skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad that the author is working through his problems, or, at the very least, expressing them through some fantastic writing. He makes some very astute observations that I don't think many of us would have access to otherwise. He is also the vocal minority of vet Uber drivers. 99% of vet Uber drivers are simply shuttling people around with these sorts of thoughts stewing repeatedly in their brain; most likely with no creative outlet or release other than alcohol/drugs because the treatment options are far from adequate for PTSD-afflicted vets.

There's a shallow reason and a deep reason people like to read these stories about what it's like to be an Uber driver. The shallow reason is that these drivers usually have great stories about all of the strange, quirky people that come creeping out of the woodwork at night and put their real selves on display for the invisible taxi driver. The deep reason is that you like to see how bad these guys really have it, and then think to yourself "wow, I sure am glad that I don't have to do that for a living and work for that awful company that makes a lot of money employing/exploiting vets." A schadenfreude of sorts.

Anyways, I commend the author for sticking his neck out and writing about the problems he perceives. It has sparked a dialogue here, and seeded ideas in my mind, along with the many others that have read the article. You don't have to agree with his points, or even like the guy as a human being, but it's great that he's got us all thinking.
> Does working outside of your office make ambient noise more tolerable?

Ambient noise in a cafe is different than ambient noise in an office, in my experience. Obviously this is going to be different in each office and cafe, but I'll try to compare/contrast them.

In a cafe:

* (Con) The conversations of my closest neighbors, clearly-audible.

* (Pro) Muted conversations of everyone in the building

* (Pro, sometimes con) The espresso machine(s)

* (Pro) Weather sounds (rain, wind)

* (Con) Road noise

In an open office:

* (Con) Office air conditioner noise

* (Con) Typing and mouse clicks

* (Con) Every conversation in the space is clearly-audible.

* (Con) Doors opening and closing

* (Con) The annoying beep our badge entry/exit system makes

* (Con) Phone conversations
Most banks want at least 2 years of tax returns if you are a freelancer. It is possible to get a mortgage under 2 years but extremely difficult and not many banks will do it.

If you have at least 2 years of tax returns with good credit, then there is not a whole lot of difference compared to the salaried/employed people. You will still need to come up with all the remaining requirements but the 2 year tax return is a must.
>It took almost five thousand years to stop openly owning other human beings (and people still do it with different names today, but at least we don't condone it anymore).

In the US it never stopped. It merely became only the right of corporations and the state via prisons. Maybe it stopped in other countries, but how is that different than saying it stopped at the first civilization that banned slavery?
No. 1 with a Bullet Point: To Get Research Cited, Make Sure It's Listed First
I wonder why I don't see many of such websites.
Great website, inspiring and practical. Learnt so much from these guys.
In case of the China Town WeWork in DC. They switched to cold brew coffee. I'm guessing you can't just have an open tap in the kitchens in DC?
I really dig http://asoftmurmur.com/

* he has worked very hard on blending the loops. They are not detectable in the 100 hours or so I have listened to them.

* It has an Android app

* I would much rather listen to outdoors noise
What kind of rain?

like http://pluvior.com
or http://pluvior.com/raindrops.html
Tuned: the tuning profile delivery mechanism for RHEL
Same reason you can tune out the murmurings of a crowd but perk up when you hear your name. At work, keywords that might be meaningful to you constantly pull at your foreground attention instead of receding into the background.
I'm currently working on the book analysing habits of success and this data is more than gold for me, saves so much time. Thanks buddy!
Pi to 1M decimal places
That's a common misconception. Solutions to the Byzantine generals problem have been known for a while. Researchers are still looking for more efficient solutions, but PBFT introduced in 1999 is already, well, practical.

The main problem with anonymous consensus are Sybil attacks. You need a way to limit the size of the consensus pool. Bitcoin does that using proof-of-work (quite elegantly, Bitcoin's PoW does actually a lot more than that, but this is really it's raison d'etre).

I recommend reading Ben Laurie on the topic. http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf

---

If you look at the current problem with DTCC, you'll notice is has little to do with centralization, and more to do with the fact that there is no technological transparency. If all of these systems ran with well defined API, most of the issues would go away.

What financial are mostly after is a shared ledger with programmatic access. Distributed is just a nice add-on.
Self employed health insurance in New York is ludicrously expensive, or at least it was prior to Obamacare. I've been on my wife's employer's plan but before that, I used Freelancer's Union which is NY only. I'm a big fan of their organization and everything they offer. The health insurance itself is a group plan and more or less provides what an employer's plan would. They also offer other types of benefits you'd expect from an employer.
Say hello to the new Logitech
Looks good but I always get reminded of this: https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/618357610287226880
> I agree that per-existing conditions should not be denied for coverage, however I do not agree that those without conditions should be required to pay higher premiums to subsidize their premiums. (sounds harsh I know, but thats my opinion.)

