skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Did WhatsApp contribute back to Erlang
I read an article the other day linked on HN about how WhatsApp made changes to the Erlang VM to get it to handle 2M concurrent connections on a single server. Did they ever contribute these changes back to the Erlang languages?
My employer does this, I don't mind it. I took a whole month off last year as a block.

As an employee, what you should do is actually take their statements at face-value, but I acknowledge that this may be harder for entry-level guys.
Swede here. I got 27 days paid vacation, not counting Saturdays and Sundays, so five weeks plus two days. Plus all the national holidays. Am I right if I understand this post as two weeks is almost an exception for Americans? If that's the case it's really saddening.
This makes me incredibly curious and eager to try it.
LOL. :)

The meta: know what you really want. Sex, companionship or kids: select up to two adjacent goals. Pick all 3 if you have a second condo and a burner phone.
Y Combinator’s lady problems, in three charts
Bad cert.
> This is yet another nail in the coffin of Eric Raymond's irresponsible and fallacious "many eyes make all bugs shallow" theory.

What a facetious and unsupported assertion you have made.

You are seemingly purposefully disingenuous.

The simple fact of the matter is, ESR is still right. Perhaps because few people use a piece of s/w these things slip through. The seriousness of this flaw is limited and thus not subject to the fierce post humous questioning you give it.

Please define how many eyes saw or used or benefited from this code. I certainly live in the world of this code and don't depend on it.

There is a chance you are talking shit.
Yes, in the sense that Crito's Law (coined by me, now) "The bigger the ship, the more freight you can fit in it." has no impact on the real-world ship transport industry.

It is obviously true to the point of being banal. It is a pointless statement of uncontroversial fact that provides next to no utility to anybody. It's not even interesting for being a tautology.

If I were a particularly objectionable and self-promoting person, then perhaps people might object to Crito's Law whenever it were quoted on shipping forums, but that wouldn't make it incorrect. Nor would my shameless self-promotion make it profound.

(Is Crito's Law _precisely_ true? Well no, some large ships are not designed for freight after all... but the general principle is true.)
They kind of recanted that statement and said they meant it for "web servers" and stuff like that. However I know there has been at least a window manager made in Go.

I don't think it's the best fit, but it's a lot better than many current solutions. I personally prefer Haskell for anything others would write in Go, however many may find Ocaml or Erlang to fit them better.

However I'm biased and believe that functional programming is a better fit, more bug-free, easier, and simpler for most use cases than imperative programming.
'AirPnP' connects Mardi Gras tourists with private toilets
:D
I guess that's more a portfolio than a "real" website.
I think that's a bit dishonest -- the standard is almost entirely supported by GCC:

http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

> C99 is substantially completely supported as of GCC 4.5 (with -std=c99 -pedantic-errors used), modulo bugs, extended identifiers (supported except for corner cases when -fextended-identifiers is used), and floating-point issues (mainly but not entirely relating to optional C99 features from Annexes F and G).

... and also by clang:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#c

> The support for standard C in clang is feature-complete except for the C99 floating-point pragmas.

Compiler/library support for C++ is much less complete(standards were published in 1998, 2003 and 2011, and none are completely implemented in any compiler) but that clearly didn't stop people from using C++. The reason is that the commonly supported subset was useful enough. The same is true of C99.

I think it was mostly Microsoft that was holding C99 adoption back by refusing to support it in their compiler suite (officially, they support C++ and C89/C90 only). That means you can't generally compile C99 code with the Microsoft C/C++ compiler, which meant you had to avoid either that compiler or (if you care about portability) the C99 standard. I don't think limited C99 support in GCC or Clang was a limiting factor to anyone in the past decade.
so I suppose it's his character being paid by the criminals at RSA, rather than him himself?

That's reassuring.
I've met a lot of people who are proud to be "the only one who knows how to do X" where X is something very important to the company or software product.

They seem to think this makes them extra-valuable to the company. But I think the common perception of others is that the "valuable" employee is actually always a constant bottleneck and thus a source of pain. "We can't do X because Timmy is at his kid's soccer game for another hour...ugh."

If you think that if you took time off "everything would fall apart", you might want to consider how others perceive that situation.

(Personally, I've always automated what I could and trained backup people in what I couldn't, and it''s worked out well for me. And I get to take guilt-free vacations. :)
My manager will chase me up if my vacation time is going unused (e.g. I get 1/2 way through the year with less than 1/4 of my vacation used) and ask me what my plans are for using it.

Getting to the end of the year without using it all up is considered poor planning by the employee and poor management by the manager.

I get 27 days (on top of the UK public holidays). So I try and have a week per quarter, plus an extra week around Christmas/New Year.

