skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved to Berlin with partner in late 2019. We were looking for 3 rooms for < 1800 in East (Pberg/Xberg/Friedrichshain).

After long, tiring search of 20+ places with 100+ people at each, through a friend of friend we got a place for 1400 because we were the only ones that looked at it. Then rent control happens and now we pay 1000.

And we would have paid 2000+...

---

If you find something you like, it doesn't matter because there would be 20 other people applying. Landlords want to rent for a long time, so they prefer Germans over foreigners/expats, and people with long-term stable jobs (government, teachers, etc.) instead of startup people, so we were at the back of the queue.

When we found a place we liked, we would have been prepared to pay way more than the asking rent, and put down multiple years of rent in advance just to get it - like happens in NYC for example. But no landlord/agent is interested in this in Berlin. I guess this is an example how well-paid tech ppl are driving rents up. Even though "well-paid tech" in Berlin is not that much.

Only at rent levels of 2200+ do you start to find places you really like in good areas, but there are lots of places advertised at ~1500 that were even more ideal but unattainable due to demand, which is frustrating.

I really don't know how anyone can get an apartment in Berlin now after rent-control.

When we move out, we will most certainly find a friend to hand over to.

---

Re: Rent control

Before it was impossible to find a place, now it must be insane. For existing tenants though, it's like an unexpected yearly bonus - but for us, completely unnecessary. It's like a middle-class handout.
Yet! Taking over mining power or electricity resources could certainly propel wars of the future if Bitcoin becomes the reserve currency of the world.
I believe they are a part of Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Bryant and O'Hallaron. You can see a list of the labs at http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html.
> can even keep their money in the bank and don't lose purchasing power by not risking it.

assuming they don't need the money to live and realise that 5 years ago they spent a today fortune on a liter of milk...
> Is this a good thing, or bad?

It's the only thing that works, so it's good by definition.

Modern chips with tiny transistors can easily get fried (or make gross mistakes) because of cosmic radiation. Large transistors are much more robust.
> Is there no limit to this? Knowing how horrible human beings can be to each other, is there really no point at which we draw the line and say, no further?

Who said there is to be no limit? I explicitly clarified the limit: violence. Words are fine. Violence is not.

> As uncomfortable as it may be, the conversation about who should be silenced must continue.

Not if you want to continue having those conversations. Silencing people is a violation of their human rights, once those go out the window for a certain segment, it is simply a matter of time
before that segment is bent and twisted to include you.
This is full email from Stripe:

```
Hi Vinh,

Thanks for using Stripe!

Unfortunately, it looks like your website, hanami.run, or a previous business you were associated with, is listed on MATCH or another terminated merchant file operated by the card networks. In this situation, we will not be able to continue accepting charges on your Stripe account.

That said, we understand that there may be some work involved with moving your business away from Stripe, and we’re happy to help out with this process by giving you 5 days to switch to a new provider. After that, you won’t be able to accept additional charges on your account, but we will continue making transfers to your bank account until you receive all of your funds[1].

If you need an alternative payment processor, we recommend considering PaymentCloud, which works with businesses with a higher level of risk than we're able to support: https://paymentcloudinc.com/stripe.

We completely understand how frustrating this situation is for you. If you'd like to try to remove this block, you will need to reach out to your previous processors to check why you were placed on this list and how your can remove yourself from it. While we'd love to be able to directly help you sort this out, we unfortunately don't have any additional information for you.

Please visit https://stripe.com/docs/disputes/match for more information on MATCH.

Again, we're sorry for not being able to be more helpful here and wish you luck with your business.
```
Yep, this was a common Perl construct as well, since you could follow "or die" with a custom error string. I used to amuse myself (way back in the Stone Age, when I was in college and didn't know better) by using amusing and unique invectives for error messages like 'or die "you son of a motherless goat"'. Not only did they make me giggle a little, they made searching code for the line that failed a little easier...
For every one person in that situation, there are nine who can't move out of their rent-controlled apartment, not because they don't want to walk away from their rate, but because they can't afford to.

Well-off-techies who somehow stumbled into both getting a grandfathered rent controlled rate, and a job in the next city over might be a majority of posters on HN[1], but are a tiny minority of the population. You probably shouldn't be basing overall public policy around them.

[1] I personally think it's unlikely.
I actually have a lot of problems with Bitcoin, but I think that low-effort upvote-bait is seriously stifling productive discussion.
It's actually amazingly common for SAAS companies to do something like this.

I will say it can be extremely stressful since you have to both support your core product, and your agency shop work.
Depending on the data, it sounds like it might be more a job for IPFS. Matrix is best for passing around histories of JSON blobs no larger than 65KB. Whereas it sounds like you might be manipulating files rather than data objects?

