skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Thus, any similar work you do on your own time cannot be done without your brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on company time.

Should I be writing all my past employers checks because I am using things I learned "on their time"? I had a job where we used CakePHP, and I learned much about the framework during this job; now, should all my future CakePHP work (of which there is hopefully very little) belong to the employer that first facilitated my learning of CakePHP? Should I write a past employer a check when the bad management practices I observed there are avoided due to my past experience? Do they own my wisdom on that subject now?

I think you can see where we're going with this. I think that anything that is not performed in the course of your ordinary job duties, not directly related to the company or its primary businesses, and performed outside of company time and facilities blatantly belongs to its original author.

>Think about it: you hire someone to solve a problem. You pay them to figure it out and implement. Then they turn around and implement the same solution, which you paid them to think about, for someone else?

Uh, yeah, this happens all the time. That's what most consulting firms do. You think when you hire a web firm to build your e-commerce site they always start from scratch on the shopping cart program? The cart was written the first time they had an e-commerce job, and now they reuse it. This is good practice and totally kosher, and should be expected, unless you explicitly request a custom shopping cart program with copyright assignment.
Oh yeah, couldn’t find Gish on there the other day. Good point.
Hey mate,

I don't have any work for you, but I feel for you. I was working on a project with a guy a couple years who lost his job. He'd previously bought a house, and rented it out when he moved to another state - then the family renting from him stopped paying the rent without moving out, meaning he had to try to cover a mortgage with no money. Absolute hell on Earth for him, things got all screwed up, but he's back on track now. It can mean a shit few months or year, but if you keep going you'll find a way, and come out on top.

Practical advice - cut your expenses to bare bones NOW.

The biggest mistake I see in people under a serious cash crunch is to say, "Well, I'm $2000 short on my bills... fuck it, what difference does another $5 make?"

Make a list of healthy, cheap foods, and go stock up. Lipton black teabags, instant coffee, oatmeal, rice, beans, tuna, maybe wheat bread if there's decent bread where you live. Stock up, and stop eating out. If you've got to eat out, get only a couple $1 sandwiches off the super discount menu from Taco Bell or another fast food place.

Cancel your cable TV. Think of cutting back your phone plan. Try to negotiate down or downgrade any insurance plans you have. Think about downgrading your phone minutes, and potentially canceling 3G internet if you don't really need it for testing what you do.

Look for recurring charges to cancel - magazine subscriptions? Do you have any bank fees? Call them up and have them cancel or change the account.

This is surprisingly unintuitive to people who are in a crunch, because, "Screw it, what difference does the $20 make?" But you might be able to carve $500 per month out of your budget in just little nick-knacks and expenses, which will add up. By all means, keep seeking work, but it's time to audit all your expenses. I know, it sucks, it seems like it won't make a difference, but do it. You can always scale the expenses back up once you're on more solid ground.

Good luck and godspeed. I don't have any work for you, but if you have questions or I can be of assistance in some kind of marketing yourself, pitching, proposals, something like that, go ahead and email me. Info in profile, confidentiality assured.

Godspeed, you'll get through. You'll shake your head at this period of your life later and laugh, you can count on that.
Only way to observe a crowd is to stand away and look from a distance.
the wakemate will finally ship
And if one controls the technology which creates the mesh? ie, requires a back-door into every device?
log2(25 * 25 / 4) * 1.5 ~ 11 years ago - 1999!

It checks out!
Yeah. Spam. Misleading. Rubbish. Etc.

In short:

He still uses a regular email-client for his work email. He apparently has it open 24/7. That's where he gets most of his emails or "communications", regardless of whether they're work related or private.

It's like saying that you never drive a car, except for those 800 KM's you do every week travelling to work and back -- oh, and when it's raining outside and you don't want to get wet on your bike.
> I would estimate that a majority of developers are under pretty onerous agreements that assert control over all inventions that they create while under the employ of the company.

Could be. I'm fortunate enough that the company I work for at my day-job has a very explicit clause in their "IP Assignment Agreement" that spells out - very clearly - that if you invent something on your own time, on your own equipment, that doesn't involve company IP / knowledge / etc., then they make no claim to it. Now, granted, the way the legal system works in the US, they could - if they turned evil - turn around and try to claim ownership of some of my open-source stuff, and the outcome would (as always) come down to "what a particular combination of judge, jury, & lawyers, in a particular situation, on a particular day, decide." But given how clear they are on this point, their chances of successfully claiming such ownership seem pretty low.

