skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's also a question of profit. Monsanto, for example, probably saved millions, if not billions, by skirting the edges of EPA regulations. To use another example, if the Macondo well had come online, BP would have saved hundreds of millions by skimping on safety measures. However, there's not enough profit to justify the risk for Amazon, and they're cutting WikiLeaks off for that reason alone.

In business its not about the law - that's what high priced law firms are for. Its about profit, and no business will fight the good fight if there's no money at the end. Just look at Google and Net Neutrality. As long as network providers were refusing to negotiate, Google was raising holy hell about network neutrality and traffic shaping. However, the moment some started to negotiate, Google dropped its hard line and crafted a joint statement riddled with exceptions and caveats.

Corporations are powerful but fickle allies. Take heart when they're fighting on your side, but don't count on them to do so to the end. They'll drop you and your cause the moment it becomes clear that there are other ways to secure their profit.
Top Culture of Tech Stories of 2010
If you own, try to rent out your house and then rent a cheaper place closer to work. If you rent, try to move closer to work. If you live in a city you might be able to do without a car. Also, if you have an extra room, you can try renting it out or listing on airbnb (no affiliation). The point is that sometimes you can find low-bandwidth opportunities to make or save a little extra cash on the side.
I, for one, do not want any kind of regulation for our trade. People can wrangle over the term "engineer" if they'd like. I don't use it for myself, as I am quite content to be called a programmer. One could argue that a guild/regulatory body would put us in a stronger position to negotiate salaries, via a kind of artificial shortage (since some individuals won't get certified). But the last thing that I want, personally, is to have to answer to any kind of guild that tries to tell me that I am or am not a "proper" programmer.
You've laid out the case for why we cannot rely on an amoral legal corporate entity to take up a principled fight for our rights (if it doesn't want to). But the point of the article is that the government is using this as a loophole to get around it's constitutional restriction on censoring speech.

The question then is, how can we maintain our speech rights when the government is using corporations as proxies for it's censorship? In the AT&T wiretapping case from a couple years ago it became clear that even when the corporation is engaging in criminal activity at the behest of the government, the government can just turn around and grant it retroactive immunity. At this point it seems that there is nothing the government cannot do as we continue our slide towards authoritarianism.
You are right on target. OTP should be the norm and should be learned as a first step. Later on for curiosities sake one can learn to program without it! OTP codifies many of the best practices that experts in this type of process based concurrency model use every day.

It is nice to be finished with the book and we are really proud of it. These days we are back to Erlware, resurrecting the project from a two year hibernation, and also planning for the next ErlangCamp.
Considering how only part of the total WikiLeaks web presence was moved to AWS it seems likely that at least suspected Amazon would take them down.
Thanks very much for those citations. I find it quite telling that three of the States with this protection are California, Washington and North Carolina. Pretty sure those are the top states in the US for software innovation. I can see how the two are connected too. Employees retain rightful ownership of their work they do at home for themselves. Many of these employees will then leave and found new, innovative creative companies using the things they made on their own dime using their own personal resources. In States where the rights of people to the fruits of their labor are not respected, there is no where near as much innovation, no where near as many new companies and products and employment growth.
The curious thing is that they are already here, e.g. Python/Ruby vs Java. According to Clayton Christensen it takes a paradigm shift of over 5x improvement before anyone notices.

I dont think the shift will be programming language based because the decision makers dont pay attention to programmers. (I'm speaking the enterprise world here, not startups.) But I hope you're right, not me. :-)
Can you (or anyone) elaborate on "The founders, employees, and other insiders of Groupon have already been handsomely paid off."? My understanding is that the handsome payoff comes when the company is either bought out or IPO's
I suppose. A side effect of this policy, though, is that it rules out any future employees who are passionate enough about an incredibly important issue to discuss it publicly after it's appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Seems wrongheaded to me.
excellent point in the edit!
Very presumptuous and egotistical to think this is about you. It's not about you, it's about the code that has been contributed which requires a separate line item and which you have contributed which you state is legally owned by someone else.
If you can install software on their computer that runs with their authority, you can look to see what keyboard layout is configured and who their ISP is. You can also take pictures of them with their webcam and steal copies of all the passwords they type.
"Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?"

Because the employer is the one giving money to the employee, not the other way around.

"If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work?"

