13. MIT Open Courseware
Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#22#3: New news I'm a news hound. And, I started http://Newsley.com to try and find a solution to the new news problem that I had. I picked financial and economic news because it's an interest of mine that will hold my attention. Besides, advertising rates are much better for financial and economic keywords than they are for funny videos or cute cat pictures. My hypothesis, social news sites have done a pretty good job…
You sure those sites do collaborative filtering? AFAIK, the 'front page' is the same for all, and real CF would show you a personalised page depending on your tastes. Like movielens does for movies.
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#23Over the last couple of months, I became involved with a nonprofit which is taking a whack at #13, Online Learning. It is not technically the "current best solution", since it is upcoming: http://www.innovativeineducation.org. The website is admittedly rough, but this organization is initiating free online accredited college courses. This spring semester will be for no credit (Calc I and Organic Chem I), as it will be a trial for the technology.
For-credit courses are scheduled to be offered starting in the summer/fall, back-dooring through community colleges until its own accreditation is achieved. The idea is to start with Gen Ed type classes which can be taught online and transferred to just about any school, and to offer more courses as the program grows.
Since the endeavor is structured around corporate sponsorships, Innovative in Education can afford to pay professors and graduate students appropriately to create high quality content and instruct live online. No complicated login process to access the live content; users can just tune into the classroom page at class time, and view the embedded livestream. (Of course, content will be archived as well, a la OCW).
Actually, on that note: there seem to be good streaming solutions for live action video (high FPS, high compression) and for slides (low FPS, low compression for detail clarity), but I have not found a solution that allows the broadcaster to selectively switch between the two optimizations. If anyone knows of such a streaming solution, please share. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#24#3: New news I'm a news hound. And, I started http://Newsley.com to try and find a solution to the new news problem that I had. I picked financial and economic news because it's an interest of mine that will hold my attention. Besides, advertising rates are much better for financial and economic keywords than they are for funny videos or cute cat pictures. My hypothesis, social news sites have done a pretty good job…
Ok, so how is Newsley currently different from, say, /r/worldnews for example? Newsley is using collaborative filtering as well. I see a bunch of links voted by the community, which I'm assuming contribute to their ranks on the frontpage.
Right now, it's not that much different. Reddit's front page can be awfully toxic at times, and I don't think people automatically look at reddit and say, "I might find some interesting economic news here if I can just wade past all this other crap."
Once I have enough users to keep the site afloat, I'm going to start offering recommendations. There's a lot more to come.
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#25#3: New news I'm a news hound. And, I started http://Newsley.com to try and find a solution to the new news problem that I had. I picked financial and economic news because it's an interest of mine that will hold my attention. Besides, advertising rates are much better for financial and economic keywords than they are for funny videos or cute cat pictures. My hypothesis, social news sites have done a pretty good job…
You sure those sites do collaborative filtering? AFAIK, the 'front page' is the same for all, and real CF would show you a personalised page depending on your tastes. Like movielens does for movies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
Collective Intelligence. My bad. I got a little algorithmically dyslexic.
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#26Fixes to these problems needn't be startups. Part of the fix for problem 1 is the international Pirate Party movement.
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#2717. I think Square ( http://www.squareup.com ) qualifies. 19. Heroku counts 23. Powerset 30. Builditwith.me ( http://www.builditwith.me )
I'm not sure what problem Powerset is trying to solve. It seems to me that they don't bring any extra functionality to searching Wikipedia with Google. Maybe I have misunderstood their project...?
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#281) Rhapsody (yeah, I know hackers are supposed to hate DRM, Windows, and Real Networks, but I really like being able to pay $10 a month and listen to any song, ever made, instantly).
3) news.ycombinator.com The comment section is almost invariably better than 95% of articles in the NYTimes.
4) Google Apps
5) Salesforce
6) HelpSpot?
7) An app that could automatically convert a web site created in Dreamweaver or some custom solution into a wordpress blog.
13) wikipedia
20) google search, site:news.ycombinator.com best laptop (etc)
22) DabbleDB
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#2928. Unblab (http://www.unblab.com)
They seem promising (I know one of the founders personally) but things are going slower than the impression I originally got. One of their products (Gtriage) is already out though. Basically they're doing data mining on people's inboxen.
Re: Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?
#30Yourgrounds.com is in beta right now, and should be a better way to use classifieds than craigslist.