skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having worked remotely for over 6 years and then having run my own company, I can easily say that there are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches - office and fully remote. It really depends on the industry and the team.

I have found that offices do tend to improve communication through instant access to people and feedback, whereas remote work sometimes requires incessant scheduling of meetings. Instant messaging and such can help, but it is not as immediate nor is it a replacement for face time. However, working remotely is a great feeling of freedom and control over your personal environment, which can lead to better personal productivity, provided the person has enough discipline to ignore distractions (if the office is one's home).

It is also a personal preference. As a software engineer, I loved remote work because I could code in peace without distraction. However, some personalities could never stand this much solitude and prefer the hubbub of a traditional office, however distracting it could potentially be. I even knew people who worked remotely that would venture outside and chat at length with neighbors just to have that feeling of human contact that is sometimes lacking with full remote work.

That being said, with the industry I work in, my customers expect a traditional office. So, implementing a mix of remote and office time has worked best for us. There are some stipulations, however, for remote work we enforce - such as childcare must be taken care of by someone else (e.g. school, daycare, spouse, etc.) while working remotely and background noise is to be minimized so as to treat it as a true professional environment. Nothing is worse than when you're on a conference call with major clients and hear crying or barking in the background. And I say this as someone with children and pets myself.
I run a GNU social hub for granite-staters, in case anyone's interested...: https://nhcrossing.com/
Former federal judge to President Obama: Free the man I sentenced to 55 years
Commonly not used in journalism. Note that the NYTimes publishes (and follows) its own style guide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Usage
They still provide value, but in different ways. There are still things that can be accomplished far more effectively in an office than remotely. However, there are things that can also be achieved better remotely than in an office.

There are many factors at play here, and a mix of this must be made by each company to suit its industry and personnel.
Cool, just spent 20 minutes getting a proper cert from let's encrypt, and setting postfix to opportunistically encrypt outgoing mail.

Used this service to make sure my setup is correct: http://www.checktls.com/index.html

Also, thunderbird apparently does not like Alternate Subject Name for smtp, but with Let's encrypt I can just issue a mail server-specific key.
Redmond also colloquially refers to the product Microsoft SQL Server as just SQL (pronounced "sequel"), as in, "We're trying sell more SQL licenses," or, "Is the backing DB for your SAP installation Oracle or SQL?"

This has led to some confusion.

Additionally, as I pointed out in a sibling comment up the chain somewhere, SQL is an abbreviation of the original acronym, SEQUEL, for Structured English QUEry Language. It seems with this provenance that the "sequel" pronunciation is more historically correct.
Notes from SaaStr 16' – Day 1 Summary
Right, that last one can go either way, but in combination with the other two, you really need to find a better way to say that. I wasn't saying the Oxford had to used all the time, just that it really compounds the parsing difficulty here.
1-click Parse Deployment for Digital Ocean, AWS, Azure
AWS Lumberyard
Biggest hint: the door. Open? Come on in and chat. Closed? Send me an email or come back later.
> If it doesn't add to sales, or have some actionable metric as to why it is being added to the product, it doesn't get done

This isn't the problem. There are justifications for new features but adding too many turns the product into a mess. I'd like them to focus more on the problem we're trying to solve and think about the product holistically.
This is such a pleasant surprise. Thanks Amazon, hope it goes well.
For what it's worth, you're not the only one. I read HN for technology oriented news and interesting articles and because I live in Silicon Valley part of the year. I've never worked for a startup and probably never will and I've never heard of Buffer.
Thank you. I was so excited when I read this, it would of been such a letdown.
The funny thing is, in my experience the most extroverted people (the sales team) all have offices, and the introverted programmers are all stuck in a bullpen.
On Institutions
headphones don't let you opt out of an open office. there is still noise you can hear above the music, visual distractions, proximity, catching colds, 6 person meetings on neighbours desk, everyone cans see your screen etc.
Lots of good stuff here. I would appreciate a wiki-style site with short answers like these instead of searching {Google,DDG} and trawling the [stackoverflow] results.

Not all of them are necessarily good practice though. This made me chuckle:

What Is The Current [Git] Branch?

