mortallywounded

> "One family member in West Virginia told APBP they paid more than $400 in three weeks for tablet usage."

Access to a tablet and messaging outside the prison is hardly a "basic resource" and it's likely an avenue for exploit.

Should we treat prisoners like humans? Sure. Should they be comfortable? Not so much.

To all the 20 year olds, libgen.rs

Sounds like a skill issue. /s

Available in prisons, god forbid it be available to the public!

It sounds like you spent 4 years building a product before you even knew if anyone would use it. That's a terrible idea, but a good learning experience.

I wouldn't give up (perhaps you need to give up on your current product though).

What you need to do is evaluate _why_ the product isn't selling. Who's the ideal customer? Can you get on a call with some of them and put it in their hands and get actual feedback? Figure out if you need to abandon the product or not. Stop building. Focus entirely on marketing and sales.

Next time, don't go so deep on the building phase until you have people handing you money.

For reference, I recently came up with a new product idea. I did some searching to figure out if any competition exists and I found none. That's horrifying. I almost immediately gave up the idea entirely on the spot.

However, I randomly met someone that was an ideal customer (while dropping my kids off at school) and they immediately said they would pay $200/month for that and asked when they could try it. Not only that, they said they knew 2-3 other people that would as well. I ended up meeting two other ideal customers that said the same thing and one even asked if they could invest in it.

I'm still not entirely sure-- but those are strong signals that people will put up money for it, but it doesn't mean they will. I am still nervous but decided to go ahead and build an mvp and see if the idea has legs.

What kind of signals are your ideal customers giving you?

I'll be blunt.

1. Take all of the side projects that are too niche and/or unsellable and polish up the code then open source it (add it to your portfolio/resume).

2. Take the projects that are sellable and publish them in places people can find them (app store, on the web, etc) then put it on your portfolio/resume.

3. With your beefier resume/portfolio in hand, find a job.

It came after the first wave of SPAs and if we listed every SPA framework (or "library") we'd be here all day.

Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.

The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.

The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).

There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."

But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).

^ I think you'll enjoy the paper's deep dive. It goes into the references deeply!