Element Home doesn't have traffic limits currently, but all Matrix has rate limits (a few messages/s) to prevent flooding.
Reminds me of the HP 200LX that came with full version of Lotus 1-2-3 v2.4. Quite a powerful computer to run off of two AA batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX

I still feel there's things it could do that I can't do with my iPhone; and spreadsheets is one of them. (Yes you can get Excel on an iPhone, the interface sucks).
I think part of the confusion here is that Visa's role in fraud detection / prevention is not well understood.

Issuing banks are the entity (in the US at least) that know about the cardholder.

The merchant bank is the entity that the merchant runs cards through.

Visa connects the merchant bank to issuing banks. You'll notice that Visa already uses different rates to govern fees assessed on a merchant banks' transaction with an issuing bank based on details about how the transaction occurs, and where:

https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-in...

You'll notice nothing relating to chargebacks per se; the assumption being higher risk transactions are more likely to be refunded or canceled, so each one "costs" more for the merchant bank to issue in the first place.

The merchant bank sets the rate for the business type based on the fees it expects to pay for the transaction mix the merchant will bring.

Merchant banks will almost always roll on an issuing bank requesting a charge back from a customer because customer retention is their highest priority (because you can charge the consumer interest), whereas the merchant knows it's a pain in the ass or existential to stop using them and switch to another processor, so they know you'll eat it.

The merchant bank has a lot less to lose than the issuer bank, so it's not like they're going to go to bat.

Visa does govern the agreements between Merchants and Issuers using their services, and they get to decide certain features of Issuer's cards with Visa logo trademarks. But they can't tell them how to run their fraud operations, for example.

That's why Visa doesn't really enter into the equation here.
Wired names Gideon Lichfield as its new top editor
Publons is a nice way of keeping track and I use it myself, but I think institutions are generally willing to take faculty at their word with respect to reviews we have completed. (Although my statement here is really just based on anecdotal evidence, so I could be wrong.
> This is boneheaded and obnoxious.

No it isn't. You are overtly arguing that trans people should be killed.
PowerPC UserInstruction Set Architecture [pdf]
This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I see a lot of anger here or blame on the author for deliberately choosing to not use types, but I think the author actually does a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head:

"... concepts like Generics felt very hard to understand ... every piece of code is strongly typed and overwhelming. Even simple code like below scared me ..."

The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget.

> specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can take.

No, absolutely not. Learning an entirely new syntax, static semantics, and entire way of reasoning about code is about as high-hanging as you can get. Sure, once you know how to use static types, applying that knowledge is fairly easy. But it's a big mountain to climb before you get to do that.

This is the key advantage of dynamic types. You can make a computer do useful things without having to invest the large effort required to learn how static types work.

Now, personally, I think it is worth learning that. And, certainly, once you learn it, you get to amortize that benefit through the rest of your career. But there's a lot of people standing at the base of the mountain, realizing only how far they have to climb with no idea of the view they'll have once they're up there. Those people deserve sympathy, understanding, and encouragement to climb. Not criticism and mockery like I see all over this thread.
Wine 6.3 Built-In vs. DXVK 1.8: A Comparison of Two DirectX Implementations
Downvote away! HN apparently is ok with condescending/patronizing replies. But if I call them out, downvotes!

Besides, I don't care about these fake points. You can keep them.
Cryptocurrencies can help alleviate poverty (2019)
Not to mention it isn't really necessary. It's pretty clear now that surface contact is not a major vector for COVID transmission.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
Congratulations. I'm looking forward to reading this one.
Relevant:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/03/printed-website.html
In theory, sure. In practice, nobody does, and length prefixes stop a format like that from being conveniently writable with a plain text editor.
Tell it to Tom Brady... Speed is one component of the package but not everything, there are other factors
> Incremental refinement is not a given

I was wondering if you were going to call me out on that!

> Additionally limited accuracy in observation tools actually make it impossible to falsify anything either

That's a problem with GR too - it's true only within our current ability and accuracy to test that it's true. Better measurement may suddenly reveal something to not be true that we currently believe to be true.

c'est la vie!
My mom had a touch-capable phone with a resistive touchscreen and hated it. Her fingernails were not huge or anything but they were long enough she had to press with the pad of her finger, not the tip, and it crippled her accuracy.
> Interesting. Is Deutsche Wohnen origins the old East Berlin then?

