skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "...Houses are still way cheaper, in actual out-of-pocket terms for average people, than they were in 2008. Today's interest rates are way too low."

Only true for a small minority...Although your calculations are correct, its not how it works. What matters is average house price to income ratio and the Housing Affordability Index, that measures whether or not a typical family earns enough income to qualify for a mortgage loan on a typical home, at the national and regional levels based on
most recent price and income data.

There are also huge variations in housing markets,
as they are also very much specific to local laws,
regulations, job markets, and at the moment Europe
is in a much worst situation than the US.

I like this definition:

"A housing market is defined by the ability of residents to reach employment by daily commutes. Generally this can be defined as a maximum 60 minute one-way commute time, while average work trip times tend to be about 30 minutes in most areas. Housing markets are thus also labor markets, which are also called metropolitan areas. In a well-functioning market, middle-income households should be able to afford the median priced house."

Its not as bad in the US as in the other parts of the world
but its getting worst.

"Demographia International Housing Affordability"
http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf

"Housing affordability has deteriorated materially in recent decades, which has been a principal factor in an internationally observed reduction in middle-income standards of living."

Its pretty bad in Australia

"Dramatic rises in house prices in Australia"

https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Pacific/Australia/Price-...

Very very bad in UK:

"House price affordability at its worst in a decade"

https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/mortgages/house-price-af...
https://archive.is/OGV5g

"UK house price affordability worsens over past decade"

https://www.ft.com/content/afead1e2-3143-11ea-9703-eea0cae3f...
https://archive.is/G5zV3

Dramatic in the Netherlands

"Average Joe can only afford one of 5 homes in Amsterdam"

https://nltimes.nl/2021/08/20/average-joe-can-afford-one-5-h...
Agree that corporate devices typically come with data plans. I took the $100 bit as a reference to the Lyft situation, where she was required to load a bunch of apps onto a mobile phone, but wasn't given a work device. So she bought a dedicated device with a one-time cost and apparently paid an ongoing monthly fee as well.
Computers are not sapient, and therefore can't be prejudiced (which would be a necessity for them to be racist) because prejudice is a feature of sapient entities. That would be like calling an elevator that had a malfunction and fell to the ground floor killing everyone inside "a murderer".
im not sure id trust the isolation to be done properly.
I went down a rabbit hole and analyzed Fannie Mae data and found buying a home is increasingly affordable when you consider low interest rates and the median income.

> In October 2019, the median mortgage payment would cost the typical American 18.21% of their income. Apart from a few months in the early 1970s and 2011–2013 period, homes have never been more affordable. [0]

>That's why the 30 year fixed is such a fantastic bet if you are willing + able to hold and lock that fixed price... but housing is a pretty lousy investment if you need to sell.

That's not necessarily true because if rates go up you can bet that property values would go down as home ownership would become less affordable. And if you bought a home for $300k and rates go up and now your home is only worth $250k, that's not a great value, because had you not bought, you would be able to buy the same home for less, although that might be offset with the higher payment

[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/buying-a-home-in-the-us-...
The best way to think of it is probably that Cassyni is to webinars as an academic journal is to blogs.

As an example, we issue a DOI for each seminar, meaning their metadata are indexed in the same systems that are used by journals to manage and report on citations. This turns the recording into something that is much closer to the formal sphere of human knowledge and can be included in typical academic reporting and evaluation structures.
A typical hack is to distinguish an empty field from a field with a quoted empty string. The former is null, the latter an empty string.
We actually think we'll have the opposite effect! Single-owner vacation homes are used less than 60 days a year and often sit vacant. With Ancana each owner purchases the number of shares that corresponds to how much they'll use the home. With multiple co-owners the home will be in use far more frequently
The whole thrust of the article is the satellites are hyperachievers at this, and there's tons more variables than that, path, velocity, acceleration, relative height ... – I don't have the energy to make a tortured analogy slamming you for lazy thinking, so I'll leave you with a lame one: you're hyperachieving at insulting after hyperachieving at false dichotomies.
Im the same. I don't mine the algo but i wanted a human as well. This is disappointing. Ive been really pleased with what they sent me.
Long subject. Short version: for server-side webcrap, use Go.
All the standard parts needed for that are in good shape.
For complicated stuff with real-time or graphics aspects, use Rust.
> Today's interest rates are way too low

