skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women.

Sometimes these laws actually discourage hiring women. For example, you say:

> companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return

This is a great example of why these laws are more complex than they appear. For example, in that case I'll need to hire somebody to fill in for the person on leave while they're away. So I'm paying for that training, paperwork, etc for the new person. Then when the first person comes back from maternity leave, I've got two people for one job. Either I have the unpleasant business of firing somebody who hasn't done anything wrong (and may actually be the better employee!) or depending on how the laws are written I may be forced to continue to employ both, despite a lack of need. What if I've downsized or pivoted, and no longer need to original person? Do they accumulate benefits and paid vacation while they're gone? All this can be an employer's nightmare.

A post by a Hungarian entrepreneur partially on this topic went viral last year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive.

http://andorjakab.blog.hu/2014/03/02/this_is_why_i_don_t_giv...
The problem is that OpenBSD has had some pretty significant user-facing changes in only the past year. The past few releases have seen apache replaced with nginx, and the next version is going to be getting rid of nginx for their own httpd. If you're just using the basic webserver, that's some pretty significant change right there. While they're advertising clean and simple, they can and do introduce potentials for heavy breakage in nearly every release.
What about the other thousands of things that can incapacitate your employees? Any one of your employees could get sick or have an accident.

Having a child is very much like that. The employee is on an extended sick leave, and then they're back and can be brought up to speed again. The big difference is that you know of this several months in advance and have every opportunity to make up for it and can take the time to train a substitute.

This is a good argument to treat parental leave just like other sick leave and leave it to a similar insurance system.

(To those to think companies' fear of children is rational, do you also think to ask your employees if they scuba dive, or ride a motorbike? That's probably more "dangerous" to the company than being of child bearing age, and the consequences far worse.)
Cool to get your opinion on this - I'm a huge fan of my Tuft & Needle mattress. Interested to see if they make a good combo.
UN population projections indicate that the population will peak later this century and fall back substantially before resuming a much more modest growth rate.

Most developed countries are today only maintaining growth through immigration, if at all, and China is set to peak and start contracting in the next couple of decades. India is lagging, as is many African countries, but even that is unable to prevent the world population from peaking towards the end of the century.

That is with encouraging reproduction this way in large parts of the developed world, and with substantial easing of restrictions in countries like China.

Ironically, the US, with the worst maternity leave policies in the developed world, has one of the highest reproduction rates of the developed world, while most European countries today are below replacement rate.

Policies to limit support beyond the first two children may sound sensible, but would likely have a negative effect: The countries which today have extensive maternity or paternity leave for the most part will run into substantial problems of aging populations unless they manage to push reproduction rates up and/or increase immigration numbers over the next few decades. Given the political resistance to high immigration rates most places, that's not likely to fly.

The "payoff" of holding back of maternity leave to limit reproduction rates would also be minimal because the countries with good maternity leave for the most part have a low enough reproduction rate that budging it some small percentage rate further down would not really do much.

More and more countries are making the transition to low reproduction rates, and if it continues we will eventually be in a situation where population decline will be the major problem.
Steve may have been a tad unrepresentative that "open video" issue.

Remember, this is the guy that controlled QuickTime and never opened it up. That was a bit of problem for open video supporters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
Philadelphia is insanely corrupt, owned by Comcast, and will not allow Google to build a network like these other cities will.

Read about the building of Comcast Tower and how a plumbers union forced Comcast to install unnecessary pipes:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-166039.htm...
I simply expect that doing an upgrade of the system (as opposed to grabbing the latest version of applications and libraries) is going to totally destroy my box and I'll spend the day recovering, because that's happened to me multiple times, from multiple OS vendors.
If I recall, to be a true Grade 1 one needs to pass a UL test for your electronics to withstand a minute of fire which requires packing them in sand. We're fine being labeled a Grade 2 if we're using a Grade 1 deadbolt, Grade 1 keyway, and Grade 2 electronics.

