skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Crazy tax incentives. Mortgage interest is tax deductible in the US and capital gains from selling your home is largely tax-exempt. As part of the current fiscal stimulus plan, many first-time home buyers even qualify for an outright gift from the government of $8000 just to buy a house.

Even this nay not be a valid reason for buying against renting. This would just lead to more buying power for buyers and raise the selling prices of the homes till a good fraction of the tax/gifts actually disappears.

If the market were 100% rational, which includes rational decision making, having access to all needed data, etc., then buying and renting would end up being equal except for transitory effects. Since however, more people are inclined to buy due to various myths, renting should actually be better than buying for those who realize that those are just myths. This is because the myths would raise the prices of buying artificially beyond what they should be in a rational market.

However, even this is not necessarily true since there are still more factors coming from myths and human irrational behavior, unavailability of the needed data, etc. because of which the problem becomes way more unpredictable to solve rationally even for those who are rational.

My conclusion has been that you must therefore look at your specific case, and the locality you are living in and figure what is better for you. Here [1] is the most complete and sophisticated buy-vs.-rent calculator that I have seen, which takes all important quantifiable things into account. The issue of course again is that you have to feed in your own future predictions about where the market is going to make a wise decision out of it.

[1] http://michaelbluejay.com/house/rentvsbuy.html
So you cut out the parts you don't want seen and then put a sheet of black underneath?
If I could snooze in my driverless car overnight, I would ride instead of subjecting myself to the current flying experience for any such trip of 10 hours or less.
Article Marketing Tips: How To Market Anything With Articles
Mandatory voting is essential for a healthy democracy.
Like a couple pages of redacted "This page intentionally left blank"?
A most peculiar series
I know but there is plenty of space between LA and San Diego. Irvine, Huntington Beach, Orange County should be enough to accommodate most of SF!
You're funny. I like you.
You could try probabilistically showing pending comments to users who moderate. Then those comments will only be shown to a random sampling of others until they have been promoted. I've always wanted to build an algorithm like that!

I've often wondered if this could be applied to the homepage too: rather than relegating submissions to the "/new" URL, show them to a random subset of users right on the homepage until they've hit a threshold; then show them to everyone.
Or no sheet underneath at all.
Hey all,

I've been working on a site for connecting people over content related to living a good life; pretty much a Hacker News for life.

Here is the initial prototype. For now, there are only two rules: (1) anything related to living a good life is on topic, (2) don't be an asshole.

Would love your feedback on it, as well as an email signup if you are interested :)
http://www.pri.org/stories/health/scientists-find-surprising...
The actual article, without the blogspam and inaccurate title: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/08/justice-dept-defends-secret-rul...

The gist of the DOJ's argument is sound. The key thing to understand is that the FISC court is not making law. It is interpreting the government's powers under existing law. This is a process the executive regularly engages in: it asks itself, is this activity legal? This is the only way it can act, indeed the only way anyone can act, within a federal court system that does not allow courts to issue advisory opinions. You interpret the law to determine whether your course of action is constitutional.

Without secret FISC rulings, you'd have secret NSA legal interpretations. The FISC can't grant the executive any power it didn't otherwise have--it exists instead as a check on the discretion the executive would otherwise have in using that power. Nothing forces the government, or any other entity, to publicize its interpretation of law until it is challenged in public court.

EDIT: I should note that I don't think the DOJ's argument is necessarily the "right" one. Or the "best" one. But I think it's sound. It's based on a conservative interpretation of the scope of the executive's powers, but not one that's outside the mainstream.
Hey, YC, how about a collision avoidance transponder for bikes that makes a bike look like a car to collision avoidance systems?
The UK National Archives suggest a few different methods on pp. 13-14 of this PDF: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-man...
I would consider showing a section of work that you have already accomplished. Coming to your site, I would likely not use your services based on the fact that I am not able to see what you are able to do.
I just assumed that they did that on purpose. "Pay no attention to the text. Look at our pretty drawings" seems to be a common designer anti-pattern.
Docker combines LXC along with a few other isolation and security technologies. What the Docker maintainers are also doing is setting up a system for distributing LXC based images. Beyond this, since Docker works with these union file systems, it also lets you build on top of other images.

Eventually, there may be some way to merge images together, though I imagine that will always be a little harry compared to a simple stack up.

Documentation is more than a little sparse right now, unfortunately. It took me a few days to figure out how all the pieces work together.
They need time to figure out if warrants were actually obtained prior to gathering the information, verses just grabbing all the information via their blanket surveillance.
Renting out your car while you're not using it negates the advantages of owning one that GP points out. In addition, you're now taking on the risk of damage and the onus of maintenance for a car that's used as a taxi. I don't think this will be a popular option.
Sounds like html. Or qt. Not 140 characters.
> there isn't a single thing you can do about it.

