skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article is trying to demonstrate a contrast between the "Golden Quarter" to our current quarter.

Consider comparing the recently posted Orion project vs. the first moon landing. 8 years of development time to get to the moon vs. the estimated 22-27+ years development time to get to Mars [NASA said ~2030's for the actual Mars voyage].

I believe that's the point the author is trying to get across, that in our quarter, everything is moving along very slowly.
> the colleague behind making a phone call with details far too personal

I work in cubicle, and once I put the standing shelf desk in at home I'll be working from home more because of this same thing.
No, just your name is telling. Must be sad in your world.
As a thought exercise - I suppose you could short eBay stock and then leak the information underground. I don't think this would be considered insider info by the SEC and if you let other people do the actual stealing from accounts you haven't violated laws in that regard. When paypal finally discovers the problem and fixes it, you inform the media what happened (assuming paypal doesn't fess-up) and then buy back your shorted stock after the inevitable drop in stock price. Maybe someone with more knowledgeable could comment if if/where this might be illegal?
> It is amazing how many people on HN really hate science.

Counterpoint: medical science is insanely difficult and expensive, due to individual variations in genetics and lifestyle, and the huge number of variables that it is effectively impossible to completely control for. This leads to research that is tainted by the incentives of those agents that afford the expense, and results that tend to be correlation more often than causation.

That's not to say that we should ignore the science we do have; rather, we shouldn't fall into the trap of assuming we can model biology as precisely as astrophysics. Sometimes the illusion of knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.
I truly don't understand some peoples hatred of cubicles. Sure I'd rather my own office with a door (I guess), but high-wall cubicles provide just enough privacy for me to keep outside distractions from being a problem (unless a cube-mate starts whistling or something).
100 Years of Makeup and Hairstyles
From you description, you do sound kinda' like a bot. Disabled cookies. Disabled Javascript. Irregular searches. I understand the frustration with saying, "You have to have these features supported to use the product," but let's face it: providing an experience to people who deliberately disable huge chunks of browser functionality is a tremendous pain in the ass. I think I can understand both sides of the argument using different strawmen:

"Can I read this paper, please?"

"Yes, of course, just put on these reading glasses."

"Why do I have to put on the reading glasses?"

"Well the font is quite small. If you don't wear the glasses, you probably won't be able to make out anything on the page. Your experience will be seriously degraded."

"I don't want to wear the glasses. Why can't I just read the page?"

"Well, we can fit a lot more data and make the page more robust by printing the text smaller. Why don't you just wear the glasses?"

"I have concerns about the glasses. I'd rather strain my eyes."

"We're not going to make a special page for you when 99% of the people are totally okay with wearing the glasses or wear the glasses anyways."
True, but Waterloo in particular is known for having a great coop program and producing people who know their stuff.
I think one of the reasons you are seeing open offices as cost savings measures is because a lot of the companies considering it have absolutely no clue how to quantify the productivity of the people inhabiting the space. This is inherently a far worse problem.
Thanks for clearing that up, makes a lot of sense to me.
I too would prefer the single transactor model.
just based on the strongly divergent opinions, maybe this falls into the category of "divisive yet inconsequential", like emacs vs vim or brace placement?
Your open office experiences and mine are massively different. I guess that's why two reasonable people can have different opinions on the subject.

I would go nuts if people were gossiping and being as chaotic as a daycare... Luckily I've never run into that. Actually the worst gossip-y company I ever worked at was a closed office/tall cubicle company.
>> "Half a century ago, makers of telephones, TVs and cars prospered by building products that their buyers knew (or at least believed) would last for many years. No one sells a smartphone on that basis today; the new ideal is to render your own products obsolete as fast as possible."

I enjoyed the article, but this paragraph doesn't exactly bolster his argument that technological advances have ground to a halt.
In my mind when I think of abstractions above the level of individual machines, I pretty much automatically go to Erlang as the only language that I know of that operates at the right level of abstraction for that.

It's the only (semi-mainstream?) language that I know of that includes the infrastructure in the language itself to make the individual underlying machines (OS / hardware) appear irrelevant and allow programming to seamlessly span a group of computers.
For some reason, the ability to say this with a straight face in the English language and actually convey information cracks me up.
Do you have a team chatroom? Are you ever distracted by messages you receive in it?

For me the two are very similar. I work in an open plan office and enjoy being able to talk to my co-workers - often someone will pull their chair up to someone else's to pair program for a while, or just discuss the issue they're having.

