skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Supposedly (and I have yet to see this consistently work in action) the efficiency comes from collaboration that naturally happens when there are no physical barriers.

What I generally see is I find out more about my co-workers lives and their interests than the increase in productivity and innovation from the team.
VoiceOver, among other features I believe:
https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/voiceover/
New York Times article citing the report: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/study-highlights-si...
Siri "Launch the X app"? I gather the rest of the UI can be used with gestures. See a user flicking sideways in the video.
Maybe they are using Siri to launch apps
> For most optimised HTTP/1.x sites there's already a complexity cost of merging JS files, merging CSS files building sprites - including the tradeoff of getting the bundles right, which of course reduces cachability.

And all of this is a build-time problem.

If we're going to engineer the HTTP-protocol to solve build-tooling and development related problems, we might as well add JS-linting and minifying to HTTP itself as well.

Seriously: This problem is best solved elsewhere.
> People do the open office floor plan because it's efficient and economical, not because it's the the best for the workers.

I don't buy it.

They pay these people minimum $60K/year (likely closer to $85K+), there's no way they would intentionally reduce an $85K * 20 worker's productivity to save 10K on furniture like you're suggesting. Even with only a 1% productivity loss that's still 17K/year down the toilet for the team.

No, the real reason people do the open plan thing is that they believe that it improves worker productivity. People are better able to "collaborate" and cannot browse non-work related things (like HK) as easily. Essentially it is another "lines of code"-style management technique that is trendy at the moment.

The funny thing about MBAs are that they aren't scientists and the "facts" they study aren't science. The entire thing is a "circlejerk" of things that sound like they would be constructive but rarely stopping to actually test their assumptions (instead depending on anecdotes like singular "success stories").

Nobody has tested open plan Vs. closed plan. But then how would you do that anyway? How do you measure productivity, lines of code? So that's the rub. People believe, with little basis, that open plan helps but you cannot disprove it for the same reason they cannot prove it.
I personally work better in an open office environment. I work off the energy of others and it allows me to focus more than being alone in an office.

I have stints like this, particularly when working on a hard problem. One person typing with others brain storming is a great way to push through hard problems.

For a lot of us coding is a very solitary endeavor, but it doesn't have to be.
This feeling goes away.
The Zip: Anonymous Vows to Avenge Charlie Hebdo, 3D Printed Skulls and More
Target to layoff 18K Canadians and close 133 stores after 2-years in the country
And is that why each C++ iteration is adding more tools to finally implement C++ garbage collectors?
Thats not what worries people like Musk. It's that we will create something far superior to human intelligence.

And if you believe that something as complex as the brain came through evolution but life started out as immaterial matter then I find it hard to understand why you don't think this can be recreated?
Basho, Klarna, Cloudant (now IBM), WhatsApp, T-Mobile for some SMS stuff, many others.

You also use Erlang without even knowing ;-) Chances are every time your access the Internet via your smart phone, there is Erlang code managing that. RabbitMQ broker is written in Erlang.
I used to work at Epic (the Health IT company), which is known for its interesting office design and giving its staff individual offices [1]. Now that I've been working for startups, I've worked in more bullpen-type offices.

A few things:

1) Having my own office did not mean that there weren't distractions. It's impractical to build sound-proof walls between offices and the guy across from me loved to try to sing opera for hours a day. I eventually moved offices to another part of campus for that reason.

2) Likewise, I've worked in open offices that were pretty monastic. Engineers are quiet, everyone is wired in and most people talk on Slack/HipChat. The only interruption was when the mailman would drop off the daily mail.

3) I think the worst thing about open offices are the logistics of staff that need to take phone calls. As a customer-facing programmer that does sales support and configuration assistance it's sub-optimal not having a dedicated space for phone calls. When the perfect storm arises of too many people needing to take calls, everything flies into anarchy where I'm forced to take a call in a common space and try to be quiet. A bullpen that has some separation and accommodation for those needs is ok. A bullpen that doesn't have that is not.

[1] http://www.xconomy.com/wisconsin/2014/09/19/epic-hopes-wi-ca...
Exactly. I mentioned Shrek for a reason. It was (and still is) hugely popular in my country (Poland), and one of the reasons for that is the deep localization. They replaced original jokes and pop culture references with local ones.
US-Cuba travel and trade: New rules start on Friday
http://i.imgur.com/Kk0jP5o.jpg

Pretty interesting people working there, I see.
You can set a `defer recover()` which will stop the panic from crashing the entire program, letting you recover & take whatever action you deem appropriate.
My first $100K (Inteview)
> I believe that most "normal" people are capable of doing enough exercise (combined with good eating choices) that they can lose weight.

