skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You mean, if I want the big companies to do good (or "not do evil") I have to pay up to them?

It means you need to align incentives. Those can be positive (tax breaks for hiring veterans) or negative (penalties for violating antitrust laws), but they are incentives nonetheless.

>So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing.

Do you, individually, benefit more from living in a society where mining companies don't dump toxic chemicals in rivers in third world countries, or from making your quarterly bonuses? This is a classic tragedy of the commons.

>Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?

Because companies are amoral profit-maximization constructs.

>"Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.

There are many corporations and politicians who are more than happy to indulge that fantasy in exchange for your money or vote.

You can rant and rave about evil corporations till you're blue in the face, and you won't change a damned thing. Corporations respond to incentives, not moral pleas. Change the incentives if you want to change the behaviour.
Ask HN: Replacement for BitTorrent Sync?
I first moved to BitTorrent Sync when it was announced from Dropbox because I did not want a copy of my data in the cloud.

Initially, things worked pretty well with some hiccups along the way which isn't too surprising for a 1.x product.

However, the straw that broke the camel's back was starting with version 2, BitTorrent decided to start making certain features premium. While it's entirely within BitTorrent's right to do so, they chose to do it in a way that legacy installs of various vintage across multiple machines would break in a fashion that would require a reinstall. And lo and behold, a reinstall causes further breakage.

So if one wants to see how not to incrementally update (notice I do not say improve) a product over time, look no further that BTSync.

Even worse, recently I discovered that I actually suffered from data loss due to some strange idiosyncrasy of their sync algorithm.

That said, I'm now looking for suggestions for a product that I could use to synchronize across Windows and Mac for both 1Password and regular files.
The problem for authors is accommodating all the different modes which readers may consume their media. Well-styled hypertext presented in the way the author intends/imagines is never going away, there will always be a place for that and it is very important.

For other use-cases... that's why we have HTML and stylesheets. The problem has been solved, mostly sort-of.
What are good examples of high quality React Native apps I can try on my iPhone?

Bonus if they are free.
Okay in the sense that we won't immediately die because we can make up for it (although it won't be nearly as good). Losing honeybees is still easily one of the most pressing issues.
> Is there a problem in our entire society and schooling system, or are Black and Hispanic backgrounds a liability because of the views and attitudes they have/teach?

The two are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that a very significant part of the problem that Blacks and Hispanics face (besides simple discrimination on the part of people in positions of power -- which is very real, as studies of responses to applications in various context from people with stereotypically Black or Hispanic names vs. otherwise identical applications without that feature) is attitudes toward societal institutions and mainstream culture in their respective subcultures that are a direct product of problems in the broader society (including the schooling system), both currently and over the past several centuries (the longer time especially for black subculture) including, over much of that time, overt de jure subjugation and exclusion (which while it didn't directly impact young people today, is recent enough that lots of them have living relatives who did directly experience it) followed by covert (but still present, see earlier comment about applications) discrimination and neglect.

Arguing over whether A or B is the problem is pointless when A causes B which then contributes back to A.
To learn more about the LINC (and why, in the grand scheme of things, it was so incredibly important):

- "The LINC Revolution", in "Biomedical Computing" by Joseph November: http://www.amazon.com/Biomedical-Computing-Digitizing-Univer...

- "Computing in the Middle Ages" by Severo Ornstein: http://www.amazon.com/Computing-Middle-Ages-Trenches-1955-19...

- "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop: http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...

R.I.P.
I don't understand why people are trying so hard to be the alternative of a dead app?
Germany post-WW2, took in a ton of Turkish migrants to prop up the economy.

Britain post-WW2, took in a ton of Indian/Pakistani migrants.

For that matter, some people say that Germany currently is trying the exact same with Syrian refugees.
Dogs we with us before the concept of culture, possibly before what we know as language. Cats joined us with the birth of agriculture. Pigs and cows have never been partners in the way that dogs and cats have.

"New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks – despite little or no previous exposure to dogs."

https://news.byu.edu/news/babies-understand-dog-speak-byu-st...

I've seen this effect demonstrated amongst people on opposite sides of the planet, with totally different languages and cultures. We can all understand the mood and intent of a dog's bark. You don't even need to be a dog person.
Please stop turning HN threads into the same old tedious flamewars. This site is for conversation, not pre-recorded rants.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184341 and marked it off-topic.
Several copyright holders have assigned their copyright to SFC, so SFC can act on their behalf. There is also at least one copyright holder that is unhappy about Canonical distributing ZFS with the kernel:

https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/700074164435091456
This is the first stage: lawyers are now going to the cloud for their tasks. Legal offices can now be run without a physical office. Lawyers can potentially deal with more cases. It's blue-ocean strategy that just found a way to disrupt a market; Legal assistants can be reduced (or eliminated), Eventually, the need for paralegals will disappear (or pivot, hopefully). Then even Lawyers will be eaten by software.

