skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  Startup co-founder doing consulting on the side, IP issues
Hi

I co-founded a startup last year and things are slowly picking up. However, I need to bring in some money, so I started looking for contract jobs.

I found a position, but I find the domain was too similar and the NDA I had to sign was too restrictive. I am worried about IP infringement issues if I take this contract?

I am trying to get in touch with an employment attorney to ask for their opinion.

Are there any rules of thumb / guidelines to be followed in a situation like this? What do startup founders do if they want to consult? I am sure someone in this forum has done it. What did you do to protect yourself legally?

Thanks in advance.
Isn't this the majority of RFPs? Most are just there for props as part of an attempt for some guy to sell his favourite company to the boss.
> You only get price gouged if you don't negotiate or shop around.

Nonsense. Health care isn't something you price-compare on Amazon and Best Buy before making a purchase. It's something you need right now when an unexpected medical emergency happens. That's why an insurance market exists in the first place.
So, what were the rates?
No, you're incorrect. Your friend was able to get $269/month health care because he is young and male. But in the US, health insurance isn't guaranteed issue. If you are not young, if you are female, or if you have ever been hospitalized before, it is very possible that you are locked in to employer-provided group coverage.

It happened to us and it happened to other people I know.
Before we had health insurance, we lost candidates over this issue. I don't have to speculate about it. The current US health care system retards startups.
While I'm not disagreeing with needing to say no to a client, the moment you figure you know everything they want or more importantly, need, YOU are the one with the problem.

There are numerous examples of programmers/providers figuring that they know what the customer needs. They're called enterprise software.
I do cook at home a lot, saving about $500 a month over what I once paid. When I revert to having money again I can just switch back.

I share an apartment, saving about $2,000 a month over what I was paying before. When I have money again I can just switch back.

I can't really downgrade health care in the same way, as when I have money again they won't be able to pull my amputated leg out of the freezer and give me the hypothetical costly surgery that might have saved it.
His story works because he's framing it as getting a broken finger set or getting meds for an ear infection, and ignoring the fact that what we need insured is prolonged illness and hospitalization. What his mom really is is "very lucky"; also, not afraid to throw "bankruptcy" onto the negotiating table.
I'm wondering what sort of spatial / geo-enabled database and backend he's running with. GeoDjango with PostGIS and some cronned script to do crawl google maps and do the computer vision stuff for a given area would be what I'd use. He could even go the whole hog and EC2 it, spinning up instances as needed and prioritising the crawling of commonly-requested zip codes.
In the highly unlikely event the doctor's office is prosecuted for failing to charge her for a splint, I'm sure they could plausibly call it a billing error. Note that they didn't charge her less for the splint (which only cost them a few dollars), they simply took it off the bill.

I'd love to see the DA actually try to prosecute the doctor for this. It would make a great reelection platform: "I prosecuted doctors for failing to charge uninsured patients $300 for a $6 splint."
I've had car insurance for many, many years. In the past 10 years, despite paying many thousands and thousands of dollars for it, I've never "needed" it, even though I drive every day.
It seems a license from UBC would be required to use the SIFT algorithm in a commercial venture. This may have been enough to dissuade the algorithms use in this case.
I have a brokerage account at etrade. Is my money in danger?
This is from the dark ages; just ignore it.
I would adjust the question. Free healthcare can't exist. It costs something, either through taxes or your premium for insurance.

A more appropriate question would be: "If health insurance were more affordable and you were not in danger of being dropped from coverage as a small company or individual, would you start a new company?"
By far the best thing about moving to Massachusetts for oneforty was the fact that I knew I could get reasonably priced health insurance that wasn't subject to recission through the Massachusetts exchange. (Of course oneforty isn't buying people's health insurance. We're barely seed funded.)

Boston/Cambridge is no Valley, but it's certainly good enough. If health insurance is the one gating factor (and geography isn't), move here.
Why do they bother saying "Brands" when everyone knows that never happens?

