skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are the people living in vehicles not minding their own business?

No, they aren't, mostly. There are probably a few that are conscientious, but over the past years, almost every RV that's gone through my neighborhood has brought problems with it.

Part of living in physical housing is that there are sewer lines to it and trash pick-up. RVs and cars don't have that. Most of those denizens are not driving halfway across town to drain their blackwater tanks or paying to dispose of their trash. Instead, the dump it out on the street before relocating.

In addition to the obvious health risk of literal human shit being dumped on the street and grass, that trash more often than not contains used needles, used toilet paper, and other dangerous stuff.

On top of that:

1. Along with piles of trash that had been jammed into the bushes, my neighbor found a discarded gun. (Fortunately he found it before his toddler did.)

2. My wife interrupted someone squatting and shitting on the ground in our alley. Multiple times.

3. We see and hear screaming matches and fights between people in and near RVs on a pretty regular basis.

4. Property theft is constant. Most of us don't ship things to our homes anymore. One friend has a giant bin with a lock on it for package delivery people to lock things in.

5. Our car has been broken into twice.

6. Someone once climbed our back fence and was wandering around the yard babbling incoherently.

7. A gas can was stolen out of the back of my truck.

> How do you know the people living in homes are respecting the law?

Let's not play the whataboutism game. That won't solve any problems.

The people living in their vehicles need real help. The city (and the country at large) has profound systemic problems around inequality, housing, healthcare, and drug addiction.

Pretending that the people living in their vehicles are law-abiding citizens whose homes happen to have wheels denies the full reality of their experience. Most of them, in addition to experiencing homelessness, are also experiencing drug addiction, often have mental illness, and are living in an environment that lacks the sewage and trash infrastructure needed for humans to live safely.

All of that needs to be addressed. These aren't just free spirits living the dream out of their VW bus. (If they do want to do that, more power to them. But they still gotta find a place for their shit and trash.)
Personally I have found that structuring my code so that I am able to write unit tests has been far more useful than any unit tests themselves. For your code to be testable it requires a certain structure and decoupling of dependencies that was not natural to me at all when I first starting doing projects. Now that I know that I might one day want to write a suite of tests with full coverage, I write my code much differently.
Ohio is investing in hyperloop studies. Why?
I don't think Xiomi is banned in India, they are still available.
Talent is overrated. The ability to work hard is much more valuable.
Google Is Quietly Providing AI Technology for Drone Strike Targeting Project
It would be interesting to know how this compares with the BBC Masterchef.
Blue Mail: Android Mail-App Sends Login-Password for E-Mail-Account (german)
Since computing is a young field, that gets less true every year. I would say less than 60% of what I learned 15 years ago is out-of-date, but talking with my dad, it was a much higher percentage when he got his MS in the early 80s.
8BitMUSH: The ANSI Art Game
I don't remember keypunches being very amenable to editing in any sense of the word. That was a long time ago though.
When it comes to trade what matters is whether or not you meet your treaty obligations. It's a rules based process, where you agree the rules and have some arbitration process, e.g. through the WTO.

On that basis, what matters is whether China is following the rules it, and everyone else, agreed to. If you think some one is cheating you arbitrate. We made a deal.

Trump is intent on blatantly breaking the rules the US has agreed to, and breaking the deals it committed to. That is important because companies invest billions of dollars based on the rules countries agree on trade. Arbitrarily change the rules with no warning and those billions of dollars of investment can become worthless and the jobs associated with them lost in Canada, the EU and countries all over the world aside from China.
I think they are listed in the full list: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
If you were to jack up vehicle license fees, you would further punish low-income people who are barely getting by and need to drive for work.
The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive in Cryptocurrencies
So the Golang guys are in the same situation now, aren't they? Isn't it a bit unfair to fault them for not including generics from the beginning?
Rule of thumb is to have the center point of your main monitor directly at eye level, or very close to it

Leaning back in a chair is ok so long as your back is straight
Interesting, I had to search for an image and recognized them right away. Hadn't really given them much thought in the past, but now I'll have to track one down and give it a shot.
New Foils for the Right: Google and Facebook
In his inspiring book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big", Scott Adams places much emphasis on the seeming randomness of luck. In describing his approach to success, he says "I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me." His strategy includes focusing on systems rather than goals, and developing moderate skills in multiple areas. It's a very good read.

www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still/dp/1591846
Yes, and they will vote on the person that had the biggest budget on their campaign most of the time, because that's the person they will see on the television or outdoors. A lot of the corruption in Brazil is for stealing money to spend on political campaigns.
In another universe you bought a house in an area that had a housing bubble and the price appreciated by 100% in a couple of years. You sold your house and retired in Mexico working on fun side projects.
I'd rather put it as everybody has the opportunity to develop their talents and skills.
Ah, but when you add the average inflation rate to the real return of the S&P500 since 1928 or so, you get about 10% rather than about 7%.[1] So the discrepancy remains, whether you add inflation in or not, if you are consistent.

