skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't understand employment law. This is nothing to do with property management companies, it's everything to do with the fact that you were employed by them at the time you built this.

Whether or not you did it on your own time is largely irrelevant. It's related to their business, you were employed by them (under default contract) and hence, by law, it probably belongs to them.

You goofed, it seems to be your fault, and you won't get any more advice or comment if you rant and shout at us for telling you the truth.
As I said, no, I'm not a lawyer. (EDIT: I am especially not a lawyer in the USA, let alone California)

Updating the laws is not the issue. I am an employer and I use a contract that states explicitly that anything anyone does in their own time without affecting the work they do for me, belongs to them. That's my choice, that's an explicit contract. (Added in EDIT: I believe people with good intentions should not be taken advantage of, that's why I have the explicit contract.)

The default contract doesn't say that. Your employer is a lawyer - he will know.

As I said earlier, you goofed. Take the pain, take the lesson.
I remember that I wrote "Under construction" and "Please visit my guestbook" as a link on my site. Can you find it?
In California, companies don't automatically get everything you do on your own time.

However, it appears he already handed it over, so I don't think there's a lot that can be done, and especially not without talking to a laywer. Never deliver stuff without a contract.
It's really sad that the first thing you (and I, too!) think of when reading this sentence are anti science crooks. Infecting our minds so thoroughly is a impressive achievment.
Web Alphabet Set to Change
As much as I love BostonDynamics, I'm pretty pissed off at them since they won't return my emails about speaking at a local university.
Court Upholds eBay's Standard Terms - If You Sue, You Sue in Silicon Valley Only
As a Manager: What I value in developers
Stephen King's Under the Dome gets great reviews
NASA Ares I-X Flight Test Live Stream
I'd imagine most of these services just do GETs, which negates most of that possibility.
Let me do the same, http://twitthegame.com/ It's a place to talk about sports on twitter (like stocktwits).
Very expensive, unless you only need to use it during peak traffic hours. A month runs you over 700$, and I'm renting a dual quad core with 32GB of RAM, plus bandwidth for 450$ right now.
Sexism. That's what this basically boils down to. . . Evil Sexism. Hire the girl as a secretary, rape her of her talents, and steal her credit. WTF.
but still, it doesn't scale as linearly as other databases like Oracle or PostgreSQL. Even compared against MySQL 5.1, PostgreSQL scales linearly all the way up to 128 cores -- so it seems like for big databases, you'd want to use something that can actually utilize all 128 cores.

I'm pretty sure they're using MySQL because it's popular, not because it scales. I figure when people hit 10 million rows in a MySQL table, they start looking at sharding/partitioning instead of buying a bigger machine.
Google Voice lets users keep phone number
A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task
Diabetes Blood Sugar Levels - 5 Tips to Say Goodbye to Diabetes
The attack seems to be based on the arbitrary assumption that e=3. Isn't e always a huge number in practice?
> Unfortunately, the guy who hired me is a lawyer.

"Talk to a lawyer" means "enquire with a lawyer about the possibility of them taking on your case". Presumably not the one that you feel owes you.
XMLHttpRequest is an ActiveX control in IE6...
I have no desire to rank for [turkey recipe for thanksgiving] because, as you pointed out, there is no money in it. If Google is sending me folks who are not looking explicitly for bingo cards, then Google is doing something wrong. That said, Google is pretty good about figuring out what the page is about. See the top 8 referring keywords for that page here: http://www.pastie.org/671478
Download Free FLV Player to Play FLV Files | Tech Bucket
As a reader: I value good fonts.
Doesn't Amazon realize we don't need no SQL? Spluh! (sarcasm - this is cool)
'FarmVille' gamemaker Zynga sees dollar signs
OK, there's more emerging as we delve deeper.

Firstly, it appears that you worked on this web site only outside of the hours you were being paid for. Is that right?

Secondly, you were doing this work in the time allocated to your own company as an opportunity to show what was possible. Is this right?

Thirdly, during the time you were being paid for, you worked only and exclusively on what you were asked to do. Is this right?

If so, then so far so good. Now the problems start.

Fourthly, at some point you demonstrated the web site you'd developed running on your own server. Is that right?

Fifthly, you were specifically requested to transfer the web site to a server they had control of. Is that right?

Sixthly, you did so, without mentioning payment or issues of ownership. Is that right?

Why should they think it wasn't theirs? Did you ever say to them that it was yours, not theirs, and that you were going to offer it in exchange for payment?

What seems clear is that there is scope for confusion. From what you've been saying it seems completely reasonable that they think they own it. If you think otherwise then you must explain not your point of view, but their point of view.

Consider. They were paying you. You produced this. What did you do or say to make it clear that the two things aren't related?

