davi

They're talking about Philip Greenspun's [1] encounter with Groupon, about which he says: "I think what this shows is that we were much worse at marketing than even we could have believed." [2]

[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

[2] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/03/19/groupon-market...

(And by the way, thank you.)

You worked for it, now nail it!

fight for more. (Or at least donate money to others who will do some fighting for you.)

[edit: An idea which I wouldn't know about if I hadn't seen it here. For me, HN still is good enough to spend time with. But it has grown less stringent about humor and links to images, which I think reduces S/N.]

MI: Was it clear to you when you started out at as Editor-in-Chief of Science how important the move to electronic publishing was going to be?

FB: When I got to Science, it was quickly explained to me that the price for paper was going up. The price for postage was going up, and I was asked where in the budget did I want to make the cuts in order that we wouldn't be in a deficit. And so it occurred to me, if I was constantly going to be confronted by changes in paper costs and postal rates, which I couldn't control, I would have to find another way to distribute the magazine. And we decided we had to be online quickly.

MI: So the age of electronic publishing really came to fruition while you were at Science. Were there issues that you faced for which you really had to define limits as to how far electronic publishing could go?

FB: Well, PubMed Central [the initiative put forth by the National Library of Medicine to archive and disseminate biomedical research findings] was one of the last issues that I faced, and I think, faced down. It was wrong-headed in its origins. But the concept that people should have access to the scientific literature is of course a good one. Scientists want to have access to research findings so that they can pursue experiments. And when scientists are confronted by a publisher's wall that says you must be a subscriber to get in here, you'd like to find a way to get around it.

But to me, nothing is free. I am aware of the cost of making a prestigious publication. The cost of rejecting 95 percent of all the papers that are submitted makes the accepted ones so valuable. And there's only twenty-four hours in a day, no matter how intense your efforts to keep up with research reports. If I have time to read, I'm going to read in a place where I know that the information has been thoroughly vetted, and so I limit my reading to places where I can trust the judgment of the editors. If everything were free, and everybody could publish everything they want to, anyplace, I'd have no way to know how to sort things out. I certainly don't have time to read through a lot of very provocative assertions that turn out not to be true.

[1] excerpt from http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/content/1/4/192.full [2] Appel 1996 Ann NY Acad Sci "Classical and Contemporary Histochemical Approaches for Evaluating Central Nervous System Microanatomy"

Imagine a lab or office in which everyone used an LED in this way. It might be nice.

Here's the way I can rationalize it: imagine Google spends $20 million (or whatever) to build underlying technology. Then spends $2 billion to roll out a nationwide sales force sufficient to saturate all cities of some threshold size, and another $1 billion for a nationwide marketing campaign to introduce the project to consumers, all over the course of 1 year.

On the surface this is a better deal. But does it remind you of anyone? Microsoft. This is what Microsoft does when they try to do something new. And all too often, they fail. One reason they fail is that it's hard to effectively mobilize thousands of people and spend gobs of money in a short amount of time. The effort is so big it threatens to crush itself under its own weight if it is not properly managed. And management is hard.

Google is essentially sidestepping this management risk by spending a ton of money. They get something that is in a working state, rather than trying to quickly deploy something huge and new. Money is (relatively) cheap to Google, but opportunities for low risk, significant growth into a complementary space are rare. So this makes sense for them.

Here endeth the half-baked disquisition.

[edit: I meant failure to discuss mechanisms of addiction to alcohol, which are at least as interesting the biochemical pathways by which alcohol is metabolized, if not as well understood.]

You have an obligation to look out for the best interests of your friends and family -- i.e., to take care of them -- whereas your only obligation to professional investors is to honor your contracts.

This would be horrifying. Maybe it could work in some fields, but not in mine (neuroscience). What, I'm going to use Java v.<whatever> on Ubuntu v.<whatever> because a funding agency tells me I have to?

I agree with much of your post, but not this bit.

edit: I think much of the professional insecurity of my field -- which feeds into the stuff you're complaining about -- is driven by the fact that way more grad student positions are funded than there are academic jobs. I wrote about this in more detail here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/neurobiology/labs/ahissar/new_page...

Andrew: How about that “Inc.” article? There was an article in “Inc.” which announced Manpacks, and then it asked other entrepreneurs to give feedback and suggestions for Manpacks. How did you guys get that article written about you?

Ken: The editor reached out to us in March. He said they would be interested in doing an article on Manpacks. Would you be interested in an interview? I said, of course.

Andrew: Okay. Was this after the Hacker News hit?

Ken: Yes. It was maybe a week and a half after.

Andrew: That’s so interesting. By the way, I found that other reporters will look at Hacker News and come up with stories. And then those stories end up just kind of growing and growing and feeding on each other.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in...

“You owe me $20, with interest. Don’t worry about paying me back right now. Instead, next time you raise money or sell the company, we’re going to pretend that I’m either investing with the other guy or selling with you."

So if indinero takes more money, the early investors could sell their hypothetical convertible notes to the new investors.

This was the most interesting part of the article to me. Ruby on Rails is relatively obscure. Scaling web sites is relatively obscure. I bet there is a latency, probably inversely proportional to market size, between when a specialized tech skill is originated and when it has disseminated sufficiently that it can be outsourced.

So, there can be a simultaneous shortage and surplus: a shortage of talented developers working with recent technology, and a surplus of talented (and otherwise) developers who are only familiar with older technology.

that was some of the nicest work I ever did -- it's interesting how destructive processes can also produce great work. (This is not to say that the results are worth the destruction.)

Take the feedback you receive and use it to improve the product but unless something is really trivial it is better to sell what you have than to make some promise you can not keep -- another general lesson I would take away is, "be very wary when the salesperson is allowed to write the spec". I bet this is true across all business domains.

Fred never did hire a replacement, and hoped that I would stay on because I would not let my buddies down. -- I think this dynamic is built into the business models of some companies, especially consultancies. You feel guilty if you go home to sleep while your friends are coding 'til their eyes bleed, even when the overwork is brought about by extrinsic factors (see above).

EEG sensors measure large aggregates of activity.

I haven't read the paper thoroughly (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/07/28/1009112107), but looks like the authors are using a strategy of systematic and tightly circumscribed injections of anterograde & retrograde tracers to map out, with unusually high precision, the inter-areal projections for a particular circuit they're interested in. This mapping of inter-areal connectivity is a little different from what I'm interested in, which is to understand how the many-to-many anatomical wiring diagram between individual neurons in a neuronal network relates to the transformation of information carried out by that network. In other words, they are mapping connections between areas, but I think it's likely that an additional level of resolution -- the mapping of connections at the level of individual neurons -- will likely be necessary (and probably insufficient) to crack brain circuits.

Barring that (or some sustained operational mishap -- downtime, security breach, etc.), network effects make it unkillable.