jgarmon

As a test model, I asked LlamaCoder to "Build me an app for generating characters for the Dungeons and Dragons TTRPG, using the the third edition ruleset." Here's what happened.

The state is deeply red, but Jefferson County (where Louisville's MSA is centered) is decidedly blue.

Vernor Vinge reference?

I assume this statement means that the advertiser's site does not appear organically on the first page of search results. Thus, buying paid placement on the first page only produces one listing on the first page (the ad) rather than two or more (the ad and the organic search result).

Far be it from me to impugn the credibility of researchers I don't know, but I have to think there's at least some confirmation bias at work when Google concludes that giving Google money for paid ads is a good thing.

Related question from a different perspective: HOW DO I MAKE MY CEO TAKE SOME TIME OFF?

I'm not a confounder, but the CEO-founder is a friend and hired me on as soon as he cleared his A-round funding. (We've been confounders before on a project that flopped and he knew I wasn't in the risk position to be a dayjob-quitting early employee this time.) He's a serious workaholic -- claims to enjoy being so -- and the company is doing very well. That said, he's CLEARLY burning out.

He's talked for the last year about taking some time off, but between the birth of a new child, fundraising, strategic partnerships and the continued burden of success, his "week in Florida" kept being pushed off, shrunk to "three days in Florida" to "a day off" to "I'll take some time after this next funding round. Maybe."

Setting aside the fact that he's my CEO (and a ragged chief exec is bad for everybody), he's also a friend. I don't want to see him burn out. This will almost certainly NOT be the last company we work on together, and I'd like to see him survive -- mind, body, marriage and social circle intact -- past our current endeavor.

So, again, how do I convince my workaholic CEO to take some time off?

Supplementary material: the Onlinesmanship WIki http://onlinemanship.wikia.com/wiki/Onlinemanship

Curated by Theresa Neilsen Hayden, who at one time modded comments at BoingBoing. As a former forum mod myself, I can attest that there are LOTs of great crowd-hacking insights here.

There's a legal principle call Forum Non Conveniens that is supposed to remedy this, though I don't know if anyone has challenged these seizures on those grounds. Basically, a legal matter is supposed to be tried in the most relevant and appropriate jurisdiction. For example, you sue a corporation in the state where it violated civil law, rather than state where it's headquartered. I shouldn't have to fly to Dallas to sue Pizza Hut if my local franchise poisoned me.

That said, the Internet breaks down a lot of established jurisdictional law because a website can operate effectively anywhere the Internet exists, and as such can theoretically be subject to the laws of any web-connected jurisdiction. These seizures are just another example of how the law has not caught up to the basic operating procedures of the web.

There is a certain legal philosophy that says the Internet is operating under its own version of Maritime Law, which is to say its a non-national zone where the law is defined by consensus practice and then ratified by bordering or participating jurisdictions. International salvage rights emerged from common maritime practice, and are now generally recognized as legally binding.

That's in theory a good model for the web, but I'm very certain the US Government doesn't see it that way.

1) Self-reported happiness is an EXTREMELY unreliable indicator, as the social pressure to "seem happy" is very real and very different by culture, class and educational level

2) Happiness and income are relational in that we've seen over and over again people are most happy not by being objectively "rich" but simply objectively richer than their peer group. "Poor" countries with a growing middle class see themselves as having -- or at least with the potential to have -- more than the median material wealth of their peer group. "rich" countries with shrinking middle classes have the opposite expectation.

Bottom line, this is merely a very clumsy study

I don't in general disagree, except to say that the consumerization of IT departments means that enterprises are using consumer-oriented stuff, so you get the best of both headaches these days.

And if you think the neterprise is bad, just try selling into the government channel. Jeebus frak, those guys are hideously cheap and supremely demanding. If it weren't for scandalously longterm lock-in due to high switching costs -- when everything is reviewed forever, almost nothing ever changes, including product selections -- no one would sell to the public sector EVER.

I would be extremely curious if this holds for content as well as app. We've trained users that content is free, while apps can occasionally cost money. This has led to all kinds of price distortions in music and, most especially, ebooks.

