skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already.

There is such a thing as being the first to give a real physical (or commercial) form to an idea, though.
How about fixing the domain fuckfest we have today?

Most of these ideas will end up with stupid names like lulzdatr.com or bizzwarezz.com
The Five Best Firebug Extensions
Domino Domino Logic (vid)
Why are mouse sensors in the middle of the mouse?
Sigh, I had really hoped we had gotten past this Coldfusion bashing. CF has an easy barrier to entry so there's a mix of code from poor to excellent.

Lots of open source people bash CF because it's a commercial product. Well in October that's about to change in a big way.

Railo will become the newest member of the JBoss project. There will now be a version of CFML with an LPGL2 license.
PG always celebrates time to market and CFML will quite simply get a startup there faster.
Crib Sheet: 15 Sites to Cut Your Startup Operating Costs
Learn Squeak Smalltalk with a few videos
I'm passionate about online learning. I like James Burke's knowledge web idea [http://www.k-web.org/], but I'm not terribly optimistic about their approach/implementation.

The idea is to make a network of knowledge which enables self-directed learning. Could incorporate tests/games, dependencies (to learn x, you need to learn y, or even complete a subgame), external references for further reading, and possibly a lot more. A great feature would be systems to allow collaboration or lightweight teaching among learners (chat/forums/etc).

With a bit of thought it may be possible to make a framework into which volunteers add a lot of the content, though editors/quality control would likely be necessary.

If I built it, I'd be inclined to ignore existing public educational systems and start from scratch, but if it hooked into them it may help growth.
Can Machines Think? Interaction and Perspective Taking with Robots Investigated via fMRI
plus there is open office as an offline alternative.

when better is free, why choose windows?
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price
It's not scalable because the market isn't that big. Too far up the food chain.

Succesful startups: thousands, if not millions.

Startups for startups: B2B, or YCombinator, or Techcrunch.

Startups for startups for startups: can't think of any. These needs are already served by the B2B companies. At this stage, the ecosystem is small and covers itself.

The market just gets too small at a certain point, but going meta can work.
Well, okay, I will of course concede that there were personal computers before the Apple II (although at the time it came out, the Apple I was probably the closest thing to a working computer, as opposed to a kit that you could use to build a working computer, that you could get)

But Popular Electronics readers or not, I still think it's accurate to say that "the market" for PC's did not exist before Apple. The post I was replying to was arguing about whether Apple or Microsoft was more like Henry Ford. I think it's also fair to say that the market for cars in the US did not exist before the Model-T, despite the fact that there were several cars sold before it, all of which were unreliable, extraordinarily expensive, and used only by hobbyists - just like pre-Apple I (and to a lesser extent pre-Apple II) computers.
I won't dispute your results, but those alone are insufficient evidence to suggest any correlation between languages and the ability to develop secure applications. It's a huge leap to say that ApplicationX, developed in Blub++, has more bugs than some completely different application developed in another language, therefore Blub++ is an insecure language.

More likely, the correlation is between security and a number of factors far from choice of language, such as developer experience, diversity of the development team, budget, etc.

Based on my own experience, I've seen that many CF developers are typically less experienced and work in smaller shops so those results aren't the least bit surprising. It's important to keep in mind that they say far more about the developers than the language the application was developed in.
Five Ways Technology Has Changed the Olympics
When the Summer Olympics kick off in Beijing next month, they will be very different from the Olympics held eight or even four years ago. From weather control to laser timing devices, technology is having an impact on the Olympics in a profound way.
I've come to value structuring an argument so that it mimics the process of reaching the conclusion.

For example, I might write an essay on gender. When I start, I might think that there are two genders: male and female. By the end, I might have concluded that gender is meaningless. If I stopped there, my essay would be: gender is meaningless because a, b and c.

However, I find it more interesting to rewrite and end up with a journey through my abandoned conclusions. This allows the reader to reason along with me as they read, thus strengthening my conclusion. For example:

1. There are two genders: male and female because a and b.

2. a and b are faulty because c and d. Gender as a continuum between male and female fits with c and d.

3. c and d are unsound because e and f and g. Gender as a vector of n points on n continuums might work.

4. ...
sigh just use parametrized sql statements. It's really really really not rocket science. If your language/framework doesn't support them, don't use that language/framework.
I agree, what I offered up hit several points on the list. I think it more comes down to who you are. Like the people behind YouOS.com (http://www.youos.com/html/static/team.html) are from MIT, CalTech, Stanford. I can't compete with that, only they gave up and I haven't.
Because it's vi, not vim.
Yeah, I think you guys have something good in that area, I was surprised you didn't get an interview. Also, an open source product has come out in the last free months that unintentionally solves #2.
hi pg - we are already on version 2.0 (already have a subscriber base through version 1.0) - the thing is the dev team is here in the Philippines - our founder is in suburban Detroit - any suggestions? we have a small time window of less than 45 days - to make this happen - I'd be happy to share the details via email.
Startups are just an emerging niche. If you look at it that way, the metaness is irrelevant.

