skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Zillow buying up properties in cash over their own online estimates

A discussion around this probably deserves its own entire page, but as I am currently looking for a home as a first-time buyer, seeing “Zillow owned home” labels all over the area in which I’m looking (as if it’s some sort of positive thing) has been infuriating. All they do is use their scale and data science to push me out of the market several times over!

I present no evidence, to prove this, but from what I can tell, this is what they seem to do:

First, they use scale and data science to find what they consider under-priced homes and buy them for cash. If I happen to find the same home for sale at the same time, what seller is going to go with a traditional loan over a full cash offer who could easily offer more if needed? I can’t compete with that.

Secondly, they don’t do anything to the house (aside from clean it up and taking nice pictures—no value added) and then resell it for multiple tens of thousands more than what they just paid. If this house was originally at the high end of my budget, bought by Zillow, then re-listed for more, I can no longer afford it.

Third, if that house DOES sell for more to someone else, it just drives up the rest of the prices in the neighborhood. A lose-lose all around for me and my family. I don’t see how Zillow being able to flip houses is good for anyone. And by flip, I don’t mean fix up—-I have yet to find a Zillow-owned home that has anything of substantial value added to it—-and saving 1% of closing costs or whatever their incentive is by owning a Zillow house is not enough value add.

FWIW, I’ve spent a LOT of time of the past few years trying to get a hold of reliable MLS market data to do my own sort of analysis to try and find affordable enclaves or diamonds in the rough or whatever and that data is damn near impossible to get free access to. So the fact that Zillow has this data and also has unlimited pockets and FTEs who work on this stuff all day…it doesn’t feel right to me.

And it’s not like they’re driving up prices of arbitrary goods or services—these are single family homes (in probably the most popular price range) they’re inflating when we’re already in the middle of a national housing crisis!

/rant

Edit: spelling/clarification
That description doesn't apply for most programs though.

* Not all programmers can understand all programs

* Most programs don't describe the problem exactly

* Almost no program describes the desired outcome exactly
> They're all one-liners in DNS config

$1 - turn the screw

$9,999 - knowing which screw to turn
Here's the heuridtic-based hypothesis of the python package ftfy

>>> ftfy.fix_and_explain("â€™")

ExplainedText(
text="'",
explanation=[
('encode', 'sloppy-windows-1252'),
('decode', 'utf-8'),
('apply', 'uncurl_quotes')
]
)
fyi think you mixed up dollars with cents
I'd like to pose a serious question to you, which might run the risk of offending you--so fair warning, there.

I understand the fact that you believe your opinion is reasonable... It sounds like you also understand that the world broadly disagrees with you. A federal judge (Kimba Wood, no less!) disagreed with you... Since there was no appeal, I'd gather that the guy couldn't find funds to continue his suit--so his backers seem to have disagreed, too.

Is there a reason why you're more willing to believe in the idea that "All these people, including experienced legal minds, must be wrong", rather than "My own layman's intuition about the law must wrong"?

I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand why you'd want to continue backing your POV in the face of evidence to the contrary. I may have missed something, and I'm curious what your thought process looks like.
The near total lack of resistance makes more sense when the scale of the corruption is considered:

> When an Afghan police officer was asked about his force’s apparent lack of motivation, he explained that they haven’t been getting their salaries. Several Afghan police officers on the front lines in Kandahar before the city fell said they hadn’t been paid in six to nine months. Taliban payoffs have become ever more enticing.
Assuming you're running a system where normal request/response handling blocks on database queries it's often optimal to have more workers than available cpu threads and 1.5x is a common rule of thumb to try first.
Well, part of it is now. Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo.
>> our on-campus vaccination rate of 94% is higher than those other instances.

My work just had a "breakthrough" case. We are 100% vaccinated (military, no holdouts) but a fully vaccinated and healthy person nevertheless got symptoms and tested positive. They were better in a couple days but the incident is making us all think about any return to "normal" work. We may be safe, but none of us want to become a Delta carrier. (Funny story, their post-vaccine symptoms felt worse than their later experience with having actual covid.)
I always liked the TEAC mini reel to reels.
Then obviously no one will sacrifice much of anything, because some subset will always be willing to cheat or ignore the call to these sorts of sacrifices. This is why collective action efforts at changing major problems are so fraught with difficulty. Instead, fundamental practical changes in the direction of better ways at doing things that also happen to be easier and more convenient are what really drives positive innovation in many cases. Example: the digitization of most documents just made it convenient for more people to stop using vast reams of paper in certain contexts.
Cool idea :), currently this seems to go through Facebook groups mostly - maybe that's a good place to spread the word?
SEEKING WORK | Remote in United States PDT (GMT-7), open to earlier business hours (-2/3)

Front-end leaning web application development (I’m open to development projects, technical writing, software testing)

Technologies: JavaScript, React/Redux, PostgreSQL, Jest, React Testing Library, Super Test

http://www.carolchung.com

email: carolchung.dev at gmail
I played another gacha for about 2 years (stopped about 1 month ago). I tricked myself into playing it exactly like that:

> Ok, I'll try it out... but I'll drop it as soon as I'll hit the paywall

The problem is that the companies like Gameloft, Mihoyo, etc. got extremely refined in giving you a *semblance* of progress, while never completely grinding the progress to a halt.

