Ask HN: Holy Crap I need an Idea - <AUTHOR> I have a unique opportunity on my hands, but lack the ammo to execute with.
In my senior projects class at CU-Boulder I have been given the go ahead by the professor to forego the standard curricula of CSCI 4308 and create my own project as long as it has "substantial business influence". This of course directly translates to building a startup.
I have six months, a team of five senior cs-majors, and the support of the university, but there is still a glaring hole.
I don't believe I have a good enough idea to run with.
Some that I have been contemplating are a comedy-mashup site (basically a last.fm for stand up comedians), a Haskell web development framework (which I asked for feedback for in a previous post and was pretty much told not to do it) or trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware.
I am not sold on any of these and am looking for some inspiration because I only have a couple more days to write a formal proposal or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from the industry.
Any ideas that are within the scope of this project? <comment><USER3> Two free ideas that I just pulled out of my list:

1\. Promoter Marketplace - A site where people can buy/sell product promotional services for local areas. Examples include a club promoter who gets paid based on the number of people at the club on a certain night, or an energy drink promoter that gets paid to hand out cans on exam week. Allow for people to list their rates and let past clients review them.

2\. User Manual Creator - A site that lets people easily create user manuals for their products. Most manuals seem to follow the same set of steps: list parts, show numbered steps with pictures, provide alternate language text, etc. Let users upload pictures/text for each step and then you create a printable manual that can be folded up and neatly placed inside a product box.

They aren't my A-list ideas, but you get what you pay for. :)

<comment><USER4> I kinda like 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't you build an airbnb for Tools and Equipments. In winter, I'd pay to borrow someones snow blower once a week instead of buying it out-right.

People with specialized machinery will flock to your system if you manage the bookings and payment processing, and make it easy for locals/neighbours to meet each others needs.

That's something I would personally find value in, but it might not be so technologically challenging for a group of cs majors.

I'll shoot out more ideas if I think of any. You've got the ideal situation on your hands, get busy!

<comment><USER6> Competitive landscape:

1\. rentalic.com - US startup, based in Silicon Valley, founder appears to have technical and business chops and some social networking cred. Some traction, and imho, the most promising.

2\. neighborgoods.net - LA-based, founder does not appear to be very technical. Limited traction around the LA area.

3\. zilok.com - EU-based, looks like they are trying to reproduce their EU model of the same thing to the US market. Some traction. Because of their EU background, it is likely that they may not understand subtle nuances / user- behavior/perception of US market, which may be their biggest challenge.

p.s. I've been thinking about this problem for a while.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the break down. I've been intrigued by this opportunity for the past two years. Even purchased Localfindr.com in hopes of doing something about it but never developed the concept further in my head.

Definitely a sector to watch!

<comment><USER6> I would challenge you to ask yourself this: Look at one of the competitors, say Rentalic.com. What would you do different than them, product-wise, and marketing-wise ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Solve a problem. That's it. Make a solution that will put a salve on someones pain.

It sounds like all of your other ideas are trying to take advantage of a percieved hot space or were just "neat ideas".

Start making a list of all the problems you have observed and figure out how your proposal could help address them.

Get your team together and brainstorm.

<comment><USER7> By the way, I love the Hemingway reference in the SN. Feel free to email me and I will brainstorm with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 999 business ideas, courtesy of Seth Godin and his folks.

<http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals.

From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identification. That file then acts as a key to find and access the rest of the user's content in the network.

From a network standpoint, every client system has access to an amount of data proportional to the amount it's willing to store for the network. Data stored on the network is chunked down, encrypted, and stored on multiple nodes. Piecing together encrypted data without being able to read the contents of a user's index file should be considered Very Hard.

Something along these lines could really change the computer industry, and I think it's within the realm of possibility for a university and 5 CS majors, if they're sharp and motivated to work on it.

<comment><USER10> Interesting idea, but I wonder how many copies of my data would need to be stored across the system to guarantee that at least one copy is available when I want it?

Many people don't leave their personal computers switched on all the time, especially if they go away for a few days, then there are network outages, people deciding to leave the network, ...

<comment><USER9> Yeah. I think some of that would resolve itself as the network grew. Otherwise, whenever I've spent much time thinking about it, I've figured that it should be possible to have a nearest-neighbor node notification protocol.

Node A declares that it's quitting to Nodes B and C (or Nodes B and C are suddenly no longer able to poll Node A); Nodes B and C both check the chunks that they know Node A had, and see if there are enough redundant copies of those chunks in the network.

There's a lot of "and then magic happens!" in this idea, but I'm pretty sure it's do-able. The worst part of it by far is doing node searches on a completely decentralized structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why don't you ask the people in your team? They're more likely to give more to the project if the idea comes out of a discussion of theirs, rather than something you just present to them.

<comment><USER12> Although you also face the possibility of disenfranchising someone who thinks their idea was way better and should have been picked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two things I would love to see:

1\. Kayak.com for ground transportation. Trains, buses, ferries, etc. are a pain to compare prices and book right now. Admittedly there probably isn't as much of a business case for this.

2\. A music site where I could collaborate on a playlist with my friends and listen to the music at the same time. Currently there are sites that let you share playlists, but not listen at the same time as other people.

<comment><USER14> #2 is partially handled by rdio (<http://www.rdio.com/>) you can create and share playlists and any number of people can listen to them. Not sure about collaborating on playlists but considering the heavy social aspect of the site I would be surprised if that feature never arrived.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, when you create a playlist on Rdio, you can choose collaboration options: anyone can edit; only followers can edit; nobody can edit. And, as far as I know, there's no limit to the number of concurrent listeners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would poll your professors for a pain point and pick one of those as a problem to solve. May sure it is something they would pay to solve (even if that just means out of their university budget).

1) It would provide you with a "customer" who is close by and you can interact with heavily. 2) There are likely more professors with a similar problem and a similar willingness to pay for it. 3) If you are successful, you will be giving back to your community that fostered your opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER17> What do you wish someone would start a startup to build for you?

<comment><USER18> I guess I should expect that parsing the English output of programming language designers would be difficult.

<comment><USER19> Needs more parens:

      (what
         (wish you
           (someone
               (start startup
                  (build (lambda for you))))))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An augmented reality app for furniture stores. The store would include something like QR codes in their catalog which shoppers can cut out and tape on their wall or place on the floor. Then the app renders 3d versions of the product when viewed through a phone.

It'd be pretty awesome to see how a chair or painting would look in a room by getting a live rendering of the object actually in the room.

<comment><USER21> As an example, the USPS does this for boxes.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpS3LeCiCtc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Make an app-store, but for web applications.

You can fill it to begin with using affiliate links to existing web apps. Once you get a decent number of people using it, you can allow people with new web apps to advertise there, or charge for subscriptions to be listed there, or take a cut out of every sale/signup. Many ways to skin this cat.

<comment><USER23> Also provide extensive curation and guidance. Whether through analytic indexes, "best of" pages for different categories, or a questionnaire for visitors to fill out and get a personalized set of recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've got a startup that's just starting to gain traction (~$4,000 in SAAS license sales, pipeline of more customer prospects). I've taken a tiny amount of angel funding, with a larger angel round pending more product validation. I'm a single, non-technical founder looking for a techie or two who can help build out features. I'm also just to the North of you in Nebraska, well within driving distance. Email if you'd like to chat.

I think the benefit to you is a real-life business that has a business driver (me) with business connections and already has some market validation. I've got a completed business plan that you can pull from to create a great case study. My technical advisor can also give you guidance from someone who's "been there and done that" (and will prevent me from making requests that are technically unsound). Instead of starting from scratch, you have a base to build on.

</comment><comment><USER25> > ... or else I default into the standard class and must take a project from > the industry.

What about if, instead of speculating on a business idea to implement in isolation, you found some of these industry partners, and asked them to describe something they need desperately and would pay for? If you can't do that before your proposal is due, make that research your proposal -- get familiar with the process of gathering needs and learning about a market. Deploy your team on iterating implementations, from paper sketch to running system. If you can get a customer or two to sign a non-binding letter of intent saying they'll buy your product if it does X,Y, and Z, you'll have accomplished something that's beyond most startup-oriented hackers.

<comment><USER26> This is one of the best ideas I've seen so far!

