skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So the first problem is zoning, but imagine if zoning is fixed. Now the taller the building is, the smaller the portion of the taxable value derives from the land itself.

Which is sort of the problem, right? You have an area which is, say, two story buildings, in an area where you really need an average of three story buildings to satisfy local demand.

Implement LVT and everyone gets the bright idea to build twelve story buildings, because why wouldn't they? Three story buildings would have four times the tax per unit.

But then you get the opposite problem. Real estate prices crash, because there are suddenly twelve story buildings going up everywhere and the prices need to fall to the level that building more of them isn't viable even against the tax advantage. Which is well before you're saturated with tall buildings.

But now you have a thousand plots of land and 10% of them have new tall buildings while 90% have existing single family homes. Now the owners of the single family homes are paying a disproportionate amount of the taxes. They abandon their properties, which have already declined in value, because the tax is more than the newly lowered cost of buying space in one of the tall buildings.

The government is now receiving no tax from 90% of the lots because they've been abandoned, so the land tax amount has to increase by ten fold per plot. But that makes it profitable to build 25 story buildings instead of twelve story ones, to amortize the tax over more units, and the cycle repeats.

It seems obvious that this only works if the amount of the land tax isn't large enough to cause these behavioral changes.
> If you want to sit on an acre of land in a dense area, you should be taxed at the highest and best value of that land.

Isn't that what property tax already codifies?

Also aren't market forces already essentially doing this? If I sit on an acre of land in a dense area I will have developers knocking at my door and everyone has a price.
> By establishing my own recursive resolver I can act as a chokepoint (and monitoring point) for their behavior online. It's a very elegant solution, actually, and I have created a nice integration between my datacenter-hosted resolver and nextdns.io as the adblocking upstream DNS.

This only works for the subset of devices which use the local DNS. If they use any of the well-known techniques to avoid that filtering it's completely ineffective.

> Since we're talking about it, though, it occurs to me that you could quickly do a DoH lookup to every single new IP that initiates a new connection, outbound, from your network - and then block all IPs that answer your DoH query.

It doesn't solve the CDN problem: CDNs will route traffic based on the hostname and blocking them will have a degree of collateral damage which most people can't work with. Setting up your own HTTPS proxy avoids this.
Python was actually the reason I asked the question. There are multiple ways to integrate Python and C, depending on exactly what you want to do. The simplest is to use ctypes, which almost reduces calling C APIs in a DLL/SO to calling a function to load the shared library and then calling the APIs like any other function.

The most obvious practical limitation is that ctypes can only infer so much about the required parameter and return types of the C functions from how you call them, so you have to specify the types explicitly in your Python code in any other case. That's no harder than writing a C header file, though, and I expect there is probably a tool somewhere that would automatically generate the corresponding Python/ctypes code for the common use cases.

There are a few other warts that aren't quite as intrusive, including some restrictions relating to pointers and some verbose marshalling if you're passing strings around. But overall, it's a very convenient way to call out to C-style APIs from Python code that probably covers 95+% of practical use cases with only minor inconvenience compared to what you'd have written doing everything in either language on its own.
Wow that’s fascinating and insightful! Stripe sounds like such an awesome company. Congratulations on getting an offer from them, psyched for you!!!
Cuba, China, Australia.

The only common denominator is that these people worked as US government employees and/or in US government buildings.

Work-related injuries. A class-action by these employees is on the cards for the future.
I've been developing one that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux and provides a unique/aesthetic/effective visualization.

It's definitely more for the audience that enjoys sleek, convenient interfaces over tiny files sizes though ;)

(It uses Electron for the UI, Rust for the disk scanner)

https://diskatlas.com/ It's in beta now, so I'd love feedback from anyone who wants to try it.
Change Carbon tax to "Pollution tax" -- even on the topic of global warming, methane and nitrous oxide are potentially more harmful, and a pollution tax is far more future proof for capturing externalities.
> It's better to accept that C (and C++) are only portable in theory, in reality it's nearly impossible to write non-trivial code which compiles without warnings in a different compiler or runs out of the box on a different hardware architecture

It’s not that hard, unless you’re using -Wall or similar. And usually a platform that warns about something is probably giving decent advice anyways, regardless of whether the warning shows up elsewhere.
In theory,

Tax should be based on land value, not your improvements. So a really nice house isn't taxed more than a run down house. Fixing up the house, or knocking down a post war box and putting up a nice modern house, should not change your taxes.

Tax needs to vary with the maximum use of the land. A daily farm that is now surrounded by luxury apartments should pay taxes at the same rate per acre as those luxury apartments. This is where people start to flip out and get offended that they might be on the side of things that's disadvantaged by it.

