skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
COBRA still exists and it is good that it does, but it doesn't address this situation. COBRA exists to give people a safety net between full-time jobs. In the context of the original argument, COBRA is somewhat part of the problem because it too is tied into the world view of people having full-time jobs with employer-provided healthcare insurance.

If you're a contractor who is working in 3-6 months contracts you very likely aren't going to have employer health insurance coverage to begin with (thus COBRA doesn't apply to you) and will need to have your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan would because of economies of scale and our steadfast refusal to make real changes to the way healthcare insurance works in the US.
I couldn't agree more with op.. I remember when I was younger (20) and working on my first startup, my partner and I would work 6 days a week, some times from 9am - 2am with only a break for dinner. I now realize that this type of schedule is absolutely not sustainable.
Under the ACA, health care is no longer tied to employment. It's practically the whole point of the individual mandate that is being villianized -- when everyone has to buy insurance, everyone can be placed in the same risk pool, including individual buyers.

It's not as sensible a system as single payer, but it's a big step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World
Those of us that aren't model-grade attractive don't post photos.

Oh, and also not a brogrammer, so... maybe this doesn't apply to me.
This stigma, coupled with changing jobs semi-frequently has led me to not having a week-off vacation for over 2 years

Pro tip from someone who has worked for 4 companies in 6 years, and taken 6 weeks per year of vacation: once you have been offered the job, tell them you have a vacation already planned (approved by your last job) and it can't be rescheduled. This gets you an exemption from rules like no vacation during the first 6 months of employment, and it sometimes also lets you get your 2 weeks upfront, instead of having to accrue them. This is also your opportunity to get a longer vacation approved (e.g. my last job offered 3 weeks, or I had 3 weeks banked up that I had to use).
All this time I thought management had forced Howard to do it under an unreasonable deadline, leading to a poor game, but this comment made me rethink things. I'm starting to think Howard had the idea for an exploration game more or less thought out long before E.T. came to be and just saw an opportunity to fit his vision in the game.

Too bad he didn't have enough time for testing (I presume), the fact you're punished for exploring in a game that requires lots of exploring is really unexcusable.
SEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area / Remote - Long or Short Term Consultation

I am a Product Designer (Interaction Design/UI/UX). I have experience relevant to products from iOS & Android to Large Web Platforms. I typically consult on or perform the following:

* Product management - strategy, best practices, team building, implementation.

* Product design - strategy, best practices, team building, process, interaction design, ui design, iconography.

* Front end dev - I tend to build most things I spec at the very least to a minimum in which there is no chance of fidelity loss from prototype to final product. I've also setup processes for growing teams and established best practices for new hires.

info@bvrgroup.us | http://bvrgroup.us | http://dribbble.com/dylanrw
> NSA/etc has been fucking with people's rights for so long and I'm surprised that their main building is not yet burned down.

The last time someone attacked a federal office building it did not end well.
>That would be nice, but as long as healthcare is also tied to employment, it won't happen.

Indeed, one should also not depend on their employer to tend to their personal health obligations. Honestly the entire employment model is outmoded, and was never suited to office work. People should stop allowing corporate bigwigs to push them around, and start demanding acceptable working arrangements.

Maybe it's just that I'm so personally unemployable for long periods that I've learned to adapt and not rely on a single party for any of these fundamentals. I've never held a "real job" for more than eight months, there's always been some beyond the pale behavior in superiors that's pushed me over the edge and caused me to turn in my resignation. On the other hand, I've had some clients on contract for 4+ years and we continue to get along swimmingly. Things are much less intense for everyone if you don't allow that co-dependence to develop.
Enjoying life? Otherwise you're just being used.
My only objection to Hyperloop is that it's so damned ugly. What ought to be an inspirational feat of engineering looks, under the proposed pillar design, like an elevated oil pipeline. I can't imagine anyone wanting to look at it, let alone having it blight their property.

It's a shame they haven't proposed a graceful cable-stayed structure.
I don't get the irony, maybe you mean hypocritical, but I don't see that either. She isn't advocating being comfortable with your body as given to you, nor is she saying we shouldn't wear makeup. She's saying you should eat healthy most of the time.
While not the same idea as yours, a device similar to the one in this video was created at Argonne National Lab with the intention of helping make pharmaceuticals. I included a video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=669AcEBpdsY
That's a truism of orbital mechanics: to speed up, you slow down, thereby dropping into a lower orbit where you go faster. This was used as an effective metaphor (along your lines) by John Brunner in The Shockwave Rider.
The allure of abandoned Tube stations
It's not difficult. Just buy a 5 gallon bucket of virgin coconut oil. The medium-chain saturated fats in coconut oil are very friendly to your body.
Americans have a funny idea about what the middle class is compared to what I know in the UK.

