skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not so much open plan vs offices. It's quiet vs. not-quiet.

One of the most effective office setups I have seen had two kinds of work areas:

1) Reconfigurable "team rooms" where most of the team can work together. These have a door that is kept closed to reduce conversation noise leaking into other areas, and a glass wall so you can see who is in the team room. The other two interior walls can be moved to adjust the size of the team room.

2) On a different floor, there is an open quiet area equipped with large monitors for individual coding, writing, and CAD work.

There are other workspaces, such as lab rooms for fabricating things. Their larger locations have large shops with all kinds of fabrication equipment.

Everything is hot-desked. Many people spend part of the week working at home. The company with this workspace is a major design firm, and I'd wager they put a lot of thought and objective measurement into the design of their workspaces.
Hello, the use case is that you can count what you usually don't store (for example different IPs connecting every day to your server), or you can count what is usually stored but it is too expensive to count otherwise (Like iterating a database table and counting unique items in a given column).

Also since it is so cheap, you start counting even things that could be unreasonable to count otherwise but that may provide useful insight, for example unique users accessing the site for every hour of the day, unique words ever used by a given user in her comments, and so forth.
Hi, I'm also an account created solely for the purpose of a single submission / comment!
The main compilers for PHP, Ruby, and Go all do, although gcc uses a handwritten one now http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_bison

Do those not count? What are the tradeoffs to doing it from scratch?
In my experience, regular programming is doable in open floor plans. You can write stupid crud sites and winforms apps just fine. As long you have headphones on.

But when you have a system crash and need to dive through 100mb of log files to try and figure out what went wrong. Good luck doing that in a standard open office! You just have to schedule a few hours after everyone else has gone home so you can have some peace and quiet to do your log diving.

I honestly think the traits that make you able to hack the Linux kernel, optimize the linear algebra required for the internals of a 3d engine, write Haskell etc are incompatible with preferring open floor plans.

Edit: Btw, if you are able to do these "high level advanced" programming tasks while in a noisy open floor plan I would be very amazed. For me it's like trying to play chess against a highly rated opponent and that is impossible to do competently if you have to endure constant interruptions.
I would like to see an ad that is just plain text "We donated the $250k production budget for this ad to Haiti" and a logo. That is far more likely to make me give a company my business than any stupid pointless video clip.
Now that sounds interesting! Thanks for this, I'll be looking for some more info!
Great term, does that make when multiple people ask you questions a distributed denial of service?
This raises an interesting point about design. I've worked for small (<8 person) startups where the open floor plan worked well. I now work for a large company (~50 people on my floor). We still use what I would call an "open floor plan" at the large company, but it has been carefully designed such that I only have 6 or so people in my immediate vicinity. Despite both being "open", they very different in layout from the each other.

At the large company, I can't generally here what's being discussed by folks in the next group over, except maybe as low background noise. I don't generally get distracted and I am easily able to grab my teammates' attention when I need it.
I enjoy the chaos as well - I am not productive at home alone at all. But strangers don't interrupt my every 10 minutes (or ever.) Software development requires sometimes being collaborative and sometimes needing uninterrupted work time. An optimal environment would allow for both of these, as needed. Open floor plans and closed-door, isolated offices only allow for one.
>Until recently, I had thought that the only real tools out there to do this kind of analysis lived only on Solaris (DTrace).

FYI, there are ports of dtrace to systems other than Solaris.
If we could ignore April Fools Day and treat it as any other, that would be fine.

If we could dismiss anything we hear on April Fools Day and treat it as a lost day in the news cycle, that would also be fine.

But we're in a situation where 90% of news is everyday pablum, 9% is AFD BS, and 1% is the creation of GMail, changing the Internet forever.
Microservices (comments on 200-500 LOC services)
22 yo here, recently dropped out of college. I cannot tell you what to do, but I can tell what difference dropping out made to me.

To give some context: I lived in a small city in Southern Brazil, and I've been programming professionally since I was 16. Of course the money and the recognition were close to zero, because who trusts a kid anyway. Self-taught from the beginning, so by the time I got to university at 18 I was always the best programmer in the class, which made almost every class extremely boring. More or less 2 years later I started getting offers from big companies in Brazilian tech hubs like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Moving to another university meant losing almost 1 year worth of studies, so I decided to stay. But at this point I was convinced that I was worth something, and started working remotely for a company in Rio. I was in charge of a whole product, and the pay was ok for Brazilian standards. Since I lived in a small town, I was getting paid more than all my friends, even those that already graduated. I thought that I was on to something.

