skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US, it's possible for your employer to own your ideas:

http://www.salon.com/2004/08/18/evan_brown/

Follow-up:

https://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown

Solution: never disclose anything to your employer unless absolutely required. If you have a new idea, keep it quiet until you quit your job.

FTA:

(After 5 1/2 years of litigation, Judge Curt B. Henderson of Collin County, Texas' 219th District Court ruled in favor of Alcatel, and Brown was obliged to fully disclose the idea to Alcatel and only Alcatel, and to repay in full Alcatel's legal fees of more than $330,000, which according to Brown forced him to sell his house and other assets.

During the court case, Brown argued that since his idea had never been committed to paper or physically manifested in any way, there were no grounds for the company to claim ownership of his very thoughts, and he drew comparisons to the fact that an invention cannot be copyrighted or patented until it is transferred from an idea onto paper.

He didn't handle his case well, which torpedoed it. But in parts of the US, yes... anything you do during the course of your employment is owned by the employer.

As a contractor, I've been asked to sign contracts with similar clauses. Uh... no. I have other customers, and you don't own what they pay me to do. Their typical counter is "But this is a standard clause".

Telling them to "no contract" is usually the only option. They just can't understand why an entirely one-sided contract isn't good for me.
Ask HN: Do you use earplugs and/or headphones to better concentrate?
If so, which ones work best?
The free users have no skin in the game. If they don't get what they want, they're on to the next one.

The paid users see your products value, and use it to solve a problem of theirs. They ask for fixes/features because it would make a bigger difference to them.
When you decode json there is an option to set a flag that will allow you to use arrays or objects.
Is it incredibly popular because it is uniquely useful or primarily because it was open source under the MIT license? To put it differently, would people have started using it if you started with a closed source solution, or would someone else have emerged with a better open source alternative?
Serious question from someone who flinches at living more than ten minutes' walk from a train station and won't rent anything that doesn't have a crackerjack shower with painfully hot water and enough pressure to bruise, and an internet connection that sees less than a few minutes degraded service a year (although for speed, I actually don't demand that much - I'm happy with a couple of megabytes per second); why do people live there?

That's a genuine question; not "why" as said to imply that there is no reason. There must be reasons. I just don't know what they are.

Not generalities, please. I'm interested in first-hand information from people who actually live or lived there. Did you move to such a place? Why? What's the economy based on? Does it generate enough money to be self-sustaining, or does it exist through inertia? In areas with such low density of people, what jobs exist? Is it all farming or other such? How many people living there might actually like to move, but can't?
Google search defines a startup as "a newly established business".

Dictionary.com says "a new business venture, or a new commercial or industrial project".

Merriam-Webster says "a fledgling business enterprise".

I don't mean to be difficult but it's annoying that some folks on HN insist that PG's definition of "startup" is the only possible one. It's a useful definition, but people who use it the non-PG way are not wrong either.
I’ve worked at companies who have said it would be absolutely unacceptable for everyone to have a computer at their desk. I’ve worked places where they said it would be absolutely unacceptable for everyone to have an internet connection at their desk. I’ve worked at places where everyone is constantly on the phone at their desk, and somehow they make it work.

And I just noticed I’m breaking my rule of never responding to the kind of troll who would put “M$” to mean Microsoft so I’m going to end here. I’m sorry for wasting my time.
I don't think you contradict each other. You just seem to focus on different sides of NASA development process.
The problem I see with that proposal is that it would entirely eliminate the ability of Congress to compromise on anything, for fear of a video going viral showing them ceding ground on contentious issues and being used against them next election.
For fun, let's say we'd sat Geoff down 20 years ago and asked him to rate the following futures in units of 'preposterousness': "Geoff, how preposterous is it to believe that in 20 years..."

1. We live in a world of self-driving, all electric automobiles, the safest and fastest ever built in mass production.

2. We live in a world where private space companies build profitable space transportation systems that can land themselves after orbiting the Earth.

3. We travel from city to city in vacuum tubes that enable 700+ mph speeds on land.

4. The mind-numbing gridlock of urban auto traffic is relieved by tunnels that whiz cars across town at speeds exceeding 120 MPH.

I'm pretty sure he'd scoff at all of it. I would have, too, but then I'd be pretty giddy that even one of them had materialized.
A lot of negativity in the comments of this article here in HN but I feel exactly the same. Tasty recipes have tremendous value because they show that cooking can be easy, that most of the time recipes are just guidelines (with the exception of bakery and a handful of dishes) and that it's ok to experiment and mix different things creatively when cooking.
It's not just fast food restaurants. Ever wonder why the food you make in the kitchen never stands up to (insert your favorite restaurant here)'s food even though you are using the same ingredients as them?

