its_so_on

What if the component you bought has already made it into your products?

I'm talking about "at a glance" or the briefest moment of confusion, as a highly informed consumer. Never happened with anything else. Doesn't happen with Samsung's current phones.

This is like Wendy's deciding: "Fuck being third. From now on our logo will be a minimalist W, but upside down, and yellow, and we will not be happy with its form until customers start streaming in at the same rate they do to a McDonald's."

Everyone who brings in prior art is missing an issue. When I first saw an iPad, I wasn't like: "Oh, a Star Trek pad!" But I did look at an iPad and say, oh, an iPad: it was a Samsung designed to confuse the customer into thinking that it was one, by infringing on iPad's design very closely.

Let's be honest. It would have been easy for Samsung to take all the design cues it wanted from Apple while adding enough of their own design so as not to cause confusion. But they chose not to do that. They chose to be confused for an iPad.

Even the lawyers on the case mistake one for the other. But they think that this "confusion" is just an effect of the infringement damage. It's not: it's the source of the infringement damage.

There is no way there is really that much of a difference in applicant quality and quantity at that margin: it has to be YC's selection bias.

1. Someone is doing exactly this.

Response: "How is this different from (someone already doing it)? Even if it's better, what keeps the biggest guys from doing the same thing?"

2.a. Nobody has done this.

Response: "There are a lot of very smart engineers out there. Wouldn't one of them be doing this if it worked? Even if you get it to work, what keeps them from just executing on the same thing, better."

2.b. People have tried and failed.

"A lot of people have tried this. They failed. What makes you think you will succeed?"

--

Now let's work through some concrete examples. First, take Google. When it launched as a search engine in Stanford, there were loads of other search engines. This puts it firmly in category "1". There was nothing Google could do that another company couldn't.

Next let's take eBay. When it launched as "a perfect market" based on auctions, nobody had done that. Firmly 2.a. category.

Finally let's take Dropbox. A lot of people had this idea. They failed. Firmly 2.b. category.

Basically, there is not an idea that I could name that doesn't fall into one of these three categories. You can dismiss everything.

I am personally working on a massive project that involves fundamental innovation and falls firmly in 2.a. It is really hard. Progress is very slow. As a break I've started a bit of a side project. This one falls firmly in 2.b. In the nineties and even before, this second project got loads of attention, huge amounts of research (I can find publications up the wazoo) and never took off. People tried to do it and failed.

What separates me from the opinion just expressed by David Sacks is: Fuck you, David Sacks. That's what.

Exactly. When NoSQL "honestly" say, oh nooooooooo we're not replacing the traditional RDBMS approach, this is anything but honest.

It's like me building this suspended-rail system for inner-city transportation. Oh noooooooo I'm not replacing traditional cars and bicycles!

the way you get acceptance is by faking honesty that you're not at all replacing the traditional approach (that you're replacing.)

More like, technically true, but contrary to the whole reason for doing what they're doing.

Nobody puts a lot of work into something "honestly" not intending to replace the thing it's replacing.

They say this to appease the people who point out that it doesn't do all the same things.

If I built a better alternative to a common item, you could bet your bottom dollar i would be very "honest" about it not replacing that common item. The last thing that statement would be is "honest." It's appeasement.

I am extremely interested in listening to their way. That doesn't mean I'm already doing it.

They should let every single applicant in who is willing to listen to them and show them an existing, working product in a big market.

This is a hard one, and I would need some more evidence. Don't you have a steve jobs quote?

Let me explain. Currently everything has one score. So, give it a second score that also starts at 0. Instead of score "1 point" it would score "1 point (1 point at adult table)."

Then the adults at the adult table would immediately downvote anything that isn't adult (this only concerns its score at the adult table) and can upvote highly reasoned but nuanced posts, and so forth. However, there are not so many at the latter table. So, the former table might go from -2 to +100 maybe the second score has most comments untouched (at 1), with a few downvoted, and a few upvoted.

This way, you could have a children's table (current reddit) with its thousahds of votes, and good comments languishing at 0, and the adult table, where the same 0 normal score comments can have high votes at the adult table, and so forth.

So, here on hackernews, you could have a "serious" or a "founder's" table. And you could have a snarky table for people that just like having everything picked apart - where, "correctly" (per policy) we (the serious table) would vote the snarky comments down.

So, to illustrate. Here is a snarky comment "Oh, I see. So it's like a coupon system where you insert yourself into a transaction and book the whole transaction as revenue, deducting the actual 'rest of the transaction' as cost. So even though you lose on every transaction, you make it up in volume! Hey, it worked for groupon, right? :)"

This starts at 0, 0 for the snarky and serious table respectively. The serious table immediately gives it a downvote, so it is now at 0, -1, and then another, 0, -2, and soon it's hidden here: 0, -3. Meanwhile the people shifting through the trash say, "hey, ZING!!" and promote it, it gets to 5, -3, then 10, -3 then - if this place degenerates into reddit, hundreds of points, -3 respectively.

The serious or adult table is not impacted. It's not even visible. Meanwhile the snarky guys can have their children's talk.

