Show HN: TryCatch – Get offers only with your desired salary - <AUTHOR> https://www.trycatch.cc/ <comment><USER2> This is a great idea, but there needs to be some substantial recruiter vetting in the background somewhere. Here in the UK the bad tech recruiters are renowned for advertising jobs that don't exist in order to get candidates to hand over their details, at which point the job suddenly vanishes but the recruiter spams you for the rest of your life with appallingly unsuitable roles.

For a system like this to work there needs to a way to verify that the recruiter is trying to fill a real job that actually pays what they say it pays. That bit will be _exceptionally_ difficult. If trycatch can solve it though, then I hope they take over the entire job market. 100% of it.

<comment><USER3> User ratings can help too.

<comment><USER4> ^Yes that's exactly what we are planning to do to make sure that developers only get genuine offers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is current salary relevant? In most cases, revealing your current salary will be used against you by the new employer, as it allows them to lower their offer if they had planned on offering much more.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the reasons is that we are using the delta (demand minus current salary) in ranking the profiles in our lists.

<comment><USER6> I fail to see how this benefits me as an job seeker.

It doesn't matter how valuable my current employer thinks I am. All that matters is how valuable my next employer thinks I am.

<comment><USER7> It is also inherently false to assume that two identical positions at two different companies are worth the same to each company. A software developer working at a company which sells software and a developer working at a company where they develop a product for an insurance company that enhances actuarial analysis are very, very different in terms of how much value the developer creates for the company - and how much value they create is the only legitimate criteria to test compensation against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a hiring manager here's my concerns/issues with the current process of hiring/using a recruiter

\- recruiters don't screen well enough technically or personality wise

\- recruiters tend to lie about everything (candidate availability, salary requirements, etc)

\- recruiters are hellaciously expensive

\- you still have to do the full process for everyone that needs to be interviewed (regardless of source. Skipping steps has always resulted in a bad hire in my experience)

\- resumes/profiles suck for determining coding ability. Sparsely filled github accounts and pet projects are far better indicators

As a person being hired here's my issues:

\- recruiters lie (about opportunities, salary, etc). Notice a trend here?

\- companies are cagey about salary. I'd rather know up front rather than waste everyone's time.

\- lack of exposure to the team during the hiring process. Since I'll be spending more time with them than my family I want them to be people I like rather than neckbeards that aren't personable.

<comment><USER4> \- recruiters don't screen well enough technically or personality wise \- resumes/profiles suck for determining coding ability. Sparsely filled github accounts and pet projects are far better indicators

We are the same team behind [https://remoteinterview.io](https://remoteinterview.io). We encourage employers to screen on the basis of technical skills instead of resumes.

\- recruiters tend to lie about everything (candidate availability, salary requirements, etc)

We are planning to implement rating system for employers by candidates.

\- companies are cagey about salary. I'd rather know up front rather than waste everyone's time.

That's what TryCatch.cc is trying to solve.

\- lack of exposure to the team during the hiring process. Since I'll be spending more time with them than my family I want them to be people I like rather than neckbeards that aren't personable.

Very valid point. It should be solved.

<comment><USER7> That Remote Interview looks absolutely brilliant. I firmly believe that the future lies entirely with remote workers and it's simply a matter of the right tools being available. Please keep doing what you're doing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spin this around so a company can test the water with a salary range and desired qualifications and get a percent of candidate pool coverage... Basically what fraction of an anonymous but hopefully representative group of programmer would consider this salary (a) acceptable and (b) below or above current salary.

Bonus point, filter by geography.

<comment><USER10> This would be huge. Having both used recruiters to find work and to find candidates, from the employer side it's one thing for a recruiter to say "You need to raise your salary range by $20k to attract what you're looking for" \- after all they get paid a percentage of base salary.

It'd be something else entirely we had a tool where increasing base salary by $20k showed us that it doubled the number of interested candidates within a given skill set.

<comment><USER11> I have some wiggle room on my dev jobs so I'm offering $X-$X+20 for someone with $Y-$Y+5 yrs of experience. I'm perfectly open to an increase and I work with a recruiter whom I trust, so I usually ask him if I'm low or high and he's honest with me. So much of success in things coming from not working with scumbags.

<comment><USER10> Are you hiring any .NET folks? :)

<comment><USER11> Sorry, php and golang developers and sysadmin types. But I hired two guys who were .net guys who were tired of it, they say that the grass is greener, sky bluer, and their wives and girlfriends are more beautiful. ymmv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wary of this without knowing exactly how your profile would be anonymized. I work in a very small niche and even if the company names are hidden, just seeing a list of job titles, time frame, and my skill set would really narrow me down. If my location is listed, that absolutely pinpoints me, as I'm the only person in my niche, in my area.

I didn't sign up, so I don't know if is possible to see and edit your profile before it goes public or not. But giving me that level of control would resolve most of my concerns.

<comment><USER4> It's a very valid concern and thanks for pointing it out. We will let you edit your anonymous profile first. We should add this in FAQs.

UPDATE: FAQ updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For a lot of companies, "salary" is usually a mixture of base salary, bonus and stock options/RSUs.

I guess there are also various perks (public transport ticket, food, ...), but those mostly don't end up scoring that high on the 'money' scale.

Are there any plans to take these things into consideration?

<comment><USER14> > public transport ticket, food

Don't care, don't care, don't care. Unless the IRS is taxing it, I don't care about it.

<comment><USER15> You don't, but others do. There are more people in this world than just you.

<comment><USER16> I think he means that they might as well be included in the salary, unless there's a tax or bulk buying discount.

<comment><USER14> I find that relying on my employer for everyday stuff isn't conducive to building future proof systems: am I alone in finding it hard to budget for expenses when my employer is providing a large chunk of my expenses?

Whenever possible, I prefer taking a cash equivalent and buying my own. Insurance, food, living quarters, public transportation..whatever.

<comment><USER17> Well employers get discounts for getting a large amount of these expensive. Food might not be true, but if an employer would give you the exact amount of money he pays for insurance, you would get an insurance a lot crappier, simply because the employer gets discounts.

I am currently paying insurance out of the pocket, it sucks. When I'll reach 30 (no more catastrophic plans), I'll definitely will find another employer with health insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I understand that this is your MVP and you are simply gauging the developer interest at the moment, but I would love to see what you are pitching to the employers. No, this is not about me not trusting you, I am just curious why would the other side use this (or how you will convince them to use it). Since you are building a marketplace, I would like to see how you are attracting both ends of the transaction

<comment><USER4> Great question. The biggest value employers get is significantly higher response rate from developers. Compare it with linkedin inmails where most of the interview offers are considered spam because developers don't see the incremental monetary value in offers.

<comment><USER18> Well ofcourse there ARE benefits to them, but I would just like to see you present it to them as awesomely as you presented to us devs

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we are slowly inviting the 'other side'. We do want it to be awesome and create real value!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately, it's likely that in many cases the anonymity won't be preserved simply due to the probability of multiple candidates having the exact same job experience.

Take the example profile (which doesn't appear to belong to an actual person). We can create a google search that is something like the following:

site:linkedin.com AND intitle:" | Linkedin" AND intext:"Data Engineer" AND intext:"Distributed Systems Engineer" AND intext:"Software Engineer in Azure"

And, if it belonged to an actual person, would likely show up in the results. If there are multiple candidates with these titles, you can add more conditions, such as the employers to narrow it down.

<comment><USER4> Yes you are right. For that reason we are planning to show anonymous profile to candidates and let him/her edit it.

UPDATE: FAQs updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Salary is the wrong metric!

For example, I don't want to see a job below 125K but a job is posted at 115K and they subsidize X where X is important to me personally....then that can change everything.

It's obviously a much tougher situation to define all those little things, perhaps they should be valuing the total compensation package and not salary?

There are jobs with certain benefits where either the same or less salary could still be compelling to someone.

<comment><USER20> Would you give up $10k a year in salary for a free parking space? What if that space's market value was $289 a month?

EG: I'm not sure what's getting subsidized here. If it's worth less than 7k is probably better to take the higher salary and pay for it yourself.

<comment><USER11> Fair point, my argument is that rather than saying salary is 100k, they should be saying total compensation is valued at 110k with 100k being salary, parking being valued at 7k and donations to the upper peninsula bird watching society covered by the company to the tune of 3k per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't trust anything that is Linkedin-based. I find their privacy policy impossible to understand, and I would just assume at some point my employer will know that I've signed up for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand, not everyone is a fan of LinkedIn. We will soon be adding email signup.

<comment><USER22> Thanks, I also refuse to use linkedin but would like to use this service. Also +1ing a geography filter request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Like the concept, but have some reservations. What happens when recruiters start using it and spamming me regardless of whether they have something that pays the figure in question or not (one of those situations where the amount "magically" becomes 30% less than the recruiter said it was when you go to interview.) Like I said, I love the idea but I have doubts about how it will pan out when exposed to the seedy world of tech recruiters.

<comment><USER24> This happened to me. I said I'd only interview if the offer would be at least a certain amount. After going through the process, the offer was $15k lower than the recruiter had promised.

<comment> l-jenkins I've had this happen. When I got the offer from the CEO (small company) it was what I was currently making but with less job security. I stopped dealing with that recruiter immediately and ignore all correspondence from them (or anyone at their company).

I think what they hear is "I need my compensation to be X" instead of "I need my salary to be X". Big difference.

