I don’t mean to derail this thread, but I am considering a stint in Taiwan to learn Chinese. I am wondering how different the accent/dialect is compared to mainland China. Are you a native speaker or did you learn while there?
I am an ethnic European who lived in China for several years and now live in Taiwan. I speak and read Chinese at a level good enough for casual conversations, doing banking/rent/etc and getting by in the workplace, but I am far from an expert.
The accent and dialect is mutually intelligible on both sides of the strait, but there is a fair bit of vocabulary and some pronunciations that clearly mark you as having learned in one place or the other. Think of it as the difference between British and American English.
The bigger difference in my opinion is simplified versus traditional. It is possible to learn one and read the other, but having lived almost 2 years in Taiwan now I still find a wall of text in traditional a lot harder to digest. Personally I think simplified is more legible, especially on low res screens or at a distance, but it's unlikely to change over here for political reasons.
Taiwan is probably a fine place to learn Chinese as a beginner. It's easier to "cheat" due to the English language resources available in the community, but if you make an effort I'm sure you can immerse yourself.
Is there any reason there is not a popular micropayments solution i.e. <= $1?
It seems like there’s plenty of use cases but I’m not aware of any popular platforms that make it feasible with their fees. I assume there are a bunch of costs associated with processing those cc payments but surely they aren’t large enough to make in infeasible to process small payments.
One micro-transaction doesn't need to imply one credit card transaction. A micropayments solution could work like PayPal, whereby every user has a balance. Then it's just database transactions within their own system.
The tricky part is the chicken-egg problem; does user adoption or developer adoption come first? I expect that one of the existing major tech companies would need to do it.
Apple, Google, Microsoft: Can build it into their browser, and are already facilitating payments via their app stores and existing user accounts.
Stripe: Already have the developer adoption in Stripe checkout.
The limiting factor might be CS & disputes. There is an average support cost of transactions, and it might be higher than what they could make on fees. I think some automation could bring that cost down in the future as well, though.
As a developer that is the worst price model to be in. If you don’t use a stores like Apple Store. The issue is state taxes. Some states require to file taxes when you reach N amount of sold good in USD. But some actually for number of transactions. Like 100-1000. So imagine if you sold 100 for $100 now you have to spend all of those money to figure out taxes situation in that state.
Something to keep in mind that I do not believe anyone else has mentioned is that the F-35 was built in several variations to serve different branches of the military in roughly similar configurations. The Navy and Air Force can both successfully operate and maintain the aircraft as older planes are decommissioned, and eliminates the need for other aircraft to be developed to serve the specific use cases of the various branches of the U.S. military.
It makes maintenance far easier and over the long run results in significantly reduced costs.
Posts like these really need to provide proof of income.
“I make $xx,xxx per month from MySite, click here to visit MySite!” has become an extremely popular marketing tactic, even though in reality the site could be making next to nothing.
> I have nothing to sell (other than the French course). I’m just sharing my experience.
I like your project, but this ^ is blatantly disingenuous.
Disclosing your revenue is a very effective marketing move that gives you a lot of traffic and drives sales up. You cannot not know that and it's extremely unlikely if it weren't one of the reasons for the linked post, if not the primary one.
If you were up to "just sharing", you would've done it anonymously with the name redacted and no links to your website.
That would be true if indie founders and HNers were the audience of my app but they are not for the most part. Doing interviews like this is really not doing much for me marketing wise. Just to give you an idea, this interview generated 5 trial signups which is less than what I get on an average day from Google alone.
The main thing I gain from this is making connections and meeting fellow indie founders. I’m not sure you will believe me but it’s true. Not everything is a calculated marketing move.
And sure, I could have shared anonymously but this would make the content way less interesting than knowing what the app is etc.
Interviews like this are extremely valuable due to their viral spread, resulting publicity and improvements in the search ranking. By your own admission you spend 60% time on marketing, so, no, I don't really believe you hadn't given a single thought to this aspect here and this claim is what I find strongly off-putting.
It’s a chandelier/candle holder or heating device, is it not? Wax was even found on one. The different size holes accommodate different candle sizes.
They were made with a copper alloy and thus conduct heat efficiently. That also aligns with the reasoning used to justify the gloves theory (i.e. they were primarily found in colder climates).
Maybe it wasn't finished? And the ones out of stone could be a poor persons attempt, because stone also retains heat.
I actually like any theory related to heat because that's what the map indicates. Any other theory is related to things and actions that were common throughout the empire.
Maybe. I tried to find a catalogue of dodecahedrons, but I couldn't really find any in a few minutes of searching, so I'm not sure if all except one doesn't have any holes, or if there are more of them. Many of the images seem to be of the same few objects.
As for heat: how did people heat their homes? Rich people had their fancy underfloor heating, but what did poor and middle-class people use? In Celtic and medieval times they would typically use a hearth (i.e. fire) – it seems to me a candle just doesn't give enough heat, and you're going to need a hearth anyway for cooking. I would imagine that's also what they used during Roman times since that's what's used both before and after the Roman era.
When a type of object is ubiquitous enough and has the ability to serve multiple purposes, even those it wasn't specifically designed for, it will inevitability be used for those purposes.
