skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Also any personal advice is welcome, to the extent that it is possible in such an anonymous setting.

That's your choice, not mine.

> none of the ideas I thought about earlier seem that great anymore.

This is very common. I have this when I shower ;) Go stand under the shower long enough and sure, one idea after another. Mostly because I can't access the internet when I'm showering so there is no context. Then as I go and check feasibility, others active in the field, invariably the majority of them pale.

> what to work on ?

Without any stated goals this is a very very hard question.

You'd have to at least come up with a couple of boundary conditions, such as how long you can afford to work on this without any income, how much time you are willing to expend, whether it has to be a strictly one man/woman job, your skill level and so on.

That you quit grad school doesn't mean much, I've seen people with impressive degrees that would not be able to run an icecream stand, let alone a software or service business, and I've seen high school drop-outs that were doing just that and doing fine.

As for small concrete problems, if what you are looking for is work experience instead of running your own start-up for a make-or-break effort not to land in a job somewhere there is a middle ground, it is consulting.

If you're good you could simply hire yourself out by the hour to software companies or companies needing software written for them in your region. If you do that well then roughly 1/4 of your time 'booked' should pay for basic living expenses.

Then you still have 3/4 left to work on you own stuff.

best of luck!
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Zombies are hot right now. Seriously, they’re everywhere. Countless books, movies, video games, and comic books featuring the rotting undead are racking up sales, and many more are already on the way. Odds are pretty good the last Halloween party you went to had at least one zombie and one zombie hunter, and you probably know someone who was involved in an amateur zombie film.
Personally, I like hearing about both the technical and the commercial reasons driving a business decision. The fact that GitHub did not serve Ruby projects exclusively (or primarily) was an important factor to EY - why should they neglect to mention that?
Please do, as I am sure there are a bunch of us who would love to hear more about it.
My own private notes didn't show up.
I like the 'life wars', that's a clever one.

I'll raise your glider one f-pentomino.

Set it up so that you only have to agree to the number of life cells you can both place, as soon as the last cell is placed the game fires and runs to completion.

Two sliders, starting at 50 cells or so, both players can lower the slider as long as the cells have not been all places. Each player sets a cell to their colour in turn.

Excellent little idea, it won't make you any money in the short run but it has a fair chance of going viral.

Core wars for life.

Really neat little idea.

edit: and now the Hacker News variation on this, set it up so there is an API where hackers can pit their skills against each other, a sort of face off arena for cellular automaton placement strategies.

There is your machine learning angle.

For extra points provide a schedule and a way for spectators to follow the action.

I'd help you build it / host it :)
What can be computed?
This should really be made into a web service. Where all the new card decks are shared for free. I think it could become a very powerful collaborative environment.
A former housemate started a relationship with a cute girl. Of course, when non-geeks are around conversation must veer wildly away from anything in the field. But he said that she might be a bit geeky herself.

Conversation turned towards computing when she was over a bit later on, and I let it go there. Said housemate and I were having an enormous bitch about Lotus Notes from shared work experience. She wore on a sour expression, and I thought my instincts had been shown right.

But then it came out that she was a self-taught Domino developer, and had a web application with tens of thousands of users hosted off it, built on Domino - something she'd just done as a hobby.

Now what are the odds of that?
Thanks, you are right that I wasn't specific enough and I agree about impressive degrees and such, basicly that's why I quit grad-school :). I would say I have decent coding skills and good knowledge of machine learning, computer vision and related theory, as well as the hacker's hubris of not being afraid to start working on anything, no matter how hard it seems, with the hope of 'picking it up' on the go. Also the timeframe is difficult to specify, because one hopes to start a hobby project that turns into a lifetime of work (as Linux did for Linus for ex.)... Obviously if it becomes self-sustaining, it's perfect, if not, it can be done on the side with a day-job or such...
Medical Hypotheses fails the Aids test
Speaking from my personal experience: you can get very far just by dumping a few hundred questions/examples/small-problems into your favorite SRS. That's so many that your mind, rather than memorize them, will instead learn just how to do them. This works as well for math or CS as for languages.

I've proposed for Mnemosyne 2.0 that there be a card type which is just some Python code which is evaluated: http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users/browse_t... The idea is that if you want to learn, say, multiplication, you would write some Python code that generates 2 random ints (as the question) and their product (as the answer), and now the user must solve it. You get much the same benefit as if you generated several hundred problems by hand or by script, but without cluttering your deck or risking memorizing some.
> ... interesting startups are hard to find in my geographical location.

