skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Focus on an idea that:

Is B2B.

Provides Value to the business and solves a pain point for them.

Something you are interested and knowledgable about.

DHH's startup school talk is great, very inspirational. I used to listen to it once a day on my commute.

Good SaaS ideas are hard to find . . .

Listen to the Startups For The Rest of Us podcast, they have episodes on finding an idea and lots of other good advice on validating your market, finding paying customers, building an email list.

It's not rocket surgery but it's still hard you'll need to wear lots of hats to build a successful SaaS. I'm currently working on my second one, first one isn't getting traction.

Just to throw something out there here are some ideas I've been approached with in the last year. (I'm not saying build these, pick something you have expertise in, and contacts in that industry, get to know the business owners first, get some paying customers lined up then start building.)

Car Wash Management App, tracking soap, chemicals, maintenance, washes, revenue, etc.

Pet Kennel booking/management app.

Mechanic/Repair Garage app, track customers, notes on their vehicle, mileage, history of repairs, oil changes, send out automated SMS reminders/promos when they have an oil change/maint. coming up.

There are still lots of ideas to leverage technology for small businesses and build up to 200+ paying subscribers for a SaaS.

It's not really the idea, it's making sure paying customers want what you have in mind. So validate the idea, talk to business owners, find out if it's a pain point, would they pay for a SaaS to solve it. Then it's about execution.

Pick something you can get an initial version up fast and get paying customers signed up and using it. Maybe a goal of 30 days to launch initial version get signups.

You don't want to spend 6 to 12 months building X only to find out customers wanted Y or Z instead. So launch fast.

Then you can track how paying customers are using it, how often they log in, create/view X,Y,Z in the app. And you'll have an idea if it's providing value.

SaaS is a slow slog to gain customers so it will probably take 18 to 24 months to climb up to maintaining 200 subscribers.

Good luck.
Please, do not run this on Tor. The p2p aspect will definitely help, as it will be harder to locate a single server with traffic analysis, but it isn't enough. Run this on bitmessage (or a fork thereof) which broadcast messages to all peers, making traffic analysis futile for an attacker.
I guess another dumb question; what does Occam's Razor say about the Fermi equation?
>> Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.

The technology is there to build this kind of device, I agree not 100% accurate but still practical enough to be used in real life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IraqComm

>> Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words

This too, the technology is there to build a device. I would say we've much more powerful devices in form of smart phones than just doing 1 or 2 things.
The talko app on iPhone is actually much more than just speech to text converter. http://www.talko.com/

I would also like to say that Singularity predictions doesn't employ that the technology will be so mainstream that every person will be using that. But even if we can build a technology in some lab, it still becomes an event on Singularity timetable.
I've yet to see any off the mark prediction from Singularity timeline.
It would be cool to combine this with the Requirebin.com backend so the GLSL code could use glslify, and the GL code could use stackgl (or some other family of modules) rather than just an in-house GL abstraction.
NREL Teams with SolarCity to Maximize Solar Power on Electrical Grids
First LHC data becomes available to the public
Just install SwiftKey, Kii Keyboard, Swype, etc. Far better for completion and UI in my opinion at least.
I wasn't complaining. I just wasn't sure how else to address a rebuttal since people often downvote to disagree.
>I see this as a big failure of "modern" graphic systems.

Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons we were stuck with such incredibly shitty low res displays for so long. Up until windows vista, high DPI monitors were simply unusable in windows. Even now they have problems.

We still have a similar problem forcing us into having tiny screens. Windows and all the desktop environments that copied it are absolutely worthless at their primary function: managing windows. So people prefer two small monitors over one large monitor simply because the two small monitors allow an easy "make this take up half my screen space". Something that is of course trivially easy to implement, but most "modern" windowing systems don't care about at all.
There are four themes for the builtin keyboard now:

- Material Light (the default, the one that's shown in the article);

- Material Dark (the same but dark);

- Holo White (the old one);

- Holo Blue (the old one with blue accents)
The Sound of Interstellar
Reputation systems do not need centralization to have enough data points, what they need is traction. That can very well be achieved with a decentralized system.

