skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See my response to stickfigure. The relationship is not balanced.
Other countries, other states, other cities have "solved" this problem in a bunch of different ways, it's not a unique problem. What's unique is the city's unwillingness to actually solve it.

At the core, you need to spend more money by basically giving these people healthcare, mental health care, and a place to live.

"But that's not fair, what about all the good, honest citizens of the city who work their asses off to pay the exorbitant rents and exorbitant health insurances and still struggle to put food on the table bla bla bla"

No, it's not fair, but as long as that mentality rules, SF will have a homeless problem. The city sure as fuck doesn't lack the money to solve it, it lacks political will.

"But that's socialism!"

Yes. Now do you want to solve the problem, or keep sticking your head in the sand and hope it goes away through the magic of capitalism and the free market?
+1
They should learn from Ballmer wasting MSFT resources housing him. Epic "me too!" failure.
I'm from Florida -- and have deep roots going back more than 100 years.

Florida is significantly less developed than it has any right to be, on a range of measures.
This is the problem of our generation. Shame on us.

Is this an Area where YC can help ? I challenge YC to consider Request for Startups that will consider ideas to fix this problem. I envision someone as powerful as YC and its network partnering with the city of SF,SJC,Oakland to allow for experimentation in finding long term fixes to this social issue.

here is a NPR report that shows the impact of fixing the homeless problem.

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/581778796/er-use-goes-down-as...
Unions bargained for defined-length days because longer days were killing people through both physical grind and the inevitable failures of (non-negligent) attention that happen when one is worked to the bone.
Can you provide some specifics?

We were represented by IBEW at GTE, and when my mother's job was moved to Florida, they got a pretty decent severance deal. Curious to hear how things were handled elsewhere.
Thank you for saying a reasonable thing.
Facebook bans all cryptocurrency ads
Hospital Program Pays Homeless People's Rent
So you want to go back to child labor on weekends?
Personally I’m not even thinking about software companies, I’m talking about the vast majority of companies out there in countless industries.

It’s just not possible to have a good generic app to serve all of them. There’s just too much variety in workflows and edge cases to capture them all, and few companies will change the way they work to accommodate the opinionated workflow of some productivity vendor.

The best solution is still to build custom applications for each company, molded around the way they work, and owned by them 100%, so they can feel fully confident that the product will not disappear or change in ways they don’t like.
And at least in Melbourne, construction unions haven't slowed progress at all. Look at the fucking building boom! They constantly fight for wages and hours and get a lot of demands met, yet there is no slowdown of tower construction any time soon. Now Melbs has more shopping centers, housing and the people building them can afford to live and shop there as well.
I tested my friends 6s after it was noticeably slow in even basic built-in interface navigation like settings or msgs, I did an antutu benchmark and he got half the score of published antutu results for the then flagship phone. It's ridiculous how far many people are going to defend the worlds biggest company when things are so obvious. My wife's xiaomi note is still going strong after a year without any performance degradation and/or battery issues. I wonder even if apple is not deliberately slowing it down they realised its happpening and never bothered to improve the battery life - the result? Billions of additonal revenue when users feel their phone is slow for the latest software and upgrade the hardware without any benefits for them other than removing restrictions forced by Apple. It's a shame and the company deserves to be shamed!

P.s the CPU and GPU scores both were noticeably lower (almost half) for otherwise perfect phone. Remember it's once benchmark score could still beat most Android flagships if not for the artificially introduced throttling by Apple..
I find it so weird that so many software developers think they're being paid fairly in the face of Google having massive reserves of cash just lying around.
Fact-checking website crashes during Trump's first State of the Union
What I think is interesting is the different standards applied by people like you -- and even whether you realize you're doing it!

Concentrated power in the hands of capital has had utterly devastating effects on millions if not billions of people. It has easily cost 7-digit numbers of lives. Yet in general, capitalism is taken for granted as a good, discussions of problems always get tons and tons of "yeah, but even if it did that bad thing here's a bunch of good that outweighs it", and at best people suggest only very moderate restraints as a remedy.

Putting even small amounts of power in the hands of labor... does not get that kind of pass. Instead, the focus is almost exclusively on harms, flipping the story to "I guess they did some good, but..." and then bringing up criticism after criticism, either implying or outright saying that unless labor unions manage to somehow be perfect angels at all times it won't be worth allowing them to exist.

What's even more ironic is that a labor union is just a legal form that pools a resource, for the benefit of those who provide that resource, in ways that wield more power than any of them could individually. The only difference between a labor union and a for-profit corporation is the resource being pooled.
This thirds rule is what we used at our consultancy!
What do say when you decline? I struggle with something that sounds appropriate. "Sorry"?
They were paid room and board, obviously.
Ask HN: “Doing Business, where?”: My state or the clients?
If I work with remote clients, selling my services online, where does the law consider me to be doing business at?

