skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just make something useful.

Forget about patents. Patent pending refers to a provisional application and is not legally enforceable. Essentially, anyone can get a 'patent pending' on anything.

Patents are important only if you have enough money to either sue someone or if you have tons of money to interest someone to sue you. Assuming none of the above is true, and as someone commented above, cross this bridge when you come to it.
This article does not do the book/author justice. Buy, 'Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion'. Quick read, and it is one of the best books you will ever read on marketing and human behavior.
Agreed - and that's what Agile does, too, to a large extent, by removing the focus on long-term planning, which is why it is more successful at delivering.
Is Microsoft up to old tricks with Silverlight?
When presenting designs to clients some firms add a "pink rabbit" to it, i.e. something that's just too obvious to be ignored by the client. The discussion will then be steered to what to do about it, how to change it, what color it should have, etc.

This is a way of deflecting the client's need to "contribute". If there are other issues with the design those will come up as well, but that initial itch will be lessened.
great article none the less
Also, the truth of the majority of most FOSS projects is that the lion's share of the work is done by a minority of the contributors.

Definitely - which makes the need for a large team even more dubious. What you want is not a team of 100, it's a team of 5 brilliant programmers. Of course, finding 5 brilliant programmers and getting them to work on your enterprise project is easier said than done. However, I'd wager it'll be easier to do once you have the budget of a 100-people team to share amongst 5, and once it's a team of 5 instead of a team of 100. I don't know any brilliant programmer who wants to work in an enterprise team of 100.
Agreed. Pricing parking correctly would be one big step. A potentially even bigger step would be to repeal the medallion laws that currently give taxis weird cartel status in most cities. This would allow anyone to offer transport for money, i.e., you could form jitneys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitney). I secretly want to find a large city with bad public transport (Los Angeles? San Jose?) and start a jitney company---which, on its way to making billions, would solve the problem of urban mass transit. (Talk about "Be good" and "Make something people want"...)
bingo.
140 characters isn't a news service. But If you follow 100 people (frequent tweeters) in every city around the country/world, you may get an early warning of something happening.

I think scoble had a post some time back - making the comparison between "news" and "noise". There is breaking news in the noise - the problem is filtering it out.

Anyone think there's potential in a breaking news stories site? There's probably a 30 minute window where twitter / fb / etc are really the only sources reporting... Enough to build a business model perhaps? (Maybe selling content / targeted adds at journalists)
FaceStat's Rousing Tale of Scaling Woe and Wisdom Won
check this one out too:
theories about persuasion - http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/a_persuading....
Mikiane - Bzzster
Agreed. However, run some simple analytics on the entire Twitter message stream (the "fire hose" as they call it) looking for bursts of keywords from a large number of users, and you'll have a pretty good feed of breaking stories.

Summize/Twitter Search has "trending" keywords which is a good start, but I want a feed that automatically sends me breaking keywords.
http://bit.ly

;-)
I assumed that Knol rated highly because they have access to some good SEOs. Who better than Google to optimise your site for a search engine crawler?

In terms of Google being a media company, of course they are: advertising == media. Whether they are a content business is another question. I suspect they are, but they leverage a huge amount of user generated content (i.e. the web) instead of creating the content themselves.
very useful article!
I also find desktops more comfortable. I don't see the point of using a laptop when you have to setup mouse, keyboard, external display + everything else you might need, everyday or atleast quite often.

I like that my desktop has lots of juice, nicely set up with multiple displays and ready when I need it.

Likewise, I like that laptops are portable as they can, light, have a small footprint and long batterylife. Usually you can't get both ultra-portable and ultra-speed.

Fiddling with the files and settings can be painful though, but I think its less painful than alternatives.
A thing to note is that patents have a life of 20 years or lesser, so in some cases patents would have become void. Probably it is less likely to apply to internet technologies since lot of the internet development took place in the last 20 years.
This is probably overkill, but Amazon Web Services offers something called "Grep the Web" which you can use to run offline regex searches of the web: http://www.amazon.com/Alexa-Web-Search/b?ie=UTF8&node=26...
Ask HN: Growing a Company?
I'm not sure if this falls into a core competency area for HN, but not sure if there is a better place to ask. One of my friends has a business with about $12 million gross revenues. He wants to grow it to $60 million revenues within the next several years, and knows that things need to change, but not sure exactly what to do and the order to do them. I assume there are consultants and coaches to help, but how do you go about finding them? And what other resources are there?
It takes 10 years to become a success
Statistical programming with R
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"If one person today can do the work of 5 people from days gone by, that in itself ameliorates the problem."

