skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Property prices never stay flat because of inflation.

This matters because the payments on a fixed-rate mortgage do stay flat; they don't adjust with inflation.

I just refinanced to 4.5%. Long-run inflation is 3% so my actual cost to borrow is 1.5%. With the mortgage deduction it is just over 1.1%--nearly free money, in other words.

It's true that I pay property taxes. In my jurisdiction they are just over 1%, so now my actual cost to own is maybe about 2.2%.

Maintenance is a bit of a red herring...most straight maintenance is inexpensive (cleaning, painting) or optional (fancy landscaping).

Most expensive "maintenance" is actually improvements. For example last year I replaced both my A/C unit and furnace. It was a substantial cash outlay, but the new units are far more performant and efficient than the old ones. If I stay in the house another 5 years I will completely recoup that investment in lower monthly energy payments. And if I don't, the modern new appliances will allow me to set a higher asking price in a sale.
A new Google Wallet app for all Android phones
I wonder if this explains why, when my current server failed and I decided to replace it with two more powerful ones for half the price, my order was mysteriously on hold for a week until the servers I ordered were out of stock, and then the payment was cancelled after it was too late to question it :(

(They did at least give me the old server back with the failing drives replaced...)
I agree. I think James Cameron's trip to the Challenger deep in 2012 is quite apropos. No one had been there since the Trieste in 1960, though there were a couple of ROV visits.

I believe it's not that we couldn't have put more people there, but rather that there's no good scientific (or government/military) reason to do so. ROVs have been more cost effective.
It contains a lot of toxic stuff -- left over fuel, oil, and especially rotting food. It's also sitting on top of an environmentally sensitive area. So cutting it up in place is not a good option.

In a way, this ship is Italy's Exxon Valdez¹. Irresponsible ship's captain crashes into a reef...

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez
A look at Yerdle's new iOS app - sharing meets mobile
OpenZFS - brings together developers from illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and OS X
Solutions For Real-World IT Problems
People rent out otherwise empty houses regardless of what the mortgage rates are. Selling at a loss is a thing because it's less bad than not recovering anything -- renting below the mortgage price has a similar logic.
How to discriminate fast upgrades versus newcomers is the gist of this issue, yes.
There has been some interesting work from Johnathon Edwards @ http://www.subtext-lang.org/
Technically correct again but in this case it really is close enough :).
Why does it matter if that compatibility layer sits in a system-wide library or in application code (as anyone would add if writing a program to target multiple kinds of system)? Wine is not an emulator, it's a free re-implementation of the windows API that runs on Linux.
I don't know what you want to imply with the comment, could you please explain?

It will be moved to a close harbor that can hold the ship (to my knowledge http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piombino is discussed, currently). That sounds like reasonable thing to do.
It is useful because it means you can strategically identify a much smaller set of users to focus on. If you get the seed group to trigger, you get massive payoff. And so you can target initial messages to them, and analyse who takes action and who doesn't and why, iterate, and retarget on the seed group rather than wasting lots of time on the much larger full network.
Thanks, it's a very early "vision", but I'm happy with the way things are going!
Are you sure about that? It seems that businesses wanting this is both crucial to the idea, but also unproven. For example, consider two very close competitors in the widget-making market, A and B. If A adds this, then:

1) They might get better bug reports and be able to fix them better, giving a less buggy product and making them better than B - good for A

2) A user reviewing both A and B might see that A has a list of bugs, and (most likely mistakenly)assume since B doesn't have such a list that B has no bugs. They assume B is better - bad for A

I suspect it depends on a lot of other factors which of those results is more pronounced, but it is unproven which way it would go for any given business.
The long term fix boils down to increasing prices, adding setup fees, or adjusting pricing of older equipment. Either way pricing needs to be adjusted (pricing failure or lack of pricing foresight). There's no way to successfully enforce retaliatory measures against those who cancel / re-order every few months. Because you can always use a different CC / account / payment method.

