skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now.

And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all.

The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.
Worth checking out the rest of Yarin Gal (the PhD student whose work prompted this post)'s extrapolated works of art:

http://extrapolated-art.com/

Some of these look so seamless it's staggering.
SEEKING WORK - Remote / London, UK

Experienced Python/Django developer (~6 years). I love Linux, Macs, the command line, web standards, open source, learning new things and doing things the right way.

Have worked on many projects within the music industry if that's your bag.

I work with:

* Python
* Django
* Django Rest Framework
* Postgres
* Debian/Ubuntu
* Celery
* RabbitMQ

Available immediately for 2-3 days a week.

https://codekitchen.io/ http://mrben.co.uk/
Speedtest and Comparsion of Open-Source Cryptography Libraries (2008)
Wasn't it also true that the password for every account was a simple function of the phone number? Then they changed it, only to base in the IMEI instead.

I didn't look at it again so I don't know if they fixed it for real in the end.
1989: America's Malls
> eating cheese pizza slices

Well cheese is a good mix of protein and fat, and the base is full of carbs
If you trade a fish for a service it isn't free. If you trade a gold bar for a service it isn't free. If you trade a service for a service it isn't free.

If you trade data for a service it is not free.

To consider "free" a function only of fiat currency is naive, both of history and of economics.

Google search is not free.

If it is I have no idea how they made so much money...

Or maybe you can tell me what 'free actually means'?
How will the 5G network change the world
Interesting article, but the anachronic/non-linear ordering of events really increased the cognitive load for me, for seemingly no good reason.vIt just seemed like the temporal leaps occurred too frequently and didn't contribute to the story-telling aspect of the story. I suppose it didn't help that a lot of the people in the story had 'last names as first names', which had me checking back to see if I was being introduced to a new person or referencing something already introduced.

Interesting subject matter though. Now I need to research more into anti-cheating measures for fishing competitions and see what is done...
Here's my argument against open office: I work in the dark.

I am sensitive to the flickering of fluorescent lights that most people cannot see. Most offices have standard fluorescent lights, often with cheap bulbs or ballasts that have not been changed since the building was built.

People also have different temperatures that they are comfortable at.

So, you really need at minimum four offices:
Dark & Cold
Dark & Warm
Light & Cold
Light & Warm

This ignores all the other problems with open offices and cubicle farms. Programmers really need to spread out. You need a whiteboard, preferably a large one for every two programmers. They need a desk big enough to support two or three monitors (if you're only giving them one, you're being penny wise and pound foolish, most likely.) Many programmers like to have books open for reference on the table. Or documents, etc.

Collaboaration is higher in my experience when people have their own offices or a few people per office. Focus is much higher.

Why kill productivity by %30 (a low estimate for the negative impact on my personal productivity) in order to save a fraction of an engineers salary?

I think it's just bad management.

But the nice thing is, these people advertise that they have open floorpans, like they don't even realize it's a mistake, and that makes it easy to just say "next" when looking at jobs.
If you find something let me know. I literally want blinders to complement my QC-25s. It's the only way to get things done.
Building an App with React and RefluxJS
Referenced first is an impressive:

"Cryptanalysis of GOST"

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/attachments/2243...
It is almost certainly affordable for the vast majority of them. And as the article points out, evidence suggests that they are losing money by not investing in proper office space. Walls are a hell of a lot cheaper than lost employee productivity.
If the article is implying that taskers and buyers were happier users under the old system, what was it about that system that made it hard to scale?
Having individual offices is is a lot more complex then just more space.

Actually building these things is non trivial. It's not just walls, it's air con vents, electrics, etc. I also think you may be underestimating the extra space required to make an office not feel like a closet.

Then there is natural light. In a big open plan space light travels to the entire space. With offices you either need to build on the edge of the building and have a window, or make at least one wall out of glass (expensive). Even doing that you still can't just take a big room and turn it into partitioned offices.

The capital outlay for a company to fit out a space with individual offices is actually really high and it all comes in one big hit. I'm sure if it was a matter of just paying 5k per employee extra per year the story would be different, but that isn't really a reality.
Tock: The flexible and transparent way to book restaurants
If you ever wanted to get a professional engineering license, you'd need a degree from an accredited institution.
Sure, some limitations could be mitigated this way. But being open source does not in itself make it a good language/platform.
I think that valuations right now are the tech VC equivalent of penis size. You can structure a deal such that a valuation becomes pretty much anything you want and it is more about bragging rights then anything else.
Cryptanalysis of GOST (2012) [pdf]
Writing a Primitive Debugger: Part 2 – Breakpoints and Stepping
He did address the gross receipts tax. There's an immense difference between a sales tax and a gross receipts tax: sales taxes happen at final sale, and gross receipts taxes apply to every transaction.