If you don't want interruptions, you put headphones on. It works well.
Thanks for sharing this. I was really impressed by this example: http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/potomac.html
It depends on what you do.

Some activities like teaching are open by nature. Interruptions are ok and even desirable. Design, politics, sales, could have a great amount of work done in the open.

Now, in activities like programming, writing, science, you are suiciding yourself in the open, constant interruptions and the theater.

I have done programming in the open but choosing my partners, one, two or three people that I admired, but it was almost an intimate relationship, far from what people consider OO.

In Soviet Union it was more important what other perceived you were doing that really what you accomplished, so everybody created the farce of working a lot, but the productivity levels were terrible compared with the West. Their work was simulating they were working, and like good actors, some even believed their role.

In big buroucracies managers find very hard to identify what other people really contribute to the work so they start using external cues, like how much(time) this person works, how busy he looks, the sense of security and so on.

"what's the alternative? Everyone get a 4-walled office?"

I work from home. So do the people that work for my company.

I created my company programming, so I could identify the value of the people that work with me. I could trust them, they could manage them selves, and also they are more productive when they don't have anyone breathing over their shoulders.

Of course, it is no lala land. It takes experience, knowledge and work to be able to implement something like this.
At a former job I worked from home where I had peace and quiet pretty much all day. I only really worked 4-5 hours in a day, but I was significantly (in the order-of-magnitude realm) more productive than my in-office teammates. On the occasion I'd go into the office for a few days my productivity level would similarly plummet, even though I was working for more hours each day. I can only attribute this to the incessant interruptions of the open-office plan.
They know about the research but usually say it's more important that "openness" is a "core value"

e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5768771
Something can be made obsolete without advancement having occurred. "Oh, let's just change the design of our proprietary charging cable for our entire product suite next generation for zero or marginal benefit to the consumer."
Productivity an objective fact about the world, not something where people can agree to disagree about their equally valid outlooks.
I couldn't tell from the OP and the previous story it linked to: is the spreadsheet of salaries and personal data straight from Sony's servers? Or is it a cracked database file that the hackers took time to convert to XLS for easier dissemination? I'm guessing the former, since the screenshots show the kind of spreadsheets that are lovingly hand-formatted and curated by the people tasked to maintain them.

It's kind of a fascinating look at how data is clumsily handled within corporations. I mean, how do they keep everything synced between the sheets that contain salaries/benefits, severance actions, etc.? (shudder)
>Well, private offices make nerf-gun battles harder. And you hear less juicy gossip. And you don't have an audience for self-important rants about Lena Dunham. It might get so "boring" (in the sense of a lack of distractions) that you might be tempted to actually work to pass the time.

Amazingly this is also an argument from working from home. I've been at two companies during a WFH transition and they act surprised at the increase in productivity. Often times it's this very reason, less babbling and nerf-gun fights and more actual work.

Of course this doesn't cover those who "work from home" by watching Netflix and jiggling the mouse on their laptop every ten minutes or so. I'm talking about the more responsible people.
> My current theory is that most of it comes from people who are still in the honeymoon phase of their career (like, the first few years after college when everything about the workplace still has some novelty to it).

Or are younger people able to handle more distractions? I don't mean that in the sense of "those kids these days", but as a more general developmental thing.

In college I remember doing homework while watching TV with the sound off so I could listen to music and chat with friends on the computer. Over the last few years at work it seems much more difficult to refocus after distractions from coworkers or text messages from friends and family. Has anyone else noticed this? The reason I ask is it's difficult to tell if this is an aging brain issue, or a side-effect of the projects being so much bigger and more complex than anything in highschool, college, and even early-career.
At least some open plans, are ultra low walled cubicles. Simply install taller cubicle walls.

The cost is approximately zero compared to the costs of sick days and ruined productivity.

Fire extinguishers are expensive. However, they're pretty cheap compared to getting cited by the fire dept/OSHA for not having a fire extinguisher. And they're really cheap compared to the result of a fire that can't be put out.
Since 5.8GHz wifi devices are required to detect and avoid frequencies actively used by radar systems, it would be pretty straightforward to just use your laptop to check if it's safe to do a hobby radar project in your location. It's really easy to make this a very low-risk project.
> Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.
Works very well. One feature I would like to see in a future version is a full screen mode that captures the Windows task bar as well. The program can record the task bar now, but the buttons become unclickable, and there is black filler for anything below the task bar.
It's used as a checksum for LZ4 compression. I'd use it where you'd consider something like CRC. It doesn't claim any security properties like SipHash.
Thanks for the detailed response! Will work on getting more traction so we can expand the size offering!
Doesn't look to be designed for a lot of traffic, be gentle.
In San Francisco the pendulum has definitely swung back closer to center (the scale being all open to combination of open and private to private office intensive) with most startups occupying a hybrid solution with a myriad of breakout rooms and smaller meeting spaces / soft seating.

