skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I refused to sign the non-compete that my current company asked me to sign. It was a deal breaker for me.

And a former company asked me to sign a non-compete after I had been there for a year. No chance, didn't sign.

It's obvious why companies have non-competes but unless the position you are applying for is going to pay you sufficiently to where you don't mind staying on the sidelines for six months, or even a year, (think C level) I see no reason why you would give your employer that kind of leverage over you.
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian, All The Pretty Horses, etc. His writing is incredible.
I got this idea from the MPAA telling my ISP to tell me to secure my WiFi or lose my connectivity.
Just out of curiosity, what would happen if someone e-mailed you something with a title of 'Here are the files you requested about [illegal stuff]' and include an attachment with encrypted contents.

Then say I notify the cops about your 'illegal' activities.
Boosting your immune system could only make your cold symptoms worse.

This isn't at all surprising. Many of these symptoms are part of the body's efforts at fighting the cold. As long as these symptoms increase the body's effectiveness at fighting the virus, I'd view them as a good thing.
A plant still produces a net positive of oxygen though, correct?
Could you update your profile with contact information (the email address field is not public). I'd love to read the post you described. It sounds like I've recently came to the exact same conclusion, except I'm actually the business guy who used to pitch stupid ideas (ah the naivety).
Nice job! I just tested it out and it works great. I see you're using google app engine, I'm building a couple of apps on it and love working with. My platform of choice for sure.
Or Arch's ABS, to a lesser extent.
>So I started to look back at why I’m having such a hard time learning when I picked up PHP and ran with it so quickly, again partly its because RoR have a much greater complexity rating (in my mind) that just plain procedural PHP but heres the biggest issue I have... Rails tutorials are too long...

Try comparing RoR to a similarly-complex PHP framework. You'll find they all require a lot more groundwork to be able to do Random Thing X regardless of what X may be than a bare-bones PHP / Ruby / what-have-you implementation.

But that's normal. Essentially any framework necessarily increases the breadth of things you must learn to do what you want - languages are simple. The advantage is they trade that increased breadth off for decreased depth - you don't need to know how to write a JSON parser or crypto code or ORM logic to be able to use it.

As apotheon mentions, give Ruby a try on its own, it's a heck of a lot simpler, and the core library is by far the most brain-friendly I've encountered. If you need things to do with it, you can always try http://www.projecteuler.net .

edit: geh. I always type .com first :\
"Once a year my dog shits diamonds." CNR.
Actually they are exactly equivalent.

See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression ("Regular expressions in this sense can express the regular languages, exactly the class of languages accepted by deterministic finite automata.")
Also, when you're the only guy on the block that's able to turn energy into a useful form, you tend to get eaten a lot.
Would also be useful for people to register where they get their speeding and traffic tickets. As a long time Bay Area resident, I know what stretch of 280 the smokies like to hang out at a lot, and I bet that could be useful information to others, or even others with a satellite navigation program. Would be awesome if your GPS always had a threat level indicator based on accident and ticket likelihoods.
There are quite a few factors that affect productivity besides passion: education, experience, concentration, deep thinking intelligence, quick thinking intelligence, and so on. All else being equal, it would be plausible to suggest that the passionate beats the disinterested one but in practice things are rarely equal.
The GP was stating that choosing Ubuntu over Solaris is merely a matter of preference, just as choosing FreeBSD over Ubuntu is.
Social karma doesn't exist and promoting something in place of money equals shilling.
Not a lawyer, but I'd summarize: In Google's view, their use of the parts of the Harmony code as is allowed as the Harmony code is a clean room implementation and Android doesn't use that code to run Java, so there was no need to get licenses from Sun/Oracle. Regarding patents, they simply claim they don't infringe, I don't see that they claim why -- maybe because they don't actually use any code, but the device makers who install them on their hardware?
IDA Pro 6.0 with QT-based GUI (Native support for Linux & Mac)
Also don't use downvotes as an "I disagree" weapon, but rather a way to cull commentary that isn't contributing to the exchange

---------------------------------------------

I fail to see where that part is reflected in the guidelines. The comment basically contradicted itself enough that I felt that they actually needed to explain themselves further.

But as requested I will proceed to write a small thesis on why I think their comment is wrong, if you'll permit me dear protector of hacker news.
I've laughed at how little technical recruiters know or understand the underlying technology.

At the same time, I haven't noticed that the few recruiters who understood the underlying technology did any better. In fact, I haven't any good experience with "tech savy" recruiters.

