skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're certainly right that looking at a single factor like median income doesn't say anything about whether I'd want to live and work in a country or not. There is more to it, but it is largely determined by my personal preference, which differs from those of other people.

I think it is extremely hard to come up with a measurement for quality of life, but there are attempts to do it, e. g. the OECD Better Life Index http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/

But then too many factors can be overwhelming and hard to visualize. While the flower like shapes in the OECD example look nice, I find it hard to draw any conclusions from them.
AppCode vs. Xcode
I deliberately used the phrase "I don't see much of a problem with this" rather than "this is legal." I have no idea if it's legal, but I know that I don't have a problem with it.
What do you mean when you say "programming"? Sitting in front of the keyboard and typing? When I do "programming" I spend at least a third of the time with a pen and pencil and thinking about the structure or algorithms.

Without sitting down and thinking I just don't have enough good ideas in my head which I could type in for 6 hours straight.
> Because you want to stay in business and there are other healthcare providers the government could use instead?

Okay, now suppose that you have a patent on a particular drug or device or procedure and as a result are the monopoly provider of it. Where does the government go to get the lower cost alternative? Where is the downward pressure on your prices?
Because it is extorting guests into not leaving bad reviews online - regardless of service. I'm not really sure how one would think this is okay!
I think this is a sort of wacko reverse psychology gambit.[1]

The Yelp page is now attracting comments like "This place should be relocated to china. They have a policy about reviews that is unamerican."

So, if you're looking for a hotel that actively dissuades the sort of redneck who likes to throw around words like "unamerican", congratulations - you've found it!

[1] ok, ok, I don't.
Solaris 11.2 released
It's not extorting if they are clear about these terms before you decide to book the hotel.
Wow the Internet has already taken them down to 2 stars. I can't image this is going to end well once this news spreads to other internet communities.
> I can get done more than most people in that amount of time.

Not challenging you, just curious - how do you measure this?
In the scenario you present, I can get 4 hours of programming done in a day. The rest of the time, I'm emailing, thinking, writing, talking on the phone, etc., I'm not just goofing off on the interwebs. Software development isn't just programming, especially as a freelancer.

I don't quote clients based on how long I think it will take, or how long I think I can work. I quote them based on the profit I want to make. And some clients, who have projects I don't want to do, get quoted ridiculous rates. It's been somewhat surprising to see how many have gone even for that.

I charge per-day, not per-hour. I sometimes evaluate quality of life issues around a per-hour basis, but I think the smallest unit of work-time is a day, not an hour, so I charge by the smallest unit. I find this makes me a lot more honest about my time accounting, as there is no temptation to pad time with goofing off.
Is there any proof this is happening other than this post? I hope so otherwise internet vigilante justice is destroying a business and people's livelihoods.

Edit:

I took a look at their site and apparently they only enforce this policy for weddings:

"Also, please note that we only request this of wedding parties and for the reasons explained above."

The reasons seem to be that as guests are not booking the hotel themselves (presumably the bride/groom has done that for them) it may not be to their tastes and they feel it's unfair to leave a negative review of something you never would have booked in the first place because it's not to your taste.

I can kind of understand this reasoning, although it's not great.
Before mob justice drives this place out of business, perhaps those posting 1 star reviews should promise to take them down if the policy changes. Not that I agree with the policy, but a mistake like this might not be worth ruining some's life.
That's true in a vacuum. However, the high rating they have is clearly unjustified since they have been extorting people to remove negative reviews. Some collective action against the gaming of the system is called for and, I think, ethical in this case. Try thinking of it from the perspective of their competitors that don't extort their customers.
Google 'reveals user' over Gmail child abuse images
There are people who pay for this sort of service. Or so I've heard.
Oh, sure, but no one thinks they are violating the laws of physics anymore. It's "just" engineering now to get the accuracy and sustained-read lengths high enough.
I would say that you owe $300.
I have had two years of being paid by US company while in the UK and painful does not even begin to cover it. Initially I got airmailed checks (cheques) and would pay them into my UK branch who would promptly send them back to the US for clearance. It took one payment five months to end up in my account. Seriously.

We fixed it and started using wire transfers which worked fine but I would get beaten up on the exchange rate. I was one of the few people in the UK hoping our economy would get worse just to improve my rates :-)

I would say the biggest problems were

- W2 withholding (they had to have proof I was legit or they withheld taxes and payments)

- not having a US bank account

Getting a US account is on my todo list, but it was so problematic (my UK bank simply refused to help - less than 2million GBP turn over ? Fuck you, work it out yourself). There is a Silicon Valley bank that is more amenable but by the time I found them we what wire transfers sorted and it lost it's allure.