<comment><USER15> Well, many times as candidates, we're told to state our total compensation when asked about our salary.

<comment><USER25> That's surprising/confusing to me--I've actually never been asked that. This is in the US (east coast), so can't speak to other locales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Liked the concept. It's like applying free market models for developers! But I'm curious about anonymity? How does it work?

<comment><USER4> Co-founder here. Thanks for the liking it. Our anonymizer is semi-automatic for now but listing for recruiters is automatic.

<comment><USER27> What does this mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> This means that the process of removing identifying information is mostly automatic. But a person then reviews and removes anything identifiable and then the candidate himself approves the profile before we add it to our public list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Heh, clever name (and reason for it).

<comment><USER29> > Why "TryCatch"?

> Because you are an _exception_

<comment><USER30> Ahhh I just got it. Cheers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great idea! I signed up, but I worry that there's no geographical adjustment for salaries. For instance, I make $200k and live in Cleveland. Even 20% more in NYC or SF is a very different lifestyle.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that we will need to consider location and all the aspects related to it. We are already brainstorming on this.

<comment><USER7> Please don't forget the only location that is going to matter in 10 years: REMOTE!

<comment><USER4> Can't agree more. Remote is the future!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You should increase the salary on the sample to something more realistic. How about... makes $125 wants $150k?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok makes sense. Done :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Developers only? Or are you just starting out with this role and plan to expand to others later?

Do employers sign up as "recruiters"? I would think not since the word "recruiter" has a very specific meaning.

This service helps employers save significant time on promising candidates that have wage expectations beyond an employer's budget. Worst case, employers can adjust both initial salary bands and corresponding expectations accordingly through the use of this service.

<comment><USER4> Noted. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I'm trying to sign up:

Error: failed to find request token in session at Strategy.OAuthStrategy.authenticate (/app/node_modules/passport- linkedin/node_modules/passport-oauth/lib/passport- oauth/strategies/oauth.js:124:54) at Strategy.authenticate (/app/node_modules/passport-linkedin/lib/passport-linkedin/strategy.js:118:40) at attempt (/app/node_modules/passport/lib/middleware/authenticate.js:337:16) at authenticate (/app/node_modules/passport/lib/middleware/authenticate.js:338:7) at /app/linkedin.js:84:15 at callbacks (/app/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:164:37) at param (/app/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:138:11) at pass (/app/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:145:5) at nextRoute (/app/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:100:7) at callbacks (/app/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:167:11)

<comment><AUTHOR> hmmmm weird. Can you give it another try. I just tried and it works. Will check logs after traffic reduces :)

<comment><USER34> Tried again, works now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Btw, Wouldn't a good anti-recruiter mechanism be that you only allow employer accounts when you verify that the user represents an actual company etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan on only giving access to accounts with @company.com emails (where company will be researched ideally by our staff to be a legit tech company). Can you think of any other mechanisms we should have in place?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How is this different from hired.com except that you reveal your current salary?

<comment><USER4> Hired.com is an auction site for limited time. It works when you are desperately in need of job switch. TryCatch.cc is not bound by time and our target developers are not actively looking for job switch but may change their mind for higher pay.

<comment><USER36> I once had an internship in college where I worked with Sitecore (a .net cms). When I was applying for jobs out of college, I mentioned it in my resume when I posted it to Monster.com.

It has been many years since I took that resume down, and that technology has been off my resume just as long. However, I _still_ get recruiter spam asking if I'm interested in a 6-month contract-to-hire position on the wrong coast working with Sitecore.

This tool sounds like it fits a pretty good passive use case, but I just thought I should point out why I, particularly, love the limited-time model of Hired.com. It lets me avoid being considered "on the market" for all eternity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> People are creating job sites and announcing them here almost every day. Is this working? Isn't there a chicken-and-egg problem in there?

If it works, someone please tell me what is the magic strategy to get public for a general (no devs, programmers or IT in any form) job postings site that is simple, easy and works. Brazil is in need of it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm open for new ways to find jobs but sadly my expectations aren't that high. I still signed up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good Luck! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looks like an automated version of White Truffle. That said, looks straightforward and has an interesting metric.

Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice tagline. OAuth is blocked here. Will try from home.

> Why "TryCatch"?

> Because you are an _exception_

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I wonder why would they block OAuth ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How does it choose what jobs I am "eligble" for? In the past 5 years I've done design, user experience, customer support, qa, devops, and programming.

Most recruiters want someone who has done one and only one thing for the entirety of their career, regardless of whether that's a sound strategy or not- do you rank higher for employees who have done the same thing for years or is it strictly a position-avialable:pay-requested rank?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is purely upto the employer watching your profile. We don't use your consistency in our ranking.

If the employer feels like contacting you. You will get contacted along with complete details about the job position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "firebase.js:18 FIREBASE WARNING: Specified Firebase has reached its Peak Connections limit. If you are the Firebase owner, consider upgrading. ([https://remoteinterview2.firebaseio.com)"](https://remoteinterview2.firebaseio.com\)")

Also, will there be a European version of this? My salary in Dollars has gotten quite low ( eur vs dollar ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Co-Founder here. We got HN hug! And firebase is having trouble changing our plan. We will be contacting back everyone who is trying to login :)

Edit: We are back up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> These job sites pop up frequently (each with a small twist) and they get developers to hand over their emails. But I'm not sure how well they succeed in getting good companies to pay for their service afterwards. It's an area I'm interested in learning more about.</comment>


Suddenly Microsoft is the Hippest Tech Company Around - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/suddenly-microsoft-hippest-tech-company-around/50402/

<comment><USER2> Around where? Seattle? Certainly not within a 200 mile radius of, well, just about anywhere else.

When I see Microsoft's new ads, I _still_ cringe. It's just a veiled "developers, developers, developers" thing. It still feels like the rich nerd trying to act like the cool kid. It just doesn't work, and Microsoft should realize that.

Why are the marketing-heads so interested in "rebranding" anyway? I personally don't understand image campaigns.

Actions, not words, Microsoft. Give us more things like Xbox 360 and Kinect (or half of the stuff Research comes up with), less lame attempts to make me "aware" of your cool work on Internet Explorer. If you want me to use your product, make it kick the ass of its competitors in my head. You won't convince me based upon your silly marketing anymore. I've been hurt by that a couple of times before.

I am glad IE has finally started to come around to be a browser worth using, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I think these "hip" commercials are targeted toward people that are mostly off of the whole Windows game by now anyway. The problem here is that Microsoft is too late. The Lumia looks beautiful, IE doesn't look bad, but Apple already ate their mobile market and IE had its chance in 2005 when Microsoft didn't seem to take Mozilla seriously.

<comment><USER3> It may not work on you, but perhaps it does work on others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two points.

First, Microsoft's status as a "cool" or, at least, "not eyeball-gougingly awful" company is inversely proportional to the power they wield over customers. MS was universally loathed when they were _forcing_ people to use their browser and when it wasn't possible to do any meaningful consumer computing without paying the Windows tax. Now that we don't _have_ to use MS software, MS are having to make software that people might actually use by choice. It's very hard for a dominant company to avoid becoming evil (cf. Google), but the flip-side is that once the dominance fades away the company has to start competing on merit again.

Second, MS in 1997 were competing with Netscape (cool startup), Sun (hippies) and IBM (erm...). Now they're competing, and often successfully, with Facebook (evil), Apple (enormous) and Google (evil and enormous). Today's 20-year-old college student was _six years old_ during the "browser wars" anti-trust trial and isn't going to hold grudges for it. Today's Microsoft is sort of like late 90s IBM - dull, slightly confused and often irrelevant, but it's not exactly _evil_ ; XBox/Kinect is a genuinely good product, and Windows Phone is actually _innovative_ rather than an iPhone clone; Bill Gates has morphed from a dystopian monopolist plutocrat into your genial wealthy uncle who spends his time trying to cure malaria and tackle poverty, more famous for giving his money away than for the means by which he amassed it.

None of this means that Microsoft is now the hippest tech company around, but it does explain how they might become so and why that wouldn't be a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> If the general public doesn't even bother resetting their browser's homepage, I have trouble believing they will switch browsers because of an ad.

As for "used to be the evil one", I note they managed to keep the money they extorted out of our industry, with almost no reparations to the innovators they excluded from the market via threats and kickbacks. And they're starting to clone Apple's dystopian walled garden.

</comment><comment><USER6> I kind of followed the post up until they started talking about Windows 8. "Windows 8 surprised and excited the tech blogger world, something a Windows browser hasn't done since Windows 95."

Do we live on the same planet? The feeling I got right after the consumer beta was that it was generally hated. And wasn't Win7 quite acclaimed?

<comment><USER7> There is something clearly wrong in that sentence. Windows 8 and Windows 95 aren't exactly "browsers". Which makes you wonder if the one who wrote the article did an innocent mistake or really doesn't know what she's talking about.

<comment><USER6> It might seem like it. I haven't got the time checking out the web site, but it seems as a "tech blog" as that site that commented on the Raspberry Pi being an ugly computer a little while ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it'll take more than a few smirk-inducing commercials.

<comment><USER9> Like what? Genuine question. What could MS do to win here?

<comment><USER10> Microsoft needs to do three things:

1\. Come out with better, more insightful products. This is something it actually is doing: 360, Windows Phone and Windows 8 all look awesome. I would be very happy for Balmer to leave and for him to be replaced by J Allard (Entertainment and Devices head that left/was forced out). From the outside looking in, it looked like Allard had vision, he knew how to execute, and he knew the culture the company needed to cultivate to achieve it. Xbox and Windows Phone was out of E&D, as well as the canned-but-great-looking Courier.

