skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am an old curmudgeon who hated working in an open office (at Google in Mountain View) for a few years.

My personal theory is that the open office trend at Google (and probably Facebook, and others) was initially driven by the fact that the founders jumped directly from school, and never had a "real job" with a normal, old-school office when they were first starting.

Thus they have never personally seen the immense value of a real office, but they HAVE seen the value to the "computer lab" sort of bullpen environment that was common in the 90s (when almost everybody had to show up to the lab to get their work done, as very few people had *nix machines elsewhere where they could do their assignments).
You could work with hashed variants in that case; there might be performance benefits there, too.
For what reason? I'm curious as to why people do this.
The Strangers Project
> one Italian guy who's yelling into his Skype microphone

That's a problem. If he's in an open area, let alone an office where people are trying to work, he shouldn't do that.

Solve them problem of 'him' and maybe open offices will be less distracting?
I don't buy the opening argument; essentially "rich people are smart". We've endlessly witnessed stupid corporate acts. To name a few that have nothing to do with open offices: Conglomerate building (if your name ain't Warren Buffett you almost certainly destroyed value), corporate raiders (destruction of value to line the raider's pockets), the 1999 bubble (let's throw billions of dollars for 'eyeballs'), off-shoring, American automakers (do I have to get into the details here), stack ranking, faulty risk assessment (nearly every NYC banking/investment firm). Waterfall (the stupid kind, not the way it was meant to be done, which is quite good for projects involving airplanes and such). Agile (as it is practiced, the manifesto is nice for certain kinds of projects). Windows 8, or MS' ignoring the internet for a long time. I could type all day.

Companies do stupid things all. the. time. They fly in the face of all available evidence. People are put in charge that shouldn't be in charge. They are driven by ego, or other measures that lead to sub-optimal decisions. Sometimes they are really good, but just make mistakes. I'm a programmer, and my compiler tells me I make 100 mistakes a day; I don't fault upper management for the same. They just don't have that immediate feedback loop that we do. Of course they will make expensive mistakes.

Heck we see it in this thread. Evidence shows that productivity is lowered in open office environment, yet we read claims that it is improved.
The ML activities at Facebook seem to be focussed on delivering content and advertising optimally to users. They can determinine which posts or adverts you might 'Like' based on your friends choices, or those of other similar groups of users found by various demographics and metadata. It's right there in the research group page you linked:

> "We strive to find ways to deliver more engaging content in News Feed, rank search results more accurately, and present the most relevant ads possible."

I think it'd be a pretty poor use of ML and AI to use it to try and guess the gaps in your profile, and then fill them in. Of course I'm sure they try and show you content and adverts based on what they believe your demographic profile might be, but these beliefs are purely internal to the algorithms that make the decisions as to what to publish - they aren't used to populate your public profile.

In fact, Facebook want the profile information to come from you and for it to be as accurate as possible - to help those algorithms. It wouldn't be sensible or useful to just set your profile fields based on guesses, no matter how clever the ML behind it. As I said before, I think people ascribe too much intelligence to the way Facebook handles personal information - it isn't magic.
It isn't just loudness that affects hearing loss. A large amount of the damage coming from headphones comes from the fact that they increase the temperature of your ear canals. That temperature increases the amount of bacteria which cause significant hearing loss.
It's shocking the amount of people that don't grasp this. "It works in my home, why isn't it the same in the office." Is it misinformation? Have people become so used to things "just working" in home they don't think of the technical differences between a couple devices and a couple hundred devices?
Well, those anti-circumvention laws, for example in Germany, only apply in some cases. For example, as soon as software is included on the CD, too, breaking the DRM becomes legal.
Why bother when your own 4G connection could be significantly faster than sharing a 100/100Mbit with 80 other people?

I never use guest networks for that exact reason. I know that my traffic and my connection is my own, and works. Way easier imo.
That's why I said trade in those XP boxes. New hardware has gotta seem nice for them by now.
How 19 awesome tools made me work faster
I'm pretty sure Advertising is about as low margin as it gets.
English loan words, that is, which South Korean is packed to the brim with these days. South Korean say aiseukeurim, North Koreans say eoreumbosung-i ("ice pudding" or something).
I met him while I was still at school, 1981 or 1982.

The maths department at my local University (Liverpool) organized meetings for kids from the surrounding region who were reasonably good at the subject, Conway came to one on a trip back to see his parents.
Glad to see you fixed the issues, I absolutely love it that you acted to fast. You have been removed from the list.
Show HN: Farm Feedery – menuless lunch delivery with farm-fresh ingredients
> Downvoting isn't equal to censorship.

Except when it is. Given sufficient downvotes, a post will fade to the same color as the background, making it easy to scroll past and not see it. Whether you want to admit it or not, brigading happens here too, and once in a while a perfectly valid, thoughtful, and reasoned response is silenced because it doesn't fit in with the group mentality here.

