skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The well-understood issues of ADUs, multifamily zoning, and mixed-use development are all very important low-hanging fruit. Along with eliminating parking mandates.

I hadn't heard the term "incremental housing" before, but it immediately brought to mind what I have long considered a key missing piece which is modular construction.

It looks like the term is often used for the concept of constructing half a house, and then allowing people to add to the house as their means permit. Although, this may be another definition.

This is sort of like modular housing, because it would allow people to become homeowners more quickly, and then only spend more on upgrades as their needs require.

A full modular housing vision would allow adding entire new units to a structure as if they were LEGOs. But this is basically illegal everywhere. Even that other kind of incremental housing is basically out of the question in most places.

Land speculation is the primary affordability issue, but this more radical kind of YIMBY vision that I describe would have legs.
> On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which is currently rendered as fedex.com in tweets.

I'm in awe. Does Twitter have any software developers left, or is it just Elon's nephew working his way through W3Schools?
I'm pretty bullish on this tech.

A clean, low-friction separation of storage and compute for a top-tier database like Postgres is huge. I think it will take some time for the implications to sink in though, because it changes some assumptions about how to integrate a databases with a system that are so fundamental that we rarely think about it... (not to mention, it probably doesn't make sense to change existing systems, where the fundamental system decisions have already been made.)

We tend to centralize the database in system design because they are complex and expensive to run, and you can amortize those costs the more you put into a single database. But of course, that also makes the central database bigger, more complex and more expensive. And once everything is in a central store, we tend to bind everything together (with joins, references, procs, etc. Each step in that direction tends to make sense on its own, but the end result is the "big ball of mud" architecture where everything is interconnected and there's no separation of concerns, which makes the system fragile and increasingly difficult to change.

With this tech the pressure to centralize the database is relieved.

E.g., if you have a situation where you are adding some new, logically distinct data to your system -- maybe just a few tables and maybe with a variable load, especially at first -- traditionally you probably would lean hard toward adding this to an existing central database since the overhead of spinning up and running a new one would be prohibitive. But now you can just make that a separate database -- spinning up a managed one is easy and you only need to pay for as much storage and compute as you actually need to use (which is really about the same as if you had put the tables in an existing central database anyway).

Of course, systems would still tend to have significant central data, but that could be based on actual app concerns, not operational ones.

Anyway, I'm loving this and can't wait to see the long term impact.

You can have as many databases as logically makes senseseparate data logically without exploding the operational cost of your system. E.g. you can spin out a separate a database that has light (or even no load) most of the time yet can seamlessly scale to heavy load. And it can do this independent of how much data is in it, and you don't need to worry about it's affect on day-to-day data access in your system since you
I mean, time series data is different from generic tabular data, so obviously there are impedance differences that are reflected in the query languages. I can see how some people might feel more at home using something even more like SQL, but there are a lot of common use cases where SQL is awkward and/or more verbose.
So you are describing aws. The problem of infra is that you need someone to run it. Until then, either run it yourself or pay someone to do it
A typo. Thank you for flagging! I updated the article and added a correction. HN is the best.
Yeah, I'd prefer the pandas call look like

```

from csvbase import CSVBASE_FS

pd.read_csv('//calpaterson/onion-vox-pops', fsspec=CSVBASE_FS)

```
Got me suspicious, why google advertises chrome even heavily with TV ads. At least in Germany.
My point is, the -ism doesn't matter, corruption exists everywhere, so saying the corruption is the result of capitalism/democracy is bullshit.

Indeed a "proper" democracy seems to be a lot more resilient against corruption, although I wonder if it's more to do with the society's cohesiveness, e.g. in Scandinavia. Then again the crazies like to call Scandinavia "a socialist hell hole", so maybe even socialism can be done right if you have the right society...
> Since they actually make a product

At the time they were up to their original shenanigans they did not sell the saw. They did not sell a saw for the first five years of their business being open. It was a pure IP play. God damn do people have short memories.
Elon rebranded to run Twitter into the ground.
When I was a teenager, I responded to shitty product behavior by switching products. But that was an era where you had a half dozen competing desktop messengers as well as third party client options for most of them. We need to make adversarial interoperability possible again so users are not at the mercy of tech companies and their marketing teams.
Are you sure you're not the one grinding an axe? Shell scripts are a mess but YAML isn't? On the happy path they can both be fine, and on the unhappy path they both suck.
Imagine acquiring the Bugatti brand then changing the name to “Karr”

Musks multiple unforced fumbles might be the biggest boneheaded blunders in corporate history
This is tearing me apart. On one hand I believe if we blocked all the bad stuff like YT, social media, games... they would certainly be bored more easily and get into more "wholesome" activities. On the other hand, I don't know if there are negative side effects of going full authoritarian that would outweigh the benefits. For now we walk the line, limiting social media but allowing some YT and games.

