borgia

This seems like a lot of hand wringing. Taxi drivers give rides to, and deal with, people in various stages of inebriation every night of the year. In fact, collecting drinkers at night is likely the best money making time of any every day.

The legal blood alcohol limit in basically any developed country is usually so low that people can readily hit it with a drink or two without feeling any sort of intoxication from it, let alone having their abilities grossly impaired.

I don't think this publicity stunt carries much danger for anyone involved beyond the usual dangers associated with operating a taxi at night. Drinkers will still get cabs, free or paid for, but this may cause more people "on the fence" to get a cab rather than driving their car home.

Even getting them into a line for a free cab may spur them to just take a paid one since they've made already made a moral choice to not drive after drinking by lining up for the cab in the first place.

It's a good idea overall, I think, so long as the cab drivers are properly compensated for it. I would also wonder about how it will affect the drivers in terms of lining up to collect these customers versus simply taking whatever is going through the app. There's an opportunity cost involved for them if they're sitting in a queue versus driving around waiting to be hailed with or without the app.

>I know you probably think you're being a skeptical and intelligent speaker of uncomfortable truths. But you're a lot more like a climate change denier. You're going with your gut and not the facts.

>You will probably now try to bury me with various quibbles, because you can argue against any statistic. but maybe you could try ASKING A WOMAN.

That's a heck of a lot of assumptions you're making about me, Neil. I can't understand how you came to the belief that this kind of gruff contributes to the conversation let alone to your point.

>Is it really conceivable that women were more interested in computing when it was all about hand-coding assembly for a modest amount of money, and less interested now that you can make >$100K/year doing Rails from home?

Is it really conceivable that women are abandoning well paid careers in business and other areas to become yoga instructors? Or life coaches? Or re-training in psychology? Or starting their own home businesses on etsy or similar?

There's seemingly more ways to make money than ever before. Just because sitting at home grinding out a rails app is an appealing way to make money to you, doesn't necessarily mean it is to others.

>There's tons of evidence that women are excluded from our industry, at every level -- high school, university, and even the ones that graduate and go on to work in the industry drop out at a very high rate. Other scientific or mathematical fields do not have the same problem.

How many of their male counterparts drop out of the tech industry? Or move into non-tech roles within it?

On a second point, how much more socially acceptable is it for a woman to change careers or to become stay-at-home mothers than it is for men?

I've read studies about self-actualization that have concluded that more than twice as many women achieve self-actualization than their male counterparts, so maybe it's a case of more women realising how lacking in substance tech work really is and getting out of it, than their male counterparts who simply struggle on with it?

And by the way, Neil, I have talked to women about this. My own partner is a very successful female in a competitive, scientific area. I've worked with many female engineers over the years also.

I've also seen first hand, and have actively supported, many female engineers leaving the industry to do something they find more fulfilling.

This is a complex topic and we're not going to agree on everything. Building me up, even internally, as some demonic misogynist who has no contact with women isn't going to do or contribute much though.

>One is that women simply aren't as good at programming as men are. The other is that there is a persistent and difficult cultural bias against women in this industry.

What about option three: They've less of an interest in the area.

When these topics come up there seems to be this weird suspension of the fact that men and women, or girls and boys, are different in many ways. They've different interests, they're driven differently, they've different skills, etc.

They're not perfectly aligned bell curves across the board. We also don't need them to be. We don't need men and women to be identical save for what is between their legs in terms of their interests, or how they perform, or their desires, or whatever else.

We simply need to make the same opportunities available to everyone regardless of what is between their legs. If a man wants to become a nurse, he should have the opportunity to and he does. If a woman wants to become a programmer, she should have the same opportunity and graduate employment rates would show that they do.

Women dominate many professions. Men dominate many professions. As a society we don't need to have an equal number of penises and vaginas present in all professions.

Leave the opportunities open and let people develop their own interests.

>Do you have evidence for someone being branded sexist for merely not bending over backwards to prove that they aren't?

Maybe not a specific person or event, but would the constant demand for "diversity reports" from tech companies from the "tech media" not be an example of this? And the subsequent shaming by the same media of these same companies for having too many penises in the office, or too few vaginas?

