skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My best advice is to write it in plain and simple English. A ToS doesn't have to be written in legalese. For a good example (that got an award for being so good), check out BillMonk's ToS and Privacy Policy. They wrote it themselves with the help of a Nolo book (available at your local library) if I remember correctly.

If you really want to use legalese, just find a ToS from a website similar to yours and adapt it to your specific needs.
Nonverbal ~ body language, sign language, print media ~ books, newspapers, etc, DVDs, music, radio, Morse code, land line phones, semaphore, visible light communication ~ the list goes on I think I've even heard of people communicating with whistles and clicks.
I think this statement will be repeated for years and years. The problem is that at some point it will only be used to poke fun at our past selves for taking the idea too far.
One way to handle it is to design your system so that it doesn't matter if the requests come back out of order. Could you give an example of where order matters, so we can work on designing it so that order doesn't matter?
What's the specific problem? Why do you need the results to be ordered? If you really do need to order the results, just attach a sequential ID to each request, then hold a priority queue of results sorted by request ID. Pseudo-code follows:

next_request_id = 0;
next_response_id = 0;

// the following code assumes there's a PriorityQueue class implementing a
// priority queue with push(object, priority) and pop() operations
response_queue = new PriorityQueue();

function send_request(request) {
request.request_id = next_request_id;
next_request_id++;
ajax_send(request);
}

function receive_response(response) {
response_queue.push(response, response.request_id);

while(!response_queue.empty()
&& response_queue.top().request_id == next_response_id) {
handle_response(response_queue.pop());
next_response_id++;
}
}

The above code isn't very robust as it doesn't deal with requests that die in transit and never return a response, etc.
I'd like to implement a note-taking system, with an auto-save feature (say, set by a timer). If the requests that go out to the server are received out of order, the wrong state will be auto-saved.
A modest proposal to abolish universities
Right - this is what I'm about to try to implement (and I think I'd trash the entire queue if a response isn't returned within some timeout limit and display a subsequent error message). I don't know if this is the best practice though and as this seems like a pretty generic AJAX problem, it feels like there should be a pretty generic solution...
Don't save again until the first save has been registered. If it times out, try again.
Right - so this would amount to creating queue? Nevermind, I see what you're saying... This is a very specific instance of something pretty general though. Lets say the user edits a note and then deletes it. Do I have the delete action wait for any saves that went out complete first? As the system gets more and more complex it would be something of a pain to try to work out dependencies every time I want to add a new feature.
I doubt most AJAX applications are that reliant on request/response ordering. However, a priority queue is the generic solution. :-)
Yes, queue up the deltas, then only send the full set of deltas every time the timer fires. This will also prevent you from hammering your server with a stream of requests backing up.
Thanks for the advice!
-Greg
Now, lets say I want to stay away from auto-save... The app I'm working on will actually be a widget on the side of the main site and so I'm not confident the user will pay enough attention to know if his/her info has been saved before they navigate to another page. In this case, can I still avoid a queue? I'd want every action a user takes (adding a note, editing it, deleting it) to result in a server request and some spinny wheel notification that the request is being processed. By the way, thank you both for your help!
Wikia Acquires Distributed Web Crawler Grub
Wikia has acquired the distributed web crawling engine Grub from Looksmart.
no I was talking about gambling.
bring drinks/food
thanks, I've been wondering about this too. Does the same advice hold for privacy policies?
No, you don't wait. You delete it immediately.. If the delete command arrives before the edit command, the edit command will simply fail, which is fine.
You don't need a queue.. Just issue the commands as the user makes them. Each command should be separate from every other command, so that order doesn't matter.
whistles and clicks.. yep. What medium do you most use?
I think order does matter - lets say a user types in 'hello' and then saves the note, then quickly changes his/her mind and types in 'hello world' and saves the note. Now the backend will save the version of the note which it receives last, which could be 'hello' depending on network lag.
In that instance, you'd abort the previous request, create a new XmlHTTPRequest object (important step), then re-issue the request.
How does one abort the previous request unless a queue is being kept track of? Also, there could have been a few other requests made between the first save and the second save. Its definitely possible I'm just not understanding how XMLHTTPRequest objects work - please do explain if you think that is the case.

Also - I'm not necessarily using XMLHTTPRequest, I'm leaning towards dynamic scripting as my site will need this widget to run across several different subdomains - dynamic scripting doesn't have a lot of the nice status functionality that XMLHTTPRequest does...
Okay, here's an alternate method.

When a user needs to save their note
If the note is already saving
Set note.saveAgain = true
else
Start the process of saving the note

When the note has saved
If note.saveAgain == true
Set note.saveAgain = false
Start the process of saving the note again

That doesn't require a queue. It also only saves the most up to date version.
Cool.

Thanks again.
I can has karma now?

