skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's weird right?

The rest of the world, the people who will be paying you money or helping you solve your problem, don't always operate in the same closed off world of email-only communication.

In my work experience :
Phone calls or in-person meetings = $$.
Email only = lots of emails.

So, in this case - I'd compile a list of realtors and/or letting agencies. Then, call them up and ask them about their pain points.

Not only will you get REAL and valuable info, but you'll be making potential connections. (call them up next week and say, "hey, remember that product I was making to help you? well - I did it, you should check it out")

A room full of programmers will likely never have the answers that you are looking for (in this case).
Not to sound like a complete dick, but... duh? Is this a controversial opinion really from a finance perspective? I was under the impression that almost all arguments surrounding rent control are:

1) Moral/legal arguments

2) Whether rent control is the small problem and lack of housing development due to zoning laws or NIMBYism or conspiracy or whatever is the much bigger problem - i.e. rent control is one small facet of the housing issues in SF.
Would a possible example of a large magnitude event be the 2012 Virginia Derecho[1] ?

Does anyone remember this evening as a day of large outages? I wasn't able to experience the event as an internet user having lost power. This is the type of event I would EXPECT to get a big magnitude.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2012_North_American_derech...
Remember, colorblind users are rather common.
Everything's doable, but that is not the point. I once had a client - a one person shop kind of deal - who asked me to install a ticketing software on the same account they hosted their website from. They liked Redmine, another RoR app, so I set it up for them and suddenly everything went down, because the CPU and memory usage went above of what their plan offered. They decided it's not beneficial for them to pay for a better plan, so instead we went with a PHP based solution. So yeah, in some cases technology can be as much - if not more - important, as the list of provided features.
Cybersyn was kind of a joke; it was a Star Trek set hooked up to telexes where aides manually aggregated information in the same way leaders get their briefings the world over.
Because the old market price was $4 due to there only being 20 houses that could freely move on price.

If there's 100 houses there will more supply and the market rate will drop. Basically market rent is simply the price at the available margin.
Microsoft Announces Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview
And everyone is silent... But if it was Microsoft trying to use it's weight to kill off some net technology it doesn't like/own.
Once again, nothing really "just happens". It takes a huge amount of energy and resources to cultivate.
I didn't find it's usability for RST docs all that great.
yeah, the cv part i haven't read too many things.
I don't really think people are leaving finance for tech because it's a gold rush. Most of these guys are making half of what they made as an associate or VP. Even with all the money pouring in, exits aren't exactly that common. Even if they were, most of these people aren't going into executive, or technical or founder roles that they could make that much money off the exit.

But you do get to do much more interesting and rewarding work. You get to work in a collaborative and supportive environment You can wear whatever you want and enjoy the SF weather. And the hours are way better.
A Mental Model for Media Queries
Ask HN: Did Chrome install Google Wallet app witho permission and witho notifying me?
While adding a Desktop Entry in Ubuntu 14.10 I came across a Desktop Entry with ...
Type=Application
Name=Google Wallet
This app is not listed under "Your Apps" in the Chrome Store, and I don't recall installing it. Anyone else know about this?

EDIT: this is a little bit more bothersome as i just realized this is for Chromium, not Chrome.
LinkedIn acquires Careerify
If they're working alone or with somebody who shares their passion, sure. What about the, oh, 90% of the rest of the time?
I felt like the link between "passion" and suffering was quite poetic and worth thinking on. People claim to be passionate about various things, but this root is a reminder that this passion, if it's genuine, is likely to be connected to suffering in some way.

You work so hard that you suffer, you are so devoted to a cause that you suffer. Passion isn't free.

Passion may not be controllable, but insofar as it is, maybe some caution is advised around it? Especially when "passion" is becoming a job requirement, and people are being asked to find a passion.

I've seen lots of home pages and twitter summaries claiming "passion" about the oddest technical sub-areas. "Passionate" about web standards? "Passionate" about DevOps? Maybe so, but make sure it's a price worth paying.
This just seems very basic.

Rent control discourages investment in real estate. Less investment in real estate means lower quality and fewer apartments. There are some lucky winners who get cheap apartments, but the rest pay higher prices to live in worse places. The same thing happens in New York City.

The economically sound answer is to make it as easy as possible for builders to make large buildings with lots of apartments. Right now it is so hard to build that only luxury apartments are profitable.
I grew up in Cambridge. When rent control went away, the rent skyrocketed and a large swath of the lower/middle class was forced to move to the suburbs.

