closure

How does prop 13 cause a housing crisis?

It certainly entices people to hold and rent properties they own rather than sell, but those units are still part of the housing stock.

I think repealing prop 13 for commercial properties makes sense as a way to raise tax revenue, but don’t see doing so for residential property having an impact on housing costs.

Buffett is a trustee of their foundation and pledged most of his money to it a decade ago.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Informati...

I stopped reading here:

“If San Francisco residents really believed that sea levels were rising, they’d have all sold their homes by now.”

Apparently the author has never been to San Francisco or seen the sea level estimates for the next 30-70 years.

The last time I looked the northernmost and easternmost parts of SF will have some trouble, but by far the biggest areas of concern are east of 101 south of the city. And yes, if people thought ahead that far they would probably be concerned but even in the areas that are predicted to have the most impact we’re still talking 25+ years.

Yes I understand that and the outdoors activities have no appeal to me.

I’ve lived in Michigan, Texas, Washington, California. The weather in California is dramatically better than the others, but on balance I would much rather give up 3+ hrs of commuting a day for 1hr where some of that is in a humid subway station.

If you haven’t lived in the humid areas of Texas, you don’t know that it’s much worse than NYC/Boston/etc in summer. Rather than 85-90 with 85% humidity, think 104 with 85+% humidity. With virtually zero culture. And continual rain throughout the otherwise mild winter.

All I really mean is that on balance I think it’s worth the trade-off (due to the other pluses). I wouldn’t trade SF for say an inexpensive area with no culture and bad weather, but I think I am willing to put up with the heat & humidity along with cold & snow given all the rest NYC has to offer.

After 8 years in SF I have been seriously considering moving to NYC, largely over my commute to South Bay, but also for the substantial increase in density which brings with it a manifold increase in cultural opportunities and activities.

The weather is a drawback (in probably 200+ days in NYC over 10 years I can remember a single week of what I would consider nice weather). I have realized that crappy climate is a poor reason to avoid the move.

My one main concern is finding a job with similar pay and interesting work. 90+% of the job listings I see are for Java enterpise-type work paying a third of what my (admittedly more than comfortable) current total pay is.

My chihuahua was rescued on the streets of San Francisco after an unknown period of time fending for himself. He was a little underweight but not dramatically so. No signs of previous ownership (no chip, no collar, not neutered) so he was possibly just dumped somewhere at a young age (they estimated he was 1-1.5 yrs when found).

He fiercely guards food and will snap at anyone that reaches for him. He hunts insects including flies and cockroaches (he caught at least a few of those on our walks).

I don’t think he’d be as effective as a rat terrier, but I suspect he could hunt and kill field mice and maybe small rats.

YMMV, but only in the last two years of high school do I recall these five-paragraph essays being a substantial part of classes. We certainly did them from time-to-time before that, but we also did a lot of other writing of many different forms, and in the last year or two also did a couple "research papers" (in the classic sense, not in the grad student moving a field forward sense).

In a sense, yes. What I'm getting at specifically is that:

- Although we teach people to read, we don't necessarily put enough focus on comprehension and understanding.

- Although we teach people to write, we tend to focus on mechanics rather than on writing clearly and in a way that emphasizes our meaning.

- We don't just focus on functional math, but teach much more complex math to virtually everyone that goes through high school.

You can argue where exactly to draw the line on math (and don't get me wrong I loved math and was very good at it, at least the way it is taught in the US), but I'm not sure everyone needs to become as highly specialized as we attempt to make them in that area at that age.

Totally agree. It took me until several years out of school to realize that learning to think should have been a primary focus of university.

25 years on I am realizing that although it got me work and very decent pay I probably would have been much better off if the entire focus of university had been:

1. Learning how to think

2. Learning how to learn

Really the focus of earlier schooling probably should have been:

1. Learning how to read with good comprehension

2. Learning how to write so that others can understand me

3. Math so that I could do basic calculations required for everyday life.

Everything else is gravy.

My cardiologist told me never to try a low-sodium diet without talking with him first. He is very up-to-date on research and said that an equal number of people see blood pressure increase on low-sodium as see blood pressure decrease but for many (most?) people the difference is negligible. In other words if you are one of the ones who is very sensitive to changes in sodium you are as likely to be harmed as helped by lowering sodium.

A "graybeard"?

I think he made the right choice there.

Addictive or not, I think this statement is a sign that the authors didn't do much of an investigation:

>It is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be.

I've seen many people who ended up with serious relationship issues due to spending as much time as they did playing video games. Perhaps that was a sign of a deeper problem in the relationship, but in the cases I saw it didn't seem to be. When they were away from the games the relationship seemed great.

Likewise I've seen people calling in sick, coming in late after a late night of playing video games, etc. and ending up with work and longer-term career issues as a result of spending many of their waking hours playing games.

It can get well beyond "unwinding after work" and really start to affect your life. The same can be said for other activities, but to dismiss the idea that people who play games or do those other activities obsessively aren't harming their lives and couldn't use some kind of help seems disingenuous.

One observation here from someone who has taken a mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) class but isn't currently meditating (but would like to get back to it!):

Expect to get distracted a lot, like your mind wandering continuously. The key here is to observe that happening, and gently bring yourself back to your breath. Don't let it frustrate or discourage you. Watching yourself become distracted and gently bringing yourself back is part of the process of meditating, not some sign that you're failing at it. The noticing of the distraction is in itself mindfulness.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests, you need to approach this with non-judgmental moment-to-moment awareness.

I too can make a rumbling sound at will since I was a child.

What is responsible for this?

I don't know how I discovered how to do this but it always seemed natural.

The author doesn't state her father's age or when he lived on Linnhurst.

My father, now 82, lived on that block from birth until his late 20s or early 30s. He went back 20 years ago for the first time in 30 years and was shocked and saddened by what he saw.

Thanks for pointing out the reference - the OCR apparently stopped part-way through the document.

The harm comes from having a definition that is so loose as to be meaningless. You're now saying "high-level to high-level", but most people use the terms "source language to source language", and several people here have admitted that a compiler that generates assembly should be considered a transpiler.

If you're going to define it as something that goes from a "high-level" language to another, then you need to define high level. Is C high level? is C++? is HLSL (there are lots of HLSL <-> GLSL translators)?

Also, in almost every context that I see "transpiler" used, people say that it's a transpiler from X-to-Y, which adds zero value above saying it's a compiler from X-to-Y.

People usually don't feel the need to qualify what they are compiling from or to, despite the fact that many compilers target (or use as a source) many kinds of languages and/or intermediate representations.

The overall point here is that compilers (of all kinds) are simply translators - some from a high level source language to one form of (textual or otherwise) IR, some from one form of IR to another, some from one source language to another (be it high level or not), etc. Saying one is a "transpiler" and others are not, especially when you give adequate context and say what the source and destination forms are, just doesn't add value.

I don't buy this definition at all.

First, the "semantics" had better not change, either by an optimizing or non-optimizing compiler, or you've got a miscompile.

Second, I've seen several source-to-source compilers (that the proponents of the term transpiler would certainly call transpilers) that do non-trivial transformation, e.g. to try to capture certain idioms, or that are required as a result of an "impedance mismatch" between the languages.

Sorry but can you point to the particular use of "transpiler"?

I've skimmed this several times and have now run it through a PDF OCR program, and am not finding it.

Even if this paper does use the term saying "we've been using it all along!" is hardly accurate because this has hardly been a well-known term until very recently - I've read hundreds of academic compilers (mostly on the optimization & code generation side of things) going back to the late fifties, and it's only a term I've seen used in the very recent past.

So the number of people doing something is how you determine the definition of a word?

That really makes no sense.

> IRs, ASTs and bytecodes are not programming languages. If you insist otherwise because "some might consider it that way", you have no business criticizing the use of words, to be honest.

That's not what I am saying. The point is that compilers make many transformations from "language" to "language", it just happens that other "source languages" are sometimes the target.

> If you have some program that actually translates to assembly language as a target, by all means, call it a transpiler if you want.

For a very long time that was the model most compilers used, and in fact people (mostly those espousing to be advocates of the UNIX philosophy of building small tools that could be chained together) would rail against compilers that directly generated machine code rather than generating assembly that was run through a separate assembler.

So if a compiler that generates assembly source is a transpiler, then the by definition most compilers are transpilers (and all transpilers are compilers which people seem to agree with).

By that definition every compiler that generates assembly language is a transpiler, rendering the term meaningless.

Perhaps you don't think you could "just as well" program in assembly language, but there are many many people who do, perhaps not in your own problem domain.

I don't think it's a meaningful term because there is no reasonable definition, specifically of where you draw the line.

cfront compiled C++ to C, so it's a transpiler, right? Or is that just an unimportant implementation detail?

Everything targeting LLVM IR is a transpiler, because it's just source-to-source, with the second source being LLVM IR.

Similarly things targeting the JVM or CLR - all transpilers because both of these are relatively high level targets. They might not be something you would consider a "source language", but for many people assembly language is a perfectly reasonable source language, and thus...

Everything compiling to assembly language is a transpiler. The target language is assembly.

Having worked on compilers for over two decades it just comes across as a made-up term by people who don't understand that what a compiler does is translate from one language to another (be it another "source language", ASTs, linear IRs, VM bytecodes, assembly languages, or executable code).

I don't think I'm being particularly pedantic here. Compilers simply generate another form that one person or another might consider a source language (in fact people working on JITs most definitely think of their input as the source language).

I do wish people would stop using the term transpiler as if there is something novel or different about source-to-source translation.

If you're taking a higher level language and compiling it to assembly, it's a compiler.

If you're taking a higher level language and compiling it to LLVM IR, it's a compiler.

If you're taking a higher level language, and compiling it to another higher level language...it's a compiler.

I am not sure where this term was first coined, but we've been doing source-to-source compilation for a very long term and it's just within the last 7-10 years I start hearing people use this term, which IMO adds no actual value.

It's perfectly fine to say "Swift to JS compiler".

On this point, I wouldn't say that CS PhDs are necessarily having a hard time finding jobs but rather CS PhDs aren't by themselves particular valued in industry so you generally aren't going to get your time and money's worth immediately after graduating (i.e. you'll get paid somewhat less than someone who spent the same amount of time in industry that you spend getting the PhD).

What it can get you is opportunities that people without the PhD don't have available (like corporate research teams that only hire people with PhDs or put them into a separate class called "researchers" vs. other people who are hired strictly to write code).

Whether it helps you longer term in the positions that are available to non-PhD holders entirely depends on you. I've seen plenty of people with PhDs struggle to advance and plenty without PhDs excel while working in the same environment.

> I'm looking to transition out of startup nonsense and move into basic research.

There are options other than startups and moving to research.

Are you considering those?

It's not entirely clear to me from the post what you're hoping to attain by completing the PhD.

By the way, mid-30s isn't old, 10 years of experience isn't much, and a director-level position in a startup isn't particularly meaningful (if you were a director at a major corporation it might be).

I was at Microsoft for over a decade and had access to the Windows NT source throughout.

I couldn't agree more about Dave's code and the code of the other early contributors to the system. Extremely clean, clear, and simple code neatly partitioned into small understandable functions.

I happened to come across this article recently, an article which I think demonstrates how competitive Dave was in his youth: http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/sports/2015/07/23/d...

TAPL by Pierce is as far as I can tell the book everyone recommends, but if you have another you think is good I'm interested.

This is why I have always found proofs difficult. I just don't know what steps people think are important to spell out but.