Largest true-color photograph of the night sky ever - <AUTHOR> http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html <comment><USER2> From the author: [http://skysurvey.org/blog/2011/2/17/for-all-the-nights- stars](http://skysurvey.org/blog/2011/2/17/for-all-the-nights-stars)

I was surprised to find that this wasn't a compilation of Sloan images, or one of the larger sky survey collaborations. This appears to be a one-person project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess because the title here says "photograph" it didn't occur to me until the second visit that I could click and drag to look around. When I did though I got hit with the "Oh wow. That's incredible." sensation.

I love this.

<comment><USER4> same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Impressive to see how big (near) the Andromeda galaxy is compared to all the rest.

<comment><USER6> Andromeda looks actually really big! It reminds of this post on APOD showing the apparent size compared to the moon: [http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html)

Mind = blown.

<comment> alok-g Wow! I had seen Andromeda before as a casual star-gazer and still had not realized this, just as the cited NASA webpage points out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks so different like this!

The Andromeda Galaxy was easy to spot, but I couldn't find any of the constellations I'm familiar with (until I found the "Show Constellations and Objects" button).

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what the clouds of black are in the galactic plane? Is there something in the way, or are there no stars there?

<comment><USER9> Dust and gas blocking light from the stars behind: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_dust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_dust) \+ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_lane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_lane)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just found you can zoom with the mousewheel. Zomming in on what appears an interesting feature reveals more and more details. This is just awesome. I can't help but feel more insignificant than usual when exploring this sky map.

<comment><USER11> It'd be even cooler if there were deeper zoom levels which linked in images specifically of a particular object. Say I find and zoom in on the Horse Head Nebula I get to images of that specific object.

<comment><USER12> Well, you can click on the object which takes you to further information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would had been better if this sky map was not only Earth-centric, but also had Earth's polar coordinate system, or at least Earth's rotation axis. Here if you look "up" and rotate the sky, there isn't a North Star sitting there, and that's weird.

</comment><comment><USER6> Smallest false-color tiny FOV long exposure photograph from Val Thorens ever: [http://pilgrimbreak.com/sites/default/files/DSCF2027.JPG](http://pilgrimbreak.com/sites/default/files/DSCF2027.JPG)

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks amazing. I wish the app was available to us foreigners as well.

<comment><USER15> I am about to buy an iPad for the first time, and I thought "this would be a _great_ app, cool!" and clicked on the store link.

 _So_ annoying that it's US store only - why do devs do this, anyone know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is so well done - I especially like the galactic reference in the lower left corner, that shows the FOV and direction. I promise not to say anything unkind about Flash for at least a week.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish there was an easy way to save the current view as a PNG. I could set it to full screen and use Print Screen, but the app icon and interface buttons would need to be edited out.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, it would make a nice wallpaper.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Play Eve Online 2. Set a route going through dozens of hisec system 3. Hit Autopilot (ctrl+s) 4. Enter windowless mode (ctrl+F9) 5. Sit back and enjoy the nicest interactive screensaver o7

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there a reason why it appears more populated and dense in the middle as opposed to the upper or lower regions? Is that the plane of our galaxy, or something to do with the light?

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's the plane of our galaxy. If you click show constellations and objects, you can see where we are in the spiral, bottom left.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, I haven't seen this clustering from looking at the sky before - is it because this is more sensitive than the naked eye?

<comment><USER20> This is one of the downsides of living in a heavily populated area. It's quite visible once you get away from the light pollution around cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lovely picture. Looks a bit different from the sky outside my house: that's what I get for living near other people...

Anyone used their iOS app? Is it better/different than Star Walk?

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't see this info anywhere so...

Try these keys:

a for in, z for out,

and the 4 arrow keys...

much better that way!

</comment><comment><USER23> sky map with higher resolution: [http://server7.sky- map.org/v2?ra=17.243&de=-38.586&zoom=2&im...](http://server7.sky- map.org/v2?ra=17.243&de=-38.586&zoom=2&img_source=DSS2)

</comment><comment><USER24> I was able to spot the Magellan clouds, the Andromeda but where is Triangulum?

<comment><USER25> Just below Andromeda. Find Mirach, the brightest star below the plane of Andromeda, then go the same distance further south.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can't get it to work on firefox (v26.0) on osx (v10.7.5)

<comment><USER27>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The biggest surprise to me is it requires Adobe Flash.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why it is bright only in middle and dark else where?

<comment><USER6> Imagine you are look at a CD from the center, you would see matter in the middle but not above nor below. It is a little bit the same thing except the solar system and our Earth are not located in the center of the galaxy but somewhere close to the edge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can anyone find any planets in this photo?

<comment><USER31> Jupiter is there. Press on the (i) icon and it shows constellations. Jupiter's orbit is shown in green.

<comment><USER32> The green line is actually the ecliptic, the path which the Sun travels on the celestial sphere. You may find all the other planets along it also, because it is coplanar with Earth's orbit around the sun and, as consequence, almost coplanar with the other planet's orbits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I felt I am the actor in gravity!

</comment><comment><USER34> iPad / iPhone version not available? Come on.

<comment><USER35> I know, I'm sick of websites that do things like this.

<comment><USER36> I suppose it's because they want you to download the app that is linked on the bottom right corner?

<comment><USER37> The link doesn't appear if you visit on an iOS device. Could you post it here?

<comment><USER38> Here you go: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sky- survey/id518884826?ls=1&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sky- survey/id518884826?ls=1&mt=8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> No WP/Android version => failure.

<comment><USER40> Really? The project is an abject _failure_ because it was made available without an Android or Windows Phone version? Sure it would be cool if it had one, but I think there are enough people out there with access to desktop browsers or iOS devices to make it at least marginally worthwhile!

<comment><USER41> Just do not feed (idiotic) trolls.

Who knows what hit him last day/morning/night, that killed his mood and changed him into antisocial-hulk. ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Anderson family: On meat diet for 17 years - <AUTHOR> https://thenortheasttoday.com/archive/anderson-family-on-meat-diet-for-17-years/ <comment><AUTHOR> 20 years, actually. Here's the latest report: [http://meatheals.com/2018/02/04/charlene- andersen/](http://meatheals.com/2018/02/04/charlene-andersen/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. The images in the other story were broken, and honestly I expected to see something different :)

<comment><AUTHOR> More images here: [http://web.archive.org/web/20150512024032/https://zerocarbze...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150512024032/https://zerocarbzen.com/2015/03/09/zero- carb-interview-the-andersen-family/)

And their Twitter: [https://twitter.com/JoeCharlene8898](https://twitter.com/JoeCharlene8898)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just an anecdotal report. Not even a case study. Worthless information.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'tis a good thing I did not have you adivising me you all those years ago, otherwise I would not have healed myself from the chronic condition of 4 years by going on an all-meat diet inspired by these anecdotes, eh?

No one actually suffering from physical ailments care one iota about "case studies" (which more often than not tend to be epidemiological studies backed by agenda-filled food industries); they are only interested in what actually works and, given that doctors are increasing regurgitating what they learned in school, self-experimenting to find out the facts of the matter for themselves.</comment></comment>


A deep dive into macOS MDM and how it can be compromised (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://i.blackhat.com/us-18/Thu-August-9/us-18-Endahl-A-Deep-Dive-Into-macOS-MDM-And-How-It-Can-Be-Compromised-wp.pdf <comment><USER2> good stuff. I thought this looked like a deep dive into the work presented in a trivial (and fear-mongering) manner earlier by duo. That led me to this:

[https://medium.com/fleetsmith/on-dep-mdm-device-identity- and...](https://medium.com/fleetsmith/on-dep-mdm-device-identity-and- authentication-82c9b78cb9c2)</comment>


Intel to Launch 3D XPoint DIMMs in 2H 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12041/intel-to-launch-3d-xpoint-dimms-in-2h-2018 <comment><USER2> Do these really have RAM-like performance or is Intel calling them DIMMs as a marketing ploy?

