skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason why Slack ends up being prone to "noise" is because there's no sense of what each "sound" is about or its origin. Given the same number of messages, a Zulip-like model of putting messages in topics in channels makes it (hopefully) at least somewhat eaiser to differentiate between the sound for which you're listening and the other sounds about which you couldn't really care less.

If you have one of those voice-driven personal assistant gadgets (Echo, Google Home, etc.), try putting it between you and some other sound source (say, a TV) and give it a command. It'll probably hear you correctly, since it knows to listen in a particular direction and can differentiate between you and the TV. Now put yourself between the Echo and the TV and give the exact same command. The Echo probably won't even hear you, and if by some miracle it does, it'll get overwhelmed by all the noise coming at it. Same amount of data, but how that data is arranged matters significantly.

Same thing here. You're the Echo, the information you want is the user, and the information you don't want is the TV. Slack puts the user between the Echo and the TV, while Zulip claims to put the Echo between the user and the TV.
I had a similar feeling when I removed all social media apps and games from my smart phone.

Whenever there's a lull in activity (like waiting for a bus, at the doctor's office, etc) I used to mindlessly swipe and scroll away. Now I pay more attention to the physical world around me (the bus stop has a map, what kind of magazines does the doctor like, etc)

But I wonder if the author could get the same benefit by cancelling her mobile data plan.
If the private corporation didn't like the conditions of the city zoning and development laws, they could build their office elsewhere.
As another grid-noob, I thought I'd try to tackle this one. It seems to require only one additional style to define the grid:

<div style="display:grid; grid:auto/repeat(auto-fit,minmax(min-content,0)); justify-content:space-between;">
<div>Left</div>
<div>Right</div>
</div>

There's one gotcha: repeat() doesn't seem to accept min-content as its own value, so I had to use minmax(min-content,0).

It's strictly less effort to do this with flex, but I expect that as soon as you have more than two single-word divs as children, Grid becomes more useful.
I obliterated one of my smartphones last year after dropping it on concrete while getting off the bus. I freaked out, had no clue what to do since I was low income and couldn't afford anything for quite awhile.

For a few days it was like I was an addict, constantly feeling my back pocket vibrating, constantly reaching to check my phone. After a few more days, I felt very liberated. I felt very free. I started enjoying life more. I started noticing how much the world (at least USA) depends on their phones for everything. I would go out to Reddit meetups without my phone and notice times where everyone would have their heads down, checking various social media platforms and not talking to each other. People would ask how I lived without a phone. I noticed how dangerous the distraction is with people doing simple things like walking crosswalks with their heads down staring at their phones. I noticed a lot of the time the entire bus full of people were looking down at their phones, most doing nothing of any real meaning.

After a week or so I learned how to cope without. I would look up directions and bus routes on my computer before I left. I would check my bank account before I left to do anything that cost money. I brought a notebook with me to keep notes of things I thought about and wanted to look further into when I got home. I noticed new things I've never noticed and learned more about the city I live in, especially the streets and landmarks so I could get around without GPS. It noticeably helped my anxiety and gave me a viewpoint of the world that I feel I hadn't been a part of since the first iPhone was released.

I'm not saying smartphones aren't useful, but I strongly recommend to anyone to take a break from their phone. It really is eye opening in very beneficial ways.
Many Chinese companies ‘will go bankrupt’, if US delivers on tariff threats
I would definitely like more granular filtering by user. I'm a purely remote freelancer, so I'm in a number of client Slacks, and I sign into Slack on my phone in case anything comes up I should respond to quickly when I'm AFK.

I would love to get notifications for "DMs on this Slack from the following people" (who only Slack me to joke around or with nonurgent questions I don't need to know about in the supermarket or the gym) or "@all messages in these channels except from these users" (who I don't directly work with at all but sometimes post "@all who wants lunch from the sushi place").
Having to sift through 800 channels to find the relevant topic sounds like a nightmare.
> The whole point is to fix all the problems with tech insularity and wealth polarization that everyone complains about here.

It's not at all clear how forcing some software engineers to eat out for lunch will magically fix insularity or wealth polarization. Saying "hello" and "thank you" to a server at a restaurant is supposed to somehow make tech workers feel more in touch with their community (and I don't even know who decided tech workers, and they alone, are out of touch). Also have you been to Castro Street at weekday lunchtime? Free food or not, those restaurants are jam-packed.

> OTOH, the cynic in me says that it won't actually do a damn thing about this, and that tech workers will stand around talking to each other and ignoring the locals in line for Veggie Grill

You seem to be making a distinction between "tech workers" and "locals". If they live and work here, aren't tech workers locals too?