This is in the UK, but I had the same thing with an enlightened manager when I was US based.
Did she lie about that too or was she using GnuTLS?
Most expensive city in America, the most downright tyrannical laws in the country, might come crashing down on your head at any moment... oh, and NO WOMEN.

I thought you guys were supposed to be smart.
Such an interesting direction. Replication at the level of individual tables would be killer!
So, you need to cover yourself against (at least) the following:

1. Bug in your backup software
This is addressed by using more than 1 piece of backup software.

2. Corruption in your live data
(i.e. your filesystem corrupts your favourite baby photo)
This is addressed by having lots of incremental backups going back into history. Note that Time Machine throws away historical incrementals over time, so does not protect against this, given long enough time windows.

3. Failure of your backup hardware
This is addressed by using more than 1 piece of backup hardware.

4. Destruction of your backup hardware
This is addressed by having your backups exist in more than 1 physical location, so you can never lose your live data and all your backups because of, say, a house fire.

5. User error deletion of data
This is addressed by having backups that run frequently.

My strategy is:

* Time Machine to a Time Capsule on my LAN

* Time Machine to an external disk on my Mac

* Nightly Carbon Copy Cloner clone of my entire disk to (the same) external disk on my Mac

* Nightly Arq backup to Glacier's Ireland location (I live in London)

So (in addition to the live copy of my data on my Mac's main disk) I have 4 copies of my data, from 3 different pieces of backup software, on 3 different pieces of hardware, in 2 different locations. The CCC clone is there mainly because it's bootable, so if my mac's SSD fails, I can reboot and hold a key and I'm no more than 24 hours behind.
"LSD can have you feeling a profound connection to a piece of cheese"

This is what usually happens to my friends who drop acid. I'll always remember my best friend's deep connection to some lamp post, and how he "figured out why that lamp post is there, mans. I know it now".
I'm sure this isn't what happens to everyone. What I think happens is that true profundity happens to people who are sort of on a good path to find it already.
This app caused me a lot of trouble. I tried to save some PDFs and they were impossible to open in any reader. I opened them with Notepad++ and they were now HTML files. Also, there is security issue of giving full access to your PDF downloads away. Sometimes financial institutions generate PDFs with account and identiy information; this app by default doesn't ask you if you want to give it to them, it just automatically does so.

I like the concept and hope to download a future iteration. Just some feedback.
At my last employer (a small startup), we had very clear vacation rules:

- Every week, you track the hours you worked (honor system- we just filed out a spreadsheet).
- You’re expected to work X - 4 hours a week on average (X being a normal work week, 4 being the number of vacation hours you accrue per week).

So, if you work X hours a week, you’ll find yourself with about 26 days of vacation at the end of the year. If you work long hours for a few spots and find you averaged X + 2 hours a week, you end up with 39 days of vacation. You could use your hours whenever you want (and even go negative if you didn’t get too crazy).

It set clear expectations, showed that people were expected to take vacation, and made everyone feel like they were entitled to their days off, rather than guilty. I thought it was pretty neat.

That said, we dismantled the system about 6 months after I joined because although most of us didn’t mind the hour tracking, a few people really disliked it.
Not sure about this, because someone found the bug.
Why tech firms can’t get talent fast enough
It's pacific time for me so it's 404 days ago. :)
Ask HN: Hoverboards This time for real?
http://youtu.be/A4vE_vpkr90

It's hard to believe + scenes look hardly mocked-up. What's your thoughts on this?
So if you work 7 days a week, you can take off two full months a year?
It's not that developers don't have paid vacation. Most companies have at least 2 weeks, and a lot of tech companies give unlimited.

Rather, it's a culture of working which discourages you (but doesn't prevent you) from taking that vacation.
I agree, if it's true is very sad
Fake: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341539
It was 15 years ago. 1999. But i am sitting here with a scotch.
Not many people would know Theo "personally" but you do know his reputation. You do right?

That's all that is required to give his statements some weight.
I am sad to see someone actually falling for the claim that someone else being willing to pay a higher price is to blame for the cycle of often illegal and generally unconscionable evictions that have happened in San Francisco and elsewhere.

I mean, the immediate cause is landlords and the ultimate market cause is the lack of housing in Silicon Valley. Tech workers in SF are just dominoes in a chain.

And the cause for Tech workers being better paid is the failure of the average workers to defend their wages. You could defend your living standard by the left-wing means of unionization or by the right-wing means of providing more value to your employer so if you just sit on your ass and attack higher paid workers, you deserve contempt from any point of view.
They have been ordered but not received yet.
Portuguese here: 25 days each year, more national holidays
The jury's still out on coffee in aggregate. Caffeine is a stimulant, and generally speaking, it has a host of positive effects on your processing speed, alertness, etc. Coffee may even have long-term positive effects there, though the evidence is inconclusive. Additionally, it might be neuroprotective.

