skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> These replies to my comment are super weird. I'm reading them collectively as, "I don't see how the influx of millions and millions of dollars of investment capital would have an effect on housing prices."

Huh? Let's talk about the rice market, rather than housing. Let's say you dump 1 trillion dollars into rice. What's going to happen? The price of rice rises, dramatically. However, rice farmers the world over see that price rise, and they start growing more rice. If you keep buying 1 trillion dollars worth of rice every year, the rice farmers will grow more rice in response, and the price will start to fall.

You, being a rational rice investor, will see that happening. And unless you're an idiot, will stop dumping your money into the rice market.

The only reason that houses are any different from rice is that housing is supply constrained, whereas rice is not.

> Well, okay, I guess. How many houses do you think need to be built to satisfy the investment needs of everyone looking to outperform the S&P 500? For extra credit, realize that this means that every metropolitan market is now an international investment vehicle.

This question doesn't make any sense. You don't create homes so everyone can outperform the S&P. That's like asking "how many stocks do we need to create for everyone to be an early investor in a decacorn?".

The question you're trying to ask is: How many houses do we need to build until the rate of return on buying property equals the rate of return of the stock market, adjusted by risk. To be precise, you want the number of homes that need to be built for the Sharpe ratio of the residential real estate market to equal the Sharpe ratio of the stock market.

That question is going to vary by geography. Many housing markets already dramatically underperform the S&P. It's only a very small number of them that perform better. In aggregate, housing already does underperform the S&P.
I have a neighbor that has something like that.

Compared to a leaf blower it's wonderful.
They were not in the UK, which makes this a really really bad plan.

The person was in the UK, and they ordered them to produce specifically protected non-UK documents that they don't own, simply have access to.

To give an analogy, imagine taking a random contractor to your company, who is passing through the UK, and forcing them, under pain of jail time, to login to your VPN and produce records that the contractor happens to have access to, but doesn't own, control, do anything with etc.

Now imagine if that contractor was really an officer of a company suing you, and the access was also being forced upon your company and only being allowed on a temporary basis by a court.

The only reason they would ever get away with such a thing is because everyone hates facebook.

Six4three can and should be held liable in a US court for this (though that is unlikely).
Yes, but also trauma is treatable without Pharma drugs eg by meditation, hypnotherapy
>Pretty bold move by the UK gov.

This wasn't the UK government, though, but Parliament through its Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Parliament doesn't allow government ministers to be members of parliamentary committees, only backbenchers, as Committees are one of the main ways that Parliament holds the government to account.
All the links I clicked led to other websites. Is it an aggregator?
Human error is what makes programming difficult. You can watch a computer do billions of calculations flawlessly, while a human cannot type a few hundred words on average before they make an error of some kind. Developing software is not amenable to simple checklists, and is a very creative process. What would be more helpful than checklists are improved languages that make it much harder to make a simple mistake.
I haven't used Pinterest in years and may have accidentally clicked on a Pinterest result in Google search results and suddenly started getting all kinds of desktop popup notifications from them and don't know how or why.
Why does the question of ownability even arise?

In my mind the purpose of property rights is to resolve conflicts over scarce resources. So what is the conflict with Bitcoin?
Was Library.nu folded into LibGen?
bitcoins introduce an artificial scarcity with its mining algorithm (there's only so much bitcoins out there)
More: The Mormons were intending to leave the United States and start their own country. When they came to Utah (1847), much of it was still Mexican territory. They celebrate the day that commemorates them trying to leave the US as hard as they celebrate the 4th of July.

Note well: This does not make Utah Mormons less patriotic... just a bit historically schizophrenic.
Does it have to be expensive countries ?

Cost of living in Asia is vastly lower than that on European countries.

One can easily live in Urban India safely and somewhat lavishly, with ~300-400/month.

A summer of travel in India would cost $2000-3000 including international flight tickets. The one caveat being that they would need a local Host to help make sense of things.

If they were a part of NGO programs teaching under privledged students or part of structured camp/trek/exchange program then they don't even need a local contact and part of the trip may actually get funded by the org.

I can easily see a $60,000/yr. Salary being sufficient for such an experience once in a decade.
Do the memories and images of past wars create the desire for new ones?
Training for Everest Base Camp
If it's any consolation, I think we all agree this is a general human problem instead of a problem with the men doing the labor. Why does the company require this service? Why do customers request it? How can people think a few leaves are bad? Etc.

People have very strange ideas about landscaping, and that usually means bad things for the environment. eg: "I'm a fully functioning adult, but I couldn't bear to see two kinds of grass so I had to cover the whole lawn with a neurotoxin."
US following policies that are not necessarily good for it's own people, instead serving agendas of external entities.

