skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Almost all the companies I've worked for gave Christmas Day, New years day, Thanksgiving, July 4th, Memorial, and Labor days. Many also through in Christmas Eve, and day after Thanksgiving, plus 2 floating holidays.

One thing I'm not sure how I feel about, is the combined sick/vacation PTO -- you end up with a larger number of days that you can use as vacation, but usually a smaller number of days overall (my current company is 18 days total PTO, previous company was 5 weeks). This works out great for people like me, who never need to take sick days (if I have a bad cold, I can work from home usually).

Now what would work really good (and what I think my current company had before I started), is one vacation pool, which us use when you are going to be off for 2 or more consecutive days, and a separate large pool of PTO days for either under-the-weather days, actual illnesses, or "fix the garage door / wait for Cable installer" days.

Another thing to look for, is how the vacation is rolled over. The best is where you earn X.something hours every paycheck, and can be sitting at any one time on what you would earn in 2 years. So a previous employer (Motorola) gave me 3 weeks a year, but I was always sitting on 6 weeks available until I had to take some time off to avoid losing new accumulation.
Wow! Really interesting post. I've always wanted to set up a mesh network, just for the learning experience. Just one question I've been wondering:

How much do you think the whole setup would've cost if you did it yourself? I ask because I've always thought that the cost of the special hardware for a mesh network was the major limiting factor.
good stuff man
Türk jigolo
Witty website lands unemployed Dutchman a job
it's not even from Kanye, nor has he endorsed it
Citizens in the United States are free persons and they can choose not to work for an employer

With unemployment in the US at 7 % and voluntary quits still unusually low the picture isn't nearly as sunny as you paint it. One does wonder why you are saying things that aren't quite so.

If you are running a small business yourself, consider that in more civilized countries, like the EU, small businesses are exempt from many regulations.

If you are running a small business that isn't doing too well, perhaps it's time to let it go under - the market has spoken, it shouldn't be kept afloat for a few months more on the backs of your employees.
I have a friend who got Red Heat accreditation and got a string of jobs based on it. Now he is in SF doing very well for him self. He had nothing but HS degree.

But I am very interested what others think on this topic as well, so please up vote.
Making Pretty Text Directory Trees
Both NSA and GCHQ have quite the history of co-opting smart mathematicians to create secret theoretical advances in cryptography and cryptanalysis, which could well be relevant given a quantum computer with the following three properties:

* Fully general. By this I mean capable of solving BQP problems in polynomial time. This excludes D-Wave machines, for example.

* Sufficiently large. 100 qubits would probably enable qualitative advances in cryptanalysis.

* Low enough error rate. This is a slightly redundant requirement, as too high an error rate would provably prevent the computer from being asymptotically faster than classical - which is what we care about.

The last requirement is due to the quantum threshold theorem[1]. Briefly, there is an error rate below which quantum computing is possible and above which it is not. The precise value is not known but it is probably over 1% and, at least for some kinds of circuits, under about 40%. That means that at the theoretical level, the task is to create a model of computation that has as high a threshold limit as possible, and then to design an error correcting scheme that comes close to that limit. This is something that a secret agency could plausibly do in-house.

However, there is then the question of implementing the model of computation in a physical system, with a sufficiently low error rate. NSA, GCHQ etc. are not known to have this sort of experimental expertise - they would probably have to contract it out (and indeed this is the major piece of new information in the article). The history on fundamental advances over civilian technology shows that this normally depends on co-opting basically the entire research community working in the field - as in radar, nuclear weapons, stealth etc. This is not at all the case for experimental quantum computing, which is not in practice treated as a 'sensitive' field.

Thus it is my opinion that the NSA may well already have some theoretical tricks up its sleeve that it can use in the future for a decent edge, but is unlikely to get the opportunity to use them before quantum computing becomes considerably more feasible in the unclassified world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_threshold_theorem.
Bounds lifted from http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.1464.
Qualifications: I studied the mathematics of quantum computing as a Masters student, although I can't claim to still be current on the state of the art.
I don't agree that political correctness "equals" being polite. It's possible to be polite and not be PC. It's in fact possible to not be PC and not be offensive at all (note: politeness was originally a way of dealing with disagreements, including offense, not hiding them). However, our modern masters want us to see the two as conflatable...
What do you mean much? When working like this the more the better. There's an opportunity for an open source variant of this technology.
Introducing Poole, the Jekyll butler
Snapchat Says It’s Improving Its App, Service To Prevent Future User Data Leaks
For some reason, I had never read the GNU definition of free software. Very interesting thanks!

