skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a condition of employment, back when I didn't know any better, I signed the All-your-IP-belong-to-us contract. I tried digging through my archives at my parent's house last year to try to find it but couldn't. I'm not sure I want to bring it up with my boss and Legal (red flagged). Then again, maybe I want to be the nail that sticks out and doesn't get hammered down.

Now that I am doing substantial freelance and collaborative projects - my strategy is to work on either a) side projects with diffuse ownership b) pro-bono projects or c) projects where we don't own the product - the client does - while I plot my eventual jumping ship. I hope they won't go after me.

Going to another company is kind of ridiculous because they tell you in the interview that 'as long as you don't use any of the code that you work on during the day'. Any good coder knows that reusing code is part of the job - and it would be difficult if not insane to pretend that you can keep code out of side projects. My strategy, if I were to take such a job, would be to open source the code I do on my own time that I might use at the company - and get permission to use my own open source library.

However, I've done enough freelance hours to know freelancing isn't a bed of roses - a bed of roses with thorns. There is no concept of weekends or holidays with client deadlines...

Ah, health care...
Thanks for sharing. I've wondered for a long time what UI toolkit was used to make Picasa!

So you create the UI elements as PSDs and then export to some image format when building? Or do you actually interpret the PSD files in code itself?
Can't forget the Ford pickups that 'Dateline' discovered have a tendency to explode when you attach model rocket engines to the gas tank.
Do you have a citation for your statement that "what you do in your spare time" is not owned by you in New York?
Yeah I saw your comment there. I find it fascinating that the two groups using twitter that look "grafted on" are Journalists and Software entrepreneurs. Both groups are early adopters of twitter. I see those two grafted on bits as bridges to unseen nodes.
Hmm...there's no mention of it being suited for a dynamic or "online" setting as another commenter notes (not sure why my other comment was downvoted for that). I don't know what to make of this from the description:

"This algorithm especially well suited for long S, multi-substrings, small alphabet, regex/parsing and search for common substrings."

Long source text: the O(n times m) worst-case time per search kills it. Even for a single search, O(n times m) worst case here versus O(n + m) for suffix trees.

multi-substrings: suffix trees do each substring of length m in O(m), but are not compared.

search for common substrings: again, suffix trees would be more appropriate.
Nintendo should have bought Palm. Would be great to have a Nintendo branded phone; one developers can make apps for & even use some of Nintendo's B-list characters. I think that such would give Apple a run for some of it's money.
+1 for staying as healthy as possible for as long as possible - not that I'm actually all that healthy.

There's a good chance that human lifespans will increase dramatically over the next few decades.
It's "hear, hear" by the way :)
Great Article
I thought your article was introspective. Not only did you go into detail weighing the many pros and cons of both languages, but you actually reached a cognitive conclusion.
In my earlier programming years (not that I have advanced), I remember entering pages of programming followed by debugging to enhance the effective use of the product. Then I began to see thinkers emerge who would concatenate patterns, links, functions, all into one or two sentences. This charmed and impressed me. Thank you for taking the time to, in a non-egoistic but entertaining way, let us have your thoughts and useful tips. What a pleasure! I will read other blogs certainly.
Even if the cars turn out to all be fine (and we don't know that yet), Toyota certainly couldn't have known that at the time.

It is totally unacceptable (and illegal) to hide a potentially fatal problem with your products, even if you think it's probably not widespread.
For a small game I'm working on, Photoshop has actually become part of the build process.

The artwork is saved in largish PSD files and I have a script which generates the required AppleScript to open each one, scale down the images to the required formats (for ex, retina-display and non-retina display), occasionally exporting different layers into different output files.
Its important to note that YC isnt "at fault," or "did something wrong." They did what they thought was best, and that decision drove Jon down a different path. The end result (at least at this point) is net-net positive for both. Being in YC as a single founder would have been really hard on Jon, and would have probably netted a different short-term result, given the learning and potential shift in direction an accelerator can bring (YC, TS, etc.)
I was just answering your pseudorhetorical question in a semi-satirical way.
Still seems weird seeing a company that's not even profitable yet go public. I don't expect the initial demand for their stock will be that high, despite the growth.
"Digg tries to reverse the spin of the Earth in hopes of undoing damage."

A lot of a social media site's success is doing the right thing at the right time.

