skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree. The guy pretty much invented field theory. Yes, Maxwell wrote the equations, but Faraday had the great conceptual insights. For more on how this evolved into modern gauge theory:

https://www.physics.umd.edu/grt/taj/675e/OriginsofMaxwelland...
“And technology companies are moths that will chew through more of the fabric every year if we let them”

I’m done reading.
pretty rich that Elsevier's director of universal access talks about theft while working in an entirely parasitic business.
True, maybe the idea will make more sense in 10+ years.
You should change, “I’d just like to see some actual data…” to “I’d just like to see someones hand chopped off for stealing.”
Who are you speaking on behalf of?
On the topic of distasteful, the author sounds obnoxiously proud of his accomplishments...
It's not a good thing when there are glaring issues that remain unfixed, like books receiving 1 star reviews while they're still being written.
We'd need to look at analogue computers in a lot of detail to figure out in what sense they count as computers.

I am taking the computer science defintion, ie., a universal Turing machine. All computable functions are over discrete inputs and outputs.

I suspect either (1) the sense of computer at-work in "analogue computer" might just be problem-relative, ie., it is just that someone uses this device to help them compute something; or (2) that analogue computers do compute computable functions (ie., their computation is discrete).

I suspect it is the latter, ie., the output and input to an analogue computer is discrete. As I'm pretty sure there isnt any coherent sense of "computer" as defined for continuous "input".
Lottie-web: Render Adobe After Effects natively on Android, iOS and web
More Ethereum Has Been Burned Than Minted in the Past 24 Hours
That's a self-correcting problem, isn't it? Either those cafes and shops will raise prices and pay their staff more, or they'll close down. I've never understood why we're supposed to feel bad for "small business owners" who won't find staff when paying peanuts for their crappy jobs.
While this collusion theory is unlikely to be true, NCMEC is not just any "private" organization. NCMEC was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 and has received up to $40 million of funding from the U.S. Congress every year.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121029010231/http://www.missin...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120111031718/http://www.missin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_Children%27s_Assistanc...
I can envision a scenario where both are true and result in short term (possibly on the order of decades) pain for locals. The supply of housing is not meeting the demand of local residents and the supply of “desirable” investments in stable societies is not met for global investors.

It is an arbitrage and inefficiency scenario created by the ability of capital to move easily around the world, but not people.
I don’t know what to say to that, other than to talk about my experience living in Eastern Eruope: about two of my friends are the ones who remained in the country, everyone else has gone to the west, whether Austria, Germany or the UK, they all understood that there’s a better life waiting for them there (with its own pros and cons, of course). So very few remain with the will and the courage to wish for a system that’s not corrupt and fundamentally broken. And not just the people in STEM. Natural resources are also increasingly leaving, whether legally or through bribes to officials.

And the money, something which always gets thrown at Eastern Europe, how it benefits from incredible amounts of grants - that tends to end up in private pockets and not in restoration, infrastructure or innovation.

Again, I can’t tell you what the way forward should be, because I don’t see it myself and I’m certainly not smart enough to imagine it, but what’s happening is certainly noticeable even to individuals.
> My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment.

The US government has a lot of investment in infrastructure, however these investments almost always go to private contractors who produce bad results raking in a lot of money (comparatively to any sort of however-inefficient public service). Unfortunately European governments have been following this way for a few decades now and privatizing everything.

Of course, only profit is privatized. The private sector still largely benefits from considerable sums of public money, and States take action quickly to save endangered businesses (eg. banks). Or, to paraphrase some thinkers, "Socialism for the rich, exploitation for the masses."

> the money not being available because of wars

There's two assumptions that irk me in this sentence:

1) Capability has nothing to do with money. The entire value of money is based on public confidence in the monetary system. Whether you have those virtual (or paper) numbers of not, a community or State has considerable infrastructure, skills and resources it can leverage to help improve life for all. There's usually legal provisions to enable "requisition" of private resources/infrastructure in times of needs, but there's also nothing stopping a government from developing a volunteering-based economy without money (like a huge cooperative).

2) The money is pretty much there, and it's spent not just on the military. There's a lot of infrastructure money that's being misspent on contractors doing a poor job and not doing any form of maintenance. There's a lot of bureaucracy money spent on managers making life miserable for field workers and making sure they can't do their job properly: education, health, regulation enforcement... As an outsider to the USA, i found a lot of Last Week Tonight episodes enlightening in this regard. You could also take Medicare for example, which is designed as a scheme to siphon money into private healthcare (insurances and cliniques), where it appears funding a public socialized healthcare infrastructure (as in many other countries) is far less costly overall.