EDIT: If it comes to some sort of arbitration - what evidence do you have that the work is yours?
Hey, the article was more india specific.
I don't have a degree and I've never had a problem getting multiple job offers when I've been on the market. I've held some very high posts as well. I think people use the degree as a road sign or indicator of possible quality, among other indicators, to come to a hiring decision. When the candidate is demonstrably talented, the degree becomes worthless (not negative, but just not contributing to the decision anymore).
A very good friend of mine just died yesterday, so I kinda understand why it's a really good idea to do that =/
This, this, a thousand times this.

Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.
At first blush, this seems cheesy, but it's the wave of the future.

Pieces of dead people are going to persist more and more on the net. The pieces will become more and more interactive and eventually dead people will outnumber living people on the net.

Sounds strange, but that's the trend.
I've never met anyone who described themselves as an 'Autocad engineer'.

Every engineer will describe themselves as an 'X engineer' where X is equal to automotive, or electrical or structural or something similar. No engineer is going to think that just because they're really good at design underwater oil pipelines, they'll be equally awesome at designing cars.

Many programmers on the other hand seem to be of the opinion that once they've learned how to 'program' they'll be equally adept at writing ray tracers, TCP/IP stacks and video editors (as long as they get to use their favourite language).
I have decent access to the track/follow apis. I just queue the tweet right away and have a bunch of workers take care of it. Something like rabbitmq works wonderfully here.
Where from if you don't mind me asking?
Mixins can be as double-edged as operator overloading. Doesn't mean I don't love me some operator overloading in C# when the mood strikes, but neither are features that in anyway approach KISS principles nor are they essential.

As for everything else, PHP can hang. I actually particularly like their implementation of closures. I know people fretted about NS but that is all much ado about nothing. Millions of keystrokes wasted complaining about which single keystroke is used as a NS delimiter.

If you must do some PHP and you've come from Python, Ruby, Scala, etc, do check out the Flow3 framework. You'll feel closest to home.
I think that's sort of the point being made -- you might not find eclipse programmer, but you'll find plenty of Java or .NET programmers, and those are tools also.
'"here's an introduction to C++, read it before next week's lecture" or "for this project you must use a VCS, pick one and learn it"'

My one modification would be "here is the problem, implement a solution however you choose" (with maybe a caveat that it must be in a language that the TAs can read well enough to grade your work). Maybe some suggestions as to which languages are appropriate, especially if libraries written in a specific language are required or recommended.
Ding! Give that man a cigar.
BlogPost blogPost = BlogPost.factory("post");

Ahhhhh, Java.
One interesting tidbit about Go is that it's one of a very few games where humans are still better than the computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
Use what they give you for free. Impress them. Ask for better access. Profit!
Twitter as a protocol is pretty stupid. It's trivial. Also, as a messaging protocol, it sucks. 140 characters? :/

There's far better more widely used communication protocols out there, and new ones being made all the time. Difference is Twitter has a fantastic hype machine.
What seems most odd to me is that Joel has previously written the almost exact opposite viewpoint:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

He even links to this in the current article! I suppose he is trying to make a more nuanced argument, but it does not come across well. He seems to be saying that universities need to be a little more "Java School"ish than they are now, but not too much...?

I think he should better clarify just how much Java School there should be in a good computer science curriculum.
I think the kind of company he's referring to would be something like RightScale.
I'm extremely talented and adaptable. As "secretary" I endured the pain of answering telephones and routing calls. Whether or not I worked on this web site in or out of official "work hours" is irrelevant. I did work on this site mostly away from my official "work hours," answering the damn telephone.

The entire site was developed on my personal server, before being exposed to this Evil property management company, and my site is entirely wholesome. The changed link is not so much. I'm still begging for help; how much do I have to beg?
What can i do against a cold?
i have a cold. what can i do against it...?
I'll second that. The whole point of the internet (at least as I see it) of linking relevant documents together is pretty much lost when those links are fragile shortened urls. Maybe if there was a markup, similar to the img alt tag, that allowed you to say "Here's the short one, if that doesn't work, here's the full one".

The real issue, as I see it, is that people solved the wrong problem. I see this a lot at my new job, where they created bigger problems for themselves by asking the wrong questions and therefor solving the wrong problem. Isn't the main reason people use shortened URLs so that they can link to things on sites like Twitter where every character counts? If that is the case then the real problem isn't that URLs are too long, it's that Twitter counts them against you, instead of allowing people to put actual hyperlinks (you know, <a href="xyz">Title</a>) in their tweets. If the only part that counted against your character count was the Title section then we wouldn't have this problem. They could even simplify the markup somehow to make it more user friendly then actual HTML.

If I've misunderstood the problem that URL shorteners are trying to solve then I apologize for my off the mark rant.

