Great work guys. Lob's a great service and I wish you all the best.
Certainly rings a lot of bells here at Pwinty as we both launched about the same time.
Our first ever order arrived sooner than expected and was fulfilled by me running down to the local photo store with a memory stick and them over to the post office. Then spent a few months with a commercial photo printer living in our dining room. We'd drape a blanket over it when guests came over for dinner, but it had a habit of whirring to life at the most inopportune times.
My wife tolerated this wonderfully for a good few months until we had a better alternative!
We're using GoCardless at Pwinty to bill our UK based merchants- works really smoothly, and much cheaper than collecting via debit card or PayPal as we have to do in the rest of the world.
Best of luck to them- especially after hearing they're rolling out to Europe as well- exciting times!
Unfortunately the working time directive for doctors in the UK is also averaged over a longer time period. So my wife has just come off an 80+ hour week of night shifts
Maybe I'm missing something- but I can't see the valuations the companies are raising at anywhere (e.g. I can see that Company X wants to raise $490,000 - but how much of the business this is for)
Surely this is question number 1 when you want to invest in a company?
EDIT- Found it once I clicked the "Apply to invest" button". Maybe it should be a bit more up front though
Although TDD does give you more confidence to make changes to your code in future, I think you're overlooking a major benefit, which is allowing swifter code/test/debug cycles.
So rather than having to make a change, run up the app in my browser, and manually test that the latest bit of code is working, I can test individual functions just by running my unit tests.
Of course this doesn't obviate the need for browser based testing too - but it can reduce the amount of it you need.
TDD allows me to produce working code faster by helping me notice and fix my errors sooner. If you're an excellent coder, maybe you don't need this- but I certainly do!
interesting- in the UK, Volvo drivers tend to be thought of as left-wing, cautious, careful, slow. The brand is also associated with the left-leaning newspaper 'The Guardian' as well as museli and wearing socks with sandals!
But a DNS based failover is still going to take an hour or so to propagate right (given that a lot of browsers/proxies/DNS servers don't respect TTL very well at all)? And then you end up with a system with stale data, and the mess of trying to reconcile it when your other system comes back up.
I'd take an hour long Appengine outage once a year over that anytime!
Surely hosting yourself exposes you to just as much, if not more risk? Problem in the datacentre where you're co-lo'd, or one of your servers blows up?
I think people not trusting the cloud is similar to how people feel safer driving their cars then taking a plane. The stats say the plane's safer, but people prefer being in control. People like the idea of being in control of their servers, even if that means there's hundreds of extra things that can go wrong compared to a cloud provider.
We also get a lot more publicity when a cloud provider has an outage as LOTS of sites go down at once. Hardly anyone notices when service X who self-host go down for a few hours...
I think it is incredibly important for tech companies to not only give adequate amount of leave, but also to make sure it is taken.
I know that after 6-9 months without any holiday my productivity drops, my motivation too, I can start to get bored etc. After a week's (or preferably two's) holiday, I'm raring to go again, and my output sky rockets.
I think the mandatory minimum in the UK is 20 days plus public holidays. However, less than 25 is too little in my opinion.
I'd take issue with psychology not being a science. Ok, 'pop-psychology' as evidenced in this article is not, but psychology itself definitely is (speaking as someone who did a very rigorous course in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge).
Just to name a few things that psychology covers (off the top of my head):
Speech and language development
Child development (e.g. work of Piaget and many since)
Models of mental illness (depression, autism, schizophrenia etc)
Animal psychology- operant conditioning (Skinner and forward), language in other animals etc
There's too much to mention really, and its an extremely important and relevant field.
For the same reason burning wood is green- as long as you are regrowing it.
So - if you're burning timber from a forest which is sustainably managed (so you're renewing wood at the same rate you're using it), then there is no net carbon released.
I'm not sure I agree. I'd say my name is private, I'd say my date of birth is more private, I'd say my medical conditions are more private still. There are clearly degrees of privacy.
Does it really make sense to hold my bank to the same standard as a real estate website? Sure they should all reach some minimum requirement (salted and hashed passwords), but I expect my bank to have far higher standards (e.g. two factor auth) than a a random site.
But I want to be able to make that decision. There's nothing stopping me from re-electing Zuck as CEO every year and letting him do his thing.
However, if he starts doing crazy things, or I think there's a better candidate for the job, I want to be able to vote to chuck him out. 1 share 1 vote!
They may say buy on bad news, but following that philosophy might have lead you to buy Enron and any number of companies where the bad news wasn't just temporary but a sign of real underlying problems.
You're also falling prey to anchoring bias. Because Facebook stock has previously been twice as much as it is now, it seems 'cheap', and a good deal.
What you really need to consider is the net value of Facebook as a company (by assessing its long term money making potential), and deciding whether its currently under or over valued.
I personally would never consider buying shares in FB because of the weird voting structure/rights. When I buy a piece of the company I want the corresponding votes to have my say in making sure that company is run in my best long term interests.
Couldn't you say the same about any company though? "Sure XYZ are doing badly, but they've got some really smart guys there, all they need to do is come up with a fresh idea for how to make money"
We can only really judge Facebook on what they are doing now, not a revolutionary new way of making money which no-one has yet thought up.
Hi- there isn't at the moment, so we'd love someone to come up with one (and I'm sure we can offer you some free credit on the service to say thanks for your effort!)