skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've started two companies that took out patents, and thus have seen this up close. My experience is:

- The market doesn't care about patents. Whether your product is good or bad a patent makes absolutely no difference to a customer.

- Competitors care very little about patents. They know the cost of patent litigation, and that you probably can't afford it. Even if you could they would probably be able to strike a deal.

- Investors, on the other hand, do care about patents. The thinking seems to go along the lones of I have no idea which company to invest in, but the ones that have a patent must be the smart ones. So those are the ones I'll invest in. - This is from Denmark, and may be different depending on your meatspace coordinates.

- Patents take time and focus. Patenting takes the focus off your product and selling it, and patents don't get you customers.

I would say that if you're gunning for investors get a patent, if you're not don't.

Hope it helps.

Edit: bonusinfo: If you have to go out and get a job at some point later in life a patent definitely helps. Employers are pretty impressed when you can say that you're so smart that you've taken out a patent...
Exporting or travelling to the US soon? Do this pronto
I just wanted to add that I love eMusic. Holy crap, what a bunch of awesome it is. I've been a subscriber since the first year it started, and I've never hesitated to re-up each year, as the selection just gets bigger, and the site just gets better and better at helping me find cool new music. Growing up, I was the kind of kid that made the rounds of independent record stores every week just to check out the new releases and pick up a few underground classics from the used bins. eMusic is like a drug for someone like me...and I spend as much each year as I used to spend per month at record stores, and end up with at least as much music that I love (because previewing is more efficient, reviews are right in front of me, and the cost per track is a bit lower than the average used CD).

The interesting thing to me is that it only took one study by a somewhat biased organization that believes strongly in, relies on, and supports, the "blockbuster" version of the music industry, for a large number of people to call "the long tail" bunk. When you already know what outcome you want to see, and you have a very strongly vested interest in seeing that outcome, it'd be foolish for folks to take those results at face value...and yet, a lot of people have.
1) Sell your Microsoft shares

2) I actually think the product is a decent one but the advert was unwatchable

3) I'm pretty sure they user Autotune to give that girl's voice the correct pitch
I might buy some glow-in-the-dark knitting thread (http://www.embroiderthis.com/glindath.html) and make me one...
news.yc always adds that leading period to my domain when it gets posted here for some reason.
The Train in Spain Replaces the Plane
I really enjoyed this but the contrast of the text with the background made it quite hard to read.

http://jottit.com/n2x8w/
I dono... do you think you can compete better by marshaling lawyers? or by implementing a product better and sooner? How much of an opportunity cost does that money represent? (I mean, do you need that funding to run?)

The big thing I see is that it takes money to be a patent troll. I guess if the patent is really strong, you might be able to get your lawyers to work for a cut of the proceeds (maybe ask your lawyer?) but that sounds unlikely to me, not that I know anything about patent trolling. if your resources are like mine, I'd not worry about the patent, and I'd focus on making something that is worth copying.

But yeah. I'd argue that patent trolling is a lot like starting fist fights- don't start if you can't win. If you loose, you get nothing. You just get a black eye and look like an asshole. On the other hand, if you build a product and then get crushed by copycat competition with better resources, eh, you still learned something, and you still look good. You created something that was worth copying. At the very least it helps you get your next job.

But then, Maybe you have access to cheap lawyer time like I have access to cheap SysAdmin time. that'd change the equation.
I don't have any experience personally, but I would say just work on your killer product. If a competitor comes along and you're already established as the leader it won't matter.

Save your capital.

Just my $0.02
A pygmy marmoset with a joystick would make an awesome mascot.
http://uartsjournals.com/2006_sara/wp-content/uploads/2007/0...
I guess it makes sense to say this evidences a stack-based model of human memory.

push memory boy

push memory ball

push action kick

evaluate.
I pulled a wishy-washy. You caught me.
I agree, I think that post text on HN should be a bit darker.
Or maybe you know, it does provide better results.
The guy who create a successful app all by himself? You bet.
Here we go again... like it or not he used his time and abilities to minimise loss and generate net worth for his investors, and that is valuable.

It is valuable because I would pay a fee to him in order for him to manage my money. Indeed you do not need to have created something to be of value.

The financial markets are a place to trade value, it can be viewed as a game, with given rules, rules which are accepted by ALL market participants who are exposed to RISK whether they know it or not. He played the game better, whether out of luck or skill he won. Just like sports stars they play by the rules and are valuable without the need to create, because its just that entertaining to see peak human performance.
I don't see much originality coming from Apple either. Not sure what he means by culture.

BTW, there's lots of cool research coming out of Microsoft Research, but little of it seems to make it into their products.
"What do you do if, halfway through the year, the corporate board tells you to cut spending?"

