skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the founder of a real estate tech startup that caters to realtors.

This article was written before Opendoor and before a record breaking $10B was pumped into proptech in 2018.

The consensus now is that this industry is undergoing rapid change. At the bottom end of the market (maybe 10%), iBuyers like Opendoor will likely completely disrupt the traditional brokerage model. Next, you will see discount brokerages (Redfin, Purplebricks, et al) take more and more of the market. Full commission brokerages will still be the mainstream for the foreseeable future, but commissions will come down modestly, even for them.

As purchasing or selling a home is one of the most expensive, most emotional, and most intimidating transactions you will ever do, seeking the help of a real estate agent is generally a good idea. Increasing competition will create more options and more value for consumers than we've ever seen before and that's a good thing.
I was thinking about a Colorado and even those are huge compared to my old B4000 (Ford Ranger with a better grill). The Colorado was also the most uncomfortable truck I've ever sat in.
> Yeah, [UBI]'s the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests

Nah, that's called rolling in it. Not UBI.
Zillow CEO argument falls on it's face. If this was such an important transaction, buyers would chose top dollar firms across the board, contractors, architects, masons, etc. Yet the fact all these survive the most competitive, bottom dollar market. Only realtors who carry no liability compared to the above, they still enjoy top dollar. This is a rigged market signal.
I follow you on Twitter! Great content, as always.
In the same way that react-native-web should be "react"?
There is definitely some shitting going on. It’s the same argument people make when they say people buy Apple products because they are a status symbol.

And honestly, NEED is a dumb question. You can ask do you NEED just about anything. No, it’s not strictly a need, and neither is anything else nerds regularly spend their money on. All of what we buy lands somewhere on a spectrum of Need-Convenient-Frivolous, and people who don’t buy something are not going to make the same assessment as people who do.

A car owner saying that a truck owner doesn’t need a truck because they get by fine without one is like a bike owner saying that a car owner doesn’t need a car because they get by fine without one.
If you're using MongoDB nothing is stable /s
> Developers know markdown, web creatives know markdown, but does anyone else?

Randoms who comment on Reddit. It’s not a high bar.

I actually prefer using markdown than fighting with an opinionated WYSIWYG editor. (Looking at you Word).
Yep. I have heard stories of people that setup a Streisand VPN on a digital ocean droplet, and then got sent DMCA letters for torrenting. Digital Ocean turned over their identity and banned their account.

If you're just doing it for privacy, then cool. If you're doing it to mask potentially illegal activity, don't. Use PIA or something like that.
Yeah. I still massively prefer carrying my own space with me if possible. But actually I think hotels could be an option even for people like me. If rooms were properly constructed then they wouldn’t be able to harbor any parasites at all and it would be possible to clean them thouroughly and properly between guests. If I were to start a hotel, I would make public the methods of cleaning and then offer some kind of verification for each guest. Like the receipt checklist you get on a ups, your room would come with some kind of receipt of cleaning. Mattresses would be sealed in plastic. All cloth goods like sheets and curtains would be autoclaved and come with proof of having been so. I honestly think hotels focus way too much on making rooms look homey and warm. Give me a small barren room that’s 100 percent guaranteed to be clean.
What is the point of making a 'dogwhistle' comment if you have to follow up with explaining how you're not suggesting that?
I’ve seen people do really well at sales within one organisation completely fail in another.

Dollar amounts between salespeople are really only comparable within a given company and maybe not even then taking into account different territories, product lines and times.
I have watched you have sex with your wife
I'm a backend engineer at a company that sells home monitoring cameras. I see everything you do in your living room. Everything you do in front of our cameras
It depends. Do you believe that it is the role of government to build new housing or is it their role to create an environment that encourages new building supply? Is new housing not being built because of government regulation that deters new building or certain types of buildings?
Re the Vietman War, of course opposition made perfect sense. It was a stupid, misguided adventure. It was driven by the "zero tolerance" standard for accepting communist development, even when in response to legitimate grievances. For Vietnam, that was long-term colonialist repression by the French.

So I'm not arguing that the Soviets created the antiwar opposition. But they clearly helped it develop. As I understand it, the main actors were domestic US communists, who were encouraged to join the movement, help train and organize, and so on. I was there, and I was part of it.

