skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever is going on is not restricted to coastal cities. We bought a cheap house in a college town in Michigan last year. Within 24 hours of listing it 10k over what we bought it for we had an offer.

I suspect low inventory in certain price points as well as low interest rates are driving people to buy whatever they can.
This actually strikes me as a huuuge waste of effort. I work with every one of the different technologies they mention every day.

The differences and idiosyncrasies are truly, truly not a big deal and really what you want is to allow different library maintainers to do it all differently and just build your own adapters over top of them.

This allows library developers to worry about narrow use cases and have their own separate processes to introduce breaking changes and features that deal with extreme specifics like GPU or TPU interop, heterogeneous distributed backed arrays, jagged arrays, etc. etc.

Let a thousand flowers blossom and a thousand different Python array and record APIs contend.

End users can write their own adapters to mollify irregularities between them, possibly writing different adapters on a case by case basis.

If any “standard” adapters gain popularity as open source projects, great - but don’t try to bake that in from an RFC point of view into the array & data structure libraries themselves. Let them be free / whatever they want to be. That diversity of API approach is super valuable and easily mollified by your own custom adapter logic.
To me there's nothing really surprising here. Prices in SF are down just 5%. The pandemic is a massive negative economic event. You would think it would impact markets like SF much stronger (50%+ drops in value considering the insanely high prices), but that just goes to show how in demand living there is. I also don't see any companies leaving, so why would residents leave? Just because of remote work? I don't buy it.

Additionally, it seems there's some underlying mechanism sustaining the economy from completely collapsing. Whether it's just a factor of time, or something else I don't understand. But the stock market is sustaining, and the housing market seems to be even improving in certain areas.

The bottom has to fall out from under this thing at some point, but who knows when. Impossible to tell.
Thank you for the detailed reply! I understand that the technical details might not be of great interest for who you were primarily targeting with the blog post, but I think the discussion on HN would be much enriched (possibly including actionable-for-you ideas and suggestions) if these points were mentioned in the submission itself.

> I have no such personal or professional belief, and I can assure it isn't a view held by our company/team

Fair enough, it might just be my interpretation that is colored by the context of the content being written by an analytics business. Although I'm still at a bit of a loss what the implication is in the sentence I was referencing. Could you spell that out for me?
Except it's not so black/white but much more nuanced and gray. Assuming and asserting otherwise is disingenuous and distancing an is part of how trump was elected in the first place.

Climate change and policy around it, due to its economic implications, is complex and hard to do without costing lots of middle class people their life styles.
In 2012 the NRO turned over two satellites to NASA [0] for research purposes. The scientists who have examined them (they have not been launched yet) described them as being better than Hubble even though they are comparable in size (designed to fit in the Shuttle bay). Given the unlimited funds available to them, I expect they're a decade ahead of industry.

The NRO is probably going for larger lenses in future satellites to increase their field of view. Could they use a series of smaller sats orbiting in a cluster to form a virtual lens, much like the multiple mirror telescope in Arizona [1]? Maybe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMT_Observatory
I was responding to a specific point - that a wealth tax means that someone will lose control of their company. That's all I was arguing against with those points.
In Australia we're all insured. The only developers who aren't are employees for the companies they're writing code for. The worst thing that can happen to them is they'd be fired. The company still owns the blame.
What is the form of the "75 cents for locked in solar contracts" ? That's Canadian, so equivalent to about $500/MWh wholesale US prices?

It's in the nature of R&D investment that you can't have tomorrow's prices for things built today, so if government agreed to pay 75 cents per kWh to drive innovation ten years ago that's what you have to pay now, you can't change your mind now the work is done or else nobody will work with you in future since they've no reason to think they'd get paid.

But $500/MWh does seem high, subsidised UK solar projects from five years ago receive about $80/MWh and new ones proposed this year are expected to pay somewhere in the ballpark of $50-60 (less than consumers pay for electricity but more than unsubsidised providers are paid for it most of the time). So perhaps I just don't understand the basis on which you've got 75 cents.
This is something that some governments do, printing money to finance the government through seigniorage, but it tends to be the last resort of dictators and destroy the economy. Not an option anyone takes if they have anything better.
It seems their method works for pin tumbler locks, which are the most common and also one of the easiest to pick.

I wonder if it would work on something like this, which has no springs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_tumbler_lock
The "good start" is that an individual or small group were able to go from concept to display in a shorter period of time with these, and for relatively low cost. Hopefully there's interest and support for redoing one or more of them in permanent materials. I can definitely see this as a more promising start than spending years in committees fighting over the details and funding for a conventional statue that might never see the light of day.

