skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've lived in SV for nearly 20 years. There's a reason that the homeless problem is as bad as it is here. It's not economics biased against the poor. It's not greedy landlords. It comes down to two things:

First, SV has the economic ability to support a homeless population this large. If the homeless couldn't get basic necessities, they wouldn't be here. There are many reports that show panhandlers here can make $10-15 an hour. Highest anywhere in the world. SV people are extremely giving.

The second reason? Weather. The weather is mild enough that people can live in makeshift shelters year round. With a huge population to provide all the necessities, there's no reason for them to leave SV.

I have a friend who lives in Toronto. We got on the topic of homelessness and asked him how they deal with the homeless in Toronto. He said, "we have an amazing homeless abatement program here. It's called winter." If SV had snowy winters, there would be dramatically fewer homeless here.
And/or management that doesn't allow devs to spend time on user-friendly features.
Definitely interesting...but the obvious downside is the years when revenue goes down (if it ever does) are going to suck...HARD!!!!
> Exactly. And if you're honest about it, there are no "alternatives". Seriously, name one alternative to air travel that offers comparable value in terms of time and cost. You can't. Because there aren't any. Given the distances at which is makes the most sense to fly, all of the "alternatives" impose massive burdens in terms of both time and cost.

Yup. I have driven across the entire country (~3000 miles) 3 times in the past 3 years. Anyone who says that driving is a substitute for flying, even domestically, is an idiot.

I was able to do that drive those times because my schedule permitted it, my bank account permitted it, and my car was in good enough shape to manage it without leaving me stranded with costly repairs. (The reason I did it was because I enjoyed it.) Had those stars not aligned, it would not have been feasible in the slightest. Forbidding people to fly, even domestically, is incredibly unreasonable.
The issue is that behind certain NATs, WebRTC's peer-to-peer component can't work. In these situations, it needs to fall back to using an ICE/STUN server, or some other form of proxy between peers.
They got some great press upon launch. TC, Gizmodo, Pcmag, Time, engadget, etc. When it rains, it pours. Way to go. Most of the money is likely to go towards manufacturing, I hope their business model let's them make a healthy profit as well.
Does anyone think it would be a good business idea to join their API for $1,000?
If h2o is heavier than other components of air like o2 and nitrogen why can't we just run air through a giant centrifuge to get the water out?
Last time I looked, SV was located inside the US.

(For the record, my original comment wasn't intended as a snide remark. This however is.)

And your comments about homelessness make me want to throw up. As if being discarded as worthless human thrash is in anyway less horrible when "the weather is mild and the people are generous".

How on earth do you manage to twist this so that it's the affluent denizens or Silicon Valley that are the victims here?

I'm sorry I'm not being constructive, this attitude just pisses me off. Like I said, I don't consider myself morally superior, far from it, I'm a selfish dick 95% of the time, but even I have limits. I couldn't live there and cheerfully ignore the problem.

Children are growing up homeless in one richest areas of one of the richest countries in the world. There's no nuance here, no deeper meaning that requires further research before one has the right to formulate an opinion.

There are many gray areas in life. Hell, at my age, almost everything turns out to be a grey area. But this isn't one of them.
If we were to think about the distribution of companies and opportunities, I would think that the power law distribution would be most appropriate. Being #11 when even #2 and #3 just don't match up isn't exactly something to be proud of.
The speed of trust
Tim Berners-Lee is a great guy but it is a failed organization as far as I can see.

There is a reason why I pushed the TAG to finish this:

http://www.w3.org/wiki/Evolution

(Clue: TimBL is part of the TAG.)
Visioneer - An Android app for making apps
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that vivint is a tech company. They are a sales company that sells technology that is entirely developed out of house.
Anil potti's research was clinical research. There were patients who went through the WRONG chemotherapy based on his "computer treatment prediction algorithm". In other words, there were patients who were effectively chemically tortured to death under the color of medical authority, based on faked data.
I lived in Provo and Orem for a number of years while I was attending University, and I feel you've nailed some of the major issues. Life was drastically different there compared to where I grew up (and now live) in the Bay Area.

One on-topic aspect I appreciated about Utah was the quality of the Computer Science program at Utah Valley University. The chance to learn from experts like Chuck Allison [1] and David Heldenbrand truly expanded my mind and was an incredible opportunity. Really, all the CS faculty was excellent and commendably eager to do the teaching themselves rather than offloading the most critical parts to TA's. Given the high ratio of religious fanatics in the surrounding region, the school is a remarkably open and progressive institution.

As soon as I finished school I moved back to Palo Alto and would never consider returning to Utah other than to visit friends, go skiing/snowboarding, or go to hike at Moab or Zion National Park.

I definitely wouldn't recommend going to Provo or Orem to start a tech company.

