skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've had the same thing happen to us, though in our case there was no attempt to negotiate beforehand or to buy us out: we found out we were being sued when the other company issued a press release about it. Classy. They're just trying to put us out of business through a combination of lawyer fees and scaring off potential customers. Thankfully, it's not working.

It's amazing how many resources lawyers suck up, and how long patent lawsuits last (we were sued in December 2007, and we're still nowhere near trial). It's easily the sort of thing that can cost millions of dollars to fight, which is obviously the sort of expense that can put a startup out of business.

However, I'm not too hopeful anything will get done about it any time soon: it seemed from the discussion the other day that the HN community wasn't even solidly against them, and if this kind of community isn't, then the anti-software-patent movement clearly isn't mainstream enough to make any kind of impact yet.
I think it's interesting that everyone is assuming it's a bad software patent. Here's the chain of reasoning I see again and again, and I don't buy it:

1. Some software patents are vague, overbroad, or not novel.
2. This is a software patent.
3. This patent is vague, overbroad or not novel.

It doesn't logically hold up. You may want to argue that we shouldn't have software patents as a matter of principle, but pointing to examples of bad patents doesn't prove this. The guidepost for me is RSA. To me, if you have patents, then RSA should be patentable. It was novel, it was useful, and the fact that it could be implemented in software doesn't change that.

This being about software patents is coincidental. This same story could be told by a tool manufacturer, or an MP3 manufacturer, or anyone else. The real issues are whether the patent is valid, whether they are infringing, and then, if we find that we don't like the consequences when all is played out, figure out where the breakdown between what is really good for innovation and what is actually happening is.

If you want to say no software patents, then someone needs to come up with a strong argument why a new way to build an amplifier that improves sound quality should be patentable, but a new way to compress audio files that improves sound quality should not be.

There's a lot that could be done with patent reform to make things better, but doing away with software patents is orthogonal to this.

Business practice patents are a different story. Most of them don't patent a "how to do X", they patent a "wouldn't it be cool if we did X". My example is that Amazon One-click was trivial to implement. There was no "how". The proof of this is that B&N worked around it by going back in and adding a second click. You couldn't work around a good patent in this kind of way.
> Work a solid 8 hours a day every day without fail for a few years might be a "harder" thing to undertake than a couple of months worth of eighty hour work weeks.

Follow-through is really valuable; look at FLOSS. How many projects are not as successful, or are very successful and then decline, because there was no follow-through?
> I used to write my bingo cards myself, and I’m fairly good at it, but eventually I figured that while it was a worthwhile activity it didn’t really get all that much more worthwhile as a result of me doing it. Instead, I put out a call on my blog for freelancers, and eventually worked out a mutually rewarding relationship with a highly-educated American teacher. She bangs out the cards on her own schedule, and once a month I click “Post” on my backend interface and then mail her a check.

> The economics of this arrangement are so staggeringly efficient that people tell me I have to be lying about it. The pages my freelancer writes for me were visited 65,000 times in September, producing roughly $1,300 worth of sales for me through getting people into my various conversion funnels. I did less than five minutes of work to maintain the freelancing relationship in September. Do you want to do the math?

I find myself hoping that she sees this post and ups her prices.
This isn't the first time I've seen 'learning,' 'cognitive,' or 'brain' Python libraries come up in on HN. I'm always interested, but can never glean enough from them to understand what to use them for.

Can anyone offer anecdotal experience your machine learning project?
I think drupal is cleverly and elegantly designed, given two assumptions:

1. We can only use the LAMP stack. (perhaps with other operating sytems instead of GNU/Linux, but you get the idea).

2. We can't use php's object and class system, we have to create our own using arrays.

Given those, you'd be hard pressed to build a better CMS.

The problem is that I don't see any reason to start with those two assumptions, particularly given advances in web development in the past 5 years.
Meh, it's not so much MySQL that's lame in this case, it's just the MyISAM engine, which depressingly enough is still common in 2009. MyISAM is based on IBM mainframe database technology developed back in the stone age. The InnoDB engine doesn't have these kinds of locking issues.

Getting Drupal to run on a non-MySQL database is non-trivial. Here's an interesting article detailing what folks at Oracle had to do to get it to run on Oracle.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/pedros-drupal....
I'm not even a big Python fan. I don't hate it. It's just not my favourite... and every language has it's warts.

I can understand the author not LIKING certain ways that Python works but I tire of philosophical differences in language design decisions being branded wrong.

I can accept that the author doesn't like a bunch of things but this annoys me:

36 chars against 18.

