skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Or that Apple wouldn't have released the iPhone, which is a cash cow for them, if they couldn't patent it?"

Patents were definitely part of the plan from the start or Jobs wouldn't have stood on stage in front of a giant 200+ slide at the 2007 keynote and said:

"We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them."*

With no patents they wouldn't have had any defense against the other mobile phone makers. That's the way it works. You say I infringe your patents, I say you infringe mine, we come to a cross-licencing agreement. Otherwise, I pay you money.

* Bottom of this page - http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-s...
Toyota, The Media Owe You an Apology
IANAL, but in the UK, unless you have a contract that specifically says otherwise, yes.

On the other hand, if the outside work provably used no employer resources, and provably is unrelated, then you can probably defend yourself against an action. But you really, really don't want to depend on that.

Get it sorted up front. Get an explicit agreement with your employer that non-competing work done without their resources and without impacting your work, belongs to you.

Otherwise it's murky and dangerous.
Compare CNN to CNN international sometime :)

World news outlets (inter-regional) seem to be the best at objectivity.
DEC systems, the good, the bad, and the ugly
FUV: A Real programmer's editor
Glad I could be a part of this story of boy meets incubator, boy loses incubator... boy still gets the funding. :)
It's a seller's market, don't take a job at a company with policies you don't agree with, regardless of how common they are or how enforceable they might be[1]. It's quite easy to find employers in the bay area that don't demand such things or will waive the clause.

Make sure to tell them why you didn't take the job.

[1] I suppose if it's clearly and completely unenforceable little harm is done
In general you should avoid signing the standard contracts at any job. I've always made changes to protect my after-hours work, and they've been okayed every single time.
> Note well. This is for clinical research.

My own experience is that there is much constant questioning about published clinical research.

In addition, decision-making of clinicians based on clinical research is tempered with other considerations, sometimes quite complex. Stephen Paulker commented in response to the original paper:

"From the perspective of an epidemiologist or a statistician, the relevant question is whether the study's hypothesis is true - i.e., is the probability of H1 greater than 0.5. For clinicians and their patients, the relevant question is whether a particular strategy should be followed in an individual patient or a subset of similar patients. That decision (or recommendation to the patient) will depend on the pre-study likelihood of benefit in that patient and on the relative magnitude of benefits and risks of that strategy, if the diagnosis in that patient is uncertain. For many such decisions, the "more likely true than false" criterion may not be the best decision rule. For serious diseases and treatments of only modest risk, post-study probabilities of considerably less than 0.5 may be sufficient to justify treatment."
Pinboard Creator Maciej Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More
I'm actually not surprised by the choice of wp7, and not simply because the new ceo is ex-MS. Going with Android would make Nokia just another Sony/Samsung/HTC, but throwing all of their eggs in the WP7 basket at least gives them a chance to maintain some relevance as a distinct entity. It's going to be rough on the hardware guys though, making every new phone with a Windows logo on it.
Love this story and can vouch for its authenticity!
there is almost no barrier to entry

Yes, anyone can stream videos. But not everyone can buy the rights, which are sold in exclusive windows.

Every title is only licensed to one entity in each window. This system was designed for pay-TV channels that wanted exclusive rights, and the studios found that it was a good way to maximize revenue. So after a movie leaves the theaters, there are a series of these licensing windows, each lasting about 1-2 years. This is why a movie that's on HBO will never be on TBS simultaneously.

Buying content within a window is essentially like an auction. The highest bidder wins. It's possible to enter the market, but to do so you actually need a lot of capital to bid and win content.

studios... will simply change the licensing costs

Reed publicly stated that a major goal in the future is to pay studios more for content. And that's only fair as we increase the number of viewers.

Disclaimer: I work at Netflix.
Knowing a little Qt isn't a bad thing, and it's kind of fun to prototype stuff on a desktop and have it run in an embedded environment with a quick recompile.
Absolutely. Along with the standard, "talk to a lawyer" advice, it's worth noting a few things:

1) Virtually every major technology company includes intellectual property assignment agreements in the paperwork they require new hires to sign. Most startups probably have the same policy, many perhaps without even knowing it, since its part of plenty of standard paperwork. Y Combinator's standard paperwork includes such a clause.

2) For all of the ones I've seen (and I imagine most respectable companies, and probably every company in California, for reasons to be mentioned), the paperwork claims ownership over anything developed a) during work hours, or b) using company owned equipment, resources, or IP, or c) anything that doesn't fall into the first two categories but that involves an area of business the company is active in, or has plans to be active in.

3) The reason California companies all have roughly the same language, is because those restrictions are what are specified in California state law. Given the nature of California in the tech industry, I would guess that influences what a lot of tech companies use as a general policy. The language is somewhat complicated by the third part of the equation, but generally I believe the company has to be able to show damages in such an instance.