There have been conflicting and sometimes contradictory reports on coffee's effects on cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. Many studies suggest coffee has anticancer properties; other studies suggest it promotes certain types of cancer. Same thing with arteriosclerosis.

In terms of dependency, caffeine has been shown pretty conclusively to be habit-forming and dependence-forming. Almost anyone who's been a longtime coffee drinker and quits cold turkey will experience the side effects. But it's not clear whether coffee is doing you long-term harm, long-term good, or some combination of the two that nets out to being positive, negative, or neutral.

For my part, I've been drinking coffee every day since junior high. My stance is that it's been a net-positive in my life, regardless of what price I may pay later on. But that's one man's opinion. Not a scientific observation.

Also worth noting: coffee, marijuana, and alcoholic beverages are complex substances. There are active compounds in coffee other than caffeine. There are active compounds in alcoholic drinks other than ethanol. There are active compounds in weed other than THC. Studies that isolate the effects of any of these compounds aren't necessarily indicative of the effects of the substances themselves.
Yes! One of my pet peeves (philosophy major).
Think you can already buy the left hand drive version in the UK, they have a showroom at Westfield. Haven't seen anyone drive one in London but I think they will do well, personally I'll wait for one after Model X once battery tech is better
> Only in America is a tax increase equated (without any further investigation) to depressing the economy

That's not strictly true. There are other countries who harbor economists possessed of half a brain and theory describing the basic principles of how quasi-rational actors behave in various situations. They just usually don't get listened to. :)

Promising free lunches for everyone is much more popular and gets you elected! :D
They're shown at the wrong aspect ratio. What is this, linux video playback in 2003?
It's even stranger considering that they bundle the corresponding SVG font (great and uncommon choice!) – they could have made an SVG image.
Numbers like 26 and 39 vacation days tell me that you are not in North America.

Over here we are talking about 10-15 vacation days per year.
Seattle has Condo Internet and Cascade Link. Both provide gigabit. The Gigabit Squared thing fell apart.

Condo Internet uses a combination of microwave and fiber to provide connectivity to the buildings that they service. They only target apartments/condos, since building the infrastructure to individual residences is not worth it.
The commercial supplier has a financial incentive to get it right

Is this why Microsoft dominated the market for 15 years with the worst security model of all contemporary operating systems?

How many lawsuits were successfully pressed against Microsoft for losses due to their crappy security implementation? Forget about successfully, how many were even brought against them? Of those brought against them, how many were from companies not large enough to have their own legal departments?
Stubilizer - the video stabilizer for the action sport junky
If you want to save all the lemmings at once, type this into your developer's console:

tabLemmings.forEach(function(l){ l.paraOpen();})
this graphic chart was made in 2003 but it's pretty nice illustration of all 17 wallpaper groups

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/symmetry/wallpaper/Wallp...

there is also "geometry and the imagination" whose authors include John Conway (Princeton ) and fields medalist Bill Thurston

http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/gi/gi.pdf
Dr. Isbell is one of the best instructors I've had the pleasure of being talked at by. It's like he has a cable dumping knowledge directly into your brain.
Write email to support Ukrainian Army Troops
better translation http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=uk&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mil.gov.ua%2Findex.php%3Flang%3Den%26part%3Dnews%26sub%3Dread%26id%3D32800&sandbox=1
Skype's web-based version is now available worldwide
This is as plausible as anything else I've heard so far.
Uh, ATMs use Windows XP Embedded, which isn't really the same thing and is not at EOL. Microsoft said they'll support Embedded at least until 2016.
Would it be easier for Microsoft?
If life is a game, where are your trophies?
I very much need a ;TLDR. Not through laziness but through hatred of the patronising prosaic style which stopped me reading.
I didn't see anything in article about forcing you to take time off when the company is slow. In fact this seems to contradict one of their goals, to make sure the systems are maintainable without you.
That's an interesting proposition. If you did have different companies doing the job - say, Aereo would rent you the roof space and provide a dumb Internet pipe, another would sell you the device and yet another would install it for you -, who would be to blame?
For a similar visualization of the human genome, and to get a sense of how vast that landscape is, check out this genome browser I made a couple years ago:

http://chromozoom.org

At the lowest zoom level, one pixel is 280,000 bp (roughly the length of one or two genes, including noncoding segments). You can zoom all the way into the individual base pairs (a, c, t, and g).

There is a track below the chromosome cartoon (cartogram) that shows you the genes if you pull down on its label.
Now that we've got you here, prepare for my one question AYA (ask you anything).

