Ask HN: Should I sign this agreement? - <AUTHOR> TL;DR I made an iOS ecommerce app, along with backend server and a simple web-app POS system. My co-creator asked me to sign a standard NDA agreement except it specifies that I am an unpaid intern. My instinct tells me not to sign it.
Here is the whole story: I am a senior engineering student. This is my last semester at school, and I thought it would be an excellent experience to be in a venture course and try something different. The course is offered by the school's business school, and it is taken primarily by business students who have had professional experience and are seriously considering starting a venture. The speakers, pitches, and quality of the students' participation have been a great learning experience for me so far.
My co-creator, an EMBA student, and I are taking the course as a way to iterate through our product and process. She is in charge of the business model, and I am doing the coding.
Our professors urged everyone to start talking about equity splitting as soon as possible; and my co-creator had a really simple answer to that: "I should have 100%," she said.
She knew that I had accepted a full-time offer prior to starting the class and that started this project with her because I saw it as a chance to learn more about business.
So far, I am on my final testing of the iOS MVP app, getting ready to submit to app store anytime this week. Along with the app, I also wrote the backend to support all interactions for the iOS app, and another simple inventory POS web-app. She just sent me this NDA to sign, specifying that I enter the agreement as "an unpaid student intern". Everything else seems rather standard, but I'm not sure if I should sign it. Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> Not a lawyer, just a cynical person.

Do not sign anything she gives you, especially a NDA that says you are an unpaid intern. She is trying to fuck you over. Did she file papers for a LLC or the like? If so, whose name is on those papers? Did you file them with her? She could have took off your name. The State you live in probably offers a way to search for business entities and you can see the papers that were filed. [1] Does she have any of the code? Perhaps, you should consider not giving it to her. Absolutely do not host it on any servers or etc. that she has paid for. It seems like if you signed an NDA saying that you are an unpaid intern and she registered some sort of entity without listing you, she could say you were commissioned to do the work as an intern so you would have to give her the code. You gain nothing from signing the NDA. You need to tell your professor what is going on. Also, and I don't have a lot of experience with NDAs, isn't that something you usually sign before a project?

You might be thinking that all of this stress isn't worth a measly little school assignment and that you should just placate her by giving it all away. Do not dare do that. For all you know, she has been in talks with companies and has sales or prospective investors. Even if you already have a job and don't want to do a business, having equity is still worth something, especially so if the business blows up.

[1] I see you go to Columbia, so I assume you live in New York. Here you go. [http://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/bus_entity_search.html](http://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/bus_entity_search.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This incident may yet provide you with the one of the most important business lessons ever, and at relatively low cost to you: have a lawyer read over _EVERY_ agreement you sign in a professional capacity.

It doesn't matter how much you trust the other party, either. Mistakes happen, ambiguous agreements are written. In fact it's entirely possible that the document contains clauses the _other party_ doesn't want either, which have simply been overlooked in boilerplate (I have experienced this first-hand).

Look at agreements as though you were an attacker trying to compromise a system.

One example (which I read about on HN a few years ago): a developer signs an employment contract that grants complete ownership of _all_ intellectual property he creates, including on his own time, to his employer. That's fine because he knows and trusts the employer. Then the company is bought by a bad actor, and that bad actor immediately lays claim to his personal projects as well as his paid work.

<comment><USER4> I see this recommendation repeated often.

How do you find a laywer to read over the agreement? How much do they usually cost? How can a student afford one?

<comment><USER3> Re. the first question: [http://bit.ly/1idSHvU](http://bit.ly/1idSHvU) ;)

In terms of cost, it really depends upon where you live, and what services you require (essentially, how far up the lawyer food chain you need to go). I'd budget up to a grand to review an employment contract, for example.

As for how a student could afford one.... Maybe save the cash in advance, if you can, if you're going into a deal like this? Ask for help from friends and / or family? Look around for organisations offering legal assistance to students (e.g. [http://www.lslap.bc.ca/](http://www.lslap.bc.ca/))?

<comment><USER4> We expect a student to save up a grand in order to pay for a contract review, when this is for a class and the student has earned no money from it and is likely poor?

The organization offering legal assistance to students that you linked to explicitly says they can't assist in this case (no Business and Commercial Law).

Like I expected it seems like this advice is not practical for the vast majority of students.

<comment><USER3> > Like I expected it seems like this advice is not practical for the vast > majority of students.

A grand is, what, three weeks work at _minimum wage_ in the USA? So yeah, saving in advance would totally be possible in many cases.

Also, bear in mind I said "in a professional capacity". It may well be that students _can 't_ afford legal review. The lesson (get professional review when you're a professional) still stands though, with the proof provided by what happens when you don't, as a student.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's just insulting. You should teach her a lesson in business: You don't get anything without offering some consideration for it.

It doesn't matter that you did this as a learning experience. Your motivation for working doesn't transfer ownership of that work to another party. You are the sole owner of the code. If she wants that code then she has to purchase it or license it from you.

I suggest you ask for cash rather than equity in her company since it's unlikely she'll be able to do anything productive without you anyway. If she doesn't want to pay then I suggest you post it to demonstrate your skills, and don't mention her or give her any credit at all.

Either way, she'll learn the valuable lesson of having contracts up front.

</comment><comment><USER6> Important: IANAL.

Now, it seems to me that there are two issues here: (1) Do you sign an NDA? (2) Do you represent yourself as an "unpaid student intern"?

(1) Do you sign an NDA?

First, you may call it "standard", but the real standard is to ask someone to sign an NDA _before_ revealing information to them, so that they can weigh costs vs. benefits. Presenting an NDA to you at this point doesn't make sense.

Second, do you get any benefits from signing this NDA? I think not.

Third, "standard" does not mean "a good idea".

And fourth, what price do you pay by signing this NDA? If you decide you want to do something similar to this app in the future, are you not allowed to? Is your "co-creator" trying to limit the future use of your skills, your future business prospects, etc.?

Putting it all together, I think signing the NDA is a _ridiculous_ idea, "standard" or not. I'd say a firm "no", and call it a learning experience for this person -- part of their business education.

(2) Do you present yourself as an "unpaid student intern"?

It sounds like your "co-creator" is asking for a gift. She wants you to give her the app and relinquish any claims on it.

Why would you do that? Well, altruism, I suppose, and perhaps the desire to rid yourself of any connections with someone with whom you should never have partnered in the first place.

But I see no reason whatsoever that you would be _required_ to do that.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

EDIT: Or, to put it more bluntly, alkxa is right. See the comment by that user.

<comment><USER7> _It sounds like your "co-creator" is asking for a gift._

Cynical me thinks your colleague isn't asking for a gift but rather doing business as usual because "[the course] is taken primarily by business students who have had professional experience". Standard operating practice in business, your partner has learned, is to ask for the moon with cheese on top, and if that's too much it gets knocked down to proper size during negotiations or in the courts, if necessity demands. Besides, you are inexperienced, and your partner is not.

This is not a viable long-term strategy, and it's really dubious ethics, but since it's just an MBA class, and you won't have business dealings again, it's at least a rational strategy. What I'm saying is that the "rational economic actor" is a deeply amoral being, if not an immoral being, and it isn't worth dealing with such a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would consider explaining to her the following: 1\. that the time to have negotiated that deal would have been prior to your doing all the work; 2\. now that you have done it and have no obligation to sign this, she can't do anything with the work product without running the risk of your suing her for 50% ownership, which you would certainly do if anything came of it (and by the way, don't post the app, transfer the code, etc) 3\. that you are open to any reasonable offer and will sign IP/tech assignment rights, post app, share code, etc. as appropriate if you reach agreement; 4\. That she might want to consider this a business lesson of the sort they apparently don't teach in business school, and you won't charge her anything extra for it....

* = i'm assuming US or US-type legal framework here

(edited for formatting only)

</comment><comment><USER9> Do not sign. If she is not going to pay you or give you equity or a percent of app sales, that is a big red flag. Do not submit it to the app store either.

I would in fact talk it over with the Professor running the class or a student association lawyer. It looks like she is trying to gather evidence to suggest that you are not a cofounder after the fact. So you should assert your intellectual property rights for the code you created. In fact, not having a contracting agreement, or an employment agreement makes it more difficult for your cofounder to assert ownership anyway since there is nothing legally binding you together.

