skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite possibly the best idea ever: If someone tells you you have the worst idea ever, don't give up.

You may need to stubbornly prove them wrong, or you may need to listen to them and make some changes. But don't pack it all in and get a job working for the man.
How is that the worst idea ever?

I use Buddy Beacon with Where.app all the time on my iPhone. Probably one of the most useful apps I've used.
Unfortunately doesn't look like it, if you make a mistake you have to reset the dictionary :/
Settings->General->Reset->Keyboard dictionary

Which is kinda a pain if you make a mistake ;)
The quote actually was:

"Out of all the ideas you could build for this platform, this one is quite possibly the worst idea ever."

Sleep.fm probably didn't work on android :P
slep.fm is better than all of the ideas still on the drawing board ;-)
Move to Silicon Valley.

Join this group: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/

Work for a company that has a lot of hackers. (Google and Yahoo are both very good choices.) You want quantity.

Don't go back to school, it's a waste of time and money.
The thing is, Kramer had some decent ideas. Particularly hiring an NYU student as an intern for Kramerica Industries. Easiest way to get a personal assistant ever.
Get a job working at some other startup. You'll get

a) Experience in startups

b) Contacts with all sorts of startuppy people

c) Money

d) Stock, which could be worth a lot someday, if it pans out

e) Freedom and a bunch of contacts of good people recently out of work, if it doesn't.

Also, there are a few non-startup startuppy places. Google and Mozilla rank pretty highly up there. I hear Amazon is pretty good too, though the location isn't as good.

"Startup" conventions are pretty low on intellectual content. Startup School is the only one I'd go to. On the other hand, tech conventions are pretty good: Foocamp/barcamp/superhappydevhouse/pycon/ruby meetups are pretty good. Also, there are a lot of startuppy people in the bay area javascript meetups, if you're in the area. http://javascript.meetup.com/4/

Finally, contests in programming (ICFP, SPOJ, ACM, Topcoder) and math (contest in math modeling, the Putnam), and engineering (DARPA grand challenge, the solar car project, robotics contests) are a good place to find smart, project oriented people with a lot of technical depth, drive, and follow through, though you will often have to sell them on the idea of starting a company.

Good luck!
Update: RIAA Says Muxtape Hosting "Illegal Content"
Actually, I really like this idea, though this implementation might be a bit rough. Making this an iphone app, which would be your alarm clock, might be better than having your laptop next to your bed.

And like youtube there could be top rated wakeup messages and bedtime stories. It could be a passive voicetwitter that helps you in and out of your day.
That's funny, our startup has a 168-hour workweek.

It's admirable that it works for some people (I have read the book, by the way) but the 4-hour workweekers that I've dealt with professionally seem to be out of touch with the industry.
Q1: I would leave them alone for now. Sorry, but unless I know what my relationship is within the group, I would treat them like outsourced work (which means, I would avoid). There's just too many things that can go wrong - they may have gone belly up for a very good reason (ie - they maybe can't read the business trends or have no sense in user interface design).

If I were to do anything, I would help them find contract or consulting work and keep in touch to learn their capabilities - no need to rush into things.

Q2: Again, I would leave them alone, or I would give them the idea to work on (while leaving them alone). This is sounds like a recipe for disaster to me - a group of 4 people being given some work to do by an outsider, and the group of 4 doesn't like the idea enough to sacrifice for it...

If I'm missing some information that would change my views, please feel free to give it.
Surely it's not a million miles away from loopt? I don't see why loopt would be a good idea and this a bad one...
Hire out the designer and use the money to retrain the lisp hackers to do something useful?

