skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a vast difference between an NYC that has massive inequality and the NYC that's being created today -- one where gentrification that squeezes out not just "crime" but anyone below an upper class income status. That's the trend and future that Byrne describes:

> If we look at the city as it is now, then we would have to say that it looks a lot like the divided city that presumptive mayor Bill de Blasio has been harping about: most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich (which, full disclosure, includes me), and aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people. Bit by bit, the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated.

He goes on to describe a number of elements that contribute to these trends:

> The talent pool became a limited resource for any industry, except Wall Street. [...] any businesses that might have employed creative individuals were having difficulties surviving, and naturally, the arty types had a hard time finding employment, too.

Environment drives out creatives -> creative industries have hard time hiring (start moving elsewhere) -> Environment gets even worse for creatives.
Death spiral: When you keep creating products with no demand in the real world [1]. You create things, release things, nobody uses it, but by then, you're working on the next version nobody wants either.

Death spiral: Working on components of a larger project with no hope of ever integrating all pieces into a coherent final release. Everything gets incrementally improved in isolation, but nobody can figure out how to cut a product out of all the pieces.

[1]: Plenty of demand exists in the delusional minds of executives, PMs, and clueless employees though. It just doesn't match the real world.
I think people understand how capitalism works. I also think it's OK to lament that the outcome of people expressing their preferences en mass is that light entertainment is favoured so drastically over science.
Well if they are unable to seize them, then bitcoin will become more valuable to the black market. If they are, then some of its patina as a 'safe' stash will be lost. Of course even if they don't get them, they will be able to see if they are ever used right?
1) You cant say that unilaterally - Fat shaming may very well also prevent skinny people from becoming fat. You can't just look at already fat people.
2) These self reported "weight discrimination" studies have so many biases you really shouldn't take them as fact.
3) The usual correlation =/= causation speech. It could very well be that amount of discrimination also varies with weight (duh) and that those that get a lot of discrimination are already past the point of motivation to change (just one of many alternative theories. This specific example isn't the best by any stretch).

All in all, it just does not make as much intuitive sense that fat jokes (among other things) encourage people to stay fat and this little study is definitely not enough to override occams razor in my opinion.
I like Hamilton, despite the industrial smells. Heh. I spent quite a lot of time around there and Burlington and I much prefer that side of the GTA to the eastern side.

The GO train commute isn't that bad...90 minutes at the most and it's pretty direct.
You don't need a CS degree to develop software. I have one but plenty of my coworkers do not. If you want to see if the work suits you without jumping right into the deep end or going back to school, see if there are any Software Craftsmanship apprentice programs in your area. You'll get more exposure to test-driven development and other ideas than most jobs however it may have a consultant slant to it as that is what a lot of SC places are doing.
> The ecosystem is more than just libraries, and using java libraries in scala is giving up much of the benefits of scala.

What does that even mean? There's full Java interop, so I just add a dependency on JodaTime and voila, a kick ass library at my finger tips. That is by and large the ecosystem, a massive wealth of functionality, followed by community and tooling (which in Scala is admittedly a weak point).

With Haskell you have Haskell's ecosystem, nothing less, nothing more. So if a Haskeller hasn't developed, for example, a PDF generator to produce client invoices, you're SOL short of writing it yourself.
Fix 260 character file name length limitation: Declined
Yeah. I read through too quickly...

Thanks for pointing that out.
Trading Places was set in Philadelphia for some strange reason.
Conversely, if you don't know them, you'll not be safe at all. Do you think you can out bid the USA?
The $100 Handshake Restoring Faith in Humanity
What if a complete stranger came up to you and handed you $100? That's exactly what I set out to find out. I wanted to restore a little faith in humanity. Thanks for watching! - Brody White
Pierce's book (the standard text) is surprisingly readable, at least compared to what I expected.
MongoDB 2.6 development branch available in free sandbox from MongoHQ
Queens is still here and as ethnically diverse as ever. The Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn West and South, and Manhattan North of 110 Street are all places where people live. You don't see many pied-à-terres on Grand Concourse.

These complaints are from one warring faction of the wealthy. One faction wants total isolation in their neighborhoods and the other wants a sprinkle of the right kind of poor person as scenery. To me it's an irrelevant debate. I couldn't possibly care any less whether young bankers or young artists dominate the East Village.

Let them have their whole foods and their dog walkers and their prestigious addresses. We have an income tax -- they are contributing tax money for the rest of us. Even the absentees are paying property taxes while not consuming any services.