2\. Have better ad campaigns. Across all divisions, the ad campaigns have been uniformly awful.

3\. Keep executing cleanly. No company is past redemption, but Microsoft's history is not good. They need to keep being good citizens. Trust takes time, but it's very easy to lose it (see Yahoo!).

<comment><USER11> > Come out with better, more insightful products. This is something it > actually is doing: 360, Windows Phone and Windows 8 all look awesome.

A corollary of this point is that their Windows 8 "everything is metro" broad- brush attitude is going to bite them in the ass. Case in point: Windows 8 Server - the interface in the beta is horrendous.

Someone wise once said: "God is in the details". They need to realize that they can't just take an idea like the Metro inteface and slap it onto their server product... the result will be tragic.

Instead, they should take the "Metro" vision, and fabricate a server version. A good example of this would be the work that Apple has done "iOS-ifying" OSX. You can argue whether this is a worthwhile path to take, but all of the features were whitelisted after a) making sure they were true to where they wanted to take the OS, and b) ensuring it looked and worked decent (even if there was lost functionality from a previous version).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well they did just opensource their ASP.NET stack under Apache License (which, AFAIK, grants patents on the derived works), so now all those Microsoft hating trolls can shut up about Mono being patent encumbered (doubt that they will tough). And they added Git to Codeplex. I actually like what Microsoft has been doing for the past few years for developers, it's giving away free development tools for everyone, it's open-sourcing stuff, working with standard bodies (CLI/.NET). Shit I wish Clojure was on .NET, I jumped off .NET two years ago since I went in to web development and I'm strongly invested in Clojure now, but JVM is inferior in a lot of ways and I don't even want to touch Java. ClojureCLR might be worth checking out.

<comment><USER13> JAVA maybe inferior to C# now-a-days, but claiming the JVM to be inferior makes me doubt your credibility.

<comment><USER12> No value types, no generics, this forces all sort of hacks with arrays to pack memory layouts when you don't want to use reference types (think small vector structures, tuples) and inefficient code generated for Java templates (essentially everything gets boxed to Object). Value types don't touch GC. Also on the low level Mono has SIMD vector support which is also useful, you can even turn off dynamic bound checking when you need extra performance and presumably already did the testing. Also native interop is better with PInvoke. This might not be relevant for web development (although jgit and twitter teams both mentioned they had problems with this), but I did game development before switching and this sort of thing really matters. .NET was bad on the JIT/inlining/optimization side but Mono fixes that with AOT compilation/using LLVM for code generation.

And .NET has better libraries to deal with asynchronous programming, Task uses continuation passing and each thread has it's own "event loop" with SynchronizationContext, it's really simple to switch between them, Java has all sort of mixes, some API's use pooling, some use continuations, and you have to mess around with Executors since there is no equivalent to SynchronizationContext. Also RX is a wonderful abstraction on event streams. Java can't even consider this sort of API's because it has no lambdas/extension methods, and this reflects in JVM libraries.

<comment><USER14> Also, the CLR has had the ability to dynamic invoke delegates for years. Also dynamic compilation and assembly unloading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This story is only to do with editorialized perception and opinion and nothing to do with tech. Why is it here?

</comment><comment><USER16> No, it is not.

What prevents them from being anywhere near "hip" is their past/present actions and our memory.

<comment><USER11> > What prevents them from being anywhere near "hip" is their past/present > actions and our memory.

No, what prevents them is their "Microsoft is a windows company" mantra that Ballmer reiterated recently. Windows is not hop, it's not the 90s.

Furthermore - Microsoft is and has always been an "enterprise" company. Windows = decent enterprise product line(s), and Office (esp. Excel) is a powerful, possibly indispensable business tool. But consumer-oriented it is not. Absent a huge change in management focus, they will never be... they have billions of reasons each year not to.

<comment><USER14> Don't forget the PC games market and Xbox. It's a significant enough market to disprove the second part of your hypothesis, I believe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah! Can't wait to use their hip and cool .NET technology ... and using windows is a delight. cmd32.exe > zsh ;)

<comment><USER18> Come on, Windows PowerShell was released 5 years ago!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Power_Shell>

One could even argue it's better in some ways, for example: "PowerShell differs from Unix/Linux in that .NET objects are passed between stages in the pipeline instead of text. This eliminates the need to explicitly parse text output.

See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_command_shells></comment></comment>


Riding Rails: Rails now tested on Travis CI - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2011/7/27/rails-now-tested-on-travis-ci <comment><USER2> Great! travis-ci.org is a useful yet fun platform. The fact that Rails is now tested also guarantees that the project will be more mature really soon. That's very good news! Congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER3> congrats! I really like travis but it was quite hard to find the right widget- code to implement in your github readme files to get a test result indication ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess you mean the status images? Docs can be found at <http://about.travis- ci.org>

Here is the page on the status images : <http://about.travis- ci.org/docs/user/status-images/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That are good news for Travis.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work. I <3 Travis.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome! Great work guys!

</comment><comment><USER7> Travis rocks!</comment>


Telling boys not to be girly - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/09/25/5_ways_america_tells_boys_not_to_be_girly/

<comment><USER2> The societal pressures involved here is why I now prefer having two daughters. Now I get to see lots of kids on a regular basis, being a girl seems to be easier these days than being a boy if you deviate from society's notions of gender norms.

My eldest daughter flip flops between playing with dolls to wearing a knight's costume and 'defending' her friend who's dressed as a prince. My daughters oten wear boys clothes and have "boys" toys but can also pull off hot pink, dresses, "girlie" shoes and all the rest. Could a 6 year old boy pull off wearing a pink Barbie top to school in the same way?

Intriguingly, there's not a single boy in my daughter's street dancing or gymnastics clubs and they're not gender limited or oriented. The odd one or two have turned up but never lasted more than a single session.. Nor are there any men at my daughter's nursery. Or likely to be at her first school. This is rather sad because it surely must lead to kids becoming even more convinced of gender norms and expectations.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _It's easy to find news of boys suspended and expelled for growing their > hair_

Huh? This one is not just scandalous to me, it's… _alien_.

<comment><USER3> My high school had something of a dress code that you had to be clean shaven and hair can't be past your shoulders. It was in no way a masculine thing, it was more of a uniform sort of thing (schools making rules for the sake of making rules).

I had been given a razor on more than one occasion to shave in the morning, but never got into real trouble. I think the author is overstating this.

<comment> loup-vaillant He's not. He provides links to actual instances. I reckon there's the possibility of reporting bias, though. (Extraordinary events are more often reported than ordinary ones, leading us to believe they are more frequent. Case in point: lottery winners.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry, but what is this article doing on HN?

<comment><USER5> <insert some comment about how this relates to hacking the status quo of gender roles in our society></comment></comment>


Any idea? - <AUTHOR>

Someone have an idea of how to run a C-based app on an html page? <comment><USER2> emscripten/clang?</comment>


Ask HN: What's an easy way to keep myself safe from phishing attacks? - <AUTHOR> Asking this question because I often get afraid when read articles like 'nuclear power plant was hacked because some employee opened some email' and because I also think it would be devastating and hugely damaging to lose my information to a malicious actor.<p>I use OS X's mail client. Delete all junk mails without opening them (I regularly receive mails saying your account is hacked, but none of them have my password and hence I think they're illegitimate). <comment><USER2> Familiarity

<comment><AUTHOR> Familiarity is something phishing attacks usually use to their advantage

<comment><USER2> Familiarity with the kind of attack</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Monthly billing software for SaaS site - <AUTHOR>

i'm working on a project which is almost done except the payment aspect of it. I'm wondering what does the HN community use for their SaaS website to accept payments and also do monthly billings?
i was looking at chargify.com and really like what they offer. any other ideas?
cheers <comment><USER2> Start with PayPal, add a merchant account once your volume makes it worthwhile. Billing code is really not hard to write, at least in the beginning when you're not dealing with a lot of special cases yet. With PayPal subscriptions, you basically just need two things -- some code to generate a link to start the subscription (which you can then put in a webpage or redirect to after someone fills out a form), and a script to receive the POST- backs from IPN when subscriptions are created or canceled. And that's all part of their standard service, not the Pro/PayFlow plans with monthly fees... why commit to monthly fees for Chargify or Recurly or anyone before you even have revenue?

I tried the subscription-as-a-service stuff before, with both Spreedly and Recurly, and ended up with just as much work and just as much code, while tying myself to startups that are much less stable than PP. That came back to bite me when Recurly screwed their beta users on plans/pricing and I had to rip out all their code and start over.

<comment><AUTHOR> i was leaning towards using paypal as well but wanted to setup that merchant account right from the start. i feel that it gives your site a bit more credibility that way.

I've bee very hesitant to go the chargify route for that exact reason you mentioned. I'd rather rely on a long running stable company like PP than to risk it all on a startup that may not be there in a year or two.

thanks for the advice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From what I've read, Stripe.com seems to be really simple, and they have a lot of documentation based on what language a user is trying to implement in.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use <http://saasy.com> because I am in Canada, if I was in the USA I would use stripe.com. It depends on how much you're charging too - chargify looks good, but actual costs are $3.49/user... and up to almost $10.

</comment><comment><USER5> Go with stripe. They are the only one I have seen with no monthly fees. Great product too.

