skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a matter of cost-benefit. On one hand, you have a rat race of soul crushing minimum wage work, always one slip away from the investment in hard work evaporating and being dropped right back on your ass. On the other, you sacrifice any chance of advancement to live with few obligations other than what it takes to survive. It might be more accurate to say that the person didn't choose to have this dichotomy, but given it, they chose the latter option.

Our culture is rather obsessed with the idea of wage labor as morally imperative and necessary to provide life with self-meaning. I can sympathize with the idea that to some, wage labor might subtract meaning from life. Especially if it's working at a Burger King to pay for a room at a flophouse.
Bullies proactively seek to hurt others for their own amusement. For better or worse the Secret Service (in the case of the president) and the FBI (in the case of airplane safety), are reactively responding to potential threats.

So if you don't want them to react, don't threaten the president, don't make threats about messing around with aircraft EICAS systems.

Remember, the FBI isn't responsible for designing safe aviation comms systems, their job here is to investigate potential threats. I think most of us on HN would suspect that Roberts is not a threat, but from the perspective of the FBI, he's certainly a potential threat that needs to be investigated.
Did any of you grow up in danger of homelessness?
To be fair, much of the time people don't quite rise to the sentience of humans.
You were right the first time. "The medium is the message" was one of the pithy statements from Understanding Media (1964) that made McLuhan's name. The other variants of the phrase are all just plays on the first.

It's typical of McLuhan that he pretended the word "massage" was by design when in fact it was a typo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_9JKKj-xE#t=2m15s.
That was bog standard at the Microsoft campus in Redmond as of when I left in 2006.

Microsoft is/was well-known for giving employees their own office.
When I tried out the play framework that was one of the "woah" moment when I discovered the typesafe routing. It is really good, and it automatically generates the routes from controller methods.

It's like a whole new world of generating urls.
It's also almost certainly cheaper than imprisoning someone, even if the full cost of the program is borne by society at large.
Ok, fine. PLATO was a super cool more generalist machine that happens to not be a personal computer. My use of personal computers was just an example that I thought would get a point across about the evolution of technology. The fact that PLATO existed and was very different than what came before it (as per all the cool stuff you listed) if anything strengthens the argument I was making. Generalist machines were a big step up from what came before, orders of magnitude better. A super-AI will also be unpredictably orders of magnitude better than what we've done so far.
I don't blame NSA just for reading private stuff. I blame the NSA because they abuse their position that allows them to read that, much like I blame whoever leaked this email for having done so.

To me, your position is like, as we say in my country, "covering the sun with a sieve". The act is done, trying to oppose it now is futile.
Open offices are primarily designed to save money, and they save a ton of money when compared with private offices combined with collaborative working spaces (fancy word for conference rooms/areas). It is very easy to quantify this cost difference, and this cost savings is immediate. It is much more difficult to quantify productivity impact vs costs, and this would not be realized clearly and immediately.

So 10/10 times now companies pick the option that costs 2x-3x less, be dammed with trying to figure out its impact on productivity.
> Adderall is not the answer as these journalists like to claim though. It's useless for basically anything other than very rare usage and has difficult to manage loss of productivity during withdraw. It has an incredibly fast tolerance buildup. If your work requires steady output instead of rare bursts, it's questionable whether it even surpasses coffee because of these downsides.

If that's your experience, then you need to take an extended-release capsule and halve your dose.

It's amphetamine. Its dose-to-efficacy graph is linear.

If you're losing a day of productivity on off-days, then you're simply taking too much on on-days.
And volcanism. Coincidence? Wake up, sheeple.
you can have multiple smaller teams working on different aspect of the same project, I've seen project with 50+ devs and I wouldn't put the full project on a single room. but I see your point, it works for small projects, I'll figure out something on those lines.
Both is probably the answer here. There is a range of characteristics in people and ideally you need to accommodate them, so if you want to get the best out of your employees you need a range of work environments. The ideal office building would probably be fairly fractal.
Some of my Best Friends are Linguists (2004) [pdf]
The problem is that search is a constant battle between Google and spammers/SEO. It's a never ending arms race that ensures there won't be a perfect solution.

And in this arms race Google's massive resources gives them a huge advantage. I think Google will probably maintain their dominance until they inevitably get caught doing something egregious enough that the government decides to step in and bust them up.
That conclusion is about as silly as a study that concludes that snorting cocaine was not shown to improve euphoria over caffeine.

It's something you might believe until you actually try amphetamine.
Sorry, but to me that office has the charme of a morgue.

