skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few points, some already cited here:

* Survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit.

* Second, an idea or early prototype has little correlation to its inevitable success or failure. As is often said, execution is everything. The idea is necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee a market success, as defined differently by different markets.

* Third, while he decries his stance as calling something "stupid" as an arrogant position, this article itself comes across as arrogant -- in effect he's positioning himself near the beginning of these companies' inception and being in the position of being asked his opinion in a taste-maker fashion. I suspect in reality, he was one of many people that were exposed to this idea and his opinion was mostly irrelevant in their efforts to pursue the idea. It can be interpreted as very Forrest Gump to position ones self at the crux of so many eventual market successes when in reality that is not the case. I'd like to understand the context of these meetings. I've certainly been at the early-stages of many ideas, but no one asked for, or cared about, my opinions. In which case, saying that they were stupid ideas was an opinion offered only to myself. And I probably did indeed think they were stupid at the time. Was I arrogant? No. But then I don't claim that anyone cared about my opinion.

* Finally, I call your attention to Pinterest's actual success path (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest and http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html). They iterated and "failed" for 2 years before becoming an "overnight success". I dare say that perhaps at the time of the meeting, Pinterest's idea and execution were probably stupid, and it took time and relentless iteration to make it a success. In fact, "Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users." Which goes to show just how many people's opinions he solicited in the process of building to its current level of success.
In my defense, I pulled the option and tuple examples straight from the scala docs. This was just my experience working with the language for a while. Apparently if I had taken the time to learn Scala better I would have been amazed?
A stupid population makes stupid things popular.
I liked it very much, but I believe I encountered a bug(?):
http://i.imgur.com/TwwnLRy.png
the part I'm referring to is "You needed 4 bullets, but only had 4"

A suggestion I had is to consider changing the text when someone leaves, "we'll probably won't see him again", to simply "we probably won't see him again", which is less awkward.

Overall, great idea and execution. It was fun, challenging, and evocative.
For now I doubt many people have only bitcoins and have at least some cash. For point 1, you can always leave some money on an exchange site and then as soon as you spend bitcoins somewhere, you buy them back on Gox. For point 2, I wouldn't spend my bitcoins until they increased again. For the time being I would say bitcoin is more of a payment system and a store of value, not a currency.
In Australia we can login to Internet banking and send money to another account with any bank in Australia free of charge and usually within 2 business days.

Is something like this not possible in the US?
In all fairness, Pinterest still looks like a stupid idea. Like Twitter. Like Instagram.

Stupid is popular, though. You don't need to build more than the most mundane of the things to have a popular product.
There's still a link. "Yes, I got these BTC from JoshLeaves for n$, now follow the trail with him".

Of course, it's all about the weakest link
I still do this - it's something I'm actively trying to fix. I'm worse still when products never materialize into a full-fledged success, still seem mvp/alpha but provide enough interest and income to spin up a proper shop here and there.

I think the root of it, for me at least, is just a bit of envy staring down at me from my shelf of half-completed and less interesting ideas.
Also check out https://appstorerankings.net for App Store Optimization services.

The model Trevor used for DL estimation is pretty good, actually.
In my (admittedly limited) experience people don't weld contacts to their eyes, nor are contacts capable of physically restraining you from pushing an 'Off' button. I suppose you could attack someone with epilepsy this way.

The rest of your post is rather more accurate. Hence the need for good security (on devices that you don't wear as well as ones that you do).
I thought bottled water was idiotic "Who's gonna pay that for water ? ! ? Gone in six months." And phone sex lines. "1.99$ first minute, $.99 each additional minute? Please!" In six months their rates doubled. Business models can be hard to judge.
That's wonderfully informative stuff; thanks for posting.

BTW, I notice, in the WP article:

> In a review by Bennett[8] it is argued that there are no clear evidence for cognitive maps in non-human animals (i.e. cognitive map according to Tolman's definition). This argument is based on analyses of studies where it has been found that simpler explanations can account for experimental results.
Those cracks where there with Steve Jobs as well. For some reason people tend to forget the bad business decisions he made. But he made plenty. Was the period between the iPod an the iPhone just also coasting on momentum? Because if that was the case, I think they are going to be ok.
Google Glass Root Method Available, Detailed
The experiment is interesting and I'll like to read the results. But I don't like a few details, probably most of them are errors in the press release.

