skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I prefer open offices. You get a pretty significant echo chamber effect on articles like this because people who don't like it turn out to comment.

Personally, I have no difficulty with noise (I prefer working in coffee shops to at home), and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable. I totally get why some people don't like it though.
The sample size is just fine, actually, it's very large.

The issue is randomness. If it's a random sample, it's very large. If it's not a random sample, it's worthless.

"We have no idea how they found the participants or controlled for bias in the selection process."

A) This has nothing to do with sample size

B) If they have any credibility whatsoever, they hopefully know what they are doing. Adjusting is a statistically legit thing to do, they do it in political polling (and in hindsight) it works.

But yes - with 'online surveys', it's hard.
I do that all the time
>Same if they contribute to public health

They are not contributing to public health, they white-wash their image related to the health damage their products do.

If they want to contribute to public health, they should do it with their products.
Is Let’s Encrypt the Largest Certificate Authority on the Web?
I just want to point out that batteries are often connected in series in regular devices.

Many devices where there are two AA batteries (TV remotes, etc...) usually have the batteries wired in series. They need to do it to get the voltage high enough for some of the components.

Additionally, many batteries are actually made from multiple smaller batteries wired in series internally. For example, some 9V batteries are actually just 6 regular 1.5V batteries wired in series.

Of course, in these configurations, they generally discharge at a similar rate.
Great idea. The fund would list all the studies they need done, as well as the funding, and dole out the money for a small management fee.

They use part of this management fee to invest in their brand, so that studies that don't carry the "neutral-study-guarantee" sticker are treated less seriously than those that do.
It's basically anyone whose job is non-routine and requires significant amounts of independent decision making.
Agreed, but when people fall, they usually try not to land head first. Also, I was assuming that many commuters in other parts of the world ride more upright bikes (e.g. "Dutch" bikes) that are easier to bail off of. If I get doored while riding at 12mph on an upright bicycle, I'd be more worried about my genitals smashing into the stem of the bike than falling on my head.

Again, I'm not saying helmets are useless, but we should view them as seat belts, or even lap belts as best.
Agreed! The author mentioned Smalltalk and it instantly clicked for me. Having a live programming environment sounds awesome, it sounds like it will fit my thinking pattern better. Then, for production deploy, you drop the editor library from the JAR. It's kinda like stripping the IDE part of a Smalltalk/Pharo image before production deployment.

As much as I want to like Pharo and am amazed by its fast progress, its integration story (to external data source like PostgreSQL) is pretty weak, currently. I'll be tracking the progress of this project to see how it goes, though I've yet to love Clojure.

I want to add that I think it's a beautiful approach to solving the problem; rather than implementing a complicated mechanism for interrogating the application state from a tool running in another process, the author is flipping that around and putting the editor inside application so that it has a very simple access to the application state. Love it.
When my company moved to open offices we were straight out told that we were doing this so that more people could be squeezed in.
Samsung Galaxy S7, the first 4×4 MIMO smartphone
Awesome SCSS – A curated list of Sass/SCSS libraries, style guides, and articles
What are the alternatives to open offices for companies with hundreds or thousands of developers? Do you have offices with dozens of people split up by team?

I've been to the AWS headquarters in Seattle and I think that's what their setup is like but I didn't get too much of a chance to look around.

I've worked on systems administrations teams that had their own office and being able to close the door was awesome.
I worked for a "start-up" (if you can call a 15-year old company that was bought by a VC company a start-up) where the CEO was CONVINCED that open offices were the best thing ever. He made our content people write articles about how great they were and how much better they made our company than other companies in our field. One of our content people was like "this is the worst assignment ever, because it is literally impossible to find research that says open offices make you more productive."

To top that off, he used to talk to people across the office using a megaphone. I was over 100 feet away from him, and people I was on the phone with would ask me what was going on, "Is everything all right over there? Is somebody swearing?"

"Yeah, uh, that's just our CEO."

I don't work there anymore.

My productivity fell off a cliff at my new job when I got promoted and moved to a "nicer" desk. The desk probably has three times as much area as my old desk, but my old desk was in the back corner of an office that was split in half with a partition. I could work for hours without being interrupted. Now I'm in a cubicle right by a door, and I'm interrupted several times per hour. I think open offices just feel more productive -- more than one coworker has mentioned how great it is that they can drop by now without feeling like they are interrupting me.
Sample Pics from Pixel “#Nofilter Needed with Your New Pixel”
That's for creating a transaction. Validating / verifying a transaction takes milliseconds, which is important for the consensus algorithms to work properly.
Don't be too professional
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....

