skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why blanket punish and make every single development on the waterfront more expensive because of a single Warriors arena project that was eventually moved to Mission Bay?

All of these little costs, process hurdles add up and make housing more expensive. The broad point is that these citizen anti-growth initiatives, which might have a single poorly-designed and consulted project in mind, end up having very long-term and consequential impacts on housing prices across the board.

This 2014 study examined 7,300 land parcels in the Bay Area and found that if you increase the number of independent reviews for a construction project by one standard deviation, average land prices increase by about eight percent.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/07/01/regulatory-const...

I agree and am concerned about how the point of the economic cycle we're in affects the profile, goals and objectives of people we attract to Silicon Valley. You tend to get more true believers at the low points in the cycle versus the gold-rush folk we're seeing now.

What do you think is the best way of dealing with this? We can either build a lot more housing or drive away jobs and companies if we think they're too greed or speculation-driven.
Best of luck to Rothberg! Amazing!
Blogging is not for everyone, and certainly not a requirement. On the other hand, writing is a good medium to share knowledge, to get your name out there, to have a connection with other people.

You don't have to share your feelings either. Just open a Medium account, or self-host Ghost/Wordpress etc., and document things you've learned, problems you've encountered, interesting discoveries you made etc. In my experience, this contributes to the learning experience.

Good luck in your journey!
Thanks, but it's an athn: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man4/...

I've seen others get the same error, funny enough the man page says:
athn0: device timeout
A frame dispatched to the hardware for transmission did not complete in time. The driver will reset the hardware. This should not happen.
I can't find any reason to be optimistic after reading this article.

Is there any reason to even consider moving to the Bay Area after graduating? It seems like any other city would be more manageable.
Yes, I'm familiar with the incident. I was reading LKML when it happened. It's a counterpoint to the usual "Linus's style doesn't cause any problems."
> HDMI 2 is OK, but there are no video cards that do HDMI 2.

There are:

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-980...

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-970...
Hope they destroy the industry.

10 minutes of ultrasound to diagnose a serious illness can cost several hundred dollars in the USA

Maybe in a decade it can even be built into smartphones like a tricorder.

This device already looks like it can plug into a smartphone http://www.mobisante.com/products/product-overview/
Show HN: Tinder for Hacker News (iOS app)
[...] the number of rich people in the world is growing.

Thats because many more people become poor. I'm not saying they are directly exploited but indirectly they are, because it is a zero-sum game.
I'm from Germany (born shortly before the fall) , and I always found it super weird that this "us vs. them" mentality existed. Compared to the enormous timespan east and west Germany was considered the same nation, those 40 years seem to pale in comparison. Besides that, there wasn't a civil war or anything that divided the population intrinsically, but it was forced upon us. On the other hand, Germans are known for doing or thinking what they're told and in German media and the German mindset, the wall still exists.
> "Nothing is recorded or sent across the network. Peace of mind, without giving up on privacy."

Devices like this still make me uncomfortable, given the track record of even large companies making extremely insecure devices[1].

[1]: http://www.ioactive.com/news-events/IOActive_advisory_belkin...
These articles also left the impression that the journalists were hired believing that Omidyar was funding this org with $250m and partway through he switched to wanting them to make money / be self sustainable. We still essentially have no method after craigslist destroyed the newspapers to support long form investigative journalism. The huffpo is what you get when you try to make journalism pay its own way; there are only a tiny handful of exceptions (nyt, ft, the la times has repeated layoffs, perhaps the wsj though that's really murdoch's right wing hobbyhorse).
It's bad for bootstrapped startup, but startups who decide to raise funds can still do fine.

Anyway that's always been Silicon Valley's strength: VC money. If you want to start a bootstrapped startup, Silicon Valley is a bad place to start with. You're in competition with so many cool companies for recruiting, while in a big enough city with a university you can easily be one of the sexiest company to work for and attract the talented workers who don't want to move to California.
"Why blanket punish and make every single development on the waterfront more expensive because of a single Warriors arena project that was eventually moved to Mission Bay?"

It's a long and detailed backstory, but the executive summary is that you've got a group of lawmakers who were inclined to rubber-stamp the sweetheart deal, so you can't just write a law that allows them discretion on the outcome. The arena plan required a zoning variance that was being granted for this particular project, and so the initiative targeted the exception-granting process for zoning. It was as specific as possible to the arena project, while still being effective and legal.

