skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect that's what he meant. In a small company two weeks is often all you'll ever get, if that much. In a large company you'll start there and pretty quickly get to three weeks, and if you stay long enough you'll get to 4-5 weeks.

This is in the US, of course. In a humane country you start with 3-4 weeks, and I think after a couple of years in some European countries you get around six months of vacation per year ;-)
I personally go for things that have bad design. Like slackware linux. I associate bad graphic design with great software. I love seeing a great science fiction novel wrapped in a generic illustrated cover. It seems more quirky and personal to me. I think good design can be bought, so I distrust it. I really hate it when the packaging is slick, with a perfect logo, and a perfect website, but the product is terrible. Like you were fooled into buying it. It happens more often to me these days because good graphic design can be bought, or copy-pasted.
gnome tool kit. Note that gnome is pronounced gi'nome just like gnu is pronounced gi'new.
> ... but it could conceivably take over a year.

I see what you did there. 8-)
it is gimp isnt it.
DevOps for Building Shippable Code
Does NYT have a policy about taking on outside work or accepting money from outside sources? If NYT means New York Times, is this something to do with journalistic integrity? I liked the author's suggestion about donating unwanted tips to charity or turning them back around into tips.
Are channels and CSP failing as the favored design approach? I keep seeing frameworks that just seem to use Go as if it were C with closures.
Purely a PR move, after the recent revelations. MS for years collaborated with various governments, often providing information before being asked. And now we are supposed to believe that they are concerned about it?
For all intents and purposes it's only PG. I occasionally change security and performance related things, but not features.
I was curious to see how accurate the displayed ephemeris are (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/Scripts/distance.js) given that they are known very precisely indeed.

For instance, ranges to Saturn are known to better than 1km, and Mars to better than 10m (http://tmo.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report/42-178/178C.pdf, e.g., fig. 1 for Mars), and we don't even get to take direct measurements of those bodies as we can for the Voyagers.

Alas, the js seems to simply be interpolating between two known values, at a spacing of 1 year (86400s):

var epoch_0 = 1373990400;
var epoch_1 = 1374076800;
[...]
var dist_0_v1 = 17396281625.1305;
var dist_1_v1 = 17395807835.8111;
current_dist_km_v1 = ( ( ( current_time - epoch_0 ) / ( epoch_1 - epoch_0 ) ) * ( dist_1_v1 - dist_0_v1 ) ) + dist_0_v1;

I'm not sure how to square this linear progression over a 1-year span with the comment in the OP that "Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is traveling from Earth, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of the year."
This is not the first time that Silicon Valley has dealt with patents. Gordon Moore:

>Ah, one of the questions that has come out of a number of lawsuits as of recently, that here on the west coast, in silicon valley, we didn't patent circuit designs or Computer Aided Design for that matter. And as a result, we never patented at Fairchild the ROM and the RAM. Intel never patented the microprocessor... and others did. East coast companies or TI in particular, took our work and patented it. How come we never recognized the importance of that... circuit development?

>Well, it was probably a different attitude about patents. One thing that happened in the semiconductor industry... semiconductor processes are a long series of steps and the patents had gotten pretty broadly spread because all of the people working on the technology had some of them. And the net result was in order for any of us to operate we had to be cross licensed so the participants tended to all cross, license one another. So, there was not a tremendous advantage to having more patents... with a couple of exceptions, there wasn't much net benefit from it.

>What we never anticipated, I guess, was a lot of other participants were going to enter the business later on. So, at Fairchild we tended to patent relatively few things, typically the ones that we thought we could police most easily and were the most difficult to get around, you know, the more fundamental things. But, I was responsible for a lot of those decisions. I remember one in particular that, in retrospect, is kind of funny. In the early days of the integrated circuit, Bob Norman, one of the people who were involved there, suggested the idea of semiconductor memory... the whole idea of how semiconductorflip- flops could be used as a memory structure, and I decided it was so economically ridiculous, it didn't make any sense to file a patent on it.

>You recognize that a few years later, semiconductor memory was the basis of...

>Of Intel.

http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/chronicles.ht...
http://www.justmommies.com/articles/how-long-do-sperm-live.s...

"around the time of ovulation, a healthy female body produces a particular cervical mucous that creates a protective, hospitable environment for sperm"
I didn't write that, but my guess is that it was literal.

I've seen and personally worked at a company where 2 weeks was not only your vacation time, but also your sick time as well. A government contractor I had worked for gave out 4 weeks (which was also sick time). Currently, I'm at 3 weeks.