I give it fifteen years before Judges are hearing arguments from Watson (or [hopefully free software] equivalents) more than they're hearing humans.

I'm looking forward to running process on/through a judge that's software-based, myself, as even their jobs will be swallowed soon enough. Judges are pretty much compilers for legal processes. it'd be interesting to deal with a GNU one.
Vayyar's Walabot Will Transform 3D Technology as We Know It
This is very similar to the MacGuffin from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
Please don't post snarky dismissals of new work to HN. Substantive criticism is fine.
> That the court order stems from a student loan debt is not beside the point.

It is entirely beside the point: he wasn't arrested for an unpaid student debt, or even for an unpaid default judgement from a case he failed to respond to over a student debt, he was arrested for failure to appear when summoned to court.

That's not being arrested for debt, student loan or otherwise.
> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.

Yeah, but every year you have as much infrastructure as you had last year, except some of it degrades or is abandoned and becomes dangerous.
Google.org Awards $3M to Racial Justice Organizations in SF Bay Area
Is it passed time that the federal government has overstepped its authority here? We need to see some repercussions for directors when these departments start breaking the law.

When I exceed the speed limit and get caught I get a speeding ticket. To enforce the law we put police in strategic spots and give them the tools to enforce the law. We should have similar policing of federal agencies.
today is like a party for email company's marketing team.
Sure, but lynx is a web browser. If you use a real gopher client, clicking on any of those links will open into a browser rather than in the gopher client.
Curiosity does increase the likelihood of survival by expanding the information an organism has or simply have it wander into a more effective or new way of living.
Because there are just so many people who believe in Inbox Zero (which is a lie) and they have nowhere to manually swipe away their emails now.
Well, apparently now there's demand to bring it back with this new resurgence of Gopher :)
Well I'd agree to buy a book that is thorough in its science, but how do you really know its science is good enough? Same problem. Should I extensively read scientific literature on the subject, or should I just read books that are close to being mumbo jumbo, since it's aimed to be read by non scientists?

A psychiatrist is someone who had extensive education in psychology and medicine, who I can talk to. That's a little easier to sense things when you're face to face with somebody. It's much easier that way, just like it's easier to learn a complicated subject by asking questions instead of reading many books.

I guess you're right, I could read a book on the subject, but I'm a little skeptic...
This is directly contrary to what has been found to work in practice. Mental illness and drug addiction can take years to treat successfully, and it's impossible to treat people who don't live in a fixed location. "Housing first" policies treat housing as the first priority, necessary for even gaining access to help people with other problems.

Without housing, many of these people gradually become worse off and eventually die. Housing should be treated as a human right, without any special conditions imposed.
You are being philosophic asserting that there would be a reality to reflect, in a rather colorful language, while axioms are real enough to not need to pull a strawman from beyond them.
Which is all sort of unrelated to the point. Sure, in some cultures dogs are working animals. In others they're pets. That doesn't mean it's somehow wrong that yet other people see them as livestock.
One one hand you have APIs that help with plumbing like mandrill and twilit. Those you can replace much easier than data APIs like clearbit, moz, etc
So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.
While we're not there yet, it's pretty much the plan for Canada:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2014001-eng.ht...
This is one of many problems that disincentivizes construction projects.

To build a new condo in San Francisco is rarely profitable:
1) Unlike other cities, when your building plan fits all criteria, it is not effectively automatically approved. To get your permit, you must comply AND be very lucky. In other cities, you generally must ONLY comply.
2) Once your building has been approved, small community groups may oppose it and the government will reject you if you do not.
3) A substantial percentage of your building must be sold at a loss for affordable housing.

Development projects here are effectively the highest risk and highest cost. On top of this, most buildings can only be 4 or 5 stories tall. Of course, the only way to stay afloat is to build luxury overpriced condos.

The question is how do you overcome the rich and entrenched voters who effectively control these policy.
Who gets to be the jury in these sorts of cases? Ordinary people? Other companies?
That's not how modern PHP works.
I bet a ton of hipsters would love to hang out in Japan. Doesn't seem that hard to sell...
Characteristics of leaders
Simple Bank Implementation in Go, gRPC, API Blueprint API for Beginners
Are they really flouting the GPL though? I think you could make a better case that SteamOS is, with an integrated Nvidia driver.

What makes this different IMO from VMWare is that they are not creating a work that exists purely b/c of Linux, instead they a making a piece of software that allows their hardware to work with a Linux based machine.

