skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My current office has 475mm high dividers. Next year they plan to relocate us to the 'workplace of the future' with barriers that in some instances are sub-300mm. They have 3 setups - a 4x desk each getting a 90 degree partition, a 3x each getting 120 and a 6x flat rectangular thing with no dividers. We will all be expected to hotdesk (what happens to my desktop workstation is anyone's guess?) and will get a single ultra-widescreen attached to a laptop dock (bye productivity gains from 2 monitors). Each of the configurations has less overall desk real estate which is going to be fun when we have to roll out A0 drawings.

I already get constantly distracted and find it hard to work. I'm placed next to a corridor just near where one of 3 entryways from the foyer into the office area is. Previously, I was next to 1 of 2 printers, at a junction to a hallway holding the toilets, which doubled as a spot for people to strike up conversation. I rarely get any extended periods of focus here which is infurating when my job is structural analysis, maths, etc. We are currently given a grand total of 8 meeting rooms per floor (200+ people), most of which are permanently tied up with meetings so you can't even use them for private workspaces. This is something they claim they'll fix in the new office but in reality you will be lucky to get one.

The new place sounds and looks (when I checked out their examples of the desks) like it's going to be a nightmare even worse than this. At least here I can sort of sink into my seat and fall below the dividers, and at least I also get my own space as a desk that I can customise to suit my own needs/ergonomics/etc. and have it feel like it's my own space where I have some miniscule hope of focusing.

I'm already polishing my CV in anticipation of bailing because of it.
I think because its so easy & cheap to create websites using wordpress, we have so many websites. Without that I think a lot of demand will disappear. So while there is some impact on web designers, it will be at the low end and unlikely to be huge.
Smelly std::pair and std::tuple
Ask HN: Any updates on the basic income experiment?
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-y-combinators-basic-income-project-2016-6
That's quite expensive. In Barcelona the scheme is a fixed €47 subscription per year though you can only use the bike for 30 mins per ride (after that there's a surcharge).
yeah I was quite surprised too. I knew the internet felt speedy when I tethered to my phone, but never bothered doing a speedtest before.

I'm in Adelaide and the test was done about 10km from the CBD
Or a giant spider.
Hey listen man I need a business model. How about you give me your money? I got some great stories I could tell you
Restricted mode was released in 2010 so it's not new. It's an opt-in setting and only 1.5% of people use it. Compare that to the percent of people using ad blockers.

https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/03/restricted-m...

For people who can't stand inappropriate videos, the alternative is not using youtube altogether, which would be even worse for ad revenue. So introducing restricted mode helps ad revenue. Obviously whether the creator of a video is LGBT or not should not affect restriction, and it appears youtube might be breaking that. But the affect is quite small because very few people use restricted mode.
Mining is already there, bringing a mine online is human intensive, but when that's done most of the mining is automated.
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on TrafficRtr: push based config-less L4LB?
Hello Experts,

I have implemented a proof of concept TrafficRtr: push-based configless layer 4 load balancer and would like to know your thoughts and feedback on it.

I believe currently, all popular load balancers like Nginx, Apache, and HAproxy require a static configuration of backend hosts. In an auto scaling environment, these configurations require frequent updates. Thus a service discovery module is also needed to keep track of available backend servers. Also to add fault-tolerance, a monitoring module needs to be present as well.

TrafficRtr aims to eliminate the need for service discovery and monitoring modules. Currently, it is just a proof of concept and I want to get some feedback from the community before I publish alpha quality code.

See Demo @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXEV2SL9yNU

Thanks,
Ashish
Working with text in general is what Perl excels at so it baffles me that you guys with 20 years experience was not able to make that work. Capture::Tiny is one module just from the top of my head. That module lists 10-20 other modules that probably can do the same things like IPC::Open3. Now I don't know exactly what your use case was but I have always been able to solve my capturing of stdout and stderr with Perl.

Concurrency is definitively a pain point since it is not built into the core but for Web and even certain terminal apps I have found Mojo/Mojolicious to be both well designed and well maintained.

I don't deny that sometimes Java, Erlang or Go is the correct tool. I am actually very interested in Go and use many tools written in it like Docker/Kubernetes, Consul, Terraform etc. Go will probably be my choice for anything that needs concurrency until Perl catches up or something else better comes along.

But I will not abandon Perl for my unix scripting needs as it is still the best in my opinion. Getting max work done in a short time and with less code with max convenience and unix-y feel is where Perl whipes the floor with every other language. And that is also a sweet spot for DevOps needs where you don't develop everything from scratch. You take the best practices tools of the day and glue it together with Perl.