Well, I don't see any downside in the US supporting Israel, only upsides:

1) ensures that jobs are being kept in the US

2) ensures that Israel won't buy the weapons from somewhere else (aka binding Israel to US, or at least Western, tech)

3) ensures that the US has a reliable (!), friendly allied democratic nation in the Middle East.
It's advertised as working in IE6 ... and Netscape Navigator?!

Looks like it could greatly simplify distribution of Prolog scripts. I've found the SWI Prolog web docs a bit difficult to wrap my head around. Thanks for posting this.
That's a straightforward engineering problem: website monitoring services should watch both IPv4 and IPv6 by default.
Ask HN: Quintessential readings for software optimization
What are some of the best resources for getting more familiar with stuff like playing nicely with branch prediction, instruction pipelines, and building data to fit well in with CPU cache?
When I saw Gardners using leaf blowers in SF, Pacific Heights, they mostly just blew the leafs onto the street.. how that's allowed is beyond me..

With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.
You could add caffeine to the most acceptable list.
Fair enough, I was looking at a chart that apparently didn't go back that far. However, looking at another chart that goes back to mid 2010, I don't see it either.

Can you point me to a chart and time frame during which the behavior described was occurring? It looked like it did something sort of like that (but not at the magnitudes described) a couple of times in the runup to $19k in late 2017, and I see a big spike in late 2013, but I don't see any sort of real pattern of any type, other than the fairly consistent small price spike after a big drop that comes from people buying at bargain prices.
Nice! This takes me back to my days as a kid when I would pour over issues of Cinefex, which I'm very happy to see is still around.

If you enjoyed this, you'll probably also get a kick out of how they made the legendary HBO intro from 1983: https://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI
Another obscure Thanksgiving fact:

Thanksgiving is commonly known as a celebration of a good harvest, but the reason why the harvest was good is seldom remembered.

Plymouth Colony was originally communal. Marx was far from the first to think that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" might be a good idea. Such thinking dates back to Plato at least, and in 1620 the colony actually tried it. Nobody wanted to do the work, though everybody had needs. After 2.5 years, with half the colony dead, Plymouth governor William Bradford decided to prioritize survival over the ideals of socialism. The resulting harvest was plentiful, giving reason to celebrate Thanksgiving.

https://www.forbes.com/2008/11/27/thanksgiving-economy-histo...

It's a lesson people are starting to forget. We'll probably try again, and maybe somehow things won't turn out the same as every previous time.
Real estate supply is local; real estate demand, via capital, is not.
Thank you for this distinction, minister vs. backbencher.
Basically the mixture of solvent and epoxy is much less viscous and easily infiltrates the material. There are numerous protocols that describe the process. For example: http://web.path.ox.ac.uk/~bioimaging/bitm/instructions_and_i...

Start where it says "Dehydrate through a series of ethanols or acetones and propylene oxide." basically this is for replacing the water with solvents, if the sample is dry you can just immerse it in your solvent of choice, probably propylene oxide (toxic) or acetonitrile (less toxic), something miscible with your epoxy resin.

Follow the protocol up to the polymerization. I'm not sure if all resins are suitable for this type of infiltration but there are many suitable ones, see: https://www.tedpella.com/chemical_html/chem2.htm
Retro Sci-Fi Computer Desk Build
No doubt, it was about slavery. However, it was also about economics. Slave labor really changes the equation when manual labor is needed for production. This is especially relevant in the current model, where businesses of a certain size can afford to overcome shipping costs and enjoy lowered costs of production in emerging economies.
For anyone wondering: the serjeant-at-arms is a mostly ceremonial role that keeps order in the common parts of the Parliament. You mainly see them carrying the Royal Mace, the symbol of executive power that is kept in Parliament for obvious symbolic reasons. They litterally enforce the authority of the Sovreign.

https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/principal/serj...

Sending them in town has no close equivalent in the US, maybe threatening someone to be in Contempt of the Supreme Court.
Show HN: Simple layout generator of putting a basic blocks elements in a webpage
The article makes many lofty claims about how knowledge must be free, but how can books continue to be put out if you disincentivize the authors? What's in it for them? Had I been an expert on a niche technical or academic subject in the eighties or nineties I might have published a book on it. These days, certainly not.
Thank you. Going to see if I can get it from my local library.
My first thought was perhaps this could be done using 2.4 for one and 5ghz for the other, but while I was trying to find an example of configuring the radios independently, I came across DD-Wrt "Repeater Bridge" mode [1] so I don't see why that wouldn't be what the Pixel is doing.

[1] https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Repeater_Bridge
I haven't used the Makita leaf blower but all their other battery tools are amazing and 100% worth switching to from 2 stroke. I've used their trimmer with a brush cutter head for clearing land and it's powerful, quiet, and if you need to go for longer than 45+ minutes of clearing brush you can always get more batteries, which charge fairly quickly.

