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OpenPipe

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hacker-news

like 10

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amichail

I'm interested in novel uses of prediction markets. For example, one can create an online dating service where people bet on whom they believe would make good couples. People might then take this as a suggestion as to whom to consider for a date. A similar thing can be done with business relationships, academic collaborations, etc.

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amichail

I really like the photosynth idea: http://labs.live.com/photosynth. But can we take this idea further? For example, what can we do with video? Maybe we could put together many people&#39;s videos to produce a dynamic 3d world? One could imagine allowing people to watch and explore events in 3d such as concerts and sports games.<p>Another idea is to identify dense areas in 3d where people tend to take a lot of photographs. One could then use these dense areas to guide people to interesting places. For example, when visiting a museum, one might look at the dense areas first.

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amichail

I think it would be interesting to provide a way to give people advice in real-time via the web. For example, you might watch a sports game on the web and give advice to individual players about what they might do next in real-time. So the spectators replace the coaches here.

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amichail

I am interested in collective intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence. How would you build a service where thousands of people collaborative to solve a problem, create a work of art, or play a game (e.g., chess)?

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danielha

If you have a second rate product, then good advertising can only do so much.<p>This is an age of rapid communication. Word of mouth has never been so valuable. A good word for your product will reach millions in a very short time span. <p>But I disagree with you about web ads. Web ads will continue to be viable and valuable. There is plenty of proof online regarding the type of conversion returns that firms are getting and the revenue publishers are generating. If someone wrote television ads off, saying that the majority of people just change the channel, they&#39;d be dead wrong.<p>A lot of people tune out ads online. Many, many don&#39;t -- especially today when they have become more relevant to your desires than ever.

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danielha

The Internet&#39;s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers

http://www.johnchow.com/index.php/the-internets-biggest-google-whores/

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hwork

outside.in joins up with 3 VCs, Steven Berlin Johnson talks about why

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2007/02/our_new_investo.html

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danielha

For all intents and purposes, I found it all to be completely still relevant.

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amichail

I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web search:<p>http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ<p>http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDwB4-DPXE<p>The idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains.<p>Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.

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jamiequint

it is apparent from this article that the author is a lot more familiar with Django than Rails and misses a lot of things. (e.g. I haven&#39;t seen a project in the last year that uses salted hash login generator - acts_as_authenticated is great - and there are admin interfaces available as plugins that are similar to what django offers by default.) Each framework has its advantages, but its unfair to compare them (in a which one is better sense) without equal knowledge about both.

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timg

Done this recently with good success. Great fun. Many conversations have gone on for over 1k and even 10k messages. It&#39;s still seeing a good amount of action. Anyone interested in developing this idea or the framework further? Let me know.

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timg

I put a lot of thought (and some actual code) into this exact idea! I put up a fast demo of it and it is rather popular.. I&#39;m interested in developing this idea further.

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nostrademons

In a good OS (I believe Linux qualifies), you only need to save the contents of the registers. Each process has its own address space, each thread has its own stack, and so there&#39;s no need to much around with memory beyond that. Stacks aren&#39;t actually copied around, the processor simply restores %esp and %ebp from the saved process data structure.<p>IIR my OS design course correctly, the big performance hit is the switch from user mode to kernel mode. I&#39;m not sure *why* that&#39;s a big hit, but it seems to be a slow operation on most processors.<p>You can use user-mode threading libraries in C/C++, but Apache doesn&#39;t. Perhaps that&#39;s why it&#39;s slow. (The main reason it doesn&#39;t is probably that user-mode threading blocks the whole process when one thread performs IO, which obviously doesn&#39;t work well in an I/O bound application like a webserver.)<p>There are other C/C++ webservers - like Lighttpd - that use poll/epoll for I/O. These should run even faster than YAWS/Erlang; anyone have any benchmarks to compare them?

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timg

Interesting stuff. I&#39;ve some similar ideas on how this should be done.

