skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem isn't source code theft, it's this, in the words of the Smule CEO [1]:

"If you fork off a startup and there's IP overlap, it's just a big mess."

And the big legal mess favors the company with more resources, something Smule knows. Whether the lawsuit is personal doesn't really matter. What matters is that former employees started a company in an overlapping product space, which unfortunately made them an easy target for litigation.

1: http://uk.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video-lawsuit-...
This thing guzzles up to 300 watts under load. There is no way this chip is not going to be throttled to death in a laptop form factor, unless the laptop itself makes more fan speed than a 747. I personally own a Gigabyte Brix Pro i7 and it gets hot and throttled as soon as you load the 8 cores, and this is a 65 watt TDP. Sure, this monster-chip-in-a-notebook pitch sounds great in the press release. It's not going to be a good piece of engineering.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-re...
Very simple: a system like this could become a legally accepted standard.
All of this stuff takes effort. That people aren't willing to expend.
Things to Remember When Teaching Junior Developers
This number ("one in three") is really ambiguous[0], as I haven't seen them state what they consider a farm to be. It could be the Ag Census data (~2.2 million farms), or along some subset (say non-family farms at ~90 thousand), or some farm type (I believe I've previously seen them say "row crop farms").

I'm sure it seems like an impressive stat to throw out there, but it's a lot like saying they're offering a million shares of options to new employees; without the total number of shares we don't know what that means.

[0] http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html
I've worked with Meteor on and off for the past few months and it's very fun and fast for development. It's very exciting to see how quickly Meteor is moving ahead. I'm eagerly awaiting the official release of Galaxy as production deployment is a bit involved with different options to piece together for Mongo and Node hosting.

My biggest concerns are the lack of official support for server-side rendering, routing and relational db. Although, many of the common concerns you'll see in the HN comments are on the development roadmap[1].

[1] https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, if you're under non disclosure, somebody shares an idea with you, and you use it, then you've stolen an idea. Or, if the idea is patented.

Enforcement could be another issue, depending on evidence.
From the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe".

To me it seems quite desirable: a decentralized protocol for sending government-backed money in a way that is legal (strong crypto isn't protection from being arrested for money laundering), and yet offers better privacy and is more open to competition than existing networks of banks/credit cards/PayPal.
This isn't the first time, even for a yc company. Remember AdGrok? I think the original post is down, but the short version is the founders met while working for AdChemy. AdChemy's ceo Murthy Nukala -- who sounds like a real piece of work; he apparently got $2.4m [1] in the eventual walmart acquisition while the employees got fuckall -- sued AdGrok and basically killed the company. They had to raise while being sued and the founders basically got tired of the stress [2].

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/document-from-walmart-adchemy...

[2] http://priceonomics.com/the-time-my-startup-got-sued/
For my part, I can't stand JSX. The 'magic' behavior of using things without quotes/escaping just makes me go "ewww".
Apparently, the software only checks if the steering wheel is being moved. If the car is being tested on a platform and the steering never moves, "clean mode" is engaged; if driving on a road, "Enough-emissions-to-choke-a-Humvee mode" is enabled.
From my own experience with Ruby and MRI, there's quite a strong culture of "transparency of code". It's not unusual if you're really down into some "interesting" problem to delve first into your gems/frameworks, and eventually even into MRI itself. Being a PL polyglot pays off in spades in these cases, since you get a solid understanding of the underpinnings of everything.

Note that there's very rarely any need to go there, but the fact that it's both possible and culturally encouraged makes a huge difference for those of us who've needed it.
In our case, we did not develop anything Shred-related (ideas or otherwise) while we were employed at Smule. So invention assignment is not at issue, because we did not moonlight on Shred Video while employed by Smule. I knew I wanted to build products for the GoPro audience, which is why I left Smule. Mark left for his own different reasons, and we only began prototyping on things that turned into Shred Video after he left Smule.
That's a very helpful explanation, thank you.
Tesla is on that trajectory. But the plan was always to go for the lower market eventually and use the higher end markets to incubate the technology, so I don't know if it counts. I think you just need some serious institutional discipline to make it work.

Same deal with SpaceX.
We had the same idea but wanted to go much much further.
You should really try it out, its called Collusion.
https://col.lu/
You have to sign up but it keeps your drawings like google docs and is real-time collaborative without the other people signing up.

Works on everything too, tablets, laptops, supports ms surface etc and is free for public drawings.

