hyperberry's comments

Google puts far too much stock into the "accuracy" of its Maps data.

Here's my fun story: in order to verify my dad's website with Google's 'My Business' service (now a defunct product?), they had to mail a physical postcard with PIN code to ensure the address was legitimate. Picking the mailing address was hooked into Maps/ Maps data; a "real" address had to be among their existing database of addresses.

Well, my dad lives in a somewhat-rural area outside St. Louis. His street is "Alt Road" -- named after the Alt family, German immigrants who started a large farm in the area 150+ years ago.

Yet Google Maps had the street listed as "Alternate Road". Clearly some data entry person presumed it must be an abbreviation and took liberty to 'correct' the apparent mistake.

So it was literally impossible to have a postcard mailed to his address on Alt Road. I had to have it sent to Alternate Road instead. I recognize, of course, the verification steps taken thereafter will have permanently corroborated what was bad data in first place. Now I'm part of the problem.

I'm guessing Maps will now forever have renamed the street. Should I alert the county to Dad's 'new' mailing address?

Also doing it in rural Missouri. I grew up & lived in the St. Louis area/ suburbs first 30 years of my life; that's where (most) family still resides.

I have a small agency and work independently from home. Currently have a sweet gig for a Global Fortune 500 corporation with offices all over the U.S. and around the world. Every day I collaborate with colleagues spread across North America, yet I still get to enjoy the beauty of the countryside. Occasionally I'm asked to travel into St. Louis (90 minutes) or Nashville or Cincinnati (6 hours each, respectively) for meetings.

Several years ago I "escaped" to a large wooded property just outside a small town with population around ~4500. Fortunately I also have a small college town 20 minutes away - home of the University of Missouri tech & engineering campus - with full-year population ~25k (it's also the county seat), where I can shop at Wal-Mart, Lowes, Staples, Kohl's, etc. In fact, there is also a brand new Starbucks + new development just opened with a Menard's, PetSmart, TJ Maxx and more.

So while I enjoy the privacy and peace of rural living, I also have a number of modern conveniences within easy reach. Also worth noting: my small town is fairly affluent, so there are nice restaurants (including a place with 20+ craft beers on tap), and we have a full-size grocery store.

Upsides of working rurally:

* Money goes significantly further. Not so much for typical everyday items and consumables, but especially because:

* Housing is VERY affordable.

* Property taxes are extraordinarily low. I have a 4000+ sq/ft home with 5BR and 3BA on 160 acres. Total annual real estate tax is less than $2k. Smaller home on 1/3 acre lot in STL suburbs was 2.5x that amount.

* Personal property tax and sales tax rates are also quite low. That makes it much more affordable to purchase/own vehicles, farm equipment, etc.

* Multiple, awesome farmer's markets every week -- 52 weeks/year -- where you find (inexpensive) produce, eggs, meat, dairy, baked goods, and you buy directly from the actual farmer/producer.

* Don't see any neighbors. Rarely hear them.

* True sense of ownership over your environment - no need to "keep up with Joneses" like you do in Suburbia

* Feeling of isolation. That's an upside for me, but won't apply universally of course.

Downsides:

* Maintaining a large property is a lot of work. A DIY mindset is helpful. So is a chainsaw.

* Poor cell service.

* Few/expensive internet choices. Currently using a 20Mbps satellite connection (which works just fine, including for realtime screensharing via Skype or WebEx) that costs $120/month. Earlier this year my telco line-carrier (CenturyLink) finally began offering DSL, so I plan to look into that -- cheaper but may be slower.

* Not much nightlife, few opportunities to socialize.

* No Whole Foods, Costco or Sam's Club. So I generally go into St. Louis once or twice a month to stock up.

If you're considering making the "escape" yourself, I would strongly consider the following:

* Road access. Rural properties differ significantly -- even within a small area -- based on the length & quality of roads you need to travel. Personally, my driveway connects to a _numbered_ state highway with hard pavement in good condition (maintenance and slow plowing are prioritized over smaller _lettered_ highways & county-maintained roads). Plus it takes only 10 minutes to get to the Interstate highway... a huge win. Compare that with some rural areas where you might either: A) travel a long distance on two-lane roads to reach the Interstate; and/or B) drive for miles on a gravel road just to hit pavement.

* Related to above: your driveway. In case of snow you'll probably need to plow yourself. If it's gravel, you'll need (or need to hire someone with) a tractor for periodic road maintenance/grading. Likely need to haul in & spread more gravel every few years.

