1) A way to ensure that each person can only create one account on a website, without having to sacrifice anonymity.

2) A day planner that plans my day for me; based on my to-do list, what my friends are doing, and also what's going on in the local area. Also, populate the bulk of my to-do list automatically based on what my friends in the same classes are adding to theirs. Plan social dates for me based on when my friends and I are free. Introduce me to people I don't know but should know.

3) A way to get more people involved in Internet-mediated locally social stuff.

4) A semi-standardized way for people to build up a reputation without needing a college degree.

5) An IMDB for people who have won awards. I want to a quick way to find the professors with the most citations in any given subject, the chefs in the area with the best zagats reviews, the local high school football players with the most touchdowns, etc.

6) An academic search engine targeting people who are college educated but who don't necessarily have extensive experience with the inner workings of academia. Right now there are really good ways of accessing journal articles online, but really poor ways of learning what academic journals to look in. There's no way to know which journals are respected and which aren't. No easy way to translate plain English questions into the keywords that are used by academics.

7) A way to turn recipes on the web into peapod orders. A way to turn the customized diets that Weight Watchers or WebMD create into a peapod order.

Most of these ideas will end up with stupid names like lulzdatr.com or bizzwarezz.com

Even if this were true (which seems extremely unlikely) someone had to think of it first. So there would have been a point when it was possible to have new ideas. How can you be sure the present is not such a point, when we know there were such points in the past?

And think about what a journal provides: a forum for researchers to submit the results of their research and a mechanism for selecting which of the submissions are worthwhile for folks in the field to know about.

What I just described is essentially just a karma system, albeit you would have to find a way to take the credibility of the rater into serious consideration. Assuming you solved the chicken-and-egg problem of getting enough credible people from academia to be raters and to submit their best work to your site (quite a tough problem considering many large universities are much more like big companies, or worse government bureaucracies, than startups), you could totally replace the entire system of academic journals.

Think of all the other free extras you would get by having a web app host all journal articles: at minimum, the process of citing references and looking at the background of a paper could be improved: you could visually trace the findings of the paper you're looking at all the way back to the founding of the field by what each of it's references used as references. Search would be a lot better, as would recommendation engines (lots of professors have grad students waste time simply scanning journals for articles that are relevant for their work). If you're into NLP than you would have a much better dataset and a clear application for doing summarization. And think about the possibilities of social networking or productivity-app type features enabling all sorts of new possibilities for collaboration among people at different universities!

But the real big play is that once you do all this, you're well on your way to replacing universities themselves, which any undergraduate can tell you are bloated enterprises which spend large amounts of money and pass the costs onto their customers, who accept it because the university system has a monopoly on giving out credentials for people going into the working world.

One of universities main products is research, and in many fields (biology, physics) you need the big backing of university (and government) dollars to support research. In many other fields (math, Computer Science, philosophy) you don't. Researchers in these fields usually need to somehow pay their living expenses, and the actual equipment expenses are minimal. They mainly need: -a place to find like-minded collaborators -credibility for their work (ie, ability to publish in journals). You could give them both of those things. Now people in these fields wouldn't even need to choose the career path of grad school and then professorship (in other words, staying their entire life in the university monopoly) in order to contribute their research to humanity's body of knowledge.

So in other words, what you need is to build a HN/Reddit style voting/peer review system that weights the credibility of the voter heavily. Then you need to find some early adopters who are credible enough to lend your own site credibility. Then you could be well on your way to reinventing the academy in a way that is much more democratic and makes its results much more widely available and usable by the public.

Anyone want to build this? My email address is in my profile. Or just go ahead and use this idea yourself - I just really want to be able to use this service somehow, though probably more as a consumer than a producer of research. Maybe someone who actually went to grad school and had lots of papers published themselves would be in a better position to build this idea.

There are of course new ways to view results, but with arguable advantage. A new startup I found recently, Viewzi (http://www.viewzi.com/) does a pretty good job. But it's not better at finding stuff than Google.

Naturally, these are the waters where everybody goes fishing, year after year.

I think part of the secret, though, is to stop designing (e.g.) "the next dating site" and start designing a way to get compatible, single people into the same room. Focus on the problem, not the old solution. For example, the very word "WebOS" encourages bad habits of thought: It encourages you to look for something shaped like Windows or Linux, or for apps with a UI that reminds you of the desktop.

Modern academic psychology and economics aim at being scientific; the works of Freud and Marx fall very short in this respect, according to contemporary standards.

Both are, of course, very important in the history of ideas. And their ideas are not necessarily irrelevant to the psychologist (childhood traumas can cause persisting psychological problems) or economist. But their actual works probably are irrelevant to the work of most psychologists and economists.

Hegel expelled from philosophy? First, his works are particularly difficult to read and understand (and difficult to translate into English). So he isn't popular with philosophy undergraduates. So not many courses are offered on his work. (But some are: http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/ug_study/ug_honours/documents... )

Also, Hegel fits on the 'continental' side of the 'analytic' vs. 'continental' philosophy binary opposition. That is probably the main reason for his lack of presence in English-speaking philosophy departments, which are overwhelmingly analytical in bent.

Most people who read that one will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from.

Main issues for a startup using AppEngine:

1) Quotas. Until they let you pay-as-you-go, AppEngine isn't really production ready. There are file # limits and quotas you may trip, depending on your target market. Google says they'll open things up by the end of this year.

2) Processing issues. AppEngine isn't a good platform for CPU-intensive processing apps. Transcoding videos, for example, is kind of a no-brainer for Amazon EC2 versus AppEngine. I think the AppEngine team is working on background processing systems but nothing is public yet.

3) HTTPS. There's none right now. You can use Google authentication, so that's one workaround but this is a deal-breaker for a number of possible apps.

These are the main ones that jump out at me. On the positive side, I think it's awesome to outsource significant infrastructure issues (servers, DB) to Google. I've got too much to code as is, so I'd much rather delegate the chunks I'm not as competent or interested in.

I'm not as concerned about lock-in, although I understand how others may take a different viewpoint. Also, tethering yourself to Google may have some repercussions if you are trying to get acquired by one of their competitors. (But I think you should just worry about your business first and not the exit strategy.)

You may also find it interesting to read up about colonialism -- some of the statements you've made represent attitudes that are considered somewhat dated by modern standards; it's almost as if they were cribbed from "The White Man's Burden" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_man%27s_burden).

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

I've always been a heavier guy, even with exercise and proper dieting. A couple years back I had issues with extremely high blood pressure spikes. It landed me in the hospital for a few days.

After my wife watched a medical show on Discovery Channel she came to me one day and says "Maybe you should get checked for sleep apnea?"

At that time on most weekends I could sleep for 13 hours straight and wake up still feeling exhausted.

Went and had a sleep study done and the results showed that I woke up over 150 times throughout the night and never entered REM sleep. With a CPAP machine I awoke only once.

The CPAP has change my life. Because I have more quality sleep I have more energy for exercising and have dropped another 20 lbs because of it. I work out 4-5 times a week. My quality of life has improved ten-fold.

So if you're a larger person that feels like the energy is drained from you, has problems getting the motivation to follow through on a physical fitness plan, and _especially_ if you're a loud snorer, you should get a sleep study done.

While wearing a CPAP to bed isn't going to get you laid, you'll quickly realize how much life you've been missing out on because of your poor sleep.

Seriously, this list is exhausting to read. It's like the topic sentence for an entire century. I'm going to have to take it a little piece at a time.

If you use satisfaction as the test, you may be letting the present state of things influence your thinking too much. E.g. I bet a lot of people were satisfied with pre-Google search engines, and just took their limitations for granted.