I think so. There's a big difference between coding every day and coding all day. Sometimes I only get one or two commits in. I spend the rest of my time running, rock climbing, reading, and socializing. Not having a TV or Netflix subscription really helps my productivity.
Also, I want to write software. If I didn't, doing it every day would take phenomenal willpower.
I never said Stack Exchange websites were “perfect” for anything. I’ve just been using it today and I hate it. Stack Exchange websites use competition to achieve answers to questions a paradigm that is completely at odds with collaboration and understanding necessary to actually have conversations in which multiple opinions can coexist and learning can occur.
Thanks for the useful reply. I’m giving MailMate some serious consideration depending on whether the smart mailboxes feature can distinguish between threads I’m involved in and threads I am not.
> Also look for bloggers who have quality comment communities
Yeah that’s quite a good point. Twitter too I guess. The trouble with blogs and twitter is that you can’t ask a question unless you have a blog or a twitter account that is popular.
The latter for blogs would depend on patience, and effort and/or luck. I.e. find a relevant blog, and either the blogger brings up the subject you're interested in, so you can ask a question, or---and this is probably the most important thing you can do, whatever forum type you do it in---become part of that blog's community. After a certain point you'll be able to ask the author directly and perhaps have it become the basis of a blog positing.
If you can find a community you'll be a long ways towards being a position to get your needs satisfied.
Oh yeah, this is not a book to use for learning Haskell. I personally recommend Graham Hutton’s Programming in Haskell or Real World Haskell if you want to learn Haskell. Hutton’s book focuses more on the principles of the language while RWH on its applications but still covers principles well. RWH is a significantly larger time commitment.
I know a lot of people wax on the virtues of Learn You A Haskell but I found its explanations sufficiently full of inferable minutiae that my brain switched off safe in the knowledge that thinking is not required and I stopped learning. Maybe this is just me though.
The first part is all about logic and it tells you everything you need to know. You have to approach it like reading a big academic paper though. It’s not like you’ll be flipping through the pages rapidly but it is definitely understandable. Can’t comment on later parts because I stopped reading. I might start again one day though. I quite liked it.
The absence of that executable flag does nothing to protect you from using an existing executable and some data such as an interpreter and source code.
That advice creates startups that are more likely to work, yes, but also seriously narrows the range of different startups likely to occur. You’re optimizing for reliability—not surprising, you’re an investor—not for where the need is greatest.
Perhaps once you’ve made a lot of money you could afford to optimize for where the need is greatest instead of reliability and fund tech startups tackling problems less familiar to their founders or founders from different backgrounds. This will probably be more risky but greater needs should produce greater rewards, right?
Except the overall effect of this startup will be the opposite of what you just describe. Prim isn’t creating more dirty laundry, it’s consolidating the laundry jobs into batches that will be performed by fewer businesses than would otherwise overall.
If you happen to own one of the laundromats that Prim doesn’t want to use you will see a reduction in your business. There is a saving grace for that situation however, you could apply for a job at Prim.
I think they're probably competing with non-consumption rather than with their suppliers. Note the market segmentation and markedly higher prices, for example. (I have some accidental knowledge on this due to previous HN threads attempting to value laundry services as a perk from Big Daddy G, so I happen to know that weekly laundry pickup costs about $800 a year in SV, which is a sizable discount relative to this.)
To put it another way: they don't have to create more dirty laundry, they just have to successfully sell people on "You've always thought that poor people use the laundromat, middle class people use their own washer, and rich people have hired servants, but guess what, people just like you can actually outsource laundry without any of the squicky associations you have with hiring domestic help. It's as easy and natural as ordering a pizza."
I've "outsourced" most laundry since I was in college.
The problem these guys are going to have is that the quality of third party wholesale laundry is poor, always. Generally, what I see happening is that you have a mom & pop cleaner business who operates for years doing their own stuff. Then they grow / have equipment troubles / retire and bring their kids into the business / etc and move to either a centralized laundry plant model or outsource some or all of the cleaning.
Once that happens, your shirts get lost, buttons get crushed, etc.
So you have a premium service dependent on third parties for service delivery -- who usually suck. Hopefully they'll find a solution to those issues.
Yes I agree with patio11 here. What they're essentially doing is "growing the market" for commercial laundry. In theory 80%+ of the laundry they're processing would otherwise be done inside the home. If they hurt anyone via disruption it's the kid at Sears selling washing machines and dryers.
Presumably they'll choose the companies who can/do service them best. I work for a contract manufacturing company and the same thing holds true for us as a $6b corporation with a presence in 25 countries. Customers pick the partner who provides the right mix of cost, quality, communications, timeliness, location and alignment. Depending on the customer's own business goals and performance, the list of eligible partners ebbs & flows over time. Generally speaking, though, the cream always rises to the top.
