skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need some guidance to identify a startup idea
Longtime HN member writing from a throwaway account here. Before you bury this post as yet another frivolous ask HN post, I urge you to read through it.

For the last couple of years, I have had this ambition and itch to do my own startup. To pursue that dream, I left a cushy 9-5 job on the east coast,uprooted my wife and moved to the bay area to join a startup as a Django engineer. Since I did not have any great ideas of my own, I decided to take the next best route possible - to join a startup, learn the ropes, network around and then do my own thing.

Its been almost an year now working at the startup and I feel that things are not that exciting at work as before. And the urge to do my own startup has become even more stronger than before. As with several other folks, startup ideas continue to pop up in my head incessantly.

What I am seeking is some guidance, some direction in terms of how do I go about finding a viable startup idea. The best answer to that would be 'scratch my own itch'. To answer that, I have made several attempts to scratch my own itch. I worked on several ideas:

1) Foodspotting idea - I was midway through coding, when I found that FoodSpotting had already launched successfully (I was way behind in terms of development).
2) Provide phone call support for pingdom alerts - found that pagerduty (YC company) already does this and does this well
3) Chatroulette for lunch - LetsLunch beat me to launch and execution.

I am looking for an idea that has a sustainable, viable business model. A geo / location / checkin / picture / group chat idea does not interest me since I dont use these services myself. Plus, I dont think that most of such services have a viable business model.

I've hit a major roadblock in terms of finding that next 'scratch my own itch' idea. I've even tried applying the lean startup model to a couple of ideas, but there didnt seem to exist a market for them.

Any pointers or suggestions that you can offer will be appreciated.
Microsoft To Stop "Zune" Production; Goodbye Zune
I don't get it. What does it mean that the last bit of Pi is 1 when there is no last digit?
You will note I didn't mention that Oregon and Washington :-). If you look at the USGS analysis [1] of the tsunami risk it does not extend below the western most part of California (Eureka/Fortuna area). This is a bit of fortunate geologic structure on the part of California. You might also note that there are no US nuclear power plants near the coast between Eureka and the southern border of Canada [2] so for some definition of risk avoidance, no one has built reactors there.

Point being, in California at least, there is a very very small chance that one of our reactor's disaster plans will be challenged by a combination 9.0 earthquake and a 30' tsunami.

[1] http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661b/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NRC_regions_and_plant_loca...
If it is so much work for Microsoft to support IE9 on XP, they should make it and offer it for sale. Since XP is so important, and IE9 is so important, people will surely pay for a browser upgrade, right?

What's the market price for a modern browser? $79? $29?

$0?! How on earth did that happen?
Scanning Library Cards on Smartphones
Clickables:

http://www.crumbsapp.com/ => Looks cool!

http://www.linkedin.com/in/wongjoh
On the other hand:
"Blaming a third party lacks class. The Reddit guys made the decision to rely heavily on EBS, and it came back to bite them. They show a lot of character by taking responsibility for an outage they had very little control over."
What do you think is the best solution to that one?
Exactly my reaction. This was posted a few weeks ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2241132
There is a different definition of "professional" that is often used however; it's a co-opting of your proper meaning that is often used by large corporations to support the status quo and discourage innovation.

That definition is this: "Professionalism" is the recognized respect that should be given to those individuals, processes and companies labeled as such due to their earned credentials in a particular field.

It's a definition created specifically with the intent of preventing the questioning of the status quo; an overdeveloped argument to authority, basically.
Idea for web-based startup, but no programming skills.
Hello,

I have an idea I've put a lot of thought behind for a web-based startup. I have ten years of experience in sales and management, but no experience in programming or coding.

What is the best way for someone who does not know how to program to build a complex website?

Thank you
Oops, I always thought Anne Hathaway's father's name was Berkshire Hathaway
Because the few moments of footage showing them touring the area in a rental car, you see them interact with their interpreter for everything. "What are those cars doing over there? Why are we in so much traffic?"
So who else is camping out the night these go live to snatch (see what I did there?) one of the premium domains to cash in on later?
Well, I think the executives who made the decision to pursue this strategy might very well disagree with me. I'm also not convinced that it's common sense to pursue quality over popularity.

In general, following your metrics is the sounder strategy. If CNN were to A/B test the "education in Afghanistan" story against Lindsay Lohan, what do you think would win? I have to guess Lindsay Lohan by a mile.

