skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They were actually a great company. I interned with them during college, learned a ton. They just had some very old-fashioned policies which I suspect were due to the CEO/founder (and most of the higher-ups) being from a military background.
No, but you may be a great "Hello world in C" writer. People can be insanely fast at solving Rubik's 3x3x3, but that doesn't imply they are good at puzzles in general or even at a 4x4x4.

[by the way, "Hello World" in C is a surprising amount of work. For example, version 2.9 is over 270 lines, and saw over 40 revisions for the main file (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hello.git/log/src/hello.c)]
> What disturbs me is that so many of us use this as a substitute for facts and objective analysis.

I think there's something to this. At a guess, people use a heuristic because facts and objective analysis are hard. I don't mean that sarcastically— I mean that it's difficult and complex even if you are not lazy. When people opt for what everyone else is using, they receive the benefits of treading a well-worn path. This isn't an excuse, but I am sympathetic. Some people are just trying to get work done.

On the other hand, that is a poor justification for being too lazy to do the job right. Often a problem isn't as hard or complex as it looks, and you might just learn something while looking into it. You get the idea.

Also, +1 to your comment re: sexism and ageism.
The security film is an interesting solution. It seems like it only protects the glass and not the mechanism for opening the window. I am interested because I have actually had an apartment broken into via first floor window many years ago (do you happen to have a source handy for those break-in statistics?).
Mandiant Acquired by FireEye
At my employer (here in the US) we start at 18 days. People who've been here for 10 years have 33 days. There are even people who've been at the company for 25 years who have 53 days (though today the max is 23 days). Our parent company is in travel (a GDS, think reservation system) and has been around for 50 years. You can't save up from year to year (except if your manager is OK with it) so people take the time off. People are generally happy and productive and the company does well. Why anyone thinks working 90 hour weeks and never taking time off is a good idea is beyond me (even if it's your own startup at some point you will burn out).
Based on wikipedia, he seems to have more knowledge of the subject that the "medical community" would have, to be honest, given he has the following qualifications:

Robert H. Lustig, MD

Nationality:	American

Education:	MIT, Cornell University Medical College

Medical career

Profession:	clinical medical practice, teaching and research

Field:	neuroendocrinology, pediatric endocrinology

Institutions:	University of California, San Francisco, UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital

Specialism:	childhood obesity

Research:	biochemical, neural, hormonal and genetic influences contributing to obesity

I don't know too much about him, but I'm curious as to whether or not any of his detractors have similar specialties. On the surface, most of the data would seem to agree with Dr. Lustig.
People go on low carbohydrate or ketogenic diets and feel better because cortisol and adrenaline levels are boosted. It's like getting a cortisone shot. This affect can last a year or two. But then eventually stress hormone resistance develops and the whole thing falls apart with some ugly health consequences. People get crashed testosterone and thyroid levels and brain fog.

Sustained low carb is a bad idea. You are mimicking the metabolism of starvation. For the most part you want to be operating with glycogen topped up.
Ah, the tone argument... I Am Too Emotional, causing me to use Incorrect Words.

Except, here is what lkrubner said, emphasis mine:

The same is true about this conversation, and _your reaction_.

See how we were, in fact, having a thread where we all address each other personally? How you made up an arbitrary rule to discount my comment just because it made you uncomfortable?

Next time, check your own emotional state before jumping with with a lecture on someone else's. And try to argue on substance, not tone, please.
Reminds me of the Tay House on Charing Cross Podium, a building straddling the M8 motorway in Glasgow, Scotland, near my office: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M8_Bridge_to_Nowhere and http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Wfm_m8_br...
Good on you for declining, I hope you expressed that as your reason why. Employers need to understand that is pathetic.
"Professional runners take long breaks between marathons. They make no excuses for this, and no one judges them for it, because everyone knows that rest and recuperation is an essential part of being a pro athlete. The same is true for entrepreneurs (and everyone, really). Preventing burnout is part of your job."

Everyone is different and even comparing muscles is not the same.

Some people may need to take time off to prevent burnout others may not. I worked 5 or 6 years without a break and didn't think anything of it.

That said it's probably natural to try and elevate oneself when you have some ability that someone else doesn't appear to have. Some people do need less sleep (not me) and would almost certainly have an opinion of someone who need more than 8 hours.

The thing about "making fun" of other people is that you isolate one thing (that you identify as negative) not everything about them. And there is nothing wrong with trying to perk yourself up because you can do 20 pullups with your feet out while the other guy (who only needs 4 hours of sleep) is focusing on his extra productivity as a way of feeling good about himself.. Human nature.
It's a good chance to show off your knowledge of hoisting.
IT'S A TRAP!

