skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been married a while ago, I'm pretty sure we had the invitations done at a local print shop.

Weddings are generally the ultimate in meet-your-hero-letdown. Everything is fussed about in minute detail, but then it's all over, and you're left thinking 'what was all that for'. The memories of the day and what comes after has zero to do with wedding stationery. I can't even remember what color ours was. I'd rather spend the money and fly in a distant relative or old friend than spend big money on invite printing. Your guests will appreciate and remember hours spent refining a speech over hours fussing about invites and place settings. There is definitely diminishing returns once you get over pre-printed and hand-written invites.

Getting back on-topic : I think you'll do well with this and the wedding industry is over-priced, but a lot of it has to do with ego-management. If I were a photographer or florist, I'd add 20% to the price to put up with all the 'it's got to be perfect' crap that goes with it. Self-serve printing removes all that, so is justified with a lower margin. As long as it looks nice, people will pay the money. You'll be able to pick the cheap paper without someone frowning down your nose saying 'if you really want it to be special...'
Also do not forget classics - http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html ^_^
If anyone at Twitter's paying attention, your mobile redirect breaks the link.

But I just typed it in manually.
Tiger Global Said to Invest in LinkedIn at $2 Billion Valuation
When I worked for Bravo, which contracted me out to Software Spectrum, which contracted me out to Microsoft, back in 1999-2000 - I was supporting Windows 95/98 and all the applets installed (theoretically meaning I supported, for example, MS Paint and Notepad and such...) - I had access to a certain level of the MSKB.

I printed out but subsequently lost, and haven't been able to find anywhere - there was an article about Kraft cheese inserted into a floppy drive. It was meant as a joke, and wasn't public... but I wish I hadn't lost it. (IIRC, the basic advice was "don't do this"...)
Email sent (from San Luis Obispo no less)
Apparently FarmVille makes more money selling ringtones and credit cards and such than they do by actually charging people for things in the game. (So said Jesse Schell of Schell Games.)
That's generally true, but in some cases, particularly in certain niches, that argument breaks down.

In the past several years I've staked significant money(6 figures) on my ability to predict traffic quality(how well a traffic source converts) and you may find that the people who click on ads(sometimes before clicking on any search results) convert much better than SEO traffic. I've seen 50-150% difference in conversion rate between targeted free and paid traffic several times.

This is why many companies bid on their name in their SEM campaigns, even though they obviously easily rank first for it organically.

This isn't necessarily always true, but it's something to think about.
There's Happstack too: http://happstack.com/index.html . That said, there are quite a few little Haskell web frameworks/libraries floating around already, so unless you're bringing something absolutely amazing to the table compared to what's there now, I don't see much point in building yet another Haskell web framework.

Looking at the course ( I take it this is what you are talking about? http://www.cs.colorado.edu/ugrad/seniorproject/ ), it seems that your project is based on a proposal from a sponsor, so I'm not sure why you're trying to come up with something already.

I don't know why you have a problem with the past projects. That a couple of undergrads can put together a working, useful (I presume), application is freaking awesome! I wouldn't dare assume a random CS major fresh out of university could pull something like that off.
Pretty ironic.
Actually, in ~1987 on our XT clone, my dad or I'd found a little program whose sole purpose was to play a short snippet of something like "Mushroom, magic mushroom" - I think from a commercial or something.

It was grainy, but not only was the speech intelligible, the music wasn't overly painful (i.e. it was grainy, but only a bit more than a bad record).
The stack segment descriptor virtually never changes in userland protected mode code. You're not "asking for trouble" by not fucking with it. It's also not simply a pointer, unlike EBP with frame pointers. And it's called SS, not "ESS", and it's implied in stack operations.
I don't sell furniture, and, keep looking.
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I suppose this is just semantics, but when a "startup" is considering ditching the cloud to build a datacenter, isn't it well past the "startup" phase?

When I think of web startups, I picture a couple of guys in a tiny apartment with a few linux boxes in a closet and box fans for cooling. At 3 months, they have a $20/mo VPS, at 6 months a few Amazon EC2 instances. The next handful of years should see them scaling nicely in the cloud, but when they get to the point where it is less economical to continue scaling on Amazon than to build a datacenter (like Twitter, Facebook, etc), I think they can drop the "startup" label.
They haven't gotten back to this tab to comment yet.
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I'm not sure that this is a promo for IE8 so much as a promo for Amazon's IE8 toolbar. Especially if when you saw this page you were running IE8.
"Campaign contributions would be eliminated because all campaigns would happen on the Internet so that running for office would cost next to nothing."

I doubt it. Competition between better and worse campaigns would ensure that everyone running for office would still want the best campaign managers, and they would still pay through the nose for that. Just because media purchasing is thrown out the window doesn't mean there isn't room left for further (expensive) optimization.

