skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find most pattern texts rather weird, this one is no exception. They start out with a super convoluted OOD, then refactor to something better but still fairly ridiculous. Case in point the Type Object Pattern, ridiculous straw man design refactored to something cleaner but still more complicated than necessary. If you find yourself working on a team and some one purposes the starting point you must be dead because you are in one of the inner circles of hell.
Neither Russia nor the US forced militants to establish a despotic theocracy in Afghanistan dedicated to the facially ridiculous prospect of establishing an Islamic Caliphate that would run the middle east under medieval religious law, or to host a transnational irregular armed force dedicated to the delusional prospect of hastening that lost cause by targeting and murdering civilians abroad.

If you want to pursue a line of argument that leaves you sticking up for the Taliban, that's your prerogative, but I don't think doing so will strengthen any case you have to make about the US.
Software engineering is not a very middle class occupation, as you can easily earn amounts more than the average middle class family as a single worker, even in areas that are not tech hubs.

> I don't understand why tech workers in the Bay Area feel guilty about receiving 'high' salaries of $100 - $200k/year. This is not a lot of money... People on Wall street laugh at these amounts.

100-200k a year is a lot of money. That amount easily puts you in the upper quartile of income earners in the US. Comparing yourself as an economic class to the people on Wall Street, who are consistently some of the highest earners in the US, is silly and doesn't make any sense since the vast majority of people do not have income like that.
NYC is more affordable than SF overall.

The reason NYC's still got real-estate-price-itis is that demand still outstrips supply even though they do allow new construction. But the mismatch is not as great as the bay area, where from what I hear nothing can be built and everyone wants to live there.

If you want to see matched supply and demand, look at most of the big cities in Texas. Part of that is geographic -- they're in "flatland" as it's called -- and part of it's that Texas tends to be more pro-development. Supply can rise with demand. Lots of people are moving to Texas too, but prices remain relatively sane excluding a few hotspots.
> So I cloned the repo, ran install.sh and got prompted to run the git submodule checkout for jedi the first time I opened a python file.

Yep, I added that check to better support the use case of people checking out the repo themselves instead of using Vundle (which will checkout the git submodules for you automatically).

I'm happy you enjoy the plugin!
Ryan Davis, 1979 - 2013
FilterStack: Customizable WebGL/Webcam effects.
Wow that link to the Internet Peeps article brings back so many memories. It's true, the whole scene was basically one room full of people.
> NYC is often considered more expensive, and Manhattan is certainly... well... Manhattan. But taken collectively the NYC metro area is actually much more affordable. You can find places to live that are nice, friendly to someone older than 25-30, and at least sanely priced.

It's crazy, isn't it? I was looking at housing prices recently, for places within a 30-35 minute train commute of work (I refuse to make a car part of my daily routine). In New York, for $750k or so there are 2-3 BR places in good school districts in Westchester, right on the Metro North line. Not cheap, but not entirely outside the long-term plans for a two professional family. Similar places in Palo Alto or the like seem to start well over $1 million. Over a million, to live in a place where the nice restaurant are in strip malls!

And if you can expand to secondary cities... it's incredible what kind of water views you can get in downtown Seattle for $500k.
Except that when it related to san francisco, some of the things on that wikipedia page are directly contradictory to the point i think parent was trying to make:

IE
"When wealthy people move into low-income working-class neighborhoods, the resulting class conflict sometimes involves vandalism and arson targeting the property of the gentrifiers. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, the gentrification of San Francisco's predominantly working class Mission District led some long-term neighborhood residents to create what they called the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.(image)" This group allegedly destroyed property and called for property destruction as part of a strategy to oppose gentrification. Their activities drew hostile responses from the San Francisco Police Department, real estate interests, and "work-within-the-system" housing activists.[37]"

This is not a problem with the wealthy people!

Now you could argue this is still "not good", but there was no real argument made at all, just an implication of "you should read this wikipedia page since it comprehensively responds to your ideas", and it really doesn't.

Basically, i'm trying to understand whether he actually wanted to participate in the discussion and had substantive points, or just thought it was obvious and covered by this wikipedia page.
Automation didn't hurt Detroit jobs. There were fewer wrench-turners, but there was an explosion of specialization. As it turns out, when everyone can stamp out a bog-standard ICE, you diversify and compete by creating ever-more-finely-tuned engines with custom parts and electronics that no-one had the time, skill or budget for previously. So what was lost in manual line jobs, was more than made up for in skilled line jobs, CAD/CAM jobs, engineering jobs, supplier jobs, etc.

It wasn't until the Big 3 were on the brink following the banking/liquidity crisis that the greater auto industry started shedding jobs. And by that point, the jobs weren't even in the city in the first place. The losses were suffered by the suburbs.

