skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It takes some training to get to the state where you can sense and recognize when there's a problem where something sucks. I've thought banks really sucked for two decades, but never had the idea of doing something like simplebank.

The best ideas are ones where there is pain you can relieve.

Here's one: Web development sucks profoundly. People actually write CSS and HTML by hand, using text editors. That is a complete indictment of the state of web development tools. We've got decent stuff for web apps, but nothing for html building. Cappucino and Sproutcore are starting to provide interface builder apps for javascript based apps. But still nothing that works.

I think an Interface Builder for the web would be revolutionary and profitable.

I'm tempted to say that if you don't have a bunch of ideas then you shouldn't be leading this thing-- but on the other hand, you have the presence of mind to recognize that those three ideas are all poor and that, my friend, is extremely valuable. So at this stage, pick the best idea from here or from the other people who will work on it and go for it.

For anything you do-- see if you can find 4-5 people who are not engineers who will honestly say "Yeah, if you could build that, I'd buy it for $X" or that their company would.
By Halliburton even... LOL
I considered that but it's not so hard to signup for a gmail account.. and once signed up she wouldn't have to ever login.. It is required for signup though.
To me, where Google stands to improve search the most is in parsing more complex ideas. Sometimes, I want to search for a specific concept that may be expressible in any number of different ways, but I don't know of (or there doesn't exist) a standardized way of describing it. All I can do is throw different expressions into the field and sift through pages of results hoping my wording may have coincided with someone else's.

I've no doubt there have been many dozens of engineers on this problem in Mountain view for years, but the last time I was truly surprised by the intuition of a Google search result was probably 2002.
Mom.
"find a small problem, and start with a smaller problem inside of it"

Also, dont make a product that helps you generate ideas.
I wonder if this could be used as a Gödel patent. If you had a patent on patent trolling, it could be a weapon for patent reform: go around suing patent trolls. Either you win, in which case trolling ceases to be a viable business model, or you lose, setting a precedent for the argument that patents on business methods aren't valid. Either way, you tie up patent trolls in unproductive litigation, force them to argue against the current state of the patent system, and put a spotlight on the ridiculousness of the status quo.
The difference is all between the ears. A positive attitude and open mind go a long way.
As someone who's had apps break the top 50 in the iPhone store (for a while, Reflexion) and currently has a top 25 in its category in the Android store (NewsRoom), I can say that the economics aren't fantastic.

On the iPhone the competition is fucking insane and it depends on a lot more than just your product. First, yes, you need something that is amazing, better than Reflexion for sure, but you also need to have the connections to get it pushed at launch so you get in the top 25. Once there, if your app is brilliant, then you will make bank, no doubt about it. But there's a lot of if's there. You'll notice that the players doing well in the AppStore now (repeatedly) are the ones that can leverage previous hits to catapult new ones. To give you an idea of scale, the few days we were a top 25 game we were making over $1k a day.

On Android, the money just isn't there yet. The culture so far doesn't seem to encourage paid apps to the same extent as the iPhone. We've floated up and down in popularity in the Paid Applications section and have done ok, but nothing you can really base a business on. Somewhere around $3k/month I believe.

The figures in the article using 'average' are way way off. My experience, as well as what I've heard from others is that the 'average' paid app makes nothing at all. Perhaps if you are in the top 5% then you are making a little bit, but a pittance, and the top .1% is rolling in it. This is especially true in the iPhone store, divide by 100 for the Android store.

It's a tough way to make money, no two ways about it.
Don't worry about the idea too much. If you find a good one, great, but this project will probably be an awesome experience whether or not you have a great idea. Taking charge of a project and executing on it, even if the idea is mediocre or down-right bad, will be incredibly educational and useful.

So... if you have have a choice between 1) doing the project with a bad idea, or 2) doing a project for industry, I would definitely pick #1.
Facebook Recommends Spam Profiles
> Gödel patent

I think you just coined a term.
For what it's worth, pretty much all major credit card companies impose conditions on merchants who want to have delayed or recurring payments, which form the financial basis for this sort of dubious behaviour.

As a result, if someone is trying to pull a fast one like this, you probably don't need heavyweight legal action to defend yourself. The payment authority on your card will have expired when your card did and chances are that the merchant is required by their card processing service to get a new authority for any further payments. If they didn't, and they didn't contact you immediately but let the "debt" run up for a few months, that's basically their problem, and neither the credit card services nor the courts are likely to give them much sympathy. Whoever they sent after you is probably well aware of this, and gave up as soon as they realised the situation, particularly if they're only receiving a percentage of any money recovered as their fee.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, if you trust any legal comments you read on an Internet forum without independent verification then you're a fool, etc. :-)
Term Paper Software Understanding
With the widespread use of computers many tasks done manually can be done with the help of computers, faster and better. The quality of writing also has got better with computers. This article shows how different types of software can be used in term paper writing.
On the subject of kitchen utensils...