Whatever you would otherwise have done. If you have to lay people off, you lay people off. Since the yearly pay is known in advance, the only odd bit is the schedule of payments... if you have to lay someone off, you've actually spent less than you would have if all their paychecks are the same. But the details of all this aren't really the point -- I'm sure they could be worked out, if someone wanted to try it. I may if I hire employees at some point.

Paying partly in equity seems nice, but it seems even less sustainable than distributing an employee's paycheck unevenly.
If you like classical try youtube and Nathan Milstein, not only a pleasure to listen to but also to watch.
"The race is long, and in the end, only with yourself"

from "Don't forget the sunscreen" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwVVpwBKUp0
This is a bit of a meta comment, but that TechCrunch has only just posted this demonstrates how awesome Twitter is for being on top of memes, news, and what not. I saw the Steve Jobs stand down news on Twitter first, and this Songsmith thing went around a few of my Twitter networks a few days ago already.
He's doing more than most of congress is to prevent a recession!
That's useful to know - thanks! It's a shame that good comments die with the user, though, although I expect few users with consistently good comments are banned anyway.
1) Looking at the graph from the article:

http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-8dec08.png

For December the average page views per day averages about 200K => 6M page views.
Some large companies only patent defensively, in order to prevent other companies from patenting their ideas and then suing them. Enforcing patents is difficult.
I'm not suggesting he does this, but why doesn't he use eBay? Is it because of the PDF files? or because it's very local service?
Probably because 'brainspl.at' doesn't have a www or other subdomain.
There is a social institution in some countries where tea is consumed in the afternoon and, importantly, this comes with a societal expectation that work stops during the consumption of tea. The societal expectation is similar to the expectation in the US that most professionals are not available for productive labor between 12:00 and 1:00 because they will be eating lunch.

Thus, when an American company says they're instituting afternoon tea-times, what they mean is they are adding a break to the workday which is not typically present in American companies. When an American company which previously had afternoon tea-time eliminates it, it means that the workers have lost a socially acceptable period in which they were not expected to labor.
> open speech and that community members can be taught, through participation, to behave according to some simple constraints

That's the bread and butter of most open source communities, and part of why they tend to work: open source, in my opinion, is primarily a social phenomenon and the forces for social cohesion, whether in terms of coding standards or ideologies quickly produces communities that work well together online.
Maybe I'm just over cautious but I wouldn't have posted revenue/traffic information without his permission. Just because he was willing to tell a single customer on the phone doesn't mean he wants it posted online.
Tech Bloggers are blogging themselves into a corner. Instead of covering things that are happening of relevance, they're constantly making wildly inane speculative entries because x and y happened without factoring why z has/has not happened.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market.

If it's the best RSS reader on the planet, why even make the suggestion that such a service would just go away?
IceRocket Live Web Search Rolls Up Twitter, Blogs, News and More
Thanks - kind of what I was hoping someone would say. Our lawyer is a bit of a salesman, not really, but it amounts to as much, him saying "if you don't do X, Y Z bad things might happen." but we are thinking, it would mean we are in a good position if we do get sued for patent infringement or whatever down the road if someone else goes for this, etc. It kind of feels like an insurance policy that we can't afford for a set of circumstances that don't seem all that likely.

Totally agree on the focus issue, my partner is spending all her time stressing about this b/c the clock is ticking and I ended up reading a bunch of patents the other day as well instead of focusing on the product.

Thanks for a business perspective - we are new to this so I really do appreciate your thoughts on the subject.
I used to be a pretty good musician, but after watching that I don't think I'll be able to play anymore. Anybody want my guitars and equipment?
tough is good. yahoo needs help with bottom-line issues. some advice:

- get rid of the last old timers in the ranks (ash, filo, hilary to a lesser extent etc). they had their time at bat and then some. hard reboot on the exec ranks is needed.

- close socal offices. dumb idea left over from semel.

- proceed with more bangalore stuff. y! bangalore gets shit done

- take two more levels out of y! management depth, at a minimum

- sell search. y! is losing tens of millions annually in a war it has already lost. search is over. google won. accept it.

- y! engineering is a disaster. a jillion groups with a jillion almost completely independent production stacks. this can't go on. most y! properties should have 20% of their current eng staffing levels after so many years...yet they continue to be bloated, doing their own stuff as if they were independent companies

ok carol, that gets your bottom line in order

but what are you going to do about top-line? you can't fire your way to success. you need to figure out why people have migrated their lives to facebook...you need to figure out how to try to stem google's near-monopolistic hold on ad dollars. frankly though its not clear you can deal with either facebook or google...the time to do that was long ago. advertizers like google. people on facebook aren't coming back to yahoo.

good luck, my guess is you will realize getting balmer to make another offer for 18 for the whole company is the best bet
I have experience with a similar project. How can I get a hold of you?
Eight Python warts
True, that's what it seemed to me at first.

