skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every year for the last 4 years, Apple has spent 50% more on labor[1]. Mainly because it’s hiring so many new employees, but also because it’s raising salaries and benefits.

As of September 2012, Apple had 76,100 employees, including 42,400 Apple retail store employees. Operating expenses in FY2012 divided by the total number of employees were $176,360.

As for employees at Apple’s suppliers, Apple releases a Supplier Responsibility report every year[2], in which they detail exactly what they’ve done to ensure suppliers treat their workers well. Apple already made Foxconn pay their workers more in past years, but the pay increase alone is not a good solution. From Apple’s latest report:

“Third-party labor agencies help many suppliers recruit contract workers from other countries. [...] Workers are often required to pay fees to each of these agencies to gain employment. [...] They must hand over a high proportion of their wages to recruiters to pay this debt, and they have to remain at the job until the debt is paid. We consider this a form of bonded labor, and it is strictly prohibited by our Supplier Code of Conduct. When we find violations, suppliers must reimburse excessive recruitment fees—anything higher than the equivalent of one month’s net wages—for any eligible contract worker found working on Apple projects.”

[1] Apple annual report FY2012: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2439775143x0xS11...

[2] Apple Supplier Responsibility report 2013: http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/
SpaceX has an intership program, that might be a good thing to look into.
Even smaller than Armadillo - I really like Copenhagen Suborbitals. They are basically your friendly hackers next door, looking to launch a person into space.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/
I'm not sure what can go wrong, but let's try ...

In 30 characters you can encode the ADN for very small proteins. Many of them are interesting [1]. For example, oxitocyn has only 9 aminoacids [2]. Each aminoacid is encoded in a 3-base codon [3], and most of the codons can be tranlated to an ASCII letter [4]. (You must choose carefully the aminoacid->codon translation to get printable characters.)

But you will need also at least a starting and ending signal, so in total you will need 11 characters. But it's not enough to have the information there, the cell will not produce the associated protein unless it is in some bigger regulatory structure. For example, it needs to be part of an operon [5] that is a much bigger ADN sequence. (I couldn't find the minimal size.)

I think that not even the 140 characters are enough to destroy the word or create a drug producing plant. But IANAMB.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin#Structure_and_relation...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code

[4] http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-se...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operon
Cross Platform Compiler and Runtime
Actually, it makes sense if you include the context that I quoted. Namely the "everyone should know" bit.
I'm building a quadcopter with my kids. With parts sourced from China - http://hobbyking.com/ - it's ridiculously cheap.

I'm sure SpaceX's hex is big, powerful, and carries all sorts of nice toys, including having enough lift to carry an HD camera and stabilizer - but still, it's not that complicated to make one. I could probably make an HD-camera-carrying hex myself if someone was willing to sponsor the parts - including stabilization for the camera, onboard controller for extra smooth flight, etc. And I'm not a rocket scientist. :)

You want a hex for this sort of job because you can lose one rotor without crash-landing your sensitive HD gear. With a quad, you lose a rotor, the whole vehicle crashes.
Ask HN: How can a government implement Bitcoins?
Hi guys, this is a throwaway account.

I have a direct access to the government of my country (Small South American country) and I can present a project that can be implemented country-wise to start using Bitcoins.

So, if you have the access to present a project of great impact what would you do?
Hobby King for parts. RCGroups for info.

http://www.hobbyking.com/

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/
It's formal because the law is not simple and people are not laid back about their legal issues. I'm not sure what good convincing clients otherwise would serve.

Just because something can be identified as having certain qualities doesn't mean that it can be improved by forsaking those qualities. "Defendant? How about DeFUNdant?"
is the intent of this to prevent bad actors from re-selling them?
I don't see how it is all that impressive. Nokia has been shipping a million plus phones a day from a long time ago.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/matrix.asp
Using three estimates can help. Create optimistic, likely, and pessimistic estimates for each significant development task. Plug the values into the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (pioneered from building Polaris nuclear submarines in the 1950s) to get a reasonable estimate:

t_{expected} = (t_{optimistic} + 4 \times t_{likely} + t_{pessimistic}) / 6

http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php

This also helps indicate what tasks will take the longest, allowing managers to prioritize based on business needs.
Before a journalist takes the time to load a press release into a "spinner" maybe they'll just go ahead and rewrite in their own words.
First off, I have some small side iOS projects coming down the pipeline so if you're interested in helping a bit, get in touch.

Also, storyboards are really powerful and can save you a lot of time once you learn them.

I'm mostly a Rails/Ruby dev as well but am doing more iOS. My recommended resources are:

1. BIG Nerd Ranch book (best book IMO)
http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Guide-Guides/dp/...

2. Programming iOS (5|6) by Neuburg (either version is fine)
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-iOS-6-Matt-Neuburg/dp/1449...

