skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A) With respect, your experience and the author's experience may vary, for a variety of reasons, so I'm not sure it makes sense to pit one set of experiences against another, so to speak.

B) Would you be willing to clarify what was toxic about your experience with SV startups as you described?

C) Realistically, without denying the problems which probably do exist with "intersectionaly identity politics", etc, it seems pretty clear (as in there are studies, etc) that sexual harassment is one of the most toxic aspects, not only of tech, but of contemporary business and American life. Discrimination based on the color of one's skin is up there as well. So it does seem a bit disingenuous to point out the flaws in ways in which people are trying to ameliorate these problems without acknowledging the problems themselves, and/or to imply that said flaws are more pervasive than the damaging behaviors which they are a response to.
And I'm sure every single one is backed by legitimate USD deposits...
I grew up in the South and there's the insidious presence of all the monuments and statues in public places and state houses of leaders of the slave states during the Civil War. Then all the public schools named after Jefferson Davis or Robert Lee or similar traitors. My high school history classes always emphasized the South was fighting for states' rights and their way of life, as if slavery was something honorable. The message is loud and clear of the institutional support for these attitudes.
Decent considering the magnitude of the needed effort. I use it to occasionally play Age of Empires 2 on Steam running over Wine. It is playable, but has still some bugs. For example embedded browser doesn't work with Steam and there's this years old bug, for which there is a patch that is ignored by mainline, that makes your view scroll sideways.
NYC has the largest homeless population in the US. You are still more likely to have your bike stolen in NYC than you are in Houston. “Safe” doesn’t mean “less crime” it means less violent crime. Overcrowding — definitely still true in NYC. Urban decay? Still there. Have a visit to the Bronx or Queens sometime.
Because expensive cars are luxury goods with negative externalities.
From that perspective, does any country have their own publicly owned pharmaceutical manufacturer? It's the kind of thing the NHS should do, since they control most other aspects of health care, but I don't think they do.

There's so little benefit to competition with generics, you may as well have that vertical integration to at least provide what hospitals need.
The RFP quotes up to 50,0000 employees in 15 years. Any sane incentive package should have hooks in it to make sure most of those jobs do materialize.
Private vehicular taxation is really unjust when done in this way. Not everyone has the same usage patterns.

For example, I commute by bicycle. I would love to have a street legal van, in the eventuality that I want to move something bulky. I would use it once a month at most. Probably less. But I would have to pay thousands of Euros of road taxes just to own a street legal vehicle that is parked in my own garage. Why? Fuel is already taxed a lot to limit usage. Parking permits in cities are expensive to prohibit ownership and congestion. Why am I being taxed, exactly?

BTW, I know this is not a road tax in the article but same nonsense of assuming that ownership is the same as usage.
It really, really depends on the company and a whole host of other factors.

If you pushed a bug to prod, knocked out all of Australia, then went home and aren't answering your phone because it's after hours and you're not on call, I'm not going to be happy with you. (Not that we would normally push to prod right before going home, but to illustrate the point...)

If you work 9-5, M-F, never cause any fires, and hit your milestones, then I'm perfectly satisfied with that.

That's just me, though; I intentionally maintain a relatively balanced workplace. Other companies and managers will have different styles. That being said, don't underestimate the importance of likeability [0]; you'll be fighting against human nature and unconscious biases if you do. How that manifests (general friendliness, going to after-hours social events, helping others with tough tasks, etc) will vary by person and team.

[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-likability-matters-more-at-...
How a TV Works in Slow Motion
Jane Jacobs, one of the historical thought leaders behind modern urban planning, discusses in her book (The Life and Death of American Cities) how thriving neighborhoods have a mix of cheap old real estate and expensive new real estate. The old real-estate allows for places like dive bars, and general affordable housing to exist, where new buildings house chain stores, high end boutiques, and allow the neighborhood to grow to match current demand from new residents.

The key issue here is that this cycle works best in the long term, but can cause pain in the short term. Additionally, if the new housing doesn't match the complete incoming demand for the neighborhood, the prices of the old units rise as well furthering displacement. In turn, she advocated for the removal of zoning, for as it stands right now, there is an extreme demand for housing in neighborhoods that are zoned in such a way that restricts their density from matching the demand in addition to pushing commercial activity to fixed locations where prices will always be high due to demand to living within walking distances to stores.
Nah that was GT staff, ATL city got isn’t that competent to be posting on HN.

