skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to focus when you're stuck at home.

5am coder brings programmers, developers & makers together at 5am for session of deep, focused work.

Hi HN!

This week I did hours of focused work, by video calling my friend and holding each other accountable.

Co-working over video call is nothing new. But wouldn't it be interesting if:
- it took place at 5am
- brought together programmers, makers and coders?

5am coder is an experiment to get a bunch of programmers, engineers, makers together at 5am, for a session of deep, focused work.

5am Coder will run on Tuesday 30th March 2021 for 90 minutes via Zoom.
There are 2 sessions:
5am BST (UK, Ireland, & Lisbon time)
5am PT (US & Canada)

I'd love to see you there! It's super quick to sign up via Calendly at https://5amcoder.com/

FAQs
I like to sleep in - why is 5am coder so early?
5am is super early haha! I'm not an early bird either, but I do love the feeling of beating the sun and feeling productive. If that sounds good to you, why not give it a try?

What if I'm not in the Pacific Time or BST time zones?
Please feel free to join in! I will try to open up 5am Coder to other timezones after our first session.

Why is the session 90 mins long?
90 minutes is an optimal length of time for focus, based on the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba...). This is based on the work of researcher Nathaniel Kleitman.
well we are having to support the self in some how. i am not sure if there are diferent way. only other option appear to be take some money from a person and give to other person with state force. this behavior is not ethical
Can you put some numbers around "rapidly"?
People really want to run hair salons from their house, but zoning regulations prevent it. People really want to run daycares without licenses, but laws prevent it. People really want to house old folks without licenses, but laws prevent it.

We have zoning laws, restrictive covenants, and boarding house licensing rules for a reason. If there is demand, then have a public referendum like we’ve seen for cannabis laws, overturn the legislated barriers and allow it. But right now, it is illegal in most places and consequently hammering the market for actual residents.
I've done this course. It's interesting and makes you think, would recommend if that's what you're looking for.

While not my area of expertise, I don't this course is particularly relevant to any practical modern formal methods unless you want to reinvent the world.
Ask HN: How is this specific enough to be patentable? [pdf]
Seems kind of obvious, eh?

When they're really young their minds are not yet formed.

And children are biased to trust their parents and adults in general.
The calculations of the article is seem wildly not reality based.

Most young people buying a home in a big city are getting downpayments from family or they are saving more than 10% a year. Add in the rsp savings, tfs accounts and the actual calulations are more complex.

The drop in the condo market because of the drop in airbnb makes that sector an attractive entry for young Canadians.

You can get a fairly big house outside of the downtown core (45/50 by 120+) for a fair price or you can get a rundown older house postage stamp close to downtown for 4 times more.

I see raises in prices for all detached homes for the next two years followed by a period where people try to move back to major cities causing a price increase in major cities and a drop in cottages / smaller cities.
> because it benefits a good chunk of voters that are homeowners.

Western nations all deciding to encourage homeownership looks like a bad decision in retrospect. Having a large percentage of voters with a large percentage of their net worth in a particular asset class practically guarantees bad policy with respect to that asset class. The same sort of thing is no happening with pension programs being replaced by investment schemes that encourage widespread stock ownership.
Yeah, thanks for the correction.
Rick Beato has an ear training course. He’s big on YouTube.
If every empty house on the market in SF or Vancouver came on the market tomorrow it wouldn't make a dent in housing prices.

Vancouver has actually seen some price declines as recently as 2018 and CMHC says it is driven by new construction - any jurisdiction where you can't build will attract investors that can afford to sit on empty properties and still expect a reasonable return. It is just the iron law of modern real estate.
Still, as most men are straight, this confirms that women have an unfair advantage.
> berated

Where did it say "berated"?. Outside of the stance "I've already decided I distrust anything Amazon does", what facts do we have that this "live feed" is anything more then a welfare checkin to make sure the driver is OK, or something else non-malicious and sincerely focused on safety?

And as I posed in another comment, what incentive does Amazon have for it to be anything other than this, given that if it really does lead to more privacy intrusions, many more staff will quit and regulators would take action?
Unlike the fringe conspiracies of the right, the conspiracies of the left, like the ‘white supremacy’ boogeyman and ‘critical race theory’, are much more prevalent, broadcasted from mainstream news and promoted in schools and workplaces.

The dogmatic, intolerant way of thinking and active suppression of differing opinions which comes with this pseudo-liberal wave is the real danger in my view, and is probably the closest to religious fanaticism.

I’m not sure what happened with liberalism but it became its caricature somewhere along the way. And it happened quite recently.
In 70 years, thousands of stars have Disappeared from the sky
There are zero triangles in that structure, it'll fold like a cardboard box.
Yeah, the same applies to Spanish.

