skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It didn't make sense all along. 10 years ago this would have been crazy because PV hardware was so much more expensive then.

A lot of people do fail to do the math. Many people are not quantitatively analytical, even in situations where such analysis is in their material self-interest.

A few years ago I encountered an engineer who was really angry about lightbulb minimum efficiency standards. "I already switched to LED bulbs where it made economic sense. Anyone with a brain did! Now the government is forcing me to buy these expensive bulbs for places where they run for less than 10 hours a year, like my attic. It's worse for the environment too when you consider the additional embodied energy in LED manufacturing."

His technical analysis was perfectly sound. His social analysis wasn't. A huge number of people won't do the smart thing as soon as it becomes the smart thing. (Or maybe ever. My mom stockpiled incandescent bulbs in anticipation of efficiency standard upgrades. She also complains about how high her electric bill is, after running 8 incandescent bulbs for several hours a day in the kitchen ceiling lighting...)

Much to the annoyance of people who are perfectly able and willing to do their own analysis, it can take too much effort to judge who's rationally avoiding higher up-front costs because they won't pay off in the long run and who's just being myopic. A one-size-fits-all rule forces smarties to do something worse as the price of forcing fools to do something better. There's an aggregate benefit because the fools outnumber the smarties several times over.
Facebook is evil and sin. Fuck them.
It's already gone, so, no harm, no foul. (Hugged to death.)

If you can connect to the site, you could wget/curl after you pay.
> Butterick has Strong Opinions™ about Kindle typography

Apparently so, as the website has a strange skinny/tall hard-to-read font for prose, and another strange hard-to-read font for code.
How the “Boring” Local Chamber of Commerce Is Important to Your SEO
Our rates indeed resemble cost of living a lot. We've found that the rent was a good indicator of market rate https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
Say Hello to Born-On Airbnb Hotels
Induced demand in housing is a myth. Research confirms that building more housing reduces displacement.

UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project study covers this quite well: http://www.urbandisplacement.org/research#section-84

Key summary: "What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including
reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis
strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even
more important when it comes to reducing displacement of
low-income households."
The important thing about humans is that we do better the more of us there are- so if you want your moon base or other off-earth colony to succeed, you need to get people and equipment there at scale. I don't see it happening anytime soon, unless Elon musk succeeds with his mars colony. Another couple astronauts collecting moon rocks is not going to accomplish anything.
I'm surprised to see basically only books on how to be better at making software. Nothing on negotiation or other soft skills like that.

Do people generally just not value things like negotiating? Or do you just not think a book would have helped younger you?
The short answer is money. <50 people now work the same amount as their parents generation for much less money and benefits.

People are more interested in spending the money and time they have on hanging out with their friends or their hobbies than dating.

Basically all of Japan’s “problems” boil down to society cutting inputs then acting shocked that the output has dropped, then choosing to blame the younger generations instead of helping them. Cf. avocado toast in the west
> enforce

People keep saying "enforce". That's the wrong word. Enforcement is a last resort. What actually happens is that the regulator writes you a letter asking you to come back into compliance, and points you to latest best practice.

At that point you decide what you want to do. If you have a European presence it's easier for them to impose fines. If you don't I guess they can declare you non-compliant which makes it harder for EU businesses to send you data.

Here's a case where a large firm was handling sensitive personal details and didn't bother with their legal duty to register with the Information Commissioner.

If the fear-mongering about fines is correct they'd get hit with a huge fine.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/u-k-healt...

> The U.K.’s Data Protection Act requires all organizations processing personal information to register with the U.K. data regulator. Although handling sensitive data on recent patients and those needing regular health care, Cera also failed to register with the Information Commissioner’s Office until February this year. The ICO said in a statement that it would only consider “enforcement action” if a company failed to register despite ICO advice.
"Egon... your mucus..."
Why risk your job being social with anyone at work? Why ever do anything other than exactly what your job requires?

I'm saying, if your social skills are so bad that you're risking your job by being social with women at work, you should make fixing that a top priority.
You can, but I see no indication of such a desire here.
ZTE is a public company. It's considered "state controlled" not state owned because majority of stock is owned by private investors.

If ZTE is liquidated and Chinese government controlled companies buy its assets and start production again, private investors lose billions.
Very true. There is a very good article[1] in The Economist about this. Their conclusion:

"These are all things that China is working on.

America’s use of its new weapons simultaneously demonstrates its power and will hasten its relative decline."

[1]https://www.economist.com/news/business/21741556-there-are-a...
LogDNA (YC W15) – fast server logging – is hiring a senior writer
You can specify you want different precision in location. If you just want rough location, you'll get notified if you change location based on WiFi or cell tower switch. This uses next to no extra battery power and is sufficient for many background applications.

