skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open floor plan offices are generally pretty unpleasant, but some of the negative effects can be mitigated.

I worked at Sun Micro a while ago (the place that is now Facebook), and we all had offices at the time. However, Sun had also started to create numerous drop-in work centers. One of them was in downtown SF, just south of market.

This was an "open" office with three largish rooms with cubicles and desks, and a smaller number of offices with doors that close (reservable or walk in).

Here's what made it work - one of the rooms was designated a "zone of silence", and it really was enforced. The two outer rooms had phones at each desk, the quiet room did not. Sales people and other workers who needed to make noise worked in the outer rooms, programmers and other heads down people worked in the quiet room.

Not surprisingly, there were plenty of people who wanted to break the rules. This generally happened when all the desks in the loud room were taken. Then you'd get people trying to take phone calls in the quiet room on their cell phones. Some felt that as long as they spoke in a relatively hushed tone of voice, it would be ok (though everyone could still hear their conversation). Others figured that the phone could ring, and they could start their conversation in the room, as long as they were actively walking outside the room as they talked.

What saved it was an office manager who simply wouldn't tolerate it. She would absolutely tell people that they couldn't do this, and that their right to work from the drop in center would be revoked if they continued to do it. She didn't care about their rank, or if they liked her.

I did have a couple of ugly moments about it. I very politely asked people on a couple of occasions not to use their phones in the designated quiet room (with signs everywhere about it), and more than once, they started in on how much more important their work was than mine.

But it was relatively rare, because the signage and vibe of the room really was pretty clear about it, and the office manager was very strict and just didn't have the kind of personality that was easily pushed around.
Last thing we need is another frontend framework

Why? I'm not sure have an existing one that satisfies every requirement anyone will ever have.
My only question is how do you handle trolls, idiots, abuse etc?

What happens if for example 4chan decides to 'raid' your app and direct blind people into unfortunate situations. I must admit it's a very low act but that's my only real thought about this.

If abuse wasn't a possibility I think the app is 100% amazing.
>> Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office

> The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it

> I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations

This is confusing.. Are you saying you do like Fog Creek's setup, or you don't?
Why does it have to be either or? Why not provide a variety of different work environments, encourage employees to find the one that best suits them, and work there? I think back to my days at the University. Sometimes a louder, open space was great so I'd head to the student union or the group floor of the library. Or maybe I needed some isolated quiet time, find a private room in the library so I could think. I've worked in places that had only open spaces, and it was very difficult to find any quiet, more private rooms. There are times that I like a more open environment, and I get work done there, but when there are no quiet places I can retreat to when I need it, then it can become very frustrating to get any work done. And no, don't tell me you provide me headphones to 'block out' the noise. Sometimes its quiet I want, not louder noises to block out the existing noises (not to mention the fact that it doesn't block out visual stimulation which can be equally distracting).
CSS.js: CSS parser in JavaScript
> Apparently, he succeeded - his subject elected to release the fake AI.

Hasn't he refused to release the transcripts for this experiment? And I think there've been subsequent runs of the experiment, with some losses as well as wins.

Edit: I see that not releasing the transcripts is part of the design of the experiment. Which seems kind of like it'd seriously hamper any kind of independent analysis of the results or the quality of the experiment.
This is my preferred solution as well. As a bonus, it makes parsing the data so much easier, if you ever need it.
Baidu built a supercomputer for deep learning
Is FutureOfLife.org a competitor to Machine Intelligence Research Institute? So now we have two charitable organizations researching how to make AI's beneficial? Who knew this was going to be a growth industry.
Viaweb (1997)
Swiss frank detaches from euro, market goes crazy
A brief look at data science’s past and future
We do have abuse handling
What happens when AI reaches provably better decision outcomes whose chain of logic is opaque to mere humans? Now you have a trusted black box that cannot be audited by humans.
How We Earned $10,120 in 30 Days by Sending Horse Poop to People: Amazing Kickstart of a Marketing Experiment

http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-3...
Artificial intelligence helps Stanford physicists predict dangerous solar flares
Last time I was at a Radio Shack, I was just starting to learn electronics. I bought parts to build a battery-powered guitar amplifier: LM386 IC, a small loud speaker, a handful of capacitors and resistors, a roll of wire, a project enclosure, a couple of potentiometers, knobs for them, and a switch. Just the sort of stuff one would expect to find at a Radio Shack (though, increasingly, cannot find). The store manager checked me out and made some crack about, "what are you making? Some kind of bomb?"

