skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No matter what they say, you're still losing your job and it's going to sting. I think the message was pretty reasonable, it just sucks that they did it by phone.
This kind of behavior (promoted by HR/Legal) needs to stop. Period.

It is not about firing people by conference, phone or whatever. It is about the thanklessness and the attitude that sucks. Does it really hurt to genuinely feel and say "sorry we cannot keep you any longer. Hope you understand". No one is going to sit and whine about being laid-off but the manner of layoffs (in america at least) is getting shameful, appalling and disgusting.

However, not shocking at all. Companies have too become risk/lawsuit averse when it comes to firing/lay-offs that they all have scripted things to say because they don't want to risk a potential lawsuit. My friend was laid-off by my ex-boss (I referred him and left). I know that my ex-boss was a really nice guy who would at least apologize. During the lay-off, all my friend got was "Your position has been eliminated. Please do not use any company device and leave immediately. We will ship your stuff to you". He was even told not to talk to any co-worker while leaving. Poor guy was so heartbroken that he could not even say bye to people he worked with. You know what he was not sad about ? Finding another job.

May be I am overreacting but this is when Capitalism starts to bite. I am all in for profits, competitions, fierce business but if I ever have to layoff someone specially for no fault of theirs, you bet I will say sorry in person.It may not mean much but it is called "being human".
Agreed, I would have preferred:

$ say -v "Bad News" "Unfortunately your role has been eliminated and you will no longer have a role at patch. Today will be your last day of employment with the company"
More precisely, "functions that modify their arguments". For example,

append(list,value)

returns a new list;

append!(list,value)

modifies at least one of its arguments, typically, its first argument, but it could be another or multiple ones.

By the way, all of these are conventions. The language doesn't require you to use the punctuation (http://opendylan.org/documentation/intro-dylan/expressions-v...). The conventions grow on you soon, though (I never really wrote anything in lisp or dylan, but still would like to see more flexibility in allowed characters in names)

Functions that have side effects on non-arguments should be very rare, and don't use a naming convention (see for example http://opendylan.org/documentation/library-reference/common-...)
Code-Used vs Time-Used Shapes for Computer Benchmarks Game 
I've found the computer benchmarks game to be an interesting distraction for a while (I particularly like how they're rigorous about telling you what's happening behind the scenes), and have been particularly amazed to see the relative changes in performance in particular code bases as things like JIT compiling have been integrated into them. The rest of the site's statistics (ex: n-body for same x64 http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?test=nbody ) are pretty cool, but I find these code vs time shapes to be some of the most concise representations for per-language efficiency.
The challenge with natural gas is capture and transport.

Gas is, well, a gas. It doesn't stay put, and it takes considerable infrastructure to convert it to a more manageable form (compressed or liquified). Both of which are states it doesn't particularly seem inclined to remain in.

There've been enough issues transporting oil from new drilling zones. Transporting gas (by truck, rail, or pipeline) is even more complex.

That's among the reasons oil (and coal) are so useful as fuels sources: they're very convenient. Oil most especially, though even coal can be moved in pipelines (as slurry).

Mind: for both environmental (AGW) and resource limitations (peak oil/gas) reasons we'll have to shift off of them. But the practicality of both coal and oil means that that transition will carry with it immense costs.
Two words, Therapeutic Cloning. From the center for Bioethics and Human Dignity(http://cbhd.org/stem-cell-research/overview):

6. What is the relationship between embryonic stem cell research and "therapeutic" cloning?

Another potential obstacle encountered by researchers engaging in embryonic stem cell research is the possibility that embryonic stem cells would not be immunologically compatible with patients and would therefore be “rejected,” much like a non-compatible kidney would be rejected. A proposed solution to this problem is to create an embryonic clone of a patient and subsequently destroy the clone in order to harvest his or her stem cells. Cloning for this purpose has been termed “therapeutic” cloning—despite the fact that the subject of the research—the clone—is not healed but killed.
Show HN: Zendesk for apps: add an FAQ to your app + sync with Desk/Zendesk
SoundFocus (YC S13) is hiring an Industrial Designer
We're looking for an experienced industrial designer to help us craft the future of consumer audio devices that will improve the lives of millions. Our ideal candidate loves consumer products and has a passion for creating products that people can hold and touch.

We've architected our company with a strong design culture at its heart - both founders have worked in design, and understand its importance in product development. As the first full-time designer on the team, you'll own all things design from physical design of our product to our website, mobile applications and all aspects of our brand.

Responsibilities:

- Design SoundFocus’ audio hardware, packaging, and accessories from concept to final product.

- Own all aspects of brand identity, from our mobile apps and website down to the company logo and branding.

- Translate ideas and sketches into 3D prints and ID prototypes.

- Establish core concepts and signature elements of our brand and fully define these elements.