(Used their circular saw, drills, and angle grinder and chainsaw too all of which use the same batteries.)

The thing is, for home owners this stuff is amazing. For lawn care companies that need it to work for 10 hours, it might be a lot of battery to invest in. I'd be interested to see how the economics shake out though.

This is one of the game changers a Tesla truck would bring. Much easier for lawn co's to switch to all electric if the truck is electric.
Discussions of older effects work always make note of the high manual labor effort. But increasingly I'm not convinced that we really have things that much different in the CGI era. Certain things can be done in a commodity fashion(e.g. instancing thousands of AIs to make an army) but a good visual effect is designed and crafted, not manufactured. You don't get great animation just by scaling up the processing power.

So you still end up with labor effort, but proportionately more goes to the intellectual parts of modelling it on the computer, instead of hiring a crew to sweat over an array of painted glass, miniatures, and puppets. When CGI visuals got really popular for the first time in the 90's and 00's, they often suffered from the belief that the computer would make post-production so fast that the up-front design could be avoided in favor of a brute force "just redo it in post until it looks good" approach. And this is an appealing pitch on the surface, since it means more aspects of the work can stay undecided until the very end. Indecision is one of the things that drives a lot of software complexity.

But that kind of futurism isn't touted nearly as much as it used to be. It adds unnecessary risk for expensive mistakes, underwhelming visuals and awkward editing. Post work is still a huge part of doing blockbuster cinema, but it's been supplemented with extensive testing and a resurgent trend of in-camera effects. Meanwhile, the studios that provide CGI services are treated as commodity labor, just like yesteryear's model painters.
Downloading books and articles from libgen is technically "theft of intellectual property". So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc.

I'm often surprised to observe the extent to which Americans, both inside and outside of academia, and regardless of their station in life, overtly engage in this form of 'IP theft', given how much anger there is these days at China for alleged IP theft (I'm granting for the sake of argument that the allegations are fully accurate).

Why don't Americans find this form of 'IP theft' equally ethically problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of:

(i) deep down people don't really feel that 'big evil publishers' like Springer, Kluwer etc really deserve all that money; we are less likely to feel bad about 'stealing' from someone if we don't feel that the person from whom we are taking the thing away is morally entitled to it.

(ii) $30 per article etc is just too expensive and impractical. Paying is not a consistently followable policy, so we may as well consistent pirate.

To the extent that 'Chinese theft of intellectual property' occurs, can it be attributed to the same motivations?

Some analogue of (i) arguably obtains. After all, Americans committed two of the biggest thefts in human history: first the entire continent stolen from the natives, then, entire human lives stolen from generations of black people. So much of America's present-day prosperity and advantage can be chalked up to these two egregious acts of theft, neither of which they have remotely adequately compensated for. Obviously you can't return something you stole from some person (people) if you killed him (most of them). And the idea of reparation for slavery has never gained mainstream acceptance. The example this sets is "let's steal with abandon, after all our descedents can play the 'I was no part of that' defense just like present-day Americans".

As for (ii), I'm not entirely sure. Has anyone ever looked into just how much money a Chinese company would have to pay if it were to fully comply with intellectual property laws? I find it hard to imagine it not being just as exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.
Does anyone here have insight into the different Prolog implementations and the key considerations that go into designing an optimal engine?
I think you missed my point when I said "the terrorist didn't win but we certainly lost".

Everything you say about how we've lost our identity, optimism, and freedom is exactly what I meant by "we certainly lost". I agree with that 100%.

But none of these things were the goal of al quida. AQ doesn't win by virtue of what we've lost. AQ doesn't care that we turn ourselves into a police state. "They hate our freedoms" is a propaganda line we told ourselves. The goal of AQ was to end the rule of secular governments on the Arabian peninsula (namely the Saudi's) and they attacked the US precisely because we prop up the Saudi's. 17 years later we're still backing the Saudi's. Bin Laden is dead. An order of magnitude more death has been unleashed in the Muslim world than what was released on America on 9/11. 9/11 was ultimately massively counterproductive to the goals of AQ. The terrorists didn't win.
This could be us!

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/9zvoe2/the_...
If Linux survives that long I will be very happy. It always reminds me of how great collaboration between humans can be :)
I can't find a great one...but if you go here:

https://99bitcoins.com/price-chart-history/

And click on 'all' and select 'logarithmic scale' (beneath the chart), you can see it fairly clearly.
In the specific situation of petertodd's transaction, the blockchain will resolve the first solution as the owner.

There is actually a technical flaw in those transactions in that a miner that is aware would just rewrite the receive address to their own as there's no signature.

But ultimately a confirmation will hit the chain and transfer ownership of the UTXO.

It's already a solved problem. This is literally the entire point of Bitcoin - decentralized consensus without need for trusted third parties.

