skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So she lives in San Francisco for 6 months and feels qualified to explain what is 'wrong' with Silicon Valley? (which is nominally the Santa Clara Valley btw) I've lived (and worked) in the actual silicon valley for over 25 years and I can tell you that evaluating the area based on a 6 month snapshot is worthless.

In 1984 I was Intel and the 'problem' was that there wasn't any real use for personal computers. A 1024 x 768 color CRT monitor was huge and cost about $3,000. Running at 640 x 480 in monochrome with a 'Hercules' graphics card didn't come close to the experience you could get with a decent minicomputer 'workstation.' But a workstation cost $50,000 and up.

In 1994 I was at Sun Microsystem (the Liveoak project, aka Java) and I would have told you that the 'problem' was that you couldn't do business over email and without an economic engine what would fund all the work. I told Eric Schmidt (who owned Sun Labs at the time) that so called 'e-commerce' was where all the money would be in 1995 and if Sun wasn't able to participate it was toast. (sounds pretty lame in retrospect, but they did sell a lot of servers to Amazon :-)

In 2004 I was at NetApp (after having my startup acquired by a company which would later be folded into Motorola in a deal which was reminescent of one of those trades in baseball where you get cash and a draft pick and oh by the way this guy over here.) I would have told you that the problem was that technologists had been pushed aside by MBA types who had lasered in on the 'rent seeking' business model and killed off innovation along the way.

There isn't a 'problem' with Silicon Valley, it simply exists like a beaker sitting over a bunsen burner. Over time different chemicals are available in the beaker and sometimes something magical happens, and sometime noxious fumes come out, but the place is an engine. A lot of startups are endo-thermic with respect to cash but a few are wildly exo-thermic. Often times the by products of those become the ingredients of the next round of innovation.

I'm not sure the author has had time to appreciate that while she may have encountered dozens of GroupOn clones, she seems to have missed that there are dozens of GroupOn clones. If you were in, say Minneapolis, how many GroupOn clone startups are there? Energy makes reactions possible, the SF Bay area is full of energy (and resources) which makes it easy to create a new company. That the companies that have currently been created are boring to you is merely a side effect.
Google is DOOMED now that the others have access to these patents seems to be the big headline, but I do not see that being the case unless Google tries to move in areas covered by the Nortel patents.

So while Google did not get these patents that as it stands seem to be unrelated to current Google activities, they did help force the others to pay a premium for them. It looks like they may have helped Nortel gain enough that the company might in fact be able to start anew. $1.5bln in seed money is pretty decent, as long as that does not get liquidated to investors. Interesting none the less.
W3C moves to snuff Apple web patents
The argument is that this lowering of the cost works against independent developers in favor of already large corporations who have other advantages to rely on (such as large marketing budgets, etc.)

The point is not that value isn't created - it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses.
I believe her point was that she expected to hear tech entrepreneurs "talking shop" about tech, rather than about "entrepreneurship".

To follow your analogy, it's as if you heard a bunch of doctors discussing how many patients they had last week, instead of interesting cases among those patients.

I don't live anywhere near the Valley nor am I an entrepreneur, so I can't either agree or disagree with her points, but I confess that I would've had similar expectations in her place.
How concerned should a lifestyle hardware startup be about patent exposure?
Hello all,

Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

I'm a software developer in the US with an idea for a startup that involves a hardware component. I've done a lot of research, and the idea seems tractable technically. I have the capability to build the software side personally, and I have contacts that would make good partners for the hardware side. From informal polls of friends, it seems like something that people would love. I have enough money saved to build some prototypes before seeking funding.

There's just one issue: the hardware component appears to be covered by multiple patents, at least one of which has been granted and is held by a major software corporation.

(Incidentally, the patent was filed in 2000 and issued in 2003, and this corporation shows no signs of doing anything with the idea -- grr).

(Also: I'm clearly biased, but I find the patented ideas fairly trivial, and an abuse of the intent of the patent system -- double grr).

How worried about this should I be?

My ideal goal would be to build a "lifestyle" company with revenues of, say, 20-30M/yr and ~10 employees, and just run it indefinitely. I'm not interested in building a gigantic business; I just want the ability to work on cool projects and work with a handful of great engineers.

I would consider exiting to a bigger company if the opportunity arose, but it would not be my goal.

I think the commonly accepted wisdom for typical web startups is to ignore patents and run as fast as possible. Perhaps part of this is due to the usual goal of selling out to a larger company, who presumably has the resources to defend patent issues. Is the calculus different for hardware companies, non-service-type companies, or companies that don't want to sell?

