skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like my work isn't done. The truth needs to be told, and unfortunately, very few people have the courage to tell it, especially under their real names.

No, I don't dislike all founders or VCs obviously. I just hate most of the ones I've interacted with, and I'm shocked by the number of people who've had similarly horrible experiences. When I left my last startup after being asked to do something horribly unethical, in March 2012, I thought I'd been extremely unlucky. I thought my experience was a 1-in-10,000 case of bad luck. As I poked around, though, I realized that horrible experiences are the norm in VC-istan. People just don't talk about it.

Why the fuck aren't they speaking up? Why aren't they exposing unethical people and companies? Why are people so terrified of ex-bosses that they refuse to tell the truth so the horrible founders can fail and some good ones can step in?

I've managed to put cracks in the image of VC-istan. My job is to make those cracks bigger so some light can get through. At least some of the climate of anger that's been on Hacker News for the past few months is something I've started. Good for me. I'm starting to contribute. Courage is in rare supply in our industry; we tend to bend over and take it when our masters screw us. Well, at least I will fucking speak up.

So, I've also worked in finance. As an industry, it has an image problem. To get smart people, it has to pay. So it does. Most of the work isn't terribly interesting, but the pay is good and the people are actually a lot more decent than in VC-istan. If you're good, they'll treat you well. In general, financial firms are a lot better, ethically speaking, than VC-istan.

If we can bring VC-istan's image in line with what it actually is, then they'll have to (like finance) start treating engineers better if they want to get talent, and the bad startups will die out, making room for good ones.
The thing I really want in my next kitchen is an "air wall" and well designed fume food/fire hood, with both big lights and task/spot lights. Right now I have one of the stupid "recirculate the output after running through a tiny filter" nominal hoods over the stove, which is really incompatible with high-heat cast iron or wok cooking. And would terrify me if there were a fire (I have a Halon 1211 and an ABC dry chemical between the stove and the exit, along with a costco bag of baking soda, and plenty of pan lids, but still)
You'd also lose an additional 3% each year to inflation, so the practical worth of your money would be much much less. Most funds gain some money in the long run, but there is no guarantee that you'll net money in the long run (it has just been historically the norm).

The main thing however, is that the typical fee is closer to 1.1% or so. They are grossly exaggerating what the typical investor would pay. Nonetheless, compounding returns forces you to think about these things.

As I've stated in my other posts, you can get a Vanguard fund with 0.05% fees, or the typical SPY index ETF, which is currently at ~0.09%/year expense ratio. Focus on low-fee funds, and read the fine print on your 401k plans.
Or turning that around, do you think it requires all 8 of my cores to copy data over the network? Do you think the two lines of code + justification text provides sufficient value for this application to distract from the point of it in order to show why someone should override the default behavior?

Do you believe users shouldn't have any control over the number of cores any particular application consumes?

Have you measured the CPU contention of the application and determined that using more cores is worth the overhead of increased overhead of multi-thread exclusions (vs. more simple things happening directly in the scheduler)?

Overall, it has nothing to do with this article and now even more people are going to copy it in more unnecessary places as a cargo-cult "turbo button" for their programs.

If you are going to use an idiom like that, the least you could do is check for the GOMAXPROCS environment variable and only do this as a default when the user hasn't specified otherwise.
The salient point is that if there were no fees, then all of that money would be yours.

Whether Wall Street and/or its employees actually use the cash to "pay their bills" or invest over that same period to fully realize their portion of the return is irrelevant.

For that matter, Wall Street could (and probably would) invest that money elsewhere and may gain an even higher return. But, again, that's not the point. The point is that it's not in your pocket.
http://sparkleshare.org/ is sort of a Dropbox clone backed by git, that might be what you want. There are a few other things in this space but Sparkleshare, by virtue of aiming to replace Dropbox, is the most polished IMO. There's also this script called gitwatch that does pretty much exactly what you want without the GUI: https://github.com/n3v1k/gitwatch . I guess if you don't need to push to a remote repository automatically this would be the better option (and you can easily stick in push/pull in the right place in the bash script if you want).
> Run the math, if you are paying 2% fees, you are getting straight up robbed. If your employer doesn't offer low-fee index funds, it would be worth your while to make sure that they get some onto your 401k portfolio.

