skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tend to enjoy the open plan. Our team has currently voluntarily moved to an open space within an otherwise cubicle-dominated workplace to facilitate better communication within the team. I can see issues with this layout when multiple teams are involved or team sizes are large, but I really like it for our small team (and I'd like to think the rest of the team would agree). I also feel like there definitely needs to be "individual spaces" where you can go and be not interrupted for a while, which we currently do not have. A flexible work schedule would probably do just as well.

Maybe it depends on the team and the personality types in it?
Just make a consistent snapshot of your data (I'm using UFS snapshots), point Tarsnap at it, and you're good to go.

You're using the --snaptime option, right? It's necessary when you're backing up a filesystem snapshot in order to work around a race condition with them -- if a file is modified, the filesystem snapshot is created, and then the file is modified again, all within a single time quantum, it can trick Tarsnap into thinking that the file hasn't been modified later (which triggers an optimization of "this must be the same blocks as it was last time" in place of the usual "read the file and split it into blocks" behaviour).

Finally, compression and deduplication is amazing:

Well, if we're going to be posting statistics here...

Total size Compressed size
All archives 269 TB 121 TB
(unique data) 177 GB 72 GB

That's 269 TB of data backed up from my laptop, deduplicated and compressed down to 72 GB. This is what I get for taking a backup of my entire home directory every hour...
Curious, do you get much sun? Vitamin D definciency commonly results in sickly people too.
I wrote my favorite function ever last semester with itertools! It (roughly) lazily generates a list of dictionaries that map players to their moves for all possible moves. It turns out you can do that with a chain of combinations, two cartesian products, and an imap: https://github.com/shargoj/acquire/blob/master/gametree.py#L...
WebRTC clients should be encrypted and secure, since it's P2P communication.
Ask HN: What Are The Biggest Angel Investor Problems?
I did a bit of playing with the client. Once you generate an address under the 'Your Identities' tab, right click and select 'Special Address behaviour' and have it 'Behave as a pseudo-mailing-list address'.

Here's a test one if you feel like trying it out: BM-2DCGcvGwvGUr7yYSzWWa6rBrVok8mM7HtK

I don't think the name matters but I called it 'kruhft-list'.
> I don't even want to know on what planet mob lynchings and indignation at the brutalization of a defenseless individual are the same thing, just "anger"

It is the planet Earth, your home, and it is not as simple as you wish it were.

Men who do and wish violence upon others -- and women, but mostly men -- claim to for various reasons: money, power, fun. But it's blatantly obvious that we live in a universe where escalation to violence is almost never the best way to attain your desires.

But us mammals, we grew up in a much more dangerous world. We grew a brain function to overrule our own better judgment, to make us look tough when we feel our weakest, to make us fight when we would retreat. Anger is the feeling of wanting to do violence and not knowing why, because there was no time to ask questions.

But we have time now. Something unconscionable has happened, and we should ask questions like "How do we fix the damage? Why did this happen? What could we have done?" But anger seizes the thoughts of men -- and women, but mostly men -- and transforms this into: "Who should suffer for this?"

Of course, no one in this thread is going to raise their hand because of this (nor, I imagine, does anyone here have anything more productive to do). But I'm not asking anyone here to change their behavior; just to think on it.
You could use the CharSequence interface http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/CharSeque...
Obama's Gitmo Problem
People can harm your life. Abuse runs wild off-grid, and wherever technology walls and kills us evilly, equally human beings do something suffering by having no tools to fight back.

Tech is anti-harm and or technodeadly gun. Lack / control in context means fighting to give programming our lives more than a technical meaning.

If we want psychotechnological tools bridging heart and online, we need to find time to talk more than power and paranoia, and add more mentally healthy methods to our programming commits.

Commitments to giving technology a meaning as a lifeline, begins with supporting deeper programming, deprogramming technicality and nuance left out by profit.

Deprogramming psychotechnological tools sciencing ideas of power for people who hurt, is real.

A major technical problem, life's reality problem..

Tooling real life guns v. life aware tools, together, finds us interconnecting unit-tests with reality-tests with reality-cared..

Psychotechnological tools can care to remember and understand, as well as dominate and aggress, so is it maybe about balancing complex emotions - with complex problems - with complex technical gears?

Wearing Glass can be caring as well as wearing Glass can be baring.

So real as I fear technology, I fear people without technical senses, so I feel we need equally care.

