got2surf

Really interesting, does anyone know more information on how the initial eigendresses were computed? Was there image processing to distill the dress into major components, hand tagging of variables (like short/long, color, etc), or just raw pixel data processed?

It looks like the demo video has at least two different buttons so it seems like they have different MAC addresses

As far as technical challenges on streaming/hosting in Africa - I remember hearing about Kili (http://kili.io/) on HN a while ago. They do AWS-like infrastructure located in Nairobi, so could make it easy to get started in East Africa. Good luck!

That sounds really interesting - with the net-30 billing, you also have some cool opportunities to choose when to hold USD vs BTC based on the expected climate in the next 30 days

From the meta description tag: the original website was used for 'nutrition guide, locations, franchise information, and career opportunities'.

While I've never seen anyone actually browse the Taco Bell website, it seems like they will still need a web presence for hiring and making nutrition guides available (if not legally, practically). Taco Bell probably doesn't drive many sales from their website, but I have heard of people applying for jobs or checking out nutrition info online.

[edit for clarity]

As some background: I was interested in playing with the Instagram API so I built this last night.

I've heard about a trend of people 'liking' their own pictures on Instagram. Some people (mainly teenage users) say this has become more socially acceptable over time. I was curious how often this actually happens, so I built this site to find out.

You can do something like this to change the URL without reloading page, and then just use AJAX for the currency switcher:

  window.history.pushState("Updating URL to ___", "Title", "/?currency=USD");

The idea is pretty similar to Hunch, but we think there's an opportunity since Hunch had some dedicated users and no one else has stepped in to fill that gap.

We're also trying to be more social than Hunch, and think there's something special about answers by friends (both in terms of the "friends know you better" angle and the fun angle).

Great design on the site as well as great UI/UX for the app - amazing how powerful HTML5 apps are becoming.

I just make an Asana checklist for each project I'm working on - it's a great way to track bugs, add lists of features, see how you're doing, etc. It's also easy to add collaborators if you add a partner to the project and want to manage features in one place.

The 'when we become a legal entity' seems to be a pretty common answer.

What I've been thinking about lately is how passion plays into it - like you said, while you have a day job, your startup is what you're dedicated to hacking on whenever you can. Good luck with Fogbeam Labs, and I think we'd all love option E ;)

Looks like an awesome concept, and well executed as well!

Since the GamePress arcade lets you play any GamePress game, you could even publish top games as standalone apps running on your engine (if the creator wants). But more interestingly, you could provide some "edit" functionality in these apps, so that players can modify their local versions using the GamePress editor (either the full or a simplified version).

Angry Birds is cool, being able to build Angry Birds is cooler, but being able to customize your own version of Angry Birds is the coolest. People love sharing things they make, so that could be an entirely new growth avenue.

I completely get your point, and Emil is a great role model for all (not just young) entrepreneurs faced with failure.

What I don't understand is all the animosity towards Nick D’Aloisio. What makes him not a "real" entrepreneur? Whatever the means, he still took a company from inception to acquisition, which fits any definition of entrepreneurship.

There are lessons we can learn from Emil, and also lessons that we can learn from Nick. They've both had valuable experiences that I'm sure many of us would love to hear about.

After spending the past week thinking about monetizing ads, the next social/local/mobile app, etc... that all seems so minor compared to Watsi. It's awesome to see people doing so much social good - best of luck and amazing job!

My guess is Amazon - they're involved in enough different lines of business that even if one drops off, they'll still be fine, and if all lines of business prosper, they're in for huge growth.

E-commerce should continue to drive huge revenues, their cloud offerings are supporting a lot of emerging companies and technologies (which hopefully continues), and if they continue physical product offerings (semi-transformational things like the Kindle), they're looking good.

as an aside it'll be interesting to see what social sites do long term - perhaps Palantir's focus on brilliant engineers and consistent growth will let it eclipse Facebook/Twitter/etc at some point?

You really think this could be the next Facebook?!

But actually, I feel like this falls into the category of "cool but absolutely worthless" things (like Infinite Drunk Ron Swanson at http://www.drunkronswanson.com/). So while fun to make, I guess it doesn't have much value beyond that :)

Clickable: http://www.infinitepoppedmolly.com/

I thought this was interesting because Craigslist is known for sticking to its classic (some would say dated? ugly?) user interface. This is the first change that I've really noticed in Craigslist's UI (the update adds purple buttons for viewing results by "list" "pic" or "map".

After 3 years of having startup ideas, I finally committed and built a product (with a couple of great friends) that's ready to launch! I'm not sure when we can truly call ourselves a startup (when we exit private beta? When we incorporate? When we get funding?), but I made huge steps towards that this year and it feels awesome!

