skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* I find it somewhat strange that people didn't use all those previous predatory practices of PayPal as an opportunity to look for alternatives,*

I've been looking and looking, but the one thing that keeps me with PayPal as a vender is their debit card (and the instant access to cash it give s you). The moment a credible alternative offers that, I'm gone.

That said, the Obopay method of depositing money to your bank account every day may work - I'll have to investigate and see if those deposits happen quickly or if there is a day or two processing delay.
Your point on be an engineer is what I have been thinking lately. I am 27 as well and not in a position to be an enterpreneur. What I have realized is I need to start developing libraries(javascript/jquery) and not just use it.
Jython doesn't compile to JVM bytecode its just a Python interpreter/implementation written in Java that runs on the JVM.
Yes, on your first day at IBM you were given the opportunity to declare IP that you owned. Anything else going forward belonged to Big Blue.
I just did it to practice my programming...
My boss crossed off that section of his contract when he worked for Booz Allen, and nobody made a peep.
Plea HN: Any work?
This is a throwaway account. My main is a fairly high karma HN account that's been here for years. I've met some of you in real life.

I recently took a lower paying (but much lower stress) job to allow me more time to bootstrap my own startup. This made our budget tighter, but between my income and my wife's, all the necessities were at least covered.

Fast forwarding to now, my wife just lost her job, making my leaner budget entirely unworkable. I have no idea how I'm going to cover the bills that we have, much less have any money left over for Christmas for my family.

I'm a competent Python web developer, and have familiarity with Django, Tornado, Mongo, MySQL, SQLite, Nginx, et al. I have decent design skills, though I am nowhere near a master, understand HTML, XHTML, CSS and am dabbling with HTML5. I can slice PSDs, develop web pages end-to-end. I build solid UI/UX interfaces that are cross-browser compatible down to IE6 if necessary, and am competent in JavaScript and jQuery.

I've done work for some of you for free (and for fun) in the past, but if anybody has need for any help, please feel free to contact me at the email address in my profile (Yes, it's in the 'about' section,) and I would appreciate consideration before you farm the work out to Elance or oDesk or what have you (though I am also bidding on work there.)

I'm not looking for charity, and won't accept any payment that isn't commensurate with the work performed, but I'm happy to do anything that anyone needs with the understanding that I will be performing tasks on nights and weekends.
maybe $10 is so high they rejected it? similar to adding a zero on a stock purchase at etrade - they'll call you and tell you you overbid...
VCs shouldn't care about a founder's wedding -- but they should care about whether a founder is going to be stressed about going into debt to pay for a wedding.

A founder's personal life becomes relevant the moment it affects the successful management of the company.
I hope you are right but even knowing a fair amount about web technologies I am not certain that the Internet is technologically uncontrollable.

Deep packet inspection and the seizing of domain names are tools that authorities could use if they generally agreed on their goals. If Wikileaks' activities were considered out-and-out illegal and indefensible a-la child pornography, I'm doubtful we would see a lot of them.

So it seems to me that Wikileaks' activities are being protected by Western free speech traditions as much as by technological barriers.
We build this since January 2009 and already had some great feedback from our developer community. We are a small Startup based in Europe and would love to hear your feedback.

I'm around to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to vote up. ;)
Logos 0.1 - Logic Programming for Clojure
It might be typical amongst large companies, but it's more extreme than the three IP agreements I've signed, and several others that I've heard of. It would take a very extreme incentive to make me sign an agreement that took all the output of my mind.
wow! this is really helpful!
Are you qualified to be a "professional"?
I do wonder how many open source / free software projects have code contributed to them that is actually owned by Google (or some other corporation) and will it come back to bite anyone?
How about using the voting to change font size?

And if every user retained a unique id (maybe by using the IP), then the voting would change their font size for every post. And the voting would go back to 0 over time. eg. 1 point an hour.

And limit any ip to 1 message a second. And block double posting.
And I have to many ands.
It's nice to see more evidence that people do this. I've always believe that contracts are negotiable, so it's good to know that I'm not the only one that does this.
As you point out yourself, that's hard, and only getting even harder.
The world's worst boss (it's you)
As an old wargaming geek who's always been disappointed that the never translated well to the electronic medium, this looks pretty exciting. I can't wait to spend some quality time digging into it more.
Good summary of all the incentives Amazon had not to stand up for free speech or their customer's rights by waiting for a court order. Of course there are arguments both ways ...

