skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a company is making a product which people switch every two years, and if a competitor is shamelessly ripping off features, it is extremely insulting and awfully naive for them not to seek legal measures.

Imagine if people switched social networks every two years, and Twitter copied everything Facebook comes up with. What in the OP's mind should Facebook do? Ignore and compete? Probably not. Protect and compete? Maybe.

It is Apple's (or Samsung's) responsibility to protect interest of people who spent years imagining and inventing these features. It is also their responsibility to protect themselves and the thousands of developers who earn their living off their platform.

Microsoft just showed just how much more can be done in phone and tablet world. Samsung shamelessly copies. So does Apple, but that does not mean companies should ignore blind ripping off of their hard work.

Besides, the competition from copycats does not actually help customers. Hundreds of companies ripped off the Walkman. How much innovation did we see from what Sony had? It only usually drives the race to the bottom of pricing tier until the actual innovator chokes to death.
Using the cursor keys to try and scroll on that site is really aggravating.
This is not really the norm, but it does happen every now and then that pull requests are refused cause "they'll do it themselves". At which point you may think "my code sucks that much?"

Then when they do, they just copy your pull and put no credits, and there, you understand. Classic :P

But then again, it's not the norm. I don't give a fuck about pull requests or anything similar anymore since a long, long time. I just put it there for anyone who wanna take stuff, but the fixes are generally for my own use. And I'm usually too lazy to fork and fix the world, anyway.
There's a big difference between selling a piece of cloth or leather that looks similar as a marquee brand and claiming that it is in fact produced by that brand (what we usually mean by "counterfeiting") and producing a highly complex mix of electronics and millions of lines of operating system code, none of which were copied.

Samsung doesn't pretend to sell Apple products and I don't see how anyone walking into Verizon store can walk out with a Samsung phone thinking that they bought an iPhone and that's why there's no "counterfeiting" involved. Android has a very distinct look and feel to iOS and again, I don't see how anyone could confuse the two.

The gravest error in your comment is assuming that Apple is in it for the justice. Apple is scarred of the runaway train that is Android. They are having Windows flashbacks and faced with loosing in the marketplace they go for legal blitzkrieg.

I can't describe how hilarious it is when a company built on ripping off other people's ideas (Apple I/II was a mass production of a motherboard inspired by hobbyist home-made motherboards; Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with) suing other companies for using one or two ideas out of tens of thousands that are present in a modern smartphone (including those that Xerox Park came up with).

Jobs himself is on the record pontificating about how Apple is shameless about copying other people's good ideas which he apparently doesn't find in any way conflicting with suing everyone else for allegedly copying Apple.
I don't think raising early increases the chance of that company going for a talent acquisition at all.

Just one example: I work for Cloudera. As I understand it, we raised a fairly large round when we had almost no employees or revenue, and weren't exactly sure what we were doing. And we absolutely needed to. Hadoop wasn't mature enough for most businesses yet, most businesses weren't really looking to do the things that Hadoop is letting them do yet, and the company was nowhere near mature enough to know how to support enough big enough customers to pay the bills anyway. We needed time, so we needed funding.

3+ years later, everything has matured and there will certainly be no talent acquisition.

More generally, your claim doesn't seem to make much sense. Why does raising money make a nascent company more likely to sell out for a small talent acquisition? The real reason that companies that raise early sell more than companies that raise late is that the set of companies that raise late is a biased sample. It is, by definition, a set of companies that got too big and successful to be talent-acquired.

In the current landscape, early companies that haven't yet started printing money may well find that their best option is to take a fairly large check and work for someone else. I can't see how investment would make them less likely to get past that stage; investment gives them more time to figure out their business, and less incentive to sell because investors will get a cut and not really want them to.
I agree that not every business needs to raise. If your goal is to slowly build a lifestyle business, there's no rush. If you want to become huge, funding helps a lot. Being patient means you give opportunity to others to bypass you while they raise - we had 2 funded competitors rise up after we launched. Luckily, we outperformed them both, and one of them will soon become an affiliate, but if they had stronger teams the outcome could've been the opposite.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit.
I've recently gotten a 500/500 fiber connection (I'm located in the Netherlands) and it's been fun, but I haven't found a way/service to saturate it yet. It's fast enough that I don't think about the speed but 100/100 would probably be able to provide that as well.

An internal network with just fiber subscribers would be cool though, I seem to remember old DirectConnect networks that would only allow university connections with big links.
I find it really strange that you build a service without an idea of how to monetize it. Surely "being bought" isn't a valid business model.
Tambur.io provides your business with APIs to build scalable real time web apps
MS disbanded the IE dev team for one reason: fear. The mostly unwarranted legal harassment that MS faced for defeating Netscape fare and square with a superior product (which largely served as a proxy for punishing MS for other, admittedly bad, behavior) caused them a lot of grief. So they gave up, and as a result we were saddled with a lack of innovation in web browsers for about a decade.
>Admittedly it is missing lots of the features of Mathematica

That's quite an understatement.
When Talking to Users Saves You Time
You dont get any compensation for noncompetes?