However after some further thoughts, I changed my mind:

I've played Worms before. He pretty much copied the entire game design from Worms. So basically, he didn't even create the element that attracts the users in the first place.

He was smart to create a Lite version, so maybe he is intuitive about marketing. That's hard to say from one example.

He got lucky, but didn't realize that he did (apparently the app store environment is rather arbitrary). He thinks he has lots of talent at things he didn't design, so he went all-in by quitting his job. Now, he spends his afternoons watching Judge Judy (or as the article says.)

Yes, he knows how to write code. That's about all I can infer.

On top of that, he makes rash decision, lacks hindsight, spends his afternoons doing useless activities.

Now I don't know him. I'm sure he's a good guy. I just think the publicity he got was rather negative for his future.

But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?
If you thought #8 was really cool and useful, you should go learn bash, sed, and awk. Stuff like #8 is what makes unix fun.
> Voluntary transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't do them.

Why would this be true?
Be Careful What You Post Online
No worries. Throw me a mail if you want to talk more :-)
I love trains! Perhaps President-elect Obama will consider this in his national spending package (economic stimulus?)

If we are going to spend the money, we should spend it on something cool! (and useful), like high speed trains.
This the modern equivalent of the Wa-Wa-Wa-Windows promo:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=4915875929930836239&#...
Obama Official Portrait: EXIF Data
Do you guys not realize that this is a joke? Because I'm fairly sure that it is done firmly with tongue in cheek -- and it's pretty damn funny, too.
Investors, on the other hand, do care about patents.

This is one reason to keep patents provisional as long as possible - you get the investors to cover the capital outlay of executing the patent.

If you launch into the WIPO "International Patent" process, for an upfront cost (US$5k or so - varies a lot on circumstances) you can extend the process by quite a bit - up to 18 months iirc. My bus partner wrote a blog on this after we'd done rounds of meetings with attorneys : http://www.jodoro.com/2008/09/patent-discussions.html
GPUs Used to Successfully Crack Wi-Fi Passwords
I wouldn't pick on MS for having a Mac in the ad.

Yeah, I find this sort of thing funny. Internet people get all worked up into a lather when they discover that, say, some machine somewhere in Microsoft's network is running Apache/Unix or OSX (OMG!). In the real world, no one cares -- they have real problems to solve, and at the end of the day, what brand of computer you're using is not a big deal.
If you watch the site with showdead turned on, you'll notice that moderation has increased as the userbase has increased. There are more dead items than ever, but such is life when trying to maintain quality.

So in short, you are seeing it.
The blog article that mentions this listing is worth reading as well:

http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com/blog/?p=409
I found a web startup here on HN that is based on a subscription model :: https://www.timesvr.com/ . They were using PayPal subscription services when I joined and left.

I am interested in these questions as well as security and data retention issues.
Yikes, link appears to be broken!
My dad runs a small web design/hosting business, most of his customers are local business. This is exactly the process he goes through to find almost all of his clients.

There was a big wave of this in '96, people going door-to-door to sell mom-and-pop shops on a website. I guess this is the second wave, upgrading them to a good website.
Email me at andrewljohnson _at_ trailbehind.com
I thought about that, but I didn't think the story would be interesting without the numbers. You know anyone else who sells a million bucks in something with 50 visitors a day? The numbers do a lot to illustrate the opportunity.

If the guy gets mad at me, so be it. But if these numbers were really a secret, he shouldn't have told them to a random guy on the phone.

I also don't think there's any harm in relating what he told me - maybe he'll get someone to help him because of it.
In case anyone is interested, I just tested a bunch of UTF-8 Japanese characters in Twitter. It counts each character as 1 on the front-end (countdown from 140 to -infinity), but counts the BYTES on the backend, so the front end will say you are under the limit, but then you click update and get an error message saying you are over the limit.

So, this idea is DOA.
You're right. Here, I posted it on my blog as well:
http://www.trailbehind.com/user/blogpost/33/
Asshat of the year
Hmm... Where does that fall in the trinity of Hubris, Impatience and Laziness?
10 ruby on rails plugins you should be using
Intel's profits dropped 90% in Q4
this works, I use it, it's open source, maybe a good place to start:

http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/demo.shtml
Am I missing something? All I see is an ad for a software product. I wouldn't buy it, but I could imagine my niece digging it.

It's a lame ad, but so are most ads.

shrug
It looks like this site has some amazing potential. But I wonder if its possible that the site makes this much because of the bad design instead of in spite of it.

I've actually seen cases where a redesign to make a site look better kills sales. I'm not saying that it would happen. I'm just saying that it could. Its possible that the kinds of people that buy firewood like simple sites like this.

On the other hand, I see absolutely no reason why putting in online ordering would hurt sales. And that would be very easy to set up.

