Python Locks, RLocks, Semaphores, Conditions, Events and Queues - <AUTHOR> http://www.laurentluce.com/?p=241

<comment><USER2> While the OP talks specifically about Python, the patterns of a semaphore, lock (aka mutex, a semaphore with value 1), condition and queue are relevant to many languages, many of which are not hampered by a GIL. Personally, the more I use threads, the more I like this way of programming, at least for the request/response paradigm.

<comment><USER3> Try writing an operating system. Then let me know if you still like programming with threads.

<comment><USER2> That is an entirely different problem than the one I typically face. Also while I have no experience writing OS's, but IIRC none of the modern ones have their processes based on event loop. Maybe writing an OS is just not a trivial problem and the code is bound to be somewhat ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.dabeaz.com/python/GIL.pdf></comment>


Kissing Your Socks Goodbye - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/garden/home-organization-advice-from-marie-kondo.html <comment><USER2> This is crap. It's also not very Japanese... the assertion that your apartment already has all the organizational equipment you need is utter bullshit if you've ever visited or lived in an apartment in Tokyo (that costs less than 5k USD a month). Even in less crowded places, there's usually a practical need for extra shelving, hanging space, etc. in order to keep enough clothes and related items around unless you live alone and lead a rather spartan lifestyle. I'm currently managing it, but only barely, and with a bare minimum of... everything.

It doesn't help that consumption here is positively rampant. Without making a value judgement, I'll just leave it here that shopping is a major form of entertainment.

This is the same kind of self-improvement crap that sells so well in the US. Don't make the mistake of thinking Japan doesn't have it too.

So, really, the only objection I have here is the idea that it's a "Japanese art." That's marketing; effective marketing, but like most effective marketing, it's a lie. I got rid of most of my stuff to move here, which was actually one of my goals, and I'm very pleased with it; however, the "joy" tenet is misguided, and the general lack of space in Japan has NOT inspired minimalism. It's inspired clutter and the avoidance of the home as a place to entertain and relax.

Again: Not a value judgment. Just observations from an American living in Japan and surrounded by the culture and people this piece misrepresents.

<comment><USER3> I've seen people who's idea of "organizing" is to Buy More Things. That advice, in my head, was trying to stop those people from Buying More Things in order to unclutter the house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I do a full clean out every year. Our key phrase is "Be ruthless". Some things are obvious tossers, some are obvious keepers, and if it comes to a discussion usually just saying "be ruthless" to the other is enough to force the decision.

It's frightening how much stuff you can collect over the year but also how much stuff you kept last year that you no longer care about.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, if it's my closet or the landfill (as opposed to reselling, and the associated depreciation and opportunity costs) I'm not in a _rush_ to toss things.

Unless there are circumstances like an impending move, or I am running out of space in the closet.

It's kind of a difficult line to walk. I used to keep way too much stuff. But just yesterday I pulled equipment (tools, a VGA cable, a prototyping board) out of the back of my closet that I hadn't used in four or five years, and was able to save myself a couple hundred bucks (computer repair). That VGA cable occupies _very little_ space.

<comment><USER6> I would advise you to not completely rule out the tax that every item you own has. Even just looking at a drawer that is full of odds and ends can be stressful. With that said I am all in favor of re-selling things, then someone can get use out of them and overall waste in the system is reduced. Now I just need to sell my $300 jambox that I only used 10 times...

<comment><USER5> I'm definitely aware of that. But I am also avoiding the other extreme. For years I was cutting "stuff", largely because I was moving constantly. Then I bought a small house and stopped living with other people, and found that a barren house is its own brand of distressing.

I'm not very good at creating a "warm" house, but one thing I do know is that empty rooms and bare walls are not it! So I am not afraid to have a little extra "stuff", for example my $10 pair of ice skates. What little annoyance they provide (Where does one KEEP ice skates!?) is easily repaid by the fun they provide pond skating each winter.

<comment><USER7> Reading your post, I imagined the ice skates as wall decorations. Just a nail needed, and maybe an old frame or some of that fancy ricepaper sticky tape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a pretty simple rule with my stuff, which works because I mostly live out of a suitcase. Since I kind of relocate somewhat often, almost all my belongings end up in boxes regularly. If something hasn't left a suitcase I have with me by the time I'm packing again, I sell/donate/chuck it.

If I'm in a place longer than 3 months, that's the other time I audit all my boxes and see if an item has been there since I moved in. I either try to put it to use right away (if I'd just forgotten about it) or get rid of it if it's not immediately useful. I am really ruthless with my stuff if I'm living in a big city or in the states, where I can re-acquire a similar item on short notice (nearby store or amazon) when needed.

Winter-wear is the only exception to this rule - a single thick jacket, pair of gloves and two sweaters stay in my possession despite not being used for months, for obvious reasons.

Edit: With this rule, I find I own less and less stuff every year, and I have rarely missed anything I've discarded due to this rule (I do miss things I had to discard for other reasons, like when I couldn't afford to reasonably transport my home theater system across continents).

</comment><comment><USER9> This sounds very similar to Alicorn's How to Have Things Correctly [http://lesswrong.com/lw/eyt/how_to_have_things_correctly/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/eyt/how_to_have_things_correctly/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Right this moment, my mom's going through my old school books and papers - work I did from ages 7-16. I still have C64 printouts from the 80s, old BASIC listings and graphics. And lots more besides.

These are the equivalent of old family photos. You can't capture these things electronically! There's no way to run your fingers over the curves and grooves of decades-old handwriting, to hold a sheaf of printouts to your nose and have the scent of Epson dot matrix ink bring back memories of days long-gone.

This is personal history, a record of who I once was. If I'd thrown it all out, who would I be now?

</comment><comment><USER11> >For Ms. Kondo's instruction on sorting papers is perhaps the most liberating of all her maxims: Just throw them all away.... >"There is nothing more annoying than papers," she says firmly. "After all, they will never spark joy, no matter how carefully you keep them."

Strongly agree with this. Scanning every document I owned, then discarding the originals (save for things like my birth certificate, social security card, etc.) was one of the most liberating things I have ever done.

Now, I scan every piece of paper I have collected over a month, then shred and recycle.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you do with old tax returns?

<comment><USER12> I dunno about others, but I use TaxACT to file my taxes and it spits out a PDF of my full return. My W2s are delivered as PDFs through my employer's internal site. Everything else (student loan interest, investments, etc) is downloadable. The only tax document that doesn't come electronically is the mortgage interest statement from my (crappy) servicer so I scan it and shred it. Hopefully that gets fixed next year when I refinance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see. My taxes are complicated enough to require a CPA, which means I get a thick envelope full of papers back from him that I promptly stick in a box and hope never to look at again. (Until recently when I started working on thr mortgage preapproval process.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I clean out my belongings at the end of every month, and it is surprisingly refreshing to see how much unused stuff has been cleared out of my home.

But I guess it's easier to live a lifestyle as a 24-year-old where I can pack up and move to a new location easily... I imagine it's more difficult for older people that have more items of sentimental value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm 32 and have become _less_ sentimental over time. I went through an aggressive cleaning spree about six months ago, and gave away about 1/3 of my belongings.

<comment><USER14> 33, never been very sentimental and I don't own much stuff, but there are those weird little things. Sitting here in my office is the manual film camera I used during photography class in college. I've been meaning to put on eBay. It hasn't been used in many years and I could always get another camera, if I wanted one. And I wouldn't even want this model again, if I were starting from scratch. But once it's gone, I'll never have _this_ camera again. I don't know why that matters, but it somehow does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Camera gear is the only part of my collection of stuff that is growing, but—on the plus side of things—I actually make use of all five cameras that I own:

* Fuji medium format film rangefinder

* Leica M6 35mm film rangefinder

* Hasselblad 501CM medium format film SLR

* Fuji X-T1 SLR-style digital mirrorless

* Fuji X100s digital rangefinder

I can't imagine needing or wanting to buy another camera without paring down on my existing collection[1].

On another note, you should run a roll of film through it just for fun. I've been compiling a list of available types of film, along with darkrooms and film labs where you can have it developed here: [http://www.ishootfilm.org](http://www.ishootfilm.org)

[1] Except for a 4x5 large format camera, which I've been drooling over for months. Still, they're sufficiently impractical that I've resisted the urge.

