skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm interested in ways to make more novel startups succeed. The problem here is that the average web surfer has a very short attention span. And so it is hard for anything novel to get much traffic. One possible solution is to try to extend the attention span of the average web surfer much as you would with young children. Namely, present an idea in a cute and funny way. See for example: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html . By extending their attention span in this way, you might be able to get them to understand and appreciate your novel service.
meta-meta-meta!
I am interested in more intelligent ads. Make the ad so intelligent and interactive that people would want to play with it, just to test its boundaries. Building a better ad now reduces to coming up with the better AI. Taking this further, you might allow people to combine two ads to see how they will interact with each other. For example, you might combine an Apple ad with a Microsoft one to see which AI will win out.
PageRank works almost exactly the same way as a PKI. The only difference is that instead of people signing your key to vouch that it belongs to you, they are linking to your webpage to vouch that it has quality content. PageRank can be faked, certainly, but it is difficult enough to at least significantly slow someone down. To make it more trustworthy you'd probably have to modify it to create certain webpages that were absolutely trusted, and then do some sort Kevin Bacon rank where end users were scored based on the degrees of separation. That way there is some designated starting point, rather than the whole system being based off popularity.
I'd second the Fabrice Grinda recommendation. It's obvious just minutes into the interview that he's a straight-up A-player entrepreneur. It's especially interesting because he ISN'T an ideas guy -- rather, he's a master executor -- but does a great job of playing to his strengths. He takes proven, innovative ideas and executes the sh*t out of them in new markets (e.g. the eBay of Europe, ringtones in the US, and, currently, Craigslist international).

Premal Shah (Kiva) was incredibly, incredibly inspiring. His interview transforms microfinance from an abstract concept ("oh, that Nobel Prize thing...?") into something tangible. Did you know that you can be an angel investor for $25??

The Jason Calcanis interview gives you a much more nuanced sense of his character than you get from his blogosphere presence.

And though you'll probably avoid Sharelle Klaus -- what self-respecting tech entrepreneur would care about a SODA company, right? -- I'd urge you to listen, because it was totally fascinating. It's refreshing to get outside of the internet-startup echo chamber and realize that, well, entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. In other words, there are business fundamentals that apply to any startup, whether it's on the web or in meatspace.
Share Your Dreams And Maybe Someone Will Realize It For You! Great Idea
Create A Shop In Your Blog For Free
How To Bring Nore Traffic To Your Blog
BUG: If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page, the comment is re-submitted.
A "no-cache" and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this problem.
BUG: If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page, the comment is re-submitted.
A "no-cache" header of the submit request page would avoid this problem.
I am interested in getting free labor out of users in the style of the espgame.org. For more on this, see: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143 An obvious step would be to extend the ESP Game to video. Of course, the service need not be a game. For example, consider two groups of people: those who wish to grammar check their documents and those who wish to learn English. To grammar check, one would submit the document and users trying to learn English can try to find errors in it and provide corrections. General agreement about certain sorts of errors might be viewed as making it more likely that those in fact are errors. Moreover, one can also look for agreement among corrections. People learning English would benefit by getting back feedback about how well their errors and corrections correlate with those from others. One could of course do something similar with code design say.
Excellent ideas, all very intuitive and actionable.

Also, I agree with the author that it is annoying when you have a good idea and you can't figure out if there is prior art or not. All you can really do is start calling up professors in your rolodex, but it's hard when it's something that is somewhere in between three or four different fields, but not really a part of any of them.
I'm interested in novel uses of prediction markets. For example, one can create an online dating service where people bet on whom they believe would make good couples. People might then take this as a suggestion as to whom to consider for a date. A similar thing can be done with business relationships, academic collaborations, etc.
I really like the photosynth idea: http://labs.live.com/photosynth.
But can we take this idea further? For example, what can we do with video? Maybe we could put together many people's videos to produce a dynamic 3d world? One could imagine allowing people to watch and explore events in 3d such as concerts and sports games.

Another idea is to identify dense areas in 3d where people tend to take a lot of photographs. One could then use these dense areas to guide people to interesting places. For example, when visiting a museum, one might look at the dense areas first.
I think it would be interesting to provide a way to give people advice in real-time via the web. For example, you might watch a sports game on the web and give advice to individual players about what they might do next in real-time. So the spectators replace the coaches here.
I am interested in collective intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence. How would you build a service where thousands of people collaborative to solve a problem, create a work of art, or play a game (e.g., chess)?
If you have a second rate product, then good advertising can only do so much.