In fact, any system with rules is going to have inefficiencies to be exploited. In this case, it seems like the biggest one is privacy. The most well off startup citizens are going to realize they want some privacy back, and will pay dearly for it (just as the wealthiest currently value their privacy so highly). This will create a market for elite "privacy engineers" (think ghost in the shell style), who will be the citizens most in demand.
It is, undoubtedly, one of the more appalling pieces of software in wide use. Just to complete the wild tangent, GraphicsMagick is an interface-compatible fork that claims better performance and less cruft (while still weighing in at above 280 klocs). Flickr uses it so presumably it only gives you two brain aneurysms instead of 4.7.

I also can't help but to gush about varnish a little (a handy thing to put in front of an image processing server, for one thing), which has a number of post-1975 features beyond its memory management such as an actually useful configuration language, statistics aggregation and reporting and the inexplicably uncommon ability to manage and modify configuration without a restart.
Embedded or not, they still work for an American newspaper, which means that their stories can be censored via legal bullying. By contrast, WikiLeaks can't be stopped by the powers that be.

WikiLeaks' war logs contain 100s of short reports from troops on the ground. Now the question may be: what is more truthful, a platoon leader's report, or a wild-roaming journalist's report? The platoon leader must please his commanding officer, the journalist must please his boss. They both are constrained.

Yes, there are journalists who were in Afghanistan / Pakistan back in the 1980s during the war with the USSR who are visiting Taliban leaders. They can go where no U.S. soldiers can go, for sure. But is that bringing forth that much truth? Sure, it's valuable to listen to the enemy's point of view, but don't we all know already what the Taliban want?
Apparently nothing that will result in time traveling humans coming back to kill him before he can create sentient robots.
IE users are less savvy than Firefox/Opera/etc. users, so they would "need" a plugin like this more than Firefox et al users.

Also it's probably easier to get IE users to download something like this.
Upvoted for non-dogmatic thoughtfulness. Apologies if that sounds politically bigoted, but so much of what I hear coming the GoP these days is devoid of that quality. I hope you run for office some day.

I think this issue is only part of a larger group of related problems that seemed to start metastasizing 30 years ago. In a nutshell:

scientific management ->

manufacturing process and profit margin optimization ->

manufacturing outsourcing to low-cost countries ->

decreased product costs + planned obsolescence ->

increased volumes ->

increased profits ->

rising pay for management ->

decreasing skilled labor 'making things' jobs ->

wealth of the country (and the world) becomes more and more concentrated into the hands of a small demographic ->

corporate personhood granted by Supreme Court (not sure exactly where on the timeline this goes, but it's part of the story) ->

significantly more political influence for a smaller group of people at the top of pyramid ->

Democrats join Republicans in courting this small, wealthy, influential demographic ->

financial deregulation driven by that demographic, either financiers looking for more ways to increase returns, or m/billionaire management looking for better returns for their un-FDIC-insurable cash piles ->

Less than 10 years after the last protections of the Great Depression era dismantled (Graham-Leach-Bliley '99), we have a similar-in-nature debt-driven financial crisis ->

This time the small wealthy demographic that caused it has the power to 1) avoid punishment for it (for example, compared to the 1980 S&L crisis that saw thousands jailed), 2) transfer all the losses to the US Government ->

The final result of which could be any/all of 1) monetary inflation and defacto dollar devaluation, 2) further debt deflation, 3) rising interest rates on baseline Treasuries leading to rising interest rates across the board and decreased corporate investment (and hiring), all of which will hurt the fading middle class more the wealth owners.

This is just a cursory summation of observations of correlated events that I suspect are more than just correlated. It's still taking shape in my mind, and I'm sure someone could write a PhD dissertation on how all it all fits together, I just don't have time for this atm.

But I do wish our politicians/media/pundits/economic book authors/people like Robert Reich/etc would look more at this big picture of how and why we got to this situation we're in, and how it might be possible to reverse it.

Increasing concentration of wealth is a major problem, as you point out. It has been a cause of not only social unrest, but even revolutions. Definitely not a road a country wants to find itself on.
People perceive bias in the absence of bias. I remember in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, the local paper ran with the headline "Four More Years" and a smiling picture from Bush's victory party.

People wrote in and complained that it was a biased headline. They had imagined that the editor who wrote that wrote it with a heavy heart - even though Bush supporters themselves were chanting "four more years" to rally the troops at campaign events.
I like your idea with the invites, but I'd suggest that you're only going halfway with it.

1) Guide the customer through creating professional-grade invites. That part is relatively straightforward.

2) Print and mail the invites

3) Provide an RSVP service available to the couple and their vendors -- the caterer needs to know who wants vegan food but, honestly, the bride and groom don't care.

