> I would prefer if we figured out what other than cultural changes is making everyone have symptoms of inflammatory dysfunctions.

I personally hope it's just cultural and sugar/hfcs. Because some alternatives might be grim to reckon with just from a humanistic/grief perspective: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34484127/

I've been using F15 since it was released and these are both things that had user add-on patches within a week. Finnbarr Murphy is responsible for a great deal of extensions that I use: http://www.fpmurphy.com/gnome-shell-extensions/

I remember when facebook was the "grown up" MySpace... oh wait, I mean 6 years ago.

That was my initial thought too. Instead of having to type all of your information using a tiny keyboard or on-screen one, you just snap a picture. I suppose, though, that most online markets allow you to save your information and the problem really isn't that big after the first entry. Something like this is kind of neat, but nothing new or novel. OCR has been good enough to do this for a long time.

To be fair, I can't say that I wouldn't have downloaded it if I hadn't stumbled across it. I don't know if we're accepting your immediate decision that it's a bad game on what we should all know as "common sense," or if you're just giving your opinion. Either way, it doesn't answer what I think is a pretty interesting question: How do you effectively market a mobile app?

I at least agree with the understanding that quality is an effective marketing tool. I just can't say that his app lacks quality without trying it.

And the answer to the question of marketing doesn't stop there anyway. Plenty of crappy things have sold well due to good marketing.

That said, I'm by no means a marketing expert, so I'd be interested in hearing others tips / suggestions.

Edit: I guess I just wanted to add, that regardless of whether or not his game is good, an iterative feedback/dev cycle is obviously a good idea in (almost) every case. :)

Perhaps we could do the reverse? Provide search suggestions if the user explicitly tells us to by beginning their input with a special character. '?' perhaps.

Alternatively, although not intuitive, if the user enters focus with the search bar through a specific key-stroke: CTRL + L for a regular URL entry, and re-route CTRL + K to our web-bar, but with suggestions.

In Opera typing g + space begins a Google search. The prefix is stripped off before it's sent.

Your alternative method is Chrome behaviour (of course it gives suggestions even if you don't prefix with ?, but the keyboard shortcuts are there)

What? I thinks the author goes a bit far with his idea that people need to talk. Does anybody remember how and why BBS' were so popular? It's because you had a voice, an anonymous voice, and you could share information without being judged. I don't know why the author thinks that people on sites don't communicate (maybe I missed the jist of the article entirely), but just because people aren't doing VOIP doesn't mean they have no 'voice'.

How is this any different than e-mail? What I would enjoy is a way to browse, categorize, and rate everybody's ideas. Ideas are neat to read about even if they're terrible. The only problem with such a facility is that potentially businesses could come and steal an idea and perhaps even profit from it.

It is free for people to distribute, it's just that you have guilt about it, but feel free to live within your own code.

Amen.

There are many different kinds of free

It's brave to drop everything you've been working so hard for in sights of opportunity, but is it really in the electronic part search market? Sorry, I don't mean to sound negative, but a PhD in physics would have opened such a large expanse of possibilities. You're going to throw it away for a chance at more women and on the whim of one man (PG's) advice. Best of luck.

Whoah! Give me a little more credit than that! Octopart is a startup which we've only been working on for three months- we're no where close to being done. So far as my comments about women and society go, I think they will resonate with physics grad students and probably a few others. Otherwise, I agree, they don't make sense.

Hey Andres, Major Life Decisions aside, I gotta say that Octopart sounds like a pretty smart idea! Perhaps the first so-called vertical search engine that's really piqued my interest. Don't know anything about the market or competition, but on the surface it seems like a solid niche -- not a market that Google's going to go after anytime soon -- in a growth industry. And isn't hardware hacking, open source hardware, etc. supposed to be the Next Big Thing? (Tim O'Reilly's been talking about this a lot lately.) Anyways, just wanted to lend a word of support to help you tune out all the haters. Good luck!

A PhD is really a lot of grind especially at the end. I don't think you can really do both a startup and a PhD well at the same time. You can't really do either without a reasonable level of commitment so if your heart is with the start-up I say go with it. As for the chicks... I've gotta say they dig the title Dr...

A PhD in physics today opens up some opportunities in the one very specific field that you studied. Getting post-doctoral positions is hard; there isn't that much money floating around. I know that I'm dropping out soon.

Exactly. If you are devoted to one specific field then grad school makes a lot of sense. I also dropped out of grad school in October partially because I didn't see myself devoting my career to the particular sub-field I was in.

Depends on how far along the PhD he is.

The social argument was bizarre, I agree. Campuses are great places to meet new people; most of my friends agree that starting work is socially a step down. And they're at least working for large corporations with lots of people in them. Working insane hours at a startup it's unrealistic to expect your social life to be an improvement relative to *anything*.

I agree entirely. I am just out of undergrad, and working is a major step down socially. If it weren't for my Customer Service job I would probably interact with no more than 5 people a day (in order: my wife, boss, coworkers, wife.) (Unless you count here and Reddit.) It seems to me that he was just using his girl count as an objective measure of his social life.

I did the first 7 semesters of my undergrad in physics, and still have a lot of friends doing Ph.Ds in physics. A bachelors in physics opens up a large expanse of possibilities - finance, management consulting, economics consulting, computer programming, high school math teacher, and of course physics grad school. A Ph.D in physics qualifies you for exactly one job: physics professor. There are far more opportunities for a physics drop-out than a physics Ph.D, particularly for someone who doesn't absolutely, positively love the subject.

Dude, you're not right at all. There are a lot more opportunities for a PhD although there are many for a BA too. You don't have to be a physics professor if you get a PhD.

You could be a post-doc for 12 years until some professorship opens up in the Golan Heights. If you don't want to stay in Physics the only thing a Ph.D. is useful for is a "change career free card". You're allowed to change your career to anything but only once.

There are positions opening up for physics Ph.Ds in electronics (especially now that the size of the technology is becoming smaller and more apparently susceptible to the laws of quantum physics) There may not be a ton of opportunities now, but once nanotech starts moving out of the labs and into more applications I'd say the market will grow significantly.

I'm a PhD in infectious disease, with a long term interest in nanotechnology and the interface between biosciences and nanotech - But its going to take too long to be in a pole position to drive that innovation (i'm going to be 35 before anything gets going (12 years!) and i'm impatient. The information age has shaped my life in more ways that i could have ever imagined - i want to change people's live now not later. Thats why i'm into the web and particularly online/offline convergence. I want it now not later!

Plus i'll need a track record to build a kickass, disruptive nanotechnology startup which can impact on medicine - 12 years of the information age is just the fix i need!