skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has this guy even worked in any of these environments? I've worked at Facebook and it is surprisingly quiet. If people want to have meetings or talk, there are plenty of conference rooms to take advantage of. Worst case, the free Sennheisers in the tech vending machines takes care of any other noises that you might not like.

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.

While I understand if people legitimately don't like an open office environment, this type of article seems like it is just trying to put down these companies with little knowledge about how loud it really is in these offices.

And if you don't like the environment at Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc, just move to another company. Let's not pretend that it is hard to get another job with one of those companies on your resume.
RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing
As I said, all rankings are flawed, but if you drill down into the individual factors you'll find out some of the reasons for any surprising results.

Luxemburg is part of a giant tax evasion scheme. That's the only reason why some multi-nationals are doing business there. They don't need "ease of doing business" like a startup does.

I really don't know nearly enough about Malaysia to compare it to Switzerland. Apparently you do.
An experienced programmer friend of mine uses Go professionally. I was surprised to hear that he much prefers Java: he said that many concurrency libraries are available for Java and that Go's features are quite limited in comparison. He dislikes the fact that you have to break Go's poor type system to get many things (such as tests) to work. He has a pretty strong background in FP, so I think that perhaps Go's interfaces are the straw that broke the camel's back.

This made me realize that I'm still holding onto some biases about Java, and that it's worth a look. I did start to dabble in Scala (and I have experience with Clojure), but it seemed like I'd want to know some Java before doing Scala, whereas that didn't seem as necessary with Clojure.
> Having a really good language as part of your stack works as a filter-- you get the best programmers that way.

Agreed. At one point I felt this way about Scala, but it's starting to change as the boulder rolls downhill.

I still use Scala, because it's fantastic, but it's no longer a safe assumption that a Scala programmer can be trusted with sharp objects from the jump.
The Latin American Spanish localization of Dreamworks's Shrek is a great example.

They brought in Eugenio Derbez, a Mexican comedian, to voice Donkey (voiced in English by Eddie Murphy). Donkey in particular speaks in colloquialisms and pop culture references with wordplay, so Derbez wrote a bunch of new lines and jokes that referenced Latin American colloquialisms and pop culture.

Children learn different fairy tales in different countries, so they also managed to change the identity of some of the characters without changing their appearances (and without altering video at all, just audio).
I've been on both sides, cube vs open plan. I used to liken cubes to prisons, but now I look at them the same way a cat will look at a box that it tries to squeeze itself tightly into, because the cat wants to be there.
> it's efficient

Efficient for what or who, I wonder?
An awesome drag&drop HTML newsletter builder
I think one reason to choose Go is simplicity. You can run, say, a JSON REST service and build it with TDD out of the box with only the standard libaries. It's also such a small language that you can pick it up quickly.

I haven't done an serious Java development recently but my impression is that if I wanted to get up and running with it quickly there would be a ton of choices to make around frameworks, tooling, which conventions to stick to, etc. and it would all be difficult to navigate. (And maybe that's not even true, but if that's my impression I'm just gonna choose choose Go).
I don't understand if you like Fog Creek's environment or you don't.

At any rate, I'm so over the open floor plan/cubicle mazes. I get really distracted by the doppler effect that conversations (sometimes LOUD conversations) that pass by my cubicle, have. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I much prefer the solitude that an office with a door provides.
"if they're preserving the rock face by not drilling bolts into it, then what are they preserving it for?"

Don't you think there's any worth in preserving the natural environment for its own sake? It sounds like you're saying if you can't put bolts into the rock to climb it then the rock is worthless and shouldn't be preserved anyway.

Maybe if you can't climb something without permanently defacing it then you should just not climb it.
Let's face it - sometimes it is better to just avoid the problem than to (try to) solve it. Just use some other form of sentence, people will not even notice and you will save yourself tons of problems.
It was an actual charge for a specific route (e.g. SFO - JFK). I couldn't later claim that it was for SFO - YYZ.
Stack Exchange's office is very similar. Starting to feel like Joel is the only one who still believes in private offices.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708933,-74.006578,3a,75y,203...
>But I still don't see why you would choose Go over Java (or Scala) for serious backend development.

1. Less verbose code
2. Platform Ind. + native binaries, no runtime dependency
3. Built in unit testing/benching
4. Fast compile time
5. Better tooling, no Ant etc needed
6. Better core language support for multithreading/concurrency
7. A memory model that makes it easier to read the code and understand how the resulting data will be layed out in memory
8. Related to 7, better stack vs heap allocation control

>Java has more libraries

Many of which are of low quality / filled with code-rot, I used to play in the Java ecosystem the Go stdlib is cleaner and the Go 3rd party libraries tend to be better, more single function.