I apologise for the vulgarity of the above, but that's what it is when it comes down to it.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing we can expect a lot more of in the coming months and perhaps years as the "tech media" continue to attack it from the fringes.

You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. There is no satiating the thirst from the "tech media" for faux outrage driven clicks.

This is a woman in tech, but more specifically she is a techie in tech. She has been assimilated into the normality of the modern tech industry and is participating in a highly competitive, skill driven arena.

Make no mistake, any company that does not behave as the organisers of this hackathon here - not actively displaying an organised, certainly biased, effort to promote the "Women in Tech" narrative - are open to being squatted on from above from the "moral highground" occupied by the tech media.

This is what happens when you attack meritocracy in the name of making people feel good. It is what happens when you create an unrelenting narrative that continually assaults an industry over how many or few people with a penis or vagina they have in it. It is what happens when you've an industry surrounded by "journalists" who've never spent an actual day in it, ready to fire out articles shaming you for your lack of, or apparent abundance of, penises or vaginas in your company.

The author here is simply another bystander to the continued assault on the technology industry.

>Then I discovered that "color revolutions" were not happening by chance and that it was a CIA "technology" to remove an unwanted leader from a target country.

>Now I understand why they use censorship.

You're being downvoted for this but I understand where you're coming from. The west has shown that it regularly targets other countries in terms of information warfare. We know, for example, that the CIA tried to instigate a coup last year through a Twitter like application[1]. We know JTRIG exists and what it exists for, etc. etc.

The West exerting influence through information/misinformation distribution, the corruption of online narratives, etc. is most certainly a threat to foreign entities.

I can understand why they would work to curb western influence in their countries and I don't blame them, and they use a very heavy-handed approach to deal with it.

There's an information/misinformation/psyops war going on every day on the internet and some entities have chosen to deal with it by filtering out anything that could be part of it.

Do I agree with them for doing so? Not really, I understand where they're coming from though. Do I think that they are actively fighting a threat? Yes, they quite likely are.

Things aren't as black and white as they would like us to believe.

[1]http://time.com/47912/u-s-officials-created-a-cuban-twitter-...

>Why not have campaigns to not support products made by countries with oppressive governments.

Nobody cares. It's over there, it's not something we need to worry about.

It's not like the working conditions of those making our clothes, those making our smartphones, those pulling the materials for our electronics from the earth, etc. aren't unknown. They're very well known. We know damn well that there's children sewing together our shoes. We know that the people making our smart technology products are so miserable that their offices have anti-suicide nets in place around the building and throughout the stairwells.

We know this stuff and we don't care. We want our products and we want them as cheap as possible. The shareholders in these companies want the company to perform as best as they can to maximize returns, that means acting nefariously in many cases and we all know that.

People do not are and they will not care. If you gave people the choice, to be made anonymously and that nobody would ever know their choice, between paying multiple times what they pay for their technology or abolishing child labour and horrible working conditions they would choose the cheaper option. Or maybe not, maybe they would choose abolishing these things in an effort to delude themselves and make themselves feel better, but when it comes time to purchase a product they will still go for the cheaper one manufactured in horrible conditions.

People simply do not care so long as it is not them feeling the affects. That's the same damned reason nothing is being done about the NSA revelations, or the corporate corruption of the US government, or the torture allegations about the CIA and the list goes on.

Interestingly, from traveling and having limited TV options in certain places, I've had broad exposure to RT.

Is it more free than any US news channel? No, I don't think so. The US mainstream media - Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc. - are most certainly not free by any means and spend the majority of their time peddling a toxic, divisive narrative.

But RT? RT does the same, but for the Russian government. In fact, they go another step further and recruit westerners to present many anti-western shows to give their views more credibility here.

They do report the news on the west that otherwise gets brushed over or doesn't adhere to the narrative being peddled by mainstream US TV, but to say they're more free is something I would doubt.

While the US media spends its time dividing people and, for whatever reason, stoking the anti-Russian, anti-China and anti-NK flames the US government seem to want stoked at the moment, RT simply spends its time peddling an anti-Western narrative.

Both are ultimately propaganda machines. RT is somewhat interesting because it does give a different view on situations that we in the west are dominated by the western narrative with.

