skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who works in the NHS, I would also like to know. My trust has hit full capacity yesterday for the second time in two weeks. Another trust I work for had full ITU capacity and has had to cancel elective surgery. According to more senior clinical staff the hospital is full of genuinely sick people.
> Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done."

Relationship-building sounds like something my manager would say. And I’d still have to code XYZ, make sure it works, and make a presentation about it. Not sure how relationships help me in a technical role.
That would be possible using a proportional font like Input Sans with elastic tabstops[0]

[0] https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Any recommendations for alternatives for Windows?
Smartdrv.exe was a vital utility on DOS systems.

You had to unload it to play some games, though, otherwise they wouldn't fit into memory (DOOM on 4 MB systems, Duke Nukem on 8 MB systems).

God, I am old.
No problems doesn't mean enjoyable. It's still 90 minutes of overcrowded public transport. I may prefer it over sitting in car, but no commute at all wins.
The title and first paragraph reads like an Onion article
No I don't think so.

To be able to dock it you need a screen and keyboard (or a laptop-style "shell"). That means you need a device that takes just as much space as an independent device but can't be used unless you plug your phone to it. The only benefit is a slight lower cost - but then you need to make sure your phone is powerful enough so a cheap Android is out of the picture.

You've been saying this for ages, and manufacturers have been trying it for ages (Motorola Atrix, Samsung Dex...) but it doesn't catch on. So maybe you should reconsider your prediction!
The book Peopleware had a nice description of cubicles:

"Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; indeed in some cases, sources of noise and disruption are actively piped into your space. You’re isolated because that small lonely space excludes everyone but you (it’s kind of a toilet stall without a toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible to participate in the social unit that might form around your work."
I like this, let's start a club
Was hoping not to need to take my hands off the keyboard and use a click-drag gesture? Unfriendly to force switching. Note that these are special gestures for terminal and Finder (which I did specially request). A generalized copy and paste would be even friendlier.

Thank you for the open command mention. Suppose it's a path I'm trying to bring to a File Open or File Close dialog?
Hmm I assumed that this was similar to the EU reg which did lead to NICs being turned off even when you have WoL enabled. The NIC definitely affects idle power consumption and I would not be surprised if vendors take the path of least resistance (disabling features that are only used by "power users") until their hardware meets the requirements.

I'm sure similar PCs meet the requirements, and I'm also sure they're more expensive on average because they are newer. Too bad consumers are not allowed to make choises for themselves.
I mean, that's almost exactly how Slack's DND mode works. The thing is, it's too open to abuse by that one prick who stays on DND for months at a time, or (for less vitriol) maybe you just forget to turn it on/off, then you try to automate it and then never follow the schedule you set for yourself, etc., making it basically useless.

It's pretty difficult to fix bad social behavior with more tech.

On a tangential note, thanks to WFH, I've grown to hate clockwise with a passion. It's the single most disruptive tool in the remote workplace, especially when combined with private-by-default calendars. Maybe I only worked with bad users, I don't know. I just haven't seen anyone with that consistent a schedule, and no one pays attention to their calendar schedule after they set it once anyway. Have to set a meeting for 5 clockwise users? Tough, you'll either have to ask them individually if that time works, or just ignore calendars altogether and hope the relevant people make it work. I hope it dies soon.
See LGPL v2.1 section 7. It's annoying to comply with. Section 6 too. 7a was clearly designed for proprietary software. It would be a problem with the GPL too if section 3 wasn't there.

LGPL v3 didn't make things better.
Not "should"; it's a "MUST".

If there is a delivery failure after acceptance of a message, the
receiver-SMTP MUST formulate and mail a notification message. This
notification MUST be sent using a null ("<>") reverse-path in the
envelope. The recipient of this notification MUST be the address
from the envelope return path (or the Return-Path: line).

And:

As discussed in Section 7.8 and Section 7.9 below, dropping mail
without notification of the sender is permitted in practice.
However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and
community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If
silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine
confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So
silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases
where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously
fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.4

The RFC makes clear the long-standing principle that a mail-server operator is entitled to make his own rules as to what mail he is and isn't willing to accept. But he's NOT allowed to accept it for delivery, and then silently discard it.

