skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A4 is an internationally agreed upon standard, letter size is a mostly US thing. It's the whole SI units vs imperial units debate all over again. Makes sense to have the international standard as default rather than a country specific one.

> Letter or ANSI Letter is a paper size commonly used as home or office stationery in the United States, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines. It measures 8.5 by 11 inches (215.9 by 279.4 mm). US Letter-size paper is a standard defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI, paper size A), in contrast to A4 paper used by most other countries, and adopted at varying dates, which is defined by the International Organization for Standardization, specifically in ISO 216.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_%28paper_size%29
Pretty happy user of anylist[1] here: contains all my recipes, when I go to the shop I just select a few recipes and have a shopping list.

[1]: https://www.anylist.com/
Laws and Causes – Vsauce
Permissions have been fixed.
For a more concrete example:

At present, a new item in the news cycle is a 2nd whisteblower coming forward about Trump - Ukranian things.

This person is apparently being represented by the same lawyers as the 1st person.

If (all) encryption becomes subverted, that law firm would have no effective way to store and/or communicate details digitally. Back to pen-and-paper records, only meeting in person in (eg) secluded locations, etc.
If it helps: The salaries paid to early career engineers are mostly option value for mid-career engineers rather than being a direct attempt to compensate for your year 1 productivity. You might have a good bead on what your year 1 productivity is likely to be; you may be surprised how quickly you climb the skill curve and how valuable your labor becomes, at which point your employer will be saying "Phew! Good thing we don't have to get this geek from the market; that would cost [a substantial premium to the largest number you can think of being paid as of today]."

Not sure I have anything to offer regarding the disparity between your income and that of anyone else in the economy, other than to say decreasing your income does not make any of them better off. Tip much more generously than society expects you to. If you have the opportunity to, join a company which broadly impacts economic opportunity.
Yeah not native and Grammarly is god sent. The only big minus is that it will send all my writing to the cloud. Is there similar but less intrusive addons?
Australian metros suffer from similar issues to the Bay Area: limited space and resistance to dense zoning.

Australian land may technically be ample, but Australia has enormous problems incentivizing living in rural areas, to the point of granting work visas to unskilled laborers that can be renewed long enough to achieve permanent residency (Working Holiday Visa). The only requirement is youth.

Australia's urban population: 90%; Sydney & Melbourne metros: 40%

Much like California, the bulk of Australian economic opportunity centers around the major metros.

Your comments about banking and tax law are a non-sequitor. The same banking and tax laws apply in the entire country, but the expensive real estate is largely limited to the major metros. Australians would live in pleasant coastal towns such as Surfer's Paradise if there were enough jobs in those regions to support them. Or they would have stayed on the sheep stations in the interior to remain close to family.
It depends on the companies these people work for, though. Someone who has worked for a company like Facebook or Google with large salaries and generous RSU grants will eventually be able to buy a house in Silicon Valley. The RSUs would be enough for a down payment, and their salaries are sufficiently high to cover the mortgage. Now, places like Cupertino and Sunnyvale may still be stretch goals because a house in those cities could exceed $2 million, but a $1 million house in Fremont, Milpitas, San Jose, or Redwood City is entirely in reach for people with that level of compensation.

But not all tech companies in Silicon Valley pay Facebook/Google levels of compensation. There are plenty of engineers in Silicon Valley who make low six-figure salaries (i.e., $100K-$150K) and who don't own five or six figures worth of stock. I fall in this category. While we can afford to rent apartments in Silicon Valley, buying a house within an hour commute from Silicon Valley in a safe neighborhood is definitely a stretch goal for us. If I want to buy at my current salary, it's either a 2-bedroom condo in South San Jose or in Alameda County, or it's a long commute from exurbs such as Tracy and Hollister.

Now, San Diego is much more affordable and would be a very appealing option for me since the housing prices are within reach, perhaps not in places like La Jolla, but in places a little further away like Oceanside and Escondido. I wouldn't mind relocating to either one of those places.
It's not really a good essay though; it's "I'm a rich white dude who never has to think about how politics might affect me and I don't see why anyone else should either."
What Is the Best Time to Buy an iPhone?
I think you wanting them to define merit may prove their point. Who defines what merit is? Merit, depending on time and place, has been as arbitrary as your level of attractiveness, wealth, religious conviction, political conviction, etc. Merit means something different to many different people.
Please don't do this, try to be more charitable.
At least in zsh, you can interrupt slow autocompletes with ^C.
Yes, indeed.

