jmm

I co-managed a SF/LA test prep company up until recently, so if you any questions specific to test prep, hit me up.

And a reaction... I'll be interested to see how well you're able to retain your better tutors. Tutoring clientele grows firstly by word of mouth, and if you're a good tutor, you'll inevitably get referrals. Yet from where I'm sitting there's not a great way to funnel these referrals through TutorSpree (we had a decent way of managing it in our SAT prep world). There's also nothing preventing a tutor from leaving TutorSpree after, say, a few first lessons with an initial cadre of clients. So all those $5 rings of the register are lost.

This, I think, is a distinguishing feature from Airbnb, as Airbnb efficiently connects a seller with a pool of distant buyers. The service itself gets primary credit for the connections rather than the individual venue or venue owners due to the nature of individual travel. Tutoring is a little different. A tutor produces one happy client, and that client serves as a connector (rather than Tutorspree) to a new pool of students.

Nevertheless, the level of support and the quality of the systems you provide to your tutors will play a role in overall retention (client acquisition and payment processing are certainly a start).

Why keep talking about college athletics? Comparing U of Phx admissions/passing criteria to that of high level athletes at big schools is not exactly redeeming. Because everyone knows the idea of the scholar-athlete at major programs is a mostly a farce (which is not to say there aren't exceptions).

Addition: And if you're simply trying to knock non-profit higher ed from a pedestal, my point is that it's already been knocked. At the same time, there's a continuum of relaxed academic standards and capitalizing on certain types of enrollment, so U of Phx is not necessarily on equal standing simply because there are some concerning things happening at Big Football U.

Did you catch the law school article which was the #1 article for several days on nytimes.com this week? My thought is that with all of this, the education bubble needs to deflate some lest it burst.

The NFL (and other football governing bodies?) are actually equally worried, if not more worried, by the repeated lower intensity hits that take place in the trenches (read: offensive and defensive linemen). So improving refereeing is perhaps part of the solution (to avoid some of the more horrific/sensational injuries), but other things need to change to protect the linemen.

It's sad actually, skills players in football have always been the ones talked about and focused on, and here we have, yet again, the linemen mostly forgotten about.

Another point mentioned here is that the improvements in helmet design have undoubtedly led to more violent use of the helmet. I have a friend in the NFL league office, and they're well aware of this ironic (?) fact, but what is there to do? Go back to leather caps without face masks?

The technology mentioned here could actually provide the players with real-time data and threshold points ("you've had 264 high-intensity hits this season; danger zone") which could perhaps help to adjust player habits more readily. I'm thinking about a parallel situation where certain residents used less water (or some other utility) than their neighbors when the meter was visible for routine/daily check-ins.

Disclosure: I played a year of college football as a quasi-lineman (tight end) before the drudgery of football practice led me to quit and move over to [JV] basketball.

See The Streets "Fit But You Know It": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPbNMLwmxYk

Actually, I hope that people's budding interest in hobby beekeeping can help pick up the slack...

I was thinking the other day about the viability of a small business that would install apiaries in peoples back yards, and the hosts would get a share of the honey. The rest would be sold at at markets. A distributed system of bzzzzz. Eh? An article in the nytimes the other day inspired the idea - about how different communities are dropping prohibitions on urban beekeeping. Of course, this article appeared only a few days after another article about bees drinking maraschino cherry juice in Red Hook and producing red metallic-tasting honey.

Especially considering that Mashable provides one of the worst ad experiences ever for the iPhone.

What's with the language "agreed to acquire" over simply "acquired"?

Yes - while most would argue that some kind of passion is necessary for a successful venture, it is rarely sufficient.

This reads like an argument analysis answer choice on the LSAT or GMAT. In a good way.

I was perplexed for a second and thought MG had discovered nested tweets, but actually it looks like it was just too much to ask him to take screen shots consistently.

Testing related diagnoses should be viewed with a bit of skepticism, I think. I worked in test prep for five years, and our [high end] clientele had quite a way of paying their way to various diagnoses that granted extended time on the P/SAT, ACT, or whatever. (And in case you're curious, colleges are unable to view whether a student took the SAT under extended time conditions or not.)

That said, "exam anxiety" might be a new one to try in the college admissions racket.

Tilapia and catfish are good fish to be eating over their carnivorous cousins (food input vs. food output), but the specifics of farm raising have something to do with an individual fish's greenness.

In the end, I hope that we push up production of tilapia here in the US, and I'm excited by programs that blend simple aquaculture with more traditional green growing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks (Will Allen is a boss!).

Yes, our obsession with cleanliness/newness is one of the major culprits in our piles of waste. And to think we once lived amongst each other with communal drinking cups at the water fountain...

Here you go (I had to type it up for the police report). My friend actually met the dudes at the BART station with a brown bag with a candy bar in it, the police waiting in the wings. All for my iPhone. What a guy...