4) There are no such general protections on the federal level, and I believe a majority of states do not offer those protections, meaning that in many states all work, and even in some cases all ideas, that you generate during your employment belong to your employer (if you signed a contract to that effect with the employer).
If that's so, what do you do if your ISP's DNS is terrible? Try to find a better one that's still geographically close?
What's disappointing is the 9 - 5 job that doesn't teach your anything nor provide much time or ability to learn it on your own. That actively discourages on-the-job self-development and innovation. And yes, they exist. A lot of "grow our employees" language is, when the rubber meets the road, hogwash.

I don't advocate endless additional work off-hours, unless you are really into it. And in the latter case, I'd suggest it be for your own, personal benefit and not simply to make you better at your job. Unless it's a job you love and you otherwise have what you need.

But, when the job's a dead end in terms of personal growth, you're going to have to invest in off hours (self) development. Or be prepared to: 1) Move to management, if you can get on that career track (given the precondition, not a good sign with respect to the quality of your organization, BTW); 2) Stay in a very protected niche; 3) Face the end of your career before too long.
This also varies somewhat by state; there's a law in California (Labor Code section 2870[1]) that bars employers from claiming work that an employee does "on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities or trade secret information" unless the invention relates directly to the employer's business. I'd still check with a lawyer, though, even if in California --- and if elsewhere, most states are a lot less generous.

[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...
In some cases, especially if you have a good plan, you can get a very decent product out of the project, but changing requirements (especially with today's agile environments), are not conducive to off-shore development
I'm a "young gun" (26) without a formal degree in CS. I believe the number of graduates in CS dropping isn't affecting finding talented people. The talented people aren't taking CS and are not even graduating or going to college.

I graduated with a degree in mathematical economics from a liberal arts school and took some CS (Java and C++) along the way, but ended up not pursuing a degree because I could tell the technology being taught was outdated and largely irrelevant. I taught myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails mostly through reading books and blogs while trying to solve a problem for a client I was providing desktop support.

A friend's consulting shop recently hired their 20 year old intern b/c he is a great hacker, and he, in turn, dropped out of a CS program largely recognized as "very good" b/c it was he thought they were basically teaching "solved problems."

The point here is that a good hacker comes at any age, and your technical ability and attitude mater regardless.

I love working with the older guys b/c they have failed, a lot, and can steer me in the right direction and offer wisdom whereas I bring enthusiasm and an open mind.
In my experience, photoshop designers (who don't know how to code) often make poor design choices. I've found myself scratching my head more than a few times when trying to convert a mockup to html/css because of a designer who has a poor understanding of the browser as a design environment.
Would that likely be a general problem with CDN's or is it specific to just Netflix?
hard to say what its impact on the economic system would be

if lifespan of everybody doubled it would have devastating effect on world economy, as one of the most important issues we face today is population aging (and not just in developed world, but in China as well for example).
I have a few questions.

1. Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does? If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool? Or maybe even obviate the need for a new pool?

2. Does Google have anything in its royalty free patent grant that says "If you sue us or otherwise challenge our VP8 IP, you can't get a free license from us"? If so, wouldn't that kill any possibility of a successful MPEG-LA pool? Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.

3. Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?
Kinect hack makes you the Man of Steel
Palantir Apologizes For Its Plan To Crush Wikileaks
We could probably go back to the 50s and all the events all around the eastern block during those times but that was not the point. Just that the events around 1980 (Gdansk .pl, Velvet .cz.sk) started the domino effect which led to dropping the Berlin Wall and eventually failure of the USSR. No contest here.
New admin interface, and lots of API changes (unicode, forms, etc.).
HBgary/Anonymous story details - social engineering, "security report"
vision is something Jon is not short on...great post!
Apple Is Revamping Notification System For iOS
In discovery, if the hard drive is encrypted and you forgot the passphrase, what happens?
When I see this kind of reaction, I can't help but think that the speaker is a "True Believer" in democracy and mob rule (in the Eric Hoffer sense). I readily concede that I know nothing about Egypt or what is going on there, but don't you think it's a little too early to congratulate and feel happy for the people? You even admit that no one knows what the country will be like in the next few years, but you want to celebrate, simply because they overthrew their president!
As my cofounders are no doubt tired of me saying: "Keep your hat on, we could end up a long way from here."
what is the cover letter? :)

