yangez

Let's say at your software company a sales rep brings in $2M in 2022 and demands a $1.8M commission. What do you say?

> We want to be the job search platform that puts engineers in control.

I love this, but I'm curious about the incentives here. Triplebyte only makes money from companies, not engineers. In the long run, can engineer-centric intentions override a business model based around companies and recruiters staying happy? I hope so!

> We’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above.

This is an important qualifier. I'd argue that the most technical candidates are not necessarily the ones who offer the most value to companies. In fact, I would argue that "notably de-emphasizing ambition" will cancel out your technical superiority in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Here's a choice for your company's next hire:

1. A technically superior but comfortable candidate whose top priority is maintaining work-life balance and flexible work arrangements

2. A technically adequate but hungry candidate whose top priority is moving fast and learning tons

Who would you choose?

> The bottom line is that the difficulty of the decision is the most important factor in determining whether a player makes a mistake. In other words, examining the complexity of the board position is a much better predictor of whether a player is likely to blunder than his or her skill level or the amount of time left in the game.

I wonder if this also works the other way around with good moves instead of just avoiding blunders.

A parallel in business: we spend so much time thinking about hiring "A players" and "10x-ers". But could refocusing on better processes, environment, and goal-setting (reducing the complexity of the position) be just as effective for increasing performance?

How is this "strong-arming"? If we keep devaluing the meaning of words, we won't have any left when something serious actually happens.

The rep ran through a couple of retention scripts, and then got mixed up because OP called on the last billing day. Then he promptly canceled the service without any charges, which is exactly what OP was looking for. (And no, it's probably not because of the threat to contact his supervisor; customers overestimate how scary that is.)

There is literally nothing to complain about here, except maybe OP felt a little bit annoyed. I'm all for calling companies on their BS, but this feels just a bit too trigger-happy to me.

The BBB is basically a protection racket with excellent PR.

Get a customer complaint? BBB contacts you to pay for membership. Don't want to pay for membership? You must not care about your customers, so you get an F-. Pay for membership and the score immediately goes up to a B.

But with a name like the "Better Business Bureau", it's no wonder that people get suckered into thinking it's a legitimate organization.

More info: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_customer/2010/12/... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110919/14221016016/criti...

> Programming, like writing, painting, and music, is chiefly a creative endeavor not a technical one. Practice... will not make you a substantially better programmer. It will just make you more efficient with your tools.

Show me a world-class writer who doesn't obsess about his writing with every waking moment.

Show me a master painter who doesn't paint every single chance she gets.

And show me a music prodigy who hasn't slogged through 15 years of mind-numbing practice every single day.

Only then will I believe that these artists are just getting more "efficient with their tools".

In creative fields, it's even more important that you put in a huge volume of work. That's the only way to connect the dots and create something truly unique.

> Rails isn’t just a brick wall, it’s a brick mountain... By the end of the first month, I had literally no idea what was going on.

This is not a brick wall. It's giving up as soon as something gets hard.

Rails is a great example. It has so much behind-the-scenes "magic" that it's really hard to wrap your mind around at first. Back when I was first learning it, my brain felt like it had been filled with cement at the end of every day. I didn't understand it for weeks; I felt like I was just pounding my head on a brick wall over and over. Then, all of a sudden, the fog suddenly parted and it was like being set free. After that, I never had another Rails problem that I couldn't handle.

Everyone that I've ever talked to that has learned Rails - or any other language - has struggled through this initial pain period. The difference is that the successful ones push through it after it stops being fun.

It doesn't only apply to programming either. Everything you ever learn starts with a "brick wall" that you think you'll never get past. Once you suck it up and break through it, you may find that the road is clear from there.

Here's an important piece of demographic information for the survey:

> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.

So almost half of those polled don't actually have steady access to ebooks. I wonder how the statistics change for a sample who have ready access to both.

> When the Internet bubble burst, the company underwent rocky times. By 2000, [the founder] was gone from the company, as were four other members of his founding team.

> For the next decade, Bloodhound recovered and slowly grew, raising seven more rounds of financing. In April 2011, the company was sold for $82.5 million.

11 years is a long time. How much do they think they deserved?

Employee compensation is absolutely not associated with the value of the work the employee does.

Instead, it's associated with the best replacement that the company could find.

If Joe makes $2M a year for a company and gets paid $150k but Steve can do the same work at the same level for $100k, Joe's out and Steve's in. The initial $2M of value doesn't matter, except to lower the chance that a replacement could outperform you.

Cynical and unfair? Sure. That's how it works, though. Start your own company if you don't like it.

