skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the key with working from home is learning to set up and maintain boundaries between home life and work life.

I was working from home fulltime for well over a year prior to the pandemic. Prior to that, I went into an open office every day for about 10 years.

Overall, if you subtract the time from a 1-hour round-trip commute, distractions from coworkers, and longer lunch breaks I had while going into the office, I'm definitely more productive at home.

At least most of the time.

Lately, I've noticed that my boundaries between work and home have been slipping. I'm less likely to tell my wife that I can't help her with something in the house during my work hours. I tend to run errands in the middle of the day. I was doing better, but I need to tighten things up a bit. I'm still productive, but there are weeks that could have been "highly productive" but instead started merging into my home life too much.

I'd wager that a lot of people have an ebb and flow in their productivity at home as boundaries become fuzzy and bad habits come and then go as you realize they're having an impact. And while I don't have kids, I can see how having kids would make working from home a huge challenge.

Let's also not forget that 2020 is a steaming pile of shit, and it's had more horrific distractions than any year in recent memory.
Eh. I'd tell my younger self the exact opposite. My side project is what eventually led me to a 2x increase in income. In fact, it was only after I started to spend time on a open source project that I started getting recruiters to initiate contact with me.

Heck, my entire career was born out of immersing myself in an area of interest in my free time, outside of my original field of study.
I don't think you even need to be able to sense others' specific needs or feelings to care about making the world a better place.
My phone has predicted text on the top of the keyboard. I wonder if the secret is not a bunch of custom shortcuts, but a better mind-meld with the predicted text so that you the user hit the predicted value every time. You get the same speed and correctness benefits mentioned in the article.

But I’ve never seen a touch typing program which let’s you use the predicted text.
What about confusions regarding shortcuts that depend on the context? HW for hardware in CS or homework? We do use unexpanded shortcuts and out brain knows how to interpret them from the context. Adding shortucts like these in an editor to expand into words would create a lot of unnecessary problems and solutions IMO. Everybody knows for example that im not talking about the internatinal math olympiad here or internatioal money order.
Acronyms in this case are a good example how the context create ambiguities if we dont know the context
i addded js dvorak as input option on my forum software to make it easier for anyone not on their computer
Respecting user preferences is, IMO, the major use-case for Tabs - they display indents at the depth of the viewer's preference, not the author's preference.
It's based on the characters in the candidate's name, so yeah (though I doubt a genetic algorithm was involved)
Absolutely! Those aren't relevant to my case, I live alone (which makes the loneliness worse).

Yes, kids needing to do school from home requires a lot of time and effort, my co-workers are struggling to get their work completed because of it. I've taken over some of their tasks to help them out.

Also if you are permanent WFH (which I am since I switched jobs in May), you set up your work environment differently. I rented a 2 bed room apartment so that I would have an "office" that I could close at the end of the day. If you live in the Bay Area generally you rent a shoe box of a place because you spend most of the time at work, that is not longer the case.
I have no idea why this comment was downvoted, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
> I'm from a period when you just couldn't always reach someone immediately

Sure, me too, but that's exactly where I'm coming from when I ask. It's the same set of sensibilities that says that if there's going to be a call in the middle of the night, it's probably for a good reason. I would think we'd have to fast forward from there to reach the place that views regularly taking the phone off the hook as the natural solution, due to e.g. jadedness/cynicism/etc.
> I have row X that takes up 1kb. I replace it with row Y that takes up 500b. I then write row Z after row Y that takes up 500b. If you want to rollback the original transaction, row X will no longer fit in its original spot because row Z is now taking up part of the space it used to occupy.

But this only can happen if replace X with Y and add Z are in the same transaction. If you rollback the transaction, then you start by removing Z, then replacing Y with X. What I'm missing here?
... and there's also a pretty wild election in the US, to add to people's anxiety.
Finally someone shot down this ridiculous shared delusion.
An interesting version of that is how cloud computing relates to development creativity.

On the surface, why have any fixed server infrastructure at all, anywhere? Well, if you don't, you're putting friction in front of anybody not authorised to spend to develop / test / prototype something. Yes, you can give everyone a cloud account and let them use that. But even then you'll have people cautiously limiting their usage to avoid accidentally overspending. By contrast, when that server is sitting their idle half the time, I actually feel guilty for NOT trying out some whacky idea on it. Of course, it can work exactly the opposite way - if you DO give all your developers complete freedom to run stuff in the cloud then they have even more liberty than if you give them a fixed server to work with. But I suspect few organisations would tolerate the potential cost risk from that.

