It's not prescience or genius..... almost no matter what happens, someone somewhere predicted it was going to happen. And with the Internet, it's on record so can be looked up.
Whenever there is a financial crisis, someone goes back and sees who predicted these exact circumstances, which of course someone did because that's statistics for you. But it doesn't make then a genius or prescient.
It just means they are the person who happened to guess what did actually happen. And I tell ya, it aint hard to predict which of the big companies will buy some other highly successful smaller company because there ain't that many acquisitive really big tech companies.
If you want to look like a genius in the future, Tweet a few predictions about random([amazon, google, microsoft]) will buy random([jetbrains, atlassian, twitter]). No one will notice if it never happens but when it does you can stand tall as a true crystal ball gazer who "really called it".
Here is when some other guy predicted - right here on HN - and way back in 2008 - that Google would buy github https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262460 Now that guy is a genius! Oh wait now he wasn't, it was someone else who made a different guess.
And when those aliens arrive.... you'd better believe there will be a long queue of people lining up to take their title as "genius" and "prescient" and "called it".
Well not planets, but my question is more general - could a star moving this quickly have a planetary system - obviously this one would not if it got shot out of a supernova.
If you plan to make some radical alterations that could potentially "fix" that bug in near future, could you please freeze current state somewhere until diagnosis finishes?
Programming feels like productive work, and indeed it is, up until just about the point you are at. Now it is not productive work any more, in fact, once the product is finished, programming is counter productive work. Other things need to be done and you don't know how to do them and if you do, are not in the habit of doing them. IOt is easy to get up in the morning and write code, harder to do unfamiliar things.
--> self sabotage (deeply seated need to actually not succeed)
--> fear of the unknown
--> avoidance of a change in work habit - from programming to...... ? what does one do post launch
--> fear of the likely outcome which is zero feedback, zero users
Curious - how close are you to launch, what remains to be done, and what does the software actually do?
Can I suggest perhaps be really ruthless about the remaining tasks - likely many of those launch tasks just are not important, even though the completionist in you thinks they are. For example - terms and conditions document? Ditch it until users are interested. Privacy document? Same. Purchase? Drop it.
See what I mean? If people like what you have built and use it, then the world will not come to an end because you did not have those things... and user interest will motivate you to implement them.
It's incredibly hard to work on something with no user interest. Just dump what you have built out there and see what happens.
Christ this hits hard to home. (Note amateur programmer here), I built my software, openers to beta testers and was active in the community. (It's a good deal control software for a popular game - pretty much a copilot who would do things for you).
So many testers said they would try it out, never did and there was an insane amount of actual testers who wanted something slighty different. (Which i couldn't do, as I had spoken to the company, and doing certain automated style actions would have gotten me banned).
24th of May 2018 might not be the best time to choose to launch anything while intentionally having ditched thinking about your T&Cs and Privacy Policy...
I'm happy to be blocked from products that aren't compliant. There will usually be other alternatives. This is better than unknowingly using something that could cause me problems later.
I don't even take it as an aggressive negative, unless it is explicitly expressed as such. You can just be honest and say "I can't accept your custom at this time because X, and we have other priorities that would make addressing X to everyone's satisfaction a problem for the foreseeable future".
That _helps_, but I'm a British/EU citizen, living in Australia, who regularly VPNs through servers in Singapore, Tokyo, and the US.
I'm still protected by GDPR.
(Personally, I reckon that's quite an overreach by EU lawmakers, but that's what they've chosen to do, in response to equivalent or worse "overreach" by internet companies trading in personal information...)
That actually makes sense (not something that's expected to be true of laws...)
So by my reading of the advice linked there:
If an individual is in the EU, they're covered by GDPR - whether they're a citizen or not.
If a company is based in or does business in the EU, all it's users are covered by the GDPR - whether they're in the EU or not, and whether they're an EU citizen or not.
That's much less over-reachy than I'd thought. The EU arguably does have the right to make laws about how you treat people within it's borders - whether they're citizens or not. (A death threat against a Chinese person in Paris should be prosecutable under French law by French police/authorities). The EU definitely does have the right to make laws about how businesses in the EU or who have offices/presence in the EU treat people everywhere. (A London company discriminating against a homosexual Saudi citizen should be prosecutable under British law by British authorities, even if it's not illegal to so discriminate in Saudi Arabia).
I think it's even less reachy than that - if a foreign multinational has a subsidiary in the EU, I don't think the parent company is covered by the GDPR unless they directly deal with subjects in the EU. So they can compartmentalize the parts of the company that must deal with the GDPR, by redirecting every EU user to the EU subsidiary.
Sure, and I know it's mostly scaremongering, but "4% of zero, or 'up to 20 million euros'" is up to 20 million euros.
