skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like Travis CI's take on unlimited vacation time [0]. Probably won't ever catch on in the US though.

0: http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/12/10/from-open-to-minimum-va...
Understand. I was mostly referring to many families having lots of hand-me-downs at this point.

>I also don't want my kids inadvertently dialing 911 - they don't need a cell connection (even without a plan) as first graders.

Genuinely curious. I certainly managed to get to adulthood without a cell phone but I guess I assumed most parents gave their kids some sort of cell phone these days. When do parents think that kids should have at least very basic feature phones these days?
Yeah, even though the article gives plenty of additional data to explain how markets are weird beasts, Sony had so many failed attempts at bringing a new format ...
Am I the only one who read this as "Intellectual property may buffer the brain against addiction?"
Materialize CSS vs. Google Material Design Lite
Not just that it's low, it's also a fact that little jobs have more uncovered overhead. It's a new domain that you have to wrap your head around, etc. No body knows right off the top of their head to get everything done. I don't see the pricing as viable.
If they can get the requisite approvals planes seem to be an ideal application of these, as burst tyres upon landing or takeoff are actually rather frequent and the shrapnel can cause extra damage... sometimes leading to catastrophic results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
That's what I think as well: tax it. Problem is: it has become very hard to distinguish advertising from other forms of communications. I think there should be some form of blanket tax on all forms of communications (billboards, web, magazines, newspapers etc) and part of the tax income should be spend to compensate for the negative effects of advertising: i.e. educate people based on scientific facts and subsidise real journalists, public tv, quality newspapers.

Of course there is no good way of implementing this. Advertising happens on a worldwide scale and no government (except north korea, who have this problem under control already) can implement it. Besides: advertisers own politics, it will never happen.
Yea I'm working for a company focused on "autonomy" at the moment. What this has resulted in is calls at all different times of day and night, and an in inability to get questions answered during normal working hours.

The calls themselves I don't mind so much, it's the stress of looking at your phone on a Saturday morning and seeing five messages "Hey are you awake?", "How about now? Time for a call?". Or messages at 9:30 at night, 2:00 in the morning, 8:00 AM. Instead of autonomy it's more a constant feeling of stress about work. Instead of freedom it ends up being prison.

I've let them know I'm moving on in two weeks to greener pastures. I'll have an office instead of working from home, and a schedule. The heirarchy won't be flat thus reducing the number of people I have to communicate with. Everyone will be based in my hometown meaning I won't be communicating over google hangouts which I am so looking forward to. And as an engineer I sort of really dislike meeting with clients and I'm glad I won't have to anymore. I can explain things to people, and I will willingly, but to have to explain technical concepts to the nontechnical frequently and over hours of hangouts is tiring, uninteresting, and frustrating.

Essentially, it's not for everyone. And that went a bit off topic, but beware the virtuous intention which paves your path to hell.
Hey friend, how can I get in on this niche market??
Something I always wonder about is the mass. Airless tires have a lot more mass around their edges than pneumatic ones do and so at higher RPMs would seem to put more stress on both the axle and the wheel, especially when turning. That seems like a really hard problem which gas solved really well.
Ask HN: Bonus system
What is the best bonus system for a small team for a startup (or a new product team in existing company)? How in your opinion the bonuses should be given and paid? Which metrics can be used for this?
They don't pay well for "Senior Data Scientist", whatever they mean by that. I make more than that in a much lower cost of living area of the country.
For a conclusion about gender differences to be exaggerated by the data there would have to be systematic biases to sampling women with lower salaries, and men with higher salaries, in the same position. Does this seem likely?

For a self-selected sample, absolutely. Self-worth is far more tied to salary in males than in females. (I don't think this is innate; I think it's a result of social conditioning which tells males that their role in society is to be breadwinners.)

But you don't need to be able to point to a specific source of bias to say that self-selected samples are problematic. It's up to the person who intends to use the statistics to show that they were either gathered reliably or carefully examined to remove biases.
Seems solid to me.

At the start the founders will fill the requests, and slowly onboard staff. While the founders are filling the requests they're possibly running at a "loss" from opportunity cost, but I can easily see them being willing to do that.

Wrapping odesk or MTurk is the last thing they'd want to do. It kills the edge they have, of zero project management overhead.
An ad-free house is definitely a good idea. I grew up in a household where we had a habit of always muting the TV when commercials came on. I really appreciate that that was a priority for my parents, and I think it was instrumental in my developing frugal attitudes in my life and rejecting at least some of the constant drive to get more and more stuff.

