skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IANAL, but odds are that this "agreement" would be ruled as non-enforceable by most reasonable courts in the US.

It's not like the guy was VP of software development. He was an intern. The whole reason he has the job is to presumably transfer the things he learns into various other roles.

http://www.heydary.com/publications/non-competition-agreemen...

Both you guys should completely ignore the non-compete and see if they try to enforce it. That's a lot of money for the loss of an intern. :-)
To refute your statement that the control systems of the ISS aren't windows, there was a story in wired [1] where it talked about Windows problems on the station's on board computers. They linked to the commander's log [2] which mentions the NT problems. Generally infrastructure issues with specific software and such is redacted from this log for national security reasons but this tidbit survived apparently. The speculation from wired was "The network appears to be a mix between IBM AIX (Unix) and Windows NT servers and Russian laptops running an unspecified operating system." which correlates with what folks I know at NASA have hinted at as well.

[1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/04/42912?...

[2] "At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network)." - from http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/exp1shepmarfeb...
Using JQuery Efficiently
Pinterest is so freaking monetizable it's not even funny.
Sony Pictures acquiring movie rights for new Steve Jobs biography
So I'm guessing you never built one of the Radio Shack "build your own radio" kits when you were a kid. They sounded like garbage, but gosh-darnit, you built the thing with your own two hands! Any semblance of a sound coming out of the thing was cause for celebration. I was convinced I deserved a Nobel Prize.

Even though it was totally ridiculous, I was hooked. Hacking is an incredibly rewarding experience for kids and young adults. We should encourage it wherever possible
Show HN: KernType, a typography game made with Raphaël
IV is funded by Google, among others.

"Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft as a private partnership. It lists Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based law firm as co-founders. They reportedly have raised over $5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, SAP, Nvidia and eBay, plus investment firms such as Charles River Ventures. Reported statistics indicate over 30,000 purchased patents and applications[3] and over 2000 internally-developed inventions. Licenses to patents are obtained through investment and royalties.[4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Reference...

You're as sound in your logic as saying that because IV was founded by the author of Modernist Cuisine, it's obvious that the molecular gastronomy movement is responsible for Google's patent troubles.
Discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3082196
"The point that they're missing is that Stallman is effective at what he does precisely because he violates social norms — much like Steve Jobs."

The big different being that Steve Jobs would have made a comment like this. I'm not canonizing Jobs, but this was the worst thing I've heard Stallman say, ever.
40-year low in America's view of Wall Street
Thanks for the feedback. The post wasn't intended to make a subtle distinction with or without the "well" qualifier. To make sure there is no confusion, I edited the post, prepending the well qualifier to each instance of educated. I made no other edits. This way we can consider the points as they are without concern for whether the qualifier is present.
Already submitted by another user, fyi.
Ask HN: What happened to IWantMyName.com? Are they still operating?
I have spent the better part of 3 weeks emailing IWantMyName's tech support. A few weeks ago, I paid $20 to transfer the domain http://andre.me/ from Sedo into my IWantMyName account. Well, 3 weeks have gone by and the transfer still has not completed.

Ugh, I am sick of waiting. I know these things take a while, but we are fast approaching a month of complete inactivity. Even worse, IWantMyName refuses to reply to my emails. The least they could do is say, "hey we are working on it!" I know the team frequents HN, so hopefully this will get their attention. (I don't mean to harm their image, but when I pay for a service I expect it to be completed in a timely fashion).

If anyone knows what's up with IWantMyName, please help! I am desperate to get this done by Sunday.
Except it is not really a tradeoff situation here. There is no reason why you couldn't have freedom in what you put on your computer and freedom from porn and viri (I think that was Job's argument) at the same time.
Psicologas | Psicologos Salamanca: Gabinete psicológico METIS
The purported purpose of patents is to increase the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy. The purpose of patent trolling is the opposite: the product stops getting produced, and the amount of useful stuff decreases. That makes patent trolling more harmful to consumers than normal patent lawsuits.
Ask HN: Where can I find an example of a simple game development contract?
I am licensing an indie game and need to write a contract. Googling is not yielding any useful results. Where can I find a good example of a simple game development contract, with things like royalties and IP assignment?
How can a virus be mathematically impossible? And what if there's a bug in your math?
Machines running native OSX are still luxury computers, the barriers to entry are a lot higher than bad UX.