>is faster

This is not always the case and is changing for Go's better fast. To paint Go as non-competitive would be unfair as its in the same league as Java and it usually faster than C# Mono.

>has generics (for the love of god)

I used to miss this, but I find I don't anymore... I wrote proxies, databases, systems applications.

>has better IDE support

True. This used to pain me until I found LiteIDE and I started writing unit tests more and using the debugger less. Go's profiler is awesome though...

>and has a larger hiring pool.

Not really, any smart C/C++/C#/Java developer can be highly productive in Go in weeks.

>In summary, the ecosystem is more mature.

A double edged sword mind you, not to mention Go is maturing at faster rate then Java did.

>Java's checked exceptions are less painful then Go's C-style error handling.

No. C++/Java got it wrong, ignoring error paths lead or letting random low level errors bubble up are some of the horrible results of the Java way to handle exceptions.

Forcing programmers to consider which operations may fail- how to handle those failures is one of the best decisions Go made. Multiple returns make this much less painful than C.
Monetary rates being negative are a big deal in a way negative real rates aren't. When you pay the bank to hold money, you begin to see cases where it is most rational to hold cash instead.
(For those wondering: Flemish is the Belgian variant of Dutch.) And i agree.. i also prefer the Flemish dubbed voices. For example, Timon&Pumba in The Lion King are Flemish, to great effect.
Are paywalls ok on HN?

http://uk.businessinsider.com/r-radioshack-prepares-to-file-...
If I ride my bike 30 - 35 mins

If I drive 20 - 60 mins
MI6 Forced to Show How It May Snoop on Privileged Lawyer-client Exchanges
This is my concern, in the Snowden/NSA age. While few ISPs are willing to go to the mat defending their customers' privacy, I am absolutely certain that when it comes to governmental providers, it will never happen.
Do you want to hire people that are incapable of learning a new language?
The biggest thing that's missing from this article to me is there's no explanation at all why the game was rebranded to Infestation. He wrote the article out as "we made mistakes, we learned" but if you learned and adopted why did the name have to change?
Java actually doesn't have generics. It has syntactic sugar for generics, but they are so horribly broken they can't be fixed.

For example, because the generics are just sugar for casts, you can't specialize them. Because you can't specialize them, you have to put behavior in the "wrong place". Take for example a hash map from Double -> T. Because IEEE floats don't actually form an equivalence class (NaN != NaN), they don't make great keys to a hash table (if you put NaN in, you can't get it out). But, rather than specializing the hash table for floats to give special NaN handling, Java had to make Double(NaN) == Double(NaN), so when they're boxed, they do form an equivalence class.

And if that were the only inconsistent behavior in primitives versus their boxed counterparts, that would be great...

EDIT: To those who downvote, would you discuss your objections? I understand that I may come off a bit caustic, but having been burned by the myriad correctness issues in Java, it's hard not to. These aren't abstract problems that don't come up in practice -- for a public example, look at what Paul Phillips has to say about the JVM and standard libraries.
Yeah, I never realized how much I would miss having my own office with a door until I moved to an open floor plan.

Utterly impossible to concentrate on things w/out headphones.
THAT is a gorgeous workspace. I'm envious..
The Erlang/Elixir way can be hard to appreciate because it's not just a very different way of handling errors, it's a completely different way to architect your application. The following tutorial only takes about 45 min to go through, but you'll get a taste for how error handling (across distributed process, at that) works in Elixir: https://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1
Why the numbers say that there will not be a podcast resurgence
sort of unreal to have a 50M number kicking around. Who are these people? If it isn't just spam/misguided links...
Seems like a user would have to have serious investment in content or community there to stick around. Perhaps some strong communities hanging on. Still seems pretty crazy since the relaunch/revamp wiped mostly everything out..... defo another one of those straggler online entities hanging on ...I always like to wonder about this 'other internet' people seem to surf that would include dead properties like this...
Same goes for a good men's suit.
Cursor 'snaps out' of the window if I move a lot to the left/right.

And Firefox IS going to shit, whether the HN community likes it or not.
About 20 miles each way, about 40-50 minutes a day.

Also have the option to work from home, which I do 2-3 days a week.
Perhaps for the visiting VCs, investors, and Executives?
> 2. Platform Ind. + native binaries, no runtime dependency

Also available in Java. It is just a matter of choosing the right compiler.

Java like many other languages, enjoys a standard, certification process and multiple implementations to choose from.
That’s a good idea:

“But I just couldn't stop thinking about one thing: the AT&T offices were dingy and dark, in some kind of a stone age office that smelled of 1930s bureaucracy. People were starting to look like mushrooms. There were torn Dilbert cartoons all over the cubicles. (Warning sign number one.) The furniture was falling apart. It was just nasty. But Viacom was in a nice, shiny, modern, bright office building that felt like lawyers' offices. It was clean and new and pleasant. I know I should have been thinking about something more substantial as I made my decision, but I just could not get over how unpleasant it would be to spend my days working in the AT&T dungeon.”