Comparing languages by character count is fruitless. It's like comparing pieces of music by the number of notes or food by the number of ingredients. You have to decide where the important numeric barrier is, which is pretty arbitrary. For me, programming is more thinking that typing. It just seems like a ridiculous comparison.
Serving billions of pages a day is not a particularly hard scaling problem if most of those page views only require reads. It's writes, and particularly transactional updates, that are hard.
Ah man. Once I logged into YC and saw the black banner, I thought another CS idol I never knew had passed away, but to find out it was one of our very own was terribly shocking.

My friendship, if you can even call it that, with Dan wasn't as nearly as tight as others here, but when I decided to finally take an idea of mine seriously into startup territory, I came to Dan for a lot of advice. I was kinda new to the whole thing, and even with such a newbie, Dan always took the time to answer every question, explain every concept, letting me know about problems I will come across, and how to deal with them. It always shocked me how much time he took to help me out. I had only met him through the #startups channel, so we were virtual strangers.

From my minimal interactions with Dan, he seemed like a genuine dude. The phrase 'a real stand up guy' comes to mind as well. He just gave off that vibe and it seems that tons of others here picked up on that vibe as well. The best thing to do is to take a page out of Dan's book in how to treat others, and be selfless, and spread that. I know I'll try.

We didn't know each other too well, Dan, but cheers to you, man. And my prayers go out to your friends, family, and Tom.
maybe the op was just wondering what amount of slavery he could personally have prevented. that was the thought that crossed my mind. not that "throwing money" at a problem is a reasonable solution, but how different is my perspective on money than "a slave." or rather, i wanted to add that perspective to my thought process.

ps - donations to credible organizations do help.

pps - somewhat relevant fiction making the rounds these days by Stieg Larsson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stieg_Larsson
I really respect Larsson's response to things he felt were immoral. he set out to change them. 1+ investigative journalism.
Why less than 30 "pages"?

I know sites that literally run 100s (if not 1000s) of pages with tens of millions of page views worth of traffic per month with no issues.

IMO wordpress triumphs Drupal is both User-friendliness and performance. The only way drupal might be better than wordpress is on security - and that too not by much.

With wordpress it took me couple of hours to understand 90% of the system, when I gave drupal a shot earlier this year I was still scratching my head after 5 days trying to figure out my way, and I thought I was a fast learner.

Drupal may not "suck" but it got some serious usability problem for as long as I can remember.
Something like that was announced just yesterday, or very recently, Google is going to use traffic camera, security camera footage to liven up their maps with realistic crowd and vehicles, plus I assume part of they could use any building photo too for their 3D map.
Emulating Smalltalk’s Conditionals in Ruby
"It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something."

Any links to solid research (i.e., not Malcolm Gladwell) regarding that number?
No he isn't. It's at best bikeshedding and at worst trolling (and self falls into the first category).
Perhaps words are confusing things. Instead of "working harder" let's say "working more". For some people what they're doing is not work. There are plenty of people who can work on something they enjoy almost every waking hour for 10 years on end. Burn out is a non-issue. So if you intend to compete an a business or field for which the bar is that high, and you don't really love what you're doing, you may be in trouble.
I'll bite... Could you list the "good points"? Did he really make any?

First he insults people using (for example) wicd. No - I didn't even notice it was written in python until I read this article. I don't think it's slow either.

Then he says "crashes wherever it encounters broken Unicode". That's not true - throwing exception is not a crash. And if a bytestream is really broken unicode, then what else can be done?

Numbers formating / representation is something that shouldn't surprise any programmer. That's the way it works - whether it's the preferred way or not is a different thing. I like to see when a number is a proper number. Is this in ruby any more correct than python's way?

irb(main):001:0> 1.1000000000000001
=> 1.1

"Python treats objects as hashes (dictionaries), but this approach is flawed. You still need those ‘blessed’ methods, and python surrounds them with double underscores as distinction measure." Here I'm not even sure what is he on about... The distinction is clear - internal stuff has underscores, you usually don't use the underscore'd stuff. You don't touch `__class__` for example - you use isinstance() and others.

Self may be verbose, but it's not that bad. There's at least one reason to use other name - in metaclasses, it's not `self`, but rather `klass` since it's not an instance.

The constructor example is completely broken. First, why does he want to return 0 from initialiser? Second, who cares if it's 3X or 1X characters... You only write the initialiser if it does anything, so it's going to have 80+ characters typically.

"Python uses and/or encourages no naming convention" - I guess PEP 8 was too long to read.

GIL "problem" - learn to use multiprocess. Yes - the threading itself may be slow, but if you need that much speed, why are you writing in python? Just port it to some static language after you've done prototyping.

