Or perhaps with the fact that comparing Syrians to Skittles carries echoes of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher comparing Jews to mushrooms in a popular children’s book that posited the ticklish dilemma of how to distinguish poisonous toadstools from edible fungus; and has a mother saying to her son Franz:
“Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk.”
.. The co-founder of Google, co-founder of Tesla, and founder of eBay were all immigrants. Steve Jobs’ biological father was a Syrian immigrant. In fact, earlier this year, the National Foundation for American Policy found that 51 percent of the country’s start-up companies valued at over $1 billion had at least one immigrant founder. A study by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a coalition of governors and business leaders, found that in 2013 more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including seven of the world’s 10 most valuable brands, were started by immigrants or their children.
.. Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was a German immigrant. He arrived in the United States in October 1885. For decades, the family lied: They said he hailed from Sweden. In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump says his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” The family historian, John Walter, explained that Trump’s father, Fred, “had a lot of Jewish tenants and it wasn’t a good thing to be German in those days.”
Don’t Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
What is a Little Snowball?
- Very simple idea with a single facet
- Extremely low product surface area (frontend and backend)
- Can generally be prototyped and brought to market in months
- Is instantly useful and quickly gains early-adopter traction
.. Fast to Prototype and Launch
The sooner you can get to market the sooner you can validate and start learning about how your customers make purchase or adoption decisions.
.. Notice Problems
.. Look For Optimizations
How I built an app with 500,000 users in 5 days on a $100 server
The guy who reached 1 million users in 5 days by making a chat app for Pokémon GO fans.
.. The article states that Zarra had a hard time paying for the servers that were necessary to host 1M active users. He never thought to get this many users. He built this app as an MVP, caring about scalability later. He built it to fail.
.. I built image recognition software to automatically check if an uploaded image is Pokémon GO-related, and resizing tools for uploaded images. We run this whole setup on one medium Google Cloud server of $100/month, plus (cheap) Google Cloud Storage for the storage of images. Yes, $100. And it performs well.
.. A database should query only on one index at a time, which is impossible with these geospatial queries.
.. I separate the snaps into a few different collections: all snaps, most liked snaps, newest snaps, newest valid snaps and so forth. Whenever a snap gets added, liked or marked as abuse, the code checks if it (still) belongs to one of those collections and acts accordingly. This way the code can query from prepared collections instead of running complicated queries on one huge pile of mess. It’s simply separating data logically into some simple buckets.
.. How much extra time did I spent on all of this? Maybe 2 to 3 hours. Why I did this in the first place? Because that’s just the way I set things up. I assume my apps will be successful. There’s no point in building an app assuming it won’t be successful.
.. I bake minimum viable scalability principles into my app.
.. At one point last weekend, our server’s 4 NodeJS processes were running at 90% CPU each, which is unacceptable to me for 800–1000 concurrent users. I realized that it had to be Mongoose doing things with my fetched data. Apparently I simply had to enable Mongoose’s “lean()” function to get plain JSON objects instead of magical Mongoose objects. After that change, the NodeJS processes dropped to around 5–10% CPU usage. Just the simple logic of knowing what your code actually does is very important. It reduced the load by 90%.
Employee #1: Apple
Conversation with Bill Fernandez, who introduced Steve Jobs to electronics, and then to Steve Wozniak. “Jobs had bicycled over to my house and we were going to hang out and I needed to go to Mr. Taylor’s house to get some parts, so we walked across the street. Woz was out washing his car and I thought, ‘Well you know, here are two electronics buddies. They might be interested in meeting each other and doing electronics stuff.’ So we walked over to the car and I introduced them” (6,500 words)
.. Across the street and three houses over was the Wozniak family. Jerry Wozniak was a mathematician and engineer, he was a real genius and worked on top secret projects at Lockheed. He had two sons and a daughter. His eldest son, Steve Wozniak, was into electronics... He and I were both deeply introspective, very philosophical. Neither of us wanted to play the social games that you needed to play to be accepted into any of the numerous cliques that define the social scene for 13 and 14 year olds in junior high school. So we eventually gravitated towards each other and started hanging out. We became fast friends. I got him interested in electronics and so….. It turned out that Woz loved pranks and Jobs had a very countercultural streak. One of the first projects they collaborated on was this huge sign of a hand with the middle finger raised. It was a huge cloth poster and they put it up on the roof of our school and weighted the ends with rocks, I think. This was the end of the building that all of the parents faced during graduation. And the idea was that during graduation they would cut some strings which would release this thing to roll down over the side of the building and it said, “Best Wishes, Class of ‘72!” and it was giving them the finger... Then a couple of things happened. He started working on building his own computer and he started attending the Homebrew Computer Club that was happening at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC.So all of those things happened at the same time and then as his computer came together he would take it and show it off after the meetings. At some point there was enough interest shown that Jobs became aware of this.
.. Basically Jobs said, “You know, we could make printed circuit boards and just sell the computer already assembled so people wouldn’t even have to buy all the parts on the open market and figure out how to wire them together. We could just do it for them.” And so that was the beginning of Apple Computer.