skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ideas are rarely unique anymore. The real question is can you turn a profit? If yes, what hurtles are in place that stopped other people from already doing it? If this site helps gauge the business impact of an idea, great. Sharing the solutions to implement the idea, well that would be silly.
Ok, probably spent too much time there than was necessary. "We" (whoever was there) ended up with a few faces which evolved into pimps which evolved into splodges which evolved into me trying to make the whole thing yellow.

Thanks for the link!

Edit: It actually got somewhere: http://imgur.com/M8elJ.png
Ask HN: Ethics of writing HN conversation digests on my blog?
Once in a while, I ask a question to HN that gets some very insightful feedback. Would it be ethical for me to write digests/analysis of those conversations on my personal blog? I'd do it mostly for myself to put some order in my thoughts... I don't have any audience anyway :(

PS: I'm not talking about copy/pasting the comments in my blog. I'm talking about writing a condensed summary of the most interesting points that were debated.
Is it possible to opt out of social networking?
i actually don't live in san francisco, i was just there when that photo was taken. and i'm kind of over doing marketing on my own, i know perfectly well i'm not any good at it. i'd like to work with somebody who has the personality for it.
Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting
The site is public and indexed by Google within hours. What ethical dilemma is there in quoting or analyzing what is public information? As long as it is not slanderous. If you are still feeling guilty, post a comment to the HN conversation and link to your analysis.
Over diversification is dangerous too. Jack of all apps, master of none? I like the idea, but the problem with this product space search is that is dead slow. You might want to search like this for a bit and see what takes off, then put more energy into the ones that are doing well.
You can download the Arc tarball and read news.arc to see what's available. It's not up-to-date with the current version of Hacker News, but it will give you the general idea.

The direct answer to your question is "no".
I refer anyone that's interested to Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge. It's a free online course to learn to make your first $1 online. It's mostly about niche selection, test marketing, and beginning SEO, but it's great for beginners. It's not overwhelmingly awesome, but it's free and targeted to people that aren't ubergeeks like us.

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com
Goal Progress Review With Your Goal Buddy+Ready To Use Worksheet
Right. Perhaps I am over-thinking this.
"Artists and Craftsmen just forge ahead into creating with little more than a general idea of what they're making. The design evolves as they go."

Interesting. Any woodworkers here? I've been under the impression that furniture makers would first work out the design, careful cut the pieces, then assemble them.

Likewise, many painters will do several sketches, then carefully build up the final piece when working on canvas.

Of course there are artists who make stuff up as they go, but the suggestion that artists and craftsmen do not, as a rule, employ careful planning and detailed steps in the creation of their work is false.

There's an art to engineering, and there's engineering in art.

"If designing a bridge required specifying the exact position of every iron atom, no one would bother trying to do it on paper first. With software, there is no advantage to doing more than a high level design on paper first because every byte in the source code is significant. You get one wrong, and the software doesn't work. You can't capture that in the design without actually writing the source code, so we skip that level of design."

Blueprints :: High-level source code

Construction of physical bridge ::Compiler/interpreter

Discuss. :)
As Mike Arrington has proven, a large part of growing your presence on the internet (read: becoming known by the masses) involves selling out and engaging in morally questionable activity (not to mention evolving into an enormous dick). Om is probably glad that he didn't compromise his integrity like Arrington did to get attention of the masses. He gets more than enough attention from those that matter.
Not necessarily. If you're being followed by 7,000 "people" who really turn out to be just Twitterfeed dumps and folks trying to sell you something, that's a useless set of followers. If you have 1,000 followers where a good portion of them actually interact on Twitter (and with you), I think that's more helpful. I know people with tens of thousands of followers who can't seem to get more than 10 people to retweet any blog post they write, but others with less who seem more influential.
You are right about the dangers of diversification. You would have to prune down projects as you go or else risk not doing anything well.

