jpallen

It sounds silly, but I find juggling is a great way to get a bit of exercise in the office. Once you can juggle it's a great way to step away from a problem and do something interesting but mindless for a while. After 10-15 minutes of it your arms will have had a little workout.

It's difficult/impossible to get a merchant account without a previous trading history and money to show off. The financial spend isn't too bad, but from what I can tell you need to have some sizeable accounts before you can get one. Basically they're aimed at the larger business end of things, which makes small projects that need online transactions a non-starter.

(I tried and failed to set up a merchant account and instead had to settle for PayPal as the only other option)

> WHY

From my experience in the UK it's the only option for accepting payment that doesn't have the serious admin and financial outlay of getting set up with a proper merchant account. Perhaps in this case going with EventBrite from the beginning would have made more sense but that's only an easy call to make in hindsight.

Edit: You seem to have changed your comment. Consider this a reply to the underlying message of your sarcasm.

Even with all the talk recently about how successive governments have failed the children of Britain, I still haven't heard any reasoned arguments about what can be done to change the situation.

The excessive drinking culture we have isn't fixed by controlling the price of alcohol or pub opening hours, and underage sex doesn't disappear with better sex education. These are all part of the culture that people are brought up in and can't be regulated away. Yet I've never heard anyone discuss how we can create a more positive culture.

Don't worry, neither do physicists. When people talk about 'quantum gravity' they mean some theory which unites curving of space with the idea of gravity being 'quantised' in particles. Only string theory does this consistently (and here the curvature manifests itself as a background of gravitons), but string theory isn't really a serious competitor for physics beyond the standard model.

If the LHC finds nothing it would be interesting but I don't think it would be a good step forward for physics. Of course any step in the right direction is good, but we would have no where to specifically look, and have just blown a lot of funding with no results to show off during the next round of funding.

A much better outcome would be to find something exotic that can spark research in the right direction. At the moment we have many ideas past the standard model but no way to know which to pursue with any seriousness.

Of course, discussion of what would be good or bad doesn't matter much. It will find what it finds (or doesn't)

> Why are there no 16, 32, 64, and so on, dimensions of numbers? Would multiplication not be invertible with them?

Yes, this is exactly why the 16 dimensional sedenions are not in the same category as the others. For it to be a division algebra, you must be able to reverse any multiplication that isn't by zero. This is just the normal concept of division in the real numbers. It also allows us to define division in the complex, quaternion and octonion numbers. However, it is possible to multiply two non-zero sedenions together and get zero. This breaks this property completely.

> Is there a possibility of things that are distinct from our concept of numbers but are none-the-less useful being discovered in the future?

Absolutely! These four numbers systems are a tiny portion of spaces studied by mathematicians. There are a lot of interesting things that can be said just by generalising a few properties of numbers (e.g. without requiring that we can divide, or without requiring that we have both addition and multiplication). There are groups, fields, rings, algebras, topological spaces, and all sorts of interesting things that aren't 'numbers' as such.

There are no three dimensional numbers because it's impossible to construct such a system that behaves like 'numbers'. The real, complex, quaternion and octonion numbers are the only 'normed division algebras'. This basically means they are the only spaces with a notion of length in which mutliplication is invertible (division). These properties are needed for anything that we want to call 'numbers'. The fact that there are only 4 such spaces is quite a profound result and leads to a lot of other important results. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurwitz%27s_theorem_%28normed_d... for more information.

I'm in the North East, in Durham.

Yes, different fields will have different styles. Perhaps my language was too strong but I meant that people generally don't like to publish (make public) their current research ideas until they have something well formed and complete.

Like any community site there is a serious chicken and egg problem. Even more so in academia where there is a very engrained sense that research and discussion should happen behind closed doors. I can't imagine academics wanting to discuss their opinions too openly for fear of it coming back to damage their reputation later. If you could foster an academic community which was more open it would have a positive effect on the whole of academia, but then we're talking about changing an institution not just building a community.

I notice that you have made a point of being able to change the anonymity of a comment at any time. I think this is one way to help with fear of damaging reputation so good job with that.

I've got quite a few thoughts on the problem and ideas to go about tackling these issues. I don't know if they'll ever come to anything, but I'd love to bounce them around with people working in this area. My email address is in my profile if you'd like to chat.

Even if you don't have a personal story you should still be able to construct a nice narrative about how your product can help the end user. I think the important thing is to not just list 20 features and expect the user to be awed by your amazing product. Instead, give a description of situations where there are pain points and explain how your product comes in with just the right feature set and pricing to save the day.

When I first started with Javascript I used to think it was an awful excuse for a programming language, with its weird prototypal inheritance and functions pretending to be classes. The more I get to know it though, the more impressed I am by how all these features can be used and built upon to create an easy and flexible language. It has been taken in so many directions and I think Backbone is a prime example of how it can be built upon well. I love coding using the Backbone framework but I like that it's not the only option for doing things in an object oriented way.

What you say is true if you restrict the term usability to just mean user interface design, but usability can go far beyond that. Usability should be about how your product solves a problem, not just how its options and menus are laid out. As soon as you hear about how Dropbox works you know instantly that it's far more usable than other sync options.

Services like this significantly reduce the barrier to entry for complicated web apps. I've been mulling over an idea for a while now but it would tricky to implement. With the discovery of Directed Edge and a few other services it's now a minor technical hurdle. I can shift my thinking away from how to build the technology and onto how to execute the idea well, something that hasn't had nearly enough thought yet. I think services like this making innovation much easier.

Nice article, thanks. Is there anyway to have a smoother 'install' process rather than just asking the user to bookmark your page?

I use Paypal's recurring billing API directly. It's not an ideal solution, but being based in the UK without a merchant account it's the only one I have available. I use ActiveMerchant and some extensions to talk to the Paypal API but I've had to write the logic to handle recurring billing myself. I'm trying to extract that logic into a gem and make it more robust. I'd like to eventually release it and possibly save some headaches amoung small developers who just want to get up and running quickly.

I would appreciate a splashscreen or other method of letting me know what the app does before I let it have access to my Facebook account. I want to see what I'll get out of it first.

I agree, ScribTeX needs support for XeTeX and other LaTeX compilers. As the creator of the site, I guess I'm in a unique position to make this happen! It's been on my todo list for a while now and isn't without its difficulties, but I'll use this conversation as renewed motivation to get it done.

A lot of users have said they really appreciate how accessible LaTeX is with ScribTeX. I know that's not an important point for everyone but it is a big help to some.

Hi, I'm the creator of ScribTeX. I'm a regular reader of HN and it was great to see this on the front page this morning. Most of my effort is focused on the technical side of things and I've been relying on word of mouth for promotion. (Sorry to those of you who have been looking for something like this for a while!)

Thank you for all the positive comments, they really mean a lot. The constructive feedback from HN is excellent as always.

For the interested, here are some features I am working on at the moment: * Better history navigation. The current implementation is quite flat and cumbersome. * A much better editor. Currently it's just a textbox with syntax highlighting, but I'm working on something to rival the functionality of a desktop editor. * Overall design, in particular the splash page and information pages

Push and pull access to the underlying git repository is currently a feature I am testing. Send me an email (james@scribtex.com) if you would like me to enable it for your account.