skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Salaried employees usually get a minimum of two weeks of vacation time on top of that, which often includes sick days. Extra weeks are earned by long-time employees. So you start at 20 days and get to 25 and 30 over some number of years with the same company

I said not counting public holidays, i.e. 31 days holiday + 8 (I think?) days public holidays. If you start at two weeks, isn't that 10 days rather than 20?

And I wouldn't even dream of including sick days in that. When you're sick you get the day off, paid, without affecting your holidays; I think that's a legal requirement, but if it isn't it's certainly industry standard (If you're sick when you've already taken a holiday you can claim another day off in lieu, though that's a little more complex).

The US just seems to overwork immensely from where I stand.
I'm assuming the patient wasn't a racehorse?

If I had a dollar for every time a dermatologist or podiatrist tried to be 'helpful' on an emergency scene... I could probably buy a coffee at Starbucks... The same goes for 'nurses.' If an ER nurse wants to help out, that's great. Invariably though, it's a nurse at a nursing home or dialysis center...

I don't mean to imply these folks aren't skilled professionals, but prehospital medical emergencies are generally well outside their experience, and the confusion that arises from that can be dangerous.
> $0.50 per chip doesn't necessarily sound huge.

One of my relative's husbands is a hard drive engineer.

He used to talk about how if they could eliminate one single bolt from the HDD assembly (3 cent cost) - it could end up saving millions over the total life of the production run.

$0.50 is huge
> When Americans talk about "Europe", they're generally talking about Western Europe, not Eastern, and are excluding the UK too.

This doesn't hold true for any of the Americans I've met (and I've met a lot). Also, one of the countries Martin Varsavsky mentions in his examples is actually the UK.

If it were true that the American definition of Europe doesn't include Eastern Europe, what part of the world do the many Americans who visit Budapest believe they're in? Asia?

> The Europe that Americans refer to does mostly use the Euro, have better-distributed wealth, plenty of consumers, and ambivalent feelings toward entrepreneurs in most of its parts.

Western European countries that don't use the Euro: Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway (and then there's the UK, but of course that isn't part of your definition of Europe).

> Perhaps the main point of the post was, be aware that Eastern Europe exists?

No, the main point was, if you visit e.g. the UK, don't make general observations about Europe based on that.
You're making the mistake of thinking of Europeans as a whole and comparing it to America.

I've met plenty of Europeans who were incredibly nationalistic from France, Great Britain, Austria, Czech, etc. and they are extremely vocal and proud of their national heritage/identity. They love telling people that they're French, English, Austrian, Czech, etc. but they never claim to be European.

Similarities could be drawn between the individual European countries and US states/regions (Texas is a prime example).
How to beat inflation?
Thank you! I've been grasping to try and find a good word for this bit of semantics. Synecdoche is it!
traceroute bankofamerica.com

traceroute: Warning: bankofamerica.com has multiple addresses; using 171.159.100.150

traceroute to bankofamerica.com (171.159.100.150), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 10.242.2.1 (10.242.2.1) 22.506 ms 20.144 ms 17.502 ms

2 rrcs-***-105-172-***.nys.biz.rr.com (***.105.172.***) 15.713 ms 14.517 ms 13.708 ms

3 rdc-204-210-68-170.ne.northeast.rr.com (204.210.68.170) 19.284 ms 17.016 ms 14.870 ms

4 g10-4-0-0.ptldmehx-rtr001.ne.northeast.rr.com (204.210.69.250) 15.874 ms 17.843 ms 16.786 ms

5 rdc-204-210-69-49.ne.northeast.rr.com (204.210.69.49) 37.636 ms 36.087 ms 47.473 ms

6 ae-5-0.cr0.nyc30.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.74) 37.837 ms 38.048 ms 34.735 ms

7 107.14.19.147 (107.14.19.147) 31.687 ms
ae-0-0.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.157) 50.793 ms
107.14.19.147 (107.14.19.147) 35.358 ms

8 tengigabitethernet3-3.ar7.nyc1.gblx.net (64.213.104.193) 36.177 ms
66.109.9.210 (66.109.9.210) 39.815 ms
te7-4.ar1.nyc8.gblx.net (208.48.23.1) 30.077 ms