I am not from the US, but where I come from noncompetes are enforced, but are very expensive (by law) for the companies so they are not used that often.
A discussion from 2008:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209955

A lot of the current post seems to be taken straight from there. Compare, for example:

> in Alzheimer’s patients their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.

with Goebel's quote:

> 'Their short-term memory hardly works, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.'
In baseball, a "no-hitter" is a game were one team prevents the other team from hitting the ball all game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hitter) and is quite a rare feat. That Dock Ellis was able to pitch a no-hitter while on LSD is even more remarkable. The article is more about Dock and his life than that one event.
I see that User growth is stabilizing since around July 23; if you were to plot the first graph from that date (instead of June 29th) you would probably see a steady (not growing) number of new daily users.

Tomatoes by day (actual usage), however, is growing at a much quicker rate than users. This can only mean that part of the user base is actually using the service more.
EFF doesn't ask companies to ignore patents but for the people to voice the opposition to patents so that the government has some incentive to reform the patent system.

And in your "fair play" analogy you should be explicit about which party do you think doesn't play fair. There seems to be a misconception that it's about Apple accusing Samsung of patent infringement but if you pay attention it's also about Samsung accusing Apple of patent infringement, so at best it's a pot-kettle kind of situation.

And if you pay further attention, Apple has just been found guilty infringing Samsung's patents in Korea so "Apple good, Samsung bad" seems to be a simplistic view of the situation.

We know one thing about this war: Apple fired the first shot.
Rcollectd - An idea for a simple and minimal system statistics collector
I think the point of showing relative dates is that the web is International and cross border. and if you display a date time. You need to define next to it Which Timezone !

Then it would be complicated for the users living in USA to read the status of His Japanese friend that is stamped with a future date while it was actually posted a minute ago.

Another Scenario:
Which Time-stamp you want to use. the Client or the Server ?
Imagine a user in London using a server in Singapore, which time stamp you want to display, the Java-script generated Time-stamp for the Client's browser in London, or the Server time-stamp in Japan ?
In Malawi, the average salaries of good developers is 14,400 USD (22% of that of Latvia). Lord have mercy!
The LG Prada was nothing like the iPhone, and using it, simply because it had a form of "touch" interface, to try and defend your point is simply false.

None of the key iPhone technologies were present on the LG Prada. It was single touch, it did not resolve touches into single pixels like the iPhone does, it thus had very large buttons. It had no stack oriented UI, no tab or navigation based UI, no scrolling lists. No two fingers, and really to call what it had a "UI" is not quite correct at all. It wasn't even a smart phone, it was a feature phone with a gimmick. There were no apps, except for the built in features that make up all feature phones.

In short, none of the innovations of the iPhone were even in it, and it didn't ship until After the iPhone.

It was announced before the iPhone shipped in part to try and steal some of Apple's thunder but it doesn't even compete in the same category as the iPhone. So, bringing it up is, quite simply, dishonest.

It really is quite astounding the level of self deception and rationalization that Apple haters have to employ to pretend like Android and all these multi-touch smart phones that came after the iPhone, are not copying the iPhone simply because someone had a device with a screen you could touch prior to 2007.

But when you state such things in public, you step beyond self deception and into the arena of simple deception.

Further, the fact that the LG Prada example has been brought up ad infinitum for the past 5 years from people such as yourself, and that you still bring it up now, shows that the actual facts of reality are not relevant to you.

Your only point is to defend your ideology. And to do that, you are, quite simply, lying.

Touch is not what Apple invented. There were touch screens going back in the past. Jeff Han made one using Cameras. That's not prior art for the iPhone. Neither is the movie 2001: A space odessy, or any of the other long refuted nonsensical claims one finds android fanatics making.

Consequently, I am forced to reach the conclusion that you recognize that Android is a blatent ripoff of the iPhone, and you simply don't care. You either hate Apple or Love google, or you've attached to some anti-IP ideology, and that is more compelling to you than logic and reason, and the simple facts of history.

I know that this site is full of people who share your ideology and you will shout down and vote down anyone who disagrees, while calling them "uncivilized" and other names.

But that does not change the facts, and you cannot refute the facts.

You can only evade them. Or you can lie, and choose to live in your own made up reality.
Top 10 Y Combinator startup fails
> selling for cheaper

Ignoring the rest of the discussion, I just wanted to point out that "cheaper products" most certainly count as "consumer benefits" where I'm from.
Typically the client checks to see whether the server has the right certificate. That protects against this.
1. A $50k investment
2. A job or research position
3. Marry a brazilian :)
4. Be over 60 and with +$2000/month income

And there are no immigration quotas.

