skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There appears to be some discrepancy in the interpretation and use of some terminology.

To clarify, what many of us refer to as bloat has nothing at all to do with run time resource usage, but instead relates to unnecessary features and complexity. We see freedom and beauty in short, clean, simple code, small utilities and terse specifications. These are seldom the most efficient (computationally) solution to any particular problem, but these tools are small (in terms of code, possibly binary), and therefore easy to implement and maintain as well as understand. And we can easily replace such tools if necessary; we don't become excessively dependent on giant code bases. When computational resources permit it, we prefer to get rid of optimizations to simplify these tools internally.

A bloated tool might have a million features, it can be many times as efficient at some things, it can probably do more. But it is likely to be hard to modify, a pain to maintain, difficult to port, and diagnosing problems gets harder with more complicated tools. As soon as you start using half of its features, you become very dependent on that particular tool. And you probably cannot replace it, it would be too much work. Your freedom suffers.

More often than not, we can get our jobs done with simple and small tools. Thus the big and complicated tool is filled with unnecessary things; it is bloated.
dealing with Delphi as a product more than programming language hurts the Delphi community. I mean Embarcadero should give away some (freebies) to the community. like a free/express Delphi version. I think this will refresh its community and the Delphi empire would rise again.
The Netflix slide deck makes it clear that the company seeks to reward performance only, not poor proxies for performance like number of days worked. So if you took 100 days off, yet were still as useful to the team as the guy who didn't take any, you'd be treated the same way as him in reviews.

Whether this is possible is up to you. Also, having not worked at Netflix or Heroku, I can't speak to how well it works out in practice.
A surprisingly good list. I expected the usual CC galleries on Flickr or elsewhere, or Getty Images' new (and free) embedding option.

As mentioned by someone else, I don't get the "photos sent to you weekly/monthly" sites. Why? I can't picture (har har) someone needing a photo for some design, but thinking "Welp, nothing good on the web... I'll wait to see what comes along next week." Unless it's just aimed at photography enthusiasts who enjoy seeing beautiful photos, with no intent to use them for something.

I'll also add that if you're looking to add photos to your content, consider being different and using a funny cartoon drawing instead, like Jason Cohen, 42Floors, and others have been doing. Here's a stock cartoon site I created just for that purpose: https://www.gagcartoons.com
I'm hesitating to say collusion is involved, but given the brevity of the act and speed by which this is being passed, it's probably not far off the mark. Also, 'emergency' purposes isn't even defined.
There are legitimate reasons why the government needs to operate in secret for a short while — a sting on a suspected criminal, where they have strong evidence, but need to close the case without scaring the target into fleeing the country, for example. This usage should be firmly rooted in law and disclosed after a reasonable period of time, however.
Open Source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations
I wonder what would happen if vacation time were tracked and made public (within the company). I'm sure outliers would come under social pressure to conform to group norms, but it'd be interesting to see where the norm stabilized. It probably depends a lot on other aspects of company culture.
If he public knew the why, then they'd want to know more. So far the pattern of information control is to seal it at the most root position as possible.
Very true, we don't need everything to be pegged to a single currency. Another development that will make moving between crypto-currencies more fluid will be decentralized exchanges.

I believe that apart from Counterparty and ColoredCoins, Ethereum may also be able to run as a decentralized exchange in fact helping Bitcoin and the other Alternative coins.

I assumed a long time ago that eventually many of these coins will somehow tie into each other in the process of building the future foundations of a new decentralised internet. I think that time is coming.
“We were the first people to work on Stripe, and chronologically that’s interesting but so much of the great work that we do now, we’re a piece of it but we’re not the most important piece of it,”

This is amazing. A huge part of my job right now is too find people who make me feel this way - but it's remarkably impressive to find it put so perfectly by the founders of a company like Stripe.
This looks like another attempt by the ACLU to get the national security letter issue resolved (or undone). Its a worthwhile battle and I support them in it, but I'm not sure what this article brings to the conversation. It is yet another skirmish in the district courts.
I did a contract that involved some Delphi not long ago. I was really surprised to see it still in use. The worst thing, though, was registering to get a trial from Embarcadero who then had an elaborate follow-up process including phone calls from them. And after all that, the code in question wouldn't compile with the new editions of Delphi and I had to track down a copy of Delphi 6.

I was really surprised to discover they still have a C++ compiler product. Does anyone use it?
Hack The Border – The Baarle Problem
Think of the government as being a member of Hacker News with nearly infinite downvote power. If it doesn't like what you've said it disappears what you've said...often without even so much as an explanation.
Your first sentence needs an addendum starting with "because..."
Easy, spend some of your free time contributing to open source software. That is precisely what I do. I ended up becoming a co maintainer for 2 of the projects I worked on (graphite / saltstack)
We're essentially swapping simple guidelines for a test of people's ability to correctly judge social mores.