From what I've seen/heard, it's not uncommon for such clauses to exist... some companies also invite you to submit a list of "things that you were already working on before gaining employment here" that are excluded from any IP claim by $COMPANY. Lulu, for example, did this when I was there (and presumably still do). When I joined them, I just gave them a list of every open-source project I'd ever touched, looked at, thought about, or considered, and the vaguest most abstract list of things I was working on that I could dream up. They weren't exactly crazy about the list I gave them, but it wasn't a deal-breaker. <shrug />

It sucks that we have to deal with this crap at all, but I honestly don't think most employers are actually evil in this regard. A lot of this is just bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake, IMO.
News from the future:

IQ found to be influenced by a whole mess of genes, and nutrition in parents, and grand parents, and hugely by the environment. And IQ tests found to be very bad at distinguishing between knowledge and intellect.
While it's not paranoid crazytalk, it certainly looks like typical bureaucratic foolishness to me. Maybe I'm missing something here, of course.

I can sort of see the logic: if you are working for an organization whose classified data got leaked, but the organization has not declassified that data, you must still treat it as classified to avoid leaking any other related data by accident (for example).

But these students don't work for the government yet. Discussing leaked cables does not necessarily imply they don't understand classification.
Life With Arsenic: Who'd Have Thought?
When it comes down to it, these cables were leaked most likely due to Bradley Manning handing them over to Wikileaks. Thus, it was fundamentally a failure of the security clearance screening process that made this leak possible; a bad apple got through.

From that point of view, it only makes sense to assume that the screening process will be more strict moving forward. No surprise, then, that one metric that may be taken into account will be a person's feelings toward Wikileaks. I imagine the people conducting clearance reviews will look at everything a candidate has posted online, and ask them directly how they feel about Wikileaks.

Sympathetic feelings toward Wikileaks is simply a chance the US Government will not be willing to take.
We are doing many of these rounds as inside rounds, meaning the existing investors are funding the company without a new lead investor. I see this as a big opportunity for our firm and I am excited about it and entusiastic about making these investments.

What I don't see is a lot of firms interested in leading these messy middle stage rounds as a new lead investor. I'd like to see more deal flow from other VCs at this stage because I think this is where you want to be in the VC busines right now. I think you want to invest in the mess.

Hrmm, so which is it? The blog seems to have some really mixed messages. If you're excited and enthusiastic about keeping portfolio companies close then why would you want more outside led rounds? Just for the validation?

It is hard to not read this as a plea for more risk sharing in ongoing financing so that they can allocate more money elsewhere - like the overly frothy early stage market the reader is instructed to avoid.
I love that this post got 50+ votes and that so many people here are stepping up. Despite some occasional negativity in the comments, HN is something special.

And throwaway - if you're not deluged with other offers, drop me a line (rand at seomoz dot org). We're a Ruby shop, but might have some opportunities.
Are there any plans to move the code in the Flash piece to a Java piece? :)
Somewhere in all this furor, I saw 'demagogued' used as a verb. As in "No, don't say it like that - it'll get demagogued. Frame it like this instead..." That was a first for me.

Initially, it seemed like an ugly development. But then I realized that it was probably a good thing, since it means that a real problem is getting a proper name. That's a critical step towards a viable solution.
I have a similar feeling on big corporate employee stock purchase plans. You should always sell the shares as soon as they vest (if you have the discounted purchase price most of these do) as you will likely see a stock dive around teh same time you lose your job.
Never used GrooveShark before but this is pretty cool. Wonder why they don't have playlist ratings though (as far as I can tell)? When I do a search for playlists I'd like to see what other people thought of them before I click through each one.
Nexus S shows off its camera, video recording abilities -- Engadget
I'm kind of surprised that this conversation is solely about founders (well, and which Porsche to buy). There's only a few founders out there, and a lot more regular ol' employees.

Here's the thing about the scenario in this post: the founders and investors that are swinging for the fences and taking big risks probably have their nest eggs in place. But what about their employees? A modest exit could mean security for them. That exit may not cement the founder's "legacy", but it might give a few, a dozen, or even a big group of people a stable financial footing for the first time in their lives. What's more important? What has the most utility? I'm honestly not sure.