Courts cannot move Bitcoin from address A to B. They simply do not have the power. They can muscle in and lock people in boxes and stuff but the actual coins cannot be seized because of the nature of the system.
Super interesting, thanks :) My rasteriser is admittedly optimised for requiring the most basic math possible, as it's mostly an educational resource.
Haha totally. I was thinking of that as I made that comment. Would be happy to put funds in escrow though, as long as whatever it is is not too annoying.
The guy who described his vision as "raping Dune"?
Assange hearing Tuesday in Alexandria, VA to remove secrecy order on US charges
Save Rare White Lion from Being Auctioned to Trophy Hunters
A lot of people seem to love these twitter thread unroller sites, but it's not clear to me what problem they solve (on modern Twitter) and I almost always find the original Twitter thread to be more readable/flexible. For example, in this one, I found it a bit confusing whether a particular paragraph went with the clip above or below it. Anyway, to each their own! Original thread here… @Foone is the best: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066284025600339968
Saying it was about slavery is also misleading (although less so than just saying states rights). At the time the civil war started, the North was willing to compromise on the issue of slavery [0]. The North did not fight to abolish slavery. Had the South surrendered earlier (or never seceded at all), they would have been able to keep their slaves [1]. The reason the North fought was to preserve the union (apparently not an answer on the citizenship test).

I actually think that preserving the Union is, in some sense, a more technically correct answer, since the South did not start the war [2]. The South declared its independence. The North started the war to prevent the South from gaining its independence [3].

As an aside. Independent of my actual interperatation of history, I think it would be highly unreasonable to deny citizenship to someone for holding a controversial belief that is shared by a significant portion of the country. Like it or not "states rights" is an American interpretation of the Civil war, even if it is one that is not historically accurate. And we really do not want the government to be in a position of dictating the "correct" history.

[0] You could argue about how trustworthy the North was. I would argue the main cause of the Civil war was that the South lost confidence that the North was (or would continue) to compromise on this issue.

[1] At least for a while. With hindsight, I am sure that slavery would have eventually been abolished in the South as well, and it probably would have been the North that was the primary political force behind it.

[2] Fine, they did open the attack of Fort Sumter when the Union refused to withdraw. You could therefor argue that the South did technically start the war, but I find that to be a bit of a stretch.

[3] As I mentioned above, this was the primary motivation of the North. The North, at the start, did not continue this sentence with "...so that they could abolish slavery".
For routine tasks that are repeated with a narrow set underlying actions, checklists are easily devised. For something with as many degrees of freedom as programming, it's just too difficult to come up with something generic. Something more doable is having a checklist for your particular project, so everyone follows similar conventions and can add to the list as flaws in the methodology are discovered - a lot of projects operate this way already, so I think we're doing the best we can!
Operation Argus: How a Cold-War Secret Was Revealed
Agreed, that's incredible. As I watch that it strikes me that one of the underrated uses of CGI is to make practical effects possible that wouldn't have been before. An actor can safely fall out of a helicopter or jump between rooftops, knowing that rigging can easily be painted out.
Interview with Dmitri Love, CEO of Bundil, on Shark Tank and Bitcoin Investing
If you would like to use "AlphaZero lite" to analyze games you can opt for LCZero (Leela Chess Zero) http://lczero.org/ These guys have done a fantastic job on resources that's shoestring budget compared to AlphaZero.

Also our own clone BellaChess https://code.aihello.com/aihello/BellaChess/ it's not really "zero" as it started off with supervised learning of human chess games and then moved on to CPU+GPU engine
You don't have to be a libertarian (in fact, it rather helps not to be) to recognize that “capitalism” refers to the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th Century, which was largely abandoned because of the widespread misery it caused in favor of the modern mixed economy in the developed world by the mid-20th century.

OTOH, the test is of ability to parrot the mythology of the dominant political groups in the country.
Is that (not being allowed to hold copies of the documents from discovery) standard practice in such cases, did I miss a reference in the article or what's the reason to assume that the "documents weren't in the UK"? I'd assume various legal aspects treat the VPN access scenario differently than carrying a copy that gets seized, despite the result being basically the same?
FTFY
> After 2.5 years, with half the colony dead...

...the socialist natives took pity on the starving Europeans and helped their fellow humans. Good luck with the rest of your rewrite of history.
Is that in the UK?
Yes, this is main way that States Rights affected the Civil War: northern states ignoring federal law and federal court rulings about returning escaped slaves.

I can see several folks in this very discussion who might be surprised by this bit of history.

Edit: so far two different people think I am mischaracterizing what Southern states said at the time about their state's rights. I wasn't talking about that at all. I was talking about how I (and many modern historians) think about Southern states' reaction to Dred Scott and how Northern states ignored it. Please respond to what I said, instead of something I did not say.