skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Subletting implies 30 days or longer, and in NYC leasees and renters are entitled by law to sublet their apartment provided they give notice to the property owner. The owner can decline in certain situations, but it's on them to prove why their reason is valid. Airbnb laws are concerning advertising of giving out your apartment for less than thirty days, which is illegal in its entirety without a proper license.

In either case, the main point is that lease agreements (and in many cases, even the law, as we saw in Santa Monica) don't stop people from doing what they want to do. I don't know why you think the parent comment has anything to do with poor people; sometimes a person just wants to have a good idea of who's living in their building, regardless of wealth.
It's a little hard to know where to start to respond to this.

First, growth in the national debt under Obama has been comparable to that of the last 36 years of Republican presidencies. Obviously, you can't simply compare the raw numbers; depending on the metric you use, Obama is getting crushed by Reagan (who almost tripled the national debt), or is just outcompeting Bush. You can pick metrics in which Obama compares unfavorably to Bush and Reagan, or metrics in which he compares favorably, but from what I can tell, he's pretty much on par with every president for the last 36 years except for Clinton.

Second, Obama isn't responsible for a big chunk of that debt growth: it simply represents a continuation of crisis policy from Bush's administration in response to the collapse of 2008. It also captures Bush's disastrous tax cuts, a policy that Republican-controlled legislatures have ensured Obama was stuck with.

Third, the US GDP is ~17T. Our debt is just barely over 100% of GDP, within 10% of France, Canada, Singapore, and Belgium. As a percentage of GDP, it's not the highest its ever been, and the increase captures our response to the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression.

Fourth, seen through the lens of the GDP, it's clear that there's two bad things that can happen to the debt: our total debt can grow, and our GDP can shrink. Money spent on the recovery is, again, a huge factor in the increased debt. That money was spent in large part to prevent an even more disastrous contraction in the economy. And, indeed, despite a relatively anemic recovery, we're doing a hell of a lot better than Europe did.

Finally, an important mitigating factor with our debt is the unique position we hold in the global financial system. Treasury yields remain at historic lows. The market seems unconcerned with the debt, and remains happy to finance us.

Unsurprisingly, you can't really evaluate the financial picture of the US by comparing two simple dollar numbers.
Absolutely. That is a valid and empathetic perspective, and one I've heard before through many years of living in the south. I was never able to work up any sympathy for the CSA as a nation, but had a lot of appreciation for the history/tragedy/bravery exhibited by both sides.

My only quibble is that when it's been explained to me in those terms, the explainers often offered it as the only perspective. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights" or "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about the industrial states trying to dominate the agricultural states", etc.

The problem is that every time anyone said "the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about X", they were always really trying to say that it wasn't also about slavery. But of course it was also about slavery. There are all sorts of values of X for which one could say, "the Civil War was about slavery, and it was also about X", but there is no value of X that somehow erases the slavery aspect from the origins of the war. It was about a lot of things, but it wouldn't have happened without political disagreements over the continued existence of slavery as a government-protected institution.

There are many people in the south who honor and respect those who died fighting for the CSA, but who still view the war as a great national tragedy in which the south unfortunately chose to stand up for a morally indefensible institution (but may have also been standing up for much more legitimate ideals as well). Those sorts of nuanced views just seemed far less common than the "it wasn't about slavery, it was about X" perspective.
I know they're sabotaging their newer versions :(
I think you need a job in the government. Then you can collect data for 10 years to decide the people are not really using dial up connection as much as they used to.
If the number had gone from 40 to 20, that is within a understandable deviance. But when the number goes from 40 to 1, I think the bubble has popped. You may not agree, but I did not think that data collection was a requirement for posting here. Perhaps 40 years in the tech industry was enough for an educated opinion.
So the subject of the article claims to be an altruist. And gets to post about how moral and pure he is. I'm left with the perception this person the subject isn't calibrated with the plight we're all facing just to get by.

A lot of us sacrifice ourselves. Unlike some, we're humble about it. People go into the public sector and get paid less. People join the army and risk their lives on minimum wage.

I think gratitude is something we all need more of. It rarely ever deserves to go to the one's who advertise for it for their own benefit. Boasting is the opposite of altruism.

An account signing up on HN just to defend and congratulate the subject (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=asdffdsaasdf1). I hope its not the subject of the author using a sock puppet.
I certainly agree that marginal rates are important. I'm just saying that it's important to understand the difference between marginal rate and average rate and not use one where you mean the other.
The USPS images every address they deliver now and logs for law enforcement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...

