skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have often wondered what I would do about the Office Question if I started a company, since any company I might start is very likely to be distributed due to geography (mine and my network's both). Usually I end up with the idea that everyone would work from "home," and would be encouraged to use co-working (company-paid) if they wished; and I might maintain a minimal "HQ" assuming it was more than just me at that location; and I'd build in regular face-to-face team meetings into the business plan, say at least every quarter.

The only problem is, I'm not sure I'd want to work that way myself if I were an employee. I think I'd want an office: preferably one to myself.

I currently work from home, and have previously rented office spaces (both shared and not) at my own expense; and at various times I've worked in the HQ, branch offices, and various combinations of all these things, for a few different tech-related companies.

I would probably rent another dedicated office right now, but my rental apartment has a guest room so it seems decadent. But I'm still tempted, and check the listings every couple of weeks.

I would say that for me, working in software development and also doing "creative" work, having a separate space easily made up in peace of mind and probably in productivity what it cost in money. (In a high-rent zone like San Francisco that probably wouldn't hold.) But I found a coworking space too annoying, and probably would not go back to that if I could avoid it.

I found the big advantages to a rented space were, in order:

1. Freedom from distractions (usually; neighbors make noise too).
2. Work-only nature of the space, i.e. you go there only to work.
3. Ability to set it up as I like (decoration, layout, etc.).
4. Got my butt out of the house and out amongst the humans more often.
5. Your feelings about Home don't get so mixed up with your feelings about Work.
6. You can still opt to work from home when you really feel like it.

Disadvantages vs home office:

1. "Shared resources" (kitchen, bathroom, etc.) might not live up to your normal standards of utility or hygiene.
2. Neighbors pay rent too, and are thus unlikely to change their habits at your request.
3. Expense (though this is very location-dependent).
4. Commute, while probably a good thing overall, eats time.
5. Your landlord, like most landlords, may suck.

None of this in any way contradicts the idea of going all-in on remote teams, but it does raise a question: if you're doing it for the competitive advantage of high productivity, might it be better to spend more on offices that are themselves distributed?

(FWIW: Married, no kids, and neither one of us works a 9-5 schedule.)
It's almost funny, Comhem (Sweden's Comcast, except they don't actually have the monopoly they seem to think they do) has also been pushing the "Fastest wifi" angle really hard lately, whatever that actually means.

Meanwhile, my grandparents just upgraded to a "250Mbps" connection with them which actually seems to be about 5Mbps... Wired...
Toronto tried it. The city is full of ugly, ugly towers. This has made traffic much worse and the public transit system is a pain to navigate. The craziness of traffic made condos right next to the subway much more desirable than 15 minutes away (the last place I lived in had 700K condos for a two bedroom, 40 minutes from Union station). No silver bullet.

That said, I've almost had it with high housing prices. 900K for a crap hole starter home in Sunnyvale does not make sense to me. Unaffordable housing prices are starting to make me want to go to the bottle :'( Curious how other people are dealing with it?
I would assume that introducing a VM that has "time-travelled" (especially the restore-from-previous-state case someone mentioned above) into a distributed system would inherently break that distributed system, no matter what it's doing. It's a really crazy thing to do, much crazier than a regular network partition.

Personally, though, I don't see why it's so hard to just say "this distributed lock system requires that soft real-time guarantees can be made of the host platform. If the platform misses the algorithm's scheduling deadline, the system breaks. If the platform has no way of providing for a soft real-time deadline (because e.g. it's running in a VM that can be paused), the software will detect this and fail to start."
The answer is really simple, and has been well-known at least since the time of the book Peopleware and the studies it cited.

Provide a real office environment for every knowledge worker.

You know ... a door that shuts ... a window ... space to allow your gaze to adjust.

Things that are ... human.

It's really simple.

And before you say it costs too much, it doesn't. The problem is that you're in denial about how much your current offices with open floor plans are costing you. You merely think the cost is equal to the rent. It's much greater than the rent, though, because of lowered productivity, lowered morale, increased superficiality of important inter-worker communication, incessant interruptions disrupting developer flow, more sick time, etc. etc.

If you didn't pretend like those aren't affecting you, and you actually counted their cost, you'd see that the extra cost in real estate for offices is well worth it even in short-term scenarios like 1-year where you're using your start-up runway to pay for it.