Finally, if you REALLY want to provide something disruptive: take a handwriting sample from the bride and/or groom, turn it into a font, and produce the thank-you notes (they need to look hand-written). I have no idea how you would do this, but having been through a wedding myself I remember utterly loathing this part.
If a dentist had an actionable idea for a DVR and the drive to make it happen, he could have made it.

Yeah but if a DVR firmware developer had an actionable idea for a new form of filling substrate it's unlikely he'd be able to get his idea to market. It's a regulated area practiced by individuals with academic and industry accreditation

(unlike the DVR, and wider software/hardware, industries which has no real formal accreditation or academic requirements. This is why your way around works and thus the answer to OP is "depends which market").
I've been a long-time user of Kongregate recently worked through their flash tutorials. They were very basic, but well done.

I really enjoy the site, congrats.
Design Comparison of Apple, Dell and HP Product Websites
I have a saved search for "software sucks" and another for "program sucks", they can be pretty insightful. A lot of people really hate CD/DVD Burning software and manufacturer's printer software.
I cannot contradict the naysayers' warnings about marketing costs. However, the cost to build, launch, and test the marketing of this project is absurdly low. You're only generating a PDF! So, the warnings are meaningless.

I support you to build and launch the thing and then see what works! Go for it! And best of luck. The wedding industry deserves a good thumping.
I rather go skydiving
I'm not looking to shoot you down, but I have some thoughts you might want to consider.

You are not going to disrupt the industry by providing a pdf for a cheap price, you are going to be working twice as hard for half the pay.
Right now you may have 25 design templates ready to go, how many will you need next month?

How many hours will that take?

Are those billable hours?

You are making the design choices easy. Concentrate on that.

Instead of looking through a huge binder of printed samples, the bride to be can look at a website and get a design made simply, without the usual headaches to the designer.

Hopefully the pdf you provide will be easy to preflight and prepress, because a lot of your customers are going to end up taking it to a real printer after they see the results they get at home.
That can be an additional profit center for you, if you are willing to charge what your time is worth for anything other than what gets generated by the templates.

There are not huge profit margins in most printing, even though letterpress commands high prices, the process is very labor intensive, and that wonderful Crane Lettra paper is expensive.

Don't forget that part of the final price of an invitation set is how much of a bridezilla the designer and printer had to deal with.

Finally, take a look at etsy, lot of wedding invitations there for cheap prices.

Not to be self promoting, but I am in the printing industry, digital, offset, and letterpress.

Good luck, I think you have the germ of a good idea, but you will have some refining ahead of you.
Fake Pokémon cartridges aren't so hard to come by...
http://imgur.com/ctgWe.jpg
if consumers are so easily influenced, why do so many startups have a hard time influencing them?
Great idea, must have been nice developing a theme without having to worry about IE.
It's rare around here. I'm in an affluent midwest community where the middle class tends to spend itself into oblivion and the upper-class tends to produce trustifarian hipsters incapable of building a life-sustaining skill set. I was debt-free except for my car payment by the age of 21, but then I got married. We were very close to debt-free before my wife's health spiraled out of control in '06. Seriously, though, I really don't currently know any 25 year olds who are debt-free, and 5 years ago when I was about that age, I didn't, either.
Thank you for disagreeing. The article was actually so sparse with the information that I misunderstood it for an epidemiological association. I went and found the study in pubmed, and I see that it's actually stronger than that - it's a cohort study with an intervention. It's not gold-standard, randomized-trial-level evidence, but it's still important.

I'm still a bit skeptical, because the human genetic data, so far, doesn't back up the association between Vit D deficiency genes and T1D. Nevertheless, I'll revise my statement to agree that both (a) diabetes can cause a decrease in the hormonally active form of vitamin D, and (b) high-quality Grade B evidence suggests that the converse is also true.

Nevertheless, I don't see Vitamin D deficiency as the unifying diagnosis here. One could even speculate that the Vit D deficiency was secondary, and the T1D was tertiary, but we really don't have enough information to speculate here and I'll stop now. I probably shouldn't have in the first place.
Why not just cut back on the time you spend here? I bet you could get 80% of the value in 20% of the time. A simple thing like only coming here two or three times a day would probably help a lot.

Cutting back is way better than burning out.
Er, no he isn't.

