skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To start with: IAAPL.

In my opinion, there are only three times when software patents are useful:

1. There is a hard computer science problem at the very core of your product or service -- one that you have solved, that competitors have not, and that gives you an advantage. Further, the answer to this problem, once known, is easily replicable. The canonical example of this is Google/PageRank, and the closest non-software analogue is drug research. This is what software patents are designed to protect and they usually do an ok job of it.

2. You are a large business and you have grown to the point that you are attracting attention from patent trolls and other large, patent-holding entities. At this level, the quality of the patents usually doesn't matter nearly as much as the quantity. It becomes a "my stack is bigger than your stack" type of negotiation, and having a very large pile of manure is useful because people are forced to assume there is a pony or two in there. If you want to see an example of a company that has recently had this realization, look at Huawei and compare their total number of issued patents with their total number of patent applications.

3. You are inventing a completely new type of hardware device and you also file for patent on the software that interacts and enables it.

Two special cases:

If you are a startup, then (IMO) it rarely pays to file for patents unless you a) expect to get really big, or b) want to sell out to a big company. This is a special case of #2. Otherwise, execution trumps IP. Startups are just not big enough to worry about (or be targets).

It also may pay if you are creating a completely new market - think RSA. If software patents are part of this, then this is probably a special case of #1.
Possibly. And if not there's a good chance that they'll do ok after an exit anyway. But they've already spent a year of their lives doing Formspring fulltime, and they'll probably spend a few more years. So Mark needs to decide whether he wants threewords.me to become a major part of his life for several years. If he does, he should keep it. But if not, now's a much better time to sell than after months of putting it on the back burner and having the viral traffic subside.
Perhaps it is. I still hope that it's useful :)
Well, if the author is in contact with the advertiser directly and are selling impression instead of clicks, then why yes, of course the advertiser would be okay with it. Its like TV hosting the ad of the advertiser for a period of time. If the TV wants to tell people buy the advertiser product, then most of the advertiser wouldn't mind.

If however, say KFC is advertising on the TV, and instead of impression, they are taking a cut whenever someone who watched the TV goes to KFC, then the situation would be very different. Which is the case of Google, where each click has a cost.

My advice to him, instead of depending on Google, just get the advertisers directly and just charge by impression, or at least a fix charge for a period of time. Since there are value in the stuff he is doing, I would believe that there would be advertisers willing to pay anyway, just a matter how much.

The only downside going that way, now he has to do the marketing to potential advertisers as well, as opposed to Google doing it for him previously.
There is of course the classic GNU/FSF essay: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What about a software program that adds some type of filter layer on screen that can only be seen through special glasses that you purchase?
and now it seems it's yourself who's being "accidentally" upvoted...

anyway, do you have anything to say about the topic?

do you consider vandalizing local top-level domains with meaningless BS (that local people might have used for something relevant to them) appropriate?
That page lists a number of startups - sure. It's atomic compared to the startups out there. I do agree - it's impressive to see some of the names on the list and it would be nice to see it grow. All the same, you have to admit that it's rather small.
If they were to payout investors with their cash receipts, they would have LESS cash to actually reinvest and grow the business. For Groupon, given the amount of competition and the local focus of the business, this would hurt their competitive position significantly against any competitor who decided to reinvest all their cash and raise more money.
Just so you all know, sites like Linode and Slicehost are NOT cloud hosting but actually VPS hosting
"So yeah, personally I think this is a great market to be getting into."

Why do you think it's a great market to get into? Is it the size of the opportunity? Your first three paras outline why it's a difficult market.

BTW: Your description of the small business market is spot-on. I have also done small-client work (and still do) and agree with your assessment. It's just that your last statement seems out of synch with the sentiment of your comment.
This article sounds like it's trying to say that electronic medical records are a bad idea, but all I'm hearing is "our vendor's software sucks ass". I mean, none of these limits are that tough to fix. If there's a need to tell which visits on a list are long ones and which are short, we could color-code based on duration or just display the duration of each visit in the list, for instance.
Consider my comment redacted!
Get rich or die tryin'.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67046/robert-c-lieber...
It works a lot faster than you might think. Sure, if you're setting up a new site in San Francisco or Austin this kind of thing will be a much harder sell. But in small-town USA where no one knows what SEO means, it's actually really fast.

We've had people jump to #1, #2, and #3, of target keywords in under a week (we don't advertise this, btw, because it's unrealistic), but 30-45 days is very common.