Most property tax systems in the US have features that allow some land to be taxed at much lower rates than other land based just on historical ownership. Most notorious is California's Prop 13. The beneficial incentive system of the LVT is that it encouraging redeveloping now-valuable land. That means grandma can't afford to live there anymore. But, that only happens if grandma owns land that has appreciated, so she's probably okay overall.

I'm not really clear on whether LVT always goes with opposition to zoning or discretionary review, but I have seen some of that as well.
Well, you can give up and not read anything you don't already understand, I suppose.
Ooh, exciting! I built a parser [1] for AIS messages [2], a quirky ship-to-ship protocol. My lower-level stuff always felt clumsy to me. I'll have to see if this cleans it up.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/simpleais
[2] https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/AIVDM.html
Just don’t skip the Blinker Fluid checkups
Apple has gone through their share of UI fads and APIs. And by dropping backward compatibility more often users see less variation.
I think you mean unsubstantiated. True or not, the claims you are making are also unsubstantiated.
Of course, every individual extremist has their own story, but we are also all products of our environments and it is clear that the web creates an environment in which extremism thrives.

Personally I think free speech is worth it but we can't pretend there's not a cost.
LVT, in its most pure form, isn’t based on any improvements (or lack thereof) to the land — the tax would be based purely based on the land itself, as if the home were NOT there.

Most likely, it would be heavily based on zoning, neighborhood, and proximity to jobs and transit. Take Los Angeles, for example. I would imagine you could actually see taxes in predominantly SFH enclaves like Calabasas or Malibu 1hr+ from job centers go _down_ while taxes on similar single family homes in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, being much more incorporated into the urban framework of LA, would go up.

Wealthy people can still have their expansive estates elsewhere, but the incentive is to move them off of land that would have a better use serving more people: just as it doesn’t make too much sense for the Empire State Building to be built in Aspen, CO, it doesn’t make much sense for a single-family, detached vacation home with a white picket fence and yard to be built in the financial district of Manhattan.
Carbon taxes don't seem simple, to me. Measuring the carbon cost of many things seems really hard. What's the carbon tax rate of income from a downtown parking lot? How do you even reason about that?

(the others, sure, much simpler)
Thankfully, it will be soon: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-...
Ah yes the "Asian" monicker, the most generic and "racist" (in its own way) ethnical description in the English language

You're adding South Asians, SE Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Mongols, etc all under the same umbrella
Mazda uses the ABS data instead. Which I prefer, because otherwise you'll need eight sensors already, if you switch between summer and winter tires.
The industry is in a very strange place right now. HDR monitors are both quite expensive and unimpressive compared to the HDR OLED TVs..

For the 5-6k that this display from Apple costs, I would certainly expect it to be an OLED display at LEAST. But it's not.

How is this the best we can get and it's NOT OLED? Dimming zones for 6k? I don't understand what's going on, I just want a nice OLED monitor that will fit on my monitor arm. I'll even pay the same price that you can get an AMAZING 55" OLED TV from LG for; 1500-2k.
This was a great intro to political philosophy: “Reconstructing the Classics”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1729979
I haven’t heard these terms before and I am paywalled from the actual study, but my first reaction is to view them with suspicion since the level of academic rigor in these fields seems very low in general. And yes they do end up having an impact on all of society when their conclusions are popularized and amplified by activists ultimately. So the caution is warranted.
I used intmax_t just yesterday in an ODBC type conversion test. I wrote a template for use in a Google Test typed test to find the highest and lowest values supported by the client and server type. Something like:

max(
static_cast<intmax_t>(
numeric_limits<T>::lowest()),
static_cast<intmax_t>(
numeric_limits<U>::lowest()))

I tried std::common_type first, but it didn't quite do the trick.
There are so many ways to tax the wealthy that would "work". But as long as the rich have way more influence on how society is organized than than the poor or middle class, it's just very difficult to do anything about it.
The death of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987 effectively killed the integrity of journalism and allowed op-ed and infotainment to take place of informed and factual reporting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

I'd be happy if this was successfully reintroduced. I can't imagine why this isn't widely supported, especially by those who detest "fake news" and want misinformation to be suppressed.
>If you think they are skimming money, then there has to be a way to offer the same services cheaper (without the skimming). So instead of complaining, do it. What's your excuse?

What if they are skimming money precisely because they made it difficult to offer the same services cheaper?
No, or not nearly as much.

The needs of a child are mediated by productivity, which has been wildly different throughout history. E.g. maybe we'll have practical fusion in 100 years and can support 100 billion people no problem.

But the surface area of the earth is fixed. If you want 100 acres to do nothing good with, do it with a giant seastead.
Not much more than that fascists can use them. For the rest all this rhetoric about fascism, racism, trans-activism and other critical-theory related issues does nothing but drive a wedge between those who are in support of deconstruction and those who oppose it - there is no middle position here. It is a small but vocal minority which supports this, that is why it keeps on cropping up everywhere. Unfortunately the majority of those who oppose it are afraid to say so out of fear of being ostracized or cancelled.