If you're salaried, there is no such thing as overtime. That's what the word "exempt" means on your tax forms. This is also why Google doesn't care when I get in to work at 1 PM, or when I take an hour long lunch break, or when I spend my whole time going to Tech Talks instead of working. As long as I get my work done over the time periods required by the business, it's none of their business how I spend my day.

Employment law recognizes many different categories of employees. If you're a contractor, you're paid for your work - you and the firm agree precisely on the deliverables, they give you a lump sum for the job, and then it's completely up to you how you build those deliverables. If you're hourly (non-exempt), you're paid for your time - you receive a set hourly wage for each hour that you work, and what you do outside of that is your own business. If you're salaried (exempt), you're paid for your ideas - you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

You should know exactly what you're signing up for when you sign those employment agreements, and pick the form of employment that suits your goals best. But remember that companies adjust the amount of information they share with each class of information accordingly - no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.
TaskRabbit: Life is busy. We can help.
Ask HN: experiences with Lasik eye surgery (programmers especially)?
A friend of mine had Lasik eye surgery performed in June (5 months ago) and has a perfect experience so far. No complications and the doctor has been fantastic throughout the entire process.

I have been wanting to get Lasik eye surgery for a long time and, seeing my friend's successful experience, decided to get the surgery (also, I graduated from college in May and can actually afford the procedure now that I have a job). I did some research, visited the same eye doctor as my friend, and scheduled the surgery for January after it was determined that I was a prime candidate. I felt extremely comfortable with the doctor and he is a leader in his field in the Baltimore, MD area.

I made sure to tell the doctor that I am a programmer and stare at a computer screen for far too long everyday. They said it was not an issue and that I was still a prime candidate.

What are your experiences with or opinions of Lasik eye surgery?
Manja
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The hunger of a real start-up? | 24 Ways To Start
Dan Wilson recounts the early days of eBay UK. Among all the choas; the highs and lows — the one thing he remembers might be blindingly obvious. But it’s true. Is it true of your startup?
Considering cherry trees require bees to pollinate, you'd hope the damn cherry factory would be very interested & concerned about this.
Git: Push Rejected Non-Fast Forward
Very cool! Incredibly slow on my MBP + Chrome though. :(

I wrote my first version of it in 2006 in Pygame: https://gist.github.com/728623
Thank you for correcting.

I don't see how it is that different in practice. Do you mean that there is a loophole, since a company that is "not evil" can clearly "act evil" and still operate according to its principles because of the specific wording of the statement?
Pursued to its logical conclusion, this means that the 800,000 or so US citizens with some level of security clearance have been forbidden from reading newspapers, watching the Daily Show, or discussing politics for the last week or so. Really? I mean, I know that reductio ad absurdum isn't a successful defence against dumb law, but this seems a bit excessive.

Especially considering that a big part of what's been released so far has been ho-hum stuff that just reinforces what a lot of people have speculated was true---"Eh, they don't really think that'll work."---and now making a comment like that means you're propagating classified information and thus ineligible for a State Department job?

I mean, it has shades of the old Khrushchev line ("3 years for insulting the premier, 20 years for revealing state secrets.") It's one thing to say that a leak that one person saw does not automatically declassify something (trade secret law works the same way), but when the leak is on this kind of scale and has been commented on so publicly, it seems hard to justify.
http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html

That IP address is just wikileaks - the DNS is down for me currently is all.
Definitely want to live as long as I possibly can. If at any point that stops being true, it's because I screwed up.
He needs to turn this into a positive narrative. The Germans have an aphorism: "Stubbornness is the energy of fools." He should reframe this as a persevering focus on his prospect's needs. Sam Walton suggested an approach Rand might consider in his ten rules for building a successful business:

Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find
your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for
a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way.
I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town
of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

I blogged about this in http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/02/01/focus-on-your-prospe...
Will a copy of Duke Nukem Forever be included? Word on the street is that it will be released in 2011 as well.
3 words: christmas shopping season
2011 will be the year of the dealpool.

Myspace deadpools.
Digg deadpools.
Flickr deadpools/shut down by Yahoo.
Utimer isn't everywhere like time is, and is thus much less useful.
This policy is probably preventing hundreds of new startups from being created every year if you think about it. Since most people work on their startups while keeping their day jobs.