About Russian-influence conspiracy theory, have you actually watched RT very much? They've been trolling disgruntled Americans for almost 15 years. As subversive as VoA ever was, they've been total straight shooters compared with RT.
Depends on if you have to pay rent with company scrip.
> It's key that the writing point is at a 90 degree angle to the device spines

But the device in the picture is exactly like that one! The three main spines will always occupy exactly the same positions in either the device in the picture or in the device in the video; only the interior hinges used to enforce it are different. The device lies flat on the paper in both cases, and the writing point (your pencil or whatever you stick in the holes) will of course be at 90° angle to the device spines.

Actually a better search found names for these devices: see terms like “Sylvester's Link Fan” and Laisant's Link #2 here: http://www.takayaiwamoto.com/Greek_Math/Trisect/Linkage/Link... — and a much better video showing almost exactly the device in the picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTQVi7zskGU (except for quadrisection instead of trisection). (And the article does mention the Laisant reference; hadn't noticed it earlier: see p.38 here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED058058.pdf#page=49 )

> [...] straightedge with a fixed pair of marks [...] origami

Fair enough; these devices are indeed simpler to construct, but the actual process of trisection of a given angle is not as simple as “plonk the device on the paper, open it up to the angle, and there, it's already trisected”. Nor is the proof that you've successfully trisected as straightforward.
That's true, but it seems to be unavoidable.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080800

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Not sure why you're getting down voted but it is bad because the government is not doing this and we're accepting it.
Show HN: Your curated weekly list of top marketing books
This is incredibly cool work. Love watching the progress of this. Keep it up, and thanks for sharing!
from the Seattle Times version of the article: $475M for loans to housing developers over three years and $25M for resident services
Man, just email. You can join in anytime you want.
"which tunnels VPN over HTTPS bypassing restrictive firewalls,"

That's one of the reasons I recommend HTTPS-based approaches over things like Tor for anonymity. Makes things look like all the bland, harmless traffic out there. Smart move. :)
Diet, Dying, Demographics
> But then, you either never run/tested those smaller individual commits

Not necessarily. One nice option that the git rebase command has is --exec (which can be specified multiple times). So you can run a rebase and have git execute a command (like running a test suite) for each commit in the branch. If any commit files, the rebase process will stop and let you amend the commit to fix the issue.

> or you have to do extra work (stash changes, test, restore stash) to do that.

I've found that it's easier to write and locally test a given feature and them incrementally stage parts of it and create commits before pushing the code up for review. To me, that's easier than just making a large commit and then trying to split it out into a better set of commits after the fact.

For example, I may write a new method and then call it several places in the code. So my first commit would be to add the new method along with its unit tests and my second commit would be to add calls to it in the code base and update the associated integration tests (if necessary).
Great write up Christian, really enjoyed reading it.
patch: hey everybody look at javascript it has two nulls. wat lol

javascript: at least my nulls aren't like midnight, january 1, 1970

unix: damn js that's an epoch burn
Good - reacts quicker to market demands and is directly incentivized by opportunity therefore creating jobs.
I was wondering about this, given the examples. AWS's Golang support for Lambda involves including their library and passing your function to a Lambda initializer function. Which I'm sure is all that's happening with this, but it's weird to hand off the Go source to Google. I wonder if they are multiplexing multiple functions in single binaries or using special Go toolchains. Or just don't want to lock into specific backends yet.
Yes, two and a revisit: episodes 22, 43, and 64.
Thanks for sharing. I have always found machine learning fascinating; to see it put to use for something beautiful is a wonderful experience.
sometimes I feel that way, but a quick trip to DDG or Bing reminds me that while Google has felt regressive, they are still the kings of showing me what I want up front.
Pay more corporate taxes instead and let elected people decide how to spend it for public services?
No, but a central power generator can produce energy far more cheaply and efficiently than a consumer gas engine optimized for mobility.
I'm no advertising expert, but I have seen a number of stories over the years of companies being disillusioned by the promise of targeted ads. One common thread I've noticed is that most people don't have a targeted product and a targeted message. Most products generally have broad appeal and a lot of ad campaigns work by changing the general perception of a product.

Advertising in the New York Times in general is already targeted in some fashion (you know the basic demographic of New York Times readers), and if you want to advertise laundry detergent there's not a lot to gain from knowing a person's exact age and the gender of all his siblings siblings and the top keyword searches he made on Pornhub. Logically speaking, it seems for targeted advertising to be worth it, you'd need an unusually high response to advertising among a very narrow selection of people who can be identified as such, and that these people don't have an obvious place where they can be found.

