skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> [affordable housing] offers lower returns than low density luxury housing.

Not true - as a RE investor you're always looking for around 1% of the property's value per month as rent ($1 in rent per month for every $100 the property is worth). Much below that and you're not going to have sustainable cash flow.

It is much, much easier to get $1k per month in rent from five $100k properties than it is to get $5k per month from a $500k property. Especially in areas with high property values (California), you're lucky to break 0.4-0.5%, which is not going to support any meaningful level of investment, only speculation. Which in turn helps drive a cyclical market, which helps pump up the higher end home values, which further hurts cash flow, etc etc.

Lower value housing may offer lower returns in an absolute sense but as a far as ROI it's much easier to make it on the lower end of the scale.
My unproven suspicion is this is the consequence of the much-celebrated flight from the suburbs and return to the city.

- Take a large population spread over a big area.

- Consider that they are used to 2,000sqft homes and not the 300sqft apartments of decades long past

- Squish them all into cities

Boom, you've got yourself runaway prices.
The trend of choosing minimalist styling over usability has been obvious for some time. Apple is one of the worst offenders - particularly in light of their previous commitment to usability - but sadly not the only one.

My personal pet peeve is when both Apple and Google started removing colour and textual labels from the icons in their interfaces. Fortunately textual button labels are back in Gmail, but Google Docs and Aperture are still hampered by black-and-white-only icons. Surely it is obvious that it's going to be harder to quickly locate the desired icon if they are all black-and-white silhouettes instead of coloured illustrations?

(I can appreciate in the case of Aperture that there might, very occasionally, be cases where the coloured icons could affect the user's perception of the colour of the photographs they are editing. A global UI-desaturate switch would be more useful than enforced B&W icons, however, since colour is still used in other parts of the UI.)
Assange has never been found guilty of a crime or even charged with one. The British legal ruling was not over guilt or innocence but simply over the bureaucratic definition of a crime. If the Swedish government reprinted the exact same request with your name on it, you would also face extradition without the ability to challenge the request on the grounds that its allegations are not factual.

This is the key point that apologists for Sweden miss. The prosecution could have charged Assange and got an extradition warrant that way. They didn't because doing so would have required a court filing and granted Assange rights to a speedy trial and freedom from indefinite detention. Interviewing Assange in London was equally impossible -- once it was done the Swedish prosecutor would have been legally required to either charge Assange or close the case. And charging the case would have required a court filing, etc. etc.....

Arguing that Assange would have been found guilty of rape also shows a lack of knowledge of the case. Despite what you seem to believe (who told you this?) the woman in question was not asleep and has in fact made statements contradicting your claims and accusing the authorities of railroading her. I do not personally know what happened that evening, but her description is striking in showing Assange complying with every request she made. The only possible breach of consent lies in the possibility that Assange broke a condom deliberately, but this is apparently contradicted by forensic evidence which shows the breakage was due to wear and tear. Add on the woman's affectionate treatment of Assange both before and after the night in question, and the way her change in behavior followed her realization that he was sleeping with someone else, and it seems rather obvious that while Assange may have been a cad the rape allegations simply don't hold water.
You've made a great point here, and certainly this should be involved in conversations about police wearing body cams. I'm still for body cams, though-- the inherent trustworthiness of the police's word must be ended permanently, and there is only one way to make that so.

Eventually the video from body cams will be scraped for ID information, which can then be cross referenced with the cell phone data they pull from the local Stingray or dustbox. They've got your name, your face, your digital communications, and your physical location tracked over time, controlled at the metro level, all without any kind of warrant/oversight or consent from you. Pair this with an ARGOS equipped drone, and you could easily show a live map of where "problematic" individuals are. Reaching that point is a totalitarian panopticon, and 100% enforcement of the law becomes possible, criminalizing everyone.

At what point does the complex of this technology constitute a search/seizure that requires a warrant? At what point does this complex of technology constitute an unreasonable search or seizure? When does this cross the line into being illegal or unconstitutional, if we aren't already there? I mean, there's no legal participation needed to follow me around all day via a sky camera, snoop my communications all day for content and metadata, note all of my purchases, note all my interactions with others, note my general state when in view of police body cams, and generally scrutinize me 100% of the time.

