skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Time to load up on debt! Good thing interest is tax deductible..

This is more of a game than anything. There will always be ways to reduce the tax burden, and I find that changes are often made without really properly thinking them through.

Closing loopholes is great, but rethinking critical parts of the law can also create a whole set of loopholes if not done properly. Which, considering we're human, is always the case.
Agile: Right Solution Wrong Problem
We watch for subtle gaming like hawks, because (a) we know the community hates it, and (b) we're part of the community. Look at my comments from yesterday alone (admittedly a big day for anti-gaming commentary):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8320466

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8320253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8320382

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8321378

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8322608

Most of this is caught by software.

That's not to say that we catch all of it, of course. Also, Reddit has orders of magnitude more quantity to deal with. I imagine the challenges are different at that level, and probably a lot harder.
the article states that if you can't comfortably pass due to narrow roads and such then you slow to a safe speed
No, Amazon and Google seek to minimize all costs so they can increase their profits.

Doing this will just reduce their profits a little.
I'd be very surprised if dancers were taking cabs to work
A lot of states and cities have similar laws. Austin passed similar laws a few years ago[0]. Austin's law is a bit interesting as they make large trucks give bikers 6 feet.

> (1) three feet if the operator’s vehicle is a passenger car or light truck; or

> (2) six feet if the operator’s vehicle is a truck, other than a light truck, or a
commercial motor vehicle as defined by Texas Transportation Code Section 522.003.

[0] http://www.3feetplease.com/images/pdf/austinordinance.pdf
Open borders!
What's the Return on Investment for a Condom? 114,266%
Note: this was (briefly) flagged as dead, either through automagic or mods.

This is exactly the sort of article that I like seeing on HN: funny, well-written, and with hard (snicker) numbers to back up its assertions.
I just went out an measured the road in front of my house, and it came out narrower than I thought. It's ~ 9.5/lane, with just over 1' for the double yellow.

OTOH, if you see more than one other car, that's a traffic jam.
Refactoring for performance: How Kickstarter made the homepage 100ms faster
In the US, we are actually aware of the Scots ambition to secede. Insert Braveheart reference here. Many of us were actually Scotsman or Irishman at some point in our ancestry.

We are anticipating what will happen if "yes" succeeds and what that means to Scotland (and its economy). World leaders do not want successfully countries with desirable/friendly leaders to break up.
Since we don't need two stories about this in the top 3, we should
treat one as a dupe. I think the Techcrunch article is probably the
one, because it doesn't add so much info over the canonical page to
justify preferring it instead (as does sometime happen with major
articles on a launch).

Both discussions are good, though, and it would suck to lose either.
So I propose to implement a rough back-end version of the "merge thread"
feature that many of you have requested, apply it to the Techcrunch
thread, and then bury it.

Anyone who objects to this plan has until the code is ready to make
their case. :)

Edit: That's done then. Emphasis on "rough". The hard part of making this a regular feature is that it's not obvious yet what the UI should be, and I am loth to mess with the minimalism of HN's UI.

All: disagreement is welcome, so feel free to object if you think this was a bad idea. The best way is to email hn@ycombinator.com, because then we're guaranteed to see it.
This makes me wonder if the domination of two monolithic political parties in the United States, well-represented in geographically disparate areas, is actually a force for the cohesion of the U.S.A. as a country. For instance, since there are large numbers of G.O.P. supporters in, say, Idaho, there's a lot less credence to a group of, say, southern red states considering secession due to fundamentally different policy preferences.

It does still baffle me, though, that economic conservatism is seen as a force for the poor in America, whereas elsewhere in the world, in this article's words, evoking "socialist utopia... [is] an effort to stave off the spiraling growth of inequality."
Bop.fm (YC S13) brings on-demand streaming to Pandora
There is a recurring theme in this post about "putting candidates to the test" - sometimes simple testing in the hiring form (to select the ones with the highest intent) and them to "test with a project" to find out the best ones. I wonder if this is very practical for a company that isn't a popular/based-in-vally startup. I have a two part question: (a) How successful have you been in getting this level of engagement with candidates before you hired them? I would love to learn more about this. And (b) How well does this work for "non-programming" roles - that is, can you really devise practical projects/problems for people to solve. I know the business development example mentioned in the OP, but that is a small test in the form of a question - but I can't imagine what a real "project" for this type of role would be? -- sorry, thats 3 questions :) .. but I am curious to dive deeper into this aspect of the post.
as it is already infectious on the infected fluid contact, it just need to learn to hitch a ride in a micro-drops of fluid people breath out (like the flu virus, though in case of flu the virus learned to make people cough - it helps to shoot the micro-drops out)
Delaying having a child for ten years also implies that the associated costs of having that child will have continued to climb over the intervening ten years.

