I've used Braintree extensively with their subscriptions, and would not recommend using them.
Their documentation is spotty, they don't inform customers about required changes to an implementation, and most importantly their failed transaction rate is much much higher than other processors I've worked with.
A while back I had an issue with Lastpass settings not being properly enabled on my account. I discovered that all settings were rendered, and in order to disable them they used 'display: none' rather than not rendering them on the dashboard at all.
The fix was for me to disable Display: none and it gave me access to the feature in a limited way.
After reaching out to support with screenshots, they fixed the issue and I gained full access, but it is clear to me that Lastpass uses 'display: none' as feature gating and that their software is absolute garbage.
There's thousands of bots with obviously recognizable pictures from Thisdoesnotexist on both LinkedIn and Quora. Quora is arguably more insidious as these are ranked and spreading huge amounts of disinformation. Someone should really step in and create a neural network to recognize and flag artificially generated profiles
I interviewed a young man who was doing this kind of work for about six months in Ireland a while back for a completely different role. It was quite clearly mentally taxing and he broke down crying mid-interview.
I ended up canceling my following meeting and talking through things with him.
He was close to suicide, had cut contact with most people in his life and said that he hadn't been able to sleep or think straight since he started the work.
Unfortunately I couldn't offer him any work, only a shoulder to cry on and a promise that there was beauty in the world as well.
I never thought a job could do so much mental damage to someone, but these jobs are horrible.
Not entirely illogical, if something is expected to generate a lot of media attention, the case may be kept private to prevent the 'court of public opinion' to influence the outcome. Everything is still documented and shared afterwards regardless of the outcome.
That would cause systemic problems for the person and almost certain death.
Platelets are filtered out of the blood by the spleen and then stored or cleaned up there. The spleen likely just cleans them up as per instructions from the immune system. On the other side are production problems where your bone marrow stops producing platelets, but that is more commonly due to cancers or cancer treatments.
I've had the exact some happen (It's rare, but here I am), including a transient ischemic stroke while having virtually no platelets.
There is no real understanding for the cause of immune thrombocytopenia in the first place, but the combination of low platelets and clotting happens in quite a few cases.
Platelets take on a lot of roles beyond clotting (for example they transport serotonin, which itself has been linked to clotting) and clotting itself is about more than just platelet counts (which would need a few pages to even start to explain).
Once the immune system targets platelets though, unexpected things tend to happen beyond just uncontrolled bleeding, none of which are particularly well understood due to the low number of cases. The cause of idiopathic thrombocytopenia is most commonly attributed to an immune response, although it can have several other causes.
What I can say is that thrombocytopenia following a viral infection is more common than it appears to be following this vaccine. I believe this would be a more fair comparison than to compare it against the general population.
The percentage of people who would have this same stroke when having COVID-19 would in all probability be much much higher.
Negotiate for converting your equity into debt that needs to be paid off at certain events. Easiest way to get the most money out of him. Lawyers can help you set that up in a contract, you just have to negotiate on the value of the debt.
Interestingly, the damages can be calculated and definitely add up.
Restaurants spend a lot of time and effort to build up loyal, lifetime customers that are created by giving them three exceptional experiences in a row. There is a lot of research on getting to three exceptional experiences in return for a lifetime customer. Those exceptional experiences require investments in staff and training and take a long time to pay off.
Having GrubHub break that effort through misrepresentation they are destroying the lifetime value of those customers. If you apply that math to slightly more premium venues, GrubHub is easily costing restaurants hundreds of thousands in revenue through lost lifetime value.
Restaurants are complex, fragile businesses, and this practice damages them at the core of their business.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out in court.
Although I'm not particularly familiar with the latest in US trademark laws, in most European trademark cases it can be argued that the name "Paper" is too descriptive to be defended.
At the same time the fact that both are in the general category of "apps for the curation and creation of content", the confusion in the market is definitely going to be there.
To be perfectly honest, people can steal your idea.
Case in point, back before we launched our first startup, I went out to a trade-fair asking people their opinion about our conceptual product as if it was something we had already built.
I must have talked to maybe 50+ people that one specific day, but one person in particular was very interested in it and wanted to keep in touch.
A bunch of years later, that guy turns out to have been part of another company, in a similar field, with a bigger network, a bigger budget and an existing infrastructure that matched. Over these past years, they've changed their entire company to align with our startup's little idea and actually managed to capture a significant part of the market by launching simultaneously to us rather than following our lead.
The point is, don't ever assume that your neighbor who is an accountant will steel your mobile app idea.