</comment><comment><USER6> We use stripe.com

</comment><comment><USER7> I like Recurly a lot. They are somewhat expensive ($70 a month minimum + fees) in comparison to some alternatives, but I've found it to be worth the extra cost.

</comment><comment><USER8> Chargify.com works well for us.

</comment><comment><USER9> there are many things to consider when choosing the right payment solution for your SaaS website. Simple solutions like Paypal and stripe might work well if all you need is a plug-in-play solution but theses out of the box products might not give you the the full suite of tools you'll need once your business and volume grows. Recurring Billing, Secure Vault Storage, Post re-direct, Fraud Protection and management and simple PCI Compliance are going to be key to your success. We have payments pros on staff as well as developers that would be happy to answer your questions anytime just give me a call direct 310.997.0100 <http://www.ndmscorp.com> Ask for Todd or Mike

</comment><comment><USER10> Been using stripe.</comment>


Imagine your computer as a wallet full of Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4697943 <comment><USER2> Every day, another event occurs that reminds me of Daniel Suarez's books Daemon and Freedom(tm).

This is one of them.

Every currency is based on the credibility of the underlying guarantor, whether it's the value of precious metals, the full faith and credit of a government, or the long-term viability of an organization.

The underlying guarantor here is the belief that an open, distributed system like bitcoins will grow and thrive. Given the nature of distributed systems, the main risks to its survival are lack of interest by participants, a security flaw in the bitcoin system, or the complete collapse of the internet as we currently know it.

The latter isn't likely to happen - even if the US became like China in trying to regulate activity (not likely), it will just open up elsewhere. Short of the kind of global social catastrophe that would invalidate every other currency as well, it's not a realistic risk.

Lack of interest and security flaws are the only real risks. They're significant enough that I wouldn't invest money I couldn't afford, or base a business model around bitcoins - but acceptable enough that I will definitely spend some disposable income on bitcoins.

<comment><USER3> _the main risks to its survival are lack of interest by participants,_

Much like prior "alternative currencies" like Pogs and Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs and Second Life real estate?

Stepping away from the idealism of "ooh wouldn't it be nice to have a distributed currency", what we have is a bunch of people trying to create a bubble. Unlike many bubbles there's not even an attempt to claim that the asset has some intrinsic value; instead it's just a bunch of people collectively deciding to fool themselves into thinking that a random scarce commodity has value in the hopes that they'll be able to fool more people into it later.

Of course, for new bubbles it's all about creating buzz. And how is buzz created? Well, upon getting fooled into paying money for a bunch of bitcoins the rational next move is to start talking up bitcoins to everybody as loudly as possible, to pull more people into the bubble and inflate the value of your own assets. Thus, I predict we'll be hearing more and more about bitcoins over the next year or so as the process accelerates.

The bubble almost certainly ends at some point; basically when it runs out of new suckers. I don't hold out much hope for this bubble lasting long enough to bring in significant numbers of mainstream suckers, though, since you pretty much need a degree in mathematics to even understand what the hell a "bitcoin" actually is.

In summary, if I'm going to be part of a pyramid scheme I think I'll start it myself instead of getting in at the fifth floor.

<comment><USER4> It's money. Its value will come from people willing to exchange it for other valuable things. People agree to do this because it makes doing business a lot more convenient. It works fine if everyone cooperates and the system is well designed. Bitcoin seems to be much better designed than any established monetary system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in Bitcoin, you may want to check out several other attempts at creating decentralized digital monetary systems.

The Ripple project is creating a system where each node can issue their own unique money, and where transactions occur over paths of mutual trust: <http://ripple-project.org/>

I just released Rivulet, an alternative Ripple server that should be useful for website owners who want to let their users engage in user-to-user transactions without having to centrally distribute currency to them: <https://github.com/jplewicke/rivulet>

Pelle Braendgaard has proposed OpenTransact, a standard for RESTful digital transactions, so that we can escape from this mess of incompatible APIs and help people transact in their choice of currency: <http://www.opentransact.org/>

<comment><USER6> There is also a cost in creating bitcoins, prior to them running out of bitcoin numbers there will be an ever increasing use of electricity.

Another point is there is a limited supply, unlike other currencies where the possible supply is unlimited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately there seem to be scalability issues with Bitcoin. Currently each node needs to know about every transaction that ever happened. The size of my .bitcoin directory is currently around 100 MB. So with more users the high amount of transactions might become an actual problem.

There's also some discussion on the bitcoin forum about this issue: <http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=286.0>

<comment><AUTHOR> Once I got to this idea, I heard about longest chain. So we can randomly cut existing chain keeping it at safe length. It could be done even per client (server will store the whole chain, while smartphones will keep only "safe"-length chain)

Anyway, all of this is just implementation problem which, I believe, could be solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That looks a bit ropey... it needs incoming connections through a firewall? It does peer discovery by connecting to an IRC channel? It's rate limited by adjusting the complexity of the calculation? (Who does that and why can't anyone else manipulate it?) I need to backup a bitcoin wallet after every transaction so the money isn't "lost" (where does it go? is it just leaked and lost forever?).

It's written in C++ with hardly any comments / comments like this:

        // Get cursor
        Dbc* pcursor = GetCursor();

It has hard coded IP addresses to connect to by HTTP, sending headers claiming to be Mozilla 4, to find the external IP address?

</comment><comment><USER9> So computing power generates bitcoins? Is it ethical for me to use the 3 8-core machines at work I have to generate bitcoins for my personal use? What about my personal work machine?

<comment><USER10> According to their FAQ:

      No. There's a constant average rate of new Bitcoins created, and that amount
      is divided among the nodes by the CPU power they use. When Bitcoins start
      having real exchange value, the competition for coin creation will drive the
      price of electricity needed for generating a coin close to the value of the
      coin, so the profit margin won't be that huge. The easier way to gain a lot
      of wealth would be trading goods.

      At the moment, though, you can generate new coins quite profitably, if you
      expect them to have real value in the future. If you choose to, be aware that
      Bitcoin is still experimental software.

[http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#So_your_wealth_is_determined_by_t...](http://www.bitcoin.org/faq#So_your_wealth_is_determined_by_the_amount_of_CPU_power_you_have)

<comment><USER11> That's not _quite_ accurate, as it changes over time (just above that in the FAQ), and you cannot "discover" bitcoins which are already known. The difficulty in finding a new one increases as each new one is found, if only slightly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone explain the mathematics that the article glosses over? What constitutes a valid bitcoin? Can I sit down and start generating 'em just in case?

<comment><USER12> There is a paper available here: <http://www.bitcoin.org/sites/default/files/bitcoin.pdf>

It's using digital signatures to transfer coins. The prior owner will sign a coin and the new owner's public key. The new owner will verify the prior signature before accepting the coin. This is a longstanding idea going back to the 80's.

The rest of the details are to prevent double-spending without having a centrally trusted authority. I haven't spent time looking at this and can't say whether it works as advertised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone's interested in an explanation on how digital currency can work securely, I remembered an old mailing list message that's pretty straightforward with the math: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user- groups.linux.provo.p...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user- groups.linux.provo.plug/13350)

Edit: a teaser: _an anonymous coin is one which you can withdraw from the bank, but which the bank can't link to you when you spend it._

<comment><USER3> All of which is very nice, but it doesn't solve the actual problem of starting a new currency, which is persuading people that it's worth something.

<comment><USER6> A currency becomes worth something when people begin accepting it for goods and services. This is already the case to a very limited extent with bitcoin.

This also began to happen with QQ coins, in China people began accepting them for goods and services until the government cracked down. And the funny thing is that this was never meant to happen with QQ coins, they were meant simply as a way for QQ to make more money. But once people accepted them they became a form of currency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> it looks like a distributed search for sets of values having their sha256 starting with N zeroes, N+1, N+2 ... with target values having property something like this Kth value = (K-1)th || <value to find at step K>

One can only wonder where the seed money came from (and whether the current price of 50BTC x $0.25 = $12.5 per newly found value is self-sustainable in the system or still seed-funded) and whether the NSA have a listening node in the system (as all the transactions are broadcast to all nodes).

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the architecture for this inside a network? Does each node have to have its own Bitcoin wallet, or can you have a central node on a network store all the bitcoins?

<comment><AUTHOR> every node have it's own "wallet". each wallet consist of public/private keys, where public key is address.

So there is no centralized place where all wallets or coins stored. In fact, there is no coins - there is amounts assigned to each address (public key). And the whole bitcoin network is huge transactions book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So as more people join the bitcoin community, and as computing power generally increases, the value of each bitcoin approaches zero?

Doesn't sound like a huge benefit to taking time to generate a lot of bitcoins now, as there isn't a stable commodity to index it to.

Very interesting idea, nonetheless.

<comment><USER17> No, generation rate remains constant as computing power increases. You can only generate a few million total, then it stops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lol, I don't have the slightest idea if this will work in the long term, but it sounds like a great way to do small-scale money laundering. Or is it? Haven't researched it much.</comment>


Aternative to Google Apps for Business? - <AUTHOR>

So my small business (in Europe) needs to stop using Google Apps. What alternative serious solution do I have? <comment><USER2> You could look at Zoho: [http://www.zoho.com/productivity- apps.html](http://www.zoho.com/productivity-apps.html)

That is the only alternative I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but Zoho is based in the US.