Hotmail was always awful for this. There are comments up-thread to the effect that Microsoft might be trying to squeeze out self-hosted mailservers. I suspect that was the case in the Hotmail days. Either it worked, and nobody self-hosts any more (FALSE) or it didn't work, and they should have given up. I suspect the same policies are still in place due to corporate inertia.
You don't remember what a game-changer Google was back in 2000 or so. Its results are pretty awful now, probably because of Goodhart's Law, but they were such a huge improvement over Jeeves et al..
Depends on your neighborhood, but this sounds like a personal preference issue; walking just for the sake of being outside is a liberating experience in of itself. Walk for the sun and for the breeze and the sounds of nature. Or go for a jog.
> I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing per se. The problem is that it seems in some places there's no alternative
Confidently wrong
South American and Mexico are in the same time zone, I'm sure there a couple million decent programmers in the entire South continent.
I don't think it's going down that path. We're seeing people use phones more and more, and a lot of people don't seem to need a computer for most tasks. Why buy a dock plus keyboard plus mouse plus monitor when you can just use your phone?

People that do need a computer-like device probably won't have enough with a phone, and will need something more powerful than browser-based applications. Not to mention that a lot applications would be far more expensive if moved to the cloud (imagine a video editor where you not only pay for the software but also for the storage + computing power to the provider).
I’m not really sure how one could be w computer programmer without knowing anything about computers…
Do you have the same difficulty when speaking to somebody?

If not, then just talk out loud and write down what you say. Engaging writing reads like a person to person conversation. Yes, it's a bit like the rubber ducking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
> (ie. Grand Duchy of Moscow)

The Grand Duchy of Moscow existed from 1263 to 1547, but the beard tax was from 1698 (Tsardom of Russia) to 1772 (Russian Empire).
Agreed.

It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other.

The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others.

There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour.

As an IC you should expect to spend 70-80% of your time on focus work (either solo or pairing) and 20-30% on communicating/planning/overhead.

The writing of the code itself happens in the middle of a much longer conversation and to deny the programmer visibility of this is to deny them context.

Designing working spaces to allow this is possible, but easier if you let people choose where to work for 4 out of 5 days a week.
I think that makes a big difference! Cubicles should be outlawed really, or at least optional. Seems like an archaic thing to me. For my own contracted jobs I went to place that had you choose between an open plan or a small room workplace. All flexible.

So I think you are right, if we had more choice, people are happier. Hubs are also a great way forward I think.

Maybe there are some exceptions, like high security or high demand for coordination on the spot, but a lot of sectors should or could be more flexible.
Because Nordigen doesn't operate in the USA.
It is a bad thing, for the reason you just eluded to. Your work goes away for any reason, and so does your social life. This is why many of my friends haven't made any real friends since highschool
> It's just the ramblings of a very immature engineer.

> second hand toxic one

You mean, be cautious because the reddit poster had not been sufficiently institutionalized yet to love his openplan cattle stall and believe he works with a "family"?
The open office space plan is silly when "normal" companies want to imitate office cost saving from Silicon valley startups. I feel nobody really questioned why.

Open floor plan is good for cost saving but not for anything else. Collaboration is less in open plan than a traditional office.

Here is Harvard research on Open Office plan
https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

"When the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%."
https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/bernstein-open-offic...
Imamoglu appears to be making much more headway into the conservative circles than any other secular leader, so it’s not obvious to me that he would lose if he tried. However, he is also a new name in Turkish politics, and only Istanbulites regularly hear of his name. While Istanbul is the heart of Turkey it’s not so dominant in a way that winning Istanbul practically guarantees the race — it doesn’t.

In short, I’m hopeful about him, and he’s already doing a good job in the second most powerful post in TR in terms of visibility. I’m not entirely sure his time for presidency has come yet, but if he thinks it has, he would have a fair shot at it.

> Is there a reason to worry about a possible coup or large scale voting fraud if Erdogan is likely to lose?

Turkish elections are one of the most closely watched in the world by international observers and they have a world-leading participation rate at 80+%, which is unheard of in most western democracies. It likely very hard to pull off large scale election fraud.

> The current constitution of Turkey gives a lot of power to the President. Is the opposition ready to draft a new constitution with more checks and balances?

Yes, this is the priority #1 for any incoming president that would not be Erdogan. He wanted the system to be essentially an elected emperorship by way of the Holy Roman Empire and he got unexpectedly close. That needs to be patched up.
Better Default Directory Views with HTAccess
How to Write on a Web 3.0 Platform
“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
- David Graeber
I've made that point before, but was told otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27356320
The Coursera course Programming Languages (Part A and B) by Dan Grossman teaches FP (and more) using SML and Racket. I enjoyed this course a lot. I would not recommend it for kids, but it should be great for students with some limited programming experience.

