skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope, no minimum vacation time.

Also, to save you a few years of surprises, here are some other factoids:

there's minimal healthcare, likely to be canceled by the next president

minimum wage is the equivalent of 5.33 euros and for waiters its only 1.57euros

Payday is not mid month but well after you do the work.

You can be fired at anytime without any waring for any reason from most jobs. Frequently a security guard will escort you out of the building.

But on the upside:

There's a death penalty in 3/5 of the country

The notion that the world is 6000 years old is sometimes taught in school.

You can buy a gun instantly in most states.

We have a per capita GDP almost as high as a northern European country.

We may not be socialist. Well, ok, some people say we are so never mind.
That guy is the poster child for the Materialistic Self Entitled Baby Boomer Me Generation.

Materialism and greed are literally everything that is wrong with the world.

Spoilied Douchebags like he and his generation are a legacy hangover from post-WW2 America, a time of middle class economic excess greater than any the HUMAN RACE has ever seen.

Americans aren't exceptional in any way.

We just got lucky by being the only 1st world country not in the middle of World War 2 so we reaped ton's of resources and opportunities from that and we have been coasting on it ever since and attributing it to our 'exceptionalism'. Americans love to believe that the individual is greater than his situation. Such bullshit.

You want hard workers look at China. I can't wait until Communist ass China is the next world power and assholes like the guy in the commercial don't understand why 'Mericans aren't exceptional any more.

I'm so grateful that the new American generation's self awareness, global consciousness, hacker ethic, lack of racism, community values, and so many more positive qualities are replacing douchebags like this.
HTTPie has just been added to Homebrew:

$ brew install httpie
Therein lies the problem with the US and the mentality of the citizens. Since the proletariat are "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", the safety net is never there. To even take advantage of it is shameful. Perhaps unrelated, but the status of your achievements is reflected by how much you need to pay or put into it such as your job and even that 5-star hotel where you need to pay for breakfast and Wi-Fi.
Rights Group Is Seeking Status of ‘Legal Person’ for Captive Chimpanzee
Editorially joins Vox Media
German Gold Stays in New York in Rebuff to Euro Doubters
well I was trying to be funny.. but blood alcohol does indeed have a physical model that relates consumption to levels in the blood.

And atmospheric temperature has a simple physical model that relates it to C02 levels. And I use the term "simple" deliberately because whilst the short term fluctuations of climate are indeed vey complex - on geological time we have always seen rising temperatures with rising CO2 and have a simple compelling atmospheric model to explain it.

Without arguing over the resolution of the historical scientific data or how fast global warming will happen - it seems inevitable that with the current CO2 levels it will happen.
> The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment

Don't forget having a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (when compared to countries like the US), something that is often forgotten when holding up Scandinavian countries (esp. Norway) as a model.
GDP per capita is a terrible measure here. There are countries that work significantly less than us and still have similar or higher productivity levels (some countries like Switzerland even have higher GDP per capita though that's still irrelevant). Not to mention a much higher quality of life. (http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2...)

This isn't surprising considering the water cooler based work culture in the US. This benefits no one, but since there are almost no laws protecting workers, most workers have no choice but to comply or be fired. Then, of course, you have the people that do it intentionally, especially in the software industry, as a badge of honor or because delusional thinking makes them seem productive when they're actually less productive. The ones who can take vacation and won't. Mixing the desperate former and insane latter is exactly what most US companies strive for as their ideal work culture.

What the article overlooks is the unemployment caused by overtime. Two people working at 60 hours are roughly equivalent to one 40 hour a week job taken out of the economy--though obviously, the quality is much less than having a dedicated third person working. This isn't true for all jobs, just most.
Thanks again for this, this evening I'll investigate why lodash beats fast.js on some of the iteration functions (although they're close)
What database do you use that supports parameterized table names?

Edit: see also, ORDER BY field names
The US is one of (or the only?) industrialized nations to have no legally mandated amount of paid time off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacation_time#Statutory_Vacatio...
Paul Vixie leaves stealth mode
You seem to imply that higher GDP of a country is relevant for quality of life of its citizen. Knowing the US and Europe, I was also wondering what this high GDP is about, because it surely does not translate to material wealth.

Googling reveals: GDP includes military expenses, bloated health care expenses, bloated education costs, ... I guess that explains the relation.
Everything is an Investment
Awesome hack. It'd be interesting to run the rules in reverse: i.e. take some code, run it backward through the mapping and see what music comes out.