At the very least, you'll learn something about practical development and what it takes to get a real-world project off the ground. If you can can both get a good grade and make some money, so much the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would try looking here (if you haven't already): <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

<comment><USER28> A slight addendum to this, show this list to someone you know who isn't a techie. I mailed this list to my parents and was amazed at what their problems were in many of these fields.

I've always figured that people outside the 18-35 male geek demographic have itches that need scratching that we can't even imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A Mint.com for managing your frequent flier miles instead of money. It alerts you to deals, expiring miles, and ties-in with the infinite affiliate programs for travel in order to generate revenue. (Credit to my mom on that idea.)

<comment><USER30> Does anything like this exist (that's actually helpful/usable)?

<comment><USER29> Not that I've seen, but haven't done much research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a couple:

TV chat system - used to find (local?) people watching the same show you are watching and form a chat channel (on mobile phone?)

Personalized news site - kind of like YC or digg but using netflix style machine learning algorithms to customize

A free version of 'vault.com' (reviews on employers, salary surveys)

Find a haircut (paste your picture, sort of photoshop different hair on it)

Underserved search terms: find some way to figure out what terms have a lot of search traffic but very few good results

Easy quotes for local business (eg, find a plumber). Enter in "my pipe is broken" and get a bunch of emails with quotes.

And one meta idea: a website for people to share startup ideas and form startups

<comment><USER32> > Underserved search terms

This is what Associated Content does. And they are in Denver, just next to CU- Colorado. AC is currently looking for cool algorithms for discovering unsatisfied demand for content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> First of all congrats on convincing your univ to go with you on this.

Here's the biggest problem/asset I see with your scenario - the five seniors. If you really want to do something of significance, you better be damn well organized with your timeline. Another problem I've seen with school projects (yes, I speak from personal experience in the recent past :) is that it doesn't matter if you're willing in to put in the extra mile, but your teammates may not. If it's a grade they're going to be after, be careful, because that's all the finished product would look like. Seriously, your idea isn't so much important as getting along with your teammates.

Also, forget about a technical challenge as a sole basis for the project. Instead, focus on what pg says - what do you wish a startup would do scratch an itch of yours so well that you won't hit the back button :) Remember, your customers don't have to sit through your final project presentation, they can hit the back button anytime!

Alright, the ideas: 1) Look into the higher ed space. I am willing to bet that your univ is already spending boatloads of money on crappy enterprise software. I just walked out of lunch with a friend in the higher ed realm confessing about YC funding amount of money spent on calendaring software alone. Per Year! I am sure with six months time, you could rewrite iCal in javascript.

2) Well, put on walking shoes and talk to your friends about what's missing in their lives? But, really ask yourself what someone could build for you?

</comment><comment><USER34> "trying to edge my way into point of sale restaurant software/hardware"

Having ventured into this realm, Just Say No. Or, at least don't think about the problem like, "Restaurants pay much too much for POS systems...I could build something cheaper and better." Contact me if you want to know more or would like an intro to some people in that space.

Having said this, here's what I want.....

I just bought what is, at least for me, a kick ass USB microphone from M-Audio for $60. Even as the world has become more accepting of telecommuting, the conference call still sucks from an audio standpoint. Skype seems optimized for modems. [Still true?] POTS lines are, of course, awful. Instead of compressing my voice from a cheap microphone into a 2Kbit upstream, what if my voice was recorded with a good microphone and sent upstream at, say 64Kbit? What sort of set-up should I have so that I can collaborate with someone and have the same audio efficiency (meaning, I don't have to expend brain cycles on a bad S/N ratio) as being in the same room?

On a much broader scale, I think that there are huge opportunities for companies who can produce better A/V collaboration tools, and I think that audio is much more important than video from an efficiency of human interaction standpoint. I'd be willing to spend my day in studio headphones and speaking into a mic -- much like a radio DJ -- if it meant I could have effortless conversations.

<comment><USER35> Gosh, when using Skype with a decent headset with a good mike (e.g., a higher- end Shure), the audio is crystal clear--just like being in the same room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I like the comedy website idea. If tracks or "bits" were tagged it would be even better.

"clean", "family", "kids" (for example)

And then I could hear Bill Cosby's cookie jar bit, or Bill Engvall's I.G.Joe bootcamp bit, I'd be in listening heaven.

HOWEVER, I know for a fact there used to be something out there similar to this. I think it was called "haha" or something like that. I don't know if it exists or went away, but I used to use it back in 2005 (I think).

How about a StackOverflow.com for Indie Game development?

<comment><USER37> StackExchange is working on that last part already.

<http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/>

<comment><USER36> I just got goosebumps. This is what I've been hoping/waiting for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is there a site where I can crowdsource my documentation within some privacy agreement? Let's say I have tons of undocumented code written by a previous employee and I'd like to pay someone X dollars to document each method/class/etc.

I tried searching for "crowdsourced documentation" and "paid code documentation service" but I couldn't really find anything. This might be a lucrative idea?

</comment><comment><USER39> One idea I've had that I'll never get around to actually doing anything with is playing with Amazon's Spot Instances. I think that the cheap cloud computing they offer can open up some new possibilities and also just save people money.

I think the best idea that I've had come out of it is some kind of spot instance guide where someone could say "I need this job done by 10am Monday. It'll take ~5 hours on 10 large instances. Get it done for me as cheaply as possible while still having a 95% chance that it gets done in time." You would know enough about the patterns of spot instance pricing that you could instantly estimate the cost for them, and they could play around with the confidence that they want of it finishing as they see the price vs. chance that it doesn't get done trade-off.

Now, there are definitely some issues with that idea. It may be a terrible idea. But I think there are opportunities to build businesses like that that exploit the cheap computing that spot instances offer.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hmmm. Here's a problem that I'm going to end up building a solution to if someone else doesn't do it first (and by all means, please do it because I am lazy and have enough projects to last me for the foreseeable future):

A CRUD application generator. You go to a page and define all of your models and basic rules. The models get defined in very simple terms - you give each model a name, and then define each field with dropdowns that define what each field is. If it's a foreign key, you select that in the dropdown. You can select validation for each field from a catalog of validations (phone number, email address, string min length of 5 chars, whatever).

Offer addins for commonly needed functionality - for example, I end up using authentication in just about every project and end up having to do a lot of work to get it up and running. So you could have plugins like authentication, private messaging (which would require auth automatically), a ticket system, whatever.

Also offer the ability to choose a theme before generating a project.

So a user can go to a site, define their models, add any addins they want and pick a theme.

Then in the final step, they choose a language and framework they want everything generated in: Python / Django, Ruby on Rails 2.3.x, Ruby on Rails 3.x, Python / Pylons, Scala / Lift, ASP.Net MVC; whatever templates you've gotten built.

When it's done, they get a compressed file (zip or tar.gz) that contains the generated application and some programatically created documentation that explains where everything is, how to change the important parts and how to deploy it.

There are lots of ways to make money with something like this:

* Charge for addins per project

* Charge for premium themes

* Charge a small amount per project (I like this option the least)

* Provide automatic hosting a la Heroku for projects - this would let people with a basic idea but no programming chops get something up in an hour or two instead of trying to find someone to explore the idea with them. For this you'd want to limit it to a subset of frameworks so that you don't have to have a lot of different production environments.

* Use a fremium model where people can generate x number of apps a month for free, but over that limitation charge some amount per month. People will try to get around this by registering with multiple email addresses if the product is good, but that's a great problem to have!

Although it sounds like you're probably somewhat freed from a profit motive while you're building this, which helps significantly. From a dev perspective it would be fun to learn enough about all the major frameworks to generate sites in them.

<comment><USER40> If you're willing to go without Python/Ruby, then a hosted Drupal (and it's trove of modules) is perfect for this. Acquia (which includes Drupal's founder) was founded to fill this space.

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I hadn't heard of Acquia before. Unfortunately I personally need the ability to build out apps in different frameworks because I'll almost certainly be extending their functionality beyond CRUD operations and I'm not personally fond of Drupal.

However, I'll definitely be checking it out for simple throwaway stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How about a website for people who want to lose weight? I know this kind of thing already exists, but there are still lots of overweight people out there. I figure the existing ones don't attract all the target population, or they don't work for whatever users they can attract.

Incidentally you will be helping people to get laid.

