skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having lived on another island, with the same woes of SF (limited land, high growth), the problem is always the same - even though it's been on a much smaller scale.

The people that have owned for the past 30-50 years, are completely unwilling to give up on their single family homes, gardens, etc. They basically demand to live a nice and cushy suburban life, in the middle of a big city.

It then takes forever to build vertically, because for every projects that's proposed, there are hundreds, of not thousands of protests from neighbors that'll lose some sunlight, depreciation of property value, and what not - or they just don't like the modern architecture. So it can take YEARS to just get the first shovel in ground, because these projects go through so many rounds in city councils and what not.

That's how you end up with extremely partisan / one-sided city councils, consisting of established home/land owners, that will fight tooth and nail to impose draconian zoning laws, and general NIMBY-politics.
I grew up in suburbs, I went to school in suburbs. I met my wife in the suburbs, I had my first kiss in the suburbs. I definitely had some formative events that occurred on the mid-90s Internet, and would not be the person I am today without it.

But I for damn sure also wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't rode my bike to my friends' houses to trade floppy disks or watch Schwarzenegger films, or sneaked out to the mall to meet folks, or hung out at the neighborhood strip-mall comic shop and picked up various CCGs and RPGs.
Most Frequently Mentioned ML Topics in 2020
My thought exactly.
But Google has built such a big moat that it'd be hard for any new player to take out any considerable market share from them.
Comments do not support HTML. I would imagine Too many issues with parsing, injection/security etc.
Oakland relaxed a lot of zoning, and permitting regulations about 5 years ago, and so now you're starting to really see production sky rocket. This article [0] mentions 2019 was had 15x more units completed than 2018. And 3x the total units from 2013-2018 combined. Anecdotally, I have several friends who've all moved to Oakland in the last year or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and maybe, hopefully, SF will take the hint.

[0] - https://www.city-journal.org/oakland-rezoning-california-hou...
Creativity in a World of Technology: Does It Exist?
Would a chip (such as a CPLD/FPGA) implementing mmc/sd be an option? It could host a chainloader with PCIe support and serve as a kind of rom.

Also, is there any work on kernel level x86 emulation on arm for expansion roms?
fwiw, this claim was brought forth by a environmental group. Nestle sued them in court and won.
As a data point: I asked for 25% off my 1 bedroom rent (which seemed like roughly market rate). They said something along the lines of "we're not lowering any rents because we're struggling due to the economy".

So, I left and they got nothing. I doubt they're going to rent it out again for a while.
Is Substack the Media Future We Want?
I mean.. so is uranium. When you don't specify amounts, you can say this about nearly anything that can be found outside a lab setting at all.

I'm not saying there's no threat here, just that this headline is worthless.
You may enjoy that podcast about how the Army Corp of Engineers do these things: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/americas-last-top-mod...
Human are turning into cyborgs through wearable technologies
I'm 61. Been paid to write software for 42 years. I make it a point to add a new technology with every project. Currently that's Vuejs. Next one will be Blazor based, I think. It's the way I keep my skills up to date and myself hireable. I'll never retire cause even if I stopped working for others, I'd still be writing code for myself.
The children's books actually show hansome princes very rarely. Those are featured in traditional stories, m but most children's books in bookstore are decisively not that.

What you call well established story tropes is not actual content of actual children's books.
I grew up in a suburb. As kids, we found plenty to do, often involving places where we weren't supposed to be. The nature of suburbia as boring didn't even occur to us until we were teenagers, and then it led to adventures that can't be portrayed in children's books.
Sure, but look at yesterday. In the near term, we clearly can't decommission the gas power plants because we still need them sometimes, but when the wind blows (as it often does), we save burning that gas and the associated CO₂ release.
Maybe it is not for lack of trying but it is surprising to me that the desktop UI of today (say MacOS Big Sur) is the same "windows, icons, menus and a mouse pointer", beyond some improvements in animation and graphics, as it was 20 years ago (say Windows 2000).
I DIYed an ErgoDash for about €150, mostly from keycapsss.com. That meant buying a PCB, case, parts kit, Arduinos etc from them, and key switches and cheap keycaps from China.

You can further reduce the cost by ordering the PCB yourself from China, and some components from electronics suppliers, or laser cutting a case yourself at a maker space (or doing without).

It's also possible to do without a PCB, and handwire the whole thing. This is common where there's little alternative, like on the Dactyl or Dactyl Manuform 3D keyboards.
GPU yes, rest no.
In the Noe Valley rent is still pretty darn high. While that is to be expected in this area, a lot of people have moved out and the neighborhood is a little vacant. With the massively high rents I imagine most landlords paid off mortgages, so could these expensive properties remain empty indefinitely?
Resilience: Things
It exists!

