skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The world doesn't revolve around your mentality though. But at least having a statistical mentality might encourage you to sample the idea space until you hit on something big. That's better than wasting your time on things few people care about.
Also from Vancouver :)
Look to the openMoko for distributed innovation from a mobile device -- and the opening of the spectrum.
Separate ask.yc from news posts. The questions often generate good discussions, but die too quickly because they get pushed off too quickly.
news.yc Bug: Upvote more than once
Click the up vote arrow, and then keep hitting the enter key. I didn't try the down vote arrow. On Firefox 2.0.0.5.
If foo.com causes enough people to buy foo.com t-shirts to feed you and clothe you, why not consider that "established"? Case in point: the guy who runs http://xkcd.com works on xkcd full time and is entirely supported by the stuff sold through the xkcd store.

(P.S. xkcd rocks)
About 5 years back I had an idea for a free wireless system. I'd go and offer places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for their customers. The hardware at their end would be a simple DSL/Cable modem hooked up through a small form factor unix box with a wireless card in it and a fairly anal set of firewall rules to prevent deep abuse.

The business model was to be setting up in line ad replacement on websites with a focus on local businesses. You're sitting in the coffee shop and an ad comes up for 10% off your next purchase at the book store across the corner, or a two for one this day only at the diner down the street.

I was working at Telus (big canadian telecom) at the time and they had just started cracking down on employees running side businesses that crossed over their product and service lines. I would've been fired and sued if I would've started it up, too broke to do it alone, and didn't have a clue where to go for investors or the like. I'm still tempted to do this, but free wireless has spread so much it would be hard to penetrate the market and convince people my way was the best way.

I regret not having the balls to say that three months living expenses was good enough, lets make a prototype and get a test going and pray I can find some business minded investors in time.
There is a huge confusion in this article. It tries to equate distributed innovation ("democratized") with government mandated research into things like stem cells (also "democratized" in the literal sense of mandated by a democratic government).

That doesn't even make any sense, to confuse the two.

I have to agree with another comment about finding generalizations where there are none. Painting with a rather broad brush: all technologies are developed by elite teams top-down or distributed.

What about elite, distributed teams? Yah-know -- like the set of all startups :-P
Looks to me like trying to vote multiple times this way will keep on updating the web page you see, but the server only records one vote.
pregnant wife?
http://blogs.business2.com/startups/2007/06/zenter_acquired....
Any numbers on the percentage of users who are professionals? Considering the college roots, my guess is it isn't too high. I'd like to see trends on growth in the UK as well, across demographics.

Another note: banning a site in hopes that your employees will be more productive is a waste of time (pun intended). Wasting time on social networks while at work is a symptom of a bigger problem.
"Another note: banning a site in hopes that your employees will be more productive is a waste of time (pun intended). Wasting time on social networks while at work is a symptom of a bigger problem."

I disagree. People are obviously addicted to these social sites and if you make it impossible for them to get another "hit", they will wean off it in a day or two. I wouldn't call this a 'bigger problem', everyone has some weaknesses.
.... or just keep clicking the invisible arrow. Your mouse even turns to the usual pointer cursor.

And as cperciva said, they don't register on the server.
I'm more the kind of person with no big idea. I think I should start a constellation of websites and see what takes up.

Maybe one day I will have THE big idea, but for now ...
LISP IDEs: CUSP rules
The power of memorized key strokes
Does software design really pay off?
OSI approves 'badgeware' license
What an excellent little fucking article.
news.yc Bug: Users can get free karma points by posting a submission claiming that submissions can be voted on more than once. [1] [2]

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506
I am from Halifax as well (actually rami, I think I first found YCnews from your blog.)

I will be living in Waterloo soon though.
IMHO, so much nicer than emacs + SLIME. but really I never liked emacs. (no flame intended).
"... Thanks for the pointers. I plan to use this as a text editor/hacking environment, and I don't use, nor want to use, the mouse for that ..."

