skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most Japanese get around 3 weeks of annual leave per year - but each day expires after 24 months.
> It is quite common for leave to expire.

Japan has the same problem as the US in this case, your worth is tied to your work, the more it appears you're working hard, the more worth (and self-worth) you feel you have.
This also fails with many non-browser applications. For example, if Murmur (the server for the Mumble VOIP application) does not detect your certificate is correctly chained, your server won't even start.

Best to set it up correctly in any case.
Looks like they've signed up for the R-Pi revolution instead.

http://www.irobot.com/~/media/MainSite/PDFs/About/STEM/Creat...

Makes me happy, since I'm a card carrying R-Pi nut.
For CIA, truth about torture was an existential threat
Atlas as a project name seems very popular these days (Facebook Atlas API, o'Reilly Atlas platform, etc).
Paul Allen donates $100M to start cell research institute
An automatic-fire weapon in Cave Story also allows you to fly by firing it downward (though there is a separate jet pack item available as well).
Wow, remind me never to work in finance, too much paranoia for me (though I do know it's justified a lot of the time- I taught some IT folks at a bank once and they told me about a branch manager who went on holiday and forgot to turn off his automated money siphoning software. That was the only reason he got caught)
Can't recommend 'Raven' highly enough: http://amazon.com/Raven-Untold-Story-Jones-People-ebook/dp/B...

It's unsettling and gripping and all kinds of bad scary weird things happen. Actually found it through a HN post about Stephen King, who made his young children read it aloud to him.
Adding WebSocket Endpoints on the Fly with JRebel and Spring Boot
9447 CTF 2014 – HelloMike Writeup
Qt and Java.
|slow, shitty "web apps"

Ah yes, nothing is better than waiting 5 minutes for the native Facebook iPhone app to boot up. But seriously, I've mostly switched from facebook to ello just because ello as a web app is faster than facebook as a mobile app.

Not all web apps are slow and not all native apps are fast. It's up to the developers to handle that, not the platform.

I see a lot of benefits of building and using web apps over native ones.

As a developer I can really focus on using the browser as my runtime. Meaning my app will, for the most part, run on most devices. It's also easier to maintain. If I need push a patch or update, I just edit some javascript.

As a user, I know that when I switch from device to device I won't need to go through an install process. All I need is a url.

Why can't the web be for games or text editors? Some of the most useful text editors I've used are on the web. What about WebRTC? Should we still all be using the Skype desktop app instead?

I would probably say that it's lazier not to make your app work well on the web.
I don't find 4 weeks to be a "lot" of vacation time, but I think the hundred million workers or so who have 2 weeks or less every year would disagree that 4 weeks is "standard." On top of that I took 2 weeks of remote work.

That said, if you're an awesome engineer (especially mobile -- Trulia has about a dozen mobile apps to build out), and you want 10 weeks every year, lets talk. I don't hire for the mobile teams so I can't speak for them but I am certain that would at least love to talk to you.
Thanks, I'll send you a note.
That was an awesome video, resulting in some follow up questions. Is it correct to say that lowering the bits increased the ground noise level, then why, (basically is quantization on the amplitude of the wave??)?

If lowering the number bits still produces the same output wave as input wave what and where is the lower limit that changes the sound?

Finally how is this 24 bit 16 bit related to my 128kbps mp3s?
The Mill, if it ever gets built, does something like that.

http://millcomputing.com/wiki/Memory#Implicit_Zero_and_Virtu...

"The big gain for this is that the OS doesn't have to explicitly zero out new pages, which would be a lot of bandwidth and time, and accesses to uninitialized memory only take the time of the cache and TLB lookups instead of having to do memory round trips."
Why do hapless businessmen disproportionately make such errors in their own favor?

How often does a store accidentally undercharge?
Why exactly would anyone answer yes to that? If they don't know the root, there's nothing trusted to chain from anyways. Chain intermediates only.
Yes, it is. And, just, seriously, what sort of a society doesn't mandate holidays?
... as long as you understand what's going on with dynamically loaded code, and you try to free something that was allocated by a module that uses a totally different allocator.

