skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it sounds like my only options are:

1. Quit, if I really believe in an idea, and work on it somehow without any income or by working with a company that doesn't require such an agreement (which I have yet to encounter around here). I'm not quite confident enough in the idea to do that... but I would like to be able to work on it to see what it turns out to be.

2. Get a waiver, somehow, by wading through all the bureaucracy. If they would sign such a thing, it would obviously be worth it, but I worry about all the fuss this could cause by trying to go up the chain to the appropriate level, for an idea still in its infancy.

"Ask a lawyer" aside, are there any other options? Has anyone ever been to the point where their company actually showed interest in what they were working on, on the side?
Try accessing it from Android/iPhone (buzz.google.com). I can access it on my phone even though it isn't popping up in Gmail yet.
During the live event they mentioned that it might take up-to a few days for Buzz to show up in Gmail for everyone.
I really liked Chris Dixon's post "What's strategic for Google?" from a while back: http://cdixon.org/2009/12/30/whats-strategic-for-google/
... following his line of thinking, this may be a lame me-too product, but they _have_ to run it anyway: if they allow Facebook to move a lot of user-hours away from the internet to what is really a big intranet, that would kill Google's revenue.
To have a kid is to create such a person who really needs your help, can do nothing in return, and needs help on a continual basis. This is a horrible thing to do! Not to mention that those created will most likely do the same thing in turn, reinforcing the vicious cycle.

You don't quite seem to be advising people to lead a meaningful life by having kids, but it's close. Your recommendation to help people in need who are already born, though, is sound.
+1.

And likely if you live in another state this would not be upheld, especially if you were building something wholly unrelated to your employer's product / service.

I'm no lawyer though, so do some research regarding your state's labor laws.
Way ahead of you.

I told my girlfriend that I didn't get together with her for her looks yet she married me anyways. That was 20 years ago and we're still married.
That's like saying it's silly to ask a doctor why you have chest pain before you ask Reddit. This is not an area where you want the opinions of a bunch of non-experts. Pay the relatively small amount of money to find out the answer from some who actually understands the relevant law.
Re-Engineering the Human Immune System
My day job is not suffering in the least. I have to provide for my family, and I make sure to clearly separate the two. I take pride in what I do. I think my boss would agree, so I'm not worried there.
India now has social networks related to caste
exciting. more options to scale django apps without google app engine. all it needs now is a mascot with magical powers...
I guess the iPhone must be an abject failure then! After all, Nokia's 3300 series has sold over 200 million of those phones. So it's clear there's only one winner in the mobile phone market!

Please, if you're going to compare numbers, be aware of what you're comparing. The Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 are only similar if you're an outsider and can't realize the apple to oranges comparison that's taking place.

The Wii's major feature is that it's a family entertainment system and not a gaming console. The reason it's sold so much is because, as many others have stated, it managed to breach into new market segments. Yet when I talk with any person that dedicates a significant portion of their time to playing games (ie a gamer) they never talk about the Wii, they talk about the Modern Warfare 2, PS3 and Xbox360.
A Declaration for Capitalism
Thought it was a little funny to see that http://buzz.com/ seems to be a similar unlaunched service from AT&T with the same name.

It seems they've managed to roll up what a lot of others were doing into a seemly nicely integrated package. I would like to think that this will give location based networks the push they need to become more mainstream.
Open source software is frequently a clone of commercial software and free. If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil. Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.
Agreed in a social context; in a business context, though, short status updates from the people I email most (and higher ups) are very very useful...
They're certainly doing their best to hijack the "Buzz" product name away from Yahoo!.
"Any prosecutor can convict a guilty man: it takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man." --Melvyn Bruder