One unintended consequence I noticed already with time-limiting YT, is the kid is carefully planning her YT viewing usage and ends up not branching out to crafting/educational/etc. videos because she doesn't want to run out of time for the fun stuff. So this ends up unintentionally killing the desired content.

My gut feeling is that setting an example by doing (so like what you described) and occasionally recruiting the kid for assisting (but not forcing them to participate too much) is the right way forward. We'll see I guess...
Apparently Elon has been trying to push the "X" brand on things throughout his career, but always had someone stop him until he had complete control of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-...
I don't understand the social structure inside a software company where this kind of thing can go from some intern's 3am idea to production, without passing many layers of gatekeepers, any one of which should have swiftly flagged this down. It's not that the string replacement was implemented wrongly (that too)—it's that they're touching, in any manner at all, one of the most obviously-sensitive UX things in their product. Without a commensurate amount of security review.

Like, in my imagination, within five minutes of anyone seeing this, a person with responsibility would have stepped in and said "No, you can't do this. And if you insist on doing this, here's five layers of audits and sign-offs that this needs to go through first, because the thing you're proposing is potentially really dangerous". Am I thinking it about it wrongly?

I cannot understand at all.
> Changing Debit/Credit to Incoming/Outgoing smacks of jargon and will cause confusion.

I disagree. Discussions like this on HN always invite someone to say "Look, it's super simple. Credits are just... and debits are just ...". Then a reply saying "You have it backwards. Look, it's simple! Credits are just..."

I would be perfectly happy to ditch those terms forever.
I use a tool called Kuar for MacOS, which just allows me to encode whatever I like in it. I need to find a windows equivalent at some point though.
As we had discovered since Leptin research, things that seemed simple and dumb and claimed with loud firm voices were more complex and smart that it seemed in retrospective.

Europe has not the same ratio of extreme obesity, while eating basically the same products, How would you explain that?

Some cities in US have much more overweight people than other similar cities, both eat basically the same corn subsidized and distributed by the entire territory. why?

It seems that low places down the river have more overweight people than high places up the river, why?

> It isn't politically realistic though to make food taste less good (i.e. less sweet) and increase prices, nor is it politically realistic to remove corn subsidies or create sugar taxes.

Other countries did it all the time. It was a more realistic goal for them (or they just didn't knew that it can't be done and did it anyway)?
He owned the X.com name, this is a way to get paid for use of it. That reduces the sting of the bad overall investment.
He bought x.com early and has probably paid stupid amounts of feed to hold on to it all these years so he's forcing it on his new pet project he totally wanted and had a plan for when signing legally binding documents. (/s)

I do believe he's just been obsessed with having x.com since he got it in the 90s and had a chance to use it and jumped at it just to put his own imprinter on the site.
From what I understand, Elon has owned the x.com domain for a long time and in the past wanted to rebrand PayPal to X the same way he did Twitter. Seemingly at that point in his career there were still people around to tell him no.

He also wants to make X into an "everything" app where you'll do shopping, calls, chat with friends, send payments, etc. And if that was pulled off successfully it doesn't seem like the craziest thing to distance from the Twitter brand which has long been associated as an app primarily for news and shitposting? But he has a long way to go to get people to think of it as anything other than what it was before. Everyone on the platform is still calling it Twitter and refers to posts as tweets.
Some stuff he does works (SpaceX), but lots doesn't...
The purchase was never about business in the first place, so the running of it could be just as bad.
Why read only? What's stopping this engine from using (for example) FoundationDB as storage?
They worked hand in hand.
Lol. If that's where your head is, Google illicitly tracking your location is the least of your problems.

I hope you wear a ski mask everywhere, removed your license plates, and rolled your own mobile network...
Just picked up Wigderson's book and I am liking it so far :

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691189130/ma...
This strain was found in the wild. Some humans already have it. It would take finding those and figuring out if they have any issues.
Hermetic CC Toolchain
Five years ago he scammed me out of 7500 euros with the self-driving feature that remains dangerously dysfunctional. (It's sort of the computer vision equivalent of this Twitter regex.)

So I'm not falling for his bullshit again. But I suppose that's why he wants to own the world's biggest megaphone — to ensure he doesn't run out of us suckers.
That's (somewhat) true for accounts that represent stocks (assets, liabilities, not really for equity though), it's not true for accounts that represent flows (income, expenses). Income is recorded as a credit entry in an income account, eg (the corresponding debit entry would typically be on something like a current account or claims on customers).
> without passing many layers of gatekeepers

Given all the Twitter bugs and issues, it seems they have all been laid off.
Perhaps, but bacteria do it on time scales of hundreds of millions of years, while humans do it on timescales of decades or centuries.