I'll send you an email and maybe I can help him out with this.
PostRank isn't personalized, which is the big difference with Feedscrub. FS gives you unique results depending on what you like, not just based on how much people are talking about something.
Chill out, everybody. - Dr. Shadowfax on Steve Jobs' medical leave.
yeah with only difference that God din't need to know how to code.
Health Isn't a Private Issue When You're a Legend
Nintendo Wii and DS sold twice as much as Microsoft and Sony in 2008
+1 on sleep. You'd really be amazed at the difference this makes in how you think and act.
Where Sweatshops Are a Dream
A similar concept from UI design is Apple's async progress indicator. Many more non-Apple applications and websites (eg. Twitter) seem to be using it now, but Microsoft (like Mercedes) will probably never use it.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conc...

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conc...
Perhaps

boy.ball.kick()

or just

boy ball kick

This also reminds me of the way verbs can accumulate in German. (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?ReadsLikeGerman) :)
Can I quote you on that as "Computer programming is omnipotence without omniscience"?
Apple without Jobs, Obama with Microsoft?
well assuming you have a provisional patent and asking here, shouldn't you say what the patent is about?
New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience
Write it yourself -- the provisional, especially if it was lawyer authored, should be almost good to go.
Mortgage for Good People currently in Bankruptcy
In todays world it is important for there to be a network of lenders who understand the special needs of good people, with bad credit, seeking refinances and home mortgages, including first time home buyers.
377 sq feet is luxurious.

My apartment is smaller and my friends who live in Nagoya refer to it as Castle Patrick. (Half a decade of living in ~120 sq feet will alter your perceptions a bit.)

(P.S. And they wonder why I won't move to Nagoya.)
The Tax Resource Group | Tax Research
The Tax Resource Group has produced hundreds of technical tax memoranda. These memos represent our responses to practitioner ...
Sure, go hog wild.
Actually, it is a collection of images for different zoom level.For example, the lowest zoom level uses one image and the next one uses two, and then four (from what I remembered).

You can find this out in the google map API.

I imagine vector calculation is just unnecessarily complicated when simply storing the images works well enough.

In that case, panning and zooming seems easier to implement, as you are probably just moving the images around and reloading different ones when you zoom. jquery comes to mind for these tasks.

Maybe it will take some work to make it run as smoothly as Google does it, maybe not.
"There might be a certain status equated with using Google."

Maybe for the .1% of search queries you conduct with someone you know watching.
Thanks for the tip. Right now we are thinking about dropping the whole thing but we'll talk to our lawyer tomorrow and see what kind of wiggle room there is.
How would you know? I haven't used anything but Google for probably 8+ years now, except the one or two searches in IE7 or something when I first installed Windows.

For all I know, Yahoo and MSN are both better. I doubt most Google users ever check. Comparing would be rather laborious.
Isn't this a perfect use case for Wufoo?
Why Startups Don’t Make Money Anymore
without the cult-like persona following

To be fair, maybe a little cult-like persona following...
Yeah, but you can put two of these multi-use spaces next to each other. His and hers :)
This happens all the time where I grew up in South Dakota, and, like you said, in St. Paul where I lived up until a few months ago. The pictures are cool, but they really don't do it justice. When this phenomenon is happening to every streetlight you can see in the city, it is pretty striking.

edit: when i say all the time, i mean on some of the coldest nights of the year, but it is a pretty frequent occurrence.
I'd be surprised if this wasn't intentional - as the saying goes, theres no such thing as bad publicity.

The Seinfeld-Gates ads got how much free press?

I'd be willing to lay money on this being a sign of things to come with MS - with so many people poking fun at their products, they're actively trying to divert the attention to other things.

Seems more like a play straight out of the bush-cheney administration's playbook :P
The search industry has grown to a point where the different options return very similar results, however, Google does do many things better than its competitors. For one, they have cemented themselves as a part of internet culture itself. It isn't exactly a secret that Google has been compiling private information from users for years, but the company's shiny exterior keeps them coming. It's hard to imagine the internet without the catalog of Google products we all take for granted today, but realistically the day will come. Small companies will inevitably be able to use their nimbleness to attack various offerings of the bloated Google empire.
I like that the article uses a word I thought I coined (but probably read somewhere) - "techno-utopian."
interesting idea - I'll try and find out how much the pure application is.
Webhostingpad Review & Webhostingpad Coupon $25
New Search Engine, KGB: Knowledge Generation Bureau
Seems intriguing. Their web search is still in alpha though.

Here are their three youtube ads as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWXo3ctvGXI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3taQ2Ym38E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PULV8EAgTNI

Already better then cuil, imo, on the strength of their ads.
The Story of Gold
I've wondered about this. It seems common for OCaml code to only have the type annotations where necessary, but it's usually included in Haskell by convention.
Frankly, Kongregate seems better.
if you can't afford it, forget about it.