</comment><comment><USER10> Disagree with all the people saying you own 50% of it, or, really, anything of it.

Note the poster says straight up he at least implicitly agreed the other owns 100%, and that he did the project as a learning experience.

On the other hand, don't sign _anything_ like this, there's absolutely no upside, plenty of gotchas (albeit, at least if your country's contract law is like ours, it'll be unenforceable because of a lack of "consideration", see the "no upside", but that can be expensive to prove), and no previous agreement to do it.

Keep your end of the bargain, deliver your stuff, and let her have a learning experience about how far one can take a dead body of code and her attitudes towards the creators of such.

Not to mention probably not getting the IP rights locked down. If you have no agreement on that, mark it copyrighted by you, and give it to her like that.

<comment><USER11> Without a signed contract he might not own any of the "company" that doesn't actually exist. He does own 100% of the ip of the actual software.

<comment><USER10> That depends on their original agreement, what the scope of that "100%" she was getting was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> gut instinct is a wonderful thing, don't ignore it completely :)

this sounds like yet another case of a non-technical person trying to strong arm a developer/designer/the person that does actual product development into signing away their rights.

in my very limited experience and from others i know, unequal equity split for co-founders usually always ends up with someone becoming sour over time that they're not getting their fair share. you may not think you might be that person, but if the app takes off or somewhere down the line the company is acquired, would you be okay with not receiving a single penny?

don't sign anything without talking to a lawyer. if you don't know what you're signing, you might even be worse off than signing a "standard NDA".

you can always say no.

<comment><USER10> A lesson from the early days of microcomputers is relevant (and I knew some of the players): Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and first PC killer app, "I have to buy an Apple II to run Visicalc". (Per Wikipedia, $2,000 of PC for $100 of software.)

But they, their company Software Arts (SA), made a distribution agreement with Personal Software (PS) that was grossly unfair to latter, and this became a big issue over time, because SA wasn't willing to budge on the agreement.

So PS exercised their only club, that SA would have to port it to any PC model they asked for, and there were a _lot_ of them out there. So while SA was distracted doing a lot of porting, plenty of it silly, and did a generic port to the IBM-PC (forget which OSes of it), Lotus did a much better spreadsheet for the IBM-PC and the rest is history.

Except, there's a bit more relevant about that, see my top level comment. 1-2-3 was written in assembly language by 6-8 people as I remember, and the team didn't stay together after the launch. Lotus didn't have what it took to be a successful software company, clueless management that was kept afloat by stunning sales for a long time, etc. etc.

Their "mid-life kicker" is the best illustration of that: IBM-PC memory was limited, ultimately 1 MB addressable (640K until you hit adapters, but there were tricks you could play), so someone came up with concept where you could add a card with lots of memory and it would map parts of that into the address space on command. Ah, now I remember, Expanded Memory Specification, EMS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#EMS)

Two engineers at Lotus modified 1-2-3 to use it to great effect, but that was against management orders, and they left the company before it realized they had to use their code base to extend the life of 1-2-3, which they did for some time.

There's of course lots of details I'm leaving out, like an attempt at a C language version, but it's notable that one of the reasons almost all of Microsoft's competitors failed is that they lost their ability to write software that mostly worked, generally after their first major version, and most especially when it came time to do a Windows 3.x version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. EDITED: I wouldn't be too sure that the EMBA student doesn't already have rights in the app, etc. The facts aren't entirely clear (and can make a big difference), but she might be a "joint author." If so, she'd likely have the right to do whatever she wanted with the code -- but she'd have to account to the poster for whatever profits she made (usually a 50-50 split if the parties haven't agreed otherwise).

Of course, the reverse is also true: If the OP and the EMBA student are joint authors, then the OP might have to account to the EMBA student for any profits _he_ makes.

For more information, see a presentation I did a couple of years ago: [http://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Toedt-IACCM-ATE- intellectual...](http://www.oncontracts.com/docs/Toedt-IACCM-ATE-intellectual- property-law-for-contract-professionals.pdf#page=29) See in particular the slides about "joint works" (with examples such as Weird Al's parody of Lady Gaga's _Born This Way_ as well as the royalty controversy over the organ solo in _A Whiter Shade of Pale_ ).

2\. If the individuals qualify as a partnership (sounds like maybe not), then the partnership arguably owns the copyright. Under New York law, "[a] partnership is an association of two or more persons to carry on as co-owners a business for profit ...." [http://law.onecle.com/new- york/partnership/PTR010_10.html](http://law.onecle.com/new- york/partnership/PTR010_10.html). In general, a partnership can be _de facto_ even without formal paperwork.

3\. The usual disclaimer: The above is only general information; small changes in facts can sometimes make big differences in outcome; don't rely on this as a substitute for legal advice from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction; I'm not your lawyer; etc., etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mate, unless you have prior agreements that you have signed to the contrary, you own the IP. Period. You own it. Turn this around and invite her to 'share' in YOUR IP. The fact that she is 'in charge of the business model' is immaterial.

I've been in the software game for 30 years, and my advise is: never, never, never do anything that will reduce your ownership of IP. IP is your ticket.

P.S. I am not a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER15> No experience and not a lawyer here either

But even putting aside all the money-talk, while I was reading the story I almost feel like she's not being very respectful of the effort you have put in. It sounds like you and her have a co-creaters relationship, and you have participated and put in equal (if not more) amount of work throughout the entire project.

This "I should have 100%" thing makes it sound as if you were working under her all along and she's asking you to sign away all the rights you have for your project. This sounds bad but think about it, she might not even have this app today if it weren't for your effort, why does she own the right to claim 100% of the app?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here: To clarify, I did not agree with her keeping 100% of the equity. At the time, I mainly wanted to focus on developing the product first, thinking that she would find herself ridiculous after seeing the complete app. We never reached an agreement/conclusion and I have not signed anything yet. And thank you so much for all the advice. It has been really helpful!

<comment><USER16> It'd be interesting if you could post an update about what happened, either here or in a blog post detailing everything. There are also people who might find such an account useful, especially talented developers who get involved with programs and people like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea, I will follow up with a blog post once everything is sorted out :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IANAL - It's always upsetting to see the 'idea-guys' knock the engineers, so here are my $0.02.

So who owns the IP? If you haven't created a legal entity where you have signed over the IP, then I _think_ technically it is yours, or at least 50% yours.

If that's the case, signing something like this seems a little shady. If you call her your co-creator, that implies you are part of the creation process, and if that's the case, I feel that signing this may not be the best idea.

Additionally, I always think people should have the difficult conversations first, and I think by not signing this, it's not like you are fucking her over, but instead laying out a difficult conversation on the table. I think all founders should be comfortable having conversations in the beginning about equity, and if she isn't comfortable with that, remember that you are part of the reason the product exists to begin with.

On the other hand, if you want to give it, I agree with ggchappell -> it sounds like you're giving her a gift. Yet there is still no reason to sign something like this.

I don't see the signing of this document helping you in any way, but hey - IANAL.

</comment><comment><USER18> IANAL, but I would trust your gut instinct on this - don't sign anything unless you're comfortable with the terms. It leaves the project in a weird state, but if your co-creator is being this aggressive to dismiss your claim, you may want to leave it this way.

Several years ago I had a problem similar in nature. A co-founder of my old- company parted with us on unfriendly terms. However, before we parted she didn't sign any paperwork. When we got accepted into an incubator and she found out, she threatened to sue us for 33 1/3% of the company. Our legal representation at the time told us that it would be considered an equal partnership if we didn't have paperwork stating otherwise. Ultimately she had all the leverage b/c she didn't sign anything.

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't sign it. Tell her as the author of the code you'll take 100% ownership if she won't agree to a split. Also, I don't know why you need an NDA as the co-founder and sole author. Seems like this biz student is on some kind of ego trip. Be cautious working with this person.

(IANAL)

</comment><comment><USER20> OP, can you clarify why the NDA had not been discussed before building? And did you agree beforehand to her keeping 100% of the equity? If you did, was there any contract/agreement signed to that effect?

Also curious to the course structure and student roles: Did other teams in class form companies? If this more like a regular class project, then I wonder if you could call it a day with both sides retaining a copy of the final report, while she retains the biz details (spreadsheets, etc) and you retain the tech bits (code). She would be free to find another dev to build a new app based on current specs, just as you would be free to find another business person if you decided to pursue the concept.