It sucks, because only 2 or 3 towns in MA had rent control, but developers scared city councils across the state into voting to ban the practice.
If there are multiple players in the market such that you can't make a profit then you leave the market as will others until either a) the market stabilizes (or a clear brand winner emerges) b) disappears because it's fundamentally unprofitable.
During the last months with a smartphone and a 3g I have noticed I read more. I spend a lot of time in the metro and I read. I read about everything, but I enjoy in depth articles on many topics. However, I find it difficult to find good writing or good writers, following 1 or n magazines won’t cut for me, I rarely enjoy the full magazine, just 1 or 2 articles every few months. What I am saying I guess is that I would really pay for somebody to pick good articles for me. I know the internet is full of aggregators, but somehow those are not enough. For instance, I like HN a lot, but it's focus is too narrow sometimes.

Maybe paid article discovery could bring some revenues for magazines/writers? I don’t see much interest in this tough.
Javascript-Style Objects in Python
The key to self-driving cars is to realize that they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than us. It's not that the AI driver so good - it's that human drivers are SO BAD! I agree with you that AI is a pipe dream but I do think self-driving cars will succeed. I don't think the computers will ever match our judgement but it's trivially easy for them to beat us on attention span and reaction time, which will make them better drivers.
Malware is by definition self contained and can simply be removed. We move the file to another directory, so it cannot be executed.

Regarding security vulnerabilities, we specifically patch only those vulnerabilities. This way you can be rest assured that your customer's websites continue to function properly.
Rent control is one cause (of many) of the housing problem. People are less likely to invest in real estate, especially targeting low income, if there are restrictions on how they can monetize it.
There's one like what you say: Mercali.
I like using rsnapshot. I think it's a great rsync wrapper.
You indeed have a very good point which I had forgotten about. The literature search is a tremendous amount of work. I'm still confused three years into grad school why some articles make it into top journals and others do not. It mostly seems to come down to how novel and important the work is; not how "difficult" the work is to perform. I saw something in Nature the other day, and my first reaction was "Seriously? I could program that in a weekend." But then I began researching the topic and figured out no work had ever been done in that area before, and the result was really surprising and counterintuitive. The reason it was in Nature wasn't because the project was a lot of work; it was because it was a great idea that no one had thought of.

And it does seem like every new idea I think of has already been done in some form when I start searching for it. I thought I had discovered a new kind of interaction between hydrogen and lithium the other day. I did a search for articles between year 2000 and now -- nothing came up. I was really excited until I lowered the starting search year to 1980 and discovered the entire concept had already been exhaustively researched in the early 90s, and now there's not much more to say about it.

So yes, you're right; that would be difficult for a high school student.
If the City needs teachers, social workers and others with traditionally lower wages, wouldn't it make sense that their wages would also go up (based on demand) if the rent control goes away?
The other problems in the Boston area are oppressive zoning laws and height restrictions that discourage or make impossible the construction of cheap, high-occupancy buildings. Boston, despite its liberal reputation, is a very conservative city economically speaking and is a perfect example of what happens when NIMBYism runs amok. Cambridge and Brookline are probably worse in this respect.
I don't understand all this hate. Unlike US-only offerings, Whimsical is a service that's trying to open up to readers of Hacker News from other countries.

As some have already pointed out, it is not easy to go International.

On top of that, I'm sure by now you've realized that HackerNews has many international readers and they'd be very happy to see services that were previously only in the US with no plans of going international have some International competition.

I'm sorry that some of you are not entertained, but for the rest of us, HackerNews is a great place to Show and talk about what we're working on and get advice on how we could do it better!
Webpack is pretty nice, but it feels so 2014.

In 2015, we have ES6 modules now. Instead of define/require, we have import/export and it is standards based now, which is nice.

For systems that do not support ES6 syntax directly, this is provided today with tools like SystemJS [1] and jspm [2]. SystemJS is great because it supports all of the module formats for backwards compatibility. jspm is great because it doesn't matter where you grab your dependencies from (npm/github/bower/etc).

I agree with the authors comment about gulpfiles being hacky and not very DRY (don't repeat yourself). That said, his examples felt very hacked together as well, there is too much programming in there. Do I copy that build file across every new project I create?

gulpfiles are great because they provide extra functionality that is missing, like only re-transpiling files that change. For large projects this can really be a time saver. webpack has that by running a separate server process, complicated! Projects like gulp-helpers [3] try to bring a tiny bit of sanity and re-usability to gulpfiles by making things a bit more DRY and configuration based. It is just an example of one way to do things, but hopefully you see my point.

[1] https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs
[2] http://jspm.io/
[3] https://github.com/lookfirst/gulp-helpers
Netflix is already moving to HTML5 video http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/05/yosemite-finally-allows-netfli...
I did not want to get viral, or for money. I just wanted something similar to Magic, that worked in Canada. I hope to make it different to Magic in the future, and meant no disrespect.
Can you show some screenshots of what you mean? Gogs[0] looks plenty different from Gitlab[1] in colors, fonts, icons, and spacing. Hardly identical, but both clearly inspired from Github.

