skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got rid of my cellphone because no one calling me was anyone I wanted to talk to.

I used to be a financial/investment advisor, and those calling were mostly financial service wholesalers (insurance and annuities) and other commercial calls. Whenever I felt a vibration in my jacket's breast pocket, my stress levels would soar, and more than half the time it was imagined. Now I feel free, plus I'm probably saving $100 a month.

I'm now a programmer at a bank, and my wife can get me at my desk at work. I got a small tablet (a Nexus 7) with a data plan (attached to my wife's phone plan so it's cheap!), and I paid $20 to switch my phone number to Google Voice. Now when someone calls, they can leave voice-mail or text me, and it shows up in my gmail on my tablet. I added a Zagg hard-shell bluetooth keyboard and it's like I'm carrying around a little laptop.

I feel like it's an awesome change that has really improved my quality of life. I love to brag about making the change, in hopes that others might be inspired to follow suit, thanks for the opportunity.
We all make fun of "One weird trick to lose belly fat" but how many articles have you read about pomodoroing, closed offices, meeting refusal, and the like?

The market is ripe for The Secret to Developer Productivity, a product that talks about all the common strategies in a happy but "we all know they don't work" style, while promising to let you in to the True Secret after you break out the credit card.
Did they refuse treatment?
It's pretty interesting how a story about both Charlie Stross and software usability, complete with Charlie Stross providing additional information in the story's comments, was inexplicably knocked within minutes (the time it took me to read the story and comments here) from the front page to the third page (at 12 points and less than an hour old), following an interesting pattern related to stories that shed any sort of negative light on Microsoft or the company's products.
Well, this is why Burma did the exact same thing (anybody who casts their memories back a few years might see how this relates to Egypt):

>Naypyitaw, then, is the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative ‘colour revolution’ – not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography. 320 kilometres to the south, Rangoon, with five million people, is home to one-tenth the country’s population. But even if that city were brought to a standstill by public protests and demonstrations, Burma’s military government – situated happily in the middle of paddy fields in the middle of nowhere – would remain unaffected.

>

>Of all the possible reasons why the junta chose to relocate their capital to this isolated, dusty place, this is perhaps the most plausible. And judging by the pace and scale of construction underway here, the transfer of capital is intended to be as final and irrevocable as the grip on political power of the Tatmadaw, the Burmese military.

http://svaradarajan.blogspot.sg/2007/02/dictatorship-by-cart...

More bad news:

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/05/how-geography-influe...
Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8208183/penis-transplant-s..., which points to this.

Submitters: HN prefers original sources. Everyone will appreciate it if you track these down before posting.
I can't believe HN is reacting to this as if checking location is a bad idea. It does have an emergency override.

On the underground, particularly during rush hour, doors opening on the wrong side, or in the wrong place, could cause people to fall out of the train onto the tracks, in the dark, and risk serious injury or even death (especially with electrified rails).

And using GPS and repeaters in the few spots where the signal's poor sounds like a practical and cost-effective approach. Given the issues, perhaps they should've implemented it some other way, but it's hardly the ridiculous solution you're all making it out to be.

As superuser2 mentions below, there's even a non-safety reason for this feature: long trains in short stations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203351
Am I the only person who hates daily morning stand ups here? Not everybody on the team arrives at the same time, so if you arrive early it will become aninterruption in your workflow. Sometimes I can't do what I planned to do and most of the time I don't care about what others are plamning to do.

Also in my previous companies members of my team had the tendency to talk a lot in the daily standup, making it last sometimes 20 minutes.
To be honest, I don't remember. She had gone there many years before we met, and had since moved on to another church, maintaining friendships from there through Facebook (which is how we got the invitation). I know it was in Gwinnett County, Georgia, near Stone Mountain.
You totally miss the point: authors do not want to use MS Word. Stross only uses Word because it's what his publisher forces him to use. He apparantly uses Scrivener to write with Word as a final step for the publisher.

(This is why the Register fucking sucks: their empty article failed to mention this; it's all in the comments and the comments are hidden.)
Digital Game Downloads and the 10 year scam
You've got a point there.

However, not every modern tech-buzzed startup wins the market by rejecting privacy and playing the next Facebook. Consider Xiaomi, Uber or SpaceX good examples.

Or in other words: social media is not everything there is in the tech scene. The landscape is not simply a battle of bearded-hardcore-hackers vs brogrammers. Seriously, there's plenty for everyone.
> Before running your test suite and checking everything is fine, the first thing you do is probably to look for the changelogs of updated gems.

Uh, no, the first thing you do is run the test suite.
How does this distinguish itself from existing services like Kayak, Expedia, etc.?
Not just you. I feel like this post just regurgitates a bunch of other "every few days" posts. Doesn't really add much to the conversation.

