bloomshed

Money, credit, bonds, and the stock market are mankind's cruelest jokes. We have no better way of transporting value so we base value on consumer confidence. It's just as silly as basing value on the supply of gold.

Is inflation good or bad? I'd say inflation is good if it gets businesses moving. Inflation would be bad if currency became devalued and consumer confidence dropped.

The world's fiscal system is in crisis and people living in communities which don't create value are suffering.

Is it even possible for the majority of a country to create value? The system seems unsustainable to me.

Great video. This guy seems grounded. He's my hero.

I used to work in a lumberyard with several insanely insensitive men. They had a saying which applies here that I will not repeat.

I think that the super slick look can actually hurt an app.

www.gowalla.com comes to mind.

Enormous cuddly looking stuff makes it hard for me to know where I'm supposed to focus.

Does a video on your splash page help market things virally?

I feel like there are few things more irritating than a video of a founder or an overly cutesy animation explaining a new product being launched. How wrong am I?

The exception to my hatred for video is the Land o' Lisp video, that thing made my month.

"With computers nowadays. . ."

I was thinking today about the potential of digital textbooks/instruction especially in subjects like math. Schools group so many students so arbitrarily that most kids are not engaged at all in their class. The teacher gives a lesson but half of the students didn't understand yesterday's lesson so they don't understand today's either, one third of the students are ready for something new.

Give every student a laptop with extremely limited internet access. Students rotate from class to class getting mostly individual help from teachers on different subjects and work on their individual progress on a web-based teaching curriculum. All Johnny or Suzy has to do each day is make progress towards his/her educational goals, stay on task, and not break anybody or anything and they can be "successful" in the most modest sense. Somebody breaks a laptop, oh well. No work is lost, it's all web based, get a new machine and move on. Smells like the future to me.

I didn't mean to sound like I was being skeptical about ramps. Ramps make the most sense, especially the enormous three mile ones that lead right to the top level of the pyramid being built. I love big ramps made of dirt!

Egyptians also used the "build an earthen ramp to get the heavy stuff up, then clear the dirt away after you're done" strategy to build their ridiculously awesome temples. Any History Channel fan knows that.

I hear you. No worries.

I've been running into some dominant themes on HN as I've been participating and learning. This is my first project so usually when I say I can't code, HNers say, "Well you have no resume and can't code, so what value do you bring?"

Since I'm applying for winter session, I want to let the selection people know how I respond to those questions because I'm sure they have similar concerns.

Ok, lots of administrative suggestions here, which is good insight, I appreciate it.

What about collaboration and working with developers to incorporate their knowledge of sound programming structure and data architecture into the site? My site looks simple from the front end, but has a ton of stuff happening on the back end of things.

Excellent data management will be key for me and its something I need a lot of help with. The front end was easy for me to draw up but I need a great creative relationship with a technical cofounder to make the site as powerful as I'd like it to be.

Any suggested languages? I was emailing a guy last week about learning C. My first developer I worked with (college buddy) was using Rails for my site but my current developer is using Drupal.

Finding a technical co-founder has been surprisingly difficult as I've worked through my network of college buddies. The project is risky and I think my buddies who are also trying to establish their careers are more tentative than I thought they would be about this.

The people who like this project the most are the industry contacts I've pitched to. Essentially I've got three believers in my product: the IP lawyer I consulted with in fall of '09 when this whole thing started, the former coworker who is also a "guerrilla-style" marketer/graphic designer/photographer, and my current coder who I've contracted to do $2K of work to build the alpha prototype.

As far as investors go, I think the recession of '08 shook people's perceptions of Wall St. and made it easier for startups to argue for funding from individuals. I make the case of, "Hey, you lost how much in your mutual fund? This product is a high risk to be sure but the potential return for a small amount of cash is astronomical." I never say those words exactly of course but that's a theme of my financial argument to investors.

Its very very cheap to start a web company and I'm trying to run it that way.