Even in San Francisco. Even in Manhattan.
He is not claiming that the commutator is equivalent to the divergence, what he is saying is that [xl',Hl] = 0 is equivalent to div H = 0, which is different. If you click on the annotation on the left you will see that [xl',Hl] = 0 means that Hl is not a function of xl and so ∂_lH_l will be zero and consequently div H = Sum ∂_lH_l is also zero.
Is this for real? It's like 2001 never happened. Bunk beds from IKEA? No, you can't have my office. You ditched yourself completely. Buffer.
It's not just the fingerprints. Entire organs may grow according to the elegant mathematics of reaction diffusion systems. Not to mention metal alloys, igneous rocks, suns, galaxies, and so on...

A mathematical theory proposed by Alan Turing in 1952 can explain the formation of fingers

http://phys.org/news/2014-07-mathematical-theory-alan-turing...
Good, why should we follow? Nahhhh
This is so cool! You guys are setting a great example and doing an amazing job! Kudos to you!
I think donating by way of kickstarter is fine, but it attracts the same people that regular donations attract. Developers themselves, rather than the companies that are profiting from the use of free software. That's really the gap that needs to be filled.
Yes interesting...I almost received a degree in computer engineering in 1988 from a highly regarded technical university.

Back then, there was absolutely no substitute for the in-house training I got from going to classes and doing my homework and taking the test etc etc...

Today, I am far from convinced that people cannot simple learn the informational part of it all through (yes albeit intense) online courses, videos, and training.

Do we want people building bridges and building without proving they understand their static and dynamic physics and structural limitations of materials and such??

Of course not...but these things can be solved via various technical means that do not necessarily require sitting in real-world, outdated classrooms.
Especially if you select your teachers for actual teaching ability, as opposed to citation count on their papers. Teaching ability is undervalued by the market.
How to create a news feed across multiple content types with Contentful's Vault
I'm seeing a large number of comments talking about the in person effects of traditional education. Not just as it relates to education, but also ongoing employment. The two issues seem to boil down to:

1. Social status signaling. Including networking among alumni.

2. An environment with interpersonal interactions among the top performers will push you further than working solo.

Rather than simply saying "MOOCs don't do 1&2", we should phrase it as "what will it look like when they do?". Clearly the internet can handle social status signaling. The internet can also organize groups around specific interests. There are unique social groups that exist now precisely because of the internet.

For now MOOCs are a web version of correspondence courses. Is that all they will ever be? I doubt it. If I had to bet on education 100 years from now, I'd expect it to look more like MOOCs than the traditional collegiate experience. Certainly there are gaps in what exists today, but I'd expect those gaps to close faster than traditional colleges will adjust.
OK, reading through all this, I'm wondering if there isn't a compromise approach needed. For myself, I go in each morning for a couple hours. If there are no meetings that require my physical presence, then I drive home, and work the rest of the day from there. Sometimes that means home at 10am, others closer to 3pm, and occasionally 6pm. But it means I am available to comingle when it makes sense, available to be run into for at least a couple hours a day, and almost always home before traffic gets bad. It also means I don't mind working past 5 most days as if I was in the office I wouldn't get home until then due to the traffic. Maybe this kind of half and half approach would be ideal for others?
I wish there was a way to tell an advertiser "I Bought it, stop bothering me".

I don't want to completely block ads because I understand how they bring in money, but there has to be a way to interact with them a bit to make them less annoying.
are you able to mail folks at google/live without going to spam? Genuinely curious.
The first step to getting out of the hole is to stop digging. The author of this article clearly hasn't learned this lesson yet.
Online degrees might still be good enough. Even though they might not be as good as an offline degree, they can be radically cheaper. (See innovator's dilemma and how they originally defined `disruption'.)
It was, but aside from the awful character portraits, it's not much worse than other low-poly 3D games of that era. That's right around the cusp of where 3D engines started to overtake the older 2D/isometric engines for RTSs and strategy games.
Trailer for “Need to Know”, a Game about Mass Surveillance
Yeah doing something else on the main interpreter loop, BEFORE checking the signal flag, is what what I meant. The "something else" could be long-running C extension code, or a blocking syscall. (I realize the original signal will interrupt a syscall, but there could be another one after that.)

In either case, the signal handler doesn't get run for an arbitrary period of time. And another signal could occur.

I didn't trace through the code to see how this is handled... but it seems like it is hard to handle simply and correctly (you're kind of recapitulating the problems of signals to begin with, in a higher level language).