(http://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl_transcript.html)
Unfortunately, this is something I heard from a Googler at SMX East. And I don't know how applicable it is--a human would find a long list of navigation links boring, but to a search bot they have much more content than, e.g., a list of "related pages".
I want to be clear that I'm not asking legal advice. I would never make a decision based solely on advice from friends.. but your opinions matter. Many of you have been in the same situation, so aside from the "ask a lawyer" suggestion I knew I'd get, I'd love to hear from people who have been in this situation. :)
My question: Why does Paul Graham think you must be in silicon valley when doing an Internet startup? Living expenses there are expensive, broadband is available everywhere, and many people are outside the valley and successful.
From a Y Combinator's "customer's" standpoint, (the new companies applying) with all the iterations and increased class sizes, what's to keep the magic sauce from disappearing? Can larger class sizes get the same attention from you guys as founders did during the first session?
Is Buzz built with Wave? Can't find a mention anywhere, but it sure looks like Wave.
Yeah, but that’s not really the topic here, right? I guess you lost track.
Agreed. The problem with regressive taxes is that it ignores that there's a sweet spot in income for people who perform efficient financial transactions. In reality, efficiency doesn't come into play for those who have little discretionary income, so it doesn't matter, outside of the moral standpoint of excising taxes on those who truly can't afford it. They spend the money as soon as they get it. The issue is with the top few hundred thousand income generators, who are heavily incentivized to maintain the status quo, and also have the means to put resources towards it thru lobbying, purchasing and killing innovative competitors, etc.
I've always thought that if a company claims rights over what you do outside worktime, they should do it not only for your genial ideas, but for the bad ones too. So, if you incur in a stupid debt it must belong to the company. Your newborn baby? The company mus pay alimony. It's all or nothing!
Just the kind of advice based on experience I was hoping to see. Thanks
and rand was wrong about much as well.
Maybe the page designer has a "tell" :)
Mine was exactly right: INTP.
Google Buzz: Forget Twitter, Microsoft's SharePoint is a bigger target
Astaga.com Lifestyle on the Net: Green Lifestyle | Dwiki Setiyawan
I have never signed a contract/non-compete/IP agreement without making a number of edits to it first. So far I've always been able to get it changed to something that works for me.
Well, it's true. There are more iPhones in use than devices running Android.
I know YC recruits founders from all over. However as someone in Asia seeing more and more great Chinese web services, I'd love to know if any YC companies primarily serve a non-English speaking market.
Litigation, or often additional consulting fees to add the features.
Again agree. I'll just add (again my opinion only) that I'm on the fence about the whole app store thing. I think if Apple had, at release, provided a comprehensive Javascript API that really allowed for very low level functionality on the iPhone we might all be happily making iPhone 'apps' as webpages. But we all know that didn't happen and opening the app platform may have revealed an unforeseen sweet spot of consumer software. One where the buyer no longer has to worry about installations, complex conflicts, software dependencies, drivers, etc. Consumer software may not be the same again. Who knows, perhaps this portends the downfall of the filesystem we all know and love.
Right, so the interesting twist in Google's story is that because of their dominance in the open web it is in their interest to protect the open nature of the web, rather than lock users into another walled garden. That's pretty cool, and I think they've been very smart to position themselves that way. It's still surprising how they completely fail to innovate in some areas, though.
Do you always run to the doctor at the first sign of chest pain? I would bet you, or most everyone, does just a little bit of research/asking around first. That's all I'm doing.
If you have a good relationship with your boss and your work is not influenced by your side-project by all means talk directly to him/her. Nothing like having actual management support to get things moving quickly.
Yes, your company owns all the inventions you come up, including off-hour work, during your employment with them. And companies are not hesitant to sue to get your IP. There were cases before and they won. That's why people moved to states like California where protect innovation by individuals. For your current situation, you should keep quiet and keep working on your project. When it's ready, quit your job. Continue to work on it quietly for two months before going public. Good luck.
Everyone recognizes the iPhone, very few will know what the N1 is.
There are many, many more iPhones and iPod Touches out there than there are Nexus Ones. Google wants as many people as possible to be using this, so they're showing these people that it will work with their devices.

They'll save the 'superior device' angle for other features where the size of the user base is less important (GPS Navigation).
Of course I am not a lawyer (but I am an English major!), but I think many are misreading the last part quoted.

"any of the foregoing" means "anything we talked about earlier" not "anything whatever".

They need the last part because copyright is a sticky thing. All copyrights stick with the owner unless they are a "work for hire" or very explicitly granted in exchange for some good consideration, and you can't simply declare something to be a "work for hire", even by contract--it has its own meaning in law and (even more so) judicial interpretation of law. In (a) they try to define what they'd like to be included in "work for hire", but if it came down to it, a judge might not agree, so they require you to explicitly assign rights to everything in (a) (and possibly b, c,... don't know what's omitted) just in case they don't have them already.

If there's nothing important between the two sections you quoted, then I believe the ownership of your invention would hinge on the judgment of whether your invention relates to the company's business. Also any applicable state laws, etc..

I'm not qualified to answer completely, and even a relevantly trained lawyer would need to know the state, but I think there's good reason for hope.
It's better than Twitter and FF because the messages can be larger. Images and videos look better. You can see a conversation inline. etc.

It's taking the best of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter, Friendfeed and putting it into Google's social graph. It's innovative with the combination of features they've chosen to employ, but it's not original, though. Search was never new when Google started either, remember.

-- edit: I am going to use Buzz to start blogging again. Instant viewer base, who I can identify.
Equity Financing Documents (mentioned in Mixergy Talk)
From the looks of it, Google has integrated Buzz into their existing products (gmail, maps, places) that makes it more than just a me-too product. Specifically, a big advantage is in the way Buzz integrates with Gmail - it's brilliant.