An absolute plain vanilla TeX, exactly as Knuth wrote it, and my tool chain compiles it, composes all 495 pages of The TeXbook in 0.300 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Pro laptop (the first "Retina" model). Single threaded, composing pages in 0.6 msec each, running in well under 1 Megabyte total for code and data. Back on the SAIL mainframe (a Dec PDP10) that Knuth used to develop TeX, it was almost exactly 1000 times slower: the pages would tick by every half-second or so (at night, anyway).

Of course, nowadays we also have lots more memory to throw around. One cool idea is to modify TeX to retain all the internal data structures for the pages it has created, and run a nice screen viewer directly from that; Doug McKenna gave a slick presentation at the recent Palo Alto / Stanford TUG meeting of such a system that he created in order to enable live viewing of his Hilbert Curves textbook, including displaying figures of space-filling fractal curves that can be arbitrarily zoomed, which is simply impossible to do via PDF.

Going further, you can additionally modify TeX so it takes snapshots of its internal state after every page, and is able to pop back to any of these states. Presto, now if the user makes an edit on page 223, TeX can quickly back up to the state of the world just before page 223, and continue on forward with the modified input. Page 223 gets recomposed and immediately redisplayed, essentially in real-time. Of course, the trick here is creating and storing the snapshots efficiently; the TUG demo I gave using The TeXbook runs in a few hundred megabytes, and does the whole "pop back, recompose a page, redisplay it" rigamarole in milliseconds.

The bad news is that my stuff is still in the proof-of-concept stage, as there's no support for the well-established extensions to Knuth's TeX (importing graphics, using system fonts, etc.) that are required by the vast majority of LaTeX users. I don't expect any of these features to slow things down appreciably, but time will tell. I intend to do a "Show HN" by and by, with lots more details, when it's able to handle real-world documents.

My apologies for failing to successfully fly under the radar until things were ready for prime time. My premature TUG demo was intended to wow Prof. Knuth sufficiently that he'd approve of a decades-late Ph.D. for me. (Happily, he did agree, contingent on just one additional feature being added...)
Democratic means the government is voted by the people and represents the people. Authoritative means its not.

People can be patriotic on this matter, but it still doesn't represent all the people.
It doesn’t need to, NYC really is different. Very few other major US cities had the density, space constraints, or existing transit infrastructure of NY. None of them had a Bob Moses, but they built roads for different reasons - in LA a cabal of auto and gas companies dismantled the streetcar. Also I’m not sure about “at the same time” - for example when Moses was at the height of his power in the 30s and 40s the interstate system didn’t even exist yet.
Cue Musk’s goal of making desirable electric cars. As an attempt to use desire to alter species wide outcome.
That does seem fairly reasonable, thanks.
It does work though. The left and the right in the West are mostly together on hating China. There are small minorities in both that are not on board, but in general, it works.

Of course, you'd only level up the problem, from being a domestic issue to being a global issue. Next up: those damn bugs from Klendathu are threatening earth, we need to stand together against them. A planetary threat (with a face, climate change won't work) will bring together pretty much everybody.
But if the people in power use force to prevent a legitimate discussion then the only avenue left is revolution. There is no legitimate way for the people to involve in discussion, the HK protesters want democracy, the Chinese government doesn't. What alternative do the HK citizens have apart from not be part of China?

Edit: further there is no way to express dissent in China, the HKers are taking their life in their hands by expressing dissent. I can think of no time this happens in the west.
I was just recently at a gender-inclusivity seminar. The speaker asked everyone in the room to give their name, but specifically asked for NOT everyone to state their [preferred?] pronouns. Why not? Apparently the speaker is currently in a community were certain transgender members feel quite strongly that stating pronouns is itself problematic and hurtful.

