skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These buildings look like they were built in one pass. If a building expands piecemeal, "learning" as it goes, I imagine the end result would look better even if nobody was thinking of masses and voids along the way.
I'm not a big fan of the McMansion houses, but I'm sure they mean the world to their owners, who have made large sacrifices to get the house of 'their' dreams.

Personally I like the Georgian style; big windows and look decent when they're kept simple, or something a little more modern depending on the location. Yes, money doesn't buy happiness, but I'm sure we all have a picture on our mind of a dream house. Nothing wrong with aspirations, excuse me while I do more than just dream!
Complaining about p.a. in a finance context makes about as much sense as complaining about "etc".
This is really cool, and exactly what I need for my project.. thanks!
Yes, in fact, I always assumed the derogatory nature of the term (McX for X = mansion) is a dig at wanting an impressive-looking facade, but not being able to pay for a larger plot of land or the architect to design that big facade.
Nissan Motor Company has announced a new type of gasoline engine
The connotation I've always had for "McMansion" is the object of a middle or upper-middle class obsession with a poorly built, absurdly huge, cookie cutter house that looks just like every other house on its street, packed together on 1/4 acre or smaller lots with no lawn, yet selling for upwards of $500,000.

Not that I'm one to be snobbish, since I live in an old farmhouse that needs two issues fixed for every one that I tackle. But I'm happy that my only neighbors are a nice old lady in another little farmhouse, a church, and the animals that live in the woods behind me. It's not much to look at but it's within my means and in fact, my mortgage payment (tax and insurance escrow included) is less than a car payment for most of my peers. I'm happy that I don't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" and I can focus on my family's needs and my own hobbies instead.
> I imagine it would be quite awkward running on all fours while holding on to your spear.

"On all fours" isn't quite what our common primate ancestors do on the ground, though. Picture a gorilla: the "hands" are knuckled. I imagine it'd work alright to hold a small tool (e.g. a stone dagger) in them, though not anything as long as a spear.
But a lot of these rules are silly pseudoscience. I am strongly reminded of the history of people obsessed with fitting everything into the golden ratio. Because it's "god's ratio" and supposedly appears everywhere in nature. It turns out a lot of that was BS. And it certainly didn't make paintings that didn't fit the golden ratio bad or inferior.

There isn't any evidence to support that any of these rules actually make the architecture "better", whatever that even means. Even if a survey found that people prefer one style to another, it's still a highly subjective personal preference. There can be people with different preferences. If people didn't like this style of houses, they wouldn't be buying or producing them.
Your argument sounds reasonable but I can't see how these homes have sane floor plans based on the rooms we can see.

I've seen a lot of property and general the homes I like the most generally make sensible and efficient use of the space with minimal or no weird angles. This kinda limits the general shape a house can have.
Cook has his edges. He's supposed to be a demanding, logical boss.

> One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?” Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

http://fortune.com/2008/11/24/apple-the-genius-behind-steve/
I think you guys are missing my point, which is my fault. Making art for the money should never be a primary goal, unless one's goal is the emphasis and irony of that relationship (see: Koons). Otherwise, how can it really be art? It's been constrained and affected by the expected effect.

However, there's a huge difference between self-labeling one's art in a way that obscures it from wide access (like labeling a music created today as 'Jazz') and actually re-producing previously successful art forms (e.g. 'Jazz') because of a fear of judgment or chasing of praise.
While you're points are valid, you're wrong about there being no technical reason. There is a valid technical reason, and that is, if http2 didn't require TLS, and ran on port 80, in practice it would get MITMed by software expecting plain http 1.1 and result in a broken mess. Requiring TLS is a technical decision that allows you to avoid that issue.
On the other hand, not enforcing standards gives everybody the opportunity to be one's own judge on aesthetics, and not everybody is good at that.

Belgium is well-known for that kind of freedom (for examples, see http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/)
I can't seem to find the old pie charts on the FSF site about their money breakdown (~the fsf has plenty of money, like 5x their annual spend and contributions cover more than operating expenses).

Every once in a while pops up a (not so subtle) post like this and every time I really want to help their cause, but after my wikipedia fiasco I only want to put money where I believe it does good and really needed.

[]http://www.fastcompany.com/3024306/bottom-line/why-this-star...
Most certainly. Here is my hypothesis. Each individual has some taste function f which assigns an aesthetic enjoyment value to some house appearance. It is unlikely that f varies uniformly or without bound across people, as a certain kind of aesthetic nihilist might think: there are clearly universal trends in aesthetic judgments across cultures. But these trends are weak in comparison to culture-specific preferences. In music, for example, most cultures agree that an octave sounds more pleasant than other intervals, but the other intervals considered consonant/dissonant in Western music are not universal, nor is the concept that dissonance creates tension that needs to be resolved. These concepts form the core of what makes Western music seem good or bad, but they are entirely culturally learned from other people in your social network.

