skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree that there's a crisis. There are many tech workers who can afford to pay the prices. I agree that there are also many dysfunctional zoning practices as well as laws (Proposition 13).

People have 3 options in general:

1. Make more money.

2. Leave.

3. Endure.

Option 1 is what a large fraction of the Bay Area has done. Whether or not it's a bubble is another conversation. It's pretty much clear that Bay Area tech jobs pay more than anywhere else on the planet. Even when taking into account the cost of living, you will save more money in absolute terms living in the Bay Area than anywhere else.

Option 2 is already happening [1].

Option 3 is the strange thing. If people hate the prices and general cost of living that much, why won't they leave? Temperate weather, job opportunities and family are many reasons among the many. Regardless, these factors are already factored into the price. By staying one simply reinforces the positive qualities while having no stake (home ownership).

The conclusion is there is no crisis. As far as the backward laws and zoning policies. Don't hold your breath -- for Prop 13 in particular that's state wide and the majority of Californians own [2]. As for zoning -- let's just say there's zero incentive for it to be relaxed.

Summary: make more money or leave. Sorry. The irony is that the logic of the people who insist people should be able to live in their own community for reasons is the same that resulted in Prop 13 and in making zoning laws strict to prevent newcomers -- who would change the community from what the original migrants had when they arrived. The preservationist entitled attitude is the problem. If people just left the problem would resolve itself. Teachers would be paid more to prevent mass leaving, etc. etc.

[1] https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265?platform=ho...

[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/ca/PST045217
That example they chose is Pratt. IIRC, Pratt has a BA, not a BFA. It's also not even in the top20 art colleges.

And you know, $160k debt in a profession that has $35k salaries... paying that off will easily take 20-30 years. How's that not indentured servitude?
Sorry about that, seems my eyes skipped over the first line of your previous reply.
Hitachi and KDDI’s Test on Blockchain Biometrics Retail System
The other way around: the term 'Personal Computer' existed years before the IBM, and they were running scared down in Boca Raton, so they tried to co-opt the term. Chaplin or not, many of us wanted nothing to do with Big Blue and its 27 feet of manuals.

Its 'success', like that of MS, is down to religion.
> Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years

I wonder if there’s a country without a manufactured language where that’s not true.
See also previous discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913381 (420 comments)
This is great. I bookmarked this and will be referring to it consistently as I roll out my first serious open-source project. Thanks!
I think the issue with automation is it requires a cultural change for most companies / projects. People are very used to small atomic commits and so it’s hard to reduce the noise once parsed into a changelog. To make it work, you need each commit to be as meaningful as a line in the changelog.

We use Phabricator and it’s default workflow, so have a clean linear git history. Phabricator already requires strict formatting for any new diff (title, description, testing, etc). It’s built into the culture of any org using Phab to consider commits as meaningful entries in the history of the project. So it would be very straightforward (technically and culturally) to require a simple title prefix ala Changelog (ADDED, FIXED, SECURITY, etc) for each commit and have yourself a automated and meaningful log.
Maybe if you live in a country who's IPs are deemed "trustworthy"
> but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus.

I always manage to astound people by mentioning that Marx independently developed foundations of differential calculus[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_manuscripts_of_Ka...
> I think the counter-argument for 1 would be that, as we are dreaming, we ARE explicitly putting things at the forefront of our mind to organize it. We just mercifully forget it when we wake up.

I don't know if this really passes the... sniff test, if you will.

Even if something is not remembered, it would need to be processed long enough for the subject to also be able to recognize it and/or wake up as a result, with an emotional reaction. This doesn't really seem to happen. Most cases of people waking up with a strong reaction involve nightmares and similar.

"Anything can happen if we can forget it" is not really that solid, since things happening here-and-now nonetheless have effect, even if not remembered.

Conscious thought requires effort, is tiring, for some painful, etc. I find it unlikely that, during sleep, this activity suddenly becomes more viable.
If a stunt, then why throw away and waste potentially useful medicine like that? I understand the point he's trying to make, but the way he goes about it underlines his childish view of everything.
As someone who struggled with the "engineering calculus" track and switched to the "humanities calculus" track to do an economics major, I don't think the problem is with the material. I think it's a combination of poor teaching and overemphasis on computing results as if it were "fancy arithmetic" to be used daily.

It's worth being made aware of calc so that you can seek it out. It has applications aplenty. But that's a different role than the one it's presently in. For many calculus problems encountered in the real world, you can hand your data set over to the computer and get a numerical approximation back. For the ones that don't respond to that treatment, you can, most likely, look up tables of identities and find the ones you need to get the analytic solution.