<comment><USER15> Hmm, yes, have a Mamiya medium format SLR, M6, X100s, but 4x5 is a bit small, have a 5x7. Film cameras are much more interesting, you can have more - borrowing a Hasselblad Xpan at the minute.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd definitely rather have a 5x7 or 8x10 than a 4x5, but film availability for 5x7 seems...limited. I only know of ten film stocks available in a 5x7 format[1] vs. 25 for 4x5[2] (including some C-41 and E-6) and 19 for 8x10[3] (again including C-41 and E-6).

And then, of course, 4x5 seems moderately impractical, and 8x10 only more so ;)

[1] [http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?utf8=✓&film_size%5B%5D=size_5...](http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?utf8=✓&film_size%5B%5D=size_5x7)

[2] [http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?film_size%5B%5D=size_4x5&utf8...](http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?film_size%5B%5D=size_4x5&utf8=✓)

[3] [http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?utf8=✓&film_size%5B%5D=size_8...](http://www.ishootfilm.org/film?utf8=✓&film_size%5B%5D=size_8x10)

<comment><USER15> There is more 5x7 than that - Fuji still make some [http://www.japanexposures.com/shop/film-analog/film/sheet- fi...](http://www.japanexposures.com/shop/film-analog/film/sheet-film/page-2/) and Kodak Portra is available for special order, and thats just the colour ones. You used to get a bunch in half plate and European metric sizes too, although less now. (I also have an 8x8 back for my camera and cut down 8x10...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see, from Japan. Cool, thanks for the links. I'll add them.

edit: all of the 5x7 film listed there is out of stock :-\

<comment><USER15> Argh, wonder if it is discontinued. You can get Rollei Ortho 25 5x7 [http://www.macodirect.de/films-blackwhite-films-sheet- films-...](http://www.macodirect.de/films-blackwhite-films-sheet-films-178cm- rollei-rollei-ortho-sheet- filmbr127x178cm-5x710-sheets-p-426.html?language=en&osCsid=f3987683c9a45d56e5e3ecffa22ab2d6)

Also Ilford do other films ie Delta 100 in any size in their annual ULF run [http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/201457131359681.pdf](http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/201457131359681.pdf) (their Ortho is 13x18cm which needs different holders but they are fairly easy to get).

But yes its got much worse recently... I mostly stick to Ilford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> slightly OT, but I remember seeing the blog of some guy who got rid of everything he owned except for a laptop, a kindle, and some clothes, does anybody remember this person?

I've always been fascinated at having as little junk as possible, especially since I've been moving very often recently.

<comment><USER17> Not the same guy, but figured I might as well put this here. I've been living on what can fit in a suitcase for the past... year or so? Especially now that most of our valuable possessions — photos, writing, music, video — can be digitized, it's awfully liberating to pare your physical inventory down to the bare minimum.

I'm doing this for travel purposes, but the end result is mostly the same, I think.

[http://www.archagon.net/a-few-pointless- thoughts/2013/8/28/g...](http://www.archagon.net/a-few-pointless- thoughts/2013/8/28/gathering-the-goods)

[http://www.archagon.net/a-few-pointless- thoughts/2014/6/15/g...](http://www.archagon.net/a-few-pointless- thoughts/2014/6/15/gathering-the-goods-take-2)

<comment><USER18> I've been living out of a suitcase for the most part, but recently I've been developing my hobby of cooking, and now I'm anchored down by a huge pile of heavy, expensive kitchen items.

<comment><USER19> It's funny, but the kitchen is my main reason for thinking about getting a house now... I'm turning 40 at the end of the year, and though I had a house with an ex-wife, I was only there on the weekends for the most part. Though I like having a big entertainment center, I could live without it... and all the extra "stuff" I could easily pair down.

My kitchen, however is quite a bit different... I have the assortment of pots, pans, utensils and even gadgets that I actually use pretty regularly. I'm actually about out of space in my kitchen now, and thinking it might be time to look into getting a house again. That, or might get a nice armoire or wardrobe to expand my storage near the kitchen with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If Marie Kondo can show me how to fold a king-size fitted sheet properly, I'll suggest that's a feat worthy of nomination for the Nobel Prize in Physics...

<comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHTyH2nuFAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHTyH2nuFAw)

Been following this method for a few years, and worked really well. I also suggest just not buying fitted sheets if you make your bed everything morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you have a compulsive reading disorder[1] and need to shed books, consider [http://www.books4cause.com/](http://www.books4cause.com/) \-- they will pick up your books and provide a tax deduction receipt. The last time I dealt with them was 176 books, no problem. My local (Queens, NY) libraries weren't so friendly.

[1] [http://bit.ly/1w1NT64](http://bit.ly/1w1NT64)

<comment><USER3> The median value of a used book is $0. Most people don't want your book at all. The only way bookstores make money is by having exactly the book you want when you want it.

Libraries have a hard enough time getting rid of yesterday's books; they don't want yours to add to their problems. Libraries are places of learning, not museums for books.

I just chuck most books to the Goodwill or Amvets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wouldn't it be incredible if this was the attitude of your average American?

<comment><USER24> Why? What are the "incredible" benefits that you imagine? This is about taking things that once brought you enough "joy" that you bought them and moving them from closets to landfills, probably making room to buy some more joy.

I'm not saying that tidying up is a bad idea--I think it's a _good_ idea--but I'm not sure what imagined consequences have filled you with such rapture.

<comment><USER23> If you are mindful of the things that you have, you tend to acquire less of them.

<comment><USER24> Or more. After clearing out more space in your home, and thinking "mindfully" about what you like and don't like, you could just as easily become _more_ interested in acquiring new things than if your home were already "full" and you weren't thinking about things. You could be right, and I'm somewhat curious to know, but I'm not aware of any evidence either way, and I'm skeptical that such certain claims may be based more on a fashionable type of utopian theory than on real-world evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice methodology described (well, maybe methodology is too heavy a word) by I disliked all the BS self-references and attempts at jokes by the journalist. Either cover your subject with respect or don't.</comment>


My bank forces me to use 6 digits as a password for online services - <AUTHOR>

I just told labanquepostale.fr about this issue via their internal messaging system, and they justify it by saying that I also have to input a 10 character identifier, and that their "virtual keyboard" changes the arrangement of the digits at each logon.<p>How can this be secure? If it's not, what would be good arguments to get them to think about changing it? <comment><USER2> They often do stuff like this so it is easier to verify a customer via a phone system (e.g. "enter your pin now!").

But, yes, it is bad practice and lazy. They could trivially have a "phone pin" or just verify security questions over the phone like almost every other bank on the planet.

As nodata quite correctly pointed out, it could be made secure by locking out your account after a very short number of tries (e.g. 5). Then requiring telephone or email verification to re-enable it. That would stop brute force, dictionary, and distributed versions of the same from effectively working no matter how small the password space is.

In my experience companies who enforce things like a 6 character password are not the kind of who will sit there and calculate out the attempts/minute and "time to break (TTB)."

Plus the thing they said about their virtual keyboard shows utter ignorance and incompetence. Professional keyloggers don't literally log your keys! They hook into the network stack or browser and literally grab completed POST HTTP/s requests, so a virtual keyboard adds nothing at all security wise (and arguably makes it easier for someone to shoulder surf you, even if that threat is highly overblown and rarely exists).

So, yeah... Good luck convincing them. Whoever works there and making security decisions clearly is incompetent and it will likely take internal rather than external pressure for that to change.

<comment><USER3> It makes it more secure, but not fully. If the password hashes ever got dumped via other means, the effort required to brute force those hashes (even salted) would still be far less than you want it to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It depends on how quickly they lock your account if the wrong password is entered.

If they lock it after three goes, how is a 6 digit password less secure than a 100 character password?

<comment><USER5> 6 digits are less secure than 100 characters because when asked to generate a 6 digit password, many _many_ people will pick their birthdate, wedding anniversary, or childrens' birthdate.

With an alphanumeric password, many people will still pick a variation of "password12345" or "letmein!!", but at least then their banking password is not literally posted on their public Facebook page. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, it might be secure from their point of view but from user's (yours) definitely too anoying. I'm sure that it's not easy to update/migrate to new security system but some solutions are just crying to be updated.

