skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 5% foreigner owned is not big enough to have an appreciable difference

I doubt it makes zero difference, but like you, it's just my feeling.

Real estate investing could be a price driver, certainly. I don't know what it's like in Canada, but I know that in my location even individuals are buying second and third homes and renting them out as short-term rentals. Doesn't seem to be sustainable to me, and certainly is affecting local housing prices.

One way I'd combat this is to ban short-term rental outside of hospitality zoned areas.
This is absolutely true, and also why this can cause so much anxiety in most people. More people are afraid of flying in airplanes than driving a car precisely because they have no control over the outcome. Posting an opinion on social media about Ukraine, despite having less impact on the situation than a pebble dropped in a lake, can make some feel better. That might not be a bad or useless thing.
Arbitration just means they decide your case on secret criteria.
> GS-7, and max, maybe, but would be hard, GS-11.

I’m guessing that this was actually a 7/9/11 position, with automatic annual promotions (apprentice, journeyman, master, iirc).

Still… that’s really low for someone who can get a decent tech job in the private sector.

Note that an ambitious person with the right skill set could probably be GS-15 in the DC area in their late 20s, and they would hit the GS salary cap soon thereafter. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a good thing (total comp still low), but I just wanted to throw that out there.
This is also true in the US - but not at all what the parent comment meant.

If you pay the balance in full every month - you have spent $2000 on a $2000 mattress by the end of the month. This exposes you to ~30 days of inflation and you will have paid no interest.

If you pay 0% APR over a twelve month period, and make installment payments until making a single lump sum to close out the line of credit at the end of twelve months - you are exposed to something closer to ~365 days of inflation (depending on the installment payments and the lump sum). You will have also paid no interest.

If we assume roughly 7% yearly inflation, you're paying less real value if you take option number two, because you will have paid $2000, but that same mattress is now worth ~$2140 - You are abusing the time differential between purchase and payment to receive a discount.

That said - this is not the majority of folks using these services.
Even though I have the money, I've used this to leverage my liquid funds for side gigs. Although I have huge ethical issues with predatory companies like Affirm incentivizing people with less financial self-control to spend beyond their means. Honestly, I think companies like Chime are a bigger issue. They're the payday loan grift of today - especially with their advertising clearly targeting minorities that focuses on paycheck advances.
Would you say that's the case for bigger ticket, long lived items, such as houses or cars?
Do you have any evidence of that? They were already very difficult to find before the website, and if the associated twitter account is anything to go by, a lot of people have been very successful using it to find one in stock.
It's not recursive, though -- that would only be true if AOL stood for AIM On-Line.

Maybe "nested acronym" is a better term?
I was single at the point when I was making around that much so that’s probably the only fair comparison I can make. You’re right that a family on just that income would be tighter. Between my girlfriend and I right now we’re definitely not making $200k though and I still feel pretty comfortable. No kids yet though :)

Philly suburbs can be expensive (although that’s not universally the case) but Philly proper is relatively affordable.
Probably because grocery store margins are low, and the number of employees for a small one vs a large one is pretty similar, so it's cheaper and easier for the company to build larger ones.

We do have "convenience stores" some of which are effectively very small grocery stores (produce, fresh meats, etc). But usually significantly more expensive.
Another factor could be the fact ENS names expire and require a renewal fee, which didn't make a whole of sense to me given the immutable nature of the blockchain - there's more overhead involved in expiring them but more profit to be made for the next renewal. The price was also ridiculously high if you ask me for something so basic, just like a bytes => address mapping, doesn't require a genius to make, although it seems like they managed to get some partnerships/integrations behind it which add the main value as it seems like there's some integration with web3 libs to know how to leverage ENS.

Anyways, I agree it probably was a fad and such but the way it was structured for renewals also makes me think lots of people just don't own their .eth handle anymore, so it wouldn't make any sense to share it. I'd have probably gotten one if it was one time cost for a permanent static address, but that wasn't what they were offering. I think it was something like $250 per year (in ETH at the time) to keep it active, I never opted into that because it seemed like something I would want to opt out of in the future - I'm not surprised ENS has some attrition, it's built into their business model.
This was a fascinating read.
Most people want more ips or static ips? How many people know what an ip is even? Jesus.
Why do banks everywhere insist on disabling copy and paste in their sites? It's such a useless inconvenience for pure security theatre.

