skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually agree with a lot of the points made here. Still terrible advice. Youre always gonna need somewhere to live. Guess whats a better bet to invest in than an apartment? A house. If you buy though, check all your bases. Whats appreciation looked like for the last 10 years in this neighborhood? How are the schools? Hows the job market for professionals? etc.
The Financial District of Manhattan (and Midtown) is the only place like that in the U.S., and most people have been to Times Square, so it does a good job conjuring up an emotional reaction in voters.
I don't think it's absurd either, but I think Tesla was the wrong company to try to do it in 2016-2018. Musk and everyone else agrees that Model 3 is a do-or-die time for Tesla, and the financial picture for Tesla looks dire as it is sitting on a sea of red ink from an enormous burn rate financed by bond debt. That is not a situation in which to take a likely profitable but unnecessary systemic risk which imperils the entire Model 3 program by its nature. If GM or Toyota tried an experimental lights-out factory, it's not going to potentially kill them. For Tesla, that's a possibility.
> And yet you don't see that for some this is in fact a "killer feature" in favor of the Chromecast?

For me that is the feature which kills the Chromecast.

My mother's manual dexterity and mental state are degraded enough that working a smartphone is out of the question. The touchpad Apple TV remote is also too challenging.

Until this past Christmas, my girlfriend's children had no tablets of their own with which to control the television.

I want to watch something in living room but I left my phone charging in the kitchen.

The great thing about a Roku TV is that it works just like a regular TV but with a better UI. My mother could work it after a 30-second explainer -- here's your remote, there's DirectTV Now, there's Plex, press the Home button to get back here. The girlfriend, kids, and random houseguests just grab the remote and go.

Everything else the Roku can do via App / Casting is gravy and I could live without any of it. I do appreciate Private Listening tho because it works with whatever output device(s) are available to the device the app is running from -- no extra Bluetooth pairing steps and doing the Which BT device will my headphones end up connecting to when I turn them on? dance.
We switched over to Gitlab from Stash about 9 months ago and it's been fantastic. There are so many amazing features, and the CI/CD integration has been smooth. I highly recommend it.
No one has touched on

1. Interest rates are at historic lows. Real interest rates have recently been negative. When this changes in the next decades, interesting things will occur.

2. It is time for the baby boomers to leave their houses and move into smaller digs. There is a demographic shift on the horizon.

3. The Republican tax legislation just hammered home deductions in many areas.

There are interesting times ahead.
How Uber is moving the “blue dot” and improving GPS accuracy in big cities
> Zelle is not "a company even worse on refunds and user rights"

missed your point.
I would make a subtle adjustment there: "you thought Knuth knew how to design, this proves you wrong". \makeatspecial here we go\oh\boy ...
Reasons why your house is a good investment:

- Massive tax subsidies provided by the government. Seriously apalling if you think about it hard enough, but since they're available, you should try to take advantage of them.

That list is sufficient.
Of course, their methodology for doing so is nonstandard, since there are obvious incentives for Facebook to use it and keep it to themselves. Unfortunately this keeps these transformations out of reach for most applications.
Yeah, I think a frame that people don't use often enough when talking about homeownership is as a hedge against rising housing prices. As a person who needs somewhere to live, you already have a short position in the market whether you like it or not.
throwaway84742, you are correct. That is why I said, "thing that customers wanted" and not "idea." Even having the kernel of the idea was insufficient.
I find myself wondering what, with a similar approach to analysis, would ever qualify as a good investment. Certainly stocks are out, given their volatility, the individual investor's inability to ever compete with professionals, the brokerage fees, and the taxation of any gains you make. Owning your own small business? Goodness, you have taxes, expenses, and the continual risk of losing everything if you become sick or market conditions change. 401K? Subject to government regulation that could change at any time; you're restricted in how much you can invest and how and when you can withdraw. That sounds terrible, too. What's left? Bitcoin?
You can't run a blockchain without miners either; we're both omitting things from our models.
It could be that the risk management department would like to shut down football but doesn't have the political power to do so since there are so many people invested in keeping that going.

PSOC is a convenient soft target without anyone on the payroll to defend it, so risk management is in a position to do whatever they want.
this really should be as easy as a database DELETE operation, why is it so difficult? guess the design for HN site is not "user-first".

recalling facebook etc was impossible to remove your account but now it seems feasible and quick, though not sure if facebook/etc indeed flushes the deleted-account cleanly.
I can manage my real estate risk better (IMHO) in a rising interest rate environment better than a REIT can (and I find most REITs to be overvalued, specifically O). My cash on cash returns are better as well.
The author makes a few good points, but IMO most others are negated by the two he conveniently skips:

1. Your house is usually generating income (for a rental property) or offsetting the rent you would otherwise have to pay. Saying "you have to pay a lot of taxes" doesn't mean much unless you compare the numbers.