All of this strikes me as the rich complaining about the richer, while trying to couch their complaints in populist rhetoric.
And software engineering (web development, coding) is probably one of the most egalitarian industries.
Those movies were addressing a contemporary phenomenon when inequality took off again after being relatively dormant since the 1920's. A combination of deregulation, a reduction in top tax rate, and demand for all kinds of debt caused an explosion of wealth on Wall Street. Meanwhile the rest of city was still recovering from being bankrupt in the 70s.
I really like the look of the bio page - might have to redo my own blog template :)
Would such tax penalties stop the rich from renting/owning in NYC? I doubt it, they are rich after all. Would those tax penalties convince them to declare those homes their primary residence? Maybe, if they were American. But would declaring those homes to be their primary residence actually get them to spend more time in them? No.

Is it really a problem that rich people aren't living in all of their homes simultaneously? No. That is their own business, don't worry about what they do, worry about what you do.

What is next, complaining that middle class families often leave one car sitting idly in their driveway?
Me trying to dance across Europe :P
Bitcoin Animated Short
You wrote nasty code in PHP that you don't clearly understand, and aren't immediately either researching (and then documenting!) why you did what you did, or failing that, recoding for sanity. Once those little hacks calcify it's all down the tubes from there.
When you're related to them and they die young? That's kinda a bummer.

I already am in a socialized medicine system where we all share the costs for everyone, its just run by private sector for profit crooks who skim a huge amount off the top, mostly. So every penny spent on fat dude's insulin so he can keep drinking corn syrup soda is a penny that can't be spent on something I directly care about, like glaucoma (yeah yeah I know just get medical weed, whatever...) or celiac disease or other topics.
Ahh yes, that is partly my fault. I should've been a bit more clear. The .gstencil is for versions of omnigraffle prior to 6.

Sorry for the confusion.

You can download a trial of omnigraffle 6 and then export the stencil as an .svg
FreeMAT is a really good OS clone of Matlab.

http://freemat.sourceforge.net/
A friend of mine, CTO at Elfo [1] (a 60-ppl Italian software basically-unknown company) is successfully using Kanban for software development since almost 2 years.

Each team/project (6 to 10 developers) has it's own Kanban board, each person has no more than 1-2 tasks/phase and they focus on keeping the phases balanced, i.e. with the same amount of tasks. They're happy since its a light weight way to have a full picture of what's going on.

His original notes (in Italian, sorry) [2].

[1] http://www.elfo.net
[2] http://www.robertocappelletti.com/2012/01/kanban/
From the other end of the spectrum there are a lot of backend engineers who don't want to touch the frontend.

IMHO aside from javascript, there's a huge tedious side to frontend engineering involving html, css, browser incompatibility and ugly hacks that aren't really programming in a sense (more just endless debugging). It's all very domain specific knowledge that doesn't translate well onto other facets of of traditional programming. Hence a lot of backend devs want to stay away from that so they build a wall of separation between the people who do want to deal with it and the ones who don't: "Frontend" and "Backend" engineers.
You both pay taxes according to your capital gains and expenditures. Your gains are $100, AirBnB's are $25. Coca-Cola pays taxes, too.
> The most shocking study, published in August 2012 by the journal Health Affairs, found that life expectancy for white female high-school dropouts has fallen dramatically over the past 18 years. These women are now expected to die five years earlier than the generation before them—a radical decline that is virtually unheard of in the world of modern medicine.

High school graduation rates are up substantially over that time period, especially for women, so the category of "high school dropouts" probably represents a narrower pool of women today than 18 years ago.
$725.75 per credit hour (non-resident) for EDGE vs. $134 for GA Tech OMS CS is a significant difference.
That is the interesting test is it not? Why is it that 'high income' people can live in a high rise apartment building but 'low income' people cannot? I am aware of the various 'projects' where we've seen violence, drug use, and property destruction. I am wondering is if it is even possible to create such a facility?

Could you, for example, create an elevator system that took you from ground floor to your apartment, and only if you keyed in the right code? And would that be sufficient to allow people to live without being negatively harmed by their neighbours?

Curious and I don't know if anyone has looked into this in a controlled way, hence the question.
Huh? I'm pretty sure Kanban helps with all of these.

Why are we building this feature? With a strict limit on work in progress, someone must have explicitly decided that it was more important than all the other features in your backlog. Sure, you can still disagree with their weighting, but at least it forces them to prioritize, rather than delaying the product with a kitchen sink of everyone's ideas.

We can't release until quality is better? If you keep cards in progress until they're released (and you should), you very quickly reach a point where you have to release, or it's simply impossible to do any more work. In fact this is pretty much the core problem Kanban was meant to solve.