Edit: How dare I ask to be compensated for my time. I should be ashamed of myself.
Thanks!

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
[time change] San Fran news.yc meetup - this eve 8.30pm onwards in North Beach
Tonight 8.30pm onwards 2140 Taylor street. Bring drink & food. People will be most likely arriving around 8.30-8.45.

See you there..
Until all Lisps standardize on Unicode (at least UTF-8 and UTF-16), Lisp will never replace XML. It's been slow going just getting Unicode support into Lisps, let alone having internal data structures (symbols, etc.) represented in Unicode.
Well for personal communication I use Instant Messages, email and a phone (land line and cell). But my day job is to communicate to the public thru our website.
There are a lot of concepts and subtleties that underly a TOS document. However, to get a decent one, all you have to do is pick a big relatively similar Internet site, and copy theirs. Replace their name with yours, and their jurisdictional information with yours (e.g. state names). That's the starting point. Then look at the other big Internet sites, and copy anything you feel is applicable. Then read it slowly. If you don't understand anything, post it here and someone can probably help you understand what it is talking about.

If you really want to understand what is going on, I suggest reading this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Commerce-Ronald-J-Mann/dp/0...
and the cases and statutes it references. But this is really unnecessary to get something decent.

I don't recommend hiring a lawyer. They will either go through basically the same process as described above anyway and then charge you a lot for it. If you have a specific issue with your site, you might want to hire a lawyer to help you draft specific provisions that deal with that issue. But seriously, do you have an issue that facebook/craigslist/ebay/microsoft/amazon/etc. don't?
Think about it: That's 20 grand per month for a few months. After taxes, that might be 16-17 thousand per month, minus small expenses. You can quickly amass tens of thousands of dollars in seed money. I think it's a sweet gig.
Web 2.0: For Woman! Community for Professional Moms
30 Under 30: The Coolest Young Entrepreneurs in America
YCombinator-funded startup at #4.
Thanks for the link, definitely an interesting read.
What an excellent choice of terminology for this subject.
Contact Luke at lukexi@gmail.com
Interesting that the comments on here (so far) are the exact opposite of Guy Kawasaki's sentiments:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/482413_for_lega.html

"You could do less legal work and do it cheaper, but if you ever want to raise venture capital much less go public or get acquired for more than scrap value, this is not the place to save a few thousand bucks. If you're negotiating an investment or a liquidity event, you want someone who worked at Brobeck, Baker & McKenzie, and Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati--as opposed to your uncle the divorce lawyer from Penny, Wise, & Pound Foolish or myinstantincorporation4less.com--not only for her expertise but to show opposing counsel that you're not clueless."

Just some more information to think about...
this blog has some other funny and entertaining articles:

http://www.crankypm.com/2007/07/beware-the-care.html

http://www.crankypm.com/2007/01/a_day_in_the_li.html

http://www.crankypm.com/2006/11/the_it_awards_s.html

http://www.crankypm.com/2006/08/cranky_observat.html
But is it legal to copy (parts of) someone else's TOS doc?

What about those "pay $20 for a legal document" websites?
How do you encourage users to share/copy/evolve data while preventing competitors from copying it?
What sort of license would you use?
this blogger lost me when he implied the delicious acquisition was a mistake. that was a brilliant acquisition, and cheap. like in the 20M - 30M range for a very important internet property. it would sell for a lot more than 30M now.
By data do you mean source code?

As a start you can review the open source licenses commonly used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license

Or in theory you could always write your own license.. But once you open your source it will be impossible to completely protect your IP. People will find ways to copy it anyway..
In my searching I found a Creative Commons'd TOS for Wordpress here: http://photomatt.net/2006/04/05/open-source-legal-docs/

I'm actually in search of a web hosting agreement so I couldn't use this one. I needed to move pretty fast, so I just forked over $29 to these guys: http://contractedge.com/
No, I mean the data contributed by users. For example, consider a wikipedia-like site.
Y Combinator Portfolio
How Much Is A Facebook User Worth? At Least 30 cents.
What Twitter is
Whose Name is it Anyway? Decentralized Identity Systems on the Web
Those comments of Guy's were about incorporation.
aston, we're not suicidal ;) We use the term "social network" out of convenience, but we're not working on a Facebook clone. It's a hybrid of a few different markets.
Sorry rkabir, but I think what Guy's talking about is the legal work that goes into the negotiation of an investment, takeover or IPO.

For a bootstrapped start-up, getting a lawyer to write your ToS and Privacy Policy would be wasteful.

epi0Bauqu you've nailed it: who's got "an issue that facebook/craigslist/ebay/microsoft/amazon/etc. don't?"
Facebook Bankruptcy
Kingston Technology Company - Flash Memory - CompactFlash Ultimate 266X
share alike, non commercial

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
I'm looking for something commercial that would prevent competitors from getting all the user data from my service.

