skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do we stop 'design trolls'?
Is anyone else worried about how as we move towards flat/minimalist design and designs that are really more or less the same (how many ways can you really draw a 'flat' clock for example) that we're opening up a pandora's box of trolls?

At least with to patent troll you actually need a patent. To be a 'design troll' all you need is to have drawn something. After that you're 'protected by copyright' and have the right to file a DMCA takedown once you're infringed. Right?

But is there infringement? A lot of the support of LV's takedown was more to do with ethics and morals than the law. Unfortunately they're completely different things.

People saying that the similar colour palettes justify a DMCA complaint aren't just wrong but they're misleading the group they post in. Colour palettes aren't copyrightable, colours can in some circumstances be trademarked. Tiffany & co did it. So did T-Mobile.

If I use Tiffany blue and T-Mobile magenta in my website about silver-cased phones I won't get a DMCA complaint. I'll be notified of a trademark infringement. I'll probably get my ass beaten up in court.

Long story short, is it time that someone put together a resource for founders that explains in plain language when they should/shouldn't be putting in complaints or taking legal action? I'm still a law student so I can't until my degree is over so I'm not really able to. Is anyone in HN qualified and interested?

The potential for trolling here is enormous. More worrying is that copyright is a confusing sonofabitch and it's easy to assume that making something grants exclusive use over all elements of it. It's hard enough for me with most of a law degree and a particular interest in IP law to get my head around which parts of my startup's product are covered and why.

I guess I'd just prefer it if we could spend time making neat stuff instead of constantly looking over our shoulders every time we make a new icon. What do you think?
If you have meetings with 20 people with nontrivial frequency, you've already lost.
Sure you could, but then why would one go through all the hassle just to get a (probably already cached) screenshot?
(I do product at CropUp.)

You're right, we need to make pricing more visible.
Your pricing worries me. It looks like you have just made the numbers up and don't know what your costs are.

I feel the starting price is fairly high but that's not to say it won't work for you.
The prototypical talking head with speech bubble: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/installation/comple...
Totally understand that.

Q: What do you mean by source code guarantee?
I think this is good advice and an accurate view of how to get ahead (as much as I hate to admit how much of an advantage everyone with deep pockets has). It's definitely hard as a little guy to get started but there are ways to get some attention if you can afford to invest in buying installs.

There's of course Facebook mobile app installs, but a lot of other ways to get installs also that might be more cost effective. Some others:
http://www.appoday.com/#developers
http://www.curios.me/

Best of luck!
> The downside to this approach is that your HTML is "compromised", if you will, and many developers don't like that. My thought is that it's already compromised using Handlebars so what's the difference here? Personally I have no issue using the ng-* directives. Some people do, and I respect that.

I'm a bit off-topic, but you don't need to "compromise" your HTML with AngularJS, you can place "data-" in front of your attributes and you're HTML-compliant again :).
I would assume that's against the iOS store TOS, you can ask them for a review but you can't ask for a five star review.
Similarity is completely irrelevant. If we independently arrive at the same original work then that is not copyright violation. That's not what copyright is about. We then each hold the copyright of our respective works, even if they're completely identical (in practice it will probably be hard to proof that you didn't just copy the other work if they're really identical).

IANAL, but that's what I was told by a law student.
Does it let you take a screenshot of the whole height of the page? I see that you can specify the height of the viewport, but what if I want a whole long screenshot of as much height is rendered?
Facebook looking for office space in Cambridge
Ask HN: Any SF EdTechies want to meet up on 3/14?
Hi HN,

My co-founder and I will be visiting the Bay Area from Chicago next week for business, but have a free day on Thursday the 14th. We wanted to see if anyone wanted to meet up, have coffee (on us), and talk EdTech.

About us:

Together with a third co-founder, we started a EdTech startup around classroom instructional software.

We've bootstrapped to 50 installations in some of the best high schools and colleges across the country and are cash-flow positive ($250K+ in first 9 months of business).

We're interested in sharing our lessons and learning about yours. Topics that we're particularly enthusiastic about include: hacking the edu sales cycle with a lean sales team, EdTech business models that work, and mobile development.

Interested parties can leave a note below or via email: windycityedtech at lavabit.com
Unfortunately, that doesn't make up for the 400k indie games out there that are not making the top 100 and are competing between them to have a little piece of cake.

Asymmetry is a real problem in the App store.
KPCB mea culpa
I don't agree with the cents thing. I think stick to whole numbers for this but odd whole numbers. Like 129 vs 130
What is Coltsfoot, Tussilago Farfara Herb?ž
(I work at CropUp, I'm the designer there.)

Thanks! I completely agree with you on getting a video for the homepage, and we're actually in the process of creating one (they just take some time), as well getting a product demo link up.
tl;dr -

Complaints relating to UI's are bound to get more common as the minimalist trend continues. This sucks because a lot of the time complaints will be invalid/mislead and stressful for all involved.

