L_Rahman

The choice in front of Garry is fundamentally different from the one he tells most people to make.

I think virtually everyone here would quit their job and try a startup for a year if a famous investor believed in them and wrote a check for a year's worth of comp (assuming this includes healthcare).

BigCo jobs are revolving doors. The only thing you would be putting on the line by doing the startup is the small amount of money you would have gotten from a raise/promotion.

This is vastly different from telling a 23 year old not connected to Peter Thiel, without a check 1yr salary to go work for a startup.

Pinboard happens to be a web service run along the same principles as the article we're discussing.

The bus factor is high, but I suspect that Maciej has a plan that'll let us download our archive even if he does get grabbed by the mainland Chinese government let alone a forecasted going out of business action.

It does not. See FAQ here: https://pinboard.in/upgrade/

Seeing Like a State Robert Caro's Lyndon B. Johnson biographies The Overstory

/u/op00to: This is challenging because ramen is classified by a mix of base, seasoning and thickness. Roughly bases can be: bones of chicken, pork, fish or in rare instances beef. Often there is blend of these bases

Seasoning: sea salt (shio), soy sauce (shoyu) and miso

Thickness is a spectrum ending with: kotteri (thick) and assari (light)

Now, how to pick a light broth? This will be highly context dependent. Most shops in Tokyo where I'm living right now are specialists so research will show you upfront whether it's tonkotsu (heavy pork), chicken paitan (heavy chicken), hakodate (light fish), tonkotsu-gyokai (blend of pork and fish).

If you're in Japan, I recommend the Ramen Beast app which has location based recommendations, high quality reviews and lists for lighter ramen.

If you're in NY and looking for a lighter bowl: I can vouch for most of the bowls at Nakamura, the yuzu shoyu at Mr. Taka, and all of the bowls at Yuji Ramen.

Why not stick with Korean pronunciations? The pronunciation is deterministic from the alphabet.

I'm guessing a pretty significant minority of HN's users maintain offshore seed boxes to get other copyrighted content and for them it might be pretty trivial to add partial peering of libgen content.

With roadmap decisions like these, the compute or storage cost for the data is an insignificant part of the product decision making.

The real cost of doing something like this is doing user research to figure out the set of human behaviors around the memorialization process, deciding where in the product to make the functionality available, training material for how it escalates up to human support teams, and what other things are on the team's plate at the same time.

Walking through LIC makes me deeply unhappy but I agree with you completely. In terms of its ability to deliver on raw numbers of housing increase it has been a total success and arguably helped keep rental pressure off my crappy Alphabet City apartment (and by extension the cheaper apartment I would have moved to and so on down the chain) by drawing away midtown finance types.

I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR

I am not making that assumption, only pointing out that my argument hinges on that being the case and concede that if he does get extradited it was smarter from his perspective to be a fugitive.

Assange's living conditions were entirely self inflicted. He could have surrendered himself to the Swedish authorities, undergone a trial and had he served time would have spent time in a prison system known for its humane treatment and low recidivism rates: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/26/prison-swede...

I am of course assuming that he wouldn't be extradited to the US, in which case not surrendering was the correct choice.

I also carry a mechanical keyboard around, and one of the ways I deal with this is to type for a few minutes and then sent out a message on the office chat to ask if it's bothering anyone and emphasizing that I'll stop if it's even the slightest bit annoying.

Most of the time people tell me they didn't even realize I was typing with a non-standard keyboard.

Replying to this after having a spent a few days in Tokyo, a city based on which Alon makes many of his arguments and I have to say it is also miserable. The experience of Tokyo neighborhoods is a relentless wall of gray, right until you take the train into an outlying neighborhood which is of course mostly three and four story mixed use apartment buildings and homes.

Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind.

The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile.

If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city.

We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.

It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable.

What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei.

If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them.

It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States.

So yeah, no towers please.

Your life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood).

You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.

And even bus based mass transit hits carrying capacity limits.

Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system, which is among the best designed in the world (train-like boarding platforms, all door entry, express and local “tracks”) is nearly impossible to use in rush hour because too many people are trying to use at once.