The only solution for this issue would be for everyone to adopt a personal policy of only downvoting trolls, intentionally misleading comments, off topic comments, spam, and "me too!" style comments that don't contribute to the discussion. Unfortunately we're only human, and instead of rebutting a comment one disagrees with, many of the users here take the lazy path and downvote. There's no easy fix for that, so the brigading continues, as does the censorship of valid but controversial ideas.

As for the topic at hand; while I agree with most people that the word "retard" is offensive and derogatory towards a specific group of people, I find it hilarious that its use is being questioned by people running a site/service named after an equally offensive and derogatory word.
> I think the reason is that the places airplanes go is not random.

This is how two planes collided 37,000 feet above the Amazon rain forest.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901
I agree completely. Why the hell should Github care about this? These sorts of decisions reduce my confidence that Github won't make even worse decisions that actually materially effect me. Without confidence in them, I'll start hosting my code elsewhere.
3D Printed Walls with World’s Largest Freeform 3D Printer
Offence is meaningless. White people are occasionally offended by 'cracker', rich people by other terms, but they don't cause material harm to them. But people of colour are hurt by words like 'n$@!%r".
If I remember correctly, the 30 square feet of desk space was largely to be able to have a large number of tech manuals open to the necessary pages at the same time. Given how much documentation is now digitized, I wonder where the same recommendation would still hold, or if you could just condense it down to the space of a couple of monitors?
Article describes author going into a conference room for quiet & isolation (also notes people coming in to ask if that's why he's in there).
> Just like your salary was not negotiated in the company break room...

But hopefully you were there.

This is like you (the people) hiring a lawyer (elected representative), who then goes to negotiate your salary in secret without you.

And who receives all kinds of benefits for himself in exchange for accepting a low salary for you.
Evercookies in the wild
Read the Reuters article carefully: that's all the money spent by all the members of the "US Business Coalition for TPP" on all lobbying, it's in the same order of magnitude as it was prior to TPP, and even the surge in spending now isn't all TPP. For instance, Boeing doubled their lobbying --- to lobby against the proposed elimination of the Export-Import Bank.
while that panel will /never/ repay itself with the energy it harvests.

Go on, show your working.
The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that your daily productivity doesn't matter. The incentive here is to make the company as productive as possible over the long term (relative to costs).

This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability.

I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.
6 Figure Exit Interview: How to Sell a SaaS Business
We missed you, Markov activist.
>I can't wear headphones. I literally, physically, can't wear headphones for more than 10~15 minutes, it starts hurting like somebody's driving nails through my eardrums. Now what?

See a doctor? That's definitely not normal.
They aren't "private" like you're probably thinking, they're more like rooms that 2 or 3 people share with glass walls on one side.
Noise cancelling works great with cyclic sounds, such as an airplane engine. With acyclic sounds, such as conversations? They're rubish. No headphone in the market today can cancel out[1] a conversation with a method other than playing another sound high enough to cancel it.

[1] By cancel out, I mean make it impossible to understand the conversation, while the headphones are silent or playing in low volume.
Opportunity knocks (rather, gets served by pneumatic tube): the domain http://burritos.nyc appears to be for sale.
For me, life at work is really important. I want to enjoy my time at the office, and that includes socialising while working (where appropriate) - talking about the music we're playing, sharing work problems, complaining about being hungry, etc. I'd find it too stagnant and boring otherwise. My desk jobs (all web stuff) have been:

- open room of around 15 people, bit of chit-chat but mostly quiet
- small area of 3-4, disparate types so very quiet
- large divided room of 10, pretty raucous, very fun, lots of trash talking
- small area, quiet, mostly alone
- room of 4-5, very social
- room of 3-4, we barely shut up all day while working; put headphones on if you want to concentrate

I'd hate to have a room to myself all day. If I want a stretch like that, I come in early or work later than others.
It's not my expectation that I should reveal my name just to kick back and chat to friends, and that wasn't required on any previous social websites. Nor if I go to the pub or if we sit in the park -- to name two other social venues, one commercial, one public domain.

When I'm on HN I'm building up a professional reputation, so I use my real name (or at least an easily searchable abbreviation of it) here.
So the web is more dominant in Asia and Africa because the is more readily available on feature phones than apps.

