skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't help everyone you see, or even half the people you see, and still have the time and resources to help yourself. What's important is to know what you're comfortable with doing, why you're comfortable with it: Personally, I will buy or give food, but never give money.

Sometimes, when asked for money, I will offer to walk with them to get them food instead.

Sometimes I remember that I'm pinching pennies on damn-near everything, to have just one more month's rent, just one more week of food, and have that much longer for my company to succeed. So I shrug and tell them the truth: "Sorry, right now I don't have an income either."

Sometimes "Zombie By The Cranberries By Andrew Jackson Jihad" starts playing in my head and I'm too lost in thought to prepare a response in advance. By the time we cross paths and they say something, I end up genuinely startled and its awkward for everyone.

I also don't have a point to make. Like you, this kind of thing makes me feel bad, and I just need to vent about it for a moment. At least we both can be sure our sense of sympathy is functional.
oh, I'm sorry. Surface was the name of the table-sized touchscreen, now called PixelSense, it got repurposed for the tablet line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense#Microsoft_...
I have this reaction every time I visit a west coast city. So far, that includes San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

I've always assumed it has something to do with the climate being more amenable to homelessness. But thinking about it now there must be some other political or structural reasons at play.
> I figure, every single person who's out there begging is in need.

Then you've figured incorrectly. There are absolutely a high number of these people who are scamming. A major reason they persist and misdirect resources from those that are truly need, is because of those who blindly assume "every single person" is in need.
I set this up on my io chrome box. It is pretty great. I hope it becomes a fully supported feature with better security and x integration...I word love to have my dev setup in a chroot on google drive that I could use from any (x86) chrome device.
What does it mean for a panhandler to be a 'scammer'? They're not really homeless at all, they actually live in a mansion in Beverly Hills with a two car garage, and manage to pay for it all by asking for change on the street all day pretending to be homeless?
There are Human captcha breakers that you can buy for less than $10 for 1000+ captcha breaking.
There are software / plugins that provide you direct access to these people. Once the plugin detects a captcha in a form, it just passes it on to these people.

Your software solutions can do only so much. Wikipedia, StackExchange etc has Human monitoring (volunteers who report spam) in addition to automated stuff.

Its tough keeping up with spam.
Yes. It's shocking for Americans from other parts of the country as well.
As others have said, in many cases the request for food is a bluff hoping for money. There is a guy in my Brooklyn neighborhood who stands on the corner every day asking everyone, "Hey, can I get $3 to get something to eat?" We call him $3 guy. In large cities, there is not a lack of food for the homeless. (Although, to be honest, maybe it's not so easy to get to the right place at the right time, if you are strung out.)

I used to call the bluff, and have bought many sandwiches and slices of pizza (except for that guy begging in the pizza place who said he didn't like pizza [cash only, please]). At this point, I almost prefer giving out cigarettes.

This is case of "give a man a fish / teach him to fish" on a grand scale. I'm far from an expert on homelessness, but I really like things like The Doe Fund: http://www.doe.org/

Getting people out of drug/alcohol/crime/convict-status-induced homelessness is not an easy task. Helping people get their shit together, finding a purpose, and getting a job they can do is exhausting, soul-crushing work. The people who do this work are saints. Buying a guy a sandwich is no big deal.
I know someone who's been experimenting with the same rough idea, but trying to be a bit proactive about things by putting together small kits of food/water/stuff (granola bars, raisin packets, water bottles, gift cards for chain restaurants, socks, toiletries) and keeping a few in the car to just hand out when he gets asked.

This is in LA, where you're usually in the car when you see unfamiliar people (down on their luck or not), so YMMV in places like SF where foot traffic is more the rule and you may not be habitually carrying lots of extra baggage.

Carrying a Subway gift card specifically to give away might work out, though. Maybe pair it with the card of addresses for local help institutions (shelter, food, addiction treatment, mental health if we still have any of these) for extra mileage.
Yes, we really want to set that precedent.
We already require money to access the legal system in certain cases.

You act as if this is a slippery slope where if we differentiate here we've given up the ball game.
If that's what you think, well, that ball game was given up long ago.
We already have different pleading requirements for different types of lawsuits, etc. This is all done to serve various end policy goals.
The business model you give is not the end goal of patents. It's not clear why supporting it should be a policy goal, and as of right now, it isn't.
The end goal is to encourage innovation as well as R&D, not to create license revenue. These are separate things.
Link removal requests can also be malicious. A blackhat seo will check his competitors domain to see if there's a spf record, if they're signing their mail, and if there's a catch-all (simply by checking if random mail is accepted). If there's neither they get a list of backlinks, from public web-crawls or sites like ahref, and request these links be taken down by sending mail with spoofed email addresses.
Ubuntu is also there :)
I would not be so enthusiastic. It has also been well established that this solar curse is the driving force behind global warming.