Sure, they have more experience in cooking and you don't have access to the recipe, but you bet there is a whole assortment of salt, butter, sugar, other fats (vegetables may be "sauteed" in bacon grease or duck fat) or MSG.

Interestingly, the fast food industry has to publish nutritional information where "small business" restaurants are not held to this standard.
Some hypnotized people think that a Hyperloop in tunnel under the Baltic sea between Stockholm and Helsinki is a good idea - two sparsely populated capital cities of two small countries.

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/stockholm-helsinki-hyperlo...

Even if it's only there to siphon of some taxpayer's money to someone or another, I just can't fathom how things like this can be allowed to go on. Even if the entire population will spend half of their income on tickets, it will not be economically viable.
Given that it's client-side JS, I'd probably just use an honor system. I'm not really a licensing law guy, but: Give it a license that businesses would not like to use (GPL?), then sell proprietary licenses to waive some of the requirements of GPL.
You have been downvoted, but I too would think that was a good idea - unfortunately there are many potential traps here, not the least of which is the ability to control the questions.

In addition to that, you end up breaking the democratic system, which is so very good at keeping our disputes and disagreements from boiling over into a civil war.
The exceptions are interesting, https://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html ...or maybe it's just me.
I agree built in package manager wouid be awesome.

Composer is so much faster than npm in my experience but haven't moved to yarn so I might be missing some speed.
It's not a problem, but if you fetch fresh veggies and then you add a ton of tasty cheese, you will miss all the delicate flavour of the vegetables.
P.S. be careful, I'm italian :)
Link to Shanthi Bavan childrens education http://shantibhavanchildren.org
Dalton Caldwell at YC Startup School 2010 did a great presentation on the subject talking exactly about the nuances of the music industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU

In October 2010, Caldwell spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford University about the failures of imeem and of the challenges still facing the music industry. At the event, Caldwell delivered a cautionary message for entrepreneurs interested in music startups. Caldwell criticized major music labels for holding too much power, focusing mainly on the industry’s licensing deals for content. He said that the current state of the industry made success for startups bleak.

While some commentators praised Caldwell for his harsh but realistic insight on the digital music startup industry, many critics (notably David Hyman, CEO and founder of MOG) felt that the lessons learned from Caldwell’s experience with imeem did not accurately portray the industry as a whole.
"Compiling Postage from source will only give you the server version and all first time users should try the desktop version first."

Sorry what? How does one go about "compiling" the desktop version, then? Or the installers that are supposedly great?

Something really reeks of red flags over here.
Hey, thanks! I'm glad you like it.

I did consider a dual license, however I don't want to fragment the project, given that it's pretty much "done" and someone would just use a fork from before the license changes anyway. As for offering paid support, I could definitely still fall back on that if I need some extra income, but it takes time. So right now I'm leaning on my graduate research.

One method I have found somewhat successful (but I am still flushing out) through another project, Caddy, is selling sponsorships. They give me some flexibility to put more time into the project to benefit everyone, rather than a single customer.
1) php doesn't have to setup everything on every request - opcode caches, process pooling et al exist

2) the benefit of php over java is that php is going to run everywhere with no effort, and running that same java based website/service is going to start with some doc on installing tomcat or similar, which will devolve into chaos as you start working with ssl certs or shared servers
What an awesome writeup. I am not even really personally invested in the problem as I don't play older video games, but I loved reading the story. I wish other open source projects would do similar writeups when they reach major accomplishments.

If I just saw "specialized shaders replaced with ubershaders" on a feature update, I probably wouldn't think there was much of a story to it.
The amount of seasoning and flavor development in all these fast recipes seems to be extremely lacking. I agree, they must be terribly bland.
I had code on HN (on a different handle) and really, people never nitpicked code. Nobody cares about that one misnamed function or that global variable or that useless abstraction layer.

People, however, do like the one-note replies. "Why isn't this in Rust instead." "Why isn't the license GPL instead of MIT" (or vice versa). "The name is immature." "Will this be on Mac OS X too? Why not?"
Yeah that's interesting, it does have some kind of memory with all the genes we have. I mostly just meant that Nature is not an intelligent agent with an agenda (unless you believe that in a spiritual way, which is cool too).