Take ANY other process and speed it up by 5-6 orders of magnitude and see how different it is. For example, try sipping your coffee at only 3 orders of magnitude faster — it'll literally require an explosion to accelerate to 1000fps and then decelerate to 0 to traverse the 2' from saucer to lips in in 2/1000 sec instead of 2 sec. The effect on ecosystems is similar; changes that would be easily adapted to by all flora and fauna are instead fatal to many. And those ecosystems sustain us.

Moreover, even the slow pace of bacterial climate change is no solace — the most notable change they caused was the Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth wiping out almost all life for 300 million years.

I'd prefer to not whistle ignorance into the wind. I'd rather we take simple measures that make life better for everyone and everything, and yes, using sustainable energy sources instead of burning valuable and increasingly scarce hydrocarbons is a basic step.

[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...
you mean, someone's broken regetwitter
And now we have transgender surgeries, which many of us look at with similar horror. And we are accused of being transphobic bigots for it.
It's similar if you're invoking through the shell, which should be avoided for precisely this reason, but if you're launching a program directly (through execv or CreateProcess) there is one big difference:

On Linux the parsing is done on the caller's side of the interface, so the caller knows what quoting rules to apply – could be Python's rules if they're using Python to construct the argument array, bash's rules if they're using bash, etc.

On Windows, the parsing is done on the receiver's side of the interface, so the caller can't know how it's supposed to be quoted unless they have special knowledge of a specific receiver and its parsing rules.
What code LLM tools are Twitter employees allowed to use? Would be funny to find when this exact code was generated.
I had to clean the coffee off my keyboard after reading that.
> this helps with important finance reports [...] since you can now see how money is moving around.

This is the real benefit I've encountered. Any time I try to "simplify" financial recording for someone else and avoid double-entry, I inevitably end up wanting to perform a query that would be easy in a double-entry system but is not in any other system.
Ah, I misunderstood you at first. I agree.
To call this "amateur hour" would be unkind to amateurs. But maybe they can at least get the "hour" part right if they roll it back quickly enough.
There a lot of people on visas who can’t quit, so …
Move fast and break things I guess
Another Easter Egg was “mkdir Alt+255”, which created a directory with the name of the ASCII code 255 which is blank on the command line terminal. Tools like DIR would skip them so you could hide files in there
Purpose is hard to find, you must be intentional about looking for it. Take care.
You also lose a lot of potential for 'repeatable cuts'
Elon's personality means he can't be in anyone's shadow. He needed to refound the company to remove the mental association with Dorsey and create the association that he's the founder.
I went through the same thing, but my brother didn’t succeed in taking his life. He had a similar profile as described above, and socials played an outsized role in his alienation.

At the time, I quit everything I had on my hands and reorganized my life to be much more present. Living around for a while, trying to engage and be a part of his life as much as I could: sometimes in innocuous forms (“hey, wanna do that thing you love this week?”), sometimes straight up suggesting therapy.

You know what? No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. I wasn’t able to connect more with him at the time, nor to change his viewpoints. The simple act of getting in touch with him became extremely hard, to an extent none of my friends, or relatives that weren’t part of the nuclear family, were able to comprehend. Ultimately, I just think he had decided things wouldn’t just stop there, or something inside him held him back among us mortals, and that’s about it.

All I’m trying to say is don’t blame yourself for this.

We’re all doing our best and it sounds like you were already being a great brotherly figure. Blaise Pascal once said: “The heart has its reasons which reasons knows nothing of”: the inner workings of one’s mind (God’s, in Pascal’s case) are too difficult to penetrate for our logical reasoning. We’re just out there on this planet trying to figure out how to help our loved ones, and sometimes it’s not up to us.

You’re not at fault, and I hope you’ll soon find peace.
This is my mental model and how I built the backend of a budgeting web app.

Two types of accounts:

- assets (you want your balance to be more than 0)

- liabilities (you want your balance to be 0)

Two types of entries:

- debits (increase balances of assets, decrease balances of liabilities)

- credits (increase balances of liabilities, decreases balances of liabilities)

Rules:

- A transaction represents a transfer of value between accounts.

- Every transaction must have at least two entries. The balance of all entries the transaction holds should be 0, i.e., balance = debits - credits.

You don't think about money leaving or entering an account before you nail down those definitions. The account representations can be anything that holds a numeric value, not just money.

You can affect more than two accounts by adding additional entries with the condition of keeping the balance to 0.
This is getting really weird.

The only dividends that can get taxed like capital gains are qualified dividends and they’re very rare. Because they are dividends from selling capital assets in a business or the like. All other types of dividends are taxed like income.

