skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, that seems like a good solution that anyone could figure out in about 5 minutes. So why do companies go with "unlimited" vacation instead? Because its just a money saving scam. If the company doesn't specify an exact amount of vacation then they don't have to carry it as a liability on their books. Hence the name "unlimited" which really just means "unspecified". Startups especially like it because accrued vacation money must be set aside leaving leaving less runway.
It completely screws the employee because vacation was actually money that had to be paid out if they left. So the employee is out that money, usually at a time they need it most. Getting fired with 8 weeks vacation banked it not nearly as risky as 0 weeks.
It was crossplatform for a time, kylix ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylix_(software) ) was delphi for linux, it worked okay but compared to delphi the produced binaries was not dependency free.
Here is the current browser based version:

http://browser.openworm.org/

http://caltech.wormbase.org/virtualworm/

Human version (much cooler): http://www.zygotebody.com/

Cow version: http://open-3d-viewer.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/web/index.htm...

Source code for the viewer for all of these: https://code.google.com/p/open-3d-viewer/

Note: you're going to want to use hardware acceleration for these, otherwise they'll be very slow.
Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines
It did not scare him away, it made him question the	legitimacy. That's not something you want.
I would say rename the whole thing to something like "intellectual use tax".
W3C effort to define persistent vocabularies for the Semantic Web
Phabricator is definitely interesting. In my limited time with it I really took a liking to it.

Unfortunately, to me, the Atlassian toolchain still wins out over it, provided it's within the budget. I vastly prefer Jira's Agile boards to anything else I've ever used, and it's integration with Stash and Bamboo just make things absolutely lovely.

But I mean, as long as it's not Mantis.
> I doubt that a typical smartphone actually infringes on 10,000 patents held by outside entities, or that 10,000 separate entities each hold one of those patents apiece

10,000 is probably in the ballpark. People have no recognition of how incredibly complicated phones are today. They're obviously not owned by that many separate entities, but that doesn't really help much. It takes about the same amount of time to determine whether a device infringes the claims of a patent regardless of whether the same patent holder also holds other patents. The "savings" come when you stop looking at the claims and start paying royalties based on the quantity of patents the patent holder claims you're infringing, but that's where the incentive to get low-quality patents comes from.

> if filing fees are set so as to cover the entire costs of the court and system, and the system has a fairly inelastic capacity (supply), the increased demand for services would cause the filing fees to rise. Presumably an equilibrium would be reached where only those with large and realistic claims would bother to file, whereas those with low quality patents would be priced out.

The counterargument you're going to get there is that you'll price small inventors out of the patent system.

> Ideally the system could always afford to look closely, because it's self-funding. It wouldn't necessarily need to be adversarial, either -- it could be more like arbitration, where you file, paying the court to evaluate your claim, and the court makes a decision. No need for lawyers, unless you need help putting your claim together.

But you're still not solving the pricing issue. What objective metric is an arbitrator supposed to use to evaluate the value of a patent?
Google is finally cloned
I look at tools for DOM manipulation right now - and I look at what people dream of doing with the DOM, especially with apps.

Then I think back to what Delphi was doing in early 90s - then I wonder if just some of that magic was available for building apps on the DOM we'd be in a better place.
Yeah, but people change. Drastically. All the time. Because things happen to them.
The difference is you don't read sheet music to look for errors (tonal imbalance, wrong notes, what have you), you play it and listen if it sounds "right".

Much the same you can't read code (code review) to look for errors, you'll miss most. You need to run and test the code to really find the errors.

I think that is the take away from the OP.
I can see iWatches as a big market for a startup, or add-on for Nike - but not for Apple. The profits can't move their meter.

The problem is input: Apple solved it for phones (touch screen). They tried voice-recog for shuffle iPod, but dropped it in the next iteration.
If they really are making a mass-market iWatch, I think they must have solved this problem in some other way. (Glass solves it, so maybe it won't be a watch...)
I wrote this code, but I'm not sure what's wrong with it. Can you explain what's bad about it and how you'd improve it?

---

To provide some context, this is the top-level entry point for all requests. It routes requests to code which does application-level things, like showing a code review or updating a task or whatever.

When the application-level things go wrong, we try to display a pretty, human-readable exception page with a nicely formatted stack trace (if you're in developer mode), etc. This page relies on some infrastructure subsystems (like configuration, to check for developer mode, and static resources, to include JS and CSS, and rendering, to actually produce the HTML) working correctly.

Normally, the exception is in application code and everything works fine. We produce a pretty page and send it back to the user.

However, sometimes there's an error in one of these subsystems. If we start rendering the page and encounter a second exception during rendering, we fall back to a less-pretty page which has bare text and no dependencies on subsystems. Normally, this happens during development when you've made a mistake in changing one of the subsystems, and all JS inclusion or all configuration checks are failing.

