skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Have you signed anything regarding IP? Review it.

2. If no, don't worry about it, just don't use anything from the company, including time and domain knowledge.

3. If it's completely non-competitive, and you have the right environment, you may be able to put something pro-dev into writing.

4. Move to Canada, where courts have consistently ruled against these asinine laws.
:( Very much so.
Top Five Tips when Buying an Office Chair
There are some things about Macs that drive me a little nuts, same as any other system, but they do have the very most awesomest terminal program in existence. I can spend ten hours straight in ssh terminals on those things, and that makes 'em almost worth the price tag for me.
I have a suggestion for anyone considering acting on the information in the WSJ article. I suggest that maybe the author of the article has a friend or two in the human-resources department of one of those big tech companies or maybe some executive or lobbyist for a big tech company or industry bought the author a nice lunch or vacation. So before acting on the information in the article, since verifying is easy and inexpensive (by e.g. finding an online forum with employees on it but not employers), I suggest verifying it with a half dozen or so people in the industry you are in.
Sure, I'm with you there. But does "the right people" == "workaholics?". I think not.

I'm always brought back to my army days with this one... I tried out for JTF 2, which is Canada's special forces, basically. Special Forces are like the start-ups of military life... Small teams, high-performers, massive flexibility... One of their #1 knocks on me at the time was that I wasn't married.

Marriage showed stability, it showed you were multi-dimensional, that you had a built in support group, and that you weren't too much of a risk taker.

When you relate that back to the situation at hand, I think you want people who have something to lose, but at the same time have an understanding that there are other important things in life that need to be appreciated and respected.

Workaholics tend not to have this, and because of that they often make one-dimensional decisions, get burnt out, and over exert themselves in the wrong direction.
Actually it has gone way way down: $200M is worth a lot less than it was a year and a half ago =) (except as measured by the amount of real estate you could buy with it...).
Chinese hackers infiltrate Pentagon
I'm curious if anyone out there is doing the "Silky Smooth Searching" thing I mention in the article. Does that have a more official name?

(The idea is to use some AJAX magic to post the user's search term to the server before they actually hit "submit" so that it can be cached when they do run their search).
Suggesting macports is like suggesting gentoo as far as administration time goes.
This is a really great quote:
"Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad. "
Stanford to help new Saudi university in applied math, computer science
I refute your claim with this:

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
There are going to be some scary times. Of course, I have no idea how severely the credit problems will impact high tech - I could guess, but so could any other astute reader of the newspaper.

Personally, I think that if fears like this are enough to send you packing to a bigcorp, then you should probably be working for a bigcorp. This doesn't mean you're uncreative or overly fearful, bu the way. I've worked for bigcorps, and they actually aren't terrible (though I did work for Sun Micro, which is (or at least was) very laid back for a bigcorp). But I have so much more impact on the small startup-ish company I work for now.

If you want to live in the edgier world of startups and small companies, well then you're going to have to stare down some fears. These fears aren't meaningless.
WSJ: Are Start-ups bad for your family?
What OAuth is for, and why not to trust 3rd party clients
reredd: think you've reddit before?
I can only get one mongrel instance running. Search also broke when I deployed. Working on these, but just wanted to get it out there...
How did you get away with iChat? I don't know a single person on AIM account, everybody is either on Yahoo/MSN or even ICQ.
Washington Prepares for Cyber Wargames
Chris Anderson and Michael Arrington on Charlie Rose
I've always thought the opposite. Mainly because I've always bought PC's because I could research and choose the parts appropriate to what I wanted to use the machine for. Then build it myself. Though this has most likely changed now that apple uses intel parts for their machines.
neither have I... that's the point I was trying to make regarding apt-get. Kernel updates, dependency installation / removal, (most) drivers, and even entire OS upgrades are 100% automatic. I'm not saying it's perfect, but Linux has come a long way in that regard.
The amount of "sysadmin crap" you have do to on a macintosh is directly proportional to the amount of "sysadmin crap" you do to your macintosh.
Mac users even feel superior to other Mac users... I've witness the derision of some longtime users to the ' '06 switchers'...
/upvote for caring about the source of motivation
Steve Ballmer and MacBook Air
I posted it because while the comments made by BusinessWeek are self-contradictory and somewhat resigned to a fate of Microsoft-dominated software forever, they do give some insight into problems that startups could help solve, as seen from the standpoint of business users.
weird. i don't know anyone on yahoo. msn only warcraft III players. AIM everyone else.
The recent release of FogBugz 6.0 has, approximately, doubled our sales

Jesus. Who is buying that?
Being a public web forum, we really can't REQUIRE anyone to provide anything here, though if advice requesters are inordinately vague, we are free to not reply...
Are you or your friends from outside of the USA? Seems like AIM is only really popular in the USA.
allright. i came up with something but 1) it only works on windows and 2) you need an extra app. it's a really really good app though

the app is AutoHotkey: http://www.autohotkey.com/

and the script is:

