skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Article lists 2,650 people as the estimate of homeless in Vancouver, which has population of 603k people as of 2011. Compare that to Santa Monica, CA, where they estimate between 2300 and 3000 homeless, against a population of 90k people total as of 2011. (Source: http://www.opcc.net/tabid/255/Default.aspx)

Clearly there is a difference in the orders of magnitude. Now, Santa Monica has well funded program to help, provide shelter, etc. The city is very safe and full of tourists, making even panhandling an ok way to make a living. All this definitely attracts more homeless, BUT, according to the article above 24% have mental issues and 54% have drug issues (the two overlap). If we could get 54% off the street, it would make a huge difference not only to them, but to the community. I for one don't enjoy being harassed when trying to enjoy my weekend at the beach.

Unfortunately, this discussion is purely academic in nature. Long term homelessness is such a complex issue that there are no silver bullets. We can only hope to help on a case-by-case basis and an individual level.

When I volunteered with a few organizations working with homeless, I was stunned to hear make talk about personal freedom they enjoy. To me that seemed almost incomprehensible, but to them it was plain as day - if they conform to the society, they will lose the freedom to do whatever they want...

This perspective is often overlooked, but it is one our country is built upon - personal choice. We should always provide a way back to society, but if the person doesn't want it, and stays within the confines of the law, who are we to judge him/her for it.
I think we all agree startups should innovate a lot on their core product where it can be a useful differentiator. I think this goes far beyond "business model" -- things like which programming language to use for the core product are good things to innovate on. Using untested/unpopular technologies like Linux, functional languages (well, really just interpreted languages, functional was still a small subset), Apache, etc. became useful advantages for some companies in ~2000. Using the cloud in 2008-2010, or adopting social and then mobile from 2008-2012. Not sure what it is today (I'd like to think it's hostproof/security-from-NSA, but that's probably not it for most businesses.)

I hope we all agree startups have finite resources and shouldn't try to innovate (or really even spend much time on) the really mundane things which don't matter to that particular startup. Legal paperwork, trash disposal, etc.

It's an interesting question which things are in the middle, and how much innovation/experimentation is reasonable there. Hiring is clearly core, so things around hiring might be more legitimate grounds for experimentation than others. I don't think cash compensation is the pain point for most of that, though -- how people pick projects, how people are recruited, etc.
The good news is that this has become a forefront issue. Governor Herbert has started making air quality a priority, but also key local groups like Envision Utah.

Fixing the inversion problem though will take active involvement from the community. If we could get 1/3 of the cars off the road on the 10 days/year it mattered the most, it would be a game-changer. The tech companies in the area could make a big difference in this effort if they let their collective thousands of employees work from home on those days.
If MCSE stands for Must Consult Someone Else, what did MCM/MCSM stand for? I kid, I kid.
> Do you see anyone besides techies and the libertarian fringe talking about eternal and perpetual surveillance?

Just last night, I was asked about the leaks by a 50/60ish bus driver after mentioning I worked in tech - who as far as I could tell, had no particular previous inclination towards privacy activism or technology.
Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries
Tumblr made a blog post[1] about exploiting similar compression techniques.

Using that technique, personally I've had great success storing data in hashes by JSON-encoding it beforehand, where it would normally be like so:

HSET user:159784623 username ihsw
HSET user:159784623 email blahblah@gmail.com
HSET user:159784623 created_at 1377986411

But instead it's like so:

HSET user:156039 687 {"username":"ihsw","email":"blahblah@gmail.com","created_at": 1377986411}

Where we divide data into "buckets" that are 1024 in size and given an ID of 159784623, the resulting bucket ID is 156039 and the remainder is 687.

id = 159784623
bucket_size = 1024
remainder = id % bucket_id
bucket_id = (id - remainder) / bucket_size

Using this I've been able to reduce memory usage anywhere from 40%-80% (yes, 80%), which depends compressibility of the data (length and randomness of each hash item).

I've also been replacing dictionary keys with integers and it further reduces the size of the data being stored by an additional ~30%.

HSET user:156039 687 {"0":"ihsw","1":"blahblah@gmail.com","2":"1377986411}

It shouldn't be underestimated how these simple techniques can make such a significant impact, especially when the gains are quite considerable. JSON-encoded data may be quite verbose, so CSV may add considerable gains too, but JSON can accommodate missing keys.

Lists and sets can also accommodate "bucketing" of data, however that comes with added complexity of accommodating the variety of redis commands that come with those data structures (BLPOP, SADD, SDIFF, etc).

[1] http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/12202313862/sto...
Is Levelup actually considered successful? I have seen it in several establishments around here (Seattle) but I have never seen it used, and the employees tell me it is not popular or easy (unlike, say, Square). I don't know Kuapay. Starbucks had something of a firm place from which to launch, so it's not really comparable.

