skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Virtually all contractors in our field work under "work-for-hire" clauses. I am baffled by the people voting you up and those questioning you down. It is not "in the Constitution" that two parties can't agree to a binding contract that transfers ownership of work product.

The IRS tests for contractor vs. employee status break down to:

* Does the worker control the "how" as well as the "what" of their task, or do they have to e.g. work at proscribed locations during set hours?

* Does the worker control the business aspects of their work, for instance the cost of tools, the expenses incurred, &c.

* Has the company employing the worker done things to create a de facto employee relationship, such as offering benefits?

None of these are bright-line differences. Contractors routinely work on-site, 9-5, using tools provided by their employers; however, care has been taken in structuring the relationship (for instance, by working corp-to-corp with a large consulting firm or head shop that itself maintains a W2 relationship with the workers).

It is indeed possible or even likely that AOL is treading a fine line by 1099'ing the people writing its content. On the other hand, AOL can afford pretty good lawyers, and it's equally likely that every aspect of their workflow has been structured to avoid imputing employee status to people doing piecework writing for them. You should tone down your stridency. There are a lot of people on HN that consult professionally.
I don't think so...

in any time, you could write "apple" on your navigator, and instead of performing an automatic google search for apple, it will send you to apple website...

the same for a lot of words like google
Ask HN: What's Wrong with Your Hosted Time & Billing Software
I'm currently a Harvest (http://www.getharvest.com) user, and it works great for my needs as a freelance developer. I showed it to my accountant, and he was underwhelmed and deemed it not feature complete. He tried to explain why it fell short on his requirements (much of it on the reporting side). Most of it went over my head, with various accounting terms and what not, but it made me curious; how can these types of hosted time tracking and billing be improved from a feature standpoint?

What features are missing from the web-based time & billing tool that you currently use? If you can include your industry and role, it will help qualify the responses.
The question isn't "Is BitCoin's value non-zero?" As a general critic, I freely say up front, yes, it's interesting and has some non-zero value. I won't even say I'm "admitting" it, because it was never my contention otherwise. But merely establishing that there is some aspect with a non-zero value isn't interesting. The question is, do the positives outweigh the negatives, and if so, do they outweigh them enough to fulfill the stated goals?

You can make anything look great by considering only the positives, you can make anything look terrible by only considering the negatives. The question at hand is about the balance, not whether BitCoin has any positives at all.
If you sign a professionally drafted contract stating that you are being compensated for writing done on a work-for-hire basis, you are not keeping the copyright to your work regardless of whether the IRS determines that your employer owes penalties and interest for stiffing them on your payroll taxes.
Of course not, just like not every project on github is open source. It just seemed like a nice glance at the ways people choose to spend time online.

I doubt society was ever much more virtuous than it is today, but we do hear about the problems more. There is the orthogonal and much more serious issue that many more people today feel unfulfilled in their lives than they did before, but I can't even begin to address that -- read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace if that interests or concerns you.
Will the browsers play ball with that, though? Technically, the tld is .apple, so you'd have to type .apple into the browser.

Google isn't a charity; they want you typing "apple" into the address bar, then seeing ads for apple before clicking on apple.com. As it stands now, they could accomplish exactly what you're saying.

Check to see if there is a ".com" associated with the single word you type, and take you there.
Mii Gary
Where can one buy security for $10,000 anyway? I'm not mentally disabled and have spent many weekends learning about info security. What are they even talking about?
To rephrase what dazmax said: They're under no delusions they're not evil. They're saying, "there are a lot of evil people around, and yeah, we're one of them, but who cares? There are a lot of evil people around, and in terms of damage, we're probably doing far less than anyone else and happen to be doing some good by bringing attention to how weak these security systems are. You're spending so much effort chasing us and condemning else; not that we don't deserve it, but you should be spending at least as much, in fact, far more on the people doing far more damage and not announcing it and not doing any good at all."

