skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feedback on my startup ideas
HNers, I need some feedback on a couple of startup ideas that I have. Which one would you recommend ?

1) A site for hosting contests for the web app startups, one app at a time. Similar to AppSumo, but instead of selling the subscriptions (of web apps) at an insanely low price the new site will be hosting contests for distributing free subscriptions to the contest winners along with the regular discount coupons. It will be a good way to distribute the invite codes for startups and to get some buzz free of costs.

2) I myself felt a need for this. A shopping search engine for ebooks from Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (Nook), Borders (Kobo) etc. I use all three ebook readers in my iPhone and felt a need to search all 3 to find the lowest price for buying. Should it be a website or an iPhone App?

Which one should I start & would you be interested in as user for them?
Very cool. Didn't Freckle start as a Rails Rumble? IIRC it was actually a wedding planning or some other event planning app at first ...
Cool. Would be even cooler if you could specify a range.
He used to be a math teacher. I believe he took some programming courses (as an adult student), and we had a computer in the basement back in 1978.

I think he's developed a couple of websites for pay. I just remembered that he worked for a while at the McLuhan centre at University of Toronto.

Now he's mostly working on personal research projects for education.
We will be launching http://goodsie.com in November, though it's been in development for over a year now because of various fits and starts!

HN will work as a code for anyone who would like to try the beta :)
As is with the networks owning hulu, I can understand their incentive to make hulu a destination site, so atleast they get a chunk of the revenue and not a third part... as a separate public company they don't have this advantage so it's dependent on Hulu's ability to lock up long-term contracts, which I'm not sure they can do. This is a lot like Orbitz... originally started by a consortium of TV companies/air carriers then went public
It's in the popular culture now as the successor to "AJAX"... which started out referring to dynamically loaded content using XMLHTTPRequest, but very quickly became a label for cool stuff with JavaScript.

I used to grumble about that, but now I just let it all slide.
Good idea: November Startup Sprint. Require weekly status reports from all participants and use that as a way for people to help each other out when stuck. Encourage everyone to be totally open about their idea, their research and their progress. Offer a hosting discount for NSS startups from Linode.

I'd participate I just launched my new baby last night: fanbldr.com
I can see where you're coming from. For people that don't know the history of intranets.com it seems a little odd. FWIW, intranets.com pre-dates basecamp and was acquired by WebEx many years ago.
Yeah that about sums it up I think.
On the class thing, I bowed to pressure to have some sort of classes. And I can see how we'll use them in our guis, each gui will be a class and we can safely combine them in an uber gui w/o name space conflicts.

Could have just as easily been modules (all this crud is built on top of tcl namespaces, it's just syntactic sugar to make things look nice).

We are not doing inheritance of any sort. L is not trying to be cool, it's trying to be useful and easy to review.

On that note, the

n := 1;

is shorter than

int n = 1;

but which one reviews faster? My opinion, which matters a lot in this tiny instance, is the second one reads faster, especially when you consider we flip from C to L to tcl to shell. We're optimizing for the reader, not for the writer. Much bigger win in our code-review heavy environment.
Might be a bit late for this, but it's a real bitch to google help for a programming language with a name like 'L'.

That's what I learned from 'R' anyways.
NIC.ly is, to the best of my (casual) understanding, run by a company incorporated in Libya. I see no meaningful distinction to draw.

It is not, for instance, as if the TLD was operated by Verisign, and pressure on the NIC could cause them to disrupt or shut down the TLD in protest.
Plenty of users buy phones without knowing what Android is or even what an "operating system" is. All thee know is compared to their old phone with a random proprietary OS, this phone has a much more polished interface and apps similar to their friends iPhone.

I'm sure most of the people that read HN care about the details you listed, but I wouldn't assume your average mall-shopper that walks into a cell phone store not knowing the difference between any two phones knows or cares about version numbers or compatibility.