This is an age of rapid communication. Word of mouth has never been so valuable. A good word for your product will reach millions in a very short time span.

But I disagree with you about web ads. Web ads will continue to be viable and valuable. There is plenty of proof online regarding the type of conversion returns that firms are getting and the revenue publishers are generating. If someone wrote television ads off, saying that the majority of people just change the channel, they'd be dead wrong.

A lot of people tune out ads online. Many, many don't -- especially today when they have become more relevant to your desires than ever.
The Internet&#39;s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers
outside.in joins up with 3 VCs, Steven Berlin Johnson talks about why
For all intents and purposes, I found it all to be completely still relevant.
I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web search:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDwB4-DPXE

The idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains.

Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
it is apparent from this article that the author is a lot more familiar with Django than Rails and misses a lot of things. (e.g. I haven't seen a project in the last year that uses salted hash login generator - acts_as_authenticated is great - and there are admin interfaces available as plugins that are similar to what django offers by default.) Each framework has its advantages, but its unfair to compare them (in a which one is better sense) without equal knowledge about both.
Done this recently with good success. Great fun. Many conversations have gone on for over 1k and even 10k messages. It's still seeing a good amount of action. Anyone interested in developing this idea or the framework further? Let me know.
I put a lot of thought (and some actual code) into this exact idea! I put up a fast demo of it and it is rather popular.. I'm interested in developing this idea further.
In a good OS (I believe Linux qualifies), you only need to save the contents of the registers. Each process has its own address space, each thread has its own stack, and so there's no need to much around with memory beyond that. Stacks aren't actually copied around, the processor simply restores %esp and %ebp from the saved process data structure.

IIR my OS design course correctly, the big performance hit is the switch from user mode to kernel mode. I'm not sure *why* that's a big hit, but it seems to be a slow operation on most processors.

You can use user-mode threading libraries in C/C++, but Apache doesn't. Perhaps that's why it's slow. (The main reason it doesn't is probably that user-mode threading blocks the whole process when one thread performs IO, which obviously doesn't work well in an I/O bound application like a webserver.)

There are other C/C++ webservers - like Lighttpd - that use poll/epoll for I/O. These should run even faster than YAWS/Erlang; anyone have any benchmarks to compare them?
Interesting stuff. I've some similar ideas on how this should be done.
37signals chat with founders of skinnyCorp (Threadless) &#38; Connected Ventures (Vimeo)
I would say that reddit *created* it's startup oriented niche to a large degree - Particularly for college and maybe even highschool guys who know computers well but never seriously considered starting a company so soon.

In this regard I think of the early reddit and now n.yc more of as clubs, like the acm club I used to attend, than another news site. What really makes this club great is it's members and what they come here expecting.

Why is the linked news site failing? Right off, the front page design is a show-stopper. I can hardly force myself to get past that.
That's what PHP/MySQL are for. ;-)
It's starting to look like they got lucky once, and won't be finding any more ground-breaking features. I'm just saying.
That's a really cool idea. I doubt it could be turned into a successful business, but I love synergy effects.
It seems to me that things like this have been done in academia for a while; because I've only seen a video (rather than, say, some code or a paper), I'm unsure exactly what Dexter is doing, and whether it's different from the stuff done with bipeds at CMU, MIT, or in Japan. I wonder if there is any more information available.
Image mining
Incredible!! Congrats, Trevor!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go prepare my bunker for the coming War with the Machines.
What about advertising using smart mobs? A web service would allow a company to specify the logistics of the event and how much it is willing to pay. The company could also track the event in real-time and make changes as required. Advertising could be subtle such as in the form of a mob that forms in a shopping center carrying several products from that company. And advertising could be more blatant: a mob might form to create the logo of the company say.
How To Become Rich From Making A Simple Video -  Part 1
I am interested in giving people ways to track their influence on others. Forwarding Tree's URL tracking is all about that: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree/browse_thread/thread/ad998b99b9e3b7a8

URL tracking allows you to see what happens to those URLs that you forward to others, post on your blog, submit to a social news site, etc. You can see how the URL propagates around the net in real-time.

In other contexts, one might show people their influence on wikipedia articles, search engine rankings, open source code, etc.
What do you think are the &#34;real&#34; values of the hottest web companies?
In my opinion Facebook and Myspace are easily worth 5 billion each. Just because of the fact that if they were to significantly add features that would pave the way for future e-commerce and social bookmarking they could start with a tremendous amount of base users.

