skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is exactly right. It is easy to measure 'time in chair', but that isn't a metric of productivity. Productivity is harder to measure so 'time in chair' is often the substitute.

When you work remotely you don't have 'time in chair' as a proxy for productivity so you have no choice but to prove yourself through your output.

When in an office you can stare at the wall all day and have it considered "work".

Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people do not have the self-discipline. Don't allow those people to work remotely or don't hire them at all.

There are other benefits to working in the same meat-space: culture, easy collaboration, etc. I don't believe pressure to produce results is one of them. I also think that most of those advantages are disappearing or gone with chat, email, skype, google hangouts, and other collaboration solutions.
The quotes are contradictory. The Bayesian approach agrees with the second and disagrees with the first.

I suppose you could weasel in some sort of consistency about the wording ... something like "You cannot properly say there is a 25 percent chance that something has happened, but you can properly say you believe there is a 25 percent chance that something has happened." OK, fine, but what's the difference? You still assign a percent probability to the chance that something happened, and you still rule on the basis of those beliefs. Or do you? (It's not clear to me from those quotes.)
Definitely not at the cutting edge of phone design either.
There are plenty of successful founders who didn't quit their jobs immediately to work on their startup. Not everybody has that luxury. Maybe you meant to limit your comment specifically to YC startups?
Apparently using Vumi.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_over_SMS_%26_USSD

http://vumi.org
> Working for home is not for everyone but for some of us its speeds us up not slows us down. The days I go into the office for meetings are the days I get nothing real done.

It seems like you've drawn a particular conclusion from this, but I think you are missing an entirely different one. If you "don't get anything done" every time you come in to the office, that would suggest there is something more important than your individual "getting things done" that doesn't get addressed when you aren't in the office. When you are there, taking advantage of the opportunity to address this exceeds the value of what I'm sure most people would describe as your primary job function.

> Here and in all the remote-working threads people come along to say it doesn't work and that you need to sit together to be a team. Well, I guess these are inexperienced people who haven't worked out how to do it effectively is all.

I would agree with this. Obviously remote working can work. That isn't to say that there aren't trade offs. There absolutely are. Like all trade offs, the exchange is a bargain for some contexts and an unacceptable price for others.
Annoyance-Driven Development
Volkswagen to Unveil 261 M.P.G.e. Production Car
The rise of the quantified-self; and what it means for your organisation
I'm generally a fan of 37 Signals and the way they treat their people. I also don't have any knowledge about any of this other than what I come across on the internet. My current company doesn't have a set WFH policy, it varies by department and sometimes seems hypocritical when you realize that there are overseas contractors. This is my disclaimer.

I disagree with this post. From everything that I understand from what I've read it seems like one of the major issues at Yahoo is a culture thing. This doesn't seem so much like a trust thing to me. It comes across to me as a way to rebuild an identity by changing the environment and you can't control the environment when people don't come in to the office.

It does seem to me like there is potential to lose some good employees up front, for sure. I don't assume this decision is a short term move. Whenever management makes a decision that is more restrictive, or against popular opinion, there is always out lash. Then it dies down. New people start and it's the only thing they know so it's not a big deal.

The people are going to be the ones who change the company, and to change their mindsets, and reinvigorate them it seems like a culture change would be a good thing in the long run. The current policy clearly isn't working, how bad could this really be?

I love the idea of working from home, being independent and working autonomously, but it has its place. It's situational at best and this might be the perfect example of a place where it's not currently working. This by no means is saying that it doesn't work for 37 Signals. It seems to work fantastically for them and for many of the customers who use their software. I loved Rework, and I'm definitely looking forward to Remote.

Not everything is black and white.
Microsoft Completes Journey To Big Data Through Hadoop
The first two methods don't.
I may have missed it, but what features exactly does this have over Vim?
What differentiates hard evidence from circumstantial evidence? It comes down to the probabilities, which in turn comes down to statistics.
A couple observations about this situation:

Yahoo will likely be better off with a an all local workforce. Having spent time working both locally and remotely myself, being local and present with the rest of the team has significant benefits.

That said, the personal costs for the employees in question are likely to be very high, particularly for those that telecommute from places that aren't in driving range of the Yahoo office. My hope is that Yahoo is treating these people as gently as they can.

> Companies like Google and Apple can get away with more restrictive employment policies because they’re at the top of their game and highly desirable places to work. -DHH

The causality my be wrong here... it may not be the goodness of the employer that enables the restrictive employment policy, it may be the restrictive employment policy that enables the goodness of the employer.
The article describes a hypothesis based on probable distribution of the essential precursors, it's not a discovery, and there is no observation of "A natural nuclear reactor on Mars".

