skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fractal Exercise Selection
Breaking Bad Episode “Ozymandias” Gets Perfect 10/10 Rating on IMDb
A clear case of "the company's PR rep was asleep/out of office and could not prevent the fool from talking about stuff he wasn't supposed to"
To add more data to this discussion, I've been playing with the GitHub Issues API recently, which pretty-prints by default. I grabbed the last hundred open issues from the Mozilla Persona repo, and found

== Uncompressed ==
Pretty Printed: 312,556 bytes
Minified: 272,604 bytes
-------------
Delta: 39,952 bytes (+14.66%)

Not as bad as a 24% hit, but that's all moot because gfodor very explicitly discussed using gzip when pretty-printing. Let's see what happens there:

== Gzipped ==
Pretty Printed: 41,748 bytes
Minified: 40,648 bytes
-------------
Delta: 1,100 bytes (+2.71%)

Not as good as the original claim of <1%, but still pretty darn negligible.

Data derived from this API endpoint: https://api.github.com/repos/mozilla/browserid/issues?per_pa...
Well, I did get the card to fully work using my own kernel and ramdisk and filesystem, even bringing up ubuntu. Just had to do some dirty things to the kernel. If you're curious, the linked article described how to do this.
Current quantum mechanics say that copy&paste transportation doesn't kill you. (Yep. The question was philosophical, and the answer came from physics.)

[citation needed]

As far as i'm aware, there's no evidence that the mind is anything more than a physical construct. As such, the idea of 'uploading' it makes no sense. You can create a copy, sure, and perhaps even a running simulation might be self-aware and identify as you, but you still only last as long as does the hemisphere of jelly in your head.

I agree though that it is a question of philosophy, but a different philosophy altogether. We will have to redefine what a 'mind' is to take into account the persistent pattern of the brain in whatever form it takes as software, but that's not actually going to solve the problem of mortality any more than religion does.
One thing Google will never do is firmware/bootloader level programming to specific devices, and actually writing the code that lets you update your carrier/manufacturer controlled device to the latest version of Android.

CyanogenMod could effectively help more users get the latest version of Android faster than manufacturers and carriers would, and continually do so with their own software OTA cycles and suddenly have a platform of Android on top of the major devices regardless of manufacturer/carrier.
Yeah, but that's what I thought they were doing after the whole Randy Powell incident - look it up, embarrassing...

I hope they try harder to audit the TEDx events. The main TED events are usually so inspiring, it's a shame to have it tarnished like this.
> One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.

A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say, it's awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I'd all but forgotten what I was asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing how long I'd have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of focus.

No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just aren't very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.
> but looking through the docs on typed racket it certainly looks like it adds java-style static typing

It's unclear what you mean by "Java-style static typing" then, because the Java type system and Typed Racket's type system are completely different.

One actually has local type inference (which is not "crappy" type inference necessarily; HM-style type inference is notoriously brittle), the other doesn't. One has nominal class types, the other has no class types (yet). One has intersection types, occurrence typing, "true" union types, and so on, while the other has none of those. One has bounded polymorphism, the other has System F-like polymorphism. One of them has variable-arity polymorphism, while the other doesn't. The list goes on.

In fact, aside from being explicitly typed, there are few similarities.
You would be NOT annoying the guy next to you with your loud chewing/constant throat clearing/conversations/talking through problems/music heard through your earphones.

I've worked in open plan, cubes, and my own office. Open plan is by far the worst. For me, it comes down to perceived privacy more so than noise.
> I don't fully understand why

It's pretty simple - Apple owns the hardware and software they're pushing updates for. Sure, they don't own the carriers, but that's not the problem.

In Google's case they neither own the hardware nor all the software because each third party phone manufacturer slaps in its own stuff and maintains its own fork of android.

Microsoft might own the software, but they don't fully own the hardware. Microsoft is a lot closer to managing it than Google though.

This isn't that Apple has more power over carriers and it isn't hard to understand - it's simply that they have more ownership of all the devices and there are far fewer types of devices (very limited set of software/hardware combinations).
I read this as _why, which made for a very interesting title.
github.com

rackspace.com

customer.io

stripe.com

getsentry.com

circleci.com

zendesk.com
An email can have multiple labels. And labels can be nested. They really are glorified tags.
You would spend the time orienting on your personal tasks, as opposed to filtering out the chatter of your coworkers, the movements that distract you, the sound of a hundred fingers tapping away at the keyboards... you would have time to mentally turn a problem over and over for as long as your mind could stand it.
> This really is organization dependent.

