skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What "Word" Defines Your City?
PG's essay "Cities & Ambition"[1] has been a huge topic of discussion here lately - but most of it has centered around NYC, SV, LA & DC. That's great, but with several other growing hubs of entrepreneurs - I'm curious to know:

What "word" best defines your city?

Ideally we're talking about upcoming tech centers in the US - Chicago, Austin, etc), as well as international hot spots for startups & bootstrappers that don't get as much attention or chatters as NYC/SV/LA/DC.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083151
> This is an active and vibrant defense of freedom, not some worthless British law.

> (Oh I'm sorry, did I just libel Her Majesty's judicial system? How careless of me. I should watch what I write).

guess I missed the bit of the US constitution where other people's databases were considered protected speech.
I'm astonished you're the only person in this comment thread to have made this very significant point.
I think benefits of electricity are obvious.
> They've already started to make it hard to install it from other sources.

They had to because idiots were installing malware left and right by clicking and installing random malware extensions without realizing what they're doing.
> after 30y you end up with a house that worth $1M

In his video, Sal Khan did an apples-to-apples comparison: He compared the net out-of-pocket costs of (i) an interest-only mortgage in which you build no equity, and (ii) renting, where you likewise get no equity.

If you also want to build equity in your house, in addition to merely paying the interest, then that's an additional out-of-pocket cost (which unlike the interest payment is not tax deductible).

That's not to say his numbers are realistic approximations. But his basic approach to comparison seems sound.
Two issues.

- I'm currently paying $2,300 for a $500k house. I think his rental rates are way off.

- In a free market, rental rates are supposed to adjust to make it such that an individual is indifferent between renting and buying. If it was that much more expensive to own than to rent, the landlord would never rent the house out!
I found using the SVG version rather then tff helps a bit on windows. Its nasty looking but it does make it a bit more presentable. Only thing is that for some reason Google Web Font doesn't display the SVG so I have to use something like Font Squirrel to create my fonts and host locally. I only tend to do this if the client just so happens to tests on windows , most of the time they don't care since they are on macs so its not that much of an hassle when I have to go down this road.

Edit: Maybe I should of read the article before my comment, seems he does the same thing.
No more anonymous downvotes and flagging, for one?

> Every police officer should be issued an identification number, to assure accountability for his actions.
Tinkering with a H.261 encoder
I'm amazed to see how many scientists are in here. Lot of math, lot of graphs, lot of speculation but nobody even mentioned that we are, before technicians, people. We have desires, we have daily routines, we have habits and we have a psychological environment and background.

Renting will effectively (as the video outlined) leave a surplus of money in your pockets. Which you will use to buy the latest gadgets, to pay the latest cool service, to take fancy trips around the globe, to hunt the last ever living rhino in Africa or whatever else. BUT, thinking in perspective, after 20 years you will anyway have 0 cash in your pockets AND no house. Until your health and job keep up, this might be fine. In case of need you will just be f---.

What you are really doing, when you buy a house, is forcing yourself in saving a liable equity for you and your family. Not only it will free you from any rent after 30yrs, but you'll also have a tangible good and you'll leave something for your children and relatives. Not even mentioning that, in case of extreme need, you'll be able to sell it.

Not sure how the concept of "house" might differ between Europe and the US and i realize that if you buy a really crappy built house, my arguments might not be valid. But where i live, houses are built to last centuries and they are by far the best way to responsibly spend your money.

Doing a Khanacademy video advising people in renting vs buying is just SO wrong. The video itself is not only rounding numbers in a bad way (IMHO), but it's also giving a superficial and quite-not-always-true message.

Horrible.
He should have had his pal over at Harvard upload it. Why give the administration power over you? Relying on the goodness of executives is big gamble, imho.
What you are looking for is this http://swannodette.github.io/2013/12/17/the-future-of-javasc...
I'll vouch for everything in this article [1] and add: if doing this, sleep consistently every day.