Thanks
Mark
I am torn on this. For some folks, this will be a wonderful persistent reminder of the deceased and a place to leave memorial messages. For other folks, it could become an awkward persistent reminder that just makes it hard to grieve and move on.
Russian scientists set to clear up sky with air ionizer
Why would they remove status updates?

I could see myself wanting to go back and read through a deceased friend's online history, just to remember.
> GHC uses GMP

Exactly, so I don't understand in what sense we could say GHC is an example of languages that "do as well with their native numerical tower"?

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ReplacingGMPNotes
Is there a public dataset of tweets?

There was one available for download, but it seems Twitter pulled it: http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/12/29/massive-scrape-of-twit...
It explains it in the article -- the robot is designed to simulate the motion of real, human soldiers in order to test protective, anti-chemical gear for the military (both walking and crawling apparently). It'll also be able to regulate temperature and sweating.
The sad truth is, average and below-average developers actually need considerable training to learn a new programming language. They can't just look at the specs and read some tutorials to get an understanding of the conceptual and syntactical differences and then start hacking. They need to be trained.

Also, to counter your 'Autocad engineer' example, commercial airline pilots can be described as a 'Boeing 747 pilot' or an 'Airbus A318' pilot. You need certification to fly a specific model and can't just hop in and start flying a different model.
Get a lawyer. Good luck!
Sadly, I think your summation is accurate.
> I'm extremely talented and adaptable.

I have no reason to doubt that.

> As "secretary" I endured the pain of answering
> telephones and routing calls.

As a technical person who has occasionally been called upon to do this sort of work, I know how difficult it can be, especially when dealing with the general public.

> Whether or not I worked on this web site in
> or out of official "work hours" is irrelevant.

Sadly, I think you'll find that the law takes a different point of view, and if you did do any of this work during the time being paid for, you are on very, very difficult ground.

> I did work on this site mostly away from my
> official "work hours,"

"Mostly" is unlikely to be good enough.

> The entire site was developed on my personal server,
> before being exposed to this Evil property management
> company, and my site is entirely wholesome.

So the question remains, how has it ended up under their control? Did they wget and upload a copy? Can you prove that? Does the site contain anything that you can prove is yours?

> I'm still begging for help;
> how much do I have to beg?

I suspect you've been given the best advice you're going to get from here. You have two basic options. Either take your lumps and walk away having learned something about employment law, evil employers, and not giving things away before you've discussed and agreed payment terms, or ...

Get yourself a lawyer. Do lots of homework, compile your evidence, read about employment law in your area, then take advantage of the free hour initial consultation that many of them offer. Make a compelling case. If you can't convince them then you'll have to walk away. Otherwise you will have some professional advice on your side.

Alternatively, what help do you want us to give?
A graduating structural engineer has no idea how to marshal a design through the building inspector's approval process. A graduating lawyer has no idea how to actually engage in litigation.

Why not, looks like a gap in the market.
Agreed. Learning Sinatra means learning Ruby and not someone else's abstractions (or DSL or whatever you want to call it).

With that knowledge gained one might stick with Sinatra, or even move to Rails with a better understanding of and appreciation for what the framework offers. Either way it's a win.
Is Your Code a Candidate for “There, I Fixed It”?
A small-ish company called 478east(www.478east.com). They offer relatively cheap high-end hardware in their LA point of presence, but lack a fancy control panel like SoftLayer.
Same here. I started reading, made it about 1-2 sentences, and then started scrolling for headlines. There were none. The combination of white-on-black and the structure just led me to close the tab.
You know what I worry about, war becoming too "easy".

Drones, robots, etc. with little or no human toll to pay.
I suspect it's pretty easy to get job offers when you are demonstratively better than 99% of your peers, degree or no. That doesn't mean your average programmer can find a job without a CS degree...
It's just hard to get the tone just right. Obviously, they need to handle dead people's pages somehow. But they don't want to look like they are profiting off of it, either. They certainly don't want to seem like they are "memorialising" the deceased just as a way to keep getting ad impressions for someone even after they are gone.
It might not be too pleasant to read the last status updates of someone who was depressed and committed suicide for example
Quick reference: http://www.amazon.com/Mis-behavior-Markets-Benoit-Mandelbrot...

He did a paper on the price of cotton in exchanges obeying a 1/6 power law. When confronted with this, the powers that be said, effectively, "we don't have the tools for that" and didn't use any different tools than they were using to measure risk. See The Black Swan for more examples.

Markets don't fit normal distributions.
This might be of interest:

What are real-world prime examples of good Ruby code?
http://www.rubyflow.com/items/1817
Recompiling Tomcat may cause runtime problems
Distributed blogging you say. Sounds like this newfangled NNTP protocol I just read about might be just the thing. Maybe I could build a startup around that
It means that companies offering services for AWS users need to be aware that AWS is growing vertically and could easily knock them out.