Also, such a startup would be guaranteed to have an intimate understanding of the problems they are trying to solve!
In a startup, isn't "IT dept" just another name for "technical co-founder"?
List of Firebug Extensions
Marketability.

Choose the one for which you either: know particular people that will be very interested in it and will definitely use it, or have a very good strategy for getting lots of people to use it.
I cannot address complaints about your imagined concept of universal health care. Perhaps next time you'll respond to my post, rather than your imagination.

Such methods as training doctors less and allowing specialization earlier, eliminating situations where doctors are currently required, tracking and publishing doctors' success rates, allowing pharmacists to write prescriptions, etc. all would reduce doctors' income and weaken the medical school monopoly. Many more students would enter medicine since, while it wouldn't pay as much, it would pay well, and the requirements and time needed to enter the field would be significantly reduced.

And please read
http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/07110?gko=564...

Scroll down and read especially "Redefining Competition" about Porter and Teisberg's ideas.
You are right... up to a point.

History has shown us that the progression of science isn't made by giants standing on the shoulders of giants as much as midgets standing on the toes of midgets.

Newtons, Einsteins and the like don't come along too often. And 99.9% of anything too new (as you put it) is likely also wrong. And when something too new does manage to pass through the filter and (god forbid) become fashionable we're in serious trouble. Just take a look at String "Theory" decades of work by arguably some of the best brains in the world and absolutely nothing significant to show for it.

Now, don't get me wrong. The review process is far from perfect, and just the reviewer selection process can have a lot of influence (at least until an automatic method is adopted say, like http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0605112). However, I don't think making the reviews public would improve anything. In fact, it would probably make it worse by conditioning (directly or indirectly) your career progression by the "yes-man" reviews you give. The reason reviewers are anonymous is to prevent undo pressure from being exerted on them, and to give them the privacy necessary for them to be completely honest.
Wow... The amount of hardware required for that application is just horrifying...

I'm really not sure what to think of this. I know Ruby isn't a speed demon, but 25 servers to serve up a few hundred images per second is just insane. These articles about scaling Ruby/Rails apps remind me a bit of those old Java/EJB/SuperEnterpriseEdition/TimeSink hello world examples that took 80+ lines of code... only with hardware.

I'm not a big Ruby fan, but I have a hard time believing that this is representative of the experience one could expect to have scaling a Ruby application. Can anyone here share some personal experience? All that seems to be out there is the typical Twitter bashing kind of stuff.

By the way, I think this is the article the blog refers to: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/06/web-scalability.html
Ask YC: Startup using Google App Engine?
Hi guys,
I a have an idea for a startup, and I am deciding on which technologies to use. I noticed that Google app engine is probably the easiest way to get something out of the ground quickly.

Do you see reasons why a startup wouldn't be successful using Gapp engine? The main issue I see is the lack of proper database layer (only Gdata store), but do you think this is something that desqualifies Gapp engine?

I would be glad to hear your comments.
I haven't used App Engine, but the BigTable thing looks pretty cool and I think a lot of us are starting to realize that SQL relational databases aren't very good for a lot of the things we do. That said, I think the main concern is lock in. The question I'd be asking is how easy is it to get an established application off App Engine.
An idea for new news:

Start with the reddit concept: users submit and vote on links to articles, blog posts and so forth.

Then, allow users to tag each link (or otherwise add metadata), and vote on the relevence of the story to the tag. Also allow users to vote on the trustworthiness of each link and/or each source or author. Could also allow users to vote on other users, to get networks of trust.

Then you just take all that data and use it to generate personalised news, or whatever else you want.

I also like Adrian Holovaty's ideas about a data-oriented approach to news: [http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2006/09/06/0307/] [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_future_o...]
Very true (1359 myself). I abandoned it when it gave up any pretense of being "stuff that matters" became "controversy for the sake of driving page views". The quality of comments there now is only one notch above YouTube.

Oh, and Slashdot PT Cruiser. 'Nuff said.
GLASS: Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk
I am not sure how Nedit qualifies either.
Thats because .com is the king of the internet. The users know dot coms, the term is a mainstream one. And frankly the whole company name doesn't really matter, what does yahoo have to do with search? What does eBay have to do with auctions? Just get some creativity and come up with a word that sounds like a real word and you'll be fine.
This should give everyone a boost in coming up with good products. Thanks guys.
It is a very cool feature, but can you think of a sensible use for it on a machine that can run the entire screen in high resolution and full colour?
I believe that statement (the first half, anyway) is simply not true. X11 is capable of displaying different windows at different color depths. Look at the "int depth" parameter to XCreateWindow, or run xwininfo(1) and check out the "Depth:" line.

