HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zanewill9

33 karma · joined January 22, 2016

submissionscomments
zanewill9··on 7 things to keep in mind building Amazon Alexa Skills
Alexa's done an admiral job of showing us what's possible. Still impressed how good it is (and how good it could become)
zanewill9··on Ask HN: Usually engineering jobs are plentiful – is this a time to stay put?
Sorry - good point.

My question is SV-centric, but broader viewpoints would be useful as well.

zanewill9··on LinkedIn Tumbles 30% on Earnings Guidance
The one year stock graphs for LNKD and TWTR now look remarkably similar (or at least they will tomorrow when the price is no longer "after market").

That seems surprising to me, all things considered I actually believe LNKD is a company with real value - TWTR seems far more shaky.

zanewill9··on $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups
This is probably a leftover opinion from just a few years ago using AWS. At that time, the pricing model increased shockingly fast with AWS. I know a few startups that were caught off-guard.

AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.

zanewill9··on Show HN: Plain Email – An app for one-touch email processing
Although there's a strong "email sucks" sentiment in the world, I believe the truth is that email is a complex system that has actually already evolved quite well. Gmail is quite an adept tool.

The inherent issue is volume - which isn't per-se the fault of the medium. Filtering and categorization has been the primary answer there - and those things (including this post) have helped evolve those issues.

zanewill9··on Decommissioning a free public API
In my experience, people/companies will pay and in fact, want to, once they rely on a service enough.

People generally get that payment gives them some semblance of rights (whereas consuming for free does not).

If you're running a free service - make payment an option. It really does benefit some class of users.

zanewill9··on At 83, I Decided to Develop an App
Inspiring.
zanewill9··on Why Are So Many Zappos Employees Leaving?
This was a fascinating (and daring) experiment. Sad it ended up like this.
zanewill9··on Universe Sandbox
Beautiful beautiful program. Some of the preset scenarios are great (i.e. galaxy's colliding, Jupiters moons)

(also, often on sale on Steam)

zanewill9··on There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts
This is a dangerous trend (especially since I've noticed other articles questioning a University education altogether).

I was first alerted to it by (of all places) The magic-the-gathering professor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic

(bonus if you're looking for some great magic-the-gathering videos)

zanewill9··on Ask HN: How do prolific programmers go about their daily lives?
"like food-to-code machines"

Great phrase - I'll be using that !

zanewill9··on Ageism: a worsening epidemic
I see a strong conflation of "older" with "lots of personal responsibilities" that affect job performance.

It's clearly true that 30 year olds are more likely to have kids then 20 year olds, but it seems 40 and 50 year olds get "blamed" for being unproductive because of things like kids, mortgages, etc, than do the 30 year olds.

The interesting study is the 45 year old with no kids, house or marriage. Are they "old" too ?

zanewill9··on Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley
Excellent post. We like to think sometimes the underdog wins but sadly, success is typically given to those that were born with it. The unfortunate part to me is the credit they were given as if they were amazing, not born lucky.
zanewill9··on How do I raise a seed/A round on the most founder friendly terms in 2016?
Angel list is a good place to start. Look for angels that you have connections to (or connections of connections).

Don't ask for money - ask for advice. You'll learn a lot and if you are ready, you might start to get offers.