Show HN: noteZilla - Interactive sheet music - <AUTHOR> http://notezilla.io <comment><USER2> First of all: über-cool.

Minor bug, Beethoven's 5th was off by a measure for me. (Goldberg variation was spot-on).

Also, right/left arrow keys aren't skipping measures (as the keyboard page says), but are skipping whole sets of measures.

But overall, as a musician, I actually found it rather distracting to watch the line try to follow the notes _exactly_ , as the line constantly sped up and slowed down due to rubato, etc. -- indeed, in particularly fluid pieces, it can even be possible that the right and left hands don't match up precisely in actual performance.

It might actually be _more_ clear, and far less distracting, if you followed the time signature for the beat, and simply highlighted all notes in the current beat within a light-pink rectangle overlay, and then that box would instantly disappear, and the next one appear, upon the next beat.

That way, we can focus with our ears on the actual movement in the music, without being distracted by visual movement, but still have a perfect visual indicator of where we are.

But anyways, great work and great idea! Kudos, well-done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! I forgot to change the definition of the keyboard controls... it's actually meant to turn a whole page so I just need to change the definition.

(just moving by one measure is more easily done by clicking in the score...)

Thanks for correcting that :)

As for Beethoven's 5th, it should self-correct, but I have noticed that in some browsers it doesn't quite work... What browser and hardware are you using? I will look into this further.

I have heard from several others that the current way of moving the cursor isn't optimal. Your solution could work. I'm going to explore a few ways and probably offer some new choices to the user. Your suggested solution would be very easy to implement, so most likely I will add that.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER2> Tried it again and the Beethoven's now fine. (Chrome, OSX.) The Beethoven audio file had taken about a minute to load though, maybe it had to do with that. Anyways, probably just an edge case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, load times seem to be quite high at times, that's not exactly ideal... I will look into that. Where are you located?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this. I'm not as impressed with it as many others seem to be, since I've worked with Encore and Sibelius a lot and they have almost this exact feature. That is, they play synthesized audio while moving the bar along with the sheet music. But it is nice to have better-played music to listen to while following along with sheet music.

I do also sometimes pull up some classical sheet music and try to read it along with a recording. So if you get a bigger library that includes pieces I end up being interested in, your site would be useful in that respect. I would enjoy the safety of having the red bar following along to make sure I don't lose my place.

You said on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226990) that the left and right arrow keys should move by page, and not by measure, and they're just mislabeled. I think it would actually be more helpful for the arrow keys to move by measure. That's what I'm used to in other programs, and I would want to do that more often. I often move back a measure or three back to replay a complicated part I just heard. Moving back a whole page is too much, and using the mouse to click the previous measure is less efficient. You could still keep the keyboard page-moving functions, but bind them to Page Up and Page Down instead.

I've used Transcribe! ([http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html](http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html)) before to manually mark up the measures and beats of pieces. You say you have some JavaScript tool that helps you mark up pieces, and I would love to see it, but you might also want to look at Transcribe! and see if that makes marking up pieces easier. Transcribe! uses a proprietary file format, but it's not too hard to extract the beat times by parsing the text of the file.

Another scrolling method you could try to help people keep their place is showing two rows/systems at once. When you get to the end (right side) of one row, move the bar to the left side of the next row, and then scroll the next row up, displaying the row after that below it. I'm thinking of the effect in this video, which uses Finale Notepad: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTav4S-4Tk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTav4S-4Tk).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also a long-time Sibelius user, but was missing high-quality (real) audio together with the playback... So thanks for the comment.

The javascript that I use to partition a score is extremely simple - all it does is play the song while I click on the note in the score that is currently being played. This allows the script to "register" the x-coordinate together with the the current position in the audio, at each click.

That results in an array of [x-coordinate, time] pairs, which are then used to control the speed of the cursor movement.

If it makes sense for to let people upload their own pieces (some have asked for that), then that functionality would certainly be made available!

As for the scrolling, I think that it's great for piano pieces (or pieces with just a few parts), and I might consider implementing that also. It wouldn't be possible for larger scores with multiple instruments, but I think it would work better than the current solution for smaller scores.

Finally, great idea regarding the measures / page movements! I will re-map the keys so that page up / down scrolls a whole page, and the left right keys just scroll one measure at at a time. Please look out for that improvement in the next day or two ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like this and would use it at a concert, but the page turning is very jarring. Having the time sig fixed while the sheet scrolls like some sort of symphony hero would be pleasant.

Hell, you could even color code the instruments subtly with some light shading. Maybe make that a checkbox option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Well it seems that consensus is that the current page turning is not optimal... Perhaps scrolling is the solution. I will definitely invest some time in that to improve it.

Also, regarding the time and key signatures, I very much agree with you, they need to "stick"...

As for color coding, is the purpose to make it easier to follow a certain instrument?

<comment><USER5> As for the page turning - I think you could alleviate a lot of the issues by just slowing it down somehow. I can't remember if it was animated, but, if not, I think it would be less jarring if there was an animated scroll effect, starting slowly and then getting very fast, to cue the viewer that we're about to change pages. Similar to how the iPhone transitions screens, but maybe a bit slower since with the iPhone the user initiates the action and is therefore more prepared, perceptually.

[edited for clarity]

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. It is is currently scrolling (but very fast; I think I set it to 100ms for every page turn), so I could certainly slow that down. I will experiment a little bit and see how it looks. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like it. I have a few suggestions (full disclosure: I haven't played music since high school).

It would be nice if the key and time signature could remain onscreen as the sheet scrolls.

I think my preferred solution for scrolling would be to have the position marker move until it hits the center, then have the position stay centered while the sheet scrolls until it hits the end. I'm not sure what the correct way to handle repeats in my scenario would be--perhaps have the sheet stop scrolling when it hits a repeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think having the key / time signature "stick" makes a lot of sense... I will work on that. The only thing to look out for is key signature / time signature changes, and make sure those get captured too and that they stick...

As for scrolling, it seems like that is a feature that some people might prefer. I will most likely add that as a feature to it.

Thanks!

<comment><USER7> I think having the page stay still for the majority of the time (like it is now) _is_ better than to have it constantly moving, but when you do change pages, scroll to the new position (ease-in, maybe ease-out too).

Removes the disorienting jolt of having everything just change, but also not always moving and being a distraction

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha! Well, just slowing it down is a very easy fix / improvement...

Personally, I honestly appreciate the fact that the score is not scrolling continuously! I will try to have it not jolt though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely love it.

Maybe additionally highlight the notes that are currently played. And have you tried scrolling the sheet instead of moving the 'now' indicator? And who are you and why are you doing this? Add an about section.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much!

Yup, I can do the highlighting fairly easily, that's a good idea!

Scrolling is easily doable too, but I'm not sure that's the best way for all situations. I might provide it though, and then let the user choose depending on their situation.

About me: a wannabe classical composer / tech geek ;)

(and in the event people are actually interested in this idea becoming more than just a concept, I would be very happy to provide a more elaborate About section)

<comment><USER8> Great :)

Even a "right now this is just a little concept I worked on in my free time, hope you find it useful. Tweet me suggestions @..." would be enough on /about.

<comment><AUTHOR> A first cut to the About section has been added, FYI!

[http://notezilla.io/about](http://notezilla.io/about)

Cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nicely done! Do you consider synchronizing scores with recordings on YouTube?

We've built a similar thing at [http://particellissima.net](http://particellissima.net) at the Classical Music Hack Day in Vienna.

It's a demo, but you may find some UI ideas interesting, for example synchronization and navigation through a video, flowing score, hiding the instrument parts that are not playing for a while, and assembling a score from small pieces with measure images hosted on multiple subdomains to improve the fetching performance in the browser.

And of course more music would be great!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have considered that, actually. There are certain advantages with it - although, one thing that I like in particular with hosting the audio myself is that for example, I can slow it down to 25% speed and still have it sound great! Not possible with Youtube at the moment (if you slow down their videos, the results are deplorable).

Interesting demo! I definitely like the hiding of the instruments not playing.... also, lots of people seem to prefer a flowing score.

As for fetching more quickly, yup, also worth addressing.

More music? You can be sure about that ;)

Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is very cool! Also check out Soundslice ([http://www.soundslice.com/](http://www.soundslice.com/)), which does the same thing for YouTube videos and MP3s.

Demo: [http://www.soundslice.com/demo/](http://www.soundslice.com/demo/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Adrian, I accidentally discovered your site just a few days ago and I think it's great! Neat solution to use Youtube to pre-empt copyright problems as well.

