skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Suburbia, with all their HOAs and such are the physical manifestation of the cultural preferences of a large majority of Americans.

The following quote perfect illustrates the goals:

"The idea, of course, is that the peaceful slumber of the suburbanite should not be interrupted by the noise generated by the transaction of commerce or any other public-sphere human activities"

Most Americans want to have an estate where they aim to live independently and completely unaffected by their neighbors. They don't want to hear them, see them, or ever have to directly interact with them unless desired.

This can be often rationalized as safer because if other people are physically less likely to interact in any fashion they are less likely to cause harm. It can also be rationalized as better financial sense as these "ticky-tacky" boxes are designed to be bland and therefore have mass appeal. HOAs especially help this as they prevent your neighbor's choices from impacting your resale value.

As long as Americans continue to value trying to live a life as separate and as unaffected as possible you will have something very much like Suburbia

Most who rail against suburbs (like me), do so because we have a different set of values and beliefs about community. For those who like suburbs it's about trying to build a personal community that you opt in to be part of.

This idea that community or your social network is something each gets to determine for themselves is seen in a lot of political debates. This fuels charter schools, school vouchers, zoning laws, etc. It's interesting because it cuts across political boundaries.
How can you seriously claim that roads are not subsidized? With the exception of a few toll roads, there is no fee to use them. Gas taxes are the only tax that can be connected to road use and those only cover about half of the cost of road construction and maintenance. In addition to the subsidy of half of the cost of the roads themselves, there is no tax to cover the cost of the environmental damage that cars cause. Added together, that is an enormous subsidy for car travel.
Unless you're claiming 7 billion people in the world were born in Canada

Not at all. I'm claiming that 7 billion people are not Canadian citizens due to the circumstances of their birth.
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I'd agree about the negative impact of suburbia for completely different reasons. The culture created by it has the nature of a bubble where its occupants don't ever interact with anyone "different". Clothes, jobs, mannerisms, jokes, religions, activities, food...are all the same.

This dulls people's sense of empathy in a considerable and damaging way. Instead of being able to think critically and with empathy, suburbia drives people to view all of their sameness as a "good thing".

We need to break these bubbles, redraw our towns and cities with integrated services, focused on walking, biking, and as little driving internally as possible. You car for should be intra-city travel. Not for going around a fence to the grocery store that's 1000ft away.
As a European who likes cars and enjoys driving, during my visit to America I have found all these planning choices charming and convenient. Except the need of daily commuting, of course. It reduces the joy of driving to dull routine. Why remote working is so unpopular, I don't know.
Go hasn't used segmented stacks in quite a while. Go now has 2k stacks and uses stack copying to grow.
Yes, some of those people just want to keep some backup money in a different jurisdiction. Most of those people probably just want to do business offshore, and maybe even getting more money back into their local economy.

Those are both quite ok and nobody should disturb them. But lets face it - most of the money (not people) are plainly stolen and hiding outside local law enforcement's sight.
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I used to live on the UES of Manhattan and now live in flyover country on a half-acre wooded lot in a house that is 6x larger than my studio apartment and yet costs less -- the extra space is quite useful for kids and a work-from-home office. There are pros and cons to both arrangements and I certainly miss some things that NYC had to offer, but articles like this exaggerate the advantages of city living. Other comments have pointed out some of them, so I'll point out just one item -- the geographic proximity of rich and poor in cities is way overblown. There may have been poor people living within a couple hundred yards of luxury apartments in NYC, but that doesn't mean there was any interaction between them. NYC is very stratified by socioeconomic status and living geographically close to people in other socioeconomic classes does not change that at all.
Why every meeting is a total waste of time
> the predominant suburban design of the US of the worst features of life here, viewed from the perspective of a European immigrant like me,

Really? As an immigrant, I always though the worst features of life in the US are the 10x higher murder rate, millions of desperate people with no health care, etc. and the crushing debt placed onto young people looking to educate themselves.

I would change those things long before changing urban planning.
The geometric intuition is important but missing. Calculus and algebra is not everything.

Short version:

Imagine a line connecting A to B. Now imagine a point sliding across that line, starting at A and going to B.

Now consider a line A to B and a second line B to C. A point slides across each line: one from A to B, another from B to C. Now draw a line connecting these two points, and imagine a point sliding across that line.

This moving line starts as A to B, ends as B to C, so the point sliding along it goes from A to C along a curved path. This is a quadratic Bézier curve.

Add another layer and you get cubic.
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But you say this like its a bad thing. He has become a career CEO, if you're a career CEO you're most likely really fucking rich.