Let's kill design trolling before it's a thing.
You've gone to Amazon, had to do an extra click, and decided not to buy because of that?
Thank you. That's how we feel about the pricing, but's it's definitely good to know that some folks are turned off by it.
Want to Roll Your Own Crowdfunding Site? Here’s What You Need to Know (Pt. 2)
This is pretty much what we're trying to do. We think the .99 pricing schemes dehumanize the relationship, and we're really all about humanity in our business relationships. Glad you appreciate it -- I'm surprised by the controversy, though, and we may have to reconsider after getting so much negative feedback on it.

Glad you like our published consulting stuff too! Openness is our core value, and it's good to hear that that is getting across to someone in the wild :)
Ask HN: Warby Parker of fragrances. Your thoughts?
Hello HN,

We just launched Commodity on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/14opUNg) and wanted to get the community's take on our startup. Any feedback to further improve the business model, features, or design would be great.

The gist of Commodity:
- eCommerce Fragrances
- Free Home try-on Samples
- Premium, produced in France, bottled in California

Appreciate any thoughts, thanks!
Not blogspam. Circa is a pretty cool tool that tells a news story by pulling in all the sources talking about it, and then updates the story as new information comes in. Take a look at them; it's really useful.
So far no major bugs, good job!
I actually have called people because they won Yahoo! Hack Days and put it on their resume...
I'm not sure cheating helps as much as it used to, and even so is a poor tactic and will possibly get you banned.

That said, Apple's App Store is an absurdly tough market in the U.S. When your game goes live, it needs to be at its best, and even large gaming companies have trouble getting games out there that do well, even with significant legitimate ad spend.

Here are some ideas, based loosely off of the experience I have had:

- Start contacting other indie-devs with relatively high dau numbers and arrange for X-promo via notifications and features.

- Stage your ad-spend when your metrics are known. Ie, if you beta test your app in some country like Brazil or New Zealand and improve your metrics so you have a known LTV, you can spend accordingly when you launch in a big market like Canada or US.

- Start with Android first because it is an easier ecosystem to iterate upon and attain an niche audience.

- There is a growing body of proof that burst spending on launch day is not the best strategy. There are games that launch early and are unknown but gradually improve their grossing metrics and buy audience in batches over time. I believe Rage of Bahamut was one such game [1]

[1]. http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/rage-of-bahamut/ranking/hist...
Nice downplay but most people are going to serious problems with people streaming them on the internet. Wearable cameras are great tools for extreme sports, porn and undercover shows but to try to market them socially acceptable articles of clothing is downright insane.
It took you 6 months to develop it?
The examples provided to describe the difference between controllers in Ember and Angular do not appear to be different to me at all. In fact I'd argue that they are identical. It feels to me as though the author is wanting them to be different because maybe it's a style preference from the templating perspective?
It doesn't make them a troll (IMO, you need to have a pattern of behavior to be a real troll) but it makes them potentially guilty of perjury, which is kind of a big deal.

DMCAs shouldn't be filed lightly (unless you have the legal resources of the RIAA/MIAA/etc to dissuade your targets from retaliation).

Not a lawyer, and haven't talked to a lawyer? Don't file a DMCA no matter how butthurt you are about being 'copied'. Just because it is relatively easy to do doesn't mean you should do so in the spur of the moment. It is a Real Legal Thing with Real Ramifications, and this is good because it limits the amount to which bad actors can abuse it, but it also means you should be really sure you're the victim of copyright violations prior to using it yourself.
You have to multiply that by your chance of winning (and account for the risk). I even have to bring my own material for CNC!
Really nice constructive writeup (as always by Rob), and I think it should be addressed by some better EmberJS docs and tutorials. They do a good job explaining the "what", but it could probably use more "why".

It took me a while as well to figure out why controllers proxied to models. However it started to make a lot of sense in when building an app, since the controllers are there to stay around, and the models are swappable.

Having the option to easily swap out a model at the controller level is worth the extra layer abstraction. That and the ability to add additional UI specific properties on the controller that don't necessarily belong in the model (since they don't need to be persisted).
> there are only three semantic things - anchors, images and text

That's not what he said. Also, those are not similar things. A, with or without HREF, can wrap the other two. Images and text are symbols of meaning where the text defines itself as to what that meaning is, and the image defines itself as to what that meaning is.

A blockquote indeed means something, but it doesn't define itself. It just sets off text from other text. It needs text (one of those two things above) inside it to convey the quoted meaning.

Put another way, a blockquote is not content. Text is content, as is an image.
Yes it does. See this example of the nytimes: http://url2picture.com/Picture/Png/?apikey=6101EE5C99B145ECB...

