skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A "discovery" is not a special case of an "idea"? That is, you are claiming that ideas necessarily don't build on each other, that is, are not 'cumulative'?

Here is the hidden point in this discussion: The article and much of information technology entrepreneurship want to say that the 'idea' is some, say, Facebook for dog owners or eHarmony for cat lovers. So, the 'idea' is some description from 40,000 feet up of some business, say, category. Maybe the idea is an Internet site for printing and sending via FedEx personalized paper napkins for big picnics. It seems to be such 'ideas' that J. Doerr finds flooding his e-mail inbox and that lead him to conclude that "ideas are easy" and "plentiful" and "execution is everything". Doerr, and the article, are not thinking of tungsten for electric lights, Reed-Solomon codes for CDs, or F = ma as 'ideas' or any such ideas as important for business. That's DUMB.
Patrick, that is a great write-up.

I live in Tokyo. On Sunday, I was looking at the buildings on the way to the train station. There were no visible cracks, except on a few old buildings which might as well have had the cracks before. Almost all businesses were open, etc.

Edit: as Patrick says, civil order continued. However, there were huge traffic jams and I witnessed a traffic argument turning violent. This is really rare in Japan.
Thank-you. I guarantee this will be very helpful to a lot of people.

Deskgap?
I really wish I could do this. As a developer who programs, I'm still pretty tied to a laptop or desktop to do the work I need to do. But I yearn for the freedom to get rid of all that complexity and live off of just an iPad.

Maybe we'll get there eventually and building rich apps on iOS (or equivalent) will make sense. Or maybe I'll just have to become a rich VC and only need email and Keynote. Both of those scenarios would work for me.
I liked this quote: "we were crippled by a large complex codebase".

I think a lot of developers don't realize how introducing complexity hurts you in the long run.
Japan earthquake: Footage of moment tsunami hit
Best video illustrating the power of the Tsunami that I've seen
If it's just you and the original founder, sounds like you're almost taking the role of a co-founder or cto. If that's the case, 2% does you absolutely no justice. But again, that entirely depends on what skills you have and what your primary workload is.

Another factor to consider is where you're located geographically. If this is in Kentucky and you don't want to relocate elsewhere, 2% is a much better offer than if you were in the Valley. Simple demand/supply.
2/3rds of the earth is covered with water, Nothing would prevent putting solar on the oceans surface. And why would we cover land with panels, when we have rooftops that cover triple the area required to generate the base line you cite? Already, flexible rooftop material exist that serves a dual purpose of protecting the home, and producing power.

Every problem you cite can be solved readily. Put even a 100th of the resources expended to develop nuclear energy into alternate energies and we can be rid of the suicidal methodology of nuclear energy on the planets surface. Why anyone would defend something as poisonous as nuclear energy is beyond understanding. It is a continuous threat to the future of the species and supported only by those who stand to profit greatly from its deployment.

I don't think you actually understand the science at all.
The History of Science Fiction as an intricate hand-drawn map
The world needs more hacking gentlemen, with a monocle and their own mahogany-panelled laboratory.
You might talk to some of the people at the Diamond Synchrotron facility in the UK. They are using it to allow scripting for control of their instrumentation. In my own use, I do remember there being some annoyances with getting a ^C into a text based client we were working on (from java), but that might have just been me. Also, I would suggest being careful with the possibility of memory leaks when calling java from jython (sorry, can't remember the details now).
Ummm... IBM, MS, and Google are there as well, so they aren't the only ones present with deep pockets. They haven't done anything at SXSWi before that I am aware of.

It's amazing how SXSWi has grown into a legitimate conference as opposed to the poorly attended appendage to the Music and Film festival.
In my 3rd & 4th years of CompEng at University, I was consistently working between 80 & 120 hours per week. Although I've not worked in startupland, I have worked in one of the large consultancies and in a significant engineering company in both marketing and development. I've had peaks of required effort, but never had to put in anything like those two years.
What is and will happen in the exploded nuclear plant in Japan
I think I understood you quite well, I was just agreeing with you :)
Discussion - Why do you do it?
I wasn't sure whether to post this here since what I'd like to discuss is not directly linked to startups, the web, funding, and so on. But, I figured it would gratify one's intellectual curiosity as the guidelines say :), and also shed some light on how entrepreneurs and like-minded people view the world.

So what I'd like to ask you is seemingly simple: is there a higher purpose to what you do? Do you get to work because you believe your actions will benefit mankind, because you enjoy it and think that is all that matters? Or do you do it because it brings financial gains which help you achieve your other dreams? Or is it something else? I'm not trying to point out a good or bad way, I'm just really curious as to what drives people to go through sometimes unbearable difficulties, in order to achieve something.