The trend over the last decade began with die-hard open office plan fanpeople (breaking free of dads private office intensive historical), who quickly found that there was a lot of counterproductive distractions. From there as more traditional business starting adopting a start-up mentality to their office space, a balance had to be struck to ensure productivity.

Now the offices of Airbnb, Optimizely, Weebly, all have very strong distribution of open communal work area with solid guidelines from a cultural perspective on how to treat people in that environment, while also matching the open area with ample meeting space distributed evenly throughout their building.

With a more thoughtful approach than just open vs not open I think a balance can be readily created while also speaking to the culture of the company and genre of business it functions in (gaming, Saas, mobile, etc.).

For the record
1- 10 years
2- open (3.5 yrs) vs closed (6.5 yrs)
3- dozens but you learn the headphone rule which basically means (don't bother me or text / message me)
Maybe it's because I've been working "alone" in the quiet for so long, but I can not force myself to not stop and listen when other people are talking. I can, however not switch windows/tabs over to the chat client until I'm ready.
G+ is much like a blog page for me, instead of a social place. In fact, its customization experience is very lightweight, compared with Wordpress.

Curious about G+ for Android app developers and users. Anyone?
Nearly 9,000 Daily record cold temps in just November
When you're talking about "low-profit" businesses you're talking about every single retail establishment from Amazon to Walmart to your neighborhood hardware store to every single restaurant you've ever been to.

I think you'd be pretty upset if all of those businesses closed their doors due to a massive tax increase.
I’m not convinced open source would really help. I get the feeling that Mathematica’s underlying philosophy just isn’t a good fit for practical programming.
Oh this is definitely true. Most unix programs are not portable to POSIX, even when they don't intentionally use features that aren't in POSIX (e.g. kqueue).

UNIX API fragmentation is still a problem, but my point is that POSIX was trying to unify existing implementations rather than a greenfields project to generate a set of portable APIs.
IMO, the angry / irritated line is completly subjective. To the point where I would call them different intensity's of the same emotion.
I couldn't agree more, but we're in the minority. But if I see a project/company has limited its marketing/explanation to video only, I just close the browser tab. I can't stand watching a 10-minute video for an explanation, when reading a brief, well-written paragraph could give me all the info I need.
There are more alternatives than that: low wall cubes, high wall cubes and bull-pens, for starters.
None of that justifies what amounts to "gravity don't real" being posted here constantly when it comes to anything remotely related to nutrition. Biochemistry is a real science. We know what we're doing. "I want to pretend fad diet salesmen are equal to scientists" is not reasonable.
Not in my case. Neither Turkey nor Bulgaria has control over Telegram. Howaver these countries have good relatoins with Microsoft, you know we buy Windows you give user information stuff. That may happened to me in the past or not I don't want to mentoin it here but I have 0 tolerance to companies somehow related with Microsft like Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype etc.
Really?

So the child who ran out chasing after a ball is your fault? The bicyclist wearing black, at night, in the rain, with no reflectors or lights is your fault?

We are human. We have moments of inattention ALL THE TIME. This is proven by many, many, many psychological studies. You don't convict someone of a crime because they committed an accidental error.

If you want to cut down on this, fund self-driving cars.
China, Russia, Iran--now North Korea is the "cyber boogeyman"? Attribution is an incredibly difficult problem. Color me skeptical. Does anyone know where the rumors of North Korean direction started?

Any explanation below seems more likely to me than it really was a North Korean operation (yes, pure rank speculation):

1) it was made up by Sony to make them look somehow less incompetent†,

2) it was made up by some media organization to drive clicks, or

3) the initial investigation revealed suspicious activity from IPs in/linked to North Korea--which could, among other explanations, just mean the attacker owned their boxes and launched attacks from there

† ...And boy does their image need improvement! The attackers were supposedly able to exfiltrate a rumored 100TB of extremely-sensitive corporate data before anyone noticed?! After the rootkit fiasco, the epic SOE break-in, and now this--I can't imagine anyone wants their data anywhere near Sony's networks (nor, perhaps, Sony's software anywhere near their networks).
Sorry, as much as I tried to like it, the results just don't match what I need...
I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
That would be quite interesting. Leaking it to the media so they can report that the hack is happening right then and has not been identified by Paypal yet. Panic!
SendGrid nabs $21M and proclaims company emails are here to stay
The former is how it might work in a dynamically typed language. In a statically typed language, like Go, there are great benefits to decoding into the fields of struct with fields of known types.
I also feel much more sharp on coffee. But as a heavy coffee drinker, pretty much every available study shows that I am just as sharp as I would be without the black stuff.