He talks about people working in meat processing as being middle class if they get a good wage. WTF? In my mind middle class jobs are doctor, lawyer, professor, politician. Then the aristocracy are upper class. I guess you don't have an aristocracy in the US who I don't know what counts as upper class there.
Sorry to say, but what you are thinking is actually just wrong. Drop your mental model and adopt mine.

You apply very light pressure to the wrench, which turns the plug, which collides with the weirdest pin out. There are circumstances in which you may bind multiple pins. If the lock is made to absurdly high standards (and I mean lock manufacturer playing a prank on lockpickers level of high standards) or if you apply your tension too heavily.

Watch this video to see what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNKvPS1ac6E&list=SP66CD42F86F...

The first several pins in the lock, as I am searching for the binding pin, are under no pressure whatsoever and can move freely between the upper and lower pin chambers.

Also - noticed you are at Quora, I actually write about lockpicking in film and television over there from time to time: http://tvpicking.quora.com
You might want to check out ROS from the willow garage people. It's probably the right tool that you're looking for.
It's really hard to read the thin grey text on the bright orange background:
http://i.imgur.com/dCMcnmv.png
But someone with a fructose intolerance reads labels to avoid fructose. If you are tolerant of fructose, but decide to eliminate it from your diet anyway, how would you not start reading labels and becoming conscious of the ingredients?
> Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better

Least substantiated claim of 2014 so far.
> If Google strictly abode copyright or computer access laws, it would have never existed

Whoa there. At the time, the consensus was that anything put up on web servers was there for anyone to see by any means. Minus the 'robots.txt' convention for automated scanning, which existed because there were many other search engines before Google.
It's fun and relaxing but most locks are too easy to pick. For me it's kind of similar to knitting as a relaxing exercise :D

I still remember a fun talk I heard about the safety of gun safes (or lack thereof). They cracked it and told the manufacturers how easy it was and got a reply along the lines of "well maybe it's easy for a specialist like you with good equipment but it's safe enough for normal folks". Next slide contained a video of a 6 year old kid (highly trained security specialist) cracking the thing with a straw (specialized security equipment).
Here's how I deal with family obligations, home repairs, etc. - I do them as needed and take no PTO. I'll email my team and say "Garage door getting replaced. Be checking email sporadically". Now if the company I'm working for says nothing, that's good. If the company I'm working for says "You need to log those X hours as PTO", I give notice. It's expected that we (employees) put in a little extra effort when at the end of a project or the end of the fiscal month or whatever. And I don't ask to be paid for that extra 4 to 12 hours of work. So if I take 4 hours here and there, you'd damn well better NOT bitch at me.

Edit: fix some grammar
When you factor in things such as "I'm a skilled programmer, but I don't know Ada." Are you still a skilled programmer? Sure, you're quite good at Ruby and Javascript. But you don't know Ada. Why not? Because your goal was never to learn every programming language.

If you want to pick every lock available to you and you can do so quickly and successfully, you're a skilled lock picker. Buying harder locks just to show you can pick them is an academic feat, not necessarily a real-world skill. Skill is just aptitude in doing something successfully.
Uber Lays Bare Our Love-Hate Relationship With Supply And Demand
Duno about the downvotes, but in short the first link says "may" in the title and the abstract concludes with this pointless statement "Thus, the increase in consumption of HFCS has a temporal relation to the epidemic of obesity, and the overconsumption of HFCS in calorically sweetened beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity." which tells me as a scientist nothing.

The second article isn't very helpful either.

We are looking for high quality data that meets the criteria required to make nutritional advice:

1) almost certainly needs to be a controlled clinical trial with double blinding
2) needs to be replicated by multiple indepdendent groups who do not share data or methods or design before publishing
3) after that, get a Cochrane REview and ideally also allow Glantz and others to pick apart the methodology.
It's hard to find info but isn't the UI and other parts closed source? If that is the case Firefox OS and Ubuntu mobile OS look more promising.
I really have a problem with the generalization of "people often use the excuse..." Clearly I'm being picky about language semantics here; however, I think that it's important to note that there is no proof of such a claim.

