skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do lodging-house owners not drink wine? Do vintners not vacation? People making luxury goods earn an income, often a very good income, and often they spend rather a lot of that income on luxury goods. It is perfectly possible to sustain an economy where the main productive output is luxury goods - it could be argued that many international cities are exactly that.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that the money a lawyer earns in exchange for his time is "real money", whereas the money earned by a fashion designer or an organic honey grower or someone who restores vingage fixed-gear bicycles is somehow not real money.

The economy only demands productivity. It cares not one jot whether that production is hamburger buns or brioche, whether it is kalashnikovs or designer garden tools. All that matters is that enough people will pay for what you do. It should be self-evident that artistry is highly marketable.

The real growth in the current economy is beauty. Apple is testament to that - their products are made by Quanta and Foxconn like everyone else's, but they are worth more by simple merit of being beautiful. Every year the metal and plastic and glass is worth less and the design and styling worth more, that's why we in the west no longer manufacture very much at all. The taste of Steve Jobs and the imagination of Jony Ive is worth more than any factory machine.

For every bohemian running a boutique B&B, we merely need 20 other people who make or do something that other people like. They don't have to wear a tie or work in a tall building, they only need to be productive.
Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10
Big difference though is that Jonathan Swift is still more interesting.
Geeks at work
One idea I've had that I'll never get around to actually doing anything with is playing with Amazon's Spot Instances. I think that the cheap cloud computing they offer can open up some new possibilities and also just save people money.

I think the best idea that I've had come out of it is some kind of spot instance guide where someone could say "I need this job done by 10am Monday. It'll take ~5 hours on 10 large instances. Get it done for me as cheaply as possible while still having a 95% chance that it gets done in time." You would know enough about the patterns of spot instance pricing that you could instantly estimate the cost for them, and they could play around with the confidence that they want of it finishing as they see the price vs. chance that it doesn't get done trade-off.

Now, there are definitely some issues with that idea. It may be a terrible idea. But I think there are opportunities to build businesses like that that exploit the cheap computing that spot instances offer.
A slight addendum to this, show this list to someone you know who isn't a techie. I mailed this list to my parents and was amazed at what their problems were in many of these fields.

I've always figured that people outside the 18-35 male geek demographic have itches that need scratching that we can't even imagine.
How about a website for people who want to lose weight? I know this kind of thing already exists, but there are still lots of overweight people out there. I figure the existing ones don't attract all the target population, or they don't work for whatever users they can attract.

Incidentally you will be helping people to get laid.
There are 2 single founder startups in the current YC batch. I think there were 3 in the last one. So we do fund them. The odds of getting funded are lower for single founder startups. I once calculated about 5x worse. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything, because the single founder applicants are not simply the same kind of people as the multi-founder applicants, just in quantity one. When people apply for funding for perpetual motion machines and the like, they are disproportionately single founders.
Three main Parts Of the Term Paper Format
There are many tasks that a student should get familiar with when writing the term papers. They will need patience and perseverance. They should learn to make a cover page. The most important part, term paper format is explained in this article.
If your plan is good and you plan on bootstrapping anyway (which means that you see YC as a way to speed things up a bit) the best way to get in would be to prove that it stands a chance before applying.

Otherwise you'd just look like one of a hundred (or more) individuals that apply and have to overcome the 'have no co-founder' stigma.

You need to offset that somehow and I think the most concrete way of doing that would be to show you are already on the road to success.

Then if you are accepted you'll be able to move a bit faster and you can benefit from the network and if you are not accepted you are on your way but on a slower path.

Bootstrapping and using investors are not the same path - as has been noted elsewhere in this thread - but I don't see why you couldn't convert a bootstrapped business in to a larger one if you can lay your hands on some capital.
If I were going to downmod you, it would be because you go on for rather a while about an ill-defined concept, backed by vague references to hundreds of years at a time as if they could somehow be meaningfully captured by such a quick sketch. How do we measure "linearity"? How do you address the fact that regardless of the language, human text and speech is a serialization of an arbitrarily interlinked concept? (And thank goodness I can fall back on programmer-jargon to ask that question, I'm so very glad I didn't have to type that in non-jargon.) What is linearity, exactly?

There very way may be sharp, clear answers you can give me that will shut me down, in which case I will graciously admit it. But I don't know what they may be.
The Environmental Impact of Email Attachments
A Map to Your Nearest Data Center
All they need is a warrantless backdoor into Facebook (which they likely already have) and they probably know everyone you've ever emailed.