The problem is not the article, the problem is that the submitter wrote his own title.

The article's title: "EVIDENCE FOR A LARGE, NATURAL, PALEO-NUCLEAR REACTOR ON MARS"

This submission's title: "A natural nuclear reactor on Mars"

Imagine how simple murder trials could be if lawyers were allowed to do this.
I do not understand the general uproar against this. I have been working remote alot in my life and i find its not the ideal way to work productive for me and it certainly isnt the ideal way to build a great working culture.

Its more like everyone cooking their own meal, communication is hardly ever as good as it should be in remote teams and you are just more disconnected from the core.

Personally i like my time alone and i get alot of stuff done in less time, but i enjoyed sitting in an office with 4 other engineers alot more. It was alot more fun and not alot less productive, if at all... Working remotely from home makes me feel alone after a few weeks now, i might even call it depressed.

While i think working remotely for some time (1-2 days a week) is awesome, i dont see the future of work as being remote only... I dont want to mix private with work life too much, which happens alot when working from home and i want to feel relaxed at home and not always think about getting back to my desk to get some more work done. And i know alot of people that think the same.
Oh.

I was really hoping 'literate' meant you could read the code.
There's a difference between a development environment and the code that runs in a random device...

The problem is not just closed source software (which I don't like and try not to use) but a lack of documentation of the architecture and bitstream formats. I program for a living, but wouldn't for the life of me work with a closed source compiler for an unknown architecture with no/incomplete documentation. Many people may be ok with this though (see for example, some shader compilers for embedded GPUs).

There's a reason processor manufactures release all info about instructions sets and that in turn allows a lot of projects like gcc, llvm, v8, luajit, etc. to support them.

I would think that opening up the details of this technology would spur a lot of innovation regarding FPGAs and HDLs, both in academia and in the industry.
I had always equated sub-vocalize and "hear" the words. What is the difference?
Can you? If the situation was truly bad at Yahoo, I can't. That if is an important if, of course, but the question stands.
... The good thing is you want to learn, and that’s all that matters.

That's the best advice to anyone: never stop learning. Working hard isn't always fun, but it's - in my opinion - the best way to succeed.
I used the coursebook Breakthrough Speedreading successfully in teaching myself the technique a number of years ago. Though all arguments here about nuance and critical thinking also were nagging in the back of my mind then, the actual reason that made me drop it was actually reading another book on an unusual technique: Relearning to See on the Bates method.

The Bates Method emphasizes that one of the worst offenders to natural vision is staring, or the act of fixing a point and relying on peripheral vision to capture a much bigger area. Relearning to See is in big part about relearning to skip, like animals do, when they constantly move their eyes and heads to scan the environment or an object. And speedreading was at odds with this, because it emphasized you should fix your vision on some center point in the page and allow your peripheral vision to gobble up the surrounding text, and you need not even do it sequentially, you should get to the point where you "understand" the image of the page as a whole. That's the bill, anyway. So I opted for natural vision (and comprehension).
I worked for Yahoo in the years surrounding the Microsoft debacle. Let me tell you in no uncertain terms that Yahoo was the worst company I worked for.

I had very little work to do. Period. End of statement. I spent most of my time doing practically nothing except playing ping pong and foosball and getting paid for it. A lot of my coworkers and a lot of Yahoos were in the same boat. Needless to say, that once the Microsoft acquisition failed and the layoffs started happening, most of us were out of there.

On top of that, there was very much a prima donna attitude around Yahoo, with a great deal of self-entitlement. I remember a couple of threads on devel-random complaining about the lack of ping pong balls, and how that insulted us as Yahoos since it meant that management didn't trust us. Oh the humanity of not providing everyone with $2 worth of ping pong balls!

Yahoo was filled with lazy workers, and an extremely fat layer of lazy management. I vaguely remember Rasmus running a script that calculated around 70 employees per VP. As well, the internal politics at Yahoo was astounding. One of my friends worked on an iPhone app on his own free time, and when he tried to get approval, it was held up for months because people were arguing over things like color schemes, and which group should own the app. It was pathetic.

