llbeansandrice

You’ve made the same mistake that this thread is talking about.

It’s not about whether the abstraction is human or not, it’s the level of abstraction you can operate at. Using hand tools vs power tools as a bad analogy: you can use either and still become a good carpenter. If you have someone build your cabinets for you that’s a totally different level of abstraction and you don’t actually have any carpentry skills or knowledge.

Housing is a market and the value of items in a market can go up or down.

For some reason going down isn’t allowed in housing.

If Nvidia or Tesla tanked tomorrow to $10/share are those who own shares being “denied” money when they sell? Obviously not.

The sales tax comes out to $0.03 more on a $100 purchase. I don’t think this argument about providing these types of social services really holds that much water. That obviously depends on the actual tax amount but in the case of Front Range Passenger Rail it’s safe to say that the value provided by having a train outweighs the mill-levy.

I don’t know anything about your country’s situation so I can’t speak to it specifically. The US spends $200bn/year on roads and then there is the massive socialized cost of owning a car. Providing alternative options pretty clearly outweighs the social cost.

Taking regional rail to avoid a car trip would already pay back the sales tax I will pay many times over.

> US/Colorado money

CO is quite constrained in taxes compared to other states. Any tax increase must be voted on and have the spending already determined. This sounds nice in theory, in practice people hate new taxes intrinsically even when services are horrifically deteriorated.

Funny how those never seem to favor labor. I wish I could have an accounting error like that don’t you?

> but why on HN?

It makes sense to discuss it here since YC is largely US-based and the US has been such a large center of tech, VC-funding, etc. That impact obviously extends globally but I’m fascinated by the attempt to be “apolitical” on HN when those in charge of YC and nearly all of those in YC’s orbit are anything but.

I understand wanting to keep discussion curious and meaningful, but the influence of tech and these companies cannot be separated from either red v blue, capital-P Politics nor from small-p policy and politics on any level. It cannot, in my opinion be “apolitical” in the sense of “absence of politics”.

Either way, there clearly seem to be bubbles on HN. I’ve almost never seen pro-union sentiments here but other commenters indicate that the prevail view here is left of Marx. Evidence of bias either way is impossible with anec-data. I find the arguments about the actions and views of those in charge more meaningful than complaining about post and comment removal personally, but the discussion here is multi-faceted and prone to folks talking past each other.

Tfa only spend a small amount of time using grok threads as a case study of the general views and actions of HN though.

I think this assessment is fairly reductive and doesn’t consider that the realm of start up tech is massive, the political affiliations and views of those at YC and the inherent stance that being “apolitical” actually ends up being.

I also feel that HN attempts to avoid these classic forum trappings and in my personal opinion it has failed. Either you are correct and this is a minority of people or it’s not a minority and HN is pervaded by extremists. Both are bad and if HN wants to continue to be good it needs to be solved imo.

I wonder how quickly businesses would advocate for better land use and city planning if these externalities were more apparent and properly accounted for instead of providing “convenience” in a system that has been designed to be inconvenient.

You are excusing literal theft to the tune of $16mm. And the excuse is that the company is so large and vast and dominant that the scale to the company is a drop in the bucket.

Does the theft of $16mm become worse if DoorDash was half the size?

If I steal $16mm I’d go to jail but it’s no big deal because a corporation did it? The apologia for this is baffling to me.

Colorado is shipping a regional rail project in the front range. Service will start in ‘29 and the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansions.

It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.

It’s actually quite easy. RTD in the front range in Colorado has drastically reduced issues on buses and the light rail the past couple of years. It wasn’t that hard.

I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.

So you agree there should be more options besides cars?

Roads cost $200b a year and that doesn’t include the individual cost of owning a vehicle, fuel, insurance and maintenance. It also ignores the opportunity cost in having parking lots and land taken up by highways instead of being more economically productive in even small cities.

Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.

No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.

Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.

Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all

Then why is Amtrak breaking ridership records?

My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.”

I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.

Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.

You keep saying Starlink may be more efficient without providing any actual evidence that it is.

