skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>at least in the us they are mentioning how development companies scaled back in 2008 and they are still ramping up construction

That's in the US. Canada wasn't hit anywhere near as bad by 2008, and
Vancouver construction rebounded very quickly. With the way real estate has been skyrocketing since 2009, it was inevitable.

>This is a bit mindboggling: flood of foreign does not explain the global effect very well.

I'm not talking about the global effect, I'm talking about Vancouver, where prices have become so decoupled from local wages that you need to earn twice the median family household income just to afford the average home (I'm including condos in the definition of "home").

>flood of foreign money into a city like Vancouver could be helping a lot in its economic development

And it could also hinder its economic development if there's too much. The only question is whether or not there's too much. Given the completely out-of-whack salary to cost of living ratio, I'd say we hit the "too much" point a long time ago. I don't think there's anyone familiar with the area who says otherwise at this point, including the infamously, intentionally out-of-touch government.

>we still dont know why a rich person would buy a property and never rent it out if he doesnt plan in living in it

Right now, we can only speculate thanks to the government shoving their fingers in their ears and refusing to admit there's a problem. But there's a few key factors that help us make informed speculation.

First, we know from the Panama Papers that Vancouver real estate is being used to launder and hide money. You don't rent out your tax shelter or money washer to some rando off Craigslist.

Second, having a tenant delays sales by at least two months (that's how long an eviction without cause takes). That's a LIFETIME in Vancouver real estate.

Third, in the last few years, asset appreciation means you're gaining more money on paper just by holding onto the real estate than you could ever hope to collect in rent. Even if you pay a property management company to deal with everything, it's still a non-trivial amount of work for comparatively little gain.

Fourth, it sounds nuts, but in Chinese culture, a home that has been lived in sells for less money than one that has never been lived in. Something about feng shui, which is still such a big deal in China that it's made its way into Vancouver real estate. Hell, until the city council put a stop to it due to the logistics issues it causes emergency crews, buildings were going up that didn't have floors with the number 4 in them. 4 is associated with death in Chinese culture, and apartments with the number 4 don't sell as quickly.
In the end Amazon.com managed to survive and prosper with a very similar strategy.
> Which is kind of what you have to do when you have billions lying around and investors that expect you to multiply them.

Which is also part of their awful strategy that they didn't have to do.
That's cultural rather than religious. Probably the religion's tradition derives from the customs of the near east and eastern mediterranian.
As I see it, the only acceptable outcome for Uber at this point is gaining a huge lead in the establishment of an autonomous driving fleet.

I don't see any way its current businesses (e.g. app-based taxi service, food delivery, etc.) justify its valuation. The question then is whether reliable fully-autonomous cars are 2 years out, 10 years out, or more; even the experts can't agree. Uber needs it more than Google needs it, more than Tesla, more than anybody.
They certainly missed the mark in China at least.
Really? Is anyone expecting a successful product to come out of Google anytime soon?
>One of the two versions is the active and the other isn't (for 97% of the population)

My understanding is that the inactive form is actually metabolized into the active form by the body.

There is some argument that this happens differently in different people. But if AstraZeneca knew this (which they almost certainly did), why didn't they release esomeprazole at the beginning? They released omeprazole first, then sat on esomeprazole until the omeprazole patent was about to expire. It's obvious why they would do that.
The Importance of Side Projects in Relation to Your Mental Health
How to get the most out of conferences
Especially as you got 10 licences for everything. Was great value.

I believe they stopped it a year or two back.
There is the free 10 day content as well as a 30 day money back guarantee.
The left seems to believe that projecting weakness is a virtue. Poor dumb bastards, they will always be weak to appease their own doctrine but will not be allowed.
I generally agree that flooding the market might lead to stupid investments. Two points:

> That forces institutional investors to pour their money into risky investments like venture capital firms.

Are there statistics about this? Is this really the case? What is the percentage of VC compared to the rest? I only have a vague feeling that VC is tiny compared to private equitiy and even tinier compared to Wallstreet.

> their money ends up subsidising a 10 minute taxi ride and being lost forever

That actually seems like a good thing. People with capital subsidising basic services for the general population. Wealth generally has the tendency to move in the other direction.
Missing from this list: FRACTRAN, a turing-complete language based on fractions, invented by John Conway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN
>illegally, not sure how prisoners get phones

From guards making a quick buck?
Show HN: Simple DAW-Like Beat Maker Using React+WebAudio
An opinionated starting point for awesome, reusable Swift 3 modules
And for the services that don't accept email addresses with pluses...? And your friends/family/boss? They get unique pluses too? What about spammers who are smart enough to not remove but change the plus to random garbage before they send emails?

Getting creepy LinkedIn spam is such a non-issue it isn't worth exerting even a moderate amount of effort.
> Passengers don't share the ride with other customers.

