skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One big source of apartments being too expensive to rent is investment companies swooping in to buy apartment buildings, hoping the _building itself_ will appreciate in value, so that they can then sell it later at a profit. In this model, it's actually against the owner's interest to rent apartments because renters inevitably cause damage that needs fixing, which cuts into the owner's bottom line and makes the building less resellable. So, the solution is to charge exorbitant, insane above market rents; a small number of fools with more money than sense will rent at that price, and that will help cover loan interest costs, etc. in the meantime. With enough starting capital, renting to a few tenants at very high prices is a much better investment than renting to many tenants at market rates. You just hope that the building appreciates by a large margin in the next X years while your few, wealthy tenants pay your interest, and then you can sell the whole building to the next investor.

Now, is this ethical? Abso-fucking-lutely not. Not only is it basically a bigger fool scam, it takes an extremely valuable and important commodity (housing) out of the market for no reason other than financial gain. I'm of the opinion that apartment buildings should be required to maintain 80% occupancy or risk having their apartments go rent controlled; if you aren't willing to rent at market rates in order to provide the service you claim to provide, you're taking housing away from people who need it, and you should be punished for it. Sure, you can argue that real estate is an investment and therefore these ghouls have the right to do this, but IMO becoming a landlord should come with the social responsibility to _increase_ housing supply and availability, not decrease it. If you're not willing to play by those rules you shouldn't be allowed to participate in the market.
Developers are not investors. They borrow money to build and hope to sell at a profit. It’s just like a new car dealership. The “inventory” isn’t owned by the builder or lot, it’s owned by the bank. The builder pays interest, taxes, insurance, every day a home sits unsold. They are motivated to sell and due to market factors they are starting to offer steep discounts. Now existing homes are a bit of a different story. There is a mix of owners and investors and they are likely locked in at a comparably low rate. If they bought in the last 2 years they may even be underwater. And if looking to move they may need to get a certain price to be able to get into their next home.
It's crazy to me that housing is calculated as part of GDP - there's just something wrong about attaching a capitalistic value to someone having a roof above their head.
Community Growth At: Atlassian
Zngur: A C++/Rust interop tool
> I've read that the overall effect of electricity deregulation is that prices are slightly lower, and reliability is down.

One interesting option is the option to let customers choose where they want to be on the reliability vs price scale.

Typically, in times of crisis due to undersupply, an electricity network cuts off customers (blackouts).

However, this needent happen at the district/region level. It could just as easily be implemented by your own electricity meter - effectively a breaker which opens when it detects crisis.

Crisis can be fairly easily measured from the power itself - when the supply of electricity is tight, the frequency and voltage drop.

That means a supplier could theoretically have customers choose what reliability they wanted, and set a switch on the back of their electricity meter to give them the reliability they had paid for.

The downside is that this system only works if the majority of electricity meters behave this way.
The core reason for this is that lots (all?) of "modern" mail user agents (MUA) mess with whitespace in their default configuration, which breaks patches as the indentation is all of and git is confused.

git send-email is made for this, and handles all edge cases correctly, but depending on your MUA and/or it's config, it can work pasting patch diffs in there just fine – the point is that, especially for newcomers, and for a few edge cases, it may hard to do correctly and so using the tool made for the job avoids friction for all sites.

ps. ZIP wouldn't be required, just use base64 encoding, that's basically what git send-email does, depending on the encoding, line length, ... of a commit.
They police this as about effectively as they do buying multiple commercial residential properties under a family member’s name.
How does Mastodon, the suggested alternative in TFA, reward controversy?
What kind of resources do you mean? They still have to heat and power their homes, so it still “consumes resources”. Unless you are talking about buying local groceries or something.

Propery taxes are the same in NH whether someone lives there full time or not, so it doesn’t matter that they aren’t there and would be equally valuable if they did live full time. The traffic argument is the only one I can see being true, except that traffic in the seacoast is awful already anyway with tourists driving back and forth to Maine.

Personally, I think having permanent residents is far better for a town than a graveyard of empty soulless homes, but I’m just a regular human being and I’m sure its just a matter of opinion at that point.
>but can't be used for the same thing

Eh no, why would that be? Where I live 87% of all recycled plastic bottles are reused for new bottles.
It's very difficult to get a good answer to that question. There are unknowns like the likely lifetime and second hand market for electric cars. There are serious vested interests on both sides. And there are buyers who will defend their decisions.

