skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your company was not legally obligated to pay you the PTO balance. It may be written in to the company handbook that they will, provided that you give sufficient notice, but they did not have to pay. Disposition of PTO is not covered by the same laws as vacation or sick leave benefits, so the company can basically do whatever it wants with it. If it were a mass layoff rather than one guy leaving, they wouldn't pay. In that case, they wouldn't have to worry about the remaining employees complaining or using their PTO as they accumulate it, rather than risk leaving value on the table.

As a corollary, if you have PTO and intend to leave a company, use it up before giving notice.

And we haven't even touched on other issues. People with PTO may be less likely to stay home when they are sick, because it reduces the amount of planned leave they can take. This results in more contagion in the workforce.

There are very good reasons for paid vacation and paid sick leave to be different classes of benefit. But in this case, it is simply a coal miner's canary. A company transitioning to PTO is reducing their labor costs by reducing the benefits of their productive employees. Look carefully to determine whether any effort has been made to reduce overhead. PTO by itself is not an unambiguous signal. If execs are still giving themselves bonuses while your earned leave becomes PTO, they probably just reassigned the value of your benefit to themselves, and it's time to look for a new employer before they come up with another bright idea, like stack ranking.

This criticism also applies to some extent to "we don't worry about leave" companies. I haven't ever worked for one, so I can't say for certain.
This makes no sense. Somehow having a versioned dotfiles directory with either a Makefile or a shell script is "hard" because either you need to have Python (no you don't, shell script is fine) or you forget the name of the install script (type ls), but somehow using this software (which needs to be installed) is "easier".

With this software you also need to remember the magic invocation, a trivial thing in both scenarios, but nevertheless something the author complained about, and you also need to install stow. Previously the author complained about adding dependencies in the form or Python (which made no sense, but still, he complained about dependencies) but now he adds this new dependency (which is more rare than python anyway...).
We'll see how this develops, but this ain't Gentoo, I wouldn't count on Debian to keep supporting sysv. Quote from Debian forums:

it's very unlikely that SysVinit will continue to be supported, because writing init scripts for SysVinit is hard work, and if it isn't used as the default on Linux they'll rot.
Don't keep it on the same keychain as your car keys. I don't–that would be terribly impractical. Instead, it lives in my laptop slipcase.

Even better, get the nano version and leave it in your USB slot permanently: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O8ST7MM
How can the immune system teach us to build great products?
Please see: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
CAA Sells Majority Stake to TPG Capital
I think you have a much more stylized view of what a side of a debate is than reality suggests is the case. Creating an implementation for a side that wasn't already rallying around one would just exacerbate the differences in opinion on that side and fragment it into multiple smaller sides.
So what is the accordance for a button in a flat design?
I don't want anything bad to happen to Lennart, I just want him to take his football and go home.

Then suddenly init.d will look very open and friendly again.

Maybe the same thing can happen to grub2 and I wouldn't mind going back to good old grub.conf
It should work, but less well. The conductivity of aluminum is more than half that of copper, so I would expect their 100 lb board which can hold a 190 lb person to be able to hold at least a 100 lb person.

The thickness of the metal plate also has some effect, but it is limited, and I would expect that their plate is already thick enough for additional thickness to not matter. I don't think that you can compensate enough for material conductivity with thickness, but I don't have time to research that at the moment.
Pinning? That's only a hack if you don't care to learn how apt works. And not actually necessary to avoid systemd unless you're running with `--assume-yes` or hammering 'y'.

systemd-shim? Well, yeah, but that's the entire point of it's existence.
Affectiva is looking for a DevOps Engineer
This is great! It fixes the only problem I have with maintaining my dotfiles as a git repo: the .git dir in ~. That interferes with so many things such as the CtrlP vim plugin, the integration of git with the bash prompt and many other things.

Thank you for this.
It's an overused buzzword that has no meaning anymore. Every company that gets acquired has an "amazing journey".
If systemd is bad for servers, why did RHEL[1] and CoreOS adopt it? Are we to believe that these companies work against themselves?

[1] AFAIK 90% of Red Hat's revenue is from servers, not desktops.
A few criticisms of this article:

* The article covers digital audio from its very foundations, which is unnecessary. Just put a link to Wikipedia.

* The citation format is weird. Instead of using inline hyperlinks, you have to look up references at the end.

* The test only covers MP3. This is 2014... and we know MP3 has a low-pass filter.

* The methodology doesn't mention converting from MP3 back to a lossless format for the ABX test, and it doesn't mention measuring MP3 encoder gain. ABX tests can be colored when people recognize differences between lossy and lossless playback that have nothing to do with the encoding itself: if lossless playback uses less IO and more CPU, then you might hear less clicking from your disk drive and your computer's CPU fan might spin faster. Most ABX tests convert both files back to WAV before testing.