<comment><USER4> looseweightgetlaid.com Like it. Combine it with a dating site: the more weight you lost, the more date connections you get access to.

Or it might be evil.

<comment><USER42> That should be loseweightgetlaid.com (1 less 'o').

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "find a small problem, and start with a smaller problem inside of it"

Also, dont make a product that helps you generate ideas.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've always thought it would be fun to build a "ramen profit" tool suite.

I.E. a suite of tools for startups to see how close they're coming to achieving ramen profitability and what else they need to do to get there. Also some tools to help grow the startups. Working with partners like 37signals/lesseverything/and other startups.

The business model could be something like this: offer the tools to the startups at a freemium rate model, make commissions each time they sign up with different partners...

As I was hoping to build this some day (but will realistically never get around to it) - I will mention that I own the domain RamenProfit.com and would be more than willing to contribute my design skills to the project.

Let me know if you're interested. (email is in my profile)

</comment><comment><USER45> I love the idea of tying in comedy somehow. So much of the "funny" content on the internet is pretty lame, and I think there are a lot of amateur comedians who would love to test out new jokes somehow.

So I suggest you do two brainstorming sessions, one sober and one intoxicated, with the aid of a huge whiteboard, and explore the comedy concept (and other comedy concepts) further.

Imagine if you could do a live video stream of a person's comedy act, but make all watchers plug in a mic so that the crowd laughter / applause could be captured and mixed into the experience, both as feedback for the performer and as crowd noise for those watching it.

Comedyroulette? :) It could pair one commedian with a 20 person audience with one way video and n-way audio.

</comment><comment><USER46> Two things.

1\. Don't worry about the idea. They tend to change a lot. Pick something that interests you, roll along with it, and if you don't like just move on to a different idea.

2\. I'm a college student too. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is IP and the University. Talk to your professor about this carefully to make sure that your IP is yours and the University doesn't get any claim, just to alleviate headaches from happening later. In some schools, if you use the college's money or resources to create something they legally can claim a piece of it. Make sure you know about these details before embarking on any business venture.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I most definitely agree and was the approach I took to my professor when I met with him, but he needs a solid idea to start with to make sure that we don't do five half-assed things throughout the semester and end up with nothing to show

2\. The Sponsor organization (my team) gets all the rights to the products as is described in the proposal documentation "The sponsoring organization retains the rights to the resulting software. Also, sponsors may require students to sign non-disclosure agreements, as long as the agreements"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Personally, for that type of time/budget size, I would probably start a company that make mobile (android) widgets. I would like to see full screen ones made with more to offer than the ones that are out there.

Things like niche news portals (gaming, restaurants, real estate, music industry, auto news, etc...), stock trading info, local offline shopping sales, etc...

Basically, the stuff that has been done in this area is pretty crappy imo and you could take it quite a bit further. The development for something like this shouldn't be too tough either compared to making normal mobile apps because you're mostly just aggregating existing data.

</comment><comment><USER47> I also think that you have put the horse in front of the cart.

Start an idea pad- this can be a note on your phone or whatever, and whenever you have a problem with something or think "I with I could...." then write it down

</comment><comment><USER48> Not thought about these much, but I have them jotted down on my ever-growing ideas list. They're a bit dated.

1\. Bluetooth analytics. A lot of people are broadcasting their BD_ADDR and don't know it. Give shop owners some way to see recurring visitors - <USER2> perhaps even track how they move around the shop.

2\. P2P file distribution for businesses. Your users install a client and get paid a small amount per hour (which changes depending on demand). Businesses needing to distribute a large file pay you to host it on your 'botnet'. I don't think ISPs would like this an awful lot.

</comment><comment><USER49> An idea I had was a site where members can make a list of all their possessions and how much it'd take for them to part with each item.

They then have the opportunity to search the stuff other people own and see much they'd want for it, and can make offers if it's something they'd be willing to pay the asking price for.

Basically a classified ads site for stuff you aren't really bothered about selling, but would do if the price was right.

Don't know how you'd monetize it though as most transactions would probably be done cash, in person.

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't make music but I love music. This is a way to potentially help every indie artist/label in the world.

I have an entire database of music industry listings. These types of databases usually cost lots of money and therefore independent artists have been excluded from using them. We're talking 50,000 listings spanning across the united states and canada. Lots of independent labels and artists I've spoken to are excited by the prospect of having the most comprehensive music industry contact database available for free, to anyone, any age, anywhere in the world.

The database is legit and put together by myself and a friend who is music industry major.

THE PROBLEM:

The programming behind it sucks. It should be re-built from the ground up, using the database as the starting point. The search is horrible and doesn't pull the results that users expect (even though the results exist!). There should be more community features. The best way for this type of database to stay up to date and accurate is for users to contribute. Users can also talk to each other about what works and begin to talk about their experiences with different contacts.

Business prospects: \- advertising \- premium accounts

There's always advertising, in this case the ads are to a very niche crowd, so that always helps. There's also reasons why a business with money, like an indie label, might want a premium account.

To be honest, this probably doesn't have a big chance of making a lot of money. My hope has always been to make it simply sustainable. The upside is that you are literally helping out every independent musician and label in the united states and canada that wants to be heard. You're helping the underdog expose their music to the world.

If community participation grows, it's easy to start allowing people to post listings from countries other than US/Canada. And that would be awesome.

There's quite a few interesting technical challenges this site is facing and currently no one is stepping up to face them. The code, project, and database is yours if you want it. Maybe we put it all under an open license? I'll even continue to help with design/front-end development (photoshop/html/css/js) as that is my strong point. Programming is my weak point.

<http://www.indiedirectory.net>

<comment><USER12> Why free? The value seems to be all in the database. You'd better have some brilliant FE on that if you don't want people to simply rip your db and compete with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Don't worry about the idea too much. If you find a good one, great, but this project will probably be an awesome experience whether or not you have a great idea. Taking charge of a project and executing on it, even if the idea is mediocre or down-right bad, will be incredibly educational and useful.

So... if you have have a choice between 1) doing the project with a bad idea, or 2) doing a project for industry, I would definitely pick #1.

</comment><comment><USER52> Develop an alternative to TicketMaster that you can white label to MLB, NFL, etc. They could be making millions of extra dollars a year if they had their own system. Why not create the system for them and skim a portion off the top.

[I'm a designer and have no idea what would be involved in making this happen, or if it's feasible from a business perspective. I'm also in Denver, so...would love to hear what comes of your project]

</comment><comment><USER53> Since you have the support of the university you may want to consider building something they would want to use. This way the university could be a lead user.

Try to talk to who ever procures management software, BI, CRM, payroll and see how much they pay for what. See if there is something you can do significant better/cheaper. Also ask them what they wish they had.

</comment><comment><USER54> A while ago I had a discussion going in a thread on HN about a crowdsourced medical diagnosis tool. Sort of a Stack Overflow for chronic medical conditions.

I haven't seen anyone do it right yet, here's the thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399953>

</comment><comment><USER55> I don't know if something like this exists: write a highly distributable script to solve some problem, then pay to distribute it over a large network.

To get the network, you could create an app like SETI@home which pays people for their idle cycles.

Mechanical Turk, but with lots of computers instead of a few humans.

</comment><comment><USER56> Coincidentally, I've got a great idea, I'm going to be moving to Fort Collins in about a two months and was going to start recruiting developers.

I'd love to get in touch with you to see if there's a fit. Is there a good way to exchange contact info on HN without publishing it to the wider world?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can reach me at tmbuckheroux -at- gmail -dot- com

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is something I've been wanting to see:

Virtual animals/monsters roam the earth (probably relegated to streets/parks for property issues), and with your phone app, you hunt them, collecting trophies/treasure.

You could join safari parties with friends to hunt the scariest of monsters, or to share resources.

Fun fun fun.

</comment><comment><USER58> Read The Map of Innovation by Kevin O'Connor, founder of DoubleClick. [http://www.amazon.com/Map-Innovation-Creating-Something- Noth...](http://www.amazon.com/Map-Innovation-Creating-Something- Nothing/dp/1400048311)

</comment><comment><USER59> Make an improved version of etherpad! This was a great project/company, that ~ended when Google bought them. Would love to see someone run with this.