For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, and for slow-moving organizations, this is obviously tricky to navigate. My workplace is just starting to encourage everyone to state their "preferred pronouns" prominently when introducing themselves and on all correspondence (e.g. in email signatures), and to avoid gendered pronouns when possible in many situations or at least use "singular they" (e.g. in abstract examples or documentation). Last week I thought that was quite progressive. This week I have learned that "preferred pronouns" is no longer an acceptable phrase, that "singular they" is offensive to some, that avoiding pronouns itself is problematic (at least in SE's CoC, apparently), and that asking someone to give pronouns is problematic and hurtful to some. I don't know where that leaves me or my workplace.
All major Hollywood movie studios pro-actively doctor their scripts to make them China-compliant, and you think basketball is somehow going to do better?

On a related note, this thread went from #6 on the front page to #105 (as of right now) in mere minutes. Maybe the mods, who are quite willing to pop in and tell people off whenever someone mentions astroturfing or censorship, would like to explain how a very recent thread with high upvote and comment count can sink so fast all by itself? It's not like users can downvote threads on HN. Threads mentioning China in a bad light tend to de-rank at astronomical speed, for some mysterious reason...
none of the pronouns are offensive and we use the ones that fit 99% of the time but they is fine if you really want to be neutral

its only offensive if you listen to the 1 in a million people who want to make a big deal and control everyone elses speech
It's interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to government. They took place hand to hand, either in cash or barter. But now that transactions are digitized, it is actually illegal to conduct certain types of transactions anonymously (KYC/AML laws). This came about because governments got used to being able to peer into the financial lives of their citizens, and once they got used to it, they didn't like it when people circumvented that, so they made it a crime.

The same is true here of private messaging. Governments got used to being able to read our messages. They have come to rely on it. And so now they want to make it illegal for us to keep them out.

I guess what i'm saying is: We ought to be extremely careful what we allow our governments to get used to doing. There is an argument to be made that the original sin here was allowing wiretaps at all, even when the medium was un-encrypted.
As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win! There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine, but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data, etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-ba...

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-...

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5 hours had passed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus...

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-pe...

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.
u should post it on Blind bro！
I think the biggest feature for most people is that they don't want it to dissapear after 10 years. Many people put a lot of work into their recipe collection and wants it to be available for the kids when they grow up.
> $1,600 a month

Yeah, keep going
Sorry, I edited my comment so your reply makes less sense now. Bad habit of submitting before I'm fully satisfied with the comment.
May i have to add one thing: don't you think that if the housing problem is solved (say by vastly liberalizing the zoning laws, permitting construction of a huge number of high-rise apartment buildings, and building appropriate public transport system to move all these people, and cracking down on cars), and Silicon Valley becomes a lot more affordable place to live in, it will stop working the way it does, because it will no longer be such an elite club it is now?

Salaries will become lower because there will be too much supply, as dev people will flock in. Conversations will become a lot less interesting because S/N ratio will decrease.

There will be less benefit from living in the Valley if you are one of the very best (if you make a salary in top 10% of the dev jobs, you are not concerned with the rents now, it is you who DRIVE the rents to where they are), and more benefit if you aren't so good.

VC will also have a much higher pool of founders to pick from. Non-funded founders are poor, many can't go to the Valley now, they will. VCs will get picky, and deals will become worse for everyone. Valley will just get watered down.
It does not seem relevant
this is the problem cause 99.9% of us know how to get along just fine without these weird pronoun rules

theyre literally making EVERYONE work harder and waste time to not offend a single person who probably doesnt even agree with these rules
This seems not only perfectly plausible, but quite likely.
I haven't even met anyone requesting "he", "she" or "they" in real life. And if I do, I'll probably just disengage and walk away.
its just posts on the site not real people. chill. you need to realize context and not get all offended

and when you let someone control what you can and cant say because of their feelings its gonna be a bad time. california is already eating itself. is that really what you want?
I would say it's because you feel empathy for them and for others for being such hopeless and desperate people and for others for having to deal with it.
> CoCs are a way to bring in that civility in discourse.

Like posting on reddit that someone is a bigot because they disagree with a change in the CoC? Because that happened here. There's a whole class of people online that it's literally impossible to have civil discourse with if you disagree with them on any level. It's better to not even engage.

Some community.
Ask HN: Is XQuartz Dead?
On the occasions I need to run `ssh -X` to my Ubuntu box, I get to the shell, start typing, then XQuartz immediately crashes. XQuartz hasn't been updated in nearly 3 years.