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

(if you're reading this jbranchaud, try `git branch` :p)
The language around perceived high-ability developers is important -- "rock stars" are admired. "Ninja" are feared. Neither are respected by the people who actually have money and power -- producers, daimyo, investors, management. Even "guru" implies asceticism and a willingness to provide expertise without appropriate compensation, and more importantly all three of these terms imply an independence from existing power structures that means they cannot move or advance within those structures.
The Brain Is Hardwired to Snap
I really want to know how that survived the lawyers.
How to Read a Book a Week
Abstract: Teehan+Lax was a design firm, like Frog, IDEO or Fjord; T+L had an internal R&D department, like Frog, IDEO or Fjord; T+L is out of business, unlike Frog, IDEO or Fjord.
Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint
You're correct, I didn't recognize it. Thanks for pointing that out!
I think they obviously were underpaying compared to their total number of employees, since they only had one office in San Francisco, and as far as I can tell they never had more than half of their employees living in SF.
Sitting in an open office layout gives me a sense of disloyalty to my employer because it's just plain disrespectful to not see daylight the whole day and sit in a noisy and dull environment.

I have worked with a purely remote company for a few years and I would have stayed with them forever if the business had actually worked out. Interestingly I collaborated and talked to my remote colleagues much more than I do now in the open office.

Obviously, to each his own. Some people like the office and some people like remote.
GitHub Pages Custom Domain with SSL/TLS
Neurothriller
Amazon GameLift multiplayer back end
Ah yea this is awesome. I like this idea more than how I do my notes[0] because I don't actually do most of my notes in github where this makes more sense to actually commit and know when to commit/push.

[0]:https://github.com/cmpis/notes
Putting the project name/author in the title would probably draw more attention (i.e. "Google's Ion: cross-platform C++ OpenGL application framework")
Given that we already know that originating at point A and traveling to point B, such that the distance from A to B at the time you arrive is X, does not involve traveling a distance of X... I have trouble seeing your point.
One thing I've noticed, there's the "coolness factor". Open offices are just more photogenic than closed offices, almost no matter how you do them. That's a big factor in startups and gamedev where coolness factor is actually important.

Edit: to be clear by "important" I don't mean that it's a good thing, I mean that it has an unfortunately big impact on PR, hiring, and it's something that the people in charge take seriously. Personally I prefer individual offices, regardless of the coolness factor.
maybe my sin is hosting at linode - for a new recipient at either of the behemoths, I seem to have 50% chance of going to spam. Thanks for your comment.
But they were never renting office space for their entire staff. If you really wanted to compare apples to apples (i.e., "Should everyone have an office payed for by the company" or "Should we have an annual retreat for the whole company"), a bit more analysis is needed.
> i.stack.imgur.com

what's imgur doing on stackoverflow?
That negates the whole point of the article (well, headline) for me.

You didn't stop having an office. You just realised you could save money by sending the few guys using your office to a shared space.

I think I'd be a bit miffed if I was a non-office employee there - suddenly the old 'office guys' are getting this 'team perk' that doesn't apply to me.

It would be more in the spirit of the whole 'openness' thing to say "here's $X, spend it on office space, coffee, whatever to improve whatever working environment you choose".
LA's top tech guru is preparing for the bubble to burst
Are you sure no one can make a living by improving Atom? The license (BSDL) allows proprietary forks.
It is very encouraging for myself, CTO of a company that uses RethinkDB, to see the efforts that RethinkDB go to ensure quality in their product and the willingness to allow Aphyr to potentially uncover problems lurking under the surface.

Thanks again to Aphyr and the team at RethinkDB for going to such lengths to discover, document and fix such failure conditions. Going to have to read through this thoroughly tonight.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the gun related charges have caused two issues to happen here:

1) The minimum sentence was exceptionally harsh.
2) Because of the guns, it makes it somewhat of a political hot potato since it looks like he "could" be violent.
The Power of Attention: Intelligence Over Information
$360/mo becomes a lot more affordable with the scale of money self-employment brings. I looked into getting an out-of-house office with my last gig which was all-remote, couldn't afford any of them. (We also didn't have co-working spaces nearby; small town/5 years ago, things were different.)

If I got a real job again, I'm not sure that I could afford to have a $360 monthly bill.
The state of website statistics is a sad one.

How does Piwik fare? I briefly tried it once and loved it. I've never tried GA. Am I just blissfully unaware of a whole world of a difference?
Hi all, I'm currently with buffer in the bootcamp period. I've loved every moment of it. Agree with a lot of the sentiments here, especially the separation of personal and professional lives. Working with the buffer team has allowed me to pick where I work from each day. Some days it's a coffee shop, a lot of days it's a tiny co working space I've found. Sometimes that space gets a little noisy, so I move over to my friend's office. I've got about another 4 places that have open invitations for me to drop in and work from there. So overall, pretty awesome. Would love to answer any questions too :)
Facts No One Really Checks (2012)
Generate NYT Headlines from Provisional New Hampshire Results
What exactly are you signaling to employers with your Stanford admission though? It's not really clear to me.

Intelligence? That's pretty easy to measure on its own.
Hard work?
Hoop jumping?