I think those are two very different types GPL violation. One really does flout the GPL and exploit Linux kernel devs, the other I think is generally viewed as an enhancement to Linux, thus less interest in fighting it.
I'm not entirely sure what is going on with reader view on Firefox mobile, but sometimes it doesn't show the icon in the URL bar. However, if you open the hamburger menu and add the page to your reading list (the "book+" icon), then switch to the reading list and open the page from there, you can sometimes get reader view when it's not otherwise available.
Mapbox CLI
> automatic JSON but no other serializations

Maybe I'm missing something, but? https://golang.org/src/encoding/xml/example_test.go

https://github.com/golang/protobuf uses this as well.
Why does it pain you greatly? Does it do the same for other professions like nursing?

My entryway into computers was "I want to build a website like this one, but better." This same opportunity exists for everyone with a web browser, which is most everyone. You had the additional fortune of parents seeking out opportunities for you, but it was not necessary, and I suspect you'd have found your way to tech eventually even with no external support.

Maybe it's painful because you want more diversity in your life? Why not fulfill that desire outside of work? Maybe it's painful to work on legacy stuff that you're sure with a more diverse mindset wouldn't be so crufty? I think we've come impressively far with the current (and in the past "worse") state of affairs, clearly we don't need the diversity to accomplish greatness. I'm on a team with Indians, Koreans, Chinese...and two other white guys. Our manager is black. Our manager's manager is a woman. I don't think this diversity gives us any technical advantage, but since we're all competent, there's not really any disadvantage, this is just how the dice fell for us. The only way this diversity impacts me is that my name gets mispronounced (and vice versa for some of them). But as you mention there are a lot of diversity advocates who want diversity over merit for some mysterious reason and will actively sabotage teams to get it.
> The question is how do you overcome the rich and entrenched voters who effectively control these policy.

I can't talk for every category, but the tech industry as a whole would be more than happy to promote these initiatives, because cheaper rents mean cheaper salaries for their employees.
I think we thought that bit was linkbait. We routinely take out baity "you" phrases from titles. The story itself stayed on the front page, as you pointed out at the time. There have been many negative Airbnb stories on the front page of HN—indeed there was one today.

FWIW, "don't censor stories for being negative about a YC startup" is literally the #1 rule of HN moderation: it's the first thing PG said to me when showing me how to moderate HN. I don't even think I had time to sit down before he said it.

That doesn't mean we don't moderate such stories; we may, if they break the HN guidelines (such as by being linkbaity). It means that we consciously moderate them less than we normally would, and we're pretty meticulous about it.
Whattsapp
can it be hacked?
CoreOS CEO: Containers are just the beginning
Most screen readers look at the output of the DOM. They aren't trying to parse RAW HTML from the server. Really wish this myth would go away :/
Haskell is a bit of the odd man out in terms of syntax for type annotations. Scala, OCaml, Agda, Idris, Elm all use single colon. I'm actually unsure why Haskell is the way it is.
Why is that a problem that needs solving? Quite honestly I do not give a shit if someone is choosing to use drugs and live in the street... And the idea that they just need "addiction services" is laughable. Whatever. I don't give two shits about some alcoholic or methhead, and the idea that they have no control over it and need to be "helped" is perverted.
It is a p-value, not a Bayesian probability. A p-value is the probability of seeing data as or more extreme purely due to chance, not the probability that your data is due to chance.

In other words, X is the event of observing data as or more extreme than what you observed, H0 is the event that the relationship is due to random effects. P(E1 | E2) is the probability of E1 given E. You are claiming that P(H0 | X) < 0.14, but the evidence is that P(X | H0) < 0.14.

If you wanted to do Bayesian statistics, you could obtain P(H0 | X) = P(X | H0) * P(H0) / P(X) = P(X | H0) * P(H0) / (P(X | H0) * H0 + P(X | not H0) * (1-H0))

To do that, you need a prior probability of H0 - in other words, to do Bayesian inference you need a prior belief about how likely something is to be true and evidence will update your belief. If you are already absolutely certain of H0 or not H0, no amount of evidence will shift your view in Bayesian inference, as any amount of evidence is best explained as random variation.
> I think that if you ignore classic post war economic orthodoxy there are offsetting economic benefits to a declining population.

There might be some benefits, but I've yet to see an argument that they are such that the balance is negative for the specific case of Japan.

> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.

Which would be fine, if X infrastructure with Y proportion degradation due to lack of maintenance was equivalent to X*(1-Y) of optimally-structured infrastructure.

The problem is, its not.
They only file those suits to get addresses, and use them to send out letters asking for cash not to sue. They usually don't sue anyone, and make a fortune.
Well done ! It has a very good intuitive UI to process each word.