A foreign developer will probably find a job very easily, but be prepared to live on 50% less.
Apple share in China Smartphone Market Almost Halved in Q2
Yeah, totally spaced on the badges. Thanks for pointing them out :)
I don't know much about this, but the line you seem to be describing is trademark violation. Things that distinguish iphones.

That's a whole different set of laws where the line is much closer to counterfeiting. You can't sell fake Gucci products but you can sell things that are very similar to Gucci. In fact, innovative high street fashion permeates all the way down within a couple of years. If the designs aren't inherently expensive to manufacture, they'll be very close to exact copies.

Trademark exists, as far as I understand, to protect consumers. As long as they know they are buying a knockoff, it's OK.
You only have to look at FMCG to see that you can come pretty damn close and yet not cross the line.
It's not fine because "troll" would be recognised here as the standard meaning, not the meaning from 1600.
That was a very interesting and funny read! Thanks!
Which homes in handy when you get a new phone...
Most users are going to have trouble enough trying to forget about the missing Start Menu even after watching the Welcome Intro...

Exactly, most users being the key point. You need to target all this stuff for the lowest key denominator and unfortunately for those of us on HN... but at least we have the knowledge that this exists. I think krautsourced point stands.

Damn if you do, damned if you don't!
"Tragically sad?" This is brilliantly creative, and much more humane than keeping them under lock and key or in restraints.
Is there any actual demonstration of a succesful attack on sslv2? I've found only
http://seclists.org/pen-test/2010/Jul/14
which implies it is possible. It would be a nice exercise to actually try to MITM the MS servers here.
This is simply not true. This is a post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationalization that works with people who see that almost all the smartphones out there have copied the iphone and so they believe that they must have existed contempraneously with the iphone.

Or put another way, you might as well have said "There was nothing new about the iPhone, everything important about it existed in the Motorola Razr-- it made calls, worked on GSM, had a screen, installable apps and would let you browse the web."

Or, "Marconi and Bell are the ones who invented the iPhone! And they did it decades before Apple came out with their shiny toy which people only buy because its pretty and marketed really expensively."

Being opinions these statements are more or less true, but they make the same error yours does.

Just because the landline phone pre-existed cellphones doesn't mean that cellphones are not innovative. A cellphone isn't just an execution of a landline phone.

At the same time, just because rudimentary touch screens existed (like Jeff Han's which used cameras) does not mean there was nothing new in the iPhones' touch screen (or do you believe there is a camera sitting about a foot behind your iphones screen taking pictures of your fingers?)

If you recognize that Jeff Han's camera based touch interface is obviously not the one used in the iPhone, then you must recognize that the iPhone contains unique (at the time, before it was copied) innovations.
First, the hobbyist home-made motherboards were not stolen. Wozniak built a great motherboards which then were mass-produced. He was a genius, he hasn't copied anything.

Second - Xerox was paid for their Xerox Parc patents. That's an obvious difference. Samsung haven't paid Apple a single cent for using similiar ideas.

Samsung simply built phones which looked extremely similiar to Apple ( design and OS ). This is an elaborate action because Apple built a great brand around their smarthphones. When people saw iPhone they thought about something high-quality and elite.

Samsung wanted to gain on that so they've built very similiar phones and now people begin to associate them with the brand built around iPhone.

To me, it's a pretty dickish move.
For our product, we know that there is commitment to cash for this category of products, because there are other products in that area which do well as far as we know. What we don't know is whether people pay $X for exactly our product. We have pondered a lot over the free 30x500 course materials, but haven't got around to join the course. We did not spend much on Adwords (< $100) and we did already gather some addresses. But it's hard to estimate the actual conversion rate without asking people to really pay money for it, and without screenshots and the like.

So, yes, we thought we could validate the idea with an Ad campaign, but we did not do it right, I think. We did not measure anything significant at all, and what we did is gather an "I'm interested" list. You are right that perhaps the best ways to validate a product is to ask real people - like asking quite bluntly "Would you pay $30 per month for this product, with this certain USP?", or even "Would you pay me $100 upfront to build this product?". That takes a lot more guts than just setting up a landing page and an adwords campaign, but I see that we should do it.
I'd like to be able to compare the same thing across providers.

e.g. what's the price difference between an AWS medium instance and the equivalent on Joyent/Rackspace?
Me too. But I suspect that they might be, it's probably contained within the Amazon sector.
The innovator is also losing money here. What happens when innovator dies because of loses and we only have copycat left? You have people using Windows XP till 2012 (and that is despite innovator coming back to industry).
> Macintosh was a blatant and wholesale ripoff of every fundamental idea that Xerox Park came up with

I think it is really tragic that so many people will repeat this obvious and blatant lie, in public no less. Is your ideology that much more important than your integrity?

