mr_twj

standardization is one reason: http://xkcd.com/768/

Mandelbrot (roughly): do not look at what you see, but at the process that created it.

Great ideas have infinite applications and all ideas are interconnected. The trouble is knowing how far downstream you are from the source and if it is untapped. In this sense, I couldn't say I come up with any ideas, but recognize the underlining pattern reoccurring. Let your reason guide you; great minds find each other this way quite spectacularly.

edit: there are also those times where you just say, "I wish I could just do ____", and often you can.

Or its sibling: a genie grants both a mathematician and an engineer their greatest desire to be located at the end of the room given that each step they take towards it is half the distance than their last. The mathematician throws his arms up and yells "Impossible! I'll never reach it," and storms out of the room. The engineer just smiles and says to the genie, "I can get close enough."

Ideally, yes. I don't have any projects meriting this function but I could foresee it in the future; in the meantime I wanted to know what HN thought. I'm glad to see some interested in such a site function.

Not to be overly melodramatic, but I think this is my last comment here on HN for better or worse, simply because this is exactly the microcosmic ideal I've hoped for HN from my beginning involvement--if it dies, there's no need to drag things out and I am grateful for all of HN's relentless resourcefulness I've encountered. And if not, I'll probably be helping HN continue to develop this idea further through action.

I think I can safely assume the majority of active members representative of YC here have startups that are in need of traction, but of a different kind not yet fully explored; but nevertheless, in need of resources. I hope I'm also not mistaken in the feeling most of us feel "not ready" or not in the right stage for official seed funding and don't necessarily fit into traditional crowd funding landscape, or simply don't want that much of a burden to worry about while developing.

Yes, money is a burden because it's an anchor you must tie yourself to in most cases, and is hard to come by. I've read it many times here before, as it should be, since this is the YC news. However, there could be something faster...

So, this new or new-old, dare I say model, is a natural progression--or in pg's adapted words, evolution (hopefully I am not putting words in your mouth). To where? Call it Crowd Ramen Funding (CRF), where the angels are the untold majority.

All that's needed is a standalone site to register your startup with the community, associate needed resources to your startup/project, and have others with those available resources either give or lend them to you while you're still getting off the ground. It doesn't have to be big; maybe some food, a sheltered corner to hack under, language manuals, maybe some light consulting, or other things of this nature. And like other crowd funding platforms, you make sure there are enough hands to help you down the edge so you don't have to take the dive by yourself. In return, the angels may receive the startup's product if it was something they personally wanted, or maybe simply the joy of having helped a hacker or two that is adding more value to the world than he or she is taking out, or maybe it's a kind of symbiosis not easily definable.

In short, I feel I'm not alone when I say this has much more potential than just being slash or pipe "Offer", and being so, it really is out of place in the header. HN community participation shouldn't be a function narrowed in scope by its site header, nor should the header sacrifice its functionality of directing users contributing and reading news. I think at heart it's really a classical inheritance problem, in which case, it's best to just extend rather than subtype the current functionality. May the entire community see this thing through to either a bitter end or choosing to forward it on into the future. That is all.

I'm not sure how well these are worded but assume current entrepreneurship as an underlying condition when not specified explicitly.

Thanks, all comments were helpful.

If you ever want any help developing this or need someone to bounce a feature idea off of let me know.

From what I can tell there are two camps that are converging: 1) capitalists that want to monetize off the 3rd Economy and 2) resource-based social engineers using a YC-like network of startups to start an internal shared economy. They are both experimental in nature right now and the future of which one will succeed will be determined by how efficiently either one is run. I don't think there's middle ground in the long run.

How would anyone here feel about a crowdfunding platform that would allow people to fund local startups with objects/space/skills instead of money in return for their product(s)? This way no money gets wasted and the funded items are returned (except for the ramen of course) if the startup closes up shop.

Take a look at http://zemerge.com/

I have a little hobby swap site that I could quickly convert into an unofficial HN book/thing swap. I would be glad to release the source if necessary so others could improve upon it, seeing that there are a few things I haven't had time to finish. Let me know HN, this seems to be a common enough thing for a dedicated solution.

Theoretically speaking, in a future where the world runs itself and all notions of "scarcity" are eliminated by energy, technological, and agricultural abundance, what need would there be for capitalism, let alone money?

This only confirms my conviction that solipsism syndrome should be studied more closely in relation to the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome

Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.

Technocrats understand that technology is the only thing that reduces cultural lag, more or less. On the other hand, artificial scarcity keeps it going strong. These two processes are inversely proportional in respect to time, meaning the effect of artificial scarcity will eventually become trivial in effect on cultural progression as it follows the rate of technological advancement.

Just smoke some cannabis if you want time to stop (interferes with your ability to filter perceptual information in a linear fashion--nevertheless one's own personal freedom to choose to do such a thing); the rest of us have jobs that require routines. Btw, don't pass the human species off as habitual, we are anything but in respect with the animal kingdom in its entirety (lack of a definite homeostasis in nature). With all that talk about measures, was there a mention of how spontaneity is to be measured? Breaking a habit just to find a new one seems frivolous. It seems to me one would have to be put in a truly unpredictable environment (such as the wilderness) to become less routine.

A couple of nugs might be typical. 1 oz is a lot of cannabis; it might take a year for a casual user to expend it. So no, your garden variety cannabis is not expensive and is comparably cheaper than alcohol, and much cheaper than pharmaceutical drugs.

"The Union" is a decent documentary about cannabis in general, including its distribution and pricing history: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9077214414651731007...

I downloaded polyglot earlier today and found it mostly amusing in the context of Facebook (e.g. seeing my friends speaking in broken english.) Later, I came back and forgot about polyglot and started a little unit testing. Long story short, in spanish commas are really decimal points and vice versa.