Motorola, Kodak, Newsweek... whether they get bought out entirely or sold piece by piece, those brandnames are not going anywhere. They may get new management or aggressively downsize but there will always be Kodak products to buy, Newsweek will always be on the stands, and same for Motorola.

So why say the "Brands won't exist"? I don't get it.
No, it's not overkill; it's a surprisingly clever and practical design for data centers and (with a more FP-centric core) computing clusters. The cores are relatively simple and get high performance/Watt for x86, and by fitting a lot of them onto a die with shared motherboard/cooling/etc. and some amount of DRAM sharing, they can lower the costs of machines that would ordinarily be running a bunch of virtual servers on Xen.

As for the packet-switched network on chip, that's the way of the future: even with simple routers, it scales way better than bus-based communication methods, and is vastly easier to program than the nearest-neighbor interconnect that Chuck Moore used.

I'm not trying to chew you out or anything; I just want to impress on you that this is fascinating stuff, and not something to be simply pidgeonholed as "massive overkill".
Actually, my experience with the dozens of Apple laptops I've seen over the past few years tells me that the design or manufacture of the Macbook Pro batteries (up until the recent redesign) was inferior to that of the regular Macbook. The battery swelling / exploding problem was particular to the MBP, for instance.

Incidentally, the battery inside of the laptop I'm currently using (a black Macbook), is the most heroic battery I've ever encountered: At 2 and half years old and 993 loadcycles, it still retains 95% of it's original capacity. It only began reporting consistently under 100% a couple of weeks ago.

In contrast, by business partner's Macbook Pro of similar age (and ~600 loadcycles) can barely hold a half hour of charge. He finds my battery's longevity fairly irritating.
Repeating a point I made elsewhere, and sorry, but:

The problem isn't just that health care is expensive. The problem is that it isn't available to many otherwise viable founders. You can be turned down with shocking ease by private insurers; no exceptions, no recourse except a multi-month appeals process that is no more likely to get you covered.

The financial drag isn't the issue for us; the uncertainty is.
I purchased a $130 a month high deductible ($3500) health insurance plan before quitting my job. I am healthy and under 20, however. I do know people who are healthy but have been denied (not offered insurance at a higher rate-- flat out denied) because of past procedures.
Research shows that people project their own beliefs onto God.
I would contend that the root cause is that we expect our employers to provide our health insurance. We don't (usually) expect them to provide our housing, food, car, or other necessities of life.

I'm not an accountant, but I understand that there are tax advantages for corporations to provide insurance (instead of just giving me cash, so I can choose my own insurance).

The market is much more efficient (e.g., I can more easily and directly signal what is important to me) if the consumer of a good is also the purchaser.
All this aggressive price negotiation is fine if that is your choice. But keep in mind your company will have to employ other people and if the company does not provide health insurance you will be expecting your employees to also perform these same kinds of price negotiations for their medical services.
Content free. Instead go via these:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974871

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974965
The lack of memory sharing, plus the scalable low-latency network on chip, would be the Platonic ideal for Erlang.
I've often felt that if you would remove health insurance from the employer-employee equation completely it'd be a financial boon for business. How many more employees could be hired, how much more could be put into product development, etc., etc., if one of the largest (and always growing) company expenses was not health insurance for employees.

(I'd also like to see health insurance be at a national level instead of being regulated state-by-state, but that's another topic.)
Top 5 Longevity and Anti-Aging Advances of 2009
Study Finds Wind Turbines Have No Significant Impact on Property Value
Tail-recursion can be implemented on top of the JVM.

For self-recursion you just issue a GOTO. For mutual recursion, the compiler can generate a trampoline.

There are two problems with a trampoline ... one is that the stack-trace will no longer be accurate. And the second problem is that interoperability with Java suffers because the bytecode of the method or that of the call-site will be different from what-you-see in your code.