One question though, did I understand it correctly or have a got it wrong:

I can make a free software (free as in speech), and charge you X amount of money for it, but it is within your right to sell it to the next person as long as you keep the freedom to modify etc?
I've been hoping that they might roll the iOS app store into the Mac App Store, and consolidate it all under the App Store banner.
I assume most of us have salary jobs, no employer can make you take partial days out of your PTO. If you work for 15 minutes or whatever the minimum increment for hourly employees, it counts as a full day.
I'm not buying that - not only from the OP's article, but all of the press fast food workers are getting because they feel they aren't getting paid enough.

From what I know and what I've read, you have to be at least an assistant manager before you'll see the same wages you can make as a skilled worker. Most asst. managers make around $40K a year plus benefits. Just like my article pointed out, most skilled laborers START at $50K and go up from there. If I was 23 and making $50K with a car payment and no kids and no family, I'd be living the high life!
It is worth counting total sales by platform as well as by handset.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Microsoftie, just collecting some links and adding my own opinion.

Microsoft use TFS heavily [1].

Right now I imagine most MS projects are TFS but it doesn't appear to be mandated. Maybe for the big, internal-only stuff. ASP.NET is hosted on CodePlex as a Git repo [2] and MEF is Hg [3].

They've just added Git support to TFS and that probably means a lot of MS projects will migrate to Git over time.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/08/20/t...

[2] http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/

[3] https://mef.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#.hgignore
Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
why the down-votes? the title is misleading.
It was the end of a deadline that "we couldn't miss". My sump pump had actually died, and I needed to replace it. Bought the replacement, but sat on it for several weeks because "we couldn't miss the deadline". Those last 3 weeks, I was working 7 days a week for about 15 hours a day. When I got home, I ate, crashed on my couch, slept, and went back to work. Once the release "we couldn't miss" was done, I stayed home one day and put in my sump pump. The next day I was told to record the 8 hours as PTO. So given that I had just worked 300 hours in 3 weeks, but they wouldn't bend on 8? Yeah...I quit.

And I'm glad I replaced the sump pump. It rained for 3 weeks straight after I gave notice.

Oh yeah. The deadline "we couldn't miss"? It got pushed 3 weeks.

The writing was on the wall for what they expected. But I was young and "stupid" living under the auspice of my father's work life (2 jobs his whole life - 20 years in the Army and 20 years for the State of Alabama). So I worked the hours because I wanted to be the team player. I wanted to help. In the end, I was shown that the relationship was one way. So now I'm old and more careful and less willing to put up with one-sided relationships.
Right. Michael Jackson's doctor earned a much different salary from the pediatrician you had growing up. Lots and lots of lawyers earn barely enough to get by, especially these days.
What is a Busker Wormhole in the architecture of the Internet?
Yep, totally agree with that sentiment about hangouts / iMessage being better than SMS. Although, I've found that with a really shitty cellular connection (1 bar), SMS still performs better, probably since nothing else is competing for data.
OH. Adblock Plus to the rescue. They should really look at their site with that on because the whole thing looks like a scam site.
I don't think "most" U.S. companies only give between 0 and 3 holidays. Every U.S. company I ever worked at at least had the following holidays: New Year , Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Day after Thanksgiving, Christmas. And then usually there are 2 or 3 other holidays depending on the company.
How can I get a software developer job in Netherlands? Or do a startup. I am willing to learn the native language if I must.

Btw, I'm Canadian, can we speed up the process?

never mind, the tax rate is higher. but seems like a great place to work. or be financially poor but live a great quality of life from social benefits.
Thank you for making your work open source too.
Entertaining animal photo
This is a nice picture of an animal that is just like a boss!
Obama? I think the reasons he got elected have more to do with being young, charismatic, kind of hip, and "not as bad as the other guy."

I mean, I agree with the idea that if a Constitutional law professor allows this stuff to happen on his watch, we're sunk. But I wouldn't describe it as "we tried electing a civil libertarian constitution scholar." We elected a "rock star" politician who happens to have taught Constitutional law in a past life, and paid lip service to liberty for his biggest supporters.
According to some data I forget where I read (does someone have the citation handy?) a family of 4 needs a household income of $76k/yr to support themselves in the SF Bay Area.

Assuming that that number is accurate, I do not at all feel guilty about calling my tech salary "middle class" when adjusted for cost of living.

In fact, a lot of people (at least in my family) consider 'middle class' to mean 'can afford a house'. By that measure, I'm lower class. I can barely afford rent aroun dhere.
There's actually a treaty -- the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (DAFT, yes, really)[1] -- that makes it relatively easy for Americans to go to the Netherlands and start a business, and I believe time spent under the permit counts toward the requirements for permanent residency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT_(treaty)
Good. That's their job. I'm not worried about the NSA using quantum computing, as fiscal realities dictate that it would have to be narrowly targeted at a small subset of the encrypted information out there. I'm fine with them recovering plaintext from pgp-encrypted emails sent between suspected al-Qaeda members. I'm not fine with them break encryption en masse and compromising the integrity of the Internet.
I think you're derisively trying to trivialize something which is actually fairly significant.