I'm not really sure. And I say this as someone who hires programmers and sees a CS Degree from Stanford as a pretty strong positive.
Yep and "simultaneous" is not simple either as Einstein figured out in 1905:
"So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system."

https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
I'm forced to disagree with you here. I take the stance that it should always be pronounced as "squirrel", because seriously, who doesn't like squirrels? :)
That's actually a genius way to reduce administrative overhead as well. Problem is that the exams select only for people that are good at taking exams. Not always the most interesting/well rounded students.
Right. It's not possible to prove Maxwell's equations from first principles, we only "know" they are true from experience. In particular, there's no logical reason divergence of B has to be zero; logically there could be magnetic monopoles, but experience seems to indicate there are not.
Just started playing with it. Looks very promising.
But they aren't just indexing the book. They are copying it completely. Then using that copy to provide a commercial service to people that reinforces the Google brand.

In a similar way, I could _borrow_ books from the library, take them home and digitise them, then return the library book while retaining the digital _copy_. I'm pretty sure this is not allowed under copyright law.

However, if I go one step further, commercialising my collection of digitised books by providing them online to everyone in the world in a searchable format - but removing every few pages - that somehow makes the original copyright infringement legal?...

Does Google Books provide a useful service? I think Yes.

Do they infringe copyright to do it? I think Yes.

How could they not infringe copyright?

I suggest if they bought every book that they digitise, they would then have the right to index those books so that they could offer their fair use service to people. Optionally, publishing houses and authors could opt-in to the system by providing them with a free book or a waiver.
That sounds accurate, most people don't like change too much because they get used to it, but Google at least didn't do something as extreme as Uber. But you're right, it wont stop people from using the service.
Taking the parents statement in combination with yours, sounds like you're not "most consumers".
Lots of very small companies will happily do 1099 contracts without trying to control your time at all. The hard part is finding those contracts, which usually come through networking and existing clients.

You might try emailing companies offering to work as a 1099 contractor, which companies sometimes like because it means you're easier to fire and don't get benefits, etc.

Most companies want a very serious full-time commitment and will be disappointed if you don't work there for at least a few years.
I've been putting each fact I learn as a line in a til.yaml file for the last 6 months. I grep through all my til.yaml files any time I need to remember something. It's been useful.
This is an exceptionally insightful and just plain awesome comment...thank you for making me belly-LOL.
I'm not sure if this is a troll, or just someone who is massively out of touch with how most people live.

Median household (not individual) income in the US was 51k in 2013.[1] A 10k vacation to Europe is indeed out of reach for most of the population of the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Most ISPs don't allow inbound (or, often, outbound) connections on port 25, so the number of people who can run mail servers at home is pretty limited. I think even Cox stopped allowing it a while ago, and they were among the most lenient of the big ISPs. (Comcast hasn't allowed it for a while.)

That, I think, is why the distribution managers don't make the default configurations a little more friendly/sane; most users aren't interested in installing a MTA to do anything but local delivery or smarthosting, and the people who are, are probably going to tweak the configs to death anyway, so it's not worth spending the time making it run well and securely straight out of the box.

It wouldn't be too hard to build a "mailserver in a box" with (say) Debian + Postfix + LetsEncrypt + BIND that you could stand up in an hour and be reasonably secure (and I'd be kinda surprised if that doesn't exist in some form already), but I don't know how many people would want it who aren't running mailservers already, and have the capability of doing so.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26687225
You can request the same freelancer if you are satisfied with their work, but we cannot guarantee that that person is available or awake at the time. In practice we see most people trust us to do the neccesary quality control, so that they are indifferent as to who performs the task.
View-source shows that it's used for images in tags.

<img src="//i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">
Instagram is not Eharmony
They do not detect uBlock Origins.
Because you don't want the system to break.
FBI can't figure out how to unlock encrypted phone in San Bernardino crime
I agree completely. Apple should open source it so the community can package it up as a drop-in shim for running older software.

That said, given that they haven't, it'd be nice if Blizzard would assign a programmer to this for a month or two and just port it to the current Apple networking stack.
is this opposite day?
They don't appear to be scanned for Ads, but talk with the Google Marketing team and they will be able to tell you what domains are sending to your competitors if they use Google Apps.
I've had https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode/blob/master/Bash/comman... for a while but this is much better.

I have to resist the urge to automate the ToC, though.

Edit: https://github.com/voltagex/til
R, Data Mining and Big Data to Fight Against Terrorism
Your understanding of what is difficult is wrong because you're looking at it as a detection problem when it's actually a false positive problem.

