skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open-plan offices are backdoor age and health discrimination, also known as "culture fit".

With all the project-management garbage (often in the name of "Agile") designed to mash software down into chunks that can be done mindlessly by CommodityJavaDrones, making software development superficially reliable (but the product soulless) the job is easy, which the business wants. It's more expensive to dumb down the job and hire idiots (legitimate 10x programmers only cost 1.5-2x) but more reliable-- the risks are long-term and thus pushed off to the next guy-- as they see it. So the attrition for promotion has to be conducted by subjecting people to petty stresses, but in bulk, and seeing who cracks first. When someone has the first panic attack, goes to the ER (a real panic attack, if you don't know what it is, is terrifying) and one way or another isn't working there in 3 months, that's part of the design.

Also, as one who suffers panic attacks, it's not the noise that makes people sick (and, with enough time in an open-plan office, almost everyone will get sick) because people will tune that out over time, but open-back visibility, which is much harder to get used to. The creepy feeling of being watched is what fucks peoples' health up. That could be fixed with booth-style seating if regular offices can't be afforded, but you never see that either.

There's a false egalitarianism to it as well. Managers typically have desks in the bullpen as well so they can say that it's a blanket policy, but that's making an unfair comparison. Managers can come and go as they please, typically only spend a couple hours per day in the bullpen, and don't have much to fear from visibility anyway; but workers who take the side offices "too often" draw suspicion and, even if they're getting a lot of work done, have to worry about getting "culture fitted" (that is, no-hired or fired for being old, sick, or female.)

I love programming itself but this is a fucking shitty industry and it's goddamn time we rise up and take it the fuck back.
I agree with your basic stance, but I think that most people who would have used Geocities in the 90s use Tumblr or Wordpress/Blogger now.
Ask HN: Side projects to work on when you are working fulltime?
Yeah, I too, though it does not help with things like Dropbox. You need to add a second encryption inside your full disk encryption separately for everything that has direct access to the files. And that is exactly where encfs shines (even though I also use it for home, but that is a different story).
But you can't actually 'work on the same code'. You have to have a copy. And some projects are significant, not committed in a day or two. SO merging is a fact of life.

And in an open-source community, as you rightly point out, nobody wants to do the dirty work. And merging is as dirty as it gets.
It's already filtering down into other IDE's.
If they work on the same branch, what happens if A finishes early and B is late, or abandoned as a bad idea?

Instead, A and B should be on separate branches. Maintain integration environments where the feature branches are regularly merged together when each gets to the level of doneness that environment represents. The final step is to get promoted to master-candidate, where you are going to launch tomorrow unless we find a problem. If things break there, blow that away and recreate it from master, and fix your problems one integration environment lower.
Well, non-stockholder private citizens do get involved in some of the decisions of private companies. Anti-pollution and workplace safety laws are just two of many such examples.

You may object that those are "laws", and different from the views of private citizens in the local neighborhood. But even on that smaller scale, if a company wants to expand into a new building, it will need a building permit, which requires a public hearing. Private citizens have the right to attend the meeting and object or support the change. This is public input on the otherwise internal business decisions of the company, no?

A neighborhood can complain about commercial trucks going through a street which is a convenient shortcut for a company at the edge of town, but noisy and possibly dangerous to the people on the street. In response, the city might prohibit through truck traffic for that street, causing the company drivers to take a longer route.

Or the other way around, the city passed a law saying that alcohol could not be sold within distance X of a school, unless the parents of the school said otherwise. There was a 3 star restaurant just barely within distance X of my elementary school, who had to ask for, and got, permission to continue to serve alcohol with their meals.

There have always been tradeoffs in how to use shared public resources, so I don't understand why you say "That’s not how it works, it never has been."

In some sense you are right - I do argue that $GROUP = "the citizens" should always "be able to vote whether that private company should be able to do $THING or not." I don't think we should always do so, no, but that's not the issue.
Correct - that's the basis of my thesis. That "SF" isn't necessarily more NIMBYistic than sub-regions of other cities that have had "high" (say, 15,000 residents/sq mi or more) density for an extended period of time. If those other areas had experienced a similar historical accident of municipal lines (ie, only those parts of a Chicago that have exceeded 15,000+ residents per square mile since the 1950s were considered "Chicago"), the thesis is that SF and those sub regions wouldn't show on average dramatically different levels of opposition to new development.

I guess another phrase this thesis is that SF's apparant NIMBYism is a misleading artifact of what you describe as a "historical accident of municipal lines."