As many of those costs (healthcare, childcare, education) have been growing at similar (or greater) rates than plausible investment returns, the calculated return of the birth control investment may be overstated a bit.
I don't think most people would consider the UK a "relatively minor economic and military power". It's a G7 country, after all.
ReactJS v0.11.2 is out
From a 2013 interview with Marc Andreessen, http://pando.com/2013/10/03/marc-andreessen-the-world-is-goi...

"“I think there is going to be double, triple, quadruple countries in the coming years,” Andreessen told Sarah Lacy at Thursday night’s PandoMonthly in San Francisco.

The cofounder of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz noted that the borders of today’s countries are in some cases arbitrary, pointing to Iraq, Syria, and much of Africa as artificial constructs. In the last few decades, the world has seen the emergence of a litany of new countries, and he sees no reason why that splintering is going to slow down.

“You’re going to get a much larger number of countries,” he said, before noting that the proliferation of nations could be a positive force in the long term, measured by a span of 100 years or more.

“The transition is going to be very painful,” he said, “but I think ultimately it’s going to be very healthy.”
Out of curiosity, why shouldn't some level of device I/O be handled by the kernel? If the alternative is putting all device I/O responsibility in userspace processes, then wouldn't the kernel still need to do basic driver-related tasks like programming the IOMMU and DMA engine? Even if that's outsource-able to userspace, then wouldn't the kernel still need to run some sort of security-preserving outsourcing logic (e.g. only letting a trusted process access a hardware device)?
Ahhhhhh, thanks for this. I thought maybe there were two chatbots bearing those names and the webpage was playing them off each other.
> Both choices have the potential for great results. In practice, however, the documentation and composability in the everything is a file paradigm has shown to produce better results.

Until you start doing IPC between processes, IOCTL, heavy graphics programming and there goes the abstraction.
The end of the pretentious designer
You misunderstand me. Anyone, not just consumers, but businesses as well, could buy self-driving vehicles.

Uber is simply an app with supply/demand machine learning, an army of drivers who are becoming more irate by how they're being treated, and community managers. What would it cost to reproduce Uber's app and backend? $500K? $1 million?

What happens if cities simply say, "You're out Uber" and buy their own self-driving cars for their citizens? Is Uber going to build their own roads?
It works pretty well though. Giving 1 meter of clearance is just not possible in the very tight old city centers of the Netherlands, which also have a lot of biking traffic.
> Is it me, or is the benefit of that extremely small?

It's not even a small benefit. It's a horrible interface. Streets and offices filled with people jabbering commands at machines would be just horrible.

It's a gimmick to sell phones that looks cool in a demo and grows old after a little actual use.
> Understatement of the day? :) There is absolutely no way a single developer will be able to support huge/complex codebases like web-browsers across platform versions.

Possibly but I wasn't talking about upgrading to the latest WebKit or the actual patch development – only the work required to backport a critical fix which has already been identified and fixed upstream. That's a fairly normal part of the support process at most places so I wouldn't expect it to be a huge amount of work unless you hit something which required an architectural change to fix.

Edit to add a link to the diffs which were posted earlier today:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/webkit/+/...

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/webkit/+/...

Obviously not every patch is like that but there also aren't that many critical bugs – I'd be surprised if the engineer:tester ratio was anywhere near even on this kind of work.
You did the right thing. Sadly, the quality of HR professionals has been on the decline for some time now, because kids are coming out of college with HR degrees that are completely detached from reality (wait, this sounds like a lot of college degrees :) ). They don't realize how much litigation is involved and just how much an HR mistake can harm a business.
I've given a small amount of thought to attempting a shell designed for spoken interaction, and also - relatedly - a scripting language designed to be spoken. I've not really gotten anywhere, though.

This doesn't really sound like the same thing as either of those, but close enough I wanted to mention.
Then I'm pretty damn sure AT&T won't have the data either.
Depends on where that 20-something lives. Children are considered valuable assets in many developing countries where they start generating income for the parents at an early age for a relatively low cost.

Would also be interesting to factor in some non-tangibles:
Non-parents get more sleep, are healthier, have more financial and career freedom, lead better social lives, get to enjoy their favorite music and TV shows more, worry less, have less general stress, and are less likely to say they are very happy than parents. [0]

[0] http://qz.com/262645/people-without-kids-live-better-than-pa...
It's funny, I have an easier time getting friends/family on to a usable Linux OS than myself. I tend to use windows on the desktop (more about cost/value) and OSX for my laptops... I run Linux for my HTPC, and on servers.

I run multiple monitors and multiple drives in my desktop, and generally one of those two things will lead me to pain when it comes to installation, or an upgrade cycle with the OS. I really don't like playing with my desktop for a half a day to get it running again when I'm trying to get work done.

Given, it's a lot better today than in years past, I just haven't had it in me to go to Linux for a month, only to have an update break something that will take hours to fix. That just doesn't happen as much in OSX or Windows.

