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Random Startup Generator
- Tiksi 12y agoOff topic, but in Firefox 33, I get a scrollbar past the "bottom" of the page. Looks like it's due to the margin: 20px; on .fireplace. Setting it to margin:20px 20px 0px 20px; seems to fix it.
- madeofpalk 12y agoAdditionally off topic, I'm confused as to why Cufon was used for custom fonts, when @font-face is so widely supported these days...
- mappu 12y agoThe site is at least 3 years old.
- madeofpalk 12y agoAhhh ok, that explains it then.
- pearknob 12y agoNovel. This is a project of Smore; which coincidentally does incredibly awesome design work with their products. This (ykombinator) is a good example.
- freditup 12y agoEnjoyed playing with this - it would be neat to see a version where the company name and description matched up a little bit more and the description had a little bit more semblance of reality. No startup is going to talk about 'Pedobear' or '/b/' on its splash page.
- idlewords 12y agoThat would be playing with fire, though. The risk of one of these being funded is high enough as it stands.
- Kortaggio 12y agoSomething I've always wondered with regard to idea generators like this: in the (extremely unlikely but non-zero probability) event that it actually generates a good idea and someone decides to implement it, throwing up a website with the same copytext that was output by the idea generator, who owns the copyright over the copytext?
- freakonom 12y agoThe courts would have to decide. Reasonable IANAL answer: the person who owns the copyright to (the strings in) the code.
- rtpg 12y agoI think that software output can't be automatically copyrighted. Individual snippets of the copytext might be copyrighted though, if its of a non-trivial length (since it was written by somebody, instead of something).
- andrewfong 12y agoAssuming we're talking about U.S. law, it depends. If the implementing website did not actually copy the copytext from the generator and came up with the exact same language by chance, then the implementing party owns the copyright (or more accurately, the implementing party has not infringed upon the rights of whoever wrote the idea generator). But let's assume there was actual copying. Then whoever write the idea generator owns the copyright on the copytext (assuming he or she didn't assign those rights to an employer, etc.). BUT that assumes the copytext is copyrightable to begin with. Copyright law requires that a work be created by a human being in order for it be copyrighted. In particular, the U.S. Copyright Office refuses to register "works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author."[1] Since the copytext here is computer-generated, you could argue that no one owns the copyright. But that's a stretch. Although each individual idea is randomly generated by a computer, a fair amount of human creativity went into making sure the ideas it spits out aren't total gibberish. I don't know what the exact level of human input is required for something to be copyrightable, and as far as I'm aware, there's no court case directly on point here. But I think there's enough for whoever wrote the idea generator to make a good copyright claim. One final aside though: If a start-up actually copies the copytext, they still might be protected under fair use. Fair use generally protects copying that is minimal and serves a different purpose than the original (e.g. quoting a passage from a book in order to critique it). In this case, the work that is being copyrighted would have to be the set of all ideas generated as a whole, not the text of any particular idea. That is, assume the idea generator is capable of generating 100,000 possible random start-up ideas. Then the unit of "work" that is copyrightable is the set of all 100,000 ideas. Therefore, because you're only copying one of those 100,000 ideas, you might be able to argue that your copying is minimal. Moreover, your copy of the work serves a different purpose than the original (the purpose of the generator is parody, but in your case, you're actually being serious). There are other factors that go into fair use (economic effect and commercial vs. non-commercial use), so it's hard to say for sure whether you could get away with it, but it's certainly a plausible position to take. [1] http://copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-full.pdf http://copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-full.pdf
- longtime-lrkr 12y agoWww.possiblestartups.com Simple alternative
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- frik 12y agoIt seems it's based on the markov-chain algorithms.
- thibauts 12y agoIt most probably isn't. Basic text spinning IMO.
- chetanahuja 12y agoIf someone told me that they used a tool like this to generate a startup pitch and got seed funding, I'd find it hard to dismiss it as a joke.
- _random_ 12y agoA simple improvement: add a team bios section in the bottom with three images grabbed randomly from google image search results "startup hipster" and random text along the lines of "...coded on commodore at 6, graduated MIT, left Google to disrupt...".
- nullc 12y agoWhy isn't there random news on news.ykombinator.com? :(
- MattConfluence 12y agohttp://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html http://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html Ask HN: Does my startup need to code unicorn picture technology?
- Lai0chee 12y agoThis is the very best thing I've ever seen on this site. :-)
- rikacomet 12y agoIt shows that idea is just the top cream layer, and without the cake made with human hard work and sacrifices, its nothing special.
- chiph 12y ago"Cloudulate" sounds plausible. Perhaps "Cloudulation" is what happens at the end of a successful project...