“01101100011011110111011001100101″ - 732 results
“01110011011010000110100101110100″ - 246 results
“011101000110100001100101″ - 176 results
“011100110110010101111000″ - 106 results
“0110100001100101011011000110110001101111″ - 9 results
“01101100011001010110010101110100″ - 8 results
“0110100001100001011100000111000001111001″ - 8 results
“011001110110111101101111011001110110110001100101″ - 4 results
“01100010011100100110100101110100011011100110010101111001″ - 0 results
I just got this gem of an offer in the mail:
Look at the part on the right:
I’m so confused! What the hell do they mean???? That asterisk could be anything.
I haven’t opened the envelope yet. Please leave some guesses first before I do.
The hiccups have been cured. Want to know what the secret is?
It’s simple, whenever you get the hiccups, all you have to do is think to yourself “I am not a fish. I am not a fish. I am not a fish…”
Laugh it up. Everyone I have told this since February has laughed and called me crazy. But they shut up when their hiccups suddenly stop. It has now worked 100% of the time, instantly, every time I have shared it.
The inventor of the cure is Neil Shubin, who looked at brain patterns in fish and humans with the hiccups. Electrical signals in the brain trigger hiccups. In fish, these signals run automatically to keep the gills working and the fish breathing. We descended from fish, and at some point these automatic electronic signals to hiccup became unneccessary. But every now and again they turn on. All you have to do to turn them off is remind yourself you are not a fish, and can breathe just find without an automatic hiccuping signal.
Here’s the article that gave me the secret back in February.
Should work anytime, all the time. I’ve seen 100% instant success rates. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.
Decided to try out one of these book social networks to see if I can find some important books I should be reading. The idea is you enter the books you’ve read and rate them, as well as the books you want to read. Then the site will show you people who like similar books and you can hopefully stumble upon some books that they’ve read that you will like.
The three main sites I found were Shelfari, GoodReads, and LibraryThing. The idea is pretty cool, because a good book recommendation, unlike a movie recommendation, can possibly change your life. So the chance of getting a huge payoff from these services is relatively very high. Not bad for spending no money and just a couple minutes or even an hour or two entering your book list and exploring the shelves of others.
My primary goal is to find business and technical books. Finding good fiction or literature to read is not a problem for me–there’s plenty of it out there. Really what I’m looking for is books that have been read by people I respect in a business/technical role. That’s why I think a service like this could be more valuable than Amazon’s recommendation engine. I’m looking for quality books read by quality people. Amazon generally recommends popular books. The books I want to read don’t necessarily have to be popular among the masses, just popular among the people who I want to learn from.
I started with Shelfari, then checked out Goodreads, and then on to LibraryThing.
They are all pretty good. I will update this post later with more detailed reviews, but I have to say if you sign up for one you might as well sign up for them all. You will increase your chances of finding “diamond in the rough” books that way. Of course, it takes time to input your books into all 3 of them, but there could be a quicker way to do that(I’m gonna look into existing sites, otherwise might roll one myself).
The traffic stats:
Compete.com shows goodreads pulling away from the comptetion.
shelfari(red), goodreads(blue), librarything(orange)
Google Trends for Websites also shows goodreads in the lead and growing fastest.
A: When it’s just a website.
Many threads on Hacker News begin with “Review My Startup”. Yet often these “startups” are nothing more than simple websites or webapps. A website is not a startup. If a website were a startup there would be about 100 million web startups out there right now, in the U.S. alone. For a startup to truly be a startup it needs to be your job. It needs to be a company. You don’t have to be incorporated, but you have to treat it like it’s your job.
99.XX% of websites are hobbies. Some even earn revenue. But even if a site earns revenue, it’s still just a website unless it’s your job. Your hobby website could turn into a startup and if that happens great–such was the path of most succesful startups–but until that happens your site is just a website. It’s just a collection of files sitting on a webserver somewhere. You could spend all of your time on your website and thoroughly enjoy every minute of it–but if you don’t think of it as a job (in the “this will put food on the table sense”, not the “ughh, I hate my job” sense)…it’s just a website.
I have no problem whatsover with taking a look at someone’s new webapp/site, but unless it’s a startup, please don’t call it a startup. Just call it a website or a webapp.
Why does this bother me? Because some websites can make great startups and other can’t. Thus, if you call your one-page-silver-Twitter-skin a startup, the feedback should be harsh, even though it may be a cool website.
