skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another way of summarizing Alex Rampell's video: The mortgage industry is ripe for disruption.

Yes, there are massive economic inefficiencies in the whole mortgage lending business and since a16z's motto is, "software is eating the world", there are opportunities for tech startups to disrupt all of that.

To spur discussion, I'd categorize "disrupting mortgage industry" into 2 general buckets:

(1) disrupting the procedural aspects of a mortgage : lowering the cost of moving the transaction from the "loan application" all the way to "closing". The worfklow aspects.

In terms of disrupting people, this means disrupting the loan officers at banks, appraisers, title searchers, surveyors, etc. In terms of disrupting "fees", this means reducing/eliminating "loan origination fee", "title insurance", and "survey costs". (A lot of these administrative overhead costs are basically a bunch of "checks & balances" to ensure the loan transaction is not fraudulent or has undocumented liabilities ... e.g. verify loan applicant's paychecks to make sure he/she really has a job with $x income, and the property's recent newly installed fence doesn't encroach on others' property lines creating a potential lawsuit.)

(2) disrupting the loan underwriting : This means lowering the cost of money. Today, we see that a 30-year mortgage in America is about 3.7%. Maybe there's a market inefficiency and a clever entrepreneur can lower it to 2.5%.

The vastly different problem-solving aspects of (1) and (2) will attract very different skill sets. E.g. entrepreneurs interested in (1) might think of reducing costs of surveys with robots/drones/satellites while startups interested in (2) might try to lower the "cost of money" by creating financial packages such as "500 co-signers on a mortgage that also receive a portion of the profits from the house's sale."

In the video, he mentions FNMA and FHMLC are the ones that buy home loans. Basically, it means that banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase are glorified order takers. They charge a $1000 "loan origination fee" to sell your loan to the the government sponsored agencies. If the loan ultimately ends up at FNMA anyway, maybe there's a much cheaper way to accomplish that. (Although I doubt the FNMA website will ever have a landing page that says "Skip the banks and apply for a loan directly with us!")
> just learned now that it's supposed to be loaned from French

Is it? According to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

‘We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom’
Indirectly, you can. Fund research, or change regulations/taxes to make more environmentally friendly sources cheaper (if you're of a libertarian bent, you can think of this as pricing in the externalities). Since the alternative energy source is now cheaper, it receives more private funding, both for capacity construction, and for research.
What's really broken is all the allegedly smart people reading the Economist, which regularly tells us capitalism is still great no worries, who then can't figure out why people keep voting for populists.
The entities have their own licenses also. For example a famous heart transplant program was shut down recently. The providers just found other jobs.

Edit: I am a provider also
Yelp's practice of intentionally biasing their reviews (and search results) was protected in court a few years ago[1], so unfortunately businesses have no legal recourse.

If we want to kill Yelp, we have to switch. My cousin works for Likewise[2] and recommends it. It solves the fake/biased reviews problem by letting you as a user select who influences your recommendations (including friends and family). I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for it myself.

1. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Yelp-can-give-paying-cli...

2. https://likewise.com/what-is-likewise
What is the rule of thumb for cloud-spending costs of production versus development/CI?

Somebody mentioned 1:3.
Myself and a few others woulc like to use cryptocurrency to enable fractional ownership of property where anyone in the world can buy and sell 'shares' or just own them as an investment. This is happening with art too.
> I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing.

Because prior to Blender 2.8 it was really really bad software compared to commercial alternatives.

Blender is becoming quite good. Which impresses the hell out of me. But it’s taken a long, long time to get there.
My wife and I really enjoy both IF and BM burgers - just be sure to not overlook them!

They do contain a lot of fat from vegetable oil but they are very low in cholesterol. I will trade more sodium for the advantages for me of reducing cholesterol.

They really taste good. We like them on good rolls, purple onion, tomato, lettuce, and whatever sauce we feel like. Fantastic tasting burgers.