However, if the projects are designed to be all up front effort and no ongoing time costs, you can just leave them to languish. I have had things take off in a minor way, long after abandoning them.
I don't see how this is a 'security hole'. You're still going to be subject to the user's security restrictions when you go to their profile. You won't get anymore information than you would if you had searched their name and opened their profile legitimately.
you don't have to be popular to build something, unless you want to be a popular writer. people will notice if your product is good
Even thoughtless aggregation adds value, if you consider successful sites that are nothing more than a bulletin board built around a user community that does the actual gruntwork. Putting things in context may be the "location, location, location" of the Web. You could say we're doing it right now, here on HN.
A few gratis books I can recommend: http://openbookproject.net//electricCircuits/

They're the best that I have ever found. (It is a very sweet irony that they happen to be free).

edit: be sure to download the pdf versions. E.g. here's a link for book I, DC: http://openbookproject.net//electricCircuits/DC/DC.pdf (6 MB)
No so fast with the yacht, he didn't say they're doing 230k saves/sec. That'd be the case if Warhamemr Online saved statuses for 7M concurrent users every 30 seconds. The basho guy said 7M daily users, not 7M concurrent ones.
I nearly knocked my Arduino Lilypad into the trash the other day, and while straightening up, moved a G1 and two Sansa MP3 players.

It occurred to me that I have a perhaps a dozen computers in my house.
They could just wait 18 years - that's one feasible option. I'd suppose it wouldn't benefit them greatly though.
Probably not. His demographics are epic. Random refreshes of Gigaom give me the following ads in the "lead" spot:

* Sprint
* Best Buy
* Cisco
* Brightcove

The same exercise on TechCrunch gives me:

* Google ads
* Graphical Google ads
* Google ads
* Google ads

Techcrunch runs way more ads per page. Based on the prices of those sponsorship squares ($15,000/mo for ~20 million impressions = ~$.75/cpm), I'm guessing they're all pretty bargain basement. It's just not worth running stuff like that if you're a site like Gigaom.
The Garage and the Penthouse
I want to make many cheap bucks and I hope people here will continue to teach us how to think of ideas that will generate these cheap bucks.
This sort of reminds me of the old pottery story, where they had one group making which was graded on how many pots they made and another one which was only graded on their best pot. Of course the group which was graded on quantity made better pots in the end.

I really think that by iterating really quickly you will become good faster than if you try to make the perfect thing right away. So don't be paralyzed by trying to achieve perfection; go out and create, and then create some more.
At Happy Camper Studios we had a system of flags. Colored index cards, actually: red, yellow, and green.

Green up meant you were open to interruption for anything.

Yellow meant you were open to interruptions for something work related.

Red meant don't bother me unless the building is on fire.

I was really bad at remembering to change flags, and was always on the lookout for some USB-driven traffic light thing that didn't cost a fortune.
Secondary Bone Cancer Symptoms
Symptoms of Secondary Bone Cancer

When a person is suffering from the secondary bone cancer the bones are affected in a great way and they become so weak that might get fractured leading to pathological fractures due to some minor accidents. The most common symptoms of the secondary bone cancer is a pain.
Also, wondering about "don't let the interviewee lead" advice. I've noticed that sometimes you learn quite a lot about a person if you let them go off on their own rather than stick to a set of questions...
That's the reason this analogy never works. It's like saying

"Could you run 10,000km?"

".. erm no"

"ok, how about can you run 1km?"

"sure!"

"Great! so all you need to do, is do that 10,000 times! easy eh!?"

I have trouble paying more than 1 or 2 projects real attention. And without attention, things die.
Massive Explosion at Connecticut Power Plant
It would be really interesting if you could describe some of these projects briefly.
Why Vehicle To Grid is a horrible idea
Better info:

http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/middlesex_cty/middletown-power-...
Ask HN: Appropriate levels of email contact?
More and more I despise signing up for new websites, because they all seem to think the act of signing up grants them permission to spam me as much as they want. I'm not talking about sites like "Debbie's torrent house", but "normal" sites like Airbnb.com (YC09), for example, who has spammed me 3 times about rating the last place I stayed at.

I'd like to think that it's just because they're pretty new and inexperienced about customer interaction, but I know better. For some reason, some marketing schmuck (or some engineer in the role of marketeer) gets green colored eyes the moment they think about email addresses.

