willholloway

I have an extremely strong feeling that this is the most important comment ever posted to Hacker News.

We won't understand that it was until it's over, but then, looking back forensically over the waste and ash heap before us, we will see that PavlovsCat predicted all of this, and we should have listened.

My main point is that Boulder gets the population density right. The town is inherently bikeable, which in my opinion is much better than a walkable town.

And that is what I think we should be developing for, bikeable densities. And the bike of tomorrow is really a light weight electric vehicle, perhaps a foldable scooter with a small Lithium ion battery pack that is charged with a solar panel.

Bicycles increase human range without excessive negative externalities.

The result is a town that has culture, and restaurants and bars and a very usable public transportation system, along with scenic beauty and ample space so that one need not live packed into a tuna can.

I feel that gigantic metropolises are not optimal environments for software engineering.

NYC, and it's helter skelter of noise and traffic and garbage and tiny living spaces, in my humble experience and opinion is not conducive to hard engineering problems.

I am probably completely wrong here and just a hopeless introvert with an axe to grind, but from my experience, working in home offices in towns like Boulder, Colorado, with a central, easily bikable office/startup HQ, would present the optimal small company setting.

A quality employee cares, they care about the problems of your company when they shower, when they sleep, when they are knowing their spouse in a biblical sense. The problems of the company they have pledged their allegiance to, like a knight in Game of Thrones pledges allegiance and service to their lord, are always on their mind.

So if you are paying for knowledge work, you would do well to dispel any notions of body/mind duality. Physical health equates to mental health, and a town like Boulder, CO is about the perfect size for optimal maintenance of a human body/mind. And there are hundreds of other communities in America with similar attributes to Boulder, CO.

And if you can take advantage of the space that your workers are already paying for in their rent or mortgages. Spaces that may have gyms and/or pools which are physically and mentally rejuvenating, well you will come out ahead.

I think the future of work will be semi-distributed, and this mad consolidation into a few coastal cities will be seen in the future as a gross inefficiency.

If a dentist could balance the load reasonably well, it would look very good.

Missed appointments are a big problem for dentists and doctors. A missed appointment means paying staff and not receiving income.

I always end up waiting at the doctor or dentist anyway, even if I show up on time for an appointment. I would rather there were no appointments for routine things, and that we just found some reasonable way to balance load.

Everything you say is true. But it is also true that I like it and find value in it. I like to see a numerical representation of how much time is left in a year, as a year is an important tax construct.

If you look into the French Revolutions attempts to fit the 24 hour day and the 12 month year into units of 10, decimal time, they were much more unwieldy.

Think NYC Subway vs Amtrak. For Amtrak ( and dentist) you need a reservation.

For Subways we just let queues fill up and then empty them.

I believe that dental cleanings could work like this as well. People who are around the 6 month mark for cleaning could be notified when wait times are low and could just come in.

I know its quixotic.

Awesome! Although the dream was to live completely asynchronously and divorce oneself from the oppresive orthodox time keeping system, I think a reminder of time left in a week is useful, as a work week is a real unit of measurement, the human body/mind can only go for so long without rest.

Maybe blocksyear:blocksweek or blocksweek:blocksyear

I hope people fork Maker Time and innovate on it. So happy I shared this today.

In my ideal world things like dentist visits would be completely asynchronous.

Until then, Maker Time will have to live in peaceful coexistence with the Gregorian Calendar.

Edit:

I think it's important to point out that not all cultures share the same sense of time. While my ideas here are heretical in America, or Germany, the spirit of what I am getting at would be very familiar to a Spaniard, an Italian or a Jamaican.

Here is an interesting article on it:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-unders...

I edited post to include link.

The count starts at 1095, because there are 1095 eight hour blocks of time in a normal year, there are 1098 in a leap year.

The idea is to destroy the calendar, and destroy the clock! Replace them with a slow gentle reminder of the passage of time, instead of this fine-grained instrument we use now.

I find that the main thing exact time keeping does in my life is to create scheduled events that I don't want to go to! Meetings and pointless social events, I would rather be hacking or building in a zen like flow state.

Of course to really achieve that dream I would have to be single and shun my family, and then I would get lonely :)

But I still like Maker Time. It is a comfort.