If you're in the middle of something, just drop it and go to sleep. If you've been working on something all week, you're not going to forget something or lose your place or indeed, if done right [2], even lose your 'flow' by sleeping.

Getting 80-100 useful hours out of an 168 hour week can only come if you use a good chunk of the other 68+ hours sleeping - but even moreso than getting enough hours of sleep, getting them at roughly the same time every day can make a big difference.

[1]: Having learnt most of this the hard way.

[2]: As inadvisable as it might sound, working immediately before bed is the only way I've found that ensures this.
Rtc.io – Open source WebRTC library
FTN says Merkel should stop using her cell phone
Lots of startup ones...
I feel similarly to you, and distinctly remember feeling empathetic even when I was young. Now, I see life as being deterministic, which makes it easy to think "would I not be behaving in an identical manner?"

Do you think that people who struggle with empathy have that issue partially due to a non-deterministic view of life?
security and privacy - separate rings of trust for different websites. to me the idea of trusting every website on the internet with all of your cookies, extensions and plugins is crazy.
This video was made in 2008, when mortgage rates were 6% and money market accounts were paying close to 4%. Now, mortgages go for 4.5% and money market accounts pay less than 0.5%. In 2008, rent prices were low while home prices were high, too. Today, a $1M house would cost closer to $10K/month in rent. It certainly doesn't pay to rent today, but it's harder to get a loan today, too.
I suppose I can see an argument for popping something up before firing the schema handler when something sets location.href to a mailto: URL, but that seems like the sort of thing where you'd really want to wait for evidence that it's a problem for anyone before you implement it; it both annoys the user and complicates your code, neither of which is desirable in the absence of real provocation.
> What you are really doing, when you buy a house, is forcing yourself in saving a liable equity for you and your family.

Yes, there's a forced savings component, but it's expensive in terms of opportunity cost. It's not unlike insurance agents who want to sell you life-insurance policies that have "investment" components to them, when what you really want is to buy inexpensive term protection and put the difference in price into better-returning investments.

Remember that Sal Khan's comparison is of an interest-only mortgage versus renting. If you also want to build equity, well then, that's additional money out of your pocket (non-tax-deductible).
Slightly tangential:

Conventional wisdom is just that - conventional, and an important thing to teach people is that there are times when convention should be broken.

Back during the height of housing bubble (2006/2007), a friend of mine decided to buy his first home. It was so obviously a "bubble buy" that even before things started to get bad, it was visible from a mile away that he was making a bad decision: He was buying a new construction K. Hov. cookie-cutter apartment in Edgewater, NJ, which was just close enough to Manhattan to tempt those "I'm buying a NYC apartment!" types but just far enough away that there wasn't a real fundamental demand to live there. He got a terrible no-verification mortgage ("liar loan") that we all warned him was trouble. He paid way too much -- something like $600k for a 1BR condo (near Manhattan prices, not Edgewater NJ prices).

When our friends warned him of these issues, when we pointed out that he could rent a very nice 2BR apartment a few blocks away for $2500/month that he and his wife would be plenty comfortable in, when we pointed out he was likely buying at or near the peak of a heady real estate market, he didn't care. His only refrain - over and over - was the age-old:

"But I'm going to be a _homeowner_. You guys are just throwing away money towards rent every month. I don't want to do that."

Fast forward a few years: Not surprisingly, his interest rate reset, his apartment is worth about $400k, and he had to go through mortgage default to get a modification on his loan.

And yet he still clings to his decision - "yeah but I own my place, and it'll even out over the next few years."

Sometimes buying for the sake of buying just isn't the right decision, despite what "we were all taught."
Maybe there's some linguistic problem (English being not my native), but I wrote about the power of making decisions, of telling you what to do and what not to. It really isn't applicable to junior positions, but if you're one of the most senior developers on a project, you might well doubt the competence of the project manager to make tech-related decisions. Micromanagement aside, you and PM may have serious disagreements on what technology stack to move to or buy-vs-build decisions.
I admire the courage and stance of Sean Haufler on this.