Rich CEOs almost always increase their personal wealth, and make it one of their most important goals, even if they don't admit it publicly.

What Elon has done has signaled that making his companies succeed is his most important goal, and has basically called out other CEOs for not doing the same.
If you would like this rant in book form, throwing in some well-deserved broadsides at architects, I highly recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-La...

I would also add the radical individualists of the 60s who made the cities unlivable for families.
"Suburbia" as a term in the US pretty definitionally includes single-family homes on small plots, single-use zoning, homogenous family incomes and home values, and a strict street hierarchy with culs-de-sac. Add all these up and you tend to get 'bad design' by default. Remove these and you get something resembling an organically developed small town instead of suburbs.
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Thanks! interesting
That seems to only be true in some parts of the US.
As someone who grew up in Europe, I've been to visit friends and relatives in the US quite often.

Quite often I think what this guy writes.

Between the two coasts, there is a homogeneity of architecture that is quite amazing for a European to watch. In Europe, it's quite noticeable where you are, and everywhere has enough character that you can remember it. In the US, stuff looks like SimCity.

I often ask, how did you guys (my cousins/friends) ever grow up here? When I was a kid, there were football courts within walking distance. There were larger grass fields in town that you could easily cycle to. If you met another kid, you could take the bus, train or bike to hang out, and when you hung out, you could move from place to place. Like ride out to a theme park north of Copenhagen and then to the beach nearby, then to town centre for some fast food and cinema. You could do that. When you're hanging around at home and get hungry, you can go to a convenience store. Without driving.

When I look at a place like Boulder or Kenosha, I wonder how on Earth the kids get around. Distances seem to be vast, and I didn't see a train line (they must have them though?). I saw some buses, but not many. They looked like they would take a while to get you anywhere, because I was driving and it took ages. Also, at least in Colorado, there's vast areas that seem to have nothing but prairie dogs. At least you have the mountains there.

I recall American classmates talking about hanging out at the mall. This was always a curious thing for me, but when you go there it makes sense. Malls are the only places that have a variety of offerings, within walking distance of the next thing. You have to walk through a ridiculously sized car park, which I guess means land is cheap. A multi-storey parking house would make more sense otherwise. These huge car parks also mean that your drive to anywhere is dominated by car parks, because even commercial zones that aren't huge malls are kinda like malls anyway, just with a few shops next to each other.

And about those shops... the proliferation of chains contributed enormously to the SimCity feel of the country. You can go anywhere and find the same brand of everything. I haven't travelled much in the interior, but I got the impression that pretty much everywhere that wasn't coastal was built in the same way. Same low-rise, big car park in front, wide streets, no life.

Another issue with malls is they're a big landlord. Their incentives are not towards having a bunch of independent little shops, each with their own little complaints. It's much easier for them to say "hey {Starbucks/Sonoma-Williams/J Crew/etc}, how about you rent a space in 12 of our malls?". And then a really quite large area will get served with the same stuff.

By contrast, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and SF seemed somewhat more familiar. Thought SF was a bit weird though, as it needs to look more like NYC. A peninsula is not that different from an island, especially when there's hills. Instead you get low-rise quite centrally. Much has been written here on the political economy of this.
Don't forget the self-driving cars!
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The standard deviation is 0.8 for a single HLL, but a ratio involving 2 of them will have about 1.6%. Simple arithmetic:

conversions x (1+0.008) / [visitors x (1 - 0.008)
~ (conversions / visitors) (1 + 2 x 0.008 + ...)
~ (conversions / visitors) (1 + 0.016 + ...)

(It should actually be a bit less if you do the calculation carefully, probably 1.6/sqrt(2).) 12kb is also a pretty big filter, but I guess reasonable.

It's definitely true that non-statistical errors are highly likely to drown this out. But why have extra error if you don't need it?
Embrace the Chaos of Working at a Startup, It's Part of the Reward
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So you're trying to evade taxes and not pay for your share of social benefits? You will feel at home in the Bitcoin community.
Be weary of statistics asking people what they might do if something were available vs what they actually do when it's there. Because then you have to factor in the schedules, the ticket price, etc. It doesn't cost anything to answer yes to a poll, it's a bit more complicated when it's time to plan a trip and shell the money out.
I wouldn't say this is exclusive to robots or new. Many machines, like cars, are referred to with a feminine persona: she's really humming (in reference to an engine), come on old girl. See also the many boats throughout history with female names.

That doesn't get me any closer to why, but I would say for robots, it would seem rooted in this tradition. They're just another kind of machine.
> Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented?

I think you did an admirable job of expressing my source of dissatisfaction with the article.