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joshwa

37signals chat with founders of skinnyCorp (Threadless) &#38; Connected Ventures (Vimeo)

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/294-fireside-chat-skinnycorp-threadless-and-connected-ventures-vimeo-part-1-of-2

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timg

I would say that reddit *created* it&#39;s startup oriented niche to a large degree - Particularly for college and maybe even highschool guys who know computers well but never seriously considered starting a company so soon.<p>In this regard I think of the early reddit and now n.yc more of as clubs, like the acm club I used to attend, than another news site. What really makes this club great is it&#39;s members and what they come here expecting.<p>Why is the linked news site failing? Right off, the front page design is a show-stopper. I can hardly force myself to get past that.

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nostrademons

That&#39;s what PHP/MySQL are for. ;-)

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timg

It&#39;s starting to look like they got lucky once, and won&#39;t be finding any more ground-breaking features. I&#39;m just saying.

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palish

That&#39;s a really cool idea. I doubt it could be turned into a successful business, but I love synergy effects.

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ecuzzillo

It seems to me that things like this have been done in academia for a while; because I&#39;ve only seen a video (rather than, say, some code or a paper), I&#39;m unsure exactly what Dexter is doing, and whether it&#39;s different from the stuff done with bipeds at CMU, MIT, or in Japan. I wonder if there is any more information available.

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pixcavator

Image mining

http://pixcavator.com

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altay

Incredible!! Congrats, Trevor!<p>Now, if you&#39;ll excuse me, I need to go prepare my bunker for the coming War with the Machines.

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amichail

What about advertising using smart mobs? A web service would allow a company to specify the logistics of the event and how much it is willing to pay. The company could also track the event in real-time and make changes as required. Advertising could be subtle such as in the form of a mob that forms in a shopping center carrying several products from that company. And advertising could be more blatant: a mob might form to create the logo of the company say.

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msgbeepa

How To Become Rich From Making A Simple Video - Part 1

http://www.avinio.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-get-rich-from-making-video.html

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amichail

I am interested in giving people ways to track their influence on others. Forwarding Tree&#39;s URL tracking is all about that: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree/browse_thread/thread/ad998b99b9e3b7a8<p>URL tracking allows you to see what happens to those URLs that you forward to others, post on your blog, submit to a social news site, etc. You can see how the URL propagates around the net in real-time.<p>In other contexts, one might show people their influence on wikipedia articles, search engine rankings, open source code, etc.

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jimream

What do you think are the &#34;real&#34; values of the hottest web companies?

http://www.tbo.com/news/nationworld/MGBMKYZOKYE.html

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jimream

In my opinion Facebook and Myspace are easily worth 5 billion each. Just because of the fact that if they were to significantly add features that would pave the way for future e-commerce and social bookmarking they could start with a tremendous amount of base users.<p>However, I feel that even the leaders Google, Facebook, Reddit/Digg, wikipedia etc. are extremely prone to &#34;better&#34; products being developed.<p>Friendster is the cliche. Myspace came out and simply by creating a move customizable and music - friendly layout, attracted musicians and most importantly (all their fans) I feel that even Google&#39;s adsense and search engine advertising is not the best.<p>The Internet allows for the most optimal ways sharing information as a species and we will continue to develop the web tools that are most important for the advancement of our cultures. This is where we will see true Internet Goliaths. I think in 5-10 years the largest internet company will be worth trillions, rather than billions.<p>Does anyone else agree that not only is technology increasing exponentially, but the price of the greatest Internet companies will also continue to increase exponentially? does anyone else think that there is is a website format that the world could use as its official database off information? I see it and hope it will lead to a new, and better age of human existence. Does anyone else?<p>JGR<p>

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volida

similar implementations<p>talkito (YC funded) will do something similar<p>blogeverywhere.com (by the founder of Hotmail)<p>chatsum.com<p>Yoono.com

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volida

similar implementations<p>talkito (YC funded) will do something similar blogeverywhere.com (by the founder of Hotmail) chatsum.com Yoono.com

