skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."
-- Martin Lomasney

In a business context, I try to route substantive communications through email (or, if internal, through systems like Slack). There's nothing like a searchable corpus to minimize ambiguity, commemorate who said what, and when, and in response to which questions.

Likewise, there's a certain kind of project counterparty who inevitably tries to drive substantive communications through phone calls -- specializing in the dreaded dozen-person multi-time-zone conference call, featuring the ever-popular ten-minute parade of welcome tones, "who just joined?", and mystery attendees. These email-avoiders are the ones for whom calls are a tacit means of trying to project power, and ambiguity is a project management feature, not a bug, bound up with their own personal risk management strategy.

You probably know the type: when asked a detailed question by email that requires a specific and accountable response, they reply "Let's set up a call. -- Sent from my iPhone".

N.B. I like iPhones just fine, but please, turn off that sig.
I'm not writing it off yet.

More of my friends are calling than in 2007 when it was texting, IM and then the mass rush to Facebook. Quite a few are now cutting down Facebook, a couple have left completely.

Maybe it's an age thing, but I find a 30 min call much more effective at "topping up the friendship" than any number of minutes online chat. I had a very early ICQ, and no end of IM since, but since smart phones the fragmentation has got so ridiculous I rarely bother. I think I'd need to install about 10 with 2-5 contacts in each to cover most and miss everyone using iMessage of course (never did understand why Apple didn't release for multiple platforms).
Game of Thrones just barely breaks into the massive Google-fest in the G category.
I can't say I would think that Google does a particularly good job at interpreting the intent of my search queries. I often need to reformulate them to get what I'm after. But I doubt that my searches are similar to those of the general public so that is understandable.
What's wrong with this?

Heck, I don't know -- whole families being traumatized? Children having their lives upended, because their parents suddenly have to move across the state (or the country)? That sort of thing? So you can live within walking distance of that fancy new Belgian beer bar, and your favorite S&M club?

It's one thing to acknowledge that displacement of existing (generally lowest income tier) residents is very unfortunate -- and yes, causes real suffering -- but to maintain that the cure (e.g. rent control) may be worse than disease. That's at least a position with a certain logic to it.

But what people reasonably resent about the new tech elite is that (some of them) don't even pretend to rely on sober assessments like the above. They just come right and out say it: "What's wrong with poor people being displaced? What's wrong with a city that school teachers, first responders, restaurant workers can't afford to live in? I'm doing fine -- why should I give a fuck?"
> I remember in the 80s you had to hopscotch over human feces when walking in SF.

This hasn't changed. Not as prevalent but it's not gone either. I will give you the point that the primary excretion is now vomit, and not feces.
The price of connection: 'surveillance capitalism'
You don't have to go to Boulder or SLC -- San Jose offers a lot of incentives for tech companies. In fact San Jose doesn't tax you on income at all (there is a per employee tax of $18 a year up to 25K but that's it). And if you're a big enough tech company, you can get that waived too.
This quote is clear though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair#cite_ref-le-mo...

I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics.[14]
Bin-go...

It's pretty sad that many other companies and jobs with "independent contractor" status but continually exploitative conditions have slipped under the radar.

Newspaper carriers are a particularly good example. Typically 100 miles or more, seven days a week, with the cost of each paper deducted from their pay.

I tried a paper route last year. It's a 60-70hr/week job without overtime pay. Pays less than minimum wage after factoring in vehicular expenses.

Excuse me for dumping, I just had to laugh when quitting the job meant a contractual month's-advance notice or a $3,000 fine.
It's not really fair to frame them as employees. Their relationship with Uber is a two way street - they can work whenever they want and can drive for another service in parallel. They don't have a boss in the traditional sense, but rather they are providing services to Uber.
Denying that places the entire concept of the "gig economy" at risk, and it's a shame because this mutual flexibility is the only way forward in many fields, for both the companies and individuals.
The general fund figure for 2016 is over 4 billion.

http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...
Vomit most likely from some 20 something kid who just drank way too much with their expendable income. :)
That's a great idea. A pack of peanuts at the supermarket probably gets a tighter chain of custody than 10cc of morphine.
> Mark my words, cp and terrorism and cyberterrorism (read: major bank hacks) are the things going to be used to increase

Going to be used, future tense? Welcome to 2002... This has been the status quo for a long time now.
Phones used to be shaped so it was comfortable to do so. It was quite a useful feature.
Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey spends fortune backing pro-Trump 'shitposts'
So which is it? Were they displaced by high rents, or already homeless somewhere else?