Any docs / clarity on this would be interesting to me, as I will probably implement this in my own language soon.
Not at all common, American students more typically graduate with enormous debt, which precludes this sort of thing.
You're right, and the Django Software Foundation (along with projects like BeeWare) are actively trying to work out how to solve these problems. DSF has hired a part time "director of advancement", Adrienne Lowe, to try to get money back into Django. https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/nov/23/introducing...
We'd also have to address the corruption of the system, or else you wind up in place like here, where the electric company that the incumbent congressman got privatized refuses to buy solar at reasonable market rates while overcharging the public and various other shadyness. If we allow the international bankers to continue robbing us no one will be able to afford solar panels. Now they are prepping to take control of the water market as well.
For instance, "100 boys and girls in the class". I read that as 100 students total, not 100 of each.
The thing about D3 though is that Blizzard continued to take feedback from the community and iterate through the game by adjusting and introducing new game mechanics with each update. The current 2.4 is so far different from the original release that its shocking. I played at the start and quickly got tired of the horrible drops and Auction House. Now the variety of entertaining builds that are possible is huge. I'm playing Season 5 and my friends have started again too. It's great for both short (<10min) sessions as well as long ones.
> Why recruit someone online when you have a rich, educated, smart pool of candidates who have the elitist mindset necessary to do the job?

Because everyone else is farming the same universities, making these candidates overpriced. Google and other tech companies have considerably widened their net, when they could no longer rely on Stanford et al alone.
IaaS Cloud War Looking More Like Tennis Match
Google Books started their scanning with books held in university libraries (and the New York Public Library). While there might have been some variation from school to school the basic deal was Google and the school each got a copy. The university copies are largely, or entirely, held by HathiTrust [1] (who was also sued by the Author's Guild).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books_Library_Project

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Not all of us are anti-capitalist. Before I woke up to the reality of the world around us, I was strictly anarcho-capitalist (like, "Fire Departments should negotiate contracts for payment before putting out your fire" level). Turns out, I just hate monopolism, to the point that extreme competition turned out to be the lesser evil.

The only political opinion you should share about Free Software, is whether the software honors the four freedoms[0]. The rest (open source software, FOSS, etc), are corporate add-on sales attempts.

0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
Yes, open office environments with a culture of "interruptions are fine" doesn't help either. I guess what a need is a library that's also an office? I don't know.
> It relies on Apple's Open Transport networking library, which was removed in 10.9. There is no patch and no fix.

As much as I wish Blizzard would continue to support their games, Apple deserves as much blame here as anyone. Their aggressive removal of older libraries is annoying. The same thing happened to Starcraft (and a number of other software packages I used to use).

If they are going to get rid of their old packages, they should open-source it so people who care can do something about it. That is the proper way.
The search for high temp superconductors is mostly done in the realm of semiconductors so this isn't that surprising.

Also I find the term high temperature superconductor a bit funny considering we are still talking anout <50 kelvin temperature 20k is still -250 or so C so while it's very interesting it's not like it's going to revolutionize electronics.
> I think it's pretty funny that MOOC's bought into the premise that the purpose of higher education was education.

Er, they don't. MOOCs recognize that people come to higher education for several different purposes, including education, credentialing for employment, and networking (possibly others, but those are the big three.)

Most MOOCs build on this understanding with a business model that gives away much (though, often, not all) of the "education" part away free-of-charge and selling credentialing as a premium service.

> I think the universities understand a lot better than the MOOCs that the point was never that Stanford had education you can't get elsewhere, but that it lets you tell people you went to Stanford and other people didn't.

I think MOOCs understand that. OTOH, the value proposition of MOOCs to users is that they unbundled some of the things bundled together in universities, so that people who don't need the things which .
Comparing 11 IoT Development Platforms
My family farm got fiber in 2013, and had high speed DSL for more than a decade before that. Many of the farms in the area had fiber for several years even before they got to us. I believe the rollout is nearing completion now. I don't really see any tech professionals moving here.
> Seriously: what fraction of what you do on the job isn't something you couldn't have learned at a three-month company training course?

It's actually quite a lot. Not so much any specific bit of knowledge, but just experience in hacking away. (That's not so much taught at uni, but still requires more time than three months.)
If you paste this link in to Facebook as if you're going to share it, the page title in the summary box ends up reading "Service Interruption" with no other text. I can't think of anything more appropriate.
Though let's be honest, $10k is hardly out of reach for.....anyone. If that's something you really want, you can get it.
When you say "there's nothing innovative about it" regarding hearthstone, you could say that about several of the games Blizzard has made.

WoW is a direct, improved copy of EQ and others. The default hotkeys for EQ and WoW were even the same - NumLock was autorun on both.