The job problem in Detroit was that cheap greenfield development deals drew all the new jobs into the suburbs. (with an assist from the highway system, race relations, city politics, etc) And with the jobs, went any economic reason to live in the city center and quite a huge chunk of the tax base.

Despite the difference in reasons, the challenge of San Francisco does share a somewhat-familiar shape with that of Detroit: the rich can justify living there, the young can romanticize it, the poor have little choice but to stay, but the lower and middle classes, and anyone with a family who can afford the choice makes for the exit.
And Oakland can get stabby. So it's stabby and overpriced. No thanks. If I wanted stabby I'd go to Detroit and get a Victorian for $25k.
1984 and Us
An Economist in Technology: My Biggest Misconception
Give x2go a try first (it's based on nx). In my experience it has been far less fiddly than freenx or neatx.
Taxis are not practical. They're too expensive, in most cases. If they weren't, they'd already be everywhere. You have to pay for the human, and in developed countries, the human isn't cheap enough. (This is, generally, considered a good thing.)
The trouble so many have with the Valley isn't early acquisitions per se, it's that so many companies are basically fake. As you yourself explain, in "Hiring is Obsolete", many companies wind up being something the founders do to prove their worth as big company employees, rather than something that might someday make money. A huge fraction of acquisitions are shut down afterwards - pretty conclusive proof the "company" (the software, product, business model and sales channels) has negligible value.

Of course, as you've also pointed out, such "HR exits" are a small fraction of your and other VCs' returns. However, if they predominate numerically - if 80%, say, of YC companies are "acquihired" - this will inevitably affect the character of both YC and its applicants, making it more similar to just another recruiting agency. When our brains assess the character of a place, they weight by "number of people I've talked to", not "market value at exit".
It's a pity that foreigners who live for a long time in Switzerland cannot be part of this...
Putting aside the condescending, finger wagging tone I was struck by the incorrectness of this comment. Home ownership is actually part of the "American Dream" You could debate whether it should be but you can't define it as not being. A quick Wikipedia check on the American Dream:

The meaning of the "American Dream" has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components (such as home ownership and upward mobility) and a global vision.
And then you grow by another 50%. If you go the commodity hardware route, you buy another 500 shitty $2000 servers. If you go the big-iron route, you buy another 2 $5,000,000 servers, because server price does not increase linearly with performance. If you're a big site, server vendors know they can charge you through the nose for it, because there are comparatively few hardware vendors that know what they're doing once you get up to that level of performance.

Look, if you're going to make the case that one should buy bigger servers instead of more servers, then this becomes an economic argument. The reason large web-scale companies don't do this is because it outsources one of their core competencies. When they scale horizontally across thousands of commodity machines, then knowledge of their problem domain becomes encoded in the scaling decisions they make and stays internal to the company. When they scale vertically by buying bigger hardware, then they are trading profits in exchange for having someone else worry about the difficulties of building really big, fast supercomputers. It makes life a lot easier for the engineers, but it destroys the company's bargaining position in the marketplace. Instead of having a proprietary competitive advantage, they are now the commodity application provider on top of somebody else's proprietary competitive advantage. If someone wants to compete with them, they buy the same big iron and write a Twitter clone, while if their server vendor wants to raise prices, it has them by the balls since the whole business is built on their architecture.

(I have a strong suspicion that Twitter would not be economically viable on big iron, anyway. They would end up in a situation similar to Pandora, where their existence is predicated on paying large rents to the people whose IP they use to build their business, and yet the advertising revenue coming in is not adequate to satisfy either the business or their suppliers.)
This was by far the best thing about living just outside of Orlando (and, in the long run, the only good thing). I spend more now to live in Minnesota, and the tunnel vision exhibited by Silicon Valley and San Francisco residents is an ever-nagging reminder of how vastly different perspectives are within just this profession, and how difficult it can be to see solutions when you're mired too deeply in the problem.
Yeah I just bought a house in El Cerrito last week and while we paid above asking, it was 1/3 the price of what my friends on the peninsula are paying for a great place. The fact that people seem completely unwilling to commute 30 minutes for a life changing job is pretty bizarre to me.
> generate ephemeral keypairs on the fly

You're right--that would be a major boost to usability. One question though: Does this undermine the security of PGP in terms of identity verification? I mean, if I'm receiving an ephemeral public key over the wire, how do I know it's not being generated by a man in the middle? With semi-permanent, published keys, I can put my trust in the signatures. But I'd imagine that the scheme you're proposing doesn't have signed keys. Or am I mistaken about that?

> It's also worth saying that PGP isn't a particularly great cryptosystem.

