skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most basic one is the "one-click" Amazon patent.

I'm unclear on how that relates, aside from being a patent.

Most of Apple's patents on forms of interaction with touchscreens or other touch-sensitive devices are little more than reflections of physical interaction with objects.

What objects? This is software. Just because an interface element behaves in a way that feels, to your senses, realistic, does not mean that there exists in the real world an obvious and patent-invalidating object of prior art. If a menu scrolls one way but not another, you might have an intuitive grasp of what it is doing, but that does not mean it is a copy of a real thing. (Or if it is, where is the real object? Where is the prior art? Where is the obviousness?) If a menu bounces, it isn't a actual thing that is actually bouncing: it's a conscious decision by the programmer or designer to make it behave in a way that happens to be read by your senses as a "bounce".

And why is that, in your view, not patentable? If Apple had made physical objects that behaved the same way but via mechanical means instead of electronic, that would be patentable, too. Should that not be the case?
thats a great answer, thanks.

mostly i want to grow the site and make it popular. i'm making a few dollars per day off ads, but my goal is to make a hundred or more dollars per month off the site. then i can work towards more profitability.

my guess is the best way to do this is to build a bit of a community, but nothing like reddit. the site is a clone of fmylife, so basically the same thing i guess.
Apple patent filing details 'iGroups' social networking
I think he alludes to them being unsavory things that still won't go away because there's a demand.

That's what I got out of that sentence.

I'm not quite sure why a plasma clinic would be unsavory. Maybe he's thinking of the (now illegal?) practice of paying donors?
Dr. Spock was basically wrong on pretty much everything he ever wrote. He admits this or dramatically changed his position on everything from how babies should sleep to circumcision.

Anything that has his name attached to it should be ignored in favour of common sense, like the fact that when your baby cries - you know the only thing the kid can do for a while - he/she is attempting to communicate with the parent, and shouldn't be ignored.
Seeding the Cloud with Open Source, Standing Cloud Makes It Easy
I would actually say that yes, Yelp converts very well for small businesses.

Recently, when I was looking for a printing shop to print my wedding invitations, I was very highly intent on giving someone my business. Out of the 4 printers I researched on Yelp, I picked one and paid for that company's services.

Generally, people browsing Yelp have a very specific goal. They're searching for a business to use and ready to choose and pay.
I quit Google after hearing Steve Jobs Speak

Eh? Why?
Most virus scanners will only scan compressed files 4-7 levels deep. Its configurable in Norton, mcaffee, and clamav.
I am really shocked that this sort of thing is considered "new." Have we sunk this far as human beings, that we need to have this explained to us?!
Microsoft, Bring OData to a W3C Incubator - W3C Blog
You branch every time you pull, and merge every time you push, though in the simple linear case it will always be a fast-forward. Every repository is an independent branch.
Here's Google's patent for "Systems for improving the ranking of news articles"
If you can convince a jury that you lost business because of someone else's action, then you can get damages.

Welcome to civil court.
Are you referring to all of those micro-acquisitions that Google and others seem to do? Personally, I'm not very interested in working insane hours on a project with hazy revenue potential only to be acquired for the equivalent of a nice signing bonus. Maybe if these companies had a clear path to profitability, their suitors would be more interested in the product.
I think work itself started way back in 2001, but 2004 may have been the first time it was publicly usable.
Also, E=mc^2 needs to be considered.
Why are they using the $abbreviation syntax? Stocktwits uses that all the time. This must really tick them off: http://stocktwits.com/symbol/LEH
"Even if you have 100,000 users and 1,000 pay for your paid account. If you charge $10 per month, you are still making only 10k per month, barely making the salary of one person. No one will invest in a company like that."

If I have a side project pulling in 10K a month, I don't really care if nobody wants to invest. I've already succeeded.
The Wikipedia Reading Club: A virtual book club around Wikipedia entries
If anyone is interested in this field please email me - I'm working on a project in this field and I'd love your thoughts. My contact info is in my profile.
Barely making the salary of a really, really highly-paid person.
A/B = the core of the scientific method.
Ask HN: Is this a scalable idea?
I'm just trying to continue a conversation I had with a colleague..

Imagine putting together a team of designers and developers, engineers and an overall team of technical gurus. This team is pretty much capable of building anything in a decent amount of time. (for conversation sake, only web/mobile apps)

Now imagine this team puts up a website asking the people of the world to submit ideas, or things they want built. A Request for Product, if we have to give it a name.

For example;
I'm frustrated with all the accounting software thats available to me. I want simple and easy way of tracking expenses.. and I want my app to process my taxes on a day-by-day basis. I don't want to build it. I don't care for that. I just have a need for such an app as a user.

