skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am talking primarily about property tax rates, though as siblings have said, there are other effects, like worse health and lifestyle outcomes which are a bit harder to quantify.

As the article mentions, suburban municipalities made money primarily by selling land, however the price almost never accounted for the true, high cost of servicing low-density communities. This is usually made much worse by developer lobbying. Eventually the land runs out and the municipality has to either stop growing and start raising property taxes to make up for lost sales, or start densifying to keep growth going, neither of which are popular with people who though were getting a certain deal. For a lot of suburbs densifying is not even an option (no one wants to go there), so sometimes they spiral downwards.

Calgary makes a good example. Prior to 2010 it had the image of "redneck sprawlville", but it elected an urbane, muslim, gay-welcoming mayor. One of his major issues was tax savings via ending public subsidies for suburbs. Turns out when you did the math, each mcmansion received a hefty public subsidy because the cost of servicing that house exceeded what developers paid the city. Similar patters can be seen throughout North America.
Well, of course not. I mean public transportation couldn't cover every section of a region, but it could serve major hubs well enough to reduce automotive use and reduce its downsides.

For almost 40 years Portland Oregon has been developing light rail all over the metro region. Rail has been extended to the major districts within a 10 to 15 mile radius of downtown. (Which is a good share of the "spread" that the regional urban growth boundary allows.)

MAX and street-car lines are heavily used but there are still many cars and traffic can be terrible. So I guess light rail/public transit are never the whole solution by themselves. Then again, what single modality is ever the "magic bullet" answer to enormously complex problems?
Gravit Design Tool Source Code Now Available
Hello Folks,

As promised here (https://medium.com/design-with-gravit/gravit-will-become-open-source-4608f37aef2d), we've open-sourced Gravit because we believe so much in it we'd like everyone to participate in evolving this beast into something great, something every designer would use world-wide.

The Gravit Repository can be found at GitHub: https://github.com/quasado/gravit

Gravit is available on Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS and the Browser. It is completely written in HTML5, JS and CSS3 nothing else and currently consists of roughly about 115.000 lines of code.

We're inviting everyone be it developers or designers or UX experts in contributing to the project. Now is the time you can shape your own tool for your daily usage.

We're actively developing on Gravit and are planning on a stable, first release by end of September.

Thanks and looking forward to hear from you guys.
Alex
I was amused to see that on neither of the links in the post does SSL work correctly. convergence.io identifies as whispersystems and www.certificate-transparency.org produces an ssl error on every version of openssl and browser I have to hand (I didn't try anything with non-standard ECC curves).

That said, however, the entire end-to-end project is for me one of the most interesting and exciting practical innovations in security in years.
MPLS from a big ISP....
> Would you mind elaborating more on this? More specifically about the cost the North American suburbs are starting to experience.

Infrastructure to serve the new developments is paid for by the developer, more or less directly ("development charges", etc). That keeps local taxes nice and low for existing residents, until 50 years down the road the watermain needs replacing, there's lots of it because of low density sprawl, it's more complex now that construction will disturb existing traffic and business, and no one wants to pay more.

As an example, here's a story about Mississauga, a green-field suburb that proudly ran a balanced budget for decades... until they ran out of empty land to build on recently. Now they're joining denser cities in asking for more money from senior governments: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/the-maturation-o...
The Secure Website Checklist
It took about 3-4 iPhone generations before Apple finally caught up to the immense feature set of the N95 (which was released a year before iPhone 1). I remember I was live video streaming on N95 (Qik) before video recording was even possible on iPhone!
I live in Hangzhou and they are already addressing these problems. For example, there is a network of public bike stations. To use a bike, you make a 200 yuan deposit on a public transportation card. The first hour bike rental is free. After that it starts at 1 yuan for the second hour and goes up from there. The card also works for buses (a ride costs 2-4 yuan) using your available balance. After riding a bus, the free bike period is increased to 90 minutes. It's usually easy to find a bike and they are continuing to build new stations making it even more convenient.

Cars are a problem because of the amount of traffic around the city center. To address that, the goverment mandated that private cars could only drive in the city once a week during weekday rush hour. New drivers can only get a license if they pay a hefty tax or win a lottery (only about 2% who enter win). These restrictions don't apply to electric vehicles. There is also a network of public electric cars that can be rented for personal use. They are about the size of Smart cars.

