skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is essentially a fundamentalist view of property rights. It seems like that for any X, you can find people to assert that X is obviously the most important thing in the world, so anything else doesn't matter. Fundamentalisms are mentally satisfying, because you always have clear answers. But they're practically dangerous, because the ignored concerns don't actually go away.

Land, of course, does not work like you imagine it does. See, e.g.,:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_tenure#Modes_of_ownership_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform

In addition to all that, you ignore that concepts like "trade" and "law" and even "earned" are all intrinsically social concepts. No man is an island. That doesn't mean that property rights aren't useful and important, but if you want everybody to agree on a particular set of rights, you'll have to make a case that is more compelling than, "my particular moral code says you must abide by my particular moral code".
Rental discrimination laws very strict, someone would probably try to sue you.
Many people think they should be able to live in a place they can afford with the reasonable expectation that it will be their home for the foreseeable future. Many benefits, to both the economy and society at large, come from ensuring the populace in general is able to find stable housing. While San Francisco's rent control may be too stringent for its own good, there are many reasons to support a more reasonable rent stabilization policy in a jurisdiction with unstable rental prices.
Have you looked at fish? It is in the package repositories everywhere, I think.
I wouldn't make the "let the landlord make more money" argument, I would be making the "rent control is a significant distortion of the market which hurts both renters and tenants in the long run" argument. Housing absolutely is a social priority, and while rent control is definitely a well intentioned attempted and addressing the issue, a more effective approach would be to build more - not restrict the price signalling mechanism.
"The sad part about this article is not that Science Fairs are not fair, its that parents don't know what science is and so cannot help there children develop a sense of wonder and discovery."

Very spot on.
I get that. But the concept of a security deposit is that you get it back when you leave, so long as you haven't damaged the place. Having to pay an additional security deposit each month doesn't make logistical or logical sense. Do they hand you a check for $1M when you leave after ten years? Does the number of damageable surfaces in the apartment increase each month?
And what about everyone else? That is an extremely selfish view.

Rent control stifles new construction, and allows you to live in relative luxury at the expense of others.

Let me ask you, if rent control is the solution to high rent, why not introduce legislation to cut all current rent rates in half?
This was almost certainly illegal.

Removing dwelling units in SF (as they did to the downstairs neighbor's flat) almost always requires a public hearing. See http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=2816

(via https://twitter.com/markasaurus/status/577252542419062784 )
Most property, if you trace out the actual chain of transactions, originates in theft or fraud. Either a monarch or other military force took it from another group by force and parceled out pieces of it (theft) or literally just claimed it from afar (without occupation) and decided who to grant it to (fraud). Just because you are some steps removed from the beginning of the transaction chain, does not mean that you have 'earned something', or as you put it, 'gotten it legitimately'.
> If a 4x increase in rent is bearable by the market then it's not a sign of landlord greed, it's a sign of a broken system.

It's not bearable by the market. $2145 is low but market rate is nowhere near $8900 for a place like this; not even half that. This is clearly an attempt to force the tenant out with an inflated rate.

I'm not going to comment on either sides rights here but this rate is not simply "what the market will bear".
AstroBuild: Deploy based on the planet alignments
I think if you're going to be doing sufficiently 'biggish data' with those kind of retrieval charcteristics, you've got to just give up on disk and use flash only.
Its rather strange you would bring up Notch, as I wouldn't consider Notch-run Minecraft a marvel of engineering. I'd hate to be the guy who cleans up after him, and while Minecraft works (and it is a really great game), most people consider to be terribly built.[1] So yes, while Notch is a rather speedy engineer, I wouldn't consider the skills of an engineer based on how fast they code. Maintainability is an important feature (however, at the same time maybe building a house of cards really quick than flipping it to Microsoft for 1B, maybe ignoring maintainability is not so bad).

[1]http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/8325-...
When dealing with real transactions, every thing should be stated in black and white.
False.

In reality, in most transactions, both parties profit due to the fact that there is no fixed concept of "worth."

The apple that you bought from your grocer for 50 cents was valued at 40 cents by him and 60 cents by you.
Correction: were. (The fact that the landlord trashed the other unit is key to his shenanigans.)
Ok, but there's a difference between sharing _all_ your files and just a bunch of non-critical ones (Gemfile, Gemfile.lock, etc.) :)
I believe there are also provisions in Australian law that allow a landlord to evict in a much shorter time period, at least where a detached house is concerned. I was asked to vacate my previous place within 14 days due to difficulties experienced by the landlord, complete with legal documents and such.
> A group that votes to dictate what I can do with my property might be doing it by the letter of the law

Why do you have property? Why does a police force and firefighters exist to protect that property? Why are there courts and contracts? The only reason is because a group of people have decided to set rules that protect your property - the only "natural property" you can have is that which you can fight for, and anything you have beyond that is by the grace and favour of the same society you are so quick to deride.