The point is there is there no set point of "enough" exercise to induce weight loss. It is highly variable between people and it is very unlikely that any individual can keep weight off in this fashion over a period of time. Linking exercise and weight is a time waster and, more importantly, can dissuade people from exercising when they don't achieve an impossible standard for weight loss.

> For example, say you have a 1-hour lunch break each day. During that lunch break, you could easily go for a 6km run (30-40 minutes), as well as have time for a shower, and grab food. If you're prepared to have a faster shower, and eat a quick snack, heck, you could even make it a 10km run (50 minutes).

First of all, the majority of workers do not have hour long lunch breaks. Second, that exercise during the middle of the work day sounds like a great way to ratchet up stress rather than be relaxing since now you are stuck in a time management game. This isn't an appropriate approach for everyone.

> Either way, I personally know many ordinary people who manage to get a healthy amount of exercise, and achieve their weight goals.

Again, this notion of a "healthy amount" of exercise is a fiction w.r.t. weight loss.

> I also have a friend who quite honestly, eats what seems to be an incredibly unhealthy mix - think large amounts of junk food and deep-fried fast food. However, they manage to stay reasonably slim (think BMI 18) by doing insane amounts of exercise (several hours a day). So it's definitely achievable, assuming you have that sort of willpower.

This person would likely still be a low BMI even without exercise.

> What studies are you referring to, that show that "normal" exercise will not cause weight loss? I'd be very curious to see them.

For a compilation of study data about weight loss, see the first half of Health at Every Size [1] (this is not an endorsement of a HAES lifestyle, but this book does collect the evidence).

[1] www.amazon.com/Health-At-Every-Size-Surprising/dp/1935618253/
Easton LaChappelle the 19 Yr Luminary Building a Cheaper, Better Prosthetics
You're right, it is a pretty big if.

Here's what I foresee actually happening: these networks will work great for 10 years or so. But eventually the maintenance costs will catch up, and you'll have service outages that take days to fix because it's run by lazy government workers with a guaranteed pension. Customers will complain, but nothing will happen until the city goes broke (as happens to nearly every city every decade or so). So the city auctions off the telecom infrastructure to private buyers for pennies on the dollar or spin it off as a new private entity. The net result is the same: the taxpayers will have subsidized the construction of yet another redundant telecommunications network owned by private money.

The reason I'm pretty sure that this is what will happen is because this is exactly what's happened to most of the municipally-owned utilities across the nation. Chances are that your gas company or electric company are privately owned (water/sewage tends to remain municipally owned because it's simply not profitable under any scenario that preserves basic sanitation). The city hits a budget crisis and starts looking for assets to sell, and utilities are huge capital assets that can bring in a lot of cash relatively quickly.
The point of this post is that they spend money making the office look pretty (to get people to accept offers), but they spend almost nothing making it functional. The office has become a marketing ploy; the workers aren't actually treated very well, it just looks like they are because every surface is shiny.
Running ASP.NET 5 Applications in Linux Containers with Docker
This is misleading argument - there IS a Chinese speaker in the room, but it's not the person that executes the program - it's the system "person+program" that understands Chinese.
"Our intelligence is just a manifestation of a physical system of neurons that follow the laws of physics. "

That's where I would disagree. But I'm not fit to give a full explanation here— thinkers such as Hubert Dreyfuss (What Computers Can't Do) do a much better job of explaining the critique (Dreyfuss is working off of Heidegger and other phenomenalist) .
Paywalls are nsfl. Thanks for the link.
I have found Go to be high level enough to make prototyping very straightforward.
A Bluer Shade of White
>Oftentimes these questions are ones that if the developer did more research, he/she could have figured it out.

Have you tried pointing that out to your coworkers? I've had plenty of cases where asking a question gave me a "Sure, here's how you do it. But the next time, be aware you can do X and Y instead." and that taught me to look up stuff first before asking silly questions. I just don't feel like this is a problem related to openspace offices.
It's your first job, just wait, they do get old, specially when things like, I don't know, your girlfriend breaks up with you and you just wanna get down to work and not talk about the last episode of game or thrones, and what you did this weekend (fight with your girlfriend).

Maybe I'm different, I'd like to be alone for a longer time at the office, I get the best work done when I'm working from home too.
Accurate - I don't think there's documentation for the 1.16 stuff yet? Though the code is available in the nightlies supposedly
Well, they made Angular. That's a pretty good record in my opinion. Not that I agree with all their design decisions, but the framework works, is maintained, and helps a lot of people.

I've worked with Angular for a few years now, and I find it really great. I can only imagine what the Angular 2 refactoring will bring. A framework focused around ES6? Count me in.

Furthermore, we actually need more frontend frameworks, because that's how things get better. Evolution via competition.
Is there any sure way to stop the super intelligent AI from changing its own inherent values though?