The gross receipt tax distorts the economy: it rewards firms that integrate every step of their production rather than focusing on their comparative advantage. The railroad that owns its own steel mill is tax-advantaged over the one that buys steel. That policy is inefficient: the economy should reward the most competitive steel mill, rather than insuring that the largest consumers of steel are more or less required to operate their own crappy mills.

Here's a more immediate example: imagine a tax policy that essentially fined Dropbox for not owning its own chip fab, and forced it to compete with huge companies like Apple that did.

Wal-Mart versus Apple is a bad example, because the two companies are in radically different lines of business. Instead, imagine a tax policy that fined Whole Foods, which sources the goods it sells from a variety of different vendors, while rewarding Safeway. And, of course, the point Rayiner was making was that turnover taxes penalize all of direct-to-consumer-retail; it doesn't just pick Target instead of Wal-Mart, but rather penalizes companies that rely on logistics and distribution at all.
Rendering Volumetric Haptic Shapes in Mid-Air Using Ultrasound
I'm sorry the web cookie hegemony is oppressing you. Come up with a better solution to filter bots and Google will hire you. Nobody is pushing this down your throat.
Auto (part of Cars) is hiring mid to senior level RoR devs in Chicago or Austin
We are looking for mid to senior RoR devs for our Auto.com property. Full stack preferred. Cloud experience would rock. Please contact me at gbanuelos@cars.com. Offices in Chicago and Georgetown (near Austin). Remote part of week is possible.
I agree (and also spoke with Seth for a little while) -- this is a great telling of the personal and market forces behind the org.

However, I would say this is only half of the story. The other half comes from the community of users who in Erik's words did "the hard part". I hope that someday we'll see as thoughtful a telling of those stories.
Sprint to undercut Verizon and AT&T by 50%
Confessio – Confess from your iPhone (you can even purchase an indulgence)
So the average salary was $119K? I'd love to know what the median is, the average is probably highly skewed by a few big numbers at the top.
>>I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)

From my years working with at&t's payroll system, Export-to-csv out of SAP(www.sap.com) to be manually looked at and/or imported into some other program was very common. If at&t were the target of this whole mess, I'd assume the Windows 2000 machines running crystal reports(www.crystalreports.com/) got compromised; which would generate very sensitive payroll files.
To further your point, you can get faster access directly via RDMA on an Infiniband network than the SATA bus can push data. The fastest SATA busses are around 16gbps I believe and you can get HDR IB switches that clock 50gbps today.

With the direction things are moving, "the data center as a computer" is absolutely the right approach.
Pardon my hardware ignorance (I'm one of those 'software guys'), but could something like this be used for a close-proximity meshnet?
Consider the amount of time, money, and effort North Korea has invested in presenting the image of a rabid dog to foreign policymakers, in hopes of improving that nation's ability to maintain its sovereignty against the threats it perceives from all sides, and particularly from the United States. Given that, what else would you expect? Honesty?
I have to say, what you describe as a manager seems to be more about the benefit to yourself and the way you 'control' your developers and less about trying to provide an environment that is efficient for your devs to deliver code. A lot of the benefits you think you get from an open plan office seem to be achievable through tools like slack.com . Open plan really really sucks as a developer.
Thank you! Part of my motivation for taking the job was my wife wanted the ability for us to live in Nice, France for a bit. I've noticed you mention in your HN posts that you live in the South of France; congrats on the ability to do that!
Hy Tutorial – Python with Lisp Syntax
I don't know because I'm old enough that when I was fresh out of college there were no smart phones, and the only people on chat were tech nerds and college students, so the background distraction was just much much lower.

But what I will say is that distraction is bad for everyone, and being objective about ones performance is very difficult. A lot of people claim to be good at multi-tasking because that is what a lot of work environments demand, and so people learn to cope, but on the other side of the coin, many of these supposed multi-taskers have never sat down and thought deeply with enough focus to really solve a difficult problem the right away.

