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ewwww, playing video automatically boosted sign ups 18.5%. we cannot let the dark internet win...
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Author Archives: kevin
links for 2010-10-12
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Profile of guys behind Diapers.com - they study Amazon obsessively to figure out what they're doing. Margins in online businesses are extremely low, companies have to be way more efficient
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google creative team highlights cool stuff on the net
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The average incoming freshman thinks 35% of workers earn the minimum wage, firm profits are 30% of sales, inflation rate is 11%, income per person since 1950 has risen by 25%
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Since launching Yipit in February, we’ve had a policy to reach out to users that unsubscribe to collect feedback. We send them an email explaining that we’re a startup and offer them a $10 amazon gift card to get on the phone with us for 10 minutes and explain what happened. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but we actually use a virtual assistant to handle the entire process of setting up the call. We just have to do the calls and everyone on the team does the calls.
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links for 2010-10-11
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What happens when you get acquired - lots of times a company will buy you to get your talent (engineers etc) - $1 to $2 million per engineer isn't a bad number
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h/t ben casnocha. you should take a low dose multivitamin, 1000 units Vitamin D and 1000mg fish oil every day
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Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock - a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed - they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism. When flaws are revealed weak believers pull out, only the strongest are left
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excellent - the most desperate people in your social network are the ones who no one wants to interact with, you need to find a way to shun them from the broader community
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Where do I find cool/interesting links?
1. I use an RSS reader to follow about forty different websites (here's an OPML file with all the feeds I subscribe to). Many of the websites I read are also aggregators of good content. My two favorites right now are Hacker News and The Browser. Jason Kottke is also good, as well as Tyler Cowen.
2. I use Delicious.com to save links. I also have the bookmarks of several people on Delicious show up in my RSS feed. Two good people to follow are Andy McKenzie and Ben Casnocha.
3. Very Short List sends out an email a day pointing to cool stuff.
4. I keep a Twitter account that just follows people who link to interesting things. Currently I'm following aaker, bakadesuyo, vaughanbell, globeideas, and harpers.
5. I'm not on Facebook at the moment but Shane Davis and Chris Blees have consistently good material on their Walls. They are possibly the two people at the Claremonts who spend more time browsing for links than I do.
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links for 2010-10-10
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Jerry Brown 2 to 1 favorite over Whitman at this point
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Why ride a bike when you can ride a horse bike? Good question
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33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s 1980: “We can't go to that restaurant. Karen's vegetarian and it doesn't have anything for her.” 2010: “What restaurant are we going to? I don't know. Karen was supposed to tell me, but she doesn't have a cell, so I can't ask her. I'm sick of her crazy control-freak behaviour. Let's go someplace else and not tell her where.”
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check if your domain has good reputation, sender score, sender base, aol, IP blocks
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links for 2010-10-09
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My rule of thumb: if you see a business using spreadsheets to manage something, there might be an opportunity there
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Moving, a different take than usual, hitchens writing about cancer continues to be excellent, everyone has either had cancer or knows someone who has, everyone is offering him unsolicited advice. A promising treatment involving stem cells is being blocked by religious activism
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But the advent of autonomous vehicles poses thorny legal issues, the Google researchers acknowledged. Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all times, but what does that mean if the human is not really paying attention as the car crosses through, say, a school zone, figuring that the robot is driving more safely than he would? And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software?
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Instead of asking people to find all their friends first, ask them to click on their favorite topics (art, celebrities, etc), follow users, then invite/find your friends on twitter
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links for 2010-10-08
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How many degrees a given page is from Hitler on Wikipedia
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when left alone, online daters ask boring questions - college, hobbies etc. When given interesting questions - "How many partners? Any STD's?" etc, much more interesting, everyone happier. Think about the implications
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links for 2010-10-07
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"Of the 82 participants who saw the study through to the end, the most common pattern of habit formation was for early repetitions of the chosen behaviour to produce the largest increases in its automaticity. Over time, further increases in automaticity dwindled until a plateau was reached beyond which extra repetitions made no difference to the automaticity achieved. The average time to reach maximum automaticity was 66 days."
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“We hope The Wire Monopoly game will go down well not just with fans of the show, but everyone who secretly wishes to be a poor violent black drug dealer from America.”
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What predicts firm bankruptcy? Market Value of equity/Total Liabilities, EBIT/Total Assets, a firm's market size, its past stock returns, and the idiosyncratic standard deviation of its stock returns all forecast failure.
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funny - "When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."
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Losing all your work
You've been typing away on an essay in Microsoft Word when the whole thing crashes, and you lose all your work. You wail, gnash your teeth, yell at the CMC tech staff and then commiserate with everyone you know.
Losing all your work is probably a positive development however, if you have some extra time. It forces you through a second iteration of your work, which should be clearer and sharper than your first because you are visiting the ideas for a second time. Losing all your work on paper though doesn't mean you lose it in your head, and you also probably have an outline or some other reference document to go on.
The other option is to write all of your essays from the command line and use version control to save all of your drafts. It's much less prone to crashes than Word.
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links for 2010-10-05
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expect this story to come up more and more frequently
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lamebook.com, excellent window into americans lives
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How people rationalize wrongdoing, maintain positive self image. "Future selves may score the best reviews of all" - emphasize unwritten future potential
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Don't leave variables in global scope, indent consistently, avoid magic numbers in code, functions should do at most 1 task, etc.
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Groupon customers are poor tippers, rush of people causes poor service, 30% don't make a profit off of the Groupon. Spas/salons do better than restaurants
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From a Sarah Lawrence alum: I don't recall the particular pumpkin-carving event, but Mary's tenure at Sarah Lawrence coincided with all of the following happenings: - The cancellation of Sleaze Ball, an event that celebrated sexual diversity, on the grounds that "too many kids were ending up in ER" (I think the highest count was eight on the evening in question, but my understanding is that more stringent alcohol policies were already in place by then). - The alcohol policy became VERY STRINGENT over the what, four-five years she was at the school. It's by no means a dry campus now, but trying to get a sufficient amount of alcohol at school events tends to be an uphill battle. - A shift in security-student relations. Security became less friends with us, and more disciplinarians. Make of this what you will. The only reason anybody at Sarah Lawrence was sad to see her go was that nobody who met her successor thought that there had been any kind of improvement.
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Don't commit to a price, don't look weak, as the owner you hold all the cards. Doesn't sound at all like selling a house
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At the end of 2009, Gallup asked Americans which living man anywhere in the world they admire most. More volunteered Beck than offered the pope, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, Bill Clinton, or George H.W. Bush. The only man to be mentioned more often than Beck was South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.
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economists invented fake currency that had constant value, after a few months they simply converted to the fake one. amazing
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amazing story of soccer in africa, politics that get involved. fifa tends to promote image of thriving african soccer, downplay the crazy stuff. fascinating
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