skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more interesting referendum that is still pending in Switzerland is the guaranteed monthly income referendum. There is another pending referendum, as yet unscheduled for vote, about paying every Swiss citizen a guaranteed monthly income of 2500 CHF (~$2755).

The guaranteed monthly income has long been a proposal for getting rid of a whole host of complicated welfare schemes, which sometimes have perverse incentives that prevent you from getting back to work as they go away if start earning money. The idea is simple; just give everyone a certain basic amount of money, no matter how poor or wealthy.

It would be quite a bold move if Switzerland actually implemented it. I have my reservations, but traditional need-based welfare has so many problems, it would be interesting to see if such a dramatic change would actually work.
You're making a couple of assumptions:

1) The value of employees can be measured individually. Say you've got 100 assembly line workers. What's the value of losing an assembly line worker? Almost nothing. What's the value of losing all the assembly line workers, divided by 100? Pretty big number! In the U.S. we tend to define "value generated by an employee" in terms of "marginal cost of replacing the worker" but that's arbitrary.

2) That renumeration should be tied to value generated by the individual employee.
awesome, thanks for the source luke!
Hey Joe. Thanks for taking the time to share this feedback. We'll definitely consider this. Our non-engineer copywriter was flattered you thought he was an engineer since he's a social science major. Thanks for cheering up a Sunday morning.
Because everyone takes Compilers in school.
No, It Really Is That Easy To Manipulate The New York Times
I've been working in PR since 1999. One of the most common things I run into with startups is that, when I talk about sockpuppets or how stuff actually gets placed on TechCrunch (usually via an influential investor), there's some skepticism.

That's understandable, but also a little frustrating because the media is now so broken, that the way we WANT to think it works is not at all how it works.

So I included here a link to something I wrote this weekend concerning how easily The New York Times was manipulated by a group of religious extremists in upstate New York, right as an investigation began into a housing development they were building was revealed to have been approved via fradulent means:

http://bjmendelson.com/2013/11/22/thanks-to-kiryas-joel-new-york-times-hanukkah-is-cancelled/

The lesson, at least I hope it is, should be clear: The media can be manipulated. The takeaway should be to change your perception of how the media works if you haven't done so already. It IS who you know and how well you can manipulate those people. Unfortunately.
Replace VISA/MC's model with Bitcoin. Coinbase's API is a good starting point.
What's obsession with those TITLE, PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_FOO, SECOND_SENTENSE_FROM_TO_RIGHT_WHERE_THEY_KILLED_THE_RABBIT stupidity?

translate("This is a paragraph.")

PS and in the real world, please don't translate language names with each language change
I'm from switzerland. We voted yes this year on the "restrictions on fat cat salaries" [1]. And this was a try to hop on the train on people's currently antipathy regarding some top executives in our country. But there are like a dozen ways to get around this. Fortunately we voted no (my opinion).

[1] http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Voters_accept_restric...
Computer Science Theory in Practice
Hm. I was an independent contractor for years. I got to pick every project I was on. Well, 'bid for' is a better term. I accepted only those that I was interested in, AND paid well.

Once the project starts I was almost completely independent. That's the nature of a contractor vs an employee - no day-to-day supervision, just milestones to accomplish.

So I'm not sure I know what kind of contractor you're talking about.
by what? that there are people who are stupid like that, or that enterprising individuals or companies would capitalize on their stupidity? i feel like both of those things are well documented in humanity by now...
We've had a great time with angular-translate in our in house application as well. The partial loader is a great feature that allows us to keep the memory overhead down for folks who will never need certain dictionaries.
Yeah its a different model for mini based games and the coffin box and euro game - but in that case you are paying for physical objects as well.
I'm yet to see the day when a proposal that puts the rich at a disadvantage gets passed.
Show HN: Learn languages with YouTube transcriptions and click to translate
Google’s Role In Woodland Child Pornography Arrest Raises Privacy Concerns
Cheese note: I still do the ol' pipe dance when de-compressing archives, like this:

gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf -

The reason? Well, its like this: I learned it that way on machines that had, typically, about 4 megs available. So it used to be, back in the ol' days, that if you tried to do it like:

tar xvzf somefile.tar.gz

.. you'd run out of RAM, get into swapfile sadness, and so on.

Piping it through the console first, used the tty-buffers, which blocked whenever exhaustion occurs, but nevertheless: recovered a lot smoother than when heavy swap was involved ..