</comment><comment><USER60> Not to sound negative, as I appreciate your situation, but you do realize that their are tens of thousands of people who do try and come up with startup ideas everyday; they call it work. I'm sorry, but I don't think you are going to get much here, especially just so you can skirt some classes. Best of luck though

<comment><USER61> I think you missed the point: The poster has a rare opportunity to work with five engineers to attempt to build a company, and he'll even get class credit. He could just fake it and do some dumb proposal, or he could take it seriously. Asking advice of domain experts (hahaha) sounds absolutely sensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> <http://www.halfbakery.com/>

</comment><comment><USER63> Ask your student peers about what gets on their nerves.

</comment><comment><USER64> Could you provide a way to contact you directly?

</comment><comment><USER65> It occurs to me that the professor is teaching you something. Good people are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are much scarcer.

<comment><USER66> I think you have it the wrong way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> just curious: are there any intellectual property risks (with CU-Boulder)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, this is from the proposal disclosure "The sponsoring organization retains the rights to the resulting software. Also, sponsors may require students to sign non-disclosure agreements, as long as the agreements" And in my case, My team and I are the sponsor

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Good ideas take a while to develop. You need to be familiar with the domain to execute them well, care enough to put in the work.

What domain are you familiar with? HTML/CSS/JS? Backends? Programming IDEs? Text analysis? Surfing the web? (UIs, journalism, communities etc..)

I have some ideas.

1\. Community designer - you'd start with a forum, then add features like up/down votes, ratings, tags, following, blocking, limiting length of posts (aka Twitter), anonymity, chats in threads, micro-comments (quick comments about meaty posts visually separate) topic isolation, user labels (like trolls, political, religious nuts) etc.. You could add and remove features in order to guide the community to be active, post good content, or troll like 4chan.

Of course you'd need extensive experience of wasting time on forums, digg, reddit, starting your own forum to approach this idea.

2\. Code map - lots of projects have a lot of boilerplate code, multiple functions with little inside them, linking to other parts of the program for convenience. Code density map shows where the functional code is in a large project. Complexity map could show where there is long, incomprehensible logic. Dependency map showing which classes have more dependencies than others. Some of these could be documented by the developer, he can label something "hacky" and you could see how much of the code-base is "hacky" on a map. Long name API map should look different for JQuery and Google Closure (JS frameworks), would be useful for designer coders because they have low tolerance for long lines of text. Would look different for Processing.org vs Java drawing API too.

Such a map should look different from one project to the next. It might reveal coding style. Someone who is looking to work on a project could decide if the coding style matches their own without having to dig in to the code. People choosing a framework like Rails, Django could decide based on a map of example projects that do the same task. Compare how verbose one framework is vs another.

This is a hard problem with fun social implications. I don't really know how hard, but there should be some intermediate stages for the idea that would be neat, maybe even useful for github.

3\. Individualized content - user takes a survey of words, concepts he understands, like helium, fusion, deuterium, megawatts, steam turbines and when looking at a news site he would only see the articles where he understands the concepts. If the news site wants to explain these concepts to the individual, they have to write specially written articles that break things down, start at the fundamentals.

It's not hard to get ideas after you have some experience, did a lot of research in a domain. As a bonus you have more motivation to work on it than you do on someone else's less familiar idea. That might be a problem for you.

</comment><comment><USER69> This one's easy: Facebook-killer!

</comment><comment><USER70> It takes some training to get to the state where you can sense and recognize when there's a problem where something sucks. I've thought banks really sucked for two decades, but never had the idea of doing something like simplebank.

The best ideas are ones where there is pain you can relieve.

Here's one: Web development sucks profoundly. People actually write CSS and HTML by hand, using text editors. That is a complete indictment of the state of web development tools. We've got decent stuff for web apps, but nothing for html building. Cappucino and Sproutcore are starting to provide interface builder apps for javascript based apps. But still nothing that works.

I think an Interface Builder for the web would be revolutionary and profitable.

I'm tempted to say that if you don't have a bunch of ideas then you shouldn't be leading this thing-- but on the other hand, you have the presence of mind to recognize that those three ideas are all poor and that, my friend, is extremely valuable. So at this stage, pick the best idea from here or from the other people who will work on it and go for it.

For anything you do-- see if you can find 4-5 people who are not engineers who will honestly say "Yeah, if you could build that, I'd buy it for $X" or that their company would.

<comment><USER71> Isn't DashCode almost literally Interface Builder for the web?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Like gdgt for apps. I'll throw in $5K + existing code base as investment.</comment>


A $1,800 Drop in Minutes: Bitcoin Volatility on Full Display - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-27/a-1-800-drop-in-minutes-bitcoin-volatility-is-on-full-display <comment><USER2> A 15% drop, not too bad.

I remember when there would be 20-30% swings about 5 years ago that were commonplace.

Overtime it seems that volatility is stabilizing compared to what it used to be (when you compared % volatility vs a number), however I don't have data to show this and it is based off personal observation of these markets, so I very well could be wrong.</comment>


CS Now Counts as HS Math Credit in Most States – Is This a Good Idea? - <AUTHOR> https://slashdot.org/submission/10540818/cs-now-counts-as-hs-math-credit-in-most-states---is-this-a-good-idea <comment><USER2> No. There is precious little science in CS at that level. But a decent high school mathematics course forms a solid foundation for work in other fields, including computing.</comment>


OAP unicycle unveiled in Japan  - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8273213.stm

<comment><USER2> Okay, I'm just going to wait for a segway style face plant of an OAP.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just what I'd want at the age when falls create major health problems.

</comment><comment> onreact-com It looks ridiculous, like a kitchen stool. Using it outside the kitchen might result in gatherings of laughing bystanders.

Compared to this the YikeBike is really cool: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=810787>

<comment><USER4> Hey, if you're 70 - who cares about looking cool?

<comment> onreact-com Believe me, you don't want to be ridiculed by spontaneous mobs when you're 70.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it comes with a stun gun on the handlebars?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The HomePod is the point of no return for Apple fans - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/9/16994382/apple-homepod-release-day-price-compatibility <comment><USER2> Couldn't you say the same of any Apple product? Initial release is tightly controlled but highly polished, and then capabilities are opened and exposed as specific demand grows. I bet homepods will either have full Spotify and Android support in a year, or that Apple will announce some kind of SDK for integrating voice apps</comment>


Google will pay Louisville millions to fix roads after failed Fiber experiment - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18381466/google-fiber-louisville-kentucky-3-84-million-road-repair-shallow-trenching-service-cancelled <comment><USER2> Previous discussion (from yesterday): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669372)</comment>


CodeLesson — Online Technology Learning for Professionals - <AUTHOR> http://codelesson.com

<comment><USER2> I am thinking about taking a course from them. I was hoping that I would be able to get some reviews from you guys about whether or not I should do it. Has anyone taken a course? Any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't speak about the site or the quality of the instructors but i have nothing but appreciation for Charles Max Wood, the instructor for the Ruby and Rails course. I think he also conducts the ruby programming language course. Check out his free online videos on rails at www.teachmetocode.com. They are free and will probably give you a good idea about the pace at which he conducts his online classes.

<comment><USER4> Charles teaches Rails; Peter Cooper teaches the Ruby language.

I'm a founder of CodeLesson and also an instructor. Happy to answer questions here or privately at my username at gmail.

<comment><USER5> How can I become an instructor?

<comment><USER4> Most of our instructors are domain experts in the languages or platforms that they teach. Nearly all have extensive experience teaching or writing (most are book authors).

A few of our courses have been suggested by users (there's a form for that here: <http://codelesson.com/courses/suggest>). We also sometimes list courses that don't have instructors yet; those course pages contain an "Instructors Need" link you can use to let us know you'd like to teach.

To teach on the site, it helps us if you have a complete CodeLesson profile, including LinkedIn and Twitter links if you have them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why hide the pricing behind a link that just reveals it inline?

The pricing isn't bad... it's just unusual to hide it.

<comment><USER4> We're not hiding it -- just keeping it out of the way.

The principal user intention on the course page is to learn about what's in the course and who's teaching it. Most of our courses have multiple discounts; there's not always a single price.

