Hacker News Reader

atomic77on Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

If the short-term rental market suddenly evaporates, and you have a chunk of the housing stock full-time serving that much more lucrative market (and not catering to locals), this is the first thing that is going to put downward pressure on rents. Support mechanisms are in place for most "normal" classes of renters and owners.

atomic77on Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

I admit that both my observations, and the ones in the Wired article I cited, are anecdotal. And it's certainly not the only factor driving those rent decreases. But it's oddly coincidental that the biggest and most immediate price drops seem to be concentrated in the areas that had the most Airbnb listings, at least based on what i've looked at in Toronto.

atomic77on Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

While I don't want to seem like I'm wishing unemployment or hardship on anyone, the implosion of Airbnb is already causing a rent price correction that was sorely needed in many cities that have become severely unaffordable.

Wired published an article about this effect in London [1] and I've seen price drops as much as $500 for condos in the downtown core of Toronto on Zillow already.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airbnb-coronavirus-london

atomic77on Ask HN: Career shift to a biomedical interdisciplinary field?

We're about to get quite the stress test.

It feels like we're living through an accelerated version of the disintegration of the western Roman empire. In a matter of a few weeks, decades worth of globalisation has screeched to a halt. It's hard to imagine the borders reopening to anything like their pre-COVID-19 state until a treatment is found or a vaccine.

atomic77on Google employee diagnosed with coronavirus

There are plenty of Italians, Chinese and Iranians in Switzerland - not at all clear why you'd choose to pick on eastern Europeans given how few cases there are in those countries.

atomic77on Sunlight through glass does not provide Vitamin D

I initially started with 1000 IU of Vitamin D3, Costco brand, and eventually settled on 5000 as I noticed improvements in energy level as I took more.

I am at 43 latitude so I only start taking it in mid-November and start weening myself off it in late March (you never really know if/when spring will happen up here in Toronto :)

atomic77on Sunlight through glass does not provide Vitamin D

After reading the "Big Vitamin D Mistake" article on HN in 2017 I also started experimenting with larger doses of Vitamin D and can attest to life-changing effects.

It has been like a permanent +5 to constitution; I am now almost through my second winter without getting sick, something inconceivable for me as a kid growing up with asthma and a whole range of puffers, and always prone to debilitating sinus infections that told hold in January and never really let up sometime around April.

atomic77on U.S. Oil Production Is 23 Years Ahead of Schedule

As you indirectly allude to, peak oil is an economic issue, not a geological one.

Due to a combination of technological ingenuity and externalities in the form of current and future environmental degradation, we've been able to so far avoid the point where oil cannot be profitably produced for a price that consumers can afford to pay.

atomic77on Detroit's Big Comeback: Out of Bankruptcy, a Rebirth

What I was thinking of is something along the lines of the agreements that some European countries have with each other, where residents that live within a certain distance of the border are treated somewhat differently. Or the special economic zones that exist in some Asian countries.

atomic77on Detroit's Big Comeback: Out of Bankruptcy, a Rebirth

This is a semi-serious suggestion as I am just a techie without enough background in the legal and political side of things, but it has always struck me that cities like Detroit and Buffalo struggle while they border the area that is the economic engine of Canada.

Could something along the lines of the schengen agreement be feasible between Canada and US border regions, making it easier for people and capital to flow between them? Not hard to imagine someone in Toronto trying their luck to start something up in Buffalo or Detroit where their costs would be a fraction of that in Toronto, but still allow them to remain close to home. People from those border cities that want to find better work in Toronto could do so more easily rather than having to move further away within the US. It would seem like a win-win for both sides.

atomic77on Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice

I find this odd because I am the opposite - one of my primary use cases for Jupyter/ipython in general is the ease with which I can get 'live' code introspection and intellisense. It's often my prototyping sandbox for python code that I then move into my IDE once it's close to being ready.

I also notice that developing in this way encourages me to create smaller, more testable functions that i can easily work with inside a single notebook cell.

atomic77on PostgreSQL 11 Released

On that note, I stumbled on an LWN article a couple of years ago that made me reflect on this miraculous balance of new features and stability:

https://lwn.net/Articles/645020/

Anyone more involved in the pgsql community able to comment on how this balance is being struck? It doesnt' seem like the release schedule has changed much, though the version numbers seem to be incrementing faster (no v10.1, 10.2, etc?)

atomic77on Robotic 'trees' can turn CO2 into concrete

This would have been my explanation too, but to my surprise, wood is only about 1/3 of the energy density of diesel fuel. I'm not sure why i expected it to be an order of magnitude difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...

atomic77on Python in Visual Studio Code

For now vscode is certainly far behind in terms of java ecosystem support, but it feels like not long ago that pycharm was way ahead.

atomic77on Python in Visual Studio Code

I love using VSCode and find that I have less need for any other IDE with each new release. This one might finally eliminate one of my remaining needs for pycharm.

