skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mythical man month actually says the opposite, because even if longer hours have diminishing returns, the organizational overhead from adding people to the team is worse. Maybe the descrepency here is short view (a couple years to build a startup) vs long view (mature organization over an entire business cycle)

edit -----

Secondary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547965

Quoting the secondary source:

"From a business point of view, long hours by programmers are a key to profitability. Suppose that a programmer needs to spend 25 hours per week keeping current with new technology, getting coordinated with other programmers, contributing to documentation and thought leadership pieces, and comprehending the structures of the systems being extended. Under this assumption, a programmer who works 55 hours per week will produce twice as much code as one who works 40 hours per week. In The Mythical Man-Month, the only great book ever written on software engineering, Fred Brooks concludes that no software product should be designed by more than two people. He argues that a program designed by more than two people might be more complete but it will never be easy to understand because it will not be as consistent as something designed by fewer people. This means that if you want to follow the best practices of the industry in terms of design and architecture, the only way to improve speed to market is to have the same people working longer hours. Finally there is the common sense notion that the smaller the team the less management overhead. A product is going to get out the door much faster if it is built by 4 people working 70-hour weeks (180 productive programmer-hours per week, after subtracting for 25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time) than if by 12 people working 40-hour weeks (the same net of 180 hours per week). The 12-person team will inevitably require additional managers and all-day meetings to stay coordinated.
There is another story here. Look at the inventory level at the time of sale: $371 million. In that time frame, they had about 1.2-1.3 billion in revenue. That puts their inventory-turnover ratio at around 3.2-3.5. Meanwhile, Best Buy, GameStop, hhgreg, operate at a turnover ratio approaching 5.5, and Amazon is at over 8.[1]

So here is my alternative take on this: Woolworth's knew that retail consumer electronics is a dead business in the age of Amazon and Apple/Microsoft company stores. They knew that the $371 million of inventory was never going to sell at that price. Who wants to buy 6-9 month old consumer electronics? So they sold Dick Smith at a discount to: 1) get out of a dying business area; 2) have someone else take on the onerous task of liquidating whatever value could be extracted from the company.

Now, as to the subsequent sale. It's not like prospective investors didn't see these transactions. It's not reasonable to assume that institutional investment professionals couldn't have figured out what it takes this blog post a couple of pages to explain. More likely, they were taking on a gamble: here was a leaner, meaner Dicks stripped of baggage that could make profits going forward. They lost that bet, but not because of anything the PE company did.[1] They lost that bet because Dick Smith immediately bloated itself up again with huge amounts of inventory, likely because the company simply wasn't structurally capable of operating as leanly as the market now demands.

[1] http://marketrealist.com/2015/01/best-buy-attempts-optimize-....

[2] This does not appear to be a case where, e.g. the PE company loaded the target up with unsustainable debt.
McDonalds made a video[1] in which they show how a typical photo shoot for a hamburger. All elements in that video are actual stuff that you can eat (unless the one mentioned in the article), but it's hard to say whether that's how they always do it or if they just made an exception for the video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8
Utrecht is fairly sprawly:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/52.1307/5.1605

My experience of the trains was that it would be very reasonable to live in Hilversum and work in Utrecht.
Strange Loop[0] is the go to multi programming language paradigm in my opinion. It's held in St Louis, Missouri every year and features some of the very best speakers in the domain of programming language design, theory and computer science.

0 - http://www.thestrangeloop.com/
Missed it last year and looks like I'll be missing it this year again. Bummer. I've only heard great things.
Win a free IoT development board
We should reduce full time employment to 30 hours.

You'd probably end up with nearly equal productivity for office staff, and you'd generate more jobs for shift based work, as you would need 30% more workers to cover a 5-day period.

This was one of the drivers of the 40-hour workweek -- previously, 12 hour days + saturday work were considered the norm.
China's Strategy
I would have thought they would have had a commanding majority as well. Occasionally I'll buy something on GoG - but it's usually an oldy-but-goody for $5 or less. Almost every single game I have gotten through Humble Bundle has just been a Steam key.

I guess there's Origin, but I've only ever bought Mass Effect 3 from them.

Good luck even finding PC games in a box in a retail store...

EDIT: Derp, completely spaced Blizzard... that's where most of the missing money must be going.
Wow that's terrifying.

I think it's systemic, and we need to be very clear what we want a company (like Dell) to do in this situation.

Programmers are not usually held accountable for their own bugs, and I think that needs to change too. I don't recommend prison time, but maybe just some humility?

Bankers do the same thing: Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, and I get they're just doing their best, so why don't they put their own money in the same pot?

