skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By now, I have spent more than half of my 15+ year professional career as a remote employee. My first job, back in 2000 was as a developer working for a Boston-based company from my apartment in upstate NY. We exchanged source code via CD in the mail, used a telephone and screen shared with Microsoft Netmeeting. That... was hard.

Several companies later, I find it actually difficult to work in an office environment. I'm not a hermit or even a strong introvert. I enjoy the company of other people from all walks of life, but there are so many distractions in an office environment that prevents me from doing my best work. As a Technical Operations engineer (SysEng, DevOps, SRE, or buzzword-dujour), most of my work is contemplative and best performed away from a keyboard. At home, I am free to work while running, walking, or sitting in the bathtub (TMI) with no fear of judgement from my peers. When I do need access to someone, I have a variety of tools at my disposal to suit the required latency and interactivity of the conversation.

Plus, pants are optional and slippers are the prescribed footware.

There are always challenges, though. For me, strict enforcement of work hours is a must. Sometimes I still get in the zone, lose track of time and work late, but usually I sit down around 9AM and take off around 5-6PM. Otherwise, work takes over my life and I end up neglecting my responsibilities as a husband, father, and homeowner. I am lucky to have a wife who understands my work boundaries and children who have never known a father who leaves the house for work each day. "Daddy is working" is enough for them to get them out of my office. Oddly, I grew up in a similar environment, as my father worked from a home office when I was a kid.

The biggest challenge for me has been while working for a medium-sized (1000+ employee) company in a Director role for a mostly colocated company. As an individual contributor, communication with my team and boss is relatively easy, but as a leader it is incredibly difficult to inject myself into important conversations via chat and email when those people are literally sitting next to each other. Having trusted "spies" within the organization that will keep their ears open and report back is a must or else you end up completely out of the loop.

Having worked primarily at colocated companies where I'm in the minority as a remote employee, I'm very excited to be joining an established remote first company next year and seeing how they do it in the "big leagues."
This sounds like something that has happened in your experience, but I've never heard of this phenomenon before. Do you have any articles or studies that talk about this as a trend or normal occurance?

Counterpoint: the remote workers I've worked with don't do any of the things you mentioned.

I personally think that colocation is the preferred way to perform work. Remote development environments require a conscious attention to the tools, practices, and culture. It is far simpler from a management perspective to be colocated.
I've found that it's not "working remotely" that's hard per se, it's working remotely when the rest of the team works in the office somewhere. In that set up, you basically aren't a part of all those hallway conversations, which in turn means you're out of the loop most of the time. If you're a junior engineer, that might be OK, but for someone senior: stay the fuck away from this set up, no matter how appealing it seems at first.
The heavy asterisk didn't seem to work but this asterisk operator does: ∗. std::vector<const char ∗> to a foo bar.
I wish they told me about http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs!

Also, the extended MELPA package universe. This and (use-package) allowing me not to worry about installing hundreds of packages really transformed Emacs into a productivity behemoth.

http://melpa.org/#/getting-started
“If your startup failed, it’s because it didn’t solve a tier 1 problem for a large enough audience" - Mitchell Harper. I'm having trouble understanding what problem this solves.

I'd also love to know what the triggers are for people to use this app.

Also hangover... the name entails a totally different kind of application.

Good luck! If i were you I would take time to talk with your target market to validate your idea.
The popularity of Searle's Chinese room argument has always bothered me. It's not clear what he actually believes in. So the mind is not a computer, what is it then? Something with "special causal powers"? What does that mean...
And presupposing a rule book that passes the Turing test is of course a very dubious premise. I think arm chair philosophizing is ultimately cannot give use clear answers to questions like this.
Can someone explain why the artist cannot sue everyone who sampled the track? Seems like plenty of lawyers who would happily take it on given the recent successful lawsuits? [0]

Does their limited sampling not constitute copyright infringement or is the ownership/creation disputed?

[0] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/robin-thicke-and-phar...
Disney must believe that proximity to the park (as in, right next door) adds some value to the real estate.
Show HN: Heroku Emacs Docker Image
Free is not a problem here, because we're talking "free" in economical sense. Thermodynamics does not need dollars to exist. Society has been dealing with (economically) free since long before the invention of money. Things like doing one a favour, or giving away for public good, means free on the receiving end.

And before someone mentions reciprocation - yes, it exists, but it always works implicitly. If you expect an explicit reciprocation, then you're doing trade and not a favour.
Access to kitchen is golden. You can steam, stir fry, use conventional oven, all great options to a healthy meal.
I respect the blogger's choices, but he didn't mention family. Once you have little ones, working from home becomes an incredible benefit. Obviously for females it's advantageous, but for males as well.