In any case, it's still possible to build housing on the waterfront -- it's just not possible to get zoning exceptions without public review. I think that's probably a good thing.
It's open source and modular, add it yourself?
It is _the_ book on knots, although it does miss knots invented later in the 20th century, like the Zeppelin bend. I was amazed to learn that it was used as a reference book by mathematical topologists. They will refer to a bend in space as Ashley#1024 for example, since all the knots in the book are numbered in a referential fashion.
Your second link doesn't work, just syas connecting to server and never returns, so you lost me there.
Can someone explain how can this - you must build surveillance in should be supposed to work? It is trivial to build encrypted message platform on top of current FB chat.

To me it seems that this kind of bills are pointed towards not the tech savy people that intend to break the law but everyone else.
Need your feedback on hypothesis
It makes me sad to see the direction reddit's community is going in. The mob mentality drives too many interesting people away :(
I read the first line and I thought it was going to be a proper linux distro without all that new systemd junk. But then I saw it was for z80. Very disapointed :(
"whargaaarbl startups whargaaarblr"

No, there's no reason. You can find a good paying, interesting job elsewhere. Life is not all about the newest Instagram for Pets (iPhone 6 only)
Worse than something that was, but only in a technological sense.

Surveillance today is more invasive, and pervasive. This is a direct result of technological advancement. So, unless you're talking strictly in those terms, then how the underlying surveillance capability is used must be taken into account.

For example, the United States probably has the most advanced surveillance capability of any nation on Earth. Certainly, this capability has the potential for abuse. In fact, I'm sure it is abused, and that's bad. However, the underlying use is more or less in line with other Western governments.

Contrast this with say, any hardcore authoritarian regime today using comparable technology, and it's a completely different magnitude of bad.

So, I wouldn't say the U.S. is worse than the former Soviet Union in terms of surveillance, at least not in any moral sense.
What an inspirational story! Thanks for sharing.
Right now, the way that tech companies get around this is by paying their employees progressively more and not really engaging with the political system.

But this particular strategy also has its downsides from a community perspective, because it starves out other uses of our city for public service workers, teachers, artists, etc.

Perhaps there is another way where we are politically engaged, where we can generate broad political will for more housing given that the largest and most successful companies have a hand in funding or supporting diverse growth (in the way that New York's biggest corporate institutions are also great patrons of the city's arts).
Many of the foreign-owned houses are actually bought by corrupt Chinese officials and business men planning their exit from a country that will probably eventually execute them if they stay.

The corruption crackdown forces the money out precisely because the time of reckoning draws nearer, while many more honest Chinese also see overseas markets as a value compared to over inflated domestic markets. Actually, if housing gets cheaper here in China (which it should), you'll see more activity here and less activity abroad for the same reason.
Ask HN: More Minimalistic Text Based Games?
Hey HN, my friends and I have been enjoying games like:

A Dark Room - http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
Candies - http://candies.aniwey.net/
Kittens - http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/#

I was wondering if there are any more that I haven't stumbled upon yet.

Thanks!
And on the other side, the fake vaccine drive used to locate Osama bin Laden (or at least the leaking of it) might turn out to dwarf the September 11th attacks--it may keep polio from being eradicated. Hopefully it just delays the eradication.

Back on topic: how does Gates want to address animal vectors for malaria? Nothing in the blog post.
Major startups I know that are using Clojure are CircleCi and Prismatic.

I also know Walmart Labs has a team that does Clojure.
They couldn't lose their home to their HELOC (Home Equity Line Of Credit) because they could simply continue to pay the interest and do payments on the principal. They probably shouldn't have taken that loan to begin with but now that they have it they should simply be paying off on it.

The fact that bad debt was issued required two parties to be willing partners, one to issue the debt and another to take it on and that's something that didn't have to happen. Taking on debt without having the means to pay it back is supremely stupid.

As for the 401k, don't you get a say which funds that money gets invested in? Don't you get a say on whether or not you contribute to them anyway?

As far as I get it it is mostly a tax deferment scheme, pay out later (after (hopefully) compounding for a number of years) for when you're earning less than you do today.

A flat taxation regime would take care of that in a heartbeat (then deferment has no advantages).

Personally I wouldn't trust any institution with my pension, but that's me being paranoid. If you do choose to put your money in the hands of others for increased long term return you have to keep in mind that any kind of returns indicate an increase in risk and if you're unaware of where those risks stem from then you are probably assuming a good part of that risk yourself.
India to develop an API for entire government
Good to see another example of a site that didn't have to buy into one of the trendy SPA frameworks to build a nice UI.
This isn't public review, it's a public vote. A vote is a vastly different barrier to entry than review. One of the biggest complaints I have about the west coast--and, yes, I'm a transplant so I bring my own ideas to the party--is this obsession that everything should be put to a vote. The initiative process is broken in this regard because it increases that expectation.

