Tips for writing efficient Bash scripts - <AUTHOR> http://hacktux.com/bash/script/efficient

<comment><USER2> This stuff is good to know -- I have found the "sed -e" trick and doing pattern matching inside awk help cut down on typing quite a bit. They may even make the script more readable, once you become familiar with these idioms.

On the other hand, I don't know if these type of performance optimizations will have many real-world applications. For example, if you are calling grep and awk inside a loop, and find it unacceptable slow, I don't think you are going to see a big performance gain by calling only awk. At that point, your best bet may be to write that part of your script in Perl (or C, like I did once back in the times before Perl was mainstream).

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or do most of these seem like premature optimization? I would rather use one command for filtering lines (grep) and another for filtering columns (awk) than try to do both at once.

<comment><USER4> I generally take the definition of "premature optimization" to be "going out of your way to improve performance". If you know a faster (better?) way, use it. Sometimes, people seem to confuse YAGNI and premature optimization with just "knowing better".

For your grep example, unless you are using the output of grep for something else, there's no reason not to use the awk version except ignorance (which I'm plenty guilty of re: awk and sed...)</comment></comment>


Foreign IT pros in USA get paid more than Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14/h1bs_paid_more_than_yanks/

<comment><USER2> How is it surprising that when a company has to hire out from the global talent pool, rather than the local one, they have to pay a premium?

If the local talent pool were that good (and hence worth the $$$), they wouldn't need to look outside it.

Flip the question around in your head; how do salaries for ex-pat Americans compare to the locals in foreign countries? I bet that an American working in Beijing/Dubai/Hong Kong makes more on average than the local equivalent does. Why? Because they aren't really equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER3> My personal experience is that people who change countries for a career really give a shit about that career.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand that POV.

I have a friend working for Microsoft in Seattle, and he was willing to sacrifice living in his home country for the chance to work with some of the top people in our profession (he worked with Anders Hejlsberg on C# as a SDET).

I doubt that is "giving a shit"...

Also, he was the top talent in my class (graduated on time, which is HUGE here in Uruguay, and rose to the top very fast) - no wonder he should be paid more than your average US developer.

OTOH, I wouldn't expect myself to be paid above the average US programmer, but then again, I haven't had the drive to emigrate.

<comment><USER5> I think you may have misunderstood nailer's point. I think what he was trying to say is that if someone feels compelled to leave his country (and his family and everything he knows) to further his career elsewhere, then that must mean he must be really committed to that career path, and probably has the drive and motivation to succeed in that area, to a greater level than someone who wouldn't make that same sacrifice

<comment><USER4> Ahh... you mean "give a shit" signifies that they care deeply for it.. (as opposed to "don't give a shit").

Not the most fortunate choice of words, but I get your point now (remember I'm not a native English speaker :) ).

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Yes. Giving a shit means caring. Not giving a shit means not caring.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk promises demo of a working Neuralink device on Friday - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402240/neuralink-august-2020-event-brain-machine-interface-working-demonstration <comment><USER2> With connected brains, connected cars, all apps and data in the cloud, cyber security is basically world security.</comment>


Checklists: an operational gift - <AUTHOR> https://tech.buzzfeed.com/checklists-an-operational-gift-aaf42cf0be12 <comment><USER2> Before settling on a checklist, I've used and not regretted doing workflow process mapping, as SIPOC as possible, to identify unneeded, repeated, out-of- order steps and manual/waiting points.

As a visual, it's pretty easy for all to follow. If short on decoration, it can also be put up as a poster on the wall.</comment>


Ask HN: Best VPN for China as of August 2019 - <AUTHOR> I'll be in China for a few weeks this year and wondering what the current best VPN solution is. It's been two years since I last went, and what works seems to change on a monthly basis, so I'm looking for the most recent trip reports. <comment><USER2> 1\. ShadowsocksR (SSR) is probably still the single most popular method for crossing the wall (翻墙), despite the fact that it is no longer maintained.

2\. The original Shadowsocks (SS) is still maintained. Some users are reporting that the GFW can now detect and block SS servers that do not use some form of obfuscation. One interesting innovation is the Cloak plugin for Shadowsocks-Libev. This aims to disguise the SS server as an HTTPS server.

3\. V2Ray offers more features and is less likely to be blocked than SS, though it is harder to configure. The graphical user interface (GUI) for V2Ray is provided by separate projects such as V2RayN for Windows and BifrostV for Android.

4\. The trojan-gfw/trojan project on Github has been in development since October 2017. It claims to imitate HTTPS so well as to be undetectable. Configuration is slightly more complex than SS/SSR. [https://github.com/trojan-gfw/trojan](https://github.com/trojan-gfw/trojan)

5\. The ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI project on Github claims to be able to bypass deep packet inspection (DPI). [https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI](https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI)

6\. A few netizens use Tor with the meek-azure pluggable transport, though the Tor Browser is itself difficult to obtain in China. MY PROTIP: USE SNOWFLAKE instead of meek azure

7.Wireguard may still work, though its protocol could conceivably be detected and blocked by the GFW at some later date. NOW IS BANNED

[https://medium.com/@phoebecross/bypass-gfw- china-2019-9d293b...](https://medium.com/@phoebecross/bypass-gfw- china-2019-9d293b322e20)

</comment><comment><USER3> All VPN's are basically illegal there, so its luck of the draw. All of the big providers get blocked pretty fast and I've heard stories about China blocking swaths of AWS too... Apparently the best bet is to get a US SIM with data roaming to China...

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't.

#1 - It's illegal and they tend to be somewhat serious about that.

#2 - Any major/reputable provider is going to be blocked.

#3 - Any unknown provider can't be trusted.

#4 - A lot of the VPN's they allow to work are because they're tap'ing the traffic anyways.</comment>


Google asks patent office to reexamine four Oracle patents - <AUTHOR> http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/02/google-asks-patent-office-to-reexamine.html

<comment><USER2> google (according to Florian):

        Even if such files were identical to Oracle files
        (which they are not), their use is de minimis and
        is not actionable."

Florian:

        This baffles all description. If you think about it,
        this "logic" would constitute a carte blanche for
        everyone with a large software project to steal smaller
        parts of other people's creations. Google's less-than-
        one-percent-claim may very well be true, but this kind
        of reasoning must be rejected altogether. Imagine a
        music publisher who puts out a collection of 101 songs
        and steals one or more of those songs from different
        other companies,

Example is wrong:

The copying is not on "song" scope, but on a smaller scope.

If nobody was allowed to use a sentence that was ever used before, most writers would face a serious problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oracle presented 12 files to the court. I would consider a source code file to a song. Just look at the files I presented here: [http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-evidence- support...](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-evidence-supports- oracles-case.html)

I have updated the blog post on reexamination and dismissal of copyright claims with an explanation concerning the scope of what was copied. So thanks for raising the issue, even though you quoted selectively because you left out the reference to 12 source files.

<comment><USER3> > _I would consider a source code file to [be] a song._

To be fair, a song basically stands on its own. It may be part of a larger work, like an album or symphony, but these things are collections more than structures. The album does not fall apart if a song is omitted.

Songs themselves however are structures with dependencies: melody, harmony, rhythm, phrases, riffs, etc. If you remove the melody or the rhythm, the song is harmed in a much more fundamental way than an album or symphony would be by the removal of a song.

In other words, albums are _composed of_ songs, but they are not _built on_ songs. Songs are _built on_ melody, rhythm, etc.

Now, back to source files. Applications are _built on_ source files. It is tough to say what source files are _built on_ , but they are _composed of_ lines of code.

