skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't fully understand how the decision was made which neighborhoods will be built out. It is obviously not based on demand because the coverage areas [1] include every single one of Seattle's poorest neighborhoods[2] and virtually none of the richest. Even if you don't know Seattle neighborhoods, there are obvious clues in the map. It seems almost gerrymandered to avoid including non-industrial waterfront. Some of those choices make sense to me (the UW, students are poor). Others less so. I would estimate a majority of the area covered is in lower than average income areas -- the U district and southeast Seattle.

It is obvious that there was some non-market-based decision making here. I am OK with that and Seattleites tend to be as well. I don't think infrastructure should be limited to the rich or that a fiber vendor should be allowed to cherry pick neighborhoods. However I wonder if the right balance was struck.

My suspicion is the 'highest bidder' was picked in part by how many low income neighborhoods they were willing to deploy in, and I fear this has resulted in choosing an organization that overbid because they didn't actually understand what it would take to be successful. Or worse yet is not even going to be capable of doing the buildout.

I'd love to be proven wrong.

[1] http://gigabitseattle.com/areas/
[2] http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/seattle-area/6851...
"the crises they instigated" - this is just silly. Periodic crises is a feature of a capitalist economy. Look at the 2001 dot com crash. Yes, it happened not to dramatically affect the rest of the economy this time. But would you say Pets.com instigated the crash?
Good point. I was talking to a CEO of a biotech start-up. He is not a huge fan of the banks, but he said "If I decide to do an IPO, you can dam well be sure I'll go with Goldman. I would be leaving money on the table with anyone else."
White House rejects clemency for Edward Snowden over NSA leaks
This is a standard DMCA 512(c)(2) notice; see http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID129
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I loved Microsoft Money. Yes, it was bloated and had tons of features I'd never use, but it did everything I needed it to. My biggest issue with Mint is the lack of proper Bill Payments. I don't necessarily need to be able to pay bills from Mint, but when it tells me a bill is due tomorrow and I don't pay it tomorrow, I want it to keep telling me it's past due until I mark it as reconciled or something of that nature. Instead, Mint just assumes I pay everything on time and stops reminding me. There again, perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd imagine it's a pretty large minority in this economy that doesn't always have the luxury of paying everything right when it's due. I know they're more geared towards analyzing what you've spent, but I wish they'd consider adding more features outside of that specialization.
"you could win a game that doesn't matter"

Isn't this a tautology?

If it really matters, it's not a game, by definition.
I'm not sure how thousands of companies blazing their own trail is synonymous with stopping advancement.
Don't laugh, but there is "PowerShell." :) (laughs)
I don't know why, but I have noticed,in my world, it's the
average guy, with the average IQ that thrives. A rich father helped too. Many great minds, or creative minds
seem to lose their way? I always laugh at movies that
round up the smartest guys in the world in order to save it;
a pizza delivery man is always in the mix. It's ironic, but
true.
Inspired by Snowden, more NSA insiders are blowing the whistle
Use offchain transactions for most things and onchain just to settle balances between service providers, and you could scale to major currency levels. Keep the number of transactions per block limited, and transaction fees could be maintained high enough to avoid the "bitcoin tragedy of the commons."

That doesn't seem to be the direction they're going, though.
If HFT isn't doing any good, and is extracting money from the system, then isn't it necessarily doing harm? It seems to me that if you are making money and not doing anything useful, then you must be basically stealing from somebody somehow.
Can someone who's taken the new MTA Select Bus Service busses comment on whether they are smoother than regular busses? I took an MTA bus today for the first time in a long while and it was uncomfortably bumpy.
This is going to get drastically worse, as capital becomes able to remove most human labor from the production equation using robotics in the next few decades.

I've yet to see a solution to the seemingly inevitable outcome of traditional human labor dropping to nearly zero value. And or why we'd want to prevent it from happening, given the upside to robotics.

The only way to stop (slow down?) the rise of robotics, is to place arbitrary restrictions on machines to hamper their value proposition. I expect politicians all over the world to begin attempting this before another decade goes by.

Will we see a dramatic increase in the formation of unions as a defensive response? Most likely.
Wow such angry.
I think its prudent for the dev to set expectations straight away. I would expect most people to be reasonable, but that most people, if they had their initial expectations broken, would feel cheated.

So the art of consulting/free-lancing is to make sure reality matches expectations. For both parties.

Of course, there are clients that expect a facebook for $1000, but if the dev makes sure to set out such expectations at the start, and don't agree until something is signed and sealed.
That is certainly a noble sentiment however from a practical point of view I doubt that you would have any effect considering that they are a massive company employing 33,000 people around the world.

