skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Zoning laws and building heights restrictions and other regulations are to blame. Basically, it's hard to provide enough inventory when doing so in a way that would help (build more buildings and higher ones that can receive more people) is illegal. Why do such regulations exist? Several reasons:

* nepotism, current owners want to keep the inventory low so the price of their property and demand remain high

* nepotism, because owners are afraid tall building will make their city less appealing and lower the price of their property.

* silly zoning laws, because many believe central planning is actually a good thing despite the ridiculous amount of evidence that it doesn't work.

* simple inertia, bad laws and regulations are created all the time but almost never repealed.

I'm probably missing a few other reasons I'm sure others will point them out.

Also something worth saying, owners love to say that adding taller buildings and more buildings and people would kill the spirit of the city. But preventing new buildings has a effect of super high prices that makes it impossible to live in the city, in the end only billionaires can buy homes as investment and don't even live there while the few other building are rented to a few lucky high salary people which creates tension with the rest of the population. So you get a city full of empty houses, super rich people, high salary folks and regular people who are getting kicked out. Real people start living outside the city and its spirit is gone anyway.
When your views are so contrary to HN-orthodoxy as well as societal orthodoxy, you can't just debate with a quip (like yours).
Oh sorry, that's German for STEM. It's math, information science, natural science, and technology (referring to engineering).
Chicago is doing a good job. Lots of construction, lots of good returns for investors, and a lot of perks associated with being a large city.

The media focused on the south side murder rate but if you are north of the city there are plenty of safe and wonderful places to live.
Toronto and SF are very different cities with different housing problems.

My interpretation is that in SF, NIMBYism and city council members have blocked most efforts to build high-density housing. This means that it forces the prices on available housing up. SF is experiencing a huge influx of people wanting to live there, and there just aren't enough houses. Affordability is a big issue, and probably the biggest, but there are people that are able to afford the high prices. That line won't go on forever though.

Toronto has not shunned construction, far from it. We've built thousands of condo units. The problem is that they were built for investors in mind. Oh sure, if you're single or a couple, you could manage to get by in a 450-600 sf. 1BD 1BA condo, but as soon as you start to have a family, it feels cramped. A 2BR unit helps, and they exist, but there are not that many. Furthermore, our mentality in Toronto is that to raise a family, you must live in a house. That means moving out to suburbia.

A single-family home, townhouse, semi-detached, or detached, is always going to be in high demand, no matter where you are. In Toronto, it's what most of us were raised in. Getting us to move families into condos is a huge undertaking, and it's made impossible by the fact that developers don't want to build these units simply because no one buys them. It's a vicious cycle. So Toronto's issue isn't a lack of construction, it's a lack of foresight.

Finally, all large cities have this issue because of commuting. In Toronto, your options to get to work in the city are:

1) Live downtown, close to work to walk, bus, or subway in

2) Live in suburbia and spend 0.75-1.5 hours each way driving and/or commuting by bus or train

If you try to find more affordable housing by living further from the city, you start hating your life as you commute the 2+ hours in. It's like trying to live in Walnut Creek and work in SF. It can be done, but why?

Housing is a multi-faceted problem that isn't simply solved by just building more houses. You need to adjust people's expectations, habits, and start building viable transportation options to help move people.
Let me add some thoughts as well. It will be slightly tangential, but it will converge in the end...

Men and women are treated very differently for the same things. Think law: family courts, higher sentences for same crimes, domestic violence. Think universities: kangaroo courts for men (while these are technically for everyone, there is no shortage of complaints about "men not being supposed to use these laws this way"). Think culture:
- men getting hurt? ok. women getting hurt? normalizing violence.
- woman cries? let's help her. Man cries? he's so weak.
- women sexually objectified? should be a crime. Men sexually objectified? be glad be find you useful.
- attractive man that talks to you? nice. Unattractive man that talks to you? creep.
- a man does not want to be in a relationship? man-child. A woman doesn't want to be in a relationship? you go girl.
- a woman rapes a men? he probably wanted it. A man rapes a woman? that sick criminal.

There are many scholarships, internships, job offers that are exclusively for women. University admissions are also skewed towards women and other supposedly disadvantaged groups. Yet nobody wants to admit that by unfairly favoring women, you are also unfairly kicking out the men. (Am I the only one who thinks this is just a plain old discrimination?)

It is not too hard to find articles such as "what the workforce needs? more of women's perspective." or "science shows girls code better" or "10 reasons why men are over", or "the future is female".

Universities are banning the words "manpower", "mankind", and similar, yet everybody is preaching "mansplaining" and "manspreading".

One can only face the insults and discrimination for so long.

