skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best way to block the sound of human voices in an open office?
Hi folks,

I work in an open-plan office with about 60 other engineers/designers and I find that the conversations happening in the background make it much more difficult to focus. I'd like to know the most effective means of blocking out the sound of human voices if I am willing to both spend money and to look ridiculous.

My current strategy is to wear foam earplugs in my ears and Bose QC-35 headphones over them. However:

- It seems I need to play music in order to make enable the active noise cancelling of the headphones. I can play classical music and that is okay, but I really would prefer silence.

- I still am able to hear some conversation through these two layers.

I suspect that I need a third layer like a head wrapping or large fluffy earmuffs that can go over the headphones without interfering with the microphone used for active noise cancellation.

Has anyone else dealt with this problem and come up with a creative solution?
Netflix and the constant struggle of making choices
It's a bit of a shortcut, but diazepam or xanax or something similar really works wonders. It doesn't knock you out or anything, it really just takes away the anxiety.
Nice. We're currently using the free VMware player for educational purposes (non-profit) and got a call from some VMware sales rep recently. Which is funny because some years ago we tried to get a statement from them about our kind of usage and after bouncing around nobody could give us a definitive answer.

However, our guy handling the call just mentioned that we're considering switching to VirtualBox anyways, and didn't hear back since. I think VBox actually has a clause about educational use in their EULA.
I've been thinking about the huge potential of VR to help overcome the fear of flying for years, no joke. Glad to see someone has taken up the task! Good luck to you!
> 86.93 Switch games have been sold since day one.

That's not very many games. Or bad editing.
Thank you very much! I appreciate your help.

(I didn't see this comment before I replied to your other one.)
Could router logs help find missing Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts?
I'm sure most of you have seen news relating to the girl who went missing in Iowa recently. It was originally believed that she had gone missing while she went for a jog in the area, but the latest news seems to indicate that she may have returned home after the jog and went missing later.

So here's a question for any network experts out there:

I know that our mobile devices, ex. smartphones, broadcast some kind of wifi network search signal/ping 24/7, along with MAC address, as long as wifi on the device is turned on (the phone does NOT have to be connected to the network, but only be within range). The question is, do routers record this information?

If so, could that information be used to determine:

(a) If mollie's mobile device was present in the home, and at what time? (I'm assuming yes this could be determined, since she was probably actually connected to wifi and this is probably logged).

The more curious situation, which could be really helpful, is if routers logs can reveal:

(b) If any NEW (foreign) devices were present in the area of the home, at any point that night. (identifiable by recorded search probes).

(c) In relation to the above, if the search signal/probe/ping from mobile devices looking for wifi networks are in fact recorded, could the routers from nearby homes be used to determine if:

1. Mollie's device was nearby, and at what time
2. If any other devices were nearby at the SAME time as mollie (imagine two devices traveling together down a street, both sending out probes/pings to wifi networks of nearby homes, in tandem together)
3. If a foreign device WAS present near the home she went missing from, and let's say a possible abductor turned her phone off, but left their own phone on -- then they could also perhaps be tracked this way with nearby routers.

It all seems to depend on whether these wifi search/probes are recorded by routers or not.

Anyone know?
I used to be so afraid of flying that I would cry and hold strangers hands on planes without any prompting. It was out of control. It started really slowly though. I was able to fly when I was younger, but nervousness started to take over and eventually, like you, a bout of turbulence made me even more anxious.

I told my doctor about my week long anxiety before flying and how I would cry on strangers randomly throughout a flight convinced they were the last person I would ever meet. He prescribed Xanax and suggested therapy. The drugs helped me keep to myself, but what helped the most was watching planes take off and land at SFO.

I was flying to SFO for work and staying at a hotel nearby, so I would sit and watch planes take off and land. Every time I heard the engines speed up for take off, I would get nervous (and feel myself getting nervous writing this), but after a while, it got to where I could distract myself from the fear when on the plane.

