skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure there is a place for that ! Go to a bank, borrow the $ or mortgage your house, then hire a team to build one of your plans, make it big and use the proceeds to execute the rest of your plans.

That's how everybody else does it. Other than that ideas are two a penny, plans are great but executing them is where the work is and where the money is made. You can have all of my 'good' ideas for free... I value them at exactly $0, which is as good as any other idea/plan.

By the time that you can prove that an idea has legs it should not be too hard to get it funded. Once you've successfully done one next ideas are easier.
Gaaaa! And so soon after I just purchased a 3 year lease on my server.

But even at the old rates, it's such a good deal, I'm really not that upset about it :)
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"I have only really shared them with non-tech people or my tech friends that are far too lazy or otherwise oriented to ever do anything with them."

I guess your concern is valid. But, most people are that way, the ones that really are motivated enough to complete a project or build a startup already have their hands full with ideas of their own.

If you have researched your product and have a definite vision of it, then that's what you bring to the table. A stolen idea would look, well.... stolen!
one more link about this:

http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pubs_folder/parh88-ijeee-ul...

very interesting subject.
Im thinking jacquesm is your only real alternative then. Unless you can offer something else like sales expertise etc.

The problem is putting enough info out there to get interest without exposing all of your work.

On the other hand if their left on the shelf doing nothing then, well, that is possibly even worse.
Thanks, Jacques.

Does your opinion change at all if this management consultant was a referral, and they have had three successful exits and are listed as an inventor on a series of patents?
sorry about that, i moved it to its own site.
What is far more likely is that Team A will build a good site and Team B will build a good site. Team A's will be slightly more springy to the touch and a little more pizzazz. So, you pick Team A.

Is the fact that you picked it a useful predictor of whether Team A or Team B would have succeeded in the marketplace, and to what extent?

The usefulness of this type of selection is about 0%, and has the dramatically impeding side-effect of wasting Team B's time. Sure, some Y Combinator committee may think Team A's is better, but then, instead of dicking around with the contest, Team B should have just built the product anyway and gone off to sell it on their own.

Time is money, and such "contests" assume that programmers' time isn't valuable, like it's a fancy form of relatively slow typing.
Rubbish.

If your in the US a core part of achieving the patent often requires you actually selling the product for a period of time (or demonstrate selling it). Patents take an AGE to process so he's right you do need to be considering an application fairly soon; but if you stop pushing your sales forward and another company happens to start selling the same tech first THEY have a right to the patent too - and you might have a fight :)

Sell first, patent right after. Profit.

(if your not in the US - thr UK for example - things might be a bit different, you can get a patent a little more easily here)
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In the UK, there are any number of dire warnings on the IPO (intellectual property office) website about disclosing your invention before patents are applied for. Not sure if the principles are the same.
"plans are great but executing them is where the work is [...]"
True enough, but some people are good at execution and some people are good at ideas. During the execution phase you're going to need more ideas, probably, to get past your MVP and on to a fully rounded product. Reminds me of the postings the other on Word of Goo - the idea was simple, implementing it was quite hard but additional ideas were added all along the way: things that transformed the product.

Ideas possibly are ten-a-penny, good ideas ...? Great ideas restricted to a specific market segment, they've got to be even more rare. PageRank was a good idea, sure without implementation it's nothing, without the idea there's no implementation though.
But it is eulogizing someone who isn't dead! After 1 day of inactivity!

I feel very inspired by the works of Salman Rushdie. He hasn't published anything for a few days - should we eulogize him on HN too?

I'm not over simplifying the man or his life - I'm suggesting that this is absurd way to react!
The problem is that ideas are "non-excludable goods":

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless
yes in the UK you should make an application before releasing: then you can be patent pending.

That is because here it is about first submission (I think).
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"In recent years, he's committed the password to memory and has deliberately not shared it with anyone or kept it stored on a computer."

Isn't that what everyone is supposed to do with their passwords?
How is it reasonable for AT&T to admit blatant incompetence? Couldn't they have worked with Mitnick to secure his account and even use his case to attract more celebrity customers?
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Ask HN: Has anyone used the iPhone micro-transactions? How are they?
Do users mind? Do they buy stuff? We're looking at releasing a news reader with a set of freemium features that can be bought inside the app.
The first rule of exception handling: do not do exception handling
Really, this seems like something companies should take note of. Is it really the best business decision to make it as hard as possible to get customer service?
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I don't get it... if it makes you fill out name/gender/etc anyway, what's the benefit of hiding this first? To trick the user into thinking registering is easier than it really is?
TDD - Ten Years Later
Posterous (YC S08) Finally Has An iPhone App, Could Have Been Way Better
I found it confusing. How do you know when you're done or almost done?
Palm’s Colligan Said to Reject Jobs’s Offer to Stop Recruiting
I've seen this before. It's definitely not new. INMOS did this in the 80's with their Transputer platform (Google it).

