skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We just give everyone top-tier laptops (MBPs or Surface Books) and set up a docking station plugged into two big monitors, a keyboard, and a mouse at each desk. This seems to be the best of both worlds. You have the mobility of a laptop, but a full workstation wherever you decide to sit down.

In our case, everyone has an assigned desk in the open office which they can customize however they want, but we also have standing desks and private offices that people can use whenever they want, and those have the same docking station setup.

I guess if you need a really powerful desktop for some reason this wouldn't work, but I think a $2k laptop should be powerful enough for almost everyone. Certainly no one at my company (13 people) seems limited by their equipment.
True for the US, but other Western countries never bought this theory.
Castrati means literally castrated, normally boys before puberty to retain the soprano/mezzo-soprano pitch on adulthood. This got forbidden in 1870 in Italy and by the Roman church in 1902.
It's a fair question. I don't know of any correlation between an increase in porn-viewing and decreased sperm counts.
Can anyone summarize the various theories developed to explain this decline?
I assumed the article was written by an owner, or at least a reviewer - low and behold it's someone filling article quota? He purports that he thinks the electronics in it might break down on him, if he bought on.
This article is thin as it is, and makes no point.
I think all those are contributing factors, and you're right - it's not just the result of one thing.

It seems to be the result of a successful PR campaign on behalf of economists like Milton Friedman and the wealthy elites who stood to gain from it. The 1973 oil crisis was a tumultuous time, and so it was a ripe time for a new ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...
What If It's Cloudy During the Eclipse?
> I've also noticed that a lot of male pop stars have really high voices.

Male pop stars had really high voices long before 20 years ago - the BeeGees, the Beach Boys, Freddy Mercury are three off the top of my head. I'm sure I could come up with some more if I thought about it for more than 5 seconds.
It depends on the cubicle. Having a partial back wall, and being able to personalise it, are all better than open plans.

The taller the walls the more it's like a mini office.
[A] >>>>>> I just wish it would work with relative paths. It shouldn't break your build to move a folder around.

[B] >>>>> AFAIK cmake works perfectly fine with relative paths; what breaks?

[A] >>>> I don't think it works: https://ofekshilon.com/2016/08/30/cmake-rants/

[C] >>> it makes no more sense to distribute the project files

[A] >> Nobody was talking about redistributing anything. I just said I should be able to move the folder from folder A to folder B.

[C] > I assumed you linked to it because you agreed with the opinions he expressed.

You just randomly... "assumed"? and then changed the topic?

The most likely explanation is you didn't even read, given how off-topic the comment was.

Please... you wasted > 15 minutes of my time trying to figure out how to reply to your irrelevant comment without coming off as a total jerk. I know it's fun to lecture strangers about the Right (TM) way to use $technology, but maybe spend 10 seconds to read the discussion before doing that.
> These aren't investments and they aren't going to generate a monetary return for Gates.

That's correct, but it isn't hoarded, either. It's spent.

> Under traditional economic dogma, no one should ever do this. Its not an investment, its donation.

There's no such dogma.

> Money lying in an investment fund or an investors bank account is useless while not invested

It's always invested. Investment accounts/funds do not hoard cash in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults, either. It's all invested.

> and can continue to be useless when invested in a company that fails or does nothing to help society.

Wealthy people tend to be good at investing, which is why they're wealthy in the first place. Besides, money spent on a failed investment was still spent, and others were the recipients of that money.
Here's a map of Western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:The_...
Exogenous testosterone also lowers sperm count.
Elon Musk Continues to Add Features to Tesla Cars Based on Twitter Feedback
Is this sort of pseudoscientific anecdata what passes for discourse on HN now? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - where's yours?
castratis have exceptionally low sperm count
One hypothesis, the rise of plastics really started to explode in to 40-50s and the first children to have grown up amidst that would have come of age starting in to 60s. Estrogen mimics are often emitted by plastics and can interfere with testosterone.

It would be interesting to see if there are any differential analysis that can be done with more remote populations of humans which maybe don't have exposure.
Not to mention estrogen from plastics:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222987/
Fascinating points you make, thank you for posting this.