Dunno if its still 'true' (could be a mythos I'm passing on from the old, drunk sysadmin I learned the rule from) but it aways bugs me when I forget to do it 'the new way' ..
Perl was my first language that I really engaged with, it started my career. Why did it fall out of favour? (I left web development to write applications/C, then returned some years later to write APIs but everyone had stopped using it).
Interesting to think about the sorts of cultural markers that other languages have. Maybe this is just another way of saying 'code smell', but there must be similar elements for JS/Ruby/Python (for example) where it the code isn't strictly 'wrong' (or even debatably wrong), but is still clearly indicative of a particular cultural approach towards coding in that language.

Like overriding Array.prototype.push in JS - it might be just fine, but I tend to pause and re-evaluate my attitude towards the code when I see that going on, because it's a very different approach to coding in JS than I personally use.
Make sure that you trust your sources before putting something like this in your workflow. I'd guess that these scripts are easily exploitable. A suitably malformed patch gives an attacker a remote code execution on your machine!

Obviously not a worry if you know your sources or your project isn't open to all. It's just that with something like this set up, it would be tempting to use it to pre-filter changes before you do a 'proper' review of the code, and by that time it's too late...
'Abstract friendship'? Only real, organic, laugh and cry friendship is worth having. I can't even imagine what an abstract friendship is - maybe 'liking' someone on Facebook?
Hmm. I looked at this first on my iPad and I was all "why is this person linking to the Project Gutenberg edition of Alice".

Now I'm looking on my laptop and it's hard to even begin to savor the illos - they're all overlaid on each other.

Cool idea, though!
That's right. But then again, there are certain people out there who can change people in a positive way.

Additionally, I think it is important to actively seek people that could positively affect you. The case above sounds more like a lucky incident. Luck can happen but don't bank on it!
For information on other features of the site, here's the landing page including a short intro video: http://readlang.com/landing-page

Feel free to ask if you have any questions!
Because you don't have a choice? A lot of companies relocate to Switzerland because of low corporate taxes (juices earnings per share metrics). For shareholders, driving down executive compensation is just icing on the cake.
Physician assisted suicide is a super slippery slope. I'm stunned when thinking people advocate.
We are mere puppets of the system put in place by those with the biggest pay checks.
Google’s Parisa Tabriz on protecting users from cyber crime
Controlled leaks and a blacklist. Isn't this what EVERY company on earth does?

Also: it's not a blacklist as he describes it. It's a WHITE-list, since there are people (like Grubber or Pogue I guess) that get stuff earlier.

It's not like Apple people give interviews etc to anyone -- so it's not like there's a blacklist of people not getting access.

There's just a whitelist of people having early access. I've seen this from MS, Adobe, Google, Canon and generally tons of other companies.
Agree that it is the more interesting referendum.

Tyler Cowen wrote about these sorts of proposals a week ago and I really think he hits the nail on the head. Like many, I'm attracted on an intellectual level to the idea of replacing the thicket of social services and redistribution programs with a single basic income. The problem is I simply can't imagine a world where a real-world government could commit credibly to that sort of policy long term. There's just way too much to be gained by saying, "well the GBI is great, but I think this group does need something a _little_ more than everyone else. And then instead of replacing the thicket, it just becomes part of it, and at that point has very little to recommend it as policy.

I also agree it would be interesting to see a country other than mine try it out so we could see the effects play out.

Cowen:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
Right-o. So we're mostly Americans here, at least more so than we are Swiss: let me use American figures.

Assume minimum wage of $7.25/hr, equivalent full-time salary of $14,500/yr. You're the CEO of a firm doing labor-intensive business, with a large number of minimum-wage employees and low-ish profit margins (they tend to go together) so that raising wages would mean swift bankruptcy. Your maximum salary is now $174,000. Which is not a bad rate of pay, but it's not a really really good rate of pay. Heck, I've made that much before (2010, when the market un-crashed and my stock options were actually worth money).

You used to make more, so you own your little chalet, and you've got a nest egg of $4.5 million. You make about $175k/yr off the stock market alone.

You love what you do... but do you love it more than a full-time job skiing in the Swiss Alps and living off savings?
It's utterly unsubstantiated handwaving to assume that income disparity results from regulatory capture or central banking.

The basic mechanics of capitalist societies result in winner take all systems in which having more money makes it easier to earn money. Divergence is mathematically assured.
My father was murdered about 10 years ago and really the only solace in the situation is that he was pretty sick at the time and would have suffered through the rest of his life and he was only 47 at the time. My mom has repeatedly told me she has no desire to get to an elderly age, like her mother is now. All I know is perspective on this stuff evolves over the years.

