Benja

To clarify: (1) Your scenario = don't trademark, use open source license. (2) What Mozilla does = trademark, use proprietary license. (3) What Mark thinks should be done (afaiu) = trademark, use open source license.

I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?

That makes so much sense. I thought you might be pulling the e-mails out of the applications manually, and having coded and used a system for processing submissions (to an online fiction magazine), I was wondering how the hell you could stand to do that for 500+ applications. Glad to hear you're keeping yourself sane ;-)

Hi Ryan,

The thing that struck me as really useful was the way you could use the slides to get an overview of and jump around inside a presentation. For me, that looks like a killer feature that could make me want to watch presentation videos through your viewer.

Except that the thumbnails of the slides are just too small to actually read. To make them useful for me for scanning the presentation without watching it all, I believe they would have to be big enough that the text is legible.

dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22037

Yep, but then he explained it even further and made clear that the quote didn't quite make clear what he said :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=21967

I've had the same reaction as boris when reading the original quote. But what he was talking about was the case where someone turns them down because of the valuation. And I can see Paul's point there, actually.

They're really running on a tight schedule...

On the other hand, my understanding is that they've been hard at work since their original announcement, figuring out how their program is going to work legally and organizationally. Being willing to set themselves a tight schedule when necessary and being able to meet it might not be such a bad thing for a startup investor. :-)

DabbleDB is a startup using Smalltalk.

http://dabbledb.com/

Thanks, Paul! Between your reply and pg's, I understand your point a lot better now, I think.

I suppose I took PB's post more broadly than it was intended, then. If he was only talking about solving hard problems that don't benefit the user proportionally, I see that there's no contradiction [and have a clear answer to the question of when to follow which advice ;-)].

Thanks for the clarification.

paul says that the way to build successful products is to avoid hard problems:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making-things-easy-avoid-hard.html http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16409 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17040

That made a lot of sense to me. But on the other hand, pg's "How to Make Wealth" makes a good argument for precisely the opposite view:

"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one."

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Of course, no piece of general advice is right in all cases. But what should you look for, in a given situation, to know whether it's better to seek out the hard problems or better to avoid them?

"The survey did not ask where the respondents obtained the content, ignoring the reality that many were possibly downloading television shows from Bittorrent or similar services."

To me, it sound like a good idea not to ask that, if you want honest responses.

Thanks for the answers! :-)

A general question and a specific one:

Who are you? Metalab has an extensive website, but who's behind YEurope? You know that the funding is only a small part of what YC provides -- you won't be able to live up to pg, rtm et al, which is expected, but right now you don't say anything about yourself, so why should a prospective applicant value your connections and advice?

And: One of the things YC does is that it sets up a company for you. YEurope is in Austria. Austria is a country where it's expensive to incorporate (pg has written about how that is one problem for startups in Europe [1]). What are you going to do about that?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

What I'd like to see is companies hiring lawyers who spend their surplus time blogging. Being involved in the community should prevent them from being as seriously out of tune as this, and if they spend some of their time explaining tech law to the unenlightened (like me), that'll reflect back on the company.

Your point is that news.yc and other social news sites are actually more useful when more people use them, right? I agree with that. But IMHO, that's missing the point of the article.

Music doesn't objectively get better just because more people listen to it; and yet, the authors' research appears to show that people's opinions of music is hugely influenced by what other people like. Recall their main result: They had one group of users who they didn't show any information about how often a song was downloaded, and then eight independent groups who were shown the download count of each song inside that group. "The song 'Lockdown,' by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in [the group not shown download counts]; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in [the group not shown counts] had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success." Their conclusion is that the reason why predicting the success of media products is shaky is that what's a success is hugely influenced by an unpredictable feedback process.

Thus, my question: Can we assume that Google's success is due in a large part not to anything that Google did, but to the (random) feedback process of people liking Google because they see other people liking Google?

Of course, one could argue that this is simply the truism that one needs luck as well as talent to succeed. But I come away from reading the article with the feeling that I've learned something that goes deeper than that, and I'm trying to figure out how to apply it to the tech world.

Oops -- sorry that I misunderstood so completely what you were saying! Thanks for the explanation :-)

And closer to home: Is Google?

Hey, death threats aren't funny, and being afraid of a death threat is something very different from being afraid that taking a stance might hurt your bottom line.

