skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple reasons that don't get much attention are that a.) newly-constructed houses are relatively cheap and b.) mortgage rates are very good.

A normal, custom-built house in the suburbs of Tokyo can be constructed for somewhere between $120,000 and $250,000 (source: I'm shopping for a house now) which, at the current Japanese mortgage rates for a 35-year loan, translates into a $400-$800 monthly payment for the home construction.

This is on top of what you have to pay for the value of the land itself, of course. But if you're already paying $300k-$500k for the lot, then why not just knock down the old building and put up your own, perfect-for-your-family, architect-designed, house?
"Japan has strict immigration policies" is often repeated, but I don't think this is tells the whole story. Some of the policies are very permissive:

* If you graduated university and have a 'skilled' job in Japan, you are likely to get a visa. There is no cap on the number of these. There is no language requirement.

* If you live in Japan for over 5 years continuously you can apply for citizenship, though you must renounce any other citizenships.

* If you live in Japan for over 10 years you are eligible for permanent residency.

* If you are married to a Japanese national you can do any kind of work and get permanent residency in 3 years.

* If you have enough points on the highly skilled professional visa you can get permanent residency in 1 year. This is retroactive as long as you lived in Japan during that time, you don't even need to have had the highly skilled professional visa.

So, is it really an issue of policy? I think the causes may lie elsewhere.
He can’t build it profitably, or at least without going through the environmental impact review that every other project of this scale must pass. Do you really think the hole digging is the bottleneck for every other underground project?
GraalVM Polyglot with Clojure and JavaScript
Not trying to be snarly but on HN there isn't a lot of discussion of MS, due to what feels like reasons not related to technology but political. I can see when some small project from google changes name but big news related to MS and very much about widespread technology adoption doesn't figure (except when its negative).

Now i don't mind but i am curious - is there a platform that is less politically inclined and has more tech related news?

I mean i hadn't even heard of hololens and only about Oculus etc and here they are doing 1/2 a billion dollar contracts. I don't want this to happen again...
Are you also against sacrificing a piece in a game to gain an advantage? How is this different? He played a sacrifice in the meta game to gain an advantage.
How does that change anything? It’s like saying because NASA was funded primarily due to the advent of the Cold War, that NASA should only work on researching and building ICBMs because that’s the type of stuff they originated from. The logic doesn’t make any sense.
No, the only point of EV certs is for CAs to make more money.
If you haven't seen it, the Ricky Jay documentary [1] is very interesting. Much of what he did was simply pure hard work. Being able to feel an exact count of cards as he split a deck at any point and the ability to count in his head, while simultaneously speaking makes much of what he does seem like magic, but is simply him knowing where all the cards are at all times. Which seems impossible (i.e. magic), but is simply very, very, very hard.

1. http://www.rickyjaymovie.com/
I like your thought experiment to illustrate why Roman numerals make sense for the time. I think you're right! It is more practical given the tools than Arabic numerals.

To respond to the hiking story; I would opt to use binary if I were in the same situation. I think it's a superior system to use especially out in the woods. It's hard to read for many folk unexposed to binary but it allows you to encode lots of base 10 numbers using a few items. For example, a twig rotated 0 degrees could signify 0, and a twig rotated 90 degrees could be 1. 5 twigs gets you 0 - 31!

To bring it back to the Romans... I realize Binary wasn't commonly used in the Ancient World and that is something I find a little baffling. Base 2 seems like it would be more useful in a pre-pen and paper world, especially when you have to etch something. The closest thing I can find is the Inca Quipu ("talking knots") but even that encodes base 10 numbers into base 4 knots.

If base 2 was widely used by human beings our fingers could have encoded up to 1024 digits.

