skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The main idea of the non-compete agreement is that employers want to stop people from walking off the job and taking trade secrets to rival companies. If companies weren’t able to secure those protections, they’d need to pay lower salaries, and we’d all be worse off.

Anyone else confused by this statement? How do you make the leap from non-competes to higher salaries, or conversely, that a ban on non-competes would result in lower salaries?

I mean I think I can see the author's intent (that the company would need to divert funds from wages to somewhere else to protect their IP), but it seems like the rest of the article disagrees; namely, linking the Californian ban on NCAs to the innovative success in that state (and high salaries) would suggest that banning NCAs might foster higher wages. Intuitively, it feels like, in absence of a non-compete, a higher salary is the biggest deterrent to losing trade-secrets to other companies via poaching.
Just designing on their node as a foundry customer.
In the UK, there's Unfair Contracts.The US is the same, I would imagine. Here's what
https://www.lawdepot.co.uk/contracts/non-compete-agreement/
says:
"Employers can create a Non-Compete Agreement for as long as they wish. Having said that, if a Non-Compete Agreement limits a former employee for too long, it’s unlikely that a court will enforce the document.

Judges will likely consider a period of six months to a year to be a reasonable amount of time. The time period you choose should reasonably protect your company and make sense in your industry. As a result, there isn’t a standard time period for a Non-Compete Agreement."

So, tricky, but anything longer than a year is likely to be deemed unreasonable. There may be exceptions, such as when a business owner sells a business, and the sale contains a non-compete. In that case, a non-compete is likely to hold up.

The article goes on:
"Courts may not enforce a non-compete clause in the UK if:

* The effect could be harmful to the public (if it restricts commerce and depresses the local economy)
* The scope is broader than necessary to protect the employer
* The restriction would cause undue hardship on the employee (too difficult for the employee to find a new job)
* The agreement has unreasonable time or geographic restrictions"

In late 2020, the UK gov't sought feedback on "Measures to reform post-termination non-compete clauses in contracts of employment " here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/measures-to-refo...
The outcome has not yet been published.

"The purpose of the consultation is to seek views on:

* proposals to make non-compete clauses enforceable only when the employer provides compensation during the term of the clause, and whether this could be complemented by additional transparency measures and statutory limits on the length of non-compete clauses

* an alternative proposal to make post-termination, non-compete clauses in contracts of employment unenforceable"

This seems to be heading in the right direction. I am against non-competes in general.
My app, hookrelay.dev, has transformations today. :)
> “You can’t change. Not really.

Well, you can though. Let me tell you a different thing that it signals.

It signals, that if you hold a harmful ideology, that not only should you change to it, but that you should be ashamed enough that you will never admit that you even held these ideas in the past.

It is not that hard, for most people (emphasis on most. If you run for senate, or something, it is a different story), to simply lie and say that they never held these opinions in the past.

Incentivizing people who believe these things, to vehemently deny they every held them, doesn't sound too bad of an outcome to me.
> There has been bad weather before humans walked this planet according to scientists, and dry vegetation also.

Oh sure, but climate change deniers also like to say temperature changes have existed since the dawn of time (while conveniently ignoring magnitude[0]).

The thing is forest management people have been warning about increasing risks of large fires for years and fires have been consistently getting bigger and worse (just off the top of my head, there was big basin last year, lytton, yakutia, dozens of others, and now this). There's literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies showing correlation between our polluting ways and ice cap melting and correlation between that and extreme weather events.

Besides, climate change is a symptom of a larger problem. Depletion of water sources for example is also related to dryness and is also a byproduct of human activities. I think it's shortsighted to say "onoes climate change, throw carbon offsets at it, problem solved!" just as it is to say "onoes forest fires, do better forest management, problem solved!"

Solving eco problems is going to require a lot more than cherrypicking and addressing only darling themes. Ignoring whichever factor you don't understand the underlying data for is pretty much the same as inaction where there should be action.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1732/
He is a fucking devrel - how much "leadership" can he have?

Fucking posers.
Exactly. But I fear that 1280x800 won’t look great upscaled on my 1440p.

That said for playing 2d or lighter indie games it will probably run fine at native 1440p... assuming with external display that you can use native res.
Especially in Chicago where an astounding number of murders go unsolved, most of which are gang related.

While higher for whites,
for African American victims, The close rate was near 20%, something most Americans may associate with Guatemala or Mexico - https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/10/09/768552458/chicago-s...

Based on arrest histories of gang members and failures to prosecute even closed cases, one should assume that there are a large number of serial killers operating in Chicago, many of who started as minors.