* It's stark contrast from life in a metro area. Everywhere you look parking lots -- including at the golf course -- are filled with pickup trucks. I was previously accustomed to an abundance of luxury cars as far as the eye could see.

The number of private aircraft owners in the US (immediately addressable market) is around 300,000. Overall global market is somewhat larger, but not tremendously since aircraft ownership per capita is MUCH higher in the US than any other country.

On the downside, too, the market size is admittedly shrinking slowly. Private aviation is generally less popular than it was, say 15-25 years ago (likely the result of increasing costs and regulations).

There are upsides to the aviation market, though, that may help outweigh its size: A) upscale/luxury/wealthy market - costs for everything are staggeringly high, so premium pricing applies; and B) aircraft enthusiasts are typically technology-driven and likely to be early tech adopters.

In terms of applying the software to other markets, which may be larger, we've given this some thought as well. While car/truck owners (or fleets) might benefit from this type of application, there are existing software solutions aimed at solving the problems of roadgoing vehicles.

Likewise, aircraft are fundamentally different from a regulatory standpoint. Failing to perform periodic maintenance can be illegal - and lead to fines, censure or losing certifications/licenses altogether… yet nobody is going to be arrested if they fail to change the oil in their Toyota every 5k miles.

Plus, aircraft are somewhat unique in that records and scheduled maintenance are all based on # of hours (not on mileage as in the case of cars & trucks). I have heard suggestions, though, similar software might be applied to "heavy equipment" - like bulldozers and cranes - which also have hourly logs. Market penetration seems much easier for aircraft, though, since the aviation community is smaller, more consolidated and more tightly-knit.

Thanks for your feedback. Great point about signatures; yes - the signature of a certified Airframe & Powerplant ("A&P") mechanic is required for maintenance entries. We foresee implementing a feature for collecting, and validating, electronic signatures.

In terms of retroactive conversion, you're absolutely right most aircraft in service now are generally decades old - and are going to have historical paper records. We have considered several novel approaches that would allow aircraft owners to electronically archive their existing paper logbooks (and maintain historical records alongside the newer all-digital records for user convenience).

I'm Matt, a product-focused UX designer & technology generalist seeking freelance, contract and part-time opportunities.

Location: St. James, Missouri USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: UX design, user research, usability analysis, wireframes/low-fi mockups, product management, SEO, rich snippets/structured data, conversion optimization and A/B testing, HTML5, basic CSS, responsive web design, accessibility/ADA, W3 standards compliance, Git, Bootstrap, Wordpress

Website/Portfolio: http://uiwireframes.com/portfolio/

Resume/CV (PDF): http://mattduchek.com/resume/MattDuchek_Resume.pdf

Email: matt (at) mattduchek.com

Yeah, I thought the image map was hilarious.

The second link in the menu, "Cool" goes through at least 4 redirects before winding up back on the www.yahoo.com home page :)

Startup.com

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Ilha Das Flores

Oh, come on now. You can be honest here... you want $30M like Summly & Wavii :)

And maybe you should get it. The app looks very impressive. How does your program decide which snippets are the most important? Did you build that technology or license/ use somebody else's code? B/c from what I understand, both Summly and Wavii were primarily acquired for their proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) tech. If your app is capable of NLP- and you built it from scratch- you likely have something of real value -- and you're probably in demand as an NLP engineer too.

I do wonder, however, if those recent acquisitions had anything to do with a recent court ruling concerning "Fair Use"/ summarization/ news aggregators. You might wanna take a look & make sure your aggregation of others' content is acceptable + truly protected under "Fair Use" principles. Please note, I am not an attorney.

See here for the original link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519622

It is hilarious how clueless you are. Even if you take offense at his speculative registration of domain names, you can't criticize Jacques of lurking. Check the HN "Leaders" list . . . he's #4 on the list of all-time karma.

Jacques, I love reading your posts; they offer great insight into real entrepreneurship. Keep up the good work (including domain speculation)!

>The reality of the matter is that for every person who stuck to their passion and ultimately "succeeded," there are thousands who lived the rest of their lives in obscurity and never "made it."

How do you quantify this? What is your data? I think it's easy to claim there are "thousands" who faded into obscurity, but is it truly the case?

And for that innumerable set of folks that never made it . . . did they really stick to their passion?

