skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would actually argue for an opposing viewpoint. Rather than eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction, allow the interest on all debts, and rents, to be deductible. If you really need to tax that money twice, raise the tax rate on incomes earned from interest and rent.

The problem, as I see it, is FNMA and FDMC. Those entities, whose purpose was to ensure that a market for residential mortgages would exist, is now actually just engines for inflating housing prices and commoditizing low-risk real estate investment. They are the means by which an investor may become an absentee landlord without assuming any of the normal responsibilities of property management. Ordinary people volunteer to maintain and improve the investment properties, because they are offered the illusion of ownership.

A wise and shrewd financial plan can certainly make the mortgage system work in one's favor, to produce genuine ownership, but for the most part, it has done little more than create another class of resident somewhere between owner and renter: the mortgage-payer.

Having been both renter and mortgage-payer, and having seen some of the ugly hidden details of the US housing market, I do not recommend that anyone in the US software industry actually choose live in a mortgaged home except in the following places: New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Portland, Phoenix, Denver. (California properties near LA and SF are simply too overvalued, in my opinion.) Nowhere else has a sufficiently dense industry to ensure that one can work an entire career in the same place without sacrificing higher regular pay as an alternative to moving.

I would still like to actually own my own home one day, but as parent poster mentioned, I have done the math, and determined that I would be better off renting and saving, rather than borrowing and paying. And one of the major reasons why is that I have little sense of certainty with respect to where I will be living in five years, and that is roughly the absolute minimum timespan required before taking a mortgage can become less expensive for me than renting. Another is that any event likely to force me to move to find work is also likely to depress local property values. I would prefer to park my net worth in an asset that rises in value when people like me lose their jobs, and in assets that I am not forced to sell when I move, lest they become a financial burden. The money I save can be used to buy a retirement home, after I am done worrying about the consequences of place involved in moving around or staying put.

The problem with that mass-market forced-savings program is that dumping all your retirement funds into just one depreciating asset is just a horrible way to retain value. The only reason it works at all is because it forces people to literally sit on their nest egg. They must be aware and cognizant of everything happening to it, and actively defend against any threats to it. It forces people to be active investors in a market they are familiar with, because they live in their own neighborhoods.
I don't get this Market for Lemons thing. Am I missing any axioms that make this logic correct?. My quips with the theory are:

1) Why are there only binary (2) qualities of cars - good or bad. And why are they static? What market is this trying to model?
2) Wouldn't it be sufficient for peaches (as opposed to lemons) to be lowered in cost to market price i.e. the avg. Somehow peaches are of immutable cost/ quality with zero seller margins?

Aside:
1) Also, why is the state of the cars being considered to be unknowable i.e. even in a given model of car, the units are not of consistent quality? Is this a production quality issue (i.e. inconsistent quality of units in a given model)

2) Why is this state of unknowable or perhaps inconsistent quality an equilibrium? meaning wouldn't a middle man who tests cars try and separate the lot and charge for his services?

This market situation that is being modeled seems contrived, at least to the extent that I understand from the Market for lemons wikipedia article
O oais, nos ancêtres les gaulles. The consolidation of the surrounding kingdoms (Burgundy, Savoie, Aquitaine etc) was hardly preordained, and why should, say, Savoy be French and Piedmont not (much less Corsica!)? The consolidation of two of the three Frankish kingdoms was official state policy pursued by a combination of sword and institutions (e.g. l'Academie Française and the promulgation of a single French language with its concomitant suppression of regional languages and their relegation to dialectical status).

Disclaimer: I have a degree in French history. Apologies for typos but the spell corrector on this computer aggressively defaults to English.
Apple still has a huge advantage with their iOS app ecosystem. They can introduce a hardware and add an SDK to iOS that allows their developers to create apps that seamlessly work on that hardware. But they need to come up with the hardware fast because Amazon will race far ahead otherwise.
This is an argument for buying a house in a low cost-of-living area with a high quality of life. Easy telecommuting will certainly not be kind to the home prices in concentrated metropolises that can only justify their property prices because of the existence of jobs that you can't find anywhere else. I should know -- the only reason I personally am in the Bay Area is because I couldn't make this much money anywhere else. Given the choice, I'd be working from a modest home on the beach somewhere in Mexico. :D
In the specific case of raising prices, I'd argue that it's decreasing demand to insure sufficient supply. I agree, thought, that it's a good thing.
This is a VERY important point.

I don't use FB, but a data-promiscuous person who knows a ton about me recently unfriended my closest contacts. Ignorance is bliss?
It would be nice not to need a remote, like with Kinect but with better mics and voice recognition
Long time ago, in a dot.com startup epoch long ago:

Our Seattle/Bellevue based startup hired VP & Dir of outside sales in Silicon Valley. Expensive hires, big payout to recruiting firm, then these two proved extremely difficult to get on the phone, schedule meetings with, et al.

