Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.
8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)
500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)
2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)
2M Uniques per month across all platforms
9M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users)
8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day
450M+ foods logged by website enabled users
Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager
Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase
Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana
= Who we are looking for =
Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).
As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.
= Who to contact =
{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).
You are grossly underestimating the amount people would care if Facebook went offline. The world would freak out. People have memories of their lives tied up in the service with the combination of photos, friends, and messages. The pent up data generated over the years is truly meaningful.
If Yahoo won, they'd probably wind up owning Facebook (or maybe just owning a controlling stake). They're not stupid enough to take it offline and while they might screw it up with mismanagement, that happens over time.
Oh there would definitely be mourning of the lost data because people don't keep backups, but I really don't think it would last that long and I don't think the mourning would lead anywhere. When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to anti-death institutes, it's hard to imagine any major effects would happen if all their data disappeared.
"Can you sum up your core views in a short package so I don't completely misrepresent you when reporting second-hand?
My real view is simple. I'm a transhumanist Singularitarian in the Good sense, or the Yudkowsky sense if you prefer. Anything that gets in the way of a positive Singularity is bad. [snip] Even though I'm an Anarchist you'll see me supporting national health care because there's a decent chance we'll get really long life this century and the less people who die the better."
I'm quite serious. Compare the donations and budgets for campaign donations against institutions like, off the top of my head, the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Foundation, Alcor and other cryonics institutes, and the Singularity Institute. Of course, people get worked up over pretty frivolous things, so maybe I am hugely underestimating the outcry. Maybe if Facebook went offline, the response might cause the US or other governments to nationalize social networking, mandate registration and monitor all communication, and provide custom-binary-format data dumps every so often on request all in the name of keeping your scrap-booking memories in tact.
I think it is funny that the author suggests programmers should use their hobby time to work on something actually meaningful. I feel like he discounted billing systems and ecommerce in the process.
I have no problem with programmers working on other meaningful things during their spare time if they choose. But what I struggle with is why programmers don't work on meaningful projects during their time they dedicate to their actual employment. I feel like I work on something very meaningful because I have helped literately millions of people lose literally millions of pounds of weight. More over, I think Square (a billing system) has helped thousands (millions?) of merchants gain access to a new form payments for their goods that they didn't have before. And Amazon (an ecommerce store) has brought convenience to millions of consumers seeking fair prices for products they want; not mention a new distribution channel for authors and merchants. Those seem meaningful to me.
Well, not everyone has the opportunity or desire to be employed by one of the "big guys". The programming equivalent of fixing someone's plumbing is not going to change the world, but it lets you pay the bills, have a family, enjoy your [other] hobbies, etc. Even if it is a choice, it's as much about lifestyle as anything else.
Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.
8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)
500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)
2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)
2M Uniques per month across all platforms
8.5M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~20M pounds lost across all users)
8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day
450M+ foods logged by website enabled users
Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager
Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase
Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana
= Who we are looking for =
Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).
As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.
= Who to contact =
{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).
1) The screenshots you show on apple.com / itunes / app store are showung apps I have never heard of / don't visually look that good. First thing I would do is improve the quality of the the app screenshots in your app screenshots.
2) When you click an app, it should show the name and a few of the recent reviews, not take you out of the app to the app store, it is to much of a context switch from a user standpoint when you do that.
3) However you are picking to show the applications needs to be improved. All the apps I saw are boring low quality apps.
2) I've had a review that said something similar. I'm reluctant to show too much, because I'm trying to keep the overall use of the app to a very simple experience, and leave the "buying decision" as it were to the App Store. The piece of data I've come closest to including is a star rating... I'll revisit this with some more thought.
3) Agreed, right now it is choosing randomly from a database of all apps fitting criteria (price, device, country, category). Ideally, I would want to have a click through ratio on an app to determine the "most interesting" screenshots, but I haven't implemented all the data tracking to make this happen yet.
Definitely not the top list. I opened the Health category which I follow very closely since my application is in that category. I study the top 100 app positions of many apps in the category to see how they are changing each day. I scrolled through about 15 apps in the discovery app and didn't recognize a single one. If it is hand curated, I would say it is poorly done.
Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.
8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)
500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)
2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)
2M Uniques per month across all platforms
7M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users)
8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day
450M+ foods logged by website enabled users
Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager
Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase
Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana
= Who we are looking for =
Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives).
As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.
= Who to contact =
{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).