To within 300km or so, where are you?
Eastern Europe...
Ask HN: Cloning basecamp
I have been using 37signals products for the last 2 years. On a recent project of my own, I built some basic project management using ideas from basecamp. It turned out that it was incredibly easy to build given the simplicity of basecamp (and the other 37signal products) as well as the ease of "just cloning the product without doing any thinking regarding features and user-interface design".

Now I am motivated to build a basecamp (and may be other 37s products) clone. I know the amount of effort that has gone into all the features and minor details of creating their products. I also don't want to claim that I can build a clone "over the weekend".

My intention is to build a clone with just enough features for my existing customers and market it, may be, just like 37signals. I am already profitable with other ventures so I am not in a hurry. Once the products are out, I can improve them and make them more feature rich with release-early-release often. I shall, of course, be charging less than 37s.

My questions to you guys are:
1. Is is legal to do this; copy features and design from an existing web application and building your own. If not, what can I do to remain legal. Please note I shall not be doing copy/paste from 37s, I shall be building everything from scratch.

2. Can I market my products with claims such as "it is basecamp but with less features" without offending 37signals?

I have been convinced by 37s that a product/service can still do a good job even with less features so I just want to do exactly this.

Edited title.
XHTML Conversion - What’s The Fuss
Supermemo isn't really free - maybe you meant 'Anki & Mnemosyne'? That's the big 2 in the Free SRS space.
The problem with cancer rates from 200 years ago is that life-expectancy was so different and that they might not have have been able to identify the cause of death back then.
Random advice from someone who doesn't know your skills or situation ...

If you want to create something you have to create something. From all your ideas you have to pick one and build something. Build it as fast as you can, let people know about it, see if they find it useful, listen to their feedback, and remember everything they find wrong.

Then decide - push this through to the next stage, or scrap it and start again. I would say you should go 80/20 - 80% push/change/adapt/enhance, and 20% scrap and start again, using what you've learned.

Toss a coin - two heads in a row you scrap it and start over. That's close enough.

If you sit and try to find the best idea, or if you take someone else's idea and try to build it, you won't learn anywhere near as fast. You need to think of something that you would use, and build it. Give yourself three days to build, one day to deploy, one day to advertise, and two days to gather some reaction.

> ... visualization for website visitors ... nodes are different pages, edges are the links between pages ...

Can you do better than this:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SiteMapExpt.html?HN

Or this:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HN

Can you do that for any site?
This piece has been written by an incredibly arrogant misanthrope maybe even a fascist. It has no substance, just opinion. It does not even define what "stupid" means. Low IQ? Ignorance? Lack of understanding of human relations (like in "saying stupid things")?
This guy just denounces one of the main pillars of modern democracy - "all men are created equal" - and you applaud.

Next thing he'll tell us that we have to exterminate "stupid" people in the best case before they have been born because it's all nature and not nurture.
"I think you're not using the author's definition of "stupid" "

The author does not offer one.
> I would say you should go 80/20 - 80% push/change/adapt/enhance, and 20% scrap and start again,

That's pretty good advice in principle but I'd swap the numerical values :)

Another way of achieving the same effect is to throw a bunch of stuff out there (such as you've already done) see what kind of feedback you get back, run with it and just let it sit.

Some things will develop a little traction on their own, as soon as you see that try to establish a dialogue with your would-be user base, and figure out what you have to do to keep them coming back.

And because you want to make a living of this you should probably scrap anything that does not solve a problem that people are willing to pay for. I realize that removes 95% of the possible projects but that is exactly why it is a good discriminating factor.

One of the things I've found about HN is that if you make yourself accessible (so not that anonymous) you get an awful lot more response than if you are invisible.

People are willing to write in email a lot more than they would put on the site so if it is no big deal then at least provide a way to reach you via email.
Good point. How many users have actually uploaded video?
Thanks for the encouragement... yeah I really have to build something, "waiting for an idea" doesn't really work...

the visualization in the first link looks indeed very close to what I was thinking about although it also shows how hard it is to make a clear plot with ~100 nodes. I wonder whether it would be interesting to see something like this in real time with visitor activity.
This is a great point. Let's go backwards. There are somewhere around 50MM businesses in the united states alone...

How about if 1% of those have you tube accounts where they have added content. Does that make more sense?
I love this quote! I'm really just trying to make a point. Access to analytic data is valuable.
This is a great way to explain what I've seen happen. You have to set user's expectations that it's free now but not going to be free forever is fine...

Thanks for commenting.
>> 80% push/change/adapt/enhance, 20% scrap ...