For example, I work full time from home and am able to drop my elementary school daughter to school and pick her up at arbitrary times of day (15 mins. round trip) while my spouse is off at her day job which is in a classroom and thus has rigid scheduling.

It makes it possible for my wife to work. It also means I can skip the shower and "business casual" dress-up ritual every morning. I typically work all morning in my pajamas/sweats, throw on running shorts and head out at lunch time for a quick noon time run, knock off around 5 or 6pm and throw some dinner together.

I'm in nearly constant contact with my teammates and management using skype chat and email. Occasionally, Webex conference calls with customers. Once in a while we screen share. (pro tip: You should disable Chrome browser's Gmail popup notifications if you are screen-sharing with your boss and you tend to get a lot of email from recruiters....)

Then there is the quiet, the ability to step outside for 3 minutes and breath the fresh air, make your own coffee or drink of choice and not have to settle for the office Keurig or institutional drip brewer. My preference has long been a French press and freshly ground beans -- though lately it's been chai tea -- easy at home, a pain to set up at an office.

The work-from-home option is truly a great advancement if you have a complicated home life, such as children. You can also take the laptop and pretty much work from anywhere; I frequently take the family on vacation and just work 9-5, saving my real time off for other occasions.

Certainly, it's "not for everyone" -- especially, I would think, for 20-somethings who are recent grads and still socializing into the work environment, or for people in some kind of tight work loop where the shoulder-to-shoulder approach is necessary, and the 5-minutes-in-the-hallway is critical for random idea vetting and brainstorming.
I imagine the difficulty lies in the fact that it has simply been sampled so frequently and over such a long period of time that the case would not be easy to win and incredibly expensive to prosecute.
You are being downmodded not for your opinion but for using a ton of words to say nothing whatsoever.
"I see my giving my attention as a paramount expression of freedom"
The thing is that the 5 secs you spent looking at an ad when you went to youtube to search for XYZ was not what you wanted but the price you paid for the free video service (because you didn't pay for XYZ video creation, nor for youtube infrastructure that serves that video, nor for google service behind to perform the search).

"free software"
-as in the use of the term "free" I might ask someone else to complete but I think is not referred to the cost of producing or delivering it to you but the access to the underlying source code and the ability to change it.
It's a huge part of the park's success.

http://land.allears.net/blogs/jackspence/2009/12/reedy_creek...

RCID can, effectively, build a nuclear reactor on the Disney World grounds without any interference from the city, county, or state.
It's like a security mechanism for spicy material. What stays in Vegas (defined as a group of individuals) does a better job of staying in Vegas if collocation is a requirement.
Neat, reminds me of https://tryca.st
Pinboard on the Next Economy Conference
> What the hell is wrong with that? Isn't that exactly what you'd expect?

What's wrong with that? They gave her a platform because she was an Asian woman. She disagreed with them, so they revoked the platform. It's farcical.
What kind of health problems? I've been working remote for about three years now and so far, haven't noticed any problems in myself.

Certainly it's made it easier to jump on the home elliptical, lift a few weights, do a few chin-ups, or run outside for 45 mins.

Back when I was in an office downtown, it was an expensive and time consuming project to go out 4-5 times a week to a gym at lunchtime or after work, then need to shower immediately before you can be around your workmates again, etc.

I'm also so much more relaxed now that I don't have to commute. That was a real stressor.
Yes lets.

We can start by not letting self-important engineers from other disciplines (and ostensible apologists actually looking for click bait headlines) define the character of our problem space.
Full disclosure: I work for an audio beacon startup (in bio).

It's great to see this article getting attention. I also shared it two days ago in a comment on a story about audio beacons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563134).

Mainly my goal was to remind people there are some realistic use cases where audio beacons >> BLE beacons. For some reason audio beacons seem to be often forgotten about as a viable alternative.
We may be getting of-topic but address this part: "or giving away for public good", in this case for public good and someone performed a work for whatever was gave away; in the same line favors most of the time are a social contract of/for enhancing relationships with someone else; by reduction to absurd you can't do it endlessly, because it has a cost and someone has to pay it.
A hangover led to the discovery of ibuprofen
The $4.5B startup Zenefits has lost half of its value
NPM 2.x is actually very slow.

Part of that is just the monstrous number of files involved. For example, one of our projects has 48 dependencies, which installs 24,421 files under node_modules. NPM could probably benefit from managing each dependency as an archive.

We do atomic deploys and try to make them reproducible, so for each deploy we do a fresh install from npm-shrinkwrap.json, but even when all the modules are in NPM's local cache it's very slow at copying everything.

