skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-> It seems likely that you could find a number of areas where open offices look statistically better, and a number of areas where they look worse.

To make this claim convincing you're going to have to come up with some data. For developers, the data show clearly open offices are productivity killers. Some people may like them, but that doesn't make those people more productive.

So what are the areas where open offices plausibly improve business function?

Employee retention? This is possible, as some people clearly have a preference for them, but based on comments in this and other threads the people who hate them hate the a lot, while the people who like them aren't nearly so zealous.

Productivity? The data show this is clearly not the case.

"Communication"? I put this in quotes because I'm not sure what it means, although it gets touted as a benefit of open offices. Private offices and short meetings with small numbers of people result in good communications within and across teams, and I'm not sure what barrier to communication is imposed by being unable to interrupt the person three desks over (and distract everyone in between) that can't be solved by a simple messenger app.

Scalability? Almost by definition open offices don't scale. Maybe opponents of open offices should start hitting on this idea hard: "Your architecture scales, why doesn't your workplace?"
LibGDX – cross-platform game development framework
I'm pretty sure that C doesn't guarantee a two's-complement representation. Not so sure about C++. Either way, it makes for a cute novelty article, and a really terrible idea.

Raymond should've saved it for the next April Fools' Day.
I'd like to find a non-open-office environment, but every single place I interview has them.

Is there any way to find non-open-office environments? If there was a list of companies without open offices, I'd apply to every one on the list.

I'm definining "not an open office" as either offices for everyone (best) or team rooms of <4 people. Even cubicles would be an improvement. (and you know things are bad when cubicles seem like a luxurious environment)
Self-Driving Cars and the Survival of the Fittest
Also, this: http://www.loqqus.com/blog/should-you-tell-anyone-about-your...
I agree. It is well-written and engaging, but its focus on American atrocities somewhat detracts from the main point (and conveniently forgets to mention that Vietcong forces were no stranger to mass executions and torture themselves). It does bring home the extent of the destruction the war inflicted, though.

Unfortunate to see Vietnam turning into a new China.
Is there some e-ink display that can produce more than 64 colors in development? Even if they make the OS look decent with that small of a pallette, I don't think that the e-ink display will be attractive to people if your webpage rendering looks like garbage.
Unity3D Pro License Key 2015 Crack Mac Full Free Download
Whenever I see a startup in a coworking space, that's an immediate red flag.
Funny, I'd rather "the UI for a feature" was designed by actual designers if I'm paying for it.
Only vaguely related to the subject, a wonderful 10' fairytale film for the kids, made in USSR:

Ezītis miglā (Hedgehog in the fog) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPS7tKJNj9M .

Enjoy!
Java 8 is out now and doesn't have this. I'm not aware of anything like this being on the cards for Java 9. Could you tell us more about what you heard?
Let me guess, it was by making highly upvoted comments?
"Does your conspiracy theory encompass the whole globe?"

It doesn't have to, it only has to affect those countries in which the decoupling is taking place. Not sure if that makes it more plausible or not.
There has been a lawsuit (actually several, since consolidated) about this winding its way through the courts since 2013.

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/u2yv5yz8/california-central...
Wookie – An async HTTP server for Common lisp
I suspect they were referring to the ways our body is part of numerous pseudo-closed local systems, and in each of those systems entropy will tend to increase. It's true that we are also open systems in meaningful ways and can be farmers of enthalpy inside our bodies. To some extent that's exactly what life is--enthalpy farming equipment. But farming is tricky and requires constant energy inputs. And it does seem like fighting the entropy of those pseudo-closed (ie can be opened with effort) systems is a difficult if not losing battle.
You've misunderstood. I'm not talking about bolting on a UNIX-like abomination on the side. I'm saying Microsoft needs to replace Windows userland with UNIX userland, much like Apple did well over a decade ago. That's what Microsoft would need to do for Windows to become a decent dev platform again.
That's why it's so hypocritical and annoying.