But when there's big, big money involved and close ties to government - as is the case with both the US mainstream media and RT - there is not much "freedom" involved.

It is and it isn't powerful. I was pretty impressed by how they attacked GitHub (not why) and in doing so they showed the power of the tool.

However, the requests it made could have easily been turned back against Chinese business if Github so wanted. It couldn't be done because there was no reasonable who to turn the traffic back against. If non-Chinese companies simply said "If China uses these tools we will redirect the traffic at a number of large Chinese businesses" then a lot of the power in the tool is immediately withdrawn.

At least that's my interpretation of it.

>I also use a password manager, so all my passwords are randomly generated.

Any recommendations?

Key points being security and cross platform accessibility.

Absolutely. The result of these policies leads to, from my experience anyway, trivial but very difficult to remember passwords that end up getting written down or reset every time the user attempts to log in to the service.

That being said, I find passphrases hard to take on myself. I tend to use a set of mildly complex passwords I've used for years across a number of services.

Apparently the new key to passwords is a secure password db that you only keep a master key to access and then paste the passwords contained into services as needed. I've given a few of them a try but even then personally I'm not comfortable having my passwords kept on an external service, even if I have the master password to myself.

>That was one of the problems we actually described in our blog post about the Thailand experience. It took as us while to actually find out rhythm (simple things like finding food, doing laundry, etc.) and that was taking a lot of our energy and time in the beginning.

Would it not be wise then to send someone ahead to scope these things out? As in, you're planning to have a team move to X, send someone to X two weeks in advance to sort out logistics, get internet dongles, map out places to eat, do laundry, etc?

Rather than having whole teams trying to sort it out on arrival.

I think what you've offered is great btw. The criticism being leveled on you here is pretty unfair and I'm not sure what is behind it. It's of great benefit to the locals to have westerners on western salaries come in for a month or two, spend maniacally on local resources and then leave.

The argument against it is well you should be incorporating there and providing the locals with jobs and that's nice in theory but unfeasible in reality, and all those tourist bucks create and supply the locals with plenty of jobs in themselves.

>Full time work however is NOT allowed without a working permit.

If you're being paid through an account back home and are working in a villa you've rented, it would be very hard for them to prove you're actually there working full time, would it not?

A company in most states across the US and throughout the entirety of Europe could pay a full time staff member with the same skills and experience you have the same amount you want per week ($3k) to work full time for them with significantly less hassle involved.

I think it's obvious why you're finding demand to be so low when you've set your price so high.

The amount you want for 60 hours a week ($9k) could get two extremely experienced engineers and provide them with a massive bonus incentive on top of their salary almost anywhere in the world.

It comes across as a bit delusional.

>Besides the tax benefits there are a lot of other things to like here.

How does the tax work? It's part of US territory, so are you paying your income tax to the US as you usually would while earning in the US?

Or are you resident there and your earnings subject to taxes in PR? Aside from that, as a US citizen are you not still obliged to pay the IRS the taxes on a certain amount of earnings made outside the US?

Rapidly working my way through "Breakfast at Sotheby's" by Philip Hook[1]. Very enjoyable book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Breakfast-Sothebys-A-Z-Art-World/dp/14...

>Yet many comments here are saying that people should just upgrade while it might solve the problem for some, there are ones who can't upgrade machines at will.

It's dumbfounding how people here are simply shrugging this off and posting "So what? Just upgrade. Simples" type comments. This isn't acceptable. I know many people in creative industries alone who can't just upgrade immediately any time something comes out as they've to wait for their products to support the newer version. Similarly there are many who are using Macs in work whose corporate policies won't let them simply update immediately.

Then there's many who don't immediately upgrade versions as a point while bugs/other issues in that new version are found and resolved.

It's not an acceptable answer whatsoever.

Short article capturing many points on a topic that could easily span a book.

------------

The first is a world where artists abandon their craft because they are no longer able to make a living. This future definitely hurts the quality of human life and the fulfillment and enlightenment that we gain from the arts.

------------

This has always been the case though. Most of the masterpieces from the renaissance come from artists who, from almost the start, were exceedingly well financed.

