skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Site for submitting/viewing/reviewing and discussing business/operational plans/docs
here you go guys...

a small business opportunity. allow people to post their redacted business/operational plans for funded/non-funded entities.

allow people who are looking for live plans to be able to search through abstracts/text of the plans to get a feel for what's there... charge people something small, like $10/year for the rights to access/view x number of plans.

charge them something less if they post their own plans...

also, have the ability to have plans (anonymously) reviewed by given trusted people within the site...

to deal with someone's fear that a given idea might be "stolen" the actual idea portion of the doc can be left out... for the purpose of this site, it wouldn't be that important/critical...

thoughts/comments...

if you want to build something like this, let me know.. i'd probably be willing to personally throw a few grand into something like this....

-bruce
caliventures@yahoo.com
You could also use a cron job (php script even) which can fetch emails and do what ever with them accordingly at what ever interval you need.
I have something similar... it's called Paperium (http://paperium.com/) and it's very similar to Livescribe. It uses the same type of paper (probably not the exact pattern) and I think all these pens with camera + special dotted paper are using the same licensed tech from Hitachi. Paperium also has special areas where you can point with a pen and send stuff over bluetooth over to your computer. Bluetooth connectivity was the reason why I didn't consider other USB pens (Livescribe seems to be USB). It gives you feedback as a series of short vibrations. Once it's on your computer, you can do all kinds of things including change the thickness, change the level of smoothing of the lines, export to Illustrator etc. This is all easy since the pen captures the vector data.

I've also started using Evernote which is this cool app that allows you to archive and search stuff within notes, pictures etc. It works really, really well. Even though I have a writing style of an old doctor, it recognizes my writing just fine.

The audio features of Livescribe don't appeal to me much but whatever works for you..

Paperium has solved my throwaway paper napkin doodlings problem quite nicely. I used to take a pic of my sketches/explanations with my phone and send it around that way but this is so much better. Can't recommend this type of tech enough!
That's a cunning plan. Your script could connect to a POP or IMAP server. That would allow it to process an unlimited number of messages in one run. This would be more scalable because you could do stuff like database bulk inserts of data from many messages.

It would be more awkward to write and more awkward to test but it would definitely be worthwhile for a high volume of messages.
Check out AngelSoft: http://www.angelsoft.net and http://www.open-deals.com.
procmail will do the job. From the homepage:

"Procmail can be used to [...] preprocess your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival [...]."

http://www.procmail.org/
FSJ: Why Dell will not bounce back
>Even some of his family refuse to believe the police could be so wrong

That is a problem. I have a hard time explaining to people that don't read Radley Balko's work that police kill many innocent people every year in the name of stopping people from getting high. My non-libertarian friends just assume that the dead person did something wrong, otherwise why would the police shoot at them? They never question the authority of the state, and whether or not police should have the power to knock down doors unannounced on the basis of anonymous tips in the first place.
My comment was just that; a comment. What would be worth voting down would be the original /article/ for making such a statement, rather than an observation that the statement was made.

I must agree with you, however, that I cannot figure out why my flippant observation got voted up, but this is not the fault of the comment.
Change we can stomach
This isn't especially intellectually interesting, but I submitted it anyway because it provides a few good web app ideas.
Well, perhaps the time has come to write a Firefox plugin that automatically coverts Scribd links to PDFs.
Hmm, no obvious way to make money, do we assume they last until they run out of VC money?
The Blood Brain Barrier
Monkiri - enables a web user to have clippings of a webpage and comment on the same
Ok - yet another licensee of Anoto. Not sure why people haven't yet seen one or the other incarnation of this technology. LeapFrog had a product out one or two years ago. There was a startup at DEMO this year selling a product for students.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoto
For me personally, getting from school to home costs $22 of gas, or 45.75 via mass transit. So while I'm sure I would save a lot of money if I didn't own a car and only took mass transit, as long as I already have a car I have no incentive to ever use public transportation as long as the marginal cost of gas is cheaper than the alternatives. Especially since getting home by car takes 4 hours, whereas getting home by a combination of bus and train takes 7.5 hours. I'd like to use mass transit more, but it just isn't realistic unless the whole system gets a massive overhaul.
I took a look at this and then went to IntenseDebate's home page. The first thing I saw was a glowing testimonial by Brad Feld ("frighteningly good"). That got me curious. A little googling confirms that IntenseDebate is a TechStars company (which the OP implied anyway).

