skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of these homes probably aren’t “empty” in the sense that someone’s just holding on to them long term. This article is citing the vacancy rate, which includes rentals where someone left and the landlord is trying to find a new tenant.

Any city will have some % of empty rentals, if it didn’t, no one would ever move around.

According to the US Census, [1] San Francisco’s vacancy rate is 5.4%, New York’s is 4.5%, and Seattle is 4.8%. But many cities have 10%+ or higher.

It’s pretty disingenuous to say these homes are truly empty or that they’re a sign that “we don’t have a housing crisis” as the Moms 4 Housing group suggested in the article. It’s just a misunderstood statistic being weaponized against building more housing.

If you want to help homeless folks, build more housing and put them in it. If you want your rent to go down, build more housing. If you want your cost of living to go down, build more housing.

[1] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/ann18ind.html
> An American billionaire buying a few condos and keeping them empty has the exact same effect as a Chinese billionaire doing so.

There are more nuances to this. Chinese millionaires and billionaires don't care about the sales price. They do it to diversify their portfolio to avoid CCP. Some of them did this to launder the dirty money as well.

Their numbers might be small but the chilling effect of outbidding everybody else outrageously will incentivized realtors to spread the "good news" to their customers/clients that "hey... that unit over there is sold $ x million dollars, would you be interested to sell yours as well?"

Suddenly before you know it, the market is f*cked.
Why is the city's perspective purely financial? Shouldn't it be driven by the needs of the residents? City residents need housing and the the local business need inhabitants. If you extend your "city" to the limit it would just be a giant physical investment with buildings no one lives in. The city, basically just an investment company would have a lot of money from the taxes and providing minimal services but until that happens the actual residents should drive the policies, in my opinion.
They addressed this and suggest precision is not the problem.
Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.
> no one worries about what we might break in humanity by disrupting the evolved pattern of death

Haven't we already disrupted it with spears to ward off predators, and more recently, hand soap and vaccines?
I use this technique all the time. One caveat, though: if you're doing ajax calls inside that callback (ie for an autocomplete), you _also_ want to cancel those at the same time you clearTimeout(). Browsers only do so many XHR requests at a time, so depending on timing (how fast the typist is, how fast the request is, etc) , this can queue up lots of unnecessary requests if you don't also cancel previous requests..
I also see this as a bit of a premature optimization. The triple memory usage one may be significantly faster than the in-place one -- and the memory usage is temporary so unless you're in a constrained environment that's not a concern.

Avoiding unintentional or unexpected side effects is a good thing. Pure functions are great. Do whatever you can do keep your visualization helper thing pure and avoid bugs.

Then, once it works, if you have performance issues, do some profiling.

If the profiling shows this helper method as a hotspot, then it's worth optimizing.

At that point, you'd want to follow standard Python, numpy, and pandas optimization strategies -- which I'm not familiar with.

Aimless optimization like this is a waste of time. Good program structure (data is available when you need it without tonnes of calls), the right choice of data structures and algorithms (hashmap vs list), the right choice of underlying tools (Julia vs Python) and targeted optimization (profiling) are the ways to go.
Right! Some friends of mine spent a lot of time programming a Symmetry in the early 1990s. Also around the same time, 1988, Sun introduced the Sun386i, which could even run multiple MS-DOS programs at once — but it wasn't a huge success, and they stuck with SPARC. I think Sequent and the Sun386i were just too early, say by about six or seven years.

An interesting question is: what are the structural advantages of bigness? When Control Data produced the world's fastest computer, some people at IBM wondered how it could happen that a much smaller company could beat them to the punch that way; others believed that that smallness was precisely the reason.
> Easily recover backups of previous versions of your website's files, thanks to our automatic Snapshots system. It's free!

https://docs.gandi.net/en/simple_hosting/common_operations/s...

They are supposed to be providing backups.
Probably it's just how the math works out. The atoms emit in all directions, however the waves traveling in all the other non-correct (according to reflections and refraction laws) directions cancel each other out, and only the ones with the new correct direction are still there / visible.
Ah oops, yeah, I was scanning the article and by the time I scrolled down to the DHL printout I had gone past the photo at the top.
The Y2K bug is back
Do you have any examples? I picked one up and saw ads, some soft-hitting feelgood near-politics, and some social justice stuff, but nothing of any substance.

It looked like what it was... a medium for serving ads to little girls.
>You can abandon property to public ownership (land, cars, anything you leave in the street in England & Wales: it gets sold and proceeds go to the Exchequer or Police) so your justification at the end doesn't sway me.

Sure, bona vacantia is A Thing - but your comment spells it out. The copyright gets _sold_ by the state to whoever wants to buy it.

