mbroshi

This is from the article:

"...the fact that they offer market-value estimates and 'are promoted as a tool for potential buyers to use in assessing [the] market value of a given property,' shows that they meet the definition of an appraisal under state law. Not only should Zillow be licensed to perform appraisals before offering such estimates"

It can be surprising when seemingly innocuous activities are in fact heavily regulated (cf. Stanford needing to remove all their learning videos from their website).

I am agnostic on net neutrality (ie. neither for nor against, just admitting my own lack of ability to assess its fallout).

I read a lot of sweeping, but hard to measure claims on its affects (such as in the linked article). Are there any concrete, measurable affects that anyone is willing to predict?

Examples might be:

* Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease.

* There will be fewer internet startups over the next 5 years than the previous.

Edit: formatting

The drop in returns received was 6 million.

Agreed. This article may or may not have made some good points, but I couldn't keep reading after that.

You can refuse to answer their question. You can also ask them how much others are making at your position (and they can refuse to answer that, too). I don't see where the asymmetry is.

The analogy is not perfect, but all the time people like to know how much a house or car sold for in the past, or how much a stock traded for the in past, etc. Seems like useful data.

Now, I'm not advocating for or against this particular question, but I sure do hope there is data collected and studied on the effect this has in NY before anyone jumps to conclusions. I feel it's too easy to have a knee-jerk reaction on this one.

There is no way to know whether this helps/hurts/is neutral for any particular class of people without studying its effects.

A big plus of automating tickets is that it's no longer biased. You're not more likely to get a ticket in a poorer, more high crime neighborhood, just because there happen to be more police there. This way, rich white people in the Loop are just as likely to get tickets as poor black people in Woodlawn. To me this democratization seems like a big plus.

The best no-limit hold-em players in the world are also presumably quite good at limit hold-em, limit omaha, 7 card stud, etc., not to mention other card games like bridge. Serious question: When these programs are built to beat humans in one very particular task, are they any better at beating humans at similar tasks?

Can you expand? Many proofs assume the axiom of choice, and I'm missing how this one does.

Can I ask a couple of naive questions (I'm not very well informed on these issues):

1. Since electric cars may well be powered by coal, not gasoline, might they not be more heavily emitting?

2. Does the environmental impact of creating and disposing all the batteries in electric cars counterbalance any emission gains?

It's funny, because many of the points made about SO in this article remind me of my experiences with HN. My first couple of comments were downvoted, as I did not yet know the HN etiquette and unspoken rules of discourse, and that can be pretty discouraging for newcomer. I'm still pretty reticent to comment for fear of being downvoted.

There is also the familiar rush to be the first to post some news story, which is almost impossible.

All that said, I've had extremely overall positive experiences on both SO and HN. The breadth of collective expertise and depth of comments on both sites is really awe-inspiring. I view the strict rules of engagement as a feature, not a bug.

The article mostly describes how elephants populations have been dwindling with the ban in place. I do not see any statistics supporting the view that elephant populations will dwindle any more quickly/slowly without a ban.

Maybe this is overly naive, but when I make a typo in the Google search bar, it doesn't even search for my typo-ed term (even if it would have gotten some hits), it searches for what I actually meant to type. Can't package managers have a similar feature?

For those like myself that freak about this kind of stuff, and did not read through carefully, the effect is pretty small and requires taking a lot of benadryl:

"Three years of taking either daily Benadryl, Advil PM, Tylenol PM, or Motrin PM, for example, is associated with about a ten percentage point increase in the probability of experiencing dementia or Alzheimer's compared to no use."

Am I alone in feeling like this is akin to a tutorial on how you can shoplift without getting caught? WSJ, for better or worse, does not want to give you content without your paying for it. If you take that content without paying, you are stealing. Just because you have figured out how to get past their security does not mean it's not stealing.

(See the second precept here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Precepts)

In case you are not already excited by discoveries in concrete, this should help: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/3-concrete/

Presumably they make their money from repeat customers, in which case ripping off their customers is probably not an optimal strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game

This could be a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card

Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I love this observation! I would be interested if anyone could dig up what text book that came from.

Simple supply and demand: Sell commodity futures. If there really are huge influxes of an existing scarce resource on the horizon (the article mentions platinum), prices will drop.

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant.

>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.

Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.

If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.

Insurance companies cannot credibly cover acts of god, aka correlated risks, because they happen to too many people all at once. It's not a simple matter of "fixing" insurance for those matters.

NPR's Planet Money had a good discussion: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/03/353030214/bedbu...

I was also lost at that part, although for a different reason. The function f was assumed to be from R to R, so it does not make formal sense to plug in f(x+ih).

I guess the author has the unstated assumption that f is the restriction to R of a function on C.

Number 6 on the unsolved problems list ("Is there an arithmetic progression of consecutive primes for any given (finite) length?") was solved affirmatively in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem

Kirk Odom notwithstanding, presumably they were only doing hair anlysis of suspects that were already presumed guilty. This is not a random sample.

Looks interesting, but odd that the very first code snippet is an infinite loop.

Or, to sum up even more succinctly:

- Government regulations have stifled innovation, thereby making existing products less safe, less comfortable, and less used than they would be otherwise.

In other words, nothing new.