There is also the advantages of not killing animals. My wife and I have just spent two years living in Illinois (returning home to Sedona Arizona next week) and our rented home is beside a pasteur and let me tell you that cows run around like dogs, playing together, and generally have different personalities - we notice which ones tend to start the running around playing/games and which ones join in after the game starts. I think most people in order to make themselves feel better imagine cows and steers as being dumb animals with no soul or consciousness. Not so. I am not a strict vegetarian, but personally I feel better about reducing my meat intake.
Vegans aren't stupid -- but the difference in animal suffering from a meat heavy diet and a meat free diet is massive. Just because something can't be done 100% today, doesn't mean it isn't worth achieving 95% success.
I reckon a fair way is if blender has a proprietary licence available to plugin vendors who wants to sell non-GPL version of their plugin. I suppose the proprietary licence can be a small share of the profit from the plugin sales.
Explicit reference was also made to NFS, which has nothing to do with WAN-style networking. The local Sun mafia are trying really hard to claim credit for distributed computing at all scales, and there's nothing off-topic about addressing one part.
Yeah completely the left from US like AOC, Bernie and Gravel are centre left at best. I am disgusted of China and others but at the same time I'm disgusted at the papers and media not talking about US, UK and many others surveillance states.
Is this actually unmetered? Or is it unmetered until you hit a secret limit that they don't tell you, and then demand you pay them, like Cloudflare? (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's reasonable for CF to want their highest-usage customers to pay, I'm just curious)
Not him but for me gaming has really sapped my attention span and intrinsic motivations. Before or after a "session" I find myself still thinking about the game and my brain still wired to play the game, versus the other sorts of "zones" you can find yourself in such as to exercise, read, meditate, cook, do errands, etc. I go back and forth on playing games (1 month on, 3 months off ish) - but its always quitting cold turkey. There is probably a business venture in keeping people productively busy in order to get over a gaming fetish.
I was surprised this is all about physical costs and doesn’t include digital costs that folks should be aware of. I was expecting to see the latency between AZs in a region and between regions for example.
You do link the comments, so just to point out "will not be affected" isn't true for many reasons...not just the reduced ruleset. Details are in those comments. It will be a lesser product all around.
I’ve never heard of half these build systems - are they mostly used for Cxx heavy repos ?
A Man's Walk from Tokyo to Kyoto
> On the other hand, I don't think it's reasonable to assume every build system will immediately support every compiler/IDE.

If your API is stable, why wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that it should work out of the box?
New evidence from LHC shows pentaquark has a molecule-like structure
My favorite pizza place was affected by this action. I'm about 25 minutes away from the affected area. It's not a very remote location.
In all honesty, putting money in real estate or stocks is just speculation which is fairly meaningless - the only benefit that brings is that it drives market forces to evaluate a certain good at a given price, and even still I don't believe it's all too useful today. Further still, putting money into real estate with a hope of ROI is, in my opinion as a home-owner-to-be, actively detrimental to society. Having seen the market prices in my current city rise more than 2x in less than 10 years without the wages seeing anything remotely close to the same adjustment. Just because somebody can make a profit doesn't mean that any intrinsic value has been made.
My entire monthly bill from PG&E is usually about $50...
I believe it’s unmetered by them personally.

But there’s always a “secret limit”—the point where your bandwidth usage looks like a DDoS attack, and the tier-1 exchange feeding the cloud provider’s DC decides to blackhole your traffic for the sake of the network.
content marketing...
Can you elaborate on that or do you have any best-practices for tagging and correlating costs?
My aunt was bitten by a rattlesnake on her finger. It cost 46,000 dollars for a vial of anti-venin and and one night stay for observation.

This happens in India all the time with King Cobras and I know they can't afford 46,000.

It's a total racket and scam because on a system of supply and demand like American capitalism... what has a greater demand to someone than a their life so the only limit to price is on the supply side.
>claiming he was exchanging reviews for “incentives” (a discount on pizza) — a clear violation of the platform’s Terms of Service

That doesn't seem all that different than what yelp itself does.
Compared with being vegetarian or mostly vegetarian, it is. One must pay much more attention to their diet and intake. In addition, most folks need to take supplements. As the other response said, it is also harder to eat out. Vegetarian is much easier - the addition of things like eggs and cheese helps out tremendously. I read ingredients, sure, but it isn't an issue most times. It would take more mental work to keep out all animal products.

I might be mostly vegetarian and eat eggs and cheese and fish once a week, but I usually tell folks to reduce their eat. Sometimes I say instead to make sure they eat enough fruit and veg and whole grain. I say this stuff because it is easier for most folks to concentrate on things like this to improve overall diet without feeling like they have to spend days figuring things out.
I believe ZFS represented a missed opportunity by spending all that effort on a local filesystem instead of trying to do something interesting in the distributed space. I even said so at the time, since I was working on distributed filesystems at the time, but that's just a strategic issue (and one that's quite arguable). It's not evidence of ignorance or lack of experience.
If only Yelp behaved a little like the late Jonathan Gold, who'd only give _favorable_ reviews to restaurants he really enjoyed, skipping negative/mediocre reviews for those that could improve.
ABP released a statement to german news site golem.de, saying that they "prepare for the worst case".

This means they anticipate Google to target the Acceptable Ads program.

Originally I thought 30,000 rules wouldn't be enough to cover things, but according to this research, only a couple hundred rules are enough to block >90% of the ads: https://brave.com/the-mounting-cost-of-stale-ad-blocking-rul...

So maybe there's another limiting aspect of the declarativeNetRequest API I don't know of.
Unless you live in an area where electricity prices are sky high and A/C is all but a necessity that's like 50% of people's bills.