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say

"This should give pause to those who put trust in the media, even (especially?) the self-proclaimed progressive ones, like Vox"

Why does the media's lack of memory, and lack of pursuit of the anti-globalists, mean we should not have trust that what they report now is accurate? (Genuine question not trying to make a point with my question).
>birth control/estrogen in water

Is that actually a thing? I didn't find any sources definitively showing it was enough to warrant a concern.
Well, castrati certainly did have low sperm counts...
I'm surprised at all the negative, pessimistic views about looking forward with operating systems. I welcome conversations about what things could be like in the future. Obviously Google's pondering this with Fuchsia. Maybe it will take a more vertical approach, where only certain hardware could take advantage of some features for a while.
Startup trying to help neo-Nazis relaunch their website
After reading the first few paragraphs, it occurred to me he was talking about what Buddhism calls metta, or loving-kindness practice.
Zephyr is an open source OS that targets smaller microcontrollers.
But can he buy eggs for 7 cents, sell them for 5, and still profit?
I haven't thought of this; will post there tomorrow since it's night time here. I'm not too familiar with the subreddits, are there any others might be useful?
And the counter argument:

http://ussec.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SOY13_7_Soy-and-...
I'm not sure if there was a ninja edit or I accidentally replied to the wrong comment but I was responding to someone who was blaming "The type of passengers out of Hong Kong airport (ie Mainlanders)" on the seats not being adopted. It was definitely racist but yeah I look bad now lol.
could we be simply better at doing these tests? eg more accuracy today vs ~44yrs ago?
Wow, I'm just as dumbfounded as you.
> You are contradicting yourself there. There is really no difference in clarity between an automatic path resolver and using aliases.

No difference? In case of explicit importing you get the "import" thing in the sources code and it's a huge difference in comparison of not having it there.

> It's really a matter of taste.

Not really, but a matter of separation of concern and good design. Besides Vue is a reactive thing, and such structure I guess makes it easy to apply reactivity observers where they are needed in a more explicit way.
It's also about the time that High Fructose Corn Syrup started to be shipped in bulk. HFCS-55 in particular became the dominant sweetener in soda sometime during the late 1970s.

The late 70s was also the introduction of video games and home computers. A general explosion of electronic devices has permeated almost everywhere.

Unleaded gas was introduced in 1974. What replaced lead as the antiknock agent?

The space race? Here's a 1966 video by NASA on toxic propellants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA
As to (3) obesity, one of the most obvious contributing factors is the increased refined sugar consumption. People are poisoning their mind and bodies.

And I know it's controversial and since everyone consumes sugar, everyone gets sensitive and defensive. However, in the 60's/70's nonalcoholic fatty liver disease did not exist in children nor did childhood type 2 diabeties, as to the former the first case in children wasn't diagnosed until 1983 and now 10% of US children have the disease.

And to preempt anyone from attacking my comment, as I said above sugar is an obvious contributing factor.
I find this fascinating. It's an important biological phenomenon and we don't know if it's due to culture or to chemistry.
If that's what you got from my comment then you must have misread it.
It's amazing how little the household stuff is actually worth. Maybe a few cents on the dollar.
> Although some have their own #include scanners which is odd.

I once worked in a place that had its own #include scanner (partially because it used so many different compilers and other tools... suffice it to say that Watcom C++ was in the mix). To make it work, you had to install a custom filesystem driver that intercepted disk reads during compilation and logged them. A rather... bruteforce approach. But it had the advantage of working with everything.
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company.

And how much does it cost to have your entire engineering team audibly and visually distracted and annoyed 100% of the time?

Environmental factors that decrease engineer productivity may not show up on a balance sheet, but the cost is massive. Can you get an engineer an office for less than $40k/year? Then it's probably worth it. Seriously what is so hard about this?

I work in an open office right now and every day is like sitting in a high school cafeteria trying to get work done. I work at 1/3rd capacity all day, make up 1/3rd in unpaid overtime at home, and my employer is just eating the cost on the other 1/3rd. Making me work in an open office is costing them at least $70k/yr in just my productivity.

My work satisfaction is through the floor, I'm stressed and exhausted all the time and preparing to interview for other jobs. When I start interviewing and eventually move, then they'll also be eating the cost of having to recruit and train a replacement (probably another $50-100k).

For the life of me I cannot understand the degree to which large companies will take huge piles of cash and just piss them right down the drain without a single thought, and yet be so incredibly resistant to giving offices to engineers.

My current theory is that they don't want engineers to have offices because keeping engineers crowded together like livestock in stables serves as a visual indicator of the inherent superiority of their managers and executives.

Editing to add an additional note: My employer thinks I like open office plans, my employer thinks I'm working at 100% capacity and am one of the most productive engineers, and my coworkers think their talking doesn't annoy me.

There is nothing in this world for me to gain by admitting my loss in productivity, complaining about open offices, or being the reason my coworkers can't have fun talking to each other all day. Those options have only downsides.