But out of curiosity, looking at his profile, why would someone who had an internship at Google and worked at FourSquare would need a CS(!!) and Economics(???) degree from Yale?

I might understand the Economics part, what about the CS part???
How to Foster a Company Culture Without Really Trying
How to Insult an Entrepreneur
I agree with and can vouch for every one of these points - particularly when working is isolation.

Thing is, every death march I've been on has been a group effort where appearing to suffer for whichever executive dropped the ball at the onset is at least as important as actually producing. In these situations, appearing healthy much less taking breaks will be taken as a lack of effort.

The guide I could really use is one on how to manage "up" and limit the effects of or outright avoid working for the panderers and incompetents who create death marches in the first place.
Rule 0: don't participate in death marches. Seriously. Death marches mean that management has no idea what it's doing and you would be better off quitting and getting another job. Then again, I am an old and bitter programmer. :/
I'm not sure about "most inspiring", but this was the first time something on the internet blew my mind: http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/symbols.html
Here's a big list of readers to try out:

https://github.com/smithbr/rss-readers-list
Bitcoin was a wonderful way to do that for awhile, still happening as well, just less so.
Sir, if I preoperly recall, that's exactly how you discard premises. Taking a premise and applying it to a more extreme situation just battletests it. It's done in justice and law courses, etc.

"If the common good justifies killing X agent, then it must be ok for a doctor to kill a patient in their sleep, take his organs and save three people with his two kidneys and heart."

Also, what Yale did wasn't right, and the students just defend themselves... If, for example, you were robbed wouldn't you care? "Oh but there are thousands more people poorer than me, I shouldn't bother".
The author is perceptive in identifying the large swaths of unrecognized labor that are necessary to make creative work possible. And she makes an interesting point about how the mantra of "do what you love" can lead to career moves that have unintended consequences for the people making them, including those in academia and those pursuing internships in fields that are saturated with talent, in which they're bound to be paid very little for a long time. But she goes too far in attributing responsibility to the idea that we should be doing what we love.

She shows her sympathy for this idea at the very end:

If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time. ... And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we really love.

If her main point is that people should demand fair compensation, I agree. Her angle seems to be that people should not naively be led into submitting to unpromising, low-wage employment because of romantic notions such as "do what you love." They should not unwittingly allow themselves to become tools for other people's financial betterment. But I think she misidentifies what has led to problems she describes and in doing so has underestimated the challenge. The main culprits for all of the very-low-end jobs are as likely to be automation, globalization, and a lack of regulation of large corporations and the financial services industry. Pushing back on low wages by being conscious of how "do what you love" can be used as a tool underpay people is sound personal advice, but I do not think it will go very far to fix things at a societal level.
>text in general look much nicer

Does this mean it'll have the same terrible antialiased text rendering IE has? That only looks good on high DPI? That's one of the main reasons I've been on Chrome: no blurry text.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Symbol_th...
I still don't understand the benefit of JSON Web Tokens over cookies after reading this and the associated blog post by Alberto Pose

http://blog.auth0.com/2014/01/07/angularjs-authentication-wi...

They seem like they are recreating the cookie mechanism using browser local storage and HTTP Authenticate headers, but without any of the associated browser security. I guess the use case would be when you want use a cookie across domains...?

Aren't cookies restricted for a reason? Can't anyone who can execute JS on that domain can swipe the JWT token out of storage and then impersonate the user?

One reasonable use case for JWT is to replace SAML assertions for single-sign on (SSO) from one web application to another, like Zendesk is doing:

https://support.zendesk.com/entries/23675367-Setting-up-sing...

