skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That wasn't universally true. In northern europe winters and long nights significantly reduced the number of hours they could work. Sure, they worked extremely hard during planting and harvesting seasons, but the rest of the time not that much. Seasonal farming means that the result wasn't proportional to the work put in but rather to whether the crops got the right amount of sun and rain.

Before that, hunter gatherer groups worked even less because they were so few and the food so plentiful.
Introduction to high-level multithreading in C++ via Intel TBB library
yeesh, I respect Mozilla for their true open-source-everything-all-the-time philosophy but this is an example where I think it backfires - it's too early! Even if these really are awesome components it's really hard to see past the lack of polish. People are fickle and you only get one chance to make a first impression, it's important that these things look good
Zurich?
Putting aside this story for one minute and looking at the larger picture one thing I find fascinating is how the protagonists are absolutely winning the PR battle. The irony here is that when Snowden or this owner go public the overly secretive government can't or won't reply in an effective manner. That secrecy, so effective when operating in the dark, is suddenly impotent when the light is shined on it. The only attempts at any type of rebuttal have come from Obama and have had little to no effect to change the tidal flow here.

So we just get this one sided narrative with a "fresh" new story every 2 or 3 days. It may be disturbing that he can be arrested but is that really news to anyone here? What's the point of a surveillance order if you can't back it up? We lock people up for contempt of court. You have to have a stick if you want folks to comply. Yet here is this story a few days after the main story and just as Lavabit was falling off the global media front page. This keeps the issue alive and hammers the government again. All trademarks of an excellent PR campaign. This narrative is having a withering effect upon those driving these programs as politicians see their constituents slowly turn from understanding of the need for these programs to alarmed by them.

That the government has been unable to mount any sort of credible counter story is pretty amazing to me and somewhat a relief. After all, true police states have amazing propaganda machines. This one feels reminiscent of an intern running marketing at a startup!
Some Proximity sensor tweeks to give you Samsung galaxy s4 airwave feature
I can confirm this on OSX - Chrome 28.
Hi there! I'm (from Berlin, 28 years, Backend Developer) considering to move to Dublin next spring for a year. Do you have some advice (living / working)?
It used to be the same in India. But it changed a few years ago. Now you can Indian citizenship if you are born in India and atleast one of your parents is an Indian citizen.
Honestly, this completely makes sense given how Google has been killing off non-profitable products lately. Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case? This isn't the olden days of Google, where they would shovel anything out there and see if it stuck.
>And when they aren't doing that, they ruin lives. Justifiably, we hope; that's what the rule of law is about. But regardless, ruin.

I'm not sure there's any justification for ruining lives. Note, I don't believe in the death-penalty. I think it's unfortunate that we ruin lives with excessive jail-time and almost permanent criminal records. I think society would be better served by always giving people a challenging recovery path. A way to clear criminal record, at least from employers' background checks. Excessive jail-time, since it pretty much ruins a life, should only be used in the most extreme cases - maybe only if the crime ruined someone else's life.... maybe...
Yup you can rest assured that if any of my future employers ever engages in such behavior, I won't rest easy and I hope today's young generation won't either.
An Important Move Optimization Is Nearly Invisible
> People exchange things that are worth less for things that are worth more. In such an exchange, both parties profit, always. In the case above, you exchange hours of your life for food so that you can live another day.

There are some goods that have so high a value it will be worth trading almost anything for it. Eating is one, medical care is another. This fact is routinely exploited so that those not in danger of losing those highly valuable things get more out of an exchange. The execs that run McDonald's don't have to worry about acquiring food or health care, they have the class advantage to securely have those things. And yet this same company puts out a spending guide to the workers that get low wages suggesting they have 2 jobs and that they put no money towards health care or heating their apt/homes. Those low wage workers can't simply stop working there, their ability to live and eat is in direct danger from losing that work. Is that a fair exchange?

> Also, people are the only source of wealth. Right now, machines are not capable of producing anything on their own, that is why there are no completely automatic factories and nothing gets created without human help, design or at least supervision.