The problem is that insurers try to deny claims based on a patient having a pre-existing condition that they weren't paying for.
I treat password strength relative to the importance I give the service I'm using. If it is something I care about I will use a 8-12 character password with a few uppercase letters and digits. If it is something I don't care about, but requires an account, "1234" should be enough.

I have even given up on registering on a few sites because they required a safe password. This is getting even more common to me with mobile apps. Typing long passwords on a small tocuh screen keyboard is difficult.
> If people feel the need to hear "café noise", maybe it's just a sign of loneliness?

Yes. It is somehow at times comforting to hear humans speaking, even if they are not choosing to speak to me.
Me, it's http://defonic.com
I am pretty sure the conclusion of the study posted on HN some weeks ago which concludes that music as a boost method for working is subjective and wrong could apply to café ambiance.
They are talking, just not very loudly. It depends a bit on the venue, but generally in Germany it's considered polite to keep your voice down in public places so as not to disturb the other guests. Plus, many German people like to keep their discussions private (maybe it's a hold-over from the dictatorship).
> I made the decision of not starting a Redis company.

Congratulations, seems like another right decision.

I am in similar position, I run opensource database, and I will have to start company. One-man-show does not go well with most customer.
It depends on your account (you can set it higher if you sign a form).
Thanks Tomas! We’re glad you dig it and looking forward to read your book :)
> you work in their PR dept

Do you make this assumption about everyone who disagrees with you?
"however I wish that they just expanded the medicare program to give these subsidies"

This would have been a much better overall option vs entire ACA mess. Is the issue access to health insurance or access to health care service? I feel like the two got mixed together quite often (not sure how much was actual intentional deception vs truly not grokking the difference) but... insurance is not the same as care, and moving towards universal health care vs universal health insurance... I don't know when we'll ever get to the former. :/
>The fact that you didn't have to buy insurance until 26 is a result of Obamacare too. Think of all the money you saved being on that insurance for several extra years. You're welcome!

yes i am aware that the 26 rule is an obama care result. However, if I am nice, and I am, I pay my parents the extra cost per month to go from a spousal plan to a family plan, which is $85/m, shocker.... However if my parents had other kids younger then me that required a family plan it would have saved me money, yes. in my response to another post, i noted that this was really the only positive to Obama care that I experienced.

>And maybe in part because you're spending that $84 someone else who has a pre-existing condition and no health insurance will be able to not die or go bankrupt if they get something serious.

I dont think it is fair that I have to pay for someone elses health care expenses. ESPECIALLY since that someone else doesnt take the time of day to shop around for the best coverage for the cost, care to look at success rates to avoid re-works, or heaven for bid, self diagnose themselves and go directly to a specialist that can result in more expensive care. If people actually had to pay for the coverage they used, they would take the time to shop around and make informed decisions, and do things like exercise and eat well, avoid smoking and recreational drugs, then people with pre-existing conditions, and low incomes wouldnt have to pay so much for their care. Its called capitalism, and the health insurance industry would look VERY different. Obama care only gets us farther from where we need to be, and makes the entire situation worse. I know I sound like a jack ass right now because some people would suffer in the short term, but if you eliminated obama care, and the health insurance industry, we would be better off in 10 years. keep medicare for the poor, old, and disabled if you want, keeping it will have very little affect as its an income tax and not a premium subsidy.

>You have to buy insurance because our system now factors in the strain on the system you would cause if something happened to you and you didn't have insurance. Just think of it like a tax (or the tax penalty like a tax, and the subsidy like a reward for responsible behavior.) That's how the Supreme Court thought of it.

If the government allowed care providers to go after uninsured individuals assets and not eat the costs. AND if the government allowed back charging for care given to qualified medicare/medicaid individuals, there would be no need to increase the burden on me to help pay for everyone else who goes in for care un covered. over 75% of the uncovered costs pre-ACA are people treating the ER like their PCP anyways. If we allowed capitalism to work, those individuals who go to the ER for a cold would eventually go to a PCP and only pay $25 for the visit and $15 for the generic meds.
Same here, wish offices were built with attention to varying needs of silence levels by different employees.
Evidence of “cleansing” GPL from software headers (2011)
http://fortune.com/2015/06/15/andreessen-horowitz-why-were-n...
I usually use www.rainymood.com to drown out the distractions
> When the technology sector is booming, as it is now, growth is strong. The risk, real-estate executives say, is that if demand falls—because of, say, a tech bust—WeWork’s revenue would drop, while the rent it owes to landlords stays constant.

Though an obvious risk, I wouldn't say it's the only one. To me I would be more concerned about the thousands of other spaces out there that are easily more affordable.
Very interesting article. In hindu mythology, we hear tales of sages having great powers that they could do lot of things just by thought and I always thought it was all untrue. But it seems they don't seem to be much farther from reality!
Would like to confirm this, exactly what I was asked for.
I'm not sure the advice or the conclusions are at all outdated...

