skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am of the view commercialism has overwhelmed or outrun the innovation than ever?
Seems moderately comparable to SF. [1]

Switzerland is generally considered to be very expensive compared to most places though.

[1] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
Hmm. Calvin lived and preached in Geneva. Geneva is in fact sometimes referred to as "La Cité de Calvin", and on the whole is viewed quite positively there...
On the flip side, living in China for nine years made me appreciate many of the good things in the US.
Ok, fine, so there are no real-time, optimization, or scheduling guarantees in C / C++ and it's better to be safe than sorry. But why does it actually matter if either the hash function or hash value comparison takes data-dependent time? How can you use that information to recover the password?
Looks great on mobile. I tried to look at the HTML source code to check if you where using front-end framework but I wasn't able to find any.

How did you build it?
Interesting read but I think the author makes a false conclusion that taxes on wealth is better than taxes on income. If the US income-based tax system really were progressive in practice, then you could compare apples to apples. A wealth-based system could be just as non-progressive if there were similar ways around paying your fair share like there is in the US.

Given systems that are equally difficult to circumvent, the type of taxes that would be most beneficial are those that don’t punish earning income and saving and investing money. Things like sales taxes, consumption taxes, and transaction taxes discourage consumption and also discourage financial system manipulation by the super-wealthy.

But I think the Swiss succeed despite this because they have a much more compassionate view towards their fellow citizens and are willing to pay higher taxes if it’s used for things that genuinely make people lives better rather than line the pockets of big business and cronies. Also, US workers have a terrible work ethic and an adversarial relationship with their employers. If you feel you should get more out an employer than you give them, you’re not really understanding how the system works. If you provide high productivity and there is mutual interest in the company succeeding, then taking time off or working a normal work schedule is not anything an employer would need to argue about. A company has to make money in order to hire people. They aren’t a public service. If you’re not productive, then you are probably going to have to work longer hours so that the company can succeed enough to keep your job.

And in general, Americans are greedy. It’s what brought people here as a young country and it’s in our DNA. What works in Switzerland probably can’t really work here. But what actually could work is to use economic incentives to try to encourage a healthier economy. Instead, we waste our time thinking that taxing the rich more is the solution to everything. Sure, they should pay more than lower income people do, but it’s a multi-layered problem.
Hi :), sorry you're right, looks like i am going to make it more difficult than it really is. Actually you can also skip elements https://github.com/720kb/highlighter.js#skip-next

Use cases are up to your imagination, just for example, think of a html5 game where you want to highlight but skip elements, or move cursor forward and backward... only a trivial example
Drishyam 2015
I rarely have the privilege of seeing an article so utterly discredited in the comment section.
I don't really see biology attracting the same kind of intellect that programming does. There is an enormous, and constantly growing, amount of minutiae that must be simply remembered by rote. It seems much closer to law than to computer science.

If, instead, I were choosing exclusively based on the importance of the work for humanity, I would still go for energy research before biology. That is what civilization's survival hinges on.
I have seen a ton of info on the net about non-rocket launch systems (e.g. balloons and planes, http://www.space.com/28504-darpa-satellite-launching-jet-ala...) but I have never seen anyone explore a glider, of course the payload would be limited to a micro- satellite. But with a glider, you don't have the fuel payload and it seems like the launch could be more controlled than a balloon. If they pull this off I wonder if there is a commercial application there ?
I've been kind of half-assed about "releasing" them so far, but yes! Here are my Bach playlists: http://rspeer.github.io/blog/2014/09/25/bachify/
I didn't comment on what I thought of it. I clarified what she thought of it. See, now you've done it. You guys need to slow down.
Brothers of War 2015
I consider predestination to be a more harmful idea than any Protestant work ethic (however inconsistent it is in practice), honestly.
Yes, it is more expensive in every way than San Francisco.

Given the re-float of the Franc, it's even worse now.

(I live in SF but one of the rsync.net locations is in Zurich and I travel there frequently)
If you feel like surrendering the space you and your friends built to those more socially adept by all means go for it. Who cares if they have any real connection to the interest the group is centered about, they're... normal! Maybe it'll rub off on me! Maybe then I'll be a real boy!
I had a similar experience to the author. Despite earning tons of money in the Bay Area, life quality here just doesn't compare to Europe.
I believe it's not trivial to get a job there, especially if you come from outside the EU. And soon restrictions will be imposed on EU countries as well.
That's a very good point. Costs certainly are a hugely significant factor that I overlooked. I suppose it would come down to how much of the in house framework you could write up front (so you wouldn't necessarily need to hire as many engineers and could cut some of those labor costs preemptively) and how well that framework is actually written. I think that there are probably too many variables to have a one size fits all solution to this question, however.
Some of the emails you present are straightforward and useful - the second one in particular I'd be happy to receive. If you feel like someone would be a good fit after improving their skills in some specific area, that's a good thing for the candidate to hear.