The choice of materials and colors (metal, stone, glass and black) feels more suited to a parking garage than an office.

Also glass walls do not help with visual distractions. They can in fact make them worse due to reflections.
What's really cool is that they often have links to the papers generated--take the BET project, for example:

http://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog/BET.html
Found via http://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan, which is worth reading for background.
Once again someone confuses "deep web" for "dark web".
You're assuming a sort of static model of search where it makes sense to talk about it growing to an asymptotic limit.

But it's a dynamic and adversarial environment: the corpus evolves to destroy the quality of search results (spam/SEO). A 20-yo version of Google will be way worse than Google was 20 years ago, because when it goes live it'll be attacked by 19 years of spam innovation (if I can use that word in this context).
Pointing to graphs showing decreased U.S. job growth without mention of the loss of labor union power or export of manufacturing overseas is ignorant in the extreme. Tyranny looks the same economically irrespective of technology.
When you operate a fractional reserve, other people/businesses owe you at least as much money as you owe to your deposit accountholders.

When you're insolvent, you can't cover your obligations. Even if you called in every loan you'd made, it still wouldn't give you enough cash that all your deposit account customers could withdraw all their money.

Calling Mt. Gox a "fractional reserve" is giving them way too much credit.
I imagine when google interviews candidates they don't do it in the open office, they probably go into a (quiet) conference room.

That's at least a little telling, isn't it?

Suggestion: Request to be interviewed in the actual seat/location that you're going to be working in and see what they say.
This is an age-old problem.

* In a survey of more than 3,200 people conducted by Salary.com, 64% say they visit websites unrelated to work daily.

Source: http://business.time.com/2012/03/13/youre-wasting-time-at-wo...
I think you're much more self aware about how you solve problems than i am. Most problems are just exploring a configuration space. Stuff like using a hashtable instead of a set, because there's extra associated information, or traversing a datastructure in a different order. Perhaps complex, but ultimately understandable changes.

Sometimes though, the impossible happens. Maybe a race condition or something. In those cases i find myself questioning my mental model, which is good. It leads me compare what i think is happening to what is actually happening. If i don't find that mismatch, my mind sort of tenses up.

Those terrible problems lead me to question my understanding of reality and my self worth. Some things are just hard. I really do just check out and play video games for a while. Something in my mind relaxes, my subconscious chews on the problem for a while. Sometimes i have to sleep before I feel like i can continue.

When i'm working near my limits, i get weird. I know other poeple who just grit their teeth and go on. I've tried that, but it feels like the road to burnout for me. I know others deal with that well.

Talking sometimes helps, but because my understanding is flawed, my explanation has the same flaws. Some people are good at helping identify the false belief, but usually I still have to let that realization tumble around in my mind for a while before i feel comfortable enough to continue.
People characterize DRM as something that doesn't deter criminals but punishes honest consumers. I've often thought of open office plans in the same way. Unless someone's a jerk, they're not going to want to talk to anyone about anything in the actual open office area, which is the whole point of "increasing collaboration". They're going to whisper (which impedes communication) or grab whoever they want to talk to and go someplace where they're not disturbing other people.

On the other hand, the jerks are not going to think twice about it, and they'll just walk over to someone's desk and start talking at them, and not always with an indoor voice, much less actually trying to keep it down. Jerks 1, non-jerks 0.

Another very, very, VERY common thing I see on places like HN is people talking about how much they love being able to walk over and ask their coworkers questions all the time with open offices. Meaningfully, I don't see them complaining about other people asking them questions all the time due their increased visibility. This always makes it sounds like it just enables people who always ask someone else before trying to figure things out on their own. Jerks 2, non-jerks 0.

On the other hand, open offices are really good at making engineers deeply unhappy and unproductive, while allowing some director or VP to look like a hero for saving a bunch of money while "increasing collaboration". Jerks 3, non-jerks 0.
A new Japanese emoticon website I created
My personal experience [long term volunteer with kids groups, as a child and as a parent] has been that most younger kids (<11) can't sit still for long.

I sat next to a lad in an informal setting recently (watching a martial arts class), his mother kept nagging him to sit still, not make a noise, etc.. I felt so sorry for him, he could easily have stood at the side and tried to mimic the older childrens movements, or just danced around for a bit, or played a game with his mum. When she told him off for raspberrying I really wanted to start just to show it wasn't inappropriate (it wasn't a quiet segment of the class); social inhibition prevented me. I find that my kids primary school teachers have a similar attitude, they're all female, they seem particularly bothered by some types of "unruly" behaviour which is primarily from the boys. Is there a biological divide between the sexes here too? [On the basis of the above linked study abstract, do more boys have ADHD than girls, is it a spectrum disorder?]

