skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a big part of this boils down to communication style, and how comfortable people are communicating via the written word.

I've worked places where remote working was discouraged, and the reason given was along the usual lines of "well, it just works better to have everyone in the same room". But these were also places where I noticed an aversion to and an avoidance of writing in general.
When I get contacted for freelance/contract work, directly from the company/startup, they're always open for remote work when I inquire about it (and we communicate through mainly Basecamp)

I've had 0 remote work opportunities via recruiters.
Some people feel the opposite in regards to isolation. Introverts gather energy from spending time alone, and are actually drained by interactions with other people.
This entire argument boils down to "if you don't want to get raped, don't wear short skirts in public".

That's a pretty spot-on analogy and I, for one, am impressed by the depth and nuance you've bought to this discussion.
The irony I keep seeing is that at a small startup, everyone's output is severely visible.. regardless of where you're at. I was the first technical hire at the startup I'm with now (details in profile), working remotely from San Diego while the cofounders were based in SF. There's definitely never been any question about what's getting done and by whom. In a lot of ways I understand the challenge that being a larger shop who's grown locally and is considering adding remote working might face much more than the "We're so small we have to be in the same room" argument.

The benefits of hiring remote workers early on are numerous. The fact that it leads to working more asynchronously, and makes you available to talent anywhere are worth the price of admission alone, IMHO.

[EDIT: oh also: we're hiring]
How exactly am I spreading Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt here? (I wrote that article, and run Silktide).

We have no problem with privacy - quite the opposite, I wish it were being taken seriously - but this law is not remotely about that. If you look at the ICO's latest report they say their audit of sites like Facebook and Google was done purely "visually". They are literally evaluating privacy by looking for banners or legal pages, and not at say the technology or intent behind it.

This event is newsworthy because their site - which is clearly going to be looked at as an exemplar of best practice - is changing from explicit opt-in to implicit. Essentially we're now back to 2009, when sites were expected to include privacy policies that explain if they use cookies.
If you're interested in total homicides take a look at the homicides rates for the past 60 years: http://i.imgur.com/3bFjZu4.png

2010 was about the same as it was in 1963. Homicides are not a growing problem in the US. Homicide rates have been dropping for years.

I got that chart from the Bureau of Justice statistics. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2221
Another "me too". The past 8 years, about 80% of the projects I have done have been remote. I get contacted often from recruiters, as well as HR in big name companies, and they nearly always indicate that telecommute is a deal-breaker, so that ends the discussion right there. I live where I live, and I'm not moving. Even if a client/company is local, a balance of local/remote is the right way to go. Dealing with traffic / commute, ergonomics, distraction-free are all important.

This is really pretty simple. If the local talent pool is exhausted, and you want good people, the smart move is to hire good, remote people. Bring them in periodically as needed.
we love the fact that we can recruit folks from anywhere in the world and not disrupt their lives, since we are completely remote. it opens up a much wider talent pool and allows you to benefit from local economies as well, without actually being there.
It all boils down to preferences of management who are calling the shots.
Many of them are addicted to worthless, frequent meetings. Others just don't trust people. Third are control freaks.

I personally find a 50/50 balance between working on- and offsite.
With 2 dogs and 2 kids and stay-at-home wife - working from home for me is a challenge.

But working on-site 15 minutes away from home is a perfect arrangement.
In my case, getting paid $110k/year in a country that pays $40k/year as the cap (and the currency is 2:1). I'm at it for six months and I have a huge family around me -- helps with the isolation. I will jump on a plane friday and work 3 weeks from the beach, and once I feel this remote thing has stabilized I will move to the countryside to about half the cost of living, so in one year going from the local national market cap to almost 6 times that, working much less (more focus without the office interruptions and away from the 8 hours sitting=8 hours of work) will be attractive to some people like it is to me, I guess.
Cocaine can indeed be ingested with some notable effects - in parts of South America, they drink coca tea with effects similar to caffeinated tea. In fact, there's evidence to suggest that cocaine is safer as as stimulant than caffeine is - the main difference as we perceive it is the means of ingestion (we're used to thinking of caffeine as something you drink - very few people snort caffeine pills, which is very dangerous).

Also, chewing on cocaine leaves is used as a symptomatic treatment for altitude sickness in South America.

As for the actual bioavailability, take a look at this Bluelight thread: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/394593-Bioavailability-of...
Apple has blocked Java 7 Update 11 (and earlier)
> Which is not really the case.