Thank you.
From an absolutely marketing stand point, the most effective way to get yourself out there is via viral marketing. In order for that to work, you need either some or ideally all of the following, a large extended social network, established expertise in your field, a strong web presence in your respective niche and most importantly, are willing and able to promote yourself offline - basically be charming and not awkward. I find that the latter is the most effective as people actually see the people behind the product.
Technical Co-founder/Advisor Opportunity For StickyFrames
We are looking for a web developer to join our venture. Sticky Frames are magnetically attached frames that contain messages users create and print themselves. So one day your StickyFrame can be used as a political bumper sticker, while the next day you can used it to advertise your business or sell a car. At this stage we are going forward with production of prototypes/low volume test series but we need a functioning web platform to maximize the potential of the product. The web service should help our users to create and manage content of their StickyFrames. We can offer a stake in SF project - but we are also ready to discuss other forms of compensation. If interested please contact me via HN or email at computerfix at gmail dot com
http://stickyframes.posterous.com/pages/about-us -> Our ycombinator video for W2010. Since then we have developed much better looking and cheaper prototypes that are almost ready for production.
This is not completely relevant to the current topic, but I was wondering if any video exists of the inside of a nuclear reactor. What does it look like when it's running? A brief search on Youtube could not locate anything.
Coal-fired plants were not mentioned by me as an alternative or as desirable.

Please stop that.

I see that you are confused when somebody has not the view of the nuclear industry. You are brainwashed by the corporations. Even thinking that there are alternatives that are not coal seems to be not possible.
YouTube's competition misses the point (2006)
Marco.org from over 4 years ago
Agreed! The utility of a chainsaw is greatly limited by the fact that it can only be safely used by a trained operator. No way I'm going to hand over my (small sized) chainsaw to just any helper at a campsite. In an emergency scenario, it's important to have tools that can be used safely by most anyone, lest your skilled and experienced operator is injured.

If you want something with good cutting ability that is safe and self contained (i.e. no generator required) consider the several variants of saws that "cut on the pull". The advantage of a pull saw is that the blade is kept in tension during the cutting stroke, and therefor will not buckle no matter how thin its steel. Also, typically the pull stroke of your arm is stronger than your push (back and biceps vs chest and triceps).

There are aggressively toothed folding camp saws and non-folding tree trimming saws that would be great additions to a survival kit. As the parent commenter suggests, get a larger one and avoid the frustration of short strokes!

My all time favorite kind of pull saw is the Japanese style carpenter's saw. Shaped kind of like a long (unbent) spatula, it's capable of incredible speed and accuracy, well beyond that of a western hand saw in my experience. You can get a decent one at Home Depot or Sears with alternate edges for cutting wood (across the grain) or ripping it (with the grain). I'd recommend one of these for every home repair toolkit, but unless you're going to repel zombies with finely mitered woodwork, get the other kind of saw for your survival kit.
Thanks for your reply - I didn't understand. I do now.

I won't bother to ask questions about technical matters here again, nor to ask if people I respect are having the same problems, nor to try to raise awareness of possible issues with the technology that many of us use every day.

Nor will I talk about questions of how to investigate whether recent Windows updates have code specifically to destabilise Chrome, or other things that I would've thought of interest to the HN community.

No, instead I'll watch the countless discussions of whether it's the idea or the execution, more discussion of whether it's better to go to school/college/university or to go straight into business, or yet another submission of some other much loved favorite.

Never mind that I've tried several technical forums and they are all bloody useless. Never mind that this was, I thought, somewhere that people with similar interests occasionally helped each other.

I'll go away now.
We got a very promising lead from here few days ago, but ultimately Rob could not join due to a schedule constrains. We are both quite web/tech savy, however we do not have a lot of experience with developing complex web services so we'll need a tech lead. Both me and Dustin are willing to do some work on the site, learn, and help with specific function points.
The original traditional Chinese character is 颱; the Japanese adopted the character 台 as a simplification of the original character (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai). Therefore, the "stand" or "platform" meanings of the 台 character are unrelated to that of 颱.
No: Your evidence does not lead to your conclusion.

You are working with your "a lot of people" and drawing a conclusion about business success in, since this is HN, information technology entrepreneurship. Here's where you get off track: Something under 1% of the people with such 'ideas' achieve success. Or, what fraction of the people can be in the upper 1%?

So, the evidence that would be needed would be the role of ideas for that upper 1% or less.

As I wrote elsewhere on this thread, what is being assumed here about an 'idea' is just some short description of a 'cutomer need' to be met by, say, a new Web site, say, paper napkins with personalized printing ordered on a Web site and delivered via FedEx. Then, sure, execution is everything.