They're right too. I'm not saying what they're doing is good, or even necessary like some vigilante stories portray, but they're right that we should be devoting just as much attention and effort denouncing and trying to catch the doubtless countless people, who like they, tried some simple attacks and discovered that most security systems are almost trivial to breach, and are taking real advantage of it, not just putting it on the internet and watching the lulz unfold.
> Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms.

Err, I don't think so, based on the following utilitarian argument:

First, more freedom in the network means more freedom in general. Evidence for this is easy to find. Encryption in particular does one thing and one thing only: preventing eavesdropping. That helps freedom of though, and even of speech (for small groups on a chat room, for instance).

Second, more arms means more dead people (not much, compared to car crashes and ageing, but still). Evidence is even easier to find. And as far as I know, it doesn't increase freedom in any interesting way.

Even beyond my judgement call, it should now be obvious that encryption and ammunitions have very different effects. Using one as an analogy for the other would be wildly inaccurate.
HN as a credible source in Wikipedia?
In which case, problem solved: They can't.
Watch,super 8,online free,megavideo
watch,super 8,online free,megavideo
Watch Movies Online Super 8. According to previous reports of the film follows a group of children, the Super 8 film camera or eighties
help me!

http://www.complang.org/dsnp/
Painfully accurate.
I truly do not get it.

PR exists to serve its clients. Control and spread specific messages is the job. I don't think anyone has any illusion about that.

Tech industry and tech journalism is weird. Most of the writers do not investigate or do any leg work for that matter (hauling their asses to WWDC is apparently too much work and too costly, so they demand realtime webcast). The majority of tech blog posts are dressed up PR pieces maybe with some attempt snarkiness and editorialization, the others are scoops(with fuzzy pictures!!!) or reviews or personal opinion/rant.

The gist is this: we do not get truth or plain news anymore (or ever did). The media have their angles and the companies represented by the PR firm have agendas too, but together they produce large amount of purposeful info everyday and millions of clicks. If this symbiotic relationship can be defined as war, then yes and Oceania is at war with Eurasia.
I think techcrunch writers are following the "AOL Way" of writing articles. (Although the occurrence of 5 foursquare articles in a day has stopped recently) I guess they're under pressure to sell their massively overpriced/slightly useful conference.

Jack Dorsey pantless in Paris? Who knew.
Why not just use freenet? :)

Or perfectdark
Fully agree with your sentiment. Not trying to argue Bitcoin will succeed.

But it's very clear that it is interesting. It essentially solved globally consistent distributed naming and non-web-of-trust PKI on the side, and almost no one noticed.
That citation is confirming their claim from the first sentence of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga#Intellectual_property that Zynga was indeed criticized on Hacker News.

I'm not sure that's the same as calling HN a credible source, because they're not vouching for anything said here. In any case, it's interesting and I've never seen it before on Wikipedia. :)
"We'll take it to South By, and get some Grilled Cheese"

...ouch. There also should have been at least 100 more .ly domains in there.
What are you talking about? Altering the link the user submits isn't manipulating user content? Especially when they incentivize sponsored ads from users that use affiliate links specifically?

How is it NOT?
Now Square just has to figure out a way to disrupt the market for ATM machines in "Cash Only" businesses. There are dozens of local business in Square's own San Francisco that, even given a novel payment solution like Square, refuse to accept credit cards and opt instead to host on-premise ATM machines.
Not sure why this is down voted. It's relevant. If Greece goes down, it will be a signal to the markets that what was previously unthinkable is now realistic. The PIIGS are deep in shit.
> It is actually erie how they have managed […]

Hidden, uncertain, common costs just aren't accounted for.

The loss of freedom is easily invisible, and the actual cost very hard to measure. Plus, it's a common. More individual freedom for others often mean more for yourself. (Case in point: anonymity: more other nodes means you're harder to find.) With those three effects, it's no wonder "no one cares" about freedom.