I hypothesize a person's f varies primarily as a function of the social networks they move in. Most people who are into architectural design theory are in very separate social networks from people who buy McMansions, comprising different social classes. So it is likely that they will dislike the things that McMansion people like.

Furthermore, I hypothesize that social groups develop fs partially to foster in-group cohesion and out-group separation, which requires making the out-group seem bad. As such, the people who are into architectural design theory will develop fs which penalize the kinds of things that McMansion people like. So under this theory, this tumblr is just a sophisticated way for one social group to put down another social group.

The question of what tastes fetch millions of dollars and last centuries and what tastes die out, then has to do with which social group ends up having more influence (in addition to the probably very weak universal aesthetic factors).

From this perspective, the screeds against McMansions seem especially distasteful, because the group that has more influence is putting down the taste of the group that has less. It seems like punching down.

An effective argument against this point would be to show that people who buy McMansions don't like them either, and are just forced to buy them because there's nothing better available. That would suggest McMansions violate the aesthetic principles even of the social group that buys them, and contribute to human misery, rather than just violating the aesthetic principles of a highly-educated privileged class.

The above obviously has lots of statements needing qualification and support, which is why it's just a conjecture.
There's a joke in there about third derivatives of displacement (jerk).
I too love the FastMail web interface. It rocks! On Android, unfortunately, FastMail comes up short. I have yet to find a satisfactory solution
I don't mean to imply that the theory has no merit -- what you've just cited is, I think, the more convincing part of the argument.

I'll try to dig up the refs tonight, because it makes for interesting reading.
In these types of houses, these things aren't added after the fact (like a workshop) or designed to be used as on offshoot space (like a workshop) in the original development.

The homes are unbalanced, you enter on one side, and then you go down long, strangely winding halls to find the bedrooms. They have weird angles for the walls (why does this bedroom have 7 walls? Why does it have 4 ceiling planes?). They have poor functioning practical spaces (same angle issues in bathrooms and kitchens, which inhibit the use of functional elements like drawers that don't open all the way, if at all).

Those external visual artifacts are like cabinetry that pretends it has drawers or doors but really just has the hardware for the knobs or handles.
>> "Watches? Tried that."

I don't understand how people think they've tried the watch and failed. They've put out ONE version. The first iPod was Mac only and therefore didn't sell very well. When the iPhone launched you had to buy the device outright - no subsidy and it was lacking features that other phones had for quite a while. It was a few versions before it really took off. I think people shrugging off the watch are being incredibly short sighted (and I say this as someone who had one and sold it). It's not perfect for a mass market now but it can be. The software changes in watchOS 3 are really going to help towards that but in the long term this thing could become essential to your health and from interviews Tim Cook has done in the past it sounds like that's the direction they want to go once they've got the basic software and form factor down.
My pleasure! Im aiming to release some of the articles focussing on ESXi level scheduling this week. Stay tuned!
yeah I found it hard to get through and gave up after skimming through parts of it

this clunker of a sentence stood out...

Airbnb and Uber use these newly available cloud tools to force deep changes in a variety of incumbent businesses

It's not that these writers incapable of writing succinctly ..I think there is a premium in academia on verbosity.
My point was that construction is what makes the McMansion, not masses and voids. Though the two are related in that solid construction lends itself well to some designs and layouts, and poorly to others.
Thanks all for visiting the articles. Long time HN reader, never expected to appear on HN! WOW!
You should try https://www.webfaction.com/?aid=9281 (affiliate link, pays my bill). Best shared host in the world (custom install + maintained mysql/pg)! I dare anyone to comment on a better host.
It could absolutely be both. Dave Syer is not the only person who drove Spring Boot. Phil Webb is the main day-to-day driver, from what I can tell. He's definitely been active in soliciting feedback from Labs Pivots.
My issue with the article is that it is:

1) Making purely aesthetic arguments

2) In several cases I feel that the "bad" architecture is aesthetically more appealing than the "good architecture.

For example, when the author discusses how "secondary masses should never compete with the primary mass"; what that seems to mean in practice is "ugly, squat, lumpen buildings are good; interesting, attractive silhouettes are bad". No doubt the author would disagree with my characterisation, but then, that's sort of the point. It feels very subjective.