> To be clear, I am pro-equality in a fundamental way: we should strive to be equal before the law.

And the poor and rich alike have equal right to sleep under the bridges.
What else are you expecting from a 'free' service?
It services it purpose, it partially meets my needs, and that's enough.
> In an ideal world the billboard would somehow transmit the advertiser's public key to the viewer's device so that the viewer could then look them up, but obviously we don't have any particular tech for doing that.

Augmented-reality tech (whatever comes next in the line of tech Google Glass is in) would presumably do this as one of its primary use-cases, though. As soon as there's a reader-device that knows how to passively scan for and "absorb" encountered pubkeys into your keychain, a "signed link emitter in hybrid QR-code/NFC format" would become as commonplace as printed URLs are today, because they'd actually be useful over-and-above URLs.
The Two-Page Plot Outline a Hardy Boys Series Writer Used to Crank Out a Book
Zillow has property taxes at $11,043/year

The tenant was paying $2,145/month = $25,470/year.

According to the letter, they forced out another tenant. IF that tenant was paying a similar amount, the landlord was making >4x taxes in rent, not less than the current taxes.

Also, the current owners bought the property on 12/30/2014. Why should anyone have sympathy for them having tenants? They knew they were buying a rent-controlled building. They aren't some owners for the past 30 years being held victim to tenants who won't move out.
I'm a lead dev on the fish shell (http://fishshell.com)

xonsh looks very cool. Shell scripting languages are famously obtuse and underpowered, and we've thought about how to cleanly merge shell scripting with a real language. It's heartening to see an attempt at it.

Ambiguous syntax is a sticking point. For example, say the user runs this:

[ 1 ]

is this constructing a Python list with the value 1, or is it invoking /bin/[ with two arguments? It's ambiguous! It looks like xonsh interprets it the first way. Any thoughts on this issue?

A related issue is the relationship between bash functions and Python functions. I'd be very interested to see how xonsh approaches this.

Also, here's some unsolicited advise, from one non-POSIX shell maintainer to another: The claim that xonsh is "bash-compatible" is delicate. Full bash compatibility requires your shell to be insane. E.g.

echo foo | cd /
cd / | echo foo

In bash, only the second line will change your working directory. Or consider this command:

*

this finds the first (for some meaning of first) file in your directory and invokes it with all other files as arguments. I tried it: xonsh doesn't handle either of these "correctly," which is to say that xonsh isn't yet insane. That's good news! On the other hand, this means it's not really bash compatible.

IME nobody really cares about full bash compatibility. What they want is for their existing bash stuff to just work. Bash shebang scripts will just run in real bash, but that leaves shell-integration scripts: virtualenv, rbenv, etc. Supporting that stuff is one of the most common requests that the fish shell gets, and one of the most commonly cited reasons for not using fish.

Here's a piece of rbenv's bash integration: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv/blob/master/libexec/rbe... . It's short but there's a lot of features being used: set, shopt, IFS, functions, etc. If you're aiming for bash compatibility, that's your target!

In the meantime, I suggest changing the language to express that xonsh is bash-like, not bash-compatible. Otherwise users are going to be confused and disappointed.
It's in an iframe the page has no access to.

(please read about things before taking it on yourself to educate others...)
Invisibilia already has 10 million plays, so I think your prediction has been realised: http://www.npr.org/about-npr/383255428/npr-s-invisibilia-rea...
It also conveniently omitted any calculation about how the owner is 'losing money', despite there being a ~$14,000 positive difference between what the tenant is paying per year and the taxes due.
If namecoin solves it, the DNS system solves it too.
>Crime rates absolutely did fall. Every criminologist and even several economists are scrambling to solve the puzzle

I blame the internet. They're all sitting about on facebook and twitter when they should be out there stealing.
You have to finish that thought with "Otherwise you wouldn't do the action. And the buyer wouldn't benefit from your output."
> Here's an often overlooked technique for [...] engineers like me: study.

This is fantastic advice, for everyone.

Preparing for interviews isn't wasted time, because ultimately the goal is to land a job that furthers your own personal goals in some fashion.

I wouldn't recommend lying. If you're leaving a job, you should stand by your convictions. In my market, it's small and everyone knows everyone, so claiming you nailed everything down is easy enough to verify. Just remember one simple truth: "You are the only common link between all your failed jobs."
I think the point was that no one is asking for price controls in those markets, despite the fact that we all need those goods to function - not that food/gas represent the text book cases of market equilibrium.
I think algorithmic interviews are good, because they are a kind of intelligence test. In spite of liberal dogma, some people are more talented and intellegent than others, and tests can shed light on this. However, the article does expose some flaws. Here are two bad kind of algorithm questions

1) Questions that rely too much on background knowledge. Knowing the exact properties or implementation of the more complex algorithms in the canon of undergraduate CS knowledge is not a particularly useful skill in itself.