<comment><USER3> They definitely have a strong US presence, but since the company grew (and is growing) out of India, and have customers globally - I'm sure there is a provision to host your account in a country/currency you're more comfortable with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out Etherpad ([http://etherpad.org/](http://etherpad.org/)). It's entirely open-source, so you can host all your own files on company servers/an intranet.

Certainly not a replacement for all of Google Apps, but it's a good start.

</comment><comment><USER5> Outlook.com with your domain could be an option. Why do you "need to" stop using them though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Over privacy concerns, really. Some of my important clients are not confortable anymore... Outlook.com is therefore not a option.</comment></comment>


Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eatfgXTMFf0 <comment><USER2> A comment from a reddit thread states: The gist behind this case is that the Judge's son owns patent law firm in East Texas where they often represent both sides. This guy doesn't live in East Texas. However, the dad lets these stupid cases into the town to bring business to his son. Really shady.

I agree with clavelle's comment. It's not so much the laws, but the system that allows this to occur.

Link here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4n08jj/developer_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/4n08jj/developer_is_being_sued_for_using_the_google_play/d405cbn)

<comment><USER3> According to the wikipedia page for the Eastern District of Texas both of the judges he names are retired from the court, one in 2011 and one in 2015. How does he claim in 2016 that these judges are presiding on his case and cases like it?

<comment><USER4> Perhaps they are on senior status: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_status](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_status)

<comment><USER3> No, they both show as retired from the court. They're both in private practice now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Patent trolling issues aside (they're valid, but discussed and I'm just another one of the "software patents suck guys"), I'm surprised that Google doesn't provide protection for developers using the Play Store. It's a very critical service for developers writing code for Android -- though it's not _always required_ it is if you want your app to be seen.

They certainly don't have to and I'm not sure if Apple or Microsoft do or not for their equivalents, but I know Microsoft offers patent indemnification for a lot of things these days. It would be in Google's best interest to have a patent indemnification policy for Google Play store.

I'd love to know what the actual numbers look like but I'd be willing to bet that the costs are extremely low since it works as a deterrent to these kinds of lawsuits. Patent trolls go after these lone developers because they'll settle rather than incur the cost. It's an easy buck. This guy didn't make Google Play, he didn't _write the code that "supposedly" infringed on the patent_. He simply _used_ it because that's the only way _for practical purposes_ to publish an Android app. And since the patent covers a large set of features that Play uses for licensing, he couldn't have published through Play and _not_ infringed in the eyes of Uniloc. The law allows anyone in the chain (including the guy playing with the Flight Simulator) to be sued for infringement, but they'd be very unlikely to do this kind of garbage if they knew Google would bring their legal team into the fold. By _not_ protecting their developers, Google has a deterrent to people using their platform.

</comment><comment><USER6> I find it oddly funny how Google hasn't stepped in to support their "clients", I'd think they'd help shutdown patent trolls so developers can continue to improve and distribute applications

<comment><USER7> Seriously - what the fuck Google?

It's only a matter of time until a patent troll writes a for loop on the store index to send out infringement suits DMCA-takedown style.

<comment><USER8> As the video mentions, people have been sued for App Store and Steam as well.

Google, and Apple and Valve, can send their own lawyers to defend these clients, but since there are dozens of cases, it will be quite expensive. They can maybe sue these trolls for tortous interference, but that may not stick.

So they can't do much.

<comment><USER9> A couple million dollars would bankrupt the average freelance developer, some many times over. A couple million dollars to any of those companies is negligible. I'm not saying that money is no object, but on the other hand, that Google or apple or whomever allows patrons of their store to be bullied like this is, in my opinion, an embarrassment. It not only shows a lack of concern, but it also loses them money because the apps in question probably have to be pulled from the store. I might be off base but I absolutely think that any of those companies could sue these trolls for their behavior. Instead they seem to be showing that they only care about number one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, no attempts to bring Davis in front of the Texas BAR association for unethical practices?

I'm also curious why numerous developers have not demanded an Insurance Protection Product / Plan that would take a premium in return for subrogation (defense) if a frivolous Patent Suit is filed. I'm rather certain the market exists and while it may be for larger businesses or players, developers forming a Mutual Company and writing on some big name AM Best A paper (or even going to Lloyds) could be helpful.

Anybody know of such an organization or idea?

I guess my line of thinking here is that "Yes, this is totally unfair and rigged" and then move on to "How do I work around the issues, at least to a limited extent, to avoid these pitfalls?" Sign me up for reform, sure, I'm all for it. Until then, I don't like banging my head against walls, I prefer to figure out ways around or over them.

<comment><USER11> The insurance would cost more than the expected cost of the litigation which is of course how insurance works. They key with the patent system is that you have to pay millions to defend yourself, but it's exceptionally rare to be able to recover attorney's fees even if you win.

So in the end it's a choice between capitulating and paying some amount (and perhaps unleashing more trolls in the future) or wasting millions and many many hours of your time over years of your life defending yourself.

There's no way to win, which is why this is now a big industry.

<comment><USER12> > The insurance would cost more than the expected cost of the litigation which > is of course how insurance works. The key with the patent system is that you > have to pay millions to defend yourself, but it's exceptionally rare to be > able to recover attorney's fees even if you win.

If enough people buy insurance to make sure that the patent trolls never win, then there's no money to be made and the lawyers stop suing. So the price of insurance goes down. It's not like insuring against tornados, which are going to happen regardless of whether the houses are insured. Furthermore, you can state up front "IP Lawsuit Coverage provided by XXX" as a disincentive for people to sue their members in the first place.

<comment><USER13> They don't even have to never win. It just has to cost them enough that their margin is smaller than that of some other venture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XknFl1l_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8XknFl1l_8)

He visits East Texas and shows that the 'offices' of the 'companies' that hold each patent are empty shells.

<comment><USER15> To save someone 8 minutes:

Tl;dr: He visits the listed offices of several dozen patent trolls in East Texas, including one directly across from the court house. Each one is empty with no sign of human activity. One has a secretary who claims the address is the accounting firm for those businesses. Then one person comes out to say that he is "a representative" of the businesses, and that those businesses "are based in East Texas" though. He recites one sentence about patents being property and then the video creator is kicked out.

<comment><USER16> How is this fundamentally different from our beloved SV startups organizing themselves as Delaware C-Corps?

<comment><USER17> One is a parasite on anyone who would dare innovate, and the other is trying to avoid overpaying taxes.

<comment><USER18> Less to do with taxes, more to do with having a well established and understood regulations and legal system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The patent in the video is US 6857067. Claims 1, 20, 22, 30, 31, 67, 107, and 108 were invalidated by the Patent Office in an administrative proceeding, but claims 21 and 22 survived that particular challenge. See IPR2013-00391, Final Decision. Cost for these challenges is around $300k (and often much less for troll suits), rather than the $2-5 million that is typically quoted for district court cases.

</comment><comment><USER20> Couldn't Google offer defense in such cases for its users? Every case is the same so it shouldn't even be that expensive (I guess, IANAL), and it would discourage future cases because the troll would know he will have to fight against Google.

<comment><USER21> I guess I am stupid, why isn't Google the defendant, other than the fact they have too much money. This is like being sued for shopping at the wrong store.

<comment><USER22> The problem is that the "patent" (fucking loose term of the word for something that should never have been allowed to be filed) is about the _use_ of the code in question. It's not the App Store that is supposedly infringing, it's the _use_ of the App Store. What a joke.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't Google use the Play Store to distribute their own apps like Sheets, Docs, Drive etc.

<comment><USER22> Right. But the patent troll doesn't want to go after a large corporation with the resources to defend. Much easier to go after the thousands of individuals / small businesses that can't fund a 5 year court battle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can these services just be disabled in East Texas to avoid their jurisdiction? At the very least, it would force the patent trolls into more neutral territory.

<comment><USER25> That's a very interesting idea. I wonder if it's a viable option.

edit: It'd actually be pretty effective if you stop to think about it, even if it doesn't technically prevent litigation.

Just think: "Sorry, this product isn't available in you're area due to patent litigation concerns". Part of me wonders if that happened with Netflix, Google Maps, etc. wouldn't the people start hating the patent litigation instead of being content with it?

<comment><USER26> That is kind of the nuclear option of the big internet companies. I'm sure they realize that they have this power, but they can only use it rarely, maybe once, before there is public outcry against this "abuse of power". They're probably saving this card it for a bigger issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's a vid from the same guy last year: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyW_QS8Ef8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyW_QS8Ef8)

He had just won a three year litigation with the same group, after which they pointed out that even though he had won a battle, they had enough BS patents to keep him in court for several lifetimes. He is currently in year 4 out of a projected 450.

<comment><USER28> Jesus. I think a hitman is cheaper than the cost of all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I happened to read this article about recusal recently and I don't understand how some of these allegations wouldn't be explicit grounds for recusal, specifically the son being a lawyer with a firm that tries cases in the father's court.

[https://popehat.com/2016/06/06/lawsplainer-when-must- federal...](https://popehat.com/2016/06/06/lawsplainer-when-must-federal- judges-recuse-themselves-anyway/) Article is in the context of Trump, but you needn't let that turn you off.

</comment><comment><USER30> i was the victim of a patent trolling company called acacia research. they sent me a bunch of legal threats but had my name spelled incorrectly, which happened to give away who had sold my info to them(in exchange for dropping the case a certain entity traded all of their affiliates info to acacia). i was 19 at the time and laughed it off. nothing ever came of it, but in hindsight it certainly wasn't a laughing matter. in the end i think someone staged a pretty good defense and crushed their patent.

