skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Dismissing depreciation is a serious mistake.
...
> The generally accepted rule is buildings have a 30 year life.

I think you are saying "there are substantial costs" again.

It only works as an argument about rising costs if backed up by "and the real costs to the landlord caused by depreciation have actually risen".

Do you have anything to back that up?

I think most people take the view that landlords have generally benefitted, until recently, from steadily rising property prices, and this nearly always greatly outweighs depreciation over 30 years. I.e. the cost of property doubles more often than every 30 years, so you can use the bonanza to buy replacement buildings which offsets the cost of old buildings being taken down.

And that doesn't even consider cost of the land, which does not suffer depreciation even if a building has to be replaced, and is often the majority of the cost of purchase.

> There's nothing about property management that suggests it is immune from these forces.

But there is a very significant obstacle to these forces acting fluidly according to the ebb and flow of commercial forces! I would happily be a landlord (until recently and maybe even then) on the basis of commercial thinking, but the avenue is not open to me because I don't have access to capital. Capital is around, but it will tend to be allocated first to an entity with an existing portfolio.

Also, in the town where I live, even if I had a few million, I would struggle to become a landlord of commercial property larger than a tiny corner shop, because very few units are for sale. When one comes up, which is not often, there's a secret bidding war because pent up demand exists as does the money behind it, and buyers simply cannot find something. This is despite a very large number of empty units, with owners who seem to be happy keeping them empty (I know several companies that have tried renting be turned away on various grounds, sometimes "we are not interested in renting it at all, we have plans for it in 10 years", others "we want personal rent guarantees from all the directors as well as a large deposit".) Heck, even renting is subject to bidding wars and personal interviews to decide which company should be allowed to rent among several candidates (I've been involved in this twice as a business tenant, and several times for residential, so I'm not speculating.)
State Machines, also called runtime programs.

I think when people call it "State Machines", it's for when they know the slightest breeze will trip it up. It's so seductive, because your initial use case gets resolved fairly quickly..

Ironically, the places they have worked wonders, is actually game engines from early 90's, where they have specific design, purposes, and limitations.
Is this the "pet rock" of design? A late April fool's joke that I don't get? Is it Andy Warhol or Andy Dick?
Horust: A Supervisor / Init system written in Rust
I wonder how this affects offshoot distros like kubuntu?

I'm currently on Debian with KDE, but I think I might need to move to a rolling release distro due to some issues with SMB/CIFS (that have already been fixed in newest builds of KDE) that probably won't be fixed in Debian until the next release.

Maybe I should start looking at distros in general-- but Ubuntu is definitely out of the picture.
Cryptoindex AI Daily Predictions and News for 05/02/2020
PyImageSearch will stop offering *free* help and support to readers
Ask HN: [Naive What-If] No-Fee Version of Food Ordering App
I don't have any entrepreneurial experience, hence “naive”: let's say I wanted to help small restaurants by building a Grubhub-like service that allows people to order food without taking fees myself.

Preconditions:
- I can build front-/backend- support myself.
- I don't want to make or lose money on this.
- Credit card fees (if necessary) will be passed onto the restaurants.
- Restaurants can enter/change menus themselves.
- Customers can order through the service (online) or phone (resto)

What am I missing? Would this be unrealistic (or not)?
Good Eats [Vaclav Smil]
I feel I've read a number of pieces on programming that talk about the evils of if statements (on which I more or less agree) and advocating their replacement by state machines. However I've never seen a super simple implementation of this that seems to obviously fulfill most branching use cases. The closest is the state/strategy pattern, which is great but if patterns (as it's sometimes said) reflect deficiencies in a language, what would a language with first-class state machines look like?
We've changed the URL from https://gstudent.quip.com/2gwZArKuWk7W to what that redirects to.
I think your first argument can be summarized as "everything is uncertain, so the future asset value of anything should be assumed to be zero." This is not an especially useful valuation strategy, so nobody else uses it.

> [remarks on US promotion of homeownership] strikes me as a commonly-bandied, well-debunked talking point.

Please provide a "debunking" of the idea that the US government does not explicitly prioritize, as a matter of policy, and subsidize, home ownership. Here are some facts that run counter to that idea:

1. The US literally has a "National Home Ownership Month" (it's June).

2. The mission statement of HUD's Office of Housing includes "Maintain and expand homeownership."

3. FHA loans.

4. Mortgage interest deduction on primary residences.

5. Capital gains exemption on (a large portion of) primary residence sales.
The author of that issue said they had backups, on an external drive.. that Steam also wiped.