Do I have to register my company in each state where I have a client, or can I gain the benefits of registering in Nevada for instance, while living in Illinois, doing work for a client in Georgia?
investors should always do proper investigation of the assets in which they are willing to invest money. Read here what jhon mcafee saying

https://uslifed.com/crypto-news/john-mcafee-is-still-sure-ab...
I've read/heard enough people disappointed in how buggy, slow, etc. their new iOS is on their old phone, to believe there are quite a few people who would rather not update if Apple didn't coerce them (or they would revert if Apple let them.) Grandparent post talks about Android vendors wasting our money and materials, but just this weekend my sister-in-law was complaining about how she needs a new iPhone because hers updated and is slow now. [Maybe related to the famous battery issue.]

I didn't take a general position; I expressed skepticism in GP's implicit argument that every update is a good update, and my frustration at the idea of having updates shoved down my throat. I included some other related ideas without explaining clearly enough, partially because I'm not sure how/if this should actually be regulated.
One thought though...

> inexplicably, kept their position as the market leaders.

Only because there is apparently a large segment of people who do not have functioning critical thinking skills. I know HN doesn't like to do politics, but there is a huge overlap, at least in terms of thought process, in the people who support a particular president and those who support bitcoin. Both seem to lack any kind of critical thinking and both dismiss anything negative about their worldview as "FUD". It is pretty amazing human behavior if at least one of the two categories didn't have some very negative real world consequences...

Honestly, both could almost be considered a very large cult.
I'm happy for Asana as I find the core product useful, but I do wonder how much more growth is possible without branching out into other product areas. Hopefully they've got some interesting stuff in the pipeline.
Without mechanisms to discourage unfair termination (like unions and strong law enforcement), companies can and will and do ignore the law and just fire whoever they want. The threat of being knocked around by unions and/or the government for doing it is the only thing that stops companies from firing people when they get pregnant, or when they get diagnosed with cancer, or when they get engaged to their same-sex fiance, or when they adopt a kid from a foreign country, or when they report their boss for sexual harassment.

While you're waiting for your wrongful termination/retaliation complaint to wind its way through the existing systems, you don't have a job and you aren't paying rent. It's good to have multiple layers of protection so ordinary people don't get screwed by a business operator looking to save a few dollars.

fwiw the US's current government infrastructure is absolutely miserable at enforcing labor rights laws, so that makes unions a regrettable necessity no matter how bad they are. It'd be awesome if the country was in a good enough state to make unions no longer necessary.
Oops Apple’s Fancy New Foster and Partners Store Isn’t Up to Chicago Winters
Show HN: Offensive Secure Developer Training
I've always wondered what software developers make in the heart of silicon valley. I see some things that basically say 'more than Portland but only by maybe 50% or so', which means perhaps $180K or so? Nobody is buying a million dollar house on that kind of income, but in Portland (where I think houses are pretty expensive) someone making $120K wouldn't have any problem buying a perfectly fine place, even pretty close in to the urban core.

Maybe I'm getting my numbers from the wrong place.
Sure, it's a large and complex language that takes time to master. But I'm interested to hear examples of what you call 'profusion of edge cases'.

> The ratio between what a C++ compiler will accept and what it will produce sane code for is huge.

As is the case for any programming language.

> C++, on the other hand, seems to have been designed by compiler writers for their own enjoyment and/or job security.

C++ is designed by its standards committee... If you know anything about the struggles compiler writers have had with implementing the standard, you'd know the standards committee definitely does not consist of compiler writers! It's really cheap to summarize their efforts as motivated by advancing their own job security if you ask me... I can recommend you to attend a meeting or to read some proceedings to convince yourself otherwise.
The higher the purpose, the lower the self-esteem.
Microsoft is constantly being chummy with Canonical. Coming to Canonical events — offering the WSL based on Ubuntu, etc. it makes total sense. It’s such a Microsoft thing to do: they could buy them and then offer them as a alternative to Windows and still make a ton of money. Or buy them an make WSL even better and shut everything else down. I really think it’s going to happen. And if they get flack from regulators they can just point to RedHat
The problem with our corporations is that they have not modernized, often the corporation is more interested in the corporation itself than the profit. Some are known for graft and corruption, and they also on occasion tell their employees how to vote politically.

If they want people to sympathize with them they have to modernize and address modern issues. They can't live off their 1950s laurels.
I agree with you that historically unions were (and still are) critical in making the world a better place, by being the only force representing the exploited. I don't dispute that at all. But there can be a dark side too.

