skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: When to sign an NDA?
My friend and I are being asked to sign an NDA before we have a meeting with another pair about ideas we've all been working on. The NDA feels expansive and we don't know what's reasonable in this situation.

When should (or shouldn't) you sign an NDA?

more information:

We're in our last year of college and have spent the summer coming up with ideas and making small inroads on them -- we feel like we're on a good track. Two less-programmer-ey friends of ours have some particular thing they want to discuss, that they're still very excited about after a few months of talking about it. They want us to help them make it, but want us to sign an NDA before even discussing the basis. They've shown us the agreement and we fear that they could spout vague nonsense and it would severely restrict us from working on things in the future - but if they're doing something cool, we think we'd like to help.

also, here's the nda: http://bit.ly/cwFQZ1
If I'm lucky I catch myself when I fall into some monologue pattern.

My trick is to pretend I'm doing an interview, where the words "me", "I", "my", etc. aren't appropriate. And where questions work better than assertions or corrections.
How can social media help your small business grow
I've read up a bit on blinded signatures, Brands, etc. I have two problems there.

First, I would need a reference standard implementation of blinded signatures. I know if I tried to cobble something together myself, some crypto-guru would laugh and point out that my prime factors weren't super-prime in a Zeta field of modulus three or some such thing.

Second, basic blinding still does require a central server. I believe the Brands protocol allows blinded tokens to circulate without contact with the server at every stage, and anyone who attempts a double-spend can be identified cryptographically. But it's complicated and ultimately relies on the technique of going after the bad guy with a baseball bat.

So if I went with blinded tokens on a central server, I'd be right back at the central server problem. Blinding provides un-traceability at the cryptographic protocol layer. With Loom, I figured that anyone that concerned with un-traceability could just use a VPN or Tor.
I think this is a good call on your part. There are a lot of people who know Django, and Python in general. In this phase it's good for you to use something that your immediate peers use.
For you? Django. =)

Local support is priceless.
Microsoft 'working' on patch for critical Windows vulnerability
The same. I'm also using Django just because I got caught by the ideas they put in the heart of it and it's the most popular now.
I meet up to about 20 children a day (sometimes a lot more, often a lot of adults too, but more often more children) that I don't know and need to communicate with. The kids are generally 4-10 years old but, as I said, it can be all ages.

I find that the children respond far better if I use their names when talking with them - but this is short snippets of talk (maybe 30s) with longer (20+min) gaps between. I always introduce my self by given-name and am surprised by how many of them remember me months later.

Partly I use their names as an attempt to remember them, partly to ease any discomfort or reluctance they have communicating with me and partly because I find it awkward starting a conversation or getting someone's attention without using their name.
Don't you have to successfully login before getting to this authentication step? So the people who know you would have to know your password first, in which case you're already vulnerable.
> And yet you haven't answered .

Of course I did. You might not have liked my answer, but it won't change: GIMP is garbage.

> Why would somebody invest in crippleware ... instead of investing in Photoshop (the industry's standard)

Acorn is $0 and does the job very well for the basic stuff. Photoshop CS5 is $699. Why pay $699, or spend 6 month trying to understand the alien ways of GIMP, when you can just get Acorn for free and get done with what you need to?

> or in an open-source alternative that is just as capable, only more complicated to use and less standard.

Because it's complete and utter garbage. Open-Source garbage doesn't stink less just because it's so free you can make your own. And again, if you're so stuck on OSS, OSX (which you shouldn't be using in the first place since it's not open) has Seashore, which is serviceable, Cocoa and which I note you conveniently ignored.

> Personally I love GIMP ...

More power to you, eh. You're a minority.
clickable: http://bit.ly/cwFQZ1
The lesson here is that you don't give definitive dates unless you are the one controlling those dates (for instance, waiting for a particular event to ship the product that is sitting in your warehouse).

WakeMate wasn't, so they shouldn't have worded things that strongly. Never underestimate the number of things that can go wrong.

Edit: Get the name right, idjit
Google image search is better in one way that I noticed within the first 3 seconds of using the two: You can scroll up and down the results in Google using the up and down arrows. Bing has focus in the search box. You need to click somewhere in the scrollable results viewport to get it to scroll with the cursor keys. This is such a basic, annoying screw-up.
The Maryland law is different from the law in other states. The article text reads, "A dozen states require all parties to consent before a recording is made if there is a 'reasonable expectation of privacy."" First of all, it's very dubious that a state law enforcement officer would consider himself to have an expectation of privacy while interacting with citizens in public places. Fortunately, most states have a more reasonable body of law (like mine) and allow any party to an interaction to record the interaction without permission of the other parties (which is also the rule of federal law on taping interstate telephone conversations, absent a more restrictive rule of state law). It's outrageous that members of the public can be prosecuted for recording the public activities of law enforcement officers. It is also unusual for such a prosecution to be possible.