In the case of the New York Times, that means you have a product whose message is going to be wasted on the majority of the population; who can only be communicated with through a general interest publisher like the New York Times, but not a website or conference dedicated to that thing; but who can none the less be easily identified through invasive and secretive tracking data, but not through what news stories they're viewing; who will be very responsive to advertising (so not people who are domain experts in a particular hobby or career and will choose a product by intentionally seeking information on that product and rationally weigh their alternatives); and who are a large enough group that it's even worth putting together an advertising campaign.

And how responsive are people to ads even on a base level anyway? Award-winning campaigns like "You Got Milk" had massive impact on culture and awareness, but didn't drive sales.

With so many hurdles, targeted advertising seems like something that provides only marginal and diminishing returns. Newspapers seem like just about the worst place to benefit from violating user privacy. It's like trying to sell Linux dev ops software by asking a top 40 radio station to play ads for it after specific songs.
Oh god, the customer base nearly shat the bed when they announced a transition from steel to aluminium panels... Looking forward to the uproar this will cause!
More likely, they had a pile of shitty drafts that they cleaned up slightly for the same purpose. In a process like this, a pile of shitty drafts is pretty much a given. You're exploring a range of possibilities, and if you're too self-critical during brainstorming you might not sketch out the draft that becomes your best submittal.
I would wager that it's because there are folks who applaud the private sector for stepping in on a big problem. I would argue it's a general positive when we don't have to rely on government to solve all of our problems.
It sounds like more people should be interested in regulatory reform. I'm a huge fan of refactoring regulations once the problems they've been made to fix have been solved.

The problem is most "bodies of laws" are so complex and have so many competing stakeholders that it's a lot like a method that everyone's afraid to touch so they just comment "#DO NOT TOUCH!!"

The other problem is the "policy people" who create regulations are rarely the subject matter experts. They are good at managing the process to the successful conclusion: a new published regulation. They are not good at deciding what a good regulation is.
It's a bad sign. It's a sign the gov has dropped the ball. Government should be doing this. This is their job, it's in their purview to account for growth and address it, one way or another, but not ignore it or frustrate it.
The fact that it's easier to do things this way just shows how immature the toolchain surrounding serverless development is. It shouldn't be difficult to simulate the serverless environment on a workstation, and yet somehow that's a huge gap, even for Lambda.
Absolutely! We can apply for visas for both our US and Berlin offices.
This also puzzles me. If I buy a household appliance that's not a consumable product (most shouldn't be), why does it recommend more of the exact same? Why doesn't it instead recommend other types of appliances?

The key take-away should be that you're comfortable with buying household appliances online, usually not that you need another vacuum cleaner within the next year.
Gamblers gonna gamble.
Lenovo has invested in CLEARink
problem though is that even though moderate priced housing pays tremendous returns stupid developers will always chase luxury because they can do stupid well. The fact that M$FT will make money off this doesn't stop it from being a tremendously valuable step for someone who happens to be housing insecure in sea-tac
As great as it is to see this kind of corporate responsibility and acknowledgement of the downsides of local growth, it's not clear to me how Microsoft is supposed to help here. High housing costs are a nasty example of a particular social problem where throwing money at it just doesn't work, even if you're willing to completely take a loss on your investment. To my naïve analysis, if Microsoft just pledges money to build a bunch of housing units, then that throws a wrench in supply/demand, other people pull back on construction to match, and we end up right back where we started. I'm sure there are higher-order effects and the reality is more complicated than this, but I also don't think it changes the fundamental picture much. How is Microsoft supposed to help make more housing available without other developers just canning their own projects and leaving zero net change?
Also, as any pretty girl in a DongGuan city's Sauna will teach you, put all portable objects inside the room's wardrobe and cover everything you can, including mirrors, with towels, bedsheets, or whatever piece of cloth you can find. Put all flasks of Shampoo or body soap in the wardrobe aswell. Scan the long curtains of the room's window with your eyes and hands. They are really professionals there.
We haven't published a lot on the backend architecture, but there's some info in the docs. I think it would be interesting to chat. Can you hit me up at info@gravwell.io?
Not sure where the other guy said it was clear cut. He merely stated some facts about what happens to water when it gets warmer - scientific facts, like what you've been asking for.

The backhanded good news is that with fish populations declining, there doesn't need to be as much oxygen in the water...
Most people's F Series are both their personal and work vehicle. At least here in Georgia, it's a lifestyle vehicle. It makes perfect sense to me when most middle aged white collar professionals with money in Georgia drive a big truck and like their gadgets.
This is great and all, but part of me is really cynical about corporate philanthropy like this.