Unfortunately, NPM doesn't version the node_modules folder (a package becomes ./node_modules/mypackage/...)), so you can't reuse it. The NPM cache is versioned ($cachedir/mypackage/3.23/...), but can't be used directly. It would be much better to skip the cache altogether, and have node_modules embed version strings (./node_modules/mypackage-3.23/...). Then you could easily share the folder across builds.

NPM is also pretty brittle. We frequently have deploys fail because of transient network errors (repository timing out or similar) that cause NPM to fall over. The dreaded mysterious "npm ERR cb() never called" error still hits us weekly.

(Speaking of reproducible builds: NPM lets people unpublish packages. Sometimes old versions just disappear, presumably because they were unpublished. 6 months later you want to deploy a certain app, and you find it depends on some package X, which deep in its dependency graph relies on package Y 0.3, but 0.3 is gone from npmjs.com, so you have to upgrade for no reason at all.)
So what happens after "a year or two"? Do you expect the new owners to agree to rent control in the new building for the families which used to live in the trailer park?
Why can't I find out how much it costs without giving you my email?
Well, sure. Just look what it does to the price of a hot dog on the other side of the gates. That's some Disney magic for ya right there.
I'm pretty sure the "Hangover" reference is to the series of (NSFW) still photos that played over the credits at the end of the first Hangover movie. Where they state "we're just going to look through these one time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBuwZEMMAOM (NSFW)
My suggestion: NIP — a recursive acronym meaning "NIP Installs Packages".
> we had fewer choices and less content

But the content was better and the signal to noise ratio was much bigger.
Another angle is a groupon type service. Do something fun together, get a coupon for food/drink/another fun activity that unlocks when all members on the group reunite in a month. Create mechanism for 'chaining' to encourage stickiness. People get slight push to maintain friendships they might let otherwise let slip away.
I hope I don't get downvoted for this, but the correct way to say this is "hear hear". It's derived from "hear him" or "hear her". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
This was the impetus to develop my own self-hosted GeoIP server: https://github.com/kz26/balise

It seems that self-hosting is the way to go - there's simply no incentive to run a free public API due to freeloaders and the potential for abuse. Even if you charge for it I would be surprised if any significant amount of money was made.
EDIT to add examples for your professional curiosity:

http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/05-saint-mleux.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=E53...

Note: DDD scheme also supported call/cc. :P It wasn't in the final circuit, though, except as an execution feature.

"You can only synthesize things that happen to look like functional programs because they're written using sexprs and macros and expand out to a static circuit graph which is exactly what Verilog is."

Oh, come on, that's kind of cheating as you could say the same about almost any level of abstraction. You might as well say you can't synthesize the Verilog constructs: you just synthesize something that looks like it into a connection of analog transistors that it actually is. Yet, if you can use that model and it works, then it's a meaningful thing to say you can synthesize/use such a model to get X done with Y benefits instead of hand-stitching cell libraries and gates. Likewise, the more functional (or other) alternatives to Verilog with their advantages so long as they deliver on them in the field.

For my examples, SHard is a research prototype that works on some, limited examples. DDD was used on numerous real-world projects while the spin-off was still in business. Gone now. Bluespec is still kicking ass in industry. So, Bluespec at the least proves out the concept and its advantages over Verilog.
Not visible in that picture is the tugboat that's pushing (or pulling) the ship-shipping ship.
Living in a country where engineer is a protected title, and studying toward a degree in computer engineering that grants the title, I don't quite understand the problem.

If you have an engineering degree (or have the required qualifications where it's not protected), you are an engineer.

If you don't, you are not.

Yeah, every programmer isn't an engineer. But some of them are.
Thank you! I have been wanting to see this EPCOT film again for many years. I saw an excerpt of it at the Walt Disney Story in Disney World in the 70's, and was disappointed at what they made of Epcot later.

It's funny, after Walt died it seemed nobody really had the vision to drive the original EPCOT plan forward, or they lacked the ability Walt had to sell the project to the difference sources of financing they needed, and perhaps were unable to sell the project to the rest of the Disney organization.

In the end Walt would have had to create a new organization that was prepared to build his vision of a new futuristic community. As it was, the existing Disney organizations were not able to do something so far beyond what they were currently doing.

When Epcot was built, the vision of the original EPCOT was swept away ... I felt like I was trying to convince people that this was not at all what Walt envisioned. But of course I was a young kid and nobody listened to me.
>> Unless, it cost more to service or offers more value to or offer different feature set to government customers or a particular group, you shouldn't charge different pricing.

Why not? I'm free to charge differently if I want to aren't I?

>>I think there are laws that you will run afoul of when discriminating against a group of customers without any business justification.

Hmmm, doesn't sound right to me. Can you be more specific about which laws you mean?
I'm sure presence of false and misleading information hosted by google and advertised to the whole world is something that lawyers would be happy to tackle.

