skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of points missing in this article, clearly written by someone looking from the outside and not someone actually familiar with the rental market in Berlin.

Even without these specific rent controls, most rental contracts have either "staffelmiete" or "indexmiete", that is, fixed points at which the rent will increase or an index against which rent is pegged. There are very strong laws supporting renters.

I live in a somewhat newer apartment, so it's not subject to the discussed changes. My rent increases were agreed with the landlord when we moved in, they are fixed in my contract, and after the built in increases are done, the rent won't go up anymore.

The issue with housing and prices is Berlin is not the same as other places in the world. For years Berlin was an economic wasteland. Just now it's become desirable to live here, and there are jobs and an economy to support it. The rent in Berlin is, despite increasing 5-10% per year every year for the past decade, still less than that in Munich or Hamburg. This isn't a case of a speculative bubble or outlier system, just a historically depressed economy returning to the mean, and fast.

Yes, it's unfortunate, that people cannot afford to live in Berlin as they did in 1996. But Berlin is not the city it was in 1996. To alleviate this price pressure, more housing needs to be built than demanded, and that has not been the case for a long time now; place is limited.
Welcome to the UK! Where the government does everything it can to keep house prices afloat. See Help To Buy scheme for first-time buyers and Stamp Duty Holiday to keep the housing market going during the Covid pandemic.
> The jQuery API really is so well done. I stopped using jQuery, but implemented a simple script (jSugar.js) that exposes many basic jQuery things but is really just a wrapper for native DOM operations.

so... like jQuery?
I don’t think individual transactions are meaningfully tied to an energy cost.
Eh, it’s a nightmare even on entirely digital platforms. The photographer insists on using prophoto RGB. The client tweaks the images in photoshop, and saves them in Adobe RGB. They then upload them all, which converts them to sRGB, which looks fine to them and us on our calibrated monitors. An hour later, their MD calls, furious that on his computer, this blue dress looks green, that beige bag looks grey.

Colour is wildly inconsistent across software and hardware. It’s amazing to me that nothing has really changed or got better in decades. If anything, it’s getting worse, with the various HDR standards.
If only we ate grass fed beef exclusively. Unfortunately this is not the case.
I don't know... atomic clocks are approaching precision that can measure the effects of time dilation due to gravity on the order of inches. They have to take into account daily tectonic tides.

> The precision of current optical clocks is astounding. You may have heard that time goes more slowly when gravity is strong due to general relativity. Optical clocks are so sensitive they can measure the different flows of time 2cm apart in height. If I lay a book on the table, the bottom of the book is slightly closer to the center of the Earth than the top, so experiences slightly stronger gravity. This difference is measurable with an optical clock. Optical clocks are so sensitive we can no longer average the time of multiple clocks together—the ground you or a clock are sitting on typically rises and falls by ~5cm a day due to land tides. The seismic motion of the ground currently limits our ability to measure time.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/a-curious-observers-...
Did somebody tell you that in a Youtube video or a post on a suspicious $messenger/$platform? Better get your tinfoil hat ready!

edit, seriously: After about a year of all of this Corona shit, I'm just tired of people spouting conspiracy theories, denying scientific evidence and whatnot. This is probably the biggest crisis after WW2, but lots of people still rather believe in something that "YourDave69" told them on a messenger instead of taking good advise from scientists around the world and working together to get rid of this epidemic.
Yeah, but it's kind of a Pascal's Wager:

Normal investment: maximize expected profit

Competition investment: maximize the probability of your profit being the best in the pool

Normal strategy: 100% chance of losing the competition.
Extremely risky strategy: 99.99% of losing - who cares by how much? There's this 0.01% of winning and it's all that matters.
The bitcoin community is at a general consensus that PoS is inherently insecure
> Use MS Power platform exclusively for reading/writing from MS things and you should be OK.

Through Edge browser. Corporations think "it's secure" to lock stuff to work in one browser and MS is more than happy to deliver this.
Physicist creates AI algorithm that may prove reality is a simulation
Incredible for me, too. The power of building the civilization, one generation after another, and of working together, sharing the knowledge.
The housing situation in London may be special, and I would bet you can find socialist laws behind it that make renting out properties nonviable (like rent controls and making it impossible to get rid of bad tenants). Here in Berlin there is a similar discussion, some people claim empty houses are the cause of the crisis, others say it is a myth. Since I had that debate recently I looked up the articles who found no such surplus, but the "believers" just want to believe, because it is such a handy explanation.