The article points at the suburban sprawl starting to spread around cities like Shanghai. But what it doesn't mention is that most of these homes are super expensive or so far away as to require a lifestyle which most Chinese couldn't afford. Those who could afford these houses are likely to also be able to afford an even better lifestyle overseas. The middle-class can scarcely afford to buy a small apartment in China's top-tier cities. So I'm not too worried about Western-style sprawl taking over all of China.
I wasn't implying any trust in google on my part (I didn't trust them even before PRISM, but that shut the door on the chance of my ever trusting them again), and chances are this will never progress beyond a draft spec, but there isn't any real way to implement something like this without doing so. the NSA would find the block chain of this helpful, yes, but it isn't data they don't already have unless it is somehow extended to non-email messaging as well.
They'd just keep creating new keys, and use a botnet to exchange seemingly valid e-mails with itself and a trickle of seemingly legit e-mails (buy access to a few small legit mailing lists to make sure their botnet isn't a total island). It's not clear to me that this won't make it possible for spammers to manufacture/buy sufficient "trust" to put themselves in a better situation than they're in today.
If Chinese was written like English, the characters you wrote in your comment "那个不好意思,谢谢" would be written "用阝人丨 丆卜 女子 立日心 田心, 讠身寸 讠身寸".

Not many Westerner seems to appreciate that Chinese Hanzi (and Japanese Kanji) are really words made up of simpler components arranged into squares, instead of written sequentially and separated by spaces. And the shape of the components in the square provides additional encoding information not available in sequentially written languages.
Designing Front End Applications with Core.async
Actually, Mandarin is the only one with a standardized written form. Hong Kong people (Cantonese speakers) write formally in Mandarin and pronounce the characters with Cantonese, but they way Cantonese is spoken has different grammar and lexicon. Written Cantonese is non-standardized and often requires new characters that are not found in Mandarin. I don't think there are many people writing Shanghainese because the language is actively discouraged by the government.
cannot? they must lose money so that you can experiment with their stock for free? entitlement much?
Conceptually, the working age population is divided into participating and non-participating. The participatings are further divided into working and unemployed (and working-but-looking-for-more-work is a useful category as well).

It is indeed unsurprising that participation drops in a period of high unemployment, but it's not just a matter of mathematics. Instead, it's the effect of people simply giving up looking for work.

That said, it's important to watch out for what the participation rate is measured against. Obviously, the participation rate of the population as a whole can drop for entirely benign reasons (higher percentage of retirees).
Love this! As someone working in Risk Management, it's a must have!
How Localization Gets Edmodo Increased Reach by 4x in Weeks
> I don't have a driver license so for me that would be perfect.

No, it WOULDN'T be perfect!
What if it's starting to rain/snow while you already being in the car?
And you still need to drive the car for parking..
Japan may have handled the tactics well, but their strategy sucks. Namely the "centralize ALL the things to Tokyo" idea. Like such a metropolis actually needs policy help to keep ahead of Kansai.
Another top-voted article about the NSA on Hacker News that is thin on evidence to say the least. It appears to be hearsay from a disgruntled ex-employee.

However I understand that the story fits the political narrative of the forums here, and will therefore be upvoted despite any lack of sense or evidence.
So the good news is that Medicare is no longer blowing up in cost, and we now project being reasonably able to pay for it.

The bad news is, this reduction in cost seems to be happening at least partially because people are just getting less actual care.

The unremarked but persistent fact is that if we poured the savings from Medicare into preventative medicine - particularly into fixing problems of diet, exercise, and aging - we would not need anywhere near the same amount of health-care spending on the elderly.
If you're wondering why you are being downvoted...

The readership at Hacker News firmly believes that the US is a surveillance state. Stories are chosen and upvoted which confirm this worldview. Dissenting opinions are downvoted. If you're looking for a reasoned evidence-based discussion of the NSA, then choose a different website.
> What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

You're thinking in too broad of terms. A system representing syllables as units would be a bad choice for english, which has extremely intricate syllabic structure (consider "strengths", which is CCCVCCC). This makes a Hangul-like system a stretch, though possible, and a Kana-like system, wherein every possible syllable has its own character, completely impossible. Most[1] potential english syllables are unused or used so rarely that no one could ever be expected to know their character. Douglas Adams named a fictional person "Slartibartfast" -- as far as I know, the syllable "slar" (rhymes with far) has no other existence in English. How would he have written it in an English syllabary?

Chinese has so few possible syllables that enumerating them is quite easy, but it doesn't use them all either. Kana work in Japanese because the only legal syllable structures are CV, V, and N.

> What would a designed writing system look like?

Well, all writing systems are designed; none are naturally occuring. It's hard to know what you mean by this, but:

- A syllabary works fine when the phonology of the language allows for it

- Spanish is a good, though not perfect, example of an alphabetic writing system that corresponds closely to pronunciation (a minor wart would be that I believe 'b' and 'v' are the same sound; c/z in Spanish Spanish and c/s in latin american Spanish have a similar problem)

- The Cherokee syllabary was created from nothingness within living memory

- The design goal of Esperanto was probably similar to what you're thinking of

Anyway, big picture, a given writing system is not equally suitable for all languages, so it doesn't make sense to ask which approach is "correct". They're more and less workable. Alphabets (in which the basic idea is one character per phoneme in the language) are about as simple as it gets, since the number of characters necessary is V + C rather than the O(V * C) needed for a syllabary in the languages with the simplest phonological structure.