Does that strike anyone else as dodgy?

Edit: maybe I should be more clear. What struck me as dodgy is that Feld is an investor with an interest in praising the product, but this was not disclosed. Even his company affiliation was listed as something other than TechStars.
Groupproj - let's build a scalable web app
hi guys...

starting to get in the need for a scalable web app, not just from a book, but a live app, that will do something.

in looking around, i haven't come across any code that i can take and slap on a few servers, and have an app up/running, so i can climb though the codebase.

it occured to me that this might be a usefull kind of app/tool and that others might have a use as well. so, i'm posting here to see if there are others who might be interested in creating this kind of plaything, or if you might know of sites/tools for this kind of project.

thanks

-bruce
caliventures@yahoo.com
I have had some issues with IntenseDebate. They use a script which causes IE to slow down. IE detects it and asks if I want to continue running the script. Has anyone else seen this with Disqus or IntenseDebate?

Another issue is that IntenseDebate loads (script) AFTER TypePad has already displayed its comment system. My blog is hosted on TypePad. After a few seconds IntenseDebate loads and replaces the TypePad comment box. Has anyone else seen that?

Thanks
Proving that ideas are not worth a lot.
We always argue on the relative worth of ideas. While I do not believe that ideas are worthless, I believe a lot of people are waiting unnecessarily believing they will start when the right idea comes.

When I was starting up, I had to think of a lot of ideas, before I finally settled on www.42topics.com. Since I am not going to be using any of these ideas here is an experiment.

I am telling 5 ideas, which I believe have the potential to make a lot of money. They all are in the same format, describe a problem , a pain point, away to solve them and how to make money with them.

Now here is the challenge, either prove that these ideas suck, and can not make money, or if you are waiting for that big idea go out, build these and make a lot of money.

[1]. http://42topics.com/blog/2008/05/an-idea-a-day-an-automated-adwords-optimizer/

[2]. http://42topics.com/blog/2008/05/an-idea-a-day-recomendation-system-based-ad-network/

[3]. http://42topics.com/blog/category/5startupideas/ as they become live.

PS. How can I convert these link into clickable links?
In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth.A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre.

Who writes this stuff? Doesn't anybody think about it before it gets printed in the New York Times?

Four-acre farms tend to grow high-value (and probably labour-intensive) crops. There's no point owning a four-acre farm if you're going to use it to grow, say, wheat (40 bushels per acre per year, $9 a bushel, so that's $1440 a year gross).

I'm not sure what you can grow which might yield you $1400 an acre. Maybe tulips, or battery hens? Whatever it is, it's probably something you can't sensibly scale up to 1364 acres. (And where did the number 1364 come from? And let's not get started on the fact that 1364 acres isn't really what you'd call a "large" farm. )

Anyway, I'm not just nitpicking on journalistic innumeracy. I really suspect that the whole conclusion (that small farms are more productive than big farms) is completely wrong.
thanks...

but 1)
the two sites you posted, are really the same site.

and 2)
i'm not talking of a site to bring investors/entrepreneurs together.. just a simple site to really refine/nail down the business/operational plan.

any other benefits would be great!!!

