skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect the worst software is the kind where the person buying it is not the person using it. This might also explain Apple's recent successes.
UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

"Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.
http://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement
GitHub provides <username>.github.com to their users.
None, it would be disastrous.

I would probably work with other ad networks, but that wouldn't be cost effective to monetize my long tail of smaller sites. It would lead to a significant, if not huge, drop in revenue.

You do get in personal contact with people at Google starting at some level of revenue though. So if it ever happened, I guess I would see it coming in some way.
> His DNA sample was on record after he had willingly given it to them as part of an investigation into a burglary at his mother's home some years earlier.

Lesson to everybody: Don't ever voluntarily give your fingerprints or DNA. Once they get into the government databases, you can (a) never retract them (and nor can you change your fingerprints or DNA), and (b) you can fall victim to false matches.

Here's a similar case of a false match -- in this case for fingerprints:

Portland-area lawyer Brandon Mayfield was arrested in May 2004 because his fingerprint matched one found on a bag of detonators near the train station in Madrid in the March 11 2004 bombing, which killed 191 people. But Spanish authorities said the fingerprints belonged to another man, an Algerian. A US federal court later threw out the case against Mayfield, and the FBI expressed regret for the "fingerprint-identification error". As a former Army officer, Mayfield's fingerprints would be on file with the government. A law enforcement official said the fingerprints were not on file because of any crime or as part of the government's terrorism databases.
That's really a pity because I expect the golf demographic to substantially overlap with the middle-aged-white-guy demographic which I've seen have high CPCs.

How are you driving folks to the site?
>The best way to reduce stress is to stop screwing up and setting up your life to increase your chances of success. Successful people don’t use willpower as a last-ditch defense, they use it to set up good habits and avoid problem situations.

To idiomize this great point: Willpower is a hammer, not a shield.
In all honesty, I think that the way javascript apps are created needs to be rethought when you have to combine your MVCs with your MVVMs to change a View that's somewhat like a Controller into a ViewModel that can maintain state and pass it to a View.

I'm going to propose the FuckThis paradigm until I can come up with something that makes some sort of sense.
If you want nice and boats checkout http://www.fleetmon.com/live_tracking/info
It signup only and the free plan is 5 minutes a day,
but here you go captain.
I personally like its simplicity, like the fact it's a single file and no messy authentication to deal with, and the simple data type set.

And also the docs are much more readable to me than for MySQL.
Okay, I'm happy he's doing this, and I hope it doesn't mean he's having health problems.

But I doubt his daughters are interested in his music.
This is why I collect screenshots of UI elements and Web pages I think look good (several thousand in the last 10 years). I was the typical "I can't do design!" developer for years, but if you pay attention to and record your tastes then your skill level will slowly begin to close the gap.
In the first two paragraphs you seem to say that they innovate while you deny that in the last paragraph.

Perfecting fit and finish is quite obviously innovation.
Agreed entirely. To make the metaphor accurate, the chef would then have to sue someone else who was making mayonnaise by a similar recipe.
Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success?

The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to introduce innovation that would compete with "yesterday's ideas" that are driving their profits.

This is why Bell Labs was so unique. They could basically do whatever they wanted (you might try to make the same claim with your example companies, perhaps) _but_ ... they also managed to release these ideas into the market. And not always to the satisfaction of AT&T. People once had to pay for UNIX. Not anymore.

Xerox PARC is another well-known case where people were "set free" to work on whatever they wanted. But their ideas did not manage to trickle out to the market very well. Instead, Microsoft got one of their key people, Excel was born and the rest is history.

Apple is _not_ an idea factory. If someone called them two-timing thieves and told us to watch our backs, I would be inclined to take it seriously. (The fact that Apple is not the idea factory is why the lawsuits are so offensive to anyone who knows anything about the history of computers. If these sort of broad patents should go to anyone, it should be people like the ones who worked at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. But maybe patents were not their priority. Maybe they were more interested in research, or playing computer games, than money. [How many UNIX patents? 1?] Go figure.)

But, Apple is a design house. An within IT, they do not have lots of competition in that area: e.g. design of hardware casings. In addition they go to great lengths to make the great ideas (namely the flexibility and stability of UNIX-like systems) easy to use. Another area that is lacking in IT: making the good stuff (like UNIX) easy to use.

Unfortunately Apple feels the need to abuse the patent system to stay on top. It makes me think if they didn't they might be in for a big fall. Maybe they are surprised at their own success? And nervous about losing the top spot?

