skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can’t know, and you don’t need to know. I think that’s really missing point of what I said. There is no requirement that Wikileaks or any media only publishes simultaneous dirt on opposing politicians. That would be impossible and can never make sense by the own twisted standards people who complain about Wikileaks are constantly coming up with. To make it possible would mean wikileaks would have to hold back publishing dirt on one until they had enough on the other. Which automatically makes Wikileaks biased in that time period in favor of the one they hold back on. Complaining about Wikileaks publishing dirt makes no sense. The only thing that can make sense is if evidence were ever leaked from a whistleblower in Wikileaks that they had dirt on someone they didn’t leak. Then you’d have evidence of bias. Until then there is none.
The course is $99, the diagnostic test package they've linked is $176.

That's a high entry price for something so similar in concept to the brain-training snake-oil schemes that used to be sold in the back of magazines
Maybe not 50%, but there's certainly a strong bias in that data toward friday/saturday nights. Since the data resets at midnight rather than on bar hours, look at the difference in midnight-4am data on saturday and sunday mornings, vs the rest of the week.
Volvo XC60’s rank low on reliability metrics for their price range. So, uhh what have you been driving?
You'd need more cooperation to put a pin-code activated electronic gate up.
It has a lot of impact on me even if I try to ignore because I see so much sharing of misinformation and sources that are not even close to credible. It is especially troubling when it is from people I trust and respect and it takes a lot of self control to ignore and move along as I know arguing online about these things online hardly ever improves the situation.
I still managed to learn another two languages, it's possible.
If the bank repos the property and it sells for less than the debt owed, they can and will come after you for the difference.
I was hoping they would explain how exactly this is happening? What about the amazon seller ecosystem allows this to happen in the first place. Why aren't reviews linked to the SKUs?
Bubble Candles
Except that the spooks failed even when it came to unseating Noriega because they had to call in the military to stage an invasion.

The only two cases that I’m aware of where the US clandestinely toppled a foreign government were Chile and Iran - and apparently even the Iranian operation was mostly driven by the British secret service. And by all accounts, Chile was more of a nudge than a push.
This argument isn’t as solid as it sounds, mainly because you have to live somewhere. So you’re going to need to pay rent and you need to subtract that off the profits from S&P investments.

You also generally can’t borrow 5x your income and invest it, but you can do that on a house, so if you think house prices will rise, even a tiny bit, then you’re missing out on a chance for major leverage you won’t get elsewhere. Hint: house prices don’t really go down much, because everyone is leveraged and literally can’t afford to sell below a certain point.

Finally there’s something to be said for the security and ability to make a house your own. Not being dependent on a landlord’s whims and decisions can be of huge value.
Locking people into their homes like Spain and France did might have other ill effects, like a depression epidemic. Or people getting fed up with stupid politically motivated approaches gathering en masse to protest, making matters worse. The problem in Southern Europe is that people like to party. That still doesn't warrant 1 km radius lockups which I hope would be deemed a violation of human rights in court. I understand that we're not allowed to gather in large groups, but restricting going out on a bike ride alone or with your partner or walking the dog is quite a different matter. Also the French curfew is exagerated, eleven o'clock would have worked equally well. I guess we shall see in a few years which approach was correct.

I just hope the vaccines achieve immunity and stop this pandemic. This is great news. Too bad it's not approved in the EU yet. Hopefully early next year.
Definitely not all truck driving, but an autonomous truck that's able to handle highway driving in good weather is a much easier problem that would put a significant number of truck drivers out of work
this is usually why a special purpose vehicle is used to buy the second property - buck stops there
If homes appreciate by 1%, the market averages 8% (taking the article as given), but rent's going up 10% yearly, I'm not sure the numbers still work out in the writer's favor. The market doesn't just have to beat real estate, it has to beat Cost of Living.
Nanomedicine and the Covid-19 Vaccines
If they are truly unable to pay, California already has a means tested tax postponement program:

https://sco.ca.gov/ardtax_prop_tax_postponement.html

reply
I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight.

In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube.

This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.

I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it.

For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles:

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCknMR7NOY6ZKcVbyzOxQPhw

2. https://www.youtube.com/user/christopherfrost

3. https://www.youtube.com/user/JaredPolin
Our sneak peek of the most promising cars, trucks, and SUVs of the next few years including the Ferrari Purosangue SUV and GMC Hummer EV.
It has become increasing difficult to find good reviews too. The use of affiliate links means there are a lot of affiliate link farm sites now that do top 10 product listings and sometimes they make really hard to determine if they know what they are talking about or not. You can waste a lot of time trying to find real roundup reviews that aren't just affiliate link scam sites on search engines.
I'm sorry but it's troll-level behaviour to slap the "insignificant market share" label on the entire northeast and midwest which includes 6/10 of the largest "urban agglomerations in North America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_urban_aggl...
I agree with most of the analysis. But for the average person the biggest advantage of a mortgage is that it's a form of forced disciplined investment.

