skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interested to learn the source of where you got this 2.5% figure from.

That QE activity peaked circa Apr 2022[1].

The Fed subsequently announced monetary policy circa May 2022[2] to reduce the size of their balance sheet; with respect to agency mortgage-backed securities, that means predictably liquidating assets in the open market at a rate cap of $35 billion per month.

The Fed's weekly H.4.1[3] § 3 reports agency MBS assets are overwhelmingly residential. They were slowly ratcheting down commitments to buy MBS, and effectively reached 0 circa end of Oct 2022.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ZcQw

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone...

[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/20230119/
No, you said rent control makes Stockholm "a great city for workers".

You didn't say Swedish only workers.

By "workers", people on HN understand workers of all origins.
Well, if the person isn't on the no fly list due to some form of guilt then the government is violating a myriad of other human rights including, but not limited to, the freedom of movement. There is also a massive difference between someone temporarily being denied the ability to ride the bus due to clearly being too drunk and someone being put on a list that bars them from flying permanently with no recourse and no way to even know they are on the list other than to buy a plane ticket and attempt to board the plane. Keeping flights safe is an appeal to emotion that has no place in this discussion because it presupposes doing a no fly list in a way that doesn't violate the basic principles that define the United States of America would be unsafe, which is clearly untrue.
Yes, you can create an AI model based on a few pictures of the “model” (the model can also be AI generated) and then you can generate images of all kinds with that model included.

Check out this video from prompt muse as an example: https://youtu.be/XjObqq6we4U
Unison (lang) ?
English eleven to nineteen don't have a match in base-10 numerals either.
>In exchange for that, I would have to give up 3 other citizenships. Not a great deal...

Obligatory IANAL, but the "no dual citizenship" thing is a Japanese thing and it's not like the Japanese government will go around informing other countries of your new citizenship status. You would have to make the rounds yourself informing the governments concerned you renounced their respective citizenship.

Which is to say: I'm an American, if I went and got Japanese citizenship then the Japanese government won't care to inform the US government about the proceedings, nor will the US government care even if I personally tell them because the US government permits dual citizenship. Japan would care about my holding dual American citizenship, but again: They wouldn't care to inform their American counterparts.
> By your own account, they led gen1 smartphones, but have ended up with 0% of gen2.

Japan still manufactures/designs a lot of components used in phones (flash, RAM, LCD displays, cameras), just not the final product or the software.
My iPhone 12 Mini had gotten slow and the battery life was becoming mediocre (after only 2 years), so I spent the last couple of months looking at phones. I use Linux primarily, so I was looking at Android phones because of course iPhones don’t talk to Linux or Windows computers. Unfortunately I ended up with an iPhone 14 because without an iPhone:
- I can’t use (or update) my Apple Watch
- I can’t use/track my AirTags
- I can’t use most of the features of my AirPods Pros
- I can’t use FaceTime or iMessage with 95% of the people I talk to who also have iPhones
- I can’t utilize the free Apple Arcade subscription I get through Verizon (not a big deal obviously but this is why Verizon and Apple have this deal- to sell iPhones).

I’m getting rid of my MacBook because macOS is going down the shitter (another topic entirely). On a related note, I needed a second Mac in order to restore my MacBook, that is, remove the beta version of macOS Ventura I was running awhile ago to go back to a stable (“stable”) version.
So yeah, the game is to get everyone to have to buy iPhones every couple of years whether there are any significant improvements or not. What can the iPhone 14 do that the iPhone 12 can’t? Absolutely fucking nothing.
The real gerontocracy are the neighborhoods who calcify their cities by restricting what can be built.
> - giving up the quality of your nice neighbourhood because a giant complex was built next door

> - giving up much of the capital appreciation in your house because it appreciated

> Both would be be highly unpopular for the majority of existing home owners. As a result everyone complains but politicians don't actually do anything and nothing changes. There is no such thing as additional affordable housing without any cost. There is a price to be paid. Most are not willing to pay it.

This is a pretty limited view, frankly. Your first point is spot on -- housing density needs to increase. But this does not mean worsening quality of life.

For decades density increases barely touched quality of life; a couple houses would be replaced with a tasteful 3-story apartment building, not "a giant complex was built next door" -- neighborhoods changed relatively slowly. Like Rome, Manhattan wasn't built in a day.

These days, in many places, there are exactly two practical options for construction: detached single-family homes, and massive complexes. Why? At least in California, because any kind of development not by-right will face years, and potentially a decade or more, of citizen action against it in every venue imaginable. If you're going to incur that kind of delay/anger anyway, you might as well build a giant thing and make your pile; there's no room for smaller buildings because they're not profitable enough to pay for the years of fighting the neighborhood groups.