On this bare page, we want to retain the original exception (as well as show the followup exception) because it may be helpful in identifying and resolving the issue.

With the obvious caveat that I wrote the code, this architecture seems sensible and appropriate to me, and appears to function correctly in practice.
The PhD Bubble is a fucking crime. As you noted, it's a pyramid scheme.

There used to be BA-level research positions, to get your feet wet in industrial research for a couple years, and possibly to help one get into a PhD program on advantageous terms. The problem is that those BA-level research positions, while they still exist, are now all fucking filled with PhDs.

The public sector (politicians more than bureaucrats) is short-sighted and the private-sector is worse. Basic research has been shuttered, and I think that's largely because of the anti-intellectual culture of the US. Basic research is seen as something "eggheads" do, and the mainstream distrusts people like us for, you know, believing the universe is 13.7 billion years old based on science rather than 6,000 years old based on a book.

Notably, most of these investments occurred during wartime. It appears that government support of scientific research surges during war, and declines in peace. This is a paradox that needs to be resolved in order to make better use of the nation's intellectual resources.

This is sad, but accurate. Average people respond more to the carrot than the stick, but the sorts of people who tend to acquire power respond more strongly to the stick, and only an existential and violent threat can bring them to do the right thing. Societies seem to degrade until war of some kind (international, or an internal revolution) is inevitable. War is the worst way of resolving those building-up tensions and corruption, but no one has come up with anything that works better. We're about 25 years away from a violent revolution due to internal inequality in the U.S. and, while I'd love to see a reversal of course that avoids bloodshed, I feel like the odds are against it. We just suck as a species.
The swedes always had a very big eSports scene, which started to break mainstream about 2 years ago, when the DreamHack SC2 finals were broadcast live on Swedish national TV.

I was watching the show at our local Barcraft and we had a hard time getting the place booked for us, just shows the gap in geek culture acceptance between the UK and Sweden!
I remember reading about OpenWorm a few years ago and thinking it was ridiculously cool. I'm glad to see the project has persisted. They do a bad job, however, of selling themselves.

1. What have they accomplished to date? I see little more than an animated worm. Tell me about how you're trying to model the worm, and how these approaches may accurately capture its behavior.

2. Why should I care about having an animated worm in my browser? Why is this an appropriate medium to deliver the simulation? If I want to do any kind of science, how will this help me? What I've seen to date looks scarcely more useful than Bonzi Buddy. The most interesting part seems the Academy, but I must donate at least $250 to gain access. This seems counter to the "open" part of "OpenWorm."

3. What academic affiliations does the project have? If the project is useful and has experienced success to date, surely they can recruit students/postdocs/whatever to work on it full-time, with well-established labs making major contributions. Are they computational people? Biology people?

4. What are the bona fides of the people involved? If they can't typeset or capitalize the species' name properly ("C. Elegans") in their video, that doesn't lend much faith to their expertise. The gentleman in the video marvels over the mere "1000 cells" in the worm, but does nothing to put this number in context (with, say, the 10 trillion cells of humans).

I'd love to see this project succeed, and I admire its attempt to recruit funding through a novel means, but the pricing seems too steep, and the overall quality of the pitch is regrettably poor.
25cm birch logs surely are fun to split. With any kind of axe.

We use to chop 1m (~3feet) logs of a lot more compact wood (oak, beech), and this looks like a toy to me. Has anyone seen it used on more serious logs?
It is very very hard to sympathize with the companies involved. If they wanted to, they could implement secure communication where ephemeral keys or user-controlled keys are used, and open source clients would guard against the placement of "bugged" client software. Then they could hand over cyphertext on demand, and not take on the job of supposedly protecting people who in their estimation merit protection. Protect all the bits.
> The nice thing about this is that it would be somewhat of a self-resolving problem, since it would give the holders of non-trivial patents reason to lobby for high standards for patentability.

It would also give the holders of trivial patents (and patent lawyers who want more business) reason to lobby for low standards for patentability.
Everybody else seems to love it, even compared to Java.

I can't help but think of using three days to collect and compile all dependencies for a legacy project.

At that point at least I'd take Java and maven any day.
http://www.openworm.org/getting_started.html
I agree. I've been stopping and starting learning assembly for several years with x86. It didn't really gel but with the book above, the quizzes and exercises its really started to gel, even basic concepts such as nibbles, words, twos complement, etc. What's more I can actually make a lot more sense of low-level code for IA now, such as the simple kernel post recent, and boot loader in ASM.

For the more complex exercises, I've found writing a working program in C first to be beneficial. At first I used Emacs Lisp because its nice to write in Emacs, which I'm using along with the Assembly major mode. C has less of a cognitive shift during translation since its much closer to what you're working with.