Does anyone here actually believe that to be true?
This has immense implications on how team members are valued and how to estimate and claim rewards not leading to deadlock. Something to understand very early on to know what to expect in our careers and broadly life too.
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Salon launches blogger 'tipping' system
... And be thorough when selecting the people you sell to. You may be able to leverage them for more than money, eg. use them as board members and have them use their network to help you get needed contacts to develop your business.

This was an incredibly successful strategy at my previous company. The investors had contacts at some very interesting clients, which allowed the salesmen to get in at a different level than if they had to start from scratch.
The Large Hadron Collider was tested this weekend
A little update. I have decided to start tagging my direct ad tweets with $$, we'll see if the convention takes off...

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=217 for details
So it's the kind of book that's worth browsing through, reading bits that catch your attention, but not worth reading every word of

ChangeThis solves this problem quite well.
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Yes. Of course.

Whenever the question is, "Is Microsoft trying to make use of their existing dangerously strong positions in order to strengthen their positions in new areas?" The answer is always, "Yes."

In this case, however, I just kinda have to chuckle, because it's a battle between two companies who have always been pretty uncomfortable playing on the level playing field of the Internet. Open standards are not the forte of Microsoft or Adobe, and I don't think I'd lose much sleep over either one of them taking a bit of a beating. If they want to beat each other up, that's even better.

But, I guess if I had to choose between Microsoft and Adobe which one I wanted to be in control of my online video and multimedia experience, I would choose Adobe. They've been Linux friendly, by some definition of friendly, for at least a few years...though it's always seemed pretty grudging. And Flash Player aint exactly the pinnacle of software reliability (though it seems to be better lately...and to be fair, I suppose they could be as nasty and evil as RealPlayer and try to do stupidly irritating stuff to my preferences every time it fires up...but then, I guess if they'd been doing that, they'd be in the same ghetto as RealPlayer).
"The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil."

It is interesting that the prime minister's comment was sensational enough for several Danish news outlets to pick up on the NYT story. This indicates that his comment is far from established policy in Denmark.

When our current government was elected, it introduced a stop on new taxes which has been in place since. Having the prime minister talk about introducing an extra tax on already expensive gas is quite newsworthy. Some critics argue that rather than raising the price on gas, the government should consider removing the taxes that are put on environmentally friendly cars and hybrids.
I couldn't care less if they stayed in private 'beta' for another year. Let them work out the kinks. I appreciate them taking care of existing users first, then worry about growth. This kind of service needs to be reliable. Keep up the good work, I'm using getdropbox all the time.
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Commentary on the Tribute Credit Card.
I'm going to show my age and say that you will never, ever, find me saying, "I like working on a laptop better than a desktop machine". Big monitor, nice keyboard, big mouse pad, all in exactly the same place every day. That's what I need to be happy in my computing experience.

Almost every other hacker I know prefers a laptop and they're quite content to roam with their work. I just don't get anything done that way. I guess I'm just too much of a princess.

I can see the argument that one can plug in a proper monitor and keyboard...but why? My desktop is nearly a year old, and still probably about twice as fast as any laptop anyone in this discussion owns and has more RAM and disk space, and it only cost about $1000 to build. To get close to the performance of this desktop machine in a lappy, you'd spend $3000 or more (and your memory bus will still be 50% slower).

Then again, most of the folks in this discussion aren't compiling software every day...so maybe I'll change my tune when I no longer have that task as part of my core job.
I need to give myself a raise.
Some of us would rather just avoid the 'politics' thing altogether.
Not a lawyer, but I wouldn't worry about it.

a) software patents are pretty useless nowadays, it takes so long to get it, that by the time you have it, your patentable technology is a $39.99 script people can buy.

b) Its not your problem to adhere to all issued patents, until someone starts suing you. I mean look at ANY site on the web, they are probably in violation of 200 patents. Chances are the "Add Comment" button has already been patented. So has the hyperlink I used to view your story. So has the term "flag"

c) Most of these "patents" are bullshit.

d) There is no guarantee that these guys will even get their patent approved.

e) You don't even know what they are trying to patent. For all you know, their patent has nothing to do with their technology, it could just be a patent for something stupid like "a way to display a hyperlink in a lime green bold times new roman font".