For example one way of doing it is to modify the recursive function ... fn (a) => b ... to be ... fn (a) => M[b] ... where M[b] contains either the returned value "b" or the reference + arguments of the next call done by the trampoline. And then the compiler modifies the call-sites to call the trampoline instead of our method.

About efficiency ... if you want to have a generic trampoline module (instead of many trampolines defined for each group ... which would consume permgen memory), you could implement such a trampoline on top of the new invokedynamic support in JDK7 ... this could allow for the call-sites in the trampoline to be cached and ultimately JITed. I'm not sure if invokedynamic could help here (I know little about how the call-sites will be cached) but I don't see why not.
Those countries also have regulatory climates that are hostile to businesses. It is harder to incorporate, more onerous to have employees, much harder to fire, and businesses are taxed more aggressively.

I doubt health care is the reason it's harder to start up in France.
I couldn't google up any examples, but if you read the fine print of contests given by large organizations, the fine print always includes a clause to the effect of "If you'd like to know the full list of winners of this contest, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to $ADDRESS and you'll receive it by XXX date." I would imagine that clause is to block exactly this attack.

Contest law is fairly well-hammered out, and surprisingly subtle; a few months back HN had a story about the legal dangers of doing a contest like this. If this story is accurate, it seems very likely GamePro is in violation of the law, if they are a US company. I don't know for sure as I am neither lawyer nor totally aware of the contest in question, but it's very easy to be in violation of these laws.
Nobody is talking about giving away ssh passwords: this is about a tool that Facebook has provides that helps you find friends that are already in your (Gmail) address book. Heck, just 3 posts above the OP says that he even temporarily changed his Gmail password.

The problem being described is a shady side-feature of this tool, where it apparantly stores all your contacts in your address book, even the ones not on Facebook, and when one of those email addresses ever pop up in the future, it is being re-used again. That isn't really nice if you're not up-front about it.

And you can't compare Facebook with a stranger in this context, it's a big company with a public image to maintain.
If you find yourself saying no a lot you need new clients, or a new line of work. Being a designer is hard, and so is finding good clients.

As an aside -- nightmare clients tend to crop up more on projects with thin margins. If you are taking on a new client, make sure the margins are not thin.
It is possible to read it for free through a google search of the title, or other methods.

Some other methods:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/read-wall-street-journal-arti...
I think he did an AMA on reddit two months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9lsp2/i_create_those_f...
It is close, but I would have to say that the way emacs interacts with external processes is probably my favorite feature. It is simply a paradigm that no other text editor seems to even attempt.

Here are some common modes that I use that interact with external processes.

py-shell: kind of obvious, using the python shell is sometimes awkward because of the way that python doesn't reload code.

pdb-mode:in any shell process, if my python code hits a pdb.set_trace() python will pop up a debugging repl. As I step through my code with pdb, emacs opens up whatever file the current stack is in to the position in the stack. I couldn't imagine debugging code without this. This functionality also exists for gdb and rdb I think, I don't use those frequently.

compile-mode: when I run unit tests and I get an error, compile mode lets me click or hit return on that error and instantly jump to that code in another buffer

shell: emacs deals with my bash shell. I can easily scroll up in the buffer to copy and paste output from previous commands. I can search backwards through not just commands I have previously run, but through previous output from the shell. When I open a file from the shell, it defaults to my current shell directory.

sql-mode: gives all the goodness of emacs to an sql repl. I can edit sql in another buffer, craft the query I want, and send just that query to my sql repl.
It's one thing to have systems for the NSA, it's another thing if Microsoft's "Windows 7 Ultimate" biggest feature is easily beatable by the public. Anyone smart enough to want to steal your data is smart enough to download this program off bittorrent.