Of course there are limits to this as some websites have "endless" scrolling (like pintrest)
This is very cool. I don't know much about Philadelphia, but I'm interested in how much this reflects/affects rental trends -- would people move from a higher-taxed property to a lower one? Are the taxes increasing in areas with less crime? Are the taxes increasing in areas where elected officials live?

Looking at the way this is done, it seems like the hardest part of doing this for another city is getting accurate geographic and valuation data in the correct formats.
Thanks for sharing this Rob, it was actually very informative about Ember to a newbie!
This is a legal issue. It's not a joke. It looks like LayerVault's founder turned quickly to legal bullying in a situation where he apparently has little to no justification. Just responding to and dealing with a DMCA notice like this would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in attorney fees.

People who drag others into expensive, unwarranted legal situations are a blight on the entrepreneurial community.
I'm pretty sure that giving lots of people more disposable income will increase demand. Which will in turn increase revenues and allow successful businesses to expand, increasing employment numbers, creating a positive feedback loop.

In reality however things are a little more complicated.
Generally soap destroys bacteria through acid-base reactions with the amino acids in the bacteria. As a science experiment we took bacterial colonies we had grown and exposed them to both an anti-microbial solution and a plain soap. The anti-microbial solution causes the bacteria to die, and the soap causes them to explode.

However, in heath care institutions it is impractical to use soap repeatedly due to damage it causes to your skin (for the same reason it damages bacterial cells, it is indiscriminate). Similarly with ultraviolet light sanitizers which also work by destroying the cell material and are equally harmful to your skin and bacteria.

There is an interesting investigation going on into encapsulation, basically having health care professionals change gloves all the time which doesn't kill the microbes on their hands but gives them fresh 'skin' each glove change.
Absolutely true - I should add that in. I think people look at that, however, and don't like functionality etc. shoved into the DOM. But your point stands.
I've never used EmberJS and am not familiar with any of the front-end JavaScript frameworks, but I don't get what's confusing.

It looks like instead of the controller pushing data to the view, the view asks the controller for data (which it might proxy to the model).

This makes sense with a long-running controller, right? On the web both the controller and view are ephemeral -- they last for just that one request -- but if the controller is running continuously then it needs to reflect changes in the models as they happen. The model(s) the controller references can change without the view changing its reference to the controller.

Without something like this the view would render stale data. I'm assuming this is why we have a controller.model, to add that layer of indirection.

What am I missing? How is this more complicated making the controller<->view relationship pull instead of push?
How do math geniuses understand extremely hard math concepts so quickly?
(I do product at CroUp.)

We see shopping cart providers as our competition and they usually charge setup and/or monthly fees, which we do not. Given the value and functionalities our product provides we feel our pricing is fair, but we're open to structuring it differently in the future depending on market feedback, like volume or product price based, or we introduce a premium account with a monthly fee but lower per transaction fees.
If you're local, sign up and attend the info sessions on carbonation etc. Generally though, this is about understanding the technology then repackaging it for a new place and purpose, so with some business sense you should be able to hobble along fine.
Ask HN: Looking for email delivery for 500k subscribers
Hey HN,

I run a site that has 500k email subscribers, and were looking to do a big mass mailing campaign in the upcoming months.

We are planning on sending close to 6 campaigns (so 3 million emails) in one month. What is the best solution for us to role this out? Were looking for something our non-technical marketing guy can use, but that I can set up.
"...they are recording their experience that happens to include you. Selfish notions that one has a bubble of exclusion seems quaint and a little odd."

This does not match my experience of personal interaction at all.

I suspect that viewpoint is in a very tiny minority.
I saw this, thought "yeah right, gonna be more of a pain than depicted, why bother", downloaded & installed it anyway because I've got a stupid fondness for the idea (if not the awkward reality) of QR codes ... and not 2 hours later was using it for real. Dang handy, nicely implemented.

Thanks!

Only quibble is: how big a code can this viably render? tried something not particularly large for fun and just got a big "PNG" icon instead.
Why would anyone not "want" one? I think the vast majority of my friends would think it was a cool toy to have when working on stuff.

I agree that most people wouldn't be excited about wearing it all the time or paying the initial cost.
If LayerVault made a mistake and apologized, sure. But one look at their twitter page & their response on designer news implies no apology is forthcoming. So, they are copyright trolls and bullies. They are not only running against the spirit of the law, but also the letter of it.
Arn't you walking around talking to yourself (in a sense) when you're doing a hands-free call? I see that everyday...
From a clinical / experimental standpoint there's very little difference between 4,8,16 hours. It's all essentially 'next day' right now because common practice is to send the sample off to a genomics core and they drop the data on a server for you after they've run it through their pipeline. Many experiments require their own library construction but clinical pipelines generally don't and again, the machine prep time is not the bottleneck it's deciding what to include and how to lay things out. From what I understand 454 accommodates the longest read lengths right now but this seems to change month to month, also from what I understand 454 has a lot of trouble with short length libraries.
well, for starters, I could use your (paid) account to get free screenshots.
No NDAs.
That's not a swimsuit, it's yoga attire.
The OP wrote "† some exceptions apply." and you could drive a truck through those exceptions to fair use.

