skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if you need to take say, 90 days off because of family issues, the official company policy stipulates that this is ok to do.

Depending on the nature of the family issues, in the US they're required to by the Family and Medical Leave Act (http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/)

> 20 day vacation policy

In my experience in California, 20 days is pretty generous. Most companies with vacation policies start you at two work weeks per year, not including sick days. While this increases slightly with seniority in larger companies, tech companies tend to have high turnover so seniority is kind of meaningless

> This policy is a way to empower employees against such managers

Other than some high profile large companies, most companies that I'm aware of with untracked vacation are small. The manager/employee dynamic at small companies is very different and the manager and employee have little empowerment over each other at all (in both a good and bad way)

Personally, I'm at a small company with untracked vacation and it creates a lot of social pressure not to use it. Some is imagined pressure in that it it turns it into a "can I take..." favour-type question instead of "I'm taking..." declarative form to fill out, but also real pressure in that the small-team dynamic means that I know personally everyone that will be inconvenienced by my not being around. This gives them a sort of social veto power that does happen in real life anywhere near an event like a release. Since no company is sitting around doing nothing all of the time, there's always a release of some sort on the visible horizon and of course those have "real" veto power rather than just social.

It also creates a significant disparity in how much employees at the same company take. Some employees feel the social pressure and don't take any, and some seem to not feel it and never seem to be around. IME vacation taken tends to be inversely correlated to general employee quality which is exactly the opposite of what you want.

As a result, I probably take half the vacation I could if I just knew the magic "okay" number to take and generally only for something that I can articulate like a trip somewhere or because family is in town. When I had tracked vacation, I'd take off an arbitrary Friday to sleep in or run the errand queue or just hang out. Now I don't do that and the difference in mood that creates is palpable.

I didn't think that burnout was real until I got "unlimited" vacation.
I'm curious what was your job that required (or at list benefited from) an experience with Lisp Machine.
Previous comment used the term legally guilty.

You then referenced Jimmy Carr as an example and used the words guilty inferring legal and moral guilt.

He was guilty of neither but he had a public persona to protect and admit wrongdoing where none existed.

If subsequent legislation attempts to limit TAS with the "fair admittance" rule of checking the box it has no retrospective bearing on the conduct of Jimmy Carr.
A lot of these analyses seem to wish away the agency of graduate students. These people seem to think that we're all being tricked into joining graduate programs by professors making us false promises of unattainable faculty positions. In my case, both my masters thesis advisor and my phd advisor were open about the fact that academic jobs are hard to come by and are not even too much fun in the current funding scenario.

I chose to do a phd knowing full well that it was not the right choice in terms of maximizing my earning potential. Certainly it wasn't a guarantee of a better job because I already had a job in a group where about half my colleagues were phds from more or less the same set of universities I was applying to.

For me, the phd has been a mind-opening experience. It has let me learn things and think about things in an environment that simply doesn't exist outside of academia. An environment where there's no pressure to deliver something useful right now.

It's possible I'm misreading him, but I've certainly run into a fair number of John-types. These guys are ridiculously smart and have faced almost no failure at all. Years and years of a positive feedback loop involving success and self-esteem seems to leave these people with a vastly inflated opinion of their own abilities. And this seems to affect in two ways: (a) their ego leaves them vulnerable to misreading cautious statements about the future (b) they can't seem to reconcile themselves to the fact that they might just be mediocre and not extraordinary.

For example, if a professor says, "the market for academic jobs is very competitive but one should be attainable if your thesis has a significant impact on the field." I read it as, "you have to be among the top 10 or so among all the CS phds in the entire world graduating that year. In other words, I don't have a chance in hell unless I get very very lucky." A John-type will think they have a good chance. It's not surprising at all to me that so many of them end up so bitter.
I doubt unlimited vacation is legal anywhere but the United States where our labor and employee wellness laws are much weaker than in the rest of the developed world.
Working on a Shopify backend for my startup http://originalfuzz.com. We make handwoven Peruvian guitar straps.