So personally I'd just go ahead and do whatever it is you want to do, because chances are there is prior art that you can cite to make anything they come up with invalid.
Just invest your extra 15% wisely, and remake your local world in a left-handed friendly fashion. I've heard that part of the reason for the lower lifespan is increased accidents among lefties due to the clear favoritism for right-handers in the world (one might say reality has a clear right-handed bias).

But, I'm left-handed and not too worried about it. If it were a dramatic difference in lifespan, I guess we'd be even fewer in number than we are.
Offtopic, how are your projects working out from 5 months ago?
I got tired of the screens being at different heights, so I got one of these. Also keeps the desk looking sharp.

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/elevator
That's an interesting comment because we have hit peak coal, in England at least. We actually have lots of coal in the ground which we aren't touching because it costs more to get at it than it's worth (I believe we import our coal from Germany now). What happened was there was a bit of social unrest but other than that, it wasn't really a big deal, life continued pretty much as normal.
I think there's no way to be safe from patents, except to be not worth suing. And since anyone can sue you for anything at any time, so there's no point fearing the uncertainty.

BTW: I've seen a strategy for avoiding patent infringement of a standard by using only 20+ year old techniques. If it was published over 20 years ago, any patent would have expired. Unfortunately, someone could have had a "submarine" patent (delaying issue of it) so you need to wit X years longer, where X is unknown...

Selden did it to automobiles: http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
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Interesting point that Brook's square law of communication between project members might change if you can effectively access what anyone said to anyone at any time in the past - i.e. if all communication is in searchable electronic form (email etc).
Larry Lessig had an interesting TED talk on the way the law is stifling creativity. I tried to submit it but Hacker News was buggy. Anyway, you might find this interesting:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law...
He says:

From this point of view, you can see that open source projects have a huge scaling advantage because all code is shared. If someone is waiting for a component, and they are frustrated enough, and talented enough, they can just fix the problem. The code is all shared, anybody can build and fix any component, and the responsibility for critical components can move around. The answer to the dependency problem is less hierarchy, and fewer official tool builders, not more.

But this can't be right, because even closed-source commercial projects are "open-source" from the perspective of the developers themselves.
Wow! Thanks for that. I feel like I've hit the motherlode.

I'm going to start with "A functional specification of the Alpha AXP shared memory model" paper....
Don't "Ask HN"-- ask your lawyer.

Seriously: you're being offered a lot of free advice, some of which may potentially cause you significant problems down the road.

If you're serious about developing a product, you're going to need a lawyer at some point-- and it sounds like you've just reached that point.
As opposed to here in Australia, where we our higher petrol tax goes back into building more roads and thus driving demand higher.
The danish theory seems to be that if you do it now via tax, you can apply the taxes to make advances in technology for energy efficiency and alternative sources.
Are traditional news services even good for anything nuanced any more? Seems to be evenly split between 'big boom' and 'big boob' nowadays.
I'd love to hear what the Tipjoy folks have to say about this.
"A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Bill Gates (1991)

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
Bill Gates (1991)

"The benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to their general suppression."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the USA

"Patents are being used as an offensive measure. [...] If you don't have any patents, you don't have any weapons in your armoury."
John MacPhail, Partner, Baker & McKenzie
(one of the world's largest law firm)

"Patents are intelligent bombs."
Harvard Business Review

"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere."
The Washington Post

Intel's [chairman] Grove derides such patent holders for showing little interest in producing goods with their inventions in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We call them trolls," he said.
The Washington Post

"The nature of software is that it is a writing, an expression of mathematical ideas. The copyright law protects this expression, and it does so without requiring costly and time-consuming proceedings."
Douglas Brotz, Principal Scientist, Adobe Systems (1994)

"The government and the money-counters must not lock away from us, our intellectual processes -- not even when we execute them with the aid of symbols on paper, or performances on calculators, or programs in computers.">
Jim Warren, Board of Directors, Autodesk (1994)

"It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and, at the same time, keep control of it."
Tim Berners-Lee

"Software patenting has run amok."
Tim Berners-Lee

"Building up a patent portfolio by engaging in defensive patenting cannot always protect against hold-up."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA

"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
Federal Trade Commission of the USA

learn all about it: www.nosoftwarepatents.com
Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop
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Flash now has a monopoly on "rich" content for the browser. I think a second player in the field is a good thing.