That is not the same thing as public domain - the new owner can enforce their monopoly rights over the works which can screw over anybody depending on the work being "in the public domain".
> Zoom out for a second and consider how wild it is that we turned a life necessity (shelter) into a speculative plaything.

Every necessity is a speculative plaything. There are futures and commodities markets for every consumable you could imagine. That's the beauty and cruelty of a (relatively) free market.
Perhaps I was a little too optimistic ;)
In my hazy recollection, there was another, rather pedestrian reason Apple didn't go for BeOS: it had almost no infrastructure for printing. The Mac's niche was prepress and desktop publishing (remember that phrase?), and BeOS could barely print and had no color management.

(Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)
> state and local government may claim copyright.

This isn't relevant to the issue at hand, though, because the MTA isn't part of the state government.
How is Ring better than a Wyze cam pointed at your front door? Genuinely curious. I have several Wyze cams but have never interacted with a Ring much other than pushing the bell button at someone else’s house.
I’m bringing up MS’ very real history of competing within its own ecosystem in a conversation about Amazon doing the same. The big three are all snakes in the grass. Don’t fool yourself about lesser evils.
it does make a difference to locals.

the homes are sold for profit, which does leave the country. but more importantly, there is a housing shortage. plus, the costs are kept high.
Sounds very much like they weren't doing zfs send | zfs receive to anything sufficiently physically separated. For example, if you send and receive in the same pool, it's replication but still leaves you vulnerable to issues where the pool can't be imported due to corruption in the wrong places (it can happen) or significant hardware failure (eg a PSU fault that takes out too many of the drives in the pool).
In my alternate universe, GNUStep or some other implementation of the NS APIs would have allowed Linux/BSD to rise in popularity along with a NeXT-ified Apple. Except that didn’t happen.

I think in your alternate universe it’s likely we’d have seen something entirely different emerge.
Places to Go in 2020
City budget for homeless services is a quarter of a billion dollars[1], and we just spent another quarter of a billion dollars building a new Public Safety Building (police H.Q.)[2]

[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/overview/budget/

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/New-S-F-police-h...
Good point. Curious, does the server stop execution if you cancel a request? Or does the browser just discard the response when it receives it?
They could mean using regular data transfer (i.e. using something like rsync instead of the provider's backup service). Maybe egress costs among servers from the same provider are reduced or nullified.

From[1]:

> Traffic over the private network does not count against your monthly quota.

I wonder how private addresses are setup by Linode.

[1] https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/billing-and-support/net...
I don't think it's hand wavey. It's just a different (simpler) model. To describe this phenomena (wet things are darker), you don't need to go into details about photons, or quantum mechanics or whatever.

Geometrical optics is really sufficient here, it explains it perfectly, and is much more intuitive than other more complex models.
I'm in the same boat. Somehow, neither vim nor emacs have ever made a compelling case for me to switch from nano which "just works"
If there are homes that are vacant and people that are living on the streets at the same time, that's an inherently unjust situation I think.
That seems like an extremely obvious shortcoming of this survey methodology. I'm willing to give the authors the benefit of the doubt and assume they aren't completely incompetent and that they've attempted to account for this occurrence.
The premise isn’t that housing is treated as an investment. The premise is that housing is personal property. (Just like bread, etc., and many other things necessary for life.)

It’s cities that are turning housing into an investment through laws turning it into a scarce resource. (Not just laws against building, but laws against short term rentals, boarding houses, tenements, etc.). It’s unsurprising that homelessness is actually decreasing in the US as a whole, whole increasing in wealthy cities: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/10/19/homelessn....

But this is mostly a San Francisco and New York problem. In 2015, about 10,000 people in San Francisco experienced homelessness at any time in the past year. That’s 112 per 10,000 people. (This is a different, and better, measure than the “homeless on a given night” instantaneous measure.) That same figure in Iowa is about 9 per 10,000. The national average is around 20-25 per 10,000.
At the root of it is corruption. Someone is collecting benefits privately from taxpayer funded organizations.
They aren't claiming trademark violations. Copyright and trademark are two very different things with very different laws governing them.
Haiku OS still uses C++.
There's a documentary (free on Amazon Prime) called "Fasting" that touches on this same hypothesis. Basically, our bodies are wired to eat late morning to early evening. Calories consumed outside of those hours are much more likely to turn into fat.

Optimum eating window is somewhere around 11AM or noon for most people to 6PM at the latest. When people reduce their eating window, without counting calories or doing anything else, they often lose weight. This is gaining popularity as "intermittent fasting."