To put things in perspective: Provo is 29 short highway miles from Eagle Mountain, which is primarily composed of polygamist compounds. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being a polygamist; it was just a surprise to find out about it only after several years of living in Provo.

There is a reason that Provo and Orem often referred to as the "Utah Valley Bubble". It is an isolated community and if you aren't Mormon you will likely pretty strange when you discover how poorly you fit in with the homogeneous culture.

With that being said, there are some upsides to operating a business in Utah Valley:

You can hire high-quality engineers for pennies (or perhaps a quarter) on the dollar compared to other places. At one point I interviewed at Omniture, and they scoffed at the salary I asked for.

People who live in Utah Valley are also less likely to move away as much compared to other places, because their immediate and extended families tend to live nearby. This means that it is possible to expect to retain employees for much longer period of times than in a place such as Silicon Valley.

Finally: If you are into discriminating against people for their sexual orientation, it is completely legal to do so in Utah. There is no legal protection from sexual orientation discrimination in Utah.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=chuck+allison
It doesn't really surprise me that Ancestry is based in Mormon country. Interesting.
One of your previous comments:

"$80k is hardly the low end of the car market. I can buy a decent Porsche for less."

You're a poverty expert obviously. With nothing but warmth, mercy, and compassion towards those less fortunate than you.

Fox news and Rush Limbaugh will guide your moral compass.
>In absolute terms there is undoubtedly more extreme poverty in India than the US. Why that is so is not as simple as the country's broken social institutions, we're still talking about the world's largest democracy here. I would imagine the caste system plays a part. Colonialism too.

Wealth disparity is not what Rayiner was talking about. He was talking about social infrastructure. You're actually adding to his point here.

What he meant was that the wealthy class in India have about the same spending power as the middle class in the United States. They are sheltered away from the extreme destitution that is on display everywhere in their country and don't interact with the poor at all. It's perhaps 10x what you'd see from a rich person walking in NYC avoiding a beggar asking for change on the street.

Rapid urbanization and the slow collapse of the caste system has left a vacuum in India's culture that leads to stories like that of the poor woman we saw on Hacker News just last week or so. That is the lack of social infrastructure. Not enough is being done, and not quickly enough, to positively impact the society in a meaningful way. As it is now, India is in a state of culture shock that does nothing to help its economic system.
It was a Zoombak in case anyone wants to try it (though I haven't used their new model). Their website actually worked on my iPhone, so it was very easy to drive right to where he was and pick him up.
NSA Spied On Al Jazeera Communications
I once studied in University of Utah Salt Lake City. I was from NJ, near NY. So were other students mostly, as it was a summer program. The nature was fantastic, but people laughably bad in the way you could imagine. It is called the Mormon bubble, and one of our closest friends, an out-of-faith Mormon guy, was a favorite cultural expert to explain how often we were treated so oddly and rudely.

It was fun, but not for long.
> ...pursuing trademark infringers...

That's the part they should be apologizing for.

Unless their business is actually getting hurt in any way (is someone selling fake Chinese made Tumblr t-shirts on the black market?), this is just a systematic exercise in corporate bullying.

They shouldn't be engaged in this in the first place. Tumblr is not friggin' Nike.
I think a lot of us already saw the various other sources debunking the fridge-as-faraday-cage theory. That said, low temperatures do increase the internal resistance of batteries. If you put your phone in the freezer for a while (probably not a great idea due to the high ambient moisture) then it will turn off, and not turn back on. A little bit later, it'll probably tell you that it can't turn on because of low battery. But once it's back up to room temperature, it should turn on just fine (again, assuming the moisture in the freezer hasn't screwed it up really badly).

Blocking radio signals is one thing, but using a fridge might have been an effective way to deactivate most off-the-shelf batteries in a non-invasive and impermanent way. Does anyone think this idea has any merit?
"Experimentation by enthusiasts is of great value and usually results in the creation of great infrastructure. However, we also need people and companies focused on meeting the needs of consumers."

Nuanced argument.
In general, I tend to be most productive doing actual programming when I'm in the office and it's fairly empty. That is, whether I'm in before most others or in after most others.

However, I have multiple roles and tasks, only one of which is development.

I definitely get a lot of insight during the regular day from fellow coworkers, and tend to do more "operational" (not developing) work better when I'm alongside peers than when I'm there alone late. It's also the kind of work where multiple people looking at one thing really helps, since one person might miss something important and another might notice something important.