-----

(here is the rest of my comment. I shifted the above to the top for more visibilty.)

like many others I had a "rude introduction" to hackernews, not from real connections in the startup world (which I have) but from low-quality forums. In my case I regret even the choice of username, and would change it if I could (maybe indicated to show that it's new). I wouldn't now shirk away from using my real name or a close alias - something I never do online.

So, in my case what would have mitigated my behavior is seeing where my traffic was coming from and treating accordingly. I certainly wasn't typing it into the browser URL bar. Secondly, you could have a prominent button "New to hackernews? Learn about this community, which is a more serious one than most online communities: a lot of personal connection is on the line". Then explain why, and what we get out of behaving the way we do.

Finally, as of now I can either upvote or downvote a nasty comment. There is no right answer. But you can change this in a minute. If defining the correct way to vote as "downvote any negative comment not leavened by positivity - we need all the positive thinking we can get", then I would start voting correctly. It's like Wikipedia. I don't add what I know - I add what I can prove with a reference. I don't delete uncited folklore because it's not a good read - I do so because that's the correct action.

So, policies (as is the case with Wikipedia) help immensely.

That was quick (going through the first seed), but justified. In view of your momentum and execution we are approving another seed of $2mil for the next twelve months in San Francisco as detailed under separate cover. The name is fantastic. Please run the final logo by us before putting it up, otherwise keep up the great work and we look forward to more.

Chair, Board of directors, coffeespace rocket lab

I ran across this comment of yours - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4377315 - and certainly appreciate your privacy concerns. A healthy private life is undoubtedly everyone's personal choice.

At the same time, HackerNews is YCombinator's tech blog, and highly visible. Frankly, your opinion comes off as somewhat paranoid. It's not that it isn't justified, I'm not saying that one way or another, but I would strongly consider the impact statements like this have on your image in the social space.

I heard back from Kenneth. He actually said that your social strategy is a "shambles", which is excusable, and also that you "had 0 interest in improving this" -- which is not.

He said that you were more interested in getting to the moon than in building a social network around the project.

blhack, the money we entrusted you with not appropriate to spend idly dreaming up conspiracy theories.

The world is social. People chirp, tweedle, and most recently iMessage those they care about and feel a community with.

This community is now your top priority. I want to be able to show Ken that you have put together at least 10,000 likes and 30,000 followers by the end of the year. Consider this "stage one" of your rocketry design phase.

While we are not saying that failure to meet this metric means the board will necessarily replace you, consider it a part of your job description.

We are also denying your proposed budget. Please work on your social program.

Your board.

Thanks - couple of thoughts here. You demonstrate good potential to disrupt some big companies with the coffee shop video. But you need a lot more momentum, so please hold off on coffee shop work until series A.

I would also have loved to share the render with my niece's dog, who's really crazy about the moon, but I couldn't find any social buttons. This takes precedence.

I'd like to introduce you to a social media director who would be a very good fit (cc). Please set up an interview.

Thanks,

Your board.

BLHack: Your idea is interesting, but a bit vague. Could you send a brief summary of the project? Please find enclosed $500k just in case you need a seed for you know whatev. Looking forward to more: your new board.

The article says that if a TV network's real, legitimately copyrighted feed, that they are correct in telling Youtube is copyrighted uses public domain video in some parts (which doesn't mean their particular feed based on it isn't still copyrighted), then other videos that use the same public domain video (from the original source, not off of the copyrighted feed) are identified as being the copyrighted source.

>What did you expect Samsung to do, sit around and wait for customers to realize it's not an iPhone?

would work just as well.

Nah, that's crazy talk.

Who would want to watch a high-quality hardware-accelerated local video that gets deleted when you close the tab, from the familiar interface of a web browser? Crazy talk, crazy talk.

The article says "Practicing law is safe and probably fairly lucrative" and "Practicing law is an honorable profession. Indeed, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting professions there is."

visual hallucations are pretty standard after a certain period of time that isn't even so long. (i.e. I would get them around, say, the 28 hour mark from when I last woke up and started staying up by pulling an all-nighter. So if I get up at 7 every day but then simply not go to sleep one night but try to start the next day - by 11 AM it's hard not to hallucinate. In case you get up later the following is equivalent: If you get up at 11 every morning after calling it a night at 3 am or so, then if one night you don't sleep at all then working past 11 am and on by 3 PM you will be very out of it and may easily hallucinate.)

I'm very skeptical whether there is any amount of productivity to be had what-so-ever as for me, personally, it would easily take me 2 minutes to do 30 seconds of (any kind of) work at the end of that time, even moving a box from one place to another or whatever. So I'm very skeptical how a 3-4 hour nap at 22 hour mark could possibly not make up for lost time after waking up.

going on 3 hours of sleep each night for several days (e.g. 2-3) is possible and easy.

like I said, it would make an interesting thread and someone should submit a story on this subject (sleep deprivation and whether it's even worth working after a certain time mark).

as for your story, it sounds like a simple dream/waking dream. it's really hard to tell dream and non-dream apart under conditions of sleep deprivation.

does anyone know what they could possibly have in mind?