skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you liked this, you should love this series about vintage (analog) fire control computers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8aH-M3PzM0 (part 1; other parts in Youtube suggestions).
In generator code you'd use try/catch to handle failure instead.

try {
var user = yield Users.get(1234);
return user.name;
} catch(ex) {
// do whatever
}

rather than..

return Users.get(1234).then(
function (u) { return u.name; },
function (ex) { /* do whatever */ }
);
It was pretty amazing pricing DB train tickets vs. Eurail passes (I'm going to 30c3 and will probably be in Europe 25 DEC to 12 JAN). A single 2nd FRA-HAM-BER trip costs more than a 5-travel-day pass, in first on ICE.
Do those people exist?

I'm not aware of anyone who said BTC was immune from regulation.
Do we really need another Java-like language? I would think since web development is often an "entry level" for many beginning programmers, we need languages with prettier syntax and easier to grasp, something like Python.
walled garden? ActiveX? your comment is pure FUD. dart is as open as possible - open source, open standard etc' etc'.

This is a genuine attempt to make the web better - I'm definitely supporting it.
Awesome Adam, I think there's a lot of value in cataloging/discussing people's failures like this (so much so that I started working on something very similar a while back :) Good luck!
United Nations Approves Internet Privacy Resolution
I fully agree with you.

I will only touch Dart when it is natively supported in major browsers or required by our customers.
I just peeked at the gzip source (actually, the algorithm.doc file in the root of the source). It looks like they limit back-pointers to point to the previous 32k bytes, immidietly reducing this to a naive O(n).

From my brief reading, it looks like they use a hash table to speed up lookups. Each 3 byte string is entered into the hashtable, with a pointer to the relevent location in the original text. Each has index has a linked list of entries. To find what backpointer to use for a given string, gzip finds the relevent linked list from the hash table, and scans it looking for the longest match.

More recent entries in the list are preferred (as smaller distances make the pointers smaller because of the encoding). Additionally, the linked lists are arbitrarily truncated to a certain length (determined by the '-1' through '-9' run-time argument).

gzip also has a 'lazy evaluation mecanism'. This is where, after it matches a string, it checks the next byte anyway (even if this byte is contained in the previous match). If a longer match is found, gzip discards the previous pointer and uses the new match. This is disabled in the fast speed modes.

If they are doing anything particularly clever, it is in the implementation details. The algorithm itself seems relatively straightforward.
India: The Next Big Startup Nation?
I'm a finance guy, I don't know how to code. I signed up for teamtreehouse about 3 months ago and I've successfully been able to learn HTML, CSS, and I am starting to dive in to Javascript, MySQL, PHP and maybe AJAX.

The site has given me enough structure to learn the basics while other books and the internet has provided me with more in depth learning.

I wrote Nick at teamtreehouse yesterday and said that I was disappointed with the end of chapter quizzes because they were sometimes difficult to bypass due to confusion over what they were asking.

He responded immediately and said they knew it was an issue and were hiring to fix it very soon. While the round announcement is old, if they are in fact hiring, it is great news for those who use their service.

Other than that one interaction, I don't know the team, but I was impressed.

I can say, I used to work a few blocks from their office in downtown Orlando. Orlando usually sparks memories of Disney, but Disney is actually located in Kissimmee, FL about 45 min from downtown. Downtown Orlando is young, great nightlife, fairly small and EXTREMELY affordable.

Thanks for the customer service yesterday!

[Edited because the round was actually a few years ago]
Meta (YC S13) Unveils Meta Pro, Its $3,000 AR Glasses
Let's talk about dating.

The dating world is full of monkeys. Baristas, out of work actors, "office managers," bartenders, literal starving artists, set designers who make $15k/year for working 60 hours a week all year, .... (We're talking "this is what they do" people, not goodwill hunting "unlimited potential" people who turn into rocket scientists at the drop of at hat.)