It doesn't matter if machines are 100% automated and don't require humans. What matters it that as machine automation gets more efficient and requires less humans to operate, the more previously employed human workers lose their ability to work and therefore their ability to eat and have shelter. And yet the ownership classes don't suffer from this advancement, they still continue to consume and funnel money and resources into themselves. Is that a fair exchange?
City, actually.
For those considering a relocation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey (there's a link to a full report). I'm currently living in number 4 on that list (Munich). Still daydreaming of coming back home (Poland), regardless that the top city there is number 84 on that list (Warsaw - in my opinion the least livable city in Poland but other were not taken into consideration for this report)
It probably made more sense to have 20% time when Google didn't have tens of thousands of engineers. When you have a few hundred really smart people all working in the same building back in the early 2000's in Mountain View, it was I imagine a different thing than it would be now.
Agreed - and a wide range of services and cases is what makes it difficult/interesting. Looking forward to more.
It is disabled on mine and stays disabled. Do you have cookies enabled?
Well for one thing, in my anecdotal scenario, such transactions acrue no interest. It was the kind of debt anyone could incur and payback. Money lenders aren't under any obligation to give you a loan of any size. In that village there was a self-perpetuating obligation to provide the debt.

As for how it would scale, I don't know. Is the structure and culture of western urban society the only form possible?
Testers and Developers: Bitter Enemies or Secret Lovers?
I think that the author is a little confused, the linked image in not the original XKCD (http://xkcd.com/149/)
TechShop Menlo Park needs to move to a new location
Who gives a shit.

Nation states are arbitrary boundaries maintained by violent gangs called governments denying individuals freedom of association/movement.

P.S. I do occupy the land where I was born, and the same government considers me tax cattle liable for debts incurred by irresponsible baby boomers before I was born. God bless <nation N>. They hate me - or else they wouldn't threaten me with violence - but I do love them, because I was instructed to do so.
Obama's just too smart to make a blunder like this.

When I've watched him being questioned sharply in news conferences he takes it personally. He doesn't like to be challenged by reporters. He has a large enough ego where he could very easily think he has the upper hand and wouldn't be caught.
Yeah, as soon as I read that reddit is going to be afraid from competition of the entire internet, my first thought was "You know, reddit isnt the entire internet..."
This article makes it seem like 9gag is targeting reddit users to split them off and make their own community. This is so "huh?" I could barely understand it. Websites existed before craigslist and reddit, and people move between many websites, not visit one exclusively.
I think that patriotism is a very powerful motivation in the actions of potential whistleblowers.

Previous generations had the Nazis and then the Soviets as the 'enemy' and they were tangible opponents. Potential whistleblowers might have been able to convince themselves that they were acting for the greater good, and kept themselves quiet.

The new 'enemy' are the terrorists, and they are neither particularly tangible or visible. It is not so easy to convince yourself you are acting for the greater good in these circumstances.

In actuality, the reverse happens. Snowden's patriotism convinced him that the actions of the NSA could not be justified as 'greater goods', and so he became a whistleblower.
US only shipping for now.
Cloud is Expensive. It is a simple Fact.
The future is more about Hybrid, I dont mean Colo. More like OVH. Where you can have you baseline using Dedicated Servers and use Public Cloud to Scale up and Down during peaks.

That is why i have been asking why all these Cloud Providers dont offer dedicated machines.
Not confused .. I had initially only had the image and not XKCD link until someone asked me to credit them .. I added the link without noticing the text. .removed the link now :)
> While I don't agree with physical or verbal abuse, I think in this case Fiance probably hurt Bukowski more with her words than he did with his kick.

So you do agree with physical abuse. According to you, if your partner says something that upsets you, its totally OK to hit them. That is domestic abuse 101.
> So they are important, but need to live off ramen every day (figuratively). What good does that do to them?

Maybe they enjoy it? Maybe it makes them happy?

Not everything is about money.
I'm not an emacs user, but there are a lot of great tips on this site. The one about using one's palm to hit ctrl has been life-changing for me (works great on the wired Apple keyboard)!
And how many failed projects came out of 20% time?
It's superficial abundance. The Walmart is full, but your pockets are not.

Aside: I wonder what effect increased lifespans will have on hoarding. We know the old horde, will they horde even more?
Nice shorthand! :)

uk -> au -> uk -> nl

I think I achieved escape velocity...
Mount Everest is 1/3 sea level pressure and while you can't breath up there your not at risk of poping. The reason for this is a combination of things, the skin is tough stuff, but also your insides also resist expansion. Down to the cellular level where osmotic forces can be stronger than a pure vacuume.
Photographer fights to get credit for viral ballet dancer photos
I mentioned it because I've seen that xkcd and didn't learn about the bang syntax until today. Great Article.
This means that a lowly engineer with a great idea will leave Google to develop it instead of developing it at Google. Perhaps, this is a good outcome given the way Google keeps killing web services that people find useful but aren't profitable for Google.
Why should you be careful?
Your browser already does that.
Thanks Google for encrypting my data with your key
For EU: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ZTE-Open-3G-Unlocked-Firefox-OS-Ce...
The UK is a country: it's just that it's a country composed of 4 countries.