Today I suspect it's not used much, if at all. When you've got a 256MB video card, what's a few extra bytes? Modern graphics cards might not even support this.

But I believe that 15 or 20 years ago, this feature actually did get used. You'd have a depth=24 root window, and a depth=4 (say) hardware overlay for things like the mouse cursor and popup menus, because they didn't really need a lot of colors, and you don't want to redraw your expensive graphics every time you moved the mouse.

Of course, everybody thought that dealing with hardware overlays and custom colormaps everywhere was a royal pain for application developers (and it was), so we came up with higher-level toolkits like GTK+ which make it really easy to splat up a window without caring about this, and it'll just use depth=24 (or whatever you've got) everywhere, and we've got tons of video memory so nobody cares anyway.

I'm not saying X11 was particularly good at this, but it did support this particular feature.
Regarding #27, is there anyone who is working on image processing for digital cameras?
Surely this depends entirely on what data you want to store and how you want to query it?

Your question is meaningless without that.
If anything, that's demotivation, at least for real hackers. Plenty of Fish is popular because of marketing/SEO techniques and throwing successively larger iron at traffic, not because Markus Frind was a technical genius with a clever idea. Very different path to profitability than most of us want to take, I think.
How Cybercriminals Steal Money
i thought it was some sort of mathematical sorting mechanism
Matrix restarted...
Rates differ according to definition. It's clear that YouTube commenters aren't illiterate in the sense of total inability to read; they're typing, after all.

'Functional illiteracy' encompasses people who can read and write, but not with the fluency required to function in society, for instance, when understanding and completing a job application.

Let's face it though; do you really think you live in a society where >95% of the population can read and write fluently? Educated people tend to live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by others like them, but YouTube tells a different story.
It's not very likely that the 27 million requests per day was divided entirely evenly over the 24 hours. Assuming lows and highs, those requests could well exceed 1000 requests /sec at peak times.

The data is really open to interpretation, which would allow you to draw any conclusion from it, unless a more detailed breakdown of lows/highs was provided.
I'm using GAE (for a blog and a wiki with basic functionalities) and was surprised to like to play with the BigTables.

I don't think you should care for a startup. The only thing I'm missing is the use of external apps like LaTeX to build png images from math formulas.
I'm torn...It's nice to have that much money because then you can take it and create other better things. But you first have to build something sleazy :-/
>I think calculating the optimal trade is a NP complete problem. Haven't checked this now, though

If you define the optimal trade as the trade involving as many people as possible, then the problem is NP-complete (it solves DIRECTED HAMILTONIAN CIRCUIT). There are good heuristics for solving this problem, though, so in most cases it won't matter.
Taking the other side for a moment, I think things like EC2 and S3 could help mitigate some of the costs of scaling RoR apps like this. Thought out prior to making rash decisions like buying dedicated servers from Joyent at a high cost, you could possibly save your company quite a bit of cash.

However, I do agree that Ruby (and Rails) needs to get its act together. Sure, its never going to be the best, but the ease of development and deployment and (etc.) makes it very, very hard to turn down.

BTW: 25 servers to service up to 400 images per second is inaccurate. It only took them 8 asset servers to serve that amount of images. Even so, that is pretty ridiculous. I would have to say that they didn't spend time optimizing their asset servers, or anything else other than Ruby. I think it could be done better.
Thanks for the clarification. When you say "you can change the sponsoring employer any time", how complicated is that process? How long does it take?
Not sure what you mean by lack of proper database layer. The AppEngine datastore is a different beast than the usual SQL relational database, but it still has reasonable queries, sorts, etc. (Better than Amazon's simple DB IMHO.)

Main issues for a startup using AppEngine:

1) Quotas. Until they let you pay-as-you-go, AppEngine isn't really production ready. There are file # limits and quotas you may trip, depending on your target market. Google says they'll open things up by the end of this year.

2) Processing issues. AppEngine isn't a good platform for CPU-intensive processing apps. Transcoding videos, for example, is kind of a no-brainer for Amazon EC2 versus AppEngine. I think the AppEngine team is working on background processing systems but nothing is public yet.

3) HTTPS. There's none right now. You can use Google authentication, so that's one workaround but this is a deal-breaker for a number of possible apps.

These are the main ones that jump out at me. On the positive side, I think it's awesome to outsource significant infrastructure issues (servers, DB) to Google. I've got too much to code as is, so I'd much rather delegate the chunks I'm not as competent or interested in.