What is being missed, however, is old, traditional, and rock solid: Take a problem millions of people want solved, or that a few people want very, very much to have solved, find a solution, and then execute. Here the implication is that, because the problem has not been solved yet, finding the solution, the 'idea', is challenging. Then commonly people would protect the idea with a patent.

If the idea was really good, then the execution should be routine. Examples? Business history is awash in them.

I say again: Bad ideas are easy and, then, execution is everything and likely difficult. Good ideas are likely difficult and then execution can be routine.
The article headline is misleading, it's talking about a three-day survival kit. But if we're talking a real-world, full-out, Mad Max apocalypse, one where society as we know it will never recover, yeah, I'd want a gun.
Was going to post the same - it gets really bad at 4:30. Cleaning up this mess is going to cost several GDP's.
Great presentation, very good advice
Seeing God in tsunamis and everyday events
Needed: This Tablet Program For Disaster News
You don't present any solid allegations other than that he's a douchebag.

How exactly is he dangerous to the uninitiated?

What does it say on "thefunded" about him that should drive people away?

It's like you know about an abusive priest, but you won't say how exactly they're abusive, just that the priest is unlikable.
Another way to look at it is if Apple ever moved away from its core, that is, making products that are a perfect blend of form + function combined with their awesome customer support, then certainly that would be the start of their decline.

Another action that personally upset me, me being a fanboy, is their publisher subscription model of taking 30%. That doesn't seem to be in the best interest of their users.
Please check the sources on this article - I edited a bit on it today and found out that there was one ridiculous claim (1 million Chernobyl casualties) backed by a non-existing source (dead link).

I checked the source that was meant and found that it claimed something completely different - there 56 fatalities from the site, 4k people with cancer and dozens of fatalities from those. Very different from '+1 000 000'. Apparently someone added sourced info, and someone else just edited it while leaving the source there, which expired (and no one bothered to check it).

I edited the article hastily and apparently I made it claim that there were 40 000 fatalities. Oops.Someone corrected that and found my source, without me even listing it, but they were still fatalities.

So, the lesson here?

Wikipedia - perpetually work in progress, may not be even close. Still very usefull, but keep your eyes open and mind critical.

The conclusions you can make about INES, Chernobyl and nuclear energy are vastly different when you consider a single number.
That is, what he was saying is usually interpreted as 'execution is ALL that counts'.

Again, as the article clearly states, "Having a great idea is not enough. It is the manner in which ideas are executed that counts." The idea is clearly mentioned here as part of the formula.

I'm sorry, but you're just making bizarre leaps from what the article said.
I don't think you understand my criticism. App publishers are paying you to pay people to download their app. How can that be the basis for quality, objective recommendations?

Or let me try with a question: Explain how exactly your app helps people find the good app they need in the haystack of bad apps? If you don't do that, then this is an outright scam. People are paying you money for something. Please tell me what they are getting.
The fact that Google is going out of their way to pour water on this is kind of interesting in itself. It almost suggests that they have some kind of under-the-covers agreement (I guess it can't be Facebook, but maybe Twitter?) that they're trying hard not to step on?

From what I've observed they seem to have firmly adopted a different strategy for social which involves organically growing their existing products with social features rather than trying a high profile (and high risk) product launch. To me this demonstrated some much needed corporate self-awareness (there are some things Google just isn't good at) and so I was pretty surprised to see that they would have reversed that and gone for a big splash.

I honestly think Google has all the seeds to make a competitive social offering but they need to play their cards very carefully and tie things together in the right way. If they can weave Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube and Picasa together then they basically have Facebook's feature set. All of these products are best of class and loved individually by their users. Add Android into the mix and Google even has a trump card they can play. The question is how Google can gently usher all those users / technologies into one cohesive social offering without harming the individual products, alarming people about privacy or any other negative consequences. It has to be done carefully and gradually and with sensitivity. I think this is exactly what they've been doing and is the smart strategy.
Ontologies have been used for quite a while in enterprises for things like information integration (EII). It also depends of how strict your definition of ontology is. If you ask me, RSS standard is the most widely used ontology on the web. IMO, the reason why FOAF, DC and similar standards never took off is beacause, unlike for RSS, there were never really any "killer" applications that utilized them.
So, let's see: I have a 'great idea'. One pill taken once that will cure any cancer. World shaking idea!

This example clarifies this whole thread: The need to cure cancer is obvious. So is the desirability of such a one pill. Now let's set aside the obvious. The challenge is how to make that pill. The 'idea' with meaning, then, is how to make this pill.

