skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If everything is so rosy, why are we left with multi-year gaps in even minor product revisions for products like MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iPod, iPad?

Because the Air and MBP want to phase out in favor of MBPr and Macbook (plain) and they've been waiting on Intel to deliver anything significant to warrant a new product line for ages. (Intel Skylake CPUs in form factors and energy consumption compatible with the MBPr line have been TBD until recently --some still are--, and in limited production yields still. And previous generation didn't even give any performance speed bump of 2 and 3 generations behind MBPr CPU, and in some cases, worse). In the cases where Intel delivered, Apple did too (e.g. Skylake iMac and Macbook).

The Mac Pro has a similar story (and isn't their first priority or biggest seller anyway).

That said, not sure about any "multi-year gaps" regarding the iPad. The iPad Pro 9.7 came out in March, and the iPad Mini 4 less than a year ago, on September.
Significant - it matters.
Substantial - of large magnitude.
It is unreasonable for the government to limit housing. It directly causes economic segregation. Only the wealthiest get the homes allowed by law while everyone else gets pushed further out. The market does not do this. Our segregation laws do.

If it were legal to build fourplexes anywhere in Palo Alto, merely wealthy families would be able to outbid some of the insanely wealthy with their four rent payments combined. For the most part, single family homeowners can't actually afford single family homes in such desirable locations, but our laws make it illegal for middle class families to outbid the wealthy the way they always have: using less land.

This is an obvious injustice, and the people who insist on laws that exclude others will soon find themselves in our history books. Stop letting Dixiecrats call themselves progressives.
> Why fight it when you can simply move work elsewhere?

You can't really do that. You underestimate the powerful network effect Silicon Valley has on the tech industry. Almost all of the investors are here, and many of the world's best software engineers choose to live here and will not move elsewhere for work. There are only a few other cities that have a lot of software jobs and also a large pool of software talent, and they also have a high cost of living -- NYC, Boston, and Seattle come to mind.
Howso?

Both of those involve actual research, which is to say, trying the impossible and unknown, to discover the possible and knowable.

Though I'm also aware that there's a tremendous difference between chasing markets, which gives you drugs such as Viagra, or lifetime (type-II) diabetes management, rather than, say, wiping out tropical disease or promoting diet which would avoid diabetes in the first place.

But what did you have in mind?
Government does not meddle with interest rates. Not here, at least
It's because they probably can't use Google but they wanted a Google. It's a writing device to get around that inconvenient fact.
Protobuf and most similar libraries don't support delta compression which is essential for game state updates.
Go remote. High quality engineers, project managers, designers, etc can be had all around the world, and if you're seeing a drop in team or employee performance from working remotely, you're not managing properly.

Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman. There are successful startups all over the world. Unicorns? Probably not, but that's a perception issue, not a quality issue (current unrealistic valuations will continue to come back down to Earth)

The number of orgs supporting remote, even fully remote, grows all the time: https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#companies... ; if an employee chooses to expose themselves to outrageous housing expenses due to the employer's ability to externalize this cost to the employee (with no penalty to the employer, because "that's just the way it is"), this will never change.
Incentive matters. I'm ADHD, which turns the effect of the 'this isn't that interesting' dial up to 11. I could do repitition if I was going to Japan, but I probably would prefer the other one otherwise.
There are more ways of looking at what appears to be obscene amounts of talent... some suggest the media also has a hand, since they create the celebrities (monsters). Einstein was definitely celebrated.

But it's odd how popular perception can end up so far fetched. There still exists this notion that knowing everything and memorizing everything and being able to compute like a computer are all super powers. If only.

Except, we've been able to write things down forever, the internet is in our pockets now, and we have supercomputers crunching obscene amounts of data. As it turns out, none of these are "super" powers. Their capacity is easily enhanced with simple tools, which we don't even bother to take out most of the time.

You'd get definitely get better grades if your biological capacity were higher, since using tools during exams is cheating. But we're starting to think it's silly basing tests on these things.
Direct injection makes a significant difference by delivering cooler fuel at the correct timing point. The fuel is also delivered at a higher pressure and with better atomization.
Fun fact: Antarctica got its first ATM before East Palo Alto did. (Both in 1998)
That's the point, to use a "better" language. Especially if designs aren't similar.

If behavior of compiled program matches the original one, that is.
Also governments get tax not on the value of a single property but the cumulative value of the properties (emphasis on the plurality) .

If my 1M house gets replaced with 10x 250k units the government has 2.5x its tax base. See how affordability and solid tax base can coincide?
> Your argument about investors and quality developers only being in SFBA is a strawman.

