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fuelfive

407 karma · joined April 24, 2007

dscottphoenix is the address and gmail is the domain

http://dscottphoenix.com/

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fuelfive··on I'm embarrassed for RIM: Blackberry 6 sneak peak.
It makes me cringe, and I think it's because it's trying too hard to be cool. The obviously chosen backgrounds and ethnicities of the subjects, the "was recently cool, but not really anymore" choice of a pop song. In Apple's ads, the music is either something you've not yet heard but will be popular soon (such as "New Soul"), or a legitimate classic from decades ago. They don't run ads of songs that are on their way out. Second, Apple's ads make it look like the dancers are just really enjoying the music, and dancing well to it. Here, dancers are being forced to be constantly touching a screen in a non-natural way, which makes it look neither fun to be dancing nor effortless to use (as a UI experience), and the result is bad dancing and awkward corporate-seeming stiffness, only enhancing the "we're trying to hard to be cool" vibe. Ugh.
fuelfive··on Your Office Chair Is Killing You
Yes, it's the safetype (http://safetype.com). Much less wrist strain than normal pronating keyboards.
fuelfive··on Your Office Chair Is Killing You
It's very feasible. I've been using mine for the past 2+ years. I also have a stool for when I get tired of walking.
fuelfive··on Your Office Chair Is Killing You
Get a treadmill desk:

http://frog.posterous.com/the-treadmill-desk-returns

fuelfive··on I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.
I like your thinking, but I believe this would be more effectively approached from a position of greater leverage. One person's $10M helps LE research, but we could do a hundred times more if we instead collected $10 from 100M people. Why do most people not care about this and other important issues?

If we are to invest in basic science, it seems like more could be accomplished by understanding how beliefs are formed, and how beliefs map to behavior. With this understanding, we could shape society so that people grow up to be more rational and altruistic, and thus far more interested in spending $10 on life extension than on lottery tickets.

From another angle, most premature death in the US occurs from diseases of behavior. We could extend a lot of lives if we understood why most people pick short term payoffs (McDonalds, TV) instead of long term payoffs (vegetables, exercise).

fuelfive··on Too Much Sitting Shortens Lives, Study Suggests
I <3 my treadmill desk.
fuelfive··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
That's the question I'm trying to answer. I see the answer as having two parts:

1. More rigorously define what "improve" means. Beliefs about what an ideal world would be varies drastically between people and cultures. To avoid the "colonize the savages / white man's burden" problem, we need a framework for discussing and evaluating goodness in a more rigorous way, especially one that is viewer independent, cultureless, and timeless. In the 14th century, people lit dogs and cats on fire for amusement. This sort of thing would be greeted with horror by many people today. I wonder what we're doing now that people from the future will view with similar disgust.

2. Identify the behaviors / beliefs / etc that prevent such a world from existing now. It seems likely to me that this will involve formulating a scientifically falsifiable model for how people adopt and change beliefs and behaviors. It's not clear how much precision will be attainable for a model this. It could be that we are only ever able to understand very generally which stimuli or environmental conditions will give a higher probability of shifting individuals towards certain behaviors and traits (eg, empowered analytical altruism). We can then identify the levers that cause this shift to occur, eg altering what children are taught at school.

In a nutshell:

1. [if possible] More rigorously define what good world(s) would look like.

2. [if possible] Figure out a model for belief and behavior selection that can be applied to causing / raising people to come to adopt behaviors and beliefs that bring about this better world.

fuelfive··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
http://frogmetrics.com/ - YC summer 2008.

In my spare time, researching how to catalyze mass behavior change to improve society.

fuelfive··on Ask HN: Is this a bad situation?
The tax liability thing could be real. Has the company received a valuation in the time since you started working? Let's say that you took a series A with a 5M post-money valuation. Then, your 1% would show up on your tax returns as $50,000 of income. What I would do is ask the company to take the tax hit on my behalf. IANAA, so YMMV.
fuelfive··on Dustin Curtis's new web app
What about your time? Is that the 6c, or does paypal somehow automate this?
fuelfive··on Ask HN: What's the best webapp UI you've seen and what was used to make it?
http://almost.at is great
fuelfive··on A terrible tragedy: Dan Haubert of Ticketstumbler (fallentimes) has passed away
I first met Dan at the little breakfast YC held for our newly-admitted class, right after interviews in May of 2008. I was so impressed with the strength of Dan's ideas, his natural charisma, and how much of a hustler he was. I still tell friends the stories I heard from him that day about how he worked the system in ways that I don't think even Dan would feel comfortable with me saying here. Dan worked all the angles, especially the ones that you and I would never even consider. He took crazy risks, often came out on top, and had a shit-eating grin the whole way. Dan was awesome. Throughout the summer, Dan and I would talk regularly about our companies, strategies, and how it was going. He had the rare mix of smart, incisive questions, and an easygoing manner that made everyone relax and smile. Jessica would always scold Dan and Tom for drinking too much beer in front of the speakers, and Dan would always charm his way out. Everyone was in stitches for his demo day presentations too. I remember hearing PG brag about feeling like he could just leave the TicketStumblers alone and they'd come up with something awesome without his help.