Also, the culture is set from the top-down so unless your plan is to penetrate Goldman Sachs with a fifth-column cadre that would somehow climb the corporate ladder continuously - while miraculously not losing sight of their real goal! - to one day be able to enact change from the top down, I don't know how you could possibly succeed in making even the smallest dent from your position as a corporate 'peon'.
> The language problem may have meant that the developer interpreted the milestone as pay upon App Store submission instead of App Store approval

Well that's developer's problem, isn't it?

> I can request a developer write me an app with a buy button that takes the user to my website instead of using Apple's In-App Purchasing. That app would never get approved even though the developer wrote exactly what I asked them to. So I shouldn't pay the developer because Apple denied the app?

Yes, that's how contracts work. Welcome to the real world.

How is it your problem that the developer agreed to an impossible task?
Any idea what (self-hosted) applications can be sync'd with? I'm sure that Exchange (via ActiveSync) is on the list but if you know of popular open-source web apps that it will work with I'd love to hear about them.
That's an important point overlooked by those who are wistful for trolleys. Buses at least can change routes. Trolleys were from a time when few had cars and spending lots of money on a fixed route was efficient. Now it's not.
"For bitcoin to overcome these regulatory challenges, there are several 'areas of improvement,' he says. These include customer identification and due diligence, verifying ownership and control of wallet addresses, and transaction monitoring for fraud. Bitcoin institutions must prevent transfers that would violate OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) sanctions or the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act)."

If he's serious I don't think he understands much about bitcoin. (More likely, he's trying to preserve a role for Western Union.)
It would be interesting to see which companies these are.
Off chain is always a solution, but requires some form of trust in most situations.

In all honesty I see Bitcoin becoming more of a commodity in the long term, and it is traded sparingly, or other coins/digital currencies are built that allow you to peg the value of Bitcoin to them, as to move it faster. This is just speculation, of course.
For crypto applications there isn't a strong enough financial incentive to design an ASIC specifically to do that. Maybe a GPU-based solution like oclHashcat[1] can be extended to do that.

[1] http://hashcat.net/
You may feel different if you commuted Ballard-Downtown. Standing room only, even before the service cuts.

Have you seen the plans for the Seattle Street Car?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Streetcar

Please note the Green and Purple lines.

Kinda looks like 1/2 of the monorail project plan.

The capital cost of the monorail was ~$1.4b. What killed the project was the finance package, totaling ~$12b. Still less per mile than any surface solution.

Sadly, the monorail is starting to look like a bargain.
Aligning business reqs and technical implementation is a harder and more expert job than the development part. These sites assume it doesn't exist and leave a client and dev to scrap it out in a zero sum game.
Real life jobs/recruiting solves this problem via references.

Why isn't this something elance can provide? You can get an anonymized contact info for previous clients of the dev. You can ping them for some questions etc.
I would like to make an addendum to Poe's Law - a formal accepted response / solution to the dilemma.

An extremist point of view should always be taken as sarcasm (or more accurately, as pisstake). Extremism should be derided as facile and ridiculous, but kind of funny - just like sarcasm. It is absurd whether the proponent regards it as such or not and as such should be treated with the sense of humour it deserves.
On the subject of robotics supplanting human toil, Ray Kurzweil recently said:

"In my view, it will lead to richer lives, and longer lives, but I would put an emphasis on the richer part. And I’m not just talking about financial riches. Life is getting [better] as we enrich our lives with technology. You can see that now—a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information and human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. People were lucky if they could get a book 100 years ago. We’re going to continue that expansion. Music is going to be richer. We’re going to have virtual reality experiences we can enjoy. All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence."
Source: http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-th...

He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience.
Here you go:
https://github.com/jeromeschneider/Baikal
This already exists. http://www.benchmarkmagazine.com/intruder_tests_detail.php?t...
Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.
I feel like I plug this all the time, but what the heck...

I played with Ghost (https://ghost.org/) a couple of weeks ago and loved it. It's less about content management and more about content publishing. The editor is wonderful!

Wordpress seems bloated for blogs nowadays, but to each his or her own.
Agreed, but it'd be different if this was aimed at seasoned developers, but it's aimed at beginners, as such, it's irresponsible.
With a price from 1981
Most people here disdain finance. However, it seems to me finance is still a pretty vital industry. It's not only about making money out of "thin air" or a game of greedy shallow minds equipped with social capital. I will defend for it that it's also a means of the society to distribute the limited resource to where it sees the most promising future and payback. It's the people in finance decide that if a billion dollars will be invested in a luxury hotel or DNA sequencing research. Why do you want to leave these vital decisions to those greedy and ignorant people instead of those brightest students who may make a change with their knowledge and make wiser decisions for the society?
That's a big part of what you're paying an agency for. The whole point of elance is diy management.
I m sure the dev knows that as soon as he gets anything less than a 5 star review, his livelyhood might be destroyed. Withholding the source is one way to pressure clients to give good reviews.

