skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep coming back to this idea over and over. DabbleDB was sort of like this but it closed shop after a talent acquisition. Formstack.com (formerly hosted at formspring.com) had very cool table-building tools but it appears they pivoted to become yet another Wufoo/SurveyMonkey. JotForm is somewhere between Wufoo and a database. FormLogix is another form-builder. Hyperoffice.com and Zoho.com/creator sell themselves as MS Access alternatives. FileMaker.com is probably the closest thing to pg's request.

Nevertheless, I still feel there exists a sweet spot that nobody has managed to reach yet. But I don't know how I'd go about finding out if people would really pay for a good excel-db hybrid web-app or not, considering so many alternatives exist, many of them nearly free.
So true. Apache + mod_php is very reasonable choice. Anyone who advocates using FastCGI instead of mod_php to "save memory" just doesn't understand what the actual memory footprint of Apache + mod_php really is, and how adjust the number of Apache processes.

In fact FastCGI still ties up an Apache process for the duration of the request: Apache hands the PHP request off to a FastCGI worker, then waits for that PHP worker to send back the output, so the Apache process is still blocked waiting on PHP in either scenario.

Also the overhead of Apache serving static content is miniscule compared to the amount of work a PHP does per dynamic request, unless the static content is very large, like large media files.
It solves the chilling effect of patents on startups. Many startups have avoided entire domains because of patents. Large enough companies can negotiate reasonable license terms or fight patents in court, but small startups cannot afford the risk of a dispute.
This pledge boils down to "shine light on bad actors", but I doubt it will change any behavior. Only rent-seekers [1] want software patents to exist, and you can't decrease their reputation any more, it's already 0.

The S. Ct. already had their big chance in Bilski to dial back software patentability, and they blew it. Our only hope is Congress. (/me shudders hopelessly)

And to anyone suggesting we abolish patents completely: they increase societal utility in many sectors, most notably pharmaceuticals.

[1] lawyers and trolls.
Testing Your Code's Text
Train your computer, monitor your brand online using "sentiment Analysis"
To clarify: they can't adjust the value retroactively, right? If you find out someone is profiting from your patent in 2011 which you valued at zero the beginning of that year, you have to wait until 2012 to re-value (and potentially sue them), correct?
The Self-Regulating Advertising BIG Dogs Are Watching You
'Most of us, I believe, would prefer to see companies make a stronger commitment: "No first use of software patents" [period].'

Good idea, but it can't work. If the PTO is willing to grant a patent on a software idea, someone is going to get the patent. If Google stands down, some troll will get it instead, to the detriment of society.
Great clip. Thanks for sharing.
This reminded me that the people that seem to know the most ABOUT Steve Jobs don't actually know Steve Jobs. Really cool to read.
Do any of these companies have patents that they could use aggressively?
Surely there's been a sufficient trend of posts, particularly more recently with a number of Google+ links, that google.com is no longer seen as being indicative of anything?
sure, that makes sense.

i feel like you will have to have aggregate topic categories (everything about topic x) to get enough traffic in that topic. remember that there is typically a 10:1 reader:poster ratio (or more!) and that is what will get spammed.

my gut sense is that if you make topic directories for people to sign up to you are adding transaction costs to get people into the system.

i'm not at all sure what the solution is, though.

on cluedb i made it so that multiple people had to use the same tag on an item before it showed up. cluedb has approximately zero traffic, however.
PG, was this pledge created in response to litigation you have experienced with YC companies?

There doesn't seem to be much evidence companies with fewer than 25 employees are getting sued unless there's something left unspoken here.

I think it would be more constructive to begin the discussion of what patent reform should resemble so that companies and individuals can show support for it. Some kind of software patent working group that can put forward a vision that everyone can get behind. If enough people and companies come to support a way of thinking then it will slowly affect current behavior and ultimately shape the legal framework of the future.

Even if it was a problem that companies smaller than 25 were being sued for patent infringement, I'm not sure the legal litmus test should be how many employees are at the company.
The call to action on this post seems to be stop worrying about the fact that you will not be understood and go ahead with your plans.

I am curious. Does the fear of not fitting in outweigh the benefits of financial freedom?

I dont know the answer to this question since I have never been in that situation, so I thought I would ask.
I haven't thought through OP's proposal, but your objection is covered - by valuing a patent at pennies, a company would cause compulsory licenses/willful infringment penalties to also be worth pennies.
I think the gap will never close myself. I think it will hypothetically close and then thanks to net neutrality falling over and providers grabbing cash over bandwidth, we're going back to a thick client model.

