skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends entirely on the kind of work being done.

If you've got a super-top engineer who can solve the hard problems, then they're probably working on something of their own, and can be off in their own room / at home / whatever.

But in my experience, that kind of "hard", mentally intense, non-collaborative work makes up only a tiny, tiny fraction of commercial software development (although it contributes a great deal to the value). So it's not something to base general development practices around; it's the exception.

As you say -- "double your productivity for building that CRUD application" -- that's exactly the point, that's what most companies need, and why most companies aren't interest in remote working.

When they suddenly need a top-level engineer to solve a hard problem, they hire one who consults for three months, works remotely, and visits once or twice.
The smaller possible exchange unit is 1E-8 bitcoin (0,00000001).
YAML automatic code execution.

Previously you had to send something to rails and find a way to cause rails to execute that. Not so easy.

Now? You just have to send some YAML to rails.
Using Databases to Automate Assessment and Remediation
Learn about various vulnerability databases and their role in automating vulnerability assessment and remediation.
The HMV Firings: Twitter is the pulse but who's in control?
Also the same for me.
"The result of having all these unhealthy thoughts come into your mind while you meditate,"

I would hesitate to call these thoughts unhealthy, on the contrary they are completely natural and harmless. It is our reaction to those thoughts that can be unhealthy.
Let me give you one example that felt like magic. I was taking a trip to New York on business. At 4pm I come off the train at Penn Station and pull out my phone to look up the hotel confirmation I got two weeks before so I can get directions. When I turned it on, a Google Now card was there saying "Carlton Hotel, you're checking in today." I click it and up come directions.

Now, I performed absolutely NO action to make that happen. I just had a confirmation by email that it had picked up. Now maybe that's creepy to some people but it saved me a lot of fiddling around with the phone to find the confirmation and it knew exactly what I wanted, when I wanted it. Isn't that what computers are supposed to do for us?
I generally approve of remote work hardily. But this rant called out early stage startups in particular. In early stage startups you're building your culture along with your product. You have a super limited amount of salary to pay to do both. I can definitely see why you'd want to get double returns with a local hire.
Co-Prosperity Cloud Winner
> You can obviously configure cookies in your browser settings but I imagine for most users this option is overly complex for them to understand.

Can't one argue the same thing for setting up your website to be compliant with this law?

The fact that the easy and free solution is to just tell users to turn off all cookies in their browsers makes any laws of this type a waste.
hckrnews.com - when I'm really bored, I'll go to the main site and scan down the "new" page.
This is why I don't like the name "Bitcoin". The system does not have any coins in it (unlike earlier work like Chaumian digital cash).
That only helps you with availability though doesn't it? You are just as likely to have pulled backdoored files and cached them as to get backdoored files directly. Also at some point you need to update.

So I think it only helps if you are likely to need to deploy additional/alternative servers of the same versions. For significant deployed services this makes sense but if you are only in development/testing or using a service like Heroku it doesn't really help you very much does it?
Yes, but nursing and similar healthcare work is low-pay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%27s_role_in_the_Syrian_c...
Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave

I've seen that happen (which brings up the separate question of does it matter if the team is N x more productive because of co-location)

I've also seen them stay.

I've also seen them start out very sceptical and then grow to like it (I was in this category - assuming I'm vaguely competent of course ;-)

I've also seen folk I hugely respect advocate and instigate this sort of environment.

.... so which anecdotes win... dunno... hence call for any folks who have found research on the topic.
Congrats folks!
That seemed like an ill-spoken line. What's happening here is that a row of dominoes is falling because of one class of vulnerability. The publication of the YAML hole has caused people to search for a) exploit vectors for that hole, and b) similar classes of exploits that are now much more obvious due to the knowledge of the original hole.

I think that to suggest that this bug could not have been found before is wrong, but the reason we're seeing such a cascade is because security almost never happens in a bubble.
> Any sufficiently advanced serialization standard ... it is often going to get instantiated via calling a zero-argument constructor and then firing a bunch of setter methods.

Yes, this is always a bad idea. It's actually in a similar problem space as the constant stream of vulnerabilities in the Java security sandbox (eg, applets); all it takes is one mistake and you lose.

And thus, people have been saying to turn off Java in the browser for 4+ years, and this is also why Spring shouldn't have implemented such code.

> It's hard stuff, by nature.

Which is why deserializing into executable code is a bad idea, by nature. I'd thought this was well established by now, but apparently it is not.