I'm blocked? A blocked card is filling up a valuable work-in-progress slot, and a manager should notice very quickly. If particular issues keep blocking several cards, that means the manager is seeing those same issues every day; sooner or later they should take notice.
Adobe Confirms Serious Source Code Breach and Theft of Customer Data
Ask HN: Simple recruiting software?
We're stepping up our recruiting effort, need some software to get organized.

I hate, hate, hate most recruiting software (Bullhorn, icims, etc) that is usually expensive, bloated, and is designed for yesterday's web browser.

Is there a startup out there trying to do beautiful, simple recruiting software for small operations?
Million Singles Project
One Million Singles on One Webpage
A new website claims to display one million singles from around the world on one webpage. The website, established by 32-year-old Israeli Etai Hugi, attempts to collect one million male and female singles from all over the world on a single page. The founder claims that following a disappointing love affair that left him with a broken heart, he heard from a friend that "true love has a one in a million chance” and decided to take this one step further, establishing a website that intends to display half a million single females on one side and half a million single males on the other. He named it "The million Singles Project”, or MillionSinglesProject.com.
Participation in this project costs $1 for a lifetime membership, guaranteeing a picture of the participant + a short text and a link of the participant's choice. The website was set up in English and addresses singles all over the world. The founder says that in the future, a search by country will be enabled.
The website includes a Q&A section on the project and insights on the singles market, as well as what to do with the million dollars gained by the project. Some of the answers are funny and introduce a fresh aspect to the dating scene. It seems that we won’t be passing the coming winter alone.
I was going to complain about the links being broken, but I see it's six years old.
You'd expect students of that caliber to work outside of the classroom.
In software development we call it abstraction. Privacy is for real people.
Pair Program with Me
I think that is one of the novel pieces of functionality that needs to be created. The soon to be dead man looks like any other miner to the network and submits what appears to be valid work, but he is secretly poisoning the work going to release his secret, and of course he has to be the only one capable of doing that. Maybe later on the network realizes the work it was doing was poisoned and rolls back the poison change and resumes processing. Every time a poison pill is introduced the network must do some amount of work to determine that that the pill must be discarded and that amount is tunable by the soon to be dead man.

"What stops the parties from ignoring the messages I send, thus recovering my secret by simply pretending I died?"
They would have to control enough of the network and know who you are and how you are interfacing with the network to stop you. If the network has an incentive like bitcoin mining this could be infeasible for many adversaries.

Tampering is a problem with real dead man's switches as well such as a script that you have to ping or an associate.

I think big computational networks with incentives unlock some interesting doors. If you can assume that the computational majority of the network is playing ball you can ask it to do some interesting things if you have the right private key.
http://www.millionsinglesproject.com/
As someone who went through this very question a while ago, I'll give you the advice that worked for me.

First off, your best source of solid information is going to be a large dose of good old fashioned book reading. Youtube documentaries and blog posts are fun but badly inadequate as a detailed learning tools.

Pick the main periods of history or general historical fields (economic history, political history, etc) you'd like to know about and do a bit of research to find out which 4 or 5 books get the most frequent mention as expert sources of info for those periods or fields of learning.

Start reading those books and look through their references for more sources that might be interesting.

Repeat for each historical period you'd like to know about. It's a slow process but its very thorough.

Also, do read plenty of economic history and theory books, (especially those from the Austrian school and classical liberal school of econ) they will provide you with good context for why a lot of things in history happen the way they do.
True. That's one of the ways that you end up in this engineering death spiral -- bad market / product fit and thrashing strategy.
Alfa-Mobile Enables Xsolla Payments to Steam and World of tanks
I run http://www.brombone.com. We provide prerendered snapshots as a service.

You can get it faster than 15 seconds, but you can't really get it fast enough. We precache everything. I would strongly recommend against trying to process the pages in realtime.
As much as people want to like AirBnb, I'd guess most rentals in NYC are illegal given the existing laws on the books. This is why NY is requesting the data from AirBnb.

Owners can not rent less than 30 days unless they are present. In addition, I do not know of a single condominium building that allows AirBnb style rentals -- most at this point have modified their rules/by-laws to explicitly forbid it so as not to leave any room for interpretation open.

I am President of my condo board and we both have this language in our rules as well as have a hefty fine for violating them. The minimum allowed rental is 12 months and includes a full background and financial check. Unit owners with common amenities do _not_ want short-term rentals in their buildings and can prevent them legally.
I worked at an audio company previously, and one of my main jobs was porting a large acoustic simulation suite from Juce to Qt (EAW Resolution).

Unless you really need the audio specific features that Juce includes (we didn't as we did everything in-house) there's really no point to using it.

Qt has a bigger community, more extensive (and IMO more well thought out) libraries, and as has already been mentioned, a native look and feel that can't be beat. Not to mention, Qt is completely free for personal and commercial use.