In a stoic sort of way, I have a new appreciation for C and an even greater appreciation for lisp. This, however, has not interfered with my enjoyment of learning MIPS, which I'm deriding much of from this book.
The latter -- but "we don't count the days" is catchier :)
A former large corporate employer of mine switched to this, a did this a while ago, and it was clearly a thinly veiled way to replace actual PTO and recuperative time with the odd extra three-day weekend. The H1 staff weren't going to complain about it - they just waited until they had a critical mass before switching to this.

I'd be equally critical of a start up that offered unlimited vacations. The idea of there being a 'good time to take a break' runs directly contrary to most start up's raison d'etre, and strikes me as equally disingenuous.
MIPS was fun to learn. Its instruction set is not nearly as gnarly as x86 or ARM.
I heard high price also killed smalltalk. Can't they freemium, with minimal loss of existing business?
I find it funny that the Stripe founders have inspired and influenced people by retracting from the cult-of-the-founder image that causes people to be inspired and influenced by you. It's true that these guys aren't the most important piece of the Stripe puzzle, but there's a reason FT chose to interview the founders and no one else. The first guys are the most inspiring. And these guys tastefully make sure they don't get too self-indulgent with that fact, making them pretty awesome people.
Really a great article, and these guys seem like humble, awesome people that can do successful work on a billion dollar problem without tooting any horns about it.

If you're looking for more inspirational founder articles, FT ran one on on Sean Parker a while back shortly after the Social Network came out -- http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8383ab06-45e3-11e0-acd8-00144.... Sean's a bit more indulgent than these two. Then again he co-founded Napster and was a major influence in Facebook, and it's bit hard to be humble when you stuntin' on a Jumbotron (which is why the Stripe founders are so awesome for being able to do that). In the end, he's still a massive problem-solver and an entrepreneurial inspiration. I'd recommend it.
Oh interesting - does the standard Linksys firmware use Linux too?
What I find interesting is that the PhD-industry gap has existed for many years but more people seem to be enrolling in PhD programs, as shown in the article.
FarmLogs is hiring Clojure and Android devs to invent the future of farming
I noticed that jQuery is required for Intercooler. If the purpose of the library is to enable nice UI interactions without writing jQuery, consider distributing a version of Intercooler that has jQuery bundled with it, or better yet just the parts of jQuery that Intercooler uses.

Looks like an interesting library, especially for backend focused devs.
MagentoCommerce (also PHP) has a query builder, maybe you could have a look for inspiration? http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/_media/welcome_to_the_ma...
Your restrictive password policy could be costing you users
"to work harder than 95% of the people on the planet"

What?
I am not entirely convinced that unicode has been retrofitted elegantly into Delphi. A lot of legacy functions using string (read: what is now AnsiString) have been modified to still support string; so AnsiPos() for instance takes string, unless you use AnsiStrings unit. And that's just confusing.

In a code base like the one I work with all the way back to Delphi 3, there are other legacy issues as well; such as the late arrival of TBytes, which meant that in olden days you had to handle binary data in strings. Now suddenly they are unicode strings are far less reliable for unicode.

Of course, the compiler doesn't warn you about that, because it isn't clear what you were doing back then. Still, took us a year to get our code from Delphi 2007 to XE3.

I am not saying Delphi is the worst thing ever, but I wouldn't say its legacy support is as elegant as you put it. There are issues, that are not noted by the compiler (unlike the deprecated flag for old functions and the like).

Also the fact that it used to have both {$ENDIF} and {$IFEND} is amusing, but at least now they only want one; but you cannot change it because then it would break code that needs to be compiled in an older version of Delphi.

Edit: But I will say this: I do believe unicode was introduced into Delphi as elegantly as possible. It's very hard to do truly elegantly, I'd imagine.
Having a US head-office I'm frequently bemused / confused as to why companies in that country so readily lay-off the staff of canceled projects, instead of redeploying them internally to fill other vacancies.

Particularly in large corps there's nearly always some other division crying-out for staff with hands-on knowledge of their industry and product, instead of spending $50,000 to hire someone out of college and then train them.
Test proofs expensive batteries don’t last longer – cost $0.04 to make
It's just a bullshit limit that gets in the way of my reading. More times than not I have _not_ read an article just because it's not worth the extra effort. I know the NYT doesn't care about losing my eyeball in that instance just as I don't care enough about the article to go the extra mile. It works for both of us.
> People need to act in their own interest and take vacation they need, which may not be in the company's best interest.

It's almost always in the company's best interest for employees to be well rested and not burned out

> This policy presumes, incorrectly, that what is good for the employee is good for the company.