I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.

As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).

Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?

You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.

Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.

You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.

Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.

And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.
My reaction: oh_no_anyway.jpg
This feels like Gigerenzer has read my mind.
Two weeks back I blogged about a simple heuristic to model uncertainty in software estimates [1], and I received confirmation from several people that my proposed technique might be spot-on: estimate your happy path, figure out how many dimensions your uncertainty has, and multiply the happy path estimates by (sqrt PI ^ dimensions)

[1] https://tojans.me/posts/software-estimates-done-right/
And also the same typo on the more general line just above what @anderskaseorg mentions (i.e. `{ expr }`) which should read `{ expr; }` (or line breaks instead of leading space/ trailing ';', etc. Such quirky syntax.)
> When even a major Party Politician can no longer spew lies on (internet) television because the dominant corporation deems his lies to be unacceptable, Freedom of Speech is dead

Looking at it from Europe, this looks like the obvious consequence of decades of "free market fundamentalist" in America. If the free market magically solves all problems, eventually corporations will be making the rules. No surprises here.
I'm of the mind that markets may be rational *given* (and here's the key) a long enough time period.

However, human needs have an expiration date and often cannot wait for the market to make sense.

| That assumes rational actors in local government

No it doesn't, if you can build enough power you can force local governments to enact these kinds of reforms.

All politicians can be pressured if you know where to push.
I can recommend the "Simple heuristics that make us smart" book by Gigerenzer, it's an insightful and entertainig read: for this book he and his co-authors put their money where their mouth is and invested on the stock market based on the most simple heuristics imaginable.
You also earn more in London. The main problem here is the rent increases are always higher than the wage increases in Berlin.
Why would it? One could easily argue the opposite, because high taxes usually means high social safety and thus lower risk for personal finance catastrophes.

Edit: I looked it up, there is no correlation between high taxes and personal debt: Look at this table and spot low tax countries like Ireland or the US, compared to high tax countries like Germany: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/private-debt-to-gd...
Please don't give up our freedom of speech rights just because of crazy Giuliani--those rights were really hard to get and we'll never get them back.
Yes, this is very true. Dutch housing is insane now. Most of the recent increase is due to lower interest rates by the ECB, driving up the price as you say. But in the 90s and 00s people would regularly borrow up to 120% LTV with no downpayment whatsoever. It was the norm to just also borrow for a new kitchen or bathroom, and €0 downpayment on it all.

Ridiculous situation that the banks exploited by offering interest only loans or even stock-mortgages where they would put your down payment in stocks in stead of paying down the mortgage.

The government slammed down hard on it all after 2008 and is also building down the interest deduction, luckily.
Kiwi TCMS v10.0 – first release after reaching 400k downloads
The only thing experience will do is decrease the frequency of errors. I mean this is why there is a movement to prepared statements and safer language. None of us is smart enough to sanitize correctly or avoid buffer overflows.
Death of a Project
"Poverty rate" is usually defined of terms of earning less than the average income minus some %. It does not imply people actually being poor, in the way people imagine poverty (not being able to afford food, clothes, housing...).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.
This is one of the reasons why I am glad that Monero has a tail emission: the block reward never drops to zero, but stays at a fixed amount per block, asymptotically getting closer to 0% inflation per year
Australia confirms extinction of 13 more species
Yeah or Flash :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleform_GFx
I do wonder what it takes to end up on a watch list and assumed attempting to get plutonium or even discussing an attempt would be a guarantee.

I went searching and this website on watch lists appears to be real, whilst also seeming like a joke.

“Since there are many reasons why a traveler may seek redress, DHS TRIP works with the TSC, as appropriate, when an inquiry appears to be related to the watchlist.

The TSC does not accept redress inquiries directly from the public. Instead, members of the public should contact the relevant screening agency with their questions or concerns about screening.”

https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/national-...
hydrogen maybe the only economical way of transporting goods on medium and long distances - you don't wanna drag 5 tonnes of batteries with you.
I have to flip between Chrome and Firefox depending on which bugs in which product I need to avoid :-)

My favourite one is a bug in Flow where you paste a string and the entire UI goes in to an error state (can't even save) so you have to reload and lose any existing changes.
Wait, what?! I recently checked if I can deduce some of the expenses from buying a house, but as long as I buy it myself to live there the state [Germany] says "screw you". If I bought it to rent it out, I could deduce some of the expenses. Now I need to figure out if it makes sensoe to start a housing company to buy a house and rent it out to myself so that I can deduce some of the expenses... (IANAL, but I suppose that might be tax fraud - OTOH I wouldn't be too surprised if it is not).
How exactly does limiting your language give you more options?
The value can be infinite. If you are about to die, you would give everything to prevent it - more than you have.
Twitter isn’t a monopoly? What’s the other popular social network where political discussion happens?

