While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice is key.
For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the time: I can benefit from those casual, spontaneous conversations that pop up in the open space, but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.
I think what's most important is for companies to acknowledge and respect the variety of working styles of their employees, along with the trust that--regardless of how chatting in a pod or hiding away from others might appear--more often than not they're getting shit done.
The way around that is that nobody owns their peripherals. Monitors, keyboards, etc are part of the work station, not part of the worker's personal environment. Of course there's still opportunity for customization of individual stations, and if someone prefers the more private spaces they can lobby to have one customized to their taste.
If it is really such a 'shitty problem' to someone, they can easily solve the problem by optimizing their job search for a high private:shared equipment ratio.
People share equipment in every office everywhere. Germaphobes will need to disinfect some stuff, they can't have private everything, and they can't demand that people stop sharing things. Oh well, them's the breaks!
That's a horrible solution for a couple of reasons:
#1 - Ewww (yes, I know most people are sanitary... most)
#2 - Straight keyboards vs curved (and similar for mouse, etc). Both for working effectiveness and RSI.
This isn't always a solution. I've often been tied to 'my' devkits, for example. Or 'my' tower of tablets I'm trying to port to and support. I've gone as far as buying a cheapo extra desk out of my own pocket because I was running out of space in my spacious L shaped cubical, and needed the extra surface area by forming a U. I've also had nontrivial amounts of dead tree documents.
Basically, I often labor under constraints that make it unreasonably expensive and difficult to make workstation hardware interchangeable like that.
My dev environment would be difficult to virtualize as well. I've dealt with pre-release software, pre-release OSes, and any VM based solution would need to give me proper GPU access. I'd need to develop tooling to help manage constantly reconfiguring my tools to point to whatever devkits are local as well. Syncing data is another problem - right now I often abuse symbolic links to move 'cold' projects and tools off of my SSDs, as 2TB SSDs only recently became affordable.
NYT seems to have a number of highly similar articles extolling the benefits of HIIT, but this[0] one reads a bit more honest than the one posted, IMO.
Specifically, the author delves into 10-20-30 training, which I've personally started in the past few weeks. It definitely kicks my ass, but I feel great afterwards and it requires significantly less time than moderate exercise.
The neat thing about the lego example is it uses overlapping grids instead of overlapping circles.
Overlapping circles are familiar -- everyone made venn diagrams in primary school.
Problem is it's notoriously subjective to use circles to map to some quantity. Visualization blogs are rife with examples of people riffing on visualizations that confuse mapping circle radius vs. circle area to some quantity.
Using a grid (or legos) is nice because it eliminates that area-vs-radius ambiguity.
> But the percentage of people who construct passwords by choosing random printable characters rounds to zero.
Leveraging song lyrics can be a helpful step in this direction: simply feed in the first letter of each word to create your password. Of course, you would need a fairly long lyric/phrase to exceed the benchmark noted above, but on a scale of 'hunter2' to '8%jFb#P", I'd say it's not bad :)
> There are a number of shows I've gotten hooked and then around about season 5-7 I've dropped because it became obvious they were just milking it and inventing gratuitous plot extensions instead of ending it cleanly.
This is what I'm worried about with 'House of Cards.' It feels like they might have 1-2 good seasons left, but unless Frank suddenly decides to deceive his way into becoming world dictator, I'm convinced that they need to end the show in fewer seasons than it already has.
Very cool. A similar site posted last week [0] also allows you to drag and drop specific countries across the map for direct comparisons (Mercator projection only).
Wow, I would not have thought Russia and China to be comparable in size. Yes, Russia is still bigger than China, but nowhere near as giant as the map makes it appear.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)