Was scrolling through the comments to see if anyone mentioned this. I started taking magnesium supplements a couple of years ago after hearing somewhere (forget where at this point) that it helped with teeth grinding. Whenever I'd go into dentist appointments, they'd always mention something about my teeth grinding and recommended getting a mouth guard, which I didn't pursue due to expense. Oddly enough, they never mentioned magnesium. When I started taking magnesium supplements every day, my grinding almost completely stopped. I now notice after a couple days if I haven't taken it, my jaw starts tensing up again and naturally reverts into clenching mode. I don't have any medical expertise or evidence to back its effectiveness, but it sure worked for me. Worth a try before exploring other options.
This is like Tesla entering the market with a high end sports car, or Uber entering the market with only black cars. They're targeting a smaller niche of wealthy early adopters to tweak the service and revenue model and will eventually move downmarket to address a broader customer base (if they're successful with this initial niche). This is an ideal niche to start with because a) they have the money for it b) they're more tech savvy and generally forgiving of product shortfalls for bleeding edge services and c) they have lots of connections and can spread word-of-mouth more effectively (think Chris Dixon). It will be interesting to see if this becomes more of an API for other on-demand platforms such as Seamless or if it will be standalone. Also curious to see how this will stack up to Facebook's M and if they've built something defensible enough to pose a real threat.
The metaphor is faulty. Uber hasn't brought down the cost of limousine service, and it didn't make cars cheaper or more efficient to create UberX -- it just tapped into a larger market of drivers who were willing to do commodity work for less money.
You don't pay people $100 an hour for commodity work. Unless you're so rich that price doesn't matter, I guess.
Perhaps I should have extended it a bit more--as someone else commented, they will likely drive the price point down as the tech improves and they're able to do things algorithmically which will reduce overhead. The Tesla strategy is probably a better fit here than Uber, though.
Yeah, I understood what you were getting at. That's why I was emphasizing the difference between commodity services (like driving a cab) and services that require specialized skill (like being a concierge that can get you into the restaurant, tonight, or a meeting with a celebrity). The former you can "scale" by throwing relatively unskilled people at it. The latter takes training, connections and experience.
Even Tesla isn't a good comparison. Tesla is making cars, the task that invented the assembly line. This more like applying "the Tesla strategy" to the job of a butler.
I wrote an opinion on what I think Twitter could become (https://medium.com/@danclay/how-twitter-could-become-the-ube...), before I learned that Facebook is essentially doing the exact same thing with its Instant Articles. I think this will be the nail in the coffin for Twitter becoming anything more than a niche service for techies, celebrities, and thought leaders. Facebook is making big moves in the news space, and if they're able to beat Twitter at their own game of real-time, it's game over. Moments is a start, but it may be too little too late. Perhaps it's time to pull a Foursquare and separate the traditional feed with a much more robust version of Moments into separate apps to try and gain a lead in real-time, but that'd be a hell of a Hail Mary. Twitter has a lot of good people and it's a shame to see them become a zombie in the tech space after so much early promise.
> “We literally bet the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because we thought that the time to own the market was right.”
This makes no sense. The switching costs for both consumers and businesses is basically zero, and there are aren't really any network effects like there are with Facebook, Twitter, etc. What did they expect to happen at the end of those 2 months? That consumers would ignore the hundreds of other deal players in the market and only buy from LivingSocial?
I'm currently re-reading the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, and one of the principles he outlines to win people over to your way of thinking is to "show respect for the other person's opinion. Never say 'you're wrong'." He tells a story from Ben Franklin's autobiography outlining how insolent and opinionated he used to be, to the point that nobody could stand being around him. One day, someone wiser and older pointed this out to him and from that moment, Franklin made it a point to never directly contradict people or positively assert his own opinions. Instead, he'd say things like "I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts." This warmed people up instead of immediately putting them on the defensive and completely changed the success he had in dealing with people. A little tact and diplomacy goes a long way towards persuading others towards your way of thinking. And you never have to say "you're wrong."
The company I work for recently won a contest put on by Lyft offering free Lyft Line rides to and from work for an entire week. I live in Lower Pac Heights and work in the Financial District and take a couple different Muni routes to and from work. I'll take either the 2 or the 3 heading in and the 38L heading back; the 38L is way too crowded in the morning by the time it gets to my closest stop. Morning commute usually takes around 15 minutes and afternoon takes around 10.
So, my commute isn't bad by any means but I decided to give Lyft Line a shot to see if I could do any better. The first day I tried hailing one in the morning, the app hung up looking for drivers; it said 1 minute to match with a driver but I waited 3 before quitting the app and deciding to take Muni. That afternoon, I tried again but ran into the same issue. The next afternoon, I was finally able to line up a ride but had to wait 10 minutes for the driver to get to me. Once he did and we were on our way, I had the joyful experience of sitting in traffic for blocks on end while watching Munis zip by in the designated lanes beside us. Not including wait time, the ride took around 20 minutes (double my normal commute time).