Here's my local dev setup:
http://i.imgur.com/cb0WuDH.png

New backend uses node and grunt along with the shopify theme manager. I can develop locally and keep it in git. Grunt watches the changes and the shopify theme manager uploads the new files. So I'm able to develop locally with haml and sass and deploy to my Shopify store as I work.

Also using https://github.com/toolsforliving/foundationify to integrate Foundation with Shopify. It's a good setup for anyone that needs to make an e-commerce site.
Our startup has tried both the Asus RT68-U and the Netgear N7000 (the two top of the line, AC1900 class, consumer routers on Small Network Builder[1]) for both office and factory operations with both stock and DD-WRT[2] firmwares.

Our initial preference was to lean towards the Asus given their track record on OpenWRT for the past few years. If your last experience with flashing a router's firmware was with the Linksys WRT-54G back in 2004 than you may have missed out on all the Asus development that happened in the past decade.

We found the Netgear N7000 performed better overall. We were reluctant to use it as it did not support Dual-WAN mode initially like the Asus on stock firmware. (I.e. primary Comcast internet, secondary Verizon MiFi usb adapter.)

We recently updated both routers to [Kong]'s firmware mod of DD-WRT[3] and now the Netgear N7000 blows everything out of the water.

At our factory we are concurrently connecting 50 previously unassociated WiFi devices every 30 seconds and the dual-core 1Ghz Netgear just keeps on trucking with no problems. Our Asus meanwhile will crash about once a day.

Going forward we will stick with the Netgear. It seems to have become the 'default' router on the DD-WRT community, with support for other routers being forks off the N7000 code. Given Linksys has long no longer been 'Linksys' been 'Cisco' been 'Belkin' been Marvell, I don't anticipate it superseding the thrown despite the classic throwback black and blue livery. The 1.2Ghz processor and quad-band antenna is nothing to snub at. Should be an interesting year for router enthusiasts.

[1]http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/322...

[2]In broad strokes, DD-WRT is like a nice, easy to install, easy to configure version of OpenWRT. If you previously preferred using Tomato to OpenWRT this is for you. OpenWRT is when you really want ring-zero console access only with no amenities out of the gate.

[3]http://tips.desipro.de/ - [Kong] made some modifications to DD-WRT to work better with the new AC-1900 class routers. They are fast becoming the master branch.
Hey that's some Golden Gophers stats right there!
The weird thing is, at a certain karma level, you can change the top bar color.

And that's it, as far as I know. You can't even change the top bar text color as well. It's like the one user-editable part of this site is also the least useful feature imaginable.
As long as you can sleep well ...
I know this is a basic question. But how exactly does Printoo work with Arduino? Do I need to buy anything from Arduino in order to use Printoo?
Assuming you can read the media, it's actually not hard to read old DOS word processing formats on modern PCs: both software and services exist to convert them, and, worst-case scenario, you can still run old DOS word processing software on modern PCs through virtualization and emulation.

Wang WPS files on open-reel tape, say, or Locoscript files on Amstrad 3" (not 3.5"!) floppies, are admittedly much harder to convert, but by no means impossible. Worst-case scenario, firms exist that'll convert things like this as a service.
Longaccess is your Swiss bank for personal data
A more sensible approach would be "if it's frost season, cover the plants".

If you're a homeowner and you've got a small garden or some potted plants, covering them in straw or bringing them indoors isn't a major concern.

If you're a farmer with a crop that may need to be harvested, smudged, or sprayed with water (ice coating protects some crops), with a nontrivial investment of time and materials, the distinction is meaningful.
You do now. You didn't have to then.

