skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it should be noted that all of those things are very US-centric, and workers in the US generally get a very bad deal compared to almost any other first world country.

For example, for a full-time employee in Europe, dropping below those levels wouldn't just be unambitious, it would probably be illegal. In many European countries, the counts for both bank holidays and vacation days are usually somewhat higher. Also, if you're sick then for many salaried positions you would still get paid as normal, though would you probably have to get an official statement from your doctor for anything non-trivial and different rules might apply if you needed to take long-term sick leave.

A typical reckoning in Europe is that there are 365 days in the year, but only a little over 200 working days. Put another way, the fully loaded cost of a "full-time" employee here is probably 150-200% of their salary, and a significant chunk of the overhead is paying them for Monday-Friday days when they won't actually be at work for one reason or another.
Yes, that's what I meant. Push the work to the insurance companies.
Look at the result: it just ends up hijacking what could have been constructive dialogue into a BTC proselytizers circlejerk and hangers on who want a handout by asking 'What just happened here??!!?'

You've been warned.
[Petition] Release healthcare.gov as an open-source project.
Yes, exactly. The living will conversation. It may not change his ways, but it'll make him respect how you feel about it, hopefully.

For me, it was 2009, the year everyone died. I lost so many friends and family, and so many of my friends lost friends and family, I couldn't even count them all. My bandmate in particular struggled with a father who had been a lifelong hermit, and was utterly uncooperative in his own care. He had no will, and my bandmate was the sole heir of a house that had been in the family for generations (since the 1850s). It was a legal mess waiting to happen. Meanwhile, I lost another bandmate, just a few years older than me, to cancer, and lost a friend of 15 years to suicide. Terrible, terrible year.

This led me to a conversation with my children, who were 15 at the time. I told them that if I ever get to where I can't take care of myself and their mother can't take care of me for whatever reason, that they should do whatever it takes to take care of me. Take away my car, take over my finances, put me in a nursing home, whatever. I warned them that I'll tell them not to do those things then. They shouldn't listen to me then, because I'll be senile!

But seriously, parents may not do what is best for their children, but they can at least care that that's their choice.
Startups in 13 sentences [2009]
> middlebrow dismissals

Are HN users going to get a "brow height" indicator sometime?
> It's not ok to remove negative information.

Why? The BLP stuff has been clear and firm for years: Anything that is unsourced should be removed quickly, especially if it's BLP.

Obviously, removal of suitably sourced material is a problem so I agree there.
I fully get the noise thing, and I find it hard to believe that anyone would do a scan without giving hearing protection. Possibly on old, low field magnets? At 3T it would exceed 100db no problem. In the control room I've measured 90+ db on my (highly calibrated) phone. It's loud and its negligent not to give hearing protection.
This is hilarious to me because I sold three things today on Amazon and thought on the drive back from UPS, this should be getting more press how easy this is.

I sold a laptop though which is the only item I'm worried about being returned. Luckily I listed it as not having a battery and not having a hdd so it's already listed as not in working condition.
Internal discipline?

MIT explicitly forbids an academic adviser from offering employment (directly or by a company they own) to any student while they are still enrolled. Otherwise you could have a situation of "if you accept this job, I'll let you graduate".

It's not hard to imagine that not having a policy like that would open Stanford up to lawsuits, if for instance a student feels compelled to work for someone in order to graduate. It might still happen, but if it is discovered I'm sure there are ways to address it.
No. The strength is only as good as your best algorithm. XOR'ing two mediocre algorithms does not give you a better algorithm. In fact, you might be more likely to end up with collisions in the final product if you XOR two results together than you would have had in the primary results themselves, making your random results even worse.

To quote:
in any iterated hash function it is relatively easy to find exponential sized multicollisions, and thus the concatenation of several hash functions does not increase their security.

Source: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.99.9...

See also discussion of why XOR is often a bad idea for combining hashes: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5889238/why-is-xor-the-de...

And this question about combining different hashes:
http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/270/guarding-again...
Non-profit just means the organization has to use its profits for the operation of the organization or give it to other non-profits not that it cannot make a profit.
What consequences did you have in mind? The subjective, arbitrary, and capricious cover-my-ass politics that their supervisor, and their supervisors' supervisors will play when something goes awry and they need people to blame?

