Ask HN: How do we stop 'design trolls'? - <AUTHOR>

Is anyone else worried about how as we move towards flat/minimalist design and designs that are really more or less the same (how many ways can you really draw a 'flat' clock for example) that we're opening up a pandora's box of trolls?
At least with to patent troll you actually need a patent. To be a 'design troll' all you need is to have drawn something. After that you're 'protected by copyright' and have the right to file a DMCA takedown once you're infringed. Right?
But is there infringement? A lot of the support of LV's takedown was more to do with ethics and morals than the law. Unfortunately they're completely different things.
People saying that the similar colour palettes justify a DMCA complaint aren't just wrong but they're misleading the group they post in. Colour palettes aren't copyrightable, colours can in some circumstances be trademarked. Tiffany & co did it. So did T-Mobile.
If I use Tiffany blue and T-Mobile magenta in my website about silver-cased phones I won't get a DMCA complaint. I'll be notified of a trademark infringement. I'll probably get my ass beaten up in court.
Long story short, is it time that someone put together a resource for founders that explains in plain language when they should/shouldn't be putting in complaints or taking legal action? I'm still a law student so I can't until my degree is over so I'm not really able to. Is anyone in HN qualified and interested?
The potential for trolling here is enormous. More worrying is that copyright is a confusing sonofabitch and it's easy to assume that making something grants exclusive use over all elements of it. It's hard enough for me with most of a law degree and a particular interest in IP law to get my head around which parts of my startup's product are covered and why.
I guess I'd just prefer it if we could spend time making neat stuff instead of constantly looking over our shoulders every time we make a new icon. What do you think? <comment><USER2> DMCA is a process. Someone files a takedown request, someone else files a counter notice. etc etc.

If you are a designer and your work is ripped off, and the site isn't responding to email, you will get a lot of support if you put together a simple sheet showing the similarities between your work and theirs. It might help if you show how their work is more similar to yours than it is to some other products too.

If someone is accusing you of ripping of their work it helps if you put together the same kind of sheet, showing what they claim is ripped off, your "version", and something from the WWW predating both projects but very similar. Point out all the differences and explain the design "language" (sorry, designers, for mangling the lingo) that you were going for.

If you're being targeted it might be useful to do a web-search to see if they've got a history of targeting many people.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr -

Complaints relating to UI's are bound to get more common as the minimalist trend continues. This sucks because a lot of the time complaints will be invalid/mislead and stressful for all involved.

Let's kill design trolling before it's a thing.</comment>


Steve Pavlina releases 1000+ personal development articles into public domain - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/12/releasing-my-copyrights/

<comment><USER2> I was one of his early readers, and used to love his stuff on productivity and personal development. I even tolerated his articles about astral world, lightworkers, law of attraction, etc. But when he posted a glowing "review" of a scam like Site Build-it, complete with an affiliate link, I've decided I've had enough and hit "Unsubscribe".

Lesson to be learned: never trust someone who became successful by telling others how to become successful.

<comment><USER3> I learned a different lesson, which is that you can win big by being willing to get your hands dirty. After all, Steve Pavlina's site is like a burlap bag filled with a mixture of turds and diamonds. I'd get over my disgust for fecal matter pretty fast if I found such an object.

(For example, his advice regarding waking up to an alarm was invaluable to me.)

You don't have to trust somebody to learn from them.

<comment><USER4> I found the key with his waking up early system was that you only fix your waking time, and you stay up (ideally doing something without stimulation close to when you need to sleep) until you're ready to fall asleep within 5 minutes.

I got extra waking time because my body was regulating how much I slept. If I stayed up too late I'd get tired earlier the next day, but in general I dropped my sleeping hours by about 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I liked a lot of Steve's early stuff, but when he went all esoteric and pseudo-scientific (referencing his wife's "intuitive readings" and psychic stuff, etc) he totally lost me.

Maybe I'll have to re-read some of his early stuff someday...

<comment><USER6> I was turned off by the self-help guruism but he has one article (theoretically about shareware, but widely applicable) which was extraordinarily helpful to me several years ago. One particular insight, that improvements are multiplicatively effective, essentially transformed the way I do business.

Sadly it has fallen off the Internets, but Google still has a cache.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YKYYOPx...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YKYYOPxPtuEJ:www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof/+steve+pavlina+shareware+professionals&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

<comment><USER7> Here are his early awesome articles about shareware/indie game development: [http://web.archive.org/web/20030207132433/www.dexterity.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20030207132433/www.dexterity.com/articles/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was really overjoyed when I found out about this and actually started a site based around it. I'd been listening to positive / educational audio every morning on a walk / run and found it to have massive improvements in my productivity and happiness.

I also read a lot of Steve's stuff so I wanted to be able to listen to his stuff while on my morning walk and while doing errands but he only had a few podcasts.

Thus, (shameless plug) www.empoweraudio.com was born. I got some top audio talent to partner with me to do audio versions of Steve's content - if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER9> Pretty shameless, but not a plug (as HN is clearly not the target market). Here's something I did the day after he public domained his articles: <http://alfredpang.com/steve-pavlina-blog-collection/>

<comment><USER10> how many have you sold?

<comment><USER9> I have sold 6 so far. I don't have any tracking but I believe they all came from my postings in Steve Pavlina's forums.

Somebody else did an iPhone app - which I am guessing is doing way better: [http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/technology-technical- skil...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/technology-technical- skills/57043-steve-pavlina-iphone-app.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really sad, but all I can think of is how it will be adorned with ads and become spamcontent. Hopefully it doesn't make 'BigResource' "even bigger."

</comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for posting this. Hadn't come across Mr. Pavlina before but just from a quick scan it seems there's some real nuggets in there.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if the pavstevelina.com domain is available

</comment><comment><USER14> Great way to build some links!

<comment><USER15> He must have missed how that all worked out for Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER16> Care to explain? What happened to Stack Overflow? I've not found any reference. Thanks.

<comment><USER15> Try the article and comments here: <http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2062855></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Portugal Tax Authority: Bitcoin Trading and Payments Are Tax-Free - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/portugal-tax-authority-bitcoin-trading-and-payments-are-tax-free/ <comment> jorge-d So I read the 2016 ruling [1], and it basically stipulates that:

      Assim, as cripto-moeda podem gerar diferentes tipos de rendimentos tributáveis:
      1) Por ganhos obtidos com compra e venda de unidades monetárias virtuais / troca ao câmbio do momento de cripto-moeda por moeda real (qualquer que ela seja)
      2) Por obtenção de comissões pela prestação de serviços relacionados com a obtenção ou curso normal da cripto-moeda.
      3) Por ganhos derivados de vendas de produtos ou serviços em cripto-moeda.

which would basically translate to:

      Thus, the cryptocurrencies would generate 3 different type of taxable revenues:
      - the gains from selling/buying Cryptos when changing them into real fiat currency (whatever the currency)
      - for any commission one might earn for services related to the cryptos
      - for any gain that one might get from selling products or services in cryptos

Basically this ruling is just about platforms not being entitled to charge VAT to their customers.

[1] [https://info.portaldasfinancas.gov.pt/pt/informacao_fiscal/i...](https://info.portaldasfinancas.gov.pt/pt/informacao_fiscal/informacoes_vinculativas/rendimento/cirs/Documents/PIV_09541.pdf)

<comment><USER2> I think that paragraph is just saying what they're going to analyse, not the conclusion. They proceed to analyse each hypothesis, and conclude crypto-coins don't fit in any, therefore not being taxable under personal IRS.

That's at least how I (and Jornal de Negócios, the newspaper) read it.

<comment><USER3> It seems this is following the collectibles argument. Bitcoin "isn't" a currency but buying or selling the collectible of Bitcoin is a taxable transaction.

<comment><USER2> That's not my reading, nor of the tax lawyer that read it: [https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/opiniao/detalhe/as-mais- vali...](https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/opiniao/detalhe/as-mais-valias-das- criptomoedas) (in Portuguese).

He writes: "Thus, in the understanding advocated by the [IRS], the profits obtained from the sale of cryptocurrencies are not taxable in the IRS under the Portuguese tax system, unless it is a taxpayer's professional or business activity, in which case it will be taxed as income falling within IRS category B."

<comment> jorge-d Well, you're right in the case of non-recurring crypto trading.

Now, in the paragraph B, it is said:

Now the exercise of the activity is determined by its recurrence and the goal of the activity to generate profit. If there is a business or professional activity then the person would have to pay the IRS and would be required to comply with the reporting obligations, whenever you perform a sell or provide a service.

To me, doing some crypto-trading would easily fall in this definition and the IRS might come later saying "hey, you did multiple transactions over the course of X months, this looks like a professional activity"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi guys, according to the Portuguese journal, this ruling specifically holds that (a) crypto trades are not subject to VAT, like other commodities trades in Portugal.

Will edit or follow-up once I can read the ruling itself on a PC.

