Hacker News Reader

FelixPon The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth

I would also point out that the author conflate two tightly-coupled but distinct spheres - the political and the economic. China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore have all been massively successful because they acted aggressively in the political realm to foster growth and development (with little to no regard for Democratic norms). Conversely, their economic systems were and are fairly liberal (China being both the least developed of these as well as the biggest laggard on this front). Chinese citizens may not be politically empowered, but it is far easier to set up a company, hire and fire, etc. in Shanghai than in New York.

FelixPon Managed by Q, an On-Demand Start-Up, Raises $25M

Their annual revenue is 75B DKK, which is more like 11B USD.

FelixPon Airbus Patents Detachable Cabins to Cut Plane Boarding Times

In Soviet Russia, Cabin boards You!

FelixPon How the 'hoverboards' took off in spite of laws against them

Runners are pedestrians, too?

FelixPon China’s plan to give every citizen a social credit score

One interesting thing to note is that this allows for the exact quantification ("pricing") of various forms of dissent. If a large enough segment of the population is willing to pay a measurable financial cost in order to engage in a certain behavior, the government will be able to monitor (and respond) to that in near real time.

FelixPon Why ancient Rome matters to the modern world

If you want to see the impact of profoundly cheap labor in a modern country, go to India. When I was there last winter, it was fascinating to see how many things were done by simply throwing seemingly-inordinate man-hours of labor at tasks (e.g. painting roads and signage by hand).

FelixPon Deaths Draw Attention to Wall Street’s Grueling Pace

Banker here. We actually have automated and outsourced quite a bit of the drudgery, although doing it within the framework of Excel and PowerPoint often requires some pretty strange contortions from a UI perspective.

FelixPon Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

I actually like and use sheets (it's much better than Excel for simple and/or non-analytical use cases), so when I use Excel for something, it's because I want to use Excel for that thing.

FelixPon The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

No. The middle class in the US and other highly developed nations is hurting, but by any global measure, this group of people is actually relatively wealthy. The global middle class has experienced an unprecedented level of growth and prosperity over the past 25+ years. Of course, this has in many cases come at the expense of the first group.

FelixPon Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

Google keeps trying to force me to open files in Docs, Sheets, etc., which is very annoying. It also tries to convert Excel files into Sheets.

FelixPon Do rent controls work?

There is TONS of investment capital sitting on the sidelines looking for decent returns at the moment. Capital availability is not the issue here.

FelixPon Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

I have the same setup, as well as a 15" retina MBP. Each one is optimized for different use cases, but it's amusing that a machine that ran me ~$400 is better for a lot of things than my $2500+ top of the line Apple.

Biggest drawback of the X230 is the AWFUL trackpad and the low res screen. Highly recommend getting the extended battery.

FelixPon A new team at Reddit

I mean, moving a few blocks isn't that material in terms of people's commutes (and implied relative power/importance/influence).

Moving from one city to another can be highly disruptive.

FelixPon Ask HN: What do you think of job hopping?

> Bridges. You'll burn them.

As a manager, this is definitely not always the case. If someone is leaving for the "right" reasons (namely, they have an awesome opportunity somewhere else), then that's great. While it may be an operational disruption, one of my goals as a manager is always to want the best for the people on my team - even if that means leaving.

FelixPon Bay Area Flops in 14,000 Respondent Survey on Public Transit Satisfaction

As someone who's live in both SF and Philly, I'd have to say that while they're both awful in terms of public transit, SF is definitely worse.

FelixPon Exam board contacts Jewish school over censored GCSEs

Couldn't agree more. As a Jew, this sort of behavior makes me furious and embarrassed.

FelixPon Stanford researchers to open source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis

It failed on "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

FelixPon The Secret of iOS 7

Tablets and mobile devices are primarily consumption devices, and are ill-suited for creating anything. However, going by the 90/9/1 rule, there's a much bigger potential set of consumption consumers than creators.

FelixPon Outbox – A beautiful inbox for postal mail

If you know something about the industry, could you recommend some good alternatives?