Early testing and user feedback revealed that students found a giant price list to be confusing to navigate, so the choice was to either get rid of the discounts or make the list less obtrusive. Subsequent testing suggested that we made the correct choice.</comment></comment>


America's Most Iconic Drives - <AUTHOR> http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-40757730;_ylt=AlpW6K8hEEvVIrJ91jLP6pehpYMA

<comment><AUTHOR> I like the article and views posted by yahoo officials. Feel like i am in America.....man never been there....would like to go.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've done most of those drives: for several years I've done a one month road trip every summer, and I've been to 47 of the 50 states (next time Vermont, next time).

The most beautiful of all in my opinion are the Route 66, especially the Texas-New Mexico-Arizona part and Highway 1 in California.

I also love Highway 61, the parts bellow Iowa (LA, MS, MO), probably partly because of the blues influence and partly because it feels like another country altogether.

Oh, and surprisingly (to me, a European), Utah is spectacular in the south canyon area.</comment>


Demo of building for iPhone and Mobile Web from same HTML5 codebase - <AUTHOR> http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/04/23/screencast-showing-trigger-io-forge-in-action/

<comment><USER2> I have an awful time using webapps that pretend to be real apps. I think it's mostly a performance issue. Choppy scrolling, sometimes layout gets stuck in odd ways, slow repaint when screen is flipped, text entry is awkward (keyboard unintentionally gets hidden).

Take Facebook's iPhone app, majority of its slowness and bugginess is caused by it being actually a web page.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great demo, the only thing I take issue with is calling this "fully native". If you start defining "fully native" to mean "mostly JS but with some native components", what are we supposed to call _actual_ fully native apps, then?

</comment><comment><USER4> WebViews are great for content presentation. Especially true when what you are presenting is static content. But beyond that you are just going to struggle a lot to make it interactive.

And were we complaining a few years ago about how the web was a bad application platform? Just seems silly to try and port broken shit... what do I know...

But seriously write-once-run-everywhere is bullshit guys. Just like it was for Java. There is a reason write-once-debug-everywhere was the silly comeback. I just don't trust a technology (trigger.io) that claims "dead simple" when they haven't told me how this is better than the "dead simple" easy cross platform stuff Sun spit out in the 90s. (great for servers terrible for clients)

Also this is a native app in the demo? The navigation bar scrolls off the screen. Are you fucking kidding me. This is one of the most basic stock components in an iOS app. IT DOESN'T SCROLL OFF THE SCREEN.

[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/126589/sharepicts/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/126589/sharepicts/Screen%20Shot%202012-04-24%20at%208.20.47%20AM.png)

Now I know that "fixed" in a UIWebView is kind of a pain in the ass. Because it doesn't work as you'd expect. But, you kind of have to solve that problem to make the UX native.

By using these tools for multiplatform development you give up the opportunity to get featured. Apple and Google like to show off glitzy apps that look good and show off the power of the platform. Not something that has been reduced to the lowest common denominator: Android 2.2 running on some POS LG Optimus V from Virgin Mobile.

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has only dabbled with Obj. C but has 10+ years of traditional web dev experience this looks v. attractive. What am I losing by not learning Obj.C/xcode to build native iOS apps?

<comment><USER6> When the iPhone SDK was released, I got serious about learning Objective-C and Xcode. It was a slow painful process, but now I strongly prefer writing native apps to doing front end web development. The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks are really great, and Objective-C has really been improving as a language. Xcode... yea it still sucks but things like provisioning profiles have gotten far more manageable since the early days.

What you are missing out by not building native apps is an environment that is designed to really help you create great apps for users. Even with the crazy rate web technologies have been developing, a lot of it still feels like a bunch of hacks compared to native app development, which feels much more natural to me.

<comment><USER7> The other side to that argument is what can't be done in native. From what I understand, you can't do a/b testing, you aren't going to be able to iterate as quickly, push bug fixes out instantly, etc. etc .

Andrew Cross did a write-up about it ([http://www.andrewcross.ca/2012/03/16/quick-tips-from-sxsw- fo...](http://www.andrewcross.ca/2012/03/16/quick-tips-from-sxsw-for-applying- the-lean-startup-to-mobile/)) the gist being that many companies started out using something like trigger.io/phonegap/others so that they could benefit from the quick iteration cycles and other benefits of web. Once the things settle down a bit, they built native apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone break it down for me?

Should I use Trigger.io, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, or Sencha for my next app? Also, how much gaming performance might I lose with Trigger.io?

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER9> The thing that ruins the user experience for me? Non-sticky toolbars that scroll with the page. Fix that and people may actually believe it's a native app.

<comment><USER10> You didn't watch the video did you? They have the API that allows you to easily create REAL NATIVE TOOLBARS...

<comment><USER4> It should be on by default.</comment></comment></comment>


What Is JavaScript Made Of? - <AUTHOR> https://overreacted.io/what-is-javascript-made-of/ <comment><USER2> I loved it! Really nice and easy to understand explanations, yet they covered lots of good stuff

</comment><comment><USER3> I really liked this! Looking forward to receiving your emails and giving feedback.</comment>


Tech Education Con - <AUTHOR> https://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/stem-coding-bootcamp-education-scam-philanthropy <comment><USER2> The thing about tech projects is that you can always hire more engineers. There is no limit as to how many engineers a company can employ for any given project.

As soon as the CTO loses touch with some part of the code base, that's when the middle managers start introducing unnecessary complexity into projects. Technical middle managers will always create more complexity to give themselves more work and more responsibilities. They will do it subconsciously and compulsively.

There aren't many engineers today who care about code quality or even know what that means. I'm disappointed by what this industry is turning into. There is no pride in efficiency anymore.

Most managers within tech companies today don't have a clue what good software development looks like; they think that if they use TypeScript as a programming language, Agile as a methodology and Jira as a project management tool, that the product will turn out great for sure; but it's not the case.

Tech monopolies can allow even the worst tech managers and engineers to thrive professionally. No one ever gets reprimanded for unnecessarily increasing the project complexity even though it will cost the company millions a few years from now (in a large part due to the need to hire more engineers to manage the complexity).

WhatsApp could handle 200 million users with only 50 employees; it's proof that you don't need many employees to deliver quality. Keeping complexity under control is a better strategy than just hiring more people.

<comment><USER3> > Most managers within tech companies today don't have a clue

In my role as tech manager, I've been called incompetent, stupid, short- sighted, biased, insane, greedy, vindictive, just about every epithet in the book.

This is normal. If you're ever promoted into management, you'll be, too.

<comment><USER4> If you think that's bad you should try going into politics :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dont understand arguments like this. It reads too closely to the anti- immigration narrative I hear all to much in USA lately. If you're hard working, critical thinker, creative then you deserve the opportunity to join us and lowering barriers to all these folks is not something we should perceive with skepticism. Discouraging opportunity so you can have more market share is just plain selfish and bad for society, not to mention the fact that if youre highly qualified you shouldnt be concerned with a growing field of tech workers.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. When I became a lawyer I was astounded by people speaking in lofty language about how serving people is the highest good and then turning around and saying that we have to protect the legal field from "low skilled" entrants because those people will harm clients with the inevitable malpractice that will occur.

As a lawyer, I know for a fact that a lot of legal work is not complicated enough to require a law degree, but it does because otherwise lawyers would make substantially less money.

There's a giant gap in the legal market where there are poor people who need simple services and they aren't getting them because there are no lawyers who can afford to work that cheap and pay off their loans, or the lawyers are doing the work pro bono, which is generous, but why don't we just let people who aren't lawyers do more of this clerical work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the economics of this article right? The main problem I have is that the total supply of engineers is _huge_ and Google is benefiting all companies that demand engineers, not just themselves, which is a massive dilution.

A Google search shows Google has about 40K software engineers, while the USA has about 18M software engineers. This means Google hires about 0.2% (i.e. 0.002) of the software labor force.

This means that Google only captures 0.2% of the benefit from increasing the labor pool. 99.8% of the dollar benefit goes to other people -- some of who are competitors even!

Further, Oracle hires a lot more software engineers, but Oracle is notorious for its profit motive and bad image while Google tries (in name at least) to be altruistic. Is Oracle spending as much as Google on STEM? How about IBM, SAP, etc? If the math works out for Google, it should doubly work out for companies employing more software engineers.

This is a theory that seems like it can be true (and make you seem smart at cocktail parties), but the math doesn't seem to add up.

<comment><USER8> You're exactly right. Investment into STEM education would be a very slow, inefficient way for FANG et al to reduce worker pay compared to collusion (which they were busted for in 2014) or more aggressively focusing on hiring overseas instead of the US.