It's a subtle mental difference but I think it can play into outcomes in a significant way.
Being able to do good work remote and being as productive when working remote as when in office is different.
I thought SOTA was a musical term and annoyed that the article didn't expand/define it. Later realized that it's state-of-the-art that's used repeatedly in the article. The world has gone to TXT.
My understanding is that the long and short of it is that you should not try to get a WiFi router at all and instead have a wired router and one AP. There is nothing inherently making it a bad idea to bundle those things in one device, but unless you want to go down the DIY rabbit hole, the AIO options are generally not great.

Manufacturers I think you should consider would be MikroTik, and Netgear's business and SOHO ranges (one step up from the normal consumer stuff).

If you're set on a consumer WiFi router device, Unifi is your best bet. Other than that, Linksys and Asus aren't that horrible, relatively speaking, and you can pick a device with good Open/DDWRT support if you retire it or change your mind down the line.

How important the above is also depends a lot on your requirements in terms of # connections, throughout, and consistency.
I've never seen a title that promised so much and delivered it all.

That said, I'm very glad programming is not done through tactics. Editing proofs written with tactics is a nightmare - and the main reasons it's tolerated are the ubiquity of interactive provers and the fact that you basically don't care about which particular proof you get in a prover - unlike code, which rarely has interactive typechecking (Haskell holes come close) and where you do, definitely, care about the specific code you write.

Using tactics for metaprogramming addresses all of those concerns, and it will be interesting to see if it picks up any kind of steam. Formalising the existing use of Eclipse-style code templates with a more powerful system should have loads of promise.
> If you don’t pick up the phone, the ceremony continues without you. The public announcement comes at noon.

Why don't the Nobel people just wait until you've been successfully informed before telling anyone else? Where does this self-imposed deadline come from?
Hey Sean from webpack, this was really just about our third party plugin ecosystem needing to catch up to v5. If you are feeling IRL Stress, then please don't update yet. Sometimes you have to break things to create progress and ship major versions+bring new features. You don't have to use them, you can just use webpack's zero config out of the box.
"With y=0 for Joe Biden, and y=1 for Donald Trump, my model predicts y=154476802108746166441951315019919837485664325669565431700026634898253202035277999"
What features are you looking for? Wifi range/bandwidth? Security? Advanced routing?

I upgraded my range by adding a couple of Unifi AP's to my existing ISP router. It was less of a commitment than a UDM, and I originally just set them up in standalone mode with no account or cloud presence.
Not necessarily. Let's consider this for a second.

Having some kind of backup would probably be easier than breaking whatever encryption they're using, and something like this would be a "weakest link" scenario, so anything you put would probably decrease in security.

Besides that, don't really want something a technician can just bring to you, because anything like that can be stolen or sold, so you were probably gonna have to tow it anyways.

I have no clue if that's anywhere close to the actual decisions, but it's not super hard to come up with a thought process that leads to the conclusion that the possible inconvenience of being even more stuck than usual when your car is stolen in a place where you don't have cell service is better than the security reduction of having a backup anti-anti-theft mechanism
AWS, inside a VPN. To be fair, it used to be 10ish seconds, and they improved it quite a bit.
I would guess based upon my own experience and talking to others:

1) the first 3-5 months were hard to figure out a good rhythm and is super impacted by how busy your house is (do you have kids, live-in parents, special needs kids etc)

2) many people have figured out a good rhythm by now and are doing fine

3) people who were new at the company this year are definitely having a much harder time since just sitting next to people is an easier way to sort of learn stuff by over hearing stuff rather than bugging people

4) long term "everybody working from home" likely is not a good setup.. more likely a mix is going to be a good setup.. where very likely new people should expect to be onsite for fairly extended periods of time until they have a much better sense of what to work on.. the other benefit of the "starting onsite" concept would be there would be less of the "oh but you live in north dakota so we don't want to pay you" shenanigans..
I think you're right, we should.
On the other hand, I’m happier to work an additional 30 minutes if need be that I would otherwise have spent unpaid on my commute.
I’m sorry to hear that. This speaks to the generally lower moral behavior of our society today. It develops gross incompetency in ability to deal with unique human physiologies.

Ideally people are able to work with each other’s upmost abilities rather than view people as a threat to their own job security and career progression. :(
Im using notepad++ and it has this feature auto enabled by default but at a document level. I find that sometimes it helps but other times it really gets in my way. How does it work out for you with ibus-...-...?
I solved this by using partitions (at the time it was done through inheritance, where you could make one table made out of several smaller ones), and just dropping a table with unneeded data.
As a data guy, I've have an entirely different perspective on serverless. While it may not work well for running entire parts of an application, it works great for building out and managing internal data pipelines. You don't want your pipelines crashing because your jobs overlapped and you ran out of memory/cpu on the servers you set up. You want each stage of the pipeline to run independently and scale as needed.