However, I feel that even the leaders Google, Facebook, Reddit/Digg, wikipedia etc. are extremely prone to "better" products being developed.

Friendster is the cliche. Myspace came out and simply by creating a move customizable and music - friendly layout, attracted musicians and most importantly (all their fans) I feel that even Google's adsense and search engine advertising is not the best.

The Internet allows for the most optimal ways sharing information as a species and we will continue to develop the web tools that are most important for the advancement of our cultures. This is where we will see true Internet Goliaths. I think in 5-10 years the largest internet company will be worth trillions, rather than billions.

Does anyone else agree that not only is technology increasing exponentially, but the price of the greatest Internet companies will also continue to increase exponentially? does anyone else think that there is is a website format that the world could use as its official database off information? I see it and hope it will lead to a new, and better age of human existence. Does anyone else?

JGR
similar implementations

talkito (YC funded) will do something similar

blogeverywhere.com (by the founder of Hotmail)

chatsum.com

Yoono.com
similar implementations

talkito (YC funded) will do something similar
blogeverywhere.com (by the founder of Hotmail)
chatsum.com
Yoono.com
> [...] Dexter appears to be treating each step as a discrete unit, where it has to attain balance at the end of one step before going on to the next step

I doubt that. I don't think that would qualify as dynamic balance. Remember, it's only been a couple of weeks since Dexter's first step -- he's walking quite well.

This is one of those situations where the approach bounds the eventual utility. There are a lot of non-dynamically balanced robots that would just blow the minds of researchers from 20 years ago, but they are still limited.

By solving the dynamic balance problem, even though to the untrained eye it may currently look less impressive than some other systems, there's no more ceiling to what it can do, dynamically (control-wise, not accounting for power density). All of the behaviours you mentioned can be implemented on top of this substrate.
this is a duplicate submission
Gah! Why do I keep double-posting? Someone please delete this.
I'm in a class on the subject at CMU, so I should be able to find out. What you said about Asimo is not quite true; for instance, one guy here at CMU wrote some code that took Asimo and constantly replanned in real time, so that he could respond to various changes in the environment dynamically.

Here, for instance: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Joel/footstep/videos.html#ASIMO

It would help to know more about exactly what Dexter is doing, so I can find some similar stuff. There is a large amount of literature on the subject.

Also, you note that Asimo's floor has to be hard and flat-- generally true, but also true for most bipeds, which seems to include Dexter. Can Dexter really deal with irregular terrain? How irregular can it be? An interesting question is how to get a biped to walk on *really* irregular terrain, like boulder-size.
This is a Holy War, but that comparison seems as good as any.
Sony claims that Qrio can respond to outside pushing, as here:

http://www.plyojump.com/movies/qrio/sdr-4x_recoverfromfall.mpg
How many nodes would have to be compromised to make this a viable attack vecotr? (yeah, yeah, I know, I should RTFM)
Sun cofounders talk about what founding Sun was like [video]
I love subversion, but it's not really a great tool for everyday backups unless you really need to be able to recover every single prior version of a file (and even then...). I think something like Unison or rsync would be better for most backup uses.
I just wanted to emphasize how important this is to building a dialog (and a community!). I don't want people replying to my comments, so right now I basically have to bookmark each thread that I've commented on and remember to come back and check.
MochiKit.Animator with demos (the end is the best)
I'm leaning toward Rails because I've been using it since its early stage. I also wrote stuffs in Django just out of curiosity, and it feels just as good. I think they're both highly productive environments, and with the time it takes to read all the comparison articles, we could've written entire apps.
To VC or Not to VC? That is the Question...
Now I'm interested to know what it was.
isn't part of the whole point that the thing scales up or down as you need it to? so, yeah, if you know up front what kind of constant bandwidth/storage/cpu load you are going to need then you're in a really good position to shop around for a better deal.
high traffic rails performance data point (hotspotr.com)
Open Source web conferencing
I found writing something like this to be one of the natural steps in a pure javascript client. People can do a lot more than they realize with javascript. On my website, http://www.classbug.com , the fade effects, the transition effects, and the disclosure button rotations are all done with an animating value from 0 to 1 (though not using KochiKit.Animator).

