skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My reference was what I was informed was the law by multiple lawyers when I lived in New York. It is possible that I misunderstood or the rules have changed in the last decade, but I am pretty sure neither is the case. Still you should confirm this with a qualified attorney before accepting what I say as being absolutely true.

More precisely I was told that New York recognizes 3 types of employee relationships. They are hourly, contractor, and professional employee. The first two are obvious. You are aware if you have to punch in on a clock, or are a contractor. The default for software development is therefore the third.

As a professional employee there are no set place or hours for your employment. (That is why you don't get overtime.) Therefore anything that you do that could possibly relate to your employment is by default assumed to be a work for hire that took place during the course of your employment. There are admittedly some complications there. If a programmer writes a novel, that's going to not be a work for hire. If a programmer writes a program, that's likely going to be a work for hire. But there are gray areas. For instance a VB programmer by day who works a C device driver for Linux by night might have a case that their side project doesn't relate to their employment.

But just in case, virtually every New York company makes sure that employees sign contracts that clarifies any possible ambiguity..in favor of the employer. So the reality is that if you live in New York, you can't assume that you own your side project.

Incidentally this is the reason that the FSF (which is very careful on intellectual property) requires that they get copyright assignment both from contributers and from the contributers' employers. Because they don't want to get into a situation where they think they have copyright, but someone else has a legal claim to copyright that code.
Here, exactly what I mean:

http://www.fhsst.org
Reactable: Mac-driven, Microsoft Surface-like musical instrument
Forgive me if this has been shared before, but I found it quite interesting and I just stumbled upon it via a Twitter friend.

It is a musical instrument driven by a Mac computer which uses a projector to provide a table-top touch interface -- similar to the way Microsoft Surface works. Watch some of the tutorial videos, they are pretty neat! If only the price tag wasn't so harsh.
"Publishers Are Being Held To Ransom By Apple"
Pandora's IPO Filing: All The Long-Held Secrets You Want To Know
Network data sharing and sync across arbitrary host applications would be really excellent. Here's an idea: cross-platform plugin (LADSPA + AU + VST?) that syncs to other instances of itself over a network via OSC for arbitrary data sharing (here, let me pipe the midi data from my keyboard or controller over to you) - or receiving (here, I'll take the event stream I'm getting from you and translate it as Midi Time Code input for sync) etc etc.

Really anything to bring some of the flexibility possible already with network communication over OSC w/ tools like PD and SuperCollider to the world of turnkey audio apps would probably find a welcome audience!
I'd say this is about right. Even mobile devices have great JavaScript abilities nowadays. Think Android or iPhone. I am still using an ancient Sony Ericsson with Opera Mini and JavaScript works surprisingly well.

Besides, I like you attitude. Making stuff work for everyone is a great and noble goal! Unfortunately, that's only worth your time if your goal is to learn, not to earn money.
Forgive me if this has been shared before, but I found it quite interesting and I just stumbled upon it via a Twitter friend.

It is a musical instrument driven by a Mac computer which uses a projector to provide a table-top touch interface -- similar to the way Microsoft Surface works. Watch some of the tutorial videos, they are pretty neat! If only the price tag wasn't so harsh.

Edit: It appears there's a Reactable app for iPhone and iPad as well, if you can't afford the Reactable Live! instrument.
Remember that the burning platform memo was specific.. Not only are they losing on the top end -- there's phones coming out of China now beating them on the bottom end.
I'm pretty sure Oracle is a good example of a company that makes you agree that they own everything you think of while employed by them.

A friend of mine became an Oracle employee when the company he worked for got acquired, and ended up needing to get approval from a long way up the org chart to be able to continue doing his phd, since the university had existing claims on ip in his phd research.

For quite a long time he described himself as " technically not being allowed to think anything..."
I think it would be just like giving a discount to bulk orders. Nokia will buy a huge amount of licenses compared to dell, htc or any other supplier. Once the app ecosystem grows other suppliers will want to be a part of it.
Google has no interest in hiring you if you don't need an H1B.
The problem is assessing who the critical members of the partnership are at that moment. I've met companies where the quiet, reserved hacker in the background was the real brains for the technical and business side of things. The other partner(s), while critical for adding that je ne sais quoi which the hacker required to be effective, were easily replaceable.

Some hackers just want to be Karl Rove. The problem with that is unless somebody tells you about Karl Rove, you'll think all the pawns he puts into place are the ones who are irreplaceable. They aren't, though you might mistake them as such because they are the public face of operations.