My father in law is a senior partner in a national accountancy firm. He refers to it is as the Jimmy Carr disclosure.
It's not really possible to compare LIKE to ZRANGEBYLEX. LIKE in a general case is an infix search in all text in a column, while ZRANGEBYLEX is a special case of search of all values within a given range. ZRANGEBYLEX uses a lexicographic comparison, so one can only search for strings with a prefix between certain values.
I'm working on a game titled Aerannis about a female assassin who may or may not be schizophrenic. She fears that she's losing touch with reality entirely and trapped in a world of her own delusions, but comes to realize that she may really just be the center of a global conspiracy.

http://i.imgur.com/Li0guL8.png

http://i.imgur.com/Sstch17.gif

http://i.imgur.com/j0yUGI8.png

http://i.imgur.com/tE5nfAU.png

Nothing as complex or inventive as the other projects here, but it's all that I'm working on at the moment.
waits for them to reply with another message, and then aggregates the replies

Basically, you are proposing that the world actor aggregate the entire world's data? That wouldn't scale. Or, maybe the world actor just becomes responsible for adjudicating moves between subgrids. Maybe.
Indeed. My apologies.

First of all, learning the command line, git, vim, and Python is a bit too much for a beginner to handle all at once. IMHO, vim alone will scare off a lot of people.

Second, being exposed to a lot of different programming languages is very beneficial for a beginner.
Fucking awesome art, dude.

Any gameplay vids? Demos?

What are you deving in? What platforms do you hope to release for?
This has been my first project working server-side. It's like, more complex than Pinterest and less complex than Tumblr.

http://imgur.com/sQkJPcI

One thing I have really enjoyed in this app is having built something in an industry which I have 0 knowledge and almost 0 interest. (fashion, beauty, health). I believe it's allowed me to build much more effectively and detach many of the emotions from building and any preconceived ideas about a particular industry. I normally work in front-end and because I'm looking for a job now I've seen a lot of employers give me a stink eye when I dont have experience in a particular industry or even an interest. I think it's odd and I can see their concerns but I also sometimes like to point out that I can also add to the team something nobody else can, a fresh perspective.

In order to stay motivated I have found inspiration not through the industry and the space itself, but through efficiency and learning new tools that power this website. One of the things I'm most proud is a prototype of a client side feature in which I'll be allowing users to create 'hotspots' anywhere in the image they upload. A typical use-case would be for a user to create a hotspot over a particular item of clothing or accessory and reference a referral link to that product. I've also re-created this hotspot feature in mobile and in videos on top of the Youtube API.
Great comment, and I agree. I'd just add that it's probably more like tens of thousands of "new apps of these kind" that are written every year ...

I'm assuming you meant the last paragraph of your comment in a sarcastic way :)
Great reply, thank you for clarifying!

I sometimes like to think about the ethical consequences of having that type of data and computation power.
For example it's very likely for it to be used to perform experiments in biology.

But who's to say that an organism simulated in that low level is any different from the real thing? If there even such a thing as "the real thing".

And it gets even weirder when simulating human beings. Is a simulated person any different from us? Is he really conscious or does he merely "behave" conscious? Is it ethical to use it for experiments? What about entertainment? And also, it raises the possibility that we ourselves might be simulated in one level or another.

I think that in some point humanity will have to face these questions. Though from what I understand from you, we still have a few centuries to get there... Man, that's something I'd love to see.
Shares are not cash, IBM has to know who to send dividends to. That does not mean you can't have middlemen just a known address or bank account + number of shares.
For me this comparison falls apart because I've seen very few companies as generous with vacation days as with salary, compared with the two companies in a row I've now been at with unlimited policies. I rarely see more than 3 weeks offered for new employees, and many feel that that's generous ("it's more than two"). So I'm not comparing it to a generous metered vacation policy, I'm comparing it to what I usually see for "peer"-type roles. And I haven't had any trouble whatsoever taking more than 3 weeks, or seen other people get into hot water over it. :)

So the benefit is definitely realized for me. I don't think about it. I couldn't tell you exactly how many days I took off with all the incidental ones here and there, but I can tell you it's more than I was allowed to at my first job because there were enough larger, multi-day trips in there.

