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zachkatz

327 karma · joined March 14, 2012

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zachkatz··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
There are tons of roommate situations in Portland for around that price: https://portland.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=700#sea...
zachkatz··on Show HN: I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianos
Do you have a mailing list?
zachkatz··on Show HN: I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianos
Wow, this is amazing! As a songwriter, the only feature that I’d really need to make it an insta-buy is always-recording audio as well (and then you bookmark it and it only keeps what you sang when you started playing, since obviously audio takes way more storage space). This is probably way out of scope right now, but just adding my feedback. The always-recording piano is brilliant, but I’m not sure how useful it’d be for me without the melodies I’m improvising to go along with it. Honestly, if I wasn’t broke, I’d invest in you building that feature (or entirely separate product?) because it’d be such a gamechanger (and then you could sell it to people who play any instrument).
zachkatz··on Brain waves appear to wash out waste during sleep in mice
If the problem is psychological trauma, wouldn’t therapy be the obvious solution?
zachkatz··on The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets
For more in-depth reading on Dutch street design, this blog is fascinating:

https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/search/label/what%20wo...

zachkatz··on Apple's Testy Developer Relationships Threaten to Hamper Vision Pro
Phones have completely fucked our posture because they have to be hunched over and our fingers need to contort into unnatural shapes and do repetitive motions. The form factor of being able to stand up straight (or sit back) naturally while computing is the killer feature.
zachkatz··on The changing face of post-pandemic New York City
Basically all the housing in NYC—from the brownstones in Bed-Stuy to the high rises on the Upper East Side—were built during the early 20th century when there was a huge population boom, to provide affordable housing for literally millions of people.

We need to keep doing that. NYC doesn’t need a few thousand more apartments—it needs hundreds of thousands more apartments.

zachkatz··on DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC
Illegal immigrants. Here are some sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/nyregion/migrant-delivery...

https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/tidal-wave-of-migrants-in-nyc-...

https://gothamist.com/news/doordash-legal-group-set-to-deliv...

zachkatz··on DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC
The “problem” is that many (most?) delivery cyclists in NYC aren’t legally allowed to work, so this option would be jeopardizing a large part of their workforce (bad for DoorDash) while also being bad for the workers themselves (who aren’t exactly swimming in job options). I’m not making a value judgement here, just weighing in with a tradeoff to consider.
zachkatz··on Why does sleep become more elusive as we age?
I feel like maybe one of the causes of apparently such widespread sleep apnea is how most people, as far as I gather, sleep with their windows closed. This is deeply unnatural—we evolved to sleep more or less outside, or at least in a shelter with a steady airflow—so of COURSE sleeping in an unventilated box with stale, stagnant air is going to result in not getting enough air while sleeping. A CPAP machine is basically doing the same thing. This is pure speculation, so I’m curious if anyone else has any perspective on this.
zachkatz··on Heated yoga may reduce depression in adults
FYI, for anyone interested in learning Bikram, this book (by Bikram himself) is amazing: https://www.amazon.com/Bikram-Yoga-Radiant-Personal-Fulfillm...
zachkatz··on Cannabis use disorder and subsequent risk of depression and bipolar disorder
It’s not a conspiracy theory. The nation’s car-centic instructure is a direct result of the decisions and actions of Robert Moses, as detailed in The Power Broker.

Not to say that “emergent social dynamics” didn’t play a role, but Moses singlehandedly built most highways in NYC, and influenced hundreds (thousands?) more around the world. And he built them not simply as a response to emerging demand, but because he personally saw cars as the future of transportation.

I suggest reading The Power Broker to learn more about this; I wouldn’t have believed it either before reading it!

zachkatz··on Why Ugly Architecture Is Bad for Your Health
Le Corbusier
zachkatz··on Cannabis use disorder and subsequent risk of depression and bipolar disorder
I know it seems too cartoonish to be real, but if you read about Robert Moses, you’ll see that it is shockingly true. He didn’t just lobby and propogandize; he had absolute power over all public works projects in NYC. That’s not a typo or an exaggeration—absolute power, outside of the established system of checks and balances. And he genuinely loved cars, and hated public transit, so his projects were all designed as such. Since his reign, no one has had nearly as much power (some say he was as powerful as Gengis Khan), so it’s been very difficult to reverse the impact of his decisions.

