skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NOTE: the following is a joke. or is it. Read to the end and decide for yourself.

As a VC, I would never fund any of these. How about these twenty-five ideas for starters.

1. Combine local and real-time. (Google isn't)

2. Combine the cloud with viral marketing (Amazon isn't)

3. Disrupt green with crowd-sourcing. (Power companies aren't).

4. Curate blogging (the "blogosphere" is so wide it becomes meaningless. Get the stratosphere of the blogosphere).

5. post-pc disruption. (Fingerpaint for iPhone - 1 guy, VC-ready company. needed a mac to develop. give an Indian with no mac, no pc, nothing BUT an iPhone enough tools to disrupt post-pc)

6. scale photos. Flickr doesn't.

7. the Google of Facebook. (G+ is the Facebook of Google. Where's the Google of facebook?)

8. empower html5. (Where's the Adobe of HTML 5?)

9. the skype of documents. (Google Docs isn't it)

10. the apple of automobiles. ("iPod integration"? Give me a 'brake').

11. bring the cloud to ultramobiles. ("ultrabooks" are a joke, and the cloud is too big. Find a way to make ultrabooks/macbook airs the macs of iOS)

12. the reddit of shopping. (eBay is not it).

13. disrupt ad platforms, virally. People are sick of signing in and getting information collected (Google starting to suck)

14. one word: Firefox. (Firefox isn't it).

15. one word: Office. (Office isn't it).

16. one word: ultramobile. (MacBook isn't).

17. one word: ultralite mobile. (iOS isn't it)

18. one word: TechCrunch (TechCrunch isn't it)

19. one word: Banking (Banking isn't it)

20. one word: Trending (Analytics isn't it)

21. one word: Microblogging (Twitter isn't it)

22. one word: Dating (plenty-of-fish isn't)

23. one word: Family disruption, aka Whores. (craigslist isn't)

24. one word: disrupt paradigms. (YC isn't).

25. one word: cloud. (the cloud isn't.)

what is this, some kind of a joke? Can you even tell anymore. Disrupt this.
Is that because you have lots of variation over different values? I've tried using websites like Bionumbers, but can't tell if it's curated or not, and is basically now useless. How is yours different?
And I guess they were, to a disturbing degree, right?
No, they just raise money for colluding plutocrats to bribe corrupt politicians into trying to break the Internet.
No, my argument is that of all the things wrong with this situation, stealing 300-byte bandwidth is so far down the list it's unimportant. That's what I meant by this is not the horse - there are far better horses to ride in this race.

It's nice of you to tell me what my argument is, but you have it utterly wrong.
Agreed, no doubt it takes time to set up a phone to read QR codes. I was more interested to see whether there was some link/study which compared the actually processes of typing vs. scanning, which I thought was the intent of his fifth point.
Fair enough. I am also happy to share my knowledge, such as it is, with whoever wants it.
Some of my code I am happy to share, some I make money off and I would rather nobody copy wholesale to compete, some I have done on behalf of clients and cannot make the decision on.
The nice thing about the world as it is, is you and I mostly have a choice about how we share our work and where/when we make our source code available.

The interesting thing about designers is that on the whole, they have less of a choice. Everything that they do is out in the open and - if they do their job well - lots of people see it and want to copy it.
Who is 'we'? (I'm curious!)
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Forget the US, focus on the rest of the world.
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"The police responded violently to prevent this."

"What's the problem?"

maybe that the police responded violently? and killed someone unnecessarily?

"It's sad that the factory owner needed to be part of the same social circle as the police to have the rule of law enforced, but that doesn't change the fact that the police were merely enforcing the rule of law."

If the rule of law allows for murder, then the rule of law is wrong and operating under it is no defence.

"If a gang leader was trespassing inside a bank vault, and the police beat him with a lathi, would you similarly object?"

yes? if the police have already caught him, what possible cause could they have for beating him unnecessarily?
Who is to say they will have a choice?

I am not being cute here, but the power of any government is their monopoly on violence. That assumes, however, that the government knows whom they are up against.

What if the next generation cryptocurrency was truly anonymous? Then you wouldn't be able to stop it, even if you wanted to.
That and articles about investors piling ever more money in because it's a cash machine.

BTW - people are working on this in the US, though it moves more slowly due to state by state regulations

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/former-google-cio-raises-73...
I would also love to see more startups in this area. It would be amazing to open biology to every engineer on the planet. I'm thinking of a arduino like revolution but for biology. Achieving read/write cells for under $1000 on the desktop would open up biology to an entire new set of people. I'm not a biologist, but I'm intrigued by what we can unlock in this field.

OpenPCR is a good example of frugal engineering applied to the space. I hope to see more attempts at making this hardware cheaper and accessible.

