futuremint

Good news to hear. Objective-C is alright as a language, but I'm excited to hear about some of my favorite languages running on the platform, like this Scheme and Smalltalk (http://isqueak.org/). I suppose I have no excuse to NOT make an app in my spare time anymore...

I've been a part of two startups, neither of which did anything remotely like "Customer Development". The one was consumer oriented, and they sort of stumbled through the launch of a prototype that was built to scratch their own itch (i.e. they were their own customer, so they kind of knew what it needed).

The 2nd still has very little revenue and I would say is still struggling to align with the customer. They've spent many years now developing a product that they think will fit the customer based on their experiences working in the target industry 10 years ago. Its a little scary to watch this company spend their money after only showing a mockup to a customer once, about 3 years ago.

This 2nd company is starting to get paying customers, and then they panic when the customer says, "Wait. It doesn't do x, y, and x? I assumed it did, I mean, everyone in our industry does that! You didn't know that?"

I'm curious to know how these 2 companies would be different had they done solid customer development first.

Smalltalk and GNUStep :)

Through the lens of the average user fearing OS updates, the whole "online application" makes a lot more sense. These average users can be more comfortable with online applications because there is no update that the end user is responsible for (or that they know about).

Also, when they replace their computer in order to "get rid of" their malware, all of their online applications are still there.

I'd never thought of web applications from this perspective before, but it occurs to me that maybe we can thank Microsoft's horrible upgrade path in the early '00s for the large market for online applications today.

On top of regular exercise, I also notice that staying properly hydrated and making sure I get enough B vitamins also helps. I try to drink water 1:1 with the amount of coffee I drink if not more. And some cheap vitamin supplements for the B vitamins work well.

I have similar wrist pain that comes and goes, and when it gets bad I just take it easy and make sure to drink a lot of water and that tends to ease the pain.

Also taking over the counter anti-inflammatories can help in the interim period until you gain some wrist strength. I don't take any drugs regularly, and I notice that 2 ibuprofen in the morning usually takes care of it for 24 hours. Obviously you're not going to want to take them every day for a long time :)

Lastly try to pay attention to what you do with your hands when you sleep. If you tend to curl your fingers under your pillow or something it can make the muscles cramp up overnight and make the pain worse.

A link for those who don't know what it is (I didn't). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Immortality

The awesome part about it is that your database can be very easily replicated "to the cloud" for backup/sharing purposes.

This is an attractive feature of CouchDB that I'm considering for a web application too.

Seems to me that value is just a perception, like any other perception. You can choose to perceive value or not. I think the startup phase titled, "Educating the Market" is a euphemism for, "Persuading other people to agree with you."

In the end when dealing person to person, (or business to consumer, b2b, its the same thing) its all just persuasion. Just persuading someone to give you money for something you've persuaded them gives them value. And if you're persuasive enough, they'll agree that it is valuable, convince themselves accordingly and be happy.

Its much more apparent when you convince yourself that you really need very few things in life to get by, and that most of what it takes comes from inside yourself (except for food, water & shelter).

Holy Crap. Watching that thing move scared me. I don't know why, but I just envision a swarm of them inflating and deflating and rolling after me in the dark of the night...

I've found that is a pretty good philosophy. I'm not sure what my personal phrase is, but I often find myself telling other people in meetings & conversations, "Now wait a minute. Nothing is impossible lets just think about this a little."

Maybe thats what it is? I don't tell myself that nothing is impossible, I just never admit defeat. I think thats what it takes, just don't even think about giving up or giving in.

Just do it (whatever it is) until you're done. And the move on.

The world is what you make of it.

I developed a Ruby application a few years ago with a similar structure on OS X to be deployed on Ubuntu servers. All the forking and child process signaling worked like a charm in both OS's.

So yeah... you're locking yourself out of Windows. Consider it a smart move :)

Seems to me though that the radiowaves would have to go in the general direction of the person moving, right? I suppose you could surround the entire building and go from there...

Heh, My first thought when reading the link title was, "Financial Alochol, Tobacco, and Firearms?" Really its the "Financial Action Task Force"

Cool technology, thought the editorialization is a little lame. Really? SWAT? Because anything that can track movement will be immediately useful to SWAT? Wouldn't the base-station have to be inside the building? The author could have tried just a little bit harder to envision a use.