Most non-technical people I've talked to about it have been so confused about the marketing of a phone named "droid" that they think any reference to "android" means that phone.
FlowThing: an app to organize your search for...anything!
(jobs, apartments, cars, air conditioners, match.com profiles, etc)

http://twitpic.com/2vedlp http://twitpic.com/2vef3n

You get a bookmarklet to save a listing from any site, keep track of the relevant bits of data (company, square feet, salary, bedrooms, mileage, etc), and move them through a little workflow (interested, applied, contacted, lost, etc).
All the fields and workflows are completely customizable.

I built it after a simultaneous job and apartment search, having been incredibly frustrated that craigslist didn't have a "my craigslist" like "my ebay" or "my monster", and the fact that you're never looking at just one site when you're searching. I was always scared that I was applying to the same job or apartment twice.

It's been on the backburner for a while, since my day job has gotten busy, so there's no help available and signups are invite-only right now. But you guys seem like the kind of people who can figure it out pretty easily ;)

Here are some invite codes:

http://pastie.org/1208657
You can't. He dwells upon Mount Olympus.
Count me in.. I am looking at couple of ideas myself. would you mind commenting on them @ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435 ?
> then people won't buy Dell phones

But why must the software be explicitly tied to the hardware? We don't buy desktops or laptops that way. I periodically upgrade the ROM in my smartphone and the result is amazing. Why should I have to toss a perfectly good piece of hardware just to get software improvements?
My personal view is that part of it was the unintentional sabotaging of SEO - MySQL is only spelled one way, while there is Postgres, PostgreSQL, pgsql (as used on some mailing lists) for Postgres. This fractured search results and made it tougher to find information vs. MySQL.
Andrew Gelman on creating structured and flexible models [video]
I am refreshingly surprised! It takes guts to go outside the domain and do this. Way to go dude!

Also please start a blog!
well they're the official data service of a soverign, so it seems if you put a tool that powerful in the hands of anyone they'd use it. You're implying theres seperation between autocratic power and anything without it being explicitly stated?
In the case of Microsoft, one might argue that has already happened...
I don't know any other companies this generous even after the change in two years.
I like your name better :)

Congrats on the launch!
I love Espionage. Thanks for making such a great application.
now that would be a nightmare
Obama signs technology access bill for disabled
> L is not trying to be cool, it's trying to be useful and easy to review.

I appreciate that, but your compiler checks the types anyway, so later n .= "abc" will be an error if I understand it, that's why you have them, so if the code you review compiles without error you certainly won't catch any new error when using eyes?
Old, Weird Tech: Suspended Baby Cage
Wow.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

HelpersSeekers.com - would have been yahoo answers! like site. Somehow never launched. Spent months developing.

HIGH SCHOOL

CricketFreak.com - a cricket news portal. Somehow never launched. Spent months developing.

trackmail(sp?).com - send email through it and get a notification when it's read(a personal omg moment)

COLLEGE

ChupChaap.com
Classifieds site for India.

TextbookDaddy.com - textbook exchange site. launched. shut
down. within few days

way too cool domain I need to re-register.com
woot for young women. developed for weeks. shut down in couple days after launch

Hollr.org - CL-like site. Never launched. Good call!

ClassHunt.com - let students at my uni get a txt soon as a seat opened up in a class

became a huge hit on campus, over 50% of freshman signed up, had to shut down after uni's course registration moved to peoplesoft which made it impossible to parse latest class data

Good news: I pivoted to another product in same market which is now my start-up
Sorry, I deleted my comment because I felt it wasn't very useful. The software needs to be tied to the hardware because the carriers are completely incompetent at software, and are generally unable to expend the effort to QA all the crapware they have put on the phone for a new OS; they also have a financial incentive to force you to buy a new phone from them as often as possible.
Worth noting:

Kevin Bacon -> The Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler
Ditto. Although I was interested to learn that Donald Duck has a direct connection to Adolf Hitler.
Looks great! Good luck on the launch.
Hmmm. That's like getting browser stats from w3schools.com. And back in 2000, I knew absolutely nobody on a Mac, zero.
A Smart Power Grid Is a Hackable Power Grid
The summarizing line of the article:

For things to really work for them, maybe there should be one kind of device, one OS version and one App store (sounds familiar?).