I'm sure there are some routes for which Line is a better option than public transportation, but I personally have a much better experience on Muni than I did with Line. I get why they're focused on rush hour; a service like Line requires a critical mass of people to use the app concurrently in order to make it work. But, the downside of this is that the times when it reaches this point are the times when traffic is the worst and public transportation offers a superior alternative in many cases. We'll see if this ends up taking off, but I know I won't be using it for my commute. Maybe this would be better suited for one-off events like Outside Lands, Giants games etc. but I'd imagine they'd run into the same problems.
Sounds similar to my thoughts. I've been trying to get a ride for the past two hours (I'm in the office, no rush to go home). I got canceled three times.
Graduates fresh out of college have the one thing that's most important for long-term wealth accumulation on their side: time. Take two scenarios, for instance, both assuming retirement age of 65 and a long-term average stock market return of 7% annually.
Scenario one: Smart 20-year-old college grad accepts an offer to go work for Big Tech, Consulting, whatever. Their salary allows them to pay down any student loan debt they might have, build a cash cushion, and sock away $10K/year for retirement. At 35, when they've built valuable industry experience and connections, they decide to go out and do their own thing. They stop investing in their retirement account, putting their cash into the startup or raising money, and let the retirement account sit and grow with compound interest.[1]
Scenario two: Smart 20-year-old college grad decides against the BigCo route and founds a startup (assuming this is even feasible given any loan debt they might have). Maybe raises a small funding round, takes a low salary...everything goes back into the business. There is no investment into a retirement account. Let's say they meander through startup land up until 35, making some money here, losing some there and given the high failure rate of startups never really sees the "big exit". At 35, when things like marriage and family happen, they're forced to take a job at BigCo (or MediumCo, SmallCo, whatever) and finally have the means to start investing something into a retirement account. Let's get aggressive and say they put in the same $10K/year that scenario 1 grad did up until 65 (hard to do if you start having kids, buy a house, etc).
At 65, scenario 1 grad would have $2,046,783 in their retirement account after just 10 years of investing $10K/year and then letting it sit and collect compound interest. Scenario 2 grad would have just $1,010,730 in their retirement account after investing $10K/year over a period of 30 years. The difference between scenarios comes out to over a million dollars!
Obviously there's an endless list of variables that could throw a wrench in this model, but the point is that people who fail to assess the time value of money and the opportunity cost for a dollar spent (or not invested) today vs. one invested over the long term do so at their own peril. If you're 20, just $1,000 invested into the market once will turn into $21,000 when you're 65. If you keep putting money in regularly, this amount will grow significantly and the sooner you start the more it will grow. It's up to each individual to determine the right path for them, and I'm not saying it would never make sense to go do a startup when you're young (you have more energy, creativity etc), but you must be aware that the tradeoff is losing valuable years early in your financial path that you will never be able to get back. Arriving at the same spot at 35 that you could have started at at 20 will put you significantly behind others who have used those early years to put the miracle that is compound interest to work for them.
OK, I've been trying to be nice here, but this is just too much. 7% annual returns in the stock market? Good luck with that, buddy. I'd be happy to get a guaranteed 4%, but I doubt it will happen. How about a team of unicorns to pull my coach to work every day?
Guess what: you are never going to have financial security unless you win the startup lottery. If you make 150k a year instead of 100k, the colleges you send your kid to will just charge you an extra 50k in tuition. The more you make, the more they charge. Great model, eh?
Middle class savings are ridiculously inadequate to modern expenses. Even a few days in the hospital could set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars if the bureaucrats at the insurance company decide it's not covered. In a divorce your partner will get half of the house, half of the money, and probably a permanent monthly stipend out of you (at least in California).
You're either one of the 1% or you're one of the poor. So take your chances and roll the dice. If you succeed you will be able to pursue whatever other dreams you want. If you fail, you'll just take the safe job at IBM like everyone else. Retirement is mostly a scam anyway and odds are none of the savings you've accumulated will mean squat when the big one drops / singularity hits / Sarah Palin becomes President-for-Life.
None of these numbers are adjusted for (estimated) inflation, right?
For instance, $1,000 from 1969 was worth the equivalent of over $6,000 in 2014 (45 years later, same as "start work at 20, retire at 65" examples)
So the benefits of investing, while not poor, are substantially less impressive than they appear from the raw numbers. That $21,000 of 2060 dollars might only buy as much as $3,500-4,000 in 2015, when that first $1,000 was invested.