That rocked as it had excellent software support with OCCAM, C and Pascal support. Oh and they had a concurrent parallel version of UNIX that ran on it.

The implementation here is not likely to match it or be scalable as it's bolting functionality onto a rather ancient architecture, doing most of the work in software.

If they did it in hardware with an embedded ARM core or FPGA with instruction set extensions for message passing, it might rock but this won't. I'd bet my life on it.
What Your Choice of Words Says about Your Personality
> Your example implicitly means that you do agree someone needs to be made liable for the child through 'obligatory supervision' - because if you don't do that, you will be accountable.

Sorry, I only tried to describe the legal situation in Germany. 'Aufsichtspflicht' is a legal term, and its translation is 'obligatory supervision'. The law says that parents are responsible for controlling their children in a sane way. I.e. your child can walk or bike to school unattended, but if you give her dangerous substances to play with and turn your back, you are held liable.

> Your argument seems to point more to: How do you define someone as liable and how do you enforce it?

That's what the courts do. As far as I know they use common sense and social norms to determine how much you have to guard your children.
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I worked as a Patent Examiner for 5 years and have hobbied as a copyright troll (!) for quite a long time:

AFAIK, and this is not IP legal advice, there's jack all you can do unless you have something uniquely novel and some sort of IP registration. Are they using your trademarks to describe the product; Are they using your registered design as the form of the product; Are they using your patented process; Are they copying your artistic input?

From your description it doesn't sound like you have anything - you're then getting into the territory of making something up, eg getting a weak patent to batter people with [who don't have IP lawyers on staff].

Did you see the original implementations of Star Office (now OpenOffice.org) versus MS's Word at the time? If MS could've sued they would IMO.
Annoyed me anyway - could be a great way for deciding that you don't want to sign up for a given site...
okay so to take this further, what motivations are there for breaking the "natural sleep rhythm" that are prevalent in the world of creative entrepreneurs (hackers) but not so in the "rest of the world"

You gave the exact answer I was expecting, but I'm not convinced this suffices. It /IS/ an obsession... my late night coffee binges are the stuff of legend (mostly because I rely entirely on natural stimulants when my other friends take more unorthodox steps to maintain.... "consciousness")... but WHY is this so? My stimulated friends are there for the simple pleasure of being wrecked on particular drugs, does the brain of a hacker/creative entrepreneur expect a similar payout? you mentioned being motivated by money... so by breaking (or taming?) the natural rhythms of sleep, does one invest some abstract personal commodity in the hope of future security? What could motivate this?

[ASIDE: notice that I'm trying to _START A DISCUSSION_.... voters/recent posters would do well to take that into consideration as for some reason it has been overlooked of late]
Security through obscurity gets a bad rap. You rely on the "obscurity" of your password.

The main issue is relying on false obscurity, both in systems (your program rot-13s your password) and in passwords (you pick an easy to guess password).

There's no real security failing if you rely on obscurity that isn't exactly a password, so long as you can accurately assess the real obscurity, e.g. port knocking. If, let's say (and this is probably false) AT&T has a billing system where sending 100 specific, not-easily-guessable bytes allows you to get private data, that's no worse than a password, even if the reason that it works is a bug - unless the source code is available to the attacker.

Of course, AT&T's problem here isn't obscurity, it's that they don't want to invest enough for real security at all. Which could be reasonable from a business perspective.
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i appreciate the focus. too many products try to cram too much into a mobile context.
He did his time, and now he has the same right to protection as the rest of us.
It's one thing to be inactive for a day, it's another to drastically truncate your online existence.
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This is really frustrating. Years of filling out forms and hitting "submit" have me thinking that this is a small form, only to have my hopes dashed as new segments keep popping up. This violates the principle of not surprising your users.
I've already shared that in my comment below.
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I honestly don't get the futz about this.

Also the whole "if you hire him you're obliged to ignore any other identities you know about" is just completely out of this world.