You coming up with David Duke as an example of a controversial ban is an excellent example of my argument. Was this considered controversial? Who supported Duke remaining on Twitter?
- Banglejs has GPS but is big and has no established HR or step counting algorithms
- PineTime is more Apple-like, but the firmware is less mature and has no GPS
- TTGO T-Watch has no HR sensor AFAIK, but some versions may have GPS (see https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/TTGO_TWatch_Library)
- TTGO T-Wristband is like Miband but has no HR sensor again

Of course, you could buy an Android watch or an Apple watch and program your own apps.
Show HN: Teamo 2.0 – Group cards made social
It depends on where the miners and users go.

I don't know that we can predict today what people in the future will view the incentives to be, but its certainly not impossible that the collective view of the bitcoin community might shift towards some change on that front.

I'm not saying this is the only solution, but if having no block rewards really threatens the existence of bitcoin, and a regular inflation rate were deemed to be the beset way to solve that -- the cap on the number of coins isn't actually immutable. There would be a hard fork in that case, sure, but if that's where the people went, that's where the value would go.

Keep in mind that the miners would have some incentive to back a change to that cap. Every block reward would be extracting value from the non-mining users and distributing it to themselves -- similar to the inflation tax we face with normal currencies. It's not inconceivable that they could drag the user base along with if it was seen as existential. A 2% inflation rate is better than the collapse of something holding a significant fraction of one's wealth.
The Nordic private debt has nothing to do with the EU; I'm not sure about Iceland and the Danish territories in the Atlantic, but Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have fairly insane housing markets in the urban areas, and the current record-low interest rates are just pouring the proverbial petrol onto the fire at the moment.

A few generations ago, many people paid of their mortgage within 15 years of buying property. Now, it's usually 30-40 years due to the rapidly inflating prices. It's obvious, to me at least, that this contributes to higher private debt.
I live in Sweden and though I’m debt free from my understanding most household debt it’s either student loans and/or mortgage.

And by student loans I don’t mean the same as US student loans. Education is free and the state lends you money so you can move out of your parents home when you are 18 and can become independent - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_(Swede...
Don't forget the human race also nicely made extinct a whole bunch of mega fauna around in the world. In South America, for example, toxodons, which were the most common ungulate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_American_animals...
It's effectively a partial age-limited UBI.

You get a subsidy when you're younger. You can use it to educate and train yourself, and/or to experiment with different options. This creates an educated population (good) and the more entrepreneurial types can start businesses without worrying too much about bankruptcy.

But permanent studenthood is only a good thing for people with academic talent. So it makes sense to reduce subsidies for the capable as they get older, leaving hardcore welfare support for those can't cope (for various reasons).

This kind of mixed approach removes some of the inflationary pressure of full-fat UBI but provides the same social benefits.
> designed to appeal to bean-counters who ... will not use the software at all

Easy conspiracy theory to postulate, but with WFH "bean counters" use video conferencing software just as much as devs - indeed probably far more intensely.
I think there are some problems with this. Mortgage debt in the Netherlands is fiscally subsidized through an instrument called 'Hypotheekrenteaftrek'. If we want an explanation for high mortgage debt in the Netherlands, that's the cause.

People on welfare can't get a mortgage anyways. So why mortgages would go up because of welfare not only going to pensioners is altogether unexplained. Also I think lumping us in with the Nordics is very questionable. Because although we might fit with the ideal of the 'Nordic model' to a certain extent, it's just easy to leave us out when we don't fit, because we're not a Nordic country geographically or otherwise.
Didn't you write the same, twice?
Unfortunately I think diesel is going to win over hydrogen for a long long time.
I think we have a potential winner. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273246
Six Dr. Seuss Books Will No Longer Be Published Due to Racist Imagery
I feel like Toyota is wasting its money. Maybe I'm missing something. I don't ever see hydrogen fuel cells gaining traction for a few reasons:

* For transport, electric car infrastructure is already growing and hydrogen is exceedingly unlikely to be able to keep up.