(The older David Korn actually wrote a sort-of-competitor to Cygwin, called UWIN.)
You nailed it - "Automated Chat Bot Retention System" - I've tested most of what's out there, always stunned by how well they work for most of your run-of-the-mill "offers" - I'm curious to see how this new system compares w/live operators and that level of simplicity - good solution I think.
I don't know why the downvotes. It is really amazing when you can work with standards in a reliable way.
I'm amazed at how many times those job ads get retweeted. Recently, someone put up an ELance posting for 'salon software' which triggered my twitter search in Tweetdeck. There were 3-4 pages of retweets.
i figured out a while back that the 2 main enablers of political corruption are (1) the allowing of privacy for politicians, and (2) allowing untracked economic transactions (cash handed over, etc.). If you could eliminate those two things it would be much harder for politicians to be corrupt. But it's easier contemplated than implemented, in part because we have inertia and power in the hands of people who would not allow it. Also, there is effectively no "unclaimed" land/sea in the world anymore upon which to start a new country. And in the US, at least, it is considered a high crime for anyone to band together and split off forming a new country (consider Lincoln and the US Civil War). You could still try to start a new country somewhere, but you'd probably need a lot of military power to defend it from existing countries, their puppet forces, and pirates.

To this day I still think it's amusing that we supposedly live in The Land of the Free (TM) but we can't "fork" a piece of the US off, even a tiny piece of it that we personally inhabit, and make a new country.
"... My goal is to get this out really fast and start making revenue from the start ... The wedding industry is huge, overpriced, and with insane profit margins. I’m looking to disrupt it with WeddingType ..."

In a startup I've worked in they had a "wedding" section to the sight allowing guest lists, gift ordering, vouchers and the like. Some of the things I observed that seemed to matter included:

- reputation: nobody wants to be screwed around on 'their' one day

- reliability: as above

- customer service: tech must have a human face as that's what is expected (or if things get screwed up you need to be able to re-assure by person - somehow)

- design: high quality design (visual & user) is expected

It would be good to think of it this way. If you are building a service users expect a level of experience. When they walk into a physical store supplying a service, there is a high level of kerbside appeal. [0] Failure in appearing to be able to do a good job & doing a good job will quickly kill your user base. No bride wants something that appears cheap, rather something that looks & behaves greater than the value paid.

Making the experience for the user good, making money fast is one problem to overcome. I also question the "insane" profit margins assumption. Test it.

Observations:
Having said that there is plenty of areas in the wedding industry to interrupt. You can try from the person angle - ie: registry and associated people (social) or the services angle (the stuff people having weddings want to do). Matching the wedding to service is something I see a lot online albeit using blogs. Having said that it's the services that are making the money - but is it what people need?

[0] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201003/your-n...
Nope, I was in Chrome on Amazon.com and there was a big banner to the right on the home suggesting I download IE8 optimized for amazon.com.

You can probably still see the same ad. Do you see any alternative pages with toolbars for Firefox, or Chrome?
A significant fraction of my coworkers talk like that, and I've noticed lately that I'm starting to occasionally think/talk that way as well (note I'm from the U.S. midwest and only speak english). It's a bit disturbing, really.
This is the point at which it's worth learning actual parsing tools, rather than just winging it with REs. REs are fine for tokenizing, but cannot handle recursion, and quickly become clumsy for patterns made of distinct sub-elements.

Once you sink deeper into that turing tarpit, you end up with monstrosities like this (http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html), a RE for matching valid email addresses.
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Exactly my thoughts. I recently got married as well and I can definitely affirm that a good part of the wedding industry works off of word-of-mouth. This product could be huge. I definitely would have used it if it was available and well executed when I got married.

An idea:
-Be able to include more than just an invitation and RSVP. Food choices, maps, registry info would be great. Perhaps you could even have contracts with stores that have registries.
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How often do class action lawsuits work out for anyone but the lawyers?
iusethis.com is probably a better resource for finding software that already exists. If the goal is to find ideas for software that doesn't exist my request would be something that makes sense out of Twitter searches. So much garbage, duplication and SPAM. It seems like there should be some better method even if it was simply a vote up/down style ranking system within the search results.
If you're humble and skeptical about it, though, you'll never believe in it strongly enough to even get out of the house and talk to the experts. Better "strong opinions, weakly held."
I'm perfectly prepared to eat the 4 points for this but when I read 'disrupt wedding [...]' I was secretly hoping for some sort of technology that enabled more frequent and better photobombing. Maybe in version 2?
Because if you don't exercise that functionality, you will never have confidence that it will work when you need it to.
Being more disrupting, What about doing wedding invitations entirely online?
There's a lot of hype surrounding the "NoSQL" databases, and it really doesn't help that they've been placed in an adversarial position. Are they good at something, or just not SQL (* sigh of relief * )? It's too bad that branding has taken hold - it obscures the things that make them individually interesting. CouchDB and Tokyo Cabinet (for example) really don't have that much in common.

I really like Redis, personally, but I also like Postgres and SQLite. They're complementary!
That's something I've heard. Worrying, but if there isn't any competition...