skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absent massive government intervention it wouldn't even be close. With the fixed rate, 30 year mortgage with no prepayment penalty, low down payment and massively subsidized rates; mortgage income deduction & the income exemption for imputed rent; and other government programs it becomes something of a closer call. Even so, it's still a highly leveraged asset that is as non-diversified as an investment can be, with very high transaction costs, significant carrying costs, and only moderately liquid markets at best.

The government policies to subsidize homeownership are unfortunate in that they are very regressive and they are quite expensive for the meager positive externalizes that possibly flow from widespread ownership.
another cool thing- what if you could implicitly train a model over time by looking at your upvotes and downvotes?
Most landlords I know prefer to keep as little cash as possible in equity. If they can invest 10% and have the bank finance the remaining 90% while still collecting 100% of the rent their returns look a whole lot better. Cash flow is better too.
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
I'm in the same position as you. Even though we got lucky and our house appreciated 17% over 7 years, after fees it works out about a 2% return per year (and that's not even taking into account property tax, insurance and maintenance). Right now we rent and we've put our money into the stock market - it generates a much better return with much less effort.

Even if you do have the capital to buy your house with cash, it's still not a good investment. Basically you are tying up all that capital that could be earning 4% per annum or more in an index fund over the long term.
Awesome, thanks for the information - I've been using VirtualBox + Vagrant nightly for the last few weeks with a huge smile on my face, I really love that tool. What a pain in the ass it is to get a native RoR dev. environment working...
Here is a fun thing to read:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/how-i-failed.html

And on Google:

http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...
The pain of two clicks
> 1. It's very slow

Benchmarks these days show Ruby 1.9/2.0 as being a wee bit faster than Python, and it's improving. That's still much slower than Java, of course, but then that's a bad comparison; Ruby and Python are better comparisons.
The point of the article is that you don't have to fit something into the X of Y framework, and trying to do so can often be limiting. Yes, this advice is general and sort of vague, but it pushes people to try to question the status quo and look at things in novel ways. Which I think everyone can agree is a good idea..
Yes, pretty much every reverse proxy supports this. Most other software sucks in much bigger ways. And no this could not be done with a shell script.
Turn your investors into rubber ducks
Very edited: Ah, so the human's mass can be heavy compared to the bungee cord, but if that's the case then the duration of the superman effect would be short.
Google Maps Helps Man Reunite With Long-Lost Family
Oh, I agree that Webfaction is very very good at shared hosting. It's just that I've learned my lesson and don't plan to be too attached to them.
You're making the false assumption that only Glenn Greenwald is doing the reporting and shaping of the stories, instead of teams spanning news publications, dozens of people at the Guardian, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

That said, can I ask what the reporting of someone who was impartial look like? Exactly how were these stories shaped that rubs you the wrong way? Because all I see are facts, his editorials are just a side note.

Just because he isn't doing the IC's bidding doesn't mean he's shaping the NSA stories to his own political views.
All things progressing about equally, we run out of affordable food and water for people long before we run out of space to house them. It is a lot easier to zone and build vertically for housing than it is for farming operations.
What isn't there a /r/ for on Reddit? Seems like they cover everything.
I switched back to Safari from Chrome this week since installing Mavericks. It's substantially faster in my experience.
Meet SecureDrop, a New Lock Box for Whistleblowers
Interesting, but I still have a headache since I looked at the gifs about an hour ago. Maybe it's just me but I would advice putting a warning somewhere.
I don't think the author gives away the moral high-ground. I think you're misinterpreting his sentence. I interpreted it as if the word "even" was at the beginning, as in:

Even if court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?

The point being, whether or not court orders are legitimate, it's perfectly reasonable to engineer systems to protect against insider attacks.
Most crazy pic of the Internet today NSFW
As someone who also ran a hosting company (2001-2007, when I sold it--the acquiring company is still in business and doing fine today), there are some people who are building hosting companies for the long term, and many others who will sell given the right $ amount and timing.

Some of the best hosting companies I've been with were run by "lifers" (which is what you sound like to me, too.) You've got a good team, a system, and you're profitable and growing your customer base. You're enjoying yourself, so there's no point in selling.

There are many others for whom the support gets to be too much, or they haven't charged enough to make a profit--in my case, it was both. If you can't make a profit, you can't put the systems in place you need to run a great business, so you kill yourself getting up at 3AM when a customer texts your "emergency support" line. Eventually, you burn out, sell it and move on.

Unfortunately, with hosting being as price-sensitive as it is (I like the comparison to airlines someone else made in this thread), there will always be companies that start up, have an owner that runs him/herself into the ground, and sell.