That said, GO JACKETS!
If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are therefore best buddies with the ultrawealthy and elites of society? The pundit class says they're smart? Rarely, once in 200 years, you'll get lucky with this approach and land on a class traitor and hero like FDR, but you're actively selecting away from that on purpose.

For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.
> If you want to productively block scrapers, you should consider using a captcha-based system at the application layer, preferably a captcha that hasn't been broken yet and which can't be outsourced to a mechanical turk-based API. If nothing else, doing that will introduce at least 10 - 20 seconds of latency per request, which might be intolerable for many scrapers even if they're quite sophisticated.

I'm thinking of getting into scraping as a (weird) hobby and still doing high-level research in the field. The point I've quoted stands out to me as one of the biggest hurdles to leap.

Three things.

Firstly, I'm aware of human-based captcha-defeating systems. You describe captchas that "cannot be outsourced to a mechanical turk-based API". I'm wasn't aware such systems existed, that sounds scary. Do you have any examples?

Secondly, I'm a little confused by your mention that #1 will simply raise the latency of the request to 10-20 seconds instead of completely blocking it.

Thirdly, in the case where a captcha (eg, ReCAPTCHA) can be defeated by a captcha-filling service... well, such services are extremely cheap, and there's no per-account fee or overhead. It sounds plausible that one could simply sign up for the captcha-filling service multiple times, and submit captchas to defeat in parallel. Could this work?
> you want to encourage wealthy people to spend

Not on cars.
Even at a larger state school, only the top few percent would be comparable to CMU CS grads.
This is an interesting position that I am quite conflicted about. From the conclusion of the original post it seems like he/she would prefer company that brings in high salary jobs not to relocate to the area if the company itself would not be employing people that originated from the area for those high salary jobs. This is because he/she perceived that there is no benefit to the economy since the local does not get those salary, and the local would have to suffer the consequence of rising living cost.

But my concern would be how would a city ever improve its living condition if it lack funds to maintain schools and community and the resident themselves are unwilling to bring in these company?

Even if amazon doesn't pay taxes, the employees that work there will (through buying stuff and living there), doesn't that give the city an opportunity to reinvigorate the city with new tax revenue and potentially provide a better community and education for the next generation?
Seconding foobar2000, I also use Wine for that.
This is happening in my country and the government has said they'll back any pharmacy deciding to mix the drugs themselves. Healthcare costs are spiralling out of control.

It'll lead to a metric ton of courtcases all the way to Strasbourg and beyond though. The Americans may threaten to invade.
If you serve a certain rate of medicare patients, you get additional funding. It's set up this way for 'political' reasons. Like most of us politics, it's a mess.
Ha, I couldn't put my finger on why that phrase bothered me but you nailed it.
There is also an AWS office in Dallas, based on recruitment emails I have received.
Your car is unlikely to experience life-threatening complications with a nearly unbounded upper cost while it's being fixed.

Your body is. A routine surgery can absolutely turn into a hundred-thousand-dollar nightmare.

Never mind that a mechanic has a much better understanding of a car, then a doctor does of a human body.
You add the expenses but not the benefits, which is having commuters go to their jobs, add value to the economy, and get income taxed.
So supposedly someone somewhere has, what, 2-3 Billion USD in a bank account?
No, they are not. This myth needs to die already.
> As an example, let's say a certain company exposes sequentially crawlable online orders without authentication.

Wow. That's starting to get really shady.

Note to self: All things facing the web in ecommerce must be cryptographically randomized. :(
I'm not seeing the point that you're trying to make. Are you suggesting that Philadelphia (or any major metropolis) would not benefit from the sudden windfall infusion of 50,000+ high-paying jobs? I think every small business owner in Philly is probably drooling at the prospect of Amazon dumping tens of thousands of people with disposable incomes at their front door.
I appreciate the elaboration. I wasn't aware of this issue.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or flamebait here. What you say isn't remotely plausible, since if it were true, software companies would be filled with non-programmers. Edit: I mean instead of programmers.
Jibo Review: A 3+ year wait, but was it worth it?
So much ignorance in so few lines, it's a performance. Thank you!
GPS tracking is a complete red herring; you're focusing on the wrong thing. No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary. Here's the statement that was made: "Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation)".

