shawnee_

The Kennebec hadn’t run free here since 1837.

Interestingly enough, it was Thoreau's inventory of species in these very streams and tributaries as documented in _The Maine Woods_, which can tell us how we're doing with the restoration of the waterways today. Thoreau's book was comprised of notes from three visits in 1846, 1853, and 1857, and he had a pretty early and close insight as to how bad the damage was from the get-go.

At the end of the book, in the appendix, he noted several introduced species. Since he often used "Indian" guides to help him navigate upstream, he also had the opportunity to learn a bit about what species were native and what were brought in by the newcomers. (Disclaimer: my mother was one-quarter indigenous to one of the tribes Thoreau mentions, so I've studied these texts pretty thoroughly).

Several interesting musings on the encroachment of the white man into these lands; this one especially:

Tahmunt said that he traded at Quebec, my companion inquired the meaning of the word Quebec, about which there has been so much question. He did not know, but began to conjecture. He asked what those great ships were called . that carried soldiers. " Men-of-war," we answered. " Well," he said, " when the English ships came up the river, they could not go any farther, it was so narrow there ; they must go back, go-back, that 's Que-bec." I mention this to show the value of his authority in the other cases.

[146 THE MAINE WOODS: https://archive.org/stream/mainewoods00thorrich/mainewoods00...]

Rascoff explained that Zillow really has “no skin in the commission game” when it comes to what real estate professionals get paid, comparing Zillow to information provider WebMD.

Not accurate at all. For one, Zillow could do about 1000 things to promote competition among realtors, but it doesn't do that.

It could remind people that in 1950, the Supreme Court ruled that putting a hard-coded "6 %" on a real estate contract is, in fact, illegal price fixing.

It could remind people that "6 percent" of a sales price often equates to a much larger number when it comes to equity lost (e.g. if you have 250K equity in a house worth 750K, the commission amounts to ~ 21.3333 % of your equity.

It could remind Realtors that attempting to get people to sign contracts that they refuse to negotiate on is coercion, and it could help people sue Realtors who participate in cartel-like practices.

But it doesn't do that.

For those interested: The Supreme Court case from 1950: UNITED STATES v. REAL ESTATE BOARDS https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/339/485.html

   Factual findings of the Court

   Enough has been said to show that under our decisions an illegal price-fixing scheme has 
   been proved, unless the [339 U.S. 485, 489] fixing of real estate commissions is not included 
   in the prohibitions of 3 of the Act. Price-fixing is per se an unreasonable restraint of trade. 
   It is not for the courts to determine whether in particular settings price-fixing serves an 
   honorable or worthy end. An agreement, shown either by adherence to a price schedule or by 
   proof of consensual action fixing the uniform or minimum price, is itself illegal under the 
   Sherman Act, no matter what end it was designed to serve.

it’s so similar to programming on a higher level.

Indeed it is. The logic of the `results` has to stand out relative to the result itself. A programmer can hide the logic without too much pushback; an accountant must not only unhide what is hidden, but explain every "trace route" behind what is hidden. In highly complex systems, this has to be done in a methodical way to ensure audit trails. A non-methodical audit trail is the sign of a bad accountant, or of fraud. One of the most insidious things in the accounting world today is the widening discrepancy between what companies are reporting to shareholders and what GAAP requires they report. Both GAAP and non-GAAP earnings must be reported together (for publicly-traded companies), but in a lot of tech companies, they are getting away with "selling" the non-FASB numbers to shareholders to deceive them that they are doing better than they are.

Another interesting comparison of the two: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaCQ5rcvfwhVNmLWdWydKBFDwnVZzexKePMxiy...

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"

The programmer made no reply.

It doesn't, really. Since there are umpteen ways to do things in GNU/Linux, developers often end up with less-than-ideal implementations for what they are trying to do using a single user account.

The single-user approach creates clashes between the network devs who want to build empires of containers they "own", and the stack-level bare metal purists who want the system to be as clean and secure as possible by isolating things where they should be isolated (to a single user instance for that purpose alone). This is not a new problem, nor a very well thought-out solution.

Containers are always a less-than-ideal implementation for people running Linux natively. The ideal way to sandbox in Linux is create a user account, download and test whatever code, see what breaks or infringes with its unique notion of "privileges", and delete the user when done.

But because you can't switch users on the same kernel when you're not running Linux natively, we have containers and all the messes they create. https://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/12/29/018234/linus-...

They failed the test and without this key innovation performing to spec I no longer have faith that Mastadon is any more than a technically complicated open source Twitter.

Maybe instead the question you should be asking is: who has the incentive to undertake such a resource-intensive attack? This seemed more a response targeted at Wil for promoting his logic regarding leaving Twitter, targeted at him directly after he reasoned why the good people of the world need to Quit Twitter.

Making new users feel unwelcome on Mastadon is, unfortunately, the easiest path for them to fend off the competitor. It would not surprise me in the least to discover this attack was, in fact, coordinated by some entity with strong ties to Twitter. Of course the attackers want it to look like what instead happened was a "famous person verification" problem within the Fediverse; bad and negative press about Mastadon are _exactly_ what the attackers wanted here. And, unfortunately, it worked. There is always financial motive.

The next crash will be student loans.

Yes, and it will be ugly. It was already getting bad before the tax code overhaul, but now that the payment of interest on student loans is not deductible (by anyone, namely diligent debt-paying low-income grads for whom the tax deduction was originally intended, those making < $80K), it is kind of inevitable.

little by way of tool chain integration

Have a look at nGraph: http://ngraph.nervanasys.com/docs/latest/optimize/generic.ht...

Co-design for hardware+software is tough, for sure. But the reality is that hardware has to be present to build the software on top of it. People need something to play with. So the "bag on the side" of FPGAs here is kind of like Lego blocks for cache / acceleration. If you are running a DNN for inference, for example, cache is usually your bottleneck. Rent GPUs to train the model, figure out your bottleneck, and build your own isolated and local system for the "expensive lot of folks" to create the valuable IP.

The best thing about Google News (the old Google news) was that it was like being able to search microfiche of all the old-school news publications (but digitally): articles written by journalists for publications that happened to also be digitized. You could scroll back and back to as many results as the engine could find on any given topic. As a research tool, it was unparalleled in its ability to help journalists link facts to unbiased sources and to multiple sources.

When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.

I had to stop using it all together.

Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.

Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.

Thanks for the reply.

What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion).

Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread.

Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.

The obvious thing you are missing is that it is developers who want to build rent-producing "income HOAs" ... they are the driver creating the problem. Who else would be lobbying for the kinds of restrictive zoning that creates these problems?

Well HOA fees go to things like maintenance of roads, maintenance of community-owned spaces (landscaping, parks, etc). When HOA fees are high covering all these things the city's taxes would normally cover, the cities have less money all around. Fractured spaces glued together.

It's basically siphoning money that would be going to public infrastructure to make private infrastructure. There's also statistical evidence that people running the boards of these HOAs don't actually select the most value-oriented bidders, they reward their family and friends.

Edit sorry, old bookmark nevermind the link.

it seems clear that either a dense arrangement or the countryside (if working remotely) are preferable to the burbs, where you get high costs and poor access.

HOAs are primarily to blame for the high cost and poor access of suburbia. Multiple gated communities all each attempting to create their own "privately-owned by the community" parks and recreation. Aside from HOA fees (which are basically taxes), the gluing together of all these private developments makes "freedom" and walkable / public access an illusion. Homeowners end up double paying and cities' infrastructure suffers from lack of funds.

Density is best if it is done right, but the HOA problem incentives fracture and disconnect. Thus: all public spaces in all densely-planned areas must be publicly-owned. The HOA cannot create walled gardens.

if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation

Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely.

You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.

It's hard for me to agree with much of anything the author states here. This snippet is why:

I don’t teach network programming and haven’t tested these specific ideas. But, in my specialty of software design and code quality, I use exercises built on similar principles all the time.

In the real world, learners do not come packaged with all the tools and links and resources they need to hammer out their solutions. Classrooms are great when you can have a textbook and pre-defined problems and such, but that is not now it works outside of the classroom (or the virtual classroom, as the case may be).

"Software design" is not an isolated component from network programming. It is that bridge between big data always getting piped in to (app / product / website) from the network, and how to help ( user / customer / other developer) where most engineers are hired to create value.

It is a good idea to attempt to design software with "code quality"; conceptually that sounds like a fantastic idea. But it is impossible to do without also factoring in a predictive element of how it will be used or accessed or even discovered over networks, stores, whatever.

I don't understand how cash-settled futures are meant to provide price stability to a market.

Interestingly, thrash and volatility provide stability (and profit) to the entities that take a cut of every transaction with a transaction cost. Think about brokers of any sort (real estate, stocks, insurance); they do not care whether the price momentums are going up or down, only that they can extract the maximum "equity" out of each and every transaction. Since fear-based selling (or fear-based buying by folks with fear of "losing out" on the next big thing) tends to increase overall thrash and volatility (and thus overall volume of selling), it is kind of the perfect scheme for them.

News and momentum of any sort can be exploited by insiders with information.

So, because you cannot trade apartments without spending significantly more money, there's a couple of hour-long commutes instead.

Here is where the analysis should happen. All of the "significantly more money" aspect boils down to transactional costs. Transactional costs in rentals will always, always be higher than transactional costs of ownership. Ownership's transactional costs get offset, (to only a small extent in the Bay area, but it is not nothing), by the equity the owner has accumulated.

Renters never accumulate equity to offset their transactional cost of "trading". The paper (and all of the anti rent control camp) constantly misconstrues lower-than-market rent as "savings". It is not savings; it's merely delaying the inevitable transactional cost of "trading".

The "lucrative" aspect of many of these businesses results because they register themselves as 501c3 orgs; yet they clearly operate for-profit enterprises, with active solicitation at jails and courtrooms.

This is AKA the body broker model. There was a discussion about it on HN not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024185

Report body brokers: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f13909.pdf

Paraphrasing, but it doesn't matter. I'd applied because I admired it as a company that could help you find answers for pretty much anything. I wanted to be a part of that.

Yet clearly was it the intent of the email to inform me in a very specific way that they had scrutinized and deemed my skill set useless for "all" jobs at Google. They went out of their way to tell me that no jobs at Google would be a fit for my "experience and qualifications".

This was 2006 and it had IPO'd not long before. I'd been out of grad school for about two years at that point, and I knew that "growing" companies are supposed to need all kinds of people. It was baffling.

Long story short: this (and other) rejections rendered my self esteem pretty wrecked. This one though I look back to as the cruelest one and what more or less launched me into a pretty severe downward spiral that lasted about four years.

That Google is still (condescendingly) rejecting creative and intelligent people like Mr Howell for not fitting into their mold ... that is still baffling.

they’re an algorithm company, not a product company. As a result, their core, algorithm based, functionality is successful, but they fail at new product design over and over, creating and retiring flawed products ad infinitum.

Interesting that this refusal to adapt still persists. After reading this article, I dug up my old (2006) rejection email from Google; and just as I remembered, it wasn't quite so nice. This is basically what it said:

"After careful review of your qualifications, we've determined that you have nothing. None of your skills are a match for anything at Google, and we don't foresee that changing any time in the near future. Good luck in your endeavors."

I'd applied as a technical writer.

Today I'm writing documentation at Intel for data scientists, engineers, and machine learning experts. Because guess what? Algorithms will get you only so far. Sometimes you don't need to add more engineers to solve a difficult problem, you just need better documentation.

They opened up the archives (free) after announcing it would be ceasing publication: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-pu...

If you don't care to click on the OP's pay-per-download link: https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/pdf/dljdownload.php

"Pardon me" but rental income is deductible more than it is taxable; everything to do with owning a property and generating "investment income" from it is incentivized to be deductible; it's a great and super fast way to make lots of money.

I don't know what you do for a living, but I have two graduate degrees in accounting and economics, as well a decade and a half researching and studying this very problem. The solution I outline would work... if the goal is to empower people with "equity" as Sam's article suggests he wants to.

taxing wealth is probably the single most efficient way to do it.

It's not taxing wealth so much as taxing the mechanisms that create undue inequality that would work: yes, I'm talking about taxing rental income. The number one driver preventing people from building savings is draining their income through rent.

The solution is sort of obvious, but hated by people who love the AirBnB model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14493769

[save]

But the very existence of their project raises an important question: If two volunteer data science students who are barely out of their teens can figure out how to hang out Twitter’s bad-actor bots, why doesn’t Twitter do the same?

Twitter has every incentive to lie, to minimize, to shove this under the rug. As a fairly recent IPO with virtually flat/negative user growth, and lots of fed up people (like me) abandoning the platform all together, it is desperate to squelch any negative info that Wall Street might use against it.

Unfortunately, there's no favorable outcome for Twitter shareholders in either case. Twitter fesses up about its actual percent of bots (reality is likely closer to 50 percent than the 5 percent it claims) and its numbers go down even more. Twitter continues to lie and folks like the ones in this article expose them ... not good either because every advertising dollar it's getting is "truthfully" reaching fewer actual humans.

What makes you think it's hyperbole? It's not hyperbole; it was my experience, as a female attempting to make a living while working in technology, living there.

Not anymore it isn't; this goes 100X for women.

Women being paid less means they are forced to live in the crappier parts of towns: the squalor, the commute and the danger are significantly more.

When that movie "the Social Network" came out is about when I noticed it changed. It became literally overrun with sleazy easy-money landlords, big corporate entities buying up the apartments, jacking the rents, etc.

There are thousands of better cities than any one in SF bay area. Technology works anywhere, you can work anywhere. My quality of life improved 1000 percent when I left California.

[edit]

I'm not quite sure why it's so hard for readers to fathom that women being paid significantly less than their male peers would be a key factor affecting what is "affordable" to them, and thus their ability to live safely in the Bay area.

The question I was responding to was: "Is it worth it?" and my advice is that it is not. It is especially not worth it for women. Why would it be worth putting yourself in danger where all you can afford is the worst apartment in the worst neighborhood, 70-125 minutes away (each direction) from your workplace?

The golden era of opportunity in Silicon Valley has passed. The real estate factor is now baked too deeply into every facet of life there. And as long as the AirBnb model ensures that only the landlords thrive, the problem will always be bigger than the solution.

While agree that the pricing is not beneficial to startups themselves, churn is exactly what WeWork wants because it's what their business model is founded on.

All predatory leasing systems are designed this way. In WeWork's case, as a landlord it does not care about the success or failure of any individual company; it cares only about running as many renters as it can through its overpriced bar / coffeehouse. In the process its goal is to extract as much of the founders' equity as possible through "addons" in fees and such to the rents.

Does not need to be trained? The writer maybe wanted to say it does not need to be programmed in the traditional way.

Nope, "trained" is correct. The current state of deep learning involves "training" and "inference" as distinct components where entirely different kinds of math are applied to each. GPUs can do training as training is kind of "dumb" and repetitive. CPUs, however, can do training and inference (and also can do allocations among resources dedicated to training and inference).

Sure, GPUs are the trendy thing being pumped by stock market day traders these days, but they are only about as efficient as the black Model T Ford in the "traditional" sense.

The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to try to exclude DRM is Mozilla, and unfortunately, if they do that, the users will switch to the browser that makes watching Netflix easiest.

This is simply not true. Netflix's entire business model is based around one thing: video content delivery. It started with DVDs in red envelopes, and has evolved to be app-based streaming now. Neither of these two things has any relevance to web browsers.

Netflix's wish to be able to provide its content on as many platforms as possible for the lowest cost? Yes, that would make a lot more sense for why they are pushing this. Not an enticing enough argument for destroying web browser-based DRMs imo.

People on this forum take the latitude to discuss the differences between the "letter of the law" and the "spirit of the law". They are both supposed to be factored into legal investigations and judgments when deciding someone's guilt or innocence.

Someone who has deep understanding of the letter of law and uses it to semantically defy the spirit of the law (like tax evasion by exploiting loopholes that were not designed for their use case) do, in my opinion, deserve criminal punishment.

The tax code was designed to tax entities who use more than their fair share of public resources to make private profit. Think about the legions of WalMart semi-trucks ripping up highways that most taxpayers pay for; it gets to profit from its use of infrastructure that it uses way more of than the average taxpayer.

Obeying the intent of these kinds of laws as they were written originally requires ethics that many corporate individuals simply don't have.