DirtyAndy's comments

Really nice idea. I think it applies equally the other way too, my wife is quite tricky to buy for and it is nice to have a concise list of ideas like you've presented.

Two email lists I am on for ideas (that you could no doubt use to help have a few more options) are Uncrate and Fancy - daily emails with great ideas. Similar to what you are doing, but you've made it super easy.

PS. rather than Hobby Project shouldn't this be Show HN?

Cool idea and seems to work, but might be good if it was activated by pressing a button rather than just a visit to the page - I am now logged out of a number these services just because I visited the page - which is not really what I wanted!

Another take on this sort of thing: http://app.dumpark.com/sunlight/

The guys behind this apparently wanted to know the best place to go for a beer at any time of the day. They use the zenith of the sun, the surrounding landscape and the surrounding buildings and have it modeled throughout the year. I think they then realised there may be more useful ways to use this data.

A bigger issue to me is what do you do with Lily after it has run out of battery. I don't think I want to carry it for the rest of the day on the ski fields, mountain biking, trail running or anything else, it is fairly cumbersome. And I wonder how tough it is when it is in a back pack and I fall and land on it.

Very cool device and it would have a lot of practical uses, but not sure it will ever be that useful for the masses.

As a kid in the 1970's living in New Zealand most of our local apples (NZ grows a lot of apples) were green. Imported Red Delicious used to sit in the supermarket looking so red and beautiful and screaming to be purchased, which occasionally I could get my mother to do. I don't remember them being floury, but they were always sweeter than the green apples - a real memory of childhood.

But now in comparison to Gala, Fuji, Braeburn and others, Red Delicious seem floury, the skin is too thick and the flavour no where near as crisp and clean as the other varieties. There's also a lack of airmiles on most of these as we grow them here.

35 years on I don't think my kids have had a Red Delicious, and certainly not something I will miss if I never have another one.

I would assume because PostgreSQL (the DB he is using) doesn't support importing from JSON?

Add Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to that list. Best thing, someone else has already proven their is a need for the system and a working solution!

Two ways I can think of. 1. You do a real job for a while. Work in a large organisation, see what pain points they have, which ones are probably similar to other businesses and which ones probably don't involve terabytes of proprietary data that they would never be able to shift to an SaaS solution (by never I mean politically not technically). And I don't mean working for tech firm. Be on an IT team for a pharmaceutical company, a food company, packaging company, logistics etc. Be open and offer to help people (outside of IT) and you'll be amazed what ideas they give you.

Way 2. Mix with people in the real world that work in the companies above. Listen to their problems, offer solutions, offer to pop in after work one day or on a weekend and look at their problems.

I'm working on this exact issue with a delivery company currently. The biggest question they have is "would you pay for it?". Would you pay extra to receive a message to advise of delivery time, and would you pay extra to have that delivery delivered at another time or elsewhere?

Whilst missed deliveries are costly they obviously don't feel that is justification enough to develop a better solution.

In New Zealand there have been 30 deaths since 2000 (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...), a country of 4 million where like the US most people have a driveway (as opposed to Europe where most people do not). The article claims this move might save 59-69 deaths per year, which would indicate that at least that many die each year (although I struggle to believe cameras will save that many).

A lot of cars with cameras don't seem to have rear object detection systems (that beep inside the car when something is behind you and you are in reverse). I doubt most people use a reversing camera to get out of there drive way, so this move wouldn't seem likely to stop people running over kids - beepers that go off when something is behind you would seem much more effective (certainly in my experience).

I don't know about the US, but here in New Zealand these deaths are more prevalent in lower socio-economic areas, that presumably don't buy as many new cars - these changes will takes years to filter through to the people that they might benefit most.

Depending where the OP is in the world, this sounds ripe for constructive dismissal, but I'd encourage you to really think about it before going down this route. It will create a massive amount of stress for very little reward, and rightly or wrongly can tarnish you for a very long time if made public (because then everyone knows someone wanted to fire you).

Judging by the OPs one other post on HN that they could give up 20 hours of time a week it would also be difficult to get some people to accept that the OP was fully motivated in what they were doing and working their hardest.

I'm not a fan of burning bridges, BUT: I'm no lawyer, but if your pay cut is immediate I cannot see why you can't also leave immediately. If you are in a place with a buoyant job market the most satisfying thing to do might be to just not go back to work and get another job (assuming you can afford to survive the time that might take). Even if your employer does want you out, I bet they aren't prepared for you to leave immediately, a little bit of payback that may cause them a lot of stress and not much for you (although a bit like constructive dismissal, doesn't do your reputation a lot to good).

