skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I would sum this point up by saying that mainstream companies do not want to find themselves aligned with high-profile situations skirting the edge of the law.

That's what I thought until YouTube was bought by Google. With all the furor over music and movies and Napster and all the rest, I wouldn't have expected YouTube to last 5 minutes considering the massive amount of copyrighted content that they hosted.

Clearly companies have no problem skirting the law, and in fact any number of large companies do that regularly with impunity (e.g. Monsanto and the over 50 Superfund sites it is responsible for contaminating; AT&T and its assistance with warrantless wiretapping; BP and the spill aftermath).

Large corporations skirt the law and/or flip off the government all the time, even in cases of well-settled legislation.

Here we have a situation which is FAR from settled -- the 1917 Espionage Act and its amendments with the 1918 Sedition Act which were upheld at the time would never have passed muster in the face of later recognitions of First Amendment protections. The Pentagon Papers case supposedly "left the question open", but with 9 separate opinions filed, the government (having failed with prior restraint) apparently didn't feel at all confident about pursuing criminal, after-the-fact penalties, despite having decades to do so.

It's quite clear that this has nothing to do with law; it has to do with unofficial pressure -- extrajudicial pressure coming from many quarters. It's as if to say, "Poisoning the hoi polloi is one thing, but you messed with OUR stuff, and now it's personal."

I feel for Amazon and even the evil PayPal in this case, because how are you supposed to run a business when the government can send in its bogeymen to make you comply without even bothering with the courts? It makes for an extra set of unofficial laws to bully you with -- bully, because clearly it doesn't actually achieve the purported aim (the horse has left the barn) but is simply a show of force to make everyone kowtow.

Kind of like Mean Girls. The Queen Bee was shown up, and she can't undo it but she can take it out on her clique and make them not talk about it.
WikiLeaks on the run
4) A very simple and useful stopwatch

Try utimer instead:

http://utimer.codealpha.net/utimer/
You should read "Shop Class As Soulcraft". The answer, for what it's worth, is not necessarily a life spent in the arts.
I'm impressed by that. I've never heard of such freedom, but it strikes me that since so many people are considering startups now that such an agreement may be a competitive advantage by which companies can compete for employees.

If I'm reading you right you make this declaration when you are hired. What happens if you start a project while you are (already) at the company?
This is actually a big can of worms, what with it having so much to do with state, federal and international law and treaty (wipo, amongst others). It is often unfair.

All I can act on from this fairness perspective is Google's interactions with Open Source, making it as easy as possible to release code under open source licenses, which I think we're doing a good job of.
Submitted earlier, with many, many comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966099
It's not clear who is 'we'? Do you (plural) have the legal right to sign contracts and take out bank loans on Google's behalf? If so, yes, you represent Google legally as the official legal representative and this is all cool. The code should just have a link to the signed document placing the code under BSD.
When I was contributing to an Apache project they had a standard waiver form for your employer to sign to protect them in those sort of cases. I imagine most other major open source projects will ave something similar.
If I were Microsoft I would want to be releasing a 'cloud only' device next year, all apps and data on the cloud. That would be pretty big.
Please cite.

Folk are up-voting you, so the consensus is in your favour, but let's please out the facts, not hearsay.
Because it's probably not actually "wholly independent".

Software developers are thought workers, and you don't get to just check your brain at the door when you clock out like you could your tools or a laptop. 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.

* Now, this is the fun part. Where do you draw the similar line?

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?
Thanks Chris, that clears things up and generally makes sense.

I never much minded similar constraints when I worked as an employee at a company. OTOH, trying to constrain own-time works of part time consultants is annoying (but that is not the case here).
Amazon's policy is not as liberal as your impression indicates (I work there).

Generally speaking, Amazon is very liberal when it comes to proprietary code you write on your own time. So you can very well put together a startup on the side while you work for them. In fact, people have gotten away with pretty ludicrous things (Infibeam, anyone?) that tread way over to the wrong side of non-competes and basic morality.

If you like open source though, it's really not great. I know people who want to leave for MS for their better open source contribution policies (seriously).