Software development is one field where the rigor forces you to learn this or eventually be exposed as incompetent, but I believe it is useful in any professional work that involves solving problems. Great solutions do not come from raw intelligence, they come from intelligence applied over time. If you can't focus and construct a persistent mental model then you might have a 200 IQ but still not be able to design a good system.
Perhaps those companies should learn how to manage better?
I wouldn't be betting my marbles on Hadoop, or anything Map Reduce now adays. Spark beats it pretty handily for data processing although HBase isn't too bad.
Add me to the list of people to notify when your project is done, plz.
Fossil – Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management
Ask HN: What stock will you buy in 2015?
With 2015 fast approaching, what stock do you plan to buy and why? What sort of returns are you hoping for, and what time period are you looking at?
Re: basics, here is one of the least efficient texture synthesis algorithms, but is detailed, an excellent starting place for beginners, and produces very high quality texture synthesis:
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/people/efros/research/NPS/alg.htm...

That is from my favorite texture synthesis paper of all (Efros & Leung '99), for these reasons:

- I know Efros, and he's a genius, and also an absolutely adorable human being.

- This paper was inspired by Markov text generators, its the two-dimensional equivalent, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney. Its very simple, produces great results, - AND - this texture synthesis algorithm will synthesize written text from a picture of written text. Almost none of the faster texture synthesis algorithms do this, and it seems meta; I like to think there is some deep fundamental truth hiding in there somewhere.

(edited for typos and formatting)
I've worked in software development post-college for 7 years. The first 3 I had my own office and for the last 4 I've been in an open space.

I really think this is a matter of personal taste to a large degree, but for my part I prefer the ability to ask questions readily and listen in on what my colleagues are working on. I think the point you're trying to make about an 'interruption deficit' is off the mark. Someone new to a team is going to ask many more questions than a veteran and it's certainly damaging to their ability to learn if asking questions is a chore or unwelcome socially. Email and messaging apps are alternatives of course, and are often the right choice when the question doesn't merit interruption. But sometimes a quick answer is needed to progress at all and being able to turn around and say something makes things faster.

In open office spaces people are still able to work from a laptop somewhere else, put on headphones, or work from home. And having your own office doesn't mean you aren't interrupted. People would tend to come by for long periods of time when I had an office, seemingly because they were starved of social interaction.

A caveat to all this is that for a brief period I was in an overly crowded open office arrangement and that was very much detrimental to my work.
Is it considered idiomatic to mix in test and production code in the same file, and therefore the same binary?

Also, is it considered idiomatic to not leave any commentary breadcrumbs on what files and classes and structures are for? I get that lists.h probably contains lists, and I'm guessing linked lists from the code. The rest of it is guesswork.
If you liked this, you might want to take a look at Andrew Holloway's "A Year in Pyongyang", available free online at the link below. It describes the experience of a translator in 1987-88, but not all that much has changed in the years that have passed since.

http://www.aidanfc.net/a_year_in_pyongyang.html
The bot probably has too much or too little mail in it's Gmail inbox, or maybe its is not many Google+ circles of confirmed authentic humans. Maybe the bot has not been using Google Chrome for a very long time, so its browsing patterns may still seem incoherent. This socially disconnected bot is abnormal; it doesn't fit into society. It deserves punishment; we'll make it click pictures of cats. Once it gets enough friends on Google+, we'll cut it some slack.
That already exists for 3 years: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/confession-roman-catholic/id...

Is the indulgence thing enough? I don't think so.
I don't think this is significant. They're counting the entire solar industry against one very specific role in a specific fossil fuel industry. What about all the people working on coal plants and the related infrastructure? What about all the people working in oil & gas?

Given how such a small percentage of US energy is solar, if it required more man power than coal plants I'd take it as a sign that we're doing something seriously unsustainable in the way we do solar.

edit: good points in the responses
+1 for Thrown by Kerry Howley
Still less effort than typical captcha.
Quality headphones is how most people even get close to it mattering.
if you actually read the papers they mention (and others) you will notice that people that defend it are often:

1) mislead by the initial sense of acomplishment and better communication.

it is like working in a war room. you get tons of stuff done, but it is crazy, stressful and you have lots of people working on a little thing that demands attention. your return for all those people is actually less, but you need a war room in some situations.

open office work the same way. you get a initial difficult thing done. but at the usual high cost of having lots of people working on it and ignoring/half-assing others.

2) people like micro-management.

there is no denying. open office plans and war rooms are perfect for the micro manager boss.
The punchline:

> The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about $700 per employee.

