billroberts

5 ms·

1.
by billroberts 15y ago
This event is a fantastic idea - very well done to Gordon and the team for getting it off the ground. Chances are in the first year it will be a mix of local folks and people who are coming to Edinburgh anyway for the 'main' festival and fr
2.
by billroberts 17y ago
That's true, but you have to work pretty hard on a bike to get your pulse rate as high as you do by running. (I've done a fair bit of cycling and running over the years). For an inexperienced cyclist, tired leg muscles tend to limit the ef
3.
by billroberts 17y ago
I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribbling notes on paper. You've got to learn what works for you and
4.
by billroberts 17y ago
I suggest reading http://www.withouthotair.com for a reasoned discussion of this issue. A couple of quotes: "if we covered the windiest 10% of the country [the UK] with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d
5.
by billroberts 17y ago
A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult to catch for a human. But he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the
6.
by billroberts 17y ago
iChat, Skype, Swirrl, email
7.
by billroberts 17y ago
You're absolutely right that that's how it ought to work. And when you have a good relationship with your clients you can sometimes get close to that. In practice it won't always work like that, but you can try to pick and choose your ass
8.
by billroberts 17y ago
Services-based companies are of course a well-established and perfectly respectable type of business, but a very different kind of business to a product company. I worked in a service business for many years and it has good and bad points.
9.
by billroberts 17y ago
Does anyone else think that the shortened URL business is somewhat artificial and limited? I understand the benefit of fitting the URL into a tweet, but full length URLs have a lot of advantages: you can make a judgement on the likely inter
10.
by billroberts 17y ago
Yep I think that's the key problem with business plans: estimating sales. You can make a reasonable prediction of costs, but most revenue forecasts are a mix of wishful thinking and random number generation.
11.
by billroberts 17y ago
Some non-twitter thoughts: If you haven't already read the Cluetrain Manifesto, then you should. (www.cluetrain.com). 10 years old now but lots of good stuff about why a business should be interested in social networks. Also LinkedIn groups
12.
by billroberts 17y ago
We applied unsuccessfully to TC50 last year. One thing that caught us out a little is that they are very strict on the no publicity before the conference rule - that's fair enough of course since they want to maximise publicity/exclusivity
13.
by billroberts 18y ago
"how do you get value from providing it" - how do you get value from publishing anything on the web? The same principles apply. The value comes from making information more readily available, so people can find out new things, make connect
14.
by billroberts 18y ago
I know that twitter started as an SMS app, and it may still be popular as such (I always use it on the web), but as internet-on-your-phone becomes more ubiquitous, sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary. I'm not sure how far
15.
by billroberts 18y ago
I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for minor incompatibilities. If our stuff works on Firefox, it
16.
by billroberts 18y ago
Thanks for the explanations! All is now clear. Yep, having to eat that would certainly make you work hard on your startup :-)
17.
Ask HN: hacker culture and ramen
7 points by billroberts 18y ago|19 comments
18.
by billroberts 18y ago
The problem I find with it is that if you follow more than a handful of active tweeters, then there are too many tweets to read in a reasonable amount of time. That said, I find I get useful information from people with similar (work-relate
19.
by billroberts 18y ago
I have a speculative (read: probably garbage) theory, orthogonal to the one in this article, that you can get some idea of a person's personality from their looks. My hypothesis is that as long as you are not too young, then the most commo
20.
by billroberts 18y ago
It's the tram drivers that really take no prisoners :-)
21.
by billroberts 18y ago
We don't support IE6 on our web app, just IE7, Firefox2/3, Safari 3 (and Chrome works fine). We didn't give up on IE6 lightly, but we use a lot of javascript and getting it to work correctly on IE6 would have taken a lot of time, that we d
22.
by billroberts 18y ago
Surely google can correlate the contents of your mail with blogs on getting fired/splitting up with your partner/falling out with your relatives and advise you whether or not you should send it.
23.
by billroberts 18y ago
Prakash - thanks for posting this. Yes, we 'flicked the switch' yesterday on the first release of Swirrl. It's a hosted wiki designed for collaborating around data. The data side of it is in fact an RDF database with a spreadsheet-like int
24.
by billroberts 18y ago
credit card? Assuming the Indian company can set itself up with a merchant ID and payment processor.
25.
by billroberts 18y ago
It would be crazy to assign unfiltered params to your model objects/DB and I would be astonished if anyone did it - except I suppose inexperienced programmers following simplified example code. But if you code web apps without knowing rou
26.
Insights into the marketability of tech companies(mashable.com)
1 points by billroberts 18y ago|0 comments
27.
by billroberts 18y ago
Yeah, we demo'd to Jason. Haven't heard yet about round 2, though I suspect the long silence means bad news. Based on his article, at least we got most of the basics right, though I think we failed on the crucial one, of getting across why
28.
by billroberts 18y ago
If you work on your computer all day every day, as many HN readers do, and it lasts a couple of years, then paying a bit extra for something that makes that work more efficient or more pleasurable is well worth it. After years of PC use, I
29.
by billroberts 18y ago
Yes, the development of the web is definitely not over! Lots of great ideas there. At swirrl.com we're working on something like Paul's item 22, with a bit of 5 thrown in.
30.
by billroberts 18y ago
Car company hires someone with experience in car industry shocker.

More ›