There could be some simple and comforting explanation for the discrepancy between the markets and the economy, but I find it both interesting and perhaps portentous that bringing it up generally elicits glib responses (not just from you here and now) that really don't explain anything. It tends to reinforce my gut feelings about things reverting to the mean and a very long period of market underperformance being necessary to do so.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...
The keyword you are looking for is Laplace's demon[1]. Also, note that there are physical phenomena which are known to have no deterministic outcome. Consider e.g. chaotic systems or certain quantum mechanical systems where the observed end state is one of a set of states following a probability distribution and no way to predict the end state in each individual iteration of the experiment.

To the first part of your question: I thought long about how to put it succinctly and I cannot. The best thing that I can come up with is to point you to the safeguards that are in place for gene expression within cells. A bit of Google-fu brought me to an entire volume dedicated to explaining how that particular process can be so reliable[2]. (I already know that this stuff was complex, but this takes the cake!) Now, these complex mechanisms take tons of resources to maintain. Natural selection generally gives processes with lower resource usage an edge. This has in some cases lead to amazingly efficient solutions, e.g. for some single-cell organisms. But gene expression stayed this complex. It stands to reason that every bit of this mechanism is required to keep cells reasonably alive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace's_demon

[2] https://books.google.de/books?id=Czv25w1HNcEC&lpg=PA252&ots=...
> A well patterned and modern site developed in the past five years shouldn't have these issues.

All depends on the site at hand. A great example is a content aggregation site with lots of ways to slice the data... MANY ways to "skin the cat" and it's a case-by-case situation when you fine tune how a site gets crawled.

Modern sites are wonderful because you can build in modern best practices but complexity is still a PIA when you get a product out there in the wild =)

Anyone should be really skeptical with SEO advice/content since there is no silver bullet, but I found this to be a enlightening read too!
Stealing 99% of "everyone's" money.
Not buying a house may decrease mobility for some, especially single people. But folks who have spouses and/or kids tend to be more anchored to the community regardless of whether they rent. They have jobs and schools and friends that are hard to move away from.

Also, buying a house can be an opportunity itself. Although the new tax law makes it somewhat less tax-favored as an investment, it still offers the ability to escape capital gains taxation on up to $500k (married) of gains. There are other federal and state benefits that can make the overall purchase decision attractive.

So for some folks, yes a house can be an anchor. For other folks, they're already pretty much anchored, and the tax benefits can outweigh the downsides of incremental anchoring. Also, you can't get evicted...
To emphasize your point further, airplanes make a tradeoff in terms of massive fuel expenditure to get a few people or goods elsewhere quickly.

There are similar tradeoffs in markets -- the town here made one of those tradeoffs in excluding Walmart. They relegated their residents to buying from higher priced stores or driving further to shop at a big box store. And they (and I) were happy with that tradeoff.

The tradeoff they have available against e-commerce is higher local taxes on all goods purchased with subsidies from those taxes going back to brick and mortar locations. (You can't only tax mail order goods without violating the interstate commerce clause, as I understand it.)
Is it disturbing from a US POV, or generally speaking? Because if I recall correctly, the US military spending has gone up significantly as well, also it's projected to rise even further in the future.

On a related note, could someone explain to me how Russia manages to stay a threat with a military budget that's about 6% of the US budget? Or does it only seem to be that smaller because their soldiers are payed less?
Helping FOSS projects be more successful through clearly defined project data
> Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates

That's not paradoxical; strong social support networks have been known for a long time to produce reduced birthrates; the usual explanation for which is that it is because a significant reason people have children is as a form of do-it-yourself social insurance, especially for old-age support.

Overall, “its too expensive to have kids” isn't the reason the US birthrate is lower than the past; if it was, birthrates would be higher in the upper income segments and lower among the poor, but it's exactly the opposite.
Turn psychedelics into FDA approved medicines
I think it often boils down to this: people who have more resources are allowed to test their luck multiple times, fail and try again until they succeed. People who don't have resources (a large inheritance say, no college debt) even if they are smart, might only get to try once. Invest their time, energy, money into one venture, fail and they could be screwed.

So in other words, looking back a particular instance of success might look like luck, or a coin toss. But some people just have more coins to flip than others.