Will that change when smartphones have higher penetration? That makes the assumption that smartphones will stay popular long enough for them to trickle down to everyone. And that the Web will not have evolved to fill in the gaps that make apps better. And that the ecosystem of the mobile web being currently built via feature phones won't simply transition to smartphones.
The exploit author told a Forbes reporter that Fennec (Android version of Firefox) has already been patched. If that's correct, that seems to imply two things: (1) MMS is just one of many vectors and (2) apparently somehow the exploit can be mitigated at the app level.
It seems to be common to do that... A friend of mine who was at a unicorn company in SF before it was a unicorn, had nice tables, furniture, and overpowered computers everywhere around the pathway from the entrance to the conference room. So when VCs and business angels came it looked very nice but everybody out of the pathway had nothing like that.
Inside Magic Leap’s mystery $542M augmented reality system
Capturing strong downbursts from a supercell with localized weather sensors
I have ~22 sq ft of desk space http://i.imgur.com/hKkW0T4.jpg and it's glorious, custom built my desk to my requirements (standing because I have a back condition) with enough space to thrown a laptop and another screen on the end, it also feels lovely to work at because I never feel 'hemmed in' by all the stuff on the desk.
1) Knowledge workers need 30 square feet of desk to get optimal efficiency

I expect this to be different now, and possibly more dependent on screen space than on physical desk space.

I think you'll often see workers getting this situation when they really need to be productive by commandeering a conference room and shutting the door. But, it makes sense to provide it for teams in general, in my opinion.

There have been a couple big projects where we flew in the remote people just to get the whole team in a room together. So it's not only the workers that know this; management does as well or they wouldn't approve the travel budget.
I've been frustrated about this for quite a while. About a year ago, I decided that I should just try to roll my own (just for me, using my music collection).

I've since open sourced my effort here:

https://github.com/tchaik/tchaik

What it does (so far):

- prefix grouping (so that Symphonies/Concertos etc are automatically grouped together, and the groupings transfer into playlists etc - so you can queue a whole symphony at once).
- enumeration detection.
- splitting multiple artists into separate fields (common where you have Conductors and Orchestras as the artist).
- reads iTunes XML Music Library files, or will extract metadata from supported audio files in a directory tree (see https://github.com/dhowden/tag for supported formats!).
- store your music in the cloud (Amazon S3 supported), locally (on the same machine that hosts the UI server), or on a remote file store.
- web UI (using ReactJS), music played through HTML5 audio.

Amongst the things that are still in the "plan":
- gapless playback (HTML5 makes this a bit tricky/messy).
- Opus codec support (for streaming to mobile devices).
- many more things!
Does anybody else experience issues with Truecrypt 7.1a?

It displays

X:\ is not accessible.
Incorrect function.

and the Computer Manager displays the drive with the RAW type.

- Even though the filesystem is intact (tested on another Windows 8.1 computer) and

- chkdsk showing NO errors (yes that's right: it even shows the filesystem as being NTFS).

Aside from that my UI/UX experience with Windows 10 is great and I'm really happy. The above thing is a bummer though.
> humor is _meant_ to be offensive

Humour can be offensive. Some great humour is.

Not all humour is offensive. Some great humour isn't.

And when humour is offensive, it's pretty widely agreed that it should "punch up" and never "punch down".
Downvoting isn't equal to censorship

Downvoting obscures the post being downvoted, so it kind of is.
Let's monitor this https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=retard
The OpenDNSSEC project
I'm really interested in hearing more of what people have to say about this.

It seems I often hear/read the general thought on security is that you should use open systems (ie: Cyanogenmod w/o GApps + Debian), but the author makes a good point that without Cyanogenmod on a device that is well supported, Android is going to be missing security updates.
How 1 Microsoft Policy Threatens the World’s Cyber Security
> Except when it is. Given sufficient downvotes, a post will fade to the same color as the background, making it easy to scroll past and not see it.

It doesn't change anything. The content is still available for anyone to see if they want to.

Censorship is about making content unavailable. Not giving the exact same visibility to everything out there isn't censorship. Or upvoting is also a form of censorship, since it moves content above less-upvoted comments making less-upvoted comments more likely to be missed by people who won't scroll to the end of the page.

And for anyone used to HN's way of doing things, it's not hard to spot faded comments and highlight them if they seem of interest given the context around them.
If you know you have a valid case (you aren't a troll), how hard would it be in practice to find someone to front the money for a lawsuit? Or for that matter, could you go to the competition and sell your patent? That is, say Apple's infringing on my patent; will Samsung buy the patent from me for a fair price and then sue Apple?
>> "Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs."

That's a reputation they need to lose. It was important at one time but has been holding them back for years.
Here's a mirror, since 4chan files are sometimes auto-wiped relatively quickly http://i.imgur.com/QSKsW0G.jpg
> it's just pretty odd that such a comment sits at the very top of an enormous technology event.

