skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why don't we just abolish patents? The fashion and food industries seem to get by without them.

There are several things wrong with your proposition.

First, the food and beverage industries get by without patents because they leverage trade secrets, which is the exact sort of privatized knowledge that patents have long sought to prevent.

Second, fashion survives without patents because names matter. People will buy Louis Vuitton whether it's good or not, simply because it has his name on it. Louis Vuitton has no need for patents because it's not the bag design, but his name that matters.

The problem with abolishing patents is that while it might make it easier for companies, it would make it absolutely impossible for small-time, independent inventors to advance human knowledge. What incentive is there for a couple guys to build a time machine in their garage when, as soon as they try to mass produce their invention, any number of larger companies better equipped to manufacture things at scale will just make their invention and sell it for less?

The problem with patents in this article isn't the patent itself, but the fact that it covers software, which is 50% math and 50% business process and shouldn't ever have been patentable in the first place.
But say he works for some tech company and has a great story to share that may be a bit unflattering - if I've got his real name and he's high enough up the ladder, I'm a crunchbase search away from having a pretty good guess at what company it is, which could land him in hot water.
That's why the next word is "but".
Verizon stores will sell iPads
My only hesitation with going to Google with this is how notoriously difficult it can be to reach a real support person if you have a problem. There are all sorts of horror stories on the internet of people who had their accounts frozen or other issues and were unable to find any way to contact a human being. I dare you to try and find a contact phone number for support, unless its changed recently you won't be able to. IMO this isn't acceptable for someone who's handling my hard-earned money. If I have a problem I should be able to call them up and talk to a support person about it.
The data that's the easiest to get is also the data that is least useful. For example, it is easy to get data about Starbucks and McDonalds, but people already know when these are open. I want to know if that hole-in-the-wall Thai place is delivering now, or if the mailbox place on the corner is open. But these places are also less likely to have their hours posted and machine-readable.
Virtual assistants: solving what problem?
Sculley: Apple’s Big Mistake Was Hiring Me As CEO
If your start up is your dream - go for it!

You are much better of then most entrepreneurs: the projects are up and running and are making some money. A lot of people quit their jobs and then get started.
And a year of runway is even better!

But I agree to the other comments that you should focus on one of the projects which can really become big.

Re 2: recruit your replacement yourself. Maybe you fins somebody even here in HN?
Announcing obvious bias here, but IMO one of the best things about WP7 is how easy / good the tools are; making WP7 apps has way less of a learning curve than iOS, and once you get proficient with them, you can make entire apps in an afternoon, it's really easy to be productive and have great looking apps with animations and transitions.
Did good come out of your move though? Or are you still looking right now?
Yes. I'm proud of who I am, and I don't feel the need to hide anything I do.

Incidentally, I remember a few college lit classes that focused on "identity". We never figured out what it was. But that's a debate for another forum :)
No, I meant in the past - when Microsoft was the top-dog and people were talking about them much in the same way as people (I) might be talking about google now. Windows had very valid reasons for becoming wildly popular - ignoring the more questionable practices of their management.
Spend 20 minutes talking to each other once or twice a week on Skype. By the time you have to make the video, you'll be pretty comfortable with it.

Also, close AIM/GTalk/Twitter/whatever while you do this. Don't let yourselves fall back to another way of talking to each other.
yep, plus when you work for somebody else in a traditional job you get put in a narrow slot. just an engineer. just a designer. whereas if you start your own business or (sometimes) work at a startup you can be an engineer, graphic designer, UI, product, writer, marketing, sales, biz dev, bookkeeper, etc. plus pick your own tech, tools, office, hours, dress code, etc. And even when you "lose" at a startup or self-employment venture you still win in many ways because of all the skills and experience you exercised and how much better your resume can look.
Did you pre-analyze the images to do the color filters?
Hmmm, perhaps.
Yeah. This is a really stupid misfeature.

If I see one of my own comments at -4, I try to delete it before it does any more damage. It would be nice if the delete button lasted longer; sometimes your comment gets modded up quickly, and then goes down to -a billion. I guess I don't really care though :)
What about crowd sourcing the data collection ?
Make an app to let sports fans enter the data as they watched the game and publish it under a CC license ?

I've been to many baseball games where I've seen people keeping score on paper while watching the games.
This is a seriously reductionist view of the universe. Contracts are a device for securing agreement. You put a contract in place so you can ensure both sides agree on things, like, "we're not going to raise our prices without allowing you a 12 month grandfather period".

