skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, return policies here have become more lax in regards to the time frame of when you can return something, and whether it needs a tag or not.

A recent example of this is when I've dealt with ASOS. Even though they're primarily a UK based company, they offer free shipping and free returns here in the US (also something I see becoming more common). But on top of that, even though the return policy says within a certain timeframe, emailing their customer support about a month after the return cut off period, they told me as long as the item is in sellable condition I could still return it. They literally told me that "Here are ASOS, we're not monsters" which I found kind of cute. But overall that's close to the best customer service I've had in a while (return/shipping wise).

Going back to the free returns though. I feel like this is the last major pain point in online shopping that hasn't been dealt with yet. Amazon for instance, returns are free by default on clothing and a few other categories of items. Items that are damaged, or something is wrong with the item that is not your fault gets free return shipping. But what if you just don't like it? Well no free return shipping for you. I can't imagine the amount of people that could potentially abuse a free return system could have any significant impact over the amount of profit and new customers a store could get from reassuring their customers that they care about if you're happy with your purchase or not, and offering the safety net of free returns for your purchases.
Well fine print aside sure they have lot of hidden clauses but it's a good start I would say. Nice to have Washington State also adopt something like this since now Seattle has a growing Startup community
The question is, why do APIs return 64-bit values? In general it's not because they need all 64 bits, it's because the 64-bit integer type is convenient for them. This might make Crockford's proposal completely impractical but it doesn't invalidate the argument that led to it.

I reject the nanosecond example because it's completely arbitrary. 64 bits of picoseconds would only cover 0.584 years so should we claim 64 bits isn't enough? Wouldn't 2000 years of microseconds in 56 bits be good enough?

I'll give you credit for bitboards though, that's one I hadn't considered.
This definitely interest me. I've used Linux for hobby projects for ages now (I remember messing around with slackware and fighting to get sound and my winmodem working), but I've never seriously learnt how to really use it.

I've been thinking about starting my own Linux From Scratch project, but I don't know how much of a learning experience that would be. Has anyone here got any experience with LFS?
One Woman's Journey From Israel's Elite Army Corps to Tech Startup Founder
Showing snippet of previous employer's source code during interview?
I posted this Wikipedia article to see if anyone has any additions or updates for any of these technologies and to hopefully generate discussion about them.

How many years until we can send our cars out to go get food? I'd guess 10 years.

How many years until we can upload all of wikipedia into our brains or an attachment that our brains can pull from / talk to? I'd guess 20 - 30 years.

How many years until we can throw trash into a 3D printer and have it materialize a complex item such as an orange or a phone? Again, 20 - 30 years.
So...

* No way to edit sizes

* No way to go back

* Login doesn't save credentials.

* No hoodie

* No sizes for shirts

So, basically, an app built in a weekend. Grats on that, but you really need to put more work into it. It's still fairly raw, and the lack of quality pretty much doesn't instill much trust in paying for things that are fairly high in price for something I "hate" to shop for.
Most meetups I attend are of the hiking / watch sports variety.
It's more like the talk of an IPO or exit. I've seen a lot of people starting a company with the acquirer already in mind.
#AskHannaForCash -- Evening Entertainment 
fascinating
Cool site! I really appreciate this information, you did a great job.

I just wanted to remark on a few UI bits that drove me nuts:

1. The social links. Not only are they not necessary, but there appears to be a bug with the Facebook widget (Chrome 35, OSX) that causes it to be about 1000px tall and invisibly cover the entire "Newest" column, making all of them unclickable.

2. The expansion of the 'rules' sections on hover. Not only is that information not really useful in that format (tiny text, difficult to read, too terse to be useful), the expansion makes it difficult to click on what you want. It may be best to either omit them or leave them expanded by default.

Thanks for a useful site!
Shame they still haven't cracked responsive.
Indeed, it's an early version, and really appreciate your feedback on what you'd like to see. Thanks!
> I know many people care deeply about food and like to cook, but if someone let me just exclude food I hate and shipped a randomised meal every day at a reasonable price, I'd be a happy customer.

https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

Yes, I know, not exactly randomized meals. Baby steps.
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not (text is poor medium for conveying such things), but OOCSS is very much a real thing. I love writing SASS in such a way.

See this post for more info: http://ianstormtaylor.com/oocss-plus-sass-is-the-best-way-to...
Python, JavaScript V8, Julia, Java.
Maybe they did "listen" but couldn't do anything about it?

Couldn't do anything because there was nothing that could possibly have been done, or couldn't do anything because they were the wrong people to be running the company? Certainly the dot-com bust didn't help, but you appear to agree that the "professional managers" brought in by the VCs were not up to the task, which leaves open the question of what managers that were up to the task would or could have done. Unfortunately we can't re-run the experiment to see what would happen if ArsDigita had not taken the VC investment and the original management had remained in charge.