Thanks to my clueless "friends" who must be giving Facebook their email logins, I get annoying and alarming weekly emails from Facebook prompting me to join and showing me how a dozen of my "friends" by full name and location that have joined and how I should too.
I've been using haml and sass for a while now, and I have to say that once you start using them, it's hard to go back. Sure, the major upfront benefit is less typing involved. For sass, there's no longer the long-winded

#main #content .post .title h3

CSS associations that you have to manually type out (or copy paste) each time you want to declare a style for something. More importantly though is that it creates much more readability. I can go back to code that I wrote months ago and see exactly where a style that I need to change is located in sass, whereas in CSS I'll have to poke around a bit. The tab delimited hierarchies will be a godsend when first you use them.

The variable declarations can be nice as well, although I haven't used those to their fullest capacity yet. Even without them though, I'd still use sass. That's not to say it doesn't have downfalls. It is another level of abstraction that you have to deal with. If you're building a server that's hosting .sass files, you'll need a sass compiler - not something you necessarily want to think about on a deadline. Then again, you can always just compile them before you deploy your packages, but you have to remember to update the .sass files if you ever make any on-the-fly changes on the server. That can always be remedied though by having a dedicated stylesheet server, although I typically only use one of those for development. I have a blank haml/sass template that I use for styling front ends, and will direct any site I'm currently making, regardless of the language, to the stylesheets hosted by that project. Even if you don't think you'll use it, I'd still give it a shot if you haven't played with it already.
Russia's Corruption Generates Equivalent Of 50% GDP
That's admittedly one big and non-technical problem with that idea. A lot of songs are available on YouTube, so one way is to have people find them on YouTube and paste the URL to add a song to the playlist. You could use the player API to synchronize the audio between listeners.

I would go the user-upload route myself though. Just make it non-trivial for users to rip the songs to their hard drives. By the time you get a C&D (if you do), you may have enough traction to start talking to some of the labels about licensing content.
I disagree with you. YC is in the business of doing as much as possible with very little, in my own opinion... the amounts they invest in these startups say it all. Until you can prove your business and then you get a larger investment.

What you described is more towards the type of investments that VCs do... not YC.
Banning Wi-Fi From Schools
pretty cool application. Working on a startup that uses location as well, it is nice to see the simplicity being applied to something like this. It has potential, keep up the good work
Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (Video lectures)
Clippy! And Cuecat, anyone else remember that? Potentially you never had to remember another URL again. Thankfully the web took care of web links :)

Some of the inventions are really not that bad. It's more of a lighthearted take than anything else.
Contract between two start-ups 
My start-up is partnering with another company for the development of a web app. We offered them a percentage ownership of the company.

We are in the process of signing our contract and they want to include a clause that states every 6 months we open the contract for renegotiating contract terms. The intention is to make sure that their time and effort is worth it, which opens up the door for renegotiating the percentage ownership/stake in the company.

My partner and I have never heard of such a thing and we were hoping that someone could shed light on this. Can a company renegotiate its stake 6 months or a year after working?
I've got a startup that's just starting to gain traction (~$4,000 in SAAS license sales, pipeline of more customer prospects). I've taken a tiny amount of angel funding, with a larger angel round pending more product validation. I'm a single, non-technical founder looking for a techie or two who can help build out features. I'm also just to the North of you in Nebraska, well within driving distance. Email if you'd like to chat.

I think the benefit to you is a real-life business that has a business driver (me) with business connections and already has some market validation. I've got a completed business plan that you can pull from to create a great case study. My technical advisor can also give you guidance from someone who's "been there and done that" (and will prevent me from making requests that are technically unsound). Instead of starting from scratch, you have a base to build on.
Two free ideas that I just pulled out of my list:

1. Promoter Marketplace - A site where people can buy/sell product promotional services for local areas. Examples include a club promoter who gets paid based on the number of people at the club on a certain night, or an energy drink promoter that gets paid to hand out cans on exam week. Allow for people to list their rates and let past clients review them.

2. User Manual Creator - A site that lets people easily create user manuals for their products. Most manuals seem to follow the same set of steps: list parts, show numbered steps with pictures, provide alternate language text, etc. Let users upload pictures/text for each step and then you create a printable manual that can be folded up and neatly placed inside a product box.

They aren't my A-list ideas, but you get what you pay for. :)
I am using detexify for quite some time now, saved me time and nerves on countless occassions. I hated it to dig out symbol declerations on and on again.

Nice!
First off, congratulations on your success on both the iPhone store and the Android market. As an aspiring app developer for Android, i'm wondering if you are willing to share some specific marketing/sales strategies that lead to your success.

I noticed that for your android app, there is a trial as well as paid version, does the trial drive a lot of traffic to the paid? How are the return rates like on your android app? I heard that a lot of people does the "buy-app, backup with astro file manager, return app , restore app" trick to get freebies.