It all goes in a big cycle which I've seen 2-3 times now in my life.
Greatest explanation of ideas for a start up
This is a great post, but what I really want to know is how to make a million bucks without Sebastian Marshall mentoring you and no real connections. Actually, maybe I start by trying harder to make connections.
What went wrong at Solyndra
This is exactly right. Tragically, it is cheaper to settle a baseless lawsuit than to win it. It makes business sense to give trolls money.
Two years ago I used an IMDB (In-memory database or Main memory database) in a project. I think it was CSQL. I think this is a nice way to have full ACID and great performance!!
I believe "use" means "bring suit or threatening same", here, not "apply for a patent".
I don't think I was clear, but my startup allows you to see drug side effects reported to the FDA by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst others over the last 6 years. It'll also allows you to narrow down those side effects to age and gender and make custom reports you can discuss with your doctor. The AERS data is public and has been for a long time, but it's increasingly harder to sort. We try to keep the site as clean and easy as possible.
> It solves the chilling effect of patents on startups

How?
Relentlessly focus on your customers: test usability.
Advertising works in a same way that Nigerian scam works. Because there are minority of people that give money to Nigerian scam.
This is a "spirit of the law" with no "law".

PG's solution, while elegant and functional for individuals, will fail for corporations.

We have a spirit-of-the-law in America with regards to being a citizen: you pay taxes and receive benefits of living here. Corporate persons are, one would imagine, also party to this spirit of the law, yet they not only ignore the spirit, they find ways around the tax laws on a regular basis.

Even if companies were forced to comply with this by law, they'd just find away around it. Sub-25 person shell companies making up large corporations. Who knows.

The fundamental problem is the same as with the rest of corporate personhood: we have given corporations the rights of individuals but they lack the implicit ethics and social peer pressures which result in moral behavior.
A few months ago I had just taken a meeting in Palo Alto and went down the street to sit at a Starbucks to wait for a ride since I rode the caltrain and had no way to get around. I was doing some work when Steve Jobs walked in. My grandfather passed away from Pancreatic cancer and was by no means walking around having a coffee with friends at this stage. It was really inspiring to see him pushing through the condition and refusing to give up.

Some jerk kid walked up to him and asked if it'd be alright to take a picture with him. Steve dismissed him with such a confidence you wouldn't expect. I think in general a guy like that with such amazing ideas has to have this extremely thick shell to the world, but underneath I'm sure he's an amazing father, husband, and friend. I was really lucky to be there that day, definitely changed my perspective on a few things.
>We need to realize that the 20-year old process designed by MSFT of hiring has been gamed and is no longer useful.

another way i use the interviews is to learn more from the candidates about things i supposedly know less than they do. Usually it would be a very specific details of some technology/products they supposedly have worked a lot on or with, and that i'd have less detailed knowledge about (along the lines for example - how it works, externally and internally, why would this way have been chosen/implemented , what were the alternatives back then and are now, etc...)
He's correct. This type inference is actually being added to JaegerMonkey according to the article, though IonMonkey will have it too when it's ready.

Crankshaft uses type feedback, not type inference. Ie: it will monitor the types of objects to generate type-specialized code, but will not do static type inference on the code to generate type-specialized code.
This is definitely a direction we're considering going in, but we're not quite sure exactly what people want.

Are there particular features we should provide, constraints on domains, or other things that we could brainstorm that you have in mind?

(You can also e-mail me with your thoughts, my e-mail is now in my profile.)
"multiple people had to use the same tag on an item before it showed up."

Alternatively allow people to vote on tags? Adds complexity to the UI, but it may be possible to keep the buttons subtle but discoverable.
PagerDuty (S10) seeking slightly sadistic devs to help page our sleeping users
As long as voting costs nothing, and the work comes from someone else, nobody is going to take it seriously.

Instead, attach the voter's name to the bill, as either yay, nay, or abstain. When their position is proven wrong, fine them to cover the damages their mistaken choice cost.

As is, voting is unjust. It leads to abominations like the draft.
iPads now beginning to transform baseball too
Definitely. We currently have higher level topic areas here - http://subjot.com/explore#featured but that whole system is still a work in progress.

We have been playing with some ML/NLP type stuff to cluster subjects that are the same. So we can tell if your post about Football is actually NFL or Premiere League... but we're a super small team and its a bit to early to put that stuff into production yet.
When I was writing software patents for a living, programmers hated talking to me. They considered it a total waste of time at best. That's part of the reason I decided to switch sides and do a startup instead ;)
The Direction of Success: The Startup Genome Compass
pg is concerned with startups, and I am too. But I think a lot of the rest of the world is concerned about what's going on between, say, Apple and HTC.
I still get pissed off every time I see homeopathic products (i.e. water sold as "medicine") in the pharmacy, like that "Head on" stuff. It's worse for some things like allergy eye drops where the homeopathic part may be written in tiny print on the package.