How did base n > base 2 evolve?
EnterpriseDB offers some additional compatibility features in their flavor of Postgresql. It looked a lot easier than a move to MySQL.
The price is for the land, which can be quite expensive and can go up. The cost of demolition and building a new home is about USD200-300k for a very nice three bedroom home in a typical urban area. Credit is very cheap too. Also, people prefer new things in Japan. If you see a car that is more than a few years old, it will most likely be a mint-condition collectors item.
In a nutshell: people who make stuff are critical of other people who make similar stuff :P
It appears that ingestion alone is more expensive than the commercial metric services. Might not matter for small scale.
This is a short commentary piece, not exactly much there. There's some interesting comments, the one at the top right now says

"They are no doubt imprecise, but for a majority of the faculty the scores form a tight bunch around a mean. Newer faculty are likely to have lower scores, so it is often times useful to sit down with them and review the feedback and talk about ways to improve. A few faculty members continually score higher than average, and I want to know why--perhaps they can help do some mentoring with the lower scoring faculty."
> But characterizing the clocks this well meant that the ytterbium clocks could detect how Earth’s gravity had slowed time, accurately determining their location in the Earth’s gravitational field to within a centimeter.

This is amazing to me. There was an article published 4 or so years ago that predicted a satellite network of quantum entangled clocks that would yield similar resolution throughout the entire volume of the earth.

Essentially, such an ultra-GPS constellation would be able to determine the density of any centimeter-sized volume anywhere within the earth. It's nice to see regular progress to such a goal.
> it boggles my mind that if an expense app on my phone needs to take a picture of a receipt my only option is to allow it not only permanent use of my camera but also access to all of my photos and videos.

THIS! Seriously, it angers me so greatly that I have to deal with such stupidity as all or nothing permissions. If I want to allow a single photo, but not all photos, no such luck. If I want to allow access to save photos, but not read photos, tough. Etc etc

If Apple really cared about privacy instead of using it as a marketing ploy, this would be mandated already.
“they are still standing”.

Will you be able to say that of a lot of the new builds in 100 years?
What's the resource constraint then if it's not food, energy, or shelter?

People want to buy more stuff? Hardly a requirement of years gone by.

People want more free time? Doubtful, otherwise people would work less and buy less stuff - which we don't see. People keep getting more productive, but they just funnel that into a more expensive lifestyle rather than cutting back on work.

I don't think the reasons are simple (or even the same between people) but I don't think it's dominated by resource constraints.

I know software engineers with no children and school teachers with four. Very different lifestyles, but all middle class. And I don't think resource constraints factored heavily into their decision making.
Sounds more like AWS CloudWatch Log Insights launched yesterday.
Thriving, I bet
very interesting - that seems like a good and still pretty simple rule too. I feel like if the docs are organized well then volume shouldn't matter but at the same time having fewer docs means less room for error in organizing.
I had a very similar experience with LinkedIn a couple years ago.
Most programmers working in a business know which codebases are the good ones and which are the bad. It's very unusual for a programmer to be given a good codebase as they are the most sought after, and therefore much politicking goes into getting those. Your number 1 red flag just shows the developer isn't competent or willing to take part in certain types of destructive office politics.
Very interesting.

Anyone knows how Postgres really handles data coming from Foreign data wrappers?

Will Postgres build an index for the columns? Does it leverage the Postgres query planning?
> My number 1 red flag of working with a developer, unless they are very early in their career, is hearing them describe a codebase as awful. Most really are not that bad and are usually just using unfamiliar and less than ideal design patterns and coding practices.

So, what if in reality, the codebase IS awful, and the product itself suffers from delays and setbacks even on seemingly simple tasks? Still a red flag if a developer says the sky is blue? Maybe you're the red flag in that case?
I've been using Stylus for many months now, it works exactly the same but is open source.

That, combined with "Dark Background + Light Text" with custom colors makes Firefox a beautiful sight in my personal night mode.

"Dark Background" for the majority of sites that don't have good dark Stylus themes, disabled on the ones that do.

This one is nice:

https://github.com/dparpyani/HackerNews-DarkTheme
I'm pretty skeptical of the claims in this - it'd be interesting to see actual data.

Evaluations are one of the extremely few levers students actually have to pull when dealing with a terrible teacher. I'd expect that given an entire class' worth of evaluations you'd be able to strip outliers and get some genuine useful responses.

