kljensen

How do these companies monetize their lists? (Please forgive me if this is common knowledge.)

The BSDs always feel beautiful to me. (I'm a mixed GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX user. ) The kernel configuration feels more simple and the official documentation feels uniform, informative, and almost always sufficient.

If more virtualized hosting providers offered BSDs (FreeBSD in particular) I would choose them over Ubuntu for servers.

I would love to start using tipfy, but haven't read a compelling argument for porting existing projects that are using webapp. (Working django projects seem clearly not worth it because the routing and other code patterns appear quite different.)

That is a TON if code for such a simple fiction.

The $20-30k is likely an average, spread over many years, and also skewed towards particularly expensive patents. As others note, provisionals and the early costs of filing can be relatively inexpensive.

Clearly, in the software space patents are nice but not needed. However, they are the coin of the realm for biotech, clean tech, materials, and many other fields. There's some other papers by faculty at Berkeley (Ted Sichelman) showing that, in many fields, patents are one of the more prominent drivers of series A valuations.

Patents work very well in more traditional arts, for example mechanical devices. They're not perfect, but they're good enough at stimulating innovation that most countries have a patent system and they actively encourage their citizens to use it. They're also time tested: the US framers thought so much of patents that they wrote the patent system into our tiny Constitution.

Do you see many of these? I don't...seems like it's only worth it if the in infringing party has money.

This is an entertaining and timeless story. "Trolling" is, alas, inevitable due to the transferable nature of patent rights. (Troll-like cases are perhaps 1/20 of patent infringements filed.) But, the victims of trolling are not entirely without blame -- small inventors and start ups are frequently told to "scram" by large companies when they are informed of their potential infringement. Without a bankroll, contingency litigation is the only option for the small guy.

That phone rocks and it sucks that their experiment failed. What a shame.

I love fantasizing about future revenues and FU money. But, I've worked like a dog for every dime thus far.

Regarding revenue projections based on New Hampshire state population, see http://sivers.org/1pct

Patent +applications+ cannot be infringed.

This does not get you the two primary benefits of attending a top tier school: 1) the social proof that comes with a credential like an MBA from Stanford or 2) the instant network of friends and alums.

(Furthermore, the other comments about accredited investors is spot on. And lastly, imagine somebody told you they did this and lost it all, would you hire that guy? No, you'd think he's nuts.)

We use Bluga's thumbnail service, with which we've been very happy. Does this service have any advantages over Bluga?

Cute. There have been numerous articles on this parasite recently in various papers. None answer the only question I have: do I have it?

Tons of people do. The appengine blog featured a number of prominent ones. We own http://news.priorsmart.com which runs on there.

Is a great platform for all the same reasons Heroku is a great platform: scalability, easy deployment, no sys admin.

The pre-compilation of python code appears to significantly decrease the time required for cold starts. That's just great. Awesome team, awesome platform.

I suggest the following test: send it to 10% and see if their response behavior suggests they feel your email is spam.

(Don't lose any sleep, they did opt-in.)

List and generator comprehensions are such enjoyable features of the language. Really looking forward to set and dictionary comprehensions. Alas, if only python 3 adoption were not bound to take years.

Truly. Making that amount of money is non-trivial. The web is a chaotic, crowded place filled with free stuff. For most of us, it takes a clever idea and persistence to make anything over small change.

This idea is both cute and useful. I frequently run a deployment script and switch to another window (e.g. HN) only to forget about the deployment. I will definitely be using this.

Is there any degree of "free" validation if you route all the emails through another service that probably does some of this. E.g. a gmail account that forwards all incoming mail onto your servers.

Duder who runs that is a super nice guy and has poured his heart into Windy Citizen. Nice to see him win the Knight prize.

All true. But, perhaps, not precisely the "10 commandments" I'd choose based my own RSI experience.

Tangential: notice how all RSI-related resources online are low quality and, in particular, look terrible? I've long wanted to start an attractive site with an attached Amazon astore. (If there are any similarly minded folks here, please get in touch.)

The Appengine team continually updates developers on their progress with an admirable degree of transparency. So, though I've suffered from the recent decrease in GAE performance, I'm confident they will resolve the issues in short order. (Still...it sucks for the time being!)

You would be getting into a very crowded market with large network effects and economies of scale.

Your skills may be more fruitfully applied elsewhere.

An enjoyable description of tech companies, small & medium, that make money for the founders but don't exit big.

God I wish I understood GIT. The screenshot here doesn't help me in any way. Tempted to stick with gitx. What is the advantage of this software?

Wonder if this is related to the new incentives Kappos pushed through for examiners. I've heard no acceptable explanations yet.

Any word on whether the previously leaked device was a motivation for the radically different appearance of the iPhone 4?

Not only funny, but bad SEO. They'd be better off separating the words rather than concatenating them.