There is another side to Ars Digita

True, and Michael Yoon's story is a good counterpoint to Greenspun's.
But it can't be used by software that chose BSD, MIT, MPL, LGPLv2.1, GPLv2, or other common licenses. This is fairly benign for an end-user application, but it's a restrictive choice for libraries.

This is a handy chart:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html
"Well IMHO the reason most of the times is "fear". Fear of wasting work, fear of other programmers looking at our code and realize it is suboptimal, fear of not being totally "Right""

This really resonated with me. I personally struggle with this on and off. I just call it the programmer's curse. I sometimes wonder where this "fear" originally came from. Did I pick it up from other developers? Did it evolve over time from seeing the mistakes of others? Somehow I came to associate this fear as something good developers are suppose to feel. Indeed I probably need a little bit of this or I might make some really dumb mistakes. But sometimes it really is paralyzing. It can be really hard at times to let go and convince myself that I don't have to find the perfect solution for every challenge. More specifically, I get hung up trying to predict future problems and solve them. Sometimes you just won't know what will be thrown at you and your code later. It probably goes along with what you described as wasting work. I really don't like the idea of solving very similar problems with duplicated or redundant solutions/code. In end though we often have time constraints and failures beyond on control.

I feel like I had a better grasp on this when I worked for others. But now that I work full-time on my own startup I tend to be even harder on myself.

(Completely unrelated, but I just wanted to say ciao. I saw you're based in Sicily :) My mother is from Milano. I lived there for a couple of years as well. Oh how I miss the blood oranges...)
I assume you mean the rules for parsing code blocks (anonymous functions). Maybe I muddled it in the post, but the actual rules are very simple:

1. <call(arg1,arg2,...)> {block} => <call(arg1,arg2,...,{block})>
2. anything {block} => anything({block})

So the actual rule is that a block standing to the right of something either creates a new function call, or gets added to the existing one. The same applies to argument lists.

This means that you can do: x(1,2) {a} (3) {b}, and what happens is very regular - a function call: x(1,2,{a},3,{b}).

I know of currying, but its not used for simple calls. A solution that shares some concepts with currying was used for handling if..else, try..catch..finally and other multi-part statements.
I'm not an expert but you seem to be wrong on this. The wikipedia article you linked to for the IEEE 754 decimal64 format says:

"Because the significand is not normalized, most values with less than 16 significant digits have multiple possible representations; 1×102=0.1×103=0.01×104, etc. Zero has 768 possible representations (1536 if you include both signed zeros)."
I do consulting and software development and am technically a small business.

I'm down to a single client (much easier to manage than multiple clients) so I can pretty much pick my projects, work at my own pace, and get paid fairly decently.

I don't make millions, but I make enough and am happy.

Below isn't really business but was a brilliant idea by someone. It isn't my site but maybe it'll inspire someone to do something similar: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
The app controlled smart security drone with a stun gun built in
Minor nitpick: `i.e.` should be `e.g.` in this case (for the search field's hint).
How I hacked WordPress to spit JSON and serve it on a platter with AngularJS
I'm happy to take this as more support for my theory that Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA. xD
Strange. I wonder if it's politics. There's a great idea for pushing tech, but then the anti-banking lobby kicks in, as does everyone else that's anti-business.

Unclear if this got watered down while Bloomberg was in town, or if it's part of Deblassio's class warfare.
Project Manager asks for complete 100% confidence every time committing code
Any way we can start sending letters to this guy to pull his head out of his ass?
If it takes 3-4 years, I don't see it happening at all. It requires a mayor to make it a priority.
Take a look at these articles from Mark Suster about enterprise sales:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/03/19/one-of-the-big...

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/ (look at the PUCKKA links, those are great)
Thanks for the feedback, I actually really agree with the rules comment. The old browse ui had these click filters on rules like 'commercial use' that let you filter on licenses based on rules. The new ui had to retire that for a bit, but i had requests to keep the rules at least which was easy enough to do. Unfortunately it's difficult to leave them a open as it drastically skews how the columns are aligned. I'll keep brainstorming.
Yeah, I went through it years ago. It was very helpful. Makes you realize just how much of the non-kernel aspect of the Linux world depends on open source. Most of LFS is about downloading the source code of non-kernel programs, and then learning to build them.

It's not necessarily optimized to make you productive as a user or system admin. But it's a systematic journey through building the OS and tools, and therefore it makes you aware of what's available and gives you a glimpse of what's under the hood.
It's always funny how people come in from all over for SXSW and assume Austin will be some bustling metropolis with big-city amenities. Did you not notice "downtown" includes only a few square blocks?
Unfortunately you do see this kind of thing ("fiefdoms" impeding progress) a lot in the government. Sometimes it works well (Adm. Hyman Rickover at Naval Reactors), but often you get things like this, with people (well-intentioned perhaps) hanging on to a position for so long that they become locked into what worked 15 years ago.