I'll send you a tweet or email so we can stay in touch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that's the best I've felt all day. Truly lost myself in the piece trying to follow the red line and tease the individual notes out of my perception.

Here's the example I was using: [http://notezilla.io/p/bach/air-on-the-g- string](http://notezilla.io/p/bach/air-on-the-g-string)

[edit: I agree with crazygringo that it can be distracting if you are worried about the red line being slightly off.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Makes me happy to hear that :)

I will definitely work on getting that line synced up. On my computer (Mac OS X / Chrome), it's perfectly synced, but it seems that that isn't the case for some people.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER5> FYI, I'm on a 2011 Macbook Air running Safari. It's good enough that I enjoyed the experience. Honestly, I was never absolutely _certain_ that the red line was off. Just suspicious. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe ;) Well, it will probably be just slightly off in between the places where I have partitioned the score!

I think Chrome for whatever reason will make it "less off"!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Listening to classical pieces with the score was one of my favourite things to do when I was at music school. One thing that would be cool would be an overlay of the clef, time signature and current (declared hah) key on the left hand side that updated as everything changed. Good for context as you're following along.

Super nice work though.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like the consensus view (and I totally agree with it), so that feature will definitely be a priority. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That terrifying moment when you think that your project is on the front page [[http://notezil.la](http://notezil.la) ] when it's really a completly unrelated website with the same name >.<

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch :/

Well, post yours and I'll upvote it ;)

<comment><USER12> It's fine :)

noteZilla's well designed btw. It's also beautiful as an observer, but, if I were trying to use it as a performer I'd be thrown off by the varying placeholder speed and page turns [as others mentioned]... maybe that should be your toggle if you want to accomodate that auidence — a 'performance mode' which shows multiple lines and a consistent rhythm with highlights around the active bar.

And, I think I will share even though I'm ashamed atm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe!

FYI, I slowed the page turns down a little bit... in an effort not to jolt users too much (a first step). If you're reading this, maybe check the site and see if it's any better, and let me know?

Also, thinking about implementing multiple lines as well (just haven't decided how high up it will be in the list of priorities!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Check out [http://vexflow.com](http://vexflow.com) It's got a lot of interesting features and the code is really usable... it has tab support for the guitarists (like me) who can't read music, it's open source, html/svg rendering, and it's got on a pretty interesting text based DSL for authoring music. I even wrote a plugin to integrate VexTab on Mediawiki but I haven't done much with it after the proof of concept. Too busy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here are some other existing open source solutions for music that could use some love.

[http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/](http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/)

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/midisheetmusic/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/midisheetmusic/)

I have been wanting to work on this idea for quite a while in my spare time, particularly to enable scrolling and keeping the signatures in place while the sheet scrolls.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a guy who is learning the piano but doesn't know how to read sheet music very well, I'm really excited about this as a learning tool. Would it be possible to show the letter notes next to the notes on the sheet music? Also, how easy is it to incorporate new pieces... could I potentially submit sheet music that I have purchased and you could convert it for me for a fee?

<comment><USER14> If you're wanting to get better at reading sheet music you really should not have notes being shown. It will be harder to read but that just means you need to start simpler and build up over time. If you get used to reading notes it will always be a crutch you have to work with, and instead of sight-reading the notes themselves you'll be more accustomed to sight-reading the letters.

<comment><USER15> You might be right about that. I still find though that the most daunting part about learning something new for me is grinding through writing the notes in on the sheet music then "sounding it out" going back and forth from my computer/ipod/ipad getting the timing right. This tool seems to wrap it all up into one neat learning process, perhaps one day after using it enough with "notes on" I could uncheck that box and go pure sight reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Really nice. Now I know the meaning of those squiggly lines. I also like the sparse full screen layout.

A few minor things: While jumping to time points works, scrubbing does not. Instead, the notes image gets dragged. You could embed the image as a background-image instead of an <img> to prevent that. Or catch the dragstart event on it and return false ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4211909/disable- dragging-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4211909/disable-dragging-an- image-from-an-html-page)). A custom Rails error page or better error handling would also be nice ([http://notezilla.io/bla](http://notezilla.io/bla)). And there are a few console.log's left (TIME!!!! :)

Did you match the music to notes by hand?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't anticipate this level of interest so I suppose I forgot to take out the console.log stuff. Will do now. Glad it wasn't anything embarrassing ;)

As for scrubbing, it was a conscious decision to keep it fixed for now, but I might consider changing that in future version... and also need to fix status pages, etc.

Yes, I match it by hand, but it's fairly easy to do using some javascript that I wrote...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe a problem with my browser, but help tips when hovering over buttons would be, well, helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Will work on that... Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I agree, this is super cool. Really simple and elegant. For something along the same lines in IOS app form, I found UK developer Touch Press' The Orchestra does something similar but also mixes with a video feed of the Orchestra itself, and a running commentary [http://www.touchpress.com/titles/orchestra/](http://www.touchpress.com/titles/orchestra/)

You might of seen it in the Apple ads

it's $13.99, although to try something similar, I got Beethoven's 9th Symphony for free first [http://www.touchpress.com/titles/beethovens9thsymphony/](http://www.touchpress.com/titles/beethovens9thsymphony/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's quite the app! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks prettier than the MuseScore web interface.

Please tell me you will have some way to use this to display a score written in some open format. and/or interface with MuseScore or some other software.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use LilyPond when creating the sheet music, and it can take MusicXML as well as MIDI (I'm assuming that MuseScore can output at least one of them).

Alternately, it would be possible to just upload the pictures of the score directly in .png format onto noteZilla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Despite having a reasonably complete Unicode loadout on this Linux machine (that is, yes I've gone through my distro and binged on the fonts, yum yum yum), I've got a lot of boxes with hex in them. The entire what-I-presume is a control bar at the bottom is hex, and there's two things in the upper right that are hex too. You may want to consider adding a web font for those things, if you can, though I haven't got a great quick way for you to test that that is working.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. I'm using Font Awesome for the icons, and I was assuming that they would be working just fine on Linux machines. I will see if I can replicate your error on my own Linux distro. What setup are you using?

<comment><USER20> Sorry I missed this. It's an Ubuntu setup, though without the core Ubuntu desktop. I've installed many of the Ubuntu fonts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it - thanks! Just got my own Linux machine ready earlier today so I'll probably play around with it tomorrow...!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I prefer the entrancing visualization done by this guy: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRgXUFnfKIY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRgXUFnfKIY) (his YouTube channel has much more). As a semi-trained musicians, I do see value in showing the full score, but purely as an audiovisual experience I think removing some of that information and just using colors for instruments and y-axis for relative pitch is more mesmerizing.

<comment><USER22> In music sequencer a.k.a. DAW software (Logic, SONAR, Cubase, etc.) this is usually called "piano roll" notation. Because it's essentially a player piano roll -- you know, the original lossy compression. ;)

Such software usually offer 3 views of the same underlying music data: piano roll, staff/sheet notation, and an event list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did you enter the pieces/recordings manually or does it automatically analyze the piece and score?

Either way, it would be cool to see a writeup about how you implemented this.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's mostly manual work at this point, although it's not too bad because of some javascript that I wrote that makes it really straightforward to partition a score into time intervals...

And yes, I might actually write a blog post about this so make sure you have signed up on the site :)

<comment><USER24> First off, really nice job. Secondly, if you're not aware, audacity has a segment labeling feature - (I'm just throwing this out here because it might be easier than what you're doing). Select time boundaries and [ctrl+b] will label it. Labels can snap to abut each other. Each label might represent the span of a beat. The labels can be exported as an easy to parse .txt file and can be used to determine cursor position as a function of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

As for Audacity, can it recognize the beats automatically?

<comment><USER25> Sonic Visualiser [1] can---or, at least, it makes an attempt to.

It's a highly useful tool for the analysis of music recordings.

I, too, am highly interested in the extent to which matching recordings to scores can be automated, as are a lot of music theorists. I hope you can publish a write-up of the process for syncing the audio and the score.

If there is a significant human spend required, then developing an open tool for community contributions would greatly speed up the creation of a corpus of scores.

[1] [http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/](http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think a good case could be made for such an automatic system... although it's probably a somewhat too complex / labor intensive task at this particular stage for this particular project!

As for the write-up however, the process I currently use is very simple (and it's pretty much all "manual labor").