So when men are no longer interested in work, marriage, or women, or life - perhaps we should not be so surprised.
Lack of compelling evidence that there's a *nix distro out there that will serve me better than macOS.
When I read "ads" I had to do a double-take. I find it really surprising that people are willing to tolerate an OS with built-in "malware". Is it because people simply aren't aware that there are alternatives?
As someone who has only recently made the switch to a mac and does not remember the "good old times" - switched in Late 2015 with no prior Mac experience whatsoever, was running Ubuntu/Windows dualboot up until then: MacOS is not perfect but it is by far the best daily driver for me. I am now running Sierra on a Hackintosh and would not trade it for anything else.
In my experience, if someone had a good head on their shoulders they merely have to use the lessons of the past as guidelines for what you do (or not do) in the future.

I haven't seen a politician like that in a while, but they have existed.
Chicago is doing a pretty good job. In fact, condo values in the downtown area are flat over the last 5 years because of all the new inventory that comes on every 6 months. We could do so much better here, but it's a start.
Wow! I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Though if unhappy men are mostly invisible to society, that might lead to parents choosing boys under a wrong impression.
This is a much better article on this topic, providing some important additional facts: http://m.leparisien.fr/paris-75004/nouvelles-taxes-sur-les-r...

Using google translate: "For an apartment located on Saint-Louis Island, one of the most speculative sectors in France, the average amount is € 142 per year."

The current vacation home surtax is 20%, so this means the base tax must be €710, so new total for a vacation home would be €1420. Seems like a bargain to what we pay in LA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

That kind of language, in various forms, has been a dogwhistle of the right since Reagan started saying it at campaign rallies.
That's a pretty extreme approach! It reminds me a little of my all time favourite musicians, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - who detail their process here: http://tapeop.com/interviews/85/gillian-welch-and-dave-rawli...

One of the relevant quotes:

Q: Is everything recorded live?

G: Totally.

D: Yeah, everything is live. It is pretty much all from takes one, two or three. Very few mixes. This is the first record we've done that Stephen Marcussen [our mastering engineer] listened to and said, "Okay, Let's transfer it." We didn't compress or EQ anything. Just transferred it from a machine of his that we really like, through the nice converters and a clean signal chain.

In my more limited experience having a minimalist workflow can have benefits that stray way beyond sonic purity: it encourages discipline and allows you to concentrate on the task at hand . The minutiae of your workflow are less important than simply having one.
As others have said, the first time you'd have to pair the device (which makes sense).

Once paired, my experience is that at least with the AirPods, pairing with 'regular' bluetooth devices, while not instant, is pretty quick and painless. I'm not entirely sure if that's because 1) bluetooth technology improved in general, 2) the W1 chip somehow improves 'regular' switching, or 3) or my idea of 'quick and painless' deviates from the norm, but I suspect 1 to be most likely.
I find W10 lacking in consistency.

Poke around in the settings for a while and you will find remnants from the NT days.

The dark theme is another example, it works for a handful of their own apps, not even half of them.

Half baked and unpolished.
I'm a daily W10, macOS sierra and Fedora Linux user.
I develop on all the OS:es and play games mostly on W10.
Kimi – Malicious Debian Package Generator
I used to colocate with one of their sister companies and I've chatted with the CEO a few times on IRC. They were generally very reliable, although they didn't return my rail screws or cables oddly enough.
The problem is it doesn't actually cost less. The taxes you pay for your own UBI cost you nothing.

Meanwhile a basic job has the potential to be very expensive, because unlike a UBI you can't supplement it by working since you're spending your time doing the basic job, so it has to pay a living wage, which is more than the amount you would have to pay as a UBI. And then you will have people who choose the basic job when they would otherwise have chosen an economically productive real job since it's one or the other, which you then have to pay for while at the same time losing the tax revenue you would have had from them doing the real job.

And what happens if too many people choose the basic job so that there are too many unfilled real jobs? With a UBI you can reduce the amount to push more people into the labor force. With a basic job which workers can't supplement with a real job, reducing the amount causes them to starve.
There is a limit of 2 * $2.50 instances per account.
1K $
Or worse - stealing your secrets or injecting malware. I think these are ok for specific use cases like p2p, but I would not use them for general browsing.
That looks massive though.
Maybe many people would not develop the wish to buy fashionable clothes, a bigger car or a faster smartphone if there weren't adverts and people all around us suggesting that that's the right thing to do.

I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
I'm in the same boat. I switched around 2008-2009 to jump on the iOS app wave, but am more interested in Windows since 10 and Azure.