The best artists of the day, as with today, were intertwined with big money. You had some artists who from the start were taken in by De Medici and groomed to be great, others who went to work at art shops doing reproductions or small commissions and then those trying to make a living by themselves, many of whom I imagine could not create the art they wanted to because they couldn't support themselves on it.

Not to mention many of the masters were compromised in what they could and couldn't do with a commissioned piece. This would similarly apply to musicians through the ages, as big composers received big commissions and budgets while others, who wanted to play music, had to go do something else to bring in their support funds.

Beneath the above quoted passage seems to be a belief that all artists who want to create art should be able to earn a living from it, which isn't true and never has been.

The commissioning of art in some ways has changed and in others has not. Hugely talented painters, sculptors and even photographers still receive commissioned work and can now diversify their income by gaining a name for themselves and offering their works to the public. On the flip side, there are many talented artists who will not get work, or recognition, and will have to find another way to fund their lives.

Music as an art form has changed. It's not royalty or nobility or similar commissioning grand pieces to commemorate wars or other historical moments to be played for their friends in private performances for orchestras.

Now it's large record labels doing the commissioning. What we are seeing in the world of music, however, is huge sums of money going toward manufactured, formulaic "popular" music that is created solely to derive a profit. Many musicians who want to create music as art are struggling and will continue to do so. Music, as an art form, is a profit deriving product industry now.

That is why music as such a form has been devalued. The vast majority of successful music now is not opening people's minds, or creating a message, or drawing a picture through sound waves, it is catchy, repetitive beats that are consumed rather passively with little thought involved. It sells well, therefore it is what is published.

At the same time, orchestras across the world are closing up shop as they can no longer keep themselves running financially. The future of music as an art form, I would conclude, is certainly in jeopardy.

------------

The second is a world where every piece of art is an advertisement. Every video, every picture, every song is no longer the expression of the artist, but rather a vessel used to promote a product. Artists will lose their free expression in exchange for advertising space.

------------

Again, this has been similar going back through history. Many of the great classical masterpieces of painting and sculpture are a combination of church propaganda and a status symbol for those who commissioned it. The statute of David, for example, was a propaganda piece created to embellish the values of the Florentine republic.

Many of these pieces are also not an expression of the artist but what the artist produced under the direction of those who commissioned it. Michelangelo's Bacchus, for example, did not adhere to the expectations of the commissioner and ended up being sold off and put in someone's courtyard.

------------

We hope that a third world is what will emerge. We hope to reinstill the value that is being lost in digital art. We hope to combat the hijacking of art by advertising.

------------

First of all, I believe you have to separate entertainment and art. Most of the music and videos produced and put on the internet are entertainment, not art. A piece of EDM is there to entertain, not to engage. The vast majority of popular videos on the internet are cats, people doing stupid things, etc. they're not art.

If you separate entertainment and art, both of which are now being done in the digital realm, then the outlook appears different. Entertainment will continue along the same path it has already trod - producing more and more of that which markets well and receives good feedback from test audiences. "Viral" videos and images, laced with advertisement, will continue to seize the day in the entertainment realm.

Art, real art done for art's sake, is not under such threat though. Digital art is currently going through what photography as an art form previously went through - it's not being valued highly and largely ridiculed as an art form due to the apparent ease of it when compared with the traditional arts of painting and sculpture.

That will likely change though. Art created to capture people's imagination, to get people to think, to create a message, etc. will continue unabated so long as some people still want to commission it, or to visit art markets and buy a unique painting for themselves, and so on.

It will continue unabated because the market for these things is small and has remained so. The vast, overwhelming majority of people do not care whatsoever about art in any of its forms. The vast, overwhelming majority of people going to the Louvre, or the MMA in NYC, or wherever are not going to appreciate the art, they are going there to get a picture with a popular piece so they can show people they've been there. Go to the Louvre and you'll see - a crowd flocked around the Mona Lisa taking pictures and selfies who then, after they have the snap they want, tread through the rest of the museum for the sake of doing so and then leave.

Art for the sake of art is a small niche, it has largely been so and will remain so. Transforming digital art from its current status into that of the kind appreciated in small galleries or shows by that small niche who actually appreciate art is the challenge. Making such a such an easily reproduced art form financially valuable will be difficult. How does an art buyer appreciate a piece of digital art they've bought? As a background on their computer? As a picture in a folder they sometimes look at?

