She sells (exclusively) on TeachersPayTeachers.com. Educators create resources and list them online for others to download/buy. Each seller is required to have at least one free resource so somewhere around 5%~10% are free.
The payment structure is basically 70% to the seller, or the seller can pay a flat fee of $60/yr to become a "premium" seller and then keep 85% of sales. What's nice about their platform is that the customers are highly qualified and support is mostly offloaded to their support staff. When a customer makes a direct inquiry (to a seller like my wife) about a product there's a very high chance they will actually convert, so time answering questions is well-spent. If a customer wants a refund they contact TPT directly, so it can be a very hands-off kind of thing. We've discussed selling off-site to recover a piece of the 15% but it hardly seems worthwhile because of their infrastructure and how it allows her to focus on creating new products.
TPT has posted engineering job openings on HN in the past and seems like it'd be a great place to work in NYC if anyone is looking. I don't represent or know them personally but get a strong positive impression from their virtual meetings with sellers and people who I know who work closely with them.
As I understand it they have a bit of cross-pollination with the team at Etsy, which is another interesting marketplace similar to TPT but for arts & crafts products. You might know Etsy from their blog at codeascraft.com, presentations they openly host, or because Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) works there. If not, their blog is worth checking out.
Thanks for taking questions. I'm currently on F1 OPT and just lost the H1B lottery. Was wondering if it's legal for me to apply directly for a GC instead. If yes, are there potential risks during the process and in the future. Thanks
I think esturk meant that AlphaGo is barely beatable now, so by the time anyone else gets a chance, it will have improved in the meantime and even a stronger human player won't be able to beat it.
By that measure, Fan Hui beat AlphaGo before Lee Sedol did, since he was playing an earlier and bit weaker version of more or less the same complete, distributed, system.
Lee is 3rd ranked as of now. He was 1st for almost 10 years before that.
Ke Jie is 19 years old. Lee has been a pro for nearly 20 years. Lee is not old but certainly not young. Go game prodigies seem to peak when early 20's, much like mathematicians.
My personal hypothesis for the reason why Magnus Carlsen is the youngest chess champion of all time is that with the rise of online battles and computer battles, the age where the blend of crystalized intelligence and working intelligence combines lowers.
This has obvious implications for the recent rise of machines immediately correcting human mistakes in mathematics and physics.
The problem is not really with what they've taken out (although pretty much killing TweetDeck still stings), but instead added to the overall experience.
* I'll click a tweet and immediately below it there will be an unrelated "Promoted Tweet". In the same place replies would normally be, so I always need to do a double take to see whether it's a reply or an ad.
* I'll look at my list and it'll always show a list of tweets out of order, the "While you were away" feature. The weird thing is that you can dismiss it, and then it asks you if you liked it; I always say no, but it keeps reappearing.
* They were recently inserting tweets from people I don't follow in my timeline because they were "popular". I think they changed that feature now, but it was very confusing at first.
* Promoted Tweets show way too often and are too similar to real Tweets.
* "Moments" is a joke. I used to like Twitter for live events (normally with just a search) and was excited to have a feature dedicated to that need, but they completely missed the point by making something that is hard to follow and not even close to real time. It's barely usable. That's what made me realize they have no idea what they're doing.
I like to follow a small group of people. My experience is a bit curated. But nowadays, almost everything I do on the mobile or web app will show me content I don't care about. The fact that none of it is controllable by the user (like the "While you were away" feature) is infuriating. This is not even related to ad revenue, it's just a point of user experience they decided to break completely.
I have moved away from the official clients and the experience is a little bit better. Doesn't change the fact that the platform is clearly moving away from the use case that made it popular in the first place, at least for me.
I think a more interesting problem is not how you can differentiate a spambot with a 'non-spam' bot. I've seen some bots that are really creative and fun on Twitter. I guess it's not really hard to add it to a spam detection ML model
Non-spam bots generally don't follow each other or link to external websites. (I'm also the author of one of the more popular image bots https://twitter.com/a_quilt_bot)
Purely hypothetically: access to affordable medical insurance becomes contingent upon such a scan. You have a developing condition which will render you uninsurable.
I'm not suggesting Google would or even legally could consider creating a bidding system for insurance companies to use clean scans as a leadgen system, but in the unlikely event that they did feel so inclined, it wouldn't exactly be a wild departure from their business model
The best thing about the Affordable Care Act is that it prohibits discrimination based on preexisting conditions. If a sick person applies for health insurance, the insurance company has to issue it, and the rate can only be set based on your age, smoking status, and location.
So the entire risk pool/population has to bite the cost of the "previously uninsured"? Whether they want to or not? Sorry, nevermind that second question, it was rhetorical. Of course it doesn't matter if they want to or not, it's effectively a government mandated "tax". Taxes are almost never voluntary.
Yes, it makes sense if you think about that "tax" as the payment for the lottery ticket of a functioning body and brain.
Every person here won that lottery ticket, when we could have just as easily suffered from any number of horrible diseases and disorders. Not wanting to pay higher premiums b/c the "lotto losers" are included is like not wanting to pay for a lotto ticket after the fact because you know the rare outcome won't hit you.