So I really think this hiatus was put in place so OVH can accumulate enough revenues over the next few months to be able to purchase new servers. They're just not able to get in the black or even amortize older equipment.
new link: http://pastebin.com/QqMbAgsF
>Gigabit Internet and the places that have it could look very appealing once the technology that puts it to work starts to gain traction.

I certainly agree that gigabit internet will be more valuable in the future than it is now.

But, will that make property way more valuable? maybe. thing of it is, compared to silicon valley property values, getting fiber in to multi-family dwellings isn't all that expensive.

You are gonna need like 50 neighbors to make the ongoing cost reasonable, so that's harder with single-family homes, but not impossible. Install costs are high, but not that high; generally $5-$15K one-time to trench from the street into a property and splice in, so if you can talk all your neighbors into blowing 10K+ each on the install, plus your $50 each ongoing, well, you could totally do it. The whole project is way more appealing than, say, moving your ass to Sacramento or Kansas or somewhere else you probably don't want to live.
I work in particle astrophysics data processing and management, mostly with gamma ray events for Fermi gamma ray space-telescope. Our total data size after five years is somewhere around 2 PB, but the data set usually used for analysis runs about 200 TB, not really that large. AFAIK, none of the 100+ collaborators use Hadoop. Mostly they use software I develop to run batch jobs in parallel on one of several clusters.

LSST, which I also am starting to work on, will be different, as the raw data alone will approach 4TB a day.
Brenda and John Romero to run professional degree program at UC Santa Cruz
You likely won't get high interest rates like 8% unless you have higher inflation rates. So someone who makes 2000/month right now, by the time the Interest rates increase to 8%, their salary would have Also increased.
Who profits from the nuclear weapons complex?
I read this on patrick.net years ago-- a lot of it is quite outdated now. Basically the housing market nationwide is quite strong. Whether it will last is another question.

Just one example of the article's outdatedness-- the jumbo mortgage market is doing great now:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-03/wealthy-going-big-t...
The real opportunity for Tinder
It's a function of the number of keys more than heap size directly. I've benchmarked the STW at 20ms pauses for ~2G if the values are ~10k each, and 200ms if the keys are 1K each at the same amount of RAM.
> when rents are less than the price of the mortgage, people don't rent out houses. The notion makes absolutely no sense

So they're just going to let the house sit empty? Buying/selling a house is a long term proposition because of transaction costs. Partially covering a mortgage payment temporarily is better than not recovering it at all.

If the rent payments can't cover the mortgage, they're probably going to take a hefty loss on sale, if they can sell the house at all.
This is why the the Silicon Valley high-growth game is so strange.

In a normal company, the metrics would center around, "Are we making money?" "What sort of things point to us making more money?"

In the SV game, it's "Are we attracting attention?" "What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?"
It’s Easier To Share Your Favorite Web Content with Firefox for Android
Hi, author here. Actually, Lua and Javascript were more of an influence than PHP (I don't know PHP much). But type checking was an obvious thing to remove since I'm aiming for a dynamically-typed language, and I do want sufficiently different (and looser) constructs than Go so that it can find its niche, otherwise what's the point?

I'm definitely not done, and multiple return values are one of the points I'm not fully decided yet (this is a v0.1 after all). Interaction with channels are on the roadmap, and concurrency can be done in the Go host to run different execution contexts.
>But just think - AirBnb could've avoided this discussion entirely for the cost of a crappy IKEA bed. Eat the $350, silently flag both parties - the property owner to see if they are trying a scam, and the author to see if he has any damage complaints in the future - and move on. Then we wouldn't even have to wonder who was in the right and who was in the wrong!

Yes. Exactly this. This is how you do business.
Mortgage is 34% post tax salary (for the couple). the interest for the loan is 3.05% (fix interest).