I remember I was surprised when I learned English at school, because they seemed to make a lot of emphasis on the present continuous and past continuous, and I found them trivial: they work exactly the same as in Spanish, i.e., at least off the top of my head, every English sentence analogous to "I am/was eating" can be translated literally into Spanish directly as "Yo estoy/estaba comiendo" without a second thought, and vice versa. It's not something where a native Spanish speaker learning English would make mistakes, even from a very basic level.

On the other hand, from the Spanish point of view it's much, much easier to make mistakes with the present simple, because there are many things that you can say with the present simple in Spanish but not in English. For example, to ask someone what they are eating in the present moment (not in general), in Spanish you could use both "¿qué estás comiendo?" and "¿qué comes?" (the second being more common in informal speech) and you could answer both "estoy comiendo kebab" and "como kebab". In English the first versions work ("what are you eating? I am eating kebab") but the second ones don't ("what do you eat?" "I eat kebab") and it's a super common error to make for beginner/intermediate learners, but almost no emphasis was made on that because we were busy doing a lot of exercises about writing sentences in present continuous.

I guess it was an effect of using British books written for a global audience (not tailored specifically to learners coming from Spanish) and the teachers following the books without questioning or adapting their methodology.
At least long-term holders believe it's worth it.

You can judge that there exist such people by the fact that the bottom of crashes (at the maximum fear), do not continue until zero.

I suspect cryptocurrency fills a need for hard money - not like fiat, that loses purchasing power at the whim of unelected central or commercial bankers.

Of course, there's lots of volatility, but I suspect that's normal for an asset class this new. Do you research, discount its future value to you, try to come up with true and relevant inflation rates, and only buy when the market is in a fear cycle.

About the externalities, they are the same as with any other human endeavour. Government should help internalize environmental costs.
These are just hand-wavy rosy ideas.
I suppose if the pressure to minimize cost is really high, it could be an attractive option for shops that want to take a stab at incrementally replacing COBOL with something that runs on Linux.
I think you're misunderstanding where many of these ads _are_. They're on Amazon itself. Search for anything on Amazon, and you're going to see sponsored listings in the search results. Look at a product page, and you'll see competing offerings.

I've got some novels up on Amazon and it is totally accepted within the indie author community at this point that Amazon ads can absolutely be worth it.
My Mum detested fridge magnets for some not clear reasons. And no overhead power lines. There was a nearby power transformer though, which on one memorable day burst into flames.

But I remember Dad frequently complaining about reliability, and the drives keep on having to be taken down to a computer shop (back when such things existed) in down-town Lincoln (UK) to be fixed. The problems were entirely mechanical, not electronic.
Think about how desperate you have to be to buy in Woodbridge if you’re studying in Waterloo? I think they were more likely victims of the situation not perpetrators, c’mon.

Waterloo is a legit school, not unexpected for it to draw international students and of course they have money, international tuition ain’t cheap.
Main reason we don't develop renewables faster is storage capacity.

And storage capacity technologies we can create are oscillating around break even point economically.

There's no gold rush to place energy storage system everywhere and it's not obviously economically profitable.

However variable load such as crypto mining provides similar incentives as energy storage. And there is a crypto gold rush.
Spelling = correct pronunciation in Spanish is like 99.9% correct. The exceptions are almost always imported words. Even the tildes help you out to know how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before completely correctly, with the right stresses on each syllable. English is an embarrassment in comparison. If we did a total overhaul and simplification of English to remove all the inconsistencies, it'd be far easier to learn for everyone going forward (albeit at the inconvenience of everyone alive today).
IMHO, the writing style of this article is horrible. It was truly a painful chore to read and probably the least satisfying drivel I’ll read all day.
I'll watch this with great interest.

Looks like possibly a way to get Skype working on a rPI.
1: It seems to me that this is Amazon trying to exert control, and that is part of what people are unhappy about?

2: Since drivers can work multiple jobs and do what they want with the time when they are not working for Amazon, I don't see how Amazon limiting the hours a driver works (which they likely already do) solves this problem?
Yes, it is, but having a string of correspondence in between you, and broker, and a stream of legal records pouring from sock transactions is much more bothersome, unlike pouring money into a stone cold piece of concrete in Ontario which will assuredly not go anywhere, and would not bother you with requests to prove your place of residence 4 times a year.
I think there are other options besides 1 and 2. For example, 3) non-white non-males experience different cultural pressures (or a different culture altogether) and have different expectations set by their family/peers/selves and and their careers when it comes time to work towards a profession.
> Demand is high because our financial laws allow criminals to launder money through housing

> too many NIMBY politicians that are against density increases

Now I'm sure you can argue that there's no real contradiction between these two statements, but I can't help but feel that these are one and the same problem, and that we need some idea beyond the supply-demand or nimby-yimby binaries. Do these concepts really model the reality well, or perhaps more importantly lead us towards the reality we want to see? Isn't this high-density housing also just another way for real estate people to speculate?