As a content producer who works closely with engineers, I can vouch that good content requires no less training and effort than good apps. A novel-length ebook probably takes more time and effort to produce (for any level of quality) than an app. I'd imagine an album of music requires even more. Yet we we never hear stories about perfect price elasticity in content.

I'm genuinely curious if price elasticity holds true in content and, if so, why we haven't heard as much about it.

We did precisely the same thing at our company about 18 months ago. Our original codebase just couldn't scale. It was a great MVP platform, and we learned a great deal from it, but it simply couldn't handle load, sophisticated billing options, or any reasonable expansion of the product functionality.

That said, we left the new and old systems running in parallel (all new users were directed to the new platform) for over a year before we even informed users we were shutting it off, then gave them another six months to migrate. And we never purged the old data; it's in cold storage in case someone ever comes looking for it.

Rewriting the codebase isn't something you should take lightly, but "never" is pretty damn strong word.

WOW, I had NO IDEA that was still out there. I guess nothing ever dies on the internet.

This isn't about agile. This isn't about methodologies. It's about one basic principle that's true in every industry, for any and every management system:

PROCESS IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR LEADERSHIP.

No set of rules can compensate for bad management and employees. Rules usually empower bad managers and disguise bad employees. No methodology -- agile or otherwise -- can stand up to bad execs, bad project leads and/or bad coders.

It starts with hiring. That's how Google gets away with loose rules -- they prioritize hiring "Google-level" coders and managers. All else is details.

This is not a new game. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" was born, then later became "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft" on the back of "industry journals" that were more or less the dead-tree version of the rackets Fake Steve is describing. None of this is new. This, more or less, is the history of subscription trade journals in every industry for the last 100 years.

Model is thus: Subscribe to our journal, we'll ply you for survey responses/advertising. Fail to pay? You won't get reviewed or if so, it won't be flattering. Advertise? You'll be reviewed, and positively so. Oh, and we'll charge you for the report born of the analysis of the survey data you gave us. Repeat for all major players in a niche field. Welcome to industry publishing.

Also, not all community members are created equal.

I used to be a mod/product lead for a major IT community forum. We had a group of 300 or so hardcore posters (which the ad team referred to as "inventory builders") who we took behind the curtain and showed our prototypes before we released them. They often had some interesting feedback, but we quickly fell into a strange trap:

The changes the hardcore users wanted didn't drive usage -- posting or reading -- when we implemented them.

These guys were already spending every damn spare moment posting in our forum, so they had no more to give and all the esoteric bells and whistles (segmented follow lists, advanced karma scoring, multi-tiered private messaging) they wanted were completely irrelevant to the casual user.

When we shifted to testing changes that drove casual usage, we saw much better results. The hardcore group wasn't against it, generally, except for those petty few who saw the forum as their private playground and didn't like the riff raff wandering in to post. They were just dumbfounded as to why we were wasting time on these "beginner" features.

You don't want to alienate the devoted userbase, but data -- not anecdotal feedback -- is what should guide your decisions.

This true for non-coder creatives, too. I can't count the number of times I've been asked to "look at a design" or "go over some copy" because three other employees had some feedback in some meting I wasn't a part of, but no one can remember exactly was "off" with the deliverable. We then have to do the SKype/email round robin until everyone has given their comments again.

This gets even worse when we, the creatives, get feedback about functional changes.

"When I click the checkout button, it goes to the shopping cart."

"Uh...yeah."

"Could you have an upsell page pop up between the two."

"I can write the copy and spec the creative and functional design, but I can't change the button functionality. You'll have to get that prioritized in the next sprint."

"We don't want to bother engineering. We need to get this done quickly."

"It's a functional change. We have to involve engineering."

"So you can't write the page."

"I can write the page. I can spec the page. I can't build or deploy the page."

"That's disappointing."

"You have no idea."

The naive assumption here is that the sellout option is the entrepreneur's decision alone. If you've taken VC cash, you're answerable to a board of directors and a group of investors. If the money guys are getting cold feet, and want their cash out now, it's very hard (often impossible) to NOT sell.

If you've raised an A round, the easiest place to get your B round is the original set of investors (not least because it can keep the number of board seats/turnover low). If the A round guys want an acquisition exit and you refuse, not only are you spiting your best option for B round funding, you now have to raise money in an environment when all the other VCs know you ignored the last round of VCs' desires. Good luck getting your B round in that scenario.