One of my favorite patents is for the OXO angled measuring cup[1]. It seems obvious now in hindsight, but was truly unique when it appeared on the market. The uniqueness comes from seeing the volume from both the top and the side otherwise the patent would probably not have been granted.

[1] http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6263732.html
Eric wants Google to be Marshall Brain's Manna?

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

(warning, the writing gets a little lame toward the end of the book)
google latitude, foursquare, brightkite, pretty much any geolocation based social network.
You might want to try neighborgoods.net
He made a major mistake with his little "forget the plan, I'm going south" adventure on his last solo.

What really gets me is I don't think he knows how much of a bad idea this really was... and more importantly how much this attitude could burn him in the future.

Admittedly I don't know the eastern US well enough to understand how much of a detour this was, but a mid-flight change with limited daylight hours into unknown weather patterns is a good way to get yourself into trouble fast.

A perfect example that suggests you should take longer than a week to fly an aircraft.
There are several options here. First, you could use the Django "sites" framework, which has the advantage of being idiomatic and familiar to other Django developers:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/sites/

Second, you could define a database backend per customer (using the Django 1.2 multi-DB support) and write a custom database router that is aware of your custom FastCGI environment variables:

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/multi-db/

Third (and best, IMHO) would be to run separate FastCGI processes for each customer, and route appropriately from Nginx. This approach is obviously the most complex setup, but it has the major advantage of letting you run every customer's FCGI backend under a different user id, offering yet another level of protection against data leakage and other security issues.
Why universities don't teach sales
Thanks for that -- I did that once, and forgot how I did it then..
I've read rumors about a targeted Q3 release, though I'm not sure how they'd push that out.
From the patent application's detailed description:

"[0012] The inventor and the assignee of this patent [Halliburton Energy Services, Inc.] have no intention of applying the techniques described herein offensively but instead intend to use the patent defensively to discourage patent trolls and the like from extortionist practices."

(Disclosure: The attorney of record is a friend of mine.)
I advocate for declaring post thumbnails in your theme. It's much cleaner and you don't have to rely on a separate plugin.
Even as a new Vim user I'm constantly wishing all my text editing had it's features.

Vimtutor is great, but for a general outlook for someone learning vim this post is spot on: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...
I'll ad a third:

3) Several experiences watching startups I worked for get:

a) forced by VCs to spend money poorly that resulted lower exits.

b) bent over a barrel playing games trying to get funding from vcs

c) lose direction because the CEO and executives were spending more time chasing money than focusing on the product
Why isn't he serious here? He's not suggesting anything nefarious--he's simply stating that when open source is good enough his company will begin to use it (for free) and make money with it. Seems logical.
You may be right, you probably are. But stubbornly refusing to give your paying customers what they are willing to pay for is not some magical property of engineers.
Poll: Do you bill for meetings?
This goes out to all the freelancers out there: When you meet with a client do you bill for that time?
I bill, and I let my client know I'm billing for the meeting
I bill, and I don't let my client know
I bill, I don't let them know, but I'm pretty sure they know I'm billing
I don't bill for new-client meetings, but I bill the rest
I don't bill
I don't bill, but I wish I would
Scientists probe effects of technology on brain
Mark Shuttleworth Announces UTouch Framework
"Michael Dell dropped out of school in order to focus full-time on his fledgling business, after getting about $300,000 in expansion-capital from his family."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dell
I think the problem with that is prior art has already been established :-/
Two things I would love to see:

1. Kayak.com for ground transportation. Trains, buses, ferries, etc. are a pain to compare prices and book right now. Admittedly there probably isn't as much of a business case for this.

2. A music site where I could collaborate on a playlist with my friends and listen to the music at the same time. Currently there are sites that let you share playlists, but not listen at the same time as other people.
Develop an alternative to TicketMaster that you can white label to MLB, NFL, etc. They could be making millions of extra dollars a year if they had their own system. Why not create the system for them and skim a portion off the top.

[I'm a designer and have no idea what would be involved in making this happen, or if it's feasible from a business perspective. I'm also in Denver, so...would love to hear what comes of your project]
It's an ad for the Javazone conference and is different from how other conferences market themselves. If the Old Spice ads are HN material, then this is as well in my opinion.
I love that essay.
You likely mean Copernic, the big competitor to Google Desktop Search.
Am I alone in thinking this was written in the style of the introductory text for chapters in Accelerando?
Zuckerpunch, n. A quick opening move that tricks you into compromising your privacy before you realise what's really happening. See also "Facebook, joining".
The author mentions this presentation by Stuart Halloway on Vimeo at the end of the article - Reiterating it here - http://vimeo.com/11236603

I watched the video yesterday, and reading this article after the fact helped articulate some of what Stuart was covering in his presentation. YMMV.
Got the be SipXecs www.sipfoundry.com for featureset/installation ease, and above all config simplicity, which goes as far as redundant servers being no bother at all. Grab an ISO and fire up VirtualBox or whatever, 4 lines is going to require hardly any cpu time or ram. Their v4.2 featureset is massive, but you don't have to enable it all naturally.