In any case I wouldn't sign any agreement without legal help at this stage.

</comment><comment><USER21> Even if it didn't have the text about you being an unpaid intern I wouldn't sign it. Why sign away your rights for nothing? You don't gain anything by signing it or lose anything by not signing. The only times I've signed an NDA are before I (potentially) gain access to new information. Your partner is trying to take advantage of you.

I don't know enough to knowledgeably discuss the issue of ownership. You'll probably want to talk with a lawyer. You might have a verbal contract based on your previous discussions on equity. Then again, there might be a good argument that you are the sole owner of the code. You'll have to decide for yourself if you care about the ownership stake.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why would you even entertain signing it? Just say "no".

If you wrote this app without an agreement, it is yours and she'll have to negotiate with you. Tell her she can sign _your_ license agreement. Unless you want to just be nice or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not just "no."

But "No and go fuck yourself."

</comment><comment><USER11> No you should not sign it. Never sign away your rights to anything with out being compensated.

You were not paid for the work you put into a non trivial piece of software. If your co-founder is serious about continuing with the company and wants to use what you wrote she really only has two options. 1) suck it up and give you a serious equity stake. 2) license it from you where you make a % of sales or a fixed amount per install. She does have a 3rd option to use your software and gamble that the company is never successful enough for you to sue her for an obscene amount money.

</comment><comment><USER24> No.

Hire your own lawyer. Find a lawyer who is an alum who works at a top firm. Don't be shy about asking about cost. Ask then what you are asking here. Meanwhile, STFU until you have advice of counsel.

</comment><comment><USER8> As an additional point of clarification in the hope it helps the OP, and based on lack of clarity on this in some of the responses, "NDA" stands for "non- disclosure agreement". A "standard NDA" \-- to the extent there are some generally common practices around NDA's -- specifies simply that you are receiving confidential information and that you may not disclose it to other parties.

NDA's generally also specify that you can't use any information disclosed if specified as confidential, and that promise is usually restricted to things you a) didn't already know or develop on your own [and there are various standards as to how much burden of proof there is on this] and b) are not already in the public domain in various ways.

So in a certain way, NDA's can be used to claim ownership over ideas like the one you're working, (e.g. by labelling it as confidential material covered by the NDA and thereby covering "my idea and everything related to it, which I own and you are now agreeing I own").

This would not, however, cover your work, your code, or anything you did without additionally specifying ownership and transfer of rights from you to her in those things.

If the "NDA" specifies that you are an unpaid intern, as yours seems to, this is an employment agreement or work-for-hire contract (to be clear: _not_ a "standard NDA"). If it specifies that you are to turn over code or assign your work, or otherwise tries to retroactively include your work as her confidential material, in exchange for compensation or otherwise, it is an assignment of intellectual property or technology. If it in any way specifies equity or ownership of the company, it's something else altogether.

There are various legal principles and state laws that also could come into play here, depending where you are. (For example, if she's acting as her own lawyer, she might have created a contract that's unenforceable or voidable in various ways.)

It sounds like you're in a strong position and I stand by my earlier answer with respect to how I think you should approach it, but for god's sake don't sign any such thing without having a lawyer take a look, and all of you, please learn what these things are called and what they do.

IANAL, YMMV, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> IANAL, _and_ , maybe I'm being pedantic, but it's not clear to me what the situation is: Your co-creator says that she wanted "100%"\- did you agree to that? Did you have any further discussion with her about it? Without knowing her real motivations for wanting "100%" or why she would ask you to sign an NDA (as pointed out, usually something you do _before_ someone reveals information to you) it would be hard to give further advice....

I think what you should be considering first is what YOU want- you seem to be inferring that you want to be acknowledged as "co-creator" and possibly some of the future profits of the app? Is she withholding any of these things from you now? Why?

Given that it's not clear to me that you know what she wants or the motivations for her actions, asking her is the best way to find out. I'm going to read into the subtext of the post and say that the financial business relationship is what's important here, not your title on a form, so if you can come to an agreement on the former then you've solved your problem.

If you do come to an agreement just make sure to get some record of it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I had a similar situation in my startup. Take 50% and continue working on it nights and weekends. Or sell yourcode for $20k or 5% of the company for building the first product.

Too many people here take her request as a personal offense. Its not. It's a business negotiation and she is "anchoring". Now you need to counter offer.

Goodluck.

Be prepared to walk away with the product and bury it.

</comment><comment><USER27> _standard NDA agreement_ and _unpaid intern._ and _I should have 100%_ are all different things.

This is overall a bit odd. An NDA agreement isn't necessarily an ownership agreement.

My advice is to talk to an IP lawyer and understand where the ownership truly lies before you sign it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Open source it and upload it to Github. There's no rule against giving away your code, is there? It sounds as though there was no prior agreement whatsoever.

Assuming it's OK to open source it, let her know you're going to do that because you own the code by virtue of having created it. If she gets nasty, tough. What's she going to do, sue you for open sourcing your homework assignment? That will just make you famous (and her, infamous).

<comment><USER29> There certainly is a rule about giving away the property of others, and I don't think we have established who owns what here.

<comment><USER30> If you haven't signed an IP agreement or employment contract, I think it's pretty obvious that you own the property with at most an unlimited license given to the school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> INAL, but if you contribute materially to a business, you cannot be an unpaid intern. It's probably highly illegal to use the fruits of your labor in any significant way. Internships are there for you to learn, not for companies to exploit slave labor.

Of course, as everyone else has said, talk to a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is no one else pointing out that this is part of a SCHOOL PROJECT? Of course they're asking for the moon! This is a sandbox project for her. What should you do? Scalp her back! Why? Because sandbox!

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't sign this at all. She is disrespecting you and there is no benefit to any of this for you.

</comment><comment><USER34> You could sign the doc and then sue her for illegally paying below minimum wage for an intern.

</comment><comment><USER35> Aside from echoing what everyone else is saying -- that this is a blatant attempt to rip you off and you shouldn't go anywhere near it -- I just wanted to point out that it is in no way "standard" to have an NDA under these circumstances anyway.

In my entire career (over 20 years writing software for money) I have never signed, or even seriously considered signing, a full-on NDA. Doing so can be extremely dangerous to your future career, not least because potentially it will no longer be safe for you to work in certain fields, and you don't even know in advance what those fields are. At the same time, it has basically no upside for the person committing not to disclose. It's not unusual for employment or freelance contracts to include some clauses about not disclosing trade secrets learned during the gig, but even then there ought to be explicit limits on the scope of any restrictions, as well as other safeguards for the employee/freelancer.

If you're dealing with a really big player, and you're a little player trying to break into a market where you need access to their technology, then accepting their NDA terms _might_ be an unavoidable price of admission where you have no real alternative if you want to play the game. I struggle to imagine why you'd consider signing one under less demanding conditions, though.

The situation described here is not even close to that kind of relationship. It seems more akin to the situation where Idea Guy thinks his idea is so amazing that Technical Guy should be willing to sign anything just to know about it. But try that on any veteran Technical Guy, or any serious investor, and Idea Guy will get laughed out of the room. In this case, it makes even less sense, because it sounds like any relevant information has already been shared anyway and there is literally no upside at all to signing anything like this.

There also seems to be some sort of presumption that OP would be the subordinate in any relationship and the other person would be senior. It's not clear why that would make sense from what we've been told so far, because it sounds like the OP has been the one doing most/all of the work so far. However, business people sometimes forget that good technical people aren't under any obligation to work for peanuts, and then they make unfounded assumptions about how they should obviously be the senior player in any deal. A counter-offer where they only get to have a minority share of the equity in a new company owned by both people, or even where they are reduced to being an employee of a company founded by the technical person, may provide an effective reality check in such situations, because without the technical person's work it's entirely possible that the business person has nothing of value to build a company around.

On the bright side, there is at least one useful lesson here, because it has provided an excellent demonstration of one of the most reliable indicators that you you don't want to engage in any sort of business relationship with someone. :-)

</comment><comment><USER36> No no, do not sign the agreement.