But most importantly, the idea of making "trust" graphs using a weak form of transitivity needs to die. Reputation networks should encode sign statements of facts, from which trust can be estimated by participants, using a variety of approaches - in particular non-local approaches which aren't fooled by cliques.
Wouldn't common interpretations of the Fermi equation argue that it's not a tiny chance?
> Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent. They are now executing those grand-design rules.

That's all well and good, but they seem to do this every two years or so.
The hardware isn't the interesting part of the project. The software is what's cutting-edge, and it cost way more than $100k to make it.
Thanks. The communications and the service health dashboard are two areas that we are creating improvement plans from the learning of this event. For the dashboard, we do expect it to continue to run even through outages like this one, but we did encounter an issue with our fallback mechanism that we need to understand more deeply.

For general communications, we did most of our early communication on the event using twitter, announcing the incident and giving updates. We need to build a more formal multi-pronged approach to communicating, including faster responses in the MSDN forums and here in HN to make sure we are reaching as many of our customers and partners as possible. Thanks again for the feedback!!
Unfortunately, in about 3-5 years, there will be a new trend, the Immaterial design, that every company will just have to follow!
Here's a written reference: http://news.filehippo.com/2014/10/windows-10-will-free-perso...

I believe it was also mentioned in the Windows 10 announcement keynote.
BlueColony is probably the most easy-to-use app marketplace on any device and gives new watch users a great overview on the wear-app ecosystem +++1
> Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent.

It will be like everywhere else. Someone wanted to change stuff to make their mark and found a way to get survey results that confirmed their decision.
Veu – The total travel guide
Yeah and too many times when you complain about this kind of thing you get accused of "hating change" or some such thing. No, I hate THIS change because THIS change is bad!
Remember when they bring down the central bank and every computer, every car, everything stops working because the certificate authority chain has failed?
Ballot: Massachusetts School Board must publish results of all negotiations
Top notch article thanks for posting. Thanks for pointing out those fonts, I feel like finding good fonts is always a struggle for me. Anyone have any other suggestions like these?
"Microsoft killed my pappy. And my pappy's pappy."
If only every application was just a backend with a well-defined API and a default UI, then we could have independently sourced UIs that every person could choose (and customize) on demand!
The new gmail is ok although it has absolutely no advantages over the old one so it's merely irritating they changed it just because they could. Except for the compose button over the top of my text which is really awful and I hate it so much
Hi, author here. Thanks to everyone for checking this out. I'm sorry if some of the examples don't work across the board, most of these use WebGL extensions that might not be available everywhere. As some people mention in the comments here, and as mentioned in the introductionary text on the website, I've not been able to test this across a large variety of platforms and browsers and I expected there to be issues in particular on Windows using ANGLE. Please consider filing issues on github intead of/in addition to reporting them here so I can actually track them.
I wouldn't throw in the towel yet . . .

Try to approach him like this . . .

Let's launch, get paying customers, track how they are using the app . . . both to start generating revenue and validate that the app will provide value before adding more features, getting patents, etc . . . then use that revenue for advertising, patents, new features, etc . . .

Just explain that 6 months is a large chunk of time and you don't want to invest more time until you have paid signups and can see how they are using the app/get feedback from paid users as to what they need/want.

Good luck.
sweet! can you post a shot?
A lot of people seem to think that steps like this are just Microsoft catching up. Which, I suppose, they are. But there's something else here too - this kind of thing, where Microsoft is opening up to the open source community, releasing more free tools, releasing more open source projects, all started happening when Satya Nadella took the reins.

I think what we're looking at is a CEO that gets it and is trying to move as fast as possible to turn the monolithic company around. That's no mean feat, considering how long Microsoft has gone with everything being behind closed doors in a licensing maze.

I for one approve of this trend.
I'm so glad someone finally said it! I'm tired of this crap.

This applies to physical products too. These companies change their labels so much.. It just makes it more difficult to find and leaves me, as a consumer, confused when shopping unsure that I'm buying the correct product. Yes, things needs to be updated and kept "pretty" but can we keep a base? Or can we agree, at least, to pick something and stick to it?!
I'm AU and the guys I deal with are ex-ADF so I don't know. I'm glad that there's a wiki link for that one though, that helps when I next have to reference it :)

Same idea either way - the system is far more than just the equipment/technology.
Why “the best way to predict the future is to invent it” is no longer enough
An observation:

Future-shock is here! It’s no longer startup business as usual because the bar’s about to be raised on the laggards.