My opinion is that in-house employees should have "skin in the game" proportional to the equity they hold in the company and the authority/responsibility they wield as a result. Most of that time that's a one-digit, round number. And yet employers think employees should act as if it's a magnificent act of selflessness and beneficence to deign to acknowledge the employee's existence and stoop so low as to offer them work.
Why doesn't Wikipedia sue this company and their clients?
Would you care to release any of the applications you've submitted? I would be curious to see if it's really a quality application that YC overlooked or if there are other reasons you were not accepted.
You can get DIY soylent down to between $5-$6 a day without too much effort. There are some that are a bit lower, but you're not going to beat DIY traditional cooking by any means. It's meant to be a time optimization.
Unless you have a really terrible track record here on HN, that seems like a poor choice...
This article got one thing wrong; "eBay's fees can be kind of a rip off" should be "eBay's fees ARE a huge rip off". That combined with the removal of negative feedback for buyers is why you should try Amazon rather than sell as an individual on eBay.
What is the difference between Consultant and Freelancer?

The former has better marketing (and a commensurate increase in rates, naturally).

But seriously, given the breadth of roles that could reasonably be described as freelance, there's little meaningful or objective distinction between freelancers and consultants. I don't think the distinction between freelancing and contracting is particularly relevant today either, though some would strongly disagree.
You are ridiculous!
Unless you're actually using every cubic foot of your storage unit (which would be a remarkable feat), that $0.09 figure is a bit off. Amazon only charges you for space you actually use, whereas a storage unit charges you for the empty space too.
Rational horror movie: HELL NO
how are you making a sandwich for < $2.00? I must be doing something wrong.
congrats Xan and the rest of the team!
when dogs play they frequently visibly take turns ( basically it goes something like this - Malamut to Chihuahua to "Now i'm doing to issue an attack call and you are to respond with jumping back" and after that call-response sequence Chihuahua to Malamut "And now is my turn.."), and it seems quite possible if monkey would be orchestrating their speech call-response sequences similarly.
You're assuming that "credit-worthiness" == "financial responsibility", but they're not the same thing, because "credit" as it's used in our current economy is not the same as "credit" as you would think of it just using ordinary common sense.

When you get a loan for a car or a house or pretty much anything else, the bank is lending you money it doesn't actually have. (This is called "fractional-reserve banking" in order to confuse the uninitiated into thinking it is something abstruse, when it's actually very simple: I've just defined it in one sentence.) The cash that gets paid to the seller when you close on the loan is created on the spot (ultimately it comes from the Federal Reserve, at least in the US, which can print money on demand--actually it doesn't even have to "print" it since it's just electronic entries in accounting databases); it doesn't come from the bank's vaults.

So the bank doesn't really care whether or not you can pay back the loan; it makes its money on the "processing fees" at closing. The loan payments you make are going to third parties (in many cases, the bank sells your loan to a third party almost as soon as it's created), who are spreading the risk of default much more widely. (If you ask, "what happens when that risk isn't spread widely enough?", the answer is that you get an economic meltdown such as the one that happened in 2008.) But since the primary lender is making money on fees, it considers people "credit worthy" who generate fees: i.e., who take on debt. It does not like people who pay cash because that creates no debt and hence no fees.
Out of curiosity, what do you find cheaper about the Swedish lifestyle? Moving from California to Denmark, I have sort of a vague feeling that's true for me also, but having trouble coming up with any specifics! I did get rid of my car, which is one big source of savings on insurance/gas/maintenance (plus a nice one-time $10k from selling it). But apart from that, I'm not too sure what's different. Maybe I eat out less as well, and do more picnics in the summer.
Looks cool and all but kind of worried about the code. Have a look at it: https://github.com/Wizehive/Firepoker/blob/master/app/script...

Everything is in the MainCtrl. No separation of concerns, at all. If you have felt that testing is hard (test folder looks a bit empty), it's probably because you're not separating things enough.
Manufacturing Desire
Women are hipergamous, they stay only with one person at time, but they switch to what they perceive as better ones. Most divorces are early in the marriage, when the woman is still young enough to have her first kids, or more kids beyond her first or second kid, and thus they can still find another man. Also there is research that found out that divorce rates drop when a woman has male children ( but not female, and noone knows why )
We discourage self medication as it makes sedation complicated. If someone took oral sedation, then is still needing sedation, we don't know if their medication hasn't worked, or is still coming on. We use IV sedation, its controllable, easily reversible, easy to top up. Getting an OD under control when they are still absorbing from their gut is not easy. We like to think we learn from experience!
Be very careful with this approach, due to blood sugar levels.

I can't go more than 90 minutes between small snacks without suffering shakes, and I'm not diabetic. Even a small orange or pear will bide me over.