Any open source projects you want to work on in your own time, even if their licenses are non-viral, anything, has to be cleared by a committee - one that is particularly not amenable to passing anything. I've known people at the company who wanted to work on projects in spaces completely way out of the company's current and predictable sphere, and have had the projects rejected. But of course, why approve a project and take on the minute risk of being wrong years down the line, when you can CYA and just deny the request?

tl;dr: If you work at Amazon and write proprietary code on the side that doesn't compete with the company, you're basically in the clear. If you have any interest in contributing to open source, you're SOL.
Such was also true in the 1980s (I was advised- never tested it in court). Whether a signed agreement was enforceable was pretty much a state issue, but it was generally thought that they were hard to enforce (like non-compete agreements).
Doing The Math on a Groupon Deal
BeeBole: Why we chose Erlang over Python, Ruby, PHP family for our back-end
His email is listed in his account profile. If you're interested in hiring him, I'm sure he'd be more than glad to tell you where he's located. However, you have to understand that for privacy reasons, some people may not want to include private information such as location on a sensitive post like this.
> This extends beyond 'working hours' (after all, you're on salary). It is simply a way of ensuring that the companies gets it maximum value for what you invent while being compensated by them.

I'm sorry to say it, but unfortunately for us all Marx is beginning to become more and more relevant, again (I, for one, had hoped/thought that we had left him and the problems he described in "Das Kapital" behind us). What you're basically saying (and Marx was trying to explain) is that a company like Google isn't happy with what it gets (in terms of profit) when it employs an engineer for only 8 hours/day, they want him to be on the company payrolls 24 h/day, a thing that even Marx himself wouldn't have thought possible.

I mean, it may happen that the above-mentioned engineer has a brilliant idea in his sleep (we've all had our "dreaming in code" moments, no?), but, according to what you're saying, Google is entitled to appropriate that dream's contents as being their own.
Tshirt for trolls
I believe it allows a MitM attacker to force a client to downgrade their ciphersuite. This is bad in HTTPS or other SSL environments with short-lived connections because it gives attackers a lot of chances to play this game.

The J-PAKE flaw is similar to those SRP bugs, yes. OpenSSH had the same problem. Sebastien Martini is doing some great work rooting out crypto flaws in widely-used open-source software.
I like the concept. A lot of people ignore rebates entirely because they're so often not worth the time, frustration, and hassle. If a site like this could be set up to be a quick and easy process, at least on the seller's end, I could a lot of people going for it. On the other end you've got easy money for stay-at-home moms or others with time on their hands.

I see it more as a logistical and maybe legal problem. Will companies honor rebates not submitted by the original buyer? If not, how easy would it be for them to find out that it's happening, and how big of a fuss might they make over the site? And as the parent brought up, what about fraud? Or not realizing some clause in a given rebate and not sending some vital piece of information with it?

It might all work out, or there might be some catch that renders it totally impractical, but I think it's worth looking into.
We're looking to hire a python developer. Email me.
This suggests that a lot of this stuff is boilerplate. Often, it gets added to contracts because there's no cost in doing so (except to the laywer's client).

At the same time, it's not necessarily part of a broader strategy to which the company is firmly, if quietly committed, and which they'll stick to, even as the costs of doing so escalate.

If the baseline cost of finding and hiring the right people is at all significant, economizing by lowering resistance is a no-brainer. Just treat this stuff like default settings from a useful, if not totally UX-savvy provider of software, and don't raise any eyebrows unless you get unexpected and seemingly arbitrary or mindless pushback.
LimeWire to shut down completely on Dec. 31
First of all, as far as I am aware, Google has been a very friendly contributor to open source, releasing lots and lots of high quality code, including some really cool stuff that isn't available elsewhere such as GWT or Guice. I'm strongly inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Further, reread Chris' first sentence. This isn't just Google being jerks; their policy stems at least in part from CA law.

So, under California law, which is probably the most liberal in the United States coving IP, you are prescribed
from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment.
This is reinforced in industry employment agreements, including Google's (my employer)
Most employers take the position that everything you do in the space is logically competitive.
Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

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. I'd wait for G to actually be dicks before calling them out. Also, being allowed to use 20 percent time to work on this stuff is pretty amazing. I have a bunch of personal projects that I'd love to have a day a week to work on.
2011 is going to be the another year all about web 2.0. I think there is going to be an increase in popularity for mobile web development using html5, css3, javascript and frameworks such as PhoneGap and Sencha Touch. The ever increasing number of mobile platforms will have developers looking for ways to maximize their exposure with minimal effort.

I also think there is going to another generation of social networking apps that build on top of Facebook and Twitter giving us new ways to analyze and use social data.