After edit: Another HN thread a while back recommended the book Arrest-Proof Yourself: An Ex-Cop Reveals How Easy It Is for Anyone to Get Arrested, How Even a Single Arrest Could Ruin Your Life, and What to Do If the Police Get in Your Face

http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-A...

which I greatly enjoyed reading and which my son is reading this week. There is a lot of good information there about how and why to stay out of trouble with the police.
What does 4chan actually do to "attack" a site?
I don't really like badges the way the article's system is designed (this coming form a guy whose startup is about helping sites gives users points and badges). A big part of the kickback that I see from people on here has to do with turning Hacker News into something that gets "played". I prefer a system where you can recognize and reward users for their individual participation. For it to avoid gaminess (in the bad sense of the term) it needs to be about milestones that are meaningful and further the goals of the site.

In other words, a badge for 10 submissions, 50 submissions, 100 submissions, etc., etc., would not be a good system as it could encourage people to spam. A reward for 10 submissions, each with at least 15 up votes, while not perfect, is a little better.

All of this belies the point that HN is not really a great candidate for a badge system. There just isn't enough to do. A user can submit, comment, vote, and flag. That just isn't enough actions to build a compelling system around. I do think that contextual reputation could be a good thing - if reading comments on an article about scalability, knowing that a user has posted quality comments or articles about the topic in the past helps me to weigh the value of the current comment. HN isn't really set up for this though. So, as much as I'd love pg to call me up and ask about integrating IActionable into HN, I don't think it would really be a great idea at this time.
That was the intention of copyright, anyways. It's gotten a bit beyond that, to the point that an idea can be copyrighted if phrased correctly. Requiring a working model to be submitted with every application would go a good way towards fixing that issue.
But you're intrigued enough to see what it is... was that my plan all along?! (it wasn't).
I suspect because writing memoization means controlling memoization, and controlling memoization in Haskell means either hacking the compiler, or dealing with state, and state means monads, and nobody likes monads. (Except those people who love monads, of course).
They asked pre-orders what phone they wanted to use the device with, so it's not out of the question that they knew that "screw iPhone" was out of the question.
Anybody use one yet (outside the WakeMate guys)? I am VERY interested in this product, but am not quite willing to be on the bleeding edge. :)
Videotaping police interrogations is routine in my state, just as private citizens recording their own activities and interactions with other people (with or without the consent of the other parties in the interaction) is routine. The practice of routinely videotaping police interrogations in my jurisdiction seems to help considerably with the administration of criminal justice.
I would buy your argument if they would not have selectively chosen 6 photos to sent to DCF without the context of the other photos.
I'm not intimately familiar with the process, but I was unaware that there was such a thing as copyright applications, let alone working models of something that pertains to copyright.
"I'm not really sure what you're ranting against, but the whole point of the GPL is to force "give some, get some", and to stop people from profiting off of other people's work."

My point was that Richard Stallman for years claimed that this wasn't the reason. I also don't really think there was a problem with people "profiting off of other people's work" before the GPL became popular.

When you release something for free, it shouldn't matter if someone makes a profit from it. If you do care, then don't call it "free".

"Which community are you talking about now? The "pirate" community or the "free software" community?"

This community, for starters. Check out the lasted post about the guy from Thesis VS Wordpress. The majority of the people here on HN support Wordpress.

"Also, the FSF is of the position that copyrights suck, but that doesn't stop them from making the GPL using existing copyright law. The GPL is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Copyright law is as it is, and therefore we have the GPL as it is. If copyright law was different, for example if software couldn't be copyrighted, we wouldn't have the GPL at all."

The whole point of the GPL is so people have the freedom to tinker with the source code (this has been said by Stallman many times). If we had no copyright laws, there would be nothing stopping people from releasing binaries only. The difference would be that you could share the copyrighted works with anybody.

Would this really benefit the community?
I think that reasoning would be more apt if the question were phrased, "Do you _steal_ software?" or, "Are you a software thief."
> That's much trickier than you think

I think it's much tricker than you said. Those are just a variety of small details, and there are many more in the same general category. But that doesn't stop it from working. It's very noisy data whatever you do. The difficulty may approach that of learning English while you're there. That could take a decade, who knows. Children learn English faster than that, but we do lots of things to help them, but OTOH the alien is super smart and has computers to analyze patterns in the language.

(Of course if the alien does pick up English, these context problems become pretty small.)

I took the original question to be about the fact that what constitutes a good dance move is arbitrary. That's a fundamental problem. How do you figure out something that's just an arbitrary convention? Well, the solution is to look at the people who decide it.