You can say 'robust' but there are limits of what I think one can reasonably expect from a user. That they had backups at all is not necessarily the norm.
Found it:
https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu...
https://youtu.be/FKtsx0fZzzQ?t=1135
Ask HN: Most promising tech to detect the absence of a conscience?
According to the thread, there was a size of something, and that size was used in two places. The size was specified as a literal number in both those places. The bug was caused by changing the literal in one place but not the other. One way that could have been avoided is to use a named constant for the size, so that when the literal number was changed, both uses of the name would see the new value.
> Maybe, their nursing staff has to run from bed to bed to check patient's vital signs and device alarms.

It feels to me like the management has misunderstood the cost of the software vs not having the software. It feels like they're saying "this software is expensive, and doing nothing is free" when they should be saying "having all these healthcare professionals spending time putting on and taking off PPE the check patients is costing us this much per year".

As you probably know, an ICU will go through 30 sets of PPE per patient per day. That's a lot of time putting stuff on and taking it off.
My thoughts too, but I'd not be surprised if they didn't know these tools existed. From my experience, Prometheus and Grafana (and monitoring practices and tools in general) are absolutely unknown to most developers.
Roman Mars does an amazing job at making sense out of things. Highly recommend both of these.
I wonder what is the shortest path to deploying a web application that is fully codable (as opposed to no-code), that includes user database/management/auth.

I suspect the closest is the old school libraries like Ruby on Rails and the equivalent in other languages.
Its cultural clash, people in that country doesn't think its bad, or dystopian, or anti-human. They have their point of view as to why its necessary. Maybe its culturally accepted, or the benefits outweighs the downsides, or that its a tactical solution to a serious problem. Each country has a different, history, circumstance, cultural and perspective. For instance, Western cultures think Marijuana is acceptable. On the other hand, most Chinese people think any kind of drug that causes addiction is bad because the massive massive drug problem in China starting from the opium wars. Drugs devastated a massive number of regular communities while made interest groups and certain capitalists filthy rich. Later the PRC government crackdown on drugs hard, draconian by western standards and people applauded it because they think its for the greater good. Today, a lot of Chinese people do not accept western's acceptance of Marijuana, they think allowing Marijuana in their communities is bad for their kids. Another instance, Americans feel gun ownership is absolute right but other cultures think its dangerous to have civilian ownership of guns. I think that government is an reflection of the culture and people. When people say cultural equality and people are equal from one another, its a lot easier to do that when its part of the same culture group. But when the culture is a lot different, its hard to view each other equally.
> The government of India is making it mandatory for all new smartphones to be sold in India post lifting of the lockdown to not just have the app as a pre-installed service, but also ensure that individuals register on it and set it up, before beginning to use their new smartphones

That's abhorrent on a number of levels. Almost certainly won't work either.
I keep being curious about notion(and evernote), but can't get into it. Probably because my current solution works well for me.

I simply use markdown files synchronized using dropbox. I use Emacs Org Mode on desktop, and Editorial on iOS. Editorial is still by far the best markdown text editor on iOS, although it's, very sadly, almost never updated anymore(it's still pretty close to perfect, so I keep using it).

I write down all my thoughts in one single journal - a "Notes" folder in dropbox, with markdown files for every 2-3 weeks of notes, called like "2020-05-02.md". Sometimes I use a bash script to combine them all into one big file to easily search through them.

I use ">>" symbol to mark the important ideas/insights so I could easily search for them later.

I use hashtags to organize ideas and notes by topics. Like #pst for blog post ideas, #gamedev for everything I've learned about game development, #book for books I want to read, #health 2020-05-02 for daily notes about my health, #todo 2020-05-02 for todos, etc.

Notes aren't organized in any other way, it's just stream of consciousness. When I have an idea or learn something - I open Editorial and write it down at the end of the currently open file, and if it's important I mark it with a hashtag or ">>".

Every few weeks I search through all the important thoughts of the past few weeks I've marked with ">>" and collect them into a separate file, so I have a kind of a summary of what I've learned/thought about in the past month.

Works really well for me.

Also I can highly recommend Dynalist, it is like a superior version of workflowy. An app for nested lists. Can be used as trello, as an outlining app for writing, as a way to keep a list of your project ideas and the tasks you need to accomplish. I use it to outline fiction, organize my ideas for games and 3D art I can make, and for anything else that fits well in this format.

Finally, Track And Share is the best habit tracker on iOS that I could find, highly recommend it.
So my website is running Django 1.11 on Digitalocean.

I'm potentially interested in using your software but I'll need some convincing.

Right now updating the site is very easy. I use FileZilla to upload the new files and I would simply type `sudo systemctl restart gunicorn` once the new updates are uploaded. Also perform a `migrate` or `collectstatic` if needed.