I think we have to start looking at this problem like we do healthcare: the markets are _the_ problem. Housing should be something more like a right.
I had the opportunity and blessing to meet Dr. Stallman in person on several occasions while volunteering at FSF.

I think we've met a total of about 10 times, and spent a total of about 10-20 hours within each other's presence.

During this time, I have never, not even once, observed rms doing anything questionable, except perhaps going barefoot in the office, which I was inspired by and followed suit. (I washed my feet so that they wouldn't smell.)

In fact, on one occasion, Dr. Stallman told me that a joke I had told was mean and not funny, which was probably true, but such is Russian humor.

In my internal mental models, it affects the reputation of those working much more against rms more than rms himself.

Combined with several questionable choices in the past, e.g. deprecating human-readable onion addresses, I personally no longer consider Tor Project to be a credible organization.
I've been saying for years that there should be a tiered system of property taxation based on the number of properties owned by an individual or entity.

It could be a simple as using a multiplier. Own 3 taxable properties? Your rate for each is 3x the base rate. Unsustainable? Great, lower the base rate.
I hope that's the case! And if it is, then I apologize to cup
Are you sure that's the cause of the bias?
That might discourage some of the foreign investor activity, but unfortunately I don't think that will make a significant difference on keeping price increases in line with income.

To give you a real world example, NYC's Long Island suburbs are notorious for having some of the highest property taxes in the nation (mostly the school taxes). Despite this, LI home values continue to go up at a pretty high rate, an average/very basic starter home is around $500-600k.

This is because despite the high property taxes and not great weather, the demand for homes there highly outpaces supply. In the case of Long Island, the demand is due to things like having easy access to NYC's huge job market and NYC itself, the quality of schools, low crime rate, etc.

For you to make property taxes high enough to make a meaningful dent in demand, they'd have to be so high that any decrease in the cost of the home would essentially be cancelled out by the astronomical property taxes.

Time and time again, the root cause of high home values has shown to be that the increase of supply isn't keeping up with increase in demand. To fix that, the factors slowing down new supply need to be removed. These factors vary by location, and include things like a slow/expensive permit process, overly restrictive zoning, allowing NIMBY groups to slow down or block new development with constant town hall meetings, etc.

In the case of the crown jewel of places that are horrible at keeping up with housing demand, California, all 3 of those are at play simultaneously, and the housing costs there show it.
Thank you for such a thorough answer. Much appreciated.
> Can we just all agree that censorship is bad?

Not really; there are both many reasons why censorship is sometimes good, and why attempts to defend freedom of speech on the principle of democracy is not as persuasive as it would seem at first. Many powers can also be abused, and indeed have been in the past, from food and drug regulation to anti-terrorism measures. The fact that it can be abused is not in itself a great argument against the power.

There are also good reasons to bring religion into the discussion too, and whether it should be an exceptional part of freedom of speech. Some religious speech (in particular of parents to their impressionable children) should be second guessed as deserving of protection. Nevertheless, it's also a matter of degree. Most of the elements of religion are not so much misinformation as they are unknowables or taken on faith.
And patents do the same. Especially software patents. As we are producing faster we should also reduce drastically the lifetime and coverage of copyrights and patents.
The fact that he said "people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face" is exactly what I said about context: we still used to think that using alcohol and disinfecting surfaces are more effective than avoiding direct contact (at least for the general public). We now know that this isn't the truth, disinfecting surfaces are barely recommended nowadays since we know that the virus is airbone so masks and social distancing are the recommendation.
I’m kinda surprised. I felt this group was much more rebellious a few years ago. A lot of people might say it’s growing up, but I still don’t like it.

I look back on the people I admired, and they questioned authority.
"Wouldn't simply ONLY building new buildings/housing be more effective?"

Yes, the vacant house tax is just politics, Vancouver has had some actual success with build-build-build but that strategy is limited by NIMBYs in many areas.

Same with downtown Toronto, the suburbs are a pricing disaster but condo prices are not following as steep a curve simply because there is supply being built.
Many similar studies have been done and almost always destroy the leftists dogmas about X, Y or Z being oppressed.

