skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed, don't tell me vacation/sick time isn't tracked unless it really truly isn't tracked. I, and the company, found this out the hard way. While some management may try to be nice about it, there very well may be legal & contractual issues which force enumeration and tracking of sick leave.

After a lot of hand waving "don't worry about it" answers to preliminary queries about sick time logistics, I was told (after the fact) I had to take open-heart surgery as a vacation day.
How on earth is this hacker news?
Works very well. Thanks for the invite.
Our billing runs daily and charges each customer once every 30 days based on when they originally signed up for a paying account.

So each night, we bill about 1/30th of our customers. It's not exactly 1/30th because some days have more customers and some have fewer.
30 PHP Best Practices for Beginners
Kind of a weak article, but the TL;DR of it is:

Professional gamers can now earn a decent living from streaming their play, even if they don't win tournaments and what not. You just need to play the game and gain a viewership.
Yeah, it's still shocking to me how many fortune 500 companies still don't understand how vulnerable they are to simple hacks like this. I would've thought it would be SOP (standard operating procedure) to encrypt their email years ago.

I guess a normal level of paranoia hasn't quite reached those companies yet huh?
Some companies do monthly billing runs and then pro-rate new customers (Linode, for example). Others do daily billing runs and charge customers on the anniversary of their signup. The latter can be more challenging in terms of accounting and technology in some cases but has the psychological benefit of money "streaming in" daily.
I believe Full Time Equivalent, but I was referring to the modem rating (i.e. 14.4k, 28.8k, 36.6k, 56k, etc.).
Would you mind saying a bit more about why you felt building your own billing system was a bad idea?

We're looking into that at the moment, and have been considering the usual options of DIY, using Recurly/Chargify/similar, going quick and dirty with Paypal/Google, etc. Right now, after a great deal of investigation and contacting many organisations for more details, we are overwhelmingly thinking that a simple, direct system with a payment gateway and merchant account is the way to go. None of the usual recurring billing suspects has even come close to justifying the costs and usually lock-in of integrating their service instead.

However, in the HN goldfish bowl, almost everyone seems to have a different view (though I have noticed a few dissenting voices creeping in recently). Right now, all we've done is a bit of prototyping with the test system for the service we're looking at using and a thorough read of the docs. If we're about to enter a world of pain when we actually want this stuff to work, it would be good to hear any advice about how to minimise the damage and make it through!

Great slides, BTW. Thanks for sharing.
Zork-esque 'Interactive Fiction' Comes to the Kindle
Busting out of your comfort zone blog post by.. PEER1?
Indeed, God Emperor is by far the best of the Dune series. I've re-read it many times and it never fails to deliver.

Goes to show different people like different things? Apparently, I'm more into the psychology and exploration of large-scale social patterns. People who like the other Dune books are presumably more into "action" sci-fi. Nothing wrong with that.
It actually says "What you won't learn: Java."
They should have taken that google offer.
Me neither. They are in a commodity market with a low barrier to entry. They had dozens of other competitors, but had no secret sauce nor was Groupon any better than them. Even a basic Twitter search for deals is better than Groupon--nevermind paper coupons. The CEO should've taken the Google offer and run with the money. I don't understand why investors were gaga over it.
Interesting tidbit from the article that I did not know:

"a federal judge in San Francisco permitted a tour operator to proceed with a merchant class action lawsuit over alleged false advertising"

leads to

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-groupon-lawsuit...
The $2.7 billion number which I used was extrapolated from the $200 million in lost taxes.

You're right, I should have used GDP, rather than population. I would have guessed that use tax fraud was common, but not "less than 1 percent of Californians currently report use tax" common. From your linked article:

> Board Member Betty T. Yee said ... "the low rate of consumer compliance overall points to the need to pursue multiple efforts to promote use tax compliance so that all retail purchases – from both online and store front retailers – are treated on an equal basis."

Right. Promoting citizen compliance, possibly through audits, penalties, and emphasis on income tax forms is what needs to happen here. Instead of trying to persuade their citizens to obey the law, California is trying to force Amazon to do it for them.
False advertising class action law suit can proceed versus Groupon
As was discussed on HN earlier, naming is important but not much that you have to spend a lot of money on a domain, pg makes this point clear in one of his early essays. I'd say both companies are doomed in this case, not only the names are similar but they operate in the same business.
I'm working on a website called Raunk that crowdsources rankings of anything (including Science Fiction books) and allows you to view best of lists from different perspectives.

It's also a great way to keep track of your favorites and compare them with your friends and the entire internet.