Anyone peeking behind the curtain of software will see the vast value disparity of apple-like design: remove options for the the illusion of elegance.
Nobel Peace Prize 2011 - African Women Honor
Podcast: Writing beautiful front end code with Backbone.js and CoffeeScript
Upscrn, new version has been deployed
We have added Basecamp integration. After setting it up you should be able to create tickets or messages through the link on the share bar under the file. We are also rolling out a new style. Mainly on galleries and show pages. We arranged the items son the different versions of the files are conveniently available. We are also keeping our promise, every one that creates an account on this testing period, and helps us grow (by submitting feedback, making suggestions) will receive a full account for free for 99 years. We really care about making of Upscrn a new work experience, taking sharing and debating with your colleagues which way to go to a new level.

Check us out, www.upscrn.com
This one works for me:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/39918...
Hacker Dojo doubles in size; invites you to party
Hacker Dojo (Mountain View -- down the street from YC) doubles to 13,000 square feet. We're home to many startups, hackers, thinkers and makers.

Join us to celebrate on Friday October 14th, 7PM.
Hmm build the installer yourself if you don't trust it, beauty of open source :-)

Interesting though...
They have infected the control computers, and the keylogger (and mouselogger?) is logging all the commands being given. If they can come this far, how difficult is it to, say, insert spurious "fire" commands? Or redirect the drone to some other place?
This article basically centers it's argument around the fact that people in small town america don't need an education to survive. With increased automation and robots, that is quickly changing. I bet in 30 years we'll see a complete shift in American culture where education is absolutely necessary just to survive.
"it's important to keep in mind those conditions are often better than the places the workers came from"

No offence, but I think this type of ignorance forms part of the denialism we use to avoid considering the moral issues. Mike Daisey has made the point that manufacturing has only really taken off in Shenzhen in the last 10 years, and that the horrific working conditions could be improved without a significant increase in product price as labor is such a tiny part of the overall cost.

This was a very good article where Mike Daisey rails against the sentiment you're showing above: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-dark-si...

His interview on the issue was particularly good as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D...
Actually make sure that you choose the x86 in the configuration manager dropdown and everything goes away.

Sorry, should have mentioned it in the README, will update later
thx, yes and yes :-)
Link to event:
http://plancast.com/p/7thr/hacker-dojo-expansion-party
True, I thought I mentioned the color thing, but I guess not. You definitely could not read a TRS-80 clearly on a TV. You could on an Apple, but who would? Most people - remember the buyers were predominantly hobbyists and schools - bought the monitors.

I was working on a TRS-80 Model I in the late 70s, I want to say 1977 but maybe it was '78. I remember it vividly, even down to the massive 4kb memory expansion (which weighed around 10lbs and threw off massive amounts of heat).

Later on we got a Model III. It didn't have nearly as much character as the I. I didn't like the monolithic looks of it much but it was admittedly a much cleaner machine with the built-in disk drives (the Model I eventually supported 5 1/4" floppies but they were humongous standalone units.)

What fun!
Is there any truth to the Ballmer Peak?
the service is ideas. if patents are, indeed, on non-obvious concepts, they can provide the spark for new inventions, and -- if you sign a licensing agreement with the patent troll -- you are paying them for the right to build, market, and sell something they invented.

the question is whether the patent review process is working or not.
This is awesome. I've been looking for something like this for Windows for a long time. You put some serious effort into this and it's beautiful.

FYI - for those looking to run this: open the non-64 bit solution, build it, then go to the installer directory and run the windows installer. Works really nicely.
Yeah, don't use the 64bit. The non-64 worked great for me. After that go to the installer directory and run the installer.
I totally understand the "hacking" aspect. That's why I asked, other than the "wow" factor, is there anything to it?
You can get NodeJS running on a free (until Nov.) AWS micro instance up in no time.
As the author also explains in the introduction, the compilation is based on the earlier compilation by Eric Pement, available as .txt files on his website.

http://www.pement.org/sed/sed1line.txt

http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt
Perhaps you should speak to an actual lawyer.
Sometimes the smartest people say the...

Why is outsourcing torture any worse than outsourcing web design with WebGL? Extraordinary rendition vs. extraordinary rendering!

Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the thing being outsourced.
his post is pretty deceiving, plus i'm pretty sure he just has small thumbs

http://grantland.me/dcurtis_small_thumbs.png
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch03.html

From end-note 2. "Stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people."
yup.

"Microsoft thanks the following companies for working with us and for providing details of limited, targeted attacks against customers of Internet Explorer 6:

Google Inc. and MANDIANT;
Adobe;
McAfee;
French government CSIRT (CERTA)"

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/MS10-00...
When the deal is complete, MMI will probably enjoy immunity under Google's protection-racket-fees. So IV has to race to collect from not-paid-up MMI before the deal closes.
Hey, I'm not the poster but I'm the one writing it.