Regarding the spec on the Database. User friendliness would be a start, can you throw in what you would want to improve - I'm interested in your ideas?

The company "ion torrent" caught my eye regarding the in vitro DNA sequencing. It disrupts Halcyon Molecular and could cut the cost down even quicker.
Www.techpowerup.com : Domain Valuation, Domain Info, Indexed Pages, Com
Start writing those grant proposals!
Dwolla? It kind of is already.
The public has done a bizarre about-turn on the mining tax. When it was introduced, the frothing middle-Australians were saying "How dare you bring down those who have brought prosperity to our nation!?". In the intervening years it's become apparent that those mining profits are largely going to overseas owners, yet still screw up the rest of our economy ("two-speed economy" - the rest of the economy is growing, but the mining makes our dollar grow faster yet...). Now middle Australia is whining that the gummint didn't tax those greedy miners enough, they're screwing us over and we aren't getting our cut. One of those times you actually feel sorry for the politicians.

That's off-topic though - the mining tax has left public discourse in the last year, but there's lots of noise about internet content filtering, plus according to the page about Australia on the press freedom index, there's lots of obsfucation at the government level when it comes to requests for information. There's not much in the way of protesting, but there were things like reporters working on the wikileaks story having their work blocked.
#10 is tesla
Three steps:

1. Decide how much risk Facebook has compared to alternative investments in the market.

2. How much return do investments with comparable risk have?

3. How much money will Facebook return to its investors over its lifetime, discounted by the rate of return you can get with comparable investments compounded by that many years.

Let's assume Facebook has same risk as Google.[1]

If you bought GOOG at 2004 for $100 and sold it today at $580, you got roughly 26% return year on year.

When will Facebook begin returning money to its investors? Assume 1 years from now they will have more than doubled their profits and begin paying $2 billion a year in dividends, growing by 20% per year from there, forever.(so 2013: 2B, 2014: 2.4B, 2015: 2.88B) [2]

So let's substitute all these numbers into this financial formula I learned last week to find how much Facebook is worth[3]:

Value = (2 billion) / (0.26-0.2) = 33 billion dollars.

As 33 Billion is < 100 Billion, a conclusion is made where Facebook is deemed to be overvalue and its stock should be sold and invested into Google instead.

[1] Remember, we're assuming Facebook has as low a risk(volatility in dividend payment) as Google. For a much younger company like Facebook this is incredibly unlikely. So a discount rate of only 26% is incredibly generous, it should be even higher.

[2] Yes I know Facebook profit increased by 100% last year, but it is still only $1 billion dollars and unlikely to grow forever. Also, paying dividend could be substituted with share buybacks and the result is the same, money is returned to shareholders.

[3] This formula is called "Gordon's growth model" and is a formula learned by second year university students studying finance.
One of the bad things about the world as it is, is it encourages people to release things closed, because they can make more financially that way -- and we get a very closed world.

In an open world, we could all be making derivative works of awesome works and advance the state of the art, rather than having to duplicate it first, before advancing it.
Dan, couldn't agree more. Everybody got to take a dip in the same pool.
I'm not a fan of the model either. But someone will do it. Looks like Douglas Merrill is already on it with $73m in funding.
perhaps. I enjoy watching the evolution of bitcoin. But I don't see the U.S. gov playing along.
It is properly downvoted because it is wrong.

Until Bieber came along, the most watched clip ever (Charlie bit my finger), having been seen 100 of millions of times cost a few cents of electricity to produce.

This indicates that there is an entire market out there which Hollywood is incapable of satisfying but which could easily be filled by a start up.
Why are you convinced you need to open biology up to engineers? Is that currently not the case?

The fact is you really can't do much with a PCR machine. Sure, you can identify your friends boogers. But it only reduces one tiny aspect of overall cost. Add a centrifuge, a flow cytometer, a gel box, some incubators, and then maybe you have a functional 'garage' lab.

But again, you don't achieve much by having immediate in vitro sequencing. Not sure what the point is.

The real barrier then is literally funding and the capacity to do the research. And that's exactly what my startup is doing.
Oddly enough I think one of hackernews's heros (and mine) Richard Feynman is one of the causes (but not blame).
His appearance at and commentary of the Challenger disaster made people extremely allergic to risk. You can argue his message was taken to the extreme but perhaps his scientists attitude was not so attuned to the engineering mindset of compromise and risk assessment.
It looks like they've now changed their pricing page to remove the similarities. I didn't see it before but certainly at least the boxes around packages are gone and the buttons have been changed.