What's the poor ordering experience? Trying to get the bartender's attention? I would submit that a poor order experience is a consequence of the establishment, not the fundamentals of the ordering process. Personally, I like the bar experience, it's personal, it's immediate, you can get recommendations, and it's fairly equitable for everyone around (shovers will be ignored by a good bartender, though a good bartender is by no means guaranteed). On the other hand, a remote ordering situation turns every bar into a drink machine activated by an impersonal, drive-thru-like interface. If you prefer that to the existing system, perhaps you should patronize a better bar!

I agree that there is probably some interesting way to leverage personal technology in this space, but it's not this. This app does not improve the "ordering experience," it eliminates it. That's a bad idea.
Boots on the street
How to get funding and launch your own Startup ? [video]
I have a friend who has a lot of books and loves to loan them to people who are interested. I love going to his place because I usually bring back a few and we almost always end up talking about ideas in those books rather than discussing the latest material possessions we have acquired.
Support comic book veterans doing their own sci-fi thing
Thanks for doing so! You might take a look at some pricing-page recommendations over at kalzumeus.com.

You may find things are more successful with something more like, for example:

Pay Monthly | Pay Quarterly | Pay Yearly
$30/mo | $75 ($25/mo) | $250 ($20.83/mo)

All plans come with a free 30-day trial (or money-back guarantee); cancel or upgrade at any time.
I think you are missing the point here. It is stupid to blame Tumblr for all the other big scary companies. They made a mistake. They apologized and fixed the problem, and according to the apology they found a bug in their process and fixed it.

Instead of bashing Tumblr for apologizing, we should be happy they retracted. If HN was the reason why they retracted, then great. But let's stop looking down on Tumblr purring ourselves at the top.

We are all at the same boat and same level. We are all trying to make our companies work.
FYI, your programmers are underpaid. Friends of mine who have degrees in the humanities make more than 500 USD a month as programmers working for Indian startups. If you made 200 USD a month, you won't be able to live anywhere halfway decent in Chennai.
I enjoyed reading that. I never knew that lucasfilm employed lisp back in the day so much.

Also,making a 6502 disassembler to better find out other game tricks.
I live south of Denver. I moved here from the East Bay 4 years ago due to cost of living. Tech jobs were highly competitive and I wasn't able to get a job that made it affordable to stay. So after 3 years in the Bay Area, I treked out to Colorado where my wife is from. I got a good programmer job about a year later.

In Denver there's a whole area called the "Tech Center", and there are quite a few startups in Downtown. I've heard a lot about Boulder and the tech community up there, but it's way too far away for me to look for work up there.

Plus, there's a lot to do around here all year round.

(Side note, I also lived in Provo for 5 years and SLC for 1)
It is inaccurate to say there are far fewer apartments in Manhattan-- many neighborhoods simply became less crowded, as improving mass transit meant that a working-class family sharing a one- or two-room apartment could have a larger space in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, or suburbs beyond, while maintaining access to Manhattan wages. There are also far more single adults and childless couples in the American population (especially in NYC) versus 1910, meaning an apartment that once held a family now often houses only one or two people. The New York Times had an interesting piece on this last year[0]:
"Manhattan was much more crowded in the early 1900s than today, especially in the tenements of the Lower East Side. For example, in 1910, 66 people lived on the four residential floors of 94 Orchard Street. Today, the buildilng houses 15 people."

And, in fact, many apartments have been built in Manhattan since 1910-- much of far northern Manhattan wasn't developed by then, and middle-class apartment houses were in their infancy.

That isn't to say that Manhattan (and its commuter-shed) doesn't need more new housing, and that the 1963 zoning code governing NYC isn't problematic: for example, inner Brooklyn, on top of tons of subway lines still has parking requirements, and many areas are zoned such that any new construction would be less dense than what it would replace. The problem isn't a supply that's been reduced, but rather a supply that isn't increasing along with demand, with zoning laws that often prevent any densification that would lead to increased supply.

The same problem holds in Silicon Valley, except that its zoning holds it to a suburban, rather than an insufficiently urban, form.

[0]http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/man...
So.....you are probably not going to be an effective entrepreneur in a country like India if you can't even figure out how to pay the cost of doing business for the visa you need to even start your company. If you don't understand that this is a shakedown/bribe situation you should not be incorporating in India. How could you be an effective leader there if you can't even figure this one out.
Britain had no prominent Liberal Party in the Churchill days, so thanks for making your ignorance of history doubly (misquote and misspoken misquote) and triply (Malthusianism) obvious.
I like that dvcs-autosync is able to keep a history, but I wouldn't use it because it doesn't have the ability to delete old versions of a file yet.
It couldn't kill the battery any faster than a phone with a giant screen...
I agree.
I find Computer Modern to be more suited for mathematics and making it justified as well is not good for readability.
Get them back on their feet?? Do you think they are homeless because they ran into some temporary setback? What do you think of these people that you think they are perfectly capable of living a normal life, but they hit some speedbump along the way and now they are too, what? How pathetic would they have to be if some accident of life left them permanently on the street? How little you must think of them!

