Ha! Just experienced this. It was very frustrating.
327 karma · joined September 19, 2020
With a little effort and research someone could come up with a reasonable estimate that read something like, “a typical 15-year-old reading through this comic once in a typical way would have cost the family X dollars”, and X might literally be $100k. Certainly well over $10k.
Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
A wonderful historical fiction novel with two main timelines, WW2 and the 1990’s, that includes the invention of the first computers, cool as heck battle scenes, adventure love sex music math statistics horror Churchill Turing Goering and wow the wrecked German submarine U553 crashing up and down on an exposed coral reef in the North Atlantic waves.
How do you benefit from reading someone’s mail without letting them know you are reading their mail?
I forwarded your article to my son the dev, since your post captured the magic of being a programmer so well.
And yes Levy’s book Hackers is most excellent.
TheGauntlet.news here has several well-written articles about what went wrong with the US’s response to COVID.
It’s like someone swept their arm across the kitchen table, tossing of all the junk, and said “let’s just lay out everything we know about how COVID went/is going, but only put down the science based and common sense stuff.”
I was trying to convince people to use real masks instead of surgical masks since basically day 1. I understand that at first there was a shortage of N95s, but not for that long. I totally agree with the article that it quickly became “I don’t wanna”.
But I never thought fully about what it would have been like, to be a parent that HAD to take a sick child to the hospital for treatment unrelated to Covid, and see lots of doctors and nurses wearing surgical masks when they could have been wearing 95s. That would have been infuriating.
And one of the articles also had great info on the fallacy that “getting COVID multiple times is good for children’s immune systems” type messages. It is becoming clear that is not true at all.
Really great, critically important journalism there!
You might suggest to users the following use case. “If you want to create a Timelinize data store, but don’t feel that your own local systems are secure enough to safely hold a basket with a copy of every egg in your life, you might consider the following use case, which some of our customers implement. Once our twice a year, update the data store, but store it on an external disk. When the update is done, take the disk offline and keep it in a drawer or safe.”
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I always wondered how cool it would be if I could tell some Spotify-like system, “I’m 20 miles away from the lake, we are going to stay in the cabins a week, just like we did 10 years ago. Play me the exact same songs now that played at every turn back then.”
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For a name, how about: ChronEngine That name seems pretty free and clear from previous use, if you like it grab ChronEngine.com before some squatter does and thank me with a phone call, I would enjoy a quick chat with you.
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Your web page might benefit from a grid that lists all the input sources you accept, with hotlinks next to the names that give a pop-up quick summary of what that source is about, and maybe some color coding that shows something like “green = rock solid lately”, “yellow = some users reporting problems”, “red = they just updated their format, it’s broken, we are working on it”. You will/are facing challenges similar to Trillian, a chat client from the early 2000s that would try to maintain ongoing connection compatibility with multiple other chat clients such as AIM/ICQ/MSN. Also, the grid could have a “suggested source sets” filter that helped people find what 5 (for example) input sources they might select for their use style.
Oh and make a list of anybody that says they have done an elaborate something similar with Excel (like me and at least one other person in this thread) and maybe have a discussion with them some time, we/they might have some useful insights.
Let’s hear it for people on the opposite side of the “go fast and break things” coin! My first project took 16 years. My current one I started 28 years ago!
Folks, we are just having fun here. Making fun of me. But not for making HN comments that aren’t as well written as you think they should be. For having created, owned, and then let slip through my hands, a patent that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini say may have been worth a billion dollars. So what if the estimate is off by 100x, so I let $10M slip through my fingers. It is still ridiculous and wild. But seriously who cares about the language I use to describe the thing.
I got around this issue by not giving any help; the user was presented with a form with blanks for five artist and song name pairs. Which resulted in a crazy amount of typos, which I fixed “by hand” using a pretty lame interface since I wasn’t a good enough programmer to create a better way in 1996. I spent a LOT of time correcting typos.
I had The Similarities Engine up on the very early web for a couple of years. I joined some guys and we created a startup with a good bit of angel financing. It failed, but at the last minute, Firefly bought out the tech and code that we had developed, so our investors got a little back of what they put in.
Now I met my wife when I travelled to Poland to work with the programmers that were developing our product, and she is the best thing that ever happened to me, so I don't have ALL regrets about how the startup failed, but let me tell you about the big regret that I do have.
The code that was written in Poland was never used for anything, as far as I know. The only thing of value that Firefly got out of acquiring us is the patent that I wrote on my recommending algorithm. (Yeah yeah go ahead and give me a bunch of grief here for applying for, and having issue, a software patent. It was 1997, a different world, for one thing.)
Anyway, long story short, it all comes down to this one 20 minute phone call with my CEO, where I had to decide whether to take my patent back and kill the deal where NetAngels would sell to Firefly, or give up my patent in the hopes that Firefly stock would be worth something. Firefly didn't succeed and soon after sold to Microsoft for not much. But if I had killed the deal, I really think my then-fiancée and I would not have gotten married, so I think I chose wisely. However...
That patent of mine. It didn't look like much at the time maybe. But what happened is, over time, the Internet came to it. Big time. The patent describes what is basically THE basic collaborative filtering algorithm, and it issued. Microsoft never did anything with it as far as I know, they just kept it in a drawer so nobody could ever use it against them.
So here's the thing. Recently I asked ChatGPT and Claude how much my patent would have been worth, if I had held on to it. If you have regrets in your life about business deals, if you had a few early shares of Google, or some early bitcoin or something but you sold early, let me tell you, I have you beat. I'll let you see the numbers yourself--type this query into your favorite AI (and maybe do me a favor and post a comment here about what numbers it tells you):
A single individual created patent US 5,749,081. He sold it when it had barely issued. How much money do you think he could have made from the patent, if he had held on to it and effectively monetized it, as the early Internet grew to have so many companies using collaborative filtering systems to sell products to users and make money?
Let me get my post for this thread finished then I'll try to look you up.
You can still get your fix in quick enough to benefit from some of this traffic spike, go for it! Good luck.
Hilarious, this is great.
What are the paid features and what are the costs? Do I have to install the app to see the list of paid features and costs?
You might get a better response from HN if you give us more info up front.
I especially like OP’s point #1. “I know I did x, sorry about that” is so much more powerful than “Sorry you let yourself get upset that I did x”.