HN user
Yeah, I've done this. I've bought records for years but only bought a record player recently. I would want to buy something at the merch table for a small band I like. They don't always have a shirt in my size but they always have records. Oftentimes the records went on loan to friends, which was a nice way of gently spreading my taste.
Good move, gotta watch out for complicated contractual claims in Schleswig-Holstein. Microsoft might ally with the Danes and claim Schleswig, and then we'd have an 1864 situation on our hands again.
What is the precise qualification for which illegal alien is permitted and which one is deported?
I don't think I raised choosing who gets to stay and who gets deported. My big objection to the current sweeps is that they function as a dragnet where they are detaining and questioning anyone who appears Mexican/Venezuelan/etc. Generally American citizens and permanent residents get released within an hour or so, but I still think that is intolerable. For example, there was a young woman who was ethnically Latina, but was adopted by a white family so she had an anglo-sounding last name like Smith. She was keeping papers on her, knowing the sweeps were happening. She was detained and when she presented her papers the agents didn't believe that someone who looked like her could have that last name so they kept her detained for an hour or so. I think that is an erosion of my constitutional liberties and yours.
But to try and get at your question, there are lots of legislative changes I would like to see (like this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/497...). You may not support pathways to citizenship for long-time peaceful and productive residents. I think it's orthogonal to the current cruel and unconstitutional deportation tactics.
Do you think clergy should be allowed to administer the Eucharist to detainees at Broadview? To me their refusal to allow that is emblematic of how they are deliberately being cruel. (I am trying to answer your questions directly, if you would humor me and answer one of mine.)
This is a common objection I hear raised, so I think it's good that you raised it here. Respectfully, I think there is a lot of rhetorical slippage in your argument.
First, I did not support the very loose amnesty policy, but I also don't support ICE teargassing the grocery store parking lot outside of my old apartment in Logan Square. In any case I don't think one's opinion on the first thing should disqualify them from having a take on deportation tactics.
Second, I think there is substantial ambiguity in what people voted for on deportation. There were lots of promises of deporting dangerous criminals (something that I agree would be a good idea). A subset of Trump voters in 2024 did want to round up migrant day laborers standing outside of Home Depots, and they are getting what they voted for. But I think another large subset believed that there was going to be a targeted deportation of "the worst of the worst". The administration claims to be doing this, but the worst of the worst are very unlikely to be looking for work outside of Home Depot.
Lastly, to your question, I think there are many many ways for the tactics to be more humane (and constitutional). To take just one example, I think the feds should resume allowing Catholic clergy into the Chicago-area processing facility at Broadview to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
Can it be brutalist when you have the richness of wood in full display, veins, shimmer and knots all apparent?
Insofar as brutalism is about showcasing the raw building materials, yes, I think this is precisely what brutalism is about. Brutalism often uses concrete, but the big idea is to showcase the underlying material. (And if wood is more beautiful than concrete, great!)
I enjoyed the framing but to each their own.
I can't decide to use Rust at my current job, but there are a lot of people on HN for the last ten years telling me that I'm doing it wrong with memory-unsafe programming languages. I still think this is interesting and useful information. Perhaps if I'm making a new company or starting a project, I might choose Rust if it makes sense for me.
A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.
Slipping the phrase "consider the lobster" into a place where it was germane to the conversation made me lol. Well done.
Yeesh, thanks for sharing all this. I would eagerly read that blog post!
I've gotten really into Ableton this past year and I've been curious whether I should get into Max for Live. Being a programmer and looking at their marketing materials, it seemed like it should tap into the right parts of my brain. But seeing your comment now ... maybe not the right move. Especially because I'm not looking to accomplish anything special, I just want a sandbox to play with digital audio concepts.
Can anyone in the know compare and contrast bespoke's feature set with Max for Live? (https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/) It also has a circuit diagram-ish UI and supports scripting with Node. Put another way, does Ableton already offer Ableton smashed to bits with a baseball bat?
(fwiw, you have to pay for the $1k suite version of Ableton to get Max, so Bespoke could still be a great alternative even if they do a lot of the same things)
Contrary to the author's claim, the photo booth at Rainbo Club is still there.
Yes, "community areas" is bureaucrat-speak for neighborhoods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_areas_in_Chicago)
It's useful for city planners and the like because "neighborhoods" have fuzzy boundaries that people disagree on, but Chicago's community areas are well-defined.
FWIW Youngstown has also placed some big economic development bets on white collar industries. Last I checked, the Youngstown Business Incubator had a solid success with at least one software company: https://www.google.com/search?q=turning+technologies&rlz=1C5...
There's also been a lot of work to nurture additive manufacturing businesses (https://ysu.edu/center-for-innovation-in-additive-manufactur...). A mixture of federal grants (partly from the Appalachian Regional Commission IIRC) and support from the university going into that.
But to your point of embracing white collar workers ... does that solve the problem economic development agencies are actually trying to solve? An interesting case study a few miles down the highway is Pittsburgh. There's been a much-hyped boom in high skilled tech jobs seeded by CMU (robotics, software startups) plus a relatively strong healthcare/biotech sector there. But that doesn't do much to replace the big swath of steel and manufacturing jobs that were around a generation ago. So average wages go up and there's probably _some_ trickle down benefits, but the new tech jobs don't do much for the median Pittsburgher whose parents/grandparents would have worked in the mills.