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jadams

&#62; [...] Dexter appears to be treating each step as a discrete unit, where it has to attain balance at the end of one step before going on to the next step<p>I doubt that. I don&#39;t think that would qualify as dynamic balance. Remember, it&#39;s only been a couple of weeks since Dexter&#39;s first step -- he&#39;s walking quite well.<p>This is one of those situations where the approach bounds the eventual utility. There are a lot of non-dynamically balanced robots that would just blow the minds of researchers from 20 years ago, but they are still limited.<p>By solving the dynamic balance problem, even though to the untrained eye it may currently look less impressive than some other systems, there&#39;s no more ceiling to what it can do, dynamically (control-wise, not accounting for power density). All of the behaviours you mentioned can be implemented on top of this substrate.

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pg

Really? Do you have a reference?

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pg

this is a duplicate submission

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jadams

Gah! Why do I keep double-posting? Someone please delete this.

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ecuzzillo

I&#39;m in a class on the subject at CMU, so I should be able to find out. What you said about Asimo is not quite true; for instance, one guy here at CMU wrote some code that took Asimo and constantly replanned in real time, so that he could respond to various changes in the environment dynamically.<p>Here, for instance: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Joel/footstep/videos.html#ASIMO<p>It would help to know more about exactly what Dexter is doing, so I can find some similar stuff. There is a large amount of literature on the subject. <p>Also, you note that Asimo&#39;s floor has to be hard and flat-- generally true, but also true for most bipeds, which seems to include Dexter. Can Dexter really deal with irregular terrain? How irregular can it be? An interesting question is how to get a biped to walk on *really* irregular terrain, like boulder-size.

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eli

This is a Holy War, but that comparison seems as good as any.

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jadams

Sony claims that Qrio can respond to outside pushing, as here: <p>http://www.plyojump.com/movies/qrio/sdr-4x_recoverfromfall.mpg

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eli

How many nodes would have to be compromised to make this a viable attack vecotr? (yeah, yeah, I know, I should RTFM)

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shankys

Sun cofounders talk about what founding Sun was like [video]

http://www.sun.com/2006-0113/feature/index.html

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eli

I love subversion, but it's not really a great tool for everyday backups unless you really need to be able to recover every single prior version of a file (and even then...). I think something like Unison or rsync would be better for most backup uses.

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eli

I just wanted to emphasize how important this is to building a dialog (and a community!). I don't want people replying to my comments, so right now I basically have to bookmark each thread that I've commented on and remember to come back and check.

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socmoth

MochiKit.Animator with demos (the end is the best)

http://gr.ayre.st/~grayrest/animator/animator.html

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papersmith

I'm leaning toward Rails because I've been using it since its early stage. I also wrote stuffs in Django just out of curiosity, and it feels just as good. I think they're both highly productive environments, and with the time it takes to read all the comparison articles, we could've written entire apps.

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AlfredNgeno

To VC or Not to VC? That is the Question...

http://advisorgarage.wordpress.com/2007/01/16/to-vc-or-not-to-vc-that-is-the-question/

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palish

Now I'm interested to know what it was.

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brett

isn't part of the whole point that the thing scales up or down as you need it to? so, yeah, if you know up front what kind of constant bandwidth/storage/cpu load you are going to need then you're in a really good position to shop around for a better deal.

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brett

high traffic rails performance data point (hotspotr.com)

http://earthcode.com/blog/2007/02/four_mongrels_digg_and_lifehac.html

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msgbeepa

Open Source web conferencing

http://www.avinio.blogspot.com/2007/02/dimdim-open-source-web-conferencing.html

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palish

I found writing something like this to be one of the natural steps in a pure javascript client. People can do a lot more than they realize with javascript. On my website, http://www.classbug.com , the fade effects, the transition effects, and the disclosure button rotations are all done with an animating value from 0 to 1 (though not using KochiKit.Animator).<p>That's only the beginning though. Dynamic tree views, color selectors, etc.. You should build a framework of components to insert into your web application.