They did the wrong thing at the wrong time, and it might not be possible for them to find a new right thing or time.
Well, isn't that kinda what they did? The fine wasn't for having unsafe cars. It was for getting reports that their cars were unsafe and hiding them from regulators
High Stakes Hackathon
Because they have been doing mock ups with both WP7 and android since last summer...I know someone in engineering at Nokia..
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.

Sony shipped rootkits on audio CDs, and people still line up to give them money. I don't think a DMCA trial, or 100,000 of them, is going to matter to Sony's loyal customers.
Sorry, I updated my comment just as you posted yours.

But - and I don't want to sound pedantic - how is m^2 not exponential growth?

Edit: mea culpa guys, I carelessly translated from Dutch. You're all right: quadratic, not exponential growth.
It's the visibility of the relationships - all this could in theory be derived from looking at email / phone records, but of course those aren't available.

And then there's Facebook...
"If what you are planning to do has commercial value, then make sure to get it checked by a good local lawyer who can guide you through the pitfalls and explain alternatives."

Is being no-longer-employed by your employer an absolute defense, assuming that you can prove that any IP in question was created after the end of your employment?

I'm thinking of the case where an employee does something that's either not of commercial value or lets it revert to his employer's ownership, but then quits and founds a startup (with an entirely new codebase) afterwards.

For example, Marc Andreesen writes a web browser under the terms of his employment with UIUC. He then drops out, moves to Silicon Valley, and founds a company with Jim Clark, presumably with a from-scratch codebase. They get sued for trademark infringement because they name it Mosaic Communications Corp, but UIUC has no legal claim to any of their source code or inventions developed after the end of Andreesen's employment, right, even though he gained quite a lot of experience working on web browsers there?

Or Larry and Sergey start Backrub at Stanford. It becomes Google before they leave Stanford grad school. Stanford obviously owns the PageRank patent because it was developed while they were still students, and they licensed it for a good chunk of shares. However, would Stanford own the original Google logo, forcing Google to redo it when they incorporated as a separate company? How about code - presumably Google licensed the codebase from Stanford, but if they hadn't and had started fresh instead, would Stanford have any claims on the grounds that Larry and Sergey had built an essentially identical product under their employment?
I wasn't pointing fingers at you in this, as I said - I was responding to the question directed at Paul. Now, I'll respond to you. I thought this privately, but your comment kind of pushed me over:

I'm not sure if it's intentional, so I apologize if it isn't and I'm completely off-base. I mean no disrespect, and I'm just trying to understand what I'm reading.

I'm reading a bit of exasperation from you that you weren't provided enough time to make life-changing decisions by YC. It almost sounds like blame, even though your blog post leans the other way. Whether you overtly admit it or not, it sounds like you hold a bit of a grudge that you lost out on that YC round because you weren't provided enough time to uproot your (and your cofounders') lives.

Based on Paul's response, it sounds like they had wished they'd have known in that garden meeting that perhaps your cofounders weren't on board. I don't think it's an unfair assumption that you knew, when you pitched YC, that your cofounders had families and were rooted. I think Paul is expressing disappointment that he was blindsided by you hours before YC started with something hitherto unmentioned. Is it unfair to say that perhaps you should have expressed at the initial meeting that the next round might have been better?

I can't imagine YC would have pulled funding from you had you said, at the initial meeting, "can we please shoot for Winter? this is a big deal, and I know your round starts soon, and I want to be respectful of my cofounders and give myself time to get things together". I'd have considered that a sign of wisdom, personally, and gained a lot of respect for you.

My take, anyway. It worked out in the end, so bravo.
Compared to the cost of finding out that the cars actually were defective and killing people? PR-cost plus settling the class action suit.
I recently became a subscriber and even if it does not have the latest movies i dont care because like Pandora it learns what you like and thus the recommendations are great. Another thing I love about it is the random DC comic cartoon/movies Ive watched like Batman/Superman and Superman and Shazam.
Report from Post-Mubarak Cairo
But you just admitted that you can neutralize citizen militias by bribing them.
Will Super Angels & Tech Mavens Close The Minority-Led Startup Gap?
So all I'm asking is that we all do our part to make history. I believe silicon valley's super angels and tech mavens can close the minority-led startup gap starting with an incubator that gathers that a Mexican technologist from Los Angeles, with the poor White prodigy from the South Side of Chicago, or the Black young lady engineer from Atlanta. An incubator that gathers the best from the rest.
Yes, but can they _replicate_? If so, we're doomed!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/02/google...

> Sony is also asking Judge Illston to order Google to surrender the IP addresses [.pdf] and other identifying information of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on Hotz’ private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.