C++ standard meets modern runtimes. Wheee! :-)
> That way no torrent traffic goes through my pipes.

Pipes you control are pipes you control, whether they're in a data center or in your home. You can't avoid a counterfeiting arrest by printing the bills at OfficeMax then mailing them to yourself in a security envelope. Hopefully you're only referring to network quality benefits.
BuildDirect Raises $50M for Its Online Home Improvement Marketplace
Now you can submit your web apps to Amazon FireTV and FireTV Stick
The hype around HTML/JS as a substitute or replacement for native development has little to do with developer laziness and more to do with commoditizing software development labor.

Native is hard relative to (the nearly thoughtless) slapping together of JS and CSS frameworks to "build" an "app." It requires paying people more and taking more time to develop.
The Near-Mythical Beast That Spread an All-Too-Real Disease
Thinkpad has been slowly going downhill year upon year since the sale from IBM in 2005. Before then you could bludgeon someone to death with a Thinkpad's metal reinforced body, and it wouldn't even dent.

I own a 2008 Thinkpad (T400) which still had the metal body, zero flex (in anything, e.g. screen or keyboard), and it is in perfect condition (although it has been replaced due to the hardware being outdated, even with an SSD and 8 GB of RAM added).

My coworker purchased a 2012 Thinkpad T430 which, frankly, wasn't nearly as well built (flex and plastic all over the place). Within a year a piece of plastic side paneling (at the back corner on the right) came completely off.

But even the 2012 Thinkpads weren't THAT bad. Just worse. Since then they've almost turned into consumer laptops in every way, and the recent touchpad silliness just goes to show what idiots they have managing that project.

Thinkpad was a niche product for professionals, field techs, the military, and so on. Their re-aiming it for broad appeal is flawed and dumb.
Bookmarked. Editing nit in the FAQ.

C.f. comments on Peter Thiel's graph of the year...

Should be "Cf." -- also I believe "cf." should be read as "compare", so really it shouldn't even be that (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.)
Further discussion on why 'git pull' can be considered harmful here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15316601/in-what-cases-co...

The top-voted answer has a pretty handy alias:

git config --global alias.up '!git remote update -p; git merge --ff-only @{u}'
Interesting fact. The Django web framework was initially created by the dev team at the "Lawrence Journal", a newspaper in Kansas.
I can actually see an advantage to knowing what my friends (or top profiles) are investing in. There are certainly no guarantees with it, but if you were invested in one fund, and maybe 10 of your friends were, and then suddenly 5 of them dropped off... you might have a look as to why half of your friends were moving away from that fund, what had they read or heard that you hadn't.

i suppose if your friends were trading everyday, the value in that would be tiny, but for longer term investments, seeing the herd mentallity might make it easier for people.
Mandatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/561/
NPM Redesign
The only way to be able to quantify "10%" is if you have the ability to predict the future perfectly. If you don't have any stockpiled bandwidth you will have big issues if anyone leaves the company for any reason, and you will also not be able to easily take advantage of any unexpected opportunities that come your way. I wouldn't call it a bloated organization, more like a flexible organization.
Here's an example:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/easy-street/credi...

Everyone has at least a two-week period every year when they are completely cut off from the job. If you have been doing something off-the-books, that's enough time for it to explode. Or, if the auditing department suspects you of something -- or even if they don't -- this is the natural time to bring in forensics to dig through your books and figure out exactly you've been doing.

It's not as important in non-finance, but it can still have some use. I know of at least two cases where a sysadmin was on vacation and then outsiders were brought in to find all the backdoors he had installed.
Automatically making sense of data
Nice post... I especially liked the touch of posting a link to their hiring page right after describing their mandatory 25 paid vacation day policy.
I'm not actually a mobile dev :/

But you've highlighted the problem I have with "unlimited" vacation. If I have to negotiate for 10 weeks, then I don't have unlimited, I have 4 weeks with possibly some extra but I don't know how much extra until i'm told off for taking it
God damn it. Please warn people before posting cognitive hazards.
I think aging, in vertebrates, is mostly driven by the need to preserve what data has been encoded in the nervous system.