Of all the examples given, the one I unambiguously agreed with was the one where none of the windows styles matched.
Fitbit drops support for Healthvault
Here it is:

"Disclaimer: These same principles do not always apply to Modernist or even canonically Postmodern architecture. These principles are for the classical or traditional architecture most residential homes are modeled after."

At least some of the modernist styles explicitly rejects aesthetics, so it's hard to fault them for being so fiendishly ugly.

I think this Tumblr walks a very fine line. On one hand, it seems to want to be brutishly "haw-haw rich people have horrible taste and are bad people". This is echoed in the tone of some of the text (but only some, it also emphasise some mansions as being very pretty), and in the profile picture of Reagan. On the other hand, on the surface, it retreats into an extremely narrow trench of claiming to only and specifically critiquing the half-assed imitation of classical styles.

I guess you can call it a kind of dog whistling.
Charter schools can dismiss students without due process, can kick out or deny students with low grades, and are usually not obligated to provide special education services. They are not public schools. They are corporate-run political organizations that prop up dozens of these PACs pushing an pro-charter agenda.

https://cloakinginequity.com/2016/08/01/breaking-news-aclu-f...
Go to any blog about "good" modern architecture. As it turns out "good" architecture these days is roof-less bauhaus with windows that take the entire front wall, including the bedroom. Looks good on Tumblr, impossible to live in, expensive to build, and insane heating bll. No, thanks.

Case in point: http://designhomes.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/mid-centu...
A "unit" isn't necessarily residential. There are mixed-use "units" on the market that might be used as homes or as offices/shops.

A "dwelling" mostly comes up in the contexts of censuses and elections. One census form needs to be filed per "dwelling", and should include information about everyone who has dwelled there for the majority of the last year. This includes, for example, people just crashing on the couch, even if they're just on vacation and "live" somewhere else. For another example, this includes homeless shelters: the people staying in them can say the shelter is their "dwelling", though they're unlikely to feel like it's their home. (Also, a "dwelling" is not necessarily residentially zoned. You might be dwelling in a storage unit. It's not necessarily legal, but the government still needs a word to describe "places people live" that includes such cases.)

There's also "residence", which is just "dwelling" in fancier clothes, though usually implies residential zoning.
"Java at this time is the only way to build apps" is the right answer for Android OS, because the Android OS is a combination of an app runtime and a Java middleware layer. Adding another runtime to Android would make it a second class citizen, or it would involve building a parallel middleware. What they really mean is that the result would be messy, and it wouldn't be Android-as-we-know-it.

You can, of course, move the Android middleware layer to other OSs, for Android compatibility. Which is how you can run Android apps alongside Tizen apps: https://youtu.be/nmiHPcHGgSM

Android was designed for one runtime, Dalvik and later ART. But there is nothing preventing a new OS being designed for multiple runtimes that includes runtime support for Android apps.

I'm generally not sympathetic to Java complainers. If you have Android Studio, or any other decent IDE, verbosity isn't a problem. But an OS built for Dart apps and a Dart UI stack would be the logical next step.
How does NetBSD fare in that regard?
Several questions:
* Is this a one-man effort (for now at least?) or is this 'official'
* Why refactor the increment operator? (s ++ to s = s + 1)
* Is clang supported (or libc++ for example?)
* Do you have a roadmap for planned refactoring?

Interesting project, I wonder about the effort which is required. Even slow incremental involves breaking interfaces.
I am all in favor of safety-critical software being open source, but I dislike the argument of forcing the issue by claiming the right to tinker, or really any variation on "I bought it therefore I can do whatever I want to with it". It's not true when the hardware in question has safety implications. For example, when I buy a car, I do not have a right to do anything I want to with it. I can't drive it in ways that would be dangerous to others, and the fact that I am legally restricted as to where and how I may drive it does not feel like an inalienable right being taken away from me. That's clearly a strawman but bear with me.

In a similar vein, if I were to physically modify the engine in such a way as to make it faster but fail environmental or safety regulations, that could also have financial or legal repercussions for me (or Volkswagen, to cite a recent example :). The same argument could be made against modifying automotive software- vehicles are certified by government agencies around the world based on the idea that they will perform a certain way WRT safety and emissions, therefore software behavior has to be just as unchanging and predictable as hardware behavior. The fact that people can and do hack their cars all the time doesn't change the regulatory environment for car companies.

I do believe that embedded software should be as open, modifiable, and testable as possible, but I don't think people claiming the right to tinker as a basic human right are going to change anyone's minds about this. The biggest impediments to (for example) car companies making their ECUs open source and hackable have nothing to do with a dogmatic attachment to proprietary software and security-through-obscurity (although those concepts have their adherents, misguided as they may be), and much more to do with compliance with government regulations and minimizing their potential liability.

