seanlinehan

> Can we truly empower everyone -- women, children, underrepresented minorities, immigrants and the unconnected?

Part of me thinks that Zuck means people without family or otherwise ties to wealth and influence. But another part of me thinks that he means those that aren't connected to the internet. If it's the latter, this is quite the bold statement. The implication would be that people without access to the internet are structurally disadvantaged. Which in a lot of ways are true. The internet enables anybody to acquire knowledge, skills, and relationships with an ease that is otherwise impossible. Thankfully, this bucket has a fairly clear solution path.

More likely they would just own the cars themselves.

Bloomberg called us that[0], but the ocean / air / rail freight business has a fundamentally different set of constraints and challenges.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/flexport-w...

Shoot me an email.. Would love to chat! sean@flexport.com

Link: http://www.flexport.com

The razor industry is a primarily marketing driven market... And it's a tremendous one. One of my favorite acquisition headlines: "P&G to buy Gilette for $57B" [0]. I think Harry's strategy plays well into both what you're describing, though targeting the profitable, high-end sector of the market (as opposed to the ultra-cheap commodity razor market).

They recognized that the existing players on the high end were reaping above-average profits from their brand + distribution, but without strong product differentiation. If they could (and it seems they are) launch a strong brand with good quality products at substantially lower prices, they could earn a sizable chunk of the market. Cutting out retail margins and owning their factory should let them keep pretty strong margins even on the reduced price. Pretty epic.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/28/news/fortune500/pg_gillette/

The people selling on Teespring likely prefer it this way. Launching these campaigns is like digging for psychological gold... Once you've found it, you don't want your competitors to know where you found it. A lot of the campaign pages also have do not crawl headers set on them to prevent this as well.

It is a legal requirement to allow users to unsubscribe from your email newsletter, yes. What Slack does that is really cool is at the bottom of their notifications email they have:

Snooze these notifications for: an hour, eight hours, a day, three days, or the next week. Or, turn email notifications off. For more detailed preferences, see your account page.

"hour", "eight hours", "three days", "next week" are all links that silence the notifications for discrete periods of time. Pretty neat.

I would definitely recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People as an addition to the list. I'd say that learning how to deal with people and communicate ideas effectively is at least as important as learning how to think.

This is also a book I recommend reading, re-reading, and then re-reading again for people of all ages.

Edit: I'd also probably recommend Innumeracy[0] which is a fun book about dealing with numbers. It has some pretty great strategies for coming up with good back-of-napkin estimations which is a pretty useful skill.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Its...

setInterval(function(){Math.random() > .5 ? $(".zero.button").click() : $(".one.button").click()}, 80);

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I've heard this quote repeated literally dozens of times.

~$15k per current customer

I can't speak broadly, only from my personal reaction. I also left the site after seeing the Norton logo (and before reading the comments here), because it seemed completely misplaced. I associate Norton with cleaning my computer of badware, not of whether or not some just-launched service is treating my data securely.

Because it seemed out of place, it felt like it was an obvious tactic to bootstrap trust where there wasn't any. A better icon (for me) would have been a badge from your SSL provider, or even just some well designed lock icon.

Good find! We ran across this while building Project Jefferson. It's a pretty cool project.

Mark, you are incredible. I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of certain locales needing more TLC. I think we can get away with the fully-automated approach for most of the maps, but there are certain regions where this approach more or less falls apart.

The one thing we say -- and mean quite seriously -- is that we are willing to generate maps of wherever you most desire. We've already begun the process of rendering custom areas for customers, all requested through the contact form of the site. I think we'll slowly refine maps of certain areas as time goes on. We wanted to cast the net wide and fast, but I think we can hone in from here on out.

Thanks for your thoughts Mark!

To each their own, I suppose. Our goal was create designs that were bold and bordering on the abstract, rather than to create traditional maps. I'd say maps are one of the more ubiquitous pieces of art, but rarely are cause for any attention. We wanted to create art anchored in people's identities -- not just another standard map of Paris.

I think what I'm getting at is that you probably aren't in our target audience for these current designs. That's totally okay... Perhaps one of our future designs will suit your fancy.

Thanks!

Thanks for your comment.

We were on the fence with the naming of the maps, but decided to roll with the potential misunderstanding of what they represent. We were really interested in playing into themes of American exploration for this project. We settled on Project Jefferson as the name of the project, in honor of Jefferson's commissioning of the Louis and Clark expedition. We named our map themes after the tribes found during their journey, in homage to the shared identity of the land.

Potentially, yes. We're going to go ahead and print the attribution on the maps just in case. Thanks!

Seems like there is wiggle room there, but we're not opposed to dropping the OpenStreepMap copywrite into the bottom corner of the map.