I've found this humorous rap clip from the 2016 elections to summarize the situation pretty well overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qv6S_GtLo (to watch with your favorite invidious instance).
You just buy a house the usual ways and live in it. With cash or a mortgage.

If you live in it, it's not called "property investing".

"Property investing" refers to buying property to benefit from price speculation and use as a store of value, without actually using the property as a home. The property may sit there empty most or all of the time, or it may be rented out, with a combination of rent and price speculation being the owner's business plan. "Flipping" may be involved.
This is stupid.

It bans buying or renting. Our rental market is already very distorted because most rentals fall under regulations except for people just above modal incomes.
That already leaves a gap for people not poor enough to be allowed regulated rent, and too poor to get an 700 a month mortgage, who are forced to rent at 900 a month.

If you want to hurt pure investors, tax un-lived in housing.

But really, we need to kill the mortgage tax credit for any new homes. That will reduce the value of land because it offers less tax benefits. At the same time, currently interest is low so it will barely effect new entrants.
The key is to make houses worth a bit less. Homeowners are just going to have to suffer a slight dip after amazing gains for the last decades.
Instead of petitioning Apple (how humiliating is that?) to reverse course, people should petition the government to outlaw smart phones, since their primary use is clearly of a criminal nature.

Then you can gleefully watch Apple getting on its knees very fast.
Not knowing much about the subject: cosmological principle appears to say that laws of physics are uniform in space. Then, with known matter and forces, this leads to some structure, with fluctuations, and hence some scale over which matter is uniformly distributed.

If we calculate such a scale and find matter is still not uniform at that scale, wouldn’t the first conclusion be that there are missing terms in either matter or interactions (or both)? Rather than saying that laws of physics are not space-homogeneous.

The article itself states that the length scale where the c10l principle kicks in is derived from a particular model for matter and interactions (lambda CDM).

I think there is plenty of discrepancies between standard model and observations (most of them small). We don’t know what dark matter is, either. So to me the interesting point wouldn’t be, is the model wrong, but how is it wrong?
I think it’s interesting that we tend to believe that someone would actually report these things.

Then we get hit by these US (and other) foreign companies to whom morality is just a suggestion, and whom will happily do whatever makes them most money.

Now they’ve made literal millions out of these empty properties, and they’ll be given the benefit of the doubt, because that’s how we do things.
"Launch nuclear missile directly from JavaScript"...
I have been pleased that The Journal of Field Robotics is well represented on scihub. I have an open source off road robot I am designing and the journal is literally about robots out in fields and stuff. I am a "serious hobbyist" in that I believe my open source contributions to be at least somewhat helpful to others, but it's not the kind of thing that would justify paying for paywalled papers. I just want to glance over the material and keep track of what researchers are up to. Libgen is to me a vision of a world without copyright and intellectual property restrictions and I think it's a much better world than ours.
Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already
The municipality can designate locations where these rules apply and they can designate if a location is intended for student housing.

I'm not seeing an issue that is directly exacerbated. There are simply more tools that can be (ab)used .
> scale doesn't matter, right?
I was looking for data for inequality per country (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...).

What location and timeline are you thinking of for now being less inequal? Do you have a data source I could look into? Cheers

Edit: grammar
While buying the house in early 2019 I consulted Woz portal and saw that the price (of the house I was planning to buy) had increased 300% over ~8 year period. A constant lunch table discussion used to be how crazy housing prices were even back in 2018-19. So the market was already hot even before the pandemic, but now it's reached mania levels!
LTV won’t work in the UK land ownership is way too concentrated and leaseholds give land owners an easy tool to transfer the cost to the leaseholders.

London and other metropolitan areas still have a lot of low income housing in very high value areas, there are current/former council houses in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea for example that sit on land worth billions.

LVT in the UK would likely just increase cost of ownership for leaseholders which would make flats in cities even more expensive (and since many newly developed terraced, detached and townhouses also come as leasehold these days even buying a house won’t help) and just push for further gentrification as housing like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallfield_Estate would become economically non-viable.
Preosumably the closer to the city centre the higher the per square fot value so to minimise costs you move to the edge of town, thus sprawl.
n 2004, New Scientist, published an open letter from Eric Lerner and about 30 other scientists,[1] criticizing the Big Bang theory, and noting that Big Bang theory requires Dark Matter to exists.

«Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.»

Can we finally abandon Big Shrink (BS) theory? It's obvious now that Oort cloud of Shapley attractor just collided with Dipole Repeller cloud [2].

[1]: https://www.plasma-universe.com/an-open-letter-to-the-scient...

[2]: https://vimeo.com/189355968
Pirates tried to investigate the situation from this angle only to be publicly shamed for being commies, spying on people. They only wanted district aggregate statistics.
If you've stripped a story down to the bare basics, all you're left with is predictability that gives the reader an easy ride.

I think you'd have a hard time finding a Chekhov short story that you can dismiss as an 'easy ride' or 'pulp fiction' and many of them are very, very short.
The Dutch system caters for that through the social housing system. There are special companies that get permits to own houses and rent them at cheap prices for disadvantaged groups.
Note, this targets anyone buying houses to rent out. It does not (like london considered) tax un-lived-in houses.

This is just a weird bandaid. Mostly trying to blame landlords for this housing crisis when mortgage tax credits, and scarcity due to weird eco regulation shenanigans are to blame.
Are you asking this question yourself or are you suggesting that the author should have added this to the article?
Person living in Groningen right now, as Dutch citizen here.

There aren't enough houses for students right now.
There is a .NET project that uses this feature to create a NoSQL db experience. I've been using it for a few years and it's been great.

https://martendb.io/
Or, more interestingly, you could abandon the "contractor" model which is just a way to siphon public money into the hand of private shareholders, and fund self-organized public services. Self-organized, as in not centralized/authoritarian bureaucracies, but actual field workers coming together and deciding on strategies to do their job (turns out they're usually much better than managers at doing that).
I don’t think the article is saying ownership is a bad thing in itself, but that the vast resources that have been poured into promoting and subsidising it have had some pretty undesirable consequences.

Here in the UK we have started imposing tax penalties on buy to rent that disincentivizes owning more than one or two rental properties. The problem with punishing institutional investors is it would take huge amounts on investment out of the housing market, just as we have a massive need for more housing. We need more houses for people to buy and more new housing available to rent. Rental properties by themselves aren’t a problem, it’s taking houses out of individual ownership and transferring them to the rental sector that’s the problem.
True, but citing data from 2017 is also a little misleading, considering theirs was a very recent anecdote. It's still probably relevant though.
Those are two completely different tools with different use cases.
If you're taxed on the value of the land, rather than the value of the property built on top of that land, it arguably incentivizes buying super-cheap exurban land and planting massive McManisions on it.

Obviously in real life, people care about other things besides just pure acreage, but you can see the argument.
> (this comment applies to this line, this one to the function, this to a group of functions...)

This is probably the major reason I much prefer introducing new variables and functions solely so I can give them descriptive names over using comments. Comments aren't scoped so they're often ambiguous and imprecise compared to code, which also contributes to them becoming out-of-sync with the code over time. Comments above a function definition are generally better than comments inside a function for example as it's clearer what the scope is.
One my favorite subversions of this technique is in Mr. Robot, with a gun hidden in a popcorn machine. Using of the gun is never shown on screen: the show assumes that the person watching remembers that a gun was shown and hidden, and allows the connection to be made "between the lines". Excellent use of Chekhov's Gun, but it only works because of a certain amount of TV tropes literacy.
Land ownership tax doesn't work because land is a basic need. You have to exist somewhere. The problem isn't ownership of land, it's excessive ownership of land. Ownership of land beyond need into greed. You can easily design land ownership tax like income tax where people who own more pay more. People who own enough for their family are not taxed at all and if you want more you pay a lot more.

Of course there is the usual issue of the definition of "enough" but those kind of questions are solved all the time in parliaments. This all or nothing behavior is what harms the prospect of land tax.
You’re making a mistake in thinking something has to happen. It may not, and things may just continue to go downhill.
Sure; Apple, the world’s largest company at $2.1T, will get on their knees and beg if you file a petition to the government to ban smartphones. Get on that! Problem solved.
If you talk with non-scientists, you'll realize that most people are happy to pay the fees as they don't really understand how things work in the background. While they think they are supporting science by paying the fees, the reality is that everyone is paying the publisher and the publisher takes all the fees to themselves.

But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
There is more evidence for dark energy. Discrepancies in redshift vs distance are just one, and there are interestingly also other explanations for it.