2. He mentions that property value is tied to a specific geographical area (and that's a bad thing), but then contradicts himself by calculating appreciation based on the national average. If you live in a fast-growing city then it's pretty certain that you're going to make more than inflation.
> the interest + property tax + upkeep + HOA fees + closing costs + etc. very often run significantly more than rent on an apartment

Yes, but rental prices also change over time, whereas your mortgage payment doesn't (although the tax deduction falls over time, and your locality may up your property taxes, but these are fairly minor components).

If you have reason to believe that rent will continue to increase (either around CPI, or in the case of the Bay Area, 10%+ per annum...), then by all means buying a house now (which produces an infinite stream of rents) allows you to profit off that view.

Another way to view this is that you are acquiring an rental inflation-indexed asset and a nominal liability, so you will profit if inflation is high enough.
As an iOS user, I only use sms for friends who use android but don’t use whatsapp or another end-to-end encrypted platform. IE, it’s just a fallback for me.
I've used Bokeh with decent results: http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/
> denser places are also better places to live

For you, maybe. But not for me or for everyone. I like my low-density suburban sprawl, and I intend to continue voting to keep my city [0] the way it is.

[0] Not SV, but in Texas.
Yes, because ISPs are pushing this and they now have all their net neutrality abolishment and private protection removals in place, all that money can now go to all out assaults on Facebook, Google and any other competitors in the ad space.

Part of ISPs justification for removing privacy protections via bribes was to allow them to compete with Facebook/Google.

As seen with removing ISP privacy protections from the FCC to help them get net neutrality removed, ISPs don't give up when it comes to using their local monopolies and bribing their way into markets rather than competing with products built on it that people want like Facebook/Google.

Right now ISP money isn't being spent on innovation or expansion of their network capabilities, it is being spent to combat competition in areas they want to move into such as the ad network/tracking space, network throttling/data caps and more.

ISPs also want to be the implementers of the internet filters that will be arriving soon to be broad censorship and stifle competition [1]. They are also big on helping the surveillance state and will get shared data to use in their ad networks [2].

The ISPs are helping build the network that will be more like hotel wifi than the internet we know and love today. If the ISPs do one thing well it is stifling competition to create near monopolies because they don't like to compete building actual quality or products to compete next to market leaders, they bribe and use their local monopolies to get in.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/04/internet-censorship-is-advanci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> Pointers are part of the Java implementation, not part of its abstract computational model. Calling it pass-by-value when the values being passed are deliberately hidden from the user is a recipe for confusion.

Its abstract computation model is entirely equivalent to if someone did `typedef object_val *Object`, made `.` do the same thing as `->` and got rid of `->`, and then said you could only have `Object` variables, not `object_val`s. Saying that that's enough to make it not pass-by-value anymore seems ridiculous (especially when Java does still have primitives). If that were enough to make it something else, then following a style guide for C could make your code not pass-by-value anymore.

I understand what you're saying about the helpfulness to learners, but I think that they would be better served by just learning that Java classes are all reference types, their value is a reference to an object that '.' dereferences and so on, and that even if you don't want to use the word 'pointer', they happen to behave exactly like pointers. The reason I think that's better is because it also covers other common mistakes, like initializing multiple variables to the same instance and expecting copy semantics. The same mistake is being made in both that and the swap function from earlier, but the term 'pass-by-value' could only be to blame for one of them. Once you have your head around reference types, there's no problem with calling it 'pass-by-value'.
Data sources:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doitt/initiatives/3d-building.page

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/open-data/dwn-p...

And code is open: https://github.com/rolyatmax/nyc-buildings
The report on the Chevy Bolt that UBS financed has apparently more or less wandered into the public domain. It's available here (first google hit):
http://www.advantagelithium.com/_resources/pdf/UBS-Article.p...

It paints a hopeful picture if you're interested in the future of electric cars, I think. The Bolt is something GM threw together with the minimal amount of effort necessary, understanding that this generation would have pretty low volume, and it's honestly really good for what it is.
The web happened.
The Blockchain is TCP/IP with History.

That's how you think about it and once you do that a huge amount of things open up. Some of those might not make sense to the current cohort of developers, proponents, and critics but the next coming generations will grow up with this normalized and will find plenty of ways to use it.

The most underappreciated part of the blockchain is its ability to create a secondhand market (not secondary) for digital assets. This means that digital assets will be able to increase in value if ex-owned by the right person (think an ebook who was owned by Obama. If you think this is far out I urge you to look at the art industry to understand how things with no inherent value gets traded for often insane amounts.