I kind of wish one desktop platform would come to true prominence in Linux, and I care less about which one, as any one... then that one can get a lot better. I don't even mind gnome 3 or unity so much. I just want something that will keep working right through a few upgrade cycles... opposed to where I really consider not running updates on my desktop.

My last attempt at Linux for a primary OS was about a year and a half ago. I tend to get the bug to try it out every couple years. Eventually, I hit a wall a week or few weeks in that I just don't have time/patience to deal with.

PC-BSD was also a really nice option, but the limited VM options and support for current hardware really killed that for me. I think BSD fits my mindset better, but Linux has become more ubiquitous.

Either way, I would love to see a truly great desktop Linux platform for me. A power user and programmer who likes to tinker with stuff, but wants something that has an ok ui, that gets regular updates without issue. Most of the time, when I did update, it was more for something I wanted to play with other than the main OS.
Would the downvoters please have the courtesy to leave a comment explaining their point of view?
My experience is that the best enforcement method is carrying a large blunt object: car drivers seem to actively fear scratching their paint job a lot more than maiming someone.
Agreed, that would be even better still.
Envoy: Elegantly greet visitors to your office
> Its also pretty expensive, the cost of preparing a meal for one is probably close to an actual take out meal.

This may be true if you are both paying for but not accounting for quality in what you are cooking yourself, and/or if you are having lots of waste in trying to cook for one.

> Cooking for yourself is a pretty tiring experience. You have to buy the right materials, store them, cook them, then clean up. Its also pretty expensive, the cost of preparing a meal for one is probably close to an actual take out meal.

(1) Batch cooking and storing is a good solution,
(2) Having friends, and alternating cooking with them for shared meals (probably not for every meal, but as part of a mix with other things, inclding #1) is a good approach.
So, let's assume that the issue is context (based on discussion, that seems to be a major consensus point).

Obvious solution is to allow more context to better tune understanding of voice, right?

Allowing better context is pretty much predicated on constant audio surveillance.

Is this worth it, truly?
I think the main reason why 'everything is a file' is so powerful is because it comes with a built in security model.
I'd guess because contraception is seen as an alternative to pregnancy, and pregnancy doesn't incur significant medical costs or risks for the man. What would you be insuring against?

NB I'm a father, I know that having kids isn't entirely without health effects for men, but it's close enough for policy purposes.
So, if theres some farm vehicle on the back-road going 10mph, presumably you will be writing to the farmers association to say that you think "farmers need to understand that behavior is not reasonable"?

I think you need to understand that 1) roads aren't for cars going the speed limit 2) the speed limit is a limit.
That was basically my point, the article is absurd - you don't calculate P&L on having kids.
The US Civil War was essentially fought over the right of states to unilaterally withdraw from the union (the answer was no).

The constitution could be amended to explicitly allow this but I don't foresee that happening anytime soon. So yes, the US is firmly in #2.
Translation: Smaller countries are easier to manipulate. The powerful Andreessens of the world will have an easier time getting what they want from them.
> "consider the remote worker's motivations."

For example: I love where I live and I'm not leaving. I own the house where I was raised. My grandparents are within walking distance. My parents, some siblings, and other assorted relatives live in this city, and my wife's family is within an easy day's travel. It's got my favorite sports teams, the church of my childhood, beautiful outdoor spaces, an excellent school for my son right down the street...

So I'm not motivated by your company's "great location" in the NY, SF, or Boston area; in fact that's a deal breaker for my family [0]. I'm not motivated by a 50% higher paycheck, most of which would be eaten up by higher taxes and cost of living and flying out here several times a year to be with family. I'm not motivated by a "hip" project that helps people go clubbing or hook up or share more selfies or other things that aren't really interesting to me in my current life stage. If that's your company, target other developers -- but if that's not your company, and you market yourselves like it is, you might lose me. One of my biggest motivations is being able to stay where I am and live a nice quiet comfortable life with my family.

The best fit is a hard challenge with clear requirements that requires expertise in multiple programming languages and paradigms, graduate-level mathematics or logic skills, ongoing learning and self-development/reflection, and that would benefit from long uninterrupted stretches of focus at whatever time of day is most convenient (might be 8pm-4am sometimes.)

[0] I'm a stay-at-home dad; my wife just started a new remote position. You can think of this section of the post as written from our joint perspective.
In regions with more observant drivers, painted lines are not treated as hard barriers but mainly serve to establish who has priority. With visibility and no oncoming traffic/left turns/active driveways, I will often have my right wheels next to the double yellow when passing a bike, because it's more pleasant for all involved.