Most places use vacation as an incentive - stay with us x number of years and we'll give you another week of vacation. I personally haven't stayed at a place long enough to realize that benefit.
Unlikely if you look at the chart that goes with the article http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-YE989_MFERTI_G_... cell phones weren't common in France in the early 90s yet that's when the biggest drop occurred.
> Plant sprouts won't germinate when placed near a wireless router.

The area next to my wireless router is so hot it is uncomfortable to touch. How near is near?

Oh and also, the plant sprouts germinated just fine. The media misreported the living hell out of things. Pictures can be found in the pdf@ http://www.dr.dk/NR/rdonlyres/075641A4-F4D4-4ECF-834F-C0DAF2...

The seeds next to the router did grow slower.

> Also sleeping with a cell phone next to your head apparently affects concentration the next day.

Students "noticed". Which means nothing. Measuring focus and concentration is a well studied field, we have excellent tests for doing that. It would be VERY simple to properly measure the impact on sleeping next to a cellphone and concentration.

Other things that could come into play: Talking/Texting on a cellphone late at night before sleeping means less sleep or the possibility of less quality sleep, impacting concentration the next day.

Oh, and also what was eaten for breakfast on a given day.

(Reading up more, the plant based one looks like it wasn't done horribly, but there are way too many variables. Unfortunately the reports are not in English so it is hard to find a good analysis of them.)
Cool. But I was hoping to see a speculative article about why we haven't seen other systems' Voyager equivalents.
if you look on github, you'll notice that all the obvious names were taken, e.g. go-gtk, go-gtk3. that was what really drove the project name to be gotk3.
> "Whereas in a normal case where your startup fails, it doesn't take your ideas down with it, and you're free to try them again elsewhere."

That depends highly on your definition of 'normal'. In non-software startups, there's a combination of patent, trade-secret and (probably) copyright to balance. Part of the value you are creating is in the innovative step/technical advance, which may make sense to write down, defend and assign to the company. For some companies, having the patent is a critical piece not only to demonstrate an innovative step [1] but also for investors who are putting money into the company because of that innovative step (that they know it's part of the company and you can't simply make off with it). It's a tangible asset so yes, it can be sold.

[1] assuming that the patent system is doing it's job properly (which many would argue it's not)
Mosquitos are terrible in Texas (the humid part) and would bite me all the time (grew up there). Now I'm in NYC the last few months, and I don't think I've been bitten even once. Or, I am being bitten, but I don't notice because my immune system doesn't react to the bites at all.

I find this very interesting. Does anyone have thoughts on this? FWIW I never used insect repellants growing up.
Fertilization is actually an accretive process. While only a single sperm will actually fertilize the egg, a single lone sperm is not capable of accomplishing the task. The ovum has a layer of protection that prevents access. Sperm cells, in turn, have some sort of enzyme payload that breaks down this barrier. It takes a lot of this enzyme before the barrier is weakened enough for a sperm to gain access. Not enough sperm, no one's getting through.

Additionally, the female reproductive tract is generally a hostile environment. This is by design, in order to weed out sperm cells with defects. Since this is a biological system, you're going to have some variation and some females are going to have a lower sperm survival rate than others. I have no idea what the range is, but I would be entirely unsurprised to learn the variation spreads over several orders of magnitude.
There's a big difference between innovation in the hardware space and the software space. There's a long history of hardware innovations being ripped off immediately by competitors, or even before you're able to bring your own product to market. The number of cloned technologies springing from China speaks to that.

Hardware patents still seem to work and reward innovation - things like FRAND prevent lockout whilst rewarding the innovator.

Other parts of the world, well really everywhere that isn't the USA, manage to get along fine without software patents but with hardware patents.

In fact a small hardware startup is exactly the kind of company that the patent system is designed to protect.
Don't forget HP buying Compaq. $25 billion well spent.
Kernel Dev Tells Linus Torvalds To Stop Using Abusive Language
Microsoft needs to quit acting like a lil bitch.
Life Lessons at 40
Time Machine does the one thing it does really well, which is incremental, local (or network-local) backups and easy restores.

It's not for snapshotting or mirroring. I used to use CarbonCopyCloner to clone my boot drive to an external USB drive every morning at ~4am, so if the internal drive on my iMac died I had an immediate bootable replacement.

(And when the internal drive DID die, I just rebooted the machine and took nearly a year to get around to replacing the internal drive!)
I don't think thats the correct logic to use here. It's more like using an undersized engine to try and climb a steep slope: you don't have enough power to push you over, even if you try for years.

