systemtrigger

I look at this problem in terms of automated systems. I think it's interesting how you can architect large groups of people to efficiently deliver a service. If you can conceive of and design systems you can as you put it "converge" nodes of the internet to produce wealth. There is a lot of opportunity and focus on leveraging current software and building social systems around that, which is great. The idea that interests me is how you can build virtual companies of people who do work and deliver value to a customer, which I think is ultimately what you and the paper you referenced are getting at.

> Which technologies are still out of reach to most people in terms of price or required technological know-how?

Entrepreneurs have fantastic building blocks available today. In the first world price isn't a problem, it's know-how. Benevolent hacking can deliver a kid from poverty to financial independence pretty quickly if he's clever enough and can truly solve people's problems. That's an inspiring idea. At some point, laziness becomes the real barrier.

> What is the optimal size for hackers to be able to effectively collaborate but not be bogged down by excessive control?

That's an interesting question. I suppose the answer would depend on the quality of the hackers, the problem they're working on and the parameters they're working within.

I like to explore my ideas verbally and wish I had a better way to refer back to those audio brainstorms which I sometimes record. One problem is that the audio file is rarely "tight" in terms of signal-to-noise, which makes review tedious. It would be nice if I could cheaply outsource that work to a secretary type who would listen to my rantings and just return to me the salient bits, eliminate the pauses or maybe just transcribe what I say. I've looked into CastingWords but can't justify their prices (~$120 to transcribe a 90-minute recording, 2+ weeks ETA). I think there are strong opportunities for service developers in this space.

I look for places my target demographic congregates and ask the most thoughtful contributors to help me.

I trust you mean getting business cards etc. There's a fine line between making good marketing investments and lying. I think embellishing your own success is a slippery slope.

Lying sucks energy and adds to mental clutter. Always be honest. It's hard enough to muster the creative focus you need to build something good without worrying about how you're "fronting." Better to hone your pitch so you can genuinely sell your idea to discerning customers.

Many businesses do profit from "appearing bigger and more successful" than they actually are. I call Bernie Madoff to the witness stand. Some smoke-and-mirrors is to be expected in industry but too many companies are flat-out "designing trust." Time is precious and I would rather spend mine earning customers' respect. The startups I admire are trying to be as tastefully transparent as possible.

I could use help with design too and it's not so much that I can't design but that I'm too close to my app and need outside opinions about how to lay stuff out and how to phrase things. I wonder if startups could moonlight a little and help one another out on design, doing mockups and copyrighting with the expectation that the effort contributed will be reciprocated.

I haven't read the documentation on how to speak to W|A but I think "average age at death..." would have been clearer form symantically.

This is the second time today you've submitted that link and it's a beautiful splash page but I haven't tried your app because it evidently requires me to grant you access to my Facebook profile. Maybe if you had a demo or a screencast we could watch we'd understand how much fun it would be to play Cupid with our friends.

I've clicked on a few Facebook apps and most strike me as invasive in terms of what they automatically publish about me. Maybe you could remind visitors up front what personal information we'll be granting to hookuphelper, what messages you'll be sending to our friends on our behalf etc?

Without knowing anything about your company, your service/product or what skillset you are looking to fill I think the standard advice is to participate in local hacker meetups and introduce your startup to those potential partners. Another route would be to place a job ad for the position, e.g. Craigs List under "internet engineers."

I wonder how the economy affects results. When people feel broken down do they gravitate more toward tradition?

Ah 150 per language. My goof.

I doubt we can conclude much about programmers of a certain ilk as a result of the last 150 programming related updates on Twitter. Maybe if the data were more transparent I could understand better what Delores Labs' graph represents.

One problem I see in the methodology is that the sample size for each language would vary dramatically. So the results for e.g. Haskell is probably based on a relatively small number of tweets compared to e.g. Java where we would expect a lot more tweeting. The problem that introduces is that we base conclusions on maybe 1 or 2 individuals in the case of Haskell versus ~dozens who would have tweeted about Java.

In the end, what difference does it make what some random people judge the sentiment of a tweet to be? Is the aggregate written sentiment of a language a scalar that strongly correlates to another scalar called happiness?

