skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not true, really. Many vendors keep their own in-house patches to the mainline tree, that never make it upstream for various reasons(See Android's kernel for instance). There is nothing stopping a vendor or anyone else, from publishing their own linux tree that is a fork of mainline with this AMD patch applied. Linus maintains the 'mainline' tree, just because of the history and because most kernel hackers believe in their ability to run with it, but if Linus and friends ever did something horrid, there is nothing to stop some other group of people from forking and everyone moving to said new fork. That's part of the whole point of the GPLv2 and other OSS licenses.
The conclusion of this article hinges on the vagueness of "related to your employer’s line of work". From that he concludes that all employee developers have effectively sold their total intellectual output. But that is bullshit. The vagueness doesn't make the law meaningless. He admits that a judge and jury would probably side with the employee but still picks the company's side for his conclusion (the sarcastic "big bad Google" gives away his mindset). It is true that a company will generally have more resources than you and can grind you down legally, but in general they don't because, besides the money, it's a time suck for everybody, potentially bad press, and really bad for morale
https://youtu.be/N9c7_8Gp7gI?t=2692
Yes and no. My thinking is coloured by a few years in law school before dropping out.

If there is a true "five nines" in our lives, it's the reliability of the law. We each interact with and under the law dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times every day without ever needing recourse to lawyers.

But when you need a lawyer, you need a lawyer. One might as well sigh heavily about needing plumbers when the pipe bursts. Specialisation is normal and -- this is what I like most -- lawyers are more than a paid service. They have a fiduciary duty, they are ethically required to be dutiful advocates.

Personally, while I wish the world was simple and lawyers were cheap, I have never regretted spending the money to consult with them.
We have similar directional, sound-suppressing "headphones" for use in the military. Specifically I used them as a gunner on a Bradley (BFV) and a gunner on a regular ole Humvee gun truck. This kind of thing is pretty impressive. I could talk to other gunners in other turrets in our security element that were reasonably close without using the radio. You could still hear everything happening around you -- incredibly important -- without blast sounds and weapons fire causing your ears to ring.
I would go with that, in the sense that "here's a box of parts" is the most customisable way to solve a problem - yet not the best way for most people.

Except, even people doing exploratory stuff apparently aren't using Common-LISP.

Let me point to Slava from RethinkDB, who wrote blogs about how amazing LISP is and then went to found a new-software startup written in C++. Peter Norvig, AI researcher, who moved from LISP to Python.

And even your mention of Ruby - "Common LISP is the best langauge", then why is Ruby even needed? Why aren't those people happily using Common LISP? Simply because it wasn't actually any better, and was in fact worse than Ruby in whatever metrics.
> It is clear that the original intent of calloc is to allocate heap memory for arrays of objects in a safe way

This again? Just 4 days ago there was an article making up the same nonsense.
A network of informants that feed information to a police state that harasses you based on that information is objectively horrible.

I think the connection of that police state to Google tracking your search and browsing history is a bit tenuous, however. Sure, if that police state existed and I lived in it, then Google's trove of information would certainly be useful to it. If I begin to believe the state that I live in is becoming that police state, I will certainly curtail my Google searching.

Of course, you might say, "But wait! You might not live in a police state now, but if your current state changes to become one, they might use your historical search history from before the rise of the police state to persecute you!"

Yes, this is true. However, they could also use my many public things I have said against me. I have said and written many things that a police state might find dangerous, and persecute me for. I can't possibly live my life trying to avoid creating any record of my life that a possible future police state could use against me. That would be impractical and possibly unfeasible. If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.
Not quit - above he outlines different attitudes the employing company might have about side projects.

I think his message distilled would be that by default you may not own your side project - so talk with your employer, and maybe get an agreement in writing, if you want to change that.
Not only Rangers, but any unit that will order them for you.
The Future of Cities [video]
It ticks me off how a lot of managers always forget about how the job market is a buyer's market when they write about it.
Any nonlinearities in the Fourier transform process (of which there are presumably many) will manifest as harmonics of the beat frequency. I'm on my phone right now, but if you take two simple-ratio tones, add them, apply a nonlinearity (like exponentiation to a non-1 power), and then Fourier transform, you will see the beat frequency and its effects. I imagine (but do not know) that this is the physiological mechanism for high-frequency beat frequencies.