I definitely recommend the movie if you want to learn more--it kept me engaged the entire time. I've also done 2 cycles of ProLon (mentioned in the movie and has significant scientific backing) to boost my own immune system, so I'm a believer in fasting as a health benefit.
>not retreat further into nationalism

God forbid we feel any natural affinity towards our fellow countrymen. Any alternative is so artificial and forced.
Hiring the builders full-time is only the equivalent of building a private data center if building a private data center means buying the entire companies of Intel and Supermicro.
Intel Unveils Xe DG1 Mobile Graphics in Discrete Graphics Card for Developers
Oh yes, that's quite a good point :)
> (And this process has several caveat's-one of which is that it can produce unusable dumps in some rare cases and isn't complete. users, triggers etc aren't dumped iirc.. could be wrong there)

Triggers are dumped, users need pg_dumpall (as they live across multiple databases, same with tablespaces).
They drive artificial demands which increases the overall price.

At the end of the day, it's not good for the local residents.

It's not as simple as "they're not here thus they're not consuming any services". The resulting effect of sky-high property cost ripples to everything else below it (jobs, transportation, etc).
Awesome-Scifi
No. They support surface ships, too, and it's not just sub hunting, it's also hiding our boomers.
Intel spends money on shit articles instead of development of their chips. That is why AMD is kicking their ass. No focus.
What? It absolutely is.
What about to verify that video backups/storage are working correctly, to prevent an issue like the Gandi one on the front page right now?
In that case you should probably not use this, or if you do, sign out of your accounts. If you're worried about Face ID, you can actually temporarily disable it easily (without even looking at your device) by holding down the power button and volume up until it vibrates.
"Windows Installer - 89.0Mb" should probably be "Windows Installer - 89.0MB" on the homepage.
I live in NY but travel often to SF. It's definitely an issue in NY but nowhere near SF's league. Walking around the area the article focuses on feels like walking around a movie set. Everything's just hollowed out.
postdude :)
Not free enough for America, maybe?
Also, most of the politically active residents own homes here that they are counting on to continue dramatically appreciating in value, having investors buy up new property supports this goal.
I've always wanted to have this on occasion for myself from time to time to sample my individual time spend. I wonder what kind of apps they use to achieve this and what the UI looks like. You'd need some sort of instant stopwatch buttons for frequently recurring activities and also allowing for custom stopwatches.

I guess something like a set of Amazon Dash buttons could be useful or some kind of badge readers distributed about an environment to tag on and tag off keyed to some activity for that location.
"Bathroom break. Pooped. Extended delay due to girth of feces. Required additional straining and pressure to successfully pass."
I think this sort of thing is a capabilities ladder in an arms race.

If you never evolved account based security, you never built the infra for even evaluating application permissions in the first place.
I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS.

It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market).

If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender.

Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
Kim Jon-Un will downvote you.
This seems like data has been lost from servers hosting sites/services.

Since Gandi is mostly known for domain registrations and DNS, I'm curious if you (as an individual who hosts websites/online services somewhere on the web) backup your site's DNS records periodically (or whenever they're changed). What if your authoritative name server lost data and all the caches of those records across geographies expire while you're asleep/away? If you do back these up regularly, how do you do it in an automated way on a *nix system? I found this article [1] when I searched about this, but it's not a simple shell script. The scripts that I did find on some of the Stackexchange sites seemed to have specific subdomain names hardcoded.

[1]: http://www.programblings.com/2012/07/23/do-you-back-up-your-...
Hi, Derek here. I'm one of the makers.

We built GrowSurf because we waited since 2015 for someone to build a referral marketing platform designed for startups. Affordable, scalable, and modern.

You might be wondering what makes us different from all of the <viral tool> or <referral platform>s out there (there are 55+ when we last checked). In a nutshell, GrowSurf was the referral software that we always envisioned using for ourselves. In our customers' words, with GrowSurf you can launch a referral program in a day and our UX/UI is very welcoming.

Turns out there are a lot of other companies who felt the same way. Our customers include SurveyMonkey, Indeed, Blockstack and a lot of top startups looking to grow through referrals.

- Integrate in hours, not weeks
- 100% customizable
- Full dev toolkit (REST API, JS, Webhooks, Zapier)
- Freemium model (no cc required) with a starting 14 day trial of paid plan.

Because this is HN, I'd be happy to discuss the tech-side of things. We're built on AngularJS/Nodejs. We just implemented Redis, which was a gargantuan undertaking. Because we're boostrapped, we're still fighting scale issues, like migrating out of our existing cloud providers (e.g, Firebase) to continue growing without paying a ridiculous bill. Facing many of the challenges a normal small team faces but we love it.
Marv, yarv - how is the most downloaded standard implementation called before the language cops bite - is just so unbearably slow for anything besides gluing things together. After that many years it still leaves me baffling how such a mediocre implementation is still actually accepted by it's community.