If someone does know how to make the pill, then they definitely should not tell anyone about it without good legal advice, rock solid NDAs, etc.

But part of what makes this thread a mess is that at present the HN context of information technology entrepreneurship just assumes that, with current computing, the part analogous to finding the pill is trivial and the only challenge is identifying that people would like to have such a pill. This situation won't last very long!
5 Years Later, Jack Dorsey Tweets About Twitter’s Beginning
dunno about actual run-of-the-mill daily cycle but I've seen the reactor at K-State run a couple-dollar pulse. It looked about like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgNwtepP-6M

For the day to day operation it just looked like a big pool of distilled water with a ton of pipes running around in it.
I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.
is it? Didn't mislead me...
Phil Schiller confirms white iPhone this Spring, calls it a “beauty”
Original Twttr sketch by Jack Dorsey
Honestly, I'd rather see Google and Facebook joining forces than trying to make competition! If those two work together, imagine how to web could be!
Chile's earthquake, actually.
> No, instead I'll watch the countless discussions of whether it's the idea or the execution, more discussion of whether it's better to go to school/college/university or to go straight into business, or yet another submission of a much loved favorite.

Have you read the FAQ[1]? "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something." (Ask and Tell HN posts where people showcase their projects and startups are part of its culture, however.)

HN was originally "Startup News", and a lot of its content is related to startups and entrepreneurialism, but with a hacker flair.

> Nor will I talk about my investigations of whether recent Windows updates have code specifically to destabilise Chrome, or other things that I would've thought of interest to the HN community.

It would have been interesting to read your ideas on this in a blog post. (The site is Hacker News.)

Regarding your question, put more effort in asking and people will put more effort in answering.[2]

> Never mind that I've tried several technical forums and they are all bloody useless.

Have you tried SuperUser[3]?

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#beprecise
[3] http://superuser.com/
"If you truly have a good idea, somebody else is working on it too."

Standard HN cliche number 298,498,229 and nonsense.

I've had several ideas that I can essentially 100% guarantee that no one else was working on. My Ph.D. dissertation was officially judged "new, correct, and significant" -- note the "new". Similarly for each paper of original research I've published. Similarly for the crucial, core idea for the company I'm starting.

Just what is it about original research that HN just cannot understand?
Wikileaks is not Anonymous. Wikileaks proclaimed that these documents would be released in January. It appears that they either handed them off to Anonymous or Anonymous got impatient with Wikileaks' heel dragging and decided to release them itself.
Opera displays a Blank Page, Chrome attempts to play the video with no controls and Firefox tries do download the mp4 file.

What on earth is going on here?

EDIT: it was just taking too damn long. Could be my connection, though.
I share your reservations about the loss of XCode functionality. The verbosity of Obj-C and the Cocoa APIs is mitigated to a large degree by code completion and integrated documentation. Losing that, the visual debugger, and, presumably, the tight integration with Instruments would be a big productivity loss.
My Research Problems for 2011 and Beyond
I mostly agree with your sentiment. I think WoW and Facebook are very similar in function, connecting people socially through software. I don't really think one is any better or worse than the other.

However, I do think something like WoW is a significant artistic achievement as well as a social tool. I really think this artistic product is the "achievement" of WoW.
The account name (steve@mac.com) has been used in a lot of material published by Apple as an example email address, .Mac account, or Apple ID account.
I agree (I am one of them), but there are also lots of people who get into business and start a company for the exact opposite reason: cash out as big and as fast as possible.
Anecdotal experience here, but my father who had a Countrywide home loan before BoA took over has lamented that change since the first day. The big issues for him have been customer service, at Countrywide, the people he talked to were personable and handled things in a timely manner. While dealing with BoA, the people he talked with couldn't wait to get him off the phone, accused him of fault when there was an issue with the bill caused by BoA, and took forever to deal with said issues. He has been trying to get his loan refinanced for 4 months now, but they have a queue, and they only process 8 refinances a month. Makes a lot of sense...

Now this doesn't prove anything towards what Anon is going to release, but it just shows, to me at least, that BoA very likely is not so innocent in all this.
Yeah, I just read this article and I must say the headline is actually refreshingly accurate and non-sensational, which seems to be getting pretty rare in these days of techcrunch style "journalism".
And somehow we think we are masters of the planet. When nature's true forces come to bear there isn't much we have ever built that stands in the way.

Here's to wishing all those that survived a speedy recovery and my condolences to those who know people who didn't make it.
Although a very serious situation, couldn't help but note Paul Kedrosky's observation:

http://twitter.com/#!/pkedrosky/status/46604765890752512