Though the worst professor I had at RPI held our grades hostage until the evaluations were in, so they're not perfect.
A structural transition in physical networks
Very cool. One could do this over time, and then automatically find out where values change between different versions of the code. Might be able to find bugs before they ever occur.
every time i see an old commercial editor get open sourced, i feel a moment of sadness that [aurora](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/aurora.html) never went that route.
Show HN: Open-sourcing my wedding website on my first anniversary
Recreating the Hooli Box
What availability would those producers need to provide? Some quota of supplies? Low prices don't matter for much if there's a shortage, and there _will_ be a shortage of cheap emergency medicine if the companies that produce it can get away without spending too much on the unprofitable requirement. (and if it were profitable they'd do it anyway, without need for government requirement)

I worry that requiring a pharma company to provide supplies hurts anyone who wants to start up a new pharma company. It's easier to comply with government regulations once you're a big company and have many plants, but new companies have to be lean or else they'll never make it off the ground.
I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their list of requirements.

If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"
BBEdit dates back to 1992, and I believe Tex-Edit is even older. CodeWarrior and BBEdit were both Carbonized for OS X very early (because developers needed them for bringing up other apps).
I don't remember SubEthaEdit coming out until at least 10.2 (ISTR it had a different name for first release also)
the abacus that they are based off of was in fact, base 10, positional. See my other comment.
This reminds me of temporal database [1] concepts. I've been thinking that besides the hashing aspect of it, otherwise, it's actually basically the same as a temporal database, isn't it?

I do like that they referred to it as a database rather than blockchain, as it more accurately captures the fact that it is a data store and I always felt like blockchain was more a reference to the way that the data is cryptographically linked together in the data store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database
I bet more people have died because there was no pen present (too expensive) than would have died from incorrect administration of a cheaper pen. So the design of the epipen solves a problem, but are we making the right tradeoff in insisting on using that solution at a high price point?

This is like the fact that TSA searches make another 9/11 less likely, however people driving instead of flying to avoid the hassle is estimated to have killed more people than 9/11 itself did. Risk is a funny thing, and isn't always straightforward to figure out.

Making it personal, in theory my daughter should have 2 epipens close at all times because if she gets stung on the neck, she could need one. Anywhere else is OK, the concern is swelling from her allergy cutting off airflow. That explains one, and the second is in case the first fails to work properly, which sometimes happens.

In practice there is an epipen for her at school, and at her mother's house, but not at my house. We shelled out once. But we're not shelling out over and over again to prevent such an unlikely disaster. (Twice more so that there are the recommended number of pens at school and both places she lives, then more as we lose them since they are supposed to always be on us..soon we're talking about real money!)
It's very interesting to me that the author writes a critique of a style guide, but doesn't seem to have tried to understand the perspective of those who created it or what their goals were (they basically give this lip service)

They don't really try and understand the rationale in detail and then argue that that rationale would be better served through a different set of features, they mostly just say "hey I think Google is wrong and these features are pretty cool"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREACH

Assume you have an app, rather than a site.

Your app has a login

Your password is not sent in clear-text, your server uses HTTPS for all its traffic.

You probably don’t want to use compression, then.
This is just legacy media trying to regain power. Fake news has been around forever, look up Yellow Journalism.

The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population.

Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?
No shit basing compensation on reviews by people who have an overt bias to blame the instructor.

The purpose of the review should be purely to provide feedback to the instructor and TA. It should not be available to the administration - the purpose is to help the TA and instructors improve their teaching. Especially if the instructors have tenure and so can’t be fired for failing to teach.

Ratings should also be scaled to control for biases - what are the average grades given by each student, how do they compare to other students in their classes, and to their course grade.
My best advice I got about college teaching:

University is a place of higher learning, not higher teaching.

If you're relying on being spoon fed the course, you're doing it wrong.
That's just... a fundamental limitation? I don't think there's a way for an unskilled ("normal") person to dissect and analyze the information outside of their understanding in a meaningful way, no matter how creative you get.
do you not understand perpetuation? "doesn't fly with my boss" ---> "won't fly when I'm boss". also how about having a conversation on the merits? does that fly with your boss? does with mine.
I share your sentiments about how software that was designed to be "open" with the best intentions (often done so before the world was as connected as it was), is now facing problems. A big part of the solution is getting rid of old and now insufficient practices and replacing them with new models that fit into the current world. For example, in-process plugin models with e.g. dynamic libraries loaded into the app are highly problematic, but can increasingly be replaced by out-of-process plugin executables (using very controlled communication channels like explicit shared memory regions), coupled with the proper sandboxing for those plugin executables, individually.