Drug addiction and crippling mental illness effect over 95% of chronically homeless people. These are people struggling with things you and I can't even imagine coping with. I mean that, you and I can't fathom in any meaningful way what it means for our perceptions and judgments about the world to be completely unreliable. It's pretty much not possible to cope with hearing voices or having visual hallucinations or crippling addiction. You can't 'get them back on their feet', because they are not healthy enough to stand on their own, and we don't know (I mean the royal we, all of the medical and psychiatric expertise in the world is more or less helpless in the face of what they are suffering from) any way to make it better. In fact you can't merely offer them help, because they very often aren't mentally stable enough or responsible enough to accept it.

The best thing we can offer them is long term support. We can give them food and warm/clean clothing, offer medical care, and respond when they have an emergency. We can offer them safe shelter and mental health care, that is, when they are in a mental state such that they will accept it.

We can scrape them off the sidewalk when they OD, and we can temporarily put them in a hospital when they are so unstable that they are very likely to cause injury to themselves or others. Of course, there is a fine line in such paternal actions, at some point we are violating their humanity when we give them involuntary help. Sometimes the best systems we can create to do so end up being worse on the whole than doing nothing (institutionalization of the mentally ill for example).

That is the state of the art. Someday we, as a society and civilization, will be able to tend to the least fortunate in more effective ways, but what I described is literally the best we know how to do right now. Of course everyone, even us greedy Silicon Valley types, have a strong desire to make this better, but unfortunately nobody knows how to do it. We are spending HUGE amounts of money, and besides reducing suffering a little, we aren't able to achieve much more.
>Well, the whole point of an office is to get work done.

I'm not sure about that. The whole point of an office seems to be to allow management to verify that you're getting work done. Or, to put it even more accurately, to allow management to feel like they're verifying that you're getting work done.

I'm not sure Floobits addresses that. In fact, I'm not sure that it's possible for a product to address that. It seems like the sort of thing that'll require a generational shift (as newer managers comfortable with remote work replace older managers who aren't).
I lived in Utah for a year (Logan) and San Francisco for many.

Utah culture does have some positives. The work ethic is very strong, the atmosphere is pro-business, and employees are loyal almost to a fault. In California I think the M.O. is "looking out for number one" -- in Utah I felt that even low level employees often have a sense of commitment to their employers. I also think that Mormons specifically can be good in sales due to their missionary work which is two-years of religiously mandated door-to-door sales training.

But the Utah culture lacks in other areas -- specifically on "being a hustler/hacker" and being creative, neither of which is plentiful in Utah.

By the way, Overstock and Novell are the only tech companies in Utah I can think of -- are there any that are more recent?
> A universal health care system would probably fix a lot of this, as it should reduce the number of untreated mental disorders.

The expression "reduce the number of untreated mental disorders" implies that there are treatments for mental disorders. There aren't. Talk therapy has been shown to be an example of the placebo effect, and the various drugs that exist have a checkered history, sometimes treating symptoms, but never treating causes.

If a mental patient is given drugs that prevent the disease's symptoms from manifesting themselves, that's not a treatment, it's a palliative, and the drug therefore must be used forever (which makes the drug companies happy). Many of the most popular drugs have serious side effects including anomalous weight gain, diabetes and heart disease.

In the long term, this may change as neuroscience takes over from psychiatry and psychology, a process that has begun in earnest, but that hasn't yet made a dent in the problem.
$4? I assume that is the cost of assembling the device in the USA. The benefit of Chinese manufacturing (from what I've read) is that the various factories that make all your parts are right next to each other, so if there's an issue with an order, you can order more parts and literally walk them down the street.

To become really competitive, the USA will need to bring quite a bit of manufacturing back to be able to have that kind of synergy.

However, I would say that I would trust the quality of components here more than from China in terms of better processes and QA.

Someone correct me if I've gotten something wrong here. I don't have any directly experience with any of this.
Thanks for your review! I'm aware that they are not unique points. They all come either from hard experience or from things I've read from people I respect over the years.

It's not my first programming gig, and as for young, it's relative. I'm in my early thirties. Unfortunately, I am the most senior person there.

I am surprised my writing style would lead anyone to think I'm young. Are there any specifics there? I have taken professional writing courses, but writing is still something I try to improve. I will keep the suggestion of enrolling in one in mind, though!

That particular gramatical error was really a typo. Either way, if I decide to send it at all, I will definitely be proofreading it again. Even though I re-read it once, I missed that one and would probably have missed it every time.