At that point the only thing that works is a subway or elevated train line

They're both prominent US allies; they're states with some religious identity fundamental to their existence; they're integrated into American civic society - Saudi money in the US economy, academic partnerships between US and Israeli universities; they disenfranchise their own citizens to varying degrees; they buy American weapons and count on American military support to maintain geopolitical relations.

Oh, and they both use the strength of their relationship with the US to make certain parts of the world unlivable for people they don't like.

While this is true of its peers, no one has ever accused the University of Chicago of being left leaning. The unrestrained neoliberalism (deregulation of consumer protections, unwinding of antitrust policy) that characterizes our time is literally called the "Chicago School" of economics.

Grades are determined by curves. There's no absolute scoring in most university classes, especially in engineering and science programs.

Professors usually draw something similar to a bell curve along the grade distribution and set the average to be a particular grade. Grade inflation would be setting the average to something high (as practiced at Harvard this is usually an A-).

Grade deflation which both U Chicago and my alma mater Johns Hopkins are notorious for has professors set the average grade to a B-/C+. In classrooms full of students who have excelled their entire life, where the average represents a pretty high standard of work and achievement, setting the average to a B- is grade deflation.

Hadn't fully registered till this comment, the degree to which the modern web is anchored to horizontal (usually left-to-right) writing and the design patterns of vertical scrolling that come with that assumption.

Not below sea level but close to it and mostly flat: Kuala Lumpur, Dhaka, New Delhi, Kyoto, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Mumbai, Lagos

together they represent almost a billion people and the world's biggest cities. Should we ignore them because they're not snowy North American/European cities?

German interest rates are below zero right now. There actually are hundreds of billions of dollars flying around the world chasing the slightest hint of return. So yes, we do have the money.

Also MMT.

I believe /u/gherkinnn has painted a picture that represents both of our desired futures.

The alternative to cars isn't walking in a car based city, it's a combination of any of the following modes:

subways, light rail, bus rapid transit, bikeshare bikes, personally owned bikes, electric assist personal vehicles (bikes, scooters, wheelchairs), pedestrianized walkways shaded by trees, humane public space, higher density life leading to lower transit time

People have non-car based cities where it's really hot. I was just in Taipei where it's 90F+ and 80%+ most of the year which has most of the things I described. And also where it's really cold. I haven't been to Copenhagen, but it's snowy for a solid three to four months of the year and people use their public transit infrastructure (cycling included) year round.

It is stunning to me that we can more easily imagine a city center with a collaborative hive mind of self driving cars than we can one with no cars at all.

Why do we want that future so badly?

I live in Manhattan. I can afford to live literally anywhere in the world, probably more comfortably than where I am now.

The question is whether the people who cook my food, do my laundry, plumb my home, deliver seltzer to my bodega, butcher chicken in my grocery store should be able to afford to live within a reasonable distance of my home. We can choose to build cities that make it nearly impossible for them to do so and for them to live in constant fear of homelessness (with many eventually sliding into it) or we can build ones where they can comfortably afford a modest home.

There is way for engineers to exercise their power to prevent things like this from happening, but it can only happen through collective action.

Getting fired for not acceding to a demand like this isn't the result of an individual manager making a decision but the entire apparatus of corporate governance coming to bear on the person. It can be only be meaningfully resisted and fought with an equally organized group of engineers.

If you're on Hacker News, and our industry's willingness to compromise on fundamental values to maintain access to "the world's largest market" upsets you -

Join or start a union.

I accept this criticism and I’ll rethink my position on this. Thank you for continuing to engage with me on it.

@Doreen: I will speak for Max here and say that we are both on your side.

The kind of political change that would allow SROs to be built where people want them is the same kind of political change that would allow more housing construction generally, it’s the same change that would remove parking minimums and floor space carve outs and kitchen appliance requirements.

So, if we can get that kind of political change and make sure good housing is affordably available to everyone, why compromise and build SROs?

I should be able to live where I want.

My inability to not afford housing in the places that I want to live in are not an outcome based on “efficient markets”.

The cost of housing in major American cities is largely determined by whether they can build more housing to meet demand and lower costs. The new housing is blocked most often by people who already live there.

So now the question is how different groups with opposing interests might apply power to get their desired outcome.