Hacker News Reader

beatpandaon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2019)

  Location: San Francisco, CA
  Remote: Please
  Willing to relocate: For the right project
  Technologies: Python, Ruby, Javascript, PHP (multiple frameworks in all four including all the popular ones). PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB (is anyone using this still?) Focus on data visualization and data processing, but I've worked at every level of the stack.
  Résumé/CV: http://matthewgerring.com/resume
  Email: gerring dot matthew at gmail dot com

Looking to work on projects in journalism, clean energy, and climate change prevention or mitigation. I will learn anything I have to to work in those fields. Extremely motivated self starter.

beatpandaon Tesla haters are parking their pickup trucks at Tesla Supercharger stations

Based on just a cursory Google search, the base price for a Chevy Silverado is $37,600. The Model 3 is $46,000 (before incentives). If you have the income to afford a new Chevy truck (especially with a lift kit), you can also afford a Tesla.

Having grown up in a place where people drove pickup trucks for real (as in not purely symbolic) reasons, I can tell you from experience that the trucks in that photo are status symbols in exactly the same way a Tesla is. The idea that this is about "rich people" is pretty far off the mark. It's about totally empty cultural signifiers and nothing else.

beatpandaon Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech

This is exactly why Silicon Valley engineers, and engineers generally, need to stop being so dismissive of people with "useless" liberal arts educations, and instead bring in sociologists and anthropologists to think through these processes in a comprehensive way.

I'm being downvoted into oblivion elsewhere on this site for suggesting this, but I feel like it's a very obvious move for tech companies that have this problem.

beatpandaon In some Bay Area counties, college grads have higher unemployment

By working with a product team to develop worst-case scenarios for non-technical abuse of a tool, like trolling, harassment, manipulation via misinformation, blackmail, and so on. Especially as it concerns a tool developed by people mostly embedded in one culture and releasing it to an audience embedded in another. Soliciting feedback from people who study society and social problems, to understand how a tool might be used by people who are not like the people who are building it, might have helped to avoid a lot of problems.

beatpandaon In some Bay Area counties, college grads have higher unemployment

Wild how after years of scandal involving tech companies not thinking through the impact of their products on society, people are still saying sociology is a useless major.

beatpandaon It’s a Great Age for Jazz, but Don’t Call It Golden

Listen to the artists named in the article. Half of the players that are part of the recent wave are on the same record labels as your "weird new electronic artist". The Comet Is Coming, one of Shabaka Hutching's many bands, is a great example, and so is anything on Brainfeeder.

beatpandaon Japan's cyber-security minister has 'never used a computer'

Say what you want about his approach, but it's pretty foolproof personal cybersecurity

beatpandaon Amazon Selects New York City and Northern Virginia for New Headquarters

> There are literally 100s of artists who work out of LIC.

*were

beatpandaon Carbon Removal Technologies

Just came here to say:

1) Thank you for doing this

2) You should have been doing this 10 years ago because it was exactly as obvious then that this kind of acceleration of investment was necessary, and YC sank millions of dollars into social media bullshit in the intervening period instead.

beatpandaon Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spreads Malaria

I think a more interesting question than "should we do this or not" is "how would you build a tool that could model an entire ecosystem?". Does anyone reading this know what scientists use to do this currently?

beatpandaon Mosquitoes Genetically Modified to Crash Species That Spreads Malaria

Even if your premise is that we should prioritize human life above all else, there's still a very good reason to consider the effect of eliminating any species on the rest of the ecosystem before we just pull the trigger. It's really easy to imagine a scenario where eliminating this mosquito ends up being more harmful to human life than leaving it in place.

beatpandaon Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

This is unambiguously illegal and Facebook could stop doing this anytime it wants. Craigslist reminds its users about anti-discrimination laws before they post and provides a means for users to flag illegal ads.

beatpandaon Endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure in US: disease burden and cost analysis

The Alemany farmer's market on Saturday morning is cheaper than anywhere else.

beatpandaon San Francisco Officials to Tech Workers: Buy Your Lunch

Well the "Golden Goose" has been doing its best to kill San Francisco, so,

beatpandaon SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention

Spreading misinformation is cool though huh

There is currently a well-funded political campaign, backed by VC money, to change conservatorship laws in California to snatch homeless people off the street and involuntarily institutionalize them. You are doing serious harm by allowing people to spread misinformation here without challenging them, and punishing people doing the thankless work of correcting them.

beatpandaon SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention

Going to need a citation here, because all of the data says things are getting better. I live in SF, I have worked in mid-market and I edited the Street Sheet and worked directly with homeless people for several years. I'm not super interested in your one anecdote about the one time a homeless person scared you.

beatpandaon SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention

It's hilarious to me that this exact same newspaper ran an article less than a week ago showing that by all available measures, homelessness is improving and there are fewer people on the streets in San Francisco. (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-h...)

Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States.

Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.

beatpandaon Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave

I get downvotes every time I say this but I'm going to keep doing it anyway:

If the only reason you're in the Bay Area is for work, if you have no other attachment to the culture or history or land here, do yourself and everyone else a favor and get out. You'll be happier and so will everyone else.

beatpandaon Larry Harvey, co-founder of Burning Man, has died

Not bad for a employee organizing once a year single week event

This is flatly, obviously, knowably wrong. Burning Man organizes dozens of events all around the world year-round.

beatpandaon Dropbox S-1

The Techies Are Finally Reading Marx

beatpandaon Roam has constructed an international housing network for digital nomads

If you're paying for this, why bother traveling? If you just want to be surrounded by like-minded laptop-bound people that are just like you, why leave home?

beatpandaon Why Toys?

Pretty tired of startupland using this idea as a shibboleth. Eventually, you're going to have to answer the charge of "Silicon Valley is just building a bunch of useless bullshit" with something that actually is not. Moving money from one industry to another doesn't count.

beatpandaon Forging a Swiss Lens: How Zurich's tech scene changed my view of SV

There's a huge gap between investments banks consider too risky and the kinds of things SV investors in particular want to fund.

beatpandaon AirBnB units drop by 74% due to SF regulations

You know what, actually, if you could both ban me and delete my account, that would be excellent. I've been trying to find a way to delete my content from here for years. Seems like it'd be in everyone's best interest. I only ever come on here anymore to see what the most insane, reactionary take on the news is anyway, and I could do without it.

beatpandaon AirBnB units drop by 74% due to SF regulations

I'm also glad you're leaving SF and so is everyone else who likes living here

beatpandaon YC Bio

How is enabling people to live longer going to address a healthcare crisis that is primarily about the cost of care? If people live longer they are going to end up paying more for care, especially for whatever treatment any of these companies comes up with that enables them to live longer.

beatpandaon How We Built Uber Engineering’s Highest Query per Second Service (2016)

Hey, really cool tech, good work. How's building a profitable business going?

beatpandaon Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

No, they don't "tend to allow it". Craigslist takes down explicitly illegal content. Yes, prostitutes offer "massages" on Craigslist and get away with it, but winking and nodding isn't illegal.

beatpandaon Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

Craigslist routinely takes down discriminatory housing and job ads and have been doing that at least since I started using it around 2005.

beatpandaon Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

The headline on this article is misleading, but:

"Just-released numbers from January’s homeless count, conducted every two years as a requirement to receive federal funds, show a very slight decrease. The drop is attributed to fewer families and youths among the homeless, while the number of single adults living on the street — the most visible — has risen."

http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Despite-money-an...