There are laws against most of the things neighbors could do to annoy you. Which means you can involve police and/or the courts, until your neighbors stop annoying you.

If you're renting, especially in an apartment complex, and go to sue, that likely means involving the landlord, and thus getting kicked out as soon as the legal retaliation period is up.
Good to hear, thanks! :)
> I love this trend, but I'd really love to see an asm.js target.

Why? Is "asm.js" just a mnemonic for "magically fast", or is there something specific you think would be gained by not using the full target language JS as a compiler target?
They would just tap it underwater as they have done in the past (and probably present).

"We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way."
Yeah, exactly! You'd have to redact the blankness of course, otherwise people would know what it was.. ;)
They have a lot of experience with both packets and denial-of-service attacks?
These don't indicate overbuilding. It just means you are off the cliff as soon as your cash flow turns negative.
Buying a house in this area is like condemning yourself to walk around with a huge sword hanging above your head.
Seven Samurai is not an unambiguously better movie than On the Waterfront. I hate Elia Kazan as much as the next guy for what he did, but he was a historic talent directing historic talent, making snitching on the working man to the bosses seem positively heroic. Foreign things aren't always better.
I'm beginning to wonder if tiny/slight fonts are a conscious plot to inoculate a product against too much use by uncool old people... sort of the reverse of places that use high-pitched whines to annoy youngsters away.
Yes, I noted that list container. If I need a sorted list, do I need to do that myself (which is OK though not ideal)? Or again there is some other container that can work possibly with a wrapper around it to emulate a sorted linked list?
Do yoga? In a car that upstream posters are saying will be the size of a SmartCar?
There have been no advances in structural engineering since 1906.
actually, reddit has been having the exact same circlejerk for a few weeks now
Neither option is actually insane, but the prevalent opinion that renting is an unacceptable waste of money that should only be utilized as a last resort is not correct.

I don't live anywhere near SF and I rent because I got a good deal on the monthly payment, I have a great landlord who fixes all issues promptly (which is awesome for me, since I am not much of a fix-it guy) (and relatedly, I'm not that interested in making renovations at this stage), and I don't want an asset that'll tie me down since I'm not sure I want to live in my current living area forever.

People constantly bug me to buy a house, but rent works out fine for us for now. I imagine at some point I will want the freedom to modify my home, but that'll be a little ways down the road, and I'm content "throwing my money away by not building equity" at present, especially since I don't necessarily consider significant real estate appreciation a forgone conclusion, as others mistakenly have (see: 2008) and many mistakenly continue to do.
It's scary, because what do you do when 58% of the total electorate tick the "None of the above" option?

2001, 2005, and 2010 UK elections had less than 70% turn out. That's a scary 30% to 35% of people forced to tick a box.

I'm not sure having that many people randomly ticking a box is good for democracy, especially because it's probably not a random choice but determined things like position on the ballot paper.
Bitbucket's down
Economists have actually tried to calculate this. It's pretty dramatic.

"a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office."

http://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20544/1/dp1278.pdf
Interview with Dan North originator of BDD
You never know.

I think the frailty of the human ego is more likely to manufacture scarcity than anything else.
Thanks for your reply! I tried xpra and it seems to be much better! It also fixed the issue with the keyboard messed-up on Mac OSX. I will publish an update on GitHub soon!
I will agree with what you're saying to an extent, but I think the threshold of lifestyle you're talking is quite low by your average SF tech worker's definition. All of the people I know who encountered crime in Oakland were certainly not flashy or even driving remotely fancy cars. They were all a) white b) mildy yuppie c) to varying degrees "not intimidating" looking
That is a beautifully done site, thanks for pointing it out.
Actually a car provides transportation from one location to another right fucking now

If you have to wait 15 minutes for a car to show up it's no better than the bus.
Offer HN: I will build any software and give it to you for free
Hi HN. I'm an experienced programmer with some time on hands and I desperately want to build something that users can actually use. My primary focus is small to medium enterprise software. You see, my whole life I've been building things they paid me for, but nobody used. I've gotten pretty good at that, but that hasn't made me happy. What makes me happy is when many people USE it and can't imagine their lives without it.

The deal: you explain what you need, we discuss it, I build you software, you get it for free along with the source code for inspection. I can build pretty much anything except maybe 3d graphic and games, which I happen to not enjoy anyway.

The catch: I want to be able to sell it to some other company which also needs this kind of software.