See: http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/
That is certainly a good sign. I played in the beta and decided it wasn't for me, so maybe I owe it another chance!
More significantly, it's the official host for all user-uploaded images on the site.
Whenever you post an image on a question or answer, and it's not already hosted somewhere else, i.e. you're uploading from your computer, that image is hosted on imgur. Stack Exchange has a deal with them like that. You can see this on the image upload dialog.
Obama Keeps Public in Dark About 'Black Budget' Requests
Talking About Feelings in the Conference Room (2014)
didn't know that, thanks
where does one look for jobs in eg denver/boulder? craigslist is a ghost town -- 1 ruby role (but ads for ruby jobs in sf) and 2-3 java engineers once you deduplicate / remove ads for other areas
When Human Hair Could Braid Two Hearts Together
Mexico has highest number of missing journalists, reports British NGO
> Fair enough but do you think a 1-2 man shop can get better reliability than a product like Parse if they are average app developers that don't have Ops experience?

I don't think that's ever going to be possible unless both people forgo sleep and are willing to drop whatever it is they're doing to attend incidents.

I'm really surprised by the number of responses of the form "but I could run that cheaply myself on my own server!" I see to online services.
The Holy Grail of Web Scale
Smart to put it on GitHub. Works as a nice hack to appear super productive on public profile. My day-to-day commits are all private, so I look slow/lazy to the vagabond internet surfer or startup CTO hiring based on GitHub presence.
Yeah but then you're polling, which isn't good as mentioned elsewhere).
Here's a couple of articles that provide the prosecution's side of the story.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/29/us/new-york-al-shabaab-sentenc...
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-security-alshabaab-idUK...

It's difficult to find any evidence supporting or refuting the claims that Mahdi Hashi was in Djibouti to "provide material support" to al-shabaab.

Regardless of whether he was "providing material support" to Al-Shabaab, I don't agree with trying him in the United States. He's not a US citizen and he didn't commit any crime against the United States. Even the prosecution admits he does not pose any specific threat to Americans.

The material support clause of the Patriot Act is bogus. It needs to be redefined so it is more narrowly focused.
Uhh so how do I use this? the readme makes it sound great but doesn't really give me any instructions
Well, even though the post is 4 months old, we've had remote employees from Beijing to SF for a while now. The economics of productivity is a super interesting question. And to share my thoughts on that, we have a company that basically never sleeps. At any given time there are a group of people working on stuff there. We have paid for tools that help us communicate in a manner where on a project, I can pick up where someone else left off. Whether we've beaten our competitors is a question I admit I Dont know the answer to. And I'm not sure if owning the entire space is something we want to do either. One of our bigger guiding principles is, do we have a solid product that people love using and are they happy with the support they get. On this front we know that the answer is yes. We always want to continue improving but we also are very happy with what we've created and done today :)
Except that flash cards DO improve language acquisition skills!

http://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/
Except that's demonstrably not what the NSA was doing; they were sniffing the backbones at the switches, presumably because they didn't want to create any sort of paper trail or get warrants, even secret FISA ones, against particular people.

From Google's perspective, it means they have to be involved, however non-consensually, in the process, rather than having it done to them transparently. So I can see why it's a win for them.

Whether it really matters to Joe Random User is arguable. What Joe User really ought to demand is end-to-end encryption rather than transit encryption, but he's unlikely to do that because key management across multiple devices (and who wants to read their email only on a single device?) is a pain and the companies that would be able to make it less of a pain aren't exactly incentivized to do so.
Very cool stuff. I remember my first year of high school - in our first music class, we were taught: "what is music?". According to the teachers, and the dictionary, "music is organised sound".

Never seemed like a satisfactory answer to me. And finally I have confirmation: the world's brightest scientific minds, at MIT, in 2016, are only just now cracking the surface of this complex question.

The word "music" has been in the human vocabulary forever. But how does the brain actually define music, and classify it as "not noise", at a neurological / chemical / acoustic level? This field has been little more than guesswork until now. Very exciting times.
Not that its particularly casually browsable but there are some details in the programmer reference manuals for the Intel integrated graphics encode/decode hardware. If you head to volume 8 the MFx introduction section has some sample flows before it starts getting into command packet details: https://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/intel-gfx-p...
I have searched for help info about Xero. I already use it, but repeatedly get their ads now.

Saddest bit is that I own Xero shares, so not excited that they're wasting money on ads!
Current discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063963 (401 points, 16 hours ago, 172 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11063862 (105 points, 16 hours ago, 41 comments)
"Absolutely awful" is stronger language than I would use, but yeah, I'm not feeling it. The 'a', 'c', parentheses, and especially the 's' remind me of lettering you'd see at a cheesy Greek restaurant. I didn't hate the cursive as much as the other replies here though, I think it could be a real benefit if your editor was configured correctly.