skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, indeed, heartily concur.

"News" is nothing more than a report of events potentially affecting our lives: if a particular report is intelligent, trustworthy, and helpful to our understanding of what we need to do to better our lives, it is something to be valued and even on occasion treasured; if, in contrast, it is nothing more than what amounts to a reporter's trick for grabbing attention or an attempt to pass off what amounts to drivel as something that somehow should command our time, we have good reason to shun and even resent it. We do need to care about things beyond ourselves but who wants to endure the institutional barrage of worthless or semi-worthless reports that can impose upon us throughout a given day if we allow it in this age of instant and ubiquitous communication? I wouldn't go so far as to say "please turn it all off" because then you do lose the ability to get a minimum exposure each day as needed to stay meaningfully informed as a person and as a citizen but I would say "give me one giant filter" to be able to control and limit the flow. Who can realistically profit from a daily surfeit of junk-bond-quality reporting and especially about things such as a sensational car wreck (or whatever) having little or no affect on our lives? Since that is what "news" mostly is these days, it is best to apply that one great filter available to us all - that is, personal self-control. That is what I love most about your comment: it reminds us clearly that it is within our power to use such self-control and to thereby focus on quality while filtering what is junk.

The article itself is somewhat dubious, as you note. Important note for those who would commend their views to others: scatter-gun assertions made in support of a point can leave one doubting how great is the author's grip on the topic at hand; if you have something to say, think it through and develop your points well before assuming that others will want to hear what you have to say. Not really well written at all.
"Those extra hours have negative productivity."

Can have negative productivity. I am all in favor of keeping work loads light, but in real businesses edge cases come up.

We recently just got through a couple of really harrowing sprints because of such an edge case - a lot of hours were worked. Quality remained high. I personally am satisfied with what we delivered - while it could have been done better with more time, the tradeoffs were all understood and accepted.

The flip side of that is that this kind of thing happens to a given team here maybe once or twice a year. The rest of the time is sane, normal working hours and load. If it were like this a significant portion of the time, then you'd start seeing the kind of patterns you're describing.
As a sufferer of carpal tunnel syndrome, I can tell you that this palm rest design is a bad idea. You're focusing the weight of each hand on a pressure point which is sure to contribute to pinching the median nerve.

Also, separating the left and right hand boards from one another really helps with joint stress. I saw one of the designs has a axle. Why not just split the keyboard in two completely? I vote for each half of the keyboard having a velcro strap that I can comfortably attach just above each of my knees. For most people, this would be a very neutral posture. In fact, it may even inspire better posture as folks would reach for the keys on their knees.. You know.. You could call it KneeKeyboard or Keys-4-Knees. Then again, I'm sure someone has already done it, but I'm too lazy/busy to look into it right now.

Other than those comments. Awesome stuff.

Edit: I'd like to add that the wrist pad suggests to me wrist movement is required to reach all of the keys. Again, the carpal tunnel gnome tells me that pivoting my wrist is painful. Why not strive for very little wrist movement. Once you get there, the surface is it's own support, and it would support more than just the wrist; it would support the forearm, too (see knee keyboard suggestion above).

I also noticed one of the designs recessed the keys below the face of the keyboard. I think that's a good way to get away from the vertical wrist pivoting. Still, you'd need to mind the lip of the recess, so it's not a high impact point on the wrist.
This just means they'll be paying Google for that info instead of being able to gather it themselves.
Ummmm.... they already store all your e-mail. What difference does storing images make?
I just ran the same test and can confirm the results. Google will only load your image if you open the email, which means Google has just opted-in all users to mail receipts.

I don't use any Google services outside of small tests like this, but it still makes me concerned for how this will affect the privacy of people I know.
Yes, but it is unclear whether their servers will load them regardless of whether or not they're sent to my browser.
Well, 4 bar is about 133 feet of head. I'm guessing that he doesn't have a 100 foot waterfall on his property, he has a stream that loses 100 feet of elevation over some large distance.
Honest question: Does this differ from them storing the email which already contains the pictures?
> I would argue that you can be productive for more than 8 hours a day

I agree with you, but not on a single task.

If you want to hire someone who can program for a couple of hours, design your marketing material for a few more, work on your IT infrastructure for another couple of hours, and then maybe go off and do some sales work and meet with the rest of your team, you might have something that works.