“It’ll take [far more] than all the running you can do to keep in the same place [Alice].” - Lewis Caroll

In highly interconnected environments undergoing accelerated change the past is no longer a measure for the future. We are about to experience red queen effects. There is a real risk that adverse, sizable & domino-like volatility events could deroute current trajectories such that determining where the `puck´ will be is reduced to clairvoyance. Almost anyone, anywhere has the potential to destabilize the system with their BIG idea virtually overnight, creating a shock-wave of such magnitude as to disrupt, displace, even render extinct the biggest & seemingly most robust companies, i.e., less innovators install, position for, broad optionality, in their ideas, their start-ups so-called, antifragility.
does this require a particular version of the .net framework to be installed?
Downloading... stuff.
Ars Technica just published an article complaining about Google not following their own design rules in Lollipop. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/11/the-nexus-10-lollipo...
Hmmm - you certainly make a strong case for social problems. But both halves of the equation could be true, right? Teaching and society could both be bad.

My understanding, from this article and other reports, is that the percentage of teachers drawn from the top tier of graduates is dropping (top tier measured by GRE scores, grades, and rigor of the undergraduate program). The top 10% of math majors, for instance, rarely become teachers.

I think the US is putting so much emphasis on a plan. My take on it is if you draw your math teachers from the top echelons of math students, and provide support for learning to teach in a classroom, you really won't need to micromanage the curriculum. Sure, a general plan is a good thing, but at that point you can give the teachers pretty broad autonomy in the classroom.

Still, the problems you've described are extremely serious and could completely derail an education and life regardless of the talent and devotion of the teacher. Strong teachers and a stable social environment are both pretty critical for a kid trying to excel in school.
Tremendous Opportunities Exist for Realtors in the International Marketplace
their download button points to an .exe file, no matter with OS are you running
At the smaller scale. There is a continuous tradition in home construction over that time period. Further, Japan for example had an independent tradition unaffected by Rome's rise and fall.
Show HN: YoDocker – Yo when your docker images built successfully
NextGlass Knows If You'll Love a Beer or Wine by Scanning the Label
I really like the new design and it did not changed too often in my opinion. UI design is like fashion for me and when it changes for good (I thing I like the Lollipop design) every 3-5 years this is a good thing.

When speaking about productivity and design:

So we should all stay on Windows XP because everybody knows it and how to use it?
The Nintendo DS is 10
From what I understand of systemd, it's more a factor of there being an entirely new inter-process communication mechanism, combined with a lot of custom applications. And because it's this top-down monolithic design, either you use systemd as your init, or you get none of the functionality of the custom programs... so it's all-or-nothing.

On top of that, the people who don't want to use it are against the idea of supplanting the core technology they're used to. So you have this one camp that's all "fuck yeah new technology", and another camp that's like "get that shit out of my box."

In a way it's like GNOME vs KDE, but almost at the very heart of the operating system. You just have to pick one and go with it, or you don't really get the benefit of either.

The 'set of interfaces' you mention should (imho) be patches to systemd to allow it to work as not-pid-1, so that you can still take advantage of its contributory applications without having to supplant your init system. That way you could use 'a gtk application in a kde workstation', but with systemd and sysvinit.
I think this is as bad as trying to comply with backseat driver directions, verbatim.

They are supposed to know how not to drive their product into the tree. Society doesn't. Their search is their product, and not "society's".
> This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.

I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.
I think the bigger issue would be knowing who is using it.
One team might think we only have 5 people so we'll use it! And a different team in another office might think the same. Oops.
This happens every time something changes. Wait for the next release and the same guy is probably going to be complaining about changes to the current UI.

One phrase I hear a lot is “The future is longer than the past”. It's relevant here as well – spending all of your time worrying about existing users have to spend a couple minutes getting used to a new keyboard design isn't a good reason not to make improvements which will benefit the millions of people who will never use the old one.
Welcome to the Mickysoft BloatWorld. And do not forget to get the new 700+ MB Update, so you can live up to even more bloat - this update alone flatulated 5+ GB on the harddrives I have seen.