That's not to say that it shouldn't be written, as getting your thoughts out there is always a good exercise. It being on the front page of HN is of questionable use, though. Might be of some utility to anyone who has never read HN before.
GCC can do that.
The Criminal Implications of Implantable Medical Devices
Subjective things can only truly matter if they bring pleasure or cause pain. So my point is still correct. (We need a definition of subjective, though, so this probably isn't clear.)

It's true that someone could subjectively think, mistakenly, that something matters, which doesn't. So someone could be wrong about what matters. e.g. Someone could think that God's approval matters, when in reality, only pleasure and pain matter for their own sake.
This is going in circles.

I cite ES6 features now implemented by all the majors, and point to bignums as a proposal pre-dating Dart and pre-dating other ES6 proposals that got implemented. You assert against all evidence that, unlike all the other ES6 stuff implemented, a bignums proposal that was accepted for ES6 and prototyped in V8 would have been rejected by Apple and Microsoft. Makes total sense! :-|

Your goal-post shifting had the effect of letting Google off the hook for lack of uplift other than SIMD, so far. Great development tools and beneficial debugging! Lousy argument and defense against the lost opportunity for not only JS but dart2js, frankly.

A VM is an incredibly expensive investment, but Lars et al. were tired of JS and wanted what they wanted when they wanted it. (So does my three-year old.) Whether it makes economic sense in 40 years (the time-frame I've heard for when Dart finally takes over)? Who can say. Unfalsifiable.

That Dart has cost tens of millions of direct NRE at Google, and years of lost opportunities with V8 and TC39, is in the Basil-Fawlty-ian category of the bleeding obvious. There's no way to waffle around this point. You have to hold your breath for 40 years and hope.
Self-Driving Cars Will Make Us Want Fewer Cars
Hi, I work for Planet Labs. There was definitely no retrieving those Doves once they were deployed, even had we wanted to. The good news is that we've put a lot of effort into automating our systems, so those satellites actually pinged us shortly after their deploy and were all ready for commissioning! They're currently a few hundred kilometres up and taking photos for us.
Coworker of the OP here. To elaborate a bit:

> How do I tell my clients that I only do meetings on Thursdays?

I generally do 10-15 customer meetings per week. When I get a meeting request, I ask if they're available on the following Tuesday or Thursday with a 90% hit rate. Meetings are almost always not urgent, so fitting them into Tues and Thurs, instead of spreading them randomly througout the week, has worked really well for me.

> How in the world does [doing 1 thing per day] work? [...] surely your goal should be actually doing a reasonable amount of things

In the context of software development, doing a large number of things usually doesn't push the product forward as much as doing 1 big 2-4 hour project.

Personally I still have 30+ things on my TODO list at any given time, but I try to center my days around getting one "big" thing done, and fill the rest of the day with smaller day-to-day tasks.
This. Exactly.

I'm sure Stallman absolutely HATES services such as Spotify. However the as I mentioned in the parent comment, the world is not black and white, and thus viable solutions will always be in a middle-ground.

Nothing he could ever say would bring me from playing music with ridiculous ease in Spotify to downloading "free" ogg files and playing them in GNU Mediagoblin, or something similar.

As a side note: the FSF complains liberally about different "evil" products using javascript on their "giving guide". Stallman himself asks us not to "mistreat" family by giving them non-free gifts. Yet they themselves use javascript for analytics. Proving how ridiculous some of these practices are.

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/2014/
>spending 1 or 2 months ticketing everybody would change behavior overnight.
This article is terrible.

The comments, where Stross mentions that he uses Scrivener to write then submits a doc to an editor who'll mark changes, and another editor will use red pen on a printed page and then he has to recombine these edits back in (if he choses to do so).

So, authors (and not just this opinionated author) don't want to use word. They only do so because the publishers do. But even there some people don't use word (printing the ms and marking it with pen).

It seems like this niche is being poorly served by the existing tools. There's probably a pithy pg quote about that somewhere - find a problem that people have and fix it.
The pendulum always swings to one extreme; it never seems to find a resting place in the middle.

Productivity is all about balance, which is a word that never appears in this article. A blog providing polarizing advice won't be any sort of silver bullet, as the definition of "productive" will, quite often, change completely. One day it may be fielding calls, having meetings, and talking to clients. Another day it may mean sitting in a dark room for ten hours with a coffeemaker, a laptop, and yourself, just banging out bugfixes and feature requests.

This is the kind of concept that should be felt out on a project by project / week by week basis, not with a rigid "WE NEVER DEVIATE!" attitude.
CCTV in public places is illegal in Germany for privacy reasons.
I've just canned a very similar post to yours.