> Do you have a citation for this? What particular bug in the parser are you referring to?

http://github.com/tenderlove/psych/issues/119
It bugs me that they lump executive assistants in here. From my experience they are so far from secretaries (I know several who are making 6-figures in this job too), from what I've seen most EAs are usually more like an apprentice who wants to get into a competitive field and needs to shadow someone with a very specific skillset and responsibility to get there. That's why assisting magazine editors, fashion designers, finance executives, even tech executives is so promising for women (and men) right out of college. I once heard someone say that they thought most of the early EAs from Amazon.com would probably go on to be CEOs in their own right.
That is the best part of a remote team, your deliverables are the main way you are reviewed. Superficial things are less emphasized such as if you went to lunch with the right group, were in 8-6 on the dot or work on the right team, have the right office for visibility etc etc. So many levels of extra unneeded layers of fluff in an office when it should be on product development.

I do think it is good to work on site periodically and sometimes at least a day or two per week if you can, not because it is needed to produce good work and products, but because it helps kick off, complete + integration days and earns some office points in the not so fun office game.

Many places that have offices and require 8-6, their engineers end up getting interrupted all day and then do all their work at night. So in that case telecommuting would be a huge benefit to the individual but maybe not as much the company since they get so much extra time out. Maybe it is more a salary thing, getting lots of work out of you. I'd argue it looks like more work is being done at an office but remote teams HAVE to get actual work done, there is no other metric to be measured on.
Right now they subdivide to 8 decimal places. .00000001

With minimal change to the protocol they could subdivide to much smaller units.

I think "bitcoin" is a confusing name, because it's really more like a group of account numbers, which can have money with 8 digits of precision to the right of the decimal point.

Think of a Bitcoin Address(es) as your account number(s), and your Private Key as your ATM card, PIN, and signature all wrapped in one.

If someone sends me 50 bitcoins, I have it in my "account" in the giant ledger in the sky. If I want to send 3.5 of them to someone, what might happen is that I create a transaction that sends 50 bitcoins to two different places... 3.5 to someone, and 46.5 to another account (of mine, my change!) in the giant ledger in the sky.

Or for simplicity, think of them like rewards points, and don't try to make it too complicated.
Why Adding Tech Dat\Ingram Micro to IBM Power Systems Is a Very Big Deal
The linked article provides very little info on how it actually works. What's the point in writing about something, if you are not going to say anything meaningful?
My own arm chair theory is that the market leader's dominance of their environment causes an "economic hold" on the market as all the players maintain the status quo soas to recover their investment in whatever their product(s) happen to be (within the current leader's product supporting ecosystem.) This economic hold maintains as long as a competing option's "benefit" provides less economic opportunity for the entire market than the current market leader. After all, it's a collection of companies that make a market, and they will collectively protect their revenues then threatened.
I've never had a smartphone, and do not look forward to the day when the good old fashioned flip-phone is obsolete.

Several comments have already stated my reasons for not having a smartphone: battery life (3-4 days, easy), relative ruggedness, form factor, time management, and the fact the thing works--it does one thing, and does it well when I need it to.

One other reason is privacy. While my flip-phone can still be tracked by the phone company (GPS disabled, but tower pings), I don't have various companies tracking me through their apps. And, unlike a certain popular smartphone brand, I can remove my battery.

No, you're not a luddite.
Why not build it on older, unused hardware, then. It's not going to help to have to go through all the trouble of getting something going on ARM only to have to start over on x86, for example.
Plug for my "fastest way to lookup bitcoin price" website:

http://bitcoinprices.org/
I recognized facebook because i recognized the facebook blue, not the button. And the amazon button is very distinctive. The rest, not so much.
Maximum penalty is a fine of up to around 450.000 euros.
More easy ways to improve your writing
2013 Trends in Data Governance
Or you can do like 90% of the web and use Bootstrap.
Spot on.

Worst thing is having visited other countries and see their quality of life, and know there are better countries -- USA, Canada -- with far better opportunities...

P.S.: We also want to be US, and now we rank 2nd in obesity (US 1st)... way to go.
> Screenshots taken from OS X and Linux are saved to PNG files

You can really save screenies in whatever format you like on linux with imagemagick.

It's just $ import -window root screenshot.<imagetype>

Unless you're referring to whatever the DE has implemented, but I've never taken an SS without using the terminal, so I have no idea.
Engaging post, but I do not agree with the author's assertion that "Buttons can make or break your brand." As a designer, I've spent a lot of time crafting pixel-perfect buttons, but out of these examples, I could only pick out Amazon, Square, and Svbtle (which most people have never heard of).