So until I am likely to do a lot of small business in the states, I am sticking with "wire me the money - or I don't work"
Also, while I have never freelanced, I would define day rate as simply "not to exceed 8 hours". If they want to make it exactly 8 hours, fine, but that's where ethics comes in. For myself, if I'm mentally spent, and recognize I'll do more harm than good if I keep trying to code, I'm okay with simply keeping an eye on email and responding to them (rather than only responding to high importance ones/phone calls), and if any non-mental tasks are available, doing those (documentation, minor refactorings, additional test coverage, etc).

EDIT: foz's comment x 100. Make it clear they're paying for exclusive rights to your time, not 8 hours of programming.
Inner functions – what are they good for?
Our immediate response should be to post negative reviews

"Activism" reviews are what make most online reviews useless. Please don't do that. And those who already have today do nothing but undermine their own reputation.

While the ridiculous penalty claim is outrageous and likely illegal, and their behavior on Yelp is unacceptable, everyone should always take a moment to understand where they're coming from[1]: In this case their gripe seems to be guests who did not specifically select the hotel, knowing what it was about, but instead had the hotel selected for them as members of a wedding party. Their issue is those people then evaluate and rate the hotel based upon it not being another type of hotel.

It's kind of a fair gripe, isn't it? If your normal business suffers because of a secondary business, you need to reassess costs of the second business. Now threatening a fine is hamfisted and simply stupid, but I understand why they want to do something.

[1] “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.”
It depends of your health and your sleep quality.

In good condition I exactly say like jos82.

When in pain (I have a back neck pain killing me since 2 weeks and it seems related to my working position) It is unsustainbale to focus even on other tasks than programming for more than 5 hours a day and sometimes less (like 3).

When going into burn-in (like
mbenjaminsmith, or
Daishiman) I can focus up to 8-10h+ a day, the problem is the burn-out: Months with reduced concentration and almost a negative productivity in quality and quantity some days.

When in good physical and psychological condition, I focus the same amount of time, but quality of code is way better.

At home, the lack of noise and unwanted interruption increases the capacity of concentration and I can code 6 hours with better quality. The lack of social interaction however on a long run however erodes my pleasure of working, so I don't do it too often. (but it should also happen in good working environment or with good mental Daishiman or walshemj).

Stresses debilitates me, so I code way slower and with poor quality during a crunch unless I kick a burn in.

That is the reason I prefer a balanced solution.

It is kind of funny we have the same feedbacks.

I have a theory that the difference between 4-5 and 5-6 is the difference between a crowdy working environment and a quiet one.

Could some of you tell whether you work in a crowded or a calm place too? It would be fun if I was right.
Interesting. I was normally quite happy at past hackathons that we only had 24hrs. (Startup Weekends or similar are different of course) But my general impression was that you can't build more than a PoC in most cases and thus 24hrs tend to be quite sufficient. With >24hrs you often end up in implementation hell and while that is the time required to also be able to properly prepare the business side of your pitch, it is most often wasted. At the last hackathon I attended (& won), we went from idea to PoC in ~12hrs (of 24h)...
Yes, if you can shuffle the non-programming tasks to fill up your day that's helpful, I usually put the emails/meetings/etc in my least productive part of the day

Harder to do if your job involves only programming
I looked at the deaths for one year in London and 9 out of 10 where cased by undertaking HGV (heavy goods vehicles) turning left - this wont help in that case.

Though it could be useful for touring cyclists - but they often have a review mirror.
Can someone living in the US tell me how this could be legal? Surely it's not?
I don't see any evidence that they've actually enforced the rule, but the rule is posted on their website: http://www.unionstreetguesthouse.com/events_weddings.shtml.
Traffic during the Facebook Outage
Yes on: http://www.unionstreetguesthouse.com/events_weddings.shtml
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7134798

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8127499
A day rate means a day's worth of your time, not necessarily of your code, and a standard workday normalizes to 8 hours. Don't sweat time on keys and be as productive as you'd normally be. If you'd normally take periodic breaks, take periodic breaks; the same goes for other work habits. If you can't code continuously for 8 hours (and most people can't), find other ways to contribute your skills. I believe this is fairly standard consulting practice.
Yeah this guy knows what's up.

Bill based on the value you bring, not the time you spend heads-down.
I agree, posting fake reviews as an individual is as bad as what they are doing. I think the services should put a warning though. Something like this: "The reviews for this hotel may not be completely accurate according to some recent evidence and we are still investigating the case. Thank you for your understanding".
It's great to hear that I'm not the only one who runs into the last one sometimes. In fact, this comment pretty much hits the nail on the head for all my productivity phases. Hello, friend.
You misinterpreted my comment. Yes, it would be unacceptable to lie and say that we've all visited the hotel, but that's not what I'm advocating. I specifically said "based on the revelation that none of the other reviews are trustworthy." This isn't simply based on an article I've read. It's a public policy posted by the hotel.