Is it not, really? :)
Do these projects look interesting? Help Amicus build them
Here are some interesting things we'll be working on soon at Amicus (http://amicushq.com/):

+ A realtime collaborative community environment for supporters of nonprofits to communicate, and provide each other encouragement. This will involve realtime javascript with node.js, socket.io, and backbone.js

+ Machine learning and statistical analysis on demographics and how they relate to outreach/fundraising effectiveness

+ Open source projects, including our own in house, soon to be open sourced, realtime Model View Presenter javascript framework with bi-directional data binding

+ Realtime data visualization with D3, including D3's map projection, to create data visualizations to help nonprofitss understand the impact Amicus is having on their organization

+ And for lulz: A Minecraft mod/voxel.js project for devirtualizing virtualized servers. Basically a minecraft mod that allows you to control AWS instances by putting down/picking up blocks :-)

Sound interesting? Want to change the world for the better? Head over to http://jobs.amicushq.com/
I've deleted it because 50 gigs for testing IE7 - 9 is a bit too much for my 120 gig SSD drive.
Didn't we just have a whole thread on how Amazon is not even trying to make a profit, but rather run razor thing margins to prevent any competition with less efficient methods?
I had a very similar experience. I know and respect people for whom remote work is a good fit. I'm glad they are able to take advantage of it, and support that option for them. But for me, after about a year of it, I was starting to have real emotional problems, which I've never really had before in my life. The isolation just took a tole on me. Perhaps I wasn't doing it right. Regardless, my new job, a twenty minute bike ride from my house, is, even two years in, still fantastic.
It's significant because they're the regulator, and now they're changing to do what everyone else is, instead of telling everyone else to do what they've been doing.
I think it's that the BBC is actually precluded by charter from carrying advertising in the UK, so they don't have any choice in the matter.
The official documentation is here:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling
I started to telecommute three days each week (office is ~ 2hrs from where I live) right after Thanksgiving in 2012 and am still adjusting to the lifestyle.

The biggest takeaway - so far - is that successful telecommuting is determined just as much by the given task as the person. I serve as a mixture of business analyst/developer/test coordinator/project lead/cat herder for my project team. Some tasks are easy to coordinate via e-mail/IM, screen sharing and conference calls (like scheduling, status updates, walkthroughs of protoypes). Being able to power through functional and technical specifications is a tremendous bonus of working from home. When it comes to gathering requirements, acquiring feedback and dealing with politics, however, it's really much better (for me) to be in the office.
The IE6 image is a cab and the rest are rars. I tried to make it more friendly: http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/
Funding agencies urged to check for duplicate grants
I think that depends on your process and team culture. My current team is remote and we aren't fragmented. For most remote teams all it seems to take is a daily status meeting and a chat room.
I missed this earlier. I think it's a good question and point about tests. More and more companies are relying on having good tests, but the situation you propose certainly can arise. It would be a technical and business decision at that point. What is the exposure? What is the risk? What is missing? How long would it take to replace it? What kind of PR do you want to send out. If I got a message that said -- hey, we know this feature is broken, but your security is more important to us, I probably would accept that as a customer.
to get the probability out of a/b calculate (b/(a+b))*100
Almost always this is an inability to measure and monitor output.

Continuous Integration / Delivery is going to simply change all of that. If you cannot measure a writers output by reading their writing daily, you cant run the team anyhow
I have a hard time following this discussion and would be glad if someone could clarify a few aspects.

1. What is a "static client" in this context? From my understanding, a static client is a non-JS web browser that does one thing: render HTML code that is composed and served by the server.

2. People here talk about "(not) rendering HTML on the server". What's that supposed to be? I thought "rendering HTML" means that you take HTML and display it on a screen, which happens ALWAYS in the client and never on the server.

Anyone care to explain?
Apparently we're not just behind in internet speed, but payment methods as well.
The isolation can definitely get to you. I've been working remotely for just over a year and a month now. I found it was becoming really difficult around the 6 month mark.

I was rarely leaving my apartment and working long hours because it was really difficult to "turn off", especially when I never really left the office. I fixed this by getting a dog, and honestly it was one of the best choices I've made. Working remotely, you're in a unique position to provide a great lifestyle for a pet. My dog gets a couple walks a day, and is rarely home alone.

Getting out of the house for one or two hours a day to get some sunshine and take a break is extremely healthy. Plus, there is a local dog park near by that is always filled with people.

Dog aside, it seems that you had much less conversation with other employees than I've got at my job. There is an unwritten rule to leave Skype on, just to hear about updates with the company. Just being able to easily reach out and send someone a message (not through email, basecamp, etc) is important to me.
Not as crazy as the drama currently unfolding in Afghanistan with the opium trade (spoiler: the US has an incentive to condone growth of opiates, since it reduces local economic dependence on terrorist forces like the Taliban).