</comment><comment><USER31> Judge Davis retired May 15, 2015

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Davis_(judge)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Davis_\(judge\))

<comment><USER32> Thank God, all of this should be coming to an end any day now.

<comment><USER33> Son appointed judge, family clan as associates in law-firm... The world does not work this way.

<comment><USER3> The president appoints federal judges. Not too likely that he's thinking about how to rig the patent court in East Texas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there a unified place one can donate to that people think is the best way to put some money toward real change in the system? I'm happy to send some money to the EFF, but I'd up that 100 times if I knew it was going 100% toward killing patent trolls and I thought it was the best organization to fight that fight.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I'd love to see Austin set up a gofundme with specific goals, milestones, a well defined team and strategy. We'd contribute if it's something that would bring about real change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I thought we already squashed this shit: [http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/26/uniloc-patent-troll- defea...](http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/26/uniloc-patent-troll-defeated/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Really seems like Google/Apple should make some kind of statement calling out how ridiculous these lawsuits are.

<comment><USER37> Could Google do more then a statement? It can't be good for their business if people are being sued for simply uploading an app to the Play Store.

<comment><USER38> When developers were sued by Lodsys Apple intervened with a motion due to the fact that the developers were covered under Apple's license. After 2 years, the judge refused to hear the motion and threw it out...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The only way you can deal with trolls is to slay them. Attribution of costs does not work. Most trolls consist of lawyers who create paper work and file it. They do not hire outside law firms at $500+ per hour - the ones their victims are forced to hire. The only tru costs they have are the file fees, which East Texas keeps low. That town is totally a parasitic town and they award wins to trolls to keep the town in cash that trickles down.

I say slay the trolls, slay the judges, slay them all - by legal means if possible. I would love to find an old Texas law that allows trial by combat with no substitutions...

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm no advocate of violence but this makes you wonder about the ethics of beating such guys up. The legal system seems pointless.

<comment><USER41> You're wondering about the _ethics_ of beating someone up to get what you want?

<comment><USER42> My view is admittedly a bit on the extreme side (to put it mildly) but I'd see it as similar to hunting Somali pirates or Congolese poachers for sport. There are things a human can do to set themselves apart from the rest of humanity, and patent trolling is one of them.

Patent trolls don't rise (sink) to the level of child molesters, serial killers or ISIS terrorists, but still... I wouldn't shed any tears if something really bad happened to these people, whether by accident or design. They attack the best of us while contributing nothing. We don't need them.

<comment><USER43> I think it is important to acknowledge why people do things they do.

\- Somali pirates and Congolese poachers: poor and miserable conditions with no perspective to get out of it

\- patent trolls: greedy, moral-less legal positivists

\- serial killers: psychopaths

\- ISIS terrorists: brainwashed losers, who want easy answers, a mission, a group and a leader

\- child molesters: I would say mentally ill

If you see it like this, you can fix the problems below. You will still have to protect society from serial killers, but all others seem to be solvable.

\- African criminals: fix Africa

\- legal positivists: fix the law

\- ISIS terrorists: fix ghettos

\- child molesters: fix paedophilia

Of course this will only fix the problem for future generations. Potential patent trolls will be assholes in a post-troll world, too, but you will always have to deal with those. There are paedophiles who are not human scum, but are aware what consequences their actions could have. That is also why the catholic church with its celibacy is so attractive to some of them.

I personally think that institutions must act perfectly morally, but personally affected individuals should be required ultima ratio to act against morals and be later judged and punished for it. So in this case, when you are a small developer and there is no way out …

<comment><USER44> I don't know how you can "fix" paedophilia, any more than you can "fix" psychopathy. AFAICT, they're both mental disorders that are very deep-seated and probably unfixable, at least until we have better biomedical technology and a better understanding of the human brain. There's probably ways we might be able to identify these people as high-risk and put them in programs to monitor them and help them avoid committing crimes, but that's more of a work- around than a fix.

Patent trolls aren't much different from serial killers, though: they're both socio/psychopaths (same thing really). Patent trolls aren't violent, and are greedy for money, that's the main difference. But the law itself you could say is a work-around for problems like this, but as we see here the law is broken and needs to be fixed because the sociopaths have figured out a way to abuse the law for their gain.

<comment><USER43> > but that's more of a work-around than a fix

Depends on your point of view. In the point of view of a paedophile, sterilisation might not seem like a fix, society itself thinks different.

>Patent trolls aren't much different from serial killers, though: they're both socio/psychopaths (same thing really)

I thought so, too, but then did decided to not call them that, because I imagine that many of them are just not "into market economy" (you get money in exchange for providing value). They see a gap in the law and try to take it from "the big guys", who have it anyway. There are many other groups of people, who think that they are somehow entitled to get money they did not provide value for.

<comment><USER44> >They see a gap in the law and try to take it from "the big guys", who have it anyway.

There's a difference between suing Google or MS for patent violations, and suing some small business that's just selling an app on Google Play store. These patent trolls are frequently going after small companies because they know they're more likely to settle. That's sociopathic, it's not like Robin Hood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's good to raise awareness, especially on the users of the play store (I mean, the developers).

For example I learned a lot from this video: in case I decided to sell an app on any store, I'd better contact my lawyer to get advised on where and how to incorporate my company.

I don't know if it can be easily resolved by incorporating in another country, but the difficulties of an international litigation should discourage trolls.

<comment><USER46> New Zealand. They banned software patents.

<comment><USER47> There's broad exclusion for software in Europe as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> A while back, I did some research into patent trolls, and came across the history of NPE firms that do DPA (defensive patent aggregation), like RPX [0]. What surprised me from a game theoretical perspective was how murky things got. These situations can be tough on entrepreneurs and seem to create space for said entrepreneur to purchase protection in the form of patent aggregation to mitigate against potential devastation caused by this. On one hand, I can see how it can amount to a protection racket. On the other hand, the existence of patents and how they relate to property are pretty complex. This TechCrunch article about RPX does a good job of going into further detail about this, but truth be told, I am even more on the fence after reading this. I agree that patent reform would be necessary to rectify this situation, but in the meantime, I can't think of a better alternative. The cynic inside me can't help but think that business is always it's own kind of war, sadly.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPX_Corporation) [1] [http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/is-rpxs-defensive-patent- ag...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/24/is-rpxs-defensive-patent-aggregation- simply-patent-extortion-by-another-name/)

<comment><USER49> I came from an European country, and the root cause seems pretty clear to me: why defending yourself in court is so damn expensive? In my country, you don't often need an attorney (although for complex cases you certainly do), but even if you do hire an attorney, they cost way, way less. Like $20,000 for a complex case, and it's going to be a team of lawyers.

Also, companies just don't sue each other that often. I don't know why US is different.

<comment><USER50> I'm reading this thread with a similar wonder: they seem to be blaming everything but the broken legal system.

Google should fix it, East-Texas should fix it, Texas should fix it, donation to legal funds should fix it, insurance should fix it, more campaigning and lobbying should fix it, we should let them fight to the death that will fix it!

Hmhm. Quite :)

<comment><USER51> > I'm reading this thread with a similar wonder: they seem to be blaming > everything but the broken legal system.

Except they are blaming the legal system, as you yourself enumerate:

> more campaigning and lobbying should fix it

Campaigning and lobbying are ways of effecting change _to_ the system of laws.

<comment><USER50> > Campaigning and lobbying are ways of effecting change to the system of laws.

Yes of course they are. But that way those with the biggest army of lobbyists and campaign donations are going to decide what your laws will be. This is part of your _problem_ , not your solution!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What about making an "anti patent troll" website that will allow users to share their legal approaches and documents and the rest of the defense materials. Some of them may be reusable. I guess it should significantly limit the legal costs for everyone and improve their position against trolls, right?

<comment><USER53> I was toying with doing that. Even got a domain name. Might be a bit of a hassle though. Dunno. Thoughts anyone? Would it help? Would I get sued?

<comment><USER54> IANAL but I'd setup the corporate entity outside the US and hire a mail forwarding service of some kind to redirect all the mail to your home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Richardson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Richardson)

"Ric Richardson is an Australian inventor. He is the holder of multiple granted patents including the Uniloc patent US5490216 and the Logarex patent 6400293. Although he spent twelve years in California to promote and develop products produced by Uniloc, Richardson grew up in Sydney and currently resides just outside Byron Bay.

He is the founder of Uniloc, a company based on the technology he first patented in 1992."

Here's his picture from the Uniloc web site: [http://uniloc.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/08/ricrichardson.p...](http://uniloc.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/08/ricrichardson.png)

He's apparently insanely talented, having "invented" the panic button, the visual voice recorder, the 3G skype phone, the secure browser, the universal database, the carbon scrubber, the book dispensor, "media objects", the "Internet Computer", QR Codes, DRM, a password replacement system, TV muting, and several dozen other devices, just in the past 16 years alone.[1]

[1] [https://sites.google.com/site/ricricho/ric-s- inventions](https://sites.google.com/site/ricricho/ric-s-inventions)

<comment><USER56> Full name: Frederick Bailier Richardson III

Am thinking these activities devalue the terms invention and inventor. Would prefer that to patent some process that you had invented you ought to have to come up with a device to implement said process. You may not even know how to realise your idea in practise which is kind of where all the hard work is. An not saying idea for processes are ten a penny but the bar needs to be raised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> What to do about this?

