skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Paying international employees in USD
(I am a HN regular using a temp username so as not to reveal employee info.)

My US (tech) company has a South American employee who is suffering from a weakening of their local currency. We pay this person in their currency using an exchange rate from approximately a year ago. S/he asked me (the manager) if there is anything we can do to help with the diminished purchasing power that has resulted.

We could adjust to exchange rate changes, but there are problems with this, not least that the exchange rate will continue to change, and changes might or might not be in the employee’s favor in the future. We don’t want currency markets to change their compensation all the time.

An alternative would be to pay them in USD. My question for HN is: what are the best mechanisms for this, and what are the legalities?

Pointers and personal experiences are welcome. I will not interpret answers as legal advice. Thanks.
Here's an alternative editor I wrote that also supports input using raw HTML http://bevacqua.github.io/woofmark/
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Woofmark: Markdown, HTML, and WYSIWYG Editor
Yep, that's what I meant. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word annoying as there's no way for the app to know that and it's simply working as intended.
Rate Limiting in Go and JavaScript
This somehow always ends up popping up every couple of years, never ceases to astound me...
The problem with that, is they wind up cutting education funding from other sources in favor of lottery funding. That said, funding isn't the biggest problem in education. The bigger issues are teacher pay vs. other costs don't encourage those who would be better teachers.

Just because someone dreams of working with kids, or being a vet doesn't mean they have the natural skills needed to do so, or that the training they receive is appropriate for the task. Too much of this is driven by emotions over statistics and policies backed by those emotionally/politically driven ties.

The U.S. already spends more per student than most other countries do, and we're behind many of them. This isn't a money problem it's a political one. From the publishing companies to churches, the teacher's unions and everyone opposed and in between. There is far too much politics in and out of the classroom. Kids need to learn that life isn't fair, not everyone wins, and that sometimes you will lose. That doesn't mean you give up and stop trying.
Does this bring in all of the MSIL for any .NET stdlib modules you happen to link in as well, or is there a dead-code elimination phase pruning them down to just what you use?
I gotta wonder: given that a startup is probably the most emotionally demanding professional activity you can engage in if you're stable, is it really a good idea to encourage mentally ill shut-ins to found one?
the scrolling works fine for me in Firefox 40.0.3 ... might be the extensions that I use that fixed it... NoScript, Adblock Plus or Privacy Badger
Thank you.

Considering this (and my experience in the demo), this is probably not the nice tool I was imagining.
Go is even or ahead of Java in most of the benchmarks game
Neat. I keep hoping for one of these to evolve into a more modern replacement for Silverlight or WPF. There's a lot to like about the .net ecosystem and having a plugin-less deployment story for it would be great.
Sure, it's survivor bias for people whom aren't willing to put in the schlepping and defer gratification that other people are willing to do. It's not survivor bias for everyone in all circumstances, by proof that I have friends that exited to an enterprise brand everyone knows on Sand Hill Rd. for 8 figures. There is no a 100% formula, but the timing, team dynamic, execution, business model/idea and connections/successes can put one in a far better position than say some enterprise manager wantrepreneur falling in love with their "one great idea."

Honestly, I'm a junior wantrepreneur apprentice too until getting to balancesheet positive at least into the six-seven figure range.
Regarding your third to last paragraph. This paper is worth looking at (probably the most recent treatment of deferred reference counting): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/papers/rcix-oopsla-2....
Get EMF Image Content from OneNote Document, Improved Performance of PDF Export
Show HN: Meepi – convert fleeting visitors into customers
https://greenlane.io/
Would anyone be kind enough to explain what exactly I'm looking at here? I'm very familiar with C# but only have a very simple understanding of the idea behind WebAssembly.
It looks like at the moment it doesn't support the stdlib at all. Early early prototype.
I don't understand some of your claims:

> They convert 1.1-1.3 lbs of feed to 1 lbs of protein in 9 months

They eat 1.1--1.3 lbs of food each month during 9 months, that is 9x1.1 -- 9x1.3 = 9.9 -- 11.7 lbs in total and produce 1 lbs of protein? Or the eat in total only 1.1--1.3 lb of food during the 9 months an produce 1 lbs of protein?

