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> I no longer care much about the "they're a business, they're allowed to make a profit" line

You have to consider both the seen and the unseen: consider the case where a drug is not developed in the first place because the return on investment is (expected to be) forcefully lowered below where it is profitable. Or even more abstract: research is slowed down due to more risk adverse behaviour, delaying a major breakthrough.

Investing in drug development is very expensive and very risky. Very risky investments command a large return on their success.

It's easy to focus on the large sums of money being made on specific drugs, but pharma as an industry isn't inherently more profitable that other industries as a result. The cost of lower prices on successful drugs is going to come from somewhere.
Is it that difficult to tell the difference between the capital letter O and the digit 0?
I put "more likely to cause layout trouble" bits closer to the front where they'll be spotted more quickly. e.g., float, border, width, etc.
I think his point was that these "Specific" patents were bogus patents in the first place...

"None of them represent unique and new ideas at the time of the filing. I supect they all can be thrown out over prior art if Facebook takes the time and effort to do that."

I do think that pre- IPO this is a pretty dirty play. You might have a point if you can show a case where Fred Wilson or VC's sues other companies right before an IPO on bogus patents...I am not aware of any such instance.
There's also the "Subway Challenge":

Go to a restaurant like Subway where you go along a counter and tell the employee what you want on your food item. The challenge is to get through the whole thing without a single "um", "uh", or similar word. It's VERY easy to say "uhhh.... ummm.... pepper jack cheese!" when asked to make a choice on the spot like that.
I'm sorry, but this is the dumbest 'app' ever.
ah, thanks for clarifying.
Here is a great response to the news (sorry if already posted somewhere on HN):

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/03/yahoo-crosses-the-line.html
Nor have I. I've heard "superlinear" in some cases, but normally just "n log n". I think I might misinterpret "linear logarithmic" as "linear or logarithmic" as if they weren't sure which it'd be.
I propose the following solution.

R&D stays in private sector. All successful drugs are bought by the government at the cost of R&D and a sizable profit. The government, then, distributes it. Government can control the distribution and Pvt. markets can control the invention.

Government can then tie up with other govts. and allow sales of the said medicine in those countries.

It's not an ideal solution, but it has best of both capitalist and socialist ideologies.
Don't get any phenolphthalein on you. Don't get it anywhere near your mouth, nose, eyes, or other sensitive parts. For the love of your sense of taste, do not drink the damn stuff.

My most vivid memory of high school chemistry is how awful that tastes. It's like pennies, but not as sweet and more chemical. My second most vivid memory of high school chemistry is how cold my extremities felt after it lowered my blood pressure.

I was wearing gloves. I was wearing goggles. I washed afterwards. It still got to me.
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I'm getting it for myself -- Kernighan is a wonderful writer, and I want to see how a master can explain technical concepts gracefully.
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> You don't need to be an industry expert to grok that those numbers are wildly unsustainable.

Tell you what. When these companies stop being the most profitable in America, or even just when their EPS starts declining, I'll believe you.
Well, they picked one winner - Leyland - and force-merged them with all the losers, in the hope that Leyland's magic would somehow infuse them. Instead, it destroyed them all. Some of the brands, like Jaguar, Daimler, Land Rover, etc live on. But not as British companies.
I'd say there is nothing complex in correct mathematical definition of O() to warrant simplifying it.
This title is unnecessarily sensational. Why not use the actual title of the post ("Yahoo! Crosses the Line")?
The reason why the cost of R&D is inflating so much is due to relentless addition of new regulations, new requirements, new safety-related trials demanded by the authorities. Add to that that almost every other country has specific requirements that do not fit with what was developed and proven before, and that's just another 2-3 years clinical trial you need to put up with. This is really getting insane and there is science to back all those regulatory differences, some driven by pure ideology.

As you mentioned the patent cliff is looming for a number of big pharma actors, and what this is going to result in is less innovation and more strategic moves to other "easier" markets such as generics or OTC drugs. This is just plain bad for everyone in the end.
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After a cursory glance, it seems a lot like Code by Petzold[1], or at least a similar concept in less detail. I loved that book, and I know most others did as well. I'd love to take a look at it.