Btw, I found this tweet that describes bank's security measures :)- [https://twitter.com/webchaeschtli/status/462584313209696258](https://twitter.com/webchaeschtli/status/462584313209696258)

</comment><comment><USER7> IME they just ignore the public</comment>


As Office Space Shrinks, So Does Privacy for Workers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/nyregion/as-office-space-shrinks-so-does-privacy-for-workers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> _" Yodle's chief executive, Court Cunningham, so values being close to other employees that he does not want a private office."_

I've had a few bosses/CEOs who said they loved open space and forced it on everyone. What always ended up happening is that said CEO/boss would then informally requisition the shared conference/meeting room as their own personal office (when they spend 90% of the day in there, it's hard to see it as "the conference room" rather than "X's unofficial office"), and people would be stuck taking Skype calls/meetings in the open space, contributing to ridiculous noise levels (oh and my favorite part was the CEO who'd then step out of his meeting room to tell us we were making too much noise).

 _She became a convert. "It's fun," she said. "That's the reason I wouldn't want an office. It's fun — if you like the people you work with."_

Terrible way to end the article, dismissing all of the concerns that were raised. But it's probably a submarine article planted by the architecture firm anyway.

I have a private office now, and I'd put it in the top 3 of the best things about my job. I have a hard time imagining going back to open space without losing most of my sanity and productivity.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't an architecture firm be advocating for _more_ space?

Cornell did a study awhile back that found that employees with their own private offices collaborate less often with their colleagues. A lot less. In fact their very perception of what constituted "frequent" interaction plummeted from several times a day to a few times a week. And it happened in scheduled meetings whereas it was more ad hoc in an open plan office.

They also noted something very interesting: we tend to prioritize our own personal productivity over team productivity, probably because most of us are compensated and promoted based on personal accomplishments.

You can see why management struggles with balancing these two objectives in space design. I think most of the comments here are very cynical but not very well reasoned. They tend to have not very well thought through conspiracy theories, like architecture firms wanting smaller spaces (what?) or pinning it all on cost cutting. Cost cutting? Businesses pay engineers HUGE salaries; if there was clear evidence that a given office plan was significantly less productive it would logically be a huge _waste_ of money to put their highly paid employees in it.

The reality is there is a balance of individual and team productivity that organizations need to achieve. We have learned a lot about the drawbacks to purely private office layouts (like lower team collaboration and depressingly poor social interaction). We are learning about the drawbacks to purely one big open plan layouts (like noise as it scales beyond a handful). There is no one easy solution.

Source: _Organizational Dilemmas and Workplace Solutions ‐ Work Effectiveness, Communication, and Office_ \- Cornell University International Workplace Studies Program [https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140615182702/http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/office_ex2_1238259706.pdf)

<comment><USER4> There are actually a large number of these studies of which the one you linked is...one.

Your logic as to why management makes these choices suggests you think organizations operate on logic vs institutional habits, trends and intra organization conflict. Citation needed ;).

Your survey of sentiment of the comments here (or the thousands made in similar posts) doesn't seem particular rich or nuanced, perhaps you are working deliberately with a supposition that your current situation is "just fine"?

<comment><USER3> Open plan is a relatively recent trend[1], ergo it cannot reflect an "institutional habit". Again with the poor reasoning.

One thing the Cornell study highlights is how engineers have a class bias in favor of maximum individual productivity. That is how they are rewarded. It would follow that there would be many "thousands" of comments in favor of private offices. Where these seem to fall flat is in explaining why management nonetheless build open plan offices that optimize for team collaboration, e.g. ascribing it to "greed" or "habit" or "architecture firm conspiracy" \-- that is where the logic errors arise.

[1] It is also a very old trend historically, but in the tech sector it is a recent trend following cubes and offices.

<comment><USER5> Recent? Cubicle farms have been around for 30 years, now. We're simply at the truly extreme end of a very long term trend.

As for why, the answers there are fairly simple: cost and snake oil. 30 years ago open plans and cubicles were pitched as a way to increase "collaboration", with no corroborating evidence that showed a commensurate increase in overall productivity. It was, to put it plainly, salesmanship and BS.

I'd strongly recommend a pass through Peopleware for a more thorough treatment on the topic.

<comment><USER3> Open plan is a distinctly different approach than cubicles.

<comment><USER5> True. It seems cubicles were an attempt to undo some of the damage of open plan architecture, which goes back even further than I thought:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-origin-of- cubi...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-origin-of-cubicles-an/)

Damn you, Frank Lloyd Wright!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are an engineer, developer, or programmer the only way to fight the power on this is to refuse to accept offers from companies who treat their employees like cattle. It's amazing that I still hear founders getting very upset about the fact that they can't hire, while enacting "open office" or "bullpen" policies like the one at Yodle.

<comment><USER7> Short of trolling the recruitment process, this is hard to do in reality.

<comment><USER8> I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig, seeing what new tech trends are popping up in interviews (and what specific gotcha questions are popular), and so on. Generally I don't intend to take the job. It could certainly be interpreted as trolling the process, but I've taken the opportunity to note things I didn't love about the company when I decline offers (I see it as the mirror of wanting a company to be specific about weaknesses if they choose not to hire me), including open or noisy office space, the appearance of high pressure to work unnecessarily lengthy hours, poor clarity in equity granting, and lack of diversity.

<comment><USER9> >I interview 3-4 times/month in the bay area, as a way of keeping myself in tune with the interview process for when I do want a new gig

Sounds like you're wasting a lot of people's time and resources.

<comment> shawn-furyan Companies could obviate the need for this sort of reconnaissance by being more open about pay expectations and honest about experience requirements. They aren't because they perceive a benefit to holding an information advantage over applicants. If this information advantage wasn't widely sought by firms, then there would be no advantage to interviewing several times a month. So really, any given firm could avoid their time being wasted by the gp. But presumably they would rather have their time wasted than to give up their information advantage, so it doesn't really make sense to lay all the responsibility for wasting people's time at the feet of the gp. Most candidates just accept the information disadvantage. The gp doesn't, but that's merely a rational response to the incentives put forth by the job market.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an aside, but I think there's a strong case to be made for publishing salaries, with names. I know it's an intimidating step, but this information is easily found on line for public service workers. The sky hasn't fallen, and there are a number of real benefits.

One possible angle - perhaps openly publishing payroll info (name, title, pay) should be a requirement for all companies that receive an H1B or other work visa.

Keep in mind, there is precedent. Information about how much a house sold for is public. Imagine if, when you were selling your house, you only had a bit of information gleaned from conversations with neighbors here and there, whereas the buyer had a massive database at his or her disposal with exact prices for every house sold in your neighborhood in the last 50 years. You'd be at a massive disadvantage. That's the situation employees are in.

<comment><USER10> As of 2001 is was a requirement to post the salary of H1-B employees. That how while at Lucent I found out the one who was if anything better at the particular job we were doing was earning $48K to my $80K :-(.

<comment><AUTHOR> That alone is pretty important information, though I'd go one step farther and require all employee payroll data to be published.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little social wall between you as you're not on their level.

I had a friend who worked in a job doing social research, and one of the jobs was talking to people about childhood sexual abuse that they had, a job that was only done by the more experienced staff. This is random cold-calling to strangers, and it was handled very delicately, reminding the person at regular intervals that they can stop the survey any time and that all questions were optional. He said the odd thing was that if someone started the survey, they generally completed the 20-minute interview, and it was only in the demographics section at the end that people bridled a little - at the 'salary range' question.

Some people don't care about who makes what salary. A lot of people use it to varying degrees as a social status signaller. I've tried being open about mine, and these days, I'd prefer not to share, though I still do with close friends who I know aren't wanky about salary.

<comment><USER12> > Yeah, that doesn't work. I used to be really open with what I earned, > because I didn't care if people knew. Turns out that sometimes people can > get a bit resentful if you do similar jobs and you earn a little more than > them. And sometimes people that do similar jobs and earn a little or a lot > more than you seem to take this as a social signal and you get a new little > social wall between you as you're not on their level.

This is really a consequence of a culture that confuses material compensation with personal worth and success. I wonder if this is different outside of the western/North American job market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sometimes I wonder at the limits of productivity here. Your average Office worker can do things that took multiple people to do in the pre-business IT age. We're so productive that we have no more low-hanging fruit to grab. Now we've entered the age of cargo-cult HR thinking like these office plans which are trying to squeeze out some tiny bit of productivity at the cost of extra misery for workers.

It saddens me a bit to think that instead of being rewarded for being productive and competitive, we're just squeezed more and more. Remember when futurists in the past were predicting the 3 or 4 day workweek because of productivity gains and automation? People are working just as long and whatever dividends are being paid out from the efficiencies of modern work, just seem to be going nowhere or into the pockets of ownership.