You can be an entrepreneur at any point, you can only be a father to these young children once. Relax and enjoy your children, especially whilst they are very young. My kids are 6 & 8 and with school, sport, general tiredness that they get, I now have the time to do side projects and the like. I tried when they were younger but at the cost of some quality time with them - and with my wife.

If you really do have to do something then I found getting up at 5 and having 2 hours before the rest of the house was too awake (my kids sleep in) worked pretty well, but you have to remember to go to bed at a decent time.

I would say the developer has thought about their own requirements and knowledge, much like you have in your comment by thinking only of Europe whereas pretty much every other country/region in the world uses metric.

Whilst creating an application that deals with different units is not a massive amount of extra work, launching a minimal viable product to 300 million people in a country that has a major obesity problem is probably not a bad start. And when I say not a lot of extra work, 2-4 hours depending on experience of units, server side and client side, data store, would be very optimistic, hundreds if you are moving towards a more complex project. Quite a bit on top of what was only a weekend project.

You are feeling screwed? Because it was disclosed you entered a competition? What were you going to do if you got in, wear a balaclava and talk through some sort of voice altering device to hide your true voice?

And if you don't get in are you afraid that people are going to ridicule you for the rest of your life because your name was in the to list with 500 people?

I appreciate that TC made a mistake, and you would think they might have gone a bit further in preventing this sort of mistake, but I think we have all suffered far worse invasions of privacy than this (half the people on the list probably tweeted that they'd entered anyway).

Disclaimer: Most of my knowledge of the Wild West comes from the movies.

In the WW they used to quite like public hangings, both legal and illegal. Why do you think they did this rather than just shoot people beside a grave and roll them in? As a deterrent to others is my guess.

I appreciate jedsmith and others views, and do somewhat support them, but lets say the OP had just issued a DMCA (and it was actioned). What has that achieved. The copier loses his site, so from the OP's perspective for this instance the problem is solved. Until next week the guy registers another domain, and another, and another. And his friends do it too.

I bet the guy doing the copying is going to think about it twice next time, and I bet one or two people will have read the blog post and rethought future plans.

Don't underestimate the amount of stress, time and legal costs that some people would spend trying to resolve a problem like this.

I know this Wild West killing is not the best approach but at this point in the history of the internet I am seeing few alternatives to prevent (ie not resolve post event) these things happening.

Whilst this article is about more than just pitching everyone, that is the first thing that hits you, and personally I disagree with that as an approach. If you are at college coming up with the idea of Facebook then maybe it works, but in general the results you will get are too biased (sometimes in both directions).

People that care about you (parents etc) are likely to like your idea no matter what, friends probably fall into this too. When someone says "that sounds like an OK idea" most people hear "that is the best idea ever". At the other end of the scale some people just don't listen and are negative, they cannot immediately see how it will work and dismiss it as a bad idea. And with regards to things like Mechanical Turk, if your product is really targetting people who are willing to answer questions for a few cents then great, but in general I can't imagine it is that useful.

Pitching and validating ideas against people in your real target market is a good start, but even then there is a massive difference between saying they'll pay for something and actually paying for it. If you pitch someone an idea and it results in useful questions and a level of excitment then that is a better indicator, if someone says that sounds great and then starts talking about something completely offtopic then I would say that means they don't really believe it.

That is certainly what I used to love about Techcrunch, and whilst I think it is natural that as they have gotten bigger they have gone more mainstream and do a lot more coverage of Twitter, iPads etc, it also a shame and certainly taken them from my "first website of the day" to "if something interesting comes into RSS feed I'll click".

At the same time if you go back a few years there were quite a few startups that were really doing different things, and reviewing them was worthwhile. Now there are often so many startups trying to solve the same problem that choosing who to review and keep track of must be a nightmare, and half the comments will be "if you like X take a look at my company Y".

Speaking of Y's, is there an independent blog that just reviews (and meets with etc) Y Combinator companies - that actually would be an interesting read!

This guy sounds very talented, except perhaps at finding a job. He describes lots of interesting things he can do, without really describing what benefits he can offer to a potential employer.

Most of all he does not really describe what he would like to do (there is an undertone of teaching mathematics, most of which I would assume is done at university's and most of their recruitment would probably not be done through this way).

Providing a portfolio of a variety of skills without really defining what you want to do is really going to limit your employment potential to a select few.

I think a further thing that builds on your thing is the ability to be exposed to ideas that need solving. Big companies have lots of pain points, things that an unemployed grad or person who has only ever worked in 10 person companies is never likely to be exposed to. Coming up with ways to solve these pain points can easily lead to enterprise application startups.