"Do you see segfaults often in dynamic languages? Well in python you do. Also, its libraries require compilation." With no real examples. Also no - I haven't seen segfaults in python so far. Also no - libraries don't require compilation - they're just dumped to disk in preprocessed form when their loaded the first time, so that they're loaded faster later on. It's mainly done, so that python is faster, which he wants in the other point...

Language comparisons miss any rational examples, so I won't even comment on them.

He simply doesn't like python. Is that interesting news?
As far as I remember, both Subcplise (the older SVN plugin) and Subversive (the recommended SVN plugin for the latest Eclipse) support svn+ssh URLs. See http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/documentation/teamSupport/...
"Syntactic sugar for dictionaries". I don't know if it is good or bad or if that's very OO, but that's the feeling I get when I occasionally code Python.
I just want to point out that his example of Python isn't even valid syntax:

def __init__(self)
return 0

1. There's no colon to begin the function.
2. Initializers can't return ints. They can't return anything other than None.
skynet? hello?
How about just storing the file in Venti? A Git API could probably be written that uses it underneath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti
Peter Norvig refers to research showing 10 years of work required to hit expert level in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years" (http://norvig.com/21-days.html).

No references to "10,000hours" other than Gladwell I think.
I remember reading about two siblings who became sick, they had to be hospitalized and while they were in the hospital their parents gave them ice cream as a treat, but soon after their condition worsened.

They later found out the reason they were hospitalized was because the ice cream was contaminated with e.coli and while in the hospital the ice cream, same brand, they were given was also contaminated.

Even worse was the siblings, who survived, had a rare genetic trait that was affected when they were infected with the e.coli and now they have lifelong, permanent disability due to that freak occurrence.

This happened in the US, the mid-west I think and the result was diabetes or some sensitivity to drugs, I forget and can't find the article.
The only problem I can imagine is that we won't have enough of piracy of e-books :)
Emacs key-bindings saved my life
Flipping is Good. (aka Memo to Jason Fried: Sorry, You're Fucking Wrong.)
Talk to the people in the art/graphics design department at your local university. There's a big pool of talent there that is (a) affordable, and (b) starting out, just like you. So you'll be helping somebody else with their career, and may find someone who you can bring in-house as a designer once they graduate.

At the very least, you'll know someone 'in the industry' who has a very positive impression of you (and your company), and who can pass talent to you down the road.
More appropriate title would be 'The Paucity of Anything To Say'. The post references other stuff that has recently appeared on HN, but otherwise adds nothing new to the discussion.

Perhaps there is a paid version of this essay with actual content?
Since you've already decided we're "ugly and hostile", I'd like you cite certain examples of this hostility. I've been in the community for almost 3 years now, and its by far the most insanely-motivated and awesome community I know.
Piracy isn't a problem, it's a result - the question is so uninteresting... The more interesting question is the question of how can we make a better business model for publishers/authors
What about a system where you can download an e-book for free, read it for a month or so with the option of rolling-over that term for another month -- as long as someone else hasn't requested it? In short, where are libraries going to be in this?
I wish I'd known him.
He may make a good point, but I wouldn't know. I didn't get past the 8th f-bomb.
Many thousands of people make their living as opera singers, sculptors, and professional athletes. But they represent a tiny minority of the very talented people who aspire to do this and fail. There's a similar dynamic in writing.

Note that I am not saying "do not try to be a writer". Just don't expect to be able to make your living that way.
Awesome. Can't wait to see this model expand.
Google Advertising
Which is what the article is about I think.
I detect a bit of resentment here, as if I'm some rapacious capitalist baron exploiting the poor teacher. That's one way of looking at it. Here's another: teachers are expected to produce teaching supplies on their own time, for use in their day jobs but without receiving any compensation for them.

The market price associated with these teaching supplies is zero: there is absolutely no one, in the entire world, who cares enough about what one particular teacher's opinion on good bingo topics is to pay her a dime for it. Except me. I paid her a few thousand bucks to copy/paste her activities into a web form.

Importantly, without me, she'd have 750 activities and no money because she has neither the time, skill set, nor inclination to produce a Ruby on Rails application and then market it on the Internet. I'm the guy she outsources that to.
I've never read the Gladwell you refer to, although I know who he is. Over the last several years, I believe several studies have come out claiming it takes 10 years to build up expertise. Just a couple years ago there was a survey study that purported to review the literature and found the consensus to be 10 years/10,000 hours, although I can't find it with a cursory search and don't make a habit of tracking citations of things I read.

A quick Google search did find published papers referring to this phenomenon, though, e.g.: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118000156/abstrac...

