skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Weekends are forced vacation too. It'd be great if companies adopted a "floating weekends" policy too, for the same reasons I outlined, but no company I've come across seems to do so, officially (you do see unofficially here and there bosses who recognize an employee working the weekend and allow them to take a couple days off later, and simply not reporting the vacation).

As to your first question, yes I've experienced both. Not month long shutdowns, but week long ones, but it's the same thing: if it's not convenient for you to take a vacation during that time, it's pretty much a waste and it sucks. If your spouse doesn't get 4 weeks off on August, are you going to go on a 4 week vacation then? Probably not. But then you'll resent the people who do actually take that 4 weeks off to go somewhere. It's bad for morale.

I agree that a solid 4 week vacation is enriching, but just declaring an arbitrary 4 week shutdown is a cop out. Fix the structural problems that require every one to be in the office at once, and then give everyone that much vacation time to be used when they like it. I'm not saying that this is easy to fix, but if you really believe in giving people time to have significantly different experiences in their lives, this is what you'd have to work at.
Lhan
lhan
Yeah, horrible advice. Paul McCartney would have to have released "Yesterday" with its original lyrics

"Scrambled Eggs / Oh, my baby how I love your legs"
It seems to me that for most jobs it isn't true that it's being done by slave labor. I know in China, factory jobs pay much more than the average job (2x-3x more). In India, call center workers are considered one of the upper rungs of society - they are thrilled to do it. This can hardly be called slave labor...
I was actually considering something similar. Instead, define "first world country" as a county who's median yearly pay is at least half of hours, recognizes basic human rights, recognizes democratic voting, and doesn't punish their population for speaking out against the government or any government sponsored religion (such as the Muslim religion in various middle eastern countries), and also recognizes the rights of women.

As in, fellow countries that believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Attempting to tariff any harder can have extremely adverse effects. The rich wish to remain rich at all costs.
Anecdotally: Mongo is great for developing small projects. It's fun to work with since it's got no defined structure, and will just save whatever you give it wherever you say to.

That flexibility comes back to haunt it in larger projects. A typo in a query can trigger a reindex of a huge collection, make moot GBs of index data, or invalidate other queries that work on the same collection. It also demands that the devs do lots of documentation on the data structures as you can't ask mongo to tell you it's schema, it's just a collection of documents.

And if you work with a loosely typed language, be sure to type your inserts as mongo is not a loosely typed datastore (coughPHPcough).

But for internal tools, and smaller projects, the speed of development is great.
The 3 C's of Modern Currency
Looks great. I love the subtle rainbow effect on the left side of the header. Those little things are what usually impresses me the most because they're so subtle I'm surprised anyone ever thought to do it.

I think the message is perfect. The complication I was talking about is the (likely) unnecessary script running on a landing page. It seems like the intention of the page is simple enough that very little (if any) scripting is necessary. For example, I have a "coming soon" page that is solely meant to collect email addresses (http://soupnextdoor.com) and I'm more interested in everyone being able to see it than how it looks, so I made sure it will work for anyone. I may be wrong about your page's need for scripting since I haven't seen it with a browser that can handle it. I'll take another look with chrome when I get home. Great design tho, and the message is clear. Good idea btw. :)
The bill's been sent to congress this morning, if you can't find it on their website yet, you'll be able to soon. (Haven't gone looking myself).
Supercomputer Predicts Civil Unrest
I've long stopped reading comments on news sites specifically because they are obviously overrun by trolls. The problem is the trolls are winning as I can see by some comments I see on facebook by people who believe the bullshit.

But sites like this (http://literallyunbelievable.org/) also make me loose faith in humanity sometimes
Bluefin Labs: Better TV Ads, or a Computer That Talks Like Jersey Shore?
Ask HN: Has anyone worked with the education industry?
I'm interested in building an app catered to students and professors at universities.

Apps like Blackboard have a seemingly strong hold on certain patents and contracts, but rather than dismissing the market all together, I was wondering if anyone could share their experiences if they've had any.