In my eyes, the bigger problem with many FaaS products (which most equate with serverless) is the barrier to entry. The setup isn't very user friendly. The code doesn't "just work" like it does locally. Limitations on data size, runtime, etc. cause you to building workarounds in your scripts just to get them running. Not to mention that once you have it all set up, visibility into everything running is a nightmare and only available to the most technical users.

Based on my experience, I'm currently building a [platform](https://www.shipyardapp.com) to try and make serverless data pipelines easier for teams to setup and manage. Would love to hear someone else's perspectives on serverless setups for data management. I know I'm not alone on these existing frustrations.
While we're doing this can we please also bring back small-screen smart phones and physical buttons and knobs on appliances?
> Freedom of speech, movement, sexual preference, abortion are all core principles of the left.

Those things are rarely argued on "freedom" principles and instead are argued on the issue of progressive rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism. And no major left wing figure outside the US has ever argued strongly for unrestricted free speech. Freedom of movement doesn't seem something that is strongly one way or the other, but I'd note that the requirement to carry identification is something that was kept in left leaning countries after WW2 but abandoned in right leaning countries.

Libertarianism seems - in principle - more like what you are describing. And in the US Libertarianism is generally seen as a more right-wing view (primarily because of economic issues rather than social though).
My guess is to get ahead and be prepared before the onslaught of reporters calling.
I'm skeptical that machine learning has much to offer the typical roguelike developer.

Most roguelikes approach a player/developer ratio of zero. For every successful shipped roguelike with actual players, there are probably a thousand hobby roguelikes with no users but a happy developer or two wiling their time away. This is not a particularly lucrative corner of the gamedev world, so most are in it for the intrinsic motivation.

Handcrafting a level generator is a lot of fun. Training an ML model might be fun too, but it seems like a very different sort of activity, and not necessarily one that appeals to roguelike devs.

> so long as an appropriate loss function can be crafted (in practice this isn't very hard and proxies can even be used in tricky cases).

I'm skeptical that this is as easy as you suggest. Everyone thinks making something "fun" is easy until they sit down to try. Fun is the knife-edge between familiarity and surprise. Optimizing for it is probably in the same order of difficulty as predicting the stock market: If you train your generator to be particularly fun in a certain way, players will quickly grow tired of it, which isn't fun.
That's fair. You might do it just because of pride in your work or because you want the software to succeed. Maybe I should say that if making someone's experience better is meaningful to you personally, that adds to the motivation.
Agreed. People who work remotely tend to be a lot more productive.
soc2 compliance for Lambdas happens through AWS https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ not through our team's engineers.

So for example, if we have a service deployed in an EC2 instance, we have to update the instance(s) every month by a certain date. Sometimes, we have to update early if there is a severe security issue. We also have to manage things like security software that has to run on every instance, logging for soc2 compliance, access controls, manage ssh keys, etc. etc.

That's a lot for our engineers to handle every single month. A lot of context switching. It's not so bad if we only have one service to manage. But the actual issue is that we have many services to manage. So every month, our board had about 12 stories related to patching. Patch service X development. Patch service x staging. Patch service x production. Patch service Y development.... and so on.

For serverless, the team responsible for SOC2 compliance gets the reports from AWS without us ever having to do anything. No patching stories, no security software that breaks on occasion, no access management, etc.

All we have to worry about in terms of SOC2 compliance are the basics like principle of least privilege (i.e. lambdas do not have full access to DynamoDB), no public endpoints, we use VPCs blessed by the security team, and that's about it. Things we're used to doing everywhere else and things that we only worry about when writing the terraform.

Now when I add a Lambda, I only worry about writing the Python code for the lambda and copying the terraform code. That's it. There is no patching story for this service.

And yes, of course we're passing the buck. That's kinda what we pay for in the premiums that AWS gets from our massive bill every month. That's kind of the entire point for cloud-based systems, anyway. We're passing the buck on a ton of other things, like not having to manage hard disks, not having to manage network cables, not having to manage a building, not having to manage HVAC, not having to manage backup batteries, etc.
Very nice. I am hoping for semantic editing to make it into Haskell mainstream since I saw idris-mode in action for the first time. Even if it is just a small step sometimes, watching your editor write code for you based on what is already known from types is extremely cool.

Note to the author: There is a typo in the code: fmap = \fab ma -> case eca of ... s/ma/eca/ or the other way around.
> approaching about half of the total death toll of the 1918 flu

Approaching half of 17-50 million dead?
I was with the author about typing and setting up shortcuts.