There's some pedagogical idea that you can build your math intuition from working calculus problem sets, but that really isn't what happens in most classes. It's done by rote to keep continuity with high school math - the students because it's what they know, and the professors because it eases their lives. And so they struggle through a few semesters, and then some students go on to try advanced mathematics and encounter a completely different universe where math becomes proof-centric and they have to engage a different skillset that is more reminiscent of philosophical reasoning than anything they have probably encountered in prior math courses.

So it's a charade. You could spend much less time on any one field as a single topic, approaching higher math from an information-sciences perspective where you learn to seek out the forms of mathematics you need, engage in some inductive and deductive reasoning, and learn study techniques for math texts and papers(and hence, how to really gain insight on advanced math topics) to supplement your primary field - and not make any of it a bogeyman of higher education.
In order to get from a trusted source to a trusted binary, you have to trust the compiler and its dependencies as well, I think.
> Is it necessarily inapplicable? You could write a Python program that uses file-based locking, despite that Python threads don't map to kernel threads, no?

Sure, but what would be the point? I'm looking for legitimate motivations, not contrived examples of what's merely possible. Remember, we're talking about single-core, single-process, multi-threaded for responsiveness (e.g. in a GUI) here. That single process wants to use kernel file locking?

> Long ago, processes predated (kernel) threads. Before my time, but I believe the general idea then was that if you want the kernel to orchestrate concurrent execution (including executing in parallel on multiple cores if possible) then you'd just have to bite the bullet and go multi-process.

By the time Unix-based MP systems became common (all single-core at the time, just multi-socket), those OSes tended to have kernel threads and at least lightweight processes. I can't recall when SunOS 4.1 got it, but I think it was around '91 if not before, but Sun was pushing SunOS 5 aka Solaris 2 for their big SMP boxes https://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/PDF/beyond_mp.pdf

Before that, there wasn't much biting of any bullets, as I recall, as the challenge was time-sharing the scarce resource that was a CPU, not parallelism. Frequent context-switching, process or even thread, would be the performance-killing worry for something real-time like a GUI on a computer with a single user. Per Moore's Law, today's CPUs have something like 11000x the transistor density of the ones in '91.
People forget that actual Unix descendants are really mostly proprietary. Linux and BSD are what we often think of today, but those are really more "Unix-like's" and many of the "true" Unixes tend to be proprietary systems like AIX, HP-UX, IRIX (now deceased), z/OS etc.

The bare core of macOS (Darwin) is open source, but pretty much everything people identify with macOS is proprietary code built on top of Darwin. You used to be able to get standalone distributions of Darwin (maybe you still can?) that people built from Apple's source and they were almost completely unrecognizable.
iOS user. I think this just became my default iOS hn app. The compact view with previews is great. Overall the organization seems solid and UX is intuitive. Liking what I see thus far. Thanks.
Startup news roundup for week ending 29th July 2018
Good points. I still find Google pretty agile and aggressive.
Interesting that English was lacking this word for so long. Swedish has the word "brandgul" ("fire-yellow") which predates the English word orange by a couple of decades and is still in use. Which I guess in Swedish just makes it a variant of yellow instead of it's "own" color.

The word "orange" is also used for the color, but not for the fruit (which is "apelsin")
Politely asking to turn down the volume is effective, and generally welcome by other customers as well.
Poor black people grew up right around all this success and no ones bothered to teach them to code or intern or anything. It's amazing. In NYC they have black people going to newly open open tech colleges in Brooklyn. Most of you pretend to be liberal but never once tried to help the people on the other side of the tracks.
Again. Fallacies and aggressiveness.

You're talking about who and not what because the "what" is proven to be unbreakable. You're dishonest.
Yeah, all those people who drive my Lyft, deliver my Good Eggs, Rabbit my Tasks or teach my children in public school and those nurses should just commute every day from Modesto or Dublin! Or you know maybe just move away if they are too poor.
Reason being that using names of such public landmarks avoids potential trademark infringement that might be triggered by almost any other names, given the number of trademarks in existence today.
"Somebody else has had this problem."
Top Tech Influencer
Yes, exactly. No one is entitled to live anywhere. Don't be ridiculous. If they were willing to move they would accordingly become scarce and therefore more valuable and an equilibrium would met. By staying they are simply harming themselves -- to what end? Plenty of people move away from the Bay Area for cost reasons.

This is the same dilemma that has inhibited them from gaining leverage politically that would resolve the zoning issues.
I have a fairly hardcore PhD in social sciences (where I produced some really useful work on how to better understand technology driven social phenomena which are difficult to define, and near-impossible to parameterise). In fact my PhD was awarded in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences. Which is the problem. The business faculties have eaten large amounts of the social science faculties. And in substantial parts of the business faculties the quality of academic work is dreadful (e.g. have a look at how marketing students are taught statistics - or consider in these faculties, Economics is the most rigorous of the disciplines argh!).