Well, I haven't read everything on their site, so I don't understand all the details and I may have misconceptions, but my understanding is this: In the physical world, to prove that you have a driver's license or a valid credit card or that you are over 13 years old, you need to show a credential that also gives away additional information about you. In their system, the government or bank can issue a cryptographic credential to the user which tells the service provider only the information they actually need to know, and does this through a zero-knowledge proof, so that the provider can't link multiple uses of the same credential to the same user.

The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ("Delivers a rich, relevant customer and partner experience by extending a common set of business services across every point of interaction" and such.)

As the Ars Technica article is, uh, rather light on details, here is what appears to be the homepage of the IBM project:

http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/

Looks like it's an IBM Research project, which is nice because it means they give you actual technical information rather than burying you in incomprehensible marketing speak.

Not new, but useful. Thanks for reminding me of this!

I don't find it ironic. I find it unrelated. If you could find a successful startup today that used a lot of IBM technology -- even if you could show that a startup today succeeded only because they were using IBM technology -- that wouldn't turn IBM back into the dangerous monopolist it once was (which was what Paul's article was about).

I guess I'm in the younger half, because on reflection, I realize that not only do I agree, but that this is old news to me. I'm not complaining, though -- this article made me realize something I didn't know consciously.

A lot of commenters here seem to argue that Microsoft still has the vast majority of desktop installations, and that this isn't likely to go away soon. I agree (I don't like it, but I think it's true). But I also agree that Microsoft isn't a threat any more, like it used to be. And, on reflection, I agree that it is web apps that are making the difference.

I don't think that Word or Photoshop moving online is what really makes the difference, though. Every hoary Windows competitor has had a word processor and an image editor. (Sure, they didn't match Word feature-for-feature; does Writely?) But I believe a major reason that prevented people from switching has been the long tail of applications: "It doesn't have any accounting software for plumbers!"

The feeling that Microsoft had a secure monopoly came from the fact that these long-tail programs were all written for Windows, because that was what was economic for its developers. Word and Photoshop always had a Mac version. Accounting for Plumbers never did.

Now, these applications live on the Web. And while the people using them still might use Windows, it doesn't matter; it makes Microsoft money, but it doesn't buy them any leverage.

But, of course, you don't have to have code files full of parens in order to have s-expressions. Alternative syntaxes have never taken hold in the Lisp world, which may mean they just offer nothing to an experienced Lisp hacker, but they're certainly not impossible.

You can have user-definable infix operators; Haskell has them and uses them to good effect. (The way Haskell does it, you can't have identifiers composed of both letters and operator characters, which Lisp people like to do, but I think we can safely treat that as a matter of taste.) You pick a symbol, say ~, and assign it a precedence and left- or right-associativity:

infixr 3 ~

infixl 7 .!.

Now (x ~ y .!. z) is parsed as ((~) x ((.!.) y z)), where (~) is the Haskell way of making the ~ operator as a prefix function. Haskell also lets you use a prefix function as an infix operator, by putting backquotes around it.

If you want to apply this in Lisp, there is the issue that (foo) means something else than foo; I would like to allow (foo x + bar y) to mean ((+) (foo x) (bar y)), but I wouldn't want (x + y) to mean ((+) (x) (y)). My solution would be that a single value is parsed as just a value, but multiple values next to each other is a function call: (foo x + y) is ((+) (foo x) y), to call y without parameters you have to write (foo x + (y)).

This leaves you with the parantheses for control structures and the like. If you like layout-based languages, you can adopt the rule that "expression + colon + newline + indented expression 1 + indented expression 2 + ..." is parsed as "expression (indented expression 1) (indented expression 2) ...".

Some examples of code from On Lisp formatted like this:

http://himalia.it.jyu.fi/~benja/2007/layoutedlisp.txt

Of course, it still looks like Lisp, with less parens.

The "test case" of DRM-free stuff that I'm most familiar with is Baen Books, who are selling DRM-free e-book versions of (almost) all their titles and -- according to themselves and their authors who are also have books published by other publishers -- "[earn] more income as a publisher and [pay their] authors more in the way of royalty payments from [their e-book line] than any other outlet for electronic books." Based on this, it seems likely to me that the EMI/iTunes experiment is going to deliver on its promise of making more money for EMI.

http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/auged http://preview.baens-universe.com/articles/salvos6

Of course, it's a different medium, and Baen has also managed to create a community of users who like the company, not just its products. I don't see EMI replicating that, DRM-free music or no, which limits the applicability of the example. (The Baen people love telling the story of their users saying, "you should charge more for this." They created a premium version where you pay more to read an advance copy of the book before the official release date, and they're making money from that, too.)