I would also take this moment to note that these issues are separate from the NSA-related dragnet, though they are indeed likely to be integrated into it eventually. The body cams and police technology are about physical surveillance and enforcing physical compliance and "orderliness". The NSA is about enforcing and surveying ideological and norm compliance.
Future ‘smart homes’ will monitor your breathing and heart rate
Pssst, the javascript on that page seems to be broken. Not a great first impression for a javascript library.

http://gfycat.com/BrilliantUnfitLadybug
Well in the case of the Tor or VPN users, I suspect most of them are probably not the typical user you're implying, and at least have some IT skill.

In the case of other users, I'm not sure because I do not fully understand it, but it seems like this would not be necessary?
Ask HN: Have You Ever Missed an 83(b) Tax Filing?
Did you ever miss an 83(b) filing? Did it hurt your tax bill? Your legal bills?

I'd like to collect these stories (anonymized if you prefer) and use them to encourage future founders to file their 83(b) elections. (like a 'scared straight' program for founders)

Background: For founders, an 83(b) election generally saves a ton on their taxes. See chart - https://startuplaw.github.io/83b-elections-for-startup-founders

Part of my job as a startup lawyer is to remind founders to file their 83(b) elections. Despite the massive tax savings, and multiple reminders, founders wait until the last minute to file, or miss their deadline altogether.

I'll put the collected stories up on that blog post, and we can frighten founders into just filing the dang form.

If you don't want to post here, my email is ericladler/gmail. I won't publish your name or startup's name.
I don't think you read the top section of the README. It clearly says that I was first looking to write a simpler CSS preprocessor, and then came across M4.

I'm not saying the tool I wrote will replace all preprocessors. My point is: I wrote one with just enough features in around 30 LOC. Can we use that to start a discussion around the current state of the art regarding frontend tooling? Or software in general?
In the Finder, you can hit command-shift-G and paste a path too. (Not disagreeing, just a (hopefully) helpful tip.)
It does make intuitive sense: build profitable luxury housing and the affluent will move in there, and while it ought to depress prices on cheaper places, a bunch of new condos does wonders for property values, which in turn drive up taxes, and therefore rents.
The telecoms fight this because they don't want to become just a "dump pipe" that delivers data to you. At that point, their product/service has been commoditized and it's a race to the bottom.
18 by law; pre-pubescent by social convention. Where did 20-somethings come from?
NASA Documentary: Suit Up – 50 Years of Spacewalks [video]
I got a refurbished HP Stream 11 for $120 (Groupon) and spent 3 hours upgrading to Windows 10. I then installed Chrome and LibreOffice. It works fine, but, with all these privacy invasions, I see no reason to use it. My Acer C720 Chromebook (upgraded to a 128GB SSD) with Crouton and Ubuntu 14.04 is much more useful to me.
In addition to building, it is harder to buy. If I had bought a large SFH, I could have put 3% down (FHA loan). Instead I bought a smaller townhouse, and 95% of lenders would not accept any less than 25% down.
Nice catch, and pretty funny.
Wits University Student App Challenge
Anyone considered having an appeal-able trial without his statement ? As I understand the victims claim to be no victims of a crime.

But that's probably not allowed in the legal framework.
​Docker 1.8 adds serious container security
Remember in the early 2000s when ECHELON was revealed? Remember how people called them conspiracy theorists, wingnuts?

Not so crazy now, but the accusations of "conspiracy" are still flying. There will not be any real apology from the public once these new technologies are used against them.
This was something I was wondering about. It seems like any company that has proprietary data to protect or privacy laws to comply with (most) don't even have a choice. I personally don't use Windows a lot, but even knowing that information was being sent out by default would be a deal breaker for me.

Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches?
Why do you consider nesting bad? I'm on the opposite side -- would be interested to hear your thoughts.
The other manuals that are referenced in the programming guide are also available on the same site:

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/att/unix/System_V_Rel...
You shouldn't. The cloud is just someone else's computer. You can mitigate things by encrypting a lot but there's no way you can't know they don't peek at your data.

So if you can't trust the company offering the service, you shouldn't do business with them. It's the same with food and food supplies: if they can't be trusted to serve/sell you stuff that doesn't make you ill, don't do business with them. Very simple.
Holy that is a lot of storage in a very small amount of space. Besides the fact that I want one right now I am starting to wonder how much heat this will generate.

A lot of 1 unit rack servers can fit about 8 2.5" drives. 128TB of storage in 1U is pretty crazy storage density.