EDIT: I was able to read the rulings and deleted (b) and the statement about mining not being income. Portugal's tax authority has explicitly said it is not yet ready to analyze the taxability of crypto mining. The rulings themselves are much less expansive the Portuguese journal cited by the linked crypto blog.

<comment><USER5> "so mining is not taxable income in Portugal"

The income is taxable, even as capital gains, though? I assume when the coins are sold.

<comment><USER2> It seems it's not, at least for individuals; from what I can tell, the tax law that taxes gains is not generic, that is, it explicitly lists the types of property (shares, financial instruments, etc) that it applies to, and cryptocurrency doesn't fit any, therefore the gains are not taxable.

(Native speaker, but not a bitcoin trader or tax professional)

<comment><USER6> Is it not taxable, or just taxable at regular income tax rates (not capital gains)? The latter seems likely.

<comment><USER2> Not taxable at all, I believe; see my other post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20830538)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can see why bitcoin trading would be VAT-free but did they really say that there would be no _income /capital gains tax_ on profits from it? That would be very surprising.

<comment><USER8> I got excited thinking it would be no tax on profits, but no, just mentions VAT.

<comment><USER2> This ruling is about VAT, but there was a previous one regarding income tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like the reasonable thing to do. You don't get charged VAT when buying stocks/forex, for instance. It looks like the ruling only applies to VAT though, you still probably have to pay capital gains.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for explaining this. Coming from the US, seeing the headline I was thinking - welp either I miss understood what they meant or a ton of (rich) crypto investors are about to move to Portugal.

This makes far more sense.

<comment><USER11> That would be an interesting thought experiment. What if a country did say there's no tax on cryptocurrencies, would it be a net benefit for them or not?

On the plus side a lot of (rich) crypto investors would presumably help the country because they would have a lot of money to spend. On the negative side they might lose out on valuable tax income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tax free lol that's to reel you in.</comment>


Show HN: MorphToken – instant 1 to n crypto converter - <AUTHOR> https://morphtoken.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, I'm not too active here yet but would be happy to answer any questions</comment>


Thoughtram – Extend your memory. - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtram.io/ Starting a new project with a friend. You can subscribe here to get notified once we launched. We hope you like surprises! <comment> atom-morgan So, what is Thoughtram?</comment>


Tell HN: It's not about domains, it's about a package - <AUTHOR>

I often see advice about domain names and how choosing the correct domain name is one of the most important things to have a successfull concept, but in my opinion it's not about domain names, it's about branding/accounts in general.
If you don't have the twitter account, facebook page, linkedin, ... to go with your (domain) name, it's pretty useless to register the domain. People expect a package, not only a domain.
That is why tools that do it all (like for ex. http://www.namechecklist.com/ ) are in my eyes far more important then any domain checking tool, you don't want a domain, you want the whole package. It makes finding the correct name harder, but in general it's that name that has to be as unique as possible. It's always better to think about things like this is advance, it's harder to change afterwards... <comment><USER2> I might be the minority, but I just don't care what Google has to say on Twitter and the whole "visit us on Facebook" thing is just lame. It used to be "visit us on MySpace" and I think it'll be something else in the near future. "Friending" my bank just isn't going to happen.

Social networking sites come and go as their popularity waxes and wanes. Your domain name will (or should) outlive them.

</comment><comment><USER3> _how choosing the correct domain name is one of the most important things to have a successfull concept_

Nonsense. The name is amongst the least important bits of almost any product. It should obviously meet some basic criteria (be pronouncable..). Beyond that it's mostly bikeshedding, unless you're in one of the rare markets/situations where branding really matters.

Moreover the tool you mention seems to be horribly misleading. It gives me a green "70%" in domain availability for a name that has .com, .net, .org taken...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true in some cases the name of the product is far less important, but in my point of view it's only true for more or less traditional products and doesn't apply to new, innovative products (and even then).

Some people may like to push a product without giving proper tought to the name/branding but I'm sure it will decrease their chances of success, maybe not a lot, but still. As I see it, today everything is getting more and more connected, a product without a twitter account or facebook page is possible, but imho you're missing out on a great chance to market your product.

After you're done with development, it's getting users/attention that counts, and as it's already pretty hard to do that it's best you take every chance you get, even if it's not much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure you need the whole package, but it sure helps and potentially saves time/cost down the road.

@moe I think branding is always important.</comment>


NASA twins study confirms preliminary findings - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-twins-study-confirms-preliminary-findings <comment><AUTHOR> One notable finding was that the astronaut's telomeres grew significantly in length while in space, and after returning to earth shrank back down. As telomere shortening has implications in aging as well as in cancers, it will be interesting to follow up this finding and determine 1) the differences in terrestrial and extraterrestrial atmospheres that account for the increase in telomere length, and 2) the implications that this may hold in terms of cell senescence and tumor growth.</comment>


People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study - <AUTHOR> https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-exploitation <comment><USER2> Since nobody is actually reading the article, let me sum it up:

In a survey of regular people (not EvilCorp CEOs), "people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description."

"This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom."

"Participants read about a Ph.D. student's working relationship with their graduate advisor. Those who read a scenario in which the student was being exploited – verbally abused and given unreasonable deadlines – rated the student as likely to be more passionate than students who weren't being exploited."

What this study finds is that regular people, you and me, say that exploiting passionate people and mistreating them is OK. That we're so willing to make compensatory justifications of abuse is not a good sign.

<comment><USER3> So that's why companies want "passionate" workers, so the non passionate ones have someone to offload problems to...

I rue this era when HR mimics the tactics of marketing... we want passionate "ninjas," (whatever the term of the day is) who "share our vision" "to make a better world". You know what. Hire people to do the job description you post. All the other frills are just image marketing.

<comment><USER4> There's some nuance and complication there, of course--putting aside the marketspeak for "ninjas" (which has been bullshit since it was first termed; I think that, and similar terms, are at last dead and buried, no?), if you're a mission- or social impact-oriented organization, a fair number of your potential hires are actively seeing a source of fulfillment in their work, and providing them with an outlet for that can benefit everybody involved. I don't say that as justification for taking advantage of people's passions to load them up unfairly; more to acknowledge that there's sometimes more to it than a straight exchange of skills * time for cash.

<comment><USER3> > if you're a mission- or social impact-oriented organization, a fair number > of your potential hires are actively seeing a source of fulfillment in their > work..."

I suppose, but I think there are a great number of Non-profits and Volunteer orgs who don't rely on lofty language in order to attract talent. I still think these things should fit the job expected to be carried out. Google and others have these kinds of messages in order to corner talent, but it's not necessary, Microsoft is just as capable and they do not resort to lofty flowery language to achieve their goals and they are no worse than Google for it (in either what they do or what they stand for).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've worked jobs where I loved that exact job and I was willing to compromise and make less money than I otherwise might elsewhere to stay in that situation.

Everyone understood that to be the case, me, employer.

I don't think the employer was taking advantage of me, they were creating the exact environment that I really enjoyed.... that was the trade.

I was also involved in a situation where we had some inters we hired who put in a TON of extra work (the other interns very much not so...). These guys didn't have to but they put in a lot of work as interns and kept at it after that. They were paid less than those around them (granted still paid quite well) with more experience, but in return they got to start in a position that they otherwise would not start in (more experience required), and that took extra work on their part to get caught up.

They loved the work, their careers got a pretty big boost and after a while they were making roughly the same as everyone else (ballpark).

I think half the battle here is communication. Talk to your boss and get on the same page if you can.

Sitting in your cube and convincing yourself you're being taken advantage of doesn't mean you are.

<comment><USER6> > Sitting in your cube and convincing yourself you're being taken advantage of > doesn't mean you are.

This is a condescending attitude verging on gaslighting.

"Just because you believe it, doesn't make it true."

A low-power truism used to dismiss real pain.

<comment><USER5> I don't think I understand what you mean.

I've known plenty of people who imagine they're being taken advantage of, but aren't working with their employer on it, and don't know the lay of the land.

I'm not convinced many people really know their value in the market / what their employer really thinks / is doing, but you'd have to know those things to really know if you're being taken advantage of.

<comment><USER7> The situation is vastly more complicated than people appreciate. Because you can have people who:

Know their value and are being taken advantage of. Don't know their value and are being taken advantage of. Know their value and aren't being taken advantage of. Don't know their value and aren't being taken advantage of.

Not to mention the cases where the employer isn't aware of the value their employee is providing and would adjust their compensation if they were aware. Or the employee is taking advantage of the employer. Or many other things I haven't thought of.

I don't understand the mindset that the simple existence of a disparity means that someone is being taken for a ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you hate your job, someone may be taking advantage of you.

If you love your job, someone may be taking advantage of you.

Someone may be taking advantage of you. Or not. Who knows?

<comment><USER9> This is what the oppressor vs oppressed narrative will get you. A constant state of trying to identify the group that is exploiting another even when such thing does not exist.