But at the same time, I don't want to put major limitations on what users can do with their data -- even if it is obtained by copying/modifying data from others.
8 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
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I don't know if it would make sense, but Cambrian House set up a co-op so that they could do this. It owns 1% of the company and is made up of 2 ch employees and 3 community members. If you need more info, you should contact them and I'm sure they'd be happy to explain it to you.
So what you're trying to do is prevent wholesale copying from competitors?

The trick here is the agency doing the copying. You want to say that users can copy it, but that third parties can't.

My suggestion would be to be very clear that what you're talking about is bulk copying by competitors, and prevent it by requiring users to initiate copies, rather than third parties.
like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan_languages I only remember it from the movie 'The Gods Must be Crazy' that took place among Bushman Tribes
"... it makes no sense to me to build inside of someone else's platform when you have the wide open internet out there to develop on ..."

Probably the smartest thing I've read for a while. Is it what people want though?
No one is going to sue you for copying their TOS. And why waste even $20 on something when you know you can get better ones for free? At best, you are out $20; at worst, you copy something from the doc that is really bad but you just don't realize it until it comes back to bite you down the line.
well I work in the us defense industry... and I read jane's...
That's impossible.

If you're trying to stop automated scraping of your data, then limit the access rate per IP. That won't really help things since someone can just tell the script to slow down to the pace of a normal user.

If a user can access unauthenticated data, so can a computer.
For my bootstrapped biotech startup, I paid about $1000 for my terms of service. My terms of service are also the disclaimer, which is important in my industry because there's a serious risk of liability which just isn't much of an issue in web tech.
If I understand you correctly, you want people to be able to use your data for whatever they want except to compete with you. So why not just make everyone agree to some form of a non-compete with regards to the use of your data? Just leave it broadly defined with the right to terminate their license at any time if you feel they are violating the provisions or spirit of your TOS.
I don't want anyone to get a copy of a significant portion of the data. Moreover, I don't want competitors to use any of the data.
Is it wrong to make someone famous without their permission? Are there any legal issues?
Suppose you have a service that crawls the web for home pages and then displays one chosen at random every day for all to see and discuss. Is this wrong? Are there any legal issues with it?

It's sort of like this Facebook app:

http://apps.facebook.com/fifteen/

The difference though is that people would not sign up requesting they be made famous. Rather, the service would do it without their permission.
"... A Creative Commons license is based on copyright. So they apply to all works that are protected by copyright law. The kinds of works that are protected by copyright law are books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings, for example. ..."

Maybe you should re-phrase this to ask, "How could I sell competitors the data if they want to buy it, but restrict them if they do not?". To me the licenses found in the Creative Commons accommodate this. They give you the licensing tools to flexibly control content and can let users to share content. Safe that in the knowledge competitors do not have the copyright rights to use/abuse licensed content without recourse to the law (in a lot of cases with laws adopted in your home country).

You cannot however use CC for 'facts and ideas' (as per CC FAQ, How does a Creative Commons license operate?) ~ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ

Having said that I know of no known tools or tool sets to automatically check for content, it's licensing (if any) and contact details for buyers. Buyers would grab at this seeking for free content (images for instance) clear of any copyright issues.

If you really don't want competitors (are your users competitors as well?) to take away your content then don't create API's allowing users to use their own content. But then you risk making another "Roach Motel" allowing users to create but not export. Is this what you mean, lockout of users data?
My service already has an export feature. I have no problems with users exporting their data provided that this constitutes only a small fraction of the entire data set AND that it is not used in a competing service.
I eagerly await your launch.
No. Not if it's public domain like you suggest.
Concurrent Programming and Transactional Memory - Simon Payton-Jones
"... My service already has an export feature. I have no problems with users exporting their data provided that this constitutes only a small fraction of the entire data set ..."

Excellent. Do you intend to go as far as say flickr and use an open API as well at some stage? This allows you to integrate third party services but at the potential competitor raids. Stuart Butterfield has lots to say on this particular problem ~ http://flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#...

Out of curiosity can you define "data"? I notice smugmug undertakes the type of restrictions you are describing in their pro account.
Yes, there are plenty of legal issues IF you copy any of their stuff (pics, text etc). Even if you open their page in an IFRAME, they will potentially have a case. You can link and mock and parody and comment and praise any page you want though.
If you have a large audience, and you can figure out what at least one person wants, you can monetize the audience. Are you thinking you're going to make millions your first try or something? Small steps.
Failure Happens: 365 Main, how?
"... More poeple should send in pics of their startups... "

isn't that what flickr is for? http://flickr.com/photos/tags/startup I'd settle for demo
Doesn't anybody at YC.news use Haskell...?
Non-linkjacked for all of the Yahoo videos, including Crockford's fantastic series, plus the slides:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
'We Reject Structured Programming'