There's an ideal number of days of vacation per year.

We aren't going to tell you what that is, but if you guess incorrectly, everyone will hate you.

Good luck!

This is why I also prefer signs on the road saying either "stay in your lane" or "merge now." Why coordinate behavior by instinct when we have all these nice methods of communication?
I'm surprised by this. To me, it makes a lot of sense that Nike, as a fitness company, produces a wearable device for exercising.

It must be a failure of my imagination, but I don't see a smart watch (in the next couple years) being both attractive to the general consumer and solving the same problems as the FuelBand does. That's partly because I can't imagine what features would make me want to buy an iWatch. So I expect that Nike's going to be forced to compromise functionality to fit the limited capabilities of general-purpose devices.

For example, Craig's proposed iRing doesn't even mention tracking motion activity: http://furbo.org/2014/03/13/wearing-apple/

Also, maybe it's the specific app I use, but using the M7 kills battery life on my 5S.
Anyone know of a clip-art (non-photo illustration) version of this list?
PostScript is dangerous as a vector of attack. You can create an infinite loop as a DoS. Way back in the NeXT days, you could get remote control a system with an invisible block of postscript put in an email, turning on microphones and cameras and dumping that data to hosts. It became a nightmare to secure. The DOD physically destroyed those inputs on their black hardware to deal with it. Apple moved to DisplayPDF for license cost reasons primarily, but security and performance were also factors.
Keep in mind that it's not a charge for selling power back, it's a charge for connecting it to the power grid. Not everyone running solar sells back to the grid.
Why are we not using DNS for this?
aaaand donation made. Really want to get behind what you guys doing (and you did stroke my ego a little bit)
Using DNS for what? CAs? Are you asking "why don't we take the crappy PKI we have right now and just give it to the world's governments"?
It depends on the jurisdiction, but a lot of the "guideline amount + tracking" philosophy is driven by the law (and financial accounting).

For example, here's an except from some guidelines around the Ontario Employment Standards Act:

Employers are required to keep records of the vacation time earned since the date of hire but not taken before the start of the vacation entitlement year, the vacation time earned and vacation time taken (if any) during the vacation entitlement year (or stub period), and the balance of vacation time remaining at the end of the vacation entitlement year (or stub period).

So at least in Ontario, your employer is legally obligated to record your vacation time each year, and on demand, produce a report on it. There are also rules around when an employee has to take their vacation by, for example:

The vacation time earned with respect to a completed vacation entitlement year or a stub period must be taken within 10 months following the completion of the vacation entitlement year or stub period. The employer has the right to schedule vacation as well as an obligation to ensure the vacation time is scheduled and taken before the end of that ten-month period.

Since Ontario is also a jurisdiction with legally-mandated vacation time, at any point in time the vacation that an employee has accrued but not yet taken (or has rolled over from another year) should also be recorded as a liability on a company's books, since it could be forced to pay out the equivalent vacation pay (if the employee leaves, for example). The obvious way to get around this - and I've seen it done in a few places - is to pay everyone their full statutory vacation pay every year and then not count the vacation days taken, but that's basically giving everyone a 4% raise, and isn't even an option in some jurisdictions.

All of this is to say that unlimited and untracked vacations may not even be a legal option everywhere, regardless of what we think of them.
Definitely agree. Simple building blocks often lead to huge amazing complex things.

I really like what it would do for wearables. If they were interested in cash, they could probably sell all this tech to a SV "wearable tech" company and parcel it out over years for millions/billions.
Software has got to be one of the most interesting industries, where among genuinely skilled people you can have such shockingly divergent opinions on really quite simple questions.

From the article:

> Being highly productive has seen single Delphi developers produce software that would otherwise require a team of 5 developers. I’ve been in a team of 3 developers that out programmed a corporate wide application by having it up and running in a few months compared to another team I know of over 30 Java developers who 18 months later still had not produced their application.

I believe this to be completely true. At least for boring internal enterprise apps within corporations, the new languages/platforms and especially modern program design paradigms with their multiple tiers & supporting libraries, multiple levels of indirection resulting in 30 level deep call stacks, etc results in productivity perhaps 1/4 of what you could achieve with a product like Delphi.

