skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> All dogs are still (technically, I'd hate to think of the logistics in some cases) interbreedable

Female Ligers are often fertile. Biology can be quite surprising. The concept of a species is a human one, used for convenience.

> Another risk is that if these become more popular that less experienced money oriented breeders

That won't be a problem, at least in the near term, because they are only selling neutered pups.

> Until there are 1000's of these animals out there that have been subjected to all kinds of situations you'll be in uncharted territory

That may be the case. I don't have much experience with animals. Interesting points :)
This is a little off-topic but to me there's no significant differences among the main general-purpose Linux distros.

I help manage a ton of a mixed RHAT, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu servers and the day-to-day operations are the same; we just install apt in the RHAT-based servers since it's nicer (sure, there's the chkconfig vs rc-update and /var/log/secure vs auth or mail.log vs maillog, big deal).

I'd install or recommend one or the other based mostly on the versions of the applications (apache, postgres etc) that are packaged, if anything. Otherwise I say go with what you are familiar with or what your friends/staff are familiar with.

That's on the server side. On the desktop distros (which I don't use much) it's almost the same. I spent a few years moving from distro to distro and I came to the conclusion that the difference between a new and a previous release of the same distro can be bigger (for me) that the difference between two current distro versions, so again it doesn't matter or rather any little thing can tip the balance to decide one distro or another. It comes to a point where I install say Ubuntu in my laptop and WiFi doesn't work and I just install RHAT or whatever; it's faster to do a re-install with another distro than to troubleshoot the problem.
You should try to think for yourself, attend meetups where other founders discuss their ideas, and eventually you'll come up with something too.

As a reminder, a site designed for the purpose of discussing ideas is http://fairsoftware.net/startup-ideas-software-web-iphone.
If you put out your ideas first, I am sure there will be plenty who will follow. Also, there have been quite a lot of startup idea threads on HN in the past. A quick search brings many like this one (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250704) up. Good luck!
"It's the fact that I need visual step-through debugging, adding breakpoints and watch points, and intuitive navigation through a large file hierarchy including lots of imported files, HTML templates, config files, performing ad hoc database investigation queries, uploading files to a server, and whatever else, along with ability to jump to classes and function definitions and intelligent auto-complete and popping up parameters and catching my variable name typos and so forth."

I know what you mean, but... Vim is first and foremost a text editor, and one could argue that none of this is a text editor's job. (In the spirit of the Unix tradition, do one thing and do it well, etc.)

You can customize Vim a great deal, but it isn't really meant to do all of the above. I can see why you would choose to go with an IDE instead.
Or, alternatively, place 4 mm thick window pane glass over your walls, or the much cheaper cellophane.
Very seriously considering a Kindle, but all my eBooks are non-DRM ePUBs. I know Amazon has a feature to get your existing files on the Kindle, but has anyone tried to import ePUBs? Do they transfer 1:1 to Amazon's format?
Their FAQ says: All foxes come neutered. It is illegal to breed Sibirian tame foxes bought from Siberian farm.

I'd love to know if that's true, or if it's some hell-bent crazy interpretation of IP laws.
This would be a really useful service. And there are enough paid screencasts out there that you could probably develop relevant advertising on the site once it gets traction.
I would suggest building and launching one of those web app ideas. It doesn't have to be brilliant.

Doing so will a) give you the experience of completing a product from start to finish and b) probably give you a bunch of different ideas for a startup.
On the third hand: of the infinite amount of things you can't/won't do in you life, there is only a finite amounts of things you want to do, and you won't regret not doing things you don't want to do.
I think the crux of all of this boils down to marketing. You can market your widget as a consumable or entertainment and people will not pay. On the other hand, you can market your product as an INVESTMENT to achieving their goals -- and people will quickly take out their wallets.

It connects to what Kathy Sierra has always talked about. Design your product to make your users fell AWESOME and you will succeed. If you do that, people will co-relate paying for the product as making themselves more awesome.
Thank you. I'm also impressed with what I've accomplished. Once upon a time it seemed like an impossible mission. If you have asked me "if I could lose 20kgs ever", I would hesitate to answer yes. Most of my friends are astonished with this.
Floating there on its own seems pretty unlikely, since Australia didn't acquire any other wildlife from South-East Asia. At the time of British settlement the dingo was the only placental mammal on the continent, apart from bats and humans.
Yep. And I know the smart SEOs behind at least 3 of those rankings. There are more big brands, but there are also big brands who are not ranking there - and I would argue that is not coincidence. SEO is evolving, but whatever the algorithm, there are opportunities to take steps to have your business perform better in the search results.

Equally (and while I very much respect the work you guys are doing and trying to do) there are massive head terms where I know how much the top-ranking sites are paying for links. When they stop, they slip. The job is not done. (But you know that).
Brotherhood of the Internet Keys: Who Are the Chosen Seven?
There are a couple of "give away your unused ideas" threads floating around, you might search them up.