So Colbert has tried several times in the past to run as a presidential candidate, etc. What is your take on this, knowing him? How serious are these attempts, if he was to gain traction? In the alternate universe where all voters were college kids that actually voted, and he won, what do you think would actually happen?
You mean support nazis? I am sure most of the people from europe and usa don't even know who are those who overthrown a government, they are nazis, they damage world war monuments and try to prohibit russian language, they are walking yelling nazi propoganda and I dont think they are people I want to support.
Help military units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Crimea
To anyone interested, my favorite treatment of this appears in Artin's extraordinary book Algebra.
What's blocking you? A corporate firewall?
I'd like to see these normalized by number of applications per category, but I suppose that's a graph only YC could provide.
Pshaw. I'm releasing an app tomorrow that sends your friends links unless you click. It takes -1 clicks to send a link, so I'm calling it the -1ink.
What's the joke? I don't really feel like hunting for it in the audio.
Precisely.

We cover this issue in our blog:

http://www.indexventures.com/blog/index/post/860

Typically a post-series A company's cap table will be 20% to Series A investor, 20% option pool, 40% founders and 20% seed/angel.

Having seed investors own substantially more or founders substantially less causes lots of problems further down.
This looks like the next Proxima Nova.

God please do something to stop every single website from using Proxima Nova...
SEO Solution for MEAN applications using PhantomJS
I believe the bug was actually reported but not fixed:

http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/200802/msg00072...
Prototype Day is a chance to practice your pitch in front of your peers. For most people, it's also the first chance to see what impacts an audience, especially after they've just sat through 20 presentations. (This is helpful both for pitching investors in general, and for demo day specifically.)

You can replicate a lot of the value by getting a group of serious founders together and having them spend a day or half a day pitching to each other, with feedback. If you can get a mentor experienced with the process to give you feedback, even better.
Baby Claire twerking dance-a-thon
Suppose that you were filthy rich, owned property that included a hill, and hired people to put an antenna on your hill and run cable back to your house so you could watch TV.

Now suppose you leased a part of your hill to your neighbour so that they could do the same thing.

What's different about Aereo's model, other than the scale?
Well, in EU you have fixed vacation days _usually_ and you MUST take it, so it is possible that it is just a really good company in US
Show HN: A simple, module-system-agnostic chainable comparators JS lib
What do you mean by the disadvantages of Dropbox?

Also, keep in mind that Boxcryptor and Boxcryptor Classic are two different products. If sharing files in an encrypted way with other people or having a master key is part of your use case, Boxcryptor Classic is not a great choice. But if you just need a way to store your own files in the cloud, with seamless sync between machines, and without privacy concerns, Boxcryptor Classic has worked very well for me.
Renowned fashion houses overall do a great job, except when they add gradient or shadows to mask stuff. But the bulk of the problem, in my case, comes from large department stores when they blend furniture or accessories in fashion photoshoots making them complex and distracting from the main image subject.
Thanks! Nearly anything can be catalogued, provided there's information available for it (E.g. manufacturer, release date, etc), and it's not something like the sweater that your grandmother knitted you.
Iconic – An Icon System Designed for the Modern Web
Ah, yes. Satire may survive dictators in totalitarian regimes intact, but it perishes in the webpages of CNET News.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it was laziness.
It saves a lot of time and stress to stay near YC in the south bay for the duration of the program (mountain view, sunnyvale, palo alto etc). Living in SF means you waste at least 2 hours every trip down to yc (usually 3 times a week or so).
As a student, it's honestly 50% brand, 25% perks, and 25% delusions.

Brand in the CS sense is still huge. For some reason students just seem to love working at companies that are famous in the tech circle.

Perks also have a disproportionate impact on students who are used to college life and also don't quite internalize costs. We'll take a salary cut to have silly fringe benefits like laundry.

Finally, I think two delusions play a huge role: (1) That big companies offer more "interesting" work, which I think is empirically false. You're far more likely to be fixing bugs in old code in one of these large/famous companies than inventing new algorithms. (2) That "interesting" work is desirable. I honestly don't understand why students especially think they're above working on a CRUD app. Sure, it sounds "cool" to be dealing with things at Google scale, but I'd personally rather have a tangible impact on a company's core product.

Personally, I don't buy into any of the hype and turn away all recruiters from brand name companies. I can make twice as much, and work reasonable hours, in building "uninteresting" code for random startups...
. . . and have added a green login/register button that clicks open a modal window with login options to address your first comment. Thanks for this! After you stare at something long enough (as I have) a fresh set of eyes really awesome.
It can be, if someone puts in a pull request. Though low-hanging fruit is always going to be easier pickings.
Epicdollar startup of the future is:

wallpaper color displays, Philip K. Dick-style.

Top planetary database says this is the closest approximation: http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html

No more steaming wallboards and peeling (wo peeling the wallboard backing) when wifey says she likes this other pattern she just found.