On editors and hacking and writing unless you build in some sort of functionality to both syntax highlighting and parsers that recognise various languages, text formats you might have to cut+paste/drag & drop which easiest with a mouse. Don't discount using other editor applications for editing, validating.

At least that's what I've found.
Filipino entrepreneur to startups: Learn from open source 
A Filipino entrepreneur who sold his software startup to IBM urged local software startups not to ignore the open source movement. Instead, they should start embracing the community's practice of developing software.
Startup what?
That was pretty much everyone's reaction when I sent them this site, told them I had signed up for Startup Weekend NYC and agreed to be a blogger. You would think that they might check out the Startup Weekend Home site, but even that doesn't make it crystal clear, and some people (like my parents and even some of the co-workers) need crystal clarity. So I started sending people to Penelope Trunk's blog posting about it.
US to increase aid to Israel Military by 25% - TvByDemand | Forums | Israel
There is an inverse correlation between how much I like a job/task and how much time I waste on the internet. I'm sure lots of people are like me.
FYI, GrandCentral's concept isn't at all original. Other companies, like uReach.com, have had similar offerings (often called "Follow Me") for many years. But they're probably the first to offer it for free, and definitely the first to offer it with your choice of area code for free.
Maybe we should start thinking of Youtube as just one channel.
As video moves from TV to the internet it is silly to think that any one website can handle all the content, even if that one website is owned by Google. On TV there is not one channel for every show; there are many channels that focus on certain types of shows. The internet should be the same. There should be many websites that focus on specific types of shows, and there should be one directory that lists all these websites.

This is just a fringe thought, but imagine if a company builds an application that lets all the major media companies have their own website, where they can show whatever shows they want. And all this application does is tie all the video websites together.

Kind of like how Yahoo listed all the cool websites, this application could list all the cool video websites [in an interactive way].
But emphasizing correctness makes my one-liner not work! And reading the original I can see this whole issue was already covered!

BTW, generators are non-callable.
Make ruby-mysql create less garbage
Personally I'm wondering why I can't downvote comments. Not enough karma yet?
I for one don't like the idea that the only way to "give something back" is to do philanthropy. Any gain in happiness and productivity is a good thing. If you have had success, continuing to be successful probably means giving people both. Keep working.

An example of comparative advantage: it doesn't make sense for a $500/hr lawyer to do pro-bono work for the poor. It would make more sense to work for that hour and use the income to fund 10 $50/hr lawyers. The benefit would be much higher for those in need.

So my point is that charity isn't necessarily the best way to give back to society.
HA! Long term, children make people more happy than almost anything else.
If Chuck Moore wrote his own ultra-minimalist language, then the language had some form of structure. Using structure when you program => Structured Programming?

No?
PG, if you could haved joined 3 Y Combinator start-ups from any session, which would they have been?
I know it's a lot like choosing between children, but I'd still like to know.
> It hurts a lot my friend. Have you not received that email from ycombinator after they made the 40 some invitation calls?

I wouldn't define failure (or pain) as not being accepted by YCombinator.
GIMP's major UI revamp (unified window UI)
Hey, glad to find this here. I was just about to post it.

This is my startup; I'm working with one other guy full time on it. We applied to ycombinator, got the in-person interview, but didn't make the summer program. You can't win them all.

I made this because I felt there's really no simple & fast way to take down short notes (meeting/class notes, todos, brainstorming, random links) online. I don't know about you, but I've been using Gmail drafts, writely, and 37signals stuff for some time and it's not really designed for this use case. I find myself thinking "just show me my notes -- don't make me click on a link to see each one" when I use products like Gmail drafts.

So here's our stab at this market. It follows the same design philosophy I try to use everywhere -- simple, lean, focused. If you've ever watched a casual computer user flounder when trying a new web2.0 app, you'll know the value of being brutally straight-forward and obvious. Jjot is obvious: you've got a bunch of boxes that look like paper notes, and you can type in them. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.