9 lag1.ar7.dca3.gblx.net (67.16.146.26) 39.259 ms 43.567 ms 37.822 ms

10 prolexic-technologies.ethernet4-2.ar7.dca3.gblx.net (159.63.23.178) 39.852 ms 40.892 ms 42.304 ms

11 unknown.prolexic.com (209.200.144.34) 92.870 ms 40.866 ms 38.025 ms

12 unknown.prolexic.com (209.200.144.58) 35.344 ms 35.342 ms 43.157 ms

13 209.200.171.194 (209.200.171.194) 102.761 ms 107.928 ms 106.590 ms

14 171.159.64.3 (171.159.64.3) 167.647 ms 158.632 ms 144.629 ms

15 * * *

16 * * *

17 * * *
"What purpose would that map serve?"

You may not be hired, promoted, graduated, permitted to enter, permitted to buy, etc., ... because you have a registered firearm. Consider what HMOs, insurance companies, organizations, and governments have to say about gun ownership and you'll find your answer there.
over 2 seconds is quite bad result,

when you make new website today using modern tools, page load should be below 1 second,
Fun fact: There are countries outside the EU that use the Euro, but Eurozone (or Euro area) only includes EU.

(FTR: Kosovo and Montenegro use the Euro, aswell as some microstates like Monaco and Vatican City)
Yikes! Not used to a major bank website being down. Luckily I didn't need to do anything.
System-level tools are not project dependencies
It's actually not that surprising. Christmas week is their busiest time of the year in terms of transactions traffic.
This is very obviously and sadly true.

Where I work we are encouraged to not even look at patents, because then we would know about the "invention" leading to triple damages if we are found infringing.
This is clearly nonsense and the diametric opposite of what was intended.
The hard numbers don't tell the whole story, though.

For example, something like Kayak.com takes a very long time (~10-15 seconds) to load a results list. However, the whole experience feels very fast because the data layer is separated from the presentation layer, and the presentation layer comes up very quickly, with data allowed to load incrementally "below the fold".

Put another way, part of "page speed" is also how fast the user can start interacting with any of it, even if it's just to start looking at the initial search results.
Similar to BlueNile, I used Since1910: http://www.since1910.com/create-your-own-engagement-ring.asp...

It appealed to me mainly because it was very entertaining to be able to go through pages of raw diamonds and view their exact characteristics (measurements and all) and compare different ones. It's easy to drill down based on certain criteria.

I did call them after narrowing down to a few and talked about the different options. I learned that there are non-continuous price steps as you approach certain round carat sizes (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, etc) and so it can save you some money if you go slightly below a round-number size.

I got a 0.94 carat diamond with excellent characteristics for significantly cheaper than anything I found at $JEWELRY_STORE.

They ship free, and if you're not in NY, no tax, which will save you hundreds right off the top.
I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.
Kanban Tracking and Reporting via Trello API
The thing that bothers me most is that people's addresses are a matter of public record, period. It's one thing to know someone has a gun license, or donated money to a political candidate, or owns a domain name.

It's another thing to reveal where they live. Sometimes people move for a good reason, and don't want someone else to be able to find them. (Abuse cases, etc.)

Other countries solve this by having ID numbers -- American SSN's are the closest. Those can be used in official documents, etc. Whereas in the US, domain names and other licenses are assigned to someone with a particular name, at a particular address, since SSN's aren't supposed to be used as general-purpose ID numbers, and what other option do you have?
Not at all - as long as you're at least generally right. If you're grossly misrepresenting things that apply to one country as "common denominator of Europe" it's offensive. It's offensive to pretend all germans wear lederhosen or probably a couple of americans were annoyed if I'd say that all americans wear cowboy boots and hats, have a winchester on their back and a colt on their belt and speak the worst texan dialect ever.
And...it looks like it's back up.
I don't see the use of posting landing pages here. I know it's useful for to get xposure, of course, but what's the interest for the reader?