Some locksmiths are trying to revoke the Grade 1 rating on those Kwiksets you mentioned because of the Smartkey vulnerability. (Grade 1 requires a certain threshold of "pick proof" and "drill proof" which they argue fails to hold up.) Bolt does not have that same vuln. but you can see what it looks like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1mmjVvMsGs
The interview seems really interesting, but I find it very annoying to have to jump up and down the page to get the next video to load. Is there a "play all" button that I'm not seeing?
I am in favor of an unconditional basic income for all as well. But I wouldn't buy the recipients expensive equipment and teach them how to kill people. That seems expensive and potentially harmful.
For reference, my first-born was a non-elective C-section in the US and my total cost for the stay, including the OB performing the procedure and 2 nights in the maternity ward was also under half the number quoted. Admittedly, I can't recall if that was the negotiated rate from the insurer, or the amount actually billed, but I don't remember them being wildly different.
This guy proposes a thing. His background is Marxist, so, usual grain of salt going along with that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guSdjsctrUQ
Well thanks for not doubling down. FYI, "Ayn Rand" and "neo-liberal" doesn't really belong in the same breath either - I'm guessing you've never actually read anything she has written. This might be a moment where you consider the body of knowledge that your opinions rest on, and the phrase "garbage in, garbage out".
Targeted Jobs for Stack Overflow
Tangential thought-

Why does this seem to be tied so closely to online games?

At least superficially it seems like it was never a problem anywhere close to this magnitude in the old days of single-player, and the addiction stories are always WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, CounterStrike, Call of Duty, etc.
The reason to hire someone from the company's perspective is to address work overload. If a start-up hires a tenth employee with amazing skills to address back-end server development, there was a need for back-end server development. When three months in the employee says their wife is having a baby in a month and wants to take the full allotment of FMLA, what is the company's role in this? The employee was the best and hired to address an issue, losing them for three months in a start-up environment would be a mission critical event. The company can A) hire a temp worker to fill in, who will either be let go when the employee comes back or hired on or B) go without a back-end developer, a position that is still mission critical.

The employee is doing best in their interest, but what about the company? A large profit margin company can go out and hire another employee, tech sector is great about this. Low profit margin companies will be unable to address this.

Here we have a situation where well-to-do companies are badgering middle to low profit margin companies into a government move. The European companies are hemorrhaging jobs because of the worker benefit packages (France, Greece, Spain) to China where the wages and benefits are lower. The middle to low companies leave and the barrier to re-entry is made worse by movements like this.
Yourapostasy brings up a good point about front loading government tax breaks to encourage children.
I'm a huge fan of Flightplan. I used it extensively at a past job and added it into our default stack. Every site we worked with (60+ at the time I left) was using Flightplan for deployment.
Ubuntu and Fedora are aggressive about incorporating new stuff. It's possible to have the same release cadence while operating with a more Debian-like attitude toward stability.
Think of Paypal and X.com -- how'd that work out?
> You are preaching to the choir.

I'm a little confused by this. HN seems genuinely divided on the issue, with lots of posts from both perspectives. How is this the choir?
Now only if Amazon/Netflix would drop Silverlight all would be right with the world.
Speaking of corrosion, maybe we should be building systems with a language which avoids most of the problems of C.
2 women leave tech book project fearing GamerGate reprisals
> Tap to snap / hold for video

How do I focus?

I've been working on an app that utilizes this user interaction, and what I've come up with is double tap to take a picture. Don't focus until you're sure there's no second tap (a few hundred ms). Or you could always just add a simple camera button, which solves this problem.
I would think ideally, programmers wouldn't break things that are working. We know that ideal doesn't pan out.
This is why you want to get patents before spending time and money.
Show HN: Get a hand-drawn Slack avatar for you and your team
That was certainly the case when I had a period of unemployment during the tech bust where I was paying bills with credit cards. I got a new job a year later (after Katrina), and went to a local bank, proud to be a productive member of society once again. I was told that I couldn't open a bank account here (I had relocated to be closer to family and so closed the other account), regardless of type. Went to another and got the same reaction. I ended up opening an account with a payday loan company for a debit card, and for a few years I was paying through the nose just to have a place to store my money.
“The International Organization for Standardization approved the QuickTime file format as the basis of the MPEG-4 file format. The MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001.” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format
No. It doesn’t. Search was performed by a web app or a bot. It was slick.

My former employer was mostly customer support and everybody loved using IRC. Myself included.
They are considering the south Bay, though. It's close to home for them.
As someone who used to help maintain hundreds of OpenBSD boxes, yes.

But don't forget, OpenBSD is designed for the developers.
Show HN: Finally, just insert text in shell vim with Shift-Insert
There's a bunch of VCs who will invest in a space, once another firm has made the initial investment in a different startup. The bandwagon effect is real. Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to contact those other VCs, get funding, and ship a customer-pleasing product faster than the other guys.
There's nothing trivial about 1gbps consumer broadband (maybe if we were talking about 100mbps). It's very worthy of attention.