I'm not saying I agree, I was disappointed with the author's opinions.
I like both ideas, but would see the second one as more useful initially (to me). That said, if you get the other one done in time of the end of November, there could be a fair number of startups needing such a tool. :)
I immediately went to Wikipedia, found out what type of CS problem the first challenge was, then followed the external links at the bottom of the page to find the Perl module I needed and installed it from CPAN.

I quit because this seemed like cheating but now I'm thinking... Maybe it was the point? To see if I would try to find something off-the-shelf to solve the problem quickly. Still not sure it was, because if so the challenge certainly doesn't demonstrate that I have any CS chops. :-\

Spoiler alert: I believe this module will do the trick http://search.cpan.org/~gray/Tree-Suffix-0.21/lib/Tree/Suffi...
Out of curiosity, why invite only?
Another channel is franchising: TEDx, Yahoo! Japan (operated by Softbank), Yahoo! China (operated by Alibaba).

Franchising is especially important for global expansion.
MMC is a good start, but it isn't where it needs to be.

We have a love/hate relationship with Windows Azure at my company. It does a few amazing things but at the cost of cutting some simple but needed features. Specifically in the area of data storage, queries and node management.

I feel like I'm constantly shouting at the team on the forums, twitter and facebook to fix issues or release some simple functionality. Hopefully we'll see some big changes in the Q4 release.
I disagree with your top statement. Every user knows what an operating system is -- they've been educated on that fact for decades. And any user of a "smartphone" knows they're really getting a little computer. The iPhone probably has the broadest market of non-technical users and even they periodically get OS upgrades -- you think their users don't know what that is?

The problem with this conversation is lumping together mobile phones and smartphones. There are very few Android phones marketed to "non-technical people". But they will come, they will be cheap, and nobody will care what OS they run. But the top of line phones, the expensive phones, and the profitable phones will be sold to semi-technical people who know what they're getting.
I would concur about the date thing. It makes it a lot less fun when your path looks like:

Polycephaly -> August 18 -> Adolf Hitler

When I was able to get their manually by:

Polycephaly -> Freak Show -> Cannes Film Festival -> France -> Germany -> Hitler

I think just dropping dates from contention, apart from any other contextual algorithm improvements, would put a lot of the fun and discovery back in to it.
Small suggestion: change it to "Launch an App and Get ONE Paying Customer Month"
Your site looks great. All the best !
I didn't solve the problems using existing code either. All three are entirely solvable by pencil and paper (or just inspection in the first case).
Obviously they didn't do much to you. How did it an out? Take you in, made you wait for days, a few questions here and there.......
But...it's NaNoWriMo that month! How are we supposed to write a novel and launch an app? ;-)
"I think that if _why ever decides to come out of hiding it should be entirely on his terms and up to him when where and how he does it."

Nothing I've said negates that. He's free to accept or reject the offer/request.
Agreed - I was laughing as I was writing some of my code because it was so bad. These sort of questions are designed around algorithm design, but a one-off problem with these small of sample sets doesn't need an elegant solution - a hatchet job does just fine. I'm not a CS grad and my math skills are a bit iffy, but I was able to solve all three challenges in a pretty reasonable amount of time.
I may be paranoid, but it seems quite plausible to me that Silverlight is merely another example of Microsoft's famous "Embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. Since Silverlight failed to gain wide acceptance on the web (well, certainly not as wide as Flash), acquiring Adobe to get hold of Flash would enable them to skip the part where their software first needs to be accepted by a significant majority of users and allow them to skip right to phase two, which is concentrating more and more on how Flash works on Windows and IE, leaving other platforms and browsers behind. Truth be told, Adobe has also been known to concentrate more on how their plug-in works on Windows than on other platforms, which meant that Flash would usually perform far better on Windows than on Mac OS or Linux.
Notifo is awesome! I have been using it for some toy projects like: http://github.com/himanshuc/macanator. Also, http://push.ly works great with notifo for twitter notifications. Overall, I am a satisfied user and think you will most definitely be away from the deadpool.
"We can confirm that Microsoft has begun to evolve its employee health care benefit," the company said in statement.