* The spectrum of the residual is not very interesting, because the human ear is not sensitive to phase (or far less sensitive to phase than amplitude). It would be more interesting to compute the differences in the spectrums.

If you want a more sound and thorough analysis of audio compression, try the Hydrogen Audio tests:

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Lis...

Quick summary: At reasonable bit rates, many encoders are sonically transparent. At lower bit rates (64/96 kbit/s), Opus is the most transparent, and Apple's encoder is in second place.
Removal of Kine support from Rails
Let me give a list of people who actually should be named and shamed here:

Everyone who had seen the stuff going on but didn't blow the whistle.

I understand the people who did the deed - according to the description "A team headed by Whisper's editor-in-chief, Neetzan Zimmerman" - they had some rather obvious profit motivation. I understand the people at The Guardian - they simply did the right thing. But everybody else at Whisper and their guests and passersby who had seen this happen - you suck. If you see your employer do slimy stuff, and put your "loyalty" as a reason to let it be, then you're as slimy and deserve to be associated with the slime and blamed for it, and I hope they're paying an appropriate price for selling your conscience.

If you see your acquaintance (or a company you're visiting or investing in) doing bad stuff, and simply do nothing, then that's not calling being a passive bystander - it's called being an accomplice, and you deserve to be treated as co-guilty.
Don't argue with a timetraveller
>>Despite that several of laws except the IT laws are pretty good and time tested. IT law however is horrible and puts a prohibitive cost on various IT businesses.

"Time tested." lol. Many laws in India date from the times of British Raj, and were outdated even then! -http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29516976
Google acquired Firebase
Via Email

Hi Firebasers,
In a few moments we’re about to make a big announcement and want to let you, our developers, know first: Firebase has joined Google!

What does this mean for you as a Firebase developer?

Firebase is here to stay and grow. You can expect the same great development experience, tools, libraries and community commitment that have become synonymous with Firebase. Nothing will change for you. Andrew and I will continue to lead Firebase. We’ll continue to be platform agnostic and provide clients for iOS, Android, Web and more.

Why?

Google is doing exciting things with Google Cloud Platform. They’re exposing technology to the public that was previously only available internally at Google.

Google’s backing allows us to dramatically scale Firebase. With Google’s engineering talent, resources, and technical infrastructure, we’ll be able to do much more, much faster.

More importantly, the Google Cloud Platform team comes to work each day for the same reason we do: to help developers create extraordinary experiences. Together we can deliver a world-class platform for mobile and web apps.

Thank you!
Congratulations, guys! Are you going to change offices, or will you still be above me?
The other piece of magic you are doing is sending in the keystrokes / mouse movements. If you're running multiple iOS simulators on a Mac, how are the key presses / mouse movements not interfering with other users?
Glad I've got the "unlockable" (for now) nexus 5!
Silly question of course, anyone who has programmed for 18 years is a programmer. But the missed question is "Am I a hacker[1]?" And it is that which puzzles attempt to ferret out. Let's take the example of the 1000 piece Escher puzzle that the author uses as an excellent example. They are correct that most of the pieces are just 'shades of grey'. Impossible right? If you're a hacker you say "Challenge accepted!" if you're not you say "This is way more work than its worth." Because what the hacker mentality gets reinforcement from, is overcoming the 'impossible' (or simply the 'you can't do this') not the actual puzzle assembly.

So in the Escher puzzle a hacker says, "Hmm the picture isn't much help, its not on most of the pieces. What else can I use? Shape!" and so first will attempt to identify every piece that has a shape suggesting it is on the edge of the puzzle. Next puzzle pieces themselves have a certain symmetry, with some 'coves' and some 'penisulas' (or convex and concave curves, or 'innies' and 'outies') so unknown pieces are often sorted into the number of those features they have. Basically the hacker is looking for any piece of information that can inform on a possible way to get to the end, generally that information is non-obvious at first, more obvious once you find it. Particularly delicious puzzles will have several layers of information.

So if you don't care to figure out ways to solve a problem that is, at first glance, either really hard or nominally impossible to solve, you can still program just fine but you need a set of rules for putting together your code. And you won't find yourself asking if they are the best set of rules for the particular problem you are coding, you just make sure the problem is solved. That is a perfectly valid programming model, it gets things done.

[1] And I'm using the puzzle solving / bounds testing skill here not the application which can be applied to good or evil.
I tend to agree, I hate riddles and puzzles, I don't like trying to debug something in an embedded system with no screen, GDB (which is a riddle in itself), and a temporal component that prevent me from using some technique (like breakpoint scripts that continue).

I just put up with them in the hope that I get stuff done past them.