3. Ray Wenderlich blog and tutorials bundle (worth the money)
http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-5-and-ios-6-by-tutori... His storyboard tutorials are great

4. NSScreencast (think RailsCasts for iOS. Not as thorough yet, but worth the money)
http://nsscreencast.com/

5. Do a week-long, in person class such as
http://pragmaticstudio.com/ios if you can afford it

---

Other than that, I really haven't run into issues I couldn't figure out via Stackoverflow or Apple's docs/samples.

The real issue for me was wrapping my head around the frameworks and understanding how it differs from Rails/web world. You might find it helpful to just take a week off and bury yourself in it. Try and pick a very simple (but useful/functional) app you can build and ship in a couple weeks. Give yourself a deadline and do it.
Another classic example of the Streisand Effect. If he really wanted something changed or the fact that it wasn't a retraction more visible, he could of emailed the owner of the blog and politely asked if there was a compromise that could be reached.
As soon as the Matrix came out, there were all sorts of reports that the story was not original. As far as damages go...I'm not entirely sure that the claim to the story is where the money lies. Subjectively, the story is crap and I can think of a million ways to have made the story more interesting that were not explored. That movie was a blockbuster for its visual effects. Period.
Possible causes for the longer momentum: Apple added several carriers last Fall[1], added LTE service for more than 40 carriers[2], and more countries where iPhones can be bought unlocked[1].

The iPhone 5 was announced 3 weeks earlier in the season than the iPhone 4S was the year before, but Apple was better prepared to deal with the demand. That meant that during the holiday season, you could actually buy a new iPhone in stores.

[1] http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1937

[2] http://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/
>And, of course, Apple was right to give it to them.
How was Apple right? The market always wants cheaper hardware.

They devalued their products by competing on price. It will be a short term gain but a long term loss.
There are other readers in Windows (besides Window's 8 built in metro (full-screen) reader). Ever hear of Foxit http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/ ? Mush much faster than Adobe Arobat.
I swear this is one of the hardest problems in computer science, which is crazy - how hard should it really be to say "run this process, and restart it if it crashes"?
Bingo. This is the classic case of a tech geek looking at things through a lens of "abstract principle" when it's really not appropriate. Yes, sure, I think we can all agree that in a perfect world no one should get preferential treatment because of an objective fact of existence like ethnicity.

But in the real world, we have social groups with complicated dynamics. Expressing solidarity with your group is a normal and important part of this. Tech geeks do it too! And yes, sometimes that takes the form or a free beer or a "Greek discount" or whatever.
Not that much. Sorry if it sounded like a snide remark. I just thought the number was big and was trying to understand what those 80 modules of 10000 lines would be.

For comparison, Python 2.7.4 seems to have 400K lines of Python code.

C:\Users\me\Desktop\Python-2.7.4>cloc .
4233 text files.
4130 unique files.
1424 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.58 T=23.0 s (134.3 files/s, 54205.3 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language files blank comment code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python 2086 86198 107060 414941
C 548 50019 36839 369130
C/C++ Header 254 6514 9919 64470
Bourne Shell 39 6109 6235 38030
m4 19 1585 191 15172
Assembly 47 3659 4474 13733
make 12 500 360 3043
HTML 14 393 11 2336
Teamcenter def 9 173 162 2104
Objective C 7 102 70 635
Expect 7 115 178 545
DOS Batch 30 90 102 426
CSS 1 97 19 323
C++ 2 27 18 134
vim script 1 36 7 106
Javascript 2 15 10 97
XML 4 57 2 73
NAnt scripts 2 1 0 30
IDL 1 0 0 24
Visual Basic 2 1 1 12
YAML 1 2 0 6
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM: 3088 155693 165658 925370
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Have no fear, the Chrome PDF plugin has brought all that slowness back. Joy.
Also, the first stage put up the second and third stage units.

What if you have a payload container that was the size and weight limits of the second and third stage, which was put up into LEO by the first stage. The payload would then be picked up by vehicles already in orbit, and the first stage unit returns to earth.

Assuming that the payloads are simply building materials, to be assembled by bots in orbit....
The only way it should be acceptable is if the journalist writes "the company said X but they stand to make money off of it and I have not verified it."
Ask HN: What is your favorite company-specific engineering blog?
I love the poster and the initiative.
Sadly I can't spend $40 in a poster, so I created mine https://www.dropbox.com/s/h8bpjdui1a4myhp/poster.JPG
It all totally depends on the task. My previous job was at a web agency. You give me a spec for your website and I could fairly well nail down how long it was going to take if I was doing the work.

I've found that it's important to give a quote (to your managers) that you almost feel uncomfortable with. Not so long ago I had to quote on integrating a 3rd party ad system into a site. A 30 minute job. I'd already spoken to the 3rd party and didn't trust their abilities to supply working js. I quoted a week (even though it seemed completely unreasonable to me). We used it all.

