It would be awesome if the winner would get a free ticket to fly to the Valley and join the current YCombinator class for one of their famous dinners, and get to present.

Wishful thinking, maybe.

Heck, if you win that, you'll basically get a free ticket to fly to the Valley and join the current YCombinator class, permanently.

There's nothing more valuable than going from A -> D (open for sales) and then realizing you have no fucking idea how to get to E. Excuse my language.

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Two words for you:

1) the co-founders meetup http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/

2) instead of lamenting about a situation, do something about it http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/06/10/will-you-be-a-great-... "entrepreneurs are the ones who do when everyone else is talking"

Literally, if you don't like something, fix it. Just do it yourself. Don't cry on HN that something needs to be done. To me, that's a tell-tale sign of entrepreneurs.

I read nothing in that comment that sounded like crying.

As to your first suggestion about the Co-Founder-Wanted-Meetup: Am I such a cheapskate that $65 in advance/ $125 at the door to attend a meetup sounds a bit steep? Perhaps I can't see the forest for the trees and the opportunity cost of missing a meetup like this is way greater than the attendance fee. So for anyone who has attended this meetup, is it worth the fee?

The crying part: I was trying to anticipate the reaction of "but there is no such meetup where I live". Just do it.

http://59daysofcode.com

If I was starting a startup right now it'd be silly for me to wait a month for the "Startup Rumble" and I wouldn't want to cheat and get a headstart.

why not make a spreadsheet with each one's name and start date (may vary depending on our schedules)?

We can log our names and our app urls whenever it's done and we'll collaboratively set a final date. We'll then have people review our submissions.

Agree with the time period. 1-2 months is great. 48 days? Just to match railsrumble's 48hrs :)

The spreadsheet can be used to log our progress too. So if anyone finishes fast and and some other app is on the same track offering data which another app needs, then they can collaborate and release their data via APIs etc. Would be a great hackmonth :)

Your system should allow:

* the creation of superadmin accounts

* Map your user model to my user model

* CRUD users of my application

* Impersonate users of my application so I can see their data

* Expire / suspend / upgrade / downgrade users

* Search for users

* Notify a user via email of something

* Report top users by metric (in the mapping operation above we tell you where to look up these metrics)

* Report new signups per day

Making all of those features Samparicio said would be a little tough for code reuse. Engines feature was planned for Rails 3.0 beta but pushed to 3.x. That's the feature that can help code reuse. But it's possible to do this neatly on Django, which allows component-based architecture for apps.

Authlogic and forgotten passwords is pretty simple, though. It sort of gives it to you. Well, it gives you the tools. It's really only a tiny bit of coding.

I'll certainly check out Devise though.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1451758

To give an example of how this would be used, the project described above would reduce the time of making this from about seven hours to about an hour: http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education

Also, here are two relevant blog posts:

http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-tim...

http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-me-a...

0 http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation

1 http://gist.github.com/325757

My take on "4 steps" is: do iterative/agile/RAD/MythicalManMonth development (you present a demo ASAP, so the client can tell if that's what they want or not), but to not wait til you have a demo. You iterate on "the customer problem you're solving" and "specs of the product". This is much faster than building a demo, which is faster again than building the whole thing - and only then finding out that the "people want" part is missing. (You build the product concurrently).

What you're proposing is an engineering project - which is great! Nothing wrong with that, challenging, lots of fun, lots of learning. Just noting it's focussed entirely on that half of an entrepreneurial project - a common developer approach.

The Freecycle Network is brilliant - lots of stuff gets rehomed that would otherwise get dumped in landfills. People get their redundant stuff taken away, people get free stuff (computers, toasters, clothes...), it's good for the environment, it's all good. Technically speaking, it's in the dark ages though. It runs via mailing lists, which are operated by Yahoo and apply to discrete geographical areas. It works well enough, but I think it could be improved on, or at least supplemented.

I would like to see a system based around open standards. I envisage:

* A structured way of listing spare stuff - ie. hListing or some variant.

* A way of managing a network of people whose stuff you're interested in - Portable Contacts? Whatever the state of the art is, not sure. Ideally something that can be somewhat integrated with people's existing social network info. Or, screw it, just a list would do for now.

* A standard way of managing who can see your listings - OAuth?

* A web application that you can use to manage your listings (or in time any number of applications, since the end result is standards-based output)

* A web application that aggregates, filters, searches and displays other people's listings (these last two bullet points are probably functions of the same application)

This is a bit sketchy but If it's feasible, I think such a system has a number of advantages over Freecycle or the various balkanized web-based databases of free stuff. I vaguely intend to look into doing this myself at some point, but I'm hoping if I pimp the idea about a bit somebody else will do it for me (or with me).

Also show some sort of leader board of donators and the content they consume. Idea is to come up with guilt-ware which presents a new revenue stream for dedicated bloggers :)

It's like the quiet little joke the industry refuses to address. Erstwhile, Google is now the only people doing any legitimate active development on a new vm... and even they aren't chaining themselves to Java.

So I ask you, do you really want your software written in a dying language? I wouldn't. Java apps were hard enough to support when the many and myriad vms were being actively worked on. I can't imagine the pain that will be brought down upon adopters now. =/

0) Subject and Text 1) add image (gif,jpg,png) 2) add support for more than 1 image 3) add resizing tool for images 4) add support for other filetypes (no preview necessary - just add as attachments) 5) Add support for page breaks (separate pages) 6) Simple design choices (text and image together on page or on separate pages etc) 7) More advanced design choices (move content between pages)

The output should be zipfile (one file per image, one file for text, one file for design - SMIL language). If you want to be advanced then you can also output Nokia MMS file format.

I have written some C#-code for reading Nokia MMS file format if you need that.

I can coach and give feedback if necessary. I am working in the mobile technology industry as a software developer.

But every time I move I wish constantly for a service that would let me search craigslist by actual location. My mental picture is a location and distance, but some kind of region-selection on a google-maps overlay would be even better.. or a location and a maximum travel time. A feed of those ads as they are made would be even more powerful.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://openideas.eu/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/

I am reluctant to give you any of my ideas, but how about a web app for images, that particularly serves the needs of e.g. law enforcement, and allows storage and annotation related to crime scenes, cases, etc, or perhaps for the health industry, and does the same for patients with certain conditions, and you could tag them and other doctors could offer second opinions for money etc.

Not sure, what is the legal status of such previews, though...

http://hackernewsexperiment.blogspot.com/2010/06/status-from...

I genuinely want you to take my idea, please contact me and I will give you everything I have.

What? He said "the problem must not have been solved before"

Downvoted because it's silly to think that an open source implementation (regardless of whether there already was one or not) would destroy HN. As if it hasn't been done a million times before. It's the community, not the technology.