skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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.

The problem is that rent is easy to measure, and the productivity your staff would have, once things were settled in, with an appropriate work environment is less easy to measure specifically (there may be studies which provide an approximate basis for estimating it, but that's different than a direct and company-specific measure.)
> No 3rd party analytics service can provide more accurate data than server logs. None.

Google Analytics provides information that goes far beyond what the server logs can tell you. The logs will give you the most accurate view of the requests to your server but that's all. You can't get insights about bounce rate, behavior, goal completion, conversion rate, etc. from server logs. To rely only on mining server logs would be a huge step backwards for a business.
I'm curious to see what people have used genetic algorithms for in practice. Personally I've used them for feature selection when I was trying to reduce a high amount of features to smaller amount for a classification problem.

Of course they're definitely great for evolving little cars, like this other example shows: http://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/
Dynamic Point Light Shadows with Babylon.JS and WebGL
Short answer: no.

Longer answer: provided that things never go wrong it works. But the assumption that things never go wrong is false. In particular the whole basis of the original point is that there is no true universal time, and this post (essentially) says "provided that there is universal time then I can't see what you are complaining about"

Swing and a miss.
Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197 : the universities also want smart people, even when they are poor. (They are offering financial help for that, especially at the Ivy league.)
The business calculus is extremely interesting.

I know some HN'ers like to pit this as BigCorp simply trying to save money/control the workers, but in fact, if you're a true knowledge worker, it might be worth it to build you a small castle with a butler. The leverage a good worker creates is peanuts compared to any kind of working arrangement.

So, as you pointed out, we get to the nitty-gritty part of this: do whatever you want for whatever reasons you want, but at the end of the day, is it helping you execute your mission better? Much better? Then keep doing that until you find your next improvement.

86K/yr for an office is nothing if your productivity suddenly starts tanking, or you're unable to adapt to rapid change. In fact, it's comparing a static number with a highly dynamic one. I'm not sure if such a comparison really makes much sense.
Why Twitter Represents Everything Wrong with America Today
I think the most exciting part of this project for the HN crowd is that it's not Meteor-specific. We really want this project to be used outside of the integrated Meteor platform, in all kinds of production applications.

So hopefully it's more like "Meteor is building a reactive GraphQL system anyone can adopt" rather than "adding GraphQL support to Meteor".
When Addiction Has a White Face
How to think about databases
Isn't that bitcoin?
You may be right about the rest, I'm just digging in now, but Freeman Dyson is definitely a physicist.
> Being rich or poor has no bearing on someones ability to score highly on any standardized test.

It's technically true. It rarely affect the ability. But it does affect the result anyway. Wealth is a known good predictor in results: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/29/the-correla...
Getting Facebook or Google on your resume probably also helps with getting another programming job.
Yeah, I think I may want to know more but I'm a bit confused.
Honest question: if in the future a company I work for is submitted to HN and I notice, should I really not upvote it? That seems like it would be a really unnatural reaction.
I've never believed it's about cost, but about distrust and, more importantly, control.

IMO, most managers are paid very nicely to babysit employees and use unspoken threats and coercion to make them feel scared and threatened enough for their livelihoods where they will sit rather quietly and produce work at a measurable-yet-uninspired rate.

Much like elementary school.

I know I'm older then most of the IT workers here are and due to that, my personal experiences and insights may not reflect the current realities of many here, but they have been real to me over my 30 year career.

I have been working remotely now, for myself, for the past 3 years.

It was difficult in the beginning to have the discipline to actually keep my head "at work" for the required 8 hours, but now...I couldn't really imagine ever wanting to go back to an onsite gig.

My boss could not be happier with the arrangement as he is realizing significant cost saving as well...it's a real win-win but both sides have to be willing to do their parts for it to work.
Have you considered a line of work more suited to an extrovert personality?
What language is this in? Never really tried anything like this before, but just went through the entire game and beat it. Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks, but what is the overall context of the game? (It was fun, but I didn't know what I was doing half the time; I just tried to get the threads to hit the critical code functions)
we noticed that office space was a not-insignificant element of our overall expenditures each month—more than we paid for health insurance, or advertising and marketing.

Office space cost them 2.1% of all of their monthly costs.