Do you think the above is "reasonable" per definition? In essence, anyone who stumbled across some page where the youtube video was embedded is now suspect. Anyone who made comments on twitter is now suspect. And if you slide down the slippery slope, all of us are now suspect for discussing it here on HN.

The above is excessive, and hence, unreasonable. The lawyers of the plaintiff intentionally asked for the moon, gift wrapped, and the judge agreed. The lawyers from Sony did their job correctly, as they are expected to ask for everything they possibly can to help their case. The judge, Susan Illston, failed to do her job. She was supposed to take the expected unreasonable requests from the lawyers, weigh their merit, and rule on a limited compromise to both enable discovery and protect the privacy of the people. The discovery process is not an excuse for excessive privacy invasion.

That's just the above issue of other parties.

As for the issue of searching the hard disk of George Hotz... --it's an interesting debacle. Discovery is very important but it comes down to where and how one draws the lines. Opinions of reasonable and unreasonable will vary.
I'm surprised that YC accepted "them" after meeting just one of the co-founders

This was the first time we had a late application process and I made the mistake of not insisting that Jon submit an application form. That would have surfaced the issues much earlier. We've since established that we won't fund anyone without them filling out an application form and meeting all co-founders in person.

Congrats to Jon, that's a fantastic list of investors to have.
The patents will in turn by analyzed by MPEG LA, and those deemed to be relevant will be pooled together. The pooled patents will then be available to license as a single convenient bundle.

It looks like they are gearing up to do the same thing Microsoft does with companies that use Linux[1][2].

MPEG-LA is going to contact companies that make use of WebM and offer them the opportunity to license the related MPEG-LA patents for whatever price they set. Those that refuse get sued. That way MPEG-LA patent holders profit from WebM while simultaneously discouraging its use. And they don't have to fight head-to-head with Google.

1: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1000142405274870445430457...

2: http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/02/Microsoft_sues_TomT...
Teaching Teachers How To Teach
Here's a fun recent one from Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3132384.htm

Media Watch is a brilliant show.
I believe the admin interface doesn't work on AppEngine though :(
I think the problem is a disagreement over what "AI" means. We don't know how to do strong, general-purpose AI with artificial neural nets. We do know how to do a lot of smaller tasks with neural nets. Just because they're not currently a panacea doesn't mean they're not useful.
I wrote them up last time this came up, you can find it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970191
I liked Digg a lot back in the day. I've checked in a few times in the last year and found nothing new or fixed to recommend it and a great deal to not. Thanks guys, good luck, but I'm not planning on coming back until my friends start telling me I should.
So they need to do a deal with the devil in order to loose the keyboards and copy established designs. Nokia + MS = 2 x Marketing.
Hmm, looks a bit like the Nexus S.

Smart-phones are about the software, not the hardware (above a certain threshold). And even then, WP7 can be the sliced bread of smart-phones, but if they don't have an apps ecosystem, they're not going to take off. With iOS and Android at roughly 20-30% each, and with WP7 at, what, 0-1%? -- who is going to develop WP7 apps? We might not think about it now, but it took a long time for the cool kids to start developing for Android, and even longer for them to do it properly. I only see this slowing down for each new platform added.
It looks more like a tweet to Nokia employees from a Google employee. There's a difference; don't confuse them.
'commited' should be 'committed'.
SXSW Accelerator Finalists Announced
Yeah it wasn't really like that. The guys were willing to move if they had to. They were willing to make the move and I had no idea they were going to be out until they were. But after getting swept up in everything for a few days preparing to move, it just became clear it wasn't going to work. There was no intentional omission of facts. When I accepted, I expected us all to be there.

And to clarify, I don't blame YC at all. I love those guys. I really admire Paul and sometimes even quote the few interactions we've had. I think he's a genius and seriously hope we can work together on something one day. (Hi, Paul!)

In my comment above, I was actually just trying to explain that everything happened very fast. I tried to update people as best as I could. It was just a very crazy week.
Exponential growth is O(2^m). This is not pedantic -- it's definition. O(m^k) is polynomial, O(k^m) is exponential.
Or you can let somebody else read it, so you don't have to:

http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=3903

"BEAST philosopher-at-large Michael Caigoy reads Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, so you don’t have to"
AT&T iPhone customers: go grab your free 1000 minutes
Because 2^m and m^2 are very different...