Overall I would say get yourself into some web development
Using Markov Chains to Generate Test Input
I'm a little curious as to what legal rights (if any) a copyright holder has over a BSD licensed work. Anyone care to weigh in on this?
Letter to the Australian Prime Minister (re Wikileaks)
My own point of view is that of course it's unjust if employers are able to claim copyright on work that their employees wrote outside of work hours without using company equipment (see e.g. http://unixguru.com/), and that everyone reading this thread should work to reform your state or country's laws so that they are more like California's in this matter, but even California's law isn't as ironclad a protection as explicit agreement on Google's part, because I'm sure there's some way snap-server could be construed to relate to Google's business.

It would be better if Google simply quitclaimed any copyright interest in snap-server over to Gregory, but of course that would even cover stuff he does at work, and it makes sense that there's an approval process for that.
1) My regular identity isn't even remotely pseudonymous.

2) Not sure what the moonlighting clauses are for my current employer, and while they're aware of the other thing that I'm doing, they're likely more forgiving in that it doesn't come anywhere close to competing with their core product. This is a little different.

3) I don't want my credit-worthiness to come up in my day job, as my employment is somewhat contingent on my ability to make purchases for the company.
I love the update, but yeah please do support Opera.
Also I feel really silly now for not renewing my subscription before the price bump. Stupid me.
“You Can’t Do It” is Powerful Motivation
Given JPB's record of saying what he wants when he wants and rarely seeing any fallout, I am guessing that the answer is "no".
Green energy.
California's law prohibits employment contracts from assigning copyright to the employer in works they do outside of work hours without employer equipment that doesn't relate to the employer's business, which narrows the scope of your 2(ii) considerably.

I think I'd like to read your treatise. Can you post a link?
Right, as you stated in your first post, it's easy to open-source something as long as you let Google have the copyright. Well, that's not always a good option. We have a prominent example in the Sun/Oracle thing right now.

A copyright owner can transfer or disavow its copyright. Even if state, federal, and international law allows you to steal your employees' work, you shouldn't do it. If something that should belong to employees belongs to Google due to an incongruency or other bad thing in the law and this becomes an issue in a court, Google can simply say, "We had nothing to do with this, we didn't pay for it, our facilities were not used in its creation, and therefore we transfer our copyright to employee X, who is the primary author."

I can see how obtaining a pre-emptive declaration and/or copyright assignment can be beneficial, but I definitely don't think there's any need to act like it's a requirement and that an employee needs Google's permission to live as a free person and do things he wants that are entirely separate from Google, its facilities, and its businesses.
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?

That's perfectly fine, and happening all the time. Google got the fastest JS interpreter among all the major browsers (Chrome's V8) by hiring the guy Sun paid a lot of money to do nothing but think about virtual machines for a couple of years. Just because Sun paid for the development of HotSpot doesn't give them any kind of ownership over the ideas, with one exception: for some ideas, they can get government enforced limited time monopolies for the sake of "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by filing patents for them.

But how this applies to Google employees, I don't know: it would seem that Google ought not to be able to claim ownership of all of my ideas simply because I work there while having them. That said, I really can't imagine it being much of a problem if someone just stays honest about things (i.e. not work on a major competitor to their own project).
Ideal Progamming Fonts
Was just looking at Wepay... from what I can see you need to create an account with them in order to make a payment. That would be a point of friction for a lot of customers. When I'm buying something online I don't even want to have to set up an account with the vendor, let alone another one with the payment processor.
thanks, guess HN didn't recognize the duplicate domain.
You obviously have no idea about the lengths to which Opera goes to get sites working.
Some quick references
i) They actually fix bugs on popular websites on behalf of the developers: http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/
ii) They actually have a position called "Web Openers", whose sole objective is to reach out to web developers.
iii) An idea about the kind of compatibility issues and bugs Opera has to deal with : http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog
iv) An anecdote demonstrating the lengths to which Opera goes to fix broken websites: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/11/05/the-lengths-to-go-t...

Go through them and let me know if you still believe that Opera doesn't try hard enough. The problem is that being standards complaint is harder than it soudns. A lot of the nitty gritties aren't explained in standards and diff browsers implement them in diff ways. While developers explicitely implement patches for Fx and IE, they generally ignore Opera. And that's why so many websites don't work in Opera.
can't find Smashing Pumpkins on there either
Sure, that's the precedent and official policy for actual employees and contractors.

But does that standard make sense applied to private citizens, having conversations about widely-available information, before ever applying for a job?