* Perpetual mobile:

It's theoretically possible to build a system that moves forever. But it's impossible is to connect it to some kind of generator to extract energy for free, while the system continues moving at the same rate. And the real systems have some kind of friction that dissipates a part of the energy, so the real systems usually stop in a while.

The few cases where the movement can last forever is the movement in the superfluids and the current in the superconductors. They are not very ordered systems like this 100 Ca ring so they are not cristal-like. But the movement of the electrons in a superconductor is very similar to the moment of the Ca ring.

* Tagging a Ca:

The problem with quantum systems is that they act strangely. If the system is small enough the Ca lost their individuality and become indistinguishable bosons. (I'm almost sure Ca are bosons, nor fermions.) So to describe their state you must use Slater permanent (or determinants) and not look at each one individually. So any perturbation changes the whole system and is not useful to tag one Ca. (If the system is big enough, you can approximate it classically, but 100 Ca doesn't appear to be very big.)

* Quantum Gravity:

The Quantum Theory and Special Relativity are joined since 1928 by Dirac. The same ideas were later used in QED, QCD, and all the Standard Model. So all the calculations of the collisions in the LHC use a theory that includes Quantum Theory and Special Relativity. And the only way to use Special Relativity is to have a common structure for space and time.

Those theories are not related to the continuity or discontinuity or periodicity of the space or time. Nobody knows how to joint Quantum Theory and General Relativity, but in my opinion the problem is not related at all to the existence of space-crystals and the inexistence of time-crystals.
Yes, https://postgres.heroku.com/ its a stand-alone service (thats run by Heroku), you don't need to be on the Heroku platform to use it.
prophecy -- planning centuries ahead, directing the near past -- ability to puppet everybody under synchronous control.

Cool though.

14:8 If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land,
and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey.

14:9 Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of
the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from
them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not.

14:10 But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the
glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation
before all the children of Israel.

14:11 And the LORD said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke
me? and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs
which I have shewed among them? 14:12 I will smite them with the
pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater
nation and mightier than they.
According to the various quotes I've read there's no "non-public information" requirement.. just the vague "for business purposes" part.

While Twitter is the obvious example, what about a Github account? I've patched bugs or merged pull requests for my employer's projects from my own account. Would that qualify?
How is comparing Scala and Node to Go comparing apples to oranges? My argument is that people are using the three languages to do things in the same space: building backend servers where concurrency, mostly in IO, is a major factor.

Based on the feedback I've received on the talk, I could and should make a better argument next time, and I welcome feedback on what I should be focused on. However, I think it's totally fair to compare the three languages because they're often used for the same purposes.
I've tried both but still don't know the purpose of either.
What would be great would be if you could fund and de-fund your Dwolla account using Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is either going to be important, or it isn't.

If it is going to be important, somebody is going to make it easy to transfer money between Bitcoin and USD, and they're going to be hugely rewarded.

Dwolla is _extremely_ well-positioned to do this in the sense that it already is an established company that has banking connections and is in a good spot regulation-wise.

The only company competing in this space right now is coinbase, but I think the part of the problem Dwolla has already solved is harder than the actual bitcoin part of the problem.

So this is Dwolla's opportunity to lose, pretty much.

Disclaimer: This is probably laughable to any company insiders because there is no way you all haven't already thought through this kind of thing (and probably found good reasons to reject it...).
Recently we had that female Mozilla employee whose code (for a personal project, no less) was made fun of by three semi-prominent developers on Twitter. The consensus on HN was that there was nothing wrong with her code, but that she was being picked on solely for being a girl.

I think that was your consensus, but here is the thread, my very brief rescan of that doesn't indicate to me that her being a woman was the issue, the consensus seems to be that twitter makes it trivial to be an asshole, and many people are happy to jump in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

In general I see lots of assertion that men in tech treat women terribly, but not much evidence. The evidence that is there usually points to events that took place before employment.

In this case, our 17 year old heroine clearly faced no jerks in tech, though it is likely she faced jerks in high school.