Why do you think this?
Correct, but people keep pointing to China as a state entity that will abuse the new system.
Growth only means that there is more economic activity. If you reduce the quality of houses and cars but increase the price and your profit, that's also growth. If you cure cancers, that's bad for growth if you made more profit on treatments than the cure.

> Developing a more fuel efficient car is also growth, for example.

One of the major economic concerns about electric vehicles is that they have fewer moving parts and maintenance requirements, and might cut auto worker jobs in half.[1] I don't think the article got into numbers of job loss in gas stations, oil production and distribution, etc. So the most fuel efficient car possible may prove to be bad for growth in general.

> Economic growth does not imply consuming more resources.

Technically true, but in practice, if your product is not 100% recycled and 100% carbon negative to produce, you'll need to extract more of the earth to sell it.

I will say that with some industries like meat production potentially moving to vats and away from farmed animals, there is a possibility. But you also have to consider the economic damage of eliminating cattle farmers, farm vets, slaughterhouses, meat packing, etc.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/electric-vehicles-pos...
You can get GPUs as powerful as the ones from 2000 for like $10.
This article confuses a bunch of things: Unicode is simply a mapping between code points and characters, characters are encoded with one of Unicode "transformations" like UTF-8 (most popular on Unix-like systems) and UTF-16 (derivative of a much simpler UCS-2, basis for Windows and Java I think).

And while there is a lot of complexity introduced with Unicode, and even a lot of ambiguity, it is a great boon for non-Latin languages (think even something simple like Cyrillic or Greek).

Basically, for most of the world which already dealt with this "shit" for the last 50 years (it's not just Latin1 and ASCII), Unicode is a huge improvement (maybe not emojis ;). I've been happily using it for the last 20 years.

And sure, a complex problem requires complex knowledge to solve. But a decent language (like Python 3) will know if character is alphanumeric in any language or not or if it is any of the multitude of whitespaces (even if not as simple as in SPC, LF, CR, TAB...
No: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-first-pc/
Actually I don't think San Francisco can ever be that hot given its on the ocean. The prevailing ocean breeze does a lot to keep temps down. In LA, 15 miles from the ocean can easily mean 15 degrees increased in temperature throughout the year. When it was 110 inland in Oregon, it was still in the 70s on the coast due to the prevailing ocean breeze: https://www.beachconnection.net/news/excessheat062321.php
macOS 11’s hidden security improvements
Yep, svg + react = declarative graphics. I love it. I used it to replace D3 in a project I worked on last year and no regrets at all.
Great video from the SQLite founder that covers a lot of ground in terms of how indices work under the hood: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gpxnbly9bz4
FWIW you can indent with 4 spaces for a preformatted block e.g.

CREATE TABLE temp (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, amount MONEY, "createdAt" TIMESTAMPTZ); CREATE INDEX ON temp ("createdAt");
INSERT INTO temp(id, "createdAt", amount) SELECT generate_series(1,1000000) AS id, NOW() + (random() * (interval '10 years')) - interval '10 years' AS createdAt, random() * 100::money AS amount;
If I need to know as it is happening there should be sirens going off outside in my town to alert me to that. Everything else can wait.
Alternate headline: Starlink satellites have collided with other satellites and space vehicles precisely zero times so far.
> When the virus first appeared in Wuhan it was already really good at infecting humans. That would be unlikely if it had evolved in wild bats or pangolins and then jumped straight to humans. But we don't know for sure.