On another note, the only good thing about people being sick is that you can prepare for their death and thus when they die it can be more of a celebration. The funeral won't be as hard emotionally, and because they were sick, you are comforted by them not suffering any more.
Require in the contract that you are not their only client, but lawyer it well. "We only work with contractors with a diverse set of clients as we believe that diversity promotes excellence."

Create buffer companies for those contractors to also work for indirectly for you if necessary. You might still have to pay some taxes, but you won't have the same problem as the Swiss salary cap is trying to prevent if it were implemented.

There will always be ways to exploit systems. You see it as exploitation, but those running the companies see it as necessary to compete.
Ask HN: How do you teach/enforce programming best practices?
Since finding a work environment where you work solely with top-level talent is exceedingly rare (especially outside of tech-hub areas), it's important to figure out how to maximize the talent that you have available.

What techniques/rules have you implemented that help teach devs the importance of things like: SOLID Principles, Law of Demeter, Principle of Lease Astonishment, etc.?

I work in a fairly standard corporate environment. Initially we tried to just enforce these things solely through code reviews, but it seems like they just mechanically make the suggested changes without really learning why it matters. Even most junior devs seem to have an academic grasp of things like the Single Responsibility Principle, but at some point during implementation that falls apart.

In my experience this has been a common theme across environments (both large and small) that I have dealt with and I'm very curious to hear how others are handling it.
HTML5 + CSS3 is actually Turing complete:

https://github.com/elitheeli/stupid-machines
It sounds like you were in more of a consultant role, where the company had a particular task, and paid you handsomely to do it. A lot of companies nowadays will hire you as an employee (come into the office every day, give you projects to do, report to a boss, ect.) but for tax purposes, will pay you as an independent contractor, as to not give you benefits or sick/personal leave.
Wow. I don't bother with Bitcoin personally, but I certainly don't actively hate it like a few of us around here seem to...
Life is a slippery slope. We need to deal with death like grownups.

To address your fears, we should have simple, straightforward protocols for how this would work.
Really?

http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/162410
It works very well in countries such as the Netherlands, I've seen that first hand in cancer cases. It is the most dignified thing to do for a thinking person. Do you have examples where a large percentage of the cases are obvious malpractice?

I have long planned that I will do everything in my power not to stay on life support, and recommend you do the same for the sake of your family and your sanity.
Python 3.4.0b1 is now tagged,feature-freeze is now in effect
I'd say after learning about different classes of automata, you should understand what a compiler does in general. At least, that's what I took from it.
I think you are leaving out a few details about the history of currency in China, like the fact that the metal coins were minted by the government, and that at different times there were different governments minting coins (from different kinds of metals). You are also ignoring the fact that the metal coins from China were also being used as currency in neighboring countries, and so even when the Chinese government stopped minting (or banned) older currencies it took time for those currencies to fall out of circulation. To put it another way, Chinese farmers did not decide to use copper on their own; copper was chosen by a government in certain rural regions.

"I'm not clear on what you think the difference is between using silver by weight and using silver by face value"

The face value of a coin does not need to track the market value of the metal used to make the coin. Typically it is advantageous for the face value to be higher than the value of the metal (otherwise people will just melt down the metal); it could happen the other way, e.g. what happened with US pennies. "Face value" only makes sense with fiat currency, which is why I drew the distinction.

"The whole idea of a mint is that coins have a standard weight"

This is not true of modern coins; all the really matters with modern coins is their face value, which can have nothing to do with their weight. It is not uncommon for a smaller coin to have a larger face value than a larger coin. Relating the physical measurements of a coin with its face value is convenient but not at all necessary in a fiat currency. The US has dollar coins with different weights and dimensions, all with a face value of one dollar, and the value of those coins is independent of the market value of the metals they are made from.
How do you suggest we measure creativity to know this?
I can tell you this will get like 80% no votes. We voted two years ago if we want 6 weeks of vacations instead of 4 resulting in 66% no votes. Swiss people like to work. We are raised with the believe that work is our strongest asset.

I talked to a lot of people about this topic. It's hard even to find one who might consider it even remotely.
Wow. This touches home with me on many levels. I lost my parents a few years ago. Both suffered. I lost several other close family members who also suffered. And just last week somebody I was close to told me they were dying of cancer.

And I'm a libertarian that strongly believes that government should keep its nose out of my life.

So, of course, I'm going to play devil's advocate, at least a bit. Because if you can't defend the other side's points well, you shouldn't be in the argument.

Here's the thing: physician-assisted suicide is one thing if the doc gives you the pills and you take them on your own. It's something else if the state requires doctors to assist you, or the state requires insurance companies to require doctors to assist you. Then we're getting into the state telling doctors what types moral views they should hold.

