skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great Idea. I ran a page on an old site of mine: "Hot Startup Jobs" and regularly posted the job vacancies from recently funded startups in Israel. It was a very popular page, but doing everything manually: tracking what's being funded, copying and pasting the jobs, the companies not cooperating/adding and the users not giving anything back -- it was too draining.

Tips: have an RSS feed on search results. For companies, show date of last funding round, preferably with a link to its funding announcement and its jobs page.
To make a go of that kind of thing in a startup though, you'd have to make sure that it's something Google won't or can't execute on, something I'm not sure I would bet on.

Part of the idea of 'disruptive technologies' is that they aren't incremental improvements that the current leaders will just copy, but big changes that get ignored by the current leaders.
And what about hardware issues? The bezel that gets in the way. The slow processor. The pressure sensitive (vs. capacitive) screen.

The idea of a completely open cell phone platform is nice in theory, but based on what I saw in this video they're going to have a hard time getting a critical mass of users/developers to shell out $400 for it and actually improve the thing.
There is definitely market potential, as the current approach is very manual, errorprone and not in time and our solution will save the customer lot's of time (which means money). I would say it's more complicated to sell a car to a customer coming to your store, than selling this.

As for the discrepancy in salaries, I earned twice as much as him when I was working. If I would have started at the same time he has started, I would be able to invest more than twice as much I'm investing now without having less on my bank account now.
This must be worth something.
If you wan to mock someone why not mock the original post that's asking for new economic models?
30. Startups for startups.

I think Y Combinator doesn't take its model far enough. What I'd like to see could be called "Human Resource Investment"- investing in people, not startups per se. This would be structured as a debt and/or equity deal. You find a talented person, and invest in them using money, technology, education, and social resources. Then you charge a high interest rate (for the reliable people), or make money off of a % of all their future income (for the high risk types) for the next 30 years or whatever (in addition to the principle).

The advantage to the investee that this has over credit card debt and other forms of debt is that you don't require anyone to make debt payments until they are making over a certain $ figure per year. This way nobody has to worry about going bankrupt, becoming poor, or social shame. They also get access to major institutional support, which is difficult for people to get (and social/institutional support is one of the few things people are generally missing in their lives, if they don't go to church). No longer do the poor, inexperienced, young- but energetic and talented- types need to scrap for everything.

The advantage to Human Resource Investment, Inc., is that even if there is a high rate of delinquency, just a few Zuckerbergs and Grahams and you make a fortune. You also can make money off of them, even if they fail a few times, since it's a long-term contract, rather than a project contract. This way other VC firms don't make money off of Y Combinator having educated someone with a failed venture, and then they do another, successful startup with Sequoia or whomever.

You also have access to a large pool of talented people with whom you have a good relationship, and you've already evaluated, who would make good potential hires for startups or whatever other companies you are affiliated with. If HRI were savvy enough, you could lock up most of the available talent the VC world relies on, before anyone is taking a percentage of the money they're going to eventually make.

Think of it as government for profit- you choose the people to invest in, helping them enormously (as government services are supposed to do) and you make a profit with "taxes". Given that governments have to invest in everyone, and are inefficient to boot, yet still roughly break even, I see no reason why a private company couldn't do the same thing, but focus on talented people, do a good job of it, and make a nice profit.

I've done the math before, and the conservative estimates I used worked out to a very handsome profit. But it gets complicated, and it depends very much on the assumptions that are made. If anyone wants an example, I'll be happy to provide it.
2. Simplified browsing.

I got nothing on this, since I'm not in the target market. Btw, my pet theory is that smart people will have the best luck inventing commercially successful solutions, if they focus on jobs and activities that hardly any smart people do. Like, bagging groceries, and data entry. I've done both of those, and I had plenty of germinal ideas on how they could be improved or automated.

The corollary to this would be that it's hard to be a big new success in Web 2.0. Tons of smart people are avid Internet users, and they're interested in that. Unless you're towards the apex of that group, coming up with a market-shaking new Web 2.0 idea will be tough. This is also the reason I left quant finance- given how many smart people were competing with me, I could much more easily invent something useful for other people (which feels better and is less stressful), and make a fortune that way.

But here's the browsing idea I'd like (I don't know if this has been proposed already- I hope it's technically feasible): cluster links. This is where you click on a link, and it opens a whole lot of links at the same time. Like, a link to open all the links on the front page of Hacker News in new tabs or new windows. Or all the links in one of PG's articles. Or a link which opens all the links from the bibliography of an article. Or a link which opens Google's top 20 search results.