It's almost fun to watch a government battling two bogeymen against each other, like a child playing with toy action figures.
I am beginning to feel even a daily status meeting is too much - I would much prefer to take on tasks of around a couple of days, and when done, demo.

Otherwise just skype and chat keeps one in touch

(I would be tempted to mandate a person to person chat for each team member to each)
Great response. I'm not proposing any new laws, but my belief is that a judge will ultimately disagree with your statement that "The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is."

You're correct that an automated service can't identify/fingerprint these digital files, but if I go to mega-search.me and see tens of thousands of copyrighted movies/music/software, it's impossible to say, "I didn't know there was illegal material on my server."

Where YouTube keeps the rights holders at bay is by having those screening mechanisms in place. If Mega's design can't make that possible, and they as a company don't take actions to protect copyright holders, then I see the courts finding a basis to shut them down - on what basis I don't know, but I don't imagine major copyright holders sitting idly by.
> > Ie, no more screwing around with IEVMS

> If you don't already, try this IE VM automated installation script: https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

I clearly do already.
> And yes, casual, face to face communication is an important dynamic, even for tech workers.

I guess this is even more important for small companies of up to 20 people where there is no exact "you have to do exactly this and this and this and then you're clear"-thingie. I gained lots of insights regarding customers or how we should better build things in our tech dept. just by having daily casual water-cooler chit-chats with the couple of people we employ in the sales department. It's very, very difficult to emulate using modern technology.
When I was growing up in Wasilla, AK my best friend Don and I would spend hours and hours skateboarding behind the grocery store 'Carrs'. When we were ready for his mom to pick us up we'd dial her number on the payphone and press a number a few times. This was something that at the time you could do without depositing coins and since his mom knew we would be doing this it was like a frugal Morse code too I guess. Man those were the days...
I've been working remotely as a developer for a NYC startup for about 2.5 years now. There are a couple of other remote workers, with the rest of the team working in the office. My team has weekly meetings using webex, skype, etc and we mostly use IM and email for other communication. I make periodic visits to the NY office (I live in NC). I find that working remotely really agrees with my personality and work style. I am better able to focus for long periods and I don't really suffer from the social need for regular face to face contact with my co-workers. :) I also avoid a commute and I can spend time with my kids by just walking downstairs.
Ask HN: Any open-minded start-ups hiring in SF?
I have been getting all rejections in my job hunt so far. There's a 50% chance that I will get a phone interview, and afterward a 100% chance of a follow-up technical interview but that's where it falls apart. My conversion rate is non-existent as I am 0 for 5 in actual employment offers.

I have noticed trends in these interviews though. They are typically extremely short (first contact to rejection usually involves little more than an hour of actual, live chatting and coding over the duration of the interview process). If this particular interview includes live-coding, it is usually incredibly unrealistically on a Word document or white-board where the interviewer will get upset about a minor bug, off by one, or syntax error that a compiler, interpreter, or an instant run through would have caught immediately. Other times, interviewers aren't clear about what they are looking for. Do you want this code optimized? For speed or memory? Or are you just looking to see that I can solve a problem. Usually it's "Hey, write a function that does x." and then some scribbles before moving on.

I am certainly not the worlds best engineer so I don't expect to get every offer, but there is no way you can judge my talent and aptitude with a phone call, white-board, and 60 minutes.

Are there any SF start-ups who actually want good engineers? If your interview process sounds like the above, you need not respond.
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/issues/new ;-)
Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior
Bitcoin has speculative bubbles, fraud, robberies, money laundering, gambling, and Ponzi schemes. I think that takes care of all the qualifications for a real currency. Am I missing anything? :)
While I agree that we need to be more sympathetic to those with depression, but I think it needs to extend way past just depression and on to all mental illness. Mental illnesses cause distorted thought patterns and it isn't the fault of the individual who has that mental illness, just as it isn't the fault of the Type 1 Diabetic that they have their illness.

Speaking from first hand experience, it can be overwhelming and lonely to suffer from mental illness. I have to hide my thoughts from others (including my own wife) because of fear that they won't understand and that they may think of me as a monster.

We have come a long way from where we used to be regarding mental illness (such as blaming poor parenting), but we still have a long ways to go.
Thanks for this nice article. I love the option to switch between slideshow and contiguous views.

I didn't understand the statement that

The boxes with hyphens will be ignored because matrix multiplication works from left to right, not the other way around.