How is this a bad thing? You could just as easily have critiqued google for not being "innovative" - they weren't the first search engine. Taking an idea and executing it well is a skill, and a profitable one for Blizzard.
Gmail's new rules on unencrypted e-mail don't support self-signed certificates though - you have to use an offcial CA-issued certificate from one of Google's approved CAs.
A startup with little brand recognition posts a blog entry concerning a topic of general interest to a demographic whose attention it seeks. A predictable discussion emerges with the company as a backdrop. Everyone rejoices that the topic has been broached, because they have well-informed, unique opinions to offer on the subject. Brand recognition is achieved, and because of the photographs of smiling, laid-back young people contained in the blog entry, the impression on the target demographic is a positive one. Everyone forgets it happened, and the cycle repeats again next week.
That's right, that paragraph describes the mindset that guided Feynman in his pursuit and it is extremely valuable.
I, for one, think privacy concerns over this release are overblown. After all, the news reports I've read only contain metadata about the individuals in question.

That the data is out there isn't important. It's not being looked at by me or other humans reading these news articles.

Furthermore, collection and access to this information is critical to the fight against terrorism. If professionals aren't able to identify individuals who may be endangering this country, that puts all of America at risk.

/congressional hearing
> Starcraft 2 is okay. They messed up a lot with trying to be social allstars with bnet2.0.

Have you seen LOTV? It's amazing, I'm having so much fun playing it lately.
I think we will see widespread migration of people, driven by cheap solar energy, global warming, water shortages, self-driving transportation, 3D-printing, fast mass transit like the Hyperloop, and hopefully holographic-videoconference based telecommuting.

When you no longer need to live close to work and you no longer need to be in a major population center to get a wide variety of consumer goods delivered to you, there's little reason to live in either cities or suburbs. People are free to form autonomous communities connected to the global economy by the Internet, and will likely do so in areas least impacted by global warming and water shortages.
Key quote from the article:
"By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music."
> The value of a college degree has, and continues to be, the fact that the university spent a great deal of time and expense selecting you.

How does your theory hold up in countries where universities accept everyone, but degrees are still useful?
Tried reading this on my phone, got three paragraphs in and then got slammed with a full screen advert for buffer.com. I mean, what's the point in advertising the site that you are already on?

I have no idea what the rest of the post was about but I'm pretty sure that I never want to deal with buffer.com again.
Thanks for filing the feature request for the "I don't care" button during user setup! It's little contributions like yours that make GNU strong!
I think the point being made here is that "what your application needs" is often something you chose your way into, and can choose your way back out of by backing out some other constraints—and that it's often more sensible to back out these constraints than to dive head-first into a problem domain that requires distributed locking.

In other words: if you set out to create Bitcoin in 1998, you might end up running into distributed consensus problems that are difficult enough that you decide to "solve an easier problem"—such that you end up creating Paypal instead.
Perhaps even more pedantically, SQL is actually an abbreviation of an acronym. It was originally conceived as SEQUEL for Structured English QUEry Language[0], only being abbreviated to SQL for legal purposes (SEQUEL was already trademarked).

For this, and sheer convenience, I take the stance that it should always be pronounced as "sequel" rather than pronouncing each letter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History
I don't know but for me working in an open office is a positive experience, I feel joy talking to coworkers from time to time, sitting in a separate room is quite depressing and might drop the productivity for some people even further then time you lose chatting with coworkers
Why is your comment so harsh? Why did you put scare quotes around "service"? What's wrong with them providing a special invite link when people here were complaining about their closed beta? For that matter, why are people complaining about a closed beta?

Seriously folks, what in the world is with the insanely uncharitable reaction here to someone launching a service targeted at developers and their employers and it being linked on HN? This is completely relevant content!
Wordpress Express – use Relay, React.js and GraphQL to access a wordpress db
>:'( Curious how other people are dealing with it?

Give up on your hopes and dreams and start to convince yourself that renting isn't a bad deal and that you don't really need more than 500 sq ft to be happy.
Completely agree with you. It's been ages since Peopleware and management still thinks cheaper office rent == win $$$. I keep trying to find quite spaces and booking conference rooms in my current job just to find some quite, nice space.

Btw, any manager out there that has not read Peopleware, please make yourself and your team a favour and get yourself a copy (and read it, of course).
Introducing Operator
Would be nice to connect this to Twitter and get an update when a new one appears. Have you thought of doing that?
This is my ideal as well and over time I've been somewhat able to implement in practice. I much prefer the lack of distractions etc, vs. the open office at work but I also must begrudgingly admit that there are many times (especially in the mornings for whatever reason) where I overhear things and address problems much more quickly as a result.
run games on spot instance g2s & stream them to the sticks, ala http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own...
You could say that no scheduler is truly pre-emptive, because it can't interrupt a process in the middle of a machine instruction.

Implementing NIFs should be done with the same care you would use adding a new machine instruction to your processor ;-)