It is legal for a specific class of privately held companies, though the matter was sufficiently unclear to reach the supreme court and will probably be subject to follow-up cases which will clarify/expand/narrow the extent of the decision.
For those hoping to cut through Forbes BS landing pages, autoplay video, PR crud, and the rest of it, the survey slide deck is the closest thing I've found to actual study meat with minimal spin:

http://www.slideshare.net/upwork/freelancing-in-america-2016...

I'd recommend the article be replaced with this link.

For those questioning methodology, which is never mentioned in the slide deck with any specificity either, note that the study is conducted by a major PR firm for:

This study commissioned by: © COPYRIGHT 2016 DANIEL J EDELMAN INC. | 63 Upwork Upwork is the world’s largest freelancing website.

No, no conflicts of interest at all here. Nothing to see folks. Keep moving right along. </p>
I didn't mean the surface actually has to shine. But there's a reason for that hard smooth-surfaced plastic outside the EPS or whatever softer material.
Here It Is: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Effective Facebook Ads
Team sized rooms are definitely the way to go. You can avoid conversation from other teams that you don't care about. When there is a conversation in the room, it's probably related to what you're doing so it's not necessarily distracting you.

I worked in a room with just my team and it worked out great. We were able to have discussions and draw stuff on white boards on the wall without distracting anyone else. It also helped with team bonding.
That is either a joke or the worst, most terrifying suggestion I have ever read.
You mean like the government?

You pay in taxes, government dispenses research funds, you don't know where the money is from.
The fact that the content of these texts is (as I understand) so similar to today's canon is what is particularly interesting.
Show HN: It's so easy to manipulate parse trees with clojure.spec
How the UK's Big Brother is putting trolls in jail
Verification takes sub 10ms.
One option is to specifically target folks who are looking to move to an given area. I'm not sure how to do this aside from content marketing.
If there are plenty of candidates applying that have degrees from accredited institutions, then they are SOL. It gets interesting when there aren't enough qualified candidates.
More than 1 million songs are released annually to the digital stores. How long would these contracts be?
"Between -110dBm and -114dBm, where most devices typically begin to struggle, the Galaxy S7 Edge managed to achieve over 100Mbps. This is where Qualcomm’s X12 modem really gets to shine, working in sync with RF360 Front End, closed loop antenna tuner, antenna switch diversity (ASDiv), and the new diversified antenna design. Even at -120dBm, where most devices would generally fail and lose a connection, we’ve observed 63Mbps on Galaxy S7 Edge. At -130dBm, 11Mbps was achieved using QPSK scheme, and the lowest TBSI. "

"Designing a device with four highly efficient antennas in a small form factor is not an easy task. The main challenge is achieving high isolation between the antennas and low correlation of the received spatial streams, and with this preliminary test it is very apparent that Samsung has done a remarkable job. It becomes even more impressive if we remember that the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge global launch happened in March, and over the past six months we haven’t seen a single 4×4 MIMO smartphone from any other OEM other than Sony (XZ Japanese variant). "
Where I work (at Google), it's generally pretty quiet; you'll occasionally have conversations going on, but most of the time all you hear is typing. It's not quite "library-like", but making phone calls at your desk is very strongly frowned upon.

At my last company, we generally had 1-2 person offices; it was very easy to stay in your office all day long and never interact with other developers. With the open plan here, we're much more likely to have impromptu team conversations.

I think it would be better if we were in separate rooms in groups of 8-10, but open offices definitely are not all negative. When I work from home I miss the human interaction.
The efficiency gain with open offices is that, for high-growth companies -- or ones that are uncertain about their long-term size, it's pretty easy to shuffle furniture around to squeeze in more people. When walls and doors get involved, you're committing to "each person gets X sq. ft", for a company that may grow from x to 2x employees.

That said, they're a disaster for productivity.
> It just seems foolhardy to me to ride a bike without a helmet, like driving a car without a seatbelt.

Yes, this is the analogy I've always made. Thanks for emphasizing it.
When my company moved to an open office plan we, the developers, tried to argue that we needed the ability to concentrate and that this would hinder that. We were told that every job required concentration and that we shouldn't be such prima donnas who think we are special snowflakes. Someday I'm going to get a special snowglobe and shove it down the throat of the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference calls all day long from her desk.

Unfortunately I love everything else about my job so I'm disinclined to move on.
The whole article can be summarized by reading the last sentence: "some problems were just not meant to be solved."

That's it. The author doesn't believe the on-demand economy can work. The rest is just lead up.

I disagree with his assessment.
That fellow has been fear-mongering about Zcash for a while. I tried debating him on how the trusted setup assumption can be weakened, but he kept repeating the same arguments over and over again.
It's a noble sentiment, but it is based on research? Or just gut feeling?
No More Ransom
What you're describing is not an externality at all. It's an explicit cost to the driver that will hopefully make them alter their behavior.