It's not common, but also not rare for teams to have the invisible Wizard of Oz who is really pulling the strings behind the scenes. Neither Ferrari nor Michael Schumacher have won much since Ross Brawn parted ways with them as technical director. Yet he managed to take Brawn GP (formerly Honda F1), which was a joke of a team, to both the Drivers and Constructors championships in its second year with him at the helm (first as Brawn GP). While even more variables are at play, take a look at the LA Lakers with and without Jackson as head coach. Then tell me how many people attribute Kobe to their success and don't really ever mention Jackson's name. Would Apple have been the same company (wait for it) had it not had Jonathan Ive?

I'm not quite sure how YCombinator would accept this business based on one co-founder and then dismiss them when he was the only one left. Not being upfront about things would definitely be a warning sign. But again, in his mind, you accepted the business based only on him. Why would it be such a big deal if the two other co-workers left? I've read some other comments about it being a vote of non-confidence in the business. Talk to 95% of employees in companies and probably 2/3s of partners. Secretly, they think the company is going to hell in a hand basket and will be dead or in serious trouble in 2 years time. It's human nature to be skeptical to the point of fearing a business' prospects; Maslow's Hierarchy and all that jazz. A startup doesn't satisfy very many of those levels... people get antsy.
Interesting.

Note that the worst case of complexity for this algorithm is much, much worse than the worst case complexity for Boyer Moore. Do not use this algorithm carelessly. For example, if you use it in a thoughtless way in your web server, you may open yourself to a DoS attack.

Note that the author nicely characterizes it as of potential use for small alphabets and possibly multiple substrings (in a single search). That immediately made me think he might have devised it for genomics research. In most applications I would think you'd also want regexp features. Interestingly, DNA research and use in a regexp engine is something he goes on to suggest. (If you are searching for a very large number of regexps in a big genome database, I would not use this algorithm. I found that some simple variants on classic NFA techniques work very well for a wide class of typical regexps (e.g., regexps modeling SNPs, small read position errors, small numbers of read errors, etc. There probably isn't any one obviously right answer, though, and a lot depends on your particular hardware situation, data set sizes, etc.).

The HN headline is very bogus hype. "X2 times faster than Boyer-Moore" is far from true in the general case. "breakthrough" is a gross exaggeration: this is a technique that anyone with some good algorithms course or two under the belt should be able to think of an, for most applications, decide to not use because of the limitations of the thing. I can definitely see it being nice for some applications tolerant of its limitations but... breakthrough it ain't.
Its simply not true that children won't believe they can do something if they don't see someone who looks like them doing it.

If it were the case, there'd be all sorts of adopted kids completely incapable of doing things.

It is true that if people do not see a certain behavior or do not see that it is successful, they are less likely to adopt the behavior themselves. But even then, children create and experiment with behaviors all the time. Unless, of course, they are actively discouraged from doing so.

We don't simply repeat what we see. We are capable of assessing the way people act around us and judging whether or not behavior works.

But if children are surrounded by people not practicing successful behaviors and also are actively discouraged from experimenting, its a lot less likely they will be successful at whatever they choose to do.
Which has nothing to do with military might.
Plenty of companies go public before becoming profitable, it's a way to raise capital. Tesla Motors comes to mind for a recent example. Same for Clear.
Is anyone using the XMPP API for anything?
Bionic arms that amputees can control using their mind [video]
You'll all be out-marketed by a company run by Amy Chua.
Oh, I read "files" as a noun there, as in they were going to let people see inside their database of music-quantification. Was very disappointed on learning what it actually meant...
He talks a bit about how to pick the right number of successive letters to use as hash keys - which is where you can get a handle on alphabet sizes. I would guess (maybe it actually says) that he Wikipedia dump in the benchmark was UTF-8 or ASCII and, either way, treated as an alphabet of 8-bit characters. The DNA case is kind of interesting (2 bits min but more likely 3 or 4 in a typical genome record).
> Everyone thinks their personal pet political viewpoint, cause, issue, or ill-informed rant is important.

It's not points-of-view that I'm describing as important, it's certain news stories.

Does anyone doubt that the Egyptian revolution is a very important story in world affairs?
It's a good site and a good service, but this isn't anything new and I question its appearance on the front page of HN. We've talked about TheFunded before:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153778
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576385

etc.
I bet Digg wishes it had that power.

I always thought Superman was flying faster than the speed of light to go back in time and save Lois. Turns out he really was reversing the rotation of the Earth to rewind events. I like my version of the movie better.
The End of the (Nokia) Raj
The thing that impressed me most at an F1 race was that the gear changes - a barely audible deep pop-pop-popping noise on TV - on corners could be physically felt in your chest. Until the second and subsequent cars went past I thought an engine component had catastrophically exploded!
Yes, he pretty much burnt the boat on this one.
Necessary correction. Don't compare it to a foreign language in the United States, even if it's Spanish.

