danm07

Nice.

Non-compete is a standalone agreement; if it is signed, it is valid. It's probably also structured as part of his employment agreement, and independent of the acquisition settlement.

Typical acquisition also includes an employment contract, and a significant portion of that settlement is paid upon the contract's completion.

I get that and at my company, we restrict IP to the realm of our product line, and products developed using our resources. If our business sold sewing machines, I wouldn't expect the guy to hand over his encryption algorithm if he built it at home using his personal laptop.

I read in a subsequent article that ZeniMax was upset about John Carmack taking five of his best guys with him to Oculus, one of whom violated his NDA agreement.

I presume that's what led to this debacle.

These types of things really irritate me. Corporate NDA agreements are total shams.

We couldn't hire a P/T contractor because the engineer signed an NDA agreement with his company that pretty much said everything he developed, verbalized, or put to paper -- during work or after -- was IP of that company, irrespective of whether it had anything to do with its products. Even as an employer, I find this an absolute outrage.

I'm no expert on this, but as a consumer, I wouldn't mind having a heavier phone if it meant a longer battery life. In fact, I much prefer a device with some heft.

Is it just me or is Goodenough an amusingly paradoxical last name for an inventor?

Get rid of all the fake users.

We were in the online-video space, which made sense to be based in LA.

Our investor was also based in California, which made sense to leverage his network there to raise subsequent rounds of funding.

I'm Canadian running a company in California, and every time I cross the border, I get pulled into the office for an hour.

There was one time last year where I got detained for 8 because they didn't believe that a college dropout could run a company, even calling me "full of shit" at one point. They had my computer and went through my email one by one asking me to cite specific dates of employment at 3am in the morning.

They ultimately rejected me on the basis that I got one of the dates wrong. Can't say I've ever had a good experience with any US customs official.

Growth is not a function of immigration, but of population size. Immigration itself is just a means to get more people. It also increases diversity, which is like bringing in new people in into a company, which is always stirs things up... in a good way, most of the time.

Tell that the millions of taxi-drivers around the world about to be without a job in a couple of years.

I think what they're trying to say is that government has a role in shaping policy in light of robots... at least I hope that's what they're saying.

I think this is kind of a thumbtack solution to a more systemic issue. Self-deception, in my opinion, never works: you have to force yourself to be slightly dumber than you are.

The other reason why it doesn't work in the long-term is that you will always be working on things that are adjacent to what's truly important.

Clairvoyance is a better solution. Ever get stuck in a circular argument? After a while, you realize its going nowhere and you walk away. Procrastination, at least in my mind, is almost the same thing. If I let myself observe the mundane things I do, I'll eventually get sick of myself and stop doing it.

Success in dealing with procrastination really a question how viscerally you feel a dead-end coming, and also making the necessary adjustments to remove triggers if its difficult to stop yourself in the act.

Good point. Although, I tend to think the timespan of contracts, whether employment or temporary, are of little moment if the employer were to fall on hard times. If they don't have the cash, termination is going to happen either way.

What might work is automated Just-in-Time contracting, with minimal agency cost and lead-times, and with automation providing the stability of full-time employment. LinkedIn 2.0 essentially (fyi: this doesn't exist, I just made it up)

All this hiring and firing makes me think that the economy should err towards gigs rather than FT employment.

i.e. Full-time work is only full-time until it ends, but the ending is inadequately spelled out on the side of management, so it becomes an ongoing expense drag, leading to diminishing returns.

Multiply this by the number of employees, layoffs seem inevitable.

I have to agree. I wish open offices comes with their own bathroom-stall like cubbies for people who need to jump on a call.

... or hire Terry Tate, office linebacker: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ar83_terry-tate-office-li...

I've been in a couple of co-working spaces uses the open-office concept. It's generally pretty good when everyone is a developer, but then there's the occasional sales/customer service person, which is what this article seems to allude to.

I think open-office is a great concept that just needs to be refined a little: i.e. stricter enforcement of phone/loudness etiquette.

this is hilarious... Ben's going to get spammed with emails

It's 10 times more painful to spend my time on anything I don't truly believe in. I tend to think the default state of existence is discontentness, and so we're always going to be upset over something at one point or another. In my experience, there is more piece of mind with struggling against important issues than trivial ones.

I don't believe we should be as dismissive as AI as he suggests. There is an undertone of populism and a string of weak rebuttals that undermine his argument.

Here is why AI is reason for concern:

1. The world is made up of patterns. Proof: mathematics.

2. Patterns can be distilled down to data.

3. Machine Learning is highly effective at analysing patterns.

4. Machine Learning construction itself is a pattern, albeit a very complicated one, by human scales.

5. Learning speed is bottlenecked by hardware and data availability. Both of which are being solved at exponential rates.

The other knock is that consciousness and its constituent pieces is a product of evolution, which itself is not outside the realm of physics.(I.e. We're sacks of chemicals) This means it is theoretically possible to reproduce intelligence if the same initial conditions are met.

As silicon poses much shorter time gaps than biological substrates, and as equivalent sensory data are fed into simulated environments, the vectors intercepts are quite clear.

I think the key is whether we believe machine learning will reach a critical threshold where it will be able to interpret higher-level meaning.

There is positive evidence that this has to do with layers of neural circuitry, which recent neural net design has confirmed in output.

Additional layers can be added to machines, but it is not so easy to do with humans.

The danger is in autonomy and might. Autonomy being higher level cognition mentioned earlier, and might being the ability to bruteforce its way through problems by sheer speed and iteration, which computer excel at.

It would be great if you guys can spot flaws in this argument. The conclusions are quite grim at my current outlook. It'll be nice to be proven wrong.

I think one of the other reasons is that parents this day and age are more liberal minded than previous generations.

I remember talking to my mom and dad about this. When they left the nest, their parents held very strict conservative view, and were often very opinionated in how their sons and daughters should conduct their lives.

Nowadays there's not much to rebel against, especially among the educated class.

Thanks! I used Cordova/PhoneGap and it took about 10 days from start to finish.

In terms of resources, Cordova's docs are pretty good.

Is it just me or is fasting as an intellectual property a ludicrous idea?

Not a big surprise. Shareholders would approve the acquisition of Theranos if it were Elon at the helm.

I think George W Bush would be quite happy that he will no longer be considered the worst president in recent history.

I don't think he's tired. By the time he took the stage, news networkers have been railing about global markets in free-fall for several hours.

He literally cannot restart his shpiel until the markets stabilize. To me, his suppression looks contrived.

I don't know why but I've got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Very Snapchat-esque. Lots of room for improvement for UI, and social.

Give the kid a break. He's making an app, let him show it to people - antics aside.