I'm guessing that punchlines aren't what you were looking for though. You seem to be looking for a problem (a startup idea) that requires a particular solution (4 x hackers with a lisp and 1 x chilled-out designer). That seems the wrong way around to me. And frankly, if ideas are the easiest thing about a startup, you should worry if you can't come up with your own to be passionate about.
Take some photos and update your blog. ;)
The next new new thing?
Mind Hacks: The fMRI smackdown cometh
Maybe the idea was just ahead of its time. I remember Philip Greenspun publicly humiliating a guy who invented "tagging" back in 1998. "Nobody will ever voluntarily submit metadata! This is the stupidest idea I have ever seen!" 18 months later he sued his own company for the remainder of their cash reserves. Be cautious around old lisp programmers.
Actually, I think the idea isn't terrible.

However, the problem is that the implementation was flawed. Relying on people having solely the Android platform is a mistake. Basing it on the web as well as having a simple implementation over many platforms and having some sort of SMS or MMS integration for non-smart phone users might have got you somewhere. How to make money from it is a different question entirely though.
4HWW is first and foremost a book on marketing. The lesson is on how Ferris is fantastic at self promotion and promoting his snake oil business. The title of the book is nothing more than clever provocative marketing, not a literal recommendation. The hammock and palm trees on the cover are a proven marketing formula that someone has used every few years for ages, for example http://www.lazyway.net. I saw some self improvement book from the sixties with the same graphic.

I read some interview with Ferris a while ago where he revealed that he deliberately went around making semi-hyperbolic, controversial blog posts to draw attention to himself and incidentally his book. He sequentially targeted the online tech community, the health business community, and so forth. It worked well.

The guy is just very, very good at marketing and promotion and is worth studying in that respect. The rest of what he has to say is fairly valid and worth reading (minus the hyperbole), but it can be reasonably reduced to very little. It really boils down to an application of good executive management principles to your own time:

-Measure your productivity such that you're carefully considering meaningful outputs as they relate to personal goals/needs and not "work done."

-Track the real marginal returns on time invested and don't throw hours at a low marginal return: minimize time invested appropriately. Focus on the few high return things you do. Consider dropping altogether the low return things.

-Eliminate activities that waste your time or clutter your mind and break flow, e.g. always-on email. Minimize information inputs to that which truly matters.

-Do a proper analysis on the hourly value of your time, consider opportunity costs, and outsource tasks appropriately.

I think all the salient points in the book fit under these bullets. There's also a lot of fluff about international travel and so forth. As I say, the book has merit and is worth a quick read, but the main thing to take away from Tim Ferris is how far good marketing can take you.
Use the pref that prevents sites from disabling your right click, and use right click paste to paste it in.

That also bypasses any onKeyPress validation.

Or linux, where you can middle-click to paste.
I made my point badly. I was playing off the fact that the comment I was replying too didn't have much substance other than "This article sucks." yet the author felt it necessary to fluff it up with some vacuous text for a few lines. Which is even more humorous when his main contention with the article is that supposedly it could have been 90% shorter.
Maybe he's inadvertently trying to motivate you... personally, the more i hear the word "no", the more I'm inclined to go after something. Use it as motivation.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard this too. Just realize it only takes one "yes"... or whatever you're looking for to make it happen.
Why haven't I found this site before? He's written some great essays.

Has anyone read The Design of Everyday Things?? Worth reading?
I don't remember the name of the supplement business, but I did find the site at one point. It was total snake oil bullshit. He was even selling the same thing as two brands, one to "sharpen your mind" and the other to "focus your athletic strength", or something like that.

The other thing is, in the book he plainly admits he worked very long hours while building the business. It was only once it was an established concern that it was possible to remove himself from the picture so much. Well no shit, owners of successful businesses don't need to work all that hard. Who knew? The trick is building the business.
Developerlife - The Blog » New Android SDK, and handset
He wasn't comparing the USA/West Indies/Britain to West Africa. He was asking why USA/West Indies/Britain/West Africa do so much better than Brazil and other non-anglophone countries.
Developerlife - The Blog » Cool laptops
Somewhere, someone is dreaming up a social coffee table book about coffee tables.
ebb version 0.3 release (fast, rack-based server)
Httpfuse - interesting way of sharing links
Realistic face scanning techniques
does MADD back up the claim that it will increase drunk driving with any hard data?
Speaking of carrots and cancer and Jobs, when it came out that he had cancer I realized a lot of celebrity vegetarians have had cancer.
Pretty much anyone or anything somewhere at the top of the food chain for an extended period of time.
Ask HN: Netbooks for hacking and development?
So I'd like to use my AA1 for a little more than web surfing and AIM. VI, Emacs and the standard command line tools allow for fairly easy hacking in minimal space, but jeeze, I never thought I'd get so lost in that tiny screen. I actually thought I would be less distracted on this thing.