Others, though, feel downright insulting - especially the first email. Praising someone's programming background, past projects, and eagerness to solve hard problems isn't an appropriate lead-in to telling them they failed a technical interview. It's either vacuous (they weren't talented, but you needed something to compliment) or back-handed (if their technical skills weren't good, how can you actually respect their past projects?) That's just a way to leave a candidate feeling worse about themselves and you.

Don't abandon this idea. I hugely value specific rejections, even blunt ones like "You don't have the skills we need" or "You failed the second technical interview". Just don't mix that with praising traits you're about to reject someone for.
It's worth noting that gravity pulls any YC backed company's job ad off the front page within a few hours. They don't get pinned (though occasionally one will be "replayed" after a short delay).

And just out of compulsion for technical specification, job ads for YC backed companies also lack a "flag" link.
Separating whites from coloreds [1] should be achievable now. There's a robot that can take a pair of socks and determine if one is inside out and if so invert it. That involves more subtle distinction of colors than merely separating whites from coloreds should.

Here's a video of the robot in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKUaVzf3Oqw

It's a little bit NSFW.
I think average wage is a bad metric.

I can't find any source ATM but I think the median salary is around $75k.
It makes me sad that federated protocols are on their way out.
The Advertising Wizard Who Has Everyone Spellbound
Although Switzerland and America may have very different work cultures and social support policies, that's not the most obvious difference. Consider our per-capita GDPs (2013, nominal dollars)[1]:

Switzerland 84,748
United States 53,042

So even if the US passed new employment laws and embraced work-life balance, we would still have only 63% of Switzerland's money to spend on each person. I'm not saying that the US couldn't improve its working conditions, but its unavoidable that a wealthier nation will have resources to treat its working class well.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=switzerland+vs+united+s...
i also suspect that they are slashing their cash cow (corporate users among them) for the vague promise to be like google and facebook (the promise of add dollars).

Good luck with that one.
So the glider tech in Seveneves is possible then? I thought it seemed implausible that a glider could fly so high.
Americans didn't have an aristocracy

Wasn't there one in the South during the antebellum era?
Sometimes got weird with Flask-Mongoengine
what? America had an actual slave class. Also indentured servants.
I think article skips anything negative.

For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss.

Second the taxation leaves various compulsory "contributions": social, pension, wealth, tv, petrol etc. It is not 5% but more likely 50% of average salary.

And third, I have totally different experience with american companies. All american corporations I worked for had strong life-work balance, holidays etc.
Uhm... there's something called Amazon Data Pipeline. They offer scheduled events and you can output Alarms to SNS...
-3 but the comment isn't faded? How does that work? And while I'm here, what is the downing for? An observation on the different terms used in New York and London - too off topic? Seems a bit excitable.
Low-grade neuroses of this type are endemic to American culture. It is also expressed in discipline and reward/punishment.
Indeed. In fact, I thought one of the most notorious aspects of his theology was predestination, as Wikipedia puts it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology_of_John_Calvin#Predes...):

Near the end of the Institutes, Calvin describes and defends the doctrine of predestination.... The principle, in Calvin's words, is that "All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death."
Given the re-float, it's actually much better now (for residents) - prices of imported goods have fallen.
Well, if you don't like mountains I don't recommend it

The language is a challenge as well, though most people speak English

Smaller houses (and places in general)

A very demanding society, basically https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/11pcs1/while_i_l...
I wasn't aware that Microsoft Windows supported a stderr filehandle separate from stdout. When I worked a little on it about 17 years ago, I thought it didn't have that (e.g. warnings from Perl were intermixed with redirected stdout or so). Did I misinterpret something or has the system been changed?

(Edit: that was longer ago than I first remembered; it was on Windows NT.)
Olduse.net: a real-time historical exhibit
If you are american or from a western country you would be probably fine, but if not, there are some caveats.
Swiss are not bound by the same EU laws about on agism/sexism/racism. They are surprised when you don't include your photo on the CV. They really can get away with a lot of crap.
I have heard a lot of anecdotes about increasing xenophobia as well. Popular political parties with anti immigration agendas can pass surprising laws because young people do not vote.
In the richest countries in Europe, Switzerland and Norway, also supermarkets and restaurants are priced to match the general income level of the population.