> That's pretty good advice in principle but I'd swap the numerical values :)

The reason for putting them the way I did is to stop things from being abandoned too early. I think you need to be willing to do lots, scrap lots, but you also need to put in hard work on each one. Scrapping them too early means you don't get a chance to discover and fix the flaws.

Perhaps I should write more about that, but I really believe that 75/25 (to go with the coin toss idea) really is close to right.

Having said that, you've built and are running sites for money, and my advice is based on models of building real world businesses.

But I do believe that things should be built fast, deployed fast, and given time to develop and be developed. That's why I say you should only scrap things 25% of the time. Work hard to prove an idea won't work. If you can't do that - persist and pursue. But once you can prove it won't work (or won't work well enough) abandon it and use the experience on your next attempt.

Finally, don't do these things serially, but don't go for too many at once. Two or three is my gut feeling for a sweet spot.

</blather>
I think you're right. It might not bring in 120B, but it's revenue. Recurring revenue, that's more valuable and stable than ad revenue.
Thanks.
Oh no. I can fix that. What's the title typo?
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Thanks for your insight. Here's the deal though ->
1) Agreed!
2) Agreed!
3) Don't Agree. If there's value to the data there's a way to share it. Saying that it's too much data is just an easy way to say no.
4) You're right. Google Ads support YouTube. This won't last forever. Advertising online is falling apart - slowly - but it's getting cheaper and cheaper and less and less effective. So, looking at additional revenue streams seems like a good idea to me.
How many nodes can you handle with processing? I recently tried to write such a thing using Javascript canvas, but it was too slow for my use case. I haven't tried it with Web Workers yet, though.
Set Up WebDAV With Apache2 On Fedora 11
Search for profit prompts Twitter advertising U-turn
Sun's Sparc server roadmap revealed
The GNU Emacs repository uses almost all of my (paid) storage space. I am not doing anything wrong, either, Emacs just has a lot of history and a lot of code.
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Thanks, these are very nice ideas, especially the API for agents. I'd like to build this sometime, as it should be really fun to play...
There are some issues in gameplay that I couldn't figure out yet, though.
for example running until completion could be quite hard to detect, as there can be oscillators with a long period. Also, not sure if the board should be circular, to allow re-entry or not... I was thinking whether players can place their cells anywhere or just in their own restricted "corners" of the board. My main concern however is whether the whole thing would be predictable enough to allow some sort of strategy or it would just be too chaotic... I also sent you a private message if you'd like to discuss...
Hey OP, was your technique influenced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow? I'm referring to the relationship between ability level and challenge. Do I see similarities with your clearly effective teaching style and some of the elements Video Game designers have almost unanimously implemented to great success?
Pick a small project to begin with that can be coded in 1 month.

A great source of inspiration is:
http://osx.iusethis.com/

Go though some programs while thinking "I can do better than this". Pick a useful tool that you actually can code with little effort.

Then get the payment system working and try sell it. It's ok if it doesn't sell.

Then start coding a bigger tool and use the payment system and homepage setup and all the knowledge you have learned from the first project.
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We are working on this problem! Coming soon :)

http://activity.fm
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Why it's impossible to become a programming expert
Twisted Python's lead hacker discusses Tornado
There's a JPG of the dropbox logo, which (this being a photo-sharing site) goes to a page just for that image. I don't see anything else that looks like it was intended to be a link. The instructions say to go to your own "upload photos" page and find your own link with instructions.
no discussion about cancer is complete without mentioning "the china study" by Collin Campbell

conclusion? eat whole food, plant-based diet

and we don't need labels like vegetarian/vegan. why? because eating fried fries, potatoe chips, smoking, drinking, sodas, candies ... while correctly not including animals ... are not healthy
Well, I was assuming nigh perfect logistics. :)
i'm more impressed with how much conflicting misinformations floating around while seemingly scientific

claims like x improves y are abundant. sadly we don't often see the %quantitative improvements and fall into "every little bit helps"

then we get another claim like "a prevents b", then blindly follows. while a and x are good in its own rights, the 'interaction' effect is so complicated that taking them will become net negative
I don't know if Macs are this way but, in Windows, if you click on a link with the mouse's scroll button, it opens in a tab (thus eliminating the need for this script as I understand it).
An okay discussion, but it falls entirely flat on its face in a very important place: related work.

What is the point of related work? Notionally twofold: to argue that there are people that care about what you're doing (because they're asking similar questions), and to argue that people haven't done the work yet.

But in reality there's a third reason: to help tell the story.

Writing a paper is telling a story. The story of an interesting problem, and how you went about solving it.