> I know many in the HN community are outraged over their actions

I'm wouldn't say I'm outraged. I just think it's a great chance to show Amazon, and all the other companies caught in this situation, that there's also a big potential cost of not standing up.
It depends on how strongly the ideas resonate with the populace.

The dangerous thing about containing dissident ideas is that when a society begins to function less well, the average person has greater incentive to learn about alternative ideas. So alternative ideas become readily available exactly when they seem most plausible. That's what has historically made authoritarian regimes fragile.
It may not be enforceable in California
Not true in California -- they can only assert copyright claims on anything you build using company-owned property. So, if you did it your own time, on your own hardware, you can actually fight back against this.
What we need is more Ron Paul.
In the state of California, Google does not have an absolute right to ownership on all work done in your spare time. From California Labor Code Section 2870:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...

They can claim ownership if the work was done with the company's property, or the work is related to the company's business. And courts in California have generally held that the relation has to be pretty strong. So a software company can't claim ownership on _all_ software products you create in your spare time, just that which is "substantially similar" to what the company does.

There was a Joel on Software discussion on this a while back:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.2...

EDIT: The above is not legal advice. Corporate and worker rights vary by country, and the U.S., by state. But I hope the above is informative to Google engineers who work in California.
The graph shows a continuing decline, with a sizable difference between even now and 1990. In fact, almost the entire trend since 1918 has been roughly linear — hardly what your hypothesis would suggest.
Use Readability.
YouTube reports your ISP's average speed (and their competitors)
I think it's more about costs than expectations. Peering has high fixed costs (for both sides) — with transit one contract gets you access to the whole Internet but for peering you have to negotiate and configure stuff for each peer. If one content provider is sending gigabits of traffic to one ISP, they can probably both save money by connecting directly. Besides Justin.tv, I don't know of any YC companies that are that large.

Here's a detailed analysis of the business case: http://drpeering.net/white-papers/A-Business-Case-For-Peerin...

I just discovered a similar old discussion about YouTube: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573281
Awesome DIY dance floor gadget (3 axis spinning LEDs)
I negotiated my contract with Apple; it had to go through legal and get VP-level approval, but the changes were approved.

I doubt everyone can do this, though.
Seems to me, 'engineer' no longer refers to any of those job classes. I pretty much have come to assume by default anymore that 'engineer' refers to software engineer, until informed otherwise.

To be honest, as an electrical/computer engineering student, I kind of resent it.
In the US, maybe, but your statement is rather insulting for engineers in Quebec.

Here, software engineers must follow an engineering program at university, spend at least 2 years working under an Ordre des Ingénieurs member's supervision, and pass a test before they can use the title of (software) engineer. The mandatory courses cover things like ethics, sociology, physics, electrical and electronic circuits, computer architecture, differential equations and numerical methods, and vector calculus.

Even Microsoft's MSCEs can't use the word "engineer" here:
http://www.microsoft.com/canada/learning/quebecmcse/default....

Now, it's true that "programmers" don't require certification. The Ordre des ingénieurs and Quebec are thinking about ways to make the programmer profession more regulated, but it's of course hard to implement without an international agreement on the matter.
Everything gets harder as things change and you need to adapt. But I don't think China is having too much trouble adapting. Their tactics are working at shaping the population's minds. They may not be able to bend minds but they certainly can mold and guide it.
Sorry, I should've said I'm talking about British/Italian exotics... Ferrari/Lambo/Aston/etc. are quite unreliable long-term (i.e. over 30K miles), but Porsche is like the everyday exotic - they're actually great long-term and available in 4WD (the Carrera4, Targa4, Turbo at least). Then again the truly rare American exotics (Saleen S7, Mosler, etc.) are even worse, but next to no one even has seen them.

Certainly not a blanket statement about about those cars. I love Fiats/Alfas, and I'm glad they might be coming to the States soon. Though British cars have had a bad rap for a long time (from the Brit Leyland / Rover / etc. days) - Jag is still pretty boring and only Land Rover is at all relevant / reliable.
"Google Beatbox" reaches 1000 upvotes
I don't work in California.
The boundaries between what's yours and what's the companies is usually outlined by:

a) Did you do it on the company's time?

b) Did you use company equipment or resources to do it?

c) Does it pertain to the company's current or future business?

Item (c) is where the legal gray area shows up. It gives you enough leeway to innovate on your own time with your own stuff but it also gives the company the legal right to assert themselves if they feel you've strayed to close to "company matters".

