skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good post, and I agree with you up until your refinements of point (c).

If I dream up a improvements to my employer's business, but the incentives are not there to pursue them within that business, then you bet your arse that I can take them elsewhere. And yes, if I can be successful enough, compete with that business.

If the original business isn't smart enough to recognize the potential in its business, then it has no right to make a claim to it at a later date. None whatsoever.
The argument from the companies perspective: They hire you not as a implementor but as an inventor. In exchange for a salary they have hired you to provide the full value of your experience and imagination to the company. 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.
The law would generally disagree.
Hmm I actually see no meaning of karma in this form.
I think at first only the upvoted messages should be seen, acting like a condense of the room slowing down the feed.

Then if someone wants he could zoom in to view much more at the same time until he reaches the level of "every message in real time"
.
Also you should decide if this karma would upvote the user or just that individual message. (sorry I couldn't decide which one because of the floods)

Btw this remembers me of my "zooming feed" idea for merging together top news and most recent feeds in facebook, where one could always go deeper in lesser trending news of his friends.

Edit: Still better trying out then me who just thinks about his ideas and maybe post them in comments.
When you factor in that Google is an active investor in wholesale wind power, as well as the company's history of backing "green" startups through their ventures program, it's no contest.
It's pretty hard to discern how it works from the web site. What programming language is used to create modules? Does it run on the web, or as desktop client? And so on...

Interesting, though...
Considering that it says "(nytimes.com)" right next to the article title, football = American football should probably be assumed.
How to Get Funding From Friends, Family, and Fools
The single best improvement you could make right now is to ban a user based on IP if they exceed a certain amount of downvotes over a period of time. That would at least fix the spam problem.
Oh, I agree. I just meant that its a reasonable intermediate level of procedurally generated levels. I think for a future version they could ramp up how much is randomly generated instead of hand crafted.

I like the idea because you get a nice mixture between replayable random levels and nice and well designed human designed levels.

Theres definitely a lot of room for future improvement though and I'm excited to think about what we may have to play with in the future.
Looks like everyone's ignoring it, probably because it looks too similar to the one that's actually on the front page :)
And yet, they are widely known to not be "people persons". Hmm...
Look at startups the way Steve Blank does: as a series of experiments designed to discover and validate a set of product features that will meet a market need and that can be scaled to large numbers.

Now restrict your perspective to the stages of these experiments that A-round investors like Battery or First Round or DFJ concentrate on. In other words, stipulate that we're not talking about firms like YC that invest in 30-50 pairs of individual people they like every year.

What are the assets of these companies?

Yes, the founders are assets.

But so is the total team.

And so, to an even greater extent, are the proprietary results of the customer discovery/validation experiments they've been running.

And so, to an even greater extent than that, are the customers they have managed to close (or more broadly the "market traction" they've achieved) in the course of conducting those experiments.

And so is inventory, so is brand value, so is the core idea, so is the foothold in the market, so is the framework code they've built and the expertise in extended it, and so on.

Against all these assets, what's the real pragmatic cost of replacing the rare founder whose incentives have flipped so totally against the investors that he will drag the company away from the home-run outcome the investors need so he can salvage his personal life?

Now what's the cost of simply not giving a founder bonus money that itself might pose the risk of allowing the founder to disengage, consider a new startup, become obstinate in board meetings, etc?

I don't know, but I can see sane arguments in both directions for not giving VC founders liquidity.

The nice thing about not taking VC this time around: I don't have to give a shit. =)
$2bn in revenue does not mean you are "making a TON of money" they could be losing money. I don't know what their yearly profit is but it will take them many years to make $6bn in profit, therefore it was a very good offer from google and they should have taken the money.
Incurring untenable credit card debt for basic living expenses in the service of bootstrapping a company that ultimately needs VC funding is prima facie irresponsible. I'm not condemning it (I haven't been absolutely responsible with my own finances), but let's not sugarcoat it either.
Gaaah, so many wasted vertical pixels! http://imgur.com/DwTik.png
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.

We have a process for releasing under your own copyright, but it is not as flexible. That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested) projects in the last year for copyright release.

It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset, but recognizing the nature of IP in a company and acting on it is infinitely better than pretending the problem doesn't exist and then, in the future, retroactively claiming copyright when convenient. The latter leads to lawsuits and unfair restraints on creativity and competition.

This system works. We've released 10s of millions of lines of code into thousands of open source projects. It protects the employees and it protects Google and the price is a bit of complexity and the odd thread like this.