In fact it actually makes security worse as it is far more difficult to use password managers in this scenario.
Wow! so helpful! I love the illustrations.
We'll have to evolve the automated blocking again. Crypto folks were making it so easy to filter them out for a while.
I quoted a sentence from the post since the post has no "original" title. Happy to edit with a more appropriate one.
Change the \t to a ; and see it become a single line
> its down the road to wrapping the meat and veg stew to make an enchilada and calling it "ethiopian tacos" or something.

and then they have to outdo the established items in that food category from other international cuisines like burritos and pizzas, and the outlook doesn't look very promising for the Ethiopian fast food.
Sometimes I'm annoyed at the GDPR, especially when implementing it. But this thing just won't happen in Europe anymore, at least from my experience. Especially when writing to your local representative it's unbelievable that they are allowed to start messaging you regularly with their advertisements.
Sure, but you dramatically change the character of a city or neighbourhood when you upzone with that intensity. Real estate prices and rents would also come back to reality if rates go up meaningfully and foreign investment is banned without easy loopholes. But since BC (and Canada at large) have built their flywheel for growth on a giant RE ponzi scheme, we’re stuck debating supply side solutions to a fundamental demand problem.
Just a thought, I wonder if DALL-E would generate more realistic hands if you prompted it with something like

> an astronaut riding a horse, and the astronaut has five fingers on each hand
but many folks (including myself) aren't counting apps specific to a platform like this one. You should have a set of quick links to cross platform apps that are native.
I use Linux and grudgingly Mac now, so np++ is not even in the race. ;-)
Interestingly, I'm seeing a lack of zoning enforcement drive up prices locally.

Small-time investors are buying homes in residential zones to put on short-term rental sites, and because they generate revenue from the house, are able to offer a much higher amount and have it still make financial sense.
Yeah not much background in this article. Affirm is a "buy now, pay later" service (BNPL). It's basically just personal loans with the addition of a fee charged to merchants (on the premise that providing financing will attract more customers to the merchant). Very similar to the layaway offered by some merchants directly but Affirm offers this as a service.

Affirm is a unicorn and IPO'd in 20221. It has quite a few competitors in the BNPL space like Klarna and Afterpay. So far they all lose a lot of money.
Are you talking about the first 2 comments? Because it seems like they believe this is just part of some sort of a right wing conspiracy to defame their side.

So yeah I guess you are right, not very logical to be honest.
My impression of the parent comment is that they were saying that the specific term "induced demand" seems to be used to dismiss the needs and concerns of people in an out-group.

The economics term "elasticity of demand" is probably older, has a very similar meaning, broader application, and a clearer definition.
> Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation?

Yes, correct. That’s spot on. A lot of people were crying out for a powerful, capable, usable mobile computer to access email, the web and use applications on the go. The mobile networks had invested billions building network capacity to meet these needs. This is why there were huge queues for the very first iPhone before hardly anyone had even touched one.

The mobile industry had been full of speculation about what devices we would use on these networks, how they might work and what they would look like. Before the iPhone was even announced I could tell you very clearly what I needed a mobile device to be able to do for me, but not how it would do it. Apple figured that bit out.

Think about it this way. If latent demand didn’t exist, how could Apple have figured out what device to design? How could they select the features and capabilities and prioritise them? They had to target a market, even though that market didn’t exist yet. Without thinking about latent demand that sort of novel product development would be just random feature selection and then see what gets traction. For sure some companies do that, but not all. Some of them think it through and target a market they hypothesise exists.
Credit Cards are 2-4% + 0.1-0.3/transaction depending on your volume. Small businesses would pay the max on the flat and near it on the percentage.

Affirm and similar were 6% last time I talked to them (admittedly 3-4 years ago), and represented a far superior value proposition for a lot of customers because it gives them a longer period of time and forces them onto a payment schedule.
.eth has also surely doxxed a lot of ppl who have carelessly used a metamask wallet that has transactions that be traced to their other wallets or transactions
First Business Should Be a Spreadsheet
A sort of oracle, yes. I believe there's a vulnerability with servers that are willing to attempt RSA kex (which no longer exists in TLS 1.3 and has been a bad idea for many years), where you can (at least in principle) arrange for them to do an operation which either reveals some bits of their private RSA key (extremely bad) or is equivalent to RSA signing a message of your choosing. RSA kex involves the server attempting to RSA decrypt messages chosen by an adversary.

It's fuzzy, perhaps somebody will remind me of the specifics.
The appeal, as I understand it (and I'm 100% an out-of-his-field armchair analyst here), is that this is loan sharking with extra steps ("late fees") for those of us with the worse credit scores that can't get better options. I forgot the exact number, but when I've done the math how much maximum interest you accrue by missing every payment is well beyond usury, as I recall it gets you above 30% interests in 2-3 months (and caps there, which I guess is the silver lining), where as I've considered "interest" to be late fees over the loaned amount.