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snowmaker

Venture capitalist's explanation of why small software startups are taking larger amounts of VC

http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2007/01/fail_fast_fail_.html

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snowmaker

Venture capital 2.0 - how venture capital is ceasing to be a separate asset class and being managed by larger general private equity firms

http://earlystagevc.typepad.com/earlystagevc/2006/09/vc_20_not_so_se.html

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bkmrkr

timg I was doing something similar, could you im me: gg@uptoolate.org

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smackaysmith

Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort

http://www.socialcustomer.com/2007/02/prereqs_for_set.html

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mattculbreth

Example of Lisp Macros

http://p-cos.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-is-point-of-macros.html

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jamiequint

Rails, but I can't judge Django because I haven't played with it on more than a superficial level. It seems like it really comes down to preference. I love the Ruby (and Rails) community right now and there are a lot of hopes for Ruby 1.9 as far as speed goes (supposedly an order of magnitude faster than 1.8.5).

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jamiequint

10 Best Presentations Ever (as ranked by KnowHR)

http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best-presentations-ever/

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jamiequint

Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists - Guy Kawasaki

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie.html

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jamiequint

Pinko Marketing - Marketing in the Post-Cluetrain Era

http://pinkomarketing.pbwiki.com/Marketing%20in%20the%20Post-Cluetrain%20Era

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jamiequint

Networking: How do you manage your network and stay in touch with your key contacts?

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mattculbreth

Not a bad explanation of macros. I'm not experienced enough here to really judge how good, but I grokked it at least. It does seem though that you an approach this type of power with some of the dynamic features of Python. Am I wrong here? I think it's likely I'm missing the subtlety of macros.

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jamiequint

Networking is a vital part of being successful in the business world, connections and human capital can be just as important as cash and intellectual capital. What tools (e.g. email, notebook, post its) do you use to manage your interactions with people, and how do you use this information to further develop your relationships?

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jwecker

Nice. I like the followup even more ( http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie_1.html ). I'm sure all of these are just as applicable now as when he wrote them. It all boils down to genuine confidence in your product. If you're truly confident (not just optimistic, which we should be also) you won't get strung along by the VC's- you'll do your work, make a level pitch and move on until you find the one that matches well. Similarly you will be more honest with your pitch. This kind of confidence you only get with real business experience and/or real customers really using your product.<p>When you land a VC deal and get $4mil, are you going to dance around with euphoria and say "we did it! we did it!" or are you going to say "well, that'll be 2 years to capture x percent of the market instead of 7 years- I hope it was worth giving up x percent of the company." If only the former, then you can take that as a clue right now that your business isn't quite ready probably.<p>(I'm being a little facetious- of course you'll celebrate regardless).

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ecuzzillo

This is not startup news. We need downmods for this purpose. (I love Lisp, but this is not a Lisp forum.)

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hwork

37Signals' Highrise -- not out yet -- could prove to be a good way of doing it. I can say that I'm certainly excited. Check out the preview post here:<p>http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/265-preview-1-an-introduction-to-highrise-the-product-previously-known-as-sunrise

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Elfan

There happens to be a social networking site for old fashion networking. http://www.linkedin.com/

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juwo

Have you experienced the customer-investor-team conundrum?

http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/

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jamiequint

yeah I've been following that, the reason I asked this question is I've been working on a product since November that is doing something similar (I was hoping that 37 Signals' product was going to be more CRM-ish) I still think (from what 37 Signals shown so far) that there is still a tool that caters more towards individuals managing their personal networks (a niche within the contact management niche if you will). Any thoughts on this?

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jamiequint

Thanks for the link Elfan, I'm already a part of LinkedIn, but I think it is more of a tool for visualizing your connections not managing relationships. What do you think?

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jamiequint

Some people are claiming even higher performance than this using nginx ( a relatively new Russian webserver). The preferred Rails "business" host EngineYard is using this right now.

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brett

Language choice and thusly features of given languages are pretty pertinent to hackers trying to start startups. <p>Just don't upmod it. If you're lucky it will go away.

