Depending on the number of trips per day, this has the potential to greatly reduce summertime traffic from tristate region to Cape Cod / Nantucket / Martha's Vineyard / LI North Shore / Montauk.
I grew up outside of one of the most violent cities in New York State[1]. My high school was right in the middle of Newburgh, NY, and being a teenager, I spent a lot of time driving around the downtown area at night. There were a handful of blocks you stayed away from and you were good. Granted, this is with the benefit of a car, rather than walking around.
Ultimately, random acts of violence are scary but even in the "most dangerous cities" statistically rare. The politicization of city violence "What about Chicago? What about SF?" is an instant red flag that whomever you're speaking with is making a bad faith argument.
I wonder how much more effective this would be if the prompt wasn't "this was generated by AI." It would be really interesting if someone with a popular podcast injected an AI conversation into their feed and didn't tell their audience for a couple weeks. A real life Turing Test.
Great write up about a critical part of most interview processes without a chance to practice if you’ve never worked at an org that regularly implement complex systems.
Hello HN, I'm head of engineering at Harness Wealth. Yesterday we launched our suite of financial planning tools for startup employees. We set out to answer the question: "How will my life change when my startup exits?" It’s a question every early employee thinks about, yet there is zero accessible guidance on this. You’re on your own for the most consequential financial event of your life.
Our tools will show you the different IPO outcomes when optimizing for capital gains, minimizing risk, or avoiding AMT (alternative minimum tax). We also give you a holistic view of your net worth using our Grant Admin and Personal Balance Sheet, replacing your custom built spreadsheets.
I hope HN readers find these tools useful and we’re just getting started, we'll be adding support for RSUs, SPACs, acquisitions, and additional scenarios i the near future.
One of the first 300 users, SO was revolutionary when launched, I followed their development via Codinghorror and Joelonsoftware blogs (probably in an RSS feed). I've since moved into management and away from day to day coding, so I use it very infrequently, but, I have to imagine more than a few software startups only exist today because SO democratized software development Q&A.
The expectation that Subscriptions/Billing would be free forever is silly. The product offering is significantly more complex than the base Stripe offering. Additionally, the proposed rate of 0.5% is 1/10th what other repeatable billing providers are charging.
This is a win-win and I'll be moving my startup over to Stripe Billing in the near future.
Just kicked the tires on Optimizely for a site with less than a million MAU. They wanted $50K upfront for one year. No monthly or quarterly billing available. Went with Google Optimize instead, works fine for free. In the face of that, very surprised Optimizely doesn't do month to month to get folks started.
It's worse. They essentially kicked-out their existing self-serve customers in the process. We were on the (at the time) silver plan, but when we were ready to upgrade to gold, there was no gold, no silver, nothing... Just some super-expensive and vague enterprise plan.
But there's a silver lining: we created and open-sourced Alephbet[0] - a simple A/B testing platform together with a couple of backend options with AWS Lambda/redis[1] and couldn't be happier :)
Optimizely used to, but their sales strategy changed to deliberately reposition themselves in the market.
They've priced out self-service and smaller users, and repositioned their sales model for larger companies with immature internal capabilities. They lock you in with that annual pricing, and include enough margin to throw a massive amount of support resources at you to ensure you get everything fully off the ground and deeply embedded into your internal workflows.
As an early self-service user, it was really irritating when I tried to bring them into a new company I started at and realized they made that change. But after working for a major marketing agency for a while, I've realized that it makes sense for them (even if it sucks for my purposes). In the world of large scale brand marketing companies (such as CPG companies), even a rudimentary informational/branding/brochure-ware website tends to be a $500k+ abomination, involving a super complex IAT[1] consisting of 3-6 external agencies and internal teams. In that world, the single greatest cost for anything is the man-hours required for account management, since even the tiniest of thing involves so much coordination (both logistically and politically). Optimizely's absurd looking price bakes in the cost of providing that level of account management support as well as initial implementation/usage technical support. Without those, it's entirely likely that the brand could purchase Optimizely and it'll sit unused because the agency scopes don't account for it and no one is willing to eat the unscoped hours required to implement/support/use it.
I have been thinking about how Saas has been the golden product but how as some smaller Saas companies grow they no longer appear to be selling Software as a service but rather Service via software.
They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.
Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.
Interestingly, many other companies are starting to take this path, and I think it sucks. Not that they're focusing on enterprise customers, but that they're essentially pulling a bait-and-switch: get traction and word-of-mouth with smaller self-service customers, and then once they get enough street cred, go tell those smaller customers who were crucial to their early success to fuck themselves.
Full Story has gone this route. They used to have a plan that would work for smaller companies, now they have nothing between their free tier (1000 sessions a month) and their lowest level paid tier which is "5 figures annually" (they won't even announce any pricing on their website, though not sure if they ever did).
I was responsible for administrating an ADT security system for a Los Angeles-based startup (too many hats). Dealing with ADT was an absolute nightmare. Their support agents knew nothing about our configuration. ADT support technicians could take days to respond to a faulty sensor, which meant our operations folks would have to wake up at all hours of the night and check for false positives or disable the whole system. The experience led me to believe that office security systems are ripe for additional competition.
At least over here in the UK, ADT seemed to have an acquisition-based near monopoly in home alarm systems and acted every bit like you'd expect, and I wouldn't be surprised if commercial alarm systems were as bad.
Reminds me of dealing with Terminex dispatching exterminators to spray for insects in the arctic in the middle of winter when it was -20 deg F. There are lots of these service companies that are fall somewhere between inept and crooked.
