skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see where you're coming from, and I also agree that most real estate agents suck. One of the few bright points in this economy is that many of the most corrupt agents have left the industry since it is no longer "easy money." Of course, there are still plenty of crooks left to go around, and some are more desperate than ever to make payroll. I also agree that the incentives in the industry are massively misaligned, and I'm definitely not here to defend the industry. As I said in another post, I'm actually trying to change the industry from the inside.

One thing that many people don't realize is that if they
don't have an agent representing their interests as a buyer of an MLS-listed property, it usually just means the listing agent gets a double commission. The fact that there is not a buyer's agent doesn't lower the price for the buyer at all. The listing agent just does a "notice of no agency" and pockets both commissions. FSBOs (and some REO properties) are pretty much the only exceptions, because they don't go through the MLS, which has its own arcane rules. So, if you're going to pay the money anyway, you should try to get representation. Just educate yourself about the process, stand strong about what you want, and try to find one of those two or three honest agents ;-) Or pay for a RE attorney.

FSBOs are usually overpriced, especially during market corrections like we're in now. I admire your honesty in listing YOUR property but, unfortunately, not all sellers are as honest. Agents have more accountability, legally speaking, than a random dude on CraigsList. You have more avenues open to you if an agent screws you over than if a private seller screws you over. In fact, you should report your bad agents to your state licensing agency. Many state agencies use 'mystery shoppers' to check out agents when they've been reported a few times. The fewer bad agents out there, the better for everyone.
"I am sorry, but even if this is the case in real life that the poor have it harder, which I do not doubt, it does not make the solution government intervention."

Why is that any less a solution than starting a business?

I realize this place is full of people who want to start businesses, but at least attempt to make an argument why that is the case instead of just stating it as if you're saying "the Sun rises in the East"...

In the case of poverty it's in the taxpayers interest to get rid of poverty, because society is footing a lot of the bill. The interests seem much better aligned than those of someone running a business trying to extract money from the people who have none.
I think you make an important point. It looks great but obviously the guy who built it had an eye for visual design and put a lot of effort into finding the exact right location. Duplicating his setup would be next to impossible.

Conceptually though you could take any old patch of land and build a log cabin with the same functionality and general feel of nature (first one that came up on google: http://www.lincolnlogs.com/askabe.html)
High winds aren't such a problem, it's built into the ground which will help negate a lot. The soil cladding is going to help a lot; I'm used to the high winds we get in England (I'm sure they're comparable) and I'm used to the tiles being ripped off the roof, so from that perspective it could well be better than traditional building in the UK.

Earthquakes aren't too much of a concern in the UK, however being in the ground can help with this. Also the major damage in earthquakes is to rigid structures (primarily concrete, then brick) that cannot flex, there's been lots of designs to deal with all these problems, but the simple matter is that the lower a building is to the ground and the more flexible construction material is you're better off. However, you never know until you try.

As for fire retardation it's possibly a lot worse than your average house in the UK, I don't think I've ever been in a non-brick home in the UK. I bet it will possibly be more damaging to the structure, however the bigger concern is that is it more likely to cause a fire? If you're following proper electrical designs then probably not. However, if he used exclusively 12V then I severely doubt he'd ever have a fire through the electrical system, and thats my opinion having worked as an electrician. When my parents bought a 200+ year old house in France, the building had very old school wiring, it was coated like a sock and the house had never had a fire. So with modern materials you're probably safe.

In case a fire actually started; as with a lot someone fell a sleep smoking for instance. Well you'd be surprised huge hunks of wood really hate setting on fire, so I doubt the structural supports would go up before you could get out. Also if the insulation is behind a good coating of plaster, it's fire proof. I've used scrap drywall quite frequently as a backer for a paper incinerator and it usually lasts for about 30 minutes despite very hot flames (paper gets air faster and thus burns hotter). I'd say if you put the amount of plaster you're supposed to when manually rendering a wall, I'd give it an equal time before it started giving away.

All in all, from the experience I've had I'd say it would be reasonably safe. You've also got to consider, living in a city you're more likely to die through other means than you are in the country.

Personally, I'd have misgivings living in it. All my knowledge tells me that a huge oak beam holding up the floor has more structural support than the floor I'm currently sat on. However, it would still creep me out. My biggest concern is, how do you keep track of wood rotting when you don't have access to a large area of the building.

If all exterior walls were constructed of brick, and I'd built the supports (I'd definitely use brick for a lot of the load bearing structure) then I'd definitely sleep in one.
Diabetes: do you have type 1 or type 2?

Dietary (coupled with lifestyle) changes can produce lower inflammation and better blood sugar control. These two things attained early and often enough are enough to help avoid obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, various auto-immune diseases.