BitLocker is nothing more than another annoyance to deter lazy thieves now :\
For slime-like editing with vim for Clojure, check out VimClojure. It's really great.
A quick google search suggests that emergency care makes up less than 3% of medical spending in the US. So negotiation and price comparison is possible for about 97% of medical spending.

http://www3.acep.org/patients.aspx?id=25902
My startup loses candidates because I can't afford to pay them. I don't have to speculate about it. The current US wage system retards startups.
Or, illiquid stock in a company with no market traction and cash flows for illiquid stock in a company with large traction and cash flows. It's a trade of control for reduced risk.
Explaining to BBC Newsnight some of the problems with the CRU code
Louis Gray's FTC Disclosure Badges
For those asking "What on earth is Munsell Color Space?": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell
Misleading headline. All this tool does is suck the encryption keys out of the memory of a running system. Full disk encryption is only safe if attackers can't get to the running system.
What you say is absolutely correct. But the real point of what would be considered public health insurance is that the risks are spread over a much larger group than simply a base of employees. The pricing mechanism is based on the risk of the people in the group. If the group is defined as the employees of the company, then that number is going to depend on the risk factors of the entire group.

If the group is the entire population of a country then you are going to pay a rate that is based on the risks of a very large population. If the people are on average healthy you will pay less. If the people on average are unhealthy you will pay more.
Anyone smart enough to want to secure his data should be using TrueCrypt: http://www.truecrypt.org/
That's interesting. Mine doesn't. We can afford to pay the candidates we want to hire. We could not simply snap our fingers and solve candidate insurance problems; it took about half a year. What's your startup again?

You also misread my comment. Losing candidates sucked but did not particularly slow us down. I didn't argue that health care retarded Matasano; I do a good enough job of that on my own. I'm arguing that if health insurance ruled out people even when we offered a good wage, it must be doubly hard for people who want to start from zero.

[oh, hey, ps for readers: we're hiring: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953114 --- of course we have health insurance]
I don't see a problem with process isolation ... you can control the bytecode generated from the compiler, and then you make the Java FFI really hard to please.

Since Erlang uses light-weight processes, this is exactly what the Erlang VM is doing.
Can we assume it actually makes more than 5% interest every year? Otherwise he's slowly draining it of its value, and if he lives long enough may empty it. It probably does, but it's a thought.
This is interesting, the comic makes it kinda cute, but OP's conclusion is exactly the opposite of what I firmly believe. I have learned over the years that the best way to win and keep quality business is to find a way to say "YES".

Buyers of software products, like small children, hear one word more than any other: "no". "No, it can't be done." "No we don't do that." "No, if you did that it would screw up everything else." "No, that's stupid" It doesn't matter if you're right, all that matters is that you're just another person saying "no".

You differentiate yourself from others by giving the exact same answer, but with the word "yes" instead of "no".

"Yes, in order to do that, we'd also want to look at..."

"Yes, let's make it 'pop' using some of the things we bring to the table..."

"Yes, no one even thought about that, and we should now before we get any further into this thing..."

or even the extreme:

"Yes, there's a way to do that. No one has ever done that before, so now is the time for someone to be first..."

As I've told my customers many times, "The answer is always 'Yes'. You may not want to do it once you understand what it will take, but the answer is still 'yes'."

No other word has helped me more to find myself and do my best work for others.
Ask HN: Please review our garage startup
Hi HN:

Citrify is a fun and easy to use photo editor. We just release the public beta yesterday. Here is the download link: http://www.citrify.com/download/

Note: the beta version is free. Just click on "Skip license check" when prompted.

Here is some more background information on me and my partner: http://www.citrify.com/about/

Feel free to leave a comment here. If you need to contact me directly, my email is zee@citrify.com

Cheers,
Zee
The only thing they got wrong was where I said I was 'shocked'. I'm not shocked, I'm surprised, and disappointed by the quality of the code.
OP mentions this being a "hobby project" so my comment re. why the SIFT algorithm was not chosen is likely incorrect.
I am assuming that any company or individual covered is covered as a group of everyone the insurer covers. I see no reason for one gov entity to cover everyone. 50 to 100 non-profit co-ops would do the job: enough in each group and enough choice to ensure competition.
A much more interesting user interface used in a movie was developed by Oblong (see John Underkoffler). I am talking about Minority Report ;) They are making it into a real UI.

