skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not always about being productive. If problems start to surface and you're not there talking to those you need to talk to or you're not there to see it for yourself and you do half of all your work by email, then chances are high you're putting everyone's job at risk.
I believe parent was saying PNG folks would have stuck with JPEG if it offered transparency.
Technology’s Monotonic Assault on the Human Market Maker
Just FYI, the $631 million number is for 2011, not 2012.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN&annual

2012 appears that it's going to be a net loss, because of their horrible Q3 numbers.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN

If I were an investor in Amazon, I would definitely be worried at this point. Even though revenue is up sharply, Amazon doesn't appear to be making a consistent profit at all-their net income was down 50% from 2010 in 2011, even though they had a ~33% increase in revenue.
Official ComboFix Mirror Infected with Sality Virus
One thing this does not account for is that your potential developer pool increases by orders of magnitude with remoting. So, while a team might be more productive co-located, your ability to get much higher quality individuals working for you increases dramatically with remoting.
My main drivers for working remotely are what you just described and eliminating commuting time. I find I'm much more productive and happy without those inconveniences in my life.
Not discussed is how the author's hyper-vigilance impacts his life in the form of stress. Stress kills.
All analogies are flawed and quickly break down. They're only designed as a linguistic aid to help explain a concept by likening the unfamiliar to the familiar. They're not designed to describe the concept itself.
Antony Turbeville Explains Dementia
If it's only chemistry, why is it so much more of a problem in the developed world? Is there an unstated implication of a potential environmental cause?
Newer Web Design Trends in 2013
Declarative data access rules for Django
Maybe good job and family isn't the only factors in leading a happy life?

Not that I agree fully that brain chemistry isn't a factor. That said, the fact that wealthier countries have higher depression rates (according to WHO) does make me think there is something non-biological involved.
What if it did? Associating the Dutch with courage is an awful thing?

We have lots of words that are racist/bigoted. Cad/Caddie. Villain. Vandal. We've forgotton what most of them mean; only the perjorative sense remains.
For those equally concerned, there are "shower chairs" that you can get that greatly reduce the risk of falls. Since my SO had her amputation it was the only way she could take a shower. However I've found it to be pretty convenient as well.
Most importantly, not every project (nor startup, nor business) needs "the very best" engineers. Not every startup is changing the world, and even among the ones that are I'm sure you can pick out a few that aren't solving massively complex technical challenges that will be discussed in lecture halls for decades. The majority of good startups are just making money (sometimes not even that) until they get acquired.

Secondly, you're assuming that the best developers are going to be more introverted than the developer culture/profession as a whole, which I don't think is accurate.
I think its a measure of the paucity of Software Engineering as a discipline that a intelligent and motivated person as the parent, is unable to find any research later than the 1970's

(It seems to me that most software research stopped as the PC revolution took off)
What am I getting wrong, exactly? If a company is going to be a good long-term investment based on fundamentals, it needs to have a sensible P/E ratio. There are exceptions for companies that are growing or have a high probability of having higher earnings in the future. And of course a stock can make very big price movements with no change in fundamentals.

But in a long perspective, there needs to be a small ratio between what you paid for the stock and what the company earns if it is going to be a good investment. FYI I am heavily invested in Tesla Motors, which currently has an undefined/negative P/E ratio.
I'm afraid I don't understand the point you are making.
Would you consider moving when the team gets larger? If you don't do you think you'll get 'left behind' as the local culture develops?

We're also in SD, but trying to build a team here and not finding as many local applicants as we'd like.
That's exactly the kind of interruptive behavior that worsens productive. Communication should be batch, considered, and efficient.

The "Hello???" kind of attitude toward peer engineer communication is akin to a mobile phone notification or a blinking chat icon, all enemies of organized thought that leeds to maximum quality output in minimum time.
SEO Challenges Faced by Large Corporations
Sorting through Search Results
Secretary is derived from the same Latin root as secret. As in, they have all of yours. Responsible people, secretaries.
When we started LogNormal, my partner and I lived in the same geographic region. We both worked out of our own apartments, and met at Red Rock or a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant once a week or so. Then I moved to Cambridge, and we continued working remotely as if nothing had changed. We'd still meet up once a month to go over pen and paper stuff, but we still did all our work remotely from our own apartments.