* Updates still suck, users still can't tell the difference between fake and real ones

* Passwords are still annoying

* 2FA exists, is better than 5 years ago, but most people don't use it because, and this is the articles point, it's still annoying

* Recognizing phishing URLs can still be hard to do, even for tech savvy people

* Cert errors are still false positives (in that there is no danger, not that there is a technical issue) more often than not
Social Beer – Everything you want to know about beer in one place
http://www.noisli.com/ is pretty good as well.
Disruption is Overrated
Did you notice the aurora on Io?
The image of Io is especially gorgeous. I mean, does Io have an aurora going on there? So I pop "ralph jupiter io blue" into Google and got this:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_9...

Turns out it's from a volcano. Now, I get that we already knew about volcanoes there, and while I never really paid too much care about it, I can't help but be floored by that image. The plume is enormous, and it's blue. There's a lot of really, really cool things going on there (the color from the scattering alone is super neat), and suddenly I'm interested in extraterrestrial volcanoes.

I'm embarassed to say I continue to be shocked by how images from space can surprise and delight.
What a load of bull shit. The above post reads like someone who never served but has read about it.

Your confidence is misplaced.
Thumb up for outdors sounds then café ambience: http://defonic.com
We had beer taps at my previous job, and nobody drank during business hours even though they could have. Any work past 5 or so might have been under the influence from time to time, but we really only drank in any quantity after quittin' time.
The age old introvert vs extrovert comes to mind.

These days society seems to be run by extroverts, for extroverts, and little if any regard is given to introverts.
No you can't and that is a "good" thing in that you don't end up with short sellers driving the prices around in addition to the speculators.
Show HN: 1M+ companies in your pocket: Mattermark for iOS
A Task Management App for Remote Development Teams
I had an idea pop into my head the other day, and am interested in hearing the HN opinion on it. Here is the basic idea: A task management app that links up with bug tracking programs and automatically creates a notification for that bug. This notification would be assigned to a delegator that would then take the bug and assign it to a developer. It would be a real time app, designed for remote development teams to make it easier to manage delegating specific tasks to developers. It would also mean that tasks could be assigned to developers as soon as a bug presented itself. By integrating it with instant notifications such as push notifications on mobile and Growl style desktop notifications, it would be easy for a delegator to look at the bug, and assign it to a developer, who would then also receive an instant notification.

What does everybody think? Does something like this already exist? If it doesn't, is it needed?
I think the problem may be that people will have more and more binge watching alternatives in other platforms too. For example, right now in HBO and AMC I could watch The Brink, True Detective, Vice, Halt and Cath Fire and Humans, a few weeks ago I could add Silicon Valley and Games of Thrones, so I'm definitely consuming less Netflix right now, actually I'm considering joining only when House of Cards or Lillyhammer have a new season.
It's worse than that. Since modern systems are multi-layered and many of the layers are not even administered by the user, even users that followed advice given are vulnerable to loss, so for folks trying to make an economic trade-off in terms of time and hassle, it's all just a crap shoot. Do some stuff that you feel might be reasonable, like install Norton or something, come up with a password that includes both your name and your ssn, then wear gloves when you click on pron sites.

It's really quite ludicrous the situation we put the average user in. There are folks who spend hundreds of hours worrying about security and still get taken to the cleaners. What chance does Joe Sixpack really have?
Tupperware?
You haven't explained why Uber is any different from any other taxi service in this regard, so I think we're finished here. I know I am.
Bitcoin is the most convenient way of payment, bar none. I point my phone at the QR code, keep my fingerprint on the sensor, the page refreshes, done. None of the CC crap.
This article reads like the description of a legal Rube Goldberg machine. Fascinating to watch in action but horrifying to imagine your money caught up in.
The fine people at IndieWebCamp[0] are proposing some nice solutions.

Basically, self hosting. But with an attitude :-)

[0] http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started
Not to take away from the OP, but I generally find I need background noise at times that I can't be at the computer...the most used (purchased) app on my iPhone is Ambiance:

http://ambianceapp.com/

One of the best 99 cent purchases I've ever made...you get access to a huge library of sounds, from a variety of colored noises (e.g. white, purple, blue, brown) to user-recorded background noise, including coffee shops and various subway stations around the world. There's also a decent selection of chants and gongs that I use for meditation.

And you can mix up to 7 or so tracks together...I like throwing in the clicks of an Apple ][ keyboard, the sound of the ocean, an air conditioner, and some white noise. The big plus is that I can use it with the phone's timer to set off blocks of concentration.