>If we created AGI, then nature created AGI. AGI can look back and say the step from biological to machine was akin to single to multi celled organisms.
I do think it's interesting to consider AGI as a similar step from single to multi celled organism, but I also feel like if we consider everything manmade as part of nature, the term nature doesn't really mean anything. If it refers to all man-made things as well as all non man-made things, it kinda just becomes a synonym for "things"
We're over 150,000 lines of Elm code in production and are loving it. Wouldn't trade Elm for anything!

It's natural for people to have language preferences, but let's not pretend there's some spooky "abstraction wall" prohibiting a nice experience at scale. ;)
In China, open source licenses don't have any legal effect, so it's hard to safeguard legal rights. In recent years some open source organizations have been founded and they hope their efforts can change the environment of open source in China. However, there is still a long way to go.
> it will not be economically viable

Government projects don't (and shouldn't) have to be "economically viable." They can be services to the citizens with no hope of profitability.
Exactly. When I taught at the University I divided them into Mouse-skills or no mouse skills. Keyboard was easy to learn, and touchscreen or touchpad was not a thing back then.

The mouse skilled people where way more advanced and picking up the taught skills much faster in the practical courses, so I had to tune the program to haptically help the novices and do only non-mouse-favoring questions in the exam. The beginners and the women were equally good in the academic skills, but the women still left from 50% down to 20% for social reasons. But in the end - in the office - the numbers were equal again, even more than 50%, so I was happy.
Yeah, their videos are for entertainment (as food porn) and for inspiration. You'll look up a real recipe later.
I know that on the surface, but it does something to me as a person when I see it.

I can tell myself it doesn't matter I can tell myself that they don't know the details or the trade offs that were made, but regardless it still takes the steam out of my willingness to work on it.
This was a disappointing "article" which conflated The Boring Company (intracity tunnels) and the hyperloop (usually conceptualized aboveground) and never really made a concrete point, just provided FUD about anything that smells like a Concord or SciFi.

The general idea that the hyperloop is more of a North Star than a proposal stands, but that was always its stated nature.
What are the other ones that you know of?
There's a lot of focus on how they failed: strayed from their non-label musician roots.

But how would they have been able to monetize?

* Let fans support their favorite musicians a la Patreon and take a % from the donations?

* Partner with music labels to help them scout their next upcoming talents?

* Help musicians book shows at venues and take a % of the sales?
I think the left is not inclusive enough. Though perhaps a better way to describe it is that the left is increasingly unwelcoming,
remarkably to the people whose votes we need. As an extremely liberal person who also happens to be from the south, I am horrified by my Facebook feed where everyday posts by liberal friends proudly mock conservatives as being stupid or bigoted. Being from the south, I know many conservative people with great hearts. These are the people we are trying to convince to join our side, and we are shitting all over them.

In these articles, one can sense a true disdain for many conservative points of view on topics like abortion, the role of religion in our society, and gun control. It is rare to find articles that I would feel comfortable sharing with conservative friends or family, as their tone is so contemptuous of conservatives. If it were not for the acerbic tone, many of these articles might become powerful tools of persuasion. But I guess it is just too much fun to taunt the "basket of deplorables."

To quote an article that nicely summarizes a Lincoln speech:

> When Abraham Lincoln was 33 years old, he gave a speech inside a Presbyterian church to a temperance society. His message: The assembled ought to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol, rather than shunning them, or denouncing them as moral pestilences. Indeed, they ought to use “kindly persuasion,” even if a man’s drunkenness had caused misery to his wife, or left his children hungry and naked with want.

> For people are never less likely to change, to convert to new ways of thinking or acting, than when it means joining the ranks of their denouncers.

> To expect otherwise, “to have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation ... and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature,” Lincoln explained.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/why-can...
Every politician should have his/her talks parsed with this technique.
How to manage your resume like a product
I'm encountering difficulties right now with a project I open-sourced. Some other people made it a core part of their business, but then I left the company, so I can't merge patches to the official branch. And to be honest I don't have the time to do this (I work for another growing startup).

But it's still it's one of the best things I have ever done in computing. It was fun, and I got paid to do a kind of pure research, and enhance my own reputation while doing it. My former employer got free patches from very big and talented companies. I've made some interesting connections through this, that's for sure.
I'd like to think it's both. The license definitely helped drive up adoption very quickly, but it still does some things that no other library does. Still, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before <insert any proprietary software here> has an open-source alternative. (Not that that's bad or a defeat -- the proprietary stuff can still be successful -- but it is a reality.)
I've seen a few good classifiers to filter hate speech in tweet s at a few hackathons.