Compare how you would reply to an email notification from Facebook or Twitter: you'd have to login to the site and post your reply (or even see the actual reply) there. With Buzz, it's inline.
Part time Entrepreneurship requires Commitment
Most true open source software doesn't have the launch pad of GMail either. Besides that, the fact that the open source community clones software and gives it away is just as sad. Open sourcing something doesn't make it pure.

If that were enough to be "evil" then everything would be evil.

I don't care if Google is evil. They're a large corporation trying to make money like any other. They don't care about us.

* Nobody is claiming that Google is innovative in this example.*

My point was that the vast majority of Google's products are clones and yet they're still considered innovative where the same is true of Microsoft and they are not thought of that way.
Also http://twitter.com/Google_Buzz
No, there isn't any support for that in the C frontends that use LLVM. They all generate direct assembly code. Feel free to look at the clang and gcc-llvm source to verify.
Ask HN: Press Releases - Are they worth the trouble/cost?
My company is releasing a major new version of an iPhone app, and it's one of the more newsworthy things my company has done recently, so I was thinking I would give press releases another try (I've done one with PRWeb and one with PRLeap in the past).

I was hoping you guys could weigh in with advice on press releases.

1. Are the expensive ones worth it (PRNewswire at $600+) vs. the littler ones (PRWeb at $200, PRLeap at much less)?
2. Are press releases actually useful for SEO? I've read quite a bit on various forums about how they're great for SEO, but all of the syndicators that I saw in my past efforts strip out in-body links, and they don't seem to get republished anywhere else.
3. Do you write yours yourself, or find a freelancer to write it for you?
4. Are they worth it, period?

And a whole bunch of other questions... if you have any general advice about press releases, or if you have a method that you've worked out wrt press releases, I'd love to hear it.
I had the same questions when my employer developed an employee handbook that all employees must sign. I didn't like the part that said "during employment" because that could be interpreted as off hours. I've always been honest with my manager about side projects, so I just asked him to modify the text before I signed it and he was fine with that.
The long-term plan would be to have multiple channels, with at least one that would presumably fit your interests.
California has explicit law protecting invention by workers created in their own time.
Well, I can speak about the Clojure community. The ratio of constructive criticism/harsh tone is very good. Go for it.
I agree with you: there is a lot to dislike about facebook if you prefer to, but there is also a technological achievement there that is frustratingly difficult to deny. But I don't think they will go the way of AOL (at least not for many more years) for two major reasons: address book and photos. I know plenty of people who have two contact lists: the numbers in their phone and the people they are friends with on facebook. Sure, systems like the one Palm has let you download your contact list from facebook, but until most people are aware of that option, they will continue to use facebook as the way to keep track of people. And photos. Man, was that a killer app for that site. I personally know several friends who never wanted to sign up for facebook, but ended up having to do it so they could see their friend's wedding pictures or baby pictures or vacation pictures. And I also know friends who put their pictures on facebook and nowhere else, because they don't do back-ups or have a consistent place to store them locally and assume facebook will always have their pictures for them.

Until people can easily get contacts and pictures off of facebook and onto another accessibly sharing service in an automated fashion, they will continue to depend on it.
I think if the product was good enough people would definitely pay for it. I would just need some stats and facts to back up my claim that it's worth it. That would be the hard part.

But if I can state "Use this service to reduce support emails by 30%" and have the data to back that up, then that's something people might pay for. If you spend 1 hour a day answering support emails, and you can cut that down to 40 minutes, then you're saving more than 6 hours of work a month. That's worth some money.

The tough part is making it good enough to be a time saver.
I've heard stories of employers who have told employees shut down your side project or you're fired. I don't mean to be pessimistic, just make sure your project is non-competing and in line with their standards of ethics and values.
Amazing Tech Reviews for Cell Phones
It's for economy of scale for presentations, demo day, etc. Also to make it easier for YC to keep track of what stage people are at - i.e. all 3 weeks in, etc. Having people start any time creates more administrative work.
Especially since you are already paying $3 per minute for the 100 messages.
Awesome. Is anyone familiar with MessageMedia's sms software and how it compares to Twilio?
Which assumes people don't move to Facebook email.

Migration of my friends to FB email seems far more
likely to me than migration of all my social graph to Google Buzz.

It would also be trivial for FB to allow response to notifications via external email if they decide to do it.

I think people are seriously underestimating the value of Facebook's existing graphs. They've been shaped over a couple of years now to what most people want them to be. The vast majority are not going to leave that behind for a me-too service.
Thanks for the comment and sorry if my writing style's not to your liking. My post was not written to hurt anyone, quite the opposite. I have my own writing style, yes. It's not for everyone, yes. But you don't need to come here and try to organize a mob against, to try to force me to conform to your joy-sucking rules.