- Work closely with the engineering, product management, and manufacturing teams.

- Work with vendors and manufacturing partners in Asia to define, specify and confirm CMF as your designs go to production.

- Travel to work with partners, both domestic and abroad.

What we're looking for:

- A BS in Industrial Design or equivalent experience.

- Experience with 3D CAD and 2D Design tools like Solidworks, Rhino, Alias, Vray, Keyshot, Photoshop and similar products.

- Experience working on a product from concept through to tooling and production.

- Strong understanding of manufacturing methods, processes, materials and constraints.

Nice To Have's:

- 5+ Years of experience in consumer product design as part of a multi-disciplinary team

- A proven track record of designing challenging and innovative consumer products.

- Experience with designing audio products like headphones, speakers, or headsets.

- Experience with web, mobile and print design.

About SoundFocus

SoundFocus is building the future of consumer audio devices that will empower millions of people who face hearing difficulties in their daily lives. You’ll work alongside smart people with deep backgrounds in product design, signal processing, software development, electrical and mechanical engineering.

We're funded by some of the leading investors in the valley, including Kapor Capital, Y Combinator, Greg Badros, VegasTechFund, OVO Fund, RTA Capital, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian and Harj Taggar.

Perks:

- Located in South Park (SOMA) - 10 minutes from BART and Caltrain

- Comprehensive health insurance including dental & vision options

- Daily lunch on the company with a fully stocked snack bar.

- Pre-Tax Commuter Benefits

To Apply:

Please submit your resume and a portfolio that demonstrates process and final work to jobs@soundfocus.com.
The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
> Browsers should evolve to account for this kind of abuse. Holding down the back button should present two options: One to list all the anchors you've been to on the current page (in this case, paragraphs on the page), and one list of your previous history stack that doesn't account for URL fragments/hashes.

Chrome does this (as I discovered when trying to escape this page)
Agreed, if I were in the place of those employees I'd rather be listening to Siri or the Google Maps driving voice lady, both sound a lot more human.

Even better would be if they hired Ellen McLain to GladOS it because at least that would have been funny.
I heard it as coldly professional. What, do you think they'd want a hug? I object to your use of "appalling".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7zkd0kRS4
Because apparently even billionaires haven't managed quite the same form of sophomoricism as you, in which you trick yourself into believing that one cannot actually value things outside of one's own subjective experiences and personal lifespan.

They're not irrational, they just care about things outside themselves.
Big SENS fan here. Good question.

A lot of the reason is that people do philanthropy to gain various types of status and reputation. It's often a social action. Investing in SENS wouldn't impress their friends in the right way, while various other causes optimize for social signaling.

Yachts and social media companies are a bit different. The yachts are for fun in addition to being a social signal that impresses some people. The social media companies are usually either to make money or to hang out in certain circles, but they do also have some signaling possibilities (you can tell your old stodgy rich friends that you're involved in more hip investments than them).
C# REPL like this http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl ?
The irish and welsh accents have always been like that. The welsh accent in particular modulates in pitch strongly throughout sentences, going up at the end is just part of it.

There's a thing where it plunges right down in pitch and timbre at the end too, for a different kind of emphasis. I love welsh voices.
My first bootstrap template
You can use it for whatever you want
> the criticism is usually that IMAP does not require maintaining UIDs

Yes, exactly. UIDs should be sticky, but they should also be allocatable by widely distributed nodes without the need for central coordination.

If your UIDs are 32-bit monotonically-increasing integers then this is impossible. If they are 128-bit random numbers you get it for free. If you prefix them with a timestamp you even get reasonable ordering.

The entire UIDNOTSTICKY problem is a result of IMAP UIDs being so restricted.

I can see why a proposal as complicated as Lemonade failed to get traction, but I find the argument pretty thin. The "attractive nuisance" was the old open-relay SMTP infrastructure. If you were writing a POP client in 1991 you wouldn't think twice about sending mail since you just had to hit a SMTP server (didn't even have to be the "right" one!) and the mail would get delivered. When this all came crashing down far more effort got put into authenticated SMTP (talk about not separating concerns!) than would have been required to just get message submission right in the first place.
I'm guessing they were not covered by the WARN Act.
If they care about their kids, that's plenty of reason to fund SENS!
My first deploy at a once-top-10 photo hosting site as a developer was a change to how the DNS silo resolution worked.

Users were mapped into specific silos to separate out each level of the stack from CDN to storage to db. There was a bit of code executed at the beginning of each request that figured out if a request was on the proper subdomain for the resource being requested.

This was a feature that was always tricky to test, and when I joined the codebase didn't have any real automated tests at all. We were on a deploy schedule of every morning, first thing (or earlier, sometimes as early as 4am local time).

By the time the code made it out to all the servers, the ops team was calling frantically saying the power load on the strips and at the distribution point was near critical.