Let’s take an example from my own portfolio: qDuke.com. qDuke is a start page for Duke students. If you are a student at Duke, you will probably find it very useful(if you aren’t a Duke student, it won’t be of any use). qDuke gets many thousands of page views per day, so it’s a pretty useful website(due to na). However, it’s not a very good startup. qDuke is not a company. There’s not much revenue in it. It’s not going to put food on the table. If I wanted feedback on qDuke, I would say “Review my Website”. I would not call it a startup. Maybe I would post “How Can I Turn This Website Into a Startup?”, which would also be fine. But I would stick to calling websites websites and startups startups.
Now, it could be that a few of the recent posters on HackerNews do consider their silver-Twitter-skin like sites startups/jobs. If that’s the case, then I think the comments weren’t harsh enough. However, I think in the majority of cases Hacker News readers just guessed that the poster meant to say “website” and not “startup”. I think it would be helpful if people thought a little bit more about the difference between the two terms.
Woopra is a new alternative to Google Analytics. Two of the main features Woopra has that GA lacks are: real-time stats and live chat with site visitors.
I personally use my own custom built stats package for most of my websites(with Google Analytics for backup/verification) and there’s not a whole lot more that I can benefit from a new stat tool. However, I just wanted to point out the growth rate of Woopra:
From 0 to nearly 1M in a month. That’s impressive. Or is it? I’m not sure whether Compete is simply tracking the tracking code here, or if these are indeed real visits to the Woopra website. If the latter, it shows how even a startup can compete with Google if they can produce a feature that people really want(real time data).
About a month ago I threw some Google Adsense ads on the right sidebar of this blog on individual post pages. I didn’t expect to earn any money but I figured why not give it a shot.
One month later the results are in. I earned a whopping $3.19 in direct revenue from BreckYunits.com….To celebrate, I’m taking everyone out to Dunkin Donuts and buying everyone half a munchkin. I also took down the ads, because well, I need some time to figure out what to do with this new found wealth before I earn more.
Date Channel Page impressions Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM [ ? ] Earnings
Thursday, July 10, 2008 byvert 19 0 0.00% $0 $0
Wednesday, July 9, 2008 byvert 136 1 0.74% $0 $0
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 byvert 122 2 1.64% $0.56 $0.07
Monday, July 7, 2008 byvert 139 0 0.00% $0 $0
Sunday, July 6, 2008 byvert 114 0 0.00% $0.01 $0
Saturday, July 5, 2008 byvert 48 0 0.00% $0 $0
Friday, July 4, 2008 byvert 50 0 0.00% $0 $0
Thursday, July 3, 2008 byvert 94 2 2.13% $0.72 $0.07
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 byvert 84 0 0.00% $0 $0
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 byvert 106 0 0.00% $0 $0
Monday, June 30, 2008 byvert 126 0 0.00% $0 $0
Sunday, June 29, 2008 byvert 58 0 0.00% $0 $0
Saturday, June 28, 2008 byvert 44 1 2.27% $0.77 $0.03
Friday, June 27, 2008 byvert 67 0 0.00% $0 $0
Thursday, June 26, 2008 byvert 100 0 0.00% $0 $0
Wednesday, June 25, 2008 byvert 90 0 0.00% $0 $0
Tuesday, June 24, 2008 byvert 166 1 0.60% $1.80 $0.30
Monday, June 23, 2008 byvert 173 0 0.00% $0 $0
Sunday, June 22, 2008 byvert 106 0 0.00% $0 $0
Saturday, June 21, 2008 byvert 92 4 4.35% $18.03 $1.66
Friday, June 20, 2008 byvert 185 0 0.00% $0 $0
Thursday, June 19, 2008 byvert 106 0 0.00% $0 $0
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 byvert 180 1 0.56% $0.34 $0.06
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 byvert 156 3 1.92% $4.49 $0.70
Monday, June 16, 2008 byvert 151 0 0.00% $0 $0
Sunday, June 15, 2008 byvert 62 0 0.00% $0 $0
Saturday, June 14, 2008 byvert 86 0 0.00% $0 $0
Friday, June 13, 2008 byvert 225 0 0.00% $0 $0
Thursday, June 12, 2008 byvert 129 1 0.78% $2.32 $0.30
Totals 3214 16 $3.19
Seth Godin wrote a post yesterday with a bunch of brainstormed ideas. They were somewhat related to the concept that passively collecting behavior data would allow for very useful decision support. Here are some my thoughts on these ideas.