This is due to the vagina being a generally hostile environment for sperm (evolution is funny like that).
But why even implement a duplicate link checker without putting more effort into parsing the uri string for obvious gotchas like whether there's a trailing slash, or extraneous but meaningless query parameters?
Isn't it most of us? Most of the people I know would be delighted to spend time with customers and learn that/how their product is being used.
Paypal blacklisting the word "Iranian"
Taylor Swift '22' Parody Pokes Fun at Tinder App
Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
"If it does indeed work with arbitrary BT devices like I think it does … "

Perhaps a Pebble Watch?
Mobile platforms dominate as game investments grow in second quarter
Some theories off the top of my head: Chemicals in the air/water/food/clothes, wireless electromagnetic waves from routers/cellphones, increase in stimulating porn/masturbation, depression, over the counter/recreational drugs, and of course faulty testing methods to acquire this data.
I'm really happy that you've signed up!

Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - which I haven't actively worked in quite a few years.

One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to support a specific thing (otherwise Gittip would be project-centric, not person-centric) but to support YOU and the things you want to do.

It's kind of crazy because I'm fairly certain that I'm getting donations because of my work on jQuery and not for my current side-project research into Japanese woodblock printing - but people don't seem to mind! (And I've made it clear on my profile what it is, exactly, that I'm working on right now and what I'm using the money for.)

I have a full-time job at Khan Academy and I'm well paid so I don't need the extra money - but it is appreciated. I'm re-donating a portion of the money that I get. Additionally it's paying for my extra server costs for my side projects and it's probably even paying for a good chunk of my monthly utility bill. I've been trying to think of other ways in which I can use the money that'll have a more obvious "money in -> using money -> output" pipeline but I'm not sure what that is, yet.

Let's hope you'll be able to keep your account open and find good uses for the money!
If the effect is real, isn't this obviously the effect of increased masturbation, the trend being easily accessable porn? A good test would be to requiring subjects to abstain from ejaculation for a certain period of time.
> niche markets

--or maybe we end up in a future like this: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-back-to-the-future-2-got...
Yes. When you're working in the newsroom, you generally need to steer clear of accepting any gifts, free services, or free products. It really matters when it's from a company that the Times has covered, or might write about in the future -- but that's a pretty wide net, and most startup employees would arguably fall into that category. The Khan Academy's sponsored donation program certainly would.

Here's the actual language:

Staff members may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts,
reimbursements or other inducements from any individuals
or organizations covered by The Times or likely to be
covered by The Times. (Exceptions may be made for trinkets
of nominal value, say, $25 or less, such as a mug or a cap
with a company logo.) Gifts should be returned with a polite
explanation.

From this little gem of a handbook: http://nytco.com/pdf/NYT_Ethical_Journalism_0904.pdf

... it's the Times' internal ethics rulebook specifically aiming at the conundrums of journalism -- but I think that quite a lot of it applies to ethical business practices in general.
I agree on pretty much all points - and wanted to add why I think Dropbox for teams is a horrible, horrible thing - well sharing anything on dropbox is actually bad.

First, one typically has a private dropbox that they keep a bunch of stuff in. When one joins a company that is using dropbox for teams - it cuts off access to your personal dropbox, and whenever the company has rule over your account - if you leave the company, lets say abruptly, you can lose access to your data.

I don't care what anyone says about any employment relationship - there is some data that is private and crucial, and you should never save any of it in a shared team dropbox.

Finally, sharing things with people via dropbox is a stupid and inefficient way of handling sharing; Assume you have a paid 50-100GB Dropbox. Storing large files/data in there is no-issue. Sometimes you'll want to share out a project directory with another user - but they may not be a paid dropbox user. If they join your shared folder, that data gets replicated to them and they get that data deducted from their available space. So, dropbox is "counting" the space for that data on both accounts. If that other user has a small or mostly full account - that project share could bring them to their cap.

This happened to people I shared data with on large projects many many times.

If I share out a folder from me to you - and you join my share - you should get a free connection to that share, as it is using data from my account limit, not yours.
New Digital Signature Company
http://www.e-sign.co.uk/
Hi
We are E-sign.co.uk and we have produced a unique and secure method to signing documentation digitally via a QR code.
Each signature on e-Sign is generated a unique identifier (a long random hash of letters/digits) which is embedded in a URL for accessing the information about the signatory and the document. When you view the Signed Document PDF on computer/phone/tablet, you can simply click the QR Code which will take you to the relevant signature page on our site. But if you had a hardcopy, you would have to manually type in the long url with the unique identifier.
With a QR Code scanner you don't have to do that. At some stage we will be releasing an e-Sign app for mobiles which will have an integrated QR Code Scanner. But there are lots of QR Code reading apps for smartphones available now and all will work with our QR Codes.
We are currently at our beta stage but are on verge of going live so as of now, you can register and use our services free of charge to see what you think.
All feedback in greatly appreciated.
Yes, you have the choice to decide who your clients are. Simple as that.
You Bought Helpdesk Software for Your Startup, Now What?
Man, a cross between this and static blogging via Jekyll/GitHub Pages would be the coolest. The worst part about having my site on GitHub Pages is that the workflow of "whoops, used 'your' instead of 'you're'" requires way more time and effort than it should.