I am sad to see someone like you that clearly was involved with Perl at one point abandon it completely. The thing is that for every negative comment someone with a bit of clout spews on the internet there needs to be hundreds of positive ones to counter it. I still hear that "Perl is dead" because of that guy who clearly did not know Perl and used an example from the Stone Age that at one time was considered a feature but we now know is a vulnerability. It also exists in PHP by the way, and web developers worth their grain of salt have known better than to let user data just pass unsanetized to internal execution for quite some time now...

I call TIMTOWDI and hopefully we will se you back in Perl some day. You know it is a very special little language and if you ever "clicked" with it you will always miss its good stuff.
Fully automated unstaffed store
"Someone on Facebook pointed out that the Ofo bikes use a number code which does not change, and some users claimed to have taken the Ofo home after their first ride and used it for free thereafter."

There are a lot of these 'stolen' Ofo bikes in Beijing. They usually have an additional regular lock to prevent other Ofo users from unlocking them using the code (which the app will provide, so long as the bike isn't reported as currently being used).
I vaguely recall seeing a DOS demoscene demo that filled the 320x200 screen with a letterboxed 256x200 gradient. Then it slammed the actual display frame data into the VGA 256 color pallete one line at a time on each horizontal sync. The result was an effective 18-bit color resolution image from a 256-color device. (I think MCGA didn't actually have 24-bit palletes)

Of course, it meant you had to spend 90% of the frame updating the pallete registers and only had the vertical blank time to draw everything into the frame buffer. But, the focus of the demo was the idea that high-color was at all possible on VGA hardware.
i'm 29 but maybe it still counts. sorry im not currently hiring, but I will be.

You don't do shit about differentiation. You are intrinsically differentiated (from the 20somethings you seem to be worried about). Tell me what it was like in the 90s.

You've got the experience. Just amaze me. Internalize that its conceptually impossible to be worse than the 22 year old kid. Show me that you make an effort to keep up with the times, and then tell me about the old times.

^ That may not work with the hipster founders who just want to be hip, drink beer while "working" 60 hour weeks having raised 15M from a16z (for a16z, 15M is a throwaway round. their funds are too big for that kind of bet to make sense.)

You won't get into brogrammer companies. You wont fit in. Theyre right in claiming that you wouldnt be a culture fit. But is that something you aspire to, anyway? People like you can replace 20 of those clowns. I'd rather pay 220k for one real engineer than 120k each for an army of bumbling idiots. Any day.

But you've got to bring the skills.
To be fair, it can't possibly be easy for Google work out what ads are appropriate for what content. I mean some will be easy like a crap music video and Beats, but there are some videos that just aren't ad material.

"Ok we've got a large topless woman covered in slogans, holding a sign, and screaming at a crowd. Maybe.... Nescafe?"
"That is avoided by having a credit card on file and charging the user who couldn't be bothered to lock the bike when he was done."

The bikes are locked only to themselves, not to a railing. So even a locked bike can easily be loaded onto a truck if the city decides it's cluttering up the place.
I can't talk about China, but this scheme would probably work in a lot of places in Japan. I used to ride my ~$700 hybrid bike to the train station a lot. At first I locked it, but then I noticed that mine was the only locked bike. I ended up leaving it unlocked. Kept that up for 5 years or so and my bike never got stolen (admittedly I live in the country side -- not sure how successful that would be in a big city).

When I lived in the UK and Canada, I would never dream of leaving my bike unlocked. Even locked, I've had bikes stolen. Once, I locked my bike to a bike rack and they stole the whole bike rack (must have been a chore!). Most of the time, they will deflate your tyres in hopes that you leave the bike there overnight so that they will have some time to cut off the lock in peace.

Anyway, it's just cultural. I suspect that's hard to believe (it would have been hard for me to believe before I left Canada). In each culture there's a lot of stuff that's good and a lot of stuff that's not so good. People really do behave differently, but I've travelled enough to know that one culture isn't really appreciably better than another -- just different.
The current target set by the Mayor of London is that by 2023 ALL taxis in London will be zero emission including Uber.

That's the law. Great news for pollution in London and great news for the push towards electric vehicles in general.
Yeah that could definitely work. We're limited technically at the moment (e.g. can't really extend our platform to do things like that), but hiring a team to enable things like that.

What would be really neat is if we learned exactly how much you need and sent you the right amount at the right time.
I'm not sure if we should be taking lessons from people who's leisure time was created from slavery. Arisotle was the ancient equialent of billionaires who's family can live forever off of interest/investments
I have been hearing this for a long time now, "automation will take away lot of jobs", I don't understand the people who make such statements. Do they realize how much manual work is done in projects in even the biggest companies? Do they realize that the internal tool which caused AWS downtime last month was not built in one go, it was built eventually, that's why it is hardly perfect.

If we move to a more automated env where we have high quality softwares like the author mentions, it'll just enable us to deliver projects faster, bring better software in the world.

