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mo1ok commented on Priced out of home ownership   bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/user20180120
015a · a year ago
IMO takes like this are problematic. The problem is not enough building. That's it. All the other stuff you said is just noise that confuses people into believing this is some hyper-complicated modern-financial-system problem that's going to end the world due to its intractability. Its not any of that. Its just not enough building.

There are problems which feed into there not being enough building; the biggest one is definitely that property represents a major portion of Americans' investment portfolios, and thus our democratic system is filled with people (and companies) (and their representatives) who are heavily biased toward any decision that will raise property values. But its not that low building causes this; its just NIMBYism. This causes low building; it causes weird municipal rules about density; it causes expensive permitting; etc.

People also say "well, there's not enough land in the place people want to live so of course house prices are insane". Also bullshit. The "place people want to live" changes and expands all the time. Exurbs that were forests 15 years ago are now extremely hot. Why? BECAUSE WE BUILT. That's it. That's all it takes. Build housing. Build parks and sidewalks. Allow cool businesses to open.

Everyone, including and especially local governments, has made this so freakin complicated when its seriously not. Its freakin MBA prediction brain all over again. They're so afraid they don't understand the full problem, or the implications of their decision, that they refuse to act (build) and instead blame the lack of action (building) on intractably large problems like "interest rates" or "blackrock".

mo1ok · a year ago
It IS more complicated than that. It's not easy to build within a 1 hour commute of a dense population center. All that land is owned, built, and called for. Calling it "overpopulation" could be fair.

A parallel problem is immigration and, as the top comment pointed out, cheap credit encouraging vacancy.

mo1ok commented on The Downfall of DeviantArt   slate.com/technology/2024... · Posted by u/jfryusef
klaussilveira · a year ago
For the nostalgic readers of this thread, here's the website in 2000:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/deviantar...

And 2012, which I consider peak DeviantArt:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/deviantart-in-2012

mo1ok · a year ago
Wow, thank you for sharing this. I miss the old 00's era of maximalist web design.

Deleted Comment

mo1ok commented on Americans can barely afford homes   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jseliger
droopyEyelids · 2 years ago
There's a simple material angle that people aren't talking about enough with all these discussions:

Population growth has outpaced home construction (in the USA) for the past 20 years

https://usafacts.org/articles/population-growth-has-outpaced...

mo1ok · 2 years ago
No one wants to say it, but immigration is a huge driver of housing un-affordability. Skilled H1b immigration and/or foreign buyers drives up home prices, and unskilled illegal immigration drives up rents.
mo1ok commented on My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too   azumbrunnen.me/blog/my-ch... · Posted by u/raphaelsaunier
Zaheer · 5 years ago
I'm not sure why it took so long for people to recognize this. An overwhelming majority of chatbots I've used are utter rubbish and are better served through a regular interface (search, directory listing, etc).

Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.

mo1ok · 5 years ago
I feel like most of us were wise to the fact that this was a terrible idea on day one. It was funny to watch MBAs try to cash in on the "next big thing" in tech, though.
mo1ok commented on The Perils of Rehydration – A Realization about Gatsby and React   joshwcomeau.com/react/the... · Posted by u/joshwcomeau
mercer · 5 years ago
This is one of the (many) reasons why I've started using Phoenix LiveView for all the projects, when I can, that need either partial or full client-side functionality.

By simply keeping all the state, logic, and rendering on the server, all sorts of issues are avoided and various optimizations are possible, and I get full server-side rendering for free!

The client-side, meanwhile, via websockets, only sends events to the server and diffs whatever chunks of markup are sent back. Most of this is via server-side provided attributes (phx-click, phx-change, etc.), but for the slightly more 'exotic' stuff I can add my own events.

Obviously there are cases where this solution isn't practical, but this hasn't been the case for the vast majority of my projects.

mo1ok · 5 years ago
interesting - reminds me of what meteor attempted with its data protocol.
mo1ok commented on Jack Welch has died   wsj.com/articles/jack-wel... · Posted by u/lepton
codazoda · 5 years ago
I had the amazing opportunity to sit through a training where Jack Welch came to our company and taught a dozen of us his simple time management system. This was back in 1996 and I’ve been using some of the idea’s he gave us ever since. His philosophy about focusing on creating leaders seemed solid. His philosophy on rank-and-yank cost him a lot of fans.
mo1ok · 5 years ago
any link to or summary of his ideas?
mo1ok commented on Jack Welch has died   wsj.com/articles/jack-wel... · Posted by u/lepton
devonkim · 5 years ago
Every other F100 was outsourcing IT like crazy in the mid-2000s because of that Harvard Business Review article that talked about outsourcing everything non-essential to your primary business. Meanwhile, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) thought that was a stupid idea because every business was being transformed by its IT and that it's a revenue multiplier, not a cost center (something that every other decent person in the rank and file of IT has believed since... ever). The whole "digital transformation" boom that swept the F100 in the past 10 years is essentially back-tracking on all these divestures and off-shoring efforts.
mo1ok · 5 years ago
I recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)
mo1ok commented on 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach   danluu.com/p95-skill/... · Posted by u/janvdberg
5cott0 · 6 years ago
There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.
mo1ok · 6 years ago
I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging.

Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation.

For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.

mo1ok commented on Show HN: Pure C WebRTC implementation for embedded devices   github.com/awslabs/amazon... · Posted by u/Sean-Der
Sean-Der · 6 years ago
The encryption for DataChannels is HW accelerated while video is not. I was able to convince people to change this one! So a developer can opt-in to the accelerated profile.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=713701...

mo1ok · 6 years ago
Dude, thank you for this. My team has been trying to figure this out - we know we will eventually need a way to utilize in a low-level context, but couldn't dig up any cases of such an implementation. In addition, we were constantly frustrated by the lack of HW acceleration that created a performance bottleneck. Great work!

u/mo1ok

KarmaCake day211May 8, 2014View Original