When I wasn't in SFO, I would listen to air traffic control (smooth calming pilot voices!) on my ham radio as prep for an upcoming flight.

Also therapy is amazing for helping me work through various other anxieties.

Good luck! Its not impossible and you are on the right track through looking into statistics and trying to give yourself something concrete and rational to think about.
Just curious - what sort of data would you want to track on tenants?
audio/video work fine in chromium.
Each fall of civilization is a tale of N cities... there’s rarely “the one magic” factor.

US has:

- situations leadership cannot (ie no immediate benefit for them) or will not (ie blind tradition) correct the rules of the current system in a way founders, whom understood human-nature, could adjust to make it work better.. instead the ship is falling apart:

- essentially unlimited private campaign financing.. resulting in corruption metastasizing into all three branches, from POTUS down to sheriff and district attorneys, which leads elected officials to dismiss the public good to mostly consider the rich’es and their good.

- disengagement through manufactured consent, learned helplessness, divide-we-fell polarized animosity and non-participation.. yes, and celebrity chefs.

- mass-media oligopoly.

- insane student debt bubble, just the latest bubble.

- largely morally- and ethically-unmoored, unregulated market chicanery leveraging complexity, obscurity and trade volume speculating to alter the worth of real capital.

- large, diffuse official workforce participating in inverted totalitarian wage-slavery and living in their vehicles. more co-ops employee ownership, shorter work weeks, higher pay relativr to the cost of living and workers on boards-of-directors are needed.

- “excess” labor due to automation and outsourcing. those “better jobs elsewhere” rarely materialized, hence opioid crisis.

- opiod crisis.

- undocumented workforce which subsidizes costs of many essential goods for the lower-income classes with their cheap labor.

- complex geopolitical situation in an ever-flattening, connected and population-stabilizing work (sans Africa).

Maybe in a million years Bezos will be the first quintillionaire Morlock and feast on the marrow of the Eloi while paying for everyone’s UBI since there’s no jobs left except Scruffy, the Janitor.
I do all my browsing with uMatrix with everything blocked by default but first party CSS. It really makes the internet a more enjoyable place to be. Pages load much, much faster and it's often easier to find and read the content. On mobile it saves a boatload in bandwidth costs. For example, loading a NYTimes article takes 90KB and DOMContentLoaded is in 69ms. Truly much of the other stuff loaded is bullshit because a significant amount of the web is more usable without all the crap.
Seconding this recommendation.
What Comes After JDK 8?
Howdy. Agreed. It'd be nice to have a simpler "match x if NOT followed by y" then and something to handle context-sensitive lexical stuff like Python. I often just send all char to the parser and do scannerless parsing. :)
Yes.

Doesn't help when your mainframe's infiniband controllers shit the bed and take the whole box down (a thing which has happened to me).
For advanced designs with lots of compliance requirements, our tool isn't yet able to fully-automatically compute the final design. For these designs, the tool does the parts it can and leaves the rest to be handled by an engineer.

We have an internal scoreboard that tracks how much of each job we successfully automate, and we steadily improve our algorithms to make progress on that.
Fair enough but these rants on HN about publishers never seem to contain any examples of publications that are both successful and delivering pages that weigh scarcely more than their plain text equivalent.

I think you invite the “false dichotomy” by making the comparison between plain text Moby Dick and the front page of one of the most successful newspapers in the world in 2018. I agree with many of your points but find the way you make your argument to be full of comparisons of apples and oranges while avoiding proposing any kind of solution.
How about a checkbox to avoid tunnels? Maybe that won't matter, hopefully there aren't too many autonomous Hazardous Materials trucks rolling around full of explosives.
Yes "editors", those are people who will write you back "article does not conform with spec"(honestly though I think that's just a bot using their emails) until you fix the formatting yourself. And will send you the joined replies from the per reviewers.