Plus, who is going to build these automation tools? surely every company is going to have a different requirement, considering that for the last 30yrs we haven't yet discovered how to build OTC softwares, where the main software is a generic one which can be customized across domains, it remains to see the "automation scare" and who'll sell robots who do everything that humans do.

Plus, I don't know why this doesn't get discussed, the day we have a general AI which can think for itself, why would it work for us?
It would be more correct to say that demand for art is non-zero at every point in time when a person exists. This only becomes infinite if humanity exists for an infinite amount of time.
Thanks for giving us a try!
This it the whole idea - we don't try to replace all your coffee rituals but rather help you drink great coffee when you otherwise wouldn't be able to.
"If the government participates in such an opus, it will not get done. It should use its influence only to favor its execution. With a single word, a monarch can make a palace arise from the grass; but a society of men of letters is not like a herd of manual laborers. An encyclopedia cannot be ordered up. It is a labor that must be doggedly pursued rather than launched energetically... The more abstract the topic, the more we must strive to make it accessible to all readers... Such are the principal thoughts that came to my mind with regard to the project of a universal and analytical dictionary of human knowledge; its possibility, its purpose, its materials, the general and particular ordering of those materials, the style, method, references, nomenclature, the manuscript, the authors, the censors, the editors, and the typographer."

The translated full text [0] of that Diderot quote is pretty incredible. Two centuries prior to Wikipedia, he predicted many of the benefits and challenges of such an endeavor. I can only imagine his reaction if he were to see Wikipedia today; I imagine it would be something like [1].

[0] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=did;view=tex...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk
Pull Request Based Development Sucks
I read about it on one of the other commenters' links and immediately thought that somewhere, a product manager was told to "move fast and break things" and "get it launched next month no matter what".
Please do! There's a fairly relaxed 14 day trial. (And you get a fresh trial if you create a new "team"/organisation
How does it sacrifice the open web again? Is there a law being passed that entire web should be DRMed?
not sure what the poster was talking about but the advertising became creepily targeted
They're probably doing broad bucketing for supported browsers first, instead of assuming it's supported then limiting/targeting specific versions for various fixes, or non-support.
I tried looking for anything that would concur with his point, but all the sources Google Scholar gave me were very untrustworthy.

I did, however, find this neat little article on the "myth" of adrenal fatigue, from Crossfit.[0]

There's a part that says caffeine overuse can trigger general fatigue (or adrenal fatigue as refereed to the alternative medicine crowd).

http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/CFJ_2015_07_Adrenal_Exa...

((Of-topic, are there any other good research aggregators besides Google Scholar?))
There definitely is a cancel button too! I just tell people they can email us as well because some people find that easier.

We're just now building an in-house engineering team to make the process easier. If I had my way, you could cancel, pause, adjust timing, etc with a couple clicks. I am stating our plans to do these things :-)
Boston Students Get a Glimpse of a Whole New World, with Different Maps
I wonder if we could create a limited AI that could prompt users to define requirements better? Something where the output to would be a bunch of user stories.
I'm curious, for those that do use a location-sharing type feature (or app like Glympse), what is the appeal of doing so? In which situations do you typically share?
I don't think so.

Serotonine is the most influential neurotransmitter most animals have. You have two production sites in your body. Sleep, memory, behavioural learning, pain-regulation, appetite, blood-pressure, sexual behaviour, body-temperature are all controlled by it.
I really love my coffee. I roast at home.

But if I need to travel or whatever I will pick up the best instant I can find.

If this is as good as they claim, I'd buy it.
email me and I'll send you two!
High Pressure Misting System
Best Online B2B ICT Services Marketplace – UUUGA
Uuuga is the one of the best simple & secure online platform that offers perfect IT resources to organizations. Uuuga connects both buyer and seller and share their IT requirements with providers. uuuga is a it's kind of unique business-to-business ICT Services Marketplace that delivers highly qualified IT resources from the best vendors to Government and Corporate clients. It is a self service marketplace that serve skilled & highly efficient resources online.
> Sorry, but as someone who spent nearly a decade founding and building a premium content VOD service, and 6 of those years fighting fiercely against DRM and making great content available without DRM, I have both the knowledge and moral authority to say that you're living in a fantasy world. .... EME is a ideological compromise, sure, but it's a net benefit to the open web

If you need DRM, nobody is forcing you to create a solution based on a open-platform. Go make a OS and platform-specific app instead.

I mean... That's what EME makes browsers and web-sites into anyway. You now have so called "web-sites" where your OS and platform has to be "supported".

And then you might as well make a native app. Like Netflix does. Like Spotify does. Like everyone does.

We don't need DRM in our open standard.
4 is still a thing because of exclusives and regional restrictions meaning that you need a growing number of subscriptions to access a chosen subset of content, and it might not be available at all in your region
Why your Startup business needs an online B2B portal?
The assumption you make is that DRM _must_ exist in one form or another.