For every person using this to their advantage as a credit tool, I bet there are a dozen who are just sinking deeper into their debt quick sand.
They are legally required to report it that way. The quarterly shareholder reports include revenue with and without Bitcoin.
I find it hard to blame anybody but the company leadership for issues like this. They took on responsibility for the company, both its successes and failures.
Vaguely related. I wrote a script years ago that grabs the cheapest region for each Spot Instance on AWS. Haven't checked it in years but it still seems to work : https://simonpbriggs.co.uk/amazonec2/
A very small % of the population identifies outside of the conventional gender bounds. If anyone is getting fired, it's for not respecting the preferences and wishes of their coworkers, which seems quite reasonable. If someone refused to call me by nickname, and insisted using my legal name, for example, I'd probably be quite bothered.
I don't really dev with Qt, but I thought a lot of folks were using QML and sometimes QtQuick these days. Seems to make it possible to hide a lot of the C++ :)

Although of course, it does mean you probably have to touch C++ sometimes.
This one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Works brilliantly :).
Jup, that’s what I meant. Your nerve cells sensing where things are as opposed to other external senses like skin touch being used to figure it out.
I think 2018 maybe? There was that wave of deranged crypto hype with like every single company announcing a "pivot to blockchain" or ICO or whatever. He consistently handled that very well; a lot of humor but he did also evaluate them as serious financial products and got to nerd out about and compare them to highly technical traditional finance instruments. Which honestly that is when he's at his best anyway.

There weren't a lot of sources back then that were informed enough, accessible enough, and took those announcements as seriously as they deserved but no more.

Anyway I was working in tech but nowhere near crypto at that time and started seeing his newsletter shared around a lot among coworkers and my peer groups around then. Not surprising if he picked up a lot of long term readers from it.
> ask it to generate images of astronauts on horses, teddy-bear scientists, or sea otters in the style of Vermeer, and it does so with near photorealism.

I'm now imagining a mashup of Scribblenauts and this AI image generator.
As nickff posts below, there are other, less provocative ways to refer to the fact that demand can outstrip supply.

I'd argue that most of the time in the case of road networks the demand isn't even induced; it's not even elastic! It's already there, there's just no supply for it. At least in the short term - you might have an actual increase in demand over decades as a city/region grows.
you can file a chargeback against anyone if you paid them with a credit card, you can file for ACH reject if ACH payments.
Most agencies don't have talent capable of interviewing and getting accepted at FAANG. That doesn't mean they can't do FAANG work, even at my current company, the interview was way harder than the actual job itself.
Respectively disagree, but regardless the customer service flow is unacceptable and most of the point of the post IMO.
Has that oversupply affected prices at all? I thought they were a bit cheaper than the rest of the world?
Ah darn - it isn't extended out to Surrey and Richmond - a lot of areas east of the city itself are extremely livable due to highly opinionated zoning decisions.
What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness [video]
There's a big difference between 15 years and "couple of years", and on top of that, phones are particularly recyclable (and a good value to recycle, too! plenty of valuable metals in there).
In Vancouver, you'll usually have a few grocery stores in <10min walk because of the zoning. Commercial is usually every 4-6 blocks. It takes 10 mins to walk 4 blocks, as they are small in comparison to other cities I've lived in.

Most American cities were designed to do everything by car.
Yeah except you get paid half as much and have to wear a button down to work.
My dude, them's fighting words. So I built a SSG in 50 lines of mostly idiomatic Java (one line is a bit squished, but 52 just doesn't sound as cool):

https://github.com/vlofgren/50-line-java-ssg

Does deal with partials, bit stuff like an automatic index requires maybe 5-10 additional lines.

Took about an hour (plus 15 minutes to try to figure out how to get into my github account, which I haven't actively used in the last 15 odd years).

My "real" Java SSG is used to generate https://memex.marginalia.nu/. Unfortunately I don't have the source published.
Yes I wanna get rid of all dependencies...just finding my way through it.
There's also https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a..., which is specifically targeting cookie banners.
Of course, split-horizon DNS is used by more organizations, by multiple orders of magnitude, than DNSSEC, so it's not that simple. :)
You're right but never forget how the world, systems and people work. Even if you're an absolute rationalist, these ideas will keep flying in the realm of abstract. In the real world, idealists are starving. Cheers for your thought exercise, but real life will prove you that you're wasting breath. Just enjoy
I've been looking for a Linux version of Notepad++ for what feels like years.

I started learning vim but can't use it at work as I'm stuck on windows (which vim is rubbish on), and the way they (IT dept) installed it basically made it worse, so I never used it enough for it to be my go-to.
Izpisúa Belmonte?

Doesn't the mice either died after three or four days from cell malfunction or developed tumors that killed them later?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/08/65461/scientist-...
I think government work culture is handicapping the salaries more than anything else. If a consultant comes in for a year at $200/hour, the government ends their contract when they're finished with them. When the government hires someone at $50k/year, they are stuck with that person pretty much as long as that person wants to continue working there. There's a common joke with civilian defense employees that you can't get fired without committing a felony. Government work culture has this maternal mentality where it feels the need to care for workers from cradle to grave. You can never get rid of low performers, there's no layoffs when priorities change, you just have the same people that need to be shifted around to do a mediocre job elsewhere. It's completely immune to outside market forces and that makes it literally impossible to compete with private sector salaries, who have no problem laying people off if a project doesn't work out.