[edit] Found an image of how it looked here for anyone interested: http://yfrog.com/nwxfxoyj
In fact, it looks like a 'grammar' is quite similar to most programmings languages, http://www.contextfreeart.org/mediawiki/index.php/CFDG_HOWTO. It makes the iteration and stopping-bounds easy to create. It also allows uses functions to define shapes, so you can use them again easily.
Re-reading your post, I just realized: did you mean "synthesizer" where you wrote "sequencer"?
Interestingly enough, I actually know of a website which does exactly what you are talking about: http://wordseye.com/

(Full disclosure: I might potentially be working on a speech interface for this system soon)
You'd probably want to look for that in Pravda, Forbes caters to a certain audience, like Hacker News caters to a certain audience, like Pravda caters to a certain audience.

I'm not saying it's right, but different publications cater to different audiences and appropriately select articles and headlines that will garner attention from that audience.
How do you know the union leader was killed unnecessarily? The article is unclear on this point. All we know right now is that the union leader was killed while engaging in criminal behavior.

Your version of the story may be correct, but you've presented no evidence of it.

Similarly, in the hypothetical I raised, I made no claim as to whether the gang leader was in custody. That's merely your assumption.
Biological this, biological that.

How about ideas for those of us who aren't scientists?
One I'm looking at - Google Analytics for print/billboard ads.

Adwords/Analytics is great, because you can see exactly how much money you're spending, and exactly how many sales/conversions/downloads you're getting for that money.

In the print world, this becomes much harder to measure. I'm looking at easy ways to make that happen
There is simply not enough information in the article to make any kind of moral judgement on the people involved.*

* With the exception of Forbes' editors, who clearly deserve the bile posted. Led pipes? Really?
Isn't 2 pretty much Khan Academy ?

There are several Health focused YC-clones: Rockhealth, Healthbox, Blueprint, etc.

Also it's not clear what "Etsy for IP" means, there are already stock photo libraries, sites for selling code snippets, sites for selling brandnames, etc. Is there a particular type of IP you're thinking about?
If you consider column oriented databases as relational database normalisation taken to the extreme, this makes sense.
Apart from the semantic benefits, Codd and Date have argued normalisation gives an efficiency benefit.
Damian Conway on Physics and Programming
I made several drawings of a similar nature to those shown when I was a child; I'm not sure if my parents still have them or not - though it spanned more from my fascination for mathematics than physically seeing them.
Nalden on personal branding: Keep it real
Only after a review of peers, paid for by the journals too.
25. Uber for food

We're working on that right now at munchery.com
"The company has been criticised not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices. For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier as an example of a publisher of journals which might be "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value" and which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[6] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University and Duke University."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
Correct. I used the words literally, I meant "personal attacks" instead, which frankly I don't think helped him make his point stronger.
One thing I learned from failing tough is to fail fast and do not waste time making something work that doesn't work at this time.
First quantum jiggles detected in solid object
Just because something is a law doesn't make it legitimate. Virtually no one thinks violent cops are always justified in enforcing the law, like during civil rights struggles, or revolutions we happen to like. And when it comes to enemy nations, conventional wisdom is that the whole government has no legitimacy, and should be violently overthrown. (And when convenient, we send in a military which may kill cops and their employers left and right; then we replace the laws with ones which suit us more.)

In this case, cops are used to enforce that bosses control the factory, not the workers. But it could work the other way around.
No, he's not proposing a change in ownership of companies or corporations, or free trade.

He's proposing a change in the way that they are governed, such that the employees democratically decide the direction of the company, rather than have that dictactorially imposed by the ruling class^W^Wboard of directors. Giving the workers more control over the direction of a company is certainly something that adherents of "pure" non-state-controlled communism would be aligned with, but using democracy to achieve his ends is something that will confuse many who find it hard to separate political and economic worldviews.

His points about how capitalism /as we currently practice it/ seems to be inherently unstable - 11 significant downturns in the 70-odd years between the Great Depression and our current major crisis - seem valid. Rather than throw capitalism out entirely, he seems to be trying to find a clever hack that would make it less volatile.

FWIW, I don't think his proposal is right. I'm not sure exactly what I think is wrong with it yet, but I think he's got an interesting idea which is worthy of discussion. And his insight into the 180 year history of how and why we got to where we are now is incredibly thought-provoking.

So, I thought, rebut rather than downvote.

(It appears not many other people agree. That's fair enough. Meh.)
you should start a snarky blog called startuprunoff.com where you simultaneously create a buzzmachine that can raise money for any company and kill the same exact buzz before it even launches.
No mention of artificial intelligence.

Build an objection detection system for all 100,000 objects a human can recognize.

Build a photo-realistic face generator.

Build a chatbot than can pass the turing test.
Solving Causes' Levenshtein Distance challenge in Python, the Sequel
I'm thinking more interactive than Khan Academy.

Health focused YC clones are out there, there are no bio tech focused ones though.