<comment><USER10> Your comment sounds more like a soap box than interacting with the actual article.

> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate > about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist > than those who read the artist wasn't as passionate. This finding extended > to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day > at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.

This is not normal and professional behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's the startup business model. Fill them with dreams, overwork them, and discard them when the dream fails.

WeWork has a series of motivational articles to do just that.[1] That's part of WeWork's business case for charging more for their office space.

[1] [https://www.wework.com/creator/personal-profiles/turn- career...](https://www.wework.com/creator/personal-profiles/turn-career- passion/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems to be regularly happening in "passion" fields like human space flight, or bleeding edge tech spaces like self driving cars, medical technology, etc. For an example, just look at salaries between places like SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic where total comp for a software engineer is between ~100-140K vs any FAANG company where equivalent experience will pull in upwards of ~200K TC. The disparity is even larger for non- software roles (EE, HDE, ME). I acknowledge that there are more than likely other forces here, but I highly doubt that the labor supply for these specialized skills is higher than that for general software engineering. Perhaps this is a place where unionization could be helpful.

<comment><USER13> When you can't offer salaries, offer them dreams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was in a less-than-ideal job situation a few years ago, I found myself saying "... but I love my job" to a friend. I'll never forget the reply: "... you may love your job, but the job doesn't love you back". It was tough to hear it, but in hindsight I'm very thankful for that jolt.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, it goes both ways.

I love my job because it's not that difficult, it pays really well, and it's something I've had experience with for decades.

I can get most of my work done in the span of 2 hours/day and have time left over to work on my side business. My boss is extremely happy with my work and I actually have been making more progress than most of the previous developers in my position.

<comment><USER16> Just out of curiosity, what line of work are you in? Sounds like a great set up you have there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yeah, I know.

I am loving what I do and my boss knows it. So, he lets me run loose to do whatever I think necessary for the business. In a way, I am taking more responsibilities than he asks for my role. But at the same time, I am also taking advantage of this by learning and applying interesting stuffs to help me advance.

</comment><comment><USER18> If I love my job, then I'm not being taken advantage of (from my perspective). If I'm being taken advantage of, that is a strong force to get me to hate my job.

Whether or not my supervisors _think_ they're taking advantage of me is a different matter, and one that is largely irrelevant to me.

<comment><USER19> Its like if spanking was your fetish but the person spanking you believes they are punishing you. It's irrelevant to the person being spanked as long as they enjoy it.

<comment><USER20> I feel like this entire forum demonstrates a chronic pessimism by rejecting the idea that a deal can be a 'win-win', that somehow both participants in the deal can benefit and the world is non-zero

<comment><USER18> I think that my comment, and the one you're directly replying to, are both describing win-win situations.

<comment><USER20> Yes you're right and I was not saying otherwise. I was trying to point out that it's more the exception than the rule. The entire other 99% of the thread, and the OP topic itself is suggesting that relationships can only be win-lose

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Outside of tech, there are certainly industries that thrive on low-paid junior workers and get away with it because there are so many desperate for a "foot in the door" that they don't have to pay more e.g. entertainment, most D.C. gov jobs.

<comment><USER22> Even inside of tech, I think one can safely say that there are certain areas that do the same. Game development for instance.

<comment><USER11> NASA was once like that. A long time ago.

Game development is hell if you're not at the top.

Dealing with Hollywood is a pain if you're not dazzled by the industry. Either they're in development and their credit cards bounce, or they're in production and they want a new feature yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the most difficult challenges for me during my career is establishing boundaries to curb when I am being exploited. I am passionate about writing awesome, powerful software, so I am willing to put in long hours and grind because I genuinely love it. However, it's important to step back now and again and look at your value more objectively from your employer's standpoint, and negotiate compensation, hours, etc from that perspective. Otherwise you will burn out. You'll always be "exploited" to some degree, since it's the nature of a business making money, but it doesn't have to be as bad as it can be.

<comment><USER24> A metric I've found useful: Is your boss directing what you're working on right now?

Software is a profession, and like any profession it requires that you put in time to practice and expand your skills. Keep what you need to do for work separate from what you want to do to grow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think this study means much. It's not "it's ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions", but rather "it's more ok to make passionate people endure bad conditions than non-passionate people".

I don't particularly agree with this, but if I was asked if it's ok to ask for overtime from people who hate their jobs and then people who love their jobs, I wouldn't be surprised if I answered slightly better for those who love their jobs.

Survey design imo. Or perhaps more retroactive Protestant work ethic bias.

</comment><comment><USER26> Companies don't care about anything that doesn't drive the bottom line.

<comment><USER27> The goal is making it clear that keeping you happy improves their bottom line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is an EconTalk with a Broadway producer. And he talks about the history of why Broadway unionized but essentially people were so willing to work that producers wouldn't even pay them.

The fashion industry is much the same today. Models, photographers, hair and make up artists working very hard for free or nearly for free - hoping to make it.

[http://www.econtalk.org/mitch-weiss-on-the-business-of- broad...](http://www.econtalk.org/mitch-weiss-on-the-business-of-broadway/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember there are arguments that motherhood is seen as unpaid work. I wonder if there is a connection here with that. There seems to be a stronger shift in the past ten years or so where mothers are increasingly called out on being a "bad mother". Is there some relation there with the cultural attitudes on exploiting passion?

</comment><comment><USER30> Do the extra work nobody else wants to do and you can get away with so much. Definitely worth the tradeoff IMO.

</comment><comment><USER31> > If someone is passionate about what they do, we see it as more legitimate to > exploit them

That, to me, is a lot different than taking advantage. There are plenty of reasons you would take advantage of your job too... it's not a negative thing, it's making the best of it.

It's a much better title.

</comment><comment><USER32> Of course. I long developed that inner rule: whenever i am going to execute any business transaction and know i will not feel guilty as a result, i am going to be taken advantage of and should not do it.

<comment><USER33> That assumes zero-sum, and one-time transactions. Two parties can have a transaction where both go away happy, neither was taken advantage of, and both would like to do it again. If you push to have a transaction that's to your advantage, you might get one, and you might also make someone less inclined to do business with you again.

<comment><USER32> Not really! It even pertains to long-term relationship. If you are not hard enough on your clients, they perceive you as cheap labor. And you become cheap labor.

<comment><USER33> I'm not suggesting letting yourself get cheated. I'm suggesting not pushing so hard that the person you're dealing with feels cheated, either. You shouldn't feel guilty about making a good deal, and neither should the person you're dealing with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So to sum up: "If you love what you do, your employer won't make you stop doing it, and might encourage you to do it more." and this means they are taking advantage of you.

</comment><comment><USER35> There is no difference between alcoholism and workaholism. Both are manifestations of lack of control over self.

</comment><comment><USER36> Do extra work for same pay... that is usually how it goes for me... I suck at salary negotiations.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think people should have a sense of ownership over their jobs.

</comment><comment><USER38> Labor is the source of value. The managerial and owner class is paid and gets rich through the surplus of your labor. If your boss stops working, value is still created. If you stop working, everything grinds to a halt.

You are being taken advantage of.

<comment><USER39> Labor is only one of many sources of value. Some other sources are technology, machinery, relationships, capital, education, experience, reputation, and efficient organization of resources. A business, by necessity, brings much more to table than the mere sum of the labor.

The managerial class is paid to efficiently organize human resources (hiring, motivating, growing, conflict resolution, scheduling, removing obstacles to labor) and non-human resources (budgeting, purchasing, etc).

The owner is paid for making sure a company is aligned with a vision, investing resources, securing funding, assuming liability, and taking risks.

Labor is worth very little without the above mentioned things. This is why people often work for others rather than themselves.

<comment><USER40> >technology, machinery, relationships, capital, education, experience, reputation, and efficient organization of resources

Literally all of these are a result of labor. Maybe not relationships per se but in a business context, yes. The rest of your comment also seems very ignorant of basic Marx

<comment><USER7> Consider the idea that he thinks Marx is wrong and that basic Marx is more basic than Marx.

<comment><USER40> Can you dispute the idea that technology, machinery, capital, education, experience, reputation, and efficient organization of resources are not all direct outcomes of labor?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC/HN: What's a problem, any problem, you'd like to see someone solve? - <AUTHOR> Just name it -- something you want to see solved but hasn't been yet.  Political, technology, scientific...anything.<p>I hope to spark a discussion like the original version of this topic - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442571.  More importantly, maybe someone will do something about your problem. <comment><USER3> Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.)

Alternatively, put some rats on Seth Roberts's set-point diet (aka Shangri-La diet) and figure out the path of action, then develop it in pill form for those of us where Seth Roberts's diet didn't work / didn't work well enough.

To make a lot of money, ask yourself where people aren't looking. Often the place they're not looking is a place of moral blindness. Plenty of us would pay just about anything to look normal. The moral blindness part is the people being sanctimonious about fat being a sign of weak willpower and having no concept of the actual science involved.

