skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At my current ~2% mortgage interest rate, why do I want to pay off my house? I make more putting that money into investments returning me much better than that. I don't think the super wealthy keep their money needlessly tied up in real estate like that.
The article is a summary of a new research paper that covers real estate prices over roughly twenty years up to the start of the pandemic.

The argument is that booms and busts tend to be caused by a real change in fundamentals that people then become too optimistic about.

For example: people knew "super-star cities" (SF, Seattle, etc) were going to attract more capital and jobs than other cities, so in the 2000s they piled into investments in these areas. However, they were so optimistic that they overshot, causing a bubble that ended in 2012.

That they overshot, however, does not mean that there were not real fundamental changes that made these cities valuable. So these super-star cities, even though they had a real-estate crash, did really well because the fundamentals kept being in their favor from 2012-2020. Places like Vegas did not do as well because the fundamentals are not as favorable there (fewer high-paying jobs, more space to build).

The question now is whether we are seeing a real estate mania in response to the idea of working from home. Prices in the suburbs have shot way up. Are people over-estimating this change? Perhaps, and if they are, it means that the suburbs could face more of a bubble popping than the city. But it may also mean that if WFH becomes a long-term trend, that even if prices collapse more in the suburbs (after having shot up in a frenzy), that we may still see a permanent shift in equilibrium between being in the city and in the suburbs.

So, if you believe WFH will be a long term, real fundamental shift, you may want to buy up some suburban places when, and if, a bubble pops in those markets.
Launch? Didn't he say prototypes next year instead? Which probably means quite a bit later.

This project reeks like an AI researcher bait.
Even if it is a bubble, the market can stay irrational longer than you can hold out/believe. (Disclaimer I do have a vested interest in the housing market, but even if I didn’t I really believe it’s not possible for the average layman to know which way a market will go and when).
The friend/family perception is real and one thing, but really i think this silence creates yet more separation creating ever more loneliness.

Ultimately, my fear for lottery winners is akin to discovering cheat codes in early video games. Turning on "Infinite Money" in $GAME was great... until it quickly sucked all of the joy out of the game. The limited resource challenge disappeared. I don't know anyone who has won the lottery, but i'd be worried you risk creating that very same sentiment, except about life itself. Scary, should you not have another well-established and faithfully-held purpose.
This isn't because Google's language model is stupid, but because it's trying to give you what it thinks you meant rather than give you precisely what you put in the search bar.
I remember back in the day when FaceTime was announced Apple made a big deal about it using standard protocols throughout the stack ( SIP and maybe WebRTC?) and dangled the hope that there could be 3rd party apps that connected with FaceTime.

We were so young and naive then.
Is it? If a body is retaining additional water and absolutely nothing else, it can be the result of consistent changes in external temperature, a lack of micronutrients, or a result of illness. In the absence of these, the amount of water in the body remains quite consistent. I'm not talking about water that comes with glycogen as part of an unexpected calorie surplus, because that is not permanent.

You are correct that water weight can cause spikes in weight measurement, but this is just a contributor to weight as a noisy measurement, not an example that it is not helpful.
For those wondering, this is a reference to Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdPmNM0IF7Y

I believe the direct quote is "Why come you got no tattoo?"
That's my point too, you need hardware anyway for a Telegram call. Whatever device you use has an inherent cost.
Maybe I just have good friends but I feel like this fear is overblown.

I made a decent amount of money from a startup (enough to pay for a wedding + eventual retirement at a standard age). As part of this windfall I paid for a vacation for me and my close friends.

No one ever came asking for money. No one asked if we could do it again. Friends that didn't go have never asked for me to pay for their vacations. And if they did I would just say no.
How much is a ton? (ballpark)

And what car did you buy?

I suppose having everyone treat you differently is a downside, but surely having the money is better than not?
I don't know what I was watching but someone mentioned and then drew a diagram showing that a well may be at a certain depth, to comfortably reach water, but the water level will drop as soon as you start pumping because the water has to move horizontally through the rock, and so you will get a gradient between 'water level' in the aquifer and water level at your well, and the faster you pump the higher the slope.

I guess there are some ways to work out permeability and volume based on how the levels at one well are affected by activity at the next well.
Another trend to keep an eye on is “build-to-rent” [0]. Wall Street is hunting for returns. Real estate rental returns at scale are a viable target in an environment of near zero rates, especially at the lower-mid suburban price points.

[0] https://archive.is/byi4V
What if they are struggling with money issues and you want to help them? Or what if they are struggling with money issues in silence and you don't know about it?

Also... what if they find out about it later and you never told them? Wouldn't they think that you are a selfish doosh?
>Giving them a worse cut than the parts of the game industry

What does the industry give indie devs whose games aren't popular?

Most of these kids are just sharing games with fiends on a platform.

