elbrodeur

A++ would do it again.

One Block Off the Grid makes the complicated business of going solar as a homeowner easy, by doing remote system design and comparison shopping between financing providers. Think Expedia but with an expert guide (our solar advisors) to show you the different offerings between competitors.

We're 4 years old, VC backed and making money. With over 230,000 members interested in green home improvements and thousands of systems installed, we need developers with great brains and a passion for positive impact.

Types of things you might work on:

* Building and improving on remote design tools using satellite imagery.

* Building new business units that help our members save even more money on electricity by reducing consumption (think lighting, energy retrofits, energy management systems).

* Integrating with the top installers' sales platforms in an industry where APIs don't exist.

* Building awesome analytics dashboards from scratch.

About the team

We're a small team but we're growing fast. We're hoping to add 4 developers in the next month and grow quickly over the next year and a half. Because we're small, you'll be expected to be able to take a project and own it. We deploy frequently so your code will be in the wild within the first couple days after you join us.

Our culture is fun and lighthearted, but we love getting shit done. We're right on South Park, right in the heart of SOMA. It's Twitter's first office, Instagram's first office and of course our office, so there's lots of good startup magic here.

We're offering good salaries, full benefits and equity. Also the chance to work at a company that's building awesome technological solutions that will positively benefit the planet.

If you're interested, email Jennifer Hemmings, our awesome HR manager: [email protected]

The first few paragraphs bemoan people who are willing to suffer through the valleys to get to the peaks, while the middle of the article is all about how difficult it is to find rewarding experiences and how it usually takes a lot of hard work to see rewards manifest.

Despite his protestations, I think the author does have a sense of "time investment" and is probably often glad he "stuck with it."

Great read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayce_Pollard#Apparel

Delight directed education is powerful, but failing to recognize that pi can be delightful or that Shakespeare can make children excited seems to not be the best first step.

Also, it's pretty ignorant: Anyone who's been to a Google office or to Twitter's or Facebook's office can tell you that what someone wears or what their BMI is has nothing to do with what makes a company scale.

At Google where you have 24,000 -- a significant number of which are engineers, you have old engineers, young engineers, engineers who have beards, engineers who happen to not even be male -- even engineers who wear skinny jeans and live in the mission.

The engineers I know at Apple are really well put together and make excellent software.

The barrier to entry is sufficiently low that you should at least try to become a hacker -- or even a programmer; you have the requisite curiosity and imagination.

There are many benefits to learning how things work and what's more; you can do it!

Opportunists don't bother me, but this is pretty tacky.

I've been trying to come up with a way to articulate how I think about this whole non-debate and here's a first stab:

One of the primary reasons Flash will eventually be unseated is not that Flash is closed -- standards, to a certain extent, are constructed in a relatively closed manner -- but because standards and technologies built on top of standards are more agile.

Flash is an awesome platform, but you can only build on that platform. Standards are great because you can combine platforms and build things not explicitly envisioned. Flash's single-platform approach makes it so that it will eventually have to play catch-up to a whole set of features that are being built by mixing and matching standards.

CSS3 + Javascript, for instance, can be used without Canvas to build really awesome functionality.

Canvas + Javascript can be used to make really engaging content.

Flash will eventually have to compete not with another product on features, but an entire web of organic technologies that don't have to wait for other components to advance in order to release the next stable version.

I think relying solely on a positive k-factor is a bad customer acquisition model. Everyone wants their business to grow virally but the reality is that the reason turntable.fm grew quickly is not because of their lack of a homepage, it's because the service lends itself to virality.

I do, however, agree that you should focus on building an awesome thing that people want to use, but if you're serious about building a business you should be serious about broadening your customer acquisition channels.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184603

Clever.

One interesting idea I've heard in regards to storing electricity is using electric cars as batteries. Granted, this would require a massive retooling of our grid and our transportation system -- not to mention the question of where we will find all the resources to make so many batteries -- but it's still interesting.

What's troubling to me is all the sensationalism surrounding nuclear, which seems to suffer from lots of near-religious objections. Nuclear is dangerous but even in the worst scenarios (like the Fukushima Daiichi plant) the damage is far less onerous than the continued operation of coal plants.

If there was a strong public demand for renewables grid parity wouldn't be that far off. Unfortunately, we're a little too obsessed with other things at the moment, like politicians posting lewd photos online or which television shows to DVR.

A players have a positive network effect: You'll probably be more likely to have A player associations and recommendations.

Allow users to specify their starting point or class. How do you want to start exercising? Similar to how players choose classes in MMOs, users could pick a starting point. Srongman, Endurer, Ripped, Swimmer, Biker, Martial Artist, Climber... and the user can choose to start as one of these things and the quests guide the user to achieve that title by focusing on attributes like strength, endurance, tone, lower body workouts, etc.

The reason I think this would help people just starting out is that 1) It helps to have someone tell you what to do. That's why personal trainers are popular. 2) It'll confirm whatever bias/propensity a user has. Some people love to ride bikes and the prospect of riding 100 miles is less daunting than the goal of working up to running 10 miles. Likewise a person who is into cardio will be less inclined to try doing heavy weight training.

Very cool project. Good luck!

How long until viral blindess spreads to the people who play Farmville? Not long. It's a typical conditioned response; when there are enough false positives to tip your average joe off to the fact that broadcasting to your networks does not produce the desired result, then people will start ignoring hooks like these.