You "lifers" are in many ways smarter than the rest of us. I applaud you for not giving up and not giving in to the price war. Here's hoping other hosting company owners will read these comments and realize there is an alternative to full burnout mode.
You know what sux, stories critical of HN are getting flagged and pushed off the front page, exactly the flaw that this article points out. This article is at position 58 now with 308 upvotes after being submitted 9 hours ago. There's another link from 9h ago with 48 upvotes and it's at position 36.

This article is direct user feedback and points out that moderation is just harmful for what HN stands for, why "making it disappear". You can't moderate a community-driven website. You can for porn or harassment speech, but not for critique, seriously. Even if the critique is unconstructive, that's how humans discuss, don't moderate that, otherwise you will falsify the outcome.

That's like the NSA, always trying to control things and sweeping things under the carpet, no like.
This isn't about government run healthcare, and the specific example is an implementation detail so no it does not point out the flaw, it points out nothing more than the fact that no system is 100% perfect.
Then go find a tech co-founder:) it's a good exercise in one of the many thing you'll have to be good at later on
When I opened the first page I thought that it would be a page of unrelated GIFs. I saw the first one, read the accompanying paragraph, and stopped to think about it. I thought for a while before proceeding on, at which point I noticed that I had just thought through the next several GIFs of explanation.

That's why math is fun. You can always participate in the analysis.
Play Super Mario in Your Browser (Mac or PC)
Couldn't agree more. The way you host and manage a static website hasn't really changed for more than a decade, and most hosting UI's feel like something out of the 90ies.

I think this is partly because of providers like godaddy who have massive up-sell attempts and navigation misdirection to confuse people into purchasing all their value-add services when all you wanted was to purchase a domain or use their DNS services. It's the rare provider who just wants to do one thing well rather than be horizontally integrated and do a bunch of things half-assed. Unfortunately, people prefer one-stop shopping, but the integration doesn't make it easy to differentiate the offerings as services that don't need to be provided by a single provider. Like you can use godaddy as a registrar, but the ability to not use godaddy as the DNS provider too is buried and hidden. They purposely conflate what can be two separate services.

EDIT: I do remember canceling some godaddy service at one time and the process was super easy. Called and said I want to cancel service, wait time on the phone was low, and there was no questions asked.
Isn't this the concept of "host proof hosting"? The idea is that the encryption secret is never even transmitted to the host so they have no way of decrypting it.

Why wasn't Lavabit setup in a similar fashion? Why isn't this more widely practiced?
Where I live, there are lots of multi-family buildings, either "traditional" apartment complexes, urban apartment buildings, and a plethora of 2- and 4-unit buildings built on previously single-family residential lots. Almost all of these are solely for rent, not to purchase. That has kept rents somewhat stable but the price of buying actual land (that is, a single-family home or even a townhouse where the purchaser owns the dirt underneath the structure) has skyrocketed as people move in.

Therefore, renting is cheaper than a mortgage for most properties in my area.
Druge's sole existence is based on how well he is able to spot fringe stories and push them into the mainstream. There would be not reason to go on that site if it weren't for his (and his team's) talent to spot some detail in some overlooked story and blow it up into a scandal. Somebody looking for the complexity of in issue is certainly not going to find that on Drudge. But Drudge is an amazing place to learn how to spot the right angle of a story and making it newsworthy.
The question is, what's a better investment?

Investing in the home you live in gives you tax breaks (jurisdiction dependent).

You will look after your own home, instead of having renters with no vested interest.

You need access to a home anyway, why involve a 3rd party (landlord).

The leverage you can get is fantastic, and the interest payments are generally similar to what you'd be paying in rent anyway.

This does no apply to Buy to Let however, the advantages above don't really apply. A second property makes much less financial sense to me.

Having said that, I currently rent. I'm not settled down enough to tie myself to a single location, Australian property is super expensive (I think overpriced, but that's just a gut feel), and I'm keeping my non startup risk profile low to try and balance the risk I take on as an entrepreneur.
I wonder if he invests in housing in bubble markets, and if his house makes up more than 10% of his portfolio.
I'd be curious - what do u use, and why? I've been meaning to look into getting my own blog restarted, but just haven't gotten down to the question of which static site generator to use.
Google cars versus public transit: the US’s problem with public goods
Secrets of the Most Successful College Students
Yup, same- we got outta MT just in time about 4 months ago. Switched to DO.
Wow. An actual critique of Rails??? +1!!!
It is irrelevant to his point whether he does or not. Lots of people who are well off own $100k+ non-classic luxury cars or at higher levels yachts and such, the difference between those and houses being that no sane person would argue the cars or boats are a good financial investment. OTOH, with houses and other forms of real estate the idea that they are universally a good investment is widely seen as accepted wisdom to the point where it is almost a religious belief.
Marine Corps Marathon organizers send simple message to Congress
It's not the point to fork, but to experiment and see which features are worth porting back into Ruby core.