(c) is important because your employer can not control what's in your head. If you work for a company that builds cars, they don't want you thinking of a new, innovative way to build a car on your own time, leaving, patenting it, and then competing with them.

This is entirely reasonable for both parties, IMO. In this particular case it looks like the author has build a web server. This clearly falls within the realm of what Google might consider their current or future business and therefore can reasonably believe that the author is using Google knowledge (even if not equipment, resourecs, or time) to build it.

EDIT: Clearly every IP agreement is different; however, every one I've ever read or signed has essentially been the above. Further, there is always a schedule allowing you to outline the IP you currently own that might violate (c).
I just joined Amazon.com, and they explicitly state that they do NOT own work done on my own time, unless that work is in direct competition with Amazon itself:

"During the course of employment and at the
termination thereof, the Employee shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional
compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected to be of interest to the Company,
in writing, or in such form and manner as the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms, procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated, adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such
algorithms, procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the Company recognizes that
the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company, unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company ("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."
What are the agreements you've signed? The boilerplate agreement I've seen, over and over, take anything related in any way to the company's business no matter when you build it, modulo a list of specific things you enumerate before taking the job.
It's amazingly impressive that they took on ASL as a first target and didn't give up before completing that beast of a rule set.
Gmail has stars and for the Mail.app, I use flags and then have a smart mailbox for flagged items.
Bah. Amazon didn't cave to political pressure, it made a sound business decision. While it may offend your politics this was about the bottom-line. It isn't Jeff Bezos' job to make polical statements with other peoples money, he has enough of his own for that. This isn't a privately held firm we are talking about folks. I doubt Amazon's PR team had to give this more than 5 minutes thought before calling the board. Whining about Amazon not fighting the fight is to either sorely misunderstand the nature of business OR a veiled attempt to promote anti-capitalism rhetoric. Liberal Capitalism (or however closely we approximated that during the last century) is in its death throes. The revolution is upon us and the bastards are winning. But to whine about Amazon acting in their own self interest? Wake up! As much as I love the Amazonians (as they refer to themselves) and have had the pleasure of gracing their halls on several occasions you need to realize that in the true scheme of things Amazon and the Federal elite are on the same side in this war. And it isn't the side many of you think you are on. But the power structure keeps selling the dream and enough of the poor and down trodden keep buying it up.

If you want to attack Amazon's decision, then you must attack the forces and structure behind it. If this was a game, Amazon made the right move. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Please.
California does have moonlighting protection laws, which would prevent you from dealing with adverse effects simply for working on a side project.
It's not about the idea. It's the execution. China has the power to effectively mold the minds of the majority (like 80-90%), and the majority is all that's needed. The idea may be in the back of the minds of a lot of people but China can prevent them from coordinating, spreading, and developing those ideas.
I agree with j_baker -- I was thinking that this document was kind of nice until I got to the part where everyone has to take a holiday together. No matter how you tweak this, what it means is that the company is impinging on the employee's personal life and leisure time.

Another thing to remember is that there's a difference between personal and work relationships. You can (and should!) have great work relationships with people who you have little in common with, personally.

"Forced fun" is always as bad as it sounds.
Hmm, if that's the case then 26x25x24... still gives you twenty trillion unique ids with non-repeating chars. Not bad after all.

Will have that in mind.
I've always done this with contracts, in any part of life. If I don't like a clause then I amend it or spike it. SOP as far as I'm concerned. No-one has ever complained, although there might be some discussion.
I love 90s techno-optimism. Pick up some old issues of Wired for this sort of thinking. The Internet was viewed as a transformative, unstoppable force for freedom. From an engineering point of view, we're closer to that ideal than we ever have been in the past, but people don't have the same outlook on the future. IMO you can date the death of 90s optimism to the NASDAQ bust and Bill Joy's essay "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us." Both happened within a month of each other.
i applaud you for trying to be innovative about how to run companies, and hire and keep people.
Lawsuit Targets "History Sniffing"
An age-old question. The answer I've gotten is, "if you're making your numbers, you're driving the bus; when you stop making your numbers, your investors take over the bus".
Forums aren't a software problem -they are inherently a sociological issue: community building & forming, spam filtering, navigating the political intentions, etc. If there's a single conclusion of Google Wave, it's that being "realtime" makes no guarantees for quality, and signal/noise; but makes management of such extremely more harder.
The problem with this line of thinking is that he's not doing it on company time and thus not being compensated for it. This guy built a web server on his own time, and now Google gets to add it to their portfolio and is not compensating him for his work.