Anyone else have issues with XQuartz? I get that Apple made it an open-source, community driven project. But for a UNIX-based OS, shouldn't they do the right thing by keeping it updated? In my mind, there's gotta be a non-trivial number of Mac clients in *NIX environments that need to reliably interact with remote X11 apps.

Anyone mind asking Craig about it? I'd e-mail him, but am not cool enough to do it.
Note that nearly every time communities begin discussing the authoritative forcing of community members to use "correct pronouns" in communications, it invariably ends in firings, resignations, and the community bitterly divided.

It's ironic that certain social activists, who outwardly claim to be motivated by a desire for mutual respect and an acceptance by the community for diverse lifestyles, are so quick to destroy the reputations of those who show even the smallest hint of resistance to their demands. The type of respect they truly seek is that which comes from the fear of the consequences of anything less than total agreement.
I identify as a gender akin to a math wizard. The correct pronoun is a newly discovered prime number, unique each time. You know my preferred pronoun so please don't use "they."

Now this seems absurd but dare you call me out on it and tell me I'm not actually who I am? Are we all entitled to commanding everyone's use of the language by constructing and dictating pronoun usage?

I've had an easy time with gender issues in my life because I'm pretty carefree and accommodating. But I'm trying to understand where it goes from here.

I don't see how we can go past he/she/they because it opens the floodgates to an infinite number of more pronouns, does it not? How does any group get to decide which new pronouns have enough subscribers to be added to the official list?

It feels like in a gender fluid model, pronouns just don't work. "He" and "she" are legacy and "they" is the catch all. So I kind of get this idea of just not using them anymore. But does that feel manifestly absurd to anyone else?

This is also why I enjoy the internet so much. Gender doesn't matter and I have mastered picturing everyone as a cat on a keyboard.
Volume conversion to grams would be great for automation. I love how much less dishes there is when you can use the scale for everything. Just zero the scale and pour in flour. Zero again for the butter and so on.
> Remember to convert CAD to USD

Absolutely not. We aren't importing data from the US. You can't tie exchange rate to CoL.
> apparently "singular they" is offensive

I think the point was that 'singular they is offensive' only when people have specifically asked for certain pronouns (ie you're blatantly disregarding people's requests)?
> Seriously, though, that just simplifies to male.

Seriously, I'm tired of this. In what company that HNers want to work in does being a male give you any advantage?

Or in what school? (I'm aware of certain nurse and chemistry studies prioritizing men, but that's it.)

If you cannot come up with any I kindly suggest stop insulting men. You don't need to do that to support others.

- Someone who has gone out of his way to help women and immigrants
No, I mean folks who criticize other people’s work directly instead of qualifying every criticism with three insincere compliments. Where did you get the idea that I ever throw a single homophobic slur? Your comment tells me that you’re actually the kind of person that CoCs or guidelines or whatever should actually regulate. Flagged.
The ability to privately communicate with other citizens of your country is fundamental to a functioning representative democracy.

It should be as clear as day that an attack on encryption is an attack on the values of America.

This is the tact that should be taken in the conversation - is the attorney general so anti-American as to request this?
"I can't read the article"

"Chinese censorship is good, actually"

"Also it's easy to get around"

...Is this a parody account?
You realise there’s a lot of people between wealthy professionals and part-time/odd job workers right? A secretary has to be on time, so does a cashier. I’m not sure what good peak pricing would do, apart from push them to less carbon-efficient forms of transport?
youth? yea you dont get to decide until youre an adult. this is just kids being forced into it by parents who want to follow some social justice trend

and guess what there are 100s of these kids being treated for abuse and psychological damage now https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7541679/Hundreds-yo...
I can't find that info about funding sources in the urban.org article, or what "sales tax" is generated from specifically. The article does say that HTF is not fully self-funded. If something comes from general revenues/tax, that means that all taxpayers are paying for it, whether or not they use a car.

If this is in fact the case, I don't think it's a bad thing. The problem in that case comes from double standards, where the ground-level understanding of how society operates includes costs incurred by individuals/businesses which effectively disappear into a vacuum rather than being directly paid/passed onto customers, yet is used as evidence of the completely natural and inherent utility of cars over alternatives.

For a different doc more directly about who pays for roads, I've found this one useful. Made by a so-so thinktank, but seems well-sourced and rigorous.

https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pick+your+battles

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/headshrinkers-guide-...