The answer will almost certainly lie, if it's to be financially feasible to derive a living from, in its creation being in the digital realm but the purchased product being in the physical realm.

The crud of the entertainment industry should largely be disregarded when discussing the two.

Facebook is/was primarily a web app. That web app has a messenger in it. Why does Facebook need a standalone web app?

WhatsApp's web app is fantastic and I use it heavily, but that's because WhatsApp didn't have a desktop client or any non-phone/tablet alternative.

This is just totally unnecessary.

>especially when the topic takes up 50% of my news feed nowadays.

In an era when the "media" we consume is "free" (entirely supported by ad revenue driven by clicks), clickbait, bent sensationalist narratives and faux outrage appear to win the day.

Personally I'm sick of it. The tech media have went from reporting tech news to hiring culture vultures from Vox, Salon and the Gawker network to stir up click counts from idiots.

>Is it because you assumed it was a dad? Me too. :(

Yeah, god we're such shitlords, aren't we? Time to go give myself some lashings at my home built shrine to Ellen Pao.

Seriously though, this is entering the realm of stupidity. You made an assumption based on your own experiences (that the vast majority of computer programmers and enthusiasts are male) and one that is backed up by data - the vast majority of computer programmers and enthusiasts are male.

Coupled with that assumption is the many other various "I'm teaching my kid to program" blogs and similar that pop up here from time to time that to date, as far as I recall, have all been written by men. A story about a programmer is highly likely to be male. A story about a programmer regarding their son wanting to learn programming and them teaching them is likely to be a male teaching a male.

When women are showing the same level of interest in computers, in programming, in computer science, etc. as their male counterparts and are blogging, developing, taking part in the community at the same level, then it may be questionable to automatically assume it must be a man teaching his kid to program.

You are as sexist in your assumptions here as you are in your transphobia in automatically assuming the son is "cisgendered".

C'mon now, let's take a large step back from this nonsense.

True, fair point.

>At a recent interview I mentioned I like tinkering with code on the side and was told I'd have to give that up and stop contributing to open source.

I faced similar in my last company (not with Apple). Now find it very difficult to get working on a side project or similar at home after having not done anything in that regard in a few years.

Ideas I once had to develop are long gone. Bleh.

If staff are consistently having to work overtime to hit targets then there's either:

- A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required

or

- A problem with the management.

I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.

Enjoyable read overall, but his ending slunk into a somewhat currently beaten path of "success but at what cost?" regarding local culture.

There have been many such articles springing up recently decrying the "damage" "gentrification" is doing to the culture of certain areas in the USA. It's a little tiring. The types pushing the narrative whining over the rapid development and investment in some areas then whine over the lack of development and investment in other areas.

Aside from that though it was a good read.

>As a non-native English speaker "No, Totally" doesn't sound natural at all to me

I'm a native English speaker and "No, Totally" doesn't sound at all natural to me either.

I've seen 5 Apple Watch related threads pop up on the front page of HN already today, including this one. What is going on?

Automation en masse of low skilled labour is going to present an absolutely huge challenge to society.

I cannot see how low-skilled jobs such as:

- driving jobs (taxis, haulage, etc)

- store work (stacking shelves, stock ordering, cashing out purchases, solving basic customer queries such as where in the store is product X, etc.)

- retail banking

- fast food or convenience store services

- etc.

will not be replaced by automation in the next decade or so.

We're already seeing it as self-driving vehicles are rapidly developing, stock picking bots at Amazon and similar are coming along rapidly, self-service checkouts at stores are becoming very much mainstream and highly used, online banking and ATM machines offering a wider range of services, etc.

Those jobs listed above represent an enormous amount of employment throughout the western world as it is. If we accept that not everyone can do every type of job, that IQ does separate people in their abilities to do or even learn to do a job, etc. then that means we will see mass displacement of the workforce when the only jobs available to many are one's that are out of their educational or intellectual reach.

This is just the beginning, by the way, as AI and automation gets better then the skills and jobs it can replace will grow and increasingly sap up jobs requiring higher levels of intellect or education. So while low-skilled job replacement is the primary short-term challenge, overall job replacement is a medium-longer term challenge.