Incidentally you could argue IBM started all this software patent nonsense. Not sure many programmers would agree with you, but the number of filings and issued patents by IBM, most of them before Microsoft even had a patent department, tells the story quite clearly.

You are not going to see much innovation released from "research labs" at the likes of Microsoft or those other companies. They will not keep their patent department in the dark. Those guys want to keep their jobs, not take risks. "Microsoft Research" or "Google Labs" are not Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. It's a wonder that something like Kinect was even made into a product. And you could see how nervous they were about it.

Today, the "labs" and the idea factory is the world wild web.

That's where the risks are taken.
Thoughts on Samsung, Apple, and the American Patent System
Most young people won't get the reference, but before I clicked through to the OP, I was thinking this was referring to who would own the digital sales rights to "The Return of Bruno" after his death.

Shamefully, I admit to buying this CD as a teenager, just because it was on sale for $10 (very cheap at the time for a CD).
Really wish there were some other sources. All the tech blogs are also linking back to TheSun which I have a hard time taking seriously.
I see you've never worked with GOOD offshore development.
No iOS has been done before, as has the iPad. It's nowhere near original.

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/NC.html#NewsPAD

Note the features here: ARM CPU, Touch screen, Contextual media app, "Apps" button down the bottom, self contained apps which were modular, integrated into the OS. I know the OS well (RISC OS) and I've had my hands on an actual device.

It was smaller and lighter and less complex than anything else technologically possible at the time.

The basis was an EU funded project to build something like an iPad. Notes here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_computer#NewsPad

Arthur C Clarke innovated this particular nugget of technology.

Apple has invented or innovated precisely bugger all there.

Their only innovation is how to make it look pretty and extract money from people.
Honestly, we're not doing a great job of user acquisition right now, which is exciting because it means that 100 users/month is just the tip of the iceberg.

When we started we spent ~$3,000/month on AdWords to get our initial customer base. Once we had enough users, we stopped advertising and word of mouth took over. We basically don't do any marketing right now, but that we're going to change that soon.
"May you come to the attention of powerful people."

-- Old Chinese curse
How do you compete with Google Analytics? From the first glance, most of the features of Improvely might be implemented with GA as well... or am I getting something wrong?
"Use your left/right keys to browse stories" - seriously? A single click of the left or right arrow moves to a completely different page?
Applied Micro shows 64-bit ARM server chip, ignites x86 debate
MITs Next Mars Space Suit
How could this scenario have gone well for Samsung? Did they think the bloggers would suddenly change their moral stance and do a complete 180 on what they had been insisting for weeks?

It seems it would be much easier to find people who are willing to be brand ambassadors and be up front about it if that's what you are looking for.
> The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative - they just take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up and running effective ad campaigns to gain marketshare among the masses. And there's nothing at all wrong with that - if your primary interest is making money.
Must-Watch Movies List #1
I think Canonical had a chance to make a real impact here but they essentially blew it.

Curious to hear you elaborate on what they blew, and how. I don't use Ubuntu myself (prefer straight Debian), but I've always respected what they're trying to do (and to some extent, what they have already accomplished).
Humans.txt - on Google.com
It's not even that.

Oftentimes many of the recurring services are easily replicable. So until a market leadership position is cemented (until you set up the moat) you don't want others to know that building XYZ service actually could be significantly profitable.
To quote Zed Shaw on how enterprise software gets sold: "steak and strippers".
Sorry but PostgreSQL's JSON support is a joke. It is nothing more than a VARCHAR that validates. You can't search or index across fields and the way you actually query the JSON is cumbersome at best.

Also all of your arguments are "push to the application layer". Well my point is that with most of the newer databases you don't have to reimplement the wheel.
I think you're referring more to invention than innovation. I think innovation is more about bringing something new and good to the market. The last part "to the market" is the most important part in the whole "innovation" process.

There are a lot of inventions, especially in those R&D labs you mention, but they rarely come to market, or are good enough for the regular consumer to use.
The Linux desktop has been wildly successful! Hobbyists have been using it since the 1990s. Yahoo! was built using the linux desktop. Much of Facebook was, too. People in web dev and tech support use it as their workstation OS.

The Linux desktop has failed to become a mainstream 'consumer' OS. Meritocracy has nothing to do with it. Microsoft's monopoly is just unbreakable here. OS X is less than 10% of the market. Linux less than 1%.
I believe the Linux desktop is usable in the retail space, because I installed gOS on a guest computer and several novices (including my mom) used it for email, web, music and word processing.