I have never been comfortable advertising myself as a geek because to me there's no way to distinguish oneself using that word without coming across as a wannabe or fanboy. You don't crown yourself smart. When somebody today tells me they're a geek my private reaction is "what specifically are you a geek of?" If it's "social media" then I'm starting to lose interest because there are no skills involved. I'm thinking "for chrissakes Shaquille O'Neil is on Twitter." If these people want tech cred they've got to lose the "Hi, I'm Bob. I am a big social media geek." Although I suppose today that gets you more female admirers than "Hi I'm __, I'm a hacker working on a project that __."

Words evolve. Language corruption is a well-documented phenomenon in linguistics. The word geek is a good example. Geek started off dodgy then it turned edgy and now that it has become so popular its connotation bares little resemblance to the original. Another example is the word awesome which used to be reserved only for truly magnificent, spectacular things; over time the edge dulled and we now refer to things as common as potato salad as "awesome."

For an interesting lecture on language evolution listen to John McWhorter: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142733/Audio/Lectures/Story%20of%...

The manufacturer the article refers to, PlasticLogic, presented a prototype at DEMO 08.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOWQvrgdZRE

Pics: http://www.plasticlogic.com/assets/PlasticLogicPreviewsElect... http://www.plasticlogic.com/assets/PlasticLogicElectronicRea... http://www.plasticlogic.com/assets/PlasticLogicElectronicRea...

In the Q&A after his Harvard presentation last month Stephen said he would not crowdsource Wolfram Alpha. In short the reason he gave is that crowdsourcing is unreliable. Stephen used as an example the problems of Wikipedia where rogue interests and non-experts manipulate results. He only wants great curators of knowledge to sign off on the inputs. That way when you search for something on Wolfram Alpha you can expect near certainty in the results.

The ontology of Wolfram Alpha is involved. Those professional researchers in Champaign who understand how to talk to Wolfram Alpha are not getting their data from simple Google searches and then citing their sources. This is a complex process even for simple data points. If Wolfram Alpha has a need for Mechanical Turk it would be to catch mistakes or maybe do information triage - but Stephen made clear he doesn't want quasi experts going anywhere near the research department.

Wow judging from that screencast Twiggler looks excellent. I'm impressed. I haven't been keeping up with Twitter apps for the past few months but it appears you've put a lot of good functionality in yours.

Well that's weird, it's working now. OK I'll take a look at it...

I don't know if it's just me but when I watch the video it's just a static image not a screencast so I can't visually follow what the narrator is saying.

Insightful piece. I wonder what solutions we'll devise to edit all that video. App idea: outsource tightening to mturk. Hardware idea: the record button on your video camera should operate on a cache so if what happened in the past isn't interesting it won't get saved.

http://albumbud.com - Sharp, clean design. I like the music metaphor in the header. Good tagline 'Keep tabs on your favorite musicians'. I wonder if it could be more specific, like 'Get notified when your favorite musician releases a new album.'

If all I want is one RSS feed, I shouldn't have to sign in to try the app. Maybe make registration optional.

Good search results. I found both artists I searched for. It would be nice if after I added an artist, Album Bud told me the most recent album. Just an idea.

Glad to see you've open-sourced the site. Good luck.

They're about as reliable as tabloids. The Forbes article is ok (http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/14/best-cities-for-jobs-opinio...). Here are the highlights: Washington D.C. is the new Rome and Kansas City is in "The Zone of Sanity."

Top 10 Big Cities for Jobs: No. 10: Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Ore.-Wash. No. 9: Oklahoma City, Okla. No. 8: Raleigh-Cary, N.C. No. 7: Salt Lake City, Utah No. 6: Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash. No. 5: Dallas-Plano-Irving, Texas No. 4: Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas No. 3: San Antonio, Texas No. 2: Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas No. 1: Austin-Round Rock, Texas

Top 10 Mid-Sized Cities for Jobs: No. 10: Mobile, Ala. No. 9: Anchorage, Alaska No. 8: Shreveport-Bossier City, La. No. 7: Baton Rouge, La. No. 6: Corpus Christi, Texas No. 5: Kansas City, Kan. No. 4: Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. No. 3: Lafayette, La. No. 2: Tulsa, Okla. No. 1: McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas

Top 10 Small Cities for Jobs: No. 10: College Station-Bryan, Texas No. 9: Morgantown, W.Va. No. 8: Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash. No. 7: Athens-Clarke County, Ga. No. 6: Laredo, Texas No. 5: Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas No. 4: Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA No. 3: Longview, Texas No. 2: Grand Junction, Colo. No. 1: Odessa, Texas

Insightful perspective on what might happen if you gradually augmented your brain. Kurzweil covered a lot in The Singularity is Near; this narrative on consciousness is more playful. The brandy in the chocolate here is his existential musings on the Omega Point - blew my mind.