Also ignoring the political implications of a country spending tax money to buy services from a highly political company from a country whose politics and world influence are in flux right now.

Starlink is good because it is easy to deploy quickly. But the entire constellation and service will be dead within 5 years without constant launches of new satellites.

Forget efficiency. That sounds like a very poor investment of tax dollars to me. The fiber laid will provide lower latency and higher bandwidth connections for the next 40 years.

Also, whether an organization (private or public) is bloated and inefficient is often only a reference to what you think the goal of the organization is.

If the goal of the USPS was to turn a profit, then serving rural addresses is inefficient and the jobs and infrastructure to do so is bloat. Luckily that’s not the goal of the USPS.

I hesitate to mention Mamdani in this forum but it seems like he has done a lot to make NYC’s government “more efficient” in many ways. But also many people disagree on who that government should primarily serve.

I feel that a lot of government spending on roads is inefficient and would be better spent on transit systems. Many people disagree with my values tho.

Actually many cities aren’t accepting traffic deaths at all and are adopting Vision Zero. I believe it’s Norway that adopted it for the entire country and was able to go over a year with exactly zero traffic related deaths.

This problem is solvable and people in this thread saying that it’s not are absurd.

Cars are not necessary nearly as much as most Americans think they are.

It is a difficult problem to untangle, but not impossible. Accepting this level of tragedy and violence because cars are sometimes “economically necessary” is very sad. And again they are not nearly as necessary as is perceived. I drive my car maybe once or twice a week now and I live in a suburb of about 40k people, not in a major city.

If they do not want to fund it they do not support it.

The purpose of the system is what it does. Or in this case, the actions of the billionaire class and their capital are their values and morals.

You don’t need to outperform an LLM tho. The experience of working on it together is incredibly meaningful.

I generally reject this litmus test that someone has to be “better” and an LLM in order for the human interaction and effort to be worthwhile.

You’re now part of the journey of this novel. They will thank you in the acknowledgements section. It’s this foundation upon which our lives, communities, culture and societies are built.

You do not need to be better. This act you did for a friend is not suddenly pointless and meaningless upon the release of the next model.

This is anticipatory obedience and it's actively harmful.

You are also wrong. Contracts, ordinances, and everything related to governance get rolled back or changed all the time. Especially at the local level.

If you have lost the initial battle you can do the same thing as them: you keep attacking their presence and you only need to win once to undo it.

This is just anticipatory obedience. Deciding that you've already lost before even trying is actively harmful, especially when paired with a lack of any other action.

If you don't believe in this system then start setting things on fire[0] I guess. Otherwise shut up, people are actually trying to fight it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Kimberly-Clark_distributi...

They are absolutely hoovering up the excess profits are you fucking stupid? That’s literally how capitalism works.

When have you ever saved the company money and been given a bonus that was even 1/10th of that money?

Those flock cameras arrived in many places in the US bc people did not show up to public city council meetings to oppose them, aka “activism”.

I read something a while ago that talked about this. Friendships are solidified mostly by asking for help. It shows the other person that you trust them and people are often honored that you would do so. Even if the request is small.

So being on a quest is a great approach! You often need help and are in a discovery phase where you need to interact with people. Even if the interactions don’t go anywhere most of the time.

From a user perspective this makes sense. But if you’re MSFT or GitHub this number is pretty embarrassing.

They would love if everyone on the platform used all of the features and had massive lock-in right? So if some part of that is always broken, it’s not a confidence booster for users to adopt more of the feature set.

Sure the more things you use the more likely it is that one has an issue but clearly stability isn’t a goal for these type of companies anymore.

Does this truly play out? I’m sorry but I don’t buy that this is true based on a stereotypical Japanese exceptionalism trope.

The parent comment is specifically talking about abusing zoning laws. It’s also a very generic term and I’m interested in what would be an abuse of zoning laws specifically.

There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.

How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.

I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.

It’s a bike lane not a road. It’s mine as a cyclist gtfo.