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy answer for distinguishing between metrics you "should" follow vs. metrics you should not.
Some winners, some losers. I think the key for me was keeping at it, getting a library of snippets and lowering the dev time on each successive app until I got a hit.
Unless they're performing a deep packet inspection, there's no good way to tell if you're tethering. Usually tethering option uses user name that differs from non-tethered option during authentication. If your unathorized tethering application sits on the device, it simply shares non-tethered connection, hence the user name doesn't change. The only plausible explanation w/o going deep into packets - bandwidth or some unusual ports usage.
Sounds like you need to find yourself a technical co-founder. Be sure to put together exactly what it is that you'll be bringing to the table, because coders don't like to hear "I have the idea, you do the work".
I think there is a big difference between a television "reporter" (i.e. newsreader) going to Japan for some intro pieces, versus, say, a long-time AP reporter who lives there and understands the region.
I think it's high time to register comcastsu.xxx
Twitter's "White People Stink" problem
Geologist Predicts Major N. America Earthquake Imminent
yes! Wanted to say exactly that. Esp. with aggregate sites like kayak, priceline etc. this will push them lower in the results
Netflix Gets Into The TV Business With Fincher Deal
Your rhetoric is hilarious and I really wish we could duo this routine in bars.

I suggest the "causative agency" is the voice that says "I am supposed to be getting all the attention. Why is he? He didn't even do anything amazing!"
ICANN Approves .XXX Top-Level Domain
Sure. But there's little real research an non-native language speaker can accomplish. And even if you speak the language, if you're not from there, well you're never going to get the inside track. And this is precisely the reason why Al Jazeera has so many foreign bureaus and employs a lot of local staff - way more than any other network.
Er, is this an ad for an event? I'm confused apropos the title...
There's a huge difference between either funding your own long-term deployed journalist, or simply contracting an independent, versus shipping your desk man over for some intro pieces.
Disappear as in they crash and reboot, or disappear as in they're unpingable?
Of course it's a net neutrality issue. AT&T wants to charge more for data from a tethered computer than it does for a non-tethered computer. Bits are bits: that's the point of net neutrality. If you pretend that "all bits are created equal, but some are more equal than others" (apologies to Orwell), then you're not net-neutral.
(Edit for the HN readers: This comment and following comments were posted in response to an earlier frontpage design.)

I posted this on shacknews but to duplicate the discussion over here on hackernews, here's my feedback:

The frontpage splash for this is really hard to read. It's obtusely written. It focuses on features, not the narrative. It focuses on buzzwords, not what it does. I kind of get it from your long video, but I doubt anyone has the patience to learn about this. There are a lot of social tree-based todolist applications out there, so to win in this space you have to be really really really focused on UX over functionality.

Best of luck though, I think you have some interesting ideas!
well, if you look at the chart, BRK.A has been climbing that whole time. someone less lazy than me could count up how many days it went up, and how many days it went down and give you a a good number. let's just say there are 100 down days, and 200 up days.

what are the chances of selecting 6 up days without replacement? 200/300 * 199/299 * 198/298 * 197/297 * 196/296 * 195/295 ~ 0.085

(i'm also not a statistician, and i'm not real sure i did that right.)
Thanks for the feedback. Design has been my weakest link for sure. And I need to edit the video. Much thanks for checking it out.
The real news here is that while Microsoft is losing the smart phone market they are the market leaders in the bot net market with a clear 100%!

Thank you Microsoft for helping to clean up your mess!
I prefer a "wifestyle business": A business that is set up and run by my wife primarily with the aim of sustaining me at a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which I can enjoy a particular lifestyle.
I've long ago given up on CNN and other cable news networks. All the cable news channels are dumbed down to the point of annoyance. The only exception is CNBC, which of course is financial news. CNBC, perhaps because of its focus on the economic perspective seems to keep closer to the facts, and also gives more interesting analysis. One thing for sure, CNBC, wont be covering the royal wedding. They may at most, show a clip of it, followed by how much it cost the British taxpayer.
Why not share it? Because nobody reading it will benefit in any way, and many will be annoyed that you wasted their time, and you did waste the time of everyone reading it.

Send me your email address, I'll send you a 10 paragraph rundown of the trials and tribulations of laundry day.
On the comment itself, I have this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339715
Where desktop is a computer that is on your desk (or under) and where alive is at least 5% marketshare.
Just one suggestion, just because other people are already started doing what you thought was a good idea does't mean you give up on it. if this is the case then none of the following companies existed : Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Cisco etc etc.

Just pick what you are mostly interested and start finding a niche which is useful to the users. The most important thing is to develop some thing users want. If you can figure out that then your already won your 50% battle.

just my 2c
I think your reasoning fails the real world test. Reasons Zappos' target customers use Zappos: vast selection, easy returns, no hauling your kids to the mall (this is HUGE), excellent customer service. I'd guess they could charge 5-10% above retail and still win.
Yes, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw the news. I would be pretty cautious about building anything on Twitter after that.
it would be great to have ability perform beautify(like http://jsbeautifier.org/ does) of such code.
I'm broke and my company is not growing. I believe that a large contributing factor to the failure of my company was that we went in to it with an exit in mind instead of a love for our product.