:) But seriously, very cool stuff.
Firework explosion 2:47
Career clothing for women can suck
You can read them here: http://www.guidestar.org/
+1 I have yet to see any reasonable evidence from people who tout going dairy free just because of lactose intolerance. The lactase enzyme reaction is one of the simplest bits of chemistry to do. Lacto-ovo vegetarians live longer. Advising them to cut milk seems irresponsible.
There was actually some back and forth on the matter. Eventually they offered 10 days but at that point I had other offers and wound up with one that started at three weeks vacation.

Of course, that job sucked for a variety of other reasons which led to me leaving after six months. "Oh, we hired you as a programmer? Babysit this Excel spreadsheet for me."
> Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.

GNU Emacs is much better. It's easier to use and easier to extend.
It's practically the raison d'etre for third party subscription agents that already exist, although their business model revolves around actually handling the purchasing part and charging a fee for it.
I guess your alternative: flat rate access to a well structured general price list of software, data services and biz intel products would have some value to some BigCorp purchasing specialists, but would it cover the costs of putting it together?

It's also pretty easily ignored at the high end of the market where salespeople won't quote anybody without a proper telephone conversation and/or valid company email, and will claim every package is highly customised (even if it isn't). Even at the low end it's easily dismissed as "out of date", "inaccurate" or "for a different service we've discontinued"... and believe me I've had that conversation plenty of times about third party guesstimates of product prices when those excuses were actually true
You have some great videos in that playlist, thanks for sharing. I do however hate you for not explaining how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UU5gByMec2Bi49LEfJVrZTyw&.... I feel like a complete idiot! :)
Whether or not warrants were obtained for their activities, is, however, an objectively verifiable boolean fact.
The Windows killer: Chromebook
You know I think you are right. We should also apply this to murderers.

Find and punish all the murders or let them all go free!
It is, however, widely accepted on HN that you should be eating pure paleo or keto, that carbs of any sort are bad, and that fructose is the equivalent of a Schedule I drug (highly addictive, highly toxic, no known benefits).
What you say might have made sense if not for the fact that countless other Jewish students were similarly denied from MGU. Did they all have uncles that lived in the West?

In Frenkel's story, the lady from the correspondence school hears his name and that he wants to apply to MGU, and immediately asks for his nationality. When he replies "Russian", she keeps asking until he replies that his father is Jewish. Then she flat-out says, "Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?". I think it is fairly clearly established that this is the reason he was denied a place there.
I would like to mention something very substantial and non-trivial.

Robert Lustig is a research doctor. he works at UCSF (it's where my PhD in Biophysics is from), and sees patients there- highly obese, atypical patients. He promotes a particular position about metabolism and health. However - and this is the key thing - he has NOT published data which is convincing to reasonable scientists to support his position. At UCSF, he's generally considered a bit of a quack (personal comments from a number of professional scientists who work there).

Here is a list of Lustig's publications.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=author:...

I, working with grad students at UCSF and elsewhere, have picked apart the materials and methods of his studies and found numerous statistical errors which make us doubt the validity of his conclusions. I won't claim that we have evidence he is being fraudful- it's more likely just an example of poor scientific behavior.

I'll give Lustig credit for one thing. Sugar- the Bitter Truth is one of the finest examples of manipulative sophistry I've ever seen. After seeing that I realized that most scientists are doing an absurdly poor job manipulating the public.
Well, since they're constantly told on HN that unless they're visible on Github they aren't getting a job, why are you blaming them?
The research cited by Dr. Lustig demonstrates that sugar causes both mental and physical addiction. It's more addictive than cocaine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
No, but it's his fault that he exploited the butler's cretinism to gain access he knew or suspected he shouldn't have. If you're still unclear on the concept, your Google query for today is the Latin phrase mens rea; I'm no lawyer, but the impression I have is that that's the legal concept of import here.
Pretty much how you have to do it. Virtually no one is going to agree to allow you to scrape their stuff.

It's just like when you're discussing your entrepreneurial plans with a non-entrepreneur. Typically, their response is an eye roll and a sarcastic "Good luck!". Most people envy successful entrepreneurs really hard, but they have no patience for beginners. It's like they don't understand that there's stuff in between being a broke college kid and having a record-breaking tech IPO. The same is true for copyright infringers and web scrapers; demonstrate your value first, and then open discussions.

If Google strictly abode copyright or computer access laws, it would have never existed because it'd have to ask each website owner for formal permission to crawl their page and store records of their copyrighted material, including derivative works caused by compression, indexing, etc. (and worse the right to reproduce this content for display in search results) and meticulously record each copyright holder's assent. They'd have to verify that the legitimate copyright owner had provided assent, and not an imposter. They wouldn't be able to access anything because almost all boilerplate ToS documents forbid "automated access" and similar, and violating the ToS is illegal computer access.