You don't get contracts in place so you can sue people.

We're a small business (in the grand scheme of things). We're unlikely to take anyone to court. You think we don't have freelancers (designers, devs) sign contracts with us? That's insane. Of course we do. How else would we all agree on what the freelancers were doing?
You can easily compete with Google on UI/UX. It's a company run by engineers, so traditionally they've been horrible in this respect, focusing mainly on the engineering behind the product rather than the eye-candy.
Just dive in, take the opportunity. What's the worst that can happen?

When I started as a junior html developer I'd written exactly one website, a really poor 1997-era personal homepage. I didn't even know what a html table was, I'd never done forms, etc etc. It was a really junior role, but I figured I could learn what I didn't know on the spot. I stayed at that company for 4 years, and left with the job title "Senior Database Programmer". I'm now a highly experienced developer with some good academic qualifications too; I joined my first university on the strength of my experience alone, which was that first job.

Stop worrying and go for it. There's a crapload of documentation online, so even if you really are a bad developer you should be able to squeeze by until you become good enough.
PadMapper Maps Out Crime Levels of Cities
I completely agree. Exit strategy becomes more important once you start taking other people's money. Something which occurs with high frequency among startups.
Which metro stop?
It is clear to me that Chargify users assume they agreed to a lot of things. Some of them appear to be even crazier than "Chargify will never raise their prices or eliminate the free option".
You're perhaps not the right person to ask all these questions, but maybe you'll be able to answer...

Do you know how the application store will work? If I write a WP7 app, can a user download it from my website or do I have to be listed in the store?

And if I have to be listed in the store, what restrictions are there on apps?

I ask because the main thing preventing me from being interested in WP7 is the lack of a decent web browser (Wikipedia's WP7 article claims the browser is "halfway between IE7 and IE8").

So, is there any chance that someone could port Chrome or Opera to WP7? Or is there no way to get HTML5 on WP7 at all?
Pocket Guide to Do it Yourself Usability Testing
hey thanks - we were trying to figure out between cap and fabric and your answer was of big help.
Yes, but the Jabber group chat implementation is actually half-assed at the protocol level. IRC actually does a much better job and has much better features for managing large group conversations.
could you comment on the feature?
The "colleagues" part is what ruined it. Stick to pleasing yourself and your friends.
Less directed at you - but personally I've grown frustrated with the dismissiveness of the term "eye candy" - having a good design, and good UX is a good thing. Designing with the user in mind, and making tradeoffs in favor of the user is just good practice.

I've seen a lot of people use "eye candy" as a term that somehow excuses their crappy UI and UX, time and time again it comes up in discussions about open source and linux UIs. The users matter.
One idea i've really been thinking about is traffic analysis over time.

Where I live, traffic is highly variable. If I leave 5 minutes later one morning, there might be no traffic at all, but if I left another 3 minutes after that, I would be stuck in heavy traffic. If there was some way we could track the rate of traffic over time (say, plot out the mph between 7am-8am) every morning, I bet after a month we could figure out the ideal times to leave for work.

Google maps already uses crowdsourcing for its traffic data, so maybe that's the way to go. I would need a large sample size though. I researched a few cities and Houston, TX has sensors that use the toll RFIDs to determine traffic conditions. There are tons of other applications for this data, too. Think of shipment or delivery companies (UPS...), among others.
"We use the Etsy API to get the latest listings from Etsy multiple times a day. We then take the listings, index them by their titles, tags, materials, colors and price."
ChinaTown
Drupal for Web Designers – Introduction
This is the first episode of a new weekly series about the other most popular CMS. Yes ladies and gentleman we’re talking about Drupal! First of all will let our new guest author Idan Arbel of Arbel Designs. Feel free to share your thought on CMSes, Drupal or anything else in the comments section. Enjoy!
If some open source advocate assassinated a patent troll I don't think it would reflect too well on the open source community.
Modern Bedroom Design
For most people in the bedroom is the most sacred part of their home Bedroom embodies tranquility and privacy of whoever occupies.
I think what sets Apple apart is an unshakable belief in the quality of their own products. While Blackberry etc. release a whole armada of smartphones, as if to say 'we hope variety can make up for a lack of quality,' Apple typically release one model with some minor variation, as if to say 'we tried to make the best, and we know we have, so here it is. There's no point in releasing anything else.'
Hmmm, seems to me there's a business opportunity in providing lower cost, more developer friendly sports data. I remember looking into getting access to sports data since I wanted to do some analytics after I read Moneyball. Old, archived data is easy to come by, but any fresh, real-time data sources seem to have non-trivial costs.

