skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any use in contacting a lawyer?

YES. YES. For the legal and accounting implications, you need to see people who understand them. I can't help you there. I know enough to know that you absolutely need a lawyer on your side (and don't fall into the trap of trusting the company's lawyer).

Career-wise, you need to move on. First, working with a pair of brothers or a couple or a father/son duo is generally a bad idea. Others' pre-existing relationships to or within power put you at a career disadvantage and you should avoid them when possible. Call that a lesson learned. Second, they obviously didn't see you as important enough to the company to know what's going on. Don't expect that to change. They've shown their hand; now show your back as you walk out the door.

That said, don't burn bridges and read Smushman's reply. Don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't want in the New York Times. (I know that that's cliche advice, but here it applies. Be extremely cautious, is what I'm saying.) There's a good chance that if you go into court, these guys will attack your character and reputation and the quality of your work, even if they've been cordial to this point. (I've seen startup breakups. They're ugly.) You can't prevent that but don't give them any ammo. Just find another job, give 2 weeks' notice, and move along.

Have someone check your references and report back. You'll be shocked at how willing "jilted" startup founders are to tarnish the reputations of exes who "quit on" them. Risk-averse corporations don't give bad references but cowboy founders who've never believed rules apply to them will say all kinds of shit. If you get a bad reference, you need to reach me offline (michael.o.church at gmail) and I'll tell you how to fix that up.

Don't stick around because of vesting unless you stand to gain millions. By all means, get what is rightfully yours based on the time that you have worked, but don't put your career at risk. These founders don't see you as the same class of human (most tech founders don't, because they have the investor-level connections and you don't) and that's not going to change.

Good luck. Above all, don't get angry and try not to hate your soon-to-be ex-bosses. It will just cloud your judgment. This is extremely common and a lesson that a lot of people have to learn the hard way. Given the circumstances, you'll probably get some money out of it but it probably won't be anything close to what you want or think you deserve.
paint.net is not FOSS [1]. IIRC it used to be, but it was made proprietary at some point.

[1] http://www.getpaint.net/license.html
Because consumers learn not to trust products with Google branding to stick around.
OP should consider this a good lesson (and one that I learned going through an acquisition); unless you're a founder, you cannot control "the deal".

Unless you're in the room when the chips are (re)divvied up, you have to trust someone else to advocate for you. And after tolling away for a few years, trading your life for the promise of a better future through being acquired, ultimately you end up in a shitty position.

Don't be diluted in thinking the founders will "take care of everyone".

Your only leverage in the end is to walk away (and try and blow up the deal or company, if you're that critical). And if you do walk and they don't stop you and counter offer, you probably weren't going to get anything anyway.
We're not building from scratch. The constraints imposed by the pre-existing stuff mean we can't really take full advantage of the upsides of Django.
I used to be puzzled about Apple's stock price but then I notice that it really tracks revenue and the product cycle, that is, it really is earnings driven, and it is volatile because the earnings are volatile.
I'm not sure your statement about "capital loss" is correct. I know people who have gotten burned by this. They still ended up writing a big tax check at the end of the year despite having worthless shares. The tax code is definitely not fair.

EDIT: other people have pointed out that capital loss is capped, which makes sense. So while it may be true that you can claim capital loss, my understanding has been that it never compensates for the tax you're already liable for when you exercised.
I don't see any benefit to this in its current state.

It's way less inefficient than standard weapons today, and it is effected by things such as smoke, humidity, etc.
The Dow is a ridiculous stock index. It doesn't adjust for inflation, and - more importantly - just looks at the stock price, not the underlying market cap. So if Caterpillar (market cap
49.44B) rises 5$ from 80 to 85, the Dow rises 32 points. If Exxon Mobil (market cap 362 Billion) rises from 86 to 91, the Dow rises the same 32 points, even though the first rise means CAT grew only in 3,3 billion Market cap, while XOM grew 20,95 Billion.

NPR's Planet Money has a great episode on the DJI: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/03/12/174139347/episode-...
Just upload the song encoded at 24Kb/s mono off a CD that you dropped on the sidewalk and kicked around.

Seems to be how they did it during the late 90's early 00's.
UnderscoreJS Advanced Collection Handling: Video Tutorials Part 3
I'm not sure if you were summarizing or disagreeing with me, but I mostly agree with you, except that I think the "work for someone else for free" part is spin. It's not totally inaccurate, it just mischaracterizes the goals and practicalities of the work. The goal isn't to make something useful to commercial entities, it's to make something useful to anybody (or, more likely in my case, nobody). Working for someone also implies that they control the design and direction of the work, but one of the huge draws of open source work is that you are able to design and direct it however you want. If someone likes your design and direction, they can use it, but they can't tell you what to do.
Goqu – An idiomatic SQL library for golang
Pulling net neutrality from a swamp of lies
What’s cooking at Kismatic?
Indians Find Ways to See Rape Documentary Despite Ban
I generally find that the GPL hatred comes a lot from academic circles. Lots of university-produced software prefers BSD or MIT, and looks down on GPL/LGPL.