Check it out at http://raunk.com

Log in to make your best Science Fiction Books list here: http://raunk.com/create/82,268

Or view the list here: http://raunk.com/list/82,268

We just launched and are still in Beta, so we'd love to hear any feedback on the site.
It concerns me how much influence TechCrunch has and how willing it is to use the influence to coerce start ups. Do sources like Mashable and Read Write Web do the same thing?
Nice. I've toyed with this notion several times. I assume you're going to add Single Sign On capability and sell this in the Google Apps Marketplace, right?
"Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified"

I don't understand what notified means? Notified of termination? So each year the company measured which people had the most sick days, which would of course be those dealing with cancer treatments as such, and fired them? IF so, it is reminiscent of Jack Welch's notorious dictat to fire the 10% "at the bottom" each year.

No doubt I am misunderstanding the policy you are describing, which is why I am asking for clarification.
The retitling is definitely useful information. I didn't notice that!

However, you seem to have forgotten to explain the actual argument.

Is the actual argument that sometimes some software, which may or may not include Java, asymptotically becomes old or bad or unchangeable, but that's OK?
A classic case of 1 + 1 = 0?

Been thinking recently, what internet brands have come back from the dead? (Not Apple, they are a hardware company.)

The Napster brand was acquired, but the new company never really made it.

I was chatting to a young dev on the Zaarly startup crawl who said he worked in 'gaming', but when pressed he said he worked for a startup acquired by Yahoo. He didn't like saying he worked at Yahoo. That is a very strong signal they are dying.

MySpace, Bebo, Friendster. It seems like once you hit the deadpool or are on your way down, there is no way back?
What's missing are the jobs lost in other parts of the economy, because govt stimulus is basically a transfer of resources from existing private businesses. In other words, do we really think taxing Google, filtering the money through Congress and the lobbying machine, and providing those funds to a politically favored roads project is really a net jobs creator for the economy?
My guess is that since Sifter is a bug-tracking app, "no custom statuses" means a user can't provide a custom status for a particular bug--only pre-set options like "Open", "Assigned", "Resolved", etc.
This is nice. But an article link would be better. Here is one.

http://www.nano.gatech.edu/news/release.php?id=4240
You should try to avoid subverting a framework's conventions if you're going to use it, sure, but Rails' helpers seem more like an absence of convention. They're a dumping ground for methods that are crying out to be properly structured. Surely not even the most fervent Rails advocate would claim that it is complete and unimprovable.

Every single helper module is mixed in to every single view instance, no matter how irrelevant it may be. There's therefore no reason to carefully choose where to put your helper functions, because they're all available, all the time. This means that a new coder coming along has no idea where to look for helper functions that might be relevant to a particular view he's creating - they could be in literally any helper, or even be helper-ified controller methods. This in turn means you end up with duplicated functionality, orphaned functions, and obsolete cruft stinking up the joint.

As a result, any even slightly professional team must develop their own conventions regarding the placement of helper functions. These conventions need to be communicated somehow, and how better to do that than through the code itself? Once you've got a pile of helper functions that are bound by a common cause, why not give that cause a name?
Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)
Are you saying then the deadline is always "ASAP"?
Because the two smallest plans, while having high turnover, have also ultimately generated 65% of our revenue. So at this point, they're still a very important part of our customer base.

As far as only offering one plan, it simply doesn't make sense for us. Our costs go up based on the amount of usage, so it makes sense for the price to go up for customers who use more resources.
Shouldichangemypassword: check if your password is compromised or not?
I see Groupon's rise and fall as similar to MySpace. traffic for rival deal site Living Social rose 27% Maybe Living Social is the Facebook in this comparison.
"Listening" to your customers also includes the iterative, quantitative process of testing and measuring your ideas, not just listening to qualitative customer feedback and requests.
I appreciate your insightful and relevant comment. Pity it's getting downvotes.
Testing your website before launching: how to let content drive design
Social advising app just launched that uses metrics to communicate progress.
... A firmware upgrade, for example. Or some jumpers changed.
Your dev tree doesn't have to be always working so you can clean your commits later, you can commit much more often. Instead of using the VCS just for final collaboration you're now much more mobile. In a centralized VCS check-ins and branching are the sorts of things that risk breaking tests and require your team's awareness. With a DVCS you're the only one using it and can check-in every minute if you want, have all the experimental branches you need, etc.

Instead of copying files or some other manual filesystem manipulation to swap between lines of development you're using a tool to help you. Once you're free to branch around as you wish you can get even partial ideas into code - they don't block anything by not being complete.

Then you can clean up this dev rambling into the public commits you want everyone else to see - usually the whole side-project in a couple of larger (and often out of original order) commits. Here is where you make sure the tests are successful at each commit, that you reference bug numbers, write decent commit messages, etc.

