skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An NDA means almost nothing these days. It's more of a scare tactic than something tangible and certainly not very enforceable (at least in California) and most people wouldn't find it worthwhile to do so. That said, there is less and less value in an NDA among several different parties, depending who you talk to.

The correct answer should be, assuming you already have your company entity formed, is to get an attorney to draft up what is called a Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement. This agreement basically states that any and all work done for the company belongs to the company. The draft is different for employees vs contractors but can be made for each type of person you are hiring. In it, you can detail what exactly is being done to avoid it being stolen (IP and all). It basically has a built in NDA but goes further in length to protect what you need.

I do agree execution is where its all at but don't worry too much about your idea getting stolen. If it's easily ripped and you can't defend it better than the people who steal it from you, you got bigger problems. I find that sharing ideas to the public are often better than hiding them. I can't keep count of the number of people and number of times I've received valuable feedback, resources, etc... for sharing what I'm working on with random people I've met at networking events, etc... only to gain more insight than before. Learn to let go of the fear of sharing what you're doing to some degree. Only some things are worth keeping private. The general premise of the idea however, is not one of those things and you certainly don't need to map everything out to your developer you are hiring up front to get them to build a prototype.

As for abroad, you might as well forget it. International legal battles are fruitless unless you're talking about monumental amount of money involved and high power. Chances are, you're definitely neither of those and you're not going to be suing someone overseas. If you're that worried about your idea being stolen, you got bigger issues than it actually happening.
Those that can do, those that can't, teach, and those that can't teach get tenure.

This is an extremely ignorant and insulting statement. Further, you have just asserted that the worlds best minds, and many of histories great figures, are all incapable fools. I hope you realize how this statement makes you look.
Intel, AMD and Nvidia are also notorious for these kinds of practices.
You will still lose data so is DLP worthwhile?
Its my first post here - still I am a very active reader.
I don't think the problem is the action of selling and starting anew. I think the problem is double-talk.

Either treat your startup like it's your life's work and see it through for as long as it takes, or treat it like a big project that you're happy to turn over when something better comes along. But keep the attitudes distinct.
> everybody says that company X should emulate Apple, it is just the easy thing to suggest because Apple is currently winning.

That's like saying "it's the easy thing to suggest that Johnny will only win the foot race by emulating Jimmy, who is running instead of taking a bath then playing video games." As though there's more nuance to it than that.

Apple is doing what is necessary to win. If someone says a company should emulate Apple, it's a shorthand for saying that Apple has consistently won in the markets they've entered for the last decade and their approach is excellent for selling consumer electronics.

Apple wins through focus. Is there any argument against having focus? What is the benefit of avoiding focus and smearing your efforts around a dozen different projects?

Apple wins through quality. What would be the argument for making shit instead of quality?

Apple wins through integration. What would be the argument for making devices that weren't well integrated, from software/hardware perspective or a user experience/ecosystem perspective?

Want to know who is emulating Apple, proving the value of its example? Look at Amazon and the Kindle. Supreme focus: Maximum of two hardware variations so far. Excellent quality: great hardware, decent software. Incredible integration, with Whispernet allowing you to buy any Amazon content anywhere in the world, tied to your existing Amazon account, which is pre-loaded onto your Kindle when you open it.

Kindle is now Amazon's best-selling product.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html "all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it."
Agreed. To whomever drew the nerds in the cardboard boxes: I love that illustration. Nice work.
I apologize for the incorrect assessment of the parent's message, but please consider for a moment that rampant amount of insurance fraud that goes on all the time. There's a reasonable amount of ambiguity as to whether or not the comment was sarcastic.
I comment more than I should, and soak up an enormous amount of intellectual capital I now employ.

Thanks, great minds!
Reminds me of the days of using graphite pencils to unlock CPUs :)
It would be great if we could submit cool tumblrs. I would submit mine: http://lookAtThisFuckingSideBoob.com (NSFW!)
"One of us tells the truth, and one of us always lies."
So only a "longbeard" would have read something on the internet 10 years ago? I have news for you. Someday you will have a little bit of experience. At that point you will look back at your attitude and see how wrong it was. Karma.
I don't know about other people, but I don't really care about the environment when I am working - be it coding or designing or researching. All I need from the envolironment is for it be quiet and have good lighting.
I recommend reading Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"

> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Doesn't SAD start going away once the sun starts coming back out again?
So ignore his arguments and opinions and take a look at that graph. That's one of the more informative pieces of "what language should I learn" dialogue I've ever seen.