I still remember when Optane was first announced Intel hyped it as a replacement for RAM. When it was finally available it turned out to be about 1,000x slower than RAM and barely faster than other SSD. So much for RAM replacement...

<comment><USER3> Barely faster than NVMe SSDs when fully saturated. At low queue depths and in mixed workloads (especially when overwriting data) Optane absolutely destroys the competition. This is a database dream drive. Only problem is the low capacities right now.

<comment><USER4> It's much better in latency too[1].

I also wonder if the current products are bottlenecked by the controller and whether DIMMs will see vastly superior performance. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

[1][https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Optane- Memory-32...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-Optane-Memory-32GB- Review-Faster-Lightning/Depth-Performance)

<comment><USER5> > I also wonder if the current products are bottlenecked by the controller

There's no question that they are. NVMe drive prototypes that use DRAM as their backing memory instead of flash or some other persistent memory have about the same overall latency as Optane SSDs.

With NVMe, the storage industry is in a much better position to take advantage of 3D XPoint than if we were all still using SATA or SAS, but it's still on a peripheral bus not a memory bus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could be an amazing technology for high performance mobile devices, especially laptops.

For this first release, "3D XPoint DIMMs will require server platform support because they are unlikely to operate as standard DDR4 DIMMs. The JEDEC NVDIMM-P standard for persistent memory DIMMs has not been finalized and is expected next year".

</comment><comment><USER7> Whether they have an $8B market or not will very much depend on the performance and price. I really hope they can make it work though. The first generations of a new technology are typically not much to get excited about, but as it gets better over time this could be the first major shakeup to the memory/storage hierarchy since the SSD - with potentially bigger ramifications because it's byte-addressable.

</comment><comment><USER8> so, as someone naively excited about memristors I've noticed the similarity between Xpoint and memristive memory... am I totally off here though?

<comment><USER9> XPoint is a form of chalcogenide resistive memory while HP memristors are titanium dioxide resistive memory.

<comment><USER8> is this a measure to avoid patent conflicts? (or is there an appreciable difference in inner workings)

<comment><USER10> Not a patent issue. PCM is also a NOR flash device, and have been used for decades in shipping memories.

The answer to your paranthetical depends a bit on how much detail you care for. Both devices are types of resistive crosspoint memories. In XP, the resistor is a chalcogenide that has a low resistance polycrystal line state, and a high resistance amorphous state. These are tuned by the program pulse length. In TiO2, the mechanism is (presumably, perhaps debatebly) filamentary bridges between electrode, which can be eliminated by reversing the voltage.

So on one level, both are resistive memories. On another, we are comparing a bulk phase transition driven by pulse control to a filamentary transition driven by voltage.

Finally, the more important difference is the selector. PCM devices can use a chalcogenide based threshold switch. That is the OTS on the XP diagrams. That selector is the key to functional, dense memory arrays, and the existance of a matched selector is what makes PCM functional. I haven't seen what the matched selector for memristors is.

Worth reading recent material from Crossbar on these topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One thing I wondering is what Micron is planning on doing with 3D Xpoint. It was a joint venture between the two firms, after all, but it seems like Intel is the only one doing anything with it so far. I haven't even heard anything.

<comment><USER5> Micron has shown a few prototypes, like an SSD using a controller from CNEX Labs, who are best known for their open-channel SSD work.

I didn't really expect that Intel would end up this far ahead of Micron in bringing 3D XPoint to market, but it has been clear for quite a while that Intel has the dominant role in their relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That will change things. I really would like a nice hibernate function that didn't require saving anything to disk.

<comment><USER13> Why? Hibernating to an SSD is pretty fast already.

<comment><USER14> Imagine zero-draw "hibernation mode" taking a few milliseconds to enter, and "waking up" in a few milliseconds, too. Apply to mobile devices.

<comment><USER15> Mobile devices have battery, so they can power RAM allowing sleep. Also I've read that Optane is power-hungry, so it won't be used in mobile devices anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of core memory, which was intrinsically nonvolatile and likely has more endurance per bit than any flash-based storage today. I wonder how it handles wear leveling, since being in a DIMM format means the CPU(s) can write to it far more aggressively than an SSD.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't require wear leveling like SSDs do. It's like RAM in that regard.

I strongly recommend this talk from StrangeLoop on persisted memory: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=VE1hCUMLHX4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=VE1hCUMLHX4)

<comment><USER18> _> It doesn't require wear leveling like SSDs do. It's like RAM in that regard_

Are you sure? The article lists a fixed durability of 30 drive writes over 5 years. If it wasn't wear leveling, those 30 writes would be reached very quickly on specific locations.

<comment><USER9> 30 drive writes per day, which is over 50K writes total. But at RAM speeds you could hit 50K writes in no time (XPointHammer? you heard it here first), so wear leveling would probably be a good idea. And here's my favorite wear leveling paper: [http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- moinqur...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us- moinqureshi/papers-sgap.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> sad part is you gotta combine it with an EPYC cpu otherwise people can potentially grab your DIMMs and read the data

<comment><USER9> Epyc has SEV encrypted memory and Skylake has SGX encrypted memory (although I wouldn't expect SGX to actually work with XPoint).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> With free added back door!</comment>


CoreCLR ARM 32-bit progress - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/3977 <comment><USER2> Nice work. It will be great to use ASP.NET Core on a Pi with official support.

I tried .NET out on the Pi using Mono, years ago when it was relatively new but after the software floating point OS was deprecated. The weird hardware floating point CPU made it pretty much unusable. Even simple things like DateTime objects would fail to work correctly.

Similar issues were in Java IIRC but they had a special build of that. I think Sony had a fixed build of Mono but I haven't tried it. It will be good to have official .NET support outside of Win 10 IoT.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, imho Java makes no guarantees about FP portability if you don't enforce it with the strictfp keyword, you'd get 80bit on x87 and 64bit on other architectures.

Why would this cause failing tests though? Does that mean they relied on extended precision?

<comment><USER2> Not sure of the specifics. Java SE is now included with the official OS (Raspbian/NOOBS) [0]. When the Pi first launched you had to use the soft FP version of the OS or Java wouldn't work but this had a significant performance penalty. They added official support for hard FP a few years ago [1]. I believe the .NET issue was similar in that the VM (CLR i.e. JVM) didn't support the hard FP version of the OS. FP on the Pi processor is a bit weird and a non-standard implementation from what I've read.

P.S. In researching this post I noticed that one of my projects (a globe wake lamp) has been included in the latest project book (p108) [2]. First I've heard of this! This is actually an old version and there is a newer write-up on my blog [3].

[0]: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/)

[1]: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/oracle-java-on-raspberry- pi...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/oracle-java-on-raspberry-pi/)

[2]: [https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi- issues/Projects_Book_v2.pd...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi- issues/Projects_Book_v2.pdf#110) [pdf]

[3]: [https://unop.uk/pi-glowbe-mark-2/](https://unop.uk/pi-glowbe-mark-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a major step forwards. Having .NET on ARM is one of the most important milestones imho.

<comment><USER5> It was already there, but not the main version.