In all, I think it worked out well. We build a useful product and pulled in several customers. Since we covered the East and West coasts of the US, we were closer (geographically as well as time-zone wise) to many of our customers than we would have been if we were both in the same office.

I don't think there was ever a time when we thought we'd be better off sitting in the same room.
If you look at 3Q numbers, AMZN had 27% revenue growth, while Walmart had 4%. That's a huge difference.

(Walmart didn't announce 4Q numbers yet.)
I connected my facebook, put in the URL for my site and hit "Test"... and it took me to another registration page. Awesome.
Why a CEO should develop a habit of daily meditation
Its possible to be careful and unstressed. I avoid caffeine. I don't even think about it any more; I just don't choose drinks containing caffeine.
In my experience, a group chat like XMPP MUC or IRC is essential for a team especially with remote developers to stay in the loop, feel connected, keep moral up, and get most of the benefits of the war room while still remaining async so you don't stress out your introverted developers.
I really wonder why GIFs are still around. Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik. They really feel like an old technology. They are also a pain to support on android.
Works very well for me, I can stream music and cartoons on all my devices.
censoring of the subconcious?
Moment Camera (iOS App) Clean White GUI, Self-Timer & Sequential Shooting
Not looking like you're entry-level.
the methods of threading.Thread are camel case (ie getName)

http://docs.python.org/2/library/threading.html
> 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???

You're confusing people who are bad at communication with working remotely being bad.

Maybe you've never worked in an office environment with someone who has the same issues, but they're by no means alleviated merely by having their ass in a particular chair.

> Or are you just so special that you deserve all that extra effort?

From the employee point of view: Is your business so special I should sell my house, pull my kids out of school, and move so I can work for it? Do you really want to pay me the 50% pay differential I'd need in order to live in your higher-cost-of-living and lower-quality-of-life area? Is your (presumably internet-focused) company so incompetent it can't manage to use the same systems that we use in our day to day work and life to communicate?

> 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?
Is it churlish to suggest that the most clear counter-example
to "all in same room" is http://git.kernel.org/

However with a cursory glance over the references, they seem heavily biased towards a "crunch time, in a war-room" scenario.

This can lead to large productivity gains for reasons unconnected with physical location

(Clear short term goals, only the best get invited into the war-room, daily distractions and resposibilites are lifted, a fostering of elitism compared to the outsiders)

However I cannot see a long term study on this (I may be wrong).

My "gut feeling" is that regular funded sprint meetings plus remote working is an area of research that may well yield best long term trends.

But wheres the proof :-)
Apple has also gone for the first option:

* Kindle books (especially self-published ones) should have better margins than real books. Kindle grew 70% YoY while real books only grew 5%.

* A growing chunk of their revenue is from AWS, and software-as-a-service certainly has higher margins than mail order.
I really liked to work remotely at my previous job because I could stretch the flexible hours even a little more, working from 10 to 7 for example, which was frowned upon when walking in the office.

My boss eventually asked me to stop working from home, because for everyone else, "working from home" was a metaphor for slacking off. That was the company culture that was so damaging to this whole concept. They didn't care if I was on reddit for 8 hours, just that I was doing it in my office.

In my new job, we make heavy use of teleconferencing, instant messaging and email. Even if we are in the same office, the fact that we are a few minutes of walking distance from each another totally masks the fact that we "work in the same location".
Most developers using VS don't have any need to use SSH.
It appears that the gains from team dynamics (packs) outweigh the average individual quality (lone wolves) for most tasks. The optimal solution in finance, at least, is having the bulk of work done with co-located teams with telecommuting being an option when recruiting niche geniuses for specific tasks.
The 'Reverse Education' Concept. Incredible.
I can't stand the fact that the author is using "X" and "*" as multiplication symbols when we have × and · provided by Unicode. It makes the text much uglier than needed.
If I walked around my office saying I hate my job they'd probably fire me too, and people would say I was an idiot for doing that. This is the same thing. Free speech means you can say what you want, but people can also act on it as they want.
A handy technique for evaluating situations is this: how many mistakes am I away from death/injury? If I drive without a seatbelt, I've put myself 1 accident away in many cases.

My Scouts are young, and love to climb things. I tell them, I know you're strong and skilled. But a loose rock or slippery foothold puts you at risk anyway. So wear the harness - now it takes two mistakes to kill you (e.g. loose rock + badly rigged harness). The risk goes down drastically.