I would goto this site and say this is my frustration and put the idea up for vote. If it hits a certain threshold in votes and interests, the team (company) takes over and dedicates labour and money to build the product.

When the product is built
A) it can be open-sourced and released for anyone to use

B) spin into a company of its own with for-profit focus

All the while you are achieving market fit through the feedback, free marketing, and a high-conversion on everything you build. Only the most popular ideas get built minimizing the failure rate.

Does this seam feasible?
Is it a small business or can it scale?
Ideas to make this better?

I'm not taking ownership of anything discussed here, so you're welcome to chime in freely and put it to good use.

Cheers
I highly doubt Government regulation is what's holding us back.

I said that regulations distort the market, which is precisely true. The result of the distortion might be to retard the market, or to cause over-investment that accelerates the market; I suspect that's the case in the countries you cite.

Just because they're getting more broadband faster does not mean that they're better off overall. It may be that there are other, more important investments that are being made in the USA, but those other countries won't benefit because they squandered their money on universal ultrafast broadband.

Of course, it's difficult to impossible to prove this either way. The market is a mind-bogglingly complex emergent system, and like a neural net, you can't fully reverse-engineer any particular piece of it. The fact that money acts as a communication mechanism, carrying information about the relative importance and substitutability of goods, allows the market to dynamically adapt to what the participants actually want (as demonstrated by their wallets), rather than what is forced on them from above.
Mercurial will make up linear incrementing revision numbers for your repository, it's the only DCVS to do so.
I have one, love it. Changed my sleep patterns, and, most importantly, I'm able to get by on 5 1/2 - 6 1/2 hours of sleep without waking up groggy.

Prior to MyZeo, if I wanted to wake up refreshed, and relaxed, without any effort, I'd have to get about 7 1/2 hours of sleep and let the sunlight coming in my window wake me up. But, I knew from experience, that depending on how I woke up - I could go for quite a while with about 6 hours of sleep and feel fine all day without that morning struggle to break through that "inertia."

That's the cool part of myZeo - you basically say "Here is a window when I want you to wake me up, but make sure I'm _just_ exiting REM sleep, so i'll wake up refreshed!"

For those that doubt the value of the device, ask yourself what you would pay to :

A) Get back one hour each day (presuming you are
okay getting 6 1/2 hours of sleep a night

B) Exit sleep refreshed.
"Babies who are left to cry it out alone may fail to develop a basic sense of trust or an understanding of themselves as a causal agent, possibly leading to feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, and chronic anxiety later in life. The cry-it-out approach undermines the very basis of secure attachment, which requires prompt responsiveness and sensitive attunement during the first year after birth."

Sure it's much better to make the parents neurotic and paranoid by putting forward such simplified claims.

Jezz

You could might as well argue that following the above advice of prompt responsiveness could lead to egocentric, selfish and lazy people later in life.

You should always react obviously. But "prompt response"? that's just silly and in many cases not even possible.
I put the shirt in my suitcase, then after several months a holiday comes. I'll fly home, and find the shirt in my case so i'll give it to my mom. She'll smile say something along the lines of "some things never change" and fix it for me. I'll eat a chocolate chip cookie while I wait.
Thanks for the high praise, Rich.

If anyone's got questions about the experience, I'd be happy to share. Short version: freaking awesome!
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1185352
First time I can recall seeing "Dead Simple" is on Posterous. I think we're just used to everything being overly complicated so that anything that's simple is by definition "dead simple". Simple by itself is naked and unsophisticated. Dead simple on the other hand is special.
I did sign up using my FB account, just to try it out.

After signing-up I could easily disconnect my FB account from quora account.

So, the logic of asking to sign-up using FB, does not really make a lot of sense - if its affecting user sign-ups.
MIT students launch new MIT Entrepreneurship Review
List of 2010 Google Summer of Code Organizations
Shamelessly copying that warehouse idea is very tempting.
You can do that just fine with git: just make multiple independent checkouts in the filesystem. I do it all the time.
While I agree Mercurial generally is more conservative I also believe they do this because they have a well used extension system. So you can't really say they don't support power user features when many of them are only a configuration option away.

The real difference I thing is the way they manage branches, because this is part of the repository itself, thus changing it through extensions requires everybody that pulls the repository also install this extension. And if you do this then you aren't really using Mercurial or Git, you have instead created your own DVCS.
Is it real? ;)
Not sure who is the target audience for this article - management? If so, this is exactly what they do, turn talent in cash. When a programmer wants too much money they are out - who cares? Hire another young, talented programmer.