thanks

-bruce
caliventures@yahoo.com
The Front Page Effect – Why I’d Rather Be on Techmeme than Digg
The coolest thing from JavaOne had to be getting Effective Java 2nd edition. Being able to meet the Guice guys was also great.
It throws a NoMethodError, because strings don't have that method. And you can introduce that kind of syntax at roughly the same time you'd have to in Python.
I don't think it's necessary to prove that the ideas suck; rather, it's enough (for me) to say that I don't find them compelling enough to invest the time and energy and commitment they would require to bring to fruition. I believe that successful start-ups are based on ideas that the founders are actively jonesing over, not merely ideas that "don't suck."
Information Rules is an excellent book going into details of how markets work in information economies where the marginal cost of a product is near-zero. It covers segmentation, lock-in, network effects, etc. ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X/ )
I rank: Techmeme, Hacker News, Digg, Blog Mention, Aggregators, 2nd tier.

You?
I love the "automated Adwords optimizer" idea. This is something my startup (ecommerce) would absolutely pay for. We have discussed building something similar for our own needs.
[1]. http://42topics.com/blog/2008/05/an-idea-a-day-an-automated-...

[2]. http://42topics.com/blog/2008/05/an-idea-a-day-recomendation...

[3]. http://42topics.com/blog/category/5startupideas/ as they become live.

To make the links clickable.
Yes, but the Harvard course’s treatment isn’t nearly as deep as MIT’s SICP course was, skipping most of the coolest parts, and they put it after a C course.
My list: big blog mention (TechCrunch, FakeSteveJobs, etc.), digg, TechMeme, others...
MIT’s intro CS course (using python) doesn’t strike me as particularly “job skills” targeted. Care to explain?
You are right - a great blog mention (like TechCrunch) is the most valuable... the value of a blog link quickly diminishes though as there aren't too many massively trafficked blogs.
I hope you guys challenge and win. Search needs an upgrade these days.
This reminds me of the first essay students hand in when they arrive at university. The tutor then proceeds to criticise the hell out of it.

Ironically, this particular post has an onomatopoeic ring to it - the content within the post is about as organised as the content being described.

That said - I'm curious to hear how everyone thinks these Tweet-aggregator startups are going to do. It seems like every other article on my KillerStartups.com RSS feed is in the space.
The man behind the handle is probably Eliezer Yudkowsky, a researcher at SIAI who, among other things, run the annual Singularity Summit. In case anyone wants to know.
NSA Attacks West Point (cyberwar simulation)
Paper Replay is absolutely amazing.

http://livescribe.com/smartpen/videos.html

The SmartPen itself is only $150... 4-pack of notebooks is $20. Experiencing GAS - gear acquisition syndrome.
Your rant is rather silly, but if you'd like to know about the colon at the end of blocks:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-December/0...

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-December/0...

If you really want a close block delimiter, python is happy to oblige. Just spell it `#end`. ;-)
Ask YC: How to get more beta testers?
Hi, I am needing beta testers for my new application, but I am not sure where to get them. My targeted audience are senior high school kids and non CS college students. Does anyone have any idea?
Apropos of nothing, I'd like to throw out a longstanding personal idea for improving dating sites. All of the current dating sites work by matching similar interests. This is really dumb, because most people don't want to date people with the same interests; rather, they want to date people with any compelling set of interests as long as there aren't any red flags. So rather than matching people with similar interests, dating sites should let you add tags to your profile and then let show you everyone in your area except for those with tags you are filtering out.

For example, show me everyone within 10 miles of 14850 except those whose profiles contain: jesus, single mom, smoker, republican, pulp-free orange juice, george bush, herpes, bbw, us weekly, horses, etc.
interesting argument -- where did you get these statistics?
That's a good solution. I think you are very right...dating is about filtering more than matching.

Just from my experience, the hard part is getting people to accurately fill in all that information. You've definitely got the right approach though.
If you're running a pop3d or imapd - then it's much better (and safer) to have your script fetch email from there.

Check: http://us3.php.net/imap

If you're not running a pop3d or an imapd - then xirium's way is good - just get postfix to forward to a mail account that runs the script from .forward.

