skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it really that difficult to type your question into skype or campfire group chat? We're all remote and we have daily 20 minute video conferences, and everyone is always logged into campfire. It's the most productive team I've ever worked with, and if someone isn't pulling their weight, you can tell from their git commits. Every argument I've heard against remote working boils down to that "something special" you mention, which is pretty darn vague. We have had a few new hires lose it and go AWOL, but those people wouldn't have been a good fit in a co-located team either.
Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin
> The bug in the YAML parser was reported and the author of the YAML library genuinely couldn't figure out why this mattered or how it could be bad.

Is that seriously what happened? It sounds oddly similar to the Rails issue from about a year ago (the one in which the reporter was able to commit to master on Github), even though I believe that was a separate set of developers altogether.

If so, then that might suggest a larger community/cultural issue, which makes me wonder what other exploits exist but haven't been reported (publicly) yet...
IE9 and later are not seriously "substandard".
So I recalled correctly that you already argued that Java's the best thing since sliced bread recently [1].

Apart from the low jab in this particular line, why's Java related to VS, VS features and the .Net eco system?

Language wars are boring.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098006
Ask HN: Deploying django on github to AWS?
How do you go about deploying django on a github repo to AWS?
Amazon is a category killer just like Wal-Mart is and if their PE ratio is 14.38, then Amazon's P/E ratio should be in that area as well.
In order to avoid being placed in that category, you have to do some disruptive things. It's similar to what most web based companies do, they try to shoot for the stars and keep that momentum going.
I think that explains the high P/E.
With commonJS javascript is a perfectly good language to write real, large code base apps in. With coffeescript, it's a pleasure.
That must be an awesome boss!

On the Google Hangout thing, I sometimes find myself thinking(for the day I get a remote job again), why couldn't people be on a Hangout the whole day(In my case almost all of the dev team were full-remote)? When I did there was a techies chat always open on Skype and we used to chit-chat just like we would IRL, commenting on the Hacker-News-like-stuff, talk about semi-work-related stuff like the our most productive setup, crack jokes at each other and etc and there was definitely a "camaraderie vibe" even though we never met...

Now take a virtual environment like this, add more virtual face-to-face, Planetside 2 afterhours gaming sessions.. I don't see it lacking much, if anything, compared to a in-place tight-knit startup team
The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor
That's just barbaric!
ADN Developer Incentive Program Allows Netbot to go Free
Guns, Germs, and Steel was most certainly not about "how and why European societies were able to advance themselves so much farther ahead of all other civilizations". The concept of "advanced", or being "ahead of" is inapplicable. It's a book about sociocultural evolution.

Additionally, Diamond is pretty ambivalent about the "winners". Diamond wrote an essay on the subject of agriculture called "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race". He closes the essay with "As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?"

http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Are you sure you're not referring to animated GIFs? The slow FPS rate occurs as they load, and is contained to the GIF itself. Surely a static GIF would not reduce your browser FPS.
I have got chance to work both in 9-5 environment as well as working in isolation.

Working for home was my own choice so that I can give time to my infant kid which is most important for me. Working from home gave me relaxation. I could work on my chair or on my bed, nobody was going to ask me how I sit. Second most important thing which helped me a lot was to have a feeling of helplessness. When you work in an office, you often ask some of your peer to write a part of your code or look into it. When you work alone you have to do everything on your own, finding solution and implement it in your own code. In the era of Stackoverflow finding a solution of your problem is not difficult at all.

It's been a year I am working individually and I am enjoying it. Instead of wasting time in gossips about Boss or management, I prefer to play with my kid, his smile gives me enough oxygen to keep me motivated for rest of the day.
> 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.

That's my plan.

3 days working from home as daughter is at nursery and wife at work.

1 day working at the house of one of the other founders 20 minutes away, wife and daughter.

1 day looking after daughter whilst wife at work.

Weekend a mixture of family time and work (required since some events relating to startup occur at the weekend.)
Actually, PNG 8 is better for that 1px graphics: http://www.phpied.com/give-png-a-chance/
It implies that they can't have courage without being drunk, and certainly that's not a very nice thing to say about someone, let alone a huge group of people who obviously don't all fit that stereotype.
Have any good contacts at these "boring consulting businesses"? I am not averse to an unsexy (remote) job.
Favorite Buzzword: Crowdturfing
Blippar app for iOS and Android lets users try Blackberry 10
Can you pick out a brand just by their button design?
Pretty good breakdown going on here [1]. To be honest, while the chosen tool to provide the update is odd, it is one of the best post-mordems that I've seen and applaud the volunteers for taking it so seriously.