Ask yourself these questions. Would you rather have old bones or young bones? Would you rather have an old cardio-vascular system or a young cardio-vascular system? Would you rather have old muscles or young muscles?

In every case, the answer is "young".

But would you rather have an old nervous system or a young nervous system? The old nervous system is trained, the young one lacks all skills (skills range from the basics, like control of urination and defecation, to knowing how to hunt down an antelope).

Creatures that do not have a trainable nervous system (trees, coral, insects) experience a very different aging process.

Among vertebrates, those creatures that demonstrate negligible senescence (tortoises) also demonstrate a lack of learning. The price of immortality is perpetual immaturity of one's nervous system.
The Acquisition Environment for Startups in 2015
Show HN: Querying Visual Content + Image URL API
> According to this study[1] you need at least ten consecutive days of leave to "de-stress" from work. Short vacations aren't as effective as long ones.

That can't be true across the board. I haven't taken a vacation in 3 or 4 years by that definition. And frankly, I feel fine. I work with awesome people solving cool problems and love what I do. I've had friends tell me I should take a vacation, and my response is, "why?" I enjoy my time at the office and I enjoy my leisure activities away from the office. I typically work more than 40 hours, but it doesn't matter. Sometimes I'll put in 12-hour days for awhile, but I always make sure to get some recharging time. The longest "vacation" I've taken in the last 4 years was something like a long Thursday - Monday weekend. Those leave me feeling plenty recharged and ready to get back. I can even get that from a lazy Sunday where I just stay home and relax.

If a billion dollars dropped into my lap tomorrow, I probably wouldn't do much differently. I might think about taking some time off, but I'm working on things I actually want to accomplish. Even if I did just take off on an extended vacation, I'm pretty sure I'd want to get back to my current job before too long. Part of me might want to work fewer hours since I wouldn't need the money, but that would probably slow down my rate of progress on the things that I want to accomplish.
It's true that coders have lots of great tools for working with textual representations of programs... But IMHO programmers' tools are stuck in a certain kind of local maximum due to the difficulty of moving beyond text. We've done all we can to make textual programs easier to manipulate, but there are fundamental difficulties that can't be solved this way.

I'm personally interested in this question: What if coders had design tools as powerful as those used by architects and construction engineers?

I wrote a blog post about this recently: http://blog.neonto.com/?p=44
This is such a great comment! I really wanted to say this, but didn't know how to put it into words.
This doesn't detract from your main point, but...

4 weeks off is not necessarily "extremely generous." It depends on whether that includes holidays.

You might say that of course vacation days don't include holidays, but I know of several small tech/biotech companies that just give X total days of paid time off, usually 25-30. You can choose to take those PTO hours on holidays or not, which is more flexible I suppose.

However, depending on the state and industry, there are 10-15 normal holidays every year. So, that 4 weeks off might really only equal 1-2 weeks of vacation, not so generous.
> The liabilities may matter to investors, but that doesn't mean that they actually affect the business. If I have all of my vacation days left or none, there is zero impact on the the company's business. Value is not effected at all.

That's completely untrue. If you are billed out at some rate X, then having 2 weeks of vacation coming up this year directly impacts future value vs having 0 vacation days. That's X * 2 * 40 hours of future value. It affects value in the same way that any debt affects value.
How is this 'market place' any different from the old school calling-a-taxi company and they radio in "Hey, there is a customer on the corner of 3rd and Broadway" and then the taxi goes there to pick you up?

It's incremental. Not innovation.
No, you are not required to take them,but if you don't the company has to pay you the full amount for those days(so in effect, if you don't take ANY holidays during the year, you will get an additional 1-month's salary at the end).
I don't think I see a single negative comment here about long vacations, so allow me to play devil's advocate. (These questions don't necessarily reflect my own opinions.)