Over time we developed a policy that if we were integrating with an external system we would only do it on a time and materials basis. We might give a guess at how long it might take - but always caveated with a "this is probably wrong" (and we'd totally overestimate to avoid the surprises).

I'm now building new technology with a friend (who's not a developer). I don't really make predictions about how long anything is going to take. At first he found it a bit frustrating that there's so much uncertainty - but after witnessing again and again how long it can take to solve a single issue he's come to accept that's just how it is.

Two very different worlds.
I do math problems in my head.
Anyone have a non-scribd copy?
In a similar line I recommend the paper "Cultural Biases in Economic Exchange?" http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/sapienza/htm/cul...
Big moat? Apple has more money than any other company. Facebook is losing users in droves and every day there's a new article on HN on how to get Google out of your life. Of the companies you mentioned Amazon is the only one with bright prospects.
This is a pretty common point of view of novice developers.

They have no idea how to do accurate estimations other than guessing, or giving in to a management target date and not understanding the difference between targets, estimates and commitments.

The next step is nearly always, rather than learn to be a good estimator, to declare that if they don't understand how to do something, then no one does.

The idea that if you haven't bothered to learn how to do something, no one has, is an amazing act of hubris and is characteristic of a certain sort of person who often causes more damage on a project than contributions.

The solution is to either stop giving bad estimates based on nothing, or to learn to do it properly. Giving bad estimates because you don't know how to estimate is a form of engineering malpractice. Declaring that because you are an incompetent estimator and have not bothered to learn how to do it that therefore no one else can estimate either is pure immaturity. It is similar to the principle of object permanence where in Piaget's theory of cognitive development he notes that where infants from birth to around age two don't believe a ball exists once it leaves their field of vision.
The Changelog Live with Jeff Atwood
I have to admin part 2 perfectly sums my ideas about JS and classical OOP inheritance. Looking forward part3 and its "solution".
Designing Technical Equipment
pg's comments have a downvote button too... If everyone agreed with you, his comment might be an indecipherable gray-on-gray. I think he has as much right to comment how he wants as the rest of us do and just like many OP's who defend their articles or startups on threads here.
Instagram's and AirBnb's are some of the good ones..
I would assume that a highly paid professional spends a much greater percentage of his or her day engaged in actual work, is more efficient than I am, and is required to produce a higher quality output than I am. I'm sure it's cognitively harder, but I doubt it's anywhere near the number of hours.

My dad is an accountant. He gets to work at 7:30am and gets home at 4:30pm. He spends about as many hours at work as I do at school, but when he logs off for the day, he's done. I can't remember the last time I actually completed my obligations for the day. If you do manage to do a good job on all the problem sets and readings before losing consciousness, there's always a test to be studying for or a paper to be revising. I procrastinate because there is literally no such thing as "after homework is done."

I don't mean to complain - I gave myself this courseload and I've done well enough with it that I'll be going to my dream school next year (UChicago - yes, I know, the workload will increase exponentially). Sleep deprivation is a price I chose to pay. But I do think that most professionals have a day which ends - usually before 7pm, but at some point it ends - and several hours to commit to a social life, family, side projects, pleasure reading etc. as they please. Obviously not in 80hr/week fields like law and not in startups about to ship, but on balance. Is this not accurate?
As mentioned below, this is available in Firefox: http://spasche.net/openinbrowser/
I know this is meant to be funny, but I'm not sure what message you're trying to give by having the people happy and cheerful when they hear the person they've wronged has Lawdingo. The message I'd get, if I took it more seriously, is that the person who wrongs me has nothing to worry about if I go with Lawdingo.

I think a comic panic reaction would have worked better, begging him to "get a real lawyer, don't use them guys" or something silly. Giving the impression that you guys are better than just going the traditional route, and more scary for the other guy.
If they had no electronics, how did the golf ball finders work? Or are they also scams that he just marked up 200000%?
I guess this is what happens when you get angry and threaten someone who knows better than to be scared.

I wonder what the author would have done if the initial email had been a plead, especially if only to make the article say something like "NOT A RETRACTION" in the title.

If it had been me I would have responded much more kindly to a plead than to a threat.
I stand corrected, on my home machine it does indeed work beautifully :)
White dwarf collapse down to a neutron star. Sad.
They're giving that $1 to the investor who was smart enough to invest in AAPL, which produced a product that was sufficiently valuable to consumers that it could demand such margins.

The theory is that investor will be more likely to make such smart investments in the future.
It doesn't really matter because regular locks aren't hard to pick.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lock+picking
I agree. I liked the opening line though: "C is memory with syntactic sugar."
It is a good introductory article for someone who has never used C -- CS-1xx Intro as you said.
Hey pg, I've followed your writings ever since Hackers & Painters was published, and you've thoroughly influenced the decisions I've taken at every major juncture of my career. Sorry if the initial comment was too quick trigger, I did not mean any malice towards the project creators. I've left more useful feedback elsewhere in this thread.

