ryanmahoski

Yes, I think you're right. Updated.

Good catch - I count 7: http://100.s3.amazonaws.com/camo.jpg

Every week you read "tens of thousands of blog posts"? Seriously?

To read 20k+ posts a week, you have to read 2,800+ posts a day. If you sleep 8 hours a night and do nothing else with your life except read blog posts, you still have to read 180 articles per hour - 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I'm curious about your comprehension. Do you consider an article "read" if you just skim its headline?

Depends on what they value. Old people love new technology when it solves their problems. Health is a big motivator. If you invent a gadget that cures arthritis, I guarantee you millions of "technophobes" will be among its early adopters.

My chain-smoking grandmother considers herself a luddite, but in a sense she's bleeding edge. If I had a nanobot pill from 30 years in the future and with it I could return her lungs, arteries, skin etc. to the condition they were in when she was 25 - I know from talking to her that should would be ecstatic with techno lust.

To win over a luddite, ask yourself what they most desire that they can't currently get. Sometimes the technology is already available. If so, demonstrate it solving some vexing problem they have, or think they have.

If someone wants to rob you, they too prefer your id to your thumb. The average sentence for aggravated assault in the U.S. is 30 to 90 years per count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault#Aggravated_assault

In a way, it depends on how we define mental effort. If you concentrate on raising your heart and breathing rates - which are physical, but then so in a sense is mental effort - you can significantly affect calorie burn.

Windows only. No Mac, no Linux.

App is mostly functional but doesn't live up to the marketing hype. Surprised you're accepting payments this early. The lofty promises of "no more accountants," "safe from the tax man" and "it does everything you need" strike me as careless if not legally binding. Unclear why the word "online" is needed 5 times on the home page - seems obvious enough this thing is a web app. Signed up for the free "forever" account. The language is starting to drag - work on copy editing. Maybe simplify the 'Select Package' headings - e.g. just say: "Single user account | Free | [Select]" or something to that effect. Consider adding a success page after that form - better yet just log the user in.

Setup let me bypass all elements so I posted to payroll - and I think that broke your algorithm because now the (ks-Info-Neutral) div at the top of every panel says: "An error occurred, please try again."

Invoiced a customer, which wasn't easy. Stymied because I didn't specify a tax. Good thing I remembered where to set that constant - had to back out, re-entered Setup then added a Tax Item...which should have worked but didn't - until it occured to me maybe I should give it something called a Parent Group. Boom, but now I notice the tax rate isn't transferring from the Setup pane. That's right, the Invoice displays 0% even though I entered Tax Item in Setup as 3.4%. Oh well, it works - and that concerns me. On to the financial statements. It appears I owe my creditors negative 1 million dollars. Haha so does that mean they owe me? Need some commas in there to separate digits into threes. Nice drilldown on the P&L. Open in Excel link broken. Hiding Help - oh this is wild: Help is a different feature than Help! with an exclamation mark which logs me out and takes me to an unbranded site.

Caveat: I've built some corporate tax software for a US state revenue dept and managed expense+reporting tech evangelism at a corporate card company. That said, my work has been tangential at best to Bionic Books and I'm not a CPA so take my comments with salt.

If you encourage or openly tolerate the sharing of copyrighted materials, that is considered illegal and you can be sued for it. To be safe, discourage such activity. Instruct the community to post their own scripts or scripts they know to have been shared in the open - and then trust your community members to do the right thing. In a large community, you can't possibly police everything. So follow the YouTube example. If a developer or lawyer claims to own a script that one of your members is thought to have illegally posted, censor the file and inform the member. Ban repeat offenders.

The author's literary style may be overzealous but I thought his philosophy was at least credible. He echoes Tolle, Zittrain and others who warn (as Zittrain puts it) "the internet, in many important respects, is a collective hallucination." Consider how many people today will spend most of their waking life sitting stationary, staring directly at a display. Is that a rational, enlightened way to live given the opportunity cost? I don't know but debating the question as this professor is doing doesn't seem to me horrible or baiting.

"Summarising what we do, I'd say it is this: whereas before the objective was to create new dishes, now what we seek is to create techniques and concepts that will generate many dishes."

