moberemk (u/moberemk)

moberemk commented on People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one wired.com/story/car-free-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

maxsilver · a year ago

It's tricky too, because a lot of "low density suburban wastelands" was already significantly phased out over a decade ago, in a lot of the US anyway.

People hear "suburbs" and imagine a single-family home on 1 to 2+ acre lots -- something that looks like this -> https://st2.depositphotos.com/1658611/5485/i/950/depositphot... . And while that definitely still happens, it's really limited to the exurbs in the US these days, it's not representative of newer suburbs anymore.

The primary style of suburban development built since say 2010 in the US, has really been more like 5 single-family homes on 1 acre, or 10 townhouses on 1 acre, or equivalent. Something that looks like this -> https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/modern-suburbs-17207940.jpg or this -> https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/0... -- which is anywhere from 5x to 20x higher density per acre.

moberemk · a year ago

My first thought looking at that first "new suburb" photo was: where's the sidewalk? And the second photo has sidewalks but no visible amenities.

Sure they're denser, and townhouses are at least less materials-intensive to build, but I'm curious how this is otherwise an improvement on the old planning model of swathes of detached homes?

moberemk commented on Quality of new vehicles in US declining on more tech use: study reuters.com/business/auto... · Posted by u/lxm

dghughes · 2 years ago

You may not get the chance. Or at least here in Canada as shown on the national news a woman went to a Toyota dealership and said she'd like the RAV4 Prime (a hybrid). She said they laughed at her, as if someone could just walk in and ask to buy a vehicle I guess. They said it would be an eight year wait (the video interview said but not the print version). I find hard to believe it would take nearly a decade to get a car.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/car-market-analysis-1.68737...

moberemk · 2 years ago

As someone shopping for a PHEV in Ontario right now: yeah it's dire. The Prime I've consistently heard is a 2-3 year wait, with the dealers saying Ontario is getting somewhere around 12 for the province because they're all going to BC and Quebec (higher provincial incentives there) and even there it's years out. Kia is the fastest right now but even that's a 10+ month wait for their most comparable PHEV.

The only one that seems easy to get is the Outlander, but that car is also way too big for my needs among other issues.

moberemk commented on Molly White Tracks Crypto Scams. It’s Going Just Great wired.co.uk/article/molly... · Posted by u/samwillis

X6S1x6Okd1st · 2 years ago

I really don't see any reason why someone working in cryptocurrency, but clear eyed about the possibility of down sides would "cross swords with Molly". She is an incredible source, as far as I can tell the *best* at finding and highlighting what's going wrong. That's incredibly valuable.

rekt.news is also quite good, but skewed towards less reporting but more in depth.

IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source, regardless of if there's a difference in belief of whether crypto is eventually worth it, if you want to build for the long term you must know what is going wrong.

moberemk · 2 years ago

I agree with you everywhere but here:

> IMO Molly should be getting public good funding from the ETH ecosystem for being such a good & reliable source

It's a generous thought, but it's very bad optics to take a bunch of money from someone that you report on. Yes I know this happens all the time in bigger media circles, but they're big enough that it's either not going to be a dominant revenue stream or the appearance of integrity is irrelevant (the ur-example being Fox News and their claims of being "entertainment")

moberemk commented on Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” semianalysis.com/p/google... · Posted by u/klelatti

BiteCode_dev · 2 years ago

Investors are obsessed with moats, but people have to realize that the entire world runs on business that have no moats.

There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant...

The moat concept is predominant because the idea that everything must make billions have infected the debate about businesses.

It's all about being a unicorn, a giant, a monopoly, making every body at the top billionaires, and it's like there is no other way to live.

Except that's not how most people do live, even entrepreneurs.

Even Apple, which today is the typical example of a business with a moat, didn't start with "we can't get into this computer business, we'd have no moat".

They have a moat now, but it's a consequence of all the business decisions and the thing they built after many decades.

They didn't start their project by the moat. The started their project by providing value and marketing it.

moberemk · 2 years ago

> There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant...