This is not just about "style" or "personal preference", it is a serious problem: it eats too much energy and therefore destroys the planet, millions of old but perfectly usable devices are transformed into highly dangerous toxic waste because Windows 8x is too slow for them and - most important - we loose a whole generation of brains as too many young developers grow up in the perception that this kind of bloat is acceptable, what is a real catastrophe for the whole industry - it is so hard to find people that can program without crutches and really know what they are doing.

We should more actively avoid this bloat and support better alternatives.

Yes, Mickysoft jobs pay the bills for many, but this happened because we tolerated this too long and alternatives were too weak. Nowadays it is possible to replace all the legacy MS waste that still exists in many companies with better solutions.
I wonder at what point it stops being a UI redesign and becomes a psychological experiment.
I know WebStorm, thanks, wanna try the competition :)
Verse – IBM's answer to Inbox
Or Chrome with Stylebot. I love to see people reactions when they see how different their sites are on my screen.
The underlying problem is dev time gets wasted on cosmetic updates while basic usability issues are ignored.

Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong.

I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world.

Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX.

It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers.

Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.
> and even then it's only on some highways entering California

When I entered California several times from the northern border with Oregon, it was like every other state-crossing to me -- oh, a state line, simply keep driving.

When I heard about being stopped at the California border about a month ago on another social website, I was confused until informed that these border checks were more so along the edges with Nevada.
I actually meant the tricks, not the companies.
The one time I drove into California, it was at like 6:00am or so and the station was closed, so I just drove through. And even then, it was pretty far in from the actual state line. Definitely not the most impenetrable border protection.
During installation you can choose a customize path and un-check everything you dont need.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/Evju1.png
I think it is just a fact of life, it's the same reason that I can't ever figure out how to really use a microwave. They have to make it different this year to "differentiate" the brand. I've learned to live with a lot of churn and reach to buy the products that were built with more care and last.
"The future is longer than the past" seems like the perfect excuse to justify pretty much anything.
Ask HN: What is the best resource to find a dev job? Looking for Berlin/remote
The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Excessive change is generally better than no changes at all. Things have to evolve and even if we miss the mark every now and then it should always improve over time on average when new ideas are tried and tested.
The user pays a cost every time a UI changes -- but the user also pays a cost if a UI is frozen forever and not permitted to evolve.

What are some techniques for evolving UIs at minimal cost to the user?
> any criticism of it elicits a knee-jerk reaction.

While this also may be true, I'm quite familiar with the patent issue. And I am not even really criticizing Light Table for this decision, just expressing a tinge of sadness that yet another project has switched to a non-viral license.

> Please understand that the license change is a really big deal for some people.

Yup, I'm one of them.
One thing that this graph doesn't capture is that, especially for Peach, Ice Climbers, and Mewtwo, a single player has brought each of those characters into the limelight.

These kinds of graphs don't translate well into MOBAs because the team size (5), character count (100+) and drafting mode (ban/pick/ban/pick) tend to create very stale metagames if the game is not rebalanced from time to time. That said, both Riot and Valve have made some pretty crazy balance decisions in the last 12 months.
Deploying lighttpd, your flask-apps, gunicorn, supervisor with Ansible on CentOS
Tech Journalists’ Fine Line Between Critic and Booster
As a Dutchman: lol, helmets.
Google is making a huge amount of progress in UI and UX; the company has historically been rather mediocre in terms of it's UI and UX, while Apple was always the star. Over the past year or so the roles have reversed, and Google continues making strides towards unifying their applications in a single user experience and ui paradigm that allows for simpler app use, particularly for new users.

It's easy to get upset when things change, but keep in mind that change can be positive and/or negative.
ISS astronaut Karen Nyberg commented on this illusion (or rather the lack of it, from space) earlier this year:

https://twitter.com/AstroKarenN/status/441338200242393088
Something about the entire approach Google is taking with Lollipop (and Material Design) just seems off to me. I can see their philosophy but I don't agree with large parts of it (I don't need or want animations to guide me along the path thank you).

Overall I'm left with a feeling of a lack of 'grace'. It's just not graceful, which I guess is where the art of UI comes into play. Maybe they will get there eventually, but right now it's still clunky as hell. Even worse, they are dropping functionality along the way.