And you can do this without anyone needing to know or help with anything until you finally have nice clean commits based off of the current tree and they get imported as nice atomic chunks. You can either ditch your ugly dev commits, or keep them without it getting in the way if you're a history junkie.

tl;dr Instead of a flat directory as your sandbox you've got a full VCS at your disposal.
No similarity between ‘discrete’ and ‘discreet’
raganwald, Posterous reportedly has an option to override their user-hostile decision to force body text to render without in a subpixel anti-aliasing. Would you be so kind as to throw that switch? Currently, the readability of your blog is negatively impacted.
I Went to the Dentist & Here’s What I Learned About Client Work
For a more complete extrapolation of this concept, check out Diaspora by Greg Egan.
17. Store Passwords with Encryption

Many PHP beginners often plunk sensitive data like passwords into the database without applying any encryption. Consider using MD5 to encrypt passwords before you put them into the database.

:(
I have my own opinion on Flash, but I don't think I was defending one or the other in that comment. The point was, it was absolutely an Adobe vs Apple battle of wills scenario. We can debate wether the "vs" mentality was right or wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple and Adobe went head to head, very publicly, over this issue. And Apple won, I don't see any other realistic or pragmatic way to call it.
HTML5 Platformer: ported from a XNA
Thanks for the explanation. This is a great resource. My only regret is that I wasn't there to listen in!
The question is: Why doesn't Yelp have a flag for someone whom is posting a significant number of negative replies and one positive reply for the same business category?

Would make me question whether or not the owner of the business receiving a positive reply is trying to game Yelp's system.
Maquillajes
I get a ton of misdirected email, but for different reasons.

The first is that I have a common nickname @gmail.com. There are many other users with some variation on that nickname @gmail.com, and people are careless about typos, including suffixes, etc. It's a similar cause to the article, but the username instead of the domain.

The second case is a more interesting one:

I bought an expired domain.

Now I get all kinds of email sent to what used to be legitimate email addresses of the old domain owners. For more than one of them it was clearly their primary email address. I was getting emails related to bank accounts, Netflix, Facebook, etc. I thought about trying to get in touch with those users, but ultimately decided to bounce their email.

It was something I hadn't considered when buying an expired domain, or about my own email addresses, but it's a real problem. Here's hoping my email provider never lets their domain expire.
Ship or Die
The TechCrunch/AOL Saga Told Through 'Star Wars'
Top 5 Online Invoicing Apps Freelancers Enjoy
Online apps offer some excellent tools for a variety of tasks from money management to email. Freelancers can really benefit from online invoicing and there are tons of choices for you. Let’s look at a few of those apps.
I suppose that decision is up to the obituary writer.
In my personal experience people very quickly realised the new interface was fine - but when you've been using a site for years you get used to it, and like how it looks. As others replied, Facebook is another great example - people complaining doesn't mean they won't end up prefering the new version.
Interesting thing about that: if you're curious, dig into the SoCs used for this stuff, and you'll see that's really not about "giving access". The voice handling in most smartphones never leaves the SoC, and the OS just communicates with it like you would with a modem: "call XYZ", "hang up", etc, usually with a familiar AT command set.

Useful side-effect: if the OS crashes, your phone call will typically remain alive. (You probably won't be able to hang up without powering off, though, and definitely won't be able to dial another number.) Or, if you have an original iPhone 3G like mine that's sluggish at the best of times, it doesn't affect the phone call. :)
Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I think flash did to the web was bad, and in my view held the internet back five years.
Probably not, but only because they don't have the requisite influence. If they had the influence, they would probably do so.
Ah, I see. I assumed that this was a selection of mostly-hidden features like http://secrets.blacktree.com/. Anything that helps me avoid dialog-diving on a new machine is good in my book.
God has yet to be disproved by science; it's unlikely that will ever happen, actually, no matter the fact of God's existence.

There's also no general framework from science that makes God incompatible with known laws.

So God, in the context of a sci fi book, belongs to the class of things that have yet to be discovered but which are still consistent as possible discoveries.

Even aside from that, you can have concessions made to the willing suspension of disbelief. There are limited concessions made in all but the strictest of science fiction for the sake of making a compelling story.

I can understand if you have such a strong distaste for those kinds of ideas that it ruins a story for you, but that's a matter of taste, not any necessary quality of the genre at large.
Groupon Sales Team Files Class-Action Suit Against Company
On a related note. I remember reading "The design and evolution of C++" where Bjarne Stroustrup explains a lot of the decisions and trade offs he had to make when he evolved C++. It is a great book because it teaches you that changing the design of software that is widely used is very difficult.

Java had it easy at the beginning as it was able to fix many of the problems that Bjarne could not because he had to maintain compatibility. Now that Java is widely used it has become more difficult to change its design.
VIM cheat sheet for programmers
Derrick rose
Not one of Peter Watts' [1] books made it to the list.