I'm not as concerned about lock-in, although I understand how others may take a different viewpoint. Also, tethering yourself to Google may have some repercussions if you are trying to get acquired by one of their competitors. (But I think you should just worry about your business first and not the exit strategy.)
Search engine that concentrates on design? What that supposed to mean?
What about storage limitations?
Well, not meaningless. If the answer were a big 'NO', then the question would be just fine, even if it's missing important details.

You're right that the details count, though:-)
Let's see, 12 of the machines are database and web server machines. Here's a hint--ruby doesn't make you need particularly more or less web servers or mysql machines. The fact that the author bemoans this betrays that he doesn't especially understand what he's talking about.

They are serving around 3/4 of a billion page views a month. That's billion with a B. So yeah, I'd give them a slap on the back for that. Would it be cooler if they needed 9 app servers instead of 13--sure, but come on.
I think the open source textbook projects in the works might be something that could propel an idea like this forward.

Personally, I find the lack of high quality videos about physics, mathematics, and computer science quite irritating. When I do manage to have some free time, I like to watch videos, such as those from Nova. Unfortunately, one can't find many free versions on the internet.
I disagree passionately. I complete agree that the climate is changing. It could have devestating effects, but the idea that it's caused by us, is not backed up by evidence IMHO.

There is a whole raft of evidence showing that co2 is released because the earth is hotter. There's evidence to show the 'green house effect' doesn't really do much. There's evidence to show direct correlation between sunspots, and the temperature on earth.

To label people 'denialists' and 'intelectually lazy' is offensive. Of course we shouldn't use so much oil. We should be more efficient. But the reasons for blaming humanity for global warming are shady. More to do with money and power, and oppressing the third world.

The "Global warming is caused by man" theory has turned into a religion instead of actually looking at the latest available evidence to make an informed decision. that is intelectually lazy.
That's true, but I hear what mechanical_fish is saying, too. I suffer from much the same problem: many elements on the list are things which I have thought about to an extent that I've worked out every single step needed to make them work. The problem is, I haven't the time to pursue everything I would like to.

Let's take the "simplified browsing" problem, for example. I worked phone technical support for an internet service provider for a while, and it wasn't long before I saw the need for exactly such a thing. But, it runs deeper than just web browsing and email: there is a huge, absolutely massive number of people out there that need a simpler computer. They don't understand things like firewalls and security, and aren't inclined to ever understand them.

The solution? Take a Linux distribution and hack it heavily; simplify the desktop layout, hide all the settings, and set it up so that immediately after booting, a full-screen web browser appears. The web browser defaults to a very simplified portal page; the user logs in to their "computer" exactly once (on the portal page), and from there they have access to simplified email (which, for example, doesn't have things called "Reply to All"), chat, word processing, and other services.

Thing is, the previous services that have tried to create such a thing have done it wrong; they tried to release their own computer, hardware and all. That doesn't work, at least not now. This would work though because you could sell a CD which would make the installation process a breeze. You wouldn't have a huge initial development cost for the operating system; a good Linux hacker could probably make the necessary changes very quickly.

After, say, 6 months of development by a few people, and with the aid of a crack marketing team, you could start distributing copies of this thing for around $75. You'd be tapping in to an under-served market not just of senior citizens but of every average family that's frustrated at using their computer.

You could even build in a secure remote desktop protocol for the operating system, and make tech support -- if you wanted to offer it -- the easiest it's ever been.

So, there ya go. Probably a hundred-million-dollar idea, with most of the framework. Lots more details, too many to list here.

Got time to build it?
I understand why Facebook might want to claim this in public, but don't call people 'fabricator', okay? You never know when someone might just have conclusive evidence that proves you wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I admire Facebook for making Thrift public, and it was a great thing for the internet. It was probably foolish of me to focus on the lineage of the thing.
inertia? ignorance? distrust?

There are many reasons. Very few corporate P&L holders know much about software, the options, alternatives, benefits, actual TCO numbers, roadmaps, specific business need in terms of software requirements and so on.

In my experience, inertia is the biggie. "We've always done it this way", "we've invested $XXXXXXX in this", "it's all our people know" etc etc.

It's undoubtedly frustrating, but I have found it to be a useful reality check that in the real world, the vast majority of people do not enjoy (?) the same perspective as us on technology.
The main lock-in issue to me is the datastore. If you are worried about lock-in, you could try to use vanilla Django as much as possible. I think it's likely that an opensource datastore equivalent will appear, or at least something that's close enough like HBase or Hypertable.
I don't know. I was just saying that if you want to beat Google, that's their weak spot. Or at least a big one.

Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.