A better motivator, in my opinion, is that disclosing up front what data you're going to capture, and what you're going to do with it, and obtaining consent for that from users - is "the right thing to do". Unless your business model is "fucking over the users", those are not scary things to do, and will likely lead you to make better decisions about what you collect and how you store it, and reduce your and your users exposure in the worst case.
Perhaps worth noting that none of that is langauge syntax, it's library syntax. mapOf takes vararg pairs: Pair<K, V>, and then the 'to' operator is an infix function that makes a Pair<K,V>.
So you could trivially do your own listOf or mapOf that creates whatever data structure you want, whereas languages with special syntax for this tend to hardcode the result of it. That's a valid choice, sure, but just that there are tradeoffs here rather than it being obviously better one way or the other.
Because it allowed them to use basic understandable functions rather than writing special use cases. listof and mapOf are just functions and to is just a infix function that makes a pair out of two elements. It makes far more sense for someone making a language.
Actually no, all keys are strings in JS, and if you use something that isn't a string as a key, it is converted to a string (unless you meant Maps[1], which don't use object notation).
One of my biggest annoyances in Scala is not having literal syntax for sequences and maps. The language seemingly tries to have every syntax convenience that's ever existed in every language, even when they conflict with each other and cause confusion, and then misses the most basic one.
I've been told that it's because "how would it know which specific sequence and map class you want", but it already has Seq() and Map() which give you the default immutable sequence and map classes, so obviously a literal syntax would give you the same one.
I love the weird, awkward social situations in the video at the tapwithus website, featuring people interacting with the tap keyboard secretly while they are talking to other people - magnificently strange.
The police will arrest you for wearing brass knuckles if you are caught using this device.
This seems to be capturing finger movements that would otherwise map to a keyboard. I wonder if there is an even more optimal way to capture finger movements and map them to input, if the idea of mapping to keyboard finger movements is discarded.
Hey! The Tap is made with soft-touch TPU and it looks more like rings than brass knuckles. If an officer did ask to see it, they would be more interested than concerned.
I'd be interested to know more about the background and history of your company and its founders, please?
And what's on the roadmap -- any plans for tactile feedback?
Are they available and shipping now? Do you ship to Europe?
Thanks for dropping by!
Did you know there used to be a magazine named Tap? And have you seen the movie "The President's Analyst?" ;) I bet the Woz would love to play around with one!
I’m not the poster here but I’ve been involved with the sale of a few businesses like this and I consult for a VC. I’ll answer a few of these.
I’ve seen owners (either single or partners) who own between 5% and 100% of the business when they sell it. Unfortunately, most of them seem to own between 5 - 35%.
Most of the sales I’ve been involved with are the company trying to find a buyer. However, occasionally a VC will flat out ask if the company is for sale. Though it’s probably 10 to 1 in my experience.
There’s usually some level of negotiation. There is a “SAAS multiplier”. Right now the VC I consult for looked at about 3 - 5 times EBITDA. This gives you a healthy negotiation range.
People should absolutely consult an accountant and an attorney when figuring out what to do with the money they make. Often if you handle it right you can pay significantly fewer taxes. Taking stock or equity is a good way to handle reduction of those tax burdens.
I’ve seen people celebrate by buying multiple very expensive cars. A house on the beach in Hawaii. Huge trips. I’ve seen people blow huge amounts of money very quickly. The fastest was two guys who blew through $3,000,000 each in 6 months. It was stupid.
Most of the sales i have been involved in kept the former owners in a working capacity at the company.
I hope this helps a bit. Obviously it’s just my observations.
I made just over $1m because we raised a bunch of money for growth that didn’t pan out. Because LOL California the money went straight into a house. I still have a mortgage and a day job.
Bigger lesson is to buy a house as soon as you can. I’ve made more money on paper living in this house than building the company.
I kind of needed to raise the money. The wheels were falling off the bus because the software was so bad and it needed to be professionally written. I should have raised less and sold sooner though.
Whenever there is a financial crisis, someone goes back and sees who predicted these exact circumstances, which of course someone did because that's statistics for you. But it doesn't make then a genius or prescient.
It just means they are the person who happened to guess what did actually happen. And I tell ya, it aint hard to predict which of the big companies will buy some other highly successful smaller company because there ain't that many acquisitive really big tech companies.
If you want to look like a genius in the future, Tweet a few predictions about random([amazon, google, microsoft]) will buy random([jetbrains, atlassian, twitter]). No one will notice if it never happens but when it does you can stand tall as a true crystal ball gazer who "really called it".
Here's when "The Simpsons" predicted the Trump Presidency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcYMvzZ7jk Same thing.
Here is when some other guy predicted - right here on HN - and way back in 2008 - that Google would buy github https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262460 Now that guy is a genius! Oh wait now he wasn't, it was someone else who made a different guess.
And when those aliens arrive.... you'd better believe there will be a long queue of people lining up to take their title as "genius" and "prescient" and "called it".