I grew up in the Detroit area, through the '70s and the '80s, which was a time of great decline for the city and for the American auto industry, which neither the city nor the industry ever recovered from. I was a kid, I didn't really understand the details of what was going on, so I would appreciate opposing views of what was going on if anyone's more informed than me. But what I absorbed from the adults around me was a sense that the UAW (United Auto Workers) had a stranglehold on the American auto industry, and it eventually killed the golden goose. It helped raise wages and benefits over the years, but in the same way that monopolies in business can be detrimental to the consumer, monopolies in labor can be detrimental to an industry as a whole.

Which is not to say that unions are bad- I think they are a net good. I'm just providing an example of why many Americans have negative associations with labor unions, even on the left sometimes. America may have soured on unions because of a black swan; I don't know how true that narrative is, but that narrative is the basis of how many Americans see unions.
Teachers don't get promoted.
How often do you plan to move across continents? And why couldn't you just use the homes already built there?
If you think my predictions are bad in general and this is just cherrypicked, one can always review my 2,000+ expired predictions since ~2008: https://predictionbook.com/users/gwern (I also have a profitable track record of personal & prediction market betting going back to ~2003.)
On business law, the US works well with Taiwan and Hong Kong. Mainland China is harder. But with China cracking down on Bitcoin, fleeing to the mainland would be risky.
> Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

It’s an issue with the tool startups use to run their businesses: either C or S corps.

What if a startup used a DAO instead of a corporation? I’d suspect you’d see the rate paid out by the smart contract would be proportional to an engineer’s contribution.

Measuring the engineer’s contribution is non-obvious though; it’s not a simple metric like LoC, bug reports closed, feature requests completed, etc.
I wasn't under the impression that the current issue in SF was a lack of willingness for politicians in both the city, and the state, to throw money at the problem due to constituents complaining it is unfair due to its socialistic resemblence. But I'll admit I haven't read about it as much since I moved from SF.
Most of the so-called abuses of unions happen only because employers don't want to negotiate fair conditions. They prefer to drive conditions to a dead-end instead of working with union leaders to promote shared interests. This way, they can demonize unions and increase their power over workers.
Their software also sucks compared to the “just-works” ios and its integration.
> Could be shills or Bitfinex oiling squeaky wheels. I too would love to see someone here on hn post about their experiences, though.

Completely agree. You'd think with the reach of this place, you'd get a couple people who have done it.
In that particular case, I think you're right.

Old technology meant steel coming out of PA was expensive. Steel should have presented a united front (labor and employers) demanding Carter and Reagan address dumping and drive for modernization --even if that meant fewer workers in the future --but at least the industry would remain.

After US announced 30% tariffs on imported solar panels, a Chinese company said they'd build a factory in the US [1].

We should demand fair reciprocal trade. None of this WTO, promises we put up with.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/30/news/economy/jinko-solar-us-...
What would you think about have a base income or "mincome" where every citizen essentially gets a base level to provide for necessities, and then anything else you make through employment is bonus?

I've been thinking about that a lot lately due to the mass robotization of jobs. Not sure how I feel about it, but it seems like an important conversation to have.
Busy locking kids up for a gram of weed.
Programmers make more money because their work is profitable AND demand far outstripped supply. Walmart is also highly profitable but labor supply exceeds demand so low wages.
Agree with some points. The state I live in has a strong union culture. There is a tendency in which unionized places think about only "Rights", but not "Responsibilities".
This in turn affects productivity. I guess when the balance tilts to their side, the union leaders try to take advantage of it; shows us human nature. The trick is to achieve correct balance. That can happen if both sides are willing to discuss and understand the aims and problems associated with it.
In the case of China, a big part of the problem was that the government was too slow to encourage CS education. While it has been pushing CS for the past 10 years, the result is a pyramid with a very very wide base as many juniors are produced every year but very few engineers with the 10+ years experience you'd expect from a senior engineer. So the main problem is the ratio to true seniors who can lead teams or solve problems that reach into many domains are in small compared to the total number of developers. Over time this will work itself out.

Salaries for seniors are rapidly approaching NA rates, it's no longer viable to outsource to China purely for cost reasons. I expect in 4-5 years if the trends hold they will reach parity. But right now the issue isn't about money -- those senior engineers have their pick of their projects and it's very common for them choose lower paying roles if they can work on problems and tech that interests them.

10 years ago, Chinese dev offices looked like sweatshops with as many people crammed in as possible. Now there isn't much difference between NA dev offices and Chinese ones -- at least in 1st and 2nd tier cities. Really the whole development culture has shifted from everyone wanting to work at big foreign firms with safe jobs to everyone wanting to be in a startup. It's done a complete 180.
Kind and firm.