(from Preliminaries 3: Cost table). Matrix multiplication is associative, so can be grouped as you like, and then reduced 'left to right' or 'right to left'. I think the relevant point is that the cost is symmetric, in the sense that the two orders of reduction give the same cost; so there's no need to fill in the sub-diagonal entries. Is that correct?

Finally, I'm sorry to have to nit-pick that the plural of 'matrix' is 'matrices' (just one 'i'). At least you didn't use singular 'matrice'. :-)
Who are you to say they don't understand their own business process and culture well enough to determine that remote employees aren't a fit for them? I've worked with several remote team members, and it's always been frustrating. Why aren't you answering your phone? Why haven't you responded to that email I sent you 5 minutes ago? Are you even at your computer right now? Hello???

Communication is extremely important when working in teams, and you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim remote workers are able to communicate as well as on-site workers. If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them. They respond immediately. Sure, you can set up some sort of always-on video or teleconferencing, but do all new, growing companies have the know-how and resources to implement that for multiple remote workers? Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?

Small, early stage companies also seem to be focusing a lot on developing a company culture these days. Remote workers don't fit into that strategy very well, if at all.

I'd welcome a remote employee under one condition: They're required to be on a constant video call so their on-site team members can see and talk to them at any time.
Agreed. I can definitely see how a team that's used to working in physical proximity would need time and good direction to get used to such a drastic change in methods and environment, but that's simply a matter of acclimation, not an indictment of remote engagement.
Prime is really a killer feature. I'll find myself ordering things I never would have dreamed of buying online, or possibly at all (because I didn't know it existed). And this from someone who balked when Amazon first started selling things besides books!. Living in a small town might be a factor in this, however.
There's nothing wrong with the idea in principle, it's just that OEMs have a bad habit of putting on too much stuff, and putting on stuff that nobody would want (or should have).

It's just all those installers (yes, I'm talking to you Adobe and Oracle) that do everything they can to trick you into installing "toolbars" and other crap.
Making them tell you they want the keys and give you a reason isn't all bad.

But yes, the proxy ought to do more to encourage people. One problem is that two of the major browsers (Firefox and Chrome) are funded by a company that makes all its money from tracking and advertising (google), and it's pretty unlikely they would turn off third-party cookies by default, which I think would be a good start.
From Python to native code: Just-in-time compilation with Parakeet
It's a simple case of the OP having an opinion -- remote working isn't necessarily the be all/end all solution neither is working on site.

I see why the OP would want to complain about how most companies out there don't encourage remoting but then again they are paying you to work.
Apple Trademarks the Design of its Retail Stores
Jsfiddle with 500 Internal Server Error, Twitter with Overcapacity
What's going on?
NPRs Planet Money did a podcast along these lines - "Why It's Illegal To Braid Hair Without A License":

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/22/155596305/episode-...
The amazing thing is actually that the judge actually understands what a programming language is:

> Even when a language is created from scratch, however, what it amounts to is a system of rules for the generation and recognition of meaningful statements.

Yep. A good textbook definition, even.
A Quick Introduction to Apache Cassandra
I'm glad TWC allows this. My parents (who are on Comcast) began getting a $5/mo fee added because they did not rent Comcast's cable modem. (which also costs $5/mo)
Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely.

Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations. So either the remote person won't be as in the loop as the others (bad for them, and bad for the overall team dynamic because someone needs to be treated specially), or else everyone on the team needs change their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).

So there's nothing inherently wrong with remote workers, but it's probably better to go "all in" like some companies are starting to do, or try to avoid it at all, except in very special circumstances.

I bet many of the "99%" of companies the author was referring to that said "no" to his working remotely simply fell into the category where the majority of existing employees weren't remote, so they they chose not to introduce the new and arguably difficult to manage dynamic.
For a new Crowd Funding start-up SV or SB?
I'm deciding between SV or SB for to set shop for my new Start-Up in Crowd Funding.

Which one would you recommend best for quality of contacts, atmosphere and possibilities ?
I'm personally not a big fan of remote workers. Not because I don't think the tools are adequate or that I trust they are actually working. I think there's something special that can't be reproduced when a small team that's just starting out is physically together. I've been at a few startups and I can't count how many times a good idea or breakthrough came while we were out getting lunch, a beer or playing pool in the office. Sure, your remote workers are a phone call away, but it's just not the same as being able to turn to the guy next to you and start talking or white boarding. It's definitely possible to make remote teams work and the tools have come a long way. By there's something special about working together in person.