AWS is something I've been meaning to look at for a while now but from what I've seen, the value add services provide a easier experience. I'm not sure how else services are going to be able to differentiate. And at that, you're only going to attract small customers as larger customers are more likely to deal with any technical issues to the lower cost. Although, at that point, they may be willing to ditch AWS altogether. How AWS continues to evolve will be really interesting.
Wow, this is fun... wonder why it wasn't rolled out.
Public Can Talk To Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty Clear
Windows 7 a la XP Mode
pg: Is it okay to contact you with questions? If so, where? Thanks.
BookGlutton an online bookstore
Client services should be safe for a while - that's the place to add value.
> ...nor good computer science programs.

This may well be true, and that is pretty unfortunate.

But, frankly, if all you want a job developing software, I'd suggest interning instead of getting a degree. You'll certainly be more qualified than your peers for most jobs four years on.

And, for what it's worth, I'm currently hiring for a Jr Developer. I want someone smart who we can train. A CS degree wouldn't hurt, but it's certainly not a prerequisite.
CMUCL: http://www.cons.org/cmucl/
Net neutrality in the EU - Sign up
If you don't value your time, it is expensive. If you already have some bricks-and-mortar, it is certainly expensive as an increment to what you have.
But to me and my startup, its heaven-sent, because it saves two of my commodities that I have to strictly ration: my effort, and calendar time.
Biber Hapı
Kırmızı meksika biberinden elde edilen Biber Hapı
pleasant isn't the point.
Particularly latency benchmarks. Quick enough for web-commerce isn't the same as quick enough for collaboration for instance.
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903276

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904143
Why Web Designers & Freelancers Should Switch to Online Invoicing?
> hosting, power usage, cooling

These are all the same thing, in the sense that they're all included by a colo provider, and even high-end colocation space will save you a ton over AWS.

> backup solutions (an extra server, tape-libraries etc)

Grandparent talked about server-level redundancy.

> maintenance (your super servers will break down at times)

24h on-site service is a standard option on server-class hardware, and not all that expensive.

> $60K a year is peanuts for most companies.

It's peanuts for large companies, but they already have their own ops departments and won't shy away from the details of handling a little hardware. Smaller companies will be acutely aware that $60k/yr is a good fraction of the cost of hiring another developer (or marketer).
They can give MySQL away for free
$23.99 seems a bit steep as a fee to try out the experience of an on line ebook reader - even if it is written by "The Master". However this looks like an interesting addition to what looks like becoming a wealth of alternate ways to access books other than in the dead tree format.

If we were clever enough to spot the winning technology right now we could probably make that fortune - but perhaps we will just have to wait until it becomes retrospectively obvious...

<edit> OK - Now I have spotted the sign-up makes a difference - you can get access to the book OK. BUT I can only see the top two thirds of the page - oops now the navigation buttons have wandered off somewhere - I might come back another day and take another look.

<edit 2> Looks like signing up was a bad idea - that email address is now picking up emails saying that some other users are following me - clearly balderdash because I can't get the site to work so am making no discernible progress for anyone to follow no matter how slowly they read.
The advanced option idea sounds good. By default, I'd suggest follow the redirect, and add the time of both requests together (e.g., do what a browser would). Other options would be to not follow the redirect, or to accept only a certain status code (e.g., 200)
That has always confused me too. Has web hosting in general gone down in cost?
It would be nice to shunt all the blame off on MBAs but programmers have much of the responsibility to shoulder themselves.

How many times a month does news.yc have a thread where people debate whether you need any education whatsoever to do our job? If we can't even decide ourselves no wonder others think anyone can do what we do.

Another systemic problem in our industry is training. "Training" at most companies, if you're lucky, is a small budget for buying books on amazon.com that you can bring home and read on your own time. Lots of companies will tell you (especially if you're a new grad) they train their new employees and then, once hired, you're shunted off into a cube and the "training" turns out to be an overworked co-worker who comes over to tell you how to set up your workstation, where the source code is oh and if you have any questions just send me an email.

Combine the above with a culture of acting like add-afflicted children (oooh shiny erlang, let's rewrite everything in erlang! Rails is sexy. I'm a rockstar!), and the MBA types distrust us and view us as people incapable of managing ourselves, people that need proper structure to deliver anything at all (Joel's last statements).

At my last job, soon before I left and after I'd handed in my resignation, a manager (not my manager but another) came around and congratulated me on how much work I'd gotten done in my last couple of weeks, with the obvious subtext that he was surprised I did anything at all since I'd resigned. It was insulting. If he had seen me as a real professional, there's no way he would've said that but he obviously didn't.
I think it's the same as the argument against URLs -- anything you link to may end up going away in the future. Hasn't destroyed the Web yet.
Morning Inspiration
Researchers Reverse Cognitive Impairment Caused By Sleep Deprivation (in Mice)