[0] http://gogs.io/imgs/screenshoots/2.png
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/images/feature_page/activity_stream...
Deployment is trivial, and it is very stable.

Gitbucket is what I recommend.
Show HN: Swift Resources – 800 URLs
The Content Flow: Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block
Brocade CEO: Why a free and open Internet is pointless
Agreed. Worth taking the whole thing and first running it through the filter of 'WIFM' (i.e., the first question you answer shouldn't be 'What type of app is Must?', but instead, 'What does Must do for me, the user?').

Then, worth taking all the copy and running it through http://www.hemingwayapp.com.
This should be taken in consideration when setting deadlines : at least 3 months without deployment when Uranus and Neptune are aligned.
That sounds dangerously similar to saying, "... you don't have to actually follow the law, because no one checks, and you'll never get caught". Maybe it's my inner pessimism, or maybe I'm channeling Woody Allen, but I'd expect that I would end up being the poster child for What Not To Do were I to run a company that knowingly slacked off on HIPAA.
Maybe there would be more housing built if the area was not under rent control?
All of the arguments I have heard for rent control act like the vast majority of us who live in non-rent controlled areas are going through a Boschian nightmare hellhole of landlords jacking up our rents, driving us out of our ancestral homes, and sticking pitchforks in our collective asses.

<checks cranium> nope, no screw-vices here.
Ideas are cheap, and execution is king.

With a service as conceptually-simple as this, "added value" lies entirely in the difference in quality/price of the service.

But I do agree that this doesn't belong among other "Show HN" posts, principally because this landing page eschews implementation details.
Price controls almost always lead to shortages, for the very reasons the author described. If rent control is used to keep prices down, it is self evident that the market clearing price must be higher for those units... otherwise you could just get rid of rent control all together and there would be no side effect.

I guess the real question in my mind is "cui bono?" Seems that this policy would greatly benefit any landlords with non-rent-controlled property, since the artificially low price would create an increase in demand... since the price of those units can't increase the effects would presumably be felt in the next best substitute(s), i.e. free market apartments and/or values in the surrounding areas. Seems like property developers in the both the city and the suburbs might have a strong interest in distorting the market in this way.
From the blurb:

"Let Over Lambda is one of the most hardcore computer programming books out there. Starting with the fundamentals, it describes the most advanced features of the most advanced language: Common Lisp. Only the top percentile of programmers use lisp and if you can understand this book you are in the top percentile of lisp programmers. If you are looking for a dry coding manual that re-hashes common-sense techniques in whatever langue du jour, this book is not for you. This book is about pushing the boundaries of what we know about programming. While this book teaches useful skills that can help solve your programming problems today and now, it has also been designed to be entertaining and inspiring. If you have ever wondered what lisp or even programming itself is really about, this is the book you have been looking for."
What I never understood is why OCaml allows row polymorphism in objects, but not in record types. For example, we can write:

let bar x = x#info + 1

and OCaml will give a type:

val bar : < info : int; .. > -> int = <fun>

which is precisely what we want since we can now define functions on any object that has an info member. At the same time, we can't write

let buz x = x.info + 1

because we receive the error

Error: Unbound record field info

This is a big deal since the exposed members of objects must be methods in OCaml. Certainly, we can declare values and mutable values, but these are not exposed in the objects type. Specifically,

# class foo = object val info = 1 end;;
class foo : object val info : int end
# let bar = new foo;;
val bar : foo = <obj>
# bar#info;;
Error: This expression has type foo
It has no method info

In order to get around this, we can change these values to methods (or add getter methods that return these values). However, the problem with doing that is then we can't make a new object with all of the same values, but with the specified valued changed:

# class foo = object method info = 1 end;;
class foo : object method info : int end
# let bar = new foo;;
val bar : foo = <obj>
# bar # info;;
- : int = 1
# let buz = bar with info = 2;;
Error: Parse error: [str_item] or ";;" expected (in [top_phrase])

In other words, we don't have a good mechanism for creating a bunch of immutable objects.

In other words, OCaml records allow immutable records, but they lack row polymorphsim. OCaml classes allow row polymorphism, but disallow immutable updates (immutable updates meaning create a new object with everything the same, but one element different.)

Does anyone know why this is the case?
In 2015, we have ES6 modules now. Instead of define/require, we have import/export and it is standards based now, which is nice.