I flatly do not believe the claims that the images are not retained long term.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

See also the very entertaining book by Daniel Okrent.
> I also wonder why there are still people who want to argue that there was literally no genuine news value in a media outlet outing a powerful billionaire who would personally and financially support a party that would put this on their platform, but I guess that's another story.

Is it normal to reverse causality to make an argument?
I'm exactly the opposite. I'll sip Pepsi chilled, but when I drink Coke, I'll chug it to satisfy a thirst, never stop to sip it - if I do, I generally don't enjoy the taste, while with Pepsi I enjoy the nuances of the flavour.

I don't get why you say it has greater carbonation. The carbonation in Coke gives a harsher feel, which I tend to dislike other than when its hot and I'm very thirsty. Pepsi gets frothier, and is more mellow, but in overall levels of carbonation I don't think there's much difference.

The only other cola than Pepsi I'll sip is RC, which has a strong caramel undertone.
A couple of red flags here. Do people really understand their own preferences? There's a number of psychological experiments that indicate our self reports of our preferences and why we prefer certain things are quite inaccurate. (There was a famous one involving socks/stockings that were preselected to be equally preferred by the general populace. It turns out, that if the things are pretty much the same, people tend to select things from a particular side of the table, yet they give all sorts of reasons that sound more socially plausible than, "it was the one on the left.")

Unless one is a musician, one probably has a very undifferentiated understanding of intervals and chords in isolation. Also, musical preferences very rarely involve listening to intervals and chords in isolation. They are part of a complex "cocktail" of auditory and other stimuli that go together. (Most often, I meet people who only understand "music" in a context that includes performers and specific recordings/performances and are really unable to discuss pieces of musical composition in the abstract.)

As an analogy, this is like presenting some aromatic compounds to people from different cultures, asking how much they like the compounds, then declaring wine preferences are mainly cultural. The conclusion, that such things are cultural, seems obvious. The construct of the experiment seems legit on the surface. However, there is a pretty poor logical connection between the two on closer examination.

There should be a name for this kind of fallacy. It's a kind of unjustified reductionism. It's virtually a trope in the social sciences.
Holy cow, poly/ml looks outstanding, threads, sockets, signals, a ffi, a lot of things I've been missing in SML all these years. Is there support for unicode in the string library? How's the generated code performance wise? I will definitely keep an eye on this project.
Demand for recreational drugs is ever present, it seems, and it looks like the prohibitionists are losing 'the war on drugs.' I hesitate to recommend sweeping legalization, but surely it must be time to rethink drugs policy. I suppose it is happening, slowly, with medical and recreational marijuana legalization, but other drugs must be considered as well.

I don't use drugs or alcohol anymore because I couldn't control my use of opioids. I have had a very difficult time in the past 10 years because of this, and every rehab/behavioral health treatment I found myself in recommended 12 step support groups as a one size fits all solution to my substance abuse issues. It wasn't until I got into a methadone program that I was able to find some relief from my addiction and frequent relapses. Unfortunately, methadone is frowned upon as much NA/AA is favored by addiction counselors.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. The point is that I think addiction is the real problem we face when it comes to drugs. And two potentially addictive drugs are currently legal. I think that if enough money was allocated for medical addiction treatment, legalization could work. A lot of money could be made by regulating and taxing recreational drugs. Addicts could be kept out of jail and receive the help they need instead of falling into the trap of the criminal justice system.
Hyperdev does the cloud IDE thing pretty well; I spun up a half-serious prototype of a web app in a weekend, and sitting down at any nearby computer to hack / run / test really was a joy. I even logged in from my iPad to fix some css (not painless, do not recommend, but it worked.)

Nothing to install, no environment to configure, just log in and start editing.
The counterpoint to that is that universities are moving more and more teaching positions to short term contracts with terrible pay and benefits. So skilled people might instead choose to go in the industry/pursue other opportunities, and the students find themselves with instructors who end doing what they do because they can't go anywhere else.
Even if your every desire was fulfilled for 24 hours a day, you can't create a 25th hour.
Even if this is true, and it seems much more aspirational than something that actually occurs with any sort of frequency, that's merely one benefit to be weighed against all the disadvantages. To name just a few such: worse average teaching ability than a selection method that focuses on teaching ability, reduced research output due to splitting researchers' time between teaching and research, and of course the issue pointed out in the article that the needs of undergraduate education in large measure limit the number of research scientists.