Whether this is justified or not, the $800 isn't worth a less-than-5-star review. If the client is a dick and leaves a crap review even if their specs were satisfied, what's the dev to do?

The problem is actually the review system - there is no auto-correcting feedback loop.
I don't really understand how bitcoin works.. however is there a point where generating the new coins or doing the computations required is no longer profitable. At that point, how would the bitcoin system survive if no one is willing to provide the necessary computational power?
That was pretty dirty.
Goldman PR team has arrived.
It's never just about the product. There's also the market, the logistics, and the peripherals. Even if it is the same product and "before its time", it's still before its time.
Oh as far as "popular" Zimbra is probably popular enough to count (someone just bought them from vmware but they are still open source)
I don't actually know that it is. I've heard a variety of complaints from her about it mostly to do with timing / waiting / etc.

That said, she does have a card that she pays with, and it would be easy (at least in theory) to require that of prison inmates as well.
Users can't control their hardware, so they can't control their bits, coin or otherwise. Institutions cannot stomach the idea of a populous with powerful computers that don't answer to them. Trusted Devices being the only electronic devices in existence is one solution.
Translation: There is a lot of opportunity with Bitcoin and remittances.
The thing that made me crack up was "console.loge" - love it.
I file an unusually large number of bugs with Apple so I am familiar with their process, or as familiar as someone on the outside can be. There are definitely a lot more than one engineer involved in fixing bugs on ios.

That said, Apple is a fraction of the size of MS, so it would not at all surprise me if I learned that he has seen my name on bug reports.

I interpret this "managed bug-fixing processes" statement to mean "used Radar (Apple bug tracker) often enough to identify specific process improvements for radar which he then designed and led implementation".
Keith couldn't make up his mind.

When Hunter mentioned the CEO of LinkedIn blogs, Keith said it doesn't count because they're not a startup.

But by definition, the "unicorn" companies are all more like LI than the average startup.

Maybe the question is "at what point does a company cease to be a startup?" At a $1B valuation? Or a significant liquidity event?
Guy does "Wrecking Ball" in different impressions
While I agree that the US Patent System is broken for allowing this, Microsoft and Apple have to wear the moral blame for following this course of action.
Robotics, technology, etc. sure haven't led to more jobs in America the last 50 years. I'd be hard pressed to name a large country (a nation with a sizable pool of labor) in which it has. The American standard of living has fallen by half during that time.

And while seemingly most Americans think China is the big job stealer, manufacturing wise, the reality is huge productivity gains have killed off far more manufacturing jobs than China has taken.

Kurzeil is guilty of a science fiction style utopian dream in this case, in my opinion. He's of a generation that thought the future would sparkle. The future that has come to pass - so far - has been far off course from that expectation. I think he's placing far too much hope on technology unto itself.

I regard technology as a neutral player on the field; and in the right situation, it can provide a huge multiplier. Political issues are far more important than technology - if you have an environment that is hostile to innovation, science, starting businesses, manufacturing, employment, capital formation and savings, etc then no amount of technology will save you ultimately from erosion.

There's a joke in Zimbabwe, that goes something like this: what did we have before candle light? Electric light. Political situations can neutralize all potential technological benefits, leading to stagnation or worse. I think that effect is at least somewhat to blame for the problems America has seen in standards of living, despite the dramatic leap in technology.
This needs to be traced:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497

An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested.
pay for time is just as "bad" to the client as fixed cost for the dev. The root problem isn't with the way the payment is made, but with the way one party's expectation does not match reality (whether it's the dev's or the client's).

Fix that, and any payment model will work.
I tried github several times and every time it fails to load at least for a couple of the places but it does load intermittently from all of the servers. I wonder what that means - is it being throttled so that it loads slowly? The same doesn't happen with other websites - for example, my website consistently shows ok from all servers.
You can certainly buy fake cameras. You can also buy real cameras for under $40 and just not hook them up.

Many cities are starting to deploy these municipal surveillance boxes, many with grant funding. So, it's hard to say which are real and which are not anymore.
Getting a functional app within 2 days, and him thinking he's going to be able to "learn to code" and have that kind of output is bonkers.