Check it out : www.oblong.com
McLuhan Thinks Webcams Are Stealing Our Souls. Seriously.
Is there some point to that photo of Buffet eating a popcicle?
I discovered Munsell color space yesterday. It would seem to have amazing applications in graphic design, cartography, etc. I'm surprised it's not more widely recognized.
Regular Health,Medical Tips
When my wife was pregnant, and on health insurance that didn't cover pregnancy she told her doctor she didn't have insurance. End result flat fee, under 2K to have the baby and about double if a C section was necessary.
Yeah, asset managers generally advise withdrawing no more than 4% annually to preserve wealth. However, I'm guessing that this is classified similar to a foundation, which must pay out 5% of its assets each year.

EDIT: Just read the wikipedia article he links to, and as the value of the trust is recalculated each year, and his annuity is based on the recalculated value (as opposed to the original value) it's effectively impossible to deplete the value.

Also, you can setup a net-income CRUT that pays out the lesser of the annuity income percentage, or the trust's net income for the year, thus ensuring that your annuity doesn't reduce the value of the trust from year to year.
Wow, talk about a classy move.

Major props to Derek.

"The best things in life aren't things"
Even then, if you can reach the transitive closure of your friends, (and vice versa), then your profile is just as public as a personal web page. Unfortunately, Facebook strongly suggests otherwise (you are supposed to connect with "friends", and external links arbour big warnings flags about privacy on the scary open web). I think this mere mismatch is creepy by itself.
The Munsell color space is apparently more intuitive than even HSV (Hue is always intuitive but I'm having a hard time predicting the effect of changing Saturation and Value sometimes). It relates strongly to the way we actually perceive color because it's defined in those terms.

I've been meaning to use it for some time but last I checked, it seemed encumbered by patents and that the only way was to use some proprietary programs you have to pay for... I didn't know these data mapping files were available!
Version 1 sucks. Ship it anyway? Yeah, Cuil can tell you how well that worked out.

Cuil didn't just ship; Cuil was launched Hollywood style with a tremendous amount of anticipation and buzz. If they had soft launched, their fail wouldn't have been nearly as epic.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=cuil
Unwise to passively assume. It's my responsibility to make sure it grows by at least 5% or that defeats the whole purpose! :-)

http://sivers.org/book/SmartestInvestmentBook

http://sivers.org/book/InvestorsManifesto

http://sivers.org/book/FourPillarsOfInvesting
Why do you say that "never" happens? Brandnames definitely do go away when they become liabilities and not assets.
If you know what you're doing, I wouldn't be surprised if you can force a dump of the data for it from Windows, without any other tools. At the very least, if you can create a BSOD (or, I suppose if the computer has had one before), the default (at least for Windows 7 Enterprise) is to create a kernel dump.

All this shows is that its not safe to leave your computer running if you have full disk encryption. Its no different than logging into, say, Facebook at a public computer and walking away. If you're already in, it isn't that difficult to steal/change the password.
Organovo Has Its First Commercial 3D Bioprinter
That's what I was thinking. 5% is the upper limit of the fraction of his wealth that a rich person could safely spend each year anyway. So his income is no different than if he'd kept the money. The only thing he has lost is the ability to change his mind about where the principal goes when he dies.
Exactly. I'm required to pay out 5% per year to myself, but then I don't have to spend the whole 5%. I can reinvest it or whatever.
You're aware that HTTP cookies are not sent to DNS servers, yes?
5% * 22 million = 1.1 million

Not bad.
He's getting 5% of $22 million each year to cover living expenses ($1.1million)?

Doesn't exactly sound like "living simply" to me.