I think my takeaway from this article was, design attractive buttons that look and work consistently, and then go do work that matters.
Twitter Currently Experiencing Widespread, Rolling Service Outage
I have a question here -

'Does biggies which acquire startups care whether the employees of the startup work remotely or from a central (base) location?;
What Google Searches About the Future Tell Us About the Present
Does anyone use testling.com?
http://testling.com/
What is crazy to me is everyone has had this bug, and learned from it, and fixed it. Why has it taken so long for Rails? Java has this bug; you can't deserialize untrusted input without a lot of work. Python has this bug; you can't unpickle untrusted input. Bad Javascript JSON parsers that just call eval() have this bug. It's not a complicated concept; you can't treat untrusted user input as code to execute. How'd the YAML developers miss it?
I can only assume you haven't used it yet, then. Some examples (I live in NYC):

Whenever I am not at home, Google Now preloads what subway station I should head to and how long it'll take me to get home, and updates as I move around.

It tells me when to leave home to make it to appointments: "leave now for lunch with Dave".

It scans my Gmail to bring up boarding details for every flight I take, and hotel details for every booking I made. It also brings in package tracking, so as soon as I order something from Amazon, I can track its status to my door.

And that's just getting started.
I'm not sure I get what you're the analogy to.

When I first read your blog post I got the impression that you were saying that the YAML vulnerability were found with some new code scanning technology that lets us find bugs in Rails faster. Or are you just saying discovering the existence of the YAML.load() class of vulnerability is "new security technology?"

Or are you talking about the ronin support module people are using in some of the PoCs?
Protect your WordPress site from attackers in 2 minutes with Authy
Unless these studies were controlled for gender - and it appears that they were not - height is just one more factor which both men and women have to contend with. And if that's the case, then attractiveness is still a lopsided standard which women deal with more.
I'm speaking from my own bad experience with some remote employees. Accidentally learning from another founder that this guy ALSO works for them, was a really bad experience with remote workers for both of us.

He was covering up his lack of productivity for some months with "personal problems" on both sides, while not being focused in either company. If you have many employees, such behavior can go unnoticed for a long time.

OTOH, after this event, I tried giving significant equity to some other guys on the team, and their productivity went up. I guess some of them had side projects as well before that.

Maybe one can work around this by requiring full-time Skype camera access during work hours, or similar, but I hate to be "the police". I feel much better giving away some equity in exchange for loyalty.
Like a few others who have responded, you're not seeing the forest through the trees. That's somewhat alarming for a group of people who are supposed to be creative problem solvers.

Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something. As a resource to the team, you hurt it's overall performance by making yourself less availble.
This sort of thing is the thing I'd love to see more evidence about.

Getting interrupted kills my flow. I'm less productive as I get back into flow (although I have techniques now that let me get into flow much quicker - but that's a separate post).

However - is that drop in productivity outweighed by the increase in productivity of the interuptee not having to wait / switch tasks / fumble on and make a mistake / build the wrong thing / etc.
This was posted in a HN comment not too long ago. It's a very good lecture that goes into both the biological and psychological aspects of depression and then manages to tie them together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

> We say that there is something wrong with their brains, rather than saying that there is something wrong with society.

The real answer is probably a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.
Same here, I couldn't recognise any.
Last.fm Desktop Scrobbler Released
Funny and cute cat pictures
I would like to show you some funny and cute pictures of cats and I am sure you will like them!
Spring isn't the only widely-used Java framework that's had these problems. The Struts developers put a general-purpose interpreter (OGNL) in their parameter parsing pipeline, and thought they'd kept things safe by blacklisting dangerous syntax.

Wackiness ensued: http://blog.o0o.nu/2010/07/cve-2010-1870-struts2xwork-remote...

It would obviously be unfair to claim on this basis, or the recent problems with the Java browser plugin, that the "entire Java language community" has a bad attitude on security matters. Communities are big, each of them has a range of attitudes within it, and most importantly --- regardless of attitude --- sooner or later, everyone screws up.
Flight: A lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework from Twitter
P90X After Many Failed Attempts
Here's a slighty more descriptive press article: http://betabeat.com/2013/01/venmo-touch-from-braintree-lets-...
I think there is a primitive brain thinking going on here,something like "I pay you to work, I want to SEE you working"
Nice list. Also could provide some limited exclusivity for a short time period. Or discounted pricing for early adopters.
Cachegrind (part of Valgrind) will do this for you: http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/cg-manual.html
There is one reason that I can think of for why they would be classified as unhealthy - they distract you from what is happening right now and, as a result, you might miss something important. Multitasking is widely recognised as being a counter-productive activity. Do one thing at a time, with your full attention, and you will excel. Do many things at once and you will do all of them badly. Or one could say that multitasking is the process of failing at many things simultaneously.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking
I completely agree. Dealing with remote team members has always been difficult with teams I've been on, and I would guess they have been only half as productive.

