skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When it comes to studying, most people I know seek a calm place without interruptions where you can concentrate on reading or solving hard exercise. Like your own room or a library. Office is equivalent of that.

Open office is equivalent of trying to study in a busy corridor where groups of people chat, come and go and every 15 minutes someone stops by to tell you hello.

Now, five or other small team in one room is a great thing. Kind of the best solution I would say. You can discuss when you need and it can be calm most of the time. However, open office is usually six such teams together overhearing each other while having next to zero chance to actually concentrate on anything.
I don't see meeting rooms as a balance. It doesn't solve the increased distraction of an open floorpan. Also, meeting rooms that are communal are not as useful- consider a whiteboard on a communal meeting room vs. one in a small office that houses 2-3 developers. That office whiteboard can have project info on it for weeks, while the communal one can't be left there.

For me, in an open office, having headphones on is not enough. There's visual distraction as well. People interacting in your field of vision are also a distraction.
> It is really annoying that so many people are producing useless video content now instead of writing nice, clean text.

To be fair, many of the people creating useless video context would probably have been writing useless text if video wasn't the hip thing to do.
Firebug is basically built to extend default FF dev tool capabilities. Its comparable to running chrome nightlies.
I disagree. If it was open source I think enough people would write libraries for it (or add-ons or whatever they would be called) that most if not everything could be done with functions found online. In the rare event that they could not be done you could just create your own. This is similar to my annoyance over Wolfram Alpha being server side when some sort of client side solution would be way better but would involve the source code being available.
No bitcoin payment?
There are very few companies that enjoy outsized success with such a setup. So I think the retort to your final sentence is likely "Yes, you do".
Triggit - Golang Tech lead - Full time - San Francisco

Why you'll love coming into work every day:
Help build a new product and lead it to completion
Spends approximately 70% programming and 30% managing a team
Working with talented, smart, focused and driven teammates
Lead a small team to create solutions to challenging problems
Create and be apart of a culture that promotes pragmatism, openness and simplicity

Check out more at: Triggit.com/careers - Apply by sending resume and Github profile to Joanne@triggit.com
I like the open office layout most of the time because I find that learning and team bonding occurs very quickly in these setups.

An ideal environment for me would be an open office most of the time but with four walled offices available for me to occupy on a weekly reservation basis where I can get some coding work done when I need to focus. Something soundproofed maybe, to allow me to play music without needing headphones.

We had such a setup in one of the engineering buildings in university and I found that I really thrived when I was able to "plug-out" when I needed to focus and "plug-in" when I needed to work with other people - all while not having to wear headphones!
Its a They, not He. The post isn't written by Wolfram himself :)
I was curious about the CAPTCHA solving, too, so I tested WebVivum out on ~8 reCAPTCHAs.[1] It solved all except 2 of them, taking 20-60 seconds each time. In 2 cases it reported failing to solve the CAPTCHA, but it never gave an incorrect result. That is, whenever it gave a solution the solution was correct (in my brief test).

So, while it's some way off their claim of "instant" CAPTCHA solving, this is definitely a very useful addon, especially for those people who cannot solve CAPTCHAs at all. Thank you for pointing it out.

[1]https://www.webscript.io/examples/recaptcha
4 walled offices for everyone is a nice ideal but its just not affordable in a lot of places. I work in New York City. There just isn't enough space for that. Its totally cost prohibitive to provides offices like that for everyone.
open office is very easy to get wrong, and thus it is usually the case. Myriad of wrong details immediately surface. For example, shades - any issue with it and people get the direct or once-reflected or significant part (they installed these modern fashionable semi-shades in our office which block too little) of sunlight right into your eyes as there are no cubicle walls to protect you.

Near the passageway the lights are not soft/spread fluorescent, instead it is individual light bulbs, so forget sitting face toward that direction (which would be happily back to the sunlight mentioned above) as those bright dots of lights on your peripheral vision field are just like small suns.

Compare to those lightning problems the issues like highly collaborative excited guys running like herd of elephants from one workplace to another across the space is just nothing.
Grand jury decision generator
>Commercial real estate is about $3/SF (per month) in San Francisco (Class A) and $4/SF in Manhattan.

I think you're off by quite a bit with your price-per-square-foot estimates: http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/10/01/manhattan-leasing-str...