Also, thanks to this system, Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects, which is clearly useful and recognizes that people who work on open source almost universally do so without regard to the machinery or network they use.
How to respond to fear: Be Brave.
Facebook’s grand plan for the future
Somehow, I doubt Facebook will miss you. The product is not designed for you.
interesting indeed. I hadn't considered this. If this is the case, it's unfortunate they don't reject bids saying they're too high.

I just submitted several more otherwise identical bids at different prices to see what happens...
PCs are going to be like trucks: http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-steve-jobs-on-the-iphon...
So this is really the only proper response. If you work for a company in the US or in Europe, they have claim to your creativity and work. If you don't like it, work for yourself. (see my post above for how we deal with it at Google)
Understood. Until they don't need you anymore. Then they boot you out, leaving you with no ideas. And that's why these things bother me - you don't have a backup plan under contracts like this, and in this day and age you certainly need one (or two.)
Next year austerity and rising interest rate will take root in major economies, forced by runaway inflation in food, gas and commodity prices - caused by massive printing by US/Europe/Japan/China. This will result in money in flight from risky investments (emerging countries, startups, expansions) to safe investments, which will cause job losses in many of those sectors. Healthcare and Food industries will grow. Entertainment, Advertising, Construction and Transportation industries will wither.
I think there's a good argument that an enlightened media company would find it in its long-term interest to fight for the first amendment. Establishing the legal right to publish possibly controversial content allows them to do business without operating under a legal cloud.

However, based on Amazon's message [1] they don't seem to consider this a good test case.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/
You are clearly not a lawyer, and I strongly advise people to not follow your advice. I say this as a non-lawyer who has direct experience with this exact situation.

What you have said is the case in California only. In most other states the test is very, very different.

That said, there is a fairly simple process within Google which this guy can use to get permission. While Google wants to assert its intellectual property rights, Google also understands that it is usually good for everyone when Google employees have the freedom to work on open source projects.
Yeni Oyun
They'll change the law, as always. That's why they wanted to include Wikileaks as a terrorist org. All the way clean for them.
See above. Since we clear employees for open source work, we can generally say that Google contributions into opens source are reviewed and okay.
What is this "whining" if not an act in our own self-interest? :)
Not now, definetely. But I did enjoy facebook in the past actually.
This plugin is supposed to stop quote replacement: http://coffee2code.com/archives/2004/06/27/plugin-wpuntextur...

Haven't tried it myself.
It runs as a client, and I think the modules are created from the client, but I don't know what language they use, if any. Haven't tried the module creator yet.
"Wouldn't it be great if someone leaked a bunch of evidence that would help further my goals - in this case to help take down an institution I dislike?"

It's hard to envision any person not wishing this sort of problem upon their enemies, when they're in a position of limited power/influence over the situation...
A lot of the talk is from people who (should) have low confidence in their predictions. Meaning, there's a 80% chance this is bullshit, but hear my out anyways.

Yes, many of the facts are wrong. The conclusions are wrong. So why should we still discuss?

First, it's fun. Like a sport for us to watch (and some to play :).

More importantly, though: Forcing yourself to open your eyes, stay engaged and keep an active mind about what's going on in the world. To practice thinking things through, even with limited information (you'll never have 100% information). This encourages curiosity - so you get more involved, ask questions, do research. Overall it helps you learn how the world works.
Given JPB's personal history and the climate of censorship at Harvard, I'm wondering if there will be any fallout from that tweet.
I don't know about that. Looks to me, just from eyeballing it of course, that there are two periods of logarithmic decay. The first in 1918-1969, then another period of logarithmic decay until present day. A brief Google search reveals some information that would seem to support there was a big change in fire safety in the 1970s:

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/08/09_williamso...

>"[Williamson's contributions] helped make the late 1970s the high-water mark of concerted fire safety science research in the United States, a level which has not subsequently been exceeded."

These contributions began in the early 1970s beginning with the classifications of plastics and their flammabilities. The overall tone of the article (admittedly, it is an obit for a noted physicist in the fire science field so it's bound to be flattering) indicates that the decade starting in 1970 began a sea change in fire safety and great gains in fire science.

That's my point. Big technological advances increase survivability and decrease risk. I don't get the round-eyed, slack-jawed wonder at the fact that there has been a huge drop in fire-related deaths in 89 years. Moving from open flames to electricity then improving building codes etc., provided two huge catalysts to change. Given that drastic technological change was the constant of the 20th century, this Freakonomics post just seems silly.

