skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you believe it's about "the mission" I have a bridge to sell you. When management offers a buyout, it's about to cull the workforce. It's a go-to private equity trick. Silver Lake probably realizes that Dell can do just as much with a lot fewer people, so getting rid of the excess workforce will result in an instant shot in the arm for profits.

That said, offering buyouts can be risky. On one hand, they're better for morale than just firing a bunch of people. On the other hand, anybody who has any sense knows that buyouts means that layoffs are imminent, and so the ones who have the most prospects elsewhere (i.e. the people you want to retain) will be the first ones to jump ship.
Funny I should find this after mopping and scrubbing my kitchen floor (I have a Y chromo, BTW.)

I like a certain amount of cleanliness and order, not Felix Unger levels, so I handle my assigned areas to the level I like and no one seems to object.

Women who'd like men to at least appreciate housework might advocate more men joining the Armed Forces. My three-year stint was pretty much latrine duty.
I presume that Germany doesn't have many irony meters.
Yes, and may that person be Scott Guthrie.
Let It Full-Bleed
Why? I am sorry sir.
Its a little worrying that you plan to build to enterprise (I'm assuming you are in the UK), yet are asking one of fundamental questions about data security. Have you considered other security fundamentals that might be critical for an enterprise mail client?
Optional GC[1] in a language like C++, and Rust has pointers with task-local GC

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_GC
I agree. I think security questions are a broken idea. Sites will validate that you have a strong password, and then have you fill in the security questions, which are often either easy to guess or easy to google.
> No amount of cajoling, threatening or reasoning will get this guy to give up his "one-man island" philosophy.

That's an unreasonable assumption. If he doesn't breathe slowly, he dies. As CamperBob2 also points out, it would be completely irrational for the libertarian astronaut to refuse to cooperate, so he'd go along.

The problem most libertarians point out is that we're sometimes forced (by society) to contribute, without receiving anything in return. One-sided trades are the problem, not mutually-beneficial cooperation. When you pay 40% of your income so others get welfare, you're arguably not receiving anything in return.
> the claim from GCHQ etc is that they have acted fully within the law.

And you're going to just believe the claim? Come on. Actually, if all that was fully legal, that is IMHO more shocking.

> It would be good if people recognised how biased The Guardian is. It has an agenda

And yet you can't see GCHQ' self-serving agenda. I see that you "trust your government to do the right thing". The right thing for who, them or you? Why do you trust them and not other parties?

> The inquiry into the "expenses scandal" ... What the hell was the point of that

And you don't see the point of uncovering corruption in elected officials either? Perhaps you don't want your trust undermined? Nice selective use of logic there!
The media "bashing anyone in power" is not an agenda. It's a counterweight to the huge, well, power that anyone in power has. It's a very important part of the checks and balances you mentioned.
That was not a legal option in our case, the covenants upon the Deed of Title were not enforceable by the impacted neighbors because an interest in the legal person that sold the lots did not convey with the lot - i. e. there was no HOA or COA. Instead, covenant enforcement would have required locating the heirs or successors of the' legal person' who platted the neighborhood and their goodwill toward enforcing covenants some thirty five years later, assuming such use was against the covenants upon the Deed of Title.

Our case was not a private dispute, or rather it was intractable as one, and in any event the use was illegal. Thus it took overcoming the normal bureaucratic wall of mud at the enforcement arm of the city zoning department and eventually offering testimony before Judge Jim* in Municipal Court on a Tuesday afternoon last spring.

*Judge Jim had been the Miss June's diforce attorney several years before his election And a fellow Rotarian of another testifying neighbor.
Speak for yourself; here in America only a minority of people are really concerned about male circumcision and it is widely performed for religious and non-religious reasons. You are also ignoring the very large population of Muslims in the world, who are generally not opposed to circumcision.

One of the great things about the Internet, though, is that you are free to express a minority point of view without having to wait for some editor to approve of it. This is true regardless of whether or not you choose to post under your real name.
If the government hadn't such power, no one would try to influence it.
No shit. Well, I'm for one glad the UK hasn't had any problem with, you know, extraordinary rendition, torture, extrajudicial executions during the Troubles, warrantless surveillance of political opponents during the Thatcher era. And I'm sure Tony Blair was telling the truth, and nothing but the truth, about these weapons of mass destruction.
> Why are they less valued people? Because NYC has a very high renter and owner-occupier population, and they vote.

Isn't that normal and just? People want something to happen, and they formalize this as law rather than applying mob violence, which is a Good Thing.

> People should be able to dispose of their own property as they see fit, without undue intrusion from uninterested third parties. This sort of liberty is sometimes inconvenient for other people, but when those people choose to restrict the ability of other people to enjoy the ownership of their property, they do the same to themselves. And all those petty infringements on freedom add up to undermine one's sense of control over his own life.