Not really, no. It was founded in 1998 and initially had no Berlin holdings at all. It then bought various entities with housing stock in Berlin, which also have complex histories - e.g. one example was founded as a city-owned company in the 1920s, lost its East German properties obviously but continued to operate in West Berlin, after reunification got the eastern bits back, and then was privatized in the 90s. But of course East German state ownership plays a role in how the situation overall came together.
I did read the article, it's an explanation of how blockchains work. And I know how blockchains work.

What the article doesn't explain is why decentralized consensus and ledgers matter for a system that is increasingly obviously designed to be centralized and used in a centralized manner.

Yes, Bitcoin allows transaction resolution in a distributed ledger. The problem is that everything else around Bitcoin's design, implementation, and community is ill-suited for creating a decentralized currency. There are a hundred coins out there that use a blockchain to "create time". The article does not explain why Bitcoin in specific is worth paying attention to, other than because speculators are currently already paying attention to it.
I’ve seen the code of Wordpress and would not touch the spaghetti cluster-f that it is.

I won’t even speak of the ecosystem built on the above principles.

All I can say is that a 1-click install does translate to popularity :)
A blockchain is a database. But a regular database doesn't really minimize trust, that's the point of public blockchains.

The need of not relying on a centralized entity or third parties in the digital space does exist.
I mentioned that these days I write Go for a living, which involves a lot of:

if err := thingThatMightFail(); err != nil {
...
}

so I was saying that of course I think lots of `if` statements for error handling are reasonable. (Hmm, thinking back, I learned Go in 2012, and my Bash probably peaked in 2013, I wonder if having learned Go made me more amenable to this in Bash.)

I think a single-line `cmd || die "msg"` like in Perl or Ruby is handy and fine. Or maybe even a two-line

some command that might fail ||
die "Some message that is long enough that it wants to be its own line"

But once it starts getting to have multiple statements that you're grouping with `{ }`, just use an `if` statement. If I were reviewing someone's Ruby that had multiple lines after the "or" in "or die", I'd tell them to just use

unless thingThatMightFail
...
end
I had originally figured that you believed that a government would forego its fiscal policies if a monetary crisis ensued, the general assumption for most aficionados of the gold standard (albeit one that is thoroughly disproven by history).

The way the government forces you to make good on your tax obligations is wage garnishment: they tell your employer not to pay you but pay the government instead because you're in arrears. In general, I think you overestimate the willingness of third parties to become criminals for your sake.
Same kind of experience here. On top of that, I'm usually a pretty picky purchaser who does a decent bit of market research ahead of time. So I'm probably more likely to only buy that good electronic item from a shop like Best Buy that I've got a high likelihood of giving a 4-5 star review.
>If they are married, but divorce, get an apartment each and then re-marry

Or more likely divorce to get the apartment, but continue to live as if married except for purposes of that extra apartment. It isn't unheard of for couples to not legally marry today because of the tax difference even though for all social purposes they act as married. That is despite some social pressure to marry.
> My opinion is that it's more likely than not that these sites are little more than honeypots to troll the gullible into making asses of themselves so that we have another subject for our Two Minutes of Hate.

Or maybe, instead, some people really do hold extremist views and post them on the internet? I don't understand your theory here - the majority of Gab content is public already (well, behind an authwall, but otherwise public). The hack achieves nothing for these masterminds that just want to make fun of people being bigoted on the internet because they already could.

> Now that data can be used against the most ferverent Republican supporters and there's no one to blame, officially, because they were "hacked". Oops! Maybe you should think twice before publicly supporting Republicans online, I guess!

Do you seriously think the problem people had with some of the content on Gab is that users were "supporting Republicans"????

GP has edited their comment like 10 times so here's the version I'm replying to:

> I'm one of the world's biggest fans of Hanlon's razor, and I've done so much damage to it with Gab and Parler that it looks like a hairbrush now.

> My opinion is that it's more likely than not that these sites are little more than honeypots to troll the gullible into making asses of themselves so that we have another subject for our Two Minutes of Hate.

> I do a lot of research on social media mechanics, and I've used both of them. I can't quite put my finger on it, but they performed and felt differently from any other sites I've used over the past 20+ years. For one thing, you could not read or see ANY comments without registering first.

> I could just as easily be imagining it, of course. And they did paint a huge target on themselves. But they also made it easy to steal the data.

> Now that data can be used against the most ferverent Republican supporters and there's no one to blame, officially, because they were "hacked". Oops! Maybe you should think twice before publicly supporting Republicans online, I guess!

> (Not affiliated with any political party, apolitical, have friends and family who are into all different flavors. Just think it's fucked up to throw thousands of people under the bus like that, if it's true.)
I'd be interested to know what do you find rough about XRC (as wx XML layout system is known)?
> aka forcing them out of their homes

They aren't theirs. They're renters.
Every engineer tests a hypothesis by designing things based on that hypothesis and then testing that they work as intended. We tend to use the hypothesis' that have already been elevated to the status of theory though.