Collectors Cards (Crypto Kiddies) this is only the beginning and when I look at the kind of things my son care about it's fairly obvious that digital memorabilia is going to be a huge industry.

Digital Identity this is going to be the defacto standard in a few decades, decentralized is the future.

So hate it or love it. The blockchain is here to stay and there is nothing wrong with us not having found any real traction for it yet outside the speculation space, it will come because the fundamental properties are sound and useful.

It's worth spending many more billions on this to get it to to become the 2nd layer on top of TCP ip on the internet. That's my take on it.

Edit: I'm genuinely curious. Why the downvotes? Did I say something wrong?
I bought a house in 2013 and sold it in 2016 for a total return of probably close to 50% -- not including leverage, after factoring in avoided rents and all costs. If you include the leverage, the ROI was probably >100%. What's more, the cash I invested was at the moment of my investment significant with respect to my net worth -- something like 33%. So this was a great outcome.

However, that does not mean I made a wise financial decision. I made a lucky financial decision, which is very different. This article is about making wise decisions, and it's very hard to reason about this from results in a single investment.

I just want to add that a lot of people account very poorly for their real estate profits. Whether that number is good depends on how leveraged you are and the value of the property, and many other variables, like your costs and (unknowable) future vacancy rates. (If you have a lot of leverage and the property is only worth a little, that's great! It would not be very good in a scenario where the the property is paid off and worth $2M.)
Hacker News doesn't use a database - data is stored in Arc Lisp closures in flat files.

I'm not certain how it handles usernames, though (I've played around a bit with Anarki, but can't remember) but I suspect it would probably involve a lot of file
parsing and editing, assuming each username is literally just copied into a field in each thread file.
In most situations trust between two parties can be obtained by means of a third party they both trust.

That’s how the banking system has worked for centuries.

The use case for a blockchain is narrower: it can be used to establish trust between two parties in absence of a trustable third party.
PSU has unlimited coffers as a state school and the Outing Club is very popular, and also run by amateurs. A perfect storm for e.g. a rich international student to get injured or killed and then have their parents sue Pennsylvania for megabucks.

This is 100% related to liability reduction. No insurance company would cover a high-risk activity group without demanding conditions like being able to call 911 or medevac.

The condition demanded here is 100% reasonable given the risk.

Reason is complaining about people wanting to do risky things and have other people pay for them which is par for the course for libertarianism these days, I guess.
> I really fail to see how most of those points are relevant when you consider that a home is an investment you can, you know, live in. The alternative would be to rent indefinitely, which apparently we're ok with even though its not just a 0% return on investment, its an infinitely negative percent return on investment.

This would only make sense if you want to live in a place indefinitely. When the economy here (Alberta, Canada) tanked due to falling oil prices, people who were renting and were laid off simply gave their 1-2 month notice to their landlord and moved to Montreal or Southern Ontario for better employment opportunities. Those who owned could not do that without taking a huge loss, selling their house for less than the price they bought it for, potentially less than the remaining mortgage obligation, potentially leading to their bankruptcy. As for renting it out? Forget about finding a tenant in that economy. And even if they did, how could they manage a property from the other side of the country?

Mobility is worth more than zero. If you think the economy in the place you are living is going to be good for the rest of your life (or at least the rest of your mortgage term) and you are certain you would not want to move during this time, go ahead and buy a place. Otherwise, it makes sense to rent.
Android… the Community
Nothing is ever that easy.

Should there be a soft-delete in case they change their mind, or if it's malicious? Can YC alumni delete accounts, since the login is tied to applications? Should new users be prevented from signing up with an old username, to avoid "stealing" an identity? Are old posts from the person deleted? Old submissions? Either way, will it cause errors somewhere? Are child comments deleted? Are deleted accounts still available in the API (which is hosted by a third-party)? If not, will that break the application of someone using the API?

I'm not saying they should/shouldn't do it, however it's not as easy as a "database DELETE operation".
Oh, huh. I might have to look into paying for that then.
Normalize before approval and add filters that only allow in /expressly approved/ items from insecure environments.
Exactly. A house is more than an investment, it's a place to live. My sister and her family are living in their 3rd home in as many years because the owners of the places they are renting keep selling and don't renew their lease.