So put some non-skid floor mat in your shower, or a chair as advised in this thread. The mis-step no longer carries the same risk.
"The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF"... On the Web!

PNG has been more popular than GIF since a very long time for basically anything non-web needing lossless picture compression.

From smartphones icons to OS icons, software logos and icons, etc. I'd say the proportion is about 100:1. Actually I was suprised while just running a "find" on my Linux distro to even find a few .gif files. But thousands of PNGs, of course.

Screenshots taken from OS X and Linux are saved to PNG files (for OS X it actually depends on the version of OS X, sometimes PDF are used, but not GIFs).

And games... Lots of games ship with PNG pictures (as well as jpg of course). But GIF? Common...

It's actually a very, very long time that PNG files are more popular than GIFs.

Glad to hear that it's now true for the Web too.
The author has already made it to age seventy-five. As he writes in the submitted article, "My hypervigilance doesn’t paralyze me or limit my life: I don’t skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things."

I think the author has actually made a very sound point, statistically speaking, that often incremental improvements in dealing with the little things has as much impact on health outcomes as heroic measures to deal with the big risks to health. All around the developed world, mortality from all causes is steadily declining at all ages,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

and most of that decline in mortality (and consequent increase in life expectancy) has come about from incremental reductions in risk. Changing engineering standards for highway construction reduces risk of injury and of death from car crashes. Simple checklists can reduce the risk of surgical complications.

http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/en/

http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/d...

A girl with my daughter's birth year in the United States has a better than even chance to live to be 100 years old,

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/1/1/e000128.full

just from an accumulation of incremental improvements in health in the developed countries. The little things matter. We don't have to worry about the little things. Indeed, we can celebrate that so many little things are taken care of for us by societal changes.
Indeed, it seems that way after reading through it again and inserting a dot.

I would still argue that images used in the layout of the average site, most of which are already prone to having transparent parts, are better off using a lossless rather than a lossy format.
If you can't deal with interruptions, maybe teamwork is not for you.

I agree that it's distracting and irritating at times, but that's the nature of working with other people.
How's your marketing doing?
Looking at my keychain I see I have three logins for alioth... draegtun, draegtun-guest & draegtun_guest... all created on 1st Jan 2010.

So it looks like I had issues logging (back) onto Alioth at that time :(

Anyway resolved it now because I see that draegtun-guest does work for me :)

It's a little convoluted and the contribute notes don't initially match what you see at login but after rummaging around I found the required tracker and have now submitted the faster fasta.pl.
The ability to effectively work remotely is entirely determined on a person-by-person basis. And it's clear, especially from the mixed feelings in these comments.

People come in all breeds, and I know that some people absolutely cannot get work done unless they are around others working, whereas others need quiet and the comfort of their own home to be the most productive.

What it comes down to is if you want to hire remote, you need to make sure that your talent is self-motivated enough to do their best work at home (or wherever). If you require an office, make sure the culture fits, otherwise you'll have employees constantly distracted and grudgingly coming into the office every day.

You can have mixed teams, and it doesn't even matter the ratio. I've been on extremely successful teams where only two of the 30+ engineers were remote, and they did their best work remotely. For others, separating work from home greatly improved their productivity.

Don't forget -- your empty house can be the most distracting environment you have access to. It's all about personal culture and fit.
>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."

Sites like mega-search.me are operated by different people from the ones who host the data. In any given case the data hosts don't even necessarily know they exist, much less the content of the links or whether they're licensed. They have no better ability than the copyright holders themselves to discover the links and a far, far worse ability to know which links the copyright holder has licensed, which is why we put it to the copyright holders to identify them.

Meanwhile the link sites are extremely lightweight. You don't need a CDN with regional caching or any of that, you can host the whole thing from a single location for the whole world. So shutting down the link sites is whack a mole. Shutter one and a different one will be up and running in less than a day.

Again, it's an economic problem. It's not about the structure of these entities or who knows what. Changing the laws might move around the pieces on the board but it doesn't change the nature of the game. It doesn't change the fact that it costs millions of times less to send bits than to accurately filter them. You can't change economic reality so easily.

In theory we could put the genie back in the bottle, but that doesn't mean "shut down The Pirate Bay and mega-search.me," it means "shut down the Internet and stop having computers." Because computers are what create the underlying economic conditions that lead to the issue. And I have to hope that nobody is seriously suggesting that would be an acceptable trade off.