So with that PhD, what do I do? I'm a jobbing programmer currently doing ecommerce stuff - i.e. I tell computers what to do. It's good money, interesting work and they mostly leave me alone to get on with it, so on that level, no problem.
A Git Origin Story – Linux Journal
Make a README – Because no one can read your mind
It's just a reality that the majority of people will ignore or overlook a personal failing of a business partner, politician, celebrity, etc... so long as they are successful.

I think that's what makes the #metoo movement so impactful. That for a specific type of failing, namely male initiated sexual assault/harrassment, your profile is proportional to your culpability.

The fact that pretty much nobody outside of SV/VC knows who Mike Cagney is, and he's really successful, and he had a consensual relationship, means this is a non-story. Nobody cares that he lied to his board.
It's a company trying to get approval for a merger, so the state has the leverage to get them to do things they feel would benefit the state.

Not a big deal, pretty common, and pretty common sense. These states want to bring internet to everyone.

They are allowing concentration of power, if that power promises to help them accomplish some of their goals.
Ironically, I couldn't read anything on my mobile client because the text was so small since the site isn't responsive.
capitalism > decency. Full stop.
It's a little unclear from the article, but based on

> Since the system supports asynchronous replication, our data centers eventually become consistent. Writes are considered complete as soon as the remote data center acknowledges it.

I assume its eventually consistent (so AP).

I wish they compared why normal mysql async replication fails for them and they needed to build this though.
Same. Please post a PDF of your communication strategy.
The stupid, it hurts.
> for instance, user research

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

(or yet another Bundler/npm/Cargo clone.)
Organisations are often systemically rude, whether by evolution or design. This is not occult knowledge.

And not all organisations are bad at customer support. I'm also aware that solutions aren't always immediately forthcoming. But it should be possible to move toward resolution on a continuous track, respecting the customer's tiime, intelligence (if indicated), and humanity.

Endless holds, bureaucratic busywork, front-line incompetence, inability to retain state on aan issue, etc., are all failures.

Counterexamples: Apple will schedule support calls or call back rather than keep customers on hold. Various no-hasssle return or exchange policies reduce customer risk or aapprehension. I frequently find far more competence among field techs than phone support, even in notorious areas such as residential / SOHO telecoms, as the techs directly interface with both equipment and customers. I've known enterprise software and hardware vendors who go all-out in ensuring customer satisfaction (though you frequently pay up front for this).

Invert these instances, and you'll find what I was calling out above.

And very little of the competence has to do with voice-honing. It comes from knowing how to do the fucking job and being authorised and expected to do just that.

It means training, retaining, equipping, respecting, and rewarding support staff for doing just this.

And not resorting to cheap, manipulative, ineffective, gimmicks.
Power has been radically deregulated in the U.S., and is primarily regulated the national/regional level, so that's not a great example example. You don't have good water service--it might be reliable, but it is artificially cheap because (1) municipalities have been underinvesting and deferring maintenance; and (2) municipalities externalize the cost of forgoing needed infrastructure upgrades by externalizing costs (i.e. dumping raw untreated sewage into waterways when under-sized treatment facilities overflow). U.S. water rates are very low compared to those in other developed countries, in part because dysfunctional municipal politics is unable to set prices at sustainable levels. The net result is that we're facing $1 trillion in needed water/sewer infrastructure spending: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking-w....

And, of course, there is no "universal service" for water, sewer, or natural gas. Our county builds out public water/sewer based on density, and if you get water/sewer to your house you're on the hook for $20,000+ in construction costs. This is typical.

It's also worth noting that out of the top 10 countries for internet speeds (on Akamai's tests), all have highly deregulated internet, and none have state-owned broadband service. Denmark, for example, got rid of its telecom regulator in 2011: https://techliberation.com/2017/03/27/who-needs-a-telecom-re.... If we were a "progressive" European country, we might well be trying to figure out how to privatize WMATA or the NYC MTA. Instead, we're trying to figure out how to turn one of the few bits of American infrastructure that isn't an international embarrassment into a public service.
We have the option to accommodate everyone at a price they can afford by building more housing, why not take that option?
Why L2 and not L1? Isn't L1 supposed to be more stable?
As discussed elsewhere, both companies enjoy large tax breaks that give them huge advantages. However, I think only Amazon sells so many items online without sales taxes across the US.

Apple still makes a good deal more revenue.

For quite some time, Amazon made almost no profit and just spent everything they earned. I believe they recently started taking in more profit, and this has probably excited the stock price a lot.

