skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, actually you did say that property taxes are fixed to the 1970s, which I said was wrong.

Based on the level of home sales and the current median home prices, it's safe to say that there is more than enough turnover to reset property taxes, and the idea that property taxes are fixed to the 1970s, which was your initial statement, is utter nonsense. Linking articles that are 10 years old and from the middle of the housing bust is also nonsense.

No one is talking about prop 13 now because there is more than enough housing turnover across CA, and more than enough hungry home buyers willing to pay whatever price, regardless of the property tax.

And since I know you just skimmed the articles you posted and didn't read it, here's a finding that pretty much talks about today's environment, and it completely invalidates what you are saying about Prop 13:

"Rapidly rising housing prices may also have
contributed to reduced tenure by increasing home sales, including speculative home purchases. Low mortgage interest rates over that period may have also increased
home sales, especially for first-time home buyers, which in turn, would decrease average tenure."
I have a private SQL server that is expired since 2011 and it's up and running. I can't recall how many time I asked them to close it.
No cars in the city, an even better idea.
iOS 9 Content Blockers: Impact  Analysis and Mitigating Strategies
Like most things in programming, 'it depends'! What's your background? If it's in a more interpreted language like Ruby or Python, learning Elixir instead might be a good idea. If you want something that's going to be more approachable, it also might be a better idea. Are you going to do web development, and want to use a more conventions-over-configuration type of framework? Do Elixir with the Phoenix framework.

If you already enjoy Erlang though? Don't get discouraged just because something is built on top of it- keep going! Elixir will be there regardless, and might even be easier to learn when you understand what it's built on.
There is also a correlation between having an academic background, and having specialized knowledge that is inherently hard to communicate with non-academics. Just because the format was a blog post, doesn't mean that the author was aiming at a general audience. Even if it was possible and desirable, the author might not have had time to flesh out all the concepts that are taken for granted in their field.

I liked the general ideas in the blog. People think about these things informally all the time, but it's nice to see the ideas laid out systematically.

Maybe you can wait for someone to write a blog expanding on these ideas for a more general audience, or write one yourself.
No, tasks like "extracting all links from a webpage" are absolutely trivial using an HTML parser. Run the following XPath query on an HTML object:

//a[@class='specified_string']/@href

Yes, you have to understand the syntax XPath to write such expressions, just like you have to know the language of regexes. Or at least be able to google them.

The answer to "who cares" is "you", because you're the one who's going to catch hell when your regex failed to capture some hyperlink that utilized some feature of XML that exceeded your test-cases. The one-liner above is guaranteed to Just Work on all valid XML documents, so why even create such a monstrosity?

Everyone knows that Regexes Cannot Parse HTML, and yet people still try it because they think they're smarter than Noam Chompsky. The real truth is that everything looks like a nail to these people, because all they have is a hammer.
From the article: "(Bonus: the letters left after finding all the words spell out one of my favorite features of Ruby…)"

Or did I misunderstand something?
Email isn't point-to-multipoint.

Usenet is.
They seem to be using "что" for the russian question word, which serves the correct function in my experience. [1] However I'm not sure what the "a" interjection is supposed to be and I don't think I have heard it used in practice, although I'm not a native russian speaker.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=l...
From the article: "(Bonus: the letters left after finding all the words spell out one of my favorite features of Ruby…)"

So it's clearly been done. Or did I misunderstand something?
Does life exist on Mars? NASA to reveal Mars mystery on Sept. 28
Always bet on text (2014)
Sorry, I'm trying to point out that gendered harassment targeting men is very common online. I've edited my post for clarity.
Elon Musk: Dieselgate Proves It's Time to Go Electric
> Omniusaspirer: It's a taboo thing to say but spend enough time in
> different locations and you learn very quickly that the homeless are
> shameless opportunists who go wherever they can most leech off
> society.

First, I have to be clear: the homeless are a broad population, and calling them all parasites, essentially, is offensive to me. I've spent more time than most talking to homeless, helping them, and I consider many homeless people to be friends. A lot of them are mentally ill, and they are ill in ways that are easily identifiable from a brief encounter. However a lot of them are ill in ways that are just as damaging, but not easily identified. One rather common example: depression. From the outside they look normal, but if you spend any time at all talking with them, it's clear that something is very wrong. Some of them have trouble regulating their emotions, and it's not that they just don't try. It's not a problem that they can think their way out of, and medication often isn't that effective. Some of them are physically ill, but again, it's not clear just looking at them that somethings wrong. One friend of mine had a heart attack, got MRSA in the hospital which became a 9 month ICU visit that cleared him out of all his money. The end result was six or seven years of homelessness, until he could get into subsidized housing.