The State Department may get more careful, coldly calculating applicants by eliminating those who discuss leaked cables – but not more curious and well-informed ones.
$20k is hardly an irresponsible amount of debt. That's not something a year making software won't easily pay off.
So contracts and bank loans take a higher strata of employees to approve, but I've been given authority on open source matters. It's not practical to have a signed document on file with every project, but we do have such documents on file with the FSF, Apache and many other projects.

It's not always practical to do these docs, but they are out there.

This is one of the great things about open source, through the use of real , trusted open source licenses, we state our corporate intention quite clearly, and then we don't need to have a huge load of paper that accompanies every project.

We don't , for instance, have paperwork clearing the ip on all the projects we use at Google. The linux kernel alone is a huge work of shared copyright. No paper....
G.E. Goes With What It Knows: Making Stuff
Except when you make 75% of your revenue off of slow moving IT departments who use complex VPNs and Firewalls.
Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin
Hey look at Web 2.0 and all that private money, almost none of it public, or with anyone's pension riding on it. Please don't look at Gold, NYSE, NASDAQ or 0% Prime. Those valuations are definitely not a bubble, and aren't at all based on the money the fed is handing the banks to prop the markets. Yes, it's all Web 2.0 THAT's where the bubble is.

All those accredited investors in PRIVATE companies should definitely take their money out and hand it to a large bank who will definitely not handle it as poorly as they previously did.

Even if there is a Web 2.0 bubble the size and scope of it is definitely not comparable to the first bubble, or the subsequent real estate / CDS / MBS fraud. If you're looking for a bubble look at the NYSE / NASDAQ or basically any investment a bank could possibly put their fed money into.

Honestly, the problem is that the USV VC model doesn't work well when you can put a company together for $15,000. That environment much more favors the YC model, the problem is that once startups reach USV from YC they've already established traction and generally have a money making funnel that is ready to be primed with a large amount of cash. Once a company has traction it changes the valuation formula greatly. The reason that a 3 person startup in 6 months has higher valuations than in previous years is because the risk / reward ratio is greatly changed from previous years. Valuations are higher because the new startup life cycle is much shorter. You no longer need $5 million just to see if your idea is viable. With the amount of cash that the big boys have on hand and the difficulty of a modern IPO I think the industry is headed towards more informal version of Japanese style Keiretsu model where startups are using resources of larger parent entities rather than the more formal VC/IPO.

YC has taken the bottom end of the market from USV, so USV sees higher valuations because YC has already taken the risk and weeded out a bunch of companies that didn't work out. So from an entreprenuer perspective you'll see both higher AND lower valuations. Once a startup reaches USV it's higher than in previous years but you'll find a lower valuation for your seed round because of YC (and the associated lower costs of startup).
> Supposedly Groupon is making nearly $2 billion a year in revenue.

Of which somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion are pass-through, going to local merchants.

Assuming actual revenue is the more widely-reported $500m, I'm not sure how far that goes when you have 3000 employees.

Recall that MySpace was putting up similar revenue numbers but with only a single profitable quarter, making something like $10m.

Revenue alone is meaningless. I can increase my revenue at any time by selling things at a loss. What's the profit?

I assume GroupOn must have real profits in order to turn down that much cash. We've seen just as often though that companies are deluded, like PointCast or Digg. It would be easy to settle this point by looking at profits. Curious how companies jealously guard that information but loudly trumpet "Revenues!"

That alone should be enough to convince anyone how meaningless revenues are.
http://store.p212121.com/

An e-commerce site, I talked with a number of customers before launching (wish I had something more fascinating for you). The site fits under the category of scratching my own itch since I am a scientist. I wouldn't consider the site as having lots of traction nor expected it knowing the customer base. At the moment am focused on customer's problems and am quite dependent on word of mouth.
Don't know the numbers for mobile search, but after Google retreated Baidu has climbed from 60% to 80% market share of total search.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2010-10/23/content_114...

Being in such a dominant position, they go directly to all the major Android smartphone manufacturers to request that they preinstall Baidu search on the smartphones, so Google doesn't have a shot at getting on the phones.

Don't think the Android Market is operating in China after Google gave up, they are probably blocked. It's not on the Android Market's official list of countries supported either. http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

The Chinese download Android apps in a fragmented app store environment. There are larger ones like www.hiapk.com, and carriers and manufacturers are also trying to setup their own app stores.

Don't think Google can benefit at all unless they get their search, Android Market, mobile ads on the actual smartphones.
The last thing we need is more anti-science politicians, especially ones who favor massive increases in government power over our personal lives (Paul is against Federal government--he's fine with intrusive government if it is state government).