Show HN is pretty interesting, but these sorts of posts always seem a bit exploitative to me.
Why Scientists Can't Be Atheist
Software and technology is not a top priority during crisis and other people don't read HN so much :)
But on the other hand, a friend of mine recently said that he would invest to create homes for elderly people in Romania (in old communist resorts,in mineral water rich zones,having some infrastructure ready, etc) for West European (eg. German) old people. Cutting costs in West Europe could be a very lucrative business in Romania. Could work fine because of crisis.
The future of email
The last company I started was an email startup -- Peek, we made a mobile email gadget that won all kinds of awards from Time and Wired and everyone (www.peek.ly). The company became a software platform and was just acquired by our top customer.

So now I'm thinking about new stuff and noticing there is tons of innovation in email.

What do folks think? Agree/disagree with the following statements that everyone keeps repeating?

- Email overload/inboxes are broken

- Gmail is the winner. All other webmail is fail

- A better interface to email than Gmail is out there

- The best mail app for mobile is... Apple's Mail? Sparrow? Gmail for iOS?

- Tasks are crowding inboxes

- Commercial/deal mail needs to be in its own place (e.g., AOL's AltoMail and Microsoft's Hotmail experiment in 2011)

Some background posts about these topics with examples

http://a.sarva.co/2012/12/how-email-is-like-craigslist/

http://a.sarva.co/2012/12/reading-paul-graham-on-the-re-invention-of-email/
T.38 In VoIP is tricky. We run almost every codec in Kazoo that FS supports (711, 722, 729, all the way up to Siren64Khz and h.263 for video), and I can tell you that t.38 has been the trickiest.

A lot of the transformations layer7 firewalls apply to packets, particularly SIP packets, can cause unexpected side effects with an extremely time sensitive application like fax. In short, moving packets involves buffering on some level, and fax machines are intolerant of any jitter or delay. Therefore, delivering media in t.38 becomes an exercise in conflict mitigation.

In summary, t.38 is active on a lot of providers who don't talk about it because heterogenous equipment might not play nice.
You're lucky, I had to try very hard to take my bank's website down.
That story seems _really_ fishy to me...

Why would electrical engineers fly to a conference on a Concorde? What good would an aeronautical engineer be _in flight_?
The issue with posting the maps is that it can put people at risk.

If you're a bad guy, you can use this sort of information to find victims. Get a list of people with guns and cross-reference it with professions where the cash-based nature of the business makes it likely that folks have unreported money that can't be deposited in the bank. People who own laundries, tradesmen, jewelers, etc.

This sort of thing happened in my town in the 80's. Someone broke into a locksmith shop and took records of safe installations and re-keying. There were a number of subsequent burglaries of home safes owned by people with jewelry industry ties that went unreported until someone was assaulted when they interrupted a robbery.

This is especially an issue in a NYC or other places where handgun registration is a really onerous process. If you made a FOIL request and also asked for the type of handgun permit (target, carry, concealed carry, etc), it would be an even bigger personal safety risk.
The aesthetics/fashion/status thing isn't going to be hit with a mass-market iDevice. Apple makes beautiful, even jewelry-like devices but they are solidly mass market and there's nothing to differentiate one owner from another.

A 100$ watch probably performs 99.999% as well as a 10000$ watch

Hell, a fifteen dollar quartz watch will outperform a $20000 Patek Philippe.

This is difficult to explain and may be generational.

It probably is generational. I'm Gen-Y and watches seem like an irrelevance nowadays. I can't think of one of my similarly aged friends who wears a watch.

To be fair I used to wear one, and felt naked without it for a while after the band broke but by that time I was carrying a phone everywhere and I soon forgot about it.
Advanced humanoid Roboy to be ‘born’ in nine months
Thanks for the recommendation! We're always trying to improve our pages.
Seems it was a short outage, since it works for me, and http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/bankofamerica.com says it is up.
Inky connected to imap.gmail.com using IMAP, but authentication could not complete.
port 993 using TLS: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
1) If you want to try I think the best place to start would be to sit down and talk to the professor. I get the feeling that a personal talk is more likely to lead to a change than an email or something. There's a notable chance he reconsiders his ways. It might be kinda awkward, but if you really care, then that should outweigh the awkwardness.