I like what Marisa Mayer is doing. I think by getting rid of some privileges like remote working, it is enforcing a discipline that hasn't been at Yahoo, at least during the years that I was there. Showing up to work is a small price to pay for being paid a great wage and having the opportunity to work for what will hopefully become a first class company again. People need to show up and work and interact with their peers, instead of hiding at home and people not knowing wtf is going on with them. Sure, some people will quit, but quite bluntly, anyone worth their salt would have already left Yahoo by now. Anyone who is happy working in the environment that was Yahoo over the past 5 years is not an A player by any stretch, so it's safe to assume that you can afford to lose them.
That's not an ad hominem, it's pointing out a relevant conflict of interest. DHH is heavily invested in promoting remote work arrangements. It doesn't invalidate his arguments, it does help explain why he's flying off the handle over this.
I really like this article. The phrasing is so good that I can imagine myself sitting at the computer and staring at the weird ASCII characters.
Yea it's very simple but in an interview environment I probably would have over thought this. (I guess that's the point though)
If you're comfortable with PHP I'll give you some contracting work today.
Collie - High Performance Animation Library for Javascript
It looks very promising when I can code from anywhere. I'm also enjoying the nice, clean IDE UI.
Chromebook Pixel review
Your priority isn't everyone else's priority. The luxury you exercise in walking over and disturbing someone to enlist them to help you fix your problem comes at a price of latency to them in how long it takes them to get back on task after you walk away happy that you got your problem fixed and that you had a social interaction.
I don't think this is limited to women. I suffer from this "syndrome" too. I went to work at one startup several years ago (geez almost a decade now) where I was surrounded by the most brilliant developers I had ever encountered. Definitely my experience wasn't up to par, but they hired me anyways. To combat the imposter syndrome, I worked my tail off learning all I could about their architecture and filling in my programming gaps. I'd like to say the imposter feeling goes away, but even today I get twangs of it when confronted by other brilliant developers (male and female BTW).
Sure, running too taxing software on unaccelerated hardware is a bad thing. But webOS wasn't slow. It had sporadic slowdown and then it really was slow, but in normal state it sure could compete speedwise.

It was buggy, the scrolling felt slow because the settings were wrong (as proven by the buttah-patch), same for the animations, the default-browser lacks html5-support, the connectivity of the phones is bad, pages often don't load without a reason even when on wlan (and when not, it often fails to fetch a slowly loading page bit for bit, which was made even worse because the browser would reload that page the moment it was loaded because he was inactive too long(!)) - it wasn't performance that was the issue here.

So maybe LG really can take the system and make something out of it. The tile-system sure could work on TVs designed to be used with a remote-touchpad-controller.
Show HN: Speedproject to display books I have read  in 2013.
I was inspired by Arron Swartz's post: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2011 and Harper Reed's collection: https://harperreed.org/books to start tracking what I read as well.

This is my attempt: http://crismannoble.github.com/tabula/

Feedback welcome.
clickable: http://crismannoble.github.com/tabula/
It does stand for super user. The article cites the su.c code from 1975.
I'm just like you. I don't sub-vocalize or hear words when reading and I can consequently read significantly faster than people speak (I'm assuming most people read at this rate if they're 'hearing' words -- though I'm actually not sure).

I have the exact same experience with character names -- that's a great example.
That's interesting. I work for a Telco company and we track inventory without stickers. I know we did; but not anymore.

Instead we have a CMDB (change management / inventory database) which tracks all items related to the business (like a router, user, link, or vpn connection).

For laptops, cellphones, etc. we track manufacturer serial numbers (which relates to support contracts). To avoid theft we use vendor tracking/remote disable/erase.

I hope this helps.
Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds
I agree, you are probably not ready to do a startup if you struggle to answer this question.

I believe it wouldn't be an immediate rejection but a strong warning indicator. If a founder is not willing to commit to their startup full time, the startup is going to fall apart when all hell breaks loose. Founders that are half committed may have strong disagreements with each other when there is a conflict of interest (eg: too much time spent doing his full time job while working on the startup). Disagreement between founders can kill a startup.

I suggest the author to find a full time job or work at another startup first. Do a startup when the time is right and you saved up enough money.

If you decide do the startup, don't look back. Be committed to your decision.
Former Obama advisor argues Comcast is a threat to the open Internet
Perhaps they're useful as interview questions insofar as eliciting whether the applicant understands why it's not a good idea.

One does not understand an opposing view unless one can give a convincing argument for that view, then tear it apart. I usually apply this to politics & philosophy, but it applies to engineering too: X is a clever approach, but subject to limitations Y. In this case, understanding that more information exists somewhere than is obvious shows insight ... and articulating the limitations of that concept demonstrates superior knowledge. It's not about swapping numbers, it's about how much information can be crammed into two variables and their metadata.
I hate puzzles too, but that's primarily because I never know the answers :) On a serious note though, it is quite possible that companies use puzzles as a screening technique because they are not looking for you. Specifically, they are looking for not you.

