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.
Why is everyone in such a rush to compare this to facebook? I believe emmett was just trying to point out that OP's argument was essentially "they're not going to make $1.5b ever, trust me". Which frankly sounds a lot like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
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.
First, if you want to talk Darwinism you need to get your terms right.
"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.
"First nice =! expensive. It's a subjective term meant to allow you to find your own definition."
The words 'cheap' and 'expensive' appeared 6 times in the article. I guess cheap can be used metaphorically but generally they are used to describe specifically the cost of the item. So I'm really not clear what point you are making. At no point did I confuse the concepts of 'nice' and 'expensive'.
"The point of that advice is that prevention [...] and taking care of your long-term health is a far better option than waiting until something breaks."
No, the point made was that prevention is orders of magnitude cheaper. It's you that seems to be confusing cost with a more subjective 'better'.
As for your mild_snark remark, all I can say is you've clearly not read my comments in this thread.
The topic of the question was:
"life lessons [that] are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom"
'prevention is better than waiting until something breaks', 'spend money on a good bed', are these really unintuitive? Do they go against common-sense?
As a hypothetical example, I would consider a good response to this question would be a well-cited example of how in fact a really cheap bed made out cardboard in fact gave the best nights sleep, or how actually it's a lot cheaper to ignore diet and deal with it later.
I hate to be the debbie downer here. I love her ambition and ability to market herself, but when you are attempting to sell yourself as a visual & UX designer shouldn't your design be original?
These students (or their parents) are paying UCF to provide them with this education and then to certify their education with a diploma.
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?
If you review the footage of the professor confronting the students, you will realize that this was not a publicly available test guide. This was a pool of test questions based on the material in their books intended only for the teachers of the courses to create the tests, not the students to study from.
They obtained the test blank using, at best, morally questionable methods (social engineering, purchasing them under false pretenses, etc). At worst, they stole the materials outright.
If they had used information that was legitimately publicly available, I would agree with you. However, they did not, so it was morally reprehensible.
hmm, now this is new information that in my quick reading i missed.
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.
My sister-in-law teaches English in South Korea, where grades are even more important than they are here to a child's future, and cheating has even graver consequences (entire college career, and thus their future in knowledge jobs are gone).
Yet, they still cheat.
Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic, but I don't believe that 200+ students believed they just had study material. I believe they knew they were cheating; else you would have had at least 1 of the 200 step forth and say "You know, this is identical to the study material I received from my friends...". Even the person who did eventually clue in the professor did so anonymously by dropping the complete test script in his office.
Of course, blaming this on the professor seems overly optimistic about the state of mind of those 200 students.
Either way, I would not want one of those 200 students working for me. If they don't have the moral fortitude to admit that something is wrong on a test in college... I can't imagine what they could do to a company where moral standards are core to a companies very survival; such as a company which handles customer credit data where a single leak of customer data can sink the company.
Wait, so are you claiming that upon receiving the study material these kids had to have known they were cheating? Or they knew they were cheating upon receiving the test?
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?
mccon104 - your thinking regarding what my response should have been when I "Got Lucky" and discovered I had seen the test ahead of time, is pretty much what mine was when I was in Grade 12. I was wrong. The ethically correct response is to let an instructor know if you've already seen an exam that has been just handed to you. At that point, the only person in the wrong is the instructor who was too lazy to create a test that would have been new for their students.
Note - it's one thing for a high-school student to screw up (as I did) - we can only hope that the teacher calls them on it, and they learn from their experience (as I like to believe I did). What's a little disconcerting here is that these were Senior Level college students, who one would hope would have at least a _few_ people who would have stood up and said "Hey - I've seen this before."
I wouldn't have stood up and said that, unless the tests were identical (i.e., questions were in the same order, with the same pagination, same ordering of the multiple choice answers, etc.). Even if some questions were identical, if I had not endured an experience like yours, there is nothing about the situation that would suggest to me that what was happening was ethically murky.
So, I agree with you in large part. The instructor failed his students. By pulling questions out of a test-bank that would likely be available (and obviously was) to his students, he both signaled too high a level of accomplishment to those students who had the exam, as well as too low (in comparison) to those who didn't have the exam.
I think the ethical lines that were crossed by the students were more clear if the students realized that _the exact questions_ had been found on a test they had studied from. If there were students who realized that they had studied from the same test, then that is where they had a personal responsibility to stand up and say "Hey - This isn't fair. I've already _seen_ these questions, I had an advance copy of the exam."
Nobody is saying this was an unspeakable wrong. It was the moral equivalent of keeping an extra twenty that your ATM machine accidentally disbursed to you. It's the rare individual that goes into the bank to report the error, but it's the right thing to do.
I've been in several university classes that issued practice exams which contained questions that showed up word for word on the test. It's actually pretty common.
I suppose if I found the actual test listed the questions in the same order as the practice test, that would be worth noting. But it doesn't sound like that's the case. The professor and his students merely pulled from the same test bank. Since it is so common for questions to be recycled, even years later, I have a hard time finding fault with the students. I think the professor is entirely to blame.
oh give it a rest with the "my(older) generation acted with morals/humility/respect while your(younger) generation has no morals/shame/responsibility"
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.
What you don't believe the defensiveness was merited?
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?
I am not denying his success, in fact, I think it was an interesting spin mixed with some good timing that he made successful.
That being said, while some of the comments in the original thread were in poor taste, his defense came off sounding petty, rather than well thought out. Instead of addressing the concerns people had with him thoughtfully (maybe I worded my orginal post too strongly, I never meant to come off as being being arrogant, simply someone frustrated with the job search process. Next time I'll also add my qualifications as well, so that way I can get applicants for X, etc), he basically just retorted back with "everyone is wrong, they don't know me" kind of mentality. He basically does no self-critiquing, but rather puts it off on other factors (it was a joke/you are all wrong/you didn't understand) vs taking blame (or talking about improvements) that he could use for next time. So it came off as sounding like "Hey look, I got a job, I was right, the haters can hate" kind of thing, which didn't really improve his image from what some people thought was self-centered.
First - do everyone a favor and throw this "If I say bullshit enough people will think I'm good at spotting it" mindset out. While you're at leave the "there's a lot of loser talk in this thread" talk to trolls.
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.
I would argue that in a conversation about app store rejection policies and specifically Google Voice that someone informing us that they have never heard of it wasn't doing much more than adding noise.
To anyone who has heard of Google Voice it's pretty clear that it's valid to put it forward as a innovative product. The level to which it's failed to permeated the broader public consciousness doesn't count against it at this stage in it's existence.
I'd say your response added just as much noise and introduced a degree of intolerance not necessary to the conversation. Let the non-helpful comments die a silent lonely death, no need to get haughty about it.
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.