Sorry to post something as an alternative to the OP, just wanted to point out something that's worked for me...as far as browser-based noise sites go, the OP is one of the better I've seen...Turning on all the cafes at once is actually somewhat soothing.

edit: I'd never visited the Ambiance app page until just now, and so found out they have a Mac app...the 99 cents for iOS is definitely worth it. $9.99 for the Mac app that hasn't been updated since 2012 is probably not worth it. Also, when I had an Android phone 2 years ago, the Ambiance app was substantially inferior to iOS, in that the audio would skip at a regular interval. It was so annoying that I just stopped using it while on Android.
I agree - I kept looking around the page for more details. The landing page seems too basic to sell me on a subscription.
One of my clients has a space in one of WeWork's San Francisco locations. Every time I've visited, I have been struck by how many of the spaces seem underutilized (i.e. companies have more space than they're using). For example, I see companies that have private offices with x desks but I only see x/2 being used at any given time.

Other private offices appear to be entirely unutilized (i.e. they're occupied but I never see anybody in them). The latter seems to be more common with large companies that have "real" offices elsewhere and don't really need space at WeWork.

Obviously, this is entirely anecdotal.
Could you link to the sources you're talking about? That sounds interesting.
I just hired (like signed an offer yesterday) by making a "How to" blog post on my blog two months ago.

I posted this post in a couple of relevant linked in groups and that's it.

As it happened the company was looking for an expertise in the exact thing that I've posted.

Just sharing ...
You're right - they were just overviews of the previews of M. I did notice that many things were changing in them too - I found it odd that the way pages were laid out was so fluid/changeable compared to the previous M preview given that UI guidelines should dictate how things are laid out.

The fact that things move around so much would be indicative of not being really sure how it should look (despite the UI guidelines), perhaps? If I was buying a car and the next version of the car the next year moved the dials to the other side of the dashboard or swapped whether the indicator stalk was on the right or the left of the steering wheel, you'd ask what the heck was going on. Yet this appears to be normal for Android.

I would love to blame my phone manufacturer for not getting updates, apart from Android was started with the Open Handset Alliance. It doesn't appear to be much of an alliance to me.

It's a daft situation. If you bought a laptop and could only install hotfixes and KB releases via Dell, yet Dell did not give them to you, would you be happy with Microsoft? Would you take their advice to just buy a Surface Pro from them? That would be unrealistic because it would ignore the massive market that is Wintel devices; rather you would expect Microsoft to only provide Windows to Dell if they agreed to provide hotfixes Microsoft gave them.

If you had a MacBook Pro and El Capitan would not run on it, yet you were aware of all the security holes in Mavericks and some in Yosemite, would you accept advice to just buy a new MacBook to get security fixes? Or would you expect Apple to backport fixes when they know that a sizeable percentage of customers are connecting to their App Store with older versions, given your purchase fee of the hardware?

The solution to not getting updates for a device is not to buy a new device.

Google boasts how many devices they have all over the world (see last year's io keynote) and how Android is everywhere, yet it failed to mention the important point about Android being everywhere: that it is insecure outdated Android that is everywhere.

Google know how many people are connecting with older versions (the Play dashboard tells you what percentage is running which version), so they should push out updates or mandate in their agreement with phone manufacturers that a timely update cycle should be followed, or the agreement would be terminated. There would be no other way to keep control or maintain a high standard.

I say this with a plethora of Android devices and with my dayjob of writing Android apps. It is a rubbish situation for security.
Ansible 101 – On a Cluster of Raspberry Pi 2s
when not listening to music and needing to drown out coworkers on the phone I am partial to earplugs + http://rain.simplynoise.com/ (it also has an app) I usually take out the thunder which is distracting but the rain itself sounds nice
Apple Store down
It's important to note the difference between short term and long term effects.

Yes, unemployment might increase in the short term, but if cheap workers can't fill a need then people will look for alternatives like increased automation.

For a concrete example, machines can automatically dispense correct change, yet due to low wages this is fairly uncommon.

PS: To make this work we long term we need a minimum income, but that's a side issue.
I have an unhealthy fish. What brand would you recommend?
I am happy to pay for prenatal care IF AND WHEN my wife/partner and I decide to have a child. and in that instance, yes I would be paying for prenatal care, however I do not think it is right for the government to force me to purchase ANY SERVICE that I may not want or may not use, such as prenatal care.

Those young women who made the decision to have sex not knowing if the individual they "Tangoed" with would help with any costs or work will soon learn that it was a poor decision. Sheltering the consequences of ones actions is not an affective way to direct behavior for the masses. That young girls friends will see that it was hell, and their parents will learn it was an expensive decision, and then those other girls and their parents will do a better job being responsible citizen. I shouldnt have to pay for coverage that is ultimately needed because of poor parenting.

And yes, with any statistical examination there will be a small percentage of people that statistics work against, IE. the less the 1% of pregnancies due to rape.
Thats probably more dangerous.
I will, thanks for the suggestion!