There are also personal factors at play. Different people thrive under different combinations of stimuli. I'm not a psychologist but I think it'd be related to the intraversion-extroversion axis of personality.
I love my open plan office because it is open plan for my team, but still has walls between us and other teams. It definitely facilitates collaboration.

I think the holy grail of offices would be to let you choose at any time where you want to work...grabbing an isolated office some times and being in an open area at others.
Pick any distribution, any browser, and even pick which flash implementation to install (including Adobe's). Flash has worked fine on Linux for about a decade.
Heh, so the music I listen to tends to be pulsing non-vocal quiet electronic music (currently listening to: Done by Robot Science) because it's not music I'm going to sing or sitting-dance along too, and it's entirely ignorable, but it also cuts out the noise of everything around me.

I can still see my coworker hacking SQL into some XML (wtf is he doing) out of the corner of my eye, but I'm not sure wearing horse blinkers to work would be socially acceptable.
engineers - offices, techical staff - cubicles, blue collar workers - open plan factory floor ..err.. office space. It is just a reflection of software engineering status as a profession.
Accounting for Hackers
This isn't really a feature of the environment, except accidentally. What's really at stake here is striking the balance between the short term cost of integrating a new team member and the long term cost of failing to integrate them well.
Where is the desktop/web version!
I had my own office, complete with door, the entire time I was at Apple. It was fantastic. I've worked in open plan offices before and since, and I vastly prefer individual offices.
This could be huge. Even if they just take the route of updating the most popular phones to the latest versions of Android, bypassing the slow manufacturer+carrier update cycle, they could easily have a platform if they can get the adoption.

Make an easy "switch to CyanogenMod" installer for the top handsets, and provide your own OTA updates faster than the actual device manufacturer and you could have quite the platform. Plus Google will love you since you're keeping more of their devices up-to-date, essentially fighting the fragmentation problem for them.
> It is common for me to not talk to a single coworker about work throughout the day.

I have to say, that is a rare situation in every office I've worked in. Maybe it has to do with the types of people I've hired, but it is incredibly common to see collaboration during the day between 2-3 people and heavy collaboration anytime difficult problems comes up.
Probably around ~100% on nexus devices.
> In Google's case they neither own the hardware nor all the software because each third party phone manufacturer slaps in its own stuff and maintains its own fork of android.

Which is a problem because these forks take substantial time to update to the newest version of each OS. And then they take more time because sometimes vendors make modifications to the core OS that breaks Google or other core apps (see e.g. EVO and Gmail) so the whole system has to be QA'd rigorously to prove that nothing is broken.
Err, let me give you another example - abortions. I love it when women (that have had abortions) or men (that encouraged women to have abortions) are becoming anti-abortions as they age.

Considering their changing minds can lead to people being convicted for crimes they themselves were guilty of, does that count as hypocrisy?

Of course it does, because such opinions don't come with a disclaimer. Any conversation with a child or a school principal about drinking should start with "You know, I got wasted several times in college...".
I'm pretty happy with my current open environment, coming off of a fairly negative open environment.

Here's what I think they did right:

- High partitions around team cluster, low partitions within cluster. Means you don't see just anybody who's standing, but can easily get eye contact with the people you actually need to communicate with.

- White noise generators. All ambient noise is suppressed--I can't hear the people in the next cube if they're talking quietly. Only the shrillest beeps or sneezes disrupt my concentration.

- Lots of natural light. If you're going to do open concept, at least take advantage of the #1 benefit.

- Lots of small meeting rooms with whiteboards.

Even then, I noticed a massive difference in how much I enjoyed the open plan when I transitioned from working on a project that was very collaborative (pairing being the norm) to a project that required a lot of solo effort. I'm very conscious of distractions now, and end up working later hours to take advantage of the quiet when everyone's gone home.

So I think there's a lot to be said about the dynamic of your team. And in that regard, my current employer again does well by giving QA, support, and other "solo acts" individual high partitions.
Great, thanks for this awesome contribution!
As I recall, Microsoft designed X-shaped buildings with shared spaces towards the middle.

Every developer has a private office with "a door that shuts". They all have a view that doesn't look into another office. When they need to work alone, they can work alone.

Each office is large enough that a second person can come in and work alongside them, whiteboard together etc.

Social areas are placed towards the centre of the X. Offices are on the outer. This controls the spread of noise from the social areas.

These buildings were inspired by IBM's Sillicon Valley Lab (née Santa Teresa Lab), which itself was inspired by studies of programmer productivity which found that private offices improved performance markedly over cubicles and open-plan offices.

There's a discussion in Peopleware.
>What is the reasoning as to why one would voluntarily give money when not absolutely necessary?

