jbr

They're in SF, near south park.

http://www.presencetelecare.com/ is looking for a lead engineer (first technical employee).

Details at http://presencetelecare.com/careers#1226ffb63eb89022_OLE_LIN...

I'm not affiliated with them, but I know the founders are looking high and low for the right person.

Checked it out; Deck is invite only but has contact info "for more information" -- it's exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't poke them to see if you can get in. They probably have pretty strict design and traffic requirements, though, since they're high-end.

Deck is exclusive. From http://www.decknetwork.net/

> Only a single ad will be shown for each page viewed.

I hear it's a pretty sweet deal, though.

Maybe deck network (http://decknetwork.net/) or fusion ads (http://fusionads.net/)?

Isn't it weird leaving that sort of thing behind? I also built a "purchase prediction model" right before I left a startup. It did really well on the test portion of the data (which wasn't included when building the model), but I have no idea how it's performing in the wild. It's stranger than leaving something like a program that has a clear function, because it's not necessarily obvious how well the model is performing compared to how well it "could" be performing.

Have you thought about getting ahold of them to find out how it performs now, just for curiosity's sake?

I'm co-founder of http://www.stormweight.com/ -- realtime brainstorming and voting for small teams. I alternate between title of "technical co-founder" and "ceo," depending on audience.

Maybe I'll finally get some closure.

I'd like to respond to the last paragraph, which seems like the relevant point for a startup audience.

"It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them."

This is less an issue of funding and more an issue of their belief that they would make a "new cool"/"paradigm shift"/"disruptive tech." Although this might often be correlated with funding, I think that's because funded disruptive technologies are the ones that make waves (heh). Segway was a company that had the balls to believe that cities would change shape for them; it seems ludicrous to think that looking silly (now) would pose much of a threat to their confidence, money or not.

So instead of pg's conclusion that it was the funding that inhibited them, I suggest it's the very nature of disruptive technologies. Some of these fail and we laugh about it; others actually change the fabric of modern life.

In fact, perhaps it's because they had such a big, outrageous dream that they captured the public imagination (and possibly funding). Outrageous propositions like "technology that changes the shape of industrialized cities" are the sort of black-swan-esque gamble that VCs seem to adore. (Nicholas Taleb's extremistan / pareto principle) Not to mention that it makes a great story for the media.

R is one of my favorite tools and I heartily recommend it to any hacker for data visualization alone. I've used R to make sense of high-n high dimensional data and it's a delight (even if the syntax takes a little getting used to).

As Buckwild said, best way to learn R is by messing around with it; There's in-editor help and a REPL. Download the GUI for your OS, not just the command-line tool; it has nice package management and graphical output (to a quartz window in os x).

If you're thinking of using R for plotting as well as analysis, I heartily heartily recommend the ggplot2 package. ( http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ ) -- there's a lively google group for support and the output is far better than comparable packages (like lattice, my second favorite).

The other famous book for R isn't actually for R -- it's for S. http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/ R is the open-source superset implementation of S/S-plus.

Download R and give it a shot: http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html

Wow, this is exactly the sort of advice I was looking for. Do you have a blog? Book references? I'm approaching this as a skill that I know I don't have, so I'm looking for learning resources.

Thanks!

I just found http://www.squidoo.com/tribebuilding which seems related, but very generic.

This is now a high-priority feature for us; I see the value in this. We usually have campfire open at the same time, but it really is tied to the brainstorming process.

What's the motivation to remain an LLC? (My co-founder did all of the legal stuff and chose to go directly for a C-corp, so I don't know what the benefits of an LLC are)

We have an iPhone app in the works and are working on beefing up the email integration so you can send commands and requests by email, since all smartphones have strong email clients. Right now you can add ideas to lists by email and request the names of your lists by email. Next up is the ability to request the group's merged favorites by email. Thanks for your input!

We do have output to email; you can email new ideas and attachments in to your lists and receive customizable updates by email.

We've looked at doing a host-it-yourself version a la github FI (http://fi.github.com/) or the google search appliance. Although the pricing that tier allows is quite cushy, (http://fi.github.com/pricing.html), the company they used to wrap up the installer is dauntingly priced for our bootstrapped budget (http://bitrock.com/). So that'll probably happen after we get the SaaS version off the ground.

The bug was that you ran into our free account limit and we didn't give you the proper messaging. Our pricing model only gives free accounts five members per list. I've upgraded your account to an unlimited beta account in thanks for finding this bug.

Having to click view source is so drag and drop doesn't accidentally highlight text. I'll make it so that only applies on the pages with drag and drop.

I've gotten a number of replies about the email invitation. I am looking into that currently (one monitor is that code, the other is HN). It's absolutely a bug if it doesn't do what you, the user, expect -- even if it's what we intended. However, this seems like a true bug, probably an overstrict email validation regex.

We're actually just marking them as deleted (acts_as_paranoid rails plugin) so we can later add an "archive" that lets you pull things out of the trash bin. We haven't figured out the UI for that yet, so it's in just an unranked idea in our product development stormweight list for now.

Demo is a good idea. Check out http://www.stormweight.com/lists/hn-demo -- a public list I just made (open access).

The js is certainly processor-intensive; the client polls every 2 seconds for updates. Search is also done in the client, which can get kinda slow. We'll look into optimizing that code a bit more, but we are trying for "rich client," which involves a bit of client-side processor tradeoff. I'm hoping that the newest wave of JS engines (sunspider, v8, whatever's in FF3.5) will also increase the adoption of rich web clients.

Good point. We'll make it so the dashboard lets you go back.

You can invite people by email address and Stormweight will send them an invite. When they sign up, they'll go straight to your list.

Try inviting jbr to your list and I'll come interact with you to show you live updating features.

Thanks for the comments! Adding member allows them to interact with your list. Try adding jacob@stormweight.com or jbr and I'll come play with you to show you how group interaction can work.

Thanks! Changed the title.

The comment by ZachS pointed this out and a fix has been deployed. It should be working now. Please let me know if it's not.

This is what comes from trying too hard to look like a Real Business -- we saw all of the other companies with Marketing Departments using phrases like "Deep Email Integration" and assumed it was a good place to start. We don't have much traffic yet, but we have a split testing architecture in place to start playing with less ridiculous ways of expressing the same thing.

Thanks!

position: relative is now fixed on the screenshot. Sign up and learn more buttons are now clickable.