(As another responder said -- there's also been a dramatic decrease in cases of scurvy over the same timeframe. Similarly a "duh" revelation. I bet a graph of cases of kuru and measles would look about like the fire one.)
They took down Wikileaks' AWS instances.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-f...
I feel like people who are my age (around 18) will be one of the last generations to remember using red and blue glasses and in the future will find a couple of pairs and wear them as a fashion and the entire young peoples generation, at that time, will not understand them.
I dunno. I invest in internet startups because I know the product space, I can do most of the work myself (I can code, I can make product decisions, etc) and I have a good sense of where it will go. And I'm excited about the space.

Cleantech (and medtech) are fascinating, but I don't have the thousands of hours of focus that I've had on webtech. It feels like I'm just analyzing the numbers when I look at those deals, and that makes me a bad angel there.

I'd consider a VC fund with some background in it, though.
Don’t Mention the Cables, Future Diplomats
And when you drive your own custom branded supercar -- we all know that you're never going to cash out: http://zondahh.com/
Pretty sure DHH is in a continuous state of "cashing out". He has no VC, in the sense being discussed here (they have a strategic investment from Bezos, but that isn't a VC relationship).
Yep: http://pixplz.com/
I agree with you that this was the WO vision. I think what we have settled on instead is JSON over RESTful interfaces. The downside is that it takes a lot more code to hook the web logic into the interface. The good side is that it works across languages and technology stacks, you just need a JSON library and an HTTP stack.

This is probably a good trade off, because the "one language for everything" has never succeeded in practice.
Mail me? Thanks!
Video Barbie in FBI Cross Hairs
Minor gotcha: -- has been morphed to a dash, so be careful to distinguish between one hyphen ('-') and two hyphens (a dash) when typing or copying the command options.

I actually love this feature for most writing. I use -- a lot in emails and in texts and wish it would be expanded to a dash. It's an error in this case, though, especially since copying and pasting the dash gives you one hyphen instead of two.
Am I the only person who thinks he wasn't being serious, and is now just seeing how long he can keep a straight face?
Sure, I suppose it is...it's just rare.

6 Billion is a lot of money to turn down, but I've never been in their shoes, so I can't say what I'd do.
Bill Joy's essay: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
there's something brilliant in here. it's not there yet, but it's a really neat idea. keep hacking away at this, you're on to something cool. and ignore the overconfident naysayers, this is really interesting and new.
Agreed. I don't like the politics of this "scandal" like many in this community, but this IS a serious fight AND I believe the stakes are even higher than many here on my side seem to think. It is how the battle is to be fought that concerns me as victory is my goal. This editorial, with all due respect to the EFF which I mostly support, is ultimately trite, pendantic, and shallow despite casual appearance to the contrary. This isn't just about freedom of speech. It is about putting a roof over our children's heads and food in their bellies. "You've got to get mad. You've gotta say 'I'm a human being God damn it, my life has value!'
Yeah, but this points to someone who didn't get clearance so I wonder if it is a unique case. Also, I am actually thinking of some other companies. Thinking about it further, some projects want copyright assignment, so one wonders if some of those weren't done properly.
nVidia's Fermi chip has coherent L1 and L2 caches, and that is what is used in Amazon's GPU Compute cluster nodes. Branch-prediction and superscalar execution are still missing, but IMO aren't needed due to other architectural decisions on the chip.
Additionally you could decide to only store up to 6 occurrences of each integer in the bit array, use the value of 7 as an indicator that there are 7 or more occurrences and store the actual counts for those cases in a sorted array occupied by the remaining 346 bytes left in the 4KB page.
Vanco Services (https://www.vancoservices.com/vancoservices_solutions.htm) may be a solution for some. The company I work for has both used their services and partnered with them, and they've been great to work with.
Beautiful Young Minds (2007 BBC Documentary)
What do you consider "safe" in a super-inflationary environment? Safety is generally regarded as being cash or bonds, but those become the absolute worst asset classes to hold during very high inflation.
Take a course on art history. Especially global art history. This is not a new concept, new style, trend, focus, what-have-you, though it has gained new momentum.

Edit: See: Suprematism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism), De Stijl (though they liked bold colors) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl), arguably Bauhaus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus), "International Style" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_style_(architectu... ), all of which came before the increased business in art of the 40s-60s, which came before "Minimalism" proper in ~1965. And this is primarily in America & Europe - other areas have had their blends as well.