My linux desktop progression has been X11R6 -> KDE -> Mandrake -> Ubuntu gnome -> Mint -> latest Ubuntu HATED IT! -> Xfce crunchbang -> (plan to) Mint Xfce
How is it "blurring the lines" to state clearly and repeatedly that you wish to attend as a reporter and not a promoter?
“Outsourcing monetization” has got to be the worst oxymoron I’ve ever heard. The purpose of a business is to make money, and it doesn’t take a business school degree to know that you outsource to reduce costs, not to raise revenue.

--While this is true to some extent, a few counterexamples are worth noting. Namely, transactions services. These are of a real business that scale. Think: paypal, visa, etc. There is also a class of services that are pre-transaction: like amazon referral fees. These services all monetize through external sales, but represent real-value-added services. They are orthogonal to attention, in that the make life easier, simpler, less complex.
There are multiple types of patent. One of them is a design patent.
"Enterprise software" is about selling a $10,000,000 piece of software to one entity which requires specific features (and usually complex logic).

Apple's mantra is selling a $1 piece of software to 10,000,000 people who require a simple piece of software.

The two are perfectly valid. In fact the latter would not exist if it wasn't for enterprise software (such as CAD systems, inventory, supply chain management etc).
Everyone’s a critic: The pleasure and pain of Amazon reviews
> "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up"

The devil is in the polishing up, evidently.

Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension.

Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you?

It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.
If they wanted to do that they could've just sent samsung devices to the bloggers at home instead of bringing them out to a show. I think that's what most tech sites typically get.
This is the same argument aimed at Microsoft in the 90's. next big tech company will get the same thing in 20 years. Meh.
The discipline of being posix compliant forced Linux to innovate across the defined boundary. I recall Chris Click's talk about JVM and its definition of garbage collection APIs, class libraries etc each enabled innovation to be done independently of one another.

There is no such story for kernel-mode drivers. The problem was so dire with network card drivers at one time that there was a project that enabled windows drivers to work on Linus. Think about it - if Linux standardized on a stable external API, then there'd be no arguments about how to implement it.

Linus kept talking about userland vs kernel, and did not address the issue Miguel talked about. Kernels need performant external interfaces too. Drawing a line around what is being innovated and changed will only help Linux the way posix did.

On another tangent, when Microsoft made IE6 the stable browser platform, it gave a clear goal for Mozilla. It became a reference implementation, allowing Mozilla to emulate all the layout behaviors and eventually carving out a nice marketshare for itself.
Based on the original cost, it's 17% (10% excluding outliers). Based on current market value, it's 6%. I did sell off some REITs at a loss a three years ago for tax purposes.
How long have you worked on that, and how long have you been in business in Russia?
Good point. Still very strange.
So would you be interested in a similar service if someone were to make it available? :)
Linux is not a corporation. It's not fighting for turf. If Mac OS X is good enough for most of the desktop users, Linux doesn't have to throw resources and bullshit around (as corporations do) to counter that success. As long as Mac OS X does its job well Linux can focus on being linux-y, and succeed.
I really agree with what you just said. Mirror my own thoughts very closely. Laid them out in a blog post here: http://peebs.org/thoughts-on-samsung-apple-and-patents
The author wrote it in English, too: http://int13.net/france/blog/i-won-a-contest-to-go-to-the-lo...
Tangential, but I just ate at Sukiyabashi Jiro last week and it was incredible. They were much friendlier than sometimes portrayed too.
Even better than making this blog post would have been to make a pull request to the public repo that runs the site (https://github.com/resume/resume.github.com). It's written in JavaScript. Seeing as you're (http://resume.github.com/?beezee) not only an experienced github user but also an experience javascripter, I would guess that it's well within your capabilities.

See a problem in the world? Fix it. Especially when it's trivial based on your skill set!
The blog is entirely custom. Several years ago I made my own blogging software just as a fun side-project, and I decided to use that code as the base for The Yummy Life. It sucks missing out on all the great WordPress plugins, but it's really nice having absolute control over the entire experience. I know you technically have control with WordPress, but it's much harder to edit someone else's code than your own (for me, anyway).

Until recently, Amazon made up almost all of our revenue. Now that we're doing slightly better with advertising, Amazon makes up about 60-70%. We also sell a $1 eBook, but we only sell about one per day, so that revenue isn't significant. This information isn't up-to-date, but you can read a blog post about our monetization: http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_...

Visitor information:

-65% new, 35% returning

-1.7 pages per visit

-1.2 million page views last month

-Most traffic comes from Pinterest or direct. We get ~3000 visitors from search each day. My mom (understandably) hates link building, so we don't have many inbound links meaning there's not much referral traffic, and we also have weak SEO relative to other blogs our size.