For instance, "copies for sole personal use" that you mentioned, in Poland are "single specimens shared by people in a personal relationshiop" (link to this specific rule: http://prawo.legeo.pl/prawo/ustawa-z-dnia-4-lutego-1994-r-o-...) which literally indicates that the digital transmission between people who don't know each other is excluded from its scope.

Also, the fait use section ends with a limitation clause: http://prawo.legeo.pl/prawo/ustawa-z-dnia-4-lutego-1994-r-o-... - which is a totally unclear ruke but means something similar to "fair use cannot hurt author".
The examples were to show how $scope is used in Angular vs direct use of the Controller/Model proxy in Ember. This makes a bit more sense to me, personally.
Watching the peep code screen cast helped a lot
Here's the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&biw=1...

text-only: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
"allow changing the volume by using the scrollwheel over the speaker tray icon"

Left-click the same icon, then use the scrollwheel?
The implant will be supported by advertising. You will see banner ads in your field of vision continuously. And as another bit of advertising, it will broadcast this out loud if you ever meet someone without an implant: "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."
Even better, take Screenshots of any Website/App with just JavaScript and Canvas: https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas
They misused the DMCA because they did not own the copyright of the content they filed a DMCA against, plain and simple, and they made specific claims in the DMCA otherwise. Just because the icons were similar does not make that a copyright violation. LV either abused the DMCA out of ignorance or dishonesty. There is no other possibility here, and they deserve every bit of negative sentiment that has resulted against them.
Whoha, that's awesome!
Part of the argument is that this isn't disposable income, that it's in fact needed as a baseline against poverty.
Yeah, we got similar advice when I was working at a social gaming startup. Apparently, it's not unheard of among growing, venture-funded companies like ours. I assure you, however, that the vast majority of the indie games that make the headlines (Super Hexagon, Hundreds, Letterpress, etc.) don't use these techniques.
The first instruction is to go to BBCUltraViolet.com. So I typed BBCUltraViolet.com into my browser as instructed, and immediately hit a “website not found” error. I tried some variations like .co.uk or bbc.ultraviolet.com, but no joy. So I Googled it. And discovered that the website doesn’t work without having www. appended to the front of the URL.

Not that this is your fault, but modern browsers will automatically append the www prefix when needed.
Open Source Projects created by the Times, NPR, Washington Post, and others
They've certainly spent plenty of money sponsoring racing games, racing events, and various other racing related things. The connection between cars and going dangerously fast is not something the automotive industry had nothing to do with.

If you can't control yourself after seeing "These CGI polar bears and this multi-ethnic group of skater kids both like our soda", then that is entirely on you. (Well, on you, or perhaps on your parents who clearly failed to raise you properly.) For anything short of "More doctors smoke camels", I really cannot place blame on companies for advertising. I see no evidence of such deliberate deception in modern soda advertisement.
When was the last time you heard Goldman Sachs rent out a room, provide pizza, and give 10k to whoever can improve on their strategies the best? Oh, but they're providing test data for free!

Kraft is actually renting out a ballroom in SF for anyone who wants to improve their cheese recipe. You get 10k if you can make a better mac and cheese than Kraft! You'll get a gold star on your resume while we make an extra 13 cents per packet sold (on a scale of billions a year).

It probably cost Coca-Cola 10k to bring the consultant who thought of this idea. If they truly wished to repay people for bringing immense value to their business they would offer them upwards of a $1M USD, not less than your average car.

Coke nearly invented the modern day soft drink industry, and milk that cow to the tune of billions a year. Yet apparently if you beat them at their own game you only get 10k. And your IP taken. And probably a gag agreement.

Seems a little unfair, doesn't it?
This is why upvotes exist.
DMCA is a process. Someone files a takedown request, someone else files a counter notice. etc etc.

If you are a designer and your work is ripped off, and the site isn't responding to email, you will get a lot of support if you put together a simple sheet showing the similarities between your work and theirs. It might help if you show how their work is more similar to yours than it is to some other products too.

If someone is accusing you of ripping of their work it helps if you put together the same kind of sheet, showing what they claim is ripped off, your "version", and something from the WWW predating both projects but very similar. Point out all the differences and explain the design "language" (sorry, designers, for mangling the lingo) that you were going for.

If you're being targeted it might be useful to do a web-search to see if they've got a history of targeting many people.
This is addressed in the article, the Handlebar templates have functionality too.
Comparing MongoDB New Aggregation Framework and SQL