skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, part of it is certainly that they're the cheap 'n' shitty option. However, when you weigh the money saved against the loss of productivity, they're not worth it.

Open-plan offices aren't collaborative. Open-Plan Syndrome actually makes people more selfish and misanthropic. When people don't feel in control of their space (and what makes open-plan so bad isn't just the awfulness of the environment, but how fucking unreliable it is) they tend to be more jealous and territorial, not less.

They also aren't egalitarian. Let's say that you're two seats away from the CEO, and between you and him is a junior who needs to pair a lot. Whose space is going to be invaded when that happens? Not the CEO's. That's just human nature. It's not even conscious, most of the time. Open-plan offices actually reinforce status differences.

The main reason for the open-plan trend is that these offices photograph well. The act of getting work done is abstract and hard to prove for the camera. Open-plan offices look busy and energetic and (gahh) youthful. Unfortunately, they're also awful places to work for 8-10 straight hours, in the same way as one would not want to live in Times Square (as opposed to the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights) even though it is visually impressive.
> Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost.

This is a common assumption. But empirically, it turns out that the inherent social cost of heroin use (or even heroin dependence) is relatively low, no greater than the social cost of alcohol use/dependence, and arguably a lot less. The only condition is that heroin has to be easily accessible for an affordable price and with a known potency.

Diacetylmorphine maintenance programs do exactly this, and have had great success in Switzerland and the UK[0]. People on diacetylmorphine maintenance are able to hold steady jobs and lead otherwise "normal" lives, save for a daily trip to their local clinic.

Substitute "bar" or "coffeeshop" for "clinic", and suddenly we're talking about a large chunk of the upper-class workforce, including the tech industry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
Culture doesn't just "change", forces shape it. Culture moves towards a suburban, car oriented culture when the local governments pay (at great taxpayer expense) for an overbuilt highway system to quickly get people in and out of it.
> When I work from home what's stopping me from opening up news or playing video games?

Being an adult. Really, do you require a baby sitter to keep you busy?
[Pinned] JBL Synchros S200i INTERNATIONAL GIVEAWAY
Zionism was a process for European Jews to find a land that had problematic claims for being their "homeland."
That's definitely part of the problem – especially when it comes to the amount of a particular drug being prescribed. A lot of the addiction/dependence exposure involves diversion, i.e. the people using the prescription opioids are not necessarily the people who they were prescribed to. Often someone will start by buying leftover/extra pills from a friend/acquaintance, become physically dependent, find someone else when their friend runs dry, start running low on cash, and then finally break down and go for the cheaper option (heroin).

I don't think I've ever been prescribed less than 30 of an opioid pain reliever for an injury. Sometimes with refills. Five or ten, with the ability to call the doctor for a same-day script if I were still in pain after those, would be infinitely preferable.
"norway is going all digital"
People in general are very afraid of flying despite the fact it is reasonably safe. Making a joke about fucking with an airplane is in poor taste considering many people are on edge.

It'd be like making a rape joke when you pass a woman on a dark street.
With physical locks you are exposed to the few people that can walk up to the lock without attracting attention. With digital security, you are potentially exposed to every connected system on the planet. An invisible attacker can't pick your lock, but could hack your security system. That is why digital security is paramount.

Robots are not going door to door picking locks, but that is exactly what happens every second of every day to every system on the Internet. It only takes one, and there are lot of disenfranchised smart people around the globe.
I run an office design website and I hardly ever see team rooms, which is very surprising and they seem like a good balance between collaborative space and privacy.

One of the offices I like to show as an example is Ubiquiti Networks, particularly images 3 and 4 (pardon the link to my own website): http://officesnapshots.com/2014/03/12/ubiquiti-networks-san-...
I don't see how the first follows from the second.

"keep re-running LaTeX until the labels stop changing" is relatively easily done. If nothing else, use a loop detection algorithm.

Sure, theoretically it may "never" stop. But you already have that problem.
But what groups are targeted? The new recipe is scanning everyone's online communication to decide who to target.
It depends on how you define "better". As a sibling comment points out: let's say that the AI is programmed to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. And then to accomplish that goal, it kills all humans (by eating our infrastructure to turn it into paperclips). But that's not enough. The earth's mantle and core contain massive amounts of iron and aluminum that could be used to make paperclips. So the AI starts consuming the Earth. And then it scans the rest of the solar system... ah, Mars and the asteroid belt contain lots of iron and aluminum too!