> But here's the real kicker--by providing the nitrogen that crops need

The fishes don't fixate nitrogen. They can "free" some nitrogen compounds in their food, but the nitrogen compounds have to come from somewhere. IIRC only some bacteria can fixate nitrogen naturally, (i.e. transform some unuseful nitrogen from the air into useful nitrogen compounds, that may be used to build proteins). Some plants, like soy, are good host for these bacteria, but I never heard that fishes have a similar symbiotic relation.
You're right, whoops. I thought that was the search which included this paper near the top of the list, but I failed to double-check:

Quantum network theory of computing with respect to entangled flux qubits and external perturbation

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jap/113/15/10.1...
From the title, I assumed this was going to be yet another attempt at making Python multithreaded. Apparently that's way off. What's the significance of "Atomic" in the title?
I'm glad I could, uh, help.
I buy one a few times a month for the same reason.. only ever one ticket on a given drawing, and usually when the jackpot is over 100 million.
Whoa, that's freaking awesome! Peaking at how Facebook is implementing some components should be fun.
That's very cool. Please repost it with the proper link later. I imagine more people will see it that way.
Building Python Modules with Go 1.5
I'm used to wander to totally unknown routes when I'm in a new city with some spare time. An app like this would be useful for me (if I had an internet connection and a smartphone, which are problems of second order), since sometimes my totally-random route-picking algorithm leads me to some ugly places.
No. Completely blocking legitimate ads and destroying any possible business model for the person with the content is the problem now.
The most interesting thing in this article was his mention of Elm: elm-lang.org

I'd never heard of it before but it looks pretty cool.
As someone who primarily works on iOS, I would have liked to see Apple's ARC mentioned. With the addition of weak pointers, I think it gives a good blend of performance (no GC) and low mental overhead. I think marking pointers strong or weak actually adds semantic meaning to the code.

But maybe that's just rationalization.
One of the things I wish browsers supported would be signed content... IE your CDN/distributed content doesn't need to be on HTTPS, just have a header with a payload signature against the HTTPS cert that the application host uses... I don't know why such a beast was never introduced into the browsers.

I also feel that it would be nice to see more p2p protocols especially regarding live chat, and other systems. I think having a self-discoverable alternative to IRC could be a pretty nice thing... of course eventually the bots would destroy it if it got popular.
"JavaScript Object Notation" ... it makes perfect sense for JSON numbers to match JS numbers, which is IEEE spec.
Transmedics’ Heart-In-a-Box Could Help with Organ Transplant List
Originality is a function of putting together old ideas in new ways or of having a completely new idea, however you distinguish between the two. Machiavelli was completely unaware of Chanakya. The paradigm in which he worked was the Mirror of Princes, which were not marked by Machiavelli's realism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrors_for_princes

Machiavelli's "The Prince" was a break from a tradition which assumed that what was moral for a ruler was what was moral for an individual, just at a larger scale. As manuals for statecraft, instructions for how to achieve the goals of state it is far superior to the works that preceded it in the Western European tradition.

If you want to read more Machiavelli after "The Prince" try the Discourses on Livy, often considered the greater work, and definitely closer to Machiavelli's own republican personal leanings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli#Disco...
How a Junior Developer Can Become a Better Programmer
In fact, it isn't. From a quick perusal of the github repo[1], it seems that the react devtools can mostly stand alone, and have wrapping shells that access the Chrome and Firefox APIs when necessary. Here's the plain shell: [2]. My understanding is that the GP was trying to convey this architectural flexibility while pointing out that the Chrome shell is more mature because it is the tool of choice for most devs at Facebook.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/react-devtools/
[2]: https://github.com/facebook/react-devtools/tree/master/shell...
The article was so calmly and with such a good description of risk that it actually felt weird to me. Its just so common to get stories so deeply committed to "If it saves just one child's life..." without considering the costs and risks of some proposed solution.
The original title is the one the author gave it. The HN guidelines ask you to not to change that unless it is linkbait or misleading.
People are working on it. The biggest challenge is that it isn't "let's reverse engineer this ARM blob"--they have to reverse engineer the entire (VC4) architecture, and write an assembler for it. Most people think of the rPi as an ARM board; it's more helpful to think of it as a VideoCore IV board with an ARM co-processor tacked on. The stock "boot blob" isn't just a boot blob--it's actually an entire OS (ThreadX, I believe) that's running on the VC4 GPU, in parallel with whatever OS you load on the ARM CPU. Of course, you wouldn't need to re-implement all of the OS, but it does make reverse-engineering harder.

The people working on this like to hang out at #raspberrypi-internals on Freenode.

(Disclaimer: the last I looked into this was in January, before the Raspberry Pi 2 came out)
The Tesla Model X Does 0 to 60 MPH in 3.2 Seconds, Costs Over $100,000
There are others working on this now, here in San Francisco. I think it's the tip of the iceberg. The on-prem ISV market is fucking huge.
Ask HN: What will happen if Google shutdown?
Google has changed the world, but how badly is the world dependent on it? Would the world come to an end of Google didn't exist?
Amen. I was a new DBA at a company that used a DBMS which used extent based disk allocation with a default extent size of 16kb. That was a problem on a busy table (which this was), because there was a finite limit to the number of extents that could allocated, but that limit was impossible to predict.

