skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's the Trump MO. They drop something big like the FBI director that they have in the bullpen to overshadow another turd like this.

Underfunding the census directly hurts the democrats, as urban areas always need more human outreach than the burbs, whose residents dutifully fill out their surveys.

It's not just gerrymandering, its outright warfare. Census numbers drive things like sales tax distribution, school aid, and local government aid too. The strategy here is to starve out democratic strongholds.
It should be.. basic subdivision would work but it's nimbys that prevent it.
I knew a guy who used to wire down safety features on old gas stoves. He said similar stuff about how unnecessary these were. He died (along with his daughter) a year or two later because he disregarded what ski areas were and weren't off limits. Something he'd no doubt done before without any problems. You're fine until you aren't.
Property taxes pay for the schools that already exist. It's hard for a district to 'save up' because, well California, and 'surplus' money should be returned to the taxpayer. If developers don't cover the cost a district usually issues a bond but that's hard because, well, California, and direct democracy rarely votes to raise property tax mil rates whatever it would cost to cover the bond. And doesn't California basically freeze assessment values? Because why should the people who already live there pay for services for newcomers? It's all very hostile and backward.
Agricultural land is often connected to 19th century water rights in CA, allowing nearly unlimited access to ground water and a set allocation of running streams at very low cost.

Access to ground water is so unrestricted that the entire Central Valley is sinking!
https://www.revealnews.org/article/california-is-sinking-and...
it will only help apple, not you.

the article convenietly leaves out the pricing rules being disputed.

remember that there is already regulations for std patents to be priced reasonably and non discrimatory.

what apple is hunting here, is a discount. nothing else.
Chicago is an awesome city. Right now is the best time (Chicago summers are amazing) however it really depends on your priorities.

Strong opinions here:

If you are ready to settle down, buy a house, raise a family in or near a city... Chicago is a safe/comfortable bet.

If you are looking for tech, don't move.

Can you provide more details on WHAT you are looking for in Chicago?

DISCLAIMER: I moved to Chicago about 2 years ago and now i'm back in the bay area.
(1) It's been known since forever that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising.

(2) This story is tech related and way more on topic for HN then pure politics (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). I'm sure Reddit is having kittens, if politics is your thing.
Why?

This is a far more important story than Comey.
> There are many cases where UK tax payer would actually save money by firing the people in the jobs, giving them golden payoffs and buying more effective equipment elsewhere.

The UK learned their lesson on that approach decades ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassau_Agreement#Skybolt_Crisi...
I live in an older neighbourhood in Edmonton, and there's a bunch of them. They're all roughly a century old, and still in great condition. Think your home will still be standing a hundred years from now?
Or how about jobs in Pleasanton/Tracy, close to where all the new cheap(er) housing is being built?

Instead, those homeowners now have a 60-90 minute to SF or Sunnyvale, where all the jobs are.
Needs 2015 in the title. "Published Jul 8, 2015"
More renters than owners. Renters need to get out and vote.
The game that's the subject of the OP is written in Rust. The one in the Reddit thread linked elsewhere was only a texture.
I think what the above returns depends on the language. In java I think there is an actual run time exception for this. The point of the original comment is to show how 100% coverage is easy to achieve but often meaningless.

There is some other more abstract concept related to the classes of input that can possibly be passed to a method. IMHO 100% coverage and "test first" have done more harm than good to the cause of automated testing.
I'm not sure this rather dated precept is compatible with the exigencies of 21st century economics, and the flexibility, mobility and long hours demanded.

For one thing, houses are cash sinks. It doesn't make sense for highly paid professionals to spend enormous amounts of time or money reshingling roofs, painting, mowing lawns, treating weeds, trimming hedges, repairing plumbing, etc. The deep specialisation and constant attention that the professional economy asks are orthogonal to all those things. It's prudent to upload those demands to the cloud (aka your landlord, at scale) so to speak.

I know far more urban professionals that were hindered by the ballast of owning real estate than those empowered by this "most basic form of security". Here in the sprawling metro Atlanta area, taking another job will very likely take you to a wholly different part of this vast agglomeration and doom you to a punishing commute unless you sell your house and relocate. The uncertainty, transaction costs and other friction kept a number of people I know in dead-end jobs until they were finally laid off.

As a personal anecdote, I bought a condo in May 2007. I was drinking the very same Kool-Aid about basic form of security and whatnot. I finally let my home go to foreclosure in summer 2015. I financed at $160K, and in summer 2015 it appraised at $85K. I still owed $140K. One of the lenders sued me for a $29K deficiency and got a judgment, and I'll be paying them $250/mo for the next six years. Some security. I grant that my effort at partaking of the most basic form of security a human needs was exceptionally disastrous, but I think the housing crash educated a lot of people about just how much security it really offers. A senseless push to ownership for ownership's sake threatens to discard those valuable lessons.