Yeah, specifically the GM plant in Lordstown, which is not in city proper but is in the metro area. They made Chevy Cruzes there. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/podcasts/the-daily/genera...
Agreed on most of what you're saying here.
For me, a house isn't an investment but it's a place where I house my family.
I really want to view the world this way :) I wish housing were a boring commodity that depreciates in value over time like a car. With prices being what they are, I am _forced_ to think of housing as an investment because of how much of my net worth will be tied up in it.
I think some smart companies in "third tier" cities are tapping this. There are some hilarious targeted ads I see for an Austin company (HomeAway) that prominently shows the median home price in Austin and a link to their open jobs. Similarly, Duolingo (Pittsburgh-based) put up a billboard in SF advertising the prospect of working in tech AND owning a home: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/23/duolingo-to-silicon-valle...
Let me try and complicate this :)
First, I submit that $430,000 is still expensive. Instead of buying the median home in Pittsburg and commuting 60+ minutes on BART to downtown SF, I could add an h and buy a huge home in my favorite neighborhood in Pittsburgh PA for about the same price and have a chill bicycle commute: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Pittsburgh-PA/pmf,pf_p... (Obvious and legitimate objections: fewer job options, snow.) This is just me trying to say, $430k for that arrangement does not strike me as "cheap" given alternatives in other metros.
I agree that with a tech salary it's possible to save up for a down payment and buy in the Bay Area. But the risk seems unacceptable to me. Paying ~$1M for a house is a big bet that the Bay Area housing market stays hot. I don't want my wealth to be so tied up in a hyperlocal bet like that. I see things going one of two ways (and this is probably over-simplistic).
Option 1: A $1M starter home is the new normal. Prices stay flat or keep rising over the long haul. In that case my investment is sound. But I don't want to live in that kind of place. Where will my kids' teachers live? How will I cope with the moral ickiness of living in a place where housing costs create extreme spatial segregation of the professional class from the service class?
Option 2: The vision painted above is unsustainable. Something has to give (maybe a big financial crash; maybe just state-mandated upzoning that quickly increases housing supply) and the value of my investment drops by a lot.
Either way, I'm planning to save up on the West Coast and use my nest egg back in the Rust Belt.
Hear hear! It's a good solution for this domain using reliable, free tools. And other folks without a lot of compute resources or experience setting up Spark clusters or whatever can easily adapt their approach. Hats off.
"If you owe the bank $100,000 the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100,000,000 you own the bank." Not a perfect parallel to this situation, but a nice aphorism.
That's useful to foreground and I agree that's his target. There is a reasonable argument to be made that a constellation of policies targeted at courting big businesses will bring more of the likes of McDonald's, Caterpillar, Boeing, etc to downtown Chicago, and this will help lift all boats. Meanwhile, it's unclear how much finite political capital and staffer attention this project burns that could have been, eg, directed towards tracking down funding for the Red Line expansion. Maybe they can walk and chew gum. More likely they can only chew like three sticks of gum and I wish this weren't one of those sticks. (Not that you were making a claim either way. I'm just riffing on your post.)
Yeah. IMO the stakes aren't super-high because, as the journalist mentions, Chicago already has decently fast and consistent service via the Blue Line from downtown to ORD. Given that, it would be odd for CTA, Cook County, or the feds to throw money at getting marginal gains on an airport express line when there are much bigger wins to be had at lower cost by, eg, improving reliability of bus service in the South Side (https://southsideweekly.com/beyond-the-l-proposal-south-side...). The express line is (imo) a silly issue for Rahm et al to be giving as much attention to as they are, but as long as we're just at the stage where Elon Musk is spitballing how to build a whiz-bang tunnel of the future and Illinois tax money isn't going to it ... sure, go for it
Check out The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein for an extensive treatment of this topic. (His focus is not on Jim Crow per se, but on the entire web of policies used to enforce segregation across the States, thus locking African Americans out of the great boom in housing wealth post-WWII.)
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Yep. Conversely, it's interesting to see some urban planning folks warm up to ride sharing as a way to extend the reach of existing transit networks. But still a lot of hostility, to be sure.
Chicago also released their taxi trips dataset recently: http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/chicago-taxi-data...
I thought "artisanal, shade-grown code" was such a delightful phrase. I took it to mean not bad, but rather too costly for practical/mass use. Like some people can afford to buy $6 lattes, and those are likely very tasty lattes, but Folgers is going to move more beans.
This was one of the main takeaways from a delightful interview about depression with Peter Sagal (https://www.apmpodcasts.org/thwod/2016/12/peter-sagal-opens-...)
"Avoiders" who push themselves into social situations and work they care about will fare better than ruminators.
Yes yes yes. I seemed to me that the article defined "hot" cities as ones with expensive housing, which prevented it from looking at hot cities with less housing problems. Pittsburgh and Columbus come to mind as two cities with growing creative/professional industries where the middle class can afford to live.
(Although housing in the epicenter of these cities' tech boomlets can be absurd compared to the rest of the city. This new construction in Pittsburgh's East End - http://www.zillow.com/b/bakery-living-pittsburgh-pa-63CwP3/ - charges the same for 1 bed that I paid for a 3-bedroom townhouse in a solid neighborhood ~1 mile away 2 years ago.)