It's your choice and your right not to accept people who are different from yourself. God knows half of America is full of rabid, Jesus-loving attack dogs who try to force their beliefs on the rest of us. If you don't mind, however, could you please try to suffer in silence and keep your crying, bitching, and trolling to yourself. Thanks :)

BTW, if you don't like words like "ass" and "fuck" and all the rest of those naughty words that cause you cry out and try to rally a mob for a witch hunt, you might want to avoid blogs such as "500 Hats" by Dave McClure. Here's Dave's bio: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/about-dave-mcclure.html here's one of his posts: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2006/11/why_you_want_yo.... and here's every post he's written with the words "ass" or "fuck" in it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=ass+o... Can you still see, or did all those naughty words blind you?

Better stay away from TechCrunch, too. That Arrington has a mouth on him! Of course, it's nothing like that Zed Shaw. Hehe, I love those guys. You know, what really burns me up, though, is little people who use words like "shit" and "fuck." Who do they think they are! We gotta teach them a lesson, don't we. We gotta stomp them back down where they belong. After all, only "important" people are allowed to use "bad" words.

Oh shit, better not read any William Shakespeare, either: http://socyberty.com/education/evolution-of-profanity-how-sw...

Damn, or watch award-winning movies, such as "Pulp Fiction," "Mystic River," "The Departed," etc. Or any of those award-winning HBO shows, such as "Sopranos," "Deadwood," "Entourage," "The Wire," etc.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, what's left for you?! Well, at least you've still got your Fox news, church, and tea party friends, right? Speaking of which, where you at the rally? I heard Palin's speech was great! She's so smart and wholesome and funny and right. I love her! She's got my vote in 2012, I've had about all the "hopey changey" stuff I can handle outta that Obama guy!

Do you now see how ridiculous your attack was, Brett? And do your employers and university (Amazon.com, Trilogy, LiquidPlanner, and Yale, if this is you: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brettbender) know you're harassing people on Hacker News when you should be working and making them look good? In both cases, probably not, but I'm not going to argue. Life's too short to waste time with miserable people. Good luck. Seriously.

Cheers!

PS: I took out the asterisks and did some polishing and now the post is making the rounds all over again. Thks.
Interesting... There is a bit of value in not having to find and program your own content (e.g., Radio DJ vs. MP3). On the other hand, there are already a bunch of services that handle this in a more general sense (HN, Reddit, Digg, etc.) and specifically for video (YouTube, etc.).

Your differentiation seems to be that you're planning a constant stream that doesn't require the interaction of an on-demand approach. Without interaction, I imagine it'd be difficult to solicit votes.

If it were me, I'd try to get the streaming idea going by aggregating content and popularity data from the various existing services.
I'm curious how this can pick up on introversion vs extraversion. It would seem that such would be difficult to analyze just based on a person's writing.
And how much I personally use this will hinge fully on how well they do on making this as open as possible. If this has a solid API, and it's easy for an ecosystem of associated tools to grow around this, then I'll probably end up using it a good bit.
Community, getting away from "home" helps with intense concentration, more access to mentorship, investors, partners, etc.
Fairness is an abstraction, just like circles and triangles are abstractions. They are no less real. We can always aspire to fairness to guide our lives just like mathematics is used to explain the physical world.
My New Philosophy Website
It puts http://www.<what you typed>.com and then navigates to that location. Works in IE, Firefox, and Safari (haven't checked other browsers.

Go to the address bar and type "google" - then hit ctrl-enter. Ctrl-shift-enter is .org, and alt-shift-enter is .net.
Quit, if I really believe in an idea...

IANAL, but I would be concerned that even this would be insufficient if your employer can show that you had the idea while working for them.
Or the buzz.com domain from AT&T.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079765

AT&T To Launch Yelp Competitor - The telco's buzz.com site lets users' "favorite" local vendors and services.
I'm curious. Why all the downvotes? Those comments are very reasonable. It seems all the comments stating the fact - the OP is screwed with his IP - are downvoted. Why? You can't bear the straight truth?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079765
Actually, Google more resemble Sun Microsystems to me: 1 revenue generating product (search with ads as, as opposed to servers) and then building an eco-system around it to support it (by using open standards.))

I think Sun's revenues also came from Software and Services, but mostly servers. We all know what happen to Sun. I don't know where Google can find its next cash cow.
In response to a question at the press conference, they said the UI was "inspired by Wave." (Similarly, they said that it was not connected to Google Latitude now, but "over the next year" they hope to bring them closer together.)
can a mod edit out the title since the interview is over?
The Smarter Guy: Adam Arnold
RE non-technical founders: the first part of building a company is building a successful product/service, and technical founders can do that with sweat equity. Non-technical founders can still add value, but they need technical people to make the product. Spencer Fry of CarbonMade has written some great stuff about duties for non-technical founders: http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do