Just curious about this point - wouldn't this always be the case, since before it was good at infecting humans it would only be in a few if any of them? IE. My thinking is that even if it had existed for a while before that point, we'd be unlikely to know since it wasn't at that point good at infecting humans and thus not many had it.
This is adjusted for CPI inflation, but asset prices have inflated far more than consumer good prices. The 12.5 fold [1] expansion of the money supply since 2008 has, according to some analysts, flowed to assets.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
Who’s working on new heat pump tech other than Gradient?
I need to drink 3-4 liters of water a day. That's fairly fixed. If I'm drinking water with twice the concentration, that's twice the poison.
Just a small note: When I visit the URL provided (https://en.ancana.co/) the website content is in English as expected, but the title of the page is in Spanish ("La mejor manera de comprar tu casa de vacaciones").
It could be a discrepancy is orbit. Most space debris is not on circular low earth orbit. In fact, that is not a stable orbit because of atmospheric drag.

And circular LEO is where most satelites are. So satelites in that same class of orbits would indeed be 'hyper achievers'.
The numbers here are impressive. But I find myself wondering about those smaller, 15-second attacks they later mentioned in the article; were those actual _attacks_, or is it more likely, given their smaller scale, short duration and (relatively obscure?) targets, is it more likely those were TESTS in preparation for something bigger?

I suspect the latter but I admit I’m not an expert in this area, so more educated views are wholeheartedly welcome!
Add a progresssive tax on land. The more land you own, the more you pay. This forces developers to focus on denser housing while the average home owner can be left alone.

The tricky part is that home owners will knowingly defend the interests of real estate corporations because they want their own tax bill to be low.
A globally unique id is incredibly useful to many businesses, particularly since half of America changes their names. Often repeatedly. So there will be incredible back pressure at implementing this.
> I think it's reasonable to have different expectations of children vs adults.

Given the current state of stupidity in the US, I think there are a lot of children in adult bodies. No, I don't think it's reasonable to have different expectations for users.
What seems broken at Google is the iteration process. I'll let more informed others speculate as to why.

But I would contrast it with Apple (who seem to spend much longer in the pre-release baking stage + have a more mature user feedback cycle post-release [for hardware...]) and Amazon (spray and pray + iterate like crazy + a more mature deprecation and support story) and Microsoft (developers, developers, developers [and especially enterprise developers]).
this is really great feedback, thanks!
Paying somebody to do something physical and paying somebody to physically use their body are two completely different things
> For a technologist, I'm definitely fairly anti-technology.

Same here. I have built many cellular networks from the ground up in the early 90's, then I worked in R&D for cellular devices and today I do various cloud things. When I am not at work, I seldom carry a phone, nor even mess around with technology. (Other than the random hobbyist project I'll mess around with on the weekends every now and then).

I find it fascinating when I am out and about, only to watch people living 18 inches in front of their nose, while there is a great big world of activity all around them, and they are not even aware.
How do you tell if something is biased or not? Seems like the current system is "if people cry foul because it seems unfair, then the model is biased" which doesn't seem scientifically rigorous.

This seems like a hard problem. For example, say that you have an ML model that decides whether someone will be a good sports athlete or not purely based on biometrics (blood oxygen level, blood pressure, BMI, reflex time, etc.). If the model starts predicting black people will be better athletes at higher rates than white people, is the ML model biased? Or is the reality that black people have higher-than-average advantageous physical characteristics? How do you tell the difference between bias and reality?
Let's just go full on mole people, tunnels underground, all we need is a surface antenna for the 5G. It's not like most of us see much sunlight as it is.
Perforator: Record exact perf metrics for individual functions of an ELF binary
To me it just sounds like you’re trying to avoid a 4 letter word. Even if your model is completely different, it’s so on the periphery of timeshares that I think you really need to find a different term. Maybe one that’s less “accurate” and one that’s a brand all its own. Might be worthwhile to learn how AirBNB has described themselves over time. Their name at least plays on something familiar but makes it different. Ancana means nothing to me. Maybe there’s something in between? Or another metaphor you could pick?