* Electric batteries are getting better faster than anyone thought and after a plateau, the rate is accelerating again.

* Energy efficiency, infrastructure, and maintenance of fuel cells is worse than electric cars.

This poorly translated article for VW cover the most of these points in more detail: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...

Most hydrogen advocates discuss new membranes that could improve electrolysis efficiency to 80+%. Even at 100%, the equation still seems to be worse for hydrogen than electric, for transportation at least.
The sad part is that all these tax gimmicks are there not because the state wants welfare but because they want to put up a free market charade. You don't directly encourage additional supply but 'let the market build housing' and support the demand side. It's the same here in Australia, the amount of shenanigans related to buying a house a insane. Of course this only drives up prices and leads to asset bubbles.
Yes and no. Higher savings would also mean more capital to load from. Expected return on investment would be higher, which is probably just a good thing. Lots of non-profitable companies today can keep surviving without doing any real good due to money being cheap.
Potatoes are a staple in many European countries, and cuisine varies wildly between various European countries.
Would it be legal to partner with a friend and rent houses to each other ?
> The reality is that the reason we do these things is to make ourselves feel better. Ah, yes, my daily shot of endorphins from recycling. Ah yes, my bumper sticker makes sure everyone knows I'm one of the good ones -- my social standing is safe

Speak for yourself my friend. The idea that people only make changes, even little ones entirely out of self service is extraordinarily cynical and a very negative and sad view of the world.

Sometimes people just do good things, because they want to improve some minor aspect of our world, or make someone elses (or somethings) day a little bit nicer. Sometimes people do this entirely without the desire to praise themselves or be praised by someone else.

It still exists, but by it's nature you don't often see it. And if you don't believe it exists, even when you do catch a glimpse of it you wouldn't notice or care.

> I think it's all hollow. If you aren't making a real impact -- actually moving the needle -- you are doing nothing. It's just a vanity.

Say on my walk to and from work every day I pick up one single piece of litter and quietly put it in the bin. I do this every day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. That's 500 pieces of litter. Every day those little actions aren't moving the needle at all, but at the end of the year I've actually managed to make a tiny little nudge to my environment around me. Say I tell my friend and they decide to do the same thing, now it's 1000 pieces of litter. They tell 2 of their friends, now it's 2000 pieces of litter. Then I decide to make it 2 pieces of litter, and I tell my friend and they pass it on. Now it's 4000 pieces. They start telling their friends. And so on and so on. The individual action barely nudges any needle, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't moving some needle even slightly. You just don't have strong enough vision.

> I believe in donating money to causes that have high impact. Given my skillset, I'm confident that's by far the best thing I can do. And aside from that, I don't sweat the small stuff. I have a keurig. Yep you heard right. Also donated enough to save a few lives from malaria. Exactly one of those facts about myself made any difference at all to the world.

You don't exist in a vacuum, and my whole point of all my comments is that individual action drives collective change. One person making minor adjustments on it's own is nothing, but if many of those singular people decide to make changes it can lead to amazing things. You can choose to make whatever change you please, I'm glad you believe in some action. But let me ask you, what change do you think you're making by stomping on the idea that multiple little changes can lead to positive effects? Why expend the energy if it's pointless anyway?

Things can be better, and people should try and make as many little positive changes as they can to the world. No person is smart enough, or has enough foresight or knowledge to be able to predict what that may lead to in the future, and personally I choose to be optimistic because why waste my life believing that anything better is a futile mission?
Let them ask you "who are you?" and "what's your name?"
There has got to be a bus stop somewhere between that terminal and the one where Giuliani stepped off the bus.

I don't believe these policies are all-or-nothing, and some level of self-moderation is probably the only way to maintain the freedom that we enjoy without governmental obligation.
Are there any videos? [2] is a video but only 5 seconds long and demonstrates 1 small change on screen. I was wondering if e-ink screen suffers the same problems other e ink screens such as ebook readers
But according to Ancient Aliens, the large stone Pyramids were built by aliens, but the TV cameras recording the show's hosts, with CCDs, and likely 10nm chips inside, were built by humans.

In all seriousness, it's impressive what knowledge sharing and cooperation achieves.
Oh. Wow.

The story is a lot more messed up with the inclusion of that detail. I didn't know.
Isn't Norway in the EEA, hence has to contribute to the fund regardless?
Interview with Andy Crestodina and His Advice to Digital Marketers