What will it take to teach startups that just because I sign up for your website, I am not a marketing lead for you to abuse?
Here is a thread from the Red5 mailinglist:
http://osflash.org/pipermail/red5_osflash.org/2009-August/03...

The main issue is that the spec says (5.4, page 10) that in C2 and S2 messages you send random bytes. If you do that only VP6 streaming will work but H.264 won't. You have to do a HMAC like digest on the "random bytes" and send it back so that H.264 works.

Of course all of this was reverse-engineered before the spec was released, but later with the release of Player version 10.0.32.18 it stopped working. So it had to be reverse-engineered again.

About that time I stopped working on a Flash Media Server (fortunately), so I just heard from my ex-colleagues that Adobe changed the handshake again with a new Player version.

EDIT: changed the link to a better one.
Thibaut, are they all advertising based?

The major pain point for me is payment processing.
I like his no-nonsense style. What I found is that its not as much the substance (although that is important), but the fact that you have a clear strategy that makes a difference.

Going about hiring or raising VC or marketing without a clear, well thought out plan is probably what dooms most startups.
Funny. Just yesterday I was flipping through MIT's OCW 6.xxx offerings, getting a refresher on EE and CS. There are a few holes in the on-line documentation, but it's a fantastic resource.
Yes, a large portion of the value (for me, at least) is the comments, which are generated by.... us.

That is beyond, and because of, the aggregation. What is created is new and more valuable than the original posts, or even the aggregation thereof.
I don't know why we have to assume men and women should have the same roles at startups. I'm not saying they don't play an equally important role, it's just not the same.

It seems that men are more inclined, for whatever reason, to start companies. It could be a combination of many factors. However, I don't think we should assume something is wrong just because the numbers aren't the same.
http://aruninte.blogspot.com/2010/02/tcscom-hacked-dnshijack...

DNS hijack
The prototype source[1] has the answer, and it does not curry the function. In fact it does not even perform real partial application. It just returns a closure that has references to the original function and the argument(s) you asked it to partially apply. When you call the resulting function it merges the new arguments and calls the original function.

[1] http://github.com/sstephenson/prototype/blob/master/src/lang...

Conceptually it's the same as partial application so most of us would overlook that detail, but it is nowhere near currying. See Haskell if you're interested in these concepts.
AI's Evolved for Alternate Psychic Substrate Drugged in Service of Art
>> "and currently runs way more than 400 sites/projects."

I'm guessing they're some sort of auto generated content sites ranking and making money off ads?
I know horizontal space is tight, but it'd be nice if you could have 2 at-least-80-character-wide views (rather than hard-wrapping them at whatever they are now) when you have a wider screen. Looks good though.
Agreed - these ideas are not a startup - they don't create real value as a company. However the idea of making passive income is very attractive to many programmers, and creates an opportunity to have time to work on something big.
Facebook staff do weird stuff for lulz. I think they are evil. I've seen them mess with the JIDF and support holocaust denial groups. It's the double standard that irks me.
so do you think: 30% eBook shop (e.g. Amazon, iTunes), 20% editors / producers, and 50% authors?
As someone who programs in ActionScript very often and makes heavy use out of RTMP, I'm very well aware of Flash's shortcomings and how quickly they would be fixed if it were more open. However, I really wish discussions like this weren't full of so much empty talk. If you don't like Flash, don't use it. Uninstall the Flash player and leave it all behind. Fact is, they have succeeded in getting a proprietary and commerically-trusted video codec available for the masses. If you think that is such a small feat, or such an insignficant reason to keep it closed, I challenge you to do better. If a lot of people really didn't like Flash and actually didn't something about it, Adobe would get the message REAL quick.
So that's the measure of success? If I were Om, I'd be sad about being compared to the sensational journalism of Mashable, or the world according to Arrington.

Om's content is far better than the other 2, but that's just my opinion.
Maintaining 400 projects is impractical, but it is possible to create 400 micro-businesses that don't need to be taken care of.

