jlees

TED talk link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQaW2bFieo8

I like your idea of letting buyers express interest in things that aren't actually for sale yet, which helps sellers gauge what demand there is. But you do need to follow up quickly with sellers or the buyers will end up going elsewhere. Perhaps you could add something unique e.g. paying with Bitcoin?

The most frustrating thing with these popups is when they come up after clicking through from the site's email newsletter. Some sites I visit do it on every single page load, which is a really good way to make an engaged subscriber unsubscribe.

The point on dress patterns not scaling linearly is an important one, especially in the plus size range. It's also true that proportions vary even within the same dress size. I'd love to see Stross' model of the store-as-scanner, made-to-measure clothing come true -- though I've seen a startup which measures body proportion in the comfort of your own home, so maybe the stores would be more for final fit and finish, if the cost works out.

Well, the wealthiest - the Oscar red carpets of the world - do wear hand-sewn, one-off custom-designed couture. That opens up a whole marketplace of cheaper knockoffs "inspired by" it, as well as the original designer's ready-to-wear line.

As an overlap between the two worlds, tailoring to make an off-the-rack garment fir properly is also something that a certain wealth level take for granted - when I was recently shopping for clothes in Nordstrom, it was assumed I was going to get them tailored for the perfect fit.

It's not very good. I had that idea around the same time, tried to use MealSnap, gave up and decided the problem was on the wrong side of the difficult/interesting balance for me. After looking at the photos I took for ~a week, I felt that as a human I'd be wildly inaccurate with the calorie counts, so how on earth could a machine be better?

(Though, I was eating in a company cafeteria. Combining photos with geolocation for popular restaurants could be a good start to a more reliable, if sparse, approach.)

Neat story. I guess cheating by trial and error doesn't work so well when the impact of an error is physical...

I got into programming through cheating. When I was a little kid I wanted to win at some ZX Spectrum game - Treasure Island Dizzy or something like that. Fortunately, Your Sinclair magazine published a guide on how to PEEK and POKE your way to unlimited lives. That blew my mind, and I credit my interest in the inner workings of computers back to that experience :)

It's satire.

I did exactly this in July. My colleagues and friends were surprised that I didn't have something else lined up, but I needed to take a full break from the 9-5 world. Funnily enough I had about 6 months of runway too.

Several comments in this thread have mentioned how it's hard to get a side project to profitability in 6 months, but that's really not the only route to a sustainable lifestyle. Freelancing, consulting and other income streams (hurrah for busking!) are all perfectly good ways to try out new projects, learn or improve skills, and bring in some cold hard cash.

I've personally found that far more doors are opening for me now I'm open-minded, available, and willing to have conversations. When I was equated with the tech company I worked for, people would not have approached me about the things they do now, and I certainly wouldn't have considered some of the things I'm considering! It's taken a few months but I'm happy with where things are going, excited about the various projects I'm doing, perfectly satisfied not to have a complete prototype of a fundable startup idea yet, and definitely still overwhelmed at the sheer amount of branching futures ahead of me.

Good luck!

It varies from individual to individual. Some people can't focus well on a side project while working full-time, either because the full-time work eats up all available energy/time or because dissatisfaction at work leads to a low-level depression, making it hard to get motivated to do anything else. (I've been in both situations.)

Sure, finding a job that is both rewarding and non-all-consuming such that you can work on side projects too (ignoring any IP ownership issues) is a great solution, but not everyone is in that situation.

Here's a recent paper: "Civility 2.0: A comparative analysis of incivility in online political discussion" by Ian Rowe of the University of Kent.

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/epop2013/docs/Rowe_Ci...

Are there people alive in the USA who contracted polio in the 1950s? There certainly are in the UK, and post-polio syndrome is hitting them now.

I can understand folks simply not knowing someone who had polio -- it always seems to surprise people when I tell them my dad had it -- but perhaps we could increase awareness of the suffering that's going on years after the initial epidemic.

Everything counts, but you can be strategic about usage - dialing via Google Voice from a laptop keeps me well under 100.

The issue is that of avoidance. If I have to tell an app I've been bad, I'm more likely to avoid telling it at all. (Like not getting on the scale when one knows the weight won't be good news.)

Sure, highly motivated users will track everything, but it doesn't take much to leave the highly motivated state. There's also the angle that knowing you have to report in with bad news might stop you doing the bad thing in the first place, but when the penalty for not reporting in is nil, it loses some of its power. Perhaps approaches that use human accountability or other reward systems (eg. GymPact) could help here.

This is genius marketing. I've already seen a bunch of friends go nuts over the idea and I hope those kittens find great homes through the initiative!

I'm the same, though I have definitely adjusted to warmer temperatures over nearly 4 years of living in California, and the general elevation in mood from the sunlight exposure (and everyone else's elevated mood too) makes up for the heat in many ways.

Having said that, there's nothing quite like the smell of wet winter coats gently steaming over an Aga, is there?