Take a look at the github and stackoverflow communities. If you think they're doing cool stuff, then you can probably feel safe tackling any language in the upper right corner of that graph. It's a safe bet.

And look what's up there!

javascript, python, php, ruby, c/c++, perl
scala, actionscript, haskell

The angle above the regression line suggests whether the language is more talk (so) or walk (github), the clusters are sensible based on my domain knowledge of the languages: useful workhorses, weird and developed.

I love the informative display of quantitative information. This is especially true when everything rhetorically boils down to opinions.
Show HN: A video demo of my html5 game engine
The coworkspace I use in northern IL (not Chicago) costs $225/mo for full-time access.
Got it. I guess the distinction is not that big of a deal for me, though it would be nice to have the inline {.or}-like construct (it saves one statement).
The fix depends on the cause. Did you burn out due to an oppressive/insatiable boss, or due to pressure you placed on yourself? The first is largely correctable by a better working environment. The second, unfortunately, requires deep introspection to figure out and address the true source.
Yes and no. Gates had a large amount of experience with programming in an era where most people had not seen a computer, and had very wealthy parents who supported him dropping out. Now you may argue that he "made the opportunity" by convincing his parents that this whole software thing was a good idea, etc., but the reality is that he was born at the right time, in the right place, with the right set of parents, etc. This is not to lessen what he did: he grabbed the opportunity by the tail. He did no less than any other wildly successful entrepreneur. But for a vast majority of college students out there, the resources and experiences he had at the time are untouchable. To use an analogy: you can have all the willpower, drive, motivation, etc. to move the world, but you still need that damn big lever.
Why do these types of market partitioning practices anger people so much? Isn't it a good thing that these companies are offering different price points for people to choose from?
There isn't a lot of love for Tim Ferris around HN. But you definitely should read "The four hour work week". It will give you some ideas of what to do, but more importantly, it will give you some ideas of how to efficiently do whatever it is that you want to do (time and money wise). Nothing he writes there is secret, and yet, it is unconventional on one hand and potentially extremely useful on the other.
I think Jean's post helpfully encapsulates the value of this discussion: that engineers (and non-engineers!) should certainly consider startups in general as an employment, educational, and financial experience that at a base level (say, in the context of a well-funded startup) will probably at least rival work in a larger corporate setting.

But, as lylanm also points out below, perhaps the larger point is that there's not much merit in comparing the prospect of work at an abstract startup versus the prospect of work at an abstract large corporation --- especially if you don't have an offer from either.

Whether you're looking for a first job or just a new job, it's certainly worth exploring whether a particular startup might be a better fun+financial+whatever fit for you than another opportunity that's been extended to you at a particular established company.
From the article:

"...I came home in 1989...to a tenure-track job, running my own research lab at a University of London institute, where I remained until the sad demise of my career...I got tenure..."
I am afraid they lack the background to pull off "the future of education", certainly not on the college level. Sorry for being harsh.
The consequences are that if you don't understand this and drop out of school to become a programming rockstar, you might be in rough shape... which I believe was the point of the article.
You appear to be someone else. It does happen from time to time.

Out of curiosity, what industry/market was this? How big was the company? Have any idea how much the lawsuit cost?
I actually took a team to an off-season ski chalet in Chamonix one summer, and it was surprisingly affordable. Airfare included, it came out to less than we'd pay for cubes in LA. Possibly even less than $200/desk/month, considering the place rented for $800 euro per month and slept 10 comfortably in 6 bedrooms.

Details here: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-of...

In SE Asia, I guess you could go 2 ways with pricing. You could look at what the backpackers pay (~$10/night or $200/month for a room), and go with something comparable so that you'd get some overlap (and thus end up with Swedish girls hanging out at the pool). Or you could go for the "Surf Camp" model, where you charge $4k/week to people who have too much money. Personally I'd probably lean towards the first model if it were up to me.