They really are just being cheap on office space, but they justify it with some nonsense excuse about how they are more productive environments.

If proper offices make workers 10%-20% more productive, it would obviously be worth it, because the office space expense is still small compared to salary and other overhead.
Ah, now that you say that, I see that my brain produced a _very_ poor parse. Sorry :(
Thanks I just figured that out. I does work from there.
Thank You much
That's exactly right - but what's the one option that's guaranteed cheaper than renting an office? Not renting an office, or renting a smaller office. Hence, remote work. Your employees also save all that commute time, consequently get better (and cheaper) fed and rested.
I think you didn't read my post very carefully.

I'm not confusing those terms at all. I said:

"I am usually thinking of the match itself, rather than the design of the game".

By which I mean pretty much exactly what you said. "Game" can mean either a single match, or the actual thing that you are playing.

My point was that the term "balance" isn't limited to the dynamics of the game (those that exist regardless of the players skills in using them), but that it is often used to refer to the equality of the teams -- and that when I hear the term "balance" in regard to gaming I am more likely to think of the team equality than the other possibility.
The ultimate guide to pinball
Lead Developer of TheDirty.com here. Nice work. We're built on WordPress, running on a single machine, using Nginx + PHP-FPM, and currently serving ~20,000,000 pageviews a month.

Before I took over development we were running on apache w/ vanilla PHP and CPU's would be > 75% on a regular basis. The site frequently ran into the Apache 10k issue you mentioned in your paper as well. After getting the new server setup & optimizing all our MySQL queries, it's abnormal for all of our CPUs to even be doing anything. Out of all our CPUs, we might have 5 < 10% currently.

One thing I've gathered from this project is technique is a huge part of optimizing WordPress. 1 resource hog at this scale is greatly amplified and can bring everything crashing down. I remember the first time I coded a simple 'popular posts' widget and how hard that hit when you have 150,000 posts to run through and 300,000+ pages generating on a regular basis throughout the day. We had to scrape it the same week it went up.

One big example on how thinking about your queries is huge (let's ignore page caching for a moment) is if you have a menu that queries all your categories (We have 1,000+) in the menu on every page load, and then run that query every time you generate a page, that would be ~650,000 times a day that menu query is run and the menu is generated. When you think about running one query on a table with 1,000+ rows, it sounds like nothing. But when you have to do it 650,000+ times a day... It adds up.

By switching our menu to be generated once every 5 minutes, having it cached in html each time, and by having that menu loaded onto every page via javascript instead; we only have to query & generate the menu 288 times a day. Apply this "single query/generation + load in js technique" to things like widgets within WordPress (all our related posts areas are loaded like this), it has made our resource usage less than 1% of what it used to be.

Although people get really excited about things like widgets & cool custom plugins... It's good to remember, if you can code, that sometimes hardcoding and/or coming up with your own technique will save you a ton of cpu/ram usage if you truly want to build for scale. Every single query counts. Nginx is crucial > 10k connections & php-fpm is a great partner for nginx as well. I'm going to print out your thesis and run through it a few times. Nice work my friend.

----

Also, idk why somebody said APC is dead. One of the most, if not the most, widely used caching plugins, W3TC, still supports APC caching and a lot of talks about WordPress optimization use APC. Personally, I find other ways to be better, but that's another topic.
I Recreated an Unprocessed Sandwich from Panera Bread.Here's What It Looked Like
I was curious how one of my clients was gaining weight despite eating a healthy diet - as it turns out, restaurants and companies have sneaky ways of adding more calories to their food.

http://modernhealthmonk.com/panera-bread-experiment/
I'll just add this to the list of 10,000 other felonies I unknowingly commit every day.

But seriously, most of the claims here are ridiculous and false. Not surprising considering the source. What's that anecdote about taking legal advice off the internet though? That applies to their site as well as my comment equally.
About us part is very funny. Can't stop laughing!
I bet Louie CK will agree.
> For instance, phones with oversized numbers are also used by legally blind young people.