The analogy of a source file to a song breaks down, because the source file is only useful because the application is built on it. If we are determined to use this metaphor, applications are more analogous to songs, and source files are more analagous to structural elements like melody and rhythm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even a melody is protected by copyright law if it's longer than X tones (X depends on the jurisdiction).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By the time this is resolved, the smartphone platform will have been disrupted by something even smaller and more convenient.</comment>


What's New in DevTools (Chrome 68) - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools <comment><USER2> I was curious how they implemented the side-effect checking, so I dug my way from the dev tools frontend eventually into v8, where it turns out to basically be a bunch of whitelist checks over bytecode and builtin javascript methods [https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/e48d9788a4ef21d3bfffbc691bb02c...](https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/e48d9788a4ef21d3bfffbc691bb02c794445c089/src/debug/debug- evaluate.cc#L603)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Chrome really got traction over FF because of these dev tools.

I used to think "Firebug" was the greatest thing since slice bread when along came Chrome with its dev tools and soon every web developer started switching to Chrome because making sites with it is just too easy. When it comes to the internet I've often seen that targeting the technical users can pay back in many folds.

<comment><USER4> Also adding new APIs quickly means people end up using the browser just to play with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Eager Evaluation is pretty cool! It will help me discover APIs a lot easier. I have two questions about this:

1) what happens when evaluating is going to take a lot longer that usual?

2) why the arguments list hint is using Flow syntax for optional (question mark before argument name)?

<comment><USER6> [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools#e...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools#eagerevaluation):

> DevTools does not eager evaluate if the expression causes side effects.

<comment><USER7> Long-running doesn't imply with side effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For fans of eager evaluation, there's a VSCode plugin called Quokka that inlines similar functionality as code annotations as you work.

[https://quokkajs.com](https://quokkajs.com)

The youtube channel 'funfunfunction' (@mpj) is where I first learned about the tool.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4brAobC2Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4brAobC2Hc) (JS iterators explanation using Quokka)

(They started sponsoring his channel several months after he began singing their tool's praises.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Excited for Eager Evaluation! I can't count how many times I've had to re-rype selectors when exploring the DOM in a project.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow BigInt support [1] sweet! Finally 64 bit integers in JavaScript. Proposal here [2].

[1]: [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools#b...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/devtools#bigint)

[2]: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- bigint/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/tc39/proposal- bigint/blob/master/README.md)</comment>


Coyotes Poised to Infiltrate South America - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/coyotes-infiltrate-south-america-180974016/ <comment><USER2> In my island province here in Canada the biggest animal was the red fox (vulpes vulpes) until about ten years ago. Then suddenly coyotes appeared seemingly overnight. It drove foxes into the towns and cities or killed them off in rural areas.

It's amazing to witness such a sudden change although I've read they arrived in 1983. It's very densely populated here but also rural it's many small towns spread out plus two bigger cities. Coyotes were easily spotted since they stood out compared to a fox or even a dog.

It's not really a true coyote it's canis latrans or the "eastern coyote", or "coywolf". They're bigger than a true coyote, they're smarter, and they live in packs of a dozen.

The Coywolf is also more dangerous than a coyote or wolf. There are reports from people who were out walking and upon seeing a large dog they turned back around. When walking back they discovered they were being herded into a trap of several Coywolves. One woman in Cape Breton was killed by Coywolves when she was out for a walk in a wooded area.

<comment><USER3> > One woman in Cape Breton was killed by Coywolves when she was out for a walk > in a wooded area

Yes, this did occur and it was a tragedy. But worth keeping things in perspective: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_attack)

Three fatal attacks recorded in the last 100 years. And so few non-fatal attacks that the wikipedia page can list nearly all of them. Even the attack you mention, Taylor Mitchell, it sounds as though this was one particular pair of animals that were far more aggressive than typical.

Coyotes are generally big cowards. They're successful in the anthropocene because they stay out of sight and mind.

Coywolves are more dangerous, perhaps, but we should keep things in perspective about _how_ dangerous we're talking about. If they were ten times more deadly than coyotes, they'd still be a orders of magnitude less dangerous than sharks, bees, and lightning. (All of which are unfathomably less dangerous than drunk drivers).

<comment><USER4> > they'd still be a orders of magnitude less dangerous than sharks, bees, and > lightning.

And well, dogs:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_United_States)

BTW, since we just adopted a very sweet chocolate lab mix who according to wisdom panel has 25% American Staffordshire Terrier in him, I'll also share this article pointing out that breed is a poor predictor of bite risk:

[https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/literature- reviews/dog-...](https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/literature-reviews/dog- bite-risk-and-prevention-role-breed)

Gratuitous pic of our new family member:

[https://ibb.co/thq4sRG](https://ibb.co/thq4sRG)

<comment><USER5> Did you read the list of fatal dog attacks? I toolk a cursory look came to exactly the opposite conclusion as the second avma.org link did, which seemed to be engaged in mental gymnastics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Other than eating the occasional housecat (which is bad) Coyotes, in general, seem like good partners for our current urban/suburban life. They make hidden dens in our parks, like to eat rats and other small rodents and are scared of dogs and households.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/12/08/131876027/6...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2010/12/08/131876027/60-wild- coyotes-patrol-chicago-and-occasionally-stop-at-convenience-stores)

<comment><USER7> Once coyotes establish themselves, you can never get rid of them. If you try to exterminate them, they just start having larger litters until their population recovers. They are adaptable and cunning. I hope that South America's animals are ready for them, because they can permanently change an ecosystem.

<comment><USER8> Big Felines and wolves erradicate it. Is just that we, humans are not good at that.

<comment><USER9> Big felines and wolves don't do well in urban/suburban environments. Coyotes do.

<comment><USER10> The irony: we kill large scary predators, but inevitably medium sized predators replace them. People and cattle are not terrorized but our Shih Tzus and kitty cats are.

<comment><USER8> Yep, It even has a name in Ecology: Mesopredator release. You can have one wolf or "twenty" coyotes in the same area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fascinating article, highlighting that the coyote is one of the few species to thrive in the Anthropocene. How do such populations cross significant barriers such as the Panama Canal? I could imagine a coyote or two crossing, but how do enough breeding pairs cross?

<comment><USER12> My guess is simply by trotting across a bridge or roadway. I've come across coyotes in Chicago and they're fearless. I was walking along a major road at around 5PM and a big, fat one that had been running down the sidewalk ran right past me and bolted across the street into a wooded area of a cemetery. I was kind of zoned out and hadn't even noticed it until it was right upon me.

They've happily walked into shops with open doors too.

[https://coyotesincities2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/urba...](https://coyotesincities2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/urbancoyotechicagosuntimes450092900_b9bead8ebf_o1.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The interesting question is why did not happened before. This would suggest that big felines are retreating (and that coyotes trive in urban areas of course)

The golden jackal in the same way is returning to its old domains in Europa, for some reason is a global trend. Maybe control of distemper has triggered something, or maybe climate is more accurate now for they.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Then, around the turn of the 20th century, nature's barriers began to crumble. Forests began to fragment,"

It's impressive how wrong that statement is. 1900 is when forests stopped fragmenting, not when they started. Between 1630 and 1900 forested area of north America declined from 46 percent to 34 percent. That declined only slightly to 33 percent in 1997 and has since increased to 36.2 percent.

<comment><USER14> Fragmenting and loss of overall area are not the same thing.

A fragmented drinking cup may weigh the same as an intact one, but one of them is a lot better at holding water.

A power line through a forest, for example, incurs minimal deforestation, but provides a highway for animals to transit through the surrounding forest.

<comment><USER9> I would think that power lines are a minimal impact. What probably really hurts is some species have roam areas of dozens to hundreds of square miles. With the introduction of roads and urban areas to break up some of the ecosystems that spanned multiple states, for example, had to have a much more dramatic effect. Fencing, road barriers, etc. Create choke points and make it harder especially for large predators to thrive. The Florida panther was not even an especially large feline but it did occupy a central place at the top of the food chain in Florida and now its population has been decimated due to fractured ecosystems and each one needing about 75-150 square miles of roam area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is not unusual, at least on large timescales. Life finds a way.

If you want to read about larger migrations have a look at The Great American Biotic Exchange.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2987556/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2987556/)

</comment><comment><USER16> We've had them roaming through the middle of the city of Houston for well over a dozen years. This local news article from a couple months ago has tips for how to handle them in your yard:

[https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/local/urban- coyotes...](https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/local/urban-coyotes-in- your-backyard-heres-how-to-keep-them- out/285-59e4514c-d081-4dc1-be81-9723e94008cd)

</comment><comment><USER17> Coyotes are on my lawn regularly. Once there was a litter of seven, that dwindled to 5 by the fall. They liked to play in the yard.

I never bothered them, they didn't bother me, though they'd watch me carefully.

There's an eagle nest nearby, and the eagles are often circling above.

Amazingly, I live in the middle of the city.

<comment><USER18> > Amazingly, I live in the middle of the city.

I live within a Boston postal code, and we have at least one coyote in our neighborhood. That was a surprise even coming from nearby Arlington where coyotes are not uncommon. Nobody expected we'd have one chillin among the concrete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes.

<comment><USER20> I know an old lady who swallowed a dog. She swallowed the dog to chase the cat to chase the bird to chase the spider to chase the fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The crab-eating fox and the coyote may soon swap territories, initiating the first American cross-continental exchange in more than three million years"

If you don't count humans

</comment><comment><USER22> Ok so apparently they would have to get through the equatorial (Amazon) forest first

My bet is that it's not going to happen. It's not really a place where that kind of animal will thrive

<comment><USER23> Yeah, the Darien Gap - well done to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thought it was only the repulsive rats that benefit from the human ever- expanding footprint. Interesting to know other species are also adjusting.

<comment><USER25> Domestic dogs, many crops, and feral-descended populations (like wild pigs and pigeons) also benefit

<comment><USER26> Strange list. Other domestic animals (cats, pigs, chickens...) benefit the same way domestic dogs do. That's the whole point of being domesticated.

<comment><USER25> It certainly would be a strange list if it were exhaustive. It was just a random list of examples to make the point that anything humans perceive as beneficial are reproducing at massive rates.

Food animals (like cows) are perhaps not fitting anyone's definition of "doing well", but they're certainly reaching record-high population counts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Linux ready for desktop? tl;dr – NO - <AUTHOR> http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html <comment><USER2> This is a re-submission. Previous discussions:

• [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214) (368 comments)

• [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757785) (2 comments)

• [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616146)

<comment><USER3> Interesting how people editorialize the title.

<comment><USER4> That's against the site rules, which ask people to use the original title _unless it is misleading or linkbait_. Submitters: note how that does not say "add more linkbait".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am using Debian as my main desktop (laptop in this case) for the last 8 years... sure I am not the only one.

I have suspend/hibernate, great Gnome experience, no issues to run presentations or use public printers, really stable and very fast experience, and I did not configure any system aspect to make it work, just installed the distribution and that works out of box.

Well, I am very happy with Linux desktop. Just presenting a contra-example :)

<comment><USER6> What laptop are you using to get such great compatibility match?

<comment><USER7> I bought the new Dell Precision 5510 (Business version of the new XPS 15) this week.

With a 4.4 kernel, Everything seems to work more-or-less fine. There's one or two issues with the graphics stack (HiDPI display, Nvidia Card), but these have workable solutions.

Heck, my last laptop (Sony Vaio Z), more-or-less worked too.

I think you've just got to follow one rule: Intel, Intel, Intel.

<comment><USER8> "more-or-less worked" is the story of my 15+ year history with Linux as a desktop. Unfortunately these is always one or two small but important thing which doesn't quite work which always eventually sends me back to windows/OS X.

<comment><USER9> Not trying to troll here, but in my experience this is true as well. You know what the culprit usually is? PULSEAUDIO ... oh my. I appreciate that audio is a complex solution, but it seems that even suspend issues often come back to, "oh, well pulseaudio isn't letting it ..." _sigh_

<comment><USER8> Funny you should say that. Pulseaudio, and not getting it to work reliably with Skype, was what one the main things that drove me away from Linux on my latest attempt to switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Computing-wise that three week vacation turned out to be very relaxing. > Machine would suspend and resume without problem, Wi-Fi just worked, audio > did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the > kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with > the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered

For three weeks every system works. After six months every system breaks. Even Windows 10 and Mac OSX developed various strange bugs (or annoying idiosyncrasies) after few months of my use.

<comment><USER11> You seem to be doing something strange. The (Linux,Windows,Android) systems under my control (mine+family) seem to be working rather well for _years_ , without any special sauce on my part, or the users'.

<comment><USER10> I don't do anything beyond installing, uninstalling and upgrading software. I don't tamper with the system itself, don't use any automatic system cleaners, decrapifiers and such.

For example my Windows 10 now got stuck on some system upgrade and periodically informs me about that with fullscreen message box and sound gets stuck for fraction of a second from time to time when I watch movies and games I'm playing get stuck from time to time for few seconds when I'm running them from one SSD but not the other.

My Mac OSX gets stuck on accessing network share and refuses to continue until I restart finder, also prefers WiFi when cable connection is available despite wifi being lower on "set service order".

Haven't run Linux for last few years as a main system but I'd surely find some stuff that stopped working after few months or in some circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of points there make sense for power users only. If you need just basic internet station (no gaming, professional video/audio editing etc) then linux works almost perfectly.

<comment><USER13> Any OS is good for a "basic internet station". Today, a school-age hacker can probably hack together a rudimentary desktop OS for running Chrome and Firefox with no advanced audio/video codecs. But Linux is no school project, in fact as an OS it's almost as mature as Windows in terms of their age. And we all know Linux is quite good, almost unbeatable on the server side.

But for the desktop side, there is no excuse for not having your video, audio and networking sorted and polished to death. Improving your battery life or saving internet traffic while on cellular data is not "professional video/audio", it has become pretty much standard computer experience today.

<comment><USER14> I've a HP Windows 8.1 machine, added an Intel wireless card with Bluetooth. Bluetooth pretty much disappears after a suspend. And networking can sometimes die and only recover after a reboot. The control panels/diagnostics for both networking and bluetooth are also really sucky (and admin in general on 8.1 is pretty horrible). So don't be under the illusion that Windows is any better.

Bluetooth, how it works, how to use it on Linux is also an Enigma. And that's been patchy on my Thinkpad, but I haven't had that much of a joyous experience using Bluetooth on any device.

In short: 'they' could all try harder.

<comment><USER13> Well, to be fair Bluetooth itself is incredibly difficult to deal with on all levels, just like any other committee-driven thing out there. It's a mess that I doubt can ever be fixed.

As for WiFi, my experience with Apple devices is mostly positive, or definitely better than on any other platform. So WiFi is quite possible to get right.

<comment><USER14> As a consumer you still get that sinking feeling of something that doesn't quite work. it's all glitchy.

Has Bluetooth been bettered? I was hoping V4 would iron out wrinks. Wireless applications that are simple to use could be really, really great. That's what I thought the initial promise of Bluetooth was. I have some simple wants, like file exchange, control a media player remotely etc. Send audio output to another device etc.

The last office I worked in, a colleague had a modern Apple laptop, and he had connection issues with the wireless router. It wouldn't connect. Lots of fudging about with it. A fix was falling back to a slower speed to get it to work. There are issues with most hardware and software.

The wireless issues/fixes suggested for my HP are pretty ridiculous, removing drivers, installing in a certain order, barring updates etc. Very technical.

I don't think I've ever owned a machine/OS that hasn't had some problem, including an old Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Android contains the only Linux component - the kernel"

Well, only the kernel IS actually Linux. A Linux-kernel based *nix OS in itself, which is usually wrongly assumed as Linux, is not in fact Linux (or not quite). In this regard Android is just like a lot of other Linux-kernel based distributions, no mater that it runs on an older/modified kernel.

<comment><USER13> That's not entirely correct. Linux kernel is Linux kernel; what we call "Linux" usually also includes the GNU userland. And then there are "Linux flavours" that only differ in the way they screw up packaging and updates of the kernel and the userland.

<comment><USER16> What you call "flavors", most people call "distributions". And you are wrong; "Linux" is the name of the kernel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel and works rather well. There is a paragraph dismissing Android as a desktop OS, but ChromeOS (including the Chromebox) is very close to a classic desktop experience, especially if you consider typical consumer use cases.

</comment><comment><USER18> Based on the number of issues I've had with either OS, Windows 10 is much less ready for desktop than Ubuntu.

In fact, using Windows 8.1 or 10 I can't get 1080p video over HDMI without screen tearing.

With Ubuntu, I can.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure it's even "ready for the server".

I have a server without a monitor I'd like to VNC to. Unfortunately X doesn't start without a physical monitor plugged in because it uses it for autodetection. It's such a silly problem that you can even buy fake "monitor" dongles to plug in to trick X into thinking that there is one.

I don't feel like spending money on a software problem so I followed the standard workaround - create a static xorg.conf file. This is very suboptimal because what happens if I later plug in a real monitor?

Ok so now X starts. Sort of. Actually lightdm starts and I still can't get X11vnc to connect to the `:0` display. Apparently there is a workaround involving the MIT magic cookie but at this point I've given up.

In fact does X even support monitor hot-plugging?

Oh and also, if the wifi connection goes down and X isn't running it doesn't automatically reconnect! Wtf? I assume this is because the thing that does the reconnecting is a GUI tool of some sort.

Madness.

<comment><USER16> > _I have a server without a monitor I 'd like to VNC to._

That's your problem right there. You can't (or, rather, _don't_ ) "VNC" to Unix servers. For normal remote access, you use SSH. If you _really_ need to run a graphical X program _continuously_ on a server, you run a _virtual_ X server program like "Xvfb", and point your graphical X program to that. You can then "VNC" all you like to this virtual X server. All without a monitor or even a graphics card or a mouse on the actual server.

This thinking – the idea that a server has something one can refer to as " _the_ " screen, or " _the_ " mouse – is completely and utterly wrong, and betrays a thinking born from Microsoft Windows and other desktop-only-oriented operating systems.

<comment><USER20> Microsoft is going to ship a headless version of Windows Server:

[https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/mt126167.aspx](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/mt126167.aspx)

<comment><USER16> The problem is that all server software written with Windows in mind already _assume_ that their interface is a screen and a mouse, and will try to create a main window, dock icon, and show popups when something happens. How will they work on a headless Windows server?

<comment><USER21> Confused: remote desktop makes any server not headless.

<comment><USER16> So, if I understand you correctly, Windows' new "headless" servers are not _actually_ headless, they simply have an _invisible_ head – it's still there, you just can't see it.

<comment><USER20> It sure doesn't seem like it is there reading the page I linked.

I guess the software you mention that depends on having a desktop will do some combination of not working and working poorly, but they aren't targeting legacy applications with it, they are fleshing out their cloud offering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> dang, the title is editorialized (and in bad taste).

It was discussed a few days ago with a lots of comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812214)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been running Linux Mint on my private desktop exclusively for 3 years, and Ubuntu for one year on my laptop (HP EliteBook 8530p). I use Windows 7 at work. The only thing I miss from Linux is MS Excel.

</comment><comment><USER24> Chromebooks don't count?

</comment><comment><USER25> Its a great dev desktop.</comment>


An Infantry Squad for the 21st Century - <AUTHOR> http://warontherocks.com/2016/05/an-infantry-squad-for-the-21st-century/ <comment><USER2> When all of these small-and-smart weapons meet up on the battlefield it's gonna be cray cray.

However, it will not be anything new. All it's going to do is shrink the same thing into a smaller space. Instead of an air force establishing air superiority over a theater, a platoon will launch a swarm of drones to establish air superiority over a tactical battle. We'll have the exact same rock-paper-scissors strategic tradeoffs, we'll just have them within smaller constraints of time and space.

Sooner or later it will shrink all the way down to the individual. A far- future soldier will be accompanied by an array of personal small-and-smart weapons. Imagine the advantage you'd have in a knife fight if you could launch a little drone off your helmet to fly around behind your opponent and stab them in the back.

Speaking of knives, that's going to be the most interesting (from an abstract point of view) part of the far future soldier's job. They will have to be proficient at every technology that's ever been introduced to warfare because they will have to be able to fall back to older, more reliable technology when the advanced stuff fails.

The far future soldier will probably end up having to specialize in complimentary levels of technology. A squad will probably have a "designated swordsman" who's spent a lot of their time learning to use pointy sticks so that they can take the lead when someone deploys their "deactivate gunpowder gas." Someone else will have to understand the latest AI-enabled VR hacking interface so that they can take down the opponent's integrated autonomous defense system. Nobody's going to be able to do both of those things at the required proficiency.</comment>


US housing market hit a 'significant slowdown' in recent weeks, Redfin CEO says - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/housing-market-has-hit-a-significant-slowdown-in-recent-weeks-redfin-ceo-says-2018-08-09 <comment><USER2> There are all sorts of reasons that house sales slow down, not the least of which are reduced tax benefits, higher interest rates, and a general market forces.

The interesting thing to watch for is the flipper sales. Which is to say if a significant chunk of the market in your area is actually being held by people who bought the house just to flip it, then when you get two or three months of flat to downward pressure on house prices they will all yell "Peak!" and run for the exits. Then you'll see a nice flurry of downward movement as these folks try to unwind their position before the market falls into a hole that loses them money. Pro tip, there aren't enough chairs and the music is no longer playing :-).

That could bring some welcome relief for home buyers who have struggled in the 'no contingency cash only' markets like parts of the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> That's not really what happened in the last crash though. The people who bought, held. The only people who got hurt were home owners who go underwater and then lose a job. They can't afford to wait it out, they can't afford to make the payment, so they end up in foreclosure. Then the bank holds and it ends up as a zombie home.[1] The zombie falls to pieces, so the bank gets a bail out, the home is written off, and the market is just as tight as it ever was. All the flippers are going to do is rent the places out while they hold on for the next run up. At least, that's what I witnessed in the last crash.

[https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/07/25/zombie-homes- without...](https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/07/25/zombie-homes-without- owners-forgotten-by-banks/)

<comment><USER4> Flippers are like canaries in the mine. They are usually leveraged like crazy on short term loans, not flipping the house quickly can be fatal to them. Rental won't let them pay off there loans when they come due in a couple of months.

<comment><USER5> Cant rental (ie, passive) income be used to secure additional funding?

I know that was the case when I considered buying property to rent back before the 2008 crash (I ended up not doing that, luckily).

<comment><USER6> Yes, 75% of rent can be used. It is called "market rent", according to Fannie Mae. Remaining 25% is used for Vacancies, etc.

In California markets, rental properties are not profitable, when you consider 20% downpayment, 75% rent, etc.

There are 4 kinds of buyers in this market:

1\. First home buyers: renters becoming buyers. 2\. Second home buyers: thanks to the appreciation of their primary residence, people have bought second homes for "retirement nest egg", "return on equity", etc. Borrow 80% at 4.5%, expect 15% return. 3\. Moving Up: same like (2), but they sell primary residences. 4\. Flippers

It is kind of hard of flippers to get conventional loans; they have to use portfolio banks, banks that keep loans on their books. A bank I know of, offers 6% fixed first year, variable rate for the next five years. Flippers get these deals, after putting 20 to 30% down.

<comment><USER4> Right, flippers aren't taking conventional housing loans on the properties they are flipping. They are getting short term lines of credit instead because they don't expect to have the house for more than a few months.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what kind of flippers you are referring, but usually there are no loans. Cash purchases - 100% for the entire value of the property. Source: my parents are prof. flippers.

<comment><USER8> This is pretty unusual for anyone doing it seriously. I've "flipped" (not exactly -- mostly major additions and teardowns that we hold for 6-12 months) the past 5 years and haven't met anyone who exclusively uses their own cash. We use some of our own cash, but you have to look at the opportunity cost.

The interesting part has been the interest rates. We started out borrowing hard money at 14% and are down to 7-8% now depending on the lender. Lots of cash out there chasing returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The upcoming changes in the tax code certainly did not help the housing market:

\- The new SALT cap is extremely low, particularly if you own a home in the Bay Area. 10K! Mitigative solution: Stay put and keep current tax base, hampering both supply and demand (for a nicer home)

\- The doubled standard deduction made owning _with a mortgage_ less attractive (But a win overall once your loan is paid off enough).

\- Mortgage interest deduction lowered from 1M to 750K (I believe it's 1/2 if you're buying alone). Houses are so expensive here this actually matters. On the supply side: More post-tax money + higher interest rates means those who locked into great rates won't want to sell, or want to buy a more expensive home. On the demand side: All of the above means everything just got even more expensive.

EDIT: Regardless of what your stance is on mortgage interest deductions, there's no doubt that the upcoming tax code changes threw cold water onto the housing market.

This wouldn't be such an issue if there was more supply in the first place, but here we are.

<comment><USER10> This is all true, but the mortgage interest deduction should be $0, particularly in the rich cities that refuse to let enough homes get built and fix things like zoning. It's an awful distortion that's a handout to the wealthy to the penalty of renters (generally less well off)

<comment><USER11> I'm a homeowner and I think it's an absolute crime my mortgage interest is tax deductible yet rent isn't. If we believe, at a philosophical level, that interest payments should be tax deductible, ok, then make ALL interest paid tax deductible - credit cards, personal loans, auto loans, payday loans, etc.

It's shameful.

That being said, with the new tax bill, 90+% of both owners and renters will be taking the standard deduction this year. It is my opinion that's a good thing, it's my opinion the standard deduction should truly be standard. However, moving all the middle and upper middle class into taking standard deduction makes the mortgage interest deduction basically exclusively for the very wealthy.

<comment><USER12> The entire (expressly stared) reason to make mortgage interest deductable was to encourage more home ownership.

You may disagree that that's a desirable policy goal (and I might agree with you), but comparing it to some other payment that isn't deductable misses the point entirely. Especially rent. Congress wanted to create an economic dis- incentive to being a renter and push people to own the homes they live in.

<comment><USER13> > _The entire (expressly stared) reason to make mortgage interest deductable > was to encourage more home ownership._

IIRC it was actually to encourage more _borrowing_ so that the _banks could securitize and sell off the loans_. Increased home "ownership" was/is the altruistic reason presented to the public so that they feel good about the whole thing. Not looking to start an argument here, but there are plenty of other ways to encourage "ownership" that don't require encouraging debt peonage and market inflation.

Also when credit cards were first becoming a mainstream thing, the interest on that was also tax deductible. I forget the specifics about why it was deemed acceptable to dispense w/that tax break.

<comment><USER14> Both that and the encourage home ownership theory seem unlikely when it comes to why it was deductible in the first place.

It became deductible in 1913, but simply because in 1913 all interest became deductible. The first $3k ($4k married) was excluded. Only the top 1% paid enough interest to take any deduction, and very little of that would have been mortgage interest because they usually bought their homes outright.

Wikipedia claims that the reason they made interest deductible on personal income taxes was that in a nation of small proprietors the line is fuzzy between personal and business expenses, and it was simpler to just make it all deductible instead of just trying to allow business interest to be deducted.

As for why credit card interest later became non-deductible, it is kind of the inverse of why mortgage interest is deductible. That is just as mortgage interest became deductible because all interest became deductible, credit card interest became non-deductible because _almost_ all interest became non- deductible. The Reagan tax reforms took away almost all such deductions except the mortgage deduction.

As to why Congress decided to save the mortgage deduction when they were killing all the rest--I have no idea. That was in 1986, when a lot more than the top 1% were taking it, and most homes were bought using mortgages, so both the "encourage home ownership" theory and the "encourage more borrowing to please the banks" theories are plausible, at least.

<comment><USER13> I appreciate your digging into this. The 1913 tidbit is an interesting wrinkle.

I'd say, based on experience and conversations w/ elected officials, at the end of the day "encourage home ownership" is less likely to be a driver, but more so a selling point to the public.

I also seem to remember reading in a number of sources, one of Michael Lewis' books comes to mind, is that Lew Ranieri (and friends) _is_ a probable reason for the deduction's survival if, as you suggest, there was any real discussion about cutting the MI deduction.

I can also tell you that NAR, for the more recent discussion about cutting the MI and SALT deductions would have been (and were) a significant factor in lobbying _against_ changes that they would expect to slow sales.

Externally, lobbying is talked about as some sort of corrupting force to be excised. Internally, it's simply considered to be an _integral_ part of the legislative process. IMHO, people should attribute less to altruism decisions that are likely linked to someone's lobbying efforts.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anecdote, but my wife and I dropped out of the market recently and rented instead. The rent was 30-40% cheaper than a mortgage would have been on a similar place (including taxes, insurance, etc...). So we figured we would just put the after-tax difference into a 401k (because 401k is pre-tax, for every dollar we 'saved' in housing cost, we are putting ~1.4 dollars into 401k). I figure that building equity in a house has similar investment timeline to the 401k, so it doesn't really bother me whether my net worth comes from one or the other, and unlike a house I can diversify the 401k via different index funds. In terms of ROI, the buy vs rent calculators are all starting to lean towards renting[1], so unless we are going to be in the same house for 12-15 years (unlikely) renting seems to win (and this assumes fairly good/neutral economic outlook, if you turn some of the knobs on the calculator to assume negative growth, oh boy...) .

Add to the fact that most folks don't really know how the new tax laws will impact them until they do the calculations early next year, and the fact the rising interests rates should put downward pressure on the market, and the rather volatile political situation (who really knows where this tariff thing is going to go, and how it will impact the economy), and it just made more sense to wait it out.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- cal...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calculator.html)

<comment><USER16> My house in Seattle has been appreciating by about $100k/year over the past five years. In other words, I'm making $100k/year on a $50k investment. You wont find returns like that in a 401k. And my interest payments are less than rent would be. Last but not least, home appreciation is TAX FREE up to half a million bucks.

By all means, max out the $20k or so you are allowed to put into a 401k, but don't fool yourself into thinking it will outperform what is essentially a government-subsidized leveraged investment. You have to have exceptionally bad timing or move very frequently to lose in real estate.

<comment><USER17> You're talking about unrealised profits. In order for the profits to be realised you need to _sell_ the house. So what happens then? Either you keep the profits and are left without a house, or you buy another house and are left without a profit. Because, you see, it's not only your particular house that has appreciated, all houses have.

<comment><USER16> What you say is true only if you never downsize and never leave a hot market. Realistically most people will book those profits when they no longer need to live next to a job center. When you don't need that downtown job anymore you can sell a million dollar house in a big city and buy a nicer house for half that elsewhere, pocketing the other half million as pure, tax-free profit.

<comment><USER18> "What you say is true only if you never downsize and never leave a hot market."