If I just wanted to flush my eyes out with water, I'd do that at home for a fraction of the cost. When my allergies act up, I need eye drops with actual medicine in them. And that's when I'm the least able to see well enough to avoid bottles with tiny print.

But Wal-Mart still stocks that crap in their pharmacy. Ugh. Shouldn't they limit it to medicine?
Most of my peers in school used the same "compile, debug" approach as well. Most of them are still doing it and I can't see any serious software company ever hiring them (there is no shortage of positions for mediocre programmers though, so, they're doing just fine). I don't think this symptom is unique to me and my lack of discipline. As to why I didn't just "learn" to use VS or "learn" to program better? It wasn't for the lack of trying. MSDN was worthless, written documentation (yeah, it was that far back) was worthless and all of the code that other people wrote in VS that I had to interact with was absolutely terrible. It wasn't until I switched my environment until that I got any better. I got more from a man page in an hour than I did from a week of reading MSDN.

As far as Eclipse; I've worked with large codebases and I was faster with vim and knew my APIs better than any of my colleagues who used Eclipse. I heard them complain about Eclipse freezing pretty much daily (as well as doing something wrong when it came to interacting with perforce, often in a devastating way). I know that I Got more things Done than any of them.
No but the taxes would have to be paid only after a successful patent case. The point is that the patent has no real market price until the first successful willful infringement penalty. Until that point, the price is arbitrary.
Kernel.org servers compromised
Thank god this is on HN, not sure what I would of done without reading this article. Lets make sure to spread this one around folks.
Everyday Algorithms: Sorting clothes fast
Superpacking JS Demos
What's the next Xbox going to be? It's all about definitions.
I think the title is perhaps a little off. Martin Fowler's event driven system still requires a persistance layer to track events over time. I think the real push is to move away from the static concept of data in tables to a looser change management system.

This sort of reminds me of some of the schema involved in OLAP databases for tracking changes over time and the ability to retrieve results and data for any specific point in time. Albiet with a less constricted implementation.
> I like the UI a lot

My experience was the opposite, unfortunately. Why can't the offline gmail application use the same UI as the online one? To me, that would be the obvious way of doing it.
If you want to start a movement, you can't aim too high initially, or you just stall. The patent pledge in its current form is at least fairly easy to swallow. If it sticks, it will have the effect of making patent suits against competitors seem more dubious, which would in turn prepare people for more exacting versions.

How far ultimately would you want to push it? I honestly don't know yet. Patents may have some utility. It's a very complicated question. I've read a lot about the history of technology, and I can't say for sure whether things would have gone better or worse without patents. The topic seems to be one of those where on average the strength of people's opinions is inversely proportional to how much they've studied the problem.
Superficially they are both similar. They're also a lot better than OEM-grade product. That's about where it stops, though.
> How do you decide whether to take your projects from
> hobby to company?

When I was 22 (I'm 35 now), I decided I wanted to be a freelance programmer. A friend of mine was a web designer and we decided to go into business together -- though we both had day jobs. We didn't have much money, I had about $2,000 saved in the bank. We managed to find a paying customer who needed a website for around $4k. We quit our jobs that day and turned into a "company."
This might usefully and reasonably be expanded to cover an individual or a non-profit of any size including universities, as well as a small company, in parallel with the Patent Office's definition of a "small entity" for reduced fees.[1] Companies suing universities for patent infringement for doing research is similarly problematic for innovation.

And, I think the intent would be served equally well by getting rid of the restriction to software patents.

[1] Although the small entity rules define a small company as a maximum of 500 employees, rather than 25.
Chrome's Most Important Feature is autoupdate

In that case, the latest incarnations of Microsoft Windows ought to be doing pretty well for themselves.
OK, if so, who is going to pay the $10k+ in costs to get each of these patents? Whoever pays to get a patent and not enforce it does society a service, but bears the cost themselves.
>Already most technology companies wouldn't sink to using patents on startups. You don't see Google or Facebook suing startups for patent infringement.

You would, however, see Facebook sue startups for using the word "book" in their website name.
I mean, I'm able to communicate things. But I'm interested in being able to write in a way that's effective and intriguing. I look up to people's writing like James Altucher, Tim Ferris, and I think Paul Graham's essays are absolutely great. Partly I just need more experience in things to write about, but I'm trying to be proactive in getting better at it.

My blog is on my about.me page. I intentionally don't really post the link because I'm not happy with it as to publicize it - but feel free to check it out! vjtorres.com
Sulley - Pure Python fully automated and unattended fuzzing framework
"They're talking about a specific kind of advertising, what we would call "brand awareness" advertising. The objective is, as they say, not to get you to do anything, but rather to shift your perception (implicitly or explicitly) about a product or brand. Alone, it doesn't do much of anything. Matched with direct-response, promotions, events, point-of-sale, etc ... it can be powerful. But this is a tool for mass market consumer packaged goods and the like, not your niche startup."