I would have no problem if they instead switched it to, say, five weeks + a separate generous sick time pool, but at that point the math also gets more messy with accrual and all since that money would be coming from somewhere... and frankly, I like that I don't make relatively less money because someone else was a workaholic and accrued a bunch of vacation they never take but will eventually get paid for, if I can be at my most productive with a healthy amount of time off.

It is a downside, though, in that it may require some more negotiation skills to make sure you get a fair amount of time off. However, I've also seen people get denied time off at certain times under metered plans—they're no panacea for "but it's crunch time for the project, you can't take off now!" tactics.
Why the f%%k do people think 30's is old? A 50 yr old George foreman KTFO the heavy weight champion of the world but a 35 yr old must not be able to handle algorithms.
The job ads for F# usually do have higher salaries than those for C# programmers. However, I think you misunderstand why that is the case; it's not (just) because good F# developers are harder to find than good C# developers, it's because a good F# developer will be more productive, even more so than reflected by the salary ratios. A good F# developer is (almost always) going to also be very proficient in C# too, so they'll be able to switch back and forth easily and use whichever language is better-suited for a specific project.
I'm extremely skeptical of this, even though I spend a good deal of my time trying to automate machine 2 machine communication (which gets me thinking about this a lot). I also think that there's a good amount of hubris in these scientists believing that the brain is something that can be emulated by computing power of any kind...are we sure it's an apt analogy (brain as computer)?
“Do not allow me to forget you” ― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

(we won't forget you)
I'm sad that domain did not work :(
Is working in the browser?
the grid has to balance its own generation, but that happens today

Yes, but today (i.e., without individual homeowners putting power back into the grid) the grid's control system can assume that the load is always positive except at a finite and fairly small number of known points, the grid's generators, which are controlled by the grid itself.

When individual users can put power back into the grid, the load can become negative at any arbitrary location in the grid, without warning. That greatly complicates the control problem.

The dream has to be a proper demand response system, with electric cars being a key sink for excess generation.

Yes, and who's going to pay for that? (Not the electric cars, but the improvements in the grid that allow it to make use of them as storage.) An obvious solution is to charge the people who are creating the problem by making their connection with the grid two-way instead of one-way.
I agree interactive shells suck. I like to use Acme which has been called Plan 9's Emacs, but it uses the shell tools instead of Lisp. In Acme I can enter a shell command -- I can write it directly in the appropriate dir list if I want -- then to execute it either drag over it with the middle button, or select the whole line (by double-clicking after the end; nice and easy) and then middle-click. It's much nicer than groping around blindly in a regular shell window. I've not found it so good when I wanted to use environment variables, but I've just thought on Plan 9 I could edit the files in /env directly. Not sure if that will work correctly though.
This is really cool. It looks a lot like baudline; have you ever used that?
I'm a few months away from releasing a demo and I haven't recorded any videos in a while. I'm making fairly rapid progress on it, so any videos I have are tremendously out of date.

I'm making it in Lua/Love2d and I'll be releasing it for Windows/OS X/Linux. Love apparently works on Android as well, so I'll see if I can port it to that after I finish it.
For "real" shares, yeah. (also, voting, and other rights at dissolution). I think it is possible to have a virtual corporation which has some kind of self-enforcing dividend also payable in bitcoins. The practical benefit of this for any company with a legal presence is minor, but allowing something to exist entirely online with no particular jurisdictional ties would be nice.

I still don't think the benefits of this make up for the costs of the blockchain for most uses.
Because F# + London = Most likely to be a investment bank or finance.

Which is really annoying because I want to do functional programming, but the only place they employ those programmers in the UK is london.
Another vote for the Fiskar X27. I haven’t used anything else for a few seasons now.
Well that just cost me 30 minutes. Excellent. Well done.
Excellent post.

Yeah the build times were stupidly fast.