If they want to go pro... welcome to the world / every platform where scale / getting attention is hard?

Better they have a learning experience now because they made a roblox game.
This would never fly in Canada, where lottery winners must present themselves in person for wins, with publicity and all. Full names are given to the press, complete with home town and smiling face. Some winners have tried to skirt or directly challenge those regulations, to no avail. A winner cannot disappear behind an LLC or other apparatus. Frankly I'd be greatly worried about collecting a huge win from a Canadian lottery unless I departed the ceremony directly to a private plane for any of the well known tax havens in the Caribbean.
They were still about 6.8% in 2007.

Compared to a 3% interest rate today, on a $300,000 loan that's about $700/month difference in payment, about 50% increase.

Housing prices have not increased by 50%. At these rates, they often still cheaper.
We've come to a similar conclusion. We're fairly priced out of our market when it comes to the yard and picket fence situation - with 3 kids, a 4 bdr home would cost us around 1.5M CAD to get something we'd actually enjoy livinh in and reasonably close to work. It would be old - maybe from the 60s or 70s. A similar sizes home we could afford would induce a 1-2 hour daily commute for my wife. Meanwhile, a condo near work that will fit us is around $500k less... Sort of affordable.

When you weigh the pros and cons though, the condo can be alright. It's not my ideal at all but the things like the yuba can make that lifestyle so much more livable. More time with the family, more time to get out of the home if we want to, quick grocery shops, less money on commuting, etc - I think it could be alright. We fortunately live in a small city where you're only an hour drive from nature, so I suppose we could turn that into our "yard".

The last thing I want is my kids sitting in a car for 30-60 minutes every morning on their way to school. Or on a public transit bus, transferring and rushing around so they can sit in school for 6 hours only to bus back the same way. I know plenty of kids do it and they're fine, it's all fine, but it's not what I want for them. I wouldn't want it for myself. There's something to be said about shedding ideals (especially with living situations) but letting my kids be kids is one I don't want to compromise on.
Lots of people miss the fact that the Fed has intervened in unprecedented ways in the past year, that we may not understand fully for decades.
The biggest issue with the west was that it was in a historic wet period 100 years ago when water rights laws were solidified with different groundwater levels. Its a drought only relative to this time, historically in Southern california it is usually dry like this. The issue with runoff water in LA and other cities is that its super polluted. You don’t even want to swim in the ocean after a rain. If you wanted to be smart about it you would have to treat it, but it rains in earnest so few times that building that infrastructure would be too costly if its only going to be used when it deluges 6 times a year.

What the city has been doing instead is honestly a better long term move imo. They treat sewage and turn it into grey water, which is used to water public grass spaces like parks and is starting to be used as well as recharge local aquifers since the state says the ground is the best filter for grey water.
Say you became a consultant.
You clearly have no point to make.
That looks like a really nice project. Are you familiar with Mathbox https://github.com/unconed/mathbox?
Yes they are maybe %1 - I was able to get %2 at 15 years. And hedge funds get money from investors then leverage that with loans that brings their total cost of capital down even lower. Our previous Secretary of the Treasury (Mnuchin) made his fortune that way after 2008.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/lookout/fed-official-heckle... (March 2011: Fed official heckled: ‘I can’t eat an iPad’)
The article says that they were avid hikers. I’m not familiar with the area, but carrying plenty of water seems like a relatively fundamental bit of prep. Am I missing something?
I was thinking something like pastebin. I don’t know if it’s capable of returning html. I think a gist could work however.
How do you compare prices?
Probably a fake. I visit MarketWatch a couple of times a week and they always feature on the front page a letter of someone in a unusual financial situation who has taken, or is planning, questionable decisions about their money. The ghost writer behind this is quite good, I have to admit.
It does. The development environment is pretty bloated, but it's relatively easy to use and does require actual Lua code to do anything complicated.
Because you are in a position to get a low interest mortgage, not everyone is. Then you have to consider that giving someone ₱250k to buy a house is different to buying someone a ₱250k house.
Sure, but you still don’t say anything.
No, I disagree. Law of big numbers.

Houses in Seattle area are mortgaging for 1.2M. Property taxes are low.

Houses in NY are mortgaging for $500,000. Property taxes and interest rates are higher.

You shouldn't apply 8% interest rate from 2000 and think that it somehow is the correct rate when prices are 5x higher.
Projection ain't just a river in Egypt.

Wait... that doesn't sound right.
I'm strongly partial to a wearable token. The NFC Ring is one highly attractive option.

- It's inobtrusive enough to wear all, or very nearly all of the time. Contrast cards or similar carried-but-not-worn tokens.

- It can be readily use to tap a sensor for identification purposes. Contrast cards or similar tokens (e.g., USB keys), which are far less immediate.