This is no longer true with Uber Pool and Lyft Line
if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck....

UBER is on its sure way to bankruptcy, the model is not sustainable.
What world we live in that $50 is considered expensive....

I paid around 150 € in for Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.1 with student discount and around 200 € for Turbo C++ 3.1 for Windows 3.1, back in 1993.

Imagine how much that would be in today's money!
I never claimed low interest rates were the only trigger for malinvestment! Just look at the south sea bubble. The dotcom boom was mis-spending by retail investors, rooted in ignorance of new technology combined with enormous hype. But because it was a fundamentally market driven boom, it ended relatively quickly with a large correction. This time it's different: it's a deliberately engineered wave of malinvestment caused by government policy. And they happily admit it!

It's not just Uber of course. There is tons of money flooding into questionable tech startups with no end in sight. In 2014 bitcoin companies alone had received more investment money than the whole internet did in 1996. It's an industry wide phenomenon.
These are amazing! I'll have to try your 3rd tip next time I'm out in the dark.

I took my first Milky Way picture in June from the Grand Canyon:

https://flic.kr/p/Lw5qWz
He comes from Wiltshire. SF is very different.

'bucolic' is the only word I've heard to describe the village I grew up in.
> They can't "extend patent protection" for the drug

Yes they can. The Hatch-Waxman Act was written specifically for this. Also see:

http://www.citizen.org/congress/article_redirect.cfm?ID=6435

You never said whether or not Martin Shkreli makes you angry. Should investors be encouraged to find undervalued drugs, buy the IP, then raise the price through the roof? That would be good for society?

Part of the reason the advertising business is so profitable is due to companies spending so much money on ads. We banned many kinds of cigarette ads because of public health concerns and I would argue that there are legitimate reasons to ban many types of drug ads as well.
True. Actually there was an exhibition I saw once, with inventions, or rather, stuff made in prisons.

It had from DIY tatoo kits to radios and all kinds of stuff done with whatever was available.

(Hmm, could be related to this: http://temporaryservices.org/served/projects-by-name/prisone... ).
Lots of work isn't always bad, but we move in the direction of where we spend our time. First decide, where do I want to be in 1,3,5 years? Map your time usage (including work & leisure), determine how much truly free-time you have left and split it into 9. Spend 5/9 of free-time positioning for where you want to be in 1 year, 3/9 positioning for where you want to be in 3 years, and 1/9 positioning for where you want to be in 5 years. If your 1,3 & 5 year goals relate to climbing ladder at company you're in now, then your work weeks may be many hours (Jeffrey Immelt of GE for example), if your goal is successful completion of a project your managing due in 1 year, so you can move to another company in 3 years and then do whatever after that, your workweeks this year will be standard hours + 5/9 of your free time. The further the goal, the less time you devote today, but if you devote no time, the goal won't ever happen. This is the cost of leadership.
Room 641A
In R we also have notebooks that does this just it is slightly different. RMarkdown is how we do this same thing. At first I missed the different code and text blocks but it is just easier to work with when it is all a text file. You can make the RMarkdown for reports and then just run them from the command line and never have to open RStudio or R. Saves me a ton of time.

You use back ticks to make your code chunks.

For example:
Some random Markdown text here is treated as a text block in Juypter

```{r}

summary(cars)

```

Then some further text goes here.

http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/index.html
> the video game aspect of it necessitates a lot of "grinding"

No, there's a creative mode where there's no grinding needed. The player has everything available right away.

> but how is this better than another logic board simulator or cheap electronics?

Children use it.
I think Uber's future hinges on two things:

1. Whether they figure out how to cut costs with driverless automation

2. If not, how many people will keep using them when fiscal discipline is inevitably imposed and prices go up.

They are in a tough spot. Without driverless cars they are a commodity service in a market with low barriers to entry. But no one has yet pulled off the type of driverless they need - no actual human in the car who needs to get paid.
Okay, so icons are a different use-case than "graphics" and in particular graphs, right? Font-awesome (as an example) and The Noun Project are excellent packages and ones that use SVGs to good effect.

Graphs, though? Graphs?

The sweet spot for SVGs is when you have relatively small data set sizes, need interactivity, and update the data very little. There's also the question of how competently different browser vendors handle SVG and animation--if you're on a nice desktop or laptop, it'll be great!

Once any of those things change, you need to start looking at using raster or GPU graphics. If your dataset updates frequently (say, faster than every few hundred milliseconds) or is large (say, larger than a few thousand points) or needs to reliably run on mobile devices or older workstations, the SVG approach will show issues pretty quickly.

Oh, and it's not trivial performance gains, unless you have your head so far up your ass that you don't watch how balls slow the average user's device and browsing experience is. Nor is it at the expense of easily-writable or modifiable code, unless you're a hack script-kiddie who cannot fathom how to modularize their code and write clear solutions to problems.