Which is why the behavior around capital gains.

The loan situation is very very specialized, and loans that aren’t paid back in a reasonable amount of time or have no interest get considered as either gifts or income by the IRS.

For someone sufficiently high net worth, I’m sure there are ways to play various shell games for awhile in this - and if sufficiently frugal, even past their death.

But property taxes still get paid every year, income taxes still get paid on income, and capital gains still get paid when there is an actual sale.

for example, Elon Musk also eventually had to pay the largest tax bill ever as an individual to finance his shenanigans. $11 billion dollars.

How does that fit in your theory?
he is an extreme narcissist and is very mentally unhealthy / unstable. X is his favorite letter. it's not "cool", he just fancies himself to be King Joffrey who can do anything he wants on a whim.
If the CTO builds an engineering team that lacks the expertise to write a regex that matches the company's own name, and builds a culture of security and quality process that failed to catch this before shipping to production, then the CTO should be fired for cause.

Unfortunately the CTO also owns the company.
Not every shell script has to be that portable. And even then, "POSIX compatible" shells vary in their "POSIXness". Sometimes using arrays is the right thing to do, or having a reliable indicator of the source script location, so you code to Bash 3. Sometimes associative arrays or something else is better, and your platform is known, so you code to Bash 4 or 5. Maybe all your users are Zsh users so you use that. So you can start by writing POSIX compatible scripts, but there's no sense in tying your hands if you don't need to.

The Bash manual also covers POSIX semantics, I just remember which is which. You're right that the Dash manual is a good place to check what is mostly POSIX (Dash isn't actually strictly POSIX). I would probably use Shellcheck with the correct shebang to double check what's compatible.
> it cannot learn to read/write to a hypothetical infinite tape

Modern LLMs can perform external function calling. How is that not the same as having access to a potentially infinite memory?

Conversely, your brain does not contain infinite storage. So it is clearly not Turing complete in the strictest sense. Does that tell us anything useful about the level of intelligence in a brain?
https://archive.ph/wJ0f3
The cheeky intern was not cheeky enough to obfuscate his code to make it past the code review and was caught. You can easily obfuscate your code by preparing it in several commits with each commit handling a little part that under the code review inspection of said commit appears not only benign but also necessary to the actual task your implement. And then in one final commit you put everything together and BOOM!, cheekiness implemented, while the manager and code reviewers are none the wise. Or that's how I did it in one such instance ;)
did the same for facebook circa 2020, and even in lockdown it was a godsend. Obliterated my reading list and actually managed to make headway on the massive list of mothballed projects.
> actually explain the "double" part in detail?

$100 appears in your account. That’s one part. The other part depends on why.

* you moved money from another account, the double is -100 in that account.

* you sold stuff, +100 in income.

* you borrowed some money, +100 in ‘debt’.

In a physical book each of these categories would have a left and right column, and each transaction has numbers in one left and one right column. Or in many columns but the sums of left vs right columns must be the same.
"social media has both positive and negative effects on people, and these average out to fairly near zero"

Is that the right way to think about it though? Opiates have many positives (medical pain management) and many negatives (drug misuse and overdoses). Do we simply say "the effects average out so there's not a problem"?
Inspecting the Residual Attack Surface of Cross-Privilege Spectre v2
Agreed. The "magic" of double entry bookkeeping is that it is a financial version of the Principal of the Conservation of Energy.

It isn't as strict in that it allows for assets to alter in value, for profits or losses to be made. But it does keep track of the way that money and "value" circulates in different forms, e.g. as cash, assets, debts, depreciation, etc.

The "double entry" keeps track of the transformation of the nature of "value". This is hard to do using a simple household-style "cash-in" and "cash-out" set of accounts.
Did the "modern data stack" not deliver?
Companies have invested a lot on data tools and data stack. It seems the ROI is either not there or hard to measure and budgets are being cut, or being repurposed to collecting data for LLM training/fine-tuning.
How do you determine which thing goes in which account, is it subjective or there is a formal way with a definition
Online Measurement for Parameter Discovery in Fused Filament Fabrication
San Francisco Open Source Workgroup / AI and ML in Healthcare
No price was mentioned. I guess it's one of those things were if you have to ask for the price, this product isn't for you.
Yes, that's part of it. The lengths accountants will go to to avoid having to deal with negative numbers is a bit funny.
pretty sure they just pushed it live without any messy "testing"
Woah! Podman? Adguardhome? grafana? Loki? NGINX? rclone? Vaultwarde?
Your setup sounds a lot of what I want to achieve!

You're not using an OIDC provider like KanIDM or so?
Is your Ansible repo on GitHub?
bank is interesting, broadly north west, when you might expect south east.