I guess when you're paid from other people's taxes, you don't care as much about perceived "fairness", or that businesses don't take advantage of your work. It may even be the right thing to do.

In fact, companies using your "free", no-strings-attached SW may be a bonus in that situation. It looks good on academic grant applications.

Of course, the word "free" here means "paid for by other people", as it often does.
It isn't even true for that. There have been several security bugs, which he stubbornly refused to fix.
Do you play in pads for recreation?
Sometimes it’s also about being able to reuse work that you’ve done elsewhere for other employers. My current employer is friendly to the idea of me open sourcing a lot of the ancillary work that I’ve done that may be useful to other projects.

Using the GNU GPL family of licenses would not even be on our radar. (It isn’t core code, and if we accepted contributions from elsewhere, it would then start to have the ability to taint our code.)
Today is Node.js with Angular, React, Ember. But I think Mongo was a little stagnant, is not what it used regarding its use and popularity.
The harm is in how VMWare's customers are being denied the very generous conditions Christoph extended to VMWare and everyone else who benefits from using that code. He didn't write it for VMWare, he wrote it for everyone.

There is nothing wrong with using GPL code in commercial products, but why should VMWare be allowed special privileges to it? Everyone should be able to use the code for their own purposes, whether commercial or not, on the same generous terms.
8 years ago I was using slackware as my main server distribution. Yes there is no "apt-get ..." in slackware even nowadays, but back then debian switched to aptitude at around 2005 ( sarge ) [1].

I remember around 2010 I reached uptime 3 years on one of the machines, with my good old patched slackware 10. Now imagine me switching to "apt-get ..." because of "easy security updates" for a tool that lived less than my uptime was.

Yes this is the time that I had to use exactly this argument, but against doing precisely that.

1: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detail...
I like gov.uk. However I think they are overselling the value of centralising and modernising existing government websites, which are generally speaking quite good (albeit perhaps not on an ipad).
VMWare knew the software was licensed under GPL for years. They chose to violate the terms of the license - that's what matters here. They could have chosen to base off BSD licensed code, but they did not

Would you be ok with them breaking the terms of the MIT/BSD license?I'm not familiar with the MIT/BSD restrictions, but I think one of them is to acknowledge original author? How would you feel if they violated that?
People high up in the government agree with you! From the aftermath of healthcare.gov, two US government entities were created:

1. 18F - An pool of in-house developers working with agencies to build (or rebuild) services.
https://18f.gsa.gov/

2. US Digital Service - A group of technologists quietly trying to rescue projects (like healthcare.gov, the VA) and change policy.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-serv...

Plenty of roadblocks and difficult times ahead for both groups - but unlike before when failure was guaranteed, they've already had some wins and have a non-zero chance of success.
Even among tech people you can have trouble explaining things, why would it get that much easier to talk to people across an entirely separate world and dimension of concerns? No tech "dictionary" or translator can ever make up for sheer lack of inability to grasp a concept in the first place. Good luck trying to explain transcendental numbers or the number of servers Google has to the Piraha tribe, right (heck, they're actually not even interested)? This is modified partly by how deep the person is in their domain as well as how smart they can be (horizontal thinking mostly). For example, in the cloud infrastructure business, a LOT of people that are in charge of companies' infrastructures are in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s, and it's been a struggle oftentimes to explain basic concepts like image-based deployments, cross-region failover, etc. The dad from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs lives in a world of fishing in his head obviously - maybe you'll have to learn a little bit about fishing to communicate with him right. However, a talking point that works really well for these people seems to be "imagine your mainframe was built out geographically across the world" and then you get all sorts of different conversations.

It's extremely rare in larger businesses to find people in charge that care enough about WHY something is not working when it comes to their operations or even legal as much as just having it resolved and when it'll be fixed. These guys are having to put up tons of defense against an army of angry customers and managers above themselves that want something done NOW. So, it's best to respect these folks' time by giving the most execution-focused response possible and if they want to know more, then you tell them and ONLY then. If you don't know, don't be afraid to tell them you don't know - then they know they need to come up with a really, really good smoke screen and it won't be solved soon (within minutes or less than an hour or somewhere in the timeframe of 1-2 phone calls).