The proactive fix was simple. Backup, restore the table in a two hour outage window. I asked for 5 hours, as the previous DBA never tested a restore. "Unacceptable", said the SVP.

Fast forward two weeks. We hit the limit, and the entire company is essentially down. Between lost revenue, SLA fines and payroll, they were losing something like $5k/minute. Recovery at this point required 30 hours of full database restore, including journal recoveries from slooooow DAT tapes.

There were three of us, everyone stayed calm, provided regular updates and handled a few hours of direct observation by the CEO and a board member for a few hours.
I'm sure people have (tried to), but the problem is that, possible legal issues aside, the RPi is not a relatively standard and widespread system like the PC and Broadcom have not released much in the way of documentation. There's so much undocumented, and not enough people willing to go and analyse it all (unlike with the PC).

Although PCs are becoming more closed and blobby with each new generation, the legacy of backwards-compatibility means that a lot of things still work like they used to - in the days when documentation was far more open. IBM released the PC with full schematics and source code for the BIOS. The RPi was released with nothing more than its software and a few very incomplete datasheets.
I am a remote employee based in Brazil and I receive payments in USD. In South America, inflation is usually significant and payments in local currency are increased regularly to stay at the same actual value. I think that paying the employee in dollars is fair because it is a fixed expense for the company and preserves the buying power i.e. real value for the employee. It is usually as simple as a SWIFT transfer. The local receiving bank will do the conversion according to the current exchange rates and following regulations. Of course the particulars vary according to the country. It's true that there may be fluctuations but in the long run exchange rates will reflect the actual value in the local currency and keeping the rate frozen for a year will be like paying an ever diminishing compensation.
The Smoking Gene
That's actually been discussed quite a lot. However, it shares the "request privacy problem" that I talked about in the blog entry; the mere fact that you're requesting information -- even if it's public -- is sometimes sensitive information.

Keep in mind that the determination of its sensitivity is often highly contextual; e.g., something that's not a problem in your country may be illegal elsewhere, or someone in a different situation to you may feel differently about how their request stream should be treated.
There is only partial agreement on these results. For a bit more, see: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6246/354.summary?sid=c...
This is exciting stuff for c# devs. I dream of writing isomorphic web apps in c#.

Is there a runtime environment for executing wasm available yet?
These Videos of Ships Going Through Storms Will Turn You into a Landlubber
It is, at least the way the OP put it. I was pointing out the absurdity of saying something A isn't specifically built on B, then immediately acknowledging that A is in fact built on B.

But I'm happy to hear the original statement isn't totally accurate.
Exactly.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node189.html

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html
It's a shame you were downvoted, I enjoy technical discussions here. Can you elaborate why you think React's approach is bad?
No.

But there seems to be some similarities. Smalltalk was implemented on the 432, and this feels heavily influenced, but I don't think there was an implementation in 1981.

Edit: added information.
Porting Linux to a new processor architecture, Part 1
The Brand Colour Swap 2: What's in a Colour?
Somewhat. Those are/were actual email addresses. It's just another kind of email (UUCP/Usenet instead of SMTP):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing
Here's the thing that never seems to get mentioned in these stories. Aren't almost all yellow cab drivers contractors? And hasn't it been that way for decades? Isn't it kind of weird that Uber comes along and all of a sudden the rules (might) change?
I thought the USA outspending the USSR, forcing resource exhaustion is what broke communism.

No, the problem was that without a market to provide prices, it was impossible to sensibly allocate resources (capital, labour).

It was possibly exacerbated by military competition with the USA, but it was inevitable for sound economic reasons.

Communism is a bad idea in theory as well as in practise.

If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM's watson providing clinical expertise instead of doctors, etc, you could provide socialism without taking from people (because labor no longer has value compared to software and automation).

Leaving aside the aforementioned calculation problem, no, you still have to take from people. Watson, electric vehicles, etc. don't (yet!) build and run themselves autonomously.

It'd be nice to think that you'd have to take less, as time goes on. But that's not proved true either; expenditure on socialist programs has increased over time, even as technology works to decrease the actual cost of providing goods and services.

Again, that's to be expected. If you give people the ability to vote themselves other peoples money, by and large, they'll do it.
The ml prototype in the draft specification repository (https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/tree/master/ml-proto) is the closest thing at present. ilwasm targets that presently.
It's solvable if you remove ideology from loaded terms like communism, capitalism, socialism, etc. America certainly is not a pure capital system, it's a mix of regulations and financial forces and incentives.