Anyway, this is just a preview— the full exhibition includes 122 such statues. So it's also a good start in that regard. :)
To get a salt cavity just pump in water in salt deposit and pump out brine. It can be used to store H2, CH4 or compressed air, from 70 to 200 bars. H2 is way more energy dense, but has a lower efficiency round trip. There is many salt deposit around the world.
Return it to Amazon.
They got him to admit he was wrong. That's more satisfaction than they'll get from Facebook.
I was just thinking something similar. SpaceX on its current trajectory could quite possibly be the equivilant of the next Dutch East India company when it comes to access to space. Which so far, hasn't been particularly a profitable capability. But starlink, might just be the tip of the potential profits. If they manage to get even a small amount of that business worldwide its going to be a cash printing machine and likely once we have people spending more time in space proper economies will start to develop. And spaceX will be there acting like the local bank/govmt taking a couple percent on everything.

That all of course assumes Elon manages to live for another 3-4 decades, because frankly I don't trust anyone else to have enough vision to put everything on the line for scifi level ideas.
I guess you could make a case that, today, SLS is further along. But SpaceX is moving several times faster here than SLS, so in any case it is going to be up and flying regularly long before SLS. And in terms of cost per weight to orbit, it will be a hundred times less.
I’m not following the privacy issue: The UI shown in the screenshot requires explicit opt-in to which app is launched, so the user has consented to that app receiving the image that is taken?

I’m also not immediately seeing a non-privacy reason to make this change either...
I absolutely don't know much, so question here:

Why is it assumed that a "star faring society" must originate from a place of significant gravity?

I can understand heat and some way to gather the required chemicals (primordial ooze) together is required. But does it require much gravity really?
Im glad it's not just me. I've spent weeks learning basic C to contribute a few patches to my favorite OSS project.

I swear it's taken me longer to figure out how to build and include libraries with CMake than learn C. And it still makes no sense to me. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with C/C++ package management.

I gave up on learning the build system. I recreated a working build setup in Code::Blocks UI then exported it to a makefile. Then exported that to CMake and copy pasted shit into the original build setup until it worked. Fuck it. C library management is harder than the language
Offtopic: Was 2020 YC's Year of Developer Tooling or something? Seems like there have been lots of launches for YC-backed dev-tool startups in the past few weeks.
I get a 404 error when "Generate" is selected (although "Random" mostly works, but sometimes the picture is truncated).

Is there any source code available for such a program to use locally?
What's your background?
...ever? That's a bold prediction.
How's the credit/mortgage situation in Spain? Isn't it feasible to buy a small property taking a loan at a reasonable rate?
If it was just pastures I would agree. But 30-40% of all corn produced in the US (the largest corn producer in the world) is used to feed lifestock [1]. That's a lot of perfectly good farmland that could directly produce food for human consumption.

Even if the lab process takes more energy, as long as producing the growth medium takes up less farmland that is a win towards the goal of having enough farmland to feed the world.

1: http://www.worldofcorn.com/#corn-usage-by-segment
The difference here is that space is a lot more international (and thus harder to police) than your wrist.

We really want to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome, and so far humanity has shown a pretty terrible track record when it comes to exploiting earth's commodities or ensuring the prevention of long-term global disasters...

Already we have astronomers being increasingly hindered by man-made objects dashing through the field of view of ground-based telescopes.
There is a reason why many people (including me) perceive Java as relatively bad. The language paid a great deal of resources to keep backwards compatibility, which is definitely a thing. They couldn't even just remove the unsafe package even though it was specifically announced to not be compatible with future versions, because of big vendors.

And this has a price. Bad language features stay, they make it difficult to introduce new stuff. Also, Java is very conservative in picking up new things. Saying "once Java has caught up" ignores that Kotlin, at that point in time, will be even further ahead of Java most likely.

And both of them will never reach feature parity with Scala. ;)
> Second, taxes don't disappear into nothingness - they pay for civilization.

Modern monetary theory disputes this commonly held idea that governments need to collect tax before they can spend it on public works. On the contrary, government creates money to pay for public works, which leads to money in circulation, and in turn allows tax to be paid. The purpose of tax is to redistribute wealth and lead to harmonious society.
I'm not sure what distinction you're getting at? I'm in Somerville Massachusetts, houses are very expensive, and the land is all built out. If you tore down a house, you would not be able to build as large a house in its place, in almost all circumstances. You definitely couldn't build a bigger one. What are you trying to get at with "new houses" versus "new homes"?
Yea, I think the point of the post was to "name a thing", not necessarily to wade into the tech. (Like I mentioned, was written by a PM colleague who has been discussing this issue with customers/prospects.)