So I think it depends on the kind of work you're doing and how you like to work. And that is partially why letting employees work when they want, and even choose where they work, can lead to them being more productive in general, at least as long as you can trust them to choose a schedule that makes them productive instead of one that lets them be lazy.
How often is that "genetically unsuited" theory really pushed, though? I think it might be more a myth than reality ("people always try to argue with genetics").
I left as soon as I could go to school out of state. :) Occasionally relatives will tell me of the booming tech economy and point out Adobe's "big building". It's hard to describe just how much bigger Microsoft's offices are and the land mass they occupy. (Also I don't know anyone who works at Adobe but I suspect there's a pay gap too.)
Where I work, we have a similar system of transparent salaries. There is a scale, but it is not very granular (the rule of thumb is that if most people couldn't guess a given employee's salary level, they're in the wrong one) and dependent on skills and industry experience. There is a good description here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html (SatvikBeri also linked to this article). That is still relevant except for a few points - we no longer give stock options and reviews are annual instead of biannual.

> If a good employee has an offer for 20% more than they are making...

We let them leave. That said, it doesn't happen often (I don't know of a time it did). Our salaries (and annual bonuses) are generous, and any differences are more than made up for by various other perks.

That said, we do lose new hires to bigger offers. If this happens too often, the entire pay scale gets moved up to reflect market changes and/or inflation.
So much to discuss here:
1) hard numbers; where do I confirm everything you are saying, analogy to economy does not make it true (nor are you proving that the first concept it's true)
2) if you create something specific to A, expecting it to adapt to B magically is wrong, C has to adapt it bringing more work to the flow
3) "Consumers, on the other hand, rarely care about the technology itself but focus instead on what the technology enables them to achieve." Sure, but that would also mean that they are not interested in the enabled features by it so was it interested on the technology or whatever it enabled or not?
4) " How many non‐enthusiasts do you know who use Linux (and who don’t live with an enthusiast who set it up for them and fixes it for them when something goes wrong?)" All android users

What if the problem it's actually that there is no goal, therefore tech is irrelevant?
You might think, but no, they might not necessarily attract each other in the stomach. An ex-girlfriend's kid ate two magnets (http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/12.1) and they ended up separating, then attracting each other in different parts of the body (http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/20.1).
Do you honestly believe that these people were in some way 'thrown out'? Like they were doing fine, and someone came along and said "time to live outside, trash!"

Lets have an adult attitude here. In general, this means accepting that:

- you don't have all the solutions, and if people just did it your way it probably wouldn't help much and would probably make things worse, since your armchair understanding of the problem is probably mostly assumptions and other bullshit.

- all the worlds problems are not caused because the people who disagree with you are evil and prefer a world where people suffer, or intentionally want to make things worse. In reality, almost no one is this way, if they propose a different solution or course of action it's because they see the world differently from different experiences and understanding.

- if there is a solution, it is very unlikely to be any of the things currently proposed or attempted, and will likely require innovative thinking and new solutions. If someone somewhere had figured out an effective and affordable solution, you could point to it and say "look, they figured out a great solution that we can afford and works well", and everyone would say "YEA!", and that's the end of it, assuming there isn't some non-obvious side effect that crops up later and makes the solution actually more harmful than doing nothing, which there usually is.
You're misinterpreting Rayiner's point, and debating this in the wrong way. You're speaking from an ethical perspective, but Rayiner is not. He's making a point about logical sphere of influence - it's not cold and uncaring towards distant suffering, just not prioritized.

I'm sure Rayiner feels deep sympathy for places that are not presently near to him (such as India, in this thread).

If every major problem in the United States were already solved, it would be more reasonable to then try to help others solve their problems. But that's not the case.

If you have people suffering right in front of you, it just makes sense logistically to help them first. Helping our own homeless and unemployed would aid in stimulating the American economy.

The bottom line is that there isn't any sane reason why an American would prioritize the needs of another country before his own. Nor would it be sane for an Indian to prioritize America's while she lives in India. It just doesn't make sense. You tend to your side of the street first.
I don't really understand. Why can nothing be illegal by definition? The use of force is only illegal if there is somebody stronger stopping me. Can you point to an instance where this is untrue? If there isn't such a person, I'm creating a law. For example, if I spank my children for swearing, I'm making a law against swearing, and if there's no local, state, or federal law prohibiting it, then nobody will initiate force against me. Depending on how a law is made, it may be inconsistent, unjust, totalitarian, etc.

I also don't understand why it is senseless to say that force establishes law. That's what law enforcement officers do, they use force to establish / enforce the law. Of course legality is subject to the whims of the powerful; in a democracy, "whims of the powerful" approximates majority rule.

A "law" is just a rule that is punished when broken. If there is no punishment, it is a guideline or moral.
Not really. I had a similar issues a while ago. Paid $5 for a test account (vps), customer rep lied to me about some issues then refused to refund. The $5 really wasn't worth my time, but I don't appreciate being lied to and having my time wasted, so I made sure make some public complaints on Twitter (after no response through their ticketing service).

