This article backs these observations with research data. Although, the evidence is inconclusive when the subjects have domain knowledge, it clearly establishes that the knowledge base is not likely help when bombarded with repeated illusory general knowledge from a fluent source.
> Smoking has been associated with many psychological symptoms and psychiatric disorders (Hughes 1999; Kalman et al. 2005). One explanation of this association has been that those destined to become smokers have pre-existing or “latent” psychiatric or psychological problems and use nicotine to “self-medicate” to abate these (Markou & Kenny 2002). Several epidemiological and biological lines of evidence support this hypothesis (Markou & Kenny 2002).
It's not a controversial point. We know that people with schizophrenia smoke; they smoke more cigarettes than other smokers; they smoke more of each cigarette than other smokers; they inhale deeper than other smokers; they start smoking at a younger age.
> Other disorders associated with cognitive and attentional impairment, such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), are characterized by a very high prevalence of smoking among those affected. It has been proposed that individuals with these disorders smoke in order to alleviate the symptoms of their disease, and a number of clinical trials using nicotine as a therapeutic agent have been conducted.
(I'm not cutting and pasting because PDF fucking sucks).
Thanks for quoting the backing research and it looks very sound. Now I am curious about how do they even begin. I know it's a naive question, but it's not like somebody is "prescribing" them to smoke or use nicotine. I can make sense (barely) of the behavior after smoking the first cigarette, but before that, a person, in general, should be unaware of its consequences. I am geniunely curious about what motivates such individuals to take the leap from 0 to 1.
Not really related, but this made me think of a funny episode I have witnessed.
After university, I had to have one year of civil service, and I ended up in a structure which patients were mentally retarded and/or light psychiatric disorders.
We would often work outside, tending the garden, planting flowers and whatnot, and some of the patients used to smoke.
Some big honcho saw this and decided that it was not a good sight, seeing them work with a cigarette in their mouth; on the other hand, they would want to have a smoke every once in a while, so it was decided that it would be more dignified to have officially sanctioned cigarette breaks.
The results? well, as it was (by definition) a "cigarette break", everybody wanted one, so all of them started smoking....
Yes, it will save me _weeks_ of work. But, I think that there are a few fundamental issues at play here.
1. I think every project has different requirements, e.g. what if I want phone auth or single sign-on using email. Once you add all those features, your product is likely to become complex like Firebase Auth or Auth0 where understanding third-party APIs is almost equivalent to writing your own system (especially since open-source ecosystem already has key components available). You might argue that the solutions have client libraries to make things super simple, but in real world applications, plug-and-play rarely works to perfection.
2. Projects that are just starting out can't really afford third-party solutions. Once they can, they can also afford to build their own.
3. Solutions to these things already exists, just not in one place. Netlify has a solution for Forms and templates (I think). For Auth, we have Okta, Auth0 and Firebase. For emails, I think Amazon SNS (not sure).
I created a small Android app called Noice about a year and a half ago. The app is written in Kotlin using the native SDK. There's also the Chromecase counterpart that is written in TypeScript. The current version of the app is pretty stable, but it has a few _known_ bugs. I also have a couple of ideas to take the project to the next level, but I am currently too busy to execute them.
This is a really noice app with a good collection of sounds, thanks for making it available (on F-Droid, in particular). I've since learnt earplugs work better for me, but this made for a nice transition point between listening to music and shutting out all sound.
For any potential contributors: the only issue I had was (relatively minor) UI difficulty - there was no way to set 'saved presets' as the home screen of the app. So every time, I had to open the app, open the side bar, click on Saved Presets (which was pretty much the only things I wanted to play), then click on the preset title. Making this easier might be nice for other users who might have the same issue. Relatedly, widgets would be nice to have - just a simple 1x1 Play button, that when clicked starts playing a particular Saved Preset chosen when creating the widget.
I'll open a GitHub issue for this. It has been asked so many times now. Just haven't had the time.
PS, I added an "Add to home screen" option for individual presets about a month ago.
And a hack: After adding to homescreen, if you delete the preset from the app, the homescreen icon becomes a shortcut to Preset list (limitation from Framework).
Tried sqlx a few weeks ago. I personally didn't like it. I come from a Hibernate/JVM background. Writing a data access layer with that much boilerplate isn't something I consider to be practical in today's fast paced environments.
After sqlx, I gave sqlc (https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc) a try and I found it to be much more painless than any other database solution (for PostgreSQL) for Golang.
Edit: sqlc is an inversed solution. Instead of generating SQL queries using Golang, you write annotated SQL queries and sqlc generates Golang source from them.
..in source size. What I meant was while for a single source file, performance implications aren't noticeable. But usually when we run a tool like this, we happen to do it on an entire project, e.g. imagine running it on Kubernetes repo. If it were to parse entire syntax trees, the performance implications would be significant.
Most of these businesses have customers that directly engage with them online. From what I've observed, their requirements were more individually defined at first, but over time, all of them have similar generalised requirements with a slight touch of a few unique ones.
As I said, I am still in the process of gathering the required data, so its too soon to tell.
Thank you for the clear, comprehensive response. This definitely tickled my brain into considering a few more angles. Risk management wasn't actively on my mind so thanks for the reminder. While I did mention that the goal of the project is to bring down the software cost for these businesses, I considered it to be implied that there should be a significant improvement to existing systems. I say this because focusing on a single version after listening to prospects of multiple potential customers, should generally produce a system superior to those maintained individually by each customer. At least I am inclined to believe this at the moment. But you're right that I should be careful in framing my pitch.
PS, I think many many people have said something along the similar lines. "Your product has to be 10x better than the customers' next best alternative."
In my experience working at a lot of companies that have a mix of in-house and third-party solutions, management generally prefers to use off-the-shelf software because of the costs and predictability. But you have to persuade them that they are not losing any functionality and can customize and integrate. People like to think that their business is special.
I still get asked to write accounting systems. I usually say "Use Quickbooks" (or any of the many available off-the-shelf packages). Then I get told "We can't, we do X, Y, and Z that off-the-shelf systems can't handle." Digging into that I almost always (one exception in two decades) find that they aren't doing anything special, they are either doing accounting wrong (they built an idiosyncratic system for themselves) or they just didn't understand different terminology or features of Quickbooks or whatever. Perhaps ironically the question of switching accounting systems often comes up after failing an audit.
I went through this with a Salesforce adoption a couple of years ago -- "We can't use Salesforce because it can't do so-and-so that our home-grown CRM does." But it can, it just uses different terminology. So you have to understand the business domain and expect this kind of resistance and know how to overcome the objections.
If you get the CTO or IT people involved they may perceive off-the-shelf software pushed on them by management and consultants as a threat to their job at worst, or a new deployment/migration/integration nightmare at best. So prepare to deal with that. IT people will focus on risks, and they may exaggerate, but you have to have a solution for migration in and out of your software (assure them they own and have access to all of their data in some standard format like a relational database), and you need to show the customizing and integration features if those apply.
Reducing friction and risk is probably the best thing you can do. Offer a fully-functional limited or trial version. Make sure you have a turnkey setup. I once worked for an educational software company that included laserdisc players with their software because requiring a school to buy those was too much friction. Have a laptop or PC you can plug in for your potential customers to use. Every complication you can eliminate to get them using your software will smooth the process, and it shows you are customer-focused. Think about how motivated you would be if someone sent you a link to a .zip file and a Word document with out-of-date installation instructions.