I've been coding half my life, and it will still take me weeks to put together small stuff that I obsess over every little detail on.
This Apple iPad Air commercial is timely. (Yes, I'm lumping Google and Apple and all engineering companies together.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9gLqh8tmPA

Somebody should juxtapose this quote with this ad right after.
If it'd been in his own bitcoin wallet, he would have never lost the $20k
I think it does more than just temperature, but has other biometrics. I'm assuming this based on the project on their site:
http://www.grindhousewetware.com/Circadia.html
But the queen bee is surrounded by female bee laborers.
many truth.

I particularly enjoy the ingenuity of some constructions in there :

such nested
plz console.loge with ['so', 'wow']

The hilarity!
I live in Brooklyn. They can't officially refuse. But you'd be shocked how many taxis meters stop working about 20 seconds into the journey....
> I have a finance background and previously worked for UBS and in retail and wholesale stockbroking. I fully understand the role of, say, market makers in the financial system (ie providing liquidity).

> I hear those same arguments being used for HFT but honestly they don't really stack up (IMHO). <snip> It must be a challenge and I'm sure you can make a lot of money, which is fine, but it doesn't really contribute anything to the financial system.

These two statements stand in direct contrast. If you understand the role of market makers then you should understand that the most popular HFT strategy is to be an electronic market maker. It's about competition for liquidity provision which tightens spreads which reduce the cost of trading for everyone.

> 2. Not allowing investment banks to fail ("too big to fail" like Merrill Lynch). Bailouts of investment banks could reasonably be described as welfare for investment bankers;

This would have caused the collapse of the global economy. Google would have suffered mightily from the following depression. Companies like ML might "deserve" to be punished and that process is now working it's way through the courts, but that bailout cost a lot less than 25% unemployment.

> 3. Allowing banks to take positions as well as operate as market makers. There really should be strict separation here;

By it's very definition, a market maker must take proprietary positions.

> 5. Strict regulation on commodities market to separate speculators from hedgers. Driving up food prices causing untold misery even death should result in criminal liability for the organization and key personnel.

Hyperbole. There's never been any evidence that speculation on commodities is "driving up food prices" let alone causing "misery event death".
I will not work in "everybody gets an office" plans ever again. It felt like I was the last man on earth every day, you'd never see anybody. Horribly isolated environment. Glad to work in an open plan office.
> People often forget that the medical profession's highest priority isn't the health of you, the patient. If you were to grab a medical ethics book you will first be told that the well being of the population as a whole surpasses any individuals rights.

That is just not true. Completely, 100%, entirely false. In medical decision making, the principles of beneficence, malfeasance, and autonomy far outweigh the concept of social justice. As someone who works in the medical setting, hearing something like this stuns me.
What about a tax on machines in combination with an unconditional basic income? Right now the worker is the loser in this game. Why not make him the winner? With technology he is no longer forced to do boring work. Machines can do it much better.
The fact that it didn't happen means that the people it would have been transporting aren't worth the investment from an economic perspective. In the case of corruption, the city would unwittingly be investing in it's poorest citizens at a deficit to itself. -(-1) is 1.
Great to see really technical topics on HN at least every once in a while.
Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d printing and virtual reality are so exciting for them.

A meme back then was from Buckminster Fuller, renowned architect, thinking, and systems analyst--what they used to call hackers back then. Fuller made a proclamation that in the future we will reach a point in society where a person will only need to work 1 full work to generate enough value that lets them live for the rest of the year.

How crazy is that?

Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things.

For example say you want to be an artist. To do so you endeavor on the artist path, living the artist lifestyle. You don't work a 9 to 5 so that you can focus on your art, because of that you don't have a lot of money, and thus you live the hipster way. In the cheaper edges of a big city, you work entry level retail jobs, and you're constantly at the edge of failure.

Many of us like to create art, but because we don't want to live that kind of poor lifestyle we don't pursue what our passions are. We're misfit, square pegs in round holes of society.

You absolve people of toil and now you have no fear. Without fear you create more. When you try more you do more.

J. K. Rowling credits her completion of Harry Potter based on England's welfare system. They removed her anxiety and fear by helping her out when she had no job. Because of that she took the plunge to write Harry Potter.

Imagine if all 7 billion of us are free to try, really try, at art. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the internet revolution. None of that will compare to the next wave and all that new activities will bring.

That's how the world is enriched by removing work.

Or, we can all end up reverting back to living in caves.

Who knows.
Nope! As I mentioned the French Mafia started at NeXT while jlg was already running BeOS...