</comment><comment><USER37> tl;dr. Do not sign the document. Beyond this case, it could also affect your future employability. VCs fund good teams, not ideas, which are cheap. If your partner doesn't realize that, she also has a hard lesson in front of her. Another great HN post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844893)

+++++++

IANAL.* This is mostly based on my personal experience with NDAs, employment docs, and patent applications. NDA may also go by the name of a "confidentiality agreement" or a "proprietary information" document. You should also refuse to a non-compete agreement that says you can't pursue a related business or anything barring you from recruiting someone from this business. She may also ask you to sign a "work for hire" agreement that assigns your work product to her, which would also give away your ownership claim. Obviously, this work-for-hire contract is typically signed when you're getting paid as an employee or contractor.

More to beware: You may also be presented with documents assigning away all "inventions". Be especially wary of this, as you may be signing away your idea and your right to pursue something even vaguely related later. You may also be giving her what she needs to file a patent.

As others have suggested, company uses of NDAs are all over the place. Many companies do require them. Many don't. Strictness is all over the place, as is validity by state. For example, non-competes are _almost_ unenforceable in California. Some companies who ask you to sign such an agreement will offer to compensate for the time you're under a non-compete -- for example, you can't work at a competitor for 2 years, so they pay your salary for 2 years after separation. If you had to sign a document like this to take a job, sometimes this stuff is negotiable, though not often at big companies or at the entry level. You may see "in perpetuity" given as the timeline for some of the things she's asking you to sign. Consider that as well. The "unpaid intern" part may not even be legally valid. There are stringent employment rules governing interns, generally an internship is supposed to benefit the intern more than the mentor and it is generally illegal to just use interns as a cheap/free alternative to paid labor. That said, this often goes enforced.

Again, don't sign anything. It's better to be in an uncomfortable position where you haven't signed than in a position where you have signed and have to hire a lawyer to even get back to where you started. You need to think about future employers. They may ask you to sign general HR documents or NDAs, and one of the things they often ask you to legally acknowledge is that you aren't bound by other documents you've signed. This is why I really hate these things. Lawyers can't read code, and engineers can rarely understand the convoluted nonsense of a document than can come back to bite them later. You don't know who's going to be running the company 10 years later, when you're long gone but the documents you signed are still in force.

As sjg007 suggested, you may consider going to the professor.

Finally, the cliche is that ideas are cheap. (If she doesn't get that, send her this Onion video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q)) The reality your partner is going to learn is that even if you signed 100% of the code away, it's not much good to her. She can't maintain it and iterate it to a winning product. Anyone who can is either going to want money, or more likely equity. If the idea is truly a good one, as soon as another good dev sees it, or hears her talk about it (and isn't under NDA) could rewrite it. The source is irrelevant, there will always be clones for good ideas. VCs don't expect a perfect product, but they will fund a team that they think can get to one. Teams without technical founders don't get funded.

(*though I spent considerable personal money to hire a human resources lawyer specializing in NDAs when a former employer presented me with a very lopsided NDA. I considered that a small expense to protect my career.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Hard to imagine there are people so naive still out there. Now where can I find some ...

</comment><comment><USER39> Hell no?</comment>


WiFi: "beamforming" only begins to describe it (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://apenwarr.ca/log/20140801 <comment><USER2> Interesting read. I'm already familiar with these concepts, so I'm not really the target audience. I think mentioning (and showing) some antenna radiation patterns would help the viewer. The transceivers are not point sources. Their 3D orientation matters quite a lot, especially when multipath is a dominant factor (ie inside).

Also don't be fooled by the last sentence. There is no way to cheat Shannon's limit. These are all just tricks to try to get closer to Shannon's limit. TANSTAAFL. You need lots of transistors to implement these complicated tricks and you are always limited by the channel (the signal from transmitter to receiver, including all antenna, multipath, noise, and circuitry effects).

<comment><USER3> MIMO can and does go beyond the single-path shannon limit. See e.g. DVB-S2 using circular polarisation duplex.

<comment><USER4> You are still not cheating entropy with that.

<comment><USER5> I think when we come up with a way to cheat entropy it will be bigger news than wifi.

<comment><USER6> As an aspiring speculative-fiction author always on the hunt for a new premise, I'd love to know, what would be possible if we _could_ "cheat entropy" in this sense?

(This doesn't have to be possible in our universe; posit a universe where it _is_ possible—maybe one inside a Matrix-like simulation inside our own universe, if you like.)

<comment><USER7> So many things would break.

The statement that we cannot cheat entropy is basically a statement that the volume of an evolving quantum system (in phase space) stays constant over time, but gets more complex.

Entropy increases because our maps of that volume increase in volume, because we can't follow all the little eddies and crinulations.

So, okay. Two options for you: Maybe we _can_ follow it, because the universe turns out to be more predictable than expected. This is basically a statement that chaos theory is wrong, and entropy isn't increasing as fast as our current understanding of the rules say.

Alternately, maybe the volume of the actual phase space is decreasing over time. This would allow the volume of our estimates to stay constant despite increasing complexity, but breaks linearity and suggests the universe might be going away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313470)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a good intro on MIMO. The spatial multiplexing was first used in the 50's in microwave towers using quadrature splitters:

[https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/mimo-an- historic...](https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/mimo-an-historical- tutorial)

</comment><comment><USER10> Does Wi-Fi use the same frequency for a transmitter and receiver? In general, this statement is not true:

"Relatedly, even if there is no explicit beamforming feedback, in theory you can calculate the phase differences by listening to the signals from the remote end on each of your router's antennas. Because the signals should be following exactly the same path in both directions, you can guess what phase difference your signal arrived with by seeing which difference his signal came back with, and compensate accordingly."

But maybe the frequencies are close enough such that the channel matches.

<comment><USER11> I think it helps to think about the problem from a multiparty standpoint. On wired ethernet the simplest case is one wire going between two machines. In coax everyone shares one channel and so RX and TX have to interlace instead of overlap. You go to twisted pair and it's unambiguous that full duplex is available and desirable.

But, now you cant just wire three machines together, because everyone's TX has to connect to your RX and vice versa and how would that work? How about with fifty machines. You'd need some sort of star arrangement, or a little box in the middle to juggle every outbound to every inbound.

With wireless there is no box in the middle (except, very loosely, in two-tier mesh networks where infrastructure nodes talk on two channels and leaf nodes on one), so it's really like wireless coax with the occasional router. If you want more bandwidth you could run several channels everywhere, or segment fewer machines into separate channels and connect them with more routers.

<comment><USER9> You actually can overlap RX and TX bandwidth on coax, though you need magic- tees and very good impedance matching in either end, and of course constant impedance cable. That limits it to about 100 Mbps, but you can buy the (magnetic) magic tees to do it. These are specifically for replacing analog video cameras with IP over the existing coax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any data on real-world performance improvement from beamforming with consumer gear? I know anecdotally 802.11ac is way better than 802.11n (much less .11g) but there's so many related improvements in it that I don't understand how helpful the beamforming part is.

<comment><USER3> In our hackerspace, using 3 antennas in an ubiquity "UFO" danling in front of a shelf, communicating 2~3m to a thinkpad with afaik 2 antennas, using an 80MHz 5GHz 802.11ac configuration, we get consistently >500Mbit/s (iirc hovering at roughly 600Mbit/s) (unidirectional) to the NAS (1000BASE-T wiring, 1-2 switches in-between) when mounted via NFS. A single stream can't get more than ~420Mbit/s _in the lab_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the worst way to learn RF physics.</comment>


Real Time Human Pose Estimation in the Browser with Tensorflow JS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tensorflow/real-time-human-pose-estimation-in-the-browser-with-tensorflow-js-7dd0bc881cd5 <comment><USER2> This is neat! It looks like it can do a lot of the things people use a Microsoft Kinect for.

Do you have any examples of linking this to P5 or three.js?</comment>


The lunacy of Silicon Valley is no secret (review of Lyons's Disrupted) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/4/27/11455180/disrupted-book-review-dan-lyons-silicon-valley-hubspot <comment><USER2> Have we 'beaten them before'?</comment>


Cycling 23.000 Km from Alaska to Ushuaïa in 97 Days New World Record - <AUTHOR> https://jonasdeichmann.travelmap.net <comment><USER2> One really needs two sleeping bags on a trip like this. One +10°C and one 0°C. When combined, you can survive -10°C. Those take less room than regular +5°C bag.

BTW nothing is worse than one (too warm) bag on a multi-season trip. You'll get skin problems, because of constant sweating and itching and scratching.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.jonasdeichmann.com/panamerica- solo](https://www.jonasdeichmann.com/panamerica-solo)</comment>


Gist Is Down - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/ <comment><USER2> GitHub is sending 500's on repositories and user profiles as well: [https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped](https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped) / [https://github.com/TimWolla](https://github.com/TimWolla)

<comment><USER3> Repositories are working for me but I can reproduce the issue with profiles.

