Andrey Khavryuchenko himself

How to keep brain fresh

September 20, 2007 – 01:15

Neurogenesis is the process of creation of new neurons in the brain.  That literary keeps your brain fresh new.

NY Times run an article on recent mice brain study.  Most of article is devoted to the role of aerobic exercise, i. e. running.  They sum up with rather interesting and though-provoking list of things that also help neurogenesis.

• marijuana (how wonderful!
• alcohol (yeah! bring two more beers!)
• sociability (.. and one for my girl.. each of them
• chocolate
• aerobic exercise (to keep list complete)

What hurts most?   Fat diet and uncontrollable stress.

P.S.  No mice where hurt in writing this post

Posted in Health | No Comments »

Make Thy Service Sticky

September 19, 2007 – 16:18

There’s a baby inside each adult. And every baby likes to play games.

How this matters to a startup? Well, if you give a potential user a toy – he’ll stick to it. And if playing games with this toy would also do something useful to him (e.g. pay his checks or do his job he’ll even pay you.

Just came across wonderful post “Using Psychology to Create a Killer Sticky Website” by Laura Alter (via Chytach via Hackers News). She describes it in much more details and gives a bunch of references for further reading.

Just an excerpt from her post so you’ll have the idea:

By developing concepts around these 5 components, you can shape the way your site/app is used.

• Collecting things.
• Earning Points.
• Getting/giving feedback.
• Exchanges/Gifting.
• User Customization.

How many sites do you know that incorporate these features? The ones that do are pretty darn sticky. Ebay, MySpace, Facebook, etc. That’s not to say that any app with these 5 things will work – it’s far more complex than that – but it does mean that these features matter.

Now, back to my own startup to implement new features, while you’re just reading

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feedparser patch for UnicodeEncodeError

September 17, 2007 – 18:18

Recently some feeds grabbed by chytach (and parsed by feedparser.py) started to traceback:

Failed parsing http://del.icio.us/tag/gtd with exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError: {'object': '/tag/\xe6\x97\xb6\xe9\x97\xb4\xe7\xae\xa1\xe7\x90\x86', 'end': 6, 'encoding': 'ascii', 'args': ('ascii', '/tag/\xe6\x97\xb6\xe9\x97\xb4\xe7\xae\xa1\xe7\x90\x86', 5, 6, 'ordinal not in range(128)'), 'start': 5, 'reason': 'ordinal not in range(128)'}
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/akhavr/chytach/bin/feedupdate.py", line 97, in processfeed
    etag=feed.etag, modified=modified)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 2626, in parse
    feedparser.feed(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1441, in feed
    sgmllib.SGMLParser.feed(self, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 95, in feed
    self.goahead(0)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 134, in goahead
    k = self.parseendtag(i)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 296, in parseendtag
    self.finishendtag(tag)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 336, in finishendtag
    self.unknownendtag(tag)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 476, in unknownendtag
    method()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1318, in endcontent
    value = self.popContent('content')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 700, in popContent
    value = self.pop(tag)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 641, in pop
    output = resolveRelativeURIs(output, self.baseuri, self.encoding)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1594, in _resolveRelativeURIs
    p.feed(htmlSource)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1441, in feed
    sgmllib.SGMLParser.feed(self, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 95, in feed
    self.goahead(0)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 129, in goahead
    k = self.parsestarttag(i)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 283, in parsestarttag
    self.finishstarttag(tag, attrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/sgmllib.py", line 314, in finishstarttag
    self.unknownstarttag(tag, attrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1588, in unknownstarttag
    attrs = [(key, ((tag, key) in self.relativeuris) and self.resolveURI(value) or value) for key, value in attrs]
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 1584, in resolveURI
    return urljoin(self.baseuri, uri)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/feedparser.py", line 286, in _urljoin
    return urlparse.urljoin(base, uri)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/urlparse.py", line 158, in urljoin
    return urlunparse((scheme, netloc, path,
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/urlparse.py", line 125, in urlunparse
    return urlunsplit((scheme, netloc, url, query, fragment))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/urlparse.py", line 130, in urlunsplit
    url = '//' + (netloc or '') + url
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe6 in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)

Investigation revealed that feedparser fails in _urljoin when passed uri contains non-ascii characters. Thanks to former django unicode experience, the patch was easy:

def smartstr(s, encoding='utf-8', errors='strict'):
    if isinstance(s, unicode):
        return s.encode(encoding, errors)
    elif s and encoding != 'utf-8':
        return s.decode('utf-8', errors).encode(encoding, errors)
    else:
        return s_urifixer = re.compile('^([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9+-.]://)(/)(.*?)')


def urljoin(base, uri):
    uri = urllib.quote(smartstr(uri), safe='/#%[]=:;$&()+,!?')
    uri = _urifixer.sub(r'\1\3', uri)
    return urlparse.urljoin(base, uri)

Tested and works.

