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tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

I'm from New York.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

That's fair. But it's also worth recognizing those 70K units may mean that some middle-income SF resident had to move to Pleasanton or something instead due to affordability, so our nice hiking proximity is their 90-minute commute.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

Totally agree. However, that doesn't absolve us of trying to find solutions that are feasible within our cultural and political landscape. At least in SF, for the moment, that primarily seems to mean getting more units built within the city, since we're not going to improve transit to other towns soon, nor are neighboring communities willing to build more units to help SF.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-articulated_bus

None of our mass transit operates near the speed limit anyway, afaik.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

The point is you haven't solved the problem. You've just moved it to a different place. Urban sprawl is pretty well acknowledged to be a bad thing (TM) - it increases pollution, is bad for people's health, bad for the social fabric, etc etc.

Saying "it's crowded here, let's go move somewhere else and make that crowded" is not just kicking the can, it's making the problem worse because often those areas have even less mass transit.

tomkarloon Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

Potentially, a self-driving car (or even Google Maps nav and a regular driver) would not have this problem - it would simply not drive itself into a situation where it's both in heavy snow and a place that's not safe to stop. I've had a few times in California where I started a long drive in sun and warm weather and ended up stuck in a snow-storm mid-drive (hello Sierra passes)... it would have been nice if either my car or my map software warned me this was likely before we set off.

tomkarloon Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

We already trust our safety to the cars in front of us - working tail lights & signals, proper securing of rooftop loads, etc. It's just a question of whether the incremental safety of knowing about hazards outweighs the potential for intentional mischief.

Look at it this way; if you get false positives about hazards in front of you, the consequence is maybe you slow down unnecessarily. If you get a false negative, that's really no different from no data at all - your car should behave the same.

tomkarloon Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

Why would we expect computer vision to perform as poorly as human eyes? The input sensor is just part of the system - human eyes aren't very good sensors (narrow FOV, narrow set of usable wavelengths, etc) and the human brain isn't very good at detecting things (gets distracted, fooled, etc.) Anyone who's been using Google Photos search will tell you if often notices objects in the image that you didn't even register when you took the photo or viewed the image.

I'd expect the opposite - a self-driving car might outperform human drivers significantly in conditions where we tend to underperform - poor visibility, longer braking distances, poor steering control - because it will be more effective at adjusting than a human.

tomkarloon Waymo Will Test Self-Driving Cars in Snowy Detroit

Having ridden the Google buses for 6 years, I can tell you this generally wasn't a problem. They were almost always on schedule (I'd say 95% with 2-3 minutes of planned departure) and never bunched up. You didn't really have a latency problem, because you knew exactly when you needed to be at the stop, and the bus would be there right on time.

One bus replaces probably 150 car trips a day (assuming it makes ~3 runs, partially full. If you assume similar capacity utilization on cars (3 passengers), it would take ~50 car trips to replace those 3 runs, effectively putting 17 cars on the road for every bus currently in operation.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

The folks who are having the most trouble living in SF - the ones who don't work in tech - often don't spend all day looking at a computer, and have to be physically present at a specific location to do their work. They're teachers, firefighters, nurses, chefs, mechanics, contractors, etc. Generally the tech crowd is impacted the least by housing prices, because they have higher incomes and more job mobility.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

He didn't use a car to commute before (I'd hope) given he was in the middle of SF. But now he likely needs one to get to the grocery, take his kids to school, etc even if he's WFH. And he's likely also using more energy at home, too. So yes, more pollution - and if a lot of other people moved there, higher prices too.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

I think you're presuming a lot there - for example, while Manila has its problems, there's a reason people want to be there rather than the provinces. I certainly don't think it would be a better city if you took its ~13M people and spread them out further, especially considering they mostly can't afford cars.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

If we added bus lanes they way they do in other countries, it would address the traffic problem. But we always favor the lone-commuter-in-car.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

They are in fact planning to do just that - put more office space in that zone, which will create demand for housing in SF (the nearest major residential area) rather than adding housing. And in the past, they've blocked a proposal that would have added 70K residential units.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-small-city-control...

The attitude is essentially, "I've got mine, let's pull the ladder up after me and deny anyone else affordable housing."

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

That's great, but it seems kind of orthogonal and non-scalable to the problem of the Bay Area housing crisis. Are you proposing that everyone in SF move to places like the Central Valley (driving up price) and start driving around cars (increasing traffic and pollution)? What about folks who don't have the luxury of jobs where they can work remotely?

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

Paris is twice as dense as SF, and denser than any other US city except New York. Increasing density isn't necessarily a goal, but it's a sign of a healthy city - it means people want to live there so much that they're willing to pack together closer in order to be there, and it helps drive the cultural wealth (food, culture, social) that marks the most prominent cities such as NY, Paris, London, Hong Kong, etc.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

It's beneficial for the rest of the US to find solutions that make high density cities successful. Such locations tend to be both your cultural and economic centers, in particular due to the network effects of putting so many people in close proximity to each other. (The Internet helps but hasn't proven to be a substitute quite yet.)

