tathastu

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

First, talk to a trained professional.

https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline might help.

No matter how permanent they feel, feelings are temporary. The short-circuit can and will get fixed.

May you be well.

tathastu

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Tesla's autopilot page (https://www.tesla.com/autopilot) says (as of today):

Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars

All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Non-paywalled stories:

http://spacenews.com/indias-pslv-launches-7-satellites-in-a-...

http://www.firstpost.com/india/isro-successfully-launches-ps...

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Still can't develop apps for iPad Pro on an iPad Pro.

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Great, we'll have 1/3 less traffic and more housing space soon!

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/386/

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Brazil may be shooting themselves in the foot -- they're trying to create an innovation industry around Sao Paulo and these things will just create a chilling effect that chases a huge bunch of industries out of the country.

tathastu

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Try search from Google, then open resulting link in a private / incognito window.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

The article is comparing median income (of all residents) to prices that home-owners pay which is pretty much apples to oranges.

Fewer people are buying houses in the Bay Area right now already which causes the disparity in the house-price-to-income ratio: Most folks who can afford a house worth 1M (and prove it to a lender) are probably earning dual-income in the tech sector and 330K (which would make the ratio 3x, same as the national average) is not too much of a stretch between two technology jobs.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

The Insight Meditation Center has a ton of introductory talks and guided meditations available for free: http://audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/ for example.

All you need is a timer which is already built in to most phones; if you want a slightly better timer that has a soothing chime, use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.xipa.medigo... which is also free (and has no ads, social networking features or other annoying stuff).

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

  ...anybody who thinks that the above is
  
  (a) legible
  (b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
  (c) particularly safe

  is just incompetent

If that isn't a criticism of the person, I don't know what is.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Bookings are 10B, not revenue -- that's what the passengers pay; stated revenue from the doc was 2B, which is what Uber keeps (rest goes to drivers). But your larger point is well-taken, even at that number, the valuation of Uber is not that surprising.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I worked (and studied) in Singapore for a while. As an engineer for a tech company, you get paid very little compared to cost of living.

In my graduating class, most EE+CS folks I know who are still in Singapore became bankers, government employees or consultants. Most engineering talent left because the salaries were barely enough to pay rent.

Edit: spelling

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

C&H is about imagination, not loneliness.

Imagination is an intrinsic and essential part of the human experience, especially in childhood, and to call it a 'coping mechanism' is completely missing the point.

Bill Watterson's genius was showing that there's a magic world in all of us; not that the world outside was not oppressive or unpleasant.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I think it's important to separate out two things -- the startup boom vs the housing boom.

The startup boom in some sense has always been there. There is a bubble-like environment but I don't think it equates to 1999 -- most of the high-value companies are doing fairly well, having either good exits (Whatsapp, Tumblr, Etsy), or raking in decent revenue (AirBnB) or having marketing executives fight over the chance to advertise (Snapchat, Pinterest).

As other folks have pointed out, VC firms have gotten rich and there is money to go around so the amount firms are being offered is a little higher than normal especially for late-stage rounds when it looks fairly sure that the company is on solid ground.

The housing boom on the other hand is simply an effect of not enough housing. Startups aren't the major employer in Silicon Valley. The major employers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn etc -- all employing thousands of people, all generating loads of profit and they aren't shutting down anytime soon; nor are they going to relocate anywhere in the near term. These people need places to live, but SV suburbs don't want to authorize extra housing, leading to the spike in prices. Even San Francisco they city has had way lower housing built than a city like Seattle over the last few years, though the demand has been far higher.

The housing boom / bubble will burst if there is a sudden, huge surge of new housing projects; but I doubt it.

tathastu

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

It seems the attack was on an ISP's DNS server rather than Google.

tathastu

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

I think to learn C/C++ it's helpful to have a mindset of wanting to understand the machine rather than build code. It's of course great fun to use Python's built in maps etc (and C++ has equivalents) but what you can do in C/C++ that you can't in Python is create the raw data structures down to the exact memory locations where they'll be used. One of the ways to learn C++ is make a relatively complex data structure (red-black tree, or bloom filter) and then throw as much data as you can inside it, see when you cross a threshold of memory usage -- then see if you can improve on that.

Having said that, C++ has come a long way, despite what haters say. I program primarily in C++ and very rarely have to use pointers. C++11/14 has excellent features (lambdas, initialization lists etc) which can make programming almost seem like writing a Python or Ruby script.

You may also have some luck with Bjarne's smallish "Tour of C++" book -- http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html

tathastu

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

I think these articles are kind of missing the main point. I don't really care who buys the multi-million dollar houses since I'm never going to be in that market anyway.

The issue that we are seeing is investors (Chinese and otherwise) who are just plonking money in the real-estate market for normal homes. The homes we are seeing right now are pretty basic in the sense that a first-time home buyer would not be considering them if they had a million dollars cash in the bank. Yet these homes are going for all cash or 50% down -- I think the main reason is people with extra money have few options to park their cash; since asset prices across the board (and across the globe) are at all-time-highs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/upshot/welcome-to-the-ever...

tathastu

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Microsoft: Stop talking, start doing.

tathastu

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Computer Systems: A programmer's perspective

Great look at under-the-hood of what happens when a program runs.

Submissions

Palo Alto planning official resigns, citing unsustainable housing situation

Ask HN: Who is hiring in India?

comments