I, as an open web proponent, want to make it difficult for any business to add DRM to their media offering. by making DRM a difficult system to implement due to proprietary plugins, it increases the perceived value of just offering it without DRM.

but by having EME a standard, it makes it a no brainer to use DRM, because their customers will automatically have it as part of a browser. the cost of DRM is then externalised, and even legitimised such that it's the norm.
In what situations do you typically use Glympse?
> But music you buy on iTunes is DRM-free. That's a significant step away from DRM.

And Amazon. And Google Play music. And band-camp. Etc etc.

In fact, I don't know a single place on the entire internet which still sells DRMed music. Such a thing simply ceased to exist.

Imagine if we could make the same happen for video. That would be real nice.
Prediction market: It’s about knowing what is happening in the present
But what if the programmer program could identify possible ambiguities and interactively ask you to clarify them? That would obviate the need for a formal language specification.

>Make me a sandwich.

Do you want to (1) be turned into a sandwich or (2) have a sandwich prepared?

>2

What ingredients do you want in the sandwich?

(etc.)
> But if a hot new chat app becomes popular

...Lord have mercy, not another one!
I've seen this in Life360. Have you found youself in situations where you want to share with others outside your circle? Ex. People who don't have Life360 installed.
Surely companies enter into these agreements knowing what service Google will provide for them, right? On top of that, I don't think many people believe even Google has the technology and resources to scan every bit of content they show and determine if it's "extreme"--according to a particular company.

This is a case of companies catching flak from potential customers for being associated with something offensive to those vocal customers, and wanting to distance themselves from it. So they try to shoot the messenger: Google/Youtube.

They either knew what they were getting into when they signed the contract (because "We'll give you money. Just shove our company down the gullet of the public."), or they're inept.
The future of the music release is resilient, liberating and fan-focused
I seem to remember an incredibly nerdy and thoroughly enjoyable article about the arcane details of drawing subway lines. It was written, IIRC, by a startup that had automated the process of optimising these maps, only to have Apple launch their maps – which had brute-forced the problem by doing it manually.
Banker Dies During Marathon Sex with Married Woman
Reddit Books 1-500
Yup, I hear you. I've definitely talked to people on both sides of it - there are preferences either way. I think both can work. FYI, before our subscriptions renew - we notify customers a few days before, so they can increase, decrease, or cancel the order. We do want to proactively alert you before it renews rather than hide it from the user. It should be very clear to you what's happening (thats our goal at least). Our platform for subscriptions doesn't let us force you to hit accept before billing - that would be hard to implement.
The chat with the professor is one of my favourite parts. Paraphrasing.....At the start he may not know what the problem is, but through interaction and response, he and the computer will work it out together. Totally nails interactive design, and what software development is, and yet often still fails to be
Things are even worse than your water analogy at most US employers:

- Even when the water is turned on, it isn't free. Depending on your employer, some percentage of your monthly water plan bill is deducted from your paycheck. Furthermore, for many water uses you have to pay a set per-use fee. In some cases, you have to stick coins into a slot to actually get water. Of course, in an emergency, you don't have to pay in advance, but you also don't really know how much you are going to be charged after the fire is put out.

- There are often strange restrictions on what you can use the water for, with many uses triggering higher rates.

- there is a cap on how much water you can use. No, not a per month cap, a lifetime cap. Once you go over the cap, your company sponsored water plan is cancelled, and you have to pay for everything yourself at much higher rates.

- Your water bill is almost certainly going to increase every year by 10-15%, and possibly quite a bit more.

- The more water you use, the higher rate you are going to pay if you ever have to negotiate your own (non-employer-sponsored) water plan.

- Oddly, your water plan is in effect even when you aren't at home, but the rate you will have to pay at a water fountain will depend on whether the vendor operating the fountain has a prenegotiated agreement with your water company. If there isn't an agreement in place, the percentage that you (rather than your water co.) are responsible for paying and the rate that is charged both go up considerably. This is true even when travelling to another state, where finding an "in-network" water supplier to keep your costs down can be a very frustrating experience when you really just need a cool drink to rehydrate.

In short, the jury-rigged, patchwork, inconsistent and hugely expensive "water" system in the US is completely screwed up, and the employees who have to rely on it get completely screwed over at the time they most need it.
"Best in the world my ass", he mutters...
I'm guessing the original SIFT paper?
> If Chrome were to ship without DRM, Netflix would cave faster than you can say "thepiratebay".

True or not true, this is just not going to happen.

Google was the single browser pushing DRM into the web-standards to begin with. They were the first to ship with this enabled.

And Google already has a vested interest in DRM. They have their own media-services now, remember...
Too many bucks to pass, the court cases would never end.