You still let the main assumption stand - i.e. looking for and hiring people who is ok with wasting of their productive time.
I couldn't be more proud of Jon, Janette and Storenvy. Serious ass-kickers.
Can you provide a source for the video games fact you quote? I would think that most games license engines/SDKs that already support/license MP3 and its included in their upfront toolchain cost, meaning they pay for it whether or not they use it.
There was also a similar clause in my washington employment contract. The law even states that the clause must be put in all contracts and still applies if it doesn't.
ShowedUpWithoutTeamThatWasAccepted = GotKickedOutOf

Rejected != GotKickedOutOf
One big distinguishing factor between success and failure can be - who does the requirements? Allowing the same company who is going to code, to get the requirements part done is asking for a bad product, no matter where your development takes place, period! In all off-shoring projects that I have seen, successful ones had requirements done by the client, and having a client liaison work on a day to day basis with an on-shore tech lead from the off-shore company ... (too complicated?)
it's not an elephant, it's a dolphin...
An out-of-date list can be found at http://wiki.xiph.org/Games_that_use_Vorbis

Edit: some big names include World of Warcraft, Quake 4, Grand Theft Auto, and Eve Online.
Facebook's Performance Engineering Approach [podcast]
Google, my employer, recently refused a request that I made to release as open source some software that I had been working on in my spare time and without using any of their resources, on they claim that my software would compete with one of their projects. :-(
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab...

Unless I'm reading this wrong: if you work on it solely on your time, with your equipment, it's yours (in California, anyway).

UPDATE: Oh, also it can't compete with their business.
Today Egypt is Free. So is Keynotopia.
UI templates for prototyping web and mobile apps using Keynote or PowerPoint.

100% Off using coupon code EGYPT through end of the day today. http://bit.ly/Keynotopia
It may be harder than you expect to establish that you're not in a business related to your former employer, at least to the extent that you can quickly end a legal action; all I'm saying is, that legal safeguard may not be as helpful as you'd hope.
I certainly agree with you there. Sadly, the metrics the politicians appear to be using to grade the health of the system are: "amount of money made by licensing patents" and "number of patents granted."

It doesn't take much imagination to see why those are bad metrics for people more concerned with promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
Million Song Dataset of audio metadata
Buy grenade whistle
That's not a sleep state. That is a form of disassociation.
What would you think about having to license a patent to build a car? What if there were the equivalent of MPEGLA for cars that could prevent you from competing with other legally licensed car manufacturers? What if the licensing authority threatened to sue anyone who distributed, sold or bought your car?

It did happen. You might enjoy learning about Henry Ford's patent struggle against the ALAM (Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers.) They possessed an essential patent to automobiles and wielded it as a weapon against anyone who tried to compete.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
http://www.cojoweb.com/us-patent-2.html
http://www.s363.com/selden/zapped.html
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsseldona.htm

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- Santayana
Interesting that they've moved to Lucene.net for search - I remember hearing them say that full text search is one of the reasons they were so happy with SQL Server.
Agreed. Don't forget to flag it.

We have too much spam here already.
You can say all you want about resiliency, but I think it was the ninja-moves animated gif.
how do MBA course like this stack up against a regular MBA from any B-school??
In some cases --- maybe a lot of them --- the board of directors requires the management team to operate from an approved boilerplate contract. I'm sure you can get anything overridden, but I wouldn't fly off the handle just because I saw an agreement like this.
I hear what you say, and I've upvoted you, but I disagree with you completely. I believe that stories such as those currently unfolding in Egypt are absolutely unsuited to HN.

Here are my specific counter-points:

It's historic! Just look at the picture to the right!
If something truly momentous is happening, then I'd
like to see discussion about it on HN - it tends to
be well-informed.

Well informed discussion does not make it suitable. If it's not somehow specific to HN instead of generic news discussion groups then it doesn't belong on HN. You get well-informed discussion elsewhere if you know where to look.

The Hacker News Guidelines explicitly allows for
political stories that demonstrate "evidence of some
interesting new phenomenon".

There is no interesting new phenomenon being reported. No one is claiming that new technologies are specifically helping, there are just vague claims that see to be based on the idea that Twitter and Facebook are new and hip and cool and therefore must be helping. There are no facts, there is no information.

It's arguably more worthy of discussion than the
majority of the Techcrunch posts that we see on HN.

That's true, but most of the Techcrunch crap doesn't belong here either.

It's an entrepreneurial opportunity! With a GDP of
nearly $500bn, Egypt just became a lot more attractive
for innovative startups.

Excellent - tell us how! Tell us what! Connect startup opportunities to what's happening!

Just don't endlessly regurgitate the same news that we're seeing 24 hours a day on every other "news" medium.