Edit: Also: I'm also aware of the conflict between "lifestyle business" and "seek funding". For now, I'm just interested in the issue of patent risk. I clearly need to do more thought in the other areas of my idea :).
Could be a thing like a Java program would like to do some Python stuff and could get into it quickly, but I would think a seasoned Python person might get testy with Java quicker. Then again Python people usually know a few languages anyway :P
you can't rely on your memory as a given

Oh, it gets even more exciting than that. You can't always even rely on your computations, let alone your memory!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Radiation-h...
50 Lego Designs with 50 Pieces
Actually, if they are suitably different, yes. It has the added benefit of making it easy to sell the product/business down the road or convert to a different kind of Corp to get investors.

If a product is good enough to make money on it's own, it's good enough for its own LLC.
Right, but is legal martyrdom going to change things?
Ah, yes, weighted raffles. We'd love to have weighted raffles. We were fooling with that awhile ago, but there's a sticky legal point. The whole no purchase necessary clause. If we had weighted raffles it sounds like we'd need a way for people to send us a postcard and have equal treatment as the highest person on the leader board with the raffle. That didn't sound fair. We'd love to figure out a way to do it though.
I think his basic premise (which may need more argument) is that games rob you of agency.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by ever increasing agency, hardcore gaming, he argues, arrest that development.

Thus, anything that diminishes age-appropriate agency is bad.
In this case, there is no need for a trial. The evidence is indisputable and the OP admits to the action.

In a free market, I should charge what I want. Why does Comcast need to create a higher tier when 99.9% don't need or want it?
Interesting framing of my comment. "Polarizing figure" suggests something akin to a Great Taste v. Less Filling debate.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Nobody thought that Apple, Google or Microsoft would be game-changers when they were in the startup stage. When Apple and Microsoft were in the startup stage, their customers were hobbyists. When Google was in its startup stage, it was clear to everybody that they would never be anything more than a modest compliment to what Yahoo offered.

If every startups were to listen to this author, nothing would ever get done. We'd spend our lives trying to "change the world" without making the millions of incremental improvements that are necessary for the world-changing stuff to happen.
Looking for cofounder interested in building activities/interaction graph
Well, I'm student and currently working on new project. But I'm only good at UI/X Design + some frontend, so I want to find anyone interested in building this with me :)
My project is.. basically group with friends and share activities with friends. so basically it will let people auto suqare(group) their friends by activities they did together, hangout together(autogrouping histories). Activities graph will include location area,histories and activity words and keep changing graph by interactions between friends and me. and then, notify that might be interested in.

It sounds like cool grouping app, But no. It will suggest where you go next, nearby same-minded people, and next activities. This will use shared activities and histories, but also Facebook connect. Grab facebook account and get all things, then system will analyze and turn into personal db.

and keep them interact thru frolic by that, notification system i said above. But also behind it- It will know, and change how we get info and act outside. The reason I put auto grouping thing on the front side of concept is, people usually not gonna use something looks very technical. By covering graph side to nice auto grouping to let them share activities without feeling something awkward.

Anyone interested in, comment or email me toddoh [at ] me.com my bio is on yc profile :P
yeah, but that's what they are claiming, the app has a link to another app and they want to sue over that. There is not in app purchase.
Many state utility commissions require multiple notifications written & verbal prior to turning off service.
I wonder how small ISPs like those in my country can afford to provide at least 500GB/month at 30Mbps for about $60. On the other hand, I do have about four other ISPs I can switch to, maybe that influences it?
" there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers. " -- 1% seems high to me, but it seems to surprise her.
I was going to tweet this about how horrible it is, but I figured I didn't want to send people to that site. That was one of the worst pieces of reporting I've ever read.
Arbitrage vs Innovation - consider that startups that are using technology to make an existing market more efficient are profiting due to arbitrage of technology. Consider that startups that are using technology to create a new form of value are innovating.

Technology arbitrage is kinda boring, but can have big rewards. I imagine the profit distribution among these startups looks kinda bell curvish.

Technology innovation and commercialization is a different game - here you have a few big winners effectively creating new paradigms, followed by technologies that may add marginal value in a large number of markets.

Its part of any economy to have a mix of those who arbitrage and those who innovate. Silicon Valley is no different.. in fact, you could argue that the arbitrage plays are necessary to create the funding environment that can facilitate technology innovation. I find it a useful lens for understanding the startup infrastructure.

To further refine the lens, you can look at through the asset class that each startup is attempting to create (personal reputation, team, tech, users, profits, strategic value) - Elad Gil has a good blog on this http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/01/m-ladder-position-your-start....

So, I see what the author is saying, but really I think she is looking through the wrong lens. Funded innovation sits at the top of a complex economic ecosystem of interconnected, evolving pieces.
SV startups I've always felt are significantly less derivative than any other business that I've ever known.

