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Well, they do say that the product is #1. I think the focus of the slides was the nontechnical stuff.

I have a friend who works for the patent office reviewing patents, and I've asked her a bit about the process. Overall, they are incentivized to verify claims because they want to do a good job. Same as any other employee at any other job. I don't think they're penalized for rejecting claims and rewarded for letting things through. Their goal is to act appropriately to each case.

Where any problems occur due to bad patents being approved seems to be due to time constraints in reviewing patents. My friend didn't think that the patent system is "broken" by any means. Her opinion was that they just need more qualified reviewers. They are hiring like crazy, or at least they were a few years ago.

I didn't know some of the unusual specifics, but then again, I don't think that I need to either. It seemed less like a tutorial on what every web developer needs to know than it was documentation on what every browser maker needs to know.

A fully-polished business plan may be a waste of time, but it is definitely useful to put together financial projections for a couple years in the future. Especially for a social networking website. If his only revenue stream is advertising, he'll quickly learn how many pagviews and users he'll need in order to make money. If he does research into it and finds out what the average CPM, PV/visitor, etc. are, then he'll learn a lot and maybe change strategies. A few days worth of research and planning are worthwhile if it can prevent wasted development time.

I agree, PCI is a really cool book. All you need is some basic Python knowledge and it takes you through so many actual data mining examples. I used some of that code to analyze data using Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and got results that I thought would have taken an actual CS degree to get.

Here's the non-shortened link: http://www.pluggd.in/startup-pr-firm-strategy-297/

There's no character limit on HN, and shorteners can be used to hide malicious links.

You really need a trademark lawyer to do a search and review of that name. Don't trick yourself into thinking you'll be okay without getting a qualified opinion. I'm sure MS has tons of filed trademarks, and until you get a trained person to review specifically what MS and others have trademarked, how their claims are worded, how broadly their mark can be applied, etc. I went through this process with a trademark lawyer, and came away knowing a lot more than when I went into it. If this product/company is worth anything to you, then spend a couple thousand and get the name cleared and in the process you'll also learn a lot for future projects.

I would be wary of self improvement programs that charge money. I'm not sure what exactly you've looked into, but there's a lot of information out there for free or cheap.

I've spent a decent amount of time reading self-improvement books/blogs, and for me the stuff that made the most impact were things that were tailored to the problems I was having at the time.

Here's an overview of what I've read over the years that have helped me to some extent:

I Can Do Anything if I Only Knew What it Was: http://www.amazon.com/Could-Anything-Only-Knew-What/dp/04405...

Paul Graham's Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

How to Win Friends and Influence People: http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/14...

Four Hour Work Week: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/d...

Randy Pausch, Time Management: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0

GTD: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Produc...

Steve Pavlina: http://www.stevepavlina.com/

7 Habits of Highly Effective People (reading this now): http://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People/dp/0671...

So I would say "it depends" on what you want out of life and where you are now. Self improvement is a life-long task and you will need advice that changes as you progress.

When I'm doing work on my own projects, I prefer to work with a sharpie marker and blank paper. It's the easiest way to get my ideas out as quickly as possible. The downside is that it's not digitized or searchable. Usually when I'm done writing and sketching out a lot of ideas, I'll just put those papers into a manila folder with a descriptive label and file it away. I bought a nice filing cabinet and label maker last year when I started doing GTD, so it works pretty well. Every meaningful thought is documented, and it's pretty easy to find it when I need it.

I've had success with domain-specific forums. If your product really is something that people can get passionate about and you present your website in a non-spammy way, there's a chance that you'll get initial traffic and then eventually the members will spread the word about your site to other forums they're members of.

For your project, I would suggest having a no-signup live demo that they can use right away. No one will get passionate about a landing page. That might be useful for gaging interest and collecting emails, but if you can't solve someone's problem on their first visit (or at least make it clear how you could) then it's going to be hard to turn them into a passionate user.

There were also probably no death threats.

Mech E here also. Spent two years as a design engineer until I made the jump for web programming. I didn't leverage any domain knowledge though. Light bulb design doesn't have much to do with fantasy football :)

That's a good article, and I can definitely see how it applies to spending time with young children. However, if you don't have children (like myself), I'm not sure if I like the idea it's promoting. It's kind of saying that my life is going to get progressively worse over time, so I need to cherish what I have now. I'd rather be grateful for what I have now, but also work hard to build an even better life in the future.

