skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is so much incompetence and political game playing regarding property taxes. I work in commercial real estate development. We negotiated a TIF district in a small midwestern town to help redevelop their vacant mall. In theory, if we could redevelop the mall and fill it with new stores, the sales taxes and property taxes from this growth would greatly benefit the city over the long term and help finance this risky project.

First we came into battle with the school district. They would not allow us to build apartments on the mall site because "renters don't contribute to property taxes for the school", even though the citizens of this town need rentals because not everyone can afford a home. It then came to light that the city had been paying the school district out of their operating budget... which is illegal, schools can only be funded by property taxes. But would any politician want to go to war with the school district because they had accidentally been paying them illegally with taxpayer dollars? No way, they'd be voted out for attacking schools. So the school district continues draining the operating budget from the city to this day, while also getting their share of property taxes.

Enter the county assessor. We went back through all the assessment records and discovered that the county assessor had not re-assessed the commercial properties in the area for 8 years... meanwhile jacking taxes up on single family homes annually. Essentially they were giving businesses a freeze on property taxes while shifting the burden onto homeowners. If the county wasn't reassessing commercial real estate, than our TIF development couldn't demonstrate growth as the taxes would not change! So we tried to shake the hornets nest and let the county and city know that their taxpayers were being taken advantage of...

What was the end result? Why had they not been reassessing commercial properties? Incompetence, the assessor was some idiot who was voted in because he had the "D" next to his name and did not know anything about assessing property taxes and argued that he was simply "too understaffed" to assess commercial properties for the last 10 years.

Now imagine a whole country where massive, expensive errors like this can play out without anyone noticing for nearly a decade... it's frightening how broken, corrupt, or incompetent our government is in the United States.
Friggles and bop, produce nothing.
Still paying according to location for the same work?
Damn dude, you guys should really unionize.

I know it's got a particularly bad reputation in SV but software developers are long overdue a strong union.
I've never heard of a "union signup" fee (that's not to say it doesn't exist) but the person who posted it claims his buddy was paying every month.

edit: Looked it up in my state, they are limited here to $15.
If I had to guess, based on other large models, it’s in the range of hundreds of GBs. It might even be in the TB range. To host that model for fast production SaaS inference requires many GPUs. An A100 has 80GB, so a dozen A100s just to keep it in memory, and more if that doesn’t meet the request demand.

Training requires even more GPUs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they used more than 100 and trained over 3 months.
Nala – An alternative front end to apt
It works under WSL. I seem to remember some other experiments years ago (maybe cygwin/mingw based?)
I find it staggering that there exist companies where they don't value their QA people. As far as I'm concerned, QA is one of the most important roles on a development team. I've had meetings with higher ups where I told them we need to get our QA on the call to voice their opinion or the conversation in question can't proceed. The ability to systematically and reproduceably break things in ways that nobody else thought of is a powerful skill, and should not be overlooked.
> I see them definitely creating a "Metaverse" App Store filled with their spyware.

They could do that from a technical/engineering level, but I question their product/business capability to woo users to such a store. Meta is an old tech dinosaur at this point, and their Metaverse initiatives have yet to bear any fruit. Users at this point are all juggling nearly a dozen of social media, email, e-commerce, streaming entertainment, and so on accounts. Dealing with another Meta App Store account to manage is going to be inherently a source of friction unless Meta presents a lot of compelling new content to win them over, which I completely question their product ability to execute on.

> They have the leverage to push users to their store between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Right- I understand that taking their existing offerings and moving it to their store is a way to artificially boost demand. But it will come with blowback. Users will be annoyed at dealing with another account, most will see it as a transparent attempt to steal their data, and a non-zero amount will not bother to migrate. They'll try to use mobile web or stick to only desktop for some apps. Facebook DAU has dropped in a prior quarter, their continued level of usage is not guaranteed; perhaps Meta will soon find more users than they expected can live without their product.

And if something as crucial as WhatsApp is moved off of its currently largest platform- the App Store- into a scammy Meta App Store exclusively, well I doubt the regulators will sit still for that either. Not only does it also seem like a monopolistic move, that also subjects such a store to scrutiny as well. Regulators aren't happy at big tech for user data tracking. It's another issue they're pursuing, and the idea that they'll let a Meta or Google third party app store off scot-free for doing so is pretty unrealistic.

> Running an App Store is hard but companies like Facebook and ByteDance already run the sort of infrastructure needed.