Imagine you're a YC person: Altman or Dallas or Quinto or whoever they have these days. At what point in a relationship does it get annoying not being able to share the upper parts of what you are and what you do? Sure, you can always commiserate about the weather and the latest TV shows or what your 188th level Orc Paladin did in WoW this week, but does that give meaning to "high achievers?"

That's the lanterns in the dark versus the rabble of reality tv watchers.

(Cutting off some replies here: yes, there's a continuous gradient between "only-a-barista" and "only-a-serial-billionare," but there are levels people seems to get chunked into fairly easily after talking with them for 5 seconds to 5 minutes. yes, some of these positions are due to life circumstances and coincidences along the way, but that's the life we end up with—we can't all go back in time to be born to the mother of Bill Gates.)
Hey Vine: I Don't Want "Celebrities" - I Want My Friends
Okay, so basically TED should be another dry facts-only scientific conference? Guess what, we already have plenty of those. The speakers will present facts and be judged based on the facts rather than on their presentation skills or ability to inspire. We have a lot of them and they work well - but the general public isn't interested.

There's a place in our culture for real science that is easy to understand, presented by people who know how to present. We need something non-scholarly to keep people interested in science and technology.

That said, we've had a lot of TED talks (especially at TEDx) that are simply sales pitches, fantasy, or completely false. There's a problem here that needs to be fixed. Keep the accessibility and the inspiration, but lose the factual errors and lack of fact by mandating vetting by qualified actual experts.
> This is a genuine attempt to make the web better

Better for Google that is.
Announcing Elasticsearch.js For Node.js And The Browser
I'm sad that it's a Google-only thing and that all the other browser makers are balking. Purely in terms of the merits of the language, it strikes me as leaps and bounds better than JS.

I'm also a fan of Mozilla's asm.js. It seems to have so much potential. As a full-time JS dev, I guess I'm easily impressed. I just wish the browser makers could get their heads together and agree on some way forward, instead of incrementally polishing the JS "turd."
Larry Klayman crows on NSA win: ‘We hit the mother lode’
Actually I think all the major lines were initiated by private businesses, during the steam era.
> I love Couchsurfing-- and it "works fine"-- but I was also glad to see Airbnb succeed.

Funny you should mention Couchsurfing. I would say that it used to work fine... several years ago... before they went for-profit and rewrote it completely. Sure the old app wasn't sexy but, like Craigslist, it solved the problem with minimal friction. The new Couchsurfing attempts to be more sophisticated but reduces global transparency and tries to take more control over the process, in the vein of Zimride or Airbnb. I can no longer be bothered with Couchsurfing, and it seems I'm not the only one: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchsurfing.org
Perhaps I should have been clearer about the parking.

Here in the UK, particularly in London parking is often non-free. In some areas, councils have adopted policies of not granting planning permission for workplace car parking spaces, or making planning permission conditional on there being a certain charge, in order to increase the costs of driving. I agree that this is not technically a direct tax, but it is an example of government intervention to increase the costs of driving.
Formal PIP is a bad idea. Once things are at that point, fire immediately but with severance. A 3-month severance is much cheaper than a 1-month PIP, while this "walking dead" employee pisses all over morale and has divider effects all around him.

From the OP: 50% of people who are put on performance improvement plans become repeat offenders.

Even when someone recovers from a PIP, they can't transfer internally in most companies-- they're not blocked, but no one wants them-- and the stink never goes away. Promotion is out of the question, too, even 2-3 years later. Good people (wrongly PIP'd, it happens) leave and bad people stay.

Most "repeat offenders" on PIPs are people the manager still wanted to fire. HR said "no, we're not willing to take the legal risk of firing this person." PIPs are rarely passed. Either they fail (leading to termination) or are ruled "inconclusive"-- which makes the manager look bad (HR declined his firing request) and more pissed off. The only time PIPs seem to be "successful" is when there's a change of manager (or, if possible, the team).

