SMrF

High karma on hacker news may not translate to a high reputation on a writer's blog, but it would pretty much guarantee a civil, thoughtful comment. In this way karma is pretty portable, you just have to give everyone karma somehow. Maybe start off by trusting friends of people with high karma.

I think sites like hacker news and slashdot have a pretty good handle on this problem but only in their own communities. A good start to a more generalized solution would be to make these currently siloed reputation systems portable.

Agree. I meant to put a note about this. I was quite financially secure and did not need the money. I would have doubled down on this idea if this was my only option for paying bills. But it wasn't and I could easily find a job that paid more and was more rewarding, hence why I killed the business. I feel like many software developers are in this position. While I'm no fan of a JOB the kind of job I can get as a software developer sets the bar pretty high in terms of replacing it with a business.

That said I've never been in it for the money. It's easy enough to get a job as a programmer. If all I was going for was making money, entrepreneurship makes no sense at all. So all I'm typically looking for is to cover my bills so my wife doesn't stress out too much.

The rapid iteration/pivot approach makes more sense if you start with something you are passionate about. That's the key. Maybe try only testing your assumptions about your market? Try to describe someone who would use your product and then find someone who matches your description. If they are not interested it's only one aspect of your idea. If your passion for this idea wilts after one encounter like this then either you aren't cut out for this gig or you weren't that passionate about it. Probably the latter, because if you have the guts to make a phone call to some random stranger you're already doing something 99% of people won't.

The landing page is nice. Nice enough for me to click on the button to try it and then find out it's invite only. If you were going to launch tomorrow, why not let us try it today?

And of course I'm going to want to know how this is better/different than pingdom?

It ended up here: https://github.com/sfioritto/lookout

No license but I'll throw a BSD license on there later if anyone wants to use it.

Update: It's been a while but I think when I left off I was working on a bug in the Bayes module. The concept was new to me at the time and I was still wrapping my head around it. Also I'm sure the email parsers are out of date at this point.

Basically the whole project was an excuse to learn Bayes rule and use Lamson. Plus people wanted to pay me for it. But once I got the code out, I quickly lost interested as explained above.

EDIT:

A few emails from people interested. Look here for a little more info: http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my-delus...

After this I learned you need to price it for the entry level PR folks to pay for it. Honestly I learned so much after this I think your best bet would be to pick up the phone and chat with PR people to fill in the gaps where I left off on the blog.

After implementing the billing system I was thinking of pivoting out of the PR agency market and into small businesses (who do their own monitoring). I was also looking at ways of gathering alerts without actually using Google Alerts and blatantly violating their TOS.

More like the last 1%. Implementing the billing system would have been trivial. It was a mental block. I just didn't want to completely commit to the business I created.

In theory I like this concept, in practice it blew up in my face.

After two years and two ideas that failed, (executed poorly, no traction, no market, trouble in cofounder paradise -- you name it, I've failed it), I decided to try a different approach: rapid exploration of niche products. In the course of a year I spun through about one idea per month.

I got remarkably good at (in)validating my ideas. (Hint: write down who you think your target market is and then pick up the phone. Have a conversation. Ask if they would pay $X dollars for your product where X is something that makes you cringe because you think it's too much. If it's worth pursuing they won't hesitate to say yes. Then tell them if they give you $X right now you'll start building it for them -- if they ask where to send the check you're golden, otherwise you need to rethink your assumptions. If you don't know anyone to call run some ads to a fake landing page, collect emails, then offer an amazon gift card or something for a 30 minute phone call. I wrote about it here: http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking-wi...)

I finally landed on something, (and feel free to steal this) -- filtered google alerts for PR agencies. I had customers using the service and waiting for a bill. But I never implemented the billing system, I procrastinated it hard core. It wasn't because I was afraid they wouldn't pay, (they would have). It was because I was afraid of supporting the project. It was like I built myself a job I didn't want.

So for me the biggest pitfall of this approach was a total lack of vision combined with a drive to pivot to product/market fit at all cost meant I created something I had no passion about whatsoever.

I admit, though I found the topic fascinating I only had time to skim. But I did notice something which may be of interest to others: CeroWrt is a branch of OpenWrt geared towards fixing the buffer problem on your home network. So I'm guessing if you get this configured correctly you might see significant improvements in latency. I'm intrigued.