.NET Compact and Micro had ARM versions.

There is also an Arduino (AVR) that uses .NET Micro as their OS.

<comment><USER4> Exactly :)! For the Arduino you are potentially referring to the Netduino, which allows you to write applications targeting the .NET Micro Framework.

<comment><USER6> Re: Netduino - I've got one of them, works really well with Visual Studio, i.e. hitting break points, stepping through code running on the board etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great work. Can't help but notice most of the contributors in this issue are Samsung Electronics employees. Interesting to see Samsung in the .net world!

<comment><USER8> You can build Tizen apps in .Net now I imagine they're working to improve compatibility across all Tizen devices. Samsung is also now a member of the .Net foundation

[https://www.tizen.org/blogs/dh0922/2016/tizen-.net- developer...](https://www.tizen.org/blogs/dh0922/2016/tizen-.net-developer- preview)

<comment><USER5> Which will be the fourth reboot on the Tizen SDK stack, so I don't know if they will actually win anything with it.

They already went through Meego APIs, replaced by Bada OS C++ APIs, replaced by C and Enlightenment APIs, alongside HTML5 apps.

As a developer I would be weary to invest any resources in so unstable OS design.

<comment><USER9> Assuming they implement the entirety of the .NET APIs then a developer would have to invest very little to get on their platform. One would hope anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fantastic!

I was looking into this just yesterday to see how far away it was, so the timing is really fortunate for me.

Between this and the VS Code builds we should now have pretty solid support for developing .NET on Pi and/or Chromebook, so I'm really excited to get rolling with it, especially seeing as I have some free time this week. I'll try to write up my experiences too in case it helps anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looking forward to an official Docker image for this. The Raspberry Pi is probably the main board we think of when people say 'ARM' \- but the Pine64 and Odroid C2 are maybe better suited - being 64-bit and the Odroid having twice as much memory.

What kind of .NET runs on Windows 10 IoT though (on the RPi Model 3)??

<comment><USER12> .NET Core + .NET Native, but that's on Windows, not Linux (.NET Core has been running on Windows ARM since Windows Phone 8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still waiting for it to run on any Android device.</comment>


Show HN: Reactable – fast, flexible, and simple data tables in React - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/glittershark/reactable <comment><USER2> This looks lovely. As someone who has battled too often with jQuery DataTables - which can do everything under the sun but often feels like you're performing unanaesthetised emergency dentistry on yourself in the process - it would be terrific to have something more modern and flexible, even if it's not quite at feature parity. Here's hoping this might be it!

<comment><USER3> I had felt the same way about Datatables, which is why I ended up writing Dynatable over the course of a couple years. Tried to take a somewhat different approach that felt more natural to use.

[http://www.dynatable.com](http://www.dynatable.com)

<comment><USER4> That looks really really nice. It's like it was built with javascript in mind rather than strVisualBasic i6.0 ;). I'm going to rip datatables out of my current project and put this in.

Have you considered (or implemented) col or row spans? A particular dataset I have to work with has multilevel column and row titles - so I've avoided using datatables for that.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! It has been considered, and is planned, just hasn't been implemented yet. There's a lot more discussion about it here: [https://github.com/alfajango/jquery- dynatable/issues/30](https://github.com/alfajango/jquery-dynatable/issues/30)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Added to [http://www.reactjsx.com/](http://www.reactjsx.com/), where you can search reusable React components

<comment><USER6> Great idea. I just started using React and was wondering if there was a repository of components so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel for just about everything. It might be handy to add tagging functionality so the components can be easily browsed through in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice to see this but there are few other related projects based on React(Not 100% React) that I know of: [https://github.com/bgerm/react-table-sorter- demo](https://github.com/bgerm/react-table-sorter-demo) [https://github.com/josebalius/ngReactGrid](https://github.com/josebalius/ngReactGrid)

</comment><comment><USER6> Neat. I'm also building a general purpose grid for an app I'm building. From the demo it appears the entire table data set must be loaded for the pagination to work. I'm not sure how practical it is for real use.

<comment><USER8> I've been using Reactable in production for ~3 months now. I had the same thought when I saw that there was no server side pagination.

So, I put it to a test. My app has an audit log, 4 columns wide. I loaded in 30,000 rows into Reactable and it renders just fine...even on my Android device! Pretty slick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty cool. Sorting by the datetime field in the demo sorts the strings alphabetically though. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the plugin or the demo, but it probably isn't the right behavior.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey cool! I've been working on something similar. [http://dynamictyped.github.io/Griddle/](http://dynamictyped.github.io/Griddle/)

I'm glad to see more components coming to React :)

<comment><USER11> Nice! You may want to add it to some of the React component list, like this one someone else mentioned: [http://www.reactjsx.com/](http://www.reactjsx.com/)

<comment><USER10> Added it :) Didn't even realize that existed until seeing this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You have a bit of a namespace collision - [http://www.reactable.com/](http://www.reactable.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why are some developers so enamored with tables and making ever more table- generation libraries. They are one of the worst ways to display information in a readable way. Outside of spreadsheet computing and source data, they have limited use. Tables should almost certainly never make it to an end-user UI.

<comment><USER14> I disagree. Even if you come up with novel ways, or use common visualizations (e.g. charts) to display tabular data - I'd still give the end user a 'table button' that lets them simply view the data in a table.

Because of the ubiquity of the spreadsheet, most users simply grok tables and in a pinch, want to see the data that way. If they can't, the first feature request you're going to hear is for an Excel export so they can work around your application - not in it.

I'm not saying it's right, I understand you can deliver more information per second in a way that aids cognition - but until users are accustomed to this - we need tables.

That being said, if you work in React.js - why not have a nice table library for React.js?

edit: grammar

<comment><USER13> Most users do not grok tables. Most developers do because they are easy to automatically generate based on lists of things with common attributes.

Tabular data is a very exclusive set of information in which columns can be aggregated to sums, counts, et al.

Most tables on the web do not contain tabular data.</comment></comment></comment>


Gary Vaynerchuk is ambitious - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/print/lifestyle/content/may2008/bw20080520_095683.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Gary: "I absolutely believe I am going to own the Jets."

Gary's father: "There are much bigger things to come…I think he has a very good chance to replace Oprah."

Don't you just love this?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23trump...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23trump.html)

At least one other guy talked his way to the top.

<comment><USER3> Donald Trumps father had a 400 million dollar fortune.

More accurately he talked his way from the near-top to the very top.

This article also mentioned Gary's father had a 4 million dollar wine business.

<comment><USER4> I've read that Trump's fortune, before he became a TV celebrity with The Apprentice, was actually less than he would have had if he had simply taken all of the money he inherited and put it in a savings account at a bank. Essentially he wasn't a very good investor.

<comment><USER5> He was a celebrity a long time ago, and I doubt he made >2.5 billion from a TV show.

<comment><USER4> He wasn't a TV celebrity though. He was more tabloid fodder.

And no, he didn't make it from the show directly, but the show made his brand name a lot more valuable, and made it a lot easier for him to make money from his businesses. And his true worth is probably far less than that. A lot of people claim in the $150m-$250m range. It's hard to estimate a guy whose worth is primarily not in equities.

<comment><USER6> It has been a running joke in _Forbes_ \-- since the 80's -- that he thinks they've underestimated his net worth. I think the issue is not that he doesn't own equities -- they estimate the fortunes of Bloomberg, the Koches, the [Fidelity] Johnsons, etc. just fine. The problem is that he's so leveraged: being off by 10% on his assets might mean being off by 50% on his equity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the smell of megalomania in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER7> Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a PR piece about the podcast that Revision3 cut loose?