— Joel Spolsky, Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?, June 2000

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
I wonder how the goal can be achieved? How would you prevent the development of AI which is so intelligent that it is dangerous for humanity?

Perhaps there might simply be fundamental physical constraints which limit intelligence? Still seems that something much faster and bigger than a human brain would be possible, though.

Maybe by containment? If it's possible to keep the super intelligent AI in a virtual environment, but it can't detect that it's virtual.
The limits of “unlimited” vacation
Those are fair points regarding energy expenditure for specific exercises. However, that doesn't take into account the effects of regular exercise on BMR. That normal exercise can elevate your BMR is certainly plausible, and many people have conducted studies that have reached this conclusion.

Metabolism is a complicated thing, and there are conflicting answers on the subject. Results differ under a variety of conditions (human, animal, forced/voluntary, etc.). The abstract in this review summarizes the state of the research nicely: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14692598
I am currently working at Google as an intern and I'm probably going to be the contradicting opinion in this thread but I really appreciate the openspace office we have here. Maybe because it's my first "real" office job, but I do not find much of a problem working here. When I want to be on my own to think on stuff, I just put my headphones on (sometimes with music, sometimes without, since they are good at canceling noise anyway) and it's like being in my own isolated office. And if that is not enough, we have small cubicle-like mini-rooms where you can go and isolate yourself, most people use them to have phone conversations or do interviews, but nothing stops you from working in there with your laptop.

All in all, though, maybe it's my floor that is very quiet but there's not much distraction or annoying background noise as most people are busy working. When they are not working, they go somewhere else (the pub, the relax rooms, etc etc). If they want to have a work-related conversation that lasts more than 5-10 minutes, we have open areas with whiteboards separated from the desk area, or we have separate conference rooms you can use. Most of the time, I enjoy taking my headphones off and listening to a couple of coworkers making remarks on stuff (either work or non-work related), it helps me relieve stress and boredom much more than just staring at a wall or reading some articles online.

Ironically, the major source of annoyance in our floor recently has been the old AC system that sometimes starts making very loud noises and bothers everybody, but this is not the fault of the openspace office so it doesn't count :)
I created an account to just say this.

So lets analyze this a little.

JeSuis is of course in English "I am".

Dieudonne is reference to the well known terrorist.

In total it translates into

"I am Terrorist".

Well. Here are more bright ideas.

"I am murderer",
"I am p * ph * le",
"I am going to blow the school up".

So I do not think that there is much hypocrisy here.
Swiss Franc Roils Markets as SNB Abandons Cap
Having spent a day at Atlassian's office in SOMA when contracting for them recently, if this sort of setup is done right (with the additional caveat of having an energetic staff) the effect is positively electrifying. The "Costco purchases" jab is overly broad, because this office had very nice motorized standing desks for everybody. Also, the complex was large enough that you could escape into some personal space without feeling like you were hiding.

On the other hand, Gannett attempted a setup like this, except it was out of cheapness (they wanted to lease office space in their Tysons HQ) and was carried out mindlessly. They mixed developers with technical support, managers, etc. thoughtlessly. And they installed "white noise" machines which made matters worse. Working in that place was almost impossible and I quit after a month.
Alternate Title: Surgeon willing to perform experimental surgery oversells the necessity of his surgery.
Exercise has a huge effect on BMR, so I don't think your point really works.
It won't be longer true in Java 9, latest Java 10.
When people focus on a language, they tend to think only about the language and not the ecosystem around it. Yes, Java 8 has closures, but then again it will be a very long time until the ecosystem will move to using them. And for example, even though Scala has baked-in features to make functional programming much more pleasant / practical, it's not those features that position it as a functional programming language, but rather the ecosystem around it. In other words, even though you can mostly use a language that has closures in an FP fashion (and people did so with languages like Java or Javascript), it's painful doing so not only because of the language and the standard library, but also because the other people and the supporting libraries are not doing that and then you're the weirdo that swims against the tide.

On the other hand the JVM on the whole is an extremely good platform and given that one can use on top alternative languages that do make a difference, like Scala, Clojure, Ceylon or Groovy, well that's the comparison I'd like to see ... the JVM versus Go.

On your arguments - Java's checked exceptions are deeply broken IMHO, but something that works much better in the context of a static language are types such as `Try[T]`, `Either[L,R]`, `Option[T]` or `Validation[E,A]` from Scala. They achieve their purpose of documenting the error in the function's signature and can do much more than exceptions can, they force you to either deal with it or escalate and their API is very comfortable. Unfortunately whenever you bring these into a discussion, people dismiss them because you know, monads and applicative functors are apparently too "academical". But we keep reinventing broken wheels, because we can't bother to learn anything else that isn't in the gang of four.