For someone with a lot of bandwidth, and not listening to music online, and browsing from home, automatically opening 30 windows at once is not going to cause any problems- just close whichever ones look uninteresting. I open an awful lot of links every day, and my fingers get tired. Make it easy for me.

If there was some sort of a risk (like a spam link that has 200 links), make it so a warning window opens if, say, more than 40 windows would open (or a number chosen by the user)- allowing the user to individually decline or accept links, or give a batch OK/reject to all of them.

Corollary: this might be a useful idea in, like, software help searches. A lot of times it's hard to tell which help page would be useful when I do a keyword search- why not be able to open all the results at once? I hate wasting time making a decision about "is this worth opening or not?" when usually it would be easier to make that decision when it's already open. If the summary is so great, put it at the top of each opened page.
He said a 65:35 deal was ok for him.

If it turns out we are going in different directions, I think I'm going to have a big head start on him.
Business idea 1 is undoable for him. Business idea 2 will be possible to do for him, as the software is a very much simplified version of business idea 1 with less features.

I already completed nearly all of the software, so I could start much earlier than he does. (He would have to get someone creating the software for him). If he decides not to accept, he probably would also ahve to leave the incubator which would also leave a negative annotation on him. (also if we would be both be selling the same thing)
But I don't think it will come to this and it would also not be in my interest or his.

I haven't done anything from protecting my idea. (no NDA...)
8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear.

This problem falls under the classification of "critical mass" problems. I think any solution that works for one of these types of problems, is likely to work for the others. "Critical mass" is when the problem is not in coming up with a good alternative, the problem is that having a critical mass of users for your solution is going to be an important part of the value you offer to your customers.

I've never been able to flesh this out enough to the point where I was sure I had a solution that would definitely work. But here's what I came up with so far: make a website, and a company, whose focus is solely on building critical masses of users for those "new alternatives". It would consist entirely of methods and social software that could be used to build critical mass.

For example, users could state how many other users would need to be using a new service, before they would try it. Or how many of their friends were doing it. Then, you inform them when those numbers are reached- when the 100th user is there, the 1000th user, etc. (whatever they named), the third user after they posted, etc. Ideally, you would have enough people who've registered their herd-desire, that you could set off a chain reaction from 0 to the number needed for viability.

Unfortunately, that probably wouldn't work for anything but what attracts the most savvy users. I think you might have to pay people to form flash mobs. I.e. people go hang out on the website, and they get a notice of "if you're interested, go to this dating site and fill out a profile, and earn $5. Each other new user you find earns $1 for you". Especially the more social it is, the more it would work to have a flash mob thing going on, where there's only one opportunity at a time. Then you hope that a temporary critical mass sustains itself- that if it's good enough, people will stick around and the rest of the nuclear reaction can complete itself.

To some extent, what I'm proposing is the Mechanical Turk thing Amazon does, but for user bases. And you'd probably have to do a lot of user verification.
13. Online learning.

Well, if educational materials were either cheap because of my idea for #17, or the government were putting educational materials in the public domain (that would be a good place to start, in my opinion, before branching out), that would help.

I'm in the middle of an article about reforming the education system (how the institution could be restructured). It will be posted to anamazingmind.com/blog (a friend's blog) when I'm done. It would definitely create new educational markets, and online education would be a big winner.
Your grandfather's childhood food shortage affect your fetal hormone levels how?
26. Better video chat. Skype and Tokbox are just the beginning. There's going to be a lot of evolution in this area, especially on mobile devices.

It's called "meeting people face to face". Oh, you didn't laugh...

But seriously, if you really want to take video/online interaction further, why not put electrodes on your skin, and use a USB port to feed the data into your conversation window, and the other folks can see how you are feeling in real time? OK, that might be a bad joke, too...
28. Fixing email overload.

I have an integrated solution which might also fight spam, and which would relate to contact lists / social websites. I.e. if someone is in the contact list of one of your contacts, their email gets treated as not-spam, and if you had an automated ranking algorithm for email (emails with frequent correspondents go towards the top, email from contacts is second tier, newsletters go towards the bottom, etc.), it could go towards the top. Or, the email comes from the friend of a friend of a friend, it's considered to not be spam, and put in the middle.

I'm not suggesting you be able to see your contacts' contacts, but something akin to the six degrees of separation application in Facebook. This could get computationally intensive if you were checking for enough degrees of separation. But it's obviously doable, if the Facebook application can do it- and if it were too CPU intensive, maybe some people would choose to pay for the service.

This would also fight spam even if it were only applied in a small number of email inboxes. Because, if it sees that emails from an email address aren't in the first six degrees of contacts of any of, say, the first 10 receivers, it could inform ISPs that all future emails from that address are suspected spam.