Egypt's much closer to other countries and has a huge tourism sector. Knowing a "foreign" language is vital; virtually everyone knows how to carry a basic conversation in English.
And when he waived all gifts and NDA access, he got his MVP status back.
Microsoft + Nokia coming together leading to The Perfect Storm
Yes,

But the point is that most large companies will, on general principle, have you sign a piece of paper giving them everything they can imagine getting from you. Then it's up to you to figure out what existing laws says you can take back.
i loved digg. i love reddit. i'm in love with hn.

i visit hn for the startup content mixed with tech news. i stay because of the educated, insightful comments by the mature userbase who keep discussions on point and relevant. at one point in the past, i visited digg for the same reasons.. and 4 years ago, the reason why i switched to reddit. unfortunately, digg has suffered with every upgrade, and reddit has be over-saturated with pun threads, circlejerks, and meme-related image reposts.* once reddit reaches it's peak, i fear this crowd will migrate to the beloved hn. :(

*reddit still has great content, and we've done many great things, but the content quality has decreased as the userbase has increased.

i created this throwaway account because i know how harsh the hn community can be in regard to this subject
As I said... http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2011/02/what-the-bible-really-...
People goes to Russia (1987)
"Do Not Track" Internet privacy bill introduced in Congress
> I think the problem is a disagreement over what "AI" means.

Simple: "If it works, it isn't AI."

Remember when playing chess was a sign of undeniable intelligence? Remember when playing Jeopardy was?
Seems to be automated spam.
What the Bible really really says about sex
I prefer Front Line myself. That Michael Moore fellow (no relation to the documentarist) is very trustworthy.
Wow, thank you
I don't mean to be a turd but the proofs are kind of obvious on the face on this one. He's claiming expected linear time in the string being searched for "natural" texts and worst case O(MN). Proof of the worst case is pretty trivial by construction (of examples of that complexity) and contradiction (reaching the non-existence of worse cases). One can't be casual about proofs of course but: try thinking of an O(MN) example and then you can probably see from there why you can't do worse than that. Hint: if you can construct an example where you have to do the length M check for nearly every position in the length N haystack, aaaaaaaah... hmmmmm...., the rest should be clear.
Here's a cool comparison video of Porsche GT3 versus F1 on the same track/corner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex5dhhpSHCw

F1 makes some of the fastest street-legal cars look downright slow.
I don't think that's the point. The idea of patents is to make trade secrets public for the common good. If the patents were useful, the VP8 guys would be able to produce a list of helpful patents. Since this is a call for unknown patents, including patents unknown to the VP8 implementors, patents have failed to encourage innovation in this case.
This is good news for the people who watch these videos sped up. It's amazing how much more engaging some speakers are when you watch a video at, say, 1.4x the normal speed.
"If someone enjoys soldering but doesn't like electrical engineering, it is probably the EE curriculum that should change."

Do you see why this is a silly thing to say?
NYHacker.org should be this outlet if it isn't already
It depends on the business type, but I'd suspect most business owners are savvy enough to know it won't help them acquire customers. I got a groupon to eat at a restaurant in Berekley, $10 for $25, and either the prices were specifically marked up to combat the groupon, or the owners are suffering some delusions of grandeur. Either way, the food was good, but it wasn't worth 40/person, and I won't go back.
UberMedia, Indeed. Bill Gross’ Twitter Ecosystem Empire Just Acquired TweetDeck
> When they inform you of these clauses, regardless of what the state law says, they are warning you they intend to create legal problems for you if you ever try to work for anyone else.

That sort of thing used to be called barratry, and it was illegal in a lot of jurisdictions (indeed, a felony in at least one state in the US).

It's also worth pointing out that this kind of abuse is less of a threat in jurisdictions that don't default to everyone paying their own fees. The behaviour seems particularly common to the US, where to an outsider the legal system can seem obviously flawed in this respect.

In any case, the advice to just not work for organisations that try to pull this kind of crap is sound. Even if this particular case doesn't apply, it's a good bet that they will try to screw you in other ways if this "we own your life" mindset is dominant in management/HR/legal at corporate level.

I once worked for a company here in the UK that got taken over by a US company, and one of the first things they tried to do was rewrite the contract so this sort of silly stuff was in it. To cut a long story short, I don't know what happened to the HR people who were originally responsible for the handover, because we never saw them again, but most of the original staff from the acquired company did stay and everyone had exactly the original IP clauses back in the contracts by the time we'd finished collectively re-educating the new owners about how much of our lives they were going to own.
Introducing The Microsoft Puppet
In a sense you're right, 30 and 60 billion represent the same thing - an inability to act by Apple management. On the other hand, when Apple had 30 billion one would ask "Don't they have a plan?" When they hit 60 the question becomes "WTF are they waiting for?"