This account is anonymous for a number of reasons: I don't like publicity and in the case this thing takes off and I have another client, I'd like to be able to accept Bitcoin exclusively. I couldn't care less about bureaucracy, papers, lawyers, taxes etc - that's a waste of my time. The identity will be revealed after we are comfortable with each other and that requires a conversation. Hit me on Bitmessage BM-2DBmXzWdegfD2LNjVkfz4WFYf6iE4VsT1d or ask here. Thank you.
I am curious to know how do you verify these addresses? what methods you use? I recently built one for a client using Google maps api and it was not as easy and accurate as I thought.
You think? I connect controllers to my Android devices on occasion, it works beautifully. Still I don't do it that often unless I'm sitting at home. That's been an option for Android users for years, I just don't see it taking off unless the controller is built into the device.

On public transit, or an airplane, I tend to use my 3DS for gaming.
Plasma Ring Experiment Offers New Path for Fusion Power
In short, I see no reason to force sugar coating on HN. I'd rather have a 'flag' button on individual comments for getting people banned who are being insulting to a person rather than an idea. As it stands, a genuinely useful but 'harsh' comment may never get seen even when it should be.

I have never understood, and probably will never understand, why so many people on HN seem to think "critical" == "insulting" == "harsh". It's possible to criticize someone or their idea without being a dick, but too many people seem to think that "being a dick" is somehow necessary to give "critical feedback". I don't think it is.

Rational, reasonable people can disagree and debate, even disagree vehemently, without anyone needing to resort to the kind of comments that often get attacked (the ones where the criticizer is just being a dick).

I don't think anyone on HN wants to eliminate constructive feedback or even "negative" comments. The goal is to get the constructive feedback and the criticism while remaining civil. We don't need sugar-coating, we just need people to practice basic manners and remember the Golden Rule. Walk a mile in the other guy's shoes, etc. Have some compassion and empathy.

"That idea is terrible."

Taken by itself, that's a terrible comment - even if it's true! It's terrible because it lacks any explanation or exposition on why the idea is terrible and, as such, amounts to just an opinion (even if it is, coincidentally, accurate).

Why not say instead:

"I don't think this idea is going to work, because XXXX"

where XXX might be "there are already 374 competitors doing exactly the same thing", or "it takes very specific industry connections to break into that domain", or "it violates the second law of thermodynamics" or whatever?
Show HN: Information extraction and rendering REST API
I'm guessing you're talking mainly about the outer richmond, outer sunset, and maybe the excelsior? There are a few truly suburban-ish spots in the hilly parts in the middle of the city (like Monterey Heights, for instance), but I don't think those are very extensive.

Population density of the outer sunset is: 16,489

Monterey heights: 9,639

btw, I'm getting these from

http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Monterey-Heights-San-F...

Now let's take a really sprawly place

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioch,_California

about 3,500/sq mi

This might not be completely fair, since I'm taking all of antioch whereas I'm doing SF in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood way... but all in all, I just don't think you can call any part of san francisco "suburban sprawl" without stretching the term beyond what people typically mean when they say it.
pls ignore!!<br/>
noob<br/>
testing<br/>
whether html is allowed in HN comments
What's the advantage of creating one of these as opposed to just connecting to Tor with your computer?
Only Twitter or Github auth.
'Holographic Duality' Hints at Hidden Subatomic World
If that bullet exists in the first list, it'll eventually exist in the second. Given enough time.
I have to agree with PG here. I guess I just see criticism and incivility as two different things.

I think what you are describing is criticism, which is fine, if civil.

It's incivility that should be eschewed. I would actually be more inclined to vote civil arguments up if I knew such a system was in place.

I also think your hypothetical would-be founder is more likely to get criticism of a higher quality under the circumstances that PG is proposing.

"X is bad"... I'd imagine might give way to something more like... "X is requiring three clicks to get done, and at the end, it does Y instead. You guys should look at that funnel." Which is much more helpful.

"Y doesn't work"... I could see morphing over time to something more like "Y doesn't work on my Vaio with 8GB RAM running Firefox 23 on Windows 8." There's a bit more information there, and it's still a civil comment.

I'm interested to see how it plays out. I could see it being ESPECIALLY good for things like feedback.
That's perfectly fine. To each his own! :)
Yes. Sort of like a dialogue from a random comic strip I heard about long ago:

- Why did you shoot the suspect?

- My finger twitched.

- Eight times?