The real argument for owning vs. renting is the mortgage interest deduction, and that's an artifice of government tax policy that hugely distorts the market and the incentives.
I think you both have the causality backward. Vanishingly few people are moving to California to live in a bus.

People are moving to California to get better jobs, and most of them can comfortably afford to live in California. The people who are ending up in buses have lived in California since housing was cheap enough that they didn't have a problem, or since they were children.

People who can't afford to live in California anymore also can't afford the cost of moving. So they end up on the street and unable to find work or leave the state.
Having fun laughing all the way to the bank at idiots like you. Just as an example. I saw what Bitcoin was right way and invested a few thousand. That couple thousand has since netted me more than $200,000. I now have much more in Bitcoin than I ever put in and have withdrawn more than I put in.

Sorry, but you are naive. New things happen, nations change, "money" has not always been USD. I am having fun laughing at fools like you work your life away because you are too proud to try and understand a new paradigm.

In my early 30's I am financially secure for life, have a happy family and am working on a PhD, all because of what Bitcoin has allowed. And its still going up.

Good luck at your 9-5 and with your employee matched Roth IRA.
I'm using Clojure and ClojureScript for Co-op Source (a platform for building software cooperatives) and have found it to be a great set of tools that keeps everything simple and clean. While it is not public/production, it will be soon ;-)

I've also started using ClojureCLR (via Arcadia) to build a VR/AR software development environment for use with Co-op Source. Using a REPL within Unity3D is awesome for prototyping.
What didn't work out for Firefox? Firefox is used by millions last I checked.
I have what would appear to be a good middle class job at a state university but because I live in the Bay Area, half my paycheck goes to rent. Many of my coworkers are now working weekend jobs just to stay ahead. Positions remain unfilled for many months because the jobs don't pay enough. The chances that the state will give us a meaningful pay raise is basically zero. The California Faculty Association negotiated a 10% pay raise over 3 years and that required major arm twisting right up to a strike vote.

Forget home ownership, forget starting a family. This current situation just isn't sustainable.
Yes but please see my reply on the previous comment saying the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14305121
If SF housing politics has taught me anything, it's that the nastiest of human behavior is revealed by parking disagreements :(

I never understood the residential parking permit argument anyway.

Public dollars built the road, which now contains public parking spots.

Implementing residential parking permits is a transfer of value from the public domain to private land owners.

In Palo Alto (and the rest of the Bay Area, where land owners are inherently millionaires), this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the public to the wealthiest few.
No love for Oracle here (except for all the money they spend having talented engineers work on the JVM. ie fuck their databases).

It's still laughable to call IBM and RedHat a community. They're consultants. Government consultants, mostly. This is an entrenched politics play and surprisingly, Oracle is playing the part of the little guy by virtue of not giving enough of a shit to micromanage the Java ecosystem.
I think people (especially urban dwellers) are disconnected from how agriculture works. It takes lots of water to support plants, and even more to support animals (including people).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/food-water-footprin...

some highlights:

1 gallon of coffee - 1056 gallons of water

1 pound of chicken - 518 gallons

1 pound of beef - 1847 gallons

1 gallon of wine - 872 gallons

1 gallon of lentils - 704 gallons
Brick Block – click to build, right-click to remove
> This seems like an unnecessary war.

Especially insofar as it's a war, yes. In general, I like two strongly motivated and opposing advisors on my healthcare decisions, one advocating for the best possible care, and one team of actuaries arguing about what's least likely to be a waste of money.[0]

Anyway, that's just the ideal case where insurance and hospitals oppose each other, possibly motivated by financial incentives, and I benefit. Admittedly, things usually aren't ideal.

You might be able to restructure things where hospital incentives are tied to outcomes. Making them responsible for hospital-acquired infections was a step towards that.

But it's hard to pin them to long term outcomes, and weight that towards cost of procedures, which is apparently what we really care about judging by the outcomes / cost headlines.

You could assign people to a specific hospital for long periods of time to track long term health outcomes, make them responsible for your health full stop. But occasionally some hospitals face systemic challenges and become institutional failures over time.[1] It'd be horrible to chain people to a failing institution, especially the sole institution responsible for their health.

> It's a very deep problem.

Agreed 100%.

--

[0] Even if I'm not paying full costs directly, I don't want society to simply waste money on me. I've heard of plans that give you a weekly back massage from a chiropractor at a $10 copay. I'd feel terrible doing that, like I was stealing money from babies with cancer.