I suspect there is a benefit, but what the size of it is is anyone's guess.
The now relatively uncommon UK gallon is the volume occupied by ten lbs of water in the same way a litre of water weighs a kilogram. Not only are the pints bigger there’s also twenty ounces (also rarely used now) in them which means a fluid ounce of water weighs by definition an ounce in the imperial system.
It's less precision for a given number of symbols. Fewer usable factors mean you can only reasonably divide up segments of time into larger, less precise chunks.
The 2023 version of a brick-through-the-window, as an aside:

The note reads something like this:

BY ACCEPTING THIS BRICK THROUGH YOUR WINDOW, YOU ACCEPT IT AS IS AND AGREE TO MY DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS WELL AS DISCLAIMERS OF ALL LIABILITY, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL, THAT MAY ARISE FROM THE INSTALLATION OF THIS BRICK INTO YOUR BUILDING.
You know that Vulkan targets vast amount of Hardwares which makes Vulkan Extensions a lucrative deal rather than thing you despise, right?

Don't get me wrong. I agree that it's less worrying to know beforehand that all the features will be available in the target environment with features made mandatory rather than extensions. But, it's not like the case of Apple/Sony/Xbox which has software tailored for the device.

Vulkan devices range from Virtual devices(Moltenvk) to Android(Low powered devices) to Desktops(Linux, Windows) to Workstations(Linux). Having ray tracing mandatory in low powered devices like low budget android phones doesn't make any sense, that's why it's made as extension.

But, you can be sure that any modern desktop with modern GPU by any vendor atleast adheres to Vulkan standard and has specified extensions available. That can't be said about experimental extensions though (Like Vulkan Video).

> Making them in the end hardly better than multiple backends, when doing serious stuff across multiple GPUs and OSes.

This "multiple backend" solution is not ideal too. Firstly, it was necessary because not all Vendors supported single Graphics API standard. Secondly, it isn't powerful as main API it gets translated to(DX,Vk,Mt). Thirdly, I don't see how it helps when target environment doesn't have an extension available.

Maybe "Multiple Backend" solutions might make few things easier like removing Verbosity and maybe they are good for Small applications but I don't think they are worthy replacements to Main APIs
That uses app specific passwords, and with Google Workspace, the administrator can completely turn off these “less secure apps”. Pretty sure Office 365 has the same.
I haven't used XML is a long while, but there was a trick I had when I designed schemas, back when I did use XML all the time. Use an attribute if the data is a primitive String, number, or boolean. Break into multiple attributes if the data is structured but has only one level and has few children. Otherwise use an element. The three rules are simple, but produce schemas easy to read, easy to maintain, and easy to implement against. One code smell is if you start winding up with tons of attributes on one element. That may mean you should break the logical concept that element represents into multiple concepts, have those concepts be nested elements, each with its related attributes.
Hey Juicearoo was a great product! It solved the problem of me having a bag of juice and needing to get the juice out.
Another option that I really like is forcing rent control on landlords who don't have at least 80% occupancy. Don't want to reduce your rents to market rate? Fine, the law will do that for you.
I helped build a similar setup a "long" time ago to build a sky HDR database. We had over 40k images across hundreds of days. The longer exposures definitely did not help (even with a ND filter) and by the end the camera had some broken pixels along the sun trail. Nothing noticeable visually, but likely not good for computer vision purpose. If we were to redo this it would be definitely a valid concern to address.
Espanso: Open-source, privacy-first, cross-platform and extensible text expander
> "My message is not to learn to live with that beep, but to train your brain to classify that sound as harmless, allowing you to forget about it"

This is essentially what I do. I've had it tinnitus for some 20 years now. Both ears, a constant high pitched ringing.

Most of the time I honestly don't notice it, even in quiet rooms. As soon as something reminds me about it, or I'm trying to listen for something quiet, or certain high pitch sounds go off (my least favourite is flashbang like effects on TV or in games), it'll come back with a vengeance. So e.g right now because I saw this HN post, it's feeling especially loud.