We launched recently and the reception has been pretty good. We were on delicious popular over the weekend, and were (inexplicably) moved from that list to web2.0 popular-
http://del.icio.us/popular/web2.0

There's been a few posts about Jjot on the web, including one from lifehacker. Now that we've got a few users to get feedback from and improve the service, we can really work on getting some more traction. Running a service with users is 5x as fun as the building stage. All of a sudden, a lot of people care about and take notice of each change you make.

I'd love to hear any comments/ideas/criticisms; news.yc always has good product feedback. If anyone is curious as to how this thing is built (it uses some fancy client-side coding), I'd be happy to talk about it.
How many people host their websites where they could handle a lot of traffic? I sure don't. Up until last year, mine was running on a 586 with 32 MB of EDO-RAM (remember that stuff?), from my parents' house.

I think you'd have to stick to myspace pages, and, well, I think we both know that's a bad idea.
Correct, you need around 20 I believe.
Yes, this article made me think of Seth Godin as well. It's about doing something "remarkable" in a very literal sense. Something that causes people to remark on your product or service. And to do that, I think you really have to have a good idea of who your customer is and know what would please them enough that they feel compelled to remark on it. Then make sure that you are offering it to them.
I get a

"java.lang.NullPointerException"

whenever I try to load the REPL. Any suggestions?
do some people have enough karma to downvote submissions?
don't talk about what you regret not implementing. Implement the next thing.
Amusingly Ottawa considers itself silicon valley north as well.
Nice app, but I already use something similar: stickit.com. How is this different from stikkit?
He can't answer this without dissing the remaining groups he did not choose.
Montreal, QC here.

Why do you ask?
Demo Day. Like all YC-funded startups they had to demo to investors after 10 weeks. They worked particularly hard because they had nearly zero written when they arrived in January. The two of them wrote 40k LOC in 10 weeks.
stikkit is cool, but doesn't quite hit the nail we're aiming for. It turns out to be another wiki product, similar to BaseCamp, while Jjot is a light-weight WYSIWYG notes application. Try playing with Jjot for a few minutes to see what I mean. An example:

To edit one of my notes on Stikkit, I have to

- scan through the titles of my notes

- guess which one contains the info I need, click it, (hit back and click again if I'm wrong)

- find a small "edit" button somewhere on the page

- wait for the page to reload

- enter some text using some markup language

- hit save

With Jjot:

- scan the contents of my notes (they're all on the same page, fully editable)

- Edit the one I'm looking for, using a visual editor

That's it. No save buttons to worry about, no markup language (Jjot uses a rich text editor), and everything is on the same page. It really is sticky notes on the web.

I think Stikkit is a promising product, but I wouldn't say it meets the same needs as Jjot. If I wanted something heavier than Jjot, I might consider Stikkit, BaseCamp, or maybe an online word processor like writewith.

I also find it mildly annoying that they label my contacts "peeps," but to each his own.
I came up with essentially the same idea as inviteshare about 2 years ago. It all started with a "damn, where the hell are these guys getting all these invitations."

My version was a bit different in that users would have to give feedback to sites whose invitations weren't ridiculously rare, and as you gave feedback, you would earn points. Then, when the really hot invitations would roll around, users could bid on them using the points they've accumulated. Either that, or the more your feedback was rated positively, the higher up a ladder you climb, giving you priority/ more points.

That all ended with me pitching the idea to a friend of mine and having him reply "Eh, sounds cool, but I don't think anyone would use it."

Looks like my $25k was meant for another bunch. Oh how impressionable I was.
China's Alibaba.com confirms plan to list in Hong Kong
cool! this (almost exactly this!) was on my list of possible ideas to pursue a few months back. great to see that it's being done.
This is like a group confessional,

Anyways, everyday I have to put up with my co-founder's whining about Meebo. I don't really know what they do or how they make money, but now I'm starting to see their name everywhere.

My co-founder is convinced that he had the idea behind meebo in undergrad but just was too lazy implement it.

In fact, I am going to send this link to my co-founder so he can see me go on the record in saying that he is the laziest SOB in our time zone.

