and an easy sale for them.

Perhaps changing human behavior to do something they don't naturally want to do is not the best basis for a business.

That's a lot to pay for a car. I bought a used 2001 Mitsubishi Gallant 10 years ago and it still is a solid daily driver. I think I paid $7,000 or so for it.

Perhaps in 5 years a used Bolt will be a sensible purchase. Until then, I'll let everyone else buy them new and pay the depreciation for me.

He seems like a reasonable guy and his points about how close minded the diversity movement in SV is are interesting.

NOTE: Don't make the company you work for your life. It will end in sadness.

Here is one thing we get very wrong. Programming is a communication tool to describe communication systems. If you were to design a tool to design/build communication systems, it wouldn't look like what we program with.

Paying $4/month for email is worth it. I pay a lot more for a lot less elsewhere.

If you are on HN, I can all but guarantee you this - you've already spent more than $4 of your time even doing the research and posting on HN.

If you can't afford it, go get a minimum wage job somewhere and work for an hour. That covers the $4 right with a few bucks to spare...

Bizarrely, it's almost to the point where Microsoft is making better computers than Apple.

You don't seem to get the other half of the advice - earn more money. Get better at making money. If you spend a lifetime to save $100,000, you won't be a millionaire.

No, not a 401k unless you don't want to be able to do anything with it until you are retired.

The purpose of a non 401k is to invest so you don't have to wait until you are 65 to retire.

Yes.

Getting it right is not what I'm talking about. I'm saying doing the exact same kind of thing. What if his next company would have been building an online store like Amazon. Does he end up building the iPhone from there? Probably not.

One important thing that visionaries get credit for, but perhaps shouldn't...

Being in the right place at the right time.

It is a delightful bit of luck that Steve Jobs made it back to Apple. That scenario could have been way different where Apple bought BeOS, and Steve Jobs didn't return to Apple.

If Jobs isn't at Apple, he doesn't have the opportunity or resources to make his vision for the iMac, iBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, or iPad a real thing. In fact, he probably wouldn't have had the reason to envision any of the things at NEXT.

Also, you could argue that Jobs being at Apple when ARM got good enough for mass market smart gadgets at scale played into it too. If the tech isn't quite there, it doesn't look as interesting at all.

Without the right tech being available, Apple stalls out at the iMac and Power Mac and so on and is a profitable computer vendor, but not the most valuable company in the world.

So, Tim Cook might not be as visionary, but it might also be a poor time for anyone to be CEO as the opportunities shifted.

Man, people are obsessed with Trump. I think the people who dislike him care more about Trump than his supporters do. Bizarre.

PHP.

Why can't women make climate change too?

It'd remarkable to me how many people who support 'diversity' and 'inclusion' will shun those who have ideas/beliefs they disagree with. Good job to Mark for not being one of those people.

This is interesting, but if you need card present payments and EMV, something like CardFlight's SDK https://cardflight.com/sdk/ is going to be a better fit.

Disclaimer: My friend works there and has told me all about it.

I think the problem is a simple assumption - people will leave the print version of My Local Journal and go to mylocaljournal.com when in fact they go from My Local Journal to Buzzfeed or the Yahoo! homepage or Google News or Twitter or Facebook or RSS of their 10 favorite blogs etc...

For example, I don't have a newspaper. I also don't check the local newspaper website. My wife, friends, relatives don't seem to either. The entirety of local news is mostly ignored.

And yet, we are fine. So, is all of that news necessary or important to our lives? As it turns out, no.

All models are flawed, but sometimes they are useful.

Most businesses that are one-off type businesses tend not to work well. Uber works well because you will use it often enough and is basically a similar model to other transportation services like Bus and Train transit.

A lot of businesses require subscription or other predictable recurring revenue to truly work. Even golf courses, bowling alleys, heating and air repair companies, bug terminators, advertising, etc. tend to rely on recurring revenue as the major source of revenue.

Even restaurants and bars rely on recurring revenue. You show me a restaurant or bar without regulars and I'll show you a restaurant or bar about to go out of business.

You know, sometimes it would be better to just let market forces do their thing. The downstream effects will be interesting and far reaching.

Not sure if that is a good or bad thing.

What was RethinkDB's business model and why didn't it work?

Because someone has to or civilization doesn't exist.