Yep, exactly - applications like that are just cool, useful and intuitive all at once.

What's interesting is that for visual displays, we have decades of detailed research into visual perception - we know from experience how to design a graph so that patterns can be quickly extracted and understood. We don't yet have that same level of understanding for sonifications, but once we do, applications like this will be even better

I've done about 4 years of research on sonification, which is using non-speech audio to represent patterns in data (http://mags.acm.org/interactions/20120102/?pg=37#pg37 for some specifics). This article is a subset of sonification in some ways, since we're representing some quantitative data using auditory parameters.

There's an entire class of scenarios where conventional HCIs can't represent data for analysis: where people have an occupied visual sense (doctors during surgery), where people are mobile, where people are overloaded by visual data (stock analysts), where the visual sense isn't suited for extracting data from noise (during the Voyager 2 mission), etc. We tend to rely only on our visual sense for communicating data, and as we start using computers for data display in more places, we're reaching the limitations of conventional HCI.

My research was on proving the viability of sonification - looking at the accuracy of comprehension, the cognitive and physiological processes, demonstrating shared mental processes with visual graph comprehension, etc. It's still something I'd love to revisit and commercialize someday.

If by chance you're using Ruby on Rails, then http://www.rubygeocoder.com/ is great.

Very impressive, great work!

Hopefully we can look at great, precocious coders like you as an example for teaching others - even if other kids only get to 20% of your coding ability in middle school, it'll be a huge step forward for our education system and society.

Thanks for the advice! I'll start downloading and playing around with the software - I'll start with Hello World and keep going up from there. I may end up PMing you later on with more specific questions if that's ok. Thanks again!

Unfortunately I'm a college pre-freshman without a couple grand free :P but I'll look into the Microchip PIC, thanks!

I'm commenting as a high school senior who has a few start up plans and is still going to college this fall.

First off, I take fault with the entire "college is overpriced" deal - that's only without financial aid. Harvard costs 60k sticker, but costs around 20k or so after financial aid (with 2/3 of people receiving aid). If you make 150k a year, you'll pay 10% of your income on tuition, it's not a massive 60k expense for most people.

But secondly, life's always about thinking, and it's always going to be about thinking. For purposes of developing education, nothing develops thinking like college, literally. We have no other social institution that fosters the same long-term interaction, learning, and application as college. But even more importantly, college is crucial for general life development, for learning about the world, meeting girls/guys, and all of the misadventures that we tend to take lessons from.

I have over 2000 hours of research in an emerging field, and I'm interested in starting a company on it, but it's not worth skipping college over. It may be worth taking a gap year (which seems more in line with the original Thiel philosophy) but I'm sure I'll have time to fit in a budding startup after classes. If the startup looks promising, and becomes less risky, then sure, it's worth taking a break from college. But until that point, college is a great investment; if you're going to invest in anything, why not invest in yourself?

But with all that being said.. the Thiel application has a few major similarities to the college app process. Thiel recipients probably did well in school, maybe in math/science competitions, have good ideas and are communicative. These skills probably got them into top schools (Ivy/MIT/Stanford). But because the Thiel program is a selection process in itself, it still provides some guidance and is at least better than an unstructured 4 years of skipping college.

Oh and one more thought: people will always care about credentials, which prove that you can do what you say you do. Starting a company, participating in Thiel, or going to a top school all count as credentials - but dropping out of college doesn't guarantee any of those three, and in that sense, is a very risky decision.

Yep, works now. Haha I may be reading into the Harry Potter metaphor a bit too much, but I've always thought about myself as a Slytherin. Sure, I wanted to be Gryffindor, but I always felt like more of an impostor within Gryffindor than anything else

Thanks for the reply! I do want to do a startup eventually, but I may also want to go into banking or finance (I've been working at a hedge fund locally and like the types of problems they can solve algorithmically).

And thanks for the Quora post, that analogizes it pretty damn well

Very good point, and I actually should have thought about that a little more. I loved the culture and town of both - Stanford's campus is just amazing, but I could also see myself fitting in really well at Harvard, especially with all the stuff to do in Boston. Thanks!

The thing a lot of tech people don't understand (including a few of the commenters here) is how important Instagram is in friend circles that aren't ours :P

I've never even felt the need to use Instagram, but two friends of mine (17 and 15) can't stop using it. They told me "no one shares pictures on Facebook anymore, it's just not cool." I mean, with how rapidly the Facebook demographics shift, we'd be making a huge error in assuming that Instagram isn't vital just because we have no use for it. Actually, we could draw a parallel to Pinterest's early lack of support in male-dominated VC circles. At the end of the day, 40m people love Instagram, and 40m is a good chunk of Facebook's market.