skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Me too. Sounds like the typically short-sighted drivel heard from those who think a smaller, or declining, population is a good thing. Usually it comes from a "look at how bad the humans are for our beloved Earth" point of view. But such individuals usually aren't particularly studied in demography or human geography. They don't realize the catastrophic effects of a sub 2.1 (US) population growth rate. I.e., the so called "replacement rate." Currently it stands at 1.9. As this trend accelerates it could theoretically result in massive social fall out. One of the obvious possible by-products is not enough workers to support an aging population: either in providing necessary services, or tax revenue to support things like Medicare and Social Security. Usually, from what I've read, what matters is how stable and gradual the trend is. If it's a slow increase or decline then it's potentially okay. If there are rapid changes, or shocks, it is likely to be much worse because it doesn't allow time for society to adjust to the new reality of things.

Glibly saying that having fewer kids on average is better is awfully bold, verging on ignorant (as would the opposite argument).

It is true that in order to make ends meet in a big city, many families have many fewer kids (one or two, from what I saw in San Diego).
Not only is that untrue in several places (Zurich, Stockholm, Paris and until recently London) but you simply can't look at it using just the raw numbers; you have to take perks, quality of life and how much you're actually saving up into account.

Six figures is barely enough to keep up with living costs in some parts of SF, whereas in Greece it's 1-2 orders of magnitude lower depending on which part you live in.
Clearly false. I guess we just have substantially different utility functions.
"Everyone understands it" is not a goal of psuedocode.
Most likely. If you think its unaffordable right now, wait until Uber, Airbnb IPO's.
The video is at the top of the page but it's a slideshow and not super clear. I'll have to make it a bit more obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xoSHdMIMYU

Good point on the comparison - I'll have to add that.

Shipping is $10 flat rate for US, and we ask non-US customers to contact us and pay the exact postage - will streamline later.
>The one and only fix is more houses

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The heart of the problem in many parts of the country is that we fund our schools with property taxes.

Hence, a cycle of better schools and increased demand in concentrated areas, which causes the supply-demand imbalance and price increases. Compounding this is the fact that people in such areas actively block "higher density" housing, which naturally means fewer houses per acre.

Building more houses would help to a limited extent, but the shortage would still exist and resistance is stout.

Hence, the shortage of housing is just a symptom of how we fund education, which is the real problem.

>Inequality is not the problem

Inequality absolutely enters here because if wealth/income were more evenly distributed, then funding for schools would be more evenly distributed, thus alleviating concentrated housing demand in small areas with better schools and driving up prices.
You can buy affordable houses right now. I have one here where I live. There are plenty on the market.
I take solace in the fact he lived over 100 years.
"my post is being judged not by the accuracy of the answer I provided"

Actually, it is. Every single point you list either is outright false or is twisted beyond recognition from the reality of the situation. That's why you're receiving downvotes.

Phrasing things as e.g. "People are told that the government is running a conspiracy to invent global warming" would be a better way to put things, if you're merely stating factual information. Phrasing it as something like "the government is running a conspiracy to invent global warming" makes it sound as if you yourself believe it.
I didn't, unfortunately. Other projects ended up taking priority.
Sooo why not just watch a college architecture course?
We have a Taiwanese ex-pat CNC the carbon fiber parts for us.
I've been using Kmail and I'm really happy with it.
I have Gmail/Inbox on my phone and sometimes I use them on the web but Kmail is still my favorite.

It was quite unstable for a few years, but it's solid these days.
Category Theory for Programmers
Other drawbacks to house size inflation: more space that needs cleaning/maintaining/heating/cooling, higher costs for buyers who want to own a house in a neighborhood but don't need or want to pay for extra space.

In the area I live in -- not even a big city -- you're basically forced to choose house size and house age at the same time. If you want only 1400 SF you're buying an old house with old quirks (asbestos, a history of lead paint, old wiring...) If you want a new house you're buying more square feet and the additional burdens thereof (more space to heat and cool, more space to clean). There's practically no such thing as a new well built small house, or at least none that I could find when I was buying. I ended up in a 1940s house because all the newly built houses were too large for my tastes. And those huge new houses often had huge lawns that needed a riding lawnmower and ridiculous amounts of water (why is everyone landscaping a desert climate like we live in rainy England, argh...)

Is there some weird feedback loop going on? "Our sales indicators show that buyers preferred even-larger new houses this year than last! (Because we didn't give buyers any options to buy smaller new ones.)"
This is actually a problem with a lot of languages that allow runtime template like String interpolation.

For example Groovy on the JVM has GStrings which one can do fairly nasty things.