This distortion, of course, can make SF look good as well as bad. You can pump SF up by talking about the ratio of <desirableculturalfactor>:Resident compared to Houston, or Chicago, or LA, conveniently ignoring the fact that in Chicago, the residential suburbs are counted, whereas in SF, they aren't. My guess is that this ratio in LA or Chicago's densest 48 square miles would look quite similar to SF. Or, alternatively, you can make SF look bad by excluding the sort of developments that favor the burbs (such as percentage of households with children - when a family moves from SF to Redwood City, SF "loses" a family - in many areas, this would just be considered a move within the region).

Good or bad, my thesis is that these differences are largely an artifact of how the borders are drawn, rather than innate cultural differences between SF and other metropolitan areas. I don't doubt that these cultural difference exist (and they may in fact be driven by the fact that the electorate in SF isn't diluted by the votes in the surrounding areas), but I think they may be greatly overstated.
Except cubicles feel like tools of oppression.
> (and let's stop for one second to think about what that has given us)

It's entirely unclear to me that Tim's web is better than whatever similar system(s) would have gained popularity in its place.
Firstly, your "founding fathers" - ha now there's a joke. Do you think anyone respects those amendments? Nope. If they thought that, you wouldn't be stocked up with weapons.

And we all know how effective that technology is at ending all those pesky terrorists with their zip guns and IEDs...
No. None of this is accurate.

Microsoft gets information about vulnerabilities from the same sources as everyone else. They outspend every other software vendor by something like 4:1 on outside software security consultants. If they are in a privileged position regarding WinAPI software vulnerabilities at all, it is a marginally privileged position. No security person working at Microsoft would tell you they were confident that outsiders weren't holding severe, exploitable vulnerabilities back.

NSA, meanwhile, is as competent at sourcing vulnerabilities as any organization on the planet. They have internal research teams that generate them that are presumably competitive with any private research team, and they apparently purchase vulnerabilities like everyone else --- not from Microsoft, but from research teams that sell vulnerabilities.

Microsoft gives pre-release information about vulnerabilities to lots of different organizations; for instance, the IDS and network security vendors get pre-release info to create signatures. This program is, IIRC, over a decade old.

NSA is a dual-role organization; it also houses the USG's center for defensive technology expertise. It is the opposite of surprising that NSA would have the same relationship with Microsoft as, say, Symantec would.

Finally, CISPA does nothing resembling what you claimed it does. CISPA is opt-in; it cannot be used to force a company to disclose anything. CISPA is about incident data, not vulnerabilities. It is already lawful to share vulnerability information with the government. The gray area in data sharing is non- anonymized incident data, which can be covered by any of 10+ different regulations that make even IP-level metadata risky to share for collaborative defense.

CISPA is an extraordinarily short bill; you can simply read it instead of taking my word for it.
"It's non negotiable."

It may feel that way right now, but no, it's not.

That's like saying, "The recipients I have in mind use AOL Instant Messenger. They're never going to switch to Facebook."
As if having an IDS would make a difference.
G7 warns Russia on 'annexing' Crimea
Radar cross section is a function of the signal backscatter density in the direction of the radar receiver. That is, it's all about how much signal is bounced back. Small things that bounce a lot of the signal back (see: radar reflector) have very large cross sections. Similarly, if an object is designed to absorb or reflect in a direction away from the receiver can have a small cross section. The F-117 is "radar stealthy" because all of those funky, flat facets all over it reflect small parts of the radar signal in odd directions so that very little is reflected directly back in the direction of the emitter (which is one reason why they aren't in service any more...air defense folks figured out that multiple receivers spaced out plus a little signal processing could tell you where an F-117 is).
Cloaq – A communications App for hackers?
It's kind of interesting to think about. Remember the hullabaloo just after the Boston bomber lit off the bomb but wasn't caught yet? Imagine all of that societal rage focused on a small group of people who have started an armed conflict and killed a few policemen, and you can imagine how quickly that group will be annihilated.
I hadn't realized the post-1979 thing! Sorry for the misinformation above. I guess that every place I ever considered renting in SF was an older building.
You can change the rate, but with an expanding planet and continuing flight to cities there's no end in sight. So ultimately, old people quit being able to afford where they live. It's not going to change soon, but as you observe you may be able to change the rate at which it occurs.
Not really, it's just usually when I'm trying out different queries in the console that I have the, "oh crap, what did I name that column" moments. If I need to search for something in particular, I just search schema.rb.
Which the private company paid a LOT more than the average person to create. Not sure why so many people seem to think that companies pay nothing fro infrastructure.
I feel tempted to just answer the question using the Betteridge Law of Headlines: Why is git pull considered harmful? It isn't.

- nonlinearities aren't intrinsically bad. If they represent the actual history they are ok.

- accidental reintroduction of commits rebased upstream are the result of wrongly rewriting history upstream. You can't rewrite history when history is replicated along several repos.