Another place to look would be fast, accurate molecule recognition array tests for venereal diseases. Get it down to something the size of a vending machine, $20, and thirty minutes (results sent via text message) and you'll get people paying you every night. Again, moral blindness may be a reason why people aren't looking as hard in this direction as they should to create lots of hedons - sex is sinful.

Speaking of not looking where everyone else is looking, would it be too crazy to ask people to do something that actually creates large amounts of value instead of throwing sheep? Even if it involves doing something other than computer programming?

<comment><USER4> _Safe liposuction. (Going to be a few self-righteous "just eat less and exercise" replies to this one by metabolically advantaged folks who haven't got the slightest clue how difficult it can be to lose weight when your body doesn't want to cooperate.)_

Metacognition can help with this (at least until safe weight-loss pills are invented).

The following worked for me: I taught myself to enjoy the suffering associated with weight loss/fitness. Basically, I made feeling hunger/muscle soreness my short term goal. When I didn't feel feel hungry/tired, I actively tried to feel it.

Using that strategy, I went from about 300lb to 210lb. (Switching that strategy off once I reached 210lb was also a bit tough. )

In the past year, I've used the same strategy (making muscle soreness my goal) to gain about 15 lb of muscle.

To learn Eskrima (fighting with a short club), I also make bruises a short term goal. This encourages me to fight people far above my level, which teaches you far more than fighting people at your level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Making the publishing of negative data as prestigious and scientifically rigorous as positive data.

<comment><USER6> Make the publishing of anything scientific independent from Journals and freely available to anyone.

<comment><USER7> Isn't that Arxiv.org?

<comment><USER8> Do tenure committees and other such parts of the scientific establishment give publication on arxiv.org the same weight they give to publication in traditional scientific journals? They didn't used to -- has this changed?

<comment><USER5> nope, it definitely hasn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "De-manufacturing" instead of throwing away things. A company that sells you an item must take it back at the end of its life and break it down into constituent parts to be re-used/recycled. i.e. cars, phones, computers, fridge, house, office fitouts etc. Companies will seek to maximise profits and so make things that are easily re-used/re-sold.

An example of a product like this is the 1981 Jeep CJ-7 I had when I was young. I could swap in pieces from around 4 other models from a range of 15 years of production and they would work... nowadays the door panel from a 2009 BMW 323 won't fit a 2010 323, its ridiculous and leads to a lot of unnecessary waste.

<comment><USER10> I don't like this idea for several reasons but partly because it implies that no-one but manufacturers can actually "own" anything. In this model you are only renting a product while you use it. This seems fine and dandy to you because it means that you get to duck the responsibility of having to dispose of it properly, and instead you get to put that burden on some "evil", faceless mega-corporation. But if you go down this route you'll end up ceding far more of your rights of use to the manufacturer than you'd like.

<comment><USER9> Just to clarify my original point, I don't suggest the consumer is forced to return these products - merely that if I want to throw away my first generation iPod then Apple should be the one that can take it back and reuse or recycle it; after all they know exactly how it was made. I feel it's a real waste to throw such a highly engineered piece of technology into landfill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see a way to get a non-government based passport for travel, where the organization issuing it does basic checks and certifies you're not a criminal and can take care of yourself. It's a bit of a catch-22, but if you could get enough places to start taking this sort of passport for entry, then soon most places would have to. This would be good for people who like to travel to interesting places that are dangerous to travel with their native country's passport, and for talented people with dysfunctional/oppressive governments.

<comment><USER12> Dual nationality? Try to get a passport for a neutral country like Ireland (all you need is one Irish grandparent)?

An NGO passport won't work easily. It's much much too easy to set up a NGO. It's much harder to set up a new country.

And if your government is doing things that make it hard for you to travel, then it's up to you to try to fix your government. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Corruption.

It is a huge problem in India, I wish it is solved using transparent processes, aided by software tools.

RTI (Right to Information) act helps in bringing out issues to an extent, but those who file RTIs get threatened or can even end up being killed..

<http://www.google.co.in/search?q=RTI+activist+killed>

Something like anonymous or proxy RTI filings can help and all the results should be cataloged.

<comment><USER14> I would guess corruption mainly comes about because individuals can be in positions in power. Ie it is not a real democracy and the legal system is defunct? Just guessing, but if that is so, I don't think transparency would help. The bribes would probably never be entered into the computer database either.

<comment><USER13> The problem with knowing if corruption occurred or not is access to information, which was not possible earlier.

With RTI, officials have to provide requested information within stipulated time frame or face actions - including suspension from service.

But, this is pull model. RTI application needs to be filed to get information.

Instead it should be push.

All Govt. expenses, the authorization details for those expenses (who made it) and the reasons for making those authorizations (details of tenders received and why one was favored over the other), should all be made public. So that it is easier to find foul play.

All this is related to corruption in Govt. expenditure.

Regarding bribes, usually applications/files submitted to Govt. offices do not move if bribes are pending. Now one can file for information on why some particular file has not moved and if that details given are not satisfactory, one can use it to file a complaint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.

<comment><USER16> This is interesting, what sort of thing did you have in mind?

I think a horn is more about communicating between drivers, not cars, and seems like an good solution for this.. In the "hey, im here!" sense, rather than "hey, fuck you buddy!". It provides an alert and rough location that doesn't require much processing by the driver.

<comment><USER17> Here are some things that I've wanted to communicate to other drivers:

"You might want to check the air pressure in your right rear tire, it's riding dangerously low"

"Your left turn signal's been on for three miles"

"Your gas cap is off"

"The speed limit in this section of road is 45mph"

"Your coffee mug is on the rear bumper"

etc.

<comment><USER18> Flashing headlights is a common indicator where I live for alerting someone to any of these problems.

<comment><USER19> Yeah but then someone flashes their lights at me out of the blue and my thought is 'Oh, s __*, what did I do wrong? What is wrong with the car? Is there a speed trap ahead?' etc etc until I can stop and check things out...and it turns out that they just accidentally bumped their brights lever. Kind of the equivalent of grunting instead of talking. Would be nice if there were some standard tone set for different common signals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1) ubiquitous public transport. 2) Safe bicycling in most cities. 3) Better treatment for chronic pain

<comment><USER21> It might not be much safer than regular bikes, but electric bicycles are great for expanding the non-car commuting range of the average suburbanite. I ride a scooter-style ebike that has enough cargo room for a few bags of groceries and looks more like a Vespa scooter than a 10-speed. The headlights, tail lights, and turn signals make me feel safer than my mountain bike. Of course, cars don't pay much attention to mopeds or motorcycles either, so it's probably just a psychological safety net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Digital receipts - I hardly need to carry cash anymore, pretty much everywhere I shop takes chip-n-pin cards so I use my debit card to pay for most things.

However, what you end up with is silly bits of paper that I end up carrying round in my wallet or stuffed into folders at work or at home.

Why can't my payment card contain an identifier that allows the bank to send me a digitally signed receipt - I could get notification by SMS or email that this is in place before I leave the shop.

There is a lot of crypto tech that could be thrown at this problem and it would end up more convenient and better.

<comment><USER23> Grocery chains / big box stores could add it as part of their rewards points programs. -> Attach email to safeway card. -> Scan safeway card. -> Receive receipts via email.

But this also means replacing hardware, which is a more expensive proposition.

<comment><USER22> My bank already knows my email address and phone number(s).

I would expect that the easiest way of doing this would be for the banks to handle it all - when I buy something my bank gets a receipt signed by the shop's bank to say that I did buy item X at time Y at location Z. My bank could perhaps then countersign the receipt to link that strongly to my identity.

It would be particularly good if the format included a standard representation of tax paid (VAT etc.) - would make filling out expense claims so much easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Online elections. Think of how many more people would actually vote in the US if it were _online_. The 2008 election had 63% voter turnout, which is historically high, but is nothing compared to countries like Italy with 90%.

Obviously, there are huge security concerns and it would be a logistical nightmare, but that's what someone needs to solve.

<comment><USER25> If not proper elections at least a whole population simulation before the polls. That way people could express their true preferences without fearing that their vote will not count if it goes to a fringe candidate and would reassure them that they're not as few as regular polls and eventual results usually show.

<comment><USER26> Surely the issue is voting systems that do not rationally incorporate each voter's preference equally?

Unless you're suggesting iteration as a way to get around Arrow's paradox? I'm not sure if anyone has tried it - could be interesting? But if not, then ranking candidates get you the same results.

<comment><USER25> Few voters will express their true preferences and will go instead with 'the lesser evil' when they fear their option will be in a small percentile and discarded. It is not unusual to have systems where 5% is required for a party to get into the parliament, or for a nominee to get into preliminary rounds, etc. So one cannot expect a voting system to incorporate all voter's preferences if they are very small but a warm-up voting would reveal that the fringes that big media avoids covering can become popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A better way to meet co-founders. Almost like a dating website but instead of going on a date you work on an Open Source project together with someone who would be a good match.

