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I'm still disappointed they removed their friends feature. I valued my friends' ratings more than the ratings of the Netflix user base as a whole. I have noticed that Netflix tends to be more accurate with the "users like you" star rating than the whole user base ratings.

I no longer see a sum of my ratings but I believe it is well over 2,500. I know others that have rated a lot more (when there was the friends feature you could see your friends' number of ratings). Because of my number of ratings I felt that Netflix did a pretty good job with recommending me content. I will be sad to see this go as I definitely refer to star ratings when adding content to my queue.

Others have mentioned that the two factors of quality and enjoyment make the star rating more valuable and I agree. The only time I remember it breaking down for me was the film Rachel Getting Married (though I am sure there were others). I couldn't stand Anne Hathaway's character to the point that I gave it one star but at the same time I recognized that she gave a really strong performance in what was probably a good film.

Are they converting ratings to thumbs up/down? What does a three-star rating convert to? Those are typically movies that I enjoyed but wouldn't rewatch or recommend to others.

Don't forget state income taxes which very easily can bring you effective rate up to 30-40%.

I agree that there seems to be a stigma in the startup echo chamber around single founders and as one I find it frustrating. The reason am I a single founder is that while I have always been a computer nerd my friends and colleagues were not so the number of programmers in my immediate network is effectively zero. Secondly, the people that I would have chosen to start a company with in my industry are former colleagues and were not in a position to leave their jobs for something new with zero pay. (We would not have been allowed to build this company in our freetime as there would have been too much overlap with the employer.)

I imagine my situation is pretty common and the way out of it is to bootstrap to enough profitability to be able to provide salary to co-founders or to hire help. But at that point I wouldn't need investors. :)

My good days are ones where I end the day with more todos that I started with because that means I made progress and now have new challenges ahead. So I continue to appreciate what having a cofounder (or even an employee) could mean for me.

Because of that new appreciation if I was investing my own money I would also be taking a long and hard look at companies with a single founder and would likely pass on many of them for that reason. Creating a successful company is incredibly hard and I believe having a second person increases the chances for success.

I love the quote that is along the lines of "All it takes is one sufficiently motivated individual to change the world." I hope that is true for us solofounders.

That is only true if you don't have a transfer.

Both Credit Karma and Mint make their revenue by offering financial products that might help you based on your financial profile so I imagine that can be fairly lucrative.

Congratulations on your launch! My startup also aims to help people improve their finances but from a different angle (a financial wellness platform for 401(k) advisors to use with their participants) so I very much appreciate your efforts to help people get on track with their finances.

I wonder if you can share any insights as to how effective you are changing people's spending habits after they start using your app?

Weber Kettle grill (love their smoker as well but points knocked off for cleanup).

I have always found Microsoft keyboard and mice to be well designed.

I remember having to use a floppy with custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files to run a lot of games on my 486sx25 with 4mb ram.

idkfa made single player Doom a lot easier :)

There is always some scope for product differentiation and a lot of scope for marketing differentiation. There are hundred(s) of different CRM products on the market and some differentiate themselves on features (specific features/workflows for particular industries) and some trumpet their lack of features as the "simple crm" or "lightweight crm".

Another example is that there are dozens of customer service software products across all price ranges and target business sizes.

Retirees might need to liquid a percentage of their portfolio each month to pay their bills. Getting caught in a flash crash can have an effect on them.

In a general sense though I agree that the behavior shouldn't be illegal but am fine with exchanges implementing rules about it. For a trade to occur both the buyer and the seller are getting what they want at a price they both deem acceptable. Phantom orders does not inherently change that.

off topic:

I took a look at his new project(https://www.matterapp.io/) and wonder what people think about the method of social proof he is using by showing logos of companies that are not customers but that are transparent about their diversity. Seems like a great shortcut but feels slightly misleading to me.

I would imagine that as investors YC would like to invest in the founders that look at users and revenue as validation of their ideas rather than acceptance into YC as validation. Not only does that show the startup is more viable but shows the dedication of the founders.

I agree with you on feedback. I would LOVE specific reasons why I was not accepted as it would give me very clear goals to shoot for. I also understand that the time to provide that feedback would be crippling to their own productivity.

(As an aside, I wonder if we are past the stage of another Facebook or Google. In a macro sense it seems as if we might be at a bit of a pullback from globalization and a result of that might be less new large global companies. I wonder if the next global companies of that size come from India or Brazil but for that to be the case the company would really need to come at the same time of massive economic growth and reduced corruption.)

I did that when I was nearly hit in a marked crosswalk (they didn't slow down and were less than arm's length from me) that was at an intersection with no light. They went around the block to come back and start threatening me for hitting their car...