For binaural beats with low-frequency tones, I can only guess, but you can actually reconstruct phase information from the frequency domain signal depending on your sampling period. As a trivial example, imagine f << 1/T; now you can treat the DC component of the Fourier transform as a time-domain signal that contains f. I imagine that's how binaural beats work, as they occur at sufficiently low frequencies for this to happen. It could also be that the ear transmits low-frequency time domain information as well as frequency-domain information.
I negotiated IP assignment out of my employment contract before taking my job. I wouldn't take a job that tried to lay claim to my work outside of work.
This is why programmers need unions! Or a guild. Or something! That employers totally dictate everything in a field that is in such high demand is absolutely unacceptable.
Ooh, or the highest-level language, Homespring.
http://xeny.net/Homespring
The article doesn't really address dealing with "the AI said so" as a justification for action.

Like if we start using AI to do things like populate no fly lists.
I have to say, I'm really, really sick of the entitled mentality that companies take towards those that actually do the work keeping their business afloat.
Nope. Still not believing. You could have hyped me two years ago, now I'm just going to pick the Tech apart and compare it to whatever Microsoft most likely learned by having a product out.
A Russian App That Will Find You in the Internet Crowd
I fought for years against the culture of just turning off SELinux. I read every doc trying to Do The Right Thing when configuring the likes of vsftpd, samba or kvm.

Didn't manage to keep them working jerks-free long enough without disabling it. Daemons always find a way to break with selinux on with me.

After years, I just gave up. I feel sad about it, but just after install, I SELINUX=disabled them.

Is Selinux too hard? Or am I too incompetent? I really don't know.
That's cool, and I'm happy for you. But is this something that should be a luxury only reserved for those in a good bargaining position?
> Instead he seems to just be saying that employees that want to keep their side projects should just quit.

I thought he was suggesting that employees take it as an opportunity to negotiate for higher salary, since the company will be buying all of their inventive output. Then they should just work 9-5 and enjoy their free time by relaxing instead of working on side projects. That seems like pretty reasonable advice, unless you're in California, in which case an employee doesn't have that bargaining leverage.
I think he means pricing schemes are more simple when you go with a flat "200$/hour rate". Obviously it's shit for the client since they have no idea how many hours will be spent on the case, but that's not the lawyer's problem.
Be a little careful, because I think you're reading a Stack Overflow question recast as a blog post (Spolsky just moved his blog from CityDesk --- can you believe he was still using CityDesk? --- to WordPress, and so I guess we'll be seeing some more stuff like this on it). People are less careful capturing all angles of an issue on forums than they are in blog posts.

I assume Stack Overflow is just like most big software shops, in that if you have a side project you want to work on and be severable from your employer, you just fill out a little form and get it signed by your manager.

You'd be pushing things to take it further than that, but I'll add anyways: if they're like most firms (and I have every reason to think they would be, since they're famously dev-friendly), even if you didn't follow this process, they're not going to fuck with you. It would be terrible for their own business.

But if you're going to take a side project and turn it into a business, it behooves you to do things by the book, because the worst possible problems for a startup to have are the kind that don't become apparent until after your project is successful.

(Also: Spolsky is the CEO of Stack Overflow; Anil Dash is the CEO of Fog Creek.)
A lot of EU countries also recognise the concept of so-called "Moral rights" at copyright which cannot be given away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
It exists in the form of them and other suppliers providing cad for everything
It might be that it really is a big secret, and people are quietly using it and gaining advantages from it.

If that were the case, I would still expect to see lots of gushing blogs of leaks from inside hush-hush companies and people desperate to learn LISP posting "how do I replace strings in files in Common LISP" on programming forums, and "I learned LISP and doubled my salary" on Twitter.

Yet what you really see is Steve Yegge and "my EMACS code at Amazon was replaced with Java years ago" and "Facebook working on a new JavaScript thing" and "Microsoft working on a new JavaScript thing" and "Apple working on Swift" and "Fog Creek compile VBScript to PHP" and "rPi comes with Mathematica and Python" and so on and so on.

I wasn't saying that no one is using it. I was saying "if it was the best - as claimed - then there would be a buzz around Common LISP, because huge numbers of people would be using it".