To be more fair natural gas is our perfect bridge fuel to a renewable future. Coal powerplants can be replaced right now instead of waiting for unsubsidized competitive solar. Nuclear powerplants can be brought down for maintain and improvements. Cheaper energy will drive manufacturing and save families money on heating.

Problems exist to be solved, fracking's problems are no exception and the reward is progress.
It's more like a guy who has been living in a $400 rent controlled 2BD apartment on Fell since 1991. He charges his roommate $800 a month, then goes and scams people on Haight for pizza money, but mainly just for kicks.
Yes, you should have to plan what your exposure is when you lose lawsuits. Normal businesses already do, and warn about it in SEC filings.
I say, "No, but thanks for asking"
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Some cities in the US just make it illegal to be homeless. Problem solved.
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How did the end up about the same? Were they paying themselves the same salaries they would have been getting at Microsoft the whole time? Were they living more frugally than they would have been had they been working at Microsoft?
I agree. If someone asks for food, you know that they are hungry (they can't turn around and sell the food for profit). However, if they ask for money, you don't really know what their needs are.

My mother works at a seasonal food bank that provides meals in the winter and I think that's one of the best services we can provide for people that cannot provide for themselves. Food is also relatively less expensive than other aids, such as rent controlled housing.
Honolulu comes close. As you say, it's complex in origin, but contributing factors are the constant influx of outside money (tourism), significant pedestrian traffic, and moderate climate (you can live outside year-round and the weather will never be completely unbearable, or kill you outright).
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Maybe an option to use HTTPS?
This has some fairly serious security issues, which is fine for a something not designed to be seriously used (or at all). However, the readme implies you could use this and your files will be safer than with some third party. Which is dangerous, to say the least.

I'll outline a few obvious issues I see:

- No explicit protection against directory traversal attacks (../../etc/passwd type stuff) on upload and download.

- Shell command injection on the file name on upload.

- Naive authentication.
- Unsalted, fast hash sent in the URL.
- Password stored in clear text server side.

- No transport security (HTTPS).

This is cool as a interesting project to work on, but it should be made clear not to use this for anything just yet.
Local law enforcement has told us that, off the books, many East coast cities have actually paid to fly their homeless out of their areas into other parts of the country, California (namely San Francisco) because of their homeless-friendliness.

People wonder what happened to all the crime and homeless in NYC? They were flown out west.
Sort of off topic but related...

I wonder how the homeless will fair when we become a cash-less society. This may be far off but it's inevitable.

While initially one might think the homeless will be worse off, I can imagine technology actually improving things. Imagine some sort of NFC chip or ID a homeless could obtain from a shelter that would allow someone to give money to them from their mobile phone...and then perhaps gamifying the goodwill (leaderboards based on city or social graph) for the donators.
The site doesn't seem to work. I am unable to sign up. It takes me to github auth. But, while returning from github it says something went wrong.
Is there anything to stop you from installing Linux or Windows on a macbook?
In the mid-90s, when I lived in New York, panhandlers would follow me several blocks while negotiating for change (you got tokens? I take subway tokens!). In Paris in the mid 80s, the same thing happened constantly in the metro station. Panhandlers would also come up to you while you were stuck in traffic, ask you to roll down your window, and try to bum money off you. It was constant. I was punched by a bum in Dublin when I didn't give money.

SF is bad, but I'm always a little surprised when people say it's somehow unique. There does seem to be a more seriously mentally disturbed element to SF, though, I will give you that.

I've heard NY has cleaned up, and I didn't get spanged last time I was in Paris as far as I remember (though someone did try the old trick of pretending to "find" a ring, ask if it belonged to my wife, insist on handing it to her, and then asking for money).
Are there any more specific release timelines outside of 'by the end of 2013'?
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Somehow moving to a location further from the reach of the US government would give me more confidence.

Kim dotcom's case shows the US willing to even break it's own laws to stop things it doesn't like. I suspect Bitcoin isn't a target currently but why bet that the situation won't change. The US arguably will a significant incentive do things to protect its currency if Bitcoin truly becomes an alternative currency.
> it's like chip and pin

The user experience would be similar, yes.

> doesn't require new pos hardware

There are lots of ways it could be deployed. Some would require new POS hardware, others don't. But unlike chip-and-pin it wouldn't have to be custom hardware. It could be a smart phone or a tablet.
Thanks for the link. The expert in the video says that he believes fracking is safe, yet the facts he cites support the opposite conclusion.