Worth my while, true, but maybe not worth theirs. More flexibility comes at a higher price from the 401k vendor, a crucial part of the scam here. Employers can offer "a 401k" as a benefit but might not view this as a tax-sheltering vehicle through profit sharing or discretionary matching--they could simply see it as yet another benefit expense. As with all employers offering benefits, some are more generous than others. Most employees don't know/care to pressure their employer to offer better investment options, or would prefer to have other benefits improved instead.
Its some what old school it's to stop confusing similar symbols O and 0 for example - It may be more common in the more technical branches of programming and in science and tech fields.
That's precisely it, I come from a background of doing Perl and Ruby, which led to my misuse of the word hash here.
Admittedly I haven't spent too much time testing your product, but I just wanted to point out a few free tools that have been around for a while (which I use often):

http://www.gethifi.com/tools/regex (js regex tester)
http://rubular.com/ (ruby regex tester)

Have you heard of/tried these before?
Uncle Sam Wants You to Hack for the U.S. Government
future = principal * (1 + interest) ^ periods

So some basic math to show how much a 2% yearly fee costs you:

In[2]:= 100000 * (1 + 0.07)^50

Out[2]= 2.9457*10^6

In[3]:= 100000 * (1 + 0.05) ^50

Out[3]= 1.14674*10^6

In[4]:= Out[2] - Out[3]

Out[4]= 1.79896*10^6

In[5]:= Out[4] / Out[2]

Out[5]= 0.610707

So you lose 61.07% of your 401k balance to these yearly fees reducing your effective interest rate.

The 100k example isn't accurate, it's just trying to give people a sense of how much they'd be losing..

However - this article doesn't really do the full benefit calculation of company matching, effective interest rates of other types of accounts, etc.
The notion that goroutines aren't threads seems to exist primarly because Golang also makes use of OS-native threads in order to schedule goroutines, and so needs to draw a distinction in order to explain how the runtime works.

But that's just a detail. In reality, goroutines are threads; they're just userland, non-preemptive threads. Similar constructions have been available, even to C programmers, for well over a decade (and probably much longer).
I ve known people doing it with SVN/Git for at least 7-8 years now.
Yep in the UK my personal pension is sub 1% charge
I really liked playing around with Quintus. It's one of the newest, and feels the most like modern JavaScript development. Almost like Backbone for games.
Exactly! Just discovered this feature - pleasantly surprising.
2% seems high, but you need to be careful. During bubble-1, the startup I was working ended up soliciting feedback on the option proposed by our payroll company (I believe). Most of the "management fees" on the funds were in the 1-2.5% range. I went to the morning star website and showed what poor ratings this batch of funds got as well as pointed to some fidelity/vanguard funds that were in the < 0.5% range for fees, yet in the same class.

In the end, we ended up with better options. You need to pay attention to these things.
Any recommendations for who my employer should be using that would allow us to invest in low fee funds? We're really small, so most people have told me we just don't have the leverage to negotiate a better plan.
I have a friend whose surname was McCurry (which she rarely used - family baggage) and she ended up changing it to Blake, because you never have to spell out Blake to people, but you do every time with McCurry.
As people have picked up I meant a hash table serialised as JSON.

You are probably thinking about associative arrays. A hash table is something different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table
Cube Algorithm Question on SO - Pretty Interesting
All you can really do is pressure the company into picking a better 401k provider (Vanguard is a good bet).

A self-directed option in a 401k isn't really possible as far as I'm aware, since you're limited to mutual funds. They don't want people "gambling" with their 401k money by betting on individual stocks.

Still, given the tax advantages, you're likely to come out ahead in the long run in a 401k compared to a taxable brokerage account. Just pick the funds with the lowest fees.
> But the moment writes are sustained for longer than it can merge segments (say while doing a bulk load), per-write latency spikes appear

Isn't that a problem common to all SSTable-based databases?

Is LevelDB any worse than HBase or Cassandra in this area?
If you'd like to see tiny fonts taken to the extreme, check out "The Bee’s Knees", a font with x-height of 3 pixels but surprisingly legible because it uses subpixel rendering:

http://www.sitepoint.com/two-teeny-tiny-fonts/
> good illustration that the Go designers didn't think their ideas through. This is a real pain in the butt when you are writing code and regularly commenting in and out sections of code while you are testing things.

How could it be that bad?

It's as simple as a compile, a click on the error message and adding a one line comment.