Your points about your career are pretty interesting.
Seriously? Damn. Still, great implementation. Hope you can push the bar even higher.
The Japanese had no choice, if they wanted to keep the territory they controlled at the time. They were heavily reliant on imports from the US, and the US imposed an embargo on them.

>US Ambassador Grew in Japan kept Roosevelt fully advised of her precarious economic situation and urgent need for imports. Chief of Naval Operations (NCO) Stark had warned the president of the danger of imposing an oil embargo on Japan. Stark had "made it known to the State Department in no uncertain terms that in my opinion if Japan's oil were shut off, she would go to war." He did not mean "necessarily with us, but … if her economic life had been choked and throttled by inability to get oil, she would go somewhere and take it … and if I were a Jap, I would" do the same.[1]

You can google many papers about this.

1 - https://mises.org/library/us-japanese-relations-wwii
"How Not To Die" - Paul Graham. http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

"Merry Christmas, Bob" - Chris Shugart. https://www.t-nation.com/powerful-words/merry-christmas-bob

"An Essay on Winning" - Jason Shen. http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/an-essay-on-winning/
This one I can believe.
so apparently this is not about a Toyota.
Don't you mean a seller's market? A buyer's market would be in favour of the employer (they are buying labour).

A job isn't a product that is bought by employees.
'You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games.'

This is what origin say in the article, it sounds to me really not like a full time employee.
For me I know the fundamentals well enough that I can kind of winnow it down to a couple movements that would be good to start looking around in, but I'm not sure if it's a strategy you can use when you're just breaking in. You first have to know the history, then you can determine how original your ideas are.
>This again? Just 4 days ago there was an article making up the same nonsense.

Seems perfectly reasonable. Care to enlighten me?
12 Cloud Projects Rise Above the Crowd
Indeed. Example:

In Germany you usually have some paragraphs on this in the (work) contract (there are a couple popular variations - there isn't much leeway provided by German law here, which is good). "We own everything you do" is definitely illegal in Germany, and also not put into work contracts (such a clause would be void anyway).

The legal construction is basically that the employee grants an exclusive, irrevocable license[1] to any IP produced by the employee for the employer. There is of course a grey zone here, but it's quite narrow, and directly non-existent if the side project is unrelated to the current core business of the employer.

FOSS contributions aren't really touched by this; you work on behalf of the employer to contribute to a FOSS project and the exact same terms and conditions apply as always (you put your name on it, not your employers; since exclusivity of the license implicitly granted to your employer conflicts with the FOSS terms, but the employer explicitly commissioned you to do that, the latter "wins" over the former, ie. the license of your employer to the diffs you write becomes non-exclusive in these cases, because the exclusivity is implicitly revoked by the work assignment, essentially action implying intention) -- or so it was explained to me).

[1] This also means that you retain your copyright: it's not possible to transfer copyright in Germany. Very rarely things like "Copyright (c) 1871-1918 Softwareschmiede GmbH" pop up in open sourced stuff, but it's obviously something stamped on when open sourcing, and equally obviously incorrect. The copyright still belongs to the developers involved in the project, but because the company "Softwareschmiede GmbH" has an exclusive license they can re-license it on their own accord under any terms they want. They'd still have to, technically, state the correct copyright, though.
>However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking.

Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business".

In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.
Now that he would be very happy to hear you say, because that is precisely his goal. Meaningness was actually originally a side project branched off from his original blog about Buddhism (Chapman is a Dzogchen Buddhist, which is not Mahayana but you get partial credit for being close) when a commenter asked him, almost as a joke, if he could explain the ideas he was talking about in a purely secular way to STEM folks.
There are no shortcuts to "supercharging" your work. Git gud, bro. Put in the effort. When you see exemplary code, study the principles behind it and seek to emulate it. I'm a better C programmer now than I was, for instance, because I read a lot of BSD source.
From vim to emacs in 14 days
> ... but I'm not the one who got the email telling me my months of work ... would not be merged.

See, the thing is that they were told previously -- back in February? March? -- that this wasn't gonna happen. Instead of trying to work out a better way forward, AMD effectively ignored that, went back to work, and just now came back and said "here's 90k LOC, please merge".

Dave replied -- rightfully, in my opinion -- "no".
Yes, something similar to AdWords. Which Google previously did do, but then cancelled it. http://betanews.com/2007/04/16/google-s-ad-moves-ruffle-feat...

