mikeleeorg

This article is from 2017, but has some more technical detail behind DDG than other articles do:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-anonymous-privacy

Could/should there be an equivalent of a sports manager and/or sports agent? Like a headhunter, only dedicated to a programmer throughout that programmer's career? Hmmm.

Though not exactly the same thing, I like to think of these as spiritual successors:

https://ifttt.com/

https://zapier.com/

I think that's the key point here, even if the article doesn't quite highlight it.

Technology and social media haven't changed human behavior, but it allows both positive and negative behavior to be amplified multiple times over. And sometimes all it takes is one negative incident to crush an adolescent's self-esteem.

We shouldn't discount the positive that social media and technology bestow, just as we shouldn't discount the negative as well. I don't think the problem is just a little worse - I think, for some cases, it's A LOT worse. And that's the frightening thing. Both the positive and the negative are amplified.

I dealt with a lot of bullying in school. High school was a nightmare. But at least it's over now and I'm hopefully a stronger person for it. But if the kinds of things that the bullies said or did were recorded on social media and amplified...

By "working under" do you mean having an engineer report directly to a product manager, where the PM is responsible for the engineer's career growth, compensation, reviews, etc?

As a former engineer turned product manager, I would not advocate such a reporting structure. A PM wouldn't be the best person to help manage an engineer's career growth and everything else. I think it's perfectly fine to be on the same cross-functional team though.

"make bright comfortable" <- Yes, this. f.lux has been great for my eyes too.

Definitely seems to be a preference thing I guess. I'm like you, I find it more uncomfortable reading bright text on dark backgrounds that I often avoid sites that have that color scheme, if there is no "bright mode" available.

Censorship is only a piece of what is disturbing too. Linking searches to personal phone numbers is way more frightening.

The articles don't say if phone number logging was only going to be done for users searching for censored keywords, or all users making any kind of search. I suspect the latter. And that is a very, very problematic.

Wasn't there a Silicon Valley (the HBO show) episode about something similar?

Ah, found the episode: Season 2 Episode 2, "Runaway Devaluation".

Wow, yikes, you CAN run Javascript in a PDF:

https://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat.html

PROS

* Potential marketing for your startup, especially if you gain followers that are also in your target audience.

* Have a way for someone (e.g. investor, potential employee, potential business partner, etc) to look you up and see what kind of person you might be.

CONS

* Distraction away from your customers and team, which should be among your top priorities. It can take time to cultivate a social media presence.

* Misinterpretation risk. For better or worse, if you happen to say something that can be misinterpreted, and someone has an agenda against you, social media can be risky. Assume that everything you say can be posted on a billboard in every major city.

MY $0.02

Each of these carry different weights. I would argue that the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

If you want marketing benefits, you'll get more bang for your buck by having someone with lots of marketing experience. Being discoverable by investors via social media is really a minor thing; you'd have to substantially invest in your "social media reputation" in order for this to give you anything, and even then, it's more useful as a tool to maybe get meeting with an investor, than it is to secure funding from that investor.

Being a distraction from your core priorities is really the most important thing I'd offer. Social media can easily be a black hole for attention and time. That's attention and time you can't afford to lose right now.

Do you have any browser extensions running? It's possible one of them is causing some problems with their IDE.

That's a very sobering article.

I looked up a bunch of similar products about 5 years ago. Just last month, I looked them up again, and found that many don't exist anymore.

It's definitely a tough market. I suspect that it will be the larger corporations with enough revenue that can release such products into the market - and probably even release them as free features of an existing suite of products (e.g. iOS with Downtime, Disney's Circle[1], etc), as opposed to a standalone product.

[1] https://meetcircle.com/time-limits

Reading this makes me think of all the indie app developers building educational mobile apps. Most of them are parents with the best of intentions. Maybe they started off building an app for their kids. Maybe they saw a need at their local school and decided to fill it. Maybe they themselves always wished for their particular app and decided to build it.

The vast majority of them eventually burn out and leave the field or take on a day job to supplant their income. A small number sell their apps to a larger publisher or get hired by a larger company. And very very very few break through that barrier to generate self-sufficient income, much less growing profits.

They have many of the same business challenges of indie game developers too, it seems. Too many alternatives/competitors, distribution challenges, marketing challenges, lack of differentiation, etc.

I suppose the same could be said for indie developers in many other verticals too.