Disclaimer: I am a web developer, so these criticisms include myself.

I feel like so many folks (me included) in the web development community are constantly re-learning new (old) techniques that we all really should have realized long before now.

Though I don't think I would change a thing as I've learned a lot over the past decade that I probably never would have if it not for this community.

Sometimes I just get a sense of deja vú, like none of this is new...

This whole "Unicorn" business for example. I read about this last week, and thought to myself, "Ok... hasn't Apache been doing this with 2.0 for years?"

So isn't this just re-implementing the wheel... yet again, but in Ruby?

I've found that keeping an eye on iPhone UI design can help out with UI design in other areas if you find yourself in a space-constrained situation wanting more out of your controls or existing UI.

I guess I just felt that way after reading the anecdote of developers writing their own PDF parser, and then giving up and purchasing yours. Though I'm sure it is evidence directly from your experience, it just feels a little salesman-ish to me :)

I think the article could be stronger with a few more thoughtful paragraphs on your thoughts, and maybe removing the link (though keeping the name) to your product?

This seems to be to be a post light on content with a link to the author's product.

In summary, "Be aware of what you're working on, don't shave yaks, and here is a link to buy our stuff!"

Not sure this has the "replace the OS aim" to it. From the lively site, "... Rather, it is an experimental system for turning the web as we know it into a universe of objects that are active, accessible, changeable; in short, lively."

OTOH, I've been using Seaside + Squeak/Pharo for a webapp at work and its been awesome to work with. SqueakNOS is pretty exciting too: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1762

But my first reaction to Lively (and still is) is, "what for?" I guess I can't get over having an application in the browser that doesn't need a server. In that case a native desktop app. would be much better. I guess its just experimental :)

This is news... just not hacker news.

Running an entire application environment in the browser like this still gives me pause for concern. On the one hand it'd be great for creating an open community where anyone could modify the code (locally) to do cool things, on the other hand it makes it a lot more difficult to control security if there is a server involved in the mix.

And if there isn't a server involved... what's the point of using a browser then?

So this is a neat technology exercise... but to what end?

Wow, now those Micrsoft ads for "cheaper laptops" can add a line that says, "Now you get an anti-virus processor included for FREE!"

Ah yes, the Wii is another example. I also have one of those :). Just recently we also purchased a Keurig coffee maker (with the little cups, give you coffee in about 3 blinks of an eye). Also a great experience thats wonderfully convenient.

"... or pass on to my kids." and "... roughly 75% of the books I read I'll never read again." are mutually exclusive, no?

I read a lot of objections to the Kindle stating that you don't own the books. Personally I read a book once and I'm done with it (unless its a programming/reference book). I assume most people are the same way. So why hoard books if you're not going to read them?

The other thing is that "buying" a book for the Kindle is more akin to "renting" the book. You don't own it, Amazon does. You don't own a DVD you're renting from Blockbuster, or Netflix, but I don't hear people complaining about wasting that money.

I also think that if I'm going to read a book more than once, I'm going to buy a hardback version of it and keep it on my bookshelf. If not, then I'll buy/check-out a paperback book and donate/return it when I'm done reading it.

I think there are really two distinct kinds of books, and critics often confuse the two.

(I don't own a Kindle, but have given some thought to it and read up on people's objections)

I don't think the opening premise is entirely accurate. Isn't one reason for the iPhone's popularity (and most of Apple's devices/computers) that they provide both a great experience and they're convenient (iTunes/App store, reliability, "it just works" etc.)?

Later the author states that he believes price to be a factor of convenience (which I would agree with), but that needs to be stated in the intro because I was put off before even getting to the meat of the story.

I couldn't make it to the end of the article because of the spelling errors. If you're offering business advice, at least learn how to write a coherent sentence!

This is a cool language... but this isn't news. Its been around for a few years.

Maybe the title wasn't titillating enough? Or maybe it was the link to scribd (I avoid scribd, its just a personal annoyance thing though).

Or maybe people here would rather read a brief news summary than a paper? Who knows :)

This post was created around the same time as all of the Bernie Madoff "everybody and everything is a pyramid scam!" insanity going through the news for awhile.

If I remember correctly, pretty much any story with "pyramid scheme" or "ponzi scheme" in the title got massive amount of linkage.