Tangent: every Mac developer isn't a one person shop.

Question: WTF are they waiting for?
The title actually reads "Sony: Publishers Are Being Held To Ransom by Apple"

Missing off the "Sony:" makes it unnecessarily inflammatory.
Etsy Offering Free Class on Programming With Its API
Looks nice, but if you take away the Nokia logo, it could be a phone from any other maker that licenses WP7.
Exactly. The entire purpose of opening your company up to the public is so that you can raise more money than you would otherwise get privately. Yes, the shares would probably be discounted for lack of profitability, but perhaps the timing is right for them. I don't know.
It's not the method. It's the data. The fact that anybody with the know how now has access to public data is what is great about it.
Ask HN: Tips for evaluating a startup offer.
I have an offer to join a startup as a first hire and am trying to figure out if it is worth doing. There are two founders, one of which is putting his own money up to bootstrap with. In the first year, one founder will commit between 150k to 210k in cash, the other will work with no salary. Both founders are absolutely key to the idea working as they have the industry experience, smarts and contacts to get going with. They are looking at hiring two to three people, one of them being me. The offer that is on the table is this:
Option a) take a salary at 40% market rate in year one and receive 3% equity. Option b) take no salary in year one and receive 6% equity. With both options, if we live into the second year, my salary would go to 80% of market value. If we live to year three, market value salary is restored. The exit that is being targeted is in the 30 to 50 million range. The company is not planning on taking VC with the founders sorting out more funding through personal finances and a little revenue in year two. The idea is solid. The problem is really interesting. We are all new to the startup world which is why I am a little worried about the offer on the table. We haven't started hacking yet so there is a load of risk around building the product and interest in it. I would be very grateful to hear what you think about the options on the table. I want to take the plunge, but only on terms that make sense.
Why Nokia Chose Windows Mobile Over Android
I was initially psyched on this (and I still like the idea) but it's not viable for me simply because of the very late timing. (The fact that you can't apply without a Facebook account is a little annoying, too.)
Incidentally, the other 2 guys are running a successful t-shirt printing company. You should totally order your swag from them. http://threadbird.com/
This is no longer necessary since version 1.0, it now opens your editor from the gem's directory. https://github.com/lmarlow/gemedit/blob/master/History.txt#L...
There's a tricky balance to be struck here.

On the one hand, it's not unreasonable that a company paying an employee to work for them should expect a certain degree of loyalty as long as they are taking a company pay cheque. That would reasonably include the employee not directly competing with their employer.

On the other hand, some employers are vast companies, and no one employee can possibly know everything that is going on. Is it really fair to penalise someone who creates a side project completely independently of work, just because it happens to relate to a company project of which the employee had no knowledge? If you allow that, without imposing a corresponding duty on the company to disclose everything they do to every restricted employee so that employees can understand the mutual obligations before making decisions that might be affected by them, doesn't that conflict with the most basic principles of contract law?
Or, they'd rather be in charge at a small company than a property manager at Google.
> Ford pickups ... have a tendency to explode when you attach model rocket engines to the gas tank.

And I was told it was a fail safe mechanism so that the gas tank didn't explode unexpectedly, some people will lie to you to sell you anything!
Could you please provide a reference to the sources for these claims? Thanks.
Who's to say he didn't do that in an alternate timeline as a failed experiment?

It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure for movies. :)
An illustration from the book I cited above showing the importance of the alphabet size (y-axis) and the pattern length (x-axis):

http://i.imgur.com/KGOZW.jpg

In the experiment he used patterns of different length on the same text collection. As you can see in the graph, different algorithms perform best for a certain alphabet size.

He describes the text collection as "text corpus taken from wikipedia text dump" so I'm guessing the alphabet size is around 90?

It's also probably not a good thing that all the strings he is searching for are prefixes of the same pattern.

References:

Shift-Or: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node6.html#SECTION...

BNDM: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/bndm.html#SECTION0...

BOM: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/bom.html#SECTION00...
A recent relevant discussion on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/fftaa/my_25_hour_foray_...
> IANAL, but in the UK, unless you have a contract that specifically says otherwise, yes.

Cite, please. Your claim directly contradicts formal advice I have received from multiple employment law specialists in the UK, on several occasions over the past few years, most recently last year.

You're right that it's always better to be clear in the contract anyway, though.
Agreed. While I feel curious about what sort of spectacle we'd be seeing if they were still allowed to run 1.5l turbo motors with active suspension and ground effects all at the same time, I understand the need to both keep costs within reasonable bounds, and to keep drivers alive...
You're right about Phil Jackson. He's a basketball genius. LA has always been able to attract top talent, but raw talent alone doesn't equal multiple championships at NBA level.
Wireless Advances Could Mean No More Cell Towers