I can't help but think that, if our society didn't already have a tradition of mute buttons, that it wouldn't be allowed nowadays. "Giving the consumer the means to easily ignore the messages that support the content they enjoy? That's stealing!"

It's downright painful to experience the "normal" level of ads in everything -- TV commercials, ads on the Web, the insultingly obnoxious sort of ads that play on most radio stations.
Wouldn't the individuals behind organizations such as the EFF and ACLU gladly stand behind their message?
Yep - check out http://bugherd.com
Neither of them are really advertising products or services, so any regulation (under a "commercial speech needs regulation" paradigm) that would apply to them (or other NGOs we might hold near and dear) would be light or non-existent.

There's a separate argument to be made about whether political speech should be free (mostly unregulated) for corporations... Japan as I understand it is a fairly good example of heavily regulated political speech. As far as I can tell, politics in the modern world is dysfunctional regardless of how light the restrictions on political speech and political organizations' funding and activities. Political speech has many of the same problematic aspects of commercial advertisements, so I think there's room for argument that Citizens United and other precedent on the issue are a disaster, regardless of how much it might help political organizations we like.
> Syntax is crucial when developing for reliability. Brainfuck trivially proves this. Both semantics and syntax need to support reliability.

This is an almost content-free comment. You could have made your comment substantially better by giving some examples of language syntax that makes it easier to write reliable code than unreliable code.

I think that we all agree that Brainfuck and Whitespace are two examples of languages that are very difficult to read. A comment along the lines of "Languages that are difficult to read do not support reliability." is also almost content-free and probably not entirely true. (Some people find C terribly difficult to read -for some reason or other- but very reliable systems have been written in it.[0]) :)

[0] Yes, a quint-squillion unreliable and even dangerous systems have also been written in C. This doesn't invalidate my point.
"We are not separate from the computer systems we create"

Every bug in code and every example of high-speed computation is evidence enough that we are separate from the computer systems we invented. Claiming credit for the work that our computer systems have done is very insulting to the machines that actually did the work.

"they exist in a symbiotic relationship with us and they are driven by our basic needs."

But the computer systems are not driven by our basic needs. The only thing that is "driven" by our basic needs is the source code that the computer systems use. But once we provide it with that source code, the computer system will happily execute it, no matter how buggy or unmaintainable it is. If I run a computer system in an infinite loop and then die, the computer system will keep on running.

Once we provide source code to the computer systems, then our role is finished. For all they care, we can be ushered off the stage and replaced by cyborgs and computers that can happily produce more source code. If these cyborgs and computers delusionally believe themselves to be human, all the better.
I think you should reconsider reading the article. It presents an interesting viewpoint on the benefits of passing judgement in domestic abuse situations. I think that "passing judgment" is a misleading description of what he is doing. A perhaps better one would be "encouraging victims to take control of their lives".

The author has found that, in his experience, some (maybe many) victims of continued domestic abuse stay with their abusers because they simply continue doing what they've always done. Or perhaps the abuser "needs them" in some capacity. So the authors solution is to encourage and explain to victims that they can choose a different path in life and that their abusers may in fact not need them at all. It seems the author believes that a lack of self interest can be a contributing factor in continued abuse and that the solution is to increase the victims sense of self-worth and self-determination.

I don't believe that this solution will always be beneficial. Or that domestic abuse is in some way the victim's fault but the author does present an interesting argument for the benefit of asking the question "what do you get out of this relationship?" And has, at least anecdotally, found some positive results from doing so.
Extraterrestrial Life: The Shadow People
As someone from a group that's underrepresented in tech, a co-op structure would make me hesitant to apply. I would be concerned that as a minority my voice would be lost. At least with a hierarchical structure I sign on knowing who the decision makers are and what their approach is (and thus I can find a place where the decision maker values solid arguments rather than whether the majority agrees).
In the implementation yes, minimizing single-event latency and maximizing batch throughput are largely mutually incompatible. But from a user/API standpoint, there's little difference.
I find it incredibly sad that anyone would think these planes are ridiculous. Very fkn cool would be my thoughts.