Public officials, especially elected ones, are supposed to have discretion. That's why we elect them. If they screw up, we vote out the people responsible, not erect more set-in-amber barriers to doing things in the future.
Barcodes, bank cards and digital TV: the secret numbers that run our lives
There was a group of folks on Silk Road buying lsd from various vendors, running gas chromatography, and posting externally verified purities and reviews. I'm sure the silk road people will coalesce on some other site and someone else will do this.

Remember when you're buying anything but pot or shrooms through the friend network you don't know what you're getting or how stepped that coke is.

edit: Also, these sites directly observe transactions plus financial exchange. That gives them a lot more tools to detect straw vendors. What lengths are local cops willing to go to to catch people buying personal use amounts of drugs, particularly when anyone can claim their house was used as a drop address.

Virtually nobody has been prosecuted for purchasing drugs on silk road; the only limited attempts so far look to me to be attempts to build cases against the vendors [1]. The guy in that article has purchased narcotics from someone in Washington.

[1] http://heavy.com/news/2013/10/silk-road-drug-buyer-reddit-ar...
> The economic situation in Europe is truly awful, in contrast to the US and Japan where growth has been respectable.

That depends very much on where you're looking. Spain or Germany are worlds apart in this respect.
Stockton is bankrupt. Go build and live there for 20% of the price, you can still come to SF for meeting VCs. Or somewhere across the bay.

"Oh but they don't have my favourite vegan frozen yogurt there, and in Starbucks all I see is PCs" grow up.

They think of themselves as the most innovative people of this generation and use the internet yet they can't manage to have their team 10mi from where they think it should be. Pathetic.
Another interesting article from Kim-Mai Cutler on the absolutely fascinating Bay Area housing market. In case you missed her last one and the discussion in HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7590250

One correction is needed: tenancies in common (TICs) ARE NOT a method of avoiding SF rent control rules. It has absolutely no effect on whether or not a particular unit is subject to rent control. It is simply a way that people can share ownership of a multi-unit building - like a coop. On the other hand condo conversion does remove many of the burdens of the SF rent control. That in turn is why the SF government had to essentially outlaw condo conversions. The rules are very complex and constantly changing - educate yourself and then talk to a lawyer.
nemcv.com
In Germany, you get a unique PIN code via SMS to authorize every transaction.
Well, I'm glad that /someone/ has recognised and stated the correct word for what we have today.

Until I encountered your post, I was reading the comments here with dismay - "capitalism" this and "capitalism" that...

Folks, please, recognise what the system we have today is; It's Corporatism. I have yet to see in my 45 years on this planet anything resembling laissez faire capitalism.

The creature and symtpoms as described by that article, and what you're all discussing, is Corporatism and its inevitable outcomes. As a variation you could probably call it Crony Capitalism. Go look both terms up and see which seems the most fitting for what we have today, for it is most definitely /not/ laissez faire capitalism in any way.
It's one of the things that makes me wonder what useless worthless fuckwit thought that was possibly okay to do. We have enough -- and often for good reason! -- problems getting vaccines to certain countries; indisputable evidence the cia was testing identities subverts all the trust people have worked to build.
Hmmm, bet international postage would be a killer
The need to see an untermenschen to rail against always puzzles me; these tirades about "stealing from us" are just a good way to give one's eye-rolling some exercise. It's like you think, with your labor, you're not poor, too--while some folks (hi) recognize that a couple years of illness are enough to destroy a laborer's career. Even a tech worker.

If you don't own capital to sustain your lifestyle, you're almost certainly part of the poor you want to spit on. Nobody has serious designs on your slightly bigger slice of the scraps that the middle and lower classes have, and I have this sneaking feeling that you know that. But Steinbeck predicted you most of a hundred years ago.
I think we should distinguish between the individual and the group.

When dealing with a specific individual, it is important to avoid short-circuiting inferences based on some group membership. This does not require any suppression of the truth: it is a fact that intra-group variance is higher than inter-group variance, and a member of the group with the lower average may surpass a member of the group with the higher average.

For example, let's say you have two candidates for a tech job, one black and one Asian. If you were forced to pick one based on that fact alone, it may be true that picking the Asian would be the better strategy, but it is clear that choosing an employee based on race alone is completely asinine. Both fairness and good business practices require that you evaluate both candidates on their individual merits; at which point any prior probabilities based on race become moot, since you now have specific individual information to decide on. And it is entirely possible that the black candidate will turn out to be the better pick.

However, it is wrong to try and transfer this to the collective level and claim that the racial composition of your workforce should match that of the general population. That would be the expected outcome if and only if it were the case that aptitude for tech jobs is equally frequent amongst different races. However, scientific evidence does not seem to support that assumption; in fact, it seems to strongly support the opposite.