(P.S. you can't really call it C# minor if there are no cadences, ya know, in C# minor.)
The banking example you cite are voluntary industry practices or self-regulation, not legally enforced.
Interesting, but reminds me how weird people are.
Enhanced Google Chrome Emulation Tools
> In the USA many people grumble if the city wants you to pay only a couple dollars a month in return for the privilege of being allowed to park along the side of the public streets, on top of a patch of asphalt that probably costs the city many times as much to maintain.

Most municipal parking permits I have seen are more on the order of a couple of dollars a day for weekdays. That provides far more revenue than the cost of maintaining just the parking spaces themselves. In fact, parking enforcement is often the greatest expense in maintaining paid municipal parking, and I know a few cities in South Florida that ditched paid street parking because they noticed that nearly all the revenue was effectively going towards collecting the revenue.

> I've heard people complain that it's communist for the city to charge for parking. Because here in the USA socialism means, "Either giving free things to people who aren't me, or not giving free things to people who are me."

To me, paying for government services al la carte is a very libertarian arrangement. I don't know anyone who would call it "communism", but I have certainly encountered hypocrites who decry freebies for others while also decrying lack of freebies for themselves.
Beyond Tianhe-2
Ireland bags another gong: world’s ‘goodest’ nation
There is surely some freedom in being able to set whatever policies you like at your company without having a federal entity stipulate you give each employee X days of paid vacation.

If you want to heavily incentivize a cultural shift towards more vacation time for US employees, I don't think a federal mandate is as attractive as just an economic incentive. (Tax break to companies where X% of employees take more than Y days per year etc)
Frankly, S3 is awesome as it is - I would appreciate it if there was direct connect between DO and AWS.
> The code on most of SpaceX's spacecrafts is in C++.

A few weeks ago I found out that the B-2 Spirit now flys on olde C.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit#Fur...

> I think it is rather embarrassing that most code written in modern languages performs worse on today's computers than native code running on 1980s machines.

Are there any sources to support this statement, or are you drawing on personal experience?
Opera Buys Mobile Video Ad Platform AdColony For Up To $275M
I think the real message is:

"Hey, we're a company. We have things. That doesn't mean users use our things, or that developing for said things is going make you money or a userbase. That requires looking at the market and seeing where users are."

They create the supply side. If there is no demand, blindly working in their tools is just a silly mistake. I think it has been plainly demonstrated nothing Windows Phone offers entices the mobile market away from Android en masse at this point.
This is a genuinely hard problem and it's great to see new companies taking it on. Unfortunately this particular instance is close to useless - US only is a non starter, it's why this stuff is hard in the first place.

Dealing with country-specific services is as good as aggregating relevant databases directly.

I'd pay good money for a single API that covered most of the western world, and seamlessly integrated external services (e.g. Equifax in the UK)
Download a list of email gravatar images (A Ruby Script)
this is a small practice of downloading a list of anonymous emails gravatar images, this could give you a good indicator of what email is active.
the script is for fun use only, i got the list of emails from pastebin
and you can use any emails list.

Full script with docs : https://github.com/blazeeboy/RubyScripts/tree/master/2014-06-24
People in tech industry (all I know) tend to call in sick to "recharge" or get things done (that are causing them stress) rather than take vacation. The interesting thing is that this tacitly known to not really be sick and accepted both by peers and management. Vacation == lazy. Sick days == we all pretend we work 60hr weeks non-stop.

Cultural anecdote example from http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#quickstart

2012-03-29 09:00 Called in sick.
Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.
I don't know about the security vulnerabilities, but it works fine as a config file format (we use it at my company for a lot of in-house stuff). I had a similar reaction to the language. Even if not YAML, why not just use JSON? It's universal, dead simple to use and understand, has extensive libraries in just about any language, etc...

That said it's not that big of a deal. At least it's not an in-house markup like Haskell's cabal...
France, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain are developed nations, they just don't suit your argument. They all have or did have very long vacation days per year.

And you cant just cherry pick a few european countries and compare against the whole of the US. If we are going to play that game, why not pit them against silicon valley, manhatan, etc.
Can someone explain to me why paid vacation is ok? If you don't work, in other words contribute to your job, why in the hell should you be paid? By the way that doesn't mean I don't believe in the workers' welfare, but just not in this way.
You know it is very easy to be generous with another person's money. Yet mandating yourself rights to their money will likely lead to less jobs as many can be off shored. I know, what about those service jobs; automation.

Guild tripping works to a point. However this is a two way street. Many companies voluntarily offer paid maternity leave, some offer time off and paid time off. Yet who is there to hold the workers accountable? Just the cost of doing business? We all know people at work or have know that so abuse the system it makes your head spin.