Presumably because it wasn't very successful? Even by the low standards of rev3.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it possible that he was just a bad fit for rev3 and not a bad guy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gary has always been a little over the top for me, but it works for him and comes off naturally. He deserves all of the fame he gets because he works his ass off. He claims to answer every e-mail. Based on how quickly he's built a following I wouldn't doubt it.

If you haven't already, watch his first appearance on Conan: <http://www.viddler.com/explore/djsteen/videos/69/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Why do people do interviews where they come off like this? This must be the image he's trying to project. How could being quoted as saying "I absolutely believe I am going to own the Jets" EVER help anybody?

<comment><USER10> Well, he's a personal branding guru, and "Gary Vaynerchuk is ambitious" is practically a summary of HIS personal brand, so at least in this case it helps him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> that article makes Gary sound like a kid...if someone read it w/o that first bit where it says he is 32, they would have thought the article was about a 16 year old

<comment><USER12> I've met Gary and seen him speak live over a webcast and he is just a big kid. That's not to say he isn't very smart. We were with a couple of the Youtube folks and we spent lunch discussing monitization of that platform. Gary had some great ideas and insight and I wouldn't be surprised if they talk to him again about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://garyvaynerchuk.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Programmable dashcam? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for a programmable dashcam. I want to control the frame rate at which I record, run local  deep learning models and other on-device analysis. Any recommendation? <comment><USER2> I'd consider using a rooted android smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER3> rpi + rpi camera ?</comment>


Static Hosting Benchmark 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.pierbover.com/posts/static-hosting-benchmark-2020/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here!

First time doing some data analysis which might not be up to standard for HN folks. Let me know if I missed anything or I could this improve this in some way.</comment>


The New American Homeless - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless-housing-insecurity-richest-cities <comment><USER2> A San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago

[http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm](http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm)

> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that > have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized > world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, > giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:

> _As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — > constantly forcing down wages._

> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy > human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot > reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to > labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased > productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of > progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot > increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity > to make anything at all.

<comment><USER3> Sounds nice but the devil is in the details. Land value tax would be determined arbitrarily not by the market. It's sounds great if you ignore the problem of actually assessing unimproved land value.

Of course we know "value" is just the amount of money someone traded for something, so Georgism can't be implemented practically.

When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.

<comment><USER2> This sounds like an argument to abolish all property taxes. No?

Land value assessments should be easier than typical property assessments (which take into account land value already), cf [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/ap...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/appraisal)

<comment><USER3> Pretty much. An assessor can write down any assessment they want. All assessed value taxes have this problem. The value I attribute to something can only be objectively defined by a market transaction. And more importantly, people attribute different values to the same thing.

This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k, person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar value intrinsic to the property itself.

<comment><USER2> So, because land value assessments are easier than property assessments, we should get a smaller margin of error by switching to a LVT. This is good.

Your other point seems to be that no margin of error is acceptable and we should therefore ditch the whole thing.

It's not clear that the societal pain from somewhat inaccurate tax assessments is great enough that we should just set everything to 0. We have lots of data that 0 property tax leads to housing shortages and rampant speculation (cf. Malta for an example) and if you don't tax land ownership you often end up taxing something productive, like income.

<comment><USER3> Margin of error? I don't think you understand me.

There can't be a margin of error because there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything). Margin of error compared to what?

People attribute different values to the same property, which is not reflected in any sort of assessed value.

I'll explain with a question: If I say a property is worth $30k and you say it's worth $100k what should the assessed value be?

<comment><USER2> > there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything)

There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value". I'm not very familiar with finance so I'm not sure if this is what you you're getting at.

But your idea, that land can't be taxed because it has no value, can't possibly be new as these questions have been around for literally hundreds of years. That being said, I've never heard it before and would be genuinely interested if you can link some papers or books.

<comment><USER3> > There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value".

If there is, then how would I calculate the intrinsic value of a piece of real estate, to levy a tax on it?

See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value) vs [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy.

It works for the mobile wealthy, sure. I'll effectively never have to worry about paying for the rent unless I decided to move to like, Manhattan, and probably a ton of HN readers won't either.

It works way better I think to give people a small plot of land, build them a basic house, and let them crack on with it. It's much better for someone to end up with a home in a state of disrepair and have to figure that out, than have a literal lord turf them out. Give a man a fish vs. teach them how to, that sort of thing.

An apartment could also work though the legal structure is a bit more difficult.

To put it another way - people who have literally zero capital are capital-F fucked. You can only ever apply a series of band-aids to that sort of situation, you can't actually fix it.

The poorest people I've seen in council housing or in more rural areas have a hell of a lot more dignity than someone bouncing from apartment to apartment in an expensive city despite potentially being in "poverty" statistically.

In brief - renting is financialization, if you don't have enough Money Points, you go and die. Simple, right?

<comment><USER5> _> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy._

I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen.

Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered. We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more people than there is need for them to be there.

The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the humanities.

<comment><USER6> Didn't rural living become relatively less attractive more than it became unaffordable?

Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in cities because the income was much more attractive.

<comment><USER5> Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable situation.

Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do.

It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In this situation it's really hard to blame corporations for all the problems when the key issue - zoning restrictions that prevent the construction of dense, low-income housing - is entirely caused by the government and by extension the people who elect them.

Allow developers the freedom to build huge apartment buildings and the housing crisis will be severely mitigated. The answer from the left is always more taxes, more government, more red tape and it blinds them to the true problem.

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.

Usually what happens is they raise or borrow a bunch of money to build much higher margin housing (e.g. hip condos instead of affordable apartments) until the market is saturated with still more unaffordable housing.

Without explicit incentive structures or requirements like, "You must build X number of affordable units for every Y number of luxury units." things tend to stay pretty broken.

<comment><USER9> > It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and > incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value > areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.

No car company produces cars for people living on the minimum wage and yet a great many people living on the minimum wage can and do afford cars. Building new housing reduces the value of existing housing.

<comment><USER10> cars have much shorter lifecycle than housing, are mobile, much smaller, and get replaced far more often than housing.

<comment><USER11> Cars also depreciate and aren't seen as an investment.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. This gets at the root of the problem. Housing can't be both affordable and a great investment at the same time. The latter requires high (and increasing) asset value which eventually precludes the former being increasingly affordable.

The problem with housing is a lot deeper rooted than basic Econ 101 supply & demand models can address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is an abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all rentals are _less expensive_ , and presumably a poor person would be living in one of those. How many hours for the 20th percentile rent? That would actually be insightful.

I wonder how many hours of minimum wage I would need to work to afford a new BMW.

<comment><USER13> > _The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is > an abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all > rentals are less expensive_

There are tons of poor people making less than minimum wage (working less than 8 hours or on/off days/gigs (and still not counted as unemployed because of those).

People also need to pay way more than the rent alone (food, utilities, children, commuting, health costs, and so on).

<comment><USER14> Working less than 8 hours doesn't mean you're making less than minimum wage if your hourly rate is minimum wage. If you take gigs that work out to a lower hourly rate than minimum wage, that's a different story though.

<comment><USER13> > _Working less than 8 hours doesn 't mean you're making less than minimum > wage if your hourly rate is minimum wage._

It means you're making less than 8 * minimum hourly wage each day, so those 127 hours stretch to even more than 15 days of your working month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can't make a law that orders people to care about each other. From an outside view it looks a lot like the erosion of a previously high-trust society. Possibly caused by middle-class economic woes. Those who want to build a family and are not rich have been gutted by various dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER16> The start of this article pains me.

