skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By definition, as a renter, you pay those same costs plus a small proft margin plus a premium to cover the times it's not occupied. Unless your landlord is a moron.
Comments aren't dead. The problem that the author of this article has identified lies more in moderation then the comment system.

Comments have evolved. Many high profile sites rely on passive, one way comments that are occasionally peppered with the odd reply, but for the most part act solely as the receptacle of one-way feedback. This isn't necessarily bad and at one time, provided adequate engagement.

Today, readers have become accustom to community and participation rather then simple contribution. We expect more, but we don't receive it.

The solution is a mix of additional functionality, increased participation and eventually clear identification of authority.

Additional Functionality:
We've seen basic moderation systems evolve. From Digg style voting buttons to full on wiki style comment systems where users can add sources and refine messages, there have been technological advances that have been largely overlooked in commenting systems.

Increased participation:
This is more then simply encouraging users to comment. Users need to be engaged and that happens by the author in the comments. After an article is composed, authors need to become conductors and individually guide conversations and continue to contribute their ideas and messages. Generally, commenters need to have their thoughts validated while the article is thought of as an introduction to a topic while the comments contain the larger message being presented.

Authority:
Comment systems such as Disqus and Facebook Comments gather contributions across blogs. All of the comments a commenter has made are available through a common system that supersedes individual articles. This needs to be expanded and improved. Comment systems need to identify authority and encourage "cross seeding" through related people, their individual expertise and the interests they share.

We're getting there. However, we have a long way to go.
Novice question: Why is C++ used for the vast majority of video games today? Why is it used for most commercial CFD codes? (A lot of codes in academia still use tons of legacy fortran though.)
He's expressing an opinion except his style is to state his opinion as fact without providing any evidence at all.

It's not worth reading.

Now if he had predicted this purchase, that would be different.
Beats Drum Machine
Lender 2.0: Kiva's Premal Shah
I disagree, I'd vastly prefer a good episode 3 than an early episode 3. Valve has always sacrificed time for quality, and it's the sacrifice that allows them to be great.
You should really convert the basement to a seperate residence, so you can independently live there, while also providing the same conveniences to the renter upstairs.

Rent to a family.

Being a landlord does suck. I have worked closely with a real estate investor managing 30 residential rental properties.

I would say the two biggest issues are the quality of tenants and the quality of homes.

Central A/Cs die. Whole homes need to be repiped. Roof leaks.

Tenants do not pay or will have 5 people in a 2 bedroom home. Eviction is costly and time-consuming.

The only real estate I would consider as an investment right now is something commercial/industrial, like a group of warehouses or office suites, something with multiple renters.
Palm-Sized Tiny Quadrotor Flies With Style in Sweden
I think the point is long-term thinking. As you mentioned, over the life of a 30 year mortgage, I'm likely to have paid about double what I bought the house for. However, that's $900/mo today and that'll be $900/mo in 30 years. In 10 years, that'll be worth $675/mo, in 20 it'll be worth $495/mo and in 30 it'll be worth $270/mo. Meanwhile, the unit I was renting will probably be $1,500, $2,136, and $2,760.

So, I think even the expenses I've incurred (I replaced the power junction box and ugpraded it from 50amp to 200amp, installed several dedicated circuits, and did tons of other work to this place) will seem small in the long run, as will the interest included in my mortgage. Of course, I only have a 30yr mortgage as a failsafe. So that "if things go really bad, I only am obligated to a certain amount per month". Unless things go totally awry, I'm expecting to pay it off in half that time, which will be an enormous savings. (Also, payment on mortgage interest is tax deductible).

And best of all, in the end, I have a house and property to show for it. So even if it came out to be on par with renting for thirty years, I don't end up owning anything at the end of those three decades when I'm renting.

Of course, in the meantime, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that something doesn't arise that requires me to move and spoil the whole plan. That would suck. But the long term game will be beneficial. That's an admitted risk I have to take, since just about none of us can ever be absolutely sure that we'll still be where we are in five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years.
Thank you, this is a very good comment.

"I know what mine are - but it's subjective."

Well, see... That's the thing... I spoke vaguely because the benefits themselves are ambiguous, subjective. They are hard to quantify because their intrinsic value varies based on who you ask.

However, just because they are not easily quantifiable does not mean that they have no value. You are right. It is easy for me to sit over here and criticize them for not discussing something that was probably outside the scope of their article.

With that said though, it may be possible - one day - for someone to figure out some way of approximating these things (no landlords, lower fixed monthly costs, more control over your own property) and giving them some type of monetary value.

