adam

Thanks for the comment. I agree that as she gets older she needs to be more self sufficient. Even now she plays by herself in small spurts. The intent of my post wasn't to insinuate that she must always actively feel she's the most important thing in the world, just that if it's a time when we should be actively engaging, say at the dinner table, we should do that, and I, nor she when she gets older, should be preoccupied by trivial "screen time."

On the other hand, we had no vesting schedule, so very founder friendly, but one of our founders left after 3 months by mutual decision. We spent the next 3 years trying to get him out of the company and ended up having to spend a decent amount of cash to buy him out altogether (not to mention the legal fees we had to pay to do so.) It can definitely go both ways.

We built 55Prophets to be a new entertainment app, somewhat similar to fantasy sports, but available for any topic. We're calling it a "fantasy betting" application where you can create and/or join leagues about any number of topics, such as sports, tv shows, politics, or technology. You start each league with 10,000 prophits (our fantasy currency) that you can use to make bets.

To help demonstrate the concept, we created a Hacker News Predictions League and added some questions. For example, you might make bets on questions like:

* Will Facebook announce any acquisition of a YC company before Aug 1?

* Which will be the next tech company to announce an IPO?

* Will San Francisco change its law to make AirBnB rentals explicitly legal by Aug 1?

You can also submit your own questions for other people to bet on.

You can download our app from the app store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/55prophets/id622424094?ls=1&...

Once you have it installed, you can point your mobile browser to http://55prophets.com/deep_link/leagues/25/join and it will open up the HN league in the app.

We'd love for you all to check it out and give us any feedback you have. Thanks!

Here's a blog post we wrote a few years ago about it: http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2008/05/judging-prediction-ma...

Prediction markets don't necessarily have to be real currency and it's a misconception that they are only accurate if you're using real money. We have run a prediction market using fantasy currency for years: http://home.inklingmarkets.com. We also run run private markets for companies...

It's interesting that in HN comments, most people are very excited for the arrival of glass. They think of it as something that will enhance their lifestyle, their productivity, etc.

If you read comments about glass in other forums such as at the bottom of NYTimes articles or other more general public media, most comments seem to be just the opposite: fear and paranoia about the arrival of glass in terms of privacy, or "naturalists" who abhor the thought of technology being a ubiquitous layer in front of real world experiences.

This makes me think it will be awhile before glass will be universally accepted. Just like certain restaurants and cafes are declaring themselves as cell phone free zones, will they also make you take off your glasses before being seated?

David Rothschild who is heavily cited and quoted in the article is doing some great work aggregating all kinds of forecasts from disparate sources at http://predictwise.com

Speaking of, we built a fun little viewers guide based on Inkling Markets' play money predictions here: http://academyawardspredictions.com

I think the reason I began trying to understand production logs and bug alerts was more of a calming mechanism than anything else. The developers get the same alerts and are already reviewing the logs, but by me understanding them I rarely need to ask if it's anything to worry about, etc. So it's not really me trying to help them with anything, it's more about knowing when to be worried vs. not, say if a client is launching their site on our platform tomorrow and I see some New Relic error come through at 2am the night before.

This is true, but think about how opaque github is for a non programmer/blogger (one of the use cases the OP mentions) vs. what he's put together which is truly about as simple as you can get in terms of getting started with a version controlled collaborative doc.

tinok - way to make presumptions about our preparation for birth, what my wife's medical history was, the research we did, our conversations with a close friend who is a midwife, my wife's predisposition to extreme pain, and what we've been telling others since having the baby. For you and others in this thread, home births may be the choice you make. A denial of any sort of frugs may be your decision as well. That's great. We decided a hospital environment was more appropriate for us.

To me the decision of how you want to deliver your baby that you and you alone conceived is as personal as religion, abortion, and numerous other topics which I believe people should be left to make their own decisions about. The quick fire judgments of absolute strangers proselytizing from up high should be checked at the door.

I'm curious how often you worked in runs to this workout? Did you ever go to 2-a-days or did you just run on your lifting off days?

The Intouchables

We just built a prediction market iOS app for Inkling: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/inkling-predictions/id549984...

It uses fantasy currency due to US law...

You could use prediction markets for something like this (disclaimer: i founded a prediction market software company) but unfortunately using real money isn't allowed in the States which would limit the interest of more serious traders.

Relevant point to bring that up. However notice the progression from trader to other more classically "noble" pursuits. And again, I was speaking about his (and other's) character in how they treat people, not necessarily what the stereotypical viewpoint of their profession is.

Not only is this mean spirited, I think it's fairly short-sighted. I've tried several to-do list apps and none of them have quite worked for me. I end up going back to scrap pieces of paper laying on my desk or stickies, both of which are sub-optimal. In fact I've never met anyone who fully recommends their to-do list software, their recommendation is always filled with caveats and things they still do "the old way."

Yes the market is saturated but that doesn't mean there is nothing innovative to be done here. I say more power to this person for building something for himself and putting himself out there to see what others think.

Thank you - I think people are forgetting such misses as the Cube when Jobs first came back. I remember very distinctly after taking it off the market his comments about not always being able to get it right but they must continue to try and push the envelope. To add to your list btw, he also let MobileMe ship which no one agreed was up to snuff and he acknowledged later by firing the entire team.

"...because nobody wants to be in Topeka."