They are not editors in any real sense of the word.
I wonder how future engineers work will look like

Here's hoping it looks like software development. I want engineers to capture their expertise in code so that everyone will be able to benefit.
Can a VM with Internet connectivity be considered "completely trusted"?
That's the kind of thing I come here for! Tiny hacks of all sorts.
I support your effort to make Moby-Dicks the football-field-like unit of measurement for text-focused data. It’s close enough to the 1.44 MB floppy disk to handle easy mental conversion of historical rants, and half of the people reading this have probably never held one of those. I still remember downloading a text version of a 0.9 Moby-Dick book from some FTP site and carrying it around on a floppy so I could read it on whatever computer was handy.

That aside, the most shocking part of your analysis is how inefficient the nytimes was at caching resources for your reload.
I like checking the aviation forecast for my route so that I know when and where turbulence is expected. Knowing in advance what’s expected helps me feel better about the whole experience. It makes me think that perhaps whatever flying jitters I have are about the unknown.

https://www.aviationweather.gov/
It's absolutely why their stock crashed. Fb lowered their guidance for upcoming quarters mostly in expectation of slimmer gross margins. Since the top-line revenue isn't expected to change, the decrease in margins is by definition driven by increased costs. This increase is directly connected to Fb's efforts to (manually) police more content. Zuckerberg even explicitly warns of this occuring in one of last year's earnings calls.
Not only this but family practitioners spend about 4 hours in med school studying nutrition.
I think SEU is far better than you seem to giving it credit for. In fact, I used it for decades and my only real complaints about it started when IBM stopped actively maintaining it. Over the years I also tried using various other "modern" editors, only to eventually cast them aside as being too unstable, buggy, or just slow and clunky (like Eclipse). In fact, I can only recall one particular instance where using such an editor (Eclipse in this case) actually proved unquestionably advantageous over using SEU, but even then I quickly got annoyed at some of the stupid (IMO) implementation details of it.
A simulation is a prediction, not a verification. Verification would be going out to a load of planets and seeing if they look the way the simulations say.
Clever tech experiments don't make up for hostile UX. I begrudgingly use eBay when I have no other choice, but I don't enjoy the experience one bit. The listings are flooded with obviously counterfeit products, obviously dangerous electrical goods and Chinese sellers who are obviously lying about their location.

The massive fees I pay as a seller offer me no safeguards whatsoever, because the seller protection policies are riddled with loopholes that every scammer knows about. I budget for the fact that I'm going to be defrauded about 5% of the time, in the knowledge that eBay will always side with the fraudster.

You can do all the machine learning curation you like, but it's just frosting on a dog turd. The core experience of buying and selling is utterly miserable. That's the stuff that needs to be fixed.
I'm looking for it now, but there was an article recently that talked about a system that had been gamed in that it deemed almost 99% of people a flight risk.
A LOT of academic research right now... specifically in the "soft sciences" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Stanza is our implementation language. If you're interested, you can check out the website www.lbstanza.org. It looks pretty similar to Python, plus it also has types!
At least from looking at Georgia Tech, there is a difference between the Computer Science curriculum and the Computer Engineering curriculum. The Computer Engineering curriculum seems more practical.
Read the sibling comment to see for how wrong and right you are.

That aside, I disagree with your statement that these religions don't hide anything. Christians, Freemasons, Wiccans and others all have their secrets, their mysterion. Nothing wrong with that, if you ask me.
> Hilarious!

Give us the perspective from the other end of the learning curve: If you were the author, how would you start learning these things?
Invalid JSON parsing as `null` would be an exciting API decision, haha.

One thing I think I like about JS over Python is that empty containers are "truthy". This, combined with non-raising missed lookups, tends to be pretty ergonomic. For me, at least.