While most middle and upper class Americans dismiss this as just gang members killing each other, so it’s no big deal, this clearly would not be tolerated in a largely white suburban setting, gang associated or otherwise.
Hydrogen has lost and it's not coming back. Every home and business in America has power lines. Making hydrogen work would either involve new pipelines to homes (a MASSIVE undertaking) or replacing gas stations with hydrogen fill-up stations, which again needs either new pipelines or a fleet of new hydrogen carrying trucks. That infrastructure hurdle is huge compared to electric cars -- everyone has a plug at home, and adding chargers to places like gas stations is not some hard thing.
I fully expected to read his post and dismiss it with the idea that as a leader your first job is to make your employees comfortable and feel safe and respected.

But it’s a genuine, good post. There are so many better ways for Google to have handled this than to just fire like they’ve done with AI researchers before.

The relevant comic is: https://goomics.net/327/
Overreach and needless brutality are par for the course. Bad apples and countless years of zero independent accountability has unfortunately spoiled the bunch.

> If your kids stay out of trouble, they won't be interacting much with them.

Unless they're black, statistically. Then they're being pulled aside or pulled over at night and put into these interactions for just existing. You can't teach your kids to just "stay out" of their skin color, they can't just "stay out" of a system of institutionalized racism.
>The Biden administration is working with technology companies to flag users and posts for removal.

Is the spreading of misinformation "free speech". I agree people have the right to have different opinions, but when those opinion have been proven to be false, do you give up the right to spread it? A bit of a slippery slope.

>Journalists and whistleblowers are being censored, monitored and even jailed.

Journalists have been censored for the past 200 years. I see it getting better under the Biden admin, not worse. Whistleblowers were a particular problem for the Trump admin, not so much Biden admin.

>Our biggest newspapers cannot report on majority held beliefs and perspectives without retribution from activists. Our institutions are referring to books they don't like as "violence."

Any proof on this?

Last one is just crazy.
Visualizing All the Vacant Office Space in San Francisco
You, xrd, are a fucking loser.
>>"I have no clue what I’m talking about. "

Nobody told me we have to specify that! I thought that was the default and we only have to say when we are experts in something!

Now I have to delete all my posts.
Needing to trade resources for other resources is inherently hostile toward people with fewer resources. Even so, we can all acknowledge that the intent of such a system is to create a fair and prosperous society.
Honestly, I had no idea that was the case, but it explains a lot, so thanks.
Just started book 3, I'm clearly being Baader-Meinhoff'd. I think the basic logic of preemptive first strikes being the universally safest response is sound, assuming the current trend continues that a species' offensive capabilities will grow faster than its defensive capabilities as it improves its mastery of physics. Even if in the short term, some civilizations are inherently friendly and some are inherently hostile, in the long term the chances of any randomly selected civilization being hostile approaches unity due to survivor bias.

It's pretty similar to one of my favourite quotes, from Peter Watts:

> Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.

(I'm admittedly finding a lot of the other plot points of the series, especially around how people respond to adversity, less convincing though.)
Here's one that isn't about the insulin itself, but is about diabetes.

Some diabetics use a "continuous glucose monitor" to read their blood glucose levels regularly. The information to that device is fed into an app on your phone (for newer devices) that visualizes the data for you.

It doesn't just visualize though, it can also give you alerts. This is an incredibly useful feature! Unfortunately, at least in the ones I have experience with, the metrics they give you to be able to alert on are not good enough. For example, you'd think that "give me an alert when I go below x value" is a useful alert, and it is. However, the app I use only lets me set two alerts: a "low" alert, with the values 100 to 60, and an "urgent low" with the values 55-40. (both are in increments of 5.) That is useful, but what if I want three alerts? What if I want a non-5 value? Sure, you can argue that this isn't necessary, but if it were open source, I would be able to build something to do exactly what I want.

Okay, so that's the first issue here. But here's the real issue: the absolute value is useful, but what's more useful is the rate of change. What I truly want to be able to do is set an alert that says "hey if this suddenly drops 10 points, give me a high priority alert" no matter the absolute value. There have been situations where I've seen a sudden downturn from ~180, dropping by 15 each time, and you don't even know until it crosses that 100 threshold. Likewise, I've seen alerts about it going low because it went from 101 to 100. One of those is very serious, and one of those is irrelevant.