I've done some Greenfield science as an engineer, and plenty of scientists do some engineering. Titles dont really mean that much to me. It's all sort of a continuum and our place on it isn't strictly defined.
I particularly appreciate the description of the switch of the video games market to the entertainment model around 1995, where games are hyped like movies before they're released.

It's something that confirmed what I felt but couldn't quite put my finger on. That something changed between the early 90s and the late 90s in the way video games were discussed.
Right, that works in theory, but in the real world it’s not happening. Once supply is increased, the price should go back to a lower equilibrium, right? So why isn’t that happening anywhere in the world? Because it’s a real estate bubble and speculators are buying because the price is high. Real estate prices drive rents not the other way around. They don’t care if the buildings are half vacant as long as they can sell them later for an even higher price. Demand by renters is irrelevant.
/e/ & fairphone have a partnership.
You can get a fairphone preloaded with /e/OS (in Europe & the UK):
https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/04/30/keeping-your-data-sa...

https://esolutions.shop/shop/e-os-fairphone-3/
You should try to find SCO Professional.. It was a 1-2-3 clone for UNIX/Xenix that I think used curses or at least termcap. It worked quite well in an SCO Xenix-based office I maintained in the early 90s.

So this was a single 386 machine with a large card that supported multiple hercules graphics card eqivalents as daughter boards. Terminals included a keyboard and monitor connected to this card over RS-485. A single 386 supported four users this way.

Here is an ad for it:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LVCsAZClkfUC&pg=PT453&lpg=...

It ran SCO Professional, Real World Accounting and a custom database. There was no TCP/IP.

This system replaced the previous Radio Shack model 16-based system. That one ran RM/COS and had several serial port terminals.
why is splunk better than ES?
> Which companies are these?

Pretty sure they are talking about Vonovia [0], Degewo [1], Deutsche Wohnen [2].

[0]: https://www.vonovia.de/en
[1]: https://www.degewo.de/
[2]: https://www.deutsche-wohnen.com/en/
I don't believe it. People predicted the same thing would happen due to technology enabling outsourcing in the 90s. The only success was at the lower-end of the information economy.

Also, while COVID is going to accelerate the shift to remote work in the US, the vast majority will be <100% truly async remote. It's the 1-20% of edge case requirements that are really hard to mitigate. The ability to answer a phone call at 2pm Eastern Time and hop on a plane to Chicago is way different for someone from Manila than it is for someone from Cleveland, even if they only do it occasionally.
"The donors disagree with the ideological stance taken by the university, and so, stop donating."

The ideological stance taken by students. "The university"---the administration---couldn't care less either way; they just want the donations and not to be embarrassed publicly.

The ultimate question here is, "who is the university for?"
Almost all online stores seem to be like this. Why would Dell or Lenovo show you products that had anything less than 3.5 stars? There’s a huge conflict of interest in showing reviews of their own products. BestBuy has to sell the inventory they carry, so sure, they will tell you everything is 4-5 stars. Amazon is actually slightly better because they profit no matter which headphones you buy, but then it’s the sellers that are gaming the system. In theory it should be easier to detect.
You are either going to catch the bugs in the type checker or you are going to have to write unit tests to catch them.

For me, typed python saves me a bunch of time.
> It all seems so crazy to me, but this ship has long sailed.

Nope. And it's why Svelte is something that I've been hard adopting because it looks the closest to old-school JS/CSS/HTML while still bringing some of the same capabilities over that I love from React and VueJS. It also runs without a VDOM or a constantly running event loop - both things are incredibly attractive to me.

Although it's not a perfect solution (nothing is) I would strongly suggest you checking into Svelte as it looks more like traditional web development vs. highly complex Webpack + TS + React + eslint + Babel etc etc-based development.

The ship hasn't sailed. Your instincts to be weary of such a complex, constantly re-invented toolchain to get traditional development tasks accomplished are a natural response to the craziness that these tools bring to the table.
If rent increases are capped at 7% per year, landlords will have an incentive to increase it at the max, because that gives them more flexibility the next year.

For example, let's say the free market would raise rents 5% this year, and 8% next year. A cap of 7% means the rent will rise 7% this year, as the landlord won't want to have caps permanently reduce future rents.
>and yet their stock price is down..... this market is hard to read!

Stocks don't just magically go up forever on good news. They've run a loss for the last 4 years in a row, and they've missed their last two earnings by more than half. They're already massively overvalued as it is.