That might fly in some rich suburb of NYC but try that in Buffalo and the tar and feathers would come out.
> The Google support page for managing and deleting your Location History says that once you turn it off, "the places you go are no longer stored. When you turn off Location History for your Google Account, it's off for all devices associated with that Google Account." The AP's investigation found that's not true. In fact, turning off your Location History only stops Google from creating a timeline of your location that you can view. Some apps will still track you and store time-stamped location data from your devices.[1]

> Google itself offers at least three support pages on location: Manage or delete your Location History, Turn location on or off for your Android device, and Manage location settings for Android apps. None of these makes any mention of Web & App Activity. [1]

1. https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-of...
And how many times has that protection been challenged by republicans? They’ve voted to repeal it in the republicans controlled house, the senate, filed lawsuits, and the AG stated overturning Obamacare as a goal of the DOJ.
> Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces procured from poopsenders.com. In a little over a month, the group has attracted 278 members.

With this kind of publicity poopsenders might soon go public
Their bandwidth limits are based on Mbps / Gbps, so the bandwidth is unmetered, but not unlimited. And unlike CDNs, public cloud companies make money from the computational power (CPU / RAM) they provide.
In Denmark, it appears to be about US$800,000 per kilometre.[0] The article mentions, that 17 billion DKK has been invested to dig down 3,200 km overhead wires. It further notes, that 5.7 billion DKK of the budget is spent on buying the cables from the regional owners, before they can be dug down.

The article further talks about people outraged by the amount spent on digging down these cables, as they are generally high voltage cables, and not those that actually reach houses. So I'd imagine regular wires cost less than the above calculation (which includes the 5.7 billion for purchasing the original wires).

[0] In Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/nyt-opror-stop-milliard-fras-pa-grave...
I'm afraid you are in for a nasty surprise: CloudFlare specifically forbids using it mostly as an image/video CDN unless you are on the Enterprise tier (clause 2.8 in the Terms).
I found it out the hard way a couple of years ago when I was helping with maintenance of a pretty large image hosting website (we got to 1-2Pb/mo range). CF may not pay attention to you while you are small, but when they do, it's going to cost you.
What I was responding to:

> you could always have dmca’d them when they deployed
What a guy though:

>Under the alias “Babghanoush I,” Cerretini posted 13 fake positive reviews for Botto Bistro, as well as fake critical reviews of neighboring restaurants — sometimes going so far as to disparage fellow owners.

......

>In the spring of 2014, after turning down another Yelp salesperson, Cerretini claims that four 5-star reviews were filtered from his page, and three 1-star reviews were suddenly catapulted to the top of the page. For the chef, this was the final straw.

>“Those 1-star reviews were from people who never even set foot in my restaurant,” says Cerretini. “One complained about our waiters… we didn’t even have waiters!”

Yeah, I wonder why you got fake negative reviews.
Yeah, but what does the peering look like for these?
Rich people have whole house generators and will be mostly unaffected. This is a major PITA to everyone else.
PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines. Even if they served all of California (they do not), that would be less than 15K customers for an average 30 mile segment.
Efficient or not, seaweed is already growing in the enormous area of the oceans and washing up on beaches worldwide. All that needs to be done is go get it.
But you overlooked the part that makes this complicated and sparks this whole debate. It's free to get and free to modify, but can you sell what you modified.
Beauty mode is very specific in what it does, namely it only blurs skin, and usually just the face. Oil makes everything blurry.
It is absolutely sinister. If I don't want to be tracked, I have no way of hiding my location from Apple aside from not using GPS on my phone. No other OS has this problem.
The cost of items is based on what you will pay, not what it cost to make. Capitalism 101.
Nurses and doctors in the US work a lot, but they also get paid very well compared to say the UK. Nurses in particular. Starting salary for a nurse in the UK NHS is 23,000 pounds: https://fullfact.org/economy/pay-rises-how-much-do-nurses-po.... That’s about $29,000. (This is a bachelors degree required position.) Starting salary for a US nurse with a bachelors degree is well over double that: https://online.drexel.edu/online-degrees/nursing-degrees/nur....

EDIT: Adding taxes to the calculation adds an additional dimension. Online calculators show that the total tax on 23,000 pounds with a 9% NHS pension contribution amount to 25%, leaving 17,500 pounds or about $22,300. In Maryland the total tax rate is the same for someone making $65,000, leaving $48,000. That’s after paying for social security, which will pay out about as much as an NHS pension would pay. A US nurse typically will receive health benefits on top of the salary. Even if the employer doesn’t cover 100% of premiums, the out-of-pocket premium payments (which are per-tax) are unlikely to be more than $5,000.
How did you come to the conclusion that Blendle didn't get the major national newspapers on board? In the old model every single major newspapers was since the start on board and only the NRC left in 2016. With Premium all major newspapers except NRC and de Telegraaf are on board. So practically every newspaper in the Netherlands is on board with both the micro-payment the subscription model.