[1] I have no numbers for this; it's a guess.
Frequently anonymity can be easily broken when discussing the sorts of things that probably warrant speaking up.

I've definitely felt the "systemic pressure to stay quiet" as mentioned in the article, in situations where speaking up anonymously would've been impossible, dealing with dishonest people who have taken advantage. From that position I'd say this shows more the importance of picking your battles. Sometimes all you can do is learn some people or organisations aren't worth your time.
Open hardware free space optic project KORUZA world wide experiment
Slightly worrying to see the word "checksum" used to refer to a one-way cryptographic hash function...
I highly doubt he had eyes on you :-)

The fact that he goes out of his way to talk about a very special iPad leads me down the path that maybe he's signed in to your iCloud account? If so, he's watching iMessages and any activity to contacts/calendars/reminders/etc...

A few clarifications that might better help us:

1. Is there some sort of bet or challenge?

2. Were you intentionally hiding?

3. Has your friend had recent physical access to any of your devices?

Boy have I hit rock bottom responding to this...fucking insomnia :(
As someone who inherited a similar system, its a massive pain. Have world routable internal IP addresses is utterly utterly dull.
Best of hyperlapse videos
> and the consensus around that is that it's a lie.

Is it?
Yeah, the guy who founded them and wrote that blogpost, Bre Pettis, had previously publicly humiliated newbies to the community for not correctly releasing their hardware designs (because they didn't understand how), calling it "a dead end for the innovation and development which is the heart of the open source hardware community".

Basically, they're very keen on other people releasing their stuff as open source hardware so they can use it, but refuse to release their own stuff. It also doesn't help that certain prominent, business-owning members of the community called anyone holding Bre Pettis to the standards he expected of others terrorists and claimed to be standing up for "polite discourse" by doing so.
It may also be because in Japan space is very constrained, while China is a huge country with a lot available space - just like US.
Actually, looking at the list of metropolitan areas with over 5 million population, I think if we look at the first world cities, but exclude North America, but include New York City and maybe Toronto, all of them have very usable public transport systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_p...
Inside the mind of Derp, a hacking group with a taste for cyber chaos
Think about it. You're saying that the USA spies on all non-US internet traffic. Does that make any sense? Is there any evidence? No and no.
My suggestion is for them to work at least another 12 months on this, before they even begin to publicly test it on Gmail accounts. We need more privacy quickly, but let's not rush into a protocol that could last for another 20 years, if all the major e-mail providers adopt it. We need to get this right.

I wish the DIME (former Dark Mail) protocol was out already, too, so we can compare. There's also Adam Langley's Pond [1], but sounds like it's too complex, and it only works over Tor. And TextSecure/Axolotl could probably be used as a secure e-mail protocol, too, if you add a proper e-mail like interface. I hope the team behind End-to-End is looking at all of them.

[1] - https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
shiiieeeettt... let's see how many downvotes I get for this comment.
I don't remember the exact phrase off the top of my head but it's basically a generic description to describe someone exerting energy to do something - e.g. even foreigners who want to volunteer in Thailand need a work permit to do so.

Not according to me. The law says what it says. The chances of being arrested for working one day while on holiday are pretty much zero, but technically it's still a breach of the law.

Even someone who comes for a month and works every day has very little chance of being caught or even being an issue the police would be concerned about/investigating, but that doesn't mean what they're doing is legal.

You seem to somehow think that because this law is in place in Thailand, I'm suggesting it is in place elsewhere? Why? I never mentioned any country but Thailand.
I think the key here would be to limit both – no buildings higher than ~6 stories (~30m) and a limit on urban boundaries, either enforced by land planning or economics.

Standard mansion blocks of six stories still have a much higher population density than suburban sprawling single-family homes while avoiding some/all of the issues with too high a population density – two-lane roads are usually quite sufficient and the sun does reach the ground from time to time.

See e.g. Berlin and Munich for (IMHO) decent examples of this.
I agree, I find it way more shocking that my government (the Netherlands) is so laid back about all this than the "revelation" that Americans care about America spying on Americans. Yes, the dutch government announced a Dropbox alternative that is open source (http://tweakers.net/nieuws/97793/overheid-werkt-aan-opensour...) but I believe it is the wrong approach. They should publicly denounce NSA spying and swear to not cooperate with them (!when it comes to Dutch civilians at least!). All they do is empty gesturing. It annoys me to no end that my government is so afraid. It also annoys me that they are so adamant in pleasing the US in the sanctions against Russia, they only damage our economy, not to mention Russia's (hey, the Russians love their children too!)
We are so the US' lap dog.
I am amazed on how this could be cheaper and faster than actually doing real life photos. The scenery and lighting quality is amazing though. Can't do that in a warehouse full of ikea products and fake housings either.
Speakers of JSConf EU 2014
Don't students have to know how to write anyway when they need to take notes in class?