SVP Sales flew in unexpectedly, called & had them pick him up at San Jose Airport. When he threw his bag into the trunk he noticed they had not only our sales & mktg materials, but SEVEN other companies' materials as well. He grilled them on what work they'd accomplished, clients called / met, et al, then ended up firing them before he flew home.

We passed along info to authorities, who later shared the recruiting firm had been in on it, and they were trying to collect evidence to persecute. Sounded like they were collecting recruiting fees & salaries, then sharing among all 'co-conspirators.' FBI was pulled into it, so I assume it involved fairly substantial cash.
The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May - Yanis Varoufakis
Removing the mortgage interest deduction is the third rail of politics. Until most people are renters, I realistically don't see it ever going away, and is one of the few major benefits widely available [1] to the middle class.

The US is still reeling from a strong racial divide, particularly in regards to homeownership. As stated in the article, banks would literally redline neighborhoods that weren't white enough as late as the 80s [2]. But it was worse than that, my parent's house (Built in the 40s) in the East Bay came with old covenant documentation stating that no POC were allowed to live in the home unless they were servants! Thats how bad it was in some areas as prosperous as the Bay Area, and we're still feeling its effects.

[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
Haha, this really was TLDR-length. Kudos!
The law actually caps their profit margin[1] so it effectively forces the insurance to pay and charge more if it wants to increase its income. Ironically, this law is called "Affordable Care Act".

1. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamacare-health-insurance-re...
it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible.

how do we get people to move there?

It seems the two of you agree, unless you feel that getting people to move there is a small problem that does not require action on many fronts.
The people responsible for this knew exactly what they are doing. They are putting a vice grip on society's notion of what privacy is, crushing it into an ever smaller idea. It's not for the benefit of people, it's for their own narrow self-interest and profit.

If this were bi-directional, that along with a loss of privacy came blanket transparency into how they're using the data they record, shared their data sets and open sourced their algorithms, I may not feel comfortable with it, but I wouldn't feel this existential dread that my greatest value comes from being a data point.
How do you identify a situation like this where people might have been helped by the "price gouging" vs something like a company running a festival where they don't allow water to be brought in and you can only buy it from approved vendors who increase the price massively? If there's going to be error one one side or the other, I'd prefer it to be on the side that doesn't incentivize company's to do things that hurt people.
>I'm working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear.

Sounds interesting. Please do a "Show HN" post when your app is ready for it.
> You can call or message any contact who also has the free Alexa App, an Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show and has enabled Alexa calling and messaging.

Just to be clear for others that can't/didn't read the full article, you can't make full calls to anyone, they have to have at minimum the amazon alexa app.
Want to Truly Optimize CI? Squash Complex Bugs
One of my students tried something along these lines for Natural Language Inference (NLI) last year. [1] The results where not conclusive, but perhaps Machine Translation is a better target? My reason for believing this is that the specific dataset for NLI most likely does not require multiple steps of inference for most cases (you can get away with simple token overlap), while the decoder in MT does so since it is constrained to output a single token at each step.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07647
That is getting quite normal nowadays; training a model in machine learning typically takes way more resources than running it.

However, if you need gigabyte to expand your macros, it is likely you need megaseconds, too, and then, it is wise to use 'precompiled headers', and save your 'preprocessor output'.
Amazing presentation. Concentrates on the content, works on mobile[0], no bullshit effects.

[0] within the constraints of Android's embarrassingly crappy audio subsystem
Because we're delicious.
Space is as necessary of a life resource as water and air. We should look at the 1800's and the Homesteading Acts as a template for a new land distribution program. There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere.

It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have enough space to grow a garden.
Chinese Factories Going It Alone to Build the Next Must-Have Device
Doesn't the module question overlap with packages? Not all batteries included sounds like you want to install more features using packages.

A new package system is in the works and, afaik, should be available with Julia 1.0. Here the Julep: https://github.com/JuliaLang/Juleps/blob/master/Pkg3.md. Don't know what the current timing/state is though.
Graph collocation using GNU Guile Scheme
As an observation, your dystopia sounds like the grand vision of many politicians I've heard trumpeting privatization and philanthropy replacing social programs over the years. (However, I would mete the latter part of your AND (market governed) that VC is only a small part of the grander market, and their spending habits are (potentially, although I'd say likely) probably limited to their strata. Normal businesses are by nature not in the business of making these sorts of gambles at a scale to which it starts paying off.)
There's no supply issue. We're talking about adding small marginal cost to transactions between 4-7 PM on Friday and 6-9AM Monday. They don't price it too high, because shifting demand would actually cost them some revenue on the higher margin convenience business.