Why do PIPs persist? Two words: externalized costs. An HR department can claim it saved money on severance payments, while the cost is externalized (and multiplied) to that employee's team and manager.

It may be counterintuitive that "rewarding failure" is the best strategy, but it's just another cost of doing business.
The ends of your chromosomes are sensitive to a variety of environmental factors
CEO Burnout. Why Moz Might Get a New Leader – with Rand Fishkin
Or perhaps I've found the perfect sleep schedule for me.

If you don't need an alarm clock, then, yes, maybe. You could try to measure your reflexes along the month, it's possible you've learned to ignore fatigue.
I think fees on the exchanges, different currencies(fee for trading to the corresponding currency) and time(it can take weeks until you can start to trade on a site) are the major obstacles.
Flashblock catches it for me in FF25, the video is actually

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-sY_z8MNs

Perhaps you don't have Flash installed, you lucky thing.
I'm much the same. I wonder if it's related to my screen use and artificial light. What kind of climate do you live in, out of interest?
We allowed our users to cross-post to CL if they chose to (it was opt-in, not the default, and they had to sign into CL themselves to do so... so not automatic) and many people did. If they cross-posted to CL, there was all the basic logistical info in the post, plus a small link to their ride on Ridejoy at the bottom of the post (which the user could remove).
Except that ActiveX works only in Windows. The finance dept where I work all need Windows VMs to access this one website that won't work on OS X.
And that democracy of desktop becomes the new trend.
Thanks for noticing, we fixed that yesterday.
The US does have an expatriation tax[1] that is of concern for many. There was also a dramatic increase to the tax proposed as a result of Eduardo Saverin's expatriation before the Facebook IPO. Even though he hadn't been living or working in the US for some time prior, the US imposes taxes on all moneys a citizen earns, regardless of where they are living, or where that money was earned.

Beyond that, expatriation from the US is at an all-time high[3], and the rumor is that it's related to the adoption of Obama's progressive taxation schema.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax#United_States

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-PATRIOT_Act

[3] - http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/18/US-Taxpaye...
FBI can turn on a computer's webcam without activating the indicator light
...except he stated in the article that they work 8 hours a day...
HHVM and Dart seem to be the two new fast performers in town showing impressive performance in some tests. JS has been falling off the charts compared to some of the first rounds, but still a good option performance-wise. C# keeps sucking badly. I miss Nimrod/Jester, I always wanted to see it in the top 10.
I do, I was just saying what you're saying. Changes like this are annoying, and a few people will reject the change.

That said, As long as theres no sound and the ad is to the side of the actual content/app, its not that big of a deal. I use adblocker for all sites except grooveshark, which uses a video ad with no audio. Dont mind it that much...
If you love both watch mechanisms and incredible feats of "traditional" machining, I highly recommend George Daniels' "Watchmaking." Not only is it a beautiful coffee table book but it takes the reader through modern (Swiss lever) mechanical watches all the way, from concepts to workshop design to machining to assembly. Even if you don't end up reading the whole thing the diagrams are wonderful to flip through over and over again.
Did you use any kind of drugs?
I actually had the opposite experience. Every time I needed a rideshare on CL, I couldn't find one. Or, when I offered a rideshare, I got no responses. And when I did get a response, it was from someone who didn't read my post and realized it was WAY past due. Perhaps it's because I live in a smaller metro area. I don't know. But, I did often commute up to the Bay Area, and I did often commute to L.A.

I think rideshares are just generally a bad idea anyways. After some thought, I think the idea of sitting with a stranger for several hours, trying to make conversation, would get tiresome in the end.
Good question. We thought about what we should do after YC.

Post rejection, we waited a few weeks until we had some pretty good traction stats, and then sent an email to PG asking they reconsider us. We got an email back saying they don't change their decisions because they wouldn't be able to scale that way.