I still think their rMBP 15s are the all around the best you can buy. I haven't tried the track bar version yet though. Also, OS X (or whatever) on a rMBP is still great for surfing the web. The zoom with the trackpad is flawless.
I recently picked up a Dell 9365 2in1 for a portable person computer. After some rough edges I am pretty seamlessly switching between my Apple work laptop and new PC through the likes of WSL & Vagrant.
> 1) Function names are misleading or not descriptive enough. E.g. isAlpha(). I assumed this meant is alphanumeric, but it actually means isAlphabetic

Why should it mean alphanumeric? C's isalpha() also tests for being a letter, for instance, and has isalnum() for alphanumericness.

> If it's not uppercased of course its lowercased

If you're working exclusively with ASCII and ignoring non-letter characters, yes. But is this library bound by those constraints?
fact-biased?
Yes...I'm having trouble verbalizing what I'm trying to say.

Basically trying to say that Pi, to me, doesn't appear to be a man-made construct. Any naturally occurring circle that's near perfect seems to illustrate that. Any deviation from a Pi-derived shape has plausible reasons for the defect, like the one you point out.
> could only hire a small number due to the vast majority failing drug tests.

I'm surprised mandatory drug testing is a thing in the US. In Germany it's actually outright illegal to do drug tests on employees (exceptions are rare, generally employers need reasonable suspicion (!) and the job must be safety critical, per http://www.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2013-11/arbeitsrecht-droge...).

As long as it does not involve any heavy machinery, weapons or healthcare no one gives a f..k here what you do in your free time as long as you don't show up drunk or high on the job. And even then, many policemen and healthcare personnel has issues with alcohol abuse...
"Nepotism" is favoritism shown to family relatives. I think the word you're looking for "NIBMYism".
My reading of the author was that he (Owen Williams) switched when he needed to upgrade. He had a Macbook which suited him for a few years, and now needed to decide to go with the late 2016 models or buy into PCland (which gave him much more bang-for-buck).
Yeah, that's exactly the problem.

Happily, though, the inconsistencies don't reach as far down as the kernel level. W10 looks weird and sometimes acts strangely when you try to use the new stuff, but its bones are stable, which is all I really need.
Uhm no. Here in Norway Apple is huge. Go to a major Asian city and there are Macbooks everywhere. Sure there is higher percentage of Apple among some devs and for places with higher income, but to call a major product from one of the most valuable companies in the world "exotic" is absurd.
I too use both. OSX at work, and Windows (7) at home. They are both bad, neither is the best.

I remember spending time trying to figure out how to disable the animation that plays when switching OSX virtual desktops - only to find out that you literally can't without code injection or a third party app - rendering the virtual desktops on OSX entirely useless.

The fact that this a) is the default behavior and b) is not configurable, is just another in a long line of awful OSX UX and it only gets worse with every update. El Capitan changed terminal font smoothing to something woeful which was also a struggle to revert.

Honestly the only way I have found development possible on native OSX and Windows is by stretching a terminal(/putty) to the full size of the desktop and handling all window management with tmux.
It's quite obvious that Apple is slowly converging iOS and OS X even as they say they are different beasts at the moment. Maybe that's why some power users's expectations are frustrated atm?

But that is also precisely why Apple is still WAY ahead of Microsoft and co. They will be able to make the desktop and tablets converge where you can carry your computer in your bag, and when you're home you put it in a dock and you have a full blown powerful desktop with the 5K Retina screen and maybe even a dedicated GPU in the dock fit for triple A gaming. I'm pretty sure that is where they are headed, since obviously you can't make a single "form factor" for both uses. And for people who don't need the full blown desktops you won't even need the dock, external screen, just the keyboard and you'll be able to do most computer tasks.

And that will be possible because they are already thinking ahead, while Microsoft will be stuck with their turd of a desktop and making funny hardware that kinda works for some uses, but can't quite decide what it does.
Yeah, I heard about it from others, too. Look forward to it. Hope the dev team stick to the plan.
If you spent a comparable amount on a PC as you do on your mac, I guarantee you would not have a hard time selling it in three years.

I don't care about this whole windows/mac debate, as I run linux, but my 4 year old Asus gaming machine is still quite a powerful machine and hasn't been updated outside of SSDs. It would fetch a few hundred bucks, probably 40% of its original price, and it doesn't have a cult following willing to pay a premium for...whatever it is.

Used Macs remind me of used Jeeps.
Really? I give women more credit than that.

For the first time in how many centuries, they don't have to be chained to some dud with a good job, and they're figuring out what they want.

Good poetry? Being a good househusband? There's going to be quality in that.

World's changing, and you can't get away being a schlub just cause you've got a good job anymore. I say bring it.
> women were oppressed, but not without reason

That's completely unacceptable. We've banned this account.

If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise never to post anything like this again, or anything close to it.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795585 and marked it off-topic.
That is...much better than I would have expected of Vox.
>> attributing women's desires not to rational decision making but to whatever desires the man imagines evolution has instilled into the woman.