It all started as an exercise in exploring Decimal Time. But Decimal time has all kinds of problems and all implementations are really clunky. And the reason is that the solar and lunar calendars don't sync nicely. I found what I think is a pretty elegant compromise, by breaking the day into 8 hour time periods.

Decimal time was attempted in the early Americas and most famously during the French Revolution. A form of Decimal time was at one point the official calendar of France.

Yes but it is helpful for tax purposes! The clock switching from 2 to 1095 means that:

You have survived another rotation of the earth around the sun

and

It's time to close last years books and open a new set and deduct your business expenses against the new

The browser clock I wrote is written in Javascript and runs off the local time in your browser.

I have not implemented those. The idea was to do the opposite of the granular nature of our current time keeping paradigm. To smooth out time, and think of it in larger blocks, the kinds of blocks where hard problems can really be tackled in.

Its precisely not for organizing events, although you could. For example, 35 corresponds to the 8-4PM period on December 20th of every non leap year.

Its time keeping for a small team that just got seed funding as in hardcore build mode, or for people living like Thoreau at Walden.

The soothing zen feeling of not being on anyone else's schedule :)

Maker Time is for people who build things, and building things requires decently long periods of focused time without interruptions.

But it also reminds you that time is passing and that you can not waste it.

It's the perfect clock for startup founders on the hack on product, eat, exercise and sleep lifestyle in an early stage company.

The rundown is very slow and gentle, and then it resets on January 1st. Right now there are 35 eight hour blocks of time left in 2016.

It's a numerical representation of the time left in a year. I like to think of it as 35 chances to make meaningful progress on important things in 2016.

I'm going to take this opportunity to shamelessly self-promote my own attempt at creating an entirely new calendar system, inspired by Paul Graham's Maker/Manager Schedule essay.

It's called Maker Time, and the current Maker Time is 35. Here is it's pitch:

Your clock has it backwards.

* Time is infinite, but our time on earth is not.

* Clocks should count down, not up.

* Time keeping should be based on meaningful celestial events like the year (one earth rotation around the sun) and the day (one rotation of the earth)

* Each unit of time should be based on a viable period of work for makers.

* Maker Time is reset on January 1st each year. The year is divided into 1095 blocks (1098 in leap year). Every 8 hours the count decreases by one.

Here is a browser-based Maker Time clock:

http://willholloway.net/makertime.html

Here is a github repo for a simple Maker Time API Flask server and the algo for calculating the current Maker Time if one wants to implement it. I still hope it catches on.

https://github.com/willholloway/makertime

What I am trying to understand is how is underground compressed air storage not the solution to the energy storage problem. LightSail is doing this, I don't see why others aren't too.

The tech is simple. Dig a hole in your backyard, put a large steel tank in it with an air compressor and a small turbine generator.

Putting the tank underground vastly improves the safety of the system and hides it. You can also derive heat from this process.

We just have to look at the world of bitcoin mining to see that custom fabricated ASICs would wipe the floor with general purpose CPUs for this kind of task.

Intel 3930k = 66.6 Mhash/s AntMiner S9 ASIC = 14,000,000 Mhash/s

Passive solar homes with heat storage may not.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for thay are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Redfin isn't disrupting the industry. They set out to, and ended up pretty much recreating the existing model and competing on price.

"We’re full-service, local agents who get to know you over coffee and on home tours, and we use online tools to make you smarter and faster. More than 10,000 customers buy or sell a home with us each year."

That's pretty much what any brokerage is. The only difference is they pay their people salaries. Any agent that can actually substantially sell and earn would strike out on their own and get their brokers license.

As someone who grew up in a family of real estate investors, landlords and brokers and has 14 years experience as an adult with it, I have to say, and I'm not picking on you because what you are espousing is a widespread belief, but you are wrong.

You are wrong about the amount of time she spent, and wrong about the industry being ripe for disruption. Spending 10 hours on four deals is not physically possible, or you have the luckiest, worst realtor in the history of the broker business.

Many have said the same thing about the industry, where are the results? Realtors are not still in business because of information asymmetry. Redfin has tried, and they have not succeeded. In fact they ended up moving towards the historical model. That tells you something.

I'll let you in on a secret, you can sell and buy any house you own or want yourself! It's called For Sale By Owner and many people do it. You can also negotiate on commission.

But be careful, because there are a lot of laws in place in RE, to protect buyers. It is heavily regulated. You could make a mistake and fail to disclose something that could end up costing you HUUUUGEEE.