Facebook feels gratis, and even free, because (1) you don't pay money, and (2) you have an easy way to talk with other people. The advertisement you can live with, and the spying you don't even see. Few people could actually link Facebook's spying to changes in their present lives. (I'm not sure those that can are at liberty to speak their mind right now.)
Silicon Valley status symbols emphasize mind over material
Sleep Sort With Actors For No Reason
Or perhaps Mark V Shaney?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney
“But men at whiles are sober / And think by fits and starts, / And if they think, they fasten / Their hands upon their hearts.” --A E Housman
High Performance Web Apps with Snap and Haskell
This doesn't really follow:

> Bitcoins have intrinsic value if they enable desirable interactions that are not possible without them.

Yes, any fiat currency has the 'intrinsic' value of enabling some kinds of interactions that are not possible without them. For example, hard-to-counterfeit pieces of paper have an intrinsic value. The problem is that such things are often substitutable: the real value of most paper currencies comes, circularly, from the fact that we've decided to settle on this set of hard-to-counterfeit pieces of paper, not a different one. That's why it's fiat currency, because its value as currency fundamentally derives from the fact that people have agreed to use it as currency.

The same applies for Bitcoin; the general idea could be a good one, but Bitcoin is not the only possible implementation. If we settle on this implementation over others (perhaps because it was first), it is for reasons closer to fiat money than for reasons advocated by "hard money" proponents that they have value.
"So the company you started 20 minutes ago already failed."

"Yeah it crashed 8 minutes ago."

Also I thought the name Brushfire was hilarious.
I don't get it... why does a Fresh Prince reference make him a troll?
The tough thing about comparing these two is that it is hard to find a benchmark (I don't know of one) that works similarly with them both. Sysbench is somewhat of a standard for testing MySQL configs but Postgres does not handle it well.

Though I tend to prefer Postgres don't get me wrong - MySQL has some advantages.

For raw pkey lookups, especially range selects against pkeys with lower amounts of concurrency InnoDB's speed is unmatched. It should be given that it is completely laid out on disk specifically for that to the detriment of other features.

MySQL's replication is extremely sturdy. On paper the older method (statement-based) sounds incredibly fragile but in practice it works extremely well and has been proven on countless projects. mmm makes it almost too easy to setup replication and failover.

I feel that MySQL stalled out for several years in the 5.0-5.1 period where poorly engineered features were bolted on to create a product with too many pathological cases that destroyed performance to keep track of. All these features were available but experience taught you to avoid most joins, avoid most subselects, avoid most usages of views, etc.

That said, v5.5 has a lot of nice improvements and can actually scale up to more than 8 cores (I've gotten linear improvement up to about 32 cores and that is what Oracle puts in their white papers as well). Percona and Facebook are releasing nice patches and branches, and forks like Drizzle are reaching GA and doing good things as well. So I think it is headed in the right direction again.
Daniel Lyons: Fake Steve Jobs and the SCO Shill Who Hated Linux
Cool. Do you have to work at Google to use it?
Running 3 raided SSD drives on my home workstation . . . seriously considering upgrading to one or more raided hyperOs DDR2 Ram Disk Drives. The write latency is nasty on compile time.
Agreed, there's huge potential upside if it all goes well. PayPal was acquired for $1.5B. A $2B for Square (at its very early stage, with a part-time CEO) seems pretty bubblicious to me.
Black Money is a Spam
Thanks, that is high praise.

FWIW, I think even small software businesses have a lot to learn from pg and Spolsky (among others).
Humor is funny. That post was a sarcastic expression of an obvious truth. Neither the tone nor the obviousness was what I come to HN for.
Curious about this, is it RAID-0 for speed or some other variant?
Amazing how many people are commenting about how SSDs don't help much. I am stunned by how long it takes to do anything on any of my computers that don't have SSDs now. IOPS matter to me.
Why there is no successor of animated Gif format?
We're not officially engaged yet, but suffice it to say that, if October were to set another record this year, that would be fortuitously timed.
I agree with you, but I think the spirit of the article is to acknowledge the value of bitcoin as a technical solution to a problem we thought was simply unsolvable.