To partition a score into time intervals, I have a couple of lines of javascript that record the time the audio is at, together with where in the score I click (and where I aim to click on the note currently being played).

It doesn't take too much time and effort to partition a score this way actually, unless the piece is slightly complex. Beethoven's 5th took a little more effort than Air for example ;)

Hope this helps for now! And I am planning to publish a more detailed write up of everything, so please stay expect that in the next month or so (easiest to hear about via Twitter or by submitting your email to the site).

Thanks for your interest and suggestions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is fantastic.

I love (classical) music and as a music hobbyist I try to dig more into sheet music for a while. I would also pay for some kind of premium service (maybe great content or listening the sheet music in combination with a famous record).

Anyway, I subscribed to your mailing list, please just keep on rocking.

PS: And yes, I own Logic and could play sheet music in that way. But I do think you folks will prepare something more which a hobbyist can enjoy!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think so too :) Thanks for the subscription and the nice words! I definitely want to hear your ideas, so please feel free to get in touch (contact information listed under [http://notezilla.io/library](http://notezilla.io/library))

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are you releasing this under an open source license? I teach music lessons, and I'd love to use this to create lessons for my students.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would be happy to release parts of it as open source, and also very happy to consider implementing functionality that allows teachers to - for example - create lessons for their students.

How about you email me at email@example.com and we can chat more? Would love to learn more about your thoughts and how this could be useful to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I liked it a lot! Very nice work.

What I was missing is some indicator showing where exactly in the whole piece I currently am. A simple solution would of course be a timeline but maybe something neat like a minimap with a sliding windows of the current view is possible. Like this one could directly navigate through the whole piece by clicking in the minimap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for a great suggestion; that's a feature very likely to come in the near future actually! I'll probably post it together with a few other updates to Twitter, so please stay tuned!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cool project! Just found this link (are you aware of this?): [http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/rosa/matlab/alignmidi/](http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/rosa/matlab/alignmidi/) They seem to have automated the process. Apparently they synthesize the midi, then somehow align the beats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting! This looks like it could potentially be useful for this project as I will have the MIDI files available in most cases!

Thanks much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just spent the past two hours playing around with Beethoven's 5th on my violin after having not touched it for 5 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow this is so great. As a musician listening to a classical piece (well and an engineer too) I often think, "How does this work? I hear a clarinet here, is that what it is or something else?" So yeah, very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is fantastic. Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is great, looking forward to more!

A bug: If it reaches the end, then clicking in the score will move the pointer there and start scrubbing but no sound is played. The play/pause button behavior becomes a bit funky as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I couldn't replicate this error. Would you mind giving me your platform / browser details?

<comment><USER33> Chrome 30.0.1573.2 dev on OS-X 10.8.4. It was on the fifth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks... I'll add it to the list of bugs...!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love this so much! The possibilities of the Internet with art are just endless; this is just one more example. Great work. Looking forward to where this goes from here. I'll be watching! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> And listening too? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Site is down for me (Holland)? It was the same 20 minutes ago fwiw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Looks like the database is not keeping up with all the connections. Will look into that....

<comment><AUTHOR> Just upgraded to a paid database in Heroku, took about 3 minutes all in all ;) Hopefully it will handle the traffic better.

Kudos to Heroku!

<comment><USER23> Still seems to be down, but with a different error message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Still down? I made yet another upgrade after that first upgrade... Is it working now for you?

<comment><USER23> Nice! Works for me now. Great job :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Pleased to hear that! Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great stuff. I know very little about music, but found it very helpful to visually decipher and decompose the sounds.

Would it be possible to isolate each instrument? Turn each one on/off?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most likely that will be very hard to do, at least for orchestral pieces, which are typically recorded using overhead microphones (ie, not with separate tracks for each instrument).

For pop music, it's definitely doable as long as I can get access to the individual tracks. It's actually something I have been wanting to do, so thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Have you thought about adding Lilypond import? [http://lilypond.org/](http://lilypond.org/)

That way you could allow users to upload their own songs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes!

I'm actually using LilyPond already to create the sheet music, so if I do add the possibility for users to upload their own scores, it would most likely be with LilyPond...

Although the user would still need to partition the score (ie indicate at what time a certain note occurs) if the music was to be synced up to it.

It isn't _terribly_ labor intensive but still requires a little bit of work... so maybe, if that's what people want!

<comment><USER37> Oh hey, sorry, just realized that you are actually the original author. See my comment above suggesting MusicXML instead, since it's more widely used and machine-readable. As for specifying times, you can use the note lengths and tempo markings to generate a rough timing and then allow the user to tweak it to fit the music.

But this is awesome by the way, great job! I'd really love it if user- generated content is supported. I have a bunch of lilypond transcriptions from the Real Book that I'd like to upload.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, let's stay in touch because I also think that user-generated content is the way forward, and I agree about MusicXML.

Just need to be clever about it and make sure it's not too arduous a task for the user to upload something. Please feel free to email me or tweet at email@example.com / @notezillaio and we can stay in touch / discuss further, would love more input!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Very cool idea. Eventually it would be cool if you would allow users to submit music and somehow transform there music intro sheet music like this.

Albeit, either way this is a great idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, have heard this from several people now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Very nice! A minor bug: it seems to break once you exit fullscreen mode (pentagram goes underneath the instrument labels).

<comment><AUTHOR> Will look into this - just please clarify the pentagram part, and also what hardware / software you are using? Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Went to share this and following showed up:

"This website lets users to bla bla bla..." (cause og:description).

Just something to note.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up, I will fix it this weekend along with a few other things - I didn't anticipate this level of interest so there were a few details (including that one) that I had overlooked ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks very nice.

Makes me wonder about the genius of the coposer - very insightful.

</comment><comment><USER42> Cool, but now make one where I can compose and hear it ;)

<comment><USER43> Here you go. [http://www.sibelius.com](http://www.sibelius.com)

<comment> jay-anderson Some of Sibelius's core developers we let go recently. Steinberg hired them and they're writing a new music notation application from scratch. They're still in the very early stages of development. (see [http://blog.steinberg.net/](http://blog.steinberg.net/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Full of bugs, only canvas draws correctly on mozilla. But I admire how you can get a product online like that and I can't because I'm a perfectionnista.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please elaborate so I can fix it ;) But yes, not entirely bug free yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What's the connection with Yandex?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using metrica.yandex.com to study user behavior (mouse movements, etc) - extremely useful and free, and in my opinion far more telling than Google Analytics!

I can highly recommend it. You need to activate their WebVisor functionality to get access to what I just mentioned.</comment></comment>


Amazon target of mysterious postal investigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/Amazon_target_of_mysterious_postal_investigation38762482.html <comment><USER2> I wouldn't read too much into it. Could be anything. Typically companies like Amazon negotiate with the USPS to get better rates in exchange for designing the packages and labels to meet stricter requirements.</comment>


Life for a startup on the receiving end of a patent law suit - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/19/for-whom-the-bell-trolls-life-for-a-startup-on-the-receiving-end-of-a-patent-law-suit/ <comment><USER2> _"You'll stay in business and license from us, or you'll go out of business," he told him over the phone. "Either way is fine with me."_

There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat then rob travellers. Later they rode around in rusty pickups with ak's killing and robbing villagers. Their weapons change but their tactics don't. The measure of civilization is how we choose to deal with them. I'm afraid they'll always be with us. It all comes down to where our sense of justice meets our apathy.

<comment><USER3> "There are villains in this world. They used to hide beside the road and beat then rob travellers."

Nah. They've always been lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have an LLC (US), but this is one of the blunders I've made and I plan on dissolving it soon. There are many reasons to my answer, here are some:

The problem with a US based LLC is that you open up free access to thousands of patent trolls waiting to eat your hard earned money. This isn't a problem if you can afford a decent Lawyer for $5000-15000, but for businesses like mine, which are bootstrapped, it's totally unaffordable.

Well funded startups usually have a separate legal department to resolve these issues, but when you're running a startup totally from your own pocket, it becomes extremely hard and annoying. I was wondering for a solution until a very good friend of mine suggested me something nice.

If you set up a company somewhere in India (or some other popular, Start-up friendly developing country), these patent trolls have little access to you in terms of licensing, etc. Usually a patent troll will send you a legal letter threatening you about violation of some kind of absurd technology patent, etc. But, when you start up elsewhere, these become nulled[1]. Meaning, they can't touch you. Worse-case scenario, even if someone DID sue you, the lawyers are really cheap in such developing countries. We're talking about price ranges of $50-1000. And for $500 bucks you can get some really nice lawyers to get the job done.