I hear about "feeling burnt out" so infrequently that I'd argue the opposite is true, and I work around a LOT of hard working people. Then again, I'd have no proof of such a claim.
Clojure Kata #2 – The Bowling Game
>guys who can afford to pay 6-12 weeks of salary to someone who isn't working

This is the basis of the misconception that time off is optional. For a healthy life, time off is not optional. Denying employees sufficient time off is effectively asking them to sacrifice their health and well-being for the company, a condemnable practice.

As to how much time off is sufficient or necessary, and in what sized chunks of time, I would leave that to the professional psychiatrists to figure out.
Have fun forcing down coconut oil to get enough calories. Wouldn't you enjoy the taste and convenience of a glass of grape juice?
Looks like the primary new thing here is the ability to create orders on the phone, including the option to accept a credit card swipe. (Which is awesome.) Most everything else was part of previous versions of the mobile app.
I wonder if this would be a good technology for a pick-and-place robot for circuits.

Obviously the palsy needs to be fixed, but assuming that's solvable, it would be interesting to see it used as perfectly sterile tweezers.

Alternately, there seems to be some impressive vertical momentum imparted. Perhaps it could be used to launch small components into the air to be caught by another acoustic field, which does a more refined drop or transfer.

Or... Well, there's an awful lot of applications, really. Truly cool tech.*

* This isn't the first time a trick like this has been done, but it's the first I've seen with such control and dexterity.

Low frequency sound "halting" flow of water (illusion):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODqQvlrgIQ

Non-Newtonian fluid on speaker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoTKXXNQIU

Of course yesterday's article on General Fusion showing the power of a well focused waveform:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996683
I bet the mean years left for a 27 y.o. man is greater than 72-27, but i don't know if there are any public statistics to back up the claim.
> Who is going to pick the lock on somebody's house to break in?

Wait, why wouldn't this be better than smashing a window to get in?
Indeed. It amazes me how willing people (well, Americans at least) are to give up vacation time. All it takes is the smallest whiff of a threat to somebody's all-important "Career", and they'll back down from any plans for a real vacation. Other folks I've worked with simply don't even bother, and if forced to take the remainder of their paid time off in December, they'll just hang out on the couch with the XBox.

Makes no sense.

Anyway, here's the obligitory six year old blog post:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...
Look at the sites claiming

"The Scorecard: Snowden Approval Rating 54%, Obama 46%, Congress 17%"

As far as I can tell, they do not cite actual sources so it's impossible to know how good the survey was. It's entirely possible that they only surveyed people who know who Edward Snowden is, which ruins the point.
There was a video games museum at the top of the building, it is closed now, only boring offices remain.
This is just crazy. In the UK, the minimum holiday entitlement is 28 days (Full details at https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights). That usually does not include Bank Holidays - unless you're working somewhere a bit sketchy - so that's another 7 days (although you can't decided when to take them).

In some companies I've worked for, HR can force you to take holiday if it looks like you've not been using it.

I'm not claiming the UK is a Socialist paradise, but I shudder when I look at the terms of employment with US companies.

Do you want a happy, healthy, dedicated, and motivated workforce? Or do you just want to burn people out as quickly as possible and then replace them?
I just bought a Shopify subscription for my stepfather for Christmas. He's been wanting to start an online store to sell the fly-fishing flies he makes and asked me how he could go about building that website. Thankfully the Shopify starter pack does everything he wants and he's happy as can be. He was actually asking about integration with his ipad and I didn't quite know what to tell him (until now). It's really nice to see the new innovations like this coming out of that company. That - along with the stellar reviews at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894121 - is the reason I went with them over something like Bigcommerce.
In my mind middle class jobs are doctor, lawyer, professor, politician.

Highly relative. By default these are considered upper middle class, although in certain cases they can be either middle class or upper class.

Remember, middle class isn't a solidly defined term. It has nuances and ranges.