One thing that could be done is to look at the difference between rent and ownership prices and build an econometric model in an attempt to tease some numbers out of it. Maybe someone has already tried it, but I am not certain. There would be some selection bias though - the kind of people that own homes are probably not exactly the same as those that rent apartments. I'm not sure how to deal with that...

Just something to think about, I have taken some classes in Urban economics and all of these professors talk about how incredibly stupid it is to own a house. Then, over the course of the semester, I would realize that they owned houses myself. When I ask them why, none of them has a decent answer.

Maybe the answer is something really sort-of fuzzy. It seems to me that people tend to buy a house when they want to lay down "roots" in a place, but then that wouldn't explain why so many people just rent for a long time despite not needing the mobility.

There are probably hundreds of factors that creep into the decision to own vs to rent. I guess being aware of this is why I feel repulsed at articles claiming to compare the two but not even trying to factor in the preference-related factors and how they cloud this type of analysis.

Disclaimer: I am an economist-in-training at this point in time. My thesis involves an application of a hedonic pricing model. Too much work with hedonics and you may become delirious - believing that everything can be quantified if you just tinker with the model long enough...
I learned Emacs about 7 months ago. I would say that spending a little bit of time experimenting everyday with it is probably the way to learn new functionality. But I think learning Elisp definitely improved my usage of Emacs because it lets you understand why Emacs does what it does.
The problem with C++ is that the language is too damn big. This results in most programmers only learning really well a subset of the language.

Unfortunately, different programmers end up with different subsets.

I'd like to see some de facto standardization on subsets. For instance, there could be Basic C++. When programming Basic C++ you use it like C with the following C++ features added: constructors, destructors, references, std::string, and maybe the STL collections.

Simple Object C++ could be Basic C++ plus single inheritance.

The on top of that, we could add things like multiple inheritance, operator overloading, templates, and so on.
I bought one of his books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) and now deeply regret it. If you are familiar with principles of design and with the aesthetic of minimalism, reading Tufte will gain you little knowledge and will feel like watching some self-proclaimed Don Quixote battle windmills.

My favorite part was where he tries to poo-poo modernist/contemporary architecture (why would one insert such an irrelevant/inflammatory opinion in the first place?). According to Tufte, it is better to superficially decorate a conventionally laid out building than to architect a radically new, untraditional form -- which only illustrates how out-of-touch the author is with contemporary trends. What a boring, self-aggrandising old prick.
since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.

Well put.
Skype is the google of VoIP. I recently travelled to Brazil, and needed to make free calls to our US 1-800 number (vs R$18/Minute for the phone in the Blue Tree Marumbi in São Paulo). I had used google voice as a test a few months ago, and spent the better part of 5 minutes trying to figure out how to do it again - but failed - and I'm obviously highly technical. That suggests to me that 95% of your average community of people would not be able to use Google Voice, as it stands today, to make a phone call from Brazil to the United States.

Skype, on the other hand, made it numbingly obvious and about 2 minutes after typing "skype.com" I was making free international calls to US 1-800 numbers.

Purchasing Skype for Telecom is like purchasing Google for Search. You basically will be purchasing the market segment at this point. Lots of good reasons.

And $3.00/Month for unlimited calling to the United States - Wowza! Lots of room to grow fees there. :-)
Show HN: Amubosé, a quick way to search for multiple books on Amazon
Have you ever had a long list of books you needed to look-up on Amazon? So have I, and I found it very tedious. (Copy title #1, search, find book, copy title #2, search find book, &tc.)

So I fixed it.

http://amubose.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

(Why S3? It's free, and I expect that this will only be used by me.)
clickable: http://amubose.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
Is this a play on words?
Concur. C++ compilation speed was legitimately a problem five years ago. Improved compilers, faster computers, and multi-core compilation have made it moot.

Often you'll see a C++ basher bring up compilation speed and then in the same thread advocate python + C as the happy medium, which I find crazy. C++ is so much higher level than C the need for scripting is often obviated. I've typically got about 2x SLOC expansion rewriting perl/python as C++, including stuff like headers, so really not much more code at all, just 100x faster and a tiny fraction the memory.

The other line you see, including elsewhere on this page right now, is that C and C++ are the right tool for the job in different domains. I really don't get this. C++ is straight-up a replacement for C. There is no C program that wouldn't be shorter and clearer rewritten as C++. The only occasion to not use C++ is when you don't have compiler support, which is extremely rarely a concern anymore. Even the lowest level embedded stuff is moving away from C in favor of C++.
That's true - but you probably don't grind your own flour, service your own car, run your own bank or make your own furniture. Why run your own server?
How many hours a week do you spend in therapy? And what is the price to you?