For example, you can create a website, write 10 high-value blog articles and make a landing page for a product you want to sell that is related to the articles. (This costs <$10) You have to put in the initial hours to tweak the content, maximize conversions and get good SEO, but after a certain point you can just let go.

Of course, you will get nowhere near the revenue you can get if you put in the hours to actually build the business. But if the purpose of the site is to maintain a certain level of income (like a lifestyle business) and grow no more, then this is definitely feasible.

Jeremy Schoemaker (online marketer) uses exactly this approach. 1) Find a niche, 2) create a product to help people in that niche, 3) create a system that will stay intact even if you don't touch it for a year.
Those I know revolve around affiliation, alternate search engines, porn/erotic stuff, niche technological forums and such topics :)

Not by him but in the same kind of idea, here's an example:

http://fastpowertools.com/

A while back I know the owner of this site did a few hundreds $ per month. It was really an eye-opener to me :)

Of course this requires SEO skills to earn more than a few bucks, that need to be learn on the way.

I started a couple of sites like this one, and although I earned a bit of money, I wanted to try sites that are really useful to myself, which I'm focusing on now.

I think it's always good to remind myself that between what would look a half-spammy site to a regular programmer, and the typical too complex projects regular programmers would start, there's a sweet spot in the middle.
Thanks you, that does make sense. Can I suggest adding that explanation to your article so it's clear that the example actually does do more than simply switching on a singular requested format?

(I'm actually curious in practice how often the "Accept" header is really used to specify the format, and how often the format is simply coming from the extension on the requested path. I've only ever encountered the latter case, which I why I was thinking of the format as a single-valued variable you can switch on.)
If ever I wanted the ability to down vote a blog submission, it was this one.
nope: it's really a mix of affiliate/commissions, regular ads and micropayments (allopass).
Sure and I understand all that. My comment was just that the examples in the article are perhaps not the best ones to use because they are simply replicating what other languages do with lexically scoped variables, and users of those languages view the lack of such as a deficiency of Ruby.
Project Idea: AJAX without writing a single line of Javascript
Is a .5% difference substantial enough to make anyone sad? What's Alexa's margin of error?
Looking at the comparison chart of growth

Very bad use of a chart. His growth is actually about the same, maybe identical. Look at gigaom.com by itself and set period to max.
Posted and discussed a few hours ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107806
Why a Small Change in Gender Ratios Has a Large Effect
Or perhaps it's like saying,

"So you want to visit every major city in Europe. Do you have a year of free time?"

"... erm no"

"Okay, could you maybe take a vacation every other year and visit just one country in Europe?"

"Yeah, I can do that."

"Great, just fit those in when you can for the rest of your life and you'll have done it. Easy, huh?"
Thanks, I've been looking for that for a while. Is that linked anywhere?
I think you're referring to StackOverflow's points and badges; is there a deeper dynamic that you'd like to explain?
Interesting, I've been doing just that for the last couple of years.

It's been a mix of partial successes and total failures, mostly failures. I didn't want to go the 'mfa' route for obvious reasons, so I try to make these sites in to something that actually is useful, and that have a sense of community about them.

Here is a breakdown of what you can make this way in a month based on adsense alone after several years of work, not something to be proud of, that's for sure.

It is very hard to make stuff that does not need maintenance.

pfn	3,203	18	0.56%	€0.08	€0.26
leftsidebar	68	1	1.47%	€0.00	€0.00
linkbar	72	0	0.00%	€0.00	€0.00
ccm	1,012	2	0.20%	€0.06	€0.06
dzleft	52,480	34	0.06%	€0.03	€1.81
dzlink	47,804	98	0.21%	€0.04	€1.87
dzmain	46,950	222	0.47%	€0.17	€7.93
fls	90,839	459	0.51%	€0.50	€44.98
gms	4,242	61	1.44%	€0.31	€1.31
hst160x600	30,360	54	0.18%	€0.20	€6.13
hst468x60	29,992	55	0.18%	€0.20	€6.00
jks	359	10	2.79%	€2.06	€0.74
lrmsmall	90	0	0.00%	€0.00	€0.00
lrmtall	2,173,823	2,039	0.09%	€0.05	€112.76
lrm	5,209	17	0.33%	€0.35	€1.81
lrmlink	2,204,212	2,234	0.10%	€0.05	€115.06
lrmlinkbar	24,719	109	0.44%	€0.15	€3.64
mdcl	84	1	1.19%	€0.05	€0.00
pcs	93,418	225	0.24%	€0.21	€19.21
pcslinkbar	89,701	1,206	1.34%	€0.43	€38.88
stroompunt	1,039	17	1.64%	€3.60	€3.74
cams	1,510,897	5,889	0.39%	€0.19	€289.18
ztk	27,112	711	2.62%	€3.69	€100.15
ztklinkbar	28,534	462	1.62%	€1.30	€37.10