I posted it as a separate topic here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3461790

But what if additional authentication reduced fraud? Wouldn't that be beneficial? Are you saying it's impossible to reduce fraud rates any lower than where they are now?

There have been experiments that show we could probably make it without going insane. http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars500/

Dying of other random space hazards is still something to think about.

I was expecting infographics. :-(

I've always suspected this to be true, but I would love to see some data to back it up. My parents have seen enough instability in their career paths to agree with my decision to actively pursue starting my own company. They are pretty risk averse...

It boggles the mind that this was actually implemented. Some poor schmuck had to sit there and write the code to delete little kid's emails.

This was my first startup. We were going to use wireless mesh networks to "bridge the digital divide" and provide broadband to the (at the time -- 2005) 40% of Americans in rural America that didn't have it.

I've always lumped this under the "too idealistic" startup destined to be a nonprofit. Rural America is broke, for the most part, and our margins were going to be razor thin -- even using commodity wifi gear. I only ever got one angel interested, mainly because they all thought the market was bad. We never really got it off the ground. Perhaps skipping the backhaul altogether, (like the linked article), would have made it viable. But honestly I'm not sure I could have sold faux-internet, which is what most people are going to think of this. As it was the only way we were able to get a town interested was to uncover grant money that would have covered most of the costs and let us subsidize prices (see non-profit thing above).

But there were other challenges. Mainly wifi is just not that great over big distances. And it's absorbed by water -- so trees are a big problem. Also one of the most requested apps was VOIP, and the latency on a mesh network makes VOIP kinda crummy. As we built out the financial model, we learned that there was a lower limit to the density of a community that would support a profit. It ruled out most markets. And to make matters even worse, when we did find communities that met our already ridiculous criteria we usually had problems finding a backhaul. For our pilot town we were going to create a point to point wireless connection over 20 miles from the nearest major population center. Yeah, we gave up, graduated, and got jobs.

It's also worth knowing that wifi in major urban centers doesn't really work. There just isn't enough frequency to go around, so the interference makes it pointless. At the time Clearwire (now just Clear) was buying up spectrum in city markets. I thought it was genius, but I always doubted the wimax standard would live up to the hype. I remembered we had a point-to-multipoint wireless 56K connection back in the mid 90's and that was shit. I figured things would get better, but the basic problem remains the same: you can only really jam so many connections into one point, and you need LOS. Of course cell phones seem to work fairly well, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about. But Clear doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation.

Alright, so here are some links to other mesh networking projects that have been around for a long time and have software that is actually deployed:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php (seems to be slightly broken, but working mostly)

http://www.cuwireless.net/ (interned here, really smart guys built this and they have a running network in Champaign-Urbana).

Also recently the feds opened up a bunch of spectrum, so I'm really hopeful about what we can do with it. 2.4 just isn't enough.

Edit: Highly recommend following @saschameinrath He's a genius and has been a champion of community wireless internet since the term was invented. He also started CUWIN.

Have to disagree with the second comment. My experience was that the partners were exceptionally good at their job, which is essentially sales. Perhaps they are mediocre along other measurements? Every single one of them was a workaholic, which I don't find to be an admirable quality, so there's that.

Off topic from this comment thread, but the best part about working for Accenture is the extremely transparent career ladder and laddering process, (at least in the consulting workforce). It's something you only appreciate once you don't have it. I was able to look out 10 years and see that I would gradually be transformed into a workaholic sales guy that makes huge amounts of money. As soon as I figured that out I was out of there.

I think you can check off everything on this list and still write inscrutable code. The worst code I've seen is code that was written so that only one person understands what's happening -- the author. Typically the code has too many branches and ridiculous call stacks. The writing analog is a run-on sentence.

This usually happens when the programmer at fault is really smart but still hasn't learned that at some point in the future, someone needs to come along and understand the code he/she wrote.

Maybe we need editors?

Salaries are set by CPS and go up on a schedule based on years of experience. How is that a market?

Yes, she is willing to work at this salary. But we look at is as a donation to society and to our city. If we have to look at her decision to be a teacher as a donation -- she is not payed enough!

I'm sorry, but $37,000 per year is not a great starting salary, especially for a job that plays a fundamental role in shaping and improving our society.

My wife is finishing up graduate school to start teaching in poor, urban schools. Chicago starting salaries are higher, I think around $55,000. I've seen the challenge she faces at her job and I can tell you -- this is not enough money.