This was around the time that the city of Boston decided to go completely nutso and assume everything that had a wire sticking out of it was a bomb, find the people who made it, and then destroy their lives for "making a bomb hoax", regardless of what the item actually was. I had a flash of an image in my head of some soccer mom walking by the store in the mall, hearing the "bomb" quip, and calling the cops to send in the SWAT team.

I didn't expect the manager to know that speakers and amplifier chips don't go in a bomb. I mean, he was a manager at a Radio Shack, we're not talking about the cream of the crop here. But I did expect him to have a little tact and not make the sort of stupid jokes that our trigger-happy, security-theater-conscious society has demonstrated a gleeful willingness to destroy lives over.
What AI research can learn from magicians
Can you please send an email to info@bemyeyes.org with the details, as we are very interested in fixing this issue
> but it's a bit presumptuous to think that we are near to making a strong general AI

But I don't think they're presuming that. They're simply saying that it's possible in principle. How long it takes, and whether indeed we ever manage it all, are separate questions.
1. These are clearly marketing pictures taken by professional photographers. Well done ones I might add. They are meant to demonstrate (perception/reality) what daily life of an any employee is. Not every big tech company is a composed of 99% engineers. Cassandra and HHVM were built there (or somewhere similar), yet people whose only evidence is a bunch of marketing pictures decide to question the design decisions of people with intimate knowledge about their company's organization.

2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work, and I don't expect this to change anytime soon. What is clear to me is that the correlation between good code and office does not exist. Think of how much code has been written in kitchens, garages, vans, etc that may have changed the world...
> These taxes are non-voluntary and coerced from me under threat of force

Just to be clear, what this really means is that you aren't willing to go to jail for your principles.

That's fine and you're in good company under that criteria, but that's what the GP was getting at.
It doesn't do that for me, I played the game pretty spasticly...

I don't know in what way you mean Firefox is going to shit, but here's the great part about it: you can file bug reports, and submit code so it ISN'T shit.
Oh really? I guess you'll be releasing your bootloader unlock instructions for my phone any day now, then?
> I think, in spite of the theoretical want for quiet space and isolation, there's a very human need at work to be in the middle of the action

This is why I, and many others like working in coffee shops. There's usually an ambient background noise which makes it feel like you are involved in something, but it doesn't require your direct attention. I think there's also a subconscious element to having activity around you which keeps you focussed. I personally find it easy to look at cat videos on the internet when no one can see my screen, but when I know people might walk past me when at a coffee shop, or at work, it keeps me focussed.
> 1. Less verbose code

Go is much more verbose than Scala or Clojure. Go is just a language, whereas the JVM is a platform with multiple languages.

> 2. Platform Ind. + native binaries, no runtime dependency

In my opinion Java has a greater degree of platform independence. Wherever it runs, things just work. On runtime dependency, you're wrong, as Golang does have a pretty heavy runtime dependency. It's true that it doesn't get distributed as byte-code that needs a VM, but at the very least you're still dependent on a garbage collector and that makes it unsuitable for all those things one would naturally do in C/C++.

Also, Java being the standard that it is, has multiple implementations and it doesn't necessarily need a VM. The purpose of RoboVM (http://www.robovm.com/) for example being to build apps for iOS in Java meant compiling Java to native and RoboVM does just that. But there are advantages to distributing apps as bytecode - Android ART (the successor to Dalvik) is doing AOT compilation to native upon installing an app on your phone and the cool thing is that you don't have to worry about what processor your app will end up running on.

> 3. Built in unit testing/benching

I don't see how that is an advantage. Does Go have something like YourKit Profiler? Can you easily connect to a remote application for debugging or profiling?

> 4. Fast compile time

One can argue that fast compile times are a direct consequence of the compiler not doing pretty much of anything you'd expect a compiler to do - like optimizations or type-safety. For example the C++ compiler is slow, but the C++ compiler can optimize the shit out of anything. Scala's compiler is slow, but it can catch a lot of errors for which you'd normally have to run expensive third-party tools.

> 5. Better tooling, no Ant etc needed

Nobody is using Ant anymore. Go doesn't have Maven or anything like it (i.e. Gradle, SBT, Leiningen). As a personal opinion, whenever I have to work with other platforms, feels like going back to the nineties.

> 6. Better core language support for multithreading/concurrency

This is a common misconception, when the opposite is factually true.

On the JVM you'll find support for the Erlang-style actor model, Hoare's CSP, Futures/Promises, reactive streams (Rx), STM, parallel collections and the best concurrent data-structures that open-source can provide. See Akka, Quasar, Scala's and Clojure's standard libraries, LMAX Disruptor, etc...