This article was written by someone who sells email utilities like spam blockers, etc. This is his proposed solution to the problem:

"This non-confrontational approach can be achieved by using an e-mail monitoring tool that will not only monitor activity but can also be set to automatically respond to the activity in a variety of ways."

It doesn't look like he has a specific porn-filtering utility, but overall I think his opinion is a little biased.

Also, I'd like to add that Feedback Army is great for this kind of high-level website feedback: http://www.feedbackarmy.com/

After spending time looking it over it seems like it's potentially a really cool and useful service. From the little marketing I've done, I know it can be tedious to manage a bunch of services. Here's my feedback on your home page:

1) No, it wasn't clear until I went back for my second visit. I originally thought it was some link or photo sharing service. The egg is distracting and I didn't see the "Your Information" icon next to it. That helps describe exactly what you distribute. Also "your information" is vague. It would help if it was more specific as to what information you're distributing.

2) Not really. If someone's website is already on Google, why is their logo listed? How do you publish someone's marketing materials to Google? Also, why should I or someone else care about having info on MySpace or Topix or fwix? I didn't know those were sites business cared about, and I haven't even heard of the last two.

3) You already have the egg guy in the logo, I think it's a little much to also have him be the primary focus on the explanation graphic of how your service works. Also, I don't like to view videos about products because they always take too long. I might suggest also adding a page that describes the benefits of your product so that people can learn more before having to decide to sign up. I'm still not exactly sure how the service works.

Reminds me of the Simpsons: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701245/quotes?qt0207833

Homer: [to Doug] Let me ask you a question. Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?

[pause]

Doug: I withdraw my question. [takes a bite from a bar of chocolate]

Cool, thanks. I've been using ZoneEdit without any problems, but I may look into those providers also.

Do you have providers that you recommend?

I've found myself going through the HN archives when I'm looking for advice. Part of the issue with fewer ask HN questions may be that a lot of common questions have now been answered. I do think those posts are more fun to read and comment on though.

The article linked to another one that mentions how in some cases single-member LLCs don't provide protection from personal liability. Is that another disadvantage of LLCs for single founders? Or is the risk of the corporate veil being pierced very small?

There's some discussion on that on the website for the book Building Reputations:

"Leaderboards Considered Harmful" http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2008/12/leaderboards_...

I'm a web developer, and I'm a little confused on who the target audience is. Is this something that I would buy and then resell as a product to clients? Or is this something a mom-and-pop store would buy for themselves and hook into their hosting account? In general it looks cool, but I'm unsure what level of abstraction you're going for.

Also, your tagline "custom software solutions" is way too vague. Tighten that up to be more specific so that it's clear what you're offering. Also, your name Dokuments may be a cute domain name, but I'm not sure how documents are related to custom-built LAMP apps.

It looks like there's some really cool and easy to use technology there, and this is probably a really good area to target. I know a couple non-technical family and friends who could possibly need a couple of those applications. I would just work on some of the marketing copy to make it clear who your audience is. Good luck!

Makes sense. It's no more of a bribe than the "bribe" your employer gives you to come into work everyday.

Bill Gates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data

I use Binary Canary to alert me for down-time, which is about the same thing that Pingdom does.

Just do whatever it takes for you to fall asleep at night. I recently bought a smartphone (N900) that allows me to ssh into my server from anywhere, so if a small fix is needed, I can do that quickly. Before I had that, I actually took my laptop camping with me during a busy period last year and drove to a nearby coffee shop periodically to check for any important issues.

Other than that, I'd say to scale up your architecture as your site gets more popular. If you later need some dual-DB setup with a heartbeat monitoring system then you can add that when the time comes.

Have good backups too. That might be more important than just uptime.

It may be a confusing name, but it's not hard to google. They're already #1 for the term "where": http://www.google.com/search?q=where

Hmm.. I didn't know their original name was Cadabra.

Does 99designs have superstars like Tiger Woods?

Wow, I love the clock http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/segmentus/