Please note that I'm not saying that all homeless people are just in need of some love and understanding and then everything will be just ducky. The fact is that some homeless people are dangerous and should be locked up. I don't have any trouble with that (although they should get psychological help while locked up).

If I had to guess, based on my (very) limited experience I'd say that about 1/3 of the homeless population is there because of addiction issues, and the remaining 2/3 has serious mental issues.

I agree that there needs to be "expanded mental services, more rehabilitation", however I think the policing needs to be dome very carefully. From the tone of your post, I suspect your idea of "strict policing" is going to cause more harm than good. First, there are some civil rights issues -- it's illegal (in the US) to discriminate against a class of people. That's why cities can't just kick out the homeless, just like they can't ust kick out addicts, or black people. Second, strict policing of homelessness will end up throwing a vulnerable population into jails or prisons, both of which are expensive, overcrowded, and have many other serious problems.

The thing with homelessness is that there isn't any easy, one-size-fits-all answer. It is a difficult problem, and one that will take time and money to address. I don't have any easy answers, either. But there are a lot of people suffering. Also, don't think that you are that far from homelessness. It's not an "us vs. them" issue. Sooner or later all of us get old, or sick, and need someone to take care of us. That's just how life is.
Stochator 0.6 released with pseudo-random string generation
Ask HN: How agnostic is Microsoft these days, really?
I'm a Linux sysadmin who's recently been offered a job at a Mediterranean subsidiary in a customer-facing position.

In the early engagements, I was lulled with all sorts of stories about How Microsoft loves Linux and all, but halfway through the interview process one of the interviewers told me point blank that I have to dogfood Windows 10 (laptop and mobile) or "it would look bad".

Considering I was sought out precisely because I work on AWS using solely Linux AMIs, spent the past 3 years using a MacBook and prefer Android phones, this did not sit well with me, but I let it pass at the time.

Am now looking at a fairly good offer letter (slightly more than what I can make anywhere else in this part of the EU, at least) and wondering if I should accept it - not because of any ill will towards Microsoft (the buzz is good, and I was never one of the haters), but because I don't want to go through a culture clash - I had enough of those at Oracle, thank you.

Advice, anyone?
> 1) Do you allow 1 + 1.5? Most languages say yes, even very disciplined ones like Haskell.

That's not really because of an implicit conversion. Integral literals are typed as `Num a` and floating literals as `Fractional a`, since `+ :: Num a => a -> a -> a` both operands must be of the same type, so `1` becomes a `Fractional a :: a` and voilà, the expression is correctly typed as `Fractional a :: a`.

Force `1` to a concrete integral type and you'll get a type error because there is no `Fractional Int` instance which would satisfy `(+)`:

Prelude> (1 :: Int) + 1.5

<interactive>:28:14:
No instance for (Fractional Int)
arising from the literal `1.5'
Possible fix: add an instance declaration for (Fractional Int)
In the second argument of `(+)', namely `1.5'
In the expression: (1 :: Int) + 1.5
In an equation for `it': it = (1 :: Int) + 1.5
While I sympathize with the gist of your sentiments: What's in it for FB? Nobody (outside of an HN-type crowd) wants to self-host anything, nor do they know what that means. The 30 yr old+ folks without any technical knowledge think FB is great and see no reason anything should change. You are basically calling for FB to reduce their monopoly to satisfy 0.01% of their addressable market. I believe the force that will reduce the significance of FB will come from outside of FB (and there is no shortage of people trying and failing to do that).
The thing I don't understand is this: What is the added value these workers create? They have no daily routines, they have no strong attachment to their team nor do they have a say in the furbishments of their work area. In my role as a highly trained knowledge worker in a system that is rather more organically grown than planned, I need intuition on the status of a large number of different parties in the ecosystem where I work in, and every fixed constant and known know and unknown is a valuable fulcrum I can use as a leverage to do my work as well as I can.

What human constants do the people have that work there? Are they treated as pure drones? Or is there a some sort of 'digital nomad' vibe going on there?
That would work, use base 1 representation.
Anyone would've been better than DiFi.
I don't understand how this works. Are you supposed to enter the answers as you go? Or just the final answer? I tried entering intermediate values and got zero feedback from the interface.
Good points. However, object oriented programming doesn't necessarily mean arrays of objects. I'd disagree that it encourages it in any way.

I realize that's a common paradigm in Java and C++, but it's an architectural decision that you make, not a part of a programming paradigm. The array-of-structs prevalence really stems from C, not object-oriented approaches.

You can do both in a object-oriented manner. For example:

points = Points(xarray, yarray, zarray)

vs

points = [Point(x0, y0, z0), Point(x1, y1, z1), ...]