I haven't provided examples for three reasons. First, I'm hoping it prompts discussion. Second, many of what I would include as examples are things that either I or they have pointed out previously. Third, it is already very long; details will bog down the pace. Given those reasons, would examples still help?
Would something like git gc work when the repo is considerably big?
Post-processing in the sense I referred to usually has the goal of replicating, not altering, the moment of firing the shutter. Cameras (film OR digital) do not see the way the eye sees; the image straight from the camera (which, as I said, does all sorts of automatic processing to be able to create the image in the first place) is rarely a faithful presentation of what the photographer saw -- not to mention the subjective mood of the moment that the photographer is trying to capture.

I think it's a very small minority of photographers indeed that are purist enough to consider things like cropping, levels, and white balance "altering the subject" in some reproachful way.
Google sign in is required. I'd appreciate if HN had less posts from the "walled" sources.
"Do people vote themselves a pay reduction during bad times? Good luck with that one."

Actually, yes. I read the Semco book mentioned above, and he has an example of it, that people agreed to pay reduction for everyone rather than layoff someone. Which is actually mirrored in other human experiences, where tough times seem to usually bring people together (contrary to what is often believed).

Another point from the book. They did financial training for the employees, so presumably, they understood financial dynamics. Semco employed lots of blue-collar workers, apparently, and it still worked for them. I don't see why company employing primarily SW engineers (smart people) couldn't handily do the same.

The key message from the book seems to be, just be honest about it, don't try to cheat, and it will work out nicely.
... and istumblrdown.com is somehow stealing tumblr's business?
Being 11th on a power law distribution with so few samples isn't a good place to be.

Even being 2nd means you'll have to fight more than twice as hard for resources.
Hawaii also. The state of Hawaii has started a program that gives free one-way airline tickets to homeless people who decide they want to leave.

http://rt.com/usa/hawaii-one-way-tickets-homeless-824/

Now if only New York will offer airline tickets instead of bus tickets, the homeless can commute back and forth between New York and Hawaii forever. :)
If it is just investment which is mostly fucked, Utah seems like an awesome place for a raised-money-in-SFBA company to have a second office and hire a lot of developers. If they're committed to Utah, they probably won't leave very soon.

I'm thinking WA state makes a little more sense (I personally prefer UW to BYU/UU, and I like the culture in WA more than (my limited experience with) UT), especially if you want to have only a single location which appeals to both "city people" and "country people" (an overgeneralization, but I think accurate). However, SF+UT seems like a really strong option.

The awesome thing about this is that if UT becomes the backend dev shop for lots of startups, SFBA VC will be drawn there to finance new startups at some point, solving your financing problem.
No worries; I think I understood your intent, but hijacked the wording to make a point =/ In any case, you're spot on that the culture of fundamentalist polygamy has myriad issues with respect to authority, abuse, etc..., for which tolerance is not a solution.
So which one is it, is South India very safe, or are encounters with "nasty criminals" common?
Huh? I right-clicked the link and opened it in a Chrome incognito window (thus not signed in) and it displayed the map fine.
But you cannot see a RAW - so it's debatable whether you can call it a photograph. Many choices must be made either implicitly or explicitly when rendering a RAW into an actual image representable on screen or paper.
Here's a screenshot for the lazy http://f.cl.ly/items/2L0s1j0y3r2b2U1F2d0N/Screen%20Shot%2020...
No, it's not required. Try the link in a private mode tab or different browser.

This is one of those evil tricks, if Microsoft or Google know somehow you have an account they'll try to force a sign in ever after.
I'm new to the project, but not new to the company. My previous role was a project lead, and I interacted with this project on a regular basis. I was brought in to this project to get stuff done because it's very behind and new work is piling up in the future.

I agree that it's too long. If I send it anything at all, it will have to be shorter or in segments. Based on this and other peoples review, I probably won't send it. Still, it helped my identify the issues for myself. There must be ways of getting results without sending this, and I'll continue to consider that as I work with the team.

I suppose I really would like these ideals to be a standard.

Thank you for taking the time to read that novella and to post your thoughts!
Thanks, this is a good way to partition hashes, added link to the post. When applying compression to real-life redis data, I usually also get a ballpark of 50% savings.
Property and Datatype are in the HTML namespace* and their values are namespaced identifiers (in XML, QNames).

The identifiers are namespaced so that if you have differing vocabs with the same property names (or datatypes), you can distinguish which one you're talking about.

Your proposed transformation means that Property lives in the example namespace, meaning it has a completely different interpretation, which is specific to the example namespace.

*: (before someone pulls me up on this, it's not 100% correct)
I suspect a tech company which fired people on that basis, even if fully within UT law, would be punished in the marketplace (both customers and employees).
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