There are millions of businesses in markets less than 25k people, and those people are our targets.
How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century
Project manager likes "On Camera"! Thanks!
Under protocols you may want to specify MongoDB's as BSON and Cassandra's as Thrift. That would be more helpful than "binary/custom".

Updated:

Also Redis's main selling point is it's extensive data structure/operations support. "Blazingly fast" really depends on what your workload is and what you're comparing it against.
But small businesses are still behind. Way behind. See http://buddingtonsphoto.com/ as an example.

What a great way to acquire new customers. Post the worst websites you can find on Hacker News, bombarding them with hits and laughter, and embarrassing them into upgrading.

(I'd call them and ask why they haven't engaged Seeing Interactive, but I just don't have the heart.)
It was meant to flow from the previous sentence. The market has been hard to get into, but it's inevitably opening up due to growing familiarity with the web.
"Random secret" doesn't capture the fact that it must not be reused across messages. A session key ("random secret") can be reused to encrypt multiple messages, a DSA secret nonce can't.

You need three concepts: unique (used only once, ever), unpredictable (pseudo-random), and secret (never revealed to anyone, before or after use).

You should read the DSA spec, FIPS 186-3, section 4.5. They call this parameter the "Per-Message Secret Number", which doesn't capture the fact it needs to be unpredictable. (Later in that section, they mention it is "random", but the name of the parameter doesn't have that notion.)

My surprise is not that Sony didn't read our blog, but that they didn't read FIPS 186 when implementing their concrete-vault root signing tool. "Per-message" is spelled out right there in the title of section 4.5.
I didn't see a date when this would become available for everyone.

I tried registering an Estonian domain once (.ee TLD), but require the business to be registered there. Don't countries realises domain names are just that, names. The ending really means very little to people. Who thinks all .tv domains are companies from Tuvalu?
Looks like top stories on HN grow to be top stories elsewhere.
If you pick up a book on best practices in development of enterprise software, it is basically a catalog of obviously beneficial things that people fantasize about in the pages of a book because they are never allowed to do them in real life.

For instance, talking to prospective users. The importance of this has been stressed over and over again and is no longer disputed. In fact, when an in-house team started designing changes to an accounting app my friend had to use, there was an official user expert designated to work with the developers. The user "expert" was her manager, who had never used the application that was being changed, had never used a similar application, and had never even done a job similar to the one done by the users. What's more, she forbade the developers to speak to the users because she didn't want the development effort to affect their productivity. Oh, it did affect their productivity eventually, believe me it did.

(It's an exaggeration to say it's uniformly terrible; I had a good experience with the one enterprise app I built, but it was for a network operations team, so they understood a lot about software and about the need to be generous with time and access.)
Don't believe the rosy forecasts
I wish I had read a bit more before I went on a lending spree :( I wonder if I can de-lend a book ...
So it seems it's quite valid to compare them in terms of baking, as ingredients for pies etc.
There is a way: it's called dividends. The problem is that dividends are subject to double taxation: first at ~44% (Federal + CA) for the corporation, then at the dividends rate for the individual, which is currently at 24.3% (15% Fed + 9.3% CA).

Compare to a sale of stock, which is only taxed at 24.3%, and you can start to see some of the advantages.

Another advantage includes being able to capitalize on a multiple of your revenue/profit, instead of on a 1X every year, as well as continuing to put the company's revenue towards growth instead of cashing it all out.
President of RISD on the importance of art for innovation
I had no idea "impostor syndrome" had a name. Every day, I go into work thinking I'm just waiting to be fired for incompetence, just as soon as they discover it. Meanwhile people continue to point out how productive I am, but I don't seem to believe a word of it.
People often stay to build up their fuck you fund, and to prepare their exit. Finding the right job can be a long process. And even when you find it, taking it is not necessarily the right decision. If you're married and you have kids, for example, that Apple offer might not be a no-brainer if you have to move to a new city. Also, once they've been burned by a shitty corporation, people can become very picky on the job hunt.
Perhaps I missed it but why not consider mean racial IQ as a factor in the differences found.
"twitter has servers dedicated to high-volume users without having to use urls/dns like that"

That's why they need so many load balancers w/ failover:

twitter.com has address 128.242.240.148
twitter.com has address 128.242.245.212
twitter.com has address 128.121.243.228

Load balancers aren't flexible to work with especially when dealing with sessions. I imagine Twitter's front end nodes are doing nothing but routing URLs to backends, which are doing the real work. So the front end balancer takes http://www.twitter.com/unixy and routes the actual server-side request internally (where scalability is implemented).
37signals took money off the table w/ money from Bezos....exact same play
"What small businesses really care about is cost effective customer acquisition."