[1] e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Joseph_Medical_Center_(Hou...
You should tell your kid to buy the extra parking allotment, then knock on your neighbor's doors and note that "for a small fee" he or she can make sure that no one with a permit parks on the street in front of their house.

"Beautiful street you've got there. It'd be a shame if someone were to start parking on it. Every. Day."
> It's been known for a long time that Trump and the FBI director didn't see eye to eye, and the former employs the latter. Still significant, just not surprising.

The president firing the FBI director is huge news. The story is currently at the top of every single message board and news outlet except this one.
It's funny how easy people think this is.

Yes it's "just a data collection app".

You're talking about an org that, if your address is in the middle of a swamp, they will send someone by boat to find you.

They take collection and processing very seriously.

If you gave a startup 200 million or whatever, you'd have a pretty accurate census of internet connected people in the top 20 cities in the US. Oh, and a declaration of victory from the startup, plus 300 billion in market cap in the hope that they may actually be able to count everyone someday!

Somehow, i doubt you'd come up with something that can collect data well, know where to be focusing field representatives, etc with 600k+ field representatives in a reasonable and efficient manner.

Has anyone here tried to organize people,targets, and data in say a company twice the size of all of IBM?
How did that go?
:)

(the census is honestly relatively cheap. it costs about 50 bucks per person, total. Obviously, counting rural, etc areas is the majority of the cost)

The 2020 Census is going to be weird, too.
Disadvantaged minorities, etc are statistically less likely to be counted[1], and especially given the climate in the US, counting immigrants is going to be especially hard.

[1] Which is why in the US, they democrats often try to pass rules around using statistical methods, and the republicans claim it requires actual enumeration
Who cares if they didn't see eye to eye. The FBI director was investigating his ties to Russia which could have been criminal. Close to a dozen FSB agents or people with ties to the agency died in suspicious circumstances after Steele's Trump dossier surfaced. Saying "the former employs the latter" grossly understates this - they serve 10 year as a compromise to prevent the accumulation of excess power (Hoover) but to insulate them from exactly this type of thing.
This is beautiful and amazing. I love how each step builds on the previous, and uses pop examples to explain theory concepts. I've often wondered so many of the things presented in this, particularly around what common characteristics a genre has with respect to rhythm! Big kudos to the team who built this. I'd love to learn about the development backstory, as this feels a lot like an internal sideproject made by passionate individuals and less like a product idea dreamed up with requirements and specs.
You've gotta live under a nice large rock if you're on HN and you don't know NIMBY.
You can't downvote submissions.

Some of the things that affect submission ranking is number of points, (increases) age, (decreases) and number of comments. Somewhat surprisingly, having more comments will penalize the ranking of a story, to push flamewars off the front page. This is to prevent HN from being Reddit, where r/all is a constant rolling flamewar. (The FBI submission has 5 times as many comments as this story, and has already fallen off the front page)
> right now it looks like this entire JSR is going to get killed in 30 days.

I don't think so.

I suspect Eclipse/IBM/RedHat will still vote against it, but the others will accept that voting "yes" is better than the alternatives (as you have described) and let it through.

There are a small number of members who think that Jigsaw if fundamentally bad. For them, it's solving the problem the wrong way, ignoring their beloved existing module systems, and is a waste of effort that ought to be killed. They will alway vote no, and will look for relevant technical reasons to justify that. And there's always something wrong with a spec if you want to find it. I don't specifically mean "this is political" so much as "they are predisposed to be against Jigsaw, and will always find flaws in it because they simply don't believe in it".

Most of the other members who voted no, seem to think that Jigsaw can be salvaged, but don't want to simply wave it through when there's still so much angst, and there's hope that, with time, some of that angst can be reduced and the spec will be improved along the way.

Once they get to the critical point where it's vote yes, or kill it entirely, that decision changes. At that point, voting no creates more angst and more problems, and won't improve the spec. I expect that they'll vote "yes" then, and accept that they got the best outcome that they could possibly achieve.

Perhaps there will be one or two who will still vote no because they don't think enough progress was made and they will take a principled position over a pragmatic one (which is not necessarily a virtue in a standard committee), but I think it will get through, simply because the alternative is so much worse.
People tend to forget things are public when they're using them, but accutely remember that fact when others are doing so.
When you sell the coin for cash you know exactly the amount you will have. Bitcoin needs a stable secondary currency or an exchange that will process the transaction immediately but sent payment at a later date.
Some of us just wanted a 3 bedroom house on a 5000 sq ft lot -- so we could have a small yard with room for a dog and BBQ. Maybe a kid playing outside.

Now we're being told we're greedy, and our neighborhoods should be replaced with 3 story townhouses on 1200 sq ft lots. No room for Fido.

