mccon104's comments

A couple I've thought up but never had the time or know how to make. If you want to take any of these and run feel free, if you'd like to talk more about any my email is in my profile:

-A dating app that more closely mimics real-world dating by bringing spontaneous discovery and subtle-interactions into play. Traditional dating apps require you to a) know what you want and b) know how to find that in a text-based profile. That's not how the real world works. In real life dating you either meet through a third party (friend, roommate, classmate) or you randomly meet this person in a bar, library, etc (serendipity). In the latter case you choose to interact or not based solely on a) attractiveness and b) very basic personal information (age, general personality, intelligence). This app would try to closely mimic that form of meeting. It would also control a major pain point with current dating apps where men send out hundreds of messages without hearing back and women tend to get buried in a sea of copy and paste messages. It would do this by first requiring the female (in hetero users) to indicate interest in the male (real life: raised eyebrow/come hither look). Men can say they are interested in a girl (real life: buy her a drink) but they cannot interact with them any further until the woman says she is interested. The idea would be to start this in colleges where the majority of users are of similar demographics and actively seeking casual dates/hookups.

-an online marketplace for premium artisan greeting cards. i've always thought there was a market for the $10-$20 greeting card as long as you can really bring something people want. You see it with Hallmark trying out fresh ink and with the rise of Papyrus. The idea is that you can find plenty of very good artists who are looking for a way to pad their income. Personally I'm family friends with a good number of cartoonists but a look in any liberal arts university could surely uncover 5-10 quality artists. So the idea would be to seed the site with numbered, limited runs of the best of these artists greeting cards. You would need to find a quality printer and make sure your packaging is worthwhile but if you could seed the site initially with 10-20 new/unique quality greeting cards it could turn into it's own machine. Especially if you allow artists outside those you "invited" initially to submit their entries and have the top 5-10 make it to print each month/quarter. After allowing for printing and shipping costs you could give the artists 60% and take 40% of the proceeds. If done right this could be a place for artists to get started/make extra money.

-and iphone app built to be a "personal assistants assistant". An app that can take a persons calendar (google, outlook, ios), travel plans (tripit), address book, etc and make common tasks for a personal assistant much easier to do.

-a site/app that makes it easier to find a workout partner. it's been shown that people work out harder and more consistently when they have a workout partner but finding one (especially in urban areas) is incredibly difficult.

To give such a definitive "never" answer and say their only hope is if the "bubble keeps inflating" without offering a shred of evidence makes you sound like any critic of anything that has ever gone big.

If you're going to educate me re: the valuation, then by all means educate me. Don't give me some confidently worded finite opinion and expect to pass it off as fact.

"It's not the strongest who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change." Charles Darwin.

By (incorrectly) calling someone who isn't rich "weak" you're placing your personal judgements on them, because that's not at all what Darwin was talking about.

<tangent> I do find it interesting that you consider taxing people "punishment". Does that mean you consider government, or at least funding of the government, a form a punishment?</tangent>

What if the current system is rigged (by loopholes and allowances for swiss banking) so that the rich can avoid paying what the rest of the population does? Wouldn't that mean the "weaker" species were the ones actually being punished? So by raising the effective rate on the rich wouldn't you simply be restoring order to the system?

I get not liking "the 1%" but you do the exact same thing by using the word "handouts". You swapped one co-opted term for another. One can only assume you really mean "welfare" when you say "handouts", and that to me means you have no idea what welfare is or what it does for the families and people that need it.

First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition. The whole point is one you seem to be in need of (don't focus on "specs" or "definitives" and just find a bed and bedding that you love. If it is more expensive then it's money well spent.)

Re: farmer v doctor- again you're focusing on the "detail" of the advice and while totally missing the point. The point of that advice is that prevention (whatever you personally define as such) and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks.

You seem to want this advice to offer the exact recipe for a better life. You expect it to contain the scientifically proven facts. Unfortunately that's not how good advice works. Good advice gives you perspective while leaving the details up to you.

<mild_snark>

Finally most of the advice deals with this thing called "joy". you'll find that scientifically speaking there is no agreed upon universally measurable "joy" metric. In lieu of science I recommend creating your own totally subjective definition of joy and applying it to as much of your life as possible. I have no facts to give you as to why this improves your life so you're going to have to trust me... But it does. Vastly.

</mild_snark>

And that is the big picture that each piece of advice is offering you.

Both this page and her portfolio are blatant "adaptations" of inspectelement's html5 single page portfolio design http://inspectelement.com/html5portfolio/

The top bar, color choices, structure, font, her "logo" for her portfolio, the contact me portion... all of that comes straight from the template

edit: added "contact" part

Because the former is preposterous. It was a pre-fab "teachers" test from their textbook publisher. It sounds like the perfect thing to take the night before the real test to see what you may need to look over one more time.

