SnootyMonkey

Would be nice if the home page had an example of what the finished product looked like. What's the experience of using one of these narratives?

I'd leave as of tomorrow, once you found the job that is directly on track to where you want to be.

Life is too short to be on some deferred plan.

I'm a little confused... isn't there a whole market (many markets actually) for each of these areas you point out (IQ enhancement, mindfulness, etc.)

I don't get the role of a startup here.

This whole we can't optimize for Rails anymore seems like a red herring. Dumb (random) routing is dumb routing. It doesn't matter if you have single threaded Rails or Django stack or highly concurrent Node.js or Erlang serving requests, if you distribute the requests randomly you're not going to efficiently use your resources and the Heroku "promise" of spinning up a 2nd dyno and getting 100% more concurrency is just not true.

All it changes is the details of the analysis, not the core finding. It makes the problem not as worse, but it's still pretty bad, and it's worse the more uneven your traffic is (in terms of how long each request takes to service).

All apps, even Unicorn, JRuby, Node.js, Erlang, etc. would benefit from something better than random routing.

Ah... that makes more sense then. Hyperink is unique. Funny how the brain turns the word into what you expect, Hyperlink rather than what it was. I wonder if HyperInk would be less prone to that.

I believe Hyperlink did a good job for you but what a horrible, horrible name for a company.

Given your word of mouth recommendation here (w/o a link) how am I too find them with such a generic word that's so closely tied to their industry? Search for "hyperlink publishing", "hyperlink ebook"? Yeah, good luck with that!

Companies should not chose a generic name for their company that's already widely used in that market. Apple Computer... that's good. Apple Orchards... not good. Hyperlink? Come on.

So... anyone got the link?

I would also love to see a trimmed down version just to use datalog.

Here's the challenge by DARPA Network Challenge (Red Balloon Challenge) from 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge

The challenge was to find 10 red weather balloons located somewhere in the US.

Dr. Crane and a team from the MIT Media Lab won it by using viral spreading through social networks.

I have ethical qualms about it too. I'm not sure I could get comfortable enough with them to do it. But you're totally spot on that the negative priming (he's making risky decisions, upsetting his family) and the distancing (it's my brother, not me) are very important to the effectiveness. If you say it's your own idea, and don't prime the pump of negativity, I'd expect significantly better feedback.

People can't help it. No one likes to say your baby is ugly, or those pants do indeed make your butt look fat.

The point about using the "brother" is to provide the distance required to make the stranger feel like they can give truly honest feedback without hurting your feelings.

A couple years before Amazon's Mechanical Turk came out I started thinking about web services (SOAP at the time) with human beings at the end point. To do the things for our software systems that only humans could do.

I had a few long brain storming sessions with friends about it, but other than that I did nothing. Now it's my favorite story to tell people when they ask me if they should execute on their pet idea.

Less Accounting is very good for a small business or startup. http://lessaccounting.com/