Tech people like you and me love to nitpick. It's quite "logical", measurable, and it generalizes complex issues into nicely formatted bullet points.
I think it's even worse on Linux, because on Windows you have an anti-virus that might detect you have a malware. On Linux you're blind.
The site was lost long ago. Enforcing a brand on it is one of the things that caused it to become lost. It was a developer tool. Developers want things to work, fairly, reliably, transparently and ideally with (technical) elegance.
MicroMono – Write Micro Services in Monolithic Style
> It demonstrates that at least some of Docker's core functionality does not require a monster application

```The following packages are needed to run bocker.

btrfs-progs
curl
iproute2
iptables
libcgroup-tools
util-linux >= 2.25.2
coreutils >= 7.5
Because most distributions do not ship a new enough version of util-linux you will probably need grab the sources from here and compile it yourself.

Additionally your system will need to be configured with the following.

A btrfs filesystem mounted under /var/bocker
A network bridge called bridge0 and an IP of 10.0.0.1/24
IP forwarding enabled in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
A firewall routing traffic from bridge0 to a physical interface.
A base-image which contains the filesystem to seed your container with.```

Is this the "well-written software" pattern that you're talking about? Because to me, this looks like a "big ball of mud" - i.e. dependence on an eclectic combination of libraries, co-programs, and environment configuration - and indeed, if for some perverse reason I felt like I wanted to deploy this in production, it's exactly the kind of thing I'd wind up writing a Dockerfile for. (Which, I notice is functionality "Bocker" doesn't attempt to replicate.)
As a Linux sysadmin of 17+ years (and now a CIO), this is the best advice posted to this thread. After you complete this I'd suggest Linux From Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) as it'll teach you about the inner workings of a Linux system, which is vital if you want to be a really good sysadmin (a good troubleshooter understands the internals). I would hire someone for an entry level position if they went through this process and if they could explain things at a deep level as that would show me that they have the potential to take it to the next level.
Just some food for thought, Facebook sells its services to the intelligence community. If there were anything that resembled something like a global authoritarian surveillance network, it would be Facebook.

The genius part of it is that people maintain their own personal dossiers on themselves. Who would have ever, in their wildest dreams, been able to think of a future where an authoritarian regime has gotten its citizens to keep their own files on themselves. It's bonkers.

There used to be an assumption that a national, let alone global surveillance state would have been impossible due to the sheer workload of maintaining dossiers on everyone, who would have thought that is totally irrelevant because people are more than willing to self report.
The enterprise I work for won't touch cloud with a 10 foot pole, and I know this because we literally got told to quit asking about it. :)

So yes, even we are building out a pretty beefy internal Hadoop cluster, so I would never say that it will be all-relational-all-the-time. But my point was more that there will be copious amounts of SSAS cubes and Oracle warehouses for the foreseeable future. They work great for their use cases and they have well known problems with well known solutions. Doing what Twitter's team is doing when you aren't Twitter might not be the best idea for everyone, after all.

In our case, we use Teradata for our work and it's quite capable of handling very large workloads, and thus we currently have no plans to spin it down in favor of the new hotness. (Even though the new Hadoop cluster positively dwarfs our TD appliance.) I'd say we have a mixture of both on the horizon, if only because our DBAs are less than cooperative about Java UDFs, so Hadoop is the easiest way for us to do complex processing against our fairly large data set.
It's probably not circumvention if you're using a licensed reader/player.
This is a valid point. I don't really have a response to it other than, I know people like the one I asked y'all to imagine, but I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I know who might fit your imaginary person's description.

You're probably right that this betrays a bias of mine. And you're also probably right that this isn't a great guiding principle for decision-making in the future.

Still, if I'm interested in increasing the total number of people contributing to open source projects, I would give an issue like the use of the word "retard" a fighter's chance.

Maybe it's not worth bending on free speech in some specific cases, but there is a point where it is worth it, ie, if there are enough people in the offended audience that the chance of losing a potential contributor is nontrivial.
Yes, that's my theory as well. As noted in other comments, some studies have shown that an office of 4 people all working on the same project is the most efficient, and other studies have shown that a single office is best for companies with < 10 people.

And Zuckerberg and Brin and Page probably switched from mostly programming to mostly management by the time their companies reached substantially more than 10 people. They probably have really fond memories from their time when their companies were <10 people.
Can't tell if you're joking. Poe's law...
While this particular solution may be a failure, it is a reflection of the demand, which I don't see changing direction anytime soon. This is an attempt to cache in on the fact that competent engineers cannot be found at this price, which only drives the point home. If these experiments fail, it will only drive he price higher.
2 - Yes.

Re: controversy - ok, so the same as GitHub or Reddit, you just arbitrarily choose what to take down and when. In particular, this leaves all repositories open to media-induced attention and controversy, followed by a takedown. IMO, having an explicit, well-defined policy would be much better, even if it's highly restrictive, as long as it's objective (i.e. no "offended" and similar) and changes aren't applied retroactively.

I agree that being open source helps, and I thank you for that, but I still wish there was a hosted site with a large community safe from censorship.