So again, the costs don't show up on your balance sheet, and every person on your team could fucking hate this open office shit and work at half capacity, and you would never have any idea.
PHP Developers – you are responsible for billions of users private data
Are you talking about Compose pricing? Enterprise customers do pay crazy loads of money for a lot of things bundled up into ec2.
> It's simply horrible how expensive it would be to give private offices even to >3 people in our company

How do you quantify the loss in productivity and quality that could be associated with a noisy work environment?
Yeah no shit, that's the point. Kotlin is only 0.1% less kludgy and gross than regular java.

Ceylon will find footing in enterprise now that android developers are busy ruining kotlin ecosystem.
It is not dead. It has invested every living corner of this earth.

Does it suck and ruin my productivity and drain my work happiness? Yes.
Something in the water or the milk? Something basic enough that a significant majority is in contact, but culturally distinct enough that a significant minority elsewhere are not in contact.
I pretty much agree. They also feel like shantytowns in a way since they are flimsy pieces of material. I'd imagine that a nicer looking quality framework of wood without the ghastly florescent lighting would go a long way to improve perception.
It also has commercial disadvantages though, such as the fact that even if it never gets warm, I'll be too grossed out just by the thought of what it's like when it warms up that I'll never buy any.
The phathalates hypothesis sounds plausible to me. However, it will be a combination of factors social, economical and biological. One hypothesis, I have been thinking of is about relation between the age of the father when the child was conceived and it's correlation with sperm count of the child when he grows up.

I am not sure if this data was collected in the study. Does anyone know about any such study?
I would love for this to be true, but I'm afraid I don't have any evidence that it is. What are the better options you'd recommend?

More specifically, Google's Bazel [0] is the most serious attempt I know of to replace CMake/autotools, but it only just began to support Windows [1] and requires the JDK. Say what you will about CMake, but it's a quick-and-easy MSI to install on Windows and has supported Windows for probably longer than I've been alive. Google's other open source build system, GYP [1a], supports Windows because it builds Chromium, but GYP might as well be undocumented. Unless you like spelunking into the Chromium source, GYP is a non-starter. (Props to the Node folks for actually doing this for Node and Node extensions.)

I haven't used Gradle [2], but I've heard more than a few times it's slow (warning: might be FUD)... and it also requires a JRE.

Ninja [3] is blazing fast, but it's specifically designed not to be used directly, but rather through a build system generator like CMake.

I'll be the first person to ditch CMake if a feasible alternative presents itself, but if you want to build a cross-platform, moderately-complicated C++ project today, especially one with dependencies on other libraries that use arbitrary build systems, I don't know of any such alternative.

[0]: https://bazel.build

[0a]: https://gyp.gsrc.io

[1]: https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/windows.html

[2]: https://gradle.org

[3]: https://ninja-build.org
Geo/GIS is an area where SQL Server and Oracle have a solid lead over MySQL and PostgreSQL. Oracle especially handles GIS data extremely well.
After 2 years in an open floor plan ( nothing but simple long tables ) I have come to deeply appreciate my cubicle
Could you understand it if you turned on closed captioning and paused the TV to read them?

I primarily used Duolingo to learn Spanish. I think it's a great tool and starting point, but if that's all you use to learn you will have holes in your practical knowledge of the language. I think there are three factors that make the jump from Duolingo to real life hard:

1. Accent - In duolingo the speaker uses a relatively neutral accent. In real life speakers usually have a bit of an accent and do not speak perfectly.

2. Speed - In duolingo the speaker uses moderately paced speech, you have plenty of time to process what they are saying. In real life speech is faster and words blend together.

3. Vocabulary - In real life you may hear a word or a conjugation of a word that you've never heard before. You won't have time to process it and figure out what it means before they start on the next sentence. You may be stuck on the first sentence trying to guess the context of the unknown word while they say the second sentence, and by then you've missed both.

All three of these factors come together when listening to language outside of Duolingo and can make it frustrating. I'm still not great at Spanish but I did a few things to get past being a Duolingo Spanish speaker to become an actual Spanish speaker:

1. Immersed myself for a few weeks in a country that speaks only the language I was learning (I know you said this wasn't an option for you, but leaving it here for others.)

2. Read books and newspaper articles in the target language to get an idea of how actual sentence structures work. This can be tedious because there is a lot of unknown vocab but I think it's important.

3. Watched TV shows in the target language. This can be tedious as well. I generally put the closed captions in Spanish and read them along with listening to the words. If I'm feeling confident I take away the closed captioning. This can be tedious as well because you may not understand everything and end up going back to re-watch a scene.