A mortgage requires you to make an upfront downpayment and then recurring monthly payments into a durable asset. You could put them same amount into equities, but 90% of people won't have the financial discipline. And even of those who do, the average equity investor gets skittish and tends to panic-sell at the bottom, missing out on huge accumulated gains over time.

For one thing selling your home is a lot harder process than pressing a button. For another you don't get a constant stream of updated marked-to-market prices. If you're a perfectly rational, even-tempered homo economicus, then low-fee index fund is a much better better deal than real estate. But there's a reason why historically home ownership has created much more middle-class wealth than stocks.
I'm repackaging my code snippets for common features on React JavaScript?
Hey there, to rebound on the title, would you be interested in getting a copy of code snippets for a list of features that you don't have to build yourself from scratch? I noticed each time I start a new project I copy-paste code from my past projects which saves me time. I thought you could make use of it as well. What do you think? interested?
Counting Twitter Followers over Time, the Corey Quinn Way
> That is to say that if you have bought a $1m home in 1948, it will be worth, in average today, taking inflation into account, $1 745 809,82. The same investment in the S&P500 will be worth $74,426,964.60.

Yes, but does this account for the fact that you need to be leveraged at $1 million at margin rates for that period of time? Or is it just looking at the upside of putting a million in the S&P500?

It reminds me of the ole “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics” saying. Without context I’m not sure how much to trust this.
It's likely Amazon. Of course, there are instances where (e.g. mason jars) where fakes may be acceptable as they're commodity products.

It's tiring using Fakespot just to find dozens of D and Fs. For the most part, I use other retailers or just don't buy the item (surprisingly it's a zen option to not buy stuff you don't pressingly need).
Sadly, you would never be able to play Bust A Move 2: Dance Tengoku Mix with this, and really that's the only game that I want to play.
I think the comparison of a house vs other investments is a bad comparison - you need to live somewhere. You need to compare buying a house to renting a house or apartment or whatever. People do view houses as investments, sure, but I think that's fundamentally misleading. Compare the basic cash flow of the different options available. Figure out how much you're willing to pay for being close to work, close to friends, having more or less space, being in a walkable neighbourhood or whatever else matters. As much as I enjoy the illusory dollar value gains of home ownership, ultimately I had to work within the confines of my budget.

Also I think this line of thought is also misleading: "For most people, their home investment represents a large part of their net worth."

That's true but it's because of inflated house prices and reflects the fact that Americans don't save that much. Again, just treat a house as a liability and not an asset and suddenly this is meaningless and we can get back to managing cash flows and thinking about increasing savings. (Although as a side note, being very aggressive savers isn't necessarily great for a country as a whole, Germany is very conflicted about it's very high savings rates - for example, https://www.dw.com/en/why-cant-germans-stop-saving-money/a-4...)
As someone with rental properties, I love articles like these. Keep on renting!
Chances are China might still not be able to make complex engine in the next 20 years with focuses on AI and decline of manufacturing. IT/Engineers positions earns 5x more and there are lots more positions than mechanic engineer
Some states are recourse states when it comes to first mortgages. In all states (I believe!) second mortgages are recourse loans. Your second sentence is not true in a lot of circumstances.
The NYT calculator for this is pretty great and is a more substantive way to evaluate the decision than this article for your specific circumstances.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

I do think the cliche about "throwing away money" on rent is wrong and ignores how much of what you pay for a house is for things like interest, insurance, repairs, maintence, property taxes, etc -- but for me home ownership made sense, mostly due to expected length of stay in the home. There are also benefits, of course, that aren't dollars, to either renting or buying. For example, a homeowner may like additional freedom to change the flooring.
That's what's supposed to happen though right?

People start making products. They get better and better at it. They move up the value chain. Etc. That's market capitalism.

China is only doing it as fast as they are because we take ill advised actions like declaring, "We won't give you X anymore." As if that will stop a nation like China from figuring out how to manufacture the X's they need to make Y's. Naturally, they start successfully manufacturing X's a lot sooner than experts expect because they have greedy businessmen who want to continue making money selling Y's.
Hey just FYI, when you run the hackernews and explore examples without enabling the tokio feature flag, you get compilation errors about undeclared types for all the tokio stuff. I think these examples just need entires in the Cargo.toml requiring the tokio feature like the reddit example.