I'm not even going to apologize for this, because there is just so much garbage advice and bad practices going on in the frontend right now because some chucklefuck found D3 and has decided that it has solved all of their charting and drawing problems forever--and never notices how badly their cutesy demos perform in the wild.
Couldn't you just fail basic training?
The advantages of a 9 to 5 job are that:

1) It gives you time to reflect on whether the direction you are going makes sense and is aligned with others.

2) It gives you time to sleep and exercise, which makes you more focused and effective at work.

3) It removes the illusion that you can ignore planning/reflection and just pour more hours into something in order to make it successful.

4) If you are demanding people work really bad hours as a matter of course, then that scares experienced hands away. Given that most employees won't see any payout from an exit, those with experience will demand to be paid in cash and will demand that much more if you expect long hours.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-23/are-public...

People with capital subsidising basic services is not a good thing because pensions are so widespread - the subsidy is essentially coming from the same people taking the ride in the first place, just via an incredibly high overhead and roundabout trip!
Those other "highly effective program manipulations" include refactoring and modifications which involve changing parameter and return types. While I understand what you're saying, to myself it's pretty clear that there's a wide gap between these two scenarios:

* Changing the collection's type and not knowing until runtime -- when your program crashes -- that it's being used wrong.

* Changing the collection's type and the program refusing to compile until all usage is corrected.

Because of this, I don't agree with the most modifier you're attempting to apply. The difference to me is confidence. In the former, how confident am I that I didn't miss a use-case on some branch? Considering that the program will crash or otherwise fail to operate, that seems like something I want to be pretty confident about.

It's very useful to have something telling you that everything looks OK. That something can be testing, but why rely on writing good tests when we have formal proof systems available?
Many taxi drivers own their vehicle. (If you can afford it, it's often more profitable to do so, then to rent the cab from your company.)
I'm surprised no APL or its successors: K and J

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_%28programming_language%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_%28programming_language%29
Yeah, was mostly extrapolating from Greece -- and only including employed people too. For Greece I should factor in that 60% of young people and 25%+ of general working population are unemployed, so they make 0 euros (if they're lucky, they get some welfare money for a year or so).
e.g., https://popehat.com/2015/10/08/bad-reporting-on-matthew-keys... .
>That's an experiment that's been running in a tiny part of one state in one country for a very limited time.

It's driven over 1 million miles. That's the equivalent of 75 years of driving for the average human. Plenty of data to draw a conclusion from. In all that time, it's been responsible for a single accident. That's way better than human drivers.
Another name I've seen this under is having "F You Money". Or in other words, enough money that if you ever need to tell management "F You", you can do so without fearing for you or your family's livelihood.

I think this is important anywhere, not just programming. When I was younger, I worked at several fast food places. There was a Burger King job I left within 2 weeks because they had me working insane amounts of unpaid overtime. When I told them I would be leaving they essentially tried to bully me into staying. "We may not be paying you in full, but if you leave you'll be making no money, and that's much worse. You don't have another job waiting, it's just a bad idea to quit. You could become homeless!"

Thankfully I was living with my parents at the time and could tell BK to screw themselves. But I feel really bad for other employees in that same situation who either fell for the spiel or legitimately couldn't afford to be jobless for a day.
I learned to developed a hard skin when discussing such matters on online forums, but back in Portugal in the mid-90's you would hardly find anyone that didn't enjoy using Borland and Microsoft tools as a developer.

The only real alternative to it was doing games and demoscene programming for the Amiga.
Off-peak generation is really cheap, though. It doesn't affect the equation that much. In some places (I'm sure SoCal isn't one of them) it's cheaper than free sometimes.

And of course it was a cost driven thing. This is the cheapest way to meet the demand. If there were a cheaper way, they would have taken that.
> their money ends up subsidising a 10 minute taxi ride and being lost forever.

What? Uber is just a black hole? What about the driver? Who received most of that money for their services? That driver can now use that money to invest in the way they wish.
Amazon actually moves product, and there is a HUGE infrastructure barrier to entry in the AWS space.

Uber competitors don't have either of those stumbling blocks.
We cannot tell yet whether it was awful or not. As we all know, many of the really big ideas looked awful.
Sure, but we're also talking about back in '98 where the software landscape was pretty different. It was about the same as a AAA PC game title which was a fair price to my younger self.

Heck back then I got a physical 8" x 6" box, none of this puny CD/DVD sleeve stuff. We had to drive to a store in downtown San Diego that explicitly sold compilers/productivity software/etc. Hard to believe that happening this day and age.
When Does Praying in Public Make Others Uncomfortable?
Looks really nice. I'm a heavy Python/Stata user, but I'm seriously thinking about transitioning, given all the amazing work in the hadleyverse.