On the more serious note, I still can't imagine that report in any other way that the person was either accidentally shot or executed. I mean, what kind of tripping you'd have to do to shoot a person on the ground in the chest? Geometry doesn't add up.
Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.
"A complex system designed from scratch never works"
This is based on the work of John Gall who I've never read and cannot comment on. However he was a pediatrician who has never gone near software, I wonder how relevant the personal anecdotes and experience his books draw their conclusions from are.
Also what is his definition of complex relating to the above quote? I'm assuming he could plot a graph with complexity along one axis and utility of starting from scratch along the other. At some point it might cross a certain threshold.
Also is there much in software development that could really be considered 'complex'? or, how does complexity scale in software?
Software could be described as "1000 layers of abstraction" if you are, say, re-writing a program in a high level language you are not starting your system from scratch. All the lower level elements of how it is assembled, run on the computer + all the protocols/ libraries drivers etc. used in the system are not changing.
It seems to me that it is even more simple. Economics 101: scarcity of a highly demanded product drives up costs. There's just no room for significant expansion, the bay area is surrounded on 3 sides by water. Furthermore, a good majority of the San Francisco peninsula is undevelopable since it's state park.
Remember when TaskRabbit launched followed by a hundred clones?
I predict his file will be incredibly boring/banal stuff, with the odd wild conjecture. The blacked out parts will consist entirely of things embarrassing to the agents who compiled it.
> I'm the web guy for Silent Circle.

cough
US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses
> Nothing forces the government, or any other entity, to publicize its interpretation of law until it is challenged in public court.

Okay, that's a solid legal perspective, but what about a normative perspective here? Is it a good thing that judgements of interpretation are inaccessible to the public?
The thing about promises is their real power comes when you return them out of functions you run, thus causing any function to become async, and the promise being returned allows it to be used in a variety of ways:

promisesFunc().done(function(){ // execute on completion }

q.when(promisesFunc).then( function(){ // do stuff } )

It's nice to be able to treat something that is inherently asynchronous like it is inherently asynchronous. Feels good man.jpg. And just wait til you start mixing in generators (well, eventually).
I have the Helvetica Neue family installed, so apparently I care about fonts. What I don't care for is smug, condescending bullshit, and I didn't finish the article.
They're not flip-flops - they're jandals and we're OK with that
You'd be hard-pressed to find and Aussie or Kiwi who will do anything except furrow their brow at this article ;-)

I remember the first time I saw a 'no shirt, no shoes, no service' sign - half of my adolescence had neither and yet I can still mostly use a knife and fork and scrub up for some fancy pants eatin'...
This is on top of them covering passes and encouraging employees to live closer to work, and just reflects on low quality of Bay Area's of transportation grid.

If Muni, or SAM or VTA ran buses from SOMA/Mission to corporate campuses, those would definitely be used. But after a three-hour one-way commute that involves Muni+BART+Caltrain+city bus (an example would be a Google employee in Mountain View who lives in the Mission) even a die-hard public transport fan would switch to a company bus.
>> The condo maintenance fees would then be $1000 or so per month.

Does this condo in Harlem come with a pool and 3 acre managed lawn?
We use data provided by local post offices from the country you specify. It was really hard to build, aggregate the data, and than standardize the input and output. Would appreciate any feedback you have on it.
In computing we often try to find new and extravagant ways to do the same old tasks. i.e. I'm going to use a new language that lets me write {beautiful, functional, etc} code... Exciting new things are fun!

In an op like this, exciting can get you killed. Proper tradecraft is very much focused on executing a successful mission within a very narrow operating window. When planning you try to build in as many opportunities for adaptation as possible, but in execution try to use as few of them as possible. A boring uneventful operation is a good day at work because you get to go home to your family.

Just because they used methods that work doesn't mean they are running from the "same playbook." They are staying safe and getting the job done. Have some respect for fellow professionals, regardless of trade.
That's an interesting thing, though--it makes me less likely to post from HN on a mobile device, and thus I'm more likely to be thinking in a useful manner and making thoughtful criticisms.
Inside GitHub #1
1) Leaving sf in any part, due to your perception of the reaction of random women at bars, to your profession, blows me away. There are plenty of people in the city who also admire your profession, including many single women. And quite frankly, there are more important things in life anyway.

2) People who feel 'guilty' about getting decent salaries are missing the big picture. You are now an allocator of wealth. You can help that mom and pop shop pay its rent, if you are so inclined. Abandoning that privelege and responsibility is also a baffling reaction.
How to speed up Internet Explorer 9
Ha ha ha, I was in sales for a while. I hated every second of it. I legitimately felt like a bad person.

All that doublespeak about "honestly believing you can help" and "finding the prospect's pains" is just so much trash.

At the end of the day, you're wasting other peoples' time by calling them up and trying to shove your products down their throats.
well damn your eyes! this is not relevant but how the dickens doesnt one insert a line break here??
There are bunch of apartment complexes near the train station. They're just not that tall.

The nice thing about Millbrae is that the station has both Caltrain and BART, so you would be able to commute to most SF tech companies without driving.

But the train ride is 30 minutes, (BART doesn't do express), so it would be more like 40-45 minutes with walking and waiting.