The explore page on our website also shows you what others have drawn so also check that out. https://collusionapp.com/explore
Yes. MongoDB is the only officially supported application for Collections.
Google+ on Firefox is a great example. If you use Firefox, it'll actually cause Firefox to seize and lock up for several seconds while it loads.
New Khan Academy mobile apps, including first official Android app
I think it's absolutely crucial private citizens have this right, to not be permanently judged in a court of public opinion for things outside of their control, dictated by a search engine.
Burlingame and Menlo Park are both restricted by street crossings on both sides of the station, not to mention that many stops are limited by platform length. I'm not sure if it would make sense to make just a subset of the stops.

An unofficial blog about Caltrain and California HSR talks about one solution to the capacity problem and some non-solutions. I personally take it with a grain of salt, but it's still interesting: http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-virtues-of-widt...
They're big fans of Clojure (and are sponsoring clojure/conj).
> I doubt go to C calling conventions are going to be the slowest part of calling tcsetattr().

Well, by "C calling conventions" it really means "performing a stack switch to get out of M:N, allocating a big stack if necessary or taking a lock to check one out". It's quite a lot of overhead and I wouldn't be surprised if it dwarfs the cost of the SYSENTER/SYSEXIT pair in many cases.
And C is also not meant to be functional, but yet, there's a 400+ page book on Functional C: http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/1077/02/book.pdf
I appreciate this unbiased view. You're absolutely right that reading emotional appeals online is a slippery slope.

However, reading this Business Insider article about the case (http://www.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video-lawsuit...) really underscores the apparent sleaze on Smule's side:

> You compare a 100-person company with 10, 30, 40 million dollars in the bank to a two-person startup. If it goes to litigation, if we're wrong, we'll win.

> Right? We'll win. We'll put a giant law firm on it and we'll do all of the discovery and we'll do all the depositions and we'll win. And if we're right, we'll still win.

Pretty much no matter how you slice it, saying "even if we're wrong, we'll win" because of money in the bank sounds pretty awful.
I don't have to know the specifics of all the laws to expect that they're followed. When I buy a car, I expect that car to be legal to sell.

The harm done to customers will be really obvious in those jurisdictions where customers have to get this fixed to maintain their registration, since power and fuel efficiency will be affected.
I can't remember seeing them looking for anything other than Postgres, which seems less like "big data" than... regular data. Maybe they don't put their heavy duty stuff in job listings?
add #JohnDoeHatesTheConstitution to your tweets for minimum effort - at least mention the bad players

A company or institution cannot introduce or vote on a law, a Representative or Senator can
It's right on the home page:

Taler uses an electronic mint holding financial reserves in existing currencies. This means that Taler is not a new currency with the inherent currency fluctuation risks, but instead the cryptographic coins correspond to existing currencies, such as US Dollars, Euros or even BitCoins.

So, yes, inflation is possible, since the digital coins are tied to existing currencies.
What makes that worth noting?
Again, the c.o.n.t.e.x.t is emissions.
You also can't patent ideas.
Non-disclosure is just a form of contract. It doesn't itself protect ideas from theft. If they are valuable enough, or if the contract is not enforceable, then the person can still walk away with the material. They need to look to tradesecret law, that is IF any of their code qualifies for tradesecret protection.

The big if is in the relevant code:
"(d) Trade secret means information, including a formula,
pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that (2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy."

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?file=3426-3426...
10% is kind of a lot.
Errr, All I'm seeing in the article is a, 'We didn't use any of their code guys, see compare the functionality of our products yourself.' Unfortunately, as true as the article might be, simply showing different functionality doesn't mean you didn't steal other portions of the codebase that don't deal directly with the algorithms of what you're doing. For all the reader knows you stole video decoding/encoding, audio decoding/encoding portions or something even as innocuous as a GUI frontend. Now agreeing to do a 3rd party analysis is a wise thing, hopefully the legal system forces this. If the accusation is that code was stolen, then someone should have to actually verify against what is alleged that they stole, it'd be pretty ridiculous if they awarded any damages without doing anything like this and simply went on the basis that 'they are similar products or may use similar algorithms.' Being similar or using similar algorithms does not mean they are the same.
lol @ preposterous. That's the law yo.

Copyright - Source code that has been copied.
Patent - Monopoly on an idea.
Trade Secret Law - N/A. They are former employees.
Non Compete Agreement - Agreements in restraint of competititon are void in California.

Shred's story sounds credible to me. The fact that Smule offered to make this lawsuit go away in exchange for equity sounds a lot like extortion to me. Why would they settle for a % of a company when they already own 100% of the secret sauce that was stolen? If their claim is as baseless as this article [1] suggests, RICO or anti-SLAPP laws should definitely apply.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/on-the-shred-video-lawsuit
"Single" probably means "not married," which doesn't mean celibacy (unless that's your thing).
That's probably not even close to true. Without wading into the morass of what an "idea" is, a boilerplate employee agreement might list things like:

technical information, methods, processes, formulae, compositions, systems, techniques, inventions, machines, computer programs, research, business information, customer lists, pricing data, sources of supply, financial data, and marketing, production, or merchandising systems or plans

If your employer is working with a concept or idea and can tangibly tie it to anything like these (or any of a similar list of "artifacts") that employees had access to, then it's very dangerous for employees to start their own firms based on those concepts or ideas.