Google is operating in a highly illegal fashion, and the only reason they're allowed to exist is because they demonstrated their value first by driving traffic to the copyright holders' websites. PayPal did the same thing with banking and payment regulations. At some point, you just have to recognize that most people aren't going to get it until you show them, and don't want to be bothered with your delusions of grandeur. It's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
In 2014, no one would really need to argue about this, should be generally accepted as a universal truth: Vacations are good.

The ancient Greeks were spot-on: «παν μέτρον άριστον» (all in good measure).
The ternary Goldbach conjecture is true
Why Nest Is Worth Less Than Pinterest
Some of these are really great although I always chuckle at the idea of web design agencies using free themes for there own website.
And Helmsley Building (Park avenue Viaduct):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmsley_Building
Previous submission 339 days ago with extensive comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5127221
In that case, it could hurt potential future revenue. But, again, that's something RapGenius should have thought more about before cheating.
Here's a quick take down on Lustig's sugar and fructose phobia.

http://www.andrewkimblog.com/2013/02/quick-commentary-on-dr-...

Sucrose alongside adequate nutrients to process it is good for you. Sweet fruits and honey are not to be avoided.
Berlin has something similar with a subway since ~1900 (along with the house that can be found in other comments):

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

(scroll all the way down)
Introducing Goiardi: an in-memory Chef server written in Go
And only the executives and high-end employees will be able to save money for vacations. Brilliant.

Strongly disagree with you when you say that no one can pay 6 weeks of vacations, using this as an argument to say "no one can pay vacations at all".

It's clearly the question of our social model that you are asking and I will say that: the social model I want for me, my children, and the others, is a world where you don't have to sell yourself as a work slave if you don't want.
Paid vacations are not perfect, they are expensive, but they also are a not so bad approximation of a world where you can live your life outside of the work if you want (at least periodically).
"Munter" means something that presumably you don't think it means.
> Energy-balance (digested food calories - energy exerted living) is magnitudes more important than the macronutrient content of your diet.

That's a convenient fallacy which is so often repeated that it is simply assumed to be true, but some -- such as Gary Taubes, Dr. Lustig (the author of this article), Dr. Eric Westman, and others -- argue the exact opposite: the macronutrient content of one's diet matters very much. Different macronutrients provoke differing endocrinological responses. Our bodies are biological, not mechanical machines, and we process carbohydrates differently than fats or protein. It isn't controversial and it shouldn't come as a shock. New research is showing that the hormone cascade brought about by certain foods -- and by adipose tissue itself -- has an enormous impact on our health.

The problem is that people want to oversimplify nutrition into universal equation which assumes that everyone is the same, and they often cite epidemiological nutritional studies -- notorious for being inaccurate and unreliable -- to do so. The truth is probably more complicated: the diet that keeps one person healthy might make another fat and sick, and it's primarily dependent upon genetics, not physics.

For more on this, read any of Taubes's books. They are quite compelling. Dr. Lustig has written a few himself.
I would consider the Sports Broadcasting Act and the following legislation that expressly permitted the AFL/NFL merger to be, as you imply, well-known gifts from Congress to American professional sports leagues and the NFL in particular.

Those are hardly loopholes, however, since the legislation worked exactly as Congress intended as far as I can tell.

Your allegations of "Hollywood" accounting seem more consistent with loophole exploitation, but I would like more concrete evidence other than the alleged dearth of team profits.
Turn your smartphone into a puck.
Uber Claims It's Not to Blame for Death of 6-Year-Old on New Year's Eve
It's not impossible for a person to have stellar research credentials, yet be a terrible research MD.

Could you point to the data which agrees with Lustig? can you vouch for its accuracy, compared to, say, some data people who don't agree with him?

I've talked extensively with people in the Biochemistry dept at UCSF (my phd is from biophysics there) and they mostly seem to think he's a buffoon.
The two rings are attached in one place and the whole thing is rotated. Think about it as putting a "<" shape on a base and rotating it.
Human Behavior Trove Lures Economists to U.S. Tech Titans
> ... yet while they are working, they never actually push themselves to their physical (and mental) limits.

You could argue that in the long run, only those who push themselves see any kind of career progression. For the likes of your example the future holds stagnation or, in the most extreme case, unemployment/unemployability.
How is this different from meteors (shooting stars)? size?
That would be nice, but as long as healthcare is also tied to employment, it won't happen. Those same people who have their time off eaten up by obligations generally can't afford to be without health insurance for two weeks every few months. Additionally, they can't justify paying for private health insurance when their employer forces them to accept its own coverage (and won't give them the cash equivalent).