I think there is another principle that comes into play even for a niche startup.

An startup gets initial publicity maybe from TC or HN or even mainstream media. I think it then needs to spend money on brand awareness advertising to keep itself from becoming "out of site out of mind". Unless of course it's mentioned everyday in the news (like Twitter).

My question to you (as the ad person) is do you think that a company like myspace could have prevented their decline at least somewhat by investing in brand awareness advertising meant counter Facebooks rise? (Forgetting for a second the things they failed to do or need to fix).
Gameification part 2: the quick demo
They are getting it right about 4 orders of magnitude more often than one would get from random guessing. You consider that a non-event?
Apple loses another iPhone prototype
> If it's a good idea, someone else -- perhaps the very next person who confronts the same problem -- will almost certainly reinvent it independently.

It's not reasonable to assume that discovering the same solution to a particular problem is inevitable for everyone.

> The idea of paying monopoly rents on ideas should make no sense to anyone but a lawyer.

That wasn't my point. After the patent expires, the knowledge is available to everyone. If it's held as a trade secret, then it's possible that the knowledge is never released to the public.
Give me a break.

This is horribly poor reporting and speculation for Forbes.

HP is almost literally giving these things away, and it took a $99 price point before anyone gave 2 shits about it. From the comments I've seen online, these are being purchased by geeks to "hack" on, people who think they're getting a deal, and consumers to uneducated to understand they are basically purchasing a very expensive paperweight. None of these demographics are Apple's core business.

Additionally, there is no evidence that a loss-leader style tablet market has much merit, the one possible exception being Amazon since they have a reseller ecosystem setup that can rival Apple in some cases.

All this whole HP tablet giveaway really says right now is that WebOS, Android, Blackberry, etc. have not been able to create a device as elegant, compelling and profitable as the iPad.

Apple created the tablet market, and now everything that comes out is compared to it on all aspects. Consumers are trained to expect something both better and cheaper as the next thing, and so far that product has not emerged.
Google App Engine leaves preview, new pricing
Oh great. That's the book I don't want anyone to know about.
Sprint enters the landline business
There's huge difference between easy access costing nothing extra and "knowing what you are doing" and 259GBP / year. For you, the setup you have chosen suits probably very well but please understand that it's not for everybody. I bet there are many people who would enjoy offline features and do not have the money and know-how for Outlook with hosted Exchange.

Relevant modern interoperability is a very loose concept. There are many types of sharing. Consider that with Google docs you can share a document for example as a web page for free.

Other factors such as already using one Google product such as Gmail and Google Contacts and the synergy of using other Google products.

But yes, I agree with you partially that this problem is solved. Just not for everybody.
I would like to preempt the inevitable "but Apple doesn't do user testing" argument by saying something.

There are two known ways to make good products.

One is to hire a large team of excellent designers and design managers, relentlessly design multiple alternatives for every single option, and have many layers of design review all the way to the executive level. Continuously kill off all ideas that are not perfect, and all features that you don't have time to do perfectly. Have your designers and executives use the products realistically for long periods of time before release to identify problem areas. If you are willing to do this, feel free to not do usability testing.

On the other hand, if you have to get to market quickly, if some of your features are sometimes half thought-through, if your design department is so backlogged you're lucky to get even one thoughtful comp for the current engineering work, you had damn well better do usability testing.

These are the two choices. You should not expect to design everything once, build it once, not do user testing, and then blame your crappy product on the meme that "Apple doesn't do user testing."
They also do it defensively, to protect against someone else getting that patent and using it against them.
Apple employee misplaces/loses another iPhone prototype at San Francisco bar
When [EDIT: you think] someone's dying, it's more satisfying to tell him (or her) how much you appreciate him, while he's still around to take some pleasure in it, than to attend the funeral wishing you'd done so.
Squashing commits can fix up git history, but it does not address the bigger issues: refactoring, lack of builds, and having to deploy multiple branches to test features. The first two make it very hard to do any significant code reworking on a feature branch.
I'm not so sure pharmaceuticals are an example of good patents. Most of the patented research is actually paid for by taxpayers through the NIH, and then paid for again by patients through exorbitant prices for 15 years. Then there is the problem of people in the third world dying because of the high prices charged by patent monopolies.
Why Let Users Create Passwords At All?
To my understanding the antennas in the phones are incompatible though.

What I'm aiming for here is what the FCC was aiming for when it released this spectrum: device/carrier interoperability.
Apple searching for another missing prototype left in SF bar
Interviews: What do you ask them?