What happened: the code caused every user (well upwards of millions daily) to enter an infinite redirect, very quickly DoSing our servers. It took a second to realize where the problem was, but I quickly committed the fix and the issue was resolved.

Why it happened: a pretty simple string comparison was being done improperly, the fix was at most 1 line (I can't remember the exact fix). There was no automation, and testing it was difficult enough that we just didn't test it.

What I learned: If its complicated enough to not want to test using a browser, at least always build automation to test your assumptions. Or have some damn tests period. We built a procedure for testing those silos with a real browser as well.

I got a good bit of teasing for nearly burning down the datacenter on my very first code deploy, but ever since, its been assumed that if its your first deploy, you're going to break something. Its a rite of passage.
If you have hundreds of employees who can find the time time to work for you day-in and day-out, every week, you can find the time to let them go in person.
what do you want to do? what do you want to track? what do you use right now and how does that fail you?
Which part was the screw-up?
Only if you're a new customer. From the linked forum post:

It will become the default for new customers. Existing customers won't be forced to change (but they'll be able to on their own).
I wish this was how all billionaires thought. I hope it's how I would think, if I were a billionaire. They probably think[1] however that there's realistically little they can do even with their billions to significantly lengthen their life within their lifetime. So they'd rather make their life better instead.

There might also be some (perhaps cultural) selection bias - people who want yachts try to become billionaires, people who want to improve the world focus on improving the world themselves rather than on becoming rich.

[1] I wrote "realise" first, but I have no way to know if they are right or not.
And DigitalOcean doesn't have ELBs, or S3, or DNS service checks. Need I go on? Digital Ocean is good for small projects, cheap projects, or anything where you only need semi-reliable compute power.
My parent was not arguing they should be funding SENS to do good. My parent's premise was, why are these people not acting selfishly? Further, that funding SENS would be the most rational selfish choice.

Funding SENS for the sake of your children is not selfish, so it's irrelevant to the question of why are billionaires not investing in SENS to extend their own lives, as the rational selfish choice
There are some pretty powerful permissions that apps can request. This allows interesting apps to exist that can't be done on iOS.

It's up to users to not install apps that request permissions they don't agree with, although that is indeed not presented ideally.
How many people are working at Patch? Sounds like an internet startup with less than 30?
"This was aided by paying US companies to rebuild Europe and Japan."

How much money was spent on manufacturing here for both versus total GDP?

"If Britain or France has come out of the war unscathed and been able to rebuild the rest of Europe, the postwar history of the United States would have been significantly different."

The US would have still been fine and given the same policies minus the Marshall Plan, we would have had less government spending. Also, if the UK and France came out unscathed then the US would probably have not needed to enter the war in Europe.
Hawking timeline: A brief history of black holes
Agree, I loved this series. I also highly recommend the movie 'Her'.
Guide on How to install Mac OSX Mavericks on Older generation Mac Pro (2006)
You appear to think that sex and gender is a simple, binary, option defined by XX or XY chromosomes.
Don't see any kind of FAQ or further information. Would be nice to have that at the bottom of the page.

Does it work throughout the US? Square Cash doesn't work in a few states.
Companies have become risk/lawsuit averse when it comes to firing/lay-offs that they all have scripted things to say because they don't want to risk a potential lawsuit.

Absolutely. Every time I've had to let someone go, the first person I call is my HR person. They walk me through the dos and don'ts which always include, "Don't say this and don't say that otherwise they could use that either in a wrongful termination lawsuit or in filing for workman's comp."
Bitcoin Investors Urge Restraint at Regulatory Hearing
Hey HN - we (Hipmob.com) are launching a way to add your FAQ/Knowledgebase/Help Center into your iOS or Android app. (Basically Zendesk for apps) Benefits are:

1. works for iOS/Android/Phonegap

2. syncs with your Zendesk/Desk knowledgebase (if you don't use these, we'll port whatever you use manually)

3. helps reduce your support emails

If you're a mobile dev/team getting a ton of support emails, this will help you cut it, and give you diagnostics on what kind of help your users need.

Hit me with questions (ayo at Hipmob dot com)
What was the context there? Was abel part of the group being fired in the call? Or was he fired on the spot with that remark?
In an abstract sense they both want peace. That does not mean that they are actively working to reach a peaceful situation.

There is a very large gap between wanting something and being willing to truly prioritize it and sacrifice for it for the common good.
Don't call the boss out when he's wrong if it's not important.
The reasons why patents are bad in pharma are different from software- in pharma, if you can't afford to pay for a patented drug, you (very well could) die.