Again: If he valued his privacy so much then why did he appear in public? You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
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While I concur that the Cult of Personality problem is pretty high in the Ruby world, I would like to say that I'm not a Ruby programmer, and really wasn't very interested in Ruby at all .. until I encountered _why's "shoooes" project. I had so much fun reading that document on shoes that I really thought to myself "okay, time to get up on this ruby stuff" .. and was just about to launch into a few hours of tutorial and study, just a few minutes before I read that _whys' stuff had all been deleted.

Darn. What a shame. Guess I'm not gonna learn Ruby now.

On a lighter side, for some reason Ruby reminds me of "The Mighty Boosh" .. its supposed to be great, amazing, and all the younger kids are into it, but when I actually sit down and try to comprehend "why?" (no pun intended), its just a big fat meh.
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Yes, but just about everybody has ideas. I can't imagine that those that are good at execution do not have ideas.

The original 'apple' was an idea that many had at the time, two guys with the werewithal to go and execute that idea made it big. I'm sure that in the HCC of the time there were 100's if not 1000's of people that had the idea of a (cheap) computer for everybody.

People that have 'ideas' need to be aware of several really important things:

- everybody has ideas, pretty much all the time

- your idea is most likely not even original ("hey, I thought of that long ago!", yes, so?)

- it might be a great idea but it may never fly, to ask others to risk all to implement your idea for a substantial portion of equity while you risk nothing is out of balance.

- those people that 'had ideas' and made it big invariably were also good at execution.

People that 'just have ideas' usually end up in advertising or marketing where 'brain storm sessions' are their way of minting their idea motor, after all, there you get a salary for just having ideas.

The OP asked if there was room in a startup for an idea guy, the answer is really I don't think so, a startup needs one good idea, then execute it properly the rest is implentation. (Ebay : let's put an auction on the web, YouTube : Let's make it easy to post videos, facebook : let's do 'classmates' but much better). After that the execution takes over, that sort of idea you only need one of to have a viable business.

Sure, during the 'execution' phase you'll need more ideas, but those are usually not going to fundamentally change the nature of the business, unless the original idea wasn't very good...

In an incubator though, there is a place for an idea man. That's where there is added value, also if you're good at ideas you may be good at shooting down other peoples ideas before resources are wasted.
I think using this in the form presented there would be a mistake.

However, if you have a two-part registration, where the first part, for example, requires an email (that needs to be confirmed), you could use something like this to request the next set of registration data while waiting for the confirmation email to be received by the user.
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That depends.

If they were active in the same field as where the company approached would be active that would count in their favour, but after 'three successful exits' you usually don't have to hire yourself out as a consultant...

As I said, it's fine to get information, if you go and make some deal make sure you keep control, no exclusivity and they get paid if and only if there is a deal, and from the money raised in that deal.

edit: also, such information should probably be in your original post.
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I skimmed the FAQ and "Getting started" part and can't help but think they either completely missed the point or fail to explain it properly.

Why would I (or anyone) want to use this, what particular problems does it solve?
Sure, but if you are a 'master burglar' selling your services to companies securing other peoples goodies your reputation as a 'master burglar' is what allows you to do that.

It means that a lot of people that you are putting down will see you as their prime target. This goes with the territory.

If KM would have taken a job as a programmer somewhere I highly doubt that this would have happened. After all, he is minting his reputation as a former bad guy, nobody forced him to do that.

If he had been a white hat all along it would be different, but a burglar complaining he's been burgled is a bit hypocritical imo.

I guess it sucks being on the receiving side.

Basically all these little jerks do is make him look silly, personally I wouldn't even bother to respond to them, just take it as praise and laugh at it. By taking it so serious he is actually fanning the fire.
Or maybe give it a sequel title, like Eulogy II: The Eulogy Strikes Back.
Having done a lot of late rising and early rising in my life, s/sunrise/sunset/ and s/breakfast/dinner/ doesn't apply. You can go to bed at 22:00 every night and unless you live in the Arctic Circle you'll see a sunset every night you care to, all year long.
Yeh that's the way I am leaning at the moment. It really does seem to be a case of identical featureset and similar language to describe it (for example some of the acronyms for features are the same though the exact words (that make up the acronym) are different).