The workflow I got right now works and is very simple, and does not rely on any middle-software.

Is there any good reason for me to use your app to deploy changes?
Checked just the first two answers:

1. MoM Percent Change

It's better to use windowing functions, I believe it should be faster than self-join.

2. It seems that the first solution is wrong -- it returns whether "a"-s parent is Root/Inner/Leaf, not "a" itself.

I'd instead add a "has_children" column to the table, and then it would be clear.

Second solution works, but without optimization it's 1 query per row due to nested query -- slow, but not mentioned.
My concern with SaaS's are the legal problems, need some blanket ToS I can use, do I need an LLC? Etc... Like this rendering bug caused a seizure give me money, sort of thing. Outlandish but yeah
For small datasets, pretty much any approach will work. Once you hit hundreds of millions of records (which isn't even that big of a dataset), SQL still performs well on pretty modest hardware.
> And, head yaw can also suck in VR.

Aren't tethered headsets a thing of the past now? I have a Quest and never had that issue.
My first exposure to computers was through Logo in 1992!

Thinking back, it was really effective in grabbing your attention and making you want to experiment with different commands!

This is a good reminder that Logo is still a great teaching tool, especially for kids.

I suppose python + turtle can replicate the effect to some degree as well.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html
there is possible performance hit [1]. Also, it could mean that the data granularity has not been modeled well if there are duplicate rows.

https://sqlperformance.com/2017/01/t-sql-queries/surprises-a...
Youngsters have no concept of 80s computing where so much was accessible to simple programs.
RAID is not a replacement for backups. In the case with Steam the top level comment mentioned, all files writable by the user were deleted (including mounted drives in /media). RAID might protect you against hardware failure, but you also have to consider software (bugs/hackers/ransomware).
I think some of the difference is that we went through all of that, and the NSA/Snowden leaks, and trust in the US government in general is at all-time lows. The fact that all that happened gives me hope and expectation that people are more suspect this time around.
I moved from Ubuntu MATE to Fedora MATE for this reason. One reason I use free software is that I get to have the final say in what my computer does. There's a big thread at snapcraft forums asking for the ability to shut off updates. Canonical wouldn't bulge. So I ve moved elsewhere and thank the Linux ecosystem for allowing diversity so that I can still use it as I d like to.
There's a structural difference in the needs that a government needs to satisfy in order to stay in power depending on these economic factors. If your economy runs on extraction and export of a few raw commodities, then any government that can keep that concentrated industry running will be successful, and it does not need a strong citizenship, quite the opposite, it needs a weak citizenship so that it's easier to control that concentrated source of wealth - that's part of the "resource curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse) that facilitates dictatorships in such areas. A similar country without oil or comparable resources, on the other hand, simply has to rely on decentralized citizenship producing wealth through their labor and skill, and its leadership needs to facilitate a strong population even if it wanted to be an extractive dictatorship, because otherwise there's nothing to extract. In the long run, these circumstances push towards a society structure that's more reasonable and beneficial for the population masses than the resource-rich countries.
Retirees without savings are moving in with their millenial children
>Getting all these various tools set up to work together will take some time as well. Just searching "configuring webpack for X" reveals a minefield of blog posts written for various versions of webpack and X. Some will help, some won't, and sometimes only experimentation will reveal which is which.

Yes, I too hate Webpack but it keeps getting pushed on me by companies where they have set up Webpack because it is what everybody uses.
Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program
When you write software you write bugs, because nobody is perfect. You cannot even try to deny the bugs that you wrote, because it's all in source contol. Your fix might even brake something else, every senior knows this.

So I still feel the more experienced you get, the more you have to aknowledge your own shortcomings.
If you see VR as another medium like a laptop or a smart phone, then I believe they are for everyone.

People underestimate the amount of applications for VR. But Mark my word, in a few years your comment will have poorly aged as every household will have a VR headset the same way every household had a printer or a desktop PC 20 years ago.
I think we agree but I was less clear than I could have been in the grandparent comment. When I say "consumers suddenly have terrible looking credit," I don't mean FICO credit scores. Those remain, as you suggest and I agree, mostly unaffected, as they are a lagging indicator.

Banks are not fools, however, and they understand that there is more to consumer credit risk than FICO scores, especially in this kind of turmoil and economic contraction.
> all restaurants want to be a 'dining experience'.

Wanting to be a dining experience, and having "be a dining experience" be your primary business model, are two different things.