The app would ideally have a contractual relationship with schools (similar to Blackboard) but would not be a direct competitor.

In my mind these are the potential routes in:

1) Start at the top: Try to get conversations going with people in charge, have a small group test-drive the app, and hopefully arrive at a contract.

2) Start in the middle... through professors: get them interested in the app, then bridge connections to get a contract going.

3) From the bottom... go through students, offer it for free. Generate enough buzz so that the school would take notice and would be interested in a university version of the app.

thanks!
Solaris 11 Released for Early Adopters
Did you read the article?

The gyst of it is that if you are receiving unemployment insurance, you no longer forfeit it by starting work on a pre-revenue startup. Previously, you would have been "self employed" and lost access to your unemployment.

I'll further note that this bill, as far as I know, does not make venture capital illegal.
There is nothing more ironic than the jingoist segment of the population who are also ravenous Walmart shoppers.

It seems like such a no brainer for a political movement/party to run on a platform of restoring Americas manufacturing base.

I think people forget how many second order jobs are lost with the withered manufacturing base. Transportation, IT, HR, restaurants that people eat at on lunch breaks... I can't even enumerate how many second order jobs large scale manufacturing creates...

I regularly go out of my way to pay for American made stuff, so I can say I put my money where my mouth is. Same with shopping locally - farmers markets with local producers etc.

I don't know when well ever snap out of this way of life --- spend less to have more and the quality of life around you declines. Personally I wish my kid had less toys but they're so cheap that grandma and grandpa ship em by the boxful.

Ugh.
> If food is plentiful, then everyone (even "useless" people like, I don't know, myself 28 years ago when I was 18 inches tall) has the right not to go hungry. If we are stranded where is no food, a "right to food" makes no sense because there is no food available.

When you are 18 inches tall, you were incapable of work. Are you suggesting that if someone is capable of work, but elects not to work, then others should provide that person food, shelter, etc?

edit: Why the down-vote? I am honestly asking for clarification on this view.
Perhaps if more programmers were working on a solution to cancer, instead of a social webapp to allow people to share photos of their dogs...

Not to mention the number of programmers who waste their time creating new languages and frameworks. Then they spend years rewriting everything in node.js or whatever the fashion of the day is.

I'd say there's more than enough programmers.
Lessons Learned: The power of small batches
I'm very confused about the math you did there.
Where to advertise for Computer Scientists?  
Could anyone help out and tell me where to advertise for computer scientists? Especially in the UK? Any advice greatly appreciated.
I've included my job advert below if anyone is interested or is generous enough to offer some feedback:<p>"I own a small search marketing agency here in the UK and would like to recruit a computer scientist with experience working with software that intrinsically rely on complex algorithms.
The salary I'm offering is £5000 ($8000) per month. (No benefits as it's a contractor role)
It's a "contractor / freelance" position and once the project is complete (estimated 6 - 12 months) then I can't guarantee that the contract will be extended - especially if the tool doesn't work as intended or fails to become a revenue generator for my company.<p>I will also consider a single digit profit-share deal on any revenue that the tool generates. This is in addition to the monthly retainer. The rev-share deal isn't standard though and I’d only offer it to people that have significant experience or skills that will help develop this project faster than our anticipated projections.
Work from home or your own office if you don't want to work from mine in the UK.
The project is a linguistics based although no machine learning is required. Yay. All the tools and data currently exist for this tool to actually work, although none of them fit together to form a single entity. Some of the existing technologies have API’s some don’t – but there is no wheel inventing requirement as part of the project.<p>High output and stability is of the essence and the only way we can make the tool profitable is by having extremely high throughput rates with our orders. As such, I feel that any person that’s interested should have decent experience in C++ or Java, although, I'm open to suggestions as I’m not the expert ;)<p>Thanks for your advice in finding the right person Hacker News.<p>Chris Angus - Warlock Media
Using #find in a Rails project tends to be a mistake, especially when used on an ActiveRecord association proxy.
Very cool! If I could get this play as a channel on my Roku I'd be in heaven!
That's the theory as commonly applied to CEOs and university administrators, but if cash is the only thing keeping a employee from jumping ship I'm not sure that should be rewarded.
Arrington launches a ThisIsMyNext-style competing blog in 3, 2, ...
In spatial queries, find the 5 restaurants closest to me. In full text search, find the 5 words closest to "fuschia" so you can spell check, or try to search for what you __think__ the user meant to type.
I agree.