Amazon also seems to do things Apple isn't willing to. Amazon hosts the NSA's data, while Apple fights for privacy. Amazon has notoriously poor working conditions and unethical sources, while Apple leads in creating an ethical supply chain, using green energy and making recyclable products.

Apple's strategy means they're virtually the only ones who can sell phones, tablets and computers for a decent profit margin. Amazon's strategy shows they're willing to be cut throat. Both are attractive to traders in about equal measure, it seems.
Where should the non-tech workers of the Bay Area live?
> I've never heard of anybody claiming to gain unconscious insight while concentrating hard on something else.

I feel like this might have happened to me here or there...

You never felt like you thought about one thing, and, in the background, something else was processed?
It's about a need to control the conversation and a corresponding fear of losing that control.
My guess is Google makes better ROI on copycat sites (the reason for their existence beeing linking and displaying adds - both fields dominated by Google). So it isn't accidental it is direct result of Google's policy.
In music 'high variation' is frequently a plus. For example the value of Stradivarius or Steinway (and countless other instrument brands) is dependent on 'hard to emulate'.

Of course digital has its place ... but nature chose to go with analog.
Anywhere they can afford to.
Some people don't want to live with more density as that's not what they encountered when they first arrived.
I do. They ushered a new era on the PC, where PC finally had something that could compare with the demo quality of Amiga demos.

To be more concrete, it was "Second Reality" that they did it with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA

and here's Future Crew making it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU

Europe and Summer school holidays. Perfect time to code.
Technically true, and there were some weird-ass byte sizes in the early decades of computing, but the 8-bit byte has been universal for, I think, around 40 years now?
As far as I can tell, the autogeneration of changelogs you can do with standard-version https://github.com/conventional-changelog/standard-version and commitzen ( https://github.com/commitizen/cz-cli ) fulfills the criteria Keep a Changelog wants: right date format, clear notes for breaking changes, and no unnecessary information from irrelevant commits. I've really liked using the two for a variety of systems - the strict commit message formatting and opinionated changelog generation means that the resulting changelogs are pretty darn readable. But ymmv.
This isn't a changelog, this is a NEWS or release-notes file.

Keeping a changelog in version control is an invitation for artificial conflicts on every single commit. (There are ways around that, but better to not keep a traditional changelog, since version control does completely make those obsolete.)

But keeping a NEWS file is an excellent practice. And when you send out a release announcement, you can include the corresponding release notes for that release.
Your comment suggests you're thinking about the problem in moralistic/score-keeping terms. But the question is not "does the state have leverage," but rather "what are the economic effects of using this leverage to impose a particular policy?" State and municipal regulators love the idea of a free lunch. "They have to get our approval, and we can extract these concessions, and it's free!" But that's not how the economy works. Every policy has a cost. State and municipal regulators not only fail to balance those costs, they don't even realize that those costs exist.

The most damning example is, of course, the reason why we have so much market concentration in broadband to begin with. State and municipal regulators thought they could get universal cable coverage for their constituents, so they gave out municipal franchise monopolies with universal-coverage obligations. They thought they were getting a free lunch, instead they created massive market distortion.
Well yes, that may work in the specific case of music being too loud. Not so much when the noise is just from people talking and moving about and the coffee grinder whirring and glasses clattering and the room is all hard surfaces that amplify all of this. Designing the audible environment can be as important as the visual design.
I respect that you're able to voice such an unpopular idea, but you're still wrong. It's bad for a city when growth becomes toxic in terms of commute, traffic congestion, and lack of good transit options. The economic and psychological impact of long commutes and high rents are serious.
Not dumb anymore: New tech helps feature phone challenge smartphones
Of course there's also derivates of OSM that would be impossible to replace with Gmaps. For instance the topographics maps with detailed path characteristics for offline use for hiking and cycling provided by https://www.openandromaps.org/en
I thought this post had more humility and self-awareness than it's getting credit for.

"The result is that well-liked entrepreneurs with shitty business ideas get funding immediately while shrewd founders outside of the Club can’t get a foot in the door. It’s not fun to play a game that isn’t fair, even if you win."

Coming from someone who was successful, this is a pretty unbiased observation!
Left, Right and Center: Crypto Isn't Just for Libertarians Anymore
A Rogue Tesla Mechanic Resurrecting Salvaged Cars [video]
Vulnerability in Hangouts Chat: how Electron makes open redirect great again
Oh, that’s awesome! I need to pay more attention to your Changelog.
The problem with minimal version selection isn't that it can't support nontrivial version selection but rather that it doesn't automatically select the newest versions of packages.
Thanks for your comments here. Re: Brown vs Board of Education: Malcolm Gladwell's podcast has an interesting take about how the schools could have been much more effectively integrated:

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...