As an aside, access to the Camera and access to Photos is already separate on iOS, you have to approve both separately (which becomes apparent if you use Instagram, for example).

Sometimes when I want to save an image, instead of allowing access to Photos, I copy the image into the clipboard.
Wonder if they will offer a local solution.
The article title is misleading. A better title would be:

"Japan has 8 million abandoned houses. A small fraction are being given away"

The article then links to a blog which occasionally links to empty houses for sale for very low prices. The blog gets its information from local government "empty house banks". Many local governments have these, but lots of them are not web based, you would have to go to the government offices in person to ask about empty houses.

In reality, the best way to find an empty house in Japan is to go driving around the countryside and talk to some locals. They know who owns what and who might be interested in selling.
Setting aside the barriers to getting a lawyer when you have no money which I think you dismiss too readily, I am more interested in how you would propose to determine whether consumers are willingly sacrificing safety for cost?
> we'll move it to jruby!

Hahahah Oh man, that's great. BTW, we had people who did this. Our performance is 2x better with half the servers after we undid this "optimization" at our org. I suggest benchmarking first.
I thought the most interesting part of this was the part about the internal structure being classified.

Naively I assumed that they were cast solid and then the surface machined to the exact shape, but it sounds like they either have internal passages or they're made of some sort of honeycomb to reduce weight? What else could be inside?
We pushed very hard at my alma mater to publicize course/teacher evaluations. We eventually got the University to accept iff a minimum participation rate was met (on a per course basis-- so it wasn't all or nothing. We'd get a subset of the data when enough participation occurred. We considered this reasonable, since if very few students participate, the data isn't all that meaningful).

Regarding professors wanting to keep review data tightly sealed: in my view, if you can't by public disclosure of your evaluation, then you either don't feel you're meeting expectations, or have no desire to improve in areas where students feel improvement could be made.

Also, the biases pointed out in these reviews aren't unique to academia. Gender and age biases exist everywhere. This article sounds like it's just pushing the idea that students should have less influence in the hiring and promotion decisions of professors. You know, the very people that the teachers first and foremost serve at a university.
Replace "Amazon people" with "people knowledgeable about these services".
Access to Camera is different from access to Photos.
If you can keep a high salary and work wherever you want, and you want a quiet life, then just throw a dart on a map of the USA or the world. Basically everywhere except a few metropolitan areas is very cheap to live. If this is something you want, yes you are missing something, you should look around a bit.
I think it’s still a worthwhile trade off.

The percentage of people using network inspection for “good” like malware/phishing filtering is much lower than the percentage using it for bad stuff like ad/cancer tracking.
That's not what the article says.

Its thesis is that automation of an industry first increases employment in it, and finally decreases it.

This is because early stages of automation reduce very high costs to a manageable level, increasing demand and increasing employment despite increased efficiency.

Later stages of automation reduce already low costs, so demand does not increase much and the efficiency gains translate to reduced employment.
My school district actually offers public Montessori classrooms. It's a lottery to to get in but it is available.

The reason people get up in arms about the whole "school choice" thing is that it is often used as a way to disguise attacks on the public education system. 'Give people vouchers so they can choose whatever school they want.'

Many times it is meant to funnel money into private charter schools and starve the public education system. There are no price controls so the reality is that people will still be priced out of the best private schools.

Not saying everyone who supports vouchers has ulterior motives but there are some people pushing them who absolutely have ulterior motives. And ultimately I don't think that the public school is hopeless because there are plenty of districts and even states that have great schools. It's just that there's a huge gulf between the best public schools in America and the worst.
This is why obsoleting frameworks by expanding the native component model of the web is good for the world.
We write our runbooks in a wiki in Phabricator. We have a wiki per topic-- we have one for getting started with the system that has some useful commands for running tests, another for deploying the system, etc. I usually find them by searching for terms that I remember are in them, but starting out, I was sent some of the wiki pages.
Japanese ghost stories dwell in the spirit of their times
There are three things at play:

1. Value of land
2. Value of building in perfect order
3. Lost of value of building due to wear/tear etc.

If building/trades costs are rising #2 can rise too while #3 will counteract it, and it depends how much money is put into maintenance and renovations.

Notwithstanding cultural issues with old houses.