The only popular commercial app I know of that is using Juce is Smaart by rational acoustics. They used MFC before that if I recall, so obviously the cross-platform capabilities are a huge bonus. I still wondered why they didn't move to Qt like us though.
A simple typographic trick to increase text readability by up to 30%
At its very heart typography is about two things: legibility, which is concerned with how distinguishable letters, words and phrases are; and readability which deals with how easy it is for the brain to convert those elements into a coherent message.Have you ever found yourself reading a single line of text twice, as if it were two lines, especially when your eyes are tired? It occurs, because the eye gets lost on its journey from right to left (or left to right, depending on your language) from the end of one line to the start of the next. It’s the reason that children trace lines with their finger when they’re taught to read.There are a few things that typographers can do to prevent the problem, and they’re especially important in large amounts of body text, like news reports or blogs...
“The brain is comparable to the digital content of the world.”
People over 40 are perfectly capable of using their legs. If they used them more often, instead of hopping in the car every time they needed to go a mile or two, maybe they would remain healthy longer. Cities typically have transportation programs meant for the elderly and disabled, if other public transit is unable to service them.

I shop with my car maybe once a month, tops, and that is mostly just because I like to buy dozens of liters of seltzer water.
How the NSA might use Hotmail, Yahoo or other cookies to identify Tor users
Practically speaking I'm not sure it really matters. If he's unable to do anything with the backups himself until they can 'convince' him to give them the password, they will still probably eventually get the money. If someone else starts spending from that wallet address they'll probably be tracked down and charged with conspiracy or obstruction of some sort.

Basically as long as the money can't be spent for whatever reason it is effectively seized.
It's possible that being a contractor shields me a bit but that isn't why I mostly contract. I really don't have a lot of tolerance for corporate politics that inevitably crop up. I find that as a contractor I'm usually outside the day to day maneuvering that you find in most organizations. Most contracts are for a limited timeframe for a particular project that many times is in trouble. I find those types of gigs rewarding.

I will work for a startup as a full time employee but it would have to be the right position. Right now I'm contemplating doing something myself but I haven't decided exactly what yet.
Nissan gives rides in self-driving electric LEAF at Japan's CEATEC show
Twitter IPO: Some Thoughts
Isn't this architecture redundant? Why have two application servers in between the database and the browser? Wouldn't it be better to serve the page once and have the browser communicate directly with the api? Is this setup common? Is it really the future?
It's also worthwhile to note, as long as this thread is engaged, that the value at 260 was a "spike" -- the only people who bought bitcoins at that price were speculators who couldn't bear the thought that the spaceship might fly away even higher without them on-board, and other I'd guess clueless users who didn't notice that what they were paying $260 for today could have been had for a maximum of $100 only two weeks prior to that date, with Bitcoin having never experienced such high valuations on any public market in the history of time leading up to that point.
Meet Four Teen Hackers (And Another Even Younger One)
They can only legally increase your rent 2% every year or 4% every two years, and they HAVE to renew your lease by law unless you really fuck up (giving you the option of both a 1 and 2 year lease). The apartment only becomes unstabilized if your income is exceeds $250K or your rent exceeds $2500/month. The only possible way you would ever see a large rent increase (that I know of) if you lived in a rent stabilized apartment in NYC is if the owner of the building dumped a shitload of money into the building (there is an actual formula that depends on the number of apts, I believe), and then since the building is a lot nicer they actually increase your rent to market rates.

I agree with your second statement
Kanban does nothing to solve the product strategy and market fit questions and is often applied as a fix-all for much deeper rooted problems. I would also argue that Kanban has the tendency to turn engineers into widget builders and is demotivating. Here, take this tiny piece of work and when you finish it I will reward you with another. Keep your head down and just trust me.
Really good criminal would not spend his time making sure he does not get caught.

Good criminal spends his time preparing for when he gets caught.
It could put some tax money into subsidized housing to offset their market effect of increasing other peoples' rents and commute times.

It really kind of is a problem because of the effects that it has on the housing market. It's completely different from somebody having an idle car in their driveway because nobody else could park on their property. This is a situation where this is an apartment somebody else could rent and live in and decrease sprawl.
You can buy Game of Thrones on the Google play store now
Duplicate post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509437
I think you're a bit delusional about crime in Philadelphia. It's intolerably bad by all reasonable accounts.

It makes zero sense to put a business in Philadelphia as opposed to surrounding areas because of the tax and regulatory situation. The city of Philadelphia is a financial basket case, just like Chicago, LA, and Detroit. All these cities are getting closer and closer to the inevitable precipice. New York is not.