galenward

Those who subscribe to the "startup CEOs shouldn't debate with or mentor others" mantra will miss out on working with some of the greatest CEOs in the world.

Josh, you're right - that's why it isn't possible right now. I put that we need a simpler, cheaper way to invalidate patents before a patent-killing x-prize is possible in the post, but maybe not clearly or loudly enough.

I like the use / active-pursue requirement except it seems nearly impossible to enforce. A patent troll could easily spend money to look like they're trying to use a patent.

Interesting!

Granted patents aren't re-reviewed, so someone would have to cough up a few tens of thousands of dollars to do anything with submissions on granted patents.

Is the concept that people are contributing evidence to be used should someone challenge the patent?

Ask Patents is for stopping patents from being granted. I'm suggesting a way to kill patents that are already granted + monetary incentives for the worst / most expensive offenders.

My argument is based on the premise that most software patents are bad for our economy.

Amazon's One-Click patent is a perfect example. Amazon would have developed one-click whether or not it was patentable. By granting the patent, we granted Amazon a monopoly and didn't get anything in return.

I LOVE the shorter patent idea - particularly for software patents. It wouldn't work for pharma, but that's okay.

The problem with this - at least as I understand it - is that patent trolls make a lot from patents on a one-by-one basis - much more than companies want to pay or feel is affordable.

Well said: I too would rather do that than the usual marketing driven thing of wearing a ribbon.

I don't think curing cancer makes much sense in the Kickstarter sense: 1. It is enormously expensive - curing a form of cancer costs well into the millions. So it wouldn't get funded. 2. There are loads of funding sources out there already. 3. "Curing" is actually very difficult to define. Most cancer treatments reduce and you'd need a bunch of expensive studies just to determine if the metric was met if it was anything short of "cured."

That said, it might work on a limited basis if you applied an X-Prize to certain forms of cancer. It could mobilize people to really focus on certain types of cancer and specific goals.

The EFF is probably the closest to doing something like this, but they picked the patents and there isn't a way to support killing just one: https://www.eff.org/patent-busting

We have an engineer whose name is "john; drop table users." Man does he wreak havoc.

"Google just launched an Evernote killer" is a particularly inflammatory title for Hacker News. Almost all "killers" end up being competitors and more often than not "killers" never beat the product they're trying to kill in terms of userbase and revenues.

"Evernote competitor" seems much more appropriate unless there is clear evidence that Evernote is going to die as a result of Google Keep's release.

"Mystery Meat Navigation" is a very good description of what makes Windows 8 a frustrating first time experience, is the synopsis of all the complaints about it, and is why Windows 8 is going to be a slow sell for the first 6-12 months.

After 3-5 hours, Windows 8 is surprisingly decent, but the first hour is a super frustrating adventure of swiping and gesturing with the hope you can get back to the home screen.

Looks interesting.

Doing anything beyond a "give feedback" email link means a bunch of integration headaches for app developers.

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I view this as proof no one on Hacker News has a sense of humor.

Here's the thing with this: It's easy to find new unproductive sites and an outright ban from distractions is difficult to live with - humans crave distraction.

What if instead of blocking sites, the nonproductive internet slowed down a lot? Then in the 10 seconds you waited for Hacker News to load, you might think to yourself that this is a bad idea and give up.

There is nothing absurd about this.

Twitter is a company that is in the business of making money. They are nominal value for themselves when they let third parties import their entire graph and providing incredible value for the importers.

This is a 100% rational business decision. If Twitter didn't offer friend finding on 3rd party networks before, it would be a bad business decision if they up and did it today.

No one will stop using Twitter because they can't use it to connect with their friends on another service.

I don't buy the complaint about CPU or RAM - featuring specs is not the way things are done anymore.

No way should you have to pay 10k+ to setup a corporation in Delaware. That's way too much.

The legal benefits go even deeper than that: Delaware has great, extremely well tested laws around corporations (no surprises) and a judicial system that is highly familiar with corporate matters.

It's less about corporate advantage, although that helps, and more about a well known system with no surprises.

Sure, 20% of Facebook's valuation but also 1/2 of Facebook's revenues.

Facebook still has a lot to prove, but they also have a lot more opportunity to improve.

Adsense is a $10b a year segment not based on intent - it's based on advertising you see when you are on random pages on the internet (like the New York Times).

Facebook will know what you want better than Google: they track you across multiple retail sites, see what you are looking at and even get structured data volunteered to them about that stuff.

Here's the likely real story: LifeShield bought tens of thousands of links to improve their SEO (made sense on a 6-basis, less sense on a 2-3 year basis) and got hit hard by a recent update.

I helped a company a few years ago that had paid a consultant to purchase tens of thousands of links. The way they did it was by buying one of three slots on a few different freely-downloadable wordpress and forum themes.

The problem with buying links like this is that once they're purchased, they are out of your control (buying links is pretty much always a bad idea, but 10x more so like this).

Yes, competitors could have bought tens of thousands of links, but let's apply Occam's Razor here:

- Did an angry competitor spends a ton of money on the off chance that they can swamp LifeShield an SEO penalty (risky - could go the other way)

OR

- Did a company that has purchased tons of spammy Twitter followers (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970998) and pay referral fees to people who review their products (and link to them) also buy tons of spammy links?

Open source it and we will help maintain it.

That's hugely broad. Basically they won't sue startups unless the startups sue them first.

I love this approach, but it should also be pointed out that this is a very easy approach for a patent-poor company to take. If you don't have many patents, you aren't going to sue other companies who do have patents and you'd sure like to look like the good guy if you infringe on their patents.

Double acceleration is fine - don't be worried about future may-or-may-not-exist acquirers when you're getting started.

don't negotiate for them before you meet: they can negotiate some of it away if they want at the time of sale.

Spot on. You stated this much better than I could.

Most of the design elements that are different we changed between October and December or between December and now.

You can't copy code and tweak some stuff and call it your own.

That was (and may still be) the next step. Why isn't this a good idea also?