This is "not-insignificant"

Am I reading this right? If anything, they are under-paying for their office space.
Recommendation Letter 2019
Someone coming up to me and talking to me interrupts whatever I was doing and makes it hard to get back into that original context. In general the research is showing open spaces is less productive. Obviously there will be edge cases here but in general it's usually much worse.
Seems like mostly "by the way, we still own all the TV." If they really wanted to inspire confidence in me they would at least put a checkbox for both with 'unlimited data'.
I meant that the company does what is in its own best interest. It does publicly trade stock with voting rights as GOOGL which has a 1:1 share to vote. It does not allow the class B stock to trade publicly which is 1:10.

I meant, and you correctly pointed out was not clear or a particularly good way to verbalize, that google like most companies does what is best for itself. In googles case this is a combination of maximizing shareholder value and the vision various thoughtleaders in the company have.

I do not believe google is evil or bad.

I used to believe this.

I now believe that google is doing a lot of great things. However by achieving horizontal success in almost every area of such a powerful concept, it effects how the landscape develops and does cause many issues.

Even if we accept google is mostly good, and I mostly do, it is concerning. I hope that their voluntary meta structure will allow them to distribute fault tolerance and limit power consolidation.
how are you going to put this in a way where you can make a strong case for spending more on facilities? you can easily make a case for saving money with open plan and showing how much you can save, what about the reverse? how can you justify spending 2x what your competitors spend on rent? how can you quantify "lost productivity due to constant interruptions" or "more bugs due to developers not being able to focus" in an accountable way?

Also, are the people that make the budget decisions the type of people that thrive on collaboration and open plans, or the type of people that prefer quiet and isolation? if they are the type of people that thrive on open plans they might feel negatively about private offices period, which leads to making your case about their positives even harder.

On one hand you have hard data, open offices cost x, open plan costs x/2, on the other hand you have "engineers say they could be more productive with offices" against "do you remember when we were small and working in a single room, that was awesome, we were so agile and communicative" (whether or not that is applicable at your particular company size or stage, burning the midnight oil on your stack to cobble together a demo for a pitch is not the same as writing production level tricky security code)
You can tick every box securing your email server and still get rejected or flagged as spam.
Not talking about employees. You can release whatever message you want internally. It's the external message where upside downside needs to be a consideration. By which I mean whatever you say in email can be printed and quoted. Disseminate the message not email
Time differences: Exactly that. Which is why having 3 or 4 synchronized detectors is necessary for narrowing down the direction of a source. (3 minimum, 4 to reduce noise.)
A taste of Deep Learning [pdf]
It's typicaly not tractable to prove that a system is safe. For example, RethinkDB used the raft consensus algorithm, which on its own is proven correct, but due to a bug could in some cases break linearization. Jepsen was able to uncover this.

The best method we currently have for demonstrating that large systems are safe is to try really hard to prove that they are unsafe and fail.
The same applies to the more theoretical aspects of programming. (Because Computer Science is a subset of math..)

See http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad... for someone trying to show the way, and not just the result.
It's totally possible for people who are more extroverted to find an interactive setting more pleasant. You could round up all such folks and let them sit together, since they get energy from that.

But clearly for the people with more introverted working styles it won't work.

So let people pick. Want to sit in the communal workspace? OK, do so. Want your own office? OK done.

From time to time you'll need to intermix. Sometimes a social butterfly needs to tune out the distractions. Provide a place for it. Sometimes a hermit crab needs to sit with the team for 1/2 day and pair program. As Picard says, make it so.

This is not rocket science. The important part is that company management has to recognize that getting this right is one of the most important financial investments they will make. Instead of seeing space as a cost sink ... something to be standardized, minimized, and papered over with free lunch and dumbass "team building" shit, they need to recognize that of all the places to spend money, spending it on compensation for rewarding hard working employees is number one, and spending it on creating a humanity-affirming physical work environment is number 2. In visibly healthy companies, everything else hinges massively on those two things. Companies that have been so distorted away from humanity that they grind out success (generally for senior level people only) despite humanity-disaffirming workplaces ought to be seen as the frightening panopticons they are.
I realize your question is rhetorical, but there are tons of people. Anyone new to programming, in a CS course that uses git, for example, would be familiar with basic git but many would be unfamiliar with the path (or on Windows).
A regression model trained from existing spam and abuse report data to twitter would cover ~99% of terrible at-replies on twitter.

