skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox)

I'm not a fan of a binary "open office or not" distinction: both can be done well. Dropbox's old office was the best open office I've worked in. Large desks, low employee per sq. ft. density, sound-absorbing foam on the (high) ceilings, teams spaced relatively far apart. The new Dropbox office was a slight regression. Smaller desks, slightly higher employee density, no sound-absorbing material. But it was still mostly fine.

IMVU's open offices back in 2012 or so sucked. Employees were packed together to the point that it was sometimes even hard to walk from point A to point B.

I feel like the most important office quality metrics are employee density and how well sound carries.

Whether or not there are useful collaboration surfaces matters too: cubicle walls are great for stickies and note cards. But that's solvable with easy access to dry-erase walls or dry-erase boards on wheels.
I agree with your points if hot desking is forced on you, but I won't mind it being an optional thing(in addition to private office), can definitely use occasional change of environment to fight boredom.
If you saw a "the future is male" shirt, what would your first impression be?
Speculation in a Truth Chamber
Is there any explanation on how this thing actually works?
Definitely. I've consistently told recruiters I'm not interested when I hear there's hot-desking involved, and even (politely) declined mid-interview once when I didn't know up-front it was a thing at that particular company.

If your teams have no need to be together physically, then THEY HAVE NO NEED TO COME INTO THE OFFICE.
All labor which could be done by people in, say, Vietnam or Laos, has value below the required amount to exist as a human in USA. So, more and more of it.
Any studies about Rooibos? I miss that in this article.
Not at Apple, apparently.
That's the point: there is almost certainly work being done now for $10/hr that is not economically worth being done if the lower limit by statute is $15/hr.

If someone is capable of holding down that $10/hr job but not capable of landing a $15/hr job, they are harmed by an increase in minimum wage in two ways: 1. The direct loss of job, income, status. 2. They are now shopping in an economy where the goods/services they purchase are likely to be marginally more expensive.
What a stupid clickbait headline. Obviously it's not dead. Research that shows it's terrible has been around longer than open offices have been popular. If management cared about the evidence they wouldn't have done it in the first place.

Let me fix their conclusion with the cheapest, most employee friendly way to solve the problem.

> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple— allow everyone to work remote.
I don't suppose you'd know what that ip is and if this fix still works do you?
It seems to me that we would naturally become less "creative" as we age because we are emmasing knowledge and experience. As we do so we have a much larger bank of solutions to new problems we face. When we are young we have to come up with creative solutions because we can't draw on past experience and accumulated knowledge.

This is probably why we seem more creative when we try something new and novel. We now again have to come up with creative solutions because we have no other reference to go by.
Another asked if she was going to demonstrate her products for him.

Sigh... Anyone, of any gender, is probably going make this joke regardless of the gender of the other party.

If you can't laugh with the joke you probably shouldn't be in the sex industry. At all.

Nothing to see here. Move along.
Minimum wage++ == Inflation++
Guar gum is also natural. It's extracted from guar beans. And it's widely used (and overused) in lots of US ice cream brands.
While I agree in principle, the counter-argument is that you're just going to end up with that job going overseas or getting automated. Basically, if you need something done and it's only worth $10/hour to you to have it done, but no one near you will do it for less than $15/hour, either 1) it won't get done and that $10/hour economic input is lost, or 2) you'll find a way to get it done for $10/hour or less via means other than employing a local human.
How about a 42inch 4K monitor (Philips BDM4350UC). In term of screen real estate it is fantastic.
That sounds incredibly unfriendly to differently abled employees. What if you need a desk that is significantly taller or shorter than normal? What if you need a non-traditional keyboard while recovering from surgery?
Hardened Linux kernel sources removal – Gentoo Linux
It's amazing when you look at software engineers' value in dollars. If you measured our value in square feet of local real estate, it would be blindingly obvious.

A tech company in a prosperous city can buy you all the 4k Dell Ultrasharps and Macbook Pros a person could want without breaking a sweat. Another couple feet of desk, on the other hand, could turn you from a net creator of value to a net destroyer of value. It's as unaffordable to the company as the salary bump that could put homeownership within reach.

I'd love it if someone would offer me a private office, parking space, and ability to live in a market with closer to median home prices, but the industry is very clearly trending in the opposite direction.
I was born in 1966 and loved watching his movies on TV as a kid.
Ask HN: Have I been mislead with my job offer?
Half way through my last year as a comp sci undergrad I was hired as a "Entry Level Software Engineer" at a major tech company.

When I got my offer letter I noticed that the team I would be on was called "Client Technical Support". This immediately threw a red flag for me because it sounded like over the phone tech support. I emailed my interviewer to clear up what exactly I would be doing. I absolutely did not want to be doing tech support and wanted to be developing and growing my skills. I was quickly assured this was a bad name for the role and that it primarily was a development role. I accepted the offer and forgot about any of my concerns until I started.

Once I started, I quickly was told my role involves providing technical support, over the phone, for enterprise software and as they put it "no you will not actually be doing any coding, but don't worry you'll be looking at plenty of code and providing solutions for other engineers" They also assured me it was fun and I will be learning lots about one specific product.

I feel as though I have been mislead. I really want to be growing my skills. Should I stick it out at in hopes of moving into a developer role or should I begin looking for another job?

Much appreciated :)
So, why isn't one of the solutions at the bottom something like : "Have traditional offices?" or is this implied?
So what caused the change in 1973?
The Common Secrets Behind the Top Most Viewed YouTube Videos of All Time
The U3415W is the monitor I finally got at work. It's a nice monitor.

At home I have a Benq bl3201pt, which is a 4k 16:9 monitor. It's nice as well, but does have a flickering issue (one side of the screen will flash every 4-8 hours or even 1-2 days).
Is it like that for security purposes or are you working with legacy software?

Apart from those two issues, the loss of productivity should so obviously outweigh any possible savings. There must be some explanation.
What you're mulling over is the precept for the autotools toolchain.. spare the next generation the same pain we bore :)
I think the nuance here is that it's stagnating relative to overall income growth. I.e. 1% isn't terrible if everyone is getting roughly 1%. But that's not the situation - the economy is growing more rapidly than that, but only a tiny percentage of people are seeing big gains for their own incomes.
Thanks for writing this! I have especially been waiting for the next release of some OS to have something revolutionary for people who use the computers as workstations.. but at this point most updates seem to be about voice automation, accessibility, sync and other "mobile" features.. I have wanted a DBFS for a long time for both personal and work files, and my huge multimedia collection.. secondly the ability to pipe data from one GUI app to another will help us immensely.. its the main reason I feel more productive while using CLI.
I'm afraid history has shown that once the cat is out of the bag someone will use it and other countries will follow suit. And the cats already out of the bag because the technology that allows autonomous cars, civil/industrial robots, drones, and face recognition programs to work just need to be combined and modified to make "killer robots".
You'll also need movers on staff or on call for employees who can't move their own desks.

It's a cute idea, but making it OSHA-compliant sounds expensive.
In terms of PPI, not so great.
They won't hesitate doing that, after all whole open workspace movement is a cost cutting method on the pretext of increasing collaboration.
Please comment thoughtfully and substantively or not at all.
a filesystem is a database
Any ideas on how the internet could be changed to not allow that?
Really, citation please?

I see companies was so much money all over the place that it's a bit hard to believe that assigned desks would be such a hardship for them.
The statistics in this article contradict what you say: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/moneybox/2015/05/sex_hist...
> become less "creative" as we age because we are emmasing knowledge and experience. As we do so we have a much larger bank of solutions to new problems we face.

I don't think this makes any sense.

Drawing on knowledge and experience, and a larger bank of solutions, to solve new problems is creativity.

> This is probably why we seem more creative when we try something new and novel. We now again have to come up with creative solutions because we have no other reference to go by.

I don't think makes any sense.

When we older more experienced people try something new and novel our experience and knowledge and solutions from other fields doesn't suddenly evaporate. There is a lot of crossover in accumulated experience and knowledge.
This quote by the fed chairman during the Great Depression, Marriner S. Eccles, seems apt

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.
Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants.In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped."
I'm also a technology lawyer, i've written several of the patent grants used very widely, as well as having been responsible for open source licensing compliance at Google for a very long time .

If i thought this license would actually help i would support it in an instant. But so far

1. i don't believe it would. It's a very old idea, discussed to death, with a lot of downside, and a little upside.

2. they've ruined a lot of the possibility of getting people on board by doing it in a way that's fairly tone deaf.

As for the license itself:

You also have the same concern if you aren't large.

It's also not just going to yank your react license, it will yank your license to everything under this license.

This license will not have the effect of stopping patent litigation. Patent trolls don't use React, and most of the danger is still trolls.

If you really wanted to play that game, you'd be better off saying "if you sue us, you lose the right to use facebook the service". That might have some effect (but probably not a lot).

Instead, this license will have the main effect of further enabling the large to leverage the small. Hey, seems like you got technology i like, and hey, looks like the app you depend on for your livelihood uses react. it'd be a shame if you had to sue us for taking your stuff and lose your react license.

Do i think facebook will do that? Honestly, no. I doubt it. They may by accident. Do i think, if widely adopted, it would have that effect: 100% yes.

As for the origins, these kinds of broad termination clauses have been around forever. They aren't anything new. As i've said before, they were considered and explicitly rejected from most current licenses with patent grants.

Rather than come to a community of license authors, etc, and say "hey, we want to re-explore this, because we're seeing a problem", they did it this way.
That's ... unlikely to be a successful mechanism (and in fact, i know a large number of corporate counsel who have banned it).
It doesn't appear to be curved or ultra wide screen.
Ugh yeah. I'm glad I'm not the only one that hates this generalized fight for a number that's ultimately irrelevant.
I wrote a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Alaska-Eric-Matthes/dp/154417596...

Bicycle travel is great. You go slow enough to see everything and meet people you wouldn't through motorized travel, but you go fast enough to cover long distances over a period of weeks or months.
Very interesting. Where did you find the $50K figure for Japan?
The problem is that if you set a minimum wage that is higher than the real value of the work performed, it means those jobs just simply won't exist anymore.
No, the area where the ice was recovered is near the Allan Hills of the Transantarctic Mountains. This area isn't in the center of the ice sheet, where consistent accumulation patterns exist and drilling from the surface to the deepest ice would yield ~500k of these annual layers. The Allan Hills are on the fringe of the ice sheet, where the rock beneath the ice rises and due to some of the dynamic deformation mechanisms (and strong surface ablation) old ice is forced towards the surface. The researchers therefore aren't drilling from modern ice to this ancient ice, but are instead tapping directly into the old ice which is now exposed near the ice sheet surface.
You're surely not done are you? I'd love to hear more about the problems with free trade and how your company will fix them.
I've been using my own mechanical keyboards forever. You make a lot of friends with a model M in an open office (suffice it to say, use quieter switches now).
WW3 is going to be a real bitch.
Forgive my ignorance, but why wouldnt we expect to see exponential growth in wealth, and as a result a greater discepency between the top 1% and everyone else?
It's because the large tech companies' offices have expensive real estate and just don't have the square footage to give everyone an office. I actually think that in some cases they could pull off micro-offices if they engineered ventilation and virtual windows or something, but basically it comes down to space and without some high-tech micro-offices which is not actually a thing, there is just not enough space. I mean square footage in downtown SF is at a premium.

Now if they were sensible and had optional offices in less expensive areas closer to where people could get nice affordable homes, they could get a deal for the real estate and have lots of offices. Also they would need less offices because they allowed remote. But there is a distinct lack of being sensible in general. The execs have fancy offices in downtown SF so demand everyone commutes there and sits at communal tables of whatever.
No. Absolutely not.

I'm sure you have a female in your life who is important to you. A wife, daughter, mother? Would you be ok with an investor talking to your daughter like that? Joking that she demonstrate a sex toy for him? I would be absolutely furious.

This is not something to just ignore.
Fun interesting article - I'd like to apply this to my kids (6 and 4) to keep them from wasting their time.
No hot desking. please.

the people pushing hotdesking seem to be manager types that spend their days talking to various groups of people.

but it fails completely for some dev types. oh sure you can churn out some css while balancing your laptop on the edge of a table at the local cafe but just try that with a desktop workstation plugged into various bits of hardware while doing hour+ compiles.
Computer Science is an odd field.

In the early 1970s, IBM failed to produce a multitasking, multi-user timesharing system that customers could stand.

Academic researchers developed VM, a virtual machines system. IBM's lack of a coherent operating system vision became a non-issue because a site could run different operating systems at the same time under VM. Circa 1980 a mainframe developer would spin up an OS instance in a VM, and spin up more OS instances in the VM if they want to run more tasks.

Although many think of mainframes as dinosaurs, it took PCs 30 years to get to that point.

There is part of computer science which is timeless, which is part of mathematics. There is also part of it that is so future-oriented, that the ideas will only bear fruit 20 or 30 years from now.

The 4-yr university aims to educate you for a lifetime, not to get your first job.
This looks pretty decent.
This kind of language sounds intimidating if you aren't familiar with it, but it's actually not that complicated. The documentation states the universal property of the cofree comonad for a functor. You don't need a degree in math to understand it - the bits of category theory that most Haskellers use are very basic.
Don't you need a pattern rule for %.d? GNU Make doesn't seem to come with this rule.

There is a profoundly ugly example here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Automatic...

%.d: %.c
@set -e; rm -f $@; \
$(CC) -M $(CPPFLAGS) $< > $@.$$$$; \
sed 's,\($*\)\.o[ :]*,\1.o $@ : ,g' < $@.$$$$ > $@; \
rm -f $@.$$$$

I copied it into a running example here for anyone curious:

https://github.com/oilshell/blog-code/tree/master/dotd
The crisp shape of the text often makes me nostalgic for systems pre cleartype on windows and pre-gnome 3 on linux.
Why didn't electricity immediately change manufacturing?
I do that thing, where I just start coding from scratch.

Example:
When programming in haskell, I just write the types (not always) and undefined most things and only then I start implementing. Whenever I make a new function, it gets composed by a bunch of other functions that are not yet implemented (undefined's) and eventually this converges.

Refactoring is then based on equality principles in my head. Yeah, it fails sometimes, but that's why pure functions and type safety feels so important sometimes.
Remembering Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback
The internet is designed to make any such attempts impossible, up to the scale of a nuclear assault.

Luckily, though, 99.9% of assassination markets are bound to be scams or honeypots anyway.
I can't imagine working somewhere without my cheat sheets on the wall, stress ball, notepads, printed docs and books adorning my work space.
Financialization of the economy. The fall of Bretton-Woods. The fall of the gold standard. The repeal of Glass-Steagall.
Regarding CI/CD we use gitlab pipelines to build and push containers and run 'helm upgrade --install' to update charts in the cluster to use the newly pushed images. Works very well and not at all difficult to set up.
I use an X34 at home, aside from quality issues (needed a warantee repair after 6 weeks, nontrivial shipping and hassle), it's a fantastic monitor for every task.

I've never understood the tendency towards multiple monitors over one larger monitor.
I hope you're being sarcastic because there are already a half-dozen build tools called "bake"... it's literally the first name that everyone thinks of.
A colleague had another problem with hot desks - a visitor would arrive at his floor and ask "Is Bob here?" => "I don't know". Without hot desks, you know where Bob sits and have a good chance of finding him. With hot desks, the visitor now has to work to find Bob, as does the person receiving the visitor.
If you're a newbie and need to get up to speed, having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help. And if you can design your software so that the team members are replaceable, being able to easily replacing engineers is more important than keeping them happy.

IMO it only works on a certain complexity level of software, and up to a particular skill level of engineer. Beyond that, you need more specialized engineers that need more code ownership, and will be replaced less often. They'll cost more too.
Check out http://isitsnappy.com (not my app, I've just used it before), lets you measure latency empirically. Set up a loop where you press a key as soon as something appears on screen, and that will give you your end-to-end latency.
Bail.

You were lied to.

That's a terrible way to start a business relationship. If they're willing to do that, you are almost certainly walking into a toxic waste dump of a corporate culture.
Minimum wage costs are mostly passed on as increased prices paid by the middle class. The profits to the .01% class are barely affected.
Yes. I haven't done it myself but it's possible on several exchanges.
I think if we could get to the point where we admit that racism (or more generally, bias against or fear of those outside our group) is a normal human trait, and not something deliberately chosen by hateful people, then we could more effectively discuss how to counter it.
And when outsourcing happens, you tax the fuck out of that business transaction, and with the proceeds pay your unemployed laborers a livable minimum income. You think Chinese labor is cheap for no reason? There are tons of gov't subsidies, from straight up handouts to nonexistant labor laws (which are a form of subsidy to big business at the expense of workers, a reverse tax).

The same should apply to automation. The inordinate inequality of wealth which is bound to happen with automation should be alleviated through heavy taxation. Or if tax is too dirty a word, ownership of such dual capital/labor should be partly socialized--i.e. newly created AI/robot companies must put up a % of their shares to the public who receive equal amounts.
I'm not sure I follow his thought process on why "through the growth of individualism and personal experience that makes cooperation impossible." On a simple personal level, I'm for individualism and cooperation, so I'm not seeing the inherent conflict. Perhaps it's a matter of definitions?
Yeah I've lived it. You have to get to work right away so when it kicks in otherwise you'll generally keep doing whatever you were doing when it did. It can turn you into a god of productivity if you use it right or a degenerate jacking off for 12 hours straight.
Show HN: Practical example of Headless Chromium using puppeteer
Well, it's a large company with lots of in-house software, so that's the official reason for the delayed roll out of Windows 7. But I think it has more to do with bureaucracy and inefficiency.

For not bringing my own hardware, security (it's a bank).
One option I’ve seen with hot desking is to give employees a permanent storage locker/cube that they can leave things like laptops in.
I spent the first ten years of my life thinking he was the same guy as Jerry Lee Lewis.