Huh; I could understand wanting physical buttons rather than a touchscreen, but the standard 10-digit keypad is incredibly easy to dial "by feel"—or, basically, to touch-type on. Why make it bigger? Is it for the really young legally-blind people who are first learning to use a phone?

I mean, we don't make keyboards for legally blind people with bigger keys, do we? (There are keyboards with braille guides, but that's somewhat orthogonal.)
Consolidation in this space, in my opinion, is putting the future of the Internet in great jeopardy. I'm not sure exactly where we're heading, but i have a feeling the days of a "free" internet are numbered.
I've never seen it before, I'll investigate when I get home, but it looks great at a first glance. PGP does need a bit of an update, at least from an implementation perspective, in my opinion.
I think just browsing can be done at a reasonable speed, but I would think that app developers would be put off by the restrictions that e-ink implies.
Interpreter, Compiler, JIT
Ill check out the culture series - I've read Revelation Space and loved it, thanks for the rec!
Any time. Sorry it was a problem :/
Just a strong digression. It's sadly common to have badly recorded talks which is surprising considering the era.
No problem! So far it's decent, but for the stuff I like (consumer-facing businesses) it's definitely nothing like the Bay. There's a lot less money for early-stage startups, there's a lot more government money (which is good and bad), and there's a more risk-aversion on behalf of founders and investors alike. Here's an instructive read: https://medium.com/toronto-tech/toronto-d0ea5da434e

I was fortunate enough to not have student debt when I graduated, so that's one thing that made my leap easier. Agreed, though - I don't wanna go broke either :)

I think braindrain probably plays a role... But ultimately, the issue is that there aren't even enough (successful) startups in the province to employ all those grads if they stayed.

Actually helpful resources are scarce but we could grab coffee or skype if you wanna talk about your options! My email link is in my profile. It's always best to find someone who has done exactly what you intend to do, so just keep talking with folks.

-Andrew
To nitpick, Lolita is not Russian literature, it's English
Generally, duh

Rigorously, only the last 50 but most recent 5 comments counted. Most upvoted comment did not count as well.
Joel might be authority on spinning up a business out of nothing, or writing blog posts that are appealing to junior devs, but he is not, and never was, an authority on software development. Let's face it, any idiot can write a bug tracker. Not any idiot can successfully sell it and turn it into a business. I respect Joel for it, I just don't respect him as an engineer.
Hey all, happy to take questions/feedback/criticism.

Funny anecdote: while developing this post, once I got the JIT working I was very excited. I showed a few people in the office. Our CTO walked by and came to take a look. He's worked on numerous VMs in the past. SpiderMonkey's first JIT, TraceMonkey, being his PhD thesis. He took one look and asked "Is it self hosted." I replied, "well...not yet." To which his response was "pffft!" and walked off. I found that pretty funny. Maybe in the next blog post!
I honestly can't tell if this is supposed to be a sarcastic comment on current state of copyright and copyright enforcement in the US, or if this is actually suggesting that people contact ASCAP and Time Warner about violations. I'm quite sure that it is actually talking about the difficulty of enforcing bans on popular songs that the general public assumes are in the public domain. Maybe my Aspergers is showing...
See my most recent reply to infogulch.

I thought it was obvious from my response that I did know that I was talking about a different thing. In fact I was intentionally pointing out that I was thinking of a different thing.

My point was that when I hear the term "balance" in regard to gaming, I'm thinking about the relative equality of skill of the teams, not things that relate to the game design itself.
So, you're the idea guy?
I think people are saying APC is dead because another opcode cache was included in PHP 5.5 and APC has not seen a release since 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators#Alter...
http://pecl.php.net/package/apc
Trying to shoehorn a performance hungry HTML5 OS on low-end phones was a complete waste of time. Just read this review of the $35 Firefox phone [1]: it's completely unusable to the point that even typing is difficult. What an embarrassment.

