Hacker News Reader

nowarninglabelon Bringing back the Somali shilling

This highlights well some of the conversations I have with folks who want to replace fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies. Sure, one can design a better monetary system, but that doesn't mean people are going to want to use it.

You have to incentivize and enable people in order to get them to change.

M-PESA and the similar mobile money telecom products are doing more for digitizing and disrupting fiat currencies than cryptocurrencies are currently. Bitpesa is having some success as a bridge between the two, but it's going to be a struggle for any cryptocurrency or token to surpass the usability of digital currencies tied to the devices they already use and th kiosks / storefronts around them.

nowarninglabelon How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering

Part of the problem here, which the article doesn't quite reach, is that the possible pool of mentors is growing but those women are themselves lacking in the confidence they need to become mentors. Encourage your female engineering senior managers and leaders to knowing that they are respected and capable of being role models and mentors to others if they choose!

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

Not by design, but by circumstance yes. I'm sure we'd be open to folks joining from other nations though as long as they could travel to our once-a-year in-person meetup.

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

Hmm, depends on the non-profit, but in tech-forward non-profits we are often only about 20% below market for most positions: https://www.ctosforgood.org/

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

I find your comment very interesting, because I view it somewhat the opposite. Basically, many take your statement just the way you ordered it:

#1 Take care about your own family and children #2 Do not harm others

Then, it becomes very easy to cause harm to others and justify it through the idea that one's first priority is taking care of your own family and children and that outweighs the harm you are doing to others.

Which is just to say, it's not that simple.

nowarninglabelon U.S. Startups Fail to Attract Expected Crowd of Small Investors

Small dollar amounts, but not necessarily "few" in numbers of people. Granted, I'm not particularly interested in crowd-funded equity, but crowd-funded interest-free charitable loans that Kiva has been doing in the U.S. have been steadily growing. https://www.kiva.org/lend/kiva-u-s

Growing at the bottom may not produce eye-popping changes right now, but could have some great long-term effects for re-invigorating small business growth (which has been on the decline in the U.S. as I've posted elsewhere).

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

Checking for issues with loan photos as they are posted. It's been interesting to find that many ML platforms and libraries don't do a great job of recognizing humans with dark skin. Hopefully, by adding Kiva's 1 mil+ images to the mix we can give them a better basis point to learn from. Hoping to use it for a lot of other things as well, but we're still getting to know how to leverage it.

nowarninglabelon Introducing Yelp's GraphQL API

I'd echo the comment down the line a bit for the pros / cons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14264977

The other non-obvious thing is it has been easier to introduce people to use, especially newer programmers. Being able to walk through examples in the browser, all on the same endpoint, just makes it a lot easier for sharing the concept of getting data. Though it may speak to the fact that our audience is primarily people seeking data, not trying to perform actions.

nowarninglabelon Introducing Yelp's GraphQL API

It's really validating to see Yelp putting a GraphQL API out there as there were a number of questions on whether or not GraphQL made sense as we approached introducing a new API. We (Kiva) also just released our own GraphQL API, though very much in "Beta" it is available at https://api.kivaws.org/graphql with some general API info at https://build.kiva.org

We're still working on documentation among other things before further publicizing it. Hope to take lessons from Yelp and others on best practices with it.

nowarninglabelon Information Technology and Moral Values (2012)

I think perhaps the reason you got downvoted was for taking a privileged perspective in terms of thinking all humans make sense of the world through the world wide web.

Most of the world isn't checking the internet constantly. Even if one were to take the position that they will be soon, it's still perhaps limited to think that improving upon that is the best we can do.

nowarninglabelon A Cosmic Burst Repeats, Deepening a Mystery

Perhaps, in a way, The Sparrow.

nowarninglabelon Why Japan’s Rail Workers Point at Things

More on the Navy usage can be found in David Marquet's book: "Turn the Ship Around" about his time improving training / operations on a submarine he commanded. Every one had to announce their intention to do an action before actually doing it, this gave others the chance to identify when someone was going to take an incorrect action before it happened.

It's a really great, short read that I'd highly recommend.

nowarninglabelon Canada to announce marijuana will be legal by July 1, 2018

Legalization has led to more non-smoked products on the market (e.g. chocolate bars). There are many people who don't smoke but do enjoy marijuana. Someone should do a study on this, but my bet would be that legalization would lead to more non-smoked consumption. Maybe the government could even incentivize those products by giving them a lower tax rate?

nowarninglabelon Canada to announce marijuana will be legal by July 1, 2018

Your link is good and people should read it, but your statement severely mischaracterizes it. There is certainly no link mentioned on that page regarding a connection between marijuana smoke and lung cancer (which is what the grandparent comment stipulated)

nowarninglabelon Amsterdam Airport Launches API Platform

Not quite answering the question posed, but I do want to posit that air passenger traffic has continued to grow steadily nearly every year since it began: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR

There are a lot more people flying and/or flying more and that could increase the complexity of travel. Also, increased security can lead to more variable wait time and thus another variable to consider more now when deciding on what time to leave for a flight. Perhaps the increase in flight apps allows more efficient travel planning and thus saves people a lot of time? Just a thought.

nowarninglabelon Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

I know how difficult it can be to run a volunteer review system, but we have done it for years and have learned a few lessons. One thing you should do here is remove privileges for a bit from the moderator in question. Reviewers need to have some consequence for mistakes, otherwise they will tend towards moving faster and faster in their actions, with lower quality as the result.

nowarninglabelon In praise of cash

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-se...