I fail to see how a solar system turned into a ring of paperclips orbiting a sun is in any way "better" than what we have right now.
The next tech bubble is about to burst
Has anyone else noticed there were no commas on the entire email?
Wink smart home hubs knocked out by security certificate
The point was that everyone seems to have trouble understanding why software AGI might be dangerous but a much easier time why whole brain emulation is, not that Hollywood is a representation of reality.
How does this tool compare to psake (https://github.com/psake/psake)? Psake is essentially powershell make.
Yeah screenshots would be a huge improvement.
Agreed. I saw it, was excited, then saw non-free and immediately disregarded it as practical for work. We're not going to pay for an unproven MSBuild alternative when MSBuild, despite its warts, works fine.
Not serving the airport is amazing.
Is there a reason to think that humans are near the upper limit of what's possible? If not, why can't we build something significantly smarter than us?

A simple hypothesis: because we can't build what we can't understand, and we can't understand an intelligence smarter than us.

(Most theories about the Singularity have machines building increasingly smarter machines, in a recursive fashion, but they could likewise be hampered by the same problem.)

I don't think this is necessarily true, but it makes sense to me, and doesn't require that we are the theoretically upper limit, just the local maximum.
I don't see a you're/your error in the original source, but its/it's is a pain to handle on a mobile keyboard. A lot of other apostrophes are handled by autocorrect but that particular one isn't.

All caps I don't get, I find it impossible to read. I suspect that people who write all caps must be desensitized to it somehow.
The noncommercial band of the FM dial is a godsend-- college and community radio stations exist in nearly every city, and serve a very special niche in allowing human-curated broadcasts to exist. (No commercials, no repetition)

I'm perhaps a bit biased-- I work as a program director for one of the bay area noncommercial stations (KZSU, 90.1 FM), and help with the Soundtap project.[1]

[1] http://soundtap.com/
Amazon is playing a totally different game with Kindle. They're not trying to compete with Google for general-purpose Android devices, they're trying to make limited-purpose Amazon-machines that help users consume more content from Amazon.
"Technical debt only hurts if you have to pay it back"

To continue the "debt" metaphor, when your product dies, it debt dies with it (or if you switch technologies, you might get a 'debt relief').

So for the thousands of startups and products that disappear or get pivoted before they can mature - it might be worth it to bet on not paying technical debt.
When I worked at an office with cubicles, it wasn't any less noisy than the open office I work in. You could hear everyone talking and it was impossible to tell who was in the office and who wasn't.

It seems to me that a better compromise would be to have small private rooms in addition to open collaborative spaces. Cubicles are the worst of both.
How is he sending the email through @gs.com? He stopped working there in 2010 https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonynoto
You can! You just need to make the F-Droid app a System app, then it can install applications without having to keep the "unknown sources" options on.

You can use this app to do it: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=de.j4velin.syste...

You can also disable the "install" script and have it install stuff without any prompts like the play store, just go into the settings, scroll to the bottom and enable "Expert" and "Install using system-permission".
Busywork shouldn't be the goal. Busywork is what is given to children when the adults don't want to deal.
Do you think humans can do things that no computer will ever do? If yes, could you give an example? If not, doesn't that imply that human-level AI can exist?

Exist, yes. Be built by us, not necessarily.
While I take your points, see my other reply, it sounds like the Minot train derailment is being used for anti-radio consolidation propaganda as opposed to a real and useful object lesson about the role of AM and FM consumer radio. The critical details per the Wikipedia article are that the Emergency Alert System was not activated by any of the authorities who could do it, which didn't include the radio stations themselves, and who's listening to the radio at 2:30 am for putative local announcers to do their thing?

I think you're overly focused on immediate emergency announcements, where you should not depend on normal consumer AM and FM radio, vs. in the US systems like sirens and NOAA radios with their alarm system. Local consumer radio is much more useful for follow on information, once people are alerted and desire to find out more information.
Whether you are extending an existing nation or creating a new one is an irrelevant distinction. The point is that people bring in a group that did not live there previously, and establish a new society in that land.

You seem to treat it as a detail that the land where Zionists would be autonomous, was already occupied by non-Jews. The desire for Palestinians or Kurds to create a state is a different matter since they already lived there.

Your argument reminds me of the "terra nullius" argument used to justify the invasion of Australia. Being pedantic about the definition of a nation does't fly when discussing the terra nullius doctrine, and it's no more reasonable when discussing Zionism.
It looks like we can add Forbes to the list of publications that don't understand what the "dark web" is. It's too bad that this article starts right off with gross misinformation.
He stopped in July 2014 - also listed on that link.