It's pretty obvious after you invested some time: you can do some actions, but only up to X times a day. You can refresh the X with premium currency. You can convert premium currency into normal currency.

In the meanwhile, the tool/weapon/vehicle/character, won't be unlocked right away, but it needs a certain sets of components to be accumulated.

After you finally unlock it, you can improve it/tune it/level it up... but you'll soon hit a wall. To improve it any further you need to boost it/star it up/whatever. And you thus need to accumulate more components.

Eventually, you might find time-limited events, which will you give you a special currency, which you can use to unlock more time-limited goodies... and eventually convert it into one of the other kinds of currencies.

A lot of these concepts don't seem to be heinous: it's perfectly fine to provide a gradual way to unlock something in a videogame. The problem is that usually there's some different mechanism/puzzle/part of the story that leads you there. In a gacha instead the only thing that grants you the majority of those incremental milestones is the pull/loot/boxes/crates/packs.

The reasons you put up with it are pretty obvious:

- sunken cost: you already invested some amount of time

- feeling of progress. Every inch closer to a goal keep you engaged

- the rest of the game is genuinely well made

Again: what would be a good amount of content for 10 hours of game, gets stretched and dripped very slowly across hundreds of hours. For longer games (like, RPGs) what would be dozens/a hundred of hours gets stretched in thousands.

Even when I play a videogame, I don't want to just "kill time", I want an interesting experience, which ideally makes the most out of the hours that I put into it.

Traditional/non-bullshit/paid in advance games make sure that I get that either with skill, or without having to sweat for it (lowering the difficulty). In a gacha, it'll be a neverending stream of pulls (also, they'll obviously keep adding derivative content, to give you more and more things to unlock)
I first discovered music MOD files on the CD-ROM of the magazine "What PC?" in 1995. I was only 10 years old at the time so hadn't even heard of the Amiga but I was instantly hooked on the music style.

I would record the MODs from the family computer on to my cassette player so I could listen to them without hogging the computer. Listening to these again is such a nostagia trip.

"Space Debris" was one of my favourite songs...
Y Combinator stealth edits SARS-2-CoV post titles without author consent
They also flag posts without explanation.
The article mentions a few times that "there are no snakes in New Zealand." This reminded me of the short story titled "There are no snakes in Ireland" by Frederick Forsyth in his book No Comebacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Comebacks
I disagree with unsupporting compact.
You'll probably learn more by trying to understand why these practices are long gone.
These are pretty low-quality patents. I'm curious if Google tried to attack the non-obvious requirement. These seem like straight-forward naive UIs.
America's chief moral argument for continuing to intervene in Afghanistan is now that the Taliban will mistreat women and girls.

There is a simple solution that does not require indefinite occupation:

Hold the country for a year or two longer, and sponsor free flights to the US for Afghan women. Obviously, also provide expedited US residency.

Imagine what the US government could do with a large fleet of cargo aircraft.

For that year or two, the US could maintain a network of fortified franchises, throughout the country, to which women could go. These would be advertised widely.

It could also conduct periodic "door-kicking" raids of Afghan homes, in order to rescue any women who may be held there under patriarchal conditions. Logistically, the easiest way to do this would be to bring all the women encountered to US military bases. There, outside of earshot of their "husbands", they could be offered the choice of free transportation back home (if they really are happy with their marriages), or transportation to the United States (if they are not).

In addition to the usual "tough guys" employed by the US military, this would also create useful employment for American women, who we can expect would be better able to relate to the Afghan women than the dudes-with-guns would be. Essentially, they'd be working in Human Resources.

A successful program would uplift the rights of women, bring millions of new workers to America, and destroy Taliban biopower, all with a single stroke.

And America has no shortage of cargo aircraft to do this.
In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
As I understand it, only mods have the ability to update submission titles. You can email them using the Contact link in the footer.