But I'll switch my brain to thinking people are just using this poorly worded question bagging out hackers as a springboard for cool things people have tried (And some of them successful)

Back on topic always remember flying cars have been around or almost 100 years, it's not a technical problem -

http://jeffwise.net/2010/07/28/flying-cars-a-very-old-dream/
It's insane that advertisement spending is tax deductible (at least in the US) given how questionable its impact to society is. A slight change to the tax code would cut down on ads considerably.
I've worked for a company with "unlimited" vacation time, and "Orwellian joke" really is a great way to put it. In addition to everyone being careful not to be the guy who takes too much vacation (oh, except the slackers, of course), the value of an individual vacation day drops in everyone's eyes (no scarcity) and the result is that management develops an attitude that it's more acceptable to veto specific vacation dates. I've never had a proposed vacation denied at any other job but I saw it all the time at the "unlimited" vacation company (not only for myself but I heard coworkers complain about it).
Show HN: EchoScope – Graphical ping utility for iPhone
I actually look forwards to the ads before movies on the rare occasions that I do attend cinema screenings. Since I watch no TV (and grew up without one) and make a point of minimizing my exposure to online advertising, this serves as an amusing little peek into the current state of pop propaganda.
> Seeing a lot of teenagers with them…

Could this perhaps be explained by a teenager's relative (price, legal?) difficulty entering into a cell contract?
Actually, that's an interesting question. Having built similar systems before, the main reason why you would not simply run a function every time your input is updated is that you often need for your computations to keep a certain amount of state, which may depend on the input. However, as Incremental does not seem to support much in the way of stateful computations, I'm a bit puzzled wrt to what problem it addresses.
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I'm not sure if you're implying that Elixir's syntax makes it less good at developing for reliability than Erlang. If so, I'd appreciate if you could explain your thinking further -- if the existence of brainfuck proves that Erlang's syntax is better than Elixir's at developing for reliability, I'm afraid the nature of that proof is eluding me.
It reminds me of Douglas Crockford's talk where he mentioned that a company asked him for an exemption to the "do no evil" clause in the JSON License, and he said he didn't want to name the company as that would embarrass them so he would instead give their initials: IBM.
NxM BEAM processes will give you a real boost only if you have NxM physical cores to run code in parallel. Yes, Erlang makes clusters painless, but it's still more reasonable to use a single machine with a faster VM/native code.
I moved from FreeBSD on a server two days ago, because it lacked Docker-support. Kicking myself in the foot right now...
Leaving a job a week in for a better one?
So I've accepted a offer for company A but a few days into company B has offered me a job which is better in every way. The reason I took company A is because I had been looking for a month or so and didn't think I would get B. Is it wrong to leave a week in?
IANAL, but my understanding is that all (with a few caveats) works created by US government employees are, in fact, in the public domain but that doesn't mean they can be made available publicly without restriction.

http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html

The fact that U.S. Government works are not protected under the U.S. Copyright Law does not create a requirement that all U.S. Government works be made publicly available without restriction (See Gellman, Robert M. Twin Evils: Government Copyright and Copyright-like Controls Over Government Information. Syracuse Law Review, 999, 1995. ADA394923). See Pfeiffer v. Central Intelligence Agency 62, 60 F.3d 861 (D.C. Cir. 1995). Federal laws and agency policies govern the public release of U.S. Government information. Examples include Executive Order 13292, Classified National Security Information , OMB Circular A-130,63 Management of Federal Information Resources, Department of Defense Directive 5230.9 Clearance of DoD Information for Public Release, April 9, 1996, ASD (PA) and DOD Instruction 5230.29 Security and Policy Review of DoD Information for Public Release.
I'm pretty sure you can just say pot, weed, or marijuana if you want to sound smart. :)
You can couple material with complexity such that everything can apparently be material. However if we limit our notion of "material" to what we observe in our universe then we can easily do the same with conceivable forms of non-material. We can even simulate them in our entirely material world using the universal correspondence of the turing machine. The "everything is material" explanation is a degraded form of the "everything is complexity" explanation. I suspect most formulations of an intelligent entity or an "idea" would be non-materially formulated but materially represented in this same way. If you assume materialism is the explanation for everything then yes all known instances of the materialism idea are incidentally materialistic.
Yeah, we're a Los Gatos based company as well and we beat
those numbers. Without adding stock in the picture, just salary, bonuses, 401K and healthcare.

But we're a company that is more like a co-op than your typical startup, as in, we're weird. Good weird, but weird.
Have you taken a look at the Thinkpad X1 Carbon? I always hear nice things about it.
Just to clarify, the noise is helping you sleep, not keeping the cat from moaning?
Isn't this the same thing as eating more when you're bored?
Tiny houses for the homeless thrive in Eugene: Would this work in other cities?
Yes, indeed I was refering to that Linus' post. But thanks for the link, I found Bjarne Strousrup's interview particularily interesting to read: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/I_did_it_for_you_all

Blew my mind:

"...this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.

"I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it’s taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.