Lead to some bad habits though - e.g. Why debug when you can trial & error 10 solutions per minute (on a weak box)?

The first time I used VB/C++ I thought the IDE had crashed because it took so long to build...
A "fitbit with extra featres" would be underwhelming. Anything that is not revolutionary on the scale of the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad would not be credible as a core Apple product - which is what Wall Street is crediting the iWatch with being. If Apple did come out with a FitBit competitor they'd be wise to avoid the "watch" moniker, perhaps going with iFit, iBand or something similar.
Unicode was retrofitted into PHP and then the entire effort was abandoned, so yes, i think anything would be more elegant.

PHP currently supports unicode in the same way as lua or C - every string is a binary string. If you want correct UTF-8 behaviour in string functions then instead of using libc or string_ functions, you must pass the character set as an additional parameter to specialised mb_ string functions instead.
I’ve always used the bungee trick, too. Easier than getting split wood out of the tire.
I wish it was easier to browse by locations

E.g.: hackatonwatch.com/seattle
I have been working on a salary crowdsourcing platform http://salaryfairy.com

After receiving great feedback from a show HN, we are glad to have been able to implement almost all of the suggestions we received from HN.

screenshot: http://salaryfairy.com/static/fairy/images/report_page_new.p...
Edinburgh University student here, first introductory computer system course also introduces assembly and system programming with MIPS.
Which prices are those? When I go to the doctor I get an insurance statement that says something like:

Billed: $800

Paid by insurance: $200

You owe: $0
Your next car without the hassle
Hm. Racial and gender diversity good, but old, fat, and ugly (whatever that means) people bad. OK.
What they're saying is that their underlying hardware has been selected such that it can be used with the Arduino programming environment to target it as if it were a regular Arduino. So it is compatible with Arduino software and tools.
Learning From Korea's Disaster
The company was already "Inprise" by then, right? That was when I started losing faith
This is like Unlimited Webhosting. It is unlimited as long as you are within limits set by board that you cannot know what exactly they are. It is extremely confusing.
Better yet - just do 1 week mandatory holiday every 3 months. This way all employees would get fair amount of holidays, they would not take long leaves hurting company workflow and would allow employees to recharge batteries every quarter. Not only you would get rid of people abusing holiday system, but also get workaholics to leave the office for 7 days every 3 months with de-activated entry card so they couldn't just "pop in" for some documents etc. If there is deadline you are worried about - then work late for few days but take freaking holidays. Spend some time with kids. Travel. Sort your issues and re-think your work strategy from safety of house.
Extraordinary beautiful.
Thanks for your comment. I'm working on the portfolio. After you said FizzBuzz, I googled it. Couldn't grasp what the trick question was in the test, so I had to google solutions since I thought I must have misunderstood. Where are these statistics that claim it has such a crazy failrate coming from? This is the first thing we do in the first course, but with line breaks and colorcoding.

I would only quit college if I got a decent web dev job, since I'm living of my spouse and it can get a bit too sparse sometimes.
I would agree, but hey Apple does have the brightest people on board to make the new iWatch both sexy for the masses and extremely useful. I was looking at either Fitbit or Misfits Wearable, both extremely well designed, and one of them is coming from te "hands" of an ex apple engineer
This wrapper should grab more than just distance/duration.text (see https://github.com/edwlook/node-google-distance/blob/master/... - I'm assuming Google's API includes the distance as a number, and unit of measurement).

If people want to use this API to convert to a different unit, they have to parse the text which would be very clunky.
I'm a bit miffed as to why MS didn't use F# -- a language from a family of languages designed to implement compilers -- to implement Roslyn. If they had, they could've even gone back later and re-implemented parts of it in F* to guarantee the compiler was bug-free!
Working on a mitre sled experiment for use on a table saw. This will allow me to get precise mitres between wood panels. Using Rhino3D/Grasshopper. A few more real-world tests before I redesign it parametrically.

http://i.imgur.com/McFWvHl.png