Hmm. I haven't perceived any slow down. Especially not like others here are saying. Gmail still seems pretty quick to me.

Sorry for the late reply. I believe you can do that: https://getpocket.com/import/instapaper/

And such a great business development strategy at that. It's a win/win for everyone involved. Other online payment providers didn't have the foresight to create Atlas, and it's a testament to Stripe's brainpower that they had this idea and pulled it off so well.

I just noticed that their vision is to "build the economic infrastructure for the internet." That's ambitious. I wouldn't have guessed, from that vision, that they'd build Atlas. But in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.

I used to love Instapaper, but then migrated to Pocket. Both those kinds of apps serve as both article bookmark managers and article readers.

I once fell into the position of having to hire for a fast-growing new team at a large corporation. We didn't have a manager yet, so our department's VP trusted me to make hiring decisions.

I made the first 20-ish hires, then helped out with 20 more. When we eventually got a director and other managers who were peers to me, I held the informal distinction of being able to make good hiring calls. Many of my hires rose quickly in the company, earned strong performance reviews, and even won awards at the company.

Eventually, I become a middle manager and had to teach managers I supervised how to hire in a similar fashion. Relying on me to make a final call wasn't scalable.

And that's when trouble began.

A few bad hires leaked in. For the first time, our group experienced attrition. So I set about to try to systemize my recruiting process such that it was repeatable by others.

That's when I had to codify our team "culture", which was something I used to help with my hiring decisions. There were times when I made a call to hire a candidate who seemed too junior for a role, because I felt there was a strong "culture fit."

Of course, what I realized was, I was simply assessing for typical soft skills, as well as personality traits such as tenacity, initiative, quick study, etc.

In other words, there was no magic. I didn't have some special gift for hiring. It was just a simple unspoken template in my head. And it wasn't exactly "culture" either, as much as it was a set of personality traits that every company looks for.

I suppose what I came up with was basically a "structured culture fit screening assessment", to borrow the article's parlance. If you don't have something like this, I'd highly encourage that you look into it. Not only can it help minimize bias, but it can also give you a repeatable process for all of your company's hiring managers.

I really loved the concept behind Google Plus. Really sad it didn't work out for them. I used it a lot, but it never felt quite right. Always felt "beta" and not quite polished. Which I was fine with, because I loved the idea behind partitioning my interests and social circles.

I know Facebook allows this to a certain extent, and I've set up a bunch of Facebook lists in the past. But it's much harder to use.

Yup, I'm very conscious of this. I wrote a longer comment in regards to this elsewhere in this thread.

Yup, I think about that all the time. That's why I originally unfriended anyone that isn't family or a friend I know in real life who has already met my kids.

And as I learned about Facebook's (and social media's) privacy leakiness, I scrubbed my posts of all personal info (kids' birthdays, names, schools, etc) and many photos. My privacy settings are pretty tight too. In another comment, I mentioned several alternatives that I've been exploring for photo sharing - since the primary audience for these photos are grandparents, relatives, and close friends.

Unfortunately, I have a relative who's posted photos of my kids and definitely uses them as social media fashion accessories. It's lead to some awkward conversations and demands to scrub their posts of my kids.

As a side note, I've been having conversations with my oldest kid about social media. I even went through all of the photos I posted, asking if any should be removed. I already post very few photos - and when I do, I carefully curate them. My child was comfortable about all of my posts, but did feel embarrassed about a few from the relative I mentioned earlier. My child now also asks on occasion if I can take a photo and post it. Most of the time, my answer is No, and that I'd share it privately with family instead. But once in a while, I'll share it.

I'm sure people are weeding me out too. I'm perfectly fine with that. Some of the people I unfriend are people who don't interact with my photos much, so I figured they've already filtered me out, or don't care to see such photos. I'd rather be unconnected to them than to clutter their news feed with posts that don't interest them.

I'm still experimenting to find the right mix. I've tried Dropbox, Google Photos, Amazon Photos, a private site built from scratch, and a handful of paid private photo sharing sites. Haven't quite found one that I love yet, but I'm still experimenting and searching. Building a custom solution offers the most privacy, but it's hard to find the time to do it.

It definitely depends on the sub.[1] You're right, many are very noisy. Startup and tech/programming subs don't quite match up to HN, so for those topics, I use HN.

[1] As an example, /r/AskHistorians/ is heavily moderated and high quality.