Look how effectively a hacked-together script that just uses a couple of heuristics like GGAutoBlocker works. [1]

Something a little more principled, trained with unfettered access to user data, would effectively kill the problem. IMO.

[1] https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker
So what are we, as customers, supposed to do? Lie down and give up? Businesses have strong incentives to get as much money from people as they can get away with. In a competitive economy there's no leaving money on the table - if you don't pick it up, your competitor will. The only limits are those we impose ourselves - whether through laws or through just saying "screw this" and installing an ad blocker.

> Wasn’t the whole movement aimed at helping these sad artists that were being screwed over?

And who screwed this up? Not piracy, really, but labels. That and clinging to business models that don't make sense in a digital economy. The reality is not obliged to cooperate with whatever money-making idea you like - you have to find a one that works. In the digital world, content is cheap and copying is free; everyone needs to learn to deal with it. But alas, companies are more willing to destroy the Internet itself than change their practices. That's why people retaliate.

Frankly, the Internet is more important than some artists not getting properly compensated because of it (even if it's really all because piracy), and it's better to lose them than to have everything DRMed up.

The businesses started this war, and now they're complaining people are defending themselves and it gets harder to take their money? Cry me a river.
Almost 20y earlier Eric S. Raymond wrote that famous line in his essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar':
"Release early, release often".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often
Are you hanging out or working?
I've been in this exact situation. Fortunately I found another place to work in the same building that contained our office and I was super productive. I feel like the "no fun employee" but when you get shot 20 times a day from all the nerf Wars that break out I don't understand how anyone gets shit done. Ultimately they probably just don't (at least if it is as frequent as I ran into).
Theory and history, then technical training (scales, chords, arpeggios, ear training, sight reading, and etudes), then my repertoire which currently consists of Bach's BWV 903, LVB's op. 13, Brahms op. 118 no. 1 & op. 118 no. 2, Gershwin's three preludes, Berg's Sonata op. 1, and Webern's Variations.
There's a lot of things that I question about Google, but forcing their Gmail customers to adopt more secure practices is worthy of praise. They are the biggest free email provider in the world, and they are owning up to a responsibility to ensure their users can work safely.

Those running their own email servers have a similiar responsibility to their own users, even if it's only themselves. You had time to set up the server in the first place, so you have time to make it work with TLS. Now that Let's Encrypt is here there's no excuse to be running an insecure email (or web) server.
This is not entirely true. Gmail (and other big email providers) blacklist blocks of IP addresses belonging to hosting providers who are perhaps not as proactive as they should be at detecting and removing spammers. If you unwittingly sign up at one of these providers, it doesn't matter how perfect your mail configuration is: anything you send to a gmail address is gonna go to spam. Gmail of course doesn't publish these lists, so the only way to find out about them is to run into one.

I understand gmail's problem, and I don't have a better solution, but it's not just about insecure mail servers.
Vasily Blokhin – Stalins Official Executioner, 10,000 Murders
LLVM Patches Confirm Google Has Its Own In-House Processor
If you borrow a book from a library or a friend, scan it to a file on your computer and return the book, you've committed a distribution of a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder discovered this they could sue you at which point you could attempt to present a Fair Use defense based on the four factors [0]. Assuming it's a whole published book that's available for sale, you'd need a noble use to explain why you didn't just buy a copy to scan for yourself but even if you lose, the damages could be relatively small assuming you didn't distribute the file further.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
Google is also working on a globally distributed `now': http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

Of course, they make use of GPS, but also add their own atomic clocks.
They have this new thing in SV that I think would be perfect for you. After a brief admissions process, you join a group of engineers who congregate at the same time and place five days of the week. You collaborate on projects, learn new things, and perhaps even socialize. They even offer you units of exchange with which you can acquire resources. It's a really great setup, and just goes to show what an innovative and dynamic place SV is.
Which does not address the question -- why specifically currency traders rather than other sorts of traders?
It's not that Snow Leopard had fewer bugs than its successors, but that it was the last update which clearly had fewer bugs than its predecessors. Since then, each new version has changed things around without seeming to make life better overall.

What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings.

I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.
Context?
You have that option - you can relinquish your citizenship. Otherwise, taxes fund public goods and services you benefit from, such as medical care, infrastructure, education, crime prevention and border security.
> Being rich or poor has no bearing on someones ability to score highly on any standardized test.