OK so you want someone on call all day to answer your 800 line and read from a script. Wow I sit in a quiet room at home most days and if the phone rings I could switch over to a script and answer your customer support calls. I've done phone tech support and can handle customer service questions. I'm working on a startup right now but I have spare cycles for random calls. To monitor quality maybe you could just call in now and then to spot check me. It's just an idea in case you're interested and want to pursue a conversation. We'd need to work out a couple details but if we're reasonable people that shouldn't be a problem.

It's a problem. No modern man understands all his written obligations.

> Perhaps an opportunity of a startup that would introduce a new way of writing contracts

Yes! Every contract I've ever seen is just an analog program, a decision tree really. Legal concepts are mostly classes. Since you can do things like multiple inheritance with OO you should be able to mimic contract law in a program. But is designing such a service lucrative?

The hardest language in contracts - apart from all the whereupons and nods to the Magna Carta - has to do with contingency planning and minor details. It's all the "if A then B when (C | D)" cover-your-ass reserve. That stuff can get pretty terse and for most people it's a total waste of time to muddle through, so we just sign it and hope it didn't give away our wife as chattel. Of course when we cut out these complexities our contracts might not be as watertight. But I think this should be a judgment call between the participants. What good is a "safe" agreement if no one but a judge can understand it?

You would probably want to focus on a small, profitable subset of contracts. Take web startup investing. There ought to be a way for Startup X to have a form on its site that lets me invest in their company. Maybe that's just too wild of an idea for 2009 but if startups become financially transparent -- I mean really transparent -- micro investing is bound to happen. Government loopholes notwithstanding.

Map of today's Amtrak network: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amtrak_ne...

It's not clear if you are asking for a management book or a programming book. Assuming you want to hack, my question to you is What do you want to accomplish? That would drive which sort of development book we're talking about. Then I would ask How much do you know about programming? Nothing at all? If you don't understand concepts like 'object-oriented' then I bet we're getting ahead of ourselves if we start talking about agile.

I think you need to pick a language. Not knowing much about your situation or your goals, I suppose I'll just recommend one: Agile Web Development with Rails - 3rd Edition, just came out.

These guys are "building a more efficient market for flights" so they might need the kinds of connections and insight YC promises. If the founders are amazing and yet they need help producing their show you assume it's all a funding issue. They're from Australia; they don't know tech angels or Silicon Valley, they know YC. Even if all they think they need is money I don't know any angels who are clamouring for unreferred new blood, do you?

Success in the flights industry can be lucrative but if you don't hit a home run you get zip. Solution: impress some knowledgeable, connected people who will be determined to help you if they like you. These guys passed, maybe they have reason to be happy.

They didn't label everything. According to their research paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...) they covered the "natural sciences, social sciences, as well as the humanities." From the companion article (http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/sto...) "it's a graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services."

When I went to install the AIR app, it warned me "system access: unrestricted." Huh? Is that normal for an AIR app? I chose not to install Boks.

If you get a chance, read the interview with the author. It's a good companion piece to the article, and maybe even to Why Nerds Are Unpopular:

"They've turned this word 'geek' into a term that's almost romantic in some ways, and through the Silicon economy, they've been massively innovative and economically important. A lot of them are running circles around the extroverts who are selling shoes. So I think part of what's happened lately is that the digital economy is giving introverts a new place in the sun."

Well yes obviously they're a profitable industry, I don't deny that. I'd be the first to hunt down numbers to back up what you say, I was in the card industry myself for awhile. But I wasn't answering the question of 'are they a good business' I was answering the question 'would I pay for today's virtual gifts' which I understood to be your submitted topic. And I was being honest: in my experience virtual gifts have never appealed to me as a consumer. I likened them to gift cards because gift cards provide no added utility while reducing liquidity - they're a huge consumer sham. But as to whether these items are profitable, absolutely - they're spectacularly profitable!