skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you have vacation time in the bank hopefully you get paid out for it.

I was under the impression that is legally mandated (at least where I live - NYC). Is that not true?
Probably more reasonable approach than true ink-flow simulation would be using separate font (or hinting) for screen and print for the same typeface. Similarly like some typewriter fonts (eg. FF Trixie[1]) would emulate the ink spread from the typewriter, whilst the actual typewriter would have clean-cut shapes.

[1] http://trixiefont.com
Yeah, it's unfortunate. I actually had to explain the reality of the Tesla car fires to my mother (who is usually very good at seeing through media bias). She was under the impression that the Tesla fires were actually indicative of the car being less safe than normal cars...
I've been saying this for a few months now. Although I love what the learn2code movement is trying to do, what people really want is to learn how to build things.

To facilitate this, we started Major League Hacking (http://mlh.io), the NCAA of Hackathons. Since it's inception last year, we've had over 10,000 students take part in MLH Hackathons.

A large number of those students had never built something before. Many didn't even code when they arrived. Once you show someone what they can build, it becomes infinitely easier to convince them to learn2code.
So I'll lead with "you need to leave." Huge, obvious cultural mismatch.

With that said, I think it's bizarre how some of the commenters here are vilifying your management. I don't know the specifics of your company, but you can't run a startup at crunch time with devs putting in 7.5 hour days. Even at Google, which I considered extremely cushy and laid-back, there was the overt expectation -- repeatedly referenced in internal literature -- that engineer-weeks were about 50 hours long.

I think it's great that you've identified the level of work-life balance that will work for you and are standing your ground. But you need to understand that working 7.5 hours days is not some sort of universal human right. In the (near) future when you search for jobs, you need to communicate that preference up front and make sure that management is on board with it rather than taking for granted that they will be.
Nah. Nook Simple Touches can be rooted and run Android just fine. As long as wifi is off (thus disabling the vast majority of app background syncing / periodic updates) it easily lasts a couple weeks. For that you can run a surprising number of apps just fine in a ridiculously-limited available RAM space. I can't imagine this would be anywhere near as slow as a NST, so it should be able to do just about everything except play 3D games and visit crazy-bad websites.
Me too, and it's probably only the third app I've ever paid for
Anonymous™ chatroom for iPhone!
We tend to make side optimization recommendations whenever we notice something is wrong and you open a support ticket. We could add it to the warnings at the end, but I can safely say most people don't read them. Still worth having for those that don't, good suggestion.
Anyone want to brainstorm on the strategic issues here? This had to have been a long development schedule. MS has been pushing their own phone for so long, taking their product to iOS is a big thing. Reminds me of when they initially took Office onto Mac.

At least they're willing to cannibalize their phone efforts. Seems pragmatic.
If you've stopped to look around you'd notice there is a dire shortage of good developers who want to work for others. Nearly all the good developers I know work on side project/hopeful businesses in their spare time. It's almost a mark of a good creative developer that he has those kind of side projects.

A startup would want a guy like him because a startup needs to grow rapidly to justify existing in the first place and a good developer will easily justify their position on a team. If the OP is being truthful, he designed the very product the entire startup is based on. So to answer your question - the startup would want a guy like him because there might not be a startup without him.

Obviously if he's no longer worth his salary then the startup needs to let him go. That decision has absolutely nothing to do with the number of hours he works and everything to do with whether his benefit to the company justifies his cost.
It's also way, way cheaper in terms of ram.

We fire up sidekiq and clockwork in threads within the puma process rather than take ~ 100 MiB/process hit of running them separately.
Things I would like:

1) No more Unity trolls in Ubuntu posts. No one is making you use Unity. There are hundreds of other distributions for you to use, and only one happens to use Unity.

Pick any other Linux distribution and stop trolling.
If the stress is overwhelming you, then you should see if there is a solution to remove the stress. If not, then you should probably quit. It isn't worth what stress can do to your health and relationships.

If they need you to do more work beyond your 40 hour week, to the point that they threaten to fire you, then your supervisor likely realizes they need you.

If you find that at 5pm that you are twenty minuets away from finishing something up, then you should consider doing that from time to time, just to show you're on the team.

I am lucky enough to be in a position that I am on salary, but I am still paid overtime if the work load moves beyond 40 hours a week. If I need to work an extra 15 to 30 minutes to finish up what I'm working on, I don't count that as overtime. If I get a ticket that needs addressed, but there isn't time to do it in the normal work day, that counts as overtime.

Maybe consider proposing something similar. If what they really need is a little more help, but don't want to hire a new dev, they may be willing to come up with a compromise.

Good luck.
This is great timing and should settle the community after the uproar about the FB acquisition this week.