Never, ever, ever try to "talk down" to anyone unless it's been proven beyond a doubt that they truly are actually dumb (and at that point, you should make efforts to leave because the truly dumb tend to run their companies into the ground). I've inadvertently done this before and nobody has a good impression of an asshole even if they're actually not like that. Perception is reality when it comes to people, it's part of why politics is so image-focused by necessity.
Outsourcing Does Not Mean Offshoring
> If the shares a complete loss and liquidated that way, you also have a capital loss for the millions of dollars which can be applied against income for tax purposes; this may end up somewhat less than offsetting the tax bill depending on your other income because of tax rates; you do end up paying (for employer-provided options) the payroll tax for the spread in any case, but then, the main part of that is limited by the annual cap on SS taxes, so for most of anything in the millions, you'll only be paying, on the payroll tax side, the Medicare portion.

This depends on the tax jurisdiction; as the OP indicated, in Canada capital losses cannot be deducted against ordinary income, which the difference of (FMV - strike) would be assessed as. (I believe in the US, up to $3,000 of losses can be deducted against ordinary income)
Here's one I like:

You wouldn't want to walk across a river that's 4 feet deep _on average_.

---

First read it from N.N. Taleb, not sure if he came up with it.

I use it to explain to clients why "average" metrics in analytics tools are useless if you're not specific enough.
Someone I knew had done some advising to a part of the military. He liked to play it up as a a "I could tell you, but i'd have to kill you" kinda deal.

If anyone in the office had been travelling and then complained about their flight he'd say "Be glad it wasn't a C-130!" (or some military plane). I'm sure it would have been more practical to take commercial flights, but he loved the whole faux-spy thing of turning up at military bases and taking non-commercial flights.
Does owning a mac helps you secure funding/reputation easily?
My doubt is regarding: Correlation doesn't imply causation.
I have seen scenarios where mac makes a difference. People doesn't take you serious if you using linux thinking you are nerd.(Windows is ofcourse out of question). I know it's all about the implementation of idea, but i seen recruiters asking "if you own a mac " during negotiation.

During hackathons i saw lot of presentation where a guy would be using ubuntu to give a demo about (distributed cdn/remote controlling light system) while a guy showing d3.js graphs would make to finalists and not the earlier.

So i am just want some views over the perception, how people look at you owing a mac or linux .
Is it about the mentality of free thing in linux i.e you just like free and cheap stuff not steady to pay ?
Sorry if this insults anyone !

Thanks

Cheers
there's a difference between "worst company" and "worst company to work for". worst company is voted upon by everyone. Everyone on the internet, which is the most vocal group, hates EA which is totally understandable.

Worst company to work for is voted by employees. Most people who work at EA enjoy their time there. They might not agree with some company decisions, but overall, it's a great place to work.

Please realize there is a difference and that list is also fairly biased. I mean, its fucked up how a video game company is worse than banks who take billions of money from people through fees, interests, and all other random shit.
> I strongly urge doctoral candidates in history to seek out non-historical methods in the form of mini-courses and institutes

I wonder how one would make the a similar but opppsite case to techies; to take interest in the world outside of tech such that your work has broader value.
I hate business cards
You would be mandated to use it whether or not gov.uk linked to it. gov.uk isn't in control of that - the DWP is. Maybe, once the DWP's contract with Monster expires in a few years, gov.uk will be able to make a case that they should be running it.
On the other hand if I want some intricate decorative wood carving, I'm going to seek out a guy who specializes in intricate decorative wood carving, not a guy who says "well I've never done any carving, but I've sawed, drilled and hammered lot of wood in my day and carving is basically the same thing."
For me it was also the 'groups', which were basically a free one-click alternative to PHPBB, albeit more primitive. For many niche interests, it was actually livelier than reddit is today.

Persistent security holes plagued them, though, and it sort of disappeared shortly after the News Corp buyout. Nothing I've read paints a picture of Myspace as a classic feat of software engineering.
Ask HN: How do you deal with IP (when you don't believe in it)?
Howdy folks,
I've recently found myself in a position where I am developing a SAS offering, and the company I work for wants to investigate IP options.

I don't believe in IP. I think the whole idea is silly. If I could I would prefer to GPL everything I write. I don't think anyone can own ideas, and I definitely don't think someone can have a government monopoly on implementing certain ideas.

How do you guys deal with this? Does anyone else feel personally that they don't think IP is a legitimate idea - but they are compelled to file patents and such regardless? Do you pitch your company on going open-source? Or try to sell the company on just keeping the goodies as 'trade secrets'?

What say you, hackers of the world?
He needs an accountant more than a lawyer.

You can usually negotiate a payment plan. Plus, he gets a credit when he sells or writes off the shares,
What I’ve Learned About Giving Feedback to Peers
Why Twitter Has Become the “Go-To” Platform for Business?
Really loved this tool when I was writing Python.
This Week in Data (March 6, 2015)
There's a long history of companies being sued over GPL. For instance, that's how we have OpenWRT. This lawsuit won't change many companies' attitudes. Either you're a company who's already embraced GPL and figured out how to make money with it, or you've rejected GPL (and if anything, in the latter group, some will start paying more attention to contract law).