1. I wouldn't say so. Not until they're all the way through.

2. Not at the moment, but general guidance is that we should all have local gem repos that we maintain ourselves and only rely on external sources when needed. It is something I'm going to look into ASAP.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/10tuM51VKRcSHJtUZotraMlrM...
Put the vms on an SSD and max out your ram. I can run at least two windows vms on a late 2011 i7 MBP with SSD + an express card SSD for vms, and 16 gb of ram
Have you even read the study, or are you just quoting it blindly? Your link provides a very brief summary but mentions no details about what tools and workflows remote workers were using. It also doesn't mention anything about the type of project that was being delivered and the various constraints that it had. Maybe you're just taking this stuff on faith.
I get your rant, I've done remote and on-site work. I personally prefer a healthy mix of both (http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/an_async_experiment/).

I think having everyone in office in a small company is often more about building a great office culture, and less about it being the only way to build a company. Small teams tend to do more than just work together, they integrate their socials lives. When that is the type of company you are trying to build, remote workers don't fit into that picture right away.

Also you cannot forget the difference between good distractions and bad distractions. Overhearing a conversation (between other developers), is less of a distraction than overhearing a couple of suits on sales calls or talking about the game last night. You can still be in the zone, have good distractions, be an introvert, noise cancelling headphones, etc.

A small team on-site is going to rapidly move through ideas, faster than chat rooms or even facetime/skype can truly allow, as natural as it appears it is nothing compared to in person conversations. That moment when your team discovers their Epiphany, in my opinion, is much more likely to happen in person.
XP is going to end support in April 2014. I wonder how fast people are upgrading.
I do think this is the immediate future, especially as we utilize typed languages that compile to JS in order to create more complex applications than are feasible with JS alone.

I also think that there will be a swing back to an almost complete server-centric model after that, where all logic and rendering will take place on the server and be streamed to extremely dumb clients...like TVs with basic touch input. This will require a pretty intense infrastructure, but with some nice perks for hardware/software developers. For one, absolute control over an application...bump versions any time you like, easy access to debugging information (crash reports, etc.), watch user usage in real time, on and on. Hardware will also be insanely cheap. Users benefit from the practical equivalent of having a top-of-the-line computer embedded in their smartphones.
Is working from home all that it's cracked up to be?
Chirping in, I recommend Zen Bones and Zen Flesh as a accompanying read. http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Flesh-Bones-Collection-Writings/dp...

I've found myself relating to many of the koans and as a result, it has allowed me to "take a step back" from a hectic life. I'm not claiming to be a "better" person because of it, but instead, I have increased my sense of perception.
Your tone is of disagreement (?), but I wrote the same thing:

> Therefore what's important is not the origins of a word, but its current associations and effects: "my car was vandalized" is OK but "that movie is gay" is not.

On Dutch courage: the meaning is the courage you get when drunk, implying that a person is not courageous when not drunk. I don't think that on the scale of bad things this idiom is very bad at all, for one the Dutch are not often victims of discrimination, and neither is the association very strong nor the meaning very negative. I'm just pointing out that in general, what matters is not the origins of a word, but its current use and effect. So the fact that "Dutch" in "Dutch courage" originally referred to the drink and not to the Dutch does not automatically make it OK.
Wonder what happened to the WebP format from Google? Last when I tried using it, there were no nice image converters that would convert my PNGs into WebP properly.

Any live websites using it?
It's deflation. With inflation the amount you can buy with a set amount of your currency goes down (i.e. your currency is dropping in value). Right now the bitcoin is rising in value.
Regarding #2, you could use gems from the github repositories (just specify the tag) instead of relying on gems hosted on RubyGems.

Obviously then it is up to you to verify everything, including that you're using the right versions and what not.
Dongfeng-Volvo, VW Chase Low-End Market in China
Racism is behind many bans. I think that the goal is not so much to harm the minority group as it is a form a status signalling: showing that "we" disapprove of what "they" do.

Cocaine was banned in the US because of its use by blacks.

Marijuana was banned because of its use by hispanics.

The first gun bans were in the post Civil War south, where armed black citizens stood up to the KKK riders (the phrase "Saturday Night Special" is a contraction of "Niggertown Saturday Night Special" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special#Origin_o...).

Tangentially, I strongly recommend the book _Albion's Seed_, which traces American culture to four different subcultures prominent in England in the 1500s - quite enlightening.
... and I was hoping it's an article about public funded research, the results of which are sold to public again, via fancy schmancy journals subscriptions.
RZA must have cut the line about how being cache oblivious becomes asymptotically equivalent to being cache aware.
Animated GIF, the royalty-free web video standard that Apple and Microsoft couldn't prevent you from using.
"4. Agree on one place to store all documents, all meeting notes, everything."