In professional fields we have a choice who we work for, we can choose the good companies and if they continue to do well that will encourage their competitors to step up their game. However we should never assume we deserve something just because someone else has it or we convince ourselves its a good idea.
I don't get why people make a distinction between man-made climate change, and "natural" climate change, when both have equally terrible results. Even if the earth is "natually" warming, it's still going to cause issues. Why not work to stop it?
The v2 API is a huge improvement, great work!

If you're in need of a Ruby client, check out barge: https://github.com/boats/barge.

Additionally, Tugboat[1] will be moving from my github account over to the 'boats' org and using the new API. If you're interested in helping with an existing project (such as Tugboat or Barge), or a new one, please let me know!

[1]: https://github.com/pearkes/tugboat
Can you show me a link for that? I'd be interested in reading about it.

What I've read is that a lot of people on disability benefits (higher than jobseekers allowance) were in fact just fine and when properly re-examined magically stopped being disabled.

However, that assumes the review assessment was more reliable than the old one. I'd be interested in data showing whether it is or isn't.
def doappend_dwim(arg = []):
arg.append('a')
return arg

assert(doappend_dwim([]) == ['a'])
assert(doappend_dwim() == ['a'])
assert(doappend_dwim() == ['a','a'])
That's not really carte blanche to build everything on unstable technology. The point is things are supposed to be converging on stabilization. And a lot of what's unstable now is under the direct control of Rust. What TOML does or doesn't do is now a matter that needs to be worked out with Tom. It's not confidence-inspiring in the least.

If the plan is to jettison TOML, then it's simply just an odd choice to use for a first cut. And from a purely perception manner, seemingly reaffirms concerns some have had about the bundler team building cargo (right or wrong).
His "optimization killers" article is also really insightful: https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Optimization-k...
SlamData Releases Open Source Analytics for MongoDB – Denver Post
Disproving climate change is virtually impossible. Every scientist agree that climate changes, it has done so in the past, will do in the future and is doing it in the present.

That is not an interesting question.

The interesting questions are:

- Is climate changing in a different way (faster, for example) than it has done in the past?

- Do humans have anything to do with it? Is it caused by increasing levels of atmospheric CO2?

- Will this change be negative?

- If the change is negative (be it man-made or not), can we stop it?

- If we can stop this climate change, how much will it cost? Will this money better spent stopping climate or is a better strategy to adapt to this change?

- Do we understand climate physics well enough to create models that can predict the climate of the future?

This last question is important, because if we can not produce a model that can predict the future well enough, all the other questions are irrelevant. And it seems that predictions of the models and reality are showing quite significant discrepancies: http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/06/ipcc-ar5-weakens-the-case-...

So it's not black or white, yes or no, good or bad. As usually it is in science. Name-calling, appealing to consensus, arguments of authority… those are never the result of science at work.
this is also why the USA is a lot more religious than other developed countries
don't down vote comments like this because you disagree with obamacare
Most EU unemployment is in the countries comprehensively raped by the IMF/EU Central Bank/European Commission cabal, who swooped in after 2008 demanding huge cuts in social spending so that the bond investors who were partly responsible for the crisis would be inconvenienced as little as possible.

Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus have seen huge leaps in unemployment, underage prostitution, suicide, child and adult mortality, and drug use as a result.

They used to be solid economies, with EU-wide unemployment running at around 7%. Now they're hollowed out shells.

'Employers' have nothing to do with this. It was purely a political decision, based on bad economic science (at best) and north-south racism at worst.
The world's first end-to-end encrypted 'Email 3.0'
It's not normal. The majority of people can't be bothered switching it on or off, so they just leave it on all the time.
This phone has the same launch price. If one sees a price drop, the other is likely to as well. You can get the Moto E for $130 on Amazon right now as well.
Being high-level is about more than having features - you also need to lack some features. More is not always more, if you get me. High level languages don't get segfaults. I'm not saying that dangerous behavior should be impossible, just that it should require a conscious decision where the developer is aware of the danger. In contrast C++ almost actively seeks to lead the programmer astray, hampering every effort to create good code. It's not quite the sirens singing to Odysseus - that would be PHP - but it's close.
Notice what I said here: "If you're afraid of taking vacation only because of what you've heard from the media"

If you're afraid of taking vacation because of first hand knowledge about the culture of your company wrt vacations, by all means, be afraid of taking time off.
Ah I see what you mean. I should dig out Qt again really - I haven't used it for years. I have managed to make do with wxWidgets.

Regarding iOS and Android, the attempts at getting C++ on them (particularly Android) are brave but I think for normal apps (not OpenGL or games), developers are probably better using Java.
Like you, I too am writing for the Big 3 normal desktop OSes, with sporadic Android development and iOS tinkerings, necessitating learning new languages.
FWTL (0.1): Library for Developing Wordpress Theme
> Should this prevent us building such real-world data into the language?