If you want exact location, then you'll be running the GPS, which indeed uses more battery. But even so, it's not that bad. I record detailed GPS for my runs quite often with a fitness app, and it only uses 5-7% battery an hour. (Key is to make sure it's not also hitting a data connection to download maps, and that the screen is off.)
Amazon's Alexa will be built into all new homes from Lennar
While I agree that the article does a poor job at explaining why they are affected by the changes in the Audio API, I advise you to visit the chromium bug tracker issue [1] and check for yourself how many user/libraries/pages are affected by the problem:

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=840866
The maintenance cost of existing infrastructure is paid for by existing residents. It seems sensible to have the up-front cost of adding new infrastructure covered by new residents/developers (who are later considered existing residents covering maintenance for the new, now-existing infrastructure).

Why would existing residents ever agree to new development if they have to pay for it? (Either through taxes to upgrade infrastructure, or by needing to deal with insufficient infrastructure that doesn't get improved as needed) Maybe instead of directly performing the upgrades, developers should be paying extra to the government (either lump sum, or over N years) because in theory the government can then do a few large upgrades rather than developers doing many small ones, but the cost of new capacity should really be the responsibility of the people who need it (developers/new residents).
Same issue here with v60. I really, really want to move away from Chrome but I just can't, it's unusable on my MBP.
Can you provide sources? I'm going off of reports like the View News report on Iran (HBO episode). They just showed normal teenagers who had to make skateboards out of iron because they couldn't buy any real skateboards.

Seeing as how there was Iran deal on the table that Obama pushed for, then that means reducing/removing sanctions is not as crazy as you are proposing.
What is the reason that you want to switch?
Isn't this the crux of the issue? Why would current tax payers volunteer to pay more so that more people can come into their neighborhood, devaluing their property by increasing noise, light and chemical pollution?

It's curious to me that so many people complain about gentrification in terms of destroying the nature of an existing community, but then we also have so many complaints about zoning laws that are designed to protect the visible characteristics of communities.
Just because it's not some profound connection doesn't mean the analogy isn't interesting in itself. The author maybe should have toned it down but it was still interesting and blog post worthy IMO.
That would be copyright infringement. If you don't have a legal right to exclusive use of your UI (for example, the One-Click patent) others have every right to copy you. In fact, mimicry of other UI's is part of every UI.
In http://glom.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#access-gr...,

> After years of research and countless iterations, the glom team landed on this simple construct:

'years of research', 'countless iterations', 'glom team', really?
How do you get $1 per visit our of $5 per user per month?
I wish they would fix the bug in developer tools network tab. Adding columns breaks alignments. :(
Productivity is a personal journey, yet everyone who writes these articles feels they have the holy grail and everyone should know about it. Worse is that most likely a few months down the road, they could (and probably will) write a different post because everything they wrote about previously has changed. The only things which stay the same in my work environment is my text editor and maybe my chair.
Ask HN: How realistic is it to build a career as a remote employee?
I've been working remotely (not in NA/EUR) for the past 2 years now and, even though I love the life quality improvements, I feel like it might not be worth on the long run.

What I'm most worried about is: how would I grow my career? I like being a developer, but I think I'm going to do my best work being a Product Manager, and it doesn't seem to be easy to achieve that being remote.

I've been thinking about moving to NA to pursue that path, so I can have better chances to grow inside a great startup, but I wanted to post here and see if anyone else have any thoughts about it.
Unboxed ICO get free points for Tokens
I am biased cause I went to engineering school where people typically dates even less. What people are saying is that both for boy and girls it feels a lot to commit if you decide to start a relationship right now. Way cozier just to hang out with your friends instead. I personally think it have something to do with the culture that rewards people play safe and not attack.
[video] Google I/O 2018: Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Hit the Public Roads
Is this something you would care to share? This would be ideal for watching Wong Kar-wai films.
> Why would current tax payers volunteer to pay more so that more people can come into their neighborhood, devaluing their property by increasing noise, light and chemical pollution?

Rayiner's point is that current tax payers won't pay more, because new residents result in a higher tax base in the first place.

In California with Prop 13 and widespread rent control, this is especially true.
But that's not new under GDPR.

If you were handling personal data in your blog and it wasn't recreational you already needed to register with ICO (in the UK).

https://informationrightsandwrongs.com/2014/08/17/ico-indica...