I bought the mid-spec Flame developer device out of curiosity, and it's not much better. Everything feels slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Even Android 2.x was better.

My quad-core i7 desktop still occasionally struggles to render the latest and greatest HTML5 stuff at 60 fps. How on earth do they expect a phone to do the same?

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-...
Notes from On-Demand conference
That's part of their agenda. If they will let people easily use other languages, naturally only JS devs will use JS.
It is satire: http://mako.cc/fun/
That's a rather silly argument because it's his hardware...
Ask HN: Good business or technology book recommendations?
Going on vacation soon so I'll have some free time on my hands to read - any good book recs for an engineer/product person? My friend recommended Tufte's data visualization book: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information/dp/0961392142
Giant headers are :(
http://imgur.com/bT77LeK
Touch allows you to create any flat 2D control-plane interface you want. If you're a sound engineer, for example, a touchscreen can replace thousands of individual custom knobs and sliders. (Touch also, through projection, allows you to interact with 3D spaces as long as your interactions are themselves two-dimensional. Minecraft, CAD programs, etc. fall into this group.)

On the other hand, we tend to just ignore the possibility of creating apps for interface modalities that aren't possible with the technology we have. Molding virtual clay, or putting together virtual lego, with your fingers? How? There's no plausible "how" right now, so most UX designers just forget about the possibility and come back to check on the idea in another ten years.

The problem comes from the UX designers who try to force something like "virtual lego" into a "flat 2D control-plane" shaped box. This sort of unnatural control interaction is what confuses people who are first exposed to computers. It's not the fault of the computer; it's the fault of UX designers whose reach exceeds their grasp.
If you're using something that generates a parser for you—like bison or yacc—then sure, you can express your grammar like that, and there are advantages to doing so. On the other hand, if you don't have something like that available—say, you're working in a language where nobody has written a yacc clone yet, so there's no way for you to generate a parser from a BNF description—then implementing a Pratt parser is a lot easier than implementing a parser generator.

Even if you have alternatives, there are still situations in which you might want to use a Pratt parser. It's much easier to understand the internals of this kind of parser than understand the shift/reduce rules of an LL(k) grammar, and Pratt parsers have the nice property that you can easily modify them at runtime, making it easy to switch to alternate grammars in particular contexts—e.g., directly parsing SQL within particular delimiters is a pretty trivial task that is somewhat more difficult with a BNF-style grammar.

EDIT: Actually, a better final example would be user-defined operators with arbitrary precedence and branching. There is no way of expressing this directly in a BNF-style grammar, but it is trivial with a Pratt parser.
> the main reason employers choose open offices: cost

True, but I don't think the ~$10K a year[1] they're saving (per dev) outweighs the productivity loss.

[1] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
Gradle's syntax is too hard to understand for a beginner. If you write 'something', you cannot say if that's a method, field, property, task, closure or whatever. And nobody writes a well explained tutorial for that.

Either Gradle should make the syntax understandable, or adopt some other JS-based build tools or Buck.
The first Russian multi-core processor
Google translation of http://www.vestifinance.ru/articles/57769

It released the first Russian multi-core processor
Print
25/05/2015 16:50

The Russian company "Baikal Electronics' releases the first engineering samples of multi-core processor Baikal-T1 is designed for use in a wide range of industrial and consumer devices in the market of communication solutions, industrial automation and embedded systems.

"Baikal Electronics", a leading developer of integrated circuits, a subsidiary of " T-Platforms "announced the first national system on a chip with a large set of advanced high-speed interfaces. The latest dual-core processors Russian "Baikal T1" MIPS architecture designed by 28-nm process technology and comply with the latest requirements for performance and power consumption of industrial electronics. Engineering samples of Baikal-T1 available to developers since June 1, 2015 The processor comes with software development.