According to the video, unlike ordinary natural gas drilling, fracking involves pumping toxic chemicals (including benzene and formaldehyde) under pressure into the ground. But like ordinary drilling, failures can and do occur. The video cites faulty drilling casings and operator incompetence as the causes of two incidents where water was contaminated with natural gas, and a third incident where water was contaminated by trucks bringing benzene to the drilling site. That the first two failures weren't unique to fracking and that the third was not directly related to the drilling itself are not rational reasons for discounting them in assessing the overall risks of fracking.

Even if the expert is correct in saying that the risk of failure is the same as ordinary drilling, it is the consequence of failure that must be considered. If the risk for a plumbing failure at a nuclear power plant were the same as the risk of a leak in my garden hose, no reasonable person would conclude that the plant was therefore no riskier than watering my lawn. Yet that is essentially the logic applied by the video's 'expert'.
Most dumpsters/trash cans in big cities have tons of free food, you just have to keep your eyes open.
i can't believe that. it fails the conspiracy secrecy test - there would have had to have been a bunch of people involved and eventually there would have been a scandal.

my bet is that we have mild winters in California that are much less Darwinian.
Well your logic is obviously flawed, because people do use bitcoins for transactions and they have changed by hundreds of percentage points. "No one" is patently false.

Besides, illicit transactions are still transactions.

And.. you are just plain wrong. Bitcoin is also useful for buying many completely legal things. Including a VPN that can't be linked to your identity. (Illicit you say? What about a journalist in a repressive regime).
Yes, "Check Him Out." The article also mentioned that the app didn't have much of a user base, at least in the author's location (LA.) I'd really love to see women taking the initiative in online dating, but I believe this will require a sociological shift (in how women relate to men online and potentially offline as well.)
I used to walk down Market street and pass guys sleeping at 12pm in a beat up sleeping bag with a garbage bag of stuff next to them. It's hard to believe those people are 'scammers'. But what do you do? Most have metal disabilities or other problems that prevent them from contributing back to society.
A rising price does not imply long-term viability. A stable price does. For long term viability, people can't just be buying and selling it, they should be transacting with it. It seems like the most active form of Bitcoin use that I've seen is trading. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a double-edged sword, as people learned last year. Once more and more regular people actually start using it for real purchases, then I'd be more willing to say there is long-term viability.
None taken! I understand you probably hadn't encountered anybody who had done more than just toyed with the idea. I also agree, people like to talk about how cool it might be, but I hadn't heard of anyone doing it in production before us.

I think one of the reasons it isn't done a lot is because when people think "one-page JS apps" it's usually account-based, making you log in to use the app (at least the ones I use). So other than a few marketing pages which could easily be handled by a CMS, there'd be no purpose to store generated HTML for your own pages.
HTML5 localStorage allows sites to fill up users' hard disks
Market street is a different scene than the Haight.
Nope, Ubuntu 13.04 works perfectly out of the box on my Air. With older versions you have to install more stuff to make sure the fans kick in, etc.

edit: Actually, hotplug Thunderbolt is touchy in Linux 3.8 because Apple's thunderbolt implementation is back-ass-ward stupid, but that's not really a biggie, I don't use Thunderbolt for anything really (the display out is fine)
Probably no on the Subway gift card because they'd probably just find some way to hock it. I'd stick with actual food.
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Exactly. Eliminating working from home punishes those who need the option most, Yahoo moms and dads.

Just for the record:

- The US is the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns

- The US is one of only three nations — rich and poor - that doesn't guarantee job-protected time off with some amount of income after the birth of a child

- New parents in the U.S. are guaranteed their jobs for 12 weeks after the arrival of a new baby, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, but they do not have to be paid during that time and exemptions apply for small companies.

- California provides 60% pay for 12 weeks

- UK provides 90% pay for 280 days, Russia 100% pay for 140 days, Spain & France & Netherlands 100% pay for 112 days, Germany 100% pay for 98 days, China 100% pay for 90 days

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/maternity-leave-pai...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/why-paid-le...
That wasn't your failure per se.
But the failure of pretty much everyone above you.
That they treated you like that after the fact is pretty shitty.
In hindsight I'd say that you are much better off by not being there, where you would learn bad practices.

No Stage Environment.
Proactively Cancelled Backups on a Business Critical System.
Arbitarily implementing features 'because they have it' rather than it having some purpose in the business model.
No Test Drills of disaster scenarios.
The list goes on.
As I say, and you probably realise now, that you are lucky to no longer be there.
Alberta offered bus tickets to welfare recipients to leave the province. A lot of them ended up in Vancouver and in the Downtown Eastside.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Canada#Cuts_to_...
He's probably referring to the preponderance of foodbanks.
San Francisco does the same thing, only with bus tickets.
http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm
My experience with Coinbase has been amazing. I tried to buy Bitcoins around a year ago and it seemed nearly impossible to do with USD.