The written law should indeed be updated to differentiate between a quick pass of a slow/stopped vehicle on a city street, and a long pass on a similar-speed vehicle like two cars on an undivided highway. But until then if one is still adverse to driving on some paint, they can continue being overcautious by slowing down and passing at +5mph when possible.
Obviously drivers should err on the side of more space. I have passed plenty of cyclists in an automobile, and I believe that I have always done so safely, but I can't confidently estimate the exact distance I put between the car and the cyclist.
Ask HN: Should I hide subculture-specific side-projects from future employers?
General question: If you started a side project in your spare time as part of your participation in a sub-culture, and it's starting to become a good product, should you keep it on the down-low or show it off with pride?
Not exactly this, but iOS and google both have voice mode shortcuts you can use "Hey Siri" (which i think only works when the device is plugged in) and "Ok, Google".

The problem I see is users getting frustrated with false positives - having the device do things they are not expecting. Pretty much the experience someone has when they first try vi or ed.
Every startup is not HN-worthy; when there's a particular aspect, feature, or discussion to be had, great.

When it's the actual website with absolutely no commentary being submitted by employees... not HN-worthy, yeah.

This is a discussion and interest site, not Product Hunt.
And how do they increase their profits? By providing goods and services that customers want. Increasing profits and having your product/service valued and wanted by your consumer base is the same thing. Why do you say "profits" as if it's a bad thing?

As the Democrats argued when Grover Cleveland was elected, taxes make goods more expensive and subsidize monopolies. This will be no different.
‘A National Admissions Office’ for Low-Income Strivers
Do you think it's at the root of the policy differences? I frequently suspect it's more of a stalking horse for other ideological agendas. How much of a brake did the precautionary principle put on a unified currency, for example?

And it's hard to see on which side the PP comes down for many issues: Should we institute a carbon tax because we should show precaution at the effects of a continuing accumulation of greenhouse gasses? Or should we avoid it because we can't properly gauge its long term cost/benefit ratio?
I'm writing this comment in advance of reading the article, but I've been thinking about this circumstance and the thoughts are finally gelling to a few concise, if not fully encompassing, words.

For many particularly in the developed world, globalization and its pressures, particularly economic, have made it clear to individuals that -- perhaps ironically -- it is every person, every community for oneself.

Those individuals and communities are beginning to respond.

If this trend leads to an increasing push not just for individual but also communal self-reliance, I don't see that as a bad thing, at this point.

It can cap or limit some of the current exploitation. And re-introduce some redundancy into what have apparently become very fragile and risky systems and dependencies.

A primary push should be for energy independence. Once you have that, it's much more difficult for external interests to jerk you around. And hopefully the initiative can grow and maintain a significant domestic technical sector.

There are also perils, and I'm no political nor sociological expert. But as with municipal broadband in the U.S., pushback against intellectual property excesses in many places, and a thousand other things, more in the general public are finding that, for them, "bigger" is NOT "better". Not currently. Not, increasingly, for a while, now.

Independence is one means of drawing boundaries to that "bigger" that seems to just keep squeezing them.

P.S. I'll add that I've read the OP article, now. Having done so, my comment stands unchanged.
So when do we find out the NSA has made it's own little "purchase" for everyone ?
This Iconoclast Injected Life into Artificial Body Parts
If you ignore Cold War fallout (though the breakup of Yugoslavia continues to this day), and sham countries like South Ossetia, then there's at least Timor-leste and South Sudan. Timor is not in great shape, but appatently getting better, and certainly better off independent. Remains to be seen if South Sudan is better off by itself or not, but I'm not planning a vacation there any time soon.
Are risks ever downplayed due to question marks in headlines?

Have we reached Peak-Betteridge?

Will we be following on after this with the weather?
> Yes, but those specified circumstances are pretty broad.

Not really.

> If you don't feel safe biking along a strech without taking the lane, then the middle of the lane can be "as close to the right as practicable".

You will probably usually get away with that the same way you'll usually get away with ignoring the law requiring yielding to pedestrians at intersections -- its not something the police usually care that much about enforcing. But that's not at all what the law says, and I'd be very surprised if there is any reference in the statute, or any case law, that you can point to that suggests your attempt to define "practicable" as "whatever the bicyclist subjectively feels comfortable doing" is a correct interpretation of the statute.
Note to self: never go to the Netherlands.
The UK is a relatively minor economic power? I mean, yes, it's far from top dog, but it's the sixth largest economy in the world (by GDP). It's not as though the only countries worth paying attention to are the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, and France (which is neck and neck with the UK), is it?
Er, I still don't understand how that is quicker. You mean I get to skip unlocking my keypad? Apple's fingerprint scanner thing is a much better solution to that problem.

And how often does that get triggered by accident? I saw to a friend, "did you see my photo on Instagram", and my phone loads the app.

I'm sorry, but voice is an awful interface. And it has been for decades, ever since people first proposed the idea of office workers sitting around dictating their work. It never happened, and that's a good thing.