If you're mostly operating on a series, it makes more sense to structure objects and methods around the former "plural" approach, anyway.
Schrödinger's Board Game?
I've never played Earthbound, but I came across this after playing the OP's just-released game, Undertale, which is apparently an homage to Earthbound and bills itself as "the friendly RPG where no one has to die":

http://undertale.com

Undertale is probably the most brilliantly twisted game I've ever played, but this Earthbound hack the OP describes making while in high school sounds even more genius. Makes me wish I had played Earthbound when I was young rather than passing it up for its cartoonish graphics.
Yeah, it would probably "Tsumiappuri" (積みアップリ).
I have to wonder if the author is a U.F.O. TV series fan: http://ufoseries.com/guide/sid.html
Opinion vs. Stupidity
The fact is: Google makes billions more in revenue and has billions more users. Google is founded on real technology and algorithms, facebook started by copying and pasting cold fusion code from myspace.
> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address.

I don't understand why this would be. Would you explain why -for your cohort- this is true?
It's called "Tsumige" (積みゲー).

It shares the same "Tsun" as Tsundoku in the form of "Tsumi" (積む/積み, stacking up) and means games that keep stacking up and never been played or finished.
Instead of asking the internet, you should talk to your future manager and teammates. See what the dogfood requirements are. When I worked on Windows Phone, we were required to dogfood the phones but the rest of the company was not.
Reminds me of this: http://abstrusegoose.com/323
Founder of TinyLetter here. Cool article! Glad TinyLetter is still going strong & a successful acquisition for MailChimp.
Perhaps considered to be part of a best or reasonable effort?

A friend who was configuring some systems containing healthcare personally identifiable information (PII) included a similar tool in its defenses.
That toolbar tho. Ugh. I assumed he was talking about Outlook.com, not Outlook 2013.
5 Tips for Getting Started as First Time Landlords
All it takes is metadata.

The "digital exhaust" we leave behind is extremely revealing. I usually use COTRAVELER as my example of how just a few data points (without any PII) can reveal a LOT about your social interactions, but browser history is another powerful data source.

I believe this is why Dan Geer, in his incredible talk last year[1], suggested that "privacy" should now be defined as "the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself". To avoid exactly the type of analysis, you need the capability to misrepresent yourself, and you need to regularly be in the habit of use use that capability.

Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion
on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can
be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in
cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself
not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping
affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation
means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy
through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between
you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no
reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when
there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not
one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but
having as many as you can.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
Diaspora did a few things wrong.

Two of them were:

* Their federation protocol was (still is?) very poorly documented. This made alternate implementations difficult.

* A user cannot move his data from one Diaspora server to another. (This might have changed in the last six to twelve months, but I doubt it.) This sort of moots the benefit of decentralization; what good is it if I can pick from any one of a sea of hosts, but must stick with that host for the rest of forever, even if they turn evil?
I wouldn‘t call it software archeology because it is still very much in use and modern standard.
Project looks promising... Do you have source code to a demo app available?
"A ground loop is the result of careless or inappropriate design or interconnection of electrical equipment that results in there being multiple paths to ground where this is not required, so a complete loop is formed.":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_loop_(electricity)
Thanks for sharing, exactly what I am looking for as I am looking for a new laptop. Some quotes from the test of the Librem-13 that seemed important to me:

[..]The Librem 13 has a 13.3" 1920x1080 Matte IPS screen that I thought looked great. It is nice and bright and to my eyes looks better than the 1920x1080 IPS screen on my X240. [..]

[..] I'm used to the relatively weak speakers that tend to come with Thinkpads so I was pleasantly surprised at the volume from the Librem 13 speakers. Speaking of sound, I've gotten some questions about how quiet the laptop is. The laptop does have a fan and features vent holes along the bottom. It's kicked on while I've typed with it on my lap and while you can hear it a bit in a quiet room, to my ears it's pretty quiet. Let's put it this way, you can't hear it over my typing and certainly not if you were using the speakers at all. [..]

[..] It's a bit tricky to compare keyboards between the X200 and the two island keyboards but I definitely preferred the Librem 13 to the X240. When it came to the X200 and the Librem 13 I think it's more of a tie. I like the extra key travel of the X200 but the Librem 13 keyboard actually felt a bit crisper, especially when typing heavily with more force. [..]

[..] Honestly the biggest issue for me personally is the touchpad mouse. I'm just a trackpoint person, I can't help it. That said, at my day job I have a buckling spring keyboard with a trackpoint in the middle of it, but since my home setup uses a classic Model M I've sort of been trained to not reach for it and reach for the physical mouse instead (and for the most part I just stick to the keyboard and keyboard bindings anyway). If Purism can fix the issue with palm presses generating mouse events while typing (which the multi-touch driver is supposed to solve), I think the mouse will be fine. [..]

