skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I posted on the 37s blog:

Management paranoia is not the only reason why someone would want to decrease the amount of remote work. There are team spirit benefits to bringing people together physically, and depending on the type of work being undertaken, remote work may have more downsides than upside.

I don’t see this as an aggression against remote workers, or an attempt at controlling remote workers more closely based on some paranoid perception that “they’re slacking” – it seems more like a change meant to help strengthen the culture at Yahoo by making it easier for teams to bond.
I recently had to burn an old fashioned eprom using a non-legacy PC and found it impossible to find a USB connected linux compatible eprom burner. Yes if you have a parallel port on your laptop (not since 2003 or so?) there's the willem programmer. Yes there's a company in .de selling a USB burner with Ubuntu software but the shipping and handling to the states was kind of extreme. Why do they charge $75 or whatever it was from .de when Seeed studios charges approx nothing from .cn? So closed source problems are hardly limited solely to high tech FPGAs. Abandoning FPGAs doesn't mean you'll eliminate closed source from your life, it just means you'll eliminate FPGAs from your life...

Also I suspect you do not have a copy of the firmware inside the microcontroller that runs your mouse, or your PC 8042 keyboard controller, or innumerable microcontrollers thru the machine, so either you are already OK with using "some" closed source or don't have a full picture of your whole system. Pessimism is your friend in this case and the situation is probably much worse than you think. I ALWAYS prioritize open source above all other criteria for obvious reasons, but when its not available I do my best with what I can get... Its an engineering background thing... Much as I'd love to ideally make everything outta aerospace carbon fiber and titanium, but lets face it, my house is made mostly outta wood and my car outta steel.
Here's a solution that merges in place without any sorting: https://gist.github.com/Mononofu/5029975

The basic idea is to use the (unused) beginning of array b as swap space for the beginning of array a. This swap space needs to be shifted around, so it's of course O(n^2). Still, it was fun to write.

If you have termcolor installed ('sudo easy_install termcolor' on ubuntu), you'll see the arrays a and b as well as the swap space highlighted in color for each step. Example: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2135523/2013022517.png
sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results

As someone who has worked independently and for others in offices and remotely, the above statement is the exact opposite of reality.

When people are in the office non-production is perversely seen as production. Where warming a seat and having lots of busy work meetings and filling white boards full of inanity is "the gears of work".

When working remotely, the sole indicator of accomplishment is actual production. All of the bullshit is pushed aside.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow.

As humorous as that is, your "heed the man" advice is quaintly archaic. A business like Yahoo is nothing but the combined work of a bunch of smart people. We've seen -- time and time again -- that many such companies are driven and succeed because of a subset of those people, so it is dangerous, dangerous ground to offend them. Because they become the upstarts that grind places like Yahoo into dust.

The world has changed. We all have the tools, the technology, the capacity to scale, the communications mediums, and the audience. It is nothing like it was.

EDIT: Places like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are by far busiest during the North American work day. These are by and large people working in offices.
You're unfortunately being down voted because others don't agree so I uprooted since you're on topic.

I was a remote employee for the last almost two years at Cheezburger with many others. We had a culture of emails not taking forever and a day to respond to and if you needed a response now you could Skype, google talk, jabbr, phone call whoever you needed.

The whole organization was committed to it.

On top of that, everyone I knew worked like mad. There were definitely pros and cons and I'm sure the pros outweighed the cons.
I checked the link to The Straight Dope about the reading comprehension tests they had conducted; turns out they hadn't conducted one at all. So I guess the author didn't read slow enough before writing.
...but you are under more pressure to produce results.

No, really, it is the opposite. You're fine as long you as you sit on your computer from 9 to 5.
Working from home, there's a constant pressure to produce actual results, because that's what you are judged by. I find it more stressful and there's more tendency to do overtime (you're already home anyway, right?).

I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

There are many ways around this, chat clients being the most obvious. Also, continuously interrupting people can be very counterproductive, specifically if you do intellectual work.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like

There's many people for which working remotely isn't actually a choice, barring a change of employer.

I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same?

I've done consulting jobs both locally and remotely, and if you ask me, in a few years time we'll consider non-remote working (when it isn't necessary for the job) a thing of foolishness.
I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to

It really depends on people/culture, but I find a shared IRC channel where people idle and are reasonably responsive to be the #1 way to have relatively friction-free quick coordination, even with people in the same building. Physical colocation is 2nd-best, email/Skype 3rd-best.