No, we actually hand-designed all of our styles in XML and generated all images from the pure data in python.

Yup, totally OSM data. Going to add attribution to them in our Our Story section right now. Totally missed that, but happy to give credit where credit is due. Thanks!

Really good question. We started with a list of the 5,000 highest population cities in the U.S and tried to generate maps of as many of them as possible. We are using Open Street Maps data as our source, which is generally pretty amazing but didn't provide the data in the format that we needed it for every city. There were a good couple hundred cities that we wanted to generate but didn't. We hand generated binding boxes for a good number of very large cities, but didn't do it for all of the missing ones.

If you'd like, we can make one for Madison!

Hey there,

I'm one of the two creators of Project Jefferson. We'll do a full run down of the tech we used to do this some time this week, but I'm 100% willing to chat about anything to do with the project.

We started working on this just a couple weeks ago and are super excited to ship it tonight. If anything breaks or looks wonky, please drop me a line. :)

Cheers, Sean

Zulily's market cap is around $4.5B right now as well. I believe the criteria for that claim was that there are no other full-priced ecommerce companies breaking the $2B mark.

If you are going to attempt to use this tactic, the most important thing to consider is that your offer must be within the range of reasonableness. "Shock 'em with your first offer" is a good sound-bite, but make sure not to actually shock them. If the number that you propose is outside the range of reasonableness, an experienced negotiator will "wipe it off the table" and re-anchor.

For example, if you are negotiating your salary for a first-time software engineering gig and open with $500k, the other side is likely to say something like, "There is absolutely no way we can do that. We would like to offer you $75k." If you're offer gets wiped off the table, your anchor has absolutely no power in the negotiation.

So go high (or low, if you're on the other side of the table), but don't be too extreme.

Congrats David. The new homepage looks super clean. Excited to see what the future has to offer for Weebly.

This is precisely what a company called Sold used to do before their acquisition:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/dropbox-snatches-up-sold-th...

It's an interesting system to build, though, and there is money to be made. The very first version of my startup was something that was pretty much the same system, but we focused on offloading liquidation inventory. Some things that you will likely discover along the path

1. If you use eBay as your dataset, you are pretty much SOL. Their lack of rigorous moderation in terms of their image style guide makes computer vision really, really difficult to carry out. Using SIFT image features from the same exact images, I only got about a ~75% accuracy because eBay users tend to slap all types of random extra things onto their images. I can't imagine you'd have much success trying to use CV for identifying (with sufficient accuracy) consumer electronics in consumer supplied photos. I can't speak for Mechanical Turk... We wound up modifying our tech strategy such that we didn't need high accuracy in identifying other listings.

2. Product versions dramatically alter product value, but are just about impossible to figure out without being explicitly provided that data by the person holding the product.

3. Unless you own your own sales channel, you will be beholden to the marketplaces to offload the inventory in. In my case, we automated the process of selling on both eBay and Amazon. We were reading in data from multiple wholesalers (dropshippers), which had catalogs full of an arbitrary assortment of products... Which means we wound up listing weapons, sexual objects, etc. We got dinged pretty bad by eBay for these things (though, turns out batons sell really well on eBay). Eventually we pretty much got banned from both marketplaces for listing violations + bad fulfillment speed. We couldn't control the shipping speed of our dropshippers (we had no bargaining power), which I attribute to killing that section of the business.

As somebody who actually built the same system that you're describing (sans being an open marketplace, which actually makes it more difficult), I can say that you're in for a rough fight. Pretty epic watching an ebay store run itself, though...

I remember the very first time I pushed something onto a server via FTP. Some acquaintance on a gaming forum gave me a subdomain + hosting on their server to play around with. I must have been 8 years old or so... I had no idea how it worked, but was completely amazed that I put something on the internet. I consider myself quite lucky to have found somebody patient enough to walk me through setting up my FTP client.

I started building things in PHP pretty shortly after that. Not sure how early that was, but I distinctly remember building a gradebook system for my 4th grade teacher during class. I used to finish up my classwork early and jet over to the computer to work on it. I don't think it wound up being fully functional at the end, though.

It's interesting being in my very early twenties and saying I've been programming for 10+ years. On HN this isn't very unique, but in the public-at-large people tend to look at me with either suspicion or amazement. Though, I usually immediately follow saying "10 years" with, "Though, that doesn't mean I was any good for most of them... ;)"

Fun stuff.

Glad to see Breue hitting HN. My company einstein.com went through the BreueingRoom and it was a fantastic experience. My full testimonial is on the Breue site, so I won't repeat myself here.

The community so far is of the utmost caliber, and I hope that it is able to remain that way. I have high expectations in this regard, though. Zach has done a great deal towards pushing high-quality community standards.

I look forward to seeing it grow.