Mostly I'd be looking for something that paid for itself, kept me on the beach, and kept a bunch of interesting people around.
The argument seems to be BigCorp vs. startup. You can also work in a relatively sane, small-to medium sized stable business.
You'd have better success if you showed some respect for your readers by capitalizing and writing your posts in a normal style. Starting off with "lol" and an emoticon marks you as somebody who hasn't thought about what he is about to write, and who doesn't care to present his thoughts to the reader in an organized manner. In your comment history, other posts have it worse, and your writing style and mannerisms make you seem like a nut-case. If your comments were written using normal sentences, that would not be the case. However, if you're talking about "higher privileged clergy folks" downvoting you, writing style won't help much on that front.
Do You FourSquare on the First Date? Love in the Location-Aware World
Cuba's Internet Capacity To Increase by 3,000 Percent
> {{#genes}} open table {{#rows}} row stuff {{/rows}} end table {{/genes}}

JSON templates has an interesting solution.

http://json-template.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/Introducin...

{.section genes}
open table
{.repeated section @}
row stuff
{.end}
end table
{.end}
The anger comes from essentially paying for air, or just adding profit for the company. If two parts are almost essentially the same, why am I paying more just for a different label?

Chip manufacturers actually do sell you a different product when you buy the high performance product, and it's related to chip yields.
If you visit any backpacker beach in the world, you'll find people who've been there for ten years. Some of them own bars and bungalow complexes. Nearly all of them are living on tourist visas.
How long until we get a DMCA-like law preventing these kinds of blog posts? He'd be guilty of trafficking in technology which aids in the circumvention of profit-enhancing business practices.
Well I think the problem is the way the job market has changed, not the way that the curricula have changed; they've remained remarkably static. It used to be that if you had a college degree in something you could get an entry level position in... something. Nowadays you have to have had some sort of vocational training in that field. If you have a degree in history there aren't many fields that applies to. And the problem in C.S. isn't that C.S. programs aren't teaching advanced algorithms well, it's that all the job listings want you to know RoR. Computer science != programming, as my C.S. Ph.d. friends like to frequently point out. You could (theoretically) get a graduate degree in C.S. without ever opening your text editor, if you're into proofs and the like.
Hi guys, Im not associated with nerd fort,so Im not able to provide any photos. Posted the link because I thought it would be useful to other hackers (and liked the design as well).
"The biggest issues with the Valley are local, state and federal governmental overreach and overregulation. It's over-pensioned, over-unionized and over the top."

-- Scott McNealy
I knew DOS. But what forst got me passionate about making stuff on computers was Doom.

I could move move walls. Make a pit. Add monsters. Try and make the room outside rather than inside...(fast forward a few months)...combine the unenclosed sectors hack with the no-lower-texture-bleed bug and make passable deep water.

It was fun. And simple.
I wonder if Obama is ever going to grow a pair and stand up for what's right.

I've never liked him much politically, but I've always had the feeling that deep down he wants to do the right thing. He's just too damn caught up in being a politician.

Perhaps if he gets re-elected?
The example I gave was productivity(hours) = max(hours-20, 0). This is nonlinear.

My second paragraph explained how the gap between the 20 hours/week scientist and the 40 hours/week scientist grows with time.
This is very true. Unfortunately not enough entrepreneurs out there get this. There are exceptions to the rule but there are exceptions to everything somewhere. Generally speaking though, if your company fails, more often than not, it's because of you, your team (or lack of a team), your inexperience, etc... There is a long list of reasons why a startup my fail, but at the top of that list, it's usually because the founders fail.
Because it feels like your being cheated when you are sold something that the person that is selling it to you broke on purpose.

It doesn't really matter if the practice actually lets more people use a product, it just feels dirty.
When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.
Did you read the post? The $200 headphones are /exactly the same/ as the $350 ones, except for a piece of easily-removable foam they crammed in the opening to reduce the sound quality.

That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.
I try to comment when I have something of value to add, that has not already been contributed. Mostly information. To a self-imposed limited extend, a bit of anecdote and/or humor. [1] The latter usually only in accompaniment to information.

I support the original attitude that pervaded HN, that karma is about surfacing interesting information. It's not personal, nor should it be.