Technically, you should vote both 'yes' and 'no'.
That is a part of the roadmap. To allow multiple currency use.
Thing is: friends of mine recently returned from Zurich after over a year of working there and apparently they got much "hate" for being germans working in Zurich, for whatever reason. Not saying suisse people are racists, the ones i know are nice people! Also it's expensive. And i am not the mountain-vacation-type of guy. ;)

(the last point is probably more of a reason then the first)
It's pure evil, not "unreasonable".

Not only you have to suffer from a person holding a gun, you also should not even try to ask for help. You are a hostage in the hands of an armed sadistic monster. That's what it is.
My first release was Potato. I still remember downloading so many (3? 6?) CDs...

God, I feel old.

I don't use Debian much these days, certainly not as a desktop, but it will forever be the "real" Linux distribution in my heart. Without the ongoing work of umpteen Debian package managers, you wouldn't have Ubuntu (and all its humongous downstream), Knoppix, and so on.
They probably didn't lose as much money as they're gaining from the successful ones
Wales' counties have the same powers as any other county in the UK. However, Wales as a country also has devolved powers in it's own right.

As anywhere else, different areas have different levels of cultural self-identity - in that sense I can understand a comparison between Wales (country) and Cornwall (county) although not to Yorkshire, etc.
>The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

That had me cracking up.
Backbone Eye : Understand application behavior without debugging JavaScript
Does this matter if the engineers and/or the company learn something from the failed project?

We under-value sincere-but-failed projects.
How to Implement Offline Support using HTML5
-bash: To: command not found
I don't know, most professionals I know spend at least some of their "free" time (or at least the time they spend at home) reading journals or publications.

The idea of a profession is that one is not generally paid by the hour for "work" even if one bills a client by the hour so time spent on professional development whenever it takes place is part of work and covered by a salary rather than a wage.

Of course it might be true that other professions do less non-billable practical work though this is probably more due to the fact that programming doesn't require a significant budget.

The issue I think is one that many companies want programmers to work more like wage laborers and take care of the professional side for themselves.

For example a law firm is probably more likely to allocate budget for associates to use for professional development than an IT contracting company.
I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

“We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

“Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”

> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> So you do agree with physical abuse. According to you, if your partner says something that upsets you, its totally OK to hit them. That is domestic abuse 101.

That's absurd. Where did I say "if your partner says something that upsets you, it's totally OK to hit them"?

I stated that:

a) Bukowski's fiance probably hurt Bukowski (by stating that she cheats on him) more than he did by kicking her.

b) It didn't seem like his reasons for kicking her were because he "thought it was funny to kick women."

Please read more carefully before you troll me, sir.
I may have to steal that alias, good tip.

Ctrl-a/Ctrl-e are equivalent to Home/End (unless you're inside a screen session, which was a terrible choice of binding on their part).
Otherwise the break has nothing to break out of.
On an added note, I feel that a tangential problem here is that we do not know how to handle death.

It is not about the things we do not do, it is about having had enough.
A Google recruiter, while doing his spiel, told me in a light-hearted, offhand manner that some engineers call it "120% time". Having lurked here long enough and read similar sentiments from ex- and current google employees, it wasn't really news to me, but I was pleasantly surprised at his candor.

But do any of the other companies listed do 20% time? AFAIK, they only have infrequent "hack days".
For debian there's a typing tutor called dvorak7min, I found it very helpful.
> The problem is just that people want to live in the cities, and there just isn't a lot of space in the cities.

People will live where they can find jobs, and the very concentration of people brings in even more jobs to cities. As much as some cite the amenities of large cities to stay, a very large portion of the retiring population move away as soon as they don't need to work anymore.
Thanks :) This is my first article to break into HN top 10 and also got me max upvotes
Get things done by procrastinating
Over The River And Through The…Wait – Are We Talking The Outer Boroughs?
It depends how much time is spent doing computation and how much time is spent doing lookups from disk. If the latter is clearly dominating, then a switch to Go will not help much.
Background story:

I'm currently working on a ToDo-App for the iPhone. The problem is, I'm not really working on it. Instead, I created all social media accounts I could potentially need for the app (if I hopefully finish it sometime). In addition to this, I rebuilt my personal website, redid my résumé and a lot of other stuff (like this side project). In fact I was quite productive - but not on the task I should do.