I think it's similar to management. A former-programmer can easily be a terrible manager - they don't know the discipline of project management AND they want to tell you how to do your job. A "tech savy" recruiter can't prove you know anything to the client but still presents you with tech quiz questions to prove their usefulness.
This is a stance that makes sense if you're a back-office or research employee, but makes less sense if you're customer facing.
Pick a metric and singapore probably wins. They have a functioning universal healthcare system based on vouchers. Their government is cheap, being remarkably cheap and effective on any GDP based measure. They have an effective but cheap military. They have a working immigration system that serves the citizenry. I could go on.

That you do not like Singaporean society is neither here nor there, and actually rather separate from the government. Your (presumably hippy) sensibilities might actually appreciate it's multi-ethnic and fairly harmonious.

Lee Kuan Yew will go down as one the great men of the 20th century.
When I applied I fully expected to be able to go but sometimes things don't go as planned.

If it becomes certain that I won't be able to make it then I will RSVP no and Startup School can invite someone else.
The common commands page[0] lists a few translations for package managers. It would be great if someone could add a FreeBSD column to the much more voluminous Pacman Rosetta page[1] (which is intended for Arch users, but provides a helpful matrix for all the common Linux distros).

[0]: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/commands....

[1]: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta
Updated profile with a link to my blog. It's less of a fully thought out post and more of a rant/anecdote. Enjoy regardless :)
The new Internet craze: splitting hairs over browser share changes
Great, Malandrew. It always helps to have someone to help you go through it. Email me sometimes, we can update each other every now and then on our progress. Cheers,
I'd bet most people on HN think this is lunacy, because most of them aren't in situations where client lists are truly confidential. As a salesperson, when you add a client contact to your LinkedIn profile, you're putting your employer's client list in your "back pocket" (as it were). This isn't ambiguous; the fact that you've shopped your employer's client list piecemeal instead of all at once doesn't make it better.

What makes this a sticky issue is that your employer probably wants you to groom a LinkedIn rolodex, because they're helpful for selling.
So, the standard opening moves to the multi-year patent litigation dance.
The original title of the post, as submitted, was something to the effect of "Why I settled with the FTC for 300k". Personally, though? I don't believe anything the author says.
+1 on this.

If you learn enough to do a bad job building your prototype, you will learn what you don't know. Right now you don't even know what you don't know.

Also, you can't hire someone for a job you know nothing about. Doing (even a poor) job on your prototype will teach you to evaluate a technical co-founder.
Even for non-commodities, customer contact information can be invaluable. Often would-be repeat customers just forget you exist, but if reminded about you they would happily continue to buy.

The same reasoning for websites periodically sending their users emails is at work here. Remember how Facebook used to send email notifications that you've received a new Facebook message, but wouldn't tell you the content of that message in the email? "Hey, we have more goodies back here - come visit again."
They're not mutually exclusive. ;-)
I have a crazy idea ...

I'd like to see all drivers tested and graded for driving competency. Just because you can purchase a car and turn a key doesn't mean you aren't a vehicular homicide waiting to happen. Next, require all drivers to display their current driver "grade" on their car like a license plate.

Depending on your driver grade you are allowed to do different things in a vehicle:

Lowest Grade
- can't drive on the highway (probably eliminating most fatal highway accidents)
- can't drive vehicles over a certain weight (hopefully ruling out most minivans and SUVs)
- can't drive high-performance vehicles (hopefully eliminating a lot of machismo stupidity)
- can't drive above 65 mph
- can't ride motorcycles on public roads (reducing harley and sportbike sales by about a million percent)

Middle Grade
- can't enter the fast lane of a highway
- can't drive above 75 mph

Highest Grade
- can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want

etc
From someone who has interacted with a lot of investors trying to raise money and pitch a business I started with some friends, I can assure you that a lot of what people think makes a business is bullshit.

We spent months and months building a business plan, doing market research, talking about our IP, our proprietary processes, etc. When talking to all the investors we met while in the Notre Dame McCloskey Business Competition, we were basically informed the business plan wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, we had no IP, and the reason investors won't sign an NDA on your idea is that an idea isn't worth shit. When I actually started building something, when we got the land needed for the other part of our business, and when we had substance (not just words); that's when they listened, offered us money, and things started to work out.
The merchant also needs to know, "Am I in the business where an impulse buyer can be converted into a repeat customer?" I don't know what the user behavior is like for skydiving, but I can easily see it being the kind of thing people only want to try once. If you're in a business where impulse buyers don't convert into long-term customers, you need to find alternate channels for customer acquisition.
> I think Fried is sharp enough to identify talent and bullshit anyway,

So what you're saying is ... learn to program, unless you are sharp enough to identify talent and 'bullshit' ...
How would one identify this innate ability to know that they didn't need to actually learn how to program then?

> the above advice isn't entirely applicable to his case.