Simple: something you value may go away if not funded.
Cost savings until Cold/Flu season hits. Watch that burn through the office...
I completely agree. Additional (unlimited?) labels would be a serious upgrade to Trello. It's a tool to help people get shit done - which it's very good at - but adding useless features like custom emojis don't assist in the core function.
Maybe SO doesn't have a paid staff to pay for, and has larger operating costs? without other sources of income to pay those
If I helped you out in some way every month, month after month, week after week, day after day, you would presumably eventually feel like you were indebted to me in some way, correct? If I then gave you the opportunity to do something for me, you would gladly do so, especially if I were still doing something for you that was worth more to you than what you were doing for me, correct? Same principle.
Thank you for sharing this story.

Have you read any books by John Taylor Gatto or Charlotte Iserbyt? If not, the entire compulsory school agenda will be swiftly illuminated once you do.
Well, it certainly makes more sense to look at the by department data rather than the aggregate data. But I would say that the fact that we see such large disparities in which departments are applied to is already enough to refute the idea that male and female applicants are pretty much the same, and that therefore it would be pretty reckless to conclude any sex discrimination based on the difference in acceptance rates.
"Full balls" is pretty colloquial, but I imagine it was intentional. It makes sense to me.

Kind of like "balls out" or "balls to the wall." Or even "balls deep." Y'know?
Fascinating, thanks :)
The desire to pull down the entire patent system because of failures in the software industry is understandable, but misguided, and the proposed solution is completely unworkable.

Patents [should] exist to recognize and reward real and substantial effort to create new technology from research. There is real value in fostering a research community as a separate discipline to pushing it to market.

OP talks about 'insufficient capital' - but that's looking at it the wrong way around. An "inventor" shouldn't be defined by capital they're able to bring to bear. The cost and skillset required to invent vs commercialise a technology are vastly different, and punishing capital-poor inventors serves to suppress innovation.

"Patents" are not the problem. Inappropriately awarded patents, impossible-to-contest patents, and an outlandishly complex and expensive legal system are the problem.
To be clear, I meant verbal communication, not over the computer. There's lots of the latter. But overall I agree it is probably a quirk of the office I work in that we have more solo work than usual.
Well, sorry to say that you're failing pretty hard at your mission then. But do keep ramping up the snarky rhetoric. It looks like I hit a nerve.

I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.

But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-...
They are recirculating too much HVAC air, too.
Destroying the reputation of Freelancers everywhere
Exclude a word
-query	Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for synonyms like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.

jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org

Tip: You can also exclude results based on other operators, like excluding all results from a specific site.

FROM: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_ope...

See how hard that is?
Prefer conditional loading of social network scripts
Weird thing for Page to say:

> So I’m tremendously excited about the innovative new way we’re funding this project

Are they doing something other than just dumping money into it, siphoned from their core business? Or am I reading this wrong?
But if no one talks in the open plan layout, what's the benefit of open plan at all? Might as well give people their own private space free of visual distractions.
I'm afraid I don't feel physics really answers that particular philosophical question. I do a lot of philosophical questions arise from edge-cases in our relatively informal definitions of things.
Interesting, this looks like proof that truth is stranger than fiction. After reading a lot of WW II thrillers, this seems surreal.
If the discussion is in an unintelligible (to me) language, then it becomes ambient noise and is far less distracting.
I can't tell if you're saying that visual/graphic designers are saying they are doing "UX", or if "UX" people are really just hand-waving visual designers?

I got lost around "wank word" and UX being the "Web 2.0 of the design world." Most UX people I know are focused on user research, usability, information architecture, and interaction design. I'd say maybe, 1 in 5 are visual designers, and maybe 1 in 3 have any passable graphic design skill at all.

Maybe you're saying that people will be just called "user researcher", "information architect", etc etc and not use the word UX. But I think "wank word" is a tad inaccurate.
Thank you! Please let me know if you run into issues about using Yeppp! with your project.
That's a blog, from 2008, with no citations itself, and no claim of original research. So essentially it's opinion. It is confusing correlation with causation. Westernisation brought "cancer diagnosis" with it. So of course cancer rates increased, because before they "just died", then they "died of cancer". The rate of cancer didn't change, the rate of diagnosed cancer did.

Your body needs sugar (through various sources like carbs, or protein)... so sure if you cutout sugar, you won't get cancer (because you will die of malnutrition).

I'm not sure what "industrialised oil" is... how does it differ from regular oil? What about it in particular that makes it carcinogenic?