I want my pool cleaning guy to be able to go online and buy a radio commercial advertising his business. If he has to go through a salesperson and negotiate and all that, you've already lost him.

I think there is a ton of money sitting on the table waiting to be claimed for this opportunity.
Isn't law school a few years?
For all intents and purposes, it's more energy than we will ever need so it's closer to infinite (conceptually) than finite.
Related to the idea of pull, I've found that learning from mistakes is in some way the only real way to learn. Like I'm trying to learn about furniture making for practical necessity reasons and it's so clear that the only real way to understand is to make something and then see why it doesn't work and then make something better.
I've had three companies rewrite or append something about past IP or even current IP on the weekends unrelated to the company, the company's hardware, or the company's time.

If you approach it right (sometimes I show them how this limits our ability to work with OpenSource software) you can often swing it. Admittedly, the larger companies are less likely to entertain the request of some new hire.

I think more people should bring this up in the hiring process (you don't have to push it), but lets teach companies that it's not just vacation that maters to us.
A company I worked for (property appraisal company) got acquired by another company. They forced one of the higher up developers out. 6 months later that developer wrote an app dealing with lines at Disney and was making money on ad revenue. The company came after him claiming they owned it because he used skills and knowledge he gained while employed to write that app. We had a "everything you do at any time belongs to us" contract.

So it does actually happen.
Eve Evolved: Analysing Eve's New Economic Reports
I certainly would prefer that my employees not get burned out. What they do after work is none of my business, but I definitely hope most of them aren't living and breathing work 24/7.
There was talk about Dropbox using 14TB drives. It's possible that these drives have actually existed for over a year and HGST is only now deciding to announce them to the public, but there's really no evidence one way or the other.

The cloud space is full of rumors about awesome yet secret equipment but they don't really pass Occam's Razor since if it's so awesome why keep it secret?
Don't worry about it, enjoy your life, spend time in nature and cook yourself some nice food for dinner :)
I recently received one of these letters (a 'happy holidays' postcard) from Chewy.com with postage stamps on the envelope, written and signed with what looked like real color marker pens, and my respect for the company immediately dropped.

I can see how it probably works with many people, but it doesn't change the fact that it is at best deceitful, at worse a lie.
"At the end of February 2016, the total liquid ISK in the EVE Online economy was 948.043 trillion ISK (equivalent to $16.45 million using PLEX conversion)."

find this fact mind boggling!
How Python Linters Will Save Your Large Python Project
1,500 People Give All the Relationship Advice You'll Ever Need
The Kermit Project
And Yahoo! paid 49 million dollars of stock to throw the LISP in the trash and use something else instead.

It wasn't even worth them spending 1 million dollars - 2% of that price - on training people.

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...
srs :)
Peter Thiel is trying to save the world
As a Canadian I don't even know what the requirements are, or protections if any. But I did notice one thing in particular: you need your own equipment (no company equipment) to qualify under the Californian protections.

How does this factor into bring your own device (BYOD)? At what point is it your employers equipment, and at what point is it yours? I think BYOD is a terrible idea for several reasons (usually leveraged as a cost-saving measure, can't 100% verify that all company data is wiped at end of employment, etc), but this seems like it muddles the whole thing further. If you only own the devices that you use to work, does everything belong to your employer and how can you draw a line?
I think he is too dismissive of company time though. Company time is very straightforward only if you work 9-5, but a lot of companies let developers work flexible hours and work from home, which I think makes company time less straight forward. Then when you add on call or emergency work you have to do off hours or on weekends (even once every 6 months) it makes the idea of "company time" even more vague.
This presents a false dilemma. There are other options than "own everything" or "be negligent and get sued."

Contracts can say almost anything. You can agree to grant the company a liberal license to anything you deliver to the company or incorporate into any product of the company. You can make a similarly protective agreement on the patent front.

There, now you own what you do on your own time and the company isn't at risk of a lawsuit from you.
What software is that? I always see that decompiler software in posts like this.
Reading into this, I assume they just hit Proto for the device and are starting a process that will take ~6 months (in an ideal case) to ramp to a mass production ready design and production line. (given they follow the standard model, Proto -> EVT -> DVT -> PVT -> MP)
after i figured that he is CEO and cofounder of many famous startups, I feel bias in this article and I will make sure I will not work him in the future for sure :-)