Maybe technology can be more sensitive .. so maybe people can be more sensitive?
Which makes you wonder why they are interested in it, anyway, doesn't it?
Unless it's in a URL. (This is why URL-safe Base64 versions exist... Which can then in turn be inappropriate for other places.)
In the film Surrogates, there's a device that, when discharged on 'avatars', kills the real person operating the avatar. I wonder if cyber warfare of the future entails this kind of thing. I would assume that being physically connected to a(n implanted) device would allow for this but, then again, non-implanted technology has been known to cause photosensitive epilepsy (like the Pokeman seizures).
Doesn't everyone who uses a laptop as main machine? at Reed Elsevier I had a docking station and two monitors separate mouse and a full sized keyboard.

There are good H&S reasons for having docking stations real monitors and keyboard.
Most hybrids with a larger battery (as this one) also have a charging port. I think what they do is start the test with a fully charged battery and never count the energy in that. So you get the first 40 miles or so free until the motor kicks in to recharge the battery again (which is where they then start counting the gasoline consumed).
Going Overboard:  Keep IT or Dump it?
What do you mean "becomes"? J. Edgar Hoover actually did use his power to persecute political dissidents. I say this whole FBI backdoor/legal intercept thing reeks of trying to do that sort of thing again.

I mean, it's pretty easy to monitor Quaker anti-war activists: they do everything publically and invite participation politely. No agency needs wiretap access to monitor them. So, who are they going to monitor with this?
All speech has an effect otherwise no one would bother talking. The question is not whether it has an effect, but whether it causes enough harm to justify stopping it. Older than the fire in the theater example (which if I remember rightly comes from a supreme court case in the US) is John Stuart Mill:

>An opinion that corndealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

But he then of course gives one of the most brilliant defenses of free speech in all circumstances other than direct harm ever written. Do you think this is going to cause direct harm?
I love how crazy fast your site is on my slow browser (chrome on iOS seems to drag when you've got 100+ tabs). I'm starting a blog network as a side project and setting it up as Jekyll for exactly this kind of performance.

Also love the honest assessment that in your repo's description that your setup is "far more neckbeard and far more work" :)
Yes, commenting on HN from starbucks is quite doable.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does duplicated in this context mean? Multiple copies of the same file?
You're wrong. At least in France, education is free (well, almost, we have something like 200€ / year of administrative fees), for foreigners too. Depending on which school/uni you enter, you might even get a stipend and/or a room.
Making string abstract or creating new string subtypes does not solve the underlying problem: Your type system isn't good enough.

Now what I say this, let be clear: I'm talking about everybody's type systems. That goes for you Haskell-ers too. And the post-Haskell rocket surgeons doing crazy advanced typing insanity.

Type systems are abstractions. The ones you are used to, like the Java-ish OOP ones or the ML/Haskell functional ones, are designed to detect and prevent a wide variety of programming errors, while also enabling analysis that will improve execution performance. However, there are many sorts of "type systems" that solve different problems.

- There are tree schemas for validation and data generation.

- There are database schemas for indexing and query planning.

- There are grammars for parsing and validating languages.

- There are contracts for ensuring preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.

- The list goes on for quite a while.

The idea that you can assign a single named type in a single kind of type system to a value and 100% verify the correctness of your software is just bogus. You need optional and pluggable type systems, so that you can bring a particular type system to meet a particular problem.
CEOs storm Washington
So all the good guys who could disinfect the system from within should just turn down the chance and ensure only bad guys get into the position of power and authority?
I have worked in just about every office configuration imaginable: open office (my current job), everyone gets their own office, and cubicles.

Despite everyone hating them, I actually think cubicles are the best arrangement. The cubicle walls offer separation and let people focus and get more work done, but not so much that they stifle collaboration and communication (which everyone having their own office does).

Open office is by far the worst, I actually really hate it. So distracting, noisy, and for sure the least productive.
Open plan is all about the brogrammer macho bullshit. The idea is that if you can't deal with 10+ hours of being on edge due to vertigo-inducing noise and open-back visibility, you're too old/lazy/weak to write code. It's total nonsense and the sooner that attitude dies, the better.
His name is "Alan." I'm not sure how you managed to copy-paste that improperly.
How do you expect these companies to operate in the US while defying US laws?
I feel like I'm the only one that feels this way, but I far prefer open plan. I used to work at somewhere that had offices for everyone and I hated it. Maybe it's more productive, but it makes going to work hell since you don't see anyone the entire day. I much prefer having a more social environment where you can actually talk to people.

And good open plan offices will give you nooks and crannies to get away from the noise when you want to.
The FBI can already do this in restaurants. They can ask the owner to tap a table (or set of tables). How many owners do you think would deny this request? This is essentially what the FBI is requesting.