Today I tried an online Mensa test (the quick stuff), I didn't recognize any patterns in the domino section (I tried 5 before giving up, vertically, diagonally, like text, nothing), I guess, some people are not made for that. I know people who love them and are good at it, I just hope to still get some respect from them.
Can you point me to some data on that?
There is a tumblr called ourincrediblejourney DOT tumblr DOT com which tells a long tale of users left in the cold.

Interesting: when I try to post that link as a URL the submission is '[dead]' on HackerNews. Why?
Depends on the kind of puzzle to be honest. I enjoy puzzles (as in a physical puzzle like the author is talking about) but only ones that are not stupidly hard like his Escher puzzle. Sod that!

Programming puzzles are very different though. Do I hate programming puzzles? Sometimes. Again it depends on the puzzle at hand.

As for is he still a programmer? Well if he codes and produces something that works how he wanted it too then sure. He might be one of those programmers that hate debugging though so ends up writing more and more code to 'fix' a problem rather than actually find the real problem instead of coding around it.
"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name"

Once "art" becomes defined, it ceases to become art. The barista ceases to become important once a machine can replicate the exact results. The artist becomes useless once his or her method can be codified and repeated.

The method of choosing good engineers also becomes useless once it is defined because then that standard can be copied without regards to the traits it originally was trying to gauge. Pure arbitrary processes aren't great because of the lack of transparency that encourages nepotism, but neither is a purely mechanical approach that opens itself to becoming gamed.

A heuristic exchanges information for faster processing. When heuristics are passed around, the original information is lost. Almost everything we do is a heuristic though. 3 meals a day, brushing teeth everyday, etc... Is it better than nothing? Probably. Is it great? No. But everyone offering a "solution" isn't really offering a solution. They're just telling personal stories about what heuristic worked best for them.

The job interview process is quite similar to the friend making process. Not everyone is going to be your friend, and following scripts like saying hello every morning isn't going to do it either. It's just one of those things that are part of life.
We will absolutely not be dropping support for any platforms. We'll support what our customers want to use, whether that's Ember, or iOS, or React.
A sad fate known to many woodiis
Docker in Production – What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300M Containers
We've had multiple competing init systems for years without forking the entire Linux ecosystem any worse than before.
Congrats James and the Firebase team!
Linear Congruential Generators
I can't help but think this is a perfect example of the contrast between a programmer and a hacker. When I think of those who enjoy puzzles, or more accurately the mental process to solve said puzzles, I think of hackers. A programmer is simply someone who programs.

That's not to say that you can't be a perfectly competent programmer without being a hacker. On the contrary, sometimes, though rarely, hacker traits can be detrimental to programming as a profession. A programmer bitten hard by the hacker bug may become a bit too enamored with a puzzle when going about their work on a given project, and as a result come up with a solution that effectively solves a difficult problem but is a nightmare to effectively maintain, especially when others are doing the maintenance.
This is how I manage my dotfiles since I discovered stow a couple of months ago.

The only thing that bugs me is that I haven't figured out an elegant way to have some configs include machine specific configs. For example a set of bash aliases that I only use at work but don't want at home.

My best idea is to source all files in, say ~/.bashrc.d and put machine specific configs in there... Haven't tried it out yet.
Does this mean Google is now providing the HackerNews api?
http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Basically, it's a cargo culted phrase in acquisition announcements.
I got a little further... http://i.imgur.com/IVktzqU.png
It didn't act unethically as a business partner. It withdrew from being a business partner when it found extremely bad behavior and then, rather unsurprisingly given that it is a newspaper, it published it.

Even if your business partner is not a newspaper, if you show them something highly unethical in secret, it is not unethical for them to end the partnership by passing on what they know, whether publicly, or to regulators, or to the police.
> Could you please solve this algorithmic puzzle within half an hour? I failed. Hiring decision made. End of story.

If that alone was the reason, then your interviewer did a bad job.

The point isn't to trick you. It's to see how you work under pressure when presented with a tough problem. What is your thought process? Do you dive right in or do you take time to chew on it? What parts of your background can you draw on to help you?

It certainly helps your chances if you can solve the problem, all else being equal, but I'd rather take someone who talks through their work but doesn't quite solve it over someone who solves it yet has trouble explaining how or why.

The best interview questions are layered. There should be a relatively easy solution solvable in multiple ways by anyone with experience programming. It should almost solve itself if you walk through the specifications. (Think fizz-buzz-level.)

But underneath that should one or two harder problems with very elegant solutions. And those are much more about the process -- about weeding out the people who would dive in without really thinking it through. If you make a mess of the whiteboard, get frustrated, start desperately erasing and rewriting the same things without ever stepping back to think through alternatives... well, that might be what I'd hold against you. It's not that you didn't solve it. It's that you didn't prove to me you could've given more time.
It seems that Whisper is acting in a manner that is contradictory to almost every claim they make about the service and software. Isn't this just spyware?