Here, the JWT is stored not in the browser but on the server in the app trying to SSO with the identity provider (in this case Zendesk).
Since we're playing that game, it's "Internetwork" OS, not "Internetnetwork".
POST, PUT, DELETE are just as much part of HTTP as GET...
Nothing odd about it, save that encountering such a pure strain of Marxism as late as 2014 is a bit of a surprise. I suppose every generation has at least a few True Believers, in every ideology that admits True Belief -- and Marxism is most certainly one of those.
Thank you. Please substitute in your head the argument reasonable people can infer I intended to make for the argument my words accidentally included. :)
> Remember that Sal Khan's comparison is of an interest-only mortgage versus renting. If you also want to build equity, well then, that's additional money out of your pocket (non-tax-deductible).

That will save you tens of thousands of dollars/euros in avoided interests over the years.
This seems to really depend on where you live and what the house/rental prices are.

Where I live, you can get a variable rate mortgage that's advertised at 3%. More than likely, the bank will look at your credit rating and offer something lower. Even if they don't, that's half of what the video is showing.

Likewise, a 4% return on investments seems unreasonable. The same bank with the 3% mortgage is offering a non-cashable GIC (which seems to be the Canadian version of a CD) which pays 2.3%. That's only a little better than half of what's shown in the video.

As for housing prices, it's very hard to find identical houses available for rent and for buying, but here's what I found:

For rent, a 3 bedroom, 1.5 bathroom, 1100 sq ft townhouse for $1500/mo. For buying, a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 926 sq ft townhouse in the same area of the city for $225K. It's not apples to apples by any means. The one for purchase is smaller, plus it's a condo so there will be additional fees on top of the regular things you'd pay for in an owned house. In spite of the differences, $3K of rent does not equal a $1M house in my part of the world.

I plugged the numbers into the New York Times rent vs buy calculator that was mentioned elsewhere (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...). With these two properties, with these interest rates on the mortgage and investment, with local taxes and utility costs applied, buying is better after three years.

That said, it might not be all about cost. If you like to move around a lot, maybe renting is better because not renewing your lease is easier than selling a house. Maybe renting is better because you don't have the savings for a downpayment or don't qualify for a mortgage. Maybe buying is better because you like to do the handyman type of stuff and rarely move.

There's all kinds of reasons that renting or buying can be better, which is why I don't buy blanket statements that say "renting is always better" or "buying is always better".
One Direction--Little Things [pop]lee jean cover
14 yr old singer
> Scraping involves storing somethjng on a server.

Duh, of course it doesn't. Scraping is taking data in one format from there and presenting it in a different format here.
Compared to the other issues we face? We live in an age where teams of soldiers are sent in to execute routine search-and-arrest warrants. Most prisoners were never convicted by a jury, and we are now at a point where if every accused criminal were to exercise their right to a trial the court system would be unable to handle the case load -- we literally cannot afford to have people exercise one of their most fundamental rights. We have a military intelligence agency giving information to local law enforcement agencies, and then demanding that those agencies lie to judges and even to prosecutors about where their evidence originated.

We can talk about reproductive rights once we have restored basic civil rights and reined in the executive branch of government.
If you are buying house because it is great investment then DO NOT BUY HOUSE. You should buy house because you need to place to live and you want to settle down in certain area (grow roots...).

The first thing that people like me need to understand is that we are not professional investors.

Normal people need to buy house on the following factors: is it affordable? what is chance of you or your significant other moving to different area? do you like location? do you expect to live there for next 30 years? are schools good? etc.
The excel spreadsheet comparing costs of owning vs. renting should be also there as one of factors, but spreadsheet showing how you are going to be rich by "owning" the house should be ignored.
What about Nagios itself? Maybe it needs a fork.
Except that it doesn't work. Think about what a Democrat has to do to win if a Green candidate is taking 5% of the vote. The Democrat now has 45% of the vote against a Republican with 50%. If they move to the left to take the Green candidate's voters, the Democrat will stay at 45% and leave 55% to the Republican because moving to the left costs the Democrat votes from the middle. What the Democrats would have to do is move to the right, so that they take 10% from the Republican by losing 10% to the Green and end up winning with 40% Republican, 45% Democrat and 15% Green.
Of course, you can also simply click a button without even saying why, like a responsible adult with a spine would do.
Intelligence chair: NSA leaker Edward Snowden may have had Russian help
I just went from owning a house for 15 years (bought at 23) to renting, and I love it. Maintenance was a huge burden and having a lot of capitol tied into the housing market was an anchor for several reasons. I also have the freedom to just get up and go at any time.