As far as my status of being a nontech guy without money, that's true to a certain extent because I have no formal training. I have been working a lot on developing the marketing and product design end of things. Graphic design has been a hobby of mine for a long time so I've been doing all the initial UI design. I guess that's my "sweat" contribution to the thing so far.

There's always talk of "value" with startups. I would argue my "value" to my startup is in the fundraising, conceptual development, and UI design end of things. I communicate well with investors, I'm comfortable speaking to people because of my teaching experience, I know the difference between selling and educating (thanks to two failed attempts in sales) but I can do both if necessary. I also have talent in graphic design and can create meaningful mockups to guide coding development. People pay for those two functions in the industry. A lot of R&D money goes into developing ideas (Google Wave anyone?) so the conceptual work I've been doing is also not without value.

The only difference is that I don't have formal training so it takes me longer to develop these things to industry standard formats because I don't know what developers need to create a quality product. I'm learning though.

Thanks for the response!

I hear you. The reason I'm pursuing the project is because the product is nontechnical, cheap to build, and has mainstream appeal. There is no rocket science involved here. I'm taking existing tech and combining it in a new way that I think (and everybody says this, I know) could be really exciting.

I am looking for a technical cofounder and I might have one with my current coder. We're just phasing our way through the initial build of the site to see if we work well together. He's had some success on previous projects but we just met a couple of months ago. It's going to take time for us to figure out if we can work well together. Things are going well so far, so that's encouraging.

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Edit Note: I don't know why the comment above was downvoted. I tried to upvote it but it stayed at 0. No offense taken by me whatsoever.

I think the trick is staying calm while you confront somebody about something. If you set them off, they stop hearing what you're saying and the whole "discussion" turns into a spitting match.

Everybody knows that crazy talk is a waste of everyone's time. I get depressed every time I find myself reading the comments on CNN or YouTube. . . .

Thanks for taking time to help me out!

I have a marketing buddy who believes the best course of action would be to polish up an amazing presentation of mock ups and present it to some angels because the site will probably be rebuilt after receiving major funding anyway.

I've been operating under the idea that it's better to get something out as inexpensively as possible and see how people respond before getting heavily invested in the concept. That sounds like what you're advocating.

A three mile long ramp made of dirt. I said they used dirt. Dirt.

I like to ask my students how they think the Egyptians did stuff like this. They usually guess something like "a wooden thing with rope and they pulled it up." It's hard to comprehend how much effort Egyptians put into their projects. Building an enormous ramp and then tearing down an enormous ramp? That's a lot of shoveling.

It would be hard to fight a creature with 8 arms and no bones. They would grab all of our extremities and still have four arms left to beat us up.

To quote the esteemed Thomas Callahan the Third: "Run for your lives!!! Your weapons are useless against them!!!"

Part of me says, "Teacher evaluations come down to tests, and tests are b.s.", but another part of me thinks there has to be some way to evaluate whether students make progress. Our district tries to collect data on this but I'm not sure if it works all that great.

I've never met one, but I think octopi are the coolest.

"This fits with evolutionary perspectives that examine social pressures on the emergence of intelligence, and research showing a neural overlap between social-cognitive and executive brain functions."

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OK, so research shows a link between being successful socially and developing higher level brain functioning. This reminds me of a lot of training I've had since I've been working in education. The brain is like a muscle and there are ways to make it stronger.

I heard a professor give a great talk about the brain and the connection between our emotions and our ability to learn. Basically, stressful/negative emotions trigger our lower brain (our "alligator" brain controlling fight or flight) and keep us from operating at a high level of executive functioning like reasoning.

He had a great illustration for what happens to our brains when we feel emotionally safe and we begin to operate in our frontal lobe. He called it "flow" and described the feeling as when we get lost in something and forget what time it is and we stop paying attention to what's going on outside our immediate vicinity. It's a feeling I think we all recognize and enjoy.

This prof also said it could take somewhere around 3 hours for a student to be emotionally ready to "flow" after his/her lower brain has been triggered due to an alarming stimulus.

Our brains are constantly creating and destroying neurological connections. By understanding how our brain works best, we can strengthen our ability to access that "flow" which allows us to operate most effectively.