Were it not for the historical accident that we do things this way, I strongly doubt anyone would suggest we adopt it for whatever tiny educational benefit it may impart to undergraduates -- most of whom won't even go into the academic fields they are studying.
> playing on a Wii U misses the entire point of Retro Gaming

So does having a TCP/IP stack and a download store :)
> It really seems to me that the sales benefit of reassuring customers about Volvo's confidence in their platform is likely to far outweigh any marginal increase in lawsuit risk to Volvo in this kind of statement.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think insuring liability at the manufacturer level is the right thing to do. I just have doubts that it will be affordable any time soon. Animats was saying Volvo is close to shipping their autopilot. I doubt it for the reason of the cost of insurance. I could be wrong.

You can charge customers a subscription for "Volvo self driving insurance", or charge a lot for the car to cover Volvo's costs.

Accidents and lawsuits are more likely to occur at the beginning of self-driving cars' introduction before many people have bought them.

Likely, the first companies to do this will either (a) wildly succeed or (b) fail dismally and teach a lesson to the others. I don't see much middle ground. Again, I could be wrong.
Thanks for pointing this out, my post was not entirely clear on that matter. This proposed regulation does in fact contain some directive-like clauses with regards to the issue at hand. In this specific case they require the member states to disallow certain practices in their national law.

It's also not uncommon for member states to enact laws dealing with the effects of a (directly applicable) regulation.
Getting your graduate degree solely to gain professorship is a bad look for anyone, even in engineering. The supply of professors across the board has been extremely high for at least 5 years.
Well, I'm at a research institute as a postdoc. The problem is that there is no career path except for trying to get tenure, and since there are no openings and the competition in the academic middle field is insane, this is so unlikely that it has become unrealistic to plan for it even when you're doing good work and have adequate publications.

So at least in my area there is no research career. It's a dead end.
And methanol poisoning. Not to mention other nasty things that were intentionally added to industrial alcohol to poison anyone who tried to drink it [1] - now, it would be interesting to try and get a sense for how many drunk drivers were kept off the roads during Prohibition, but I doubt most would consider it an unalloyed success, even then.

1: http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5975605/alcohol-prohibition-pois...
How is this any different than popcorn time?
The lack of scientists has been a myth for a long time, and probably comes from the lumping of very different fields under the umbrella of "STEM".

Lots of good info from the IEEE Spectrum (2013): "The STEM Crisis is a Myth"

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth-an...
> The soldiers who fought for the south were people's family members, and honoring their memory had evolved into a statement against the cultural erosion that many in the south are upset by.

That doesn't actually fit the facts in explaining the popularity of the Confederate flag as a symbol; the modern popularity of the Confederate flag as a symbol traces directly back to its adoption across the south specifically as a banner of resistance against the civil rights movement, before which it was much less commonly encountered.
This. If a business stops working because of technological progress, it's not my problem to keep it afloat. We don't have many blacksmiths anymore, so should everyone stop using things made of metal or make their own? Ad tech has been digging their own grave since they started with crap ads, poorly-secured platforms, annoying / malicious experiences...and now they're asking everyone to feel bad for them. Google manages to make an absolute killing with ads, and those don't make my eyes bleed like the ones on most news sites. I guess ads for articles don't work; the value the viewer gets isn't worth the price. Free market blah blah ok so maybe your business isn't viable any longer. Pivot, get acquired, or die, just like everyone else.
Conceptually, threads are probably easier than actors for a beginner. I'm not saying that it's easier to implement correct code with threads (in fact it's more complex), but most devs go from OO to FP, not the other way around.

These days there is such an explostion of languages, frameworks, techniques etc it must be scary for a beginner. Given that, i'd advise to go by the safe (average) path.
This one?: http://www.ijaiem.org/volume2issue12/IJAIEM-2013-12-26-071.p...

starts reading

Holy broken English Batman!

checks author names

Ah. Ok.

Interesting that respondents seem to be using "sweetness" as a stand-in for "how much I like it". I'd class Coke as a fair bit drier than Pepsi—still quite sweet, but noticeably less so than Pepsi. The "open" version of responses, though, rate Coke as much sweeter.

I don't get measuring the "caffeine" perception, but maybe I'm just unusual in not knowing what caffeine _per se_ tastes like? Possibly something's being lost in translation (so to speak) here.

I wonder what percentage identified _both_ drinks correctly. Perhaps it turns out that ~half+ of all people are really bad at differentiating flavors in colas.

Interesting that "can't identify" went up with Coca Cola. I definitely find both its nose and flavor to be milder than Pepsi, so I guess that makes sense.

(for the record, I go for Coke over Pepsi, which you'd have to pay me to drink, though even Coke wears out its welcome with me after a half-dozen ounces or so)
Here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Lis...

Read the methodology and the statistical analyses, they are reasonably thorough and rigorous (amateur, but definitely not "quasi-scientific").