Heck, we expect the cafe to refund our coffee if they mix it up wrong, so why can't we just push that message upwards?
GreyB Research Is Providing Free IP Consultancy for Startups
Currently reading Carl Sagan's Contact. Loved the 1997 film with Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway. The book is a real treat.
I'm guessing asian markets have to do with this. PC gaming is way more popular than console gaming in China, mostly due to the long ban.

League of Legends is also incomprehensibly huge. And Blizzard is nothing to scoff at.

*EDIT: Found the article an article from Newzoo. Looks like China alone is almost triples USA PC game sales.

http://www.newzoo.com/insights/us-and-china-take-half-of-113...
Oracle is the DBMS of the Year
That working fewer hours ==> increased productivity is also a mathematical tautology. Productivity being a function of output and hours, with output generally being somewhat sticky as hours change.
> It really is all about the lighting, presentation and a decent macro lens.

That pretty much sums up all of photography, though. It's like saying "programming is all about structuring the code". The devil is in the details.
The Zen of Mobile Apps: Seven Harmonious Tips to Increase App Shelf Life
Encode a hash table where key order matters (like the Python OrderedDict). Or a hash table with non-string keys (like a sky chart with XY coordinates). Or any other data structure which doesn't conform to a simple list/hash table format.

Right tool for the job. JSON is a great 80% encoding format, which handles most cases. The problem is that folks try to make it handle all cases (ironically, just like they did with XML).
Context switching tax
I'm a fan of landing.jobs
I wasn't trying to make a point about the disruptive effect of technology. My point is that people getting free money is functionally equivalent to them having access to more goods and services, which is something technology does (in the medium run) and that no one seriously worries about.
No argument about the batteries themselves, but self-driving cars require substantially less overall maintenance -- oil changes, timing belts, fuel pumps, transmissions, and even things like brakes all either are unnecessary in all-electric vehicles or maintenance is substantially reduced.
Been a big Stephenson fan since Cryptonomicon. Enjoyed the Baroque Trilogy, Anathem & Reamde, but non of them are as good as Cryptonomicon. It's a bit like be an Umberto Eco fan - nothing since Name of the Rose has been quite as good. Or Wes Anderson for that matter; there's been good stuff, but nothing's touched the heights of Royal Tenenbaums.
Absolutely delivered, one of the reasons Boston is such an amazing city. If you like European style cities, Boston is the only one USA has and it's awesome.
What you call “flavors”, most people call “distributions”. And you are wrong; “Linux” is the name of the kernel.
Jolla Fails to Deliver, Again?
Porting dl.Google.com to Go
>> * Install NPM in a way that you can upgrade easily. Your package manager was designed to do this, so use it. Never ever put untracked files in the system directories.

> The articles uses the package manager - specifically, the article directs people to install node using nodesource's RPM and dpkg node packages (npm is included with node), and only mentions tarballs if these don't exist for your OS.

Sure, but it also advises users that it's generally OK to extract tarballs into /usr/local. While this clearly is OK in some circumstances, the target audience for this article clearly aren't in a position to make that decision, or understand the consequences of doing this. The article could have suggested "/opt/node" for example and avoided the issue at the expense of explaining how PATH variables work.
Can't remember where I read it because it was such a long time ago but one explicit benefit of null-terminated strings is that they take a single instruction to check for the end on nearly all processors: jump if zero.

That allows for elegant constructions in C such as:

while (*p++ = *q++);
Same idea as in http://xkcd.com/504
If anything I'd say a movie license in the world of gamers is a chain around your neck, because there haven't been a lot of films that made the jump well. Mad Max did well because it was a legitimately good game, and while Metal Gear was a big deal, its not as big on the PC as in Sonyland.
We don't even have to take the speed hit. Why? Because here is how the unspecified evaluation order benefits the above scenario: the compiler doesn't have to reason about whether p == q.

But since C99 we have had a tool by which we can tell the compiler, "trust me, p != q". Namely:

int f(int * restrict p, int * restrict q) { ... }

So with this, even if we have strict left to right order, it can still reorder the code the same as before.
I think the analogy holds for the case of employees not having the capacity to give extra hours due to other commitments. However, I totally agree that people aren't AWS servers, and the reason I felt the analogy was bad was that such a mechanistic view doesn't leave room for the multitude of positive, human ways of working around such problems. For example: if an employer asks a 20h/wk employee to work extra hours, then there can be a negotiation around whether the extra hours can be done at home, flexibly in the evenings, or for a higher hourly rate. In other words, people can compromise and negotiate a settlement which is beneficial for all.

I also don't think it's necessarily true that two part-time people would be less skilled or less focussed on work. It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.