"According to the latest health ministry figures, however, 29% of Japanese men aged 20 to 60 are overweight - an increase of 5% in only five years and a long way off its 2010 target of below 15%"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/02/japan.justinmccu...

Try spending some time carefully defining "eat healthy." I know plenty of people that are skinny and don't really have any discipline about what they eat which flies in the face of "fat people are just lazy." Skinny people are lazy too! I think they have something different in their genes that lets them handle a modern diet better than I do. So I simply don't eat a modern diet -- voila, weight lost. The last 10 pounds came off without counting a single calorie and eating as much as I wanted. Not joking.

There is some possibility that you eat too much because you are fat. It goes something like this, (details are surely wrong, but just so you get the idea. Google gary taubes for more info):

1. Your body is expecting a certain amount of calories at any point during the day which is either being pumped into your bloodstream from your fat or food in your gut.

2. Your fat doesn't work right, (probably because you eat too many carbs), and doesn't release enough calories, so you get hungry.

3. You keep over eating until you have enough volume of fat so that even though your fat doesn't work as well at releasing calories into your bloodstream, you make up for it by just having more.

4. Voila, you have reached homeostasis. Your body conspires to keep you at this weight. You are either hungry and thin or full and fat.

As for exercise, well, I can only offer up a personal anecdote. I lost 50 pounds. At first by starving myself with a calorie deficit and now I've figured out how to keep the weight off with the food I eat. (I no longer calorie count -- hooray).

During this period of weight loss I attempted to increase the amount I exercised to speed the process along. It didn't work. The only thing that moved the scale was either counting calories or eating a low carb diet, (paleo to be exact). If I had it to do over I'd just start with changing the things I eat, although because of years of calorie counting I'm now very aware of what I put in my mouth -- a good habit to have.

Edit: I do actually believe exercise can help you lose weight. I am currently training to race bikes. I go for very long rides (3-4 hours twice a week) to train my body to burn fat. This is critical for endurance sports. But I don't think it's realistic to ask everyone to become an endurance athlete.

"In situations like this you have to help people figure out for themselves where their own internal model is flaky. Sometimes that takes a while."

If you are any good at this, please write a book. I would pay a handsome some for even just incremental improvement in this skill.

My day is filled with people going around acting as if 2 + 2 = 5. Thus far my only strategy is to say, "Are you sure it's 5? I'm pretty sure it's 4." Repeat over and over for years until people adopt the new "2 + 2 = 4" mental model and forget I'd been saying it for years...

So what translates the speech to text? I guess I just assumed they used software but perhaps there is a human doing this. I probably just missed when they mentioned this.

The documentary mentioned that Watson does some speech recognition. It attempts to listen to the competitor's answers so that it doesn't give a wrong answer that was already given.

Edit: Ignore this entire comment. I've been reading a different "engineering a compiler" subtitled, "vax-11 code generation and optimization". Which, as I explained is very interesting, but certainly not really for a beginner. Now I just need to get a copy of the actual "Engineering a Compiler" everyone has recommended I read. :-)

I've just started reading this book, (older edition), after reading many recommendations that it would be a good place to start for beginners. I find it is an enjoyable read, but I don't really feel like I'm learning how to write a compiler. Much of the text seems devoted to the experience of wrestling with the restrictions of the technology of the day, (e.g. compile times were 12-24 hours because they had to wait for tapes generated by one half of the compiler at one location to be couriered to another location to be finished). I find this fascinating, but it's not really helping me learn to write a compiler. On top of that the solution and code is very close to the metal, which again I find to be fascinating but not incredibly educational.

I want to write a templating language in Haskell as an exercise to learn Haskell and get my feet wet with compilers. What's a good book for me?

I don't know about ironic. Certainly I can see the inherent recursion.

http://upstartly.com/startups/view/1

Ironically my mostly intrinsically motivated life was extrinsically validated while reading this piece.

Tiger Woods used to be sponsored by Accenture. They dropped him after the scandal.

All alerts are from Google Alerts.

clickable: http://www.lookoutthere.com

The last startup I did my cofounder did not have a job. (I still kept my job to help fund things). If I recall correctly he was able to get "oh shit, I have cancer" insurance for somewhere around $100/month. I think his deductible was $5,000 or some nonsense.

As a young guy I think this is a fairly reasonable amount of risk to take on. Although this would be basically impossible if you had some sort of preexisting condition. Unless you live in Europe or somewhere with universal healthcare.