That's not necessarily bad for slowly-evolving fields, but it's certainly not helpful here.
That's awful for the people who are dead, their families, and the company.

This brings up an important lesson about minimizing risk that many businesses should consider. Many companies forbid the upper management from traveling together in case of a disaster such as this. Maybe the same thinking should apply to other employees, a limit of 5 - 10 employees traveling together, just in case the worst happens.

I wonder how this will affect their stock price. They have about 20,000 employees but news like this might scare away investors, we'll see Monday.
Welcome to APD. Just be glad you're not a young black male (if you are, mind your Ps and Qs).
ADHD here. You have some really really strong points, hits too close to home here. I got to rethink some stuff.
Why Ubuntu? Debian would make a lot more sense.
The point of the article is many of these folks actually want to be janitors. They have no debt and want a job that pays for 8 hours, but requires only 2 or 3 of actual work.
Python has three basic numeric types, unbounded integers, floats (with the precision of C doubles), and complex (for example, 5+0.3j). However, its standard library includes both a decimal type and a fraction type. The decimal type has been in the language for over 9 years. The documentation is quite clear [1].

Python's decimal type conforms to IBM's General Decimal Arithmetic Specification [2] which is based on IEEE 754 and IEEE 854. Python's decimal type is very complete. For example Python supports the complete range of rounding options found in these specifications (ROUND_CEILING, ROUND_DOWN, ROUND_FLOOR, ROUND_HALF_DOWN, ROUND_HALF_EVEN, ROUND_HALF_UP, ROUND_UP, and ROUND_05UP). By comparison Dec64 supports only one.

Despite having used Python on and off for over 10 years, I've never felt a need to use this decimal type. Integers and floats seem to work for me (although it's nice to have a good decimal implementation available if I need it).

[1] http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/decimal.html
[2] http://speleotrove.com/decimal/decarith.html
I hope it didn't come off that way. You shouldn't be getting paid less, but instead, at bare minimum and equitable amount, and additional if you're the kind of employee who is constantly pushing.
The unofficial city bird is the (construction) Crane, define few?

Generally that means 2-3. Is there such a thing as hypobole?
I suppose it depends how many patents you can turn out annually... personally I would rather see my salary double each 14 years rather than in 36.
Oh yeah. This sounds familiar (6 years at IBM). Very familiar. I wasn't even in the software division. I was in GBS. EVERY thing we did would get discussed and executives would ALWAYS ask if it could be patented. Half the time stupid, normal stuff like making AJAX requests to improve a web page's UX or embedding a browser in some piece of software would be cause for execs to encourage us to try to get a patent for it. It's insane. IBM will one day be the world's largest non-practicing entity.
What does "bounced" mean?
This is partially because developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"/"manipulating a URL can't be a crime"/"laws about disclosing protected information invariably contain a public policy exception which comports to the temperament of the dev community" are axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal system which fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully resemble the legal system we actually operate in. This results in developers sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are unprotected by the legal system because nobody can steal a number", which is a proposition that is absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a programming language" is to a programmer.
This seems like something that will only work for someone who views clothing as 100% utilitarian and does not care about how they look. The sizing, fit, and style aspects are really hard to do right for clothing where people care about their style and other players seem to have shipping basics on-demand nailed down. (e.g. MeUndies, ManPacks - although none seem to have a mobile app so maybe you can just compete on user acq. in that channel)

1. I don't know of any brand of jeans that sells for $40-80 that fits well and looks good. (I'd say Flint & Tinder is the closest and they come in at $105)

2. How do you size tees, tee sizing varies widely across brands? How does jean sizing work, are the jeans bootcut, straight leg, slim straight? (you also have 35's as a waist size which basically nobody but Bonobos produces)

3. Are you matching the shoes to my style somehow (or the other clothes you are sending) or are they just some random pair of shoes?

4. How are undershirts and t-shirts different?

5. Are you shipping me sneakers or shoes? If shoes are they oxfords? desert boots? something else? If anything but sneakers are you shipping dress socks to go with them or are you still shipping athletic socks?
Think along the lines Debian/Ubuntu/Mint and Fedora/Redhat/CentOS.

However, I've never used OpenSUSE or its related distributions, and know nothing about it.
“By giving programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste their time making choices that don’t matter. Even worse, making a bad choice can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs. This is a bad practice that is very deeply ingrained.”

This is like saying that the sharp blades on scissors (diverse numeric types) make them prone to causing bodily harm to surrounding people(errors due to constraints of types), then concluding that we should replace all scissors (numeric types) with those rounded plastic scissors(dec64 play dough floats) which come with a play dough set.