Jobs also didn't have cancer until he was an adult... are you suggesting he had some how set his body up into a condition ripe for cancer to develop? That implies that if you've ever tried "industrialized food" (in your entire life) it's already over for you, so don't worry about it.

What about children born with cancer? Is that because of their mothers diet (or their mothers diet when their mother was a child herself)? Simply by following your reasoning I've just ruled out a HUGE proportion of the population who don't have to worry, because the damage is already done.

Do you have any academic sources on the subject?
If an American POW comes back to the US and says the US was the aggressor in the Korean War, he does not have an opinion, he has been "brainwashed". What kind of mental gymnastics do I have to perform to think this way. It's about a step removed from saying someone who denies Jesus Is Lord has been possessed by a demon. Or the same thing really.
Layoffs are never fun...and neither is life at a company leading up to those layoffs. Best of luck to them.

Overall I really like the blackberry platform it was great for messaging. Its to bad they weren't able to stay on top of the market but this is what happens.
There's no particular reason that everyone has to be on Earth.
The web is the network of hypermedia documents, the internet is the network of computer networks. A "web page" is a node in the graph of the web. A "computer" is a node in the graph of the internet. For practical purposes, the "internet" is the things that link together using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol and the "web" is things that link together using URIs.

The web is content, the net is machinery.

When you are on Xbox and playing against someone else, you are playing over the internet but you are not playing over the web. Similarly, you can download web pages but you cannot download the internet.
Work spaces I have had

* High school: desk in bedroom. Unaware there are worse options: Productivity: 9.

* College, year 1: dorm with roommate, cop-style desks facing each other. Shut up! Productivity: 4.

* College, years 2-4: two roommates, desk under bed. Vaguely cramped, but not bad. Productivity: 6.

* First ship: Flight of the Intruder style aluminum desk/dresser/bookcase measuring 24" wide, aligned athwartships, so every roll of that frigate dumped my work all over until I hacked some retaining straps in. (http://www.maritime.org/tour/img/fbc/fbc-captain.jpg, except our bunks were 3 high). Productivity: 3.

* Second ship: Double-wide version of same but it's a carrier, no rolling. Productivity: NA because I also an actual office, with a door, and it was right next to wardroom. Downside: back wall of office was next to the trap wires. Had to wear double hearing protection during flight ops. Office productivity: 6-9.

* Staff at the Naval Academy, Annapolis: more desk acreage than I could use, huge vaulted window, rich blue carpet, could hide out all day. Productivity: 0-8. Home office: got an Ethan Allen desk on clearance. Productivity: 6.

* Med school, year 1: Katrina. 5' folding table next to the foldout couch two very kind University of Houston students let me sleep on all year. Still have that folding table. Not bad. Productivity: 6-8.

* Med school, years 2-4, New Orleans: Ethan Allen desk tried in every room of the house, but little kids make it impossible. Productivity at home: 0. Starbucks: 7.

* Internship. Same as above, but also had a cubicle in the 180 desk "resident storage facility". Had no desire to be there and rare could be. Productivity at cubicle: -1.

* First job as a doc: moved to San Diego, converted falling-apart cubicle desk in our office (incidentally the server closet, possibly the only reason it had an air conditioner) into a standing desk. Joy. Could work all day. Had a 34" stool that helped on occasion. 3 officemates: productivity: 5. A Navy clinic, "doctor's office" set up during the weekdays I took clinic, productivity: 4 (they seemed to feel doctors were cheaper than medical assistants). Starbucks: 7.

* Oh, during that job, worked at an urgent care on the weekends: sterile "doctor's office" with a desk and computer. 4 exam rooms. Highly routinized workflow seeing 30+ patients in 12 hours. Productivity: 11.

* Currently: professionally designed cubicle set up in an office with one office mate. We face opposite directions, neither face away from the door. Most productive ever. Productivity: 8-9. Starbucks 7. But also moved my Ethan Allen desk into my bedroom and installed a door lock. Home productivity: 4-8.

N=1
I wonder if the 'foot in the door' technique was just used on me to get me to buy the book....
I worked in one of these places where we were expected to do real engineering work, but with an overhead loudspeaker paging system for incoming sales and service calls. "Bong, Rick Line 1, Bong Dale Line 6" Those were the days... (not really).
because if it was, it worked....
This study does not look at actual productivity. It is very hard to measure productivity in a study though. Does anyone have any links to open plan vs. offices for developers (actual studies)? Considering you can in some way measure productivity for developers.
I worry that it will not be a choice (or at least taboo, like suicide is these days -- given that's basically what it will be).

EDIT: I wonder if the possibility of living nearly forever will make society even more risk-averse?