Makes me wonder what we're working insane hours for -- to settle for permanent apartment style living. At least we don't have cage houses yet.
> Like or dislike Trump, there have been many on the Democratic Party side calling for Comey to be gone and the odd part is many are now rushing to the guy's defense. That and he was fired over incorrect testimony about a Clinton aide, testimony that painted her in a worse position than deserved.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing overall is complicated, so no, people aren't just going to be singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead". But the manner in which it was done was a bad thing.
I know you and the other poster are using "California" as a shorthand for "Coastal California", but the Central Valley and the Inland Empire are very affordable.
Prompting the few remaining Google+ loyalists to flee to the mountains, Red Dawn style.
The government contracting system is fubar.

Everything is done by contractors and has layers and layers of nonsense that has to be tracked and complied with. For a program like the census that includes everything from development to Helpdesk to field service nationwide. I bet the end user support alone is $30-50M through a web of contractors.

Work like this also gets deliberately broken up in chunks to lock in the votes of influential congressmen. More chunks are less efficient and more expensive.

When I worked for a non-federal US government, the process for a small business to get "on contract" to actually bid on many projects cost anywhere from $20-50k in legal, insurance and compliance costs.
Gould was issued U.S. Patent 4,161,436 in 1979, covering a variety of laser applications including heating and vaporizing materials, welding, drilling, cutting, measuring distance, communication systems, television, laser photocopiers and other photochemical applications, and laser fusion.[25]

So 1979 + 20 = 1999 - 1959 = 40 years which is twice the nominal 20 year patent terms.

Critically the original patent was overturned based on a private notebook from 1957. So, the public gained NOTHING from these patents because someone else had already published and others where actually creating the product and bringing it to market, but no based on a notebook which nobody saw suddenly the world changes.
Why do you feel this story is more important?
There is a set of assumptions in your argument that I believe are false.

1. Unregulated water use that allows for production of export cash crops will continue

This could easily be fixed by regulating water use properly, such that farmers have economic incentive to grow crops that are less water intensive given that CA is not water rich.

2. Market prices of current export and current import crops will hold constant regardless of growth

That's not how markets work.

If there was a sudden surge in lettuce demand, farmers in Salinas would respond to increasing prices by switching some fields currently used for export crops to lettuce, which would be consumed locally.

This is aided by point (1) above, where we could push this shift with water regulations.

On the whole -- your concerns seem best addressed by sensible regulation of water in CA, which is a long term political problem. Opposing the farm lobby is well known third rail in the CA Leg.

Nativist population control programs are not the solution to a market failure of water distribution, however they might be implemented. Opposing housing construction is even a really poor way to implement a nativist population control program.
Totally agree... Private sector just isn't going to serve people with a negative ROI and stay in business. Facebook's costs would skyrocket if they had to chase down the last 10-20% of the population necessary for comprehensive coverage.

These are all structural issues with solving the problem, before we even get to a procurement process that picks a mediocre LPTA contractor instead of Google.
>I'm curious what caused the cost of the new electronic system to nearly double

Nitpick: the article mentions that the cost estimates "had ballooned by nearly 50%", which is not the same as doubling (which would have involved the estimates increasing by nearly 100 percent)
I used to be GIS Coordinator for a medium size municipality. The Census Bureau sent out DVD's of address points for the 2010 count for cities to validate. There was some collaboration between cities, USPS, and Census on it but as you likely know address standards are a mess in the US. Many states have efforts to standardize but it's often difficult because addressing is left to the municipality and often falls to a non GIS person (city planner, building inspector etc) who has little concept of normalization or why it's a bad idea to create addresses that are difficult for a computer to understand.

Openaddresses.io is an awesome project, as a GIS professional thank you! This type of data can be immensely useful!
I'd argue intensity is as, if not more, important than just "statistics." A source that tells one lie that starts a war is much worse IMO than one that tells 99 lies about celebrity pets.
The director of the FBI serves at the pleasure of the President, as evidenced by the fact the latter just fired the former. If you don't like that, then I suggest you work on passing a law preventing it.

Obviously an employee of the President isn't going to police the President very effectively. Historically, that's what special prosecutors have been used for.
> Pointing to the highest performing companies that have been selected by the market is not really a fair comparison for a government agency.

Fair point. All the companies I pointed out are flush with cash, making the annual budget of the census comically small.

So if we want large publicly visible government software projects to start going well consistently, what would it take? Recent poorly run projects have included the failed launch of healthcare.gov which was "rescued" by SV techies and this project which is way over budget. There are many more which are smaller, less visible to the public, and I'm sure there are a set of projects which get done on time and on or below budget.
Yeah, this seems pretty serious to me. It's not a drop in the ocean as the op makes it sound .