These changes will leave you healthier overall, something that cannot be said of surgery or drugs.
Depression of 2009
Look at the wealth accumulation with time of people with different incomes. I bet you that someone who makes $80k/yr will accumulate a whole lot more wealth with time than someone who makes $40k/yr (~ median income in US), and compare to those that make $14k/yr (what you make in a year of full-time work at minimum wage). That should tell you what the ROI of money made at various income levels is.
Ask HN: help my friend pay off his house
Twitter Data - A simple, open proposal for embedding data in Twitter messages
There be dragons in the Python:
http://code.google.com/p/dajaxproject/source/browse/trunk/da...

If all that importing is really necessary then you might want to check out Django's new preferred import method, importlib, it might clean that up a bit:
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/8193

And here in the J/S - lots of evals - is that really necessary?:
http://code.google.com/p/dajaxproject/source/browse/trunk/da...
Actually it's the opposite, Cappuccino applications are mostly client-side, running on JavaScript. Objective-J is an extension to JavaScript, which gets compiled to JavaScript (either at runtime or ahead of time).
Related video: Comedian Louis CK on the cost of being broke:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q0dIktwJmw
I don't think it's all that useful. The simplistic view that say Java > Bytecode > ASM is approximately true but modern CPU's basically ignore the ASM and give you the correct result even if they did not do it the way you suggested. Even simple assumptions about RAM break down once you start looking at how L1 cache actually works. And let's not get into what the video card does when rendering text.

At this point I think most people are far better served understanding the abstractions that sit above the HW than what's under them. Learning how stuff works is great fun, but the average programmer and the average carpenter have little reason to care about QM even if it impacts what they do at some level. :-)
Regarding your reply, there are two things to address. First is that of economic mobility, which I referenced casually with "meritocratic sentiment." I'm not ready to say anything conclusive, but as other posters have pointed out, there is reason to disbelieve the popular belief.

In the very page you link to: "While there is some economic mobility between generations in the United States, it is still difficult to move up one or more quintiles in regard to one’s income."

But again, I am not one to make conclusions about this topic; I merely express skepticism and disagree with those who hold strong opinions one way or another, because either borders on irrational conviction.

The second point, which you don't address, is the effect of generational wealth on offspring. The effect is subtle and easy to overlook, but is as important as wealth itself. Why do the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor? It's not as simple as saying the system is or isn't in favor of mobility. You must also consider the possibility that rich offspring have become inherently stronger, smarter, and prettier than the poor -- and they are. There has been research on this topic, but it is intuitively obvious: a desperate person is not attractive, is brash, and is weaker against temptation.

The symptom is one: wealth disparity is increasing; but the disease is manyfold. That's my "theory". The problem here, is that somebody will write an article illuminating one facet of the problem, just like somebody takes a magnifying glass to examine a rash. Then somebody reads it and says, "let's apply Cortisone!" But it's actually an allergic reaction to an ingested substance.

The skin-deep understanding of society helps perpetuate this "credit hog" mentality. And that in my opinion is among the foremost barriers to equity.
You give some great advice, brk, buy you should know that the average buyer's agent commission is 2.5%, not 1% or 'nothing."

I know this, but most listing agents will cover some or all of the buyers broker fee, so the actual buyer (typically) ends up paying somewhere between nothing and 1%. At least this is how it's worked on the 4 properties I've bought in the last dozen years.

I didn't realize that he was renting instead of buying. My original advice was 100% geared towards buying. I've never rented, so have no good advice in that regard.
truely awesome article
I was a progressive until I discovered that the progressive movement caused many of the worst problems affecting the poor in America. Intentions are not the same as results.
Of course, many other tools can do this almost-trivial unit conversion for you. Unless you have forgotten how many seconds are in a minute or how many foos are in a kilofoo, you should be able to do this in your head...
Does anyone know of an appliance where you can just plug it into the wall and plug anything into the appliance?

Basically it would act as a pass-through that could keep track of how much the thing plugged into the wall is costing. It would be nice if you could set a price on it and have it display in $/h or something but that's not necessary, just a running total would be fine. I can handle the watt-to-dollars conversion myself.
$100/wk gym membership? Are you an Olympic athlete or something?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715...
Does your anti-virus actually work?
Looks cool, but of course you would need to get potential users of your addon to install jetpack first. Will be great when/if this becomes a core part of the browser.
Just remember that the realtor works for himself, not for you.

No offense, but you have a firm grasp of the obvious. This is true almost 100% of the time when you are "hiring" someone to work for you. In any transaction you should do some research yourself, get some references, and so on.