I only have 14 days of PTO a year, and that includes sick time. I use almost all those days visiting family, especially my parents, all of whom live hundreds of miles from me. I took the week of Christmas off this year and still ended up committing some code. It wasn't much, but the people who weren't taking off easily could have done it (i.e., it wasn't something that only I knew how to do). I was still asked to do it.

Although I could easily pay cash for a nice European vacation, I won't go on one this year because I don't have the time.

I'm making my job sound terrible. It's not, far from it, but your extremely mechanical interpretation of the parent post is pretty frustrating for me to read. This sort of policy has real effects on real people's lives. It doesn't just affect me, either--it affects my parents who can only see me a few weeks out of the year. I don't know about you, but I don't believe in an afterlife, so this is all the time I've got for them. I don't own a home, but if I did and I had to use some of my very valuable PTO just to do home maintenance, while still being expected to commit code while taking PTO or in the evenings occasionally, you can bet I'd be pretty upset.

http://seeyourfolks.com/
Note that this is $10M _per RSA-2014 key_, whereas the hypothetical quantum computer can crack all of them.
That makes sense to me and all... but the difference is quite noticeable. As in, I need to take off some layers if I am doing something on my imac, but not with the others.

If I had to guess, it probably has mostly to do with the imac sitting closer to me while typing, and also that I tend towards using it for more graphics heavy tasks (since it has the largest screen). Also, I am in the southeast, so heat changes are unusually noticeable, especially in the summer.

You are right though, the imac probably is as efficient or even more efficient than my other machines, however it is more noticeable when the heat is in your face instead of blowing out off next to a baseboard.
But if I am using Forth I am going to be much more cognizant of what is on the stack than if I was using say, Python.

What is possible and what is easy or normal are often far apart.

What about compile time macros or run time macros? Users of languages that do not have those features often have a hard time grasping them. Yet they are totally possible in most languages we use today (eval,Janino,etc).

EDIT: Apparently linguistic relativity says, if there isn't a word for it then I can't understand it (to horribly paraphrase). Is that a somewhat correct interpretation? Yes, you said that.

I guess my conjecture is that while I don't agree with LR if that is the definition, the semantics of the language definitely change what is easily expressed (no shit), the aborigine girls are constantly aware of their position vector, most people are not. The way they use language has shaped their thinking.
Just downloaded a theme by using a throwaway email address and have already customized it. Looks really slick!

I have also just discovered fontawesome, which just shows that I really need to improve my front-end programming skills...
>Whistle-blowing means you go up the chain of command FIRST and find someone who can fix the problem.

Have you not heard of Binney? Or any of the other WB's in the past who did just that and were silenced.

Also, your version is predicated on the assumption that the chain of command is not already a corrupt path.

In the case of Snowden and the USG, it has now been proven beyond a doubt that the NSA/USG is a completely corrupt criminal organization.
I got the jolla on the 28th or so (bought mine in late November), and I've been using it a little since. I haven't switched from my iPhone, but I do have some impressions:

Good:

- Sailfish OS is really nice looking, and the gestures have grown on me. Actually, I find myself trying to perform the gestures like closing an app by swiping down on the iPhone as well, and when it doesn't work, the iPhone feels old and clunky.

- The phone feels good in the hand, the back has a pleasant smooth feel. It's nowhere as plastic as the galaxy phones, but doesn't have the weight and solidity of the iPhone. In general, I'm happily surprised by the quality of the hardware.

- Terminal and SSH access is one click away.

Con:

- There are no apps. The ones that are there (a media player, a calendar, a mail app) are extremely bare bones. They work, but lack essential functionality. On the plus side, they look good. Well, the browser looks a bit iffy and some of the UI choices there are no good.

- Android apps don't really work that well. Of the ones I've tried, only the official Twitter app and the Youtube player really work okay. Most apps either fail to detect network connectivity or crash. Plus, the Android apps run in a VM, not appearing as separate apps in the sailfish UI, and are pretty sluggish. Not a great experience.

- The screen is not great, fonts in the browser in particular look terrible. Hopefully this is something that can be improved (some of the fonts in sailfish itself look great). It's not a terrible screen, but it's fairly low resolution.

- The camera is pretty bad. This is a bit sad, since my last maemo/meego phone was the N900, and it had a fantastic camera for its time.

- Wireless and 3G data are flaky, and 4G is not working at all, yet.

Right now, my impression is, despite its flaws, pretty positive. Once there are more apps, the worst bugs are fixed and the browser is a bit more polished, it'll be a pretty nice OS on a slightly outdated phone. If they can get sailfish running on something like the nexus 5, I think that could be a pretty nice choice.
Interesting - I didn't know about FutureAdvisor, which seems like a great tool.

