mariojv

It's kind of dystopian that it would even get to this point, but I wonder if there would be a business model that could sell "squatter insurance" to people, requiring that they follow particular security system procedures, but pay them out if someone successfully squats in their place.

I’d hate to run out of battery or accidentally break my phone and lose access to something as basic as an identity document or my main means of transportation, at the same time as having lost access to call for help.

???

Are you claiming the Fed has directly purchased US stocks? I don't think they have.

I've only ever seen reports of them buying government and mortgage debt: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/how-the-federal-reserve-affe...

You can argue the purpose of these actions was to prop up the stock market, but I don't think they've ever intervened in as direct a manner as the Bank of Japan has with buying company stocks.

Not sure, but BOJ was a net seller of stocks in 2023: https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Bank-of-Japan/BOJ-turned-net...

So, it seems like they're at least starting to offload their stock holdings.

I was very surprised when I learned that their central bank was purchasing stocks. I'd heard about it first in 2020, but apparently it had been going on before the pandemic.

It makes me wonder if the US stock market crashed hard enough if the Fed would start buying up stocks on the major indexes. Are they even legally allowed to do this? If so, what other assets can the Fed acquire? REITs? What about direct real estate purchases? I wonder if corporate real estate crashed hard enough from remote work if they'd prop it up.

I liked Gerrit when working on OpenStack several years ago. The use of patch sets seemed pretty intuitive, and it was nice that there wasn't a "force push" workflow available that would hide changes from previous reviews. I tend to use a merge rather than rebase workflow with GitHub now, but I often see developers do the opposite, which can make directly viewing code changes from previous reviews challenging.

I am surprised that this post advocates for amending commits, though. It's been a while, so I might be misremembering, but I think a tool like git review makes that unnecessary:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/git-review

https://docs.opendev.org/opendev/git-review/latest/

I wish the map were higher definition. I see a line from San Antonio (or Austin?) to El Paso, my most traveled route, but nothing in the text description about it. There are also some other lines linking the Texas Triangle which would be great!

Regardless, I hope this plan sees fruition in a reasonable timeframe. Further investments in transit within cities themselves would be welcome too, given a lot of folks may be renting a car at 1 end of a high speed rail trip, but this seems great.

To me, it seems like more of a competitive issue for OpenAI if part of their secret is the ability to synthesize good training data, or if they're purchasing training data from some proprietary source.

I wonder how they chose which countries to include in the graph. A lot of my family's Venezuelan and have 0 spice tolerance whatsoever despite growing up near the equator.

They also seem to be ranking things per recipe rather than per unit of food eaten by the population, if you read the abstract. Even if there are 9 spicy recipes and 1 bland recipe in a country, if the 1 bland recipe is eaten every day, doesn't that just show that there are more spicy varieties of dishes?

Still an interesting article regardless.

That's an interesting fact about the ketchup. What other everyday similarities like that did you notice?

Would they need to do it all at once like this? How have other countries that have officially dollarized handled the transition, if there are any major ones?

It looks like the list of countries besides US that exclusively use USD is small, none with a population over 100k, although I know several economies have de facto dollarized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_substitution#Countrie...

Maybe that Wikipedia list is out of date. I'd thought Ecuador was running on dollars.

My eyes popped at that salary for a notary in Spain given most eng positions seem to pay under 60K euro.

It looks like they need a law degree, too, so I'm sure they offer legal services other than property transactions?

https://www.notariado.org/portal/en/how-to-be-a-notary

On the topic of fire codes, most Spanish apartment buildings also don't have smoke alarms, as far as I can tell. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246950

I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.

It looks like this will only be available in a few countries to start, but what would the implications be for censorship resistance if this were to be available in countries with significant internet censorship?

Is anyone familiar enough with the underlying technology to know if countries would be able to identify individual users or jam the signal easily?

My understanding is the main bottleneck for using Starlink for something like this today, besides the company's willingness to do so, is that the terminals are needed to use the network.

I'm really sorry your comment is getting so much pushback. I have a brother with some Medicaid benefits in Texas who can never live independently. He's mute, can't take care of his own hygiene, and can't swallow food, so needs to be fed through a stomach tube. Medicaid is constantly trying to deny him nursing benefits, and he can't ever hold more than $2K in any of his accounts or he would lose SSI.

People have this fantasy that the social safety net takes care of people that can't take care of themselves, but that's really not the case. It is extremely easy to lose benefits and hard to get them in the first place for various services, with very long waiting lists for some things.

Germany seems like a good option if you have no other EU ancestry that you could get a passport through: https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

They even have a specific page on that site for software engineers. It seems like as long as you get a job offer over a certain salary threshold and meet background check requirements, you can live there. I've heard a lot of jobs there operate in English, also.

Those numbers make this paper net worth increase seem so ridiculous. Did the median American really become 36% richer since just before the start of covid?

I suppose you could argue people spent less and were able to pay off a lot of debt. I suspect more that a housing correction is overdue, although it remains to be seen if this will take the form of housing staying flat while inflation nibbles away at the real value or an actual price drop.

I've only ridden distance trains in Spain for two round-trips, but both routes were efficient, comfortable, and faster than driving would have been. Maybe faster than flying, too, if you account for getting early to the airport, but I never compared the flying times.

You can save the tickets in your phone's Wallet app, and the security procedures were very easy compared to taking a flight. I got there quite early the first time I rode the trains and was pleasantly surprised to find that security took about 30 seconds to get through. The stations were all very clean and had various places to get some food. Even one of the smaller stations had a few choices for a train that was pretty early by Spanish time standards. Barcelona during peak summer travel was a bit crowded but still easy enough to navigate.

The wifi generally worked well, too, but the views were so scenic that I ended up not using it much and just looking out the window most of the trip. I now associate the Renfe (train operator) chime sound with happy memories.

One thing to note is that on some routes, you may need to order food from the food cart ahead of time online, or you'll have to go to the food cabin to order. I only had this happen on the Barcelona to Valencia route for some reason.

I'm planning a trip to Germany next year and was surprised to see this other recent article in the Guardian about problems with German trains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881767

I found that rather surprising, but I'm looking forward to comparing the trains in different European countries. As an American, I'd be happy having the ability to do train travel within the US even if it added an hour or so compared to a flight itinerary!

I do wonder if anyone's calculated what the fastest possible reasonable travel time on a train from say, Austin to San Francisco, would be, given the article's focus on how day trips from Madrid being possible can really change a city's economy in Spain. Obviously Austin to SF day trip seems pretty tough, but I wonder what the possible routes and their travel times would be if we really got to work building high speed trains across the country.

Also not bifrost, the OpenStack orchestration project: https://docs.openstack.org/bifrost/latest/