In this case, we didn't think the best thing was to do flashy techniques, based on what we've heard about PG. Depending on where our startup is, we may apply again next batch. We're applying to other incubators right now too.
I only made it 3/4 through this, but this seems like paint-by-numbers advice, and lacks the real-world flavour that make "following a textbook" in these cases <actually hard>.

Feedback needs to be immediate. As soon as someone steps off the path or veers into dangerous territory, let them know. Ideally during the first 90 days, give people “an exorbitant amount of feedback,” Lopp says. “Just think, you could have fixed it six or nine months earlier by pulling Jeff aside and saying, hey you really frustrated people in that last meeting because you weren’t listening.”

People that are being "jerks" are typically not leaving obvious footprints when they "step off the path" nor do they tend to make obvious and transparent mistakes or mis-steps in pubic. You are typically dealting with people well versed in passive agression. Plausibly deniability, and adding unwanted "drama" by abusing their authority, or bullying their staff or doing a whole range of things which if the junior staff report to (skip-level) management, they (not the mid-level-manager) will be on the hook for "insubordination" to the business discretion of the middle boss. This is the type of opaque, catch-22 that many people face in reality and dealing with it is a PITA, time consuming and risky (for senior and junior staff). Its not a paint-by-numbers situation at all, those are ovbious and people with blatant incompetence tend to not make past interviews. The types of problems that tend to result after effective interviewing are rightly seens as variations of incompetence, and bad leadership though... because they impair the ability to "get shit done". But dealing with them requires more than a nudge on the tiller when something is headed off course. It requires (1) a system and approach to make performance transparent; (2) a system to compartmentalize risk; and (3) a system that generates enough observations to for reliable systemic data on performance and accountability. Without such a struture in place in these fronts, "bad apples" will underperform without consequence for long periods of time, because they will cover their tracks, blend in, and otherwise obfuscate situations to manipulative effect.

If all this seems "overly complicated" and not anything like following an HR handbook, that's probably about par for the course !!
I saw some benchmarks showing that Dart was slower than JavaScript... Is there truth to this?
Treehouse developer here. It's actually four 8s.
Anyone have thoughts on how 4-day work week compares to a 5-day-but-shorter-days work week (discussed a bit yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6912645)?
Whats the obsession with beginner friendly languages as of late? I can understand it to some extent, but at the end of the day, as long as its size doesn't cause problems does size really cause long term issues? After all you are going to be using (and learning) the language far longer than you're going to be a beginner.
Firefox Logo. Such Logo.
I'd be skeptical of what you claimed. There are similar diseases to FFI which involve dementia, hallucination and death -- but don't involve insomnia. The insomnia might just be another symptom.

Besides which, if you deprived yourself of sleep to that point, I expect you'd just go to sleep.
Fantastic! I don't know if promises are the ultimate solution to async programming, but they're a hell of a lot better than plain old callbacks.
New Cisco 'Desktop as a Service' cloud arrives
I would love to see CoffeeScript with optional typing. Easy syntax, typing support for larger projects and compilation to JavaScript. The new compiler seems like it may actually be possible to support it too.
Dart has optional typing so it should feel familiar to you whether you have a background in Python or Java. IIRC being easy to learn is one of the explicit goals of dart.
It's so cruel I thought he was joking. Seriously, depriving cats of sleep until they drown? Good god...
Kind of cool. What makes it cooler than e.g. a subreddit about failure experiences?
When it's accepted everywhere for anything it will be. But that's still a ways off.
Here are the latest benchmarks:

https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
Dart could be the glue between Chrome and Android.

* Sundar Pichai (Google VP) oversees both Chrome and Android.

* Google is experimenting with ART (LLVM-backed AOT runtime) for Android. This could be modified to run Dart directly.

* Angular was recently ported to Dart.

* Polymer is Google's Web Component polyfill until browsers catch up.

* Android layouts and views are essentially a form of components. (Possibly mapped to Web Components???)