Think about it, a big company needs an employee that would join them and work for at least 18 months in order to pay back the costs of hiring, but preferably stay for 3-4-5 years... as many as years as possible, if this is a good hacker we are talking about. Hiring someone who's likely to leave in 6 months is counter productive for a large company, and puzzles is one way to keep you away.

You'd have to ask someone who was at Facebooks and Googles in their early days and see if the hiring was based on puzzles. I suspect in those times a lot of decisions were made in much similar ways to how you'd want to do it now. Puzzles are not the answer, and large companies would probably agree with you too, but it's a tool that seems to work best for them and it's scalable to achieve a consisten outcome over a long term horizon. Precisely what large companies need.
I think that what the other guy was arguing against was your buddy saying "Oh, I'm sure it's just a sinus infection" when you actually have a brain tumor. People tend to be optimistic when it's not their asses on the line. While I wouldn't say advice from others is worthless, it can do more harm than good in specific scenarios.
I suppose he meant Android is not what Stallman would call GNU/Linux (and could actually be called Android/Linux if you will). See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#linuxsyswithoutgnu
I don't think working remotely scales.

Scales to what? I don't understand how this argument can be made when most companies have multiple, globally distributed offices, which turns their workforce effectively remote on the grand scale.

On all on-site jobs I've done so far, the remote offices were effectively other companies as far as communicating is concerned. People who're used to in-face communication have a huge barrier to overcome. This is a big difference from working remote, where it doesn't matter, because the communication channels are set up.

I simply don't see how this claim can stand even basic scrunty.

Firstly, working from an office doesn't not exclude a flexible work schedule. I've gone through phases where I don't get into work until 3pm.

This works fine until something urgent comes up and a meeting is called at 11am, and management wonders why you are "late". Maybe Google is better at avoiding this than your average company, but maybe at some point in your career you'll find they're not :)

The rest of your argument is either very questionable (false negatives are OK as long as the result is positive - a more positive result is better than a barely positive one), or very squishy (camaraderie, team cohesion, culture) with no hard data to back it up, so no point in arguing over it.
wow. Err, what may I ask do you use?
Proof that you can read without subvocalization are ideographic languages such as Chinese (especially the traditional variety), where the written text and the 'vocalization' are not directly related - it is possible to understand a passage of text based on the relation of the characters to each other and the appearance of characters themselves (e.g. the radicals used and the parts within) without actually knowing how each character is pronounced.
A different, in my opinion more sane, way to look at these things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8B6DRsw4_o

and

A good way of finding out who won a war, who lost a war, and what the war was about, is to ask who's cheering and who's depressed after it's over - this can give you interesting answers.

So, for example, if you ask that question about the Second World War, you find out that the winners were the Nazis, the German industrialists who had supported Hitler, the Italian Fascists and the war criminals that were sent off to South America - they were all cheering at the end of the war. The losers of the war were the anti-fascist resistance, who were crushed all over the world. Either they were massacred like in Greece or South Korea, or just crushed like in Italy and France. That's the winners and losers. That tells you partly what the war was about.

Now let's take the Cold War: Who's cheering and who's depressed? Let's take the East first. The people who are cheering are the former Communist Party bureaucracy who are now the capitalist entrepreneurs, rich beyond their wildest dreams, linked to Western capital, as in the traditional Third World model, and the new Mafia. They won the Cold War. The people of East Europe obviously lost the Cold War; they did succeed in overthrowing Soviet tyranny, which is a gain, but beyond that they've lost - they're in miserable shape and declining further. If you move to the West, who won and who lost? Well, the investors in General Motors certainly won. They now have this new Third World open again to exploitation - and they can use it against their own working classes. On the other hand, the workers in General Motors certainly didn't win, they lost. They lost the Cold War, because now there's another way to exploit them and oppress them and they're suffering from it.

-- Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May 1994
ابراج اليوم - ابراج يوم الاثنين 2013/2/25 حظك ليوم الاثنين 2013/2/25
Printed sheet harvests energy from body heat
A Response to 'What Games Are: Consoles Are Sinking. Get To The Lifeboats'
oh well, another round of editor wars :/
The main point DHH article wasn't a debate about whether co-located or distributed teams are better or more efficient. The article states that Yahoo does not have a management team in place that they can trust to supervise a remote team.

If the people overseeing the work teams have to resort to making sure that everyone is in their seats for roll call in order to manage them, Yahoo has some much deeper problems than remote workers that need to be addressed.
Yandex Opens App Store for Android
Russian search engine Yandex deals Google a punch, debuts alternative Android app store. All apps in the Yandex.Store app pool are verified by Kaspersky Lab. Before being published, each new app submitted to Yandex.Store is checked for malware.