I think it's great.
Owning comes with two big benefits.

First, if you own your home, you can more easily withstand a financial crisis, whether it be a lost job, medical bills, or a totaled car...at least you have somewhere to live. If you can't pay rent and become homeless, it's a lot harder to recover. Second, you can pass it on to your kids so at least they'll have some security. If you rent, you can't give them that.

But both of those only apply once you've paid off the mortgage. With the trends being cost of living increasing while pay rates stagnate or decrease, and cost of real estate having skyrocketed in the last few decades, for a lot of people, even middle class, it becomes an unrealistic dream to actually be able to pay off a mortgage within a single lifetime.
Shumway - Mozilla
Well, any prevented loss can also be interpreted as profit. So depending on what kind of money is at stake you can reasonably claim a cut. You provide insurance and your cut is the price of the insurance policy. It's a well established business.
A good rent vs. own comparison like the one on the NYT website will take expected maintenance costs into account

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...
How to Add Value and Further Your Career as a Technologist
QA gets a budget at the price of an insurance policy. Just like an insurer would gauge the risk and ask for a price.
It's not the bad apples, it's the impression others get due to relativity.

To some guy slamming out Java in a bank where you have to wear a suit and tie or PHP in some chop shop where version control is on the distant TO-DO list, Ruby programmers do look like brogrammers with their fancy tools and fancy computers.
Facebook for me is just an address book of all my contacts. I never share anything personal there due to the number of privacy settings I need to hop through to make sure I shared with the right people.

Path is just a curated set of close friends with whom I feel free to share anything. Also when it came out Path mobile app is far better than Facebook.
Installing Ghost on Ubuntu, Nginx and MySQL
Java seems to fit your needs, given how you have experience with C#. Play is a good framework to work with.
This is what TFA means when it says:

In the end, what led to Lavabit's shutdown was not that the company's technology was too resistant to insider attacks, but that it wasn't resistant.
Land never spoils, but houses sure do. Land value will always increase as the population increases, but the house sitting on top of it starts rotting the day after you finish construction. Homeowners have to spend a lot of time and effort to prolong the life and value of a house.
Companies use Java instead of Puppet? How does the conversation go where you even start to compare those two things?
I remember reading something similar here on HN. Somebody built a NB classifier to pick out the stories that he/she would like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3616763 - found the discussion.

EDIT: Have a look at this search, it may show you past attempts: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=news+classifie...
That might have to change - http://theage.domain.com.au/real-estate-news/with-more-peopl...
That's not really a difference between owning and renting. It's a difference between having assets and not having assets. If you remove the hidden variable, it probably tilts in favor of the renter.

Someone who rents and has, say, $100k in the stock market or bonds is arguably in a better position than someone with a $100k house. The renter can much more easily move to a new location to get a better job. Plus, they can afford to eat and pay other expenses while doing so. You can't eat a house.
Hah! I live in Christchurch too, and yes, rents have gone up, and yes, like everyone I've been thinking about buying.

However! I'm also from Ireland where a _lot_ of my friends bought houses in the celtic tiger era and are now, on average, about 100K euro down on their "investments"

My gut feeling is that Christchurch too is a bubble. Sure it's a bubble fuelled by a nasty earthquake reducing the supply... BUT supply will come back up again (and it'll be new housing with things like insulation!)

Tricky things really. Currently my rent is cheaper than a mortgage for an equivalent - but only just. That said, I don' t have to pay rates, fees, hiked insurance etc.

The other option of course is to leave for a while - easy enough to do as a decent developer.
Greenwald exits Guardian for new Omidyar media venture
So I think you lose your colours once you collect more than 4 total. You start with two, and you absorb the colour of any fish you absorb. Not quite sure how it all works, but that's what the source says.

The arrow key commands feel a little funny to me, they turn the fish to swim towards the direction you are pointing. I would much rather use left/right to turn and up to go faster. The down key wouldn't need to be used, as the fish slow down automatically once you release the up key.

It's a nice relaxing game, works relatively well with just a trackpad too.
I do a lot of Veeva applications for healthcare. It's pretty interesting and almost all of our clients are really into it right now. I'd say 50 percent of our work is related to Veeva. If anyone has any questions about it I can answer some.

To add to this a bit. One of the main reasons it is doing so well is that their clients (healthcare) are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on software. They emphasize that Veeva only has 170 customers, but these customers are people like <insert giant pharma name here>. It's not like their customers are some mom and pop shops.

