skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone who works at Google signs the "Employee Agreement" which includes, among other things, a blanket NDA. The other parts that it includes are you transfer to Google all rights and ownership in anything you work on while you are employed at Google (during work time or not, on Google supplied equipment or not). And while there is a specific California exemption (since California has wording in its labor law that forbids this sort of blanket grab) there is wording around that exemption even in the agreement which, according to some opinions, attempts to have you give up that protection as well.

I had a dispute with them about it, I talked to a lawyer and his advice was pretty simple. He suggested that yes, you could probably litigate it and get your rights back in California, but if you were litigating against the company you were working for, you rarely continued to work for them, so in my case (since I had not yet started on my project) his advice was to quit and then work on it which would make things much clearer for everyone.

In Paul's case if he had written permission to publish and then they verbally revoked that permission (which was what he said as I recall), he could probably litigate it successfully. But cost of lawyer vs the expected royalties on an technical book? I think publishing a new book is a better choice.
built with Processing?! nice, very nice
ruby? just like any language you just have to understand op precedence..
Show HN: HomeyPlanet - Travel Social-Network (online for Europe, since June)
According to Cosette Rae, the executive director of reSTART, the first clinic in the United States dedicated to treating internet addiction, cases related to Twitter are on the rise.

I just tweeted a 140 character version of that. Irony? :)
What is "An Open Platform?" - db79
You use the word "Lean" about 4 times on the page. Spell check! ;)
Not just SmartPhones. This kind of insanity makes me question whether I should write another line of code for anything.
Picomath: self-contained math functions in 11 languages
Kaspersky: I Fear the Net Will Soon Become a War Zone
Ha ha, that was in the template I bought from ThemeForest... I should have noticed. :( Fixed.
Do it man, JavaScript has gotten a lot better.
It happens to the best of us. One good thing about rock bottom, there is usually nowhere else to go but up.

And other times, just when you think you can't get any lower, you are hit with a truck.

Unfortunately, I have gone through at least 3 (depending on how you count) of these rock bottoms. Although it was unimaginable at the time, I am a stronger/better person for these experiences.

Funny thing about humans, we always dream. It is important to go after these dreams, but also equally important to realize that we can fall down at any time. Unfortunately, sometimes you just lose control. It is how you get up that matters.
Google Ventures pushed iOS over Android
How a sixteen year fight finally righted a grievous military injustice
I understand that its really "Facebook for Every (non iOS, Win7, Android, etc.) Phone" but doesn't the name sort of imply that its the same app that can be downloaded for every phone? (I know sort of a nit-picky comment)
I guess homeland security should be called in every time someone feels terrified.
How to make Apple Text Effect
But why still no native app for the iPad :-(
I skimmed this article, but it really deserves a nice bowl of cereal and a comfy chair to go with it. This looks like serious fun. More like this please!
Commenting on an aggregator to a link to an aggregator with a link. Feels like Inception. Someone should post this on digg and go to the 3rd level.
How about Redbox?
Agree for the most part with this list. I think another important thing is to find people that aren't so fixed on their title.

When I was in 7th grade, I worked for an insurance company doing computer consultation, and all too often I saw this unfortunate mentality that someone didn't want to do something because it wasn't in their job description. I never had a problem doing even the most mundane of things (and naturally, finding a way to make them a bit more fun!) because I knew that these things were for the betterment of the company as a whole.

When I look for valuable people today, this is a huge thing for me. I saw a developer's profile just last night and took note because he had mentioned how he would willingly offer himself up to do some of the mundane things so that it would free up other talent. Ultimately, this shows great humility and makes it clear that one has the company's best interests in mind, not just his or her own.

Edit: To be clear, I don't mind that one should always be doing the mundane things, I want developers or any employee to have fun and do what they're best at, but they should be willing (and hopefully even excited) to take on any role in the company that can help.
"The same thing could happen with Google+. An app could come along that would bring sense to its UI/UX"

I'm not sure what this means. Google+ launched with an Android app that, to me anyway, has strong functionality, carries the same design as the website, and like the website, makes sense.

Is the author saying that:

1) They don't like the Google+ UI/UX and want a different design that would in their opinion "bring sense to it". This would be a small minority opinion, judging by the favourable reviews.

2) They pay no attention to android apps, and so haven't seen this app. Is it on iPhone?
There's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.
34% Of iPhone 4 Users Think They Already Have 4G
Anyone interested in building this with me?
I'm a intermediate Rails developer but pretty good at design and front-end stuff..
Unfortunately, I must confess this strikes me as being of questionable utility (for me). I guess I'll see how it goes after I enter a few more thoughts, and get some back.