There's also a LOT of start-up friendly exemptions for companies in such developing countries simply because they don't have enough of them and they want more people to start up.

So, even though these countries are often referred to as 'third worlds', they are really good places to start up. If you know of anyone wanting to start up from those countries, you should probably team up with them as their co- founder and that should be good enough.

Of course, all this assuming that you aren't interested in seeking funding and you want a bootstrapped start up. But then, if you are seeking funding, you'll probably have enough cash to afford a $5000 lawyer anyway.

One potential issue you may find running a startup from a developing country is the access to decent payment gateways. But then, if you don't mind sharing an extra 1% with the gateway provider, you can probably use someone like skrill.

<comment><USER5> Samsung was in South Korea. Apple blocked Samsung's sales in US based on patent issues.

It doesn't matter where you're located. What matters where you want to do business.

<comment><USER6> Blocking business seems like an unusual step, or at least we rarely hear about it in the news. Is there any precedent for a patent case successfully blocking a business whose service is all on a website? If so, what happened? Did they simply take over the domain? What if a business used a foreign owned domain?

I feel like there are options here that may not have been tried. Presumably a patent troll could try to tell your payment service and US based servers not to do business with you, but I haven't heard of that either, aside from credit card companies blocking Wikileaks and the US govt seizing servers suspected of hosting illegal stuff. I forgot why the US govt seized servers in VA a few years back but the point is that is pretty unusual too and I wonder how far a patent troll would go or how difficult it would be for them to get through all that.

The only way China blocks Facebook, for example, is through a massive firewall, and their businesses generally don't accept any foreign credit cards. The US seems unlikely to put in a huge firewall or modify DNSs to go after small businesses for patent trolls..

<comment><USER5> Wikileaks blockade is a good example of the power that can be used when parties fail to come to an agreement.

Most companies though prefer to settle out of court because the court is quite a gambling, that's why we do not hear it more often.

<comment><USER6> Wikileaks is based in Sweden and was seen as threatening by the US govt.

Companies that settle out of court are, from what I have read, small to medium sized US based companies that can face legal action if they do nothing.

What I am talking about is a small company that is foreign based in a place that does not comply with US patents. Has there been one that has ignored US patents and been shut down by having their domain blocked or their US payments disallowed?

<comment><USER5> In other words, is being small & poor a good defense against trolls? Yes, it is.

Try to get bigger though or get a investment round, and troll will come after you.

It is not a coincidence that the company in the article's got trolls about the same time it's got an investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe we should set up a tradition of patent-busting bounties.

Some third-party trust or nonprofit or somesuch, so you no longer have control of the money and the patent troll can't force you to give the money to them to pay a judgment against you. 2% - 10% of your contribution can be used for their general expenses, the other 90% - 98% can only be given to a party who gets a specific patent invalidated, which you specify when you donate.

So when the troll tells you that Patent #1234567 is being infringed by your company and you need to pay $100k a year or they'll sue you, you can roll over if it's your own best decision from a risk/reward perspective -- but you can also make a one-time donation of $100k, or whatever you can afford, to the '567 bounty pool.

The troll extorts ten companies, suddenly there's a million-dollar reward for somebody to take them out, and it changes the risk-reward equation for the companies and lawyers involved (especially if companies are investor-backed and aren't the sole source of income for the majority of their owners.)

I suggested this a while ago [1] and it got a lot of upvotes.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5126551)

</comment><comment><USER8> Lately my group of friends have been discussing the most underhanded ways to get PAE's to bugger off. Nothing serious, but it's interesting to think about how one of these PAE lawyers would react if you told him his daughter's name and the school she goes to.

It kinda surprises me that none of these extortion cases have escalated to that sort of thing. When someone puts 5-10 years of sweat, blood and tears into a company, it would surprise me if there wasn't a single example in the country where one of those entrepreneurs reacted violently to this kind of extortion racket.

<comment><USER5> > how one of these PAE lawyers would react if you told him his daughter's name > and the school she goes to

They would make sure you're behind bars in no time.

<comment><USER9> What if 'you' are an anonymous remailer service account and a bitcoin address? It would be amusing if patent trolling got bad enough to force startups to operate on the black market.

After all, what's the ROI on legitimacy if the state can't protect you from banditry?

<comment><USER5> What if his daughter really got killed or raped?

<comment><USER9> <sociopath>Other patent assertion entities would be inspired to think carefully about targeting entities subscribing to our protection service.</sociopath>

<comment><USER5> I dunno how it is in US, but in other places all kinds of shady businesses are protected by organized crime. Try to harass their businesses and jokes may end pretty quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the concept of "patent troll" is doing us more harm than good. The implication of this expression is that the badness is in the "trollish" aspect, and not in the "patent" aspect of it.

Patent trolls are what happens when the patent system is taken to its logical conclusion. So if patent trolls are evil, then the patent system itself is evil.

The fact that some or even many patent holders _aren't_ evil is beside the point.

Imagine, for example, that there was a law which gave husbands permission to rape their wives. Presumably only _some_ husbands would take advantage of this law. So one might conclude that the law isn't bad, it's just that society has to find some way to deal with those bad husbands, the so-called "marital sex trolls", who take advantage of such a law.

And the bad husbands would say something like: "Morally, I think husbands deserve some reward for the benefits that they bring to a marriage."

</comment><comment><USER11> Regardless of the kinds of reform we would like to see, the fact that America still considers software nothing like "math" or prose will continue to allow these types of litigators to press for a long, long time. Zombie debt collectors are a seedy yet still thriving business model praying on the weak and gullible. That is the route these trolls will take as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> Algorithms shouldn't be patented; UI components/metaphors shouldn't be patented; Anything potentially leading to monopolism shouldn't be patented; Monopolists should get their patents revoked.

This is my opinion.

<comment><USER13> The point of a patent is a state sanctioned monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's stopping anyone threatened like this from closing shop, and re-opening in another country under different ownership or some backhanded deal where the victim retains a chance of an income?

</comment><comment><USER15> Come to Canada.

Here mathematical algorithms cannot be patented, nor can anything 'obvious'. While it is possible to patent software here, realistically you can't really do it, and the legal system is kind to defendants if someone is brave enough to sue you.

The patent system in the US looks ridiculous to anyone outside the US...

</comment><comment><USER16> They say "you haven't made it in business until somebody sues you." This is the type of shit that keeps me up at night...

</comment><comment><USER17> We need aggressive patent reform to stop this. A good start would be contacting your representatives and signing this letter.

[http://devsbuild.it/patent-reform-letter](http://devsbuild.it/patent-reform- letter)

</comment><comment><USER18> Would it be safe to move the company outside of US where patent troll cannot reach in legal jurisdiction?

<comment><USER5> You can move the company. But as long as you make sales in US, you can be blocked from doing business.

<comment><USER18> How would they exactly block you from doing business? Unless you have a physical presence, if all your transcations take place online, how would it be different from doing in the US and outside?

<comment><USER19> Customs will seize your domain name without warning or following any particular legal process. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members- congress-deman...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/members-congress- demand-answers-homeland-securitys-unjust-domain-name-seizures)

<comment><USER6> I don't see anything in that article about the domain being seized as a result of a patent lawsuit.

Let's assume that's happened before anyway..

What if you use a foreign domain name?

What are the non-US based methods of receiving payment online?

Are there any viable foreign servers that are fast enough to service the US but whose country does not have patent agreements with the US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As much as patent trolls are an enormous problem, they are not the only villains in this story. The others are of course the lawyers and the courts.

Let's say that you received a summons in the mail informing you that your startup was being sued. First of all, why are you receiving it in the mail? Why can't the Secretary of State ask for your e-mail address (as some do) and actually use it for service of process? (Answer: because the courts aren't even sure they want to allow a technology as sophisticated as Certified Mail to be permitted for service of process, let alone fax. E-mail? You must be joking.)

Once you get the summons, assuming you can even understand what it means, what do you do? Look up the case on-line? Probably not. That would require you to have a PACER account, which costs money beyond $15.00 per quarter in fake-page access at $0.10 per fake-page. It would also require you to know how to navigate the system, which isn't particularly easy. Assuming that you could, and could understand the legal documents, you might be able to learn a lot right there.