(I have no idea what's going on with Smule/Shred! Shred sounds very credible right now.)
It's terrible here, stay away :)

Proximity to the outdoors are just one reason people like living here (even if they aren't bros or bro-burners whatever that is). The food's endlessly great and people generally seem content with the culture/social life. That doesn't mean Manhattan is bad- it has a lot of great things. Different strokes for different folks. If you feel your SF dollar is worth 10 Manhattan dollars, act accordingly. It's worth noting the software jobs pay less well there, and there's a smaller community which has it's plusses and minuses (like being at a large school vs a small school).

Not all men are into women, and not all single people are celibate. Enjoy the snow :)
When I left an employer to found a startup, I didn't say a word. Just said I was leaving for another position, gave notice, and left normally.

I agree: rookie mistake. This is particularly true given that there's at least some market overlap (video, etc.) and the CEO gave a talk where he basically threatened employees.
You can do that anyway, and some people do in fact replace their controller chips with modified clones to boost performance.

http://www.chipexpress.com/
I don't know if I'd say it's really the same. There's tons of drawing apps, but this is much more of a nostalgic thing, and it's for kids.

Also, it's open source, which is a huge draw. (I'm going to be porting it to a web platform... probably tonight, I'm excited.)
Southern Pacific back in the early 1990's was looking to abandon the railroad.

San Mateo County bought the right of way and formed a 3 county partnership.

Unfortunately, there is no dedicated funding source for Caltrain. So it is entirely at the mercy of the fortunes of Santa Clara VTA, San Francisco Muni and Samtrans. Each one of those agencies have as their first priority local service busses, light rail, and BART.

Caltrain gets the scraps (especially from VTA ) which rather spend Billions on BART instead of a penny on Caltrain.
> call _in_uiomove,0

Should probably add a few more for the called function, no?
That was the end result of my family experimenting with both bagel and pretzel recipes when I was a kid.
How can you declare their lack of interest in investigating - the Medium post is 2 hours old. If you think that its simply a case of not using your old employers code then you're naive (See: The Social Network).

FTR: I'm not on either side here but I'm unsure if this blog post was the wisest move.
Thanks.

I did see a job listing that noted "familiarity with stuff like Hadoop" (paraphrasing). So it seemed to cast doubt on them using Hadoop, but it neither served to confirm nor deny.
Oh, shit, that's where I remember the name from. They made the Ocarina app for the iPhone. Who would've thought a company could succeed on novelties like that?
Etter å ha lært litt norsk det plager meg også.
I love the heck out of this.
Or a bareknuckled way to take 10% of a company, or even just a signal to intimidate current employees.

I worked for a small ($30-$50m annual revenue) company sued by a giant ($47B annual revenue) company. The goal, which worked, was to drain my employer's bank accounts on $5+m of legal expenses per year to keep a superior but less expensive product out of market.
You're mistaken. Google's "free wifi" in Mountain View, particularly in downtown Mountain View, is unusable.
What a weirdly defensive comment. Someone can't be bothered to learn Rust, eh?
Also worth noting that the Ag Census likely overstates the number of farms in the US, so it's not out of line for FarmLogs to come up with their own number for their target market.
> For what, exactly, are we giving California 10% of our income?

So you can get better service than what you have today. Caltrain has no dedicated funding source and relies (too much) on handouts from Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco.

As a result, is is always short of money to really ramp up the service.

Hopefully high-speed rail money will change this.
The 9xx series has pretty good power management. In practice even at 4k resolutions a 980 or 980ti will spend a lot of time running below 100% TDP.

Also, those measurements in the anandtech article are total system power, not GPU power, which is why the idle measurement is in the 70w range. (Modern GPUs generally do not pull down 70w at idle.)

One of the upsides to having a really high-spec GPU in a laptop is that as long as the power management is done properly, it can burst up to full speed to get you low latency for rendering and then drop back down to idle. In sustained rendering scenarios (like games) it may end up thermal/acoustic/power throttled, but that happens on desktops anyway - it will just throttle quicker and scale down a bit more.
Good comment, but it's 'yin" :)

(and while I'm at it they aren't capitalized either)
The value of being cavalier
Microsoft has some experience with expired certificates [1].