Everytime they reveal a larger capacity drive I just wonder what the backup strategy is going to be. Longer tapes?
I bet they can eventually build a co-op to pay for connectivity from the Mesh to the CO. Basically a community paid for high bandwidth connection out of the mesh to the internet. Which basically turn the mesh into a last mile network.
The abandoned college campuses of Second Life
Electron – Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies
Or maybe when nobody trusts you anyway, that ship has sailed? :)
I don't think I've heard "ad hominem" used to describe positive assessments like this before. In any case, this isn't one. No one is saying "Solow must be right; he's an outstandingly eminent economist"; but it's perfectly reasonable to say "It's monstrously implausible that Solow simply doesn't understand capitalism; he's an outstandingly eminent economist".

And yes, one could and should argue the same about Paul Krugman. Of course it's possible that someone like Solow or Krugman is terribly wrong, but barring traumatic brain injury or something it's absurd to suggest that either is wrong on account of not understanding basic economics.

... Of course it's possible that Solow or Krugman understands something very well but then chooses to present an oversimplified version (for honourable reasons, like not intimidating their readers; or dishonourable ones, like wanting to hide something that works against their arguments). If that is what you were suggesting -- not "Solow's understanding of capitalism is simplistic" but "Solow probably has a sophisticated understanding of capitalism but is presenting a simplistic version, and a better one would invalidate what he says" -- then indeed pointing out that all the evidence suggests he's an extremely skilled economist isn't to the point. But what's wrong with it still isn't that it's "ad hominem".
Is your dotfiles repo public? I also use m4 for my dotfiles [0] and am interested in seeing how others use it.

0: https://github.com/paxswill/dotfiles
100% agree. Of all the potential use cases for Bitcoin, decentralized protocol-level payments (for network bandwidth, torrent seeding etc) are one of the most compelling.

I've seen this being done for torrents already, but would love to see someone try it out for negotiating bandwidth for wifi/mesh networks.
If you live in an area where a mortgage is 20% below rent, how are you losing any flexibility? You should be able to move and rent your place out at an 18% profit and have it filled almost immediately.
Political success. Tactical and strategic success are usually a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Alot of people who grew up with cable don't even realize broadcast stations exist. I've had to explain to multiple people that you dont need cable to get abc, nbc, etc.
MPEG-DASH vs. Apple HLS vs. Microsoft Smooth Streaming vs. Adobe HDS
This isn't news, wasn't it known long ago Dropbox was hiring people who are really, really good at image processing? This was discussed on HN many many months ago.
Video is a done deal. Most cable companies lose money on their video packages anyway; they're a loss-leader for broadband subs at this point. In 5 years, nobody will be talking about the video business.

And the FCC very well should give more power to cable companies, because the cable companies are at a huge disadvantage relative to the big national telcos (aka AT&T and Verizon). AT&T and Verizon are working together to ensure none of the cable companies becomes a national player capable of threatening them. The old Bells are still much, much larger than any of the cable providers, so they can throw their weight around.
> I think they should just go a-la-carte on broadcast channels.

My understanding is that the cable companies want to do this, but a tangled web of long-term agreements to carry channels have painted them into a corner.
It's probably worth pointing out that the author is Don Norman - one of the pioneering thinkers in user-centered design and Human-Computer Interaction in general. He wrote The Design of Everyday Things, which I would argue is required reading for anyone interested in HCI (admittedly a bold claim, considering how broad the field is).

I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault (some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers (or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his style (DOET is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique.

Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe? People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and images that they would recognize immediately.

I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon.

I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I missed it).

At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.
Big Bird is 6 years old.
Privacy generally breaks into security or anonymity.

Privacy is much more general than that. It is about having control of what information about you is shared, who has that data, and how it can be used.

The legal protections for privacy cover a lot more than just a few corner cases as well, but they lag behind what technology can do in 2015 and need updating.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043792
What would it take to set this up in a new city? It would be awesome to have this in SF as well.
You can stand up Joyent's Triton[1] service locally for development with Docker. The hardware is very affordable, and I think that they have a very underrated product on their hands.

[1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/spin-up-a-docker-dev-test-enviro...
Yes, we also completed our research and development of the technology. So that like all Military tech, it can be gifted to US Law Enforcement. The war was just a beta test for biometerics and served as the only justifiable pretext for the development of this tech.