Turns out my own feelings about sharpness has absolutely nothing to do with congnitive ability. Who would have thought?
I have literally never watched a video to learn something without being forced — post-literacy be dashed. The idea-per-minute ratio is not even close to that of the written word.
I've personally noticed that I get more irritated/angry 4-5hrs after my meal. This is quite evident for me in the morning when I delay my breakfast. Hence I try to time my meals religiously. Though getting irritated/angry doesn't affect my "willpower" as I can still keep my emotions in check and prevent them from ebbing out.

Coming back to the experiment, shouldn't the will power be benchmarked before testing for effects of glucose? Hypothetically, couldn't I get a study group of weak-willed people and enforce the WSJ article's premise as well as get a bunch of monks and refute it?
As much ingenuity as there is in Silicon Valley I am amazed at how uninspiring office layouts are, particularly the near dominance of the "open office".

Surely there are some companies trying out now "contrarian" layouts such as cubes, offices, bull-pens, etc?
How Isaac Newton went flat broke chasing a stock bubble
Which gets back to your original point about both sample rate and bit depth contributing to the dynamic range. I'm very curious: can you give me some search keywords that would get me to the math behind that? Also, I've never heard the claim that the 44.1kHz rate biases toward 440Hz tuning, is there somewhere I can read more about that?
“I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”
> Well, objectively speaking, it seems like the old model wasn't working. It wasn't scalable. Without standardizing something -- be it the buyer-description-input track, or the tasker-bidding-assignment track -- you have an ad hoc system that is not particularly efficient at allocating supply to demand.

But this adhoc system was working for the buyers and the sellers! TR had a pretty solid growth rate (8%/mo, as mentioned in another comment), which is pretty solid. Why would you want to switch to a system which both parties do not like? When has pissing off the majority of your customers ever been a successful strategy?
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert Issues Statement on Zenefits Controversy
How much are you paying per in^2 to have Sunstone fab a board? Are you paying for assembly? OSH Park, as used in the article, is only $10/in^2 for 4-layer.
Exactly. Java is fine if you just write plain-old classes. It's when you overuse patterns and try to make everything hyper pluggable/configurable with XML-based dependency injection that it becomes a disgusting slog.

I write Java that is 100% "Plain Old Java Objects" and it is just fine. Keep it simple.
Have you figured out "eye headphones" to remove the visual noise as well?
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhil/science64_strong_inference...
You make it sound like what matters most is not actually studying CS but getting a CS degree. Is there something special about getting a degree that would cause a programmer to "never be quite as strong" if they studied CS but not for a degree, for example outside of the traditional college system? Most of the science seems to be freely available, if one is willing to put in the effort needed to learn it without the assistance of a professor.
"instead of getting up and talking to a colleague in the office, people would just use Skype even if the person was a 10 second walk away"

We all have different personalities and everyone is different, so I'm not suggesting I'm right and you're wrong, but for me I don't see that as a negative.

Receiving a skype (or other IM-type of service) query is far less intrusive to my work than talking to someone in person at my desk. Better yet, ask me in an email if you don't need the answer right away since email signals that you don't expect an immediate response and maybe I'm deep in thought and answering your question to a useful degree will pull me out of the 5 levels of abstraction my brain is currently working under, losing me half an hour of real work to get back to that point later.

On the flip side of your points I've found that open offices encourage people to ask me questions that they could easily google and find the answer in about as much time as it takes me to answer them, which means they are burning my time (and more importantly, my focus/flow) wastefully. Not to mention they are distracting everyone else around us as well. Multiply this by half a dozen times or more per day and it really starts to be a productivity sink.
> a jury doesn't see negligent drivers as criminals

That's a little harsh. They probably do see them as criminals.

However, they can also see themselves being in the defendant's chair for this "crime". Nobody is perfect, and everybody has a story of how they screwed up while driving.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
The article makes a very clear case against this notion that it's a personal opinion. The problem is while you might like it, you also don't have a continuing objective measure of your own costs of working in an open office plan. For example, are you measuring your epinephrine levels?

As one of the developers who has a interruption surplus (get interrupted more than I interrupt others), I really dislike open offices, they actively prevent me from getting work done.