In fact, I think local is superior to remote mainly in the opposite case: where you need lengthy meetings, especially with more than two people. In that case, videoconferencing and email get unwieldy. But for routine quick queries I find IRC a lot better than walking over to someone's office, to the extent that someone local who doesn't use IRC (or isn't responsive on it) feels more distant to me than someone remote who does.
It looks like a SIMS variant played in "ASCII".
Interesting, thanks for the pointe

> What mattered, in the view of the Lords, was what could be verifiably said to have actually happened.

It would be interesting to see how "verifiably" and "actually happened" would be refined to produce a judgement. I could imagine at least refinement towards frequentist statistics, Bayesian methods, "I know it when I see it"(gut feeling, other non-quantitative standard of obviousness).
> That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company.

You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?
> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false.

I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages.

On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time.

Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear.

This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.
Too bad my shit phone hasn't had CM ported to it, so I can't try it out.
This seems like an overly broad sword to cut with though - an explicit assumption that working in the office is by definition more productive than working remote.

Employees can be unproductive in the office just as much as remote employees can be super-productive at home. Yahoo just seems to be taking the easiest to see metric for "productive".
Zuckerberg Takes a Step in the Right Direction, Backing Biotech
I believe the point being made is that it's very difficult to be assured of accuracy when applying numerical estimations to events. There is no discernable difference between the correct answer and an incorrect one, which makes the use of this technique incredibly dangerous when determining the guilt of a person in the court of law.
Follow your Passion?
Newly Discovered Comet May Impact Mars - Oct 2014
This is an excellent analysis of the situation. I generally prefer to work in the office over remote work, because it's preferable from a networking perspective, but a zero-tolerance approach to it is ridiculous.

My personal hunch is that this is a move to reduce headcount. Yahoo's top management doesn't want to put the company through a layoff, and they're not organized enough to know which projects to cut, so this is their hail-mary complexity reduction step. It's a way to shave off a few percent without having to terminate people. Unfortunately, the cultural side effects are going to be massive. It's bad for the executive image as well. "We're out of ideas."

WFH exists for sociological reasons in addition to the obvious benefits (geographic reach, lower stress levels). Engineers are smart. They know they're not all going to climb the ladder and become top dogs. Not everyone wants that, either. The right to WFH gives people the tacit ability to "grow away" to a 10-hour work week, taking pressure off the competition for visibility and rank and allowing the organization to actually function. It gives people a path whereby, instead of climbing the organizational ladder, their efficiency gains are paid back to them in the ability to retain employment with a reduced work footprint. If you're twice as efficient as a typical office drone (which is not hard) then you can work a 20-hour week.

When you go back to the ass-in-chair regime, management has more control and the social stakes are higher. People aren't going to be happy putting in 40-50 dedicated hours and not having control. To a myopic executive who thinks everyone should be like him or her, that seems like a good thing because it makes people "hungry", but it's actually dysfunctional because the competition for rank is extremely counterproductive.

Next up is the Micromanagement Death Spiral. Macroscopic underperformance leads to individual overperformance by managers, the problem being that managerial overperformance (heightened control, micromanagement) is toxicity. That will exacerbate the company's macroscopic issues and lead to more micromanagement... the vicious cycle.
I'm sure that's how the executives in charge of this boneheaded decision explain it to themselves, but try applying just a pinch of real world logic to that thought and it shrivels like a slug under salt.

Do you really think that people who have been forced to start working in the office under threat of termination are going to form a positive, collegial bond? If they form a bond at all, it will be one based on shared resentment of the Dilbert-esque reality they now inhabit.
I've been a bookworm from early age and even though I slow down when the material is highly technical and requires better comprehension I don't find the words being repeated in my head. As a matter of fact, while reading I find that while I do talk in my head, I might summarize or ask myself questions about a paragraph (stuff like: "Don't believe. Rem. check refs", like I did a few times in this article), as opposed to repeating the words I'm reading. The only moment I find I'm repeating words mentally or sub-vocalizing is when I'm writing, and I believe I do so to get the underlying tone of what I'm writing.

