Random Startup Generator

http://www.ykombinator.com/

by bwy • 12 years ago

76 27 12 years ago

Tiksi• 12 years ago

Off 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.

madeofpalk2• 12 years ago

Additionally off topic, I'm confused as to why Cufon was used for custom fonts, when @font-face is so widely supported these days...

mappu• 12 years ago

The site is at least 3 years old.

pearknob• 12 years ago

Novel. This is a project of Smore; which coincidentally does incredibly awesome design work with their products. This (ykombinator) is a good example.

freditup• 12 years ago

Enjoyed 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• 12 years ago

That would be playing with fire, though. The risk of one of these being funded is high enough as it stands.

Kortaggio• 12 years ago

Something 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• 12 years ago

The courts would have to decide.

Reasonable IANAL answer: the person who owns the copyright to (the strings in) the code.

rtpg• 12 years ago

I 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).

andrewfong3• 12 years ago

Assuming 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

lutusp3• 12 years ago

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).

This is quite false. A copyrighted work's content is protected by copyright, and how it is duplicated doesn't enter into the equation.

In principle, with a very powerful set of computers and a lot of time, I could randomly generate any work of art, visual, sound or print. The fact that the works were generated randomly doesn't make any difference.

There are many variations on the thousand monkeys at typewriters story going back decades, but the idea is if enough random sequences of words are generated, eventually a recognizable, copyrighted work will appear.

Many people don't realize that the "Birthday Song" is copyrighted. The first measure is a mere six notes long. Assuming I can render the tune within a range 12 semitones, I only have to generate 12^6 = 2,985,984 notes, to be absolutely certain to have randomly violated the copyright somewhere in the sequence -- and, of course, it's very likely that I will have succeeded well before generating all 2,985,984 notes.

But my method of generating the tune is irrelevant to the outcome, which is a potential copyright violation.

longtime-lrkr• 12 years ago

Www.possiblestartups.com Simple alternative

frik• 12 years ago

It seems it's based on the markov-chain algorithms.

thibauts• 12 years ago

It most probably isn't. Basic text spinning IMO.

chetanahuja• 12 years ago

If 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_• 12 years ago

A 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• 12 years ago

Why isn't there random news on news.ykombinator.com? :(

MattConfluence• 12 years ago

http://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html

  Ask HN: Does my startup need to code unicorn picture technology?

Lai0chee• 12 years ago

This is the very best thing I've ever seen on this site. :-)

rikacomet• 12 years ago

It shows that idea is just the top cream layer, and without the cake made with human hard work and sacrifices, its nothing special.

chiph• 12 years ago

"Cloudulate" sounds plausible.

Perhaps "Cloudulation" is what happens at the end of a successful project...

Random Startup Generator

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