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You might like the anime film Time of Eve. It's been described as the best Three Laws work that isn't Asimov or an adaptation.


And yet the company still can't afford walls.


I know a HN trope is to be anti-open-office but maybe it's better to be imitating the guys valued at 20B than the guys valued at 200k.

We need a "Show me the code" équivalent for claims about business. "Show me the money"

If open offices were a big factor, I'd expect private office startups to out-compete.


"Show me the money" is biased toward the status quo. If your litmus test for smart policy or decision-making "is everyone else who is successful doing it?", you will always lag behind the best.


That's true, and I can't think of a good alternative.

But there's a clear problem on HN where people who don't run businesses and don't know how to pontificate on things like this citing nebulous results on productivity.

If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental, then I await the disrupting startup that blows the rest of the industry out of the water by using private offices.


> If open-offices are so remarkably detrimental,

Assume they aren't. This place may of course be a bit biased - but among developers the opinion is at least appears to be very clear on that open offices suck. I'd even dare argue that many developers would either not work at a company with open offices, or would at least factor it in and weigh it against compensation.

Now if this is the case, then regardless of whether there are tangible benefits of having private offices, companies would either lose out on talent, or need to compensate them more than they otherwise would. See the point isn't only whether developers are less happy or less productive in open offices - the point is also whether they believe they are less happy and less productive in open offices. And that is much easier to test/prove than whether they actually are.


IBM did not find it nebulous its just that the tail services HR Building Services are lowed two much power and game the system to save money short term (and get a bonus) with no thought to the longer term value.


It exists lots of research how bad open offices are.

You could argue that the big companies could be even more successful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15329605


Cardery is my weekend project.

It's a script that uses dom-to-image to render PNG images from card data in CSV and card template in HTML/CSS/JS. Work in your favorite text editor or spreadsheet editor, while refreshing your browser for instant WYSIWYG feedback.

Cardery's main advantage over http://www.nand.it/nandeck/ is that you write templates in HTML/JS/CSS instead of some obscure language.

Cardery's main disadvantage is that, because it relies on your browser and OS to do the heavy lifting, what you write may not be portable between computers. For example, in writing the demo I was in the peculiar situation of needing it to look good everywhere, but not necessarily look the same everywhere. The demo specifies "font-family: sans-serif" and lets the browser choose the exact font. I did try specifying "font-family: Verdana", which is my default font in Chrome, but in Firefox the kerning became hideous when Cardery applied CSS scale(). (Thankfully the issue is font-specific, and it looks fine with my default font Open Sans.) I will try Cardery in a Linux VM and see if the rendering looks reasonable. If so, then that becomes one answer to the portability issue.


The [WTO] said in a statement that it would allow a 300 percent import duty on turkey tail imports and a domestic prohibition on sales during the transition period to allow the country to “develop and implement a nationwide program promoting healthier diet and lifestyle choices.”

Reminds me of the planet Norstrilia in Cordwainer Smith's fiction, which exports an astronomically precious immortality drug, yet maintains its archaic culture (resembling Australian ranchers with a British cultural inheritance) with import taxes of over 20000000%.


Pigs use mud to avoid sunburn.

« Some people have gone so far, especially with show pigs, as to slather sun screen onto their pigs when they know that they will be out in the sun for a considerable time and they don't want them to get dirty with mud. » -- http://petcaretips.net/pigs-sunburn.html

You could also just keep your pet pig indoors all the time.


While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?


A WarCraft III commentator told the story of how he once saw a pro, during the opening, send his Demon Hunter to the healing fountain on a certain map, and he started doing the same with the same timing on that map. One day he met the pro in person and asked why he'd done it, and the pro said, To see if the opponent's Blademaster was there.


Can you explain? I'm familiar with the mechanics and abilities, but probably not the tactics.


The Demon Hunter and Blademaster is each player's respective hero/champion and essentially a free powerful unit.

The DH player has the advantage during the early game, so is scouting around the map (the Fountain of Health being a likely location) to find an easy fight.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne "tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum"


Bravo! But not really relevant.


quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954918 :

> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.

> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.


I learned Go several years ago at the age of 20, and tracked how much time I spent on it. Comparing my progress with that of a certain strong amateur who started at age 14 and estimated how many games he played throughout his progression, I think I reached my current strength of 1-kyuu after roughly the same amount of practice that he had when he was 1-kyuu. This anecdatum of mine agrees with children's extra synaptic density leveling out around age 12. I would guess that it doesn't matter whether the writer was 40, 20, or 14; hypothetically, it might matter if the writer were 4 (or 7).


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