I bet the model here is that the oil company owns the gas and the retailer sells it on consignment. The oil guys control the price and care about making investments to chisel pennies, as they have hundreds of gas stations. They can't steal too many pennies though, or the coffee and hotdog business inside will falter.

Re: your disaster profiteer use case, I have little sympathy. I'm sure those guys were doing things like collecting Lousiana sales tax, etc that everyone else was going to do.
I don't think this is the same usecase, and the person above suggesting it could be used for Netflix is a bit ridiculous to me. I see it more for watching a quick instructional Youtube videos (as we all know there's a How To for everything on Youtube). It's also something small and easy to have around the house for quick video calls.

For watching anything long and serious, I would definitely send it to my TV.
Fancy Prisons for Billionaires Are Reshaping the Manhattan Skyline
I have mild dyslexia myself and I think any kind of notation is going to be a problem for us. The good news is you don't need musical notation to play music. You can play by ear. Don't let it stop you if you're really interested in music.
I like to think of the Java ecosystem as a giant elephant balancing on one leg, careening downhill on its squeaky little JVM roller skate.

I still remember that Java started as a toy language. And for all its security features and incremental improvements to JVM byte codes over the years, it still looks like a toy.

The classloader is the roller skate and the zillions of interoperating jars are the elephant. For the most part, the elephant stays up and continues blasting down that hill.

I used to think the scene was funny, but now I'm uncertain. Only through tools like Gradle and Maven have we papered over the inadequacies of the classloader system and gotten some control of it.

I had hopes that jigsaw would give the elephant an option of a little car to drive or at least a second skate to aid with balance. But safety trumps all, and such a huge breaking change should be avoided if we can.
Looks like something out of Robocop or Total Recall. I'm not sure if I'm excited or terrified! Let's say both.
Well, if relevance logic is part of linear logic, and it's a true subsumption relationship, then you're saying Belnap doesn't think relevance logic is relevant anymore. So in other words he's pretty much rejected logic altogether.

I guess it makes sense, his most recent papers are about indeterminism (http://www.pitt.edu/~belnap/futurecontingents.pdf), which logic doesn't handle well, but I'm not quite sure how you'd represent the branching-universe model he uses in a type system. I guess you'd need the history operator he uses, m/h = moment m on history h.
A console app that enables hackers to get latest soccer scores and fixtures
I doubt anyone would use this to watch long videos or Netflix. I see it more for quick calls and short instructional videos. It's small and fits in any room of the house. For longer videos, you'd definitely just send it to the TV.

Watching random videos while washing the dishes though is great.
Have mozilla considered Tracy Island?
The subject of your sentence never changed, and the "though" (used as "however" in this case) make the topics related. I think it's more of a solecism than a difference in interpretation.

Glad we're all on the same page though haha.
AFAICT only choices that are likely to make you any money are self-publishing (if done correctly! see links in other comment) and Pragmatic Programmers. PragProg pay 50% royalties, everyone else does 10-20%. They published author outcomes a few years ago: http://pragdave.blogspot.com/2013/11/pragmatic-royalties2013...

If you don't care about money it's about who you'd like editing your stuff, and who you can sell on your book.
> Many disagree with circular module dependencies (I am one) at least at this initial stage.

Does disagreeing with gravity allow you to fly?
I'm sorry for posting this several times in this thread already, but... I made a "music painting" iPad app called Composer's Sketchpad that sounds like it would be a good fit. It's not made for kids, but it did win a Children's Technology Review Editor's Choice Award last year. Maybe up your alley? There's a Lite version, too: http://composerssketchpad.com
I've proposed this for social media for a long time. Rich and famous people have handlers run their social media to meet their goals. I think it fair for poorer people to experience the same relaxation and freedom. Why can't I hire a cloud powered bot to manage my kids social media presence to get him into an ivy "Hey everybody, like my pix of me doing voluntourism in some 3rd world country where I'm photoshopped into a pix of a school being constructed." "How do you do, fellow kids, I am very concerned today about (insert randomly selected progressive cause)".

It wouldn't be a social problem as legacy social media is so yesterday, only auntie and grandma still use facebook and corporations and bots are now the majority users. You just know grandma is going to get into the weirdest flamewar ever on myspace or ICQ or twitter with your social media bot avatar.