The post office does allow anonymous senders, but not receivers. Mail can be intercepted, although evidence of tampering maybe harder to conceal.
The difference is that if you plot a crime in a restaurant, there are potentially dozens of sources of evidence linking you to the meeting: patrons and servers might see you, security cameras might record you, people might see you drive there, a credit card bill might link you to a meeting there, etc. If the same crime is planned in a chat room, the only thing police may have to go on is logs hosted by the intermediate service provider. Technology makes the real-time communication more anonymous and less traceable than was practical in the past. Even postal mail, besides not being real-time, isn't as anonymous as electronic communications without the possibility of obtaining logs via a warrant.

The focus of privacy activists is in my opinion misplaced. People want an internet that's never monitored, never recorded, never wire-tappable. That's never going to happen, nor is it apparent that it's desirable. What we want is something that preserves the scope of investigative powers that have historically existed with the telephone system. That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.
Would love to also see a follow-up piece about getting a job in Paris
I actually quite like that, although usually when I have a large conditional like that I just give it named boolean variables to make it read more like a sentence, IE:

bool exists = b != nil;
bool sameType = b->qid.type == a->qid.type;
bool samePath = b->qid.path == a->qid.path;
...
if(exists && sameType && samePath) {
}

It's also a lot easier to inspect in a debugger, as all the conditions appear in the locals list.
well said, thanks for posting
I Was A Child Without a Future
Good point.

You might say that this kind of thing validates a particular way of thinking for people who already lean that way.

It's not likely to inspire rape, but it has the potential to reinforce a negative perspective of women.
John Taylor Gatto[1] was a huge early influence for me. You are right about the religious saturation in the homeschool world. They paved the way (legally), so I respect that, but there is a lot more opportunity in home education outside of religious exclusion.

The time we get together is amazing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love the fact that they can spend a Thursday building Lego and making stop motion animations, and it is an acceptable educational activity.

They get a lot of social time too. People generally worry about that, but it hasn't been an issue.

[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
I'm not sure I can do anything at all for Papua New Guinea. Not to sound callous, but I'm more worried about the state-sanctioned torture and killing that takes place much closer to my home. It is the very people whom we have entrusted with power to provide consequences who get away with these things -- in fact the violence and suffering inflicted often takes the form of those consequences themselves!

So I really hope we can do better than "there should be consequences".
This is why I don't accept BTC yet -- unless the exchange rate settles down I'm only going to be able to do it via a service which lets me say "I want X USD; make it happen".

Coinbase comes close -- the only thing they don't do is allow me to specify at run-time how many USD I want; for some odd reason they need you to "create a button" with an API call before displaying that button on your site, which is a pain to deal with when you have variable payment amounts.
Ask HN: Python web programming without a framework?
I have some experience with Python scripting, but have only created web apps with PHP. I do NOT want to use a framework due to a few problems it may cause. So can I use Python to create web apps without a framework? Is it worth it?
Not necessarily. We have examples of amber that have survived millions of years, but that does not mean every sample of amber has survived.
I gave a talk on this topic [1], and about 60% of the audience was cheering and totally for this. But I got a small number of people coming up afterwards and saying they much preferred open plan. So I think there's definitely a downside: developers enjoy work less because it's less social, and less collaborate. I think overall the benefit is there though.

Does anyone know how much it costs to have private offices all round? My estimate was that a 1sqft/yr is $55 in SF right now, so the 100-150sqft for 1 open plan desk is $700, and you might need twice as much space to give people (small) private offices. Would love something more accurate though.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYk1YkCRuKQ&t=43m17s
Multiple copies of a file, or parts of a file. These can be spatial (your archive contains an SVN checkout, so there's an extra copy of every file in the .svn/pristine directory) or temporal (you take regular backups, and many of the files haven't changed very much from one backup to the next).
Google's Excellent Plan To Bring Wireless Internet To Developing Countries
So he wears eye protection when using tools, but not when test-firing a homemade AK-47? Idiot.
As someone who is regularly exposed to these types of decisions, I don't think cost is the reason. Everyone recognizes that engineers are more expensive than office space. Private offices result in engineers getting more done but working on the wrong things, or solving problems in slightly the wrong way. The goal is to expose developers to the organization more so they have a stronger sense of what users/customers value, and can make better decisions.

As a rough guess, optimal business value in an enterprise software company probably results from engineers spending 20-40% of their time with users/product managers/other stakeholders and 60-80% of their time actually programming/designing/working with other developers. These numbers are highly imprecise and depend on circumstances, but they're probably in the right order of magnitude.

The issue with private offices is that in my experience many engineers will prefer to spend 95% of their time engineering and just 5% of their time understanding the problem. As a result they build more features but the features are significantly less valuable. 2-3 person offices seems to mitigate that pretty well, while open plan offices seem to go way too far in the other direction.
This has been legal for a very long time, and is the cause of approximately no violence. Much as with the discussion of 3d printed firearms, it's not so much that the behaviors of gun owners and gun builders has changed as it is that the prevailing discourse in the political arena and the news is different.