1. If this is such a free lunch (employees are both happier and more productive overall), then why isn't lots of vacation offered everywhere (in the US)? Can it really be the case that the vast majority of US companies are too short-sighted to make a policy change that would be in their own best interest?

2. If, alternatively, more vacation is really good for employees, but slightly bad for employers, why doesn't the labor market adjust? In this case, you would expect employees to offer to work for a lower salary in exchange for more vacation time.
Ask HN: What are the best books for learning software architecture?
[How] is this different from `git pull --rebase`?
Instagram overtakes Twitter to reach 300m users
Do We Really Need Faster Databases?
Green smoothies? Gross.

Instead of stock photos of people running, it'd be great if they laid out the specific features/sensors of this thing.
Why your Résumé is being thrown in the bin
You decide which app to feature at iAppuApp
Effective marketing strategies for introverts
Talking fun, I think it would be fun for a company to run a bus factor fire drill from time to time -:just point to one employee and say "Bam! You're hit by a bus, leave the office now here's $2K, come back next Thursday. No email, no remote working and no phone contact with anyone from here."

I wonder how many companies (let alone startups) could deal effectively with this situation.
It was much more stable for me when I was installing it through rubygems and managing our middleware's dependencies with bundler directly. We've switched to the embedded ruby and it's a struggle but we deal with it since it's probably MUCH less work to support now that it's standardized across all vagrant installs.
How I failed three times
As weird as it may seem, in Mexico we have the same deal, although if I remember correctly, by law we get a 25% extra pay on vacation days.

Some places use this as a benefit to lure employees. For example I worked at a place where I got 75% extra pay on vacation days.

The downside is that getting more than the minimum mandated by law (6 DAYS a year) is not that common. For example, for that place that gave 75% extra, I had I believe 10 (or 12) days a year, and it was actually above industry standard.

Edit: To answer one of the posters below, I believe someone once explained to me, that at least in Mexico, the extra pay is supposedly to make it easier for families to actually go out of town and spend money, so it becomes a factor that helps drive the economy. I.e. if you have vacations but no money, then you won't spend anything and ultimately won't take vacations. This way you get vacations and also have money to spend during those days. At least that's how it's supposed to go.
Microsoft Word has had revision control for at least 15 years, probably even longer. It's not like the document creation world doesn't have exposure to these ideas.
I would guess it's because even really good DACs have trouble reaching noise as low as 24 bits, so capture is in 24 bits. I think most DAWs support floats as an intermediate format though.
https://www.polymer-project.org/docs/elements/material.html

Google has released this, for those brave enough to use web components.
I can't find a simple list of the sensors. But reading through this:

http://www.irobot.com/~/media/MainSite/PDFs/About/STEM/Creat...

And based on the fact the Create 2 is based on the 600 series I checked the wikipedia entry and figure the list will be:

* Bump sensors (left and right)
* Wheel drop sensors (left and right)
* Four infrared "cliff sensors"
* Acoustic-based dirt sensors
* Optical sensor located in front of the vacuum bin
* Virtual Wall Lighthouse sensor
Someone please correct me if I am wrong but I believe the answer is yes. I believe this is the relevant PR:

https://github.com/elm-lang/core/pull/25

I believe the original improvements were done here: https://github.com/jwmerrill/elm-animation-frame

I modified a game I wrote to use the modified run time. I can see a huge difference between the two in Firefox.

Unmodified: http://jcollard.github.io/elm-flyer-old/

Modified: http://jcollard.github.io/elm-flyer/
Credit Slips is a great blog, highly recommended.
This seems... ambitious. The prospects for reliable home flu testing alone seem challenging; for instance, here's WBUR reporting on an NSF-funded, CDC-advised pilot to get home flu tests to Boston residents:

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/01/home-flu-test-goviral

The "good" version of the test requires an offsite lab.

Also: if you have a product that detects influenza and fertility, why lead off your marketing with "inflammation" and recommendations for green smoothies? It's hard to tell whether this is a serious product or something for people who shop at GNC.

