L_Rahman

Yes, but that’s to manage L train shut down problems.

There’s a meaningful difference between a stop gap plan to address immediate problems and larger change in how we think about transportation within New York

"Administration" is probably a better way to frame it. The New York state government and its associated spending is one of the single most undemocratic and corrupt institutions in the world. It has been so for over two centuries.

Peak and especially distance based pricing are fundamentally regressive and unjust tax schemes that penalize the poor. Subway fares are already regressive in that they represent a larger share of income in poorer people than in the rich, making it distance based so that people who can't afford to live in the core are charged more makes the problem 10x worse.

I don't understand why this comment was voted into the negative, but I suspect that it has something to do with the world view of the people who oppose taxes on a fundamental level.

To those of you, I ask - why?

New York's flat non-distance based fare is one of the great democratic institutions of the city. Whether you live in Flushing, Rego Park or Gramercy; whether you ride one stop or make four transfers - you pay the same fare. The only way this can work is if those of us with more wealth take care of those of us with less. What seems wrong about this?

Not at all. The plan is to ban private vehicles and through traffic within the cross town streets (East-West direction, numbered roads) in Manhattan.

Larger cross-town streets like 14th, 23rd and 42nd would remain open to all traffic. The smaller streets is where the ban would go into a place making them a single grade mixing zone for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles. Service vehicles (delivery, garbage, taxis) can access these smaller streets but at a <10MPH speed.

I especially enjoyed the meta recognition that the act of writing this article and giving it a name itself possibly perpetuates the myth.

The Fourth Estate didn't abandon that job in the 80s, private equity companies saw their advertising based recurring revenue streams, bought them in LBOs, decimated the teams and extracted profits until nothing was left.

Online advertising finished off the rest.

Western psychotherapy has developed a specific ritual for activating this kind of shivering focused on releasing traumatic energy. It's called a TRE (Trauma Release Exercise) and particularly when done in the presence of someone who can help guide through energetic blocks, I've found it to be a transformative experience.

https://traumaprevention.com/

Ah, but your expectation should be for thoughts to intrude. Even the greatest meditators experience this and you should expect this to be especially true for you as a beginner.

Meditation is not actually about being free from thought. The goal of meditation is actually to notice when attention wanders, thoughts come walking in and pull back to the breath. That's the muscle you're strengthening. Each time you notice an intrusive thought, is actually a moment when you're actively meditating.

Here’s some very straightforward evidence for you: compare the cost of using the parking space to either the price of equivalent square footage in neighboring building or a private parking garage on the same street.

This meta problem, transferring best practices or as I like to call them "cultural technology" between groups of people, is literally the thing I'm working on right now.

If you're interesting in chatting about this, feel free to email me (in bio) or grab thirty minutes on my calendar: https://calend.ly/labib

This is off to an auspicious start. Here's to seeing your "How HN helped us start an ISP in New Orleans" blog post in a few years!

There are some interesting experiments with hospital operation models in India that try to make it more like flight. Every patient gets the same surgeon and treatment, but people who pay more get nicer facilities (private rooms, less crowding, separate waiting area for family).

It's not an equal model, but it is more just than what we have in America today.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world...

really enjoying mistape and thought to make a recommendation that I suspect you've already come across - Meg Myers, an incredibly talented singer, covered Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill on her NPR Tiny Desk:

https://youtu.be/vSMt8qbhu0w?t=560

This is a symptom of low road demand for Queens-Brooklyn transit which in turn is because of the relative size of both boroughs, their lower population density and most importantly because there isn't a subway line that truly cuts across the two boroughs.

If there were a proper subway line, running say from LGA, through Jackson Heights, Ridgewood and then cutting east through Brooklyn to JFK there's no way a driver could go faster on Grand Central Parkway anywhere near peak times.

The GFW is likely sophisticated enough to make distinctions between corporate VPN connectivity using products like Cisco AnyConnect and personal use setups on AWS/DO/Azure/GC or even a home server.

One of the things I've wondered about, and I hope people more informed than me will forgive my ignorance, is whether it's possible to implement a VPN protocol that looks like ordinary HTTPS traffic. I know very little about the specific mechanics of network protocols so the very premise might be nonsensical but I would appreciate an explanation of why this might or might not be possible.

This is great.

I'd add for Brazil, a great alternative to the libraries are SESCs. SESCs are cultural centers, funded by a payroll tax proposed by big business in the 50s when they were afraid of Communist sympathies in population. The result are extremely well funded community centers with big arts budgets for free exhibitions, exercise facilities, primary care clinics, libraries, cafeterias with affordable food and lots of space for people to lounge around. In many neighborhoods, they're the epicenter of social life. They've been a terrific way to break out of the downtown Sao Paulo bubble.

This is not black and white. If I recall correctly from other interactions we've had on Hacker News, we're both Bangladeshi-American so please know I'm looking at this with a similar lens.

My parents absolutely should have emphasized academics and my need to go to college to break out of the poverty trap my family was in. But they did that in violent and traumatic ways. They did that by using guilt and shame and burden as the primary engine to drive me to act. They are not alone in this. Friends of Asian-American heritage (East and South Asia) tell me their parents did the same.

Those things work when you're fighting for survival and then turn out to be incredibly harmful when you're not. It's taken me years of work and will take years more to undo that damage.

I understand your sensitivity to your daughter's situation. If you live in upper middle class America, and I suspect you do, your daughter is observing a deeply unnatural form of childhood. But there is a middle ground between squeezing performance out of young brains and being coddled into doing nothing. I hope for both of your sakes you look for it.

$100M in annual revenues isn't even much of a stretch.