That "approximation" is: "Which cell towers can hear your phone transmit, and how strong is the signal?" Your cell phone would work just as well as a phone if you disabled the GPS chip, but your location can be estimated by triangulating from signal strength. It's not nearly as precise, or as accurate, as a GPS-provided location would be, of course.
Right, I guess it more has to do with the fact that some people don't realize that the brain itself (in my limited understanding) can be changed by our thoughts/actions.
There's a distinction between a Qt project calling Rust code via a C ABI versus a Rust program bootstrapping Qt.

The author hand-edits a C++ file, autogenerated by CMake. In that sense it still needs a C++ compiler as part of a build step.

A binding relying only on Rust and QML might replace the C++ boilerplate with a Rust equivalent.
You claim that lower taxes makes inequality, but think about the poor people who would be locked out of owning a car if the taxes went up to some arbitrary amount - they literally wouldn't be able to get to certain jobs.
And the studies typically quoted showing a hiring bias against women (like the infamous "lab manager" study) are also typically academia. And actually much less substantial than the Ceci & Williams study.

See

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

and

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/ge...
From my experience in the scene:

Bot mill people are very aware of headless browsers being an effortless solution to mimic a browser, but not that efficient.

The amount of ram and so a bots spends to do a single click can truly hurt their bottom line.

Top tier collectives I heard of use own C/C++ frameworks with hardcoded requests and challenge solvers, and in-depth knowledge of anti-botting anti-fraud techniques used by the opposing force. If DoubleClick finds a brand new performance profiling test, and send it out in the JS code in one in 1000 requests, expect those guys to detect it and crack it within 24 hours.

They have no objective of getting through captchas, just having their number of valid clicks in double digits.
I can't find a long video animation depicting the process. It was a bit old, but it was so great at displaying the process of coating a layer with masks and etching them with acid. If I remember correctly it was repeated 5 or 7 times.

After watching it, I concluded we are gods for manipulating matter at this level :)
You sound like you have absolutely no clue how Amazon is run, but really don't like them so you go threw in some unfriendly, unfounded assumptions on top of your ignorance.
You've crossed over the flamebait line here. Please don't do that, especially not in this thread. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> The best urban environments I've lived in so far are the ones in the ex-USSR

You might want to read more about Microdistricts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict), if you haven't already, as a resident of one of those former communist Eastern-European cities I can attest to their usefulness. For example, until a couple of years ago I used to live in one of those apartment buildings that used to be part of a microdistrict (building was built in the 1960s), and I can tell you that I had an elementary school right bellow my window (I was living on the 7th floor) and a kindergarten 50 meters from the building's entrance. Don't have kids, but if I had one at the time he/she could have gone to kindergarten or school in record time (the elevator-ride would have probably taken longer than the actual walking, it was an old elevator), so no need for me, the parent, to need to leave work earlier in order to pick my kid up from school or kindergarden (or to hire someone else to do it). The tram station was also pretty close, like 50 meters or so.

But, yeah, a microdistrict requires that you live in a not-so-big apartment (not-so-big compared to owning an actual house) so if you're the sort of person that usually buys and accumulates lots of stuff then it's not for you, because you'd have no place to deposit said stuff. I guess that's why it kind of worked in the former Communist countries and why it's so difficult to impose in places like America.
I misspell words in Google searches all the time. I can either take the 3-5 seconds to correct it myself, or just hit search knowing that the big G will know exactly what I meant anyway. I would say an aspect of being "smart" is not wasting time on unimportant details?
Can you describe in what ways SV feels like Animal Farm?

> The Orwellian mismatch between rhetoric and action feels like cult-like propaganda to me.

Can you list out a few of these actions?
I think that's a bit extreme and a black and white way of thinking.

For example, suppose you're heading an FBI group, and you've got a suicidal terrorist in custody who is part of a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA. You have excellent evidence this guy is involved, and that the terrorists probably have a nuclear bomb in the country, and, if they realize their coconspirator has been captured, they are likely to detonate immediately.

The terrorist demands to see his lawyer. Your specialists say you should deny that request, because his lawyer may signal, intentionally or otherwise, the other terrorists. Should you allow the terrorist to meet with his lawyer?

Our society's laws say he should be able to see his lawyer. We value that kind of thing. And yet, if you would risk millions of lives to protect this right... Well, that seems perverse to me.
I disagree. I am not responsible for others feelings. There should be clear rules of conduct at any job and a clear process of enforcement. This make the situation fair and certain.