Do you in Italy have more fix or moving interest rate ?
Scala also has some pretty powerful syntax to go with
Totally agree, Call me a cynic but Schneier doesn't mention the possibility that the administration knew they could have effectively prevented their use but they don't really care that much about chemical weapons or the people of Syria. In fact, they may have seen their use as a political opportunity to provide justification for furthering American interests in the middle-east.
IBM to Investment $1B In Linux Development
Go back to the late 80s/early 90s and small System 7 UNIX clones like Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 could install, complete with their entire userland, dev sys, docs, and formatters in around 10Mb of disk space and run on a 286 with 640Kb of RAM. No TCP/IP stack (it used UUCP for comms) and no X11, but if you fast-forward to 1992 you could have Coherent 4, with TCP/IP and X11, running on a 386 with 4Mb of RAM and installed in 20Mb of disk.

Even the mammoth (by the standards of the day) SCO Open Desktop 3.0, with X11/Motif and a bagload of other stuff, could install in less than 200Mb of disk space and run reasonably smoothly on a 386/33 with 16Mb of RAM. That was a full-blown workstation grade UNIX distribution with all the trimmings. These days word processors are bigger.
Of course, but the ability to run small jobs and get a quick turnaround can be transformational in the sense that it lets you try things out and "fail faster"
We use BugHerd and are mostly happy with it.
> or money spent for a new drive

To put it other way - expected vs. unexpected expenses.
I would generally agree with you, but your thinking is along the lines of "cheaper", in every point.

Cheaper sometimes gets more expensive and then you change the opinion. The author mentions he was a heavy AirBnb user, just as you are. It's interesting to read about the causes that make one's perspective change.
What are you comparing this to? I just got an OVH Canada server (the $79 model to compliment some AWS and Digital Ocean assets) and there is absolutely nothing remotely in the ballpark. Just to compare with AWS, the comparable (but still inferior) m2.2xlarge would run $600 per month, and wouldn't include transfers. OVH just destroys the offerings from GoGrid or Rackspace.

To this actual submission and OVH's dilemma, the solution is clear -- constantly reduce the price of servers as they age. If people end up becoming suckers of sorts by becoming locked into obsolete hardware at its original, shiny and new price, of course they're going to constantly chase the market forward. Of course the flip side of this is that if you can't project the residual payments forward for years, the initial period may be more expensive.
As a marketer, my view on content is that there are three necessary elements:

1) Quality/On-Topic

2) Correctly Timed with current events

3) Luck

It's actually quite similar to startups in general when you think about it.
Another interesting thing to remember is that an embedded operating system (Android phone OS and software, for example) is likely being built on a PC set up with a cross-compile environment and not directly on the embedded hardware.
> No one knew what to do with broadband before VoD and digital delivery (Steam, GoG, app stores, etc.) came along, and we're only a few years into widespread adoption of those technologies

Napster, then other file-sharing services (Morpheus, Kazaa), Bittorrent, etc. This was ~25% of internet traffic in the mid-00s
I'm ignoring whatever steam actually offers; I'm only talking about the capabilities of android. You can easily install third party stores, so it's a much better situation than iOS or Metro.
The quest to reverse the human ageing process
Related news:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24111357
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8385700.stm
Let's start with the assumption that the coast of Giglio is not the proper place... maybe a facility that specializes in scrapping and recycling of disused vessels would be better?

That said, the ship breaking yards in Bangladesh don't look like pleasant places.
As a connoisseur of monad explanations (if not monad understanding) Crockford's talk sounds rushed. It spends a fair amount of time on setup, but when it gets to the meaty bits, it has the feeling of glossing over the details. It could be that all the essential elements are there, but they're covered to quickly to impart any comprehension.
It's hard to constantly reinvent the universe to make it fun again. Oh, look at us, 'young' programmers and admins, our early 30s: how many of us have been doing this stuff for 15 years now? And to already be weary of the daily grind, to have discovered cynicism prematurely. How do I awaken to the realm each morning, doe-eyed and blissful to learn new secrets? This venue is beyond familiar. I think I know the dance moves all my heart. And if there are more to find, my heart has grown too shallow to push blood at my feet to dance. I look in other windows, other professions, and see such ripe opportunities to improve their process. Faulty confidence? To swap careers with another forlorn professional, just long enough to rediscover why programming is indeed a for the young at heart. This weird intersection of procedure and creativity, the nexus of writer's block and chasing the bottom line, how do we keep it all together for the decades to come?
Awesome, so show me (I don't literally demand that you do, but rather mean anyone) actual data of rents that are lower than corresponding mortgages. Anecdotal evidence is very, very much to the contrary.
Physicists discover geometry underlying particle physics
0%. I saved up and bought the cheapest house I could for cash escape the high cost of rent around London.