This is the idea which is most off the top of my head, so be wary of it :).

Another idea- add a reddit-like button next to emails which lets you move stuff up and down in your inbox. This would serve dual functions- letting you sort emails and to-do items by priority (a right click on the button would let you move stuff up or down by 10, 50 places, etc.), and it would also tell your filter what you prioritize (which contacts, which key words, etc.- like, PG's filter might notice he likes emails with the SIP "Lisp" in it).

That wraps up my ideas that are relevant to PG's list, as far as I can recall. If anyone has any questions about any of them, let me know. I've fleshed out most of these much further than you see, I just don't feel like doing a 50,000 word writeup as a comment. If you want to contact me privately, my email address is ben dott seeley att gmail dott com.
Exclusivity would be unenforceable and consumers would game the system. Retailers would lose control over the perceived value of their product.
Why limit yourself to their technology without any need? The only reason to use it would be if they let you do something you could not do otherwise.

I see one application where this could be true: giving people an application they can install for themselves, without any costs. With GAE, for the first time everybody can just install a web application, same way they can just install a plugin on their own computer. Even better, they might sometimes not be able to install something on their computer (no admin rights), but they would probably always be able to install a GAE thing.
any screenshots of examples of the graphs it can create?
Venture Funding Drops for Youngest Companies As Older Ones Suck Up More Cash
Why YC is even a greater resource in these times....
IANAL, so if you say exclusivity would be unenforceable, you might be right. But it's not really crucial- the only important thing is collecting useful data, and there are myriad ways to do that.

You'll have to tell me how consumers would game the system. Declaring it doesn't make it so. I've thought on this idea for over three years- I could have missed something, but if I haven't seen it by now, I need someone else to point it out for me.

Retailers might lose control over the "perceived" value, but if they are making higher profits, what do they care? Bear in mind, retailers already have many ways they try to take advantage of the pricing spectrum, they're just really inefficient, by and large.
The Quirkbook (nerds, ritualistic behaviour, OCD and depression)
A Book With 90,000 Authors
Isn't this politics, that's supposed to be confined to the likes of Reddit?
>I'm obviously sending the wrong message in the way that I promoted it, because I found artists to be not very receptive at all to the idea of them giving away their music.

I took the first steps for a similar thing in Spain a couple of years ago. Laws here are different so the problem to solve might not be the same. Anyway, the conclusion was that it's a hardware problem. It's possible, even easy, to atract musicians, but you need to offer a wider set of services than hosting. Then it became some sort of chicken-egg problem (because of higher needs for funding) and faded away.
Matt says built a great product first, scale second.

It is true that people will put up with horrendous site performance if they really need what the site provides. And MySpace and Twitter are good examples. However, I think that only a certain class of sites can rely on this user behaviour: ones that involve a social contract.

If I can't retrieve a message on MySpace for a few hours because the site is down, or if I can't get to Twitter all day, I don't keep persisting because I need that message or those @reply tweets. I do it because I don't want to appear rude and I don't want to be out of the loop. The people I know on MySpace and Twitter are real people, not just internet people. Thus, if I don't reply, it hurts my social relationships.
That's why combining e-learning with games is such a good idea.
It directly affects his social conditioning, which in turn affects the lifestyle advice he imparts to his descendants.
I am in the midst of learning to program in PHP. I am working hard and loving it. I realize the value of the skill. I met with one of the founders of a YC company and got inspired. I now plan on graduating early and working full time on my startup at that time.
Installing And Using OpenVZ On Fedora 9
Marx was never as influential in Economics as he was in Politics. His political philosophy is interesting and challenging while his Economics always seems chosen to suit his politics. It wasn't bad compared to the Economics of his contemporaries, but it had a short shelf-life. He lost the battle of ideas pretty rapidly, and fairly in my opinion.

True, one will be a better Economist if he understands the evolution of Economic thought in the 19th century, but there is no reason to single out Marx for particular study by the average student.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Javascript. I'm just saddened that we didn't get a complete Scheme. Things like, for example, metaprogramming are massively helpful when interacting with HTML. Collectively we all might have had a lot less work to do.
You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This system will very likely end up with a LaTeX filter for print rendering.

Limitations of LaTeX for what I want:

1) It does too much - I want to be able to have documents generated once and then offer on multiple outputs. I can't do that if people use features of the platform that go beyond the 'web renderer'. The featureset you need for the save format of a document production system is actually very low. You need to be able to capture five grades of headings, support two types of emphasis, ordered and unordered lists that can nest, tabular data. I don't think anything else is needed. So in this sense, of existing technologies docbook is a lot closer to what I need than LaTeX.