Now this is just my opinion, and it is shared by many others, but there are even more who would vehemently disagree. Yet this isn't some "eternal mystery" class of a disagreement, for the type of application that Delphi is appropriate (very important), it can be very easily demonstrated if it is or is not more productive for the task at hand - the differences are so stark that the conclusion is undeniable. Yet, if you were to propose Delphi as a development platform, it would in most cases be career suicide.

I would suggest some of the main reasons for this are:

- as a developer, choosing Delphi is virtually career (skillset) suicide

- it lacks much of the more modern "cool" language features developers so love to play with

- (as a result) choosing Delphi as a platform is risky due to the small and shrinking developer base
IANAL I believe that there are valid reasons for gag orders. See http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Gag+Order

However it's fairly obvious that the purposes which a gag order is commonly used, preventing jury tampering, media distortion, or other disruption to the operations of a fair court, do not seem to apply in the instances of the article.
I dont think so. Java is the new Cobol. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JavaIsTheNewCobol
It's not a BS trend at all, maybe phrased incorrectly using the term "unlimited", but it's actually a great benefit if you're capable of understanding that there are socially acceptable limits to these "no policy" benefits and that timing long vacations takes planning around your work load. Getting ready to ship a big feature or tool? Maybe once it's been in prod for a week it's a good time to take off for a couple weeks before you get tossed into the next big thing. Let the PM's know you're going to be out so they can schedule around your absence and it's not going to be a big deal. Obviously, the company has expectations about your availability, but also respects your need for a work-life balance. So, you have to be the kind of person who is aware of whats going on around them, what your needs are and what the company's needs are, and finding a balance. "No vacation policy" is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.
I don't know what "hellbanned" means, but I'm unsurprised I got banned for posting about malloc() in a web programming forum.
This is interesting because I'm building the exact same thing, which also has the be plugged into a Cake app.

For choosing the tables to query, my idea is to present a grid. Each cell has the table name and tables available through relations. When a table is selected, the cells either remain "on" or are disabled based on relations available. These will typically change depending on tables selected. Relations are discovered as defined, say hasOne, hasMany, etc. this is step one.

Step 2 involves selecting the fields to include in reports. These are typically prefixed with the model name and with underscores replaced with spaces. So User.first_name becomes "User's first name", User's country name or Country name, which I haven't worked out fully yet. I suppose some intuitive way to combine these into virtual fields would be nice.

The hairy bit is selecting conditions. I get requests to hard code queries such as finding the number of product ordered by users who have taken an online course or an in-person course so I have to be flexible. This part is tough to express in a UI simply, because X AND (Y OR Z) isn't the same as (X AND Y) OR Z. However, having some way of grouping conditions and requiring that such groups also have a binary operator by dragging and selecting seems the way to go, a la selecting icons on a desktop.

All of this can be saved as a "virtual table" for reuse. Output is typically a CSV for marketing purposes but my intention is to have this so I can plug in a PDF renderer with nice charts and what not, like Google Analytics.

Though something tells me building all this may be overkill if I can find a package that handles analytics and custom-defined events, along with the ability to upload backdated data!
Another garbage heap of php technology from everyones least favorite personal data peddlers.

Who cares.
Lots of places in the US have bans on fires though some are seasonal. You can't build a fire above 5000 ft in much of the cascade and olympic mountain range because the small alpine trees can't stand up to wood gathering.

Many national parks and forest either restrict fires to metal fire rings or ban them out right during the height of wild fire season and, in southern California, some of these bands are now year long as wildfires can be so catastrophic.

Warm clothing and sleeping bags works well for heat, never had an issue with beasts other then bugs (head nets work for that) and i've spent a lot of time camping in remote spots populated with bears, wolves, mountain lions etc.
Why is checking for certificate revocations theater? It seems sensible to me.

Edit: I mean downloading a revocation list rather than checking online.
I think I'd be happiest with 4-12 weeks of "vacation" per year, but in a way which is minimally disruptive to the company. This isn't necessarily part of the "unlimited" aspect of vacation, but can be related.

1) Flexibility to take short vacations whenever there isn't anything to be done at work. This doesn't often happen in an early startup, but it's not too uncommon in a larger company to have a day or two where there is some external block. If you can work from home or otherwise be on email, there's no particular reason to just sit in the office that day.

2) I personally count most conferences, even when speaking, as vacation -- even if the company is paying expenses. Essentially, if it's something I'd go to myself, I'm happy to be going on the company dime, and it serves a lot of the purpose of vacation.