<comment><USER2> Not all repositories / profiles are affected for me. And for repositories not all pages are affected.

e.g. [https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/](https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/) is accessible, but the commit list at [https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/commits/master](https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/commits/master) is dead.

<comment><USER4> Both of those links are down for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://downdetector.com/status/github/map/](https://downdetector.com/status/github/map/) << interesting to see where the big development hubs are located...

EDIT: Some observations: \- Its getting late in the day in Europe - and a bunch of people are trying to commit and push before heading home.

\- Its 11PM in Bangkok - but people are still plugging away at their code

\- Notable Eastern European cities with red/yellow heat dots: Bucharest, Odessa, Kyiv, Krakow, Prague

\- Would've expected more outage reports from Sophia Antipolis in Southern France - but nothing much.

\- Barcelona is red hot

\- Some light activity in Rwanda

\- In North America: Toronto, NYC, SF, LA and Seattle are hot

\- But also notably: Wichita, Topeka, Austin, Raleigh, Denver, Boise,

<comment><USER6> interesting to watch the West coast become an angry sea of red as everyone wakes up

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> `git push` failing as well

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't browse repositories, can only get to their top level.

</comment><comment><USER9> Main repo page open fine. Cannot see commit log or PRs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some of our repos are down, others are fine...

We'll have to wait.

</comment><comment><USER11> GitHub releases respond with 500 errors.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't browse reps either

</comment><comment><USER4> My repos are down too

</comment><comment><USER13> About 50 / 50 down for my repos. API unresponsive, returning 500s.

</comment><comment><USER14> HN was the first place I came to check to see if it is just me or if it is down for everyone else. I'm getting errors when trying to push as well

</comment><comment><USER3> The status page is showing that this affects git operations, api requests, and particular pages: [https://www.githubstatus.com/](https://www.githubstatus.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is off topic, so I'll understand if it gets downvoted, but...

Why are other, normal comments in these threads about GitHub being downvoted so quickly?</comment>


Ask HN: How to become a partner at a Venture Capital firm? - <AUTHOR> I have not seen any jobs for Partner at VC firm. How do they recruit General Partners ? <comment><USER2> One or all of:

1.) Have a good exit on a startup you founded

2.) Go to Stanford/Harvard

3.) Work as an executive in tech

<comment><USER3> 4.) Born rich and with connections

(which seems to be how all my b school classmates who made it into VC did it)</comment></comment>


Design case study: How we helped Mullvad making the internet safer for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.simpleandpretty.co/portfolio/mullvad/ <comment><USER2> This was a really fun and challenging project. Judit and I paired designed the cross-platform VPN apps, from project inception to delivery. We worked remotely and collaboratively with the Mullvad development team and stakeholders.</comment>


WikiLeaks Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133435829

<comment><USER2> While the leaked cables have caused unrest, I suspect that, if successful at throwing off dictators, they might well deserve the peace prize.

No chance they will get it, however, as the Nobels are clearly highly politically influenced.</comment>


FastMRI initiative releases neuroimaging data set - <AUTHOR> https://ai.facebook.com/blog/fastmri-releases-neuroimaging-data-set/ <comment><USER2> > Apply for Access

> The application process includes acceptance of the Data Sharing Agreement > (found below) and submission of an online application form. The application > must include the investigator's institutional affiliation and the proposed > uses of the data. NYU fastMRI data may be used for internal research or > educational purposes only as described in the data use agreement and may not > be redistributed in any way without prior permission.

> Read and agree to the data use agreement below to apply for access.

Seriously?!?!?!?!?! You call that open source?!??!?! OK, let's leave the semantics aside for a moment. Yes, a dataset like that would be very interesting and I would happily play around with it for a few weeks and see what I can come up with. If it's something worth exploring further, I'll happily document it and open source it. But that isn't something I can really estimate without being to explore the data and see first hand what it is. For that reason alone, myself (and dozens off the top of my head) will roll their eyes and pretend like it doesn't exist.

False claims, over-hyping with no real understanding and bureaucratic crap like this is what is slowing everyone and everything down, the sooner people understand it, the better.

<comment><USER3> >Yes, a dataset like that would be very interesting and I would happily play around with it for a few weeks and see what I can come up with.

Spare-time tinkerers aren't really the intended audience here:

>>The neuro data set will allow researchers to test their models with data from additional machine types, new sequence types, and different coil configurations that were not present in the previously released fastMRI knee data set. Radiologists also look for different diagnostic properties (such as contrast in texture between different neural tissue) in brain MRIs. These differences present an interesting and challenging machine learning problem to solve and will help researchers develop models that generalize to more clinical settings.

It's unlikely in the extreme that anyone in that audience will be stopped by a simple data sharing agreement. And it's also unlikely in the extreme that anyone outside that audience will know what to do with a bunch of raw k-space MR datasets. Domain knowledge is an absolute necessity with this data.

<comment><USER2> Domain knowledge, while useful is not a necessity - I'm fine with contacting a specific domain expert for help and even pay for his or her services(with my own money at that), though none of the ones I've ever contacted ever wanted anything for the time they spent on a problem I presented them with. To put it as question: do I really need to explain how open source works in theory and practice on a place like hackernews? Especially given that most of the world's infrastructure in practice runs thanks to the collaboration of millions who have built most of what we use in their "spare time" as you call it.

Same applies to DNN's(if not more so) - take any large DNN with the papers, data set and code to the author and ask them to give an explanation as to why it works as well as it does while it performs terribly on a different data set, even a similar one. "Well yeah, it's curve fitting which works here but doesn't work there". Why? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

My rant concerns a different problem - if you have such data and you want to share it, just go ahead and do. 1 of every 10000 might do something useful with it but we aren't talking about nuclear experiments where something can blow up, are we? Worst case scenario someone's cpu or gpu might overheat, big deal. Just ditch the entire bureaucracy crap, we have enough of that as it is in our daily lives.

<comment><USER4> This is human subject data and there are good reasons to set legal limits on how that data is used, even if anonymized. Your "rant" is not well informed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will reiterate my comment on these types of projects. The regulatory pathway established by the fda for these types of products is woefully inadequate and they are very very hard to properly validate.

I think any application of deep convolutional neural networks should be alongside a radiologist. If we speed up scans and make up for it with convnets it is very hard (practically speaking: impossible) to properly validate that they will not hallucinate away rare abnormalities. It will also be impossible for radiologists your spot errors like this in the wild because of the reduction in quality of the scan.

What happens when the scanners change their behavior in some subtle way that is unaccounted for by FastMRI? It could start erasing a ton of subtle abnormalities and this would not be possible to check for since the original scan will be lower quality.

<comment><USER6> most places call this type of thing "clinical decision support". nobody in their right mind wants to remove the human doctors from the process... yet.

<comment><USER5> And yet, for the reasons I stated, this is exactly what FastMRI aims to do. Speed up the scan. There will be no way for Radiologists to oversee the reconstruction and make sure subtle abnormalities are preserved.

<comment><USER7> Ideally a proper DNN reconstruction would learn the mapping from the raw-space to image-space. See, for example: [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25988](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25988) .

There is just too much redundancy in MRI data, and initiatives such as FastMRI are fundamental for us to learn what the limits are of feasible acceleration. Also, some MRI scans take forever and cannot be used in vulnerable populations because of, e.g., breath holds, the need to stand still, etc. The image quality, perhaps counter-intuitively, in some situations improves with acceleration.

<comment><USER5> Can you explain why mapping from raw space gets rid of any of the concerns I raised?

It's interesting research for sure. I hope it stays far away from actual clinical use for a while, for the reasons I highlighted. I'd like to see convnets work alongside radiologists for a while and prove robustness to dcanner changes in the wild before we start shoving them deep in the stack where radiologists can't review what's happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Current MR physicist / data scientist here. There seems to be a lot of misapprehension in this thread.