Is the audience programmers? If so, it is for junior ones; job hopping can look fine for a while on a resume but if you're over 30 and left 5 gigs because you're 'bored' or 'ambitious' then you will have a tough time finding your next gig. This is because these qualities are seen as negative as you get older - stability and reliability are valued much higher.
Thank you for all the replies here and for all of the emails. I have already corresponded with a few of you and plan to discuss this with several more. I have learned more today than in several years, about the development process!
> Very hard to hate people who you never encounter!

That's actually one of the easier things. Areas with less foreigners tend to have more xenophobia (e.g. in Germany).
@140bets, if you are reading this, you need to state rules and regulations CLEARLY to host contests like these in the US. just wanted to highlight that so the founders don't get caught in a bad situation.

Google answer about online contests/sweepstakes
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/716341.html
It's more that these are ways to make money fast if you're desperate. Plasma donation is usually something people do to get paid, which is why plasma centers are usually in poor neighborhoods.
And it was in stock, so if they didn't sell it that's even more cash.
On the side of whatever you do normally, to boot.
It actually won't be in your command history as that. The entry will go into your command history as "sudo previous-line".Try it yourself:

$ true
$ echo !!
echo true
true
[up-arrow to see]
$ echo true
I infiltrated HN. For almost 2 years I was part of the top 100. I am not technical.

I have lived 13 years within a 5-minute-walking distance from the beach. I still can't swim, but I always go deep.

I was a bartender in a private club and got to mix drinks for several individuals. I met Senators, actors, tech founders, multinational executives daily. I missed Angelina Jolie one afternoon by 10 minutes because I decided to go home 10 minutes earlier.
I wouldn't have thought of sheet music as a killer app for the iPad, but now that I think about it, that makes perfect sense. Anyone working on iPad stands for instrumentalists yet?

I'm picturing entire orchestras switching from sheet music to digital displays. The article mentions the portability and findability benefits of replacing stacks of paper with a single screen synced to a sheet music library. jgilliam posted here about the potential benefits of building games on top of sheet music. But just in terms of simple usability for instrumentalists, imagine sheet music that automatically flips to the next page at the right time.
Are the people who are making "weekend startups" asking for investment money? Post seems more against weekend projects as "startups" than investments.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=intitle:%22dead+simple%22+site...
so if Karl was so great, and made such huge contributions...why wasn't Karl made a co-founder at the end of his internship?

Frankly I think working for a startup is stupid unless you get a ton of equity to make the time worthwhile AND know that the company is capable of hitting a big exit. Why? Because you are expected to put in the same time, make the same sacrifices and take the same risk as the founders, but in the event of a cash out you get squat.

Everyone always thinks of Google and Apple early employees who cashed out big, but that's selection bias, most startups crash and burn...and those which don't have smaller exits, after the VCs and founders take their cuts, as an employee you'll be lucky to make up the difference in salary you gave up by not going to work for Google or MSFT.
Broadcast Yourself (What's at stake in the Google-Viacom case)
"A specific color of blue (#0044CC) drove $80-$100 million dollars a year increase over the light blue the design team tried first."

I call bullshit on this statement. There is no way they could have measured this reliably unless the only thing they changed for an entire year was the color of the links.
I've only lived through one version control migration, that was from TFS to Subversion. The problem we have is the length of time Subversion takes doing updates, commits, and merges when you are dealing with a large repository and many changes spread out among files. (Good old TFS was fast.)

Can anyone say if Mercurial is significantly faster?

After going through Joel's tutorial it looks like Mercurial keeps history from branches in the root much better than either TFS or Subversion. I think I would opt for Mercurial the next time I have to set up source control.
Quines are easy in Python. A 0-byte python source file outputs itself when run. :)
I'll pay attention to this story when someone provides either:

A) An email
B) A recorded phone call

that suggests there is inappropriate behavior taking place on behalf of Yelp. Ever since that East Oakland story, where they became not only high profile, but transitioned into being a hundred million dollar plus company that has a chance to _own their market_, I have a very hard time believing they would screw it up by making these types of mistakes.

This isn't a case of classmates.com which demonstrated almost complete incompetence, and never left the bottom-feeding stage. Yelp really gets it, and their "Elite" reviewers make the site a phenomenal resource when trying to get a sense of how good something like a restaurant is.
> Thank you for the advice. I will make sure in future that I never try to engage in a discussion about something of which I am not fully informed.

As long as you keep asking like you did, you shouldn't be afraid to contribute. Just pushing opinions would be another thing, though.
While I agree that most of the "review my <whatever>" here are pretty Lame I must say that this post entirely misses the point.