<comment><USER28> fsav and I built <http://www.clusterify.com/> last year to target this very problem.

Unfortunately, neither of us is working on it anymore, and the site is no longer very active. But the code for the site is open-source, so feel free to launch your own clusterify and build a community around it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A better, no hassles international payment gateway

(I know Paypal exists, but I am not their fan)

<comment><USER8> Spreedly? Or maybe that's a layer on top of gateways? I don't know much about payment gateways, so feel free to enlighten me on why it's not a solution to this, if it's not.

<comment><USER30> Spreedly is a layer on top of gateways, so it can only support currencies that the underlying payment gateway supports. Gateways that Spreedly supports: <http://spreedly.com/info/payment-gateways/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Job search is very broken. Monster/Dice/Craigslist &c are broken. Not sexy, I know, but I imagine the people who solve that problem will become quite rich.

<comment><USER32> Isn't this covered by Indeed/Simplyhired?

<comment><USER33> The best opportunities aren't the ones being screened by HR. Most job postings look like someone got a description of the job from the manager, looked for the sentence fragments that could be classified as skills or experience, then put those in as the list of requirements.

LinkedIn is probably a closer approximation to what's needed, but as far as I can tell it's hard to get far out of your acquaintances with a basic account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Keys. Why, in 2010, do I still have 10 metal keys in my pocket. Why?

<comment><USER31> Because of legacy hardware. Getting loads of locks re-cored is expensive.

<comment><USER18> There's probably thousands of undeveloped patents preventing innovation too. I have a naive idea of how to get around the legacy locks problem without re- coring but I'm sure patents would stop any development.

<comment><USER18> Not sure why I was downvoted. A 2 minute search yields just these patents:

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7069755.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5701828.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5974367.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5999095.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6325429.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6867685.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6483424.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6609738.html>

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5886644.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A practical, robust method for separating essential complexity from accidental complexity in software engineering.

Trevor Blackwell has written about something like this: <http://tlb.org/busywork.html>

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the pointer. Basically, Trevor wants the distraction of low-level tweaking so he can think about the high-level problem. That's the weakest argument for low-level languages I've ever heard. But Python fits the bill: Python for high-level, C libs for performance and low-level tweaking.

<comment><USER35> The big solution I was thinking of would have to go a bit further than Python/C. Basically you should be able to write a description of the actual essential functionality of a program without going into data structure and algorithm implementation that isn't relevant to the problem domain. Something like Prolog or Haskell here, Python isn't all that declarative compared to them. Then you could write the bits that need tweaking in a lower level language, but you should be able to automatically verify that the low-level implementation matches the high-level description, at least through extensive QuickCheck-style automated testing if a full automatic proof isn't feasible. You don't get anything like this with a Python/C style solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Making Scholar articles open to public access.

Google scholar returned references are mainly to journal articles requiring a fee. This is useless. Science should be a collaborative work like wikipedia but with referees (not the narrowed minded one).

<comment><USER23> As far as I know, academic institutions have a pretty large budget for subscribing to journals. If a member (prof, staffer or student) wants access to a certain journal that isn't available, the librarian can arrange for it.

So in terms of accessibility to each other's scholarly articles, scientists in academia or larger industries don't suffer from a lack of collaboration. Since this covers most practicing academics, there is little incentive for the scholarly publishing community to change.

That said, there are many Open Access Journals out there - I guess you're not alone in your sentiments that science should be collaborative.

<comment><USER38> You can also visit just about any university and use their resources for free. Most scholarly databases and journals restrict by IP address and many universities don't require people on-campus to authenticate.

<comment><USER37> What if you aren't in a university or if the university is not that rich to have an access to most popular scholar journals ? You are not aware of the luck you have if accessing scholar journals is as simple as that for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Something that prevents all this dust from gathering up in my home.

<comment><USER23> Let me know when you want those locks changed and the keys thrown away :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Something (website) to replace my new car's manual with something that's actually useful: teach me about my new car, common probloems, how to maintain it myself, etc...

<comment><USER41> IMO it should split up the manual into pieces below the level of a level so one could collect those lesson snips one needs and skip the others. Could apply for any other kind of stuff to be teached too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Solar powered 3D printers that use the carbon in CO2 to make stuff.

<comment><USER43> Greatest would be if the printers could print (replicate) themselves. A new life form :)

<comment><USER44> There's already a CNC printer that can replicate itself. You just have to buy the raw material. For example, see this

[http://blog.reprap.org/2008/06/reprap-achieves- replication.h...](http://blog.reprap.org/2008/06/reprap-achieves- replication.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A _good_ photo management system for Windows that is designed to be useful over 10, 20 years (ie. keeps your photos stored, backedup, organized in a way that's not too proprietary). Picasa is powerful but has a CRAP ui, iPhoto is much better, but Mac only.

<comment><USER45> Actually, any technology designed to be useful after 10, 20 years is pretty impressive in our times. Which is pretty scary, if you ask me.

I've meant for quite some time to write an article about the fragility of human technological innovation.

Here are some examples that I can think of:

\- I think I read about this case in a computer magazine: when the personal computers just started to be available they scanned and recorded in the digital form some ancient holy book so that it will be better preserved in digital form from then on. The year was 1982 maybe, the computer platform was not the one that would become mainstream and the recording media was some kind of digital laserdisc I think. The irony is, some 20 years later they had a really big trouble finding the computer to read the data back. (this is from my memory, can't find the source)

\- Web platform once considered cutting edge (Macromedia/Adobe Shockwave), cannot run on modern operating systems (Linux) 15 years later. No replacement or emulation solution in sight; users depending on it are left in the cold.

\- Geocities was shut down on short notice, with no exit strategy for its users 10 years after being bought for $3.5 billion

\- Belt-clippable, battery-operated mp3 players like iRiver T10 (an achievement of its own, if you ask me) are nowhere to be found 5 years after they appeared (appeared ~2003, obsolete in 2008)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Easy to use tracking of stolen car (I live in Colombia): put small device that costs about 60$ somewhere in your car. If it gets stolen, activate via internet service and it tells you where your car is.

<comment><USER36> In the US, you can buy a $20 kit that includes a cheap GPS enabled phone and some software that would give you this functionality. Hide the phone deep in your car. When it's stolen, the software will locate it on a map.

<http://www.accutracking.com/kit.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Engaging lay science journalism that doesn't suck.

<comment><USER47> What about The Economist's science section? Or do you mean something a bit more lowbrow, or with more multimedia?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Where is energy going to come from when the irreversible decline of oil production worldwide begins?

</comment><comment><USER25> "Deprecate the base of Maslow's pyramid" Inventing cheap and healthy concentrated 'food' that would allow people to eat once a month or even more rarely. Almost all other problems have a root in our needing to eat (work and cars, pollution, corruption, fighting for social status and it's consequences). You'd have the autonomy and time to take long trips without needing to carry much.

<comment><USER18> There's no science in this unfortunately - if you gave someone a month's worth of food in one meal then they are going to put on a month's worth of food in fat in one day and spend the next 29 days starving hungry, consequently slowing their metabolism and making them fatter.

<comment><USER49> What if something was to break down slowly over the period of a month - possibly sitting in the stomach? Providing the correct sustanance on any one given day.

<comment><USER18> You're right, combining with a hunger inhibitor would be a great start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> \- negation of the UN Human Rights' council obsession with Israel

\- Cold Fusion

\- medical imaging that can detect emotional patterns and spiritual energy

<comment><USER26> I'm sorry, what?

\- I can't think of any civil words here, so I'll restrict myself to the numbers 1440 and 13

\- That would be great, but since everything we know about science makes it impossible (chemical binding energies orders of magnitude below nuclear binding energies), why even ask for it? Why not ask for workable hot fusion?

\- We already have these technologies. Well, Paul Ekman did some really good work on facial analysis, as did John Gottman, and they claim to detect emotions from facial expressions. This could be done by machine vision. And a dowsing rod is an excellent for detecting spiritual energy, although you're right, a dowsing CAT scanner would be even better. What's that, the rod only works when a physic is holding it? Damm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'd like to see someone solve the problem of (snail) mail. Its the one thing that is really preventing me from living a digital nomad lifestyle. I still have to visit my office at least once a week just to pick up mail, half of which is often junk and half of which im normally too late for.

<comment><USER41> The Deutsche Post is just about to introduce email that's guaranteed to reach the addressee. <https://www.onlinebrief.de/> That would invite everyone to use e-mail rather than snail, except for the (iirc) ¢20 price tag per mail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I want to be able to use the internet without being really worried about installing the operating system, maintaining and updating it. Heck, I don't want to SEE the OS. Just abstract it away from my view. I don't want to see it any more. (The same can be said about web browsers)

<comment><USER43> That's pretty much the direction Chrome OS is taking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> How about improving medical forms. I recently signed up with a new doctor and literally filled out 5 pages, which all asked for the same information. Name, address, social sec. #, insurance, signature etc... I felt like I was back in 1980. SO frustrating!