Personal relationships do develop here, but not as a direct function of karma (I'm sure karma plays some role, inevitably, due to visibility and so discovery.)

In short, what would the other person want to know? (That's "want", not "should", the latter being a slippery slope.) Keeping in mind the composition and goals of the community, this makes participating pretty straight forward.

--

1 Maybe I've been veering too far in this direction, lately.
Rendering members of Arrays should also be in the spec. I believe mustache.js has support for changing the iterator rendering token, however mustache.rb does not.

{
"items": ["foo", "bar"]
}

# From mustache.rb

{{#items}}
{{{to_s}}}
{{/items}}
I think a better question is what is it exactly you're trying to do. What are you passionate about. Stating you want an MBA or MS in Finance doesn't really say much. Can't provide good feedback like that.
In the spirit of letting kids curiosity flow, they can have a great time just by tweaking already existing games. In Scratch, they can open any of the existing examples, play around, change some numbers or images, play again and see the effects of their changes.

I have a 10 y/o girl and she's learning Python (we're following the Hello World book - www.helloworldbook.com) and it's fun to follow, and she enjoys seeing the effects of the changes in the programs to see if they still behave as she expects them to.

I think it's much more important to observe that pattern rather than just discarding a particular language just because it may fix a specific mindset.
I think the author has a good point though that rap is the only genre that really embraces commercialism/capitalism/enrichment in the lyrics themselves (albeit usually mixed in with a criminal fantasy element).
What is it that you don't like being a software developer?It is kind of hard to completely do something else.

I have questioned my being a software developer also in the past. I seriously thought about going back to university to become a teacher. I decided against it. Mostly because of the financial losses this would have caused and because I just try to find outlets for my desire to teach in my current job as well as spare time.

It's usually a shame if you basically throw away 4.5 years of working experience to do something completely different. Unless you really hate what you are doing, I'd recommend trying to slightly steer you career into the direction you want to explore. Drastic changes often come with high losses.
I don't understand the economics. It sounds like you're saying that there's no place in the world for a fully trained (though perhaps less ambitious than before) scientist, so it's better to start from scratch with someone new, who presumably will take many years of training to get up to speed. I don't see how we can afford such a wasteful system?
I can think of a few, but "linear/nonlinear" doesn't seem like the right way to look at it. From what I've read, productivity has more to do with statistical distributions:
http://xw2k.nist.gov/dads/HTML/lotkaslaw.html

Very curiously, these distributions are self-similar in that even when you restrict the sample to top-tier academics for instance, they still hold.
> it's only natural that the value of one coin would constantly increase

Not really. As I see it, the value is a function of demand. The fact that bitcoins have risen in value so fast, means that demand and confidence is also growing.

There isn't really a hard cap. It's just that it will get increasingly difficult to generate bitcoins, so in effect we won't have more than 21 million. The idea is to provide a predictable increase of the money supply. That is good because you know nobody's going to suddenly dump 21 million more bitcoins in circulation, and halve the value of your coinage.

That's what's happening with USD. They keep dumping trillions of new dollars in the money supply, something I really wouldn't like if I had dollars in my bank account. Just ask Zimbabwe, where they need a cartwheel of money to buy dinner at a restaurant.

So what if demand keeps growing and we need more than 21 million coins? Well the system supports up to 8 decimal points. I guess that will have to do.

As far as money laundering goes, I think it's not that much different from regular cash. I also think that tracking everyone's spending/earning habits is not the best way to stop crime.
Fog Creek Compensation (2000)
First of all, you should never feel stupid for feeling proud of yourself. Getting a job offer from any top technical company is an accomplishment, let alone from a company whose work you admire. It's obviously not something you should let get to your head, but our society doesn't give us nearly enough time to enjoy and appreciate our accomplishments and how they reflect on our hard work - this sounds like a perfect time to do so. Seriously, congratulations.

As for the decision, well, I'm in a very different place in my life - 26, single, etc. I can't exactly give first hand experience. (I can say that living in cities is often cheaper than it seems, especially if you or your kids can take advantage of public transit - car insurance and gas adds up quick!) I think the important thing to remember is, all getting a job offer does is give you more options, not less. Whatever you decide, I'd take your offer as a vote of confidence that with or without working for Google, you'll do just fine.