This can't be understated. When I ask the founder where the company logo is and they say "it's on one of the external harddrives sitting around the office somewhere", it's incredibly frustrating. The most well-oiled startup I worked for had a perfectly organized central-storage of digital resources, which greatly contributed to the smooth workings of the company.
Ruby MRI Source Code Idioms #2: C That Resembles Ruby
In this market, companies are the ones that have to make concessions. There simply aren't enough good developers to go around.
That's not totally true; in the case of software, an implementation is code, which is copyrightable. The idea, the functioning of the code, is not copyrightable, but it may be patentable, because a patent is a more restricted protection on a more abstract idea.
> Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the very best" engineers.

This is highly underrated wisdom.

If you focus on always hiring "Rockstar developers," you'll find yourself in a miserable situation of competition and egotistical conflict. Hire your team, not your developers. Get your team working like clockwork with good systems and good relationships, and your company will be rockstar with whatever people you throw at it. Look at github, stripe, twitter, facebook—you think they only hire the absolute best developers? No, they have a top 2% just like you will—your goal should be to increase the competence of your entire company, not just ignorantly hire the best and fire the worst and hope for the best.

Spot on.

You're right about the other assumptions too (though the parent may not have been that serious about them). IMHO stereotyping introverts or extroverts as being better or worse at certain tasks is a huge --ism to avoid, especially in our field. I see 'extrovertists' and 'introvertists' battle it out all the time with their propaganda and ignorant beliefs about people, and no one wins.

It's far better and more productive to be a humanist and find a good balance. Both extroverts and introverts can be valuable to your team; both extroverts and introverts can be great programmers and workers. You should strive to hire a mix, or stop using it as a metric and naturally get a mix, since these traits like many others generally fall on a normal distribution.

Don't trust your assumptions about yourself, and don't apply them to others. They're probably wrong.
> Would that mean I'll not notice cocaine either?

Not necessarily, because the two drugs are metabolized through completely different channels and, other than the fact that both are stimulants, have very different effects (ie, the mechanisms by which they take their effect is very different).

You may just have an abnormally high tolerance to caffeine, but there's no reason to suspect that that would carry over to cocaine, as cocaine targets both the D1 and D2 receptors, and caffeine provides cross-tolerance only to drugs which target one XOR (exclusive or) the other[0].

[0] http://examine.com/supplements/Caffeine/#summary14-3
>> 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.
> Completely laughable. Do you have closed circuit TV recordings of everywhere in the office?

I'm actually working with a distributed team that does this. Everyone is on a shared video conference eight hours a day. If you want to talk to someone you look at your video conference team to see if they are at their desk, on the phone, or talking to someone else. If two people need to talk without disturbing others, they mute their video conference mic and jump on Skype. You can still see them, get their attention, etc. but you don't have everyone talking over each other on the main video conference channel.

It actually works a lot better than I expected.
No. I'm pretty sure it was about why and how European civilizations were able to conquer technology and the world, and specifically why many of the developments critical to the rise of European supremacy are not found in other societies. Yes, the judgments made in the book tend to be more fact-based and objective, e.g., a gun is more effective than a spear.

It is not a screed extolling the virtues of European civilization, nor a litany of the failings of other people. Sorry if that's how you understood my brief.

Gotta love HN-contrarianism. Oh have you also heard of Jared Diamond and would now like that knowledge recognized by pedantically contradicting me?

EDIT: actually let me update this. It is about sociocultural evolution. However if I had said "he wrote a book about sociocultural evolution," nobody would have understood the primary emphasis of his work. That book is specifically and primarily about identifying the key developments in Europe which allowed that civilization to rise in power. He has spent many years living among primitive societies around the world to explore his hypotheses. As much as possible, concepts like "primitive" and "advanced" are objective qualifiers and not value judgments.

When I say it that way, people understand what it's about and want to read the book.
Building Decoupled JS Applications With Postal.js
> I still think the overall aim of the policy in terms of educating users as to the nature of cookies is a good one.

If only users could turn off cookies in their web browser and leave the rest of us alone.
The sooner the better. I'd like to see IE<10 dead and enough adoption of ie10 to get the other guys competing for speed and features again. It would also be awesome if ie10 would self update like Chrome and Firefox.

Unfortunately enterprise IT will probably block this for a while.
I love to read how companies define standards, regardless of whether or not I agree w/them. It's particularly interesting to see companies like the BBC publish them publicly. I expect that from Google, Yahoo, etc, but when companies the the BBC do, it makes me happy to see them take standards seriously.