Not trying to make a point in reference to CBT, I'm just curious about the numbers, if you feel like sharing.
One the most impressive aspects to this interview is Gabe's lack of dogmatic prognostication. They're not into something because "mobile is the future" or "the PC is dead" or "social gaming is taking over the world." They're looking into things because they seem like a good idea, but it's clear that they're equally open to discovering that they weren't that great an idea after all.

That last part - a form of idea edit and review - is something that I see a lot of companies lose very quickly. They get so caught up in what they think they should be doing (or how they define themselves, e.g. "we are a social media company") that they lose the ability to let go of ideas that just don't work, even when it seems like they should. Apple is really good at this. For every product that Apple actually announces, there are hundreds that never make it off the ground. The iPad idea had been floating around Apple for years, but it wasn't approved until mobile technology had come far enough to make it actually a practical idea, not just a good idea.

There's a saying that behind every great poet is a great editor. I suggest that behind every great tech company is (at least one) great idea editor.
I'm only aware of php and javascript equating 0 to false. But at any rate in this case it's not equating 0 to false, it's comparing non-zero to zero and returning true. (as it should)
You're right. I made the list out of MSFT, ORCL, and SAP, then every company that it suggested as being related to those which I remembered being fairly large a decade ago.

I don't think it was his list didn't include Sun. Or AOL. Or Compaq. Or Dell. Or Sony. But the comparison list was not generated with an eye towards being unfair, and I think that the point made is still valid. Microsoft could have done better than it did.
"I'm just buying more of my own place with somebody else's money."

At the cost of incurring risks including but not limited to:

- Property damage by renters and others.
- Property damage by acts of god (flooding/fire/subsidence).
- Default on payments & long eviction periods.
- Low occupancy/months without rent.
- Downward price movements in the market as a whole.
- Downward price movements in your location due to ghettoization, tax increases, service/school decline, structural unemployment or other factors.

Could be worth it for the gain in equity, but it's something to think about - especially as some of these risks can't be insured against.

You are also forgoing returns on your existing equity if you invested it elsewhere. Risk free interest rates for retail deposits here in the UK are currently above 3% for example.

In addition to that you also have the costs (in time and money) of:

- Management time/effort.
- Time to deal with renters and searches.
- Organizing maintenance.
- Costs of credit scoring etc.
Probably, but it would certainly cost human lives and effort. I'm not au fait with vaccine creation, so I cannot answer whether it is technically possible, but it seems probable.
Implementing Social Media’s Secret Weapon
I think this post sums it up pretty nicely: http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/WhyC++.html

Personally I think the advantages boil down to syntax and type-safety. For example, vector math is much more succinct and can be made type-safe. Constructors/destructors also can be handy for enforcing resource allocation.
Indeed. How does the poster figure Apple got their image? It was pretty bad, their image I mean, in the 90s. It surely couldn't be something crazy like they make great products :)
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."

We didn't hear much ridicule from Ballmer in the last months.....
In C++0x you can make those operator bool() explicit. Shouldn't have been there in the first place, and you still have to learn the difference between explicit and non-explicit operators, but at least now there is a way of making things behave.
No 4G In iPhone 4S
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http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20638
http://www.almstba.com/vb/showthread.php?t=20638
I'm a web editor at a regional news site, and moderating reader comments is a huge pain in the neck, largely because of the inherent anonymity of the web.

A few years back, I tried to come up with a solution. I created Truyoo (http://www.truyoo.com), which essentially requires a user to pay a one-time nominal fee (less than $2) to confirm their identity. They would then be issued a Truyoo ID, which could be used to comment on any site that used Truyoo.

For legitimate, constructive commenters, this is extremely inexpensive -- but it quickly becomes very expensive for spammy/abusive users.

Unfortunately, Truyoo never gained traction, largely because no publisher was willing to ask its users to pay even a tiny one-time fee to comment.
It's true that some of our newspapers here (I'm in England) have moved into the new millenium with their headings, but alas quite a few textbooks and business reports still languish in the typographical dark ages, even new ones.

As far as I can tell, title case is still one of those quaint ideas that you teach in English classes at school because the syllabus says so, even though it is an objectively inferior approach and is not particularly popular in real world usage any more. (See also: Almost any comma usage when handwriting letters or envelopes that you were taught as a child; not splitting an infinitive, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, or ending a sentence with a preposition; spelling out certain small integer numbers in full; and your teacher's pet view of the Oxford comma.)
Valve isn't making a decision to pay a specific player 20k a week, it's merely a consequence of the economy system that Valve has created. It's the players paying other players 20k a week, not Valve per se.
A very valid point. As others have stated, buying a home should be more about quality of life and living than making a buck and that has to be on your time schedule; not someone else's. The worst thing you can ever do is buy a home when you're not ready for a home -- and you know better than anyone else if you're ready.