[1] http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/
When I read the title my initial though was that this was a new book about D programming language from Digital Mars...
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using hsv rather than rgb often works better for this kind of thing (structures look "more coherent").
How many of those 2000 are in the UK?
Point taken, but I (and many others) count the Windows, Office(business) and Server division as a whole since it's all connected/dependent of the Windows OS's huge market share.

Also mind I'm considering the vast deficit left by the devices division, meaning that despite the success of the X360 it still has to break-even after all the money lost with the first Xbox, the RROD, Zune, Kin, etc...
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I'm in the mood to pick nits this morning.

The article links to the description of the patents http://paidcontent.org/article/419-meet-the-10-patents-yahoo... and tries to summarize each one in "plain English."

> Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected
> content based on another user’s authorization level (Filed
> 2005, Issued 2009)
> In plain English: Share an item only with selected friends

This is actually about a preview of what a given user (friend) would see.

The reason software patents suck so hard is because for every 10,000 totally bogus patents there's one that when you read it makes you think, wow, that really is an invention.
What went wrong with Leyland? It's a very respected trademark here in Uruguay, we still have some Leyland buses in operation here, including 1949 Leyland Olympics (!!!)

It's even on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyland-MCW_Olympic

"The Olympic was popular in Montevideo, with 240 entering service in the 1950s and 1960s. 50 of these were new to the Montevideo local authority, most of which passed to major independent and the other customer CUTCSA on privatisation. Some of the 240 were still in use as late as 2001 including a 1951 EL40 in use as a driver trainer."

Edit: kind-of-answered simultaneously here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698064 while I was writing the question :)

"they picked one winner - Leyland - and force-merged them with all the losers"
I think the table is the meaningful thing; but it ought to use named numbers like "10 quadrillion" instead of 10^16
Ask HM: Facebook's “The Hacker Way” ... coding style?
I'm pretty sure that you have heard a lot about Facebook's The Hacker Way recently. I'm really interested to know how we can deploy this approach in action, when we are "coding". Actually, I know that my style is way different from this method. Mark says :

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete.

Alright ... So how do you attack a problem that you have never heard of?

For example, You are supposed to learn Django or RoR framework from scratch. By this way, one should read "proper tutorials", "implement" the sample codes and refers to main documentation until he/she can write them by his heart. Am I right?

As you can imaging, it's very different reading 800 pages books on just one technology (Hibernate, for instance). Is it your style of learning? If so, what do you think of it ?
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>Better to just negotiate cleanly with the company for the drug you want, and sell it all on your own market like the NHS does.

Well that's what I meant negotiate a "fair" price that would encourage further investment but you don't overpay - the problem is that unless you have competition/substitutes you can't have market pricing so you need to have a good estimate of "fair" price, eg. say a company comes up with 100% effective HIV cure tomorrow - no competition, nothing comes close, a lot of people would pay gold for that but well over investment/production cost and profit is in many multiples of going rate. You would say "fine" obviously there's a high demand - but the reality is that the demand is inelastic and supply is artificially restricted by a government granted monopoly - reverse engineering costs + production cost would allow a lot lower prices, so you aren't benefiting the consumers (the discovery has already been made) or optimally allocating resources (you have recovered investment/production costs, earned standard profit rate and then some) the thing you earn on top of that is deadweight loss from rent seeking so you need to come up with some metrics to avoid that and also set expectations for investors.
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We can (and should!) demand that they not do the expected

Then you are demanding that the board neglect its fiduciary responsibilities and go to jail.
If you consider that an e-mail is a type of instant message, it makes even less sense.
Ummm...the book is authored by Brian Kernighan, not dmr. But I can see that the crux of your argument still holds if you substitute Kernighan back.
The problem is innovation is measured as number of patents filed. Investors who want more innovation, judge how innovative a company is by number of patents. More patents -> more innovative. And so that's what managers optimize for.

