skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's also very easy to "accidentally" put more people into a very large room than it would be allowed by working regulations. There's at least one large Silicon Valley company who likes to do that. The working conditions can be quite miserable.

You can call it an open office that amplifies communication in the team, so noone will notice that they're almost piling up vertically. And the problem is not just noise. Too many people breathing the same air leads to rising carbon dioxide levels which makes concentrating quite hard. Unless the office was literally built for large crowds, the ventilation will usually be insufficient to cool the office in summer and to provide adequate levels of air flow.

I stopped calling those things "open offices" and use the term "laying battery" instead.
> 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".

That seems very likely. It's very easy to screw up the fix for a serious issue when you're in a rush. I've deployed my fair share of broken bugfixes.
Innocent people should not be on the hook for the fact that the system is so broken that people can sue non-existent parties.

It's fine if the courts make mistakes sometimes, but if they're too incompetent to correctly use the powers given to them, those powers need to be scaled back to a level commensurate with the courts' abilities.
> It probably all comes down to NIMBYs.

It comes down to housing being the primary investment vehicle for most Americans; downward pressures on housing prices are fought by everyone possible.
They remind me of new York offices, like law offices with rows of paralegal looking through documents spread on endless tables.

It's something that was a financial necessity in expensive real estate, like Manhattan, FinDi in SF, etc. and someone got the idea to transplant that into suburban offices.

To add, I think it makes sense for a lean startup or a company going through a rough reorg, but once you're mature or overcome financial difficulties, it's not necessarily a good permanent layout.
I wasn't trying to create a strawman. The claim that I was arguing against said "They can't win because they are on the wrong side of history"

So the commenter claims "they can't win". That means that even if they stopped all the PR work defending sugar, they still wouldn't win and they would still be on the wrong side of history.

If they have no way to win, then the only thing they can do is stop existing at all.

If the commenter supports their right to exist as a company making sugary drinks, then there IS a way to win.
Libraries and study areas are more representative of what people need to concentrate.

I expect the cafe is more akin to white noise, not the sort of conversations you'd hear in a dev open office. Sometimes when you overhear some devs talking you can't help get sucked into the conversation. Especially when they are wrong.
>> This specifically is a survey where it's uncommon to carry out your own "experiments". You use the numbers from the original papers and hope there's some overlap in the metrics they use.

My comment was unclear. I wasn't criticizing the lit review, I was criticizing the literature it is reviewing. The lit surveyed does a poor job even defining metrics.

The rest is very interesting, and heartening. Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I don't like open offices. Sometimes they can be downright harmful though I can deal with them if I'm sitting with my back to the wall.

Many years ago, when I was fresh out of uni, I lost my job because of an open office; I was sitting relatively close to a bathroom and people kept walking past behind me - After 1 week this made me feel stressed and paranoid and I couldn't concentrate.

One month in, the boss asked me into his office and basically told me that I was unproductive and that "I'm going to have to cut you loose" - Being young, I thought there was something wrong with me but after working in several other companies, I learned the importance of the workplace environment.

If I ever get into a situation where I had to work with my back facing a large empty room again, I would start looking for a new job straight away. I feel shivers just thinking about it...
Survey: What's the Future of Mobile Technology?
Black Hat Lawyers? I hope they get nailed.
Yes, I prefer open offices. It makes the office feel more alive and interesting, and I'm less likely to get distracted since I know other people can see my screen. I have no difficulty concentrating because of noise, in part because my office is super quiet usually--people know to grab a meeting room if they're going to have a long conversation. In the past when I worked at places without easy access to meeting rooms, I just used headphones more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards
> whether takedown injunctions can actually be made legally binding on Internet platforms, rather than just being something that platforms choose whether to follow

If they're not legally binding, what incentive do Internet platforms have to follow them? It seems like it adds work and overhead; so what strategic or economic or other goals would following non-legally-binding injunctions further?
Nitpick: it is not 185 vs roughly 500, but 185 versus 621 in total, of which 225 were in cars.
I thought listening to music all day was bad. Then I got moved in to a cube area when I got promoted. The old-timers listen to the radio all day. The radio is so much worse than just listening to other people's music -- not only am I forced to listen to music I don't care for, but the ads are twice as loud as the actual music. So I can completely tune out the music and still be interrupted by some grifter yelling about what a crazy deal you can get on a new car.
Heh. Except for no natural light, the 5-foot walls with white noise to drown out conversation actually doesn't seem bad.
A design-build-test cycle for creating weird new organisms
With the advent of the iPhone 7, I can't help but wonder how long analog connectors will be around in other devices?
This seems to be one of many studies done that keep hinting that ovaries may continue to produce eggs. That's pretty awesome news especially for young women who have had to undergo treatments that may have killed off eggs early on. I also wonder how long they continue to be made. For instance if someone had a genetic disease that was somehow overcome with, say, genetic modification in some future time would her future eggs also carry the updated genetics?
I wasn't clever at all; if you think that the sugary drink companies are fine to exist as long as they don't push propaganda about sugary drinks, then there IS a way to win - all they have to do is stop the propaganda.