On a lighter note, I wonder how much smarter Americans would be on a national level if they watched fewer "gripping/exciting/scary" TV shows where they're constantly being bombarded with alarming stimuli?

I'm always amazed by the Egyptians. They cut enormous obelisques(sp?) out of solid rock, rolled them onto enormous barges, floated them down the Nile, then erected them (pun intended) with nothing more than rope, sweat, logs and dirt. Pretty awesome stuff really.

Just goes to show you how powerful bread is. Egypt had great harvests on a regular basis, something few other places could accomplish, so they were able to spend more time developing knowledge. "Western Civilization" was born in Egypt, don't let anyone tell you different.

Is it fair to sum up the Startup School meeting by saying there's more than one way to surgically remove the epidermis of a feline?

HN Version of the comment I posted on your site:

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As a teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools, I tend to think that there is a direct correlation between socioeconomic status (SES) and student performance. Students who come from homes where their parents are educated and have jobs and take care of their kids likely are not in the lowest SES categories so they are expected to do well and work hard on school. Kids in this situation generally meet their learning goals.

Kids that have no parental support are common in the lowest SES situations. These kids basically have to raise themselves and their younger siblings because mom or dad aren't there. It takes a lot of training and an amazing school environment to lift kids out of these situations and keep them on pace with their learning.

The big reason why performance based pay for teachers is such a hot issue (besides the fact that teachers WILL cheat on their students tests to get their bonuses) is that every community has such a wide array of challenges to overcome. Kids from one area of Milwaukee have very different environments from the kids across town, for example. It's hard to determine benchmarks for performance when the kids are operating at such different stages of development.

I always hear stuff about how nanotech is going to do crazy stuff. What will a nanotech factory look like (if that's even an accurate description of how things will be made)?

Good point.

The only thing violent about farmville is how zynga relentlessly pursues your email list and real life dollars in exchange for worthless worthless digital items for your farm.

Zynga does do a bit of charity awareness and fundraisers in the game (the Haiti Earthquake relief fund, for example) but the best way to get blocked from everyone's news feed is to post a bunch of farmville stuff on your profile.

I don't know if I follow what you're saying. We could make up hypothetical situations all day.

Mental illness/child neglect/child abuse are all tragic things that exist independently of media.

If the title of this article were "Study shows link between social media and depression" it would be a different story.

Right now the gizmodo article is titled something outrageous just to illicit hits to their site.

The title of this post is so ridiculous I refuse to honor the link by reading it.

Anyone who really thinks Farmville or social networks had anything to do with this incident needs to learn about what it means to have a mental illness.

This is a tragic incident that could have been prevented if people had understood and identified what was really going on with this woman. I'm extremely uncomfortable with this post's existence.

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Edit: I'm extremely uncomfortable with this LINK's existence. Gizmodo is being stupid with this article.

Scorched3D as in Scorch the Earth right? The tank/weapon game?

I used to love a game called Stuntcopter on our family's old grayscale macintosh. You'd drop the guy out of the helicopter through the clouds into a horse-drawn hay wagon.

We also had Microleague Baseball, which I wish I could find now it would be amazing. That game was awesome, it had custom speech capability and everything. EA Sports could learn a thing or three from them.

Limits make everything more fun!

I have this thing I call the Nintendo Theory(tm). Nintendo was great at producing games that were simple, responsive, and had endearing characters. Companies like Microsoft and Sony pursue complex graphics and complex controls and they make amazing feats of technical engineering but if you ask people what games they absolutely love, a lot of them will say they love the old Nintendo stuff.

I try to apply Nintendo's approach when I'm thinking about and designing the user interface for my app.

I suck at Mario, by the way, but I love it.

This is why America is great.

Could the argument be made that Sorkin's style filled a void in the marketplace that was network TV drama in the case of West Wing?

Long, tight, terse dialogue is what the audience interacted with most immediately with West Wing. Sorkin can write, so he does. I would say audiences who appreciated good writing and a different conflict arc to drive the narrative had few other alternatives for that time slot.