Cling- https://root.cern/cling/ (and the earlier Cint- http://www.hanno.jp/gotom/Cint.html)

I used to occasionally use them for local experimenting with libraries and language features.
Yes, it actually is. Web agencies throughout the world build and launch thousands (likely more) of sites a day in Wordpress. They are all legitimate businesses that once had other CMSs or just never had a web presence.
You need to rent a coffin space in a Carvana car[1], a bit like what they do in Japan[2].

1. http://media.culturemap.com/crop/65/17/633x475/Carvana-vendi...

2. https://montaraventures.com/blog/wp-content/2008/06/coffinho...
LaTeX. We have Microsoft Office. Then we have its lacking competitors. There's also InDesign for professional creatives.

There's a huge gap for LaTeX to fill, or to potentially fill, but it's not happening. The other day I saw it described as "a neckbeard knitting circle, not viable software". As a LaTeX "fan", that hurt but it's the truth.

Over the past months, I had to collaborate with various different people across various different organizations. Everything in MS Word. I don't even hate MS Word, it's useful and its dominant position isn't entirely undeserved. But holy cow was working together a gigantic pain in the behind. I really started to loathe it (Excel is far worse and did its part too).

This was all with technical people. They could potentially grasp WYSIWYM approaches like LaTeX. Slap git and CI/CD on top and you're where software developers have been 10 years ago. But my industry is still light years away.

Part of it is how Word "just works". But it takes 5 seconds of using it until it doesn't. If LaTeX was more modern and also approachable (very ugly syntax/language. Could learn from Markdown here), technical folk could ditch Word and really upgrade their workflows. I'm sick of Word templates from 2004.
I'm not so sure. Could he have moved back in with his parents? Could he have gotten a second job (at McDonald's or something?) I'm not suggesting that these would be good, or easy options, only that homelessness was not a forgone conclusion. This comic is only one man's personal story, and it does not necessarily coincide with the general demographic and economic trends of the time. ie, it's not clear that his story speaks about the particular hardships of one age compared to the hardships of another.
It looks like they try to compensate for that, per their FAQ page:

> For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco, see our technology overview for more explanations. We do crawl more sites, but we use the top 10 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for "throw-away" sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
My favorite startup management hack of 2020
Gutenberg is not made for somebody that knows html. Install a raw html post plugin for admins and it’s more or less usable.
> Expressing gratitude and accepting compliments are nice skills to have, but making of it a public show is just bad taste, IMO.

I wonder if this is a culture or generational difference. I've found my employer's incentives / gestures a bit lackluster compared to simple gratitude. I like working on a team where the members are publicly thankful for their teammates' efforts. Shrute Bucks stink.
Raising taxes on the land owner will result in increased rents. Land owners are not in the business of giving money away.
... or when wind / solar drops another 40-50% in cost and we have excess capacity.
Little of all - as an example, one of my previous jobs was enhancing control software for a german-made product (no, not that).

Also worth mentioning: the UK has a cool, maritime climate and abundant natural gas, so there's just not much demand for the biggest sink of residential electricity. This is one of the UK's bigger challenges for further decarbonisation: the political consequences of a cold, windless spell, electrical heating, and lots of pensioners would be... interesting.
What’s super fun is that if you’re a US citizen who is an EU resident, no US-domiciled mutual fund is allowed to be sold to you because they don’t meet the EU's customer disclosure requirements, but you’re an idiot if you buy the EU-domiciled ones you’re allowed to because of US-assessed PFIC.

Closest solution I’ve found is a Schwab International Account based in the US, and buying Berkshire Hathaway shares, because it's so broadly invested in lots of other companies.
Ah okay, I somehow thought that Nintendo had used microkernels on other devices too, not just the Switch. The Nintendo Switch is certainly not a constrained device.
A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize
> freedom of movement in the United States

To the extent that this means the freedom of poor people to get out of the way of rich people, you can see how some would not be excited. SF's black population has fallen by half in recent decades, for example.

Honestly, the geographic narrowness of the tech boom has always been weird. At the same time we've been selling the limitless power of the Internet to connect people, we've also been working for companies whose structures didn't demonstrate that, and in a financing ecosystem where physical proximity to VCs was a major advantage. So San Francisco got turned into a bedroom community for South Bay companies in areas that refused to build adequate housing for their workers.