You were correct to point out that it is rational self-interest on the part of the woman. My point is that because it makes sense, evolution will have selected for that behavior. It is also present in mammals of lower intelligence than humans, so it seems likely that it's a deeper biological phenomenon that just a "rational decision". Either way, the stuff discussed in the article make perfect sense.
Technically speaking this is all "distortion" of the original signal.

Not really - if it was "distortion" you could MEASURE it with an oscilloscope. There's another, less polite, word for most of those comparisons.
I run my blog on 3 distributed instances, one of them being at Vultr. (The 2 others are DO and Scaleway.)

In my experience, all 3 are very reliable: zero downtime since I started using them 8 months ago. Vultr has the nicest dashboard: it uses the noVNC HTML5 client to give you access to the console, it supports 2FA (TOTP) for authentication, etc. They give you $50 of free credit to use in the first 60 days (or did, when I signed up). Plus they accept Bitcoin payments!

Only minor complaint I have is when you create a vps they don't give you its SSH host key fingerprint. You have to log in the console to get it...
I live in Vancouver - which has become one of the most unaffordable cities in the world[1] and am from Toronto.

Watching Toronto's market explode is like watching a horror movie that I saw take place in Vancouver over the last two years. The politicians, press, and real estate industry are spinning the same stories their counterparts in Vancouver did without providing an even plausible explanation for the rocket ship growth.

The key issue with Vancouver's market is that prices have become decoupled from local incomes. The same thing is happening in Toronto.

In Vancouver, the main driver of decoupled home prices is foreign investment dollars, mainly from China. I suspect the same is true in Toronto because prices there started exploding after Vancouver instituted a 15% tax on foreign buyers in August 2016.

If you're interested in understanding the key drivers of the Vancouver real estate market, this paper by a SFU professor summarizes the data, provides a sensible solution, and convincingly refutes the tropes that are often provided as reasoning for the market's explosion:

http://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/mpp/pdfs/Vancouver's%20Hou...

1 - where unaffordable is defined as the ratio of median home price to median income.
The bash system is incomplete when compared to native Linux, but it's still really good for anything that is purely userspace. I haven't had a userspace issue in many months, and it's only getting more complete over time.
Smart Toys from China Hack American Consumer Data
I know this will sound pretty bad...

but I actually interact a lot, in a volunteer capacity, with the black community where I live. I'm just realizing that I've never noticed that the whole "men are worth something because of their career" thing there. I'm not passing relative value judgements or anything, but I do wonder if there is something sociologically about black american subculture that makes women look past all that???

I am not a woman. So I can only say what I see, (and there seems to be a lower tendency towards marriage in their community anyway). But from what I see... there are black female doctors with laid off garbagemen for instance. I see self employed business women with unemployed guys. (Generally laid off laborers.) I see a lot of really high ranking corporate vp or law firm type women with teachers/community organizer types. (That one happens a lot.) Couples like these constitute a sizable portion of what I would call the "black middle class" where I am. And of course, you have the regular couples that look like what we would call more traditional, with both parties working at the same level. But that doesn't happen NEARLY as often as you'd think, and the egalitarian pairings also don't seem to last as long as the high ranking female-low ranking male pairings. (Divorce-wise I mean.)

Here's the thing though... I can't actually recall ever coming across a couple where the man was "higher ranking" than the woman??? There are probably a few out there, but I don't come across them in my interactions.

I never thought about that until I read through this thread.

It would be interesting to look through some of these smaller communities to find out how they deal with what seems to be slowly happening in the larger society. Just throwing that out there because they seem to be further down the road towards this "jobless" economic system. The reasons may be really simple. ie - maybe they just have a different culture??? And that's fine. Or maybe it's that the pressures on women in certain american subcultures are different??? Or whatever??? Who knows??? As I said... I'm not a woman... but I think it would be worth looking at.

The more I think about it... the more differences there are popping into my mind right now. It really is fascinating. I never stopped to think about it before.
> the "Liberal Smugness" piece

Emmett Rensin was very much the exception to the rule. (Actually Jeff Stein is ok too, and he's still at Vox.) But the general bias of Vox is neoliberal technocracy / American liberalism, so it's no surprise that leftists hate them.

They're utterly mainstream (ie, extremely reluctant to challenge established systems or common views) and much lower in quality than they'd like to be.
Paul English, the co-founder of Kayak, founded a company to do just this, called "GetHuman": https://gethuman.com/

It gives you an option, they can guide you through stuff giving you specific steps they've learned from interacting with the companies in the past, or you can have them handle it for you, for a small charge.
Are You a freelancer? Or working at some company?