That isn't what your statement I replied to said... you said there was NO way for them to win.
When I discuss the nutritional content of my chicken-noodle soup, I don't mention the water content unless I'm comparing it to someone else's soup.
Because nobody is tapping you on the shoulder every 10 minutes asking "did you get the email I just sent out?". You also don't see long multi-person meetings in coffee shops (well, actually it does happen, and that's just as annoying).

If you could train coworkers to respect the explicit and implicit signals that people give off when working and concentrating on something and use some fucking etiquette like keeping the shouting to a minimum or taking long conversations elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem.
A very humble approach, and one that I try to subscribe to, as well. :)

I think the embedding part is certainly a tradeoff. Once the development community settles on a best-practice for things like this, it becomes less of a danger of forgetting. For example, once this sort of config shows up by default in archetypes and boilerplate projects, I feel that the danger is reduced to the level of being manageable. And hopefully the port that the editor uses is blocked by default in the production environment. :)
(Disclosure: FB employee)

Most of the problems about overhearing conversations, etc, can be dealt with by a nice pair of headphones. Here, it's universally accepted as the 'do not disturb' signal.
I worked for a company which had one office for every two employees, with a total number of employees around 1,500. It wasn't that hard; it was still a campus, it just took an extra building to house everyone.

So many open office plans leave enough floor space for walls and hallways; they just don't put them in place.
Probably because the nominal situation isn't "no defects", it's that the defects are below a certain threshold. They can get a sample below a certain threshold but it's not a guarantee that the actual full scale production would be.

It'd be smart to give the tolerances some extra headroom on the second go-around, but I would guess that in order to get additional certainty on their sample, they would need to run their testing program for longer while the inventory is piling up. And I have to imagine with a production the scale of the Galaxy there are immense pressures to get that inventory moving.

But it sounds like they gambled and lost.
Every job requires concentration, so the company interrupts everyone?
Show HN: Dontbug Debugger – A reverse debugger for PHP
Starting a fire is a manageable problem (the fire can be contained and put out). I doubt you can stage an effective terrorist attack with a laptop battery.
While this may affect a developer's decision to work at Facebook, my first thought is that Joel is ignoring the gorilla in the room. The number one reason that people don't want to work at Facebook is their product and mission. As someone in the comments mentioned, SpaceX has very tight and open cubicles, but people there are paid _below_ market rates, and they are doing _very_ deep work, so Joel's argument doesn't hold water in all cases.
> If you need to meet with 100 investors to raise money you are promoting a shitty deal and you shouldn't be investing your personal time in it.

Where do you get that from?

Many very successful companies had a very hard time raising money at some point. That certainly didn't make them into a "shitty deal."

In fact, Fred Wilson just wrote an article about how hard it was for them to raise their first fund at USV—and that fund ended up doing spectacularly well. [0]

[0] http://avc.com/2016/10/the-hard-raise/
I'm under the impression that Microsoft was The One Company of the big five that still gives its employees offices with doors.
No, it's not common at all. Nobody in their right mind would do this, those that do will get the message quickly, it's totally anti-social to block a bike path and dangerous to boot.
You'll get better at this, but do break out of the hourly trap. Alan Weiss offers excellent advice on the subject...> http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1145457.Value_Based_Fees
I used to work in a place like that, sometimes I would get up and dance (badly) and shout banging chooons! ... they soon turned it off.

Another place they had the radio on so I would laugh loudly at the DJs jokes, then say oh man, so funny, but so distracting, what was I doing again? Oh hell. I can't remember. They turned that off too.
"I disagree with Hobby Lobby's decision, but support their right to make it."

Well I don't, the money belongs to the employees and it's not up to Hobby Lobby to decide how they can spend it.
I think so. The buck always stops with the person you actually dealt with. The retailers can use the same protection when buying their stock in bulk I presume, so defective products get passed all the way back down the line.
I'm surprised Github et al. haven't tried to contribute some functionality for doing this to git. The thing described in the article is extremely common.
We're wandering from the topic, but I don't believe that's correct. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levonorgestrel#Emergency_birth... -

The primary mechanism of action of levonorgestrel as a progestogen-only emergency contraceptive pill is, according to International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), to prevent fertilization by inhibition of ovulation and thickening of the mucosa of cervix. FIGO has stated that: "review of the evidence suggests that LNG [levonorgestreol] ECPs cannot prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.