3) When long distance travel is involved, I'd usually strongly prefer to take a day or two before/after as vacation, particularly if it's somewhere interesting (which, for me, could be a lot of places). Sometimes this is at employee expense, but there are a lot of cases in consulting where flying someone back for the weekend is more expensive than paying for a weekend hotel. "Be reasonable" seems like the best policy for the expense part, but if you don't have kids or another reason to go home on the weekend, why not spend the weekend in Berlin or LA or something? (relatedly, I'm willing to use my frequent flyer miles to help the company on travel when it's expensive, in exchange for getting to use preferred carriers when the price isn't unreasonable.)

4) In ops, it's often useful to have people show up on weekends (for a consumer service, sure, you can push updates on Tuesday at 9am, but for enterprise stuff, weekend upgrades are actually pretty common); offering 1:1 comp time for that is the baseline, but I'd probably go to 2:1 or 3:1. Similarly with covering emergencies (higher premium if unscheduled) or holidays (I personally love working on most holidays, but if I had to get someone else to do it, I'd expect to pay at least 3 days of vacation per day).
No they are saying, "the government might have a legitimate case for censorship but we can't even tell because they don't give a reason"

Before they would at least give some bullshit answer like, "state secrets", "means and methods" etc etc. Now they don't even put up those lies.
So, people still don't think they should prioritize getting their services from outside of EU, rather than US? It seems to me that despite all the laws and the Constitution, the government can still pretty much force any company do whatever it wants, "legally" or extra-legally (hello Amazon/Paypal/Visa/Mastercard!).

Post-Snowden, US companies don't deserve a second chance - at least not while the US government doesn't seem to have any remorse about mass surveillance and its abuse of power, and has no serious intention of reforming itself.
I've done this when I was working on the Playstation Network so business users could define storefront categories that contain products based on their own custom logic. We didn't get a lot of requests to change the feature and it was stupid simple. I wouldn't get too fancy unless your users get really excited about it and ask for it to do more.
Linksys (cisco) dropped the ball a long time ago. I've moved on an have been using Ubiquiti stuff for years. Their router even runs Debian.
It seems like there's no reason companies can't do both: have an official good-as-money PTO allocation for employees, like most companies do, and have the policy that employees can take any reasonable number of vacation days. That policy works exactly like "unlimited vacation", while also (a) maintaining a minimum annual number of days that every employee is entitled to, regardless of how their team is managed, and (b) provides a fair cash payout when the employee leaves.

This may be all the author is arguing for; I can't quite tell.

Unless there's some legal reason this policy can't work, the absence of a formal allocation of vacation days in an "unlimited vacation" policy would fail a sniff test for me --- your policy might be "unlimited" as a devious way of not committing to any particular number of vacation days.

(Full disclosure: we just do a normal accrued vacation day policy.)
> Once Android Wear and Apple wearables start rolling out, it's going to be a slaughter out there.

For Nike, its already a slaughter -- FitBit has the lion's share of the market for activity trackers, Nike was in third well behind Jawbone UP. [1]

[1] http://mobihealthnews.com/28825/fitbit-jawbone-nike-had-97-p...
Try openclipart.org.
We could apply a kind of value-added tax to every good sold that might possibly be encumbered by patents, say 5%, put that money in a pool overseen by a special court, then let patent-holders file with the court to claim a portion of the money based on what products their patent applies to and how important it is relative to the other patents that apply. The other patent-holders can then file challenges if they think they're getting short shrift. The filing fees should float such that it covers the costs of the entire system.
Because the real world breaks OCSP checks often enough that browsers can't tell the difference between e.g. a malfunctioning proxy and an attacker; therefore, browsers don't hard-fail the checks, so attackers can slip past them. And in exchange for that theater, you're telling the CAs what sites you're visiting. It is a crazy system.
If you want paper pictures to persist for decades, you have to be careful about how you store them--a hot attic, or damp basement, can destroy prints or slides over that timespan.

So, you need to be careful with digital pictures too. Keep copies locally and remotely, and carefully keep track of passwords for hosted services.

This is not just limited to pictures. How do you manage your finances? Do you have the passwords stored in a place where your family can get to them in an emergency?
> I'm surprised by this. To me, it makes a lot of sense that Nike, as a fitness company, produces a wearable device for exercising.

I'm not surprised -- they've been pouring money into marketing, and yet not coming within a mile of the leader (FitBit) in the activity tracker market.

> It must be a failure of my imagination, but I don't see a smart watch (in the next couple years) being both attractive to the general consumer and solving the same problems as the FuelBand does.

They aren't getting out because of the possibility of future smartwatches, they are getting out because they are getting killed by what's on the market and popular now.
Yeah, because there aren't any documentation systems called mdoc already, at all.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/mdoc.7.html
http://www.mono-project.com/Mdoc
This seems like a great way to avoid giving accumulated vacation time when someone leaves the company.