skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm coming in late here, but I have experienced an open office environment that I found relatively productive. This was at Sun Micro's drop in center in SF (about 15 years ago now).

The drop in center had three separate rooms. Two were loud rooms, with phones at each desk. One was a smaller "quiet room", with no phones, intended for people who do quiet, focused work. I suppose there was some "back visibility", since the workstations were set up on round (might have been hexagonal) tables, so it would have depended on where you sit. Another big factor in the success of a quiet room was an office manager who absolutely enforced the noise rules, since a lot of people who would push the limits if allowed (when spaces in the loud rooms were all taken)

There were also a few offices/small conf rooms for meetings and so forth.

I think it worked, but that's probably because it didn't have the same goals of "collaboration" or "openness" that modern open office proponents often claim to provide. Most importantly, the open office and quiet room was clearly not intended to keep an eye on workers in any way. It was a drop in center in the first place, so while you might see the same people around, nobody was really monitoring anyone else. Also, there was no status associated with where you sat - open seating, grab what you like. And of course, the quiet room showed a great respect for people like developers who need extended periods of quiet focus.

It's also clear that the "open office" quality of this drop in center wasn't based on flawed notions of increased communication or collaboration. At that time, developers at Sun had their own offices (well, I did, and I wasn't high on the org chart), so the drop in center was for convenience. It was set up so that people who had meetings in other spots, or who wanted to telecommute, had a place with a workstation if they needed it, and had a phone or a quiet room, depending on how they needed to work that day. The idea that the office would be a place for constant open communication wasn't part of the plan - in fact, the quiet room ensured that this sort of thing didn't constantly distract the developers.

Kind of depressing, now that I think about it, that the only time in my life I had my own office was my first job. The industry has really moved away from that model over the last 15 years. Facebook has moved into the old sun offices… did they tear them all out and replace them with open offices?

I also had shared offices quite a few times, and I enjoyed those (actually, I liked them more than my own office in many ways, provided I shared with another developer). Cubicles and open offices are pretty horrible, but I think that if we had a "quiet room" approach to them, they might not be so bad.
A Craft Redirect Plugin for Obsolete URLs
Thank you, we will fix the link.
So a company that made TIMers for EXplosives was called Timex after a magazine and tissues. I suppose it's not impossible :-)

From the article:

"a Connecticut-based manufacturer of bomb fuses for the British government, the Waterbury Clock Co.  A few years later Thomas Olsen would rechristen the company Timex"

"Recalls Fred: “My father always loved to noodle with words. He liked to read Time magazine, and he used a lot of Kleenex, so he put the two names together and got Timex.”
Yikes, socket 478 is pretty much a lost cause, you can't even get any dual cores for it.

You could buy a low end NUC (Celeron is fine) and it would pay for itself in a year and be faster.
I'm always puzzled whenever I have to enable a Cloudflare script on a site that clearly doesn't have enough volume to need it and would have been more robust and simpler with a traditional data center. It also annoys me to no end that I have to permit JavaScript from random hosts to support a cloud server that should be completely transparent to me.
Large Hadron Collider gets ready to restart
Interesting, is there any specific font face or size that you'd recommend? I know ui/ux is always very subtle, but i have the feeling that there must be a golden standard and i miss that...
"Well, what do I have to hide?" is a bad argument with respect to whether the NSA should be doing the things it does, but with respect to whether I am going to spend money and effort to hide my photos and documents from them, I think it's a fair argument.

I care very much, however, whether hackers will have access to my files, as they can cause havoc with things like tax returns that the NSA won't (I mean, the government already has my tax returns....).

So I was mainly curious if there was some significant flaw in Backblaze's encryption that should worry me from the perspective of a non-nation state adversary.
Kafka’s Letter to His Abusive Father
They have an immense amount of power to crush anyone regardless of whether it is interest of the United States or not. Their methods are so clandestine and underhanded that they are almost to fight against. Given what we know about the discriminatory practices of public servants who operate in the public's eye do we really believe that giving the intelligence communities this amount of power that they wouldn't abuse this power and operate descriptively against ethnic and political minorities? They are essentially robbing the public blind right now and sacrificing our national security so they can have more power domestically.
I know it's not an excuse bu I am expected to develop very fast and I am the only developer in project.
Does that company even care?

Their team page at https://www.intenthq.com/about-intent/ looks like a classic British social class structure; the people-people, so-called "movers and shakers" at the top, the mere techies all scurrying around on the bottom rungs, and QA almost falling off them. Even the office admin is presented above all the technical people.