That is, aim was to introduce this idea of "shadow traffic", since most of our customers/prospects don't even know it exists! (Whereas, for example, "bot traffic", which can inflate analytics numbers, is a well-known problem.)

The sentence you are referencing is about Sentry error tracking, right? All I was intending to say is that sometimes, tracking protection throws the baby out with the bathwater. The end user wants to avoid creepy ads and privacy leaks. But, instead, they are blocking error tracking tools, whose primary purpose is to catch and fix frontend coding bugs. And then when those same blocking rules become browser defaults, it can end up in a situation where whole classes of users don't have errors tracked/logged, merely because the site owner (quite reasonably) chose to use a SaaS for error tracking/logging, rather than, say, rolling one's own self-hosted system for that commodity use case.
I'm shocked that anyone is surprised by this. It was immediately obvious that this move was the only reason for Facebook to buy Oculus in 2014. If you fell for promises, well, hopefully this has been a learning experience.
I have been greatly surprised by home prices since the start of the start of the pandemic. Back then I thought for sure prices were going to drop. Right now I am thinking home prices haven't dropped because of combination of mortgage forbearance and the quick drop of interest rates.
I do wonder what the effect will be when the mortgage forbearance runs out. I would imagine there would be a backlog of delinquencies that would flood the market.
I'm unsure which screensaver photos we're talking about--but if it's the nature photography (and others that you can choose from) which play when nothing is casting to Chromecast, then I have at least one instance where I have seen photos by a person I know is a photographer and not a Google employee (Trey Ratcliff).
A person I know at ISRO mentioned that Planet labs did the launches from India in violation of US accords. Not sure exactly which ones.
> CMake allows us to handle almost all those things right except one - it doesn’t have return values

One of my former bosses once quipped "CMake is confusing until you realize it's just a shitty version of BASIC that only has global variables"
Show HN: UberCheats: a Chrome Extension to detect if UberEats is underpaying you
Have you considered saml2aws[0]?

[0] https://github.com/Versent/saml2aws
And yet, he became a mass murderer that you apparently idolize.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but you don't have an excuse.
Fair point also! Great job on the product, and congrats on shipping. I immediately spotted Inter :)
A U.S. university insured itself against a drop in Chinese students
It's not hatred, it's an objective opinion. I worked with APL professionally for about ten years, starting back in the early 80's. I used both mainframes and desktop computers. I was very involved in the community, attended annual conferences, presented a paper in one of them, admired Iverson and some of the other luminaries of the era, I even have a very dorky looking picture of myself with Iverson.

I think that I can say that it is because of this that I was very aware of what was going on with APL in a commercial sense. It was very difficult to evangelize the language when, in the 80's, the friction points to adoption were many --the character set being one of them. It took a major effort on my part to convince a biotech company of the era to adopt APL for analysis of human DNA sequencing data.

All of this to say I believe I fully understand the decision to remove one of the impediments by discarding custom symbols and coming up with whatever could replace them that was present in computers of that era. This meant ASCII characters that could be typed by anyone on any machine. Almost anyone desperate enough to make the language gain a foothold in the market would have considered such a solution.

That was the driving force behind J. Nothing else. I never heard Iverson say "We moved away from notation because this is better". Never. Because it wasn't. It took a wrecking ball to what he had been teaching and talking about for decades, the foundation of his career, really. They needed market (and financial) success and made the wrong choice.

It wasn't long until custom character sets were a non-issue. Anyone who stopped to think about this a bit would have understood that transition was imminent. APL had the same problem that, say, Japanese had. IBM PC's required altered character ROMs and keyboards to be able to use Japanese. If you had to work with both English and Japanese you likely ended-up with a solution similar to early APL, a modified graphics card with a toggle switch mounted in front of the computer to change character sets.

And so the pressure to build computers that could do non-ASCII character sets with ease was there and it was very real. Remember that IBM never thought the PC would go anywhere. The machines only became more than the sum of their parts once mass adoption took place and clones got faster, cheaper and better.

Had Iverson stuck with APL as it was he would have been able to see it flourish on new more capable hardware. By doing what he did with J he likely bifurcated (or more, because there were other pure APL factions already, like IBM APL2) the community and likely contributed to the language languishing.