2) Whatever system you end up coming up with, it needs to be able to support Microsoft Word as a frontend because users are sold on that interface, although they really don't care what goes on underneath. While I could have my Word plugin generating LaTeX, it would be much more sensible to have it turned into an intermediate format of simple XML and then transform into LaTeX for what it's good at.

Good suggestion. It does have a place in the plan :)
Interesting. If you're in London at any point in near future and want to catch up send me a message.

Did you end up with any content? And if so, can we stick it in my system? :)
I was so sick and tiered of hearing that capitalism is the best system we have, "theres nothing better", that I designed a new world order. It is better than capitalism by a very long way. It's a complicated idea, slightly difficult to grasp, but given any problem it will robustly yield the best result for the community. You can read it if your interested on the wayback. http://web.archive.org/web/20060613054329/http://creatocracy...
I've sometimes wondered whether IT isn't becoming the 'core' part of a business. I.e. the one that's most complex and drives the competitive edge and success of a business. I have worked in IT in many different industries and often enough found the 'business' part of the business to be easy to pick up while it sometimes took ages and a lot of brainpower to get on top of the technology. In other words, IT people can understand 'businesss' but business people can't understand IT. So, in the future, instead of having a bank with an IT department, we'd have an IT company with a bank department. They'd probably switch sooner from banking to insurance than from one IT infrastructure to another.

I think amazon is a good prototype for this. It's a tech company that also sells books. They later added all sorts of other crap like electronics, then stuff that they don't even deliver but where they just act as a front for other retailers and finally they are now offering their IT services purely by themselves (S3, EC2).
Latex is great. If only it was made easy!
Y combinator in Python
Sorry on the first 10 or so pages I saw just blah blah. Don't spam the forum here if you have nothing to offer.
I haven't done what you're talking about butI can offer a suggestion based on my experience: offer them choices of how to pay. Some people like PayPal, some want to pay by credit card, and still others want Google Checkout. If I had to guess, you should accept credit cards directly - so budget 3-10 days for developing that. Add another 3 days for PayPal and 1-5 days for Google (depending on what level of integration you want) if you choose to give your customers a choice.

I suggest this because, when we offered a 2nd choice of payment on our sites, we found that we did 20% of sales through that 2nd choice! Was that 20% of sales who would've not bought the other way? Unknown but 20% is a sizable figure.
Tiny whirls in the life stream.

An example: a small assembly program that loops infinitely and copies itself. Fully dependent on the overall framework that enables its existence.
LLC works for me while talking to angels but, like noodle says, VC's will want the tried and true C corp.

I incorporated in my home state of Texas after consulting with an atty. Don't just go for the hype or advice from these boards after this state or that state: spend the money now on an attorney to set it up right so that you don't have to spend the time and money fixing it later.
I looked at it a few years ago and ultimately just wrote my own. Back then I had more time than money also...

I've been to sites that use Google Site Search and it's just fine for what I've wanted. I don't think less of the company or anything - I know Google, I trust that their search results are good. I'd say it's probably a good idea.
All fine and good until Google "catches on". What if they actually don't want you doing that? I don't know - just asking. What would the potential penalty be - delisting? Maybe I'm being paranoid but $100/yr vs the risk of "One day Google may decide to change things..." is worth spending the $100.
In a large part the deletionist tract is due to information being unverifiable, non-notable stuff and self-edited stuff both often falls into that category. Verifyability I think has been a key factor in keeping wikipedia at a reasonable level of reliability.

If you remove the verifyability requirement you could quickly spiral into a mess. So if you want to be inclusionist you'ld probably need to keep that requirement - but that would also probably kill a lot of your extra content.

I think if it could have been done it would have been done now, all the mediawiki software is available, you can even get off-the-shelve hosting for a couple of hundred dollars. The fact that it hasn't been done successfully seems to indicate that there's no demand.
My companies have a solution for #1, both videos and the music insustry in one bold move. This will not be made public until Fall of 2008. Go to www.archivemovienetwork.com to get a sense. Our demo under NDAs is more impressive than you ever thought was possible on the technolgy end. The business model this Fall will immediately prove movitization of a highbreed PGC/UGC model with the potential for completely revitalizing the music industry IF they partner with us. We will be attempting this throuth our lawyers at K&L Gates.

In the fall you will be able to contact us. Come build the future.
You are right as are the other commentors. However it seems that the difference between a 'social news' site and a forum aren't huge, i.e. forum software could be spruced up with a few lines of php and they'd be the same.