Would we have sold our company for $20 mil? Hell yes. But we went in to Y Combinator excited about an exit and we stunted the growth of our company by shooting for dollars instead of stars.
You need a verifiable SSN to get an iPhone?!?

Attn drug dealers, you can get BlackBerries and Droids from Boost or Cricket without giving any personal information.
No Face, but Plants Like Life Too
My compliers professor did. The notes were so extensive though that you didn't really need to look at the book. And it was written by a finn, so the english was a little bit off.
Man who attempted to steal Goldman's trading algorithm gets 8 years in prison
Nice. I just started using zfs on a home linux server. We have some large Macs, too, it would be nice to have better data integrity there.
RSA Fail - Security Lessons Unlearned
Reminds of when Cablevision was first rolling out broadband internet and the tech who came to set it up insisted that attempting to connect the modem to more than one computers would "knock out cable TV for everyone on your block."
Anyone know what the capabilities of the iPhone version are? It's out already (and has been since last November), contrary to the story link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-authenticator/id388497...
Bingo. If you go in looking for an exit, you're going to fall on your face.

I'm not at all against starting lifestyle businesses; those also do not have exits.
I see a bookshelf of technical computer science books. I guess Computational Linear Algebra from 1992 is makings its way up the NY Times best seller list. It must be, because its right here on my desk.

Also, I just ran my program and it didn't crash. There must not be any bugs in it.

Here's a hint, a little of bit of research will help you not make claims of things that aren't happening.
Seth Godin on his leadership philosophies.
AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers.
And the best option you've got for .NET-compatibility is Mono.

But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal problems.
That's too easy to say.

While making it all automated is the goal, it doesn't mean it will be attained. I believe CD Baby is more an exception than the rule. Its hard to hire people who care, let alone people who will make sure the business runs even without you.
It's easy to measure page views, hard to measure how a story resonated with a reader. Furthermore, it's now possible to measure per story, rather than copies of the whole edition (or ratings for the whole evening news).

You improve what you measure.
There's a choice to make between naive optimism and realism. Realistically, I needed to do at least one thing better than FoodSpotting & given that they had like a 4-5 months headstart, I decided to not pursue it further.
Have any interest in pursuing an app platform in the medical space?

Send me an email and Ill let you know what I am working on.

sam [at] sstave.com
Google got a 'trainer', Paul got an actual fighter :-) But more seriously or not seriously, if you've got the cash you can collect unusual things. I've visiting private collections of train locomotives and military tanks (different collectors). The common theme is fascination with the technology and being able to 'touch it' as it were.

Back at the turn of the century when everyone was worried about Y2K and DEC^h^h^hCompaq^h^h^h^h^h^hHP wouldn't certify PDP-11's or some VAXen Y2K compliant a lot of them showed up on scrap market. Eric Smith drove with an Air-ride tractor trailer to two or three Bay Area data centers to pick up PDP-11/70's that Bank of America was throwing out (literally he showed up, they powered them down, and carried them out to the truck) because of this even through they were working fine.

Not really hacker news material though, maybe a poll "What would you collect if you had too much money?"
Here's another CCD scanner ($35) that should work. Should be easier to deal with buy.com if anyone wants to try it.
Hey I think we've met IRL in an apartment on McKinley Ave. You know where I live and that it is not glamorous. I kind of hoped the text on the sidebar wherein I'm begging for money would contextualize the post appropriately.
Another discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341722
Why is it an elephant?

Firefox 3.x works perfectly fine on WinXP too.
Here's some concrete suggestions:

Instead of :

"
What is MindWallet?
blahblahblah
"

Maybe something like:

With MindWallet, you can socially or privately organize your plans and goals. Simplify problems by breaking them up into subtasks and coordinate with friends to complete tasks on-the-fly. MindWallet enables you to manage your to-do list instead of having it manage you.

MindWallet:

* Displays your current tasks and lets you break them into subtasks

* Communicates with friends within your to-do list

* Integrates with social networks

* etc...etc...etc...
I've been using this for awhile now and it's been really invaluable for looking through stuff like JSON feeds or raw JS. Also has some nice color themes and font options.
That was a lot of writing. While you may have clarified your views I have to wonder how many will fully read them.

That being said - and having read the full piece - you have a view and are attempting to communicate it and that is to be commended.
The clincher is that rightmost 0's after a decimal point are insignificant and can be discarded similarly to leftmost 0's before a decimal point. 00045.26030 = 45.2603 - the extra 0's are simply noise. In binary, the only non-0 digit is 1. This means that, if Pi does in fact terminate, its binary representation must terminate in a 1 - any 0's to the right of the last 1 carry no value.