It seems as though Valve has been fairly hush-hush about their VR ongoings throughout what I'll call "Oculus' rising", so I'm curious for more detail as to what went on internally at Valve with VR, and if Abrash joining Oculus means more about their VR efforts and future (i.e. is Valve done even trying to build something? Is some other partnership brewing between the two?)
Reminded me of a joke I heard a while ago:

"Just released car has amazing safety features that prevent any damage to the vehicle. Amazing advance of technology was made available by near instantaneous braking. Even going 100 mph a car can come to a complete stop instantaneously. After that wipers are deployed automatically to wipe off remains of a driver from windshield."

Any significant change of momentum will harm humans no matter how tough the car is. Newer cars are actually less rigid to provide a cushion to human drivers in case of such collision.

Edit: I meant less rigid in right places. If you observe crash test you could see how neatly car folded around drivers cage. Thanks drglitch for pointing that out.
Managed VMs are not the same thing as AppEngine apps. They are generic vms to run any kind of service that can then be called by your AE apps. It was announced a couple of days ago.
That made me smile, thanks. [1]

[1] 'Zen of Assembly Language', Michael Abrash
It might seem in their best intere$ts, but it was probably the most trusted rack server at the time they wrote the how-to article.
This strikes me as armchair philosophizing about the nature of programming language design. Programming languages are not intentionally complex in most cases, they're complex because the problems they solve are genuinely hard and not because we've artificially made them that way.

There is always a need for two types of languages, higher level domain languages and general purpose languages. Building general purpose languages is a process of trying to build abstractions that always have a well-defined translation into something the machine understands. It's all about the cold hard facts of logic, hardware and constraints. Domain languages on the other hand do exactly what he describes, "a way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us", such as Excel or Matlab, etc. If you're free from the constraint of having to compile arbitrary programs to physical machines and can instead focus on translating a small set of programs to an abstract machine then the way you approach the language design is entirely different and the problems you encounter are much different and often more shallow.

What I strongly disagree with is claiming that the complexities that plague general purpose languages are somehow mitigated by building more domain specific languages. Let's not forget that "programming" runs the whole gamut from embedded systems programming in assembly all the way to very high level theorem proving in Coq and understanding anything about the nature of that entire spectrum is difficult indeed.
Next Step: Individuals have personal news writing software that scans sources of interest and generates human digestible stories. Completely bypassing news agencies all together.
Sounds like they are trying to exploit you. There are plenty of companies out there that want you to think of them as "more than a job", but don't want to give you equity or pay competitive wages. Start taking interviews for other jobs. Once you have on lined up, you can either quit, or use it as leverage to talk to your boss.
Python does reference counting.

The downside is that you can leak memory if you have circular references. The programmer needs to take care to not let this happen. (This is essentially the cause of the Javascript memory leaks in IE, although the reference counting only occurred at the boundary between Javascript objects and browser objects.)

I believe python handles this by occasionally running a garbage collector that looks for leaked objects.

Objective C offers weak pointers (pointers that "don't count" and zero themselves out when all the other pointers to the object disappear), which can aid a programmer in avoiding circular references.

Finally, I believe it has been shown that reference counting can be slower that a well-implemented garbage collector, but I suspect this depends on your specific workload.
Yes, no SVOs, but in a way sparse trees are used to store higher level information, only they are not octant-based.

Dynamic stuff is not up to the level of Voxatron, partly because it is just a lot more data to deal with, but you can have objects that move dynamically (as seen with windows and doors). That said, I may use old fashioned polygons for somethings like character animation, TBD.

I agree on the AI, I only want to discuss that I have plans to do some stuff with AI, and like I say on the site please be skeptical until you see anything. :)
May I ask where you live? I live in flyover country, and I can't imagine you would have a difficult time finding a new gig around here.
1) Of course, but if you do not care at all for the business, the product or your team, your not exactly a paragon of the model employee are you?

2) Leaving at 17 under ordinary circumstances is not flaking out. If there is a major crisis which happens in average maybe once every three months, and you consistently can't be arsed to put in some extra hours of effort while your team mates and managers are, then yes, you are flaking out.
If you mean the product linked in this post, then yep. Palm Pilots had nothing of that though :'(
Great way of putting it.

IMO, the original developer's mistake was the "build it and they will come" strategy.

Even if you built the perfect game, the "cloners" hussled more to get people to play their game, and got traction faster.

Just because you build the perfect product, does not mean that people will use it.

We call it "marketing" and "luck"
To squash the backlash against Abrash leaving Valve, they should time the announcement of the next iteration of Half Life.
"Unicorn is a work of art and it is incredibly simple, but with that comes a lot of waste."

What "waste" are you talking about? It's a multiprocess Rack-compliant webserver, and not much else.
This is admirable and I wish the author well. His example may also help others.