- modifying the working directory is an expected result; of debatable usefulness, namely in the face of the behaviour of hg/monotone/darcs/other_dvcs_predating_git, but again not intrinsically bad.

- pausing to review others' work is needed for a merge, again an expected behaviour on git pull

- making it hard to rebase against a remote branch is good. Don't rewrite history unless you absolutely need to. I can't for the life of me understand this pursuit of a (fake) linear history

- Not cleaning up branches is good. Each repo knows what it wants to hold. Git has no notion of master-slave relationships.
I'd be much more interested in a solution that effectively minimizes the text or uses another technique about speed reading (like diagonals, etc).

The reason why I won't be using this service is simply because it makes the eye lazier. My eyes are already lazy enough because I am in front of the computer 12+ hours a day, so my eyes muscles need movement. Staring at one point for long time can also cause side effects like losing the sense of space and time. Staring at one point is often used as hypnotizing during different kind of therapies.
This is probably a secret Russian plot to destroy the US economy.
But, busses, really? They are evil now? With all the good they do, I think maybe they should be a protected class or something.
I tried to strip it down to its minimal form:

http://jsfiddle.net/Lej6m/95/
Once again you've inspired me! (First time was your posts about getting started in consulting. Very helpful!) What a great idea.

Edit: Whoa, brain is spinning, ideas are mixing. James Altucher (Choose Yourself, author) gives away ideas to network, create value, and ultimately generates business as a result. Something is coming alive in my head. Cool.
If only that were true! My first employer was a large organization that explicitly embraced the waterfall methodology that we all rightfully deride.
Yeah, you suppose one person - easy to find and contain. But a diffuse population of unrest? Impossible.
Why Buffer is the new 37Signals, and what it means for the "startup culture"
Creating a Web API that Supports CRUD Operations
Bitcoin's COO Explains what Bitcoin is on Conan O'Brien
> By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA is able to hack into the targeted computer and covertly siphon out data from its hard drive. A top-secret animation demonstrates the tactic in action.

Can anyone explain why they need to conceal it as a Facebook server? Why is that essential to infecting your computer? Why can't it just send you the malware, and then redirect you to the real Facebook (since their mission is accomplished anyway)?
That's a false dichotomy. Matter of fact is there is no right way to use git, because the way you use git is going to change according to your organization size and complexity.

The Linux kernel is a very different animal than your average rinky-dink hobby project, which is different from your ten-dev consultancy.

Matter of fact is: the git UX is awful and it punishes everyone who doesn't have have a high level understanding of how the underlying persistence model works.
Using the super cheap 433mhz wirelessly switchable power plugs using the raspberry pi is also super low cost, it's just not secure against tampering.
https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2013/03/home-automation-with-... has some details.
KBDFun
You missed out on WinG.

As a side note it is quite hard to find anything WinG related nowadays, even as historical curiosity.
Ah but what hardware will these new web apps use? How will they get their network packets across from A to B if not going through the expensive Cisco hardware?

They all need each other.
Shenandoah: a pauseless GC for the JVM from Red Hat
Yeah, it is broken. I had a higher score and got to a high number and it said I lost.
Just in case you miss the other comment in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7385494
MS's program to provide information on upcoming security issues to large customers isn't anything sinister. It's an obvious step to achieve a better overall security by allowing larger users to mitigate damage before a patch is available.

You can spin it as a secret NSA-program, but I don't think that's very useful as this program does legitimately help a ton of users.

(Not that it really would excuse things, but I'd be very surprised if intelligence agencies don't have people inside companies like Microsoft anyways.)
Surely GIFs are hardware accelerated these days?

Great article, right?
The snap to top is annoying.
given the choice, how many people on here
would pick the phone over the toilet?

I'd rather have health insurance ($5000/year) instead of a basic cell phone plan ($200/year). But if I've only got $200/year to spend...
And we all know how effective that technology is at ending all those pesky terrorists with their zip guns and IEDs...

Those people have been indoctrinated since birth to see us as evil invaders. Some of their religions have baked in the idea that it's good to die in order to kill invaders. And we've sometimes acted like an evil invader. (See Blackwater atrocities, etc.) It's an invalid comparison because our population isn't motivated in the same way.

It's easy to become disheartened with the current state of affairs, but history has shown that ignoring reality doesn't work. Setting aside the question of ethics, the reality is that an armed revolution in America probably can't happen. And besides, there are plenty of other options to explore.
Jekyll! Static blog, very fast, GitHub offers free hosting.
The amount of hyperbole and intentional provocation of anxiety in this article makes me think the writer isn't really looking to inform anyone of anything. Instead she just regurgitates one tech stereotype after another like it's news.
This is a terrific idea. I was blown away the first time I saw it. I have been able to consistently get high comprehension at 650WPM for general subject matter (ie non-technical articles), and plan on working my way up to 1000. Love it!
Let's say we do that and then what? The NSA/GCHQ decides to build a fully decentralized spy network. Millions of nodes connected all over the place; a botnet of spying. Sound familiar?
How To Detect NSA ANT Catalog Hardware Implants
Yeah, there actually is too much stout in Dublin...
Are these really agile-specific problems? These feel like problems almost any approach can have
> what happens if A finishes early and B is late, or abandoned as a bad idea?