You can also factor persistence in there as well, and make not just about money. Say those that fail have enough stubbornness to get up, get to toss the coin again, and again. So perhaps sometimes the limitations are self-imposed not just external resources that are limited.
Small businesses should have business cards with a QR code on them saying "Just browsing to buy later on amazon? use this link so we get a percentage"
What if the ability and dedication to work hard also the luck of the genetic shuffle? I started seriously thinking about this when reading up on autism a few years back.

(I don't have any answers, just a nagging suspicion that pretty much everyone is getting these sorts of moral questions wrong. I mean, if I don't get any credit for working hard to create a modestly successful very small business, why should I get the blame for anything I do?)
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16503235
Mike from Firebase & Fabric here. Thanks for the feedback, noted and heard.
hm, i like a lot of the author's suggestions, but they're missing one big piece of context.

underachieving is a symptom of work input not correlating to pay output.

why work more if you don't get rewarded for it?

for the joy of work?

sure, but then you are getting taken advantage of because you are putting more effort in than the company is paying you out. if you notice jobs that rely on the "joy of work" to get people to do them like science and video game development, you will find that wages are fucking awful for the effort that is put in.

and let me share a secret: that is 100% of the time going to be the case no matter what you do. they don't hire you for your own benefit, they hire you for their benefit. you get the scraps, even if those scraps seem like a lot of money to you. do not be naive about this because ignorance is to your immense detriment.

but let's say someone wants to be promoted. you might have to work hard to get promoted (assuming your social skills aren't enough -- they're far, far more important than actual productivity/quality) but you still probably don't have to be busy 100% of the time. you just need to produce X% more quality or volume than the next best person. greater values of X might get you noticed and promoted sooner -- maybe.

that isn't even fully up to you, at the end of the day. hence why "underachieving" is the norm.

hard work is not correlated to getting paid.
Out of booze! Send more!
You are good at what you do frequently. If what you do frequently has low RoI in terms for satisfying your desires, you should stop doing it and do something else.
> If you were to jack up vehicle license fees

I didn't say anything about the level of VLFs, I said something about the distribution of funds raised thereby.
How to create Ethereum private contracts that remains enforceable on-chain
may be some of developers don't know this technique and more evident that they never tried to work with end state machines. I am using state machine long time and made my own script player for SM, unlike to others SM i am using it in different implementation from web till equipment automation. https://github.com/series6147/ProcessPlayer-state-machine
If you want a VPN (P == Private), don't get one from a company that treats "privacy" like a four-letter word. Just as you shouldn't trust an ad blocker put forth by an ad company.
Firestore next please.

For the 'indie' developer, Firebase is a gift. By way of example, I (re)started building an app that tracks anomalies in cryptocurrency volume at the weekend. By building on Firebase (Auth, FireStore, Functions) it's all but ready.

That lack of friction between idea and reality didn't exist too long ago. (Firebase ain't the only ones, Zeit are also doing slightly-different-but-equally-incredible work).

Two points of frustration:

Cost - $0.06 per 100,000 document-reads sounds cheap until you're continuously analyzing streams of market data...but that could simply be a problem with my inefficient code.

Quotas - there's a few minutes delay on removing the quota after upgrading from free to paid plan that shouldn't exist.

Edit: make that three:

The Console - there's quite a few products squeezed into the console and so far it works. But please refrain from becoming like the Google Cloud Platform console which seems to have borrowed design cues from space-shuttle dashboards.
As did this user in the past, before being banned for using HN primarily for political battle:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sharetea
Yes of course any modern smart phone can do this by just not installing apps. But there is absolutely a need for a minimal or 'dumb' smart phone. Just having Google Play with everything available is enough to get you distracted enough to go into a never ending pool of distractions and wasted time. Yes, I should certainly have the control to stop myself and I even do an application detox occasionally when I get the will power. But if I couldn't get into that useless stuff in the first place, I wouldn't need to worry about it.

I have seriously considered going straight to a dumb phone and had one much longer than most of my friends, but then I need to carry a GPS, MP3 player, and a not shitty camera. I just want a phone that actually fits in my hand with email, a light weight web browser, Spotify/Pandora, Maps, maybe some health/fitness trackers, and a half decent camera. And of course the actual phone functions to text and call when needed.
> After all, one imagines that if they really put their mind to it, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea could all go nuclear in a period measured in small single-digit months

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_progra...:

> While there are currently no known plans in Japan to produce nuclear weapons, it has been argued Japan has the technology, raw materials, and the capital to produce nuclear weapons within one year if necessary, and many analysts consider it a de facto nuclear state for this reason...