The other high order bit for small businesses is repeat customers. Loyalty programs on mobile could be the killer app that gets small businesses online.
I really enjoyed the gift basket you get at 700
IMDb still run from a house in Bristol
Local business is a huge opportunity on the internet.

However, it far from the last 'unconquered' sector of the web. There will never be an end to vast opportunities on the internet, because new solutions create new opportunities that never existed before, ad infinitum.

For example, and idea like grubwith.us would have seemed bizarre before Groupon, but now it seems like a straightforward evolution (and something lots of people would like to do).

We still are working with very basic forms of artificial intelligence, but as it gets better, the whole internet will be reborn.

Carry on inventing everyone!
Ask HN: What Features Do You Take From Language To Language?
Hey,

Back when I was using Ruby, I got used to objects that I could add members to freely.

Now that I'm back to using c++, I find I'm using a wrapper class around a QHash for my basic data type. It seems to work amazingly well since I suddenly don't have to worry about "structure conversion hell" and instead pass a basket of arbitrary characteristics around (and I can still add guards within the wrapper class for conversion, safety etc). Essentially, I'm using the Ruby language approach of duck-typing when I need to while having the speed and libraries of c++.

Anyone else find themselves "transplanting" features of languages they've used in the past into their current favorite in a way that worked well? (Obviously, there are many ways to do this badly too).
First Earth-like planet discovered
Protocols: great idea, thanks man, amended it!

Blazing fast: I mean compared to the other four.
Riak also supports, in addition to HTTP, Protocol Buffers - a binary encoding protocol introduced by Google.

A few other notable Riak features include a JS or Erlang MapReduce API and full-text search.
Concept: Not sure how this is different than just an e-mail conversation with someone important besides I have to yet use another communications platform.

Landing page: Put all of the features that are scrolling on the page so I can scan through them instead of waiting for them to scroll.

Use the normal logo that you have without any of the drop shadows and glows, it's just making it look messy.

Logo: What does the pie chart icon mean? For the letters, I don't mind the stylized font but I would put them together so it's one continuous word.

Name: Iddhis - Does this name come from a root from another word or from a foreign word? If not, I just don't click with this name, it makes me say "hiss" at the end or "dhis" like "diss".
A recap of threewords.me and the part vanity played
We clearly need a way to make medical data systems sexy enough that talented, skilled folks build startups to try to horn in on the market.

No, I'm not being flippant or joking.

It would be a fantastic thing if even a handful of people see this story, go, "I could shit out better software then that!", look into HIPAA and other complications, consider a moment, then say, "I could still shit out better software than this," and get to work challenging the status quo.
Cambridge University refuses to censor student's thesis
Implementation of Monads in JavaScript
This is what happens when users get conditioned by really bad software in a specialist market.
Bufferbloat: buffer sizing in networks
I have Galaxy S I9000 (european version) and installed a custom rom on it a few days ago. It was not that hard, at least not much harder than installing roms on my G1. You just root the device by flashing some special kernel, then put some files on the sdcard, boot into recovery and you're done. If you are still on 2.1 you can even skip the rooting part.

I am using Darky's rom: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=814091
It is stable, fast and does not have the strange GUI modifications.

TL;DR: It's easy, try it.
1. You are expecting/hoping to be bought and you want to increase your IP assets to be more attractive.

2. You expect to someday become a target of patent suits and you need defensive patents.

3. You have something really innovative and it's obvious to the user/externally visible so you want to patent it before someone else does or so you can license it. I've never understood the point of patenting algorithms that aren't visible from the outside.

Besides these three examples, I don't see the need for software patents. Unlike say, a physical mechanism, software is largely invisible, so trade secrets should offer enough protection for the vast majority of cases.
I don't care if I get up voted or down voted for what I posted. I simply didn't want your retarded comment getting a wave of up votes because I accidentally help start the process. I would do the same to any useless "funny" comment I saw on here.
Keean, who wrote this, is a senior Haskell hacker digging into HTML5
It's not that governments want people scared, rather there's no incentive to avoid scaring the public. And so officials go ahead with their politically expedient security theater. The officials get the benefit of appearing to "do something" while the resulting inconvenience and "scare" never wash back on them.
Just another special case of how centralized systems can't compete with distributed competition systems. Chinese propaganda comes from the government and doesn't have any reason to improve. In the US, you have propaganda from the two major sides of the government and various agencies, in addition to a wide-open market in propaganda in the commercial market which we call "marketing" and "public relations", in a constant unrelenting barrage in competition with each other: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree."