The author refrains from espousing an opinion in the piece, but only just, and frankly I disagree with him. The rifles created at build parties don't cause crime. Violence in general is falling, and "gun crime" with it. Occasional, prominent tragedies are emotionally shattering, but making policy based on emotion has served us poorly for decades.

Relevant previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019586
I hate to sound like I'm trivializing your disorder, but have you tried a good pair of closed-ear headphones? I sit in a room of 40 or 50 chatty computer folks, and everything is silent when I put on my Sennheiser headphones. It lets be effectively choose whether or not I want to be distracted by sound, which I do sometimes (hearing conversations I want to be a part of it quite important to me).
Nobody has ever actually seen the gameplay from his games. (The video of the most recent game does not disclose the gameplay.) It's entirely possible that his games are utter crap, with a great coat of marketing.
You're not surprised that someone who doesn't agree with your leftist ideology got to the top of the thread, you're just mad about it.
I'd like to support GNU Hurd too, but they make some unusual (but still POSIX compliant!) choices and I haven't had the time to work around them.
Like so many things, it seems as though people are looking for "the one" best way of doing things. Obviously some people like cubicles. Some like offices. Some like open space. How about letting people choose?
Could you use headphones, noise-cancelling ones perhaps, and music to isolate yourself?
This is a very well written piece with lots of good advice. Thanks a lot for writing this.
Is there any conclusive evidence of causation, as opposed to just correlation?

Could it be, for example, that companies with worse management practices tend to adopt open-plan offices, but that it's actually the bad management practices causing stress, sickness, less productivity -- and that the open-plan offices have very little to do with it?

In environments as incredibly complex as office settings, it is particularly important to realize that correlation != causation.
http://www.amazon.com/Shure-SE210-Sound-Isolating-Earphone/d...

Those effectively eliminate auditory ADD in an open environment. Nothing has been more effective than these for me.
Yeah, the problem is that the values are strings.
> I'm a Google competitor.

I think it would be fair to say that you're trying to compete with google. Yahoo! is a Google competitor, Microsoft is, Apple too. The rest of us, we're just trying. As long as we're not on their radar we've failed to establish any mode of competition that matters. Even DuckDuckGo (for now) does not qualify.
Yeah, we're definitely the minority. I used to be an office fan, and after having one for several years, am enjoying being back in an open plan.

There are definitely downsides to both.
I emailed myself to check this out when I get back to work on Tuesday. Typically, I use Balsamiq to make mocks, but it was cool to see the mock-up work as a mostly functional app. I want to try it out and find out how much, if any, extra time there is in mocking up something using Flinto. Also, to what it extent is restricts me to stuff right out of the UIKit box.
Of course it has everything to do with them. The current administration consists of former Marxist guerrillas who openly state that they don't believe in the quantity theory of money, that, in fact, it's the stores that are causing inflation. They clamped down hard on dollar exchanges in 2011 and now there is a black market dollar rate (vs the "official" rate).

Certainly, if you're happy with the situation and you're an Argentine, by all means, continue to support Kirchnerismo.
I don't buy it. The legal reason is to be short. It's not about being rude. The valley's hiring standards are dismal and everybody is just following Google's antisocial geek stance. I believe they need to grow up as this will backfire. Good candidates are already being headhunted by competitors with smarter hiring policies.
Canada is buying billboards to take advantage of US immigration policy
Well, the guy who wrote Tarsnap is himself a Very Smart Person here on HN, so I'd say the answer is yes, by definition ;)
The government doesn't prevent you from giving actionable feedback to the person you didn't hire, it just gives the person you didn't hire the ability to sue you should you not hire them based on some criteria (race, sex, religion, or whatever their lawyer can argue).
You just described pre-Google Blogger and everything I loved about it back in the day.

I was a huge fan early on in my career of using Blogger for both work and play. It was a really flexible generator of markup files - it didn't have to be HTML, so I'd use to make RSS/XML that would get piped into XSLT to make contact directories or into a Flash site for art projects, all while keeping an easy admin interface for various people to contribute their content.

I really wanted Blogger to succeed on its own. I took an Adaptive Path workshop with Ev when it was just him and Jason running things and begged him to take my money for a premium account. He said creating a Blogger Pro was a popular request and they were working on it, but then shortly after they got acquired by Google and it wasn't long before it went downhill, especially when it stopped being a static file generator and became a bad Wordpress clone (no plugins, for example).

That's what I love about Jekyll. What's old is new again and I'm pretty much trying to recreate that great setup from 5-10 years ago for my current projects. Content-centric sites want to be in HTML, not rendered on the fly by app/centric frameworks.