> 8. Related to 7, better stack vs heap allocation control

This has always been a problem for the JVM, however stack-allocated values are coming in the next version. On the other hand the control on memory layout in Go is still weak and the JVM does have much better garbage collectors.
Using AI for Poker Is Really About Solving Some of the World's Biggest Problems
> with team rooms of 6 to 15 people, depending on role and requirements

I absolutely agree. Team rooms seem to be the optimal. The room gets to set the rules. It's amazing how different team cultures grow, develop and optimize for the team composition and the work they're doing.

Provide a few quiet ultra-concentration nodes that people can reserve and use and conference rooms for inter-team coordinating and you're set.

You get the benefits of quick communication and collaboration, without the downsides of other people's/group's conversations disrupting what you're working on AND the ability to comfortably complain that your teammate is being disruptive...which is socially harder to do with strangers/people in other parts of the company.

If your rule is "put headphones on if you want privacy" you're doing it wrong. If you need to have "flow time" in the afternoon because the warehouse you've stuffed your people into is too noisy to get any real work done (so you have to schedule time to actually concentrate) you're doing it wrong.

Some places even go so far as having re-configurable team rooms, they can change size and shape to accommodate growing and shrinking teams without too much fuss.
You don't have to, you can do it. And who said anything about buying it on your own dime? It depends on the company but I'm fairly sure any of the big companies with such open offices will provide them to you for free upon request.

I would say the benefits of getting your work done vs having complete and entire silence are not so easy to summarize. A lot of people in this thread seem to assume that an open space office is super noisy full of people talking where in my (very limited, I admit) experience there's hardly any noise other than the sound of people hammering on keyboards (and the AC). There are occasional conversations but those last a few seconds because, as I already said, if they were longer, people would move out of the way.

Maybe it depends on the company, people and office.
If only humans could agree on what makes things beneficial to themselves. Are self-driving cars and rockets to Mars beneficial to humanity? Depending on how you look at it the answer is both yes and no.
I don't see how changing the statement at all changes anything? It's certainly not impossible to create artificial humans, if not within our current technological capability.
Did you lose a pair of Juliets in Yosemite a few years back? :-)
2 Things That All Successful Mobile Apps Do
http://www.rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethle...

It's a peculiarity of humans that we can't trade off time for IQ. Do not assume an AI would be similarly limited.
Is Facebook at Work an Enterprise Social Network?
The link isn't loading for me, so here's HN's discussion on a Harvard entrance exam from 1869: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3312240
I still miss Heathkit

Radio Shack not so much in the age of the internet.
Changing your inherent values is a poor way to go about achieving your current set of values.

The biggest issue is ensuring that everything we care about gets encapsulated as a value of the AI. If not, we wind up with things like "set off a bomb in the basement to more efficiently get people out of a burning building."
5min max if it's a slow walk.
Where is Ray Kurzweil's name on that list?
I love that too - where I work I get it 9 - 9.30 and 17.30 - 18.00
4 weight loss myths you need to bust
> Of course, I'm sure there are people who notice this. My question was whether something like this makes enough of a difference to justify the investment.

Honestly - probably not. And that's exactly why we live in the world that is full of crappy stuff that works barely enough to get sold. I personally strongly appreciate when someone, however little economical sense that may have, goes the extra mile and makes their product polished. I'm willing to pay for it.
Evolutionary approaches to big-data problems
What do you mean by "normal exercise"?

For example, yesterday I burned ~750kcal on the treadmill. Are you trying to tell me this makes no dent in the calories I consumed throughout the day?

If my objective was to lose weight, are you implying that doing such a workout couldn't lead to a calorie deficit and therefore expenditure of stored fat?
Google on the Technical Debt of Machine Learning
Well I have used the app as both blind and sighted.
A blind person simply presses a button which sends requests to a helper.
If the helper does not have time, the api sends a request to another helper.
When a helper takes the call, he/she gets a video and audio stream from the blind persons phone.
The blind person gets an audio stream from the sighted person.

A conversion about the problem to be solved can now take place.
Whenever the blind or sighted person wishes to disconnect, they press a button and the call is finished.

Is that what you were asking for?
Yeah, I agree with you, this app isn't going to change the world. However, I think he's taking the right approach. He's at a point where he's earned his right/freedom to work on what he wants. If he so happens to find an opportunity for an underserved niche in something that he's genuinely passionate about, I'd argue that's definitely the approach to take. Go with that and see where it leads.

Everyone (prob including himself) is expecting him to put out a home run product now. He seems "due" for it. But if he comes out swinging for the fences, which I think he kinda did with Milk, there's a good chance that all parties will be disappointed because regardless of who you are, those home runs are really hard to come by, and even for someone like Kevin Rose, still very unlikely. I think if he follows these sorts of opportunities where his passion lies, he'll create a succession of hits that may eventually lead to his home run. Who knows, there's obviously no science to this, but that's the approach I would, and do, take.
How Google Search Dealt With Mobile
Link to the case in question: http://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two...
The easier it is to ask a question, the lower the quality of those questions.