I'm from the UK, and while I wasn't particularly aware of SAD for many years, it's clear it affected me to varying extents each winter. Moving to San Francisco definitely lessened the impact, but it isn't completely gone; though it probably helps a little that due to the long, tiresome summers here I actually like the refreshing cold snap we're in right now.

In the UK, many of my peers finished somewhere after 3 years but before 5. The writing-up phase tended to drag on, I had a couple of friends who ended up working while writing up as their 3-year funding ran out.

I think you'd be better off getting folks who are actual interviewers (or ex-interviewers) from Google, etc, to conduct interviews; your site focuses on that as one of its selling points but your resume doesn't match up (in fact your LinkedIn gives no indication of how experienced an interviewer you are).

I think this is one of those products that's best served by finding people one-on-one who need help, and providing it for free so you get a bunch of testimonials, pictures, videos, etc -- rather than throwing up a landing page and survey. It's definitely a useful service; I mentor folks in interview practice occasionally these days, and there's certainly an appetite for it, though a lot of people I talk to tend to go about it by applying for jobs they don't really want and using those interviews as practice.

As a Brit living in Silicon Valley, I look at these numbers and think that perhaps I should move back to London. I'd certainly save a lot of money on rent. (But, of course, the income scales are very different!)

Hmm, I was affected (my twitter account sent a spam post) but I didn't receive an email. I only found out about it via HN. :/

I'm looking forward to this hackathon. Way to raise the bar, Jason!

I feel you'll have to be careful around folks bringing in products they've already been working on and trying to pass them off as weekend hacks. But I'm sure you and the other judges will be smart enough to tell the difference. :)

Firstly, you might want to post this during UK time for better responses.

I went in the other direction so don't have a great deal of help I can offer, other than asking if you've considered working for a company with dual presence and transferring to their UK office after working in the US for a while? I know of several people who've done this. The other Americans I knew working in the UK all got jobs there after attending university there.

The culture is slightly different, and they feel less 'big company' for the most part. They also take on a local flavour :) I've heard good things (in fact, better things than are said about HQ) about teams in remote offices, around camaraderie and ability to get stuff done. I think there are probably downsides too, and most people recommend you spend some time working out of Mountain View during your Google career, but I also got advised that spending a stint internationally is one of the best things to do for one's career there.

I didn't work out of any remote office full-time, but I visited seven satellite offices during my time there (nine if you count YouTube/SF). They were all unique and awesome.

Yeah, but consider that some rare words are much stronger indicators of topic than more common ones. Even more so if you look at n-grams. If you use something like wordnet you can get a lot of meaning out of low-frequency words and throw away the meaningless higher-frequency ones that occur in too many categories to be useful.

You need to pay HQ a sum ($3000, iirc) to license the name "CrossFit". They will only agree to that if you've completed their Level 1 certification. Once you've done that and paid up, you're on your own...

Depends on the person. I love to exercise first thing as it carries me through my day; conversely, exercising too late in the evening means I have trouble sleeping, and historically I'm more likely to find an excuse if I'm already tired from a day's work. Gaming, on the other hand, is a perfect evening activity for me. It's certainly possible to have both.

I completely agree that doing something enjoyable is absolutely the best approach, and if you want to optimise for various things, that's great - but don't knock the millions of folk who are getting off their arses and actually moving about. (It also makes me happier to think of people out there enjoying exercise, than "putting in their time" on the treadmill like hamsters.)

Sadly, finding a form of exercise that fits is easier said than done, as with so many things.

If you are unfit, there are many barriers - both physical and mental - to just trying out new sports until you find the right one. Even less unfit people can be paralysed with fear of the unknown, over-abundance of choice, etc.

College and workplace activity offerings are great, as are good gyms, because you can just try out a bunch of classes once and see what works for you. But it took me many years to get to the point where I was brave enough to walk in the door of a Crossfit gym, which I now thoroughly enjoy.

Maybe the point here is that if you have friends or acquaintances that "don't like exercise", bring them along to something you love or have always wanted to try (ideally the latter - doing someone's favourite sport with them is way intimidating if you're new to exercise, failing together is much more enjoyable).

I find I encounter key movements often enough that I can definitely gauge progress. We do strength and metcon, so every few months each lift will get its spotlight - it's easy to compare my 5x5 power cleans now from my numbers in April. (Though doing something like Starting Strength is even more quantifiable due to consistency.)

In terms of metcon, I mostly compare myself against Rx, since I scale most things. So, this week I'm doing pullups with an assistance band one level harder than the one I'd been using for months beforehand. It feels wonderful. If I scale thrusters to 65lb from 95, when in the past I've had to scale to 55 from 95, that's also clear progress for me.

So true. nerdfitness.com has some great articles on this mindset, especially 'Underpants Gnomes': http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2012/04/05/underpants-gnomes...

There are many, many books, videos and sites that will tell you exactly what to do. The issue is not that "there is nothing that will give you a grocery list and workout plan"; the issue is that you don't think that the ones you find are 100% optimized for your specific situation, so you research and research and research and never make a single change.