Also, I think that while "contract" employment is nice for programmers, there are a large number of jobs (majority?) for which that simply doesn't make much sense because it increases training costs for employers. It is still, to this day, very common for employers to look for employees who plan to stick around for awhile. They want the best of both worlds, basically, long-term employees who can be laid off at a moment's notice.
Definitely could be a lot of room there. I can't imagine O'Reilly guides are the best way to quickly learn a new language...
"Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job."

Excuse me? You don't just take a vacation so you can be more productive at work.
LOL, I just looked it up, then went back to the page and now I can't stop laughing.
(in re people with hereditary fructose intolerance) "And they’re among the healthiest people on the planet. "

FFS, The Atlantic should be embarrassed to publish articles with "correlation is causation" fallacies of this magnitude in them. This is standard food woo thinking: "people who heavily scrutinized and evaluated everything they ate because they have a strong adverse reaction to X means that not eating X will make YOU healthy too!"

Not considered: that maybe the simple act of THINKING before shoving whatever's handy into one's maw might be the health-inducing factor.

See also: "It has been found that laboratory research causes cancer in rats." Which, as it turns out, may actually hold some non-snarky truth - http://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer-studi...
FireEye Computer Security Firm Acquires Mandiant
If you actually read the article, the doctor they interviewed is perfectly reasonable and clearly knows what she is talking about. I came in expecting the usual quackery and was pleasantly surprised, this is real doctor whose specialty is Crohn's and Celiac disease.
Sure, although I don't wanna derail the discussion too much with my silly situation. I work at a Delphi 5 (!) shop in the Midwest. I spent about a year trying to get interviews in my strong field (C#/.NET, no degree though). I wound up here because it's the first and only place I could even get in the door. Not the most elegant position but I couldn't go on much longer working clothing retail.
> Set up a repo on a server somewhere and declare it to be the "central repo"

That's the situation I described. We still have the problems I mentioned: sometimes we commit without pushing (particularly because we sometimes didn't set a branch to be remote-tracking and didn't realize this), and sometimes our branches are behind our copy-of-the-remote-branch because we pulled different branches (which leads to bogus merges in the history).
There's really no benefit to glorifying "busy."

With the amount of technology and automation we have, and how productive we have become, we should be heading towards 4 day weeks, and month long vacations.

No shame in taking a break at all here. Also, work to live, don't live to work; or you'll miss out on everything important.
In the U.S., military members get 30 days a year of paid leave, though weekends count as 'on duty' even if you would not normally work. Of course this can always be overruled by your commander - you can get stuck in a situation (i.e., deployed in Afghanistan) where you can't use your leave, you just get paid for it.
Here in The Netherlands we have a legal minimum of 4x the amount of hours you work per week for time off. So you work 40 hrs, you get 160 hrs off each year. The vast majority of employers give more, though. I haven't seen less than 24 days off. In addition to that, you get 8% of your yearly gross income as "vacation money" in the month of May.

I never get why most Americans have so much trouble with taking/giving time off. Or working part-time, for that matter, which is basically impossible, from what I've heard.
I don't deny that there are probably plenty of places that offer 2 weeks to start. But I took the context to be professional software positions. But even assuming that context, it would appear from the comments that even 2 weeks can be too much to expect. May it's a geographical function as well. I don't know that you could hire anyone to write code in the Seattle area without giving at least three weeks.
Brilliant discussion.

Before I came to work at FullContact, I went through the same sort of guilt every time I left for vacation.

Nevermind that I was working 60-hour weeks. Nevermind that I was plugged in, often checking email & sneaking in work, while away on "vacation" (much to the annoyance of my fiancee). And it wasn't unique to me - talking to most of my friends, it seemed like a common thread in the startup world. If we take vacation at all, we don't leave work at work. I guess I had been in it so long, I didn't even notice anymore.

This year I took my first Paid, Paid Vacation - no email. No internet. No work of any sort allowed. And I came back more refreshed than I can ever remember being. Not only with ideas that had germinated while away, but also an extra drive I hadn't had in a long time. It was freaking amazing.

Sad thing is, I probably wouldn't have done it, were I not working for a place that made "unplugging" a condition of my getting a bonus. The overwhelming "work more" startup culture is a tough thing to break free of.
Papa Parse: Powerful CSV parser for Javascript
Breath is a noun, breathe is a verb.
10 days plus ~10-15 days of holidays is pretty standard in the US software world.
Sorry to hear that. The stats are from 2005 but are probably similar to what they are today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/homeandga...

Yeah, I think it only protects the glass, but I believe there are other things you can do to protect the window from being opened another way.