> However, I asked them for clarification on this point. I noted that I couldn’t see any exemption from the obligation to register, unless it was the general exemption (at section 36) from the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) where the processing is only for “domestic purposes”, which include “recreational purposes”. I noted that, as someone writing a semi-professional blog, I could hardly rely on the fact I do this only for recreational purposes. The ICO’s reply is illuminating

> > if you were blogging only for your own recreational purposes, it would be unlikely that you would need to register as a data controller. However, you have explained that your blogging is not just for recreational purposes. If you are sharing your views in order to further some other purpose, and this is likely to impact on third parties, then you should consider registering.

People keep saying GDPR is imposing new restrictions. Mostly it isn't - we were just ignoring the restrictions that already existed.
There are many movies I've watching twice or even many times, but I'll usually give it some time.
Good, now all we need is a few hundred thousand more personal anecdotes and we can start to grasp the rationale behind the 1.3 billion people who didn't visit FB compared to the month prior /s
Yeah, it's been a trend in the past. You think it's linear? You don't see that it's picking up extremely quickly during this generation specifically? Do you think that we should be completely unconcerned about the fact that future generations will have lives completely dissimilar to any previous? And we don't know anything about the consequences.

People have this idea that information technology is so innocent and only improves, never harms. I feel like this field is about to get a reckoning, but it's not going to be something we can undo. I don't think it's crazy to be skeptical and careful about it. I don't think it's a good idea to just assume it's fine and normal.
You might want to read the privacy policy for the website you linked before you use it as a rallying cry against Facebook. The irony is pretty amusing.
See, that's exactly what I mean. First, it's kind of condescending and dismissive, like low-income housing activists don't actually represent the populations they live with and fight for.

Second, you're misinterpreting the graph. It just says renters want more housing. But if you scroll up you'll note the kind of housing "strong majorities favor": "affordable housing projects" -- not market rate.

The debate here between YIMBYs and the low-income housing activists is not the same as it is with NIMBYs. Both want more housing. The issue is how much market rate to facilitate vs. how much BMR and other developer concessions to negotiate for.
Public buses do work well in a few cities. London and Manchester. Vancouver seems good. Maybe San Francisco. Ok very few cities.

The problem is you need a critical mass of people using them before anyone puts any real effort into making them not awful.

There are too many cities that have a few rubbish busses, but they aren't on Google Maps, they don't have live departure boards at bus stops, everybody pays in cash, they follow terrible routes that cater to people with no alternative (children and OAPs), they're infrequent and unreliable, no bus lanes, etc. etc.

That said I don't think the future of transport is busses. They're just too slow and shit in general.
instead give them a city/state-run uber-for-wheelchairs service

The San Jose area has that: "Paratransit". It was supposed to serve mobility-impaired people who have difficulty using buses (although all buses have lifts).

As it turned out, they just let anybody ride who has the gall to call them. 90% of their trips amount to a taxpayer-subsidized cab service for the self-important.

The award of the contract was suspect, too, and the subcontractor had to be dumped at great expense... just like the county's ambulance contract with Rural/Metro.
Bus rapid transit. Dedicated, sometimes separated, lanes. High throughput stations. Carefully designed light systems, etc. If you do it right you can get a system that is nearly as good as a subway at a fraction of the cost. A lot of cities in South America, for example, have proven that it works already.
C++ would be a lot better off if references were used more heavily. (And C ought to have references by now.) One still sees too many asterisks in C++ code. References are not supposed to be null. Sometimes they are, though, because there's no checking when a pointer is converted to a reference.

"this" should have been a reference, not a pointer. Strostrup admits that was a mistake.
Russian Targeting of Election Infrastructure During the 2016 Election [pdf]
> we need to fight for BMR and other strategies to create and protect truly affordable housing.

The "BMR or nothing" thing that those low-income housing advocates do pisses me off so much (and I say this as someone whose current income qualifies them for BMR housing (the waitlists are many years long so it's not really an option though)) and it's so frustrating to see how effective the "displacement" concern-trolling is at preventing the right actions from being taken; namely "build enough dense/tall/small market-rate housing such that the market-rate becomes affordable for everyone, and remove bans on medium/high-rise buildings, and small apartments/SROs/rooming-houses".

Avoiding eroding/ending NIMBY-enabling zoning/planning/land-use laws because it'll cause disruption/displacement is the same sort of understandable-yet-suicidal decision as someone refusing to push the stick forwards in a stalled plane because they're afraid of causing the thing to pitch down and lose altitude. Doing the non-instinctive/unfamiliar/counterintuitive thing is terrifying and unpleasant; but if you don't wanna hit the ground you gotta point the nose at the ground to get airspeed.

