
Idea dump, February 2011 - vijaydev
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Idea+dump+February+2011+edition
======
psykotic
Re: The Black Sun

The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality
over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and
benevolent dictator.

MUD-Dev was like this in its heyday. JCL invited people based on their
rec.games.mud.* postings, and existing members could invite new ones. Then it
went public around 1998 and that started its initially slow decline and later
rapid descent into chaos and noise. The last few years of its existence there
was barely any technical content, and the design talk was too high level and
disconnected. As it happens, Heroku cofounders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry
were early members and Adam in particular wrote a lot of great posts.

I've been a member of another private forum since 2004. It's somewhat secret,
so I can only speak in generalities. Current members can suggest new ones for
consideration, though not everyone is accepted. The owner is a well-known
industry figure who bootstrapped the forum with his personal network. The
membership count never exceeds more than a few hundred, and there are periodic
purges of non-posting members; lurkers are not allowed. You can make anonymous
posts but personal attacks in that form are deleted. The tone is generally
professional and brutally honest, but there is still room for shooting the
shit (if there is a lull with too many casual threads, the moderator will
start to lock them).

It works very, very well.

~~~
6ren
Fractional distillation instead of evaporative cooling.

The upper layers can be "invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and
benevolent dictation". It also doesn't need to be linear, but could be a tree
(i.e. each level could have many immediate higher levels, so there's
competition). I think there's something in this, mirroring the hierarchy in
which human communities naturally organize themselves (karma/seniority works
that way a bit here), but the more I think about this, the more complicated it
seems. Maybe someone will extract the essence of it.

~~~
psykotic
Communities that are so large they require webs of trust to be managed hardly
deserve to be called communities. No matter what you call them, they don't
offer what I'm looking for.

~~~
6ren
er, how is what I described a "web of trust"?

~~~
psykotic
We can call it a tree of delegation if you like. It sounds reminiscent of how
Linux development is managed. At least to me this suggests a scale that's
distinctly beyond a community.

~~~
6ren
The tree is just me getting carried away with elaboration. The basic idea is
you have one community higher than the first one. The lower one can be
completely open; the higher one can be invite-only. (Oh, there's that essence
I wanted.)

Maybe the two levels are a little like a freemium model, where the analogue of
_free vs. paid_ is _anyone vs. invite-only._ One is a recruitment centre for
the other.

Perhaps the same submissions and comments would be presented to both but rated
by their own communities; or perhaps it would be like subreddits, totally
distinct in their stories and discussions. The difference from subreddits is
it's not flat and not all-welcome, but hierarchical (in both a logical and
political sense). Maybe SO does this a little with karma-based privileges, but
there isn't a higher-level forum (at least, not one that I'm aware of...)

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stcredzero
Here's an idea that's kind of like BigEye, but instead of a telescope, it's an
orbital launch system!

Modular Laser Launch (Mostly reposted from another comment. If you've already
seen it, sorry, just move on.)

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:uMWQ_kQFvKcJ:w...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:uMWQ_kQFvKcJ:www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/fellows/mar04/897Kare.pdf+modular+laser+launch&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShO7Oy6MI6tDEQtsrlgOaSdjd4gIAJ9h7k8zinryJKSHi9YVs6cO1rV5w-drBExiCmCKEyLeLHgXhknhV4Gxk2dtigs8OFc669SGHoCnK1MmsIdRiOFcYj5JVzuRbX8zbpIB5EX&sig=AHIEtbR2NbQSrR3wXt1e89UHL9Gl45KexQ&pli=1)

Use lasers to remotely energize (zap the bottom surface, all of which is a
heat exchanger) lightweight craft carrying hydrogen. The hydrogen wouldn't
burn. Instead, it would just act as a reaction mass of very low weight, thus
producing very high exhaust velocities. Basically, this would give you the
exhaust velocity (read: fuel efficiency) of the upper theoretical end of solid
core nuclear rockets, but without the heavy nuclear equipment onboard, making
the craft even lighter and more efficient. And while hitting fast moving craft
with a laser isn't trivial, it will be moving on a fixed track and can be
designed deliberately to be hit. (retroreflectors, telemetry, etc)

But that's not even the clever bit. The clever bit of Jordin's proposal is
that the laser tracking/energizing system can be built modularly. You can
build one prototype module that can launch one toy craft. Then you figure out
how to mass produce it and build a whole bunch of these puppies that can lock
onto and zap a much larger heat-exchanger carrying craft.

What you get is very cheap access to orbit without ungodly huge R&D and
infrastructure costs up front. (In this case "ungodly huge" = price of a space
elevator.) Even if it's never safe enough to be man rated, the ability to send
bulk cargoes up cheaply would be a massively disruptive technology. I bet a
good start on this proposal could be funded by just a handful of dot-com
multimillionaires.

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yummyfajitas
Re: BigEye. This is called Aperture Synthesis in astronomy, and if I recall
correctly a Nobel Prize was given for it's invention. You can do radar
(Synthetic Aperture Radar) this way as well.

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pkrein
re: BigEye The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network
(<http://lcogt.net/>) is building a network just like that, with slightly
larger telescopes. It seems to be retirement project for Wayne Rosing, who
used to be VP of Engineering at Google... in case you didn't see that in the
LCOGT logo.

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noinput
Re: threewords. I have two similar domains I'm letting expire on the 25th
(these4things.com && thesefourthings.com). if anyone would like to snag them
and work on a similar concept project go right ahead.

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akkartik
Re: The Black Sun

I'm thinking about how one would bootstrap such a system. When the first users
have to level up to create a new level, they are in some sense starting from
scratch. It's an opportunity for them to shop around, move to a more cliquey
venue (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2242542> suggests this happens on
HN). Why would they stay on to use the original forum? There'd have to be a
compelling reason.

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Raphael
Since when can turtles play football? I'm so confused.

