In the past, I have applied to many YC startups, and have a pretty high response rate. Being that the job board is pretty prominent in the tech world, and engineering jobs are highly competitive, it is likely that a smaller startup does not have the resources to reply to every applicant.
This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.
Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.
I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.
Hey HN, I've been using RefZoom and contributing to it for over a year now. Personally, I've used it to validate and organize health information regarding supplements, weightlifting, and overall wellbeing by categorizing white papers into hierarchical notes connecting directly to the source.
Others have used it for organizing their thoughts for their PhD dissertation, and others use it as ways of proposing new treatments by validating their claims through published research.
I think it's important to call out that it's actually constantly increasing amount to increase the results.
As patients lose weight, they need to eat fewer and fewer calories to continue to lose weight, as the BMR decreases. This isn't because of the medication, but rather because it requires fewer calories to maintain their mass, so they burn fewer calories at rest.
Increasing the dose further decreases hunger signals, which further decreases their desire to eat as much.
It's not "increasing to maintain the same results" its "increasing to increase results".
Ex.
Patient A currently weighs 330lbs. Has a BMR of 3300 Calories.
- Initial dose, they eat 2,800 calories a day instead of 3,500 calories they used to.
- Loses weight. Now weighs 250lbs.
- BMR is roughly now weighs 250lbs, and has a BMR of roughly 2500 calories, but dose still has them eating around 2,800 calories.
- Dose is increased, patient is now eating around 2,000 calories.
- Patient A reaches 200lbs, BMR is roughly 1,800 calories, but is still eating 2,000 calories.
- Dose is increased, Patient A is now eating 1600 calories.
Anecdotally, I lost 130lbs in 1 year, and have now lost 140lbs (1 year 4 months).
Initially, I was 330lbs and lost weight at a rate of 3.5lbs per week. Slowly decreasing weight per week to stabilize at around 1% of body weight per week.
During the entirety of this time, I had, and still maintain, a rigorous resistance training program. My muscle mass is significantly higher than it was when I was 330lbs.
The important part of losing weight is to know what your goals are, and to adjust all aspects of your life accordingly. Not just cutting calories, unless your goal is to lose weight, vs lose fat.
The biggest thing afterwards is, if your lifestyle doesn't support the maintenance of your new weight, and when you hit your goal you eat like you used to and revert activity to your old sedimentary ways, all of that weight will come back incredibly fast.
Whole life changes are needed. Going slow helps with these changes, as they become habits. This is why the success rate of achieving a healthy weight for someone who is morbidly obese is only 1-1266 (men) and 1-677 (women) [1].
Something can be fast, but lack efficiency or the ability to utilize the speed.
For example, a car can have 1,000hp, but utilizes a large turbo which takes a long time to spool up, leading to poor performance. It may also have poor handling characteristics.
On the other hand, let's use a car like a Mazda Miata, which only has 181hp. It is not fast, but it is an incredibly performant car, with exceptional handling and driving dynamics.
Speed and performance are not directly correlated, and are independent metrics. Performance is more of an indication of the overall dynamics of action, intention and results.
I think that for a lot of businesses, they can hire internal developers prematurely before they have a clear vision of the product that they're building or need.
We structured our studio as a group of (very) senior talent, most with over a decade of experience each across Product Design, Software Engineering, and Product Management, where thee entirety of our studio is available on each project.
We focus on documentation, developer experience, and working with companies to get the initial product in a state of both product management and cleanliness to ensure that they're reading to onboard specific team members internally to carry the product forward.
It can be very cost prohibitive to create a new product without having designers, developers, product owners, all that are dedicated to your vision. A developer may miss key user experience interactions, making it difficult to use. A designer may forgot key features from a business perspective. Having access to all of the talent for a new product is hard.
As others have said here, I recommend finding very talented and experienced SENIOR Engineers. If you are intent on them being an internal team, ensure they have excellent project management skills and have built their own side project from scratch, so they know what it takes to build a full product from the ground up.
An engineer that builds their own products has experience that is invaluable when it comes to building functional tools that people want to use.
>Arguably United airlines shouldn't have chosen a product they can't test updates of, though maybe there are no good options.
I used to work with regional parks and recreation departments, and they would not approve any updates that did not go through UAW environments that we had set up. All updates had to be deployed to their UAW, thoroughly tested, before going to their production environment.
I get this this is slightly different, but I'd imagine Airlines, Banks, and Hospitals would have far more strict UAW policies to avoid a single vendor from kneecapping operations.