- They track your location regardless of stated preferences

- They store "anonymous" messages indefinitely

- They share contents of said messages with the media when it's profitable for the corporation

- They freely share data with the US, UK and Chinese governments

- They track users with a high potential for juicy posts "for life"

- They lie about all of the above (though their terms have been updated since the Guardian revelations)
STARTTLS is not an "optional upgrade command".

Its support is routinely required and enforced by both clients and servers. Servers won't let clients do AUTH without STARTTLS first. Clients won't send emails if they are set to use it and it's not supported. One can certainly misconfigure the hell out of mail server, but then no "secure from start" will stand a chance against these leet skills either.

Besides, STARTTLS dates back to 2002, so not sure what's up with your "?!?!" and "now we need to ..." comments. Looks like a basic rant to me :-/
Yes, huge congrats guys! I don't know if I love the product or the team more. :)
Map the earth in real-time using drones on the Internet with DroneDeploy
You're either asking the wrong people, or making a silly argument.

edit: both redhat and CoreOS have email addresses, as far as I know.
There is a tumblr called 'ourincrediblejourneyDOTtumblrDOTcom' which tells a long tale of users left in the cold.

Interesting: when I try to post that link as a URL the submission is '[dead]' on HackerNews. Why?
We still love our amazing community and don't have any plans to change this. We'll work hard to stay accessible and active.
First off congrats! I have been following Firebase for a long time and think it's a wonderful product. That being said, I really hope they stick to their word and use the resources at Google to expand Firebase keeping it open and not make it a walled garden.
It isn't performing for me in mobile. I am pushing a rectangle and nothing is happening.
People need to understand this. If an app or service is free and some combination of:

(a) At all expensive to run.

(b) Funded by investors who demand a return.

(c) Has no visible means of direct revenue.

... then you REALLY need to ask the following question immediately before deciding to use it or what to entrust it with:

"How is it monetizing me?"

If you see an app or service like this, you are the product. It's either tracking you, spying on you, selling your data, somehow targeting you for advertising, or doing something else of a similar nature.
Squarepuzzle MVP is launched
We love you Firebase! Your company and culture are an inspiration to all and your platform in particular is a role model to other cloud database companies. Best wishes from me personally and your many fans at Keen IO.
> Then suddenly init.d will look very open and friendly again.

Having used systemd on a few machines by now, I won't ever go back. It's utterly naive to think that systemd would go away if Lennart were to.
ourincrediblejourney dot tumblr dot com
> if you're not you say "This is way more work than its worth." Because what the hacker mentality gets reinforcement from, is overcoming the 'impossible' (or simply the 'you can't do this') not the actual puzzle assembly.

Hmm, up until this, I thought I was a hacker. When I see a problem worth solving, I'll dig in and try different tools that I've never tried before and figure out a way to make it happen. I really resonate with what you said about not being deterred by the problem seeming extremely difficult or having no obvious solutions.

But I actively try not to work on things that are "more work than they are worth". Seeming "impossible" is not enough to me to make it worth. It has to actually provide some benefit.

This is not to say I don't still get carried away and attempt something which really ends up not being worth the time...
Correct, that would be rude. However, they wouldn't put me on their team. It's their right to have tryouts however they want to. As arbitrary as entrance exams seem, they are part of the culture, and if you don't fit in, you don't fit in. Move on, start your own company.
Why use ASP.NET for web development
>Four people need to cross a rickety bridge at night. Unfortunately, they have only one torch and the bridge is too dangerous to cross without one. The bridge is only strong enough to support two people at a time. Not all people take the same time to cross the bridge. Times for each person: 1 min, 2 mins, 7 mins and 10 mins. What is the shortest time needed for all four of them to cross the bridge?<

17 minutes, if you can stipulate that at the beginning of the problem, the 10 minute and 7 minute people are on opposite sides of the bridge, each paired with one of the other two guys.

18 minutes, if they must all start on the same side of the bridge, but there is no requirement for all of them to end up on the opposite side.

This also assumes that person who can cross the bridge in as little as one minute has no problem slowing down to accommodate someone else's slower pace; otherwise there's no real point to trying to share the torch.
Here's my take on some of the FUD around systemd - http://www.lambdacurry.com/systemd-nice-dont-afraid/
See Dita Von Teese’s 3D Printed Gown Up Close
Not sure how much placebo effect is going to help with a bacterial infection.

Especially with this new disease that was just discovered in New York State last year, you get it within 15 minutes (unlike Lyme which allegedly takes 24 hours) and it has a 30% chance of killing you. The members of my local mycology group are getting absolutely dropped by these things... One of our members almost died a couple months ago after having the white blood cell count of an end stage AIDS patient. It's almost suicidal to go into the woods without pants stuffed into your socks, a long sleeve shirt tucked into your pants, and all your clothes treated with permethrin. I've even started wearing boxer briefs just to keep them out of there at least.