So yes, it can be about the principle.
Do any TV shows publish an RSS feed?
"Flowtab wasn’t saving you enough time or energy to make it a compelling experience."

Serious question - was it ever going to? It always seemed like a backend-heavy way to optimize for a trivial inconvenience. I have to say, It seems to me this was a failure because it was just plain a bad idea. That makes for a pretty short story, though, I guess.
But what would you have done if the vote had returned a salary that seemed low and felt that team members deserved better?
Well, it was the first real programming language. I can picture people thinking "since machine code is so ugly for humans to read and write, let's come up with something that any human can read or write with extreme ease." They weren't even thinking about "elegance" or "beauty" of code; I'd be surprised if those concepts existed that early on.

We later realized it was a bad idea once we actually had some decent alternatives. But at the time I'm sure people were overjoyed that they could write in plain, clear English instead of digits or assembly.
"...is someone selling fake Chinese made Tumblr t-shirts on the black market?"

I wouldn't be surprised. Tumblr just sold for a billion dollars, remember? That's certainly a brand worth protecting.
Who cares about what a judge says? It's just a person with a hammer and a robe.
Time to get that sexy code out there
In that case, I have the solution.

I'm going to go to each homeless person I find, and buy them a ticket to your city, and give them directions to your house.

Then, when you wake up one morning, you'll have 500 homeless people living on your lawn.

Then I'm going to post to HN saying that you are a terrible person for letting the homelessness problem get so out of control at your house. "Don't you even care about them? How dare you throw them out like trash!?!"
No longer poor, but I still price compare, because I'm tired of being screwed, not because cash is tight.

Enjoy that grass fed medium rare top sirloin. Life is good.

Just don't pay top dollar for imported beef pumped full of steroids and antibiotics. I merely want what I pay for. Top dollar for indestructible hipster glasses? No problem. Tack sneaky $2.00 fees on to my phone bill? Hulk Smash!
If you had to compose your own email headers only "techies" could do it. There is nothing about secure communication that is harder, and their are examples of simple, secure systems.

Notes implemented secure messaging (except for that key escrow thing) that was as easy to use as any email client. Skype implemented ephemeral keys for real time communication that was VERY simple to use.

There is no excuse, and it will take less time than a lawsuit to provide customers with NSA-proof products.
Agreed. I was the founder of Flowtab and I can tell you we always felt just one step away from success. We felt mobile ordering was inevitable and those who fought the hardest for the longest would win. I think different now...
This is a classic case of TDC. (i.e. Tumblr Damage Control).
Matching salaries to titles means your best-performing developers can't get a raise without becoming managers, or getting a raise for everyone in their title (i.e. a raise that's much more expensive for the company), or leaving the company.

Seems like quite a pair of handcuffs to put on yourself.
Well we disallow physical violence but we allow psychological violence, so it seems inconsistent since there's a demonstrated link between psychological violence and physical pain. I think if we can work out a definition of physical assault we can work out psychological assault.
Traffic & Weather on the 8's Cartoon
how would the call centre operator know it was Skype? I only knew when I heard the particular disconnect sound, and she wouldn't even have heard that.
Probably because, as nice as this is, fixing an instance doesn't imply fixing the problem. The problem is (arguably) over-zealous protection - this does nothing to address that, it just brings back a single high-profile HN-popular site.
Wow. I can't make out half of that either, and I'm a native English speaker too. Thanks for this, that was fun.
You didn't read that article too closely, did you? A lot of the people living there prefer it to a more normal lifestyle. I've seen places in Colombia that were even worse than the Jungle. These people have trees and tents and building materials. If they want a roof, they can fashion one. The scarcity I've seen in Colombia, stuff other people would throw away here is hoarded and parceled out by hustling thugs.

I know exactly how awful things can be in the States. I've been all over and met all sorts. I'd take any lifestyle here over destitution anywhere else. Trust me, there are far worse places to be than the Jungle.
How to master secret work
"He suggested that the search order be limited to certain keywords or that an independent vendor be asked to automate the process of finding relevant material. "

Not sure that this is great, but baby steps.
Why should we appreciate the apology? We might blame tumblr a little less now than if they'd stayed their course, but I don't see why it should swing over into appreciation of what they're doing.

Perceivedly, it happens a lot that big scary companies bully smaller entities with meritless but expensive-to-fight legal threats. That sometimes there's enough of a public notice of that to make the company reconsider and to limit the damage done is just part of the game and doesn't really leave them without blame, it just means they got "caught" this time.
"So, he wants things to be so easy to use that you don't have to know anything about how they work"
That's half part of the flawed argument, even it happens you should be able to use it for some purpose, so that's another part that should magically happen.