And let's not sugar coat it. Some are mentally ill, but many others have serious drug/alcohol addictions. You only need to stroll through the Tenderloin or Civic Center at any time of day to see that first hand.
I guess I'm in the minority here for finding coding challenging but not necessarily fun. I don't enjoy programming, per se, but I enjoy designing and architecting a system that solves the problem. Programming is just something I do once the fun part is over. It's necessary to realize the vision.
I was just making some yesterday. It's time consuming if you use KiCad, which has a draw program with a UI from the 1990s. I could have drawn a footprint in Autodesk Inventor's sketch mode in a tenth of the time, and without having to use a calculator to compute distances from the data sheet drawing.

(CAD program UIs are really hard to do well. The big companies have it figured out at last, but the technology hasn't filtered down to open source yet.)
How you live and how much money your make are related but it's not absolute. Local cost of living is a huge factor. Plus you can be an idiot (when it comes to spending money) with a larger paycheck and end up with a lower quality of life than your frugal neighbor.
I'd encourage you to look at http://48hills.org/2016/02/16/five-myths-about-the-homeless-... :)
The gig economy is a way to minimize labor costs. Uber drivers can "drive for another service in parallel", but Uber is devoting all of its resources right now to destroying those rivals.
> There's a certain beauty in an entire field losing coherency.

To be fair, Woit is hardly a neutral commenter on physical matters related to string theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit#Criticism_of_string... . Of course, that doesn't make him wrong.

For discussion of this whole issue, I feel more comfortable trusting Baez than Wiki. He seems to reach much the same conclusions: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html . (There's enough similarity in language that I don't know that he wasn't involved in writing the Wiki article, though a casual look at the history (and the fact that I don't know his Wikipedia username …) doesn't show it.)
They didn't support multiple platforms for the same reason Blackberry's BBM was a Blackberry exclusive; platform lock-in. I have iMessage and I love using it with people I text regularly. It still works for SMS, but it's a degraded experience. There are tons of other options now, but I still use iMessage the most since it's the best-integrated messenger on iOS, and they'll keep it that way with things like private APIs + total control over the App Store.
From the software side, GCN is much easier to program for than VLIW.
The legal requirement for an organization to receive tax-free nonprofit status in the US is that at least 5% of funds be spent to serve the stated mission. The bar is low everywhere.
> Right now best-practice for medical training involves expensive life-size manikins and dedicated simulation rooms with real staff. My goal is a realistic software simulation of the emergency room with a wide variety of patient scenarios to let students and docs easily practice in a setting where failure is okay.

i suppose we'll see the time when instead of "Halo 7" we'll have VR-based "House 2, laparoscopic edition".
Most people don't understand log-log graphs. Also, taking the log-log is so powerful that even distributions that don't strictly follow a power law can look as if they're approximately following a straight line.
The ephemeral nature of a voice call is not only an advantage for questionable activities.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.
Actually, only 35% of San Francisco's homeless population has some sort of Psychiatric condition. According to a survey of SF's homeless the biggest barriers to finding work (as of 2015) were:

28% said no permanent address
20% said alcohol or drug use
17% said disability
14% said age
13% said need for clothing/shower facilities
...
9% said mental health concerns

So it does seems like lack of housing is the largest barrier for SF's homeless population. Additionally, mental illness is most prevalent amongst the chronically homeless, which only make up about 25% of the homeless population in SF. The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for months not years, and the many programs to aid them in finding housing and preventing homelessness in the first place have a significant measurable effect on the average number of homeless shelter entries and length of stay.

Source: https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
Recurring revenue vs. disability insurance
Margaret Thatcher said a lot of things. This has no relevance to what is happening right now in San Francisco.
Fax is still a growth market in the US, or at least was as late as last year if a chap in that market I interacted with then is anything to go by. He was working on a fax sending API. The stuff couldn't go by signed email or anything of the sorts because of some administrative and (medical) insurance related paperwork if memory serves.
So what the author is trying to tell me is: let's look the other way because it's making us money. It doesn't matter if people or communities get hurt in the process, we're making money, so let's make sure our unethical golden goose keeps making money.

I'm a business owner working in tech an I actually applaud SF for having the guts to stand up for its people.
Why Bad Science Persists
Maybe a more technical/comprehensive read is this[1] writeup, which I see some others have linked to. Prior HN[2].

[1] https://stribika.github.io/2015/01/04/secure-secure-shell.ht...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8843994
Your quotation doesn't says work experience. It says experiences with [some computer] -- you could get that at a university.
It seems clear to me that firms like Uber are arb'ing a gap in current employment law. The question isn't whether or not Uber drivers meet the FLSA and IRS definitions of an "employee". Sure, fine, whatever, they don't. But:

* Is it moral to capitalize on employee classification rules to build an enormous workforce that is denied protections and benefits that are common to other employees? And,

* Do we as a society want to maintain the classification rules that allow this to happen?