Personally, I'm hoping this stuff gets so bad that the white collar types start a revolt of sorts. We're seeing the blue collar types being 1099'd to death or worked hard at below living wages. Maybe its time we got squeezed so hard that we start taking a more political stance. Basing our modern work environment on what is essentially 1890's factory work policies (9-5, weekends, lunch breaks) seems crazy. I'm not even sure why I'm even in the office most days. Its all so inefficient and backwards, that all this open office shuffling just seems to be a way to guarantee that we won't ask for the 4 day workweek or the 35 hour week, via losing productivity by having coworkers yell in our ears all day.

I'm not saying this is intentional, its just management incompetence. They also have no idea what to do with this glut of cheap labor. Shoving us into smaller cubes or open spaces just seems like the next logical move when they hold all the cards.

</comment><comment><USER14> I work remote. I don't understand why you all tolerate this kind of nonsense.

Excluding some short-term engagements and occasional visits to client offices, I haven't worked in an office on a daily basis since 2008. Every time I go into a client's physical office, it's like walking into somebody's den and finding an 8-track tape recorder, a black-and-white TV set, a rotary phone, and a Betamax.

When I go into an office, I don't think "why do people even do this?" I think, "why _did_ people even do this?" It's so archaic that even when I see it happening right in front of my eyes, I have to remind myself that it still isn't over.

Finding a remote job is a lot harder than finding a job at a Bay Area startup, because companies which hire remote hire from all over. But it's absolutely worth it. And finding remote _clients_ is relatively easy.

Don't subject yourself to this kind of foolishness. There's nothing professional or reasonable about it. It's just a vestigial custom, a primitive ritual which hasn't fully died out yet.

<comment><USER15> A lot of people aren't like us, they are extroverts and they love going in and seeing everyone, and they hate being at home. Even I as an introvert got depressed being at home everyday and not having somewhere to go. The best is a mix with flexibility.

Remote will never apply to everyone and every line of work.

<comment><USER16> Most cities have coworking spaces. Even if you only work there once a week they're a great for replacing the social aspect of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When interviewing, I will absolutely rule a company out if the office space isn't appropriate. I like open offices, but I need my own desk, and my back to a wall. Any companies with bullpen-style shared long tables is immediately out.

<comment><USER18> _but I need my own desk, and my back to a wall_

I'm curious why you want your back to the wall. All the people I know that do this are chronic goof offs. They always scramble to cover whatever they're looking at when I come in to talk with them.

I am genuinely curious and not trolling you.

EDIT: downvotes? Really? This is a very legit question and is producing legit conversation.

<comment><USER19> I can't speak for the original commenter, but it seems reasonable to me, because if your monitor is facing away from a wall, there is a constant burden of wondering who might be behind you and what they might think of what is on your screen. And this is when you're doing actual work.

When you're _not_ doing work, it makes goofing off on the Internet less of a mental relief, and things are overall more stressful.

<comment><USER20> Same here. It's important to not feel like someone may hit you in the back of the head with no warning. Admittedly, it's not something that happens in most workplaces... most not all.

It's a primal fear kind of thing, and doesn't have to be rational.

<comment><USER17> Yep, pretty much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It really boggles my mind how the default approach to corporate real estate in the startup world seems to be getting a lease in a trendy (ie, expensive) neighborhood, spending significant money to make the space nicer, paying a lot in terms of perks (food, laundry, etc)....but at the end of the day, everyone's in this big open-air, hangar-like environment where you can't have a private conversation, and there's such a demand for conference room time that it becomes a source of conflict.

I used to work in an office in a trendy part of NYC at a company that had 3 catered meals per day, a VERY well-stocked liquor cabinet, and a varied, seemingly endless supply of high-end drinks and snacks (as in the fresh- squeezed juices that retail for $9.99, candy imported from Japan, etc). They also had an open office that was not horribly crowded but very open nonetheless.

I have also worked in a shabby nondescript office in a standard, non-sexy building and neighborhood where I had my own office with a door that closed. It wasn't big, but it was private.

The latter was definitely cheaper on a $/employee basis, and not only did I prefer it in an abstract way, but I was definitely more productive.

</comment><comment><USER22> Open offices are cheap. That's why they are so beloved.

They're also very distracting. I'm in an office right now where I have to use headphones and loud music to not listen to sales and account management all day... and that's just the audio distractions.

<comment><USER23> That's a classic open office plan fail. Sales and account management do not need to be in the same space as dev.

<comment><USER24> No, but you see, it fosters synergy between teams

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, fun all right. "Why aren't you finished with your project?"

"I can't concentrate at the office. But I'm having fun. Isn't that enough?"

"Sure, sure. Carry on!"

</comment><comment><USER26> What kills me about this is that for me (and a lot of people) it's not about square footage.

It's about distractions. I would literally be fine working inside a phone booth-sized office that provided some visual and auditory privacy.

<comment><USER27> Good point. I completely agree. While my Bose QC-15 headphones can often go a long way toward the auditory privacy, the visual part is still there (and highly distracting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> At my last gig we built out a new office space- of course all the execs got offices and none of the support people who talk on the phones all day got an office.

So everyone was in a giant open room with a concrete floor and hard desks- a couple rugs, but it didn't cut it.

On top of that the CTO said he didn't like not being able to see the devs so he put a dropcam on the shelf over our area... so open area for devs plus a camera recording everything we say and do and only one person with access...

<comment><USER29> How did he still have people working for him? I imagine that kind of bullshit would make most of the team walk out.

<comment><USER28> Yea, it did me. Most people are just willing to put up with whatever- I really want to enjoy the work I do and where I work so it was a pretty big deal for me. Everyone thought I was overreacting. They did take the camera down- not sure if it went back up...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _Long tables would have given each person even less space, he said — about 2 feet wide by 1 ½ feet deep._

Seriously? 2 feet is elbow-bumping width. Is this moron planning office space, or seating for fucking RyanAir?

</comment><comment><USER31> One of the times this came up[1] someone made a good point (wish I could save comments :) ) about the important distinction between sharing an open office with engineers, versus random people walking by/loud sales cales/managers/etc. In the first case, people don't mind interruptions - from other engineers. In the second case, interruptions are terrible. So according to that comment, a group of expert engineers working in a shared space can really experience some synergy. sometimes if you can say, "hey do you have a sec" and ask a super- quick engineering question, it can really help. If a few people start discussing architecture, everyone can join. etc. Apparently it works. If it's other engineers.

This makes me wonder.

Reading our present article - what we're really missing is some data. Really, any data. All of those people who have beaten it into us that "correlation is not causation" have won a Pyrrhic victory. We're left without even an indication of what the correlation is.

I have no idea _whatsoever_ whether the data points plotting productivity (y) and space per worker (x) is a random scatter plot, clearly correlated positively, negatively, has a peak, has any shape at all, or whatever.

I don't care what data you're showing. For the y axis you can use startup market cap/valuation per employee for all I care. You can use lines of code - a terrible metric. Or whatever other proxy for productivity you want.

But whatever you use, anything is better than nothing at all.

What I'm wondering is: in a software or startup context - or any context at all - what is the _shape_ of the correlation at all between productivity and space per worker?

This seems to be a central question, but the article only hints at an answer without presenting any data at all.

Since it's clearly a choice all organizations and startups face - let's see it!

-

[1] Other discussions on open offices:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) (top stories)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=open%20office&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment) (top comments)

</comment><comment><USER23> All the complaints about open office plans for software development are valid. However, having worked at many places that have both open and closed office spaces, I've found that the closed office spaces promote knowledge siloing, creating a lot of power for people who have had more time (to make a mess) in the code.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do open office planning. One of the basics is, why do you need 40 people to ship your product? Are you sending rockets to mars? Creating a LHC? Open plans start and end with a half a dozen people. Beyond that size, they need their own room.

<comment><USER5> There's also a right way and a wrong way to disseminate information within a team that doesn't require a work environment that's detrimental to productivity (code reviews and pair programming immediately come to mind).

Open plans as a way to avoid "siloing" is the wrong solution to a much bigger problem.

<comment><USER23> The most important thing in software is that humans build software systems. And that they need to communicate with as high-fidelity and efficiency possible. Often that works with small teams that are co-located without doors. If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it. I might spend then next 1/2 hour trying to read code. Maybe I'll figure it out but you could have just told me in 15 seconds. That's the idea here. But it can work with closed doors, too; especially as the product matures (or, heh, ossifies).