> while the service workers around them eat at the Walmart cafeteria.

I wasn't aware Walmart had a cafeteria. That aside, because cities around the Bay Area have decide not to allow any new housing ever, these service workers are ironically not "locals". They have back-breaking commutes from far-off places. They should be locals but they mostly cannot afford it. Maybe if a more diverse population could afford to live in the Bay Area, restaurants would have a wider customer base and wouldn't have to resort to such coercion.

> the flip side of intangibles like community engagement are reduced efficiency and heavy-handed regulation.

Except that there's very little proof that people who eat out in a city have more "community engagement" (whatever that means). If the city is going for increased engagement from tech workers there's a million other ideas that are better. Here's some:

1. Build more housing so that tech workers can afford to buy in MV instead of renting or commuting from somewhere else (like South San Jose). Living in a place, buying property and raising a family there will deeply connect you to it - you'll care about the schools, parks, libraries, and swimming pools

2. Allow more mixed-use development instead of restricting it to places like the Village

3. Reduce parking minimums so that stores are closer together and more walkalble. Why is only Castro Street like that?
> Otherwise, you can check it whenever you're ready.

It's the "check it" that's a mess in a high-volume environment.

E-mail threads that can be seen to branch, and in a pinch I can skip irrelevant branches once I've determined their vector.

But each Slack channel is a continuous stream of text with a tiny scroll slider. There's no possibility of skipping a couple of pages of messages unless one just seaeches for direct mentions, at which point why bother? If it's important they'll just ring / call / e-mail..
> you'll work out how to waste your time without your phone and you'll be back to square one.

I had a dumb phone for a year or so until maybe half a year ago. The ways I found to waste my time without smartphone were refreshingly different. Most importantly, thinking and wandering in my own mind without the urgent need to check every new thought from the internet. Long story short, there is now nokia 8110 with 4G and wifi available, I am likely going to get one of those soon and turn my smartphone off until I really need it.
https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2018/07/atlassian-slack...

> As a result of this partnership, Atlassian is discontinuing all real-time communications products, and we are working with Slack to provide a migration path for Stride and Hipchat customers.

They provide dates for shuttering everything. Stride and Hipchat Cloud are shuttering Feb 2019. The latest version of Hipchat Server will be supported until June 2020.
I don't think that refutes OP's point. 10^12 is not that much, actually. That would mean that everyone in the world today gets only ~100 numbers (not even including offspring situations).
Since all Autopilots end up being banned - together with their insta account holders - what's different with yours?
Overly generous APIs like IMAP? XMPP? IRC?

APIs that allow a user to delegate his access to the software he chooses are essential to the open internet. The evil behavior is not providing them.
Maybe that would be a compelling idea: have a channel-level chat for those ephemeral conversations, where the messages disappear after a certain number of minutes/hours/days/messages (maybe configured per-channel), and then have named topics within the channels for more persistent/ongoing conversations.

Maybe Zulip already does that. Haven't tried it yet.
> IMO the Kessler Syndrome is overblown as a risk. Most of our space infrastructure would go to hell in such a scenario, but it’s not an existential threat like it’s often made out to be.

It's not a threat to existence of life (or civilization) - though losing satellites would have severe economical and geopolitical consequences. GNSS systems are one thing, but then there are also weather satellites, climate observatories, satellite comms, emergency beacon tracking and spy satellites.

The main worry here is that a full-blown case of Kessler syndrome would simply lock us out of space access for couple decades or centuries, depending on the severity of it. You could forget about satellites. Space probes might work if launched straight into some transfer orbit. Manned missions would be most likely deemed too dangerous.
Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet.

1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde.

2) shortcuts are hard. I have a number of shortcuts for my most often used things, and they are always clickable, no matter what. Gnome 3's favorites are _almost_ the same, but its much harder to create custom entries (if its not in the applications list you're out of luck)
In SF, you can only be kicked out for serious violations or when the owners take the unit off the market (and can’t rent it again for 5 years). Otherwise you can stay as long as you pay rent.

As a landlord in SF you lose a lot of rights to your property.
Ain't #random already a default channel? At the very least, I recall it in every Slack org of which I've ever been a member.
It's ironic that they are called "privacy", when they are really just monopolizing your service usage information. Instead of Visa knowing exactly what services I use, now "privacy" does.
lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.
There are many reasons to doubt that the '240 million year old bacteria' were actually 240 million years old.

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/18/6/1143/1046940
Gross calls what’s happening an “economic ethnic cleansing.”

Jesus. He’s comparing people being paid to move out to genocide.