[..] The final hardware feature I want to cover is the hardware kill switches. This was a much-requested feature by the backers of the original Librem 15 and the Librem 13 has them as well. Unlike software-based kill switches or keyboard combos, these switches literally cut the power to the wireless and bluetooth in one case, and the webcam and microphone in the other. I honestly don't know of anyone else who offers a webcam/microphone kill switch like this. I tested the webcam kill switch myself and not only did the video output from Cheese go black, dmesg reported that the USB device was completely gone:

[ 626.880277] usb 2-5: USB disconnect, device number 3

and when I flipped the switch back on, the device reappeared: [..]

I would immediately order a Librem-15 if it had (as an option) a keyboard with a trackpoint with physical buttons and without the separate number block on the right, i.e. a centred keyboard.
Well that's a good example of what the original argument was talking about since the comedian's argument was terrible (e.g. by the same logic we should not say that slavery is immoral, because the ancient Greeks practiced slavery).
Interesting to discover that Mason jars are suddenly hip. A year ago, I learned how to make sauerkraut from cabbage and related vegetables (essentially: salt, compress, and seal).

Now we regularly enjoy homemade kraut from various types of veggies. It's delicious if you like pickled vegetables, and contains lots of probiotics. And, of course, Mason jars are a useful component.

I don't see how using Mason jars as drinking vessels furthers one's back-to-nature ambitions, but learning to use them for food fermentation and storage certainly does.

My next project: making wine (and vinegar) from various fruits. I especially wish to make lychee wine, because that was my favorite drink while living in Taiwan as a college student, and it's hard to find here in the U.S.

I recently bought a couple of Fido jars, made in Italy. Similar to Mason but they have these cool clasp-able lids that release the CO2 gas that is produced by fermentation without your needing to unscrew the lid every few hours as is the case with Masons. At least, so I'm told by a fellow sauerkraut maker. Am about to give it a try. Mason jars are definitely a lot cheaper, but each has its use I suppose.

Ah, so nice to talk about something other than technology once in a while. Balm for the mind and for the stomach.
Social Authentication in Node.js with Passport
No, we're just starting out, pivoting from a previous similar idea. We wanted to include community from day zero, so anyone can contribute to the design as well.
Resume Reviewers – Get Your Resume Reviewed by Real People Free
English also has words for this concept - "reading backlog" and "unread books piling up".

The Japanese term 'tsundoku' is mainly notable because it's a pun portmanteau of 'tsunde oku' (piling up) and 'doku' (reading).
I don't think it is so much about it being 'subjective' or 'weaselly'. It is more about type systems sitting on various continuum dimensions rather than having binary descriptions.

There are marked differences between where different dynamically typed languages can sit on the strong vs weak dimension. Python and Ruby are closer to the strong end while PHP and Javascript are closer to the weak end. It is a useful real world distinction.

eg PHP and Javascript will happily coerce different types (eg strings and ints) together while Python and Ruby will raise type errors.
Poll: What static site generator(s) do you use?
Octopress (Jekyll)
Jekyll without Octopress
DocPad
Sculpin
blosxom
A generic build system
A custom self-built static site generator
Another preexisting static site generator
Ask HN: Anybody have an angellist crawler?
Norwegian offshore helicopter flying job salary and working conditions
If you enjoy some of his ideas while campaigning for Mayor, you may like his series, What Would Jello Do[0]. He's covered Meg Whitman, [1] Internet Killswitch [2] and... Selfies [3]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL636ABE10C3CCC992

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMVA9pd_NvM&index=1&list=PL6...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9uRsAtGWB0&index=3&list=PL6...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iej9asP0uBA&index=46&list=PL...
Start another effort where you pay less money, or no money, to become a supporter. There are plenty of problems in the world. No one should feel locked out. Just get off your ass and quit complaining because someone else decides to do it differently than you would.
The article links to my github repository for a wordsearch utility I wrote (here: https://github.com/jamis/wordsearch) and it includes a description of a technique for embedding a message in the unused letters of a wordsearch puzzle.
Duly noted. Feel free to shoot a message to my Gmail.

My address is my first name, followed by the first initial of my last name, then the letter Q.
The problem isn't if it's a good idea to moderate forums. Problem is when it becomes a liability not to. The possibility of fines, lawsuits or god forbid prison time can have the kind of chilling effects we can't even imagine.
Afaik you need it if you use Google Adwords. Not sure if Adwords could be changed in a compliant way.

I recently started out to implement the cookie header on my site, and discovered things are rather unclear. For example, couldn't Google somehow get global consent for all Google Ads?

There also doesn't seem to be a way to ask for consent and only trigger Google Ads if consent is given.

Maybe there are some things that Google could improve to alleviate the situation. But advertising probably also depends on at least a little bit of tracking.

If they (the politicians) want to outlaw online advertising, maybe they should just say so directly?