The guidelines include guidelines around submission titles. I don't know the title you submitted, but in my experience, mods edit titles to make them more in keeping with the guidelines. Often (but not always) they include a comment that they did edit it. But, if you've got a question about it, you can ask by email. They don't always see comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I still run my own router at home, and my own servers of various kinds. I put a lot of thought into my packet filter configuration for example, and overall my handwritten router and server stuff comes at a maintenance cost that I am happy to pay.

Not so for email. It just stopped being worth it about 10 years ago or so. Regularly fine-tuning your configuration to not only not be marked as spam in originating mails, but to also filter incoming spam, walking the thin line between filtering too much and too little, was just no fun.

I looked out for an email provider that provides the flexibility that I'm used to (multiple domains, catchall for subdomains, sieve filtering etc.), pay them a few dollars per month or year, and haven't looked back. My DNS is still homegrown and I handwrite my zones, but the MX just points to my provider.
If you struggle to tell the difference between cassettes and CDs maybe you should upgrade your headphones/speakers to something worth more than 5 bucks :)
> we all know that there is nothing wrong with natural gas, its one of the most eco friendly ways to heat stuff.

What do you mean by this? Natural gas is another fossible fuel, it's far from being "eco friendly". It's better than coal or oil but that's about it.
I'm not sure you can call structured programming a fad!

An awful lot of languages (I'd say all commonly used ones) use if/then/else, do..while, for..next, and so on, but I can't remember the last time I saw a program with a complicated control flow done by gotos.

Such things were common in the 1970s, in fact the first professional program I ever read did it that way, and it took me ages to work out what was going on.

One particularly confusing technique was to goto a computed expression. Leads to all sorts of interesting bugs.

The whole point of structured programming was "Don't do that! You can do everything you want to do with a small set of restricted control structures, and the control flow is much easier to read".

I'd say that idea won so hard that we don't even notice it.
As 2fastpost wrote, basic IPv6 support is far from enough.

Also I'm not talking about routers worth 50 euro/$, but DC and carrier grade, worth 500K euro/$
Everybody kills Hitler on their first (time) trip.

https://archive.briankoberlein.com/2015/11/09/everybody-kill...
Large companies often have security mandates that dependencies should be regularly updated.
It's been years since I did it, but I added DMARC to a high volume domain and the reports were useful while I was adding it, to help make sure I didn't forget any authorized senders, but once I got that finalized, the reports were totally unactionable.

I can't do anything about the attempted spoofs; I'm not going to track down everyone's open relays, and if I would, DMARC reports aren't really enough anyway.

At the time, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all sent reports, which is a good portion of email, although certainly missing a lot. I think there were a few other smaller names, which I no longer remember.

Of course, it almost doesn't matter. Spam/phishing mail to our users still continued, they just stopped spoofing our address. It's not like very many people look at the domain mail claims to be from anyway; modern clients hide it, too.
This is a good, well-written rant, but rants are a form of bullshitting, aren't they?
Not sure that coal demand is falling. With the recent Chinese restarts of their coal plants, is that still true?
People like you are why the world is in this mess
If you hit a bus hard enough to knock it over, even given that you were driving an SUV, you were going too fast in town, it seems to me.
Code writers and prose writers will be reduced to operating the AI (checking its output, trying various inputs to elicit the desired language text). At least we won't be completely obsolete like the taxi drivers and Lee Se-dol:

The South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol has retired from professional play, telling Yonhap news agency that his decision was motivated by the ascendancy of AI.

“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” Lee told Yonhap. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.”

To speed your obsolescence, make sure you use Codex in your work, so it can learn you completely. Remember, you won't be able to compete with people who use Codex, so you have to feed the machine, whether you like it or not.
You can be a brilliant neurologist and also be anti-vax.

Expertise in one field doesn't imply expertise in others even if they appear closely related to the layperson.
T-Mobile runs billing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs
Yes I'm using quad9 but no I haven't noticed anything except this site.
Taliban enters presidential palace in Kabul
Yes, I refill bottled water bottles with tap water. I usually replace them once a year. Previously, I would buy whatever brand I found that was the right size for how I store them but last time I ended up spending more on Evian and the bottles are holding up much better. Poland Springs bottles use very thin plastic that crumples easily which is good for minimizing the amount of plastic used but bad for reuse.

I do wonder if, by reusing the bottles, there could be harmful chemicals leeching out.
As long as you don't email anyone who uses a gmail address or uses google's email hosting (which is the majority of internet users now?) then you can get away with that. I did too (also having run an MX since around 2001)... but a year or so ago google started filtering all email which didn't comply into spam.. so.. had no choice but to set it up.
The article states that a significant majority of voters don't support carbon taxation or any legislation that would impact their lifestyle.
The opening lines of La Haine, if you haven't seen it, you should.
Enigma has been my ringtone for the best part of 15 years now so I already know :)
My Uncle had some big Atari adventure games on tape and they blew my mind back in the day.

