hughesdan

Don't feel bad about not creating a "profitable side-businesses after one marathon 48-hour coding session in a single weekend". I bet a lot of side projects posted to HN took much longer than 48 hours to complete even if the author claims it was all done in a weekend. You should be proud for having released anything at all. And kudos for being candid about the level of time, effort and perseverance that went into your project.

Good point. The whole reason we have patent law in the first place is to promote the progress of science. Patents still have a role in some industries where inventing is expensive and cloning is cheap (e.g. pharmaceuticals). But on the web we don't need them. They do more harm than good. I've thought for a while that patent examiners should take into account the investment made by the inventor, giving greater weight to inventions that take a lot of time & money and less weight to inventions that were trivially easy to hack together.

You did it right. HN allows you to submit a URL or Text, but not both. It's customary around here that someone replies with the clickable link.

Nice job on the app by the way. If you add the ability to doodle a free-form drawing I might consider purchasing it. My notes tend to contain illustrations.

Many of the comments I'm reading here assume a much higher level of ignorance on the part of small business owners than is really the case. While it's true the average SBO typically does not understand internet advertising, they do understand ROI. They know how much they spend on various forms of advertising. And they know if they're getting a good return because they see the impact the next day in their cash register. And more importantly, they talk to their customers to find out what's working. The irony is, with all the sophisticated technological tracking we can implement with our startups, we often know less about what forms of advertising is producing results than does a supposedly unsophisticated restaurant owner. Ignoring Yelp's 'extortion tactics' for the moment (I'm not qualified to comment on those accusations), I don't think they could sustain premium prices for long if the ads were not yielding commensurate results.

I'm curious, how are you handling the time-zone issue? For example, MTV runs an East and West Cost feed. Usually those are just time-shifted mirror images (but not always). Fox often runs eight or more national feeds breaking the country into arbitrary sections (think NFL Sunday). Are you planning to scatter your set-top boxes in different regions of the country?

Nice job on the resume. It's unfortunate the applicant systems preferred by big companies (Taleo, Brassring, etc) do not give candidates a channel through which to differentiate themselves in a creative way as you have done. Of course there are ways to bypass the process entirely using social channels, but that doesn't scale from a systemic standpoint. I'd love to see someone invent a better system.

Actually he was initially a Marxist, then a Libertarian, and then a Marxist again. I tended to agree more with his Libertarian side but no matter what his point of view I always enjoyed reading his work and listening to him debate. He was one of a kind.

I agree. For many people the smart escape path is to continue working your soul-sucking corporate job while building your startup on the side. Quit only after you've succeeded in convincing a few people to pay for your product and you know where to find other people just like them. Pretend your corporate job is an angel investor who takes a 0% equity stake (and demands daily 9-5 board meetings).