Is there any explanation as to why this should be on the front page? This seems rather like Reddit - posts there often seem to rise up while most of the comment section is fairly negative.
Square is shutting down Square Order
I gotta wonder if the water table is really safe. What's the deepest a water table has been known to exist?
Jeez, it was actually an honest question.
One of the older blog comments talked about problems opening Word 5.1 files in Word 2011 for Mac. It wasn't difficult to find files that would cause problems myself.
If you mean drugs like LSD leave you unable to work for 8 hours, this is probably true - although it depends what sort of work you are in (heavy machinery is out, painting is probably in). However, the same thing can be said for a day spent in a ski resort with your cellphone left behind.

The term "non-functional" has a pejorative connotation and implies humans have some teleological purpose beyond personal goals and desires. Recreation is subjective; it's not appropriate to call this a 'downside'.
There is something very weird with the collapse of the oil prices. It doesn't make sense. I know mainstream media have talked about offer/demand being the reason for this crash but it doesn't make sense.

It says China didn't grow as much as expected, etc. Well if that'd be a simple offer/demand, the price would have not collapsed so rapidly. Oil is not like housing where bubbles comes and go. It's usually pretty steady unless something happens (9/11, 1982, etc).

Also, price seems to be recovering now which indicate, to me, that it's not an offer/demand issue. The oil collapsing and recovering in a ~6 months period is just plain weird.

If I had to bet, I'd say it's due to ISIS and their access to oil and selling it at a quarter of the ongoing prices. I read a story about that a few months back how they had access to major oil field and were selling it insanely cheap on the black market to finance their operations.

Those are all wild ideas. But things are just weird, I'm telling you.
As a pedestrian tourist with a frequent need to pee, in general there are very few public toilets in Western European cities. Bus stations and shopping malls are amongst the few reliable refuges.

Cost appears to be the reason. Plus presumably pursue from local businesses which feel they 'lose' custom if people can pee for free instead of having to pay for a coffee they don't want just to use the loo..
Surely you mean £x more. And you're wrong anyway, this is a standard feature to allow long trains to enter short stations.
An implementation of Atmel's AVR microprocessor specification in Go
Looks like this method converges at root(N) same as a direct monte-carlo [1]

Anyone got a stochastic method that converges quicker?

[1] http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_montecarlo.html
What an offensive thing to say. Of course I've heard of Orwell.

So?

What is it about you which predisposes you to reject someone just because "they weren't the first"? It is you exhibiting cult-like behaviour in this case, if all you can do to denigrate and negate Stallman is say "but, but .. he wasn't the first" and assault his character as if he is some sort of ripoff artist.

So what? Orwell is dead, and rapidly becoming irrelevant in the younger generations. Whereas the still-alive and relevant Stallman has tirelessly fought to educate people on the misuse of technology by nefarious, anonymous actors, in a grand and increasingly dangerous fiasco. Your desire to negate Stallman as a personality would have only one effect: to remove a significant barrier for the rising super-surveillance state.

What are your intentions in doing so, precisely? You wish to see what Stallman fears, and which is enslaving us all, come to pass?
Not that I'm aware of, but docker.com's documentation is good. For more advanced stuff, I can also recommend the Digital Ocean docs on their community site: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/
Reducing the amount the driver has to think reduces the potential for human error.
...

e^(τi) = 1

so still better.
There were times in my life I had no TV, but I still saw parts of some shows over at friend's houses.

Same applies, I suspect. "I've seen it, and I don't want one"

I'm not saying I agree with the assessment, but I get it.
Useful link, thanks! I'd always used "engineer" as a more generic term for someone who "got things done" related to software. To do this you'd need to have done some form of programming, but perhaps not self-identify as such.
In Italy, and Rome especially, something is finally starting to move. Slowly for sure, but the seed of change starts from a tiny tree. I am glad to see this post here and hope it don't get unnoticed.
Great article, keep it up, Tim!
Fair enough, it seems that was after his most productive parts. (The same isn't true for Goering, even if his productivity was in the opposite direction to our preference.) Though part of my point is that it's not just broken junkies using. Opiate treatment can provide positive value to even the richest, most powerful people, and they are not persecuted.

Perhaps another example is Keith Richards, who says heroin helped him and he doesn't regret it (and then, do we measure the positive impact such music has on other people?). Although dipping into artists for drug use is perhaps too easy of examples.
So you do meetings on Tuesday or Thursdays, and rather than doing one thing a day, in fact you do one big task a day and many small tasks. That's all fine and good, but 1) it's not really what the OP's post says, and 2) it's not really very revolutionary at all.

I'm glad it works for you guys, but I'm often irritated by these preachy posts which seem to say that developers should be treated as delicate flowers and suggest all manner of strategies to preserve their preferred ways of working, many of which, if you actually applied them to the real world, would result in clients saying, "Wow, these guys are hard to work with, can we please find someone else?"
Careful, there is a big undercurrent in the Linux ecosystem towards creating a OSX carbon copy...
So really, you don't just do meetings on Thursday, and you don't just do one thing a day.
I got laid off after twelve years with a major energy services company back in January, and I'm really glad to be out of that industry now.