We could easily change the rules so that, for instance, protections and benefits must be extended to anyone who does more than N hours of work for you in a calendar year. Individual states could do that. Shouldn't we? Why or why not? In answering, consider that over the long term, Uber won't be the only firm taking advantage of these rules, and that in competitive marketplaces the most ruthless, least responsible companies often have an insurmountable edge. One thing we like to do with regulation is to prevent races to the bottom.
Both the National Geographic article (linked above) and the NYT articles (linked in the Nat Geo) article are fairly low quality. No references or citations. Not up to HN's usual front page quality standard.
Showing only (or prioritising) same-language results helps with relevancy. A German speaker who searches for “gift” is not looking for ideas for presents, and an Italian speaker who searches for “peperoni” is not looking for the American variant of salami.

A further problem, though, is that search engines try to understand the query and the content searched at a deeper level than mere keyword matches. For example, they may try to pick up synonyms (if I search for “movies in <local area>”, perhaps results for “films” might be helpful too) and associations.
As a side note, I've long advocated developers use checklists during releases and more involved git tasks. Why? The cost of using a checklist is minimal-- maybe a few moments glancing at a sheet of paper. The upside is huge though, since you can avoid catastrophic error.

I was fortunate enough to earn my wings before becoming a developer, and as lame as it sounds, learning when and where to use checklists is one of the best lessons I learned.
Maybe someone will come out with an ergonomic cellphone and do some mad Columbussing in that area. "You pockets aren't flat, your face isn't flat; stop using a flat slab as a phone!" The marketing writes itself.
Reminds me of John Varley's book Steel Beach. Set in the future, humans live on the Moon and everyone on Luna is connected to the central computer (CC) which behaves at once as government, friend, guide, psychologist, encyclopaedia and diary.

Fascinating stuff. Other topics in the book: nanotechnology and bioengineering as everyday commodities, gender fluidity and the CC-human relationship. Reminds me that the book is due for a reread!
> As a NY-based entrepreneur, from my perspective the only people who lose here are those who have convinced themselves that there is no place other to be than San Francisco, and who accordingly suffer to a greater and greater degree as their commitment to staying in the city becomes less and less economically justifiable.

I think it's pretty similar to New Yorkers who insist on living in Manhattan, rather than the other boroughs which are more affordable, or, God forbid, New Jersey.

You don't have to move very far from San Francisco to get a significant decrease in rent. Just a few miles is enough.

I know plenty of people who insist on living in SF. They do the same things after work that most people do: go home, eat, watch TV or read a book. They go out a few nights per week. They could easily move 10 miles south, cut their rent by more than 1/3, and still spend just as much time enjoying the San Francisco restaurants and nightlife as they do now.
Mental illness and drug/alcohol addiction are highly correlated.

But read the SF survey linked twice in this thread. It's got lots of actual answers. The homeless you see on the street are not really representative of the problem. There's a bigger population of precariously housed people who cycle in and out of homelessness.
There isn't much, if anything, you can't configure from PowerShell these days. Microsoft even has versions of Windows Server without a GUI at all.
I don't know what your proposed solution is, since you elected not to share it.

I will say though that historically, the only examples I can recall of independent polities being able to work together to solve common problems involved both an outside enemy, and a shared set of values, culture, and experience.

Global warming doesn't fulfill either criterion.

Despite the Internet and modern media, Western culture and values are not universal. And even in the US, a large fraction of the population doesn't even acknowledge that global warming is a problem, much less be willing to pay for a fix.

How are you going to get those people to come along without some level of coercion?
So, if coming from a more primitive part of the brain, possibly pre-linguistic animal sounds are cussing.
Why I Say No to Big Money Customers
Was this an attempt at demonstrating your theory by exemplifying it?

Because you mix anything and everything, taking small examples which are extremely outdated, unrelated or standard behaviour of their time and do not show the big picture. As it sounds very informed, very learned, it allows you to deploy your own thesis and give it a sound of scientific truth. What is funny is that it is exactly the process you demonise.
Someone estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto (founder of bitcoin) has around 1 million bitcoins spread around multiple addresses.
I love the retire who isn't middle class, but has 2x the average family income while retired.
The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges
It's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that the gig economy allows the creation of services that were previously unthinkable. I also find it ironic that Uber drivers are discussed from a point of exploited labor, while AirBNB renters are treated like greedy landlords - both services being very much alike: a way for individuals to provide services with their underutilized resources (time, vehicles, apartments).
Free market also figured out a 400$ per hour prostitute is more valuable than plenty of engineers and musicians so that argument doesn t really stand. Value and money are not always correlated.
I'd dispute that my posting was an ideological rant, given the depth and subtlety of my arguments as well as the ultimate admission that the demographic in question is useful and essential... it's also unarguable that SJWs are not shrill in opposition. I guess "stink" was too strong of a word choice for a word meant to convey pejorative association... but it sure reads as better copy.
My definitions:

Wealthy -- I don't have to work to maintain my lifestyle.