That was not my argument. I said most, or "almost all," not all. And that's true! Even the NYC startups have to come to the Bay Area to meet with VCs.
I think that every company handles its C-levels somewhat uniquely, for a variety of reasons. But if there's an archetypical COO job, I'd say it's the process-and-execution leadership job, but not the long-term strategy, big product vision job.
This is very unintuitive to me. Most games have some sort of asymmetry built in. For example one player usually goes first. In the game of nim, a clever player can provably always dominate against any strategy if they move first. That doesn't sound like an equilibrium to me...
I agree with munificent. ‘Transpiler’ implies very similar semantics between the source and target language; ‘compiler’ implies fairly different semantics (where a translation between the source and target is not obvious).
The land in the far unincorporated subdivisions of Texas are nothing but houses exactly like the photos in the OP, and the land there is so cheap it's practically free.
Even if "some aspects of Larry Page's life are unenviable", what part of "he can quit anytime" doesn't still hold?

Some parts of everyone's life are unenviable.

That said, I don't think it makes much sense to comparmentalize working lives into "enviable" and "unenviable" parts.

The end result is what matters, and the bottom line is that he has billions to show for it, can work as little or as much as he wants (the other stuff, that he's somehow "forced" is BS, he could take a decorative role in the company if he wished to), and he can retire at any time.

So what part should I show sympathy for? That, despite all these facts, he works e.g. 15-hour days? Well, so do tons of double-shifting dirt poor people, immigrants etc. Without the good parts, and despite their inclinations.

>If you dismiss difficult aspects of a person's life because somebody else has it worse, then nobody actually has a hard life

Not just "somebody else" -- 99.999% of the population. He has it better than statistically almost everyone on the planet. There are maybe 1000 or 10000 people in his position (net worth, age, etc.).
Why would that be interesting? Presumably a Swift compiler handles its own type checking.
Housing is a taxpayer subsidized, inflation proof savings plan for the average citizen. It is also levered.

Open this chart of historical mortgage rates and click 'max': https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NUh

Since 1981, rates have declined and tax treatment has become more advantageous to existing owners.

With the current ZIRP/NIRP/QE regimes around the world, the leverage available to the average citizen has never been greater. That leverage has gone directly into housing.

If the leverage trends continue (see 'helicopter money'), housing (along with all other asset classes), will get further out of reach.
They're not reasonably separable. Memorizing romaji, or even strings of hiragana, removes the associations between root-words that are related, like those radicals that let you identify menu items, and removes the visual aid for identifying root words in context. Memorizing associations between arbitrary groups of sounds without the radicals is actually harder, it just sounds easier to those intimidated by the idea of learning characters.

Given, much to Mair's displeasure, that actual native media is written with kanji, they're immediately necessary, and not studying kanji effectively bars students from any learning outside the classroom until they have - which is completely counter to giving students either the context necessary for immersion or the reinforcement for traditional study to work.

Maybe it's merited for Chinese classes, with its larger character set, but Mair's approach just sacrifices students' ability to learn on their own in favor of lowering attrition rates of intro-level classes. It's actively harmful to students aiming for fluency to build up the characters as this insurmountable mountain in the distance before they can actually use their knowledge, rather than the useful compositional blocks and visual aids that they are.
Kind of... HTTP/2's advantages depend on using push, and/or reducing prototcol negotiation latence and round-trip time... with HTTP/2, you don't have to negotiate a new/full TCP connection, which has overhead... also headers are compressed. The differences in compression and push become more pronounced with higher latencies and lower bandwidth.

At the very low bandwidth (2g/edge), the constraint goes the other way, where you don't gain much as the channel is pretty much flooded the entire time and the connection overhead offset is lower. ymmv.

All around, more traditional approaches can have a bigger impact... actually optimizing images, switching to svg where practical and reducing code, markup and stylesheets goes a long way. Reducing server response times is also pretty crucial. If your DBMS is taking 200ms to respond to most requests, your application is already going to be at least that slow... got multiple requests, worse still.