That, and the author interjecting his personal preferences as architectural dogma - his passage about "No Street Enclosure" was very much of "I grew up in the tight spaces of old European cities, therefore preferring the tight spaces of old European cities is a psychological default universal in humankind".

I actually find it amusing that he thinks "parking in the rear" is some sort of architectural grand achievement, rather than the historical reality: it was something that emerged from streets strewn with mud and horse shit, allowing people to emerge from carriages on a clean, usually paved, surface. It was a practical solution to a problem that doesn't exist today.

Additionally, he seems to think the resultant alleys are "safe" (and, I don't know, maybe they are - I really don't know, and won't speculate), but in every European and Euro-style city where I've seen such "parking and garden in the back", the walls are all 10' high and topped with home-made barbed wire (usually shards of glass). It doesn't seem like the natives believe too firmly in the safety of these sorts of hidden-from-the-public-eye spaces.

Beyond that, there's plenty of false dichotomies.

Many of his other points are valid. They all just blend together in this general mash of "American cities suck because they're not like European cities; European cities are the epitome of human psychology and architecture."

Damn, Europe can be fucking beautiful. Just achingly beautiful (oh, so much of London). At other times, you can walk through street after street of 10' gates, marred only by graffiti and the occasional heavily-barred window (thinking of you here, huge swaths of Spain and Portugal). Then again, I can say the same of suburbia (see almost any part of Staten Island, New York developed pre-2000 or so if you want to see fantastic suburbs).
However, the culture of helicoptering kids everywhere (and hovering nearby, trying to control and risk-manage everything) is spreading to Europe more and more.
Exactly, I've been annoyed more than once by pure whining on the format/color/navigation of a site and little to no comments on content. [Now going meta whining about the whining, but I'll try not to do it again, I promise]
https://getsentry.com/ might help. It's open source and can be self-hosted.
Emphatically yes.

When designing tools for use by humans, you need to accept the fact that humans, with all our failings, will be the ones using the tools. So tools should be made resilient against typical ways in which humans fail.

We've been paying for shortcomings in C's design for decades with bugs and security failures that simply don't happen in other languages. That you refuse to see this is baffling to me.
Quite a bit of the crime rate comes from suburban development, and the highway system.
Banking run by humans has fundamental problems as well, that's why things like bitcoin come to existence. It is just a matter of tradeoffs.

AFAIK, most of the errors happen because users mistype the address or confuse the commission fee/amount fields, etc. UI could possible introduce some validations for fee/amount issue and probably require to retype the address or something else to avoid the other issue. Another issue is fraud, but it is a unavoidable product of such system, otherwise we end up with same problems traditional banking has. Fraud check means someone might deny the transaction even if your transaction is completely legit, for example, just because you are a citizen of a blacklisted country (my experience).

It is easy to dismiss bitcoin when you are a citizen of 1st world country -- because you are insider and have full privileges, but when you are outsider, it gets very complicated and things like bitcoin give some promise.
Suburbia allows you to ensure that your neighbors are able to afford to buy, rather than rent, a minimum quantity of land & construction (and usually therefore have a large amount of their net worth locked up in the value of that property), that they can afford transportation to and from wherever the nearest commercial center is, tends to limit population flows, and insulates the neighborhood from anyone who doesn't have their own independent transportation.

This selects for a higher quality of neighbor, which has positive externalities (eg, "Good Schools" and low crime rates) that balance the obvious costs. Alternate legal mechanisms for enforcing these constraints have been banned, so we use the zoning code and make a lot of theoretically neutral noise about Property Values.
It really kind of fascinates me why people are so obsessed with rail and high speed rail. What are the emotional reasons for it, because there are no rational and reasonable arguments for it that can't be refuted. It makes absolutely no sense and strikes me as another one of those examples of obsessive thoughts and ideal people have these days. It's like all the shitty education we subjected people of roughly <35 years old to are starting to bear shitty rotten and mutated fruits.
These sorts of articles are so profoundly boring, but somehow the whole "Suburbia sucks" thing recurs on here like clockwork.

If you don't like the suburbs...don't live in the suburbs? I personally love the suburbs. In fact, in the post-commuting world I think the suburbs are a better future model than dense living. At the same time I don't declare dense living dead.

And as an aside, these sorts of articles virtually always take some incredibly myopic view and project it across the entire country or world. In suburbs where I live, appropriate retail is mixed in the suburb. I have walked, countless times, for freshly baked bread and a coffee at the local grocer. Many multi-resident buildings have mixed use where small shots are at the bottom. Etc. The world isn't the 1950s.
I can't seem to understand the buzz around chatbots. I read an earlier article on here about chatbots replacing apps in China, but something about it seems so gimmicky. Why should I spend the cognitive energy to attempt a scripted conversation with a machine, when I can just talk to an actual person or use a native app?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11655027 and marked it off-topic. Your comment wasn't off-topic per se but it threw the thread that way.