It should not be taken as a signal that "outing" oneself is advisable for others in comparable situations. This guy is very fortunate that he is well established in a career and can point to good performance in his positions, unaffected (from the employer's point of view) by his condition.

Others are much more vulnerable to prejudice and discrimination, and might be better advised to stay closeted.
I think it is, at least here in CA. I also lived in NY and it was the case too.

What I was thinking is that maybe if they terminate him and he is a contract employee they could get out of paying it for a while if there was legal action brought by either party..so he shouldn't count on that money to live until it clears his bank.
Yes this is a screen-space artifact - there are ways around it, just have not implemented a fix yet. :)
Composition Over Inheritance – Object Oriented Programming
Consider the parallel addition task, it takes N*log(N) instead of single threaded addition which takes N. Which is more energy efficient?

If takes 10x the power to do layout in 20ms vs 30ms is it still a good deal?
Is it possible that there is selection bias at play hear? Are people who are more likely to be integrators also more likely to apply to work at Google?

How about tech in general? My general feeling is that in most companies where the core business is tech, many of the employees are integrators to a degree much greater than the average person. Many engineers at tech-focused companies are likely to code outside of work for fun, and it's likely that they code on stuff either directly or indirectly related to the code they produce for their employer.
I enjoyed that read. I think the world is a better place getting to hear his story.
Why is Puma better than Unicorn?
Hm, "creative pascal developer" -- so they want Donald Knuth? ;-)
AWS Troubleshooting QUIZ: Test your AWS Strength
I agree, in that I don't know what will happen but it will be big and glorious, and something will now happen - there's too many great minds and too much money in this now for it just to flub out quietly.

In every OR announcement recently I see references to the SnowCrash Metaverse. Before we all start to rent shipping containers and become the 'greatest sword fighters in the world', I worry if this fictional ideal isn't a distraction to getting this done or not. Before we can buy OR consumer kits that work as well as the potential seems to hint at (and yes I have tried and was amazed by Crystal Cove) then it seems such a long and lofty goal. It feels like Physics 301 class entrants aiming for Warp capability or something.

It would take something like a Facebook userbase and scale, the fathers of 3D game programming and a convergence of high definition mobile consumer electronics to all come together at one time for it to happen.

Oh.
Distributing instrumentation tests to all your Androids
Wow! That was an interesting read. Thank you!
Thought Finally! But, too soon $1000 is way, 2-4 times, too much. Back to waiting.
Therapy can help a lot for these problems. Therapists are trained to recognize unconscious reactions of their clients and then bring those reactions into consciousness, so they can be dealt with by the client.

If you want to do it yourself (not recommended), the first step is usually to notice patterns in your behavior - what do you try to avoid, when do you fall into addictions, etc. Also compare that to what other successful people do - do you find that some things are trivial and no big deal to other people, but cause you to turn into a blubbering mess? You're looking for intense anxiety here, which is why this is so difficult to do yourself - most people instinctively shy away from things that make them anxious, but here you have to deliberately seek them out.

Then, once you've got a clue to where the problem might be, you're looking for a thought that seems to skitter away every time you think of it. For example, I had an issue with needing to be certain about everything, and everything needing to be cut & dried facts. The idea that I may not be perfect, that there were some things I didn't know and never would know, was completely anathema to me. So every time I found myself in such a situation, I'd immediately try to force certainty, either by learning as much as I could and jumping to a conclusion, or by avoiding the situation entirely. When I tried to hold the idea of not being perfect in my head, my psyche would rebel, and thoughts would pop into my head like "That's for weaker minds. I wouldn't be myself if I didn't know everything."

Once you've got the thought that always tries to skitter away, hold onto it and face it directly, no matter how much your consciousness rebels. Usually they'll be some sort of intense emotional reaction - you'll start crying, or you'll want to punch something, or you'll feel like your life is ending. That's why movie dramas (eg. Good Will Hunting) often have some teary scene at the therapist's office. Naturally, you will probably want to be in a safe, private place for this.

You'll want to hold onto that thought until you feel completely spent - it doesn't actually take long once you've IDed the issue (20 minutes to an hour is my experience), but it's exhausting. You should feel "lighter" afterwards though, like your body has been through rough exercise but your mind is freer and no longer weighed down by whatever was troubling you.

Good luck. It's much easier with a trained therapist - or actually, I wouldn't say easier in the sense of "less painful", but you spin your wheels less on false theories about why you are the way that you are.
We each value our time differently. 3 hours per month is more than acceptable to me.
There is an HyperCard inspired tool that is very similar and works on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and is able to deploy to all those platforms plus Android and iOS.