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

I haven’t seen that cover art in decades wow. Still frightens me now.
DNSSEC is in a whole different league. But I'd be very skeptical of putting a one-liner from a generator into my DNS without understanding, at least at a basic level, _what_ it was doing. Understanding that also means you can do some manual verification - take a look at email headers to see how mail servers are responding to your configuration, etc. etc.

As for configuring a mail server, yes, that's definitely way harder. But these days, most companies outsource that to the likes of Google or Microsoft, until they get large enough to justify administering their own. There's exceptions to every rule, etc. etc., but every company I've worked at has either used G Suite or Office 365.

The result being: many companies have email services running, but don't have anybody whose day-to-day is understanding how it works and how it's secured.
Don’t sweat it buddy. People here just want to stand on your toes and feel taller. Classic HN.

Velocity of development is priority #1 and having something that needs to be scaled is a monumental achievement.
I agree and I feel like they are assuming that vaccination grants 100% protection against Covid-19.
Like insider trading it doesn’t matter how large the market is, it’s a question of the individual transactions.

It’s not guaranteed that these companies will start intentionally misinforming people for profit, but that’s very much the risk.
Exactly. I came from a math background and only ever used Wolfram Mathematica for programming, and naturally used functional programming. Later on I tried to learn imperative programming and it boggled my mind. The idea of changing a state over and over seemed so janky to me.
Worth noting here that many of the so called organic initiatives targeted at getting individuals to make little silly little sacrifices such as the use of straws, or shorter showers or etc and etc are lovingly embraced by the world's worst megapolluting megacorporations exactly because they nicely deviate attention from their colossal carbon footprints (https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...)

and throw responsibility on ordinary people to a completely unwarranted degree. Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco et al have plenty of reason to love the notion of hundreds of millions of individual millenials and others feeling guilty because they used a straw for their soft drink today, or asked for a plastic bag during their grocery shopping.

Because a great number of influencer, celebrity and media types also know that exhortations of this individual kind get them much more brownie points and media attention, they're complicit in the same misplaced guilt crusade. Posting on social media about how some oil corporation should dump 20% less carbon into the atmosphere doesn't have nearly the same level of pop culture trendiness or immediate satisfaction of making someone comment about how they'll change their ways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGpFcHTxjZs
WTF. I agree with sister comment from GordonS.

But also need to say, that the numbers are off. WW II cost significantly less than 6 million German soldiers' lifes. The author states that 7 million German soldiers died.

But yeah. Stating the death of German soldiers as the most important outcome from WW II is imho at least problematic. It shows a lack of empathy and historic sensitivity.
I doubt they expected that level of request load that early on - I imagine the technology choice was made significantly before the whole pandemic thing started.
It's worth noting that Orwell had a lot to say about fascists, and took up arms against them in Catalonia.
Tech Talks at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google
Insilico Medicine Announces an AI-Driven Protac R&D Collaboration with Arvinas
Note that uncurl_quotes is a FTFY fix unrelated to character encoding, it’s basically just s/’/'/. (FTFY turns all of its fixes on by default, which sometimes results in it doing more than you might want it to.)

You can play around with FTFY here (open the “Decoding steps” to see the explanation of what it did and why): https://www.linestarve.com/tools/mojibake/?mojibake=â€™
Related: if you have a domain from which you never want to send email, you can also set up these records to tell receivers to reject everything.

Here is a guide:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/protect-domains-that-dont-send-e...
What is the business's organizational type?
Oh I see what you mean, the dome is a little bit pointy at the top, so the first derivative is not continuous. I missed that at first. Sorry. Still though, this seems like a typical situation in physics where you get superposed solutions to a DE and then throw out the nonphysical ones. Someone else just created a new thread about the dome problem, and web search shows a vast literature about it (like there is for the Monty Hall problem). I guess you're already familiar with the literature so there's not much I can add.

Superdeterminism isn't classical determinism, it's a specific idea in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's based on the idea that not only is it fully determined which box the particle ends up in, but it's also determined which box the experimenter will look in, and those forced choices conspire to make the experimenter think the particle is actually following the Born rule. At least that's my best understanding of it: physics isn't my thing. See:

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

Besides the people mentioned in that article, I believe Gerard 't Hooft is an adherent. He has a bunch of articles on his site about a possible classical mechanism underneath QM. But, I think most physicists think that is unlikely.

You might like John Baez's article "Struggles with the continuum", which is about various annoying singularities that come up in areas of physics including classical mechanics:

https://math.ucr.edu/home//baez/continuum.pdf