-Almost all traffic comes from the U.S.
If no one else could make mayonnaise successfully and a chef came up with the process for making it, that chef should damn well get some kind of protection from the IP system for his innovation, invention, or whatever the hell you wanna call it.

That is, after all, what will make him want to share his methods instead of keeping them a secret. That's the fundamental principle of the patent system: you share, and we give you a temporary monopoly defended by law.

This patent system is obviously broken, but in the mayonnaise case it wouldn't be.
That's a key that when start paying even a little attention and collecting things you feel are good, you start to also see things that are not that good.
Waterfall is a mindset
So I guess with your insight Apple could have saved lots of money by not buying FingerWorks, PA Semi etc and just launching a Newton with a color display and make it look pretty. Right?

If you don't see any software innovations in iOS, you're either blinded by Apple hate or unable to see further than checkboxes on feature lists.
This is greatness.
For anyone that wants to read these posts in an RSS reader one day at a time, I suggest Feed Playback [1]. Just enter the feed URL [2] and a start date of 2012-08-01. Unfortunately, the feed is mixed in with every other update that gets put on the site, so it will take longer than a month to complete.

[1] http://www.streamspigot.com/feed-playback/

[2] http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheArtOfManliness
Of course Apple did not invent anything. Steve Jobs did.
That's the eventual result of globalisation, yes.
I'm part of the Samsung Mobilers program which is very similar to what they did.

I've never experienced as much pressure as described here, but i guess the Indian Samsung subsidiary is managed by different minded people.

It was clearly just a communication problem. Samsung expects you to do things at these events and you get your trip and stay for free in return, sometimes a little cash on top.

Noone wants to use the word work, for all the red tape this would create...
Well, there are some projects still going. But the joke is:

Q: Why hasn't Oracle ruined Virtualbox yet?

A: Because they're going in alphabetical order.
That is not the picture the article actually paints.
What's the license?

Note that Font Awesome has the license and details of the attribution requirements plainly displayed on the front page - "free-to-use" is not nearly clear enough.
Can the person(s) who downvoted this please explain the downvotes? As someone unfamiliar with both of these some context would be very appreciated.
"75 years rule" is the new "10,000 hours rule".
well, some responsibility has to lie with the 'victim' here, I think that much is obvious.

And Berlin is a fabulous city to get stranded in. It's not like it was Slough (UK) or Detroit (USA) or Grozny (RU)...
So other companies are more interested in being innovative than profitable and have decided to not spend as much as Apple on marketing (and polish), and that's the reason why Apple is succeeding?
Brilliant. It's the best resume generator based on GitHub I've seen so far.
> Being stranded in Berlin is certainly not the worst that could happen to you.

Right. I suppose Samsung could have dropped them off in the middle of the Atlantic during a major storm without even a liferaft.

In other words: Is that really the conversational tactic you want to apply here?
I assume the hosting is not free?
Dan, I respect your decision to not discuss numbers, but judging by the quality of your products I'd have to guess you're generating an extremely healthy revenue stream.

Of all the SaaS entrepreneurs I've found, you seem to be the one who's closest to exactly where I want to be eventually (running a suite of SaaS products).

Do you have any general tips for people following the same path? Anything you'd do differently?
I don't see how you managed to draw that conclusion. I didn't mention anything about money etc. I see it more like...well:

Sony have been doing this sort of shit for years. Someone invents something, Sony adds turd polish and a decent supply chain and manufacturing capacity, then takes the market share.

Apple just got better at it than Sony. There is no more story.

For ref, I neither hate nor like iOS devices - I've owned a couple and they've been pretty ok but nothing special. I can't see a single feature or innovation that didn't exist already somewhere else. The same applies for my current Windows Phone (the only innovation there is abysmal battery life - no wait my Treo 180G pioneered that in 2002).

Also, if a feature isn't a checkbox on a feature list, why do they market it like that? http://www.apple.com/iphone/ios/
I'm not convinced that allowing their Windows software to slip in quality - software they force you to use if you buy an iPhone - will improve their brand image or prompt consumers to go purchase an iMac instead.
Bloated application : itunes.
Clunky user experience : finder.
Bug ridden OS updates : you know the ones.
And best of all, offering two ways to run Windows on your Apple branded hardware : bootcamp and parallels :p

Fortunately, there are also upsides.
The ios app store (even if all the major mobile app stores launched in 2008) was a godsend and lifted from linux package managers. At least, that's how I see it.

Black and white is boring. Shades of grey are more interesting.
Unless there are 50 of them.