It probably shouldn't have gone into the economic value of bitcoin specifically, since it doesn't address most of the economic arguments against bitcoins.
I was also very surprised to discover (after the fact) that this was an MG article. I normally skip his articles; the problem isn't the fanboyism, it's that he writes like he's being paid by the word. They're all three times longer than they should be, and I long ago got tired of straining the soup for a few morsels of real information.

Someone needs to give MG a collection of Hemingway's short stories for Xmas.
Agreed. Its best if your looking for they're bad grammar.
If your servers were doing as much write as reads, then SSDs might not be as fast. I had (raid10) 4 intel 80gb ssd vs (raid10) 4 15k rpm scsi drives, and the scsi drives were faster with heavy innodb writes. You might wanna do some stress benchmarking before going into production if you have heavy writes. Now I'm sure the FusionIO line of drives will probably be faster than SCSI's, though I haven't tested them.
One documentary on netflix had a couple training dolphins. They used signs to tell the dolphin to do different tricks. At the end of their training the dolphin had to invent a new trick. They then had two dolphins do the tricks together. At the end of the training, they asked the dolphins to do a new trick, and the dolphins would coordinate a brand new trick together on the fly and perform it simultaneously!
AOL Makes Fun Of Yahoo. And It’s Actually Hilarious.
So what you want is, in essence, a service which you can set up a filter to direct messages to (possibly safer than letting it interact with your account directly?), which then responds to each email it receives with a message that you previously generated, possibly including attachments.

Gmail's vacation responder does all of that except attachments, but you could use the rich formatting of signatures to include links to your media kits.
IPhone apps
How To Make/develop/create iPhone Apps without being a programmer
Yea, I have been saying "legacy" PR based on controlling the message is fundamentally flawed for a while now.
Silly Rabbit, Parsing HTML is for Kids
The other post linked from this entry notes that this is based on Dan Kaminsky's DNSSEC presentation. Dan has a pretty interesting line of articles describing doing this kind of stuff in DNSSEC starting here: http://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/13/dnssec-ch1/
>You're right. It's unheard of for companies to react to consumer outrage.

A dozen nerds on a message board ranting about JS performance is nothing close to a consumer outrage. More likely Apple has a roadmap and optimizes it based on what effort will help the most users the earliest.
Really good talk. I'm curious if you can expand on how you would optimize for maximum benefit of an exact match domain. It's a singular event obviously, so do you need to lead up to it with relevant content or will it just sell itself because people are already searching for it? Are there ways to get a multiplicative effect out of it, say use it to boost other products? Also, how do you keep taking advantage of it even after the event passes?
>but our conversations with the developers of the drivers in question make us confident that they’re as committed as us and Microsoft to a robust and secure experience for our shared users

ATI and NVidia have never cared about driver stability (or anything other than benchmark performance), and now we're supposed to believe that they will start caring about security?
> It's our own government trying to create the illusion of a new terrorist threat, a new excuse for laws to control the internet (a-la Sarkozy).
CEO Flights Tip Off Investors on Mergers
I think this is the most convincing argument for Google buying Ubuntu
1000 points really? This is on par with initial tsunamii news.
Are things really at a state where 35k is considered an impressive salary for a journalist in the US? I know programmers are spoiled, but I was kind of shocked at the implication that that was thought of as big bucks. Sad.
I'm surprised not to see D. E. Shaw here. Unlike, say, Bain, which actually needs to hire people, D. E. Shaw seems to hire about three people a year but actively collect thousands of CVs just so they can brag about how many people they reject.
First hire is still pretty cool :-)
Sorry, it was besides the point, not missing the point though.
Many of these deals may have special terms as well. At a minimum VCs will get 1x and at times 2x or 3x of the first money made. That way, VCs can protect their downside while investing in some of the companies that have the biggest potential.