This challenge has been on my mind quite a lot recently, as have the challenges posed by the development of AGI/AI which are pretty well linked, although AGI has its own challenges in terms of what it might mean for humanity as a whole.

If we accept the above then we accept that not just large scale unemployment, but large scale human redundancy, is inevitable then we have very large questions to ask, and thus very large answers or solutions to provide, regarding how we structure society.

If the low skilled jobs are the first to go, which are tended to by people of lower IQ / intellect or who aren't strong academically, then not only will we have large scale unemployment/human redundancy but I believe it would be coupled with comparatively low entrepreneurship. That's not to say that people of lower intellect can't be entrepreneurs, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find easy problems to solve and will only become more so. It would also be significantly more difficult for such people to, for example, open a franchise of a chain due to the financial and experience backgrounds levied by most franchise owners.

The conclusion I've come to is that socialism is inevitable in the medium-long term whereby the machines do the work and the ownership/profits of the methods of production are shared by everyone.

I'm not a proponent of socialism, I will say, but I've come to the conclusion that it's inevitable given the technologies and changes that are coming our way.

On solutions:

- Without changing the ownership of that which produces, a basic living income for all would come at a very high cost to those who still have jobs in the form of higher taxes.

- If the current situation remains, whereby few people control the vast bulk of the production in the economy, and large scale unemployment comes around, even with a basic living income we will see unparalleled inequality. Even if ALL jobs were replaced by machines, if the ownership of these machines and the decisions regarding their profit remains in the hands of few, there will not only be unparalleled inequality but a system of inequality more sustainable than ever before.

- Regardless of how a solution is implemented, it will be gradual as automation takes time to take up increasingly more intelligent work, which will place an enormous burden on those intelligent enough to do the work. It will inherently become even more less unequal, as those who "cannot" do the work will not work but would be supported by those who can, those who can will do so and pay large taxes while doing so, and those who own that which produces can further relax.

- We live in a society that is increasingly "no man left behind" in terms of resources. The obvious solution to an issue whereby society shifts toward more intelligent work and automation of less skilled work would be to produce more intelligent babies.

-- Eugenics will never be looked upon kindly, so the only other solution is to make embryonic selection for intelligence en vogue.

-- Despite grand increases in intelligence and knowledge, many of the population are still highly religious. I don't believe this will fare well for embryonic selection in the short term.

-- Therefore in the short term we would see more of what we currently see - higher reproduction rates in the unemployed or those doing low skilled work, increasingly lower rates amongst those in higher skilled work as having a child becomes even more expensive/stressful due to higher taxes.

-- This makes all the above challenges even more difficult than they already are.

So the solution lies in something like:

- Changing the ownership of production

- Putting in place support systems to support the lives of those whose jobs are replaced and who have not the skills or intelligence to take higher skilled work

- Putting in place support systems to enable those in higher skilled work/higher education/etc. to have as many children as they want. Free childcare for working parents is one of the most important parts of that.

- Increasing emphasis on education for all. Make it available to all for the same cost and make the various colleges entrance based on merit alone.

- Continue developing and finding a way to make embryonic selection for intelligence popular and accepted.

There are large barriers to the above, namely ourselves in our reluctance to put more funding into social/educational/etc. programs, and the elite who control that which produces certainly not wanting to give up their position any time soon.

I'm interested in people's thoughts on this. It seems to be something that is largely ignored but yet appears to be staring us down head on as something that will happen and will begin happening soon.

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

What is this trash doing on HN? There are many, many other outlets to discuss this junk.

Likewise. I am highly skeptical of these stories now. The "terrorist" threat seems to have died after falling out of favour as the public slowly came to realise there never was any major threat, and now suddenly "cyber terrorism" and hacker attacks are everywhere and are apparently the greatest threat we've ever faced.

>The other thing that I find troubling is that many of our allies (Germany, France) don't seem at all enthusiastic over the sanctions against Russia. Why? I would like to understand the difference in what we (USA) want and Europe does.

I honestly don't know. The US keeps prodding Russia in recent years and for what? Is it another war they're after? What are the US hoping to gain here?

As a European I am delighted to see some of our leaders pulling back from supporting the US foreign policy.