What you say is true only if you know exactly _when_ to downsize and leave a hot market.

It can be the case that housing will always be more valuable in one place than another. But it can't be the case that the _rate of increase_ will always be dramatically higher, because that will lead to a runaway differential. Therefore you have to expect a correction at a time that is uncertain.

<comment><USER16> No, that's simply incorrect. The rising tide of inflation will lift expensive house prices more than inexpensive house prices. And no matter where you live, there is always a cheaper place you can go to when you sell your home. It's called a cost of living arbitrage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just today (in Austin) I saw a banner by the road outside a bank offering "100% financing" for homebuyers. If banks breathlessly pitching to lend buyers the entirety of a home's price is not a sign of an overheated debt-led housing market, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER3> It gets worse than that,

[https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/interest-only- mort...](https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/interest-only-mortgages/)

<comment><USER12> Is this the first you're hearing of an interest only mortgage? They have been very popular in Southern California for a couple of decades. The theory is that it allows the speculator / owner to get a much more expensive home and just pay the interest for 3 to 10 years. Then sell and reap the massive appreciation. Except of course when the market goes the other way and you're underwater and then whoops! the payment flips to fully amortized (interest and principal) and you can't afford it.

Welcome to 2007! But don't worry you'll be unemployed in another year too!

<comment><USER20> There are also perfectly valid use cases for interest only mortgages. The classic case is for people with highly variable incomes, for instance people working on commission or people working in bonus driven industries. In lean years you pay just then interest and in healthy years you pay down some principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Case-Shiller Index currently has home prices rising at 2-3x inflation: [https://www.housingwire.com/articles/46307-case-shiller- home...](https://www.housingwire.com/articles/46307-case-shiller-home-prices- rising-at-least-twice-the-rate-of-inflation) That would certainly seem to be unsustainable.

<comment><USER22> We're still post-crash, and China is putting a lot of money into American real estate.

<comment><USER23> We aren't at post-crash anymore. House prices have fully recovered and now exceed the previous housing bubble peak.

Foreign buyers could be a catalyst that has inflated the home prices to new heights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if the trade hostilities are affecting foreign (particularly Chinese) real estate purchases in the US. I suspect this is the case, but it's probably not enough to significantly contribute to the slowdown (at least not more so than rising mortgage rates and overheated prices)

<comment><USER23> IMO, I think the foreign buyers will be a bigger factor than many think primarily because it was an external force not directly reliant on local wages to buy. In essence, the foreign buyers were able to prop up or increase prices much higher than the market equilibrium. If you take away those buyers then the whole thing quickly loses its foundation and falls in on itself. I think this will be the case. People think the foreign buyers are always going to be there but this is hardly the truth.

<comment><USER25> There are lots of factors at play, some are more significant that others in one area of a country than another. Take Brexit, 5th largest economy, if you look at UK car stats (SMMT website) businesses are in recession as far as car manufacturers are concerned. Another factor, the GBP has dropped, this makes investing in London attractive for overseas buyers who may have invested in the US market. Plus as London house prices have dropped this also becomes attractive to overseas buyers. In turn as London property is very expensive, this drags the average's up for the price of property in the rest of the country. These factors will be repeated in many countries around the world, but one thing the US has lots of which counts against the US housing market, is land. The UK is highly populated, England is densely populated, the demand for land in the UK is at a much higher premium than in other parts of the world like Europe or the US. In turn, the UK landowners benefit from this global demand ie stability to park money in UK assets due to the reputation of the UK on the global stage, ie no major revolutions in recent history, one of the oldest legal & financial systems in the world. All this stability to park money in the UK pumps up property prices, so with Trump getting into office, is he lowering your property prices considering his flip flopping around with what he says? I see Trumps election as a desperate attempt to consolidate the US position on the global stage as the rest of the world wants detach itself from the petrodollar. As the dollar declines much of your money has to now be spent on things to help you live instead of just going into property. Be prepared for inflation and hedge accordingly, property prices falling is good for the wider US economy, as high property prices where a great % of income is going on servicing the property is bad for the wider economy. Besides there are more Basel requirements coming in next year and many banks have not got themselves ready for that either.

One other thing, Brexit, 5th largest economy, if the EU doesnt allow the UK to stay in the single market, what sort of effect on the global economy will the UK market crashing out of the EU single market and going into major recession have on the global economy. Brexit in a way has the global economy by the balls and the EU led by Germany will be seen as the bad guys for not budging on their philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can put some perspective on this. We got priced out of the market in Feb. According to the bank, we can't get a mortgage where the overall cost of the payments on all our debt can't exceed 41% of our pre-tax income. Given that our student loans eat about 20% of our pre-tax income, that means we only have 20% of our income left for housing. Rising interest rates means that more of our house payment goes to interest which means less of it is left for principal, so we cannot afford the same home we could last Oct. The tax incentives used to mean that we could deduct a good chunk of our housing costs from our taxes and use some of that money to live, bringing it inline with what we would pay for rent. However, that changed and made renting easier on us financially.

High student loan payments and high mortgage rates means that the only thing left to give is the price of the home. Or the bank can be cool with us leveraging ourselves to 50+% income.

<comment><USER27> if youre paying 20% of your income to student loans, buying a house isnt exactly the best play. Student loan interest is a scam. Dig deep and pay that jam off as quickly as a you can.

<comment><USER28> Best advice in this thread, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Housing is only an 'investment' because of how expensive it inherently is.

However, my opinion has been that housing /has been/ in a bubble since at least the mid 2000s (pre recession); and it didn't actually deflate (at least in the area I live in) /during/ that recession.

It would really be nice if some way of fixing this bubble chasing nonsense happened. Maybe if healthcare and retirement were fully socialized this would be less of an issue.

<comment><USER30> Cars are expensive but aren't investments; they're depreciating assets. In Tokyo, housing is a depreciating asset too.

In the US, housing is an appreciating investment because we've made that a political axiom, and because homeowners hold political power that let them fight any policy that would make housing cheaper.

<comment><USER31> Cars are a depreciating asset because you can always manufacture more of them

Housing appreciates because land supply is limited in big cities. You can't manufacture more land

<comment><USER30> How simplistic. America has enough _land_. Vast swaths of it are empty.

What we don't have enough of is _density_ in the places where people actually want to be, and that's not a natural limit. You could make more density, if it weren't illegal in all of these desirable places.

And I just mentioned Tokyo, which actually does have serious land constraints but does zoning and transit well. (And where they _are_ making more land.) Ordinary people can afford homes there and almost nobody is homeless.

"They're not making any more land" isn't a relevant thing about urbanism, it's just a cliche that a realtor says to convince you to buy.

<comment><USER31> It's not as simple as merely lifting regulations to support high density housing. The underlying infrastructure has to be able to support that density as well.

Most cities would fail to function if they all had the same density as New York or Tokyo

To solve the infrastructure problem, you have to, again, invest billions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I closed on a condo in Seattle literally this morning. Did I buy at the exact worst possible time?

<comment><USER33> It depends why you were buying it. Were you buying to flip it as a short term investment, or a place to live in for the next 5-10-20+ years?

the market price only matters if you're forced to sell or forced to buy. if you dont need to sell or dont need to buy, you can ignore it

<comment><USER34> I bought my last place in 2006, intending to live there at least 5-10 years.

I ended up living there for 11 years, with the majority of the time being there with it some $120k underwater. It was terrible and I wished I had waited a year or two - not only did I pay more to service a more expensive mortgage, I walked away with considerably less equity than I would have if I just waited.

I don't know how anyone could possibly be thinking about purchasing a place right now. It's been 12 years since the last crash started and real estate is traditionally on a 10 year boom/bust cycle. _Even if_ you think you want to live in your place for decades, things happen. As always, if you can help it, buy low, sell high, don't pander to emotion on what is one of the biggest purchases you can make.

<comment><USER35> > I don't know how anyone could possibly be thinking about purchasing a place > right now.

Well people need a roof over their heads. In a lot of areas (more rural for example) rental properties aren't very common and they're often smaller places so if you have a family and want somewhere to sleep at night you'll need to buy.

<comment><USER34> Right, but those aren't the places we're talking about that have huge swings due to the national boom/bust cycle... ie. cities and suburbs of those cities.

Basic rule of thumb - if you can rent a like property for less than you can purchase, you should rent, esp. when things are toward the top of the market. The irrational fear that one will be priced out of a market leads to bad decisions. The idea that renting is throwing money away/giving it to a landlord leads to bad decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> At some point you hit the cap of what people can possibly spend.

Depressed earnings in all but a tiny sector, and incredibly inflated house prices.

Perpetual growth is unsustainable in this manner, but is expected by investors.

I hope the market corrects. Not for my sake (I live in Sweden and have no US desires) but for those who hope to have a life and family near their ancestral home.

I am not preaching to the choir of HN, people on this site generally have it a lot better than the people who also live in the places that are huge tech hubs.

<comment><USER37> Pretty sure my ancestral home is somewhere on Mayfair. I demand access to an affordable London flat thereabouts!

Also if you're talking about the Bay Area, much of the real estate pricing there is driven by the anti-development tendencies of the owners of ancestral homes, either lining their own pockets or pushing some misguided political wheelbarrow (especially in SF). In that sense it's largely self inflicted. In other places even uneven economic growth tends to create bigger cities as the wealth spreads through the economy via construction and services and the like. It's when you try to fight the market that you get unintended consequences.

<comment><USER38> > _Pretty sure my ancestral home is somewhere on Mayfair. I demand access to > an affordable London flat thereabouts!_

We'd better get around to ceding Manhattan back to the Lenape, too.

<comment><USER36> Maybe I chose poor words. Ancestral meaning "where my mother/father and grandparents, nieces, nefews etc live.

I come from a city in England called Coventry. Family ties are what keep most of the population in place- perhaps "familial" is a better word.

The idea of not being able to live close to family is distressing to many of my fellow city dwellers.

You can argue the semantics of how valuable such a thing is. You can even argue that the entire family unit should probably move somewhere cheaper, or that commuting to see your mum isn't all that bad. But honestly; it would take a lot for me to revisit the idea that I am not able to live amongst my family. Even if I personally did not choose to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If they were assuming that because I turned 30 this decade I'd suddenly become interested in owning a home, they were wrong! If the financial pundits believed all the articles the culture pundits were writing about millennials they could have known.

</comment><comment><USER40> About time it slowed down. My house is over 2x what I paid for it 6 years ago. I pay $10k/yr in taxes just to live in it, WTF.

<comment><USER41> Teachers have to live somewhere too.

<comment><USER40> I agree. But I don't see how it has any bearing on the situation: they are affected by the extremely high housing prices as well, to a much greater extent, and real estate taxes, while high, represent only a small fraction of state revenue. Sales and business taxes dominate there. Then there's the issue of the explosion of administrative personnel. As a parent, I'm not even sure what most of those folks do. I'm sure they "have to live somewhere", but I'd rather spend the money on teachers, schools, and supplies, TBH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seattle has significantly slowed.

<comment><USER43> [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/more- seatt...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/more-seattle-area- home-sellers-lower-list-prices-as-market-cools-way-down/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Misleading label from HN - article is amp from Market Watch, not actually google.com.

Ideally, HN would point at the original.

Personally, my phone Adblock prevents google from spying on my traffic in general, but these cached amp links get tracked by google.

<comment><USER45> Yes. Url changed from [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/g...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/5038160C-9C1F-11E8-A46C-BBDE1A6795F5).

Submitters: please don't post those! It's important that readers see what domain a story is coming from.

<comment><USER5> dang, Why doesn't HN simply warn submitters to not use AMP urls or reject them outright?

<comment><USER45> Different sites encode them differently, making it complicated to detect in code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> non-AMP link: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/housing-market-has-hit- a-s...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/housing-market-has-hit-a- significant-slowdown-in-recent-weeks-redfin-ceo-says-2018-08-09)

</comment><comment><USER47> Why does this link say Google?

<comment><USER33> From the url it looks like marketwatch.com site is using google's AMP thing to implement a lightweight site, then google is mirroring it / distributing it through some AMP CDN hosted from a google domain.

(this explanation is perhaps only 60% right, someone who actually knows about AMP may like to weigh in and correct me)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The article title needs punctuation.

<comment><USER45> We changed the title from "Housing hit unexpected slowdown Shares of Redfin drop 20%".

Submitters: please don't rewrite titles like that. If an article title is neither misleading nor linkbait, the site guidelines ask you not to change it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER49> Thanks dang. Perhaps modify it to 'US Housing market ...'

<comment><USER45> Sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Redfin didn't exactly do anything interesting or unique. It was literally yet another real estate app/website. It's not surprising.

<comment><USER51> To be fair, Redfin is a technology focused MLS member and agency, not just a listings aggregation app. You're entitled to your opinion if you don't think that is interesting or unique, but their offering is far more than just a website and app. Interesting data on their agent stats and comp here: [https://www.redfin.com/blog/2018/01/how-much-do-redfin- agent...](https://www.redfin.com/blog/2018/01/how-much-do-redfin-agents- earn.html)

<comment><USER50> I worked in that industry. It really is a pretty "meh" company.

Also there is no MLS, there are a lot of them.

<comment><USER22> Though the MLS is pretty distrubuted, these days you can consider it as a single entity for the most part, though the shenanigans from the early 2000s still happen every day.

<comment><USER50> You absolutely cannot consider it as a single entity. It is not distributed, it is fractured. There is zero consistency. I got out of that industry a while back and I still have the local MLS phone number memorized.

It's a complete shit show as of 2013. Basically anything that is on any MLS I've seen is probably incorrect.

<comment><USER22> Yeah it was pretty bad 5-10 years ago, but working with it as recently as Tuesday, I can say that the major benefit of sites like Zillow and Redfin is that MLS companies have had to adapt fast to stay competitive. The realtor I'm working with has changed MLS platforms three times in the last year alone.

<comment><USER50> When I was selling my condo last year I asked for it to be kept off of Zillow. That site is incredibly innacurate for integrating data. Their cute name for pricing is always way off in my experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My Christmas hack – send one webhook to many destination URLs - <AUTHOR> http://www.hookism.com <comment><USER2> Somewhat related to my [https://requesthub.xyz/](https://requesthub.xyz/), but both face the same problems:

\- they must ensure high availability if they are to be expected to be used in production system, which is difficult

\- they must offer some guarantees (or some form of custom domain thing + open-source), because if someone points all his webhooks to an external domain and that stops working in some months nobody will be happy

\- I pretty much doubt anyone is going to pay for a simple service like this</comment>


How to troubleshoot hanging requests on IIS in 3 steps - <AUTHOR> http://mvolo.com/troubleshoot-iis-hanging-requests

<comment><USER2> Heh, I doubt much of the HN crowd runs IIS in their stack.. good to know just in case I guess.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is an IIS and why should I care? :-)</comment>


Edgewrite and some of my own experiments - TBF-RnD http://tbf-rnd.life/blog/2019/06/02/114/ <comment> TBF-RnD trying to create a resource that might turn into a collaborative book

I find that there are a lot of places where keyboards doesnt cut it \- VR \- Disabilities \- international settings \- productivity for tablets

My hope is to create a framework in code where experiments can be made and benchmarked.

Also to create a loose umbrella organisation that can coordinate the effort.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jacob Wobbrock, who created EdgeWrite, also published on gesture recognition with the $1 Unistroke Recognizer [1], which started the $ family of recognizers. If you think there's some sort of gesture-based writing scheme that would do better, you can use the gesture recognizer and focus directly on how to design your gestures instead of having to implement recognition yourself.

There's a pretty cool demo with a Javascript implementation in a couple hundred lines here: [http://depts.washington.edu/madlab/proj/dollar/index.html](http://depts.washington.edu/madlab/proj/dollar/index.html)

[1] [http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.01.pdf](http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.01.pdf)

<comment> TBF-RnD That's right I saw that. Didn't have time to add it to text yet though. I did consider it for an implementation.

Seems like Jacob Wobbrock went on to become quite influential after his work on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I use MessagEase[1] on my phone. I don't think I'm any faster than I would be with the conventional keyboard, but it seems like my accuracy is a lot better. It wasn't that hard to learn the basics, but I still have trouble with less frequent letters and symbols. Part of that is just that I don't text a whole lot so I don't get enough frequent practice outside of the most common characters.

Edgewrite and Graffiti both have the advantage of leveraging off of your existing writing knowledge, but I have to say after using Graffiti that it sure seemed like it would be a lot faster to just abandon writing as the metaphor altogether.

Actually, I guess that's what MessagEase originally was, since Wikipedia tells me that it was originally released for in 2002 for the Palm.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase)

<comment><USER3> MessageEase seems interesting. I've just downloaded it. The swipe gestures seem like they are slow, but maybe with practice the larger sized targets offset that. This comment was typed using the keyboard.

I'm going to keep this installed and see if I can get faster.

I also notice that there's no autocorrect, which I miss especially when it comes to typing the pronoun "I."

<comment><USER2> It will auto-uppercase stand alone "i", but, yeah, as far as I know it doesn't do general auto-correct. I've never been a fan of auto-correct, so I regard that as a feature. I recognize that that's a minority position, though.

Actually, the uppercase support is one thing that I dislike about MessagEase. For swipes you just swipe one way and then back to where you started, which is easy and natural. For taps (your most frequent characters) you have to draw a circle. I've found this to be error prone, and the fact that it's different for the two sets of characters tends to trip me up. If you text as much as a teenager, you could probably get this into muscle memory, but I can never quite get there.

<comment><USER3> Huh, maybe i am missing some configuration or setting, but it isn't doing that for me. I'm on iOS by the way.

<comment><USER2> I'm on Android, so maybe the implementation is a little different. It's a default setting for me, I didn't turn it on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Edgewrite looks like the same kind of thing the old Palm Pilots used.

<comment><USER5> Graffiti, yes.

Edgewrite should perhaps be called "Cornerwrite;" in its optimized alphabet, the every stroke begins and ends in a corner and every change in direction is at a corner.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_\(Palm_OS\))

<comment> TBF-RnD Yes that would indeed by an accurate description!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A friend has developed an input method called Aronetis, best suited for 12-button mobile phones. Unfortunately, with the move to smartphones it's become much less relevant.

<comment> TBF-RnD Interesting I'll add it to my back log. Maybe there are some interesting conclusions that can be drawn from it. Do you think It'd be possible for me to get in touch with him?

<comment><USER6> I believe there are some demos still online, but in any case I think he still uses his Google account aronetis ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I looked at some videos that showed Edgewrite.

It seems like a rather quick method, but wouldn't it be quicker if all letters started and ended in the same corner?

<comment> TBF-RnD I think that might remove to many letter perhaps. I'll get back to you if I find something in his PhD Thesis!

<comment><USER7> Cool, thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Bad UI in action: 11 clicks to quit Assassin's Creed - <AUTHOR> http://www.videosift.com/video/Quitting-Assassins-Creed

<comment><USER2> Assassin's Creed has other flaws that are the reason it's just an OK game in spite of its amazing graphics and innovative parkour physics, but this confused the hell out of me when I was playing it.

Basically, you just walk right up to the person you're going to assassinate, press a mouse button to kill them, then run around a city randomly for a minute or two to lose the heat. Repeat.

<comment><USER3> That's really something I hope they can improve on for the rest of the trilogy; the repetitiveness of the challenges faced was galling, despite this being a super cool game to play for the first and last 45 minutes

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually think Assassin's Creed UI is very intuitive, especially for the the range of movements that are allowed simply by pointing your character in a certain direction.

And quitting on the 360 just takes one step: turning off the console, no save necessary.

</comment><comment><USER5> This appears to be yet another symptom of the poor Windows port; on PS3 it's much easier to quit.

<comment><USER6> Press the power button?

<comment><USER5> Yes, or press the PlayStation button that allows you to exit any game at any time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't found a UI I liked that wasn't in a text editor.

</comment><comment><USER8> I never found this "correct" way to quit the game, but learned that just pressing Alt-F4 in any of those screens does the trick.

</comment><comment> a-priori Maybe they just don't want you to quit. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, that is horrible.</comment>


SafeLife: AI Safety Environments Based on Conway's Game of Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.partnershiponai.org/safelife <comment><USER2> With some graphics this looks like it could be a rather fun game to play manually. I wonder if there is such a thing? Maybe multiplayer support as well?

<comment><USER3> Right in the readme it describes how to launch interactively via `safelife play puzzles`

<comment><USER2> Yes but it's missing decent graphics, sounds, animations, imagination... etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> May be useful, but it seems to me that the reward function still is relatively easy to specify? Much of the difficulty in AI safety is due to specify what humans _really_ want.

Perhaps the AI can observe a human playing the game and learn a reward function?

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is very easy to solve if the reward function (avoid altering the green life patterns) is specified. The aim in SafeLife version 1.0 (future versions will add more safety problems) is to find an agent/architecture that naturally has conservatism with respect to side effects, without being told which particular side effects in particular are bad.

<comment><USER4> I see, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am confused by how this is supposed to be useful. It seems like the researchers are defining side-effects as things that "disrupt the world" (of this life game) and training an AI to avoid this.

But this seems like at best one of a whole host unexpected effects one might consider. AI that discriminates in a way that society frowns on might not "disrupt the world" in such a visible fashion.

I don't see how one can get away with an entity doing stuff for you with that entity understanding your model of the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is one specific safety problem -- there are many other RL safety problems that deserve high quality benchmarks too. See eg [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf) or [https://medium.com/@deepmindsafetyresearch/building-safe- art...](https://medium.com/@deepmindsafetyresearch/building-safe-artificial- intelligence-52f5f75058f1) for discussions of the problem space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hasn't Conway himself been known to say that he don't like the Game of Life since it doesn't give rise to that many interesting mathematical conclusions and how everybody is focusing on it above some of his other math axhievments? Maybe finally he can find the use case he wanted for it. And maybe it also gives reason to all the hours people have spent researching and finding new structures in Game of Life.

</comment><comment><USER7> What if the AI decides to ignore penalties due to human thinking being inefficient? Well, that shouldn't be possible I think.</comment>


'Car Accident' or 'Traffic Violence'? The Way We Talk About Crashes Is Evolving - <AUTHOR> https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_violence_language.php <comment><USER2> I posted about this recently on reddit [0]. People disagree, citing that the use of the word "accident" is a statement of intent, not blame.

My opinion is still unchanged, though. The relationship between word choice and opinions works both ways. I still have the belief that at least 90% of accidents are caused by sheer negligence of some sort and could have been prevented by simply taking the responsibilities you have as the operator of a 2,000+ lb machine. I still feel that "accident" softens the blame.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/e9ayk6/tr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/e9ayk6/traffic_collisions_shouldnt_be_called_accidents/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely agree with the sentiment, but the word "violence" has been tortured enough already. "Negligent driving" would be far better.

</comment><comment><USER4> Car collision.</comment>