 _Housing insecurity in the nation's richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans._

Is the target audience people that explicitly think anecdotes are more important than data? I preferred it when that cognitive error was at least hidden.

<comment><USER17> That's the status quo when it comes to journalism today.

Do an in depth analysis of the data and talk to experts with varied opinions? Nah....

Find an anecdote that pulls at the heart strings and use vague language to insinuate it's a "crisis"? We have a story!!

<comment><USER18> The lack of empathy in North American culture is part of the problem. You complain when they make it personal, pointing out individual problems is how you effect change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It appears to me now that we need more than one word to describe the various kinds of homeless: one group of mentally ill/drug addicts that can't keep it together under best circumstances, one group that might just need education/training to get into the groove, one group that's priced out by urbanization despite holding a proper job, one group that actually likes their freedom.

Lumping the four groups together creates a great deal of confusion - you can often find people arguing that homeless need more homes vs homeless need job training vs mental health care etc. We're just talking about different people.

<comment><USER20> The chronically homeless are almost all in the mental illness/drug abuse category. The ones that just need training and/or already have a job and are priced out can access lots of services, move, and otherwise find a way out.

<comment><USER19> The topic article describes exactly the kind of people who are well-adjusted and yet could not find a way out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not judging but there are 6 kids in that picture. How in the world is she going to manage in the first place with a minimum wage job? I'm surprised she can even afford to feed and cloth them never mind rent.

These kids don't have a chance without a lot of luck. I can only imagine not having a husband or a solid family (brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc) makes things more difficult with no one to give a helping hand.

I just want to ask where the fuck is the father in all of this and why isn't he helping?

<comment><USER22> That was covered in the article. He was abusive, so she and the kids left.

<comment><USER21> Well that is fine but his responsibilities still exist and he is a sack of shit for not helping to support the kids.

<comment><USER22> I agree that not helping to support your kids is extremely shitty, but that wasn't the most important part of the article for me.

Two of the children were abandoned by their parents, and the mother in this story adopted them. She earns her living doing work that seems to be an unambiguously positive contribution to society, and takes on extra responsibilities (in the form of two entire human beings).

The article paints a picture of a woman who is generous, hardworking, and disciplined, and who is getting absolutely crushed by the modern economy. That seems like a very real story to me, and a mandate to make some serious changes, even if they put a dent in the wealth of some wealthier people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't make it through this article. I know what the point is supposed to to be, but it probably will fall on deaf ears. The prejudice against the homeless runs too deep, the desire to justify that prejudice and insist it isn't merely shitty behavior deeper still.

I am probably two or three generations removed from low level German nobility. I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I won (and turned down) a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities in my state.

My father retired from the military as an E-8, a fairly high rank. I was a military wife for about two decades. The ex also retired as an E-8.

I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company, the biggest non military employer in my home town at the time. While I had that job, I would make small talk at eateries or the like and people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.

Then I quit to go live in a tent for health reasons. That long personal history of always being respected and accomplished and one of the privileged few in whatever circles I ran in was no protection from the prejudice against the homeless. It did seemingly nothing to get me taken seriously, respected or result in real help to resolve my problems.

I'm not sure it makes any difference for me to leave this remark. HN is a bastion of goodness compared to everything else, yet still is part of the problem. It seems to mostly just harm my reputation to talk about homelessness, not convince other people that there are systemic issues grinding people beneath its boot.

The only winning move is to not get ground under that boot. After it has marked you, the entire world will heap abuse upon you, deny you real help and tell you, clearly, you are a junkie or crazy.

I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual injustice in my life.

I increasingly hate articles like this. They do an even suckier job than I do of making that point and often just give ammunition to the people of the world who want to blame those whose lives don't work. ("Maybe she shouldn't have had six kids!!" Etc ad nauseum.)

<comment><USER4> > I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just > be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about > injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" > certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual > injustice in my life.

A level of this is absolutely necessary because there's too much wrong in the world.

I used to think a lot about how to solve the issues in my community growing up. I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I know more, etc.

But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on. All I can do is try not to exacerbate the issues.

And yeah, the world doesn't care about you, or me. You're a chicken in a farm and someone's about to lop your head off for a sandwich. So it goes.

<comment><USER23> _But realistically, I 'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on._

I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.

I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat space.

I wrote this recently and submitted it to HN.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small- tow...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-town-with- big-city-problems.html)

I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because it can't be fixed.

I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.

Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I say, clearly.

<comment><USER18> Vilifying the poor is part of the divide and conquer strategy of the ultra wealthy. They rely on us having a enemy other than them.

<comment><USER23> Although I am extremely frustrated with a number of things, I do not think this is true in most cases. Of course, you find awful people at all levels of society, but I think most rich people genuinely don't understand the needs of the poor, don't have good opportunities to really get a clue and a lot of what they do falls much more under the idea of "Never attribute to malice what can be readily explained by stupidity" \-- only substitute _ignorance_ for _stupidity._

One of the reasons I run my big fat mouth on the topic is because I do have a much more privileged background than I understood for most of my life, so I have the opportunity to bridge that gap to some degree.

I wish to hell and back that it wasn't such a slog of an endless uphill battle. I'm tired of my life being such a drag and of feeling so burdened, etc.

But I'm really not down with simply vilifying "rich people" in a broad-brush fashion. I see that as a lazy answer and a counterproductive answer.

I'm fine with calling out specific instances, commenting on known track records of individuals, etc. I'm not fine with "those people" are "just bad people."

If nothing else, it's a _pot calling the kettle black_ kind thing and I abhor hypocrisy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _She suspected the shock had been caused by exposed wiring in the basement, where there was a pool of standing water. In some states, she could have withheld her rent until these safety issues were addressed. Georgia granted tenants no such rights. Nothing prohibited landlords from kicking a renter out for reporting hazardous conditions to the authorities, what's referred to as "retaliatory eviction."_

There's nothing about this that's OK.

<comment><USER25> You cut off the quote too soon. The very next sentence is " _(A state law banning such practices has since passed.)_ ".

Stop making outrage-generating posts like this by cutting off relevant information.

<comment><USER24> So "she got the boot but we passed a law 100 years too late that might stop half of this problem but still won't let you withhold rent for unsafe housing" is supposed to be OK?

<comment><USER25> > _So "[fake quote containing strawman opinion about rents]" is supposed to be > OK_

I said nothing about this, despite your insidious insinuation. I'm saying that taking a quote out of context and/or altering it by cutting off a very relevant bit in order to make it more outrage-inducing _is bad_. Or, to emply your rhethoric, is any amount of misleading and lying in order to induce rage in readers, as long as it's rage about the "right" thing, supposed to be OK?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've heard it firsthand from someone working with the homeless that some are offered places to live but prefer the street. It's a mental health crisis as much as it's about available housing.

<comment><USER23> That assumes that _any_ housing is better than living in a tent. That assumes that _any_ deal that gets you into _any_ housing is a good deal, or at least not worse than sleeping under the stars.

Those assumptions are unwarranted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I remember watching the 1988 film _God Bless the Child_ [1] with Mare Winningham as the hardworking yet impoverished mother trying to keep it together for her young daughter. It was so moving, I cried all the way through it and it has left a life-long impression.

So sad to see not much has changed in 30 years.

[1] [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095227/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095227/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Owner occupied property taxes tied to local minimum wage. Price real estate speculators out of the equation.

</comment><comment><USER28> This was an interesting read, but very slanted. It largely lost me here:

> Most advocates agree, however, that lasting change will come only through > massive government reinvestment in low-income housing, livable wages > (including pay protections for the growing number of gig workers), and an > openness to alternative models, such as community land trusts and limited- > equity cooperatives. The fruit of the laissez-faire approach—deregulating > the private market and hoping that, with enough new construction, > affordability will trickle down—can be seen, they suggest, in the hundreds > of thousands of Americans doubled up or living in shelters and tent cities.

The idea that we currently have a free market approach to housing is absurdly wrong. We haven't had anything close to free market conditions in housing for generations, mostly since the FDR administration created the federal mess of agencies to commoditize housing in the first place. This is perhaps the single most important myth that needs to be dispelled. When it takes years to get permission to build an apartment, and 80-90% of the average US city's land is restricted to single family houses on large lots, that anyone can think we have a "liassez-faire" system is shameful.

Of course homeless advocates, who are largely paid by government programs, think that the problems created by too much government would be best solved by more government.

Earlier in the article the author cited a large scale research effort which came to a much simpler conclusion:

> Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: "The cause > of homelessness," he wrote, "is lack of housing."

This, it seems, people are finally beginning to understand. But still there is so much vilification if developers and landlords, which I believe gets in the way of progress.

The system is deeply broken, and the majority of the individual players in it are honest people trying to follow the rules as they've been given, trying to do something they believe is good: create more housing. If the city you live in only allows luxury housing to be built — which is often the case, due to the enormous cost of regulatory compliance, anything cheaper would not be profitable to build — then it's luxury housing or none at all.

In earlier eras with less regulation it was still true that more luxury housing was built. The difference was that when population growth happened, so much housing would go up so quick that the "luxury apartment" from ten years ago was now middle class, and the fifteen year old building was working class.

TLDR; it's exhausting to read story after story about how acute the housing crisis is, with so little investigation into its root causes. Why is it that our system leaves such an extreme shortage of housing in the first place, and what can be done to address that? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and therein lie the problems we have to solve.

<comment><USER29> I feel that you've created a boundary where anybody positing any specific answer to those questions, such as the one in the quote that lost you, you would dismiss as hopelessly slanted. Everything with an opinion will be slanted towards that opinion. I feel anything saying that the causes are murky, and the means of solving them a mystery; that's what you'll read as _unbiased_.

<comment><USER28> Thats a fair criticism.

What I struggle with is, this issue _is_ complex and multi-faceted. I think it's therefore easy for people to come in with strong preconceptions and cherry pick evidence to support simple answers that fit their worldview.

What I wish is that it was easier to have a more nuanced discussion that didn't involve demonizing, vilification, or picking sides.

But perhaps that's naïve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The > population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, > but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The > phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly > intractable—arose only in the 1980s. ...

The author goes on to cite declines in federal low-income housing funding as the root cause. What does the full graph of this funding look like going back to the 1800s?

I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration. It ramped up to a peak in the 1980s, then fell.

Could it be that the true cause of the homeless problem every city in the country faces lies elsewhere than reduced federal funding?

<comment><USER31> > I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the > (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration.

Why was it unsustainable? Other countries sustain far higher social spend. Do you perhaps mean politically unsustainable? Especially given the stronger lean to the right that the Republicans have manifested last decade.

<comment><USER30> Funding a massive war effort (Vietnam) while spending freely on welfare programs (Guns and Butter) wasn't sustainable. A few short years later, the country was taken off the gold standard due to its recklessness. The effects of that action reverberate today in the trade war and blooming currency war.

During the 1970s, the US experienced a surge of inflation that wreaked havoc with the economy.

Many countries you allude to are in dire shape - especially Europe. They pay next to nothing (compared to US) in defense and a few have been richly endowed with oil reserves. Their economies have been teetering on recession for years and now are in the unenviable position of facing negative interest rates heading into recession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Strikingly, this crisis of housing insecurity is erupting in America's richest, most rapidly developing cities. New York,... Washington, D.C., ... Seattle is close behind. In Los Angeles and Charlotte, San Jose and Nashville, the trends are similar. Unemployment is at a generational low; corporate profits have surged; ... Yet the teachers, maintenance workers, supermarket cashiers, and medical assistants who help sustain these cities are getting relentlessly priced out of them._

I am not sure if this is naivety or if the author is being disingenuous to make a point, but the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction problem, where it's not an addiction problem, it's almost always a mental health problem.

Not to minimize the plight of Cokethia, as the economy is clearly broken (and getting rapidly worse) for those who can't demand premium wages.

edit: s/and have a lot of dependents//

<comment><USER31> > the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction > problem

So, there's a lack of affordable housing because... ...people take drugs?|

Can you expand on that? I feel like I've missed something in your post that explains the logical leap there.

<comment><USER32> No. There is a lack of affordable housing because the economy doesn't have a way to cope with widening gaps of productivity (not to mention systemic and historical racism).

However, the vast majority (writing from a phone on train so I'll have to challenge you to prove me wrong rather than cite, but the statistics are clear on this) of homeless people are deep in the throes of addiction or, mentally unstable.

The working family that can't make ends meet absolutely exists, I am not in anyway challenging that.

But, go to one of these tent cities yourself , where these exploding homeless populations exist, and it will be apparent that people are so addicted that there is not rent that would be "affordable" as their basic human needs aren't even being met for them to be functioning in a positive economic way.

Essentially these people are sick, in a genuinely diagnosable way, and that sickness manifests in self harm. IMO, it's pretty clear that this mass sickness (primarily the opiate crisis) is the leading cause of these exploding homeless populations.

<comment><USER33> So your argument is that people become homeless because either they take too much medicine or too little medicine?

<comment><USER32> If you define taking pain pills to get high as "taking too much medicine" and then making bad decisions while withdrawing is "too little medicine", then yes that is a very significant minority of people ending up homeless.

But it doesn't account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people suffering from schizophrenia, etc.

<comment><USER33> So, taking what I stated (with the clarification of "too little") as your argument, what exactly are you proposing as avenues towards home-havingness?

<comment><USER32> I have not gone so far to make a proposal, which would depend on the hypothetical resources available to execute a plan.

I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that (much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to gentrification and wage stagnation.

<comment><USER33> I take issue with the fact that your map of reality is precisely what causes people to slip through the cracks into homelessness. Thinking about the issue as a sickness is actually just an avoidance of the problem. You are trying to reduce and abstract it away to the domain of medicine rather than to address it head on as a complex system of systems.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Schneier on Security: All Subversive Organizations Now Must Register - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/02/all_subversive.html <comment><USER2> It's the Al Capone gambit. Capone was not jailed for his criminal activities, but for not reporting the income from them. Martha Stewart went to jail, not for insider trading, but for lying about it. My guess is that this particular piece of legislation violates first amendment rights, so this is just legislative grandstanding, an activity not unknown these days,

<comment><USER3> You're point is?

Al Capone was certainly a criminal.

Martha Stewart was celebrity in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone needed to make a point.

The government interprets laws for it's convenience, yes. Occasionally to our benefit, often otherwise.

The law in the article certainly violates the 1st, 4th and 5th amendments as they've generally been interpreted (freedom of speech, right to privacy, right avoid self-incrimination). But such laws have been in force in this country before so I wouldn't be sure they can't appear again. At this moment, though, this will probably turn out to be an embarrassment.