I'm sure the author of the article would like his restaurant to be a "dining experience", but that's not his primary business model. His primary business model is selling convenience. His customers buy his food because it's more convenient than preparing it themselves, not because they need to have the "experience" of dining in his restaurant. His restaurant could just as easily be a truck parked at the curb--as many sellers of food actually do in large cities--and his customers probably wouldn't care as long as the food was the same and was available as quickly.

Sure, if you ask the customers, they'll say they prefer the restaurant space to a truck at the curb, but unless they're willing to pay more for the former than they would for the latter, there's no business value in the former. And the fact that customers aren't willing to pay enough to support a restaurant space, but what they're willing to pay probably would be enough to support a truck at the curb, is precisely why the author is struggling to find ways to cut costs--because he mistakenly thinks the space itself is part of his business model, when it actually isn't. He'd like it to be, but it isn't, because his customers aren't willing to pay extra to support it.
Fair point! One sec.
One of the best data tools I have ever used: DBT. The big concept is that everything is a SELECT and handles most DDL and DML under the hood. It also provides the ability to add scripting, such as loops, with Jinja. It is primarily meant for OLAP and ELT, but could be used for some OLTP too.

https://github.com/fishtown-analytics/dbt
I'm thinking about putting an NVMe SSD in my Haswell-based desktop from 2013. The BIOS can't boot from NVMe directly, but I should be able to install Clover EFI on a flash drive, and mount it to an internal USB header.

However, the idea is mildly ridiculous because I only have PCIe 2.0 x1 slots available (and one 3.0 x16 slot for the GPU), which is limited to 500 MB/sec, compared to SATA-III at 600 MB/sec.

Most NVMe drives support PCIe 3.0 x4, which is 3940MB/s. It'd be nice if I could bond two of the x1 slots into an x2, but that would require exotic hardware and chipset support.
A basic x1 -> M.2 adapter is $5 on AliExpress, so I'm going to run at 500 MB/sec for the heck of it.
No questions/examples featuring recursive CTE's? They tend to come up in anything involving queries over trees or graphs. They're also a relatively new feature where having some examples to show how they work may be quite helpful.
While there are less of these now (possibly because of the feature described here), if you find a store with an automatic door that swings out, standing on the pad that is outside to block the door from moving is a good way to annoy your friends who are behind you and teach them about simple state machines.
That's the most hilarious diff I've ever seen.

At least it's hilarious now, for some people it must've been horrifying.
The cloud features you described are trivial to implement, I don't see how those features justify such a high price.
I don't work with Oracle, but SQL Server has had CTE's since 2005.
How to hire smarter than the market (Berkson's Paradox applied)
Had a great experience interviewing with them last year. Highly recommended!
> RAID is not a replacement for backups.

As an IT Exec (retired)... this was a lesson learned long ago. For my own/home systems I use rclone [i] (in conj w raid5) for the most critical files.

[i] https://github.com/rclone/rclone
Yeah but the functions and style used in these answers vary across implementations (date_trunc, etc.)

I highly recommend the SQL Cookbook for newer SQL dev as a quick reference comparison to see how often this is the case for even trivial problems in any RDBMS.

Also, for your language I wouldn't expect all mid tier SQL devs to be able to write a recursive CTE from memory (though its useful, you can just look it up again), but something like breaking apart a query plan on your platform of choice is way more important as that muscle allows you to tell if your CTE was crap or not.
I have their previous version (the smaller form factor with ECC RAM). I trust them to deliver.
It depends how you define almost no one. I agree almost no one is worth that much...but that was my point. There are people with hourlies in the hundreds of thousands. I wouldn't call tens of thousands particularly high.

And no...that just isn't correct. It does vary by industry. Very generally, capital-intensive businesses have smaller productivity differences...but even then it is probably far less than you think (in some of those industries, experience curves are per employee). But, given the subject of the post, then yes...productivity can vary that much.

What is perhaps confusing you, and many companies get this wrong, is that they treat every employee like a superstar when (by definition) they can't be. It is far more profitable to hire five below-average people and teach them to be average than hire one superstar.

My point wasn't really about what companies should or should not do but how they should look at those decisions. Wages really don't matter. I will pay someone $1m tomorrow if they can generate $5m in sales. Simple.

But companies should think carefully before they go down this route. It mostly isn't worth it because most companies aren't very good at hiring and will lose the employee if they can't continuously provide a high productivity environment. Some places can retain staff but, again, there is an 95/5 rule about workplaces just as there is employees.
You can try to reason all you want, the fact is that today there is a Half Life game that is only playable on VR. It's a significant fact.
I love it that the web makes live edits possible.

If your making adjustments then I applaud you.
Honestly don't know.