Recent evidence tends to indicate that 'not smart enough' is probably a myth. Almost everything can be attributed to exposure and effort at some point rather than some innate smartness.

A lot of advanced math takes some serious concentration to understand. For some non-practical aspects, I found that I lacked the motivation rather than ability to understand it . One particular class where I seemed to hit my tolerance was a theoretical linear algebra class. I could understand the practical applications of most of the topics but some of the theory seemed just out of reach. The book was extremely dry and I think the professor may have been taking lessons from Ben Stein.

Give me a private tutor, a theoretical linear algebra for dummies book, and a pending disaster for which this is the solution, and I bet the outcome would be a little different.

Hacker News Is Failing Us.

This link is currently in the #2 position on the front page. I wonder if the people who up voted it actually read it or just agreed with the thesis?

I'm glad the internet doesn't make brightly colored images about my personal life.

The Octoparts have such a great, inspiring story. It's the quintessential startup: some guys have a problem they personally encounter, they casually decide to fix the problem for themselves, and a business is created almost by consequence.

Yikes. It's like a "Fr33 software is teh suxor!" flame written by a literary analysis poseur. Not a lot of insight, but wow, can he nest a dependent clause!

Meh. Sure, whatever. Open source hasn't taken over the world, hasn't killed windows, and is most successful on the server. I guess that's "failed" for some interpretations of the term.

That should be $15,000: $5000 for each co-founder, and $5000 for the startup.

rents go up from year to year. And we expanded in the existing space. Revenues increased about 17x in five years.

A Flash interface is not going to help kill Amazon. Lower prices and faster shipping would. Amazon massacres the new Borders on price.

Not to mention selecting "Books" on the top menu gets me an error message on a blank page:

> This page can't be displayed due to a security violation. Contact support for additional information

I can just see Amazon quivering.

It's cool as a programming exercise, but I just can't see it being useful for me. If it can do something else, that might be cool, but it can't do much. ^k and dictionary bookmarks in firefox are far superior to using that shell.

Dictionary bookmarks, for all those unaware, are a beautiful feature I rarely hear about. For example, go to en.wikipedia.org and right click inside the search text box on the left. Click on 'Add a keyword for this search.' For name, put anything, for keyword i have 'w'. Now, whenever you are in the address bar (ctrl+l or alt+d to get there in windows/linux, apple+l in os x) you just type 'w plants' to get the wikipedia page on plants.

Go and try it, type ctrl+l, 'w firefox', enter. I almost can't live without it. And the same works for anything else, so google news can be 'gn', google images: 'gi', etc thus making that more useful goosh. goosh doesn't even have any of the features you'd want from a *nix shell like redirection.

"When we started we didn't know how to do any Web programming whatsoever," Morey said. "We didn't even know how to set up a Web server or a database. But we both sort of fell in love with all the new things we were learning."

Wow! That pretty much sums it up, AFAIC.

Start with a problem. Find a way to solve that problem, no matter what it takes. Have fun.

What more could you ask for?

Don't do it. It does not help your:

1. Marketing 2. Sales 3. Customer satisfaction

It brings in uncertainty in your financial breakdown. It's silly, if you want to do silly things, do it in marketing, as they can have a positive effect there, but not in the way you close your sales. Your price is the end of the pipeline, don't mess with a customer that is already that far down your sales funnel.

I notice for example that if I absorb the tax on my products, it bumps up sales by over 90%, but if I decrease the price so that the tax does not matter, the rise in sales is about 5%. This is because of the no-suprise philosophy. A person who is clicking through your shop likely wants to buy. When you suprise him at the end with an additional fee, you lose him.