Good. Building up is the way to go. Here in Melbourne, >30-story apartment towers have become the norm, and it's succeeded in slowing the rise of housing prices in the inner city quite a bit. I also think it's helping to delay our transportation crisis.
Readit Newstobico commented on Mountain View moves forward with 9,100-unit housing option next to Google bizjournals.com/sanfranci... · Posted by u/apsec112
tobico commented on Why has the quality of brick buildings declined in the last 100 years? greenbuildingadvisor.com/... · Posted by u/nkurz
I think one thing is buildings are now are built closer to their required engineering tolerances. In the past many building were massively over engineered, while modern buildings seem to be built for their exact expected lifespan.
The one thing I really hate about most modern buildings here in Australia is the ceiling height has been reduced. A lot of modern buildings have ceiling heights around 7’ while old buildings will have ceilings of 10’ to 12’.
Shorter ceilings are better for climate control, though. No need to heat up a bunch of air that just floats around over your head.
tobico commented on It’s time for the Uber of air travel washingtonpost.com/lifest... · Posted by u/molecule
This is ridiculous, air travel is expensive because planes are giant expensive machines, consume a significant amount of rare fossil fuel to fly, and can only be safely flown by highly trained experts. No kind of app is going to solve any of those problems.
tobico commented on Google’s Ad System Has Become Too Big to Control wired.com/2015/07/googles... · Posted by u/Fjolsvith
Google adsense has a bigger problem, adblocking
It has gone from hardcore nerds (about 10%) blocking ads which was fine to everyone and their mother blocking ads on desktops/laptops, and I do not blame them. According to my measurements of adblocking (surprisingly easy to detect if ads are being blocked)
I have used adsense since it started in 2003 making close to million euro in that time, but the last few months have been absolutely disastrous (tho my traffic has also fallen in last couple of years unfortunately)
Basically the writing is on the wall and I have concentrated on other projects in last while
There must be alot of worried people now at google wondering if they will still have a job in a few years, yes mobile is helping but for how long?
I use ad blockers for distracting image and popup ads, but I fairly frequently click on Google text ads in search results. When there's a product category that's very crowded, if a company is willing to pony up some money to get my attention, that's often one indicator that a particular product might be worth my time to investigate.
tobico commented on We've Adapted Our Reading Habits to Fit Our Screens, but at a Cost fastcodesign.com/3048297/... · Posted by u/samclemens
Seems like this article makes quite a leap from the study results to their suggestion that everyone reads paper books. Study results:
1. People reading on a screen are more likely to skim
2. Skimming reduces comprehension of the material
3. Reading on paper correlates with better reconstruction of plot
It seems like 1 and 2 taken together are as good an explanation as any for 3. Given that, I feel like it would be at least worth an experiment to see if making a conscious effort to avoid skimming would be just as effective as switching to reading on paper. If so, I think that would be a cheaper and easier solution to the issue.
tobico commented on How I’d redesign piano sheet music medium.com/@alexcouch/how... · Posted by u/cyanbane
The funny thing about talking of tabs for piano, is that sheet music is already that. By representing music on a diatonic staff, with a key signature, it's shown in a perfect format to translate it to keys on the piano, at the expense of some other kinds of instruments, vocals, and general understanding of the music, where it would be more helpful to see the music on a chromatic staff.
tobico commented on Fly.js: New generation build system github.com/flyjs/fly... · Posted by u/philbo
"Fly is a build system for Node based in ES6 generators and promises that aims to be simple and elegant to write and extend"
If an objective is for it to be simple to write and extend, why use two shiny new features that most programmers will be unfamiliar or inexperienced with?
tobico commented on Inverting Binary Trees Considered Harmful jasq.org/just-another-sca... · Posted by u/lackbeard
It's actually not that hard -- invite them to work with you on a small project. Pay them reasonably. See how they work in RL. Then decide, and -- by all means -- give them honest feedback even when not hiring.
This method doesn't work well for hiring people that already have a full-time job elsewhere.
tobico commented on Amazon launches same day delivery for Prime customers amazon.com/b/ref=br_imp_a... · Posted by u/ankushio
Now if only Australia could get same-month delivery.