I've been a volunteer for the GNU project for many years but I vehemently oppose this type of activism. It doesn't help the project, it doesn't help forwarding is goals, it only serves to brand the project and in extension free software as yet another thing to be shunned by those who do not hold with critical theory.
Another way to put it: the person who owns a vacant lot in Manhattan (worth many millions) pays the same tax as the person who owns an equivalent lot in Manhattan with an apartment building built on it. They would also pay the same tax as the person who owns that same lot with a bungalow sitting on it.

It's not regressive at all. You pay tax based on the value of the land. If you're not utilizing the full value of the land (by leaving it vacant or otherwise under built compared to the demand) then you're going to pay more in taxes than you get out of it. The whole purpose of LVT is to nudge you toward either improving the land so you can utilize its value or sell it to someone who will.
I detest property taxes. What ends up happening is that people who are on the brink of poverty keep losing their (inherited) land because the government deems it an income generating asset, even though it is not (it's either their home or some dilapidated piece of land without much actual income generation prospects).
Often they also get screwed on the selling because they are under pressure and because they are not experienced in selling property, and end up losing money in the process.
So it's like crabs on the brim of the bucket being kicked back to the bottom.
It can, but it can get incredibly slow for large formats. I was using it to reverse engineer some binary game formats but the parser would take a couple of minutes to complete. I rewrote it using struct and that time dropped to a few seconds. Useful for probing an unknown format, but I prefer the 010 editor since it’s more interactive.
Yes, Carbon tax is the least simple, but at least the others free up the carbon tax alone from being at all equitable. That helps.
Theoretically with an LVT, if the value of the property goes up because you restore and extend it or convert it into a dozen flats the tax stays the same (but still increases if the value increases because youre lucky enough get a good school and a light rail station in the area as the result of others' actions). In practice, it's somewhat difficult to separate the two which is why property taxes are more common (also because the multistorey apartment block built on similarly valued land to the house next door has a lot more people with the ability to pay and the expectation of having local services paid for)

The other difference is that proponents of LVT often argue it should replace other taxes like income tax. But regardless of theoretical efficiency criteria, it's a lot easier to persuade people that a large fixed portion of their earnings are the government's share than give them an enormous bill for the valuable land their house sits on and tell them if they're not earning enough to afford it they can always move (as long as they can find a buyer...). Which is why LVT has been 'inevitable' since before the Industrial Revolution without it being very widely experimented with
> It’s recognized that the people in those communities have suffered a deep, inter-generational trauma,

Really? What about the Jewish people, who have been subjected to extremely high levels of inter-generational trauma. Yet they don't fall prey to particularly high levels of alcoholism or drug addiction.

Sure, current poverty can predispose some to addiction, but the idea of "inter-generational trauma" being a massive risk factor is unproven, to say the least.
Why its time to reshape the work management system
Ask HN: How to navigate career plateau?
I have been in industry for 9 years now but I feel like I have hit a career plateau. I have worked at multiple FAANGs (currently in one) and startups.

I have been stuck at SDE-2/E4/L4 (a level above new grad in BigCos) level for around 5 years now. I want to be more of a leader but I do not know how. I am also rather sensitive/introverted so not a typical leader like personality.

Can anyone relate? Have you personally navigated something like this, or seen someone do it?
Just my 2c below.

I went down a similar path over the last few years. Here is what didn't work well for me:

- Reading books on the history of philosophy summarizing a wide range of ideas from famous philosophers. Examples would be Bertrand Russell's and Anthony Kenny's books. The problem I found is that there's just too much stuff in there that is not of interest to me personally.

- Reading books by author. For example, just reading through Plato's dialogues never worked for me, again because the topics are vast and varied, and many are not of interest to me personally.

What worked for me are diving into specific topics that interested me deeply. In my case: political philosophy, the question of the existence of "God", and topics pertaining to morality and ethics. (There also happens to be a nice overlap across these topics making it easier for me.)

Starting out is the hardest part. I find that the first books you pick seem to set the stage for one's worldview to a large extent. That's just a correlation from personal experience, not necessarily causation. My basic approach to not blindsiding myself to specific views has been to work my way up through history to understand how the ideas and arguments pertaining to a topic evolved over time. I found that during this phase I have to actively suppress my natural impulse to immediately criticize arguments I come across; I rather assume that I missed something. The next phase for me is to actually dig deeper into some of those criticisms that came up, and see if they hold up.

Next, pick your translations very carefully. Research the best translations for each book before purchasing. /r/askphilosophy and /r/philosophy are great resources for this and the deep-dive phase of your research.