Robert Moses was so influential in reshaping the urban fabric of the US to prioritize cars that everything else is basically a footnote.

zachkatz··on Cannabis use disorder and subsequent risk of depression and bipolar disorder
For cars, it’s actually even more cartoonish than that. Read The Power Broker; auto-centric urban planning is basically entirely the result of Robert Moses’ insane power and influence (in the same way that the reason everyone has smartphones is basically solely because of Steve Jobs).
zachkatz··on Electric bike, stupid love of my life
The Gazelle Arroyo C8 is a Dutch e-bike (one of the only models available in the USA) with a beautiful design.
zachkatz··on A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and depression
> we did not evolve to sit all day, inside, at desk, gazing into screens

What I love about Apple Vision Pro is that it has the potential to solve this!

zachkatz··on America has paid a steep price for parking
This blog post addresses all of your points, which are actually just common misconceptions: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths...
zachkatz··on America has paid a steep price for parking
> the former is almost impossible

When you understand how quickly the Netherlands changed (it used to be just as car-centric at the US), you might change your view about what's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnFYOvcOn_E

zachkatz··on Many soft contact lenses in US made up of PFAS, research suggests
Any actionable advice here? Are there any safer contact lens brands?
zachkatz··on SoftBank Vision funds post record $39B annual loss
Taxis in NYC are often (always?) way cheaper than Uber now.
zachkatz··on Why “free” street parking could be costing you hundreds more in rent
These are all negative externalities of cars, not containerized garbage. All the more reason to accelerate the social engineering of society towards safer, less polluting forms of transportation like e-bikes and transit.
zachkatz··on Agents are the next AI killer app after ChatGPT
That would be crazy if so, because it reads as very human
zachkatz··on Denver’s e-bike subsidy program produced more new riders, fewer car trips
I visited Denver, excited to see all of the supposed new cycling infrastructure, and aside from like, a handful of bike lanes here and there, I didn't feel comfortable biking around the city. Would prefer not to bike in six lanes of high-speed traffic.
zachkatz··on Denver’s e-bike subsidy program produced more new riders, fewer car trips
Maybe legally, but because they don't have barriers protecting people from cars, they lack "Subjective Safety," which is one of the fundamental principles of Dutch cycling network design (and is essential for the average person—as in children and elderly people, not just the brave lycra warrior—to feel comfortable cycling): http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2008/09/three-types-of-...
zachkatz··on Denver’s e-bike subsidy program produced more new riders, fewer car trips
Here's a random main street in Denver: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7322582,-104.9861576,3a,75y,...

Or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,...

...or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,...

You can click around to pretty much any street in the city, and 100% of the space is dedicated to cars. A complete bike network that enables mass cycling is a dense grid that makes basically every street safe to cycle on: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-i...

This is what trying looks like (Jersey City's Quick Build Bike Network ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA

Or this (Inside the New Plan to Make Paris ‘100% Cyclable): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris...

Denver is not even really trying.

zachkatz··on Show HN: Transform Your City
So remove it. Way simpler.
zachkatz··on Kitchen Renovation ideas animation using Stable Diffusion [video]
Correct. In a different field, we're using AI to do the same thing but for streets: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai

...and it's already led to actual change: https://twitter.com/MikeBradleyMKE/status/157083982421467545...

zachkatz··on Paris Will Become ‘100% Cyclable’
Hi, founder/creator here. You’re totally right, more nature is better. We try to include as much greenery as possible, but it usually has to be grass/plants/flowers. Trees would be ideal, but due to the constraints of inpainting with DALL-E (the AI we use), it’s nearly impossible to add trees without dramatically changing the appearance of the buildings, too, which greatly diminishes the before-and-after effect. Hopefully in future updates it’ll be possible to generate elements that can be “smart overlaid” on top of the existing image.
zachkatz··on Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
Yep, absolutely! Our plan is to integrate existing local advocacy orgs into the platform—so we automatically benefit from their political connections + bandwidth, while they benefit from our tools + reach. Perfect win/win to Get Stuff Done.
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