Over the past 11 months, I've lost 122lbs, from 330lbs to 208lbs. (May 30, 2023 - Today)
For the first 2 months, cardio was not part of it. Really focusing on diet, reintroducing myself to portions of Whole Foods to hit macro goals. Really focusing on vegetables and protein, large quantities of low calorie foods that digest relatively slowly to keep me satiated for long periods. They're also quick to digest.
I was always active, even at 330lbs I would mountain bike (ascending and downhill) comfortable on black diamonds, same with snowboarding. This continued, but I didn't try to explicitly do and track cardio.
After I lost 35lbs, I added CrossFit once a week. Then 2 times a week. Then 3 times a week. I noticed that olympic lifts and squats would cause extreme systemic fatigue, and would leave me dizzy and out of breath. After a couple months,
I stopped doing CrossFit due to an injury caused that that effect, and started isolated training for muscle hypertrophy utilizing machines for 5+ days a week, but missed the cardio that CrossFit gave.
I was about 260lbs at this point, and started with incline walking at about 3mph at max incline for 40 minutes. Then I started to begin my cardio with a 6mph run until I was out of breath and a high heart rate, and then began the incline walking.
After a week or so, I began running the a mile at the fastest speed I could, then switching to incline walking until my heart rate dropped, and alternated running and incline walking for 40 minutes.
Then, in November, I ran my first 5k in 34 minutes. I was hooked. I walked a couple minutes of it in the middle, but was pround myself. Today, I can run a 5k in 25 minutes if I push myself.
Today, I ran 5 miles without stopping with several hundred feet of elevation gain.
Cardio health is life changing. I used to be tired walking up large sets of stairs, and it was embarrassing to not be able to hold a conversation for long while walking up stairs.
It's also a myth, perpetuated by highly trained athletes that you cannot gain muscle and do cardio, or that you cannot do these things while in a caloric deficit.
I have lost nearly 1% of my body weight per week as a vegetarian while gaining significant muscle mass (today, I am about 15-17% body fat at 6'1 and 208lbs).
The biggest thing I can say is it's never too late to start, and it's important to be consistent and find what works for you. At 32 years old, I have added years to my life, and feel and look better than I ever have.
Also, cardio gives an amazing dopamine rush that beyond addicting. Highly recommend it. But don't forget the resistance training.
Anyone can do it. One day at a time.
As someone in tech, the process of rebuilding yourself is addicting once you start to see progress on every front.
VO2Max Increasing. Resting Heart Rate Dropping. Waist Shrinking. Chest, Arms, Legs Growing. Muscle definition increasing. Lift PRs increasing. And you look better in clothing.
> It's also a myth, perpetuated by highly trained athletes that you cannot gain muscle and do cardio, or that you cannot do these things while in a caloric deficit.
I think it's more accurate to describe this in terms of definitions: "gains muscle while in caloric deficit" is possible for the untrained/beginners.
> For the first 2 months, cardio was not part of it.
It's really easy for bad diet decisions to counteract the effects of even a significant amount of cardio; and it's easy to fatigue the body by trying to do too much cardio.
For aiming for calorie deficit, I think it makes sense "do what's least awful out of: reduce calories in food, or add cardio".
> Cardio health is life changing.
I noticed my chess.com rating improved just from improving cardiovascular health.
> started isolated training for muscle hypertrophy utilizing machines for 5+ days a week
My impression as a beginner was that free weights were scary and that there were many exercises you'd have to choose from. (Whereas machines seemed idiot proof). In practice, "squat, deadlift, benchpress" would be a good start. (Or a starting point to read about, anyway).
https://exrx.net/ is an outstanding website that I wish I'd come across sooner.
Couldn't agree more, at least on the strength front (I focused on that for 6mo 1.5 years ago) - Just those basic lifts will massively improve your muscle, and a lot of those improvements persisted despite doing very little strength work over the last year.
Anything is better than nothing, and many of the benefits are going to persist in some form for quite some time. I did lose some strength, but I'm still on the order of 1.5-2x as strong as I was before I did any work at all. Never mind the confidence strength training gives you when it comes to just doing basic stuff and knowing you aren't going to hurt yourself.
I think it's valuable to turn things into regular habits, but it's also worth noting for those who have this idea that it's a waste (because they'd rather be doing something else, and they don't want to work out for the rest of their life) - 6 months of basic (but hard, proper) workouts will pay dividends for probably forever.
Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.
Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.
I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.