I'm told, you may be put to trial in East Texas, if you're selling your goods or services there. – So, why not stop selling to East Texas and let them settle the resulting collision of interests themselves?

<comment><USER51> (1) That would probably work under the existing rules.

(2) There is an active legal challenge to the existing rules (arguing that they misapply two separate provisions of law as if one controls a definition in the other, when that is not the case), which if successful would radically shake up patent venue and pretty much end the "drag everyone into ED Texas" thing we have going on right now. [0]

[0] [http://patentlyo.com/patent/2016/04/circuit-continues- allowa...](http://patentlyo.com/patent/2016/04/circuit-continues- allowance.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Yet another example of the consumer software industry being completely impotent when it comes to defending itself.

Patent trolls file these frivolous lawsuits because they make millions and suffer zero consequences for their actions. Why? Because there is no industry trade group representing the software industry with any sort of teeth. They know software developers have money, and they know software developers are absurdly weak when it comes to defending themselves. Software developers are easy prey.

Other than the EFF who is out there to represent us with any measure of real leverage over the legal process? Who is out there with the muscle to make patent trolls and software unfriendly lawmakers have second thoughts when targeting developers?

With no lobbies or trade associations with any sort of power out there representing consumer software, anyone with even minor influence over government can simply walk all over software developers, again and again and again. The consumer software industry has enormous amounts of cash at it's disposal, surely a few cash rich companies can pool enough resources together to kick off a trade association worthy of punching back, hard

<comment><USER59> Somebody needs to create a FUPA for anti-patent trolling

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Uniloc has this piece of Google Maps screenshot hosted at their web server. Isn't this not allowed? [http://www.uniloc.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/08/Screen-shot...](http://www.uniloc.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/08/Screen-shot-2010-08-05-at-10.11.47-AM-300x248.png)

</comment><comment><USER61> While I applaud what Austin Meyer is doing by raising awareness about patent trolls, does anyone here but me wish that the content had been made available in some sort of text medium instead? I can't think of any important parts of the video that couldn't have been reasonably conveyed through the use of text.

<comment> angry-hacker I agree, but maybe because he said he wants to raise the awareness of 'simple' people, such as jurors, etc. Video is probably better medium to go viral than some text about software parents regarding non techies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Interestingly, the login button doesn't even work at uniloc.com, and if you look in the source, there's a ton of commented-out paragraphs that say stuff like "<h2>The spirit of innovation is alive and well at Uniloc.</h2>".

<comment> dylan-m Fun fact: their website has listings turned on and runs an ancient version of WordPress last touched in 2012.

[http://www.uniloc.com/wp-content/](http://www.uniloc.com/wp-content/)

It's like they're _trying_ to be as obviously illiterate as they possibly can.

<comment><USER63> Including publicly accessible database backups. I haven't seen such disregard for security in a very long time.

For a "software security company" they sure are begging for their website to be hacked.

Or maybe it is a honeypot?

<comment><USER64> INSERT INTO `wpu_users` VALUES (2, 'bdavis', [...], 'bdavis', 'email@example.com', '', '2010-08-05 18:06:44', '', 0, 'bdavis');

What the hell? Could this be the lawyer the video talks about?

Apparently not:

> Bradley C. Davis, Brad serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Uniloc USA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> How has East Texas not been shut down already?

<comment><USER66> Everybody in the chain of responsibility capable of doing so stands to financially benefit from this practice continuing.

For a business to claim it's "based in" East Texas it'll have to pay its taxes there. Local litigation law firms are bringing tons of money into the area, further increasing local revenue. Shutting it down would probably even knock a significant slice off of the state's income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> One practical thing one could do is to forward this to an influential tech journalist, ideally to a mainstream publication that has a technology section, like CNN or WSJ.

</comment><comment><USER68> Someone really needs to create a patent that defines methods of patent trolling, so every time one of these scumbags starts a lawsuit you can sue them.

<comment><USER69> Someone (Halliburton!) already tried: [http://www.google.com/patents/US20080270152](http://www.google.com/patents/US20080270152)

Edit: And IBM apparently got one granted: [http://www.google.com/patents/US8386350](http://www.google.com/patents/US8386350)

<comment><USER70> lol, after a quick glance at the IBM one it seems to be patenting software that manages patent portfolios (maybe). How utterly bizarre

</comment></comment></comment><comment> blubb-fish How about a patent about placing the right foot into a solid hollow object with three to four cylinder shaped objects (with low height to radius ratio) separating that hollow object from the surface of the earth - yeah - and well, then driving with it ... will have to think about how to make that sound smart and original.

How is this even for real - why is Google not putting an end to it?

</comment><comment><USER71> Would incorporating your tech company in England instead of the USA protect your company from these patent troll lawsuits? It's extremely easy to start a company based in England, even as a US citizen living in the USA. With the patent trolling this out of control in the US at the moment, would basing your company abroad offer you any protection?

<comment><USER44> Yes, if your product or service is only available in England.

No, if you sell your product or service in the US (or at least East Texas). It doesn't matter where your company is incorporated, it only matters where you do business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's only so far a justice system can get dysfunctional before people say fukitall and it looses its legitimacy. It's not just patents, civil forfeiture is another thing that comes to mind and I'm sure there more.

I imagine if in future somebody gets such a patent lawsuit, they'd just rip up the letter and throw it away. Police comes to carry out court orders because they decided in absence? "Sorry officer, the reason you're here is just patent bullshit." \- "Oh well, I won't lift a finger for these idiots. Sorry for bothering you, have a nice day!"

Or a more extreme reaction: already in this thread, a couple of people are fantasizing about violence, hiring a hitman and so on. I realize it is mostly meant jokingly, but self-justice is another effect of a justice system that's lost legitimacy.

Rule-of-law is a great thing to have, but it only works if these laws are somewhat reasonable and in accord with peoples moral values...

</comment><comment><USER72> Here's written coverage of the situation in case you don't have time to watch the video: [http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/06/07/x-plane-flight- simul...](http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/06/07/x-plane-flight-simulator- patent-troll-uniloc/)

</comment><comment><USER73> The American patent system is a dead weight drag on the American software economy. The quality of software patents is atrocious, and the value of the tiny fraction of good patents in this space does not make up for the Billions lost to trolls and the costs of administering the system.

</comment><comment><USER74> Judge Leonard Davis presides over a large amount of these "Patent Troll" cases, and his son (!!) Bo Davis is a Lawyer who represents these very same Patent Trolls in court!

If that's not a racket, I don't know what is.

</comment><comment><USER62> Question: Is a lot of the backend supposed to be available through going directly to the wp-content? If you go to uniloc.com/wp-content/, there's backups, images, plugins, and even a .sql file...

<comment><USER75> Hah nice. Probably not the kind of firm you want to be messing with, however...

Then again I'll just leave this here.

[http://uniloc.com/wp- content/backup-9b7a1/uniloc_wpu_2012032...](http://uniloc.com/wp- content/backup-9b7a1/uniloc_wpu_20120326_014.sql)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> How about creating a petition here about this issue and we all sign it?

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/)

</comment><comment><USER77> Will Peter Thiel help? These trolls are actually destroying lives.

</comment><comment><USER78> For all the entrepreneurs looking for a problem to solve, here it is: Create a company/product that automates legal services (start with the niche case for defending against Patent Trolls): then offer it as a service, say with a flat fee. If the cost of this service is on the order of hundreds of dollars, say less than 500$, it should solve the problem of frivolous law suits. This sub- niche is huge!

</comment><comment><USER79> If Google won't step in and litigate the patent trolls into poverty, ruining everyone's life who is involved and possibly even promising to ruin their children's and grandchildren's lives long after the actual patent trolls are dead...

that would stop it.

But in the meantime, guess I'll just be writing webapps.

</comment><comment><USER80> The docket for the lawsuit in question is here:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/sknqayqz/texas-eastern- dist...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/sknqayqz/texas-eastern-district- court/uniloc-usa-inc-et-al-v-laminar-research-llc/)

</comment><comment><USER81> Someone patent "the idea of having a patent" and Sue these companies in Hawaii.

</comment><comment><USER82> Somehow this all seems illegal. I'm not that familiar with the US law so can somebody explain if the defendant can claim that the judge has a conflict of interest and is not fit to handle the case because his son profits from it?

<comment><USER83> Well it's very unlikely the judge directly works his son's cases due to that obvious conflict. Rather, the judge works a random set of cases brought in East Texas and works them favorably for trolls. So many troll cases get brought in that district, hoping for this judge or other friendly judges.

It's obviously rotten but that one-step removed corruption is probably not explicitly codified as wrong anywhere. Hopefully the legal system finds a way to root it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I live less than an hour from Marshall, TX. Maybe an hour and a half from Tyler, TX. I'd love to help in any way I could, but since I'm not a lawyer I bet anything I could do is slim to nothing.

</comment><comment><USER85> Glad to see he won.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyW_QS8Ef8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyW_QS8Ef8)

</comment><comment><USER86> OK HN, get out there and find this man some prior art so we can all just put this company out of business...

</comment><comment><USER87> If Peter Thiel could do it, why not Google? It does not cost much for Google to invalidate the patent.

</comment><comment><USER88> "... defend myself for committing the crime of ..."

But a lawsuit is a civil case, not a criminal case, right?

</comment><comment><USER89> "I'm not here to raise awareness! Ok, yes, maybe that's what I'm doing."