This stuff would significantly increase quality of life. And it's one tiny part of this whole picture of this one condition.
Ke2
Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens?
Progress in the long run may seem inevitable, but certainty of victory can be dangerous in the short to medium term. Whig history ignores the possibility of setbacks. Progressive democracies have fallen to authoritarian dictatorships in the past, and there will likely be more examples in the future. Hubris is not your friend.
I shouldn't but... Ke2

Edit: So now that I've looked at TFA, this is a neat idea, but I'm not sold on the format. Is the idea to just say "I'll be at location X at Y:00 with my board, see you there!" and hope someone (or more than one) show up? Sort of a pop-up chess match? Otherwise I fear these topics will just become crowded with negotiations on parter, place, and time.

OTB chess is just more satisfying than online. Sometimes I'll follow an online correspondence game on my board, rather than staring at the screen doing analysis.

Edit 2: what if lichess added an OTB mode? Pairs people up based primarily on location (probably with just the option "here is you opponent and their rating, accept?"), gives them a chat room to decide on a place and time, then has them report the result. Some issues like how to deal with disputes, but I think most people willing to go through the work of playing OTB would be generally honest. Maybe have them submit a photo of the final board?
Another added benefit is that you can build a simple interface to allow end users to adjust their sequences (or our support staff in this instance).

In our system, by default, all objects start at 1000. If a new account is created, and they want to increase a sequence to some value (say they already have 5000 invoices in QuickBooks and they want to start all new invoices at 10000 so they know every invoice #IN10000 and higher was created in our system), we have a simple interface that one of our support staff can go to arbitrarily increase the next value.
What is the power generation or storage on Hubble?
I, Adolf Hitler, apologize for gassing millions of Jews. Please save me, Jesus Christ.
This being an issue seems weird. Surely your employment contract could include an extremely permissive license grant to your employer for any code you've written that you use at work, regardless of whether you own it or they do. That's much less intrusive than a noncompete.
Regarding vertical farms in cities. You generally need about 1 acre of farm land per (American) person per year. A vertical farm can squeeze about 5 acres of horizontal farm land into one acre of vertical farm land. If NYC (proper) has 8.4M residents, then you need about 1.7M acres of vertical farms. For reference, NYC (proper) is about 200K acres right now. (The NYC metro area has 20M residents over 8.5M acres.) It's doable, but it will require an enormous expenditure in infrastructure, so good luck.

Water shortage is totally an issue in the American West. When you build a development you need to prove that there is enough water for your development for the next 100 years before the city will authorize you for tap. This is becoming a real challenge for developers in Phoenix and other areas.

Climate change is already effecting where people live, and it will likely get worse. Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there.

The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
This makes sense to me. I feel we're in a small room peeking through a tiny hole in the wall and asking why the outside world is so empty.
I'll take that combo. Quit on the first day, live on Bali for 2 years.
I'd love to see the extension in Safari as well, not just Chrome and Firefox. Great work.

Edit: Also, the create password page has a bug where once you set your password, it then leaves the name/email/password/confirm fields blank instead of redirecting you to login. Could confuse a small number of users.
There was a fired CEO recently that hackernews was up in arms over because he came out and said that he was fired for microdosing. A couple of days later it came out that he was talking to the press for months without an okay from the board. The first story is never the real story.
> … "either paying through the nose for Comcast's mediocre cable or being stuck with DSL, and that was in 2019."

Still a problem in many places in the USA in 2021.
Not really. Intel tries to push the thermal envelop as much as it can for as long as it can. While the CPU is rated at 45W, TB actually pushes it to 70W+ for short intervals.

On Windows, instead of disabling TB, I just limit the CPU TDP at 40W via throttle-stop.

TB just makes the laptop loud and hot even when the added performance is not required.
You must be one of the blue check-mark piece of shit liberals from San Francisco that aid/abet cancel culture.

GO FUCK YOURSELF!
This isn't a good pitch for getting me to read the book. Seems like too much psychology being applied where it's not warranted, possibly leading to misunderstandings of sitcom proportions.

I knew someone who couldn't smoke weed because any time she did, everything seemed loaded with intent and backstory that seemed all too true.

Communication doesn't happen in a vacuum. I hope the book at least acknowledges that metacommunication received is subjective to the receiver.
> if you work at a company like that (faang, basically) you probably have a choice of working elsewhere

Heh. I advise early career students from my alma mater. One of them took a job with a mom-and-pop web dev + IT firm. Super mom and pop. Like, maintaining word press and similar installs for maybe a few hundred clients and then bundling that with generic IT services (computer repair, maintenance, blah blah blah). Basically, as boring as you could possibly get.

That employer told my advisee that because the company develops software, their non-compete covers all software.

Are they correctly interpreting state law? Absolutely not. Does that matter to a 2x-year-old making 80K worried about losing their job, being sued, being blackballed in their small regional labor market (which they don't want to leave for family reasons)? Also no.