- It is replaceable. That is, if it's compromised, stolen, or lost, it can be replaced. If it becomes unadvisable to possess, it's readily discarded and reasonably easily destroyed. This contrasts with biometrics or permanently embedded sensors.

- Its absence is reasonably immediately determinable. Again, contrast carried-but-not-worn tokens.

- The existing prevalence of ring-wearing makes use of an NFC ring less obvious or evident (mostly a concern in early-adoption periods), or the opting-out of wearing one (which ring is the NFC ring?), without directly querying each individual, which ... might not work regardless (depending on implementations).

- There are relatively few people who would be entirely unable to use such a device. Ready alternatives for most such cases exist: wrist bands

- Unintentional validation (e.g., surveillance) is relatively easily avoided, if devices require immediate contact with a sensor/receiver. That is, a surveillance entity couldn't mass scan a crowd or region quickly, but would have to individually query rings in close proximity. (This might be achieved through high-volume transit points already, but this already raises the ante.)

- It's possible with a query/response system that multiple identities with the same root, but not immediately correlated, could be supported. (Deanonymisation or identity linking remains a significant problem, however.) Ideally, such a system could be limited to only satisfying minimum qualifying criteria (e.g., "I've paid a fare for this trip"), rather than transmitting either a full personal dossier or an absolute identity.

Key (so to speak) challenges are in agreeing on a single standard, ensuring crytpgraphic robustness, and protecting privacy, surveillance, and other concerns, as well as distributing the detector infrastructure for desired uses.
> By far the most satisfying part was buying a house each for my friends and family.

How did you decide who made the cut-off of being a "friend"? Seems like every acquaintance you ever had would suddenly become a fake friend if you were giving away free houses, no? Genuinely curious what that was like.
What bank is this? I'm using Privacy.com to do this with debit cards, but I've never heard of anything that lets you do it for ACH.
> This article is a dog whistle for right-wing behaviour and is quite frankly problematic

Every time I see a sentence like this, I interpret it as the first step of an attempt to reduce speech.

Step 1: Identify 'problematic' content.

Step 2: Create rules to limit the distribution of 'problematic' content.

Step 3: Broaden the definition of 'problematic' content to include anything that disagrees with a specific point of view.

Step 4: Dystopian hell straight from Orwell.

> can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.

Is this a 'woosh' moment? Is this intended to be satire?

> I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything

> Is this what we should look into next?

If this is satire, can you please clarify?
Do you think the same about selling food for profit? or clothing? or medical care?
Edited to clarify my view that the government promotes this as a norm.

I fully agree that many and perhaps most of the people don’t feel that way.
Lumber will be there in Q4:

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber
Capitalism is predicated on the idea of perpetual and infinite growth. Those assumptions are reflected in many ways and we're going to need to rethink our economy and political systems with entirely different assumptions soon enough because we're already running into their limits.
I almost never go outside. Also, the vaccines are pretty ineffective against the new variants anyway.

I followed all the rules for a year and it looks like 1 it really didn't help much and 2 the virus isn't nearly as deadly as people thought. This isn't fucking polio, it's a bad cold.
So... I can't just type up a file in this new format in a text editor, since the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard. That makes it not quite as good as CSV for at least one use case, and certainly much less flexible.

Replacing flexible standards with more-rigid standards is always really hard.
Second Life for kids.
The author fails to mention the risk of children spreading Covid to everyone else, and seems to think that a few dead children (and uncounted adults) is fine as long as the rest keep up with the arbitrary academic progress schedule.
> For adults, I agree. But this is squarely aimed at kids

If it's manipulative of kids then it's manipulative of adults too.
It is a problem[1][2]. Desktop is the only use case I even had in mind. I only threw in the mobile/desktop mention in order to reference what mobile browsers do with the address bar and a last minute thought about how the availability of a mouse pointer presents the opportunity to add a little polish. Sticky headers, whether on mobile or desktop, are worse than animated banners.

1. https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699871
If you don't mind, how much were the houses on average and how many did you buy for friends? Are you still invested in crypto?
IANAL, but this seems more theoretically correct than practically correct. The truly wealthy have hierarchies of LLCs for the purpose of tax "minimization".
If one is extraordinarily wealthy and never uses any of their resources to help others, that is rather fucked up in my opinion.

And I will even take a pretty broad view of “helping others”. But one should have put some real thought into it and sincerely believe in whatever approach they are taking.

Of course, you need to take of your own basic human needs as well. Which is sometimes easier said than done, even with immense wealth.
How did you find a bank that gives you that level of control?
Unlikely since it rains so few times the cost to benefit ratio is terrible. Instead the city has been treating wastewater and using that constant source of greywater to irrigate public parks and recharge aquifers.
He's correct that focusing on grades is bad. But one key point is very wrong:

> In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you've learned in the class.