My parents who are not native English speakers would love something like this in their native language Hindi.

It would be nice to have been able to select a full sentence and see how people would say it. I understand that right now you are getting this read on a word by word basis.

The word "bickering" did not trigger any voice so I am assuming this is one rough edge to look into.

My dad just ordered a $150 (Indian rupee equivalent) book from a local company when things like this would make the learning so much simpler.

I am going to send this to my parents and see what they say.

Thank you for doing this project.
The Japanese are rather entrenched in their way of life, and they don't want foreigners coming in and changing their society. It's not hard to sell immigrants on Japan. It's hard to sell Japan on immigrants.
Well, there's enormous amounts of charity that ensures noone starves to death, and there's enormous amounts of money spent by Fire departments/Police/EMT teams to handle emergencies, because those are deemed politically acceptable expenses.

But those are band-aid responses that can never ever eliminate the root cause. I'm convinced that the public would spend way less money over the long term, and the affected people would be vastly better off, if they were given proper long-term care and treatment.
> So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.

Yes, you can do that: that's a capital cost of maintaining quality of life under declining population. I'm not sure how a choice between continued declining quality of life or incurring a significant capital cost is a "benefit", however.
> If we want to solve this problem, we need to provide shelter along with drug rehab services & require weekly clean drug tests as a requirement to keep the shelter.

Yes and no. The question is, are people becoming homeless because they're drug addicts or becoming drug addicts because they are homeless?

If it's the former then yes, clean drug tests - as a requirement to compel them to get better - might help. If it's the latter however, you're just going to drive away the very people that you are trying to help.

I venture to say that most drug addicts don't actually want to be that way. So throwing them a lifeline and then taking it away because they're addicted? Seems callous and unhelpful. You'll never solve the problem that way.
> The vast majority of San Francisco's homeless people are, in fact, people who were living in SF and paying rent, lost one or more jobs, and subsequently became homeless.

Look closely. 70% claim to be so ... but only ~30% were actually paying rent. That's 21%, certainly not the vast majority. Also: if you got kicked out of a shelter, it counts as having been "living" in SF. :-)

Plus, this was a self-reported survey. Homeless people will often lie to get your sympathy. Case in point: the whole "I need to buy food" spiel. Most of the time that I have offered to do so, they hum and haw and ignore my offer. Some in fact take the food and throw it away. Very rarely do they actually eat the food. The point is: if the homeless think they can get more sympathy by claiming to be lifelong residents of SF, many will claim to be so.
Sometimes waste isn't the point.
While I do support infill development, San Francisco is already a dense city (the second-densest city in the US after New York City, unless you count much smaller municipalities), and the idea that everyone must, must, must be given the opportunity to live in San Francisco proper is naïve, as is the idea that any but a tiny minority of the homeless in the city would ever be able to afford any kind of market-rate housing even with a wholesale program of infill development.

You say "there is nowhere else to build." Sure there is. There is Daly City and Colma and Millbrae and so forth down to San Jose and out into the east bay and even the north bay. Not everyone is going to live in the 49 square miles of SF, even if it becomes considerably more dense.

Now, we should also build higher-density housing in SF. But that's not going to change the homelessness situation in any meaningful way.
I'll respond to a few points here:

1. I've never had a problem getting the salary that I wanted and have had a steadily increasing market-rate developer salary at each job.

2. I've only ever managed to actually work for free once, the other times they insisted on paying a base hourly, intern wage.

3. If you go in thinking this is where you want to work, but are wrong because it's "impossible to understand the company and how it operates from outside," it's much less of a hassle to leave during a trial period.

Finally I think there is a lot of posturing around negotiating positions and "strength." That's bs. If you're looking to get the highest salary you can, fine, but if you're looking for a job that you love I can only relate that this technique has worked again and again for me and no theoretical critiques of negotiating strategy can change that.
Content ID is possibly the worst thing about YouTube. It's stifling. It's an incessant pain for anyone who produces any type of review, analysis or critique of popular media, particularly combined with YouTube's 3 strikes system and lack of decent appeals process. Content creators frequently see their channels disappear entirely from YouTube without explanation or means of recourse, only having them restored by fans mass-emailing Google in protest.
SF spends $241M/year on the homeless. That is way more money per homeless than NYC does (which spends about $1B/year, for 10x more homeless).
Haskell's designers wanted single colon for the cons operator, and the cons operator is legal on the left-hand side of an "equation" (sorry, don't recall the official terminology) because Haskell allows pattern matching there.

(I'm not saying I agree with the decision.)
Thank Compute for causality.
The Linux Kernel, CDDL and Related Issues