As well it actually is fairly hard to lock down most of the template languages on the JVM for user templates. (If you are going to allow user templates I recommend one of the Java Mustache-like implementations).
Yes, there are cautions for people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic. I suspect that you can't do the strict "hack" but there could be useful ideas in there, e.g., related discussions on resistant starch.
Amusing comment. Not quite that dire, but the most affordable SFRs do tend to be in neighborhoods that either have few amenities, or are right on the edge of (or in) neighborhoods where you don't want to lounge outside at night.

Otherwise, there is a glut of condos almost anywhere you look, if you're okay with living in a condo and paying HOA dues every month - which is the problem with condos, the HOA dues can easily take something affordable and push it to the edge of affordability or beyond.

I've been looking recently, speaking from current experience.
My personal feeling: I think that the "next big thing" will be making real progress in terms of integrating probabilistic approaches (like deep neural networks) and symbolic processing (think "prolog" or "planning algorithms", FOL, or "STRIPS", things of that nature).

Deep neural networks are great at recognizing patterns, but they still don't give us much in the way of reasoning. So, "I should start cleaning now because lunch is at 1:00 and it takes uncle Bob 30 minutes to drive over here..." kind of stuff is - so far - pretty much outside of the realm of ANN's.

If / when we have systems that can utilize the best of probabilistic pattern matching and formal logic, I think we'll see a dramatic improvement in the "intelligence" available.

Note that there is no reason, in principle (at least that I'm aware of) that "formal logic" might not ultimately turn out to be an emergent aspect of a sufficiently complex ANN. Given that our brain can do formal logic, and does at times, and is "just" neural networks as far as we know, it seems likely. That said, in the short-term, I'm guessing we'll have hybrid systems that explicitly feature various AI techniques that have been developed over the years, sharing some representations (of concepts, knowledge, etc.). Maybe the "thought vectors" that Geoffrey Hinton has spoken of could be a step down that path. I'm also curious to see if something like rule induction using CN2 might not play a role. Or maybe it'll involve "semantic networks", something like ConceptNet. Who knows?

If I had to summarize, I'd say the answer is something like "coming up with some form of knowledge representation that allows us to share 'thoughts' or 'knowledge' between disparate AI/ML systems".
While I agree this is a possible attack vector, I think it is extremely unlikely, at least in the localization realm, for several reasons:

1. The localization company should never know what programming language you're using.

2. You shouldn't give localization companies direct access to your internal strings. More than hacking your code, they're almost guaranteed to screw the formatting up.

3. Typically, translators are hired for their native language abilities, and not for their technical prowess. I've met precious few who knew how to open a text editor, let alone hack your product via its strings.

I worked with Python and I18N/L10N for about 15 years. The way I always handled localization was to parse all our strings into a PostgreSQL database, and then provide a web interface for translators to do their work. This interface provided translators with the full-context of the strings they were translating, which internal strings often don't, prevented the inclusion of certain characters and keywords, and kept the translators from screwing up the formatting. By doing it this way, we got much better translations, and our internal strings were never out of our control.
Lost in the Edge: Finding Your Way with Signposts [pdf]
Set, match, meta operator
I'd love to hear your perspectives on Ruby if this bothers you that much.
The people that invest in hedge funds are, by definition, sophisticated investors. I don't buy the idea that they didn't understand the implications of a "two and twenty" fee structure until recently.

What you have said is certainly true for the average retail investor that simply isn't legally allowed to invest in a hedge fund, of course.
If you do any kind of outreach/cold emails, you may find Nymeria (https://www.nymeria.io) as useful as I have. It's really great for finding personal emails as well as business emails.
can someone explain to me why nytimes gets away with these ridiculous moral exhortations while at the same time stealing money from poor Mexicans [1].

I don't mean this to be an ad hominem but it seems kind of hypocritical to write some boring tripe about empathy/morality/ethics every single day[2] when they themselves don't give a shit about it.

1. See OECD report on Slim

2. One from yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/29/does-empathy...
Show HN: The Business of Music: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Musicians
The fix is to make more areas desirable to live in by reducing income inequality and stimulating local economies (which in turn creates more desirable locations). Simply saying build "more houses" in clustered cities along the coasts doesn't solve anything in the long run. Cities are in it for the long run.
I tend to agree. The bottom line (and very obvious) is that the more spent in any one budget category, the less available for all other categories--housing included. My wife and I shoot for no more than 20% in order to ensure we can meet our other financial goals. We have paid as high as 46% (in San Diego), which simply wasn't workable.
If 300 units are built it will help 4500 middle-income households. That's great, but how many middle-income households will still be unable to find affordable housing, therefore keeping market-rate rents sky-high?