This is backward. In theory, most tests should be testing that the teacher is effectively teaching the material. If a student does badly on a test it should be interpreted as that student needing more help.
The real answer to inflation is to start constructing homes from iPads and flatscreen televisions.
> funding startups that are not attractive to traditional investors

It's a great way to lose a lot of money. It's why venture capitalists prefer to play with other people's money.

You better absolutely love playing god with start-ups, because there is a hellish nightmare that can go with allocating capital to high-risk new businesses, tracking everything, being responsible for it, enforcing legal agreements, dealing with lawyers and accountants, dealing with conflicts, watching people do incredibly stupid things with your money, and on and on and on it goes.

And you can't just hire people to entirely remove you from the annoying aspects, because that's an even faster way to lose a lot of money.
more discussion yesterday already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28240552
It is a metaverse filled with games for kids. Kind of minecraft-like in quality, but more like an arcade than a lego set.
> I brought this up because the EA community seems very closely associated with rationalist ideas. Although I'm sure there are other rationalist conceptions of "the good" out there, I've yet to see them clearly articulated.

The EA community aren't even unified in minimizing suffering. Most of the formulations I've seen are about maximizing good life, though there are certainly people who care about suffering in the community. (I think it's mostly Tomasik.) I haven't seen any of them try to justify their preferences with evpsych though.

> I'm glad you brought this up, because it raises what I see as the key question, the crux of the matter: "Less Wrong" relative to whom? And for what end?

Once more: Less Wrong relative to a presumed-ordered natural world. To the end of shaping this world to be more in line with one's preferences.
A lot of the incentive to pay by card evaporates if the vendor pushes the fee to the customer.

The incentive to issue cards evaporates when there’s less fee to collect.

Both would be bad upstream for visa/Mc/Amex.
In that Reddit thread (assuming it is the one I'm thinking of) it seems there is also a high likelihood you get sued for giving people money because you didn't give them enough (under the same line of thought that if you regularly feed wild birds they will become dependent on your bird feeder and starve if you quit [don't know how true that is, but that is a common "wisdom"]). You also get harassed by local police, in addition to friends of your family breaking into your house/car.
When I was right out of college, I got a contract.

The contract was for 1/3 of the wages a person with that job would get, and zero benefits!

Thing is... for many people in my family it was still the most money they had ever seen, after I told my parents what my wages were, soon the entire family knew, and people started to treat me in weird ways, like making a tons of "jokes" asking money.
They didn't "kill" their child. This is a freak incident.

If they just packed up their child in their car and drove on the freeway, and they all died due to someone slamming into them at high speed, it wouldn't even be national news.
Unless his parents were about to be evicted due to payment delinquencies, why would he need to give or lend them money?
CO2 has historically been higher, but life on earth, and ocean life in particular, was completely different that what we have today. The rate of ocean acidification is such that species do not have millennia to evolve to handle increased CO2 levels and are experiencing massive die-offs.

An extremely well-understood effect is that ocean acidification thins the shells of shellfish.

This may seem like a minor effect, but rapidly upsetting the food chain of the ocean seems like an absurdly risky experiment to run on the planet we inhabit.
Q: “How are they dealing?”

A: Not well. Try buying a commercial PC from HP or any docking device in quantity.
"On the other hand, there is a tendency of projects to massively overshoot the target just to be on the safe side - see Project Gutenberg blocking all access from Germany because they got sued over 3 (three!) books."

Do I remember correctly that the German courts wanted those three (3!) books removed from Project Gutenberg entirely?

In any case, here's your two choices:

* At a minimum, block access to those three books in Germany, allowing German courts' decisions to apply the Project, which is officially based on US copyright law, where those decisions are more stringent than US law.

* Block all access to Germany. (If Germans want to complain, let them complain to their own government.)

Which precedent do you choose?
The process of porting numbers between MVNOs is more difficult than using a main carrier with brick-and-mortar locations.

I ported my landline to Page Plus in the late 2000s (which took over a week). I still have that number, and I have never spoken to a person when porting it between MVNOs (always over chat or email). My last port to Red Pocket took two days to get right. This can be a frustrating procedure, and many people prefer the major carriers for in-presence customer service for issues like this.

I have repeatedly switched between Verizon and AT&T when necessary due to phone hardware or coverage, and MVNOs usually allow this to be done (a limited number of times) through automated simcard changes with no customer service interaction.

The one surprising thing about my recent move to Red Pocket is the lack of voicemail in the included plan (it's available with a surcharge). I'm not certain if I miss it.
Amusingly, your sibling comment had an alternate proposal that included two features, but did not in any way address the one thing you suggest is missing.

Replacing a flexible standard with a more-rigid standard is really, really hard.