When I pick up my youngest (5-6yo) from school the boys are almost all [always] playing chase around the playground whilst the girls are almost all [always] chatting quietly and standing with their parents (mainly mothers). Mothers of boys seem to tell the boys off for running around, whilst the [far fewer] dads do not.
This is where the "Memex" name comes from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

A memex is a "hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article 'As We May Think'."

I'm rather disappointed that DARPA chose it as the name for a project that, according to Wired according to Wikipedia, "aims to shine a light on the dark web and uncover patterns and relationships in online data to help law enforcement and others track illegal activity".
Fortunately we don't arrest people for doing things that are in poor taste. Your comment is entirely besides the point.
> boosted dialog, reduced sound effects

As a normally hearing person this would actually be useful on some films, I struggle to follow dialog when there is so much background noise on-screen and in the cinema.
Here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=app.lastbacke...

Overall Rating: C
This server is vulnerable to the POODLE attack. If possible, disable SSL 3 to mitigate. Grade capped to C.
I guess if I had to summarize my point it would be that those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't. Especially so when we want to discuss topics relating to that historical advantage.

E.g., all people have opinions on race. But as a white person I try to recognize that my opinions have been shaped by a system that unfairly favors me, and part of the way it does that by limiting the amount I hear about the experience of non-white people with respect to race. (By the way, I don't think this involves much conscious malice; it's just one of the bugs you get when primates have to build a civilization from scratch.) So to the extent that I want to have informed opinions on race, I have a lot of work to do.

I'd add that even accounting for the learning value of listening, I think there's another value to it. Black people are already generally aware of what white people think about racial issues; they have to be. So I try to separate when I want to be heard from when I think I have something to say that is actually helpful to the people I'm talking with. In the former case, I try to favor silence. There are other ways I can feel heard, and helping other people feel fully heard is a great way to create some willingness for them to listen when I actually do have something possibly helpful to say.
While OSX is probably easier to use still, I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop since 2005, and every time I have to do something on Win8 I cry in desparation. Win7 was frustrating, but workable. Win8.1 is a horrible mess, as was Win8 before it; The Metro/Old dichotomy is intellectually painful, distracting, and damaging to any sane workflow.
But it's inevitable that any job will involve some amount of busy-work. Such is the nature of work.

Busy-work isn't unproductive work- at least, not to the organization. Busy-work is work that the organization needs to have done, but the individual does not find interesting or satisfying to do. Any company is going to require busy-work.
You are still trying to restrict the concept of a nation to a narrow definition that suits your needs. Palestinians have been continuously living in the area for as long as Jews. But their claim to the land is stronger since they were still living there at the turn of the century, while the European and other Jews who emigrated after the establishment of Israel did not.

I suggest you look into the history of Palestinians, their genetics and history. For example, Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinians are genetically very similar. Some hypothesize that Palestinians are descendants of Jews who converted to Islam.

Regarding the solution to the problem of Jewish people lacking a homeland, I don't have an easy solution for that. But at the very least a solution would involve acknowledging the similarities between Zionism and European Nationalism. You say the Jewish story is incomparable to other situations, but I think the parallels I've drawn are sufficient for most people to see that there is some discrepancy between how American liberals approach Israel, vs other kinds of ethnic nationalism.
I think I'd prefer to be in the focus room almost all day :)
We can take it as given that solar panels produce the most power during the day, particularly when the sun is directly overhead. The assumption is that air conditioning and refrigeration is a major electricity use that consumes the most power when the sun is shining. Presumably that is the case for residential, office, retail, and most service industry use. There are industries whose electricity use is not correlated with time of day, but they're not based in Hawai'i. If you want evidence that the damnedpowercompany would like to give away power at night, take a look at their awful "security light" programs.
You know, it's a silly little thing, but I got some joy out of it, and I'll probably use it as reference at one point or another. Thank you.
I think WhatsApp was a solid purchase, they have a massive, paying user-base and offer great communication alternatives to those in developing nations. Read more here: https://growthhackers.com/companies/whatsapp/
But my point is that the generalist computers weren't a sudden or unpredictable step, they were the result of slow and progressive improvement. If generalist computers are any example to go by, the fact that we don't have anything close to a primitive general AI indicates we're far, far away from developing anything close to a "super-AI".
I'm quite prepared to pay for tools that offer a meaningful productivity boost, and while I haven't tried Bud yet, I've had lots of misery with MSBuild and complex builds. I think there is plenty of room in the ms ecosystem for a better build tool, and if it's better enough, I'd be prepared to pay.