Because it is, in this instance.

> The basic premise and expectation is that people should take only as much time off as they need to remain good little not burnt out workers.

The premise is that people can take as much holiday as they like. Some people will take the minimum, and some people will take long periods.
This is my biggest nightmare. Consumer choice being limited due to corporate politics and killing innovation for bottom line because of old school corporate thinking.

Imagine working on a product, getting bought out, and seeing your hard work being dumped in the garbage because that was already their plan. Sure, you might have millions, but did you really make a change in the world? I think it would be an empty experience.
I think that particularly in the Valley it often ends up essentially exploiting the crush-code-with-your-forehead-after-70-hour-weeks culture and young employees who have not yet learned appropriate boundary setting. People would catch on a lot quicker if it were called "unlimited salary." I mean, sure, you can have as much money as you want... but dude, $3k? What do you need $3k for? Your rent is only $2.5k and we give you free soda? $3k? We all take $2.8k, bro. What's up with that?
Mine have a 2016 expiration date. It just depends on the grant agreement.
My advice regarding the usability vs power issue is to have multiple stages. You'd have a DSL/query language that you parse, is secure, etc. And then you'd have a UI over the top of that which automatically creates the right queries.

The win here is that you then have an easy interface for 90% of users but the remainder with more bizarre or complex requirements can still get to where they want to go by either writing a query themselves in an "advanced" field of some sort, or you could even do it for them for $$$. Embedded JavaScript is an option here.

I would contrast this with something I would not advise, having a visual interface go straight to a database query behind the scenes.. because then you're basically limited to what you exposed in the UI.
I can hardly believe this is never discussed on HN, is it fake or what?
Handlestuffandwritetofile() is a total mistake
Take out Daylight Savinga Time while you're at it, and I'm on board.
I spend a lot of time working on models. This is not a "poisonous and anti-intellectual" statement, it is simple a statement grounded in experience.

There are dozens of failed projects to make different models work together. It would be such a beautiful concept if we could "snap" different models people built together like legos and watch how they interact and develop together. It is also a concept very inline with the hacker mindset where we all observe the phenomenal success of the UNIX building block approach to getting things done.

It is a great idea in theory, but in practice making models work together is incredibly difficulty. You have massive issues of scale (specifically in regards to temporal scale with process going on at very different rates) and context. This has been tried again and again. There are many software packages designed to make this easy. As a general rule, they simply do not work outside of narrowly focused domains.

What is "poisonous" to science (and science funding) is to overpromise and underdeliver. What is also "poisonous" is to ignore a long history of modeling and simulation work and the hard-earned lessons and failures gained from that work.
Outside of the germline, C. elegans does not undergo cellular division in the adult stage. There is a fixed developmental pattern, with exactly 959 cells in the adult hermaphrodite. Also, the connectivity map of the entire nervous system is known.
Update: Nike confirmed a small number of layoffs but denies FuelBand shutdown, according to re/code:

“The Nike+ FuelBand SE remains an important part of our
business,” the company said in a statement emailed to
Re/code. “We will continue to improve the Nike+ FuelBand App,
launch new METALUXE colors, and we will sell and support the
Nike+ FuelBand SE for the foreseeable future.”

http://recode.net/2014/04/18/nike-denies-fuelband-shutdown-b...
>or a central ledger

Yeah, a central ledger works great if you want none of the benefits that Bitcoin offers.

>Essentially, anything which is inherently centralized has no business being on a blockchain. This is really anything backed by a physical asset

Bitcoin has proven that decentralized assets have huge advantage. Your starting assumption is wrong; wealth is not inherently centralized, and assets are not inherently centralized.
It's rather easy to trade cryptocurrencies in a decentralized manner. BTC goes into multisig, you receive the altcoin, BTC goes out of multisig. It only gets hard when dealing in fiat.

Nothing can stop people from falling into fraudulent schemes. Many altcoins are heavily premined, the developers are BS, or the developers have a disproportionately large upside compared to investors. But all of that should be apparent to all onlookers.

The main problem I see with sidechains is that 51% attacking them is made easy by default. Unless you negotiate deals with huge mining pools, there's not enough security, and BTC can be stolen from sidechains if miners attack it. So the idea of sidechains looks dependent upon mining centralization which is a big enough issue already.

I wholeheartedly agree with other posters. Blockchains just aren't good at certain use cases. You can't do HFT on a blockchain, even one with 10 second blocks. OTOH, the blockchain is censorship resistant and pseudonymous. In areas where excessive rules and regulations push out the little guy, the blockchain can be a solution.
Evan, thanks for all the hard work on this project.

We use it every day at work. At first we were like, what is this 'Clowncopterize' button? But then we enabled the serious business flag and we were off and running.