Effective caching strategies are how you overcome a lot of that. There are many pieces, and it's a matter of checking what your bottlenecks actually are, and minimizing your content transferred first.
Rio Olympics: Usain Bolt Wins, Sets Another Record
Nobody is irreplaceable. And he doesn't do such a good job in the first place.
> Learning styles are a myth

That's... an impressive opinion to hold. Good luck with that.
Local government costs also go up as population increases.
Cash transactions are anonymous only if most transactions are cash. I take x eur from the bank and give them to you. You put x eur to the bank. That's linkable. And the people sign up to all sorts of savings cards en masse making their transactions at the till completely traceable. It is not about what happens routinely, it is about what can happen. Banks don't give a damn about your transaction history as long as you account balance adds up and neither does the government. With cash, there is an illusion of anonymity. Without cash you actually know what happens.
Thank you for the kind comment. It's interesting that you say that the build quality is very high on some of these homes. I was debating the issue with someone before writing this comment and that was a question I had. I was thinking about how craftsmanship and art exist on somewhat different dimensions for creative endeavors. For example, someone who is poor at the craft of music won't be able to create a song that's listenable, but someone who is excellent at the craft but poor at the art will create something that is technically excellently but unmoving emotionally. Or in web design, this would be a site which very carefully recreates any of a million expensive corporate landing pages but doesn't have any character of its own. There are also examples the other way, of imperfectly executed creative works that nonetheless are effective on an emotional level[1].

I don't know enough about architecture to say, but it seems possible that the people who build these homes may be lacking in this second, artistic aspect.

1: I recently watched Hachi: A Dog's Tale. It is notable in that the craftsmanship of the film is merely adequate, by traditional film metrics, but it's so incredibly emotional that it has won a place on the IMDB Top 250 films. I would also point to Stephen King, who is one of the most impactful people alive when it comes to TV and film, not to mention his prolific writings, but his stories don't show the craftsmanship of one of the literary greats.
>But think about the sort of pressure that would be on Larry's shoulders. If he quits, or makes the wrong decision, that potentially affects thousands of his employees, and their families.

And yet, a vast majority of CEOs don't give a fuck about all this, and can destroy companies happily, and fly to another on their golden parachutes.
Volkswagen cheated to try to get a less expensive system in place. DPFs and urea injection are pretty well proven technologies and work pretty well.
Here in Australia, I suspect mining and construction will be the biggest contributors.

Every office job I have worked has been 38 hours with no overtime save for a handful of exceptions in 8 years of tech work.

Mining on the other hand can have consecutive 12 hour shifts be the norm, and I am sure that it gets worse than that.

We have some fairly strict award rates/employment regulations that govern things like that, but mining seems to be perhaps one of a few exceptions.
There's nothing stopping you from using something like fiddler to make it more transparent.
Great article. Are those diagrams from Omnigraffle?

Obviously you are focusing on x86, but it might be worth mentioning where many of these ideas developed. For example, SGI Origin hardware (http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/origin/isca.pdf).
I've been told that the huge Ikea-Home Depot shopping center in East Palo Alto was built on top of the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. Apparently it was contested gang territory, and the city used eminent domain to solve the problem by demolishing it and converting it to retail.
>why has some culture arrived to the particular moral notions it teaches and enforces?

Based on its history -- and because enough people came to believe that such a moral code promotes its wellbeing and interests better than alternatives.
I don't think it applies to any design of non trivial complexity.
This matches my experiences with them and other Peter Thiel funded startups.
>It seems that we made a pact with the devil by positioning housing as an investment asset.

That was certainly a mistake, but the much larger mistake was made (and continues to be made) by the FED (and other central banks at the FED's insistence). FED efforts to prop up the housing and equities markets through QEinfinity, Operation Twist, the FOMC, and countless other FED mechanisms designed to prop up markets (and owners) at the expense of everyone else have led us to the situation we are in now. If not for FED chicanery, housing prices would fall precipitously to meet real demand. People would be able to afford a place to live and speculators would realize that homes are places to live and not investments.

>If I bought shares in AAPL at $50 (now $100+) and someone comes along asking that AAPL let them buy some shares for say, $65, I'm obviously not going to be happy since the value of my investment is under threat.

If nobody was willing to to pay more then $65 for your Apple shares, then in a free market, like it or not, your shares are worth only $65. Just because they were $100 at one point and you "arent happy" that they arent still worth $100, doesn't mean the government should step in and offer $100 when the market only offers $65. That's the problem we have now. In the fantasy world that the FED is trying to propagate they can continue to offer $100 no matter how low the actual demand for your stock is. In reality, all their efforts to prop up your stock have eliminated free markets, dried up "real" liquidity, and massively disrupted equity, bond, fx, and all other markets. The longer they try to extend and pretend the worse the problem gets. For example, the bank of Japan owns over 60% of all ETF's in Japan. 60%!! Things are not going to end well.
> It's easy - and fun - to scoff

I think that's a great point. It's an easy way out to frame a discussion like this. "McMansions exist because people are tacky and have bad taste".