I can now save double quick for my longer term house.

It's a short term pain living in a small flat with a long commute, but the strategy will hopefully pay off in the long run with all of the rent and mortgage interest avoided.
I find it curious that the author believes in internet.org propaganda.. All they really want is to have more customers. Plain and simple
I believe what georgeott is referring to is the fact that ships are often scrapped in poorer places like India where it's possible to deal with toxic materials with minimal oversight.
Cool, thanks for the offer! What's the best way to contact you?
Backed this in order to secure a copy 3 years before I'll ever get to try it out with my child who is still currently in my wife's womb. I've already enjoyed pondering extensions which could be made to the basic idea once kids get the hang of things.
Google eyes big change in online tracking for ads
What part of the country do you live in? I bet it is not in the SF bay area ;-)
If you haven't already, I would recommend to give a shot to Digital Ocean also.
I've always been confused about the housing as investment idea. We don't consider cars to be an investment either do we? I feel like the idea can only help to drive the prices up further.
I think you're underestimating the power of utilizing a community built library.
Your points about food and exercise apply to both AirBnb and hotels?

Thus, one goes to hotel and most often to AirBnb just to sleep over, not to "live" there.
Firefox For Android 24 Launches With WebRTC Support, NFC-Based Link Sharing
If a new architecture was developed you could bring up the whole stack by cross-{assembling,compiling} from an already supported target. By doing so you could test the output using a simulator (or actual hardware) and then when the assembler/compiler is stable enough you could then cross-assemble/compile the assembler/compiler and then be self-hosting on the new architecture.
How to handle DDOS? 
Softlayer just disabled traffic to one of our dedicated boxes "Due to the large amount of traffic targeted to your IP address".

This box is a standard LAMP setup and we're such a small operation I doubt anyone would purposely target us.

How are events like these normally handled (in terms of mitigation, post-mortem, etc.)? Has anyone else dealt with this recently?
that... is so meta.
Smart Things Jeff Bezos Has Said
There's a huge difference between the colloquial use of the word "faith" and what we know to be an educated guess. Scientific hypotheses are educated guesses. Going to a doctor to treat a medical condition over going to the witchdoctor is also an educated guess.

In both cases, the person making the decision has knowledge about the subject matter and makes it congruent to what he knows. When your doctor makes a decision, it is because of not only his past experience, but the accumulated knowledge of other physicians.

This is entirely different from "I believe that a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator-god sent his perfect son to die for our sins," because there's no evidence that any of that ever happened.
I sublet my apartment four months ago and have been Airbnb'ing around the world since. I've stayed in 17 different places across seven countries and not had a single bad experience.

Things aren't always perfect, just as they're not always with a hotel, but the responsibility is on you to tell the host. I've not yet met a host who wasn't responsive when I asked for something. Seems odd to me that you wouldn't mention your sleep was so uncomfortable to the host before checking out.

I'm sure there are bad hosts out there but I feel I've stayed at enough Airbnb places now to be confident in saying they're in the minority.
I've learned how to program my mind with the correct reaction to that kind of scale: acknowledge it with a hearty, Who the HELL do you think I am!?