[1]http://www.rifters.com/crawl/
The main reason that I don't personally believe it's a good idea is that it's not a core part of Sifter. We use Braintree and process everything via ActiveMerchant, but we've been using Braintree so long that we're actually on their old API.

Obviously, since we built it in house, I don't have any hands on experience with the other options that are out there now, but from what I've seen with other applications, I can't see any reason not to use the other providers.

The downside to not building your own system is that you may lose some control over things like invoice formatting or other parts of the user experience.

The other aspect that's a big consideration is PCI compliance. We don't store any payment information on our servers, but it does pass through our servers which means we have to have the minimum amount of PCI compliance. By offloading it to another provider, you're almost entirely free of any significant PCI compliance.

Now that it's done, it's kind of nice having full control over every detail of how we handle credit cards. However, I wouldn't do it again now that there are so many other options out there.
Seems like an amazing service.

Just one question/concern. I took a look at your upgrade page, and "volunteered" to pay $5 per month. I now can't change this option; I'd like to be able to, mostly to compare the various price points on a yearly basis. Is there a way to change my choice, and I just can't find it?
If you stop being pedantic, a car really is a faster horse. It just doesn't the physical nature of a horse, that's all.
Unless it reformatted the page, returning only the textual content. With the maximum size of an MMS being around 100kb (depends on the operator), this is a lot of text.

You could fetch a number of pages at once and read the response even on a feature phone. This can also be combined with a web interface to bundle pages or feeds together and associate them with a shortcode.
My spidey senses are tingling that this is some sort of sabotage... too many things are falling apart too quickly.
Post Syndication: Exactly how Will Your Outcomes Vary?
Interesting! I added my blog, http://blog.weddinglovely.com

Your name is very close to The Knot, which I'm sure has a trademark on the name, and might not like that "Knot News" looks like you could be saying it's news from The Knot. Just FYI.

Right now there is too much information overload for me to use it, but man, if you added categories (DIY/Inspiration/Real Weddings/etc), I'd probably use it all the time. I hate looking for DIY posts, and having to check 5 different wedding blogs to find the right one.
One thing the OP overlooks is that high res images allow for resolution to be maintained when the user does pinch-to-zoom. Perhaps, downloading these larger images is actually a necessity.
Sure, and if that's the case, then I don't see any downsides to rolling out a new design in small pieces over the course of a yearabouts, so that it doesn't annoy your users at all.
You're very welcome. Good luck! If you do decide to come up with a brand name there are lots of articles online on methods and things to consider.

I always remember the tale of George Eastman. He was looking for something short, something that was easy to spell and unambiguous to pronounce in lots of languages, and something that meant nothing. The result? Kodak.
Ardiadam20
I agree with those titles, and would add Diaspora which I just finished. Truly mindblowing stuff, although it may be a bit too abstract and technical for some.
买房按揭贷款计算器
The demise of any social website also seems to coincide with the first mention of Ender's Game. Could this be the end of HN as we know it?
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977335

The post references the original source (http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/), but provides nothing new.
I would be very grateful if you could share your thoughts about Metricious app and what can be improved right now. Thank you very much!

Martynas
红酒面膜
Speaker Deck - Share Presentations without the Mess
From another commenter in the thread I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...

"As a result of these developments in method, Ford's cars came off the line in three minute intervals. This was much faster than previous methods, increasing production by eight to one (requiring 12.5 man-hours before, 1 hour 33 minutes after), while using less manpower.[2] It was so successful, paint became a bottleneck. Only japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colors available before 1914, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926.[2] In 1914, an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months' pay.[2]

"The assembly line technique was an integral part of the diffusion of the automobile into American society. Decreased costs of production allowed the cost of the Model T to drop within the budget of the American middle class. In 1908, the price of a Model T was around $825, and by 1912 it had dropped to around $575. This price reduction is comparable to a drop from $15,000 to $10,000 in dollar terms from the year 2000."

To me those numbers are quite significant. I am no student of automobile history, but it seems to me that the primary driver of Ford's success was the massive production efficiencies and reduced costs associated with the modern moving assembly line. I have to imagine there were "better" cars than the Model T, or other cars that had more prototypes and iterations.

Anyhow, I don't really mean to dispute the author's thesis here, since there's not really enough evidence to judge it. But I'm having a really hard time being convinced that some factor other than Ford reducing the production time per car by a factor of almost 10 and the price by almost half was primarily responsible for the company's success with the Model T.
"SINGLE-PAGE VIEW" in all-caps at the bottom http://www.xconomy.com/national/2011/09/09/the-tech-world-de...
First to file doesn't invalidate prior art.