Of course they rely on a wordlist 90 % of the time but it would eliminate the trashiest comments quite well.
DO-178B was one of best things to happen in software assurance. It was a non-prescriptive method of certification that forced precise requirements, design, and code with reviews of each and tracability between them. The high cost of certification and certification failure led to a booming ecosystem of supporting tools (esp static analysis or runtimes) and pre-made components (esp RTOS's & middleware). Some companies even specialized in handling the administrative overhead. The result was that certified systems usually had very, high quality. Meanwhile, there were people arguing on HN and other places about whether a certification could ever be useful for software.

Anyone reading the above paper should skip to the summary to get a high-level view of the overhead and resulting benefits. The author of the paper agrees with me that the certification is beneficial. The gist is you keep things simple, think about everything in lifecycle, test everything in lifecycle, throw every analysis tool you can at the design or code, esp take your time to develop the thing, and document all of this in a way where any aspect is easy to verify by a 3rd party. That's how high-assurance systems are done. They usually work, too. Some work for a long, long, long time. :)
Wouldn't Geoff be correct? None of those have materialized. Maybe another 20 years? 3 and 4 still haven't scaled past prototypes and might never exist in quantity.
Digital Startup news roundup – Week ending 30 July
But everyone in the team would have to set up their client. Not everyone would want to setup their client the same way (understandably). And not everyone is interested enough in setting up an IRC client, especially the "not technical enough people".

IRC –the protocol– isn't made for that.
IRC clients can, but don't.
"Writing comments to Medium posts feels awkward because each comment is treated as a blog post."

This is also awkward from the reader point of view. Trying to follow a comment chain on medium is frustrating as it only shows the first level, diving in switches pages, and often, a need to press a second "load all comments" button. Then the back button to wind your way back up.

Is there some sound reasoning for why it was set up this way? Some benefit I'm not seeing?
15 Things You Need to Know Before You Buy Agents of Mayhem
Some awful stuff:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.escapeshellarg.php
http://php.net/manual/en/numberformatter.setpattern.php
We live in a time when journalism is not about promoting good or truth. But about finding flaws in the most sensationalistic way. Was it ever different ? ...
They do by listening to ads.
> ...quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line!

I realise this isn't really the crux of your post, and I broadly agree with you that computers still suck. But the answer to this question is CMD + left arrow. I have no idea what applications you're using where this doesn't work.
Why would others care about his/her code being trashed publicly? Because we are all human beings. We all have feelings. Some of us are tougher than others emotionally but even those of us who don't give AF what others think feel something when hordes of anonymous master coder warriors on the net trash your work. It's also a reason people like joe rogan don't even read social media anymore because of all the hate generated by throngs of basement dwellers. It takes a toll on you to get a tsunami of criticism from internet trolls and those who just love to tear others down sadly. Why would anyone want to inflict that on themselves?
>We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away.

Were these wind breaks? My grandmother has a farm in South Dakota and I believe she got help from the government to cover the cost of planting (decades ago).
Well, the speed improvements unlock new kinds of things you can do. Old-style PHP code had to off-load any significant work to extensions, which made PHP a glue layer between the browser and the thing that did the real work. Now it's fast enough you can actually write all the code that does the real work in PHP.

I spent 10 years writing PHP, and lately I'm writing Java, Scala and Node code instead. In each case it was due to needing specific libraries that PHP didn't have, but it did give me some insight into what PHP is missing to no longer be the glue layer but a real platform for "serious code":

1. No more ugly mix of procedural and OO code. I want all of PHP's stdlib to become object-oriented, including the primitive types. Also, I need a real type-hinted collections API, not just all-purpose arrays with global functions as primary API. Yes, it's just syntax. Yes, it does matter, a lot, even if you use phpstorm and auto-complete all the things.

2. Generics. Without generics it's impossible to do a properly type-hinted collections API, or a type-hinted FP library. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to type-hint all the things, but I do want to have type-hinted API's to build my own code on top of, and PHP's lack of generics makes this mostly impossible. I can't fix in userland what it misses in its stdlib.

3. A standard story for async and long-running code. Yes, I know about things like pthreads, curl_multi, amp and react-php. I never really felt like any of that stuff was really suited for mature production code and real-world deployment patterns, which is why I always ended up with architectures that boiled down to handing off anything long-running to a queue with separately launched workers processing it in series. I would like an extension to the standard PHP execution model and core language that gives a path towards fully non-blocking architectures as a standard feature.
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