Lower gas prices at the pump usually meant that layoffs were probably coming, 2-3 times a year.
Reddit, HN etc. are an excellent platform for "peddlers of PR". Sure you need to write thoughtful pieces, and anyone can do that. But professionals do it better. They have the well-researched articles ready when a relevant story pops, and maybe a sockpuppet account or two for support. Or is there any PR agency left in 2015 who is confused about Reddit's hivemind and clueless about protecting their clients' interest on the internet?
You are mistaken, unless you can prove me wrong. Care to elaborate?
That headline is as clickbaity as it gets.
Pre-compressing is possible, but why shouldn't the http server do it for you? The server can cache the compressed files in memory and/or disk as it sees fit (although gzip was pretty cheap last time I checked). It can also deal with cache invalidation better than humans - I speak from experience :).
Use of broadcast signals like GPS for safety-critical purposes makes them a target for adverse interference - like a jammer hoping to mess with / trap people on the train.
MS Word is really bad at compatibility with itself. LibreOffice does ancient Word files much better than MSO.
Could someone please explain what is happening here and why it is significant?
“How to Earn Money Online-Google Sniper Download and Review”
Thanks for the question!

We run an algorithm to look at all the possible connecting cities and calculate the price of purchasing roundtrips to that connecting city separately (i.e. from origin to layover and from layover to destination). We don't just limit ourselves to layovers specified by airline partners, so we search the entire graph.

The savings we show are in comparison to the cheapest ticket you'll find on Kayak, Expedia, etc. On about 66% of the searches performed (by search popularity), there are no savings, but we show you the cheapest ticket you can find on other sites. On 33% of the searches, we can find savings, and we show you how to book those savings. Typical savings are $100-200, but sometimes it can be up to $500 or more for long-haul flights.

This is hard to communicate visually, so we were hoping to get some advice from HN on how to do this!

Also, to give context, this is a school project that we (a group of 6 Harvard students) hacked together in 2 months.
Pi in the Simpsons
Seems like a good time to post 355/113
http://davidbau.com/archives/2010/03/14/the_mystery_of_35511...

One of the best easy to remember approximations of Pi
Louis XIV moved the palace from Paris to Versailles for the very same reason.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's likely that Stross knows 100% more than you do about what tools a working novelist needs to use or stay compatible with.
I believe your point of view is highly naive, and very seriously deficient in intelligence. Stallman has worked tireless to enlighten younger generations of technologists on the issues of privacy and security in the dawning intelligence age. He is no cult figure - but who can you name who has done as much as he has to bring these issues to the table when, instead, quite viciously, the powers-at-large would rather it all be swept aside? Be careful that you are not becoming the very thing you are resisting, in this argument. Stallman is not the only figure out there working on this - thank the stars - but he has definitely been a leader of opinion on the issue of free speech, free technology, and just use of technology to allow peace - where many, many more would rather be using it all for war and oppression.

Perhaps you don't actually know enough about Stallman to be forming an intelligent opinion, yet. Here, educate yourself on his works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He's done a few GNU things you might not be familiar with. Things which have had a massive impact on the way technology has been made available to the masses. Without Stallman, there would be even more walled gardens by now, and fewer generations of new technologists, aware of their technological freedom to contribute to society in an open and free manner, out there in the world at large.

Please, reconsider your naive and ill-formed opinion. It does you no good.
Not having meetings or conf calls might work for you but I would be very surprised if it works for your customers and/or peers (assuming you have any).

If there is one thing I have learned it's that the quality of communication in a team usually makes or breaks the project. The quality of communication with a customer makes or breaks the relationship.

It's important to remember that humans have been communicating for thousands of years without email, chat servers or telephones. Our brains are hard-wired to respond to facial expression, tone of voice and body language.

All of this is lost with computer-mediated communication channels. Your post prompted me to look at this study which you may also find interesting: http://www.academia.edu/538403/Face-to-face_Versus_Computer-...

Don't get me wrong, meetings for the sake of meetings are a waste of time but that's not to say that they do not have their place.
In addition to GCC, a bunch of other compilers including Intel and Visual Studio do profile based optimization, as well as many dynamic compilers, such as firfox javascript or Java VMs. Profil-guided opitmization has been studied for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profile-guided_optimization
> So you do meetings on Tuesday or Thursdays, and rather than doing one thing a day, in fact you do one big task a day and many small tasks. That's all fine and good, but 1) it's not really what the OP's post says, and 2) it's not really very revolutionary at all.

I would go further than saying this isn't really very revolutionary, rather it describes a fairly normal working environment.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/28/65946/-Voter-suppre...

Must make it easier to get people to not vote... (I know, link goes to an old story, but it happens every presidential election)

I do have to wonder how representative Fergusin's leadership is of its electorate.