Key Features Baikal-T1:

2 superscalar core P5600 MIPS 32 r5
The operating frequency of 1.2 GHz
1MB L2 Cache
The memory controller DDR3-1600

Integrated interfaces:
1-port 10Gb Ethernet
2 port 1Gb Ethernet
Controller x4 PCIe Gen.3
2-port SATA 3.0
USB 2.0
The power consumption of less than 5W
The technological process of 28 nanometers
Housing 25x25 mm

...
This isn't any better of an idea than Comcast buying TWC was. It should be stopped for all the same reasons.
It looks like a capital lambda.
I think it would be nice to make that clear and allow people to make a choice. Otherwise most people will just use a spam address they never check.
Damn...how does anyone begin to reinvent the wheel like that? Was there any documentation on how it was done?
(Most of) Microsoft.
I was expecting one of those trendy HTML5 logo generators...
Yes, I'm very interested in this. Can someone point us to some good info on setting this up?
"I loved the hieroglyph page; I think that functional programming failed for years as an engineering discipline because of the culture of that style of code."

I don't quite follow your observation, but if you are suggesting that this function would be better with verbose, Englishy naming, I think you are mistaken. Quite the opposite, the parametrically is better illustrated with hieroglyphs.

Regarding failing "for years as an engineering discipline", are you suggesting that imperative programming was "successful" because of the reliance on using naming to communicate intent in the midst of rampant state mutation and unbridled complexity?
You can support us by buying overpriced items in the official Unhappy Birthday store.

This site strikes me as a masterful troll utilizing Poe's law that might actually turn a profit! Genius.
'relicensing' is also still under the original license as far as I understand it. Isn't it still bound by the clause not to make drastic changes?
Visual privacy is great, but noise and the other senses are an issue too.

Employees with allergies, employees who use heavy scents (especially in combination with employees with allergies) and various food smells can all be problems even in cubicles.

Employees who sing, hum, and make other (often unconscious) sounds are likewise problematic in full distraction office layouts.

The claim that there is a cost savings is irrelevant, as "costs less" is never a justification for anything in business. What matters is productivity per dollar spent, so if you can hire four developers with private offices to do the work of five in an open plan, it's a wash.

People who run businesses based on cost savings and not productivity per dollar aren't the kind of people you want to work for if you can help it.
In a sea of content, each piece's value is minimal. I can pick anything to watch or listen to. Why should I listen to yours?

You're no longer fighting for dollars as an artist, you're fighting for attention. There are more people out there willing to give their content away for pennies or free then people who want to live off of the music they make.

Perhaps artists should hop on the basic income bandwagon.
I'm not so sure I want to sell it but I'm curious what others would regard as the value of my Global Computer Employer Index: http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

It's not even remotely global yet - that is it is still in the prototype stage. The latest additions are for New York City.
Someone needs to build Shazam, but instead of just identifying songs, it identifies the people singing them (perhaps via the owner's Facebook profile?), and informs ASCAP.
I thought Microsoft was moving away from "every programmer gets his own office"?
Ah gotcha. The ol' "it's old so it must be dead" way of thinking. That makes sense. Thanks.
As a kid growing up in USSR I remember this cartoon, it was one of the most dreadful cartoons they could show on TV.
"Today, his biggest worry is not software backdoors, but the petabytes (1m gigabytes) of information being hoarded by the likes of Google and Facebook. “If you collect all that data, it becomes an attractive nuisance. It’s kind of a siren calling out inviting someone to come and try to get it. Governments say that if private industry can have it, why can’t our intelligence agencies have it?”

I am hoping if enough people stop using these two services; they might start deleting information permanently? I know Google is hard to give up, but I don't think they need to keep everything. As to Facebook, I can't see any reason, other than business, as to why they keep every bit of information we put up there--forever.
I'm going to plead guilty to being in the publishing (and thus font) business for 35 years, so these things matter to me.
Consolidation can also be good because a big cost is acquiring content and a bigger company will have more negotiating power with content owners. And if people just watch TV over the internet, then the internet companies will carry the cost of acquiring content leaving cable companies to invest in infrastructure.