What's funny though, is that their .htaccess, tracking, and sitemaps documents are protected.
The purpose of NaN Boxing
you might want to try stackoverflow.com - there isn't much technical support happening here.
That's still better than the 54Mb/s wireless connection (never practically above 20Mb/s) my old laptop that I'm streaming content to has. For the large part, it should work.

It won't be a high performance server, but then, it's a Raspberry Pi.
Different issue altogether. It was mass-assignment wherein the default Rails config did not have the whitelist enabled by default. The howto is here:

http://homakov.blogspot.ca/2012/03/how-to.html
Spine, a 2D skeletal animation tool designed specifically for game development
Ask HN: What software do you use to run Facebook contests and sweepstakes?
> Technically under the directive, any storage of information on the user's system should have the full consent of the user

Isn't consent assumed by the fact that they've configured their browser to accept cookies?
This reminds me that MS will support IE on Server 2003 until July 2015, and IE on Server 2008 (both R1 and R2) until January 2020. Yes, both R1 (based on Vista/NT 6.0) and R2 (based on Win7/NT 6.1), because R2 is considered a "minor release" while Win7 is considered a major release.
HMV staff hijack company Twitter account
But since drinking tea is considerably less efficient at getting the cocaine into your system, you'd really struggle to replicate a cocaine high from drinking Mate de Coca.
It's more like drinking weak tea.

Good answer here:
http://www.quora.com/Tea/Is-coca-tea-addictive/answer/David-...
Ask HN: how do you browse HN?
Do you use a browser or app or aggregator?

I only use the browser (mobile and desktop). For desktop, I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-%20/oieefcckcbbgniifdhhialgkmghahjgl to make the styles sing.

Curious to know what others use.
Self-plagiarism is an action that is very much despised in science. I have seen a professor who sent papers that were for all purposes identical to two high-profile journals, and that fellow never got a grant again from the major agency in his field. The EPSRC has a long memory, and this is how it ought to be.

Self-plagiarism on grant applications is a step up from this, and while one can imagine it happening, one would not think that it happens often.
> Is that seriously what happened?

Surprisingly, yes:
https://github.com/tenderlove/psych/issues/119

And the RubyGems folks are trying to handle this with whitelisting specific classes that the YAML parsing will still be allowed to instantiate:

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/pull/516/files
Rafflecopter
We switched from almost always in the office to a ROWE (Results Only Work Evironment) and now 90%+ of the time we all work from home. According to a company survey of the people in the ROWE, devs feel more productive, and managers feel there has been no change in productivity. I think this is because we are measuring productivity in different ways. Managers measure productivity over a week or month, which has stayed static, whereas devs measure productivity in amount of time they have to spend to get stuff done. When you don't have to spend 1-2 hours commuting, you spend less time "at work" and get the same amount done.

Personally, I like it, but we also already had a culture of doing a lot of talking via IM. In this day and age, there's no excuse for not being able to get ahold of people. But by the same token, you can't always assume someone is going to respond in 30 seconds. I hope no one is so dependent on other people that someone taking 20 minutes to respond is a complete blocker.

We use Google hangouts extensively for meetings and often open them up just to chat and connect with fellow devs.

We have lost a little bit of a sense of belonging to the team. I think extensive use of google hangouts helps a lot with this. With most laptops having a camera, there's little excuse not to fire one up whenever anyone wants to talk.
PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $10.7M From Andreessen Horowitz For IT Alert Service
I'd say this service already exists... http://cl.ly/MZz7
Perhaps a better way to put it is that it is difficult to retrofit an office to allow a few telecommuters.

In my experience, I was working remotely in the company's early days. The in-office employes really started to grow after me. While I remain the only one that really works outside of the office, the culture of remote workers was instilled from nearly the beginning and don't really find any of the problems you suggest to be true in my case.
And this particular circle is complete.

Of course the patents that were the heart of such controversy are now expired so GIF code is no longer 'not-open' but it has a bad reputation so we don't play with it any more :-).

I like PNG though, the library development, while a bit rocky at first, matured quite nicely and about 5 years ago crossed the point where enough people took the time to figure out how to use it that is dropped into everything that dealt with images. That has been pretty handy.
I know it was a different vulnerability - I was asking more whether the same developer(s) was/were responsible, since this seems to be a comment pattern that I'm hearing with regards to the initial response to the vulnerabilities.
I think after reading the tone of your response I can determine that I would have a difficult time working with this type of personality. As a developer interruptions are a huge productivity drag. I have to stop whatever I'm doing, answer your question, and figure out where I left off and get back into the right mode to program which can take a while.

Right now I have a few work-from-home days a week and I find I'm enormously productive on those days due to lack of interruptions. If the company cannot sacrifice face time and trust for higher developer productivity (even in the name of teambuilding) then I wouldn't want to work there.