Perhaps very few readers of HN would like to be in Topeka, but there are also families that have lived there for generations and all kinds of people who I'm sure absolutely love Topeka.

In fact, I suspect they would tell you that you can take NYC or SF and have it (or worse.) The bottom line is to each their own - no reason to disparage other's interests and life choices because you choose to live in a big city and have found a community of like-minded people, it just makes you sound like a pompous jerk.

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I'm not the designer, but recognize this for what it is - a thought piece that obviously required some fairly significant effort to put together. Some items have issues as you point out, but there are also some very intelligent ideas here and that was the point - to put something out there credible for discussion.

Why the snark? There is much talk on HN and elsewhere about how new ideas are generated, how companies try to be "innovative," etc. This is just his take on one way he comes up with new ideas. I don't have the same fascination with screws, but he obviously didn't mean it to be literal for everyone to do the exact same thing. It certainly made me think about both the physical things and processes all around me that I constantly take for granted. Questioning these things is how we are always evolving and improving. I'd say reminding people of this is valuable.

I think it's a great idea in concept as well but it seems likely based on the way it's described that Jason's project will move forward (because he's the CEO) and then the rest of the folks will have to battle it out to get their project funded ongoing.

In addition to allowing people to go off and do their own thing there also needs to be some sort of evaluation criteria set up or else you're going to have a bunch of annoyed people at the end of the process who worked hard then found out they didn't have a realistic chance to get funded.

I actually had the opposite reaction in terms of its usefulness.

I agree the UI/polish needs a couple more iterations, but I used this to put together an itinerary for my upcoming short vacation. Really like the gannt chart style view as a planning tool and the ability to use the bookmarklet to save stuff for later. It kind of mimics how I plan a vacation now: decide where I'm going, find hotel and flights, then look for things to do.

And it's the looking for things to do part then saving them and creating an itinerary (now done poorly with bookmarks or evernote) that is a pain in the ass that this attempts to solve.

A few kinks to work out (would love to be able to zoom on the timeline or get a traditional day/week calendar view and also actively collaborate with my trip companion) but promising concept overall.

Your specific comment about "$" may be false. Waldorf schools in urban areas are indeed $15k+/year/kid, but there are Waldorf schools in rural areas that charge far less for tuition. Not having kids myself but knowing parents of kids who go to Waldorf schools, your second statement seems more accurate: from what they say the parents are very involved in the schooling - in fact the Waldorf methodology is insistent on it.

Ironic since we were in the market first as Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com) in 2006, then the well-funded "Inkling" (inkling.com) came along who ignored our claims about trademark, and now the Wacom Inkling tablet. Guess it's just a cool name. :)

Agreed - it's been great. As soon as we added it we couldn't believe the pent up conversations that began to take place. Now we're actually hiring some community managers in large part to manage and hang out in the chat rooms.

I think you've done a really nice job with this. I've already replaced my nytimes.com bookmark with skimmer. One small request - could you put friendly time stamps on the articles, i.e. "posted 3 hours ago" "posted 2 days ago" and/or mark articles that have been read somehow? would just make it much easier to scan the page and look for unread stuff on return visits within close proximity to each other.

I worked at Accenture for 10 years and am on my second yC-funded company after leaving there. While I would never go back to that environment, I praise it for what it is to this day. I strongly believe more than ever you just need to understand yourself and "how you're built" and choose the environment that is most appropriate for you. And that may change over time like it did for me. But some people don't like the risks inherent in startups, or they need more structure to their day and know they don't do good with minimal direction and if that's the case, a place like Accenture is a pretty good place to work.

I wouldn't give back the skills I learned at Accenture and they've been invaluable for working on Inkling, our first B2B business. From day 1 I knew how to deal with large corporate cultures, understood the procurement process, how to manage projects, create a budget, write proposals, deal with various personalities, run a meeting and conduct workshops, conference call etiquette. It may sound simplistic, but I can't tell you the number of deals I've seen blown up simply because people don't really understand the business of business. Those skills are a lot harder to pick up in a startup.

I suspect this may be true, but if you're Groupon, you're not just sitting around waiting for the daily deals business model to become more and more saturated, you're hard at work on your "next thing" and your next "big thing."

Look already at the flash mob deals they're doing that are location based, the deal they just struck with expedia, the deals with national brands they're starting to do more of. Those are just derivatives of their core idea but also all bring in serious cash.

But then there are things they're likely working on that will go beyond the deal space and in to other services for the tens of thousands of businesses they now have relationships with. Think cross-business loyalty cards, point of sale systems, reservation systems, etc. If you think of a small business' "stack," they're just at marketing right now with the deals stuff, but there's no reason why they can't inject themselves further on down the business stack successfully. Deals will always be a part of their business I suspect, but in 2-3 years not their core business model, just an accepted concept in a much larger offering to businesses.

I agree. He kind of reminded me of the Gordon Gekko figure in the original Wall Street. You're not supposed to like him because he's this amoral ass, but you end up totally digging him and a little itty part of you wants to be just like him.

Your "All that's necessary..." is a big "all." Looking at the political class today on both sides of the aisle, I'm afraid they just aren't capable of taking any sort of necessary actions Zakaria prescribed. In addition, a President who many saw as a savior who would transcend all of the pettiness has proven no better or influential than any other person who could have won.