(disclosure: I work part-time for Blendle)
Not if your key is sent in the clear protected by asymmetric encryption.
Assuming one were interested in looking up such laws, how would one go about it? I've been poking away at the Google machine with no luck.
They must to a significant degree or businesses would tank.

The (open) question is, can we do better?
Location history is opt-in. You can get your GPS location without enabling it. With iOS, there is no way to even opt out of sending your location to Apple.

Your article is misleading. The same apps that build a history of your location with Android Location History turned off will build a history of your location on iOS and other platforms. It is not unique to Android. The user is well aware of it — if they search, they get local results, and they know that if they have search history enabled, Google will store everything about their query and interactions with it, including where they performed it. This happens on Android and iOS, regardless of whether the user wants full Location History.

Again though, you're getting off track. We're discussing privacy provided (or in this case, not provided) by the OS, not by the apps the user installs, which are governed by OS permissions exactly the same on both platforms anyway.
Population is leveling off. Only developing nations are still growing in general. Your assumption, as those printing money, is equally flawed.
Interesting, thanks. So, I'm not crazy to think that using HLS for audio might be worthwhile. I wonder if iHeart does it for robustness over mobile connections, or just browser compatibility (particularly with iOS Safari).

That secure Shoutcast stream is an interesting mix of old and new. It has the expected "icy-" HTTP headers, but it's using HTTP/2 and, of course, HTTPS. The fact that it even returns a valid response for an HTTP HEAD request puts it ahead of real Shoutcast and Icecast streams in terms of standards compliance. It looks like iHeart has their own streaming server.
I'm not trying to be combative but... doesn't Google's one-time fee to make an account do that just as effectively? Or an annual $10 fee, or whatever?
Most likely that was an exaggeration of the demands made by the investors.
Plastic Free Kitchen
It's been a not-unusual practice among privacy&security people for a long time.

Starting around 20 years ago, hackers spying on people through their webcams was publicized (such as with the cDc's Back Orifice, IIRC). For a while, webcams sometimes had physical doors/shutters over them. More recently, there was a boost of awareness, when Zuckerberg was seen covering his own camera.

But some companies presumably wanted you to be accustomed to their proprietary-ish videoconferencing, or to be accustomed to large wireless data plans, with network effects, and so they perhaps wanted to encourage front-camera use. Also, a door/shutter doesn't look sleek.

(Next time I have a physical office, I'll probably hang a little basket outside it, to give away trimmings of black and white labelmaker tapes, for this camera-covering purpose.)
Those numbers seem to be referring to urban areas, where burying is more expensive.
>removing carbon from the oceans, burning it and releasing it back into the atmosphere feels a little bit counterproductive to me

That's the plan in the OP, isn't it?
If it's sufficiently well-specified, sure, why not?
Doesn't wifi use frequency hopping too? Or is that bluetooth?
Senior parents might not be as forthcoming as a project lead about the fact that the call quality sucks and that they can't hear half the things you say. Just a thought.

I spent the past 5+ years in jobs where I had to have multiple video calls per week. I used every tech imaginable, from those that cost five figures to the gratis ones. If these problems are solved, why is the experience universally terrible on all of them?

When I call my parents, it's over the plain old phone line, because I actually want to talk to them. Not seeing their faces on the screen is a small price to pay for not having each and every call turn into an impromptu debugging session.
I’m pretty sure this was already known and talked about.

I think the reason it’s reiterated is many people do associate “no meat” with “more healthy”, whether it’s in error or not. (There’s even a big fad here in TO of fatty deep fried vegan foods!)

The article is likely not tuned or intended for the audience of HN, but for people who don’t pay attention to the details of nutrition more.

On a side note, I tried the Beyond Meat patty when they showed up at my grocery out of curiosity. It caused me terrible GI problems for about 3 days. Never again for me (sparing any details). Only suggestion I could find as to why was potentially the high amount of canola oil. That and I rarely eat processed foods, so I’m not sure how much that was a factor.
If you try to treat every Chinese scientist and engineer as a spy, and prioritize the handling of cases related to China, 70% is not surprising. 100% is possible.

If 70% of robbery cases handled are by black people, is it because the black robs more, or is it because the DoJ is racist?

If 70% of espionage case handled are related to China, it must be China's bad. Huh.
Are you able to talk about anything you did there? I only get to work on open source in my spare time (and nothing as complex as Blender). What did a normal day look like for you?
When 90% of the plugins and tutorials are available for proprietary software it’s hard to support blender.

It also doesn’t help that the UI of the blender is extremely hostile for new users. When other tools are easier to use and have better tooling it’s hard to justify the usage of blender.
I would think the obvious way a corporation could contribute would be financially.
I think this kind of feature set is what Bazel is designed to do. All languages are "rule sets" and you can plug in your own rules and every language already has rules.