When you start waking up in the morning and thinking "god damn, I wish I had a home, so I could . . ." then it might be time to start giving it consideration. For me, I had dealt with a home invasion. I'd lived in my apartment for five years and someone walked in while I was asleep and stole everything (the layout of the apartment was such that I wasn't disturbed by the intruder - if you were in the back bedroom, you couldn't even hear someone banging on the front door). I lived alone. Nobody else had keys . . . except the leasing and maintenance offices. Took $30k worth of stuff.

So, I started waking up in the mornings feeling a bit unsafe, wishing I had a sweet surveillance/alarm system, and also thinking about how great it would be to have room for my entertainment system (and get to blast it as loud as I wanted). Also, I kind of still want to get a dog and that wouldn't have worked in the apartment. Enough things started to bug me that I just sat up one day and said "let's go look at houses".

Until you are home shopping for those reasons (or similar reasons of your own), then you may be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Maybe because friends are all buying homes. Maybe because you feel like you're still a "kid" as long as you keep renting. Who knows?

In the mean time, definitely don't buy into the idea that you have to go for it because people around you are talking about it and you feel like you're missing out. You might be the sanest of them all. I didn't buy a home until I was starting into my 30s. I could have done it a decade before and went so far as to check out homes and even get approved for loans. It just never felt quite right, until last year. And I have been happy that I finally did so, when I did.

Well-being accounts for a lot, too. Whatever you may be losing "on paper" with renting, you may be compensated for in peace of mind, right now. You can focus on work and savings and family rather than finding a trustworthy and affordable lawn service, worrying if your boiler is going to make it another year, wondering why in the hell that sink is draining slowly, when it isn't clogged up, wondering how much it would cost to turn that spare room into a sex dungeon. . .
Why did you fail with Google Voice?
You pay and then you call a number, what is the difference?
I have a... secret wish? private fantasy?... where I take a moderately complicated problem and outsource it to a known bad outsourcing company, but rigidly require that they write it in Haskell. Just to see what pops out.
There was a time before SMTP. Vint Cerf was there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf

The historical analogy is sound and worth considering.
DoubleTwist’s Adventures in NFC Land
AFAIK Schlage offers this kind of service.
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Plus, not having to directly deal with Verizon or AT&T is an added benefit.
If you're staying in the same place for ~10 years, that is right. However, if you are NOT staying long term, you pay that + a profit margin to your landlord, but avoid the (usually 6%-8% all things considered) friction that goes to real estate agents, etc.

If you live in NYC, and your studio apartment is worth $500K, that's $40K in friction costs -- rent for 16-18 months for the same unit. Ammortized over 10 years, it is not a big deal. However, if you move after 3 years, that brings your "owner equivalent rent" up by 50%.

Circumstance is everything.

In a city like NYC or SF where most people can't afford a house larger than they need at the moment, the introduction of kids forces you to move -- thus, if you're planning kids in the next few years, you're better off renting even if you know you'll stay in SF for the next 20 years.
Most projects have a set of coding guidelines. I don't see why it cannot specify things like: "Don't use operator overloading!".

Google does, for one thing.

Without discipline both C and C++ will blow you up completely. With some discipline both the languages are manageable, and C++ more so; which is what the OP points out.
Copy constructors are bad. Variable assignment should not be a user defined behaviour.
Yeah, honestly, increasing income, or your hubby stopping some work is probably the better directions. In the states python/ruby web dev pays a bit better than php, so perhaps you could try moving towards that.

My gut says 'Don't buy this house, it's the wrong size for your income/family situation and in a place that doesn't pay well enough for the life you want.'
Why should the SF Bay Area be one of the first to recover?

In most parts of the country, housing prices are roughly comparable to what it costs to build a house, so I imagine they should be at least reasonably stable.

But here, prices are way out of proportion, and this seems to depend on draconian laws preventing almost any sort of development. If people could actually build condo buildings in, say, Palo Alto, prices would be going down in a hurry.
> For legitimate, constructive commenters, this is extremely inexpensive

actually compared to the status quo, free, it's extremely expensive.
APL, the most esoteric non-esoteric programming language there is.
The real property inflation is in New Delhi and Mumbai, India. Real estate in Delhi is more expensive than New York. A house built on a 500 yards lot will set you back $6 million. Moreover, the real estate prices are growing @ 50% every year and high as 100% in some areas.

Compared to that, I would say houses in America are affordable. I hope India's real estate bubble gets burst.