Does anyone have thoughts on developing in such a small space?
NSF and the Birth of the Internet 
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/index.jsp
I have a solution- Don't buy DRM'd content. Ever. And if you do, pirate a usable copy. I still prefer not buying it in the first place, as I don't want to support the notion of DRM.
Leadership Lessons From the Political Scene
How much? I want to hack it.
I cant help but to wonder if this author knows what he is talking about. "Mac Vs. PC??? Does he not realize that Mac (Apple Macintosh) is a brand of PC (Personal Computer)?
Increase Productivity in Windows Using Virtual Desktops
PC Gaming hits $10.7 Billion in Revenues Worldwide
Well, I lived in West Africa for many years, so I believe my opinion is based on fact. Let me address some of things you bring up:

- West Africa maybe huge, but it's not diverse. The entire western coast of Africa is one of the few places in the world where a major ocean runs on the east-west line and not on the north-south line. What this means geographically is that the coast has almost the same temperature and almost the same geography. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, they all have almost identical landscape.

- West African warfare has always been with machetes. West Africans use bows and arrows, but the arrows are very small, and the bows have a different form from the european bows. The bows are smaller and lot more arched. The arrows have also been traditionally poisoned tipped.

- You can't fight a war using a canoe in a West African river. The vegetation is too thick for this to make any sense.

- Calvary? Are you kidding me? Horses are the worst form of transportation in a rain forest.

- Shields? No. Maybe light shields, but I'd find that a bit suprisng, because I've never seen any evidence of shield use in West Africa in all my travels. Think about it - what use is a shield? A shield is useful against sword-fighters or javelin throwsers, but it's pointless in very close range. And jungle warfare is either sneak-attack (like shooting poison arrows) or it's close range fighting

- Machetes have long been the weapon of choice in West Africa for as long as I know, there is a long tradition of sheath making, there are many rituals involving machetes. Now, IF you can prove that the weapon of choice for West Africans is not the machete, then back it up with links

- The people sold into slavery were from a wide variety of places, but usually from the rain forest. If you wish to read some anectdodes about this, then please read the book by Mungo Park

West Africa is a special interest of mine, so if you really feel that you are in posession of facts that are more accurate than mine, then please do back it up.

If I am wrong, I will gratefully admit it, because it will give me the opportunity to learn something new.
Of course it will, since the password is stored as a string. It may be a random set of 0-9a-f, but a brute force attack will still only need to use those characters. Compare that to a password of the same character length using any possible characters and you can see that it is clearly weaker.
What about doping? Another throwaway idea: racism still exists, so the blacker somebody looks, the more likely they'll have to resort to desperate means like allowing dangerous medical experiments on their bodies (doping) to still have some success in society. (I am not claiming this is the explanation, just want to point out another possible explanation).
Yes, but you should still take the SAME basic security precautions on both platforms. And if you do so, you are probably just as safe on Vista, and maybe safer. The biggest security risk on the MAC is a false sense of security. I don't know how many people have told me, "I have a Mac, I can't possibly get anything bad!"
Six Rules for Rewriting
The giant oil bladder wasn't a bad idea -- the test was flawed.
hire one more guy and make a human pyramid
I sure think it should be lowered.