First, this work is about taking data in the sensor domain ("k-space") and reconstructing it into an image. Doing this with partial k-space data and hand-coded heuristics is a _completely standard_ part of the MRI research agenda and has been for quite some time. See, for example, [http://mriquestions.com/k-space- trajectories.html](http://mriquestions.com/k-space-trajectories.html). Further, several of these techniques have already made it into routine clinical work, and this acquisition-side stuff generally happens before the radiologist even sees the image (reliable acquisition is in the interaction of radiographer with the scanner manufacturer's software).

There's also various claims here that seem to imply learned reconstruction inherently implies the risk of hallucinations without recourse. Naturally, one should be careful about this, but it's just a matter of careful cross validation: hold out examples of abnormal anatomy for the test set. There's other ways to attack this problem too: training can be done partly or mostly on synthetic data because we have reasonably good forward models of the physics. In this case, one could choose a wide variety of arbitrary synthetic anatomies during training, to further ally the fear of always hallucinating the "typical human brain" from any scan.

Slow acquisition and image artifacts in MRI are a fact of life for people in the field and I believe there's huge scope for improvement if we had more intelligent reconstruction and acquisition. Ideally the reconstruction would feed dynamically back into the acquisition to gather more context as necessary; the MR machine is, after all, one giant programmable physics experiment. This is already done in a limited way, but in what I've seen it relies on a lot of hand-coded heuristics. And guess what's the logical step after hand-coded heuristics? Yes, learned models where you objectively optimize for a final result, rather than hand-coding based on a few examples.

Final note - publicly releasing human data is a massive effort in data cleaning and careful anonymization. Not to mention that the acquisition of each sample is extraordinarily expensive. So bravo to these guys for going to the effort.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a typical misapplication of machine learning. It's important to realize what information can possibly be learned by a trained network. In this case, the only thing that can be learned is which components of Fourier space can be ignored for a given imaging problem. Such a question is far more rationally addressed by a deterministic algorithm, if the goal is to speed up acquisition for any specific anatomy. But to generally assume that an imaging protocol can ignore parts of frequency/phase space without generating artifacts is not only wrong, but very dangerous for patients. I can easily play with Fourier space and generate the appearance of pathological conditions that don't exist -- or disappear ones that do! Not good!

<comment><USER10> If it is so easy, as you say, then if you can release examples where you do that using their training data, then you would probably get some acclaim, and I personally would applaud your effort.

<comment><USER9> I'll spend time on this if I can, but for the moment just imagine that in frequency space, where MRI acquisition occurs, all I need to do to blank out an imaging anomaly is discard spatial frequencies that correspond to the principal spatial frequencies of the anomaly. This is analogous to blurring your speech by notch filtering the principal frequencies of your voice. With appropriate filtering, I can make your voice nearly indistinct from background noise, so that it appears not be there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b As someone with an undiagnosed neurological illness, it would be fun if I could run my MRI backups through it.

<comment><USER11> I've been thinking about this type of use case recently. I'm curious, how many MRI scans do you have? How do you store and view them? Have you applied any computer vision techniques to them?

Thanks!

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Sorry for the delayed response. I have multiple MRIs of my brain and the entirety of my spine, most of them at 3T. I got them stored as ISO copies of the CD they made for me. I have no idea where to begin by applying computer vision. If you can point me in that direction, I would be happy to try.

EDIT: As for viewing, they come with a proprietary viewer loaded on the CD. I do have the ability to export them as JPG image stacks though.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the info! Regarding using computer vision, the question to ask is: what do you want to know about the content of your scans? For example, if you have multiple scans over time, do you want to see how the structures are changing? Or if it's just one or two points in time, do you want to know the names of the structures?

I've been working in medical imaging and deep learning for years, and have recently become disillusioned by the technology's potential to disrupt the radiology industry. But I wonder if there aren't alternative use cases for e.g. educational purposes. I'd love to know more about what you wish you could do or know! Please feel free to email me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fantastic!! Accelerating MRI with ML is an idea I've had in my little idea book for years and I'm delighted to see it getting some mainstream attention!

It's a serious technical challenge but the benefits could be enormous.

IIRC the vast majority of the cost of an MRI is the amortized cost of the imager, so faster scans should hopefully directly reduce the cost to patients, perhaps to the point that regular full-body MRI scans for preventative healthcare could be feasible.

<comment><USER13> > perhaps to the point that regular full-body MRI scans for preventative > healthcare could be feasible.

This is an interesting problem. Speaking with a number of physicians among the family, there's a perspective that having a population performing all these tests can possibly cause more problems than they solve. If the goal is to holistically make a person healthy and happy, discovering diagnoses that have no practical effects on someone's well-being can result in reducing their well-being just by knowing about it. Humans are notoriously bad this way. Tell someone their liver is somewhat different from an average adult liver and they'll start assigning symptoms to it.

<comment><USER12> I don't know, that line of thought seems myopic to me.

I'm more thinking, wow you could really do a lot in the way of automated diagnoses if you had longitudinal data sets like that.

<comment><USER13> Yeah. Certainly not saying it's an open and shut case on the right way to test. Obviously we do whole-population preventative medicine for many things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would they be filling in missing data with AI? Would they be doing something similar to DeepFovea? If so, I would be concerned about accuracy.

[https://ai.facebook.com/blog/deepfovea-using-deep- learning-f...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/deepfovea-using-deep-learning-for- foveated-reconstruction-in-ar-vr/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this accessible only to people affiliated with some research institution as it seems[1]?

[1] [https://fastmri.med.nyu.edu/](https://fastmri.med.nyu.edu/)

<comment><USER16> No, it's available for all researchers, and you don't need to have a certain affiliation. Thanks!

<comment><USER17> All 'researchers' or everyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> More details here: [https://fastmri.med.nyu.edu/](https://fastmri.med.nyu.edu/)

<comment><USER17> This was a very simple question and instead of answering it directly you linked a page with 2000 words of disclaimers and license agreements.

<comment><USER18> From TFA: "The application must include the investigator's institutional affiliation and the proposed uses of the data. NYU fastMRI data may be used for internal research or educational purposes only as described in the data use agreement and may not be redistributed in any way without prior permission."

Take 10s to read yourself instead of complaining about others not reading for you. It's at the top of the page currently, under a heading, "Apply for Access".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Huh, I was part of a study during my brain MRIs at NYU Lagone. I wonder if my brain is in there.

</comment><comment> d-d ... are these people aware these images of their bodies are publicly available?

</comment><comment><USER20> Was this at NEURIPS?

</comment><comment><USER21> Get ready to learn to code diagnostic radiologists.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get high paying (eg. $40 per hour or more) software projects? - <AUTHOR> Our company does software development projects (mostly .NET and Magento) in the range of $20 - $25 per hour. We would like to get into areas where client is willing to pay more and move up the value chain. Kindly help and suggest which are those areas and how to get projects in them. <comment><USER2> Work locally.</comment>


Moving data into Amazon's cloud is easy—getting it out, not so much  - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/moving-data-into-amazons-cloud-is-easygetting-it-out-not-so-much.ars

<comment><USER2> From the title I was expecting something nefarious on Amazon's part, which is at odds with the content of the article.

The core of which seems to be that Amazon has higher write speeds compared to other cloud storage providers, so all else being equal it takes longer to move information out of their system than into it because the other providers can't handle the speed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Total linkbait title. There's nothing wrong with getting the data out of Amazon, it's writing it to other cloud providers that's the problem. If you just want to access the data or move it to your own datacenter presumably you will only be limited by your own bandwidth. There's no artificial limitations being imposed by Amazon here...</comment>


Show HN: Wipes – pipe stdin to your browser over websockets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apg/wipes

<comment><USER2> I did something related, but by running a command repeatedly like Unix watch(1): [https://github.com/jzwinck/wswatch](https://github.com/jzwinck/wswatch)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice project. How does buffering work? Does it queue input lines until a browser connects to the websocket server? If multiple browsers are connected, will it broadcast all stdin lines to all connections?

It's not clear to me from the README whether I need to write my own HTML/JS to consume the websockets data. Does it maybe serve a minimal HTML page by default?

As feedback, I agree with other commenters that it would be better to make file serving an explicit option instead of default enabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> It throws away the data if there are no consumers. This probably isn't the best idea, but it's simplest. I'll think a bit about alternatives.

And,at this point you need to write your own consumer. The project started because I want to do some real-time visualization from a program written in C. There's a switch which turns on verbose metrics which I can then pipe to wipes.

