You should join a startup where generally everyone needs to carry their weight for the company to succeed which creates camaraderie opposite of loneliness.
They key point that's missing here is that ALL stock trades are on "margin" because in reality it takes 2 days to settle a trade, but that is abstracted away from you by the brokerage and clearing house, and made available to you instantly.
Caveat: I'm just starting to learn about all this, so it's probably not a perfectly accurate analogy.
You are taking your personal anecdotes and extrapolating. No one would disagree with you that mental illness and addiction are major factors in homelessness. But your argument is like saying, anyone who doesn't believe everyone in the world is wealthy go spend some time in Medina. It's a ridiculous argument.
This is spot on. As a hiring manager for these type of positions, the primary thing I look for is a track record of using data to achieve business results. This of course creates a barrier for entering this field and makes those with this experience even more highly sought after.
Yes, and I only feel bad for those who have cancer, and have no food to eat. The employees only have to worry about the mental anguish of suffering through some stupid whiteboard coding problems to get their next job. /sarcasm off.
Personally, I would do whatever you think best sets up your child for success. In my case, it's unfathomable in my family culture to not pay for college for the child if you're financially able because that is what we believe will set up the child for success - to be able to freely seek out higher education and realize their full potential without worry of debt and finances. However, the counter point is that there are those that feel the financial constraints will make your child stronger and instill in them a stronger work ethic and appreciation for what they have. An upbringing that combines both elements is likely ideal, but personally I chose to instill the latter values in different ways that doesn't cripple my child with debt.
It's more than people being used to free access. Tolls on a major highway like the 405 would effectively be a regressive tax - people need to get to work and in L.A. there often is no alternative. And people seem to generally agree regressive taxation is not a good idea.
This is kind of missing the whole point. Which is, as a developer, you can slip anything into the Apple appstore that you could have slipped into Alexa's, so the point the article is making about certification is silly. Of course there are more security implications in Apple's case, but the fact remains that numerous apps have done the bait and switch and were pulled after Apple discovered it much later.
We were one of these potential bigger customers willing to fork over thousands per month, but the unit cost was still too expensive for us. We tried to negotiate a better bulk rate, but their team was unresponsive and so we eventually went with another service that was more responsive to our needs. According to the article they only have ~3k paying customers, which means they only care about giant top tier customers willing to pay top dollar. Seems like a mistake to me, but what I only know from the potential client perspective.
The one language to rule them all reasoning is a red herring. We chose nodejs for our server code for an iOS app as do many others.
The reason why JS + node is popular is becasue it's pretty good at each of the metrics you mentioned. Even though it's not best in class at any one of those, it is well balanced for many tasks. Many other technologies are either too slow, too low level, too hard to scale, or too cumbersome to work with.
As soon as you make a game that's able to compete for conversions on ads, your game probably won't be considered indie anymore. Ads are extremely competitive and the only way to compete and not get priced out is to "sellout" and make games with mass market appeal, AAA price tags, high monetization funnels to increase LTV, etc. Without that, it's unlikely you'll be able to profitably spend on ads through any of the major channels. You're competing against the Game of Wars and Clash of Clans out there on Mobile and the AAA and IP titles on traditional platforms. So your metrics will need to be on par with the likes of those (it at least needs to be on par in a niche target demographic) in order to have any measure of success.
So the typical indie marketing strategy of using social media, press, and word of mouth, is actually very rational and probably the best way to go about it.
How did you get access to the binaries? I would think the AppStore requires a session and valid purchase in order to download. Or is this analysis based on binaries submitted by your users?
As a 3rd party without detailed knowledge of the space and each company's position it's hard to say. Here is a possible framework for you tho.
Since you are basically asking for co-founder level equity in the merged company, pretend that you were working there the whole time when you were working on your own startup. The acquisition cost is the amount of salary you would have drawn.
Nah, people with sour grapes are most likely are all arm chair wantrepreneurs. I doubt there are many people that are actually out there doing things that would be sour about this. People who think this went viral solely because of YC are likely too crippled by their cynicism to accomplish anything.
Although I use Netflix all the time, it's in spite of their app. Outside of the "my list" I've curated myself, 98% of the things the Netflix app shows me, I'm not really interested in. I feel like that ratio could easily be made better if they allowed me to mark things I'm not interested in and never show me those things again + apply machine learning to display a better personalized catalog.
Whenever I use Netflix I always feel like there is a lot of content locked away and I have to dig past the same stuff it always shows to find stuff I'm interested in.
I can get more things done in 60 hours. I'm looking at productivity over the long term. If I work 60 hours/week for a whole year I will accomplish a whole lot more than if I worked 30. But if I work 80 hours per week, I will only accomplish marginally more than 60 hours and maybe even less if I burn out. Everyone has different priorities and different breaking points, but I find it disingenuous when people claim more hours doesn't allow for more productivity. I'm certain there are people that can sustain much longer periods of productivity than myself and as a result accomplish more things.
Of course spending time alone does not mean you'll be productive, but assuming equal intelligence, someone who is able to sustain concentration over a longer period of time will accomplish more than someone who concentrates for a lesser amount of time.
Sorry, but I just don't buy this wishful thinking of low hour high productivity. Personally, I probably hit peak productivity around 60 hours although I rarely work for longer than 4 hours without taking a break to eat lunch/dinner or play with my daughter. People who hit peak productivity at 30 hours probably just don't like what they're working on as much and so of course founders select for the former. That said this only relevant if you're trying to be highly productive. I have nothing against people who choose to spend their energy on other things.
Voice recognition is not in an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means there is a point where something that is less real is better than something that is more real. Pixar improves the scene by adding elements that are unrealistic. Another example is a preference for lower frame rate movies.
Right now, every incremental improvement to voice recognition improves its usefulness. It might appear that we're in an uncanny valley because voice recognition is barely usable right now versus completely unusable in the past, but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition.