skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've often wondered if one could build a system where the appeals process for an assessment is "the municipality must buy the house at 95% of the assessed value" and "the homeowner must accept a bid at 150% of the assessed value [if they haven't already appealed the assessment in a timely fashion]". Naturally, I started wondering this while I owned a house that the town was over-assessing IMO.

Allow the government to set the rate as they see fit (with all the normal controls of an iterative democratic/representative process), but the assessed value is also a bid of sorts.

Of course there are flaws: an assessment shouldn't vary based on how willing someone is to move, it's still easy to under-assess by a little (but then that drives the rate higher to make the budget), and I'm still a little disquieted by the idea that the control against under-assessing so undermines property rights.

I think that Cambridge (MA) gets this reasonably right. My assessments have tracked the overall market in my area (at least loosely). They might be 10-20% off in a rising market, but they're not 50% off.
I wonder how much of this inability to be nice to others/empathize is due to tech selection bias and how much is due to lack of socialization as children? Before computer games, etc., kids spent a lot more time playing outside with their friends in person.
So, they go 25mph normally, i wonder if the terminal velocity is more or less than that.

Too lazy to do the calculations :P
use the cursor keys for player 2
I bought an Earthlink software box at a computer store around 1995. Then after that I used mindspring for dial-up. Never used AOL but got tons of Cd's in the mail...
When reading the original article I thought, this guy seems off, maybe becoming a professor does that to someone, probably no big deal.

Then I skimmed through your link:

> I predict that in a few years, fluffy feminist divorce court judges will start being assassinated by young women, as the latter increasingly see the source of their misery coming from these judges. These young women, manless, loveless, sexless, and especially childless, due to the mass exodus of the MGTOWs will then express their hatred against these judges in the form of assassination.

Nope, just a normal full on crazy person.
It is amazing how little people care about freedom in general.
Greenpeace blasts Amazon in latest cloud energy report, lauds Apple
Maybe in theory, but in practice today it's already server-trust.
With casual speaking, you place emphasis and pauses, naturally... With writing, nobody can read your body language... hear your pauses... notice your _emphasis_... unless you s.p.e.l.l. it out...
It's not quite clear what they're getting at. "Rate of change of digital evolution 2008-2013" is a strange metric. (There's an annoying tendency in the financial community to focus on rates of change, rather than absolute values; that's a trader's viewpoint.)

They seem to be observing that the countries with really lousy payment systems are finally getting usable ones. The US and parts of Europe have had good payment systems for decades. Google Pay, Apple Pay, Facebook Credits, and Bitcoin aren't badly needed in those countries, which is why they don't have much traction. In India, Amazon is still using COD (cash on delivery) payments. That's a real market for new payment systems.
do you pay for them or torrent? many of us reject piracy, so it would be nice to understand this.
So are you really telling me Youtube wouldn't use EME if it was there?
Yes, totally this. Moreover, I'd like to add anonymously down-voting / reporting someone's opinion just because it's not yours is just as mean-spirited as calling someone names.

Every internet message board has its own culture with its own take on what's "right" and what's "wrong", and on HN (and reddit) the institutionally accepted way of being mean is misusing the downvoting / flagkilling system to attempt to bleep out someone else's opinion because you disagree with it and labeled it as "toxic" from your perspective.

I mean, it's one thing to downvote someone because of spam or noise (e.g. one line posts of "lolwtf" or "this is dumb"), but every time I scroll through the comments and see discussion chains of folks arguing some valid points (about say referrals and paywalls or the ever controversial issue of sexism) under a flagkilled or completely invisible down-voted-to-hell post, I think to myself "this shouldn't be how our community operates."
I beg to differ that this discussion failed.

See, I learned about identity politics, which I've never had heard about before. I think the concept is interesting, so I'm naturally curious. But I have doubts about it. Lets change the roles, assume an atheist said something related to the snooping at Facebook and Google in a speech about atheism, would that be identity politics, too?

Also, this discussion's made me think about "allies" in political movements and compromises. So, at least for me, this discussion was valuable. Thank you.

This discussion did not derail. Mind you, since the start we weren't talking about online privacy because there never was disagreement about the need of it.

We are in totally different mindsets. That's not bad but good, because we could learn from the others perspective. HN is however not a good platform for longer discussions. I invite you to mail me at christian madez de.
The TLA+ Hyperbook
Right now, SugarCRM because it's Open Source and works reasonably well. I want more out of a CRM though, and I'm constantly tempted to start writing my own, and add a CRM product to our portfolio. There just isn't enough time to do it right now though. :-(
IDK, maybe I'm forgetting what it's like to be earlier in a dev career (I'm 30), but how much I see "this resonates me" more than "duh" is a bit scary.

I suppose we're all on a scale of ability to be empathetic (and can learn be more emphatic), but who goes into a job with this attitude?

Cheers for learning! I just wish all of our upbringings could bring us this lesson earlier in life. Because...it should. You graduated Harvard, and got a job where you acted like you knew everything. I suppose that's typical of college grads everywhere though, I'm not trying to be too harsh.
There are many systems that get you within +/-25% for 90% of the houses. Yours is probably in that range, depending on what time period you choose.

If you choose a whole year, your assessments will lag badly in a fast moving market. If you choose a shorter time period, you risk the small number of sales making the measure a noisy one. I suspect the whole year basis is a better balance.

Then of course, there's the "is a garage livable area? is it land? is it neither?" "is a basement livable area?" "what makes an attic livable area vs storage?" "what about porches? patios? sheds? gazebos?"
This feels like a "modern art" moment.

The key question is, who is your audience?

For a lot of modern art the audience is other insiders. And also, possibly, buyers. The average person may not find it so compelling.

And so it is here as well.
There's something super strange about how this article is written. There's a very heavy emphasis on how the government invaded this poor fireman's privacy and endangered the adoption process of two young children. The fireman is emotional, and feels victimized by the police and is even sueing the mayor, the main argument of the article seems to be that the police has too much information about people.

But when you extract just the factual statements from the article there's a whole different picture. The police was investigating a pretty serious crime. One of their tools in this investigation was checking medical records of employees of the fire department to find irregularities that might point to someone with motive to steal opiates. Instead of finding a direct motive they found out a person was committing fraud with prescription drugs. The person was charged, but eventually the charges were dropped because they couldn't round out the evidence, the reason is unclear.

Did this person really commit prescription drug fraud? Did he make money off that? Is that the sort of crime that should throw a wrench in an adoption process?

I obviously don't know the guy, but it seems a bit weird to me to just disregard the idea that the authorities have hard evidence of him circumventing a law. Using the properties of that guy that make him seem like a stand-up guy just to make a larger point about privacy feels a bit disingenuous.
This history is required reading for anyone interested in the topic http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
It appears the content does travel to and through the server, for both initial hashing and later relaying to other clients.

Couldn't this be done without ever sending any content to the server, via in-browser hashing and client-to-client connections? (The server could still be used to help clients discover each other.)
The way HTTPS works allows for authentication of the received data. Even for "obviously public" data, this is essential: an installation image of Windows could be modified to include malware, or news articles could be edited on the fly during transmission.

Once everything is encrypted, the only things that can be known of a request are the origin IP and the destination IP.
Outliers, lucky, Right place, right time.

The problem is with the people that try to emulate leaders like that - they try to play Steve Jobs in meetings and end up causing all of the damage without any of the greatness.
Lots of insight—and several great projects—on their blog: https://code.facebook.com

Things work a little different for Facebook than they do for sites with more reasonable traffic. I've seen a few talks on YouTube where they speak about the challenges of scalability as they gradually hot swap legacy X or Y for their own in-house component Z.

See React/JSX and Flux, and the Haxl library. They go into detail about some of the problems and solutions that they've made public with respect to those projects, and they speak a lot about testing too in many of the posts. Worth checking out.
That's a very cool attack. However, the client can sign R and R^N together, which I think defeats it. I didn't describe it as such because I was afraid "S(R+R^N)" may cause some confusion, and I ran some numbers and found the security level acceptable for 128-bit nonces and a few billion logins.
This does not come across as very well-informed. You are replying to someone who is talking about the NYT, which, whatever its limitations, is probably the best daily source of the thing we call "news" in the U.S.

You say that there is little unique content out there -- but this a false statement if we're talking about the WSJ and NYT. If you are talking about the web as a whole, then you've changed the subject, and you're talking about an unbounded thing.

Saying the NYT is irrelevant is also completely false. Endangered? Fearful? Sure. A mouthpiece for the establishment? Often. Caught in their own thought-bubble? Sometimes. But not irrelevant.

Information and quality analysis have value - this is obvious. Coming around the other way and saying that because publishers are failing to extract the value, that therefore the news has no value, is a fallacy. Markets can fail to price correctly for many reasons.

*

Clay Shirky's original 2009 essay on "Thinking the unthinkable" (http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...) was plenty frightening for publishers, and it did not need to exaggerate to make the point.
Speaking generally, rather than about Prop 8, I suspect the answer to your question is "actually, yes a donation to a campaign could imply any number of alternatives".

We like to think of politics as a simple matter of supporters and opponents for the cause at hand. But in practice it seems people can be prompted by all sorts of things -- being irked by some aspect of the other campaign, a tangential issue (such as it coming from the people rather than parties), a friend or relative being involved in the campaign -- there are potentially rather a lot of reasons why someone can be prompted into donating to a campaign they might not even vote for.
Or what they couldn't if they were. Sometimes being an asshole contributes to success rather than stymies it, see Linus and Linux.
Yeah, I pictures a Google Drone laughing.
if you could but a beacon of the leading edge of the kite and setup a NO GO zone between the remote and the kite's beacon that would solve that issue.
> The HN community moderation always seemed to be based on a very superficial rules - don't swear, don't mention banned keywords X Y or Z. Never have they seemed to seriously consider the impact that words have on other people

Of course there's no rule against swearing.

This whole description is so remote from everything we try to do that I'm at a loss to know what else to say.
> (!= is nerd for Not Equal.)

made me laugh out loud. how many not-nerds would have made it that far?
That would be ridiculously overpriced.
That's the native cross platform rendering platform. Still in development.
Just because you haven't been paying attention doesn't mean they haven't been fighting.
I fit into that "aspie" category as well which likely manifested itself in ways similar to you and the person you are responding to earlier in my life.

Now at 41 I'm probably indistinguishable in action from the group you've categorized as having a "deep seated need to win friends" not because I do actually have such a need, but because I realized my need to be vocally, publicly "right" was mostly a manifestation of a core lack of confidence, something which has since been mostly alleviated. Also, in retrospect, I was actually wrong about a lot of things I was sure I was right about because I was intelligent but not wise and the two are often divergent.
Rare Spanish Shipwreck from 17th Century Uncovered Off Panama
I love hacker news
That's very interesting (and I will never go on the daily show now if I disagree with them), but I am not sure that it applies here. The parent was discussing the interviews that Jon Stewart performs himself in the interview part of the show. Often when there is a serious ideological difference there they publish a long-form interview(20 minutes) which is clearly the whole interview.

The piece you link to seems to be more about the field pieces which are not what was being discussed, and not what the parent was comparing O'Reilly's interviews to.
There is nothing whatsoever in the Mozilla Foundation statement of values that is incompatible with whatever political stance Mr Eich had personally. Flushing such an important person out the door because you find his position bothersome is nothing short of repulsive.

But I'm sure you know this already. If you still don't give a damn, it's because you firmly believe that anyone that doesn't share your values on such a (fashionable) issue as gay marriage is a horrible person who deserves to be scorched clean off the company he founded.
Have you considered the possibility that some of your people are unmotivated because you act like a jerk to them, and you're perpetuating the problem?

If you'll forgive me quoting my own post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9117035): A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.
"Google was the only browser vendor actively trying to move the web stack beyond the technology swamp it's been mired in for so long."

Understand that Mozilla kind of is Google.

Where do you think Mozilla get all their money from?
I again challenge you to provide me with a single shred of evidence that in his 16 years at Mozilla Eich treated even one member of the LGBT community unfairly from his position of power.

But again, we're not worried about Eich's impact on Mozilla, which was, as you say, positive. I don't think he did abuse his power or hurt anybody by his actions at Mozilla - at least not from the 90's to 08 which is when the first inkling of his views became public.

More importantly, Mozilla does not exist in a vacuum - and in my mind, accepting this without protest equates to putting the success of a single company over the rights of untold numbers of people.

Let me try this another way. Put yourself in the shoes of an LGBT working there. Your boss appears to be a nice guy, very professional, a technical genius. He's up for promotion to C-E-frickin-O!

..and then you find out via the outrage machine that he's donating to groups whose /one and only/ reason for existing is to marginalize you.

Imagine how that would hit you.

What do you think that will do to your working relationship with that person?

Would you be proud to say you work at Mozilla after he becomes basically the guy running it? "Mozilla now run by a bigot" - and worse, that wouldn't even be an exaggeration!

Your boss apparently isn't such a nice guy after all.

Does it make at least little more sense now?

This role playing exercise aside. I really, truly, do not understand how you (the collective HN readers "you") can on one hand be upset at the community for expressing their displeasure at Mozilla (and sure, there were idiots that took it too far, but the consensus was loud and clear), and on the other hand, be perfectly okay with Eich reaching into his own wallet to help marginalize people (and having looked at the website again, linking Mozilla's name to it!![1]).

This view is fundamentally alien to me - I'm a geek, but at the end of the day, the people are more important than the computers. I cannot see the justice in placing Mozilla's well being over millions of people's basic rights.

[1]: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/donation/8930/
>The demand there is not infinite. It's not even close to infinite.

Neither is the supply of land.

The question is, can San Francisco build enough to satisfy this demand, without replacing so much of the existing housing stock that San Francisco doesn't look like San Francisco any more? I don't know. And maybe it's not important. Cities do evolve, after all.