#SingleInstance Force

#Enter::
SendInput mr^a ;mark current spot in register r and select all
Sleep 20
SendInput ^c{Esc}``r ;copy, stop selection, return to spot

;if we have a REPL already, use it. otherwise start a new one
IfWinExist, Arc REPL
WinActivate, Arc REPL
else
start_arc()

MouseClick Right, 50, 50 ;open context menu
SendInput p ;p for paste
exit

start_arc()
{
Run cmd /k cd "c:\\documents and settings\\blahblah\\desktop\\arc2"
Sleep 100 ;wait for the cmd window to show before typing
SendInput mzscheme -m -f "c:/documents and settings/blahblah/desktop/arc2/as.scm"{Enter}

Sleep 200 ;wait for title to change
IfWinExist, C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe - mzscheme
WinSetTitle Arc REPL
}

it's pretty simple. as you can see, it's for Arc, and it's setting a script to windows key + Enter. if you're editing some code in Vim, hit the hot key (when you're in command mode) and the script will ctrl+a -> ctrl+c the code in Vim and right-click paste it in the REPL. if there isn't a REPL open it will first open one and then paste it

you can make modifications such as only running what you have selected (would work well with visual modes,) only running the current paragraph (using the parentheses commands in Vim,) running what you have copied (i.e. Run-from-clipboard) and so on and so forth. you can also have a little window pop up where you can type some code and have it execute etc etc
(I'm not a lawyer and this is not advice. This is based mainly on a former co-worker's experience; his wife happened to be a contract lawyer.)

A lot of engineers seem to forget the IP agreement that they signed when they joined. Typical ones essentially say that any idea you come up with even in your sleep outside of work is owned by your employer...

If you want to keep your job and still do something, depending on the state you live in, you can do something. When your IP employment contract needs to be renewed or signed, bring the contract to a contract / employment lawyer. They can make ammendments to it that are more fair (eg. if the idea is not related to your company's industry and its done outside of company time and resources - it's yours). Again you should probably talk to a lawyer.

btw what state do you live/work in? if it's cali, you may have a little more leverage. if in the south east (and Texas), probably less...
Looking for a technical cofounder
I see that the person I follow with such a query hasn't taken much flak, so I feel good about entering my own. I've just now applied for the YC summer of startup in Boston. My background is in poetics, so it's tough time delivering ideation to engineers, but I'm getting there. What I've got: a drawing board at transmuting WordNet <wordnet.princeton.edu> into a virtual spacetime, over which meaning is generated, amalgamated into cosmic structures, rather than extracted. No successive collating of itemized personal info involved. Ideas are feasible, pending some well done system diagrams to begin with. How does lexical abstraction make any sort of spacetime? Let's talk.
"... When I look at the three larger investments I was involved with, they only have one thing in common: really smart, passionate and tenacious teams. ..."

There is another one that US based hackers might not recognise straight away. That is copying ideas that have hatched in the US & transplanting them into foreign companies. I've lost count of the number of Aus based entrepreneurs that have taken this path:

- go to US

- see, read, hear of some idea

- rebuild the idea altering the concept to suit local conditions

In the tech world the most attractive examples usually involves anything that cannot easily be understood or undertaken by remote outsiders. Of course there is always the temptation to import bluntly stupid ideas like pets dot com.
> “It looks cheap!” “It looks like something my kids can watch on the Cartoon Network for free!”

I demand only the highest quality animated vegetables.
As long as he distributes equity and is upfront with people about requiring them to be workaholics (and he obviously is) I think it's a perfectly reasonable policy.
It's much different than his other articles, which are glorified ads for his software.
Montana says "no thanks" to Bush's USSR ID Cards
Should a senior in Comp Sci know what a .tar file is?
Today at work I met an intern who happened to be a senior in computer science at a well-known area college. While helping them to get started on an assignment, it struck me as odd when they were working in Notepad, double-clicking what were obviously command-line programs, and didn't know what a .tar file was.

Who is to blame here? Clearly the student doesn't have a passion for what they are studying. On the other hand, how does a computer science department let students go nearly 4 years without exposure to things like UNIX-like operating systems?
This isn't a big deal.
I have a better suggestion: don't act on information from this article, but act on information relating to your own life.
eh

I don't really feel that a professor should go through and explain common filetypes, that really isn't computer science.

However, if a 21 year old is passionate about programming, they will have come into contact with a command line and tar files on their own obviously.
It would have been nice for the Institute to have done this when I was an undergrad there. I only wish that it didn't have to require a Senate investigation to get them to open up the pursestrings.
Ask HN: Could you implement News.YC in your favorite language?
State the language/framework and how long it would take you.
MIT is a private institution. It's their endowment, so they should be able to support Canadians or anyone else if they choose to.
was this post written by some kind of random phrase combining algorithm?
This site makes me cry... reddit was so great in the past.
Salesforce.com’s Secrets Of Startup Success
SXSW: Bankrupt Your Startup the Easy Way
I'm not a programmer and I found your example horrific.