Being able to have individual posts connected to gists -- where they can be commented on, forked for typos and suggestions, etc -- would just be perfect.
Product Strategy Means Saying NO
Are you asking about us having an outage on our site, or you having an outage on your site? If the latter, you could definitely set up a redirect like the mentioned article to forward all of your traffic to your status page. We'll be doing a similar integration with Heroku for their maintenance and error pages.
I worked for a fairly big company (100+ employees pre-acquisition) and I was able to develop a very broad role. I started as just a web UI developer, but soon helped design the deployment architecture of our entire runtime system and throughout my tenure I designed and implemented many of the services within that architecture. That included everything from DB schemas, custom XML databases, authentication servers, several mid-tier servers/services, as well as always being the lead owner of the UI.

What helped, I think, is that I was part of a small team in that big company. At peak we probably had about two dozen programmers, with 8-10 on my team. That's not much bigger than the team I'm on now in a tiny company where I also get to work end-to-end.

I disagree with specializing as you get older: there's going to be a tendency to do that, but it's the last thing you want to do. Never stop learning, never stop broadening your skillset. Sooner or later you're going to be a 40+ year old developer looking for work, and if you're a specialist you're going to be looking for a long time. As an experienced developer with a proven track record of adaptability you'll be able to justify the salary that you're going to want/need.
And anyone who's exerted themselves physically for more than a few minutes at a time knows that the more you do it, the more tired and weak you become (short term). If "intuition" supports both, it says nothing.
Heh. In a large corp that will remain nameless we had a management vacuum for almost a year as they played some sort of elaborate game of management chess.

Product still got released just fine due to a couple of strong team leads and a bunch of good engineers.
Needs more triangles.
Compelling Evidence for a New Tech Startup Bubble [Infographic]
"(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)"

Don't forget they were implicated as "coming soon" in the whole PRISM/NSA saga. No thanks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
I'm not talking about "surprised" or anything. I merely object to "intuitive", both in that I don't see how intuition supports this, and I don't think intuition is worth anything here anyway.

Don't assume the person downvoting you is the person you're replying to.
7:58: "I don't know why you'd want to collect mosquito legs, but if you ever enter a contest, you'll win"
Thanks for the link, I'll watch some of these. I agree the viruses/etc are a serious issue, and I'm not sure if I'm more worried about the first virus for Glass, or the first viruses for self driving cars and Amazon delivery quadcopters ... :)
You're missing the point: Nobody's denying that with the right internal authorization, the NSA can tap any phone line they like. What's up for debate (since Snowden has provided no evidence) is the claim that Snowden could do it all by his lonesome, with no oversight or approval.
Sperm counts are just the start. Motility and morphology are also factors. Motility is the percentage that can swim forward. Morphology is the percentage that are normally shaped. Using the widest ranges, normal morphology is 40% or better, and normal motility is 25% or better.

So, the total count only tells us so much. The number that are actually suitable for conception are a subset of the total, and if the total goes down, the subset becomes smaller.

The lower the number of quality sperm, the harder pregnancy becomes. Contra other commenters in this thread, the extra time this requires is probably not a linear function but geometric. At a certain point, outside intervention is most likely required (IUI/IVF).
How is Philadelphia's startup ecosystem?
I'm looking to move in the next 12 months, and Philadelphia and the greater region has been shortlisted (wife has family there) as one of the potential locations to move.

Does Philadelphia have a good startup ecosystem, or am I going to find that there are plenty of "startups" but that the good jobs are few and far between?

I'm looking for something that's a bit more work-life balance than the previous startups I worked for, but at the same time I'm interested in being part of something that I believe in and which could lead to big things.
PourOver for App.net is now available
For a lot of different reasons: most of them probably not that good.

To be able to work within the "system". That is, to stop someone from patenting prior art (our technology being only prior art if we didn't patent it) and use that against us. I've personally known of people who have done things like this (find a new usage for an existing very specific technology, patent it and notify the creators of the technology).

To give us the option to open source the technology and not have problems within the (broken) system: specifically intellectual property (Java with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft come to mind though that was resolved through Trademarks).

I was raised in the USA and, at the time we started the patent process, it "felt" like the thing we were supposed to do.

I've invested a lot in R&D and somehow felt that I needed to protect that investment. It took four years to figure out all the kinks in the technology.