(references on the wiki page as always)
Behind the Scenes at AWS GameDay: The Modern Software Podcast
Interviewers should ask for their interviews to be held in the location that they'd be working day to day.
I've worked in a 2-person office, in a cubicle, and in open office plans of various sizes. I personally prefer the open office format. It makes the team feel more cohesive, it makes me able to jump in to problems that are happening, and it's never stopped me from doing work that requires deep concentration. And if I really wanted to, I could book a small conference room or go to a corner booth somewhere away from my team and work there, but I don't ever feel the need to.
Simple supply and demand analysis shows that goods command higher prices when supply is lower.
Well, our technical challenge is a take-home, open-book and all resources are allowed.
During the interview, we ask simple array manipulation and sorting algorithm.
For culture fit, we look for people who are funny and you can get a long with in a long stressful day.
How can we explain even more about our interview?
Thank you for your feedback.
I too loathe the disruptiveness of my employer's open office plan, but have found I can easily focus in a cafe. In part, I suspect this stems from mentally being able to classify cafe conversations as "ignorable noise of strangers", whereas in the office, any conversation I hear both comes from a familiar voice and is likely related to the work at hand. Some portion of my mind inevitably tunes-in to these cues.
Samsung is sending incomprehensible emails to Note 7 owners looking for a refund
If only there was a way to search the internet for them.
There's an ideal middle ground, which is private offices with outdoor-facing windows and open workspaces available elsewhere. Sometimes you need to be alone and concentrate, sometimes you need to be surrounded by some activity and social interaction.
Investors influence on where a start-up will end up is overrated. It's mostly up to the founders, luck and the market with investors somewhere near the back of the list of factors.
Yes, this is better. BTW, I saw people writing things like

fs.id
,fs.file_hash

and

file_name = '.vimrc'
AND fs.id = ot.file_system_id

which has subtle advantages (such as easier editing).

Also, I cannot bring myself to writing SQL keywords in all caps. It feels ancient. Just a matter of taste.
but that's tabbing with the left/right keys instead of the tab key, which is how I tab through a website

ignoring the fact that there's no :active styling in the css, there is nothing to indicate that to change the tab you need to use different keys
Indeed. The Terrorism Act 2006 [0] defines the offence given in count 3 (just to pick one) thusly ...

>A person commits an offence if, with the intention of—

(a)committing acts of terrorism, or

(b)assisting another to commit such acts,

he engages in any conduct in preparation for giving effect to his intention.

That the conduct happened to be encryption is basically irrelevant. Had he been purchasing giant shrimp in order to further some bizarre terror plan then that would be the exact same offence. The author of TFA would be well advised to familiarise himself with UK terror legislation before making such sweeping and incorrect generalisations. It's the intent that is the offence, not the conduct.

Which is not to say that the UK doesn't have a frighteningly totalitarian attitude to crypto, just that this isn't a good example of it in action.

[0] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/11/section/5

Edit: add link
The only alternative to Note 3 is Note 4. Note 5 had limited release.
There's conflicting studies about those too. Actually the ones I read that make out artificial sweeteners bad use very large quantities which are tens of times more than what a human could consume.
That's really inspiring. Sometimes, in the middle of a hard raise, you question it all. In the middle of the dark night, sometimes the worst part is not the darkness but the feeling that it may never end.

Fred deserves where he's gotten, not just because he's a great guy and a smart VC, but for having the fortitude and persistence to take it to the end. It makes me recommit, rededicate myself to my own hard raise, which may not end as well, but I can ensure won't end from giving up.
10 things you didn't know about mental health
My point was that if the open office plan is scaring anyone away, it hasn't yet (in my experience) impacted junior developers who are still quite enthusiastic about Facebook. Facebook doesn't only hire experienced developers, and even their experienced hires may not have a formed opinion on open office environments.

There are plenty of people who are biased about things (like an open office environment) they haven't personally experienced, yet hold their bias based on hearing about the experiences of others.

I've never been in an airplane crash, and I'm pretty sure I never want to be in an airplane crash. I don't need to personally have that experience to have a bias against it.

If you didn't know about storage heaters or single glazing before renting a flat, there are probably a number of ways you could have discovered those things without having to experience them directly. It certainly wouldn't require "magic" as you say.

If a bias against open offices is happening, it doesn't seem to be impacting our newest industry entrants yet.
Your argument was that poor old dears were hurtling along unable to stop in a reasonable length, only able to "gently coast to a stop". You are now arguing against your own point.

I do drive, and when I do so I rely on the experience of cycling 2500km last year on public roads. You seem to be relying on experience of arguing pointlessly for the sake of noise on the internet.

All cyclists should travelling at a speed where they are capable of breaking before potential hazards. If this includes unexpected cardoors then they should be travelling slowly enough to respond to the danger.