Using terminology like "exponential" and "quadratic" correctly in a discussion of algorithms is not pedantic...
Having worked extensively as a TA in an Ivy League school, I must concur with this analysis. It's very easy, even in the hard sciences, to get by without doing any real work and by actually learning very little in the class. If you're really good and put lots of work and interest in the class, you will get an A; but so will a bunch of other people whose main qualification is knowing how to put pressure on the teacher and the TA. If someone comes during office hours, spends enough time, and asks the right sequence of questions, you are practically bound by the rules and the incentives to do 90% of their homework for them. Only exams are relatively less corrupted, but even those are going down the drain as a rigorous method of evaluation (fake learning disabilities, very easy problems, low proportion in overall grade etc.).
This is so bollocks. And from the IEEE no less. Shame on them.

A turing-complete architecture is a turing complete architecture. There is no difference in computational ability between turing-complete architectures.

The advance here is in hardware architecture, not in AI. Make no mistake, it's an interesting approach - possibly the memristor will allow a neural network to be a practical chip, which has not proven feasible to date. But it's not going to open the magic gates to Big AI.

The mathematical, philosophical, and algorithmic aspects of AI are simply not understood in any sort of great depth of thought. Say, what is intelligence anyway (rhetorically)?

I look forward to seeing the memristor research results, and I hope some useful hardware neural network advances come from it.
A client of mine does this and then posts to social networks. Amazing how a little public shaming gets you back in line...

http://www.ridingmagazine.com/riding_onlinemag/rm_badstandin...
x^2 is quadratic, 2^x (for example) is exponential.

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity , it's pretty comprehensive.
Because 2, the exponent in that expression, is a constant.

Exponential growth would be 2^m.
I think being the group who is asking all submarines to surface is very different than being the submarine captain. I agree patents suck but it's an unavoidable reality of the current US patent system. If the patent exists, it exists. Sticking your head in the sand wont help you and leaving it as an unknown only helps Google.

I think you can make the case that this is the role that Google should have been playing.
Khan Academy Education Videos over Bittorrent
Google Goggles is not "built-in", so it's plenty unclear.
By the way, what's so scary about a gas pedal getting stuck? Can't you just put the car in neutral?
A blogger somewhere saw the terms of the note and commented on it (don't remember what site). Basically if the note converts for any reason other than an equity round it does so at a $5M cap.

Even more interesting: that $5M cap also applies if the terms of the future equity round don't allow for re-upping. So basically, if StartFund can't re-invest in the next round, they get better terms on the note. Really smart.
BEST REVIEW - TOP 5 SMART PHONE TWITTER APPS
Can't reach the server anymore.
Java revolutionary?

It dragged C++ programmers halfway to Lisp, in the sense that hardware abstraction through a VM and automatic GC gradually became acceptable.
Contrast this with of all things, your standard art major--- when your grade depends entirely on the work of your mind AND HANDS, it is much harder to game the system even if such gaming was accidental. I'm sure there has been erosion since I worked my rear end off for each and every credit I earned, but it still comes down to proving you've actually learned what was taught for each studio class. Won't talk about art history, will talk about intro to silversmithing. There is no way to fake knowledge/skill when it comes to swinging a hammer at a piece of metal in an effort to change it's shape in a planned and meaningful manner. Kind of a nice regression-testy sort of thing...
You can browse the entire archive at www.bbcattic.org
I honestly wouldn't want to work with people that aren't sure about me after a couple interviews.
Sometimes people make a silly clown shaped molehill out of pile of moles...aka...a joke. But I guess I broke the first rule. It wasn't funny. Frowny face.
"so many of the people in news seemingly didn't even pay attention in grade school science classes."

I've noticed this, too. For example, I once read on CNN that a satellite was orbiting "one trillion miles" away from Earth. But even more egregious than that numerical error (which was later corrected) was an article a few years ago on how young people's thumbs are "mutating". Basically, the idea was that people were using their thumbs to type on cell phones. Somehow CNN made a genetics story out of it.
The media also owes an apology to Richard Jewel and the Duke lacrosse team.
It's funny, the activist seems to think the deletion is about appeasing political masters, but in doing this, they actually lend credibility to the opposite point: Just leaving the pages in places is unlikely to cost the BBC a lot. Is it possible that the BBC is cutting in the most visible way possible, in order to make the cuts seem much more extensive and painful than they actually are in order to scare the government away from further cuts?
This week in search 2/11/11
I can't for the life of me work out why that infographic is in the shape of a wheel, instead of a list with the actual meanings written next to it instead of numbers and a key.
Then I guess you don't know the grammarians I know.