[1]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages

[2]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages-part-b
What a story… It’s crazy when no one owns something, it just gets abandoned. If there ever was a time for microsoft to have done things differently, it was then. Might even have helped transition to mobile better.
Congrats on the amazing product! A minor note on the website:

https://imgur.com/I6KA5uQ

That's too much getting in my face without giving me a chance to browse.

If I'm visiting the website, I'm probably going to be able to answer some of those questions without having these distracting offers thrown into my face immediately.
Pedestrianism: The 19th-Century sport that was cooler than football
It's an anagram of "Slate Star Codex" but not of the others.
I would suggest that Friday makes a good time for the mandatory day. Means people can go out for drinks at the end of the day. The in office days will never be as productive but they can be good socialising times so you may as well make use of that.
Interestingly, whilst computers play an ever more dominant role, there is still a large amount of trial and error that goes into hull design.

All famous hull designers draw their curves by hand.
remote work changes the dynamics, when half the team is on zoom, everyone goes on zoom, not the other way around. Also, half-empty offices are much much less useful than full offices. So i think things gravitate naturally towards all-remote
Suspenders is what you describe for Rails. It bakes in lots of opinions, obviously, but the idea is that you can go to production with this code by pushing it to your heroku repo.
In many, many ways.

Relationships to your fellow engineers help when you're banging out code and need a review or just a rubber duck session.

Relationships to the Product Management team means you have a finger on the pulse in terms of where the product you're building is moving. That means you can push back on stupid things, and suggest brilliant things that were only possible because you had the technical insight.

Relationships to upper management helps if you have some technical idea that you want to pursue which requires a significant investment.

Basically, relationships help a ton if you want to have any influence on the work you're doing. If you're fine just taking whichever ticket pops up and implementing it then sure, you don't need relationships.

I think this however also heavily depends on the company and culture you're in.
That selection works both ways. I'm excluding all fully remote jobs from my current job search.
Go crazy: https://milkytracker.org
Yea, I think both kinds of work, on-site with high social interaction and at-home with focus on individual work, have their raison d'etre.

It's not an either-or. Both modes of working will exist in the future.
I'm not convinced. Not because it's technically unviable, but because I know that when companies like Google are involved it'd be far too restrictive for my taste. And as soon as you also want some local computing power (even if just for the situations it's offline) it's more expensive than hardware in a larger format like laptops - even more so when you need an upgrade, because phones can't be upgraded (or even repaired in some cases).
Not to mention that suffering now wouldn't prevent the future suffering.
TL;DR

Lets bury our carbon waste using plants, not address the issues that we're burning fossil fuels and creating carbon waste at an increasingly alarming rate or focus on renewable clean recyclable energy...
In my experience, public transport is great in europe if you're in a capital city. If you're not, then it is very patchy, and you end up having to drive everywhere.
YouTube begins privating pre-2017 unlisted videos through staged roll-out
Yeah, I go for a walk or a run or a bike ride after work. Unless the weather is shit.

That's the great part, I get to choose instead of being forced to the same regular pollute every day.
There were even early doping scandals – in 1876, Weston was found to be chewing coca leaves while he walked. The use of this natural product as a stimulant is ancient, pre-dating the Incan civilisation in South America, where it was used by local people to relieve fatigue and hunger. Though illegal in many countries to this day due to its addictive qualities, at the time chewing coca wasn't strictly breaking the law – just unsportsmanlike. Weston's excuse has remained a classic: he was prescribed it by his doctor.
I'd prefer to have more choice about who / where / when I get to socialise. E.g. with remote work I can save time on commute and use it to visit a tech event, or a coworking space; I'd still meet similar people there, while having more freedom.
They clearly aren’t that bad. China has very dense cities and has not had much issue controlling spread. Masks and a respectful society seem to be highly effective at stoping viruses.
It is way snappier than it was on any hardware back then, windows movements animate much better etc. Those were the times without any GPU help, running it all on some anemic 486 with maybe 16 MB of RAM and super slow and noisy HDDs which swapped constantly.
Reviving 80s classic game Dizzy for one last time
Are you an engineer? Do you work for a living?
If you have some spare time, you can re-feel the pain in real time, JFYI, the "full" set was 21, 22 or 29 floppies, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBsTvWItY0

There is also Windows 98 install in real time from 39 disks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWuJxKtF3gk
On a tangential pop cultural note, I recently realized that The Office, perhaps the seminal '00s-'10s equivalent to '90s office drone dramas (Dilbert, Office Space, The Matrix, Fight Club and so forth - https://www.openculture.com/?p=1067238), takes place in an open office. The employees of Dunder Mifflin have low cubicles that expose their sounds both to the viewers, and to each other. Not the best environment for concentration. Perhaps this has been an invasive trend that's common to white collar professions even beyond tech? And it's the defining hassle for white collar professionals of the present era.
> Code review discussions which would take 5 minutes take 3 days. You have to write multiple paragraphs instead of walking over and saying "dude, look at this right there, like _seriously_."