“Sorry I cant help you today”
Yeah, this is point on... no.

Unless a price of a home is ridiculously cheap (under $100 a month?), and even then, people without any income and/or mentally unwell people will not magically become non-homeless. Next time, read your post two times after writing and check for logical errors.
That strategy worked out really well for them.
Generally how you ship vehicles to other continents (e.g. an RV) would be to put it in a shipping container :)
I think we're already there. You can probably get around a $50 dollar bacterial genome by using robots and doing 384-well plates of samples at a time to get economies of scale.

A lot of the costs are outside of the sequencing itself. You have to extract the DNA from the sample and prepare that DNA for the sequencing platform you're using. These costs are both the reagents needed to do this, and also the associated labour costs, even when done at scale.

Perhaps you meant $100 human genome though? However I think roughly the same principles apply.
Pretty soon the US could afford to give every person 1 x autonomous cars, 1 x off-grid solar paneled home, 1 x unlimited low earth orbit (low latency) satellite internet.
These homes aren't being built/bought by your general software dev.

This is the Dir/VP/EVP + founders + high equity;low digit employee id exitors.
If we can eminent domain land to build walls and pipelines, we can do it for housing. This isn't about money; it's cheap to build housing. It's about land.

Seize it and build housing. The end.

EDIT: Of course this will never happen in the U.S. and we will always have homeless people and poor people like it's some axiom of civilization.
Start showing ever greater levels of incompetence !

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a troll magnet. When you are very good technically your management will keep you down in the mines to keep doing great work and preferably without too many pay rises. Working in support is especially bad in the sense that it is not an area that attracts many good engineers, thus you are probably indispensable.

If you are seriously keen on moving up into management you could study one of the many DIY MBA courses around. If that still looks like where you want to be, then depending on the size of your organisation you could start applying for promotions into team leader roles and possibly low-level management roles.
As have many managements in America.
Yes, and I'm quite proud of how that turned out. It's using linear sRGB color space, so colors are blended with correct gamma, and dual source blending for the LCD subpixel stuff. It's all handled inside the graphics hardware; if you look at the code it's pretty simple and accessible.
Corporations were a major force in America as well. For what it's worth, their tactics were truly vile, and it's a bit revisionist to claim we'd have no modern society without them.

Many early innovators never had corporations, so why the need today?

The fact is that, today we have many government controls in place that protect corporations. We don't owe corporations a share of everyone's money for eternity for work they take credit for.

(shall I keep posting comments like this?)
Training Deeper Models by GPU Memory Optimization on TensorFlowNIPS’17
Even opposition and Sobchak, Nemtsov’s close friend, who is currently running against Putin in the presidential elections has said that Putin had nothing to do with this.

Nemtsov was criticizing Putin and the government non-stop for almost 20 years. There was nothing new to be assaisnated for.
I agree. People need to talk to their friends in a union and ask if they regret it. My union friends have great benefits and love it.
Salary varies with experience and size of company quite a lot, but $180,000 is certainly not outside the norm. I think it's possible to buy a $1M house on that income if you save for 4-5 years.
There are two types of ARM licenses. One is an Architectectural license. This allows licensees to design and implement the ARM ISA. Apple and QCOM among others have Architectural licenses. They can add customizations such as # pipelines stages. This license is very expensive.

The other license is getting ARM's implementation of a CPU (ie A57, A72 etc). Customers can parametize # cores, cache size, memory width etc, but the basic architecture is fixed.
> one wrong step and you're on the street

You'd make a great union organizer with fear mongering like that. I've worked in a variety of places in a variety of fields, and I've never seen that done. What's more, the times when I have seen people fired they usually get a fat severance package that ends up putting a lot more money in their pocket than otherwise.

I'm sure that there are terrible places like that, but generally speaking doing business that way is much more expensive than treating your people well. When I was in management, turnover was one of the most expensive things to have happen. In some cases the people were irreplaceable (the experience and history they had in their brains was not possible to transfer). From time to time we'd have someone that just wasn't working out, but most of the time we treated people exceptionally well so they wouldn't leave and go to the startup down the street that pays more and keeps the fridge stocked with beer.

If things really were like you say they are, I'd be supporting unionization as well. However, in a couple years of management and a dozen or so as a grunt, that has not been my experience.
Google doesn’t understand least-friction products like apple and HTC isn’t going to get them there.

Their customer first and formost are ad-buyers and what they sell is your data. Apple’s customers are users, and it shows.
City Brain: Cloud Computing and Data Technology Help Our City Think Deeply
There's always a primary purpose and secondary purpose. This might be the second.