That's so sad to hear. I only met him once about acquiring my High Scalability blog. That didn't happen, but it was obvious he was one of those wise people who was both kind and very smart. Not a combination we see often in this world. A real loss...
I have the same pair of glasses. My first paid programming work was dBASE II and later FoxPro. I don't look back on MySQL + Perl with the same affection. You could really get stuff done in those environments.
The thing is, it's real. Or it was for the golden era of cheap tokens. When tokens get expensive, we'll see how that changes things. With AI, you can think in terms of features rather than implementation; that's a totally different way of working.
I first programmed in C on a PDP 11 many years ago. I'm curious what you mean by "public vs. dev mode"?
I've always sucked at marketing. For HN, I decided to be honest because that's the kind of people who read HN.
And it really does do a lot. That's not hype. It's full-featured as I could make it without turning into something it's not, like a calendar or "productivity system."
At the heart of it is the mechanic of a rotation list, not forgetting what's next, but that's just the beginning.
According to app store optimization theory, that means you were never a potential customer anyway. If that's true or not, who knows?
None of my other apps have ever had a hard paywall, and success was not a result. So I tried something different this time.
In the end, I just couldn't go with a hard paywall; it's against my nature. So, on the paywall at the bottom, there's a "not now" button that lets you use all the features of the app without paying for 7 days.
You got the gist of it. Then it just kind of took off.
The TLDR:
Where it started: me standing in front of a long aisle of dog food bags at Costco, racking my memory for which kind I was supposed to buy next for my finicky golden retriever, Kilo.
How it ended: me building Rotation List, so nobody will ever have to forget again.
While having to respond to TikTok is understandable, what's their point of differentiation? It's hard to tell the difference between the two now. Maybe that's a good thing for insta?
I use a normal credit card that I use everyday and they canceled my account for no reason that I can see at all. No reason. No appeal. And they keep sending me email to create ads! This is despite paying for google domain, apps, and google drive space forever.
The deeper problem is modeling goal setting. We know people will hurt themselves and to punish others and economics is stuck at thinking people only wish to maximize value. People are much more complex than that.
If you are from the US the food is different and is regional. The Algarve is very proud of their traditional seafood. If you aren't used to Mackerel and Cod and Sardines it's hard to get used to. As you move north the dishes change.
They're beautiful, but years ago I was on a white water river rafting trip and the guide knocked down any human generated rock art he would find.
The reason he said is it was hubris to insert your ego into other people's experience of nature. It distracted from what was already beautiful and transcendent.
I'm not exactly sure I fully agree with him, but when I go to the beach and see these installations, I do tend to see them as intrusions, rather than art.