It is nice to see healthcare trying out new things. Typically they are a few years behind on the curve due to their demographic.
Absolutely. There is nothing that singles out Microsoft as better or worse, but it is a looming issue for the whole US tech industry.
> A plugin from five years ago that hasn't been maintained in that time is probably going to hurt you a lot.

Unless it just does some simple, or basic thing. In which case, you're still hurt. But in a different way....
Unless you discount the expert time saved per year. This is actually a real metric. How do you think they calculate the budget for tech support? They measure time wasted in tech issues, multiply by the expert wage and then start doing a binary search up and down to see what optimizes the cost at average salary increments. Of course politics corrupt the process eventually.
Here's a great breakdown of the interview: http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/46539276780/...
Can anyone shed some light on why all this government intervention exists? In other words, why so much propaganda/pressure from the man to buy houses?
"It can't be true that homes rise 10 percent a year. If they did, in the long run no one would be able to afford a house."

This is such an obvious observation, but one most people miss completely. Math doesn't lie.
The CuBox i From SolidRun
I submit that you have rather egregiously misread TFA. The antecedent of "They" in this case is the judge and other law enforcement fans. Felten's point is not to stipulate to their mistaken assumption, but to contradict it. That is, he shows how the threat represented by the court system is indistinguishable from that of various other bad actors. He doesn't spare Lavabit from critique either, by pointing out how better systems design would have better resisted the "insider" attack carried out using the courts.
Unfortunately you are incorrect on your first point as you are ignoring property taxes.

Taxes are relatively low where I live (Boulder, CO) and on my property I still have to pay $500 a month in taxes. If I lose my job and my ability to pay, it doesn't matter if I fully own my house as the government can just take it from me if I am delinquent for too long.

I am totally against house ownership unless you have enough money to put up a large down payment and enough to also withstand fluctuations in your ability to pay -- otherwise it really seems like a sucker's bet to me.
The Sharing Economy Is Owned By The Same People As The Rest Of The Economy
Other items that are terrible investments: BABIES
I am firmly in the Schiller camp, however I did just buy a home. It was a tough decision for me but I think it was rational. I say that because I am fully aware of the statistics of home ownership as well as its historically poor performance.

The prime reason that we purchased a home is because we could not renovate and open our basement for business in a rental property. Overall our net costs of home ownership now are eclipsed by the amount we are making from being able to do the things only home owners can.

The other major reason is that for us, even when factoring in estimated maintenance costs, we would pay less monthly on a mortgage than we would renting. Even if we lose some home value over the period that we are planning on living here (~6 years) we would see the return of some of it rather than none in a rental scenario.

The bottom line is, this whole argument is much much more complex than what the retail value of your home is between the time you buy and the time you sell. As with pretty much everything, the economic costs are not captured in the pricing data.
And then they:

- silently stole your contacts, a move so shady it prompted Apple to quickly push an OS update allowing a per-app contacts access permission, then

- used the phone numbers of your contacts to send them completely false text messages saying you'd shared (unspecified) things with them on Path in an effort to get them to sign up (even when you had done no such thing), then

- leaked your location even when you had location services disabled for Path, then

- started effectively begging for change (subscriptions) every third screen.

Good riddance.
Why get a Biology Phd? To work for free?
It's not widely practiced because it makes for a poor user experience in most cases - what happens when a user forgets their secret? Either they can never access their email account again, or at least they can never read their old emails. Besides that, you also lose the ability to do much of anything on the server - so super-fast search ala gmail is out.

Most users will choose a provider that has good protection against illegal attacks (like crackers), and little protection against legal attacks (like warrants) because those are the threats they see themselves facing.
I think this is interesting because this may represent a pullback in the social/mobile consumer space from an investment standpoint. Path is a VC darling given that it raised over $40 million from the likes of KPCB (a firm that also mentioned a direction change[0]). Anyone talking about a SV bubble should consider that some companies with tremendous momentum are scaling back a little bit. It could be a healthy pull back.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540362
I use Path (mostly) for pictures of my kids. Path is invite/opt-in which makes it easy to share with only the family and friends who are interested.

I don't want everyone on Facebook seeing my family photos any more than they want to be flooded with updates from a doting father.
You're completely ignoring the downside of your home. If the job market in the area where you live declines, you'll find it more difficult to move to an area where you're able to find work.. and if the decline in your area is severe enough, you may also find yourself unable to sell your home and/or must sell at a substantial loss.

Your potential downside is not the difference between a lower rent and the cost of a home. Your potential downside is the entire cost of your home.

This is actually one of Shiller's points about rent vs ownership (mobility).
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