That's $8,400 per year in Manhattan.
Radius of a Silicon atom is about 0.11 nanometers; Intel produces CPUs that have 22 nanometers technology. Not exactly "atom-by-atom", but pretty close (only two orders of magnitude).
> Google SREs by last count were 1 engineer to 1000 machines

That number does not seem particularly impressive, if it is accurate. Even "traditional" well-run enterprise IT organizations are often in the 1 admin/SRE to 600-ish machines, so I have a hard time seeing that Google can only do ~2x as good at their scale and with their level of focus.

1 SRE to 5k machines, 10k machines, that makes more sense to me.
Thank you for your comment, it provides perspective other than my own which is refreshing and valuable.

I think one of the OPs points touches on this directly though. What is the ratio of questions asked to answers provided, or to put it another way, how many questions are you asking vs how many people come to you for help with their own question? I humbly submit that perhaps you are asking more questions than you are answering - and there's nothing wrong with that, but IMO it does explain a bit why we don't see eye to eye about this. Have you thought about asking one of your subordinates about their perspective on this?

With respect, I disagree about the cost of context switching being BS. I think it heavily depends on the complexity/sensitivity of the task being interrupted, but for any non-trivial task there is almost always a non-trivial cost as well.

> I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having...

I just wanted to clarify, I think it would be rather unreasonable to actually feel offended because someone asked your help or advice.
I never feel offended in those situations. I do sometimes feel a bit frustrated or aggravated, but it's always about the fact that I was interrupted and never towards the colleague asking for help, and I take extra care to make sure that this frustration or aggravation never shines through to the person I'm helping because that would discourage them from asking for help and I would rather they asked for help than make an incorrect assumption (for example).
Announcing the New Debian Code Search Instant
Just a few? This is Hollywood, baby!
Yeah, and I'd like to see what the average salary for VFX artists are.
You are describing the LaTeX model. You have a lot of packages. When you are lucky all the packages get well together. If you are unlucky the pacakes are slightly incompatible. And if you need to use \usepacage[spanish]{babel} then you are out of luck.

Two recent problems I had with LaTeX:

* If you put a \dfrac inside a table, the table thinks that the fraction is smaller and the line of the borders of the table collide with the numbers.

* If you need a different header height in your first page, you need some black magic macrology to get a not so good solution.
When I write no code, that's when I do my fastest programming
You're going to pay 50% in tax. No way around that.

$2M in Sydney doesn't go that far these days, but if you want hassle free investment, put it into Vanguard.

Otherwise just throw it into a high interest savings account for zero risk.
I'm surprised that Sony didn't increase their defenses when North Korea first warned them months ago as they were promoting the new movie "The Interview". Given that North Korea can be a credible threat, it would have made a lot of sense to beef up security or at minimum increase monitoring.
Given that it is an engraving, it might also be a plan for sharpening a burin.

There are many kinds of burins -- for a general impression of what I am after, see http://www.google.com/patents/US7032586
Definitely. Pointing to C++ as a mainstream language that is uglier than Java seems a bit like missing the point since it is basically the exception that proves the rule, but he did say "in any other mainstream language. Period." ;)
I personally find Python code easier to read and maintain, and I have an easier time keeping up with changes in new versions. I was pretty familiar with Rails 2, but feel like there are frequently big changes between releases that I can't keep up with if I'm not a full time Rails developer.
It may be just a "distortion" of perception of the past: several decades in the past are much more "succinct" to our present view than a month half a year ago; we look at all the achievements in several decades before us at once, whereas it's an entire half of our own lifespan.
From the Comments: "Clearly explains why glucose turns into fat for certain people."
The Birth of the Book Auction
I was hoping I would see someone mention Plan 9 here. Solving that problem does indeed seem like what their goal was.

"The early catch phrase was to build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes."

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
I hope that I may answer to this article with its own words:

"During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old paradigms completely"
I work in Beijing and we have 4 desk cubicles in an open space (so you get cubicle walls and around each quad. What is nice is that they put the open office area around the exterior, so I got a window! In contrast, we have offices for the level 65+ crowd, and they are quite unappealing to me because of they are interior, no natural light windows. Now I just have to avoid getting promoted.
Can easily happen when no one's monitoring i guess.

N Korea has proven track record of hacking attack.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/hard-drive-wiping-ma...

A few years ago, N korean hackers go into a bank (IBM in S Korea helped maintain/secure it) and wiped their primary database AND standby backup database. By the time they realized what was happening, even the backup site off useless.
The whole point of the article is that the differences are empirically and objectively measurable on a wide variety of axes, and almost universally against the open office. It is not a question of personal preference.

That is, there actually is a "right" answer that is the same for everyone. Measuring it is "science."