Here's how buying them through Coinbase went...

1. Signed up and linked my bank account
2. Bought bitcoins the same day (at their price on that day)
3. 5 days later they were available for me to use

I've bought more coins 3 additional times. Each time they were available in under 5 days and everything went smoothly.

Admittedly, these were smaller purchases. I'm not quite ready to start buying bitcoins by the hundreds.
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similar to EarthClassMail which had a documentary: www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies
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Or you can be a bit more subtle about it, Suburban Texas Style™, and simply design the homeless away:

1. No public transportation.

2. Unreasonable distances between gathering places (e.g. grocery stores) and often long stretches of no sidewalks.

3. Public park curfews with police sweeps of said parks at night.

No way to get in, no way to get food, no way to stay. When I realized, as a teenager, that this was why I was not used to homeless people, I was a little perturbed.
Citation definitely needed. I don't see how cities would pay thousands of dollars to fly the homeless out of town. Most of the time they are mentally ill, and simply don't have the financial resources to get better. I'm not of perfect mental health, but I have the resources and the support network to make myself normal, where as the less fortunate do not. I know this is completely off topic, but everyone has I just don't give a shit any more point and say fuck it I'll live on the streets.
I think when viewing this game from the understanding that every game lasts for 20 minutes, the dying and starting over again adds a sort of endless zen to the game.
Can people pay there taxes in bitcoins ? ( it's a question).
Seems like sabotage.
You are correct. The SFPD effectively herds the "problem people" into the Tenderloin. Something like "Escape from New York."
though someone did try the old trick of pretending to "find" a ring, ask if it belonged to my wife, insist on handing it to her, and then asking for money

I don't understand this, and if someone did that to me, I would be utterly confused. What's the basis for giving someone a ring that they would know isn't theirs?
Yes, there was a case in Toronto where a TV crew followed a successful beggar back to her car and then to her house. http://www.torontosun.com/2013/02/14/infamous-sticker-lady-m...
It seems like a lot of work for them to swing by your physical address multiple times a week.

The other services that do this allow you to have mail delivered to a mailbox that the company controls and then mail that you actually want can be forward to your home mailbox.
I didn't notice the homelessness to be nearly as bad as Vancouver when I visited SF in 2011. Maybe we missed it, but we stayed in a hostel on Mason Street and walked around a fair bit.

Here's a picture from East Hastings Street in Vancouver:
http://jamesdanderfer.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Ea...

This is what that spot looks like every day, except the lines of homeless stretch much further then the picture shows. After that section of the street you get corners filled with hookers and junkies.
Because our purpose was not to show how fast a simulation can run. We haven't tried to come up with a new approach to simulations. We've tried to present a new approach to databases, and show an example where a naive implementation with the right database can have decent performance.

Also, the very same code would work if actions were triggered by a network request rather than by a main loop. We don't assume anything about how the spaceships are coordinated. If you coordinate them to run in lockstep, you could get better performance. But, again, we've tried to show the viability of the naive implementation, where nothing is assumed.
You don't forward your mail. They pick it up at your mailbox.
> There is no such thing as a guarantee of success.

It's true there is no guarantee of success. But if you quit early there would be only guarantee failure.
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Based on the number of upvotes your submissions get, I would just step back a while and try to understand what the community likes to read. You're really thinking about it all wrong. Don't limit yourself to 1-3/day. Limit yourself to participating in the discussion and only posting good quality links.
"New York has found a novel, if expensive, way of dealing with its overcrowded shelters – buying one-way tickets for homeless families to leave the city."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/29/new-york-homeles...
Westwood in LA was pretty similar. I would guess the climate and the excess change is the primary draw.

As a visitor to the US, I find the homeless there very emotionally saddening.

I had a morning routine in LA where the same guy would greet me and everyone around. I just started buying him breakfast each day and he was always very appreciative. Saw a lot of people grabbing food out of garbage cans. Another guy with no legs crossing 10 lanes of traffic. Just a painful reminder of how much harder life could be.

I wasn't as regular with my routine in SFO and admittedly moved apartments further from the tenderloin. I ended up scaring more homeless whenever I walked through the tenderloin than scared me. But I still found it depressing to have to face that each day when I knew I could make a meaningful difference to many of the people I saw.
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Aw! That sucks! Woulda been awesome to play with the MYO.
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I was shocked when I came from NY to SF. The streets are incredibly dirty and some of the homeless are in really bad shape. Someone posted this link on Twitter (I saw it here on HN a bit later), and I got some insight as to why this is the case.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...