Last year I started working for an American company, and started getting paid a lot more. During the interview process, I wasn't even asked about my education, they just asked me to demonstrate what I knew (I understand that this is not universal to every company). This, combined with the fact that I finished all the college subjects that interested me, made me take the decision to drop out and move out of the country. Remote work is fun and all, but I missed the social contact with other people. Berlin was my first choice, and I started applying. I made it clear in every application that I was dropping out, and it didn't seem to make any difference, because I was getting interviews and ended up getting hired. So professionally dropping out did not hurt me at all, because I had the skills.

But not having a degree did make me life difficult. It was absurdly hard to get a work permit. Not impossible, but it required HR to get creative. So you have to be prepared to hit roadblocks every once in a while. I thought of giving up and going back home a few times, because it's really frustrating. In the end, everything worked and I'm more than one year ahead career-wise than if I had stayed and finished my degree.

So, should you drop out? Maybe, but be prepared for a slightly harder life overall. If you do decide to drop out, please do it as soon as possible, and don't wait a few years like I did. I feel I could be even better today if I had dropped out a year earlier. But YMMV.
Ask HN: UC Berkeley or UPenn for CS undergrad?
I got into both but I'm unsure as to which one I should pick.

Berkeley:

+ proximity to SF

+ stellar reputation

+ well connected in the valley

- size of college/classes

- public (less funding)

UPenn:

+ Ivy League reputation

+ Can take Wharton classes

+ Private

+ More social? (subjective)

- Not as good for CS
And what if it's something you need to use once in while? Why a throwaway email address?

> "I don't trust Twitter" - You don't try, or you just leave after finding out that the app can follow/post tweets?
It was featured in Russia recently. Seems like there is a chance to beat them with US / EU guys :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504296 : 356 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504472

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504476

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505530

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505583

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505882 : 13 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505967

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506297 : 28 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507071

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507244

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507301

Some other have a few comments - I didn't bother noting them all.
I'd like to note that his self-assessment of likely open-floor-plan productivity appears to be an authentic QWANTZ moment. Personally, this is the first time I have seen one in the wild.
A good university to get into (that I had gone through) is National University here in the US. Not only is it in a great city (Sunny San Diego, California), but also you learn some really useful tools in the programming field. There are a lot of international students from different parts of the world (India, Romania, Irag, Iran, China, Japan, etc) at National University. If you are not able to do that, check around your area for someone that is an expert in the field you want to be in and see if him / her can mentor you. Also, check out Matthew Moran's book called "Building Your I.T. Career." It is a great resource book.
What are Stack Overflow unicoins?
1883 eruption of Krakatoa
1. The Wikipedia estimate probably only includes text. All of the media is distributed separately, and was ~200GB as of a few years ago. I can only imagine it's grown since then. Some articles make more sense with images (e.g. a photo of an animal to go with the description).

2. Is the entirety of Twitter really useful as part of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Future employee's rant (some previous experience):

A future employee's first experience at your company is his job application. When someone has taken the time to apply to your company, here are some things that would be nice if done:

* When you post that you are hiring, either here or elsewhere, please make sure to reply as fast as possible. Delaying action on job applications doesn't help both you and the candidate.

* Even if you are not interested in the candidate, sending a reply, however simple, helps in more ways than you can imagine.

(Sorry to hijack this thread)
This feels... weird. There was a problem with Coinbase months ago that was patched where some of this information could be found if someone was using Coinbase's merchant tools.

A list of emails and names feels a lot like trying to cause a panic to get people to dump Coinbase.
Works only for fast-forward merges:

git fetch origin master:master
> ... legally ...

Hence the problem (in my view).

Because "marriage" has important legal ramifications in the U.S., you are denying people rights if you deny them marriage.

I think you should be free to think about marriage _as a tradition_ as you want. But to enforce discrimination against people is a different thing.
A presentation given at the London Lua Group about it's development: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/3820-developing-a-lua-v...
I think you'd have to check out the target branch (stashing any changes if you had them), do `git merge source_branch`, and then check out the original branch you were on, and pop stash if you saved one.

Alternatively if the merge is a simple fast-forward you can just do `git push . source:destination`, which is what `git forward-merge` does in that case too.
I have the exact same feelings, in an open office and are a developer who does braindead work then it's great as you can chat while working on repetitive tasks.