It seems like a biz guy not knowing what excel is.
Ok: Classic ASP, and about a week... or Python/django in about a day.

So, why are you asking this?
Had it existed, it may have changed my life... although I actually love my life right now, so maybe that's overrated. :-)
I got a free hosted version for beta testing, and I can say it's much, much better than ANY product I've used in any of my day jobs. I'm happily using it for my own projects and I wish my day job would use it.
"My background is in poetics"

I'd love to see your business plan :-)
pretty funny/interesting comments on this at techcrunch
Definitely. There are a couple philosophical discussions I am participating in which require long, drawn out replies, while my yc posts are generally very short.
I started out with a Powerbook 140, and I don't think 26 counts as old here. I have a T20 too - 6th laptop I've owned. I've rebuilt it 3 or 4 times and replaced everything but the screen at some point. It's a good machine aside from having an annoying tendency to corrupt the contents of its CMOS chip.

I've noticed both Apple and IBM/Lenovo dropping in quality over the past 10 years or so. I have a Thinkpad 600X from 1998 or so - it's made mostly of carbon fiber, with a rubber coating. My Z61m is made mostly of cheap plastic, though it does have a metal frame and titanium lid. Apple uses either polycarbonate or aluminum, but seems to have a high rate of logic board failures. I'm not a huge fan of metal on the surfaces of a laptop that come in to contact with my body during use either - it transmits heat.
I like it. Sounds much less defensive.
Why isn't it?
do you know any public places worth discussing philosophy at?
Fire the workaholics
Chatterous (YC winter 08) connects your friends via SMS, IM, email, and web
BBC - Horizon - 2008 - Are we Alone in the Universe? [video, 48 minutes]
Mentors? Benefactors?
We had a guy at our company with a Masters in cs and he didn't know the shortcuts for copy and paste! His first code review was unbelievably painful. Suffice to say he didn't last too long.
I understand that, given the content of my appeal, these jokes are to be expected. Tho I assure you I mean business. Most people I approach about this startup take me seriously, in fact, as they should. I've agonized over it most of last year, while propelling a poetry journal to significant regard. Thanks for reading. Hope we can talk.
And this is why people like the mac. I can edit an XML file in emacs, I just don't want to have to figure out which file to edit and what to put in there.
Has anyone been able to find the original "Mindset Profile" from "Mindset Media" about this? My searches so far have turned up a bunch of commentary but no original references.
Melting of Arctic ice will facilitate access to vast storehouses of fossil fuels
What's important is whether this person has any important skills that you care about. Also, it's quite possible to get by under Windows without knowing anything about tar files.
Certainly.

None of the smartest people I know would stay in such a place. Few would be effective while there. Many would try to sabotage it.
No real compelling points to the article and it brings up a number of arguments which appear to support the proposition it is purporting to rebut.

The overwhelming impression I get of this guy's world view is that it is all a zero sum game and the most important question to worry about is the distrubution of this finite amount of power.
The Wisdom of the Chaperones:  Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.
congrats guys! looks slick
Man, I sound bitter. I should clarify that I also think a lot more people would be interested to learn if the material was presented in an interesting way. As Lockhart points out, school somehow has a way of taking all of the life out of the subject. This alienates a lot of people who could otherwise really take an interest in the subject and pursue it for its own sake.

This definitely happened to me with math. I liked math as a kid and enjoyed it, but in HS and college math just became total monotony and boredom. I'm now taking time to study some of it on my own and getting a lot more out of it, as I actually understand and appreciate what I'm reading.
My cat feels superior to me, but I don't think it is. Not by much at least.
"... If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source. If it's tangential to your business, default is to open-source. ..."

I would have thought it's the other way around.

Lots of code is just that, code. It doesn't make money by itself. You could try to sell it as is. But I'm not sure if you could make a living off it. On the other hand if you give it away [0] and let users own it something interesting happens. Firstly most users have trouble using it. Some others want additions but don't have the skill to do it. Or simply no time. Then there are others who rely on this software 24/7 but realise that division of labour means it's cheaper to get someone else to run and maintain the software.

The software I'm thinking about in particular is WordPress.[1] The software is free to use but most will probably pay a small fee to have their blogs hosted with domain names and other extras. The company automattic hacks on WordPress and various other projects building a business around the software they gave away for free. [2]

So how did WordPress start? How could it afford to give away it's business core at that time? Users flocked to WordPress after deserting Movable Type looking for fairer alternative. [3] The groundswell of users gave WordPress the opportunity to create a business.