Each person hired by the government is a massive, open-ended liability that can most likely never be fired, never be demoted or take a pay cut, regardless of changes in circumstances for the employer. I think the USDS was a huge step in the right direction by focusing on having "tours of duty" where the term of employment is fixed. I think the government should adopt that much more broadly if it wants to be competitive with the private sector.
I don't think it's slimy. Saying "a grocery store opened in the low-income neighborhood and demand was induced for fresh vegetables", if the people there actually are now purchasing fresh vegetables at an increased rate, is accurate and probably correct. If you view that as a "slimy" thing to say, then that exists as a negative connotation on the word "induced" for you, an experience which may not be what others experience.

The basic idea of "if you build it, they will come" is the same as "induced demand", but with different words. "Induced demand" though has been used lately though when you need to say:

No, you can't just 'more infrastructure' your way out of a problem of high utilization, since utilization will probably rise to meet new availability.

You may reply with "well then we'll build more when we get there", but specifically related to roads, that leads to it's own set of problems like "we will run out of space to realistically build more" and "building more has massive adverse effects" and "building more will cost more than it's worth". Those downsides around building roads can be ignored in the name of increased convenience or because in specific cases the downsides may not apply as much. But it doesn't make the downsides go away. And ultimately, the downsides will exist because induced demand is real; if you build it they will come (even if you'd prefer they not).
This is a problem with the whole credit system, right? Yes it is a bad system.
It's an intriguing question! People of the early 20th century ate too much fat, too much sugar, too many carbs, too many calories, and yet did not grow obese. There is an interesting paper [1] making a strong case that the cause of the 21st century obesity epidemic is an unidentified environmental contaminant which (1) causes obesity in both humans and other mammals; (2) accumulates in major river valleys; (3) started noticeably affecting the US around 1980, and by now has spread worldwide.

Some possible candidates proposed for such a contaminant include animal antibiotics, PFAS, and lithium (e.g. in industrial lubricants).

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6miu9BsKdoAi72nkL/a-contamin...
So to give an extreme example: there would be one cohort of unsuspecting elderly people that can't recognize spam and therefore still get a lot of Spam?
> because spreading the payments out over 12 months means more investment capital

This is essentially borrowing money to invest. It doesn't matter if the investment makes money or loses money the lender will expect payment. This strategy can make a lot of money, but it's also ruined many people. One key thing to watch while implementing this strategy is your debt to assets ratio. Also understand that during a market crash this ratio might change suddenly and dramatically.

I don't make small (sub $10k) purchases on credit, period. Not only is it somewhat risky but it also encourages overspending because it makes the 'pain' of spending money decrease. As for your $2000 mattress, I saved way more money by buying a $600 mattress instead and I sleep like a rock.
It's way too expensive to have individual models for these things.
At this moment in the US at least Bank of America, Discover, Chase, Citi & Capital One have publicly available offers for cards with 15 - 18 months of zero interest. All but the Chase (Slate) & Citi (Diamond) offer rewards of 1% back or better.

It is very common to get a credit limit in the range of $10-20k on these cards, one could easily put all expenses on a 0% interest card, make minimum payments and put the amount of the statement balance in a high yield savings account until the promotional interest ends.

In total one would get negative interest in the amount of the rewards (say 1.25% average) plus the 15+ month yield on the cash stored away.
Having right of first refusal doesn't mean they can veto a sale- it means they can buy the shares at the offered price instead. Either way the seller gets to sell their shares.

It makes it difficult to attract buyers though- why go through all the due diligence when Stripe could just exercise their right to buy the shares instead of you at the same price you would have paid?

Still, different from being able to veto the sale and block it entirely.
So, train a classifier to create an embedding of Spam Types, then train a different Bayesian filter for each Spam Type with only the data from the users in that type class?

I mean, yeah, I guess that would be possible, but is it a good idea? Echo chambers tend not to be productive, so if the choice is "get rid of stuff that most people think is bad" or "get rid of stuff that most people who agree with you think is bad" -- and if it takes much more work to do the latter -- I can't justify putting in that work. It's counter-productive, and all to satisfy peoples' desires to hear what they already think.
> You don’t just have a bunch of ‘proprioceptor’ nerves dedicated solely to that task,

Actually you do. Most animals have capsule joint receptors which are dedicated to sensing stretching/relaxing of the joint capsule tissue.

This signal is then sent through dedicated nerve paths on the dorsal part of your spine.