I could see a singular development vision of Angular + Dart + Web Components where Chrome apps are Android apps and vice versa.
Interesting. If trains only make sense for trips of <4 hours, how does that impact the California High-Speed Rail project?
Why wait for the VM when you can compile to JavaScript today?
Life At A Startup (part 2)
Facebook Wants to Know Why You’re Self-Censoring Your Posts
Show HN: Pypeline DB, a database for data sets
So this is still pretty mac-centric, right?

I tried using Obj-C on Linux as a "better C", much like people use C++, D, Rust...

The language is... acceptable. The ecosystem is just, mac, mac, mac.
honest question, but what would the problem be with having "margin: auto" work vertically as it does horizontally?

EDIT: I mean, what freedom would have been lost when it was designed to work like this, not talking of changing it now.
Flex boxes?

http://jsfiddle.net/J88tz/
Croissant! Lucky soul. They had supply problems when I went on it. We had Fosters and microwaved burger for breakfast. Not a great start to the day.

It became apparent at about 11AM that the burger was poison and tried (unsuccessfully I will add) to escape both ends. Sorry if that was too much information.
I have high hopes for Ruby in the browser. https://github.com/opal/opal-browser
If we believe that companies have their culture (I certainly do) then it's not so surprising that someone may or may not be "culture-fit".

However, I'd question the health of the organization if the so-called culture is in the way that people dress or trim their facial hair. It is hopefully much more related to things like company's structure, employee's attitude and interpersonal skills, people's approach to team management, problem solving methods, work ethics etc.
So with a handful of out of context citations and some rather retarded points of view (Greenspun WTF?) you are trying to convince people? Really? At least give it _some_ effort. This way it is rather boring...
> Once things are at that point, fire immediately but with severance. A 3-month severance is much cheaper than a 1-month PIP,

Just fire on the spot with no severance. I've never known anyone to go on a PIP and remain at a company. They are either fired "eventually" or they find another job.
Congratulation! This is how it should be done.

And I have a question....

All professors of management and organizations understand that work week should be defined differently for knowledge workers. And that most the important quality of knowledge workers is initiative.

So if you have 80 hours work week and all innovation or initiative is dismissed, that can mean two things:

1) you are not "knowledge worker" but just "coding monkey" (it is "above your pay")

2) the company sucks

Majority of tech companies require 7-day work week and they discourage any initiative.

Does this mean that majority of programers are not actually hired as "knowledge workers" but as "coding monkeys"? Or that majority of tech companies suck?

EDIT: This 7-work week is actually based on calculation: 5 days * 10 hours per day + 5 hours on weekend (just check email) which is 55 hours per week => 7 working days of 8 hours each.
It's always easier to oppress the man who believes he stands alone.
Better for users also (and yes, better for Google because Google makes money when people see and click ads on the web).

When the web has more interesting content being produced by more motivated developers, users win. When the web starts up faster, users and vendors win. When pages and apps run much quickly on the web, users and vendors win.
You cannot yield from the global scope; you have to explicitly be inside a generator function. This isn't really a problem in practice except for one-off-scripts, since most modules don't have side effects but instead export functions (possibly generator functions). But for those one-off scripts it is indeed a bit awkward... you could imagine ways to get around it.

You can catch async errors with generators and promises; see e.g. the linked post, or http://jlongster.com/A-Study-on-Solving-Callbacks-with-JavaS...
Just buy a computer without a webcam, or cover it up. Problem solved.

Why would the government advertise this when people can now proactively prevent this sort of intrusion now?
I've worked 40 hour weeks in a corporate environment (where it's often actually less than 40), 60 hour weeks in an agency, 32 hour weeks at Treehouse. I find that needing to physically commit to work five days a week is the crux—it makes very little difference how much time you're spending in the pursuit of it. I'm big into backpacking, so three full, available days makes a world of difference to me, not the amount of hours I'm expected to work.