skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Partitions can still be installed between the work pods to provide a measure of privacy. Many of the open-plan offices I've seen have no partitions, the only thing between you and everyone else is a computer monitor. It's insane.
Digital Grotesque: Intricate Full-Scale 3D Printed Room
If you have money, just hire them as a contractor via craigslist. If you need help vetting then I would ask a developer friend to help. If you don't have money, good luck. Most developers will not partner with someone who just has an idea because it usually means they will do the majority of the initial work for something that will most likely fail without any compensation. The exception is a developer friend who really sees the vision.
If the techniques described in the book have been used to make me buy the book then it is a good purchase.
Wildcard Support for Amazon Cloudfront
I thought america WAS the aggressor? (Korea isn't really near the US), and it was quite apparent the US wanted satellite states near russia/china, to potentially launch further attacks.

Also did the communists do a bad job in china? That is at most controversial... not "brain washed".
This foot-in-the-door techniques and many other things have been covered beautifully in an ongoing course https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology.
It is about to be over. I do recommend going through the videos. There is a lot to learn.
This is not reddit, and it seems to be a problem with engineers of a certain age, but no one wants to constantly hear your 20 year old cartoon references throughout the day. Also I am incredibly glad that the most prominent south asian on network TV isn't a white dude's impression of a stereotypical immigrant.
Where's the evidence for these claims though? I know Joel Spolsky makes the argument about "A door that shuts" but it's purely anecdotal.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html
Take a look at Google Reader. If they had let me pay for it I would have. They did not want my money and now it is gone.

I am rational consumer. I only pay to get something in return. Often I pay because I want to know someone is employed to keep updating the service or product. I don't really care if other people are freeloading.
> Since phase 2 prices vary at most 10x and the big successes generate returns of at least 100x, investors should pick startups entirely based on their estimate of the probability that the company will be a big success and hardly at all on price.

To give concrete numbers to pgs statement:

Pick 2 hypothetical startups: A and B. A will go on to be a 10 billion dollar company and B will be a 100 million dollar company. Now, valuations at round B series vary from say $40 million to $400 million (as pg said 10x). Note: they arent yet worth what they will be worth later. Now, say you take a 20% equity cut for the round and there is no dilution between this and when they go public (just a simplifying assumption). At the end, the 20% equity is worth either 200 million dollars for A or 20 million for B. The difference in profit is 180 million dollars; much more than any additional amount you would have paid to get in on a higher valuation. Therefore, if you believe the company to be of the A type, you will pay that 20% of a higher valuation.

> pay whatever the price happens to be.

This is what pg means: the difference in profit between A and B was 180 million dollars which far exceeds the difference in cost in investing in the two. This makes the investors rather price insensitive IF they think that you are in the A category. The reason that investors have the mental model of assigning to categories rather than guessing the percent chance of success is that they know often they guess wrong. There are simply too many variables to create any sort of accurate chance of success.
Corollary: sales techniques are often a form of brainwashing. I mean this seriously.
My biometric screening is scheduled for tomorrow morning ... I'm not usually so lucky!

I really didn't mind the actual wellness initiatives (though I've heard stories of obese screeners telling slightly overweight participants that they should lose weight), but employees are still charged for gym and pool memberships ... If it was a wellness program, why not promote exercise?

In any case, most of the concerns revolved around the requirement that health data be shared with WebMD.
I think the core point being made is that Experts Exchange was not evil. They were annoying.

They had a business model that was never great, but worked okay until someone came along with a better one. At which point they messily exploded because nobody (with the exception of a few employees and top contributors) actually liked them. They kept popping up in google results, but when they clicked on them it never actually solved your problem. Their web design was annoying, the cloaking was frustrating, and the actual content was often terrible. It often read like a transcript of a tier 1 tech support call that had been conducted in another language then translated into yours via google translate, and it was rife with errors or the classic "I have a problem with X...nevermind, I fixed it!", which is the sort of thing which fills everyone who finds it later because they're having the same problem with RAGE. Did our friendly sexchange experts deserve that rage? Not really, but it was their fault. EE was setup such that the average user saw tons of poor quality answers; SO was setup such that the average user saw good quality answers. Ultimately that comes right back to the door of the devs and designers.

I'd sum the blog post up as "Hey, Experts Exchange was annoying, mostly useless, and vaguely scummy, but it was staffed with good people doing the best they could, and it wasn't outright evil!" And he's right. Evil is a high bar; EE never even approached it.