I suppose I am one of those people you are referring to that spread these lies and am causing a lot of damage. I make a calorie counter / weight loss app and website that is based solely on calories in versus calories out. I think you are massively underestimating the success rate of people that use a calorie deficit rate. Literally millions of pounds have been lost for millions of people using just my application alone. All evidence of actually using the application points to the fact people will lose weight. Sure, once people stop using it they might gain weight again if they don't control their calories. Thats why it is lifestyle change and shouldn't be considered a diet. But I don't think that discredits the millions of pounds lost. From our records, and as posted on our homepage:
"96% of users who use Lose It! for 4 weeks lose weight" and "The average Lose It! user loses 12.3 lbs"
Its hard for me to believe that a caloric deficit doesn't work when I see a lot of data right in front of me that suggests otherwise.
Your numbers are also consistent with the GP point that calorie restriction works in the short term until your body decides it's being starved and your weight plateaus. What's your data say about users that have used your app for 8 weeks, 16 weeks, 52 weeks, etc.
These numbers are tricky though because the longer someone uses Lose It! the greater chance they hit their goal weight and no longer are trying to lose weight. Also, a lot of the really dedicated loggers that have been around a year or more are often high performance athletes that never intended to lose weight in the first place. They are just using the service out of discipline to their trade.
The average weight loss of all users that have achieved their goal and maintained it for at least 2 weeks is 21 pounds. This kind of backs up the idea that weight loss will slow over 52 weeks (on my service) because most people that achieved their goal only had 21 pounds to lose in the first place.
The law mostly. Otherwise ownership of companies would be mostly pointless, similar to that of gambling (in that your fate would be mostly random, more so then it currently is).
Your statement about the law is for the most part not true. There's a much more in-depth discussion of this at this older HN posting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227980
I agree with you that yahoo should have sold to microsoft, by the way. But the legal duty to maximize value bit is just not accurate.
You really shouldn't be puzzled at this. It is actually pretty easy to explain if you have ever worked on a large scale website before. The problem is you begin to accrue large amounts of data and metadata (data about your data). And just "getting rid" of that data is actually hard at scale for a few reasons:
1) Lets say I post on your wall and then I delete my account. Does that mean the message should be removed from your wall? What if you really liked the conversation in the comments that took place after I posted the comment, you are just out of luck? This gets trickier and tricker to handle these types of problems as things like groups, forums, and tagging get added to the social network feature set. All of a sudden is very confusing and unclear what exactly should happen with this type of data. Let's say you do keep that message, when how much of the deleted account is required to keep alive to maintain your database relations (this assumes you are using a normalized relational database to manage your site).
2) The site I work on gets a lot of data from users. It isn't uncommon to have ~5MB from a single user in our database. The actual delete operation on that tables is really rough. If 4 users all tried to delete their account at the same time doing a straight DELETE on the tables would be horrible. Not to mention it leaves holes in your tables in some cases.
3) Is it actually legal to delete the data? Can Apple just delete an account where charges can be placed? I would think they need to keep a history of who used what credit card and so on. I am guessing that medical records and emails for large companies have some kind of restrictions about data retention.
4) The backup issue. If a user deletes their account, does the user expect that the company also goes through all their backups and delete their information from there as well.
All of these things add up to a pretty big burden pretty quick and I think it is logical to see why companies might choose to not allow people to delete their own data. I can also understand why people disagree with that decision, but it really shouldn't be puzzling.
It should be just as puzzling as any other security / privacy issue. No more, no less.
If a website doesn't take security and privacy as high priority concerns, then they don't want me as a user. I hope to educate more people to feel the same as I do.
= About Lose It! =
Lose It! is a popular iPhone / Android / Website application that changes people's lives by helping them manage their weight.
8M+ iPhone Downloads (currently top 10 in Health category)
500k+ Android Downloads (very new, currently top 15 in Health category)
2M Website enabled users (connecting to our website is optional)
2M Uniques per month across all platforms
9M+ pounds of weight have been lost by website enabled users (Estimated ~18M pounds lost across all users)
8k messages betweens users that opted into social features per day
450M+ foods logged by website enabled users
Current Team - 1 CEO (technical), 1 Developer (me), 1 Business Dev, 1 Community Manager
Current Stack - GWT, MySQL, Java (server side and Android), AWS, Objective C (iPhone), Membase
Current Tools - Intellij, Git, Navicat, New Relic, CloudBees, Asana
= Who we are looking for =
Lose It! is looking for new members (we have more then one spot open) for our product team to help us build our next generation of products. We believe that small teams of well rounded people can do great things, so we're looking for someone that can contribute to all phases of building a great product. We believe that iterating on our products with customers is the best way to build something great, so we'd like someone who enjoys talking to customers and making them happy (and maybe even helping to change their lives). As a software engineer at Lose It!, you'll be an early member of the team that is building the core product, the most complete and effective weight loss software spanning mobile devices and the web. You should have a passion for and a proven track record of building products that delight users.
= Who to contact =
{first name} at loseit.com - If you think you would be a good fit send me an email with anything (resume, cover letter, github account, maybe just a simple 'hello'. I'll read anything and everything you send).