That is from last year and the average price in Manhattan was about $60/sf.
No, I don't. But I don't through a nerf ball around the office either. Sure, some people may need a break of think better when doing an activity but you have to be a moron to think throwing something around an office is ok. Go for a walk. Find another bored employee to talk to. Browse the web. Grow up.
Conservancy has three employees. I'm the only one who knows anything about CSS and web design. I know almost nothing about it: most of what I learned was net.searching to set up Conservancy's website and https://copyleft.org/ .

As said elsewhere in the thread, submit any UX merge request you like, I'd be glad to accept it!
The Large Problem with Medium
Although this article isn't by Wolfram I agree that the philosophy of his company seems to be to hype products like any normal consumer company does. The problem is this doesn't really work when your selling and academic product. No programming language management organization will claim they are "revolutionizing programming" without strong qualifiers.
> Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox.

I don't understand why the author is so down on phones. You know, on the original Star Trek (which aired during the "Golden Quarter"), people found it outlandish that someone could make a communicator that could fit in the palm of your hand. Then cell phones started coming out, which is why they switched to having communicators in badges in The Next Generation. Nowadays, I guess we just take the idea for granted.

Beyond that, I have a computer in my pocket right now that is more powerful than a giant supercomputer 20 years ago.I can take photos using my phone that are higher quality than anything you could have found in a fancy camera 20 years ago and I can send it to the other side of the world in minutes if not seconds.
None taken. If those frequent "spirited discussion" soothed your ego, by all means increase the weekly Java bashing. Meanwhile we just keep making software with it.
"Try doing a 100km bike ride on an up/down road circuit, with fat as the main fuel."

I am not an extreme endurance athlete, but I have heard multiple anecdotes of extreme endurance athletes eating cheese pizza slices during their 100-200 mile runs. It's actually a fairly common theme ...

ALSO: Do NOT meta-discuss your own downvotes. Don't interrupt the discussion to talk about the scoring.
Exactly.

Testing RF is a PITA because the test equipment is so stupidly expensive.
Another one of these "Innovation is Dead" articles. yay
Baltimore, MD; Reston, VA; FULL TIME

Videology Group - http://www.videologygroup.com/

Internet advertising startup looking primarily for server-side Java developers (if your Java is rusty but you're good, drop us a note anyway). I was working for a start-up called LucidMedia Networks (hence the "lmn" in the e-mail address below), which got acquired by Videology. Our stack is Java on Spring on *nix with MySQL and some NoSQL stores on AWS. The Baltimore office also has a team on a large .NET stack as well, but Java teams are spread across both offices. We have some big projects in the works involving big data and volume as we scale globally and across mediums (video, mobile, etc.). Currently, our Reston platform alone handles 4 billion requests a day.

Contact me directly at sahil_lmn@yahoo.com.

I actually got hired through a HN "Who is Hiring" thread, and I hired 2 people through these threads. These things do work!
Bloomberg reports, "The incident began when a picture of a skull appeared on company computer screens, the entertainment website Deadline.com reported yesterday." [1].

Also, the Reddit thread which seems to have started the media firestorm was entitled, "I used to work for Sony Pictures. My friend still works there and sent me this. It's on every computer all over Sony Pictures nationwide." [2] (refers to this picture: https://imgur.com/qXNgFVz).

This leads me to believe that the attacker compromised most/all corporate desktops and exfiltrated data directly from those machines. No better place to get that spreadsheet than directly from the workstation of the employee who works on it daily!

[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-24/sony-corp-computers...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/2n9zhv/i_used_to_w...
>So the employer is saving, at absolute most, $5000 per employee per year. It's not worth it.

And yet not only are employers embracing it but extending the model with hoteling and virtual desktops. A good friend of mine at Shell checks into his locker every morning and then goes and finds a random desk to work from for the day. I'll give you 10:1 the guy whose idea that was isn't sitting at a cube.
I think you'll find that it's very difficult to set up other payment options with 100% Free Software. If Conservancy were willing to use proprietary software on our website for payment options, we could probably implement others somewhat easily.

PayPal is annoying, but at least it integrates easily and doesn't require you to install proprietary Javascript or the like on your own website (like stripe.com does).

Bitcoin is possible to do with 100% Free Software, but it's very difficult to set up.

I think most people don't realize how much work goes into these things. Most non-profit organizations have a huge staff that can set up things like this. Conservancy doesn't.
Show HN: Helvetica Neue – A Native iOS Hacker News Client Built for Consumers
I'm apparently one of the few unashamed Open Office boosters here, so let me see if I can help.