No worse than the standard practice of making sure your c/c++ code compiles without warnings with the maximimum warning level set.
This also reminds me of a quote from the movie twelve monkeys - the insane asylum - seems to fit:

"Telephone call? Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world. Doctor's discretion. Nuh-uh. Look, hey - all of these nuts could just make phone calls, they could spread insanity, oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all these poor sane people, infecting them."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/quotes
> but I think "<- true" looks nicer than "<- struct{} {}"

And what looks even better:

defer close(doneChannel)

(it's also syntactically correct -- you ca't just have a defer block without a function invocation)
How many years has microsoft owned skype now?
Chat heads for Twitter hacked this weekend on TCDisrupt
Why is our generation stuck in VC-istan instead of working on things that actually matter?

I believe Bret Victor tried to answer[1] this on his Investing on Principle[2]:

Default choice 1:

The world will try to make you define yourself by a skill. That's why you have a major in college. That's why you have a job title. You are a software engineer. And you'll probably specialize to be a database engineer, or a front-end engineer, and you'll be given front ends and asked to engineer them. And that can be worthwhile, and valuable, And if you want to pursue your life pursuing excellence, and practicing a skill, you can do that. That is the path of a craftsman. That is the most common path.

Default choice 2:

The only other path you hear about much is the path of the problem solver. So I see entrepreneurship and academic research as kind of two sides of that coin. There's a field, there's a set of problems in that field, or needs in the market. You go and you choose one, and you work it and make your contribution. And a little bit later on, you choose another problem, work it, make a contribution there. Again, that can be worthwhile and valuable, and if that's what you want to do, you can take that path

And finally:

Identity

But I don't see Larry Tesler on either of those paths. I wouldn't say he was contributing to the field of user experience design, because there was no such thing. He didn't choose some open problem to solve, he came across a problem that only existed in his own head, that no one else even recognized. And certainly, he did not define himself by his craft, he defined himself by his cause, by the principle that he fought to uphold.

There are many ways to live your life. That's maybe the most important thing to realize in your life, that every aspect of your life is a choice. There are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life, and accept the path that is laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world that you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, I'd like you to take a little time, and think about what matters to you, what you believe in, and what you might fight for.

And I add: following non default choices is hard. Following a principle is hard. Noam Chomsky explains the deep reason why that is on his Manufacturing Consent[3]

[1] http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/principle-centered-...

[2] http://vimeo.com/36579366

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQhEBCWMe44
Little too hysterical for me.

Yes, you pay a fee to have your funds managed. No, that does not mean "you work for Wall Street", whatever the heck that's supposed to mean.

This is like dropping into the middle of a demented rant. There's no disagreement on the facts here, but there's a lot of smoke and heat, and not much fire.

If you don't like paying to have your funds managed, you have plenty of other options. Use one. I'm not sure this constitutes the end of civilization as we know it.
Some 401k programs do allow for "in-service" rollovers which would allow you to move the funds to an IRA before you leave your job. Those that allow this aren't all that common, but it is worth checking into.
I'm the person from Hubbub who put this in place. Before it was there we'd get pretty frequent emails from recruiters offering to send us CVs coming in to the advertised address.

This process makes it abundantly clear that we're not interested, and also has the pleasant side effect of screening out people who aren't interested enough to read the man page for curl.
Can't rollover your 401k ? Become a "qualified investor" and manage it yourself. Buy ETF index funds and pay < 0.3% in fees
So why use Go instead of node.js? You can probably take that reasoning and substitute "Go" for "Clojure", and "node.js" for "Go".

Go people would probably object that the things that Go adds, and that node.js lacks, aren't just window dressing -- sure, there are situations where a node.js-style fast event loop that avoids blocking operations is all you need, but there are also situations where you want something more like real threads, because the problem demands it.

I'm a lisper but not a Clojure expert - but I'd assume that Clojure people don't consider the existence of e.g. Actors to be "feature bloat". My impression is more that the difficult/special concurrency-enabling feature of the language is STM, and language-level support for different concurrency paradigms, implemented on top of STM, are probably low-hanging fruit once you've got it.
Comparing Pattern matching to "ifs and elses" shows that, saddly, he didn't really understand its power.

Also, his opinion on Options seems to forget its advantage that the compiler won't let you use a "nullable" object without proper care. It is the main thing about it.

From the talk, it seems that he was new to Scala, didn't properly understand its concepts, wrote a bunch of spaguetti code and then blamed the language.
I feel like you are perhaps missing the point of and ideology behind the Pirate Party(s).