These figures are for the month of January.

I've removed the ones that I consider total failures from this list or it would have been three times as long.

$1 per day per site sounds like a great plan in theory, but in practice it is quite hard to do that across a broad number of sites and not get bogged down in maintenance issues.

Anything with a form will attract spammers more than it will attract users, software will over time stop working because external things it depends on will change and so on.

Passive income is nice, but it is hard to make something that is really passive.

It's not a complete failure, but it definitely wasn't the success I expected either.

This is due to a whole pile of factors, maintenance has already been mentioned, lousy ECPM is another, inability to get any traction with some projects is a third (anybody interested in a complete platform for trading second hand cars or houses ?).
CompE = Computer Engineering.
Why don't you like people who do that?

(Genuinely curious)
Is this about Tucker Max or what it says?
I think you have some mistaken generalizations about how people use Facebook. Some people might use it as you describe, but for me, it's more of a personalized Twitter + event management platform + email replacement for people whose email address I don't have.
Yup, george_morgan is right, you were being downvoted for using abstract corporate language to solve real problems. In a forum like this, most of us have heard it before: "We'll resolve this by applying creativity and resourcefulness." "But how exactly?" "We're going to give it our all, and it will work out!" As engineers, we're the ones who actually do the resolving, and we like to apply concrete, tenable options to problems.
Opting out of a social network doesn't sound possible, unless you can somehow maintain separate e-mail and phone numbers for each of your contacts, something that would be almost impossible to do, or if you managed to find a circle of friends that understands the privacy implications of social networks, something that is equally unlikely.

Internet social networks are like small town social networks where everyone knows who is doing what to whom, except that instead of a few hundred locals who like to gossip, the community is millions, and the motive is monitization.
Those aren't legitimate questions. I understand that a VC interview is different from a job interview, but in the context of a job interview, those questions are unlawful.

To see why this is a problem, think about the questions in the equally-valid context of a man. Are you planning to have kids? What if your wife has to move for work one day? Will go you with him?

(Incidentally: I know four very skilled people who moved for their wife's career, and zero who moved for their husband).

The notion of "new-mommy-land" is equally revolting, especially given the reality of "new-daddy-land" as I experienced it.
Nothing changes if you do not voice it. Have you tried contacting the co-founders directly to express your view of their business practice? Good businesses(especially startups) constantly re-evaluate their business practices and how their user base perceives them.
Agreed. 80 characters is the bare minimum for code viewing. The choice of 55, which this seems to be, is extremely odd considering it's designed to view diffs (which technically means 81 or 82 for the leading edit indicator chars).
At the bottom of the page.
Running a Ruby application with jruby-complete
I see. Anecdotes about how female-to-male trangender people felt, plus a wild generalization about the role of a single hormone across almost all social situations. I'm sold.
Thanks!

I'm having a tough time with CSS right now. I hope to add a client-side way to detect when the screen is large enough and show 80 character wide views.
Sounds like something Tyler Durden might have said.
I think the HTML5 people are doing just that, and I think this string of blog posts Adobe is pushing out is the reaction. I think the bigger problem is that Adobe Flash team and certain Adobe executives are not quite dealing with what their customers are telling them in a mature way or totally truthful way. This tends to annoy people.
Facebook doesn't need your consent to listen to your acquaintances about you. Next soap opera, please.