Apple paid Xerox handsomely, in pre-IPO Apple stock sold at a discount for a LICENSE to use the technology that Xerox PARC was developing. Full stop.

Further, the Xerox systems were very rudimentary. They were a lab, and there's a huge difference between a lab experiment and a product. Xerox didn't have a GUI, for instance. They had the idea of windows but they didn't work like windows, they couldn't overlap. At least %60 of the innovations in the Macintosh were developed by Apple. Xerox showed Apple a direction which was important.

Thus to claim that it was a "ripoff" is to simply tell a lie.

Your misrepresentation of Job's statement is also false, but at this point I've come to believe that you, and the rest of those with your ideology simply don't care about the truth.
Rather than piling another pull request on top... you've put

[@WHWeb](tyyp://twitter.com/WHWeb)

I assume you meant http? Other than that extremely minor issue these look like some solid modifications to me - well done :)

(In case it's relevant: I'm from the UK.)
Error: DDG is not a browser.
The description you used on your lionite portfolio page sounded good: "Binpress is a marketplace for open-source code. Developers can sell and buy source code from each other, creating additional revenue for sellers and an inventory of certified, production ready source code for buyers. "

It's not perfect, but it at least mentions the key idea of 'marketplace for code'. This phrase (or something like it) should be used, even if you continue by saying that Binpress has open-source code too.
Lance Armstrong Statement: "Enough is enough"
Nginx Vs Xitrum (Scala) benchmark
If you quit a job to form your startup, you can get COBRA for 18 months.
Trademark is one set of laws, but you can only trademark names and images. You can't trademark designs.

For that there are Design Patents. Design Patents are very different from Utility Patents.

Design Patents are effectively a trademark on the design-- the look, the shape, the key design choices of an item.

In that regard Samsung clearly copied Apple's designs, and the documents that came out in the trial show that they did this intentionally-- by examining Apple products and talking about how they need to make specific changes in their products to look the same way.

Design Patents are the issue at trial here (or well, at leat half of the issue at trial here.)
i think Microsoft hasn't even gotten started in the phone and tablet markets yet. thats coming soon. should be interesting.
Show HN: Discourse has collaborative document editing now
It's a brilliantly creative solution to the problem, but that does not change the fact that the situation is tragic and sad.
Last sentence is so inspiring!
Longchamp outlet factory
For using *BSD as a desktop, going with something like PC-BSD would be a good choice. PC-BSD is basically a friendly FreeBSD with its own sort of package system called PBI while still maintaining the ability to use the ports system.

FreeBSD by itself can be used as a desktop OS but can become troublesome compiling everything (you can use pkg_add for installing pre-build packages). However, by using PC-BSD you won't need to do this.

Also, FreeBSD/PC-BSD does have the proprietary NVidia drivers. I do not think DragonFly/Net/OpenBSD has it.

All in all, I have found PC-BSD to be quite nice.
Source code version controlling may have "less" to do with "agile" or "collaborative development", but how can you "collaboratively" track changes among developers? Version control helps. I have ever been a detester of version control before, but I saw it in practice where I was in a bigger group of developers. It changes my whole thinking about it.

In addition, we used ticket versus code check-ins during scrum sessions. It was great!
Depends, when you've got one studio to work in, a very finite amount of time allocated to you and you've got to build and take down an entire set they'll generally not be too worried about keeping things in giftable condition.

I don't necessarily agree with it, but I do understand it.
But you can sideload other apps on Windows 8. You can bypass smartscreen if you want to override it, or you can turn it off entirely. What's the difference?
You make good points, and it is worth noting that, unlike Samsung, microsoft has a license from Apple to use Apple's technology. (they have a cross licensing agreement) That agreement prohibits copying.

As a result, Microsoft made a touch screen based UI, but made an innovative one.

Whether Microsofts work is good or not, it is clear that they tried something very new (unlike Android which is a replication of the iPhone UI to a large extent) and only by doing something new can we move the ball forward.

I am sometimes surprised to see, on a site ostensibly for people who want to found startups, and thus do new things, that people are so defensive of products that are simple copies of others when Google does it, but pretty hostile when someone copies another startups HTML code or when the Samwer borthers clones YC companies.
as far as i know SSLv3 more secured over SSLv2 on outside manipulations coz of hash of all old messages..
no one liked the ribbon? data point here: i liked it. i think its very logically arranged and straightforward to use. i could never understand the frothing hate for it. because it has clear categories, and a nice visual layout of buttons and functions? because it doesnt have enough cluttered text menus?