I'm legitimately shocked how even amongst people who don't have anything to gain via artificially scarce housing, the mindset is disturbingly often isomorphic to "pulling back on the stick puts me farther from the ground, time to pull back!" and well, I really don't want to follow that trajectory to its sad, pancake-shaped end.
A man is not entitled to get anything. And if he's trying to get something, that seems like a pretty good reason for a woman to not be receptive to him. How many times have you walked past a homeless person trying to be "friendly" because you knew their motivation was to get something from you?

I'm a man, nerdy, below average attractiveness, but a majority of my friends are women because I don't approach them trying to get something, and I've found that a majority of women are extremely receptive to being friends.
How would brain do gradient descent without backpropagation?
Suspicionless Forensic Searches of Electronic Devices at Border Unconstitutional
Tenants' rights groups in California don't want new housing. That's why they opposed SB 827, and that's why they opposed SB 35 (even though some of them, for example MEDA, went and used it anyway to construct affordable housing, while still maintaining their opposition to save face).
"In a small number of states, Russian-affiliated cyber actors were able to gain access to restricted elements of election infrastructure. In a small number of states, these cyber actors were in a position to, at a minimum, alter or delete voter registration data"
Interesting idea, but the law of hidden consequences will surely bite in some form or another. For example, the aggregate of employees' houses is almost certainly less efficient energy-wise than their offices. I feel confident that many neighborhoods' internet service would struggle under the weight of simultaneous videoconferencing from every house.
I can't stand Trump, and I personally find it hard to believe. There's a reason they got banned from military bases.
If "development-stimulated gentrification" and normal gentrification are our problems, then what's the solution? You are setting up a scenario where there is gentrification no matter what.

The problem with trying to get BMR units everywhere is that less units are created. Big picture, you're just helping two classes: those who qualify for BMR and those who are rich enough to buy the units that are subsidizing the BMR. What happened to the people in the middle?
The market isn't being ALLOWED to to solve the problem.

Allowing the market to solve the problem would happen if we significantly upzoned the land. (ie, we need to double the allowable density across SF).

The best way to produce more affordable housing isn't that build so many houses that the market price is BELOW the affordable housing price.

But if you really care about affordable housing, one thing that could be done is incentives.

IE, if you make 30% of your units affordable then in exchange, you can build you building to be 3 times the height of whatever it is currently zoned for.

YIMBY people would absolutely be in favor of an incentive like this, that triples density, in exchange for making 30% affordable.
>induced demand, where adding capacity can actually create more demand.

The timeline on induced demand for number of houses required has to be pretty long. Also, if you are worrying about induced demand from housebuilding, then you are attempting population control with homelessness.
Not if you use cash
> Roughly, there's 40 or 50 people on the bus, vs 1-2 per car, and you get, what, 3? 2? cars in the space of a bus. He found it completely unjustified to let the convenience of those 45 people be outweighed by the convenience of the 4 or 5.

That's only true if the lane is as full of busses as other lanes are full of cars.
Well, that just pushes the goalposts of the complaint: now Haskell has Int, and those other languages do not.
That's probably my favorite part about being a tech person. When non-techies ask you what JavaScript in Excel is useful for, and you can respond in the dryest of ways "Primarily malware".

And then they look at you like "But you're the tech person, you never think that technology is stupid".

Which it isn't, just some companies behind it really fucking are.
I think you nailed it (though I think Jeremy Ashkenas and Mike Bostock and that NYT group are brilliant... especially working in the media space at a company that doesn't encourage that kind of work to put it mildly).

I've had my whimsical entries into experimenting with Web Components, but they just haven't felt like they're quite there—ignoring the lack of support. They're workable, but I think design patterns surrounding current paradigms might need more readily addressed. As they are, you'd probably want a framework on top of Web Components to improve the semantics and just make working component state in generally less verbose.

I have a hastily-written example here playing with them:

https://robert-fairley.github.io/es6-webcomponents/

(No repo, it's not worth it. Just check the source–it's short enough)
The value that the graphical pieces provide is that they are interactive.

The graphical pieces build up to the one where you control both parameters simultaneously, and see how you can halve the throughput of the system by seemingly innocuous changes.

The whole point is that the cause of the slowdowns is not obvious because the effect of the changes is non-linear. Sure, you can take the author's word for it - but with the neat simulation, you don't have to. You can see the model in front of your eyes.
Yes of course they do. Corporations are defined as persons by law, not by the constitution. The congress can easily revoke corporate personhood and the 14th amendment and all of the rest would no longer apply.
God, I hope not. That leads to far more serious consequences, like out-and-out war. Trade has its downsides, but one positive consequence is that it does help reduce the likelihood that two sides will get into military conflict with each other.