pj_mukh

It's not just carrying cost, it could be the full A&D cost, so you're paying the loan on the mortgage without being able to build anything. That's huge and has sunk major projects around me. This happens, literally all the time [1][2][3], all around the country.

What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.

[1]: https://jerseydigs.com/american-dream-owners-default-on-1-2-...

[2]: https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/11/08/one-camelback...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/y2ein5

"The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry."

Confusing statement, the IRR is low and the risk is high because the carrying cost is unknown (and unbounded).

This is a red-herring. No one is suggesting loosening laws on whether a building will stay standing.

The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.

What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy

I don't think a construction companies bank account cares about whether money is going to the time component or the physical act of going to city hall to apply.

Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.

I think this is true, but even after a construction company works through all the approvals the sheer cost of construction is insurmountable. A big part of this is obviously (sometimes union) labor. This happened recently in NIMBY-HQ Berkeley as interest rates crept up [1]. Pre-approved construction sites are sitting empty.

I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.

The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.

[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/04/berkeley-housing-dow...

I've never fully understood this, shouldn't the brine be mixed in with wastewater? It's all a net-zero system, it's not like water is leaving the system.

The rest is just infrastructure (which is mostly political will).

The constant drum of limited-pie headlines is getting really grating. Stock/Personal "paper-money" valuations coupled with Citizens United has really broken our brain into thinking that everything everywhere is just Billionaires stealing stuff, when realistically this is just water that will be recycled, available for anyone else to use.

But the imagery of Mark Zuckerberg personally guzzling 500,000 gallons of water to simply waste it away is too attractive to pass up.

Lets Anti-Trust! Let's Break Citizens United! But let's also stop with this sensationalist pablum.

P.S: In the dry western deserts, couldn't this just be salty ocean water just piped through too? Doesn't even need to be de-salinated? Or hell, use the heat to boil the water and de-salinate it. Win-Win!

I think we'll have to wait and see here, because all the layoffs can be easily attributed to leadership making crappy over-hiring decisions over COVID and now not being able to admit to that and giving hand-wavy answers over "I'm firing people because AI" to drive different headline narratives (see: founders/CEO's talking outta their a**).

It may also be the narrative fed to actual employees, saying "You're losing your job because AI" is an easy way to direct anger away from your bad business decisions. If a business is shrinking, it's shrinking, AI was inconsequential. If a business is growing AI can only help. Whether it's growing or shrinking doesn't depend on AI, it depends on the market and leadership decision-making.

You and I both know none of this generative AI is good enough unsupervised (and realistically, with deep human edits). But they're still massive productivity boosts which have always been huge economic boosts to the middle-class.

Do I wish this tech could also be applied to real middle-class shortages (housing, supply-chain etc.), sure. And I think it will come.

I wish your parent comment didn't get downvoted, because this is an important conversation point.

"PRECISELY BECAUSE AI cannot be applied in an ethical way, since human beings en masse will inevitably have a sufficient number of bad actors"

I think this is vibes based on bad headlines and no actual numbers (and tbf, founders/CEO's talking outta their a**). In my real-life experience the advantages of specifically generative AI far outweighs the disadvantages, by like a really large margin. I say this as someone academically trained on well modeled Dynamical systems (the opposite of Machine Learning). My team just lost. Badly.

Case-in-point: I work with language localization teams that have fully adopted LLM based translation services (our DeepL.com bills are huge), but we've only hired more translators and are processing more translations faster. It's just..not working out like we were told in the headlines. Doomsday Radiologist predictions [1], same thing.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/ai-jobs-radiol...

I pay $300 to fly from SF to LA when I could've just walked for free. Its true. How classist!

No, just that the questions are obvious to most of us except maybe the most cynical (like OP)

What YC is (actually) asking: For example, When was a time you went the extra mile to get a job interviewers attention

What HN thinks YC I asking: "how they cheated a system for personal gain"

lol.

Source: Me, I got into YC by answering the question that way.

The numbers would be much higher if the city had any foot traffic [1]. It's dead, small businesses are dead, it's just not safe to walk around too much, everyone keeps it to a minimum and drives between parking lots in 5000lb tanks.

[1]: https://www.unacast.com/foot-traffic-data/oakland

"and I hate hate hate that we're enabling masked, unnamed government"

Sidenote: As per the article, this is already illegal and was a mis-step on the part of SFPD and CHP searching OPD's database (OPD didn't give ICE anything). It sounds like whoever did it will be prosecuted.

"And what precisely did the glorious US manage to get with all their wealth,"

You're not going to get some defense of the US here, there's well known connections between America's tryst with Slavery and Jim Crow and its dysfunctional government services.

But I'd love to see a Venn diagram of countries that "Actually Colonized" (tm) and countries with really generous welfare systems/labor protections. I am guessing it'll be close to a single circle w/ some countries that are actually just a bunch of banks in a trench coat, sitting on the outside (looking at you Switzerland).

Letting most of your population twiddle your thumbs all summer without any consequences means you're mortgaging some sort of early lead, that's really all it is. Europeans don't have some magic productivity pill for the rest of the year that keeps you ahead of the curve.

I think the author should've clarified that this is purely a conversation about the platform plays. There will be 100's of thousands of companies on the application layer, and mini-platform plays that will have your run-of-the-mill new grad or 1x engineer.

Everything else is just executives doing a bit of dance for their investors ala "We won't need employees anymore!"

What are people's other "go try to build this thing, perfectly aligned to your noob-level" ways of learning lower-level ML Tools (PyTorch, CUDA etc.)?

Controversial opinion: Strip out the colonial wealth compounded, Europe may look like South America in terms of Economic and Exportative output over the last 50 years.

I have seen no evidence that European states would’ve developed the comfortable pace of work, welfare state, retirement and vacation systems independent of their amassed colonial wealth.

Do you actually live in such a place? Or are just looking at videos on Twitter?

This is such a weird notion. Waves of immigrants have created some of the biggest most economically productive cities the world has ever seen. If Tokyo goes this route, only greatness lays in its future.

The rest is just nostalgia, and that's fine. But realistically, a big piece of Japanese culture will be well preserved in the new culture that will emerge. As it is, we've stopped lamenting the arrival of Buddhist influence on the island, so too will other immigration influences.

Yea this was major de-growther vibes to me. A couple of small businesses getting swamped just means you don't have enough small businesses. It's true that generally there aren't enough small businesses.

I'd like our productivity gains to free up people to pursue their weird jazz-coffee bar fantasies and start more businesses. That's a better world to me than the the one OP is trying to get us to retreat to.

There's lots of terrible things about social media but its ability to spread the wealth of attention to small businesses is probably the best thing about it.

Bad tourists? FINE THEM. I realize the Japanese don't like to see their relationships as transactional, but they have foreigners there and managing their behavior via transactions is totally fair to me.

P.S: I know, I know I have recently been to Japan and seen its over-tourism first hand. I also don't know a country better equipped to get a handle on it and gasp scale.

Does Google AI Edge have React Native support? Doesn't seem like it? Cactus does though.

Amazing, this is so so useful.

Thank you especially for the phone model vs tok/s breakdown. Do you have such tables for more models? For models even leaner than Gemma3 1B. How low can you go? Say if I wanted to tweak out 45toks/s on an iPhone 13?

P.S: Also, I'm assuming the speeds stay consistent with react-native vs. flutter etc?

Looking forward to the length of the sentence the NTSB uses for Air India flight 171. Gonna be a doozy

It depends on which level of government we're talking about. The city governments can only really improve traffic controls.

But state and federal governments should absolute zero-in on reducing sprawl and travel distances and those actions should've started yesterday and they should stay laser focussed on reducing driving distances (especially for non-leisure reasons)

Yea, I don't know I disagree. The denominator should always be just be population. I don't want to use sprawl as some sort of justification for more deaths per capita. Sprawl should be reduced and/or mitigated somehow.

Jokes on them, my city doesn’t enforce cars without license plates very commonly visible [1]. So these plate readers are useless and people are regularly getting murdered on the streets with little to no consequences and to hit and run is the most advantageous position.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oakland/comments/4wdd57/whats_the_d...

Also FWIW, this is also not a guide to networking. It’s a guide to attending networking events. Those are not the same things.

I wish someone would write a guide to what to do in the 2 weeks after the networking event when inevitably everyone forgets about each other.

That's fair, especially around firmware and things like OTA updates and lower level controls/safety you'd want to keep that closer to team.

But on the long-tail of autonomy options? Implementing the latest papers, trying cutting edge solutions, I bet a thriving open-source community could be very helpful ala PR2, given that the hardware is already open-source.

Nothing stopping you from picking and choosing from the various implementations to build into a streamlined product offering on the front end.

Amazing, pretty nice list! Two quick suggestions:

a) some of these definitely look they could be done without hardware or with light hardware support from a staff member?

b) if you do a) and are open source completely I bet you don’t even need to do bounties. The increased participation could mean some great community generated solutions quick.

Pretty sweet! Don’t have the time (or budget) to directly invest in the hardware but do you have a list of open source “open” software problems you are looking to solve?