On Go my personal opinion is that it is a very poor choice compared to the JVM, even when speaking about Go's strongest points, like performance and concurrency and yes, I believe that the JVM is a strong winner on all points. But then I wouldn't expect people that have chosen Node.js or Python/Gevent to start making good decisions.
I wonder what do people who disagree with open floor plans think the desks should be like?
Philosophically I think it's a mistake to believe there is any possibility of creating artificial human intelligence (and the mistake is in our assumptions of what human intelligence is— computers are not human beings and human beings are not computers) ... But I've got to hand it to Elon Musk— when he believes in something he commits to doing something about it.

EDIT - Saying I disagree that AI is a foregone conclusion on Hacker News is probably a bit trollish... Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to condense an explanation to this comment box— but my disagreement stems from philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfuss (What Computers Can't Do) who are working off of Heidegger and phenomenology.

EDIT 2 - I know how douchey it is to namedrop Heidegger, but I really believe in this case it's necessary ...
I don't understand, why does that pain you to say? That sounds like a great idea.
The doctor spends all day getting other cases right, which doesn't make for as interesting of an article. Expecting them to be infallible is unfair.
I have a semi-private office (two of us) in a ~15X15 office with a door, I would not give it up for anything in the world. openspaces are terrible for productivity. too many distractions.
Maybe instead of adblock for turn, someone should put together a plugin to generate a random header string sized at about 16k just for *.turn.com.

On a side note, if your browser automatically filled up the remaining allowed characters in the header (depends on the server of course), it'd be interesting to know how that would be handled by Verizon's support since all sites would get a 400 error when their header injection is enabled.
Show HN: Giftbit – money-back gift cards as a service
I love this post for how wrong it is:

* Acting like regular college students don't have classes that are super simple to game and pass

* Saying life moments like dating/flirting aren't important (what exactly are students supposed to do between classes anyway!?!)

* Saying being an actor does not require intellectual or academic ability (hint: it does)

* Has no idea what FAFSA is like or what it's like to navigate that mess

* Pretending that they aren't already indirectly paying for people to "get easy As, ogle girls, and pursue unintellectual careers"
Windows to open spaces in my back?
No thanks...
Also, it's $5/mo. I'm sold (and have been for a year now). No complaints.
Or, perhaps students choose to attend WCU because it's a dry college.
Is this some extension / perversion of the original XP principles? I feel like XP Explained talks a lot about office layout and how it can foster communication and teamwork.
Your assertion -- "they're obviously spending a huge amount of money on the office" -- is compatible with the previous assertion. They're spending it on the office, while employees are still treated as fungible cogs to be plugged into said expensive office.
The noise isn't the only consideration (though it is a big one). Visual distractions, lack of privacy, the feeling of being watched, people approaching from behind you, etc. The human animal is stressed by these things.
That's the problem with large open plan offices. The only way for it to be workable for everyone is if everyone shuts up. I find it incredibly stifling.

My ideal environment is the team I'm working on in one big room, the music going, everyone jamming on the project together. Getting shit done. That's probably what Zuckerberg et al remember from when they started the company, and that's why they want to recreate it for 3,000 people.

Unfortunately, once you have more than 1 team in the room, it breaks down. You just shipped something awesome and want to shout about it? The other team gives you dirty looks and want you to just STFU because they're 3 days from shipping and in total crunch mode. Some people just like quiet all the time, they'll give you a dirty look when you get noisy.

Thus the big rooms of people end up being completely silent, it's the only way to make it work. They are terrible for collaboration. The only conversations happen in conference rooms, otherwise you disturb 100+ people.

In my mind small rooms, holding 4-10 people, are ideal. Each team gets a room. If the team likes it quiet, it will be quiet. If you want to bounce ideas around, you can do it without feeling like you are disturbing other teams. If you want to play music, you can play music. I think it's the feeling that the open plan offices are going for, but people haven't connected the productivity of open plan office with the actual size of the open room yet.
The changing face of Pyongyang – in pictures
I think there's a balance to be struck.

I used to think that programmers complaining about open office spaces were just nitpicking... then I learned how to program. Open offices are a reason for headphones at best and a nightmare at worst.

That having been said, I've worked in spaces where everyone had their own private office. It was great for productivity, but I felt like I never got to know anyone. All communication was forced, which caused a lot of annoying and unnecessary meetings.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's probably somewhere in the middle.
Can they not afford carpet.
It's efficient for people/sq foot.
Handling the Anxiety That Comes with Ambition
I think it's more accurate to say that it's because open office are cheap (*up front). It's pretty clear that they reduce efficiency in many, if not most, cases, which can be very expensive.