stephenhess
stephenhess on Hacker News
That's true.. though you could also look at it the other way which is that they didn't capitalize effectively enough to stay competitive with Asana. The niche is not always a safe place to hang out.
As much as I love not having to see Trump on Twitter now.. the future of social media is going to be fully decentralized and distributed (whether we like it or not). The Free World will need a much better immune response to this kind of radicalization than deplatforming people.
Posted by
stephenhess on Thursday October 25, 2018 @11:26PM
from the self-post dept.
FAANG stocks have gone up 4.4X in market value in the last 5 years[1] but average salary for software engineers has only increased 30%[2]. Why is that?A few possible explanations:
- Startup sector is not doing nearly as well as FAANG, dragging down the average
- Increase in supply of talent is outpacing market growth
- Tech people should be demanding higher comp and are buying the dream too...
Love this. I'm as harsh of a critic of organized religion as you'll find but I think secular culture has a lot to learn in terms of how religious rituals and habits can foster human excellence, joy. And finding a way of reformulating these to be consistent with scientific thinking (i.e. throw out the mythology)
Specifically, I've been really curious to understand the relationship between faith and anxiety/depression. You see a surge of mindfulness and meditative practices in the Bay Area that appear like secular replacements for how "faith" in the Judeo-Christian tradition helps people face the unknown and the fundamental uncertainty of the universe.
With you until that last part.. older populations that go through diabetes prevention / weight loss programs actually do better than younger folks. Also, "if they actually care enough to do so" is a tricky statement. Many folks that are overweight have tried losing weight numerous times only to gain it back and have leaned on confusing (and often incorrect) advice about diet, exercise and its relationship to weight loss (e.g. the food pyramid). They go through waves of motivation like anyone else. There's a good opportunity for the healthcare industry to engage with people at that level, in the way mental health professionals support people battling anxiety and depression. Would love to see more research targeted at that motivation point because I agree with you that the physiological mechanisms are pretty well understood at this point (at least in comparison).
Also, non-insulin dependent which lowers the risk considerably
We've known that low-calorie dieting has this effect for some time; unless I'm missing something, this looks like solid confirmation of this point but isn't adding much knew to our understanding of diabetes prevention. The big challenges in this space are adherence, scaling access to treatment and creating long-term lifestyle change that will help the patient maintain the weight that is lost.
There's good evidence that ketogenic diets have an additive metabolic effect beyond pure calorie restriction which is exciting. Virta Health is doing some interesting work here and just published some results that speak to this:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-...
Or.. its just a reflection of the market they're in. Understanding how much innovation opportunity is left in a market/category is a huge part of identifying whether you should continue to invest there or elsewhere.
Love this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-
Posted by
stephenhess on Friday February 05, 2016 @08:24PM
from the medium.com dept.
With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.
The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer convincingly. Namely:
- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad?
- What is the meaning or purpose of life?
- Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one?
- What happens after we die?
This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian violence and war.
Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.
Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religio...
One aspect that I haven't seen mentioned here is that these ads are also designed to improve patient adherence. So you have 30 million prescriptions of zoloft prescribed in the US every year (crazy right?) but there's a lot of money left on the table when folks don't refill. The ads are reminders to these people to go get that refill and get back on their meds. For people with asthma, diabetes and hypertension, non-adherence can be really unhealthy and leads to hundreds of billions in unnecessary cost to the healthcare system.
Posted by
stephenhess on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @08:31PM
from the ask-hn dept.
Does anyone have recommendations for services that allow you to send long form content that is self-destructing / ephemeral? Or can at least be deleted by the sender from all recipients? The value would be to have an email like correspondence without the fear of it showing up in the New York Times or in discovery as part of a legal action.
Is there a professional VST version of this? Or something similar? Sounds beautiful and love that it isn't sample based.
Great comment! The data shows a quickly growing social network and ad business (despite a lot of the naysaying in these comments).
From my personal observations, younger folks are spending a lot more time on Instagram and Snapchat, and a lot less time on FB and Twitter. And on Instagram, a lot of Snapchat content gets re-posted with their username in the comments.
Also, the amount of content I see created by people on Snapchat is way larger than what you see anywhere else. The expectation of curation is much lower so engagement is higher.
A few things about the product that I really like that illustrate Snapchat's transformation into a revenue generating business:
- The new "Live" stories from different places around the world are amazing and one of the most intimate forms of cultural exchange outside of physically visiting a place that I've experienced. Advertising has started in these streams already.
- The attempt with Discover to replace conventional TV programming with a mobile-first format is bold and has the potential to grow as younger folks find themselves consuming more media on their phones and as Snapchat builds out better relationships with content creators in the LA area.
- Snapcash is a smart first attempt at getting people's payment information so that peer-to-peer but eventually brand driven commerce can happen on the platform.
There's a difference between generating business value and generating profit. It's common for founders to get liquidity during financing events and this typically involves a sale of equity (i.e. transfer of business value from the founder to another stakeholder).
This is distinct than the company becoming profitable; many companies will increase in value while not being profitable.
The original commenter is making this comment I presume because he/she thinks Spotify is a mature enough business where it should be generating profits instead of operating at a deficit in order to grow and grab market share.
One of the aspects of Elon's work that I think is brilliant is his ability to craft business strategies that are achievable given his current resources and then build on top of his success. The zip2 -> x.com -> paypal -> spacex -> tesla story is really well told here.
Having taken quite a few cabs in DF (lived in Roma for a couple months), the uber-bashing in this thread is perplexing. Cab drivers in DF routinely don't follow rules - they often share the same license amongst multiple people, they'll lie about knowing how to get to a place and take you on a merry-go ride where they stop to ask people for directions along the way, they'll go out of the way to extend your ride intentionally and cars will be completely devoid of seatbelts. The idea that Uber is line-stepping ignores the fact that everyone is already line-stepping but at least with Uber, you get a way better product. (Granted ideally you have a set of rules that get enforced and quality control that way but this just isn't the tempo of DF).
Product designer @ Stride Health here. We actually work closely with TaskRabbit to help Taskers signup for coverage. Single payer would be pretty awesome but the next best thing is a high functioning individual market and companies that encourage their freelancer population to get signed up for coverage and stay healthy. You can check out the LP we direct Taskers to here:
https://taskrabbit.stridehealth.com/launch
Here's my short list: Peter Norvig, Yann Lecun, Andrew Ng, Demis Hassabis, Michael I. Jordan, Ben Medlock, Jeff Dean, Jeff Hawkin, Steve Gould, Geoffery Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Simon Osindero and Fei-Fei Li
I think there's probably something here related to timing. You want to be early enough that most people think what you're tackling isn't feasible (and therefore low competition) but not so early that it's impossible to capitalize a business that can go after the problem. In these cases, the idea being "bad" is more about people thinking you'r overly optimistic rather than people thinking it's not something that's useful.
If you're looking for a better place to go than healthcare.gov, give us a try at stridehealth.com. Bunch of ex-privacy folks and healthcare folks - can shop from your phone. Pretty shocking to see such a novice mistake by an org I think we were all expecting to take it up a level this year.
I really like this. Simple mechanic and has that intimate feel that you get from snapchat but with people nearby. They clearly need some love from a real designer tho.. that logo / loading thing looks like something you'd stomp to death if you ever ran into it.
Interesting. Makes sense why a lot of synths come pre-programmed with a "Popcorn" patch.
Zocalo is also a large, historical square in Mexico City. That reference makes a bit more sense to me.
Surprised to see so little startup activity in the Seattle area. Is there a reason for this? - in spite of what I expect to be a pretty serious pool of a talent drawn in by Amazon and Microsoft.