99% (or whatever) of businesses started are another bank, Mediterranean restaurant, carpet cleaning company, franchise, etc. that are exact clones or nearly anyway of the same company in the next town over.

If by her scale there is no innovation in SV and YC then its just not happening anywhere.

She's just dealing with an unrealistic expectation of the speed and efficiency of innovation.
I'm curious about this too. Why not fix such an obvious issue? Even if the workaround isn't perfect, a more graceful failure mode would be preferable.
I know this is some heavy-handed sarcasm but even still, "sexy" is not a word I think many people would use to describe functional languages.
Since they offer TCP in addition to just HTTP I doubt they use Nginx.

Possibly they use Nginx for the HTTP balancing only.
Look at his other posts. He just has joke keywords in all his posts.
"Branded Luxury" Comes To Empire Avenue
I recall reading about Dunbar's Number in a Gladwell book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

I'm curious if this jives with what pg is saying about group size–or am I comparing apples and pears?
My point was that "this. <explanation and clarification>" does not deserve a downvote (should get an upvote), because it has actual content.

However, a content-free message of simply "this." does deserve a downvote.
Should move the corporate to China and clone the heck out of everything.

Facebook -> RenRen

Twitter -> Weibo

YouTube -> Tudou

Google -> Baidu

Flickr -> YuPoo

See http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones

Yeah, Trolls, go ahead and sue them.
Surely the recent spate of websites being valued in the Billions rings some alarm bells that something is seriously up?

I don't know how you can reasonably value a company that has only existed for a year or two at that level. Things can die / be killed as quickly if not quicker than they took to grow, and we see it happen every day.
Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?
MVC3 has always been extensible enough so you could add most of the major new features in the MVC4 roadmap. The "extra mile" polish you would normally add to MVC3 applications look like they will be in MVC4 as standard:

* jQuery Mobile templates
* Mobile/Desktop view switch API
* EF Code First DB Migrations (finally, without having to rely on third party libraries such as MigratorDotNet)
* Built-in JavaScript and CSS minimization

Can't wait!
How to Save Google+
isn't it really that web startups are "easy" and hard-tech startups (hardware, biotech, alt.en, pharma etc.) are...well, hard? (I mean this relatively speaking, of course) -- It takes close to zero education to sit down and create a product on the web (how many of us were building websites when we were 12? yup.) - hell, we're even now questioning the value of a college degree... To create Halcyon Molecular, on the other hand, you need world-class scientists culled from top universities with years or even decades of experience (never mind all the liquid capital you need). It's simply a different ballgame entirely. With this marked difference in entry requirements, of course the web-app startups outnumber the Halcyon's 1000 to 1. Is that a problem? Well, maybe. But is it a surprise? Absolutely not.
No argument there. It's true of most SAAS companies as well.
The set of people who can take a company from 0 to 100 doesn't necessarily overlap much with the set of people who can manage it well at that point.
I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero

Yes, I would like to drive the cost of software to zero, for the same reasons that I would like to drive the cost of energy, housing, and food to zero.

and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'.

This is in fact how most developers are paid today. It's a relatively small minority that's writing software for sale to end users.

There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin.

And that's good. The market has figured out that using a proprietary programming language is a very bad idea. And by reducing the costs of development software, the demand for developers is increased.
When this was discussed on Quora, a bunch of other Googlers chimed in and said basically "no, not really":

http://www.quora.com/Google/Is-Googles-software-infrastructu...

I wasn't one of them, but I agree. Google's internal infrastructure has its warts, but it's generally light years more stable and reliable than anything you can get open-source. I have a teammate that worked with Hadoop in previous jobs; he said that there's no comparison between it and MapReduce. I used JSON for my previous startup's core data storage; were I to do it over again, I'd use protocol buffers, which are much, much more efficient. I use both Closure and JQuery on a daily basis; I consider them as occupying different niches, and wrote a bit more about that last night:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758317
Thanks for the feedback and I know a bit where you are coming from. It's something that is on our minds constantly with this. When we looked at contests on Facebook and Twitter now, almost all of them force one thing: the use of social capital to buy entry. Most sweepstakes on facebook put up the "Fangate" where you are forced to like the page before you can even see what the sweepstakes or contest is even about.

I'm not in love with Fangates. I'm also not saying we won't experiment with them though. But I think I know what you are saying and feel a lot of the same stuff.

But that's why we thought we were making this a lot more interesting. We've had Cityposh contests being played and won from people who don't even have Facebook or Twitter accounts. They just like playing the games. We have 6 other games right now and will continue create more that have nothing to do with "social capital".