Their focus is much more on personal privacy, government transparency, and sensible copyright reform than it is about "Free movies".
Unrelated, but Grumpy cat finally smiles
They where probably more like guidelines - though shares for PMC Contractors aka mercenarys go back much further to Italy with the condottieri.
The company I worked use to use ADP's 401k, which wasn't very good. We've switched to The Hartford, which is decent, but I've only heard good things about Vanguard.
I think something that's not discussed as much, but would resonate with the HN audience...with lots of us being full or part-time remote workers, imagine being an American and doing your remote job with the low low cost of living of living in Thailand? Or how about waking up on a beach and eating fresh Oysters in Ecuador? Imagine if the majority of your salary went into the local economy of the Dominican Republic?

Sure lots of Thais, Ecuadorians and Dominicans might move to the U.S. and Western Europe for jobs, but the Americans and Europeans might move to their countries and live like kings, generating tons of local jobs.

Now suppose you did your remote job in the countryside of South Korea (relatively cheap and has its charms), and you decide you need an junior person to help you out with your work? Why not hire an incredibly well educated local, who'd be just as happy to not take a job in a boring chaebol grinder? Now you're generating high-end white collar jobs?
This is why checking the fees of the products you buy when you invest is so important. I'm lucky enough to have index fund options at 0.04% and bond fund options at 0.07% in my 401k. That doesn't matter if you don't use them though! I work with some pretty smart people that used to put their 401ks in target funds with fees in excess of 2.0% until I sat them down and worked out the math with them.

If you want to quickly eyeball how your 401k stacks up, Brightscope (http://www.brightscope.com/) is pretty useful.
Given that there are individual ideas that require more than one word to express, including adjective phrases makes sense. I was actually impressed by their inclusion. I did notice a false positive though: "integrity.While"

I hadn't heard of the NLTK before. Thanks for pointing me to it!
Show HN: My new side business
I'm guessing he's referring to the fraction of underweight children, 5.1% below the poverty line and 5.7% above 4x the poverty line.

Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.

The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)

One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)

Sources:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... for the definition of food insecurity levels.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... for the 1% number.
I thought it was just merging the accounts? I login with my skype name, and can talk with all my MSN contacts there. All the 'switch' does is add your MSN contacts, and give you a second way to log in. As far as I can tell, this affects everybody.
It isn't a huge problem, but it was enough of a problem to be annoying, and I had an afternoon to spare so threw this together with the hope it would also attract some attention from inquisitive hackers.

You could indeed flood us with applications using it, but if you did we could also screen them out pretty easily, or just turn the service off.
The Redditisation of HN marches on.
http://www.de-captcher.com/ - have 1,000 Captchas solved through their API for $2. Captchas haven't been a reliable anti-spam solution for years.
I agree on the tone. A calmer (but still pretty negative) version of the rant has been given repeatedly for some decades now by John Bogle, who argued that surprisingly large portions of unsophisticated investors' funds were going to paying the management fees of financial products, when in many cases the managers' primary virtues lay in being good at marketing said products to said unsophisticated investors. This is one of the more recent iterations of his spiel: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047064396X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

This article does mention Bogle, but really just reading something by Bogle directly would be better than this piece.
Hi, I wrote this service. We do indeed mention that it's a hurdle for recruiters to jump, and it was partly intended for that, but we also use it to screen out people who can't really program. The number of applicants we had before this that couldn't explain how a website might track that you're logged in was terrifying!
At first I thought this was a cute lead up to git-annex and then I realized it was a straight forward question and that you want incremental diffs. You should take a look at git-annex[1] one of joey's other projects if the diff feature is not a deal breaker.

"git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.

git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser."

The only joeyh project that I use more than git-annex or etckeeper is moreutils.[2] (Obviously I'm not including joey's enormous contributions to Debian) Included in moreutils:

chronic: runs a command quietly unless it fails
combine: combine the lines in two files using boolean operations
ifdata: get network interface info without parsing ifconfig output
ifne: run a program if the standard input is not empty
isutf8: check if a file or standard input is utf-8
lckdo: execute a program with a lock held
mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first
parallel: run multiple jobs at once
pee: tee standard input to pipes
sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file
ts: timestamp standard input
vidir: edit a directory in your text editor
vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe
zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command

The only program that I never have a use for is ts, I use tai64n[3] from djb.

[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/

[2] http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

[3] http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/tai64n.html
Thanks, I shouldn't have used the double space!