When buying properties, my wife and I have always used the agent as a sort of voice-command Googlebot. Tell her (it's been in a her in all of our cases) what we want, what our budget is (usually holding back about 10% of what we really want to spend), and then go over the listings we're sent. We'll often do a quick drive-by and scout the neighborhood first and then use the agent to make the appointments and shuttle us around, and then finally handle any paperwork.

I always get a home inspection, and I go around with the inspector as he is going through the house. I also escort the inspector when he is going over properties I've sold (one inspector shorted out the fuse panel (yeah, fuses) when doing an inspection for a buyer on my first house. He was ham-handed when removing the fuse box cover, touched a fuse and made sparks. He tried to cite that on his report as a faulty fuse box and I called him on it and made him account for his own error).

I also tend to make it pretty clear, in plain English, up front that I like to find realtors, lawyers, accountants, etc that I can work with over many years. Attempt to screw me now and you'll lose a significant amount of future/repeat business, plus referrals.

Most people can spot a sucker, and can also spot someone who is knowledgeable. Spend some extra effort on the latter, and the whole transaction process will be easier and more rewarding.
Unibody MacBook Pro catch a fire, owner want no more trouble
This isn't a political or theological forum. If you want to know my personal opinion, I am an atheist, and I don't really care whether "In God We Trust" is on the currency or not.

I think my objection to your generalizations about Americans was fully justified. The US is an extremely diverse country, and trying to paint Americans as materialistic or less-holy-than-thou is really, well, stupid.
Here is a great blog post describing the crime problems of an inner city grocery market: http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=604 From the post:

A day in the life of Tom Boy Super Market consists partly of stopping people from robbing the place blind. "There’s so many days when I don’t do nothing," Jitu says. "My main job is to run the office and I don’t have to be here, but I have to come anyway. You don't want to have, like, one person here, and then half the store is gone. We have to have so many people. They don’t have to do nothing, but they have to be here."
Not all poor people are poor for the same reason suggesting any one solution would work in all cases is stupid.

I have helped several people become less "poor" by:

1) Teaching money management skills. The payback for a poor person investing 20$ to avoid a late fee can be huge. Poor people are so used the "fees" that it often quietly crushes them.

2) Suggesting a change of vocation. Not all low skill jobs pay crap.

3) Loaning money for an unexpected expense that was going to cost someone their new job. Their pay bump was going to cover the cost but they need the money before they could get to work...

4) Convincing someone to stay on Methadone.

PS: Ok, in a thought experiment I guess you could hand them a million a week which would solve most peoples problems, but that does not really scale.
The surge in the number of visitors is due to the phenomenal attention that Twitter has been getting in the recent days. We don't have an idea about the real number of active users.

Twitter really was the major force that helped microblogging take off - but I doubt if twitter could ever establish a profitable business model.
I implied nothing. I said what I said.

Your solution, however, leaves much to be desired. Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale.
Top 100 Australian Web Startups - May 09
How I Did It: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Marketing via the Internet
Seriously, why? It's not even clear from his description why this is a worthwhile cause. Because he wants to feel better about his debt to equity ratio on the house?

It seems everyone is looking for the magic bailout these days.
Respectfully, you're too quick to dismiss saturation. Unless you have a color very close to either white or black, decreasing saturation makes the color more gray, and increasing saturation makes the hue more vibrant/noticeable.

In our example, balancing the saturation of the left colors makes a meaningful perceptual difference (again, I'm not saying anything about aesthetics).

Here is a side-by-side comparision with saturation values shown for each color. http://peoplesign.com/content/colorSaturationHN2.png
But if your "geo information" comes from a random web browsing person who lives in "Sunnyvale, CA", this service can tell you the long/lat ...

It is the "unstructured" plain text input that people will appreciate about this service.
I wish people could enjoy and appreciate a house like this or a self sufficient hobby farm, or a "down-shifting" lifestyle without it being part of some greater anti-industrial ideology.

Why does eating locally need to be justified in terms of food miles or global warming?

Why does the author here who has obviously taken on a very enjoyable & fulfilling project creating something beautiful, need to take a poke at manufactured housing as some sort of evil (which makes housing more affordable for other people). Why can't it just be that he doesn't like manufactured housing.
I find a great deal of irony in a comment that opens and closes with self-promotion, and in the middle talks about how futile self-promotion is.

