skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know, I've never worked in nor seen an office that wasn't "bullpit" style with people grouped onto many desks.

Maybe this is just NZ. Is having your entire development team each having their own private office something that actually happens in America (bar the amazing fantasy land that Spolsky's office sounds like).

Also, it's worth mentioning that this is just a survey, and just addresses how people "feel", not efficiency or anything like that. My ideal "work" environment (i.e. a beach) doesn't necessarily line up with my most productive.
GTA 5 Makes $800 Million in One Day
Couple app redesign for iOS 7
I wish we had a more detailed delta (including pricing) on the 'as proposed' vs 'as modeled'.

What does reshaping the vehicle do to the cost and fitness for purpose?
>To catalyze something means to speed it up. (...) I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific?

The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient.

People understand it -- including people who don't have an idea what "catalyst" means (for me it's a totally transparent word, as its origin and etymology come from my language. YMMV).

If you want to dress it up to make it sound more impressive, then you're not communicating effectively.

And if you include 3-4 other unecessary buzzwords in the same sentense you're just name-dropping words.

"I saw a very puissant pismire lifting 100 times its weight in a sweven yesterday". Do you see anything wrong with this sentense?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pismire
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/puissant
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sweven

(Except if you're a chemist, and you use the word "catalyst" as it applies to your terminology)
In others words make a domesday robot that remembers people before it kills them.

As they die, some will take solace in a religious belief that numbers in the machine represent everything they were and ever will be. Others will just die.

A digital tombstone to a dead race.
Survival bias much?
Ways this could be biased:

- higher skilled workers are in closed offices more often
* and satisfaction varies by skill level

- p(open office) varies by industry
* and satisfaction varies by industry

- people feel more comfortable doing non-work items behind a door
* and they like getting personal tasks done

As a developer I'm happy in an open office, as long as I have enough space, and I'm separated from the sales (phone) staff
Probabilistic Programming with Brian Ruttenberg
because Ivan Jakobović with all his profitable international inventions was working at low-level technician at high school for agriculture. Don’t worry, he is not teaching, because he never finished college.

Jakobović seems like a crank, but is this criticism really necessary? "Not finishing college" or "low-level technician" should never be reasons to put down someone. People such as Jobs (college dropout, former fruit picker), Wozniak (once a low-level engineer), Einstein (patent clerk) and others are recognized as great contributors to science and technology. Quick show of hands: How many people on HN didn't finish college or have dreary day jobs while working on something exciting or innovative on the side?

There are already many reasons to condemn Jakobović. Not having the right credentials and background shouldn't be included on the list.
Hey DonGateley,

I recommend you to check on founder2be : http://www.founder2be.com

I'm probably going to Montreal founder2be if you're in Quebec, I can link you to the eventbrite page.

You can always look for freelancers too on these websites :

https://ooomf.com
https://www.elance.com
http://www.freelancer.com
https://www.odesk.com

Hope you'll find a co-founder or a freelancer !
A.
It's increasingly becoming evident how ineffective offices can be as workplaces, especially in light of better and better communication for developers over the internet. Obviously this isn't true for all places and all cultures, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't frequently question my basic physical presence in the office sometimes. It is common for me to not talk to a single coworker about work throughout the day. Meetings are rare, always scheduled ahead of time, and always short. I feel like our office mostly exists as a vestige of past tradition, a celebration of our success (it's styled after our products), and also out of a deep-seated paranoia about the productivity of workers you can't see, even though as developers we have very, very concrete ways of measuring productivity.

(Also, the nondevelopers are in constant verbal communication.)

All that said, I'm not dissatisfied. Our office is always very quiet and cool. The kitchen is stocked. The chairs are comfortable. It's not a bad set up at all and I don't find that it really hinders my productivity too much. But it does feel unnecessary, and I personally know I'd be more productive telecommuting 3-4 days a week. Dressing up and behaving professionally for 8-9 hours straight does take a toll on my ability to output good code, albeit a minor one, and the location of the office in the city certainly takes a huge toll on my bank account (housing is 2-3x more expensive in this area, but the commutes are horrible from far out).
My Dribbble content still reflects my design style to a certain degree - with things like icons, logos and illustration, it's a bit easier. However, with a 400x300 (yes, I'm aware that there are @2x pixel and file attachment but when people browse, they only see the small cropped thumbnails) pixel restriction, it's not always easy to fit a meaningful UI design there and still keeping the thumbnail attractive (so you can get more clicks - this isn't just for an ego boost, we need to market ourselves too).