There is at least a perception that having open source, hackable ECU software would be all downside with no upside to the companies selling those vehicles. The way to change this perception is to show it as being demonstrably wrong, rather than to simply claim a right to tinker. The best way to get open source ECUs is to either make the consumer market care about this (not likely) or to update the regulatory environment in such a way that car companies have a non-abstract motivation to go open source.

This is not unlike the dreaded binary blobs required to use certain 802.11 chips on open source operating systems- they exist because of FCC requirements, not because the vendors love binary blobs. They are allowed to ship software-defined radios, but the only way they can guarantee that their SDRs don't broadcast on illegal frequencies is to lock down the software that controls the hardware. It's not an ideal solution, but its the only solution they've got aside from spending even more money to ensure that safety at the hardware level, which wouldn't do anyone any good.
I think the term mcmansion is abused.

In common use MacMansion seems to mean "big new house which I don't like", and the reason can be anything from looks, to environmental footprint, to simple envy.
Search Funds are a relatively common financial vehicle through which MBAs acquire existing businesses: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/centers-initiat...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessaloder/2014/08/07/the-sear...
He assumes that the design of dwellings should be determined by the aesthetic quality of their exterior front view. But the owners spend the most time in the interior, and second most in the back yard.
> Indeed, D.C. charters educate about 45% of the students and are outperforming the district schools, despite having poorer students and less funding

This is a common theme that charter schools seem to do "better" than the standard public schools in urban areas while they do worse in suburban areas.

The problem is that this means that the charter schools aren't doing better because of education reasons but are instead sub-selecting the students and leaving the worse students behind (either by selection or expulsion) to poison the public schools.

However, there is a giant elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. The single biggest improvement in school performance (charter or public) comes from switching to year-round school--especially among minorities. For a modest 25% budget increase, we can make a huge boost in everybody's performance.

But, see, charter schools aren't about improvement. They are about blaming people without actually having to commit more money to solve the actual problem.
>Stay postive about past employers.

That's a nice thought, but what if your past employer was Oracle? Doesn't honesty count for anything?
The British equivalent is the estates of hideous mock Tudor and cod Georgian houses on the outskirts of British cities. Same concept done on less land: poor design, poor construction.
Speaking from my own experience: Steam games don't perform all that well on Linux using a Haswell Intel GPU when compared to Windows. I would imagine BSD to be worse since Intel's focus is more on Linux, and the Intel BSD driver tends to be a version or two behind. On the other hand, the proprietary Nvidia driver for BSD is fast and stable, in some cases faster than its Linux equivalent, and Nvidia seems interested in continually improving its driver for all platforms simultaneously.
Children living close to the airport serving leaded avgas were found to have a small but tangible increase in blood lead levels. General aviation itself has been on the decline for the past few decades and alternative fuel seems to be finally getting approved at last, so the problem seems to be a well managed one.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/
How would you use A* pathfinding on a front end web page?
> Why not just call them mansions?

Because they are mass-produced and consistently pretty much the same everywhere -- just like McDonald's products.
I do recruiting (3rd party). This sounds like total shenanigans. I would be actively afraid to ask for your SSN and definitely DOB - they should be avoiding asking your age out of fear of discrimination lawsuits. What's reasonable on a call:

- name (they don't need your middle)

- email, phone, Skype (if they do video tech interviews), experience

- asking if you are legally allowed to work in the US without sponsorship. For a defense job, if you are a citizen. You don't want to waste your time if you're not.

Depending on the job, before your on-site interview a major corp. might ask for your full name, DOB, felony convictions (not arrests), etc. for a background check, but I don't think they'd need your SSN until you're there for employee orientation (tax purposes, etc.).
They run better over short distances. Bipedal great apes do better over long distances. This is proven both by experienced hunters and myself as I hunt down my cat for kisses. After just a few minutes, she hunker down and accepts her fate since I can literally jog around my house all day.
I looked in vain for a place on a wall that could hold a 55-inch flat screen

I don't think this has gotten better. I toured some homes last year, and the flat screen TVs were placed above the fireplace. Two problems: 1) you wind up constantly craning your neck to watch TV, and 2) if you actually use the fireplace the TV probably gets much warmer than it should.

And yet these houses all sell for $500,000 or more. Or even a few million dollars in expensive places like the Bay Area.
Eat shit, millions of flies can't be wrong.
Email 20280: Pay to Play in the Democratic Party