That said, you should probably think more in terms of generating ideas than begging for ideas. I bet you actually have plenty of good ideas floating around in your brain, on some latent level. You just need something to bring them out. Just look for problems people are having, and think about how to apply the technologies that you know, to solving those problems.
Elon Musk Sat Down With Colbert, Talked Tesla, SpaceX And The Irony Of The Two
How do you deal with either working from your Dropbox folder ( convoluted) or having duplicate folders (local syncing)?
Kindle supports MOBI/PRC/AZW but not ePUB. You could use the free conversion tool calibre and batch convert your books from ePUB.
New Stackexchange like site for Linux and Open Source Q&A
Is solar still coming down in price? What kind of bothers me is even if the panels were free it would still probably cost $10,000+ to have someone install them on my house, thus I'll probably never be able to do it :-(
>>The new reactors [..] are both much more expensive than planned and are coming years late.

There hasn't been many nuclear plants built for quite a while. Teething problems are to be expected.

That said, there seems to be strong arguments for solar power's cost going so low that it takes over in a decade or two. The world should probably be thankful that Germany waste lots of money to hasten that date.

But solar energy won't solve the energy generation in Finland or the rest of Scandinavia (hint -- think sun hours/angle in winter :-(.)

But maybe Polywell or General Fusion works and solves all problems...?
I'm not sure how a creator would help provide meaning. If World of Warcraft characters were actually self-aware people, would providing fun for players really be the highest meaning they could aspire to? If not, why would a hypothetical creator's plan for us have any particular bearing on what we ought to do?

Meaning can derive from yourself, you can feel good about your own acts

I can feel good about shooting heroin, but that doesn't mean it's right (or that it's not!). It really ends up sounding like "Do what makes you feel good, and try not to think too much about why it makes you feel good". That's not necessarily bad, but I haven't seen any argument that it is good, other than that it's not necessarily bad.

If what you're looking for is what's most satisfying, I'll agree that introspection and experiment will tell you that. If you're looking for what you ought to do, what's really "meaningful", it's not at all clear to me what can tell you that. Or that anything can, or that it's even a question with an answer. At least if there's no answer, continuing to think about the question can't be wrong. ;)
No, it's work experience. Being around office politics, talking to people in different roles, learning how to be a professional. If you're an admin assistant in a tech co, chances are that you'll get exposed to whatever systems they're using as well. Every job has something to teach you, including, yes, fast food jobs. I grew up in my Dad's fast food restaurant, and I learned more about human nature and the importance of always thinking about quality than I have at any of my more "professional" jobs.

My first job could be considered an "admin assistant job" by all regards - I had no official responsibilities related to tech. My boss saw that I knew computers well, and I got to work on their home-grown CRM system, and I set up a national BBS system (yes, I'm that old) for their not-for-profit. I also got to write a lot of technical documentation while I was there, and after that I made the jump into the tech industry as a documentation writer for a startup, which opened doors into development.

So yes, you can make your upward path into tech as an Admin Assistant.
Agreeing to be a co-founder is a pretty big commitment. Are you sure that the people you've talked to just aren't interested in your idea? The more interesting the idea, the more likely you are to find people. No offense to your idea, just a thought.
Well, my co-founder and I have always wanted to apply to YC but we couldn't figure out how to make it work. We're both married with young children. So, we just worked on it at night for a while and figured we would just try to bootstrap it. We frequently participated in a monthly startup conference in Utah called http://www.LaunchUp.org (site seems down right now) and eventually we were asked to present. The night we presented, someone announced that they were starting a program similar to YC for Utah called http://www.BoomStartup.com. We applied and were accepted and we're still in the program right now!

You can check out our About Us for a bit more information - http://www.IActionable.com/about
I think you want 'figurative' not 'ironic' there, Alanis.
Remember all your passwords by using a good "skeleton password" and substitute a character or two for the site name.

Example: rW4ga#l0x! where # is substituted with 'h' for hackernews.
smiles, and pulls out trusty phone full of ideas

These are ideas that I wish to capitalize on in the future but since I dont want to jump from project to project you can have them:

1) A language learning api- Website and games can add value to their service by allowing people to learn a new language as they visit their site. I did a small implementation of it in a Software Engineering Module.

2) Collective mnemonics - every single year, for university and highschool, students learn the same thing over and over. Each one, creating their own mnemonics to remember the material. Mnemonics take pretty long to devise. The solution is people post their mnemonics for different course. Eliminate the repetition of creating mnemonicss. And the goal is to obtain full course coverage.