IMO, it shouldn't be an open secret that the top performers make more. Designate them Senior Widget-Makers or whatever. If they are masters of their craft, recognize them for it.

When things are kept secret, there are abuses. The top performers whom you respect may get paid more, but then so can the below average performer who is politically strategic to whomever makes compensation decisions.

Obviously that is not an issue with a startup, but that happens everyday in larger orgs.
3rded.

A major version bump should indicate major changes e.g. time to go through any code that talks to the server. If they just want to have a number that grows, they should do something like vRELEASE.MINOR.
What about WePay!? 3.5% flat fee. Supports international payments. Dead simple API. No merchant account required! Plus, it's only 50¢ for e-checks vs Noca's 1.49%. https://www.wepay.com
The transformation to MySpace is complete.
you should see some of the code that smart, hardworking and logical people end up writing in the sciences because they are 10 years behind in programming education and experience. then the next generation of PhD students rolls in and rinse, repeat.
Although it's the naming pattern I've always used for constants (both in Java and Ruby code), I've never heard of it referred to as "SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE". I like that.
Here's the presentation from last year's PGCon, it's not exactly easy to follow, but has some hints on how this can be used:

http://www.pgcon.org/2010/schedule/events/227.en.html
> I don't recommend one letter variables. I don't know if I've ever seen an official style guide that has.

Not that familiar with idiomatic Ruby, but using one letter variables as iterators in for loops (and some other things) is pretty idiomatic C:

int i;
for (i = 0; i < queue_size; i++)
queue[i] = get_rarest_peer(t->peer_list);
I think cash helps build up an insulation layer to outside offers and poaching.

If you pay / compensate above market, and the employee knows this, they're less likely to 'just take a look' at the competition or other employers offers, as they know it'll be difficult to even make an straight transfer.

I don't know that I'd even call it a golden handcuffs style 'benefit' - it's just greasing down a small, possible source of friction for an otherwise happy employee.
This is a very interesting idea. Can't wait to try it out!
Lack of exposure to activities like coding is a problem in society beyond HN-types. These activities should be something children are exposed to in school because their home environments will not provide this exposure.
Finally someone has a story about it! The iPhone app updated this morning and I couldn't' find any details about it (my tweets were the only mentions of it in Twitter search).
That would be sane. It would also NOT mean "all gems/app just work with it", which is what GP said.
Keep in mind that Pud is the original Mike Arrington.
Download Angry Birds Theme for Windows 7
I'm wondering, along these lines, whether or not they shun SaaS products and have to host the code on their own servers.
Luxury Apartment Homes in Raleigh, NC
One of the cool thing about this job bill is crowdfunding might be now legal. It could be cool to be allow to put under 100 bucks to fund a startup idea. You could spread that 20k around.
I agree. I remember reading Seth Godin's book "The Dip" and the same conundrum is presented: when do you push through the dip and when do you quit?

He says you should quit when you're in a cul-de-sac or heading towards a dead end, both ultimately ending unfavourably. A dip, on the other hand, has a low point that feels like a dead end but inevitably gets better the longer you persist.