When I read a novel, I tend to want to spend more time immersing in the world and the events in it. While I slow myself down in this case, I tend to make images in my head while reading and I've found that it becomes inherently harder to do if I'm subvocalizing... it removes focus from the imagination side of things for me. I don't really believe that it's impossible to read without subvocalization.

In any case, one of the tricks I use to speed read at a moderate speed (as opposed to skimming) is to black out mentally everything but the current line and process it as a whole. It works like imagining a rectangle enclosing the current line. Works wonders for me taking into account I'm the fastest reading person in my social circles.
$ man su

NAME
su - change user ID or become superuser

It's not quite so simple. The meaning has changed over time.
This is an old debate, but you getting immediate responses to your queries and them getting immediate responses to their work means that you're interrupting each other when an email would've been non-intrusive.

That's basically my #1 problem where I work: we're in big open-spaces and you get interrupted all the time. Sometimes just having someone talk next to you can be enough to break your train of thought.

That being said, I agree it's very helpful to be able to talk in person sometimes. I think the solution is just something hybrid, you work remotely a certain portion of the time and get to the office for the other days.

I would be interested to hear yahoo's reason for giving up on remote work though. This article is a bit unsubstantial.
I think the distinction being made here is the difference from using statistical methods for determining overall guilt versus using statistical methods for determining specific facts about the case.

We use statistics to say that someone was or was not at the scene of a crime
(DNA testing doesn't 100% guarantee that a persons' blood is actually a match), for example. We don't make the leap that since they were there, "odds are" they did it, however.
The author asserts that the new policy is based on "flimsy foundations". How does he know if the foundations are flimsy or not? Does he have inside knowledge of the productivity of remote vs. local employees at Yahoo? Is he assuming it's the same as at 37signals? Might it not be?

He writes that Yahoo employees should be "angry" that the new policy was declared "without your consultation". How does he know there was no consultation? How does he know local employees didn't give feedback to management that the extra communication overhead with remote workers didn't create difficulties in collaboration?

He also writes that this policy change reveals that "Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not.". Why is this assumed? Why isn't it plausible that management studied the problem and found that having collaborators in disparate locations hampered progress?

The entire article seems needlessly reactionary and assumes things about the working culture at Yahoo that may not be true. Perhaps this vehement reaction is due to the fact that the author has a new book coming out advocating remote working?
Looking for scheme article
I am looking for a blog article that went into great detail about scheme, basically explaining it to a newbie why it is so great. The author seemed to really have understood what scheme was about. Do you know what I am talking about?
The hardest question on the Y Combinator application
In Java, it seems to work, but in C (gcc 4.6.3) it doesn't. a ends up unchanged, since the first instance of b contains the original value of a when evaluated. Not sure why Java evaluates it the way it does.
First make it work. Then make it elegant. Then make it fast.

DF is at stage 1 now, and I think it's very reasonable to postpone ui polishing and optimisations till all the features are in place. Otherways he would need to constantly rewrite optimizations and the structures that allows speeding the game up, to kep up with new features. Which will take much longer in the end, and could kill his enthusiasm, ending the project.
I'm finding the swinging karma quite humorous to watch, in any case.

I agree mostly with your point, but the problem is this - the gargantuan size of the company leads to problems, there are always going to be a couple of ass holes who sneak under the radar, the people who do the minimum amount of work possible, working from wherever they want and being paid for it. It's a shame that the actions of these people can make employers naturally suspicious of hiring people to work remotely when I'm sure most are decent and hard working.
I didn't bother to read the original announcement but this line stands out for me:

it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices

Seems to be a statement that good collaboration is only possible when employees occupy the same physical space.

Yahoo has offices across the glove, don't they? Are they going to also ban teams/employees in different offices from working together?
I'm by no means saying I want the game spoonfed to its players with "press X to win" cutscenes, but I do think it could take some steps toward usability, that's all.

Also, what is a "serious gamer"? What does that even mean?
I love that executable markdown style.
I created a project some time ago that does just that. For the records, here it is: https://github.com/mikaa123/lilp
From the article:

Even skimmers subvocalize key words. This is detectable, even among speed readers who think they don't do it, by the placement of electromagnetic sensors on the throat which pick up the faint nerve impulses sent to the muscles. Our brains just don't seem to be able to completely divorce reading from speaking. NASA has even built systems to pick up these impulses, using them to browse the web or potentially even control a spacecraft. Chuck Jorgensen, who ran a team at NASA in 2004 developing this system, said:

"Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement. A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly, it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal chords do receive speech signals from the brain."
I just started learning about Make today, but according to the other comments in this post, there are lots of differences, like incremental builds and parallelism. It also checks things like file modification dates and whatnot.
> I hear that juries are selected for emotionality and not rationality

The case the parent was talking about took place in the Netherlands. I don't think they even use juries in the Netherlands (though I could be wrong about that).