I went to UCSD, and groups of college students regularly made the trip to Tijuana, where the drinking age is 18. I read about some parents who wanted TJ to raise its drinking age to prevent this. Amazing. Yeah, Mexico should not be like France, Italy, Spain, Canada, England, Ireland, South Korea, or pretty much 95% of the civilized world. The US has decided drinking ages should be 2-3 years higher than everywhere else in the world, so dammit, anyone who borders us needs to change! Typical.

As for binge drinking... well, yeah, I did a ton of that as a US-based college student. I spent a year abroad in Ireland, and honestly, and we did a fair amount of binge drinking there too, but pub culture does encourage conversation and music over heavy drinking, so 18 year olds did at least have a path toward more responsible drinking.

The lowest incidence of binge drinking I've seen so far was in France, where I lived when I was 13 (though I looked older than my age). Cafe owners would typically go ahead and serve me a beer if I asked for one. Technically I think the drinking age there is 16. They also let me into bars provided I was there to watch a sporting event but bars were a little more serious (and they definitely wouldn't serve spirits to a kid). The shopkeepers would let kids buy wine if they knew it was for the parents (ie., the parents had sent the kids out to buy groceries). It really was a different world, much more relaxed about the rules.

The funny thing was, I was all ready to take advantage of the lenient rules, but the kids on the beach (this was in the south of France) were essentially uninterested in binge drinking. They were perplexed, and slightly amused with my interest. But once I discovered there were no takers, I lost interest myself (what am I going to do, go get tanked by myself?). So I had a beer or two as a novelty, and that was it.

The thing that irritates me so much about MADD is that they won't just let it be a state-by-state decision. I see absolutely no reason why voters in Utah should have the slightest say over the drinking age in Louisiana. Yes, "State's rights" have been used as a cover for severe civil rights violations, but if ever there was a situation where one state should butt out of another's business, this is it.
my htc dash, t-mobile phone, has a nice keyboard and with opera mini (free) it displays full web pages with a zoom ability. the phones battery life is about 6 solid hard use internet hours, not bad
I live in Ontario, Canada, where the drinking age is 19. The neighbouring province of Quebec has a drinking age of 18.

The main problems I hear of are on the edges of legality. For example, 18-year-olds from Ottawa, ON cross the border to Hull, QC, where they can get into bars. And, of course, as with anywhere else, there's binge drinking of newly of-age teens.

The worst problems happen when underage kids drink themselves to the point of alcohol poisoning, then don't get medical help because they're worried about getting in trouble.

Basically, my opinion is that the drinking age should be set to the point where there's a medical reason for it not to be any lower. I'm not sure exactly where this is, but 18 is probably a good number. I don't think that you can count on males being finished developing at 17.
It's not a bad idea. It's a good idea. Seriously. In a year, they will sell it for a few hundred thousands and you'll not be happy.
I've seen Nivi from VentureHacks mention "Bargaining for Advantage" a couple of times - more notable occasion was as this book review: http://venturehacks.com/articles/bargaining-for-advantage

It's quite high up on my current list of "Books to read".
Plan A: Lived 10 years in Miami. Hosted dinners, worked on dozens of projects, ran open source projects, etc. Real Hackers met: 2, maybe 3.

Plan B: Moved to SF, worked at a trendy startup. Real Hackers met: are you kidding? I pass 12 of them on the bus every day.
honestly your best bet is freelance work , that could perhaps turn into a saas model...
I always found it strange this link between drink driving and the drinking age. To me it reads as follows: "We can't let people drink until they're 21, cause they'll drive drunk". Okay, but what happens at 21? You're so much more mature at 21 that you'll not drink drive? Once you're 21 it's okay to drink drive?

What's really odd is that attitudes to drink driving in the US are so much more lax than other western countries, _despite_ the 21 age limit. Maybe the work MADD should be focusing on is how to change the general attitude to drink driving, as opposed to pursuing their prohibitionist agenda?

Just my 2¢
That is by definition a very niche problem.

Apart from running each other's proprietary browsers, there is no reason not to make any browser with enough of a following to determine machine choice, available on any platform.