I know some airlines that ban flightcrew from intermittent fasting when on flying-days for that reason.
> other sources of itemizable expenses

The interest payments in the first half of most mortgages get you close to the standard deduction. Only works for owners, but it's still a relatively common one.
No. I mean something more along the lines of "Consultant X wrote this unmaintainable piece of crap a while back, and now we need someone to fix it".
I didn't address your second point. I don't think Bill Gates's success is relevant. The question is whether students are choosing to drop out or being asked to quit. Not whether they will be successful.

I picked Bill Gates as a well known example of somebody who chose to drop out. I'm sure at least one unknown classmate of Gates also dropped out and didn't achieve much, but since I don't know their name, I didn't use them as an example.
I think tipping people in Bitcoin is an absolutely awesome way to introduce new people to Bitcoin. I think it would work well on HN, but I imagine not everyone would be a fan.
It's not companies that "fine". Second, you can change your website to something like "unplug.me" or something.

Furthermore, the word "Facebook" has been added to the Oxford Dictionary which may play in your favor. It's been added as a verb. I'm not a lawyer, but I think you can use it that way too. Something like "unfacebook.me" .. But I'm just keyboard jockeying.
That's a good point, I should have calculated the daily price. I was just thinking of the convenience of an all-in-one nutrient rich meal replacement being easier to transport and not go bad.
Ask HN: I own a niche image upload site with 400k uniques but now what?
Hey everyone,
I've owned reversegif.com for almost two years now. Its an awesome app that lets you upload and reverse animated gifs. The site is by far the community favorite, and has been pulling in 400k uniques per month steadily for the last two years.

Its serves such a niche purpose I don't know where to take it from here. Financially the site performs poorly - barely covering hosting on a month to month basis. But I want to utilize the traffic and add more features that would bring the community value but I dont know where to go from here.

Thoughts?
Even if you're only filling the floor 1` high, that's still an order of magnitude difference between the cost of a traditional unit and Amazon space. Not that Amazon doesn't offer some other advantages, but worth noting.
We didn't think it was easy enough to use. Also you can do micro-transactions with zero fees on Coinbase, which is ideal doe situations like this which are all small payments, so we wanted to take advantage of that.
> One of the problems of Soylent is the need for water. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water.

Why does Soylent need water? Could the same ingredients be prepared as a Soylent power bar?

That is a crowded product market, but Soylent might have an interesting pitch. A cashier at Trader Joe's told me that power bars were the store's best selling items.
Thank you kind Sir!
The question is whether the Wikipedia snowjob is itself notable enough to warrant inclusion in Wikipedia.

Often some random internet debate or meme is not judged to be noteworthy enough for inclusion. Should someone hiring a PR firm to update their Wikipedia article count? I mean, if misleading PR is a topic that is generally discussed in the media about a firm that's one thing, but if fairly ordinary corporate PR efforts that just so happened to violate Wikipedia's neutrality policy, I'm not sure that that's all that notable amongst the many other things a company has done.
The Little-Known History Of The World's Coolest Hot Sauce
This disgusting dating app lets nerdy guys bribe hot women to date them
ZeroVM: Smaller, Lighter, Faster
I share these definitions.
What do you think, regular employees work 100% of the time?
Right. Being able to fork the OS and release devices like the Kindle Fire do make Android meangingfully open.

Saying 'iOS is more closed' is just obvious.
9 Marketing Musts, Delivered By A Duck
How's that? If you're filling the floor 1' high that's 1x10x10 or 100 cubic ft at $90, for double Amazon's price. Parity is 2' high. When I had a storage unit I think I was using about 30% of its capacity, which is cheaper than Amazon but also less convenient. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Ask HN: How do you invest your savings?
Graduate here.

Just started my full-time job and from what it seems I will be able to save about £800-1000 a month. I have some savings already (not much, £7-8k) and want to find some good investment options, but I am obviously not very experienced in that. My question is - what do you think is the best way to employ this money (the savings + the monthly chunk I can save) in order to get a decent return without taking too much risk. Obviously, I am not even thinking I can live off that but I think it's good to start thinking about those sort of things as early as possible and having just graduated I don't think there's a better time :)

How do you go about investing your savings? Any answers will be greatly appreciated.
“It’s a concept so simple that even animals understand–give a dog a bone, and it will obey. Give a woman a present, and she’ll…”

That is a quote straight from their pitch that went out this morning.

I'm not sure who approved this going out, but they should be fired. If the CEO approved the message he/she should consider another career.
You'll learn why if your startup makes it a few years and you have high turnover of contractors and hence knowledge. Same goes if you lose a lot of employees.