</comment><comment><USER90> Is the process of filing a patent patented?

</comment><comment><USER91> As angry as this video makes me, I'd point out that we've been making some progress in the fight against trolls. Yes, they're still a problem, but some things that have weakened them:

The Supreme Court's ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank, which dealt a fatal blow to a lot of software patents out there (especially the awful, vague and overly broad patents that trolls love so much). The Supreme Court reaffirmed that merely "adding a generic computer to perform generic computer functions" does not make an otherwise abstract idea patentable. [0] This ruling helps get rid of cases earlier. While it doesn't kill off patent litigation, it makes it easier for us to fight low-quality assertions. More importantly, this puts a tougher filter for prosecution of new patent applications, the vast majority of which are dumb and overly broad.

Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings, which are rather expensive (average $278,000) [1], but are much cheaper than litigation. Third parties can use IPRs to challenge patent claims (patentability) based on prior art patents and publications. In the case of Austin Meyer's patent defense, many of the patent claims were invalidated through this kind of proceeding, and petitioned by a consortium (Distinctive Developments, Ltd., Electronic Arts Inc., Gameloft S.E., Halfbrick Studios Pty Ltd., Laminar Research LLC, Mojang AB and Square Enix, Inc.). [2]

Heightened pleading standards. Before December 2015, it used to be that trolls could sue dozens of companies with cookie-cutter complaints, citing no real facts, and put on pressure for settlements by threatening lengthy and costly discovery proceedings. But thanks to decisions in Iqbal/Twombly, complaints must plead facts and recite aspects of the accused product that are alleged to infringe. This butchers the spam lawsuit tactic, and the day before this went into effect, trolls filed a one day record for new suits. [3] Shameful, yes, but it's helped clarify standards governing motions to dismiss.

[0] [https://www.eff.org/files/2014/06/19/alice-corp._v._cls- bank...](https://www.eff.org/files/2014/06/19/alice-corp._v._cls- bank_opinion.pdf)

[1] [https://www.rpxcorp.com/2015/07/02/iprs-reality-amid-the- pyr...](https://www.rpxcorp.com/2015/07/02/iprs-reality-amid-the- pyrotechnics/)

[2] search patent number 6857067 and document 37 at [https://ptabtrials.uspto.gov](https://ptabtrials.uspto.gov)

[3] [http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/patent-lawsuit- record/](http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/patent-lawsuit-record/)

</comment><comment><USER92> WTF! This is ridiculous. later these people might start sue people use cell phone.

</comment><comment><USER93> People will mention the problem with patents but I see another, perhaps bigger, problem:

We do not have equal access to our judicial system in the United States.

If you have money, you have the power to legally hold people with less over a barrel. That exploitable inequality is poison for a well functioning society. That is the problem that needs solving.

<comment><USER94> "Loser pays" would go a long way, I think. Not being that familiar with the US system, what's the reasoning not to have this?

<comment><USER95> If loser pays, poor people would be discouraged from even attempting to sue rich people.

Even if the poor person has a legitimate claim, there is a small probability that the rich person will win with their superior lawyers and the poor person will be bankrupted by the legal fees. Since they will know that from the beginning, they won't sue in the first place.

<comment><USER96> This comes up every single time, but it remains false. Loser pays does not mean that the loser has to pay a gigantic amount for the opponent's extremely expensive lawyers. Loser pays means that the judge determines what is a reasonable amount for the legal fees. Often the amount you have to pay for your opponent's lawyers is limited to what you paid for your own. So unless you hire extremely expensive lawyers yourself, you won't have to pay a huge amount if you lose. If a party wants a much more expensive defence they have to pay for that extra cost regardless of whether they win.

Almost every country except the United States uses this system.

<comment><USER97> > judge determines what is a reasonable amount for the legal fees

That just gives financial unsupervised power to the judge, without any clear definition of involved terms. Which doesn't really sound like a good idea.

<comment><USER94> Somehow it seems to work quite fine. I can't say if judges here have some approximate documentation for acceptable hourly costs and work loads, or if it's decided case by case.

<comment><USER98> The US has elected judges, who have to campaign, and raise campaign money. The chances are non-nil that the "rich person" has, could or will contribute to the judge's campaign funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Welcome to america

</comment><comment><USER100> TLDW - Patent troll sues Xplane creator after he migrated his app to the Google play store. They claim they own the general idea of the Google play store. Law firms create these cases for billable hours for their lawyers and some of their parent judges in Texas. Patent trolls and law firms in the end want to receive a settlement by targeting app creators and not Google themselves who are well equipped to defend themselves, [http://www.thepatentscam.com/](http://www.thepatentscam.com/) .

<comment><USER101> Logically, how is this even possible? Xplane does not own Google Play Store and Xplane is not aware that Google is violating a patent then how is Xplane responsible for the patent violation? This strikes me a 15 minute conversation in front of a judge. "Sir, I did not know Google was violating a patent and I have withdrawn my application after being told so" and that should be the end of it.

<comment><USER102> Because this particular judge refuses to throw out illegitimate patent cases because he's corrupt as fuck. He recently retired, but presumably someone else just filled his place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> Someone with money and lawyers needs to sue the state of Texas for allowing a father and son duo to practice in such a conflict of interest fashion. This is a clear cut case of corruption.

<comment><USER104> I'm not even sure where to begin with this :) First, you can't sue a state without their permission, they have sovereign immunity. Second, you would have no standing unless you were directly affected Third, outside of violating non- binding legal ethics rules, it's not clear what law you think this somehow violates.

The state can pretty much do whatever it wants here.

Plus, all of this is _federal_ anyway, so suing the state of texas would accomplish nothing.

Outside of random statutes, your best bet would probably be due process violations, but ...

<comment><USER105> A lawsuit might not be appropriate, but there is a separate 'right to petition the government' for that.

<comment><USER104> Sure. However, note the supreme court has not, AFAIK, held a right to sue in general:

[http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/right-to- sue](http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/right-to-sue)

They have essentially grounded these claims in due process violations, etc, and then found a right to file _those_ lawsuits. Not a right to sue for anything.

When they have tried to find rights in the right to petition (and i will grant that historically, it included a right to sue), it has been cases where someone is directly trying to affect a constitutional right.

Also nobody has to give a damn about what you say:

"Nothing in the First Amendment or in this Court's case law interpreting it suggests that the rights to speak, associate, and petition require government policymakers to listen or respond to communications of members of the public on public issues."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> America needs to follow New Zealand's example:

Ban software patents!

<comment><USER106> In the video, he says that the politicians stopped the issue from even being voted on. That's without Silicon Valley stepping in to really lobby against that kind of ban (NZ has no equivalent of SV)

<comment><USER49> Big companies in Silicon Valley can defend themselves, so they don't care. It's small businesses that are affected.

And big companies do not really want competition from small businesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> How do you americans still allow East Texas to be a part of the United States? They're clearly rogue?

</comment><comment><USER108> So do not register your company in the USA, otherwise you have to deal with patent trolls.

</comment><comment><USER109> welcome to a political system (and indeed a world) run by lawyers.

<comment><USER110> And the 'democratic' party just 'nominated' a lawyer-at-heart as well, who has perfectly demonstrated that lawyeresque doublespeak can shield you from any blame or responsibility of actions that would have lesser plebeians dishonored, fired on the spot, jailed or any combination thereof.

I guess we must secretly love getting screwed over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> All the Mobile Marketplaces are on fire. Nice.

Posted from my Windows Phone 8.1

</comment><comment><USER112> At least that totally rad cliff diving video that YouTube queued up afterwards was a nice chaser.

<comment><USER113> Might have been specifically recommended for you. Mine was different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> It's time to call in John Oliver...He's our last and only hope!

<comment><USER115> He's already done a video on this, the same guy was featured in it

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> A couple of misconceptions in this video. Patent infringement is not a crime. A son lawyer appearing in front of his judge father would not be allowed for conflict of interest in most circumstances.

That being said, patent trolling is obviously a problem, and legislation to fix the problem is making its way through Congress.

<comment><USER117> 1) Did he say crime? I don't think he ever did.

2) He never said the son appeared in front of his judge father. I'm almost 100% on that too.

So misconceptions in what you misheard, I guess.

<comment><USER116> He said crime.

If the son is not appearing in front of the judge, then the judge's rulings don't benefit the son in any way. If you are arguing the judge's ruling is somehow affecting the reputation of the court and attracting cases, the lawyers know it is only that judge, unless you are implying some sort of conspiracy among the federal judges to be patent troll-friendly.

<comment><USER117> I'm not arguing that. _HE_ appears to be though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> I'm not sure if this would help, but I think we should all tweet a link to this video clip to John Oliver.

[https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver?lang=en](https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver?lang=en)

or maybe this twitter account

[https://twitter.com/LastWeekTonight?lang=en](https://twitter.com/LastWeekTonight?lang=en)

<comment><USER119> He has already covered it once: [https://youtu.be/3bxcc3SM_KA?t=96](https://youtu.be/3bxcc3SM_KA?t=96)</comment></comment>


Cappuccino based view of Appstore (Safari/Chrome only) - <AUTHOR> http://bryton.hu/AppStore/

<comment><USER2> Impressive, Cappuccino is a great looking framework. I've dug into it a bit, and while they need lots more docs, they're pretty helpful in their IRC room, and make some really cool things possible.

It's at the top of my "things to learn when I get a minute" list.</comment>