How people react to stuff, like what they say, is not arbitrary. There's a method to it that you can figure out, unlike dancing which arguably doesn't have a method (I'm not taking sides on that, I just interpreted the problem to be to assume dancing hasn't got a logical method to it).
They usually use a tool called the "Low Orbital Ion Cannon" which is really just a DDoS app with a silly GUI slapped on top of it.
He's doing it on purpose or calibrating.
I was not aware there were two Reich's in minimalist music? Who's the other?
Looks great simple is good! Might use it for a few things I have.
awesome thanks reynolds
When WakeMate is finally released, I'd be interested in reading a retrospective by the founders on what they learned, and on what checks/changes to their development approach they have made for version 2. As they are discovering, development with a physical, hardware component can be very different from pure internet startup development. Hopefully any other YC startups with a hardware component are taking note.

I'd still like to buy a WakeMate, once it's proven itself, but I'm rather glad I didn't pre-order.
In a crude fashion this isn't difficult to do: Simply look for things like emotionally charged words and phrases, certain sentence structures, or maybe even word and sentence length.

This is a fairly well studied area, search on the keyword "sentiment analysis" for more information, including a number of open source implementations. ToneCheck even seems to be using the 6 basic emotion categories that everyone else uses, although they've tweaked the names a bit.

It looks like they've crowd sourced evaluating the emotional content of words and phrases at http://toneaday.com/.

My guess, largely without evidence, is that they are primarily basing their analysis on words and phrases and are relying on a better word->emotion dictionary than most to provide a competitive advantage. There are a number of open source tools that do this sort of thing, the ones I've seen relied heavily on the dictionary approach as well.

This is a very clever idea and positioning, certainly a better way to productize this technology than the ideas that had been floating around my head.
I've said "Yes" but I'm in a grey area.

I'm a member of BizSpark and am developing for SharePoint inside VMWare images. BizSpark provided me with a set of licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2, but it's only really enough to build 1 whole environment (1 server license). As a result I've simply copied/branched my VMWare image so that I can have 2 instances, a dev and a test environment. The test being a snapshot of dev prior to installation of Visual Studio.

I suspect this is pirating because now I have 2 machines available from 1 licence, but then again... it's just an image of the same machine, still running on the same physical machine and really just represents an earlier snapshot of the dev machine.

Something's wrong when it's not simple enough to know whether you are or not, and when a developer program (BizSpark) doesn't really give you enough to do the job you need.
It was alarming to read that people tell him he is a con artist. He's a good businessman.
Note: I had a chance to try this on win7 cd / works there as well as the rest of the separators.
"We plan to make this more granular in the future, for those of you who want to see, say, house ads in the sidebar, but not third-party advertising that contains autoplaying Flash."

Why on earth would they require users to pay for better targeted ads? If ads target me better, the net effect is more money for them. It just seems like a bad business idea to require that customers pay for something that ultimately makes the company more money.
Swedish Pirate Party launches anonymous, log-free ISP
common story it seems :)
I wanted to write about how linguistics should be handled by linguists not philosophers, so I checked the citations. I noticed that Wikipedia says implicature was coined by Patrick McBride which, according to Wikipedia is "a retired American soccer midfielder". Turns out the article was edited some time ago by an anonymous user. I guess not enough people visited it to notice.
This is true, but there are quite a few high quality applications that that kind of culture enables as well. I would gladly pay for an ftp app as nice and polished as Transmit 4 on Linux, but as far as I know one doesn't exist. Not that there isn't great software on Linux, but I enjoy the emphasis placed on design by the Mac community when it comes to the top applications.
"Altruism, n. - the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others."

Helping Gregory Mchopa isn't altruistic because the helper has an interest in seeing him succeed. The helper is enriched by Mchopa's artwork and admires him, and he feels proud to have helped bring Mchopa's and his work to a larger audience.

A truly altruistic action would require the helper to perform an action that had no such benefit for himself whatsoever; only then would it have no trace of selfishness. However, performing an action that has no benefit ultimately comes at the expense of the altruist because his life is finite in length and is contigent upon a limited course of action. Although they vary widely in magnitude, all actions either advance a person's life or are harmful in their effect.

Such truly altruistic actions are immoral, and cannot be applied consistently to all people. If altruism is the ultimate rule for being good, then Mchopa's helper should dedicate himself fully to giving himself up to others. But the recipients must then also give themselves up completely to others, leaving an endless chain with no one to recieve the benefit.

The alternative is rational egoism: do what is best for yourself over the long-term, which is the entire course of your life. To do this requires you to be as selfish as is possible: to use reason to guide your actions, and trade value for value with everyone that is valuable^. I think that for many people, helping someone like Gregory Mchopa is exactly such a trade.