When a potential client contacts me on Dribbble, I usually send them samples of my "real" work so they can get a better idea of what they will be getting from me.

I used Forrst for a while, and some people posted design processes there. However, people are naturally drawn to eye candies more. Like others have mentioned, Behance is another option.
We are moving from open plan and little tables, where I have like 10 sq feet to work in so it's more smushed plan, to a new office with real cubes and furniture and various collaboration areas. Much better.
Can you work if you can't hear your thoughts?
The risk of (Dropbox) cloud storage: total file loss
In an actively maintained project, that bug could be fixed in a day (or at least within the week). In an actively maintained proprietary game, it could go out in a patch pretty quickly. In an abandoned proprietary game, the bug will never be patched. In an abandoned open source game, there's at least a chance you might be able to fix the bug yourself.

And that's one part of the freedom. Open source software will live as long as people are interested in it, while proprietary software dies very definitively.
You're living the dream for some of us. So thank you for sharing some of your secrets. Well, I'm hoping I get some secrets... I just paid $9.99. :)
The effect of iOS 7 on campus internet
I used to think this. And then I went to work in an open plan office... and discovered I love it! The office is surprisingly quiet, considering there's about 50 people in the open plan. When conversation does spring up, it's often really interesting and worth listening in on. When it's not, I find I have no trouble tuning it out. Other people seem to more trouble, and they bring noise-canceling headphones.

Not saying that this can work for everyone at every organization. But I for one was pleasantly surprised. Fwiw I'm a pretty introverted guy who deeply values his privacy.
I believe so, AUFS and BtrFS are for storing the images to disk, which is different then shared memory, so changing those shouldn't affect it.
There's a monthly thread for freelancers on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310240

As for vetting the person, it's usually done by looking at what they've made.
This is close to my current office environment.

I have a typical cube, located in a typical cube farm, if I want some relative peace and quiet.

And the team has a dedicated "lab" where I spend most of my day. It's not a totally open-plan area - just a conference room. Never more than 6-7 developers, of whom 4 are on my team, and the rest are transients from other teams working on related projects.

I prefer the lab and only head down to the cube if I need to take client calls. Several of the developers prefer the cubes and spend most of their day there, only coming to the lab for a few hours/day.
GreenHopper has just been renamed to JIRA Agile recently.
The Curious Tale of Dual_EC_DRBG
How China brainwashed American POWs using a classic sales technique
My thoughts too, can someone explain why IAP don't solve the upgrade problem ?

Is it because a new version requires a totally new/different binary ?
My favorite response to this view comes from Greg Egan's short story "Border Guards": The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself — not in its loss, not in its fragility.

Frankly, I think it's awful when people die. People are so interesting and irreplaceable and wonderful; I don't necessarily think it's an improvement for them to just fall over dead one day and be gone.

Please note that this is a relatively orthodox opinion: Even the Christian church has always felt that death and oblivion were rather horrible, and it thought that humans should live forever, albeit after a bit of debugging so they'd stop being quite so awful to each other. They approved of death only because it was the price of admission to immortality.
Really interesting text, thanks.

But I think this last statement

"or Texas schools to waste money copying Wisconsin."

was meant to be the other way around
> This isn't true for AirBnbs, where if something screws up you're literally out on the street.

This is nonsense. If, for whatever reason, the apartment that I'm renting out on airbnb is not available, I would not put a person on the street. I would invite them into my own place. And if even that is unavailable, then I would pay for a hotel room.

Good service is not hard.
Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car

I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life.

Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consideration before an idiot exclaims "Google is #1 in autonomous cars..."

By the way, see anything funny http://i.bnet.com/blogs/google-self-driving-car.jpg sticking out of the Mercedes car http://www.trbimg.com/img-522e6325/turbine/la-fi-hy-autos-20... ? Don't tell me they have shrunk it to make it fits inside a normal car already. How much does the Google system cost now, is it $100K+ just for the autonomous driving system? Details, details, details
That you have to spend a lot of time with other programmers asking questions raises another question: why is this? If the other programmers were better able to concentrate and churn out specs/documentation for their work that you could consult at your leisure, would there be as much need for constantly interrupting each other with questions? If you had all the information you needed at your fingertips, why couldn't you stay in your office and focus 100% on developing your part of the software?