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juwo

If you can read my burnout article at the link above, then perhaps you can tell me if the Startup Story seems like a fairy tale - true for a few, but not for the unwashed masses. <p>(My website is at http://juwo.com. there's not much detail, as NP is not yet released. Potential competitors? dabble.com, veotag.com).

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hwork

Just added my local hotspots. Pretty cool stuff.

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papersmith

Maybe this submission is a bit off topic, but I'd love to see more Lisp code for clever hacks of pratical applications.

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Elfan

"Success comes from good judgment, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." - Arthur Jones, founder of Nautilus and MedX

http://spineworks.com/public/jones/jones.htm

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Elfan

I'm in college so I don't have that many direct connections and its how I have managed to stay in contact with people from summer work. I'm not sure how it will scale for me in the future.<p>But I'm *awful* at maintaining friendships, networks, and things for that nature. So I'm not a good person to take advice from on this.

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jamiequint

I'm in college too, actually, I've found facebook to be a good networking tool, especially some of the the global groups (there are a few good entrepreneurship ones), I've made some interesting connections through it.

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bootload

The best qualities of high- and low-level languages

http://tlb.org/busywork.html

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jamiequint

I think some of this can be attributed towards Rails developers - like me :) - liking the framework so much that they want to share the joy with everyone else.

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bootload

Not a bad article, bit light on Rails though. <p>INTERESTING QUOTES: '... although there is no reason why fastcgi couldn’t be used ...' ~ except it's slower! ~ http://superjared.com/entry/quick-django-benching. '... here is no equivalent of a model-specific SQL refresh – something that could drop a specific model’s tables and regenerate the needed SQL automatically ...' ~ true, recognised & being corrected ~ http://www2.jeffcroft.com/blog/2006/jul/20/top-ten-things-suck-about-django. <p>SOME POINTS: Two things come to mind that are not mentioned. The first is hosts. What is the comparison between hosts? The second is how mature the language is. If I want to use python and I need a particular module that does 'fo '. it is probably out there somewhere (though it may be alpha or beta it will most likely out of date) unless you want to re-invent the wheel. I can't say the same for Rails. Ruby is just a younger language with less code mass.<p>QUESTIONS TO ASK: In the end what really matters is how good the idea & business is. There are plenty of Rail based companies I can think of making a go of it. The same applies to Python based companies. If you accept that technology is an amplifier of ideas, will using Rails or Django alone make a better choice? Is the difference between them compelling enough to make a difference? One area that could tip in Rails favour is "susinctness". But Django with it's python code base has more tools to choose from.

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vegashacker

I'm rusty on my Python, but I'd have to guess that no, Python's dynamic features don't get you the kind of power that Pascal's talking about. The key thing to realize is that any particular feature that your language has doesn't necessarily matter. For example, Python may happend to have a built-in way of doing<p>(with-input-file (in "myfile.txt") (do-something in))<p>In Python, this might look like<p>withInputFile in "myfile.txt": doSomething(in)<p>(hey, I told you I was rusty on my Python...especially my totally made up Python!)<p>So maybe the feature came built-in to Python, in which case you're lucky--Guido happened to decide to implement this feature. But what if he hadn't? Well, just write your own abstraction. Obviously, Python can open files and do stuff with the file's contents. So it seems logical that you should be able to create an abstraction which saves you from writing the same boilerplate that you do every time you open an input file. Unfortunately, there are some abstractions that *you just can't write* in most languages (including Python). This file open example is a good one. Here's another example, in the form of a programming challenge:<p>In Python, create an abstraction called "debugExpr" that consumes an expression E, and then does two things: 1) prints "Expression E = V", where E is the given expression, and V is the value E evaluates to. 2) returns the value V.<p>For example,<p>%python% 6 * debugExpr(2+3)<p>Expression 2+3 = 5<p>30<p>I'm betting you can't implement debugExpr in Python. So assuming Guido didn't extend the language to implement this feature, you're pretty much SOL. It's a shame because debugExpr, I think, is pretty darn useful. It means that you can take any expression in your code and "inspect it", without worrying about adjusting the structure of your program, and without affecting its semantics. Without debugExpr, I'd have to change my example code to be something like this to get the same result:<p>print "Expression 2+3 ="<p>tmp = 2+3<p>print tmp<p>6 * tmp<p> YUCK!