Of course, if you find someone who can do all those things well, they are probably off working on their own business and couldn't care less about what you are doing.
Ask NH: alternative to wikia?
I would like to create a wiki with a custom front end. Specifically, its like the imdb.com website but one that can be updated like a wiki. Thoughts?
It's too late for that, unless there's a lawsuit.
Yea, it's hard to not think this is ultimately not a great move. It seems rather shortsighted from a Gmail user's perspective if Google can't address concerns over spammers being able to verify email addresses, or even just analytic trackers. It is also vastly less appealing to hear that Google plans to cache all images, which we know Big Brother is grabbing as well. And in the case where someone may want to actually see images for a marketing email (albeit, extremely rare for me), it actually hamstrings the source of the email from possibly providing customized images/content based on geolocation/browser/etc. that I could be interested in seeing.

So, what's the upside vs. just having the option to display images as desired and NOT have Google cache them?
Dropbox and Dell partner to empower businesses worldwide
This is probably obvious to people who do email marketing, but I just tested whether gmail bounces bad addresses. They do bounce addresses that have never been registered and addresses that have been deleted. This means that even before this change, spammers could find out if an address is active.
I feel that the situation proposed in the article is a completely false dichotomy. It's a myth that a good team sits in a meeting room for 4 days and codes a perfect product in one swoop on Friday. At the same time, paying someone in KLOCs is probably a guarantee that you'll have a bad time.

This is an issue I struggle with on a regular basis, as we outsource a lot of our development work. We work on a project basis, but work very closely with our partners to help them make good estimates, maximize capacity, and minimize their (and thus our) risk. I don't want people to work overtime, nor do I want them under-committing.

My experience is that watching someone's commits, even from far away, is actually a damn good indicator as to how capacity is being managed on a project. Every project is different, but coders code: if they're not committing frequently and regularly, it's time to check in.

Human beings normally don't have flat productivity, so activity spikes are normal. But low activity in a period means there is not enough work and/or there will be a large spike later, which for me means risk.
Protect me from images? That is not why I used this feature.

I used it so that images like /verifyRealEmail.php?email=$myaddress wouldn't work.
Programmer here. I've been in two places like that. One relied on its reputation to leverage and squeeze people to the last drop; the other, more realistically maybe, just paid a lot and expected a great deal of work and a constant display of busyness. Both companies eventually had to face very serious issues caused by an unnaturally high staff turnover. Admittedly, a great company culture can be seriously financially rewarding if the management is able to create and cultivate it. Since not everyone has this ability and, let's face it, some software products are just dull to build, but still have a market, I guess that a moderate amount of squeeze works for long enough for the average so-so manager to justify their salary until they leave themselves, without giving any real benefit for the company in the long run :(
Snapchat is the best way to have a quick conversation with someone that is photo-based. That is particularly useful for seeing someone's emotions outside of being face-to-face.

Text is dry. Snapchat lets me quickly message someone what I'm feeling.

It has almost nothing to do with disappearing messages.
I've had the same overall experience as kohanz with Rails. Little toy apps do work but details are sparse while trying to troubleshoot things. I'd probably wait for Flynn to mature and look at that before investing much more time in Dokku.

Of note for anyone reading:
1. Since the buildpacks are based on Heroku, if you're having trouble try seeing what it'd take to get your app deployed there. For example with Rails 3.2, if you pre-compile your assets on the production server while deploying an app it will try to instantiate your app and test a database connection; however, Dokku doesn't provide the database configuration until after this step of the deployment so your deploy will fail. This is fixed by either pre-compiling locally or changing a setting in application.rb. In Rails 4 I believe you just have to precompile your assets and check them along with the manifest into your repo. (Ref: https://github.com/progrium/dokku/issues/165, https://github.com/progrium/dokku/issues/202)

2. It's probably easier to just set up a separate database rather than relying on one of the project's plugins. Right now they're just a little too obfuscated and hard to troubleshoot (the dokku-postgresql plugin I used would lose its persistent volume on server reboot).
Astronomy was the same as astrology until 1700 or so. Kelsey, who discovered the law of planetary motion, was an astrologer. Copernicus was an astrologer. After Newton formulated in universal gravitation, went into occult studies.

Astrology is different from astronomy in the present day, but not in the past.
I agree with most of the advice posted here. Making a living from online poker is extremely difficult in the current environment. However, it is possible that the environment could change in the future in a way that makes it easier.

Right now there are a few things making it extremely difficult to make money with online poker. The obvious one is the illegality of playing from the U.S. What isn't so obvious, is that the lack of casual American players has all but destroyed the global online poker industry. Back in the golden age of online poker, there were millions of recreational players who were really horrible, but kept playing as a form of entertainment. As the US Government started intimidating banks into refusing to handle poker-related transactions, a large percentage of these bad players (AKA fish) stopped playing. A few years later, when Pokerstars and Full Tilt were shut down by the feds, all but the most dedicated players left, leaving a relatively small pool of players that tend to be pretty good.