<comment><USER3> Got it. You mind find that wipes would be more similar to other tools that read from STDIN (cat, tail, etc.) if it implements "back pressure" by not reading from STDIN until it has an output to write to. To the user it would appear that wipes is blocking on receiving a websocket connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I like it serving files from the current directory by default - maybe with an extra flag instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't meant to be a tool for production usage. It's meant to be a quick "I need to pipe this data into the browser quick for testing / visualization."

Though, I am curious -- why do you dislike "." by default?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am sure I saw similar tool months ago on HN. Someone commented that it looks like inetd in disguise.

<comment><AUTHOR> You probably mean websocketd? Yes, this is really quite similar, but also much simpler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Show HN: Wipes – pipe sdtin to your browser over websockets

"sdtin" should be "stdin"

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Thanks moderators!</comment></comment>


Coral reefs operate free-market economy: fish cleaning stations - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2208 <comment><USER2> Interesting article, but if the timestamp is to be believed I wouldn't call it new: _09:15 28 April 2002_

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, the article is not new. I was just looking for something free on the web, and in English. A new article on this has just appeared in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 30 December 2007, economy section. There it says also that fish whose territory is so small that they can't choose between stations have been shown to get worse service and longer queues.</comment></comment>


Amazon.co.uk and .de are down - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/12/12/amazon-co-uk-and-de-are-down-is-anonymous-to-blame/ It appears that the UK domain for online retailer Amazon is down. With reports all over Twitter and confirmed by TNW personally, the site does not appear to be responding regardless of the location from which you're trying to access it. <comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997973>

Interesting watching everyone immediately crediting 'Anonymous'/Operation Payback for this one...

<comment><USER3> Anon is somewhat taking credit: <http://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/14068450506833922>

<comment><USER2> 'Sorry, that page doesn't exist!'?

<comment><USER3> Sorry. Anon pulled it, then posted another statement saying that they couldn't confirm for fear of losing their accounts again. Screenshot of the original tweet in the post on TNW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AWS's services in Europe (Dublin, Ireland) seem to be having latency problems:

<http://status.aws.amazon.com/#EU_block>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know how much traffic Anons botnets could generate? Surely it would be nowhere near enough to have any kind of impact on Amazon's cloud infrastructure..

Must be because of something else such as human error and just really bad timing?

<comment><USER5> Probably just a BGP thing. The Internet is practically duct-taped together, sometimes the glue gets a little soft.

<comment><USER6> So far, I have seen no evidence for a 'BGP thing'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Christmass shopping has begun in earnest?

</comment><comment><USER8> All European sites now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not down from Germany.

<comment><USER2> It's just come back up.</comment></comment>


Mozilla's Webian Shell interface will cloak your OS in a browser (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/06/mozillas-webian-shell-interface-will-cloak-your-os-in-a-browser/ <comment><USER2> -10 points to Engadget for inaccuracy. This is a side project of a guy who uses Mozilla stuff, and not an official Mozilla project. It is, however, based on Mozilla Chromeless.

"The Webian project is a not-for-profit venture founded by Ben Francis. Ben is a full time software engineer at a startup in Cambridge (England)."

"...when Mozilla Chromeless came along it was suddenly possible to rapidly develop a working prototype using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As a member of the wider Mozilla community this was an opportunity I couldn't resist..."

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, a whole web based OS I understand, and maybe I even get using html5/js to do a few things in an OS interface -- though I'd personally not go that route myself. This though is completely confusing to me. Perhaps the article and video provide a poor explanation, but it seems like I can already achieve the main advantages of this experiment by just pressing F11?

I get Chrome OS because it's different and gives a certain set of people what might actually be of some use to them (ie, all data online, you're always in sync, etc). I get enhancing desktop UIs with the things that worked well on the web -- but to start throwing out almost everything that evolved on the desktop just to get a webby feel? Not sure what problem that tries to solve.

The most interesting thing though is that after years of hearing that the future of the desktop will be web based, the idea finally seems to have picked up.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm still a few years away from using "web apps" as first class programs. Google's home page takes 3 seconds to load here (Opera, 3 Mb/s, Brazil) and it's the fastest website I use. To me, they are simply unusable as a first class program.

</comment><comment><USER5> This needs a framework to write distributed / sync based offline applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> I already use tmux and vim for all my development needs. So, once I'll be able to use a "temrinal" in a browser, I'll easily be able to switch to a desktop- less PC.</comment>


Ask HN: Jenkins vs. Spinnaker? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,<p>Anyone used Spinakker in production? How is it going compare to Jenkins? What's the benefit and drawback? <comment><USER2> We've helped a number of companies get Spinnaker working. Happy to chat w/ you, just email firstname.lastname@example.com (and reference this YC post to ensure it gets routed correctly).

Here are some resources that might be helpful:

[http://blog.armory.io/how-spinnaker-fits-into-the- continuous...](http://blog.armory.io/how-spinnaker-fits-into-the-continuous- delivery-puzzle/)

[http://blog.armory.io/spinnaker-is-not-a-build-server-and- ot...](http://blog.armory.io/spinnaker-is-not-a-build-server-and-other- misconceptions/)

[http://docs.armory.io/](http://docs.armory.io/)

Hope that helps!</comment>


U.S. records 75 new measles cases, 9.8% increase, as outbreak grows - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-measles/u-s-records-75-new-measles-cases-9-8-increase-as-outbreak-grows-idUSKCN1SJ1EP <comment><USER2> For those wondering about the 9.8% stat:

There were 75 cases of measles reported in the US last week, bringing the total in 2019 to 839 [1]. 75 / (839-75) = 9.8%.

A more useful statistic is that the WHO reported earlier this year that measles are up 300% from this time in 2018.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases- outbreaks.html](https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> When I read most HN threads, whether about new technologies, new businesses, or new societal trends, the stories and comments make me think that William Gibson had it right when he uttered his famous quote: _" The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."_[a]

On the other hand, this post about the recent outbreak of a long-defeated disease due to an anti-vaccination movement whose pseudo-intellectual roots trace back the 1700's[b], makes me think of a different quote: _" The past is never dead. It's not even past"_ \- William Faulkner[c]

\---

[a] [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson)

[b] The anti-vaccination movement has its roots in the 18th century: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/)

[c] [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12124-the-past-is-never- dea...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12124-the-past-is-never-dead-it-s- not-even-past)

</comment><comment><USER4> For those interested researching the reported adverse reactions: I created a repo with the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) dataset and some tool for visualizing with Elasticsearch and Grafana.

You can see that that the MMR/MMRV is not as dangerous as many of the other vaccinations, but there are risks.

[https://github.com/yehosef/vaers](https://github.com/yehosef/vaers)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing this and creating it, I am quite interested to explore and see how many assumptions or (un)commonly held positions are backed by the (available) data.

<comment><USER4> Thanks - I just put up site vizvax.com so people can play with these visualizations. I'd be interested in feedback. One think I didn't set up yet with the reverse proxy is seeing the raw document from Elasticsearch.

I'm planning to make a screencast to explain how to use the searches for people that are not familiar with the data, Elasticsearch or Grafana

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank god it's still that low (< 1000 people it looks like). And I love that we have so much data available these days.

Back when I was really suffering due to an autoimmune condition, I found that following various data-fed sources, for example one of the U.S. Navy's Twitter accounts which shared data on sick sailors, helped me make some pretty educated guesses as to what the sickness-of-the-month was. Edit: Found it-- example at [0].

Being a part of the autoimmune community, I can also see why there's so much push-back against vaccines. These people (that is, those who object due to vaccine fears) aren't referential thinkers who are comfortable with broad social measurement (objective science). They are often own-ideas driven, analytical people (NIH, as we say in tech) who have yet to cross the subject- object gap in their own methodology, but they have also typically made some notable personal progress as self-reported.

The sad part is that people like this don't realize that decision-making regarding their children is exactly why & where you'd want to apply more objective thinking ("they are not me" is where social measurement / objective science can shine some light).

Anyway, were I to try to combat this kind of thinking, I wouldn't do it via emphasis on science. These are people who are conditioned to batten down the hatches when confronted by science. I'd do it via social trend science, by testing words, phrases, personalities and social clearinghouses (be it Youtube channels, or whatever) that show possible social traction. Fringe social groups are notoriously weak against such "social technologies," which can quickly cause fracture. No numbers, no data, etc. Get that stuff out of here; this is the completely wrong psychological match for such an approach.