Dan was an amazing guy, and I only saw a tiny fraction of his light. The world needs more Dans.

fuelfive··on You're a little company, now act like one
Not sure I agree with this. My startup (Frogmetrics, YC S07) hasn't tried to sound big or small. Our site focuses on the service we provide, in concrete language with a clean design. We don't try to sound bigger than we are, but we also don't play up our smallness with a bunch of cute catchphrases either. We've been pretty successful so far at getting big customers, and I think we'd have done less well with a more "startup authentic" aesthetic.

I think the better lesson is to tailor your messaging to your target buyer. If you're selling to a level III coder at a big company, put the message in a form (s)he will like.

fuelfive··on Some “Developers” Just Can’t Develop
Some clarifications:

1. We only used code from the guy who won, and he never saw the other submissions.

2. The interview project was time boxed to 24 hours. The guy who won did it in about 9 hours.

The actual feature is big, and has lots of edge cases: our devices need to be able to update themselves when new versions become available, roll back if there's an error, archive past versions, and never, ever end up in a state where they're bricked. The applicants did a small toy implementation of this functionality. The guy who won wrote good enough initial code to be used as a foundation for the rest.

fuelfive··on Some “Developers” Just Can’t Develop
For frogmetrics interviews, we did screen sharing sessions. You get to watch them code in their native environment, and see how they tackle the kinds of problems you'd be paying them to solve. In fact, the project we gave everybody was the next big feature we needed to implement, and the guy who won the job just brought his already-completed code along with him.
fuelfive··on Ask HN: What's a Non-Programmer to do?
If you're ever out of things on your to-do list, you have a big one still left: make your site #1 for the search query "learn chinese".
fuelfive··on Ask HN: Where do you live?
I'm in Wilmington, about 30 mins away
fuelfive··on Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other?
Rails at Frogmetrics, PollEverywhere, Posterous
fuelfive··on I Hacked My Diet with Science
I always like to see a little more science in articles that use the word "science" in the title.
fuelfive··on Ask HN: Hows MediaTemple for RoR?
Use heroku. It's the best for RoR sites.
fuelfive··on New Product From 280North: Atlas
This is incredible, excellent work guys
fuelfive··on Why Do Enterprise Applications Suck?
This was one of the reasons why we started frogmetrics. :)
fuelfive··on Microsoft to open its own stores.
Note that the guy who Apple hired to build their retail empire is Ron Johnson, a veteran of Target.

Transformers, indeed.

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/ronjohnson.html

fuelfive··on Ask HN: Notice a jump in Page Rank today?
Congrats! Same with the frog. Posterous and CO2Stats are up to 6 now, wtg guys.
fuelfive··on Oblong industries, inc.
Next time I need to change cubes with chinese characters from clear to red or rearrange alphabet letters with a friend, this will be a viable option.

I always find it unsettling when I see demos of "new user interface technology" that involves people performing tasks that seem primarily designed to look visually impressive and only secondarily (if at all) are related to a task someone would actually want to accomplish.

Show me how this can help me work faster. I'm currently unconvinced that this system is superior to a mouse + keyboard. I'm not even convinced that the demo tasks couldn't have been completed just as easily using keyboard shortcuts and a mouse.

fuelfive··on YC Winter 2009 application is due today (Friday).
No such thing as too far along. Speaking as a YC founder who had angel money and a product going in, you'd have to be post-series A for YC not to make sense. The YC logo on your slide deck alone is probably enough to boost your valuation by more than 6.4%.
fuelfive··on Ask YC: What's the most hacker-friendly keyboard?
SafeType vertical keyboard. The MS Natural Elite was giving me RSI until I switched.

http://safetype.com/

fuelfive··on Ask YC: Feedback on startup: shouteureka.com
How well does this scale to big data sets (like millions of rows)? My impression was that companies who get the most value out of this type of product are very large, and deal with lots of transactions.
fuelfive··on News.yc Meetup in KOP, PA in One Week (Thu 4/24)
I would love to come to this, but I will be in Mountain View for my team's YC interview then. Can't we make it a different day? I don't want to have to wait another seven months to meet some local hackers!
fuelfive··on Ask YC: Who do you use to print your business cards?
http://www.overnightprints.com

Used them for years. Fantastic quality, inexpensive.

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