I mean from a business perspective, not purely technical. I remember how Microsoft desperately tried to get third party developers for the Windows Phone store, and the steady demise of Facebook Apps as a platform. (Not to mention how their one prior mobile play, Facebook Home for Android, was a complete bust.) It's hard to chase after both third party devs and consumers, even if they offer lower margins than 30%. Most app devs will almost certainly keep their apps listed on the App Store and on the Play Store, because that's where the overwhelming majority users will be.

> The wording of the DMA also seems like it would be difficult for Apple to stymie their data collection at the OS level.

We'll see how it goes. I believe regulators can chew gum and walk at the same time. App Store monopolies aren't the only issue that's on their minds right now. Even Google itself is changing Play Store tracking policies:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...
True that. You also want to be able to rebrand the external name multiple times – easy to do with public APIs via DNS aliases to the old one.
Oh no, now you can optionally use Google's DNS servers instead your ISPs that redirect every unresolved domain to an ad-laden hellsite! Or you could even set up your personal PiHole as a DNS server from anywhere to prevent others from reading your DNS requests! The absolute horror! How will our privacy ever recover!

Nobody is forcing you to use Google's servers. They're off by default. They've bumped the HTTP version their existing feature uses up a level. If you don't want you Android system DNS client to use DoH, don't enable it. If you want to prevent apps from connecting through DoH to resolve IPs, don't install any closed source apps and read through the source code of open source ones vigorously, because DNS evasion has been a thing for years now.

If you rely on DNS for ad blocking or privacy, you've already lost. You've lost several years ago, actually. You can't block Youtube ads with just DNS, unless you break Youtube all together.
You are correct, but its not just abstractions, its specifically abstractions on a shitty platform.

The whole log4j thing happened is because java is very poorly designed from the get go, and one of those points is the insistence of making everything an object, including data. And of course, you often need to output the string representation of data.

From a theory perspective, if you want to rely on language features like strong typing to ensure correctness, then you have to take it all the way to full provability, where you explicitly guarantee bounded input, bounded output, and any side effect (where a network call is a side effect, and if your code doesn't explicitly state that this side effect will happen, it won't run).
Oh, that's very cool. Any ability to run the server as a local service?

I know people who mix+master and sending huge project files and also have to convert between DAW formats even. Having a common web DAW that can render on a server could be a very powerful ecosystem.
Pretty maps in Python
In Australia at least local government rates are based on "improved property value", i.e. you get taxed more from building a house on your land. It absolutely does lead to land-sitting even in higher density inner-city suburbs.
Sounds absolutely terrible. I'm sorry. Hope your town gets it's shit fixed
I agree.

I was taught that computers don't care how you format things, where you place things, what language or principles you use, etc.. All of that is for OTHER developers.

The machines do as instructed, but all the fluff around coding is so other developers can see what you were trying to tell the machine to do.
I thought this was going to be about the dangers of paying bills online. Clearly not.
> I think something like California's Prop 13 that puts a cap on property tax increases is a better idea

Prop 13 is one of the worst ideas in taxation ever. It would be better just to let the aged and disabled freely defer property taxes beyond a certain, income-based level (and maybe also to let other people do the same with certain limits on total deferred amount relative to assessed value for time-unlimited deferrals, and total time for value-unlimited deferrals.)
For those with bluetooth woes:

I've had better luck in all operating systems with a stand-alone USB bluetooth audio dongle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089PYFLBN

It's not perfect, but the combination of "you can select the codec" and "the bluetooth stack is 100% out of the hands of the OS" gave me dramatically better results on almost every headset I tried.
This is terrible research. The results are meaningless.

At best, it's a case of confirmation bias. The most highly-differentiated startups don't raise anything and no one ever hears about them. Crunchbase doesn't capture the majority of these, so the data used here isn't representative.

Then they use NLP to determine how different the products are.

Those of us who get pitched by SaaS vendors all the time know that two companies can do the exact same thing and have totally different product descriptions. Salesforce started talking about IoT for a while, and they still bill themselves more as an ERP when most people still use them as a CRM.

There's also the issue of those who pivoted. Most startups pivot, and the author admits to ignoring pivots altogether!

> "2. Found the websites of all these companies, in the year each startup was launched (using WaybackMachine, a historical archive of web pages)."

> "3. Scraped the text on these websites and ran them through a natural language processing (NLP) machine learning algorithm (doc2vec)."

> "4. Measured how different the startups’ value propositions were to those of competitors (e.g. focused on a niche product feature vs others that talked about price)."
Please, someone do this successfully in Boston, for the benefit of renters.