Belonging to a minority actually appears to boost your chances of being hired (shown by studies leaving, or hiding, the name of the applicants).
Being a women in a company with a boss, reduces the gender paygap compared to what it is for freelancers: the more women are on their own (dentists, baker, founder of a sport's club, etc...), the bigger the gap compared to the male dentists, bakers, founders of sport's club... An interesting fact which leaves a lot of leftists in error 500 mode.
Possibly because it leaked from a lab?
Also, I think Ada is fully memory-safe but for initialization. That is to say, the only way in which it's not memory-safe, is regarding uninitialized variables. (That's assuming of course that you don't disable checks.)

I'm not sure if it lets you shoot yourself in the foot regarding invalid type conversions, misuse of unions, that kind of thing.
The Design History of Airline Flight Maps
It was historically too expensive (ie: not free).
I understand it has been a popular narrative for a long time. Most studies have shown it’s a tiny percentage of home sales. There are also now significant taxes on foreign ownership, and statistics show this is having the effect of deterring buyers.

“CBC's analysis suggests foreign buyers account for about 1.8 per cent of total home purchases in the GTA (Toronto plus the regions of York, Peel, Durham and Halton) since the tax was imposed in April 2017.”

A common rebuttal to this is “well they use corporations to shield the true origin of the money”. Why not just park your money in the US where no such taxes exist and is overall less hostile to foreign ownership?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-foreign-buyer...
> I use social media for information, not to be turned into a money-making asset for those I follow.

I mean it's social media... literally the entire purpose of it is to monetize you, any information you manage to extract from it is just a tertiary side effect. Not only that, but typically the quality of information exchanged on social media is of the lowest quality, so you're really getting a bad deal on the whole if this is your expectation.
no, we are need to allow people who have desiers to come here 4 good life n success, no filter for sex. in India IIT is 64% man, so you are only penalise unfair men by these action. we are needing to let almost any person who want to be in America to be here not have a nother restricting.
Deciphering the German Enigma Machine
About 15 years ago I worked on a command line shell that was adding a remoting feature which would allow you to execute a shell command on a remote machine. When the first cut of this came out, it seemed like it worked fine, but I decided to try it across a high latency connection - specifically setting up an inbound connection to the public internet and routing it from our office in the US to a proxy in Hong Kong and back. It performed about like a connection over a 300 baud modem. So I spent a weekend furiously creating a private build that reduced the number of handshakes and added streaming compression that ultimately increased the throughput by something like a factor of 20. On Monday I shared this work with the extended engineering team, and...crickets. I was just a tester after all, you know. The perf was improved after that, but nobody acknowledged the real world testing I'd done, much less the analysis and POC dev work. But flash forward a few years, and my career has progressed. Suddenly I am a manager in a performance review meeting where the promotion of someone I used to work with was up for discussion. I sat across the table from the person's boss when he capped off his argument for promotion with (paraphrasing), "and let's all remember, this is the genius who figured out we needed to add compression to our remoting stream."
I think you can easily sub in any political party for Christianity and the same will hold true.
if there's enough evidence to justify an arrest, you're not going to talk your way out of it. even if you're innocent, it's much more likely you say something that makes the officer decide to arrest you.
I recall vaguely reading an argument that New Atheism activism, so prominent in the early years of the new millennium, withered precisely because some of its demographics began to focus on social-justice activism, and this sapped New Atheism of time and effort that could be put into the cause. Does this ring a bell with anyone? If so, I'd be grateful for a link.

(In this case, this would be an example of areligious fervour migrating into politics!)
> Do these concepts really model the reality well, or perhaps more importantly lead us towards the reality we want to see? Isn't this high-density housing also just another way for real estate people to speculate?

Thinking about it. China itself is a good example. A fifth of the entire housing stock are vacant concrete boxes despite China having the biggest construction boom in human history for 20 years in a row (Chinese construction industry builds one California worth of housing every 2-3 months.)

Rents are very low though, rent to buy ratios above 100 are not rare.

Food for thoughts.
Where is the presumption of innocence, where accusations of guilt must pass a burden of proof?

Stallman is the least 'guilty' of the people you mention, since his 'crimes' consist of the pedantic quibbling over definitions that are typical of an individual suffering from Asperger's syndrome. They are, of course, 'wooden-eared' and easily misrepresented by persons of bad faith such as the petitioners linked above. There is zero positive evidence that he advocates, or ever participated in pedophilia.

I put 'guilty' in scare-quotes because, unless there is solid evidence to the contrary, there is only guilt by association involved. Epstein was a big donor, especially to research programs in physics, and that is the basis of their association with him.
Similar discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467635