Of course we're better at it, we've got tons more practice. For that matter our government isn't all that great at it, the best and most effective ideological propaganda in this country actually comes from commercial interests like Fox News and the New York Times. (And if you think one of those is much less biased than the other... ha!)

And also a reminder that the market will efficiently execute pretty much anything, regardless of the desirability of efficient execution.
Appjet Server In A Jar - Now On GitHub
I saw this when you (or maybe one of your cofounders) mentioned it on the #startups irc channel and I think your landing page has got worse than what it was before.

I think you've got a much better value proposition pitching it specifically to couples as a way to track and strengthen their relationship than as a generic "social network for 2 people". The first has clear value (allows for sharing of personal photos, thoughts, emotions) why the later doesn't.

While I appreciate you might want to expand beyond the relationship market, I still think it's better to start from there where you have a clear value proposition and then extend out to other areas over time.

As other people have mentioned "no stalkers" and "no groups" aren't benefits. "Strengthen your relationship" is a benefit.
Rice is the hardest thing to eat with a fork. Especially the non-sticky kind. Foods like rice and other loose foods should be exempt from etiquettes in favor of the most efficient method. Otherwise, as noted in the article, it'll lead to either an excruciatingly slow and/or messy meal, which is all the more noticeable than the way you hold your fork.
Wow, journalists are pretty much like smug spies. It is disconcerting that I have to be constantly distrustful of people around me just in case they are interested in digging around into any of the organizations I belong to.
We are doing something very similar for apartments websites.
My assumptions where exactly the same but after two months it turned out the the easy sales were those made with the advanced business owners, not the ones who never really wanted to be on the Internet.
The tech savy ones saw immediately the wisdom of a dedicated website builder compared to the great but too general wordpress or joomla.
The others were still asking for a guaranteed first place in Google with no keywords specified :)

So, as the system grows we will more and more target the ones who know what we are talking about.
It will be interesting to know how it goes and I'll be happy to share our experiences!

Luca

Www.adormo.com
Ask HN: selling a web site
Can the HN crowd give some advice on selling a web site - where to sell it, how to prepare etc. I have a site with no traffic but a great idea, I just have no time to market it.

I tried searching HN but the most recent ask's I could find were 3 years old.
This actually flys in the face of my recent published research, which recommends low-glycemic impact diets that do not count calories. I largely agree with you that aerobic exercise is overrated for weight loss, but we should be explicit in that the goal is not to lose any kind of body mass, but to lose fat. The best ways to maintain muscle mass while losing body weight is to lift weights and and eat adequite protein (also backed by up by research, though I don't have the links handy). One of the nice features of low-glycemic diets, like the Atkins diet, is that you get a lot of protein and thus maintain more muscle mass.
I was only ranting in what I thought was an appropriate thread, but thank you very much for replying. I appreciate the good will on HN.

Keep in mind, I may just be declaring myself Parfe, King of Idiots but when I'm happy with my resume I'll definitely be in touch.
I'd rather know about these superficialities than know nothing at all.
I don't really want to offer my random guess against your random guess of "not much money". Why not wait and see? What vested interest do you have in seeing Twitter fail?

I hope Twitter makes a lot of money and lasts for a long long time. It will be good for the world.
I only know a little Mandarin, but it sounds like its name means "give your password".
I switch to working 3 days a week at my regular gig from Jan 1. Looking forward to trying out stuff I've wanted to for a while and spending more time with the family. Mostly excited about cutting back on the "waste" generated in "going" to work.
Flippa.com is probably the best place to sell. Check out the other listings there to get an idea of how to "market" it...
I have found pirating and using ebooks to be perfectly reasonable as there are no hurdles to jump over and there is no possibility that your books will disappear from your Kindle without your permission. In fact, as far as Amazon is concerned, I've never put anything on my Kindle. My main problem is that many books I want to read cannot be found in this form for as much as a year after they are published.
I thought Facebook credits weren't even available as an option for Connect apps?

If you really want to grow even faster:

1) scrap the standalone website and build it as an iframe app (should be very little work). This will simplify login significantly and will keep people inside FB, which in my experience, makes a world of difference in the viral funnel.

2) replace the "share this link" with a real Stream.publish call. Consider adding like buttons for every single user's page.

3) Allow people to see which of their friends have answers as well.

Then, if you add the 1 credit transaction, you should do pretty well. Beware, however... Facebook has given out a lot of free credits to users and they do not give app devs any payback when free credits are used. These chargebacks can affect actual revenue from small transactions like this significantly.