Here's another: http://soundexpert.org/encoders-192-kbps

And another: http://soundexpert.org/encoders-256-kbps

You can see that the differences at 192 Kbit/s AAC are generally beyond the capabilities of human perception, and at 256 Kbit/s, AAC has a very healthy margin.

So the argument that AAC is perceptually inferior to CD quality has little basis according to the evidence.
It would be wise to do an MD/PhD. The MDs have all the data.

Also Business schools need professors.
> Most of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics can't be attributed to any of them, and even then it only covers physics

Einstein is one of the founders of quantum mechanics (1921 Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect). And Newton founded calculus - which procedes any ability to mathematically describe natural observations.
Five Years of Drought
CloudFlare, We Have a Problem
> I wonder what percentage identified _both_ drinks correctly. Perhaps it turns out that ~half+ of all people are really bad at differentiating flavors in colas.

If you serve it cold enough most people can't tell the difference between coke and 7up.
> From a public health perspective, Prohibition was a success.

Do you count skyrocketing murder rate and gov't-poisoned hooch in your metric for success?
Easy to say about any new app. Do you include Facebook and Google in this? They were most certainly a "killer app/site" at launch, but managed to stick around.
Sellers of drugs, will ALWAYS sell drugs, both illegal and legal.

Buyers/Users of drugs will ALWAYS buy/use drugs, illegal or legal.

It is an interaction between humans of Earth, no government or entity, no system or blocks will ever stop it. Shut down the internet, it will continue. Short of a massive purge of life, drugs will never go away.

If you somehow...were able to shut down the "darkweb", it would move into something else that authorities are unaware of.

On a whim, if I desired, I can purchase any drug I want, probably get it today, without using the internet.

The war on drugs has no end. Stop trying to pretend you (the lawmakers) have never tried an illegal substance. Even the most powerful public figure in the world (Obama) has admitted to using illegal substances at one point in his life.

Government: It's time to sit down, shut up, stop wasting the taxpayers money and leave it alone.
Unhealthy Fixation
The Missing Ingredient in Data Science
I wonder if Pokemon Go is using this, supposedly it is built using Unity.
Nevermind. The root-cause seems to be aggressive browser caching.

Chrome and Safari display the same behavior i.e. all pod IDs the same.

Firefox displays different pod IDs (90% of the IDS are the same, however there are a few that are different)
Spotify doesn't care
There was also "jake leg" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_ginger#History)
As long as you have more blocking tech than the non-tech-savvy public, you should be fine. Those people now know about ad blocking (they're a little late to the party), so things like ad block killer lists and extra extensions to block blockers should work for another 15 years or so before it becomes enough of a problem that it's worth it for ad companies to respond.
This is a good problem. The solution is to raise the bar: in order to be a professor you have to make a tangible advancement in your field, something that advances the state of the art by an order of magnitude.
yeah sure, vnc. which works fine over the internet.

it even works fine over ssh, over vpn, over the internet, over 3g, in an airplane!

it's turtles all the way down.
Definitely think the groundwork can be laid out without covering the entire breadth of formal methods. Even a history lesson with Djiskstra, Lamport, Mizra, et al can be illuminating. It's good to lay the foundation so that when a beginner encounters a problem they have the instincts to know that they should look up these tools in order to help them.

I found it a shame that I didn't encounter these tools only until very recently. It's a well kept secret in academia that I think should be shared.
Brexit: Why Projections Were Wrong
And what about national security information? Just as various people at The Guardian whether possessing the Snowdon documentation is legal (hint: It's not).
Apple considering a bid for the Formula 1 racing series
Ah, just like Quad electrostatic speakers.
But if you learn about concurrency via threads then you have to learn about mutexes... if you learn about mutexes then you have to learn about condition variables... and if you learn about condition variables then you have t...

Well you see where this is going. I think it's important to learn about Threads, Mutexes, Condition Variables, and why sharing isn't caring, but I don't think those lessons necessarily need to come before learning about the Actor model.
khalifa, n: successor.
This is neoliberalism at work. Bernie Sanders challenges this, while Obama and Hillary seek to preserve it.

Any chance at changing this in the 2016 election is dead. 4 or 8 more years of this and it's only going to get worse.

My only hope is that a strong progressive movement can take off before the right wing Nationalists make it into power.
> Remember that most teams are named after their sponsor. A sponsor is not related to any city/esport. It's just a sponsor.

It's a bit more complicated than that, actually. Most of the large esports organizations (examples: Evil Geniuses, Cloud 9, Fnatic, Team Liquid) have an identity that's separate from both their sponsors and their teams. Teams that represent a single sponsor are pretty rare -- I've seen a few, but they're not common.
What field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math & physics, and the further it is from engineering.