I think going with well-known firm (lawyers do know the difference between joe-blow-the-consultant and well known firms) albeit hiring them just to write a scary letter will invite a response from otherwise unavailable person at GOOG who will be more than happy to make this matter to go away.
For me, working long hard hours from home can begin to make me feel an association between being at home and doing hard work (as opposed to coming home from work, where home is a place of rest). I think being able to have work separate from home is important, especially for the family. The stress of work should stay at the office, and being able to compartmentalize that stress while working from home is a skill I have yet to fully master.
hahah hilarious...I thoroughly enjoyed the video :)
How to Install Elasticsearch on Ubuntu 14.04
Interesting rundown and I agree with most of the main points. One quibble with a subpoint:

> As we know, the trolley problem has no ethically right solution- because in principle we can not weigh one life against another

That is not the current philosophical consensus.[1]

Notably, the trolley problem doesn't ask you to weigh one life against another, but relies on the fairly unobjectionable premise that five deaths are worse than one death.

The trolley problem also involves an examination of the moral difference between action and inaction, which is probably irrelevant for a machine.

But the article is right that these situations are highly contrived and unlikely. The action "brake as fast as possible to limit the force at the time of impact" is probably always the best possible solution, or near enough.

The more likely dilemma autonomous vehicles will face is how much effort they should use to avoid rear-end collisions, but calibrations like that will probably become possible with autonomous vehicles, when we could never expect humans to have enough situational awareness to roll forward when safe to avoid rear ends.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP
Funny. I work at a company that has two work-from-home days. Those two days are, hands down, the most productive days my team has all week.
No, but if they want the product then I want them to pay more.
It isn't "suddenly a problem now". Many of us said the exact same thing when T-Mobile announced their music plan. But we were drowned out by the excitement of people who didn't seem to know any better.

It's unpopular to say this but "unlimited data" is not necessarily a consumer-friendly policy. We talk about data caps like it's a way to extort more money. But corporations have budgets they need to fill. If not data overages, they'd just raise your base plan pricing or add more fees. Unlimited data doesn't really reduce how much consumers pay.

The difference... is how that money is distributed. For unlimited data plans, everyone pays the same. Which means the dude who torrents 50 gigs over 4G pays the same as my great aunt, who barely knows how to dial her phone. (But data plans are required for smartphones.)

Tiered data is the first step towards making people who use their service more, pay a larger share of the money that, let's face it, our carrier is going to collect from us anyways. It's just hard for many of us in the tech circle to accept that. Because we're 1%ers. We use a disproportionately larger segment of data than everyone else. Should we pay more than people who barely use their phones? Absolutely.

I'm not saying carriers don't overcharge, I'm not saying carriers don't add a lot of unnecessary fees. I'm not saying we don't have scary ISP monopolies in places where the government really should step in. But what I am saying is that metered data vs. unlimited data isn't the fight we want to pretend it is. And "unlimited data" plans with their restrictions against hosting a server on wire lines or against tethering on wireless is distinctly opposed to the values of net neutrality. And setting aside what services are free to use and not free to use furthers that not net neutral goal.
It's not common but many swear by it in form of Bluespec: a Haskell extension/modification for HDL with RTL output. Look them up. Further, dig in the CHERI project for their processor source as it's Bluespec for a security-enhanced, MIPS64 processor which might give you a good idea about what the language is like. Very real-world project. Already runs capability-secure FreeBSD. Most newcomers' Verilog projects are less complicated. :)

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/beri/

Also you might find Synflow's HDL interesting. It's on my backlog as I'd rather get diverse and experienced HDL users to put it through the paces. They have several, non-trivial IP for sale that they coded in it and for cheap, too.

http://cx-lang.org/
I walk past his grave every day or so. There are often fresh flowers left there. I like that powerful works can be rediscovered over time.
And Twitter. It's an insultingly obvious troll account, and... I think that's half the point.
There's no shame in using a chair for sitting :) I'm not sure if you attended a ten day Goenka retreat but other teaching styles in the same tradition can be more flexible.

Walking meditation can also help prepare the mind for sitting practice:
http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/articl...
Large companies selling stuff to enterprises use "Contact us for pricing" forms.

What follows is a sales dance with "confidential" pricing discussions.

This may or may not work for buyers.

I personally staying away from vendors who are using this tactics unless there is no other choice.
Great list!

I agree with all but the 9-5 premise. The thing that makes it easy for me is Git! Having all of our work stored in version control gives our team 100% accountability in a totally painless way. And if there's ever a project I'm working on outside of git, I do daily dump archives so each day is snapshotted.

No need to track hours, no need to wonder what somebody did all day. If you want to know what I did last tuesday go check my commit!

Version control = accountability and trust
The latter were my exact words here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572044

(see second half)