Interface issue (in Opera): There's no key to just submit the thought. None of these work: Enter; Shift-Enter; Alt-Enter; Ctrl-Enter. As a workaround, though, I see that you can use Tab, Enter. [edit] I just set up the thoughtback submission box as a custom search engine in Opera. So now I can enter thoughts from the address bar (and press Enter at the end).

I realize that it would just make things like Twitter, but I was interested to see other people's thoughts, and found no interface for that. Perhaps you could experiment with letting people tag some thoughts #public or such, or have a checkbox under the submission field.
"why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important"

I'm sorry, but having regularly been in a situation where I'm trying to get sign-off on large tech project the first question is "what is the support package like" and the question never asked because caring about that kind of thing is below their pay grade is "but is this software free and open?"
One of the first things I put on any new flash drive: http://code.google.com/p/portaputty/ (Portable version of putty)
The only difference between Lodsys and large software/hardware companies like Microsoft and Oracle is the size of their litigation targets.

I'm beyond convinced that the entire software patent systems needs to be abolished.
Libvirt is not needed to use KVM but the purpose has been to provide stability (and an abstraction as you mentioned) over the changes QEMU has had in various releases.

Update: Here's a blog related to your very question that was written just a few days ago:
http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libv...
To be fair, the metric for benchmarking is delivered/recorded luminosity. The machine delivers, and the detector records. It is this efficiency that funding agencies are shown in the periodic reports.

Strictly speaking, (down)time can be "irrelevant", in the sense, that with higher luminosity you get more data (LHC can catchup on Tevatron easy). You can have 5 nine uptime, with 1 bunch circulating, or lots of bunches of particles (the beam is not continuous, it comes in trains of particles). So one thing is, that you also go for as many bunches as possible...

But the periodical reports are on cdsweb, because of the public funding agencies ie. for the machine itself, setting an upper boundary: "Downtime statistics over the 2010 run" -- Chamonix 2011 Workshop on LHC Performance, Chamonix, France, 24 - 28 Jan 2011, pp.70-74.
Then the DAQ of your experiment of choice comes on top of this...
I think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt.

They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this game too..
Location Privacy: What ypu need to know
Location-based services exploit location information to provide a variety of fancy applications. While amount of attractive quality of life enhancing applications are presented by location-based services, new threats are also brought in. Among these threats, perhaps the most important one is the intrusion of location privacy.
I'd prefer they fixed the Android app
Zuckerberg Quits Google+ Over Privacy Concerns
On my 2011 15" MBP i7, I think I'm actually seeing less battery life on integrated than discrete. Anyone else seeing the same behavior?
Einstein, Insanity, Nuclear Meltdowns and Tokyo Electric Power Company
This will probably be huge in developing countries.
Without ads, Facebook would not be able to pay for the investments in various features like messages, video chat, etc. Plus, the goal is to create more relevant, social ads. Nobody is there yet, but that's the goal. The goal isn't to get people to click on those ads more per se, but to get people to derive more value from them (viewer value + advertiser value), a fraction of which the website can capture.

Disclaimer: I was an intern on FB's ads team last summer. I truly believed my work and those of my colleagues were very important. We wanted to reinvent advertising the "Facebook way".
It seems companies (large or small) are all afraid that someone may take their once 'decent' idea, perfect it and make a better product. Can you imagine the anarchy that would ensue if companies were forced to be innovative? They'd run the risk of losing customers who are frustrated with their stale solutions/products. We just can't have that. Ludicrous, this idea you suggest!
I have this in Linux with a dozen lines of scripting or so. An outbound connection get made (via port 443) to a known host, over which I run a SOCKS proxy for future connections (not just ssh, it's my session proxy for everything). Check docs on ProxyCommand and the -D argument. Not sure this is really something that rises to the level of "must have GUI feature" ...
Language of the Month: Gosu
It's easy to bash IDEs for their coddling effect, and there are some legitimate arguments against them.

But looking up documentation is precisely one of the things that IDEs are much better at then text editors. Hover over some code and up pops the documentation. Plus you can usually navigate directly to the actual source.

Another example is "includes/requires/imports/pick your language". Typing those in manually is simply busy work that distracts from the task at hand.

Your other comment is also a strawman:
"As soon as you encounter a primitive that the IDE doesn't handle on your behalf, you're lost."
It could easily be replaced with:
"As soon as you encounter a primitive that you don't know how to enter in your text editor, you're lost."

Don't get me wrong. I agree that some aspects of IDEs, especially "Wizards", have a significant negative impact on developer understanding. But they also have powerful positive impacts as well that we shouldn't dismiss so easily.
Sam, creator of Prototype.js: "I hope to never have to write JavaScript again."
Ok, this is awesome.
Thank you. Like others, I believe Google keeps its infrastructure secret because that is a competitive advantage. Their infrastructure is their business. It makes sense for Facebook to openly publish its datacenter design because that's not what Facebook is about: they could be running from AWS for all we care -- the social graph is kept very much closed, however. Opensourcing seems to be the radical approach to commoditizing complements.