As an analogy, it's like saying "Who has time to implement safety measures when we're so busy administering first aid because of all the accidents?"
I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is:

- A a decent cultural protocol around it. 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. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal.
- A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use. Need to take a phone call? Have a quick 1-on-1? Debate something loudly with 3-5 people? You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand.
- Minimal noise that's not related to collaboration. Eg, no loud ringing phones. No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs. No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.

Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.
| It makes things look like hell.

... Which is why it's awesome and incredibly useful. It gives you a rough estimate of how long you've neglected a card.
Wow, that's an awesome idea. I'd love to try and bring it back to life, but I know absolutely nothing about p2p protocols or the inner workings of git.
Dalke, first off, thank you for your exhaustive explanation. I might question you on a few points, but right now it would seem senseless as I don't really have anything that I disagree with relating to what you've said and you seem far more knowledgeable about the subject.

My question stemmed from my misunderstanding of the law and a curiousness about how my knowledge gaps might be exploitable (though not as much for harm but rather protection). Thank you for taking the time to give me such a thorough answer.

I was somewhat apprehensive to post my first question to HN, (especially one that even mentioned religion) but you definitely gave me the best response I could have hoped for. I definitely owe you one. Thank you.
It's worth noting that modern offices often have the ability to place walls wherever their clients need them to be. That said, they are no better than cubicles because they have virtually no sound isolation.
relevent xkcd http://xkcd.com/859/
Hmm...

First issue I see: "Constant name is all caps?" in Java.

static final != constant

When I'm forced to write in Java, I make Enum constants all caps, as well as any immutables. So String counts, but a static final reference to an ArrayList doesn't.

Second issue: minified JavaScript?

Third issue: the site is slow.
I live in Texas and might be moving to SF area. My 2000 SF house here is cheaper than a 1 BR apartment there and no income tax. Prop taxes are a little higher (4% per year). Financially it's way better here but job wise not as much.
Yes. I am in my own office. I've more or less been in a single office since, oh, 95 or so.

It's impossible to think in bullpen/cubes. Well, that's hyperbole, but it is both wearying and distracting. I'm sure there are personality types that thrive in that situation, but it is just really hard for me to be in an environment like that for long. There's a reason there's a "no talking" rule at libraries, after all.
> It's only three blocks to school, but I drive my kids there anyways because

> It is quite possibly the ideal place for kids to roam free... and they still don't do it.

I agree that 6 is a bit young to walk on your own, but why don't you walk with him occasionally? You can walk back, and then drive to school.

When he's 7 or 8, he should be able to walk on his own. But only if you teach him how.
Bulgaria and other Balkan countries are just so radically different from all perspectives compared to the USA and Western Europe, however. Socio-economical, socio-political, national psychological...

You have virtually endless freedom to roam due to a different general mindset, and quite lax law enforcement, as opposed to the ubiquitous warrior police state that is in the USA.
Job hunting in the US while on the Visa Waiver Program
>Quality of life for most of the tech workers is pretty low,

Can you expand on this point?
Is Touch ID hacked yet?
Twitter / elonmusk: Am happy to hear that GM plans ...
I was working at a place that switched to an open office plan with desks in groups of three or four. I was looking forward to it thinking that would foster much needed communication between two teams that shared the space. Instead, I found that I hated it and quit the job based largely on the open office plan.
The whole TED operation comes across as some sort of crazy scam to prey on academics. Just check out Eddie Huang's account of being a TED fellow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk
What's up with that abstract? Can you imagine a medical abstract where N and key parameters of the results aren't in the abstract?
I'm under the distinct impression that the decision if the Hyperloop is built is less about technical details and more about project cost.

It's not like the engineers working with Elon Musk are taking a break from designing rockets - oh wait - The engineers at spaceX build rockets that go into orbit.
But if you implement all of that perfectly, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having an open office? (I.e. to stimulate more spontaneous collaboration)
Its not the open space per se that is the problem but rather the ratio of the number of people occupying how much space.

I have now had 15 years of experience with different plans, 6 of those with my own 60 people agency and a lot of time spent trying to figure out the optimal space.

Its really simple. Size vs. number of people is the defining factor.
It means they'll know one thing. They won't have time to get into anything else. Every day, they'll have to make the decision to play the one video game/watch the one TV show they know they'll like, or take a risk on something new. They'll choose the safe bet every time. This means they'll not be the Amish kids, they'll just be the kids that are really obnoxious about Power Rangers, talk about Power Rangers all the time, wear only Power Rangers clothes, but have never seen any other shows or played any other video games.