2) You could also talk to (or email) some dean or administrator. Like others have said, they probably do kinda care, it's just that most of the complaints they get are bad. If you have intelligent things to say, they'll probably listen.

3) You could try to organize a bunch of students to complain, or to not take his class. This may be hard to organize, but would have a bigger effect.

- From what I understand, having tenure doesn't mean that you can't fire a professor, just that you have to demonstrate in some sort of legal hearing that they aren't doing their job. So it really just makes firing bad professors more inconvenient. It's amazing how schools claim to care about providing students with a good education, and at the same time allow absolutely awful professors to continue to teach. At the very least accept them as sunk costs and find someone else to do a good job. It might be a good idea to politely mention to the dean/administrator that the inconvenience of firing a bad professor is less important than the benefit of providing future students with a better education.

- Is it worth your time to do anything about it? The chances you have an impact might not be worth the time it'd take to try. Your time is valuable and I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff you could be doing. With that said, I'm sure it wouldn't take too long to set up a meeting or write an email.
High school. I want to know the time and cell phone use gets you a disciplinary referral. I imagine this applies in ERs and other places cell phones are not allowed. Also I cannot pull my phone out of my pocket without standing up and spending some effort. Watches are easier to use.
Interesting. We'll take a better look at that flow.
$26,679 in 24 hours: Stats from my latest book launch
I know I'm going to get down-voted for an information-free post, but I think it's awesome that you're a commercial pilot and participating in HN. It can sometimes get too insular with valley-type techies here. Thanks for participating.
I like the concept of user generated content. I haven't been that into games in a very long time at this point, but from what I remember of playing the few MMORPG's that I did play, they always seemed to fall down when it came to making the game world truly respond to user input. What I mean by this is, what if the game world's state was as responsive to your input as say... a forum, or blog comments section, or even a social website?

Well, anyways... I checked out the first game in the article's list of "great" HTML5 games (Contre Jour: http://www.contrejour.ie/#fbid=N0F1LHvfzzM). It was pretty good. Seemed to have relatively unique, interesting game mechanics, nice visuals, and I liked the music.
Thats typically correct. My thought was that if you knew what numbers security monitoring companies would call from, you could filter out those calls, then extract the addresses they reported incidents at. Of course the monitoring company will filter out a lot of false alarms, so you'll get less data points to work from, so like I say... I'm not sure it would be worth it.
That site was always reporting it as up, for me -- I think it was just pinging http://bankofamerica.com/, which seemed to work; but then immediately redirecting to https, which didn't.
I talked to some IT directors here in the UK. They are of the opinion that a well speced Windows 8 device that combines the utility of a Tablet and a notebook PC will be of great interest to them for all staff who work away from their desks.

So they will buy such devices for the sales people - in substantial numbers because they will be able to meet the demands for tablets while also delivering the pre-existing corporate apps.

I also noted during a visit to a local electronics outlet that all of the PCs (all formats) being sold are running Windows 8. The OS may be a bit of a mess but it looks great in the demo (especially on a touch screen) and people will buy it. In the store, Windows 8 looks better than the Apple offering - and the price is a lot less.
Down from Unitymedia Germany.
OK, just so everyone doesn't think I'm an idiot who puts soap on his hands before the water...