On the other hand, when you are talking to the CEO of a company that is developing mobile experiences about your awesome idea, then don't be surprised if suddenly that company suddenly does take your idea and execute it better than you ever could have.
When you are trying to gain actual "first mover advantage", there are situations where it's not a good idea to tell your idea.
Very curious to see how much they've fixed. Last year I bought a brand-new laptop which came with Windows 7. The first two months the laptop was running completely perfectly, until Windows 8 came out and I decided to upgrade.
Since then, the experience has been terrible;
- randomly crashing apps without meaningful error-messages, mostly when one app would crash it would take down all other apps with it (this was fixed with an update about half a year ago),
- the built-in mousepad was not recognized for about 2 months until an update magically fixed it, but to this day Windows won't accept tap-to-click properly and all attempts to fix it are reset with each Windows update,
- the windows 8 installer damaged about 10% of my windows 7 restore partition from the harddisk, at the same time corrupting the MBR and making it impossible to either revert to Windows 7 or to switch OS in general without significantly reworking the entire harddrive,
- and last but not least, just an incredibly confusing user interface which has truly weird functions like "drag mouse from bottom left corner to the right and a mystical menu will pop up.
I've done a fair bit of interviews with our own asynchronous video interview tool (Interactly), and I always offer people feedback on why I decided not to proceed with them.
Only about 20% of people actually want to hear feedback. One of the challenges of giving feedback is that you want the decision to be final, but if you give points to improve upon then they are inclined to start negotiating with you.
With asynchronous interviews it gave me a very clear record of how they responded, which made it easy for the candidate to also look back at their own input.
One sales manager we interviewed had a significant background, previously having worked at high level positions with large companies.
However, when I saw his interview he was incoherent in his story, made vague statements, made several statements diminishing the challenges of the job without backing those statements up, and most of all his style of presenting himself showed he would be overly aggressive for the intended audience.
I gave him the feedback and instructed him to look at his own video with this in mind, and he really appreciated it.
The thing is, people need detailed feedback to improve. To stay safe on the legal side it would be easy to just give binary responses, but if we're really looking at what would improve the world, it would be actually detailed responses that enable people to improve.
I agree that the name "Audiour" has a few issues, but the cheap copycat issue isn't that big in my opinion. You're clearly doing something else. A copycat name would be if you were using the name "imgour" or something like that.
The problem with the name "Audiour" is that it's not easily pronouncable. If I remember correctly, imgur was aimed to mimic the word "imager". When I read "Audiour" the first thing I think of is an audiotour in a museum. When I try to pronounce it, I have the choice between "audi-our", "audio-er" or "audi-oor".
If you're interested, I bought soundur.com because in my opinion that's a much better name.
You can have it if you want - contact me at username @gmail.com :)
I actually did something similar to this about 5 years ago with Flash. By applying a complex filter to a flat layer to make the layer behave and look like it was a liquid drop on a glass surface. Essentially I just embossed it with 4 different colors that matched the background and then added a subtle "gloss" on the top to give it a 3D experience.
The blobs merged together seamlessly when they even came close to eachother and were a pretty close impression of real liquid drops.
This technique might also work to make the merging of the blobs appear more realistic.
It's funny, because Lyme is one of those diseases where "it could be anything" to the outsider because there are no external indicators that something is wrong with them.
Back when I was younger I got Lyme disease at the age of 13. I got treated for it by some quack without antibiotics and then went on with my life - essentially untreated. Between the ages of 14 and 17 I have barely any memories. There are snippets of events that I can recall in my memory, but in total they must be less than 20 snippets over the course of 3 years of my life. If I try my very best to go back to other moments in there, there is nothing, kind of like after having had a few too many drinks and being unable to remember how you got home, but then having that feeling for about 3 years of your life.
Much like stated in the post, your memory is affected by Lyme disease. You actually still have the capacity to think complete thoughts, but after only a few seconds your thoughts are gone.
One of the few snippets of memory that I have left, is the sudden strong realisation that I tried my very best to remember what had happened in the last 7 days - and the complete and utter inability to recall even one single event over those 7 days. I wasn't even able to remember what I ate for lunch 3 hours earlier, or what I had been doing for the previous 5 minutes. I remember getting really upset that I felt that that memory was also fading and I kept on repeating it in my head to prevent it from disappearing. It was scary.
I am apparently fortunate enough to continue functioning well after Lyme disease, but I can guarantee you that the experience being written in this post is absolutely identical to the experience that I had.
It's bizarre, it's scary, but fortunately for Waldo: he won't remember a thing anyway.
The video needs work; the main risk perceived will be to have bad design applied and not be caught. The video is basically a demo of that scenario.