Note: Someone could mailbomb the account with the .forward file and cause your script to be invoked every single time a mail comes in (hence, a little less secure!)
The down arrow disappears after a period of time. Probably a day or so.
I'm not sure what you can grow which might yield you $1400 an acre.

When 20 acres costs 3 million dollars, some land has to put out a lot more than that.

http://www.bergmanvineyards.com/pf_dm.html

Also note:

http://countrystudies.us/russia/60.htm

Private plots also played a role in the Soviet agricultural system. The government allotted small plots to individual farming households to produce food for their own use and for sale as an income supplement. Throughout the Soviet period, the productivity rates of private plots far exceeded their size. With only 3 percent of total sown area in the 1980s, they produced over a quarter of agricultural output.
The author says that choice of language, OS, and so on ought not to be deeply personal for programmers; they should be guided only by what's best for the customer. That's pretty hard to dispute. Who wants to argue that their ego needs matter more than customer value?

But choice of language, OS, and so on are deeply personal for many programmers, including many good ones. Are they all just being self-centered and misguided? I doubt it. Neward doesn't offer any insight into why this might be. He just says it makes him want to "hurl". (Actually, his attitude seems condemnatory and dismissive in a way that's more similar to the caricatured programmers he's critiquing than it is to the heterodox flexibility he advocates.)
Dell makes cheap functional machines. Apple makes expensive consumerist lifestyle fashion. In the current economic environment Apple is a better short than Dell.
Google already optimizes ads and keywords in various ways. Before messing with it, you would have to have a firm understanding of what they already do, which I'm not sure is presently the case. Actually, I doubt they would even be completely open about their methods.
A vast majority of your target audience uses facebook - try a facebook ad or group?
An obvious way to make money: Persistent reputation is extremely valuable. Extended and deep information about a user from their writings and the sites they visit is extremely valuable. Think about the targeted advertising down the long tail, where eCPM will be huge.
It's definitely less than 5 hours. The parent poster's post is 5 hours old and it's disappeared for me, but is still visible on yours.
Something about this definitely rings true to me. I absolutely can appreciate the sense of pride and self-determination that comes with a startup, but that sense alone isn't enough to motivate me. Without an idea that I could truly get behind, how could I carry myself through the low demoralizing points that most startups will encounter? It would be hard to avoid a cycle of working until I meet a roadblock, thinking "oh, this idea sucks anyway," and starting something new -- but never making any progress toward a single goal. Until I can come up with something truly exciting, I can't see myself quitting my day job just yet.
Xobni: Our Path from ‘Wrong Product’ to Killer App
It definitely does read like something I've written on a standardized test's essay section. In Silicon Valley, the name of the author is sometimes valued more highly than his or her writing ability.
Well, two replies I suppose:

1) I don't have advertisements on my site and my previous blog post was months ago. I'm not exactly on my way to be a full time A-list blogger. Sometimes people just want to host content they have written online, not build up an online phenomenon.

2) It's a social news site for the precise reason that people will vote for the content they like. I felt like sharing how it was possible to get a large burst in traffic using a specific method, and peopled liked it enough to up-vote it, despite my questionable writing ability. Every social news system has its holes and flaws, but I don't think my post is exploiting one of these weaknesses. For that reason I don't think it warrants special protest.

Still, I'll assume that you were lashing out from tiredness of other, more egregious, examples of self-posting, and not take it too personal.
Yes, but the focus of YCN are Internet businesses for the most part.
There's probably something prebuilt already (dunno) but writing your own POP client isn't very difficult. Figure out how to set up a socket connection and issue some commands (look these up, but from memory all there is to POP is LOGIN, PASSWORD, LIST, RETRIEVE and DELETE). Now POP server processes were fairly CPU hungry (but short lived as well, so it wasn't too much of a problem) back in the day of 400MHz servers but nowadays you should be fine.
For those who catch the reference, i'll throw Steve a porkchop.