The personal attacks were bad but you already know that. The racial comments are a problem because whether you mean them that way or not, people are certain to read them as slurs. It's hard to conceive of a comment like yours not throwing an HN thread off the rails.
Totally true, and not what is being discussed.

To quote myself a couple of lines up: "We are all aware that the law has various (mostly arbitrary) limits. The question being asked is what consistent limit should be applied in general?"

I.e. the question is "aught", you are merely reiterating what "is" (which no one disagrees with).
Yeah, I basically want both the CPU and the GPU to be FinFET for a mobile laptop, that is VR ready/ Skylake + nvidia 970 or better.
Can you share this large project?
> where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools

This all used to be easily achievable in urban neighborhoods. The elephant in the room people don't want to acknowledge is that suburbia has mostly been a way to flee from and exclude social decay. This is why people freak out about public transit to a lot of neighborhoods. The requirement of multiple car ownership in an area is a deliberately constructed mechanism for excluding lower socio-economic people.

If you shut down the public school systems and made all schools private with total freedom to deny any student entry, and you empowered a very aggressive police force (lots of stop and frisk, aggressively enforced vagrancy laws), then you'd see far more urban gentrification.
On the other hand, this also describes the work patterns of substitute teachers in the local school district and they're classified as employees.
Yes, this (Lyle Ramshaw's paper). My impression is that his work succeeds in finding the simplest human-comprehensible way of defining these objects. It's very much not the pragmatic "local hacker" approach to graphics, which can be forbidding.

I also enjoyed this interview with Tony DeRose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX0NB9IyYpU

It can be so discouraging for people to encounter this stuff (geometric modelling primitives) as a mysterious incantation, essentially as raw algebraic code. I think there's probably more scope to humanize it, as Ramshaw and DeRose's demonstrations suggest.
I think for many like me, the small marginal performance increase an AMD card might deliver is not worth the significant disadvantages AMD brings in software, heat, and noise.
Do you have a source for that 10% figure?
I've yet to read a single article about why surburbia sucks that would be convincing to me as a better alternative than my life growing up in suburbia. If I wanted to play in a field, I went to the field. If I wanted to explore the woods, I went to the woods. Too far to walk? I had a bike, and a skateboard. I didn't have to spend my life walking on pavement from concrete box to concrete box, surrounded by indifferent adults... and just the idea of it sounds positively suffocating to me.
I sometimes do short virtual walks around the globe on google street view (to clear mind) and your town is probably the best small town I saw (not in rich areas at least), Chicago area is probably the place I'd want to live in, if I was in USA :)
I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. I once did the math. If you add up shooting deaths and driving deaths, the rich suburb where I grew up is about as risky as one of the north side Chicago neighborhoods. And of course upper middle class white teens are going to be at lower than average risk of getting shot in the city, but at higher than average risk of wrapping themselves around a tree in the suburbs.

As for safe streets and good schools, it's a product of segregationist urban planning, not any intrinsic qualities of cities versus suburbs. We don't build public housing out in the suburbs, we do it in the cities. Our lack of transit makes it impossible for poor people to drive around in the suburbs. So our city schools are 90% low-income and have the problems that come with concentrated poverty.

Note that in places like Paris, the situation is reversed. Rich people live in the city (or out in the country). The suburbs are where the poor are herded into ghettos.
In this case, our conventional languages provide no way for a programmer to say "I care about overflow".

What if we instead said, "compilers will never ever consider overflow" and let those who care about overflow fend for themselves in the source language?

Does specifying an an unsigned type like size_t (as the author suggests in the last paragraph) achieve most of this? It's slightly backward, in that it's telling the compiler that overflow is not explicitly prohibited, but I think it usually has the same effect of preventing optimizations based on the assumption that signed overflow is not allowed.
IIRC with Musk he put all his fortune into the basket with SpaceX and Tesla at the same time. That's yet another level.
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> Or "man who doesn't need more, doesn't ask for more".

The article gives the example of Ford CEO Mark Fields who got $18.6 million in 2015.

Does he 'need' more?
It's an age thing to an extent, I shared a lot of similar opinions (lived in DC then in European large city from 20 to 37) and now enjoy living in a suburb with my family and kids.
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ZocDoc?
Surprised to see the demo videos were captured on OS X and not GNU/Linux.