What you get with a good realtor is a ton of service. Just the other day I drove 25 minutes each way to go make sure a homes thermostat was on and the house was warm when the temperature dropped. I was doing a favor for a realtor I know, that is selling a house for a family in another part of the country.

A good realtor will do things like that for you. And it's often a thankless job. The house I did that for might not even end up selling, the realtor may not even get a commission and it ends up being a lot of free work.

A good realtor knows attorneys, handy men, plumbers, electricians, landscapers and is a tough negotiator. A good realtor will market your property to a wider audience than would be easy for you to do yourself.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong and disrupt a sale, often times at the last minute. Those connections can save a deal. I've seen it countless times.

The reason the real estate broker business hasn't been disrupted is because it's a service business, it's not a product and its difficult to reduce it to something that scales and can be automated.

There is a large graveyard of startups that have tried.

I gave up my real estate license because of the sentiment you are expressing here, and the amount of competition that was willing to put up with it. It's a crap job in my opinion, it benefits the customers much more than the agents in all but the really hot markets.

3D FDM plastic printers are an useful component of the future the hype described, but they are just a component, they are not energy to matter Star Trek replicators.

If one designs for it, it is possible to build complex products. FarmBot is a good example. It is made with a combination of 3D FDM printed parts, flat metal parts that could be made with a plasma cutter or CNC, open source software and compute provided by small ARM computers, and commodity produced parts like wires, motors and extruded aluminium rails.

Thats how RepRaps are made, and that is how you have to build in this new way. Very few things are solid plastic shapes.

3D FDM printers are great for designing and producing the case that your etched PCB, switches and LED's attach to. It is an ingredient in the recipe.

FDM can be used to make custom metal components through green sandcasting metals.

If more projects were designed like RepRap, or FarmBot, this new industrial revolution could still take shape. Robotic PCB production is another key ingredient that is needed for reality to match up to the hype.

On second thought, agreed. I hope that is not part of the solution.

I think that our routers may be the key, or are at least completely negligent at the moment.

A normal consumer router is essentially a black box, but it should be a watchdog. The router should alert users when suspect outbound traffic is originating from it's network.

Of course the router could be compromised, and router patch cycles are atrocious generally, but this method could notify in case of hacked IP cameras and thermostats.

Could we not solve the problem of DDOS through collaboration between hosts and ISP's?

1) DDOS attack is detected 2) Attacking IP addresses are sent automated DDOS abuse notifications 3) ISP, like your credit card company when it's machine learning algos detect fraud ask for human back channel verification like SMS. 4) ISP notifies user of suspected bot on one of their devices. The onus is put on the user to run a secure network and remove or fix offending devices.

This system could work well for residential connections at least.

It could be implemented similarly to the way spam is handled by the internet, bad neighborhoods and networks that don't self police are treated as second class citizens.

Luckily I don't live in NY and short term rentals are perfectly legal in my town and state.

What I am saying are the laws in NY are too strict and strangling growth.

AirBnB house has positive externalities, and is much more desirable to live next to than multifamily, at least in the type of town I live in.

This is why my land owning neighbors love me and are happy with the direction the neighborhood is changing into.

Here is the thing, I have read the entire zoning code for my town. My town has a strict definition of what a hotel is, and what I am doing does not meet it.

A hotel has shared facilities, a check in desk and some other things.

It also does not meet the definition of a bed and breakfast, which by definition serves food.

So by the zoning of my town I am not operating a hotel or a bed and breakfast.

This house was built around the turn of the century as a single family house. At some point someone changed it to three.

I'm changing it back. I own it. If for some reason the town tried to stop me from doing short term rentals, I would just convert the house to single family and sell it for twice what I bought it for.

Unless one is opposed to property rights and free markets, I don't see how how one has standing to complain.

The state of New York has lost two Congressional representatives due to its population fleeing for more favorable areas.

New York State is not doing well, and its combination of nanny state, local government corruption and high taxes is not winning in the market place of governments.

If it wasn't for the inheritance of NYC being the capital of the world, NY state would be in seriously dire straits.

I do follow the same rules, I comply with all fire codes, carry proper insurance coverage and pay 15% hotel tax on every booking.

We should have a conversation of where short term rentals are appropriate. Maybe they are not appropriate in apartment buildings, but banning them in all of New York state is draconian.