3) A site for poker bots to compete against each other or even chess bots.
Every time someone brings up the idea of starting an site based around giving away ideas, someone else brings up halfbakery, so I suppose you could start there:

http://www.halfbakery.com/

I personally don't think the ideas there are all that great. Fortunately there are lots of places where people post ideas that they'd love to see implemented:

http://www.reddit.com/r/somebodymakethis/

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=i+need+software+that

http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs2.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs2.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html

http://ycombinator.com/rfs6.html
"Robots are really only feasible for high-volume, high-profit products"

Untrue. Many low profit consumer products are made using robots.

Currently human labour can still compete with automation, and companies seek the cheapest labour costs by outsourcing. But there will come a point, which has already been reached in a few niche areas of manufacturing and agriculture, where no human labour, however cheap, can compete against automation in terms of productivity per unit cost.
Apple's future iPhones may offer 3D recording of places, objects
For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button
The best way I've found to think of ideas is to keep track of everything that annoys you. Periodically, sort through the list and think a little more about those annoyances which are so great you'd pay real money to make go away.

For example: 37signals - All of their products have come from their own needs
Do people on PCP commit a different class of crime if they kill, stab, or eat someone?
Hmm. Except that 'huge expensive centralized energy production' produces electricity much more cheaply than the solar panels.

If this wasn't the case, the German government wouldn't need the huge expensive system of subsidies for PV.

By all means spend lots of money to encourage production of more expensive electricity, but don't pretend it's cheaper.
Helpful, and I'm definitely a fan of pypi when doing development, but depending on services like that to do installations on production machines is unwise.

It's a better idea to maintain a private repository of dependencies for production installs.
You didn't address the substance of the argument, therefore I can only conclude that you didn't read more than the first few paragraphs. The article is quite detailed, and plainly states that it's not a indictment of 37s the company, their products, or their business model. Instead, it explains why their business advice doesn't apply to most startups. It goes on to talk about pricing theory as it relates to one specific sector (software) and sectors within software (e.g. social startups vs a value-add, business startup). Pricing is not a solved problem, nor is it straightforward, and the article acknowledges this fact, and elaborates on it.

As you didn't address any of this, I can only conclude that your post is a knee-jerk defense of a company you like which relies on an ad hominem attack in an attempt to discredit the author, rather than making any useful arguments yourself.
Ideas are everywhere, man. There are a few common important themes going on right now in the technology world that we all know about.

What I'm getting at is that you should start thinking about how you're solving these problems or tackling these ideas, rather than simply ask for an idea generator.

Case in point: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

There's about as many ideas there as anyone can handle. If you solve any of them, you'll be very well off.

But just remember that ideas are cheap and a dime-a-dozen. Pyra, before starting Blogger, was working on Project Management software. eBay was selling auction software to other companies. Twitter's company had been a podcast database before.

It's less about the idea and more about 1) You. and 2) Your execution.

One more really important thing to think about is that virtually all (immensely) successful ideas arise from a founder's need. Look around your life? What around you do you hate and want fixed? Take that and solve that problem. If anything, it will make your life a lot better ;)

Excellent essay here on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

Good luck, though :)

----------------------------

Also, more detailed YComb ideas:

http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs2.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs2.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
http://ycombinator.com/rfs6.html
For years, Solaris was the "original" platform upon which Oracle was developed. Everything else was a port. Solaris got the patches first, etc.

Several Oracls DBAs I know used to say "if you want to run Oracle you might as well run it on Solaris"
I think Apple is the exception. They ate the other mp3 players and they ate the other mobile companies' profits. So it seems like if the high end is cheap enough, it can eat downwards.
I have a Nook. I chose it over the Kindle for two reasons: Micro-SD card support, and ePub support. The 4Gb internal memory in the Kindle 3 largely eliminates the need for memory expansion. The lack of epub is the deal-breaker for me.

A Nook can read any epub from any store supporting the Adobe Digital Editions DRM. To my knowledge, this is all of them, including Sony. Of course, if the epub is DRM-free it will work as well.

epub is an open format. It is mostly HTML/CSS, with support for embedded fonts and a normalized system for storing images, meta-data, etc. It is widely being supported by various open source tools. Google is making their public domain books available as ePubs (quality varies).

Topaz and Mobi are proprietary formats. Kindle is the only reader of note using them. They can be converted to epub if the DRM is broken (possible, but YMMV), but it is often a time-consuming process, and thus not worth it.

If the new Kindle would support epub, it would be a hands-down winner. But, of course, that would mean that people are able to purchase books from sources other than Amazon.

Since the Nook runs Android, I am hoping some clever person figures out a way to hack the Kindle for Android app to run on the Nook. Best of both worlds.
with gawk in the pipline, you can stream the results over fiber to a load-balanced cluster of WEDU (Windows Enterprise Disk Usage) appliances.
Most books are pretty easy to convert. As mentioned elsewhere, calibre does a good job at it, although the GUI looks like it crept out of someones mid-90s Tcl/Tk nightmares.