So the message is basically

"We own your mind, and everything you make, and you have no choice. And we don't need to pay you because, hey, you're lucky you've got a job with us."
According to the author's blog: "Gregory David Collins is a Canadian software engineer living in Zürich, Switzerland."
I think everyone here is recognizing that. I'm only pushing back on the notion that words like "despicable" apply to investments and similar business decisions. They don't.
I having waiting forever for google to support search operators in its reader. I get by by dumping my entire feed locally. But there really should have been a way to do this on their server side.
Exploratory programming is almost always worth it for its own sake. You can't be creative if you take yourself too seriously - so well done practicing your programming and exploring a new concept at the same time. Ideas and understanding you're gathering right now about this will sit in the back of your head and will make your next project just a touch better.

Again, well done!
I want to see TCU crash the party, but I really wanted to see TCU vs. Boise crash the party. But Kelly's pass fast offense versus Malzahn's run fast offense would be amazing.
The idea that one is not an engineer without state licensing is a presumption of the right of the state to determine one's vocation.
This sounds like a good theory. $10/hour is over 8x the cost of a c1.xlarge Windows on-demand instance.

c1.xlarge on US-East charts:
linux - http://cloudexchange.org/charts/us-east-1.linux.c1.xlarge.ht...
windows - http://cloudexchange.org/charts/us-east-1.windows.c1.xlarge....

Try offering $1.30 if you need linux or $0.55 if you need Windows.
Is it possible they don't ever intend to exit? I know that's pretty rare- most startups seem to be aiming for the exit- but can't some simply be trying to be their own business?
That's what we're talking about now, but note that this conversation didn't start out that way.

Meanwhile, note two things: first, that you may in reality be a lot more replaceable than you think you are, and second, that you are almost certainly perceived as being a lot more replaceable than you perceive you are.

As soon as you sell board seats, the question of your ruthless replacement stops being a moral issue and starts being a business issue. Venture capitalists aren't investing their own money. It is the case that their absolute most important priority is the protection of their investors money.
In a way I hope your non-geek friends will never join buzz because I definitely experienced facebook jump of the shark exactly when my grandmother and her tea friends started joining.

I don't know what google plans really are: I don't know whether buzz is so unfriendly because they want to target a different audience or simply because they don't see much future in it.

Reader is a good tool. It's faster than the aggregators I tried in the past (netvibes mainly), it works on my phone and it has a smart stumblupon-like feature that is promising.
Interesting. I was actually thinking about Tyrian as an example of a game where random level generation would work well (in contrast to those mentioned in my above comment), and wouldn't detract from nostalgia replay value. Another example would be X-COM. Both excellent games.
Ask HN: def startups_for_oldies?; true; end
Surely there is a model for succesful startups that does not depend on a smart, energetic teenager with no responsibilities working non-stop for 6 months?

def startups_for_oldies?;
true; # please enter the formula here
end
Oh really?

Whoever-it-was who leaked this ipso facto already knew that the Chinese were in the process of bugging the Americans. Why would this person expect that the information they were giving the Americas would remain secret??

Think about it for a minute. Sheesh.

Edit: Rebutals?
This test is only somewhat valid in California, as I understand it. In most states the Company can freely assert copyright over pretty much anything you produce with a simple employee agreement.

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.

Before my startup days I was faced with such an agreement. The lawyer I consulted with (in Texas) certified that these agreements are in fact legal and have been upheld in court. Apparently California is more employee friendly in its labor code.
re: your last sentence, what made your situation special?
The lesson though is that the answer is always no unless you ask.
Holograms Moving From Science Fiction to Reality
The Renaissance of the Interactive Book
The problem with this is that Amazon has so many businesses that almost anything you do could be related the to company's business activities.
Seems like this would have major integrity and trust issues. Do they cryptographically sign all content so you know the ad-hoc mirror hasn't been "curated?"
I've seen this type of situation blow up pretty badly. Coworker started a side-project, quit company, side-project becomes really successful, and the company sued the ex-employee. Legally the situation was perhaps iffy (they ended up settling out of court), but it left a bad enough impression on me that I ended up leaving the company soon after, on moral grounds. I just could not work for a company that thinks they own my brain, and I will never do so again.
Here's a Coral cached version:

http://blog.urfix.com.nyud.net/25-sick-linux-commands/

And a text-only version cached by Google:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DVyf69P...