It makes the parking (end goal) more expensive to them via both time (additional time to park) and money (gas wasted during finding the parking spot), so it is reflected in the cost of the good. Thus it is not an externality.
While I'm a happy mech user, the scissor switches on the Typematrix 2030 are actually quite nice. If my 60% died tomorrow I would have no issue going back to it.
Well that, and not wanting to live in L.A..
What gets me is the fact that they did the recall and produced a new version of the phone which was supposed to fix the issue, yet now there are reports of the replacement units doing the same thing.

Seems like they either jumped to conclusions and mis-identified the problem, or they attempted to fix the problem with a band-aid solution with the hopes of reducing the probability of failure just enough to make the issue "go away".

On a more personal note:

I hope this gives other Android phone manufacturers a chance to gain some market share. Primarily, I want HTC to do well. They seem to be one of the most friendly when it comes to unlocking the bootloader (you can do it via their website). I really wanted to get the Galaxy S7, but after finding out that the versions with the SnapDragon SoC will have locked bootloaders, I decided not to. In my experience, Samsung's version of Android has never been that great. Without the ability to flash custom ROMs and remove some of that useless crap, I just couldn't bring myself to make the purchase.
Neat! Better than nothing! Still not as context-aware as IntelliJ does (sometimes), but it's hard to beat Jetbrains, especially as a sole developer. Plus Clojure doesn't exactly make this easy by being dynamic from the bottom up. Assuming you're Oakes, nice job, and I'm looking forward to trying out Nightlight and will probably enjoy it as much as Nightcode :) that said, why the choice of those buttons in the toolbars? Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y are pretty commonly known.
In this case I'd suggest the reason is 'money', not some mental issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/

Just make sure you have an hour or so to waste.
How to Create Selenium WebDriver Automation Framework
https://i.imgur.com/sAdZ63y.jpg
Even a little respect would go a long way. I don't mind people having conversations, but loud laughter from the team across the way can really get on my nerves. And don't even get me started on phones ringing...
The amortized cost of building and furnishing a private office, when compared to the salary you are paying that programmer, is miniscule.

A measly additional 60 square feet of floor space, 10-20 grand in construction costs, and the same desk/chairs, amortized over 5 or so years.

Even building separate rooms for groups of programmers would provide for great gains at low costs.
No, Zerocoin is an older protocol built by some of the same authors as Zerocash; Zerocash is better in almost every way (better privacy, better performance, etc.)
That really isn't the job of the online companies. They have neither the legal authority nor the ability to act as judicial review for these cases.
What Quantum Computers Do Faster, with Caveats
I genuinely enjoy working in open office after working in both settings to the point that I would never never work in a company that is not open office aganin. All the noise points are valid here though.
For me personally, I like it because:

- Better/Faster communications. I can ask and answer questions on the spots vs. scheduling a meeting. This is gaming changing. For the same type of question, I can get answered within 10 mins vs more than 1 day. This is a HUGE productivity boost.

- Better team culture. Sitting next to each other make the team much closer. More likely to go to lunch/dinner, hang out, and become friends outside of work. This will give people empathy to each other and more willingly to help/unblock you.

For the noise issues, I get around it by blocking heads down time in my schedule and find a quiet corner in a office.
Yep. Work in an office with communal[1] music, it's really bad for focus. I would say that this policy likely loses us money.

[1] controlled by a clique, really
That's why I said "thermodynamic-ally speaking". Not practically.
They may completely appreciate the risks, however, and simply have judged it unlikely they would be caught.
I find myself trending the same way, but for another reason. I've gone back and forth on my viewpoint over my programming career, and now whenever I decide to revisit an old project, I find the "more NIH" I wrote it the more likely it is that I can load it up in a current version of the compiler / IDE and hit "Build and Run" and it will Just Work. Even if I included the external library in the repository, the library still contains extra code I don't need which may fail to build.
A Posix shell for Windows to speed up builds of GNU projects
And his writing is generally very information dense. You can learn more in one page of his writing than 10 pages of many other authors.
I wouldn't want to risk something this critical being in my project. I'm stupid so I try and limit my own attack surface against myself.
"Why do you act like you're the smartest in the room, why do you act like you're the smartest in the room..."
Epic Systems has a private office for each of their 9,000+ employees. Their campus is outside Madison, WI, so it's cheaper to do that there then it would be elsewhere. Private offices don't have to be large. I'm sure the money for private offices would appear if companies were sufficiently motivated to provide them.
Grandma doesn't want to fight new construction because she wants to "protect her investment". If she actually wanted to maximize the value of her property she would take out a home equity loan, demolish her house, build an apartment in its place and rent it out (and maybe live on the ground floor). She just doesn't want the neighbors to be able to do that and "ruin the character" of her neighborhood.
Apologies for my bad grammar. English is not our first language but that's not an excuse. How can I improve the article?
http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/04/14/meanwhile-in-a-para...
I strongly mind people having conversations about anything that is not work-related. If you want to talk about Game of Thrones or the latest sportsball game, take it outside.
Awesome and Interesting Talks Concerning Programming
Ugh, that was supposed to read: You cannot control how vigilant the other person is, but you can control how vigilant you are.
I'm sure they thought they would get away with it since there isn't a real "victim" other than someone who may or may not remember leaving a negative review or comment and probably won't even notice it's gone missing. Honestly I'm impressed that anyone connected all the dots so quickly.
"Being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers" means "easily break 4 or 5 engineers out of their flow" along with "easily create a distraction for the other 15 engineers within earshot of the easily-started discussion".