I get the complexity is quite high since every symbol will look different depending on what's after and before it however you would think you get enough practice taking note or is this a formal language used only in certain contexts?
> open('tmp.rb').each_line.lazy
NoMethodError: undefined method `lazy' for #<Enumerator: #<File:Procfile>:each_line>

Not everybody is using Ruby 2.0.
Chinese script is arguably superior in many respects, and it provides a whole platform for "creating language" rather than just script.

Forgetting how to properly write by hand is not just a problem for those writing in complex script, although it's exacerbated by complexity. People relying too much on spelling correctors feel lost without them and make mistakes, people also go months or years without writing by hand and struggle when they have to.

There's a natural process of writing more with technological aids, which by the way favours Chinese script as it retains its strengths and loses its drawbacks (there are extremely fast Chinese input systems). It may well happen - seems to be happening - that moderately skilled handwriting becomes as rare as professional calligraphy is now.
I'm from Belgium and he is right - i do think that USA spies on everyone, it makes sense and USA had admitted it multiple times.

They are just worried that US citizens think the USA spies on them.

PS. The USA doesn't only spy on non-US traffic, they just hide the spying inside the US more secretive :)

PS2. Every country tries to spy though, not only the US :)
Great product. Gives you real piece of mind.
Yes[1,3] and yes[2]. Have you been in a cave for the past two years?

1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#European_Parliament_inv...

2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Single data points never tell you a tremendous amount. People can and do write good software in languages that are poorly suited to the task all the time. No one is saying you can't do it; just that it makes your life significantly harder than it otherwise needs to be.

The success of C++ provides a wealth of evidence that C isn't really up to the task -- everyone seems to hate it for its complexity, but very few people are writing web browsers in C89 these days.
Founder Stories: Nat Du Preez, Co-Founder and CEO of New Startup Bunchcut
> HN […] implements more and more mechanisms to ensure consent.

My impression is, the focus is not on consent, but on civilized looking comment threads. More specifically, back and forth discussion is not encouraged. Consent is just a way to get quiet.

On Reddit, when someone replies to a message of mine, a little icon turns red, and I can click it to review new replies. So, I can reply to a relatively old comment, and be reasonably sure its author will see it. I don't really care there's no audience any more, sometimes a private message is worth it.

HN doesn't permit that. If I reply to an old comment, or in a lively thread, it will be buried under tons of comments, even on the author's threads page. Sub-discussion are not possible, unless you have perfect timing.

Another thing that discourage too much comments is the "average" feature: the more upvotes you get on recent comments of yours, the more visible your comments are, so you are encouraged to make comments that get upvoted. This means stating a popular opinion on a popular thread in a not too aggressive way, before the swarm gets in and drowns it. The system value those comments much, much more than, say, factual correction of a comment in an already developed discussion.
Ask HN: Are tech job specifications detailed enough?
We’re a team of two well established software engineers looking at how we can improve the job hunting process for everyone.

Currently we're building an MVP, but we’d like to further validate the problem space by asking a couple of questions:

1) In general, do you find job specifications give enough detail about what the job actually involves and the skills required in order to do it?
2) Do you use recruiters? Do they do a good job or do you feel they are a necessary evil?

If you're interested in what we're doing you can find out more at http://distl.io

Thanks!
>Another thing that could happen if you speak up is that you get hellbanned on HN.

Is that actually possible ?
That's disgusting, this makes the admin look like a piece of shit in my opinion.

I'm not sure what kind of problem this is trying to solve, but I'd rather see the hellbanned posts and the occasional person with an unpopular opinion that stay locked in an echo chamber.

I'm not trying to tell HN how to run it's tomato garden, but please, is there a rationale for hellbanning ?
9 Tips for Mobile E-mail Marketing with Examples
Thats how google works. Piecemeal. You think loon was about internet for the poor and oppressed ? Thats just how they get their foot in the door. Im sure google just wanted to write a draft spec for the fun of it.

Google is a front for US intelligence. We should give no quarter. Shun them.
The next IT revolution: micro-servers and local cloud
Robots will augment jobs, not take them
This is very enlightening indeed. Do you have sources to back them up?
XiOne – Software Defined Radio – Indiegogo Crowd Funding Campaign