I'm just starting out, but I put up a work-in-progress version here so people can see how I'm doing and give me feedback. I'm aware of all the broken links and such -- I'll be fixing them as I go along.

I'm planning on doing 50 chapters in all, and I've got seven done so far. Suggestions for chapter topics are welcome!
Funding or bootstrapping. The too-simplistic paths to startup success.
A molecular link between marijuana and Alzheimer's disease pathology.
Building it yourself doesn't protect you from malicious code. Some better advice would be to review the code yourself before building.
... overdue account collections ...

This is actually an interesting point. Both collection agents and patent trolls go about asking people to pony up the payment for goods (to put it colloquially) and they both do it on behalf of a third party, for whom doing it by themselves will involve a lot more of a hassles.

The distinction comes in the fact that in the case of collection agents, the payments owed to the goods are seemingly legitimate or at least socially accepted (perhaps collection agencies that come about collecting payments after those subscription-renewal or hidden-monthly-fee scams might be construed as as much a nuisance as patent trolls). I guess socially, asking payments for ideas only seems reasonable if the persons going about asking for the payments themselves come up with the idea.

It is a little weird and subtle. Can someone come up with a better distinction?
oh right, because we're all married to the internet, and therefore should check in with them whenever we step out for a minute.

Seriously, take a step back and re-read what you just said.
Um tea-party republicans shutting down the federal courts isn't really something to be happy about.
The Games Programmers Play
Hm, I don’t know, Marco seems to agree with you, doesn’t he?

Ads make the Kindle look cheap but he doesn’t actually seem to think that’s a problem. The Kindle is cheap and he likes it that way.
If you found it annoying, perhaps you should join another universe temporarily, instead of the one we're all in, in which this was a pretty important event.
There's a big difference between bluntly speaking your ideals and just being petty/spiteful.

I think its a pity that Jobs was never able to fully embrace the idea of empowering end-users to be in control of their computers, but RMS's comment makes it sound like Jobs the person was his mortal enemy. Does RMS really think that future leadership of Apple will be more likely to embrace software freedom?!?
"The point that they're missing is that Stallman is effective at what he does precisely because he violates social norms..."

anecdote about Stallman ripping people up in Argentina

"A person who obeyed social norms would not have considered doing this."

You know, there is a gulf of difference between having the courage to confront people who violate your principles and wishing someone dead. Steve Jobs never put a gun to anyone's head and forced them to buy an Apple computer.

The fact that Stallman is known as an asshole is nothing to be proud of. Steve Jobs had a reputation for being tough, but he also had a reputation for bringing deals together and building products that brought joy to millions of people.

Arguably, Steve Jobs has put FOSS software in the hands of more desktop users than Stallman has. Every Apple computer comes loaded with lots of FOSS software. I'm sure that has every Stallman supporters' head spinning, but it's a fact.
How about this: "Speaking ill of the newly dead increases suffering unnecessarily."?

But I think the larger point that both you and the gp are missing is that, sure, sometimes it's effective to violate social norms. Steve Jobs was famously blunt with his criticism in an environment that's excessively polite.

But RMS often violates social norms in a way that does little to advance his cause, the gp's story notwithstanding. Maybe this event was an appropriate time to violate the particular social norm of not criticizing your hosts. But it seems that, increasingly, most of RMS's violations close people's minds to the ideas he champions, instead of persuading them.

The point is to be persuasive. If it's effective to be shockingly blunt, great. Expressing relief at the death of Steve Jobs? Anecdotally, it does nothing to persuade me, and everything to dissuade me.
My concern is not with being offended (I wasn't), but with the fact that's it's just a very stupid thing for a public spokesperson to do.
Terrible for some people. I have no problem at all reading long texts on the iPad. It’s an ok compromise for me.
That /was/ coming from the plasma speaker.
Web form design cheat sheet 
Its really all about user experience, and for non designers this gives us a really good idea of what is best practice
Show HN: Skills.io, publish your work and archievements
I suspect the intern was using that as an excuse to go somewhere else.

Usually, when this situation occurs, the prior firm's lawyers immediately send a notice of intent to file an injuction as well as a statement that the new firm must retain all data pertaining to that hire, as they may be required to disclose it at a later time.