What you do with your property affects those around you; there's no god-given fundamental right to use your building for whatever you want to. We have things like zoning regulations for a reason - because we voted for them, because we wanted them.

> removing artificial barriers to new housing construction would be better for everyone in the long term.

I think everyone is in favour of new housing construction, but there's only so much Manhattan to go around. The choice is not between new houses and no new houses, or hotels and no hotels; it's between residential housing and hotels, and it's right that that choice be made democraticly.
Actually in Sweden there is a tax break like that. It covers domestic cleaning and house hold refurbishments.

Originally you used to collect the receipts and at the end of the year you recieved 50% of the cost as a tax break.

Now the cleaners/builders include the 50% off when they quote for the work. This just means they all doubled their rates.
It's definitely the case that the quality of discourse has declined on this site in the last few years. However that has more to do with the fact that it's now seen as an important mechanism for shaping public opinion amongst an important constituency; and it's popularity.
And the reason is that UI is written in native code (read C++) using internal native APIs while 3rd party apps written in managed code (using different APIs. Of course it takes more time to launch managed apps. This is clearly a disparity between 1st party and 3rd party apps.
I already dealt with the alleged hypocrisy in the other thread, but also logically, this is a red herring. It's like saying that we should cut all social services because everyone thinks they should be paying less tax.

On trade, the most valuable trade is within Europe and East Asia, and yet East Asian immigration is relatively small. The amount of immigration that is truly needed for trade is very small.

On genetics, I never claimed that it is objectively better to preserve particular ethnic groups. In fact, I don't think evolution implies anything about how things should be. However, your claim about how important genetic diversity is for overall success, strikes me as either untestable or wrong. How can you explain the success of the very un-diverse Scandinavia? Or if you can explain this away, how is your claim testable, and therefore backed up by fact. If you want to base your claim on some general theory, what about how plant and animal breeders maintain specific breeds instead of mixing them all together?

EDIT: there is a time limit placed on replies, to slow the discussion down the deeper the thread gets. This is intended to cool the tone of the discussion and prevent flame wars. If you repost your edit as a reply, I will reply to it when I can.
Couchsurfing: The Greatest Hook-Up App Ever
NSA spying hurts business of large U.S. hardware makers
who said anything about fairness? what a quaint concept.
> Yes I have moral reasoning. It's stolen information.

Well, you're free to believe that the right not to have one's information copied trumps any other concern. How are you feeling about your information being illegally copied by your own government, and freely shared with other security apparatuses?
That's one way to put it. Another way to put it would be that they are someone who understands their value and understands that their own personal identity and success in not tied into that of their employer, and that an employer who doesn't want to pay competitively won't have a mission worth believing in anyway.

Either way, of course, you can see why a company might want to get rid of that type of person.
Comedy sales call
by me on 21/11/13
I think all developers wanting Microsoft to go back to old developer focused ways (the way to win the war of platforms) would prefer Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman or even Scott Forstall from Apple of iOS fame (it might also worry Apple a bit -- if their problem is mobile, this guy knows).

As I have said before, it's any Scott's game...

They need someone that holds their ground and has been trying to change Microsoft for the better, into the present, for some time.

If it happens to be a Wall Street favorite you know innovation is dead at Microsoft for good. Even Elop talking that he'd cut XBox just shows they don't need a metrics guy right now, they need an innovator and someone to make Microsoft competitive. And the Ford CEO, while being extremely good, seems similar to bringing in Pepsi CEO John Sculley at Apple back in the day, wrong domain.
Digg's Kevin Rose interviews tech entrepreneurs
yes. he will have a hard time convincing someone to pay him either:

1) 35k as a 40 year old
2) 100k as programmer with no experience

have you ever hired anyone in your life above the age of 40? well i have. this is all the stuff that is UNWRITTEN, and UNSPOKEN in the workplace, because writing or speaking it is extremely illegal. this is why HN exists, so you can get real life opinions instead of the smarmy, PC, CYA bullshit you will hear in real life.
When you hear talk of "conservative" Garbage Collectors, what the "conservative" refers to is that anything on the stack that looks like a pointer is treated as if it is a pointer. After all, it doesn't matter what you cast a pointer to, it's all just 1s and 0s on the stack...
Who’s Hiring (and Who Isn’t) in Five Charts
Why is there nothing about security mentioned there?
Bluetooth gloves - the worst or best idea ever
I'm getting a 404, page doesn't exist.
either way, they are on sale and I just bought one :P
Ask HN: How did you get started with the programming languages you use?
Right now I use Ruby & Javascript the most because I have been working in startups where many companies use Rails. In undergrad I was exposed to Java and Haskell. I have taken an interest in Clojure because it seems like the most pragmatic Lisp at the moment and C because it is so ubiquitous.