FelixPon Why Hotel Industry Lobbyists Want A Global Crackdown On Airbnb

Lease terms that prohibit or limit subtenancy (especially without the express consent of the owner) are nothing new, and certainly not a reaction to AirBnB.

FelixPon NY official: Airbnb stay illegal; host fined $2,400

Yes, absolutely. My family has evicted tenants from some of our units for repeatedly violating this clause of their leases.

FelixPon NY official: Airbnb stay illegal; host fined $2,400

> If you don't want your tenants doing this, then make it against the terms of your rental agreement.

It's actually a violation of most standard residential rental agreements; sub-tenancy is often tightly controlled and only permitted with the express permission of the landlord.

Source: my family owns apartment buildings in several different cities.

FelixPon The myth of Nazi efficiency

>I would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in.

I'm sorry, could you clarify this? I'm hardly an expert, but I can't imagine that your average skinhead-type was drawn in by the economic allure of fascist state corporatism...

FelixPon Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class

Normally, I'm fairly (unconsciously) biased against such 'longhairs,' but in the case of Lanier, my impression is that he is, in fact, extremely intelligent.

I'd highly encourage you to read this (very long) interview with him from 2011 in Edge:

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

FelixPon McCain working on bill to allow for 'a la carte' cable TV packages

Honestly, this seems like a pretty unambiguously good thing - don't assume it's bad just because you dislike the politician / party that's proposing it.

FelixPon With Rifle and Bibliography: General Mattis on Professional Reading

Pretty sure it was just a figure of speech...

FelixPon If MBAs are useless, we’re all in big trouble

I think non-business people frequently make the error of lumping all MBAs together; practically speaking, there's a decent gap between the top three programs (HBS, Stanford GSB, & Wharton), the rest of the top 10-15 (Kellogg, Berkeley, Sloan, Booth, UCLA, etc.), and there's a pretty massive gap from there to everyone else.

I think folks often make the assumption that MBA program quality follows a similar distribution to undergraduate education, but unfortunately there's a much steeper falloff from the top few schools.

FelixPon Tight investors force young entrepreneurs offshore

I'm bringing the real fucking ingredient (talent) and not these unproductive and fucking uncultured absentee landlord fucksticks (half of whom don't even live in the city, and what the fuck are we doing allowing foreign speculators, i.e. third-world despots and their henchmen, to own property here when we can't even provide for our own fucking people?) who've stolen most of my savings.

I'm sorry, but this is a really poor way to look at things.

First of all, while I appreciate that you're unhappy about having to pay a lot of rent to live in New York, I don't think it's really fair to make ad hominem attacks on a (pretty diverse) group of people you know nothing about.

Second of all, the reason that it's expensive to live in New York basically boils down to the fact that a lot of people want to live there. As you pointed out, talented people flock to the city and are a key ingredient of the incredibly rich economic substrate - but there's also the cultural opportunities, schools, social scene, etc etc. Of course, all of these things are interlinked and reinforce one another - but at the end of the day, the price of housing is dictated by supply and demand.

Thirdly, real estate developers are entrepreneurs, too - they typically take on huge risks over long periods of time to create actual products that are (hopefully) incredibly valuable for their customers. I'd argue that housing is a lot more important to most folks than another social media app or whatever.

Finally, in the case of property owners (not developers), they're simply holding onto an asset and trying to optimize their returns. I don't see how this is morally objectionable as long as they don't do anything underhanded (which certainly does happen). But at the end of the day, they're simply trying to ask for however much money people are willing to pay for their products.

FelixPon Tight investors force young entrepreneurs offshore

I think most people prefer SF, but VCs tend to be older and thus prefer locations with more space to raise families (e.g. Palo Alto, Marin, etc.)

FelixPon Startup Index: First Round Capital

Brett, who leads First Round's platform team, was a film major at NYU... plus I have to imagine that they could outsource most of the heavy lifting to contractors to do the editing, mixing, etc.