I am fortunate to live in a renters market, you can get some really great deals for long-terms rentals if you put in the work.

A house is not an investment for the average buyer, it's an emotional purchase.
Hunter Hayes--Wanted[country] lee jean cover
14 yr old singer
Yes, the Rolling Stone journalist whose car was taken over by NSA satellites and crashed because he was sticking up for the heroin addicted blogger-cum-journalist whose most important scoop publishing the credit card numbers of everyone who ever signed up for STRATFOR. Seriously, where's Hagbard Celine? Hail Eris!
Well, having worked with many Indian firms, I can say, India too needs this Movement
Reddit Co-Founder on Privacy in America [video]
It doesn't make sense to ignore the fact that you ending with owning the house. Maybe the numbers still works but if he ignores that fact his entire presentation is useless.
Google Research: Music Timeline
One thing I don't see in the article or discussed here is that (at least I believe) a sign of reaching maturity is that you don't need to define yourself by where you live. While these places can be helpful in achieving your goals, ultimately wherever you go, there you are.
Also, django and Flask are extremely powerful. Django gives you an automatic admin interface and ORM, and Flask makes it easy to create a simple API to your data.

from django.conf import settings as django_settings
from myapp import settings
myapp_settings = return dict([(s, getattr(settings, s)) for s in dir(settings) if s==s.upper()])
django_settings.configure(**myapp_settings)
from myapp.models import User

app = Flask(__name__)
api = restful.Api(app)

class UserResource(restful.Resource):
def get(self):
return {"result": User.objects.all()}, 200
api.add_resource(UserResource, '/')

if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=myapp_settings['DEBUG'])

There's just a little trick to get your API to convert django models to Json:

from flask.json import JSONEncoder as FlaskJSONEncoder
from django.db.models import Model
from django.db.models.base import ModelBase
from django.db.models.query import QuerySet, ValuesQuerySet
from django.db.models.fields.related import ManyToManyField
from datetime import datetime

def model_to_dict(instance):
"""Same as django.forms.models.model_to_dict, but returns
everything, including non-editable fields"""
opts, data = instance._meta, {}
for f in opts.concrete_fields + opts.many_to_many:
if isinstance(f, ManyToManyField):
data[f.name] = []
if instance.pk is not None:
data[f.name] = list(f.value_from_object(instance).values_list('pk', flat=True))
else: data[f.name] = f.value_from_object(instance)
return data

class ApiJSONEncoder(FlaskJSONEncoder):
def default(self, obj):
if isinstance(obj, (Model, ModelBase)):
return model_to_dict(obj)
if isinstance(obj, (QuerySet, ValuesQuerySet)):
return [model_to_dict(m) for m in obj]
elif isinstance(obj, datetime):
return obj.isoformat("T")
return FlaskJSONEncoder.default(self, obj)
There are some projects worth keeping an eye on --

ibex VR desktop - https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=4...

VR Launchpad - https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=4...

The thing to consider is the field of view and just how huge what you are looking at is while wearing the Oculus. The best example is the Minecraft block. Imagine each one as a giant box which you would lift up using both arms.

The second thing we miss everywhere else is depth perception. Certain tasks, like building objects is greatly helped by having depth perception.

In those terms, your perception in the Oculus mirrors the real world more so than a flat, 2D screen or book.

I think we will see people who put this thing on when they wake up, and take it off when they go to sleep. At some point perhaps not even then.