Look at San Francisco, for example. Even if the population were to double, all you'd need is to double the housing units. This does not require massive complexes, it would be enough to convert single-family homes to duplexes, build ADUs, small apartment buildings where townhomes are, etc. -- except that those activities are more or less impractical.

So, we get today's dichotomy: single family homes, allowed by zoning, and massive complexes, conditionally allowed (requiring approval) because that's the only new housing that is worth pushing through the extreme regulatory environment.

Allow just a doubling of density in any SFH zone, and watch how quickly you end up with reasonable duplexes, ADUs, etc., that increase housing stock without a giant complex next door.

The only thing you have to give up is the fetishization of the single family home inside the urban core. Your neighborhood will stay beautiful and nice. And your existing home will continue to appreciate, because it will still be more desirable than the duplexes being built, which are in turn more affordable.
Realtor once told me: "This is a really nice starting home" for a property that costed $1.2M around mid-2019 in Santa Clara area. Like who the heck can afford $1.2M starting house without a well paid tech job?
do you trust faceboook ?
That the media will deliver the payload to potential customers.
Is there such a thing as a non-tiny ion? I suppose a very long carbon chain might count. It's strange that the article doesn't even name it: inositol hexakisphosphate, a.k.a phytic acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytic_acid.
I thought nonante (and septante, octante) were only used in Zwitserland and Belgium?
(If true, it would be a bit like saying in some dialects colour is written as color, while the latter is only(?) used in the States?)
I'm not saying that the housing market should be regulated, however a Dutch model may improve things a lot.

What I'm telling is, when I buy the same thing with x% of my income, in two different time frames, the latter item is of inferior quality, even if it's the same brand and model. This is because everything is optimized for economic turnover now.

The previous dishwasher we had never seen a wrench in 20 years, it's only serviced to changed a brittle hose after two decades. Current one's water pump/heater/dryer unit is changed after ~10 years. Again, it's a long time, but its life span is shorter. Let's see how long this (original) replacement will last.

The paper quality of the notebooks I get (yes, I write a lot) is always getting lower, despite price is going up. A good quality notebook is now more expensive than a tome of high quality printer paper.

Higher end electronic devices (or goods in general) get more expensive in terms of relative income every year, and they almost keep the same quality of their previous selves. Optimization means less parts, less repairability, shorter life spans and more profits.

Free market optimizes for maximum money movement (pressure), maximum profits for minimum costs. The goods become inevitably better (because the baseline improves inevitably), but slower than it should be. This improvement is due to integrated parts which has to be above a certain quality threshold to even work.

I remember reading a comment about textile production:

> Older textiles were much more durable because older machines were not able to lower quality this much. Now we can, so we do.
And the result after recompression is impeccable so it is not a big deal. It is just a bit cumbersome.
“Ton” itself can also refer two different units: The 2240 lb British long ton and the 2000 lb American short ton. And “metric ton” refers to “tonne”.

Tl;dr: a ton of confusion.
> - giving up the quality of your nice neighbourhood because a giant complex was built next door

Streets with less poo and needles, lower amounts of civil unrest, more green spaces due to less sprawl, and less noise & emissions pollution from cars is a net win on this front.

The resistance from NIMBYs is almost squarely financial. Homeowners like the fact that they're subsidized by the government (due to lenient tax policy and the like). As with all people who receive unjustified subsidies, they will fight until the bitter end to prevent the gravy train from being disrupted.
What records are you talking about?
>Youtube ultimately took off at the start because of copyright infringement. To me, it is why they have an impenetrable moat now.

This is absolutely correct.

I read somewhere this is what tech companies like Uber used as a strategy. Implement yourself regardless of the laws, and when the legal system catches up act in damage control. It's Blitzkrieg in a way.

I recall several places in the world were taxi services were regulated, when Uber showed up with better services and low prices, they won over the consumers in a matter of weeks. It was game over for the old services.

Napster did something similar but failed in the short run. If they had held off like Uber did and kept their ground everything would be very different as of today. But i think it was just too early.
I’m not massively familiar with the US it in some markets (the UK, particularly the south east), what would have been a starter home is now just more expensive.

Developers are still building small houses on small plots, but they sell for more than is affordable, so when you get people talking about building affordable housing, they are talking about building tiny, tiny places out of the cheapest possible materials.
Isn't camelCase CamelCase and CamelCase PascalCase.

On a more serious note, I feel like a reasonable middle ground is to agree to use one-word identifiers only.
> "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

> "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master - that's all."