The founders have math backgrounds but no biotech pedigree, although they do have a gold-plated advisor board.
Clearly they need somebody who is able to talk to other people.
Seems like there is a bug in the number validation example. When non-numeric data is entered, the floating label moves back into the input field making it very difficult to read. This is on Chrome.

Other than that, this looks pretty cool; I particularly like the floating label animations. I may have to give it a try in my next project!
No, most think that if you reduce something to 8 bits that it will sound like NES-powered voice mail being played back through a piezo buzzer.

If you converted something to 8 bits and used proper dithering, no one who heard it would exclaim "You monster! That is only 8 bit audio!"

Where as if you reduced something to a low bitrate mp3, people would notice immediately and call you out on it.
No drop-down for showing instructions on how to correctly configure lighttpd:

ssl.pemfile = "/path/to/pemfile.pem"

ssl.ca-file = "/path/to/chain.crt"
Ok I think I have an idea for this. It was happening for me (only alternating between the same two pieces, even after multiple reboot). The "fix" was to toggle the "Resize small art to fill screen" which completely removes this repeated image effect, while re-enabling it brings back the problem.

Edit: nevermind, problem came back after a few "Change art now" button presses, even after toggling all the checkboxes in the top-left.
Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
They claim:

* Inflammation

* Influenza

* Vitamin D

* Fertility

* Testosterone

It's unclear from the media photos on the front page, but this is something that stays in your home, and accepts sample swabs for blood and spit (you buy different swabs for different tests).

This was a really useful comment, linked from upthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744251
I can understand the multiple cup problem, it sucks to throw out coffee. For anyone else in your situation, check out an Aeropress [0]. It can make a single cup, it's easy, and I have to boil the water to make tea for my wife anyway :) Less waste than a Keurig, and cheaper TCO.

[0] http://aerobie.com/products/aeropress.htm
It's OK that you don't like using HTML/JS, but a lot of people do like using them (which is also OK), and those people are the target audience for things like node-webkit.
Web App Starter Kit for Fire TV
I'm not debating that it's inefficient if you use the same data structure that is used now. That's why I suggested using a different one.

Instead of a flat list of file names for each directory, you store the file names in a trie, so that files with a shared prefix in their name have a shared ancestor node in the trie. To do a directory rename, you just have to find the node in the trie that corresponds to the directory, move that node to a different location in the trie and change the portion of the name that is stored in that node.
Evil is the first Vi/Vim emulation package that didn't frustrate me pretty intensely with things that didn't quite work as expected coming from Vim.

However, it doesn't attempt to turn Emacs into Vim, it's more like it gives Emacs an acceptable Vi interface for the places where that matters.

As a result, if you are using both Vim and Emacs contemporaneously, it's still easy to develop habits in one, that will cause you pain in the other.

For example, because Evil still allows you to do a lot of Emacs shortcuts, and because :q kills Emacs if there's only one window open, I find myself doing C-x k a lot to git rid of buffers.

However, that causes huge pain when I accidentally do that when I'm back in Vim. Instead I should really get in the habit of using :bd to get rid of buffers, but that's one aspect of Vim that I've never fully moved to from using naive vi style :q.
He must be an angel on earth to be able to turn my love around
What can I say but ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! The spell i ordered from therapist Oniha email at winexbackspell@gmail.com did just as it said it would to my ex wife and even more,she is fully in my house now with love and respect,i am so happy she is back to me and my happiness home again. You are underestimating your spells my friend as they are more like miracles from Divinity. Blessing be with you and yours throughout life...

Thanks Therapist Oniha email him at winexbackspell@gmail.com and praise him for me. He must be an angel on earth to be able to turn my love around!
Ask HN: Should I join a startup just because its backed by a famous VC?
I'm currently in "advanced discussions" with regard to joining a dot com startup. While I do not see anything new in their product, their founder told me that they've been backed by a famous VC and this information is not public yet.
Should I trust the founder and join the company, just because its backed by this renowned VC ?
Also more importantly what questions should I ask the co-founders to make sure that I'm joining the right company ?
MIT's terror against Walter Lewin's lectures is unacceptable
https://tpb.pirati.cz/ FTW