<comment><USER2> My point is that there are enough laws that a determined prosecutor can get you on something even if he cant on the big crime. Perhaps Capone is not a good example because he committed a lot of crimes that we all think deserve jail time. Martha Stewart is a more interesting case in this context. She was never convicted of insider trading and probably could not have, but she could not keep her mouth shut. She lied about something something that probably was not a crime, However the lying was enough to get her jail time. This legislation is a trap to catch people who would not otherwise be guilty of a crime.

<comment><USER3> Yes indeed, from the SC state website:

 _Any organization or person who violates any of the provisions of this chapter shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by a fine of not more than twenty-five thousand dollars or imprisonment for not more than ten years, or by both fine and imprisonment._

<http://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t23c029.htm>

Not admitting to doing something that isn't necessarily illegal puts you at risk for a _ten year_ sentence...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, then when they arrest someone they get to cite one more violation ("you didn't register your illegal activity!") to "justify" a bigger punishment, for free.

Well played.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's the part in the addendum that gives the law an altogether different meaning:

"[...] by force or violence or other unlawful means;"

</comment><comment><USER6> Whether this is just stupid or a convenience arranged for law enforcement (see comment below about bigger punishment), my guess is that the definition of 'subversive activity' in the legislation is impractically broad. The SC legislature doesn't have the mandate to convict people of crimes (excepting impeachment of elected officials). Its members are not judges.

Besides treason, which by necessity has a _very_ low rate of conviction (the last being CIA mole Robert Hanssen last decade), I don't see how wording like "overthrowing the government of the United State" could be upheld when there is no parallel in whatever offense one was actually convicted for.

Otherwise, levying fines like this is pretty blatant extrajudicial punishment.

</comment><comment><USER7> I just find it humorous to picture a person who _would_ advocate the violent overthrow of the government thinking, "Hmm... I really should head down to City Hall and fill out a form declaring my political position. I'd hate to get slapped with a fine!"

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm going to create a new group and the whole point of it will be to overthrow the US government have it be replaced with chipmunks and then register on this and pay the $5.</comment>


Swift is a lot like Scala - <AUTHOR> https://leverich.github.io/swiftislikescala/ <comment><USER2> Any language designer that has both "modern, powerful features" and "familiar for current developers" as design goals, will end up with something not unlike other languages that have this. It is not a coincidence that Scala, modern C#, Kotlin, Xtend, Nemerle, Ceylon, Dart and Swift have a lot in common. They're all compiled languages with pretty high performance characteristics. They have support for OO stuff because of the "familiarity" goal (and, often, to interface with existing code) plus functional stuff because of the "powerful" goal. In a way, they're all Java with suck removed and cool stuff bolted on top.

So can we please stop the "ripoff!" arguments and look at what you can do with it? (note, i'm referring to HN comments on threads about Swift more than to the article)

C# 1 was a blatant ripoff of Java 1.2 (or something like that), with hardly anything new added, and only the biggest suck removed. Look at where C# is now. If Apple can push Swift the same way, there are good times ahead!

(assuming it gets good non-Apple support, but that's another rant)

<comment><USER3> C# 1.0 (the spec) and especially Visual C# 1.0 (the IDE) were recapitulations of Delphi in Java skin.

Now, C# is by far my favorite language (even though I think in ML), but I'm now a bit envious of the Java approach: One of the big ideas of OOP going back to Alan Kay is that OO languages should be _extremely_ dynamic, and that you achieve performance by building better hardware (or tuning it)†. This is what Java and Objective-C do. And, this is why Java programmers can create classes and objects with reckless abandon and still get excellent performance. Meanwhile, in C#, I find myself worrying about whether something should be a class or a struct; it doesn't happen often, and I know that I ought not be thinking about it, but it's there.

So, in summary, I now appreciate the value of putting the performance knobs on the machine rather than in the language, which represent the two different philosophies of Java and C#.

†Said by Alan Kay, and repeated by Steve Jobs: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kinda frustrating that the language comparaison is by syntax instead of features ( [http://www.scribd.com/doc/227879724/Swift-vs- Scala-2-11](http://www.scribd.com/doc/227879724/Swift-vs-Scala-2-11) is what's referenced in the article).

I'm fairly convinced that Swift enums and Scala case classes are only superficially the same, and based off the discussions I've heard about generics in Swift, Swift is miles aways from even C++-levels of generics, let alone Scala's.

Unless someone shows me otherwise, I'm convinced that Scala and Swift only have superficial similarities.

<comment><USER5> Author of those slides here.

They were made on the next day after the language was presented on WWDC and were based purely on the first draft of the Swift book published online by Apple. Needless to say the book was more of a tutorial than a full-blown spec at that time and many important aspects were not covered (generics were lightly documented without much details).

Can you please provide details about generics in Swift and how exactly are they different from Scala's?

Edit: changed 'superior' to 'different'.

<comment><USER6> Don't bother, people will just say X is better than Scala here. They don't know the amount of research done by Odersky on generics and why Scala can not be easily beaten in this area at least.

<comment><USER7> Scala can't be easily beaten there? Man...have you used C#?

I mean, I use Scala every day, but C# gives you so much solely on reification and Scala manifests are a real poor patch.

<comment><USER6> Holy shit you have got to be joking. Really trolling now, are we? Take a look at things like Shapeless ([https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless](https://github.com/milessabin/shapeless)).

<comment><USER7> I've used Shapeless. It doesn't affect my actually writing code on a daily basis. Reified generics do.

<comment><USER6> How exactly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article appears to say: they both have

* first class functions

* single inheritance with traits/protocols

* extension methods

* distinction between variables and constants

* a few builtin data structures (tuples, arrays, maps etc)

By this, most "recent" PLs look like Scala. The omitted differences are where most actually disappear (i.e. handling of variance/generics)

</comment><comment><USER9> There are similarities, of course, as you could expect from any modern language (i.e. created in the 21st century) but if there is something noteworthy about all the recent languages that came out these past years (Kotlin, Ceylon, Swift, Fantom, Gosu), it's not how much they look like Scala but all the features from Scala that they left out.

The Scala experiment produced a lot of interesting results and added a lot of clarity about what features are interesting in a modern language (property, lambda, extension methods, sum/union types, and a few others) but the complexity of Scala's type system and the uncertain shape of its code base (see Paul Phillips' talks) is demonstrating that it's often wise to support fewer features rather than be a kitchen-and-sink language.

I am very excited by this trend of minimalism in languages and the willingness from language designers to say "Interesting feature but it will add too much complexity, so I'm not adding it".

Best of luck to Swift, and I can't wait to see if a language will finally emerge on the JVM to supplant Java (even though this might take a solid decade).

<comment><USER10> The Scala experiment, as you say, seems to be kicking some serious tail, no need to speak of it in the past tense ;-)

Big companies are adopting Scala (Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, Yahoo, Sony, and so on), not surprising given Spark, Spire, Akka, Play, etc. The Scala language itself is certainly not without problems; at this point the ecosystem behind it is arguably its greatest strength.

Rest assured, if there is a language that will supplant Java on the JVM (highly unlikely in the near-term), it will be Scala (or some variant [Dotty] thereof). Ceylon's got a shot but they're a bit late to the party, and Kotlin isn't even 1.0 yet (Java 8 and 9 will punish that project's adoption, IMO).

<comment><USER9> > Rest assured, if there is a language that will supplant Java on the JVM > (highly unlikely in the near-term), it will be Scala

Not sure why you're so confident since Scala has gained about 2% mind share in ten years of existence and it's still all but impossible to find Scala jobs, but hey, if you like it, good for you.