Zoho compares their document sharing feature to YouTube 7 times in that press release. I suppose it's clever marketing to announce a Google property as your style inspiration. But 7 times in one blog post? Zoho Share doesn't even handle video.

...truant spews and new startups. Hacker News: knew cash ER, screen hawk, and "HN: We Rake CS."

Summary: A private college math head considers the existential, professional and communication problems peculiar to mathematicians.

If the project is in fact "very exciting," maybe you should respond in kind. Humor them. Rent a rock star costume and wear it to the interview. Gently explain how you were moved by the job description but that there was this one part which seemed pretentious to you. Be honest. Tell them you cringed when you saw the words "rock star." Then, with all the drama you can muster, tear off your uniform facade and reveal the person you are underneath. Or at least the person you are in clothing suitable for a job interview.

Ego drives the collective hallucination part of the internet.

I think you nailed it. Tom's character tells us Landshark sells internet strategy advice to ad agencies.

"Pure E. Not E commerce. Not E business. Not click and mortar [...] We help big, greedy advertising agencies sell the useless products of massive, morally corrupt multinational corporations. We advise them on how to aggregate eyeballs."

The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. Classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the printed page.

Gems throughout: "The more different people you can get connected with, the better. Try to swap papers with people from different research groups, different AI labs, different academic fields. Make yourself the bridge between two groups of interesting people working on related problems who aren't talking to each other and suddenly reams of interesting papers will flow across your desk."

It goes on to say: "...So cool people hardly ever learn about their subfield from published journal articles; those come out too late...You, too, can be a cool people. Here are some heuristics for getting connected."

My favorite bit so far: "After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point---or even earlier---it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers---but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas."

Would you agree it is a tragedy when a newborn enters daycare? Infants crave attention and they loathe situations when their basic needs go unmet. Can an overworked daycare temp better ensure your baby's interests than you? I am assuming we're not having kids unless we can financially plan for a nimble future.

Ever watched a trained parrot? Birds imitate all kinds of sounds. Doubtless a cell phone ring is in the avian call repertoire. The Lyre bird can perfectly mimick lots of man-made sounds: camera shutter, camera with a motor drive, car alarm, chainsaw. http://youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y

I've never seen such hype. Does anyone actually think "the possibilities are endless," that this device "is a prankster's dream" and "could destroy photography"? I am skeptical of the physics described but since I'm not a digicam expert I will just have to trust von Bismarck solved an apparent latency problem. (When my digicam flashes, the fulgerator has to receive that input and respond with its own flash, all before my shutter closes.) Ambient and direct lighting would both have to be below normal daytime levels and the subject needs to be dark enough to contrast the fulgerator's light. I wish this guy all the luck due a man caught adulterating vacation photos but I don't see how he has developed a viable tool. Maybe if I followed his über optics hack, I'd understand the secret implications of his toy.

测试 is chinese for "test." As of Oct 2007, http://example.test works -- not in english but in chinese (http://例子.测试/) as well as in a dozen other languages. Hat tip to @rofish for pointing this out.

     What is the Chinese equivalent of .com?

It depends on what you mean: the dictionary translation in chinese characters or the brand equivalent. Dot com is the strongest domain in China.

The lexical translation of com to any language is hard because com isn't really a word in English, it's better thought of in terms of a brand. (What is Nike in French?) Com roughly means "internet commercial business" but of course no English speaker would ever say that -- they'd say "dot com." So you can go to Google Translate and plug in "business," "commercial business," "com" or whatever and get back stuff like 商务 and 商业. And those are good translations but they're not going to be the vernacular equivalent of .com. As far as I know, when a Chinese person thinks about dot coms, he thinks about and writes them just as we do (i.e., ".com").

In terms of brand, .com is king although .cn is gaining in China. Cn began in 2003 and is already the 4th largest TLD in the world. The wholesale price for a .cn today is just 1 yuan ($0.15 USD). Spammers love them.

A couple years ago, ICANN started selling second-level international domains. So wise investors (like idnoptions.com) have been buying up chinese.latins (eg, 中.com). Chinese.latin is the clear trend in China because pinyin (romanization of chinese characters) isn't nearly as intuitive to type as are chinese characters. If there is a problem with these hybrid domains, it is that they're still a language compromise: currently there are no international gTLDs to be had.