This line is interesting to me, because actually I think there _is_ a major moat there: locality. I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, but for those examples specifically a lot of the value of specific instances of those business comes from their being in your neighborhood. If I live in Toronto, I'm not going to fly a plumber from Manhattan to fix my pipes; if I want a loaf of sourdough, I'm not going to get it from San Francisco, I'm going to get it from the bakery around the corner; I might travel out of town for a particularly unique and amazing restaurant, but not every week, I've got solid enough options within a ten minute drive. Software is different because that physical accessibility hurdle doesn't exist.

Rest of this is spot-on though

moberemk commented on Ask HN: What's your best (worst) VC pass reason? · Posted by u/vcproofalias

tlb · 7 years ago

See "21. Investors don't like to say no." in http://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html

Investors often feel the need to give a made-up reason, but the real reason is that they're not as excited about you as about something else. Don't be discouraged -- even the most successful companies got many nos on the way to their first yes. Don't change your business strategy based on the reason any one investor gives you, although if several good investors give you the same reason, you might want to think about it.

BTW, it's normal to extrapolate retention to a yearly number using cohort analysis. Your claim is a bit like "I can't have been going 80 MPH because I've only been driving for 30 minutes!"

moberemk · 7 years ago

From my experience, extrapolating retention like that isn't really particularly valuable. It's basically the same as making something up whole-cloth past a certain point--feels more like lying than projecting.

(I also read the OP's story as the investor asking to see actual numbers, and not projections--if someone asked to see those kinds of numbers my first thought would be that they were asking for historical data)

moberemk commented on The Allure of Small Towns for Big City Freelancers slate.com/human-interest/... · Posted by u/wallflower

ape4 · 7 years ago

I too wish Canadian towns weren't all about the car. Perhaps the university small cities are the closest: London (ON), Kingston, etc.

moberemk · 7 years ago

Lived in London during and slightly after university: it's not. City's pretty much dominated by cars, there's technically a transit system but it was slow and infrequent, and the way the city is laid out with three major N/S and three major E/W roads makes it hard to get around during constructions season. Downtown is...kind of walkable, but it's bordering on a food desert with only one (expensive) grocery store at the edge of the core.

moberemk commented on Stack Overflow Culture codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018... · Posted by u/mayankkaizen

SCdF · 7 years ago

I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore.

Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.

You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4]

I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.

Which I suppose is something.

[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction

[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code

[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid"

[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking

moberemk · 7 years ago

I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.

moberemk commented on Node.js has forked into Ayo sourcecontribute.com/2017... · Posted by u/wut42

sillysaurus3 · 8 years ago

A few weeks ago, concerns were raised by several TSC and CTC members regarding issues they had with @rvagg's interactions in the Github tracker and Twitter.
The specific issues that were reported include:
[Note: the specific list of issues has been removed at the request of several core collaborators who felt that listing the issues was not fair to Rod. This post was made with an effort at full transparency and with no ill intent towards anyone. No additional harm was intended by listing the issues - jasnell]

Ok, so what did they do? Does the announcement say?

EDIT: It looks like some of the allegations are at https://twitter.com/ohhoe/status/899748838302302212 but I'm having a bit of trouble parsing it.

Would it be possible to get "They said X, which is inappropriate because Y"? I don't know enough to understand why "apologizing to a contributor who had been repeatedly moderated" is bad (or what it even means, really).

On the other hand, I don't want my comment to be interpreted as a dismissal, or to put anyone on the defensive. I'm just asking for more info.

moberemk · 8 years ago

Here's a screenshot of the original posting to restore context: https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/899760806551666690

moberemk commented on Mozilla Acquires Pocket blog.mozilla.org/blog/201... · Posted by u/qdot76367

FatalBaboon · 9 years ago

I cannot understand the need for a thing like Pocket. Much less why Mozilla prefers to keep it close, and even less for money.

I mean, what is wrong with bookmarks and sharing links? Firefox can even send tabs to other computers I got linked via ff sync.

Iterate on a bad idea, give it a social spin, and voilà! You have a sellable startup. Except you should not buy that.

moberemk · 9 years ago

Two big things: 1) it's a lot faster to send to Pocket with the button > mark as read than managing bookmarks IMO but the real killer feature for me is 2) the offline saving of articles. Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi because it means I can keep reading things without worrying about finding a hotspot or wasting my (very limited) data.