4. Listened to music/radios/podcasts in my target language.
5. Used iTalki/WhatsApp/dating apps to practice conversation with native Spanish speakers

At the end of the day I would say the major key is to listen as much as possible to the real language spoken by native speakers, ideally in an informal manner so that it is closer to what you would hear on the street.
Sure, and the poster boy for this is Amazon. But if in 1998 Walmart executives had had the insight to recognize that a competitor with much lower costs (just like themselves previously) would be worth competing with directly, well Amazon wouldn't have been the stellar investment it's been.

Will Tesla be as lucky with clueless competitors? Unlikely but, nevertheless will Tesla justify it's current valuation? Probably. Hedging on Musk's continued unabated abilities would be a good idea.
That's a silly map, given there's no actual authority to define this and the rules are arbitrary.

Here's another map of Western countries:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/The_West...

The definition you're alluding to seems to be widespread within the US, but is by no means the most widespread on a global level.

I think this map is closer to what most people consider western: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Westernc...
Phytoestrogens. There are enough issues around them that I just avoid soy. I know the small amount in soy leichitin is not a really a big deal, but I try to be consistent and just keep it eliminated.
great initiative, will start looking into issues on FreeBSD
Economic changes can probably be tracked back to Stagflation[1] and the 1973 Oil Crisis[2], and the associated rise of Neoliberalism as evidenced, early on, through the Nixon Crisis[3] and formation of the Trilateral Commission[4]. Of course there was a huge amount of social change going on at the same time, much of which was interrelated with the economic changes.

As an example of how some viewed these challenges, the Trilateral Commission's 'Crisis of Democracy' paper[5] - though heavily criticised from both sides of politics[6] - offers some interesting insight into the perspectives held by a number of highly influential people of the period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation#Explaining_the_197...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission

[5] http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission#Criticis...
Ever since reading the recent HN-highlighted article "Aliens in our midst" re ctenophore brains, https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ctenophore-says-about-the-ev..., I've been wondering if something similar happens among plants. This article shows definitely something. I'm interested to see how far it goes.
Auto-tune is probably more of an explanation than hormones. I've been to more than one of concerts in recent years where the lead singer couldn't actually hit the high notes live.
Quote from article (meant as response to AndrewKemendo): "Phthalates are a group of chemicals used to make plastics more flexible and harder to break. In several studies over the last two decades, they have been shown to disrupt the operation of male hormones like testosterone and have been linked to genital birth defects in male infants.

Dr. Swan, who conducted a 2008 study about phthalate exposure, said that scientists have had the ability to measure exposure to plasticizers only since about 2000, via urine. That has led to a 20-year lag in the process since researchers cannot enroll men to produce sperm until they are in their 20s.

That evidence is the “missing piece of the puzzle,” she said."

Here in the Netherlands several partie are trying ot get hormone disturbing substances on the political agenda but even BPA is apparently not even illegal here. There was even a show where they measured BPA in the urine of politicians and still, very little attention is given to such substances. [0]

[https://radar.avrotros.nl/uitzendingen/gemist/14-11-2016/hor...]
My wife's parents got stuck cleaning out my wife's grandparents house when they moved to assisted living. It was enough of an eye-opener that they did a huge purging when they got back home and ended up moving into a sparsely-furnished garden home. Even after slimming down, they continue to divest themselves of things. We are very grateful to know that we won't have a nightmare on our hands when it is time for us to help them move.

My family is another story. My dad is a collector of all sorts of things: vintage toys, LGB trains, 1930s radios, fine guitars... He has a 40' long storage unit just full of stuff. I dread the day we have to deal with it all.
> But given the huge investment this involved, they were often disappointed with the savings.

Well, makes sense. Pretty easy to guess, and not really worth reading the article for the one line answer to the title.
I've been saying this for months. Don't use React!
It's not really a problem on Windows, to be honest. MSYS2 gives you that, gcc, and a bunch of POSIX utilities to boot. It also gives you packages for libraries, and a Unix-like filesystem structure where they are deployed (/usr etc). Yet you end up building clean Win32 binaries, with no emulation layers.
What about the Panama Papers?
The rate of males identifying as gay has been rising either because of the changing culture, and/or something in the water.

Such a statement claiming western men as becoming more effeminate is obvious.
I just don't want any more stuff.

I came to a realisation that much of what our society is about is focused on getting people to buy more stuff.

I don't want it. Minimise the stuff.

edit: I'm still surrounded by piles of it. Getting rid of stuff is hard. There's a sense of "value" attached to stuff even if you'd never miss it if you never saw it again.
I read that "first ten years" part and find it remarkable you were able to focus on that in the early parts - eg. the first year drooling all over yourself, spitting up, but still confusing Jerry and Jerry Lee ...