I'm fine with coffee shops over home (and did the same in college), but coffeeshop noise is "white noise" -- whirring espresso grinders, a blur of conversations between people I don't know about things that aren't going to activate my distraction monkey.
The Gratitude Series (Full) – Helpful Tips and the How To| Zooke.org
YES! I built one using a pre-fab face plate and it was super tedious. While I certainly enjoy using it everyday, looking back I'd probably just buy one. At the time though I couldn't find one that met my needs (mainly the bluetooth).

Recap of my build:

http://esheavyindustries.com/2016/04/hand-wired-keyboard-pt1...

http://esheavyindustries.com/2016/05/hand-wired-keyboard-pt2...
Facebook is paying 40-50 percent more than other places, which is usually a sign developers don’t want to work there.

More likely a sign of a high hiring bar and corresponding paycheck.
Thank you. That said, it shouldn't render the article unreadable or distracting.
Security Economics of the Internet of Things
I'm a developer who recently moved from a large open space to a small quiet room with just a handful of people. To me it feels like a big downgrade. I loved the constant chatter in the open space, and I was much more aware of what the whole team is concerned with. I felt that it was very important for setting my work priorities right. Meetings and emails are much more restrictive than just sitting next to everyone whose work interacts with mine. And it didn't impede my coding at all, I could always put on some noise (SimplyRain) and tune out.
If a business cofounder leaves, does he still get a share of profit?
Background:

We run a sports club in India which is about 9 months old now. It makes less than 10Lakhs per annum and is yet to be registered as a private or partnership firm. My partner informed me that he will be leaving to another country for a better opportunity and will not be able to work on the project for another year or two. Currently we have a 50-50 revenue sharing informal agreement since we know each other for many years. He is fine with a 75-25 after the move, but my father suggests we reach an agreement and close our deal paying him some money. I am puzzled and wonder how others handle this scenario. Thanks a lot.
Your mistake is assuming behavior like this is rare. If a law firm has connections in the state bar, there is no force that will punish them besides media outlets. Even then, the law firm (or reputation management company) can sit through the storm until public interest fades. I think required electronic document filing with computers analyzing the cases is the best way to solve the widespread problem of lack of legal accountability.
In addition open offices:

* Are usually cheaper

* Look good in photo ops and publicity: "Look how much everyone is working together _all the time_. So much activity happening! We are not like those places with loners and antisocial people hiding in cubicles"

* Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices.

Those 4 things conspire to make them more popular. I think it is simpler a function of them being cheaper in general and everything else is just justification. But in case Facebook, can't imagine they don't have the money...

Well I am glad this is changing though. There seems to be a backlash against open offices lately.
Cafes offer an odd sort of privacy since none of the conversations mean anything to you - effectively white noise - so they're easy to filter out. In an open office, every conversation may apply to you at any point during the conversation, requiring conscious effort to monitor and filter the conversation.
A large chunk of the 'new freelancers' are actually people who would love to have a normal job but that have been kicked out from their former position and are now forced to take work that normally would have been done by salaried employees. No unemployment, no benefits, a more complicated financial situation and no security whatsoever when it comes to being guaranteed some income next month. Coupled with limited financial planning skills this is a disaster waiting to happen, and all that to make it even easier to get rid of people when the economy hiccups.

Many decades of progress lost in a few short years.
The action is either harm or it's not. If I have a fence, and you run your car through it, the harm is not judged on whether I can replace the fence quickly.

Further, your statement goes a step further and seeks to normalize and legitimize discrimination. You're saying that it's perfectly ok for this to happen, borderline encouraging it by removing any and all penalties for the action.

The onus is not on me to show harm. The onus is on you to demonstrate why your statement should be taken seriously, and why there is no harm. And simply being able to find another job before you starve to death is NOT evidence that there is no harm.