I think the solution is not trying to cram more units into a small area. Manhattan has done that for decades, and it's still not enough to balance supply and demand. Rather, it's to encourage business development and residential living elsewhere, either nearby or far away. We're seeing that with Oakland and northern NJ but there are many more opportunities to expand this to other areas of the country. A lot of credit goes to southern states which encouraged (through tax breaks and other incentives) heavy industry to set up shop in smaller cities and rural areas. What will it take Google, GE, or Microsoft to move a big chunk of their respective operations away from San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle?
Can you explain the purpose of these links here?
Seems to me that ZeroMQ basically implemented this - length-prefixed framing is part of the wire protocol.
This is their default response to everything. Once you go through that step (and they maybe grab diagnostics to determine you actually started as new), they will actually push to resolve your issue. It's easy to recover from this w/ iTunes or iCloud device backups, so a moderately painless hoop to jump through.
This also results in people thinking Obama is a good president and electing characters like Donald Trump. Not everyone has time to educate themselves about something that will provide very little personal return (rational ignorance), but it would be great if people at least put in more initial research to find their initial "intellectual champion," and then trusted them from there, with perhaps an annual update to make sure your values still align. Then you might come up with someone like Glenn Greenwald, instead. Granted, Obama sounded a lot more promising in 2008.
You don't have to be a citizen to get at least some forms of social security in many European/Scandinavian countries. Norway will pay me unemployment if I am made redundant even though I am not a citizen because I have been paying tax here for the last thirty years.
The only time I imagine myself living in a big city again (I'm originally from Queens, NYC) is when I visit Montreal. Beautiful city, efficient immaculately clean subways compared to any city I've been in. If I weren't comfortable in the relatively rural part of the Hudson Valley I'm in, I'd seriously consider it.
Oh yeah. That whole site is a gem.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. Public schools in dense cities tend to be almost universally bad--in spite of often being funded at significantly higher per-student levels than even relatively tony suburbs that have high-performing schools. If you look at Massachusetts public high schools for example, the one public high school in Cambridge (where housing has gotten very expensive) has some of the highest per-pupil spending and is in the bottom tier of test results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiEQg-SHY1g&t=58s

I found this to be a really cool interpretation of the game of life, as the computation creates a visible state.
Sad you're being downvoted. I have many climate-change denying friends and family members, and these are exactly the arguments they use. So much of it basically boils down to them perceiving the left-wingers as crying wolf for many years. Now we're in a position when most scientists agree the wolf is actually coming, but the right is desensitized and politically incentivized to oppose action. We have to thoroughly understand both sides of a debate if the truth is eventually supposed to win out.
We've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, but please read the following first and make sure you plan to use this site as intended:

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Offlineimap is slow and buggy; use mbsync instead.
> What do you gain from advocating against mobility and personal space?

What works in the suburbs isn't sustainable in cities. Suburbia is built for personal spaces. It's terrible, however, at supporting the rich social fabrics densely-packed humans spontaneously weave. (There's also the problems of commute and it's environmental impact.)

City-centre richness is a direct product of density. If everyone gets large, personal spaces you're back to suburbia and all its disadvantages.

Living in a city means accepting less personal space in exchange for the benefits of density. The only alternative is to have fewer people with more personal space, which means rationing or auctioning off that limited housing as well as a less "city-like" urban core.
you got me!
adjusts his seat in his armchair Yes, my uninformed opinion, but reading the article, I think the quote from Marc Tucker towards the end is right:

>And the countries that give [teachers] more autonomy successfully are countries that have made an enormous investment in changing the pool from which they are selecting their teachers, then they make a much bigger investment than we do in the education of their future teachers, then they make a much bigger investment in the support of those teachers once they become teachers.

Teachers in these institutions are given a level of respect we offer scientists, lawyers, other professionals, so of course they are trusted to be given autonomy. Imagine the same level of scrutiny given to such professionals, if say we mandate every minute in a doctor's meeting from a city authority, would they stand for it? When we talk about education, people often highlight the fact we spend a lot of money per student compared to other countries. This fact fits in with this hypothesis.

Once an institution gains that respect, the rest can follow. No, it may not be causal (teachers being respected leads to higher pay, better quality teachers, etc) but they are certainly correlated.
I think I know this area you are talking of. And if there is a house there for 240k then it is definitely not a decent neighborhood. There are areas of Queens which are very industrial and you can get a house for cheap, next to a superfund site.
Let me make several similar statements:

"Hopefully machine learning techniques give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

"Hopefully knowledge graphs give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

"Hopefully Bayesian models give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

"Hopefully rule-based systems give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

"Hopefully LISP gives us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

"Hopefully computers give us some sort of building blocks for a general intelligence."

