Hacker News Reader

jakelarkinon Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?

Congestion pricing is great, but I am pointing out the underlying politics, its just being used to prolong the car first status quo in these cities. theres not really an earnest follow through for road/parking diets, protected bike lanes and 2x, 3x public transit that are actually needed.

jakelarkinon Congestion Pricing: N.Y. Embraced It. Will Other Clogged Cities Follow?

The financial & car industries have been immensely successful at making cars accessible to all consumers. Anyone with an income, a bit of credit history and a pulse can roll out of dealership with a car. Roads on the other hand are publicly funded and physical constrained. It's inevitable that car owning will have to become much more expensive via taxes in the decades ahead.

The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.

The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.

jakelarkinon E.U.’s Biggest Economies Ban Boeing Max 8 Jets

"the plane should never have gotten the green light to fly."

this is an overstatement. airframe fuel efficiency is a undoubtable good thing vis a vis climate change, costs, etc. Obviously they've reached a point were the aerodynamic profile of a modern, efficient airframe is difficult to control via manual pilot input alone in some scenarios. This was the case for stealth technology with fighter/bomber designs.. the B2 for example has no vertical stabilizer and would not be controllable at all without fly-by-wire. Of course pilots will lament complexity and the loss of manual input. Regardless, the FAA wanted MCAS in the 737Max. Augmenting human input in the face of instrument failure and possible human failure is an extremely hard problem and uncharted territory for the industry. Doesn't at all mean its a not a worthy goal or that the designers or regulators had ill intent or negligence.

jakelarkinon Updates from YC

http://www.ktvu.com/news/bart-investigating-3-violent-deaths...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/BART-s-approval-...

slightly depends on your entry/exit stations but I would regularly see crack/heroin use, defecation, deranged meth heads screaming and/or picking fights. I doubt I am alone in this.

jakelarkinon Updates from YC

agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add

- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.

- Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.

jakelarkinon Amazon Removed Anti-Vax Documentaries from Prime Video

there's always been bad information but it was previously hard to disseminate NEW bad information quickly. It was incredibly expensive, slow and there were watchers, gatekeepers ... various religious authorities, newspaper editors etc. now the russian election manipulation cyber warfare division or your local anti-vax grifter can anonymously target a limitless number of impressionable rubes with the click of a mouse. often for free if the content's viral. thanks social media!

jakelarkinon The Rise and Fall of a Multimillion-Dollar Airbnb Scheme

financial illiteracy is a real problem in journalism. You can't really judge how egregious/successful these guys were without knowing the annualized NET revenue of this business.

jakelarkinon Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes

another clickbait article from this organization. "${TechCo} paid X% in taxes but it should have paid Y% * Current Year Net Income".

What specifically is ITEP arguing for? GAAP profitability is not Taxable income is not Net Cash flow. The IRS has different multi-year schedules for various asset amortizations/depreciation than GAAP so of course the tax rates can be significantly different if the company is investing in growth.

jakelarkinon Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes

tl;dr we are upset GAAP net income does not equal taxable income.

jakelarkinon Google transformed Mountain View, is San Jose next?

Caltrain electrification is a comparatively small project and seems will happen quickly regardless of HSR.

the Bay Area provides 40% of state tax revenue and, even worse, externalizes the costs of its awful development policy on a large chunk of Northern California population in form of increased housing and transportation costs.

jakelarkinon Google transformed Mountain View, is San Jose next?

how pointless that the state is spending decades and tens of billions on HSR from SF to LA for a hypothetical sub-3 hour journey, while it still takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours to get between various important locations in the Bay Area by public transit.

jakelarkinon Google transformed Mountain View, is San Jose next?

+ VTA light rail

+ BART in 2026

too bad the SJC airport runway axis runs straight across downtown. They could otherwise go much much higher/denser in the urban core.

Capitol Corridor really could use an investment from the state (instead of HSR boondoogle). Huge chunk of the north-bay could be shifted to proper public transit connections to SF/East Bay economic centers.

jakelarkinon Seattle’s Homeless Challenge

from my observation, the primary drivers are

1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic

2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth

3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s

The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)

The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".

jakelarkinon Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves

it's a non-violent crime of opportunity. police time is $150/hour at least. all your loses seem to be covered by the banks, aside from the car window, which um happens to people all the time. its the kind of thing they pursue occasionally in realtime or with a sting, but not each individual case.

change your key, open a new checking account & close old, lock your credit. and that ends your exposure.

you won't get the video footage because it creates a legal liability for the owners to release it.