One easy rule is that if someone says "Only talk to me about work." then the other person has to respect it. No forcing of social acceptance , no shaming the other to believe what you believe, just focus on what you were hired for. This is a standard taught to many managers to keep the company out of harassment issues , its very robotic unemotional but its clear and will allow different groups to work together as long as this rule is enforced.

Basically we should not have to worry about a toxic culture because you should not be forced into one when you work. You should just be able to work and separate yourself from your task in any emotional way.

[California dev, 8 years, have held manager position]
> Is the siren song of every fresh bit of e-drivel really that intoxicating?

Yes, it is. Media and the apps that provide it have had literally billions of dollars invested in learning how to manipulate our psychology and capture as much of our attention as possible. Clickbait, notifications, automated A/B testing to determine which thumbnail images maximize clicks, etc. There is a giant, incredibly well-funded machine whose turbines are running 24/7 to suck our attention into it.

> My modest suggestion: hold your e-sources to a higher standard; budget your time when jacked-in so that you're not just killing time whenever you go virtual.

I think maybe you missed the point of my comment. The verbs you use there -- "hold" and "budget" -- are exactly the problem. I am doing that, but performing those actions themselves has a cost. I can either be drained because the Internet/social media thing sucked away all of my attention, or drained because I spent all of my energy standing fast against the tide.

Either way I'm drained.
He said his whiteness hurt his employability.
That's the whole point, let me refine it further: the bad aspects that mentioned in the article are not unique to tech: the world is full of overboard marketing, I see ads promising scantly-clad women flocking to me if I drink sugared water of $BRAND and muscular attractive men inviting me to the world of opportunities if I use shampoo $BRAND2 - btw, if you think tech world is sexist and pigeonholing try watching TV ads... And the other aspects are not bad but just a normal imperfect human behavior. "Toxic" is a very bad term because it's completely unclear what it means besides "it's something bad". So is the message of the article "bad things in tech were bad and that's why I left"? OK, it's nice to know, not exactly anything new but everybody has the right for one's own biography. Is there any insight there beyond that? One that pertains specifically to tech world?

> Why does the small chain of bike repair shops in my area, also taking the stress and high risk of starting their own business, not exhort about how their bike repair shop will change the world of bikes forever?

Maybe if they did, they'd be a large national chain of bike repair shops now? ;) Maybe not, who knows. The point is there's nothing inherently bad in wanting to change the world of bikes forever. And one day somebody might just do that.

> Moreover, there's an argument to be made that a field that oft labels itself as "meritocratic" relies on these hyperbolic forms of marketing and mission statements to do business, rather than a more traditional, "stodgy" business.

You can't really rely on mission statements and marketing to do business. At least not in any long term. And SV companies surely provide ample evidence that marketing is not the only thing they do. Surely, some companies are just hype, and those get up, stay up for a short while, and go down to the ash heap of history, never to be spoken about again (would anybody know what Juicero was in 5 years? maybe some ubergeeks would). But claiming it's a defining property of significant part of SV companies to be overblown marketing only is just false.
How about not saying things like whiteness holding back your career?
>Would you take one at Amazon, knowing that it's one of the worst software jobs out there because of horrible working conditions?

Source? It is consistently ranked as one of the better places for software engineers to work, despite NYT hit pieces.

>Would you last significantly longer than the average 1 year turnover rate at Amazon?

Amazon's turnover is almost indistinguishable from Google's. It's an industry issue (at the highest tier, at least), not an Amazon one.
9 Phrases Only MBA's Understand
They are likely to fail because they are under capitalized for what they are trying to do.

The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars.

If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered.

> One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen.

No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.
Yeah try Lazpaint: https://sourceforge.net/projects/lazpaint/
He also spent years in Houston. He's moved around a lot.

Not sure if any of his childhood stomping grounds are going to get much favoritism.
The people I've known who needed expensive care (high-5-figures or 6-figures) were made well aware of the costs in advance, because at that point the facility wants to make sure your insurance will cover it beforehand. But it doesn't do that much for the patients - comparison shopping doctors and facilities is extremely stressful stuff and a lot of people would rather not think about it, even when some outcome info is available. And the exact details are never known up front, so then you're dealing with "it'll probably cost X more to do it at Y but there's probably a Z percent higher chance of a good outcome..." no-right-answer type serious business decisions.

Emergency care is a different matter, I imagine, insurance-coverage-wise, but pre-approval seems to be fairly widespread for planned stuff these days.