Now, that's a pretty big "if", but this isn't meant to be serious mathematics. It's just an interesting consequence of binary representation and the assumption that Pi might terminate, and is enough to make people do a bit of a double take when you phrase it along the lines of "the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a 1".
I have a feeling some countries (namely UK and Australia, and almost certainly all nations with China-like policies) will jump all over new legislation in order to make using these names very annoying, or at least limiting their potential exposure (ha) compared to using typical .com domains.
cant wait to register redlightdistrict.xxx
I think you might already know this but it is worth while repeating.
Idea is not important, execution is the most important thing
Not for the iPhone itself, but for the account with AT&T or Verizon.
Hey, I appreciate it. I know I need two people...that's why I want to find one really, really hungry developer.

You never know...we may work together one day in the future. I've still got loads to learn on my end, and whether this project is a success or not...I'm hoping it teaches me a lot. Best of luck to you and your ventures in DC.
I don't have much honor left, but a domain shark I will never be.
This isn't entirely true. Amazon.com uses EC2 in addition to dedicated servers.

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/1516269/Amaz...
One of the editors of a major paper once told me that they viewed their primary product as _credibility_, not newspapers.

In chasing pageviews, CNN is pursuing a race to the bottom. They have to compete with HuffPo and AOL and another million sites that aggregate or regurgitate content. I stopped going to CNN.com a long time ago and I rarely see it as a linked site in any discussions online. That's not a good sign if they want to grow their business and uniques (which are a more important metric than pageviews for an advertising-based site.)
This is not fully correct, there is such a service as 'single phase' and that is what most US residential service consists of, where the transformers that step down line voltage at the pole, or in an underground vault to 2 separate legs of power, that are 240v differential between them, and 120v from a neutral that is derived at the transformer.

If you were to take the 3 phase power more common in large buildings, or light industrial facilities, and use any two legs, you would be looking at 208v between any 2 legs, and 120v between any leg and the neutral from the step down transformer.

Almost any variant of power can be produced by the correct transformer, given the the basic power available to location is sufficient, and of the correct type (i.e. 480v 3 phase can be tranformed into 208/120v 3phase or 240/120v single phase).
Are you doing all of this on your own? Find some people who has the same interest and drive as you. It's much easier to go as a group than alone.
Tell everyone about your idea, don't hide it. You proved that ideas are not unique. When you tell people, they see how excited you are and the feed back you get is invaluable. And maybe someone who knows someone also interested in what you're doing.
If you run out of idea, keep talking to people. Go to meet ups. There's someone out there who has an idea that you may be interested in and you can team up.
This is a serious question, so please don't take it as snark or mockery: Wouldn't shooting for dollars increase the growth of your company? Or at least get it ramen profitable so it can't die/fail?
I'm not flaming you here, but you should search HN because this question gets asked at least once a month and there's lots of valuable advice in those.

Try Googling 'ruby rails site:news.ycombinator.com' without the quotes. Filter the result for the last year or so, older advice is either wrong or no longer applicable. There's a search on the HN site, but I prefer Google.

Definitely focus your efforts on Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3, in any case.

Edit: Link!

Here's one from 2 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329517
Instead of:

"Get addicted to MindWallet in 10 steps:
blahblahblah"

Make this be a direct link that says:
(Get started with mind wallet.)

Then, this link opens a view to facebook connect.

When the user completes that, show them an automatically-created first task list.

For the first time creating a task list, show them guide indication arrows to important CRUD operations (e.g., "Create your first goal =>)

Think of this like a videogame tutorial, you have to show them by making them do it. Continue down your list, implementing each task as a tutorial step that you hold their hand through. As an anecdote, my grandmother recently couldn't figure out how to click a recipe link on my facebook news feed. I said "Cool recipe" and had the link posted. She couldn't figure out that blue text was a link. You have to really help nontechnical users.
The Last Psychiatrist: When Is It Okay To Rape A Woman?
So this is a reply to a blog comment board? Why put it on HN and not on the comment board itself?
Radiation fallout has reached California
I sort of take the Apple philosophy: Thou Shalt Upgrade Thy Software.

Keeping software modern is a good thing.
I believe Verizon is $20/month. (I didn't sign up for the tethering/hotspot.)
Similar behavior between them is expected, both are based on webkit.
"But it’s worth a read to understand the perspective of a vocal minority in the tech industry."

That statement is a bit off-putting. First of all, this 'minority' is the majority. Most software businesses are indeed small, and are not aiming for venture capital and outsized returns. It would not even be mathematically possible to be otherwise.

Secondly, the 'vocal' people are the people trying to make you start a big business. Almost all blogs and writers cater to the startup crowd, not the mISV crowd. Most people writing country specific tax software or inventory sorting software are not blogging at all.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what he means - but to me it seems like he is deep in the bubble, and can't see out of it. That's why the article he reacted to would have been so disturbing to him.