IIRC in lambda-CDM, if you don’t have dark energy, the whole universe just looks very different, eg the structures of galaxies, groups and supergroups etc are not the same.

It might still be wrong, but more nails are needed for this coffin.
You may be interested to read the analysis of Ivan Illich (and others) on car-oriented infrastructure. Turns out cars, both for individuals and for society, are very arguably an "inferior good".
There is no optimal strategy because there is no perfect knowledge. That's why good CEOs are paid their weight in gold. A vision and steady hands can pay off handsomely.
Sounds like a toxic environment.
Per Sabine H on YouTube ( https://youtu.be/JETGS64kTys ), the cosmological constant might be smaller than called for in current cosmology. That would agree with some other observations.
> I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than any other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated

There are far too many reviews for advanced copies seeded by publishers, though, and there’s no consistent disclosure or way to filter these out.

That, and the rating system is far too simplistic. When you’re optimizing for engagement then having users spend a lot of time reading reviews is probably good. It’s not optimized for time spent to find a good book to read, though.
> Round here in Cornwall the jobs are things like surf instructor, supermarket worker, barperson, etc. That's not gonna stretch to the local house prices.

That was the case. A colleague of mine, originally from St Just, moved to London for work as so many have to do. Another from near Cockermouth did the same. Both now work remotely full time from their 'home towns' on decent wages.

Covid has done wonders for local communities - good jobs are now available for people without having to move across the country.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/112353359 for example is under £300k. Assuming you got it for 300k (asking price is 285k) with a 15k deposit you're looking at £1,278.19 a month with nationwide on a 30 year rate, well within the range of a couple earning £35k each, which is a reasonable

Now sure if you didn't get the education to get a decent job. Hell even on 25k each, Nationwide can lend upto £275k for a first time buyer - just need that deposit.
From my experience, the size and type of investor seem to be a factor. I have rented my entire adult life since it has some advantages (notably mobility), yet have always rented from homeowners or small-time investors. They tend to place more emphasis upon keeping their units rented and keeping good renters. Except for moving, I have only seen my rent increase once. It was a small increase and I lived in that place for many years.

Contrast that to people who have lived in places with large property managers. The rent increase is automatic, even with better renters than I. I have heard substantiated stories of rent doubling. Now those renters may have been bad apples and the property manager may have been using it as a tool for eviction, but that is still a problem. It is a problem since it is used a means to bypass tenant protections. Those protections are necessary to provide housing stability.

My apologies for the rant. In principle, I have nothing against investment. That said: the excessive greed of some investors, the ones that effectively push people down or out to achieve ... well, I don't know what some people are trying to achieve beyond a certain point ... is turning me away from that principle.
This is thoroughly ridiculed in A Series of Unfortunate Events (the Netflix TV series and presumably also the books that they're based on). (Mild spoiler alert) The bank manager has a noticeable cough the whole way through. If anything it gets worse and other characters comment on it, and it seems for sure that it will be a plot point. Of course, it ultimately comes to nothing.
> What we have today is fat, comfortable people looking at billionaires and screaming greed because the billionaire has a yacht while they only have 3 cars and one massive house. Who's the greedy one here?

This is the weirdest straw man, isn't the entire point of the issue that no one can afford housing? What are you even talking about?
Well, if we're not aware of it and we don't take steps to stop these techniques, malicious people will use it to their advantage.
Depends entirely on the time frame. If you have a superior capital allocation scheme, by all means, capture all the value left on the table then.
https://youtu.be/iJOb9xHggS4?t=417
And driving wages down is the answer to what, exactly?
No, and I think this is the difference: I don't consider social media and web hosting as utilities the way phone companies and ISPs are. There are a lot of competitors in those spaces and it's relatively easy to spin up new ones, which is not true of things like the phones and internet service.

> If you cannot use AWS, GCP and Azure, there's a significant possibility your business will not be able to survive in today's market.

...I contend that this is ridiculous. I work for a company that doesn't use any of these services, I know of many companies not using these services, and in fact I'd say most of the companies using these services really don't need them because they'll never scale large enough to make them worthwhile, it's just that it's currently the fad of our industry.
I considered building a tool to have running that would capture WiFi/Bluetooth addresses of those around in case of a burglary, but I figured most devices anonymize their addresses nowadays.
spoiler alert

My personal favorite is how in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the "gun" is a dog.