<comment><USER5> _Often that works with small teams that are co-located without doors. If I have to get up to ask you a question, I might not ask it. I might spend then next 1 /2 hour trying to read code. Maybe I'll figure it out but you could have just told me in 15 seconds._

The flipside is that, if you spend a half hour figuring something out instead of interrupting me, you don't interrupt my flow, which could translate into a much greater reduction in productivity than if you'd just dealt with it yourself.

Put another way: open offices make it _too_ easy to interrupt someone else.

In our space we find a balance with electronic communication. Two person offices reduce distraction. IRC and email serve as a middle ground to interruption (as folks on the receiving end can control when the interruption occurs). Interruptions in meatspace only occur when they're actually necessary.

Edit:

And I forgot the other big benefit: two person offices mean you can co-locate people who work in the same product area, and when broader discussions need to happen, the offices can double as meeting spaces without everyone else being interrupted by the conversation.

So offices actually _assist_ in facilitating communication as the threat of distracting others is substantially reduced.

<comment><USER23> "Could" translate. Not "Does" translate. Turn this around again. What's more valuable: your productivity or the overall team productivity? Open offices don't have to be a place where it's "too easy to interrupt", but I agree they often are.

<comment><USER5> I'll put my money on "does".

If you don't interrupt me, you lose 30 minutes of your time solving your problem (and, by the way, learn to learn along the way).

If you do interrupt me, you save yourself, say, 25 minutes, while I probably lose 60 minutes of effective flow time ("gee, I'm distracted now, might as well go to the bathroom and get another coffee while I'm at it... oh hey, look some emails, let's take a look at those...").

And that's ignoring the distraction you create for all the folks around me as you come and ask your question.

So in terms of overall _team_ productivity (which is a function of the individual productivity levels of the team members), I will happily take the bet that open offices are far worse than closed ones in the the scenario you've proposed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> God forbid you let people work from home.

<comment><USER25> Can't do that, we looked at the VPN logs and no one ever logged in.

<comment><USER33> That doesn't mean no one would ever log in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Companies that use open plan offices do it for the appearance of productivity over actual productivity.

Actual productivity in modern software enterprises is visible in task management tools like JIRA and in the repos, and communication, especially in an environment where spoken English might not be everyone's strength, is best seen in a Hangout or other chat/collaboration tool.

Failing to accommodate workers' preferences for working conditions is just plain bad practice, no matter what such preferences might be or how they might vary depending on the nature of a project. You can always see the health of a team and of a project no matter how project resources are located and connected.

If the boss is actually minding the store, he'll be doing it by taking a look at how his projects are proceeding, using objective metrics, not "by walking around" or at meetings.

The boss may need a lieutenant to grok JIRA for him. But failing to be able to manage a project because you can't look over everyone's shoulder is a management failure, not a failure of the work environment.

</comment><comment><USER35> I work crammed into a long table at a Starbucks, and I much prefer it to the company office. Call me crazy, but I don't think office space and privacy is the most important thing to office workers.

The problem is they're stuck in an office.

<comment><USER36> you have a sense of privacy in public, a lot more than in a space with a set group of people that you have to constantly interact with. in a cafe nobody cares how "busy" you look, you're just getting stuff done, in an office it quickly becomes about appearances, or leaving only after your boss left even if you're no longer productive, etc. basically in a public space people can "judge" what you're doing but it doesn't matter while in a private space people "judge" you and it matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is why companies move to the suburbs. Prestige of a Manhattan address over the comforts of the burbs.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wouldn't really mind an 'open' space if I was sitting with people who wanted a similar environment. I want... low lighting and min noise. I don't think everyone wants that but the office should be hacked up to accommodate environments that allow people to focus. I know people who thrive in the noise, but I do not.

Last job I was in a short cube right next to the breakroom so ALL DAY people walked by, talked and stared at my screen. It drove me nuts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this is what Sun Micro did a long time back. At many of the drop in centers, Sun divided the office space into loud office and quiet office. The office manager clearly was empowered to kick people out of the quiet office if they were making noise, so it worked.

The downside is that it does help to be able to have a private conversion, spontaneously. A UI expert pops by your office, asks a few questions, the conversation shifts over to work, you end up showing a few screens, talking about it. You can do this in an office without worrying about disrupting the people around you (my experience is that devs tend to be far more sensitive about this).

So ironically, I actually think that open offices reduce the amount of communication between certain types of workers, because people who value quiet are shy about making noise (because they know how much it derails their own work). As a result, the casual conversations that lead to valuable work related conversations never happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any manager of a technical group who says open plans result in a better product or service are either (1) lying because "open" is cheaper (more bodies per square foot / meter), or (2) completely ignorant of the concept of concentration and focus, and therefore not competent management.

My expectation is that the former is the most often case.

</comment><comment><USER40> I just closed our 4000sq ft office after 2.5 years and went fully remote. That office was my "dream" office for my small company. Here's what I learned: 1\. 4000 sq ft is way too small for an open office. There's no where for anyone to work quietly, without distraction. 2\. Engineers and people that need to work without distraction (like me) just can't get enough done. 3\. Working remotely in a quiet space is 10x more productive for me, and as far as I can tell, my co-workers. 4\. The office space is for my ego, not for my shareholders. 5\. Some people are not setup for remote working and I don't think there are enough viable co-working situations yet. Just an opinion. These people need an office to work at.

There is no doubt in my mind that if I could I would short office space. It's way overpriced and counterproductive.

</comment><comment><USER41> It is not about privacy, but about concentration and productivity.

</comment><comment><USER42> Both approaches have merit. Any solutions would do well to achieve the best of both while still remaining feasible.

In the past, I've thought about physically-convertible setups, but this is probably far too exotic to be practical. Likewise, affording each employee two desks, one of each type, doesn't rank very high on the feasibility scale either.

What about emulating helicopter cabin communication?

Give each employee audiophile-grade closed headphones and\or in-ear monitors. Then, issue a high quality microphone along with it. Finally, use this setup with say, Slack (once they add voice support).

Open office. Each desk angled back-to-wall or similar to afford visual privacy, and the only problem you're left with is conversational privacy.

For that, anything from conference rooms to sufficiently loud artificial ambient office noise could work.

</comment><comment><USER43> I work for an IT consultancy that has about 40 people and an open office. I have never had any issues. Probably because almost everyone is a developer/administrator and people mostly prefer communicating through IRC. The office space is completely silent, and the desks are in groups, far apart from each other. It is wonderful, looks good and doesn't make me feel depressed sitting in a cubicle with partitions shorter than my height giving a fake sense of privacy.

All I am saying is there is a wrong way and a right way of maintaining open offices. Bashing all open offices for being cheap and unproductive is naive.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm curious as to why the responses to this topic don't mention electronic communication more often. Tapping someone on the shoulder when they're in flow leads not only to immediate destruction of mental state, but usually someone nearly falling out of their chair.

Headphones being the universal symbol for "otherwise occupied, please DND", why don't people use these electronic communication systems we spent the last two decades developing?

You get an IM along the lines of "Got a sec?" and you can gracefully swap that mental state out to disk and address the question.

Really, it's a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER45> Considering how cheap office space is compared to labor, the trend of compacting workers into ever tinier cubes (with or without walls) is insane.

I wrote about good data science/engineer environments in Agile Data Science (O'Reilly, 2012). You can read it here: [https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/agile-data- sc...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/agile-data- science/9781449326890/ch01.html)

Pasted inline:

Agile Environments: Engineering Productivity

Generalists require more uninterrupted concentration and quiet than do specialists. That is because the context of their work is broader, therefore their immersion is deeper. Their environment must suit this need.

Invest in 2-3x the space of a typical cube farm, or you are wasting your people. In this setup, some people don't need desks, which drives costs down.

Rows of cubicles like cells of a hive. Overbooked conference rooms camped and decamped. Microsoft Outlook a modern punchcard. Monolithic insanity. A sea of cubes.

Deadlines interrupted by oscillating cacophonies of rumors shouted, spread like waves uninterrupted by naked desks. Headphone budgets. Not working, close together. Decibel induced telecommuting. The open plan.

Competing monstrosities seeking productivity but not finding it.

—Poem by Author

Before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. That's ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content.

—Steve Jobs

We can do better. We should do better. It costs more, but it is inexpensive.

In Agile Data Science, we recognize team members as creative workers, not office workers. We therefore structure our environment more like studio than office. At the same time, we recognize that employing advanced mathematics on data to build products requires quiet contemplation and intense focus. So we incorporate elements of the library as well.