But I would love if Google opened up about that, anyway. I am an avid reader of their service failure post-mortems because they reveal a tiny bit of what goes on inside their data centers. And because the way Google stuff fails is admirably beautiful.
"Why is it that Google products always seem to come out with a bang, only to be forgotten and thrown out weeks later?"

Yeah, Search, GMail, Reader, Calendar, PicasaWeb, Groups, Books... How quickly they all died! /sarcasm

What you're actually seeing is a company that is massively innovating. They throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks. Wave and Buzz didn't really stick, along with a host of other services that don't exist any more, or didn't even make it out the labs.
Google+ and the four card problem
Who leads the Java parade?
BBC saying "The blasts coincide with the birthday of Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks which killed nearly 170 people".
Evernote Gets $50 Million in Funding
Blogger Sues To See If Government Kept a File on Him
Which seems much more awesome.
4 Entrepreneurial Cities To Keep Your Eye On
I have been wanting to build this for 5+ years as well, exactly as described: find clothing-item overlaps between what I say fits and what others say fits -- the items we don't share can be thus recommended. Who cares about the actual numbers? If I love 32-32 in Levis STF 501s, and 33-32 in Banana Republic Gavins... and you are likewise 33-32 in BR Gavins, chances are great that 32-32 in Levis STF 501s will be a win.

But major problems: clothing even within brand-lines changes regularly. Annual or semi-annual updates. Manufacturer changes. I have found size changes within colors even (BR boot cut chinos in khaki versus brown; major differences). And then identifying the clothes in the first place. We going to be scanning bar codes?

Also getting support from the retailers -- both on sharing data and collecting it (they have much better chance of getting data from customers -- attach the web address to the clothes tag). But this will compel more online purchases and reduce return-churn, so they have an incentive to participate and monetize this.
I adore this idea. This product feels like it could be the modern day memorabilia, like records for some of the classic bands have been for some time now.

I can certainly see someone auctioning off their button, with few having been in production, for some huge artist, charity benefit, or something of that sort. You can't really do that with an MP3.
RIM's Seven New Blackberries Are Only a Distraction
Google+ Is Not The Underdog, It’s The New Internet Explorer
Show HN: My weekend project: Scrollendar (for iOS)
I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional
wisdom that developers are what makes and breaks a platform.
Developers do what Deep Throat suggests: they follow the money.

Sure a large body of developers follow the money, but a fantastic minority go and develop compensation-less bits of software such as Linux, Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rails, Django, MySQL, Postgresql, Redis, NodeJS, etc. (Of course, as the projects mature and get noticed, money will appear and developers will flock to these platforms, too; and, of course, public recognition is a currency, too) Devs are not a homogeneous bunch and, unlike other groups, they can significantly affect the trajectory of a platform. See: Lego Mindstorms.

This is not to say that developers are magical and that users, marketers, etc are not needed.

It was naive to go into building on someone else's platform any other
way (yet many did seem to believe that Twitter was somehow "different").

Also apparently naive: Zynga, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, PopCap, etc.
Google Circles - Show All (Except Ones I Don't Want)
Google Circles needs to allow users to select the circles in the feed that they want to see.

For example, I have the following circles:

News
Friends
Work
Family

I only want to see the 'News' Circle when I ask for it.

I want to see some checkbox along the side of the list that allows me to select the given ones that I want to see at any given time.

Most of the time this would be:

Friends
Work
Family

My 2 cents.
I hate using the extra video card power when I don't need to. For video games, video processing, etc it is necessary to turn it on and then turn it off when those aren't being used. Unfortunately without this utility it requires that you log out of your account to do so, wich inevitably means you need to close all applications running. This fixes that. Unfortunately some things don't always switch over so gracefully (I'm on v1.8.1), but usually restarting those specific apps clears it up.
Very cool and very well done, but on Opera for some reason the HN background starts cycling through various colors.

Now would also be a good time to mention HN's IRC channel, which is #startups on irc.freenode.net ( http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=startups ).
Facebook Quizzed by Nordic Privacy Agencies on Data Collection
Its J2ME midlet, and well written I must add

Very nice effort
Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some feedback on my second iOS app, Scrollendar. My first app, LessonLog, is pretty niche (teachers with iPhones), so Scrollendar is my first app that I feel has a chance at any kind of popularity.

Some background: I finished Scrollendar v1 and got it on the App Store last May. The first version only took about a week to build, and although I was fairly happy with it, it had some rough edges. Having an engineering background, I figured I'd leave the marketing until after I submitted a few updates and got things a little more polished.