I don't think it'd be too hard to make a build tool as much better than msbuild as intellij is better than eclipse.

This whole topic nearly triggered a rant about how badly broken most build is, and how massively it smashes you out of your flow to have an irritating build problem show up. Build problems impact the productivity of every member of your team.
Give me a dark cave where I can munch my thoughts in private without seeing or listening to anybody else unless I choose to do so, and you've got yourself a winner employee here.

Office layout is certainly an area where one size does not fit all.
Thanks I believe I need to do the same and start using both.
Robert's exact statement was, "Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? "PASS OXYGEN ON" Anyone ? :)"

I.E. He was talking about directly interfering with the planes EICAS system. What if he'd joked about running a GPS, or VOR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range) jammer during final approach? At what point do the authorities decide they need to have a conversation with such an individual?
While I agree that the dangers of heroin are severely compounded by its illegality, it is intellectually dishonest to describe it as "gentle and relatively harmless."

Speaking as an ex-user, opioids are a horrendous class of drug. They steal your motivations, your desires, your dreams—your very soul. They turn you into a shell of your former self.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that opioids are gentle and harmless just because they are technically non-toxic.
Conferences are vastly better than journals for getting the word out. Nobody reads journal papers unless they get word-of-mouth momentum - which often happens at conferences.
What was your "why", and how did it motivate you?
They'll probably tell you there are security considerations against that. The next time you interview with Google, if you get a building tour, pay attention to the "no photography past these point" and similar notices...
Have you ever taken a therapeutic extended-release dose of amphetamine? The idea of amphetamine only making you feel like you're performing better is hilarious to anyone that's ever taken it. Kind of like someone telling you that marijuana is actually inert. Yeah, whatever.

The drugs will give you an effect as long as you keep your tolerance down.

You don't take them every day. You need off days. Most people I know are prescribed 20mg Adderall XRs or 50mg Vyvanse caps and only up their dose if they want to save money by splitting pills.
Churchill’s disaster – Gallipoli
Going Interactive at Tribeca with Storyscapes
Well, that depends on whether we accept following a program that tells it exactly how to play chess is being "smart".
Office space in the Bay Area is expensive, so is construction (even indoors). When you can put employees into 6x6 plots in an open space, everything else looks egregiously expensive.
The null coalescing operator is nice, but it can be overused. I recently saw some Swift code that was riddled with question marks everywhere, which()?.made?.the?.code?()?.very?.difficult?.to?().read.
Another give-away against open-offices is that people who decides them usually reserve a single office for thy selves.

A real story: a given company moved to new, but existing, installations. The original facilities were organized in small rooms. The boss ordered a full redesign of the interior into a single large open space, with one exception: a closed office for himself.

This ancient philosophy of "what's good for others doesn't suit me" never convinced me. :)
You submit new apps to F-droid. This is just a front-end to their database.
What do APK signatures have to do with Windows?
> So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days.

You are simply reiterating the original position that I was devils-advocating against.

It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day.

If some activity is exponential, like if it takes 10^x days to accomplish, then a human could solve problems of size 3 in about three years, and the million-fold faster computer would take only 10^(x-6), or about a minute.

And in three years it could solve problems of size 9. But a problem of size 1000 would take so many multiples of the lifetime of the universe that it would appear to be approximately as slow as a human, the difference is negligible.

This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know.

The topic is not limited to algorithmic complexity theory like that, it's just a proof of concept.

So the point is that superintelligence might turn out to be something that a million-fold improvement isn't enough to achieve.

We don't understand intelligence, so it's pretty obvious we don't have a handle on superintelligence.

Again, all this is a matter of optimisim or pessimism up until the subject is understood far, far better.
A Python Meta-Programming Library for Job Flow Control and Mapreduce
Bingo. This is what these discussions so often miss: open office floorpans translate to immediate savings on the company's balance sheets. They permit companies to stuff more workers into fewer square feet, and those square feet are how commercial real estate is priced. All of the stated benefits of open office floor plans (culture, collaboration, communication, etc) are subordinate to, or justification for, those savings.
For most usual cases you will be able, I would guess.
National Geographic – Photo of the Day (Inspiring Collection)
Nope. I've tried my fair share of different drugs but wouldn't dare touch opioids:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_depen...
> I'll put that one right next to my copy of "Nietzsche as an Aryan and a Scholar".

if that Nietzsche book actually focuses on what he was doing specifically for the Aryan cause/goals, then you probably should
Ukrainian Lawmaking