I think it's more interesting to look at it from the other perspective. Why is it such a popular design?

Maybe the quaintness of pre-war/post-war housing did not keep up with the needs of modern life. Maybe we need more space, and more privacy from the ever expanding sprawl of suburbia to feel safe, and sheltered (in a mental sense). The cheesy facade could just be a simple tool to keep the building's quick-and-dirty plaster walls, within the scope of the suburban vernacular.

I actually grew up in a McMansion. I always thought it was a great house. We had a pool, and two concrete lion statues guarding the front door. Thinking back on it makes me cringe. How could my parent's buy a house like that? It oozed with tackiness.

But it got the job done.

It was large, had enough room for the whole family, and was a physical manifestation of their hard work.

When neighbors stopped talking to each other and only focused their attention on their own families, it became harder to flaunt wealth. Maybe the McMansions are just a clearer, and louder, cultural identifier, compared to things like gold watches and fine clothing?
> I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto?

I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?
> If he quits, or makes the wrong decision, that potentially affects thousands of his employees, and their families.

He is remarkable in every way possible, but I doubt this is true. World won't end, if he quits. Google and everyone in there will be just fine. Look at Jobs (and many other "irreplaceable" people), for example.
All his examples of presumably 'good' architecture strike me as hideous and in many instances depressing. I'd take the McMansion over those hands down.
> Singer being one of them

Example??
I've always had a problem with Governments(who don't pay tax on their profits) operating in environments where they may compete directly with private industry(who must pay tax on their profits)

We have two cities nearby that run their own power companies and all areas around the cities are supplied by a much larger private company. Power rates in both cities are higher than the surrounding areas, and outages are far more common in the city-ran areas.

I know of several cities that have attempted to provide city-wide wi-fi service. I do not know of any that were successful. Most of them bought the mesh-networking koolaid and disaster was the result.
Transpiler vs compiler is a useful distinction.

If you could just as well program directly in the target output/language for the problem domain, then it's a transpiler.
Having a founder fly out every week is still cheaper than building a startup in the Bay Area as soon as you leave the 3 people in one room stage.

The reason why it happens is the same reason why VC have historicly had negative returns; VC's as an industry make most of their money by convincing investors to part with there money not from actual returns. As such they like having a dog and pony show in the area while they try and fleece more people.

This sets up boom and bust cycles and many market distortions. As VC's still want positive returns it's just not their #1 goal.
I'm surprised that none of the YCs startups have tried to solve this problem. People really want 'affordable housing' and YC's motto to its startups is to 'make something people want'- so what gives?
Get outta here with your free markets. In free markets, those that lose big get up off the table. In our TBTF markets, the bigger your loss, the greater the odds that your national Treasury will backstop you.

Have you helped out your local banker today?
And when you have cash, a single robbery can destroy your life savings. Or police can come and seize your money. There was someone in the thread amazed about the trust people put in the complex stack. I'm amazed the trust people put in the ordinary paper-based process. A computer cannot be bribed and leaves a cryptograhic audit trail and does not burn but for some reason a stack of papers under my matress is more trustworthy. There is a lot of irrationality around the topic. I don't know who's right but very clearly it is to an extent about fear of unknown.
I don't think it's a meaningful term because there is no reasonable definition, specifically of where you draw the line.

cfront compiled C++ to C, so it's a transpiler, right? Or is that just an unimportant implementation detail?

Everything targeting LLVM IR is a transpiler, because it's just source-to-source, with the second source being LLVM IR.

Similarly things targeting the JVM or CLR - all transpilers because both of these are relatively high level targets. They might not be something you would consider a "source language", but for many people assembly language is a perfectly reasonable source language, and thus...

Everything compiling to assembly language is a transpiler. The target language is assembly.

Having worked on compilers for over two decades it just comes across as a made-up term by people who don't understand that what a compiler does is translate from one language to another (be it another "source language", ASTs, linear IRs, VM bytecodes, assembly languages, or executable code).

I don't think I'm being particularly pedantic here. Compilers simply generate another form that one person or another might consider a source language (in fact people working on JITs most definitely think of their input as the source language).
Off the grid entrepreneurs
Some are already dong this with Apple's JSCore.
It really depends on the context. An urban street lined with massive brownstones is nice. A nice little cottage in the woods by itself is nice. Large houses all bunched up, in some random suburban setting, is usually going to look kind of goofy. It would be better to have homes in a range of sizes, with some variation in lot sizes as well. That's going to blend in better with whatever surrounds the homes.
Can you clarify what you mean by xhr throttling? Implementing something like _.throttle to wrap requests?