Email was sent on April 24, 2014.
I only know what I saw on the film adaptation of Longitude, which was a one-note perseverance story that may not be the most objectively accurate: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0192263/

Harrison apparently spent his whole life building these clocks and fighting to secure the prize given a hostile council of astronomers who had pre-decided that an astronomical method put forth by some learned man would win, not some pathetic carpenter. Every demonstration he made, they would decide they required some higher standard of proof, or some rule had changed which invalidated the demonstration. He became extremely bitter at the process. His son spent much of his life attempting to validate the timepieces in naval voyages. Harrison was only awarded part of the prize on his deathbed after intervention by a sympathetic sovereign and also the death of some of the strong personalities on the Board.
When you add standing desks, 53'' is not enough to stop acoustic abuse from people doing things like concalls.

This happens to me daily and even having conversations with people they still make the same mistakes.

Its not a cynical suspicion, its just about stacking employees like Lincoln Logs to get the cheapest work space with the most people.

Considering the profit that most of these employers are seeing per employee, and given their entire product rests on the brains of these people, it just seems penny smart and pound foolish.
BBC: Audio Spotlight
Intimidating people into working simply fails if you're hiring the kind of people your company ought to be hiring. The intimidation is a distraction - you get people to focus on the problem of social pressure at work rather than the technical problems they want to work on.

I think a related issue is that putting pressure on subordinates is a thing that managers can point to in order to justify their position. It's a lot harder to mostly stay out of the way.
The story of N++, a ninja game 10 years in the making
"Loudspeaker focusses ultrasonic beams which turn into audio near the target."
JustPlug: the Airbnb-esque platform for electric car charging and plug sharing
If you're buying any laptop for development use, it's worth getting 16 GB of RAM if possible. You may not need much more than 8 GB right now, but inevitably your need will increase over the next few years, and many laptops aren't expandable anymore.
you're right, but at some point one needs to describe what a team do - I'm not a native English speaker, and I use what I learned. I accept alternatives, especially if they don't involve a ten word paraphrase of that.
Being Turing complete means that not only might it not stop, but you can't even reliably determine if it won't stop.
I don't get what happened. The airline put up a sign saying don't go past this curtain. You went past the curtain. You were surprised when they told you off?

The people in business class (or whatever it was in front of you) have paid more to be less crowded. Therefore the airline puts up a curtain and asks you not to cross it. That seems super reasonable to me.

You don't like the curtain and sign. A reasonable response might be to fly a different airline or pay to get in that section next time.

Deliberately ignoring the sign, going out of your way to tell them that you're going to do that, and then filming the poor guy when he stops you, that seems pretty far off into psycho land to be honest.

In fact, I'm glad that they went out of their way to protect the people in the seats in front of you from being unnecessarily bothered by people like you hiking past.

Am I missing part of the story?
Would you want to be the person who was notified that someone was communicating they were considering interfering with the proper operation of an aircraft, and ignored them, only to discovery they later on did do damage to the aircraft?

That's the problem with concentrating blame. It leads to net counterproductive behavior. One in such a position is thinking about their position, not just the people they are protecting.
How do you get natural gas to Hawaii fifty years ago? You can't. You would use oil tankers like they did.
Ugh, I knew somebody would be in the comments saying this. Who cares about the ideas on offer, let's evaluate it according to the rules we all learned in third grade.
How much of the philosophy of science written since 1970 was written by philosophers in the abstract, and how much of it was written by scientists? Just look at the "philosophers" mentioned on downthread from here; Carlo Rovelli: theoretical physicist, Noam Chomsky: linguist and cognitive scientist, Imre Lakatos: mathematician. All these people were formally trained in a more specialized field and later went into philosophy. This supports my point: a person who knows a specialized field is far more qualified to innovate in philosophy than someone who is philosophizing in a void and trying to apply it ex post facto.

I perhaps should have worded my post differently to clarify that my post is a criticism of philosophers (academics specializing in philosophy), not philosophy as it is more broadly practiced.

> Right now, a constant conflict is that (many) non-philosophers of science think philosophy of science has gotten too empirical and too focused on particular scientific issues, to the detriment of philosophy

I know, and that's exactly why I'm disagreeing with these people. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy that hasn't specialized in this way is mostly useless.
I've seen some rumors about blacklists, but I didn't think anyone took it seriously. All it would take is one exchange to allow the bitcoins to change addresses to defeat the purpose.

The international scope of the exchanges and their competitive nature makes it seem unlikely that blacklists will be successful. Addresses are pretty ubiquitous by design, so short of blacklisting entire exchanges I don't see it working. (Even then tumbling would get around it)
In certain domains, we've built things smarter than us. Chess comes to mind.