Wow, way to make it sound more ominous, corporate PR person. You could have just said you were knocking your benefits down a peg, but no, it's only the beginning of Microsoft's benefits turning into... well, what? Something much less generous, I guess.

Here I thought Microsoft was just bowing to the enormous costs of health benefits, but with that turn of phrase, it seems like Microsoft has some kind of new attitude.
Yes, but the situation you describe exists because the software is tied to the hardware. When you upgrade Windows or install Linux on your PC, Dell doesn't have much to do with the process.

I agree that both manufacturers and carriers are incompetent at software -- that's probably why my phones run so much better and faster with a custom ROM put together by some hacker in his basement. In my opinion, if the software wasn't tied to the hardware the result would be better.
Thanks for your comments. Did you also felt the need for an ebook search across the major stores?
Ligatt Site Still Vulnerable to Basic Code Injections
Ah. Well I'm an even worse hacker than I thought!
Maybe we have a different hiring mindset than dschoon - we're equally happy with people who find the answers or create the answers. In a production system, we certainly wouldn't want hand-rolled primeness checking. But in a programming challenge, we think it's fun to write it for yourself.
I believe that there are ways around this.

In the ideal world, such a focus on teacher evaluation wouldn't be necessary. One example: In Finland, from the beginning teachers receive maximum education themselves and so administrators trust their judgments. I realize we aren't there, but there may be other ways of getting there.

Firstly, what if all teachers were more motivated? What if all teachers had clear proof that their methods suck? What if clear evidence of superior methods that have clearly better results existed?

What if there was a piece of technology that was so attractive, showed such promise and proved better learning occurred, that teachers themselves took it up out of interest and started using it and improving on themselves and their learning through this new methodology. The lobbyists and the like would probably be against it, but with enough backing and proof of its benefits, they would lose.

Creating a product like this is the kind of technology and innovation we need, and I firmly believe it's possible.
Looks like you've done a good job getting pre-launch traction, i.e, LifeHacker profile, etc...

Any practical tips on getting pre-launch buzz?
Yeah, I know. I'm horrible with names, I named a product BitKeeper and the company BitMover and people ask when the next version of BitMover is going to be released.

We're looking for a fantastic jack-of-all-trades marketing person, can you tell? We frigging need it, if I'm the best we've got we're screwed :)
Just heard about it this morning. All I can say is, damn :(

On the bright side, they integrated it into google maps for mobile, and it's pretty slick. Now if only I had a data plan.
Fitzgerald died at 44, Mozart at 35 so neither lived long enough to get into the old group.
for #3 used a combination generator

Congratulations, you just used an exponential-time algorithm for a polynomial-time problem.
Why You Must be at Boston's MassTLC unConference from Jennifer Lum
love total finder!!
It does get a bit greedy on memory though (only one window with two tabs open): http://skitch.com/adamgries/d4uc7/activity-monitor
JavaScript. I had my browser open ... it seemed like the logical place. :)
I know! I was worried about that, but hey, different inspirations for different folks, right? (I think thats how that goes...)
Sure, I don’t disagree, I just wanted to provide some nuance to the word ”independent”.
keep all the voice data and sell it as a corpus?
Shady Reality of Facebook
I wonder why they would make this announcement now? Why not a year ago, or a year in the future? My first guess would be there margins are slipping, or they expect there margins to be thinner in the next few years. Thus, they are starting to look for some minor cost savings.
I still think your perspective on general knowledge is off. I think plenty of people with phones still don't know what an operating system is, especially people over the age of 30 who didn't grow up with the internet and ubiquitous computers in school. But I could be wrong.