Then it's a hectic couple of months of finding somewhere new (but close enough to the same location so kids don't have to change schools) packing up everything in to boxes, moving and unpacking everything. It's 2-3 months of hassle they would love to avoid. Not everyone is buying a house as an investment.
A friend of mine recently developed robert.js, a library for manipulating Bob's datafiles.

https://github.com/Treeki/robert.js

For example, here are the Bob rooms, rendered in your browser:
https://wuffs.org/bob/room.html
My local library has a play area for kids. It's great to go in the winter to get out of the house, and the kids can read, play.
There is some unfortunate truth in the idea that individual, non-wealthy investors have very few opportunities for great investments
Citations.
No I don't realize that and I am pretty sure you can't find much that would back that up. People didn't even think in terms of racism it was just what was normal historically. Today we think like that but that also comes with it's own dangers of becoming another kind of opressor.
There's some footage[1] from One America News Network, which I gather is some kind of sub-Fox News outfit, of their reporter interviewing doctors at the same hospital Fisk writes about. They seem to tell pretty much the same story: on the day of the purported attack people were treated for dust inhalation, no-one died, a bunch of people suddenly appeared in the hospital shouting "chemical attack!" and spraying people with water, while filming themselves. Hospital staff joined in spraying water (as you would do) but no one exhibited symptoms of actual chemical weapons use.

I've read reports that doctors who spoke to the press had been intimidated and threatened if they verified the attack story[2]. The people in the video don't look intimidated to me, but I'm no expert.

I'm personally on the fence on this one, and haven't read in-depth either. But it's mighty strange to me seeing Fisk and a conservative cable news network on the same page on a mid-East controversy!

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9w8j-avq_0

2: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/syria-crisis-m...
> The supposed flexibility of renting is overrated as well.

Plus there's nothing keeping you from renting out your property and then living somewhere else.

You lose some of the nicer deductions and time spent being a landlord, and that certainly hurts ROI, but it's definitely not the case that you must live in what you own.
Those $132.000 could into another investment like the SP500 and you could get 2.6x times the investment over a 10 years period (average return of 10% with dividends). This would pay the rent + provide you a return.

I don't agree with all the points of the author as there are many factors to have into account when making the best financial decision. But rent can't be just seen as a negative investment, it's a cost that makes a person free to move their money into investments that provide a better return.
Exact, and we have seen how well this third-party trust system worked during the last financial crisis just a decade ago.
The suburbanization (or decentralization) was promoted by the Federal Government as a deterrent against nuclear strikes

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10....
Another problem with the analogy in this article is that there is no division between memory and processing element in a nervous system. They're essentially the same.

Imagine running a program on a computer where everything is somehow memoized, on a system that is always powered on.
Stocks lack most of the weaknesses listed in the article. Point by point . . .

- Not an ongoing drain on cash.

- Liquid.

- Cheap to buy and sell.

- Simple to buy and sell.

- Have historically generated high returns. (Although see my earlier comment for questions about whether this truly distinguishes stocks from housing.)

- Normally not leveraged.

- Normally not mortgaged.

- Often productive (dividends).

- Mobile. You can sell it to anyone in the world.

- Many large corporations are multi-national, and certainly immune to any event that would occur at a neighborhood level.

- Do not discourage you from moving to seek better opportunities.

- Stocks can be pretty cheap. Shares of good ETFs are in reach of anyone.

- Require no ongoing maintenance.

- Relatively immune to local or even global weather.

- Generally tax efficient, especially if held in a retirement account.

- Not subject to eminent domain.

What about this analysis makes you think that stocks fare poorly in it?
Input validation, security, and message construction are all hard topics; particularly when combined.
In CL you typically have use-value and bind-value restarts for various conditions, which do not imply modification of the running program, only of its state. Whether it is more or less powerful than "edit and continue" model (which you in fact can do in CL, but doing that comfortably requires IDE support) is for me a question without definitive answer.
Which system failure from that crisis does blockchain technology fix?
This. As a founder of a small SaaS product that has never (nor plans to) sold or monetized user data GDPR has presented issues for us. Especially because EU represents <1% of revenue. From my point of view, GDPR creates barriers of entry that can hurt small players.

As a human, yes I care about privacy and the right to be forgotten. As an entrepreneur, these barriers of entry piss me off.
Straightforward, easily verified observations have a habit of rising to the top. Longwinded tirades about MK Ultra are easy to skip.
To chime in, being able to move to smaller or bigger places depending on your family needs, or closer/farther from big cities depending on your priorities of the moment are huge advantages.
~72% of rentals in SF are rent-controlled units (capped increase at < 3%/year)

As someone who doesn't plan to indefinitely stay in the Bay Area, I'm very happy renting a rent-controlled unit.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...
I have used firebase in a couple of side projects. And quite happy.

> My fear with Firebase is being a Google product, who knows if it will stick around

Same here. Simple solution would be to self host something like parse or https://gun.eco . Anyone used the open source alternatives to firebase?
why couldn't they throw down the cash to buy out an existing product that doesn't suck?