And this is why I have a hard time understanding sane people.
That's fine, I know it can't please everyone, but as mentioned in the docs and the article, this is more about Lua-like semantics with a syntax very close to Go than Java. There are no exceptions per se, there are runtime errors returned to the Go host, and a protected mode using `recover()`.

The preamble before `if` is mainly because the variables are function-scoped anyway, but again, a lot of things may change, this is the very first step in a long iteration process, and the feedback I'm getting today from the various forums will help a lot in knowing how to steer the ship.
I have witnessed a sufficient number of pitches in the last six months to opine from my own vantage point. KV invests in many companies that no other VC in the US will invest in. We also support companies that raised money earlier under different circumstances that nobody else will invest in. (I can't address any historical examples without you guiding me to a particular company, etc.)
Do you mean provide everyone shared access to gigabit Ethernet? Or each unit gigabit Ethernet. Those are likely two very different things.
Oh they are good value but would be better value @ $20/mo cheaper like they were ;-)

Europe gets the same server hardware for $40/mo

Been meaning to write up an OVH survival guide. Like moving/removing their ssh keys, installing your own kernel, turning off their monitoring ping so they don't reboot your server if you are doing something that blocks the ping for too long, fixing the cpu governor so you get advertised speeds out of it, how to tune the software raid, joining the unlisted mailing lists, etc. etc.
Did you laugh at the bill hicks routine about marketers killing themselves when you were a teenager, but now want to take that highly paid SV position without an existential crisis? Have we got the job title for you!
I called my AirBnB host for instructions on how to get into her Boston apartment because she had forgotten to leave me a key.

A few minutes later I was creeping through a pitch-black, cold basement with half-inch-deep murky water flooding the concrete floor, using my iPhone as a flashlight.

The moral of this story is: If you use AirBnB often enough, you may become the protagonist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
According to their CEO, "We're not classified as the brokers, we're just the service." [1]

I am not sure why they are expected to do dispute arbitration if they are 'just the service'. You don't expect craigslist to refund your money for a transaction that was enabled by craigslist.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/technology/matching-travel...
No, he means proper for scrapping.

You don't scrap a ship in the middle of the sea, you don't want oil, rotten food, battery acid, sewage, cargo, and any other random stuff that might exist on a ship floating around freely.
> OVH Europe has better pricing/configurations than Canada.

You could always rent an OVH server in Europe.
Could anyone post a mirror, or the content in a comment? The site looks to be down for me currently.
Thanks you for this post, I stopped using Airbnb as well since they closed my account without providing any justification.

http://nidalalhariri.com/post/55999109847/airbnb-closed-my-a...

no one from their management/support team even cared to respond to my blog post/tweets.
Structure Sensor: Capture the World in 3D
The beef is posts to paywall sites need to be tagged somehow.
For clarity, I am what religious people call an atheist. Personally I reject that word because I dint see why we need words to describe people who don't believe in thing that doesn't have any basis in reality. For example, there is no word for people who don't believe in fairies, ghosts, or such like. I find the word "atheist" patronizing and insulting. That said...

If faith is a conscious choice, yes it can be rational.

So, if a person says; "yes that book is full of stuff I want to follow because they believe that it will be a good guiding light for me and I chose to believe that the supernatural being the book insists is real such that it helps to keep me following the rules in the book out of the fear that the super being will judge me", then to me it makes rational sense. Its a rational choice. They do know that in reality is is not real, but they chose to live that way. The choose to engage in faith. Very useful for example for recovering addicts, or people who have faced some trauma.

What I will never understand is people who literally believe a given god and there for religion is absolutely true or real. Worse still is when children are brain washed from birth to believe in such gods.

So, if its a conscious informed choice to have faith, then yes, it can be perfectly rational.

I am reminded of a conversation between the Arch Bishop Of Canterbury and Ricky Gervais. After not long, the Arch Bishop essentially conceded that god, heaven, hell, and so on are really metaphors. Needless to say I, saw the light. Twice actually. I understood the nature of religion, and how damn smart and intelligent comedians are.