Also, pharma companies have been known to get patents on drugs that have existed for many years- which does not support innovation (though pharma argues it supports government regulation of these drugs, which have been on the market for many years)
Ulwaluko
I don't think it's that bad. It was formal and distant, but not insulting. It's more insulting when someone pretends they are sorry, but actually aren't. If she's not actually sorry, and there are perfectly valid reasons not to be, then it actually shows more spine to just say it like it is.

Actions speak louder than words, and we don't know what the "separation packages" are. They could actually be good, for all you know.

We don't have the context on what it was like working there. Some places/professions are more "mercenary" than others. In Silicon Valley people are used to "company culture" and "team building", but not all companies need that.
BTW, this comment was meant to be in response to the other thread "How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username (medium.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141532

But they're both pretty much the same problem. Service has complex/secret authentication policy, so users have no chance to be secure.
Did you use Arc for this?

Edit: nvm. Thank you for introducing me to Telesc.pe. This is exactly what I've been looking for!
Yes, I have, but only because I was looking for items under a certain category. I would still have gotten the same usefulness if it were just a regular list of tags as opposed to a cloud.

My opinion is that tag clouds are better served as art than as functional UI elements...
Once navigating to a sub-domain there is no link back to main. That's really frustrating so a small link at top or bottom back to techendo.co would improve my experience greatly.
Sounds like something I'd expect to hear in Aperture Science (seconds before the floor gets flooded with neurotoxin), not in a company staffed by human beings. Poopoo well deserved, IMO.
If you aren't at least occasionally looking beyond the front page how can you be certain the best products are making the front page?
Not once
Smartsheet.

http://www.smartsheet.com

IF you want to do dates, milestones, and run a date and resource to task-driven setup.
I was this close from setting the asset management server's hostname to `ASSMAN'
They had 1100 people in August 2013, at which point they laid off 500.
Here's a law review article that discusses the issue: http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/JLPP/upload/Helmre...

That said, I don't think there would be any issue with the woman in the recording saying something kind and generic, like "I feel for you, and I am sorry to have to do this."
Interesting that you think this. My father eats lunch at McDonalds pretty frequently, and tends to stay for a couple hours reading the paper or taking advantage of the free wifi. There are people who go in to use the free wifi and don’t buy anything; nobody bothers them.

When I was last in France, teenagers could often be found studying in McDonalds, because unlike the french cafes, they don’t get kicked out of McDonalds for buying some fries and a coke and then holding the table for a couple hours.

Personally, I have no fondness for McDonalds at all, but your claim that they have some sort of corporate policy of not letting people linger seems spurious to me.
Stars are fusion plants.

Sufficiently large planets are dual gravitational + fission plants. There's pretty good reason to believe there may be active natural sustained chain reaction fission reactors within the Earth's inner mantel / outer core (for reasons the geologists / geophysicists are better able to explain, apparently not in the core itself). There's also considerable latent heat from formation -- even after 4.5 billion years (rock is a good insulator).

But not all planets have molten interiors (Mars doesn't). And many aren't particularly accessible: Venus has that little atmosphere problem, Mercury's a tad toasty, and gas giants don't give your legs a leg to stand on. Plus gravity.

Visions of spacefaring humans are, I suspect, mostly strongly fantastical:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/
After 30 Years, The Future of the Mac Remains Bright
Interestingly, living forever is not a common desire among humans. As we age, our desire for longevity generally diminishes. Having children also seems to satiate some kind of internal biological self-preservation instinct, reducing the fear of death. (Which makes biological sense.)

The simple fact is that we only fear death because our genes want to survive. Once that is accomplished -- or once we pass the age of reproduction -- the alien goddess of biology stops whispering that terror into our hindbrains. Myths of hells and grave-monsters and rotting corpses cease to haunt us so deeply. The desire to just be here becomes less intense.

I would like to extend my life, but not because I fear death. I have children. It doesn't scare me all that much, really, though I would of course be afraid if it were staring me in the face. But I'd like to extend my life so that I could experience a kind of extended late-life in order to pursue intellectual ventures of high value and long-term focus. I'd love it if after kids, after ordinary biological life, I could basically become a monk-academic-entrepreneur and dedicate a century or two to art, science, philosophy, etc.

Edit:

In addition, through Gates' philanthropy, his selfish genes are in fact increasing their fitness. All those people in Africa are walking around with 99.999999% the same genetic material that's inside Bill Gates. He is them from a genetic point of view. So his actions are "genetically rational" from a perspective of selfish-gene self-preservation.

Lots of human behavior makes more sense through this lens. Why, for example, do we exercise moderation in war? Because the enemy carries our genes. The whole point of war is probably evolutionary stimulation from a perspective of selfish-gene logic. My guess is that if we went to war against hostile aliens there would be absolutely no mercy or moderation. It would be all-out war, no holds barred.

I do not disagree with the parent poster though. Such investments would have follow-on benefits and the technology would trickle down to us eventually, so I wish there was more money being put into those areas.