Mentioned above, Aastra phone units are was good value, and the only ones which are passably easy to customise for toucscreen functions.

If that's not your ideal handset supplier, start with the list of handsets which auto-config with SipXecs.
Very good, well written article.

Can someone with a wide breadth of experience like pg comment on whether the equation of rapacious greed with likelihood of getting fuck-you money out of the startup game is actually correct empirically?
I'm not sure how typical the angel quote is, most angels would be happy as long as the founders were happy with a buy-out.

An exit of 15 million which yields $500K to the investor after putting up $100K means that the angel only holds about 3% of the company anyway.

Also, as a rule you don't blog or write about your verbal agreement, you wait until the agreement is in writing and the money is in the bank and you've agreed with your investors that you can go public with the news.

Some people will back out of a deal if you go public like this, even if they're not mentioned by name.

A deal isn't done until the money is in the bank.

And essentially he write that he told the guy just what he thought he wanted to hear, and now blogs that he is baffled by this and and that he didn't tell him the truth.

Let's hope that said 'angel' doesn't read that blog.
Taking this a step further:

1. Use Facebook Connect to create a library of things that you own. e.g. DVDs, tools.

2. Suggest Collections/activities that arise out of your social network:
"Amy, Jon and you have all the Star Wars movies among you: Time for a Star Wars Marathon? David and Emma would be interested in joining(based on interests)!", or "Joanna and you have all the things needed to go camping".

3. Profit model: Suggest things to buy on Amazon that "completes" the collection: e.g. "If one of the three of you bought "Snatch", then you would have all the movies by Guy Ritchie"

This requires data mining for list generation (see Google Sets), Facebook APIs / Opengraph, location apis, and Amazon APIs, and has a money side to it.

[i hereby release this idea under the "buy me a beer if you use it" license]
Ask HN: Can I build a business issuing DMCA notices for developers?
Would it work? Is anyone else doing it?

We all know DMCA are useless against certain types of piracy, but they are very powerful in two specific markets that I have in mind. These markets are already large, and are growing rapidly. I would be targeting specific 'content distributors' to protect clients content from illegal sharing.
List: 50 Worst Inventions of All Time
Is this a parody? Of 37signals or Jason Fried or something? It doesn't appear to say anything.
Let's not forget the patent application of patent trolling:

Generating royalty revenue using intellectual property

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2006/0200399.html
Are you asking what are your chances of being successful with your startup as a solo entrepreneur, or what are your chances of being accepted into Y Combinator? If the former, I'd say you have about the same chances as you do partnering with other founders, which is not very good. Building a successful startup is hard whether or not you partner with others, and success depends much more on the founder(s) in question, more so than anything else. If you are asking the latter, Paul Graham specifically says chances are lower for getting accepted into YC for solo founders, because building a startup is too much work for one person. (I agree with that for the most part, but would qualify it by saying it depends on what exactly you're building, and even that is not always significant as, again, it depends more on the person) Interestingly, the example given as a successful application to YC was by the founder of Dropbox, who was a solo founder. I believe it is explained why this application was successful. I would suggest you read the "Applying Successfully" section. (more importantly, so does Paul Graham)

I don't know what you mean by adding a co-founder will add to your expenses. A co-founder should be working for equity in a project which may pay off later, the same as you are. If you're referring to the money successful applicants receive from YC that is not very much, only around 20K, and is meant to cover not much other than living expenses in San Francisco while building up a prototype enough to solicit more substantial funding later, after being introduced on Demo Day. I later realized this low funding amount was probably intentional, as it forces founders to be laser focus on finding/doing what it takes to make their product successful, as a money safety net is not there. The nice thing about that particular benefit is realizing that startups that don't make it into YC can be pressed in the same way.
rescuetime, http://www.rescuetime.com/
How can anyone write this with a straight face?

"We’re all better off if Apple remains one the underdogs. I like them as a 'challenger' brand that serves as a kind of catalyst for innovation. Meanwhile, I feel better about them not having quite enough power to do things they probably would, if they were larger. (I just can’t shake the feeling that, given the opportunity, they’d turn into a bully awfully quickly.)"

