djm

I'm aware of your work with racket (read your paper from a few years ago about deploying the web server in a uni environment).

Is this something I can plug into a racket web app? If it is I'd be interested as I am building web apps with racket. I'm not in a position where I can actually deploy something yet but I'll want to build in statistics collection when I am a little closer.

Edit: OK, I read your article via the cached link another user posted. I'll have a look at your linked papers etc when I get a chance but it definitely looks interesting. Your post wasn't clear on what form this beta will take - is it a commercial venture to compete with optimizely et al or one of your open source projects I could require into my own app and deploy myself?

For others reading this who don't know the story my recollection of events is that it goes something like this:

(1) UK builds large offshore firing platforms in the english channel to target german bombers in WW2 then abandons them after the war.

(2) A military family moves to one of the platforms after the war and declares it to be an independant state. The UK government lets them get away with it.

(3) Over the years they remain there and allow others to come and live on the platform. They issue passports etc. At one point they were the base for a pirate radio station. At another point they fended off an armed invasion/attempted coup of the platform.

(4) In the late 90's havenco set up a business on the island. The idea was to provide secure hosting outside the scope of any legal harassment from authorities. The business didn't work out.

(5) A few years ago the platform burned down in a fire.

I'd love to hear accounts from people who have actually been there & seen it for themselves.

Right now they are just hooking people up and handling payments. They could go from that to learning how to put in place the best verification/insurance/customer service/emergency handling mechanisms in order to beat competitors in service quality.

It's analagous to how paypal won payments by learning to be the best at handling fraud.

Oh, wow. I don't think you could be more wrong. From her point of view, PG is a going to come accross as a concerned airbnb investor. She is already upset about brian chesky complaining that this incident will affect his ability to raise money for the company which she mentioned in the blog post. A phone call from PG could be like adding petrol to fire, even if he is genuine and wants to help.

What this lady needs is to have one point of interaction with a single person at Airbnb. That person needs the ability to make decisions about financial assistance etc, so preferably one of the founders.

This was probably 10+ years ago so I don't want to make any judgements about his work now. If he has carried on as he started it's hard to believe he has managed to make a following for himself.

I guess if you publish enough stuff over a long enough time people come to see that as evidence of credibility.

I'm still pretty sceptical however because I think you will encounter a lot of cases that are difficult to diagnose just by looking at a persons data.

For example, the first ever case I dealt with was an autistic lady who had been scammed into buying broadband when she didn't have a computer. She only understood that she had signed up to the service when she started getting debt collection letters for not paying the bill. If I hadn't met her in person and only seen her data I probably would have just set up a repayment plan instead of writing to the ISP and challenging her liability for the debt which is what I actually did.

You'd be surprised how many odd cases like this pop up.

I'm surprised the US doesn't have a charity offering a similar service to what we do in the UK; over here debt advice is a regulated industry and registered advisers work for a wide range of organisations - charities, local authorities etc. A friend of mine even interviewed recently for an gardening club that wanted to hire a debt adviser to help it's members.

With respect to (2) you are totally right. If you phone your bank asking to reduce the size of your payments they will jump at the chance to do it. The reason is simple - reducing payment amounts increases the lifetime of the loan and therefore increases your overall amount of debt.

A service that does not do that is doing a pretty bad job imo. If you have spent any time with people who have debt problems you would know that by the time they seek help they are in a situation whereby (for a large % of cases) bankruptcy or court-ordered payment plans are the only viable option they have. Getting somebody onto a payment plan when they should be going bankrupt is doing them a huge disservice.

I considered some years ago going into this market myself but I could never get past the need for face to face meets with clients. Getting them to accurately provide you with enough information that you can give them proper advice is hard enough in person, let alone online.

In any case, I'll be interested to watch this and see how you guys get along with it. Good luck.

The problem you are referring to largely comes from the businesses trying to sell people IVAs etc. Those products are not bad in themselves but they are heavily mis-sold to people who should really be going bankrupt instead.

web forums are sometimes OK for advice but it's a bit iffy in my experience. I wouldn't use a lawyer - very costly and usually a little outside the scope of their regular work.

It's interesting to note though that the difference between this and a data structure is not that great. I haven't looked into it but I'm certain I've read somewhere that data structures as implemented in racket (which is what my example is written in) actually desugar into something like my example code.

I still like to use this technique here and there, especially when there will only be one copy of the structure in use in my program. This is because it's simply more convenient to write something like (counter++) rather than declaring a global COUNTER and typing in (set! COUNTER (add1 COUNTER)) etc.

   (define (init-counter)
     (local
        ((define counter 0)
        (define (inc) (set! counter (add1 counter)))
        (define (dec) (set! counter (sub1 counter)))
        (define (current-count) counter))
      (values inc dec current-count)))

   (define-values (counter++ counter-- current-count) (init-counter))

In many cases where you want object orientation something like this will be sufficient. No need to go the whole way with inheritance and whatnot.

Bigger deliveries to larger groups is the obvious solution to that. Good luck :)

Actually I think they would. Being an employer of a human would be a sign of prestige for the wealthy.

Just imagine you're at a future cocktail party and your host unveils his pretty human waitresses. He's obviously wealthy to afford a real human instead of using robots like everyone else

The western approach was described as bringing your real life network online (fb etc)[1] and the eastern approach was described in terms of sites that allow people to create temporary ad-hoc networks based around shared interests. The example of this given in the program was mixi.jp which is apparently huge in japan.

This latter approach seems to be closer to what you are trying to do. It'll be interesting to watch how far you get with this, so please keep posting to hn to keep us up to date.

[1] This description works for fb but I don't think it really applies to twitter.

moby documentation: http://planet.racket-lang.org/package-source/dyoo/moby.plt/3...

World: http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/htdw-v1.pdf

I'm playing now. Will post some code when I have it working.

This lets me do scheme->js in the browser using moby, which is implemented in racket. So my code gets converted to js on the server hosting this site. Does this mean I can (require ...) other racket libraries as well?

Bookmarked for later.

PG: Have you considered buying it yourself? I'm assuming that you are one of those regulars and can probably afford it. You said the business was doing well in another comment so I assume they could continue paying you rent at their current rate.

http://vihart.com/doodling/

http://vihart.com/videos/

Maybe we're subconsciously trying to make him come back by flooding his server with requests for attention.

Everyone starting out seems to think it'll be all over in a year and they'll be rich. It's more likely to be a couple of years and few people can sustain intense work for that long without crashing.