I've worked with many talented and exceptional "family guys" (and family women) who were skilled and totally focussed during working hours. I haven't noticed a correlation between people's priorities outside working hours and ability to do good work.
Still does not resolve here... maybe the problem is just in my network. I can see it now using translate.google.com as a proxy and it works.

Thanks !!
Wow, that stub of a motorway has to have been useless from day one. Only built because at one point of time it seemed "modern".
Reminds me of an old German site where they photographed food in advertising vs reality

http://www.pundo3000.com/werbunggegenrealitaet3000.htm

Many food companies now feature windows on their packaging to prevent this disparity showing transparency in their foods.
But they are paid, largely, via taxes that I would believe many people would like to not pay. Taxation's gotta be a coercive thing... what's your take on that?
Standards organization accepts completion of last row of periodic table
> My take is that if it selects against candidates who view remote employment as just another free lance job, more the better for both sides. Remote employment is not another form of freelance work. The relationship is different.

I'm not really sure how you've made that leap. It doesn't seem to me that hiring people for a freelance job selects for people who don't think of remote work as a freelance job. If anything you're selecting for people able to make that commitment.
Bitcoin Engineering (CS251P)
This. They took a gamble, probably with a very small portion of their total investment. If they were building a total market fund they may have had absolutely no choice but to buy some of the stock. That said, good job Woolworth.
Russian Media Explodes with Vulgar and Racist Anti-Obama Rhetoric
It's not so much a matter of 'better' vs 'worse' as a balance between complexity and speed. node has very fast IO - that's what it's known for - and unlike Python or Ruby it can handle static files at speed: http://i.stack.imgur.com/amngX.png (from the second post at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9967887/node-js-itself-or... which provides some excellent discussion). nginx is faster, but small projects that don't need load balancing may benefit from having less software to install.

As the article mentions, you'll probably want a load balancer for high availability. Whether you use haproxy or nginx for that is a whole different discussion.
Anybody who has played Civilization understands this intuitively.
"HP's EliteBook Folio is like a MacBook that runs Windows"

So, it's like a broken Macbook then... ;-)
I prefer pyxel edit myself.

My main gripe is the non-native UI. It makes it clunky to use imo. Pyxel edit also has that faked UI made in flash but it's not clunky, anyway. My favorite editor is Tile Studio but unfortunately it doesn't really support alpha transparency properly at all and animation is annoying at best.
>It's honest communication, something that is becoming increasingly rare in this world of language policing.

It's political correctness gone mad!

/s
when i graduated from college, everybody wanted to be investment bankers (glorified sales people for businesses). now, everybody wants to be a private equity analyst. the market's replete with firms engineering paydays rather than retooling businesses as investments (the old way), and the newb "desire" to enter the market is definitely a symptom of disease.
Almost everything makeable is a remix of something already existing.

Which is okay. Often a work has good ideas, but something is missing.

Goethe didn't invent Faust.

Many music genres didn't become popular with their original inventors.

I already had a smartphone years before the iPhone and Android came out, but it wasn't as good as them.
>Cities can stab themselves in the back, too:

>They can restrict enterprise. The haves like to keep the have-nots out of business, apparently under the belief that prosperity is a zero-sum game; the result is at best lost opportunities for growth, and at worst stagnation and decline.

I think this describes the SF housing market pretty well.
> I have a server without a monitor I'd like to VNC to.

That’s your problem right there. You can’t (or, rather, don’t) “VNC” to Unix servers. For normal remote access, you use SSH. If you really need to run a graphical X program continuously on a server, you run a virtual X server program like “Xvfb”, and point your graphical X program to that. You can then “VNC” all you like to this virtual X server. All without a monitor or even a graphics card or a mouse on the actual server.

This thinking – the idea that a server has something one can refer to as “the” screen, or “the” mouse – is completely and utterly wrong, and betrays a thinking born from Microsoft Windows and other desktop-only-oriented operating systems.
As someone who commutes the full length of the road under the greenway everyday, absolutely. It rarely takes me more than 20 minutes to clear downtown Boston in rush hour traffic, an impossibility without the tunnel. Now if they could just fix the delays and inconsistency on the green line and silver line.
Yes, that was a very strange experience following that blog. I followed it very closely for a while, even trying the uberman sleep schedule. I eventually realized that he had totally gone off the deep end and stopped following it. I came back a year later and looked at it in amazement. It was around the time he started "experimenting" with different sexual habits, and then not surprisingly losing his wife...

I remember recommending the blog to a couple of people just before I abandoned it. They must think I'm very strange.
You probably mean €500 thousand, not million.
The secret is to use the Blue Line to get to the airport, not the Silver Line. So long as you're either on the Orange Line or don't have too many bags it's much faster.
So you'd prefer, if no packages are available, unpackaged software be installed to /opt rather than /usr/local? OK.