2) Questions that have some trick that you either get or don't get. These aren't always terrible, but they give a big advantage to someone who has seen the question before.

So what is a good algorithm based question?

1) Implementing something basic but non-trivial, like N-Queens with backtracking. Basically, something anyone should be able to do.

2) Something that mixes in domain knowledge. E.g. problems calculating probabilities than can be solved with dynamic programming.

3) Pure domain knowledge, but in programming form. E.g. how to implement k-means clustering.
I don't understand this argument. _Quality_ housing seems to me, to be a normal good, because when income increases the demand for such housing increases. Even crappy places in SF seem to be quality housing. Whether or not there are class issues, or your house is sentimental is irrelevant.

Edit: typo
> If a 4x increase in rent is bearable by the market... it's a sign of a broken system

This person thinks the rent increase wouldn't actually be borne by the market. Maybe the landlord has no actual expectation of making that much, and setting the price so high is just to get rid of this renter. Whether that's an OK tactic is debatable I guess, but legal trickery around zoning laws and lying about prices sound like signs of a broken system too.
> The market rent is exactly what other potential tenants are willing to pay.

You're not understanding the scam. Suppose you move in to a place and pay the then-market rent of $1000 a month. Let's further suppose that it cost you $2400 to move, plus a shitload of time and effort that you'd rather not repeat. If the next year the market price remains $1000/month, the landlord can still raise the rent on you because you'll be reluctant (and possibly unable) to pay moving costs again. The exact amount they can get away with depends on personal tolerance and your time value for money, but given how much moving sucks, in practice it's quite a bit.

> Or that the inability to charge market prices causes property owners to refuse to rent in the first place, thereby making housing problems even worse.

That is definitely a negative side effect, but not a huge one in practice. How many apartments can one person use? Who would really let an apartment building stand empty when you could be charging market rent? In San Francisco, pretty much nobody.

A bigger problem is that it might reduce the supply of new apartments. But that's also not a problem in SF because any building built after rent control was passed is not under rent control.
Vacancy decontrol = new construction can have whatever rent they want. So preventing a landlord from screwing over the current tenant does not prevent housing from meeting demand.

New construction does face many other issues, though. NIMBY's, parking regulations, zoning, etc.
I agree with you, except for one thing:

Surgeons are briefed on the problem, the diagnosis, the patient's medical history, given all the information they need to know about the project. They are then locked in a small room with all the tools and assistants they need, and given complete and total authority and autonomy over the process and results. Because of that, surgeons are some of the most respected people in their environments.

Programmers are dripfed information on a "need-to-know" basis by managers who have no clue about the process involved (and therefore with no clue about what information is needed). They are then placed in an open area, interrupted regularly, have to justify the cost of any tools, are never given assistants, and have exactly zero authority or autonomy over the process or results. Because of that, programmers are some of the least respected people in their environment.

But we do have a few things in common: if the patient dies it's the surgeon's fault, and if the project fails then it's the programmer's fault.

This stark comparison is exactly why we're blue-collar workers not professionals.
Looks like something worth exactly as much as a day's rental of bulldozers, excavators, and dump trucks. I'm not sure if San Franciscans are aware of how horribly they are being abused. Go somewhere else.
I agree that AVL trees make a bad question. But if you're in an interview, you should just answer the question as best you can. If I was asking a question and someone tried to avoid it by changing the topic, I wouldn't feel threatened, but I would indicate in my feedback that they didn't answer the question.

"Why do you want to do that" might be appropriate when actually working, but not in an interview.
How can you verify your assumptions about whether or not a commenter owns real estate?

For example, do I own real estate in San Francisco? I think your chances of getting that right are pretty close to 50%.
All landlords aren't assholes, just the ones who try to force people out of their homes by jacking up rents to insane prices.
The trouble though with this view is it always acts as though neighborhoods are static and unchanging. But any large City that's more than 100 years old sees neighborhoods rise and fall economically and/or change dramatically in a social sense over time. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. When you "protect" these neighborhoods with artificial controls you just end up extorting all kinds of outcomes which are never healthy. The tenant on this FB post is like a Frog in slowly heating water with no sense of temperature. By the time she realizes what's happening it's too late and she's seriously stuck. If the rents in her area were going up 10 - 20% or more every year (and hers along with it) the shock would be less and she'd plan ahead to move.
10x difference between error rates? No, this is not the case. Well, it might be in some special situations, like a scammer and a specialist, but you'll wont find that in the case of GPs, for example. Obviously you should only compare doctors on the same field (N0tch would be quite unproductive if he suddenly had to work with COBOL, for example), and between those the difference is measured in percentages, not 1000 percentages. (I can dig up the data if you want but I definitely read this when I recently had to look into diagnostic errors.)
Apparently "normal good" is an economic technical term, and apparently you are using that technical definition here and not the normal use of "normal". I have no idea why you'd do that; as you point out, that technical term bears no relation to what I'm talking about.
This Week in HN – Mar 13 cast (a weekly wrap up)
Xiaomi's Yi action camera outperforms the GoPro at half the cost
Agreed. But why do I need to share anything at all when a local command-line program already has all the information (or can gather it from npmjs.com or whatever)?
Crypto-Gram, March 15, 2015 (Schneier on Security)
Is this what you've got in mind?