Though it is messier -- in Python `key in d` is well entrenched as an idiom, and in JS `if(d.key)` misfires if the value is zero, and `if(d.key === undefined)` doesn't discriminate between a missed lookup and a stored `undefined`. Though the latter must be discouraged, right?
Except for the 16:9 screen. I'm so done working with such a narrow aspect ratio.
Women may get pregnant more, but iirc men have higher mortality rates at all stages of life - I'd also guess way more accidents from risky behavior work related or otherwise. Women also earn less money, and most consumer price discrimination seems to target them (pink shirts cost more than blue shirts) so maybe it sorta works out?
That’s right, but I doubt the “would still be useful part.”

I’m not sure there’s anything more harmful to society than wealthy folk who think they were poor once, but were not.

Short-lived poverty feels like a game to me. It’s entirely motivational. The psychological toll doesn’t set in until repeated let-downs begin sinking in, and opportunities start evaporating. It begins undermining every other aspect of well-being and it really seems like somebody is playing a trick on you. This is why poor people prefer to be surrounded by other poor people. It helps to be reminded you’re not alone, which is what truly puts a person over the edge..
It’s not just the web, software in general is getting increasingly bloated.

Not in features, but in more and more layers of abstractions.
I was around some people who did this growing up. In outlier cases like this it tends to get extremely obvious to anyone nearby, and then usually the onus is on the parents to push this process forward, keeping in mind what is best for the student holistically rather than solely educationally.

Of course other situations are not as clear and the judgement call aspect becomes more pronounced, but at the same time the potential downsides are usually much smaller, i.e. skipping one grade is nowhere near the same thing as skipping three.
I like your "toolkit" metaphor for test-ability in any case.

If you had asked me a year ago if you could Test-Drive UX development, I would have said no, UX tests are too brittle, and that one should just visually inspect them and focus on testing the data flowing to the view and commands flowing from the view.

But then I got some exposure to the Jest framework for testing and was blown away in that they've automated the acceptance testing and automated accepting changes to expected outputs in order to mitigate the brittleness problem.

And before that I learned about the Quixote framework for CSS testing and learned I could TDD my CSS code (to some extent), making that development more deterministic.

These tools completely transformed my beliefs about what the UX development process could be.
Noise levels would be good. When I am moving this noise is a total wildcard and luck. I would pay a premium to move in with less noise neighbours and possibly quite tenants can be rewarded with that premium.
I agree that it's easy to blame the Chinese government in this case, and that there's more to it than that, but just because competition exists in the Chinese economy doesn't mean the government isn't adjusting the scales behind the scenes.
State of Kotlin
This is so monstrously correct! Kudos!
When your IDE (or Emacs in this case) offers go jumping/searching functionality, it doesn't really matter how many files your code is in. When I used bare vim, I cared a lot more about code organization than I do with an IDE that makes jumping around the codebase easy.
Great question. I used to be scared of flying, despite doing alot of it.

A few things cured me. I watched alot of aircraft carrier landings, especially in bad weather. Even in those conditions the plans land nearly every time. I realised that in contrast, passengers jets are nothing more than highly reliable, safe slow buses.

Also I came to realise something about courage. Fear of flying is being scared about something that has not yet happened. So I simply decided I would be scared when a plane was actually crashing. That's courage - not being overly concerned about something until it actually happens.

The other thing is to understand that the physics of plans is really on your side, especially during landing - these things are incredibly stable as they land and the design of the plane is forcing it down during landing .... it's really highly unlikely something will go wrong.

And finally I thought about the statistics - you are literally more likely to die in the car ride to the airport than on the plane.
iamsomewalrus: Since you're using the same s3 key prefix for all dbexport data does that slow down your Athena queries because of key map partitioning? [1] Also, do you ever see 503 Slowdown errors from Athena requests to s3?

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-...
Play white noise through your headphones. Or pink, brown, etc, depending on which sounds better to you.
I had a similar experience. Before I was a casual flyer, and then on my way to Wenzhou in an Airbus A320 we had a sudden jolt of turbulence going sideways. After that experience I didn't enjoy flying, and would grab the seat armrests at any form of turbulence.

