ssharp

I keep hearing about people using these for coding. Seems like it would be extremely easy to miss something and then spend more time debugging than it would be to do yourself.

I tried recently to have ChatGPT an .htaccess RewriteCond/Rule for me and it was extremely confident you couldn't do something I needed to do. When I told it that it just needed to add a flag to the end of the rule (I was curious and was purposely non-specific about what flag it needed), it suddenly knew exactly what to do. Thankfully I knew what it needed but otherwise I might have walked away thinking it couldn't be accomplished.

I can't imagine an office full of people driving their gas vehicles 50+ miles per day creates less pollution than those people being at home. Lighting costs are extremely marginal these days, so really heating/AC would be the big driver.

I know prices may not be a perfect corollary to pollution but people driving that much to work are pretty likely to spend more money fueling their vehicles than they are on electric + gas for their homes.

It's a great site when you need to buy this sort of thing. However, given how lauded it is for functional usability, I noticed I need to rage click the back button in order to get to the site I came from after clicking one of their links.

This seems more expected than surprising. At $3500 there is a very limited market willing to spend that and that market likely exhausted quickly. I wouldn't expect typical adoption curves for a product that expensive with limited value.

I think we're seeing similar adoption challenges with EVs currently. With current value props, a lot of consumers interested in current EVs have already purchased them and adoption rates are slowing. It's going to take a value leap (through better features and/or lower price) to jump start adoption again.

The same holds true for the Vision Pro, which I think most people knew -- it's too expensive and doesn't do enough. Assuming v2 does more for less money, it will jumpstart demand again.

This ruling helps eliminate incentives that prevented innovation in agent services. There was zero need to innovate because Realtor controlled the entire market and nobody wanted to give up the cash cow, even though the only people it was really good for was agents.

> I'm also troubled by what the Wall Street Journal claims is that this might push a lot of young realtors out of the career field. That can't be seen as a positive outcome.

I guess that's one way to look at it. This was a service that provided very little value to the people needing the service but there was not really a feasible alternative. Sure some young people who find success in the field may no longer be able to but we shouldn't prop up nefarious businesses just to keep jobs going. Rather, what should be more likely to happen now is that young people will be able to move into this space and start out innovating the old practices, carve out a more impactful and scalable business model for themselves, and still do very well.

> Overall, I'm still unclear exactly how this is going to help anyone. Especially for the overwhelming majority of buyers and sellers who DON'T want to be their own agent, and want to hire the best realtor to do it for them. I remember when this first came out and lots of people on HN said I'll just be my own agent. Well, that's fine, but that's not an option for most people.

This option will almost certainly still be available and will now cost less. If you ever want to hear someone spout of a truckload of B.S., just ask an agent why a 3% commission is justified on either end of the transaction. The value simply isn't there and it's a huge benefit that this initial hurdle has been toppled.

So because there is intellectual dishonesty on one side, it's valid to be intellectually dishonest on the other side?

"Shoot for the moon" seems like a reasonable strategy when you're making the investment.

However, certainly at some point while they were burning through that $36 million it became evident that "moon" was no longer a viable destination. Why wouldn't everyone be aligned with making the adjustments needed to get back to default alive? Something is clearly better than nothing.

Now if it got to the stage where the CEO no longer wanted to operate at the reduced scale (and nobody else would take the role) or the product couldn't support itself at the reduced scale, then closure may have been the only option. It's just that the "moon or bust" mentality doesn't seem like something that should be set in stone for the life of the company.

Another big aspect of professional gambling is actually being able to place bets once you have an edge. This is obviously not an issue in poker but is in most other games:

The casino will ban you if you count cards in blackjack.

The sportsbooks will limit your action or ban you if the figure out you have an edge (or just see that you're winning or betting in certain patterns).

Oh wow! 2-3 is roughly the time things start to calm down after potty training and you're right back in it. Best of luck and "survival" is probably the right mindset. I have 9-year-old twins and these days I don't see it being much different than having two kids about the same age. The first two years though... I couldn't imagine going through that again!

In some ways. There was at least a logical organization around a table, as long as you could wrap your head around all the markup and maintain it. Nested divs with CSS felt like you sometimes be halfway down a road that will never lead to where you want to go.

Tables made much more intuitive sense than something like flexbox now but that came at the expense of being a nightmare to maintain.

Trying to hack a table layout together often led to frequent edits and initial attempts to maintain clean layout comments ended. You're left with never ending <tr><td><tr><td><tr><td> that you hopefully at least indented to maintain sanity. But god help you if your stumbled into another person's table layout code...

Spending time just entering "here", saving the file, and seeing where the "here" shows up. By the time 5pm rolled around "here" often turned into something like "ass" or "fuck", or if it's really bad "fuck you". IYKYK

The iPhone was widely mocked for costing $500 with a 2-year contract with AT&T at release. It also didn't have native apps and only worked with AT&T. The big jump for Apple was the next release of the iPhone 3G that brought the price down toe $200 (with contract) and also opened up the platform for native apps.

