Jeremy Thomas

Connor, what a great idea? Stephen King famously said "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." IMO, "very" is the worst offender.

I got tired of reading a new word, looking it up, then reading it again somewhere else the next week only to forget what it meant! Other people told me similar stories. So we created Yak Tack on top of a proven learning technique, Spaced Repetition (specifically the Leitner system), to help broaden people's vocabulary and help them remember words. We built it to be simple, focused, and...

Great product, and importantly this is one hell of a team. Congrats @nickgervasi and Omar!

Also, people have been asking, and here are a few of my favorite words: obsequious (https://yaktack.com/words/obsequious): obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree. anachronism (https://yaktack.com/words/anachronism): a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned [you see anachronisms in...

Since we launched last summer, I noticed two problems I wanted to solve. First, other people were discovering and remembering interesting words. But I had no way to discover those people on Yak Tack. So, I built a follow feature to make it easier for people to share words they're tacking with each other. Here's what I'm tacking, for example: https://yaktack.com/people/jt. If you sign up you can...

I agree with what folks like Peter and James are saying. Lines of code and commit count are not accurate ways to measure "impact." Usually a high frequency of commits is an indication of poor code quality -- developers are introducing new changes to fix errors introduced by previous ones. Instead, you should expect a steady cadence of incremental changes, where proper time and thought is put...

Hey folks! I've long held a fascination with words and have been searching for techniques to improve my vocabulary. Often I'd hear a word in conversation, like extemporaneous, and look it up on Google. A week later I'd hear it again somewhere and forget what it meant. Spaced repetition is a learning technique that can significantly bolster recall. Once I discovered it, I knew I'd found the...

From the author: "Trekonomics takes readers on a journey through Star Trek's fictional society, its mores and values, and its sources of inspiration in classic sci-fi. But it also looks hard at the challenges posed by it. How does Star Trek solve what Keynes called “the economic question,” the old and stubborn quandary of the allocation of scarce resources? How can it benefit all without...

I remember a scene in "Voyage Home" where the crew is dropped into 1987, and into a system where they need money to get around. So they pawn what ever is on them and stare at the cash they receive in return with bewilderment. Interesting concept!

That might be true. But I don't think there are more good writers than readers. And our aim is to make it easier to sift "signal from noise," to use a tech cliché.

Good question. It's all about creating an interesting experience for readers. In the end, we want to publish books that our readers "organically" select. Authors should expect to get feedback on and pre-orders for their books without lifting a finger. But we're not there yet. Hopefully this "book ideas" feature will help with that goal. Oh yeah, and we made it easy to submit an idea. Just tweet...

Ha! Future integration opportunity.

We wanted to give authors a way to vet book ideas before they write. And we wanted it to be dead simple. Authors can tweet @inkshares with #idea to submit a book idea. Inkshares creates a new, shareable link for the idea. And Inkshares readers can follow the idea, which stands as positive feedback.

It's gotta be "misoneism" (http://inkpaste.com/misoneism), which means "a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation or change." Push notifications are a good idea. We're also thinking of adding Square Cash-like functionality where you could shoot an email to, say "paste@inkpaste.com" with the word as the subject and automatically start the pasting process.

My co-founder has the densest vocabulary I've ever heard. He says words that I faintly remember having looked up once or twice before, but have since forgotten what they mean. We built Ink Paste so this won't happen again. We use spacing effect techniques via email (delivered at fibonacci intervals) to commit words to your brain. And we wanted the product to be dead simple. Hopefully we've...