Entrepreneurs may not want to be part of a talent acquisition, but often VCs do. If you're determined to never work for a big corporation you don't own, you better bootstrap forever and never take VC cash.

We had a more subtle approach at a forum for IT pros I used to moderate. We called it the Crazy Cafe. Known trolls wouldn't be banned -- they'd just create a new login and start trolling again, leading to a metagame amongst our community of guessing which of the old trolls the new troll really was. Instead, we'd simply flag the troll as a member of the Crazy Cafe, and their posts would be invisible except to other members of the Crazy Cafe (and to mods, if we so chose). The trolls didn't know they'd been made invisible; all they saw was that no one (save other trolls) responded to their flame bait, and thus they lost interest. It worked shockingly well.

I expect that telecommuting and/or salary are the dealbreakers here.

These auto-resume sites apply pretty dumb filters right off the bat, and you probably got kicked out of the responder queue the second you ask for a six-figure pay rate and/or the option to telecommute.

As a writer, I have the same experience. There are days I can't type fast enough. They're rare, but they happen.

The corollary to this is that you can't wait on the zone to do your job. Muses have no respect for deadlines.

During my consulting days, this was a hard issue to get across to many clients. (Part of the reason I don't do much consulting anymore.) My time has a value. You're paying for my time. Whether you extract value from my time is up to you, but I'm going to be paid for it either way.

My consulting colleagues often disagreed with this philosophy, trying to walk some careful balance of not asking to be paid too much so the client will use you again. use being the operative word here. If the client is the type that doesn't value your time, you don't want them to hire you. It never ends up being worth it.

Fair point. Sorry if I overstepped.

That's on our roadmap, yes. In the future we'll be storage-agnostic, so you can use our S3 storage, your own S3 storage, Box.net, Dropbox, and a few other options we're mulling over.

Those are fair criticisms of Backupify to date. We've recently totally reworked our throttling mechanisms, to our initial backup times are decreasing rather rapidly. But, to your point, we are at the mercy of how fast Google can give us the data through their API. That said, given Google's general uptime, the likelihood of Google losing a file before we can back it up is pretty remote. Not zero chance, but really unlikely.

The $4.99 per month plan, Backupify Pro 100, allows for 5 users on an Apps domain and 20GB of storage. That plan is geared towards small mom & pop operations, not the bigdog system e1ven was running.

Our Pro 500 plan is $19.99 per month and includes 10 Google Apps users and unlimited storage. That actually breaks down to less than $2 per user per month. Beyond that first ten, additional users are $3 per user per month. I usually just quote the $3 figure for simplicity's sake, especially since most admins using a paid Google Apps domain (Google Apps Premium) have more than 10 users anyway.

Okay e1ven, call this number 1.800.571.4984. Ask for Ryan. Or, if your prefer, email ryan@backupify.com or tweet @ryanatbackupify. He's our inside sales guy. Backupify can't get your lost file back, but if it happens again, we can make sure its restored in minutes, not days (or never). 30-day trial of our premium product, for you or anybody else who reads this post. http://www.backupify.com/business/500

Actually, since SugarSync inaugurated the shameless plug portion of the thread, let it be said that Google Apps is hard to manually backup. That why we automated it at Backupify. http://www.backupify.com

Automatic daily Google Apps backups -- all of it, even Google Sites -- for just $3 per user per month. Unlimited storage. One-click restore for Google Docs and Gmail messages. And we're soon rolling out full-domain search, so you can query all your Gmail, Docs and Calendar accounts simultaneously.

We also backup your Twitter Feed, your Facebook Pages and your Flickr or Picasa photo albums, should the need arise.

Also, for the record, we have a 1-800 number that we actually answer, so in the event you have trouble with our service, we'll pick up the phone and talk you through the fix. We can't repair your Apps account, but we can darn well make sure you get to the data that's in it. We wouldn't charge you, otherwise.

That service exists: http://www.backupify.com/

Backupify allows you to download the data you backup to their cloud servers onto your local PC, and the base level of the service (2GB online backup) is free.