1.6M knowledge workers paying an average $5 a month for their primary note taking app - apps on every platform: iOS, Android, iPad, Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux, encrypted cloud sync, and integration with other apps - feels like a very plausible reality that gets the company to a $1B valuation.

Not OP, but deeply interesting to me and especially so as I travel around South America.

I am completely fascinated by the home infrastructure choices in different parts of the world. I'm currently in Sao Paulo and the hot water setup is a little scary. There's no hot water reserve or hot water plumbing at all.

The only hot water source is in the shower. It's heated electrically in real time by a 5000W appliance that sits just above the shower head. The only way to change water temperature is by turning a knob on the appliance. In homes with bad grounding, this results in shocks often enough that my hosts have shown me Brazilian memes about it.

If there's a broken down vehicle blocking the car portion of the road, the road is closed. If the bike lane were protected with a physical barrier, you wouldn't be able to enter it. Why shouldn't it just be off limits?

I'm unhappy about a lot of the things self-driving cars will bring to our cities, but the one good thing that might happen is automatic bike lane enforcement.

Apple's desktop options are actually quite strong right now.

If you just want a really powerful desktop computer for dev work - get a souped up Mac Mini If you want it with a nice screen - get an iMac Pro If you're a video professional - get a Mac Pro

The Macbook Pro keyboard situation is a garbage fire, though I will say that I'm quite happy with my 2016 keyboard after it got replaced for free through the program.

As galago mentioned, the Ganesh Temple Canteen in NY is a beloved institution in the city and popular with people of all backgrounds.

Yes, I guess one solution to this could also be to create nodes outside of Manhattan. Who cares if SoHo, Chelsea and the West Village are large malls if the soul of the city moves somewhere else?

But that would require sustained public infrastructure development at a scale America hasn't done since the immediate post WWII era.

I'm as far from NIMBYism as is possible for a person to be [1] but the urban neighborhood growth curves seem to inexorably point to either of:

1. open air mall with prestige housing and office space (SoHo) 2. steel and glass mall with prestige housing and office space (LIC, Hudson Yards)

I know it's possible for there to be growth that is for people and not plutocrats. I live in the East Village and I love the density we have here but any attempts to upzone other neighborhoods to equivalent density seems to result in this kind of soulless mediocrity.

[1]: I support Tokyo style zoning, abolishing street parking and private vehicle traffic in urban cores, and would gladly have someone start building a twenty story apartment building next to where I live. If a majority of the units get allocated to poor families at risk of losing housing, even better :)

The transit infrastructure argument is moot. Here's transit reporter Aaron Gordon making the case far better than I could:

> The G, 7, E, M, F, R, N, and W are all within a reasonable walking distance from the proposed HQ site. In the short term, Amazon will occupy one million square feet of 1 Court Square, which sits directly above…Court Square on the E, M, 7, and G lines (the other aforementioned lines are not far away). While they’re all crowded during rush hour and Court Square itself will strain under the ridership (but less so than during the L shutdown) the G and M have additional peak-direction capacity. Also, they’re all well below the current crowding levels on the L and 4/5.

Further, there’s good reason to believe many Amazon workers will follow non-traditional commuting patterns. For starters, a number of them will probably live within walking or bicycling distance from HQ2 given the housing construction boom in the neighborhood. For those who don’t, many will reverse-commute from Manhattan (Hudson Yards, the other NYC neighborhood experiencing a housing construction boom, is straight down the 7). For workers looking to commute from the suburbs, LIC has two LIRR stops, although they currently don’t have very attractive service patterns. Some might even choose to live in Metro North country, given that LIC is one stop on the 7 from Grand Central. It’s also worth noting that East Side Access service, which would bring the LIRR to Grand Central, is slated to begin in December 2022, making Long Island a more attractive option.

The point is not that any one of these options will be most attractive to future Amazon employees, but all of them will attract some and the load will be dispersed. This is the beauty of a robust, healthy transit network: it can absorb even the biggest of shocks.

40000 people across 8 lines with a bunch of countercyclical commuters is a drop in the bucket in NY transit.

The anti-Amazon movement wasn't about hating Amazon specifically. The anti-Amazon movement was about the world's richest company and the world's richest secretly negotiating three billion dollars in subsidies with the governor.

New Yorkers have no problem with technology companies. Google just bought a third of the West Village. No one cares. The Times is running trend pieces about hapless Facebook employees moving from Palo Alto to the East Village and paying 7800 dollars in rent. No one cares.

One thing I'd encourage you to do is think of New York as a system instead of focusing on the storylines of the individual players. NY is a grossly corrupt city with a non-functioning democracy. The story of NY for the last two hundred years is a series of big companies making shady deals with the government to get big handouts while public infrastructure is failing, housing supply is unaffordable and neighborhoods get structured by real estate developers instead of people.

Unless the system attracts too much attention, it's mostly stable. That's why Google is on a multi-billion real estate buying spree and the subways have gone sixty years without signaling upgrades. The problem is that Amazon made a huge show out of their arrival and pushed for concessions beyond what their peers asked for. That created a lot of attention and organizers harnessed long standing grievances with the government and housing policy along with it to push Amazon out.

We have an existing example to extrapolate from. Cantonese is the native dialect in Guangzhou and it's fading away in the current generation of children in no small part because of government pressure in schools. It's likely that something similar will happen in Macau and HK.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2136237/why-...

I know the NYTimes thinks its charming, but this plaque embodies the arrogance and greed of wealthy landowners in NY who have opposed the construction of mass transit for over a hundred years.

It's gotten faster and is getting faster over time. It was much, much worse a year ago which makes me believe that the team is paying attention to speed.

Compared to the main competitor mentioned here - Confluence - it is blazing fast.