Barry Schwartz’s 2004 paper, “The Tyranny of Choice,” we learn that people are most satisfied when choice increases from zero to one. Satisfaction then tends to increase proportionately to the number of options. However, he cautions, only to a point. When there are too many choices, satisfaction drops precipitously. In brief, enough choice is good—too much choice is bad.

His research divides people into two groups: maximizers and satisficers (satisfice is a portmanteau of satisfy + suffice). According to Schwartz, when looking to buy a new car, maximizers would have to see every car option available on the market before they could make a decision. Satisficers, on the other hand, define minimum criteria for choice; for example, they have $16,000 to spend on a two-door coupe. When they find the first car that meets those specifications, they simply buy it.

The research (backed up by...

I was curious if anyone was using HTML5 features like the appCache or localStorage to create some kind of client side cache of rendered pages of a dynamic website, and then using a technology like Firebase or a WebSockets implementation to invalidate the cache.

It seems like this particular type of caching maybe hasn’t been explored enough?

Projects like Rails have taken full advantage of server side caching of pages and fragments of pages. They’ve even helped you do browser side caching with things like Etags. However, Etags still require a round trip to the server to get the Etag in the response.

Then there’s things like Cache-Control headers to tell your browser to cache pages. But Cache-Control doesn’t seem to be accessible from a javascript API to invalidate. And finally, there’s things like HTML5’s appCache and its manifest, but it seems more suited to store static assets.

Of...

At the bottom of most posts here, there’s a phrase with a link to my Twitter account. I had originally added this as an informational message, but it ended up being more effective than I expected.

-Dustin Curtis (@dcurtis)

Arguments you might have in your head before you even read this post

• Uggh, I hate braggart posts about your stats.
  I know. I’m sorry. That isn’t my intention. It’s just that I was surprised at what happened. I basically had been making a mistake and wanted to warn some folks not to do the same.

• Yeah, you did this because you got lucky and on the front page of Hacker News 3 times this week.
  That’s very true about the Quantity of new followers I got in such a short time, but what’s important is to judge the conversion rate that I improved on. If I had done what I always do when I blog, I would have gotten a ton of visitors and traffic, but ZERO new Twitter...

i’m going to teach a course for first-time startup entrepreneurs called stop fucking around and get back to work.

— Paul Stamatiou (@Stammy) April 23, 2012

Here is an awesome interview on Mixergy, and I like a ton of them on there. This one is Jason Cohen who has been popular in the startup community for awhile. There’s a lot of gems in this interview, but the one that stood out the most was his bit about how much a founder’s time is worth. I’ll summarize it for you here, but it’s worth watching the entire interview.

Most folks starting a business will assume their time is worth whatever their hourly rate was before staring a business. If you were making $100 an hour doing consulting before, well, that’s what your time is worth now.

So any calculus, done on the opportunity cost sacrificed when you screw around and don’t work on things that will actually get your business to start...

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

-Somebody pretty wise

Justin Kan recently posed the question: What good is experience?

The ultimate good that comes from experience is that it teaches you this…

You’ll constantly find yourself in situations where you have no experience, and you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

But here’s the thing. You don’t need the experience. You just need some grit.

grit

courage and resolve; strength of character

In other words, you can figure it out.

See no matter how much experience I get, I continuously find myself in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing. I have countless personal tales of being neck deep in some type of problem or subject, and being completely baffled how I’m going to figure it out.

There was my freshman year honor’s Algebra class. Before the first day I wondered if someone...

Here’s a great use of the web and video to help provide a bit of the “best medicine” for kids who could really use it.

A kid named Miles has his fourth reoccurrence of brain cancer. Poor guy has to go through something called a “Tandem Autologus Stem Cell Transplant” which will put him in isolation at a hospital for 3-6 months many miles from his friends and family.

His dad came up with an awesome project. Get 5000 jokes on video for Miles. So far he’s got a bunch of average folks like you and me sharing jokes as well as famous celebrities. But they could use some more.

Jokes4miles.com is also working on their next goal, to start helping all sorts of other kids who could use a little more humour in their lives to help get through what ails them.

If you know a joke, it only takes a tiny bit to record it and send it on its way to someone who could use it. Here’s a place that would...

Sweet, delicious irony.

Was just a bit surprised to find a couple tiny cookies packed such a caloric punch. Especially from an organization that probably puts quite a bit of time into educating its members on healthy living.

Note, I’m definitely not on a podium preaching about the dangers of sugar. I gladly buy these cookies and will continue to do so.

Just found it a bit surprising. I imagine it creates a challenge when trying to educate young people on how to eat well, while encouraging them to sell as many sugary, tasty treats as they can.

I want to share a story of how I helped win a game of lying yesterday with a little psychological trick that was inspired by the TV show The Mentalist.

A good number of folks who read this blog probably attend some kind of conference, most likely in the field of technology. There’s a phenonmenon that occurs at the end of most days of the conference.

Folks get together to play Werewolf. Also called Mafia. Which is the variant I played in highschool. Recently I was introduced to another variant: Resistance.

The basic premise of these games is that everyone is given an identity to play. Some people are “bad”; some people are “good”. Bad people are the liars of the game, and lying to all the good people about their identities. Good people have to play the game not knowing anyone’s true identity except for their own.

Yesterday I was playing with the crew behind Everyblock (You should...

wrong: build something and then figure out how much you can charge. right: choose your desired price, then figure out how to justify it.

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) March 5, 2012

Amy brings up a great point and motivates me to finish a post I’ve had sitting around for awhile. Most folks try and make something and then they slap a price on it. Often folks then discover some nasty things about their product. Either the market can’t bear a product at that price, or they aren’t sitting on a profitable business.

One tool in your arsenal which I rarely ever see used is to use a product’s theoretical price to frame what you need to build. So how do you come up with that theoretical price ahead of time?

If you plan on making a big part of your living from selling something online, I have a very interesting strategy for you.

The too long; didn’t read of it is this:

1. Look up the cost per click...

1: Be Narrow

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in…

Evan Williams’ (co-founder of Twitter) 10 Rules for Startups was written in 2005 but is still such a useful guide for today’s founders.

There’s an interesting rule in there though when you consider Twitter, which was created just a few months after Ev’s post.

7: Be Greedy

…While it’s true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company’s ass. In other...