And it's not at all clear to me that any abuse she has suffered as female nerd in high school is any worse than the abuse male nerds face.
4 asynchronous programming methods in JavaScript
We are both Canadian. I'm in Toronto right now, moving to SF later this month for a while.
That is a good argument. You definitely made me think.
Stupid idea doesn't mean it's not gonna make money. Great idea doesn't mean it's gonna make money. It's damn near impossible to predict what the public is gonna like.
Born and raised in Canada. Plan to move to SF for a few years, then come back.
The moral of this isn't that stupid ideas are good. It's that unfamiliar insights can be hard to understand and recognize, even for smart people. The right question to ask when confronted with something new isn't "What's wrong with this?" It's "What's the most interesting new insight(s) here?" A lot of smart people like to ask the first question at the expense of the second, and that's a mistake.
Fair enough. Better I just focus on the good of Go in the future.
Humans Need an Operating System Too
I could never take a good picture. I used Instagram for the first time and it was fast, so easy, and I was actually proud of the interesting pictures I could take (not necessarily to share widely, but at least for myself). Instagram got someone like me, who never carried a camera in his life except for when I was kid holding a camera for my parents on vacation, to actually use their phone as a camera.
A satellite in orbit is always accelerating as well, and will remain in constant motion if the orbit is far enough out (i.e. well beyond atmospheric drag).

I'm about half-way through this and it feels more and more like it was written by someone who would also ask why a permanent magnet can support a load against gravity without expending any energy - it's the same fundamental attribution error.

EDIT: In fact finishing it, I'm really confused as to what's new here. Giant external magnetic field, and stuff just coasting in a circle? Nothing about this feels implausible in a classical sense with a ring of charged ions.
>One downside would be that tools like file(1) that try to guess a file's format by examining its contents would return "SQLite database" for every image file

If the format catches on, they wont. For one, it would have it's own fixed file extension, and second, file(1) will be updated to perform and extra check even if something initially looks like a common SQLite database file.
I think this happens because we're poor judges of character. Yes, there's many bozos out there, but if you ask enough questions you will be able to differentiate them.

I'm still working on this, but I've seen that if you put aside your preconceptions and try to understand the product that is being showed to you, using it, asking a lot of questions and really giving yourself some time for big picture conversation, you are able to tell them apart.
This is the problem I have with the recent women-in-tech affirmative action as well. I have a female friend who is exceptionally good at what she does and I would hate to see her accomplishments diminished just because she is a woman.
We built an app that 'listens' to social media and closely correlates with the S&P 500 http://elite.kredstreet.com/all (zoom in to see the correlation) You have no idea how many people have ignored us along the way and yet our signal will be used by high frequency traders to trade the stock market. Talking to investors often reminds me of this gem... http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising

EDIT: someone just emailed me and said this was stupid. LOL
>I want to make an app for browsing catalogs. It's like a fashion catalog, but you can organize and share outfits

Is this really a fair description of Pinterest today though? Maybe as originally described it is a dumb idea.

Vine, on the other hand, is really awesome and Curtis saw it right then, but was more worried about how it would find popularity rather than whether it was a "good" idea.
"I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!" "10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs"

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the insights but I do not agree with the premise that 100 or 1,000 Matlab sessions per server or VM is crucial to the economics of the business.

I know many engineering firms who are perfectly happy and profitable to buy a $2,000+ workstation, $2,000 Matlab license, and X*$Y,000 toolboxes for a single engineer. That engineer might be in meetings all day. They might be on vacation, they might not be working on a task that requires Matlab. Larger firms sometimes get floating licenses that may be 10X or more that cost and still have less 100% software utilization.

I see utilization economies both in software and hardware by licensing out this resource to small and mid-size firms who do not have constant large demand and even large firms who need a surge in computation.
(Sorry, I don't know the exact definitions here)

Couldn't the shareholders dismiss the Board of Directors if they deem they are making decisions that are not in the best interest of the share price?
They could just spin up an EC2 instance when someone connects. It's $0.25/hr for a Large (~ 8gb ram, 2/4 core), so if they're servicing someone for a working day (8 hrs), they're out $2. If the user wants to save that working state, they can image the EC2 instance before turning it off (or reassigning it to a different user).

It would also be a nice feature that if you want to do some heavy calculation, you could spin up something more heavy-duty (a high-cpu xl is only 50c/hr). This same workflow with matlab would require you to go and buy faster hardware.

They could do all of that with some kind of standard matlab clone and probably get customers. If on top of that they had some parallelization secret sauce (some way to spin up new ec2 nodes on demand to do calculations), then they've really got quite a product.
NYT Poll Finds Strong Acceptance for Public Surveillance
Time crystals and ion traps... I must have fallen asleep watching Doctor Who again.