^A specific value presupposes a valuer, so it only makes sense to speak of something being of valuable for a specific person. What is valuable to you is not necessarily valuable to me, but what we have in common is that we can employ the same method (reason) to determine what is valuable to each of us.

[This is beside the point, but it is worth noting that as long as a person is capable of reasoning, they are capable of producing value for some group of people. The number of people without any ability to reason at a level required to support themselves in a totally free society is vanishingly small. For those people truly unable to support themselves, selfish charity is more than enough to sustain them - rational egoists find more value in helping these few (in a manner that they choose) than in watching them die in the streets.]
Generally, two groups of people push for NDAs:

1. Inexperienced entrepreneurs

2. Big companies

If you have to sign one, make sure it's (1) mutual, (2) doesn't include non-compete language, and (3) expires. If you want to cheat, add (4) confidential information must be noted as confidential in writing or by email within 24 hours of being communicated. No one is going to do that. :)

And run NDAs by a lawyer, especially your first few. They'll talk you through the process of evaluating them.

I wouldn't sign the linked document, personally. This is pretty severe: "no person listed as a Participants may knowingly or unknowingly profit or benefit from
the concepts, ideas, thoughts or information communicated or shared by any other
Participants, unless hardcopy proof exists in a common medium used for communication
that this information was either possessed prior to the date of this meeting by a person
not listed as a Participants, or was created, refined, possessed or owned by the
Participants prior to the date of this meeting, or is common knowledge."
Perhaps there is a certain perverse form of karma to software piracy. When you are a kid and all your family has is a crappy <$500 PC and you really want to learn to do something cool, you can't even afford student or lite versions of the big name development, drafting, or graphic design apps. So maybe you pirate them, learn to do something useful, get paid to do said useful thing, then buy a license or so to ensure the cycle for the next generation.
It's because the == operator converts its arguments to be of the same type, and it does so in a rather unintuitive way. This makes it both inefficient and frequently baffling. You pretty much always want === instead, which does not allow comparisons between different types.
How would the Humble Indy Bundle sale have fared had they done things differently? This study suggests that it was wise of the Indy guys to give part of the purchase price to charity, as it encourages people to pay more on average.

However, the study also theorizes that the reason people pay more is that they don't want to appear uncharitable. Presumably the anonymity of the internet would reduce this motivation, relative to the study's souvenir stand.
Questions to Ask Before You Start a Web Project
You may have sampling bias - you tend to hear more the ones that completely dominate conversations. This doesn't immediately mean they are really the majority.

Personally, I wish my CS program taught me to speak more at a conversation setting (as opposed to "raise your hand to speak" classroom). I spent the first 3 years of my career unable to get a word in at meetings.
Perhaps a reality TV show about dancing with stars that think they can dance would be better.
He spends five to six hours a day on his i-Phone scouring the website for good deals.
Very slow for me in Chrome 5 on OS X. Seems like it needs some major polishing before it's ready.
Well, have a chat with the doctor who prescribed your SSRI. Drug treatment is an inexact science, so it can take several attempts to hit the right medication and dose.

On a more general level, try to break your tasks into smaller chunks, and accept the idea that you are not good at estimation. Start doubling the time you think things will take. This might generate some negative reactions from others, but what's important is how people feel about you on completion rather than at inception. Consider setting up a time tracker on your computer as well.

finally, it takes time to adjust one's thinking patterns. You're not required to be on full throttle all the time, any more than it makes sense to drive everywhere at 60mph. Treat boredom like any other irritation. Cleaning the bathroom is a dirty task. _______ is a boring task. Accepting and ignoring the lack of immediately pleasant quality will cause your productivity to rise and get it done faster. Developing this skill is a task too. I found it helpful to have a catchphrase to say to myself when I am doing something exhausting or unpleasant. It can be as mundane as 'sooner or later this will be over,' or something aspirational like 'The more I do this the stronger I become.' Ask yourself what you'd say to encourage someone else and adopt that.
I wonder if he has each trade he made published somewhere. It would be interesting to see the exact progression trade-by-trade.
Me. I will.

My modus operati when I need an expensive piece of software is to pirate half a dozen different packages that claim to do what I want, evaluate them, then purchase the one that best does the job.

Wrong? Maybe. But there is a whole lot of hype when it comes to that sort of thing and I can't afford to weed it out at full price right now. Better (less crippled) evaluations (or evals at all) would help.

Sometimes I even find that what I thought I was trying to do was not what I wanted to do after all, but I usually end up buying something.
I do that with books--- I generally will buy a hardcover, then pirate a searchable PDF, if I can find one.