First of all, this measurement would only be worthwhile for novels. If you want a measurement of the usefulness of a book, a better statistic would be the number of times a book is reopened. Sometimes I don’t finish a non-fiction book precisely because it is good–I’ll take my time to get through it because each chapter could have a month’s worth of great ideas to absorb. But if you are talking about reading for entertainment, this would be a pretty good measure. This would alert you to the types of books that you “can’t put down”. But even then there are problems. What do you mean “finished reading it”. Would someone who read the first 490 out of 500 pages finished? What about someone who read only the last 10 out of 500 pages? What about someone who “read” all 500 pages, but did so in 5 minutes?
2. Let me see a map of my town with the location of pedestrian accidents highlighted by color.
This way, I can be on my guard in Spot A, where pedestrian accidents are common, and let my guard down in Spot B, where there’s never been an accident. The beauty of this is that I’ll have to return to the website every month, because everyone became so careful in Spot A and so reckless in Spot B that there’s a new pattern to learn. 
3. Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way to bringing equity to the assessment system.
I thought you lived in a town? (See idea #2).
4. Sort restaurants on Open Table by the percentage of reservations booked by returning diners.
A lot of people have consistently bad tastes. I know many people that frequently go to chain restaurants. There also are people who are afraid to try new things. And even if some people would rather go to restaurant A, restaurant B could cost half as much and see many returners.
5. Sort Facebook invitations in order of how many times someone has been unfriended.
Let’s also find a way in real life to stop being friends with somebody just because other people do.
6. Sort credit card offers based on data from Mint or Wesabe… show me the credit cards with the fewest bankruptcies/financial troubles among recipients first.
Delete all credit card offers period. Show me one independent study, that proves a net benefit to the cardholder from using a credit card. (Debit cards excluded).
7. Sort corporate email by how many people in my company have indicated that a sender is important.
Thus ensuring the even slightest difference in initial popularity level can send someone to the top or the bottom of the corporate ladder even faster.
8. Let me see stocks ranked in order of recent purchases by successful investors.
That way simply by virtue of being known as a “successful investor”, you can become an “even more successful investor”, simply because people will watch and follow your every purchase decision. You can then dump stocks after the price bump(which your purchase caused) and handle a nice profit.
9. Let me review bids from builders ranked in order of complaints filed or the length of time between first application for a building permit and finished building.
Make sure to account for difficulty of the project.
10. Let me see potential online dates sorted by how frequently (or infrequently) the person goes on first dates.
This would only help those looking for a casual hookup to find each other. If someone says “i date a lot of people”, you can be pretty sure that they mean it. If someone says the opposite, you can’t be so sure. Unless there was a 3rd party monitoring tool, but if 1984 were to ever arrive, I don’t think this tool would be a top priority.
11. Sort car models by crash and repair data.
I think Consumer Reports/Kelly’s Blue Book do something like this.
12. Let me see my salesforce ranked by closing rate or cold call rate or customer satisfaction.
Why can’t you do this already?
13. Let me see my inbound call data by hour, sorted by number of rings before answer, or by percentage of calls unanswered.
This would be revolutionary. I bet my income would take off if I could decrease my “rings before answer” average. But seriously, phones should have better APIs for extracting usage data.
14. Let me sort my customer service requests by customer value. (Including loyalty, purchases and referrals).
Many companies do this already.
15. Let me choose a doctor by malpractice suit rate.
Just look for an attractive, friendly doctor. They are much less likely to be sued than an ugly, gruff one, irregardless of medical competence. Studies have been done on this.
16 .When I watch TV online, recognize the pundit and flash historical accuracy rates on the screen while she talks.
Just flashing “No better than than a coin flip” for every pundit would do the trick.
17. Blank out comments on posts that agree with my point of view.
This is a bad, bad idea. I hope you never implement this idea. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Disclaimer: I reserve the right to disagree with every comment I made on each idea. I often intentionally tried to disagree with Seth(see #17), although for some ideas I believe my comments were better.
It’s nice to know that more than 50% of the people alive today have been around for longer than I have(at least for a few more years).
According to the World Factbook:
Median Age
male: 27.4 years
female: 28.7 years (2008 est.)
World’s per capita income: $10,000 (2007 est.)… Although this distribution is a lot different than the distribution of ages, so you can’t draw the same conclusions.
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