Also, RMarkdown looks incredibly well thought out
Microservices embody the idea that there might not be a unified domain model across the organisation.
No. Back then not many people thought about mobile and besides, I'd been burned on an earlier mobile project when I'd tried to write a J2ME app (kind of what the first versions of WhatsApp were; photos with status messages but no chat).

Both driver and rider logged onto the shared website. It was more like uberPOP, the intention was people registered drives they were planning to make anyway like regular commutes and then you got a kind of fuzzy geo-specific chatroom thing where you could see other riders who were interested in sharing line up. It also calculated the distance the first driver would have to go out of their way to pick you up and did some optimisation around that, and it calculated fuel costs. The idea was to let people split the fuel bills. Back then I was worried about peak oil.
I've personally given up on new Google products becoming successful for a while.
> We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

That is not even remotely politically tenable though, and lots of stupid things will be attempted long before it gets to that point. Mt. Tambora deposited 50 megatons of SO2 into the upper atmosphere in 1815, and in so doing dropped the global climate by .5℃ for over a year. Such an action is well within our technological and industrial capacity. It's a terrible idea but it will definitely be attempted long before global warming depopulates 2/3rds of our inhabited range.
Interesting you say that.

The reason I thought #5 was the most useful is exactly the opposite: I thought that programming in the browser feels different.
There are all these other moving parts, remote libraries, and you have to check things remotely. You're constantly aware that you're plugged into the globe's APIs as opposed to the feeling of being in this little box.
Urbit is probably one of my favorite things. The language is insane. The base virtual machine it runs on is insane. The entire stack rewrites everything for the sake of doing everything perfectly. It redefines whatever it wants. And somehow, it's actually usable.

Hoon is a programming language that uses two-character runes instead of reserved words. It's purely functional and vaguely Lisp-like. It compiles down to a minimal combinator-based virtual machine built entirely out of cons cells and bignums, where the only operator is addition. And yet throughout all of that, it's actually possible (and scarily easy) to code in, and I'm somehow fluent in it. That kinda scares me.
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Because they are no different than any other company of similar size.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that ProDOS was originally written directly in assembly and not compiled from a higher-level language.

Disassembling is pretty trivial compared to de-compiling.
See my other comment with a link to a blogpost that explains how to do just this before having PS0 :).
I do (I won't post a link because this isn't self advertising, but my username is the same as it is here) – I work for a software company, I have my own company too (but I'm a procrastinator) – Twitter for me is to opine on political news or news I'm otherwise interested in (chemistry, psychedelics, etc) – none of which have anything to do with my job (and my employer would likely frown upon it too.)
Read Goldstein's (edit: Bernstein's!) book "If You Can".

It's a whopping 16 page book of plain talk and he made it free on the internet, no strings. [1] It's the best introduction to planning for retirement, especially for those under 35, I've read so far.

[1] https://www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf
Amazon has not spent years losing money, they merely chose to match spending with revenue so their numbers were balanced. That's quite different to winning market share through raw subsidies.
One should always have the "go to hell kit" somewhat nearby (e.g., available with at most a few weeks of focused effort). Not having this can make one effectively enslaved to the current job (and not only job) which, at least for me, is very very not good for morale.
> Consider investing all your money in the company you work for.

Since that phrase is somewhat ambiguous, let me clarify for anyone who misunderstood it on first reading, like I did. :-)

I'm pretty sure you don't mean "It may be a good idea to invest all your money in the company you work for."

But rather "Consider this very bad thing that may happen if you invest all your money in the company you work for."
Extradition?! Of course not. Extradition is for criminals. A judgment on a debt is in civil court.
Uber needs it, but so many companies began moving towards self driving cars as well. Is Uber even doing any in house research? Does Volvo need Uber?

Volvo can just license the Dominoes app and have the same technology backbone Uber has, plus cheesy bread.

Sidenote: I thought of another market segment to compete in: AirBNB! Except instead of daily rentals it'll be half-hourly rentals. Brilliant!

Ignore those pesky anti-prostitution laws. They're outdated regulations that just stifle the market. Plenty of guys named John that just need a bed for 30 minutes or less.
Even though that may be factually correct, it doesn't seem to be related to static typing.
Haskell has guards but they are slightly different.
> Passengers don't share the ride with other customers

I beg to differ. I just took an UberX from Changi Airport to home, a 30 minute ride during which the driver took on and dropped off a total of 3 other passengers.

The cost was about half the taxi rate.
Well, they have free time for "everything else" too.

E.g. kids can just go out and play or go to afternoon classes themselves, they don't have to be constantly supervised by their parents or be driven everywhere, so they get more freedom, and parents gets more self time, for one example.