How did you get started with the programming languages you use? I'm particularly interested in answers about languages that aren't insanely popular right now (e.g. Scala, Erlang, Lua, OCaml not Python, Javascript, Obj-C) since it's more interesting to hear why you value a language with low adoption than it is to hear "I use Ruby because the community is strong" or "I write Obj-C because I want to develop for iOS" (which are legitimate answers but don't tell us anything about the programming language itself). Was there a particular project that got you started? And/or did you discover something in particular about that language which made you curious?
The Boehm–Demers–Weiser garbage collector is a fairly famous implementation of a GC for vanilla C, pointers and all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector
But if you give the note to the Bank of England, what will they give you? Gold! How much?

Who says that you would?
...you're seriously nitpicking on the least important things here and then using it as evidence to say it's 'too weak for practitioners'... come on.
I can understand why a lazy admin might want this, but why on earth would browser vendors permit CAs to issue such certificates? Surely it makes a joke of the entire security model?
Hey Jonathan, some quick fly-by points from a marketing perspective. Only had a few minutes to review, but you can contact me to chat more about this:

- The call-to-action on the main page is... Not clear. What's the main thing you want a visitor to do? Is it to click "Get Started," or "Why VisaEase," or "View a Video"? (BTW, "View a Video" is really vague... Maybe "See How it Works" with a small "play" icon to indicate it's a video.) Whatever the main action is, it needs to be way more prominent.

- You can probably squeeze more conversions out of the service pages (also SEO landing pages, I'm assuming) by:

- getting rid of the weird large text image and replacing it with actual text and call-to-action button.

- using the sidenav more wisely. "Related links" don't encourage action as much as the testimonials or the 100% guarantee*, so they should be re-ordered accordingly. BTW, the testimonial byline (name) is a link with no target... confusing.

- You can probably decrease form drop-offs by properly setting people's expectations. I was surprised to be thrown into what looks like a long and tedious application, which doesn't even look like the site I came from. Also in some cases you call it a "free consultation" and in others a "free application." Which is it? I'm guessing you get a lot of drop-offs in the first step because of false or missing expectations.

* In fact, that 100% guarantee should be way at the top, next to your phone number. That's a huge comforting factor.

Totally random issues:

- On the Immigration FAQs page, the Fiance Visa and Green Card item links to a lorem ipsum URL: http://www.visaease.com/visa-topics/in-vehicula-sapien-in-li...

- On the Service Offering chart, at bottom-left, "receipt" is misspelled as "reciept."

- For your service offering levels, "Platinum" is misspelled as "Platinium."
The GP's comment is about request context, not handler context.
You're forgettingabout the incentives of the insurers. They will be the ones to require the cheaper alternative, similar to the way many insurers require the use of Avastin for AMD unless there is a good reason to use Lucentis.
We have a full time immigration attorney working for the company and are setting up a separate law firm. We offer a 100% accuracy and satisfaction guarantee or your money back. We are thinking about offering far more than your money back (e.g. insurance and $1,000 if we make any errors), but that requires some administration and additional legal aspects.
I think it's important to distinguish between "crappy graphics" and "stylized graphics". You can get away with a lot as long as you have great art direction. And this won't sacrifice immersion. On the other hand, you can make terrible-looking games with the best engines.
The last 50 years of U.S. public administration has truly been a master course in how to completely destroy public faith in large government.

As of right now, it seems the U.S. government has two paths it can take -- a) Begin the long and difficult process of restoring faith in the system, or b) tighten their stranglehold on power.

Somehow I doubt we'll see the latter.
Why does not taking this offer imply taking a pay cut and small stock grants?
I'd love to sign up, but I'm unable to do so without adding it to a Google account.
I remember when my share options were worth $52.
Why would taking this deal imply you aren't getting paid competitively?
>> If there's no government, would you not have the right to defend yourself or your property against an aggressor?

You're claiming a piece of land as your own but I don't see how you have any more right to it than any other human born on this earth. You initiate force to remove me from what you see as your land. Who's the aggressor? Where does your right to land derive from?
I personally think it's a bad idea to mix sport and politics. We already had it in 1980 and 1984 - it did not bring any good to anybody. Don't like Russian laws or Putin? There are other ways to say that. Sportsmen should not be involved in this type of stuff.
Just to offer the anecdotal opposite: we left Canada precisely because the health care system harmed my son. Since living n the US, both of them have gotten help for far, far less than it would have cost in Canada to go the private route, and with a dramatically shorter wait time. This is without needing to use private insurance.
Side note: What about just consistently using a handle? And that handle being part of your "brand"? What if Jay-Z decided to become a web developer?