> Japan has also developed the M-V three-stage solid-fuel rocket, somewhat similar in design to the U.S. LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBM, giving it a missile technology base. It now has an easier-to-launch second generation solid-fuel rocket, Epsilon. Japan has experience in re-entry vehicle technology...

> In 2011, former Minister of Defense Shigeru Ishiba explicitly backed the idea of Japan maintaining the capability of nuclear latency: "I don't think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it's important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time ... It's a tacit nuclear deterrent"
I find it interesting on the support creators side it is purely about easing getting money. That is certainly important, but I feel like it ignores exploring more ways to ease the act of creation, giving ways to increase rate of creation or improve ability to prepare etc.

We developers create a lot of this sort of stuff to make our own jobs easier, but other types of creatives don't necessarily have the ability to explore the same space for their own work. I think there are opportunities there to be explored, if we can just find the right places to inject possibility. I have one idea I'm working towards now for writers (as that's my secondary interest after dev) but I bet there are ways to help musicians, painters, etc as well we haven't even begun to dream of yet.
There actually used to be accounts like this. Apparently common in some parts of the world, not so much in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
Japan getting the bomb is a tricky question because post war Japanese culture has been ingrained to be very anti-war and they oppose atomic weaponry for obvious historical reasons.
> they chose to let talent affect lucky events but not unlucky events

Could you explain that a bit more please? The paper says, "We propose a model... of people influenced by lucky or unlucky random events." So unlucky events are being considered too. But it's possible that I'm not understanding what you mean.
A new cop called AcOP to fight hackers in cloud, edge, and fog computing
C++: Thoughts on Dealing with Signed/Unsigned Mismatch
Turning a dumb part into a smart part
Privacy. At least that has always been my expectation from Virtual Private Networks.
You can tell from your grammar you pronounce 'sql' in your head as S-Q-L and not sequel.
I never thought of doing that, thanks. Is this something you've done in the past?

On its own I'm confident that won't work because it's not new money, but funnily enough I have a deeply rooted scarcity mindset (I constantly think I'll wake up one day and won't be able to generate another penny), so maybe it would work in the end if I gave myself a no strings attached "reward fund" for completing tasks.

Some type of weird permission to spend X amount per month on non-essentials. I currently live so below my means that it would probably be comical for most people as an outsider.
I've been a Moto G fan since the first one, but the current one I have (3rd Generation, falcon) does not have replacable batteries. But instead it has space for a sd-card. I was not sure which one was best to have, but after having the phone for a while and the battery loosing it's juice, I would definitely be happier with a replaceable battery compared to upgradable storage.
Personally I think intelligence is trainable and a part of the reason we do not see more intelligent people is because the RoI of scoring well on tests and IQ tests drops off pretty quickly
BlackBerry sues Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram over messaging patents
Personally, Xfce heavily configured to my liking, on top of Ubuntu Minimal (basically, I took the Minimal CD and installed xorg and xfce4-session).

In particular I've installed DockbarX--a dock that integrates into xfce4-panel, and vala-panel-topmenu (or somithing similar) to have a global menu.
What does that have to do with global nuclear war?
> New “Android Go” phones show how much you can get for $100

Not a lot, as it turns out, unsurprising to most.
Have you checked out Drawdown [0]? Biochar was #72 out of 80 solutions for magnitude of emissions reduction by 2050 emissions. I haven't gone through their numbers, but they found that biochar could displace only 0.81 GT of CO2 equivalent between now and 2050. Compare that to recycled paper (0.90 GT) [1].

[0] http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/
[1] http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
The Onavo Protect app description is below.

-----

Onavo Protect helps keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web. This powerful app helps keep you safe by understanding when you visit potentially malicious or harmful websites and giving you a warning. It also helps keep your details secure when you login to websites or enter personal information such as bank accounts and credit card numbers.

Onavo Protect works to:

• Warn you when you visit potentially malicious or harmful sites

• Help secure your personal information when you're on public Wi-Fi

• Add an extra layer of protection to all of your mobile data traffic by using our VPN

How it works

To provide this layer of protection, Onavo uses a VPN to establish a secure connection to direct all of your network communications through Onavo’s servers. As part of this process, Onavo collects your mobile data traffic. This helps us improve and operate the Onavo service by analyzing your use of websites, apps and data. Because we're part of Facebook, we also use this info to improve Facebook products and services, gain insights into the products and services people value, and build better experiences.
It does say "take charge of how you use mobile data and protect your personal info."

Protect personal info from what? That implies privacy.