It sounds daft, but I used to repeat a phrase in my head when flying: "safe, calm, happy". It's more of a psychological trick than anything else, but I found it helped me to adjust my thinking at moments.

Recently, I took a role which meant working abroad, and then I realised that I would need to be doing quite a lot of flying to get back for various events. In July I've flown 9 times, 2 of which were on a propeller plane (Bombardier Q400). The experience of doing that many flights means that I don't experience any anxiety when flying, but I still tend to strap myself in a bit more tightly whenever there's some turbulence.

Oh, and the other thing that helps is sitting next in the window seat - being able to look out the window when the plane is taking off, in flight and landing helps. You also get to see some great views.
>3 million members

Who are these people? I go to the movie theater like 2 times a year. I would never in my wildest dreams consider buying a subscription to go to the movie theater.
Well, it helped that a Microsoft employee discovered a way to make virtualization work with their ongoing Windows 3.x design instead of having to go with OS/2.

It has been several years, but I think the story is described here "Unauthorized Windows 95", I no longer have the book.

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/book-review-unauthorized-windows...
> Once robots are doing all the labor, and you have open source plans and code, the cost is only that of raw materials and energy.

You still have to pay the people who write those open-source plans and code, plus the ones who build these robots (or the one who build the robots that build the robots), and the ones who sell it. Also, maintainance and updates costs.
Hey, look, if you want to make the argument that the service audio streaming services provide and the market conditions in that domain justify making them a regulated utility service to which common carrier treatment would apply, then make that argument—as Munroe and others have for broadband service.
Not necessarily. The album Pinkerton by Weezer was critically panned at release but now regarded as perhaps their best album.

Tastes change. That said, you can still find those old reviews. Not so in all cases on Amazon...
But did they fix the coil whine?
I have been using Linux on servers since 1993. I have been dual booting SUSE with Windows 2000 on my desktop between 2000-2004. Ubuntu and then Arch has been my daily driver 2004-2017. I am not exactly a Linux newbie. But, based on these long, long years, I swear Linux desktop advocates have Stockholm syndrome. Some experiences: Samsung stopped making drivers for their MFCs so I needed to toss a perfectly working laser MFC because it stopped working with Linux, just like that. Later, a HP MFC caused endless pain, seemingly every other Arch update broke one of Bluetooth / printer of MFC / scanner of MFC. Plain Wifi eventually worked more or less (but see the endless string of bugs with 5GHz) but enterprise wifi always has been a pain. The strange F5 VPN our company used was not particularly Linux friendly -- I could only get it to work by running Firefox as root (yuck!). The only reference to the entire shebang was our IT asking around on various forums how to get it work under Linux and noone answering. And then Firefox stopped supporting extensions and I needed to tether my phone to get on the VPN. We now have a different VPN, no idea about the Linux support.

I am now using Windows 10 with the Linux Subsystem. O&O shutup takes care of the privacy concerns. I have a Lenovo Graphics Dock and docking and undocking is a nonevent. Do you want to be the one who gets an nVidia GPU hotplugging working on Linux -- and keeps it working through all the improvements the Linux desktop goes through? Worse, get IOMMU passthrough working with this setup because most of the games are still Windows only? I don't, that's for sure. I am 43 years old today and there is not enough time left to use a tamagotchi OS. The Linux Subsystem could have a better I/O performance but I will live. It's a surprisingly frustration free life. Some useful configuration tips https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...

Before you inevitably downvote this, please comment where I am wrong. If you feel all the above are trivial, give me an offer for maintaing my Linux, I would actually love to get back there but for the time being I do not feel I can. I yearned for someone to take over desktop sysadmin from me for many years but I absolutely couldn't find anyone so eventually I just gave up.
Both are bad because if you don't agree with them, they say you're suffering from some cognitive bias.