I don't think the software is the core business. Converting ideas into software is the core business. Giving away the "object code" of their ideas, allowed automattic to grow. [4]

[0] What license can make a lot of difference. I've heard of a lot of developers releasing software only to be screwed over by companies not abiding by rules of the license. I'm thinking about busybox

- http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-utA38iMHlYJ:perens.com...

- http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html

[1] http://wordpress.com/about/

[2] http://automattic.com/about/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#History
Maybe he wrote the poem on the cover of ANSI Common Lisp.
I lack a mac and so, I can't use the iPhone SDK.

And not being able to run anything in the background, means that my application wouldn't work well at all on the iPhone.

I guess it's Android for me.
I do use AHK for other things but never used it for this purpose, so, Thanks! I do my coding in my Linux machine though.
Agreed. It's not the school's responsibility to teach a student what a .tar is, but if the kid is doing any programming out of personal interest he should have come across it.

In my experience, CS students who know what they are doing are usually using Mac or Linux by the time they graduate.
The money quote is that one of the explicit purposes of public school is to indoctrinate our children to be patriotic and to defend the nation. That is nationalism folks, the movement that helped cause most of the wars in the last century. The movement that is right now causing riots in Serbia.

It may not sound like such a huge thing, but even in second grade I remember refusing to say the pledge of allegiance, despite my parents never pushing any kind of left OR right wing ideology on me.
okay? I think i am missing something...
Coding Horror: A Question of Programming Ethics
Parallels or VMware. I have a mac book pro and I find that having access to windows and Ubuntu is great. The best of all three worlds.
Ask YC: Foreign exchange student wants to incorporate
So one of the dev on our team is a foreign exchange student.

By law, he cannot work for a off-campus corporate
entity without express permission from DHS.

His country's attache is suggesting that he not receive any equity when we incorporate, and file it as an internship.

(Trust is not an issue for our team regarding equity)

When we incorporate, how should we handle this?
I dropped out from college after a successful year because I understood I was losing my time. If I had gotten in debt to pay an expensive tuition, I would have pursued the studies for the wrong reasons, just to rationalize the insane expenses and to get that piece of paper. Thank god I was free to drop out and do something else.

On a side note, a lot of psychological studies as well as common sense suggest that people wherever they are and whatever they do are less motivated if they don't get consideration. No wonder why the students that have the perspective of a Harvard or MIT diploma are much more motivated than those who attend to community college.
Wanted to implement something similar, don't want to pick a bad framework.
http://www.rescuetime.com :)
i think both of them are aggressive hyperbole and this should be considered when calculating the usefulness of the information.
That should read in fact.
That's why I used "obliged"... I meant in terms of what we should reasonably expect from advice-seekers.
Steve jobs hates buttons, I don't know about the other models but the MacBook Pro has two buttons, as does the mighty mouse, you've just got to enable it.
You need to talk to an immigration lawyer. Equity and employment are two separate issues. There should be no problem in giving him equity, since US law imposes almost no nationality based restrictions on ownership in a company. Getting him to legally work for the company is a different matter, and depends entirely on what visa he has.
I for one would agree with this - if my startup ever hires an outside employee the cheesy inspirational poster on our virtual office wall would read - Work smarter, not harder. 'Tactical' code decisions compound over time, making changes in the future harder and harder.
Here is some observations after I created an account & tried it (in a very limited way) ~ http://www.chatterous.com/landing/newsyc/

- easily create account

- has unique url's (important if you want to cut+paste, send to others)

- email authorisation in reasonable time

- basic customisation (as expected) though no memorable default icon (think twitter, flickr)

- each post has unique url (good so I can refer to them in the future).

- not sure of post size limit (twit is 140 characters) what is chatterous?

- entry box needs a few visual feedback indicators (not important just yet) what will be clipped when sent to sms?

- links in comments are not rendered as links but text (how are long urls handled? tinyurl like twitter is bad - I don't know the solution?)

Only the creation side which always leads to the next bit convincing your friends that they need to get on board. From flickr to twitter, twitter to friendfeed this has been the bane of my life on any "social-service". I don't have any real suggestions [0] other than an observation on icons. Most of my twitter friends who I know from flickr use recognisable icons. So when I saw the icons on friendfeed I could sign them on immediately.

[0] All companies are suffering because of this. No company wants to give away their users friends list. Though the first company that allows easy access to friends will be my customer for life. When is this problem going to be solved?
They're coming from opposite situations: startup vs. established business. I wonder: could a startup succeed (make its founders rich) if it was made up of non-workaholics?
The midwest is pretty big. Are you looking from someone to be onsite or telecommute?
You are wrong to suggest that you have to convice your friend to get on this. Your friends don't even need to be on chatterous to stay connected to you.

Chatterous is just social glue - they don't even bind you to the site.