A good, short read that gives some suggestions to deciphering which is which if you're interested.
How To Add More Storytelling to Your Daily Social Media Diet 
To get people’s attention you need to be able to know good stories when you see them, to adapt them to the short, telegraphic style of Twitter or to make them visual for Facebook. Just like a story is written differently for TV, radio or a magazine, a story has to be adapted for Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, your blog etc.
The government can borrow money at negative interest rates. People are literally paying the U.S. government to take their money. It may have a large budget deficit, but the government has no shortage of cash.
Bestcheapprice
You mean tumblr?
All new Posterous Spaces launches
Sorry, but no. You seem to still be trapped in the ancient mindset that an increment in the most significant version number must mean huge changes. Instead, more often than not, it's merely a milestone signifying that all of your intended features that you outlined in the previous major version's days have been completed. So when 1.0 hits (or close to it), you define a bunch of "must-haves" for 2.0, along with all the bugs and smaller improvements that come up along the way. Now you can wait 18 months, only issuing security patches for 1.0.x, and then deliver all of those features all at once with a 2.0 party. Or as each feature is complete, you release a new minor version (1.1 for foo, 1.2 for bar, etc). Once you're able to scratch off the last of your list for 2.0, you bump the version number up and call it a day, from wherever you are along the 1.x line (be it 1.1 or 1.42). With sufficient planning, you can manage to make it so that you never have to go into 1.xx territory (with double digit minor version numbers). I'm sure I'm not alone in finding 1.10 to be aesthetically ugly. If you have to, then by all means. Avoid it if you can, but at the end of the day milestones should always be your metric for release numbers.

Now in Mongo's case they might just be incrementing the major version number for the hell of it. But I'm assuming they actually planned this out.
Disagree. Arrington will have a powerful personal blog. But now he gets to have his cake and eat it to.

He leaks intel to his former staffers at TC to cover. He writes occasionally as an unpaid blogger. And he runs Crunchfund without any conflicts.
The future of Evernote: from memory machine to time machine
I think this is a misleading article in the sense that all movies lose money, due to the way they are structured.

I'm no expert on the financing of the entertainment business but I do remember a podcast on npr talking about this:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/05/the_friday_podcast_an...
Watch,Drive,movie,online
watch,Drive,movie,online
He joined Piper smart waitress who freed her ex boyfriend cherry red muscle car to help Milton. Now,
He didn't say "effective." He said "honorable."
Can someone summarize the controversy for me?

As I understand it, Arrington wanted to head a new VC while at the same continuing to serve as head of TechCrunch, the major journalistic outlet in the startup field. AOL raised questions about his journalistic integrity, and made him choose between being a VC and being a journalist, and he gave them an ultimatum, they called his bluff, and he chose VC.

Did I miss a detail or nuance that makes this anything other than AOL holding up traditional journalistic virtues?
As far as I am concerned, the full name is more readable. A few keystrokes mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Readable code does.

hash.each { |key,value| puts "#{key} #{value}" }
US lacks serious cyber intelligence
Some ODMs like Mongoid have a strict mode that requires a field to be mapped in order to save it to the db. This saves you from typos wrecking havoc. You should probably unit test your queries anyway.
The Exchanger and GC-less Java
A screenshot on the homepage (not just the github page) would be great.

Nice icon by the way.
List 10 distinct careers where programming is a fundamental skill.
I was an early Posterous user (still active), long waiting for another shoe to drop. The missing social things (stream view, notification banner, having others' content be your Dashboard, not your own old posts) seemed to be just sitting there, ready to be added at any moment.

The good:

So... the new dashboard view is better for presenting data that they already had "verbs" for. You can see new hearts (likes) to your posts much more easily, the default view is your subscriptions, not your own old posts (as it was previously).

Still needs work:

Discovery. There is no "regular" search, there is no tag search. The Find Friends just spins into time out for me. There is no directory or recommended Posterous spaces either.

[edit: Added everything below this line]

I'm generally hopeful. But I'm bummed that they really steer away from using the word blog/setting expectations for blog feature development. The "Sharing stuff socially" space is crowded and well served at a rapid pace with Path, Google+, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, etc.

I really want blog services to have a modern social lens (like Tumblr). Right now Tumblr is the only place that comes close.