Normally, the reason an 'app of choice' wouldn't be available is obscurity. The point here is that the only app that matters now is the browser & maybe another handful.

Fewer chances for an obscure killer app to kill the sale because all your obscure apps are online. If all you need to do is make sure that all important browsers are available on your platform, it's doable even if it's chasing down browsers with less then .01% of users.
Well, it would go great lengths to control the population.

If someone can come up with a much better way to combat drunk driving, I'm all for lowering the drinking age. A combination eye-scanner/breathilyzer to start the car might do the trick.
Bay Area Olympic viewership tumbles - Internet to blame?
An equally difficult question: How do you meet a hacker to start a startup with if you ARE in college? ;-)
Microsoft suggests you might want to bid on "nude female midgets" to attract new customers
Ah you guys. FuzzyShot is not solving a problem, it's creating a problem. I never take photos with my mobile phone because I have to blog about it.

Your technology is good, your idea is good, but you positioning is bad. You see, you think people want to blog, but you are forgetting the motivation. People don't want to blog, people want to be heard or want to be seen.

Now, let me give you an idea that is almost like yours, but with the correct positioning:

Imagine there is a big-ass concert happening in town. Now, this is where everyone has their camera with them, and they are taking photos with their cameras. Now, THAT is a position for your application. When I take my photos of Kenny Rogers or whoever, then I want everyone to know that I got a photo with Kenny. So NOW I want to share.

So you see, in your case I have never wanted to blog about stuff I see on the street. But in the second case, I actually want to post photos of the concert, but it's not just easy to do it.

If I were your marketing guy, I'd rebrand as this:

Where were you? Send your photos in!

People take photos of their concerts or whereever they were, and it all gets dumped into a visually very attractive group collage of that concert. Something that looks like a poster, but with everyones photos just mashed together.

And there is your first monetization idea right there - sell posters of people in their own concerts, but with themselves inside.

And it's easy to make money, because you focus on people going to concerts and events, so you can make money by affiliating with a ticket seller.

The problem you have is that you make a proposition to me that sounds like pain. You write on your site: Blog with mobile phone, and I'm thinking:

1. I have to sign up
2. I have to download and install their app
3. I have to figure out how to send photos
4. I have to frickin blog
5. I have to invite everyone to join this damn blog I have which will be filled with a bunch of boring photos

It's pain. If I were already a photo blogger, maybe your tool would make sense, but for me, it has zero compel.

Position correct, and position in a simpler manner. Think of the twitter slogan.
As someone barely older than 21, I think the statement "There isn't that much difference in maturity between 21 and 18" is the most stupid thing I have heard. I was most definitely less mature at 18 than I was at 21.

That said, I think people are missing the point - there are two "drinking ages" in the United States. 21 is the age at which you can socially drink with no hesitation and purchase alcohol. However, the age at which you can clandestinely drink alcohol that others have purchased is much younger. At that younger age, you're never quite sure when your next opportunity to drink will come or if the tap will simply run dry - akin to the way cookies were rationed out to many of us as children. Somehow, having the ability to go to the store and eat as many cookies as I want whenever I want has lost it's appeal.

It's a combination of maturity and access that changes one's behavior and I really think that we need for groups on both sides to stop throwing around casual theories and actually figure out how we can have people have more fun with less risk - wow, what a concept! But I guess when I become less idealistic that we can actually create better solutions, I'm going to have to pick one of the stupid sides and become ignorant like them. I'm glad that day isn't today.
You might be right, but it's a little hard to agree with a one word statement.
Start an interesting project.
Quite a controversial author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer
Seconded. I've met many people from meetups (from meetup.com or other places) that have the experience and hunger to start new projects.
I went to one of these, so i think i know about it.
I think it creates another kind of establishment, and not a very likeable one at that. It's very much like the Ivy leagues colleges in the US. People are not out of school that they are already so very certain of their own worth, it's despicable.