So we try and offer all this stuff up as a menu. You pick and choose what you like. If you are having fun with the games feel free to bring in your friends on Facebook to help you win. If you don't think it's worth it, there's 6 other or so ways to just play and get points.

It's a great point though Peter, and one we aren't forgetting about as we iterate on this.
Anyone who thinks there is no innovation or risk taking in the Valley, contact me. I can point you to tons of companies that are keeping the old traditions alive. Those on the leading edge always attract wannabes and pretenders when they succeed, and when the success is big enough the wannabes and pretenders can overwhelm those on the leading edge. That doesn't mean they've gone away, it just means you have to look a little harder to find them.
As far as I can tell the founders' personalities are about the same as in the Valley generally. If there's a difference imparted by YC, it's that they're more confident. But confidence usually makes people more willing to take risks, not less.
I think you're right. I've never worked in a startup but my understanding is that their purpose is to discover profitable business models, not to put the world to rights.

If your tofu-cupcake-locations-sharing app takes off and lots of people use it then you've found a way to add value to people's lives and make yourself some dollars. That's what capitalism is all about, right?

I'm fortunate enough to have graduated from a very good university and I can tell you that the majority of people I knew there didn't leave and dedicate their lives to an altruistic quest to improve the world. Lots of them left to be bankers and consultants, whereas only a few went into academia.

There's always a tradeoff between how selfless you're prepared to be and how much money you need to take home to cover your own needs. There's nothing wrong with making money so long as you're not stealing it. And let's not forget that the more money you have the more money you're able to give away to good causes.
July 14: The Day Lion Doesn’t Ship
Multi-Master Replication in MySQL
My point isn't to agree with the author that every company should try to be a game-changer. In fact, too many SV companies already think that they are game-changers before they've even launched anything. That's part of the problem.

My point is that when you have the startup process manufactured and replicated into a kind of meta-startup (like YC), at a certain point the goals of the founders become more about conforming to the community and impressing each other rather than creating a genuine product.

Obviously not all YC startups are like this, but any time something grows and scales, there is a danger of it losing its original purpose.
"Appropriate remark of frustration" - I can't think of any (contextually) appropriate remarks that are appropriate for a five year old.
CityDeal was about as close as you can get to a full-on clone schlepped to another market. If the stories I've heard are to be believed, they actually sent people to become interns at Groupon to do reconnaissance. Granted, it was from the Samwers, who both are not Silicon Valley and are famous for cloning American startups. (They've done it with Airbnb now too.)
Note that you combine the two approaches. In a native app you can embed a webkit window and show HTML/Javascript. Since the Khan exercises are written in Javascript this could be the plan (but I don't know).
I was at the barbecue and can say that she took some license with the conversations there. I (and others I've asked) didn't hear anyone asking who was going to acquire x company, etc.

The entire article comes off as condescending and self righteous. The suggestion that your company isn't worthwhile if you're not solving 3rd world problems is absurd. As is the notion that founders who are in it to make money are misguided. This sort of thing is typically said by someone with money - in this case a VC.
The difference is the impact it will have on our society. Isolated cases of illegal actions, to support the greater good, do have their place. But praising it to the world is going to play on others' emotions, encouraging them to do the same in the future. It is a slippery slope. People will be doing it for the attention in the future, not for the greater good.

And there ARE legal actions that can be taken in these scenarios. The worldwide praise of this act will encourage people to not even look for legal alternatives. Vigilante justice will prevail, and over time that damages the greater good.
Who, me? I don't even live within a day's hard drive of California.
It's a little disingenuous to...

I know we're supposed to be civil and not say anything to anyone on here that we wouldn't say to their faces, but, well, but nothing. I'd say the following to your face.

Fuck you. It's out of line to call someone calculating and not straightforward when you have no idea what their actual motivations are.

Asshole.

Karma be damned.
An independent developers' patent pool, then.
I think I broke the 250GB cap for 6 months straight (using around 280GB to 350GB), and they didn't care. When I did 1TB in a month, they called me and thought my WIFI was hacked and warned me to not go over. The next couple month I think I did like 275GB. Overall, they are pretty nice about it. I still have my Internet.

I'm curious how far over this person went.
Women 2.0 x Startup Quote: Wendy Tan White, Founder, Moonfruit
Sustaining a successful business is a hell of a lot of work, and staying hungry is half the battle.

- Wendy Tan White (@wendytanwhite)

http://startupquote.com/post/7590260543
> it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses

In the end, when value is created in the free software ecosystem, everybody benefits more or less equally.
My guess is somewhere between sept 13-16. That's PDC 2011.