That being said, these valuations are still quite high.
Something to consider before going the SSD route: failure rates are high right now.

The Intel X-25 series seem to be doing OK, but the Vertex2 and Vertex3 (brand new SandForce 2k-based drives) have really terrible failure rates. I've heard mixed things about the Crucial drives.

I am sure you guys have read Jeff Atwood's post[1] about how every SSD they've put into machines in the last year has failed. I shared that around with a group of friends scattered around Chicago and the bay area - the friend in Chicago has a company with 30 employees. They have put SSDs in 12 of the developer machines, by the end of the year 10 had failed (Vertex2 drives).

I think SSDs have a lot to offer, the performance is there for the right use-cases (which is almost every disk I/O scenario save for a few), but for a lot of folks the idea of having drives fail regularly is a suicide-inducing though (current company included).

I'm sitting on my hands for an SSD not because I don't think they are awesome, too expensive or not big enough... I'm waiting because the failure rate seems to be painfully high in these things. I want some more time in the oven before I start sticking them in my work machines.

There also seem to be other non-failure related issues as seen with the Vertex3 launch that everyone jumped on; Lookup "Windows BSOD Vertex3"[2] for a long list of issues. At least enough to make you take pause in buying one.

I have a 11 year old Fujitsu drive that is still running, an 8 year old Seagate 15k SCSI drive that is still chugging and the two SATA's in my desktop now are both 3 years old (no RAID)... I expect 5 years out of a drive at this point, turning the speed up to 11 at the expense of digging back into my workstations or servers to replace busted drives and rebuild RAID arrays... uggggg... at least for me that sounds super painful.

The only SSDs I would consider at this point if for some reason I had to get one are the Intel series, namely the 500 series. The X-25's (as mentioned) are still going strong with low failure rates and there is nothing to suggest the newer releases are any different. I'd rather see some 5-year results from those things before pulling the trigger though, which is why I haven't yet. I also haven't needed the insane speed.

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid...

[2] http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
Agree, partnerships can help them compete. But, the problem is that whoever has a good ecosystem is trying to go for the bigger pie. Amazon is building its own Android ecosystem - has an app store and will most probably come up with a tablet. HTC has its own movie and music services on its Sense devices. Even if a partnership happens, I am not sure it will be enough of an attraction for consumers to leave the iOS platform.
If we ever encounter aliens more intelligent than ourselves, let us hope that we were able to show them that we knew how to treat other intelligent species with whom we cohabit Planet Earth. Otherwise, for the sake of avoiding hypocrisy, you should be OK finding yourself chopped up on a platter, or, enslaved in a zoo to be gawked at.

Remember the Golden Rule, and Uncle Ben's words:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Uncle_Ben#.22...
LG Flip II Android phone with Dual Screens
The new LG Flip II Android phone has dual screens and a physical keyboard, with one of two screens in the middle of the keyboard.
Kinda neat. But I was always more intrigued by the Monte Carlo approximation for thinking about pi. http://www.eveandersson.com/pi/monte-carlo-demo. Although it does take alot of iterations to converge to a decent estimate of pi.
DNS is distributed, so I think you meant to say decentralised?

But I'm baffled as to why anybody would want to use it? For it to become useful we'd need to go to the extraordinary lengths of replacing substantial infrastructure, at a very great cost - to replace proven technology that scales extremely well?

And it wouldn't surprise me if Harold Camping was mining Bitcoins on the church computer. The end is nigh!
Yep, I've played around with tons of approaches to this problem : your solution is where I started. It's probably totally ok, but there was something about it that just didn't sit right with me.

In eyeballs.js, for examples, I explored doing all of the binding via the html elements themselves, eg:

<a href="#" data-bind="posts#new">New Post</a>

which would map to a pre-defined posts controller new action.

whenever.js is just another exploration along the same theme. Again, I'm not arguing that it's better or worse: just my motivations for making it.