I have one nit with it -- I just had it analyze my portfolio; I find it odd that FA recommends no changes to an employer sponsored retirement plan due to "significant amount of unrecognized holdings", while it knows what options are available within the plan (ie, it doesn't suggest rebalancing the plan)
Apologies for being extremely clueless, I don't even understand advanced math, not to mention encryption, not to mention "quantum stuff" - that's why I ask here: is it theoretically possible (or could it be in the future) to use quantum computers for encryption, too? If so, would that reduce options for breaking it to "brute force on the quantum level"? Does this question even make sense?
I didn't know when it was going to happend but i knew it would. That 80m investment is nothing, imagine if they will use it to crack sha256 from bitcoins ? A 9-10 billion "business" opened for them.
Plus, privacy = lost
That was my impression, too. It sounds more likely a hosting company admin had malware installed or re-used passwords, which naturally would give attackers full access to all VMs hosted by the provider.

Considering the amateurish defacement, I think that's far more likely than some sort of a Xen/KVM breakout exploit. If there was such a zero-day, some group would probably be going after numerous providers in secret, not doing something like this.
I cringed when I read "(...) and since it's my data, I want to be in control of its disposal.", OP obviously makes the confusion between providing the data and owning the data.
It's regrettable that she contributes to propagating the idea that users own their data on facebook, when in reality once it is on facebook server it's not their data anymore, it now belongs to facebook.
There is an easier way to solve this issue: Bug Bounty.

It worked for Google, it worked for Facebook and its working for Yahoo! Infact, it worked so well for Google that they recently increased the rewards. A venture-backed startup like Snapchat that stores private pictures (even temporarily) should have no trouble paying out $5k a few times for vulnerabities.
Among Robert Moses's unsuccessful development projects was an elevated expressway across Midtown Manhattan, with commercial development below the road and high-rises above it. One proposed route had the expressway passing right through the Empire State Building. I don't know how seriously this was considered - it's one thing to put up a building around a road and quite another to retrofit an existing building to put a road through it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Manhattan_Expressway
Way to not apologize or really 'fix' the issue. For all users who don't opt out (which they don't say will be default) this vulnerability will still exist and be exploitable. They'll just make it (somewhat) harder.
In the first few minutes of "Sugar, the Bitter Truth" he shows that the average daily caloric intake has increased on average something like ~200 calories in recent decades, shows it's mostly sugar calories, then spends the rest of the video explaining info that supports his hypothesis that it's the fructose, ignoring that people are simply eating more and not using that extra energy, so they get fatter.

Every scientific claim I hear I run through this http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html and "Sugar, the Bitter Truth" raised a lot of alarm bells for me.
I really feel like SnapChat is fumbling this whole thing. They ignored the security warning, and now seem to be blaming the security group for the leak of info:

>On Christmas Eve, that same group publicly documented our API, making it easier for individuals to abuse our service and violate our Terms of Use.

The funny thing is that folks on HN and in the tech community generally will fault SnapChat for their callous attitude to security and pitiful response. But 99.9% of their users won't know or care, and investors will consider this a "lesson learned" and move on without a second thought.

Once the 24/hr news-cycle moves past the hyperbolic "SnapChat Hacked!" headlines, this ordeal and their pathetic response will slip into the forgotten-ether of low-impact data leaks.
Why is user info presented in the clear to anyone who asks for it via their api?

Here's a more sane approach I imagine:

Allow sending snaps to a phone number (rather than to a username - since you would not know it the time), and attach a "friend request" as part of delivery. When the person at that phone number retrieves the snap they have the additional option of accepting the friend request which then (and only then) exposes their user info to the originating party.
In this case, it would be easiest to simply read the sentence as though there's no snark, as I'd bet it's the correct answer.

Quantum computing is brilliant at certain types of computation, it's not a Singularity-level silver bullet. Simplified to the point of lie, it can transform certain classes of computation by taking shortcuts; the oft referenced Shor's algorithm, for example, can factor a prime in polynomial time, which is immensely faster. [0]

But that wouldn't necessarily be enough to break crypto, as anything that wasn't based on factoring a polynomial would need another algorithm. Also, while fast, the algorithm is not instant nor easy to run: a lot of qubits would be needed, and the current state-of-the-art can't support that level of computation against large numbers without a prohibitive amount of expense (qubits are not naturally stable at room temperature). For comparison, factoring a 1024 bit number would take 1024 qubits together, while only a few have ever operated together under ideal lab conditions (Wikipedia notes IBM's accomplishment factoring 15 with 7 qubits, and notes the number 21 was factored in 2012).

There is a huge amount of work in the pipe, and there's plenty of room to be shocked and amazed by new developments. But it will require innovations that would revolutionize whole industries. This is still very new tech, decades from maturity (though naturally not from commercial early-adoption).

At least, I think that's what tptacek meant. Sorta.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm