Interestingly enough, it was Thoreau's inventory of species in these very streams and tributaries as documented in _The Maine Woods_, which can tell us how we're doing with the restoration of the waterways today. Thoreau's book was comprised of notes from three visits in 1846, 1853, and 1857, and he had a pretty early and close insight as to how bad the damage was from the get-go.
At the end of the book, in the appendix, he noted several introduced species. Since he often used "Indian" guides to help him navigate upstream, he also had the opportunity to learn a bit about what species were native and what were brought in by the newcomers. (Disclaimer: my mother was one-quarter indigenous to one of the tribes Thoreau mentions, so I've studied these texts pretty thoroughly).
Several interesting musings on the encroachment of the white man into these lands; this one especially:
> Tahmunt said that he traded at Quebec, my companion inquired the meaning of the word Quebec, about which there has been so much question. He did not know, but began to conjecture. He asked what those great ships were called . that carried soldiers. " Men-of-war," we answered. " Well," he said, " when the English ships came up the river, they could not go any farther, it was so narrow there ; they must go back, go-back, that 's Que-bec." I mention this to show the value of his authority in the other cases.
Rascoff explained that Zillow really has “no skin in the commission game” when it comes to what real estate professionals get paid, comparing Zillow to information provider WebMD.
Not accurate at all. For one, Zillow could do about 1000 things to promote competition among realtors, but it doesn't do that.
It could remind people that in 1950, the Supreme Court ruled that putting a hard-coded "6 %" on a real estate contract is, in fact, illegal price fixing.
It could remind people that "6 percent" of a sales price often equates to a much larger number when it comes to equity lost (e.g. if you have 250K equity in a house worth 750K, the commission amounts to ~ 21.3333 % of your equity.
It could remind Realtors that attempting to get people to sign contracts that they refuse to negotiate on is coercion, and it could help people sue Realtors who participate in cartel-like practices.
Factual findings of the Court
Enough has been said to show that under our decisions an illegal price-fixing scheme has
been proved, unless the [339 U.S. 485, 489] fixing of real estate commissions is not included
in the prohibitions of 3 of the Act. Price-fixing is per se an unreasonable restraint of trade.
It is not for the courts to determine whether in particular settings price-fixing serves an
honorable or worthy end. An agreement, shown either by adherence to a price schedule or by
proof of consensual action fixing the uniform or minimum price, is itself illegal under the
Sherman Act, no matter what end it was designed to serve.
> it’s so similar to programming on a higher level.
Indeed it is. The logic of the `results` has to stand out relative to the result itself. A programmer can hide the logic without too much pushback; an accountant must not only unhide what is hidden, but explain every "trace route" behind what is hidden. In highly complex systems, this has to be done in a methodical way to ensure audit trails. A non-methodical audit trail is the sign of a bad accountant, or of fraud. One of the most insidious things in the accounting world today is the widening discrepancy between what companies are reporting to shareholders and what GAAP requires they report. Both GAAP and non-GAAP earnings must be reported together (for publicly-traded companies), but in a lot of tech companies, they are getting away with "selling" the non-FASB numbers to shareholders to deceive them that they are doing better than they are.
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.
"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"
It doesn't, really. Since there are umpteen ways to do things in GNU/Linux, developers often end up with less-than-ideal implementations for what they are trying to do using a single user account.
The single-user approach creates clashes between the network devs who want to build empires of containers they "own", and the stack-level bare metal purists who want the system to be as clean and secure as possible by isolating things where they should be isolated (to a single user instance for that purpose alone). This is not a new problem, nor a very well thought-out solution.
Containers are always a less-than-ideal implementation for people running Linux natively. The ideal way to sandbox in Linux is create a user account, download and test whatever code, see what breaks or infringes with its unique notion of "privileges", and delete the user when done.
The problem with using separated user accounts for isolation is that various applications assume that they either run as root (like various package managers) or need to start child processes with different user id. Sometimes this can be worked around, but overall the amount of efforts is very non-trivial.
So people thought that instead of fixing the apps it was easier to fix the kernel. But this resulted in a big complexity with namespaces, capabilities, cgroups etc.
I have to admit that I'm quite confused about this comment. Are you saying simply running a command under its own uid is enough to provide the same isolation that containers do, and that the latter were only created because people are not running Linux natively?
I think he is saying there are a lot of 80% solutions like user based isolation that could have been made more secure, but instead people invented a new solution that has its own problems, and that the fractured landscape of solutions we see now is due to the freedom of open source.
> They failed the test and without this key innovation performing to spec I no longer have faith that Mastadon is any more than a technically complicated open source Twitter.
Maybe instead the question you should be asking is: who has the incentive to undertake such a resource-intensive attack? This seemed more a response targeted at Wil for promoting his logic regarding leaving Twitter, targeted at him directly after he reasoned why the good people of the world need to Quit Twitter.
Making new users feel unwelcome on Mastadon is, unfortunately, the easiest path for them to fend off the competitor. It would not surprise me in the least to discover this attack was, in fact, coordinated by some entity with strong ties to Twitter. Of course the attackers want it to look like what instead happened was a "famous person verification" problem within the Fediverse; bad and negative press about Mastadon are _exactly_ what the attackers wanted here. And, unfortunately, it worked. There is always financial motive.
Do you have anything to support that speculation? We have terrible people on all social media platforms. The simplest explanation is that there are genuinely terrible little on mastodon.
They did show their theory. They didn't really show supporting facts. If you claim "it's caused by something different than we see everywhere else" you really need more than "it's true, because money".
Yes, and it will be ugly. It was already getting bad before the tax code overhaul, but now that the payment of interest on student loans is not deductible (by anyone, namely diligent debt-paying low-income grads for whom the tax deduction was originally intended, those making < $80K), it is kind of inevitable.
Co-design for hardware+software is tough, for sure. But the reality is that hardware has to be present to build the software on top of it. People need something to play with. So the "bag on the side" of FPGAs here is kind of like Lego blocks for cache / acceleration. If you are running a DNN for inference, for example, cache is usually your bottleneck. Rent GPUs to train the model, figure out your bottleneck, and build your own isolated and local system for the "expensive lot of folks" to create the valuable IP.
The best thing about Google News (the old Google news) was that it was like being able to search microfiche of all the old-school news publications (but digitally): articles written by journalists for publications that happened to also be digitized. You could scroll back and back to as many results as the engine could find on any given topic. As a research tool, it was unparalleled in its ability to help journalists link facts to unbiased sources and to multiple sources.
When they redid the design (yes, I know exactly what you are talking about) it was like ... murdering democracy: limiting results.
I had to stop using it all together.
Sure you can go search google.com, but items that would show up on news ( == important things) are somehow lost from google, and it's just not the same.
Sad day when we lost the old news.google.com. If what they're saying here is true, the first thing to do is to bring back the old news search. That will help journalists more than anything.
> it seems clear that either a dense arrangement or the countryside (if working remotely) are preferable to the burbs, where you get high costs and poor access.
HOAs are primarily to blame for the high cost and poor access of suburbia. Multiple gated communities all each attempting to create their own "privately-owned by the community" parks and recreation. Aside from HOA fees (which are basically taxes), the gluing together of all these private developments makes "freedom" and walkable / public access an illusion. Homeowners end up double paying and cities' infrastructure suffers from lack of funds.
Density is best if it is done right, but the HOA problem incentives fracture and disconnect. Thus: all public spaces in all densely-planned areas must be publicly-owned. The HOA cannot create walled gardens.
The obvious thing you are missing is that it is developers who want to build rent-producing "income HOAs" ... they are the driver creating the problem. Who else would be lobbying for the kinds of restrictive zoning that creates these problems?
If it were just developers, there wouldn't be the political constituency for it. Also, developers make money whatever kind of market-rate construction they're doing, in a decent market.
If you're interested in the subject, some good takes on it are the books I list here (Zoned in the USA and Zoning Rules!):
Or, if you want to get a very real sense, the next time some apartments get proposed in your town, go to the public hearings and listen to the neighbors rant, rave, froth at the mouth and otherwise raise a hue and cry that life as they know it will not go on if the poor peop...errr, I mean apartments get built anywhere near them.
That's true in the US (where I come from) but less so where I am now (Ireland). The main issue here has been zoning and height restrictions limiting construction of housing near jobs.
Of course, it's not just density - it's the variety of use. I used to live in South Park, San Diego and it was a wonderful neighborhood, even though it wasn't all that dense (mostly single family homes - and gorgeous ones at that). It did, however, have all sorts of retail, dining, parks, housing, and other things in the same neighborhood, so I could still get most of what I needed with a walk. Of course, houses there were not going to be affordable with the incomes we could get in San Diego, because this made it about the best neighborhood in the city.
Actually, that example is illustrative. It would be illegal to build South Park now. Partially because of zoning, but also because of parking requirements and traffic "engineering" (to use the term rather generously). All those little cottages would be surrounded by asphalt (mandatory parking minimums), not gardens, and the streets would be three times as large (gotta ram fire trucks through at 45mph after all!)
That being said, it wasn't perfect. I went to the community planning meetings (at 5:00 in the evening, so it was mostly retirees) and was usually the only person defending planned new bike lanes.
There is probably some sort of follow-on effect of HOAs, but of course the original tastelessness was that of property developers. They didn't analyze the market to figure out what homebuyers wanted. Instead they figured out what they could build cheap, and convinced ignorant people to buy that. Once a family has made its one truly large investment in a shit way of life, they don't need an HOA to suggest the sunk cost fallacy.
The developer wants to minimize risk. The homebuyers will choose what they prefer:
a. Without an HOA, every home is well-kept like a postcard. (possibly most desired, but unlikely to happen)
b. With an HOA, every home is well-kept like a postcard. (acceptable)
c. Without an HOA, some homes have a "redneck" or "ghetto" look. (undesirable)
d. With an HOA, every home has a "redneck" or "ghetto" look. (won't happen)
The only rational choice for the developer is "b". If they try for "a", they might only sell a few houses before somebody makes the place look threatening. That drives down the selling price for the nearby lots. The lower selling price may even increase the chance of having buyers who will also make a threatening-looking mess.
I wish it weren't so. I hate how all modern housing has HOAs. Without some very unlikely changes in the law, we're stuck with the situation.
You've explained why there are HOAs, and your explanation makes sense, but it doesn't address my point. GP was complaining that HOAs cause shit neighborhoods, which from a temporal perspective is unlikely. HOAs don't exist before homes get built. Cheap-ass, insufficiently-regulated property developers build shit neighborhoods (and, as you observe, often set up the HOAs that infest them). HOAs are merely the crabs in the bucket, pulling down neighbors who attempt to live better lives in the horrible suburban neighborhoods that already exist.
Well HOA fees go to things like maintenance of roads, maintenance of community-owned spaces (landscaping, parks, etc). When HOA fees are high covering all these things the city's taxes would normally cover, the cities have less money all around. Fractured spaces glued together.
It's basically siphoning money that would be going to public infrastructure to make private infrastructure. There's also statistical evidence that people running the boards of these HOAs don't actually select the most value-oriented bidders, they reward their family and friends.
> if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation
Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely.
You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
- pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment
I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
> "You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company."
People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion).
Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread.
Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.
It's hard to say why specific comments have been downvoted. Often it's because they break the site guidelines in ways the author didn't notice. Sometimes it's simply not fair, and other users need to (and often do) fix that by giving a corrective upvote.
Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.
Interestingly enough, it was Thoreau's inventory of species in these very streams and tributaries as documented in _The Maine Woods_, which can tell us how we're doing with the restoration of the waterways today. Thoreau's book was comprised of notes from three visits in 1846, 1853, and 1857, and he had a pretty early and close insight as to how bad the damage was from the get-go.
At the end of the book, in the appendix, he noted several introduced species. Since he often used "Indian" guides to help him navigate upstream, he also had the opportunity to learn a bit about what species were native and what were brought in by the newcomers. (Disclaimer: my mother was one-quarter indigenous to one of the tribes Thoreau mentions, so I've studied these texts pretty thoroughly).
Several interesting musings on the encroachment of the white man into these lands; this one especially:
> Tahmunt said that he traded at Quebec, my companion inquired the meaning of the word Quebec, about which there has been so much question. He did not know, but began to conjecture. He asked what those great ships were called . that carried soldiers. " Men-of-war," we answered. " Well," he said, " when the English ships came up the river, they could not go any farther, it was so narrow there ; they must go back, go-back, that 's Que-bec." I mention this to show the value of his authority in the other cases.
[146 THE MAINE WOODS: https://archive.org/stream/mainewoods00thorrich/mainewoods00...]