Posted in Python | No Comments »

Since when hurting business profits becomes “government censorship”?

September 17, 2007 – 17:37

Andrew Leonard in his Salon article mocks science publishers that began PR and lobbying campaign to strain free access to publications resulted from  (US) government-funded research (that’s nearly all fundamental research, as far as I understand).  In particular they stated in their press release:

Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by … undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it [AND] opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record.

I may understand (but not tolerate) when here, in Ukraine, government-owned telco monopoly “Ukrtelecom” sues every POTS-VOIP gateway it can reach for “conducting unlicensed telco business”.  But hey, the US?  Leading democracy on the planet?

So I second cited titbit:

 ”… any publisher of scientific research who even begins to entertain the notion that free access to scientific information can or should be equated with government censorship should be mocked mercilessly in every publication, online or off, free or subscription required, evanescent as a blog or solid as a hard-copy Encyclopedia Britannica, from now until they beg forgiveness from every human on this planet for their disingenuous mendacity.”

Let the mocking begin.

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Huge Hole Found in the Universe

September 12, 2007 – 22:15

Robert Roy Britt at LiveScience writes:

The gargantuan hole was found by examining observations made using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, funded by the National Science Foundation.

There is a “remarkable drop in the number of galaxies” in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, [researcher] Lawrence Rudnick [of the University of Minnesota] said.

The region had been previously been dubbed the “WMAP Cold Spot,” because it stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation made by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite. The CMB is an imprint of radiation left from the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of the universe.

[...]

Photons of the CMB gain a small amount of energy when they pass through normal regions of space with matter, the researchers explained. But when the CMB passes through a void, the photons lose energy, making the CMB from that part of the sky appear cooler.

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10 signs of smell in a startup

September 10, 2007 – 02:09

I have been involved in more startup projects that I have fingers (and I have them all – you may check). Most of them rot.

Each time I start excited but as time passes, I see the pattern:

Your startup software project is in trouble, if

1. it is evangelized by a businessman and not by a hacker (by Paul Graham definition of `hacker’)
2. that person can’t answer a question “What is the first and the only function that should be present in the product?”
3. project starts with rush to “staff it up”
4. project is distributed between several organization charged with development (e.g. separated UI design and actual development)
5. project “management” has no experience in product development and software development
6. the above plus they ignore the developer’s feedback and ideas
7. first version, however clunky, is not released in 1 month
8. the first version released is not show to at least 10 people that are not related to this project and will actually use the product
9. the first version requires a registration that requires an invite code
10. time between any successive site updates after the first release is more that couple days

If you got just one or may be two points checked, it smells and it’s up to you what to do with the project.

If there are more – you’re dead. Bury it and start over.

P.S. Bonus 11ths sign: designed product doesn’t have means to observe and analyze the behavior of its users

Posted in Startups | No Comments »

On the structure of wealth

September 9, 2007 – 00:20

It appears that in 2005 The World Bank conducted a study about the structure of the capital in different countries:

The World Bank study defines natural capital as the sum of cropland, pastureland, forested areas, protected areas, and nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal, and minerals). Produced capital is what most of us think of when we think of capital: machinery, equipment, structures (including infrastructure), and urban land. But that still left a lot of wealth to explain. “As soon as you say the issue is the wealth of nations and how wealth is managed, then you realize that if you were only talking about a portfolio of natural assets, if you were only talking about produced capital and natural assets, you’re missing a big chunk of the story,” Hamilton explains.

The rest of the story is intangible capital. That encompasses raw labor; human capital, which includes the sum of a population’s knowledge and skills; and the level of trust in a society and the quality of its formal and informal institutions. Worldwide, the study finds, “natural capital accounts for 5 percent of total wealth, produced capital for 18 percent, and intangible capital 77 percent.”

So that’s the point: invest in people, both on large scale (countries) and tiny ones (startups and scholars).

Posted in Startups | 2 Comments »

Get the Big Picture or die

September 3, 2007 – 17:01

Ask the Wizard yesterday:

The point is that “build it and they will come” isn’t true. You need to build it, and then show them exactly how it can be used, and then show them several explicit examples of why it’s powerful, and then they might come.

This means that I, as an entrepreneur, a creator of a new tool or service have to think out a whole depth and cycle of people using my creating.

Depth: from User Interface down to OS tricks and pricks. Last are most painful caring about scalability and security.