I am not one of these people who thinks we should get rid of copyright. But you can read the Das Capital as a mostly accurate criticism of the failings of capitalism without accepting Marx's conclusion that communism is preferable. The facts on the ground have changed. Copyright has to change to adapt. "Change" doesn't have to mean "abolish" but it certainly means that trying to change the modern world to fit copyright is a stupid idea when we can far more sensibly change copyright to fit the modern world.
Good approach to the situation (i.e. not blaming/chiding the customer). I wonder what specifically scared him? Is the guy relatively fresh in the business world? Also, what was he expecting?

It would be nice to get that insight so you're not left guessing what might have scared him.
Not much help for people running their dev environment in a VM since running two VMs at the same time is quite horrible/impossible even on recent powerful macs.
"I used the product in the store and didn't like it" isn't "operating on prejudice." It's how people make purchasing decisions.
The key to good marketing copy
The Stars On A Shoestring: Amateur Astronauts Ignite A Grassroots Space Race
> If I need to ask a teammate a question, I turn my head slightly to the left and ask them.

Avoiding this is the primary reason I like working at home. Getting distracted by things like that are a productivity killer for me.
So, why is secretary still the top job for women?
Vim, Instinct, and Muscle Memory
> Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom?

Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with RFID scanners to verify the location of the camera and prevent any funny business. No exceptions, ever.

Also, when people ask questions they never EVER preface them with "Let me know when you have a second".

Seriously, are you in third grade? Can you read something and not interpret it literally? The Greek knew reduction to absurdity was a shitty argument more than 2,000 years ago... how come you still haven't figured it out?

From adrianhoward above:

> 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). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008
Point taken. I imagine much depends on the domain and deliverable, as to what that ratio might look like. As someone stated above, not every company is doing ground breaking work which needs the "best and brightest". But some companies might, at least in niche areas as you mentioned.

However, I know from attempting to hire even entry level engineers in sub-250k population areas, it can be very tough to even find a bare minimum candidate. I would jump at the chance to hire a rock-solid developer in a nearby city, state, or even country.
A bit old news: How to get the private ssl encryption key...
In fairness I can see it from the libpng guy's perspective. It will make their library larger and potentially less fit for a certain purpose.

Why hasn't someone forked libpng, added the apng patch and then made it available for WebKit? Then everyone is happy. Just needs a middle-man.
Convert Your Python Functions into a CLI program in A Line
If you like docopt[1], you will love Clime[2]. :P

Check out readme on the Github.

[1] docopt: https://github.com/docopt/docopt
[2] Clime: https://github.com/moskytw/clime
I've always found IETester to be a great "good enough" lightweight testing tool. No VM images to download/spin up separately or worry about expiration.
> Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik

I wouldn't be surprised if those short videos were the bulk of the GIFs around. At least of the GIFs actually used and being dormant in some long forgotten archives.
If you're doing software development without an asynchronous work pipeline in 2013 then you have a problem. Regardless of remote or local work, long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project. That being the case it makes perfect sense to optimise the pipeline around this very basic fact.

Once that is out of the way, whether you're local or remote is basically irrelevant. All the disadvantages to remote work have always centered around an insufficiently asynchronous work pipeline. I say this as someone who presently travels the world and works on a large array of projects and would never even consider a role that attempts to change that part of my life, simultaneously in the past having worked extensively in async and non async environments both local only and remote.
biased opinion here, i helped build Excel 2013.
We did a lot of investments in making it easier to work with your data. Off the top of my head here are some of the top things we did:
Flash fill : Automatically detects what you are trying to fill/parse and does it for you.
Suggest Pivottables: Select a range and ask excel to aqutomatically create a Pivot for you.
-Suggest charts: Excel suggest what type of charts work best with selected data.
Data model - Although you need Pro Plus to use powerpivot and powerview, basic functionality that "converts excel into a database" is built in. You can combine data from multiple sources and create relationships between data.
Apps for Office : A new way of programming against the productivity suite in javascript and html5
Chart enhancements: creating beautiful charts is easier and the options are more accesible.

A lot of this information is on our blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/
Twitter account: @MSEXCEL

and if your particularly inclined to data analysis and business intelligence I blast cool features and how tos on my personal account: @doppenhe