What they were was incompetent. And SO called them out on it, and Andy is hurt by it. He has every right to be, but it doesn't change the fact that EE was is effectively gone, and deservedly so. And 99.99% of the people who ever tried to use EE will be pleased.
Worked in the office acoustics world for awhile including coding a simulation for acoustics within both cubicle environments and private office to private office environments:

The most important sound paths in most office spaces are refraction ( low cubicle walls may as well not be there, just because you can't see your neighbor over a 48" cubicle wall doesn't mean that wall in contributing much of anything to sound isolation ) and reflection ( hard walls, cheap ceiling tiles, ceiling air vents with open air returns, etc ).

"Movable Walls" vary widely in their absorption profile, as do ceiling tiles. In both cases high quality models are fine. Most issues with movable walls had nothing to do with their absorption profile but rather poor installation/fitting causing 1/4" air gaps around the edges creating a perfect refraction and / or reflection path for sound.
Hey man... Pineapple would like to say..... awesome work!
I agree with you on this one.

I have no idea how every company running after messaging just forgets that we use computers! Almost every messenger app out there doesn't work on desktops. A simple web app will do, but no!

iMessages are quite close to what messaging should be. They work on your (Apple) desktop, phone and tablet and sync quite well. Too bad they're only for Apple Ecosystem!
I make an argument in good faith and get a nonsensical passive-aggressive blow-off in return. You should be ashamed.
It seems that the X-shape exists as described, though not for all buildings:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...

Some buildings aren't strictly cross-shaped but still use right-angled wings for a similar effect:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ImageGallery/ImageDetails...

Compare STL/SVL:

http://www.nfbcal.org/~anordley/IBM/Air/SVL/

IBM published a paper on STL/SVL in 1978; I haven't gotten around to piercing the IEEE paywall to read it yet: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...
There's a difference! Bluestack is a workaround.

Better situation would be at least a web app. An app that integrates Whatsapp with Windows and Macs (like iMessages work on Macs) will be a great idea.
I sat next to my very first technical mentor for a few years, and he had no compunction about holding up a finger and saying "hang on" curtly when I'd start to ask something. If you all agree that it isn't rude in this context, I think that reaction can help. I do it myself occasionally and usually can keep about 80-90% of my flow.

Try doing that to your wife on work-from-home days at your own peril.
> What kind of mental gymnastics do I have to perform to think this way.

They probably used the foot-in-the-door technique on themselves.
Yes, I too ran into this problem and found the answer in the github issue tracker[0]. I ran into other issues in the 0.2.0->0.3.0 change where they made quite a few small changes without releasing any upgrade instructions or changelog.

[0] https://github.com/firebase/angularFire/issues/105
I swear this post feels like I've typed it word for word. I'm pretty much in the same situation except I'm planning for a Masters next year. Hoping to see good advice here.
You could buy developer account device slots for $5-10

Sorry? how does that work?
When you get a developer account (for $100) you can distribute to up to 10 devices right?

Are you saying you can pay extra for more devices? Is that possible?
I can relate, not being able to receive group texts is now my #1 issue with GVoice, since they've fixed most of the bugginess in the Android client.
I'll agree with what TheZenPsycho said and add my own bit.

I think designers are getting worse and worse at doing one aspect of design and so they ignore it and latch onto a term that purposefully disregards that aspect. So a UX designer would scoff at the visual design aspect because that's not part of their job.

In most cases, outside of huge companies, a designer does pretty much every aspect of what most people consider to be design; visual, UX, UI, Information architecture, research, and branding. That's what designers are trained to do, that's the point of being a designer, you NEED to know how to do all of these things in order to call yourself a designer.
> what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight

Good Lord, now we're doing social-life standups. Agile really has taken over.
> Message can intelligently switch between Apple's own backend and SMS depending on data connection and presence information

I'm not familiar with the Apple implementation, but something similar was implemented by the Yahoo Messenger client app running on my Windows Mobile several years back, seamlessly switching from Internet data connection to SMS -- resulting in an SMS for every single outbound message and a bill of around $300 from AT&T for all those "OK" and "Sure" messages.
I was one of the editors for POSA but had to drop out because of other time commitments and family obligations. I'm really stoked for this to come out! The chapters that I had seen and reviewed looked awesome!
You can filter by user in Trello... even using keyboard shortcuts! It's right on the Filter menu, and the handy "q" keyboard shortcut filters to your own cards.
I often question this as well and I work remotely most of the time. I go in once or twice a week because I feel guilty. there are certainly days that I go into the office and don't talk to anyone other than the occasional "hey, how are you". To the op it off I drive into the office to connect to a customers vpn to do remote work for them.
I'm not so infatuated with Apple products as I'm disgusted with the quality of the competition. When Android phones and tablets actually become usable and won't break after a few months, I might consider saving money on them.