I'm suggesting that people comment on a public policy. No more, no less.
What is the best robotic vacuum cleaner?
That might be your ethical analysis, but other people might have different ethical analyses.
Getting rid of burnout permanently
Busy raising money for the inevitable lawsuits, I guess.
It has been studied:
http://www.cnrs.fr/inshs/recherche/facies.htm

Criteria by order of importance: colour of skins mainly, sex, dressing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131341

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128687
Even if they could produce 1000 complete treatments for less than 1$, they still spend billions of $ to research the treatment. That cost and some profit needs to be covered before the drug is available in bulk from asian companies that piggyback on that research.

Take for example PPIs, they where crazy expensive at first, but are now very cheap. I can only imagine the same will be the result with this treatment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128687
Yet it is.

When you attend a wedding, you have absolutely no say in the venue. Yes, the bride and groom may have agreed to the terms, but the attendees did not have a choice.

So if they get shitty service and want to post a review about it online, they find out doing so will cost the bride and groom $500. It might not be clear cut extortion - but it is not an acceptable business practice.
MS does have a nicely integrated set of developer tools, but they are not particularly useful for people who aren't developing for a Windows platform. Most consumer-facing Websites don't run windows, nor do most cell phone apps.

There are plenty of Windows jobs building corporate software (think intranet web apps and desktop GUI applications) and so there are indeed many devs who build that stuff and enjoy doing so on Windows. I imagine there is an overlap between the Indian devs and the Windows-related dev jobs.

Personally, I build OSS-based web applications on Linux. My last machine was a Mac and while I enjoyed it I chose Linux this time around because of the lower sticker price and the better native integration with OSS tools.
interesting article, albeit like on any real insights. No real details on how the tech was scaled or how they grew to 250 people. I was surprised that their volume in 5 years is 270+ billion emails. That's a pretty impressive number whichever way you look at it.
Related (by not identical) submission of the story behind this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8128687

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131341
Another interesting question is, given that responses seem to be in the 2-7 hour range, for programmers that report 10+ hour days at your startup, where is that time going? Are you constantly working past the point of exhaustion? I can productively program 4-6 hours a day. In a pinch with rough deadlines I've pulled all nighters (these were for personal projects with hard deadlines of a scheduled event). But if I am trying to put in 8+ hours of programming daily I would be a wreck.

What are 50 hour a week and up programming jobs like? Do you just tough it out and code endlessly?
Please take a look at my response to danielweber. I'm not advocating that people post fake reviews. I'm saying that we should point out only what we know: some of the other reviews may be disingenuous because of the $500 fine. This is a public policy posted on their website. It's a simple matter of fact, not opinions.
What about "no such thing as bad publicity"?
In a sense this strategy could be somewhat ingenious on their part, as after some exploration some people might assume that all negative reviews (even ones from customers who legitimately received poor service) are spurious ones associated with the fact that the internet doesn't like their review policy. With that being said, most people won't even bother to explore a hotel with a terrible review, so they're probably screwed.
Probably no more than 3/4 hours. After that, I find that the quality of code goes down significantly. Of course, this would be different if this 3/4 is spreadout throughout the day with other "filler" jobs in between.
Show HN: Auto Layout's visual format in Swift operator overloading
Exactly. It is the government that hands out the patent in the first place. If we, as a society, don't wish to pay $1000 per pill, we can simply have our governments instate a precondition in granting a patent for a drug, that the government has the right to set a maximum price.

Now, the interesting question is: if this were the case -- if acquiring a patent on a drug means that you agree to the government setting a maximum price -- would this drug have ever been developed in the first place?
Is it necessary to have used a service in order to comment on its policies? What if you just call a place and they are very rude, would it be ok to post that in a "review"?

I don't really see anything wrong with warning others that a hotel's policies are irregular and for people to be careful.

Just saying something such as "make sure you carefully read their terms before staying at this place or leaving a deposit, they are not standard and you could end up paying much more than you anticipated." might be justified, no?

Yes, I feel bad for the hotel, this could cripple their business, but it will probably make the news and encourage other hotels to review their policies. In the end the consumers (who are innocent) will be the ones who benefit from this.
I'm not sure where you got "fake reviews." I specifically suggested that people comment on a public policy posted by the hotel. No more, no less.
seriously? They are in hospitality business and such level of rudeness, lack of empathy for their customers and such superiority feeling about themselves should ideally take them out of business.
Surely you'd need to write it yourself. Well, no - what if the compiler is compromised!

