HN user
Canadian liquor stores have dumped all American booze. Dinner conversation up north for the past few days has been all about travel and services boycotts (Amazon, Netflix, Uber, etc.)
Haven’t heard the US anthem booed at all Canadian hockey games since the “freedom fries” days post-Iraq mobilization.
Will take a decade to recover the goodwill lost this week.
Hey Doug, huge fan of yours. Thank you for everything.
logic.
for words: rhymezone, roget, oed, b-rhymes, fun python dictionary things :~)
Relatedly, Transit app is doing real-time analysis of rat sightings in the subway: https://transitapp.com/rats
I love the beautiful motion!
We now take this file and filter the data within such that we only keep entries which fit in the Zurcih area bounding box. After this is done we obtain the road network of the city from Open Street Map. Having this information we can now estimate a shortest path between two stations and take this as a guess for the taken path. As a final step we need to estimate a timestamp for each intersection in the path. This will help us in creating a smooth animation. This process is done by linearly interpolating the time from the start location to the end location, based on the distance.
This is super clever too.
Wonderful job.
I work at Transit app (https://manifesto.transitapp.com) and I think we fit the mould.
We build a navigation app that (1) helps drive down CO2 emissions and (2) encourages good urbanism, by helping people in urban areas make optimal use of their public transit and bikeshare systems.
In dense urban areas like NYC and Paris, where most of our users live, proposing a “most environmentally-friendly car trip”, like most consumer navigation apps do, is entirely beside the point. Carbon neutral transport options are just as fast or marginally slower than cars in these locales, especially when combining bikeshare and transit trips to eliminate long walks, and timing those trips with real-time transit data to eliminate waits at the stop. We believe in the compounding effects of good public transit and work with a few hundred transit agencies to make their service more accessible and accountable to riders.
Besides having a worthwhile mission, we also know that it’s only defensible in the long term with a sustainable business model, which we’ve managed by partnering with major transit agencies (like LA Metro, Muni, the MNTA, STM, OC Transpo, etc.) and having a soft paywall to encourage user subscriptions, which nullifies any incentive to monetize via impertinent ads and all those other unsavoury business practices regularly pursued by other companies in the consumer nav space.
Relatedly, we’re always on the lookout for bright, ethical, city-loving engineers — especially ones whose passions are machine learning, data compression, mapping, and mobile development. If that’s you: https://jobs.transitapp.com
This is awesome! Nice work.
Pun of the year.
Sunset Limited is a ~play, so for a similarly short Cormac rec I'd suggest The Road.
If you like his bleak, Hemingway-inflected style I'd suggest trying the short stories of Joy Williams ("Visiting Privilege").
Fun fact: Hachette’s CEO Michael Peitsch is also an occasional working editor, having edited David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (when he ran Hachette’s subsidiary Little, Brown) and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
Getting the same
Watch Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance — it's incredible. You should be able to find it for free online.
Yeah. Trade it in for a bike.
Very much agreed; while I try to avoid food delivery services as much as I can (knowing drivers are generally making sub-minimum wage after vehicle depreciation) this brazenness of DoorDash's tip garnishing is a bit of a black mark on YC. I won't even take DD up on the "free meal" promos they're running in my city.
Editing: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg
>> Max Perkins was the editor of Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F Scott Fitzgerald, and other famous 20th century writers. Great, great, book.
Bartending: Cosmopolitan by Toby Cecchini
>> Very well-written memoir of a bartender in New York in the late 1980s. He invented the Cosmo in NYC while working at the Odeon — on a lark, without thinking much of it. The drink took off, but I think he's still a working bartender in NYC.
Cooking: Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain
Painting: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Music: Meet me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman
Tech: Chaos Monkeys by AGM
And seconding swyx's recommendations for all things Michael Lewis, who can spin a good yarn about any profession — whether it's baseball managers, junk bond salesmen, or high frequency traders, etc.
I've also picked up lots of good recommendations from this thread https://ask.metafilter.com/243036/Recommend-a-nonfiction-aut... (I, too, like "insidery" type business books. I'm currently reading "The Emperor of Scent" about the world of perfume and it's pretty good! Also looking forward to reading "Ninety Percent of Everything" about the shipping industry.)
Business insider link since the sub got put private: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-trader-claims-make-mi...
This was from yesterday; trader claimed he had puts on the stock at its peak, and doubled-up from $4M to $8M
They just switched permissions
Funny to see the world's biggest underground music critic meme star on the front page of HN!
1599: Shakespeare writes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, As You Like it, Henry V.
"It's the year in which the thirty-five-year-old playwright went from being an exceptionally talented writer, to one of the greatest who ever lived.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/a-year-in-the-...
Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? The only reason that doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.
Looking back on the 2010s app wave, it's hard to think of any other app (including FB, Uber, and Airbnb) who have had a bigger cultural impact than Tinder.
Love to revisit this piece every few years. Why food delivery will never be profitable: "The Food Delivery Death Star" https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...
Wow, it's almost as if workers will have to fight for better work-life balance themselves rather than relying on the mercy of their benevolent broscience-inspired bosses
Sure, Jeff Bezos isn't walking around the streets of Seattle stealing people's chequebooks and ratting to their bosses so they can't make rent. But he and Amazon are exacerbating INSANE wealth inequality in Seattle. Amazon is the seat of economic power in the city, and its employees are the ones bidding up property prices. It's great that Bezos is giving high-paying jobs to thousands of people, but those same people (following the "bro logic" you espouse) are bidding up property prices, and then lobbying for NIMBY policies that reduce housing supply—which DEFINITELY drive up rents and force people out of their homes and onto the streets.
If you're an affluent techie in Seattle it's easy to say "not my problem bro", work your great job, buy your expensive house, lobby your local councilman to curb new developments and head taxes, watch your property value rise and your chequing account blossom. But there are swathes of other people for whom affluent tech jobs aren't desirable or possible, and there's no need for those people to be priced out of Seattle. Building homes isn't hard.
I agree that it's insane to expect Amazon to behave differently than what's expected of a contemporary American corporation™ (aka: pure profit extraction, no consideration for local social conditions or the greater social contract.)
But rather than accepting Amazon's mundane corporate naughtiness, we should be vigilant and outspoken about it. The corporate norms we have now in North America are not etched in stone; we can inveigh against shitty behaviour while also doing what you suggest: electing better politicians and pursuing fairer tax policy.
Your argument:
1. Amazon is not the government.
2. Amazon has no obligation to solve civic issues.
3. It is the government's job to solve civic issues.
(The government tries to solve civic issues; Amazon uses its undue influence in Seattle to undermine the process.)
4. Ergo, it's all the government's fault.
Sure there are simply better ways, there are always better ways, and those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon who make sure the company can extract as much value out of Seattle without having to pay its fair share in taxes.
In the past 24 hours, Jeff Bezos added $405 million to his net worth. In the past year, Jeff Bezos added $41 billion to his net worth. And yet somehow, Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown.
Burn it all
I did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1.
My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off.
Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and didn't get the job. Oh well. Still one of my best stunts ;)