dreeves

40 ms·

361.
by dreeves 15y ago
They totally do! (Ok, our revenue is just a trickle -- http://beeminder.com/meta/paid -- but it seems like a steady trickle since launching so we're feeling very hopeful!) We've had a lot of discussions -- for example, http://lesswrong.c
362.
by dreeves 15y ago
I'm also eager to learn the answer to this, or what kind of options there are to access the data programmatically. (The answer is relevant to my own startup, http://beeminder.com which is a goal-tracking and anti-akrasia service -- you pl
363.
by dreeves 15y ago
That's persuasive. You might be right. It's a tough sell though: Come on everyone, time to start waking up earlier! Up and at 'em! Daylight's a-wastin'! (Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of changing m
364.
by dreeves 15y ago
I view DST as a clever hack to solve an otherwise intractable coordination problem: getting everyone to shift their schedules to not waste all that extra morning daylight in the summer. As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like tha
365.
by dreeves 15y ago
I think ideally you create an entirely new word, like a portmanteau, that is nonetheless spelled exactly the way you'd expect it to be.
366.
by dreeves 15y ago
Don't forget Yahoo! And I actually think there's plenty of other precedent for whimsical company-naming, even before the internet.
367.
by dreeves 15y ago
Ah, I almost thought so too, but, well, quoting myself from the article: The word "nomenclature" is almost there, but not quite. "Nomenclature" has several meanings, including simply a name or designation, a system of naming, or a set of na
368.
by dreeves 15y ago
It's hard for me to evaluate Baidu as a name since it's targeted at Chinese speakers but the literal meaning is apparently just "hundreds of times" (interesting parallel with Google, come to think of it). I don't see any brilliant connectio
369.
by dreeves 15y ago
Yeah, sort of a stretch. What I thought pushed it off the fence though was that it's a whole adverbial phrase which is pretty cool and in the same spirit as verbability. "Should we sell this stuff brick-and-mortar or viaweb?"
370.
by dreeves 15y ago
Note: it turns out the real name for "nominology" (the study of naming things) is "onomastics". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics
371.
by dreeves 15y ago
Wow, thank you! I'm delighted at the thought that the criteria may be useful. My feeling is that brevity is trivially automatable, as you suggest: just pick the function. Though brevity in terms of syllables might also matter. ("Wikipedia"
372.
by dreeves 15y ago
http://youOS.com
373.
by dreeves 15y ago
Yeah, that's just me with the colors. I tried to justify my scheme in my own post about naming: http://messymatters.com/nominology Good point about the trickiness in predicting verbability. As for the evocativity of "viaweb" I think it se
374.
by dreeves 15y ago
Oh, note the parts in brackets are my interjections (from our now internet-decades of hindsight).
375.
by dreeves 15y ago
Back up (I hope). Really sorry about that!
376.
by dreeves 15y ago
To quote Paul Graham from the article: "A company with a name like that could not have arisen organically. 'Cool.com' smells of a media conglomerate trying to create a web spinoff." In other words, it indicates you have more money than brai
377.
Paul Graham's long-lost 2006 Infogami essay, "Startup Names"(messymatters.com)
157 points by dreeves 15y ago|65 comments
378.
by dreeves 15y ago
Here's us committing to an average of one User-Visible Improvement to our startup per day: http://beeminder.com/meta/uvi It's not quite the same as the Seinfeld calendar strategy in that we can in fact break the chain, we're just forced t
379.
by dreeves 15y ago
> "Don't Break The Chain[1] iPhone app that I use on/off" You may be unclear on the concept! :)
380.
by dreeves 15y ago
I think you're confusing "virality" with "popularity". Or maybe it's a God of the Gaps argument -- if we looked at sufficiently popular stuff we'd see viral propagation! The study considered a pretty diverse set of online stuff, with, I pre
381.
by dreeves 15y ago
App Script looks nice. Does anyone who's been hacking with it know if it should be easy to implement these other features I've been wanting: Re-Ping: Add an additional field when composing an email that causes the email you're sending to ap
382.
by dreeves 15y ago
So buy extended warranties on all your electronics in case everything breaks at once and you couldn't afford to replace them all? That's too far-fetched for me. I'd assume that you could scrape together enough money (especially with all the
383.
by dreeves 15y ago
Wow, that's crazy! Oh, wait, in Oakland, nevermind. :) But I think this is a red herring because the fraudsters wanted to sue you for damages like a fake neck injury or something. So it's your liability insurance that would pay (or call the
384.
by dreeves 15y ago
I'm not sure I understand point 1, about non-linearity. Is there any conceivable way that could cause the odds to shift in your favor? Point 2 I think could only make the odds worse for you if it involves increased overhead for the insuranc
385.
by dreeves 15y ago
This also introduces the Ear Full of Cider Principle, as articulated by Marlon Brando's character in "Guys and Dolls": One of these days in your travels a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards, on which the seal is no
386.
by dreeves 15y ago
Hells yes. Applecare is ridiculous. Somehow their sales people are so good though that they make me feel like it's a good idea (and just a couple hundred more dollars when I'm already spending thousands!) until I snap myself out of it. It's
387.
If you could write a check and go on with your life, don't insure against it(messymatters.com)
24 points by dreeves 15y ago|42 comments
388.
by dreeves 15y ago
That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date. Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than you.
389.
by dreeves 15y ago
Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia page. The most recent thing I was impressed by was this: http://www.wolframalpha.c
390.
by dreeves 15y ago
I have a different answer than all the other replies: for me it's just about fitting as much of my code on the screen as possible. The standard xterm font is nice and compact. For every other font I've tried, if you adjust it so that it mat

More ›