Not being a specialist I'm not qualified to evaluate whether it's "solid" or not.

Did Gladwell not cite sources? That seems crazy.

Edit: I believe I was thinking of the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
Slightly off-topic, but the cd-company mentioned (swiftcd.com) has a brilliant frontpage headline: "At SwiftCD, we create custom CDs and DVDs one at a time, and ship them world-wide directly to your customers."

Nobody that ends up at that website, accidentally or not, will be confused about what that company does.
The Silicon Valley of South America
That's actually the very best thing the poster can do.. but probably not the kind of answer the poster was looking for...
What you're describing is not like a library. Libraries deal in scarce resources (physical copies of books). The point of a (public) library is to provide free information.

If you apply that principal to e-books, which cost almost nothing to copy, and therefore don't reasonably need to be checked out or returned, you have to remove all DRM, thus destroying the e-book business model.

Unfortunately, librarians have bought into the DRM mindset, and are putting into place (or planning to put into place) systems like the one you describe.
Yes, Anders Ericsson is the authority on the subject:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html

Here's the paper "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expertise":
http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
Series E Terms for Twitter
Horrible spelling.
My response to Patrick's post on his blog, which I am replicating here

-----------

Hi Patrick, thanks for writing a detailed post which you say is an anti-thesis to my post. I agree to most of your key points here that measuring the output for each unit of effort put in is ultra important and that there can be no real progress without measuring productivity.

However what I fail to see is that it cannot be an excuse for not working harder. In fact measuring productivity makes you even more motivated to put in more hours as you can (and often do) clearly see that the amount you derive from a business correlates to the hours you put into it. Of course there are gazzilion other factors which determine eventual success such as vision, rightness and smartness of effort, big competitors like Google, intellect, funding. However, somehow I fail to comprehend why such factors should be considered a case against hard work.

Regarding your point of “working hard” as a bad strategy because it is easy to copy, that is my point exactly. One may not be subscribing to “working hard” strategy, but that doesn’t guarantee that his competition also doesn’t adopt that stance. Irrespective of his beliefs, competition will work as hard as they can. So you have no other option but to take the best guess (and worst case) and work even harder.

No doubt your points on outsourcing, automating and delegation are valid and make sense. Good thing about such activities is that they free you from sub-optimal activities such that you can work harder on the stuff that matters. You can make an exponential dent to your chances of success, if you put in MORE efforts doing things that really matter.

Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed your post but I still subscribe to my philosophy of working harder. Of course, one should realize when he is bordering at insanity. Mental and Physical Health first. Work later.

PS: Google being my competitor gives me even more kicks to put in more effort. I know I can never match them in resources, that is why I avoid working average hours which would eventually spiral to not working at all because, hey, I am competing against Google and of course I stand no chance.
I can see in your profile "about:librarian". Hence I am a bit confused as to why you don't know where to use ML, but still, I will go ahead and just scratch the surface for you. Since listing all the fields where ML is/can-be used will require a book by itself. :-)

Well I shall limit my answer to two simple examples from the web and in the vicinity of your profile, so that you find it more interesting.

Did you know that ML is one of the key components of Google(1) search, yes, the one that you might be using day in and day out.

Did you know that all the sites offering you personalized recommendations like "people who bought this book also liked this book", use ML.

Why don't you do a fun experiment. Take up a programming language (I suggest Python) and write an algo (using PyBrain and NN's in it) that reads and learns from habits of the students (book borrowers in this case) and then recommends them on what they should read next, based on what the machine has learned from their past behavior. It won't be perfect and best prediction, rather it will be pathetic at the begining, but it will recommend good and relevant books as time goes by and the machine/algo knows more about the students.

(1)for that matter any good search engine.

Have fun!!
Textbook demonstration of why cocaine and <font> tags don't mix.
In the case of Japan we're talking about a lot of Chinese and Koreans who do in fact speak Japanese.
I spent most of yesterday reading this comment thread and other things about Dan. I only knew him the way one feels close to someone that one admires in a community like this. So I can't imagine what those of you who knew and loved Dan must be going through. My thoughts are with you.

It's striking how many of you tell the same story about Dan's generosity. He seems to have taken time to help and support everyone who came to him: meeting with them, encouraging them, staying in touch with them, cooking them breakfast... People like that are precious.

The combination of talent, mischievousness, and heart that everybody is describing is very compelling. Makes me think I would have liked him a lot.
Summary: Building a company and then selling it is a remarkable accomplishment regardless, and it is wrong to criticize Mint for not holding out for more.
It looks like a letter from a crazy person.