As a renter in Boston, I'm motivated to avoid broker cost and the headaches of finding a non-sketchy broker, so it'd be easy to get me to use a reputable service that avoids those problems. But you also have to figure out how to get landlords to use the service, to have properties listed for the renters to rent. The convention in Boston is that the renter pays the broker fee, so landlords decide they might as well use a broker and hopefully reduce headaches, at no cost to them.

(Quick notes: There's lots of turnover in Boston, due to all the universities. Standard practice is the renter is required to pay a broker fee equivalent to one month of rent. Good advice for over a decade is to show up at a showing with your checkbook, and be prepared to pay an application fee within 5 minutes, because it'll probably disappear quickly, and broker might've even scheduled multiple people to see it at essentially the same time. IIUC, rents are currently similar to SFO and NYC. There's also some sketchiness, like rampant bait&switch listings on CL, to generate leads for brokers, since they make thousands of dollars per signed lease. Besides non-broker scams on CL. I haven't seen competing brokers trying to undercut on fee; they seem to compete by having a property they're allowed to show, and somehow getting renters to talk with them instead of another broker.)
I totally agree with this. When I was in undergrad I learned about goal setting and had some of the best years of my life. After I had a couple of kids I forgot to set goals, and felt lost. Then, it finally dawned on me that I didn't have any big clear goals. After setting some and starting to take action towards them I felt 10 times better about everything. Goals are so powerful.
Requiring monopolistic platform megacorps to compete is similar to expropriating them. Got it.
> The fact that somebody can, with a straight face, say ...

To be clear, I'm not trying to devalue this at all; In fact, as I noted above, I am certain I'm missing something and that was what my comment was aimed at. In any case, thank you for taking the time to reply (seriously).
We treat payroll as zero emissions. The responsibility boundary of a company doesn't include the personal consumption decisions of employees. The spend-based approach makes this pretty straightforward — if the company is buying, those are company emissions. If an individual is buying, those are individual emissions.
> Land value taxes are even better. Property taxes provide a disincentive to making the land more productive.

I could get on board with this if cost to build and demolish were considered. We have a lot of SFHs that don't make sense to turn into town homes yet because the value of the home on property + demolition costs + cost to build new townhomes on property is greater than what those townhomes could sell for.

More to the point, a blind land value tax could create a lot of waste through otherwise unproductive land repurposing (only productive because the tax makes it so).
Visible to who? Certainly the request to work outside of their normal schedule, and the report that an issue was resolved are seen by more than just the person responding to the request?
I guess it depends on the tech stack. Where I work it's very difficult, and I've never seen it happen. We have 10 year old obsolete names appear regularly.
amazing tool. if you have any tools in the shop with radio-remote (like lights, or a vacuum) - this tool can make you an evil king of a haunted space. but don't do that tho.
How do you mean one can trade when someone has lose? Do you mean that all russians agree to lose to their number 1?
It isn't whataboutism. I'm simply pointing out that the same argument people use to disparage Tom Cruise also applies to religious figures that they respect far more. I'm pointing out ignorance about other religions, it isn't whataboutism at all.
Apparently they call it an "initiation fee" for some people.
People already produce all kinds of fake news and doctored photos and false flags and all kinds of things. This has been going on since we developed language and photography I suspect.

People already have trouble telling propaganda from fact. That has been going on since forever.

At the end of the day I don't see this being a game changer. If anything, now video and photos are less evidence for/against something as the potential falseness becomes well known. Congressman X: "no, that wasn't me you saw leaving the hotel with the prostitute, my slimy opponent obviously is deep faking stuff".

And people will continue to believe what they want to believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, just like they do right now.
>We use very few dependencies.

While this may solve the "exploit from 3rd party dependencies" this says nothing about the security quality of your functions. Now instead of the vuln being found in the 3rd party package and fixed, the issue remains in your program forever, probably getting exploited by nation state level actors without your knowledge.
Stereokit is fantastic.
Ive been looking for a .net game engine to try - and love the runtime asset importing.

Are examples of its use for a traditional desktop use? Like screen space UI. And maybe mobile touch input? Or are both of those out of scope and XR is the focus.
I am wanting to try a side project in it - but hoping to make it both VR+Desktop.
The question was if there is any other scenario where black could force a win other than by forcing a zugzwang.

I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could win without zugzwang.
Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to make the first move and by white skipping the first move, the colors swapped).

If white would not skip the very first move and play an arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.

