skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SSRN Top Papers of 2015
Show HN: Pleasant Fish, a platform to get feedback from co-workers
Even more dodgy: Dick Smith was promoting gift cards through December with a "bonus 10% value"[1]. No problem -- except in receivership, gift cards rank as unsecured creditors and already aren't being honoured (even though the stores are still operating atm). Management must have known that the banks were days away from pulling the plug yet worked to sucker the public into giving them further credit...

Never buy store gift cards for non-trivial amounts!

[1] https://twitter.com/ForagerFunds/status/684196897343471616 & https://twitter.com/ForagerFunds/status/684197213556191232
How does logging in with Twitter compare to Google and Facebook? Same experience?
Can someone help on this? https://github.com/matryer/bitbar/issues/64
Most interesting point for me: 80% of Americans wouldn't consider buying without a test drive - then Beepi added an inspection from a certified mechanic and a 10 day return policy. Suddenly test drives were no longer relevant.
Ideally, the scanning process would be asynchronous so that the program would remain responsive and you could retarget it within the app.
Faraday Future's FFZERO1 Concept Debut
There's some nice egg on my face. Don't mind me, I'll be eating crow over there in the corner.
My circle of friends are what you call professionals. They spend an awful lot of time at work, most of it on looking like they're working.

There's a fair number of jobs where the work itself is not hard or time consuming, but where a culture has grown where everyone needs to justify their position. This skew incentives; if you're a junior, you end up doing a bunch of little things that can pass as a laundry list of things someone had to do. If you're senior, you can gun for getting credit for grandiose sounding things like "strategy". Junior people end up in meetings all day, which if you're senior, you end up calling everyone into. Everyone sits around until late to demonstrate worth.

A lot of these jobs could be done remotely, on any schedule with a sensible number of hours, by just about anyone who can read and write. But because of the culture, they end up being done by the only people who have 100 hours a week, namely singles in their 20s who are just out of university, in some very expensive location. These people then have families to feed and get stuck propagating the same sick culture.

I don't see the law as providing a solution. Nobody enforces the 48 hour contract in Britain. When did you last hear about a City sweatshop being liberated by the police?

The way to change the culture is actually, believe it or not, startups. Yes working hours can be horrible in startups. But in an environment where a lot of firms are startups, there will be more variation in the working culture. Certain firms are already showing the way forward with flexible hours, remote work, and other family friendly practices, without compromising on quality.
Yeah, it's a shame that people don't value their privacy to some miniscule percentage of their expenses.
Agreed, they're not convenient for arbitrary attributes. I think where they shine are using a well defined preset of attributes to define structure.

Regarding the legacy thing, I think it's both. If you look at a lot of new tooling coming out that has to store UI state, people are still using XML
I signed up for a gym that apparently went on an initiative to improve its employee culture. The gym is really nice, not as good as Equinox in Palo Alto, but close enough. So one of the initiatives was to close the gym during holiday seasons so that staff could enjoy vacations schedules just like everyone else. Lo and behold, they closed the gym between December 20 and January 5th. Just when I was planning to catch up on things. They can count on my cancellation. What I'm saying - do you want to live in a world that is functioning 80% of time?
I see. Well, that sucks.
If this was my website. The software would reject too many submissions from the same website.
It's satirical but not funny. It's like Colbert imitating Bill O'Reilly perfectly without a hint of humor.
3 Books Programmers must read in 2016
What Is Docker? A Revolutionary Change in Cloud Computing
Any company that claims it can't find talent is artificially limiting their hiring pool, perhaps based on geographic constraints or the like. We're up to 422 Automatticians at the moment, and that's not really slowing down.
I think you're thinking of KingUser aka Kingo now and not SuperSU.
openssl is still the most popular one everywhere, it will probably be so for a long time.
Which cryptographic algorithms are included in Atom Electron and NW.js frameworks? Does the page [1] list all of them?

[1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/webcrypto
I'm reluctant to breathe a sigh of relief yet. I've been visiting the Steam Store a lot less since they opened the floodgates to any and every game under the sun as I believe discoverability is now horribly broken and the queue and recommendations features both fail to mitigate the issue.
Ok, I'll add to that a couple more details. Many ecommerce companies sell your purchase history to third parties as well, just like the credit card companies. This allows others to market to you more directly.

There is at least one company that has built technology that will monitor most all these purchases, monitor the IP's from them and the browser profile to identify a specific machine that you use. Then when you go to work, or are on your mobile they also will tag that traffic as you too. They have gotten so good they can serve ads that are relevant to your wife if she happens to be on your computer surfing the web for shoes say, but serve you different ads if you are on the same computer. They use data feeds from many sources, but ecommerce transactions, credit card transactions and companies like acxiom that let them match those with real people, incomes and household details make it very powerful.