I guess there might be some restrictions on who gets access to the official raw data for various games, depending on the sports league. If the costs for getting that data are high, then the only way to circumvent that would be to collect them yourself. Even then, I don't know if the leagues would come at you hard for gathering data and using team names or player names...
Agreed. I spent way too much time reading old mailing lists and server and client specific docs when trying to understand the protocol (not any specific software that used it) while writing nodebot (http://github.com/thwarted/nodebot). RFC1459 is seriously lacking in real-world use, explanation of terms, and general robustness, despite that it was written to document a defacto protocol.

On the other hand, you do see a lot of the organic evolution of a protocol in what is IRC, which is valuable from both an historical and educational perspective.
I know bloomberg sports provides data via an API, but it's not cheap.
http://www.bloombergsports.com/
> the best things about WP7 is how easy / good the tools are

Sadly, they won't run on any OS I use.
I created my account with an alias. I'd love to change it to my real name--I don't want to lose my comment/posting history.
Also, the documentation tells you what is intended to be public, stable API, vs. what's an implementation detail that may change with the next release.

Anyway, I used to work like this, but a couple years ago I just said "screw it" and started diving in and reading the source for libraries that I use. And that's been a very good decision so far. Using only libraries that are well-documented sets a ceiling on what you can accomplish, and hence makes your software less impressive and your potential rewards much lower. Everybody else can Google the web and read the docs; relatively few people are willing to dive into the source and understand how the library really works. The way to distinguish yourself from those people is to do what they're not willing to, and work on the hard stuff.

Some libraries are poorly documented because their authors are lazy, but many more are poorly documented because their authors are working on hard problems. If you leverage their work, even though it's not easy, you can work on hard problems too, and that's where most of the rewards are.
Better to fail early and often, right? As far as I'm concerned, I want to hear my harshest critics often. I'd rather take my lumps as early as possible.
I have a keyboard whose motto is "good feeling of oneness with cup rubber". I feel like C++ could have a similar slogan -- "good feeling of oneness with my imagination". People choose C++ because they want speed, and then they assume that no matter what they do, they'll get it. But what I've found is that after you add smart pointers and perl-compatible regexes and STL and ..., your code does not run fast anymore. You think it does, because hey, C++ is fast... but it doesn't.

So you're using C++ for speed, which is its only advantage, but you did it wrong and you aren't even getting the speed. But you are happy because you think you are. Sigh.
I'd like to highlight your mention of Scratch. I agree that Ruby is an excellent language for introducing older students to programming, but Scratch is truly exceptional for younger students. Scratch excels at introducing fundamental programming concepts,while hiding syntax and language subtleties for beginners. The puzzle/block metaphor of Scratch really works for "building" a fully-functional program. For those that have never worked with Scratch, the underlying Squeak(Smalltalk) implementation is completely hidden.

I guess the choice of language really comes down to the audience and age group. It's unlikely that colleges will ever utilize Scratch in their introduction to programming courses, thus Ruby is an excellent choice. But elementary and middle school students would benefit greatly from learning programming concepts such as logic, control structures, iteration, etc. from a tool like Scratch.
What makes you believe that Bollywood studios don't use cgi? They do.
Counterpoint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1792146
Or how about having to show you've been trying to enforce your patent?

An unenforced patent is little more than a ticking time bomb. They sit there being unenforced for years. Until, one day, a different company buys them and sues half the world.
The Slashdot comment is actually quite reasonable, assuaging concerns about privacy:

"And a note about privacy. None of your musical listening data will be available to anyone other than you. We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else."

OTOH if just one year after he said:

ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks

well... it means you can't "trust" people on the Internet with information you wouldn't want divulged.
I absolutely agree. I do think this counts more for a community like HN than it does for something like (for instance) Something Awful.
In Google:

site:news.ycombinator.com "patent troll"

Done. :)
I'd agree. When I started at my current job (my first real programming job, other than what I did when trying to learn), I knew very little of HTML, JavaScript, or any other language, really. In the year and a half since I've been here, I've learned quite a bit, becoming (in my humble opinion ;) ) one of our best coders, and if you're dedicated to learning and succeeding, you really can't go wrong. Like the poster above me, just go for it and try.
Your new web-site is broken in places on Linux + Firefox. Drop me an email if you want me to send you some screen-grabs of the issues.
I've used OO.o and worked with its code and when it came time to choose between it and Office, I had to choose Office.