Honestly, I've found screen sharing better on a video call for pair programming. I can switch to the branch and share on my screen to code through a solution, give or take control of their workstation without crowding around a tiny desk, and if I need to have an in-depth discussion that takes 45 minutes to work out what core concept is missing, then we can do that without annoying everybody else in the office or needing to find a meeting room.

Three days is an epic amount of time for an open pull request to be resolved, unless there's been some massive miscommunication. To me, that would indicate there's some other problem with the team.
I think this is too reductive. There've been enough people in this thread who mention that they prefer working from an office. It's not just managerial oppression.
Google Cloud introduces designated Enterprise APIs
Tailscale – A secure network that just works – Zero config VPN
My company has gone to mixed but everyone naturally picks the same days Monday to Wednesday typically at home and Thursday/Friday everyone is in.

This avoids all the issues of mixed.
Custom-Designed Spider Robot Trained to Walk with Deep RL in PyBullet Simulation
.. and alone/lonely at home, yet they still prefer it?
To you, maybe yeah! I've learned to use this heavily only after around 2 years of using nothing else but C++, and many of my colleagues don't even consider this.

You'd hope it's programming 101 - but it seems like barely anyone takes any courses on programming practices before writing 10k+ lines of code that I have to then go and maintain.
Harvey’s Casino Bomb
Early adopters: take podcast note hands-free with voice app
Hi there,

we're looking for early adopters/ beta testers for Noti.

Noti lets you highlight & save the best moments from podcasts all in one place. Hands-free.

Just say "Hey Google, save that".

Yes, even while you're running, taking the metro or cleaning the house.

Noti takes notes from your Spotify podcasts into Google Keep, with more integrations with our favourite note-apps and podcast platforms on the way.

It is compatible with any device that supports Google Assistant, like your Android phone, smart earphones, TV, Google Home and your car.

Would love having you guys help in shaping the functionalities of the product.

Best,
Francesco Stasi

Noti (www.getnoti.xyz)
I am also in a similar place. The things I have seen work for me.

First, sign up for a Grammarly premium account. It identifies easy fixes, and you do not even have to think about punctuations. And it identifies places where your words are redundant. You start noticing patterns. I tend to use "really" a lot. So being aware of that helps me change my writing style. Grammarly also points out better words to use, but I have found it works only 10-20% of the time. That is still better than nothing.

Then try cutting down your text by 50% and then again by 50%. I found my text to be wordy, but cutting it down helps clarify the text. And editing is more important than writing. I always find it easy to write the first draft then spend hours editing, which I never used to do before.

And then read a ton, especially fiction books. They seem to use exciting(Grammarly changed "interesting" to exciting here) words. Keep notes of what has an impact. And then you can use it in your text.

I hope that helps.
Would be good to get the opinion of anyone on HN who is in upper management and their feelings on this? What kind of discussions have you and your org been having about WFH? What have you employees been saying, and have you been losing staff over this?
Miro.com is a game changer.
That's not consistent between phones. I have a low end Redmi 9T with a 6AH battery. It lasts 2 days of relatively heavy phone usage. I'm guessing it would last a whole day in a Termux shell.

Edit: if anything the real issue is thermals. I also have a high end phone with a Snapdragon 888. This thing has a faster CPU & GPU than my Intel desktop. However, it's only fast for seconds, until it gets thermally throttled.
The simple model I have personally is that my preferences are:

1. Good office environment (including convenient commute).

2. Working from home.

3. Bad office environment.

Some people love WFH simply because they experienced an improvement from 3 to 2 and they don't even know that 1 is possible. For others the order is genuinely different from mine and they would pick WFH over any office. I think this is helpful because office experiences vary a lot and people often end up talking past each other in threads like this one.
I like this joke from a while ago about testing "QA Engineer walks into a bar and he orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone."

Which leads into being very clear about what you want to achieve with testing, correctness, robustness, fit for purpose etc, and be clear how much effort you want to put into each area. Often I have seen people put a lot of effort into testing things that really doesn't have much payback compared to what they could be testing instead. So be careful of the opportunity costs of your testing efforts.
Systems intelligence, not organizational structures define success