In that situation, it is not just that fairness at the individual level does not lead to "fairness" at the collective level: the two objectives are actually at odds. If aptitude is not equally distributed and you still want to force the racial composition of your employees to match that of the general population, the only way to do that is to pick some worse candidates over better ones just because of their race. In order to be "fair" to groups, you have to be unfair to actual people.

Which, by the way, is a very good reason why this research should not be suppressed. Making policy decisions based on falsehoods is bad enough, but treating people unfairly because of falsehoods is even worse.
Yeah, well...you're sort of grinding your axe on the wrong stone, here. This law wasn't passed because people believe "everything should be put to a vote" -- it was passed because a lot of people were (IMO rightfully) pissed that their elected representatives were essentially giving away public land to the wealthy. It's a story as old as politicians.

I wish there was another way to block that sort of thing that didn't require citizen initiative. But if it comes down to passing an initiative that requires populist approval to violate existing laws or shrugging and walking away because we can't vote the bastards out until after there's an arena on the waterfront...well, I'm glad we have initiatives for that. I don't generally like the outcome of direct democracy, but this is a case where the initiative process worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
Ask HN: Guidelines for building an “app builder”
Hi there HN,
I am a 4th year computer science student, working full time as an iOS developer currently. Off the job I want to make an "app builder". What this means is I want a WISWYG app builder for non-programmers to be able to build somewhat complex apps for iOS and Android without any prior knowledge.
This will all be done as a web app in browser.

There currently are some app builders out there but most of them I feel are really hard to use, or provide with very little functionality.

What I aim is to have as many templates as possible. By templates I mean things such as Login/Register forms which users can just drag&drop into their app and customize afterwards, with the DB and functionality being already made for them in the background.
Another really good feature would be a user being able to upload the source code to their website and the appbuilder would then be able to convert that website into a fully functional app, which they can then modify to their needs.

My experience so far is based on some web apps, Android and iOS programming. For this reason I ask you the following questions:

1. What programming language should I go about using to make the task in hand easier to handle? I do ask this because I don't really have alot of experience in any of them, but I am a very skilled googler so I don't imagine having a hard time learning whatever you suggest.

2. How should I go about designing this?

3. Any tips you might give me to start this up

4. Any example "app builders" you can provide which you find have something awesome in them, and what exactly is that something awesome.

This is the first HN post, but I aim on making some sort of written progress on my programming maybe in the form of a blog. This is considering I am aiming for an open-source app at the end.
Thank you for your patience
I am sure that whether he was malicious or mistaken will be interesting for historians while studying "The slide of the US into police state in the late 2020s", but not for the rest.

The US currently supports intelligence, domestic and external security forces that are totally out of line with any credible treat. With too broad power. A lot of it in the dark or shade. That concentration of power and force makes me feel uncomfortable.
Prediksi Basel vs Ludogorets Razgrad 5 November 2014
> What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from?

Well, just for starters, they're suffering from entirely treatable diseases and injuries because they don't have health insurance, or don't have non-shitty health insurance. Quite a few of of them are suffering from childhood malnutrition, leading to lifelong cognitive and developmental defects. On the lowest rung, they are suffering from homelessness and all the deprivation and desperation that comes with it.

You're trying to tell us that someone to trying to raise kids in a rotting, roach-infested apartment in a drug-haunted slum, with no chance at a decent education and no real hope of advancement, is really perfectly all right because at least they're not actually living in a Delhi sewer. Or are you not even aware that this happens in America? You sound like the closest you've ever come to actually knowing a poor person is tossing a quarter to a homeless man in the subway.
Still possible, but you have to run an entire political marketing campaign, complete with mailers, etc. Furthermore, with a ballot-box planning process, developers are going to bypass the typical considerations that the city's professional planning staff usually asks for in favor of whatever they think is broadly marketable to a voting public.

The cost of these additional processes adds up. Urban containment and growth control are not free. In many cases, these policies do legitimately protect a certain quality of life, but they are also effectively a tax on newcomers and prospective residents.

California home prices started deviating from national norms around the mid-1970s after individual communities and the state supreme court started enacting growth control policies. It created a system that is so politically unpredictable that we're simply not able to produce enough housing to keep up with population growth at a time when the country is re-urbanizing.
And as soon as the buttons and the scripts are delivered from other servers, you effectively can't speed their delivery up. So you can't claim even the 20% you assumed at the start:

"Hey boss, we can't even dream to deliver the pages as Google does, let's just pay them for all the things we want to be our internet presence."