It's true there are plenty of other self-interested reasons for these companies to fund CS education: PR, getting new devs trained on their toolchain (my college CS classes were in the Gates Building, and friendly Microsoft evangelists brought pizza and free copies of visual studio to my freshman intro CS class), and growing the tech industry overall when they control and monetize the underlying platforms.

But then, there is also the much more mundane explanation that these charitable contributions are a drop in the bucket compared to these companies' overall budgets, that they are run by human beings who see themselves as doing good and who are predisposed to think CS is a great path to a good future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The irony around this article is that the hardest part about getting a tech job is the interview processes these companies create themselves. Do companies want to pay less for their talent? I'm sure the answer is yes. But realistically the barrier to entry for these kinds of positions is not a "skills-gap" in terms of the technology most engineers are likely to use in a day's work.

Anecdotally, I haven't met any coding bootcamp graduates that have managed to get software jobs at FAANGs. I'm sure this is because my experience is anecdotal, and that there actually is a steady supply of bootcamp grads that are getting jobs at these companies. But my point is that even with an accelerated program designed to retrain adults to have the skills they need for these positions, the supply will probably not increase to a point where salaries are significantly effected. This especially true when you consider the number of previously non-technical companies that are hiring software engineers at incredible rates to meet expected software development demand in the coming decade.

<comment><USER10> > I haven't met any coding bootcamp graduates that have managed to get > software jobs at FAANGs

That's because the FAANGs already have stacks of resumes from Stanford, Caltech, MIT etc. Part of the diversity issue (academic and demographic) comes from the fact that they rarely recruit outside their comfort zone of 5-10 schools.

<comment><USER9> I don't have recruitment data so its quite possible those companies recruit far more heavily from those schools, but even from my own anecdotal experience at a top 30 (yes 3-0) state school in CS I was still getting recruited and interviewed by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And that was as a Physics major with only a CS minor in my Junior year. I doubt getting interviews with those companies is the issue, they are ALWAYS looking for more talent wherever they can get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course if you take some kids with liberal arts degrees (or no degrees) and train them to have programming skills they will be cheaper than people with senior level skills and CS degrees. But isn't that to the benefit of those workers who now have jobs? They might make less, say $60,000/yr, while the old guard gets angry because they now aren't competitive and their wages go down. What's interesting though - as an aside - is that these bootcamp grads _still_ demand to make as much as people with CS degrees and years of experience.

But what's the answer, protectionism and railing against STEM education? Yes software developers will be bitter about lower wages, but in the long term that means more people with skills and jobs, more people of color, more people from poor backgrounds who come from families who never made more than $20,000 in their life.

Let's not be so selfish, there are plenty of ways to outshine a General Assembly bootcamp grad with no degree... You just aren't going to do be able to do it by building websites for $200,000/yr anymore.

<comment><USER12> I think the problem is that for a lot of us technology was a way to provide ourselves and our families with a middle class living without doing something exceedingly dangerous like underwater welding or deep sea fishing. The companies that employ technology people are trying to eliminate this line of work and render it as cheap as an entry level checker at Wal-Mart. When that happens, how can anyone earn a living doing anything? It's not like these companies are going to take pity on their workforce and provide raises. Instead management will be trained to treat people as interchangeable and replaceable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've started frequenting the subreddits /r/csmajors and /r/cscareerquestions and it's truly disheartening to see the number of people who are obsessed with doing just enough to get a high paying job. I've seen people claim that the point of going to Stanford is to get a good job or that one shouldn't bother with courses past data structures because they won't help with a job. The cynical part of me hopes that a tech crash will eliminate some of the more careerist people.

<comment><USER10> Stanford's undergraduate tuition is likely in the $200k+ range over 4 years; many other US schools have similar tuition fees. Why shouldn't CS students obsess about a 6-figure job?

Also, FA_NG (left out Apple) doesn't sell anything other than surveillance and ads, and the mainstream use case of AR is superimposing dog ears on a selfie, what motivation is there for CS students to push the boundaries of their learning?

<comment><USER13> It's totally fine to think or even obsess about a high paying job. It's not okay for that to be the only reason you're in the industry.

Plus, you really don't need to go to Stanford, MIT, etc. to get a high paying job. If I wanted to maximize my wealth ASAP, I'd go to my state school, major in CS and math/econ, graduate in 3 years debt free and then go into finance/tech. I'd like to hope that the people going to Stanford are doing it for more than just a 6 figure salary.

<comment><USER10> There are lots of assumptions in your "this is how I'd get rich" plan.

\- A CS major at a state school in North Dakota doesn't go as far as one from say, the Cali state system.

\- A CS and Math/Econ double major in 3 years? How many people do that and have a GPA that isn't toilet-adjacent?

\- 'then go into finance/tech': If by 'finance' you mean IB/PE/HF, those firms don't recruit at state schools unless it's in a major metropolitan area or has a history of hiring alums. If you think you'll get into IB by just submitting an online application like the rest of the world, then good luck.

Same for FAANG and the other companies that offer big salaries to fresh grads. They aren't exactly flocking to the SUNYs to pick up CS grads.

<comment><USER13> > A CS major at a state school in North Dakota doesn't go as far as one from > say, the Cali state system.

Fair, but honestly I don't think FAANG companies put a lot of weight on school past the top 10 ranked. I don't think your average hiring manager is going care about the difference between Bing and NDSU.

> A CS and Math/Econ double major in 3 years? How many people do that and have > a GPA that isn't toilet-adjacent?

Don't sleep. Study a lot. Keep in mind we're talking state school here. Double/triple majors are a lot easier at Bing than at Harvard. If you come in with AP credit it's definitely doable.

> 'then go into finance/tech': If by 'finance' you mean IB/PE/HF, those firms > don't recruit at state schools unless it's in a major metropolitan area or > has a history of hiring alums. If you think you'll get into IB by just > submitting an online application like the rest of the world, then good luck.

Okay, sure, finance might take a bit more finesse (although outside the big firms I bet it's a lot easier). But tech is generally more focused on general hiring pipelines.

> Same for FAANG and the other companies that offer big salaries to fresh > grads. They aren't exactly flocking to the SUNYs to pick up CS grads.

I actually know quite a few people at SUNYs that have FAANG internships. Especially Stony Brook. Not unbelievable that they'd get a decent offer out of school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which is better: benefiting the world with a selfish agenda, or hurting the world with an altruistic one?

Who cares about their interests? If it helps people get educated and improve their lot?

<comment><USER15> Who does it hurt? Everyone. I think it hurts everyone when we allow bigger companies (or a powerful few) to steer the education system. That should be left up to a democratic process. Why should Facebook, Google, etc. be the ones to decide that education is only about getting a job (and specifically about getting a job at Facebook, Google, etc.)?

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I understand how that hurt actually takes place. These companies are essentially acting as charities, donating a portion of their profits to reduce the cost of a tech education. Some people who might not have been able to pursue education in tech are now able to. Do those people not benefit? Do the companies not benefit? Then how is society harmed? Would society really be better off if these companies remitted that money to shareholders as dividends, as is their right?

It seems to me that the complaint begins and ends with the assumption that if something is good for a big corporation then it must be bad for society at large, and vice versa.

<comment><USER17> It's not just funding, it's when they steer education programs by threat of removing funding, or by providing free stuff or services; sometimes even more directly.

Education time is finite. If you focus on some specific you may miss out on general or a different specific. (Reminds me of a database course focused on Microsoft tooling... half the technologies now dead.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _It's not too hard for a physics student who already writes R code to learn > web development from a MOOC in order to get an entry position at a startup._

As someone who did this, it was very hard to do and took a great deal of both hard work and luck. I'm surprised that it's dismissed in a single sentence.

</comment><comment><USER19> At the start of my career, I worked for a company that did web sites. The philosophy was to sell cheap and get cheap labor to do the work. A "digital sweatshop" is a good description. It worked because html is easy to learn and repetition made you fast.

Just knowing html is no longer an option but I can see where knowing the basics in programming is enough to create an assembly line type of programming workforce.

Prior to the industrial revolution, Craftsmen were the norm. With the advent of automation products are created that best the best craftsmen of old and do it at speeds that no craftsmen can match.