Instead, what most people would do is pay a lawyer to handle all of this for them, at anywhere from $300 to $600 per hour. But what does lawyering really involve? Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word templates, turning Word files into PDFs, attesting to obvious things ("I have caused this envelope to be placed in the mail as of this date") and occasionally reading a similar case to cite. But mostly it's not that difficult. There are definitely aspects that require skill and logical thinking. That's maybe 5% of the work.

So why are we paying $300 to $600 per hour for highly indebted people to do things that computers could? Because the courts won't let computers into the picture. They won't even let companies represent themselves through their founders, even though Citizens United guarantees corporate freedom of speech (everywhere except inside the courtroom, apparently). If they did allow technology to enter the picture, handling a patent infringement assertion might actually be fairly trivial--something you could do in a few minutes on a web form--and at worst, as annoying as calling customer service.

The USPTO isn't blameless either. For more on that you can look at some slides from a presentation I gave at the USPTO Software Patent Round Table in February, 2013.

Slides [http://www.aarongreenspan.com/technology/20130212.softwarepa...](http://www.aarongreenspan.com/technology/20130212.softwarepatents.pdf)

Video [http://helix-1.uspto.gov/asxgen/20130212_SoftwarePartnership...](http://helix-1.uspto.gov/asxgen/20130212_SoftwarePartnershipStanford_Part2.wmv)

<comment><USER21> > That would require you to have a PACER account, which costs money beyond > $15.00 per quarter in fake-page access at $0.10 per fake-page

Patent law is federal law, and nearly all the relevant federal opinions are available for free online. I do think it is problematic, in principle, that very small corporations cannot represent themselves pro-se. That said, pro-se litigants are an enormous burden on courts because they have no idea what they're doing. A federal judge will have hundreds of cases on her plate at any given time. They need litigants to get in, make their case, and get out.

> But what does lawyering really involve? Copying and pasting from Microsoft > Word templates, turning Word files into PDFs, attesting to obvious things > ("I have caused this envelope to be placed in the mail as of this date") and > occasionally reading a similar case to cite.

My mom thinks that programming just involves "typing things into the computer." What you're describing is paralegals' work if not secretarial work. Most of lawyer's work involves researching case law, writing memos and briefs, doing factual investigation, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, etc. Clients are sophisticated. They're not paying $500/hour lawyers to turn Word documents into PDF's, not when you can get droves of bar-admitted lawyers to work for $20/hour on Craigslist.

> Because the courts won't let computers into the picture.

Invent a computer program that can apply the law to the specific facts of a case and generate a helpful brief and we'll talk. In reality, many college and law-school educated people of well above average intelligence can't write a helpful brief.

The legal industry has been adopting computer technology as it becomes available. A good example is document review. Computers excel at searching through large amounts of information looking for potentially-relevant documents, so law firms increasingly use computers to flag such documents (though many/most clients still prefer to have this outsourced to low-cost contract attorneys). Most work that used to be done by secretaries is automated. Document management systems produce blacklines, track changes is used to enter revisions, etc. Again, clients are sophisticated. They're not paying $500/hour for a lawyer to manually enter hand-markups.

<comment><USER20> Clients are not all sophisticated, just like consumers are not all rational. Much (most) of legal work is indeed paralegal work. That's my point.

The legal industry has been adopting some computer technology as it becomes available. The courts have barely changed since the 1700s.

<comment><USER21> The idea that Fortune 1000 companies or startups funded and guided by well- connected VC firms are unsophisticated consumers that are unwittingly paying $500+/hour for paralegal work is laughable.

<comment><USER20> Isn't it? And that's why many law firms are laughing all the way to the bank, as well as why there's a growing trend to bring legal work in-house among the Fortune 1000, which has only recently realized that it's being fleeced.

I'm not just guessing here. I just spent a year as a fellow at Stanford Law and heard all about it from people on both sides. I also have a friend who just quit his job as an associate at one of the top valley firms. His job was to do transactional work, i.e. prepare legal documents for top valley VCs. He graduated from Harvard Law School, which meant that the firm could bill much higher rates for his time, and told me that he spent most of his 16-hour day copying and pasting Word documents--which is largely why he quit.

<comment><USER21> There is always a surge of bringing legal work in-house after a recession, because you've experienced lawyers on the market looking for a job and willing to take a pay-cut to go in-house. It happened as well after the early 1990's recession. I don't know how permanent that phenomenon is, I think other shifts like the move to flat billing are going to be more sticky.

Your friend's characterization of his work seems phat. The first year transactional associates I know are summarizing term sheets, conducting due diligence, etc. It's fairly rote, but it's stuff that's just context-sensitive enough not to be automatable. And as a practical matter, entry-level positions in any field, maybe outside of valley startups, tend to be pretty rote. Some of my friends might sum up their entry-level programming roles by saying that their jobs just involved "changing colors of widgets in the UI in response to support tickets." It's training, work that prepares the associate to do more complex tasks down the road. Speaking broadly, training entry-level people, in any field, is part of the cost of business. In law firms as in any other business, those costs get passed onto consumers.

As a counter-example, I'll offer my own experience as a first year litigator. I spent 75% of my time doing legal or factual research (including researching several issues of first impression), drafting research memos, preparing interview outlines, and summarizing expert testimony.[1] I spent 25% of my time reviewing discovery documents, and that process was heavily automated/outsourced. We were generally only looking at documents that had been marked potentially significant by either a contract attorney ($35/hour in NYC, less in India) or a predictive coding algorithm. The exception was when a batch of documents was too small to be worth dealing with the set-up overhead of putting a contract team together or training the predictive coding software.[2]

[1] Electronic access to case research is of course a big boon to making that sort of work more efficient. However, I should note that at the end of the day, using Lexis/Westlaw saves the client a lot of money. Google Scholar is so spectacularly bad for legal research that it takes much longer to get an answer, and you feel less confident in the answer you get. The limitations of Google Scholar when it comes to legal and scientific research are very telling insight into the limits of automation with existing technology. Google is amazing, but fundamentally its not actually intelligent. It suggests to you what you might want to look at based on what other people looked at. When that popularity heuristic is inapplicable, it becomes really unhelpful.

[2] This is a flip-side to automation technology that gets glossed-over. In a mega-litigation, predictive coding is a huge boon because you might have hundreds of thousands of documents. But in a more run-of-the-mill litigation, the time it takes to train the predictive coding engine might negate any advantage over just having a first year associate look at the documents.

<comment><USER22> _might have hundreds of thousands of documents_

Actually the extreme is likely to be in the millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In addition to patent reform, why legals bills are so astronomical? The whole thing stinks.

<comment><USER21> Legal bill = billing rate * hours billed.

The number of hours billed is very dependent on the structure of the law. One of the goals of courts is to streamline the law so that cases that don't have merit can be dismissed quickly and easily. If you follow litigations in the popular press, you'll see that a lot of lawsuits get dismissed on "technicalities" (i.e. procedural rules). E.g. the EFF's NSA litigation is in danger of getting dismissed for a lack of standing (i.e. dismissal because the plaintiff can't show actual injury). Courts create these procedural barriers because getting to the merits (i.e. looking at the facts) of litigation is time-consuming and expensive. Courts also create other barriers. For example, in a shareholder suit, there is something called the business judgment rule: i.e. in the absence of a conflict of interest or something like that, a court will defer to management's superior business judgment. Rules like that allow shareholder suits to be evaluated and dismissed based on facts that are easy to prove without having to reach facts that are expensive to investigate and prove.

In patent litigation, there is precious little of that. Patent litigations very quickly become a very fact-intensive process of interpreting a complex and voluminous patent, getting expert witness testimony about exactly how the defendants product works, etc. Once a lawyer is sitting down with an engineer looking over code, the clock really gets going.

The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to create categorical rules in terms of patentability, and that's largely because the Patent Act is written in a way that makes such categorical rules inconsistent with the intent of the law. But the fact is that categorical rules (e.g. no software patents, deference to business judgment) make litigation cheaper, and that's an important consideration too.

<comment><USER7> > One of the goals of courts is to streamline the law

And one of the goals of (relatively) rich plaintiffs who sue (relatively) poor defendants is to drag out the case as much as possible to impose costs and inconveniences on the defendant.

<comment><USER21> As a practical matter, that's not a situation the federal courts encounter very often. It's usually poor plaintiffs suing rich defendants, or rich plaintiffs suing other rich plaintiffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Still waiting for the "Prenda Law" moment in patent court.