Most of its utility will be in the civilian sphere. Inevitably, they'll be scanning your face every time you buy a beer.
Am I right to assume that NAND flash has higher storage density than magnetic disks? I've been trying to find some definitive data about this but failed so far. I'd really appreciate if someone can point me the right direction to search.
I see what you mean. Generally node libraries are very small and do just one thing, which is why almost any project ends up having a large amount of (small) dependencies, or alternatively, like PostCSS, a whole bunch of plugins that have to be installed separately. It can look a bit silly at times, but then again, if that means each dependency is small, well-tested and of high quality, the number of dependencies is not necessarily indicative of bloat.

But to each his own, of course!
Beats me. I've never dealt with fractional station wagons before...

A compressed LTO6 is 6.25 TB, right? Let's just go with 3 of them.

So, I figured out how many carts we need. You calculate the fractional station wagon part. My math was never _that_ good ;-)
One finger more than the scroll gesture … I’m not sure how you could do it differently. Requiring three fingers on the mouse would just be weird (I’m all for allowing three fingers additionally to two fingers, though!) and requiring just two on the trackpad is kinda not possible (scrolling is obviously more important and scrolling with two fingers is obviously superior to every other implementation of that on a trackpad).

And it’s literally only the number of fingers that’s different. And the only non-obvious gesture is probably to swipe up to invoke Mission Control.

Also, the way OS X is set up, those gestures serve as shortcuts (like hot corners used to, in the olden days). Nearly every single functionality can be reached via just clicking (Notification Center, switching from desktop to desktop or fullscreen app to fullscreen app) or buttons on the keyboard (Mission Control, Launch Pad).

Just relatively less important and central functionality is relegated to either the context menu (the ability to look up words in a pop-over can be activated via the context menu or three finger tap) or keyboard shortcut and gesture (swiping down for App Exposé).

Accepting an arbitrary number of fingers … sure I’m all for it. But those gestures aren’t really anything worth criticising. They are shortcuts that have to be explicitly learned. That’s why there are videos in the control pane. Apple knows that those have to be actually taught. That’s why the UI has non-gesture alternatives that are obvious and in your face.

This is not to defend Apple – I just want to point out that little personal pet peeves like these aren’t necessarily indicative of actual problems actual users have, especially if they come from an expert. (I also think you can always improve things and that’s certainly also true of how OS X implements gestures. But that’s just a truism that will never be wrong. As someone working in the field: Luckily. There are probably juicier targets than gestures in OS X, though.)
Look, it's not without its faults, but iOS makes for a _much_ more approachable device than a 1993-era Mac. My young son cannot read, write, or speak, and I'm amazing at how productive he is on the iPad. For example, without instruction, he's organized his programs into folders, a task that I know he still can't perform on a Mac, complete with all its menus.

Probably the most compelling advancement of iOS is that it has a "home" state. No matter how far you go or how lost you get, you can always press one physical button to get back to a familiar starting point. I didn't realize how big that would be, and how much it would do to make users feel grounded and encourage exploration. For all types of users, I think that's a great advancement.

As for the gestures, there really are some confusing advanced ones, and I'd bet they have very little real-world traction. Happily, tap, swipe, and pinch are pretty much the only ones you need, and most users can pick those up in the first few minutes.
The Reinvention of Black Paint
Or as I like to put it, at the end of the day you have to trust someone, somewhere in the chain.

In the case of software vendors, you have to trust the vendor.

You cannot independently verify everything. You do not have the expertise nor the bandwidth.

Edit: and if you have the software audited, are you not then trusting the auditor?
Of course this is true. Companies make money by spying on their customers. Did we really imagine that flipping the “Stop making money” preference was going to work?
Boston is strangled in many ways. Miraculously, they evaded the Olympics.
Both Less and Sass implement features that I consider anti-patterns: nesting, @extend, etc. Sure, you can ignore them, but there's a lot of code in the tool to support that. The code needs maintenance and puts the barrier of entry higher for those wanting to contribute to it. Also, these are first-class features of the tool, they can't be disabled explicitly. So you'd need code reviews and other artifacts to make sure no programmer/designer ever tries to use them. Finally, why would you choose a tool that does 20x what you need, if there's an alternative that does just what you need? (As stated in other comments, I don't mean my solution is what will replace all preprocessors. PostCSS looks like a more modular approach and it allows you to effectively cherry-pick the features you need by means of plugins.)

Also, easy != simple. The fact that a tool is easy to install (after having installed another mega-dependency) shouldn't count as an advantage, in my opinion.