Wouldn't your hypothesis imply that no computer could beat its maker at chess?
I've learned that for the kind of stuff I do face to face communication next to a whiteboard is the best place to discuss complex technical topics.

Also, co-location does create serendipitous instances of sharing information.

It's not a matter of management. It's about does the organization need the maximum communication bandwidth between individuals possibly from separate teams or not.

If we take for granted that silos are bad, then that leads to the notion that cross-segment communications are good, and the easiest way to have those is co-locate everyone.

There is something lost in organizational potential by not co-locating if the culture is open and encourages individual initiative.

Working remote does have it's values as well, I grant that. I feel I'm much able better to concentrate at home. But I recognize the value face to face communication has as well.
Business cat translation attempt:

- Facebook makes money on desktop ads and mobile ads
- They are making less money on desktop
- They are making more money on mobile
- They may be seeing trends before anybody else that mobile is where they will make money
- So they might value engaging mobile apps more than competitors

Thus, as Snapchat, you realize that FB is willing to pay a lot of $$, but also that what you have (the active users on mobile) is valuable and will continue to grow in value. It's interesting because it sheds light on what went into Snapchat's decision to reject the acquisition.
I think some people are confused/missing the point.

This isn't competing with F-Droid, it IS F-Droid. Everything from the statistics to the APK downloads (notice the redirect) are sourced from https://f-droid.org/.

It's a beautiful front end and necessary improvement over what exists, but it's complementary not competitive.

My $0.02:

1. Link to download button to the app entry in F-Droid so I can download it from the Android client. (Getting the user to trust random APKs is not a responsible behavior.)

2. Clarify that this site is a viewer for F-Droid and non-UI contributions should be sent there.

Other misc notes:

Install F-Droid as a system app (root) in order to install packages using the client without having unknown sources checked.

Material design for the client is coming [1]

[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/merge_requests/64

It's awesome to see this on the front page of HN, If you think these things are worth supporting, do so!
https://f-droid.org/contribute
You probably already know this, but the 'pirate' community has your interests well served. There are probably very well-written subtitle tracks for any major movie available in your native language. You won't be able to use them with a Netflix stream (thanks to DRM), but VLC lets you add subtitles to any video file.
Something that really opened my eyes to thinking about the design of everyday things was "Objectified" (2009), a documentary on industrial/product design.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI
Makerbot laying off 100 and closing down all retail stores
If anyone's interested, I generalized make to work beyond files (eg: if the tarball doesn't exist on the website already, then it must be uploaded; before uploading, the tarball must have been tested). Also to add parameters to rules, which work a bit like .c.o: rules in make, but fully general with multiple parameters.

To be fair I haven't worked hard to make this very usable, but I do use it myself a lot for all sorts of interesting things:

The tool itself: http://git.annexia.org/?p=goaljobs.git;a=summary

A subset of recipes I use regularly: http://git.annexia.org/?p=goals.git;a=summary
This seriously depends on the person. I personally hate having to commute to an office and would much prefer to work remotely from home, but I know plenty of folks who enjoy the social interaction at an open (or closed) work space. Besides, open, close, or remote work place is much more of a personal preference (like preference for different IDEs) than some inherently right or wrong decision a company can make (like decreeing no employee is allowed to become pregnant). So the smart company should leave the choice of whether to work at the open office, in a closed cubicle, or remotely at home up to the employee so that the details of how an employee maximizes his productivity is left to him, instead of handed down from up-top based upon statistical studies. After all, if you as an employer is going to trust your employees to be able to properly optimize your dataflows, innovate new databases techniques, not "drop table users", etc., why not also trust your employees to know what work environment works best for him?
My Titanium PowerBook G4 purchased in 2000 was my main machine for _everything_ for seven years or so. I used that machine HARD, for software development and writing and even recording audio for my earliest podcasts. I went through several keyboards, several batteries, several power adapters, replacement internal battery, replacement hard drive... it was also just such a nicely designed, comfortable machine to work with. I still miss that thing.

My 2008 Mac Pro is still my mail desktop machine for coding, scanning, photo editing, slide editing, video editing, music server, etc. It sits in my home office, though, and I sort of supplement it with some beat-up used ThinkPads like the one I'm typing on now.

My ThinkPad T50 was a great, solid, workhorse laptop as well; that was my main working laptop for four years. I handed it off to my wife when her laptop died and it is now in rough shape since the kids bash on it.

By comparison my scratch-built PCs are sort of like mayflies; after a few years they aren't even worth upgrading since I can't get a faster CPU with the right socket type.