Its a wonderful tool and very easy to learn. It is also GPL.

http://livecode.com
TO answer everyone's questions below, think about the following example:

You have one car that's 1,000 lbs and one that's 10,000 lbs. When you start each car, it will take a lot more energy to bring the 10k lb car up to the same speed as the 1k lb car, but after that, the effects of drag will weigh more heavily on the lighter car (F=ma, so the rate of deacceleration is a lot higher for a smaller mass), causing constant fluctuations in the motor shutting on and off.

With the the 10k car, the transitions would take much longer. The time in between accelerations would be longer, and the motor would be on for longer spurts. You gain a great deal of efficiency for simply leaving a mechanical system running vs constantly modulating a mechanical system (i.e. shutting it on and off).

This would work in favor of the heavy car being more efficient.

Of course, the heavier your car is the worse your 0-60 split would be, so for a performance car that's a negative.

Also, the heavier car would experience greater bearing resistance + friction. This is really difficult to quantify, and my gut is that it's outweighed by the momentum advantage.

But overall, for a car that ways 2k lbs, a 5% increase in mass is pretty negligible, especially for casual highway and local driving.
Ask HN: Whatever happened to Mongrel2?
I was very excited about Mongrel2 for awhile, and also some of the projects that were being built off of it. For instance, I have mostly abandoned PHP, but Photon was the one PHP project that struck me as interesting, and it was built on top of Mongrel2. http://www.photon-project.com/

When I look here it seems the bulk of the work stopped almost 2 years ago:

https://github.com/zedshaw/mongrel2

The work done this last year seems minor. I also notice that Zed Shaw is mostly working on some Javascript library right now.

The world needs a great server built on top of ZeroMQ. Is anyone still focused on this project? If not, are there any other servers that use ZeroMQ in such a foundational way?
> animated resizing

You mean, not like this? http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm249/hrenistic/ubuntu_13...
> the 100th version of 2048

Be fair: the internet also gave us the first version.
Well, well... Oculus did get a lot of hate for the facebook aquisition but HOLY COW, Abrash and Carmack in the same company again definitely raises my spirits.

Maybe the money FB brought wasn't so bad afterall...
You are definitely right - the odds are severely stacked against me (and I say this with no hint of sarcasm). So why am I doing what I am doing? Well, I feel that someone has to try. Big companies don't seem to be trying much. Maybe I can rally enough of a team and financing that there is less risk, but I also want people to be aware of the risk.

Trust me, I doubt myself more than anyone else, every day, but at the same time I really just want to try, even if it means failing. :)
Show HN: Sktchr – Balsamiq plugin for Sketch
As someone how doesn't know what hypercard is, I have a hard time understanding what this is. Maybe a couple of concrete use case at the top of the webpage would be helpful?
nice idea....more interesting than earlier....
Steve Marquess of OpenSSL on how FIPS validation supports NSA backdoors
Read this backwards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_EE_version_history

of course, Jvm is insecure by design, that's the whole point of a VM, really, to run anything no matter the context, so they're always be the same ways to escape the sandbox: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2013/Jul/172 The only thing keeping it secure is legions of devs and an "application server" propagating trust.
demonstrates an immediate connection with their tool: http://vimeo.com/36579366
Any new OS will have this problem. Seems like an unfair criticism to me.
I love Chris Granger's work, and LightTable, but jeeez my eyes were going weird by the "Chasing Local Maxima" section.

Turn the contrast down!
This resonates very strongly with me. In the past, I've tried to get motivated to "learn programming" multiple times, mostly because you just hear everyone say it. But without any sort of meaningful end goal, each attempt sort of fell through. I would hit a roadblock and fail to get motivated to crush it.

But just six months ago I actually had a need to build a website to make company training materials available to our remote offices, and with that end-goal in mind I was able to learn things bottom-up. The ability to place my learning in a greater context certainly motivated me a hell of a lot more than "OK, next up is loops in JavaScript... yawn" Not to mention the ability to use what I built to advance my career.
Dear Govt: Change typeface, save millions
Being multi-process is the "waste". Each process has its own heap, its own copy of the AST and bytecode, etc. Even with preforking and copy-on-write, the overhead introduced by processes is still significantly bigger than running many threads within 1 process.

Of course, this doesn't have to be a problem for everyone. Whether threads are advantageous depends a lot on the workload.
We killed our startup at SXSW
...best answer.
Malaysian Grand Prix: Mark Webber on pill that takes driver temperature
Newer cars are more rigid in just the right places (e.g. driver cage) - they do have larger/softer crumple zones that permit the damage to be absorbed along a longer time period. By prolonging the total crumple/crash time, the peak energy is decreased, thereby avoiding injuries from force overload during deceleration.
Think you just sold me on one. Well done :)

I'm not worried about going with the smaller pack; it only takes 90 seconds to swap it with a new, higher capacity pack down the road.
I agree that's ridiculous! But it doesn't seem ridiculous that she actually hears that message.
How to nail the URL shortener interview question