I had already turned on the faucet, gotten my hands wet, soaped up, and then when rinsing, realized it had gotten too hot and wanted to change the temperature so I could rinse without burning my hands... Man, people below are treating this like a brain-teaser!! ;) haha..
11 171.159.64.3 (171.159.64.3) 78.322 ms 77.015 ms 77.841 ms
Dèzquare – An online platform that matches you to a designer you’ll love
I got the early release of this book on Oreily Safari and I have a rather low opinion of this book. I was developing a Backbone.js app wanted to use this book to provide insights but this book was surprisingly completely unhelpful. I was ( and I guess I still am )struggling with rendering components , item views and list views and managing events/models and struggling with router etc. I am not the only programmer with these issues; there are plenty of non-trivial question about backbone.js on Stackoverflow. This book has little to help one understand the internals of backbone.js or how and where to apply underscore.js . For some reason this book veers off into node.js development as if every one using backbone.js is going to wrote a node.js back-end server app. Thankfully enough, there are several outstanding tutorials on the web on backbone.js and the underscore.js libraries as very well documented and the demo app is also very illustrative. I purchased this book on OReilly Safari to support the authors but the book is a complete disappointment.
A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney (March 2012)
Torbit looks great, thanks.
How to Build Hard-to-Replicate Links
There is an ICAO recomended kit list, but usually is more extensive than that, I have our company list (I'll search it and post it later) but trying to find if there is a more general one.
Now a days there are also automatic defribilators (spelling?) in transoceanic planes.
There should be some kind of general briefing for physicians, from airlines and medical asociations.
A web framework in Rust
Then stop comparing things like healthcare in a country of less than 10 million to one with 300 million+
Ouch.

Were I ever to become diabetic (and manage to figure out my fear of needles), I'm pretty sure I'd carry around spare insulin, like an epi-pen.

(Is it something that can be carried around trivially? Or does it need to be refridgerated? You know what, maybe I'll just eat healthier.)
> His contrast of personal liability for entrepreneurs in Europe with the essential absence of any such liability in America is true.

In the UK an entrepreneur can set up a LTD company which limits personal liability.

The EU has had limited liability for traders since 1989.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability)

> In 1989, the European Union enacted its Twelfth Council Company Law Directive, requiring that member states make available legal structures for individuals to trade with limited liability. This was implemented in England and Wales by Statutory Instrument SI 1992/1699 which allowed single-member limited-liability companies.

This is just one small example of something which is factually incorrect. It's not a matter of opinion; it's not shades of grey; it's not one person's impressions of a country. A statement was made; that statement is wrong. There are many others in the original article.

Scattering these errors in an opinion piece gave it the feel of a shallow attack piece.

> His post is not directed towards Europeans. It is directed towards American entrepreneurs who are looking at Europe - and could come to Europe with vastly incorrect assumptions about what it means to start and run a business here.

They're definitely going to have vastly incorrect assumptions if they believe everything in that article!
"The Future of Games on the Web"

Not

"The Future of Games is the Web"

*And from his article, I interpret Web as Web Browser.
It's that you haven't used C. Learning C teaches you something about programming that other languages can't. It teaches you ways of thinking about problems that are useful even when you aren't using C.

This is true of most languages, and probably most true of Lisps and MLs. If you've never learned a Lisp, I also would consider you "not an experienced programmer". Not "an inexperienced programmer", and you may be "an experienced <ruby/python/garfunkel> programmer", but I think you are "not an experienced programmer". You should also use Perl at some point, for example. By the way, it's awesome that you want to learn more, that's a very good sign. (Again, this is all very heavy IMHO ;-)

In C's case, some of the things you learn are pointers, memory management, portability, simplicity, filesystems, build systems, etc. These are usually things that are handled by other languages, or that other languages discourage you from thinking about. Other languages will have made choices for you about how to hide these details, and it's often useful to have made your own choices about such problems at least a few times in the past. Otherwise you may end up blinded by the choices made by others.
I use Linux on the desktop and I haven't touched an X11 configuration file in many years. I would have to Google for its location if I wanted to even look at it. Stuff just works now - except we don't have intelligent multimonitor support (until now).
As a European myself, I think it is fine to generalize* about Europe. Many points in Varsavsky's blog post were correct and it raised awareness of some things to consider. Sure, it had its omissions and errors, but also remember it was a blog post, not an article in a peer reviewed journal. Reading the article + the ensuing hacker news discussion one is already much better informed.

What is naive is to expect some blog post to give you an overarching view of a very complex subject. Kind of like reading a wikipedia article something and expecting to be expert on the subject matter after that.

*Making generalizations is a wonderful property of the human brain. Without that we'd all be lost in the fractal complexity of everyday detail.
If I'm on a flight and they're asking for aeronautical engineers, I'll be asking for their strongest and most expensive drinks.
5 Google Products That Failed and What Startups Can Learn From It