There is a lot of money to be captured in paid search with these sites. There are some pretty large players in the space who just built these types of top 5 or top 10 pages for tons of verticals and then bid on keywords related to those verticals. They can go to brands and demand significantly higher fees than most affiliates would get and the brands will usually pay because that acquisition is usually more efficient than try to bid on the terms the affiliate is bidding on.

Back when I was still involved in acquisition marketing, I did a test where I killed all paid search and built relationships with the affiliates to negotiate our "ranking" higher up the page. It was a huge boom for business. We scaled paid acquisition at a profitable CAC, which was very difficult to maintain, let alone scale, in bidding directly and it was significantly less work to manage.

Consumers value this type of content quite a bit, even if many are skeptical of the quality. Sometimes it's nice to just see a pared down list of things with even a cursory rundown of features/differences.

It's not limited to just filing lawsuits. There are federal agencies you can file complaints with that will then tip off investigations and you can do that for free.

These types of firings, where the employee was given no negative feedback, there is no paper trail, evidence, etc. creates the type of gray areas that can easily lead to findings in favor of the employee if she were to file something for say sex discrimination. Cloudflare may have to go and find other instances where they fired non-protected class employees in a similar fashion. At the very least, it's going to be a PITA for their HR/legal team and may cost them some fines as well.

> Vanderlande Industries

Vandelay Industries?

I don't see the issue unless the fuel-powered cars are able to reduce carbon emissions at a faster pace than the energy grid can, which seems doubtful.

I'm generally confused by how much "ATS-friendly" matters, or what that even means.

On one side of the coin, it logically makes sense that ATS systems would help recruiters pare down the list. I'd assume there is some auto-rejection happening, but how sensitive is it (getting rid of clearly unqualified candidates vs. rejecting marginal candidates vs. actually qualified but still rejected due to not being ATS-friendly)? You here about job postings getting thousands of applicants and it seems like it would be impossible to go through those by hand.

On the other side, I see lots of posts from recruiters saying ATS's do not judge resumes and everything is done by the recruiter. These posts seem to be very skeptical of anything saying it will optimize your resume for ATS's because there is no need to actually do that.

Would love more perspective on this issue.

I don't think it does. Pre-Trump, Ohio clearly had a large share of traditional conservative voters and leaders. However, when Trump came in and captured a ton of rust-belt Democrat support for Republicans, a lot of those traditional values did not come with the new support. That, and an aging boomer population being replaced with Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z that hold much different beliefs on abortion and marijuana.

> It's a puzzle to you because you had the personality & motivation to do the work of marketing+showing+negotiating the house yourself. You have inadvertently projected your DIY savvy onto other homeowners to do the same thing. But, a lot of home sellers don't want to DIY a home listing.

I might have implied I did much of this work. I didn't, outside of negotiating. The marketing is simply getting the house on real estate sites and in-front of buyer agents, which is what MLS self-listing services do for you for a flat rate. The showings were still handled by the buyer agents. The only thing I had to do was represent myself in negotiations, which was not that difficult.

Understood that some may want to do that, but the price difference is insane. If you save 4.5% (assuming buyer agent gets the 1.5% difference from 6%) on a $400k house, that's $18,000.

Regarding FSBO, this is where MLS self-listing plays a huge role. I tried selling my house for a few months by listing on Zillow (assuming Zillow is way more popular a decade later, but still) and sticking a sign in my front-yard. MLS gets you on every real estate site and at the fingertips of buying agents.

Lastly, as you say in your replies, the issue is justification of the 6%. There are lots of issues here -- super expensive, there is already a very serious principle-agent issue incentive misalignment, and the value is questionable. When housing prices skyrocketed, did their value skyrocket in tandem?

I don't know how much value agents added over the past few years, navigating bidding wars, pocket listing access, etc. but I've never understood the justification for spending so much money on these fees.

The last time I sold a house was 2011, when the housing market was still down from the 2008/09 crash. I talked with multiple agents and never got a sense of them doing much to push the house other than listing it on MLS and coordinating showings. For the seller agent, they didn't even really want to be at the showings -- they'd just provide a lockbox and give the code to the buyer agent. So where is the value there? On a median home sale, the seller side agent/broker is netting $12,400. A lockbox and MLS listing are in the sub-$500 cost range, so where is the additional $12,000 in value?

I at least understand the incentive on the buyer side. A buyer can just ring up an agent and have them do their home search for them and coordinate everything. The buyer doesn't bear the cost at all, so why not utilize that convenience?

Anyway, after talking with a few agents in 2011, I had one recommended to me. He could get deals done quickly and was great to work with, so I was told. I met with him and he wanted to list the house at 8% below the price I thought the house was worth (no bidding wars back then so this was no good) and flat-out refused to reduce the total commission from 6% to 5%.