There will always be room for the best but we are heading towards a future where low skills will dominate. AI is the big subject now but as most AI expert know AI is very specialized. Generally, it can't match what a five- year-old can do but it's excellent at doing one thing very well. Combine current AI and low skill programmers and you have the workforce of the future. It will be cheap and fast. But we can't get to this future until the workforce is trained.

Going forward, the tech giants will be looking for competent techies not necessarily the best of the best but they have to have a competent group to choose from.

Infotech workers get paid very well now because demand is high relative to supply. Increase supply and pay is bound to fall. The tech companies know this and are doing all they can to increase supply.

If you think companies are doing the world a favor. Don't! Companies are doing their best to survive one more day and create a future where they thrive.

</comment><comment><USER20> A few counterpoints:

1) Google and Facebook represent only a very small and very elite slice of the developer market. This bizarre focus on what happens at the top 0.5% of the market has a distorting effect. The rest of the market is ignored in this analysis.

2) No mention of dollars spent on training vs. dollar return in labor savings. If Google spends $1 billion on education over 20 years which provides a labor savings of $500 million then they are losing out. The article speculates that there will be a net profit on labor savings but provides no data or evidence to back it up.

3) Developer salaries may actually be inflated. In which case it's only natural that many people would try to get into the market, either by participating in MOOCs, getting a computer science degree, being self-taught, etc. The article assumes it's exploitative to help people break into this market, because the MOOC companies operate at a profit and it might reduce developer salaries overall. But people are going to find their way into the market on way or another. Even if we got rid of all the MOOCs and all the tech education initiatives talented people are going to flock to these industries.

4) Article ignores positive effects. Lower developer costs mean smaller companies or less-than-rich individuals can hire talented developers to build a new service or start a new company. Developers might be paid 10%-20% less, but we would also end up with more developers total. The net benefit to the labor market as a whole would be positive.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is written in such a pessimistic tone. I mean sure, tech giants want to have lots of labour available, we get that. But is it wrong? At least some people who wouldn't have had the change to code will get a sniff at it now.

Also, I wonder whether it will matter much to supply. How many CS grads are actually being churned out? I heard it hasn't changed all that much. And people leave the profession too, either they don't like it or they can't hack it.

I somewhat liken it to sports. It's not that easy to like programming if you didn't like it as a kid. Sure, you can learn to kick a ball around when you're an adult, but you're not likely to have time, and the best opportunities to learn and progress will have passed. (OTOH your body won't start failing you as a coder in your 30s.) That's not to say you can't, I'm sure a bunch of late bloomers will appear if I left it at that, just that you tend to know that coding is the kind of thing you like when you're quite young.

So the undiscovered pool of talent is probably quite small. We can give more kids who don't have access to a computer some gear and some intro, particularly in poor countries. But there's cultural and legal issues with tapping that pool. With advanced societies, probably a lot of kids who are going to like coding will already have been exposed.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux I think the more likely reason Apple, Google, and Microsoft push their products in schools is to hook students on their products so that they continue to use them into adulthood.

I find it pretty astonishing that ChromeOS (installed on Chromebooks) for example is so widespread in US schools. This is a 'cloud-based' operating system that _that tracks everything you do_. To properly use ChromeOS requires you sign-in with a GMail account. Now your personal details are tied to all your activity in the OS (a guest account gives you limited functionality only).

Even if that activity data is detached from your account and "anonymised" (a pretty meaningless phrase), this is still means Google captures and saves (and presumably aggregates) the data of millions of US students that they can interrogate and dissect in ways that even they probably don't yet know.

Why does the tech community accept this?

The kids forced to use ChromeOS don't even have a choice in the matter. It's the adults who decided for them. Online tracking is so normalised now, large parts of the tech community rush to Google's defence. (Does a giant multi- billion dollar corporation need your defence?) It's a pretty depressing state of affairs and shows how little the tech community actually cares for privacy.

<comment><USER22> It's not like schools choose Chromebooks because of the spying. They choose Chromebooks because they're cheap and the software is reliable. iOS is equally reliable but much more expensive. Desktop Linux isn't even in the running.

<comment><USER23> > It's not like schools choose Chromebooks because of the spying.

You really think they don't? They might go for a slightly different angle, like the ease of centrally managing your deployment or whatever, but the gist of it is that they want a device that can be made to act against the best interests and expectations of the end-user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Considering how tiny Google's workforce is compared to its value, this doesn't add up. That's even before you consider the longer term effects of automation.

</comment><comment><USER25> Those of us grounded in reality saw this coming a mile away. Apart from tech salaries dropping long term, working with people that don't truly enjoy software engineering is truly maddening. Like I always said, the golden age of the 2000s tech era died long ago.

</comment><comment> michael-- If degrees are no longer requirements to get tech jobs and tech companies start paying significantly lower salaries, what can one do to become competitive in this market?

What value do Masters and PhDs (in CS) have in the current market?

<comment><USER26> I think Masters and PhDs are basically in a totally different market than workers with bachelors', Associates', "boot camp" certificates, or no degrees at all. They are being hired for "alpha hacker" positions implementing compilers, databases, graphics engines, etc. while everyone else is building apps, REST APIs, doing enterprise integrations, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure getting a computer science degree is as easy and making chrome books cheap. It is, after all, hard. Americans don't like hard things. And I don't think $120k salaries are "cheap labor." in fact, I think I'm ready to dismiss this article as being a lazy opinion piece without research or data.

<comment><USER27> I just saw a piece that the number of cs enrollees doubled in the past x years and that they can't find professors. That made me reconsider my thoughts on this. Perhaps a doubling in supply will reduce wages but I still think there is a shortage. I also think silicon valley is an irrational place to do a start-up and the rest of the country still needs developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree however this misses a couple of things. In the future there will be exponentially more tech companies than now.

<comment><USER29> Or it could be less. I think a secondary wave of innovation won't come until the bubble pops and there is a diaspora of out-of-work yet skilled engineers forced into jobs they would have otherwise felt were beneath them, and are then required to deal with the problems of the every-day worker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So when I was in college I did a writing requirement course called _The Hero in Literature_ and in it I suggested something like that one Russian author's book was a direct response to another Russian author's book that I had read previously: I made a strong case about dates, thematic overlap, how you could view this speech over here as a rebuttal of that speech over there. Feedback for the first revision: whoa there, that is a very serious charge you are making, and even if all of those things are true it might just be that Russian authors happen to like similar subject matter, kind of like how existentialists seem to orbit around the paradoxical freedom of a young man facing the potential tragedy of a life sentence in prison. If you want to prove it, they said, go do research and find letters from the one author discussing the other author's work, analyze _those_. For high school, yeah, being all "this guy was copying that guy with a twist!" is a very interesting paper, but for college we expect you to realize that that's a very serious claim and it needs to be backed up with some very serious research.

I feel very similarly here: yeah there is a case to be made that this is a "long con" of trying to saturate a labor market with fresh talent, but if you want to prove that, really, I need to see leaked internal letters and strategy presentations that indicate that someone at Google or Microsoft is _consciously_ trying to change the labor market. Because it could also just be that Google has a lot of programmers who think programming is easy to learn and incredibly powerful as a modern-world skill, and so they have a lot of people pushing for educational initiatives. You can't tell the difference between those by the outside act of supporting the educational initiatives but only by looking at the internal communications.

For what it's worth, if that _is_ Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon's strategy, it is likely to be very difficult and enterprisey in ways that they likely don't want to be -- all at least pay lip service to some high-minded ideals of innovation and revolution, no? But if you're looking for those "black swan" successes, you face the problem that achievement is not normal but log- normal[1]: it depends on the multiplication of independent factors, and not their summation. Coding bootcamps and mass coding education only target one of those factors, but without the rest you don't have a highly performant individual. Like, if that's their goal, one would imagine them also having "emotional intelligence bootcamps" and "how to take conscientious personal ownership of the work you do bootcamps" and so forth to try to increase the number of people who have several of these skills, not to fixate on just one of them when those other ones will set a maximum capacity for the employee.

[1]: [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is- log...](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/09/29/achievement-is-log-normal/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh look, a communist magazine rediscovered what's great about capitalism. Companies, in the pursuit of private profit, make the world a better place by subsidizing education. Congrats guys, you did it.