So what if the authors of these project chooses to call them startups. Nobody has a right or the power to decide what is a startup or not.

Especially not some guy with a whiny attitude.
"It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years." - Tom Lehrer
I think he had atleast a year earn-out for most of it; but it was good timing as google hit like $560 within that time frame.
Interesting. One of my developers asked me yesterday if I wanted "JSON, XML, YAML or Python pickle" as Django Piston delivers all of them. I suppose I am not enough PM and too much developer. ;)
Few corporations would have the guts to do the same. They are essentially trading money to pay homage to a member of the team. For this, they deserve a lot of respect.
> Germans don't cringe about "bigger" murderers.

Yes. But they should.
I can easily motivate myself to write documentation without thinking about getting run over by the bus or quitting: I know that my successor will most probably be myself in half a year, and by that time, I have forgotten why I did what I did.
Pidgin isn't to bad, but OO and GIMP? They're a horrid example of UI. GIMP especially with how clunky everything is layed out.
For developing a simple routine, I've found the Seinfeld calendar to be a nice tool: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...
> 1. You must produce an actual, working prototype

Unless it's impossible to have such a prototype without a substantial capital investment that's incompatible with a small entity

> 2. If some period of time (say, 2 years) elapses during which you're not physically producing copies of the device for sale, you should lose the patent right and it becomes public domain

Maybe two years is too short if the invention needs more time to be put into production. Imagine you invent a deep space-propulsion device that only works in deep space - you may need a long time to test it in working conditions. All in all, it's a sensible idea.

> 3. Patents should be non-transferable. Companies should not be allowed to own patents, only inventors; the inventor can give license to a company to make his invention

That could make it difficult to sponsor research. Say I have a couple billion dollars in my budget and I would like to help you invent that deep-space propulsion system. Do you seriously expect me to allow you to own the invention after making it possible for you to test and build it?
That could be a geo-social problem.
Agreed. This "Year of the Desktop" bullshit is why Ubuntu is a pile of bloat.
"r.zip contains an executable file. For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to send this type of file."

And I was trying to play a nice little trick on a few of my friends with that one, too...
If they win the case, the amount of money they get will be highly related to how much "damage" youtube did to them.

The fact that they found it valuable to have their content on youtube undermines their arguments that youtube is causing them grievous harm.
For all the Weimar Republic's flaws the more interesting questions almost becomes not why it failed, but why it lasted so long.

The hit taken in the treaties of Versailles is just one reason. The economic crisis around 1930 is another one. Churchill made the suggestion that Germany should have become a constitutional monarchy instead of a republic to give the monarchists something to rally behind the new state.
The tone of your post smells of too much hate. You sound like someone who could write a cool-headed post explaining when you think startups should try to raise money and when they should just enjoy the passive income from a weekend project.

Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others.
I never really feel like I've done anything, but here's some moments of personal accomplishment:

* drew a weekly comic strip that published online during college.
* discovered a corner detection algorithm using radon transforms.
* built operational sensor networks for the military.
Even if one hand is not aware of the other, what they did goes far beyond innocent and accidental uploading - it sounds like a pretty systemic policy:

It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
> If you help your own "people" at someone else's expense, you become a hero to one side and a villain to the other, and Hitler definitely was a net gain for your average "Aryan" up until they started losing the war.

I agree with the first part as a description. The second part about Hitler being a net gain was probably only true in perception--if you measured e.g. GDP (or even better consumption) the Nazis were most probably a net loss.
I need to see some data around this before I buy.

Something as simple as... before/after stats of product effectiveness. % users waking refreshed before/after.
interesting idea. on the implementation: you might be interested in looking at the source for my code. i use a library called jquery and it allows for most things to be doing in "one line".

on the flip side there's a lot of boilerplate and it may make things run slower (i have no comparison - this is the first time i've written one of these).
I doubt they are losing that much money. I'm not at all trying to detract from the sadness of such a loss, but there are links on the top that people can use, not to mention direct links from search engines taking them directly to where they need to go.
I paid a large portion of my tuition by building 4 of the University Department websites. UofT is Canada's biggest university.

It was nice to pay them with their own money :P
> Hitler wasn't that much interested in fighting the British.

Didn't he try to make peace (or even an alliance?) with the British for a long time?

> Mao and Stalin? I can't remember hearing here in Germany saying anything positive about them.

You are right in a main stream sense, but see e.g. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Gruppen for the loonies.
@davidl: It'd be great if you could comment back - or maybe write a blog post, or whatever - on what you learned and on how you plan to go forward.

I for one, and I would guess many others, have the non-technical background but know little about programming.