Simon thinks that related work should go at the end of the paper. Reading his slides makes it clear to me that really the issue is that he doesn't know what to do with related work; it seems to be an anachronism to him that he has to put somewhere so it might as well stick it at the end where no one will notice. He also seems to have missed that related work helps answer the "It's an interesting problem" and "It's an unsolved problem" sections of his story -- both of which he's got thrown up in the "Conveying the idea" slide. This tells me that he's likely not written a good related work section.

Related work is motivation. It's part of the story. It should be relatively up front. The story should go like this:

- Introduction: Here is a problem

- Related Work: Other people have gone after this problem and have failed to figure it out, or danced around it. People care about it.

- Approach: Here is how I solve the problem

- Details: Here is what I did

- Discussion: Here is what the results were

- Conclusions and Further Work: Here's what I'm going to do next.
You might want to have a look at Pimsleur. The theory described is almost the same except Pimsleur was studying language learning... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimsleur_language_learning_syst...
I'm just about to start lecturing the tutorials for a linear algebra class next week. The prof that is running the course taught it to me 4 years ago and is the reason I'm now in grad school. She did more or less the same thing that you mention, and it definitely works. I remember all of this material from back when I took the class; it's still familiar and I use it all the time.

But despite being very useful for a half to two-thirds of her students, there is always about 1/3 of the class who does terrible in this course. How did you get these people to keep up?

Anyway, I'm glad you posted this. It's a good pick-me-up motivator as I'm about to be trying to do the same thing!
http://seleniumhq.org/ is great for system testing. Easy to start using with the firefox plugin (selenium IDE), more advanced features (Selenium RC, Grid) and tests can be written in a number of languages.
I'm also interested and tackling the problem myself. Contact me at kkouddous at gmail - would love to share best practices.
Uh, probably not.
Google and newspapers:  the false choice of opting out
No, I wasn't. I was talking about the speed-critical tight loops. Once you let GHC or TraceMonkey or PyPy or ... know what the machine types of your data is, they will generate very fast code; often the same instructions that the C compiler would generate.

C is fast because the programmer explicitly names the machine types to be used. Other languages are slow because their operations can't always be expressed in terms of operations the machine can do. (Consider Perl and "2 + 2". This is "slow" because 2 is a "SV", and that means before anything can happen, the integer 2 has to be unboxed from the SV, the runtime has to decide which "+" to use, and then the result has to be boxed in a "SV". This is much slower than running the "ADD" instruction. But if you can somehow specify, "this is not a special boxed value, just treat it as a machine integer and don't worry about overflow or anything special", then you are doing the same thing as C. Modern VMs (and static compilers) can guess this for you and generate the right code.)
It is in the category, "fast, but not C".
Keep in mind how Google's database works: These notes can only be found if there is a link to them on a page already in their database. That means one of two things: Their profile is set so that Google can read it, and it scraped the link from there, or someone posted a link outside of Facebook to the note.

Its a lot like all of the private FTP sites you find in the Google database (Do a search that resembles * : +intitle:index.of +"last modified" +"Port 80"). While some of them may have been meant to public at one point, all it takes is one link pointing in for Google to find it and open it to the world.

*A note about that search: it returns some place in the realm of ~12 million results. A massive number of those are intentionally open, for thins like open source projects. You'll have to append something ridiculous like -inurl:(com|org|net|edu|gov|uk|fr|gr|www|jp|ftp|eu|biz|info|ww|ca|ac|ru|se|us|ch|ua|pl|ch|am|co) to even start seeing links to IPs, which I would guess have around a 99% probability of being someone's home computer that they put Apache on to make life easier, and then put a link some place so they could remember it.
The only problem is accessing all those results Google has stored away. The attempts I have made to access their database have met in huge failures, except when jumping through some rather massive hoops. They restrict you to the first ~60 results if you do what they want and use the API, and ~250 results if you cheat and scrape the pages directly.

That's what makes Google a little disturbing to me. Their database is (in theory) open, but to get any more than a very small segment at a time you have to either craft ridiculous queries.
Why Can’t She Walk to School?
the ability to link to the responses / output seems like it might be useful for debugging and helping others
Ten free student hacker tickets for Business of Software 2009
No, it's not. Scott Chacon's surname starts with a C, not an S.

http://github.com/schacon

http://progit.org/
you realize you may make a bit of money, but everyone will know that you just 100% copied basecamp, you'll be known as the shady "guy that ripped off basecamp" and so on?

why would I buy your, probably cheaper, software and not support the original, better designed [by definition] software?