A final piece of advice: read slowly. Comprehension is king when it comes to philosophy. I was reading, re-reading, and parsing through 2-3 pages per hour when I started out. This is mostly because many terms that you wouldn't think are technical turn out to be (for example, Aristotle's use of the term "motion" refers to something much more expansive than what we think of motion as today). However, on the bright side, that speed tends to go up (slightly) over time as you become familiar with the area.

So to summarize: my recommendation to you for developing a personal philosophy is to ask questions first, and then seek out answers that you judge on their merit, regardless of who wrote them.

TLDR: Ask questions first, read widely second, and think for yourself.
Indeed. And look at all the uint_fast32_t, etc, stuff too:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8500677/what-is-uint-fas...
>It seems to me that Microsoft really makes no effort to improve subtle aspects of Windows and hardware integration.

Latest Windows 10 iteration is by far the snappiest OS I've used in a long time since it uses GPU acceleration for the desktop window manager. You can check this in task manager. The icing on the cake, if you gave a laptop with 2 GPUS(Optimus) is when you can run a demanding 3D app like a game in windowed mode in parallel with other stuff like watching videos on youtube and you can see in task manager how windows uses the external GPU to render the game and the integrated GPU to accelerate your web browser, all running butterly smooth.

>In fact, their OS is in such shambles and is a disoriented mess with respect to UI consistency.

True, but that's what you get with 30 years worth of built in backwards compatibility. I can run a copy of Unreal Tournament 1999 that was just copied off an old PC with no sweat right after ripping and tearing in Doom Eternal. Can you run 20 year old software on current Apple without emulation? Apple can afford to innovate in revolutionary ways when it dumps older baggage whenever it feels like it and start from a fresh drawing board without looking back, see intel to apple silicon transition. In 2 years x86 apps will be considered legacy/obsolete on Mac hardware. Microsoft can't really do this with windows so yeah, it's a mess of new GUI elements for the simple stuff and windows 2000 era GUI elements for the deep pro settings. The advantage is that if you're an old time Windows user you can easily find your way using the "old" settings and if you're new to windows you can do most configs through the "new" GUI without touching the scary looking "old" settings.
Even better, since when did "the globe" use roman numerals to begin with? Did the chinese, indians, aztecs, persians, etc use roman numerals? When was there a "global" shift from roman numerals?
Signed overflow being undefined enables a broad range of loop optimizations in a language that has no other way of allowing these to exist.
Ya it really depends. I like redis and Postgres generally speaking for data, and Ruby on Rails generally for business logic. And you can certainly do universal rendering with that easily with react_on_rails. If you do end up needing more perf, maybe go would be interesting.
The moon's diameter is about 0.5°, same for the sun, give or take — think total or annular eclipses, they are very close in angular diameter, if not equal for all practical purposes.

At this moment, December 5, 2020 at 4:20 PM Eastern, Jupiter and Saturn are 1.74° apart. So about 3.5 moon diameters apart right now.

Estimating angles in the sky is very difficult. It's also subject to perception illusions, like the "Horizon Effect" in which the Sun and Moon appear larger that their 0.5° diameter when, in fact, there's no difference.

Some say this effect explains why your penis looks small when you gaze down at it. It's hard to judge, sometimes.
Not all Perso-Arabic mathematics is Indian in origin
*pollution tax that can be reduced to zero if you are capturing (not necessarily at production) the pollutant you're emitting.

e.g. SpaceX shouldn't be taxed on CO2 release from their Raptor engines if they are getting all their methane via the Sabatier process.
Moving bungalows away from the city center allows that land to be used for denser housing, lowering commute times. The exact opposite of NIMBY-enforced suburbanism
Fair, I did an edit.
hmmmm, no complex numbers, no vla... not really what many people call modern C nowadays.
> One of the most frustrating things of this year is dealing with dangerous ignorant bullshit from people like yourself.

TBH, the same could be said about you.
One more benefit of walking in the age of covid: It's one of the few ways to visit with a friend safely. Socialization this winter is going to be tough. Walking outdoors with a friend may be the best way to share your life until Spring or vaccination, whichever comes first.
I am also not attacking Islam but the premise of the article that it ushered an era of "scientific progress".

> Also, the Ottomans never occupied Arabia/the Gulf. They stopped at the Levant. Because there was simply nothing to occupy in an empty desert.

AFAIK Ottoman ruled up to Mecca yet it remained undeveloped. Seems a little bit strange that they had made advancements in architecture yet did not develop the holiest place.
Yup! I hope it gets more love from the scientific community.
https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/5242

Also worth mention would be F#:
https://github.com/SciSharp
That's not a great source.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.06.20207530v...

> By August, the total number of suicides was 7.72% higher than the average number of suicides in the same month of the previous three years.
Which is why I presented the solution as a opinion.