Many enterprises limit their productivity enhancement of employees to the acquisition of skills. However, about 86% of productivity problems reside in the work environment of organizations. The work environment has effect on the performance of employees. The type of work environment in which employees operate determines the way in which such enterprises prosper.

—Akinyele Samuel Taiwo

It is much higher cost to employ people than it is to maintain and operate a building, hence spending money on improving the work environment is the most cost effective way of improving productivity because of small percentage increase in productivity of 0.1% to 2% can have dramatic effects on the profitability of the company. —

—Derek Clements-Croome and Li Baizhan The Sane

Workspace Creative workers need three kinds of spaces to collaborate and build together. From open to closed, they are: collaboration space, personal space and private space.

Collaboration Space

Collaboration space is where ideas are hatched. Situated along main thoroughfares and between departments, collaborative spaces are bright, open, comfortable and inviting. They have no walls. They are flexible and reconfigurable. They are ever changing, always rearranged. Bean bags, pillows and comfortable chairs. Collaboration space is where you feel the energy of your company: laughter, big conversations, excited voices talking over one another. Invest in and showcase these areas. Real, not plastic, plants keep sound from carrying and they make air :)

Private Space

Private space is where deadlines get met. Enclosed and soundproof, private spaces are libraries. There is no talking. Private space minimizes distractions. Dim light, white noise. There are bean bags, couches and chairs, but ergonomics demand proper workstations too. Separated sit/stand desks with docking stations behind (bead) curtains with 30" LCDs.

Personal Space

Personal space is where people call home. In between collaboration and private space in its degree of openness, personal space should be personalized by each individual to suit his or her needs. Shared office or open desks, half or whole cube. Personal space should come with a menu and a budget. Themes and plant-life should be encouraged. For some people, this is where you spend most of your time. For others… given adequate collaborative and private space, a notebook and mobile device, some people don't need personal space at all.

Above all, the goal of the Agile Environment is to create immersion in data through the physical environment: printouts, posters, books, whiteboard, etc.

<comment><USER46> > Considering how cheap office space is compared to labor,

Unfortunately the finance department is great at showing the opposite.

<comment><USER10> They're in different asset categories. E.g. if times get tough you can lay off people, but office space is generally leased for fairly long terms, and if you can't sublet for one reason or another....

And if the company is old enough they too often come out of different budgets.

<comment><USER47> The cost difference is so big, even the factor of leases shouldn't make a difference. We're talking an order of magnitude usually (from what I've read on the topic). And once you factor in severance packages, etc, it's a no- brainer. It's possible to argue the merits of open versus closed, small teams versus big teams, etc, but any organization using cost of space against productivity is doing something very wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> My favorite environment is having four to eight people (one team) in one very large room with a door. And a couch.

</comment><comment><USER49> So, private office proponents: what bay area companies actually provide this to their engineers? I haven't seen a single one in my experience.

<comment><USER50> I've been part of several startups. They often start with private offices, until the space fills up. Then you start sharing, camping in the lab etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Private ~~study~~ work carrels anyone?</comment>


Torque3d game engine became more reliable - PVS-Studio http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=301

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't want to divert the thread, but reading this surprised me:

"If using new ever fails to return an object, you're out of memory or some other critical corruption and your program isn't long for this world, wether you catch the null-pointer or not."

Is that the usual reaction to "out of memory" issues? I think that video games, having to deal with console memory constraints, should handle this. You can sometimes delay an allocation from a few frames if you know that you'll free some memory from another place soon.</comment>


The Reversal of Values as a Method in Criticism (2019) - <AUTHOR> http://mccaine.org/2019/05/18/the-reversal-of-values-as-a-method-in-criticism/ <comment><USER2> Wow, it's like Quilette and MIM Notes had a baby.</comment>


Redesigning Exec - Again - <AUTHOR> http://27percent.co/exec.html

<comment><USER2> It's a good thing a name like "exec" wouldn't immediately cause any hackers to think of something else, like, I don't know, one of the most important syscalls of all time.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I expected a discussion on the relative merits of the different exec calls and some new proposal that the author thought would be better in some way.

I got a slideshow of something on a background of raspberries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to wait _how_ long to ascertain what exec is?

The landing page should say "Exec will do whatever you desire for $25/hour, such as:"

and then carousel through examples.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice redesign. It is definitely more intriguing, for me at least, than the current exec site.

However, your current font choice for most of the text displays pretty badly on Chrome: <http://i.imgur.com/ERhwXio.png>

Take a look at the small text (especially the e character), such as "Tell us what you'd like and we'll get an Exec on it within 10 minutes. Everyday from 9am to 9pm."

I've verified this on two installs of Chrome on Windows 7 (Version 24.0.1312.57 m and Version 26.0.1403.0 dev-m), so it might be worth looking into.

<comment><USER6> Looks like it's an issue with the particular version of Proxima Nova that's being @font-face embedded.

I don't notice those problems with the version of Proxima Nova served up from TypeKit.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you'd be right on that one, Exec's iOS interface font is Proxima Nova and I used a bit of a dodgy @font-face generator since I don't have a typekit membership

<comment><USER6> Keep in mind that embedding may not be allowed by your font license. An officially-licensed copy will come with the appropriate files (that are well hinted): [http://www.fontspring.com/fonts/mark-simonson- studio/proxima...](http://www.fontspring.com/fonts/mark-simonson- studio/proxima-nova)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hrm. I'd definitely put some forward and back buttons on there, or somehow indicate that it's part of a slideshow. The delay between slides was significant enough that I thought it was just a static page saying "Exec will do your grocery shopping".

In all honesty, I'm not sure that leading with that one specific statement is ideal. Many people would have pressed back before anything even happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm kicking myself right about now, I played around with slide timing for the best part of 10 minutes to find an ideal pause, in the end I increased it by a third to make sure the slightly-heavier-than-they-should-be images had chance to load before the slide advanced.

I was planning on spending another couple of days optimizing the home page and completing work the rest of the application UI, which was almost complete, but EXEC released their official redesign earlier today so I had to rush it out. Guess that's just the way it goes sometimes

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Exec's designer (of the current redesigned site) here -

Nice job! Very impressive how quickly you got this up given that we released it just this morning. I like the typography and alignment you have, and putting the live feed on the landing page is a very interesting idea. Thanks for taking the time to do this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Karen!

Thanks for the feedback! I've been redesigning the whole Exec UI over the past couple of days, I didn't anticipate an actual redesign being launched a day before mine though so I rushed to get just the homepage up in time.

Love the official redesign, Exec is such an interesting service, it really deserved a solid, clean new design

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll say this... I'm going to Exec's site now because of your redesign. Kudos.</comment>


Who is DDOSing GitHub and why? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> My guess would be a hack of some kind (eg compromising a popular project's code or downloads) and then using the DDOS as a smokescreen. This is something bad guys are increasingly doing with banking hacks - steal the money and then divert everyone's attention with a DDOS. That makes it a lot harder for the victims to find out what happened and distracts the financial institution.

More info: [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/ddos-attacks-spell- gameov...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/ddos-attacks-spell-gameover-for- banks-victims-in-cyber-heists/)

<comment><USER3> Um, no. The reason they DDoS financial institutions is so they have a chance to cash out the stolen goods immediately. Stolen financial data has an expiration date and the DDoS extends that just long enough for it to be useful.

DDoS'ing github because you trojaned a source tree calls attention to the fact that you did it. Only the dumbest of all hackers would do such a thing and that is almost certainly NOT what is happening here. When you trojan a source tree, it only becomes useful after your intended victim downloads and installs it, which can take months or even years.

<comment><USER2> If you DDOS GitHub as a whole, how does that call attention to the one project a bad guy has trojaned?

If the project has mostly "commercial" developers then chances are they work on it during the week. DDOS GitHub during the week and let off for the weekend. That gives a few days worth for your trojan to be downloaded by the unsuspecting. People will also have tired hearing about the "github news" so new news about trojaning will take a little longer to disperse.

<comment><USER4> But... what commercial projects can possibly be on GitHub that worth this trouble? Facebook's C++ compiler? ....

If there is such commercial product, it would have been self-hosted. Not GitHub.

<comment><USER2> Here are some random ones off the top of my head. I'm happy to accept that you can't think of any value of these to bad guys, but the bad guys are not limited by your or my imagination.