"It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient."
Not trying to sound smart. No point in posting you did [thing] that is illegal in some states.
I have, and love, an iPod Classic. I got it ~in 2007. The battery is still pretty great, but there's something wrong with the Hard Drive in it. Certain songs are just trashed, play them on my computer and they're fine. If I delete them and then reload them, they might be fixed, but one or more other songs will be trashed. I tried to do a backup of it, so I could wipe and start anew, but it took more than a day and was not even half way through the backup. Mind you, the thing is not even near full of music. The worst part, for me at least, is I know how to fix it, but I'm afraid that if I take it apart, it's not going to go back together. It's taken quite a beating.
They get rather wobbly and noisy as you reach higher speeds.
Show HN: Ufen – Encrypt Every File in Node.js with AES-GCM
Netflix employee 2009-2011; built the user-facing parts of the original iPhone and Android apps. If you are an engineer--sorry, can't speak to other roles--and you can possibly swing a stint at Netflix, do so. They move fast, pay a ton, and you'll build a universally-loved product with some of the smartest people in the world.
Probably a good idea for a production server. From FreeBSD: Docker on FreeBSD should be considered experimental.
I don't think the research does an adequate job differentiating intellectual activity from agency. Is the learning and exploring their substitute for addiction? Or is it the linking of action and effort to reward?

I'd be interested in comparing the inert mice to mice that are rewarded sporadically for a physically demanding but intellectually effortless task, such as running on a mouse wheel. I'd guess the results would be similar.
Auto-Post to Twitter and Facebook from Rails in 10 Minutes
Intro to Meteor Revision 1.0
Many would, but I bet fewer would pay the advertising costs out of their own pockets. And any loophole you provide civil liberties organizations (pay them a salary to buy ads) will just as soon be taken advantage of by the corporations we all despise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_code#Speed_rating

In many countries, the law requires that tires must be specified, and fitted, to exceed the maximum speed of the vehicle they are mounted on, with regards to their speed rating code (except for "temporary-use" spare tires).

I see it as a safety factor - the speed ratings of most common tires (S or T, 180 or 190 km/h) are far beyond what most people will ever drive at. If this one is only rated to 130km/h, that decreases the safety factor.
Same as every other business expense, it's not like it's got a special status.
if everyone would think like you, almost nothing would end up on HN
I agree that there are issues with shareholder governance; mostly a bunch of well meaning laws from the corporate raider era that prevent shareholder activism. This is a rather separate issue.

Suppose we eliminated corporate personhood. Now a collective of people are bound together in a web of contracts and call themselves "citizens united". They agree to act and use a subset of their property in accordance with a specific governance structure determined by a mutually agreed upon charter. How do you hinder this non-corporate group's rights to free speech?
> I've known people

> I don't have any intimate knowledge of

> Don't work there but friends in ops industry have

> I had a manager who

> Had a friend who worked at apple, went to netflix

Just to disagree with the hivemind here, at this point literally only one reply talks about actually working at Netflix personally and I would expect glassdoor, quora or linkedin to be a much better venue for this.

Your attitude aside, this sentiment is likely correct.

edit: 4 people showed up and are answering questions and being generous with their time. nvm, suck it Quora, HN it is.
This reminds me a bit of Elasticsearch Percolate (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.6/...) a little bit.
Yes, it's helping me sleep. It's not that it drowns out the cat's moans; it just adds enough white noise that the moan doesn't wake me up (unless, of course, it's standing on me, moaning to make me turn over :-/ ).
> And has, at least anecdotally, found some positive results from doing so.

Quite a lot of his other anecdote was pure bollocks though. Here's the clearest example:

>> I know from experience that such a man might take an overdose as a form of emotional blackmail: the vast majority of male overdoses in my ward are of men who have beaten their women—the overdoses serve the dual function of blackmailing the women into remaining with them and of presenting themselves as the victims rather than the perpetrators of their own violence. I also know from experience that the Muslim burglar would never actually kill himself.

He's a complete cunt. Men like him did very great harm to their patients.
Or maybe their edge is that they talk to the customer and then subcontract the task out on oDesk or MTurk?

Zero project overhead is a more plausible justification for their pricing than zero project management overhead.
This Week in Meteor #23
Elastomania! There is still an active community of players playing an online-enabled mod of this 15+ year old game over at http://www.elmaonline.net -- come say hi :D
Keeping salaries confidential solves all these problems

Only if the salary is the only way in which your peer is being rewarded.

These sorts of hostilities exist quite frequently in companies that don't share salary information, because rewards exist in lots of forms, including promotion, project assignments, shift scheduling, etc.

Imagine a company that decided to keep promotions secret to avoid hostilities.