But I do think the question needs to be asked, and debated.
I would like to hear the opinions of other PhDs on the validity of this comment. Specifically if it's a universal problems to all fields, and whether the actual PhD time can be cut short had it not been an actual issue?
It's not your job to care about the emotions or inner world of anyone around you. But you'll find that life works much better if you do.
> A collection of statements, all of which are false, is not guaranteed to be consistent.

Hmm. You are right, to be sure. I guess I was carelessly generalising from the fact that anything follows from a false statement.
I'm sure you can understand how if an article with religion at its core makes it to the front of HN, discussions about that religion are completely on topic and justified (and not at all generic).

This is not meant as a flame war or a tangent. When I say I find religion scary, it's in response to the article pointing out that a blogger who focused on the absence of religious tolerance was hacked to death with a machete by members of the very religion he stood against.

I don't think I'll come to your way of thinking about my post (no surprise) but I'm a bit confused why HN would allow an article to get to the front page if it doesn't want the contents therein discussed.

Edit in response to Being Kinder. Be Kind
http://boz.com/articles/be-kind.html
Hard to imagine this could be much of a debate. If it's not idempotent you can't use GET. Period.
Ah OK. In the quote I think the word "consistently" is significant, and I've not seen folks from the mainstream take issue with anything else he said other than the environmental skepticism stuff.

Anyway, I do recommend watching the lecture.
>*most

Can you give me some data to support your claim? Or do you abide by the motto "The louder I speak the righter I am?"
And it may well have been true at each point; wage stagnation goes back 50 years...
There's a difference between being offended at disagreement and being offended at someone who took action to remove your rights.
Money is a cog.

Details of economic systems, tax codes, social services, labor laws, job markets, trade agreements, and financial institutions are what "distributes" wealth.
It's terrible if it was for being offensive. What it should have been about was a lack of elegance and logic. Marriage should be a legal/tax/etc contract between 2 or more consenting entities that can legally enter into contracts. Anything else is a hack, and en engineer should know better.

(There's also the minor issue of running an org with policies directly against your own. While not technically a blocking issue, one must wonder about a person's commitment to something when they are actively against it in their personal life.)
The 808 was cool because it did drumz
I believe a jet engine can handle this with no issues. They're tested to pass birds through with no issues.
The question is old. It's been asked. It's been debated. Both question and debate were old when both of us were young.

The answer is: yes. The heart of San Francisco lives not in a brick or a stone or a board, but in the hearts of San Franciscans. Gold in peace, iron in war.
Which doesn't mean in the slightest that whomever disagrees with the majority deserves to be kicked out of the company he founded.
> The boss was giving someone else a favor, making them the lead of this now-important project, some up-and-coming hotshot. He made up an excuse about "bad attitude", while just using it as cover for backstabbing him.

so, basically someone who was competent and agreeable was favored by his boss to get a promotion, and the person who acted like a know-it-all dickhead 24/7 got sent to the basement.

that's a real shocker.
No, you're thinking of free markets. Free markets can work (inefficiently) by barter, which still distributes wealth without centralized authority. But barter is too inefficient (especially at scale).

You could say, then, that money is a technology for efficiently distributing wealth, without the need for some centralized authority (except perhaps for the issuer of the money).
A timestamp doesn't prevent replay attacks, it just time-limits them. Also, requiring time sync tends to be problematic -- many people have incorrect clocks. Finally, just because your protocol uses a timestamp at some position doesn't mean some other protocol won't interpret those bits in some other way. Removing server-controlled bits makes an attack harder but not necessarily impossible.
I'd like to think of money as debt the society owes the individual holder for past benefits the individual holder bestowed on society. That debt can be exchanged for more goods and services from society in return at any time. The value of the debt may fluctuate (inflation/deflation) depending on how much benefits other individual holders in society is providing.

EDIT: In practicality, not legally.
I could feasibly see a mathematician understanding all this but not being familiar with that symbol, which is mostly used in programming (math prefers a ≠ b instead of a != b).
AQUAPONICS 4 YOU -DOES AQUAPONICS 4 YOU REAL?
There are many leases with tax escalation clauses included. My last two apartment leases (2000-2002 and 2002-2007) in MA included those (3-part) clauses. http://www.masslegalhelp.org/housing/private-housing/ch5/tax...

The reasoning is multi-part:

1. It aligns tenant and landords by encouraging renters to vote against property tax increases. Renters can now think whether the services increase is worth the tax increase instead of only worrying about the benefit side as the cost side is 100% someone else problem absent an escalator.

2. It allows landlords to offer their property for rent without including a "holdback" for their guess as to their property tax increase.