Every time somebody has the idea that by deluding developers more we can save them trouble and make them feel safer, we pat that person on the back and follow their recipe.
Then two years later there's a HN post about why you really shouldn't be doing whatever was prescribed.
My experience developing for Chromecast
Money, like politics makes for strange bedfellows
PHP has the list construct which is a little uglier, and has a couple of odd behaviors

php > $t = array(1, 2);
php > list($a, $b) = $t;
php > echo "$a, $b";
1, 2
I have a masters degree in English and earn an average of $3k a month, putting me on the low-end of the income spectrum. But I also work about...15-20 hours a week, from home, and take regular naps and generally just screw around a lot of the time. It's not the same as being a janitor, but it's similar in that there's very little oversight and the work isn't really too bad. So I can really understand the FU mindset, especially as I've worked B.S. jobs where the manager is an idiot and where the work isn't important but the boss acts like you're holding the keys to the nukes or something. I think a lot of the guys that go into super science aren't really looking for huge pay checks anyway. They love the science and the challenge, and they don't want to be burdened with all the BS that comes with dealing with "regular people" because we will get in their way. So I can respect that sort of decision.
In one format, IEE754 has 24576 possible representations of zero[1], which fits your definition of "wasted bits". Some of your other criticisms might be valid, but at this point I'd like to see an accurate technical comparison between DEC64 and the decimal formats of IEEE 754.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal128_floating-point_forma...
Something I feel this article misses is the market outside of the coasts of the US. If you are one of those PhDs who isn't actively seeking to be a janitor for the relaxation involved, and you're struggling for work, please look at the Midwest or so-called No Coast.

There are tons of well-paying jobs in the Midwest for talented people. Salaries are lower than a standard San Francisco job, but the quality of life is so much higher here it makes up for it. The multi-million dollar homes of Oakland and San Francisco can be yours here on a single person's salary working about 40 hours a week. (Admittedly winters here are worse, but if you do have to drive somewhere, wow you had to pay $5 or $9 for the whole day of parking in a garage 50ft from your door.) http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2014/03/it-manager-full-st...
My guess is that they were being asked by bloggers, journalists, etc who were coming in for SXSW and thought it would be easier to put out an online statement to direct people to.

I don't think this is a high priority for APD.

I don't see the big deal really. I've lived in Austin since 2005 and I've never used a cab service here. They seem pretty useless in this city IMO.

I should also mention that I'm not a fan of Uber. I've been with friends and coworkers using it in San Francisco and always I see 3-4 available yellow cabs go by while we wait for our driver.

I'm in San Fran 1 week a month and when I'm by myself, I just take yellow cabs. They seem to work OK for me.
Funny, but rather over-stated. Yes, the js runtime is incredibly malleable, and people do indeed load code from everywhere. But there are important, universally adopted conventions that mitigate the risks: the biggest ones being: 1) libraries define a single global variable (or attach themselves as members of one of those global variables). 2) Manipulation of platform prototypes is strictly verboten. 3) Using === in preference to == everywhere.

The "relentless asynchronous" nature of the environment is a challenge but, I'd argue, it's the right challenge. Async programming is actually a Good Thing because you're only ever dealing with a single process, a single path of execution, all the time. It is possible to get this right, whereas with multi-threaded code, I don't think it is, in general. It's true that you can complicate matters by weaving closures in and out of each other to the point where it's impossible to understand the state of your program by reading the source (or even with break points), but that's just bad code, and shouldn't reflect on the notion of async itself.

It really is too bad, though, that the runtime doesn't (and can't) offer better invariant guarantees, and that we have to rely on convention. But honestly, that sort of thing is possible in Java, for example, too. One of your dependancies can load up ASM or BCEL and start changing classes. Heck, Hibernate does this routinely. The only real difference is that the barrier-to-entry for JavaScript programs to do this sort of thing is much lower.
This stored seed sound more and more as a very dangerous concept, and /dev/urandom should really just block until enough entropy has been gathered like in FreeBSD. That /dev/random would ever use the stored seed is very worrisome. Thanks for that piece of insight.
First, beyond about a 145 IQ (I'll side-step, for now, the difficulties of measuring beyond 140; note that I'm talking about the underlying "g" rather than test scores themselves) typical work boredom becomes a crippling, anxiety-inducing disability but, because few people can or want to sympathize with that problem, it often gets misconstrued as an attitude issue. After a few years of professional failure, a lot of those people go into blue-collar work where their bodies are worked but their minds are free.

Second, while IQ and mental illness actually don't correlate, creativity (which is very helpful for getting a PhD in many fields) is correlated with mental health issues.