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For all the fear-mongering the media-zeitgeist tried to stir up about Mamdani's NYC mayoral campaign, I find his policies measured and fiscally responsible. A second mansion in NYC does seem excessive, and the tax could free up supply. The tax rate isn't outrageously high, if I'm wealthy enough, I'll just pay it, otherwise if I'm on the cusp, maybe it's better to sell and liquidate. Feels like a Keynesian policy at its finest.

what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.

I wonder how much of this applies to coding. Is coding thinking?

I've been involved with Kite, and I think back on the "learnings". With the recent development of LLMs, I'm astounded how dated the conversation seem now.

I think of programming languages as an interface between humans and computers. If anything, the industry expanded because of this abstraction. Not everyone has to learn assembly to build cool shit. To me AI is the next step in this abstraction where you don't need to learn programming languages to potentially build cool projects. The hard part of software engineering is scale anyways. My bet is that this will expand the industry in unprecedented ways. Will there be contraction of traditional programming jobs? Absolutely. The growth in tech jobs over the last 20 years weren't more assembly programmers. They were abstraction experts. I'm sure the next wave will be even bigger, professional prompting will explode in size.

are we not going to put a black bar on HN for her?

Steve Jobs was a product manager, the best in class.

Not really. Close to work, okay walkable amenities. It could even be better.

I think it takes up 2 blocks that could probably fit 10-20 businesses that could provide more utility, goods, and services than 1 brewing company.

No hate, would like more walkable utility around my house. We could probably pack a lot more stores and services in the two blocks Anchor occupies.

they were there first.

I live next to Anchor Brewery. I hope it shuts down and becomes a mall.

From this blog post, I could already feel the bureaucratic nature of their org. My money's still on OpenAI. I think their motivation is more pure, their objectives more focused, and their org more simple. I usually think of product dominance in two vectors: first to market and benchmarks.

Google took over the world as something like the 11th search engine to hit the market, but some of their benchmarks were 10x better.

OpenAI has both going for them right now and I don't think that's going to change.

What do you mean? The EU is the third largest GDP and half of the GDP is just comprised of France, Germany, and Italy all of which has a dwindling native population, and its growth propelled by easy immigration within the EU.

I think America/Europe would've gone through a similar phenomenon were it not for immigration. Immigration presents a significant challenge to the culture, but it's a necessity to keep evolving the economy and make sure your population/ideas don't stagnate.

I'm from Japan, and I think Japan would've potentially kept it's second place in GDP ranking if they were more aggressive with opening up the country to immigrants and creating a narrative for what it means to be Japanese outside of blood and heritage.

For me there's no city in the US as walkable as NYC or SF. NYC is super busy, but I just like how I could bike / walk / transit virtually anywhere within the city.

I was raised Christian so even though you learn that Earth was billions of years ago, when I was asked by my friends or teacher I would answer sometime in the last 10k years. A part of me was signaling and another part of me was trying to balance facts vs. faith.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary"

I think you didn't get to the end. There is a plot twist.

I personally wish there is a healthier supply of modern housing in these attractive workplaces. Places like SF/NY/LA has atrocious rent and that’s okay if housing quality on average is okay but a lot of these buildings are 100+ years old, barely maintained or a new cash grab apartment complex that’s marketed as luxurious but look an inch deeper and you could tell these developers hardly spent time nor money knowing they get away with shoddy quality apartments. What’s the point of getting paid six figures when your office is higher quality and aesthetically pleasing than your own house.

The solution to all of this is a simpler zoning law at the federal / state level that allows competent developers to win in all markets. City level zoning laws prohibits the best developer from scaling and artificially creates cost for developers that care. How come there isn’t a household name akin to Apple for apartment development? I want to be able to stick to one amazing developer for a consistent experience across multiple markets especially now that remote work is becoming a permanent option for multiple developers.

I have a sibling that lives in Japan. They live 10 min away from downtown Osaka by train, their rent is $1100 a month, it’s not large but the apartment is extremely functional, space efficiently utilized for plenty of storage and rooms. There’s also a giant green park in the middle of the complex with a foot bath. They also talk about the developer and boasts about their brand. Their family makes 1/5 my salary but I still feel like they’re living the wealthier life.

Please we could start in California: More housing supply, Let the best developer win and scale, normalize old building tear downs.

This is sooo cool.

I use Chrome on Desktop and Safari on iOS. Need a magic solution that works for both.

I’m not sure. Even then, knowing Japanese atrocities in all of Asia, it’s probably better to just keep fighting to the death as opposed to being subject to slavery, rape, or human experiments.

I’m sure a part of the reason the Japanese refused surrender was because their reflection in the mirror was not pretty.

I was like Hacker News did it again tied together completely unrelated things into a casual relationship.

Dang some of my favorite episodes are with other comedians. They try to out do each other’s humor, so you get really hilarious moments.

Sad to see all the removed episodes are heavily comedian episodes…

I call this the squeeze.

Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow.

“ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune

I will say Instagram is getting so crowded.

Adding Stories to Instagram felt natural, but shoving Reels in, feels like a squeeze.

Don't most rich Chinese use iPhones?

This is from Mark Zuckerberg's post. I think it's a decent explanation of their performance. Historically Facebook always made these longer-term bets and they've typically paid off.

"Before I get to that, I want to briefly touch on our Q4 results, which I know Sheryl and Dave are going to go deeper on. I'm proud of the work our teams did here. We shipped products, our community continued to grow, and businesses of all sizes turned to us to help them reach people. But there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business.

The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure our apps are the best services out there for young adults, which I spoke about on our last call.

The second area, and related to this, is that we're in the middle of a transition on our own services towards short-form video like Reels. So as more activity shifts towards this medium, we're replacing some time in News Feed and other higher monetizing surfaces. So as a result of both competition and this shift to short-form video as well as our focus on serving young adults over optimizing overall engagement, we're going to continue to see pressure on impression growth in the near term. Now I'm confident that leaning harder into these trends is the right short-term tradeoff to make in order to get long-term gains. We've made these types of transitions before with mobile feed and Stories, where we took on headwinds in the near-term to align with important trends over the long term. And while video has historically been slower to monetize, we believe that over time short-form video is going to monetize more like feed or Stories than like Watch – so I'm optimistic that we'll get to where we need to be with Reels too."