Do you feel the best move is to push forward with PGP, use something else now, or wait for newer systems to be better-studied?
I wanted to get some data off an old Windows 98 laptop of 1999 vintage. 4Gb hardrive, 1 usb port, 64 Mb of RAM. It worked fine in Windows 98, but back then anything USB required extra drivers and ... well, let's just say I didn't think re-learning Windows 98 at this stage in my life was a worthwhile investment.

In the end, I used Damn Small Linux live-booted off a CD and copied the whole drive to a USB stick. Took hours due to only having USB 1 back then, but it worked. Your external drive case is a better solution, but the "old distro" approach is great for cheapskates :-)
I would love a self-hosted version of this monocle.io for my group as well. Any plans to release this on github or similar?
How U.S. Post Office Sells Your New Address To Anyone (And… Loophole To Opt Out)
>Does TPC require durability?

Yes.
KeyPassX and MiniKeyPass are working well enough here, plus they are open source software that one can install on his or her computer or iPhone.

I keep my database on Dropbox for availability on multiple devices.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give you for this.

Here, have an Indignation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s

In the long term, Silicon Valley and SF is eating its young. It's a city built on young entrepreneurs coming there and doing new stuff, but if nobody who hasn't already made it can afford to live there what happens then? The other problem is that these high costs soak up everyone's spare time and money, leaving them with the requirement to work like crazy for other people to afford to live instead of on their own innovative projects. It sucks away the marginal "play time" when innovation really happens.

Someone said to be about Austin, "everyone in Austin does 3 things". There's something to that. For just one example, Austinites aren't afraid to work for the enterprise or in something less sexy than local/mobile/flavor-of-the-month because you're not expected to go all-in on one job at a time (then burn out after 14 months and replaced by another chump). This creates the cross-pollination and breadth of knowledge that generates innovation.

Bay Area people are terrified to go anywhere near an unsexy industry because they live in a culture where your job is all you do. In Austin, where 9-to-5 seems to be more tolerated, people are more willing to explore unsexy problems and hear people out in other industries-- and you learn a lot from that.

San Francisco and New York seem more fixated on a "do one thing, go all-in, and do it very well" ideology of work. That's fine after you have some good ideas but it's terrible at generating new ideas. You need the more relaxed, open approach when you're young and getting ideas (plus learning from other peoples') is more important.
wouldn't it be good to explain somewhere, early on, that this is for javascript?
neocomplete is also my preferred autocomplete plugin. it integrates very well with all of shougo's other plugins, and it works on windows. YCM officially does not support windows and it's not uncommon for it to be broken for a week or two.
I appreciate that you believe what you are saying, but TPC-C doesn't measure anything at all relevant. Having worked both on the enterprise side building WebLogic and on the consumer side at Yahoo and Twitter I can tell you definitively that you are wrong about the applicability of that benchmark to serving large scale web applications. The database and server you are talking about could not do 300k timeline joins per second, or 300k graph intersections per second or virtually any of the actual queries that Twitter needs to operate. All reads are not created equal. Checking the latency profile, it is horrendous even for these simple transactions — hundreds of milliseconds! Worse, there is no where to go as the service grows.

It would be great if you were right and all the big web companies are wrong. I can assure you that it isn't the case.
Yeah that's the other thing. $1 million for houses in a plain vanilla suburb. I mean, Silicon Valley minus its admittedly awesome tech/science scene is not much different from the duller parts of Orange County and is at least twice as expensive. OC has better weather and nicer beaches and parks too.

It's just http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13608503/Daffy_Screwball....
Are social discovery apps too creepy?
My wife's close friend was only able to purchase a house when she had (1) enough to offer a cash purchase, and (2) the emotional ability to put in an offer sight-unseen.

Ugh.
Servers Shrink in Cloud, Vendors Fight to Survive
> real estate hyperinflation in general is a social ill that deserves to be tackled directly as such.

How do you stop house prices from going up? You can't put a cap on property values without turning bidding into a lottery and screwing owners out of asset appreciation. You could make it easier to afford expensive houses by increasing the money supply, but our interest rates have been pegged at effectively zero for four years. You could build more houses but that seems unlikely given the political climite in SF. Perhaps though you can geodiversify an industry, which actually this guy is doing by leaving SF. I'm not sure how you can regulate that though, except by capping the number of jobs in a given industry, kind of like with taxis.
Just watched that talk... amazing. Do any of the tools that he uses in that talk exist?
Potluck? https://www.potluck.it/
Love El Cerrito, and even Richmond. Contra Costa County is way overlooked by the tech community. But sorta hope it stays that way for a while, in case I want to buy a house in a few years...
> increasing supply as a way to make housing/apartments cheaper in SF

Decreasing overall rent isn't a good goal, for much the same reasons as deflation isn't good. Rather the goal of building new housing is to control inflation, as rents going up 50% year over year is even worse.