<comment><USER54> This should be a very simple iPad app...

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> No keys, no wallet, no fobs, no cards (unless the internet-device wants to be card sized).

</comment><comment><USER23> Problem: Status updates and notifications from my bank, facebook, meetup, server crashing etc.. aren't really e-amils but are being sent to to my inbox because there isn't a better place to send just the updates. Also, if I want to say, temporarily turn off status updates from facebook going to my inbox, this involves going into my facebook profile and turning notifications off there and then going back in there in the future and turning it back on.

My membership and communication information for many websites is also burried deep inside my inbox somewhere when that isn't really email either.

<comment><USER56> Check out notify.io and oovertheair.appspot.com. Would love to hear your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'd like to be able to have lunch and chat one-on-one with a dozen or more angels that have mutual interests and experiences as me, without having to move to California or win some startup beauty contest.

</comment><comment><USER40> An _easy to use_ tool to connect my blog to all my various accounts (twitter, facebook, buzz, bla). that really focuses on letting me post easily. The current crop doesn't really seem to work for me.

<comment><USER58> As you said, (bad) tools for this do exist. What problems do the current crop of tools have that prevent you from working?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Senescence. Although death is a good motivation for getting things done.

</comment><comment><USER43> University Research 2.0. It seems like universities are so lateeee on adopting new technologies. Most of them are still working with printed scientific journals / email / static HTMLs + GIFs from the 90s. They still do a lot of stuff through the mail and the count goes on... If you don't trust me, just take a look at <http://arxiv.org/> or MIT's website. I'm pretty sure there's room for amelioration! If anyone wants to brainstorm on the topic, feel free to contact me.

<comment><USER60> There's some progress, although research, and implementation/execution are two very different concepts.

<http://futurity.org/>

<comment><USER61> Mendeley may not be exactly what you have in mind, but perhaps starting to take some steps in the direction of more collaboration / social approach to research (including a personalized recommendation engine): <http://www.mendeley.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Lowering the barrier to share data and information between my different telecommunication tools (phone, PC @work, PC@home, lap tops, internet caffe, ...).

</comment><comment><USER62> Speech Recognition. Enough said!

<comment><USER63> Thought recognition would be much more useful. And a bit scary.

<comment><USER41> Then, why not push it one step further -- some generalized recognition, independent of field of 'expertise' (well, we're talking about a machine/software here)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The problem of induction. No one has answered Hume, except Kant and he dodged the question. This is the big question, underlying integration of QM/GR, the nature of time, P=NP?, AI, a stable credit-money system, scientific ethics, chicken or egg?, etc, etc. Once this is resolved, I feel sorry for future generation (not really) because its "only" applications forever after.

<comment><USER17> ET Jaynes solved it indirectly in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science(1). As a tl;dr, it turns out that knowledge--as it's defined in the problem of induction--doesn't exist.

(1) <http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/prob.html>

<comment><USER64> I agree Jaynes made some significant, important progress. However, the conclusion that the problem does not exist comes from Kant, its a dodge. The problem is still open because Kant's theory of knowledge is a denial of ALL knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Establish conventions for academic publications that maximize easily machine- readable content instead of looking good when printed to a paper journal. Build a search engine that can answer advanced queries about existing research based on the citation links, machine-readable datasets and formal description language descriptions of the main contents of the articles.

</comment><comment><USER8> Balancing the real and significant perils of unfettered free markets with the real and significant perils of meddling with free markets.

</comment><comment><USER40> Take the concept of a cheap car (like the one they did in India for about 1000$) and expand. No reason cars need to cost 15000$ and up.

<comment><USER8> How bad are the emissions on that car?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Disclaimer: most of these aren't anything new or earth shattering things that need to be solved.

I dislike having a gazillion different Instant Message accounts with contacts that "only use MSN" or "only use AIM". SMS messaging may be a rip-off but there is one thing it has achieved: uniformity.

Craigslist is great but it caters to the lowest common denominator - which can be frustrating.

<comment><USER66> _Shameless self-promotion disclaimer_ I have taken baby steps in trying to build a more intelligent classified site at yourgrounds.com

I too feel your pain, and any feedback you have would obviously be incredibly worthwhile - especially if you want to help solve this specific problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> A better online shopping experience.

One area especially is customer reviews and feedbacks. I don't want to read a review by anyone who buys the products.. that doesn't help me. I want to know if that someone is like me. has the same taste in music, or food or whatever variable that is closest to my interests.

This will help me speed up the decision making on the purchase in question.

</comment><comment><USER68> Personalized Movies. Based on your past viewing history, it creates a new movie that no one else has seen and you can possibly share with your friends.

So it will notice your love for sci fi but it will notice you like comedy too, but you dont like your comedy mixed with your sci fi. :D Using this info generates a hollywood standard movie

</comment><comment><USER69> Cheap and thin electronic paper. I'm talking about e-paper as thin as regular paper and bound into notebooks. Then I can buy ~5 notebooks that each have to ability to display any e-book or text based file. I also need the ability to write in these notebooks so that I can store my notes electronically.

</comment><comment><USER40> easy to setup music system: buy x speakers, just put them where you want them (connect to electricity), decent music quality (varying sizes of speakers), they all play music from one computer somewhere in the house (wifi). About 80$ per average speaker (not 3 or 400$ as the current systems)

</comment><comment><USER23> A Real Time Strategy video game style interface for managing and coordinating aid.

</comment><comment><USER40> (this may exist) for teaching to drive a car, a way for the person in the passanger seat to see exactly which pedals the person driving is pushing. Should be cheap (50$) and easy to install/uninstall (10 mins)

</comment><comment><USER22> Augmented reality of the kind Verner Vinge writes about in Rainbows End.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a problem that I can no longer find the 'save' link on HN stories - <USER2> is it? That's one of my favorite HN features, even though I use it rarely. I'd like to see someone bring it back.

</comment><comment><USER70> Rechargeable batteries good enough to power a vehicle would be nice.

<comment><USER10> I think by definition we already have such. Perhaps you should increase the specificity of your desire.

<comment><USER17> How about a re-usable electricity storage method with a power density equal to or better than petroleum?

<comment><USER8> Now we're talking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> cancer

<comment><USER72> Most cancers are probably viral:

We know that cervical cancer is related to the human pappiloma virus, thus the annual "pap smear" for women. Warts and fever blisters are both caused by virii and cause growths, similar to tumors. I can't think of any parasites, bacteria, or fungi which causes similar growths -- and I've tried. (Anyone who knows of something else which causes tumor-like growths, please speak up. This question is of serious interest to me. Cancer runs rampant in my family.) Molluscum contagiosum is a viral infection which causes growths on the skin similar to skin tags. The cause of skin tags is "unknown" (yet it seems logical to me it is some other virus) but they are described as "benign tumors".

Although conventional medicine seems to find viral infections extremely hard to combat, alternative treatment circles I hang out in find viral infections very easily treated and offer a number of different options for doing so. I believe that I and my sons have been killing off whatever virus or virii we carry which eventually could/would turn into a diagnosis of cancer. I get die- off rashes that include skin tags and brown and red spots of the sort which look like pre-cancerous lesions. My oldest son has a very keen sense of smell and has been around several family members who had cancer. He says he can smell it when we have cancer die-off. Given my experiences with him, I believe him.

I generally don't talk about this in public. My personal problem is that people tend to either call me "arrogant and egomaniacal" or "a liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman". "Arrogant and egomaniacal" is probably the better thing to be accused of as it suggests people think it _can_ be done, just not by little ole me. "Liar, charlatan, and snake-oil salesman" suggests people think it can't be done at all, by anyone, regardless of the resources at their disposal, much less by little ole me and my limited resources. I don't believe any technology will solve my personal issue of being accused of such things. It's an issue of "the hundredth monkey" or "mindshare" or "groupthink"....something along those lines -- ie: No one else is able to do it, so you can't possibly be telling the truth. To quote an old TV show: "There's always a first."

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> We are running out of (cool) domain names. Fix that.

</comment><comment><USER46> A catalogue of charities giving information about their goals and their financials. Help me to help others most efficiently with my money.

<comment><USER74> Something like <http://www.charitynavigator.org/> ?

Lists charitable organizations, including their mission statements and financials, and rates them within their specific fields. (A financially healthy museum will look very different from a financially healthy feed-the- children program, which is why it rates by category.)

<comment><USER46> Actually pretty damn close to perfect. I'd wish there was a better overview (multiple comparisons) so that I could begin to get a better understanding for their ratings and charity expense breakdowns, but the information is all there.

Thanks for the plug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> a) an open source software repository of all programming languages/operating system software implementations. (Note: <http://catb.org/retro/> is a good start, but there needs to be more)

b) improving democracy by reasonable application of at least some of the technological advances of the last decade; why hasn't that happened yet?