To sum it up: Instead of working on a big task I got a lot of smaller ones done. So to get something done you obviously just need something bigger to procrastinate on. That's what this project is about.

Now I'm really interested in your opinions - do you think this could work?

(PS: English is not my first language - if there are any mistakes on the website please tell me)
What about the NSA reading these articles from a critical viewpoint? Surely they couldn't classify themselves as dissidents.
I think it's interesting what his incident says about scope and capability.
Here's a question for you who moved countries as a kid.

I was born and raised in the Netherlands. My girlfriend was born in California and lived in 6 different states before she moved to the Netherlands when she was 18.

When we discuss having kids, the question 'Where?' always pops in. My girlfriends idea on this, is that we should move to the states have kids there. And then by the time they go to primary school, move back to the Netherlands. She considers the Netherlands to have a more healthy environment for raising kids, but also would want to expose them to her home country and culture.

Just curious to your thoughts on this.
At first glance, the intent seems quite similar to Google's Polymer project. Hopefully they will interoperate.
It's not like there's a shortage of startups to provide innovation so it probably just makes more sense to buy the successful ones than speculatively spend a fifth of their workforce on random ideas.
I'm sure the gains from AdSense and Gmail alone outweigh anything they lost. Also engineers can stay happy if they work on things they like more often. So there could be an implied cost (by losing employees) to not allowing 20% time. I'll also add that it's almost impossible to stay focus on 1 thing 8 hours+ a day for 5 days a week. Even if there is no 20% time I'm sure they still lose time to unproductive activities. Maybe 20% time actually captured some of the time that would otherwise be spent browsing the web or making pointless comments like this on HN.
Cooling is actually a major issue with this idea. Working in space your going to encounter a huge temperature range so you want a fair amount of insulation, but dumping heat to the vacuume of space is much harder than cooling off on a hot day so current suits use an environmental control suystem to cool as needed.
Syrian Electronic Army attacks Outbrain
"if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue trying to copy it?"

That's incorrect, AFAIK 3M were the first company to pioneer this approach (with 15% of time spent on self-directed projects).

For example see: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-day...

Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been there 20+ years, an engineer with dozens of patents) I am told that while 15% officially still exists, for a long time it's effectively meant working 115% of hours.

Nonetheless the tradition allowing self-directed research continues at 3M - and this might mean using lab resources, or creating prototypes without getting approval.
To the side of the discussion at hand: I don't think anyone except 'Gen Xers' call 'Gen Yers' as 'Gen Y'. That's not something we do. Ever.
I dont think I like you
I'm wondering if your reading comprehension is really that bad or there's something else going on with you.
US -> Hungary -> US -> Sweden -> US -> Australia -> US. Jumped around quite a bit, but would love to get back to Europe or Asia
Would be interesting to hear if you discovered any downsides to Angular. I've been working with it a lot lately, but it seems to be a really good solution and the only issues with it is it can be hard to set up to be compatible with googlebot and the slightly tough learning curve
5 intellectually stimulating websites
As someone inside Google, this simply doesn't square with reality: just yesterday I spoke to a friend about joining a project he's working on on a twenty percent basis.
http://www.ribbon.co uses Angular both for checkouts and creating/editing products.

Disclaimer: I worked with them implementing that.
Another thing about the date picker that was at least happening on my desktop: when it expands, it expands well beyond the bounds of the mobile phone container they're using in their example:

http://i.imgur.com/oOQFBs4.png
"excessive jail-time"

Excuse me, which amount of mental and physical torture is "not excessive"? I may understand keeping beasts in the cages (crazy murderers and the like), but 99% of the laws are not about beasts, it's about compliance with whatever "rules for benefit of society". Be it anti-drug rules, anti-pron rules, anti-gay, anti-blacks, anti-foreigners, anti-rich or anything else. And of course, you have to fork over money to IRS for sponsoring this mafia.

Does it fix anything and not ruining one's life if a person refuses to give to IRS and being held under a gun as a prisoner for even 1 second? Would any of your friends do that to you, or you - to them if does not "pay taxes"? I highly doubt that. We all are being brainwashed to believe that violence is "for our own good" and "without it, it would be much worse". It's a religious nonsense of 13th century. "Without religion there's no morality."