In those cases, you have to fix the code base, and git wont help you. In my experience, it is much less common to have code that needs to be removed than to have bugs that were introduced because the code bases were synced too late. How much of a problem this is depends on how flexible your release cycle is.
> I still find it slightly bemusing, that 2.5 billion people lack access to any sanitation [1], but only 1 billion lack electricity and access to a mobile phone

I don't find it too surprising. Having spent time in various poor countries, my intuition is that in many low-GDP countries electricity is a no-brainer for everyone, whereas home/neighborhood/public sanitation is not just a matter of disposable income but also of awareness/education/inertia..
Can't decide how I feel about this. Does anyone feel that this type of testing is kind of dishonest? On one hand, listing a product as available with a price is a great way to gauge interest. On the other hand, telling someone it is "sold out" when it was never available feels wrong somehow. What do you think?
Except that you need to know what you will do in advance, in order to give a meaningful name to the branch, and you need to delete odds branches in order to find your way when switching, et cetera.

The first point is stronger than it seems, at least for me. It is a bit like requiring a definitive title to a novel I'm starting to write before the first line is there.
Ask HN: Why HTTPs certificates cost at least 50$?
I too would like to know this. Looks a brilliant feature.

EDIT: Found! It is still there in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Text > Summarize. It just isn't enabled by default.
Well, here's Stedman (a standard medical dictionary) on 'emergent' from...a hundred years ago:

emergent 1. Arising suddenly and unexpectedly and calling for quick judgment and prompt action.

http://books.google.com/books?id=OG0XAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA290&dq=st...
No, the compositor is written in C++ and so is the exposed interface. It's basically like cocoa.
This is a side tangent but seeing graphviz being used here reminded me of this total boss ruby patch: http://cirw.in/blog/find-references

I had spent a week slowly isolating this brutal memory leak until being able to see the whole ObjectSpace illuminated my problem.
I use git-up for this issue. https://github.com/aanand/git-up
You'd be surprised. I've been in a village in rural India where there were open sewers at the sides of the unpaved roads and there was still a massive mobile phone mast just next to it. Someone told me that 800 million people in India have mobile phones. I don't think it's that people are picking phones over toilets, I think it's that organising large infrastructure in a poor and corrupt environment is a lot harder than having a personal phone (that is important for employment and other communications) that uses fairly lightweight private infrastructure.
What is a AES Key?
While this strikes me as neat, and a convenience especially in languages like Java, my reaction to it is similar to how old guys used to regard copy/paste as one of the worst things to happen to programming. We've all seen bugs that are the result of misapplied or incomplete copy/pasting where taking the time out to put it in functions properly would have made it obvious.

So while modern IDEs make languages like Java less stressful on the keyboard in ever cleverer ways I kind of think by making this too easy we're missing the point of how to make better improvements elsewhere.
Perhaps you should post a response to keep things from being so one-sided.
The Last of Us: A denial of what video game should be
Your Job Taught to Machines Puts Half U.S. Work at Risk
Is medium really the future of online writing or just a blogger re-run?
Do we need an Indiegogo project to raise funds to pay them to shut it down and stop making variations?

:)
We needed experts to tell us this?

I guess it's a good example of how folk knowledge about technology is often wrong, and how UI transplanted from an old system to a new system can lead users to make invalid assumptions.
Probably because they don't care about any of that. They probably care about releasing products and making clients happy.

Also, mwuhahaha you're talking shit.
New York City building collapses after explosion
Coming to America...not...
New prosthetic hand gives amputee life-like sensation of feeling, gripping
kyoo-ee-yoo-ee
This is exactly the issue I have in my current open floor plan. Developers are intermixed with project managers and business analysts and anyone else who happens to occupy the empty desk at the end of the row.

However, the worst distraction I have is actually another developer whose voice carries like buckshot out at 12 gauge. He's been asked to keep it down but it seems like he is physically incapable of understanding how loud he talks.
'These near opposite meanings of the word are unfortunate, b/c people don't really know what sentences using the word are supposed to mean'

By some strange coincidence, there is a discussion on such antonymous words under the current front-page article on mispronunciation of words:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384406
Although you are technically wrong, it is LGPL, you are right. It is dually-licensed, but it doesn't vary according to the target platform.