The program is that is a ridiculously crude measure. Like measuring programmer output by lines of code, this idea that measuring innovation at such a micro level even makes sense, needs to die.
His blog title is "A VC" plus right at the top of the page it says "Fred Wilson is a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures" so yeah, I think I was on pretty firm ground there.
It conveys the tone of the post much more than the original title. And those are Fred's actual closing words. I say this title is spot-on.
Great thought-provoking comment.

edit: why was this downvoted? I wasn't sure what to say but wanted to let the commenter know that I appreciated his contribution. Should I have just upvoted?
The banking industry managed to wreak itself without serious government investment. The trouble was an absence of effective deterrents to bankers seeking dangerously high levels of leverage.
I see you too are interested in procedural content for games :)

http://opencity.sourceforge.net/B/viewtopic.php?t=55 might be interesting, especially the links
I agree, if your goal is to teach rigorous proof techniques. However, if your goal is to introduce the topic to someone, this[1] is a much better way of going about it.

This is what separates the great math teachers from the mediocre ones; anyone can "teach" the definition, but only a handful are able to truly own the topic and introduce it in a simple and straightforward manner.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/487258
Fred's official standpoint is here (the slug already says it):

http://www.usv.com/2010/02/software-patents-are-the-problem-...

Of course it is not clear if he lives up to that stance in all cases (http://www.usv.com/investments/) , but I read CPlatypus' statement more as pointing out the structural problem.
It definitely would have started under the old CEO's watch, but perhaps just as a contingency plan and as a negotiating tactic. That's just smart.

Actually pulling the trigger on the plan? Trading reputation for short term dollars? That piece of stupidity is all on the new CEO. They have about $10 billion in the bank and in long term investments, so they don't need the short term cash which would be the only possible justification for this kind of stupidity.
There is no doubt that Fred Wilson is a VC. You haven't shown that he pushes startups to apply for frivolous patents, though.
I mostly agree, but there's nothing wrong with trying to explain the underlying concepts in prose without simply jumping straight to the formal mathematical definition. This blog post doesn't even try, really.
The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, writes about a related topic on the supply side in his book, "Let My People Go Surfing." The way he phrases it is, "What is the company's real product?" and he defines product as that which the company makes its decisions around.

Some of it is a little simplistic, but the points that have stayed with me are 1) the product of a large publicly traded company is its stock price, and 2) the product of a small scrappy start up is the start up itself.
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Has that ever happened over something like this?
Neat. That might just work... :-)
> Was it a disaster or did they just pick the losing team.

The government always picks the losing team. The winning team doesn't want anything to do with the government.
It sure had his signature because after all he is the executive but it doesn't mean he had any power to pull it off nor to shut it down.

I think that at those levels and in such companies, investors are really pulling the strings. In other words, CEO is the first level of management. Disposable and convenient for all matters.

Edit: but ok, perhaps that's just my point of view.
If a company takes on debt to finance development, then "the discovery has already been made" isn't the same as "the discovery has already been paid for".
The US government picked winners like Intel, saving the US semiconductor industry through protectionist policies. (http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html) In fact, the US technology industry was developed through enormous subsidy, from transistors to the internet.

Economist Ha-Joon Chang discusses that's how powerful nations develop. The entrepreneurial Japanese government's first forays into the auto industry were failures, but of course they kept at it, learning from failure. That's the nature of investment, as any HN reader should know.
Evil is as evil does. Or are you suggesting that it's possible to be evil without doing evil, or vice versa?
"Dima is Russian. Some Russians are crooks. Therefore Dima is a crook."

This bad logic is what you are applying here.
I use a personal email domain on gmail[1] as well.

But for a different reason: It allows a "catch all" email, so I register on every site as <sitedomain.com>@vekslers.org and have my account act as a catch all sink. This allows me to both filter out spamming sources and trace back who leaked my email address to 3rd party sources. This approach is a pivot on the name+tag@domain.com email tagging which most js form validations devs are unaware of it being a legal email syntax and thus do not allow.

This relives me of the need to worry to post my email address, which is news.ycombinator.com_3698017@vekslers.org out in the open (true emails are very much welcome).

[1] http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
+1. Nothing more to add. Other than: I think we're stuck with the current system for at least a decade because we just "did" patent reform which was really just a dog and pony show for the unwashed masses.
In what way is this consumerism? Consumerism is commonly used as a pejorative to refer to entitled people buying things they don't need. Raspberry Pi is not a consumer product, it's a niche project. This isn't a case of people trampling each other to buy an iPad so they can buy more apps and iTunes music. People want these so they can create. That's not consumerism.
Good customer service is expensive. Paypal doesn't sell itself on customer service for sellers, since it perceives (probably correctly) that those sellers using Paypal have nowhere else to go.
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TBH it would be a true douche move if we were in say 2006, but right now FB is worth almost ten times more than Yahoo, so who cares? they can either buy Yahoo or even sue it into oblivion.