I also noticed that you have a website for your app, does this help sales at all?

Thanks for your insights
This reads more like a "Things I Don't Like" list rather than a "Worst Inventions" list. Admittedly some of those things were bad ideas, but Farmville and Crocs are making a lot of money.
First of all congrats on convincing your univ to go with you on this.

Here's the biggest problem/asset I see with your scenario - the five seniors. If you really want to do something of significance, you better be damn well organized with your timeline. Another problem I've seen with school projects (yes, I speak from personal experience in the recent past :) is that it doesn't matter if you're willing in to put in the extra mile, but your teammates may not. If it's a grade they're going to be after, be careful, because that's all the finished product would look like. Seriously, your idea isn't so much important as getting along with your teammates.

Also, forget about a technical challenge as a sole basis for the project. Instead, focus on what pg says - what do you wish a startup would do scratch an itch of yours so well that you won't hit the back button :) Remember, your customers don't have to sit through your final project presentation, they can hit the back button anytime!

Alright, the ideas:
1) Look into the higher ed space. I am willing to bet that your univ is already spending boatloads of money on crappy enterprise software. I just walked out of lunch with a friend in the higher ed realm confessing about YC funding amount of money spent on calendaring software alone. Per Year! I am sure with six months time, you could rewrite iCal in javascript.

2) Well, put on walking shoes and talk to your friends about what's missing in their lives? But, really ask yourself what someone could build for you?
Not having to deal with copious amounts of accidental complexity needlessly introduced by the language? Just look at the example on the o'reilly page for the Perl Best Practices book which is linked to by this article. In Perl, there's more than one way of creating file handles, and one of them is the older and less effective way. What a useless fact I have to memorize!

Perl was actually the first dynamic language I learned, and when I looked online to see how to open a file, I found the old way first. Later on, I was like, "Hey! How do I pass this $@($*& thing to a function!?" So I looked online and found several competing ways to do it. I first learned of the OO way of doing it, but that required rewriting a lot of code. Then I discovered the syntax required to assign your file to a normal variable, which required me only to add sigils to my code! Unfortunately, I never got so far in my newbiedom as to learn the syntax for passing typeglobs around. This page describes the madness so wonderfully as a "perl recipe": http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/cookbook/ch07_17.htm. Yum!

And, of course, Steve Yegge describes what I'm saying much better at http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ancient-languages-p...:

"There are no rules, no heuristics, no patterns. It's pure memorization. Commit the Perl Periodic Table of the Operators to memory, and you're officially 1/1000th of the way down the road to Perl Zombiedom. "
This doesn't seem like a realistic way to measure environmental impact.
Your chances of succeeding are inversely related to the degree you feel the need to ask permission to work on your idea.
That's not true. All future rounds do is dilute us, the same way they do the founders. So all other things being equal, we'd prefer it if founders could achieve the same level of success on less money.
I'm confused. The first sentence says the list is comprised of "some of the world's bright ideas that just didn't work out", yet includes several extremely successful products/services (e.g. Farmville, Foursquare, Bumpits, Tamagotchis, Crocs, etc.).
I'm in the same boat. I have a degree but I don't know anything about compilers. I'm convinced that being a remotely intelligent programmer means you are going to be feeling stupid most of the time.
More interesting details:
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=15369167&...

"The corruption situation is so dramatic that the report authors singled out corruption-related losses of Russian economy. They estimated these losses at about 50% expenses of Russian businesspeople. Some 80% of current assets in the education system are shadowy, that is to say mainly related to the corruption, and this figure reaches 90% in state and municipal services."
Get into a 'good college' where you are required to problem solve. I left high school early because I couldn't take the boring repetition of memorizing one thing after another with little analysis or discussion. There are early colleges you could consider, basically anything along the lines of http://www.simons-rock.edu/about.

The big question with the 'good college' route is, have you done what I did in HS: barely skate by, try not to get completely bored. If you have, then an early college is probably the only way you are going to get into a 'good college'. I had wonderfully high standardized test scores, IQ scores and a pretty run of the mill GPA. I can't imagine where I would have ended up if I had stayed in HS and ended up going to one of the 'large lecture hall' driven Universities that were in my future.

