Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great? - Onion Talks - Ep. 1
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as shorthand for vague, detail-free visionary pitches and as a satirical jab at TED-style techno-utopian talks.
What it is
An Onion Talks satire in which a young media professional pitches compost-powered cars, offering the idea itself and leaving all implementation to others.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec rpm4321 · 2013-03 · on “TEDx talks discredited: Sheldrake speaks, argues that speed of light is dropping”
If you haven't seen them, make sure to check out The Onion's TED parodies - Onion Talks: [LINK] They may be the funniest thing The Onion has ever done. =================================== Edit: of particular interest to the HN crowd would be their takedown of the "Idea Guy": [this video] and the "Social Media Consultant": [LINK]
Strong rec simonsarris · 2013-12 · on “We Need to Talk About TED”
If you haven't seen The Onion's[1] Onion Talks and want a good satirical criticism of TED, I highly recommend them: [this video] (There are more if you want to find them, I didn't want to pollute commentspace with too many links) [1] The Onion is a satire newspaper, one of the first newspapers to heavily adopt an online format. They just killed their print edition for good last year.
Strong rec karaterobot · 2022-03 · on “Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes”
> If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level. The great thing about articles like this is that it reminds me to go rewatch the the video "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?"[1], which neatly summarizes so much of the breathless excitement of vague, detail-free scientific and entrepreneurial claims. [1] [this video]
Recommends fullshark · 2019-07 · on “Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI”
Not exactly what you are asking for, but the Onion did a great send up of techno-utopian TED talks here: [this video]
Cites rpm4321 · 2013-09 · on “Show HN: Kickstart Your Own X-Prizes with FuturePrize”
Hi HN, FuturePrize is a crowdfunding site for incentivized prize competitions – kind of like if you mixed Kickstarter with the X-Prize. This isn’t a minimum viable product (we had a couple of alternate takes on the site that we ended up scrapping), but it’s definitely a more basic version of what we have in mind. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but we would greatly appreciate any feedback HN might have. We’ve gone ahead and seeded the site with half a dozen prizes of varying degrees of crazy, that we hope illustrate the range of projects you might see on FuturePrize – from absurdly ambitious, literal moonshots like the Icy Moon FuturePrize, to something pretty basic like “A Softw
Cites javaun · 2014-04 · on “Ask HN: Should I sign this agreement?”
tl;dr. Do not sign the document. Beyond this case, it could also affect your future employability. VCs fund good teams, not ideas, which are cheap. If your partner doesn't realize that, she also has a hard lesson in front of her. Another great HN post: [LINK] +++++++ IANAL.* This is mostly based on my personal experience with NDAs, employment docs, and patent applications. NDA may also go by the name of a "confidentiality agreement" or a "proprietary information" document. You should also refuse to a non-compete agreement that says you can't pursue a related business or anything barring you from recruiting someone from this business. She may also ask you to sign a "work for hire" agreement t