It's a great strategy if you're trying to breed risk-averse, close-minded social outcasts.
Do you have money?
Interesting that a Tedx event in Zagreb this Friday is still being touted on Ted.com, with a link to an Ivan Jakobović "water engine" video.
My lord this is truth. I don't care what you did yesterday, what you're doing tonight, what you're doing this weekend, why you're wearing what you're wearing, who got you that thing, when you got in, when you leave, why you hate brad, why you hate brad but love donna, why donna's nice but you'd prefer to be home studying. did you get an extra $30 deducted from your paycheck? doesn't that suck? it only takes me 20 minutes to get work, it use to take me 15.

I don't care. I've come here to work.

I enjoy interacting socially, but I really honest-to-goodness would rather talk about work at work. I really truly don't care about your personal life at work. I would feel so relieved if I never had a conversation about something personal at work.

It doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, but it doesn't need to be constant chatter.

Yes I'm an engineer.
>The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient.

Do you only read Simple English wikipedia? It's very clear and sufficient.
The main purpose of open offices is to save on real estate costs, stimulating more spontaneous collaboration is just a flimsy excuse.
That's what my closed cans headphones are for :P
I think one benefit is the cost savings? More people in smaller area + large area for group chats when needed, etc?
The actual purpose of open offices is to save money.

The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.
This really is organization dependent. Do your managers look over your shoulder and micromanage you? Would they get upset if they see HN in your web browser more than once or twice a day? Do you worry about them 'catching' you? Are you surrounded by 4 dozen people with multiple loud passionate discussions guaranteed to happen per day? Possibly in a language you don't understand most of the time? And whenever they do this making it very difficult to concentrate? Do they ignore your social requests to move it to a conference room, since they only last a few minutes and they're hunched over someones desk looking at something?

Do you know some people get a minor feeling of background anxiety when their back is to an open space with people talking and walking around? Their peripheral vision and senses conflict with the deep concentration required for software work.

Those noise cancelling headphones are meant to take out droning noises, such as AC system fans or jet engines in airplanes. Conversations with their lack of repetitiveness and human vocal ranges are not filtered out well, if at all. The music they will have to listen to filter you out is distracting in its own right.

Open Offices also decrease the barriers for interruption. Managers like it because they make their jobs a lot easier, because they get to hear what is happening and get status on their workers progress passively.

This is what open office means to many people.
Twitter announces IPO: The Pricing Game begins
in my neighborhood growing up, from time to time a parent would come and try 'coach' us during pickup football games. At this point about 1/3 of us would quit playing. Buzzkilling.
... one of the sensible ones ...
What annoys me is that it feels unpolished. The system options screen, app buttons with stock looking icons placed on ultra vibrant gradients, poorly spaced typography... it's flat taken too far.
I have ADHD. I find what's on my own computer distracting enough. Put me in a room of people moving and screens flicking and changing and

-- SQUIRREL! --

... I won't be very productive.
Are you in an environment where you're often working together and collaborating on shit? Open plans are great.

Do you need quiet time where you're thinking for 5 hours a day and coding for 1? You need your own office.

Graphic designers, phone support, this kind of stuff seems to work great in an open office. Crazy team trying to crank out something fast? Also works great.

But they just add to burnout and aren't a good fit for writers or programmers. If this is the case, give everyone a small, modest office with drywall and a drop ceiling, and then have LOTS of common areas or meeting rooms so people can get together to chat or bang stuff out.
Does this mean group messaging is available? I've missed out on a few events due to not receiving a group text to my google voice number.

Is there a service that can replace google voice?
I think the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem plays a large part in that. Apple only has to worry about a few models and can push updates all at once with very few variations in firmware.
Cialdini's book is one of the best and most readable pieces of popular science writing ever. It's fascinating from start to finish, frequently hilarious, and pretty hard to summarize because there's so much cool stuff in it.

The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!
The Operating Model That Is Eating The World
I've never understood the pure desire to give away one's money. In my book, parting with money is a significant thing that only comes after careful consideration and knowledge of clear benefits. Even then, I'm never happy to get rid of my money. The unpleasantness of giving up my money is simply outweighed by the utility of the thing I'm buying.

What is the reasoning as to why one would voluntarily give money when not absolutely necessary? It just seems odd that one would be happy simply because of that. (In commerce, that is. Charity is a different animal.)

Then again, I might be the weird one.
Aggregating a list of tools for lean startups