People have said approximations to all of these over time. All of these probably are building blocks. But there's no reason to believe that we're about to build the top of the tower.

I believe we should understand AI in terms of what it can do for us now, and that AGI keeps appearing to be 50 years away because it's actually centuries away and we don't even understand what we don't understand yet.
If China reverse-sanctioned the US, a significant portion of the Chinese population would fall into extreme poverty and starve. The Yuan would likely plummet, China would almost certainly face a national default, and it would risk a revolt against the current regime.

Meanwhile, within months, the US would have all its cheap shit imported from Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico--even Japan and Korea. We have enough retail reserves that aside from slight price increases on some inessential goods for a few months, likely nothing else would happen.
It's usually 'or equivalent'. I got around this by working on a couple of open source projects and explaining it to my future employer.
> I sometimes regret not having a structured lifestyle and warmth of family. I am envious of my friends with kids who are going with the flow of life and are not living in existential dread. It's a classic human dilemma of freedom vs security.

I've been working remotely in a semi-nomadic manner for a few years now, and while on average I have no desire to give it up, this sentiment definitely pops up from time to time.

I find I oscillate between a desire to be in a place where nobody knows my name, and places where I'm (relatively) well known.

Working remotely grants me the opportunity to adjust my location and lifestyle accordingly.
If you're really a heavy user of DAWs and Adobe's media software, you already have a very different set of needs than most developers. I also fall into that category, except with game dev Windows is pretty much the only viable choice for a primary dev platform.

If you're just using Adobe's software every now and then, you just need a dedicated GPU and enough RAM. Many alternatives to the MacBook Pro have that. And you'd probably want a desktop sized screen anyway.

The most heavy duty stuff today's software devs would commonly use that their own laptops would need to power are VMs. By the time you get to really heavy duty stuff you'll get much closer to your hardware needs for cheaper with actual workstations anyway.

This is the sort of stuff I meant when I was talking about very specific requirements. For most developers having either Linux or OS X is usually plenty for work purposes, but OS X is nicer designed.
> Dunno if you've been to Europe

I live in Europe right now, thank you.

European (freight) rail falls apart the moment you cross any internal border: differences in train control systems, electrification standards, signalling systems, loading gauges, and the like. France, Spain, and Germany alone have four different electrification systems among them.

> We subsidize rail (freight+passenger) just as we subsidize airlines. Let's just be honest about it.

Sure. Is this actually a point of contention? It'd be great if we could stop, anyway, and let various forms of transportation compete on true merit rather than on which one the politicians prefer. Especially for freight. There are various barriers to this happening, naturally. It'd be great if they could be reduced and any externalities mitigated.

And the subsidies don't nearly approach the ~$25B/yr new investment.

> BTW, your notion of the FRA over-regulating for unions is similarly malarkey.

I refer you to 81 FR 13917, in which the agency itself admits in the filing, "FRA has no empirical evidence to suggest" that two-person crews are safer, admitting that "in fact, it is possible that one-person crews have contributed to the improving safety record".

That's just a tiny piece of what they get to deal with, anyway.
Thanks a lot! I didn't know about this visa. FYI, You may have just changed my life.
Maybe this is included in your "according to the conditions" qualification, but for example in some EU countries you have to contribute to the state pension scheme for more than 15 years to be entitled to anyhing (if you make contributions in multiple EU countries they are also considered, but the rules are not exactly simple).
Apple's stunningly huge opportunity - steal Android market share.
It's an old theme, and has always been rejected firmly by Apple, but image if iOS was totally free for all phone manufacturers to put on their own phones.

Ruthlessly quality controlled by Apple to ensure binary compatibility across all iOS compatible phones.

Ruthlessly legally controlled by Apple to ensure manufacturers cannot install their own customizations and crapware.

Ruthlessly controlled by Apple to ensure it retains control over the operating system update process.

Ruthlessly controlled by Apple to ensure there continues to be one and only one Apple app store.

Surely for Apple growth into the future comes from owning the customer and selling services via iTunes and the app store. The only way to do this is through greater market share. The easiest and perhaps only way to steal market share from Android is to give iOS away free to the Android manufacturers.

People don't need new phone hardware so often these days so why should Apple be so stuck on selling the hardware? Time for Tim to start stealing the Android market share.
One of my all time favourite websites.