You didn't build it in to the language, you connected the language to a standard database via the hosted, proprietary runtime.

I'm not against this in principle - it's clearly a useful thing - but it's hardly revolutionary.

I already pay a company for essentially the same thing (where I use a DSL embedded in a programming language to interact with their database of social media).

Again, I'm not against the idea as I understand it, but the misuse of terminology and generally the way that various people associated with the project talk about it is a huge turn off.
Sure. I have been thinking about writing up a blog post about our work since it may be of use to others. A quick summary of some of our current microservices:

- Single sign-on. We have a service that abstracts users into identities that map to one or more actual logins. It facilitates the OAuth interaction with providers. To add login in any app, you just redirect the browser to the microservice's /auth/:provider API; it redirects through FB or whatever.

- For sites that don't want to rely on providers like FB, we also have a simple OAuth provider that has a basic user database with salted passwords, email/password management, etc.

- Data store. We have a structured, hierarchical document-oriented data store that is a thin layer on top of PostgreSQL. Most apps don't have their own database, but use this data store.

- Security. We have a common, path-based security model across apps that can be validated through calls into a central security microservice; it's mostly a registry of what apps delegate responsibility, and when you ask the security service about whether, say, you're allowed to modify the object at path acmecorp.blogapp.posts.1, it asks every app that is registered to be the authority for that path. For example, acmecorp.blogapp might use a role-based security system, but a different path exampleinc.cmsapp might use LDAP.

- Voting. For Reddit-style voting and kudos we have a small microservice.

- Search. We wrap our data store in an indexing system that uses ElasticSearch.

- Organizational management. We have a microservice that handles members, groups and their roles. It plugs into the security system so that we can delegate access to very precise parts of the system. For example, any user can see comments, only the author can edit a comment, and editors can update anything.

- Email/texting. We have a microservice that abstracts text and email, currently supporting things like Mailgun and Twilio. It allows us to swap out the implementation without the app knowing.

- GIS/map stuff. We have a separate microservices for geocoding and storing GIS features.

- Image/audio/video processing. We have a wrapper around ffmpeg and other tools that processes transcoding requests.

An important piece of the system is the extensive use of pub/sub via RabbitMQ exchanges to asynchronously publish and listen to events. For example, any microservice can listen to changes to any part of the data store (based on path or event). For example, our search microservice automatically populates ElasticSearch with content from the data store.

Lastly, every app has a microservice as its own backend; for example, if the app is a blog system, we have a frontend (eg., a Node.js desktop/mobile web UI), and a separate backend tailored to that frontend; the frontend treats the backend like any other microservice.
The ironic part about this is that companies think this is a benefit to the employee, when in reality this seems to be a classic example of the psychological anchoring bias that influences people to take LESS vacation. For those who aren't familiar, this is a well established psychological heuristic that says our decisions are heavily influenced by some 'anchoring' information, in this case, the number of vacation days allowed.

I'm heavily paraphrasing Kahneman here, but numerous experiments have shown this effect in a variety of ways. Perhaps most counterintuitively, in an experiment where an arbitrary limit was set on the purchase of soup on sale, the amount of soup people bought was twice what was bought when no arbitrary limit was set. I'm not aware of any empirical studies examining this with vacation days, but anecdotal evidence like this seems to support the influence of this effect. I'd be extremely interested to see the data on the number of vacation days taken by employees at the no set vacation companies vs. others.
Why? Are they Drunk when they pick you up? If not why does not matter if they were drunk 5 years ago, or 1 day ago, they are not drunk at the moment so that is all that should concern you.

I see you have a huge amount of faith in the legal system... That is sad
My grandfather's New Year's Eve ritual was to do the accounting for the year (he was an inventor and business owner). Post Nazi era, he was an engineering professor at Texas Tech, and replaced the ritual by grading of papers. Precisely one year before I was born, when he was 80, he did that and then died in his sleep.
The power of the mind
Comparing the Bunyan and Winston Node.js logging frameworks
But at the same time we can look at other planets with atmospheres w/ much higher compositions of green house gases and the environment is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for life. So why do we think we are immune to this? We pump a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, at non natural rates, what do you expect to happen?
Thank you for your post. This behaviour is surprisingly common (something similar albeit less expensive happened to me twice just in 2014, although in both cases I was stupid enough to do work before the contract was signed).

On the upside, nothing like enlightening a friend doing a reference check.
There's a lot of this sort of thing going on right now actually. I've been experimenting with dynamic interfaces on a tablet and found it to be strangely satisfying to have task-oriented controls come into view when they're likely to be needed.
Lessons Learned from Zen Kitchen