Anyway, negative, small-minded and snide observations aside, here's my totally unscientific summary of their completely scientific survey:

Readable

Simple (as in not entwined)

Functional/Verifiable

Maleable/Maintainable

Composable/Reusable

Efficient

But of course all of these aspects are also very subjective.
I see it as Red Hat's attempt to mitigate the long life cycles of its releases. Balancing the stability of a consistent OS without have to deal with an out of date (prehistoric) tool set.
> or would they hide and put the blame on a third-party?

That's usually the point of this sort of work, yes. Espionage isn't just about acquiring information, it's about spreading false information, and dragging your enemies through the mud.

I don't approve of this shit, but "the them" have been up to it since forever, and the answers to your queries are a straightforward: "None", "No", "Yes" - unless someone else's intelligence agency outwits them, and has a media mouthpiece that can't be drowned out by chaff.

Edit: Your post got me thinking about Chernobyl and Reagan. The CIA had a programme to export defective technology to the USSR - which (apparently) culminated in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

One has to wonder. Yes, I'm aware that the questions as to how Chernobyl are well answered, and all the rest, case closed, etc. - but one still has to wonder. Nothing should be trusted 100%.
Just wondering, what is more cost effective than S3 with the same reliability?

If you have your own servers I can see running zfs and replicating snapshots every few minutes to a remote machine but if you aren't, what else is competitive?

I do agree that a lot of AWS services aren't cost effective though, especially at any sort of non trivial scale.
> We don't have the same problem in europe with net neutrality.

Europe actually does, and net neutrality violations are actually commonplace within Europe. In fact, the EU documents a list of currently on-going violations of net neutrality: http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/net-neutrality-challen...

Mobile carriers are the worst offenders in Europe. Prepaid data plans in particular will actively block VoIP connections so as to prevent you from making Skype or other VoIP calls over their networks because they want you to pay for their own minutes.

P2P Throttling is also very commonplace. This is something that Comcast was lambasted for in the past, and as far as I know hasn't happened on a large scale in the US for some time, but it's very common in Europe.

While Europe does have a lot more providers to choose from, you'll often find that there are still monopolies just like in the US. Most of the DSL lines in the UK are owned by BT, and most of the DSL lines in Germany are owned by Telekom, for example. Add to this that cable isn't nearly as widespread in Europe, and you have a situation that's even worse than the usual Cable vs. DSL choice that you have in the US. In Europe your choice is likely limited to only DSL, and only one company provides the copper running to your residence.
Tailored access isn't one way. People controlling the kind of industrialized automated control over remote systems to make surveillance possible wouldn't need to rely on finding and exposing secrets; they could easily plant evidence.
"I can't think of one" as a username screams "asshole who thinks he knows it all"? Wow. You should hear my thoughts now.
Some people type faster than they can write legibly.
Quote:
"This is a Beta release of Nearline Storage. This feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to backward-incompatible changes."

So should I believe in Google's good-will? I would be fine trying out some services, which are in Google Beta. But my valuable data? They should have a SLA right from the start to gain the user's trust.
Testing and Documenting Node.js APIs with Mocha and Acquit
Binders full of Women
It's not always about just being wounded. Many became "weird nerds" because they don't like the tons of bullshit, politics and signalling games mainstream society lives and breathes. You can't "fix" them without destroying who they really are.

I say them, but I myself am a part of this group.
Juries don't know about a lot of topics. In an adversarial system, it is the responsibility of the each party to inform the judge and jury what is relevant to the case.
Yev from Backblaze -> That meteor question comes up a lot (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). We currently do have one data center, but this design allows us to bring others online. If the datacenter was hit by a meteor all our customers would get an email blast urging them to create a local backup immediately. The chances that both the DC and the user would get hit by the same natural disaster are relatively small. Still, it's not a storage service like S3 so geo-redundancy plays a smaller role. We do plan on building out other datacenters in the future, but since we're bootstrapped, we have to do that when the time is right, otherwise it would be very easy to over-extend ourselves and start losing money.

edit -> I ignored your Backblaze dev question, sorry. We have multiple processes running at all times on the pods, and they go shard-by-shard. We're always optimizing, but the short answer is, we're always looking for errors.
Not a comment on their legitimacy, but:

> The telephone number is to a phone in Sydney. If you're not in Eastern Austrialia, this number is useless.

Try doing: +61 first and if the number starts with a 0 remove that 0.
You seem like the kind of person who'd appreciate Percol[1]. It's fantastic for shell history. I have it bound to Ctrl+R:

history | percol --prompt-bottom --result-bottom-up

I'm using fish, so the whole thing looks like this:

function _percol_key_bindings

function __percol_ctrl_r
set tempfile (mktemp)
history | percol --prompt-bottom --result-bottom-up >$tempfile
and commandline (cat $tempfile)
commandline -f repaint
rm -f $tempfile
end

# Bind Ctrl+R to percol history function for now
bind \cr '__percol_ctrl_r'
end

[1]https://github.com/mooz/percol/
I don't know what repercussions there should be for that, but any consideration of repercussions has to consider the alternative to electronic attack, which is airplanes dropping munitions from great heights onto buildings with people in them.