Brilliant. Might as well reject programming languages. Or better yet, draw scribbles in MSPaint and call it a program.
Yeah, right, like Truemors is going to go public or get acquired.
Google's guide to Robots Exclusion Protocol (including new expires tag)
peace is war. love is hate. freedom is slavery. profits are losses.
coveman: your online personal organizer
the site is the next big thing as it combines the two most important facets of the internet, convenience and information availability. it tries to provide ts users with a platform which satisfies all their official needs. its services include: resume building, networking, contact lists, business cards, news, mail, horoscopes, stocks, diaries etc.
its definitely a must try
'... the site is the next big thing as it combines the two most important facets of the internet, convenience and information availability ...'

does it work on an iPhone? (or any phone?)
economics: pokerbots and online reputation
Wow, that's hell of a clean desk. Where are all the books, pizza boxes, paper with random notes?
What can you do with money?
Question to the successful guys amongst you: Did you find out what to do with the Money?

I run a successful startup. I dont make a fortune, but all of a sudden I have a lot more money then ever before. And guess what - I have not clue what to do with it.

Today, I read this:

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/27/DIME.TMP

And there is a sentence: "The person who sold the dime is Oakland businessman Daniel Rosenthal, who was unavailable for comment, perhaps because a person newly in possession of $1.9 million has got better things to do than answer a lot of questions."

I really would like to know: What are these "better things"?

What are those better things I could do then chillin on my sofa and reading ycombinator and stuff?
Why'd you pull the article? Did Ken complain?
Just don't turn a good rule of thumb into a religion.
The nice title you wrote today will not be soon forgotten. A pic of your start-up is actually a PIC.
Invest in foreign assets, you don't want all of your wealth to be in US dollars.
Depending on how much you have, why not invest in start ups? (No, I don't mean me.)
Makes perfect sense now.With dollar constantly losing against Euro and Indian Rupees , its best to invest in politically inert geographical locations .(I would love to invest in South India, but the government regulations are too much )
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Think different.

Structured programming is not an absolute truth; it's only a valuable thing in a given context (let's call one of those contexts the "mainstream programming philosophy from the 80s to the 90s"). Change the context and it may not be interesting anymore: e.g. if you decide to (really) focus on the core of a problem instead of building a "software product", you can eliminate a lot of waste (or overhead): heavy structure and abstractions, complicated configuration, etc. and keep only what really matters: computations.

You can read the story of how, by redefining the rules of the game, Chuck Moore wrote his own EDA tools in 500 lines of his own, ultra-minimalist programming language (colorForth). Yes, it's extreme, but it works: he designed many working chips using it.
http://www.colorforth.com/vlsi.html
Invest some and put the rest to good use to make sure you contribute to making the world a better place: research to find cures, charity to help those in need, or whatever good cause you believe in.
Have fun!! Invest in yourself. Go back to school and major in something that you were slightly curious about but never got around to learning -- I'm sure there'll be a startup idea buried there somewhere...
I dont have the time to analyze other startups, because I have to care for my own company. Of course if there would be some very cool project out there, I might take the time to help them. But finding that cool project would need time that I dont have.
I dont have the time. I run a company.

And besides that... school??? Sitting on my ass, listening to someone sounds not like a lot of fun to me.
Go somewhere tropical. And hire someone to do your laundry.
Datacenter love: Equinix
Excellent startup to anonymously review and rate your doctor experience
Are you talking about using your money to grow your business, grow your money, or grow your happiness?
Apparently you're not married?:-)
For a couple of the suggestions you've responded that you don't have the time. Add a constraint to your question--how much time do you have
Many startup founders are people who like to make things. So often the kind of work they do after they have the freedom to do what they they want is to make things where they're not constrained by the need to make money.

Oddly enough, YC itself is an example. We may make money eventually, but our main motive for doing it was that it was a cool idea.
Pownce: Social Networks aren't Identity Networks
MediaWhiz Buys Another Ad Startup, AuctionAds
No, thank God !!!
Grow my Happiness.

That does not exclude the other 2 points. In fact, currently most of my fun comes from my business.
Time where im not in the office?

Most evenings and weekends.

Now for example :-)
Secure your future. And do whatever you want. If you want nothing, spend some time thinking. :)
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t's a vision of a magnetically levitated wind turbine that can generate one gigawatt of energy (enough to power 750,000 homes). This is the device proposed by a new Arizona-based company, MagLev Wind Turbine Technologies. The company claims that it can deliver clean power for less than cent per kilowatt hour using this wind turbine.
Apple now worth double Dell's market value
Today, in intraday NASDAQ trading, Apple's market value passed 2 times that of Dell's, $127.81 billion vs. $63.65 billion.
For hobby stuff, yeah. Not for startup. (Though I'm seriously considering using Erlang in one area, and I've got a friend with an Erlang startup.)