Cycle: from first time a person sees – not your product, but how somebody mentions it – through the whole usage cycle up to super-power user that is not satisfied with current options and cries out “API! API! API!”.

Now I wish only have more hours a day and more days a week. Issues Done and Chytach are long before I would dare call them anywhere close to feature-complete.

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Grass is greener on the other side. yeah, it is!

September 2, 2007 – 02:18

Got the wonderful blog post on BostonVcBlog.

Entrepreneurs are recently famous for sulkily observing that the VCs have the cushiest of lives. Unlike entrepreneurs who live and die by quarterly and annual milestones, VCs get paid generous management fees whether they seem to actually perform or not. In the mind of many entrepreneurs, VCs don’t work all that hard, parachute into board meetings without having done their homework, make a few trite, unhelpful comments and then leave. In short, entrepreneurs are envious of the VC way of life, which seems to have lots of financial upside and none of the quality of life downside.

VCs are recently famous for grousing about how much money their private equity cousins are making. A VC struggles to invest $5-10 million at a time while their private equity cousins pour hundreds of millions of dollars, and recently even billions, into a single deal. Since the fee income portion of compensation is a function of assets under management, the more you manage, the more you make. The other compensation component is the carried interest, and VCs are green with envy when they see buyout guys use cheap leverage to make money while retaining large stakes in their firms. In short, VCs see the outrageous financial lifestyles of the private equity hitters, flying around in their private jets and think: “if only I could be like them – they’ve really got the model figured out”.

Private equity executives are recently famous for expressing their envy for hedge funds. Unlike private equity and VC firms, who only get paid on the gains when a portfolio company is liquidated, hedge funds take their carried interest off the table every year. And when a private equity or VC firm gets hot, it has to wait three or four years in between fund cycles to raise new, larger funds. Those lucky hedge fund executives can sweep big money in at a moment’s notice, raising their fee income with a snap. Further, complain private equity folks, the hedge fund executives rarely travel to chase around high-stakes auctions and have none of the responsibility or liability that “owning” companies and controlling boards represents. They just seem to coast along, accumulate more and more capital, and live it up.

And hedge fund executives? The top of the heap? Hardly. I often hear them discuss with envy the life of the entrepreneur – cycling through exciting new start-ups every 5-6 years and then taking long sabbaticals in-between gigs. Meanwhile, the hedge fund executive is chained to every international market every minute of the day for fear they miss spotting the latest currency or interest rate fluctuation. Entrepreneurs actually create things of value and leave a mark on society, rather than simply financial engineering. And that nonsense about money flowing in so fast being such a great thing? Remember, it can flow out just as fast. And, besides, the hedge fund business as a whole has little barriers to entry and struggle to find true proprietary elements of the busines, resulting in too much money chasing too few good investment opportunities. Those entrepreneurs who can come up with original ideas, build proprietary technology and products, and then sell them out get all the glory, reap all the rewards and then unplug. Now that’s the life.

Should I add up a word about how offshoring programmers envy product developers that envy startupers?

Posted in Startups | No Comments »

Python 3000 released as a1

August 31, 2007 – 23:50

Here’s Guido’s post to c.l.p verbatim:

From: "Guido van Rossum" guido@python.org
Subject: Python 3000 released as 3.0a1
To: python-announce-list@python.org
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:17:05 -0700


[Bcc: python-list@python.org]

The first Python 3000 release is out -- Python 3.0a1. Be the first one
on your block to download it!

http://python.org/download/releases/3.0/

Excerpts:

Python 3000 (a.k.a. "Py3k", and released as Python 3.0) is a new
version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of
releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details,
especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work,
have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have
finally been removed.

This is an ongoing project; the cleanup isn't expected to be complete
until 2008. In particular there are plans to reorganize the standard
library namespace.

The release plan is to have a series of alpha releases in 2007, beta
releases in 2008, and a final release in August 2008. The alpha
releases are primarily aimed at developers who want a sneak peek at
the new langauge, especially those folks who plan to port their code
to Python 3000. The hope is that by the time of the final release,
many 3rd party packages will already be available in a 3.0-compatible
form.

More links:


Online docs: http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/
What's new: http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html
Source tar ball: http://python.org/ftp/python/3.0/Python-3.0a1.tgz
Windows MSI installer: http://python.org/ftp/python/3.0/python-3.0a1.msi
PEP 3000: http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3000/
Issue tracker: http://bugs.python.org/
Py3k dev list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000/
Conversion tool for Python 2.x code:

http://svn.python.org/view/sandbox/trunk/2to3/



--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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