I've worked as a developer for about 12+ years, then as a product/project manager for about 4 years. As a developer, I worked about half that time in soft-walled cubicles of various heights and another half in open office environments. I spent a year or so in a shared walled office. As a project guy, I spent about 3 years in an open office and 1 in a shared walled office (2people).

With my dev lead and project management hats on, open offices wins hands down. Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses. Whiteboards all over the place so people can get up and do a quick informal collaboration, then visually reference it later from their desks. Everyone sees everyone all day, bringing an extra bit of team unity, nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team. Daily stand-up meeting is quick to set up and painless, it takes a minute for everyone to just get up and walk over to the scrum corner, as opposed to having to lose 10 minutes every time waiting for everyone to decide to come out of their hiding holes. If I do have a quick question, I can tell if they're in the middle of something concentrating by just glancing over their way rather than having to knock on their office door (guaranteeing that I disturb them).

With my developer hat on, it's a bit of a toss up. I can appreciate the benefit of having a quiet, closed-in space to go deep on a problem. And open offices, while they can be quiet if you set basic etiquette rules, will never match the volume level in closed offices. But, in an open office, there's zero friction if someone needs to come chat about the code, collaborate, bounce ideas off me, and vice versa. I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having, or ask to review their approach or code. Sure, it gets you out of "the zone" a bit, but you just get back into it. The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS. One thing I'll say though, is the cubicles are the worst of both worlds: You have the noise level of an open office combined with the high-friction human interaction, collaboration that's limited to online tools, and hidey-hole mentality. I'd take either option over a cubicle any day.

I think my ideal office environment is open offices for everyone, but with small private workrooms here and there that people can reserve in 2hr blocks or so, where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time to get the job done.
Maybe I'm being cynical but I don't believe it when people say open plans result in more "collaboration" or "openness". It just sounds like a rationalization

By far the most collaborative environments for me have been individual offices or two to an office.

In an open floorplan I find myself constantly being distracted and trying to wall people off, which makes my emotional state less open to discussion... because I'm trying to focus on work.

With an office with one or two people in it, you don't have to worry as much, can be more open because you know you will get time to focus.

The company I work for is moving from individual offices to an open floor plan. They didn't even bother to talk to programmers about it, and admitted they looked at individual office locations but didn't think it mattered when we protested.

They've also gone from a 6 person dev team to now 3. While there are many problems that caused me and the other two people to leave, them choosing an open office without consulting use and then blowing off our objections is characteristic of the disrespect they show generally.

I think that companies with open office plans don't really respect engineers. And I include google and Facebook in this assessment.
would love it if there was one focused on algo trading/quant finance
Uber vs. Lyft: A former driver compares the two services
Well-regarded nonprofit colleges are mostly doing the right thing, with some stat-gaming around things like number of student organizations, expenditure per student, etc. to jockey for higher positions in U.S. News. Not in their core educational functions.

We as hackers can tell that our $1,500 Macbook Pros are better than $450 Inspirons, so Apple thrives.

The problem is that it is much more difficult to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality education. With vocational training it is easy: do employers like the graduates? Do they get hired at a substantially higher rate than non-graduates? Do they get paid more? But with education it is much, much harder.

There are some objectively observable traits that can (sort of) tell you whether an environment is likely to contribute to certain kinds of personal intellectual growth: do students read and respond to (at least) the Western literary canon? Are classes small enough to facilitate meaningful discussion? Are a wide variety of courses taught? How deep into their respective fields to the syllabi go? Does the school actually own the equipment and materials necessary to perform the kinds of laboratory procedures that a graduate in the sciences should have experienced? Are the classes hard enough that not everyone gets perfect scores all the time? How many hours do students need to spend on the coursework to make good grades?

But all of these can be gamed. Hire lots of cheap, incompetent professors. Have small group discussions where you basically just sit there for an hour talking about nothing and wasting time because the professor is doing something else on his laptop. Force students to write papers, but have an institutional culture where they are mostly bullshitted or plagarized and no one cares. Don't actually take the time to grade students' work, but assign bad grades to the handful of students least likely to make a fuss. Assign lots of busywork. Etc. Attract students with good high school test scores by lobbying to divert government funding that would have allowed them to attend better institutions, and set your own prices cheaper.