> 2 - every such agreement I have signed has had a “carve out” clause: you can list things you’ve been working on (which is vague, I have listed areas I’m interested in and have looked into and counted that as ”work”) and exclude the stuff listed there from the agreement.

Wait, are you sure that list works how you think it does?

The vast majority of employers won't even talk to you about the scope of their non-compete.

At the outset, you are supposed to white-list things when you start employment. But then anything non on that white-list (which includes every idea you have after the moment you fill it out!!!) has to be assumed to be covered under the NDA, unless you're willing to risk a court battle and an enemy.
Honestly I think that just requiring that NCAs be financially compensated like that would be enough to prevent them from being a problem.
As a mostly introvert I can say that I lose energy from interacting with a group, and gain it back when I can be alone. But at the same time being social relieves stress. So it's a push/pull.

I actually really like most people. But I like them one on one when I can have a real conversation. I hate party chit chat because I'm terrible at it.

I have a couple friends whom I'd call extreme extroverts. One big difference between them and me is if they try to initiate talking to a stranger (at say a bar or some other reasonable location) and get rebuffed or otherwise have a bad experience, they instantly forgot about it and move on - whereas I'm still thinking about it years later.

So yeah maybe introversion is just social anxiety.
I don't think him claiming he's keeps getting misunderstood is necessarily an indictment of him. Sometimes the misunderstanding comes from readers having a particular mindset, so they see everything through the lense of their preconceptions, which might not match up with what the author was thinking.
There's a difference in competition and compensation between a craftsman who constructs products and an inventor who generates ideas. The problem is that the world is not black and white, there's a little of each in every career, and obviously companies want the best of both.

If you were a carpenter who worked in an old-time furniture store, turning chair legs on a duplicating lathe at work and turning toy spinning tops on a treadle lathe at home, there's no harm to your employer if you use some related skills at home. If you're not making parts that match their requirements, those parts are of no value to them. The company might as well pay you per unit, rather than hourly or as a salary.

If you worked at a think tank or research institution, your job might be to generate one particularly brilliant concept that was by itself worth your annual salary. You might spend your days testing ideas and improving your understanding of the problem domain while your subconscious mulls over everything at night. A musician is an interesting career in context - are they paid to move samples around in Pro Tools or think about and try a huge variety of riffs until they find the next Top 40 sound? If you had a great idea in your sleep, it was probably because you've taken a paycheck for the last 6 months at work generating no useful output, the only thing you built was the thought patterns in your brain. The company wants to own your brain, the thought patterns therein, and everything you think of.

Technology and automation is making ideas more scalable all the time, the industrial era where workers were paid to pull a lever repeatedly is in the past. I think we're only seeing the beginning of non-competes.
Yeah, this is the conservative pro-paying-people-less-money talking point, and I don't see the connection to Amazon, but which union do I have to blame for terrible customer service at Google? At least at the DMV someone will talk to me, even if it's slow sometime...
Counterfeit wireless earbuds are being seized in record numbers at US border
I love the „A Somewhat Opinionated Discussion“ section. It‘s great how it discusses the „Don‘t roll your own crypto“ mantra.
The lack of adoption of SRV records for web protocols fills me with immense sadness. Having a separate service location layer, as a general design principle, would have made so many things much easier on the Internet (load balancing, failover, multiplexing multiple services on a single IP).
Does this data include false convictions predicated on the same interrogations that are now illegal?
I think dark forest is the best explanation so far.

If what you say is true, it should've been true for earlier human civilizations too.

Why didn't the Chinese and Japanese civilizations unite to conquer others?

Why didn't the Mongols unite with whoever else to conquer, instead of Genghis Khan doing it all with a bunch of Mongols in horses?

Human civilization is a dark forest that only changed with global trade. The communication challenge is language and culture. And civilizations have always been technologically distinct, with the more powerful one almost always conquering.

With interstellar communication and technological advance it would be orders of magnitude higher stakes.
I've never had one in LA, MA, or NH except for one time when EMC (who was one of the big players who resisted the non-compete changes that MA finally put in place) acquired the company I was at. The non-compete was reasonably narrow in scope--couldn't take a senior exec position at a storage vendor--but they were also very clear this wasn't negotiable.

But I've certainly been aware of non-compete enforcement by the big companies in a certain category of consultants that basically meant anyone leaving couldn't do the same type of job anywhere for a couple years. My point though is that it's hardly universal even if not rare.
Link to the actual manifesto: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-one-amr-awadallah/

This makes it a little clearer why Google parted ways with him.