</comment><comment><USER76> Real, free form speech recognition coupled with enough nlp that would allow a dialogue between a computer and a person.

</comment><comment><USER77> Efficient purely functional data storage and the algorithms and best-practices required to effectively use it.

<comment><USER38> Haven't read it, but there is the book _Purely Functional Data Structures_ [http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Oka...](http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris- Okasaki/dp/0521663504)

<comment><USER77> Have (tried to ;) read it, but this just describes patterns for constructing the smallest building blocks for what I described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Easy incorporated suite to debug and test (with interaction) all popular browser/OS combinations.

</comment><comment><USER78> Does P = NP?

</comment><comment><USER79> build and/or packaging systems

<comment><USER80> Are you referring to:

[http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c...](http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/c6236c1fba42b9fb#)

?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Tinnitus.

</comment><comment><USER82> reliability data for consumer products. while the internet brought great transparency for the whole purchasing process, this is really the missing piece for good buying decisions.

</comment><comment><USER40> Industrial-scale production of real bio (no pesticides etc) food.

</comment><comment><USER8> HN doesn't notify me when someone replied to one of my comments.

</comment><comment><USER37> Getting rid of undesirable mails (spam, personal harassment,...)

<comment><USER43> That problem is pretty much solved for me (Gmail).

<comment><USER37> I have another idea in mind. Gmail is just filtering. There is a limit to it. Beside, there is no true privacy with Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> figure out how content is stored in brains, so we could skip learning and implement/initialize knowledge directly

</comment><comment><USER83> The halting problem (in finite time).

</comment><comment><USER84> Space elevator in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER85> Education for makers.

<comment><USER8> TechShop is pretty good for that. But you have to move to Silicon Valley or Portland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> my two hour commute :(

<comment><USER86> seriously though, we need to have term limits in politics - across all levels. i'm tired of career politicians who have completely lost touch with the reality of everyday Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Predefined quantitative metrics of success attached to more (preferably all) legislation, with automatic sunset upon failure.

</comment><comment><USER88> The broken last-mile solutions in the united states.

</comment><comment><USER87> Popularize the concept of pundits publicly applying percentage likelihoods to their predictions, so they become testable.</comment>


Is There a TechCrunch Without Arrington?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/03/25/is-there-a-techcrunch-without-arrington/ <comment><USER2> He knows how to get our Yin tangled with our Yang.

</comment><comment><USER3> i imagine his work ethic is partly responsible for the sites success.

</comment><comment><USER4> The other writers on the roster aren't as strong writers. I've been liking Erick Schonfeld lately but he's from MSM so he's not bad to start out with.</comment>


Positron Dynamics is building an antimatter rocket - <AUTHOR> http://www.positrondynamics.com/ <comment><USER2> > _Antimatter is the most energy dense material in the universe._

> _Our core innovation is the ability to generate intense beams of cold > positrons using proprietary array moderators combined with compact > radioisotope sources of positrons._

If the "fuel tank" is full of positrons or antimatter, then it's true that it "is the most energy dense material in the universe".

But IIUC their "fuel tank" has only some radioactive isotope. So the total weight is the weight of the whole atoms that is 1000x or 10000x or 100000x bigger than the weight of the positron, so the weight efficiency is not real (or at least misleading).

If they build this, it will be a nuclear rocket, that has something similar to a nuclear reactor to produce energy. Not an antimatter rocket. It can theoretically be more efficient than a usual chemical rocket, but I'll wait to see the details of the design...

Also from one of the links: [https://medium.com/dissected-by- propel-x/positron-dynamics-p...](https://medium.com/dissected-by- propel-x/positron-dynamics-paves-the-road-to-the-final-frontier-d00e60133b67)

> [...] _diverting, or directing, the trapped energy from the annihilation > process to propel the rocket. To achieve this, Weed, CEO of Positron > Dynamics, and his team use fusion reactions to transfer the kinetic energy > of the gamma-ray producing positron beam into charged particles._ [...]

I still can't image how they can use fusion reactions here, or a sensible explanation of a real process that can be misinterpreted and "translated" in the press article to "fusion". This is beyond the bullshit threshold.

</comment><comment><USER3> Scam or joke? I can't tell.

Seriously, they seem to be more or less claiming to take the basics of a PET scanner, magically cross that with a nuclear reactor, which will somehow produce fusion at some point, and turn that into a _drive_!

It's definitely bullshit, but is it a joke? It feels a bit like a send-up of those endless ICO whitepaper+splash page combos. Or wait... is it going to be an ICO?</comment>


The Lexra/MIPS Story - <AUTHOR> http://probell.com/lexra/ <comment><USER2> Given the discussion of patents and instruction sets, you may be interested in the work of David Patterson and his student Tony Chen in tracking prior at of all RISC-V instructions [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-6....](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-6.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is why humans fail. I think we'd be much further along if the kind of short term mindset driven by short term business goals outlined in this article were the exception instead of the rule. Patents in software and hardware design should not exist at all given the mathematical and physical underpinning of both disciplines.

There is creativity involved and the original inventors should get due credit but not to the point of being able to sue an equally good competitor with equally good inventors into oblivion. Everyone is worse off because of what happened here.

<comment><USER4> I too think we will eventually come up with something better than capitalism. But until we figure out what that would be, I don't know that throwing out parts of the existing system helps much, even if those are parts we happen to not like.

In particular, R&D is expensive. If patents in hardware don't exist, it's going to be much harder for investors to justify putting in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that it takes to start a modern tech company. No patents mean that investment in innovation makes much less sense for startups and small companies, because larger players can use their larger resources and deeper relationships to copy that innovation and crush the innovators.

Another way to look at it: sure, the current system has bad outcomes. But so did the previous system, one without patents. That's why we invented patents in the first place. If you want to persuade people to change, it's not enough to say, "patents bad". You have to propose an alternative and say why the total outcomes under your system are substantially better than the total outcomes under the status quo.

<comment><USER3> I have nothing against capitalism but it's a little ironic you bring up patents and capitalism in the same paragraph since patents are almost the antithesis of free form market capitalism. The equivalent in a purely capitalist system I believe is a trade secret which is different from a patent. Companies can have trade secrets but they can't sue each other over them. In fact I think that's the crux of the problem. There is no such thing as a trade secret in software and hardware. As soon as there is an existence proof equivalent implementations are sure to follow.

This goes back to what I've been arguing in this thread. The design space is very limited and the mathematical, physical, axiomatic nature of the field means there are only so many things you can actually design and implement and as soon as it is implemented everyone else can trace back the design to first principles.

As for R&D. Many of the best innovation in computers came from publicly funded projects. So I don't think the commercial nature of modern computing is actually helping anything. We had a system that worked and it was replaced by what we have now. I could just point people to historical precedent but we all know how well that works.

<comment><USER4> > equivalent in a purely capitalist system

I was using "capitalism" by its common meaning. I understand there are fantasy versions of capitalism that might be different.

> Many of the best innovation in computers came from publicly funded projects. > So I don't think the commercial nature of modern computing is actually > helping anything.

Basic innovation is wildly different than commercialization. I'm a big fan of publicly funded basic research. But going from a scientific discovery to a commercially usable technology is a) often very expensive, and b) not something that academia is good at.

Personally, I think commercial investment helps quite a bit. Look at the wave of mobile hardware innovation we've seen in the decade since the iPhone came out. That took tens of billions of R&D dollars, and investors and shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it back.

<comment><USER3> No fantasy necessary. In any version of capitalism government enforced monopoly for an idea and implementation is basically not capitalism whether it is fantastical or practical. Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long time. The US economic system is more socialist than anything else really.

I also was not arguing for replacing one system with another since that never works out. The new thing ends up being as bad as the old thing but slightly different. I'm arguing for more stringent requirements for patents and higher bars for suing someone based on patent infringement claims. That already goes a long way towards preventing patent abuse.

> shareholders don't put up that kind of money without expecting to get it > back.

Therein lies the problem and what I mean by "short term business thinking". MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively ended up worse off.

<comment><USER4> > Most modern democracies have not had any version of capitalism for a long > time.

You seem to have an unconventional definition of the word. Again, I am using the common definition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism)

That said, I'm actually fine with a higher bar for patents.

> MIPS investors could have settled for getting back much less money for their > investment but instead they chose the greedy approach and we collectively > ended up worse off.

Could you show your math here? I can't find any evidence that MIPS in this incarnation actually returned money to investors. When SGI spun it out, it looks like its market cap was somewhere north of $300m. Eventually it was bought for $100m. I can't find any record of a dividend in between.

I also am not sure you understand how venture capital works. As an asset class, VC doesn't do much better than other investments. The absurdly great hits (e.g., Google) pay for the 80% of companies that don't make it. Without taking the very big payouts on the few successes, it's not clear to me who would put money into VC funds. A lot of their money comes from pension funds, school endowments and the like; those people have long-term obligations to meet. So how do you propose to maintain significant levels of venture funding if it returns "much less money" than it does now?