Why do you think they travel above a speed where they have adequate breaking time? Why do you think they should deserve this special treatment that is not afforded to other vehicles?
I despise it as a workspace as well. Some people don't mind as much, but I haven't met anyone that's openly enthusiastic about it.

I got a pair of Etymotic In-Ear Headphones[0] which have kept me sane for several years now. They have interchangeable tips with a NRR on-par with foam plugs. Worth every penny in an open office.

[0]http://www.etymotic.com/consumer/headset-earphones/hf3.html
Just wanted to repeat my sentiment in another thread, that I love this approach to problem solving. The outcome appears to be a tradeoff, but one that simplifies the hard part beautifully, leaving a simple(r) solution. I look forward to how this goes!
Developers also hate Facebook's mission and the overpriced shithole location.
“Feels good, man” emoticon will now feel better
TortoiseHg is completely different than TortoiseGit, despite the similar names (and logos). While the latter is an assortment of context menus and dialogs, THG has this plus a great "workbench" which combines everything into one. It's easily possible to use THG alone without ever touching the command line which is a rather nice feature when trying to convince non-programmers to use version control. If there was a git equivalent, I'd happily use it.
Fabrication of the [SLAC] Accelerator Structure (1967)
Better is, imho,

foreach (var e in employees) {
// ...
}

because the iteration variable is essentially a placeholder.
Another interesting angle to ponder is what this could do to websites hosting open comment sections on the web. Already a bit under fire for having low quality in many cases, I could see a lot of places taking down their comment sections if it's also going to open them to litigation. It doesn't take many lawsuits before the benefit the comment sections may be bringing is outweighed.

I say this without judgment as to whether that would be good or bad; just musing about the second-order consequences.
Alternatively, https://padlock.io/ is useful.
My original Galaxy S is still pretty usable if i turn off internet access because Google services have became so large they don't fit in memory.
I generally agree but:

1) Your headphones have good codecs, but they are only used if they match an iPhone supported BT codec. For example AptX will not work with iPhone.

2). Yes double compressing .mp3s is not as bad as it sounds, but double compression can be worse with two different codecs. For example I believe iPhone uses SBC codec for Bluetooth, which is pretty different from .mp3/.aac.

I would be interested in knowing if AirPods solve this by doing .mp3 or .aac pass through.
Frankly, when it comes to those big 4 companies, I think the perceived value of having that name on the resume will probably overshadow any perceived shortcomings in any of the environments.
"Any substantial delay would have led satellite distribution channels to cancel their contracts, placing the entire company in jeopardy."

Can someone explain that a little more? Are satellite carriage contracts so twitchy that going dark on a channel for more than a few hours forfeits your service?
But 100MB per page is ridiculous, expect for embedded videos. I'd be waiting two minutes for each page to load.
Ask HN: Can I get a job as a web developer?
My first job was as a product manager. It involved collecting complex requirements from users and turning them into feature requests for the development team. I taught myself Javascript/CSS to be able to build mock-ups so that I could communicate with developers more effectively.
Then I moved into a training role. At the time, the company's training materials were on Word/PDF documents. It was hard to manage and distribute them, so I taught myself Rails and built an app that allowed trainers to upload/edit content and managers to see the progress of their new hires. It also had points, badges, etc. as well as real-time notifications.

Then I became a consultant for a Microsoft shop. After realizing there was a lot of demand among the company's customers for visual reporting tools, I learned C# and ASP.NET MVC to build an app that allowed users to create charts and dashboards. The charts update in real-time as data is sent to them via websockets, and are typically displayed on walls in conference rooms, sales floors, etc.

I really did not enjoy C# though. I was thinking about going back to Rails when I heard about Elixir. Currently learning that and my goal is to re-write my dashboard app in Elixir/Phoenix.

I'm interested in getting a full-time job as a developer, but:

- I feel like a jack-of-all-trades. I'm proficient in JavaScript/jQuery, Rails, C# and some Elixir, but I'm not at a point where I feel like an expert in any.

- I think I would perform poorly in coding interviews. I know the core concepts - e.g. I can explain what binary search is - but converting that to quality code in 10-15 minutes... not sure if I can do that. I feel like this would disqualify me from most jobs.

- The vast majority of code I've written is unfortunately closed source, so I don't have much to show. I'm working on this.

--

Can I get a job as a junior developer with the above credentials/experience? If not, what types of things do I need to learn?
Two things:

First, how much BTC needs to be deposited per update?

Second, this doesn't provide a solution for anonymization, does it?
This is not just a defense of NIH but also a good rule of thumb for how to do NIH "right". The more narrowly you define the problem the more likely that the DIY approach will be better in both time and quality.