Care to explain why?
Yeah, I type .com so much out of habit, and so many redirect automatically, I don't even think about the non-dot-com sites existing as such most of the time. Fixed now!
Thanks, a rant indeed. I remember seeing this blog posted somewhere a few days ago, best of luck! I can definitely relate to your "F* it, I'm just going to do it" attitude.
Honestly though, would MySQL or PostgreSQL really helped out in this situation? Sharded or not sharded, there's really not much one can do once a server (or set of replicating servers comprising the shard) starts to become overloaded. Increasing the capacity of the shard by adding more hardware will induce a significant amount of load by itself. Of course, that's just one piece of the puzzle. We still don't know what actually brought the site down completely, hopefully they'll be able to trace it down and fill us in on that.
If you contrast yelp to craigslist homepage, the clutter on yelp jumps out even more dramatically
On a related note, I recommend seeing the movie "Yes Man."
> Your idea of "well governed" seems to have an awful lot to do with lacking in things that ruffle feathers and make people uncomfortable.

You mean things like crime, disease, decay, unsafe conditions, corruption, bureaucracy, and waste? Yeah, those ruffle my feathers, and I think eliminating those things and striving for their elimination is an element of good governance.

> This is a fine example of a place that has thrown away the heterogeneity of life, the celebration of differences and quirks, in exchange for strictly enforced harmony.

That's nonsense. There's nightclubs, art, technology, universities, fashion, discussion groups, live music, things to do, meetup groups... they're fairly relaxed about letting you in and out, and there's a fusion of Chinese, Southeast Asian, Western, and Japanese culture.

Your post is just so entirely off the mark - "a place that has thrown away the heterogeneity of life" - that I have to ask before continuing to discuss: Have you actually been to Singapore?
The password is among the contents of your brain.
All that snot and sneezing helps to spread the virus around too. Perhaps some of the most common colds are those that invoke a strong immune response.
Wow, was I off! Thanks for the correction.
I'm sending money to your paypal right now. Thanks for all of the amazing things you've done for the tech community in Milwaukee/Madison :}
The futuristic design at the f8 Conference
>1. Being able (or expected) to enjoy your work is a relatively new thing in human society.

I don't know how true this is, one of Marx's key criticism of Capitalism was the idea that, under capitalism, workers were alienated from their work, because they were unable to find true autonomy and determinism in what they did, nor reap the true value of what they produced. So I don't think the concept that work should also be fulfilling is entirely new, if Marx was lamenting its demise over 100 years ago.
ps: for more info -- We ended up finishing 2nd out of 211 businesses (from idea stage to operational). In the finals, we had investors offering us as much as $50,000 on the spot (which was the coolest feeling). We didn't accept any money because we felt we weren't ready to, which was good because the business dematerialized due to internal struggles. The main guy was the stupid idea, no tech knowledge type and thought he ran everything and was the reason we were getting traction (when all he did was sit around thinking up dumb ideas that the rest of us refined, curated, and implemented).
Since you're nearby, you get a few options of baked goods: fresh baked bread; key lime pie with or without meringue; fabulous old-fashioned gingersnaps; oatmeal raisin and/or chocolate-chip cookies; or chocolate cake with cream cheese or coconut/walnut frosting. Pick one, and we'll coordinate drop-off when it's ready :)
This reminds me of the Open Spectrum movement:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Open_spectrum

http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html
That's certainly true for that particular instance, in that particular implementation. But it's not necessarily the case. Take some random file and encrypt it with gpg; there's nothing obvious in the contents to mark it out as encrypted data.
>Nobody’s going to pay Google $25 a year to store their music in a cloud.

I probably would. $25/year for my collection would make it by far the cheapest file hosting available, and as I have a couple machines and a couple OSes, being able to consolidate everything, synchronize everything, and actually keep my ratings of songs across different systems would be wonderful. Most places I go I can stream music, so I wouldn't even need to keep most / any of it on my devices.
Upcoming DropZap sequel gameplay video.
I seem to remember a while back when scientists discovered a jellyfish with similar attributes. Does anyone else recall?
Mark Zuckerberg’s College Website Up for Auction
Going from just PHP to Ruby on Rails requires a huge change in Mindset that isn't apparent when you're starting out. Rails is a framework that is much larger than Ruby the language, so understanding why certain things work the way they do is a very important part of learning it.

I feel particular empathy for you because I absolutely hated the 'Agile Web Development with rails book' too.

Here's my suggestion ... Get 'Simply Rails 2' (I'm assuming the project you're working on is in Rails 2 not 3) ... work through it, then move on to 'The Rails Way' by Obie Fernandez.

If you're really serious about it, getting through the first one should set you up for success ... Obie's book will take a while go go through, because you're going to keep reading and re-reading things as you code.
They are indeed very nice. Does anyone know an application for Linux or Windows (via VM) that is able to create such nice diagrams? I could really benefit from a tool like this but Linux seems to be lacking in this department unfortunately.
> China of the present

China is not well run. The economy remains under the heavy thumb of the state and is not really serving the needs of the people. Consumption as a share of GDP is actually going down. Massive malinvestments from state connected banks and industries are piling up and will explode. The regional party bosses are still basically highly corrupt gangster thugs.