0\. [https://twitter.com/NH_RC/status/1112816699227635712](https://twitter.com/NH_RC/status/1112816699227635712)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is terrifying as a parent of an unvaccinated child.

She'll get her vaccine as soon as she can (starting at the 1 year checkup), but there are others out there that cannot get the vaccine for other medical reasons.

<comment><USER8> I know the feeling... The CDC already recommends getting an MMR shot at 6 months for babies that will be traveling abroad. Unfortunately the measles situation in the U.S. is now that of a third world country, so IMO it makes sense to go ahead and get the shot at six months, especially if you're in an area where there have been cases reported.

Unfortunately the effectiveness of a single dose of the vaccine at six months is only something like 50%, but it's better than nothing.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I've looked into the six-month option. At least some of those failures are thought to be due to Mom's antibodies — through breastfeeding — fighting the vaccine. So that's also a little bit of solace; we're not totally unprotected as long as she's breastfeeding.

We're also not in a hotbed, but it's really crazy how contagious measles is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't blame anti-vaxxers alone. My wife realized she didn't develop an immunity to measles after a recent test. She's had all her shots and verified with 2 sources.

</comment><comment><USER10> With the first new measles case it was an oo% increase! This current rate of increase is infinitely better. Good job everybody!

</comment><comment><USER11> To everyone reading this: If you know you haven't had a measles vaccine or you are not sure, please go see a doctor. It's an easy thing you can do to make us all safer.

Yeah, antivaxxers are annoying. But there's also a large number of people who weren't vaccinated for all kinds of reasons that just never cared.

<comment><USER12> You can also get the MMR vaccine at Walgreens for $99 in just a few minutes with no appointment and no prescription (some insurance may also cover all or part of it, and if you have an FSA, you can also use your FSA card).

Most pharmacy chains have it in stock and offer it to walk-in patients. If you are sure you've never had any MMR vaccine at all, they may recommend two shots, separated in time.

<comment><USER13> Is there any danger in getting re-vaccinated if you're not 100% sure you've already been vaccinated?

<comment><USER12> I was sure of my childhood vaccination history and not sure whether I had received an adult booster shot or not. The pharmacist was happy to give me the shot. My doctor subsequently said that medical advice about this might depend on one's particular situation (e.g. travel plans), since different people's risk of either acquiring or spreading measles could vary.

Subsequent shots don't _decrease_ one's immunity, but they can still produce the same side effects as the initial vaccination, which are usually mild. For example, I experienced mild arm soreness for four to five days, which is the most common MMR side effect.

Feel free to ask your own doctor or pharmacist! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If only there was some kind of medicine that could prevent this. Some one shot injection or something?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, even if it had like a 1 in 10000 rate of nasty side effects, it would still be a lot less risky than the measles.

<comment><USER16> Not _yet_. What's the US population? 300 million, say, roughly? 1 in 10000 rate of nasty side effects is 30,000 people. The measles outbreak isn't that big... yet. If 75 cases is 9.8%, then the outbreak is about 750 people... so far.

[Edit: The thing is (as most people here probably know), you can (mostly) safely be unvaccinated if everyone else _is_ vaccinated, because you probably won't ever be exposed. But when other people also aren't vaccinated, it's more risky.]

<comment><USER17> In EU on medical leaflets risk for various side effects of drug is in form 1 in 10^N cases where N varies.

US leaflets contain useless word descriptions.

Hint: After reading EU style leaflet you know 1 in 10000 rate is very high for nasty side effect. Rare is something like 1 in 1000000

<comment><USER16> Hey, I didn't make that number up - Confusion did. I just used his/her number to show that his/her conclusions didn't yet follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related: very informative video from Kurzgesagt: "The Side Effects of Vaccines - How High is the Risk?" [1]

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU)

<comment><USER19> This is an unhelpful contribution to the narrative that vaccines are unsafe. Consumers who don't have time or medical training shouldn't feel uneasy about vaccination except in unlikely circumstances (in which case they're much better off getting advice from doctors and not YouTube), and seeing a video called "How High is the Risk?" adds to that uneasiness in ways that directly harm public health.

EDIT: See comment below. As the video intends, I mistook it to be anti- vaccination propaganda, when it's the opposite. I have minor concerns about non-forthright information campaigns, but apologize for jumping the gun.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I get what you mean. Did you watch the video? Obviously the title was chosen deliberately to grab attention from people that believe in the antivax conspiracy.

<comment><USER19> I hadn't: I jumped the gun thinking that you were sharing 10 minutes of anti- vaccination propaganda, and offering up ammunition for people who think "Well those guys over there say otherwise, so who knows?" My apologies for that.

My point was that planting the poison pill of "Are vaccines dangerous?" is itself dangerous, and despite the video's good intentions might still apply here.

As a popular video, it'll appear in sidebars more than it'll be watched. I worry that in that capacity, it'll maybe snare a bunch of no-vaccination believers in the honeypot, but will plant the safety question into the minds of many more.

My concern is tempered by the understanding that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation knows what it's doing here, but the choice to make an informative campaign clandestine strikes me as an odd one with potential negative side effects.

<comment><USER12> Kurzgesagt is a channel that makes engaging explainer videos about all sorts of topics. It is run by a design consultancy in Germany. Most of the videos on the channel are not on topics chosen by sponsors, but a few are.

In an article at

[https://medium.com/@Kurzgesagt/kurzgesagt-sponsorships-on- yo...](https://medium.com/@Kurzgesagt/kurzgesagt-sponsorships-on- youtube-3121a45b0fe9)

Philipp Dettmer, the founder of the channel, explains that he insists on editorial independence when accepting sponsorships to create videos on specific topics (including in this case, with the Gates sponsorship). This seems to suggest that the Gates Foundation did _not_ choose how the video would be titled or promoted on YouTube, just that it entered into an agreement that it would sponsor the creation of an engaging video about vaccine risks and benefits.

I don't know if anyone at the Gates Foundation specifically thought about the question of whether simply mentioning this topic in a certain way would encourage some viewers to think that the risks were worse than they are. Even if so, it's not clear that they would have a veto according to their sponsorship agreement.

(The article also indicates that people can also hire the team behind Kurzgesagt to make videos to a customer's specifications. In this case, those videos don't appear on the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see a fair number of people blame the anti-vaxxers for the current outbreak, but is that really the case? It could also be due to immigration or other sources of foreign contact, but I don't see anyone considering that angle.

<comment><USER20> Wow you're right, I can't believe no one ever thought to look at who the measles victims are or where they came from. We need to get you on the phone to the CDC right away so that you can tell them all about your novel and important ideas!

<comment><USER10> An interesting study would be to take the population of unvaccinated and count how many are that way due to antivax ideology and how many due to some other cause.

Furthermore, it'd be interesting to examine the measles cases and see what population they come from.

I see an article castigate the antivaxxers and then say most measles occur among unvaccinated populations. Is the article saying the two populations are the same? No solid link is offered, yet the two groups are mentioned together leading a non-careful reader to conclude the antivaxxers are to blame.

<comment><USER7> It is, as with many things, a mix of all things. But the decrease in vaccination rates is _definitely_ a huge contributing factor in many of the outbreaks. See, e.g.,

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6122668/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "A vocal fringe of U.S. parents oppose the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, believing, contrary to scientific consensus, that it can cause autism."

No amount of scientific evidence can ever prove that MMR can't cause autism, only that it isn't responsible for the autism epidemic. One wonders whether Reuters is purposely trying to give credibility to the anti-vaxx movement.

<comment><USER13> > autism epidemic

Is it actually an _epidemic_? Everything I've read on the "rise" in autism cases suggests it has a lot more to do with more accurate diagnoses (i.e. autism would previously be entirely undiagnosed, or would be diagnosed as some other disorder).

<comment><USER21> I mostly just phrased it that way because if you're going to argue that vaccines are responsible for an autism epidemic than that pre-supposes that there is an epidemic. I've read the same things, but I don't really follow the issue especially closely enough to have any strong opinions on the issue.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to go from (software) consulting to building your own product? - <AUTHOR> What's been your experience? Is it feasible? What to keep in mind and what are some of the obvious pitfalls? <comment><USER2> Survivorship bias: Never underestimate how difficult it is to succeed.

Egocentric bias: Don't overestimate the value people are going to get from your product, no matter how useful it seems from your point of view.</comment>