MongoDB and all the drivers <https://github.com/mongodb>

Mixpanel analytics libraries <https://github.com/mixpanel>

Sencha Javascript libraries <https://github.com/senchalabs>

Yahoo YUI and various other JS related gunk <https://github.com/yahoo>

Shopify ecommerce libraries <https://github.com/Shopify>

Engine Yard tools & utils <https://github.com/engineyard>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The typical botnet operator cycle:

1) Send email to <large_site_here>, asking for a large ransom, preferably in Bitcoins.

2) If <large_site_here> does not pay, fire your packet cannons at them.

3) Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER6> Wait, seriously? Is this a common thing? I've not heard a lot of noise about ransom demands.

<comment><USER7> It's very common to target ecommerce stores like this. Specifically jewellery stores for some reason. Probably because it's a luxury good and somehow botnet owners link that to wealth of the owners. We host tens of thousands ecommerce stores and sometimes get these forwarded. We estimate that our customers receive at least one a month. DDOS attacks are a weekly to bi-weekly occurance for us.

The internet is a messy place.

<comment><USER8> I would love to hear more about how you mitigate them.. Or is this part of the "secret sauce" for hosting companies?

<comment><USER7> yes, if we describe it, people will start "unit testing" their botnets against us.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough! That makes sense...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe the CVS users.

<comment><USER10> Nah, they wouldn't launch a _distributed_ dos attack, would they now?

<comment><USER11> That's exactly what they want you to believe.

Never underestimate the frightening power of a large number of evildoers hitting F5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the motives for DDOS attacks - [http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks...](http://www.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792189/DDoS_attacks_in_Q2_2011)

</comment><comment><USER13> Probably someone that wants to practice with their botnet. GitHub is a formidable target.

</comment><comment><USER14> This was pretty interesting on launching a massive DDOS and how to stop one. <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4535226>

</comment><comment><USER15>
      Pages is currently being hit with a DoS attack.[0]

I suspect the target maybe a site that is hosted on Github Pages, maybe a blog. The attackers may not be targeting Github directly.

[0]: <https://status.github.com>

</comment><comment><USER16> Could it have something to do with their $100MM sitting in the bank?

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies- into-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into- enterprise-raises-100-million-from-power-vc-andreesen-horowitz/)

</comment><comment><USER17> They're not overly successful--I've had some slow page loads, but no serious interruption of service.

<comment><USER18> I noticed yesterday I can't install anything through <https://>, git:// urls work fine

<comment><USER19> You sure it was https? For a short time they blocked port 80 specifically so git:// and <https://> would be able to work.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I had one <https://> clone stop in mid-download. I repeated it immediately and it stopped midway again, I tried again after half an hour or so and it went through.

This was before they disabled port 80, so I expect this was resource exhaustion, the smart-https git service wasn't completely isolated from the DDOS target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker I know GitHub is down, but how do you know someone is ddosing it?

<comment><USER21> <https://status.github.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bitbucket?

<comment><USER23> Hardly believe that (Atlassian owned) Bitbucket is doing such attack. Bitbucket offers free private repos, not just git but mercurial hosting. Although way less popular, I think Bitbucket has features to gain ground in the long run without the need of tactics like DDOSes.

<comment><USER24> It was a lame joke, but the amount of "whoosh" in this thread is a bit mind boggling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Github is being DDOS'd? I hadn't noticed. And I use Github. Every day.

<comment><USER19> You must not have used it yesterday then ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably to watch all of Hacker News squirm.

<comment><USER3> What? You guys don't think that HN is enough troll bait for someone to spend $100 to DDoS a web property you care about?

<comment><USER26> Who has grudge on us?

<comment><USER3> No grudge necessary. This comment thread is lulzy enough by itself. Watching an entire user community freak out over not being able to access their source code in real time over HTTP is a good enough payoff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you aren't being DDOSed, you aren't an interesting service.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is it so hard to guess? Obviously GitHub is popular. Most popular sites have been DDOSing. People perform DDOS either they hate that site, they want to gain something out of it, or they just want to turn it down for fun. Stop speculating. It's really simple...

<comment><AUTHOR> OK yes, but who hates GitHub and how could you possibly hate Github enough to bother with going to the trouble? Maybe its just kids who knows but, I guess I never understand why people waste their time doing things that have zero possible positive benefit to themselves.

<comment><USER4> Zero possible positives? Ideally, hackers, not crackers, are supposed to HELP companies and organisations to discover their loopholes before it was too late for them. So many attacks are friendly. Many hacker groups (not crackers) would steal stuff and post the irrelevant stuff online just to remind the infrastructure team that they did a bad job.

But on the other hands, Github is a popular site, and it attracts many users so people can spawn lots of PC to create mass attack. Why not? It's a popular site so they want to test how well their tools can keep up with GitHub. People would assume that as of today, 2012, operation engineers have learned enough to protect and recover from DDOS.

GitHub team did a very good job recovering. Not bad. But certainly the infrastructure is still not able to handle such DDoS. GitHub needs to invest more money on that to secure service.

Whatever the reason might be, it's not necessary to speculate. In some movies, we even had banks / investors hired others to crack their own banks or stores next to the bank to destroy critical evidence (financial loss). That's a scam. Maybe we should speculate if it was GitHub's own DDOs? God knows. Everyone will call me crazy if I believe in such thing. No I don't think it was GitHub, but let me remind everyone these strange things happened before in both fiction an real life. But the point I want to make is no one knows and it shouldn't matter.

Whoever attacks it is not important at all. GitHub will learn from this and make the service more reliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why does anybody ddos anything? Pretty much the same reason you carve your name in a tree or drive super slow with the bass up so high it sets off everyone's car alarms.

</comment><comment><USER23> Only a very well orchestrated DDOS using a botnet has the endurance and strength of this attack. One can think that they are distributing some malware through github or that an anti USA hostile government agency is reaping code. Only Github knows.

<comment><USER29> How does one spread malware through github when the website (and all it's services) are down?

<comment> mansoor-s I'm dying from laughter

<comment><USER30> This seems relevant: <http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/7/16/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The online silencer market is booming, despite efforts to contain it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20828900/silencer-suppressor-online-sales-gun-accesories-atf-rules <comment><USER2> Ridiculous article. People make many things. Building a suppressor vs buying a suppressor = tomatoe or tomaahtoe. Form 1 vs Form 4. Get caught with an illegal one and you pay a huge price. For possessing a device which turns a big hearing-damage-sized noise into a smaller firecracker-loud noise, which smart people still wear hearing protection when using. This article wants you to think its like the movies. I've fired guns with suppressors. They are loud. OSHA would require them, but then BAFTE couldn't collect a big fee on them.</comment>


Ex-Facebook Executive: "You Don't Realize It but You Are Being Programmed" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mustaphahitani/ex-facebook-executive-you-dont-realize-it-but-you-are-being-programmed-618242134d <comment><USER2> To a larger context beyond Facebook, how else human life could be without getting programmed? Any exposure to culture literally is a process of being programed from shopping at BestBuy to watch a movie in a theatre to take a flight with first class and economy cabins. Maybe the argument here is "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops" but is there any study that long- term loops aren't just as powerful as short term feedback programming? Or I guess the concern here is the centralization of programming done by one company, but then again, the process is centralized, but the content is still diverse and mostly created by those who'd have done the programming outside of such process.

A fair argument could be the programming now is much more organized and can be done more efficiently toward a certain goal, but I don't think having more efficiency in this context is necessarily a concern - most concepts that can be programmed can also be re-programmed just as quickly. If Facebook is willing to expose a button to de-program a user they should be capable of doing that.

We might become inconsistent as individual human beings from this, namely what I believe yesterday is different from what I believe today or the next hour due to facebook, but later on some other programming might ease this confusion and convince you that nature is just as inconsistent as you.

<comment><USER3> You seem to think that the problem lies only with people being programmed to buy things - the choice of word is probably not helping here a lot - but the real issue here is about the validation loops people experience when on social media.

It's not that someone else is programming you to vote candidate X instead of candidate Y or that now you want to buy brand Z, it's that we are rewiring our brains to follow the short-term feedback loops in how we act within society, i.e. we don't go places anymore because we want to experience something new but to share the simple fact of going somewhere with our networks and getting validated by them. I think that's the bigger issue here.

<comment><USER4> > ... but to share the simple fact of going somewhere with our networks and > getting validated by them. I think that's the bigger issue here.

This isn't a new phenomenon. We see this in the form of companies branding strategy. The more you see the brand on the people you respect, the more likely you are to buy it.

A couple of examples.

1\. Michael Jordan and Nike. Air Jordan's became the shoe to own in the 1980's.

