Okay, when reading various blogs (or checking facebook) I always get nervous that the page's owner will analyze the logs and call me out on just how many times and how rapidly i hit refresh waiting for new content to appear or hoping that someone has replied to my comment.
Most Early Admissions programs are no longer binding. Students from families earning less than 100K no longer have to pay tuition at several top schools. Every school I was accepted to pretty much offered the same financial aid, which was inline with what FAFSA said my family should contribute. I have never heard of anybody admitted to a top school having to turn it down due to finances. There is plenty of aid (grants that you don't have to repay) for anybody who is not rich.
As for SAT tutoring, well for kids applying to top schools this will probably improve your M+V less than 100 points. If it's any more than that, you probably aren't top school material.
LOL. Pincus had the absolute worst speech at "Startup School". He didn't prepare anything and just meandered aimlessly from one thought to the next, rambling on about his life story. It was almost intolerable.
Anything that cites Outliers instantly loses credibility for me. Maybe his presentations became more visual throughout the decades because of the technology available.
Steve Jobs presentation skills, ironically, leverage little in the way of technology, and everything in the way of presence.
What's your issue with the Outliers 10K hours expert thesis? Do you have any sources that indicate a significant number of individuals with a baseline skill of ability in a particular ability, who also put in 10,000 hours of _focused_ practice _haven't_ established "expertise?"
That particular thesis of Outliers very, very strongly resonated with me.
I haven't read the book, but it just doesn't seem very plausible that one needs about the same number of practice hours to become an expert at any of several hard but unrelated skills.
This presentation goes a bit beyond that and suggests that giving presentations is like brain surgery.
The actual research articles on the subject (Ericsson and others) are really interesting, though. It's not about a magic number, but the fact that deliberate practice has a marked effect on the level of expertise.
Well according to Quantcast, this site now only gets 5.9K US visitors a month, so you might not need even 5K to have a decent site. At its peak HN got around 17.4K.
Showing the summary of the story is a REALLY good idea. It's also cool that it gets the summary for you, and you can change it if you want. The font is a bit cramped-together and small. It's pretty unpleasant to look at. What is your bounce rate? I think changing the font to make it initially more comfortable to look at might improve your bounce rate. I don't mean serif to sans-serif. Your font is so serify that it looks italicized. There are lots of lighter serif fonts.
re: Quantcast: PG said that this site was getting around 40k uniques a day a few months back.
re: the font. I'll have to mess around with the fontography and see what I can do. The summaries are italicized right now. Is that what you're referring to? If those are hard to read, I can change that around.
re: the summaries. Thanks for the feedback. I thought long and hard about that, and one of the big reasons that I did it, was SEO. I thought that Google would appreciate a few more sentences per link to index and rank a bit better for the keywords I'm targeting.
Thanks for the feedback on the summary extraction. I worked pretty long and hard on that one. It's suprisingly challenging. I'm glad it's worked for you so far.
Yup this is similar to the cool thing that Chegg introduced after years of just facilitating student-to-student exchanges. I used to just sell to students directly (and usually could come very close to covering initial purchase price), but after graduating I had to turn to Chegg to sell my books. Prices weren't nearly as good as they were with direct selling, but they were much better than what the bookstore would offer.
The HUGE advantage to selling on Chegg instead of Amazon is that Chegg gives you REAL MONEY (in the form of a prepaid debit card). Some functionality on their site could be improved, but the fact that they give REAL MONEY gives them a big edge.
We're using a similar model but allowing students to rent their books to other students (get paid & retain ownership). In the long run we think we'll kick Chegg's butt. http://www.textbookrevolt.com/
If the oracle approach is voted through without forcing an licencing exception change, I will be pushing people VERY strongly to NoSql solutions who need any scalability. MySQL was pretty much the best solution for many projects, and being used as a base with it in the hands of Oracle is a questionable thing to advise from a business risk perspective.
You go to business school because you need that MBA for your job or to switch jobs. It is not about learning. It is about networking (and partying) for two years.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, sitting in a lecture about entrepreneurship does nothing towards achieving your goal. The problem with business school and business theory is precisely what this guy thinks is a virtue: addressing the "why". In real business, and especially entrepreneurship, figuring out the answer to the why is the easy part (although consulting firms would have you believe otherwise until they collect their fees and leave behind a book of trite observations and obvious suggestions). Executing on that why is what matters. Execution is everything in business, and especially in entrepreneurship.
Xbox is a net loss, and according to someone that works there (who is active on HN) they hope to be in the black 'somewhere in the next couple of years'.
So, no, Xbox has not done 'pretty well'.
They are now 5 quarters profitable, but overall they're still in a very deep hole.
They might be slowly crawling out of a big hole, but that doesn't mean they're not doing well. I'd argue that the cost so far should be considered more of an investment than a loss. They entered a difficult market dominated by two large players with a lot of brand/name loyalty (i.e. fanbois) and huge barriers to entry. Over the last 8 or so years, the Xbox brand has become number 1 or 2 (depending on which metric you use), beating out the last gen's leader (Sony). They've also become the leader in the online console space where profit margins are high and revenue is recurring (think WOW).
All this isn't to say that MS won't mess up the courier concept but that they're better than many people give them credit for.
Except that "how well they'll stack up" with Apple isn't measured in profit; it's measured in sales or market share. While the Xbox might not yet be net profitable, it does have enough market share to claim that it stacks up with its competition. I'm not saying the Courier will be competitive, but I hardly think you can, a priori, write Microsoft off in this market.
The question I pose to you isn't - is the Xbox hardware profitable? It's - is the Xbox software profitable enough to make Microsoft a profit taken the hardware into consideration. If so doesn't that make the Xbox profitable? HP and other printer company do kind of the same thing. They sell the printer at a loss and make money selling the ink.
Customers are encouraged to use Kickstarter as a replacement for Fundable.com and seek legal action against Louis Helm personally should he fail to resolve your payment issues promptly.