People should probably not kid themselves about geopolitics and military competition vanishing if we somehow manage to regulate "electronic warfare".
You are conflating "ugly/unreadable" with "untested" and with "unreliable".
There's plenty of horrible but reliable code out there, and vice versa.
HN user Animats restores old teletype machines. Here's a writeup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084788

http://www.aetherltd.com/refurbishing15.html
I don't understand the dichotomy between speed and efficiency. What's speed is the author talking about, and whose efficiency?
For disaster recovery 3 days might mean the end of your business.
The Fabric of a Comet- the Space Journal “ROOM”
Just before the electricity goes, an electromagnetic disturbance or a shockwave causes the CPU to skip a few instructions, printing out the answer.
For Hipsters
The book is based on PyMC2, a Python module for Bayesian inference: http://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc/

PyMC3 is nearing the first beta release and is a complete rewrite that's using Theano to add just-in-time-compilation as well as support for next-generation sampling methods like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (e.g. NUTS): http://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc3/
Always impressed by the write-ups the Backblaze team does. Very informative and very clear on what you guy are achieving and how you do it.

Crazy amount of hardware involved, and Backblaze is the "small kid on the block" in relation to FB, Google, and Amazon.
>>It's hard to say what the footprint of cattle farming really is.

It is hard to say for certain, but we can get a pretty good idea based on the inputs required to raise cattle. Water, grain, antibiotics, petroleum based fuels to plant, harvest and transport the grain, petroleum based fertilizers to aid in growing the grain, and herbicides and pesticides to kill unwanted organisms (I'm sure I missed something).

Not to mention a few of the by-products such as manure and chemical run-off, methane emissions, and soil erosion (from conventional agriculture practices).

The above describes a CAFO, which is where the majority of beef comes from. Managed intensive rotational grazing would be my preferred alternative, but there still wouldn't be enough land available to keep up with our consumption.

>>And the biggest receivers of any sort of subsidy - precious California water included - are veggie farmers.

Can you please site some of the sources that you are using to determine that vegetable farmers are receiving more subsidies than any other industry? I assume you meant "the biggest receivers of any sort of Agriculture subsidy", but I still don't think that is right.
Stuff like your example is where, in general I prefer a sproc, or something more like the following...

http://www.ivc.com/blog/better-sql-strings-in-io-js-nodejs-p...
Ask HN: Which programming related blogs do you read?
All lies. Microsoft has all clear text.

Make up a new, random https URL. Something no one knows and no one would accidently hit. Message it to someone on Skype. Wait 5 minutes to see a bot from Microsoft hit your URL.
It seems that the "Detailed Timeline" at the bottom shows an outage for "iCloud Account & Sign In" earlier today. That is probably the issue for the original post.
Compile-time checks can't make guarantees about 3rd party code or user input.
I'm really looking forward to the Reed-Solomon article. It seems that very few RAID-like applications are built to handle arbitrary data and parity stripes.
Hence the second half of my comment:

> or that evidence of NSA activities would be admitted in trial.
The guy making it easy to 3D print yourself a real gun
T-Mobile Poland Officially Accepts Bitcoin Top-Ups
Is the dongle thing even remotely defensible? She got a man fired over a private conversation. One of the rules of civilized behavior is that you don't do that.
That does not cover booby traps, which are illegal everywhere in the US AFAIK.
Yev from Backblaze -> we are SO jazzed to write that one up soon. We're trying to find a good way to present it, otherwise it would have been included here, but that would have made for a very long read. Stay tuned!
> Sorry guys but reality is that on a technical level some packets must be treated as higher priority.

There is nothing about a 'technical level' that implies this. It's all political. Furthermore, it's certainly not up to the service providers: if I find my work is being slowed down by a garrulous teenager on their phone, I'm gonna find a better service that will provide me what I actually pay for.
It isn't such a blind spot. They may understand the "prime directive" pretty well and see how bullshit it is. It's a system of redistribution of scarce resources that most people got confused about and now play it as a game of its own. It's not the profit that should matter, but the value that is produced, the improvement of human condition.
Because it's better than the old system where people were blatantly ripped off and lent money that if they didn't pay back would result in their legs being broken?
Economists and central banks debating inflation targeting is a somewhat ridiculous distraction... much of the data they use is based on surveys, adjustments, theoretical models, or comes from inherently biased entities such as banks and governments.