I have filled out a few applications for tech e&o and cyber liability insurance over the past week and they all had a question about antivirus on the servers, workstations, and phones. I answered truthfully (no) and wonder if that is going to hurt me.

You haven't yet convinced me that what you propose is "something better" than the educators' current curriculum. I know the education system is far from perfect, and obviously some schools are more effective than others, but I am open to hearing your ideas more fleshed out.

Once kids know the three R's then maybe you can introduce some of these other topics. Writing effectively is a job skill (and one that is lacking as anybody who hires and reads cover letters knows). Basic algebra is practically a prerequisite for programming. You mention learning how to "invest in your future" and that is was I think the standard curriculum aims to achieve.

I agree with you that the order of planets and capitals of states are not particularly useful knowledge by themselves. But in order to understand the what is going on in the world knowing geography is pretty important. If you work in any company of a certain size (whose business spans states or countries) then you should not have to refer to Wikipedia for context for every business decision.

It has been a while since I have been in school but I have managed to offend a few teachers since with my suggestion of getting computers out of the classrooms completely. This might have changed but when I was in school the students already knew more about computers than the teachers and the teachers could not effectively teach using tools (computers) they did not know.

I tried Ubuntu on my c720 and had issues with the cursor. I think it might have been me brushing my hand against the trackpad which I believe the Chromebook os recognizes as accidental but Ubuntu did not.

Have you had this issue?

My primary use case for Evernote is using the web clipper to clip articles and then tagging and adding notes. Do any the alternatives mentioned in the comments support that?

There was a scene in Demolition Man as well that dealt with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs

I wouldn't include LaserDisks on that list. It was replaced by DVDs which I believe are close enough in practice to not consider it a failed technology. More of a first iteration.

3D TV didn't last long. I never got one and didn't really see the appeal but I wonder if widespread use of VR headsets would make that technology mute anyway.

I did it where I correlated the recommendations across all of the entrepreneurial podcasts I listen to:

http://blog.startopz.com/recommended-books-entrepreneurial-p...

It has been a while but with Outlook there was an option to ignore all read receipt requests. Maybe you turned that on?

Pretty much all of Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leader talks are inspirational for me.

This is a link to my favorite eight:

http://blog.startopz.com/entrepreneurial_leaders/

The two skills that have been the key to my career are writing and Excel.

Thoughts in response:

1. I shut down a LLC about four or five years ago. I definitely didn't think about it at the time but it seems a bit wrong that it can be willed back into existence by a lawsuit. It can't defend itself without any assets to pay lawyers or members so to defend against the lawsuit would require piercing the shield and going after the former members assuming they are still alive (which in this case they all still are).

2. I think you are exactly right with that thought.

That example can even be extended that the tax office can be notified of each transaction the corporation enters and have a ledger of revenue, expenses, and deductions that need to settled before the corporation can be spun down.

One thing that I hadn't thought through is that the only reason to keep a corporation going is the hope of future earnings (or for tax/liability reasons but it all comes back to money). Without that potential it is shut down. Maybe it is a moot point. Why use your own resources to sue a company that has nothing to give you?

I would love it if you interviewed founders that you turned down but who went on to have some level of success. (For me meaning some level of profitability or improving people's lives rather than calling raising a round a success.)

I imagine a lot of the podcast audience is those that have been or would be rejected from YC at this point in their journey so there might be more lessons there for us than from the outliers that were accepted to YC.

My answer from a similar thread a couple of months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285392

StartOpz (http://www.startopz.com):

Workday-lite (really lite) for small businesses. Individual components such as time-off tracking and expense reports all have sites on there dedicated to them individually that seem to do well. This covers all of them and could use somebody who has time to dedicate to (content) marketing.

Moviestud.io (http://www.moviestud.io):

Production management for independent filmmakers. The blog has a lot of epic length blog posts that can use somebody who can spend some time promoting them.

Learn vim.

I wish them the best of luck but recall Eazel (?) attempting to do this with Gnome back in the day and ended up folding as not enough people were willing to pay.

I agree with your last sentence but there usually is a reason a classic is a classic. Same applies to literature.

However if there is one thing I have learned is that everyone has different tastes. My wife cannot watch any film made before she was born while my golden age of film is about 1940 to 1970. I will take All About Eve, Double Indemnity, the Thin Man, and anything with Humphrey Bogart over anything released these days. That is not even getting into classic foreign films.

A key component of classic films is that they weren't able to distract special effects, or even colors for some, so plot was that much more important. I can't imagine that mumblecore will survive the test of time but I could be wrong.

As somebody who has written and produced a feature-length film for $10k, and turned out nothing close to Christopher Nolan's Following, I have to say that this comment is spot on.