Anything that requires thinking, such as fixing a release-blocker bug that is very obvious once you get in the zone is pretty much lost.
Exactly. My friend does that, it's more about carefully signing in, and not signing up for apps which follow/tweet/post stuff. Which one do you use the most? Different services for different apps?
I didn't know I could talk to professors for this, but it sounds interesting! Thanks, I'm going to try this!
I think if you take a car from today and tried to make it without automation, it would cost much more. If automation wasn't the cheaper manufacturing option, why do it?
SEEKING FREELANCERS: DuckDuckGo (remote or local in Paoli, PA)

If you're an avid DuckDuckGo user who is excited about what we're trying to accomplish, then check out our hiring page at https://dukgo.com/help/en_US/company/hiring

Right now we're in need of some freelancing help in a number of areas including: 1) devops (using Chef); 2) backend (using Perl); 3) visual design.
Here is the bug closed as "Won't fix" (so yes, it is the same exploit/bug):

https://hackerone.com/reports/5200
He's not homophobic. He simply is against gay marriage
The issue would be with the opinion - quite an arguable opinion - that that statement is an oxymoron.
Backdoor age and health discrimination.

Most organizations are so inept at choosing leaders (they can't tell who's good at the job and who's not) that their only recourse is to set up pointless contests that grind people down, and then determine the last person remaining to be the leader. (Those who left weren't dedicated; those who broke were "weak".)

Open-plan offices (and, especially, open-back visibility) are just another shitty mechanism used to wear people down and make the attrition/sorting process happen faster.
Here are two other arguments in favor for college on top of patio11's:

1) While you may be worried about the depth of the content in your field, be aware that college is also a great way to acquire breadth: this is the best way to be exposed to ideas you wouldn't have encountered before, and I'd encourage you to take courses outside of your field. Economics, philosophy, or political science come to mind as topics that may not be directly useful to you in your career but do help tremendously in understanding the world around you and being a more complete individual in general. This is also a great time to live and study abroad, which is a great life experience in general. This will also be very useful if you ever decide to branch out and work in a different field, where you may feel your lack of degree much more than in tech.

In addition there is nothing wrong with getting "extra coursework" in college. Unlike high school, the goal here is to learn for your own sake and there is always the possibility to dig further if you're interested in acquiring highly specialized knowledge.

2) A degree is not simply useful for convincing old-school employers. You work in tech, so I assume there is a probability that you may want at some point or the other want to check out the scene in the US. If this is something that interests you, be aware that it is tremendously harder to get a work visa to the US if you don't have a higher education degree. Most work visas will require a degree or equivalent work experience; for the US bureau of immigration, "equivalent work experience" generally means 3 years of work for each year of school, which means you won't be eligible for a H1B for another decade. I do not know how it is for other countries but I assume many have similar requirements.

tl;dr: a degree will allow you to hedge yourself against the future. If you're bored, there are always opportunities for you to diversify your interests, seek more specialized knowledge in your field, or work on your own side projects.
However, there are environments in which there is a social pressure to not take those spots and in fact be present at your desk regardless.

Am I more productive in an isolated room? Absolutely. Do I feel comfortable doing it? No, not necessarily.
Antetype for Mac => http://www.antetype.com/

May solve your problems.
Maybe I don't get it, but I think asking him to resign is over the top, especially when he could be so good for Mozilla as a CEO. I think a honest apology, and guaranteeing that there will be absolutely no backlash against gay people within the company, ever, should be enough to settle things, wouldn't it? I mean gay people within the company don't really think that if he promises that he would not do that, he would still do it later, and fight against their rights either within the company or outside?

I don't know, I just get the feeling that this has been blown out of proportion a bit, and it's starting to seem similar to the outrage against Google buses, in some ways.
> Coinbase provides your full transaction history to the FBI, FinCEN and IRS every day. They are under a gag order.

That is interesting accusation. Even if this is true, we will unlikely have evidence. Is there a serious risk to Coinbase users granted Gov is having full access?
Well, if they hire me at local Google office, I could cut it down to ~40min / day ;).

Anyway, as my commute is walk+tram+bus+walk, I do offset this time by reading books and replying to e-mails while in transit. I'd be really, really angry if I had to spend this time driving a car.
If the feature branches are defined in the cascade order, it'll do that.

This gives me the idea of implementing wildcards in the cascade order, so feature branches will automatically be in the cascade order. Pull requests welcome.
FlightAware - http://flightaware.com/about/careers/ - Houston, TX

FlightAware is the world leader in flight tracking; we accomplish this with creativity, innovation, dedication, diligence, and integrity. FlightAware is over eight years old, is self-financed, with millions a year in revenue, but still ambitious and with the hunger of a startup.