In the US it is easier to have a six figures salary, but still drive over to a cheaper part of town to buy lunch for under $8, or buy cheap stuff from Walmart, ShopRite etc.

Whereas if you live in Norway, you have to drive to Sweden in order to buy cheaper groceries.
Related: check out olduse.net for a real-time USENET feed on a 30-year delay (so it's currently showing the news of the day in 1985).
From now on, we should call it "The Swiss Dream" and let go of any preconceptions that America is the land of opportunity and the proof is in the pudding by the much higher average annual income earned by the Swiss over their US peers despite the longer hours they put in and the jobs that enslaved them for eternity.
I spent 25-50% of my time working in Switzerland - rest of the time in the UK. There is literally no downside of Switzerland - it is a truly magical place. A commenter mentioned too much democracy, and it's true that it's one of the most democratic places on the planet - so the harsh side of people come out - but it's fair. Also the languages - there's 3 or 4 official languages, and the German is a special dialect, but in business it's all English so it's not an issue. The prettiness is the worst part in many ways - you either feel like you're dreaming (Lucerne) or you get feelings of disgust when you see rubbish on the ground (Zurich). The actual biggest downside is as mentioned in the article - it spoils you for other countries.
It's too expensive.

In regards of programming jobs, sometimes it's like living 40 years ago.

Racism is annoying, but normal here. And you must be proud of being Swiss.

Switzerland is tiny. Finding (and keeping) friends here can be hard, because if you even dare to fart, the whole village knows about it within seconds.

And you shouldn't use your brain too much, so you can keep up with the others. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't only apply to Switzerland, so you may safely ignore this one.
Extensive discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9830531
That is interesting.

To sum up, you say that a technique which NLP uses was non-NLP before and works, that's why NLP is not scientific?

Maybe I'm too tired right now, but for me that's a clearer NLP pro argument than I could come up with.

Anyway, I'm not really interested in who is right or wrong. I think NLP works and whoever wants to try it should do it, but be careful not to learn from charlatans. These who want to wait for scientific evidence can also do so.
Nobody would dispute or ignore that - of course that occurred to me when writing the original comment.

I stand by my analysis since American slaves were (at the time) a small minority of the country that existed in a fraction of the geography and lasted for less than 90 years after 1776.

No portion of americans were "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for ... 2000 years" and no majority (or even large plurality) of americans were ever enslaved at all.
Yea, and you're also a software engineer judging by your profile. Lets not pretend what we experience is the same as the average American experience.
There's one thing I'm interested in since this is on HN... How easy is it to start a venture over there?

Also, my old roommate from college works at CERN now as a researcher. He tells me that he can't afford to go out and eat since it's so expensive. Is this true?
"Driving Bentleys ruined me for BMWs and their poor make quality"

Switzerland is one of... three maybe (Luxemburg, Norway) countries with higher standard of living than the US. Not even Switzerland's neighbours (Italy, France, Germany) with people coming from the same populations can reproduce it.

All these great states are tiny (8M people) outliers. There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland. You could carve out multiple Switzerlands of the US if you broke it up and tightened immigration (as the Swiss are doing right now).
True, but my point was that imperial had those benefits of divisibility, yet we switched away from it...
>eating with my boss.

Why? Lunch hour is your own time - I doubt any European places actually require that you spend it with your boss. Hell I walk home, cook a (fast) meal and chill for a bit.
What actually helped me was to get married - it's the best training in soft skills that you can get.
I've heard similar statements to that one, and never been pleased. I met someone with Dropbox who spent much of our conversation telling me how they only take the best (with extensive namedropping) and most applicants never even get a return phonecall.

I think it was meant to draw me in by promising a selective team (he took my resume), but it didn't work at all. It simply felt like he was bragging about his own greatness (because he did have a job there) while telling me they would probably waste my time.

Even if the sentiment is good, any variant of "we're so great that failing is still an honor" feels tacky and self-aggrandizing.
Make decisions with easymind,the social voting App. (Developing since January)
"Currently an estimated 28 percent of all funds held outside the country of origin (sometimes called "offshore" funds) are kept in Switzerland."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland#Banking

It's cute that she even provides numbers and leaves this out. This is the only number you need to know. Everything else is the direct result of this.

You know who else does awesome? A closed community of multi-millionaires in the USA. Except you're not a part of that elite. Somehow, you got to be part of the European elite (anyone who lives in Switzerland) and feel like the rest of the world can magically live like that. No, that lifestyle is at the expense of the rest of the world.
The picture looks very different if you use purchasing power parity; per Wikipedia, which cites roughly the same nominal per-capita GDPs, in PPP dollars:

Switzerland 58,731
United States 54,596

If you then factor in the demographics....
This is why I think visas are better than immigration - lessons return to the original country.
>There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland.