Poor -- I can't afford basic necessities even when I work.

Middle-class -- everyone else.

Now for sure there is some variation on middle-class (upper/lower/truly middle) and that's basically a function of disposable income.

But this definition at least accounts for variation in regional cost of living and even adjusts for personal lifestyle choices. Your middle class might be my wealthy because my lifestyle is cheaper.
Not sure what the compelling part of this is, I have about 6 of similar units (2 USB, 6 outlets and a LED light) that I paid ~$13 for. I use the USB ports with the appropriate cable. My tablets seem to charge fine.

Likewise I have some power monitors that I use for things that I want general measurements on, they are also pretty inexpensive.

So unless this unit is in the sub-$30 range I can do similar things today.

Looking forward to the release to see what the pricing model is.
This is a very good point. Even if you make 200k in NY, its equivalent to 100k in Arizona. Or at least something along those lines.
I have been wondering and asked the same for chrome based browser... did not find anything so far.
Asking mentally ill people if they are mentally ill is not a reliable way to determine if they are mentally ill. The same is true for alcoholics and drug addicts.

Many people will deny their circumstances because they are mentally ill and don't realize it, or are simply in denial, or because they think they will get more help if they hide their problems.
The best part about black twitter is how dynamic and innovative it is. There is a certain playfulness with language which is frowned upon in many academic settings & especially by linguistic prescriptivists, but healthy languages change over time.

And "more diverse datasets" isn't enough. I get that you need to train an AI on a set of old data, but any truly good NLP would be able to adapt to new terms and phrases as they're invented. Not saying it's an easy problem to solve, but many people I've spoken to don't seem to even be aware that language recognition is necessarily a moving target.
Local cost of living is relevant, but if pay is also higher, they can still save more relative to their peers in lower cost locales, and then retire to a place that costs less.
For one, support of larger interfaces.

A mobile processor from five years ago is going to have a rough time trying to run 4k GUIs at 60fps.
It's really not strange nor contradictory. Most people probably think of "middle class" like this:

- lower class: on welfare & food stamps

- middle class: have a job, must work for a living

- upper class: not having to work and living off interest payments of wealth investments

Therefore, the middle class covers the wide spectrum of $9/hr Starbucks baristas and $500k white shoe lawyers. For "lower class", most people use the label "poor". For "upper class", most people use the label "rich".

(I'm guessing Bloomberg was attempting to give an insight similar to the mathematical contradiction of "everybody thinks they're an above-average driver". However, they misunderstood how people self-identify themselves as "middle class".)
Yeah, especially embarrassing if you work in tech and can't be arsed to turn off the email signature ads for your hip new mail client. I really don't like that many mobile email apps do this by default now. If your email app is significantly better than mobile outlook, I'll tell people about it myself.
The article refers to another article about "Black Twitter"[1], but the examples are all about hashtags. It doesn't seem to be a dialect; it's about subject matter of interest to the community.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/the-tr...
He is otherwise great chap, but I don't think he is the guy to turn to on bitcoin/blockchain topics. He has focus certainly somewhere else, and to me his rants about bitcoin sound more like a general complaining because he missed the train.
An evening job at a telemarketing call center is also a way for an individual to provide services with their underutilized resources. But we have no trouble recognizing that as a "job", with an "employer", and all the attendant obligations.
African American Museum opening: ‘It is a dream come true.’
These are American definitions and not European ones, where working class are people who work for someone else for a living, while the middle class works for themselves. I guess it depends if you have your FU money or not.
Ethereum stuff can also prove how to do things wrong... The DAO is a good example of that, and now the recent ddos attack.
Here's a good discussion on this: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light
I sometimes browse the web with my phone, and it's quite often painful.
Any hope getting this to work with Windows Subsystem for Linux?

I got my model up and training on wsl, which really surprised me -- it was super easy and just worked. But I didn't even try venturing into gpu acceleration... perhaps it would "just work" as well? Though I suspect not.
The analogy doesn't work, because AirBnB renters aren't a labor force.