So because the current best option is grouping people based on imprecise risk factors like age, demographics, and hereditary problems, we should forever turn a blind eye to individual warning signs even if they could save our lives?
This is a depressingly pessimistic way of ignoring the real underlying problem: health care is too fucking expensive.
2018: Google Health Scanner begins operation in selected pilot cities. Lines wrap around the block as people try to make it in while it's still free (even though the crowd is exclusively composed of people who could certainly afford it, because it's in a whitewashed, gentrified suburban neighborhood).
2019: Apple (January) and later Microsoft (October) respond with their own health scanners. Integrating with their respective data silos on personal health data, only people with iPhones or Windows Phones can be screened at an Apple Store Clinic or Windows You location.
2025: A federal case reveals that Google's initial scanner, in an attempt to reduce false positives, left millions with false confidence in their health. Google settles and introduces a subscription plan.
2027: Leaked emails, photographs, and a misconfigured Hangout that was broadcast live on YouTube show decisively that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are colluding to keep wages low for the medical staff they employ. Oracle doesn't even have any medical staff, it just wanted in on the collusion. The federal government reacts by saying "These people have our medical results now and we're not going near this with a ten-foot pole."
2030: Google announces Nexus Implant, a biometric device that relays data in real-time to Google. This is lauded by the CDC as a major help in combating epidemics. Apple launches iMe later that year. Microsoft released a biometric implant in 2004, but it was derided as "too clunky." Surface You comes out in 2032.
2031: For the 2031 flu season, biometrics users are advised to upgrade to a version with vaccination pods. Capable of being intelligently released if it detects you are exposed to a specific flu strain, this enables the immunocompromised to be "just-in-time vaccinated". Thanks to the tracking data reported back from the implants, flu is at an all-time low.
2033: Massive vulnerabilities rock the now ludicrously decrepit but still used X.509 CA infrastructure. Nobody discusses leaving X.509.
2034: First jailbreak exploits for iMe released, allowing users to circumvent the trusted computing chip on the iMe and load custom firmware. This is initially used by biohackers looking to access raw sensor data.
Spring 2035: Unrest in Bahrain turns coldly bloody as the regime infects anyone with an iMe, Nexus Implant, or Surface Inside with acute vaccination sickness, caused by firing all vaccination pods simultaneously (all implants are now pre-loaded with vaccinations for common infections). A postmortem of the attack determines that the Bahrainian national CA deployed an exploit similar to the jailbreak to issue rogue commands to the vaccination units.
Fall 2035: Protestors in China, Russia and the Ukraine keel over, eyes bleeding, as a custom-made virus is released from backdoored implants. Google defends placing the kill-switches as a cost of doing business in accordance with foreign law in foreign countries.
Winter 2035: As tensions run high during a trade dispute between China, Greater Korea, and Malaysia, rouge cyberattackers kill thousands of people using unpatched implants. Calls increase for implants to be recalled, but the flu season looks to be the worst in a long time, and critics say superbugs caused by on-demand antibiotics use via the CleanU app (YC 2033) could be more fatal than the unpatched implants. After heavy lobbying, Google supports Android Z for the Nexus Implant.
Spring 2036: The trade dispute worsens, and after a misstep on the part of a US mediator, a cyberattack from "patriotic Chinese citizens" kills several local, state, and federal government workers and politicians. Presidential hopeful Chris Schwarzenegger is killed. The United States demands sanctions on China, alleging the attack to have originating from PLA-controlled networks. Both countries enter into an economic death spiral as they try to disentangle their economies. A SpaceX launch is misinterpreted by a Chinese early-warning system as a nuclear launch and, fearing annihilation, the PRC unleashes its now-substantial nuclear arsenal on America and NATO. Russia interprets Ukraine-bound missiles as attacks on its soil and, confused by the stealth signatures, fires on NATO as well. The United Kingdom is destroyed instantaneously. This escalates to a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, New Rhodesia, and France. The world is a smoking ruin. As the radiation slowly declines over the next few million years, the wasteland left behind is left to the lichen.
Moral of the story? Stay away from Google's medical initiatives.
I am not necessarily convinced, but kudos for an imaginative, interesting, passionate contribution to the debate. With lots of nicely constructed details.
I wouldn't say gmail, maps, chrome, docs, calendar indicate 'their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products.' Also, buying a product doesn't mean you're done with it. I personally think what the folks at Android, Youtube and Nest etc have been doing is incredible.
How many of those are actually well monetized? Almost none. How many of them contribute a major portion of revenue back to the company? Absolutely none of them.
Google is good at launching products, they're not good at maturing them. Chrome is a fantastic piece of software, and it fulfills it's purpose for google quite well, but it's not a product in the way that AWS or the kindle is a product.
Google is good at development, excellent in fact. But they get stuck in the hard middle parts of product development. They fail to monetize products well and they fail to mature products into their full potential. Partly that's because product development at google is basically just play-time. As I said, revenue for google derives from a tiny subset of products (search and network almost exclusively), everything else is just a side project. As such, when a product doesn't meet its potential or doesn't bring in billions in revenue that is not an issue at all at google, it's the expected case. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad. Docs/drive has stagnated relative to what it could have been for years.
Amazon is almost diametrically opposite. They productize well, extremely well, but they have a horrid working environment in regard to devs.