I'm not saying everyone has to work long hours. I'm just saying that the few people who do will have an obvious advantage. It's up to each person to figure out if that's what they want.

> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does.

This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns.

There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.

What's with all these startups taking so much design inspiration from Stripe?

https://www.shirts.io/

https://zinc.io/

> One possible opportunity is to get the legal system and governments involved in this so as to require an adequate level of merchant support.

I wince every time someone proclaims the government should step in to regulate something that is obviously none of their business. That's the easy way out, and it hurts everyone in the long run.

It would be helpful if there was a way to show the reasoning behind deleted submissions. Like a quick note on [dead] pages that explains why it was killed, just like you did here. That way, people won't keep resubmitting the same story over and over, which makes it easier on everyone.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

This is very disturbing. How did the FBI gain access to all this information? It should be locked up in Apple.

From what I see, the NCFTA in "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" looks like it stands for the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance, which "functions as a conduit between private industry and law enforcement." (http://www.ncfta.net/)

Is Apple willingly sharing personal information with the FBI through the NCFTA?

That should be Facebook's tagline.

I see a page full of grammatical errors, inane capitalization, awkward sentence structure, and spelling irregularities like "Face Book." It probably shouldn't affect how I feel about their ability to actually complete the project, but... I mean, just check out this sentence:

> The Teams Background! Wilhelm Cashen engineer and entrepreneur with a long career in electromagnet controls and systems, has followed in his mentors Nikola Tesla, throughout his career.

Anyone else get thrown for a loop reading this? The guy seems impressive and well-qualified for this project, which is why it's so strange to me that he's writing at a fourth-grade level. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence.

Maybe English isn't his first language. In any case, I wonder how much more funding the project would get if it was presented more professionally.

> "Confused" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Relax, no need for that. Obviously India is an English-speaking country, but when we targeted "English" speakers we expected a higher percentage of our traffic to come from Western sources like the US and Canada, instead of 95%+ from click farms in India. We found that wasn't the case, so we switched to country-specific targeting. Thanks for educating me, though.

This problem isn't confined to Facebook alone. A while back we were getting ridiculous CPAs on Google Adwords of under 50c, but quickly realized that literally none of these were converting into paying customers. Notably, we were targeting English-speaking countries only, so I don't know why we were getting hits from India and Egypt and stuff.

After targeting US and Canada only, CPAs skyrocketed but each signup actually became worth something.

I'm confused. Who benefits from these click / like bots that seem to plague every advertising platform, besides the platform itself?

> It took more than five years to build the 828-meter ‘Burj Khalifa’ in Dubai—the current world’s tallest building.

> ...projected cost at US$628 million — as compared with the US$1.5 billion Burj Khalifa.

Seems like the only thing the Burj Khalifa has going for it is that it, well, already exists. This is a pretty big advantage though. Anyone can talk big before construction delays, government regulations, and other interference come into play.

Facebook's App Center has a distinct advantage over alternatives: they have much more information on the users of their apps. Also, because ratings are based on real names, they'll have a much easier time preventing ratings spam.

Because of this, Facebook has the potential to develop a more accurate app recommendation engine and solve the problem of app discovery. If Facebook can make their platform more merit-based than the capricious Apple App Store, both users and developers will flock to them.

And this isn't even considering Facebook's social graph. Not only could Facebook recommend apps based on your demographics + interests, it could also recommend them to you based on how much you previously liked the games that some of your OTHER friends liked. Things like this could add a whole new dimension to app discovery - all completely exclusive to the Facebook platform.

>The app doesn’t allow users to share anything from Everyme to Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks — Cameron says that’s so you know that what’s shared in a Circle stays in the Circle.

These guys have it right. It's about time a social network started focusing on the quality of communication rather than the quantity of connections.

It may be wiser to focus on the absolute best way to make something that people want rather than just crunching your optimal exit strategy. In most cases this probably means you want a co-founder.

10% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

He worded the post in a much more compelling way.

This is worth the $3 just for the working search functionality and the ability to view your sent messages. The awesome UI is just a bonus.

Easy. Take "ethnicity" out of the application and blot out the applicant's last name when evaluating applications.

At what point does inspiration become imitation? Clearly Curebit stepped over the line in this case, but it's undeniable that lots of startups draw design inspiration from other companies.

But at what point does this become unacceptable? For example, if Curebit merely used the same design, except hosting the assets on their own server, would that be okay? What if they just copied the layout but used their own styles, images, and fonts? Or if they just copied the button?