It'll probably be about an hour before I'll forget to think about it (for want of a better description), and I go back to not noticing it.
One fascinating thing is that on the one hand, the petrol industry messed up the recycling labels, but meanwhile, I am being made responsible by my government for the amount of plastic "I create".
It also casually mention the International Mathematical Olympiad (the protagonist is a participant) which is neat (but not plot-centric per se).
There was one treatment - I think it was posted on HN - that played sounds slightly above and below the frequency, which provided temporary or permanent relief.
I got tinnitus during a particularly stressful (job related) situation in my life. It stayed for about a year or two. Now it is completely gone. I did not do any therapy. It seems what helped for me was "just" to get rid of the stress. I was in my early thirties at the time when I had it.
Do you happen to have a list of the neck exercises you did? I've got a set now and wondering if there could be any relation (unlikely, but you never know).
Good article, but unfortunately it propagates the oft quoted "you eat a credit card worth of plastic each week" myth. Good video here explaining why it likely isn't true https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng
> … but in this system the hours are defined to be 10ths of a solar day so they vary as the day varies.

This is reasonable and not unsafe at all, particularly when it comes to timing things like exposure time with patients receiving radiation therapy.

However, we will be left wondering why treatment in the summer is more effective that treatment in the winter. Must be the nice weather.
The modern approach, of which this textbook is an example, does start with simulation. In fact there is very little classical statistics (distributions, analytic tests) in the book. The Berkeley Data 8 book, which I link to in another comment, takes the same approach. I imagine there is still too much classical material for your tastes, but there is definitely change happening.
The vacancy rate suggests most vacant units are in-between occupants, something you'd require for a healthy market. The vacancy rate should probably be double what it is -- it's probably at historic lows.

Edit: Yep, vacant units per capita are at historic lows. We have a construction problem not a vacancy problem: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=131FW#0.
> I'm allergic to all forms of code generation, to be honest. If there is an equivalent of XML in this I imagine it's even more horrendous. I can just imagine chasing down compiler errors indirectly caused by an XML switch not set shudder.

WSDL comes to mind
>The UK is adding scads of wind power every day.

Yeah about that wind

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/what-wen...

Surely if the generation is so cheap why won't anyone commit to more turbines?
Vets usually have information about cremation services. Some vets offer them on site, but some don't - check with your vet. There are also memorial options (urns, paw prints, etc.) that you might want to look through now as kitty is alive, because trying to decide how you want to remember them right after they go is just asking for ugly sobbing. Also figure out your budget because the last thing you want to do is pick something in the throes of grief and be unable to afford it. "I can't even afford to remember them properly" - > More crying.
Like most of these international committees, I believe they mostly facilitate agreements between sovereign states; I don't believe they have any legislative power themselves.

Maybe an analogy would be ICAO's (another "specialized agency of the UN") "Freedoms of the Air" [1] – they define the terminology, but it's still up to individual (or blocs of) nation states to actually grant them to each other, ratify recommendations etc.

[1] https://www.icao.int/pages/freedomsair.aspx
Regarding the legality of scraping factual data...

In the EU there's a 'database right' that covers specific collections of facts. The US has categorically refused to issue any kind of "IP"[0] on facts, and doesn't have 'database rights', but in practice you can sprinkle a few fictitious bits of information in your dataset, retain copyright on the lies, and sue people who don't independently verify the factuality of every bit of information in the dataset. So the US has database rights.

No clue if people are sticking fictional data on their websites to sue scrapers with, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

[0] Intellectual property is the right to dictate to competitors the conditions upon which they are allowed to compete, if any.
Ah scud race. I'll never forget finding that machine in a bowling alley arcade and noticing the coin feeder wasn't closed. Surreptitiously opening it to find a little button that could be pressed to automatically add a credit for free each time. That was one Saturday I'll never get back and I don't care.
> tell me under what possible distorted form of reality can this be justified? It was noted that the sound of the music was likely heard in Gaza it was so close

Right. The loud noise and improperly dressed young girls angered Hamas so they went out on kill and rape rampage, makes sense.
The investors keeping a building empty don't care about return on investment like most investors do they want to hide assests from their local government and possible have a place to flee to if things get even worse locally.

Investors looking for a return on investment want to rent everything. They leave property empty when remodeling, or when between tenants.
In case of GitHub you have this for example : https://cli.github.com/

It is often used in GitHub CI workflows.
If you live in a well run democratic society, then your plastic packaging waste has a good chance of being recycled or incenerated with energy recovery:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Not complete or permanent but it’s mellowing out over time to where I almost never hear it during the day, and it’s no bother at a quiet night, and easily masked by a fan or a podcast.

The main things for me were

- take a major break from djing and clubs. I was playing out a lot
- get great earplugs. I have westone custom molds
- talk to friends about it

In talking about it I have been absolutely shocked to learn how pervasive hearing problems are.

Lots of friends have some form of tinnitus and some have shared major problems like major tinnitus from playing drums a long time or
loss of sound in one ear from rocket explosions in the military. All was a complete surprise, I just assumed everyone’s hearing was great.