Very few countries have competitive access to 1gbps consumer broadband. You can name them on one hand.
Hooray! I delete all cookies on session end and I don't have flash installed. Having to remember to go to youtube.com/html5 every time I start a new session has been frustrating.

Also, the HTML5 player has a nice feature to change the rate at which the video plays, which makes watching long talks a lot easier.
Dang, I just bought a dual zone heated mattress cover. Absolutely love it except for the fact that it's all manual; you can't turn it on remotely or schedule on and off times (although it automatically shuts off after a fixed 10 hours). I often go to bed later than my wife, so have to sneak in to the bedroom 15 minutes before bed to turn my side on (or leave it on unnecessarily, or get into a cold bed, defeating the whole purpose).

This is actually less expensive than the one we bought, and obviously much more feature rich.
My first instinct (being the geek that I am) upon seeing this was it looks great. And having lived in England the majority of my life, with cold houses and heating turned off at night - heated underblankets are a necessity.

But as I read through the feature list, I couldn't help feel uncomfortable. Am I the only one that finds this deluge of technology into every aspect of our lives abhorrent?

Every single day billions of people stare into a screen. You can control your whole life on it. Your lights can come on when you come home (Hue), the temperature indoors is regulated (Nest), and now my partner and I can have regulated heating on either side of the bed. Those who have watched Black Mirror will see where I'm going with this.

I can't help feel that while there is nothing wrong with this product - in fact it's kinda cool - is it really something the world needs?

Anyway, best of luck to the team. It seems like a good product. You can't please everyone :)
Go out, go watch a movie or have dinner or hang out with friends or whatever. Get some sleep. Then wake up tomorrow and keep doing what you were doing anyway ... and do it better than them.
I don’t understand your analogy.
I've been using this for a week or so now. I wish I could figure out how to get colorized output in my SublimeREPL, but other than that, I can't say how much better this makes my clojure dev time.
Problem is, you have to spend time and money to get patents.
Atlanta was one of the "test markets" for AT&T's data cap (which is expected to be applied to other parts of the country soon). It might be the same for Comcast.
Better stack traces is huge. One of the biggest pain points in Clojure development today.
> I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations,

It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.
Sorry for an unrelated comment (but it's rare seeing Phoenix tech people around here).

Do you (or other Phoenix people reading this) go to Coffee and Code in Mesa on Wednesdays? If not, you should!

It's an awesome coworking event at heatsync labs (a hackerspace I help run).

Okay, sorry again for offtopic comment.
I pre-ordered one in August 2013. Note: pre-ordered, not "kickstarted" or anything of the like. I went to their web site, I saw the product described, I saw a predicted ship date a few weeks away, I placed an order, I gave them money.

A year and a half later and I still don't have it. Communication has been pretty bad, with many blown dates, infrequent messages, and a dashboard that often showed "ship by" dates that were months in the past. Now they're switching my order to a completely different product that I'm not sure I want.

Pre-orders have risk too, but not of even remotely the same magnitude. This behavior might be reasonable for a crowdfunded product, but not for one where the product is supposedly done and shipping imminently.
So did anyone with a pulse. :) The only part that garnered widespread opposition was the sixth point ("the most important reason"). Apple later reversed course on that particular position.
Becoming an Engineering Manager
Is that really the goal?

The goal appears to be something more along the lines of not capitulating to the worst-common-denominator. Designing your product and spending your efforts to carefully accommodate people who upgrade every few decades (give or take) results in an objectively worse product for everybody else.

Unless, of course, that customer is willing to front the money to make it worthwhile.
Wow. This company sure seems like a gold-plated turd in their dealings.

Nope, they shall see none of my money. I'll also pass the word around that their stuff doesn't work.
If you enjoyed that README, you might also like Jason Scott's talks. See this one about the history of early pirates in the BBS days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5AceLYWE1Q
Not so fast there ... This registration authority for code-points in "MP4 Family" files is Apple Inc. and it is named in Annex D (informative) in MPEG-4 Part 12.[18]

(from your link)

Apple did in fact control Quicktime AND keep it very proprietary.

To insinuate that they were pro open source on video is revisionism.
Well, that's exactly why Varoufakis has to revisit Bitcoin. Because the protocol's pros outweight by far the currency's cons.
A good night of sleep is invaluable to the performance of any athlete, especially serious athletes. Extremely positive feedback from all my athlete friends. Good luck guys!