Thanks to the pandemic, that is evaporating. We'll see what happens in 6-12 months, when everybody's vaccinated. But the people I'm talking to are unable to remember why commuting every day was ever a thing, and they're very reluctant to go back to it. In which case, we'll write SF's housing issues off as just another bubble.
Well most of those cities are full of the Richer Nimbys who can afford to buy and commute to SF.
Also, if you change that to "children's shows" instead of "children's books", most of them are set in something resembling a suburb: Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, Bubble Guppies, etc. Sesame Street is a notable exception.
Eh, it's fine. I used to live on the Arctic Circle for 20+ years. You get used to it.
Can confirm this anecdotally. My rent dropped by about that much, as did that of my friend.
> I don't think monkey patching is required

We're talking about a repl here, not just a basic shell. You'll need to be able to redefine functions and everything else at runtime so a repl is all you need to run your program. A lisp with a standard repl is running miles around any editor/ide with debugger support, as the workflow with repls, especially ones that can nest on exception and so on, is much faster.
> I understand your disdain for their new editor, but it is not required. The great part about Wordpress is the ecosystem of plugins and customizability of the CMS. You can just add the Classic Editor plugin and you can use the old editor - it is that simple.

You can do this if you pay for hosting or an account on wordpress.com. As this was meant to be a pet project, I really didn't want to pay for it, so went with the wordpress.com free account.

> If the editor is laggy it is because of the server / infrastructure you are using, not the editor. I can guarantee this as a fact.

I mean, you'd think that Wordpress's own editor wouldn't lag on their free account/hosting, especially if they're wanting people to upgrade and not leave?

> If you are just doing a pet project and simple blog and you don't want to spend a few minutes to figure things out, then it might not be for you.

I've spent the time trying to figure it out. The bigger issue is I don't want to pay currently, until I'm certain I'm going to stick with this project. Sadly, the only way to fix the problems is by paying.
There is overhead cost to having tenants as well that may not make the drop in rent worth it. As someone mentioned, if you drop rent by a significant amount, banks have to adjust you potential profitability, and that's a big downside. Its also harder to get rent prices back to where they were once you drop them.
Not the GP, but I see it happening with a global, but decentralized ID system. I wrote about a possible design at https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-... .
Semi-related, the Hayabusa 2 has an incredibly cool real time dashboard that's publicly accessible [0].

[0] http://haya2now.jp/en.html
2020 in Review and Glimpse of 2021
> unwilling to give up on their single family homes

I think that expecting people to "give up their homes" is more than unreasonable. The reasonable compromise being that builders can build in more densely once the current owners sell it.
There so much land in the US. People don't have to live in San Fransisco. These people grew up there, they want to live in their home. You know, that emotional thing that money can't really explain.
Sure they see the people arriving in, with huge paychecks that drive prices up, and them out as bad.

Any human will, a rational agent won't.
Thank you, I may have misspoke but this is what I was referring to.
I’m always curious how heat dissipation is supposed to work in these space projects. The vacuum of space is a hell of a good insulator as far as I know, no?
Reading Design: online archive of critical writing about design
Unlike uranium, which is naturally present in garden-variety dirt, chemicals like PFAS and PFOS are almost certainly made by humans.
Orgzly: Emacs Org-Mode for Android
SF is still a major city and there are premiums due to that. You're talking about having rents in SF close to those in places like Nashville or Dallas which I think is totally unrealistic.
The problem is ... We didn't have any remote workers in BC era. So, everything would be discussed & finalized over impromptu whiteboard sessions as-and-when-needed. The team is super-lazy on email communications too.

:(
Dear SF,

More apartments built will not help make housing more affordable for normal people.

Learn about the NYC real estate market- even pre covid apartment vacancy was extremely high, and the true numbers are unknown because building developers are manipulating the market by releasing units slowly.

With all the excessive inventory in NYC, you'd think that a normal person (defined by median income) could afford to buy... But it's still not possible here.
Stories of how softwares/products got their name
The Transferwise Borderless page (see section "Coverage") says they provide a local bank ID in several countries (ABA/Routing in the US, SWIFT/BIC and IBAN in the EU etc), so it seems like it would be like a real local bank account?

I'm thinking this could be quite useful for digital nomads.
Julia is kind of nice example of what’s possible with dynamic language and static types.
No mention about TDP. I wonder what it is.

The ECC RAM could make this a good candidate for ZFS.

I've subscribed to the CrowdSupply campaign: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sra-centr8/icepeakitx-elbrus-8cb
KeyDecoder: Open-source Key Decoding app
It is unlikely that we are going to have millions of African nevermind Indian immigrants living in China considering the current problem with religious non Han minorities.

1. Locate the factories in Africa as it is huge and has untapped natural resources.

2. Establish special economic zones in China where immigrants can enjoy a higher standard of living than back home but with no possibility of citizenship or even settling there in the long term.
Change the zoning and speed permits and watch it happen.
Call a spade a spade: how the police murdered Breonna Taylor.

So frustrating that so many American's just accept that the police force here has become what the Judge Dredd comic satirized: judge, jury and executioners.
And then who would want to live in SF? Surely not the people who love it now.
> My thinking: this is basically in the category of national-prestige project, where the ability to do domestic production in certain product categories is basically about national self-image rather than a commercial concern.