This greatly helped with my initial depression which presumably was causing me to focus on the sounds more rather to accept and ignore it.

Health problems are coming for all of us. Take great joy out of whatever health you do have, try to reduce harm from unhealthy habits, but have fun too.
Overall very informative. Really like the comparison with the Dart analytics protocol and the Jetbrains protocol. I think the comments on state synchronization with subscription based feature providers sounds very promising.

Hopefully LSP specification can evolve over time and incorporate some of these ideas!
Not permanent but there is a trick to make it go away for a short time. I read about it recently and it works for me.

1. Place both hands on your ears. Palms tight on the ears and fingers backwards
2. Now tap with your fingers on the back of your neck. It doesn't have to be hard. It will sound very hollow.
3. Keep tapping for 30 seconds
4. Stop and remove hands from ears

Your ringing should have gone away. For some people it goes away for hours, others just a few minutes.
> Haven't heard of anything like that.

(Speaking of ignorance.) The parent knows what they're talking about. "The people's democracies" was indeed the term that was customarily used within the Soviet block to include countries that did not belong to said block but otherwise lived under similar regimes.
> The feds actions show they want high asset prices relative to wages.

It’s an economic axiom that high interest rates mean lower asset prices.

So can you explain what you mean?

Also - as far as I know every us city except for Miami has had a decline in real estate prices - so again - where are you and everyone in this thread getting information? Anecdotes?
Toronto just started last year. 1% of the assessed property value, per year. They just voted yesterday to increase to 3%.
But the mugger could have avoided making the deal with the thug, so I don't see how that deal changes much.
Over the past 4 years my tinnitus has gradually gotten better to the point of being almost unnoticeable.

I'm not sure whether it's actually gone away in a medical sense or whether I'm just heavily desensitised at this point.

For context, my tinnitus onset coincided with loud music exposure and what I believed to have been eustachian tube dysfunction. I did take some treatment steps like staying away from live music / nightclubs and using antihistamines for the eustachian tube dysfunction.
I have the same issue...
Bentham brought up a good point:

> Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes.

I don’t understand how it was logically defeated with escalation as in the story. Would it be wrong for a Utilitarian to continue arguing against this precedent, saying that the decision to be mugged removes overall Utility because now anyone who can be sufficiently convincing can also effectively steal money from Utilitarians. (I guess money changing hands is presumed net neutral in the story?)
On Importance of Naming in Programming
And ramblin, don't forget ramblin.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ramblers
Utilities are paid for by use, so that's not really relevant to municipal finances. Even still, the power and water use of an unoccupied residence is obviously much lower than an occupied one.

Property taxes pay for municipal services like parks, schools, and police. The rest of the town's residents get better versions of those than they could afford otherwise. This isn't a very complex idea, regardless of whether you think the town would be better off with more people living within it full-time.
This is the true math right here. An apartment that is occupied for a year, then takes a month to lease out again, results in an 8% vacancy rate. That’s just one of the reasons. People who think we can drive the vacancy rate down, even though it already stands at a record low, are crazy.
But this is the problem they grappled with when they created social security directly after the great depression market crash.

It's important to understand that they invested in risk free assets ie government bonds, because it was a social safety net in reaction to problems in the market.

Except it was much smaller then, the problem is that now they've created so many bonds that the bonds are the problem. Anyway you look at it, creating a giant government program like this is. going to be a problem.
The problem here is that the counterargument is contrived to the point where it is stupid. This article isn't identifying a problem in theory or practice.

In theory a utilitarian is likely comfortable with the in-principle idea that they might need to sacrifice themselves for a greater good. Pointing that out isn't a counterargument against utilitarianism. In practice, no utilitarian would fall for something this dumb. They'd just keep the money and assume (correctly in my view) they missed something in the argument that invalidates the mugger's position. Or, likely, assume the mugger is lying about being an insane deontologist.
It's also possible to not be religious about it. Git is distributed. I have projects on srht and contributing does not mandate using the send-email workflow. "Push it somewhere and let me know where I can pull" always works too.
Another excuse to share the wonderful Unix epoch clock: https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/

Watch face has 4 hands, one for each pair of characters in the hex representation of the current unix time.

Being hex, it kinda makes it easier to understand for me in that the "minute" is 255 seconds. The next chunk of time is 65,025 seconds or about 18 hours. Then comes 16,581,375 seconds, which is almost 192 days.