On the Etsy for IP. I never felt much of a community with stock photo websites. I suppose this site would pull together all forms of IP under the platform.

In general, I think in the startup space, even subtle variation on the idea and positioning (given great execution) can lead to a winning startup.
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If you write your very clear specification down in a formal language, you can simply execute it...

This isn't necessarily true. Two examples:

for x, y in sorted(lst), assert(x < y => index(x, sorted(lst)) < index(y, sorted(lst)) )

assert( sqrt(x) * sqrt(x) == x )

In more practical terms, at my company we've hired someone to build scrapers for us. They have a fixed interface - scraper.getBrand, scraper.getPrice, etc. The clear specification is that on 100 examples, the scraper needs to agree with humans viewing the webpage (i.e., scraper.getPrice(page) == whatever a human viewing the page says it is).
I don’t think the analogy from web design carries over, then, does it? You’re not using the word "responsive" with the same connotation.
There is a solution for retirement for not-so-rich people, it's called tax free, mandatory, funded, and benefactor owned superannuation. It forces everyone to contribute to their own retirement. It stops companies or governments from dipping into the "pot". It's tax free and so allows proper growth not only for the funds in question, but also allows for growth in the economy. Obviously there are some corner cases but these can be accounted for fairly easily. In short it is good for just about everybody.

The more countries that adopt this the better.
Have you tried the Khan Academy exercises (with hints, etc.) ?
What sucks is that I completely built #1 on his list, tested it, but was afraid to launch due to the combination of PATRIOT changes to the BSA and FinCEN regs.

Long story short: I don't want to start a startup that sends me to jail or regulatory hell if it becomes successful.

If anyone wants to buy coinpur.se, let me know. :)
Yes, the distinction between "program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar." and "image file format" is an interesting one too.
Not anymore, Chrome / Firefox decided it was a security hazard.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7291538
There is a way around it. Here, everything after the await is transformed into a callback for the await magic:

waity = (forFn) ->
await forFn defer r1, r2
console.log "values of defer variables", r1, r2
return "this only returns from the result callback, not waity"

syncReturn = waity (cb) ->
setTimeout ->
cb "r1 val", "r2 val"

console.log "waity's synchronous return value:", syncReturn

So our output is:

waity's synchronous return value: undefined
values of defer variables r1 val r2 val

To return, you can simply write:

waity = (forFn) ->
setTimeout ->
await ...
return "works as normal"
Are these really ideas for typical startups. The high tech ideas aren't very well suited for startups. More for Universities and big corporation's side projects.
Building security in – the audit paradox
The tagline does sound like something from the '50s.

"COBOL - a program that generates software from written instructions"
UK Guardian thinks consumers will boycott Apple over labour issues
If you're hosting your own WordPress (or any other solution, actually), you really should be keeping an eye for any updates. WP is a popular hacker target, even waiting a day after an announcement can be enough to get hacked. Thanks to Muprhy's law, such an announcement will definitely come when you're on vacation somewhere.

That's, of course, assuming that such an announcement is made in the first place. Last year the timthumb bug was being exploited and not all theme download sites bothered to alert the users that the themes were vulnerable.
> the end of all progress for humanity

No.
Creating Your Own Distributable Ubuntu DVD (Relinux)
Launch it. Worst case scenario is that you become second place in modern warfare 3 global rankings.
Tech Dispatches from Davos: No Fear Entrepreneurship
> What language exists in which this is not the case?

Languages which have very little "own shape" (syntax) and let you transform it easily (via macros) or provide high flexibility.

Mostly concatenative languages and Lisps, but e.g. Smalltalk or IO can probably be fit in that category as well, they have a minuscule syntactic core and that core is used to build abstractions and structures putting both the language's designers and the language's users on a level ground.

Of course that creates other issues, where every developer or organization has its own lingo and structures, making even going from one codebase to the next more expensive. It's a tradeoff.

Still, realizing that you have pretty much the same power as the language builders themselves when it comes to creating abstractions and datastructures and control flows... is an enjoyable feeling.

> Language by committee sounds terrible.

Can end horribly, and can end pretty well. Haskell was designed by a committee over ~10 years (FPCA '87 to the release of "The Haskell 98 Report" in 1997).

It does generally end baldy.
I thought the many of the shortcuts used fullpaths in windows I'm pretty sure not all of them can be accessed with name in cmd. Looking at the .desktop files under /usr/share/applications (ubuntu) most execute by name but some especially games(both third party and some gnome games) use fullpaths.
It is, I've taken this class and David Barber is releasing this for free. That's the best thing I can say about that class, though.
Do you seriously believe that a $200 million movie is ten times better than a $20 million movie? Or a hundred times better than a $2 million movie??