That's right, I'm hating on my own co-founder. Go Meebo.
Index Ventures: Everything you need to Know about VC
man, if they'd just do a port to cocoa so the macos didn't have to run X ... sigh
... well then sooory boot that, eh! here's a dooollar. take off! ;-)
"... I'd go and offer places like Starbucks and Chapters free wireless for their customers. ..."

I wouldn't regret the decision that much if your idea revolved around Starbucks or even other large aggregators of customers. Joseph Park of Kozmo fame (see e-Dreams DVD) had a similiar idea back in Web 1. The deal went down requiring Kozmo paying Starbucks for the big bucks for the rights to serve their customers with a drop-off facility in what was meant to be a partnership. That's right they had to pay for the right to access customers. (You can see more on e-Dreams here ~ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0262021/ )

So it might be a good idea but those with the customers aren't too interested in others servicing their customers. I don't know how you get around this.

Besides, any time you have to ask permission you are in trouble.
This is a good idea and will inevitably become reality if YouTube does not come up with a way to organize all it's content by multiple layers (subject, content, region, language). Also, I remember seeing that there was a website like youtube but for racists that were kicked off yt. 3 years ago I'd not have been sure that Google would be really willing to execute it's goal of "organizing all the world's data," but now that we've seen they're willing to compromise in order to penetrate China's market, you can bet they'll be willing to reach an resolution to objectionable content.

Your theory is not entirely out of the question even if the above is true. Google may have acknowledged this. I say this because they have said that youtube will remain youtube while Google video will be a site to organize the content.

Most major networks do have applications online to view their content.
bittorrent. I had that idea before it came out. I could prove it, too, from old usenet postings, though I don't want to give away my anonymity.
I use Seashore: http://seashore.sourceforge.net/
Essential Tools for Web Developers
A peek into the toolbox of a Web 2.0 developer.
OMG vicarious cool-Internet-people stuff! girls!!
That's not going to work in the USA because inflation is a lot more than 5%.

I'd go for a foreign stock index fund.
NowPublic, citizen journalism site, expands with $10.6M
NowPublic Gets $10.6 Million For Crowd Sourced News
http://grouphug.us
Facebook's Viral Hit Game: The Brains Behind the Brain Eaters
I found a bug:

To save your notes permanently, sign up for an account.
Quite a few Ottawans! Maybe we should do a meetup and discuss how to do startups in Ottawa.
Big names backing internet video company
Now you may not recognize the name Steve Wozniak. He never really did anything important. He had a hand in starting some little company, named after a piece of fruit or something.
A few years back I was toying with the idea of applying citation-based ranking to ranking webpages... sigh...
I saw the prices for Allegro Common Lisp and Lispworks. 600 and 2000 bucks, respectively, per user.
Google Health Promises to Create AND Dominate Next Generation Personal Health Records
I thought that was exactly why blored was asking...
People should read Think and Grow Rich before they read the secret.
A social-networking service with a velvet rope
On the Next Big Web Application Framework
Lisp vs. other languages
Strategy Pattern: comparing Java X Lisp
Here's my bets (maybe I'll corner pg one day and find out if I'm right):

1. Loopt (this is the only one I'm sure is on the list)

2. reddit (news.yc is rather overwhelming evidence)

I'm on to pure speculation at this point...but I'll take a stab:

3. Zenter (the only thing I think makes this possibly not as likely is that they sold so quickly...I think pg might like to shoot for something bigger and more world-changing this time around, since he already has plenty of money...maybe Weebly or Buxfer would be number three in that case, while Parakey probably gets disqualified for the similarly early exit)