Think of any other property of legitimately good education, someone can probably find a way to appear to have that property more efficiently than actually having it.

The only reason this isn't widespread is because administrators are generally people who want to provide good education and have the freedom to spend pretty much whatever they can get their hands on to do so.

If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students, they will find ways to hit the metrics that actually influence reveneue (i.e. rankings) while spending less than the other guys, and that will probably mean compromising the quality of the education they provide.
There is too much interesting cool stuff in the world - I will never get to try out half of it !

It's like realising that willy wonka's chocolate factory is bigger than you can walk around in one lifetime.

Darn it.
Data structures and Algorithms in C/C++11
I'm curious about private offices and regions. While it was possible to find companies in the Bay Area that offered private offices, I have yet to find any here in Tokyo. I've assumed it's because real estate in Tokyo is more expensive, but what about other cities around the world?
I'd hire a therapist first because the greatest threat to your money is you.

A lot of issues will crop up about your values, relationships, and life goals. Think of the therapist as someone who can help you know yourself, design your life, and above all, use your fortune as a tool to get what you really want. I say this having sold my first co at 32 and banked $10M.
Does FogCreek still have the "Bionic Offices"? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

I thought the "light on two sides" was particularly clever.

One thing holding back enclosed offices in SF is the very high ceilings in many of the older buildings. would high walled cubes work?
So, I'm totally with you on all these foreign-boogeyman stories but this one is a bit different:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30283573

>>"When asked if it was involved in the attack a spokesman for the North Korean government replied: "Wait and see."

EDIT: To be clear, I am aware NK likes to look tough and can totally be taking credit for something they did not do. It's just that ominous replies like this spokesman gave makes it appear slightly less boogeyman'ish as compared to how the media loves implicating China & Russia in every cyber-attack story without bothering inform the general public about stuff like proxies.
Yeah, my only gripe is his implication that Chris failed to pull off the punk look.
Looks amazing. The fact that its just returns the "Cannot connect to server of image2text models" makes me very sad.
Understanding the Dark Side of Domain Parking
Combined with rump kernels I can see this as a the data center of the future.. simply a micro-kernel running a specific application without the bloat of a full OS while an orchestration unit/OS such as Mesos does all the setup and tear down of such services providing resources on demand.. lovely.
> 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)

Email, of course!
This seems like an unfairly-condescending post to me. The last line primarily. I don't think that having an open office implies the stereotypical "nerf gun wars, billiards, and foosball" environment (or at least it doesn't at the company I'm working for). Nor does it mean that those who work in it are irresponsible, immature, or self-important. Certainly those conditions exist, but it's not fair to generalize it that far.
To be fair, 6lowpan has suffered in no small part due to 802.15.4 itself having no real deployment outside of use for proprietary mesh network protocols.

BTLE has far, far, far wider hardware deployment.
"unless you know how to patch bugs/fix dependency drift"

Or are willing to pay someone who does...
What’s New to Banckle Apps and APIs This Season? Collect December Newsletter
My only gripe was that he didn't use any quotes from the two hours I spent on the phone with him. :)
Mechanizing Mathematics with Dependent Types
CoreOS: Rocket Tutorial and Demo
"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.
Why do iOS users buy more stuff than Android users? Because they have more money
They killed the golden quarter when they killed the gold standard.

Innovation was replaced by massive plundering and easy money from criminal politics instead of creativity and productivity from healthy economics. The promotion of parasites who suck the tit of the state replaced the brilliant minds who gave us all the progress of that beautiful era.

Only the internet survives as a fountainhead of innovation because it still is considered ungoverned territory.
Hy – A dialect of Lisp that’s embedded in Python
Urban office leasing is almost universally quoted by yearly rates (for whatever reason), but your parent poster quoted by the month instead.

$60/sf/yr works out to $5/sf/month, not far from your parent poster's assertion.
I work in a place that has open offices, but broken into pods of 20 or so desks. In addition to that there are meeting rooms and a more general-use area. It's rather similar to the start up offices you describe (I have seen Airbnb's in person).

I like this setup, I find it freeing because you can move to where you are more comfortable working at any given time. But the catch is, you can't just say seating is "variable" as a way of punting on giving people desks. Everyone should have a place that undisputedly belongs to them.
Which is a lame cover for the real reason of not wanting to spend the extra money.
Yes, really. This is the law in Belgium for example.
Wire – the Skype killer from ex-Skype people