Thanks for your input (you made me confident to go back to the guy and say "you need an IP lawyer" :))
I had to re-read the article about the eight digit password. As it is for his phone provider, I presume it has to be numbers so it can be typed in from any phone keypad. I can't believe someone with Mitnick's track record would use an all-numbers password by choice.
Just so they don't make it too round. That would be bad :)
FYI it's generally considered good form round here to wait a reasonable length of time before reposting topics :)

(at least mention the dupe [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774508] and why you reposted)
What is the problem with defining the kg in terms of the already existing atomic mass unit?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_mass_unit

The atomic mass unit is already associated with the mole, which is in SI.
When he sells his services, he either has access to the systems to look at their security, or has authorization to try and get in (don't know how he works, really). With ATT, he does not legally have access to fiddle with their vulnerable systems in order to keep the pests out.
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As developers, we often see technical advancements coming, when we think "I wish this platform would let me do X so I could build this awesome app!" And eventually, some company comes along and puts in the effort, and captures the market with a problematic, proprietary solution -- enough is enough. Web 3D is something that's been way too long in coming, and I say its time is now. No more waiting, no more "this is highly experimental stuff." Let's build a plugin that gives developers the basics, and a small number of other features, that we can build a first generation of killer apps on -- the rest will come with updates, which are painless once the plugin gets installed. Let's distribute the hell out of it, a la Firefox, and let's put it out there GPL'd, for all to see, hack, break, and make better. Any takers?
well we have no specific information on any of the problems (plus Im a little biased personally in that Mitnick seems to be in a habit of loudly crying foul no matter what - I do that sometimes because it gets results, takes one to know one)

It's been 9 years (we dont even know how much of it is AT&T vs. Mitnicks fault and what contact he has had with them): it's looking like an infinite battle to "secure" his identity. If there are crucial security flaws in their process then yes I am in agreement - but I doubt that is the case (because Mitnick would then be the least of their problems :)). Wash hands, move on.
reasonable >> a week or so, several hours is really pushing it :)

Your lack of 'traction' may be because http://founderinstitute.com/ is down. or at least it is from where I'm sitting.

edit: google cache link in case somebody wants to read it:

http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:5TPGecG7aCUJ:www.founder...
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Sounds unlikely, but not impossible.
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Another element to consider is that sometimes very detailed, thought-out plans are often actually less valuable than tentative, raw ideas. Elaborate plans are brittle because there are many dependencies interwoven into them. Another way of putting that is that there are a lot of implicit assumptions about how the final system will work. But the reality is that there are things that will be unanticipated developments during the actual construction. Some of these will be things that in hindsight should have been anticipated, and others will be things that it really isn't possible to anticipate. In other words, we only really learn what the plan should look like by building.

Building gives us crucial elements of the plan. But there is another essential piece as well. And that is that one person can only figure out so much of how something complicated enough to be valuable should work. This is part of why YC wants multiple co-founders rather than single founders. It's also where you want to get feedback loops working in your favor. So much of life is about feedback loops, whether it is body temperature, or social confidence, or addictive dependencies. You want to get feedback from other people, and the way to do it isn't to show them your ideas, it's to show them the built out manifestation of your ideas, for exactly the reasons in the paragraph above.

One of the many things that makes this startup thing interesting is that for 500 years, specialization has been a trend. Since you only have a few guys in a startup ...

Finally, in terms of working on the skills, why not work on skills by trying to build a straight-forward aspect of one of the simpler ideas? And if this isn't possible because of the nature of the ideas, then the ideas need to evolve to make this possible.
Down for me too.

(and yeh.. a week sounds reasonable. The original has barely dropped of the "new" page right now)
I wasn't referring to YC, but your personal endeavour with Viaweb. When you say that you were/are passionate about not failing, I was wondering if you rationally consider failure to be an essential catalyst for eventual success?!
I thought that a kilogram was the mass of 1000 cubic centimeters of water at melting temperature, and that a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter which is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in the time it takes a caesium-133 atom to emit a little more than 30 periods of radiation (9,192,631,770 p/s / 299,792,458 m/s).
If this is really possible, why don't we see this technology in more places?
Wouldn't such a customer be worth gold? A single user that constantly get's attacked by hackers would provide a great opportunity to detect and fix security holes. If a hacker get's through, it is just one person's account compromised. But each detected attack could prevent attacks on other accounts.

I think some other telco should pay Mitnick to become their customer. How else could you attract so many hacker brains and make them work on finding security flaws in your system?
There have been attempts to redefine the mole.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0026-1394/46/3/022/met9_3_022....
Maybe his disappearance is an art piece about how things can or cannot be erased from the 'net.