If you're poor, you're an immigrant. If you're rich, you're an expat.
Search Google Images for "expat" and "immigrant", and see what the difference is in the people you see in the photos. Skin color.
London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
81–90 of 192 posts
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They had Nigeria as a supported country. But they removed it ... I am a Nigerian and I consider this an unpardonable failure of basic market research. If they had spent a quality hour of their time investigating the Nigerian market, they would have found out that inflow overwhelmingly dwarfs outflow. Makes you wonder what their decision making methodology is
When there's a consistent imbalance, I wonder if instead of trading it themselves, they could queue up requests. People who really wanted the cheap rate would wait days or weeks or whatever it took to reach the head of the queue, while others would drop out so it keeps moving.
Great idea. Maybe they could go one step further, and automatically lower prices until someone does buy them out. They could call it something cool... something that reminds you of places where you can buy and sell things... :p
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like a culture that's not objectively bad, just different from what you respect. People use slang words and bragging everywhere. They're just different words and different ways of expressing their brags. But to be honest, they do have a very noble goal and they have reason to be proud of it. Poor people all over the world are constantly pouring money into Western Union and banks for this seemingly trivial s…
> they do have a very noble goal LOL they ain't no charity, their goal is to make $$$, period. Incidentally they do so in a way that is also good for their customers, but that's nothing more than a nice coincidence. We're all grown ups, I don't need to be sugar coated with all the "we're making the world a better place" nonsense. But no, these people want you to believe in their damn dream, as if working 5 days a wee…
well I am as a rule also cynical regarding the motives of businesses, but one thing I have observed is that some people seem to create and pursue businesses that are good for their customers as the central purpose of that business, and some do so as a nice coincidence if it happens. These guys can be the second, but might also be the first.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a need to transfer large amounts of USD-to-CAD or vice versa, have a look into Norbert's Gambit. It'll effectively let you perform the transfer for 0.2%. Probably not worthwhile for small amounts, but if you're converting ~$10k, might be worth the effort. This site seems to break it down: https://norbertsgambit.com/
That's all kinds of sketchy, least of all because of the taxes, but also because you're playings games with public stock that they or anyone else could manipulate. I've used TransferWise for over $8K and think the service is fantastic. I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole and my git is screaming "scam!"
The only downside I can see is that it takes a fair amount of time (about 7-14 days) from the moment you move money in to the moment you get your exchanged money out. It'll take your brokerage several working days to "journal" your shares over to the other denomination, and the shares can go up/down in the mean time, generating capital gains/losses. Otherwise there's no catch.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like some sort of place where you could hunt new products?
I don't think product hunt solved this. I'm not really that impressed with their results. It's more like popularity based marketing channel(what's with all those videos ? ), because of the lack of good search and deep metadata. Heck many products don't even have a rich, textual description. It's almost like aggregating product reviews from relatively unbiased sources(unlike the cesspool that Amazon has become), and f…
The main impediment to your goal, tbh, seems the quality of the data.
For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource.
For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google.
The closest that really exists is:
http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/
http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/
> Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.
> The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?
An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to:
A) Switch
B) Be that detailed.
C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#86Throwaway for obvious reasons. I applied for a position as a software dev there a few years ago through a friend. I hated every single moment of it. It was like they exported the very worse from Silicon Valley's bullshit start-ups attitude. They just couldn't shut the fuck up about how they were really changing the world (yeah right), how awesome it was to work 60 hours a week for such a great Vision, how sick their…
It is funny how I will instinctively trust more an anonymous post on HN over an article published on a "reputable" site like Bloomberg...
To be fair the original article is good though, it presents different sides of the story and reports criticisms too. There's even an interesting history fact on how old the tradition of swapping currency actually is!
My intention wasn't to discredit their product or the article, but to offer a (hopefully interesting) "insider view" on a certain kind of culture.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> VP of Engineering who asked me to code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard (no kidding) I agree that a VP in a late stage interview should not be asking this of the candidate, but I will say that I recently had to hire a new team member, and FizzBuzz helped me to immediately weed out the candidates during the initial interview. I'm talking like 50% of the candidates, and one guy even asked if he could take it home and send me…
Out of curiosity, what sort of (non-personality) mistakes did you see?
While I didn't quite see all of the possible mistakes pointed out by jpollock in a parallel comment, all of the mistakes I did see were nicely covered there.
Another interesting data point was that only 2 of the 10 candidates had ever heard of FizzBuzz. That surprised me more than anything else.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#88Throwaway for obvious reasons. I applied for a position as a software dev there a few years ago through a friend. I hated every single moment of it. It was like they exported the very worse from Silicon Valley's bullshit start-ups attitude. They just couldn't shut the fuck up about how they were really changing the world (yeah right), how awesome it was to work 60 hours a week for such a great Vision, how sick their…
Their marketing material in NYC was incredibly douchey, like "stick it to the big banks". I was using Xoom ( https://www.xoom.com ) at the time, which had a brand image of a trustworthy and cut-the-bullshit kind of financial company. TransferWise's subway ads focused on a people's revolution: http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Rjm3dY.BU5FmdQmId3yj1w--/Y... or http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03525/TransferW…
Is it really their fault, or is i just how marketing works in this day an age ?
Heck, they even got you, and you hated their marketing!
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#89Throwaway for obvious reasons. I applied for a position as a software dev there a few years ago through a friend. I hated every single moment of it. It was like they exported the very worse from Silicon Valley's bullshit start-ups attitude. They just couldn't shut the fuck up about how they were really changing the world (yeah right), how awesome it was to work 60 hours a week for such a great Vision, how sick their…
I worked in the same coworking space as them when it was ~2-5 people, and chatted with the founders a bunch at lunch. They were honestly nice people who seemed to genuinely care about doing something well.
Not trying to down-play your experience, thank you for sharing, just providing my own experience.
Re: London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is funny how I will instinctively trust more an anonymous post on HN over an article published on a "reputable" site like Bloomberg...
To be fair the original article is good though, it presents different sides of the story and reports criticisms too. There's even an interesting history fact on how old the tradition of swapping currency actually is! My intention wasn't to discredit their product or the article, but to offer a (hopefully interesting) "insider view" on a certain kind of culture.
In theory I think this is the appropriate give and take between established Journalism (eg: Bloomberg) and what Social Media (eg: Hacker News) can enhance a story and context.
It was really clear with the Ferrari in an apartment story I linked where a family member actually could vouch for the published article.
I see such instances as examples of what good can come of a balance.