(which is a nice narrative account linking off to further sources)

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)

Kiva | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | Onsite | Security Engineer | http://kiva.org/careers We're hiring someone who wants to make the world a better place with us through working on the code and systems that serve www.kiva.org. We're a non-profit helping to alleviate poverty through connecting lenders to borrowers for 0% interest loans across the world and here at home. We offer awesome benefits including a partner trip to anywhere we work. We are looking to backfill our Security Engineer role and would love a candidate who is excited to beef up secure practices and help fight fraud: http://kiva.org/careers

nowarninglabelon The Future of Not Working

I believe it's happening in Oakland for the California one at least.

Your remark about building your business without taking investor funds may have been made in jest, but most people build their small businesses through debt rather than investor equity.

For those interested in loans for building a small business, Kiva (who I work for) offers interest-free loans here in the U.S. to those without access to traditional credit or those building socially impactful businesses.

nowarninglabelon Uber Taps Eric Holder to Investigate Discrimination Claims

That training is actually mandated by the state of California by AB 1825 for employers with > 50 employees. If they were not having regular harassment training for supervisors then they were breaking the law.

nowarninglabelon Postmortem of database outage of January 31

Thanks so much for the post and transparency Gitlab! We had just finished recovering from our own outage (stemming for a power loss and subsequent cascading failures) and were scheduled to do our post-mortem on 2/1 so the original document was a refreshing and reassuring read.

nowarninglabelon Making Google Data Studio Free for Everyone

Google doesn't really excel at markets such as Looker's.

We happily pay for Looker and get excellent support from them.

It'd take many, many years of hearing success stories with Google before I'd even consider moving off of Looker on to a competitive product by them and even then the switching costs would unlikely to ever be worth it.

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2017)

We're hiring someone who wants to make the world a better place with us through working on the code and systems that serve www.kiva.org. We're a non-profit helping to alleviate poverty through connecting lenders to borrowers across the world and here at home. We offer awesome benefits including a partner trip to anywhere we work for a week to meet our borrowers and partners. We're looking for someon with financial system skills for our back-end position or a DevOps person to join our Operations team. If those aren't your thing then we're also going to be hiring for other positions later in the year, just shoot me an email (my username at gmail) and let me know! http://kiva.org/careers

nowarninglabelon GitLab Database Incident – Live Report

Yes, good tip from "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet is to use the "I intend to" model. For every action you are going to undertake that is critical, first announce your intentions and give enough time for reactions from others before following through.

nowarninglabelon Welcome, ACLU

Yes, I experienced this as well, though it was about 8 years ago. I was really disappointed in the ACLU, I would have thought of all people they would be the last ones to sell off private information. It bothers me that all these groups have spent more money on sending me mail in the ensuing years than the original donation amount to the ACLU.

At least now it seems like they let you opt out.

This is a problem in the non-profit industry that should get addressed, especially given younger generations are less likely to respond to mailers anyways.

nowarninglabelon Staying with the US Digital Service

I'll tag on here to compliment the usds.gov/join site. Great job at outlining everything upfront to make it easy for people to figure out if it's right for them. Might lift some inspiration from it. And thank you for serving!

nowarninglabelon What Happens to OO When Processors Are Free? (2015)

I guess to take this a bit further, the thought that came to mind for me is if we start processing every user on their own vm with own core and memory. Is that something anyone is doing today with web sites? It'd seemingly be horribly inefficient, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

nowarninglabelon Daniel Gross of Apple leaves to become Y Combinator’s newest partner

Why does it have to be someone who both created a business and scaled it to > 500? The skill-sets on founding vs. scaling are different and very few leaders possess both and had the drive to scale the company they founded to be that big.

nowarninglabelon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2017)

We're hiring someone who wants to make the world a better place with us through working on the code and systems that serve www.kiva.org. We're a non-profit helping to alleviate poverty through connecting lenders to borrowers across the world and here at home. We offer awesome benefits including a partner trip to anywhere we work for a week to meet our borrowers and partners. We're looking for people with either strong financial system skills for our back-end position or a DevOps candidates with strong AWS skills for our Ops position. If those aren't your thing then we're also going to be hiring for other positions later in the year, just shoot me an email (my username at gmail) and let me know! http://kiva.org/careers

nowarninglabelon Scraped without credit

If you want to take action against this scraper, just report them to Google for copyright violation. Google will likely shut off their advertising revenue.