Since you seem to be new to HN, you should know that people here do not add signatures. If someone wants to contact you, they can find your contact info in your profile; otherwise it's just noise.
I've got my Macbook pro 6 months ago. The best thing I ever buy. I'm programming and I use to use a Windows and a FreeBSD box before.
Here, some free and commercial softwares I use everyday:

1. Terminal: Visor - Quake-style terminal http://visor.binaryage.com

2. Uninstaller: AppTrap http://konstochvanligasaker.se/apptrap/

3. SFTP: http://www.expandrive.com/mac

4. Quick remote filesharing: http://www.getdropbox.com

5. IDEA: NetBeans or ZendStudio

6. Virtual machine: Parallels - http://www.parallels.com

7. Text editor: TextEdit or TextWrangler - http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/

8. VPN: The native OSX thing does the job

9. Mobile sync/Addressbook: iSync does the job (Use http://www.feisar.com/ to find your mobile plugin if iSync doesn't have it natively)

10. SIP softphone: Telephone (works with Googlevoice+Gizmo5 and my local UK SIP provider) - http://code.google.com/p/telephone/

11. Notifier: Growl - http://growl.info/

12. Movie player: VLC or Quicktime+Perian codecs - http://perian.org/

13. Chat: Adium

14: Desktop display: GeekTool - http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/
> each beam is unique in the cuts

A few years ago I took a class on timberframing ... and part of the class was building a timber frame house.

There's a family that - RIGHT NOW - is sitting, eating, and sleeping feet away from beams that I hand planed and joints that I layed out, cut, and chiseled.

That's a pretty cool feeling.

There are also a handful of friends and family members who have peppermills and salad bowls in their kitchen, that they use every day, that I made on my lathe.

I'm a big fan of making stuff with your own hands. (I even took today off from work so that I could sharpen some of my bowl gouges and work on some projects in the shop).

I recommend that folks give it a shot.

(And now, the obligatory plug - although I swear that I didn't plan it when I started this post! - if you're thinking of picking up a craft and don't know where to start, check out my startup http://smartflix.com )
Quite some ranting about stuff that has been known for quite some time.

Nothing new there, although I guess I would have to agree with the general sentiment. I just don’t think that re-activation is really so hard. I always found Microsoft’s internet activation to be fast and painless. Why shouldn’t that also be the case with re-activations. I don’t think it’s necessary to call anyone.
Ask Hacker News: Looking for CS Learning Buddies
Where does one go to find others with an unhealthy interest in computer science? I'm 27 and I'm gearing up for school but it'll be a while till I start learning the cool stuff.

Are there any good user groups or local Seattle clubs you guys know of that would fit the bill?
This does not actually showcase the power of Wolfram Alpha. For instance, Google will do unit conversions aw well.

Now, if you wanted to integrate that...
I'm not sure if this is legit or just an SEO consultant's wet dream. There are roughly 100 sentences, but 44 mentions of the word "depression", and 36 mentions of the word "recession".
This is true... today. Lots of utilities are already starting to install smart meters. Unless Wattvision is able to build a large installed base in the next 2-3 years, their technology won't have meters to attach to (or they'll be doing a new device with machine vision to read the digital displays on new meters, or they'll be interfacing with the meter information in a similar way to - or from - Google).
The problem with that is that most stories are not interesting to any particular reader. I rarely even look at more than 20% of the stories, and vote on even fewer. I doubt many people read even half.
One thing that many people don't realize is that if they don't have an agent representing their interests as a buyer of an MLS-listed property, it usually just means the listing agent gets a double commission. The fact that there is not a buyer's agent doesn't lower the price for the buyer at all.

Which I view as merely another good argument for buying or renting directly from the home owner. Leave the sellers agent out of the picture, as well. MLS is a 20th century idea. While many houses sold are still listed that way, there is no reason other than inertia for it to remain that way.

When we sold our house, we explicitly stated in the craigslist ad, "We will not be responsible for buyers agent fees. If you have a real estate agent, that's your problem, not ours." Our buyer was working with a friend who was an agent, and was able to work out a deal they were both happy with which I wasn't privy to the details of (and given that the buyer found the house himself with no help from the agent, who had showed him lots of houses that weren't right for him, I'd say the agent got more than they deserved, whatever the amount was). But, the buyer did get a better deal on the house, because we didn't give any percentage to a realtor. So, we could sell the house cheaper than a realtor listed house and walk away with more money than the seller.

Anyway, as you may note, my own personal experience with realtors has been so bad that pretty much nothing will convince me to use a realtor again. This could be a case of two bad apples. But, the one that took me for a ride was a 30 year veteran, and had won awards and such. The industry rewards those most effective at screwing people.

So, now that it's an industry that serves no real purpose other than injecting themselves in between buyers and sellers in large transactions (marketing real estate for sale and finding real estate to buy can now be done on the Internet; legal stuff has always been handled by the title companies and the lenders, anyway, and realtors just stake a claim to providing guidance in navigating the process...but if you call a title company, they will happily provide all the guidance you need), I simply have no use for the industry. Realtors are selling wagon wheels, and I don't have or want a wagon.

I think you, as a technically savvy individual, probably well above the average intelligence of realtors, would be well-served to think long and hard about whether the industry will change or die...and get yourself at the head of that curve, whatever it is.