Anyway, concerning the article: tl;dr Wages are low because labor unions aren't influential enough.
Alternate, equally accurate headline:

'Jolla fails to outsell 3 Samsung phones, Nokia phone'
My biggest hope was: Make iTunes (mac) not suck. It's on a short list of the worst software I use every day. Just bringing down the spinny beach balls after every action would have gone a long way. I don't blame the vast majority of people who seem to be avoiding it altogether, I'll have to follow shortly.
Are these awesome themes on GitHub? it would also be really nice if they were all under one repo, or each had their own! Just an idea. Great work!
That means the vacation probably wasn't long enough. It takes at least two weeks to really clear your head. If you're really that stressed about not/working you could really use 3-6 months off. I do it every 3 years or so am not "rich."
FSF asks Reddit to upvote user freedom by serving only free JavaScript
I've noticed a rise in cartoonified hacker portraits as well, which is a stylistic alternative.
Jodie Sweetin from Full House Pays Tax Bill
Google webmaster tools lets you disregard back
links which removes any benefit or penalty of the links. So if someone added your site to a known link farm, you can disregard those back links from affecting your ranking.
Because of the stress I've had about not working

Dude, it's a fine prison you built for yourself. This from a guy in tech, tech being one of the few areas where labour supposedly still has negotiating power.
Doesn't that ensure that OEMs can't ship it just like Acer was banned from making Aliyun phones? Also, compatibility will ensure that almost no one will bother to make Sailfish apps and that Sailfish is in an eternal race to keep replicating all the functionality that is being pushed into the closed Play Services at an increasing pace.
New system uses low-power Wi-Fi signal to track moving humans
"So instead Wi-Vi uses just one receiver. As the person moves through the room, his or her distance from the receiver changes, meaning the time it takes for the reflected signal to make its way back to the receiver changes too. The system then uses this information to calculate where the person is at any one time."
Founder here - we are constantly working on adding more. Thanks for the comment :)
From my second link:

In the absence of definitive evidence, recommendations must rely on professional judgment. No data suggest that sugar intake per se is advantageous, and some data suggest it may be detrimental. The studies above, taken in total, indicate that high sugar intake should be avoided. Sugar has no nutritional value other than to provide calories. To improve the overall nutrient density of the diet and to help reduce the intake of excess calories, individuals should be sure foods high in added sugar are not displacing foods with essential nutrients or increasing calorie intake.

Can you point me to something substantial that suggests I should not consider the above accurate? I appreciate that evidence in support of the Lustig claims may not be complete, but evidence against them seems non existent. Why should I ignore what seems obvious?
>>> When Ms. Hann took the issue to a New Hampshire court, the judge sanctioned Educational Credit, citing the lawyers’ “violation of the Bankruptcy Code’s discharge injunction.”

I'm wondering what the penalty was from getting sanctioned by the Judge. In some states, you can your license revoked by the state bar association. I thought it was odd they didn't mention what penalty the attorneys received as a result of the sanction
>the GNU tools are used in a huge number of operating systems

You mean linux? That isn't a huge number.

>and are installed on a staggering number of devices

The staggering number of devices you refer to almost exclusively run busybox or one of the similar projects. GNU software is hugely bloated and not a good choice for embedded systems.

>Second, it is debatable whether sticking to Hurd was a good or a bad idea technically

No, it was fine technically. It had no developers and so nothing happened. Minix exists, obviously microkernels are possible.
NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption
I have a hard time using Org mode , more than I used to, because I've realised that it encourages a lot of subdivisions, and deep trees only serve to confuse my mind ( see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/03/trees-treeviews-and...)
"your own individual plan... which (even with Obamacare in its current state) is going to cost you on average significantly more than an employer offered plan"

I don't disagree with your greater point about the US system, but my experience is that ACA individual policies were about the same cost as what I can purchase as an (admittedly very small) employer.

If you buy an ACA plan, you're in a much larger risk pool than any individual employer can provide.
Yes, exactly. I was at a startup that wasn't going so well, and we had the standard three weeks per year. It was already socially awkward to take those three weeks. Then the policy was changed to "all the vacation you need". For the people already taking zero vacation, there was no change, of course. For the rest of us, it increased the pressure to do without.
No, it's not widely accepted on HN that palo or keto is the only healthy diet. However, suger is pretty widely accepted here to be highly addictive and to offer no known benefits besides tasting great.
As far as I know, none of the NSA's practices have been ruled unconstitutional. At best, the courts have sent mixed signals, and the collection of metadata was explicitly decreed constitutional by a precious Supreme Court ruling.