The new YC.news

This ended up to be a long comment on YC.news, now turned Hacker news. I figured it was worth reposting here on my blog:

When I was working at an engineering job at a research lab, I was told what had to be accomplished. Of course, the degree of freedom, amount of creativity, and problem solving you can do varies from project to project, but in the end, I went to bed happy knowing in the back of my mind that someone, somewhere asked for whatever you're working on--that's why you're getting paid. When you're a startup founder, however, you aren't even sure of that, mostly because of the nature of startups and the markets they decide to persue.

A startup can be successful in an already crowded and proven market--especially if the market sucks (online dating comes to mind). But often times, where startups shine is where others fear to tread, and that's in potential markets, unproven markets, and useless markets (until you prove that it isn't).

But how do you figure that out? And given that you see a potential, how do you find a creative solution to build a business from it?

I don't think anyone can tell the future when it comes to these things. But you can certainly learn to get a good intuition for it. One of the ways to do that is to constantly read broadly about interesting things that are going on in the fringes of any number of industries. By interesting, I mean, things that you didn't know that stretchs your understanding of the world and perhaps your imagination a little bit more. When you start to get your finger on the pulse of possibility, you're able to see blooming solutions where others only see wilting dead-ends.

In addition, when you dig deep enough into any topic, it gets quite interesting. You'll start to find that all subjects are intertwined in one way or another. The way all subjects are compartmentalized in school is just so students don't get confused. But really, all subjects are inter-related. Sociology's studies on coordination and biology's study on social insects actually relates to optimization. Weather phenomenon actually relates to crytography. This inter-relatedness works to your advantage in finding creative solutions to make a business out of your new market, because creative things are usually a combination of old things put together in new ways.

Contrary to popular belief, creativity isn't often completely out of nowhere, just as masterpieces don't just materialize in front of masters. For every masterpiece you see hanging in the galleries, there are hundreds of sketches and throwaway paintings that you don't see the master artist practicing on. By the same token, a creative solution for a startup isn't just a stroke of inspiration from nowhere. It's a culmination of a slow absorbing of interesting tidbits that you've gathered and processed in the back of your mind until you've put the relevant pieces together.

So as far as I can tell, Paul Graham views hackers that are startup founders not as just really really good programmers. He believes what makes these people good startup founders is their innate curiosity in the world around them, and the willingness and drive to keep on learning about it to produce and create solutions--which lead to profit if attacked in a business way. That not only drives their strengths as programmers, but as thinkers and builders that change the world and will make money doing so. Not trying to put words in his mouth, but that's my best summary thus far.

Therefore, if you buy into that, then I think the direction into the new YC news as Hacker news is a good change. It will allow people to keep seeing and learning interesting things so they have a better gut for potential and emerging markets, as well as helping them along in their creativity for novel solutions. That is, at least my take on it.

Of course, we'll see how it actually all plays out, but I for one, am looking forward to the change.

BumpTop 3D Desktop can't beat the search box.

This is a video where the desktop metaphor is taken literally for computers. You have move documents around on the desk as if they were real things, using a physics engine. While, neat, I don't think it's entirely the right way to go. This method is only good if you can see a preview of what the document is at a glance. Therefore, for something like photos, it makes sense. But for documents, you often can't distinguish between documents just from a preview. So unless there is also a smooth zoomable interface, I don't think it would be too useful for documents.

The only reason we sort or organize anything on our desk (or otherwise) is so that we can perform search later on. There is no need to sort if there is a default search box as an interface. Therefore, I think what would really be neat is if the documents sort themselves into rankings, or into groups based on what you typed in a floating search text field.

That said, I can see definitely see applications for this technology for augmented reality though. Being bombarded by virtual screens and documents would make anyone feel overwhelmed. Bumptop physics can help lower the information overload for future augmented reality interfaces.

Twittering as a platform

Amazon is posting their deals on twitter. I'm not quite sure that people would want deal ads on their cell phones all the time...

I'm kind of amazed, as are other people in the naysayer category have been, that Twitter had taken off as it has. At its basic form, it's just passing back and forth messages, a problem seemingly solved by email decades ago. However, twitter obvious is not a question of the underlying technology, but rather, how it is presented to and used by people. It's gotten people use to the idea of instant self-expression, no matter how inane--for better or worse. I would have chalked it up for sensors to monitor and log ourselves, but twitter demonstrated that people will report or say anything if there's an audience. Perhaps trolls have already paved the way in this regard.

That said, I think it's easy to write Twitter off as a fad, since the world's largest collection of quips doesn't quite seem to make the world a better place. My guess is that there's probably value in Twitter, but only when it's married with other sorts of data or text processing. Just off the top of my head, geospatial data and emotion detection algorithm on twitter data could generate a heat map of how people are feeling place to place, or time to time. I imagine advertisers would find this information valuable, since they can set up targeted advertising when people are statistically most vulnerable to impulse buying at a certain time or place.

If twitter can manage an API or platform to support this sort of thing, they'll be around for a while, I think. If not, well, at least we'd have the largest collection of quips for the archaeologists of the 22nd century.

COMET meets mod_mailbox

COMET meets mod_mailbox is an interesting (new to me, anyway) way to think about asynchronous push of data from server to client. I have tried my hand at using periodic calls from the client javascript to the server for information, and it's a load on the server, even when there's nothing going on. And it certainly doesn't make it seem as responsive for chat-like web applications.

Many people have done it before, it's an old technique. I've seen in in the Dojo toolkit, as well as some others...but I still haven't really seen a nice standalone solution that you can plug in. Ie. I haven't gotten off my butt to write it in javascript so that it can be nicely package...hoping someone else will.

Inconsistent virtual realities for social augmentation

Cognitive Daily: If you want to persuade a woman, look straight at her:

"There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze....Since each individual's virtual experience is generated separately, in a "room" full of people, each person could experience the phenomenon of everyone else looking at them. Everyone can be the center of attention, all at the same time!"

That's an interesting way to view things. I hadn't thought too much about that, since generally, simulations and games work hard to maintain game state world consistency.

But as we know from Horchow and Carnegie, people are interested mostly in themselves. Inconsistent realities to facilitate or even manipulate social interactions is both fascinating and a bit unnerving due to its immediate implications of social engineering, as most modern people in the western world in this day and age believe in free will.

However, I think it can certainly put to good use, especially in terms of customer service, to help make a customer feel like they are getting special and speedy attention. In the future, if there are Non-Player Characters who are store clerks in either augmented or virtual realities, a customer can have the benefit of seemingly personalized attention.

I can see this implemented in a physical store, where a customer walks in and an augmented store clerk helps them out. And if two customers, say two girls out shopping together, are listening to the same augmented store clerk, one can change the image to make it seem like the clerk is addressing them both at the same time.

As for the article's claim of gender differences, the sample size is pretty small, given only 6 male pairs and 6 female pairs for each of the 3 study groups. But the difference between genders are pretty significant in the graph...and I don't see any manipulation of the graph to make results seem more significant than they are offhand.

Traffic reporting for Google Maps

Google Maps just added traffic reporting. Screen shot below:

That's pretty neat, though yahoo has had traffic reporting on their beta maps for some time now. I just like google's interface better...it's fast. And I noticed they also have metro stops now. Neat.