<comment><USER11> It isn't too tricky finding places use Scala. Most of my dev work is done in Scala.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I noticed the author wrote

let emptyArray = String[]()

That's actually old, and no longer valid. The current syntax is

let emptyArray = [String]()

</comment><comment><USER13> Basically both represent the new concept of how a new language should be today. Many similarity there are, but "it's fair to say that Swift is a dialect of Scala" it not true. Also, the word "dialect" should be mean a sublanguage much expressive, but in many of your examples Swift seems much "verbose" than Scala.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experiences playing with Swift it has roughly two design goals—make a modern feeling ObjC and jam it into ML/Haskell ADTs. Almost every moment of using the language feels like a tug-of-war between those two sides.

I'm personally hugely excited about this in the same way I was hugely excited about this feeling in Scala. I don't think FP and OO ought to stay on their own side of the fence—I think they're mutually useful.

But I think the OO in Swift goes _way_ too far in order to have ObjC compatibility (perhaps).

I think that perhaps the biggest challenge that Swift falls the furthest on is managing combining immutable and mutable code. `let` and `var` are very thin veneers and it's easy to have things "change underneath you" even while writing a lot of let-like code.

I think this is mainly driven by the highly mutability-dependent ObjC bindings Swift must support in order to be useful to Apple. I also think it's a bit tragic.

My hope is that this being the early days for Swift its influence will drive more immutability through these APIs as they evolve.

</comment><comment><USER15> All those languages look like a combination of Java and ML to me. Of course they use different features and small additions here and there but overall: ML+Java.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting, given that Joel Spolsky says of Swift "It feels exactly like go", and this person is saying, "Swift is a dialect of Scala".

Does that then imply that Go is a dialect of Scala?

<comment><USER17> And they all feel like dialects of OCaml ;). (I am not saying 'Haskell' here, because it does not include object oriented programming.)

The thing is that the current generation of languages have so many overlapping features, that they are not all that different language-wise. Just like moving between Pascal, Ada, and Modula-2 was not that hard.

Also, I'd say that Go is the exception here, because in contrast to Go, Swift manages to adopt insights from the last 30 of 40 years of PL research. Go is an utterly boring language and has very little to do with Scala (or Swift).

<comment><USER18> Aw, but what about utterly fast to develop in, utterly awesome at concurrency, utterly easy for ruby/python/dynamic-language devs to pick up and gain huge performance boosts, utterly easy to get in to the ecosystem, and utterly simple to use?

I'm not a language geek mind you, but if people find it useful (and plenty of large and small companies have had huge wins with it at rapid pace) who cares if it's utterly boring?

<comment><USER17> _Aw, but what about utterly fast to develop in, utterly awesome at concurrency, utterly easy for ruby /python/dynamic-language devs to pick up and gain huge performance boosts, utterly easy to get in to the ecosystem, and utterly simple to use?_

Most of those characteristics are also true for PHP, which is arguably also easier to deploy, since nearly every virtual hosting provider has mod_php enabled and it is 'platform-independent'.

Sure, it gets the job done.

 _However_ , a lot of PL research has gone into making languages safer. Allowing you to make bugs that manifest at runtime, compile time errors. And while large bugs may not be that big a deal for the average web application, not everyone writes web applications. Billions are wasted on software bugs, from research that turns out to be invalid due to multiplication of units of measurement that cannot be multiplied, to Bitcoins that are lost due to programming errors, to deaths caused by errors in life-critical software.

Go does almost nothing to solve the one of the largest challenges of software, namely to make it safer. Sure, it's more safe than C. But arguable it's even a step back from Java by its refusal to include some form of parametric polymorphism, requiring developers to revert to runtime introspection instead.

<comment><USER19> Speaking descriptively, not normatively, it just seems the industry is moving towards _easier_ , not _safer_. yes, including PHP, but also python and ruby.

I think the trade-off is that _safer_ requires more upfront design, and is more viscous (harder to change). Whereas industry seems to get better end- results, with less design and faster iteration (i.e. so-called extreme programming). _What 's the point_ goes the argument _of getting the wrong thing perfectly correct?_. Added to this is the relative unpopularity of safer languages like SML etc.

Statically typed languages (Java etc) are mainly popular more because of performance, not safety.

So... I predict _easier_ will continue to beat _safer_... in terms of _popularity_.

<comment><USER20> > Statically typed languages (Java etc) are mainly popular more because of > performance, not safety.

No. The whole reason to have types is for safety, type safety. Where more errors/bugs can be found and found a whole lot earlier. That's the basis of the argument of dynamic vs statically-typed languages. If performance was all that matters, we'd all be writing C and C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 82 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7837108)

</comment><comment><USER22> I know it's off-topic but I every time I heard 'Swift' I feel sorry for 'the other Swift' i.e. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_langu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_\(parallel_scripting_language\))

<comment><USER23> Apple put this phrase on their Swift page [https://developer.apple.com/swift/](https://developer.apple.com/swift/) "Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit [http://swift-lang.org"](http://swift-lang.org")

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The difference is the rounded edges, you see.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've heard a lot of people say that swift totally ripped off Kotlin, a new language that Jetbrains is working on.</comment>


Google's biggest enemy: Europe, not China - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/15528/googles_biggest_enemy_europe_not_china

<comment><USER2> I hope the US Commerce Dept is standing firm with Italy on this. If a man drinks Italian wine and crashes his car into mine, can I sue the Italian wine maker? No? Well then why can Italy sue Youtube for someone else's video when they are doing a pretty good job of cracking down on copyright violations?

<comment><USER3> So if someone sells a gun to a minor and that young person goes on to commit a crime, is the seller liable under the law? IANAL but I would guess yes.

My point is that there is a spectrum of how crimes bring liabilities to people not involved in the crime itself. The trick is to where to draw the line. I think where Italy put the line is very wrong, and I am very interested in finding a more sensible place for the line.

<comment><USER4> Yes, liable for selling a gun, but not for murder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every time I criticize Google I get downmoded, but this has to be said:

Google needs to be scrutinized and not any less than Microsoft was. This obviously applies to anti-trust, but also to user's privacy and publicity rights - something that was never a problem with Microsoft due to different nature of their business.

For example, if you are being defamed on Youtube, what kind of recourse do you have? You could take the long route of finding the culprit and suing them, but if the video is still up there the damage would continue to happen every day. Unless pressure is applied to Google to handle such situation they won't do anything because there is absolutely no financial motive for them.</comment>


Announcing the Ginzametrics API - <AUTHOR> http://ginzametrics.com/announcing-the-ginzametrics-api.html

<comment><USER2> Awesome! This seems like a really great addition to your guys' platform. Its been fun watching Ginzametrics grow :) Keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> awesome guys with great investors behind them. keep doing your thing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. :-)</comment></comment>


Carpets for Airports - <AUTHOR> http://www.carpetsforairports.com/

<comment><USER2> Flash sucks</comment>


Why Is the Home Building Industry Stuck in the 1940s? Embrace Pre-Fab Homes - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/09/why-is-the-home-building-industry-stuck-in-the-1940s/570469/ <comment><USER2> I think the biggest drawback for pre-fab housing in the negative image that it is somehow lower quality construction. Some people even confuse it with mobile homes. I watched a season of This Old House recently were setup a pre-fab house for a family. It was very interesting. They brought in the house in section that were wired, plumbed and had future proofing setup. The house took a couple of month to put together, partly because of the weather and TV show been filmed around it but it went up quicker then most homes these days. The house was very nice. It looked like a $600,000 home in my part of the world.</comment>