A problem I've seen with epub books is missing hyphenation, which really messes up the display. And this was on "native" devices (Sony PRS, nook). Haven't seen really good typography on any of the ereader devices. This includes the iPad…
Due to homeostasis, a diet or exercise programmes effectiveness is inversely proportional to the length of time you have been using it.

Average minds think alike, great minds think differently.
>I'm trying to determine whether pushing oneself past the comfort zone always results in a positive outcome.

It won't, but that's not the point. It is about the journey and growing as a person and crying and having the time of your life.
The hysterical cancer campaign against cell phones
i find this whole thing a lot more of an experiment in clojure performance than CouchDB throughput.

he doesn't attach a handler to the response on his writes and is queuing writes in memory and bulking them. he's not concerned with durability at pretty much any layer.

this kind of setup is great for a large initial import of data but i would be weary of running it in production.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but couldn't you then determine the profitable niche segments and run with those? It's getting cheaper and cheaper to make a show. And distribution isn't limited to TV channels - online, DVD... That fits pretty well into the overall trend of the internet resulting in deep specialisation.
This will make 3D modeling like http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/3D_models/ much easier.
Probably inspired by Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus.
Rough anecdotal polling from my experience on the Boston-area commuter rail in from the suburbs: I see more iPhones than Kindles, but way more Kindles than iPads. People on iPhones are often playing games, not reading.

Kindles are surprisingly popular with older women. I suspect it's because it does its one task really well and is much less technically intimidating for non-savvy users. I own one and use it periodically, but prefer traveling with the iPhone so I avoid having 3 devices at all times.

I think the Kindle will continue to be popular with older commuters - it's easy on the eyes, simple to use, and doesn't have a lot of technological baggage.
Does python runtime have a native interface like JNI?

Android was quickly leveraging a lot of C and C++ code to get the system up and running. Using Java's JNI may have helped bootstrap that process faster.
I found an old version myself smoking a cigarette. We all change. That's a given. The question is - do we change for the better?
The nook support ePUB.
Hey, don't throw in Emacs in there!

I use Emacs for a lot of Python and Django work. I can visually step through debugging, add break points, watch points, and etc... with Emacs.

Emacs was designed with extensibility from the ground up, and there are a lot of debugging plugins that turn emacs into an "IDE".
I've used Dvorak for years, and have no problem whatsoever using vi and Emacs with it. (I use Emacs for major work and nvi for quick edits in the shell.) Emacs is significantly better with Dvorak, IMHO, because there isn't so much mashed together on the left hand.

The only thing I've ever had a hard time getting used to with Dvorak is the diagonal movement commands in nethack. hjkl is not a big deal, but yubn trips me up.
Utility vs Strategic Dichotomy
Now they "only" need to get the mindshare of the users - which is, granted, much easier if your product is better than the competition - word of mouth should take a bit of the burden off that.
Guess the date (JS):d=new Date();d.setFullYear(2010);d.setMonth(1);d.setDate(1)
It's not 2010-01-01 or 2010-02-01 :-)
.NET for Android prepares to get probed
I don't push past my comfort zone near enough. It's been such an issue with me, I devised a game for myself to take chances and seek out rejection. The game (I call it Rejection Therapy) worked so well that I documented my idea online (although it's never been released to the public until today - thanks to your question). It's at http://www.rejectiontherapy.com for anyone who may be interested.

Who knows. It may help someone else, or it may help no one but me. But it's out there for anyone who wants to break out of their comfort zone but need a "push".
The value of restricting choice
There is one being developed, it will be available at try.rakudo.org.

See http://github.com/moritz/try.rakudo.org for the source code.
A couple of days ago, when I went for my first driving lesson in about seventeen years. Driving scares the hell out of me.

The outcome: well, I drove around white-knuckled for a bit, and didn't hurt anybody or damage any property. Not positive or negative yet - it'll be positive if I stick to it and get a driver's license.

That reminds me, I've got to schedule some appointments for next week.
App Genome Project analysis of 300,000 mobile applications
Yup. I'm an avid vim user, but I tried emacs for a few weeks, and my hands were always sore.

search & replace is %
indent is > (auto-indent is =)

Emacs seems really neat, and I'd like to try out some other editors, but none of them compare to the ease of vim's modal style.
he didn't need or want 3G

There are also people like me who are already carrying around the HTC Evo with a built-in wi-fi hotspot. I might grab a wi-fi only Kindle at this price.
would you be willing to write up how your writes were outrunning the compactor in a little more detail in either a blog post or in an email to the apache couchdb dev list?

we've been talking about possible improvements to the compactor and having a solid use case that outruns it would help focus that.