Wouldn't using something like Babel remove that issue?
These sound like bold claims, honestly. I have never lived in a rent controlled area, but I have also never had the money to enter into the only rent controlled areas I know of. Such that it is easier for me to understand the possible negatives of rent control over the positives. Do you have good reading on why they are false? (Basically, your moral argument sounds like I could see the appeal, but mostly false. Whereas the other arguments lack any appeal to morality, but seem much more likely.)
If only I had control over that kind of decision ;)
Stick with sockeye salmon - it's always wild and the cleanest.
If you think this doesn't relate to Tech, you must have never worked with programmers on the west coast.
I, for one, welcome our new newsletter and podcast overlord
Well, yes, but that's still a straw man. It's not as if Hawking and Gates and so on saw an Atari-bot and on that basis came to worry about AGI. Current AI technologies shouldn't update our estimates much about AGI, unless they push us way off of Kurzweil's (or someone else's) chart.

I do agree that we lack evidence of a broad community of AI experts who have been able to make good predictions, which potentially puts AI research even behind economists! Nonetheless, we'd expect there to be a period between "wild guessing" and "good and reliable models"; Gates and Hawking either think we're in that middle ground, or they think the risks are considerable enough that it's worth pushing towards it now.
On improv and drawing
"Malware is by definition self contained and can simply be removed. We move the file to another directory, so it cannot be executed."

Wouldn't this require un-obfuscating the exploit page because the malware can be basically innoculous looking like an image file? I ask because I am just curious how the tool manages to do this so automated.

Also, props on starting this company. I have been thinking about starting some kind of cybersecurity startup or newer tech startup for a while but haven't produced much yet.
This is literally economics 101. If some of the supply is tied up in below market prices to people who would not have bought at the market price, then you shift the supply curve more than the demand curve and the price of the free market bit will be higher.

Anyone who cares to know this, does. People who don't want to know this won't be convinced by a carefully reasoned toy example.

But if you really want to understand the problems with the housing crisis, http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/02/so-you-want-to-fix-the-hous... is unusually good.
I think we can all agree killing off NPAPI is the right choice. As google said it's ancient tech and it's holding them back. Netflix is the only thing I ever use that uses NPAPI, via Silverlight, and even they are moving to HTML5 video [0]. Also MS already killed off Silverlight [1] and other plugins. This is where we WANT to go with the web, a plugin-free world is goal...

Let's not try to make this a "If MS did this everyone would be up in arms" issue because that's not what it is. The article is super click-baity as Google isn't saying "Fuck You" to MS but to ALL of NPAPI which has outlived it's usefulness IMHO.

[0] http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/05/yosemite-finally-allows-netfli...

[1] http://www.itworld.com/article/2736986/enterprise-software/m...
Go to the labs that you are interested in, try to fill in the gaps that they cant handle, charge cheap.
Thanks for the reference. I will check out that and SICP[1] as mentioned by one of your replies.

It was the Austin Meetup. The name of the presenter escapes me, but it was great overview. The topic wasn't meant to be CLOS, it was just mentioned in passing, which was why I was hoping that it was the topic of this article.

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
What's wrong with "people"?

As in, "you people"?

(Grammatically correct, non-colloquial, non-regional, and gender neutral.)
Or maybe because TripAdvisor actually brings measurable revenue to hotels, unlike Yelp. Other than some opentable integrations most restaurants don't immediately see how much value is Yelp bringing to them.
Human beings don't come with specs you can evaluate to know whether or not they will help or hurt your mission.

You need to find people who can perceive the workings of the group and company as a system, then actively avoid pathologies and improve the group as a whole. Most groups aren't solely composed of such people, but the ones that work well have enough of them to regulate group interactions smoothly.

What makes hiring so hard is that it's a gamble.

It wouldn't be if there was a way that we could try people for a couple weeks, then six months before hiring. Almost anyone can pretend to be nice for 6 months for tens of thousands of dollars. Longer than that, you're either getting a genuine glimpse, or there's a darker talent at play.
For those of us who are confused / ignorant, would you be willing to share some of those financial innovations? I trust you that there are some, I just can't think of any.
I hope they will open it up to every device soon. History teaches that is the right path anyway
Prop 13 for individuals/families serves largely the same purpose as rent control - to ensure that the place they live in stays affordable.

If property values increase and there is no rent control, do you really expect landlords to not pass the property tax increases to the renters?

In fact, I would argue that more home ownership would be a lot better than rent control, because if the home owner chooses to leave a given area by selling, he/she is able to benefit from the increased values. Renters on the other hand cannot.

While it would be very interesting to contrast the tax situation in Washington state (property taxes adjust every year there from what I understand) with that of California, I doubt the current situation would greatly improve prop 13 gone, and I know for sure a lot of people would be squeezed.
At first,I was like "oh, the magic team did some rebranding."

And then I realized this was actually a complete clone, right to the screenshot.
Are Linkedin Groups down?