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=3_VWXMFGsTo
The stuff that gets broken are bash scripts that are designed to be sourced directly: virtualenv, rbenv, various prompts, etc.
Good job filtering out all the carpal tunnelers.
A lot of what you are saying rings true, but you may be underestimating just how small San Francisco is and how large the tech entrepreneur population is here. The number of new companies being started here is what makes San Francisco feel special. There is no other city on earth where you can overhear someone's new business idea at the cafe, the bakery, a restaurant, and the subway. And the crazy thing is that no one rolls their eyes at these ideas like they would in Chicago. It's pretty bizarre, sometimes unsettling, sometimes wonderful. It wouldn't happen at this frequency in Santa Cruz or Raleigh, or even New York or Austin or Boulder.
fn+delete deletes forwards.
Cancel All Student Debt
Show HN: Modular Bitmap Text Rendering in ThreeJS
> The idea behind limiting the landlord's profit is that many believe that it is more important for people to be able to afford housing than for others to make larger profits through, literally, rent-seeking.

There is a fairly well-accepted economic system that advocates both profit-seeking and making desired goods affordable. Far from being mutually exclusive, they can be mutually reinforcing.
"...and let the market correct itself."

No. This is the philosophy that put our economy in the shitter in the first place. More government regulations, please.
I was taught that patents can't acquired on discoveries that have already been made public. If that's the case Google's publication of this method before attempting to patent it makes it unpatentable.
"that most engineers need to know that a hash table is O(c) lookup"

O(1) is a leaky abstraction [1]. It's O(1) amortized assuming you have enough buckets and a good hashing algorithm that minimizes collisions. I think that distinction important to keep in your head, and good to mention/look for in interviews, since those details matter when things go awry.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
But what didn't Satoshi know?
Those are the contract guys from body shops.
That's in a somewhat out-of-the-way part of SF. More central/desirable neighborhoods are considerably more.

Examples:

http://www.trulia.com/property/3191871255-1097-Howard-St-302...

http://www.trulia.com/property/3006745092-2801-Jackson-St-30...

http://www.trulia.com/property/3191823695-425-1st-St-5005-Sa...

http://www.trulia.com/property/3190475980-2145-Powell-St-215...
SXSW Field Report, Day 2: Keensplosion
Losing, compared to what he could have been making.
This thread is a magnet for new throwaways. The one you were talking to is the second of two I've seen.
Why would I value an apple higher than what a grocer is willing to sell? I wouldn't.
Sylvia Stolz “The Reality of Freedom of Expression” Full Speech, Uncut
You absolutely can alter the concept of property ownership; to think otherwise is a failure of imagination, historical perspective, or both. (For instance: who owned the land under the buildings at 8th and Market three million years ago? What would an early Christian think of our complex system of interest-bearing loans? Have you ever read any sci-fi novels depicting societies in which property rights took fundamentally different forms? Should landlords be allowed to kill or enslave tenants if that would increase their profits? What if the government knocks on your door and claims eminent domain? And so on.)

Whether you should do so is another question, one to which I don't have the answer.
I'm in nearby Guelph (Canada) and feel the same way. The developing technology scene in Ontario is enough to keep me put for now.
But now we've ended up where we always end up, where each side of a debate rejects any alleged historical evidence supporting their opponent's position on the grounds that their opponent's proposal has not been perfectly implemented.
I see your point. I'd argue that programmers who are treated that way have bad managers, though, rather than it being a function of programming as a profession. I've never dealt with a company that hasn't given me some autonomy, though, so I can't really comment on that perspective.

A company can give programmers autonomy, or it can give them bits of information and treat them poorly. It could also do this for its sales team, its lawyers, or its marketing department. This strikes me more as a problem with the company rather than a problem with the nature of programming.
>All so some asshole (which is probably a company), can make more money. Great for the rich.

Ummm... yeah, that's why I bought the place. That's why I took the risk on the investment. That's why I deal with all of the administration. That's why I keep it up to code. So... now I have to rent it for 25% market value? I'll find any way I can out of that situation, and no, it doesn't make me an asshole.
You are conflating two very, very different issues.
It looks like he's fumbling towards replacing the field with a (graded?) ring and therefore replacing vector spaces with modules.