My wife is currently going through a non-compete negotiation, and she and most of my friends work in the finance industry here in Chicago, where this comes up for almost every employee who does decent work and tries to change employers.
How the digital age affects cheating and plagiarism
The new Ruby Toolbox is ready
Yes, of course. It could also disregard features completely if it has found that they make no statistical difference.
(AND DISABLE AUTORUN!)

on the topic of disabling autorun, there was a patch earlier this year to disable autorun on non-shiny media by default in XP and Vista (it's already turned off in 7.)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2011/06/14/autorun-a...

infections by autorun-abusing malware families dropped by over 60% as everything got patched, and total infection rate dropped by almost half.
The capstone course at my university, like many others, was to be matched up with someone in the community and be given an actual task from their business, usually with the understanding that we were likely to produce such crappy code that it was going to be discarded anyhow. (Which was broadly accurate.) My group happened to draw a lawyer's office, which wouldn't have necessarily been a problem, except their first move was to get us a to sign a heavy-duty nondisclosure agreement.

The prof brought this to us, and asked us if we were willing to sign this. My teammates were like, "uhhh", and by that point I'd been reading up enough on legal issues on the internet that I simply said "No." At which point my professor said "Yeah, I was just curious what your reactions would be. I was never going to let you sign these. Here's your new project...."

And forget "intern", we were paying for this course! It's amazing what papers people will push at interns and such.

If you're in that position, do not be afraid in the slightest to say no. One of two things will happen: They'll retract their request, or you'll get out of a bad situation before it turns really bad.
Ideas don't have a dollar value. I'm guessing that not one company who signs a licensing agreement with the patent troll does so because they want access to a library of ideas. They do it because they're working to build a real product, and the patent troll comes along and says "sign this and pay us or we'll make your life miserable and it will cost more"
the link by rlivsey on gawker works.
http://gawker.com/5847556/watch-stephen-colberts-tribute-to-...
The article doesn't make a case for Stallman being wrong, but merely for being "offensive".
The problem with that is many people DO care where their files are. And to have to use a jarringly different interface to manage them is asinine.

(Of course, if Microsoft doesn't do it, someone will; giving rise to 3rd party file managers just like we had back in the Windows 3.1 days.)
Don't count on your first product being a success.

Have reserves to handle a few less-than-break-even projects.

Have more than one idea.

Start simple.

Remember that you have to release a product every 2 months to make a living at mobile.

Never go into debt and your company can survive forever, even if you don't make a dime.

Make a code base you can reuse. Know who is going to buy your product.

Don't underprice.

Make sure your contracts always handle things like your publisher going out-of-business.

Only make products you believe in.

Don't finalize your company name / product name until after you have successfully registered the web domain.

Keep your fans talking with forums.

"Lore" is a super cheap way to make your game more interesting.

Be extra kind to the folks who aren't getting paid... yet.

Don't burn bridges... you never know.

What is hot today will be dead tomorrow, no exceptions.

Be sure to have a bloody good screenshot or nobody will buy it.

Find "movements", join them, take them over, make them yours.

Always innovate, never follow.

Notice targets of opportunity.

Polish, polish, polish.

Eventually, you have to ship or die.

Somebody has to be "the last word".

Better yet, don't do it.
Ask HN: is the AirBnB coupon code for Startup School working?
tried it for Palo Alto rooms, seems to keep getting error "Code valid only for specific geography"
I'm sorry, but I don't find that to be an instructive comparison. The money the school district spends isn't revenue from the open marketplace, it's tax dollars, which the law compels residents of the school district to give them. Your school district could be the absolute worst or the absolute best in the world, but the money they spend would be derived from the law, not from free choice of a similar caliber (it's much easier to stop doing business with the Teaching Company than to sell my house and leave the district).

On esimply can't compare legally-mandated, tax-derived expenditures to cash freely given to a private enterprise (which is their revenue). Not only that, the proper measure in both cases is outcomes per dollar spent, not total expenditures. For the business, this is return on equity. For a school district, it's educational outcomes vs. dollar inputs.

This is not to say that every company in the education sector is a great business; there are lots of so-so and outright horrible businesses in many sectors of the economy. But comparing a private enterprise to a tax-supported government entity doesn't make that point clearer.
Sony Pictures close to deal for feature film rights to Steve Jobs biography
While I am with you about finding RMS action here despicable, the comment you upvoted was not appropriate for HN.

As I have no doubt RMS would have told Jobs what he thought directly as he has done this in the past with many people. I remember him getting an award and in his speech speaking his mind about the people giving him the award (it was an opensource conference) about using the word opensource etc... He's not shy to insult whoever contradicts his views.
You know, there is a gulf of difference between having the courage to confront people who violate your principles and wishing someone dead.

Aaaand I quote: "I'm not glad he's dead"
A rewrite of the Django tutorial with Test Driven Development
Haskell and parsing combinators takes an enormous bite out of the parsing problem, too. I won't call it "solved" but it brings it down to the point that writing a parser for a custom minilanguage is more like "a day's work" than "a month's work".
Stallman did not 'wish anyone dead'

RTFA