EDIT I'm all for broken windows but thats still implemented as a sampling approach. They don't actually pursue every low-level crime.

jakelarkinon Fake Net Neutrality Comments Draw A Federal Probe

guess the Telecoms or their lobbyists hired some small sketchy 3rd party PR/astroturfing firms to do this, and those people will take the fall but blow back to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon will be minimal. Eventually some judge will chastise the FCC in a ruling, while also doing nothing to overturn the policy change, but perhaps forcing some vague fixes for the commenting system going forward.

jakelarkinon The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted

on a 2 year window its pretty accurate. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y Max view

also true that 2 years a very long time for an economic/investment hypothesis to play out

jakelarkinon The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted

a better way to understand the causality between yield curves and recessions is to look at it from the perspective of the banking sector ... banks/lenders primarily borrow short-term and lend long-term. They pay depositors short-term rates and earn the long term rates on loans. If this carry trade turns negative, it makes it difficult to make money lending, they get more conservative and collectively they tighten credit conditions on the economy as whole.

jakelarkinon Source: Google Hangouts for consumers will be shutting down sometime in 2020

this is basically what happens when BigTechCorp leaves its product decisions to the competitive empire building machinations of middle managers with 4 year vesting

jakelarkinon 'Talent Wants Transit': Companies Near Transportation Gaining the Upper Hand

"just need to live further away"

there's the rub. most suburban outposts of transit on the west coast just have SFH around them, which is a nice $billion entitlement to public infrastructure if you can get it. anyway THOSE people have the most to lose (neighborhood, lifestyle) from new apartments and a huge amount of political leverage over land-use in their area.

in summary, very fine grain local control of housing/transit planning is bad.

jakelarkinon The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

so instead of rent you pay interest, various property taxes, and hoa, maintenance, or property management. Most of which are still subject to inflation and price/wage disparity.

a better high level discussion would be how to reform the policy goal of owning housing as saving mechanism and store of personal wealth, since it can't be both a great investment for the prior generation and affordable to the next one at the same time (if wages are stagnant)

jakelarkinon The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

some aspects of the political problems are definitely driven by voting blocs rather than money per se. For example, construction trade unions leverage generally block changes to simplify/de-cost the building code or the use of public money for pre-fab housing. Those are just concrete examples I'm aware of, theres probably similar dynamics in healthcare, government administration, environmental policy.

jakelarkinon The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

"Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them."

jakelarkinon NY state tax break is $48k per Amazon HQ job

the gentrification angle is predictable. people want a generous government sector but don't want the local economic growth thats necessary to keep it afloat.

for Amazon its seemingly a PR nightmare versus just quietly leasing some large amount of office space in satellite locations. Hope the incentives are worth it.

the interesting thing to me about HQ2 is its also a wealth transfer from future workers to Amazon the company which is facilitated/financed by the local government via taxes. They're selling future worker income/sales tax to the government.

jakelarkinon Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities

... that's compared to +1.5% in SF/Alameda on houses 2-3x the cost and worse size/quality (and up to a 1.5% transfer tax in some cities).

California has the highest state income tax, near top sales tax rates and if you are a recent home buyer some of the highest absolute property taxes (thanks to the price dynamic described above). Plus you get screwed on federal SALT caps, mortgage interest deduction and maybe AMT.

I'll gladly take your 3% if there were more options for interesting places to work and it was not 110 degrees in the summer.

jakelarkinon Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities

some familiarity with running a small business in Ca. : Every little thing your business does potentially has some permitting, licensing fees, taxes, and/or approvals necessary at the local, county, or state levels, with lots of complicated form filling needed and a DMV level of service & timeliness in response. If you have a physical presence you're doubly screwed, because that potentially ropes in local land-use, health and labor departments, which can take months to turn around an approval. Its basically impossible to keep in compliance unless you have dedicated lawyers and accountants looking at each project.

My understanding is that Texas doesn't have a lot of that or at least its minimized.

The reason "business environment" can't be duplicated or reversed because it's like a legal equivalent of tech debt code rot where also a large group of ops employees (politically influential bureaucrats) earn their life's income on the busy work the system creates.

jakelarkinon 'Human brain' supercomputer with 1M processors switched on for first time

anecdotelly every neuron has ~7000 synapses so 200 layers among 7000^200 neurons?

(its probably a meaningless analogy)

jakelarkinon Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

i agree SF needs less coddling and way stronger sticks (at least for the young & able-bodied), but fundamentally theres no where for these people to go to try to get it together. cost of housing way above welfare/SSID in a 50 mile radius. there's zero net shelter space. because the political incentives on the west coast (nimby, mellow weather, already high taxes) are to not bother to build them.

theres also not enough jail space or PD headcount, so dealers, petty burglars just cycle in and out without consequence. its a vicious cycle of extreme poverty that starts and ends with a corrupt, poorly run local government

jakelarkinon Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

speaking of misspresentation, i never said youre "asked" a pure algorithm question only that the timely implementation is a necessary component of succeeding

thanks for explaining how coding interviews work to me thou, really had no idea based on the 200 i've administered in recent years or dozens taken in my career.

jakelarkinon Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

ah yes i'm sure everyone is out there leisurely deriving from first principles their implementation of XYZ graph algorithm which happened to be useful in the course of solving said "open ended question"

jakelarkinon Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem

i'm fine but thanks for your concern.

i just think its annoying because lots of companies cargo cult google and what thet do is a largely tangential skill set from the rigors of day to day programming work and knowledge. its a ritual from when they were hiring small numbers of graduate students with no real programming experience to measure them on. also the whiteboard is a relic of a time before there were laptops with hotswap 2nd screens.