jmathes

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I went off cable a year ago. The only thing I miss is ads for upcoming movies. Weird, right? Everything else I want I can get online, but I had come to depend on ads to tell me when a good movie was coming.

Browserstack is great, but it's still catching up to Sauce Scout (disclaimer: I work at Sauce Labs). It needs better support for testing firewalled or localhost sites, and it needs security (it re-uses VMs)

Awesome work, guys! I know first hand how hard it is to maintain a product like this :)

The cover says "How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Companies". That means:

- There exist at least two entrepreneurs today - At least two of them use continuous innovation - At least two of those who use continuous innovation create radically successful companies - This book will tell you how they do it

The style of writing you use is different from mine. I make declarative statements about facts when talking about my point of view, and suggestions and conditional statements about yours. You use suggestions and conditional statements about your own point of view (as well as references to famous people who appear to share it), and declarative statements about mine.

I suspect that this is because I'm trying to understand, and you're trying to be well-rounded, which I think is a social attribute, not an intellectual one. I think this is evidence that a reductionist point of view is more likely to result in accurate understanding. I should point out that I only use the word reductionist because you used it; to me it sounds silly. It's like putting the suffix "ist" on the end of "logic" or "1+1=2" to suggest that there's a viable alternative and that the jury's still out.

"I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice."

Every piece of technology you use was built on insights provided by reductionism. Nothing you do is benefitted by the reductionist-less grand metaphysical musings of Zeus worshippers. In every age of humanity, there have been reductionists slowly advancing the state of the species, and high-concept self-proclaimed thought leaders using intuition to make eventually-meaningless but feel-good declarations about things like beauty, love, and justice. Of course reductionism doesn't feel attractive - it requires the surrender of the ego in pursuit of fact. It makes sense that you wouldn't feel threatened by alien ideas if you allow yourself to disregard reason.

Most. Startups. Fail.

If your startup operates on the assumption that your vision is flawless, you're not causing your vision to be less uncertain by refusing to notice the risk.

You're shooting the messenger. You've conflated trying to measure whether a strategy is flawed with causing it to be flawed. Pull your head out of the sand. It is not the fault of the book that people who have flawed ideas won't get rich without fixing their ideas.

farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.

I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker.

Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB.

I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.

Misleading title. Power demand from US homes is rising. The rate at which it's rising is falling, and projected to continue falling.

Thanks to HN's URL shortener, with a little help from copy-paste, my mac is now singing the page source of github's 404 page

I met him and his team at SHDH48 on Microsoft campus in mountain view last year. It's not trolling. In fact, they invited a bunch of core 4chan users to be early canvas users. He's just moving on to another project, this time with a team of valley insiders he persuaded to move to New York.

You can get more free VM time from EC2

The system was never very unstable. The error rates are all low. The point is that it's now much more stable.

The reason I didn't sort error rates by month was to preserve statistical significance. If we try to only look at error rates from specific periods of time, we have to decide how short those periods of time are. Too long and we don't have data from some of the browsers; too short and we don't have enough data to form a significant opinion. It may have been possible to find a middle ground, but why bother when we can still get unbiased results for 80% of the browsers?

Firefox never beat chrome, and I like both of them the same amount.

When I first did the data dive, I thought Safari was worse than IE, which I thought made a much better blog post. That would have been way more surprising. It was after due diligence that I was forced to discard that result.

Earlier versions of Safari on Windows seem to work fine

Seems almost tautological. Everything we observe changes our brains

> I have no clue what Eric looks like

Here you go: http://www.google.com/search?q=eric+ries&tbm=isch

Ah, well, I had you confused with another Daved W then.

As to whether the book is a good buy for insiders, I say it is. My introduction to startups was when Eric hired me at IMVU, so I was 'brought up' the Lean way before it was cool (ha!)

Ever since IMVU I have seen company after company think they get it when they don't. They understand the ideas but don't practice them while thinking they do. It's easy to say you'll start measuring and experimenting once you're done with the Really Important Stuff.

I'm not saying those companies should buy Eric's book, although obviously they should. I'm saying I'm buying it too so I can have something to point to when I have to drag someone kicking and screaming to the realizatiom that they're doing it wrong even though they preach Lean the whole time.

I'm sorry for saying 'Lean' so much. I know the word is overused. The practice itself is not overused.

Hey, David, didn't you work with Eric at there.com? Were any of the lean practices in their infancy yet?

Ockham's Razor has two interpretations.

One says that if you have several theories that might explain what you're observing, the simpler one is probably right. It doesn't matter whether this is true; it saves time by letting you fail faster if you're wrong. This is the more popular understanding of the razor, but it's less useful because it can be wrong, and jackasses often use examples of its wrongness to claim that it never provides any information, in order to advance crackpot metaphysics or religion.

The other says that if you have two theories which both explain everything you're observing, then it doesn't matter which one you adopt, so you might as well adopt the simpler one. For example, if I hypothesize that E=mc^2 + u, where u is the number of invisible, otherwise-undetectable pink unicorn particles within three meters of Mars, this theory makes all the same predictions as E=mc^2, and is nondisprovable. It's Occam's Razor that says that we shouldn't bother with this pink unicorn version.

You're also ignoring WinNT, which became Win2k, which became WinXP. The real story is more complicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

A startup is made of two kinds of people: hackers and businessmen. Often it's got people who are both.

This post is about going around meeting the businessmen. It misses out on the hackers. They're not hard to find! At least visit Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. It's near Google.

You sound like a crackpot. You don't sound like you understand physics. You also sound cranky. If you want to have a discussion, you should stop using grandiose language.

You said: it certainly violates Occam's Razor. Your "initial state" has no explanation. You in fact vehemently object to any attempts at an explanation, deriding them as "undefined." This is faith in its purest form.

Occam's Razor says to go with whatever the simplest model is that accurately predicts everything, not just the simplest model.

The Razor is a rule of thumb. If you have multiple theories / models that all accurately explain all observed phenomena, then they're all correct. In fact, since they make the same predictions, they're all equivalent. Occam's Razor basically says "don't waste time with theories that accurately explain the world but also make unfalsifiable / meaningless predictions."

"Shu's idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other."

This is not a new idea. This was in my high school physics textbook in 1998, and it was an old textbook.

Who should I email if I don't have a boss?

Good enough. At least now I have to modify my hosts file to play that game, which makes it inconvenient

I'm one of 4 people who tried the same diet. We are all IRL friends with the original author, and he got us into it. It worked for all of us.

I lost 60lbs in 40 weeks using this diet, and only felt healthier as I went along.

before: http://photos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v274/234/41/1171...

after (contains puppy): http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1171451781&v=phot...

I didn't get headaches, and caffeine is an indirect appetite suppressant in that it makes me more interested in what I'm doing and less distracted by hunger.

I worked at a software company where we should have run an experiment like this. There's an upgrade on user accounts that we charged a one-time $10 for, and people buy it all the time. We decided to try it as a subscription.

We spent a month getting the subscription code ready, then deployed it to some % of users, only to discover that nobody wanted it. What we should have done was build the front-end only, get people to buy subscriptions, and then just grant them the one-time permanent version.