And building new luxury / high-end housing does help with that. New luxury housing reduces the number of wealthier tenants considering older housing, which reduces competition over said housing, reducing the rate of rent increase over existing housing.
We're using NX/x2go for working from home or, sometimes but fortunately not too often, less likely remote places such as weekend holiday places. It does work well. I wouldn't go as far as saying it feels like a local machine, and it's not as responsive as regular X over a fast LAN, either. But it's very usable.
Decentralization is horrible from environmental standpoint. It also makes cities much less pleasant, it hurts the ability to create useful schools, it horribly limits the pool in which those kids you mentioned can find friends. It makes it almost impossible to provide good public transportation (which is the sensible way to achieve things from this article, see my fav snark at electric cars as well: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=552497834771072&set=...). Backyards? We have parks! Bedrooms? Unless you're in Paris or a teenager stuck up on living in the Pijp, you will get bedrooms. Together with places to go out into, for example.
I think if all the Google/FB/Yahoo/Ebay people who are on buses took Caltrain, people would be complaining that they were late to work because there was no space on the train.

Also, none of those places are right next to a Caltrain station so the company would have to have buses shuttling people back and forth at much worse fuel economy than shuttling them from SF.

Google does have a SF office but as mentioned in other comments, real estate in SF is not cheap and it would be a fool's errand to uproar the campus in MTV.
The dream of home ownership is largely a manufactured one, like the desire for diamond rings, from William Levitt [0] and his Levittowns during the post-WW2 suburban boom. Before that, most Americans were quite content renting for their entire lives. Even today, countries with standards of living otherwise close to that of the US (western Europe, Australia) have much lower rates of home ownership with no reduction in quality of life (many would say it's an increase). Those countries never experienced the push for private living driven by homebuilders and carmakers in the US in the 1950s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levitt
One of the things that makes it difficult living in this area is the lack of people with similar interests. I usually spend time with some friends from high school who are motivated in similar ways to me. Random bars, though, forget it. I get too much of my social interactions that I identify with during the week with coworkers.
My job's in SOMA, a bit closer to Alameda than Mountain View. MV is probably one of the worst places, price-wise. You probably won't find budget housing near there, especially with a family/small child. Aging* millionaires have driven housing prices through the roof anywhere there's a good school system.

* SV "aging", in this case, having kids.
greeeaaaat, now I have to leave Portland soon.....just when I thought I could escape the egos of SanFran
I had to look up "stabby"..

Is this what you were talking about?

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stabby‎

or

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stabby ?
Building more housing is the only option, and like you say you can't build anything.

Maybe Peter Thiel needs to build his floating seasteading metropolis. If he put it in the bay you could connect SV to Newark and Fremont via a gentrified version of The Raft from Snow Crash.
Having a driverless car pull up with a child seat littered with food in various states of digestion and other bodily fluids is not my idea of the future.

Considering some adults can be more unsanitary than children, it seems we may also need a way to automate the cleaning of interiors.
My biggest hesitation here is that you're still trusting the server. Which, not coincidentally, has always been one of the biggest objections to JS crypto. That is, if the server is compromised, it can serve malicious JS, and it can just as easily steal any data that's being encrypted server-side.

To me, one of the most important things about PGP is that the plaintext and the encryption process are entirely in your control. (At least to the extent that you control your own computer.) You lose that assurance if you do server-side encryption.
I think that in a lot of ways it's because of the roots of the organizations in question. Instead of saying "yeah, we have money, we can go buy this solution and trust in the vendor to support us" (an objectively viable solution in many situations) we instead say "we've got $100,000 in seed money and one engineer plus some friends she's convinced to help out pro bono, that won't buy us a sideways glance from Oracle".

Once you've survived the first year or two and gained some traction, suddenly the decision to investigate other solutions becomes a break from tradition -- and no engineer wants to throw away their work. It's incredibly hard to do a full stop, look around, and reevaluate your needs to see if you should just go in a different direction. I'm not sure I've ever seen it happen, really; we always just bow to the organic growth and inertia that we've established.

There is also a strong tradition of Not Invented Here (NIH) at work in this ecosystem. If it wasn't written by one of your peers (other startup people) then it's just not very cool. Use a Microsoft or Oracle product? Hahaha, no. Open source or bust!

...

To be fair, though, I've never worked for a startup that could afford that kind of software, so I guess the point is moot. I'm not spending 20% of my startup's cash reserves on software licenses to Oracle, when I can instead use that $2m to hire a few people to build it for me and know it inside and out. Plus, then they're invested in my company.

Also, please don't think I'm denigrating open source software with this commentary. I just think that the kind of zealotry that precludes even considering all of the options is, in general, a bad business decision, but one we seem to make all of the time.