This isn't through any fault of their own, but they just can't be "in the loop" as much. Most communication takes way too long to type out in e-mail or IM, so you need to get them on the phone -- but calling and getting transferred, and then they're not at their desk, etc., is just too much of a pain. There's a HUGE difference between waiting until you see that someone is at their desk, and repeatedly remembering to keep trying to call them -- or sending them an e-mail to call you, and then you're out.

They can't see when someone on your team is having a little difficulty and instantly help out, turning someone's hour task into 5 min. They're not involved in the informal meetings behind someone's screen where a feature is changed slightly. They're just missing out on a lot of "informal" information that is crucial for productive development.

And even over the phone, I find it's much more difficult to explain things and make sure they're understood crystal-clear. Sometimes you need to see the understanding in their face. Sometimes you need to draw, sometimes you need visual aids, sometimes you need to pull up a web page, but it's too much work to pull up videoconferencing or something.

In the end, all these problems are "technically" surmountable, sure, but I've never seen it work. Maybe remote work would be fine in a waterfall-type development model, but with modern-day "agile" development, it just doesn't work as well for collaborative teams.
And surprisingly enough, if you add the many-worlds quantum theory[1] that is exactly what you get. Non-death.

1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Level_III:_Many-worl...
$70 Million in overlapping funds in the last decade is quite trivial actually. Let's just say they looked through NSF and NIH grants (though I think they included DoE and DoD and probably other agencies I'm not thinking about). In 2006, the NSF received 5.58 Billion and the NIH recieved 28.7 billion. Budgets have increased to some extent under Obama, so later years are more, but 2006 probably cuts it down the middle.

So 10 * (5.58 + 28.7) = 342 Billion

$70 Million / 342 Billion = 0.02% of total funding to these agencies. That is not 2%. That is 2 one-hundredths of one percent.

On top of that, as others here have pointed out, these grants come with fairly strict guidelines as to how they can be spent. These funds are not going into reseracher's pockets. They are not going to bonuses. They are going to research and university overhead. This pays for equipment, supplies, travel, and employee (and grad student) wages.

0.02% potential overlap in funding just doesn't concern me. Now let us go worry about something else, preferrably something of greater importance and impact.
I sold at $17 and don't regret it (bought at $14-15 earlier that week). But my typical use is of bitcoin is a as barter currency (where the other party only cares about dollar value), I'm no speculator.
Laugh. Inspire. Help.
Not saying that you are wrong, but none of the studies you quote was done in the last five years, and most of them are actually more than a decade old.

Actually - several of them are. For example:

"Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006)"

This is one of the things I find fascinating. You see the same kind of thing over thirty years as technology changes radically. This makes me think that there's something quite interesting happening in meat-space.

Startup environments are not average, and this must be why companies like Github and 37signals can be successful while having remote workers.

Just to repeat. I am not saying that you cannot be successful being distributed. There are lots of good and sane reasons to be distributed.

I'm saying that there is a bunch of evidence that being co-located is more effective.
Of course! If you've got older hardware do it on that.

The audience for Pi are youngsters who want to play. They don't have an office full of legacy x86, PPC, Mips hardware to play around with.

A tutorial like this is a great place for a youngster to start playing around.
This is exactly why I feel like even if there were evidence that global warming isn't due to us tomorrow, it wouldn't matter.

Corruption happens in academia every day, but because you somehow feel they "need the money anyway", it's excused. To me, it's no different than a corrupt politician or financial institution.
I'm willing to bet if you put someone like benmmurphy, ptacek, or homakov in your codebase he'll have you begging for a web framework in hours.
True but many engineers and game devs I know spend lots of time on personal projects while at the office. So side projects are really just what engineers do whether they are at the office or at home. Also if the engineer is getting the other deliverables, does it matter they have an occasional side project? If it starts to distract from work produced it is much easier to see remotely but probably matters less remotely.
New York Times Launches In-House Lab for Tech Startups
Yes, I love Jekyll and use it (with Octopress) myself...however, how easy is it for non-developers to use? I mean, I know it's easy...but even when non-developers can figure out HTML (nevermind Markdown), they are still more comfortable with a rich-text interface (until they try to embed code, of course...)
I'm not sure I see this taking off as a general-purpose thing. The range is likely too short, and visible light is too easy to block. But I do see potential in bridging: you could use this to get a signal across something that you can't (or don't want to) cross with a radio or electrical signal.