I guess a problem with containment is that unless it's mathematically proven to be impervious, the super intelligent AI could have figured out that it's being contained and started to learn about the real world and how to manipulate it, while the humans outside still think they're safe.
As someone with flat feet, I certainly hope that they would have traditional sitting desks as well.
> Daily hard exercise - the panting, heart-pounding, drenched in sweat kind of exercise - increases your metabolism.

This is not true for all people and can be highly variable between different people, let alone not necessarily possible for folks with metabolic disorders.
Lack of vision; blinkers on and plow forward. Of all the customer bases out there you would think that most Radio Shack customers would be far more favourable to ordering via the Internet and preferring delivery. I'm a bit surprised they didn't move more towards a RS / Farnell business with the occasional small shop front combined with a warehouse model (a la Argos).
The definition of AI does not matter when it's able to turn everyone into paperclips: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Good for them, if they arrived at that conclusion by themselves :) But then, those wouldn't be the people interested in exploring ancient drinking games, I presume.
The Chinese Room argument is the most sloppy argument ever made in that area. The real answer of course is we don't know.

Just like the individual neuron in your brain do not understand Chinese so does the person in the room not understand it either. The entire house though does.
You should try VoiceOver and the gestures that come with it, it's mind blowing how well it works. I've found plenty of usability improvements that are really easy to make so that VoiceOver works flawlessly in apps I've worked on.
> Go's panic() acts similarly to what you're expecting out of Erlang. You still have to call it for other libraries.

Go uses a shared heap. So even though one go-routine panics, you can't safely assume the state of your system is still predictable. If it is not predictable you can't necessarily safely restart that go-routine.

Without Erlang/Elixir I would actually do it with OS processes / containers at a higher level. Erlang's processes are only a few K of memory and are very easy to restart and handle so you get all that built in.
The NSA doesn't consider itself bound by law and hasn't since its inception. During the Church Committee hearings in the 70s, the NSA's general counsel admitted as much:

“No existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of the NSA.”

-Roy Banner
Everybody knows that it means not (not in regard).
I don't mean to be snarky, but it can be illuminating to change your statement just a little bit:

>>Why wouldn't there be any possibility of making artificial humans? We are just a manifestation of a physical system of bonds between organic molecules that follow the laws of physics. There's nothing inherently preventing us from recreating that.

Obviously, such a summary vastly oversimplifies the problem. It is easy to look at how far we've come and think that we must be close to the goal, but it's a bit presumptuous to think that we are near to making a strong general AI.
CIA board clears staff of snooping Senate computers
@eloisant: I work in automotive where I deal with translations for automotive clusters for one of the largest auto makers. Automotive companies are going to what are called reconfigurables which is basically an instrument cluster with no mechanical gauges; just a screen with gauges rendered by 3D engine. Center stacks too.

I kid you not, the way we translate is to use Google translate as a first pass and then the screens get reviewed by people who know the language. I guess somethings slip through and we evidently pissed off a lot of Chinese folks because of a similar flub. The folks doing the first pass don't know any other languages.

It's quite comical but also a real pain. One of the things I had to work into our code was the left-to-right vs. the right-to-left; you would think it would be just a C-style string but we have to know for text justification semantics.

I don't actually do translations but work on the HMI where the text is displayed. Another pain point is that we have a certain space where text needs to be displayed and everything is fitted using English but after translating to other languages, some strings are much longer than the allotted space.
> how do you trap and imprison something smarter than you?

Jails seem to have this figured out just fine.
No conspiracy, just a bad choice by Google to throw a bunch of money and promotion at a substandard framework.
It's not just the decibel level that damages hearing. Constant, low-volume white noise can damage hearing as well. I know quite a few ex-signals intelligence folk who are nearly deaf in their left ears from sitting in trailers, holding the cans up to their left ear while transcribing radio transmissions.

I'm pretty sure I have my own mild hearing loss problem in my right ear from the near-constant headphone use I had to do in the last open-floor plan office I worked in. It's not just "things sound quiet". Everything sounds normal volume. It just sounds muddy and garbled if people are talking in lower registers.
The problem is not that sunglasses are overpriced for their quality (though sometimes they are) it's that I lose a damn pair every 6 months.
Are there any legal consequences if a blind person is helped crossing the street and gets hit by a car?
I think the biggest reason to not start a project with Angular in 2015 is the uncertainty surrounding 2.0. But, I personally have had only good experiences with AngularJS, and am looking forward to the next version. The good stuff (factories, directives, and two-way binding) outweigh the bad stuff (like breaking compatibility with most jQuery plugins).
At least for this item, the paywall that gives you the first paragraph and first bit of the 2nd is OK, the simple fact that's the situation has gone from the well known dire state to "reliably rumored" to do a bankruptcy and roughly when is all we really need.
Polymer.js Chat App with Material Design Tutorial
Indeed:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708501,-74.006614,3a,75y,190...
> _encounter error, crash, restart, continue_ workflow seems a bit awful to me :)

Granted it is better and less awful than error, everything stops, get calls from customer at 4am, fix, continue cycle ... ;-)

It is a bit different. Learn about it some more and you'll love it. The reason you can't easily do it in other languages is that errors are not isolated. That crash that happened, it might have left some global variable some place in a strange un-expected state. That is why Erlang/Elixir processes do not share memory.