The latter is less preposterous, but still in the wrong mind. Is it the student's job to disclose what they studied? Frankly as long as they didn't actively steal their professors test I don't see how they can be put at fault. They studied hard, studying extra material, and got lucky when their professor decided to forgo doing his job and mailed-in the creation of his test. So now it's their fault for not telling the professor "hey it seems you copied someone else's work"?

These sound like regular college students in a 600 person business class just trying to graduate. They're not the morally bankrupt scourge of the earth, and your damning evidence against their employability (or apparent lack thereof) is based on them not coming forth because of a study guide?

though even with this i would side with what sph said below. The fact that 200 students (and not something like 10) got the guide tells me the original act wasn't one intending to "cheat" so much as study extra material.

the professor told the students he made their tests, so there was nothing that should have lead them to believe these extra questions would be on the test.

does it make their act a little more morally gray? yes. does it constitute as cheating? no.

it's an old script that gets repeated with every generation around the time when the new gen gets to be 18-28. it's like the "HN is becoming reddit" alarms that cry out every 3 months or so.

the crux of your (or at least the most compelling) arguments is these students did nothing wrong studying but should have had it in them to say "hey i've seen this before". Did i get the gist?

The crux of my argument is that in a societal structure such as a college where the students pay large sums of money to be educated it is morally wrong to take that money and then do nothing to actually test their knowledge.

i believe what the students did was a moral misdemeanor and the professor committed the felony. yet you seem more interested in prosecuting the students than fixing the larger issue.

The responsibility does not fall to the students to inform a professor that due to his own laziness they, through entirely moral and acceptable means, had already studied these exact questions.It's not a student's responsibility to tell the professor how to do his job.

He failed his students. Period. Calling it anything else is putting frosting on dogshit.

Moral fiber plays no role here. They didn't stay silent as some unspeakable wrong occurred. They studied a publicly available guide. It comes down to this. Is it the students' responsibility to inform a professor every single time they see a test question that they recognize or is it the professors responsibility to prepare a proper test of their knowledge?

The top comment on HN (with 136 karma) was run4yourlives decrying his generation's lack of humility and saying "You are not fucking special in any way shape or form." You mean to tell me you wouldn't be a little bit defensive? Don't kid yourself.

Also- just because you, psych degree and all, think he is self centered doesn't mean anything more than you, eggbrain, feel he is self centered. Give him some credit. He was in a rut, tried something new, and was successful. And now you want him to feel bad about it?

Second - Why in gods name would you teach yourself to view people so one dimensionally? You sound like a College Admissions rep only interested in a persons GPA.

I appreciate the basic notion, that execution matters more than words but I wouldn't waste my breath telling my naive self that. I was far too naive to take that advice to heart. And I surely wouldn't tell myself to not be the first to give someone a second chance.

I don't know what I'd tell myself, I haven't put my mind there yet, but I do know for damn sure that it wouldn't involve such a cold finite tone.

that's a bit much don't you think? HN is a community based around learning about/discussing this exact sort of thing. he asked an earnest question and felt he received a half-assed response. so he called it out.

it happens here all. the. time. it's why i love reading this site, trite reponses get torn apart.

  Really, I feel like banging my head against a wall by leaving this Comment,
  but dammit, Veoh going under makes me mad. You were better than YouTube. 
  I recommended the hell out of you … and then you stabbed us all in the back. 
  You revamped at one point and took away crucial ease of discovery options 
  (like WTF did you take away recently uploaded by length as an option?), you 
  kept changing the damned player software, and your support staff in forums 
  ignored all the complaints about the revamp. You guys shot yourselves in 
  the head and only now do you wind up at the inevitable end. Had you frikkin 
  LISTENED over a year ago, you might have escaped this fate. Using the lawsuit 
  as an excuse is utter BS. This is YOUR failure. This pisses me off to no end 
  because Veoh deserved to thrive. Next time, LISTEN to your fanatical users, 
  goddammit. Learn at least THAT much.

However, twitter isn't about engagement. It's not about communication. It's about broadcasting 1->many

Why does "communication" only count on a 1 to 1 sense? Furthermore how can we possibly jump to the conclusion that just because it's about broadcasting 1 to many, that it is not about engagement? As a service I find it's engagement has a much longer-tail than that of facebook's. Once you've seen all the pictures, added all the obscure acquaintances, and checked all the relationship updates facebook becomes more of a weekly "check to keep up" service than one of daily engagement. Twitter on the other hand is constantly engaging because it's one and only service is to allow people to bring fresh content/media/insight to many people with one update. There's no dilution of which feature i'm going to use now, or which one i'm going to get good at.

As a business decision, giving away access to 3rd party developers seems like favoring short term growth well above profit and the future

Really? If you realized your main product was this successful communication protocol (pg's words, not mine) you would want to limit it's usage to just your own domain? Your value is in the protocol itself, not where it's being used. If I was an investor, worrying why people don't use twitter.com would fall somewhere between "did i leave the coffee maker on this morning?" and "where did i park my car?".