Imagine if every company in the country had this policy. Our economy would grind to a halt.
Whats up with my local geek community.Need to vent
I am building a web based business.I need to find website developer so I go to a local geek meeting.I politely give out my card and asked 4 different people to call me the next day.Not one call.I washed, smelled good and dressed ok for the venue.What did I miss?And I use the word geek in the best way as there was a room of very talented people
Probably a good time to point out that the email field in your profile isn’t listed publicly. It’s there for pg to contact you if need be.

If you want others to see your email, put it in the about section.
The unanswered question here, for me, is: why is there so much sugar and dye in the runoff from the cherry factory that the bees are interested in it? And why is runoff from anything being released untreated into the surface system?

(I'm glad they made explicit mention of Ms. Mayo's name, though. It was bugging me the whole time and gave the first half of the article almost an Onion-esque feel.)
not tied. LINKED. tied makes it sound like the smoking causes this. that we do not know.
Here comes another bubble
Very little of the work done on Google products is directly assigned by Google management. I just finished up a week-long demo that fixes a longstanding annoyance with the search results. I saw a need, made a quick 10-minute screenshot mock-up, gave a 3-minute presentation, recruited a few co-conspirators, and we built it. Management will be involved in the decision whether to productionize and launch it, but the demo was all done at the individual-contributor level.

I've got a 20% project that, to my knowledge, my manager doesn't even know about. It grew out of my 80% project - we needed a library that doesn't seem to exist yet. When it gets to a semi-functional state, I'll open-source it through cdibona's office, with copyright assigned to Google. Why not? It'll end up exactly the same for end-users, with an Apache license, and it's much less of a bureaucratic hassle to just do it with a Google copyright.
Space debris may cause mysterious balls of lightning
http://213.251.145.96/mass-mirror.html

Better to use their IP as the domain is barely reachable, at least from where i am.
The Wikileak China-Google Cables
um, yes?
Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking?

If the informant believed that the Chinese government had full access to US State Department communications, he forgot to mention it. On the contrary, the NYT article describes a failed phishing attack on State department employees, in what sounds distinctly like a tip-off. That's a few notches down from the movie-caliber pervasive espionage you suppose.

Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out.

You seem to be implying that none of the information made public so far has been secret (or rather, classified "SECRET"). This is false. Most of the cables are unclassified, many are CONFIDENTIAL, and about 5% (IIRC) are SECRET. Those released thusfar are a mixture.

whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking

This is nonsensical, as the two are additive.
the miss-spoke not language keyboards but maybe reading text output in Chinese
Thxs for the feedback. It sounds like you were in the same position as me, your a non-techie and you hired developers. The only difference was geography, your developers were local whereas mine are overseas. So how did you address the quality issue? How did you know what the developers were giving you was actually good stuff?
I can't assume that just because I outsourced to India that the code they write is going to be worse then what a US developer would do. In fact if I stayed with a US developer I would have the exact same problem. Whether the developer I hire is in the US, India, Canada etc, problem is still sorting the good from the bad. I'm just saying local does not equal good programming.
With any developer you aways go through the same stages, checking experience, references, past projects etc but in the end it comes down to trust (which I have in my team) and verification (which I don't have).
How should I get the verification? How did you verify your developer's work?
Given that fully three quarters of the comments I've read can be paraphrased as "isn't it mean for the big bad multinational to steal the poor hacker's code just so he can get a paycheck", over a one-line commit message, it most certainly IS about me.

Maybe not personally -- clearly almost nobody gives a rat's ass about me, or about Haskell code in general for that matter -- but I'm just a little exasperated by being used as a proxy cudgel to wield against my totally reasonable employer, when the people who are sniping from the peanut gallery really have no idea what the legal situation is, what I have or haven't agreed to, whether I have done this voluntarily or under coercion, etc etc.

It is nice that there is some reasonable discussion coming out of this thread about the law and industry practices re: intellectual property vis-a-vis programmers, but for the most part I am pretty disappoint.
How do they decide who gets the grant?
>As the government begins to meet basic human needs, the citizens will start to yearn for higher needs to be satisfied like freedom of information.

Really? I mean, its nice to paraphrase Maslow and all, but what evidence do you have that it will actually turn out that way? At least, here in the US, the citizenry seems to be tolerating a government that becomes more authoritarian with regards to freedom of information and rights against unreasonable searches.