So now that there is a smaller group with a generally higher level of skill playing online poker, it is almost impossible to make a living.

At least three things would have to happen to make poker a good way to make a living in the future:

1. It has to become legal in the United States

2. It has to overcome its reputation for being unsafe (millions of people had their pokerstars and full tilt accounts seized.)

3. Poker has to become extremely popular like it was during the golden era of online poker.

If you are interested in poker, and you can play legally from where you live, I suggest learning the game now. If and when these things happen, you don't want to be one of the fish.

Please note that playing facebook poker won't teach you anything. People play much differently when there isn't any money involved.
It wouldn't make sense to run irssi as a daemon though as it's got a proper UI to it (not sure if it's written in ncurses or not, but it's that sort of thing). So this is the type of set up that screen is ideal for.

I agree about the annoyances of AndChat though - and specifically the multiple-server implementation thing you mentioned. Personally I still prefer that to running screen+irssi on a touch screen phone (I used to run that set up back when I had the Google G1 / HTC Dream - but personally I don't enjoy using irssi on a touch screen)
Github Guides
No problem. It's confusing.
For pressure.

If you put a 4 foot dam up and block the stream, you have 4 feet of water delivering pressure. If you use a pipe, you can have lots of feet of water delivering pressure (1 bar is about 33 feet of water, so this installation is at least 60 feet of water delivering pressure).
That would seem to enable the patenting of making a peace sign with your hand and fingers.
From 0 to Startup: How We Made $70,000 in Revenue in Our First 6 Months – Part 1
> To be fair, if you want ultra-high performance for high quality 3d games, why did you learn javascript?

That's not fair at all, because there are valid answers to that question like "Because I also want my programs to run in the browser."
I just tried it. It loads the image on e-mail LOAD. Not prefetched. This is a privacy problem.
Podcast: Spying with Avatars
Trade dress is more expensive to litigate.
It's in the article.

> Of course, those who prefer to authorize image display on a per message basis can choose the option “Ask before displaying external images” under the General tab in Settings. That option will also be the default for users who previously selected “Ask before displaying external content”.
And that's why I'll be cheering the EU regulators that will sue Google into the ground should their shoppy-thingy ever gain the marketshare of Amazon or Google search.
I wonder what size exactly a "small" team is, especially if they contain "software engineers, Q.A. testers, user-experience developers and product owners." Somewhere around 25?
I don’t think you quite understand the changes here, no "read receipts" are sent, any analytics sent only point to the Google proxy processing the images, no individual recipients nor their actions are revealed.

See how marketers are scrambling to adjust to this change:

a.) Gmail is now requesting all images from proxy servers (googleusercontent.com), which incorrectly situates users in its headquarters in Mountain View, California when images are downloaded. This impacts the ability to geo-target image content for those Gmail users who are affected by the changes. (Note: Local Maps using zip codes appended as query parameters are unaffected.)

b.) Gmail is stripping the user-agent headers from the client request, which eliminates the ability to determine the Gmail user’s device and target image content appropriately.

c.) Gmail is removing the cache-control headers from the responses, which forces the user’s images to be stored in their browser’s cache for up to a day. This only impacts live image content if a Gmail user re-opens the email after the first open.

...

http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...

Basically their only avenue for now is mobile email which will soon follow in adopting this method.
If you do your job right, you look lazy and they ask why they are paying you in the first place.

If you have no idea what you are doing, you run around, look really busy and that justifies your position.

Shitty companies fire the first guy and keep the second.
Munich open source switch 'completed successfully'
These are hyperlinks to images; they aren't attached to the email.
Coinbase Raises $25M
"Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors.

On the flip side, those same solutions can no longer set a persistent cookie with the image, so persistent tracking based on the initial email open will stop working.
I am the same as you, as far as focusing on finance and tech. I think there are reasons why these topics are far less stressful or depressing: Tech news and reviews are exciting when they are good, and irrelevant when they are bad. If something gets some bed press, you simply don't buy! Also the tone is often nice, probably because tech reviewers have a pretty good job. They get to play with new things all the time and get paid.

Finance is usually upbeat as well -- now, I get most of my news from Bloomberg, if that matters. But since hedge funds can't advertise, literally everyone in the financial news chain benefits from the stock market going up. This may tend to color reports to the positive, making for a happier listening experience. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt that they would ever "color" a story, then even in difficult times, the focus is on investment opportunities and interviews are always with those doing well. Ever since I switched to Bloomberg news radio and a focus on online tech news, I feel like I can bear to live in the world again!
Yes, there are quite a few construction contractors who require they be paid an amount before they begin work. They then either don't even show up, do an awful, intentionally half-finished job, or simply quit to never be heard from again. While anecdotal evidence, my father has been doing construction contracting for the last 17 years and runs into these types of people regularly. He often comes in and finishes the jobs that these people ran from. Usually, he just tears it apart and re-starts.
Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
Ask HN: A random maths problem we started discussing at work
How many people would you need in a group to make it likely that at least one member had a birthday on each of 365 days of the year?