In marketing we use Axiom and others a lot, their data used to be more vague and educated guesses about people. Now though, they have gotten it down pretty well, including how many animals, kids and your income/debt etc. They collect data from tax collectors offices, county records, city records, plus companies that will sell transaction data and other pieces so they can get a full picture. They of course work with Equifax, TransUnion etc too so they can build a whole economic profile on a person.

These companies are also what allow marketers to send you an email about their product/company after all you have done is visited their website. You don't have to enter anything or click on anything, but they will know who you are, who you work for and whether you fit their market profile in general. Poorly done it is extremely creepy, correctly done it can be an amazing conversion booster.
I think the rudeness is mostly a response to what seemed like dismissiveness with an apparent lack of personal experience. I had a hard time containing my incredulousness as well to be honest.

As far as official attention goes, I think Microsoft is right to stay focused. Third parties can and should feel free to build their own solutions though.
Japanese Scientists Get to Name Element 113 - Asia's First Update to the Table
Vala – Compiler for the GObject type system
While reading, I take a photo of a sentence I like. Later, I look at the photo and write down the part I liked: writing seems to ingrain the conclusion in my mind.
Why you should always under-promise and over-deliver
How to Rock Automated Tests as a QA?
To the best of my knowledge, everyone at Automattic goes through a trial process, even up to Director type positions -- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/director-of-business-wra...
I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)
Immortalizing those who appropriated other people's money

Prior to the Big Dig, Massachusetts had funded all of its interstate highways entirely with its own money while still sending it's share of gas tax money to the Feds. The CA/T project wasn't so much appropriating other people's money as much as getting back what it donate to other states to build their highways.

mass-transit-crippling debt

This is a valid point, but something needed to be done about the elevated artery and tearing it down and replacing it with light rail/commuter rail isn't a practical solution - if nothing else, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island would have been up in arms. If anything, blame the car-focused planning of the 1940s and 1950s for creating the mess in the first place.
The future of driverless cars isnt going to look like you think
I think they drunk too much of their own Kool-ade. Pixel sprites can make for a great, retro aesthetic, but using them for a full UI (including fonts) is too much, IMO. Watching the video, looking at the pictures; it's a lot of strain on the eyes due to the poor anti-aliasing and having to parse out a font I haven't used in decades.
Sounds like bad OPSec. If he used his normal account via Tor he identified himself towards Amazon. Amazon checking against a list of Tor exit nodes and warning customers is a good thing. I say that as a Tor lover.
Very clever approach, I like the simple text-based format.
Ah! Double Y axis charts!

I have been arguing with another founder about the double-y and how we should not use it.

What are peoples' response to the charts in this post?
Do you find them easy to read/helpful/giving good insight into the data?
Washington State dentists lobby is blocking potential source of low-cost care
MZZM – A new type of palindrome
The Hedgehog Dilemma – A Philosophical Metaphor for Human Intimacy
I think it's because the first argument tends to be named by the function itself. For example:

button.setTitle("Ham and Cheese", color: red)

Note that named parameters are still positional, they just have names too. Using _ doesn't get you positional parameters, you already had that, it just removes the name. (Exception: named parameters with default values can be reordered with other adjacent named parameters with default values. Why? I don't know.)

It is mildly annoying that you have to add an extra symbol to remove the name for parameters after the first one, but that's the language pushing its preferred style.

How does Scala handle all this?
Lyft’s vision for an on-demand network of self-driving cars
I agree, that really irritated me as well. I've even started to checkout Linux Mint to prepare myself on leaving windows behind completely.
I think it was fairly obvious from the start that it wasn't going to be a lasting trend. The games were obviously either uninspired clones or promising the impossible, and as soon as consumers caught on then the trend would die off. A lot of folks had to get burned to see that the fire was hot, but now they know, at least.
If your state can't sustain something with the federal government funding 90% of your expanded costs, then maybe you need to rethink the state you're in. It's no doubt, most likely in the "south" in some form, so I'm not surprised the government can't operate correctly.
IMHO, misleading others is wrong.
>That's a point well made, thank you for that. You are dead on, my life is 'simple' and I very much intend to keep it that way.

I've been thinking lately that simplifying my life is something I need to take on as an overarching philosophy. How much stress I'm under often feels correlated to the amount of complexity I'm dealing with. Thank you for reminding about it and affirming it.
Is this sarcasm?

My gym AND my favorite bar were closed all holiday.