I do hope that things do turn out the way you envision. My fear is that you're seeing inevitability where I see historical caprice.
A major problem here isn't just the interface technology, but that we have such a poor understanding of how the brain works (my girlfriend is working on her PhD in Neuroscience and I hear about this almost daily). Consequently, our interfaces will be crude and clunky at best for a long time.

We've barely got the faintest ideas of how to measure some things that would seem really basic. Memory? Perception? Forget it. When using one of these you're basically trying to train your brain to stimulate huge areas to try to get some readout. It happens that we aren't great at this. Even playing a game as basic as Pong is very hard with this type of interface, and it isn't as if we're going to get significantly better at this anytime soon.

Its about as graceful as trying to make your entire leg smash forward in order to press a small delicate button. We can hit things, but when you have lots of small delicate buttons, the resolution isn't going to get much better since we're still smashing blindly.
Right, I'm thinking that X will happen to Python/Ruby like Python/Ruby happened to Java.

A 5x improvement is a lot to ask for...I don't think that Python/Ruby offers 5x over Java, and to get 5x over Python/Ruby will be very hard. Even describing software in reasonably precise English probably doesn't offer 5x over the state of the art.

On the other hand, 50% is definitely feasible. The form this will take is a combination of, among other things:

- Moving away from the dynamicism of Python/Ruby: by sacrificing just a little bit of the dynamicism (like assigning to a variable by string name) you can gain a lot in terms of what IDEs can do and what compilers can do to optimize.

- New constructs that replace the dynamic metaprogramming in Ruby/Python with static metaprogramming, like Lisp's macros and F#'s type providers.

- Merging OOP with functional programming by unifying FP's abstract data types and pattern matching with OOP's classes and runtime dispatch. The resulting system will be something like multimethods or predicate dispatch.

- Testing tools will get more powerful. Randomized testing will play a more important role. We'll get statistical analysis in IDEs that can sometimes pinpoint the line that's causing a bug by running the randomized tests and computing the correlation of "line n was executed" with "the test failed".

- Last but not least, the days of ASCII based programming are over.

> I dont think the shift will be programming language based because the decision makers dont pay attention to programmers. (I'm speaking the enterprise world here, not startups.) But I hope you're right, not me. :-)

I agree. As usual the enterprise world will lag a few years behind...around the time they adopt Python/Ruby/F#/etc, the startup world will have new languages and tools.
An interesting problem. Despite my objections to their actions (which I spelled out in a different thread) I'm not really upset with Amazon. I will probably not buy from them for a while, but I know that won't really affect their bottom line and I partly just enjoy brick-and-mortar stores most of the time anyway. I can't even necessarily say that I would act any different in their shoes - business is business and a lot of the time that means every person for themselves. In other words, I'm not entirely idealistic and naive. Still, it really sucks that potential government repercussions can affect private businesses enough to circumvent the safeguards which documents like the US Constitution are meant to provide.
I can't speak for the NeuroSky, but I reverse-engineered the protocol and crypto used for the Emotiv to create the open source Emokit ( https://github.com/daeken/Emokit ) a couple months back. While no one has really done anything with it yet, it opens up some fun stuff. The Emotiv has the benefit of more sensors, and it isn't much more expensive. I'd love to see someone do something really cool with it.
I'd love to play with one of these and just watch the inputs, during various mind states. Resting, relaxing, watching tv, playing music, listening to music, drunk, high, bored, focused, reading, panic etc, etc. I don't know what I would do with the data, probably end up posting it online see if someone can do something with it.

Idk, I feel like with practice you could get pretty good at using it. But here it has a $300 price tag, looks like I will be waiting for someone else to get after those ideas.
What did they have to gain from contacting you? There needed to be a compelling reason from their perspective to get back with you.
In The Future All Music Videos Will Take Place On Facebook
single page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/business/05ge.html?pagewan...
i get that, but still...you dont have to run the apps that distract you in the first place. I think one can hardly have enough screen real estate especially in web dev where you have to fiddle with so many different applications.
I like having my IDE on one monitor and the Browser to check results / view documentation on the other one without needing to switch back and forth all the time.
Just had called the Miele service themselves: they offer a 10 years guarantee plan.
I will bet on Portugal, dragging down Spain in it fall.
David Stockman: I Invest In Anything Bernanke Can't Destroy
I just found that 20 minutes ago and was so excited that I ordered an Emotiv right away. Great to see that you're an HN user, I'm looking forward to playing with the Python library.