The FHS forbids distros from installing software to either location.

See http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.2/fhs-4.9.html:

> "The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated. It may be used for programs and data that are shareable amongst a group of hosts, but not found in /usr."
I think your definition of productivity is off a bit. You need to account for "effective" productivity. My hours might be 40+ but how many of those are truly focused and productive?

Hence, working less time with (theoretically) better focus and reduced stress/strain would be more productive.
I recently experienced this with a software vendor after trialing some of their software. It's one of those forms where you have to enter some personal info before downloading the installer, and while I provided them with my email address I deliberately dodged entering my employer information. Imagine my surprise when I get a phone call from them at work asking how that software was working out for me.

To be fair, I hated the software and wasn't going to buy it. That phone call certainly didn't nudge me in their direction though.
Regarding trains: In German long-distance rail, we separate between Ruhewagen (silent cars) and normal ones – if you want to have a quiet ride, go into one of the silent cars.
Apple has a data-driven business model?
Not really.

It's the unit size that matters. Mythical man month said the ideal basic organization for delivering work output is modeled after a surgical team. If you model after traditional military units, the infantry squad is the equivalent to that team.

Under the mythical man month org structure, the atomic unit of work capacity is that surgical team. You can't do more surgery by putting two more surgeons in the OR. But you can add new teams and get more output. I think the analogy works in the military context as well -- a general doesn't ask for <X> more individual soldiers, he asks for more battalions/regiments/divisions.
What is technical debt?
Not that I've used Asesprite, and since its completely possible to avoid this I might be just spreading FUD or something, but one reason to avoid using something like SDL, Allegro, SFML, GLFW, etc, for a desktop application is that the style you typically use to write those (update at 30 or 60fps always) has very poor power consumption.

When you don't care about this, it opens up a lot of possibilities for making your life easier though. Immediate mode UIs are an easy way of getting what is basically a poor man's reactive data binding, and while they don't necessitate this style, they work best with it (and avoiding it with them can be a little tricky).

But again, never used Aesprite so I can't say if it does this. My suspicion would be that it doesn't! It's worth keeping in mind as a tool though.
> Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.

That's not true.

http://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/RESTAT2003.pdf

Page 835. Total average of seatbelt usage, before law: 31%, after law: 48%, in 1998: 65%.
Simple Poll for Slack
Oh well. Indeed, I skimmed through their server-side tracking API: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

That's unsettling.
Gallup Poll: Americans' Biggest Problem in 2015? Government
>Car-free shopping districts are an interesting choice, but you still need to make some concessions to mass transit (eg delivery hours for trucks, right-of-way or other lanes for buses or expensive construction of subways, etc),

Car free shopping districts and streets are common worldwide. Even the US has them. Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House is open only to foot traffic and bikes. The only cars in there are emergency vehicles. Charlottesville, Virginia has a pedestrian mall.

>Europe generally doesn't have the sprawling suburbia of the eastern United States that would require massive ring-roads to handle traffic that isn't feasible to serve via mass transit

The sprawling suburbia of the US comes from poor land use policies that do things like require single family housing. This is true even in cities which are famous for not having zoning, like Houston.

Before we engaged in the Great Suburban Experiment the US was one of the world leaders in public transit. LA had one of the largest public transit systems in the entire world.

Loosening certain land use controls would slowly repair this problem amongst many others.

Lately these laws have attracted a lot of attention in the press, with economists from Paul Krugman on down commenting on land use controls, mostly negatively.

Cities are slowly reforming these laws, or attempting to reform these laws, and I suspect that the America of the future will be much more walkable nationally than today's America. Even LA's leadership has realized that the car doesn't scale.
The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights.

Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.
In the US, there are laws on the books that telecom corps are required to facilitate searches or wiretaps on client communication when presented with a court order. And if you look at the metadata collection deal that Obama passed recently, it says that the NSA can't collect metadata, but telecoms are required to do it instead and produce it when served with a court order. So, it's not at all unprecedented for government to make it a legal problem and put the onus on private industry. This is actually Hillary's most recent stance on encryption. She says if we can't "break" encryption or have backdoors, you have to give us another option. Wouldn't be surprised if Holland and others have a similar idea in mind.
Microsoft is going to ship a headless version of Windows Server:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt126167.aspx
This is nonsense, although it may depend on the kind of job you have. For most of us, we don't need to be there five days a week. You can plan around that.

Of course if you have five people in a team and everybody has a different day off, you can never get together, and that may be a problem. This is the same if you and your colleagues work many days/hours out of the office or at home.