I think there's a percentage of employees to contractors that depends on the project that is the perfect ratio of employees to contractors.
And there's nothing wrong with having optimized code. This seems to be a discussion about having the right priorities, not on the virtues of the optimizations themselves.
Blackberry Messenger (BBM) for iOS and Android is Finally Here
Well, I would argue that this article really is an introduction to functional programming using Haskell.
Most of the concepts he/she introduce are not specific to Haskell but are more or less specific to functional programming languages.

But the author doesn't seem to be very well aware of that.
Quoting the article: "Haskell is very different. The language uses a lot of concepts I had never heard about before."

All that to say that if you already know some functional programming this probably isn't for you.

Edit: clarity.
This is crazy stupid and naive.

I like spending time with my friends and family, some of which I have to travel far to see, for one.

I spend 40+ hours a week in front of a computer, when I get a chance to go out in the world, I want to GO OUT.

None of these things don't mean I don't love software (I do) or I'm not interested in it (I am). I just have varied interests.

Disregarding that, I used to work for a Big Nameless Faceless Corporation, and the legalize in employment agreement said basically that because I was a software engineer for them, they owned all the software I wrote while employed, even if I wrote it on my own time and with my own computer.
Completely agree with you.

If it's time to capitalize something, bring in the free market.

However if you need to build something that's never been built before, you tend to need a government, a tyrant, or a Rockefeller.
Argh, you are both right and I actually must think about subject to reach a conclusion. What a novel experience.
Dexterous mobile robot runs Linux and ROS
Microsoft starts repackaging popular mobile web sites as Windows Phone ‘apps’
Almost any book by John Stillwell

http://www.amazon.com/John-Stillwell/e/B001IQWNS2/ref=sr_tc_...

meets your requirement of "It is good if the book has exercises in the form of main story lemmas and side story / related proofs." I like Stillwell's books a lot for readability and starting from the basics.
Ah. Fair enough, and it's a good point since consultants by the nature of their employment likely don't have to deal with the consequences directly.

Word-of-mouth, though, they may have to deal with. But so does everybody.
> If you quote William Gibson's analysis of Japanese society as authoritative or insightful, you already lose...In terms of tech adoption, Japan may have been ahead of the USA in some respects, but in terms of how their society is structured they're still a few decades behind. Their treatment of women, in particular, would strike an American as archaic and quaintly Mad Men at best, and at worst barbaric and abusive.

I am reminded of a recent discussion on 4chan of, amusingly enough, this very essay, where a 4channer reading the appendix noticed that I wrote "mediums" instead of "media", and outraged, wondered how anyone could take seriously anything I had ever written since I could not even use the word correctly.

At the risk of outraging you still further, can't it be true that "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed"? Can't it be possible that in some respects Japanese society is further ahead on a trend than the USA, and in other respect behind?

> Younger Japanese (age 40 and below) tend to be more worldly and cognizant of other cultures, and understand that the social structures which served their parents and grandparents are keeping Japan held back and isolated, economically and socially.

I wonder... Not very long ago, I finished reading my first 'visual novel', one called _Umineko_. The patriarch of the protagonist's family is what one might almost call a Western otaku - English-speaking, European-literature-loving, contemptuous of all things Japanese, and a few spoiler things as well - and the novels themselves are heavily influenced by Western murder mysteries & a bit of philosophy too. I was struck by how old-fashioned this preference seemed in the character. Similarly, I have spent a lot of time on Gainax & Hideaki Anno, and one thing that comes across is how much old Western SF and television Anno & other Gainaxers must have consumed, given the pervasiveness of the references in their work. But younger directors and anime industry figures seem to reference Western materials much less - I would be very surprised to see a _Babylon V_ or _Firefly_ reference in any anime I watched, whereas Anno would freely throw in allusions to Anderson's _Thunderbirds_ TV series and now-obscure Western works like that. I've also seen claims by occasional Japan-related writers that actual English proficiency has declined, which certainly might reduce Western exposure, given how much of it would be in English. All of which makes me wonder what objective metrics there could be for 'more worldly and cognizant of other cultures' and what they would show over the past 3 or 4 decades in Japan?
As no one ever heard of this, it is probably not going to last for long, especially if its existence is 100% based on funding by SUSE / The Attachmate Group.

Don't get me wrong but such tools should be vendor-independent unless it targets only the vendor-specific distribution and have a clear business model so it can operate profitable.
Your suspicion is wrong and really, really, out there as well. I'm surprised to hear someone thinks this.
I guess you can design your startup where the downsides of using contractors and consultants will be minimized. It severely limits the choice of industries but it is interesting nevertheless.
"This item cannot be installed in your device's country."

?

I wouldn't mind having something akin to Blackberry Hub on my Android, yet I'm not sure I need another messenger.
Yes, video is very helpful. But an application without video is much better than no application at all.