Elite

>this process will be overseen by David Kappos, the current director of the USPTO and formerly an attorney at IBM in charge of their heavy-handed patent strategy.

Looks like the deck is already stacked. Are there any companies or elected officials with significant political/financial capital aggressively campaigning for this? This movement needs a champion to make this topic relevant to bureacrats and I don't know if Stallman's the guy.

Well you can't get divorced if you can't find a wife! I kid. I kid.

But engineers strike a good balance of time at home and financial compensation. If you're making much more than a decent engineer, you're probably a senior exec, lawyer, or business owner with not enough time for the wife. Don't have any data to back this up, but just my suspicion.

If you're making much less than an engineer, you may run into money problems which is a leading cause of divorce.

I don't see the problem here.

For a while I thought Google would be sweeping this under the rug.

Great call on Khan Academy.

But the $1M spent on schweeb could have done more good elsewhere. Nobody wants to go pedaling upside down on a suspended monorail. The bicycle has solved this problem pretty elegantly.

Your argument holds weight in general but Google is a special case.

I'm sure they knowingly turn away bright & competent engineers simply due to the large size of the applicant pool.

Smaller companies would be wise to heed your advise though.

Well people like him and I love to spoil the fun for everyone else.

By the way: Bruce Willis is dead.

Soylent green is people

Kaiser Soze is Kevin Spacey.

It's been 2 and a half years since the end of the wire. I don't think he owes you a warning

Yes. Yes I would.

Out of curiosity: If the FBI or NSA REALLY wanted to get the data on your hard drive, is Truecrypt enough to keep them out?

Quite a bit of it has to do with YC and the tech community buzz and implicit validation. The founder of HipMunk mentioned that CNN contacted him out of the blue within a day after they launched.

If it was the same product done outside YC I don't think they would have got CNN coverage, at least not this soon.

The concept doesn't translate for maps.

An address as entered from left-to-right goes from the very specific to the general. Therefore all the api calls and screen updating you make are completely irrelevant until I type in my city half -way through.

There's no getting around understanding what the value of your technology to your customers is.

The starting point is to find out the raw ROI. So if they use your technology, how much money will they make or save? How does this compare to your competitor? So I would say, you need to take the final step and translate that 10x reduction in error to dollars.

I don't care if my GPS is exact, but to an airline company this is critical and they would spend well to make sure it takes into account the curvature of earth, etc...

But the raw ROI is just the starting point. Companies also pay a lot of money for other intangible features. There are some companies that spend millions on Oracle when they could probably get by with free open-source. Clearly Oracle is not competiting on price here, but on a feeling of 'security', knowing that my site will not go down and if it does, I have someone to yell at and come fix it.

If your product is truly revolutionary, maybe there are early adopter advantages. Could early adopters of your product steal revenue from competitors by using your tech? Price that in.

If your product is truly revolutionary, this final price may end up being pretty high and give some customers pause. A good approach would be reduce the price of your product for a pilot phase of say months. In return for reducing your price, you can ask for some specific feedback or a testimonial. Make sure they understand you aren't just reducing the price in return for nothing.

After they go through the pilot and have a real tangible sense of the value of your product, they may be willing to pay your high price you initially calculated.

There was an article that was linked to here where a French tech guy (speaking in English though) gave a pretty good video blog analysis of how much the average mobile app developer makes (not much).

Can't remember his name or site though.

Of course not Ender. It's just a game. Just a game.

The ACM abstract gave a good overview of what the site was supposed to do, but when I went to the actual site, it was horriblyi designed with no clear description of what the service was supposed to do.

Maybe if the OP Gave a very well designed application using existing implementations it would take off.

I'm watching one of the 2 hours videos from the Stanford professor. He looks like a college freshman! No offense intended.

Do you have any resources on how to use these tools (especially the python library), and examples of implementation? I'm interested in learning more and using these tools on real data, but don't necessarily want to spend the time learning all of the theory behind it.

Their business model assumes most of their investment doesn't take off, with a few rock stars that make up for the losses.

Incidentally, which is one reason cash flow positive startups should really think before accepting VC money. VC's are happy with a 10% success rate. You on the other hand, need a 100% success rate. Interests are not wholly aligned.

Sounds like an excellent thesis for an economics grad student.

I'd love to see this data in an easy to read format for a variety of goods and industries

I'm no fan of excessive taxing, but if you shifted the source of all current tax revenue to consumption based transactions, this would cripple the poor and middle class.

For much of the lower/middle class, a significant, sometimes 100% of their income goes to consumption. For the wealthy, consumption as percent of income can be very small.

This is a pretty big flaw.

I would highly recommend the developer add a simple voice recognition functionality. Even something as simple as "next" & "back" which scrolls the screen would improve the usefulness of this app.

I read the esquire articles and the chow.com, and neither of these authors really perfected the art. Although the self-titled $20 millionaire occassionally got serviced, he was often punked because he had no style, no swagger.

And when he DID get service, he did it openly & brazenly without the required discretion. Publicly announcing in a first class airplane section that he wanted to trade seats?! Tacky. Cutting the line at a cab stand, only to end up having to pay not only the front customer, but also the 2 cab stand guys? Buddy, that just cost you sixty bucks and a half cup of coffee thrown at your cab.

The demeanor and style in which you execute the handoff matters just as much, if not more than the actual note you've got in your hand.

How'd you get paulg?

How did they find you?

To the OP, since you say you're great at front end, I would find 3-5k and hire a recommended East European hacker to build a minimum viable product. Put in a lot of sweat equity on your end to make sure the product is well polished.

Then use your claimed marketing chops to see if you can get any user traction or press coverage. Are people receptive to your product??

If they are, you'll either start making money enough to pay a superstar programmer, or you now have a real case to present to credible angels who may invest $50-200k to give you some cash to hire the superstar programmer.

I would have a cogent answer to where you see the company going. You need to be able to convey a realistic vision of the company's goal and the path to getting there. And that destination needs to be large enough and lucrative enough to justify a minimum VC investment.

You may have a team of talented hackers but if you don't have this vision, you could very well end up hacking away at a product which fails to grow b/c your actual market size isn't big enough, you're target customers don't need your product, or they don't want to pay for it.

So you'll need a justifiable answer to your market size and who would actually open up their wallets to pay you.

Lastly, don't bullshit him/her. VCs see through this pretty easily, so be confident in what you know, and honest about what you don't.

If you're looking for new business ideas, reviewing the Inc5000 is a great way to get started. It's ranked by 3-year percent revenue growth, which is good way to identify industries and sub-niches currently being disrupted.

It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. As we learn more about science we are able to unravel layers of mystery from physical phenomena and explain observations that were previously taken to be axioms.

Although the statement "mass curves spacetime" is true, I don't think it is simple enough to be considered an axiom. We'll have to dig deeper. Who knows, maybe the OP's son will do it.

And why does the mass curve spacetime?

If you're son already understands the distinction between a description and an explanation I'd say he's off to an excellent start.

That being said, I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that no one know exactly what gravity is. We understand it's effects pretty well from both classical physics as well as via the curvature of space. But we don't know what causes it.

You should go back to your son and tell him humbly that we don't know. I would explain to him the curvature of spacetime using a heavy ball in a table cloth as an example. This unravels one layer of the mystery but leaves other unanswered questions. WHY does an object curve spacetime?? Unanswered questions do wonders to inspire curious children like your son.

BTW, Watch this video from Richard Feynman. He tells an amazing story about him asking his father a similar question about "inertia". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=695Flhmjmg4&feature=relat...

How do I downvote this comment? You're disproving my argument ;)

What types of problems does your company need to solve?