As of May, Apple is bigger than Microsoft. At what point will they become "larger"?
it's important to point out that OpenJDK actually is safe. The Java specification has a patent grant clause for compliant implementations, which obviously includes OpenJDK. We can also hope that Sun did their due diligence during the development of Hotspot and during the open-sourcing of OpenJDK to ensure other patents not covered by the grant would not affect it (but of course we can't be sure).

Outside of that, it's no more at risk of patent attacks then any other piece of open-source software.
I'm a solo founder but I have a full time job and work my business on the side when I have time (beats the hell out of video games). It made sense to me to be a solo founder because I can take things at my own pace and I can call all of the shots. I'm also not looking for any funding either, and if I was going to quit my job to go after something like this full-time, I'd probably try to find someone smarter than me to help out. Good luck.
I'll be damned! Amazing, nobody in my zip yet exists.. I hope they gain traction. Thanks for sharing
"if your app is brilliant"

Yeah, that's really the bottom line. Good stuff just finds it's way to the top. Even good fart apps, or moron tests, or funny novelty camera effect utils.

You can't polish a tur- umm bad idea. But you can polish a decent idea or a quick, good idea into a performer. People are making a living on the app store (some a really good living) and they don't even chart.

Wasn't there a guy doing a gardening app that was making 6 figures on his own just by word-of-mouth? I don't think he charted except perhaps in his category. I forgot his blog or app name but he sold in-app purchases to re-energize his sales.
I've read of many cases of maids being imprisoned in the households they serve, not paid, and sexually assaulted by the owner of the household. This is slavery without ambiguity.
The phrase is a disgrace to the idea it conveys.
Three Entrepreneurs Who Launched Companies for Less Than $150
The company valuation he’d get in on would mean that such an acquisition would represent a 5x return, over something like three months. That’s a gargantuan return on an annualized basis.

You're totally missing the part where angels invest in companies that give them zero return. Even the worst stocks give you some money back. Unfair comparison.
Nice. If he doesn't build it, you should. Looks like a good passive income earner ;)

Cheers
How do you tell from the page if a patent has been granted?
It does allow them to be placed in several groups. I will think about the naming. Thanks.
Justin Bieber Commercial
re #2...where do you see the music being sourced from? Allowing listens on shared music via user uploads would be a legal nightmare and the major APIs only provide 30 second clips.
Wow. That is a very revealing insight.
I said "to the most and the most qualified citizens"... Perhaps America is doing great for the most qualified. But the education its providing for a wide range of average seems seriously problematic. Also, this country need to provide high quality education - currently, it's mostly providing "high quantity" education.

IE, yes perhaps an excess of history PhDs might not be a useful thing to produce. But a base-line knowledge, of say, history, economics, mathematics or etc. among a large percentage of the population is a crucial good - for society, for me. I want an informed electorate, I want a population less likely to fall for bogus scams, I want "line workers" qualified to step into other positions, etc...
No I think you are simplifying it a bit.

Just because all the stuff making money is good (well not all, but most) does not mean all good stuff makes money.

There are some really fantastic apps and games where people are making nothing at all. The problem is it is too binary as it is, it just isn't very predictable.

All the random articles you see on the web of people making good money ignores the thousands upon thousands of people who aren't.
Maximizing words-per-minute throughput is not a useful goal for reading; what about comprehension?

(I find I get distracted more easily these days; I suspect too much use of the internet has damaged my ability to focus for hours on end on a book. I catch myself looking away from the page and zoning out every couple of minutes. That is something to work on -- maintaining focus on the task at hand -- and so I'm trying to re-train myself to read books.)
The cost of my time selling to new clients is built into my day rate. It's a surprisingly simple concept to explain to clients who demand a discount: they need to buy more of my time to get a lower day rate because I won't have to work as hard to sell my time. They invariably get it and stop asking for a lower rate.

An odd corollary to this kind of thinking: doing client work is a cost on the business because it's costing you the opportunity to go out and get more clients.
The World's Best Countries (data-rich infographic)
Note the inclusion of Foursquare: "Introduced in 2009, the site has only a million users — a drop in the bucket compared with Facebook, expected to soon reach 500 million." Far too soon to say 4SQ is a crap 'invention' - and surely 'idea' is the correct term for a lot of what's on that list.
I'm pretty sure you will get turned down. YC is in business of collecting promising young companies, growing them under tender care, and reselling them to fat angles or VCs. Do you see yourself being resellable to this crowd? I don't, because bootstrapping is a different route. A successful investment target proclaims "I know how to productively utilize plenty of capital", but what you are saying is "I know how to utilize very little capital, and I plan to spend a lot of effort to keep it lean". That makes you a very bad investment, but a very good bootstrapper.

Here's everything you need to know to pursue your bootstrap dream: http://www.startupbook.net/ These will be the best $24 you have ever spent in your entire life. If you won't take my word for it, know that it's been endorsed by patio11.
Thanks I'll do more checking.