There are varying degrees of changing the world, and not all have to have the aspirations of something like "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." If you're creating value by helping someone do their job better, or faster, or with less waste, etc, then you're still changing the world just in a relatively smaller way. Perhaps a better way to state it would be "making a change on the world". The startups that are upending entire industries (Uber, SpaceX etc) get the most attention, but there are significantly more focused on missions that may directly affect a lot less people, but still improve their lives in a meaningful way.
Go.com, Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo!, Dogpile, Ask.com, Yandex and many other search engines existed before Google entered. Most were wildly profitable.
Sometimes it helps to read the articles you link to. None of them show that "Most were wildly profitable." In fact, those articles mention that search engines before google struggled to make money.
I'm not sure I understand the allure of this; perhaps I'm missing something. So I have to send a video/photo in response to someone who sent me one, in order to see what they sent? It seems like there would be a massive disparity in interesting activities between two parties at any given time to make this concept work. If one of my buddies is having a riot at Coachella and sends me a crazy festival pic for instance, and I'm just sitting at my desk doing work, what am I supposed to do? Send them back a pic of my coffee mug or something? Seems like they felt they had to do something to distinguish themselves from Snapchat but I'm not sure this is the answer. Time till tell though, I guess.
Well for one, you wouldn't know what his pic was. And two, that's going to be very very normal in this app.
I like it because it's a pic conversation app (which i enjoy, with close friends) that forces interaction. For those of us already using similar things, this sort of structures our interaction into a conversation, rather than one person simply sending pics to the other.
With that said, i can't help but feel i am the minority of users. Not just here on HN (lets be honest, most things are received poorly on HN), but all around. People have the sense of needing to send something meaningful in a picture, but i like simply idle chat, in picture form. It's neat
Why the hell would sending dud pictures to see a picture someone sent you be "normal" for the app? Couldn't we use Facebook, Snapchat, or SMS to get the same effect without literally working around a feature? Fucking retarded.
Why would you want to use an app that "forces" interaction? Either the two mutual parties are interested in talking to each other, or they are not. Im sorry, but a photo sharing app like this one will not help my conversations be more engaging. It actually puts up barriers.
"Neat" does not justify the money or engineering talent invested in it. If I was a Facebook share holder, I'd be confused as all hell.
I'd say Snapchat is the comparison, and yes, you literally could. It's almost as if people and companies create products to compete with other products. Multiple types of bread, what madness is this. I could literally use the same type of bread from this other company!
> "Neat" does not justify the money or engineering talent invested in it. If I was a Facebook share holder, I'd be confused as all hell.
lol i wasn't trying to justify them creating it. I don't give a shit why they did. All i care is that i am a consumer of it, and enjoy it more than Snapchat. Vastly more than sending pictures via SMS/Facebook/etc.
I'd love to continue a discussion, but this feels much less like a discussion about a product and more like i have to try and sell you on the concept, and on the product itself. Frankly, i don't have the slightest care if you like the product.
Funny how Liking something on HN is so often a mind blowingly crazy concept. "But the numbers don't add up!!" they cry. Well, make your own Facebook, become far more successful than FB, and don't make their mistakes. Since you so clearly know something they don't, you should have a serious edge in the competition, right? :)
So I won't knock on you enjoying it, because thats subjective. How do you use it though, you'll need to eventually sell all your facebook friends to use it as well since you like it so much. You'll have to convince them why forcing to send you a picture to see what you send them is better for them.
For this reason, I see it literally as an uphill battle for it to gain traction. Hoping that you are right, and that Facebook as learned something from their mistakes and will take their edge and use it - instead of building a completely separate app with a disjointed use case and calling it social innovation. Give me a break!
> How do you use it though, you'll need to eventually sell all your facebook friends to use it as well since you like it so much. You'll have to convince them why forcing to send you a picture to see what you send them is better for them.
I disagree on me personally, but that is because i try to keep my social circle, especially those who i'd use this app with, very small. I try to keep my FB friends below 10 (though, i have been debating letting everyone in, but only listening/posting to ~10).
This is abnormal for the common person today.
Fwiw, the only problem i have with this App, is that it destroys natural image conversation. Now that we've (friend s and i) used it heavily for a day (we'll see if i think the same after a week), we still enjoy it but we cannot converse beyond 1 reaction. This feels quite limited, and makes the "idle-chat" style picture convo less supported.
It sounds like "fun" to me. I think that's something that Snapchat was able to capture very well, and it looks like Slingshot is looking to actually improve on. It's just plain fun to see what your friends are all up to, at least to me. It leads to discussions and other communication (texting "Wish we had some coffee here, it would probably mellow out this Coachella riot" for instance).
As was mentioned earlier, it's a "show yours and I'll show you mine" kind of thing, but not in the stereotypical sexual sense. It feels like it has the potential to foster community, admittedly in a somewhat odd way, by coercing people to share experiences.
I do worry about the dilution of content through the "Send to all" feature, but I think that requiring someone to send something back directly to you alleviates that quite a bit.