The only way you can look at china and think "Success STory!" is by drawing a GDP or foreign reserves chart. It says nothing about being a person under the chinese government.
That is a personal question. However, here are two books that might help you answer it: (1) The Black Swan and (2) Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists)
You're a little further than @gtracy, so key lime pie is a little too squishy to send... But if you want some home-baked bread or cookies or cupcakes... (Also, I make a mean fruit bread with slices of orange and lemon rind!)
GOOG and its partners seem to be focused on the US. AFAIK none of the EU carriers are spending anywhere near as much as VZ or Sprint on Android marketing.
Bodies in Brazil: the perils of Google Street View South American-style
100 years is very recent in human history. And enjoying your work seems to be a very Western idea. My Chinese immigrant father is resigned to finding his career as an electrical engineer boring and meaningless, for example.
Only during the day from what I've read. At night they consume a net amount of oxygen.
I've heard people say that, for example, the fact that a Linux system is made of pieces from a million different projects is beneficial to its evolution because doing this kind of crap simply isn't an option. Solid, well-defined interfaces between components are a must (and if they aren't an absolute must, they won't exist - not necessarily because of laziness but because of deadlines) in systems that are made from lots of independent groups' components.
-> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1756246
How to Become a Lean Startup Machine for a Mere 42 Bucks
Giving up my passwords would compromise the security of other people, so I wouldn't do it.
> The courts can probably compel you to enter your password (to decrypt a drive, or what have you), while you can maintain that the content of your password can be protected under the 5th.

This is a really subtle point, but in the US this is not (usually) the case, because this is still self-incrimination. You see, by entering the password, you are demonstrating that you have access to the encrypted information, and demonstrating that you have that power is technically self-incrimination. The password is one piece of information that you can't be compelled to divulge, and the fact that you have the password is a separate piece of information, and you cannot be compelled to reveal either. This is also a really important piece of information too, because in order to stick you with any legal consequences associated with the encrypted information, they generally have to prove that you have control over or access to the information. If a file is encrypted it is still possible to reasonably doubt that you have access to its contents despite having access to the physical drive it is on.

While it is (currently, as far as I am aware) untested in the court of law, it may be possible to compel someone to use or divulge their password if this does not incriminate the person to do this. I can think of two ways this could happen: a) access/control to the encrypted information has already been proven, so the testimony is of null value b) the prosecution is not allowed to use the fact that you know the password in court, and takes the gamble that they can prove access/control some other way (possibly by using contents of the information).

This is, of course, assuming that passwords are classified as "testimony" and therefore protected by the 5th Amendment. If the password is ever recorded on a physical medium such as a piece of paper, that piece of paper is probably not testimony, but rather evidence. This means that, like the key to a safe, it is protected by the 4th Amendment rather than the 5th, and you can be compelled to give up the paper via a warrant. This presents quite a quandary in deciding which is more secure: a 16-character semi-mnemonic memorizable sequence, or a 128-character random sequence that must be stored on a USB stick?

(IANAL, but I've studied the topic as a layman)
Don't bother.

I got a Lenovo q150 for $200 and replaced the disk with the consumer intel 40gb sad for another $100. It is tiny, quiet, and consumes 17 watts.
Just because the feature exists, doesn't mean it works.
Marco Makes It Easy to Find Your Friends
That's not what I said at all. (and I don't see how you interpreted it that way)

To put it simply, though it is understood that one needs to make money and that it's natural to want to be paid as much as possible for whatever your work is, to a certain extent I value the work itself a bit above the pay. Meaning that I won't just do what I like if it doesn't pay anything, but above a certain level of pay, I'd rather maximize the fulfillment from the job itself.

In that specific conversation I (and I believe swombat as well) got interested in what being a recruiter means and how it could be a fulfilling job in a different way than programming can be. The same way one could look at public speaking as interesting because it's very different from programming. Thus the point of view of someone who was a developer turned recruiter interested me. (with the idea that a developer being usually paid well over decent living conditions, recruiting must be interesting in and of itself* )

However, the answer lost my interest for being primarily monetary, rather than the money being the icing on the cake.

But again, to each his own.

* I'm sure it is. It's just a reflection over that particular conversation.
ZenTracker lets you keep tabs on your kid’s location via Google Latitude
I disagree with the above post. Engineering offshore resources are cheap. If anything learn elements of good UI design. Design elements will cause you failure more often then coding.
Great job! Can't wait to see what your next project is. I'm also learning python and your post has inspired me to take a look at GAE.