All that said, yes, a large portion of life is memorization... but if you are memorizing so you can put it to use solving problems, it becomes fun. if you are memorizing just so you can pass a test, it isn't quite so much fun... plus once the tests are over, reference books exist.
Is Tesla More Like Google or More like GM?
Tesla is much more than a manufacturing company, it's more of a tech company that can create exciting products that consumers want.
As trollish as the guy you were responding to is, his criticism about the site's design doesn't strike me as totally inaccurate. I would encourage you to tweak it to, as he said, make the 'human voice' more obvious.
Well, it doesn't have to be the Las Vegas of the world, just the Las Vegas of the Middle East. But yes, obviously religion is the factor that holds it back. If the emirs (correct title?) can get it into their heads to let money beat religion, though, they have a huge opportunity.
The Day our investors came to see the office
Here's a couple:

TV chat system - used to find (local?) people watching the same show you are watching and form a chat channel (on mobile phone?)

Personalized news site - kind of like YC or digg but using netflix style machine learning algorithms to customize

A free version of 'vault.com' (reviews on employers, salary surveys)

Find a haircut (paste your picture, sort of photoshop different hair on it)

Underserved search terms: find some way to figure out what terms have a lot of search traffic but very few good results

Easy quotes for local business (eg, find a plumber). Enter in "my pipe is broken" and get a bunch of emails with quotes.

And one meta idea: a website for people to share startup ideas and form startups
Thanks for making the Web a more horrible place (step by tiny step)...

well as long as I can force my browser to use the system sans-serif font for all web pages, all is good
Stuff (in this case, physical possessions as opposed to digital) takes up space. Most people buy space so they can fill it with stuff. If you're buying space because you actually want the space, that's great! But paying for a mortgage, a storage unit, a parking space, etc is space for your stuff. And, as pg explained, stuff can be a problem.
I think that there is a bit of a stigma around those who distribute DMCA notices since they are often used not to prevent illegal sharing, but to restrict distribution of negative information or constrain fair use. If I was working in such a business, I think I would find it difficult to balance the needs of my customers with the rights of the public.
To me, that's like complaining that the people who speak Shakespearian English tend to be SCA or thespians. :) Yes, most everyone is going to speak the Egyptian or Lebanese dialect. Heck, I didn't even know that the religious types actually spoke classical Arabic.
> you can tell people you work with or work for to fuck off.

As said. A disgrace.
Because it's easy to test.
What I mean by "adding a co-founder will add to my expenses" is that when my application gets approved by YC, chances are that I'll have to find a place not for one but for two or more people if I try to add co-founders right now. Yes the investment from YC is not much, and that is exactly why I would like to use it for anything that makes my startup successful and nothing else. As I mentioned on my question, I can offer sweat equity to other developers to help me out with this, they do not need to be co-founders, at least not in the beginning... unless they have other funds to invest in this company and all of their time :) - thanks for your input!
The Magical Founding Team Mix For Web Startups
just curious: are there any intellectual property risks (with CU-Boulder)?
Wasn't that quite a lot of money in 1984 dollars (maybe closer to $1m in 2010 dollars)?

It's less than what you'd normally get from VCs but it's still a lot more funding than a couple of guys in a basement living off of ramen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Patzer for those who aren't familiar with him.
The other commenters basically have it right. Given similar funds, no, there are lots of other organizations that could have provided these innovations more effectively. And really, I'd love to see the government double down on peaceful basic scientific research.

The problem is that these organizations will never be given similar funds. People respond to fear; they don't respond to the Higgs Boson. The only way to get billions invested basic science is to say that without it, we're at risk of nuclear annihilation from the Russians/Iraqis/Afghans/Chinese.
I kinda like 2.
Growth vs. Freedom
Verizon, Google and the Woody Allen problem
Formulating knowledge in learning
Are We Measuring the Wrong Assumptions?
A "dark pattern" I know about is websites that make it extremely difficult to quit the service. Having to sift through a site design like a maze to find the "quit" button is definitely something that is manipulative and harmful to end users, since we are generally lazy, easily distracted individuals.
I think perhaps you're interpreting what he wrote too harshly.

I took it to mean that once you have FU money, you have to confront these questions because there's nothing left for you to worry about. Much of our time and mental effort is spent dealing with and worrying about survival. (Not survival in the hunter-gatherer sense, but making sure you have enough money in the next few days/weeks/months/years to live on.) When you worry about that every day, it's easier to not think about the big stuff. When only the big stuff is left, it's hard not to think about it.
Competitive landscape:

1. rentalic.com - US startup, based in Silicon Valley, founder appears to have technical and business chops and some social networking cred. Some traction, and imho, the most promising.

2. neighborgoods.net - LA-based, founder does not appear to be very technical. Limited traction around the LA area.

3. zilok.com - EU-based, looks like they are trying to reproduce their EU model of the same thing to the US market. Some traction. Because of their EU background, it is likely that they may not understand subtle nuances / user-behavior/perception of US market, which may be their biggest challenge.

p.s. I've been thinking about this problem for a while.