- Through the Looking-Glass, slightly adjusted.

The whole goal of calling it "open source" is to take advantage of the positive connotations associated with the term. But the positive connotations come from software published under the dogma, and are inseparable from it.

(You can see the same twists and turns in Elastic's FAQ, where they desperately try to twist language so that "open" and "source" are as close together as possible without outright making contact. Guess nobody told them they can just use the word under their own definition, or as the rest of the world calls it, "lie".)
A tail call library in JavaScript/TypeScript
Hi all,
I created a library to perform tail call optimization in JavaScript.
The idea is to create proxies backed by trampolines, so that it is transparent from the caller's point of view.
What do you think?
> They live full lives, and I couldn't care less about their German levels. They do enough good things with their time they put their energy into instead.

What an odd mindset. Anecdotally, prior generations of Europeans (and expatriates) valued being multilingual. Having a working knowledge of German, Italian, French, English was fun, valuable, and normal especially when doing business in diverse countries and with diverse peoples.

That generation even taught us that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." I guess that principle is no longer a thing.
> I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages.

Yeah, I really doubt that you can move to Japan with zero Japanese and in half year learn enough to hold normal conversation and be able to read/write Japanese, all that while working full time and not being immersed every day in Japanese language course.
> The second example is a lady with 76k in debt, who has managed to pay down nearly 70% of it. Somehow this doesn't qualify as savings to the author.

> The third woman actually makes a lot (they won't say how much) and has "achieved financial stability" (thus undermining the thesis of the article), but sends "the majority" of her paychecks to her family.

I’m simultaneously thrilled that I could pay 13k in medical bills in a recent family medical crisis, and very well aware that every time I’m able to do that kind of thing I have exactly the same savings of basically fuckall as I’ve always had. I’m similarly thrilled that I was able to pay off all of my outstanding debt after a few months not really recovering from burnout, again with approximately dick in savings. Neither of these achievements I feel bad about, but neither of them give me any kind of security in the sense people mean by “savings”.

Granted I’m 40, so I’m just resigned to probably making do until I don’t. So at least I don’t have 20 more years of that understanding to make do with people telling me I’m better off than I am.
>Not really any harder than making an airplane.
Except the airplane still works if something is misaligned by 10NM...
I never understood how America with it's "freedom" situation allowed the amount of zoning restrictions to occur.
Paper media also has user generated content. Such content has been the liability of the publisher and things have worked just fine for at least the last two centuries if not more.

Again: There is no reason internet-based media can't act like their paper counterparts. The only plausible reason is because nobody wants liability, but hey: You modify user generated content in any way, /you the publisher/ are now liable for it.
Yeah, it's such an obvious way to balance the pressure on housing prices and nobody wants to do that.
Translation: get the "wrong" unlimited money and the "wrong" party gerrymandering and they might get off their behinds and change their opinions

Now as for the SC being part of the problem, well, maybe it's an issue of assignments and term limits, but it is not as simple as not having one
He’s a part-time shrimp breeder, she knits sweaters out of cat hair, their budget is 3.4 millions.

The answer is trust fund babies.
I've seen countries where that is implemented, having a second home trigger a new set of properties taxes.
it's often dubbed "vacation home taxes", it affects any second, third or N property you own after the first one
Don’t you also have the nations highest property taxes?
“Analysts are worried that the lucrative cloud segment for big tech companies could be hit hard as customers look to cut spending.”

Is SAP really that much at risk? New business, ok. But their software is usually deeply embedded into core business processes, it’s tough to cut back on SAP once you bought into it.
That would be pretty cool, though they only mention Cocoa once in their entire site [1], so it doesn't sound like it's happening soon.

[1]:https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/search.html?q=cocoa&check...
I wonder how that works for countries where it is a crime to give up the citizenship, does Singapore make an exception?

I am aware that Germany does.
Pina2bo here we go! I think the first 1/4 or so of the book was a riff on the famous `How do I kill 30-50 feral hogs ...`[0] tweet. I did like the book though.

[0] https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/williemcnabb/status/115804530...
What, no Daylight Saving Time?
To put in perspective, my hello world service has less than 1 employee working on it, has been launched 10 years ago and has roughly 5 minutes of downtime per year when I restart the server.

I am available for hire to teach a thing or two to Google (and OpenAI).

/s
If that were true, we wouldn’t be having a discussion about affordable housing. Or is this a non-US issue?
This is also starting to happen in Prague city center, though the real reason is those overpriced tourist traps are not frequented by locals so there is no need for staff to speak local language, it should be enough warning for you (as local) that you are in tourist trap.
Japan is the 3rd largest economy and recently in the top 10 by population, it's not a small country.