<comment><USER32> If you help someone become an engineer out of self-interest though, it actually doesn't help them, for complex reasons you need a PhD in literature to understand.

<comment><USER31> If only these companies had set their intention better.

<comment><USER32> What we really need is to bring in enlightened humanities ethics managers to teach these greedy engineers what it means to love and cherish people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Servers of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://ls.pwd.io/2013/07/servers-of-hacker-news/

<comment><USER2> It was down for me, here's the cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Als.pw...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Als.pwd.io%2F2013%2F07%2Fservers- of-hacker-news%2F&oq=cache%3Als.pwd.io%2F2013%2F07%2Fservers-of-hacker- news%2F&aqs=chrome.0.69i57j69i58.1651j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER3> Which seems a little bit ironic, if you ask me. Anyone know what server software the OP is running?

<comment><USER4> WordPress:

        http://ls.pwd.io/wp-content/...

I still don't understand why they don't have a cache system by default.

<comment><USER5> Wordpress is a CMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 10 websites are actually running WEBrick in production. Nice.

<comment><USER7> Only 13 people using Lighttpd. I remember the week and a half when that was the preferred deployment platform for Rails. That was a while ago.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that might be under represented by people using Lighttpd for serving static content, with something else like Apache serving the main page html (Ive got a bunch of clients in that configuration with WordPress running on Apache, and all the images/css/js/etc coming out of Lighttpd.)

<comment><USER9> That should also be true of nginx, but it's pretty well represented now.

<comment><USER10> nginx is not only good a serving static file but is a (one of the most?) common reverse proxy server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's still more instances of IIS than I was expecting. Who uses it? Is it still as awful as it was the last time I fought with it 5 years ago?

<comment><USER12> IIS 7.5 and 8 are actually really good, and among the best to interact with programmatically. You can write the equivalent of nginx modules in C#, and even implement custom framing and protocols.

<comment><USER13> Hmm. As someone who's had to run a massive IIS cluster over the last 3-4 years, I disagree. It's obtuse, unreliable, incredibly overcomplicated and regularly just fucks you because it can.

Some things that are utterly broken that really shouldn't be that have cost me literally DAYS.

1\. Using IIS ARR to proxy subversion = hell. The moment someone requests a web.config file from the back end SVN server via the IIS front end, it shits a brick. You have to piss around in the applicationHost.config to fix this.

2\. It knackers XML encoding transparently inside ARR somehow resulting in clients losing requests as they come down as application/octet-stream rather than what you sent them as. This breaks lots of clients randomly.

2\. Wildcard SSL domains i.e. star.whatever.com. If you delete one site instance, it kills all the others completely dead and you can't re-add the certificate on the others: you have to create new site instances again from scratch. Workaround: stop a site instance and leave it there to rot forever. That's fine but we can have up to 100 instances on a cluster.

3\. Thread reuse. Each module (in integrated mode) can run in a different thread so it knackers thread local variables like the current culture and identity system in .Net. This is an absolute fucker to debug as it only happens under heavy load and is barely documented.

4\. Sometimes servers in our cluster randomly just stop for a few seconds for no apparent reason (7.5 on 2008 R2). Our phones start ringing then. We've had Microsoft working on a fix for over a year and even they can't work out why it's happening. They admit it is IIS that is doing it.

5\. Deployment hell. You're supposed to be able to just "xcopy" deploy everything because it uses some mish-mash of shadow copies but occasionally this screws up and leaves an older dll in the ASP.Net Temporary Files folder which means your site suddenly has broken code contracts everywhere and your site goes down big time with YSOD (as even the error pages fall over) until someone fires up the magic "fix it quick" powershell script which cleans out all the crud, redeploys and restarts the cluster. That's fine but we have 16 front end IIS servers and 80 million requests a day so this means trouble for us.

6\. IIS Express and Visual Studio integration is just shit. It doesn't work with source control software at all leading to constant problems when people do updates. The only solution is to shut everything down, delete the IISExpress directory in your documents folder and try again.

7\. The whole dynamic vs static thing falls over when you have a module which rewrites static URLs. Everything has to run through the dynamic then. The coupling internally for features like this is terrible.

It's stuff like that which means it's still a broken pile of crap that I hate more and more every day.

For reference, we moved ALL of our development stuff over to an Apache mod_proxy setup with LDAP / AD integration and _it just works_. We'd love to do it with the front end but we can't for obvious reasons...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I read the title, I thought this article was going to attempt to glean the webserver type/versions of all the servers in the hacker news Web cluster (if there is one).. That would be kind of interesting actually.. If not to only see if they keep them all at the same version/OS/updated etc. you could do this same thing on any one big site over time and the results could be interesting.

<comment><USER15> PG has stated in the past HN runs on a single, well tuned server at IBM/Softlayer/ThePlanet. Citation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229364)

<comment><USER13> Although most of the tuning appears to be to prevent people from using it

"we've limited requests to this page"

For example...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Judging from the title of the article I was hoping to get an overview of the HN server infrastructure and software.

<comment><USER17> Me too. You can find _some_ stacks here ([http://leanstack.io/cloud- stacks/](http://leanstack.io/cloud-stacks/)) but HN isn't on that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, there wasn't a single reddit link all month?

<comment><USER19> I had to go look what server header reddit returns. For the lazy:

Server:'; DROP TABLE servertypes; --

<comment><USER20> I'm not logged in. I see:

Server: AkamaiGHost

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not a single Cherokee server :(: [http://cherokee- project.org](http://cherokee-project.org)

<comment><USER22> After trying to help a friend to make Cherokee, Rack and Shotgun (yes, he insisted on reloading using shotgun) work together, I abandoned the server as "ungoogleable".

<comment><USER23> Yep, it's just to hard to get help. Perhaps because it's easier to just post a config snippet for Nginx or Apache that having to take a bunch of screenshots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 39% apache! Amazing.

Also interesting is that nginx 1.5.x doesn't appear once. Upgrading bbot.org to it last month was a ridiculous ordeal, but you'd figure at least one other site on the front page of HN would be running nginx mainline.

</comment><comment><USER25> So, who's running their site off an astromech? Bottom of the "Other" list.

</comment><comment><USER26> Minor quibble: Apache Coyote is Tomcat and not HTTPD

</comment><comment><USER27> "Error establishing a database connection"

</comment><comment><USER28> New Hampshire?

</comment><comment><USER29> cloudflare-nginx can be moved to "nginx-all versions" i think.

</comment><comment><USER30> github.com server?

<comment><USER31> GitHub hosted blogs I presume.

<comment><USER17> gh-pages / github.io

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would be curious to see the percentage that doesn't allow that information to be retrieved, if that's a possibility.</comment>


Ask HN: Best resources/examples of great sound design - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to explore how great sound design can be used in podcasts, and audio production going forward. I'd be happy to find out resources or examples of audio productions that are well designed.<p>Thanks. <comment><USER2> Try taking a look at [https://old.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/](https://old.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/)</comment>


California Can Improve Housing and Transit by Preempting Local Ordinances - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercatus.org/publications/california-can-improve-housing-and-transit-preempting-local-ordinances <comment><USER2> what could go wrong?</comment>


Lunch with the FT: Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67672314-e2e0-11df-9735-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Did anyone else notice the $10 coke?

<comment><AUTHOR> $10 for a diet-coke. I noticed that all right. The cheese-burger wasn't the cheapest burger in the world either :) I thought the exchange at the end was nice. I really like this side of Bill Gates, kind of self-deprecating. His TED Talk where he let mosquitoes out into the auditorium and half-joked that he was pretty sure they weren't malaria carrying ones was an eye-opener as well. This article didn't tell me much that was new but I was surprised to learn about how much he worked and little he vacationed at the start of Microsoft. Credit where it is due.</comment></comment>


What If We Can't Make Government Smaller? - <AUTHOR> https://niskanencenter.org/blog/cant-make-government-smaller/ <comment><USER2> "But the actual effect of cutting taxes below the amount necessary to sustain current levels of government spending only underscores the unforgiving lawlikeness of Wagner's Law."

I think this article is a little dishonest. If you look at the budget law, There is an automatic built in percentage increase every year to "maintain current levels". This is automatic and makes no assumption that a better process or method has been developed to make these current levels sufficient on the funding that was received from the previous year.

You essentially have compound interest build automatically into the budget process.</comment>