Let's ignore leap years and define likely as >50% probability.
Nope, usually about 6 people: 2-3 devs, 1 tester, 1 UX, 1 PO.
Good point! Hopefully this paves the way for a movement among other universities. I don't know of any similar initiatives in Ireland.
At that price, it doesn't seem like you would be able to provide much value by doing it manually. If you factor in some overhead, you would have to be spending less than an hour on each report to pay yourself a decent wage. If I'm running a business, I'm not going to pay someone to do research that I could do myself in less than an hour, even if it is really cheap. With B2B services, it's probably a better idea to provide substantial and demonstrable value than it is to have a really low price.
And promptly sterilized. Unfortunately most plausible life forms require meters of soil/rock surrounding them to survive the harsh space environment (probably more in the vicinity of Jupiter).
Why Invest In Bitcoin When You Could Invest In Another Currency (Tim Worstall)
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis
This type of question doesn't just apply to programmers.

In IT departments, the ones that seem crazy busy and dealing with all sorts of fires can hint at a deeper issue of low technical ceilings. The IT departments where things seem calm, relaxed, and under control can hint at a higher technical ceiling present.

Similarly, in programming, there are those who are solution based thinkers (assume they understand what the problem is and off they go coding) and are easily caught into a perpetual cycle of refactoring much earlier. There are also developers who take the time to learn the problem from the ground up, by doing the actual work and finding the things that the user is seeking to solve but can't express or imply.

This industrial age thinking of being at a desk for x hours or looking busy is an incredibly poor measuring stick for what is an abstract, and creative pursuit. I find my time away from the keyboard is as important as the time I spend at a keyboard solving problems that need to be thought about.

Going for a walk, helping someone else with their problem before my own all seem to have interesting triggers for creativity -- solving a problem eloquently enough that it requires deep understanding but little programming wizardry.

My favourite part of this article was being open to, and appreciating the value of learning solid processes from someone with more experience of having a relationship with a code base for more than 1-3 years. There are too many times where problems are trivialized, and lessons are re-learnt over and over by new team members, experienced or not.

In the end, I read a quote about the kind of software development environment that I always want to help enable -- avoid wizardry in code, frameworks and technology, and instead focus the creativity and magic on architecture solutions that don't require as much complexity to create the same solution much simpler in the short term and the long run.
OP was using "read receipts" colloquially, to include "tracking images with a unique code embedded in them".

And, as such, OP's claims are exactly correct.

The only way this would not be true is if GMail pulled every image in every email, even if it's not read by the recipient. Given GMail's usage of the term "proxy server" in their blog post, as well as the tests by the OP and others on this thread, this appears not to be the case.
> Every startup is a bad idea until it makes money. Then, magically, it becomes an amazing idea.

This is not remotely true. For example, Dropbox was not a bad idea until it made money; it was a brilliant idea with an unproven business model.
Steve Engels at the University of Toronto has done some work on exactly this. You can read a bit about the work and listen to some samples here: http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/leading-edge/computer-music-...

It used similar techniques, using a note-by-note Markov Chain on MIDI to generate music similar to an initial piece of training data. The difference with his model is that it's only trained on a single piece at a time. This leads to significantly more coherent music, but at the cost of making it effectively a variation on the original piece.

The biggest challenge in this kind of work is trying to get an overall structure for the entire song. In talks at the university, Engels has described the output of his model as that of a "distracted jazz pianist"—the moment-to-moment melodies are coherent but the song lacks overall form and direction.
Most corporate managers would observe B's rate and demand it of all bricklayers, without bothering to figure out why B built such a good wall. They'd hire cheaply (cost-cutting, HR says this is as much budget as we get) and end up with a bunch of A-type bricklayers, require B-esque timeframes from these A-type people (without bothering to train them in whatever made B so much more efficient) and get terrible walls built by mediocre bricklayers in 2 hours. That is what would actually happen.
Giving the product away for free
It wouldn't be great with current hardware.

I have a rift dev kit and any significant amount of lag between moving my head, and my vision being updated makes me feel a bit woozy.
"the manager that can't read code won't know the difference"

The manager that spent a month "learning to code" but never worked on a big project will think he knows the difference, but probably doesn't either.