The piece is an easy target for ridicule and jokes, but read something like "The Fountainhead" or at least watch the fairly faithful movie. You might soften your opinion a bit.
The web. I just don't see the point in native apps these days when you can do pretty much all of it via webapps.
Facebook to discontinue Network Pages
Actually it resembles a drug-addict rambling. Which is probably what it is, figuratively speaking.
While people do lie on normal dating sites, they tend to lie about predictable things: Men are most likely to lie about their height and income, and women are most likely to lie about their weight and age.[1] It's hard to say whether people would lie more or less on a filter-based site, but it seems to be worth a try if only because no one (AFAIK) has ever tried it. As for getting people to fill out the information, I think you could come up with some novel ways of encouraging people to add tags. As for the tags themselves, you could easily datamine hot-or-not to figure out the most popular 1,000 or so.

[1] There is an academic study by Catelina Tomas (sp?) about this.
... do not include whoever decided on the structure of this article.
Ah, you're right. I keep mixing up the Gillmors - Dan can write reasonably well, Steve seems to be trying to do some kind of reverse-Turing test.
berecruited(orig poster) == Ryan Spoon(article's author)

The proof is in the article's last picture.

:-)
The article mentions the cost of gas reaching $3.60 a gallon - here in the UK, based on 3.78 litres per gallon, the cost is about £4.35 - thats over twice the price! I always knew gas was cheaper in the USA, but didn't realise how much.

I am lucky enough to commute to work in 10 minutes on a bike, but the cost of fuel here is starting to get a bit ridiculous bearing in mind 70% or so of it is taxes.
Thanks a bunch. Just about got it working.
"I'm not sure what you can grow which might yield you $1400 an acre."

Any number of organic non-commodity fruits. Heirloom tomatoes come to mind.
Yes, I'm sure wine grapes would have to be among the >$1400/acre net crops.

As for the Soviet example, don't you think that's more likely to be telling us something about private vs collectivized farms, rather than something about large vs small farms?

I'm sure there must be data out there somewhere on the efficiency of large vs small farms. Hell, I'm sure there are people who spend their lives studying that kind of thing. Presumably there's some kind of complex productivity vs size curve which varies depending on what crop you're raising (as well as a bunch of other variables) and I'm sure if I went to hang out in the agricultural economics department for a while I could find out far more than I ever wanted to know about it.
Indeed. That's why I'm totally an advocate for a requirement for a concurrent track that's all about installing/configuring/administration of computers/networks with an automation (i.e., shell scripting, tool development, etc.) focus.
The twitter account is just a conduit; assuming that people are following it because of who is generating it; selling it is an attempt to monetise the repuation.

Now if you did something clever that is automatically pumping stuff interesting enough to follow into Twitter and you're selling that. That's a horse of a different color.
Do any of these schemes allow me to federate comments with other blogs? I'd like to be sharing comment feeds with the other blogs in my space.
Exactly. But I wasn't touting Windows Mobile, which I have never used. I am touting the proven track record Microsoft, Apple, and Google have of serving developers more than any other company (Amazon might be another one because of AWS, and they too have a mobile/cellular product, the Kindle). They have designed lots of great software and Software Developer Kits. RIM does a terrible job and has no such experience.

After some research (I didn't before because this was supposed to be just a fun prediction thread we can look back on after one year), I found experts agree:

http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/rim-switching-to-ipho...

http://www.berryreview.com/2008/03/12/rim-is-nurturing-the-d...
This looks real good. Thank-you!
THis was one of my options. I am looking into it, but thanks.
Go read the overcomingbias essay on the Many-Worlds interpretation posted above. (Or is it below?)

The short answer is that in the many-worlds interpretation, this too is a deterministic process. The total wavefunction of the whole system (atom + observer) evolves deterministically. What isn't deterministic is "your" subjective view of it, but "you" only view a vanishingly small slice of reality.

Sorry, that's the best three-sentence explanation I can come up with right now, and I admit it's only a shade better than "trust me, I'm a physicist". But trust me, I'm a physicist.
given their length tinyurl might be good in the future.