Once I add the tokio feature, they all run as expected.
I don't know, it kinda makes sense to have the reviews for phone (blue) in the phone (red) page. It's not like the colour is a major part of the product (in the sense that most reviews won't be about the colour, not that it is not important). Same with cable x1 or x2. Though it certainly is an issue if it changes the product in a major way (say, taste of a yogurt).
I'm considering purchasing a home, not as an investment; but because my return rate on rent is 0%.

I just need a home and have a flexible ~2-year time window to buy, and just need advice on when to buy.

Does this article apply to my decision making?
> Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

An economist visits Communist China and they proudly show him a railway being built. He notices the workers are using shovels to dig the holes, instead of construction machines.

- Why don't you use construction machines?

- We care a lot about the workers here, using construction machines would make some of them unemployed!

- Well, in that case, I suggest you make them use spoons instead.
> You also generally can’t borrow 5x your income

You can easily access 3X levered ETFs. Also, while you start out at 5X leverage, you pay down the principal over time. Over the lifetime of a 30-year mortgage, your average leverage is closer to 2X.
This is the trend because the existence of the brand's website as a multi-seller marketplace is considered more valuable/higher ROI than the actual direct selling of items. And that's a reasonable view considering most of what is being sold is commodity and prices, thus margin, having downward pressure.
The e-commerce website gets a positive reputation and a brand is built for being a good place to buy things, so it expands into being a hosting platform other sellers, with the intent of drawing more customers based on the brand reputation.
> I think now it is the time for a serious competition to take business out from them.

I think this is Walmart nowadays. They bought Jet in 2016 and seem to have scaled Jet up and everywhere. Jet was the last company I know of to go up against Amazon.

I think it’s a real opportunity for a Chinese or Korean brand. Or if Aldi/IKEA want to go into retail space.
There's a bit of a difference though between "all nursing home patients" and "the exceedingly frail ones". This might vary between countries to, as people in some countries might get put in nursing homes sooner than others.
I despise this practice. I ran into it recently with the LOTR 4K Bluray set. I was going to leave a 3 or 4 star review, since while it's fantastic, the image detail is hardly an improvement over the standard bluray version, with some claiming the 4K wasn't even a full rescan from the originals. Side by side shots show very minor at best improvements to detail, with most of the actual benefits coming from HDR.

Since a 3 or 4 star review was pointless given their SKU grouping, I left a 1 star review. If 10% of users started punishing companies and Amazon with 1 star reviews they would change pretty quickly.
The judge originally even didn’t want to rule on the case. It looks very much they wanted the case to go to a different court and have nothing to do with it.
Depends on the loan and the state (in the US). In most US states, a mortgage can be either recourse (which is as you described) or non-recourse (lender can only cover the debt using the house, not any other assets) - no idea which is more prevalent there. I live in a non-recourse state, which forbids recourse mortgages - https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-a-rec...?
Does common lisp have any great libraries for working with data? I’ve been reading some books over the holiday and I’d like to start getting my hands dirty, but my background is R, and my day to day is statistical analysis and graphics.
My favorite analysis on this:

https://earlyretirementnow.com/2018/03/21/best-investment-ev...
Excellent article.

I'm always arguing with my parents on this topic and i have hard time explaining them the concepts that are clearly described in this article.

One point that worth analyzing further is to take into account that if you don't buy your house, you have to pay a monthly rent for your home. And, so depending on the situations there might be cases where ownership is still financially more interesting.
I think Ben Thompson does a good job laying out the situation fairly in this article: https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-ub...

It’s not exactly a primer on the good faith arguments for employee vs contractor, but it does break down where each classification works and where each is problematic, and he comes to the conclusion that neither is appropriate to capture (in relation to CA’s gig classification bill from last year) “the protections and revenue-collection apparatus that California deems necessary while still preserving the flexibility and market-driven scalability that make these consumer welfare-generating platforms possible.”
Well you have to live somewhere, right? Either buying or renting - unless you can find free room and board (in that case, invest in the stock market instead).

I found the NYT rent vs by calculator to be pretty helpful when making this decision on my own https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
> For most people, their home investment represents a large part of their net worth. From a diversification perspective, it's a catastrophe. It's not even a diversified investment in different real estate assets, it's one asset in one location. This means it is also a bad move in terms of optionality. If crime rises in your neighborhood, the school closes, or if you have a good job opportunity elsewhere, it's very hard to move. If a crisis happens at this location, an investor can lose a lot of their net worth and can wait up to 15 years for the recovery.