Joking aside, this could be the E=mc^2 of our generation. We take for granted that the speed of light is the universal speed limit and that DNA has a helical shape, but a century ago we knew neither of these things. The internet, in the scheme of things, is still in its adolescence (at best). The thing that fascinates and scares me more than anything is that in 50 years science will have already advanced beyond recognition.
hi - I help run WebFWD and can definitely say "yes" to this - if there is an "Internet" in the Internet of Things element, we're interested :)
How could you not see how Instagram is a thing? You can take a picture then press few buttons and now everyone you know can see your picture. If you don't see how that is popular maybe the problem isn't with Instagram.
Those were stupid ideas. Nobody said stupid ideas couldn't be successful. In fact, I suspect an idea's stupidity has very little impact on its success one way or another.

Ideas I'd consider not stupid include self-driving cars, Google Glass, and Bitcoin. Whether or not those are good ideas is yet another discussion…
But it doesn't do anything to force the scrollbars either, or to provide a visual treatment that indicates that this is an independent scrollable area. We've had iOS around for 6 years now, with its hidden-scrollbars approach, and OS X has followed the hidden-scrollbars approach for some time now as well. It is no longer acceptable to assume that scrollbars are necessarily going to be visible.
You should be careful about letting your employers' code hit your personal Github site for other reasons; an employer who wants to make it difficult for you to get a new business started can use IP issues to accomplish that.

Personal Github accounts are already a little bit fraught for that reason. The Illinois statute revision doesn't change the calculus; if you're an IL employee with a Github account you care about, you (a) don't want to be working for anyone who demands credentials to it, and (b) now have an avenue to extract a few tens of thousands of dollars from that employer should they ever be dumb enough to ask and then fire you.
Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users.

I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my non-techie friends get on board and how quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, that was pretty quick. Vine seems to still be lagging. It's too much work for the payoff for most people, is my gut feeling.
In fact I think chewing gum was uber easy to sell. As a replacement to the toothbrush. Also as a substitute for food when you're hungry.
There are no stupid ideas.

Except the really stupid ones, of course.
Some people are using LiDAR/computer vision to decide where maintenance is needed http://www.nicta.com.au/media/previous_releases3/2012_media_...
I feel this way about almost all consumer web services.

Nothing is better than irc, usenet, MUDs, and email/lists, with the exception of making things mobile, detachable/multi device, more secure, and I guess supporting non Latin alphabets. There are still a few products missing from the perfect Internet (a great usenet/forum replacement, a way to run individual agents in the background, a way to great all communications as filter ably as email, and a great payment system), but I'm fine without another catalog sharing site, etc.

I accept that consumer services could become popular, but I have no way to predict it, and once they have traction, they are expensive investments. I am kind of at a loss as to how one could be a high value add investor in the seed consumer space without just focusing on founders nearly exclusively.
Kloudless Stores E-Mail Attachments Where Gmail Won’t (launching from TCdisrupt)
"A solution is a something. But a something isn’t always a solution."

I like this quote a lot: you failed to get into YC but I think you passed on this. You can build a better mouse trap, but its only helpful in places where there are mice.

Take it as a learning experiance, either adjust what you are doing or now you can approach your next idea with improved perspective and experiance. From what I recall the acceptance rate of companies offered an interview is still only about 25%. I expect there are a few viable companies that don't make it in each batch.

(From someone who interviewed in S12, was rejected, and took considerably longer that you to reach similar conclusions to those you have).

Some unsolicited thoughts:

I do use MATLAB a fair bit in my work (PhD student now). I like it quite a bit and to be honest I haven't really had any big pain points with it, at least compared to some other packages that cost even more than MATLAB does (but probably have fewer users).

I think you'll have to find a new swing on what matlab does. Academics get discounted licenses and seem to be fine to pay for them, and I'm not sure if a $2K license is a big deal for corporate users. Without those two groups, I'm not sure how many people are left. Likewise, I don't think a service to learn how to use MATLAB would have that big of market.

Maybe an interesting and disruptive swing would be to enable the power of matlab-functionality to be abstracted to allow less sophisticated users to use it? Wolfram Alpha is in some ways this, but it could be tied into other services better.
What type of paperwork do you have so far? If you don't have any, and you have been the one actually developing the product, you hold all the leverage. They will have a great deal of difficulty raising if they don't own the IP, and in the absence of any previous written agreement that assigns the IP to the company itself, it's yours to do what you want with.

I certainly would not sign any sort of release unless it included language that commits the company to compensate you by a specific date. That way, by that date, they will either have to pay you or forfeit their right to your work.
I'm curious about your engine choice. Why did you choose ImpactJS for this game?