<comment><AUTHOR> So far I would say Newegg takes the cake - [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corporate-troll-alcatel-in-third-patent-appeal- win-this-year/)

<comment><USER25> I've always admired Newegg's efforts on that. I should patronize their business more often.

<comment><USER26> Exactly! Proud Newegg patronizer here, especially because of their standing up to the trolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Excuse my ignorance, but have any companies succeeded by just replying "Go Get Fucked" to patent trolls?

<comment><USER13> If they file suit you have to show up or you lose the case. If you don't get lawyers involved you are hosed.

<comment><USER7> AFAIK if you're a corporation, you must be represented by a lawyer in the US.

If you're not a corporation, AFAIK you can go pro se (be your own defense attorney), but in that route you're not just risking the business -- if you lose and the damages are more than the business can pay, they'll be able to seize your house, your car, and your kids' college fund. And your credit rating will be ruined if you have to declare bankruptcy personally, so you might not be able to get credit cards for a decade or two afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I once considered taking a serious crack at a subset of this problem. Didn't get any takers though.

[http://libpatent.com/](http://libpatent.com/)

<comment><USER7> What's your marketing like? Have you tried approaching relevant blogs like Popehat for a mention? Or trying to get in contact with places where startups congregate, like YC? Or asking if EFF or others who oppose patents for ideological reasons would be willing to give you publicity, advice, or referrals? Heck, a Show HN post might get you some publicity and feedback.

Also, the website is a little unclear about what exactly customers are buying. "Search for prior art" \-- it sounds like you're charging people $10k to copy- paste the sentences from their product's specs one-by-one into Google. What exactly are your customers paying for? It's not clear on your website.

Remember, _you_ probably have a decent understanding of patent law if you have a JD, but your customers don't. Your target audience is (I'm guessing) similar to much of HN -- intelligent hackers who have a good business sense but little formal training in law or business. Hackers'll want to know the "how" and "why" of what they're buying, but your explanations don't explain legal jargon like "examining applications," "prior art search," or "ex parte".

Also, I would suggest offering services on contingency-fee basis -- you only get paid if you actually bust one or more patents at least dimly related to your customer's business, or produce some other sort of tangible result for the customer. To make this financially viable for you, you may need to substantially increase your fee for contingency clients, and have cash reserves in case you lose multiple re-examinations in a row.

Also it'd be nice to show patents you've busted. If you don't have any yet, you might consider looking for easy patents to target, and self-funding a re- examination of them, or (if you don't have the money or it's against the rules for a lawyer to bring such a case on their own initiative) approaching the EFF or somebody to ask if they'll fund you.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I originally created this page as an exercise in "marketing driven development" aka just testing the waters to see if there is a market for this sort of thing.

I did consider your last point of busting a bogus patent and self-funding the ex parte filing fee. I was considering going for a particular linked list implementation which was patented in the 2000s. My approach was more or less to grep / lucene a wide range of open source projects with extensive timestamps of publication dates (e.g. linux kernel).

It turns out that is a lot of work, and since I got no response to the site, I figured this kind of legal service is not really appealing -- for reasons I don't understand. At least, not enough demand to spend a bunch of time on it, since I have other projects I enjoy working on more.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

<comment><USER7> > since I got no response to the site

Just putting a website on the internet is no guarantee people will find you. There might be a lot of people interested in your service, and it could be that your site is too hard for them to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://foaas.com/off/patent%20trolls/Startups](http://foaas.com/off/patent%20trolls/Startups)

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder whether areas with strong patent law will just become... uncompetitive... by comparison to areas where such laws are not enforced.

</comment><comment><USER30> The real problem and challenge of the issue (especially in terms of litigation) is taking the power away from PAEs but also not taking the power out of our patent system.

The fact that our system allows folks to invent but not manufacture led to substantial growth in our country and also to the entrepreneurial culture we all enjoy.

PAEs are abusing this and absolutely need to be stopped.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone sell patent-troll insurance?

<comment><USER32> Too easy to game. With the minimum legal cost of a successful defense being $200,000, what kind of monthly rate would cover that?

<comment><USER33> With car insurance claims easily being >100k due to injuries/death/multiple vehicle collisions, what kind of monthly rate could possible cover that?

Other examples with high claim amounts, flood insurance, health care, etc.

It doesn't matter how high the minimum cost is, and you cant judge any kind of insurance based solely on that. The chance of it happening is just as important. Let's say 1% of all companies get sued for patent disputes every year (I don't know the stats on this, just an example), with an average defense costing $500 000. The insurance company also wants to make money, so let's have them charge 150% over cost.

$500k x 1.5 = $750k (amount of revenue per 100 customers)

$750k x 0.01= $7500 (cost per customer per year)

$7500 / 12 = $625 (cost per customer per month)

Now even that number isn't that high, and I assume 1% of companies getting hit with patent lawsuit per year is bigger than the real figures.

<comment><USER32> Average cost of a claim and average claims per year are incredibly important.

Average cost of a car claim (ignoring glass) is probably in the $5,000 range. The average person gets in <0.5 accidents a year, so coverage is <$2,500 for the average person.

Average cost of a patent claim is, say $200,000 (that is a minimum, but we will treat it as an average). Average company gets 0.05 patent claims per year (1 in 20). Coverage would be $1,000 a month. Not too bad.

Now lets add what happens after the first time you pay out an insurance claim within 6 months. Someone in your company gets $200,000 for a client list, your patent claims per year just became 10 per client. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> look kids, the system is rigged. you dont organize, you dont form voting groups based on your issues, you dont get involved in politics, and when the rules bend the odds vehemently against you, you go to a social media website and bitch about it.

when are you losers going to wake the hell up?

and oh yeah, Aaron Shwartz, never forget.

edit: you know theres a business opportunity right there. you know crowd funding? how about crowd voting? that'll teach em.

<comment><USER34> super edit: i'll seed fund it. i'm old, bitter, and have money.

<comment><USER34> for real. 2k USD/month for 5 months for anyone who puts this together. think of it as pre-ycombinator funding.

promissory note.

<comment><USER20> [http://www.plainsite.org/issues](http://www.plainsite.org/issues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> suggestion: every company that receives one of these things should incorporate in nigeria or something, till US lawmakers wake the fuck up.

<comment><USER35> Isle of Mann?

UK patent law, 'relaxed' personal taxation, zero corporation tax, good motor bike racing, English widely spoken, good transport links with mainland, temperate climate, funky passport. I imagine remote ownership is possible.

On a more serious note, patent protection was designed to _promote_ innovation by providing a monopoly in _exchange_ for full disclosure so others could understand and further improve. In the US this purpose is (apparently) not being achieved so as others have said, time for some politics.</comment></comment>


Airbnb Raises $112 Million Funding Round - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/tomiogeron/2011/07/25/airbnb-raises-massive-112-million-funding-round/

<comment><USER2> That is an incredible amount of money. Though I may not agree with raising that much, I am really excited to see what they do with it!

<comment><USER3> Once you've nailed your customer acquisition strategy & costs, you pour on the gas. $112M is an awful lot of gas.

airbnb is offering $25 for friend referral. Assuming $100 / night @ 3%, and a 50% profit margin -> it takes 16.6 nights to break even. Average time to 16.6 nights? 1 - 2 years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801332></comment>


Justin.tv down due to security issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=234154

<comment><USER2> For the unaware, Teamliquid is the biggest Starcraft fan site and it features streamers on their homepage and links to their justin.tv accounts, people have risen to "fame" through being featured on teamliquid. Also Justin.tv is a big part of the Starcraft 2 streaming scene so that's why it's relevant to TL.

I assume that now it's offline and being patched it's ok to link to a "how-to" that people were using: [http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=55667625&f=214](http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=55667625&f=214)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be back up again. Nasty bug they had though.

edit: Down again.</comment>


Short science fiction story in the form of a Twitter bug report - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.bug.quietbabylon.com/

<comment><USER2> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776454></comment>


Technological Change and Obsolete Skills: Evidence from Men's Pro Tennis (2017) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://individual.utoronto.ca/jhall/documents/TennisTechChange.pdf <comment><USER2> The money quote from the end of the introduction:

>> _We find that the introduction of the new composite racquets temporarily helped younger players at the expense of older players, reduced the rank correlation in player quality over time, and increased exit rates of older players relative to younger players. We find that these effects last for two to four generations of players._

Pretty cool, fun, interesting study. I hope the authors leave it to the reader to make sweeping generalisations/extrapolations from their results. (Still reading.)