Why would you be at either of those places? You should be enjoying yourself like everyone else during this time.
> Programmers are not usually held accountable for their own bugs, and I think that needs to change too.

I disagree. Bugs are created and will be created; it is up to the proper process to test the system and get rid of them. A bug that goes into production code is a collective failure. Why do you blame the programmer, but won't blame the tester, or the guy who designed the test, or the guy who designed whole workflow, or the architect who planned the system?
Cool, I'll definitely have to watch that. Thanks for the link!

Here's an alternate idea: rather than messing around with chemical explosives, how about filling the computer with poisonous snakes?
Of course, if you truly want to experience a European city, Quebec City is closer to the majority of the population of the United States than San Francisco is, as well as being much more European.
Or, for that matter, defense contractors.

I'm enjoying having a job where not only do I only have to work 8 hours a day, I'm not even allowed to work more if I wanted to.
Constant Variables in JavaScript, Or: When “const” Isn't Constant
Interesting how people editorialize the title.
> I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver).

As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him, and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" -- it may be take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally.

Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making sure we have the people we need.
Yes, I think that's been the primary issue behind the individual problems I've had with iOS so far. I've started asking other people how they do things to see where my thinking has been "trained" by using Android/Now.
>I have lived decades with a single payer system and left in part because of it.

No you didn't.
They take 30%.
i agree that working less should not always result in getting more done.

one of the potential benefits mentioned by the article is the climate change perspective. from that perspective, the whole point of working less is a mechanism to reduce the rate that stuff gets done.

the downsides of this would be:

1. less stuff gets done
2. on average people have less income
3. on average people have less income, and this hurts poor people far more than wealthy people
4. perhaps the economy doesn't grow, and we don't know how to run society that way

the upsides might be:

5. there's a reduction in negative side effects (both generation of pollution and rate of depletion of non-renewables and unsustainable depletion of renewables (fish stocks, timber, soil, ...))
6. we've got more time to do stuff that isn't work. hurray!
7. we've got more time to think carefully about what we're doing before we hit some hard limit
8. a lot of stuff that gets done is unhelpful, and now there's less of it
9. it's fairly obvious that we cannot keep growing the physical economy indefinitely, it might be a wise idea to try to learn how to run society in a different way before we're forced into collapse.

e.g. see the book "Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet" by Tim Jackson.
Right, when you add functionality, speed may go down. Okay. It's a worthwhile tradeoff, largely because very few websites are 'just a forum' anymore, and forums aren't distinct parts of a website, they're fully integrated into the design, and by having it be a plugin it can be more integrated throughout the full site, sharing data and widgets and such back and forth.
How to Drive 5 Times More Revenue with Data-Driven Content
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our Professional Feedback platform 'PleasantFish'.

PleasantFish is a platform to get ‘real’ feedback about how you perform at your workplace by your colleagues anonymously. Its your professional venue where not only you can get feedback on how you perform but also give honest feedback to your colleagues and peers so that they know how to perform better.

Often we see that some very talented people are unable to get the jobs they deserve due to a bad interview. On the other hand, companies sometimes hire people who appear to have a great profile but when they are actually hired they don’t turn to be exactly an A* performer.

At PleasantFish, we have tried to address this issue by allowing co-workers to give each other real feedback on their leadership, personality, professionalism and collaboration capabilities through a series of carefully selected questions.

Their profile represents the feedback they have obtained on these different qualities from their co-workers.
123 Ways to Get More Website Traffic: A Sumo-Sized Guide – SumoMe
Ask HN: What service would you recommend for managing monthly bills?
I recently had to be issued a new credit card because of some fraudulent charges. Now, I am going through the process of trying to remember all the places that I have my old card number saved and update with my new info.

I am particularly scattered with my financials as with "organization" in general. I'm the guy with 3 monitors that have 20 windows open and a browser with 10+ tabs at all time. I've always thought of that as my "in memory" bookmark cache.

That being said, I am interested in consolidating my bill paying activities and wanted to tap the collective wisdom of HN. I have a Mint account (I created out of curiosity) which I believe is a reasonable choice to use for reoccurring payments. I also could use my bank's software which I have to say has gotten pretty good with respect to other functionality. I would love to hear your experience and recommendations for these or other services which allow you to pay all (or as many as possible) bills from a single account.

Thanks!
Wonderful and scary. Inevitable I suppose.
No you don't, because hospitals intentionally obfuscate their pricing, and in many cases it's impossible for them to even tell you what your final bill would be for a procedure.