Thats a little bit disingenuous comparing absolute numbers of countries with very different sizes.

I do agree that they're outliers though - seems very difficult to duplicate.
How is all of that sustainable? Are us Americans just being massively lied to?
Lambdas really do clean things up nicely in some places. It pains me to have to write function objects at work knowing this.
That's one theory that is easy to believe, but it's not true and is a gross simplification of how the European welfare system came about.
I still send detailed rejections and so does my entire team. We get a lot of genuine thanks for doing so and some smaller amount of nothings meaning this was either useless or the candidate got upset.

I try to minimize unnecessary praise and focus on actionable items. And I always use written feedback as source.
IMO, any discussion about C metaprogramming should mention m4 [0], [1], a superior alternative to preprocessor macro system.

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/m4/m4.html

[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-metaprog1/
Nobody here mentions anying about the very peculiar banking system that let the swiss economy get a huge chunk of the illegaly made money of the world?

Of course, you can have a very generous social security system and a great transport infrastructure when you've been financed by crime for decades.

It's probably not the only reason of course, and we surely have many smart things to learn from this country.
> It seems that the past 6 years or so saw most big ISP's dropping USENET support claiming mostly piracy concerns. Was it piracy or the fact that it's tough for the government to control what people say on USENET?

No conspiracy theories needed here.

Copyright infringement is one angle; the other is that it costs ISPs a huge amount of resources for something few people use.

Once upon a time, a single server could easily mirror all of USENET for all users of an ISP, and almost every user expected it, so they'd treat it as an essential part of the service. Now, it would take far more storage to do so, and almost nobody expects it, so why should an ISP provide it? It's easier to let people get USENET from a third-party service, and it'd be a better experience for the people who actually want it, too.

If an ISP has resources to burn and wants to make their technical users happy, they'd get far better results for more users if they provided things like local Linux distribution mirrors instead. Far more users would make use of that than USENET.

And if they want to make the vast majority of users happy, and save resources on their end in the process, they can provide local CDN nodes for YouTube, Netflix, and similar.
If there isn't already an intricate system of landed class and privilege, who are "these folks over here" that give the money for the welfare and benefits?
That was my first thought, as well. Would be awesome to see it work, even though the really cool stuff in that scene is a long way off. ;-)
> For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss.

Her boss invited her to lunch for one time, just to demonstrate that lunch is supposed to be (in Switzerland) something else than eating a sandwich at your desk. If you read 4 sentences further, there is:

"When I was on maternity leave, my husband came home for lunch to help me care for our daughter."

So you are free to spend the lunch hour however, also visiting your home and children. Lunch with boss is not mandatory.
My blog runs on Jekyll and a longish post (~4000 words) doesn't get above 32kb, I would say that is pretty small, even by dial-up standards it wouldn't take long to retrieve.
My point was that he wasn't actually saying he doesn't want for anything. Of course he does, and yes for him that includes Netflix.

My point was that his argument was that he generally knows what he wants and doesn't want to be incessantly marketed to -- yet, because of bad wording, you made it sound like he was erroneously claiming he wants nothing.

Almost by definition, we all want something. But that does not require constant marketing.
Microsoft's HoloLens will ship to developers 'within the next year'
That must be annoying. Why can't you switch to C++11/14?
Although I don't think the decline of USENET was caused by worries about the inability of governments to control it, I can answer your question.

USENET has no central point of control (or at least it had none 15 years ago when I lost interest in USENET). The basic infrastructure is designed so that any news server can get a copy of all the USENET articles being stored by any other news server, and anyone with sufficient bandwidth and sysadmin skills can set up a news server. Consequently, there's no single organization that has the power to remove an article from USENET unless perhaps it is an organization that has arisen since I lost interest in USENET 15 years ago that is central to the control of USENET spam. (I mention spam because 15 years ago, spam was the only potential reason or problem an effective alliance of server owners might recognize as a legitimate reason to remove a message from USENET.) It would have to be an organization that every significant news server relies on for telling spam from non-spam. But I get the impression that spam is out of control on USENET, which is a strong sign that such a universally-consulted spam-control organization does not exist.

Anyway, I hope that you get the idea of what the OP was on about with his implication that pro-censorship forces killed USENET because government could not control speech on USENET (which, again, probably does not have any basis in reality because IMHO USENET was never popular enough with readers to worry pro-censorship forces).