But, I obviously can't speak for pg, and I'm just making stuff up based on limited knowledge. Take it as you will.
Ideas are overrated. Execution matters far more. GrandCentral is very similar to a company called ThinkLink which preceded it by about five years. Facebook coopted ConnectU's ideas. The history of high technology is replete with similar examples. Yet GrandCentral and Facebook deserve their success. They weren't the most innovative in their respective spaces, but they executed best. That's what counts.
What will come after web apps and social sites?
A lot of startups seem to be doing these two things. While there are plenty of opportunities in these areas, what do you think the next big thing will be?
Don&#8217;t you want to leave IKEA? No problem, stay in its hostel
This list is more or less identical to YC's most successful companies.
Location based apps on cell phones.
I was pretty disappointed with the kinds of people I met at TechCrunch7. I have no desire to attend any other TC events. I know there are some interesting people but the ratio is as bad as most nightclubs. It should have been called SuitFest9.
"Another issue is the complexity of the problem, which might make convergence on even a semi-optimal solution difficult or extremely time consuming to find."

Huh? Ant colony optimization and other such stuff can do quite a nice job on a variety of classic NP-complete problems.

The set of problems where a quantitative objective function can be introduced is fucking enormous. Do a Google scholar search for "evolutionary computation" and look at all the different engineering/scientific fields it's used it. There are thousands and thousands of papers on this stuff every year.

There's lots of tricks for controlling how individuals evolve - a lot of them so obvious they aren't published. The perpetual challenge is always finding the right balance between convergence speed and premature convergence.
Call for media and government investigation of Sathya Sai Baba
Ask Steve #2 - Invest Your Time to Make Millions, Not Dollars
Investing in some salsa/merengue lessons is a pretty good way to go. It worked well for me in that it's a very non-geeky thing that lots of girls like. It's also a fun environment - in the right places, you can dance with lots of people without it being a Big Deal asking someone to dance.
Me too, and probably lots of other people. The time was probably calling for it.
How The Open Platform is Hurting Facebook
I Can Has Cheezburger - Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks
Seven Highly Effective Ways to Kill Innovation
Innovation doesn't just happen, it comes from careful tending of creative teams. Find out if you or your company is guilty of squashing good ideas and their growth.
Ballmer: Innovation Takes Time
Idea for a new web app
Coding Horror: The Coming Software Patent Apocalypse
Scale Rails from one box to three, four and five
Ok, downvote me. It's not as though I don't notice even though my points still says 1.
Video interview with a European VC from Accel Partners
Agree. Far more interesting question is what ideas you've implemented and why they failed. (but please, be more creative than "no one really wanted it")
Facebook App, Lending Club, Passes Half a Million Dollars in Loans
I was thinking of a keyboard that has displays on keys, long before Art.Lebedev came out with the Optimus keyboard concept. I didn't think of all the functionality they came up with, I just thought of rearranging/reconfiguring the key layout to suit one's typing style. Well, I don't really regret not implementing it, because I couldn't have done it, and it's not really practical.
Conference Tips for Startups: Where to go and what to do once you get there
TheFunded embraces VCs still further, but Sequoia still hazed
Are we at the start of the web 2.0 bubble?
Something irritates me about the answer, but I can't quite put a finger on it.

He's right that Amazon is a bad way of making money. I hardly ever get anything out of book links. His idea may very well not be a winner.

However... "try and make millions" sort of sounds like an excuse to never try. If the guy's young, why not try a few things that make some money rather than put things off waiting for a 'million dollar idea'.
Huh! When I first submit this question, I didn't get the text box! Anyway, my main question is as follows:

-> Are we at the start of a web 2.0 bubble? I say this because I see (way) too many startups doing the same thing over and over again (e.g.: social networking, web based im, wiki/blog backed news feeds, web based video, etc). Some of the newer ones are trying to add some money making (biz model as the vc-s like to call it) tactics to the whole game, but, mostly, most of these startups have no real monetary benefits.

-> If we are at the start of a bubble, when will it burst?

-> When the bubble bursts, how bad will it be this time: global economic meltdown?
View/search YC users by location.
I had the idea for PornoTube (YouTube for Porn), but couldn't live with not being able to tell my girlfriend's parents what I did ;-)

Shame, it's now Alexa rank 203 - probably 10 times the size of twitter. :(
What are the next sites that will get their users laid.