That way it lets you feel a bit safer about crash-restart parts of the system.
The Four Species of Agile
What about limiting AI to a certain clock rate?
@daxelrod: Wow, thanks for that. Quite interesting. I always wondered about how that was done and if it was a direct conversion of sorts but I guess it's not. Very interesting.

I just have to ask: How do you know this?
Those office all look nice - until you get to the place where work actually takes place. I don't care if the foosball table is in a nice room or if the kitchen is fancy. I spend 95% of my time at my desk. Focus some energy on making that area bearable.
I graduated from high school in the 80s. My first computer was a TRS-80 WITH a cassette tape to save my programs to. How RS went from being ubiquitous to a laughing stock is beyond me, but I remember seeing the downfall during the 90s when they started offering really cheap toys (like remote controlled cars).

They almost became embarrassing.
I'm not sure why human cognition is the exception in a world of machines that can emulate anything. My grandfather would never have believed that we have cars that drive themselves. Many baby boomers I work with are still wowed by the basic AI of Siri/GNow/Cortana, or even google search. Common sense and philosophical musings just isn't enough to figure out if something is feasible.

Thinking isn't that hard of a nut to crack, imho. Enough of a ruleset/branch logic is thinking. We don't need to emulate a person perfectly, the same way we don't have self-driving cars losing their tempers or tailgating people out of spite. We just need to distill the intelligence we want and voila, you have AI.

AI isn't just a HAL-like character. Its a lot of things. In fact, it surrounds us. There's expert systems, fuzzy logic, etc controlling pretty much the entirety of our technological lives. I have no idea what drugs Musk is on, but its dangerous for him to piss on AI publically. I imagine, from a practical pov, spreading FUD about AI makes sense for him economically. For someone who wants human spaceflight, talking down about robots and AI is a means to an end. Now the public doesn't want a cheap-ish robot mission on Mars with some guy in Houston wearing an Oculus-like headset. Or autonomous robots on the moon. They want a meatbag on the surface, for their own emotional and philosophical needs, price be dammed. "Price be damned" in spaceflight makes Musk a very happy camper, considering he's going to get a lion's share of that money.

There's something really neo-luddite about human spaceflight. Its like we can't admit to ourselves that machines, AI, etc just are a better fit for it. Anyone else notice that about three months ago there's been endless anti-AI sentiment in the press? Where is this stuff coming from? Who is funding it? I really think Musk and others see it as a major threat to their companies and social capital and are trying to change the narrative to suit them and their goals. I don't think we typically appreciate how one wealthy person or organization can easily astroturf the web and the press.

Personally, I think the more feasible futurist path is actually taking the environment seriously, pushing the path to peace politically, trying to bring in a post-scarcity world via cheap replication, and using AI the same way we use all tools -- for our benefit. Fleeing to some other planet or moon without fixing life on Earth first guarantees we bring our terrible politics and baggage to this new destination. Let's fix things here first and then worry about moving to Mars. "Fixing things" more than likely involves strong AI implementations in various parts of our lives.
>You don't become WalMart/Facebook/Twitter by treating your employees well.

Today's tech company employees are some of the most pampered in history. The list of perks Facebook and Twitter offer is huge (http://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Facebook-US-Benefits-EI_IE...). Comparing them to WalMart is ridiculous.
The correct analogy would be a jail run by a bacterium.
Great point. If you switched to those language you might have more time to go for coffee and take long walks, because your system have a higher chance to manage errors and crashes and you don't have to rush to the office right away or at night to fix issue.
> and it's like being in my own isolated office.

I think that's the crux of the argument right here. I think most people who experienced both, myself included, will strongly disagree.

> it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.

Just staring at a wall? Come on, having a personal office door means you can open it and interact with other people when you so desire. Not when they so desire.
See, that's the kind of thing you need a shared space for. Who's going to notice your horse head in a private office??
Having worked in a variety of office environments over the last 15 years, my favorite has been shared, closed office space. My employee moved into a relatively small building which had 2-3 person offices in it. The devs were one, QC in another, sales in another. It worked quite well. We could close our door, but still collaborate when we needed to. We also had several meeting rooms if we needed to talk between teams.

I'm also not against the "pod"-style cubes (4 or so people in a large cube), assuming the pods aren't cramped on top of one another.