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vegashacker

Better display of source code in comments

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vegashacker

Something like a "code" tag that you can put around sections of your comment, and within these tags, the formatting will be left alone. This is supposed to be a technical news site after all, so I think this should be pretty high-priority. Thanks!

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jamiequint

Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/07/10-reasons-you-should-never-get-a-job/

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jamiequint

+1 for Ruby for Rails, one of the best programming books I've read in a while.

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danielha

A social network for geeks? (Shuzak)

http://www.shuzak.com/

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danielha

I submitted to pose a question: Is there a demand for a geek-specific social network? I understand niche networks, but I don't know if this could be a viable community in itself. I understand geeks -- I AM a geek. But if I wanted to join a social network, a complete network full of all types of people is what I would be looking for.<p>Nonetheless, it's interesting to explore. Other than catering to a specific audience, I cannot see any "hooks" that differentiate them for other offerings.<p>Another note: there is a very Reddit-like look about it...

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aglarond

Going Back to the Brick Yard

http://www.digbusiness.com/blog/archives/going_back_to_the_brick_yard.html

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danielha

It's not easy. It might not be a fairy tale, but tantamount to the American dream. Not everyone makes it. But that simple fact makes the journey an absolute thrill.<p>I admire your efforts. I can't say much for your product at this point since I could not locate a proper demonstration on your site. If you think you have something good going (and is a proper competitor to the offerings from the two companies you mentioned), you should keep it going. At this point in its development, I hope you have been able to convince others of its worthiness in concept and execution.<p>Good luck.

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danielha

This page is for the community of entrepreneurs -- or more specifically, hackers with startup ambitions. <p>That said, there are many who are interested in the topic (me included) as demonstrated by the comments.<p>Relax and upmod the submissions that you like. News is only as relevant as the community decides. :)

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pg

It makes you register to even see anything. What were they thinking?

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danielha

Ha! A true testament to the efficiency of both frameworks.

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danielha

That was one of my initial reactions when I came across the site.<p>Clicking one of their navigational buttons will open you up to the rest of the site. Still, there isn't anything engaging about it, though it definitely demonstrates how Reddit-like the design is!<p>Having mandatory registration would just be... well, something, something, nail, coffin.

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danielha

Without going into the detail of the article (I wouldn't want to spoil it for you!): a lot.<p>But you know how it is. A single proof of insecurity is all you really need.

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danielha

Startups vs. The Big Guys: The Power Of Caring For Customers

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/1109/Startups-vs-The-Big-Guys-The-Power-Of-Caring-For-Customers.aspx

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socmoth

Ycombinator, the inside scoop

http://www.flickr.com/photos/socialmoth/405517122/in/set-72157594561460322/

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danielha

The article reminds me of Paul Graham's "The Hardest Lessons..." presentation done at Startup School 06 (I viewed that here: http://startupschool.infogami.com/) about making users happy.<p>Users may be accustomed to getting their requests and opinions thrown into a pile of ignored requests. And this is where a startup can really shine.

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Harj

Using Safari can slow your system down as much as 76% vs Firefox

http://macenstein.com/default/archives/540

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Harj

Why Valley Vcs are Like the Mob

http://blogs.business2.com/beta/2007/02/why_valley_vcs_.html

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kul

Giveth before you taketh

http://lukewarmtapioca.com/2007/2/27/giveth-before-you-taketh

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danielha

Software for Virtual Teams -- A set of tools to replace the traditional office

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/software_for_virtual_teams.php#more

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neilc

A site that does 61,000 page views/day is by no means "high traffic", especially if you're distributing that load over 4 machines. Somewhat interesting post, but this is still a pretty limited demonstration of rails scalability.