Assuming unemployment will increase as production becomes more efficient across a wide variety of industries, I would not be surprised to see expanded forms of segregated economic systems implemented, similar to electronic food stamp type systems, maybe for basic income. Credit card data along with other sources of resource consumption records would easily make forms of central planning easier. To some extent, think tanks and hedge funds likely are already attempting to predict resource allocation but unfortunately it seems someone has come to the conclusion that frozen yogurt facilities should be in high demand rather than education or housing.

I imagine China is making somewhat of an attempt at centrally planned economic calculation.
Another possibly apocryphal case of linguistic collisions resulting in governmental interest: When the MIT Media Lab started doing work on intelligent kitchen counters, they found that a lot of shadowy government agencies wanted to talk to them about their research into "counter intelligence".
They seem OK with BIOS, Intel microcode and other firmware on amd64 though.
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It's not asking for access to the system keychain. No, those aren't the automated update checks because I already dealt with those. Yes, I'm treating it like a hostile app - it's an app I didn't write, has recent history of sneaking in sneaky things, ignores the settings I've chosen, and repeatedly phones home even though I've disabled every single available setting that would need to do anything other than get me the webpage I ask for. My evaluation is based on those reasons alone, not your straw man.

It has a better version of Flash, that's the only reason I keep it around.

You really don't know why anyone would turn of automatic updates? Really?
The WebAssembly design repo (https://github.com/WebAssembly/design) has a bunch of high and low level details. Essentially, wasm is a spec for an instruction set and runtime environment for native apps, and it's designed so that existing JavaScript runtimes can support it. This will eventually let it solve most of the problems currently solved by asm.js, NaCL, and (to a lesser degree) NPAPI.
ARC is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) kinds of GC out there. It's even the subject of one of the famous AI Koans:

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html (see "Moon instructs a student")

It stopped being considered proper garbage collection long ago because of the inability to collect circular references without help, which of course is the subject of that story. Apple is doing decently well with their version of it, but they're essentially reinventing ancient history.

Other GCs often have weak pointers too. You just use them less, because with a GC that can deal with circular references you don't need them nearly as often.
By "things" I assume you mean this stuff:

> ARPA: miw%uk.ac.man.cs.ux@cs.ucl.ac.uk
> USENET: mcvax!ukc!man.cs.ux!miw
> JANET: miw@uk.ac.man.cs.ux

miw is clearly Mario Wolczko's username.

Those will be his email address in different formats. The first would route email to him at miw@uk.ac.man.cs.ux using cs.ucl.ac.uk first as a gateway. The second address format is what's called a bang path, for UUCP email. The final one is a modern IETF standard email address. JANET is a network provider for UK academic institutions, similar to an ISP but structured differently.

You might find these references interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address
http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_network/x-087-2-mail.address....
http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ew_addr.htm
America certainly is not a pure capital system, it's a mix of regulations and financial forces and incentives.

Yes, sadly.

It's solvable if you remove ideology from loaded terms like communism, capitalism, socialism, etc.

No, it's not.

Claiming that you can solve the calculation problem by ignoring economic ideology is like claiming you can solve the travelling salesman problem in O(N) time, if only you'd remove the ideology of P/NP :)

This is a problem of mathematics, not of ideology.

I imagine China is making somewhat of an attempt at centrally planned economic calculation.

I hear that's working out really well for them lately.
elephants scale after all
Belly Flattening Exercise Email Scam – MailShark
Attributing bad economic decisions as inherently a fault of social service programs in the case of Greece or the USSR is a red herring.

Canada, Switzerland, Neatherlands, Norway seem to be successfully managed countries with large social service programs.
As does pinboard, in their dropdown.
True, but that seems too far away.
The solution on the solutions wiki solves the problem by building a heap data structure and then removing the k smallest elements. That seems to be correct. Why do you believe this to be incorrect?
I'm not ignoring them. I simply believe that the benefits to consumers drastically outweigh the harms to producers in every case I've ever seen. I've also observed that in practice that politicians basically don't care about consumers at all.

Also, the "plight" of Uber employees described in that article is that Uber gave them gigs better than their other alternatives, making them better off. But now they are trying to grab more money from Uber via politics. That's a flaw with the political system, not Uber.

Lastly, related to your suggestion that Uber should provide health insurance to drivers, read this essay. It's a wonderful observation about people's thought processes on such topics: http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
It took me some research to figure out too. I've read Bruce's free books, but never even heard of Atomic Scala. Following the link in the article it's apparently a paid book that only has some free sample portion about the Scala language. So I guess he's going to write a book about Python now. Really obtuse blog post, honestly.
I don't know what the answer is. I agree with most of what you say. I think we have to experiment with things that could work in theory and see what works in practice.