arturnt's comments

arturnt | 7 years ago | on: Deliverr raises $7M to help e-commerce businesses compete with Amazon Prime

Amazon leads the market for many reasons among those price, selection [1], reviews, and then with more recent shifts faster shipping. The goal isn't to beat Amazon the marketplace. The goal is to bring the Prime experience to other marketplaces. I don't believe it's a zero sum game.

Amazon is a lot more comfortable than they were 10 years ago, and you can already see that as a result in higher prices [1][2] and lower shipping SLAs. Lifting the rest of the market increases competition and helps all buyers have a better experience.

[1] http://www.samseely.com/blog/2016/5/2/the-amazon-flywheel-pa... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-is-more-expensive-tha... [3] http://time.com/money/5256866/amazon-prime-membership-price-...

arturnt | 7 years ago | on: Deliverr raises $7M to help e-commerce businesses compete with Amazon Prime

Amazon has a program called Multi-channel fulfillment. But there are significant drawbacks to sellers and marketplaces:

1. It comes in an Amazon box. Large marketplace have started penalizing sellers for that.

2. They don't integrate into fast shipping programs that act like Prime, as an example eBay eGD.

You are right that eBay and Walmart can offer this service, but most sellers will sell in multiple places, and splitting inventory across different facilities is expensive, inefficient, and difficult to manage. Isolationism in this market hurts everybody.

arturnt | 10 years ago | on: The Dorito Effect

They sell these varieties all at Whole Foods. Usually Grass Fes and Corn Fed at the butcher section and Grass Fed Corn Finished pre-packed on the side.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: A Plea for Culinary Modernism

The article misconstrues multiple food movements from by taking three words, natural, fresh, and local, and not understanding the context around them. The article therefore boils down into a straw man argument.

The slow food movement particularly is a tiny minority, it’s like bringing up the Tea Party, for a political debate. There is a much larger movement against fast food, and that’s mostly because of chemicals used in fast food. Nitrate preserved meat has links to cancer. Azodicarbonamide, a dough conditional, banned in Europe/Australia, was in US Subway sandwiches till last year. Then of course there is soda, a food engineered to be over-consumed, which leads to diabetes and obesity.

No one outside of Raw Vegans, again another tiny minority, is against preservation of foods. In fact, it’s common and promoted. The mechanism though is typically through bacterial fermentation and pickling with vinegar which is how most of the foods (soy, tofu, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, herring, yogurt etc) are prepared, stored, and used during winter times when no vegetation is available. Synthetic preservatives have been linked to negative health outcomes.

The local food movement is really just about eating produce locally when possible. Why should? Typically it’s cheaper, more varied, and more nutritious. All of the words agriculture is bred for maximum shelf life. You aren’t getting the best tasting food, you are just getting the food that won’t go bad. That also means it’s less genetically diverse. There 10k varieties of tomatoes, you can only buy about 5 commercially. Emphasis here is on produce, no one is abstaining from imported spices.

Most of these movements come at the heels of rising obesity epidemic in the US and around the world against an industry that’s for profit and not for pro health. Some are extreme, but that helps swing the pendulum the opposite direction. You can see the rise of more ingredient conscious and more delicious Chipotle, which sources all ingredients within 350mi and the fall of the heavily processed McDonalds. This is a net positive and not something we should be condemning.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: At some startups, Friday is so casual that it’s not even a workday

An average work day isn't filled with 100% development. You have breaks for lunch, coffee, people asking you questions, meetings, ping pong, etc. For a good workplace a chunk of your time is a social experience like any other. That means if you spend about 2-3 hours a day total socializing, then the 5 hours a day you spend working. For startups, sometimes you have time sensitive releases so that number goes from 5 to 10, but it's still only about 50 hours of actual development per week even though it's 65 with all the other stuff included.

Treehouse has managed to make a 4 hour week work since everyone is working remotely, so that social aspect is not as prominent and consumes less time. For people who have kids spending time for the kids becomes more important than the social experience at work as it should. The 4 day work week all of a sudden makes sense since they have bundled those 3 hours / day of a work social time into one day of a kids time.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: Why Whole Foods Is Moving in to One of the Poorest Neighborhoods in Chicago

I shop organic, typically at farmer's markets, and actively cook. I lived in Toledo for a little while and visited Detroit. While you have access to supermarkets in that part of the country the access is very poor. I ate a lot of fast food simply because fast food is within 5 min and a super market is often times 30 min. Produce is typically poor quality and imported.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)

It's helpful to have predictable names. Imagine you have to @ someone or add them on a code review by name or send them a chat by name. @fruitloops123 is a lot harder to remember than @mark[Teamname] or @marklastname.

When you are large enough first names no longer work.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: GitHub Enterprise 2.0

GitHub's tools always fell short for me. Phabricator is a much better code review tool (with a commandline workflows). Trello / JIRA are a lot faster and more flexible for issue management or sprint workflows.

arturnt | 11 years ago | on: New tool helps debug Java exceptions faster

If you are using Java with a package/build manager like maven you can always automatically pull all the source jars and then any IDE (Intellij/Eclipse) will allow you to jump through all third party libraries. Are you targeting the non-IDE crowd with this tool?

arturnt | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2013)

Sneakpeeq, Inc. (based in San Francisco)

We are revolutionizing e-commerce. Building a Heroku of Shopping. We are a smart, fast, motivated, and most of all fun group of engineers backed by top VCs. Our founders are serial entrepreneurs and former engineers. We are growing like crazy looking for smart generalists that are ready to work on hard problems.

-Artur

Interested? Email [email protected] and let me get you coffee!

arturnt | 13 years ago | on: “Growth Hacking” is BS

I disagree with this article. A "Growth Hacker" is an engineer that applies himself in the field of marketing. This means coming up with interesting and innovative ways of lowering the cost of user acquisition. The distinction is important since Marketing itself is a very loaded term.

Companies like Zynga thrived because they found cheap ways of getting users: early un-managed FB platform, and app referrals. Same with AirBnB and their craigslist post automation.

Growth hacking isn't going to make your product better, but more people will be aware of it.

arturnt | 13 years ago | on: Java is preparing to co-bundling and native binaries

Spoken like someone who knows nothing about Java. There are a bunch of apps written in Java web start(ie yEd), which involves just clicking on a link. Off the top of my head, some very popular Java apps are Eclipse/Intellij or Azureus.
page 1