The language is nice though. I wouldn't vote for the everything is an object paradigm today.
Bingo. Even the fashion is a signaling medium for wokeness now.
And what would have stopped OEMs to offer the same device with a different SKU with BeOS AND Windows for say x USD more?

(kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)
None of those nuclear ads "specifies". All of those love to ignore this waste just like the overdue reactors which are kept alive through expansive measures while problems are being underreported. Which is just another reason we shouldn't build more of those.
When I was teaching myself 3D modeling for fun, I made a little blue mailbox like you'd normally see outside on American streets. Nothing fancy--it was low-poly and lacked any text or textures. It was just a blue box on four tiny legs with a rounded top. I uploaded it to SketchFab, because why not?

One day I get an email that the US Postal Service had my mailbox taken down from SketchFab via DMCA complaint. Apparently they hold at least two trademarks on the color and shape of their mailboxes. While I think my crappy art fell under fair use, it wasn't worth it to try and fight that.

What really makes me angry about the whole ordeal is that the USPS is a consistent money loser. So why are they wasting cash issuing DMCA notices to 3D modelers on SketchFab?
> What would a modern BeOS look like?

Haiku. (0)

But if you change your question to "What would a modern OS look like?"

Fuchsia. (1)

The only relationship that they have is that a kernel engineer called Travis Geiselbrecht designed NewOS (Haiku's modified kernel) and Zircon (Fuchsia's Microkernel).

[0] https://haiku-os.org

[1] https://fuchsia.dev
The easiest way to keep someone out is to lock the door.

You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.
are you sure you're interpreting that correctly? I think they don't count a no-answer in the data. More like someone answers and then provides responses about their own home and their neighbors. I know exactly which homes are occupied in my neighborhood, so I could accurately answer for them if someone asked me.
> don't reinvent the wheel, and if you try, you'll probably get it wrong

This should apply x100 for security related matters. I feel people only seem to bring this up with regards to hash functions and encryption but I think this should always encompass auth as well.

I use Firebase for auth. It saves development time, there's no user limit on the free tier even and it's battle tested.
> the MTA isn't part of the state government

The MTA is a “public benefit corporation“ owned by the State of New York [1].

[1] http://web.mta.info/mta/compliance/pdf/Description%20and%20B...
Oh look a free clone of a commercial product, let's all jump on it and undermine the devs of postman and insomnia, whom have escaped the 9 to 5 by building awesome tools, because that's what we do: we kill indie development with free clones of small projects.
It appears you're right. Chrome doesn't actually use the system key chain underneath, but the UX is exactly the same as Safari.

Autofill doesn't require password entry, but before revealing any stored passwords you have to re-authenticate using the regular system login method.

I wish Firefox did the same.
Because if someone get a map that says train A leaves at time B, and it doesn't, it's MTA employees who will be on the receiving end of the angry customer, a good proportion of which won't care that it wasn't an official schedule (and some small fraction of that basically won't understand the difference between official and unofficial schedule). The fact the train didn't show up will also impact your reputation for timeliness, even if it was never your promise it would be there.

Plus, you know, if we can stretch our imaginations for a moment and imagine that maybe the organization gives a fractional iota of a damn about the customer's lives even beyond the direct impact to them, it's not a good customer experience for bad info to be floating around either. (Maybe not, you know, the NYC MTA, but at least some organizations are still small enough to at least think about that sometimes.)
In an ideal world, sure. But it's easy enough to imagine how you'd end up with this situation.

For example, you have a customer support phone number, and you want your call centre workers to be able to see exactly what the user sees, and help the user do anything the user can do through the website. After all, if you're keeping your support costs down, the website should be able to do 99% of what users call support for already.

So you give your call centre workers a 'log in as customer' option. And you justify to yourself that there's access logging, and staff are under strict orders. Maybe it's before you've released any indoor cameras, and it's not like people are putting doorbells in their showers.

Sure, it'd be a sensible extra feature if log-in-as-customer was a special mode that didn't show videos. But is that really a minimum viable product? We'll put that on the backlog to attend to later.

Et voilà, your call centre workers can watch customer videos.
End-to-end encryption.
We're being sold a problem and a solution.
> (1) Repealing prop-13 is probably a non-starter but we could probably get away with repealing it for non-residents. Prop-13 was meant to prevent people from being driven from their homes by property tax increases, not to protect speculators from being taxed.

I have never lived in California, and Prop 13 passed before I was born anyway, so I don't know much about the political backstory. That said, if this was the purpose that got it passed, why is the exemption so broad? How does capping Safeway's property taxes keep people from being driven out of their homes?
Offer property tax incentives to real estate owners who have empty homes if they lease them to tenants that have issues with housing stability at rates they can realistically afford.

The owner gets tax benefits. People in need get a home to live in. The city has fewer homeless. All lease income could go towards upkeep.