I propose: CloudHomes.
That is a bug in search engines though, not in blogs.
The closest I can think of are systems like Eve, where players can trade in-game currency for game time tokens purchased by other players. 1:1 ratio, but the real money is proxied by game time so that no one can actually remove cash.
To be clear I am not saying nobody believed it, in many areas the majority of people likely believed in a flat earth if they thought of it at all. I am rather saying, belief that earth was round was also quite common in that time period and people had evidence for such beliefs.
If your family refused to speak to you because you didn't share your "wealth" with them, you would pay them off just so they would speak to you again?
Interesting point of view. Maybe ssn should be used for authentication purposes.

Give SSN. Get email txt or notification to verify. SSN service replies back with a real Id number. Real id number is used for banking.
I don’t know what to say - that article includes countless examples of societies that thought the Earth was flat until they learned otherwise. If you’ve got other theories then great for you but I’m guessing they’re not mainstream.
SARS-CoV-2 is a generalist that can infect many animals. I doubt it a "lab leak". Studies of genetic sequences from around the Wuhan fish market showed that it had been circulating and mutated a bit for some time before it was detected.
A few lightning strike victims have been left with Lichtenburg figures on their skin:

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

But this is an extreme symptom of a direct or nearly direct hit. Many lightning victims have no visible injury.

Lightning isn't very good at killing people, but it's capable of hurting you from a great distance, because it takes so little current across your heart to cause problems. There is evidence that as little as 5 mA can cause cardiac arrest, and this is the rationale for GFCI protected outlets in homes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device
Too bad that the cold and influenza flu are not comparable with Covid-19.
> Advertising is actually about educating the consumer for many products, and I think we're moving more toward personal ads that don't feel like ads.

They try to make consumer to buy the product in all means. Which means, that this education is often very far away from facts in the most of the cases.
There's still some identity theft issues, because "everyone asks your SSN for no reason" becomes "everyone asks for a scan of your id for no reason".

For instance, when I was looking for an appartment, the State had a service to both authenticate and watermark some documents (id and proof of income, among others).

The watermark was a bunch of big bars with "this is intended for rental search" written on them. Kinda low-tech, and it feels like a creative attacker could use software to strip them out, but it's cool they did that.

In theory, we have some very good APIs for securely authenticating someone (France Connect in particular), in practice administrations are slow to adopt them.
Intel Architecture Day 2021: Intel Unveils XeSS Image Upscaling Technology
> There should be appropriate isolation mechanisms so that corp-ware stays in corp-land and personal crap stays over on its side of the fence

This already exists and I use it every day: separate work and personal profiles on the same device or app.

I think most browsers support this out of the box. My phone's work profile actually shuts off automatically on vacation days from work and I have to consciously enable it if I want to check work email or chat.
> Less than 40% of the US population is completely unvaccinated, which means we can open up more without overwhelming hospitals.

Not sure where you get this about open up, but have you seen current ICU fill levels in various US states such as Alabamba etc?
Dubious, at best.

The minimum wage was originally designed in the 50s specifically to keep workers above the poverty level. It was often reset so that a 40-hour work week would keep a family out of poverty. This linkage was broken in the 1970s and the minimum wage stagnated for generations.

There were no such ill effects when the minimum wage was above the poverty level. In fact, there was decades of growth at all levels of the economy. One might also note that this was a time when the franchise restaurant industry first grew and thrived - with minimum wages above poverty levels.

Sure, wages might cause prices to go up, but it is nowhere near a 1:1 ratio, at the first order because front-line labor is simply only one component of the costs, among other major cost categories including capital expense, real estate costs, cost of goods sold, administration, sales & marketing, etc.. Even assuming that costs are evenly allocated across those 6 categories, doubling front-line wages would result in only a 16% increase in overall costs, much of which would not be passed on to the consumer, and which often results in a higher quality product or service from better paid workers.

