sultanofsaltin

Pretty simple hot take:

This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.

There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.

Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.

Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.

While I support the GEB being on here... It's ~750 pages ;)

Gleick is great across the board, and Feynman's life + writings are a great choose your own adventure, regardless of your background. I personally really enjoyed "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path" (collections of various correspondences throughout his life, put together by his daughter). Probably more enjoyable with a bit of the context from watching interviews/ lectures or reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"

One of the most overlooked strategies I've found for lining up new work is to be always helping others find gigs when they need them. This is a great long and short game (and it feels good). If you help someone land a dream job and they need a pinch hitter down the line, it can be a great stepping stone from small businesses to top tier clients.

In the short term, helping friends and people you meet find their dream jobs almost always pays off in a good friendship, intros, and occasionally sub-market help when those individuals are looking to broaden their skills and you want to take a risk / increase capacity. It can feel scary to add payables, but it's much easier to sell when you can confidently go into a meeting and say: I/ we've never done that before, but we have a really healthy network to pull fresh devs from, it mitigates very legit concerns of on the job training. Any savvy client that's going to challenge you to bring your A game will sniff out being oversold from your first conversation.

Also, don't overstay. Especially right now, with startups having real concerns about their ability to raise, getting 2 projects with a few months in gap from the same client can be a great way for you to have a natural renegotiation about rates, work-style, etc without running the risk of bikeshedding, which is bad for everyone (your skills will suffer, making it harder to write clean, short proposals). This habit allows you time to make sure you've got good deal-flow and that you're showcasing work regularly, and you stay relevant.

Like some of the other comments, I’d focus on developing skills in web accessibility and areas that will help you be more productive.

I’m not sure how severe your hearing loss is but if podcasts are your style check out https://drunkenux.com/. The hosts have done a lot of episodes speaking from their backgrounds building education sites, where accessibility in development is required (also it’s funny and who doesn’t need a little levity).

More than anything, experiment with the suggestions here, different input methods, track your progress, Etc. For managing the anxiety especially, dedicating time weekly to work on your system can lead to some of the biggest rewards and occasionally, key insights.

Carpe Diem and keep us posted as you find the hacks that work for you!

Some more meta-questions: are there some HN-esque sites that are more popular in Europe/ Germany? Even between major cities in the US I've observed a lot of variability in job postings/ language usage trends, services used, etc. Has anyone found that to be the case in international work? How have you dealt?

Yeah, definitely had the rose color glasses on for that one. CEFR seems like a really good benchmark, I've been using a combination of the Assimil method (books/ tapes) and Duolingo just for the benchmarking / competing with my girlfriend while we learn together.

The CEFR seems like a great reference point though that I wasn't aware of so that could be a great more objective measure.

We're hoping to add a few shows/ podcasts to our regime this summer to get our ears more accustomed.

Touché. My original sentence said reasonably conversant. I probably should've left it at that.

"Shoot for the stars, so if you fall you land on a cloud. - Kanye West"

As an aside: I kind of wish this thread had kicked off at a reasonable hour for those actually in Berlin right now :)

I'm moving to the Berlin in the fall myself. Planning to use it as our home base for work/ exploring Europe from early Oct '17 to late Aug '18. I freelance as a software dev (primarily Python, JS and PHP work) in the US now and would love to hear if anyone has tips on picking up clients as an foreigner. I've been studying German daily (15-30 mins) for the past 1.5 months, hoping to be near fluent by the time we arrive, so hopefully I can minimize the language barrier.

Are there any good resources people have used for finding freelance work internationally or that are even specific to Berlin/ Germany?

Well that was fun! The last level took me a couple minutes (maybe have brute forced the prior fr example).

What the....?

My favorite statistic: 73.6% of all statistics are made up.

My 2nd favorite: 950% of 0 is 0.

Is that sustained website growth since then? Also can you make that distinction clearer on the site? It's definitely misleading some people.

Don't camera systems beat this in pretty much every way? http://www.placemeter.com/ comes to mind.

You don't have to resort to infrared sensors in order to provide anonymity, but they do inherently limit you potential accuracy and metrics you can prodive. It all comes down to where the data is processed and what is made available. Also, cheap camera components are coming down fast due to economies of scale, not sure how IR will play out in the long haul.

Isn't there a company doing this called Pied Piper...