Being rich or poor has a strong, fairly direct, causal relationship to being relatively free from or subject to various environmental and other conditions -- both proximate to the time of the test and at earlier developmental stages -- that have adverse impacts on ability to score highly on any standardized test.

(For a dramatic demonstration that is in the news right now see Flint, Michigan.)
I was going by quoted section here. Just read it. Lmao that's epic and a worthy use of their game engine!

Hmm. So, original part might be serious with a joke after or entirely some BS. Who knows.
I think even bringing in a list of past HN comments would be over the line, though perhaps not as creepy. HN threads are supposed to be conversations, not courtrooms.
different strokes for different folks, the ideal "office environment" for me would be being able to teleport to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with just trees / nature to look at all day, and all work-related communication over email or IM.

It's really easy to find an extrovert-friendly workspace, much harder to find an introvert-friendly one, because pretty much all managers are extroverts (they have to be, to succeed at management) and they are the ones that decide the office layout.

Makes me wonder sometimes how deaf people can manage in today's vocal-collaboration oriented workplace, which is sad as the type of work we do lends itself extremely well to text-based communication.
Get Tickets to Customer Success Summmit
It is absolutely about status. "Programming" is a low status activity. "Inking mega fucking cash dealz" is a high status activity. If I ink mega fucking cash dealz all day, then of course I deserve a better physical status symbol than some schmuck who just types code all day, right?

What? The schmucks are not happy with coding in the human equivalent of a bucket of crabs? Did you try giving them coffee? Did you try saying the phrase "unlimited vacation"? Did you jingle your keys?
Pretty much. Like I said, technically you could just have the build for nginx also include all of the modules and just split them up into sub-packages, but that defeats the entire point of having loadable modules that can be compiled independently.
> low access-demand systems, like personnel records, are apparently accessible with a little Facebook snooping.

Precisely because of the low access-demand.

If you're accessing data every day, everybody remembers their password.

If you're accessing data once a quarter, you probably forget your password or write it down. Or you need to have methods to retrieve it. And, after a couple rounds of this, the person handling the password recovery gets annoyed and doesn't do full diligence anymore.
Yes. I periodically test with various recipients and mail goes through without a hitch. The only difference I might have versus people starting out fresh is that the domains I host are relatively aged. The newest is two years old and the oldest is nineteen. I also made sure that DNS is set up properly, both forward and reverse, and especially for IPv6.
You'll move when your biggest advertiser requests that you start hosting your ads on whatever new thing Google/FB tells them is crucial to tracking the performance of your campaigns.
Store a secret securely in a standalone HTML file
I thought TIL stood for Threaded Interpretive Language, as per Forth or Factor
> teach some math to whoever's interested

But in public school you have to teach math to everyone. Any they aren't all interested.
Whoops, misread your comment. Agreed.
I understand, but maybe it's a relevant detail we should still abstain from. Or maybe there's a way to bring it up that doesn't lead to flamewars, though I doubt it.
would be nice to auto generate these TIL readmes based off personal stack overflow upvotes.
I'm mostly with you. I'm astounded that the "open plan" is the current "state of the art" in silicon valley considering we are supposedly so creative and innovative and meritocratic. My only misgiving about pure enclosed office is that it does seem a little solitary for 8+ hours/day, 5 days/week.

I remember Fogcreek came up with an interesting design that used angles and transparency to get some good light, etc: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
I was doing a text search in the comments for "lonely" and this was the only hit. Absolutely! My social life at work is very important to me. I like coming into work every day and seeing people I know, commiserating our challenges or celebrating our successes, joking around at the office, going out and having a good time outside of the office. Many of my best friends now are people I work with, and if I'd been working remotely (whether at home, in a coffee shop, etc) all this time, a natural introvert like me would have considerably fewer friends, my successes would feel less meaningful and my failures more personal. I've turned down offers to make more money writing a language I prefer to the one I write in now, because it would mean my primary interaction would be through a computer screen. I'm sure all are different, but I'd have to have a really good reason to have my primary mode of work be remote.
NASA: Visions of the Future
This is great.

BTW I've lurked that concept from you just recently and started doing the same stuff on Sunday. Thanks for inspiration.
Oh. Well that's disappointing. I was hoping this would be about a modern video/audio decode, synchronize, and display pipeline... not that knowing how video streamed on the web isn't interesting, but it's really about how modern video streaming works.