However, I made two assumptions that (unsurprisingly) turned out to be false:

1. I greatly underestimated the amount of time needed to fix the rough edges and be really happy with the final product. I ended up adding the scrolling day view, which ended up being a lot of work, then I rewrote the entire backend due to deficiencies in NSDate and EventKit. What I figured would take a couple weeks took over a month.

2. I greatly overestimated the amount of people that would find Scrollendar without any marketing. I wasn't expecting many people to find it through organic App Store searches, but I figured at least one or two people would stumble on it each day. What actually happened is after an initial spike of six whole downloads the first day, the daily downloads quickly dropped to zero. I haven't had a single purchase in the last 30 days. This is even less than my niche teaching app LessonLog.

So I'm hoping to get some feedback on the app and the website (scrollendar.com). I'd also love any tips for a first time mobile app marketer. I've poured over every HN post that has anything to do with online marketing, and most of it comes down to:
- have a viral component to the app (not really applicable to Scrollendar)
- build a following online with a well written blog and great social media posts (I have neither right now)
- build a great website with lots of useful content (like bingo cards) to drive search traffic (again, not really applicable)

So basically, my online marketing plan boils down to: e-mail mobile app review sites. Is this sufficient? What else can someone in my position do?

Thanks in advance!
Scott
Oracle is just as bad, in it's way, with respect to licensing.
I think you just want to see an MBA in a monkey suit :)
I was a quant hedge fund trader for 11 years. Ask me anything.
This is totally correct, and needs to be thought about in any platform play. Users provide for the upper-bound in the cycle. Developers push the cycle to its next iteration. Money is the grease. Without all of them, the cycle doesn't flow and the platform reaches its maximum potential. Each successive iteration requires more effort, which means many more users spending more money on more developers output.
Zuckerberg Freaks Out About Google+ Privacy, Changes Settings
I have to say that's a mouthful for anyone to learn when all they want to do is get a form up and running. I think it sets up a barrier to getting something going for a rank beginner.

My personal suggestion is to go with Python on google app engine. Use a simple text editor. The implementation is simple and has slightly less "magic" going on than Ruby on Rails. Once you've got it running in GAE, you'll have a better understanding of the request/response cycle and an appreciation of getting variables from forms manually. Then do the same project in Rails (or Django if you prefer Python). Once you understand the manual approach of dealing with forms, you will have an appreciation of what's going on behind the scenes when Rails magically does some processing for you.

After that you can iterate again and add to your skills learning about SASS, HAML, finding the "perfect" IDE etc.

Start as simply as possible, learn a little about what is going on behind the scenes, then grab tools that help you automate the boring bits.

In fact, if you didn't already know some Python and Ruby on Rails, I would suggest just hacking out some nasty PHP to get up and running (simply because it is so widely supported and saves a lot of deployment hassle when you just want to get the thing working)
This makes me want to dig out an old phone just to try. I'm not not even that into Facebook, but find this really impressive.
Targeted advertising is probably less nefarious, but neither pursuit is going to cure cancer anytime soon.
This is really good. I hope peope like Lodsys get better a pulling bullshit like this so that more people realize software patents are a terrible idea.
Sometimes, the time you save by buying software - because it has a better UI, or whatever - is well worth paying the money for.
Cant load page?
I hope that was satire. He needs to learn how to write HTML forms by hand, and a script to process the submissions. In that case, Rails MVC + SASS + HAML would be an absolutely abysmal way to learn how to do it.

Python and barebones html form processing would be the place to start.
Anonymous releases Monsanto employees' details
I left a perfectly plausible career, in a field I knew well, to learn enough programming to implement an idea of my own. (I'll recruit a real technical person when I have enough traction to do so.)

This wasn't exactly pioneering, we did have some savings. I would have been better off stripping off still more cruft and going down deeper, but I've got a family and "bottom" wasn't an option.

It's still nuts, as I've heard from many wise and loving people. Those savings could have gone to many other important uses, and I have a duty to make them back. So every day has had an urgent quality, and there have been many sleepless nights. (Come to think of it, what the hell am I doing here on hacker news?)

Not there yet, but things are starting to look up.
SSH-2 window management has also been revised to reduce round trip delays during any large-volume data transfer (including port forwardings as well as SFTP/SCP)

Doing a quick test, I'm seeing that PuTTY 0.61 speeds up SFTP downloads of already compressed data by a factor of 4 compared to PuTTY 0.60. Fantastic!
If you're on Windows, try http://en.poderosa.org/

Their default color scheme (black on white) is something I change right after install, but having tabbing and hefty scroll buffers is nice.
Microsoft ends Windows Vista SP1 support
Faulty software may have led to deaths of senior British intelligence officers