This is the source of the problem. There is no 'market' to speak of. There needs to be laws requiring hospitals to provide prices up front and honor them after the fact.
Makes sense. I can't quite figure out Let's Encrypt's (what an odd construction) policy on ultimately supporting wildcard certificates, but it sounds like they're generally opposed but not completely decided. Maybe they'll end up supporting it eventually.
I cut my hours down to around 35 a year ago. The reduced stress made me more productive than when I was working 40 hours. If I thought I could get away with chopping it down to 15 hours I would. I don't have a high enough workload to get into flow state most days. Chopping the week down would both make me more productive and allow me to enjoy work even more. But actual tasks don't come in very frequently.
That is a certain type of encoding. There is always overhead with this type. Columnar databases often provide lots of different encoding options (mixed in with compression) for these type of things. Products like Vertica can build the associativity for you ahead of time so you don't even have to maintain it.

Also, I believe you misunderstood how a columnar storage would work as your example would be for encoding values on a single row where I was referring to a column type.
Not if you explicitely configure the IList to be an instance of ArrayList and expect it to behave like an ArrayList. In that case, just taking an ArrayList is the more honest and more readable option.
The Myth of the Unlimited Vacation Policy
World’s First Automotive HMI Performance Analysis and Optimization Service
It does have features that MySQL and Postgres don't have, and it also is missing some features that those have. It's a different product.

Enterprises use it because they sign contracts with Microsoft to use all Microsoft products, and then they get support from Microsoft when things go wrong.

Furthermore, "no one ever got fired for hiring IBM" (not sure who said that originally). Basically, when you use a big-name, enterprise vendor and the software fails, it's their fault. When you use a (F)OSS solution and the software fails, it's your fault.

You can go on and on with technology that sucks that's still used by large enterprise for the same reason.
We should respect other people's time off if we want others to respect our time off. Is it really so hard to find some other way to exercise for a month?
Back in my day we called fix winged drones "model airplanes" /s
We tried to make it extensible enough to handle most use cases. Of course, neither things like GC don't solve every possible use case and I expect DotVVM to be much more "specialized". It is based on knockout and probably will not be very useful in application, where knockout would not be.

However if you would have troubles with something concrete don't mind to ask us. And have created a gitter room for chatting about it: https://gitter.im/riganti/dotvvm
Setting aside the feature comparison, there's the matter of inertia. There are tons of enterprise-quality software packages that already work happily with Microsoft SQL Server, and the cost of switching the application to use another database is too high. (Especially in enterprises where you may have dozens of different applications all talking to the same database simultaneously, and switching them all at the exact same time would be incredibly expensive.)
A serious question, though I assume that you were joking: is it more creepy to have your own actions tracked and accurately tied to you, or other people's actions tracked and inaccurately tied to you? Both sound pretty awful to me, but I think I'd prefer the former if those were the only two options.
SQL Server is about environment and ease of use. It has come a long way, and while I wouldn't use it for large scale projects anymore because of cost, it is more then capable of handling the task. SQL Server does have unique features to the Microsoft environment that make it easier to develop with and make it pretty damn robust too. There are too many things to list, but I think many choose it because it is an eco-system, you get SSRS for reporting, SSIS works well for basic to moderate ETL and the basic setup for a simple database a monkey could do. Not to mention the tooling is really pretty damn robust and easy to use (sometimes too easy IMO). Performance wise, it is good when designed for like any database, but if you do stupid things, or do things how you would do them in say Oracle, then you may be asking for trouble. But the same could be said for Postgres or MySQL etc.

Also, don't forget that many companies started with it as part of the Business Server suite and so all their software was built around it for little cost of the database itself. Then they grew into it.

I have spent a long time working in and around it, and respect it overall. Personally, I have moved a lot of clients out of SQL Server into more cost effective solutions when they have grown to a point that the licensing cost will outweigh the need to re-architect their system. That usually happens when they realize they need robust replication or a distributed solution which will take some architecture work anyway, and why pay MSFT huge licensing fees and architect for it when you can move to say Postgres and save the licensing fees, just as an example.
This reminds me of a project I started as a Religious Studies undergrad to try to use Python for scriptural analysis by analyzing word frequency. I abandoned it, however, after I tried running my program on several different translations (i.e. KJV, NRSV, etc.) and would get wildly different results. I realized that I couldn't rely on translations for accuracy and, being an undergrad, had no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to be able to rewrite the program for the respective original languages.

It bummed me that I abandoned it, largely because I think there's a void for CS-aided Humanities endeavors. I still consider myself a (mediocre) humanities academic, rather than a (horrible) CS/IT worker. I'm happy to see this article perhaps giving some hope to other majors that you don't need to go all-in on Comp-Sci to be able to use it.