I think it would be useful to have a bot run my linkedin for me. A form letter to respond to recruiter form letters. Every week it goes to Google Trends, runs a query on "computer language" to find the trendy framework of the week, and ta da I am now an expert on linked-in for "computer graphics programs in c language with output" "what does pdf mean in computer language" "computer in hindi language" and sure you laugh today, but normies (like HR gatekeepers) google for this kind of stuff all the time, and if my bot's effort posting gets me jobs you're not getting, well, we'll see who gets the last laugh ...
Oh man, is this a subject I'm currently experiencing first hand. Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth.

For the last two months I've been living on-and-off at a shelter, and the problems are legion as far as working my way out of it.

Finding a decent paying job while navigating the shelter minefields? I battle it everyday, but when someone steals your charging cords and toiletries while you sleep and you lose all connections to the net for a week while you figure out how to get a new USB-C charging cord with no income and miss a week's worth of trying to find work, it's easy to be discouraged and wonder if you will ever make it.

I'm 52yo and I'm exhausted all the time, except for a couple of hours in the morning after I wake and work on trying to find work. According to the health app in my phone, I'm walking 6-8 miles a day just getting between the local Starbucks where I "work", the shelter, and places where I can find some crap to eat.

What I find most odd is that there is absolutely no tech whatsoever at the shelter...no public wifi, very minimal computer access (30min a day after hours wait). Don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful that the shelter exists, and the kind folks working there are doing God's work, but too many people "living" there are making no efforts to move on and just see the place as a free flop-house.

Lately I've been sleeping in an empty lot near downtown because I've twice now caught fairly serious illnesses sleeping at the shelter, and it's ridiculous that you are expected to bunk-up at 3p everyday at a place with no public wifi so someone like me can't work in the afternoon and evening..

Yes yes, I get it...I made the choices that put me in my shit-sandwich situation, but doesn't everyone, even the "blameless" people depicted in this story? Couldn't most have made better choices somewhere along their lives to prevent themselves from having to live in low-income situations?

Much of the article discusses how the rich developers, in Florida at least, are gaming the tax-credit side of building low-cost housing in order to enrich themselves illegally.

Same old same old. I’ve known many building contractors in my life and almost all employ various sorts of schemes to make extra money during the construction phases.
But knowing the price of a procedure doesn't change my need for it. If I need heart surgery, I still need it regardless of whether it's $10k or $100k.

In other words, demand is inelastic.

And, most people can't afford to pay 10k or 100k out-of-pocket. So, it's not like managing your household budget. The funds have to come from somewhere else (insurance).

Also, healthcare is not easy to evaluate for a layperson. If my doctor says that I need 'procedure X', I'm relying on their expertise. Healthcare recommendations are not fungible products. If I'm buying a car, I can read reviews about the different models, reliability, etc. But my doctor's recommendation for me is highly specific to my personal health history.

So, for a lot of healthcare spending, it's not me that's choosing a medical procedure. Instead, I'm choosing to trust a doctor's recommendation. The doctor is the one that's recommending the procedure.
sure in an interview I just talk about the projects I've worked on irrelevant of the position. Also, FYI down play the business aspects of the CEO job if you want a technical job. They only really care about your tech skills for dev positions.
Show HN: Idlewords-inspired improved export for Keynote presentations
I think there is a bit of projecting going on here, while I agree with you in a lot of aspects. The market is going to dictate what's going to be produced, just because a product is hard to make doesn't mean it's wanted or objectively good. There are plenty of starving jazz musicians that know way more about music compared to what's currently selling and not just because the bourgeoisie deems it so, because that's what people want to listen at this point in history. John Coltrane is a legend and there are similar jazz musicians out there, but people want the chainsmokers and there isn't anything wrong with that. We could argue that making art using svgs, illustrator, other animation software is incredibly unoriginal and the world would be better if we taught people to use a paintbrush instead. Times change, but that doesn't discredit one or the other.
Life in America: Notes on Cost Disease
Languages like D, Oberon or Modula-3, just to name three out of many, do have GC and also support explicit global and stack allocation.
This might be the thing that stirs apple to action.

I'm under the impression that Alexa works much better at understanding than Siri? Is that true?

What would be great is if all these things could work together. Amazons smartphones are not compelling and they don't have laptops/desktops. It sounds like they do IoT well, while Apple does the later.
For a brief, ominous micro-second, I wondered why Amazon would want to kill my spouse.
> When your kids depend on your paycheck, this is not such a simple matter, and making trades for "a lot of money now" doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

Sure, until the gravy train ends, and it always does (layoffs, reorganizations, etc.), and you wind up looking for a new job with skills that are irrelevant or out-of-date. Unless you're within spitting distance of retirement, staying in a job that isn't growing you and preparing you for your next job (or, worse, might be burning you out) is a massive risk.