Primary note: African Americans could easily be labeled given the qualification of the nebulous "threat" clause, when it is in fact Old America (those likely to celebrate their licensed gun-ownership) that is going about shooting them in the face[0].

White supremicists, Men's Rights Advocates of many stripes, and the Tea Party are stridently making cases that African Americans are sub-human[1]; wherein it stands to reason they so too could be required to have "clearance" given their supposed "lack" of psychological integrity, etc.

There are many nets and dragnets being cast to categorize arbitrary lots of "unmentionable" society. There's a significant rate of undiagnosed depression in the African American community[2].

[0]: http://www.upworthy.com/she-knocked-on-his-door-to-ask-for-h...

[1]: http://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-think...

[2]: http://www.pbs.org/thisemotionallife/blogs/black-and-depress...
You don't need to give up pointers, or pointer arithmetic, just the ability to obscure what a pointer points to. Casting to void does not do this (and indeed, has no run time effect at all). Metadata is associated with the pointed-to block of memory, so as long as the address is recognizable as a pointer at runtime, you can do GC.

Some of the things that break GC aren't even technically valid C code. For example, say I allocate three memory areas with malloc() then hold on only to the area with the lowest address, and reference the other two areas with offsets relative to the first area. This is illegal in C, though it will work on most existing implementations, because it's illegal to dereference a pointer past the end of an allocation.

Specific GC algorithms might not be able to handle say pointers into the interiors of objects, but that's not a general limitation for GC.
Yeah I'm aware of optional GCs. What I meant was languages that ship with a GC as standard and also have pointers. In the case of Boehm, since you choose to bring it in yourself, it's up to you to make sure you don't abuse it.
Couldn't agree more. The Bush years were a plague on not just the U.S., but the rest of the world. It represented time and time again, across all spectrums of society, the worst of humanity. Power and corruption on all levels of government over the people.

I can appreciate that things cannot stay static and that we must keep evolving and changing. But what the NSA does now and Bush, Gitmo, etc - these are not progression, but regression. I think what Assange and Snowden have done are highly respectable since a real democracy can only function at its highest level with a true open society and a government for people, not corporations or oligarchs. All these secrets and spying just serve to keep the boot of those with power tight against the neck of those who have less or none. Sad.
No, they opened them up to everyone a few years ago, I believe. I had no problem getting one living in the US, although it does cost significantly more than a normal domain would.
A friend of mine is also a diesel mechanic. He has been freelancing for a couple of local farmers and has used that money to bootstrap his own shop. I think there are actually a lot of parallels with the opportunities programmers have.

As an added bonus, he had to learn about driving trucks, farming, etc. in order to do the job. If mechanical work suddenly disappeared, there are many things he could transition into with ease. I'm still not sure where my programming skills can be used, other than for programming. I suppose I've picked up some general computer skills by way of having to use a computer to do the job, but it seems like everyone has those skills these days.

You do bring up a good point about location though. It would be quite difficult for him to do the same in a heart of a metro area. However, the inverse is true in many ways for programmers. The opportunities for a programmer on the farm are limited compared to someone doing the same in the city.
Ah, I didn't realize that Airbnb scored that narrow legal victory on appeal (which may still get challenged) in September. So, for the moment, own room and shared room rentals are legal in NYC as long as the owner is present the entire time the 'guest' (renter) is there.

A quick search for a room in Manhattan for a single weeknight next week shows that:

Shared room: 116
Own room: 819
Entire place: 911

My original point stands, though. About 1/2 of Airbnb listings in NYC are illegal and Airbnb is fully aware of that fact yet still profiting from it. If, as the original comment claimed, Airbnb was interested in operating full legally, they could simply disallow "Entire Place" listings in NY for less than 30 days if the 'landlord' does not have a hotel license.
> Bisexual? Kenny is wearing princess clothes!

Crossdressing have nothing to do with your sexual identity.
thanks carbocation. Strangely enough, I remember you from the chembark days. You should check out what I'm doing (see profile).
I've read the John Minford translation of the book [1]. Does anybody know whether this is any good?

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-War-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140...
Good! I hope their morale continues to fall as they realize that they are committing continuing acts of treason and violations of the US Constitution. Let their morale sink so low that they have clear consciences.
Thank you! Yes, we are likely going to raise prices due to perception. We offer free review by an immigration attorney or paralegal as well, but people seem to be in disbelief at our current prices. Seems odd, but raising prices is something we've considered.

We're thinking about entering the employment based space as well.

Thanks again for the advice.
Wait, should I believe that the NSA doesn't know what documents were taken? Because I hold the belief that they do know, down to the PowerPoint slide, what resides in Snowden's Cache. I believe that the NSA is either incapable of telling the truth, or believes that lying about what they know is an advantage somehow.

Is there some way to decide this quandry logically?