No, it's clearly a Russian national security project around supply chain security. IIRC, while the US is pretty good on the processor front, they have similar concerns around other ICs and components.
That concern, though, is something I've grown much more sympathetic to. There's a fundamental unfairness in putting in work to make your local community great, making it so good that rich people want to live there, and then being told that the community no longer has room for you because the rent is too high. If the city won't allow enough housing to keep your area affordable, you have a right to feel aggrieved, and it's understandable that you might misdirect the grievance if you have no lived experience of a city successfully expanding the housing supply.
Unless something has changed, using that means no Webassembly support on Windows[0].

[0]https://github.com/webview/webview/issues/76
Kids do what is available. And kids are definitely able to use more then just yard.

Yard gets boring when you are like 6. Then the kids either have bigger space to bike, explore, play actual hide and seek where they can actually hide etc .... or move all activities inside typically toward videogames.
Chinese court sentences lawyer who reported on Covid-19 outbreak
A Free Tool to Improve Your Writing
artificially restricted supply

Let's not pretend this is Milton's economic utopia.
What should we do robbyt?
How is North Dakota doing? Meanwhile Hong Kong and Tokyo escaped relatively unscathed.
How does DuPont get away with claiming they "never" manufactured PFAS, PFOS, or GenX?

https://www.dupont.com/pfas.html
The Goal - Eli Goldratt. The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim.
The way that the article is phrased as food/area hints at where/why vertical farming could be a benefit. It seems unlikely that in the near future vertical farming will overtake traditional farming methods where land is plentiful. Indeed, the costs of the food being grown are still 5x higher. But where land/transportation costs are the most prohibitive for food this could potentially be viable.
Citation needed.

The biggest issue with residental construction today is approval process and the amount of land that can be utilized.

An unreliable approval process means increased investment risk which keeps away investors.

Setbacks and parking space requirements significantly impact the amount of usable living space per acre of land.

Both of the above can be addressed by local municipalities. High density dwellings are going up all around in the rest of the US.
Robotic Process Automation with Python
When I worked in networking I often had the new folks / interns sitting next to me for a while.

Discussions about 'pick your battles' and other similar ones were the most common.
You can still find them all on archive.org if you dig deep enough. For about 10 years there was no e-sheep site at all. I've kept a copy of the original "The Guy I Almost Was" (slightly different images in the ending, and no javascript) on my local mirror (http://superkuh.com/almostguy/) for decades.

Almost Guy is still my favorite but "Night at the rave" is just so wholesome I love it too. "A Suitable Seed"s message still hits just as hard today as it did in the 90s. Farley makes great comics.
You should be outraged, not scared. But what he's saying isn't that there's nothing to be scared of, just that this particular type of BS is just as often written about things that actually aren't real problems.

This is the exact same tone the anti-vaccination crew consume constantly - it holds no numbers, and threatens us with words like "poison", "unique properties", and "have confirmed links", without specifying how strong those links are, or how much actual impact they have. With a good study, you can have a statistically significant outcome of "increases the odds of rectal cancer over a lifetime by 0.0001%", but that shouldn't really motivate much change, since you can say that about bananas.

It's attention-inducing alarmism: "scaremongering".

Most of the country consumes 'science' only through the lens of journalism, and journalists have been doing an increasingly awful job of helping readers distinguish between real problems, potential problems, and non-issues. Fear sells a lot better than science does.
I truly believe that one of the ways to measure the evolution of a society is how it takes care of the vulnerable groups: children, elders, and people with disabilities.

Of course there are other social problems, and inequalities, like racism, unemployment, sexism... but the difference is that these groups still have strength and a voice. The vulnerable groups are exposed and left at the waves of the society.

While people were complaining because they had to stay some weeks inside, you have countries where the elder are still in isolation after 9 months, only to finally get the virus to creep in slowly and start to wipe a lot of them. It's borderline criminal.

It's sad, and it makes me worried for when it will be my turn. If we're this detached from the problems of old age, we won't have a good end.
Given the 600k+ installations of the "Disable Gutenberg" plugin[1], this is not an uncommon opinion. It sounds like this would be a good option for you.

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-gutenberg/
What precisely are you proposing? A gui for creating latex documents?
Actually if you are not running your own servers you can just pay double for a month instead of buying the hardware and having it surplus when the migration is done.
Probably not. I mean, you could, but you'd very likely have a lawsuit. Here is the Uber trademark application:

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:tal...

Note the broad claims under 'transport of persons and goods.'

You'd have to consult a specialist lawyer to get a real answer, but it would be risky at least.

Yes, a trademark is a kind of monopoly, on things being named in certain ways. But they aren't monopolies on products or services.
A Decentralized Government.
an excellent point. the standard last-mile problem, except for food in developing countries.

its been this way for several decades.