Me (on Steve's phone): Pick up the phone. And give it back.

thief (the following morning): A man I find yo phone hit m e. Backs

Steve: Cool how can i get it back from you

thief: Sense I find the can i get a reward cause I was gone throw it away but i figured u needed yo phone

thief: its up to u man

thief: hello

Steve: Yeah how much

thief: 250 or 300

thief: I jus. Need the money man am am homeless

Steve: Ok how about 100

thief: How about 200

Steve: Deal where do we meet

thief: Meet me at the am pm in west Oakland ok

Steve: Ok im at work til 8 see you there at 815

thief: Do u know anybody else dat can do it cuz datse a long time man

thief: Hello

Steve: Ok my pal can meet you at ashby bart at 3

thief: I don't have a way man tell to pal to meet me by am pm if u want yo phone i don't have all day man

Steve: My friend doesnt have a car and im in sf till 8 and hes not going into oakland. ashby at 3

thief: ok i need a number tho

thief: Ok tel yo pal to meet me at 19th. Street Bart and I'll give him my number ok

thief: so wsup man

Steve: Hes not going into oakland. ashby at 3 ok. if yeah i'll give you his number

Steve: Ok hes leaving now for ashby 200 ok his number is 510#######

thief: Ok were is he cumin from and tell him to put da money in a bag or something

Steve: Hes coming from north and the money is in a brown bag

A feel-good story about the UC Berkeley police...

I was playing basketball at the Cal rec center and someone stole my iPhone from my sweatshirt. Later that night I texted the phone from my roommate's hoping that I could convince the thief of some kind of trade. I went to work the following day during which my roommate, who was a grad student at Berkeley (EECS!), received a text a from said thief. The thief tried to compel me or my friend to come to West Oakland (danger!), but my friend negotiated for a meeting at a Berkeley BART station. My friend called the UC police, and they organized a little sting to arrest the culprits and recover the phone. All for my first generation iPhone :) Pretty great. The transcript of the texts is pretty magnificent, too.

So this is where I groan over MG groaning about having to carry a couple extra pounds in his purse.

And perhaps I'm missing some greater MG-context, but using the first person singular pronoun that often in a speculative review of a device (or whatever) is a bit off putting. Which is to say, whiny hyper-personalized reviews don't really cut it for me.

Based on the comments here, I think Carwoo will take a while to convince users of its utility. But there are people out there for whom this will save time and hassle. A friend of mine, for instance, recently decided on the exact car he wanted and then faxed an offer sheet to various dealers in Northern California. First responder got the deal. And he was able to pay a bit below the price he would have had to haggle for showing up at a single dealership.

As this catches on, I think there will need to be some education regarding the proposition itself as well as how financing might play into the service.

Good stuff. I've used maptimize.com in the past for dealing with ad hoc geographical visualizations.

I like what Tom Wolfe called it, the "fuck patois." Though he was at the time parodying lax boys, etc., at elite institutions.

This ongoing "conversation" between Zed and Jaques reminds me a bit of The Fountainhead. I won't be so obvious as so say who I think is Howard Roarke and who I think is Ellsworth Toohey, I guess :)

I get what you're saying. Even this exchange we're having is not productive in the truer sense of the word.

But I do think titles of articles here are for the most part honest and direct, and that should provide some decent filter for avoiding tech gossip. Like, "Correcting the Record from my Divorce" on Huffington Post will pretty clearly not link to an article that is edifying in the way that you want.

Funny about the PG article... I've been coworking a bit and some of the guys have put up multiple barriers to accessing Hacker News. I'm moving towards that, too. The illusion that I'm getting things done by reading tech related articles a couple hours a day is, er, being disillusioned.

Oh, come on. Elon is one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs of our generation and it /is/ news that he's been run through the wringer by Justine. This has to be distracting from companies that are aiming to do truly great things... solar energy, electric cars, privatized space flight. So I'm OK with a little solidarity here, and allowing him to clear his name before a pretty appropriate audience, given the technologies he's involved in and has been involved in.

And I think this is one of the common reasons why people are OK with the AmEx annual fee... no hassles.

I'm sorry to say but calling Posterous "Preposterous" isn't really a dig... the word was the inspiration for the current name and the reason they pronounce it like they do, with a short o instead of a long o. I remember some such tag line from the guys like "blogging made preposterously easy - Posterous."

That said, yeah, they've obviously hit a nerve with their competitor bashing. And the sad thing is they didn't really need the bashing at all... just continue on the nice guy route with "if you're not happy, we're making it easy to move over to Posterous."

Um... that's true of buying any stock, right? So I'm not sure the logic allows you to make any kind of comparative decision.

Foursquare isn't a carrier feature; it's an independent application. And the reason money is flowing in is because it's an application that is poised to be quite well suited to serving targeted local ads/offers across every mobile network.

My guess is that foursquare will not only be building out its engineering team with the cash, but also its customer service team to better serve big advertising companies and also more localized mom and pop operations.

The Larry Summers of HN!

I get what you're saying. But it is an interesting engineering failure story. Was one of our case studies in engineering ethics class...

The timing of the iPhone (its OS and its app store ecosystem) played a significant role in the check-in model, I think, as it encouraged developers to [finally] sidestep the carriers, and also prevented background processing. Though this is kinda irrelevant to Chris' bigger point of pivoting towards a perceived advantage.

(It will be interesting to see how things change with OS4's background processing. I'd guess users will continue to prefer for check-in based over continuous gps logging, though there may be some interesting/appealing applications of continuous logging. Haven't really looked into the specifics yet.)

I can see why Braintree would have no interest in businesses that are destined to maintain smallness, but they're missing out on getting into bed with some young companies whose payment volume will eventually pop. And leaving the door open for a more nurturing payment portal to grab young companies (and presumably keep them).

So it might be wise to for Braintree to loosen up the fees a bit for promising young companies - an incubator program for payments of sorts. At least for the YC/HN community :)

Though, honestly, looking at their pricing, Braintree ins't crazy expensive even for a company that gets $0 sales out of the gate... $99 initial setup, $35 monthly, $10 for cc storage, $75 as a zero sales "penalty". Setup delay seems to be an issue here as well, but that just seems like Braintree doing its diligence.

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing