skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a detailed counterpoint to your #2, see this analysis: https://www.cbpp.org/research/illinois-proposed-gross-receip...

> One potential problem with a GRT is its impact on high-volume, low-profit margin businesses, for which the tax can represent a high percentage of potential profits. Another potential problem is that a GRT favors businesses that conduct most operations in-house over businesses that purchase intermediate goods and services from other firms, since the tax is imposed each time a business purchases inputs from an outside firm. (This latter problem is called “pyramiding.”) Illinois can address both of these problems, however, by allowing businesses to subtract the cost of goods purchased from other companies from the gross receipts subject to the tax.

Which, whether you call it a deduction or a simplification of the way corporate income tax is currently based on profits now, brings us back to square one.
New Lisp Memory Management Technique (One Reference Only)
I wouldn't link to Snopes personally, but an entertaining read nonetheless.
> having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help

That is orthogonal (independent) of the office layout.

I have been both the person who needed to be brought up to speed and the one who helped others get up to speed and I can't think in either case how an open office layout would have made it better.

Just randomly interrupting people every 5 to 10 minutes is not the best approach and that's exactly the what's one of the problems with the open office layout -- they invite those kind of interruptions.
Vegetables in the sense of wheat, peanuts, and such? Sure (but since these things will get processed, so I wouldn't hold out that it helps with our obesity).

Vegetables like kale and broccoli? No way. The ratio of labor and land required per produced calorie for these kinds vegetables is far too high. In addition to existing farmland, we would need to convert large amoutns of existing natural environments areas like forests into farms.

But back to your point, why would the industry collapse? Wouldn't prices just increase?
Is it possible that someone is in fact utilizing GPS "hacking" that is assisting in the likelihood of these collisions? I believe there was a story here on hckrnews about GPS "hacking" last week, although most people said the issue was known and not that big of a deal.

EDIT: Here was the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003333
If your argument is along the lines of what I think it is, then this is a fallacy. See "Sampling fallacies and misconceptions" in https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

"All signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling; an infinite sampling rate is not required. Sampling doesn't affect frequency response or phase. The analog signal can be reconstructed losslessly, smoothly, and with the exact timing of the original analog signal."
Would it really not work to just be able to ask a coworker to help with your desk if you needed that? It seems like even having a small group of volunteers be on-call for such a thing wouldn't be much of a hassle, assuming the right pieces were in place (everything plugs in through 1 power plug, desk and chair only (mount storage to desk etc))
Blockstream employees are involved in bitcoin development but so are other employees of other companies. Just a bunch of FUD if you ask me.

https://blockstream.com/2017/07/31/segwit-myths-debunked.htm...

https://twitter.com/morcosa/status/831618208289398785

https://twitter.com/morcosa/status/875695603455586305
There is a lot of cynicism about these types of questions in this thread, but I suspect a lot of it is coming from programmers and not data scientists. As a DS candidate I always find these kinds of interview questions a valuable learning experience and a positive challenge. It also provides me some insight into the kinds of problems they're interested in, and the kinds of approaches they use.

When I mean "right approach", I mean that there are several possible approaches, but only one of them is doable in a few hours in the afternoons, where as the others might take a research team and several weeks. Being able to recognize the right approach, and to ask the right clarifying questions, is important for data scientists, in the same way that being able to choose the correct algorithm or data structure is important for (certain types of) software engineers.
I think that stems from the many people that "work from home" only to take their cat to the vet, get their car washed, go to the dentist, and pick up their dry-cleaning. Most of the time whenever I hear the term "working from home" I immediately assume they will not be home and will not be working.
"Capable" isn't a binary, lifelong condition. The remedy for incapability is generally considered to be education.
You sound like you need some Toffifee or Werther's original.
move the board, or sweep your eyes from left to right across the table it's on. You'll detect the individual events, with a sense of order. your eyes are edge triggered with a relatively slow reset. I think you'll find you can detect much finer grained deltas in time.
They could take the valve approach

The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company
makes people hard to find. That’s why we have http://user—check it
out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged
in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
Why not? Aren't Snopes articles well cited?
> This seems to be a result of different design goals of other professions that need to maximise for the most amount of butts in seat per square meter, without factoring in the losses that distractions can cause.

Many other professions factor in distractions in their office space set up. I don't think I've been to a decent attorney or CPA office setup where they were in a shared space or hotdesk situation. Offices layouts can definitely be built for this approach - perhaps you're just noting that nothing's available? Or nothing's available at a price management wants to pay?

> If you want to redraw the floorplan, you have to sign rental contracts upwards of 5 years, something no sensible startup would do ...

If it was a nicely done space, I've little doubt the space owner would have trouble leasing it out again, either to one large org, or to smaller orgs who all want private space. I run a coworking space, and most people who contact me are still really just looking for individual office space.
> Luckily, the solution is fairly simple—design offices with a variety of areas to suit different kinds of work

Putting aside the expense of the space for this -- let's just say it's all worth it if you're building a unicorn company and want maximum productivity on both the individual and team level.

My question is, what's the best way to implement the equipment side of things? It's also really important, I imagine, to offer the best computing equipment, for engineers and designers in particular. Does this "variety of areas" and "no designated desks" approach force us to use laptops and external monitors? Do we not get to use those beautiful 5K iMacs or a souped-up tower? Do you get one and also have a laptop??

Believe it or not this is my main concern. I am ok with designating zones that are "library rules" for focus even if they are not full offices, alongside chattier collaborative areas, a more social cross-team cafe space, etc. It's moving equipment among them I'm worried about -- you can't stick to library rules if you need to cluster around someone's computer to do a code review.
PRANAS: Platform for Retina ANalysis and Simulation
The full quote doesn't reverse the meaning at all.
If you want me to work remote full time, I need a raise to cover the cost of getting an apartment or house equivalent to my own but with an additional room to turn into a dedicated private office.

Otherwise, I'll take an appropriately designed office.
Probably not:

---

The Fitzgerald's captain was relieved of command and other sailors would be punished after the Navy found poor seamanship and flaws in keeping watch contributed to the collision, the Navy announced last week.

---
> Italy has next to no cohesion

References? In my personal experience that's far for accurate. If anything they are an extremely nationalistic country.

Living half way between the US and the EU has taught me otherwise - that the kind of cohesion between say Portugal and Sweden is surprisingly solid - once you know where to look e.g. social values, political views. Trying to do the same with someone from deep Texas and a little town in the Maine coast could be an interesting example of the opposite.

Having different languages even inside the same territory doesn't account for lack of cohesion. It's quite irrelevant in practice actually.

Cohesion seems to be mistaken these days by sheepishly following politicians into unnecessary wars and lacking critical thinking. Widespread ignorance is not cohesion, is divisive at best.
> Italy has next to no cohesion

References? In my personal experience that's far for accurate. If anything they are a extremely nationalistic country.

Living half way the US and the EU for half my life shows my otherwise - that the kind of cohesion between say Portugal and Sweden is surprising once you know where to look e.g. social values, political views. Trying to do the same with someone from deep Texas and a little town in the Maine coast could be an interesting example.

Having different languages even inside the same territory doesn't account for lack of cohesion. It's quite irrelevant in practice actually.

Cohesion seems to be mistaken these days by sheepishly following politicians into unnecessary wars and lacking critical thinking. Widespread ignorance is not cohesion.
For the threshold value, how is 0.25 determined to be the most optimal? is this value just specific to the datasets YOLO was trained on or is it something that is universal.

Also, this is really awesome!
I am more then 6 years sober through AA. Before I have tried a professional help and it didn't work. My personality is allergic to psychotherapeutics b..t, I cannot stand someone telling my about my flaws.
What has worked for me in AA?
1) The possibility to go to a meeting when I was starting feeling bad, lonely, depressed, tense - which previously resulted in getting a drink
2) Hearing the real stories from real people. I cannot stress how much it worked on my, how its had changed my perspective.

I am sure AA won't work for everyone but it works for certain types of people. In my humble opinion it works exactly because it isn't based on hard science but on personal experience. Actually - "this is how it works" is something you hear often at meetings.

Now regarding the financial side. 40k$ for bare bone AA meetings is something very American.

In Poland AA is self-financing, meetings are open and free. If you can afford you can make a voluntary donation to your group cash-box which is used for coffee and tea. Like 2-3$. Local community or a church is providing place for meetings. Everyone is welcome (if he is not under influence). In . city the size of Warsaw there are meeting going every day and at different hours.
So AA is affordable to anyone and at any time while even public healthcare therapy will involve some cost or long wait.
10 US Navy sailors missing after destroyer collides with merchant ship
This reminded me of a book I read last year that takes about the role of work and poverty in a poor, anonymous town in California. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in this topic: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0043GWQ22/ref=oh_aui_d_de...
I think this is more a failure of documentation than anything else. The definition provided there is correct and useful for a certain subset of people, but there are ways of grokking comonads and cofree comonads that don't require so much math.

It's a tricky concept no matter how you slice it (in my opinion), but I like the following article:

http://dlaing.org/cofun/posts/free_and_cofree.html

I won't claim it's easy reading, but it's a lot more grounded and motivated.
1 point by jrs235 6 minutes ago | edit [-] [-]

Is it possible that someone is in fact utilizing GPS "hacking" that is assisting in the likelihood of these collisions? There was a story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003333) here on hckrnews about GPS "hacking" last week, although most people said the issue was known and not that big of a deal.
I want to thank everyone for their well thought out answers. Being new in the industry as a recent grad, I will take all your advice into my future search for a position more suited to me. If anyone else has anything to add that hasn't been previously mentioned I'd be happy to hear it
I think you're right - I interviewed with 3 groups onsite at Apple, and two groups seemed to have cubicles. I ended up choosing a group in IL1, which turned out to have private offices/offices of two. At the least, I know this is true of IL1 & 2.
You're going to try to point at such a large, complex phenomenon through a single cause?
So according to you, NO ONE takes care of their neighbours, NO ONE helps anyone in their family when they need it, and NO ONE does charity work, because the government know fulfills that roll.

But we can all plainly see that this is completely wrong, and people do do all that.
And also that it has limits. Eliminationist threats don't deserve constitutional protection for the same reason as other kinds of criminal threats.
Sure it's a valid question, and today there are many good reasons why something is better off as a web-app.

I have some REALLY large TreeSheets documents (equivalent of 200 pages worth of text, but all in a ton of tree nodes), and it be fun to see if a web based version could handle it. I'm hoping someone will try :)

Certainly I would never want to write a cross-platform GUI app in C++ again.. wxWidgets has been a pain.
Are they though? Most of executive compensation plans nowadays are strongly tied to stock performance with a generous options package but a nominal $1 salary. Brings its own set of problems and a tunnel vision that's focused on next quarterly results, but at least it's aligned with large shareholders.
Recent Android versions have a pretty good system in place. The apps still work even without some permissions (for example Instagram can work for browsing, but won't be able to take any pictures without the camera permission), and you can easily review the permissions you have granted to any app, and revoke them after the fact.

Now, the real problem is that permissions are too general. The "access/read/write files" permission is all grouped up in one place, so you end up with tons of directory for every app in your root directory (that don't get deleted when uninstalling the apps that generated them), and you allow unnecessary access to other files as well. Or the network permission, which could lead to all sorts of traffic, while many developers just need it for ads.
Why should we be looking for solutions? To be clear I would agree it's intuitively disturbing and seems "not fair". But do you call for solutions because:

1) There might be a way to have higher productivity than we have now. This can't be why, it's always a goal regardless right?

2) Strategies should be considered than intentionally reduce productivity and/economic growth in order to increase worker compensation. Now things get tricky - productivity helps everyone, it makes the things we buy cheap, it boosts our standard of living. Is such a strategy even feasible?

3) There might exist some kind of goldilocks plan whereby growth and productivity are not affected, yet average compensation grows substantially. Again, kind of gets into uncharted economic waters no?

4) It wouldn't be about economics. It's just about fairness, morality, and maybe the self-interested prevention of civil unrest. It's policy not to change economics, but to change politics, who gets what, move things around, etc.

I don't doubt there are some all around good win-win ideas that could be implemented, but as a category it doesn't seem full enough to be game changing.
You can impose a consumption tax
>> No designated desks

I don't know about anyone else, but for me that would tank the productivity even worse than the open plan.

I have to be at a particular place in order to get anywhere close to "the flow". There are currently two such places: my desk at work, and my desk in my man cave at home.

Whenever we move offices, it takes me weeks to get back to 100% again. I suspect I'm not the only one. Simply put, with no designated desk I would never reach peak productivity at work.
Cooperation used to be by free association through civic organizations. As the government has grown in scope, it has eclipsed these, and it really isn't surprising that civic society has declined as a result.

When people freely participate in civic activities, they are being generous. There is no coercion. When government does the same thing, it is coercive. The activity does not occur unless taxes are collected. Choice goes out the window.

I've heard many people ask why they should volunteer or help out others, when they're already paying lots of money in taxes to "take care of those problems".

This is the final tragedy of the government intervention. It turns activities where people are helping people into programs that solve problems.
Not sure what you mean by "BTC's decisions" -- it's a decentralized network that has A LOT of different stakehodlers -- some more important than others, some louder than others.

All humans are driven by self-interest, as far as I understand Blockstream employees are humans.

Edit: After re-reading my response, I wasn't trying to be a jerk to you, poking fun at Blockstream.
> I've happily brought equipment purchased at my own expense to work.

How do you make sure that everyone understand that that equipment belongs to you and not The Company? I'm currently resorting to printed labels of my name or initials, but I can't help but consider that that's a tissue defence.
I'm lazy today, so I just grabbed this article which describes office space in the bay area for startups [0]. Their talking all the way up to about $70 per square foot. Peopleware says 100 sq ft per person, so that's up to about $700 per month per employee (or $8400).

I honestly don't think that's crazy money, but you also have to plan for growth. This makes things a lot harder. If you think you are going to grow from 4 developers to 20 in the next couple of years, then you need to make sure you have access to space. Moving offices is usually traumatic, so it's a cost you need to balance.

TBH, I've only ever experienced that much space once in my career. Normally I've had about 60 sq ft and I've had much less in some jobs. My experience is that the extra space is definitely worth it. There shouldn't even be a question about it.

I think the problem is more that it is hard for the people-with-purchasing-power to understand that productivity in knowledge workers can very dramatically. Spending $10K per year on working conditions can easily save you $100K in salary (given current SV salaries) -- you can go with a lower head count and achieve the same amount of work.

But it's not just that. I'm a big proponent of small head count. The communication overhead for large teams can be crippling. When you look at trying to increase production by improving code quality -- it's practically impossible with large teams. If you never speak to half your team mates, there is no way to reach consensus on design approaches. There are ways to mitigate these kinds of problems, but I have to stress that I have never seen successful mitigation strategies in non-open source projects. In fact I've never even seen them attempted because the overwhelming bias is that more programmers == more productivity (amongst people-with-purchasing-power).

But even as I type this, I can see how it is scary to spend money on working conditions. Let's say you are bleeding cash (like most startups), or you are eeking out low single digit percent profit (like most establish companies). You've got some cash to invest and so you think, "We need to raise revenue. To do that, we need the product to have more capability". It's a pretty gigantic leap of faith to conclude "Instead of growing the dev staff by 10%, I'm going to spend that money on improving working conditions". And even if you do, you have to repress the very next thought, "Hmmm... dev staff comprises 10% of my workforce. WTF am I going to do when the sales people demand the same working conditions? If I refuse, all the best ones are likely to quit in a huff".

[0] - https://medium.com/initialized-capital/the-outlook-for-bay-a...
What about cubicles?
Yes hacker news really is an oasis.
> I may be alone in saying so, but I'd happily take a modest drop in pay for a private office.

My friend felt this so strongly that he actually rents a private office (that he pays for himself) right next to his employer's office.
Vue.js and Brunch: The Webpack Alternative You've Been Hungry For
Good luck with your career, and I hope your future experiences will be more positive than this one.

One more thing: You may want to post a review on glassdoor.com to share your experiences with this company. It might save someone else the trouble you've been through.
Are you assuming that the spacefaring civilization that finds them will almost certainly have originated from Earth?

JPL says they'll be at a distance that's halfway to Proxima Centauri within about 40,000 years, which is a mere instant in cosmological time.
Open office is alive and well, there are always gonna be certain office cultures that likes it
Uh, visit inner-city Milwaukee, Detroit, or Gary sometime. Or, for that matter, some opioid-ravaged population-3000 former logging town in central Wisconsin. Social cohesion seems to evaporate along with jobs in the Midwest as everywhere else.
what's wrong with snopes?
A strange coincidence...let's hope Fleming's ;aw doesn't apply.
Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what comparison you're drawing here.

(Note: I specifically said collectivism, not Communism)
Funny, I've noticed just the opposite using vim on a desktop or laptop--and its always driven me nuts.

If I'm editing a file and type several repeating j or l commands (e.g., 'jjjjj' in command mode), there is noticeable latency between the last movement command and the last cursor movement.

I get no latency, however, when performing the same commands using the right or down arrow keys.

The 'h' or 'k' commands have no latency, either, just 'j' and 'l'.

I've been using vim for years and still find it frustrating. I haven't noticed the same problem with other vi clones (e.g., nvi or elvis).
Functional Data Structures in C++: Lists (2013)
This article [1] was published when the USS Fitzgerald had its collision. It describes how hard it can be to manage the position of the ship relative to other vessels.

[1] http://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgeralds-watch-team-mine/
Of course it does. Which part of Thatcher's quote do you see as promoting the idea that we should "suppress our humanity"? Do you see that in there anywhere? And can you imagine why the out-of-context "there is no such thing as society" quote could be construed as a dishonest interpretation of her philosophy?
Thanks for pointing it out. Won't quoting the command in the package's function call itself work, for eg:

outs := oexec.Series("/usr/bin/osascript -e 'say 5'")

I think even when running command in shell prompt arguments with space are supposed to be escaped with quotes
We are having major issues with an open office. It appears to be sort of like remote work: some can handle it fine, while others can't. It just gets deafeningly loud and distracting even with only 10 people nearby.