Threads like this rarely get answered by people who have significant holdings. Usual replies are "wish I bought in early" or "man I sold too soon" or "lost my wallet when the hd crashed".
Child care or kindergarten is pretty affordable, around €300/mo. If you're a legal citizen (e.g. European or w/ work permit) public schools are free, you just pay for the food, which is around €50/mo, buy materials and uniform.
If you want to pay special attention to their education regarding foreign languages and having higher chances to move elsewhere after school or at some point during school age, there are British, American, German and French schools. All of them are private or semi-private and cost up to €500/mo.
If you're considering moving here in the mid/long term, the biggest issue is work. The job market here very bad at the moment, with really high rates of unemployment.
You shouldn't care about this if you're able to work/freelance remotely. In this case, working for UK/Germany/Northern Europe/USA clients will leave margins better than any job you'll find locally and you'll be able to make a good living.
I run a company employing 8 people in total (incl. founders) and we have clients from Spain, Germany, USA. We've been doing this for 8 years.
If you or your partner are looking for a job in the local market, the biggest areas are tourism (many million visitors / year) but you can also make a good living teaching English lessons if you're native and stuff like that.
Ecuador. You will not regret it. My first choice would be north of Quito, in the Ibarra region. Second choice would be Cuenca and the surrounding area. In fact, there's a good chance we (wife and two kids) will be heading down there for a year in a few months.
I don't understand how they're paying $2000 a month to AT&T. We have 5 iPhones and 1 AT&T iPad on a family plan with unlimited text and very high number of minutes (can't remember exactly) and pay not more than $450.
I'm pretty sure their download numbers say otherwise. One or two HN threads complaining about MongoDB every month are not a good indicator for their future success.
Yeah. FWIW, working at $BIGCORP, I'm starting to hear buzz around Mongo from quite a few not-very-technical people. I'm pretty negative on Mongo as a technology, but there's no doubt that it's generated a lot of attention.
In the short term it's probably inversely proportional: more 'complaints' means more people on the platform (or at least experimenting with the platform). In the long term we're all dead anyway.
I'm working on one of those ideas that nobody realizes are worth doing. All my friends say I lost it. It's also something I can build myself (although it's quite the undertaking, I've been at it for over a year full-time) and it's obviously something I would want to have. I hope to have it released in two or three months.
Thing is, I have zero doubt in my mind that once people have it - they will ask how they lived without it, or better yet, why didn't they think of it.
Or I'm wrong. Either way I love the journey. I wish I had a co-founder, but of all the people I have access to, no one has the vision to see what I see.
I've experienced the same "nobody has the vision" thing quite a few times myself, just to go on and see others do it and be quite successful.
I've learned to not say "nobody has the vision", instead I say "I must not have explained it in a way that made it obvious and compelling".
Rather than putting the burden on them to see things your way, keep tweaking your pitch until you're seeing it there's.
There was an interesting experience I had while in an incubator where somebody asked a friend about his company, and he went into a long buzzword filled description of what he was building. The guy who asked was fazed, and didn't understand it. I stepped in and said "the do x,y,z making it better for a,b,c", and the guy got it.
We kept saying we'd do a pitch day where we'd listen to other people pitch our businesses, that way you hear what others are taking away, and you may get better insight into how people are understanding what you're doing, and what THEY think is important about it, rather than what you think is important.
Just thought I'd share that and maybe you could benefit by tweaking your discussions with your friends.
I love Fastmail and have been a paid user for many years now, but I hate the new AJAXy interface, in particular the infinite scroll as currently implemented. Slow, annoying, and makes it difficult to reach old emails.
Fastmail has one of the few interfaces that gets infinite scrolling /right/. The outer mailbox div has overflow-y: auto; and the inner div is the combined height of every message in that folder -- my inbox has 11381 messages, and the height is 364192px. When the scrollbar is moved, JS automatically determines which messages to load. Messages themselves are tiny AJAX requests that take less than 100ms each.
This is from the perspective of using Chrome on high end hardware, but I couldn't ask for a better web interface.
That said, they aren't joking about needing a new mobile interface: the current one is usable, but definitely lacks the same polish as the desktop version.
I agree. The infinite scroll is really well-implemented in FastMail. It's much better than the pagination in Gmail, which makes it extremely difficult to jump, say, 2/3 of the way down in a search or label with thousands of hits.
I used to love gmail's webclient. When I moved to fastmail, I thought I'd miss that a lot. As it turns out, I started using thunderbird and K9 mail on my phone for reading e-mail and I never check my email from any browser at all. I feel now more comfortable with a dedicated email/calendar client - plus the enigmail extension - and it pushes me towards a good habit of never logging in into untrusted computers. I mean, I can't possibly be sure my own computer/cellphone are safe, let alone the other people's.
Yeah, the new interface is missing a few essential things the classic interface has, so I keep the box checked too. Hope it doesn't get phased out- would be mad without the classic interface.
It's funny to me how the HNers who question vaccines remain silent when these threads pop here. I know they're out there and I know they read them all the time, just are too scared to respond. Guess I am too, with this throwaway and all.