That might be a tad overboard.
This started out as an overview of a new desktop bundle and quickly turned into a rant about why gnome shouldn't change your favorite feature..
Not only is rQuery not taken, jQuery isn't taken either :-D
Firefox Quantum might be an example here, though it's not a port per se.
Volta’s ad-supported electric vehicle charging service raises $35M
> Teams that love Slack are often mostly using DMs and small channels

That's just not true.

I extremely rarely use DM, it's an anti pattern.

As for the large/busy channels, why are they buys? Because of the idiotic notion of inclusiveness - aka lazy bastards and idiots are most welcome to ask stupid questions. Dozens of times I'd see questions asked just below the answer provided two comments earlier.

Having said that, people who love to help others or are. Paid to do it, do hang in busy channels.
I used to make charts off of a used car buying site, to show price vs. mileage for every car of a particular type and year I was interested in.

The advantage of this, if you pick something common with hundreds of listings, is you could easily derive a relationship between the two variables and see if a given ad was above or below average.

I never had any idea where to begin marketing it to other people though. I suppose if I knew someone who provided a car buying service...
When comment is free?
GIFs are a useless feature at best, and a distraction at worst.

Don't get me wrong, I love using them, but they ain't exactly a productivity boost.
Financial self interest works as a motivator for a lot of things related to energy efficiency. There are idiots who will buy the least efficient thing just to spite the "hippie snowflakes," but anyone who answers to business owners or shareholders will be happy to have a way to improve the bottom line through efficiency savings and if it improves productivity at the same time then it's a double win.
Hearing about it? I've been working from home for the last 6 years making well over 4 times the salary at my old job.
I’m not a Luddite by any stretch and I’ve had smart phones since they were quite dumb, but your reasons don’t ring for me:

> I can communicate with my fiancee even when she's in another country (international sms = fail).

It facilitates instant communications. Email across the planet has been around since day one.

> I can have a fiancee who's in another country.

I can assure you this was possible pre-smart phone.

> When I'm on the train I can do something meaningful to me.

The counter point to this is millions of man years wasted streaming mind numbing video.

> When I'm not on the train, I can know when it's actually going to arrive so I can do something fun instead of waiting on the platform.

Mass transit has had posted schedules for many years. It is nice to see an updated one with up to the minute tracking but it wasn’t that inconvenient either.

> If I'm having a discussion with friends I can call up the information I'm missing.

I’m probably showing my age but I miss having a pointless yet heated argument that couldn’t be settled in 15 seconds on a smart phone. The feeling of being right when you finally do get to confirm the answer is worth so much more.

> I can listen to music and podcasts while I go for a walk or a ride.

You don’t need internet for that, just some planning to have the content downloaded in advance.

> I can plan my trips instead of listening to the boring parts of conversations.

If you’re describing zoning out of the real world people around you to doodle on your phone that’s sad.

> I can take nice photos when I didn't expect it.

Okay this one I agree. The best camera is the one you actually have. Counterpoint is we’re approaching peak photo.
You've missed my point. I'm not saying that putting it in terms of cost and productivity isn't virtually unassailable. I'm saying that it's ridiculous that this experiment was necessary to convince management that ensuring the basic welfare of its workforce would improve that productivity.

Just as it's obvious that productivity isn't maximized if workers aren't permitted to sleep or eat lunch (and we don't really need studies to know that), so it should be obvious that productivity isn't maximized when working conditions include stifling heat with no air circulation while you're at risk of maiming yourself at a sewing machine. This is a sweat shop we are talking about.

I've explicitly couched my comments in terms of worker productivity, so I'm not exactly talking about ethics. But ethics is certainly the subtext here, because I think it's obvious that humans perform and live better when they're treated the way they ought to be treated, with their basic needs being met.

Commonsense ethical rules aren't arbitrary; it isn't a coincidence that people fare badly, and perform poorly, when they are treated badly and are made to work and live in squalor.
What's the news here? The widget library has been around since 2000. The comments seem to have devolved into yet another vi/emacs debate, but the article isn't about emacs per se.
That's also true of any property in San Francisco, rent control notwithstanding. As long as one pays the rent, one is at home. There is a lot of jurisprudence around this. For example, if I live in a property for 30 days, I am the tenant. AirBnB dabblers have unintentionally rented their units out this way. Also if I send you a check for the rent, and if I write "rent" on the check, and you cash it, I am the tenant.

Basically, under the law in California and specifically in San Francisco, the home belongs to the person who lives there, not the person who holds the title.
You can take a dump and shoot heroine on the sidewalk but God help you if you if you hand out a plastic straw or offer somebody a cup of water in a restaurant. What a utopia we live in.
> What I'd really like to know about today's regular session is why seven billion dollars worth of shares changed hands on the last tick.