I can't remember how often I "fixed" something by telling the people they have to empty their browser cache or that they aren't in the right directory...
You company already seems quite progressive in accepting so much being done from home.
From the guidelines "A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears at the beginning of every month, and you're welcome to post there. The rest of the time, job posts are reserved for Y Combinator-funded startups." Additionally there is a 'looking for work' thread and similar for freelancing.

Personally I prefer those posts over individuals who look for a job and job ads.
As do cats.
The two faces of modern IT environments
I wonder how long it will be until Rob Pike decides that "Handling error values should be enforced by the type system".
I code in an open office. My solution: headphones, and three 27 inch monitors angled inward. It's not quite as good as walls, but it cuts out enough visual distraction that it works well enough. I've also got an adjustable-height desk that I leave at standing height, so there's not much going on above monitor height.

A big chunk of the benefit of having an office is keeping your visual field entirely work-related.
The whole point of devops is that it combines development and operations; i.e. everyone works together to make sure that both development and operations are mutually supportive and co-ordinated. Most devops teams I have seen almost all the team are capable developers and sysadmins / operations.
Show HN: Timeline.com
FYI, HTTPS Everywhere users might need to disable it to be able to close the popup due to blocked closebox.png or just use dev tools.

https://i.imgur.com/QKAYg1E.png
Any chance of an Android version?

Edit: Sorry, should have looked at the FAQ.
We've been doing this since 2010 at www.robots-everywhere.com although it has to be an android phone. The software and even the schematics have been creative commons'd since 2012, too (they're on the wiki). We demoed at Google I/O 2010.

Wired has been notified of this over the years and consistently failed to report it.
Skepticism, or casting aspersions? The first is smart, the second is just jerk behavior.
Toyota's using Oculus Rift to prevent you from crashing into a wall
My favorite space was the one we laid out for our startup back in the dotcom boom.

We had large cubicles that housed 4 developers each. We each had a corner, and there was a small conference table in the middle so we could just turn around and collaborate. It was a great mix of a shared environment and private, where it was easy to talk to the folks on your team, but also easy for everyone to just work quietly for much of the time.
What happens to the franchise stores when the parent company goes bankrupt?
Drones that came with an iOS/Android app have been available for around two years. So the only USP here is that ex-Google employees made another one "me too!" Good for them, but nothing revolutionary going on here.
I've heard that cubicles are worse than open offices in terms of audio distraction. In an open office, you've got a constant visual reminder that people can hear you. People tend to be more mindful of their volume levels and where/how they make noise.
I know you're getting downvoted, but I agree with you. There is no way whatsoever I could go back to working in a private / cubicle partitioned office. I'm open-plan for life. The energy and intelligent conversations I overhear completely eclipse any negative aspects imho. I guess it's important that you like hearing what your coworkers have to say. If I _truly_ need to concentrate, the headphones and some www.polskastacja.pl and I'm all set.
I know it's a bit dramatic at this point to take this stance ... but this almost gives me deja-vu of racism. Like a modern version of:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Little_Ro...

Here's what I mean; I'm not suggesting that AI has, or will have, some innate set of "rights". Nor am I suggesting that anyone is wrong for wanting to fund and research "AI Safety". It's just the first thing that came to mind while reading that post, as it spoke about need to steer, control, and regulate AI so that it's beneficial for "us" ... already setting up an "us" vs "them" dynamic.

Anyways, just thought it was an interesting juxtaposition to mention ... thoughts?
The installation procedure apparently snarfs your contacts and spams them to get them to load Peerio. Several observers on Farber's Interesting Persons list have noted that the sign-up procedure is a significant security hole as well as being decidedly unfriendly because of the spam. To track the thread see https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/
> 2. There is yet to be conclusive evidence that open offices work or don't work

There's actually quite a few studies that show that they most definitely do not work.

Here's a meta-study that reviewed hundreds of specific studies [1] and the conclusion is inescapable.

Here's a survey of tens of thousands of workers [2]

And here's a New Yorker article collecting lots of this [3]. It includes a reference to a study that found actual measurable health detriment to open offices.

Arguing that issues with open offices are ambiguous is a bit like arguing that global climate change isn't happening.

1 - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119992592.ch6...

2 - http://lubswww.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/webfiles/cstsd/Images/P...

3 - http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-t...
Bill Gates Is Revolutionizing How History Is Taught
Can we not link to stories behind the WSJ paywall?