Edit: generalisations are pleasantly restrained. I found the supporting statistics much more interesting than the mathematical modelling. Maybe I just don't have the patience for the latter, but I'm not sure it really lends more credibility to the study's conclusions.

<comment><USER3> No doubt new technology has been important, but there might have been another significant factor influencing generational changes: the number of aspiring pro players. This number has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, but in the paper they only consider the number of successful players (roughly equivalent to the top X ATP rankings, where X is somewhere between 200 and 500). X has also been increasing, but at much lower rate, and as a result there are vastly more people competing for those X spots today than in 1980. It could be that to get into the top 100 today is as hard as it was to get into top 10 thirty years ago.

As the natural selection gets more brutal, new players have to develop new, more effective skills to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since upcoming changes in skill requirements for good jobs could be more rapid than in the past, we need to teach many more people how to learn faster and better.

I wonder if there are startups or programs from institution with a focus on this. I am aware of a popular course "Learning How to Learn" on Coursera. But it seems like an app that interactively helps people to apply this sort of lessons on a concrete set of materials (e.g. Finance, Cardiology, Microprocessor Design, Software Design, etc.) would be even more useful.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

<comment><USER5> _Since upcoming changes in skill requirements for good jobs could be more rapid than in the past, we need to teach many more people how to learn faster and better._

Why not teach the same number of people to be 10x? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Practically all of the graphs show that the trends they attribute to new racquets were already evident before that introduction. Given the size of the pro tour, it wouldn't take too large a cadre of young hot shots to explain the results independently of racquet technology, and those players' ever advancing age would better explain the U shape of those curves. Indeed this is when McEnroe, Connors, Lendl, and Wilander were all coming to the fore. The evidence for the authors' hypothesis seems extremely weak.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's an interesting study - but tennis is fundamentally a very bad model for understanding the impact of technology on the employment market. A better tennis player does not produce more 'tennis' than a bad player. So, no matter how the technology changes, the number of tennis players required is unaffected.

Technological change in the workplace almost always refers to technology that makes a worker more productive. Since the demand for most things is constant, this means you need less workers for a given product. So, the problem would not be old workers being worse at their jobs - the problem would be that, absent external factors, there would be less jobs around.

<comment><USER3> It's not always about "producing more". This tennis model is relevant to scenarios where the job is getting harder with time (e.g. building better computer chips, or performing more complicated brain surgeries).</comment></comment>


Pay it forward, HN style - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Pay+it+forward%2C+HN+style <comment><USER2> This is turning HN into a spam forum rather than being something for the better.

I could post an offer on HN, touting my wares and waxing phantasmagorical about my coding and consultancy skills. The first hit is free, but after that I only want to see the color of your greenbacks. It might even boost my ranking in the social graph somewhat. But I'm not going to. It would be undignified, and frankly it's not what I come to HN to read. I hope other people will think similarly and take their boosting activities elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> This idea of people only doing it for themselves is cynical. I agree that it is taking up space on the home page; maybe it should be a sub-section (edit: and now it is).

This notion reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg's recent quote at Startup School: That others (Hollywood in this case, but I think applicable here) can't see to grasp the idea that people would build things just because they like building things.[1]

[1] <http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178321>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might help: <http://searchyc.com/Offer_HN>

<comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/offers>

<comment><USER6> Wow! Has this always been there?

<comment><USER6> Oh! Got it. Here where "offers" and "offerless" came from:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808>

and

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839857>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At this rate, I see an "offer" link coming between "ask" and "jobs".

</comment><comment><USER8> Didn't you offer HN subdomain names?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but it was for a 24 hour period only, so I decided not to include it. Besides I think that was relatively easy for me to do, I think todayiamme deserves some credit for putting out a basically unlimited offer and starting the whole 'Offer HN' meme.</comment></comment>


Badgelife, Def Con's Unlikely Obsession with Artistic Circuit Boards - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbne9a/a-history-of-badgelife-def-cons-unlikely-obsession-with-artistic-circuit-boards <comment><USER2> Cool article, but I'm not seeing the "unlikely" angle. Hacking and tech in general is ultimately about creativity, and these badges are more of a physical example that can be easily seen than most.

<comment><USER3> No doubt the unlikeliness comes in to play when you realize that HNers are likely not the intended audience of this piece. "Normies" have probably never seen an artistic PCB let alone a defcon badge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty good history of #badgelife. Here's my coverage for anyone interested in the specifics of the DC26 badge contest: [http://www.deaddialect.com/articles/2018/8/17/badge- story](http://www.deaddialect.com/articles/2018/8/17/badge-story)

<comment><USER5> Thank you. I couldn't read the vice story, so yours was a good replacement.

<comment><USER4> You couldn't because of a work-related IP block or was there something else? Because honestly my stuff is pretty fast and loose compared to their coverage, though it pains me a bit to admit it.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what was happening, all the stories on Vice's website redirected me to a 404 page. Your coverage was interesting, very boot-on-the-ground type of reporting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> easily make pcb badge with svg2shenzhen inkscape extension and kicad [https://github.com/badgeek/svg2shenzhen](https://github.com/badgeek/svg2shenzhen) (im the author)

</comment><comment><USER7> I enjoyed the non-electronic badges L0stboy was doing every other year. One of my favorites was his Titanium Eye of Ra badge.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm getting a 404 for this story on vice. And for all other stories, too.

<comment><USER8> Your 'fake news' filter must be on /s?

Seems to be working fine, although I would perfer a mirror as well, for other reasons.

<comment><USER5> Well for that subject, I don't really care about distorded information in a news article, I just wanted a cool hacker/defcon story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Each year's conference badge is a printed circuit board (PCB), the same type of mini computers you'll find embedded in most modern electronics."

Oof... ouch. Owie.

<comment><USER10> It's every other year - there are physical badges in between[0][1].

[0] [http://potatohatsecurity.tumblr.com/post/126411303994/defcon...](http://potatohatsecurity.tumblr.com/post/126411303994/defcon-23-badge- challenge)

[1] [https://hackaday.io/project/7087-defcon-23-badge- hacking](https://hackaday.io/project/7087-defcon-23-badge-hacking)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the HN equivalent for (Content-)Marketing? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a place to share articles about content marketing? Is there some place you are aware of to get access to the community, not only by consuming, but also by sharing quality content on the topic?<p>Does anyone have recommendations? <comment><USER2> [https://barnacl.es/](https://barnacl.es/) kinda...?

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know about it. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Creating Executable Jars For Your Clojure App - <AUTHOR> http://asymmetrical-view.com/2009/06/22/executable-clojure-jars.html

<comment><USER2> As a B2C Java developer, I have to say it: don't distribute jars to end users. The user experience is horrific. Knowing how to make executable jars is valuable, just make sure it is the step in your ant file right before you execute your native wrapping.

Java build tools are wonderfully cross platform so you can use the following pair regardless of your development environment, as far as I know. I routinely build BCC for Macs on Windows Vista.

Launch4j: packs jars into self-contained .exes, with all the trimmings. Includes ant integration. <http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/>

JarBundler: an Ant task which packs jars into Mac applications <http://jarbundler.sourceforge.net/>

You need a file called JavaApplicationStub to get JarBundler to work. Macs can apparently produce it with software that comes onboard. I got mine by outsourcing wrapping of the very first Mac version of BCC to somebody on RentACoder, and since they I've just copy/pasted every time I've done a version upgrade. I really don't understand the internals of Java Mac applications, but I think you can also copy/paste any JavaApplicationStub you encounter on the Internet, if you're also developing on a non-Mac platform.

(Wrapping isn't quite the last thing you'll need to do to make a Java app cross-platform -- ask me some time about the joys of finding a good directory to store settings in -- but it is a low-effort absurdly-high-reward step to take.)

I don't have any experience with deploying B2C Java apps to Linux users so I don't know what I'd do for wrapping it there. (While I will probably never write B2C for Linux users, I would be interested if someone with experience with it shared what they did.)

<comment><USER3> "As a B2C Java developer, I have to say it: don't distribute jars to end users. The user experience is horrific. Knowing how to make executable jars is valuable, just make sure it is the step in your ant file right before you execute your native wrapping."

I distribute jars with JotBot, a desktop app written in JRuby. It has native installers for Win 32 and OSX; jars are just more files dropped off in a folder, and the user need never think about them, since kicking off the app is handled by a some native launcher.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a workable solution, too. Oh, that reminds me, I saw a great presentation at JavaOne about deploying JRuby apps to end users. Unfortunately I don't have my notes on me -- technically I think it was about scripting Swing apps with JRuby and their demos were _amazing_. (Suffice it to say I have not often seen Ruby used to run real-time 3D games.)