It only makes me angry in the sense that all of this has caused a situation where modern software engineers will likely never experience what notation can bring to the domain. APL used to be taught at a number of universities. I don't know if any even bothers to mention it yet.
Personally, I like how the Julia ecosystem coalesced around a Tables.jl package that gives some consistency to tabular data packages that choose to implement it. Row-oriented or column-oriented, doesn't matter! Using Tables.jl they can be interchangeable.
also they have to signal some value to society to hedge against future breakup threats
I graduated summa cum laude from Duke University in 2019 with a BS in Neuroscience. I was pre-med and planning on medical school but the more I got a taste for entrepreneurship the more I knew becoming a physician wasn't for me. Why spend your day helping 10 patients when you can reach across the globe and make a positive impact on the habits of millions of people through a product.
I think it's worth acknowledging the mental lag involved in falling home prices. If you are selling a house in SF, you're not going to sell for 50% below what the market was in Feb, six months into this crisis. Ever. It doesn't matter what the buyer thinks the fair price is -- that house is going to stay on the market for a while.

Even a 5% drop is 50k or 100k at current prices. That HURTS to admit. Expecting someone to sell a house at -30% is crazy, if they have any hope of a market recovery. It will drop 5% at a time, as inventory piles up, and sellers a year into selling realize -- maybe they're not actually going to sell that house at the price they expect.

Or hey, maybe none of this will happen, and the market will rebound by January. Who knows.
ohh, thanks a lot
I like their pricing : 399 USD == 399 GBP == 399 EUR
Ask HN: Learn the intricacies of Google Analytics and its marketing concepts?
Any recommended resources?
They do, but they aren't public access.
It's hard for many people to leave. They already built a life and probably like it in SF. But that's not the key factor. The key factor is how many new people will move in to SF in the next few years. That's a number that would be highly impacted by remote work. I don't know anything about SF but I assume it's a nice place to live. The weather is not bad, there are great universities in the area, etc. Hence it's likely that we won't see any huge drop in demand. But we're likely to see some drop in the next few years. In all major tech hubs.
I would call Oculus Rift as "just VR headset" but Oculus Quest would be reasonable to call as "standalone VR computer", not peripheral. Is requiring account for a "computer" reasonable is another question.
Show HN: Scraping JSON metadata from reverse engineered Jango API
Sufficiently advanced users reverse engineer undocumented APIs for fun.

I've been sufficiently advanced since I reverse engineered the Jango API over ten years ago. It's been a while but I still remember using Burp Suite to trace Referer. These days I would just use Chrome Developer Tools instead.

This year when some search results disappeared from the official Jango search page then I was faced with a choice.

Option 1: contact Jango people and ask "Hey where are the missing search results?"

Option 2: scrape all the JSON metadata from the Jango API and build my own search page that searches Jango the way I want.

So I chose option 2 and went on a months long quest for Jango JSON metadata. Option 1 would have been socially awkward and completely unnecessary since I'm perfectly capable of solving problems without help from anyone.

Result! Warning: technical tools only look nice to nerds.

https://jango-index.ml/

Source code! The secret is to pipe the curl commands together. Isn't that right guys??

https://jango-index.ml/src/

Yup. It was worth doing.

Sorry there's nothing to monetize here.
Connecting with recruiters and messaging them also helps sometimes.
The title game is a funny one. I work at a small startup where I replaced the outgoing technical founder (who used the title CTO). I manage a small team and am responsible for all the of the tech at the company. I could choose any title that I want, but thus far I've stuck with "Lead Developer" because it seems to be a well defined role. Whereas titles like CTO or VP Engineering seem pretty meaningless outside of much larger companies.
I think the answer is quite simple. You might start out with Kotlin and get familiar with it. But when you get thirsty for more, arrow is the logical next step. Going for Scala would require learning a lot of new stuff and once or even rewrite your things.

It's the same for Scala and Haskell, which is why Scala is sometimes called Haskellator - I still would start a project in Scala because I'm more familiar with it.
It's your choice. Trouble is that if you stay in a city under the current housing finance regime it will be a lot harder to build wealth. A lot will get eaten by rent or mortgage.
Right now assets valuations are sustained at least partly because the wealthy still have wealth to inveset and There Is No Alternative(TINA).

If you don't buy stocks, bonds or real-estate, the only other option is to hold cash. Holding very large amounts of cash can be inconvenient for various reasons. Gold is often proposed as an alternative, but it's value is already quite high, and it's an inflation hedge, while recessions tend to be deflationary.

The fact that the majority of US taxpayers got a big check, and are expected to get a second one soon is also a boost to the economy. However, mortgage delinquencies more than doubled this past quarter, so we are getting close to the point where foreclosures will happen, which will lower the prices of real-estate.
I do not look forward to the time where something akin to Google Maps starts to approach real-time (yeah I realize the government can more or less do this, but I'm happy with being obscure enough to not catch their gaze)
I thought Quebec had a better trade in selling to New England and New York with its HVDC links: http://www.hydroquebec.com/transenergie/en/reseau-bref.html