Not all trades are reported real-time; Dark pool executions are often bulk reported prior to end of day settlement.
I wonder if its using the same "roll your own encryption" that the chat app is
Our company has a similar number of channels, if not more, and you don't scan all of the channels for input. People typically subscribe to their team and related team channels as well as any topics of interest. Slack makes it easy to bring someone in just by mentioning them, so people get added to the places they didn't know about as needed.

Once you start seeing that you're subscribed to too many channels, you just leave them as they lose relevance to you. There's even a middle ground where you can mute notifications from a channel, but can still watch what's going on.

The main problem with slack is the poor search capability, and that's very relevant to your comment.
Can anyone chip in with comparative experience between Zulip, Slack, Mattermost etc? Any subset will do.

I'm not too interested in a "chat vs email" sort of discussion, just "If you've decided you want chat, which products are worth looking into?"
Outlook may very well be shit, but that’s largely because business/enterprise email products are optimized for the same PowerPoint-addled minds that Slack is. Rich text is where email first started to go wrong.

Seriously, go read the lkml archives sometime, and go tell the authors of one of the most important and high quality pieces of foundational software in the world that they would be better served with something like Slack.
Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.
Anyone have tips on some good US flip phones that work with modern networks (4G)? In a perfect world, with GPS (but not required)?
It's a real shame that the industry has forsaken the protocol in favor of walled gardens.
I find it easier to just not install apps.

My wife and I have a rule - minimal phone use around one another. We hold each other to it, unless both of us agree to look something up. Perhaps it's because we both think it's rude, I don't know..

Now, although that works generally - my wife will often spend hours pouring over Instagram a week. She too, has mixed feelings about it and on the one hand wants to delete it, and on the other feels she needs it to connect to people. When discussing this with her (she wanted to talk about the struggle she was having), she realized everyone she was worried about leaving behind on Instagram were people we knew from high school - a decade ago.

As soon as she realized that, she deleted it. I think the fact that phones connected us across time and places, make it difficult to recognize we don't need it in many cases. The addiction comes from wanting to be included, but in reality - we're just segregating ourselves; behind the facade of happy photos. The truth we all know is that everyone on Instagram works for those shots, those happy moments, to share with... well, their collective of "friends". Many of whom they will never see again in their lifetimes.

For me, I only install functional apps on my phone, never user it for fun, and already have blocked all news sites outside of HN, Reddit, and a few other niche forums. I can access my investments, bank account(s), flash cards, w.e. - that I don't find addictive. If my phone died, I'd be frustrated (how do we decide who's picking up the kids), but I wouldn't go through withdrawal (I often leave it at home by accident).

Perhaps a healthy approach to the phone is looking at it as a tool, not as a way to be friends. Honestly, it's the social networking aspect of it, that's the issue for people. Life is meant to be fluid and limited - spend time where it counts, building deep relationships.
Thanks for your reply.

It has always annoyed me that almost everyone uses exchange or gmail. It's refreshing to see people use something else.
They wouldn't, somehow the parent must have thought about illegal immigrants, or felons
What do you mean by "peak photo"?
It's also Watericecrystalls piercing membranes.
> I'm criticizing the people that make that argument because they've been responded to over and over again, and yet they still make exactly the same argument

This statement might be true as a generalisation, but is probably not true for this specific instance of conversation in this thread. I certainly haven't been responded to over and over again, yet I considered making similar arguments.

I appreciate the effort you've put into your points, though - thank you.
Spicy. The fundamental problem is that a lot of people have jobs that pay a lot of money, I take it. You seem very upset about this.
I assume he or she means that the world seems bigger as they're viewing it / paying attention more than if they were looking at their smart phone.
Taking a walk to the park without the iPhone takes longer, because you are forced to spend attention on everything but the phone. Distance = speed x time. If perceived time goes up; distances are greater. Ergo - world around you expands.
Goofing off via chat has been a thing since IRC, and you don’t really need much above and beyond IRC to goof off. And if tech companies treated Slack as belonging to the same class as ping pong tables and kegerators, that would be highly appropriate. But they treat Slack like it’s a serious business communication tool.
This is the free market voting for a end to aristocracy communism
> Unlike Windows, there is no ungainly multi-level start menu from hell.

I wonder which version of Windows the author used last.
Paging to disk makes it act much slower than simply releasing the memory when that cat has been off the screen for a moment. It is not a good solution.
I always thought that force would work pretty well to build a dystopian hellscape.