five18pm

You are equating higher cost with better quality. There usually is a correlation, but with US healthcare's opaqueness with prices, I wouldn't make that correlation.

Leaving aside that, people do in fact make medical decisions based on cost. For example, for angioplasty there are two options - a medicated stent and a non-medicated, regular stent. The medicated stent is more expensive than the normal one. When it came to choosing one for my father, I chose a medicated one only because I was paying through insurance. But many of the patients out here in India don't have insurance. In that case there is a definite probability that a lower cost one will be chosen. Another example is dialysis. The frequency at which people perform dialysis is directly related to cost and affordability.

It is not always a given that patients would go for the absolute best.

How does one go about eating the sun or the trillion trillion watts produced by sun? You need all that energy converted to something edible - that means there is at least one job, agriculture. If you can automate that, then there is the job of automation engineer. And so it goes...

Dead cells, liver byproducts

Let me add couple more:

(1) Asking for a feature and then never showing up once when it is being built. "Hey, we are adding this page here. Is it okay?" <No answer>. "Hey, is this workflow good?" <No answer>. Once implemented, come around and ask "Why is this built this way?"

(2) Not being interested in any feature that engineering is interested in.

It is okay to talk to customers all the time, but once in a while turn around and talk to engineering too.

McAfee web gateway flags this site as 'Malicious site.' Something to check there.

Allowing foreign investment is a minor problem in ecommerce space. Flipkart has foreign investment via VCs for quite some time.

There are a lot more fundamental issues in ecommerce space.

(1) Low penetration of credit cards - Banks have slowed down considerably their efforts to market credit cards. RBI regulations don't help either. Besides both of these, people have a negative feeling towards credit cards. So credit card usage is low. Cash is king and debit cards and direct bank transfers are next.

(2) Payment is a pain. Paying via credit card, debit card or bank account goes through a two step authentication process which is fraught with failures. There are multiple sites through which payment is routed => Seller site -> Payment gateway intermediary -> Bank site -> (enter password to authenticate payment) -> Back to intermediary -> Back to seller site. This long chain is breaks more often than not. And when it breaks, it becomes a pain to get your money back. Buying something online, especially for some one new is a heart-in-your-mouth experience. Again, RBI guidelines prevent any change in the payment process. It is easier to use Cash on Delivery (CoD).

(3) Two and three means that most customers prefer CoD. But CoD is a pain for merchants. There is no guarantee that customers would end up completing the sale. Most purchases are impulse purchases. But in case of CoD, you receive the product after 2-3 days, long after the impulse is gone. So the rejection rate for CoD sales is high compared to Credit/debit card sales.

(4) Logistics is another nightmare. The companies do not have scale and are quite expensive compared to the cost of goods sold. They are also not reliable. Delivery management and providing customer support for late/missing shipments forms the bulk of support cost. So any medium/large ecommerce company starts its own courier service. Suddenly these companies are not just ecommerce companies, they are also managing a completely new and different business.

(5) Low internet penetration and usage.

(6) Wafer thin margins. The margins are already thin. It is spread even thinner by offering free shipping. Shipping used to be free for any product of any cost. Its only now that companies have started charging for shipping. These thin margins mean companies won't be breaking even any time soon. Its a long haul game and its going to leave quite a few dead companies in its midst.

Derek Lowe has real high class humor. I always end up knowing new things while laughing like a maniac. It just makes things a little awkward at office though. I always had to keep watching over my shoulder just so that no one would notice that I was reading things which can blow up with explosive power which will make TNT feel like baby powder and laughing like a maniac :)

Some one did both to our startup. It was one of the most productive meetings that I had. The conclusion that we needed to shut shop was pretty clear after that meeting. It was something that I guess we knew already, but needed validation (you know how much founders hang on to hope).

So yes, if an idea sucks, say "it sucks." It will be a revelation.

Its not a troll comment. I just spent 3 hours poring over how CUPS worked in 12.04 and trying to find out why my USB printer is not working. I just could not fix it and rebooted my laptop to Windows to print. And this after installing the official drivers and reading the official install guide, etc. The damned thing was that they have changed CUPS yet again in 12.04 and whatever the official docs says is not valid anymore.

This sort of thing has been there around Linux for ever. I have reached a stage where I am just too bored to do the endless investigation and fixing any more. I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works"

Steven Pinker's book 'The Stuff of Thought' deals with this sort of phrasing. And he explains it quite better than what I can. So here is the relevant excerpt from the book:

Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

The clearest example is ordinary politeness. When you are at a dinner party and want the salt, you don't blurt out, "Gimme the salt." Rather, you use what linguists call a whimperative, as in "Do you think you could pass the salt?" or "If you could pass the salt, that would be awesome."