The lower 3-4 deciles wiuld now have double the income, and multiples of that in increased disposable income, yet prices might rise 5-10% over the intervening years. The 5-7 deciles would barely reduce their consumption with a 10% inflation, likely far less than the 1-4 deciles increased and upgraded consumption, and the top deciles DGAF.

And aside from the beneficial economic effects, it is just the right thing to do, even if there are some minor costs. The idea that "you can't impose even a cent of costs on me to better everyone" is truly ugly. We live in a complex society, not some solipsistic universe solely for the benefit of "#1". Don't be that "#1".
I imagine starlink has the advantage of being able to coordinate with 50% of satelites sharing their orbit (the starlink satelites) so they should have a lower 'incident per satellite' rate.
> In other words: Houses are still way cheaper, in actual out-of-pocket terms for average people, than they were in 2008

False. Actual average people are making significantly less today than they were in 2008. Their buying power is therefore also significantly less too.
It’s also possible that starlink are somewhat neglecting their responsibility to keep appropriate distances between satellites because they find that financial risk acceptable and want to signal to other operators that they should get out of the way. Essentially a game of chicken where Starlink has the upper hand because a loss is not such a problem for them.
Let's consider your comments applied to another ethical area: eugenics. That was a previous area where scientists did something which is now considered highly unethical (remove the sexual autonomy of people due to incorrect scientific judgements). Would you say the people who opposed eugenics were "shaming" the scientists, or helping "guide them to making better decisions?"

I think there are many concerns around ethics in AI, but the majority of the players are not contributing (folks like Timnit, with the stochastic parrots paper, the sections on power consumption are completely technically wrong). Sara Hooker is a much better spokesperson for this, but I'm really struggling to see the point in her paper, beyond "we should identify existing data biases and make algorithmic changes to reduce them" which just sounds like "we need regularization that is the opposite of L1 and L2".
Yeah, that is retail level bullshit.
With an R0 of about 6 for the Delta variant, herd immunity won't provide a meaningful level of protection for most people. Herd immunity works with less contagious diseases because susceptible individuals can go their whole lives without exposure. But with SARS-CoV-2 now being endemic worldwide we'll all eventually get exposed, it's just a question of when. So the smart move is for everyone to protect themselves by getting vaccinated and actively treating co-morbid conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and hypovitaminosis D.

Any further lockdowns at this point cause far more harm than benefit.
The Bill Gates mention set off my conspiracy nut alarm bells, but after reading this entire article[0] the criticism seems fair.

[0] https://www.devex.com/news/gates-foundation-reverses-course-...
There's math you can do to roughly judge impact of partial vaccination. If R0 is six, and you're looking at hospitalization, estimate vaccine efficacy for Delta at around 90% (I've seen estimates above and below that).

Taking your estimate of a 60% vaccination rate:

6 * (1 - (.6 * .9)) = 2.76

2.76 is the effective Rt, which is far above 1, so no, that is not enough to open up more without eventually overwhelming hospitals.

Natural immunity from catching COVID, and other (inherently temporary) mitigation measures like masks/distancing/lockdowns would bring that Rt down further. But clearly what is best is more vaccination.
You don't understand what "herd immunity" means. Herd immunity means eliminating a disease within a community ("herd"). It does not mean endemic case incidence with socially tolerable outcomes, or whatever loosey-goosey idea you mean by "equilibrium."

Herd immunity means the contagion is eliminated. It has never happened worldwide without a vaccine, and I'm unaware of any virus where it has been sustained within a community without a vaccine. How could it? The only paths to immunity are vaccine or exposure, and exposure depends on the virus actually circulating.
thank you for the numbers!

But i think you got them wrong
> 10.25/100k among people who are unvaccinated
that should be 10.25k - so your statement at the end about 10% ICU admissions does not hold.