I needed the ability to manage sections of a document, move them around, open and close them. Only Office has that feature. I spoke to someone from Sun about that feature at their booth at a convention and they had no plans to implement it.

Its bloatware, but it has everything. And it works.
Here: A method for aiding transportation by erect ambulation using lower appendages. You can not only sue most humans, but primates and meerkats as well.

Seriously, how on earth do such patents get granted? I fail to see the invention in this patent claim. Is the patent office confused by the obscure language?
Http://worldnews.psctube.com/ap-impact-us-wasted-billions-in-rebuilding-iraq-ap/
It's strange -- I have never used Google for programming questions. When I was learning, Google didn't exist; I had to read a book or figure it out myself. Now, Google never has the answer to my question, so I'm again forced to figure it out myself.

The answer to specific programming questions always lies in the code. If everyone looked at the code first, our software would be 100x better than it is now. (More eyes, more shared experience.)
Yes, unfortunately right now we're boston-centric. The more we grow the more results we'll have.
You could also try PayPal's website payments standard which offers similar recurring payment functionality and identical transaction pricing. Customer's aren't required to have a PayPal account to purchase through it either.

Both of these services only offer checkout capabilities. They don't offer product/subscription management or other advanced features like dunning which gateway wrapper services like Chargify, Recurly, Spreedly and ChettarGetter offer.
My calendar says it’s 2010 now, so it’s a bit late for that (and the ribbon was awesome from the start).
This is definitely worth your time if you're in the area. The last one was great.
Of course I do!
Thats actually a good idea. What would be the requirements? It might be an interesting weekend project for me!
Is that the Table/Autoformat thing?
looking at this decade alone, google seems to have far, far more 'world domination' ambitions than MSFT or Facebook. it's not like they release open source stuff with the primary intent of doing the public good.
As for the stats, you purchase them from a stats provider. The big dog is Stats.com, but they're very expensive. They are the primary source for all of the major fantasy sites, though some use secondary sources (I think for accuracy verification).

At Draftmix we used a competitor of theirs called PA Sports Ticker, which Stats bought shortly after we shut Draftmix down. We had previously used a cheaper one called XML Team, but we realized quickly that we had gotten what we had paid for as the feeds were often updated very late or contained errors. They're fine enough for getting started (and probably the easiest to implement, since you pull the data on demand rather than having them post it to you) especially if you don't require live stats. Live stats cost more and are harder to implement. You could get post-game stats and schedule data for a few grand a year back then from XML Team, live stats for a few times that, but I don't know what Stats buying their primary competitor has done to prices. I can't imagine it's made them get cheaper.

There's a new one called Sports Direct. I don't have any experience with them, but our former salesman from PA works there. I'd be happy to put you in contact if you'd like, just email me. He's a good salesman at least.

For player images and team logos you need to set up licenses. Logos come from the league (NFL, MLB), player images from the players' unions (NFLPA, MLBPA). This is very costly. The actual images themselves can be provided by Stats and other sources, but you can't use them without paying the license (though Stats may have worked out a deal that lets them include that in the package).

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association (fsta.org) is the best place to find service providers for the industry. Anyone worth anything is a member.
I work for the NFL and we license our data directly here:
https://www.nfl.info/NFLConsProd/Welcome/index.html

I don't really know the exact pricing structure but I don't imagine it is cheap.
4chan is always there. 4chan is never done. 4chan never forgets.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/todd-schmidt/1/834/759
After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon.

...

But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98 said that the creation of a Harvard facebook was not as far off as Zuckerberg predicted.

“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”

Another cautionary tale to launch early and often...
The Etsy API returns the primary color of an image.
I'd second this, especially as a temporary measure.

You'll of course have to be prepared to be fired outright, but odds are if you offer to stay on a while and help them hire and train a replacement, they'll take you up on it and you'll leave with all your social karma intact - which means you may be able to come back later if your startups go belly-up.

Social karma has real value that way, it's worth some effort to maintain.
Welcome to India. Most of the Government offices here are using openoffice (Indian railways,Electricity boards,Government schools,Post offices, etc). OpenOffice is a real threat to Microsoft here in developing nations.