John Carlos SF

Primeras pruebas de las pantallas LED flexibles.

A lot of herbivorous insects only eat a few types of plants, but these guys will eat literally anything that might count as a leaf. Grass, cacti and succulents, ferns, moss, even rhododendrons and other toxic plants that are left virtually untouched by insects outside aren’t safe. In the wild they’re pests of oil palm plantations, being among the only insects able to chew through the palms’ thick, leathery leaves.

And apparently they eat paper too. He can probably get some nutrition out of it as well, because he can digest some cellulose. Unlike weak- ass mammalian herbivores and their gut bacteria, phasmids produce their own cellulose- wrecking enzymes to handle their fiberey diet.

Other fun facts about this species:

- The males have giant spikes on their legs that can pierce human flesh down to the bone (but mine never seem to use them as long as they’re handled gently)

- Unlike other phasmids, which tend towards the epitome of passiveness towards their fellow insects, males of this species are jealous bastards that will murder each other with their leg spikes if kept together in the presence of a female

- There’s anecdotal evidence that mating pairs sometimes form long- term bonds (sleeping in the same toilet paper tube every day, coming out to feed at the same time night, etc.) and when one partner kicks the bucket, the other one often dies soon afterwards even if they were different ages.

- Their eggs are the size of small beans, and look exactly like beans. Seriously, you could throw them into a bag of mixed dried beans and you’d never know which beans were the eggs unless you knew exactly what shape and color of bean to look for.

You don’t need a man. You need an Alpaca 🖤 

Weekdays 

A bit over 2 years ago I was coming off a failed startup and out looking for new opportunities. I am not a fan of looking for jobs, my style is to target interesting companies and convince them to let me join them in their quest. So I decided to target Reddit because it looked like they were making some new moves. And, because, it’s Reddit!

I hatched the hare-brained scheme to write a blog article that might catch the attention of a particular person, get them to read it somehow, and then say “hey kid, I like the cut of your jib, do you want to come help us conquer the world?”. Sure, that person is actually younger than me, but you get the point.

I wanted to work at Reddit. Well, not just work at Reddit, but develop something very cool at Reddit that I think can make a huge impact on the business. So I wrote about it. I knew that the CEO of Reddit was a technical founder, so I put quite a deal of effort into that blog entry to try to impress him. Now, how to get him to see it?

My first thought was email. I can just email him! But that’s boring. What about getting my article to the top of Hacker News? I bet the CEO (and founder) of Reddit still frequents Hacker News. It is an amazing community, built off an early version of Reddit, and run by Y-Combinator (which incubated Reddit way back when). The problem is, I didn’t think my article would be interesting enough to a large crowd to make it to the top of HN.

Then I remembered a trick a friend of mine taught me a while back. That friend (who shall remain nameless, unless he wants me to name him) was running a startup and was using a very interesting technique to increase his chances of closing deals. Who wants to buy from a company they have never heard of? Not many people. His strategy was to target prospects (as directly as possible) with Facebook ads about his product so that when he called or met with them, they would already know the name. They probably didn’t know why they knew, but they had seen the name before, and that meant a great deal when meeting or speaking for the first time. 

So I decided I would target the CEO of Reddit with Facebook ads. 

But how? I didn’t have a big budget so I needed to be clever.

It turns out the Reddit CEO had a public Facebook profile, so I could go there to see details about him. Where he lived. What he was interested in. I took that info to the Facebook platform to help narrow down the campaign. But I didn’t want everyone to click on it, just one person. So I custom tailored the ad to directly target the one person I wanted to read it.

“Steve: Reddit needs recommendations”

The ad reached 197 people. 4 People clicked on it. One of them was the CEO of Reddit. I spent a total of $10.62.

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, saw my ad, clicked on it, read (probably skimmed) my article, and liked it well enough to send a note to Reddit HR to contact me about a position.

Mission accomplished.

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Chris Seline

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