quantisan

I was cycling between Delft and The Hague in the Netherlands yesterday. I headed out without a route planned. The infrastructure even outside of major cities in the Netherlands are just so extensive that with the help of some occasional road signs, I was able to make it there.

yet you wanted it enough to make it work

The $30 fully featured smartphone is already here. I've been using a Microsoft Lumia 635 ($30 with no contract, $50 unlocked in US) as my main driver for a month. Sure it doesn't take epic photos or play the latest mobile games. But everything you'd expect works surprisingly well. Compare it to a couple of years ago, even a $100 Android phone felt castrated back then.

I was a developer that partnered with a stranger. He's an MBA with a purely business background. I'm the full stack + product guy. I'm never co-founding a business with a stranger ever again.

We failed probably because of not what you're thinking. My business co-founder brought more to the table than I could imagine. I've gained a lot of respect for the hard work of sales, marketing, fundraising, and the people that make these tasks seem so easy.

We got hundreds of customers, made $10k revenue per month, and had a staff of 5 at one time. All bootstrapped over the course of 12 months.

The thing is, we were not happy working with each other. When shit hits the fan (which happens often in a new business), we just get on each other's nerves. On paper, we have perfectly complimentary skill set. He's a charming people person. I'm a proficient developer. In reality, the fact that we're so opposite means that we're always seeing and doings things differently. When we're in a grind, he wants to hi-fives to boost morale and I want to put my head down to ship faster.

If I were to do it again. I'd find a smart, hardworking person that brings me energy and that I'd bring them energy when the shit hits the fan. I wouldn't care if they're a CEO, CTO, C-whatever-O. I'd look for someone that I'd enjoy working with above all else.

yes, built part of my previous startup on it. It has its use cases.

I like seeing more CLI tools in Go.

What's the difference between yours and sivel's? (in addition to Python vs Go)

The comments on Reddit are depressing and relatable. There's definitely a selection bias though.

I love what you guys have done. I'm interested to know what is the rationale for this? Are you finding that it helps improve conversion or something? Basically help me convince the business side of my company so that I can use this for our site too. :)

Another datapoint. Difference in speed is obvious to me coming from a Comcast pipe. There's an actual page load when JS is off vs instant page change when it is on.

It seems to me that he's an opportunist. Rather we trust this particular service to each his own. He seems like a smart business person. I think he knows that gaining trust is an important obstacle to this business. So I'll keep my eyes open and see what they do with this to gain our trust.

I haven't tried this so I don't know if it's good or not. But the feel good title. the email signup. the affiliated deals. and the deliberate posting of a mere landing page to Show HN. the way that this came across strikes me as a spammy growth hack.

The feel good title. The call to action email signup. The affiliated deals. And the fact that a mere landing page is deliberately posted to Show HN. This strikes me as a spammy "growth hack" from Codementor.

Make use of your school's network and resources while you're a student. I would start by contacting your school's venture/entrepreneurship/tech transfer office.

Also your profs might know of people that have done the same. Ask those people for advice as they probably know about things beneficial to you in particular that random people on the internet don't.

I moved across the Atlantic to co-found a startup this year. I learned a lot about product and customer development, etc. The usual stuff people talk about a lot. But I'm surprised at how much I got to learn about myself.

The most important lesson for me is realising the effectiveness of knowing yourself. Know your strengths, weaknesses, how to handle stress, how to handle conflict, know what you want, don't want, what you value, best environment for innovative thinking, etc.

Knowing yourself well helps you become more optimal in everything that you want to achieve.

What does Deis do about app logs? This is a main problem I have with Dokku at the moment.

I want to make a correction. It's actually Mao Zedong and not Deng Xiao Ping, which held power much later.

Great examples. I recall back when I was grade school in Hong Kong, we learned to read and write Chinese the standard "Mandarin" way. It is like formal speak. But in everyday conversation, people speak the "Cantonese" colloquial way. It is quite weird when I think about it now how everyone speaks "Cantonese" when it's never taught in school. It's like us learning regular English in school but everyone speaks Shakespeare or something (of course it's not that dramatic of a difference).

The written system in Hong Kong uses the standard "Mandarin" saying. Most serious Hong Kong newspapers (business, etc) "speak" the standard "Mandarin" way.

Cantonese speaker here. These are Cantonese (the region) proverbs much like "Bob's Your Uncle" is a quintessentially British saying that Americans wouldn't understand.

On another note, mainland China (including Canton) actually uses simplified Chinese writing (which came out from the Deng Xiao Ping era) whereas Hong Kong specifically maintians the traditional writing. The difference is literally less strokes and simplification of the characters. The infographic here uses the traditional writing. Personally I feel the two writings are mostly close enough that people should be able to guess what the other means. And AFAIK, it's a 1-to-1 mapping anyway.

yep, you actually can execute trades on saturdays on some retail brokers (they usually act as the counter-party) if you're willing to take the humongous spreads during those hours.

I have no idea that it overtook Counterclockwise and Vim. When did that happen? Do you think it's because of Cursive coming out of beta release?

I used to use Counterclockwise a few years back when I started with Clojure and then switched to Vim soon after.

the concept is the same as Vagrant. but it's substantially faster. when you `fig up` your app, it spins up almost instantaneously because it's backed by Docker.

What is it?

Writing is a skill. If you don't work on it, you will always be an average writer. The question then, is do you treat writing as a means to an end or a skill to be mastered?

I've been writing my own blog for 7 years. It still takes me at least half a day to write each of my posts (about 500 words). I post infrequently because of that. After all these years of writing on my blog, I only have a couple hundred subscribers. If I outsource it to post more regularly, would I be more efficient and effective? Probably.

The thing is, my writing is noticeably better over the years. I started out just brain dumping ideas and try to slip in screenshots whenever I can so my posts didn't look too pathetic (e.g. this one in 2008 http://www.quantisan.com/trade-of-the-day-bailed-out-of-a-wr.... Nowadays, I do the opposite. Getting your idea across simply and effortlessly for the reader is most important (e.g. this one from March, http://www.quantisan.com/more-problem-solving-less-solution-...). In recent years, my posts are getting more likes, more shares, and have been on HN a couple times.

Writing is like programming. Anyone can do it but to be good at it, you need to keep doing it and put in the effort to improve. Or, you can spend $300 for somebody else to do it for you.

We tried a bunch of methods, getting press, cold calling, newsletters, blogs, social media, etc. We learned that the most important thing is knowing who your target first customers persona should be and why (e.g. nicolasd, in another comment here, identified their Venn diagram). The more that you can narrow and define that persona, the easier it will be for you to learn about their habits and then get exposed at those places and speak to their needs.

Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald Weinberg http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004J4VV3I/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...

SEEKING FREELANCER - Boston or Remote

Want to do functional programming on the front-end? Come take on the PR industry with us!

Spokepoint is an MIT startup based in Cambridge, MA looking for a front-end (Clojurescript) developer to work directly with our core products for the next 3+ months full-time.

Job Specs: https://docs.google.com/a/glassymedia.com/document/d/1u-7F3G...

Get in touch with me (Paul) paul@glassymedia.com

You might want to check out this McDonald's photo shoot video http://youtu.be/oSd0keSj2W8

Everything on photos must be the exact same ingredients sourced for the menu. What's different is the efforts put into making and presenting them. Same ingredients, but 100X man-hours put into it.

Well here's a business idea -- Wifi/Cell Trucks. Like water trucks, food trucks, for big outdoor events.

[2] was raised in 2012 and still in discussion. I have no idea how fonts are made. Why does it take 2+ years to make a font italic?

Inconsolata http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html