The iCult doesn't exist, you are just trying to justify your own buying decisions. But go ahead and keep thinking otherwise, I really don't care.
Brainwashed? If that is brainwashing, then it seems like there's brainwashing everywhere you look. For example:
- http://www.foxnews.com/
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBbBfrKsVqY
Moot: Full House
This is nitpicky for sure but angularFire doesn't play nice with AngularJS 1.2's breaking out some modules (Route, Sanitize, Cookies, and 1-2 more) into separate JS files. I had to comment out all the $route stuff in angularFire so that I could get them to work together. Thankfully I am not using fireBase with my $route's so I am unaffected.

Also, I'm sure some of you might point out 1.2 is still in an RC state but I needed ngAnimate and didn't want to have to re-write a bunch of code a few weeks from now when it releases it's final version.
For large enough runs, 0, 1, 2, ..., max, 0, 1, ... etc exhibits that behaviour. Thus, a PRNG that fails your proposal is bad, but passing it doesn't meanthat the PRNG is good. A test suite like diehard (or the moderner version dieharder) runs tests for uniform distribution as well as a lot of others, but even then, a pass is only saying "any glaring nonrandomness can't be detected by this suite".
Management is itself a field, with its own jargon. You can have good management and poor management (just as you can have good engineering or poor management) but don't pretend that the use or absence of "management jargon" is somehow intrinsically connected to that.

Managers have their jargon because they often trade in abstract concepts (Plan of Record, Resources, Asks, Action Items, OKRs) peculiar to their trade that are ripe for shorthanding, which is pretty similar to the reason you see it in other fields.
The only caveat is that if RdRand was made to output the bits about to be sent out XORed with a stream of AES(n++, NSA_KEY) then you get seemingly random data that is 100% deterministic once you know the key and completely invisible if you don't know the key.
"Brainwashing" isn't a precisely defined word. I believe the word is often used to describe persuasion via psychological vulnerabilities. In this sense, the article is correct in calling the technique a form of brainwashing.
For one thing, the context is self-reported employee satisfaction, not team productivity. Even if you could somehow find a measure of productivity that many people would agree to, I'm skeptical that the results would support the idea you have presented.
Great point. We have this data and will update with that plot. Thx for the comment.
Some kinds of work respond very poorly to interruption, and for others it's trivial. Breaking a coder out of their 'zone' kills their productivity. Breaking a typist out of their 'zone' is trivial. This being said, if someone is meant to be mentoring you, then this will require special tactics as it is a special relationship.
Can Bitcoin Become a National Currency?
WTFs by programming language repository on GitHub
The key here is the delta, not what opinions are right or wrong.

> compared to the POWs in North Korea, their beliefs had changed massively since they’d left home

The title does color the outcome by calling it brainwashing, but that word is not used in the actual article.
My friends in aerospace always say that there are two kinds of folks who believe simulations: Those who write the software and those who have to use it to justify their existence. Everyone else knows there's can be huge gaps between simulation and reality. Granted, things improve over the years but c'mon, who are they kidding.

> “I don’t immediately see any red flags,”

Says the simulation guy.

Really?

> “I think it is quite viable.”

Says the simulation guy. Again.

Hmmm. I'm not building rockets or cars but, you know what, I'll bet you --simulation guy-- a good dinner this thing is as viable as trying to evolve a flying elephant in a lab. You might theoretically be able to get there with enough time, but in practical terms it is impossible.

For starters I want someone to explain how we are going to build massive columns along the middle of Interstate 5 every 100 meters for four hundred miles.

And then tell me how we are going to do that and put a four hundred mile tube on top of it (let's ignore impossible construction details) for six billion dollars when building an incredibly short (by comparison) bridge in San Francisco cost the same?

Simulations like this one are like special effects in movies. They look great and make you feel like we are living in the future but they are far --very far-- from being realized. Look at something like C3PO. Thirty six years have passed and we are nowhere near such a robot being realized.

Me thinks simulation guy wants free publicity.
Let me give you a tl;dr: the North Koreans started it by rolling over into South Korea, McAuthur went too close to the Yalu in the counter attack, Chinese entered the war, Truman fires McAuthur. Stalement ensues, borders preserved, Kim Jong Un has ex-girlfriend executed.

The communists of the 50s were busy starving their own people in great leaps forwards, in the 60s they innovated on that with a cultural revolution; Mao finally dies; China didn't start to stabalize until Deng brought back capitalism.
I can't say about WhatsApp in other countries but their usage is going to take a hit in India once they start charging(they plan to charge $0.99 per year, that is ~INR 60), people will flock.

Reasons:
1. People in India are too used to "free" software. Only legal software most purchase here is Windows that comes bundled with laptops/desktops.
2. Low credit card penetration. Most of the teens don't have credit cards. Thanks to government rules, we can't use debit cards to pay on App Stores as well.

So people either won't pay or can't pay. Many are already starting to use other apps and there is no shortage of free apps due to exploding messaging space.
If you're bored where you are, perhaps you should try a smaller company. One of the advantages of small companies is you often end up wearing a fair number of hats.