Even in the UK -- the jurisdiction the article is about -- juries are purely random. We don't do the American practice of lawyers from both sides being able to reject jurors for their own reasons (as opposed to an actual good reason like their knowing the defendant, and the judge makes the decision on that).
At my company, we have a place called Quarantone, where people can go not to be disturbed for a couple of hours, that aside, if you are at your desk, it generally means that contact is fine :)
Working from home is boring. I spent 1 1/2 years working from home but now much prefer working in my client's office with the team. It seems no one else is either willing to admit this, or I am the only one who prefers the social interactions and the ability to resolve and issue face-to-face in 2 minutes rather than struggling on Skype, or waiting for emails.
What's the point of finding the trillionth number in pi? The same is implied here. We do things, just because we can.
I'd like to see ratio between remote and office employees for 37signals. My bet is they're not, contrary to the popular belief, mostly remote-work company.
So an Ubuntu phone?
All of the comments I keep reading that criticize this decision assume that the A-players were working from home, and that the A-players will hate the decision. Possibly true.

But a lot of the anonymous internal feedback was that over the years, previous management had filled Yahoo up with B-players. If that's true, I can easily imagine that there's quite a large overlap between those who work from home and the B-players. It's such an easy way to slack off if you're not motivated or capable. And nowhere do I read people saying, "Hey, maybe this was what the situation was." I only read people saying, "Yahoo is boneheaded for not respecting their people." Let's consider all the possibilities.
This is how I'm trying to get access to Google Glass: "Dogs using Google Glass"
This would be a great question for rejecting an otherwise qualified job candidate ...
One Minute Adviser: Give up something for Lent
I think a mandate having everyone work from home for a month would be more telling at who the real producers are. This would force succinct communication and everything is on the record. Working remotely forced you to communicate in a more transparent way and actually gives a good manager more evidence to judge an employee by. Of course counting hours is easier for a manager to do.
The question in R v T that Bayes theorem was being applied to was a specific, factual one: whether a footprint could have been made by a particular shoe.
Mozilla was very clever to partner with a big mobile telecom operator early on. Through Telefonica we're seeing good acceptance by OEM! I'm looking to see a Sony's equipment running Firefox OS than an Alcatel or ZTE... Still I'm looking forward for Ubuntu Touch and Jolla's Sailfish but is there enough market for everyone?
As far as I can tell, the "Ubuntu Touch" bit is just a generic set of ARM-binaries running on top of a standard Android Linux-kernel without the traditional Android GUI, user-land and bits which the user normally interacts with. HAL, drivers and all that which interacts with the actual hardware still comes from the Android-base.

This means that most devices which already has a open-source Android-implementation (like AOSP or Cyanogenmod) can easily have the Android user-land ripped out and Ubuntu thrown in on top instead. Right now that is a shitload of devices.

As far as that makes Ubuntu its "own" OS or not might be a interesting discussion (1), but it's definitely a pragmatic solution and has clearly paid off with regard to getting a product to market.

(1) The same discussion can clearly be had for Android vs Linux. (2)

(2) Which in retrospect gives us the interesting case of a standard Linux (Ubuntu touch) built on top of a non-standard Linux (Android) to emulate a standard Linux (Ubuntu) in the first place. Turtles all the way down :)
The Oscars on Social Media Visualized
Actually studies suggest that for "knowledge workers" like programmers 25 minutes is the average amount of time it takes to recover from an interruption to a task. So half an hour lost to an interruption isn't that bad an estimate. Anecdotally I've certainly had times deep into debugging complex problems where an interruption has needed a lot longer than 30 minutes to recover from.
I worked a year from home and came to similar conclusions. It was fun for the first month or so, but after that I was missing the face-to-face conversations, the happy hours and the general "buzz" of an office.
What use is theoretical "20mbps" if the real speed that you get isn't even suitable for youtube?