There is no real reason to think that 2% vs. 3% vs. 4% vs. whatever rate is, as a general rule, "correct". It is just an excuse to manipulate interest rates and make policies to benefit parties that thrive on financial engineering.

When asked about if the the US social security system could remain solvent, Alan Greenspan pointed out that they can always create as much money as needed to meet the nominal obligations of the system; however without the production of real goods and services, the details of legal financing are irrelevant.

Economic growth only comes from real labor, resources, goods, and service - not from finance.
Politics can be understood in a narrow sense (members of political parties performing kabuki dances suggesting a form of governance), or in a broader sense, as what happens when multiple humans try to make a decision.

I tend to think of politics in the broader sense, and suspect that the author of the piece does as well. It's the process of negotiation between people with different spheres of influence, when a single decision has to be made. Client negotiations are absolutely political.
I think it's a mixed bag... and depends on what you want to accomplish... a lot of the time, I will find myself bypassing an ORM about 20% of the time... the other 80%, the ORM model is simpler.

I find LINQ + Entity Framework to be a blessing in C. Though I use the monad/function syntax not the LINQ query sugar when I use it.
You gotta checking out "Internet Explorer" on iOS, it's the best mobile game I've ever played.
...how is that different than today? Someone can find a loan shark and an illegal craps ring if they want. What you are describing is not happening in Las Vegas today, which has legalized gambling run by private entities.
That was a great read. I was surprised that the data on a drive tries to go back to the same drive when it fails. One of the things that GFS did (I presume they still do) and Blekko does is that when a drive fails its data is reconstructed on other working drives so replacement leaves no long term degradation risk. If you don't do that then while your drive is dead you have lost some data resiliency until it gets replaced, as opposed to just waiting until it has been successfully recreated elsewhere[1].

Its no wonder storage companies like EMC are hurting when you have innovators like these guys out there.

[1] Which give a 3x replication system and a sharded or (chunked) file can happen pretty quickly.
If you're interested in stock Posix shell rather than bashish, the dash man page is a whole lot shorter and easier to follow, makes a great concise reference.
FTA: "If one of the original data shards is unavailable, it can be re-computed from the other 16 original shards, plus one of the parity shards"

So you would have to read 17x the data to recreate it. Given disk latency, network bandwidth, etc. I'm guessing it'll take quite a while to recreate a 6TB HDD if it fails.
Well, in any case, the problem can be resolved by adding a kernel-level api function that allows one to wait (block) until results are requested from the other end of the pipe.
> It's an odd definition of personal privilege you have,

Which is most privileged:

* Developer evangelist vs developer-on-the-floor
* 10 000 twitter followers vs nothing

> It's also an odd definition of professional victim, where publicly being a 'victim' results in you getting booted out of the profession.

Why she was booted from her profession was because she misused her position, -in a way that caused significant harm to the employer.
All you can do is keep sending them these posts :)
Insights into the lives of others with video
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> Dedicated lines such as telephones exist.

In places where it does exist, this wont be the case for long. Telephone lines are facing obsolescence and at first you're going to see them stop being used, and then you're likely to stop seeing structures being built with them.

And in places where it does not already exist, such as lesser developed parts of the world, the only connection available would be a wireless one, where neither a dedicated connection nor transport to a qualified hospital is an option.
Kick-Starting Learning Something New
Can you draw a bicycle?
Apple Is Considering Making a Pink iPhone 6
The issue is with all the 9s, is it will take 3hrs to find out there is an issue, and another 3hours to make another request? I bet dropbox could fix their shit in less time.
Kyocera’s New Smartphone Is Fully Solar Powered
Happy 10th birthday, ycombinator!
You can buy isolated USB hubs.
Backblaze is fantastic for sharing all their hardware development efforts. We've built our own pod for onsite storage and it's amazingly awesome.
How a chameleon changes colour revealed
Good for him. Little different from open-source radicals that want every bit of software available to anybody.
We plan on releasing a technical post later this week with the details. In the meantime, if you are curious about the platform checkout the forums and wiki at http://nesdev.com
Show HN: Animated tides and currents on NOAA charts with Leaflet and D3
The idea is that you can do whatever you want at a conference you run...and so can I.
Fair enough. I haven't read the spec, just went to their website, and one of the first things they mention is modules and classes. Also, when I googled 'typescript template string' the first hit was https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13, so I assumed they were supported.
An open source platform for version control hosting
Господу Богу твоему поклоняйся и Ему одному служи
Tbh, to setup sync or install extensions in Chrome, you need a Google Account, for which you need to give them your cellphone number. And it uses a blacklist hosted by Google to check if a page should show a malware warning, or not even display at all.

So your scenario isn’t even that far off.