Hey, I'm all for you shooting your cat if it's sick. What I'm against is the community all making some collective decision about who's got to go and when, and who has to do the work. That's fucked up. This thing has to be a personal choice among everybody involved: docs, nurses, family, the patient. I could imagine in many cases the patient wants to whack themselves and the family hates the idea. Fine. Then let the guy do it. On his own. Or perhaps the docs have given up hope, but for religious reasons they will never pull the plug. Fine, then let the patient do it. There's a decision to be made, somebody should make it, and the rest of society should butt out -- either from disapproving or forcing everybody else from doing things they don't want to do. It's just as bad to make somebody kill somebody else as it is to make somebody keep somebody else alive in this endless suffering nonsense.

The problem here is a search for some universal rules for a very personal thing. I don't see that playing out too well.

In many cases, we have elderly losing their minds while family members hope against hope that they recover. What to do then?

With the lack of a living will, I think the family members get to decide. That's why we have living wills. I don't like that result, but there it is. (I'd also add that this means the family members should be able to dose up grandma with enough morphine to put her out of her misery -- and I imagine such a thing happens a hell of a lot more than we will ever know. Institutionalizing people and placing all of this in bureaucratic hands is the crux of this problem.)

Also Scott, sorry to hear about your dad.
I like your hand waiving to dismiss hand waving.
The capabilities of new consoles are pretty exciting, more so the xbox one (but that's just my opinion), but things are a bit different today as consoles are only a part of the gaming landscape rather than the majority of it. PC gaming isn't going to go away. The oculus rift and other VR/AR systems may become another strong pillar of video gaming. And mobile gaming has begun to come of age over the last few years. Not to mention non-computerized games like RPGs and other table top games, which have seen a lot of growth outside of the European market where they were traditionally confined.

Ultimately a console is like any other gaming platform, you buy one because you want to play the games on it. If you never find a game compelling enough to make that jump then you're not going to buy the console. Now that so many games are cross platform, to the PC as well, there's not as much need to buy any particular console unless you find yourself with a strong desire to play certain specific games.
I'm (at least in my own judgement) a 'thinking' person. I'm involved in the medical field (in prehospital emergency medicine). Finally (as it may be relevant), I'm a fairly socially conservative person.

I am in favor of physician assisted suicide. I'd be interested to hear your concerns about it.
Oh wow. I've been using GitLab since 4.0, but I've not got it completely updated because it's such a pain in the ass. This looks awesome (and gives me a Scala project to hack on!)
> I'm stunned when thinking people advocate.

So you come out swinging with a combined ad hominem and argument from incredulity. Brilliant!
Rich people do not need money. Money is the way they keep score in the game they play. Running a high level company is not trivial, and those who are willing and able to do the hard work are going to live where they can actually compete. The best performers are not watered down by simplistic idealism.
We are Chinese but we are now considering expanding.
The true test of relationships are when something is at stake. It is does not matter what realm they lie in for your life. So my revised advice is to pursue relationships that go beyond superficial friendliness. The company you are working for falls in that area. You seem to be a renaissance individual with diverse interests. That is very good to hear. Be open to everything. Much of success (and its sometimes corollary -,financial success) is due to how much leadership you take on - which runs the spectrum from being a senior developer on a project to the guy (or girl) responsible for all software development projects or being your own business owner. The beauty of business is that if you start one - you will be exposed to all aspects. The flip side is working for a quasi-stable company will pigeon hole you into a slot - for that is how they operate.

So to answer your question - I have had many project-based relationships. When the project ended, the relationship ended. However, in a few cases, I remained friends, however loose, with a few individuals. The answer to your question is to try to work with and be around with individuals you want to be around with. And do not let the work be the only definition for the relationship.

Truely extroverted connected people have multiple circles of friends with concentric circles of trust and intimacy. For example, this means, many people might want to have some of their time but they get to choose who they spend time with. And having known a few of these successful individuals (who I need to clarify are not always extroverted - but passionate for their cause), they make you feel important when you meet with them.

So in closing of this ramble, do not be biased who you spend time with - but make the most of it - and if you do not like each other, it is natural and ok to drift.
You have no idea what you’re good at. Let’s fix that.
I love GitLab, and yeah the install isn't hard. But have you ever tried updating it? Impossible as far as I've tried. Breaks stuff every time :(
Some of the engine technology in Killzone Shadow Fall
I get the story and am sympathetic to the OP, but a little confused about this line:

And while I'm at it, I might want you to die a painful death too.

Is he just angry at everyone?