We're looking for:

* Web software developer

* Mapping software developer

* Front-end (UI/UX) developer

* Systems Engineer
The Game Changed in Venezuela Last Night and the International Media is Asleep
I'm willing to bet noise isn't the problem for a fair chunk of developers who complain about open offices because they aren't annoyed by noise, they are annoyed by constant interruptions to work.
Isn't the Lumia 625 is quite a bit more expensive?
Instant messaging has some interesting research[1] as a solution for solving the communication/interruption conflict:

"
Analysis of these data indicates that IM use
has no influence on overall levels of work communication. However, people who utilize
IM at work report being interrupted less frequently than non-users, and they engage in
more frequent computer-mediated communication than non-users, including both
work-related and personal communication. These results are consistent with claims that
employees use IM in ways that help them to manage interruption, such as quickly
obtaining task-relevant information and negotiating conversational availability."

[1]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007....
I've found that most open floors at software firms actually turn into exactly the opposite of what they're trying to accomplish.

The goal: Sacrifice a little bit of individual productivity to increase communication and team productivity.

The reality: A couple people are very loud, so the rest put on headsets. 80-90% of the office now only communicates online via instant messages and email. Internal communication suffers a little. Customer communication suffers a lot.
Just use RakNet
http://www.jenkinssoftware.com

I mean if you want to ship a product. If your goal is to learn networking, then by all means, roll your own.
Quoting myself[1] from yesterday:

And so I shall say this as simply as I can: the dignity and equality of all persons before the law is not an optional feature of a free and open society. It is a position which can neither be negotiated nor compromised nor subjected to being voted away. It is not an opinion or a fashion; it is a necessary precondition.

Proposition 8 was in its entirety about removing the existing right of certain persons to marry, and seeking to deny that right for the future. Both Proposition 8 and support for it are not compatible with support for a free society.

[1] http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2014/mar/31/charity/
This was actually a well thought out idea. He took the time and tried to do some research and analysis. While some of his conclusions were off, this is a great way to learn and think. But publicly humiliating him (which I think is the result of the media response), we're telling kids that if you make an attempt, you're going to be ridiculed. I don't know if you've ever been in a classroom, but one of the biggest problems is that kids feel like they can't fail because they'll be labeled as an idiot. Calling the ideas of a 14 year old trying to solve a problem "shallow" is pretty sad. I understand why kids don't want to tackle topics in mathematics and computer science with attitudes like this.
It IS possible for them to be separate, however in probably 99% of cases they are not separate. The latter is often a shield to hide the former.

Eich has a known track record as a staunch libertarian, so it is quite possible that he believes government's involvement in marriage should be entirely eliminated. Of course, if this is what he believes, funding Prop 8 is a pretty terrible way to go about it, so it's still not defensible. I just want to call out the logical error being perpetuated here: They are separate thoughts and viewpoints, even if one tends to be rooted in the other, and they have equivalent consequences.
Isn't it tiring? When you can click and login, you choose to fill out 3-4 fields. About the ownership of your data,what if the app asks you for the permission of fetching only basic information nothing else?
Only upvote the good posts? Isn't that what's supposed to happen every day? Sounds like today is business as usual.
Very few come up with something that is both audacious enough to be interesting, and realistic enough to pull people in. Usually it's either too pedestrian to be funny, or not realistic enough to catch the spirit of fooling people.

But that 1 in 100 is enough to keep the tradition going.
Hi, nothing wrong with anonymity.
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Firefly - http://usefirefly.com - Philadelphia, PA
node.js | socket.io | backbone.js

We’re a bootstrapped startup in the mid-six-figures in revenue and profitable from day one. We expect to more than double in revenue this year.

Over 7,000 small and medium businesses, 7,000 financial advisors, one US state and a top-ten US retailer use our software to help their customers. We power Olark’s cobrowsing.

Our cobrowsing software allows you to remotely connect up to a friend's browser see what they're doing, and collaborate in real time. It runs with pure javascript - no downloads, no installations, and no java applets. It’s not easy.

We typically sell in to big organizations in customer support, healthcare, insurance, and financial services. We’re looking for a head of enterprise sales as to help us scale. Previous experience is highly preferred. Compensation is a mix of base salary and commission. Email me (CEO) at dan[]usefirefly.com.
99 problems but money ain't one (2012)