Disclaimer: Proud investor in Luna :)
Build a Real Time Hybrid App with Ionic and Firebase
Very clever. I hope it does well for you.
I attribute it to the social aspects. For all the introverted stereotypes assigned to gamers, many find comfort and enjoyment in the communities of online games. This, combined with the direct and quantifiable competition, allows for near endless gameplay. As long as others are playing, there is a reason to continue.
Glow Headphones with laser light and heart rate sensor
Netflix has HTML5 support for Safari and iirc IE.
>> They are often very outdated too - some were closed 3, 4, 5 years ago and never updated.

This is true, but closing a question pretty much guarantees that it won't ever be updated.
"programmers wouldn't break things that are working"

So you want the world's best security experts to manually review every module of every program you use, as well as every piece of every operating system you want it to run on, to make sure there are 100% certainly no exploitable bugs that could require a fix down the line?

That's the same argument, but with reality applied.

Programmers don't "break things that are working", people find design flaws that could lead to remote exploitation. If you don't patch your stuff, enjoy being 0wned, not my problem. For the rest of the world, bleeding edge is the safest place to be.
Governments obviously do understand that it's often a tradeoff between more jobs and better employment conditions.

It's the right and duty of the government to try to maximize the wellbeing of their people - if they decide that the best way to maximize that wellbeing is by having less restrictions and thus a more active economy, then that's a valid option. if they decide that better working conditions will have a larger impact than the specific number of jobs lost, then that's a decision that they can and should make.

The employer's choice is to check if they want to do business with the people, laws and infrastruture provided by the country, or go elsewhere; the people's choice is to evaluate if they (not the employers!) would benefit from a lower or higher cost or hiring.
You are right, Germany has already flooded billions to Greece. But they didn't use it to make themselves competitive. Instead the retired early.
> "The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society."

If you replace "new people" with "works of art" and "parents" by "artists" you have logic that applies equally to a universal subsidy for all artistic activities. This might be nice, but it's something that most people would recognize as impractical and idealistic. But when children enter the picture people lose all rationality and revert to a need-focused mindset instead of a resource-focused mindset.

An actual economic argument would be much simpler than the one your propose. The production of children must be subsidized if and only if it is an objectively valuable and necessary activity (which it is) but insufficient people are dedicated to the task (which is plainly not the case, as evidenced by the stable population of the US).

Reasoning based on who enjoys the benefits of an activity is not economics, it's philosophy.
> the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.

Sincere question. What are the specific functional improvements that you've seen at a much higher mbps? Better youtube performance? Faster p2p? Faster web page load times? More supportive of a multi-device household?
The article talks about mobile app feeds, and I understand how I could build a system rpc server for mobile and desktop apps. How would this work for web apps? The headline says "real-time web!"

Compare this solution to push it all the way through the web stack: http://engineering.imvu.com/2014/12/27/the-real-time-web-in-...
The author makes it sound like the developers won't care about the bug because the user waited from 4.4 until 5.6 to upgrade.

In this case the user is better off not upgrading if the developers aren't doing to do anything about it.
Thank them for market validation and get stuck into it.
Lots of people have ideas and then produce MVP's.
But execution and level of funding will determine who survives.

It's not a zero sum game.
I've kept Flash around for the oddball site here and there that still requires it, but this week I decided to uninstall rather than patch it[1].

[1] - https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsa1...
And Chrome.
The big telecom companies got massive tax breaks at various times over the last 20 years to deploy high speed broadband, and essentially defrauded customers and tax payers by not doing what they said they would.

One example of many:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
I should have called it start-up culture, but I usually call it Valley culture. Two guys with a slide deck and an idea who call themselves the CEO and the CTO and are looking for a series A raise? Silicon Valley invented that and exported it. It's spread far and wide now, but it's still a small and self-absorbed world compared to all the other stuff going on in tech.

A lot of the innovation on hardware, browsers, and programming languages is coming from big companies, academia, and open source projects. And there's still a lot of hacking. It's just a matter of what crowd you hang out in mostly.

I guess I don't see a direct connection between hardware hacking back in the day and wannabe entrepreneurs. I knew a lot of hardware hackers at MIT, and it's just a different crowd from the web start-up crowd. And engineers at Google, Mozilla, or Apple, say, are inventing the future while knowing very little about start-ups.
Demystifying SEO with experiments
Because I am a European entrepreneur, and I have learnt that I should make hiring decisions based on talent, not on the probability of someone getting pregnant.