The essence of my discomfort with this is that because this is YC's slogan, having a YC startup publish it with the blessing of YC the organization seems a bit like self-worship. I never got the sense through any of your writings that you'd advocate for this sort of thing. I guess I interpreted it more as YC worship than a what's presented by the message, and I doubt I am the only one that might think that.

My humble 2 cents. Thanks for HN.
True Ventures confirms investment in Second Life founder’s new startup
Sure, why not shoot an own goal instead of addressing any of what I actually did say ;)
I went ahead and noted your issues in the article. I agree with your premise.

I don't know if perhaps experienced VIM users forget what it is like to start "from scratch" with the editor, but it is a lot. When I write this stuff, I am most certainly ignorant. It would be very interesting to me to see more information about why these plugins might not be needed, but I've done a lot of reading, and this is _the first time_ I've ever seen `netrw`.
KSP is great fun and extremely educational, but it makes things way easier than they are in real life, presumably for the sake of fun.

One way this is done is by making Kerbin a lot smaller than Earth. Specifically, over ten times smaller. This reduces the speed needed for low Kerbin orbit to around 2000m/s, while low Earth orbit needs around 8000m/s.

A factor of four in speed probably already sounds bad, but it's much worse than one might naively expect. The amount of fuel needed to accelerate a given payload to a particular speed grows exponentially with the target speed. A typical rocket engine exhaust velocity, both in KSP and real life, might be 4000m/s. When the target velocity is half the exhaust velocity, as is the roughly the case with Kerbin, then you need about 40% of your rocket's mass to be fuel. In other words, you can orbit about 60% of your total mass. When the target velocity is double the exhaust velocity, as is roughly the case with Earth, you need 86% of the initial mass to be fuel, so you can only orbit about 14% of the rocket.

In other words, if you're putting 1000kg into orbit, then in KSP you need about 700kg of fuel, while on Earth you need over 6000kg of fuel. For a single stage rocket, that 1000kg that you're putting into orbit includes fuel tanks and engines. You need much bigger engines and fuel tanks to lift 7000kg than you do to lift 1700kg, so a lot of that 1000kg you get into orbit is going to be empty fuel tanks and spent engines, not actually useful stuff.

Staging lets you work around this problem by letting you reduce the amount of useless junk you put into orbit. By dropping large amounts of empty fuel tank and spent engine early on, you no longer have to lift it all the way up, and you have more orbited mass left over for actually useful widgets.

A single stage that goes from ground to orbit isn't too hard in KSP. On Earth, it's right at the limits of technology. Nobody has operated a rocket as a single stage to orbit, but a couple of pieces of larger rockets are theoretically capable of reaching orbit from the ground on their own if flown by themselves. It's possible, but the amount of useful payload that such a thing can put into orbit is so small that it's not cost effective.
Ask HN: Why we can't our CPU be as powerful as our GPUs
Yes, thank you for the writeup. That page sums it up: a lot of features!
Win a free puppy - Rover.com is hiring Python/Django devs
I would not use Facebook and Amazon when comparing margins and profit. Both of these two companies aren't even in the same universe right now with Apple. Google is the only company that can play with Apple and Microsoft.

Last time I checked, Amazon posted in Q4 of 2012 around $90M (Million) in net income while Facebook did about $60M in Q1 of 2013 compared to Apple's $9.5B (Billion!!) in net income.

What drive me absolutely crazy is the fact that it would take Amazon/Facebook well over a decade to even come close to what Apple makes in three months.
> Nvidia is in the slow process of eventually discontinuing further CUDA support, and it is recommended to write new code in OpenCL only.

[Citation needed]

Their OpenCL support is still limited to v1.1 (released in 2010), while just few months ago they've released a new major version of CUDA with tons of features nowhere to be seen in (any vendor's) OpenCL.
I had a very hard time taking the company seriously after seeing this ad.

I don't know if it was the amateur production quality or the actors that seemed to be some college kids eager to get back to their frat house, but the whole thing had a local car dealer quality to me.

There's a reason professional ad agencies get paid for what they do.
I was trying to describe a simple mental model that has been helpful to me. While I agree assembly details would have been interesting putting that in would have lost more than half the audience.
Sure!

Email me at aby@gulyani.com
I'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.
A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%
Please clarify what you are trying to say.
Ask HN: n00b question reguarding Prey and cellphone tracking
I'm just wondering if anyone knows how apps like Prey use your data. I just installed it, and am wondering if the thing is constantly eating into my data plan. It probably doesn't use a great deal, but my plan is kind of crappy so I thought I'd double check. Apologies for such a lame question, but I don't have a Quora so thought I'd ask here.

Thanks!