Having been an employee in that scenario and now a founder, I can see both sides. Personally, I'm glad to see more investors making sure that early employees get an opportunity to get a bit liquid if their founder bosses decide to shirk acquisition offers and spin the wheel of IPO fortune.
I actually strongly disagree: You need to be a user of libraries not a developer of them when you work in business (that does something other than sell libraries).
Not a US citizen :(. I can't even friggin freelance.
Well, dang, who isn't -- Google, I guess?
It’s the same ideology that says progressivism is dead, despite that today’s yellow journalism is watered down, there’s no traditional war between organized countries, sanitation’s up, and we’re getting further along with promoting resource equality in LDCs.

Not only that, but there’s complete ennui in living. I can go out in most parts of the world at night without worry of being beaten, killed or enslaved; the corner market to get fresh broccoli in winter. All of the programmers I know want to buy a house, settle down, and work an unpleasant job in an unfriendly country, when the internet allows any of us to pick up and move and still work.

Welcome to the age of pessimism and cynicism. Also, bedbugs. Just because America is sliding doesn’t mean the world is doomed.
That's close. Nowhere near as elegant as Django templates though, in my opinion.
Thus, any similar work you do on your own time cannot be done without your brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on company time.

Aside from information that is considered confidential by my employer (in which case it falls under the NDA I signed), what's in my head belongs to me. Yes: me. Just as my employer is able to use knowledge and experience that I've gained from working for previous employers (and on open source projects in my spare time), I must be able to use the knowledge and experience I've gained at my current employer in future (or even current, as long as it's not the same) work.

A huge part of the reason I'm so good at the job I do now is because of the 5 years I spent working on Xfce. If my employer gets to leverage that, then I get to leverage what I've learned at my current job. It's mine, plain and simple.

That may not be exactly what the law says -- it's hard to read it and specifically say what's allowed and what isn't without a lawyer, and even then I'm sure they disagree -- but anything less is knowledge-servitude.

Now, as to the "similar" bit: I think a large company like Google could easily claim that the vast majority of personal projects done by its employees is "similar" enough to something someone somewhere in the company is working on that they are entitled to ownership under current law and policy. Even if it's not related to the work that the employee actually does for the company. And that's not cool.

Yes, I think it's cool that Google is so willing to allow its employees to open source so much Google-owned code. But that's not enough. Look at it the other way: if it's "no big deal" for the employee to assign copyright to Google because it's released under a liberal open source license like BSD, then why isn't it "no big deal" to allow the employee to retain copyright? Aside from prestige, what does Google gain from owning copyright on BSD-licensed code? As a person who writes software, a part of my resume is the body of open source code listed under my copyright. Sure, you can look at commit logs to find out who wrote the code, but it's much less impressive to be a contributor listed under your employer's umbrella.
A new paradigm / abstraction in programming languages, like macros, OOP, closures, will be adopted by early adopters in the industry. Will improve coding productivity by 50%.
This submission had the all-too-common feedburner crap in the URL, the other submission was of the clean URL. The dup detector is especially simplistic.
Your best bet IME, other than word of mouth, is to query Indeed(.com)'s job search engine using your favorite RSS reader.
This is the problem with any generalised "anything you do that might one day compete with the company" criterion. Even if an employer only claims work that an employee does on their own time that relates to any current company activities, there is still the need for an employee to know about the other project, which is hardly likely in a huge company with 100,000s of staff worldwide.

I think the standard should be that things the employee does that are directly related to their own employment are what is covered. It's fair enough for an employer to claim ideas directly related to the project you're being paid to work on, and/or to say that you can't compete in closely related fields to what you're doing for your employer. However, that's a very different thing to counting effectively the entire world of software development, if anything that any part of a large software company does or ever might do could be claimed.
Lufthansa launches in-flight WiFi on intercontinental flights, 'the future'
Scobleizer Interview with Ricky Yean of Crowdbooster (YC S10)
I agree for most part. I think a good web developer is one who can use the existing libraries efficiently to get the job done, not necessarily build one. It's hard to build something when you have to get the job done.
That said, given their relationship with the web, it's hard to say that any web related tech doesn't compete with them in some fashion.

... which is really the problem. Google can claim that anything web-related that an employee of theirs does on their own time to be sufficiently related to their business as to assert ownership. And that's not cool.