That's only the beginning though. Dynamic tree views, color selectors, etc.. You should build a framework of components to insert into your web application.
Venture capitalist's explanation of why small software startups are taking larger amounts of VC
Venture capital 2.0 - how venture capital is ceasing to be a separate asset class and being managed by larger general private equity firms
timg I was doing something similar, could you im me: gg@uptoolate.org
Prerequisites For Setting Up A Business-Driven Web 2.0 Effort
Example of Lisp Macros
Rails, but I can't judge Django because I haven't played with it on more than a superficial level. It seems like it really comes down to preference. I love the Ruby (and Rails) community right now and there are a lot of hopes for Ruby 1.9 as far as speed goes (supposedly an order of magnitude faster than 1.8.5).
10 Best Presentations Ever (as ranked by KnowHR)
Top 10 Lies of Venture Capitalists - Guy Kawasaki
Pinko Marketing - Marketing in the Post-Cluetrain Era
Networking: How do you manage your network and stay in touch with your key contacts?
Not a bad explanation of macros. I'm not experienced enough here to really judge how good, but I grokked it at least. It does seem though that you an approach this type of power with some of the dynamic features of Python. Am I wrong here? I think it's likely I'm missing the subtlety of macros.
Networking is a vital part of being successful in the business world, connections and human capital can be just as important as cash and intellectual capital. What tools (e.g. email, notebook, post its) do you use to manage your interactions with people, and how do you use this information to further develop your relationships?
Nice. I like the followup even more ( http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_top_ten_lie_1.html ). I'm sure all of these are just as applicable now as when he wrote them. It all boils down to genuine confidence in your product. If you're truly confident (not just optimistic, which we should be also) you won't get strung along by the VC's- you'll do your work, make a level pitch and move on until you find the one that matches well. Similarly you will be more honest with your pitch. This kind of confidence you only get with real business experience and/or real customers really using your product.

When you land a VC deal and get $4mil, are you going to dance around with euphoria and say "we did it! we did it!" or are you going to say "well, that'll be 2 years to capture x percent of the market instead of 7 years- I hope it was worth giving up x percent of the company." If only the former, then you can take that as a clue right now that your business isn't quite ready probably.

(I'm being a little facetious- of course you'll celebrate regardless).
This is not startup news. We need downmods for this purpose. (I love Lisp, but this is not a Lisp forum.)
37Signals' Highrise -- not out yet -- could prove to be a good way of doing it. I can say that I'm certainly excited. Check out the preview post here:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/265-preview-1-an-introduction-to-highrise-the-product-previously-known-as-sunrise
There happens to be a social networking site for old fashion networking.
http://www.linkedin.com/
Have you experienced the customer-investor-team conundrum?
yeah I've been following that, the reason I asked this question is I've been working on a product since November that is doing something similar (I was hoping that 37 Signals' product was going to be more CRM-ish) I still think (from what 37 Signals shown so far) that there is still a tool that caters more towards individuals managing their personal networks (a niche within the contact management niche if you will). Any thoughts on this?
Thanks for the link Elfan, I'm already a part of LinkedIn, but I think it is more of a tool for visualizing your connections not managing relationships. What do you think?
Some people are claiming even higher performance than this using nginx ( a relatively new Russian webserver). The preferred Rails "business" host EngineYard is using this right now.
Language choice and thusly features of given languages are pretty pertinent to hackers trying to start startups.

Just don't upmod it. If you're lucky it will go away.
If you can read my burnout article at the link above, then perhaps you can tell me if the Startup Story seems like a fairy tale - true for a few, but not for the unwashed masses.

(My website is at http://juwo.com. there's not much detail, as NP is not yet released. Potential competitors? dabble.com, veotag.com).
Just added my local hotspots. Pretty cool stuff.
Maybe this submission is a bit off topic, but I'd love to see more Lisp code for clever hacks of pratical applications.
"Success comes from good judgment, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." - Arthur Jones, founder of Nautilus and MedX
I'm in college so I don't have that many direct connections and its how I have managed to stay in contact with people from summer work. I'm not sure how it will scale for me in the future.

But I'm *awful* at maintaining friendships, networks, and things for that nature. So I'm not a good person to take advice from on this.
I'm in college too, actually, I've found facebook to be a good networking tool, especially some of the the global groups (there are a few good entrepreneurship ones), I've made some interesting connections through it.
The best qualities of high- and low-level languages
I think some of this can be attributed towards Rails developers - like me :) - liking the framework so much that they want to share the joy with everyone else.