I think there's room for more than one social blog platform (there's clearly room for more than one social photo sharing site, music sharing site, etc).

Posterous initially seemed to be a social blog platform that wanted to build out some of the "regular" (WordPress) features missing from Tumblr, like commenting.

I wanted to live in a world where there was a minimal, control freak, beautiful platform like Tumblr... AND a more "swiss army knife" social blog platform like Posterous.

Since then, Posterous has done so many about faces (getting really email-centric among other things), that I have lost my initial read on them, but I like these new changes despite the fact that they're inching away from blogdom.

(sidebar: it's worth noting here that there is a 3rd social blog platform, http://soup.io. Soup.io, like Posterous, has long seemed to be on the verge of dropping another shoe.)
First, a direct link to Arxiv and the study: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.1530v1.pdf

Second, let's avoid talk about how "correlation doesn't imply causation". Quote:

They examine this effect in more detail by pinpointing reviews that specifically mention the words "Groupon" and "coupon". "Reviews mentioning either keyword are associated with star ratings that are 10% lower on average than reviews that do not, while the very small fraction of reviews mentioning both keywords are more than 20% lower on average," they say.

I'll offer an alternative to the hypothesis that "Groupon customers are terrible:" customer volume shoots up after a deal, causing service to suffer. I haven't read the paper yet, but I hoped they checked reviews for content as well as final ratings.

Still, a novel little study that takes advantage of a naturally-occurring experiment. I'd love to work on research like this in the future.
I too wondered if that scam really works or if it's a meta scam - in the sense that new players see this going on, assume it must be working if someone's doing it and then try to do the same scam themselves, failing and getting bored after a while. The effort is put in because of the hype, as nobody wants to talk results.
I don't throw out the 'love it or leave it' for 99% of posts on almost all issues, but when a person equates taxation with theft, it's just a lost cause.

We can and should debate what to do with our tax money, but fundamentally the system always ends up in a state where some people are unhappy with some of the spending. There is no way to reconcile what those on the far right and far left want. We end up somewhere inbetween and that means at the end of the day some people are unsatisfied. Those people still need to pay taxes or the system falls apart.

For those people there are two solutions. Convince people to agree with you and change the policy, or leave the country. (Of course another option is to just whine about it.)
The 0.2 implies two "point releases". Traditionally these increment the value after the decimal point in a version number.

so:

8 + 2 = 10, therefore 1.10.

It's best to view the version number as a string rather than a decimal number.

This is a somewhat old-school way of versioning and common in open source software. Personally, I prefer something more intuitive and don't see anything wrong with MongoDB being at version 2.0!
Can Irrational Decisions Be Corrected? A Football Case Study
Thanks! Eager to hear thoughts on search functionality, and whether an 8tracks style UI and functionality would make sense for this.
I'm a freelancer, so I get to "start" at different companies several times a year, and I'm always surprised by how inefficient things are. However, I'm equally surprised by the fact that a few months in I've forgotten what the bottlenecks were because I've gotten acclimatized.

So by the time I'm in a position to influence those processes I can't remember what the problems were.

What I started doing was take notes the first few days/weeks of what is required to get setup, or where things could be improved. Then I refer back to them every few weeks, and will sometimes up up with solutions and start sending them up the chain.
Show HN: What do you guys think of our beta landing page?
It may be that tutorials for Tool X use MySQL in their examples.
Firefox can't find the server at www.αlphapun.ch.

Also, no Swiss puns, I'm disappointed.
The key modifying phrase was "for short block/method parameters." The authors aren't advocating one letter variables throughout your code, only in situations like:

[1, 2, 3].each { |e| puts e }
Object.methods.each { |m| "Method is: #{m}" }
Why You Should Dress to Impress – The ROI of Fashion
You dont speak for everybody here, but it would seem to agree with Semver: http://semver.org/
Here is Arrington's announcement at Disrupt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFARI6oBv8c