If it's true that only technical users are buying Android phones because it's still exclusive to the smart-phone market, what your saying makes sense.

I wouldn't be suprised if non-technical users with money to burn buy smart phones they don't understand just for the sake of vanity though.
That's sort of what I mean here. It's like solving a wordsearch puzzle. There can't be more than a couple dozen strings with structure xyx, or xyyx. Find them by eye and work outward and see if it's zxyxz, and so on. Decided to make this process into my algorithm.
HN: Share an unused idea
I'm always seeing people with tons of skills, but don't have any ideas to execute! But then I see a lot of people with a lot of ideas! So I thought that the people with plenty of left over ideas should share them, get critique on them, and let others build them if they like 'em!
Firefox is not reaching 50% of the browser market:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum....
The big news was that, according to most sources, usage share of IE dropped below 50%.
Thanks for the responses so far...

I know the main players in the space and I do think I can differentiate myself from them. However, it would be interesting to hear about other players/startups that are in the space, even those that have failed (would be useful to get in touch with the founders so I can learn from their experiences). It could be that I have missed a few things out there and I would love to know about more, in fact, if something already solves the problems I myself have encountered that would be great.

The general category I'm looking at includes fitness/health and technology... so anything from Dailyburn, Fitday, Traineo, BodyTrace, Lose it Lose it, fitness focused forums, iPhone Apps (i.e Runkeeper), Nike Plus, FitBit, Wahoo fitness .. to even the Wii Fit are interesting to me.
So if anyones interested, I'll kick it off:

A tab candy-esque site to share tabs, or specific sites with friends, instead of bookmarking, you can share a site with a friend, or a group of friends. Your friends could also allow you the option of automatically opening tabs that come from you. Would also be an interesting social experiment!
I'll agree with the anecdote of sharing as much as possible, but be aware that if an employee has access to monthly revenue and a good idea of profit, you can't get away with paying less than market rate. Experience from being an employee at my last company. ;)
How Google Cash Helped Find Geothermal Energy in West Virginia
Looks great I think it will be just enough to get people started with selling online.
I'd like to formally propose the hoplist law, which dictates Hitler is at most 3 degrees of separation from anything.
I am looking for feedback on my own ideas - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1773435
Microsoft is generous with their employees, but stingy when it comes to defining "employee".
Does anyone know how these are generated?

Could anyone explain what this paragraph means from their FAQ:

"Since 1992 at least 24 companies have set out to solve the random integer problem. Most fail for obvious reasons. It is rumored that a few of our competitors may have a 1-5 algo that works approximately 40% of the time. Our 1-100 algo is rock solid. In short, there is a consumer need for a random integer but the problem isn't easy. Even Google is rumored to be 2 years away from a reliable 1-50 algo."

I'm probably being stupid but I don't understand what
'works approximately 40% of the time' means in this respect.

Also this is cool : https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/secure_generate.html
Thanks for reminding me, its sitting here in my stack of books. I've watched the 1st disc and it was excellent!
The types help enormously, but so does being slightly verbose.

Lots of "reviews" happen in diffs. Much like Linus reads patches and modifies the patches because he knows the source base, we read commit messages (which are a patch) and the first review frequently happens in email.

Which doesn't address your point, I realize. Let's try this. Given the choice between make life better for the writer (n := 1 is shorter) and the reader (int n = 1 is more explicit), we pick the reader every time. We have multiple readers and we work in multiple languages. So while you are absolutely right, n := 1 is just fine, and it is type checked and it is "obvious", it will hiccup anyone coming from C (and is about to switch back to C after this review).

We review everything. And the review is just part of it, when a support call comes in we're in the source, looking at the code, trying to make the customer happy with an instant fix (which we do a lot). Every second that we have to spend swapping in tcl syntax is time where the customer is going "why am I paying for this when I could use git for free?". And a few second later they find out when get them a fix.

Time matters. Ease of reading yields shorter time on support and shorter time on reviews.

That's my take, and that's how it works here. That may not be true for you.