Additionally, dense urban areas tend to have the smallest environmental impact per capita (lower carbon footprint in particular), and help prevent the problem of urban sprawl invading rural areas. Nobody wants to live in a suburb that covers the whole country.

tomkarloon Saving San Francisco goes deeper than “build more housing”

Honestly, having lived in both NY and SF for years, you need both - a highly dense urban core, and effective transportation from the outlying regions.

If you just add transport, what will happen is what's now happening in Brooklyn - you'll just see rents pushed up further away from the center as the wealthy utilize mass transport to buy up housing a bit further from the core. It ends up with everyone else just being pushed further away until they're again facing a 60-90 minute commute.

Manhattan is able twice as many residents as San Francisco, which means it can absorb a lot of people before they start to spread outwards. It also helps unburden the mass transit system by reducing the distance that the average resident is traveling to work - helping make room for people commuting from the edges. (And to be fair, anyone in NY now will tell you that their mass transit system is having serious problems, too.)

The Bay definitely needs better mass transit - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for Marin, or Palo Alto, to jump on board with the idea of both better transit and more housing.

In the meantime, SF should be doing everything it can to increase housing stock if it wants to remain affordable - and yes, that might mean high rises in the sunset, or near GG park, despite what the author says. That kind of "build housing, but not in a place I have to see it" attitude is a big part of why we have a housing crunch.

Build more places to live, and the cost of living will come down. It's that simple.

tomkarloon Android Oreo

Most of the major OEMs do. The security update rate for upper tier phones runs about 75% within 3 months these days.

Anyway, I was responding to the comment "Most of serious security issues still require full OS updates." This is demonstrably inaccurate since the security patches do not require a full OS update.

tomkarloon Android Oreo

You're right. mis-replied in the thread.

tomkarloon Android Oreo

This doesn't make any sense. It assumes there's no competition between manufacturers, and that users don't switch. If older phones were actually "better", manufacturers would just make those and steal customers from anyone making the newer devices.

The phones of today aren't "built with shorter lifespans in mind", but they are built with more tightly packed components, more energy-dense batteries (to support their power-hungry CPUs and large amount of RAM), etc. Because that's what you need to do so you're not "too underpowered to run modern software." Which is necessary to sell phones to people.

If you made a phone and said "hey, this will live as long as a Nexus S, but it's not going to run FB or Clash of Clans or VR or take very good pictures (HDR is compute intensive)".... good luck selling that.

tomkarloon Android Oreo

Most security issues are handled by security updates, which don't require a letter update. They're issued as patches, so OEMs can issue them for an older device without updating it to a new release. https://www.android.com/security-center/monthly-security-upd...

tomkarloon Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

"If the number of hires is kept constant" is a huge IF that just doesn't hold up. If Google (or FB, or Apple) could find more candidates that met their hiring bar, they'd hire them as well. It's not a zero-sum game - these companies are constantly short on qualified engineers.

[my opinion, not my employer's.]

tomkarloon Mozilla’s Send makes it easy to send a file from one person to another

Unfortunately, we've deprecated that interview question.

tomkarloon A quick guide to Stripe’s culture

Uber did in fact have a doc with 14 key guidelines, but with drastically different contents. "Step on toes", "always be hustling" etc. The harassment issue wasn't so much a cultural value as an organizational failure that partially resulted from not valuing general respect for other employees, which when carried to its extreme means tolerating behavior that would be unacceptable at other companies. It also reportedly had a general culture of looking for ways to circumvent government rules, which is also going to undermine your ability to discourage harassment.

See: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work...

Yes, it's possible that guidelines misrepresent a company's culture. But it seems unfair and arguably, unproductive, to presume that. It's an open statement of what they want their culture to be, which seems a lot better than simply not having any goal at all.

Are you really saying you'd prefer to work for a company that doesn't think about what its internal culture and values should be?

tomkarloon A quick guide to Stripe’s culture

They're telling you the actual internal culture. Your argument here seems to be since you don't believe that, they should just tell you their corporate policies instead. Those are an entirely different thing. Work hours, vacation time and HR complaint guidelines aren't corporate culture.

tomkarloon A quick guide to Stripe’s culture

None of these things tell you that much about a company's values or corporate culture. Consider that both Uber and Lyft could probably both say all of these things, despite having radically different internal cultures and values.

A company's culture is how it thinks about resolving disputes, making decisions internally, and how employees should generally behave towards one another, especially when in conflict. It's not the benefits, or dress code, or HR department.

As Uber's proven, just because everyone gets to wear t-shirts, doesn't mean they aren't jerks to each other.

tomkarloon A quick guide to Stripe’s culture

It's a throwaway account made just for this post.

tomkarloon A quick guide to Stripe’s culture

Define "until recently"... internal culture has definitely been an issue at companies for 20-30 years now - I can remember discussions about it quite commonly in the mid-90s. It's just good business; would you rather pay unhappy people a lot more to keep coming to work, or pay them less but have them be happier and more productive? Back in the factory days this wasn't an issue - you didn't much care if an employee came back the next day, as long as you could find someone to fill the spot on the line. But in modern companies, there's a huge cost to turnover.

tomkarloon It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me

Not necessarily, at least easily. Customer comms often contain PII, so they're not just widely available to anyone interested due to privacy concerns. Unless you're on a ticket related to that specific customer's issue, it's very hard to get that info (and it should be.) Even then, PII like the email address may be obfuscated in the ticket.