All of which was pretty heavily influenced by the traditional Japanese aesthetic, which has a pretty strong focus on Minimalism-like attributes.

Minimalism as a positive thing isn't just reactionary. It also serves to bring subtle details into focus, and to emphasize the craft (ie, crafter's experience / quality) as a whole rather than individual details.
Camera and facetime for the iPad.

iPads and macbooks coming in colors.

Web of things will kickoff with arduino and programmable toys that can be controlled from and ipad/iphone.

Geolocation businesses are the new black. One can possibly disrupt eBay or craigslist.

Facebook IPO will be the best evar in terms of hype and money made. Just to deflate at the end of the year and leave the tech world in ruins.

Google IS the cloud.

Mac mini 'soapbar'. More power that fits in your hand.

Firefox 4 will never catch up to Chrome. Too late. Too sad.

Ubuntu thinks about re-branding in order to pass the 10% market share. They are that good.

Apple TV? They slowly got the trademarking and patents issue solved. They'll go for a screen now, a real TV that streams and record your shows/movies.

But not until 2012...
Salary should not be a way for companies to exploit their employees, though it often is because employees are spineless. The theory behind salary is that the value you provide the company is not directly correlated to the amount of time you spend at your desk, and therefore you negotiate a compensation package commensurate with a "fair cut" for the value you generate.

Again, salary is not given so that the company has free-reign ownership over your body and mind and it should not be a mechanism whereby the company gets an hourly employee on the cheap (some bosses seem to think that salary translates to infinite and unlimited uncompensated overtime -- of course, the 40-hour-week limit isn't necessarily applicable, but things have to stay within reasonability). What you do on your own time without company resources is your property, plain and simple. Companies are not buying your whole imagination and salary does not EVER mean that they own everything you thought up while on payroll. If Google feels threatened by this web server, they can probably obtain an injunction based upon non-compete agreements that stops the publication or use of the thing for a year or whatever, but they have no right to totally misappropriate it and steal it from the original author, and saying "well, he's on salary, so we own the entire output of his energy and imagination" is such a horrible and disgusting cop-out.

I've worked for some people who've thought that salary meant person-ownership and got out as quickly as possible. I was astonished to see most co-workers minimize it with things like "Well, you know, the economy is tough, we're lucky to even have work, they'll reward us with bonuses and more down the road". I just don't understand how people can tolerate that kind of thing. People who do that to their employees are so obviously amoral I don't see how one can expect a fair recompense later on.
My employer is sensible about this issue.

Everyone files an IP declaration enumerating the projects that are or may become relevant to the company's business. Since this determination is made at their sole discretion, I threw the kitchen sink at it and wrote down everything.

From the date of that declaration, they have a 90 day period in which they have an exclusive option to negotiate to buy. I am obliged to negotiate in good faith, but I am not obliged to sell. After that window, the option goes up in smoke.
It might be more productive to isolate genes that relate to a low IQ, and then discard those from the sample. When looking for a needle in a haystack it would make the haystack smaller.
ditto Google.
For this comment, let's assume that Google is correct that it owns copyright on all code he writes, even in his free time and not pertaining to his work at Google.

Now, that presumed, when an author contributes to the project, they explicitly agree to license their contributions under to the project's BSD license.

However, Google owns this code being contributed, and yet they, as a corporate entity, have not consented to the licensing of their contributions being distributed under the BSD license. Until they do, in writing, signed by the corporate legal counsel, or whoever else is able to sign contracts on their behalf, the code contributed is not BSD licensed because the author, which is Google Inc, did not agree to it in writing, and thus distribution and use is now a violation of Google's copyright since they did not legally consent to have their code released. As the owner of the code, Google alone can consent to its use, and not the "code slave resource" who happened to produce it, whose very soul Google now contractually owns.

This could be a problem for the project.

In general, projects need to require that anyone contributing new code represent that they alone are the owners of the copyright to the new code being contributed. If you contribute code owned by someone else and not explicitly licensed in a compatible manner by that other entity, then you have code in the project that presents a serious legal liability.
How to achieve good fitness & The Ways To Know
There is something interesting there, not sure exactly where or how this fits in. Not sure exactly what purpose the ratings serve. It is not like a particularly good comment stays on the screen very long. There is something good here and there is something missing, I just dont know exactly what that is.