I have a mashup web app http://tripoptimizer.heroku.com for looking up points of interests (Tourist attractions, Restaurants, hotels, etc) and their ratings and reviews.
The technology stack is RoR, jquery, jquery-mobile and PostgreSQL. It uses Yahoo Local Search APIs and Google search APIs.
I am not sure studying things in nature and creating exact models would be a good idea. Imagine trying to model a motor bike or a car by studying Cheetah(Fastest animal on ground). Nature may inspire to model/create useful things.
I think tuning little things or finding right combination of things is right on. For example, if you watch Chef Gordon Ramsay's Restuarant Nightmares TV show, he does the same thing. He comes in to a failing restaurant observes how it is run and tries to change Menu, Interior decoration, etc to make it successful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Ramsay
How about the traffic green light displaying seconds before it's going to turn yellow? I think this is feasible because of LEDs usage in the traffic lights.
I think how many hours per week you can work is an individual thing. I need atleast 7 hours of sleep to think straight and produce meaningful stuff (code, designs, conversations, etc).
If you would like to create your own buttons, graphics, background images, colors, etc, try inkscape open source image creation, editing tool. http://inkscape.org
If you're going to buy MBP from apple, try buying refurbished ones from apple online store, they're about 15-25% less than the brand new ones. I think the refurbished ones go through extra testing as well, so I think its a pretty good deal.
One more thing that I would add is to give incentive for checking the new page. Say if you upvote a link on the new page and if the link makes it to the front page, members who upvoted would get 1 or 2 karmas.
Thanks. My question is about filtering within the boundaries of ontopic area. Sometimes I feel HN community has mood swings, for example community sometimes likes entrepreneurial oriented articles, startup success stories and sometimes it doesn't.
Tim Westergen and his company Pandora are simply amazing, surviving failures of several business models, lawsuits, increasing music royalty fees, etc. Its pure example of perseverance, infinite passion and enthusiasm.
I also own www.tripoptimizer.com domain.
Let me know if interested.