Full stop. Housing is not supposed to be an investment. You buy a house because you need a place to live, not to turn a profit. If you treat housing as an investment, good for you. But I couldn't care less about the fact that housing isn't as good as an investment as the stock market. If crime rises or whatever, then you sell, and you take a loss. I certainly don't expect to sell my old clothes for a net profit when they wear out. Or my car, or any of the things I own out of necessity.

Stop thinking about money.
Tried that... you get a generic response and then no one ever follows up. Someone took over several of my email accounts and created a fake YouTube channel and Adwords/Adsense/Google ads account. Every time I reach out, they ignore and never get back to me. Pretty frustrating that Google is essentially enabling criminals and ignoring the victims.
I don't know what to believe. I feel like it isn't hard to cherry pick some examples.

I'll a townhouse I know about.

1994: $76.5k

2020: $239.5k

$76.5k in 1994 is $134.3k inflation adjusted in 2020. 75.5% increase in 26 years. 2.9%/year

S&P500 opened 465.44 in 1994. With inflation it should be 817.28. It's 3737 right now. lol
And yet we are discussing whether something is "dead" according to pg, which is to say irrelevant to the startup hype train.
there is some kind of implied machine capability that a layman assign to a computer. If a task is culturally ( through movies , series, ... ) though to be within that implied capability people will be comfortable. ( cf automatic trains, ... )
> People do not lose their shirts when leveraged real estate purchases go wrong, because it's the bank holding the bag

That is not true, both parties suffer. Imagine paying 10 years worth of mortgage in a place turned bad (NY in 80s, Detroit recently, Greece even more recently) and finding out that you're still in very negative equity. All your payments have been for nothing, and the most reasonable course of action is to go bankrupt and have the house foreclosed.

Also, US mortgages are on central government balance sheet, not bank balance sheet, so it's the taxpayer that suffers.
I think the argument is that "experiences" can be just another form of consumerism. You've replaced buying stuff with buying "experiences". But that's the great thing about experiences - they don't have to cost any money at all. A backyard campfire with friends, beer, and good conversation is just as memorable as a meal at a restaurant. And way cheaper to boot.

Some of my most cherished experiences have cost a lot. Others have cost very little. It's clear that the value of an experience is entirely unrelated to how much we spend on it. The key to avoiding lifestyle inflation is selecting more of the cheaper memorable experiences.

The purpose of accumulating wealth (not necessarily into old age) is to have security and freedom. Someone who is financially independent at 45 has way more opportunity to experience life than someone chained to a desk until 65 because they have to pay for their "experiences".
I have to say...I'm not sure about the content but highlighting 3-4 things every paragraph is pretty off-putting. It's almost like ALL CAPS.
It depends where you live. In some states, home mortgages are generally non-recourse loans which means that lenders are only entitled to the securing asset (i.e. the home). California is such a state, for example.
The only thing that qualifies as a operations research problem is how to distribute a limited output of vaccines across a population in order to minimize the epidemic's spread and fatalities.

Thats exactly what I am talking about.

There are at least two choices: give to higher risk elderly people in care homes and care workers first, or give to frontline health staff first, and a pair of parallel choices of give one dose to as many as possible or give two full doses to the people who get the first dose, alongside which of the three currently qualified vaccines to give.

This is precisely what I think is the O/R decision. What to do, with limited vaccine and multiple choices of how, and who to give it to.

People are already arguing about what maximises benefit.

Blair publicised a logical choice to give the maximum number of people one dose now, and give the second dose when more arrives. This invites the question if 80-90% coverage of fewer people is better or worse than 70% coverage of more people. He didn't think of it btw, he just publicised it. If this is called "the Blair choice" it will be a crying shame.

There will be around 6 distinct vaccines soon. What if different vaccines give better response, than giving the same twice as a booster? (this is a possibility)

People are trying to maximise benefit to the individuals, and to the economy. So its two-outcome maximising with at least 4 and very probably more like 8 or 10 distinct choices of outcome.
My wife and I bought our home for a simple reason: we wanted to own our home and not be beholden to a landlord. We placed the value of that higher than "but you'll make more money by renting", etc.

When we decided we hated the look of the kitchen, we tore it out and replaced it. We'll get to keep any increased equity (questionable, sure) that we made for doing so. My wife is giving the bathrooms a similar look lately, so I suspect she has plans to gut them as well.

Nobody can tell us "no" (to an extent). That's a kind of freedom I'm willing to pay for.
Same here. I wonder if Amazon employees stopped eating their own dog food, and would be interesting to be a fly on the wall for how they are trying to solve this problem.

I fear that they’ve done the math and decided that they make more money this way than a quality way.