Hacker News Reader

blangon Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize

> That position in the linked article is a bit extreme.

This is written by Ralph Nader, taking the extreme position has been his MO since 1965. As far as I can tell he takes a very hard position, in order to try and move the needle of public sentiment.

blangon China’s Pig Pandemic

Virus mutation can allow viruses to just species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Hypotheses_about_t...

blangon Ford to put $500M into electric vehicle startup Rivian

The opposite was true with the initial success of the Prius, the ugliness was a feature.

blangon Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

I wonder if this could be solved (or at least made drastically better) with insurance incentives + technology.

Idea would be reward drivers willing to ditch their phones while driving entirely, by having drastically reduced car insurance rates.

I'm not sure how it would work, but there would be a system in the car that would verify there is no active phone. Clearly there are a lot of details to be worked out both on the technological, insurances pricing, and privacy sides, but it feels like this could be a way forward.

blangon An epidemic of fake influencers and the death of meritocracy

Those seem like really low figures for bribes considering the average salary of a facebook employee.

blangon Bay Area housing prices drop in tech-heavy counties

The tax that gets passed along in rent is property tax, which in California is generally pretty low[1] compared to other states because of prop 13[2].

[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

blangon The World’s Cheapest Hospital Has to Get Even Cheaper

They do this in Maryland[1], I wish it were standard across the US

[1] https://healthcarequality.mhcc.maryland.gov/Article/View/f84...

blangon ‘Making Amazon look bad’: Microsoft supports a state tax on businesses

People do often complain about the property taxes in Washington, which always makes me chuckle, because I grew up in New Jersey:

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...

blangon How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

switched on pop has a great episode on this: https://www.switchedonpop.com/how-streaming-changed-the-soun...

blangon McDonald's Acquires Machine-Learning Startup Dynamic Yield for $300M

Dominos has been huge on technology for years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2018/04/30/delivery...

blangon “Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate

we have built them recently in Seattle, but they are called "micro-apartments", and they seem pretty popular, although we are making them harder to build. I used to live next door to one seemed like a pretty decent place to live and had excellent bus access.

https://apodment.com/capitol-hill-apodments/videre/

blangon Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Facebook

5% would be an extremely high click through rate

blangon There is no reason to cross the U.S. by train, but I did it anyway

This video does a pretty good job of explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

blangon Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

3.5

blangon Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

What if he had the digital copy, stored on floppy disk?

blangon Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

HN was down for a minute.

blangon FBI accuses wealthy parents in college-entrance bribery scheme

According to the documents https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5766243-College-Admi... (page 78), giving huge donations are "institutional advancement", it costs 10 times as much, is not a guarantee, and will get second looks.

blangon Lyft’s IPO disclosure shows it’s not close to profitability

I wonder how much litigation is costing them.

blangon The New 30-Something

That did seem like a really weird framing. It seems like the corollary article would be. "Family ties eroding, grandparents no longer spending time with grandkids"

blangon The New ‘Dream Home’ Should Be a Condo

In Brookline there are 3, they range from 9.5 to 38 million dollars: https://www.redfin.com/city/29676/MA/Brookline/filter/proper...

blangon It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

The diversity of Seattle has increased with the number of Amazon employees:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-is-le...

blangon We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

Gimlet media was started by Alex Blumberg, who worked previously for "This American Life" and "Planet Money" (he may have started that one). These are both NPR shows as well as very popular podcasts

One of it's show is "Reply All" is hosted by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman. They used to host a podcast called "TLDR" on NPR (WNYC).

These guys are all super talented and deserve to be paid very well for the content they produce, but to say those shows and podcasters you like won't go to where there money is probably not 100%.

blangon We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

I'm actually worried that podcasts are going the way of the web. What, for a while, was a weird world of enthusiasts talking about things that interests them seems to be morphing into a world of a few big corporate entities calling the shots.

I have two reasons for these worries.

1) The purchase of Gimlet by Spotify mentioned in the article. 2) The purchase of Stuff Media by iHeart.

The purchase of Gimlet is problematic for a couple of reasons, but the biggest is that a distribution channel now owns a large content company which could lead to content bubbling. I don't want to have different players for different shows, I want the shows to be available on all players. I believe this is already happening, "Crime town" season 2 is only available on Spotify.

The iHeart purchase might be more troubling. Have you ever noticed that no mater where you are in the US, the radio stations are extremely similar? This has a few reasons, one of which is, that station is probably owned by iHeart (formerly Clear Channel), they own over 400 radio stations are are in virtually every US market [1]. I'm not saying iHeart is evil, but the chance that shows get more homogenous increase when large corporate players have to satisfy shareholders. I'm not sure I can take any more true crime shows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radio_stations_owned_b...

blangon Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review

With the head tax, it was hard to say there was not incompetence or at least gross miscalculation. The city council passed the tax, the mayor signed it, and then less than a month later it was repealed.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/about-fac...

blangon How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies to Her Death

Frank Abagnale has talked recently about how it would be much easier to do his crimes today:

http://money.com/money/4953472/frank-abagnale-catch-me-if-yo...

blangon LA is using ride-hailing startup Via to shuttle people to public transit

Not as good as SNCF which is state run.

blangon Ask HN: What can we do about spam calls with spoofed numbers?

If you have the time listen to this:

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/102-long-distance-part...

it gives a lot of information about the subject

blangon Ask HN: What can we do about spam calls with spoofed numbers?

Port your number: https://support.google.com/voice/answer/1065667?hl=en

blangon Zillow CEO: startups trying to disrupt real estate commissions will fail (2012)

Realtors are the #2[1] lobbying group in the country, so it's a moderately safe bet in the short term at least.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000062

blangon Illinois Bet on Video Gambling and Lost

Anyone have an examples outside of Vegas and maybe the first two Connecticut casinos where bringing in legalize gambling actually derived on the promise of raising projected revenue benefiting the wider economy?