#

I'd also urge you in the strongest possible terms not to live off your savings if you can help it. I've had to do it in the past (the company I was working for folded unexpectedly.) It was one of the most stressful and soul-crushing times of my life: sending job applications off and getting nothing back for sometimes weeks at a time, looking at my balance dwindling and wondering whether I'd be able to pay the rent next month....

Just feels like there's this crushing horizon of doom and no-one wants you, despite the fact you know you could do all those jobs.

I keep about two years wages in various degrees of fluidity (I think that's the word for it, how easily you can get to it) these days, and I still wouldn't want to do it. It's not a happy place to live for any length of time - and in the end you may, as I did, take something you don't really want anyway just to have money coming in while you look for something better.
Leaning toward becoming Self Employed . . .

Start listening to these . . .
http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

My advice . . .

Stick with your day job for a while . . . save money and fund your side projects, recurring revenue ideas.

Learn and make connections with like minded developers who are creating SaaS Apps and Recurring revenue.

Your day job is a big asset and can fund your own business especially in the beginning until you have spun up a few recurring revenue ideas.
Thanks for your answer! I guess I would have to be more precise :)

My intent is to have a technical role in the space, not a management one. I can imagine how most of the problems facing require machine learning and statistics, so I am more interested on how to complement these skills to be able to transition into an space that fascinates me.
Our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims
What's the official term for my team, and my team only, in an open room where we can whiteboard problems, shoot the shit, play guitar, shoot each other with Nerf guns and churn out more work on average than my entire organization? Cause I love what I have now.
I can't wait til I get to downvote
As long as you've built and signed your app with your dev cert gatekeeper will open it with no scary warning -- no? That's always been my experience at least
I'm not joking here, the only people I've seen use it are foreign exchange students, and I go to a university.
I keep hearing how it's big, but then I don't see any real world use over here.
IdentityCache: model caching for Rails (April 2013)
There are also huge differences in the tax treatment of cubicles vs. walls, which can have a non-trivial impact on the decision making if it's an office of any size. Generally (and IANATL) cubicles and movable walls can be considered office furniture, whereas walls and doors are structural improvements - and those things have very different depreciation rates and benefits.
Impact of Language Choice on GitHub Projects
I am saying that "Design" encompasses a lot of skills, many of which are "invisible" to most laymen- much in the same way that most of the code a developer writes is "invisible" making two pieces of software that outwardly appear to operate identically, can, in terms of code structure, maintainability, be vastly different in quality.

Most people in hiring positions couldn't give two shits that a designer is supposed to do more than just make things pretty- And so they hire people who call themselves "designers" that actually are little more than glorified photoshop operators. Why? because these "designers" are cheaper than these other "designers" and it's not obvious why. The amateurs undercut the professionals.

This puts the real designers, the ones with educations, that actually know design principles, typography, psychology, etc, and have years of experience- in the difficult situation of having to distinguish themselves from these interested amateurs- these "stylists". So I believe, in a turn of marketing genius, some designers came up with the term "UX", and insist that it is NOT this lowly "design" thing, as you know it. It's this totally different thing that is /more/ than just making things look pretty.

Even though, all the things under the "UX" banner are familiar to people with design educations as "design".

That's what "Design" is. UX is just "Design". These are the normal things that you have to do to make a design work.

But how do you communicate that? How do you communicate that Javascript and HTML are capable of so much more now, than they were 5 years ago? You come up with a buzz word. Ajax. Web 2.0. HTML5. To experts who actually know their craft, these are obvious wank words. Meaningless checkboxes that accountants and recruiters can look for on resumes, designed to repackage skills that are decades old as something new and exciting.

But this is hacker news. We shouldn't have to use bullshit marketing terms here. That's for recruiters. That's for clients. Cut the shit, I say. Use the real words with their real meanings.
Are there any studies relating rent control and pro/anti landlord policies in these cities and how they relate to the availability of inventory and rental prices in the bay?
ZFS also has "general lackluster performance" in areas like using memory (it requires tons of it). It's inherent in the design of a copy-on-write filesystem.

According to Ted Dunangst: "ZFS wants a lot of memory. A lot lot lot of memory. So much memory, the kernel address space has trouble wrapping its arms around ZFS. I haven't studied it extensively, but the hack of pushing some of the cache off into higher memory and accessing it through a small window may even work." See http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/ZFS-on-OpenBSD

Different filesystems are good for different things. If you want a filesystem that has subvolumes, copy-on-write snapshots, built-in RAID, transactions, space-efficient packing of small files, batch deduplication, checksums on data and metadata, and so forth, you have to pay a price. Just the same way as running Apache with all the bells and whistles is not going to be as fast as ngnix.