I said "good riddance" to the agents and did an MLS self-list for like $400. I set the buyer-side commission at 1.5%. I still got plenty of people looking at the house and sold it for the value I initially established it was worth. So I ended up saving over 10% from what the whiz-kid agent would have cost me in lost value and fees.

So back to my original point -- where is that seller value coming from? There isn't much legal stuff the agents help with. You need a purchase contract (boilerplate in most cases), some standard state/federal disclosure forms, and then the title agency handles everything else.

Ohio is very clearly a red state these days. Once Trump came in, he captured a lot of blue-collar democrats and they are now fully Republican. The gerrymandering just tilts the scales significantly more to ever overcome that majority. There is a big difference between the 8% win in 2020 and the 66% Republican majority in the Ohio house and 79% Republican majority in the Ohio senate.

Considering Ohio's former house speaker was just sentenced to 20 years in prison for energy-related bribes, you'd think the Ohio government would be more transparent with its dealings.

Ohio's in a bad, but interesting, political situation. The state has clearly shifted red since the Obama elections but the sweeping 2010 election in favor of Republicans has turned the state into a gerrymandered mess. The state legislature is heavily tilted towards the Republicans and, as a result of Trump's popularity, they've become extremely MAGA. Meanwhile, you have a somewhat moderate (in comparison) Republican as governor, but he still supports the majority of these traditional conservative principles.

Since Ohio was a fairly moderate state for a long time, the MAGA legislature doesn't really align with voters' values, but there is a near zero chance of Republicans losing control due to the gerrymandered districts. All this is very unpopular. In fact, voters passed a bipartisan ballot initiative to help eliminate gerrymandered districts several years ago and it's been relatively useless as the districts were held up in court so long that they just defaulted to the previous districts in the last election.

As a result, Ohio has proactively utilized the citizen ballot initiative process to keep the legislature at bay. In August, Ohio struck down an attempt to increase the ballot initiative threshold to a 60% vote, keeping it as a simple majority. Last week, Ohio voters passed ballot initiatives to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio's constitution as well as legalize marijuana. Both these initiatives had a fairly large 55% win, indicating cross-party support, but both are something that would never have been done by the elected legislature.

Oink filled a void at a perfect time in music.

I grew up in the 90's and CDs typically ran in the $15-20 range. This was when minimum wage was something like $5.15 an hour. So it would take 3-4 hours of work to buy a CD. This led to having to really pine over purchase decisions. Pre-Napster, this meant using a few things as filters: the radio, label compilations albums that featured a lot of songs by artists and were usually cheaper to buy, or pirating via IRC, which was fun at the time, but looking back was quite tedious.

Then Napster came and went. In it's wake, consumer expectations changed but nothing really worked as well as Napster. It's replacements were unreliable, were risky for installing adware/spyware, and there were lots of scare tactics by the music industry going after downloaders in court.

This was also around the time of the iPod but pre-iPhone, so you could carry around digital music but it wasn't really streamed. At this time, I had an iPod but mostly consumed music in my car through burned CDs.

Enter Oink. Oink brought you back to the time where you consume full albums instead of single songs but also solved a ton of problems with music sharing programs -- the shady software, unreliable availability of songs, inconsistent, if not totally absent tagging, shitty encoding, etc. Since there was still some work involved in downloading and burning the albums, you had to still make some choice over what to listen to, but not labor over it like a few years back when a CD meant half a days work. Oink had SO much stuff as well. I cannot recall a time when I didn't find something I wanted. Even though it was stealing, it felt like you were getting something of quality and not taking a gamble on something from a music sharing site.

I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and buying music from the iTunes store became much more appealing with it instantly showing up on your device, so I did more of that. I remember using Rhapsody on Desktop for a while and later on the iPhone as well, a year or so before Spotify took over music.

>> Google pays the staffing agency, the staffing agency pays the "contractor" a salary (significantly less than what Google pays the staffing agency), and all is fine... legally, anyway.

The staffing agency vig is so high it is practically the same as an FTE.

"The agony and the irony are killing me"

If I'm ordering groceries on Instacart, how am I not their customer? Am I only the customer of the grocery store and delivery driver?

Amazon's support is absolutely amazing compared to a company like Uber.

I can't think of any instances where I've needed Google or Facebook support. I pay Google money for premium services, so I'd hope they'd be better, but I've read plenty of evidence to contrary.

I was thinking more specifically of the Ubers, Lyfts, DoorDashes, Instacarts of the world. They are providing a consumer service, don't really control the end-to-end experience that well, and when things go wrong they are very difficult to work with on a reasonable resolution.

Based on every mega-scale consumer tech company, the best way to scale customer service is to make it as useless and frustrating as possible.

> "...75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less."

I don't see how this shows that people aren't using their trucks. Off-roading seems like a odd use for this purpose and towing is not a great metric because you can easily utilize a truck for a ton of hauling that doesn't require towing.