Taken literally, these sentences are inane. The second is an overstatement, and the answer to the first is obvious. Fortunately, the hearer assumes that the speaker is rational and listens between the lines. Yes, your point is to request the salt, but you're doing it in such a way that first takes care to establish what linguists call "felicity conditions," or the prerequisites to making a sensible request. The underlying rationale is that the hearer not be given a command but simply be asked or advised about one of the necessary conditions for passing the salt. Your goal is to have your need satisfied without treating the listener as a flunky who can be bossed around at will.[1]

Analytically minded people would do well to pick up this book and try to understand the science behind our interactions.

[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1659772,00....

Happy Birthday Slashdot! It still has some of the best discussions in tech world.

Should we support NFC? Should we launch a digital wallet? Should we build a robotic Prius? Should we develop augmented reality glasses and launch those glasses by doing a live Google+ hangout with skydivers jumping out of a blimp over San Francisco?

The answer is "Yes". Without having an ok NFC, you are not going to get a good NFC. Apple can come out and make it perfect, awesome, amazing, but there has to be something to start with.

> And beating expectations buoys our mood. All else being equal, people who wait less than they anticipated leave happier than those who wait longer than expected.

The same philosophy which underlies the familiar "under promise and over deliver". Guess this also explains the enormous amount of outrage that comes out of schedule slips, even in cases where schedule is of little consequence.

That's the troubling part. Even when Ben came to know that Tim was not conducting 1:1s, his first instinct should be to know why 1:1s were not happening. He could've asked Steve or even Tim. Maybe Tim had a different way of knowing and talking to his employees, maybe he figured out a better mechanism to connect with his employees. Wouldn't Ben want to know about it?

You took the words out of me.

Even if there are no external customers waiting for the release, a business' other departments have to plan their activities. When will marketing start their pre-release activities without engineering's estimates? When will sales start talking to customers about the new release? There is just too many things that need engineering's estimates.

App discovery is a problem for consumers as well. My iPad does not show no more than ~40 games. I don't know if I am not looking hard enough or I just can't browse more than that what the app store app shows. I can search for an app, but I have to know the name of the app for that. So for me, if the app does not show in the app store app links, then the app pretty much does not exist.

If I do want a particular application, I search Google first than the app store. Most probably some one has already gone through the pains of finding an app and has talked about it online.

So discovery problem exists for app consumers as well. And there in lies a startup idea in app discovery but I wonder how Apple/Google would allow that.

Iron in the blood is paramagnetic. It is not affected by magnets.

Guns are not banned in India. It just takes more effort to get guns. You need a license to own a firearm. One of the high courts declared that unless there is something adverse against the candidate one cannot be denied license. This effectively makes it a right to own a firearm.

This is more broken than email.

1. This solution eliminates the decentralized nature of email. 2. No solution for corporate customers who would want to keep their emails private. 3. How would new contacts form?

That Haskell is used extensively in trading is quite interesting to know. This distinction did not come out that well on the wiki link. This is probably the reorganization that the page needs. Split in to sections highlighting companies which use Haskell as primary language, then split along industry lines.

Highlighting companies which use Haskell as primary language will be beneficial to both the language and the companies. Brings along a trust factor that real money can be made while using on Haskell.

I thought the link would be of companies that use Haskell as their primary language of development, but it is more of companies which use/had used Haskell in one of their projects. The former would be interesting to know, if indeed such companies exist.

Why didn't they think of using dedicated servers? Dedicated servers would have been more economical than using so many VPSes.

At my previous work we used docking stations for the laptops. So at desk I had my big 22" monitor, mouse and regular keyboard connected to my laptop and whenever I am away I still had everything that I worked on with me.

Then again I was a manager so all I had open most of the time was Thunderbird and Excel. I don't know if the extra pixels helped in my case ;).

In any case I would recommend that setup for work.

Also, I've not actually heard of Copycopter before, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to make the causative link between your announcement of shutting down, to also having AOL and Oink following suit. Correlation does not prove causation. (I've not actually heard of copycopter before).

I think they were trying to joke about the shutdown. I don't think thoughtbot would have been under any illusion that the events were related.

This is what happens in front of every single Indian government office - state or central :(

Do you like your team members? If not, find out why and find a reason to like them. Once you develop that basis to like your team members, everything else will fall in to place. You will take interest in their activities, not just in terms of getting your work done, but in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

Talk to your team members on an individual basis frequently and in an informal setting - people are much more open in an informal setting. Keep these meetings to 5 mins. If there are more topics than can be covered in 5 mins, increase the frequency of meetings, not the length.

Never do your team member's work. Help them in every way for them to do their work, but just don't do it for them.

(Break every rule / advice that people are giving out. Finding what works for you is one of best parts of management)

In a different location Mark does talk about the x-axis - the x-axis is "Time and Money"

http://smartfaststartup.com/2011/06/08/real-secret-to-startu...

Which make the loops palatable.

If he had been good, he wouldn't have linked to tvtropes in the first place ;).