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
Get SMS Notifications When Your Friends Send You Stellar
I'm not sure bitpay solves this. The whole "international transfer is hard" thing is what Stellar was about recently.

Afaik bitpay is "receive bitcoin, get USD deposited into your account". It makes taking bitcoin payments from people who already have bitcoin easy. I'm sure it's great.

But it presupposes my client has a stash of bitcoin already. If they do the chances are they have their own internal Treasury, accounts in multiple other currencies probably in multiple of countries and frankly would find it easier to pay me in GBP out of the UK bank account that their clients keep filling up.

And I do not work for clients who run their own treasury - well sometimes but even then this never comes up.

I personally love bitcoin for international money transfers. My bet is on supporting the diaspora - families who trust each other but live in different countries and want to send some money home. Right now they get stiffed by Wells Fargo - but if Son in law in NYC can operate a gateway and Father in law can do the same in Hyderabad then all the members of their family can give son in law dollars and he can tell ...

You get the idea. It's how foreign exchange started
clearly unjustified

You don't know that.

they have been extorting people

You don't know that.

Some collective action against the gaming of the system is called for

Oh, geeze. If gaming the system is bad, then stop gaming the system.

If someone really wanted to put the screws to these people, then they would find a patron who has actually had that $500 policy used against them, implicitly if nothing else. It would require some kind of investigative journalism to find an actual victim. But that's a lot more slow and boring than getting out the Internet pitchforks and just burning their online presence to the ground right now. (If we wait too long our anger might dissipate!)
also "good thing he got hit, cyclists shouldn't be on the road, they don't even pay road tax so they have no right to be there!"

Where the fuck do these people come from? Which retarded part of the world has spawned such brain-dead idiots?
I really do feel for businesses negatively affected by Yelp. Yelp is far from perfect, and I know plenty of small business owners who got a couple bad reviews when they were first figuring things out, and weren't ever able to recover from it.

But, I'm not sure if this is even legal. As imperfect as Yelp is, at least it's democratic. Fining somebody for their guests' opinion of their place is not okay.
Bearable wearables
Experience seconded here - would not touch me until I turned over 2 m a year. But ... International work is how I will get to two mil ... Blank looks.
I would love to as well - it's quiet and you can take a break to read a book whenever you want.

The problem with our library is that even though they have a 100mb internet connection, they filter everything. You can't use Git or SSH for example, so it does me no good as a place to work.
A little video gaming 'linked to well-adjusted children'
I'm enjoying watching their Facebook page going down the drain: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Union-Street-Guest-House/1175...
Wow. Pretty bold of them to think they could fight social media and the consumer powered era with such an outrageous policy. While I am amazed at their lack of embarrassment, (especially since the policy is still up on their website), it's great to see how people can win > businesses today. Power to the people!
Boxing and other martial activities require you to contractually remove yourself from claiming you have been assaulted as long as any violence stays within agreed rules. It would be very hard to train people in boxing, if your customers could sue you for assault every time you hit them.
The best part, 57 is trivially divisible by 3 (5+7=12)
Is automatic adaptation of webpages to mobile feasible?
Many modern websites either have sections specifically designed for mobile browsers, or are designed to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. But there are still some that are not.

These sites, for example, are hard on the eyes from a mobile phone (and have no mobile equivalents):
- http://www.rifters.com/crawl/
- http://www.antipope.org/charlie/
- http://forums.sjgames.com/

It should be possible to create a service that uses various transformations to reformat web pages to improve how they display on mobile browsers. The result wouldn't match custom designs, of course, but might get the pages from bad to useable, particularly if the user has some input into what transformations are applied.

Is this one of those ideas that was tried and abandoned five-ten years ago, or is it a blank spot on the map?
Sorry, at the time my ancestor Isaac Aaron asked for the freedom of religion for the jewish people in Sweden, I think he did not quite care what was the politically correct way of saying jews had no right to practice their religion.

And I don't make a parallel on the political situation (you know you can read something to the end) but on the social AND topological situation: lack of mixity between two populations + reduced geographically speaking capacity of moving for the poorest + obvious signs of discrimination = what we call in our slang ghettoisation)

I suggest that the political situation just aggravates a socio economical situation that already have the same effects everywhere in the world.
The Tech Interview Problem
> I tend to be more productive if I work at a client's office rather than my usual coworking space. I assume that's because of feeling pressured to look like a good freelancer

Same here - on those days I fly, I look like a genius.

Unfortunately, the next day I'm burned out, and the one day they paid me for turns out to have to cover 2 days.