Anyhow, one of the footnotes was that there is this package called Rawr which gives you a Ruby option for packaging a minimal JRuby install with the application and giving it a nice native-esque packaging experience.

(Come to think of it, wasn't JotBot the sample application at that presentation? I remember it being a timetracking app but don't have my notes in front of me.)

<comment><USER3> That sounds like Logan Barnett and David Koontz, talking about Monkeybars, the main library behind JotBot (well, now I'm using my fork of Monkeybars in JotBot, but the core is the same).

Rawr is used to package up JRuby apps, including JotBot.

The apps don't have to be made with Monkeybars to use Rawr, and it may be possible to take a compiled Clojure app and make a redistributable package using Rawr. If not, I'm sure Rawr could be ported to Clojure (Cawr?) to make life easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Somebody might find this useful: <http://github.com/burke/cljtemplate> \-- a barebones template project for clojure, using ant, with compilation for java and clojure source.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something like Rawr would be good.

<http://rawr.rubyforge.org/></comment>


Pinterest Meets Spotify with New Music Social Network Wavo - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/07/20/pinterest-meets-spotify-with-new-music-social-network-wavo

<comment><USER2> Conor, Gabriel and the rest of the team are building something really cool here. It really fills a gap in the current offerings.

</comment><comment><USER3> A must to try. It changes totally the experience of listening music.</comment>


PHP to get access token for Facebook app - <AUTHOR> http://pixelstech.net/article/index.php?id=1332866266

<comment><USER2> Looks good... I had to work on the FB API.. I'm gonna try this.</comment>


ISalt: Interactive Salt Programming - <AUTHOR> https://isalt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ <comment><USER2> This looks pretty cool, wish I had heard of it at my last job, where we orchestrated all of our physical servers using Salt.

There are times when unfortunately the end result can be a bit tricky to predict, especially when using the reactor system.

These days all the cool kids use k8s, but I think most often it's overkill and Salt works extremely well for traditional (non microservice) setups. It's especially useful if you have a mix of physical servers and VMs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone give me a TLRD on salt, is it something like Ansible but for InfoSec?

<comment><USER4> It's Ansible, plus the total lack of noticing when you've gone too far inventing cutesy nicknames totally devoid of any meaningful connection to the concept they are supposedly describing.

<comment><USER2> Then you probably shouldn't look at the uWSGI documentation.

"The emperor-tyrant forced my master to commit harakiri."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Salt, has extensive infosec portfolio. Some cool stuff. Look at their site..they seem to have pushed into secops

</comment><comment><USER5> Really great</comment>


Independent UK newspaper to cease as print edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35561145 <comment><USER3> Somebody posted this on Reddit which I thought was insightful. Newspapers are just not selling anymore. Why would I buy a printed newspaper when I have the most up to date news in my hand already?

From Reddit:

Every national newspaper is seeing double digit decreases in circulation - <USER2> this rate the print editions will be gone in 5 - 7 years. The independent was worse off than everyone else, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

Newspaper Average circulation as of June 2015, Year-on-year % change

Daily Mirror 855,987 -10.71

Daily Record 191,042 -10.68

Daily Star 416,379 -10.83

The Sun 1,818,935 -10.56

Daily Express 432,565 -9.83

Daily Mail 1,626,846 -2.79

The Daily Telegraph 489,739 -4.83

Financial Times 214,256 -2.85

The Guardian 171,218 -7.61

i 274,556 -4.12

The Independent 57,930 -8.78

The Times 389,409 -1.05

Edit: Formatting

<comment><USER4> Urgh, the bloody Daily Mail will outlive us all.

<comment><USER5> The Daily Mail (and all the tabloids) mastered clickbait _avant la lettre_ ; sensationalist headlines, sex scandal combined with moral outrage, 'celebrity' news, occasional gore, noisy patriotism. That's the news the public want to buy.

The Mail's website has some truly masterful product placement. Go to the sidebar of shame and pick one of the "female celebrity wears clothes in public" articles. Embedded in it will be a very detailed and 'helpful' ad for whatever the celebrity is wearing. Those must be worth a fortune.

<comment><USER6> I have to say, I'd find those very helpful... Except most celebs wear stuff that doesn't really fit your average fat slob (me), or even most decent people. I always wonder what woman would actually want to wear the trash these people choise, but I guess there must be a lot of them, or that feature would have stopped long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What terrible news. The independent website is terrible. It is one of the slowest, most bloated sites I've ever used. Average page size is several megabytes, page layout jams during loads and restarts several times.

<comment><USER8> I agree, some newspaper's web offerings have been awful in terms of page load and user experience. Not singling any of them out, but I went to a popular UK newspaper's site; it loads hundreds of assets and almost crashes my tablet, and even once it loads half the screen real estate was taken up by a big advert and tiny font in the article.

The Guardian (and BBC News) seem to be the only ones taking this seriously so far, and maybe coincidence but I now go to those sites a lot more these days when I'm on my tablet.

Some of these companies should take the web more seriously (rather than some side offering they don't really care about) before its too late.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/b2c6502f-7b54-4f...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/b2c6502f-7b54-4fde-9695-9ce0b304a7ba)

[http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/09/patrick-hamann-on- making...](http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/09/patrick-hamann-on-making-the- guardian-load-under-1000-ms/)

<comment><USER9> Is the BBC news site any good? I used to use it a lot in its old form, when there was less whitespace and more content. When I look at it now it seems like there's barely anything there. Most of the stories appear to be videos, which I rarely bother watching.

One of the (paper) publications I most enjoy reading is Private Eye, which has a very messy layout with virtually no whitespace, is mostly black and white and has lots of information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to see the Guardian saying "It may not have the status of a grand "legacy brand" such as the BBC, the New York Times or indeed the Guardian". As a 28-year old, the Independent has been there all my life, and its brand is every bit the equal of those three.

</comment><comment><USER11> Relevant commentary, which I think cuts through much of the nonsense about the future of hard copy news:

 _When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline "The Tribune Company's publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear."

The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide "Click to buy" is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.

Meanwhile, back in the treasurer's office, have a look at this chart. Do you see anything unclear about the trend line?_

<Graph showing newspaper ad revenue dropping from >$60 billion in 2000 to <$20 billion in 2010. Click link below to see it.>

\- Clay Shirky, "Last Call", 19 Aug 2014

[https://medium.com/@cshirky/last- call-c682f6471c70](https://medium.com/@cshirky/last-call-c682f6471c70)

</comment><comment><USER12> Keep in mind that this is one data point in a long series.

The Christian Science Monitor, once one of the highest-quality newspapers in America, went full digital a few years ago. The New Orleans Times Picayune, like many local and regional papers, now prints only a few days a week. The New York Times and others have shrunk their print editions from the former, larger "broadsheet" format. The Financial Times published its "sunset" plan for exiting print a few years ago. The list goes on and on.

(In the case of The Independent, it was previously rescued by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Like Facebook mogul Chris Hughes and his New Republic debacle, he found that the easiest way to become a millionaire in the news business is to start out as a billionaire...)

Print newspapers of a certain size are still a profitable business, if decreasingly so. While digital versions of those publications are the future, traditional media companies have largely fumbled that future, and they have been fumbling it since the mid-1990s.

Now they float in an ocean of free content produced by smaller newsrooms and full of aggregators cribbing their hard-won investigative pieces for the price of an intern. Some of that free content is coming from news organizations that are attached to a more profitable business than selling ads. Verizon's media properties come to mind. Bloomberg LP makes its money selling monthly terminal subscriptions to financial data. You could say that Mike Bloomberg's greatest act of philanthropy has been to subsidize Bloomberg News.

Newspapers were slow to recognize the decline to their advertising engine, and largely inept at responding to it. Many of them, including SF's tech blogs, are limping along as events organizers that happen to publish daily updates.

There's a lot of room to experiment in plugging news machines into other business models. The thing to keep in mind, as we do so, is that those publications will usually fail to cover one topic fairly: their owners.

</comment><comment><USER13> another one bites the dust... Les paroles s'envolent mais les ecrits restent... I wonder in which category cloud-backed digital media is... We have self supporting writings that are 3000 years old, will we have the same for things said that go against the grain for this era?</comment>