I can't help but feel sorry for Jetbrains though, who seem to be in a similar position to Opera back in the late 2000s, a small software company up against a behemoth that can afford to subsidize the development of an open-source alternative to their bread and butter.

atomic77on PostgreSQL Accessing MySQL as a Data Source Using mysqsl_fdw

FDWs can be incredibly useful in the case of needing database-level, low-latency access to a reasonably small amount of data managed on another server, and you don't want or cannot spend the time to write "proper" ETL code.

atomic77on Can Silicon Valley workers rein in big tech from within?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

This is why we have governments with the power to enact regulations. I'd like to think no one still believes in any sort of market fundamentalism that believes firms will self-regulate against their own financial interest.

atomic77on Some Bacteria Are Becoming 'More Tolerant' of Hand Sanitizers, Study Finds

> The researchers used different strengths of alcohol concentrations to combat the bacteria, starting with 23 percent. Eventually, at a 70-percent alcohol mixture, the bacteria were conquered. Typically, hand sanitizers are 60 percent alcohol.

Is it simply a matter of using higher concentrations of alcohol? Or is it possible that bacteria could evolve resistance right up to 100%?

atomic77on The Oldest Building in Every US State

The UK has always had the advantage of being an island protected from the wars that periodically sweep through mainland areas. There are plenty of cities that I have seen Europe that, due to post-WWII reconstruction, make New York and Chicago seem positively old and historic.

atomic77on Toronto adds more tech jobs than Silicon Valley in past 5 years

The only hope the Toronto tech scene has to escape from its mediocrity is, ironically, a renegotiation of Nafta, or a major change in government policy on immigration.

As long as the cost for privileged access to the US market is open season to poach the best and brightest of our labour market, and a local tech scene too addicted what amounts to a subsidy in the form of large immigration numbers that prevent wages here from adjusting upwards to US levels, very little will take root here beyond satellite offices and near-shoring, and the brain drain will continue.

atomic77on Important database news from the last few months

I also will never understand why people have so much trouble decoupling SQL, the query language, from classic RDBMS systems. Being able to use a SQL-like dialect in systems like Hive, Spark SQL, and now even Elasticsearch makes those systems infinitely more useful.

Now if only I didn't have to keep looking up the pandas "Comparison with SQL" page every time I have to do some manipulations to a data frame...

atomic77on Ask HN: What do GitHub stars mean to you when evaluating a project, if anything?

Metrics like Github stars can be gamed, but it doesn't mean that the number has no value. I would conjecture that the # of stars correlates strongly with other desirable things.

I think of it as similar to the # of citations that an academic paper has - genius can remain ignored and undiscovered, but overall the citation count has embedded in it a whole series of factors that correlate to "should I bother reading this".

Ironically before citing a paper that studied this very thing, I checked many citations it had :)

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7816479/

atomic77on Ask HN: What do GitHub stars mean to you when evaluating a project, if anything?

I'm surprised at how much dislike there is for the stars metric, and I wonder if it's an allergy that devs tend to have for software development metrics (which is understandable when they are abused).

I try my best, at minimum, to star anything I use on github as a way of supporting it , and in addition to other factors you mention, take this number as an indication of the likelihood it will continue to be developed.

Some discounting and adjustment sometimes needs to be done for projects that managed to get on the front-page for something 'cool', but then that's where the other factors help.

atomic77on Why We Disagree with The New York Times

It seems like we're seeing how scalable the mantra of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" really is.

Not Facebook scale, apparently.

atomic77on Japan Fights Crowds of Crows (2008)

Is there a reason why this could this not be brought under control naturally by providing habitat for predator species, like hawks or eagles? Apparently Peregrine falcons have done quite well in urban environments [1]

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3324408/Per...

atomic77on USA needs law 'a lot like GDPR' says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Interesting you should use the hazardous materials analogy - Bruce Schneier made a pretty convincing case two years ago that data should be considered a toxic asset.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...

atomic77on Show HN: Grayscale the Web – A Chrome extension to help avoid mindless browsing

This is an excellent idea, and makes me realize just how much I'd love to be able to have an Android phone with an e-Ink only display.

atomic77on NHL stunner: A 36-year-old accountant who has never played pro stars in win

The comparison to a keeper in football is close, but in hockey it's a far more important and specialized role. In the NHL, a typical # of shots on goal is 30-35 [1]. Seems like 3-7 is a typical number of saves a football keeper would have to make [2].

Also, the equipment a hockey goalie uses is specialized, whereas I think the only extra equipment a keeper has is a different coloured jersey and gloves.

[1] http://www.nhl.com/stats/team?reportType=season&seasonFrom=2...

[2] http://www.footcharts.co.uk/index.cfm?task=basics_shotsontar...

atomic77on NHL stunner: A 36-year-old accountant who has never played pro stars in win

This being HN, I should point out that getting goalies to play can be such a problem that there is even an "Uber for goalies" app in Canada:

https://www.puckapp.ca/

atomic77on NHL stunner: A 36-year-old accountant who has never played pro stars in win

It's fun to think of a goalie in hockey as equivalent to the database in a classic web architecture. How many of us that built apps in the 2000s actually had a codified plan of what would happen in the event our hot standby also failed before we could reprovision a new primary?