Then they went on a wild crazy tangent into pop psychology, and, uh...no thank you.
Oof. That sounds super hairy. Don’t you run into all sorts of weirdness with things like bitmaps expecting to find a specific version of a tuple at a specific location in the heap?
That's true when doing creative work, but for other occasions, notably note taking, speed does matter.
Is this really true? It doesn't seem like they consulted a lawyer. Consulting your contractor on what to do seems like a conflict of interest.
Unfortunately, Biden is significantly shorter than Trump so it isn't a safe bet he'll win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_pres...
Well I can't guess what else you imagined it to mean besides those, but I hope it's clarified now.
I feel like this is distinctly different though. If you're drawing/sketching, does it matter the speed at which you can draw? Now think about how much of an issue input lag is. It's obviously not exactly the same but I think it isolates why your personal typing speed and input lag are different things.
Is the controversial Netflix “Keeper Test” good management?
Working from home requires a lot more discipline. For some people that's not a problem, for a lot of people it is.

edit: based on responses I didn't communicate clearly. What I mean is that there are way more potential distractions at home. Some people are still able to be productive in spite of that, but a lot of people (including myself!) are less productive. For some people it may even be the case that working from home there are fewer distractions, although I imagine that's pretty rare.
Viral First Grade Math Problem: How to Solve Fruit Math Drawing
"... in the middle of a global pandemic"
Ah - you're in Europe. In the US that's a very common spam call to receive. It may come from a different number every time and the FCC and FTC (the relevant authorities) can't or won't stop it. I've had it in the middle of the night a couple of times, though I think that's not as common. It's the reason my phone is always on Do Not Disturb now.
Any studies around 'productivity' has to take into account the time spent on meetings, phonecalls, remote socials, conf calls, etc... and the time for context-switching and directed attention effort. I saw those dramatically increasing during WFH, especially for those teams that were used to co-location.
The bigger the company the more its employees are hired through the standard recruitment process -- is that not directly proportional?
Not really - the language still seems super vague - intentionally so and thus useless. But thanks for trying despite your for some reason bitter snark and sarcasm!
> I realized that local development was difficult because I was coupling my code to the delivery.

Of interest, I've spent some free time crunching on CNCF survey data over the past few months. Some of the strongest correlations are between particular serverless offerings and particular delivery offerings. If you use Azure Functions then I know you are more likely to use Azure Devops than anything else. Same for Lambda + CodePipeline and Google Cloud Functions + Cloud Build.
This is silly nowadays. It's not much harder to substitute N spaces for T spaces than it is to replace a tab character with N spaces.

I used to prefer tabs, now I prefer spaces. If we look at trends, I believe I'm in the (future) right.
>at that skill level

What skill level is that? For the most part we are talking about a bunch of people ages 22-30 that function by responding to specific feature requests or JIRA tickets from their team leads. There are of course exceptions, but by and large this population of engineers do not do well with unstructured environments, such as the type created by a sudden shift to WFH. I am wholly unsurprised that productivity at Goog has dropped. At my large tech company (where we work with consultants from FAANG) there's also a similar drop in productivity due to aforementioned lack of structure.

>10 years remote and I couldn't get in at Googs.

FAANG interviewing has very little to do with skill level and a lot more to do with mastering the very specific interview process of that particular FAANG. It's a lot like taking the LSAT. You could be a genius but still not ace the LSAT because you don't know the very specific strategies needed for the test. On the flip side, just because you ace the LSAT doesn't mean you are a savant, it just means you studied the specific things necessary to ace the test.
I hate to be a downer, but I just don't trust automatic code generation.
Proof automation is nice because proofs are ultimately irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the proof is, only that there is one. With code, it's another matter. If I have to depend on heuristics for it to choose the right option that means that I'll actually have to read and verify whether it chose the correct one. At that point, I feel like I'm not really winning anything over just writing it myself.

It's possible to write a complex specification to ensure the generated code would be correct, but current automation already struggles with generating proofs for hand written code, let alone generating code and verifying it.

Also, it isn't clear to me whether tactics programs are supposed to be kept as code or just used by the LSP which the gif makes it seem like. To me the strongest benefits of tactics are that they can be used to document what the author was trying to do and that using an IDE they can be executed step-by-step. If it's just to be used by the LSP: What is the point of using tactics vs normal metaprogramming?
Yeah, they can use the same connection for a while. The problem is that 1000 lambdas cannot use 50 connections while waiting their turn. Each of them wants a connection to the DB server.

Now if you somehow get a spike of requests to some endpoint that goes over your DB connection limit, suddenly all your newly scaled functions fail because they cannot get a connection to the database.

AWS added a service for RDS to deal with this, but it all just feels like a big kludge to deal with a problem that shouldn’t have to exist in the first place.