I'm inclined to agree with the top-rated comment on this one:

>If you stick with it, you'll be successful. It doesn't matter where you come from, who your parents are, what you know, who you know, or how you look. All that is required is a choice -- a commitment to excellence.

I've had my 7 years of fat followed by 7 years of lean. There is a very real correlation between attitude/commitment/hard work and success.

Wow- Lemme say first I didn't think there were many St. Louisans on HN. Thanks for sharing a bit about our growing startup community.

I've been in that building plenty of times- most recently for startup events- and the lobby + 13th floors definitely have a languished feel to them (12th floor has been better refurbished and has a lot more activity). I had absolutely no idea, though, the rest of building was so empty.

Quite a bit different from my childhood: that was the flagship downtown Famous-Barr department store . . . where they decorated the window displays every Christmas . . . getting nostalgic here.

*Ever been in the WU tunnels (not just the big one between Duncker & January halls)? Pretty expansive system right under students feet that most have no idea about :)

The Kauffman Foundation + STL IT Entrepreneurs Network (iten.org) hosted an early screening of this film at Washington University in St. Louis a couple months ago. I was fortunate to see it.

The movie offers an inside look at the earliest days of Si Valley, including the "Traitorous Eight" who left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. After that they focus mainly on the 70s-80s with a bunch of great anecdotes about Apple/Steve Jobs and Atari.

Worth watching IMO.

I worked recently at a hosting company that gave most employees (esp. in-house web designers/developers & marketing staff) very flexible hours. They subscribed to ROWE philosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE).

Most folks on my team were in the office 2-3 days a week and worked from home F/T other days.

Coordinating/ collaborating/ managing team communications was actually pretty easy and greatly facilitated with AgileZen + HipChat. Access to these web services was the same from office or from home (on different computers & OS platforms), and we used them actively no matter where anybody was at any given time.

One of the dev guys had rigged up HipChat so that notifications from AgileZen (e.g. card completed or on hold) were posted automatically in team chat. HipChat also got auto notifications from GitHub (when somebody merged or pushed new files) and from our build server, TeamCity (when new builds started and finished, or in case of an error).

As an entrepreneur and self-starter, however, the ROWE environment was dissatisfying. I think it's only appropriate for mature professionals -- and most of my coworkers were not. Seemed like most of their "working from home" was spent running errands & attending to side projects. Despite access to fancy collaboration tools, these folks were only really productive when they were at the office.

Strange the article is dated January 7, 2013. Did I miss something?

Very similar experience. Started the enrollment process end of October this year. Got a DUNS number November 1st. But I didn't get the green light to actually register until December 26. That was after 2 phone calls to Apple + 2 phone calls to D&B + countless times making updates (and waiting for email confirmations) using the D&B iUpdate system. Always seemed like one company was ready to put the ball in other company's court.

Now I'm idling because you need to signup separately for iTunes Connect. After 5x times getting the same error ("Your Apple ID isn't authorized for iTunes Connect"), I contacted Appple Dev Support. Their response: iTunes Connect is down for scheduled maintenance thru Dec. 28th. Uh, then why didn't the error message say that? Or a sidebar? Or alert?

Definitely feels like I'm in One Infinite Loop

I really like the simple UX, although I believe others have already provided some good suggestions for improvement.

I'm among the group of visitors who wants to know more before I click any of the big 3 icons. I'm also interested in improving (and adding to) my novice HTML/CSS skills, so I immediately saw value after reading the home page. It came as quite a shock you wanted $50/month to access your full content!

You may want to take this chance to consider a different $ model. Sure, you have plenty of competition- including big name universities- charging way more for effectively the same training. But free substitutes abound. The internet is flooded with tutorials, etc. about how to make stuff for the internet. No matter how much "better" quality you provide, I think prospects will balk at your rates and turn to free resources instead.

But you might still make a lot of money from providing your content "for free". If you only granted access to registered subscribers, you have a great tool for building a strong email list. The demographic has already identified itself: these are people interested in learning more about web & iOS development. There's a lot of cash to be had marketing software tools, templates and all sorts of tertiary materials to this same demo. Imagine the affiliate commission on 1 copy of Adobe CS5.

Also, I found it annoying the "Sign your team up" button on the http://teamtreehouse.com/groups page simply looped back to the main 'Plans' page. Seemed like a mistake when I first clicked; only realized it was intentional after scouring the Plans page to find out "you can easily add other users at a discount". But what are the multi-seat rates?