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/windows-azure-service...
True. I just meant clock rates faster than 50MHz or so, so you need tiny pin/ball arrays instead of something huge and overengineered.
You know, back in the current universe, 3% of LA's streets are already private, yet they don't charge poor Joe to drive on them. Maybe we should look into how those are funded before making assumptions?
It doesn't look like there is any way to have per-receive hooks anymore: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/26
To anyone who doubts this direction, come to Portland, aka Bay Area 2. While you're here, ask local realtors how many homes sold to Californians in the last year.
That doesn't seem telling to me, because Smule is probably just listening to their lawyers. And their lawyers are probably advising them to just wait for court. That seems like the right strategy for Smule regardless of the facts of the case.
> From the description it seems like "GNU PayPal" or "XMPP for Stripe.

The name itself screams "money": a taler is a thaler is a dollar and they all come from from the valley of Saint Joachim (Joachimsthal) where they had a silver mine. You may thank the Holy Roman Empire for making good coinage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler
All of those are more tangible than "ideas."

IANAL, but here's an example:

"It would be cool to make an app that does X" <-- not likely protected

"Our marketing research shows that there is a $3B market for an app that does X" <-- likely protected, but needs some requirements to be a trade secret.

[edit]

Also, many states allow enforcement of non-compete agreements, and in some cases that may include areas the company is planning on entering at the time of your employ.
"and you guys can all be friends". What world are you living in? This man is trying to destroy their livelihood. It's almost like a direct physical attack on them and their families.
3000 Rice genomes are publicly available on AWS
> In our case, we did not develop anything Shred-related (ideas or otherwise) while we were employed at Smule. So invention assignment is not at issue, because we did not moonlight on Shred Video while employed by Smule.

Please recognize that assignment is likely an issue because Smule will almost certainly try to claim the opposite of what you're claiming. It doesn't mean that they will be able to prove their claims, but you should at least be aware of the fact that there are two sides to every legal dispute and both parties have the opportunity to make their case.

If this isn't matter isn't settled, the legal process provides the means to sort it all out and you'll have the opportunity to evaluate the evidence supporting Smule's claims as part of the discovery process.
Brian from Backblaze here. We'll add a LITTLE bit of app hosting support around this, but you won't be seeing a full blown EC2 type of product out of Backblaze for a while, realistically we don't have a large enough team to charge down that path and still do a great job at B2 and also our traditional online backup product that we still maintain.

What I'd really like in the short term is to do a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.
What do you mean by "legalistic"? Isn't that the right type of defense, when you are dealing with law?

Say there is another case with all the facts are exactly as stated: goliath vs. little guy, and you are the little guy. What would you have the little guy do differently?
Has been resolved since over 2 years ago:

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/History.md#v060-...
In other words,head we win,tail you loose,according to Jeff Smith.Sounds like a bully to me.
This number of course applies to only their targeted market, farms of a certain size and then only those growing two or three specific crops, but that's a long ass headline.
Really? You don't give a shit about personal safety or your possessions?

I live in a (practically) zero crime area that has no yuppies and is very cheap. It's nowhere near SFO :)
> Some interfaces may be defined to use macros, and some platforms may make things work when compiled through the C compiler but not through the dynamic-linker interface. One example that I've run into recently, when binding things in Rust, is the cmsg API, which is primarily defined in terms of macros to walk a heterogeneous array, and has to be reimplemented in Rust (with platform-specific code):

The worst offender I've seen here is Xlib, which has to recreate the internal layout of large structs like Display that have haphazardly grown fields over the decades in order to deal with macros that reach into them: https://github.com/servo/rust-xlib/blob/master/src/xlib.rs#L...
It might be, but it's still hard to believe. Has anyone written a blog post with some reasonable napkin math? Some breakdown of a prominent company of engineers by salary range?

Fully agree, a lot of software will be entrenched in the Bay for decades to come.
Can you try using the package for 14.04?
Perhaps it isn't. If the figures are accurate, capturing 1/3 of their desired market in 3 years seems pretty incredible.
It's more than that - there's extra information that's compiled alongside your runtime data structures whenever you write C++. For example, every class with virtual member functions has a vtable, and every object of such a class has a pointer to the vtable. Every time you access a virtual member function, it's indirecting through the vtable to find the particular address to call, and then calling it with the object itself as the first argument.

If you got rid of name mangling (and a few other C++ features that are besides the point), you could certainly call C++ from C. The thing is - your C calls would look exactly like what the article is suggesting. That's why it's important to learn this technique: it is what your C++ compiler is doing under the hood. Indeed, the very first C++ compilers were just preprocessors that transformed C++ syntax into the type of vtable + base class + first parameter indirection that you see here.
What were the reasons that C was adopted over these other options? (Honestly don't know, I wasn't around in those days...)
@aidenn0
> "Our marketing research shows that there is a $3B market for an app that does X" <-- likely protected.
-----
I don't see how even that would or should be protected.