I'm sorry you have to accept war refugees.
Well, there's plenty of ways to reduce one's wealth. Taxes, charitable donations (MacKenzie Scott), more ownership of the company by employees, and so on. But no, I don't think it is ethical for people to be billionaires.
Showing Off Gaming PC Running Outside in -53C Temps in China’s Mohe
That is certainly true, but your experience is quite different if you speak Swedish or not. I definitely experienced a barrier when I mostly spoke English. I was working in an environment where everyone was speaking English, so it was harder to learn Swedish, however my relationship with swedes definitely improved after I tried to use more Swedish.
Make it a bunch of young professionals with money and you create a vibrant service industry around your vault.

Could HN pull this off and seed such a vault? Once there is one successful vault, people will copy it and the housing crisis could be a thing of the past.

Where would be a good place to start such a vault?
I agree with you in principle. In practice English is often all you need if you live in a big city. When I look at my country (Poland), I can see that a person can live in Warsaw (capital city) or any of the biggest 5 cities without knowing any Polish. Even having an appointment with english speaking doctor is not a problem. OTOH when you adventure outside of big cities you suddenly find yourself in a land where nobody can understand English very well (in that case it's better to chat with teens than adults, most pupils have B2-level English at school).

That being said I know a person that spend 3 years in Denmark and they do not even attempt to learn Danish. Their argument was that the language is very niche, and they are not sure for how long they will stay there. If I was in their place I would probably at least learn Danish to B2 level, just in case e.g. an accident to be able to call a police or an ambulance.

I think the real problem here is that learning a language is a lot of work and requires a lot of efford. If you live comfortably with English they why to put extra effort for something that will provide little or not benefit at all.
Seems pretty weird to me as well.

I don't understand how you could love a country enough to live and work there for a decade but not try to learn its language.
Only when we are talking about PDP-11.

Thankfully nowadays we have Compiler Explorer supporting almost every flavour of mainstream compiled languages to dispel myths.
> You should be able to share source, allow individuals to use and modify your work and build a community around that work without worrying that same work will be co-opted by an entity seeking to undermine the effort you and your community have done for years, by slapping a different name on it and hosting it, competing directly against you with your own work as a business.

The project in question is a CLI tool to a cloud platform that wraps an open source project (Kafka), complete with a page advertising why to use the wrapped software instead of the open-source version.

Its great that this person can work on a project, and share the source, but if anything, they're literally the ones doing the undermining of a community by re-branding existing OS Software. There's no community to form, no reason to expect anyone to contribute. The only reason anyone would want to modify this codebase is to interact with the centralized service through a different way.

"Source available" is a perfectly valid state, and describes a codebase like this which you can view, and even edit locally. "Open Source" is a term used for years to describe certain freedoms regarding software that has led to the abilities of many software users to modify and use software for whatever purpose they like, like the company in question using Kafka. Using an open-source codebase to make money is not undermining the project, its explicitly allowed in the license. We're all so much better off because open source projects, like Kafka, don't have these controlling and self-serving license.
I think when supporting a family you'll need level 6 at FAANG for 10 years to pay that comfortably. It's not stable employment though, as we all know.
Yes. I've been here almost that long. Mostly in the rural areas. It's just a nice normal place.. I think there are a few problems with perceptions of Japan. not being part of the anglo-sphere, most of the everyday stuff doesn't make it in front of western eyes. What does is filtered through journalists, like the BBC guy, who have to fit their stories into certain safe tropes. Another big place of interflow of culture is with manga/anime subcultures, which are produced and consumed by a very specific part of Japanese society in the first place, then exoticised a great deal by the types of internet communities where it is popular.
> anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed

Agree with the first, not the second. It not only disincentivises development, it also promotes in-the-family cronyism that corrodes the connection between legal ownership and control. A tax differential which feeds a resident-owner subsidy is more than enough.
Honestly I will probably use the term Ship of Thaddeus moving forward. It embodies the concept in a way I find deeply funny. I don't know if the author intended to write it that way or not (the uncertainty of which only serving to make it funnier) but I thank them for their contribution to my pool of available humor
But they do speak English? You can live with that comfortably in Germany and in Berlin especially, probably much less so in many other countries.
> Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it.

How many languages do you know?

I live in a country with 11 official languages; please come stay for half a decade.
"Freedom" in the USA also means "freedom to control others." It's baked into our culture. Look at our relationship with Latin America...
Wow this is very good advice thanks!