2\. Apple gear. Apple chooses their gear to be instantly recognizable. If you buy a mac book pro, say, you are extending their brand, unless you hide the apple logo somehow.

You also see this with brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, Hollister, and RVCA, where they sell clothing with the brand front and center on it.

So in 2018, the game is being played on Instagram and Facebook instead of college campuses and high schools in the 1980's.

<comment><USER5> >unless you hide the apple logo somehow.

I once bought a macbook pro while providing tech support for an organisation that used them exclusively. One of the first things I discovered when setting it up was that it takes three layers of silver gaffa tape over the apple to completely hide its glow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The visual image I like is that we're all puppets influenced by the media sources we consume. Each media source is shaped by its business model — and other goals, which gives us a (statistically) biased view of the world (e.g., social feed algorithms and engagement).

See the puppet images we made in this media literacy guide: [https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer](https://github.com/nemild/hack- an-engineer)

(Contributions welcome)

Ideally, we are individually able to realize this — and cut some of these strings.

<comment><USER7> Or go out and read more sources as this system originally intended. It's not like they are unavailable. Can't blame Facebook for sheer laziness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time I hear guff about how magnificently 'digital natives' negotiate technology, I have to refrain from being the pain in the arse who points out that perhaps one in a hundred knows how to do anything more than tap where entrained by a corporate interface.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've realized in regards to 2016 elections, and probably Brexit vote, when you can't hack the election machines to give you the results you want, you hack the electorate to accomplish that. As a bonus, unallowed entry to computer systems is illegal, putting targeted ads and spamming Facebook/Twitter with bots? Not really illegal...

<comment><USER10> Politics in a democracy has always been always been about hacking the electorate. It just seems that the tools for doing this are becoming more and more powerful.

<comment><USER11> I think it's not actually about becoming more powerful, but about being obscure. Long before Cambridge Analytica, presidents were still winning handily by hacking the electorate with expert use of mass media. Kennedy dominated television and won. Before him, it was Roosevelt on the radio.

The trouble is that like any other virus, people build up an immunity to the tricks on established platforms. You're not going to see another Kennedy or Roosevelt using the techniques they used, and it'll even be difficult to pull what Cambridge Analytica did now that that cat's out of the bag.

If you want to remain as effective as them you need to keep pushing and capitalize on the next mass media platform before people realize what you're doing.

<comment><USER10> What scares me is that a large number of very bright people nowadays work at places like Google, Facebook and others whose ultimate business model is to hack people's psychology to entice them to buy more stuff. What they are working on will be the perfect toolkit for dictators to manipulate people.

<comment><USER11> Advertisers have been doing this as long as there have been advertisers. One that really blows some people's mind (although it's reasonably well-known by now) is that although hardly anyone thinks twice about a diamond engagement ring, the notion we have of diamond rings today was invented by advertisers in the 1940s: [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how- an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/)

Similarly, Americans will ask for a Kleenex even when they don't actually mean a Kleenex-brand tissue. I didn't even think twice about this until I moved to Europe and it was pointed out how weird that was.

It's true the big tech companies make it easier to target segments of people by collecting data, but pervasive mass manipulation is hardly new or unique to big tech companies and generally it doesn't need nearly the amount of data that they collect. People are generally similar enough to each other psychologically that you can paint with broad strokes like demographics and still hit most of your target (and interestingly, some of the most viral memes have no particularly targeted message).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Palihapitiya is a great speaker and very brave for owning up to what many try to downplay their involvement in. Here's a link to the video this article pulls from, it's succinct and really hits home:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78oMjNCAayQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78oMjNCAayQ) [4:05]

<comment><USER13> Brave, huh? I guess I will give him some credit for owning up to this, sure. But his only repercussion from helping create this is 'guilt'. And from the looks of his wealth and new ventures, I don't think he wastes any time with his guilt.

Meanwhile, the world burns..

<comment><USER14> We don't know anything about his inner life, and the hell of real guilt cannot be overstated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Palihapitiya and Parker seem to disagree about something important. Parker says that the psychological programming was deliberate:

"It's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," he said. "The inventors, creators [...] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

But Palihapitiya says,

"Because your behaviors, you don't realize it, but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you're willing to give up".

Does Palihapitiya not realize that the programming he decries was built in to the system deliberately by its designers? Or is Parker wrong?

<comment><USER16> I don't see how their views conflict. Parker is claiming that facebook is intentionally manipulating its users while Palipapitiya is claiming that the users are largely unaware of the manipulation. Their claims are orthogonal and can coexist quite easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is as old as mass-media. The formula has been `money -> propaganda -> control` for at least two centuries now. Social media just put it on steroids.

Limiting paid propaganda would help, but that's sacrilege in our ad/media driven economy, so the ultimate lesson is probably just "don't be poor".

</comment><comment><USER18> There's nothing new in this post that didn't exist 4 months ago when Palihapitiya said the words.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have hope for (but low expectations) that this sort of realization that the 'free' media is being bought and paid for by people who want to manipulate your opinions and actions, will encourage more people to subscribe to media sources with better transparency.

</comment><comment><USER20> "He finishes this up by warning the audience not to think they're too smart to fall for the implications of social media, and stated that those who are best- and-brightest are the most likely to fall for it, "because you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.""

What does he mean when he says "check-boxing" and how does that relate to the "implications of social media"?

Does he mean "approval-seeking" and the idea that this is what Facebook uses (e.g. "Like" buttons) to "engage" visitors (while gathering data about their lives, personalities, etc.)?

Anyone have a different read?

<comment><USER21> In this case I would read "check-boxing" as "reducing to a simple optimisation loop without considering the implications of what you're optimising for".

Granted, I'm doing some pretty heavy interpretational lifting there, but that optimisation loop is something I see as common to productivity, video games, social media, and many other obsessions of the nerdosphere. It feels good to give your optimiser a constant stream of feedback, even if trivial.

Of course, now our optimisers are being manipulated by much larger optimisers that run on engagement metrics rather than dopamine. Where did the intuition to build these myopic hyperoptimisers come from? Surely not the same people who grew up minmaxing character attributes or building spreadsheets for optimal daily task efficiency? When you gaze into the optimiser...

Weird that we managed to turn society into a GAN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Radio, a technology which most us would consider old, was used extensively used to brainwash the populace in Rwanda to commit grave crimes. How is the current technology any different this time,

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of the novel Daemon.

Not to give too much away, but the main way that the antagonist in the book preys on people is not by hacking their devices, but rather by hacking _them_ through complex, technology-assisted social engineering.

<comment><USER24> That just sounds like realism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmmm i guess facebook is the IDE that's used to program me and each post is a line of code.

</comment><comment><USER26> I doubt that Mark understud what facebook was before it got to what it is. How could he.</comment>


The Administrative Stuff (especially for NYC folks) - <AUTHOR>

This is a question for the guys in NYC. As you know, it's unreasonably expensive to start a company in NYC. The state registration fees are bearable (~$400 after everything), but then the requirement to advertise in local newspapers costs you a good $2000 due to NY advertising prices and the fact that the state randomly picks newspapers so you can't just pick cheap ones. Given that cost, i've decided to incorporate in Delaware. Of course, it didn't take me long to realize if i actually wanted to open a bank account / conduct transactions, etc, i needed to open a "sister LLC" in NY, or basically register as "doing business in NY state" which basically costs the same as registering a new business in NY, so now i have to pay two states. Great.
Anyway, i've also found that accountants/lawyers on Craigslist who claim to help with all this startup administrative stuff don't really help at all. They don't care to offer advice, they just tell you how much they'll charge you to fill out standard paperwork.
So my question is -- what have you guys done to figure out all the administrivia, when on a tight budget? Like i want to give this new programmer some equity that vests in 6 months. Do i just write him an email saying "You officially now have x% of the company, provided you complete yyy hours over the next zzzz months"?. I heard you can print out stock certificates. But couldn't anyone just go to a printer and print a stock certificate for some random company for some random number of shares? What document/company/bureacracy actually owns all these allocations? Is a locked Google spreadsheet with people's names next to ownership stakes good enough to hold up as "the official company ownership charter" in a court?
Mainly, have you found good people in NY who help you with all this crap? Anyone gotten free advice form the Small Biz Admin, or any of the little initiatives Bloomberg has setup supposedly to help struggling entrepreneurs?
HELP! lol <comment><USER2> Very good questions. I'm here for answers too.

Can you describe more about the newspaper requirement? Seems like an outright subsidy to old media.</comment>