Just because a company has done good things for the community, it doesn't give them a free pass to do bad things to its employees.
Thanks for including the original Wired link there.

And my apologies guys, I usually include the date of the article on the title if it's something old and link to the original publication on my HN submissions.

I came across the link on Quora out of all places, skimmed it very quickly on a late-Friday night, and submitted it w/ no thought to seeing it get upvoted several times. Regardless, I'm glad we're getting a good discussion here on the interview; glad you guys find it interesting.
Alas, accurate colors tend to look undersaturated to those used to boosted vividity.
Ask here:http://dev.opera.com/forums/forum/3590 ?
Any hints if Apple intends to replace it with something?
That cost becomes a big deal when you're competing with people who decide not to tax their creative populations in the same way. Unfortunately for Americans, there's a huge gap between what we consider unacceptable, and what China disallows. That means the US tax can go up considerably before becoming uncompetitive.

At the same time getting into the "how stupid can you be and still come out ahead?" race opens up tremendous opportunity for others who are far more nimble, and are only too happy to place bets on which economic superpower will choke itself first.
Getting Started with Compojure using Leiningen
My prediction:

Overall price inflation in the USA will remain low.
Bees in Brooklyn Hives Mysteriously Turn Red
General IT

=============

* I think the biggest trend is we’ll see computing further redefined. As tablets, Chrome based netbooks and more advanced smartphones flood into the market we’re going to see a bunch of people who realize they just don’t need a home PC anymore.

* In business I think we'll see a big increase in user-focused design. Too many corporations are running into problems with employees using web based solutions on their own to avoid the cumbersome software the company used (that was built based on corporate requirements rather than user friendly ones)

* In startups I think you're going to see the VC industry try to self regulate in the hope of preventing a bubble. So you'll start to see a coordinated effort to lower valuations and force startups into business plans that become profitable faster.
===========================================

My Domain (Mental Health Care & Education)

===========================================

* Mental Health: I think you'll finally see the cloud start to move into solutions that are HIPAA compliant (meaning they meet privacy standards).

* Education: Schools are reaching a cross roads where the teachers unions can no longer bully the districts into keeping teachers they can't afford (because there's simply no money left). With those schools trying desperately to teach more kids with fewer teachers I think you'll see a boon for technology.

=========

My Life

=========

My professional goal for the next year is to push more and more cloud based solutions (which I believe in more and more) and to try to use my connections to get cloud solutions to support the above mentioned confidentiality rules.

My personal/professional goal is to play around with the Kinect and try to find a way teachers could use it to give more interactive lectures (we already have projectors so if the teacher could control the content while lecturing I'm thinking there's a lot that could be accomplished)
Here Comes The Wetware
You hear wrong (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause):

"Most jurisdictions in which such contracts have been examined by the courts have deemed CNCs to be legally binding so long as the clause contains reasonable limitations as to the geographical area and time period in which an employee of a company may not compete. "

California tends to be the most employee-friendly wrt non-competes, but even here you can construct one that is valid, for certain classes of employees and with many restrictions.
I remember seeing the words "profit is fallacy, cashflow is king" on a poster in an accountants office.

Profit is an accounting construct. Positive cashflow is real and can sustain a business for a long time.

(Note: cashflow != revenue)
The only case where this could be acceptable is when you work in the R & D dept. of a company. If you are hired for specific tasks (which is usually the case) then everything else you do should belong to you, only. Einstein produced most of the work that led to the relativity theory while he was an employee of a patent office. Should the patent office claim anything related to his work in physics? It would be really absurd, if it did.
Hmm.. it's always cyclical in my experience - which is why we have a recession every 10 years.
Thanks!

I'd love to play around with some genetic algorithms in a game design setting. It sounds like people have been having some success using it in StarCraft, and I think I could definitely find some use for it in my level generator. I might just have to explore that route for the sequel!
Well, different market. I was thinking more of home users.
Nope not by California law. Work you do in your own time on your own hardware is yours. Period.
Great book to learn OTP!
Chrome sandboxes Flash. If Flash is on your machine but disabled for Firefox, you can preserve the configurations that allowed this, and use Chrome as a dedicated Grooveshark / misc. Flash player. Depending on your arrangement, quitting Chrome can mean quitting Flash, so it can be a pretty elegant solution.

Hat-tip to Gruber for the idea http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_wi....