<comment><USER3> In that case the whole thing is even sadder. If the venture was doomed from the start they didn't need to bring down everyone else with them.

You seem to think there needs to be a solution to this that somehow maintains the status quo of VC funded ventures. I personally don't. You're welcome to come up with a solution. I'm not the one to brainstorm it with.

<comment><USER4> Do you understand that Lexra only existed because they were drafting off of work done by MIPS? Without MIPS, there would have been no Lexra to bring down. Both companies only existed because of venture funding and patents.

And MIPS of course wasn't "doomed from the start". The nature of investment is that there are no sure things. Many good bets don't pay off.

I don't particularly care about VC. I care a lot about investment in technological innovation. Your initial claim was that "we'd be much further along" without patents and greed. I'm saying that I don't think that's the case, because patents and greed are two parts of the mechanism by which we move further along.

If you have an alternative that will actually get us "further along", I'm all ears. Feel free to tell us how you'd achieve similar or greater levels of funding in a better world, preferably with some actual numbers. But without that, it sounds like you're just carping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest issues of the case to me were that MIPS believed that hardware patents cover software emulation and (even assuming that the first case is true) that Lexra could somehow be held responsible for software companies choosing to infringe. It's like holding a car manufacturer responsible because a driver decided to head into oncoming traffic.

I don't understand why these cases weren't immediately thrown out as the garbage they were. MIPS wasn't a mega-corp like Samsung or Apple which can bring lots of pressure on the system. Why did the court make such a boneheaded decision on appeal?

<comment><USER6> It seems the biggest issue is that you can patent "unaligned loads" in a way that covers both a hardware instruction and software fault handler.

These are very different things. The software fault handler doesn't even do unaligned loads, naturally.

<comment><USER7> As I understand it, patents cover results and not so much mechanisms. It's just that people tend to listen the intermediate results in such detail as to _appear_ that they cover mechanisms.

Which is, of course, fucking insane, but nobody seems to want to act on that.

<comment><USER8> The patent doesn't cover the result of an unaligned load. It covers the specific mechanism of doing an unaligned load using two instructions and a shifter to get the two pieces into the right place in the target register. You can read the claims here: [https://www.google.com/patents/US4814976](https://www.google.com/patents/US4814976).

<comment><USER7> That the court considered a software implementation of this to also be in violation again underscores how nutzo that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting for those of us interesting in squeezing what we can out of older nodes for lower, dev costs or verifiability. Their CPU's did quite a bit for push-button synthesis. The Stream processor linked had impressive capabilities for 130nm. I'm bookmarking it in case it is useful in future.

I was thinking the I.P. might still be useful depending on acquirer until I saw the name: MIPS Technologies Inc. (sighs) I doubt they'll play ball. So, now I think of using its tricks in a RISC-V CPU instead. ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> In the end, patents only ensure that good things go down the toilet. Why do companies continue making them?

<comment><USER3> Same reason nations stockpile nuclear weapons.

<comment><USER11> There is a serious social movement in society against nuclear armament/for nuclear disarmament (in Germany at the beginning of the 80th this even lead to the founding of a completely new party). On the other hand there is no strong social movement against patents.

<comment><USER12> Sure there is, but it's quite reasonably smaller and/or less visible than a social movement standing against a fundamental existential threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy is still sitting on my shelf, saved from my computer engineering classes at UIUC. It's probably the closest thing I have to a definitive source on the hard limits faced in processor design. IMHO since I graduated in 1999 there has been almost no innovation in processor cores, and in fairness, maybe there couldn't have been (as the limits were well understood by then).

Instead the industry opted to go with smaller and smaller features which led to skyscraper interconnects that act as much like transmission lines as wires, with deep pipelines and large areas of the chip devoted to branch prediction, large percentages of chip area devoted to cache, niche processing units like GPUs on-chip rather than general purpose DSP for multiprocessing, obfuscated microcode rather than RISC, just layers and layers of cruft that were driven more by demands for single-threaded performance and low power consumption than innovation for its own sake.

So it shouldn't be any real surprise that Moore's law died somewhere around 2005, give or take. Computers today are still the 3 MHz they were then, transistor counts have gone up but real-world performance has increased mostly due to faster DDR and SSD, not faster cores. To get an idea of how far behind CPUs have fallen, just look at the throughput of any video card vs, say, a Core i7. We're talking 3 orders of magnitude better performance for GPUs, about what a decade and a half of compounded transistor count for a multicore architecture would predict.

So it saddens me that there never really were other competitors to CISC for consumers. I wonder if something like an ARM or AMD with a MIPS instruction set aiming for more cores like the Teraflops or Kilocore that ran OpenGL (and TensorFlow and other AI libs had they existed) natively might have done for computing back in the day. But it was a strange time in history after the Dot Bomb. The carpet got pulled out of research at a time when it was perhaps needed most. Everyone had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and we all became entrepreneurs instead of engineers.

Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, I don't really know. But I do know that we've had about a 15 year setback in computing and we are roaming the desert of informal methods on some kind of walkabout or vision quest to see where it's all headed. Personally, I don't see any future here if we don't fix the fundamental problems in patents and intellectual property. It's fun and everything to be hip about technology but at the end of the day someone has to push the state of the art forward.

I know precisely what I want: as many general purpose cores as possible running as fast as possible with a self-organizing interconnect to as many other computers as possible so I can run the simulations I thought we'd be running by now. I want a stream to that computer, no fancy libraries in my way, no proprietary OS. I want to program it with MATLAB, Erlang, Go, Clojure Haskell, Scala, etc etc etc. I don't want CUDA, I don't want to have to lease time from the cloud, I don't want to have to depend on the largess of billion dollar companies' research programs to innovate in AI. I may have forgotten the details of how to achieve these things but I haven't forgotten the original dream of ever-cheaper transistors giving every person access to a supercomputer and eventually R2D2. We've scaled data but we simply haven't scaled processing.

<comment><USER14> The problem with simple high-performance RISC (and to even larger extent VLIW) designs is that invariably micro architecture details are going to leak into instruction set, either explicitly (branch delay slots, instruction combinations that do not handle hazards, weird memory models) or implicitly in form of micro architecture specific performance traps.

And main thing that seems to be required for general purpose computing is binary compatibility, which can be done almost for free on CISC designs while it makes RISC designs into complex nests of special cases.

Micro architectures that are not designed to directly execute user code (GPUs and such) do not have this problem and thus can do anything that makes the hardware go fast regardless of whether the resulting ISA looks sensible and whether it can be implemented in any other way (eg. drop pipeline stalls and forwarding paths, have separate register set for each execution unit...).

Another thing that limits general purpose CPUs is multitasking as it requires context-switches to be reasonably cheap, which means reasonably small and accessible architectural state (ie. not hundreds of architectural registers).

<comment> vertex-four Theoretically, if Mill isn't vaporware, its plan is to distribute binaries in a format independent of certain hardware implementation details, and have a "specializer" in the BIOS or kernel to compile from the generic instruction set to the machine-specific instruction set on demand, reordering operations and grouping them into instructions, inserting delays, and spilling belt (register) contents to on-chip RAM where necessary.

Essentially, the idea is to move all the CISC stuff out to software, and do VLIW internally. That could possibly help?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > An instruction set is a language of commands given to a machine. Nobody can > patent, copyright, or otherwise own a language or an instruction set.

This is wrong. Intel owns patents which protect the Itanium ISA. Non-Intel Itanium implementations would infringe on the patents, not that anyone would want to make one.

<comment><USER16> I'd love to see a detailed write-up on how an ISA is protected. I've never really understood what protects the x86 instruction set. I'd always assumed there were patents covering implementation details which would make an effective implementation extremely difficult.

Can you really patent a list of instructions?

<comment><USER17> Intel's ISA is protected by fear of its army of lawyers, something from which no small company could (financially) survive a head on attack.

I worked on an x86 clone 20 years back, we analysed Intel's patents in depth to make sure we were safe, the biug one for us was Intel's segmentation/MMU patent - they essentially had patented segmentation followed by (unrelated) mmu processing - there was obvious prior art (cough 360, cough) but that's a bit of crap shoot, I came up with a brilliant way around this, only to discover a patent from someone else in the process of doing an x86 clone (Exponential I think). In the end we conflated our segmentation hardware and our TLBs effectively bypassing the core of Intel's patent

You can't patent a list of instructions, you can copyright a bunch of mnemnomics

<comment><USER16> That's really interesting thanks! I wonder if the army of lawyers protection also holds for ARM. Or perhaps there licenses are cheap enough that people don't care.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NYC Startups: Don't pay sales tax on your hardware - <AUTHOR> http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/st/st121_3_fill_in.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> For the past few years I had to call in to Apple SMB Tax department to get access. However, they recently changed their tax systems, and now you can just go into the store (I got the current machine at the Lincoln Center Apple Store)</comment>