Keep HN special.
Ask HN: Place to sleep near Moscone Center, SF, CA?
Hi folks,

I'm going to the Game Developer's Conference (GDC 2011) at the Moscone center in downtown SF. Are there any friendly hacker spaces or couches that I could stay at/on from Feb 27 -> Mar 5?
IOS Notifications: No More, No Less
This is at a VERY high level, but here you go:

In theory I think that different stacks (LAMP, Java, and Microsoft were the big contenders at the time) are similar enough in capabilities. There are a million pros and cons to each stack. But I strongly believe that how WELL you know your stack is MUCH more important than WHICH stack you use.

In other words, an experienced Java team will FAR outperform if they can use Java, and an experienced Windows team will FAR outperform if they can use Windows, and the skills of the team are much more significant than the variations between otherwise very very similar platforms. (See also http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html).

So, when we started, Jeff was really good at Microsoft technology, so he was able to produce better code faster using Microsoft technology than if he had to learn Ruby or Python or whatever. And that was BY FAR the dominant decision point for us.

Also, the cost of Windows licenses is virtually insignificant. It's just a non-issue. Not just because of BizSpark (which we took advantage of), but because compiled C# code on Windows servers is so damn efficient you don't need very many servers. Our stack of ten web servers is SHOCKINGLY overprovisioned. They run at insanely low loads now.
> Turbochargers have come and gone and there hasn't been a switch to two-stroke or rotary, scotch yoke engines

This is tangential to the article but these things are not in F1 because they are bad but because several of the configurations are too good. Most of the above are banned. Today only 4-Stroke engines with reciprocating pistons are permitted in F1. See page 12:

http://argent.fia.com/web/fia-public.nsf/C5F0793AC322A70CC12...

The FIA also banned Rotary engines in Le Mans after the 787B won, enforcing all participants afterwards to use 3.5L F1 engines (correct me if I'm wrong there, might have changed since 1991?)

It kind of saddens me because racing platforms (esp. Rally) are big drivers of car innovation (suspension, safety, power). Arbitrarily banning things like rotary engines has - in a way - killed an immeasurable amount of research money that might have gone towards the topic.
Jon/Storenvy is a case study in refusing to die.
Love the URL (clickable): http://receivd.com/early-access
It depends on what your contract says... I work for a firm that clearly states that whatever you do, if it involves their equipment, resources, or time, or knowledge gained while working with them, they have IP rights at that point. That being said, some companies allow you to do stuff on your own, e.g. work for a different client / project outside your billable hours, and they don't have rights to those products (as long as you're clearly showing that you're not using shared resources).
Spam is not an accurate word, in fact it's pretty harmful.

The title of many of the posts on HN have little to do with the actual content, this is not uncommon. Check out some of the tc posts.
If you genuinely forgot it, after having long encrypted it in good faith with the intent of simply accessing it more securely? Nothing.

Otherwise: somewhat uncertain.

You probably can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but you definitely can't deliberately use encryption as a defense against discovery anymore than you can destroy evidence by degaussing your hard drive.
Love Jon and Janette and everything they are doing. I remember getting calls from Jon when all of this happened and so happy to see where he is today.
ugh, no, I can't imagine ever saying that. Full Text Search in SQL Server is very badly integrated, buggy, deeply incompetent, and I hate it. Hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it.
Even if your company doesn't sue you immediately, the fact that the intellectual property might be of questionable ownership can also mess up fundings or acquisitions down the road. If a company is looking to buy you and realizes that there's a chance of BigCorp claiming ownership of some piece of your IP because you signed a bad employment contract, it's going to be one more reason for them to say no to the deal.
In Norway, no.

Some companies try to put it in the contract, but it has no base in law and holds no legal obligations. I.e. you can ignore the clause safely.
I am in the same boat. I downloaded the Photoshop and Illustrator trails. The programs are great, but I would use them so rarely, that I couldn't justify the purchase prices. So, Paint.net and Inkscape for me!
Why does Winphone 7 make them more distinct? It offers far fewer opportunities for distinction than Android.
Borders Nearing Bankruptcy Filing
I love this guy's writing style. Great read.
This was exactly what I dove into the comments to say. You're 100% correct; this is routine discovery.

Look, do I like the merits of Sony's arguments? Absolutely not. Do I hope this kid wins? Yes. But there's nothing that nuts going on so far; save your anger for the verdict.

As an aside, who ever is advising Sony is an idiot. The bad publicity this is getting Sony has already far outweighed the value of any verdict they get (in both monetary and deterrent value), and anyone could have seen that before they even filed the lawsuit.
In case you can't find anywhere for free, try airbnb.com. I was just up there and got a good deal, it was near fisherman's wharf though.
Inspiring but ... he's trying to refute anecdote with more anecdotes, which can't really go past the point of pointing out that we really don't know what the true situation is. Some data would be more informative. However, individuals are not averages, so these generalisations aren't that useful even when they have data.
tl;dr version: improved XMPP & queue APIs