But ICANN essentially fixed the problem this week, voting to open the unicode floodgates. Dot com will continue to rule China for several years but new Chinese gTLDs will close in on .com's market share. Arabic, Japanese, Korean and others will enjoy the same opportunities. You're right, this is really a celebration for unicode (international characters), not so much a heyday for Latin based languages.

The perfect TLD is probably a dot chinese character. Over a billion people understand written Chinese -- double that of English. You mentioned Mandarin, which numbers 850 million fluent speakers (compare with 350 million for English). Although Mandarin is the official spoken language of China, written Chinese is understood by far more people than just those who speak Mandarin. The brand opportunity for a capitalized Chinese gTLD with local leverage is huge.

Most street estimates have ICANN receiving between 50 and 500 gTLD applications in the first year. (Since ICANN has not yet announced their rules or pricing model, speculation runs amuck.) That estimate is based on several WAGs, including an application fee of $100k-$300k and an annual price speculated to be around $10k-$50k.

What is the business plan of a gTLD? Just because current assets can handle a few years' rent on something cool does not mean the expense is justified. Will Apple Inc. buy .apple so it doesn't go the Washington Apple Growers Association or the Give a Teacher an Apple society? An eBay official at the Paris meeting carefully spoke about the possibility of eBay buying .ebay. The average Fortune 500 company already spends ~$500k in domain protection annually (an estimate quoted by one ICANN board member on Tuesday to which another responded was "hugely low"). But there are loftier goals than buying your own brand just so you can hoard it. What, apart from "be a registrar," is a viable business model?

ICANN isn't answering questions like "Can I buy a vowel?" If you want to apply for .i (or whatever), you need a rock-solid business plan. The reason is, ICANN doesn't want the bad press that comes with having to shut down a popular gTLD and all its subdomains. Imagine if you owned the rights to .org; you can't, but if you could and you did and then you went bankrupt, ICANN would have to shut down all your subdomains -- Wikipedia, etc. Huge headache. We're talking, for a popular gTLD, entire markets tumbling. At some point, ICANN can't be held responsible for controlling damages but they have said they will require all gTLD applicants to present a business plan. So if your gTLD isn't solvent, you had better go back to the drawing board. Otherwise you'll be out 6 figures in application fees with nothing to show for it. (I presume ICANN will make the rules predictive so you'll know in advance if you'd eligible.)

Buyer beware if you plan to build on top of one of these new gTLDs. What guarantees do you have that next year your parent brand will still be around? Will anyone ever recognize your parent brand? Maybe the rational thing to do is ignore the hype and start treating domains as they structurally are: decoration. Of course if we did that we'd have to focus on hacking and making stuff people actually want.

Stay on message.

Paul's treatment of marketing brought to mind Gladwell's What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20. The Ockhamist dialectic -- "If we are going to be honest, then we must admit the possibility that everything we know and believe is, in fact, incorrect" -- evokes existentialists e.g. Eckhart Tolle: "The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness."

It would be a mistake to view this study solely in terms of breakfast calorie counts. The researcher allotted macronutrients differently for each group, not just with breakfast [1] [2] but, more importantly, in the daily totals:

Control: 1,085 calories ~ 17g carbs, 51g protein, 78g fat

Test: 1,240 calories ~ 97g carbs, 93g protein, 46g fat

Since fat contains ~9 calories per gram (versus 4 for protein and carbs) and since ~3 percent of fat calories go toward energy conversion (versus 25 for protein and carbs), we should expect Control to burn their calories ~2x more efficiently than Test. So while Control ingested fewer calories than Test, over time Test kicked their butts on weight loss because when Test burned a calorie it burned lots of additional calories. [3]

[1] Test ate 610 calories for breakfast: 58g carbs, 47g protein, 22g fat

[2] Control ate 290 calories for breakfast: 7g carbs, 12g protein, ? fat

[3] I'm ignoring some other factors e.g. enzymes (such as liprotein lypase and hormone sensitive lypase which store and release stuff like fatty acids)

On a mobile unit, sure. But JavaScript powers keyboard shortcuts, my favorite Gmail feature. If that costs me CPU cycles or bandwidth latency, I don't notice it. I appreciate simplicity but on a modern computer/browser, efficiency and features often trump convention and portability.