How does TikTok search even work? I wish I had the patience to sift through all the garbage of an empty profile. Maybe I'll peak a Twitch stream of it some time to get a better idea.

Reading, writing, and thinking clearly has not always been my strong suit, so yeah xD ; take this with a grain of salt.

Hey dude was wondering how this comment made you feel:

> Cloud monitoring is a saturated market.

It's like yeah, it's saturated but it's saturated because the infrastructure is we're hosting it on is still and forever changing. Take some serverless CloudFormation in AWS; there was no good solution for application monitoring until someone specifically started solving for it because no one in their right mind was going to use CloudWatch and none of the other existing monitoring solutions/tools could fit the bill either unless they started from scratch and solved for that specific new infrastructure.

<Insert shameless Epsagon plug here />

The Cloud monitoring market might seem saturated but that's because there is no "silver bullet" solution given how much infrastructure has been and continues to change.

CloudWatch works fine and Epsagon's sales tactics are dishonest and shitty in addition to being spammy--I'm still waiting to hear back from a "Cassie" who I don't think actually exists as to where they sourced my email from for their cold-email marketing blasts.

I'll never do business with a company that gross.

I am particularly interested in the last item on his wish-list: Pry on Steroids: Interactive Ruby Development. Does anyone develop this way?

I'll admit that I am new to ruby and coming from Python I immediately fell in love with pry and was wondering if there was anyone out there who utilizes such a work-flow involving some sort of REPL. I have been having a hard-time figuring out a way to do this with pry in rails.

At first my inner neckbeard scoffed and proclaimed why? I looked at the source and realized I don't know jack about CSS3 and how easy something like this is to implement in less than ~150 lines of code was like ramming a sock down my inner neckbeard's throat.

I can't see the code because the account has been suspended. My inner neckbeard is shouting "Stop turning everything into a jack of all trades! Can't cascading style sheets just be really good at styling?"

If you have a ton of ideas and they're all, for the most part, general, vague, novel, and abstract, practice prototyping. Make it really dirty, don't over-think it, and keep a closed-mind while in the beginning stages of a project; IOW, don't pre-optimize your project by recursively worrying about other edge cases, write for a single case and get something on the screen.

Given your background, I'd scratch all these "big picture" or "overly ambitious" ideas and return to a domain you're more confident in, pick something (axiom, rule, theorem, etc.) specific, and see if you can express or simulate an example of the "thing" in action.

> "why didn't you spend your unemployment working on a project to flesh out your portfolio?"

Who cares? Generally the last thing I do is try to get practical with my portfolio just to impress some third party; depending on who you are, what field you're interested in, and everything else in your portfolio, the projects you produce will only vary as much as you originally imagined them.

If you're projects aren't interesting to you, are they really worth doing? All this aside, if I were OP I wouldn't be shy about chalking-up this experiment as a "project" since most ad agencies and creative types eat this stuff up.

OT but Anyone actively pumping out stuff for node.js? I just installed it on my slice last week; it took me about an 30-40 minutes to get through the README :| (mostly due to some missing dependencies), flipped through man, and was like wtf I'm doing. . .point being, it seemed like it'd take some serious investment to, first, figure what you're doing, and, second, to produce something interesting.

Coolest application I've seen come out of node.js is http://mrdoob.com/125/Multiuser_Sketchpad_HTML5. I'd be interested in what others are doing in it; let alone, how they got about doing they wanted to do in it.

A great way to get comfortable with node.js is to read github projects that are using it. I've got a few at github.com/dpritchett but I'd particularly recommend anything at http://github.com/jashkenas . Dig into some of the NodeKO winners and see if you can find source code, too.

stephank's orona (html5 tank game) is a neat project: http://github.com/stephank/orona

I would go so far as to say that the greatest strength of node.js is the way people crank out interesting and possibly useful code and stick it on github. This makes it very easy to dive in and start hacking.

I would particularly recommend checking out socket.io, and maybe some of the projects using it. It's a way of doing realtime browser-server communication, which uses websockets if the browser supports it, and a variety of increasingly ugly fallbacks on browsers that are old and/or made by Microsoft. You can make some very cool stuff with it.

Also, definitely get npm, the node package manager. It makes installing libraries much easier:

http://github.com/isaacs/npm

Yeah, I think YC applicants or founders is statically insignificant, but I think your total user base is just as insignificant as this since it doesn't tell us much about what stories are showing up on the front-page and who is saying what about it. Instead, considering you're still only interested in comments, what if you filtered your user base for anyone that has posted a comment in the last 30 days then extrapolated the proportion of comments posted given a threshold of karma or "days alive" on HN against everyone else in your user base.

I think it's more revealing this way if you are interested in how increased traffic and site participation is effecting this 6% you mentioned above or that "days alive" value; IOW, how is increased traffic and new user participation effecting the rate at which this sample is posting comments?

In the end, I don't think increased traffic is effecting the discussion to the extent that it really matters; I think what really keeps everyone else in check is the frequency at which older members are posting comments.