If EMC wins the lawsuit, I'd seriously consider never releasing open source code again, and I'm sure many developers would feel similarly. There are many jobs that exist only because of open source. The damage done by EMC winning this lawsuit would be substantial. And for companies who pay for their employees to develop GPL code, you think they're going to be happy if competing companies start absorbing their code into proprietary systems?
Accreditation is double-edged sword. Many awful providers of educational value are accredited and the requirements of accreditation often inhibit innovation in educational models.
The argument against getting a booth (and just being a visitor) I don't quite agree with.

One of the more annoying things I've found at conferences, as an exhibitor, is when people come to your booth to sales pitch you on their thing.

If you want customers, don't go as a visitor and pitch the exhibitors. Get the booth, but only if you are the right size where it feels like the leads will exist and it will pay off.

You can also meet some investors at booths too.

It helps though if people have some awareness of what you do and signage that makes that VERY clear.
It is up, but I think instead it should go meta: There should be a new section describing how his own wikipedia article came about.
I didn't donate anything either. FOLLOW THESE TERMS OR I WILL SUE YOU is not a good ethos for open source IMO. It leads so easily to MY WAY OR NO WAY, and that's not a good mindset for developers.
Setting Up Sublime Text for Python Development
If the information is verifiable, why can't wikipedia just let the page exist?
Where is the harm in downloading music and movies of bit-torrent?

Or installing a hacked Photoshop or Windows?

Just because Christoph decided to sell his code for something that isn't money, doesn't mean you can use it without paying. In the case of GPL, you pay with the source code you add to the software.
Whenable events, a simplier alternative to Promises
In the US, at least, the problem is that you realize the gain in a single tax year, but there's a limit on capital loss writeoffs so you have to spread that over a multi-year rollover. It doesn't balance.

Also, we have AMT (alternative minimum tax) which gets triggered by this kind of scenario--exercise and hold--and really ends up screwing you due to outdated but not updated calculations that assume anyone making over 150k or so is "rich".
Wandealust Weekly – Las Vegas Travel Deals for 3/5 to 3/11
The wheel well's on the outside of the pressure hull, while the cargo hold's on the inside, so is pressurised. Or at least so I gather. It may not be heated very well, mind.

Some random searching on the internet shows that the temperature of a cargo hold is about 10°C, and on at least one model of plane is (partially) heated by waste air from the cabins. Allegedly there's a flight deck switch which redirects the waste air overboard, which causes the temperature in the hold to plummet. This is known as the 'puppy snuffer' switch...
Their whole forum seems down.
Tame Your Wild CSS with CSScomb
The funny part is how for years we pretended Jabber was good and we couldn't understand why no-one was using it. There are a few critical pieces of functionality that you seemingly can't get with that protocol - being able to sign in from multiple devices and have messages sent to all of them, groupchats as a first-class thing (highlighting when you're mentioned but not otherwise), mobile support.
Gemba: Drag and Drop Git for Designers
In for $35. Come on, we can do it!
I get your point - but I wanted the article to be more about our experience with Go rather than pros and cons of GC :-P
What this approach does is only read the data for you if it's in the kernel page cache. If it's not it's your responsibility to get it somehow (maybe through a regular read call). Today it does not enqueue a any kind read-ahead.

There's a very long history 12+ years of various buffered disk IO, along similar lines of what you're asking (callback, notification). All of them ended up failing to go upstream for a number of reasons 1) pushed too much complexity into the kernel (complicating the regular code paths) 2) caused regressions in performance in sync read/write 3) were based on functionality that the upstream developers did not want (tasklets).

With that background of various failed attempts, my approach focuses on a common use case in modern servers: a network pool loop and a disk IO thread thread pool. That's pretty much how everybody works around lack of async disk IO. The big problem with that is additional latency. That latency comes from synchronization (between two threads) and queuing (cached data stuck in queue behind long running requests).

My solution tackles that latency by letting us answer in the same network thread if data is cached by the kernel.

I tried this using samba (kernel guys like this use case) and I was able to get close to sync like latency / throughput vs. ~23% lower numbers with pure thread pool. I've observed similar numbers in our application as well.

Finally, using this you can implement what you're purposing in user-space using a threadpool without giving up to much performance.
>It doesn't, but if I GPL my own iOS code, NO ONE will want to use it in an actual shipping iOS app of any significance.
I don't see how the proliferation of DRM-ridden iOS apps is a laudable goal for a free software project. If you want, you can sell exceptions to let other people to use your code in their apps. I don't particularly like the practice, but the net harm is much lower than if the program was released under a permissive license.
How does one know it's correct? If I do a research study and discover some new fact I think is "correct," should I be able to just put that on Wikipedia, without peer review?