Is not that crazy to assume this may actually be a last-resort strategy to sell Yahoo once and for all. Most agree Yang dropped the ball when he refused MSFT's offer.
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They don't have to play this game. Once they dared to: start your hate machine.
it looks like I can't edit it, dont know why..
They were useful for navigating the web between 94 and 96 or so. They then proceeded to acquire a few sites which were also useful at one point in time, (Flickr et al), although they do seem pretty good at driving such sites into irrelevancy.
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While assuming that a life tomorrow is worth about a life today might be reasonable, we're talking about research costs for drugs, and the comparison does not hold to assume that a new drug tomorrow is worth about an already existing drug today.

New drugs are often about squeezing out those last few years of life-expectancy, and even if they're not, they're a marginal increase over today's drugs. Meanwhile today's drugs fail to save many many lives because they are unaffordable in order to pay for R&D on new drugs (which will also be unaffordable).

See, the system is very broken on both sides.

But the choice to me seems very clear:

- on the one hand you have +developing new future drugs. except those drugs will only be affordable to a tiny fraction of the world population. additionally this lines the pockets of big pharma and the bureaucracy that keeps the system broken as it currently is ("Bayer was disappointed")

- on the other hand developing new drugs will be slowed down for some time, but all people will be able to afford the many current ones that could be saving lives today, big pharma + your FDA bureaucracy will fail and maybe that opens room for a new and better system to emerge so that R&D on drugs may start once more but in a more efficient manner. All the while lives are being saved and quality of live is being improved because today's drugs are affordable to everyone.
A quick win:
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Same in the UK: You cannot (legally) charge someone for a product ordered over the internet until you have shipped it under the distance-selling regulations.
I think you're confusing MPEG and MPEG-LA, but either way you're mistaken.

MPEG claimed they were going to create royalty-free profiles of H.264 and then went back on that (possibly due to cunning political moves by Microsoft) and now claim to be evaluating a couple of ways forward for royalty-free codecs (a profile of H.264 again, or building on older MPEG 2 tech). It's fairly obvious that it was pressure from (primarily) Google & Mozilla that put RF codecs back on the table for them.

MPEG-LA reduced the uncertainty around their future codec licence payments, and as a result their maximum profits. Again almost certainly due to Google and Mozilla.

They didn't take their ball and go home, they negotiated and competed and as a result won valuable concessions that continue to have value as the next round of codec development begins.
Really? Most agencies I know in NYC/London/SF have a clear separation of roles.
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That's a fair point, but I don't think it gets very far. He also goes on to say, "I don't think there's a unique idea out there in the web space and hasn't been for well over a decade." That's a pretty common attitude. Have you ever seen anyone say "yeah, that software patent is truly novel"? Ever? I haven't, so he's not really making a distinction between these specific patents and others. Without such a distinction, he's essentially saying that any patent suit would be wrong . . . but then why do he and his ilk put such pressure on startups to generate the raw material for those suits? Whether Fred himself is actually hypocritical on this point is not clear, but without a strong statement from him about that kind of pressure - and there's none in that post - he still seems so.

Is it a bit dirty to do this immediately pre-IPO? Yeah, I think so, even absent other concerns. But Fred's comments go far beyond these specific patents at this specific time. He talks about a very general "unspoken line" that web companies shouldn't cross. It's the general statement I object to, not the specific one.
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Interesting. I use my tablet landscape except if I'm reading an ebook. Maybe there's something more natural about landscape views, and I've been conditioned to read in portrait by printed material.

On smaller devices I find portrait more natural, possibly due to the one-handed nature of use.

Out of interest: do any of the apps she uses support landscape? Is she choosing that orientation or are the app designers making the decision?
They publicly stated on their own website (and it was re-reported around the web) that the $25 model will be produced later this year, and the $35 unit would be shipping first.
Can anyone expand on layer comps? Is this something that our designer can use to show different states? E.g. A list with items / a list without items (rather than 2 layer groups)
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I'd far rather read "10^16" rather than "10 quadrillion"
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