But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which contradicts our assumption.
That's not true either though. I can't even count how many Democrats have publicly supported the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and most blue states have officially passes legislation signing on to it. https://ballotpedia.org/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Com...
Road wear isn't the only consideration though. Cars take up space on the road while driving, and as anyone who's ever been in a traffic jam knows, there is a limited amount of road space available.

Maybe it'd make sense for trucks to fund the majority of wear-induced maintenance costs, but for new construction and improvement projects (e.g. increasing the number of lanes on a highway) cars should pay a significant portion of that.
Photoshop has existed for years and humans have been manipulating photos for longer, what's the difference, really?

If I see a photo in the Guardian newspaper (or any other reputable news outfit) I'm going to presume it's real, and I expect journalists to verify that for me. If I see a random photo that doesn't look quite right on a 4chan, I'm not going to immediately assume it's news.
I love this. Also, can't help thinking about a plumber fixing my toilet and then baking questionable brownies.
Chromecast doesn't run Android, of course, so I'm not sure how it's relevant to this article.

Personally, I've statically routed my Chromecast to forward UDP/53 to my PiHole and it's been very effective so far. Too bad blocking trackers also breaks the applications on Chromecast, making the block effectively useless, but that's the choice I made when I bought one of those things.
"buy fo' a dollar, sell fa' two"
- Prop. Joe
> where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time

24 hour shifts? Sounds like a real worker's paradise. I'll keep my 7-8 hour days with bi-monthly on-call over that, thanks. I'm glad you aren't legislating where I live; I am much happier with the choices and trade-offs in my life than what you or any euro-crat could dream up to "protect" me.

> if you did not volunteer for it but an employer "pushed" this unreasonable requirement on you (e.g. as a condition for employment)

You have a very different concept of what voluntary and self-agency mean than I do.
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IIRC the taxable value (not sure of the technical term）goes up by up to $1MM
If it were only Putin's Russia making stuff up we'd be in good shape.

Otherwise, I fully agree with your point.
Particularly with watches! So many of them are hot garbage at connectivity.

I miss my Pebble :( Though the Bangle.js and other "just uses bluetooth LE" devices have been essentially perfect connectivity as well. LE seems pretty reliable.
When people take out a mortgage, they normally only care about total monthly cost. If the property tax increases they can afford to spend less on a house for the same monthly payment.
I actually worry more about looking at longer and smaller text in 3D. It is noticeably harder to read, which prevents many use cases. For instance, you would not read HN in VR using an RSS reader built with StereoKit.
Thats certainly a self-proclaimed title.
Frankly I don’t see how this legislation could possibly bring massive good. For one I like my iPhone how it is and don’t see how I could possibly benefit from this passing.

As an American I think regulation should only be enacted when absolutely necessary, and these laws seem anything but necessary. I’ve rarely seen convincing cases of innovation being stifled or people being harmed by Apple’s walled garden approach. It’s clearly not a market failure because (1) it is extremely profitable and (2) it is not a monopoly. As you can see in this thread, tons of people prefer differently, and those people can buy Androids. I also don’t like how this EU legislation mainly targets American companies.

Forcing Apple to allow other voice assistants will only strengthen Google and Amazons dominance in the voice assistant ecosystem.

Forcing messaging apps to allow cross compatibility only will give them more of my unencrypted messages.

I could go on, but I’m very curious what all of these “massive goods” that I’m not seeing are.
It's just that they don't "create" anything and pressing some buttons to get more and more of the same, biased crap quickly gets boring.
> I just checked Uber from my home to the airport and it’s 17 EUR. If I call yellow cab, price would be 1.5-2x higher

A taxi may be more expensive at "idle" times - but ever tried to grab an Uber at a big event like a concert, a soccer game or Saturday night out drinking? You'll pay triple or more. Regulated taxis are more expensive, but always consistent which is a value on its own. Also, you can be sure that the driver doesn't live in poverty [1] or works ridiculous hours.

> and if I imagine a foreigner catching one on the street without the meter - that could get even worse.

I can't speak for countries other than Germany, but at least here this is simply not a thing.

What is a pain point with German cabs (and other German services) is that the acceptance of credit and especially debit cards is still a bit lackluster, but the situation has massively improved during covid.

> There was no hotel in the area to provide me with the proper accommodation. But Airbnb did that just fine.

Yeah, because wherever you were is most likely zoned residential, meaning no hotels and the associated noise from partygoers, vehicles and the likes. Are the neighbors of your AirBnB fine with someone renting out a room to randoms? Most likely not.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/He-drives-60-ho...