First off, all but $25 of the $500M will be loaned out to developers at below-market interest rates and the other $25 will be donated to related services. Good on Microsoft for committing capital that could be put to other uses, but this isn't a donation; it's philanthropic lending. Depending on the interest rates of these loans, they'll wind up keeping much of that principle. Yes, people will surely benefit from this, but this looks really conservative for such a headline.

Corporate taxation is a hot-button issue these days, but one can't help but notice how easy it is to shun government for being wasteful in providing housing services while private industry is being applauded to essentially buy the process of welfare. And while there are heated debates about what major companies should contribute (or avoid contributing) in taxes, can we even agree that affordable housing sponsored by private money is a little contradictory here?
I'm in full agreement.

like...seriously? they really thought there was improvement to be made on the Library of Congress logo? Its a book...and its nice and iconic, recognizable. They said the new design gives a brand identity thats more "accessible"...what is not accessible about a book? I get that the library has more than books, but that doesn't really make the old logo any less relevant.
Just to be clear: free as in freedom, not as in beer. You can charge as much as you want for use. You can choose your customers in any way you want. However, once they are your customer, you can not deny them the source code, nor can you deny them the ability to use the code, or further distribute the source code.

The short circuit that many people make is that if you can't create scarcity for the code, then you can't make money and hence you can't have a commercial service. This is not true, but it does mean that you can't stop people from offering exactly the same service that you do, using the code that you wrote to do it.

A free software commercial service needs to work differently than most people initially think about wrt commercial services. You need to offer something that is valuable to the customer that isn't the software. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc are well place to profit from free software because they can offer hardware abstraction services at a price/scale that is virtually impossible to compete with.

This is really the problem that some services are running into -- if you are only offering hosting as your service then you have a problem. Generic hosting companies can undercut you (and also outperform you because hosting is all they do). You have to write the software and host it. They only have to host it.

This is again why some companies turn to "open core", where they offer more functionality using proprietary software in order to provide more reason to pay for it. Again, they are creating scarcity of the code in order sell it. But this is not a free software business. It's a proprietary software business with a free software loss leader.

Every time I look at this problem, I come back to the same conclusion. There is only one thing that a free software company can provide as a service for which they have an advantage over the competition: writing software. You somehow have to link the creating of new software to customer sales. Whether you do that via customer services, contracts, or some other clever idea that I haven't thought about, I don't think you have any choice. Usually companies can't think of a way to scale this, so they abandon the idea, but I think it's probably possible (ala Red Hat). Perhaps I'm wrong.
This is such a cynical statement that I'm tired of seeing on HN.

Yes, the article mentions a product from the company, not in a sneaky way. The rest of it, some 2,800 words, is interesting and informative--to me, at least.

An article can be both informative and self-serving, and there's nothing wrong with that, provided there's no deception. Most of what you read online is self-serving, in some way.
Well Tesla does have the Semi so it's not like this is completely virgin ground. Presumably they've got better data than we do re: mileage needs and its possible (just guessing) that many of the F-Series buyers might make sense re: living within range of a single charge while also seeing more of an impact given the lower MPG of trucks.

Something else to keep in mind is that American big auto ironically hasn't been, how shall I say this, umm... great at doing passenger cars for the last 40 years. So another thought is that they might see this as a place they can be more competitive.
> they are just mostly finished

Yeah, I don't know how much experience you have with Qt but widgets are far from being "finished". There's plenty of things that could be improved if their focus wasn't on Qt Quick.

The use of Qt Widgets is declining (albeit slowly), as stated in http://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/01/14/qt-customer-survey-2018/. You're telling me that they're going to support two different technologies that do the same thing without giving preference to the newer, technically superior one?

Qt Quick is intended to replace Qt Widgets, but it isn't currently at a stage where that's feasible -- hence my apprehension.
Frankly, good. If the Eastside cities can't or won't step up with building more affordable housing and public services, then I'm glad Microsoft is willing to kick in its money. It's a shame that the counties and cities in the region, by and large, aren't willing to acknowledge that this is a regional problem but Microsoft putting up the money at least removes the "but we can't afford the taxes or find the money elsewhere" excuse.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has put its money where its mouth is for its community. They've done a lot for transit in the region, too.

I don't mind so much that they are studiously avoiding the region's most populated city. Not all of the affordable housing and public services needs to be concentrated solely in Seattle. The rest of the region should have these things, from mental health services to public health facilities to shelters to affordable housing. Concentrating them in Pioneer Square around the Union Gospel Ministry isn't the way to go.