And since Adobe is proprietary too, it's no big loss. Silverlight might become a -good- proprietary multimedia plugin.
Why am I being downmodded?
Maybe not by a factor of five, but at least by a factor of two. Assuming you're not using C++.
IPhone Software Sales Take Off: Apple's Jobs
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Ask HN: Tufte course worth the cost?
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses

$380 for a one day course ($200 for full-time students) and all four books are included. That doesn't seem like such a bad deal. Can anyone comment on previous versions?
Listen instead ... to your vision
Imeem Taking Off - Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched
I too wish dropbox would open up. Last week I recommended it to a friend thinking it might be out of beta but then I soon realized it wasn't :/

(P.S if anyone has an invite I would love one :~) )
She is basically repackaging Aristotle's Rhetoric for modern business folk who skipped that class in college. "Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself." To that, she has added various forms of bribery, which aren't really forms of persuasion.

Read the original here: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html
So then wouldn't his argument be true by definition?

He's not simply saying strategy takes longer than tactics, but that tactics accelerated by virtue of being online do not infer strategy accelerated likewise.
Here's how I think about it in chess -

tactic: a sequence of moves, almost always short and usually forced with a clear outcome in the short term.

strategy: a sequence of unforced moves designed to create a non-material advantage with no immediately clear outcome.

A tactic is something like pinning a piece and quickly bringing additional pieces to attack that piece in an effort to win a material advantage. The material advantage is an immediate and clear outcome.

A strategy is something like using a pawn structure to gain space. There is no immediately obvious advantage to gaining space, but the added flexibility will often enable (unforseen) material gains later in the match.
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Lousy article. Where's the "because it's in their best interest" option? Sometimes people say yes because they think they're getting a good deal, not because you've used psuedo-psychology to twist their arm.
What are, for me as a user, and for "rich media content" developers, the advantages of Silverlight over Flash?

Programming languages (just stick to interpreted, 'web' languages for this example), all do practically the same thing, but they all exist for a simple reason like a developers preference. Is this the same with media content such as silverlight and flash, or is it simply Microsoft trying to become the top dog for online media?

I'm all in for competitors, maybe Silverlight wont suck most of my Macs CPU up when playing online video, and Adobe might work harder to make things more efficient and better for developers, but if this is just MS trying to take over my browser as they loose IE market share, I will be disappointed.
Knowing Salon, it probably comes with an interstitial ad that opens a popunder when you close it. Then you have to sit through a thirty-second Flash ad to get a "day pass".
A New State of Mind
'Neither approach is inherently "better", and when it comes down to the daily business of writing code and building UIs, the experience probably isn't that different. But in terms of the big picture, that is the satisfying meaty answer that I've been looking for.'

Hmmm, I suspect that one of these two approaches is inherently better than the other - though I don't know which one is which, just that they won't be equal. We'll just have to wait and see what the market decides.
If I invent something and don't patent it I assume someone else can?
But let's say there is some obvious invention noone ever patented and someone goes to patent it now even though he obv did not invent it, will he get a patent?

Since it is very expensive to patent all over the world is there some way you can do something like the GNU license?

So I can say I invented this and anyone can use it however they want and noone can prevent anyone from using it.

And that would be free and hold up all over the world?
Cheap alternative: a pile of books.
Georgian government: websites attacked by Russian hackers
what a fantastic story! I am subscribing to this blog. good find soundsop.
The article also seems to ignore the looming issue that phone companies will still be able to completely lock down phones with Android, so end users may not see any of the benefits of that framework at all. What good is an "open" framework/platform if you're not allowed to access it?
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