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Even the scaled score is not that informative (and perhaps crosses the line on age discrimination) because for older workers the population of people taking the SAT was much smaller as a percentage of high school grads (and presumably weighted towards higher IQs). It's also why there were so many fewer perfect SAT scores -- smaller population in the bell curve.

In some states (California being one) the original mortgage on a house purchase is non-recourse. This means that the bank cannot come after your personal assets in the event of default. Yes your credit gets dinged but the leverage of a home loan is fundamentally different than a margin loan in the stock market.

Former Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).

Phish gives people a code that lets them access the show they attend on livephish.com without a subscription. You can subscribe and get access to all of the shows. I think livephish.com is run by and/or shares the same platform as nugs.net but it's a different subscription.

We rarely discuss the primary source of health care cost differences in the United States -- US doctors get paid a lot more than elsewhere. I haven't seen a credible proposal to address that. Most of the salary difference can be blamed on deliberately created shortages of doctors in many specialities. Not enough medical school slots (horror stories among my kid's friends of not getting accepted) and then also shortages of residencies that allow foreign trained doctors to work in the US. The only change in recent memory is replacing some primary care physician services with nurse practitioners.

One of the issues the article doesn't mention is that these houses are effectively cheaper to purchase for corporate owners. Generally they can borrow money at a lower rate, but the ability of corporate owners to use depreciation on a new purchase to offset profits from previous purchases is more significant. Effectively they are redirecting money that would be paid in taxes into the payments on the new purchase.

If you want to understand the state of these industries I highly recommend reading "How contracting because a race to the bottom"[0]. The crux of the problem is that unlicensed/uninsured firms will always undercut "quality" firms for small jobs. If you are getting a quote from a firm that actually pays workers compensation insurance it's going to be at a substantially higher price.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/magazine/contractors-cons...

It does. I have a Ford CMax from 2014. For years, when the SiriusXM radio software update would happen it would get stuck downloading. The geniuses at Ford decided the update should continue trying to complete even if the car was turned off. So once the download got stuck, it would completely drain my battery every single time. I'd rather have a car that moves that the latest SiriusXM update in my radio. The only fix was to pull the fuse if you noticed that it was happening.

There is a half cent sales tax in BART counties, 75% of which goes to BART.

The numbers are here [1]. BART generates about $300M in revenue and gets $500M in "financial assistance," of which $320M is sales tax revenue.

[1] https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/FY26%20Adop...

If I am reading this correctly, Google is now required to syndicate their search text ads to "Qualified Competitors." This is important as it will allow companies to monetize AI answers and other search replacements without needing to completely build a corresponding search ad marketplace. The search ad marketplace is a somewhat natural monopoly where the revenue per auction actually grows with the number of auctions so a second search ad marketplace could never develop on its own.

It's already almost happened with Plenty of Fish. Mostly a one person company, acquired for over $500M.

Estate tax valuations of assets should be made public, particularly the taxed value of professional sports franchises. We know that NFL teams are worth $6+ billion dollars, and seeing the billionaire owner families pay tax on 1/10th of that might infuriate voters enough to demand reform.

The supply of doctors in the US is primarily limited by the number of residency slots. Unlike many countries, foreign medical graduates can't practice here without doing a residency. I think the number of residency slots is kept low by the federal government (which funds them) and also by physician organization lobbying.

This is why it is dangerous to think that the best scientific theories always prevail and that science is a meritocracy. The people invited to give talks are usually well known or have connections with the program committees. There is also an element of bias since the people on the organizing and program committees will invite speakers whose research is consistent with their own work.

Not directly related to cars, but PG&E is unable to handle the incoming requests for electrical system upgrades[1]. Many older houses don't have the electrical panel capacity and they need engineering signoff from the utility.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/home-pge-electri...

My brother is a contractor in the Bay Area and he told me that PG&E will not allow the installation of 220 volt EV charging infrastructure in new construction or a home remodel unless the homeowner can prove they already own an EV. Add to that the issue of people who live in apartment buildings and condos and I don't see how we can scale up consumer demand quickly enough.

A totally legitimate use case for crypto is moving money into countries that have bogus official exchange rates (e.g. Argentina). I've got multiple friends that hire developers in Argentina and pay them using crypto in order to avoid the 90% haircut.

I've probably driven half a million miles and I don't remember having 10 incidents (I probably have, just don't remember). So I'd conclude I'm at least as safe a driver as Waymo. Even if not true, most people are going to feel that way when they see the data. Human nature.

The same "Builder's Remedy" kicked in last year in many Southern California cities when they missed similar deadlines, and as far as I know it has led to approximately (if not exactly) zero new construction.

To be clear, my place is not on any listing service. Purely family and friends, I never rent it. I tell everyone "the cleaners are supposed to come but leave it so that if they don't the next person is not grossed out."

I have a ski cabin (not on AirBnB) and I don't think most people realize how difficult it is to get these places cleaned reliably. You can hire a very expensive cleaning service that brings in their own sheets and towels, but it's entirely impractical to have a regular cleaning service wait around while the dishwasher and 4 loads of laundry run. In terms of taking garbage to the dumpster, it's difficult to have someone take the garbage cans to the street and bring them back on garbage day. It's basically impossible if there are bears around. If the guests help out the cleaning fees can in principle be much lower. If you want to leave the place trashed like you would leave a hotel, don't complain about $400+ cleaning fees as that service is extremely expensive in resort areas.

I somewhat disagree. The key to profitability in the audio space is moving listeners from pay-per-stream content (music) to owned content (podcasts, shows, etc.). For that latter costs are fixed even as listenership grows. The only profitable subscription audio service is SiriusXM, and they do this through exclusive licensed content (Howard Stern being the most notable example). Getting people to switch back and forth between apps makes it hard to get people to substitute the profitable content for the unprofitable.

Is it completely normal on HN to comment on articles you haven't read and to freely admit so?

Exactly -- have any of the houses in Santa Monica actually been built?

Monsanto is facing something similar with Glysophate. I think their playbook was to make the prospect of appeals so long that most of the plantiffs would never see the money, at which point most agreed to be part of a large comprehensive settlement.

I hate to be contrarian, but can civil service worker protections coexist with remote work? WFH works well when there is accountability for the quality and quantity of your work (you can be fired for not performing), but with the drawn out disciplinary procedures common in the civil service jobs it's very difficult to keep employees productive.

23% is what is in the bill as the initial starting rate.

The rate seems to be 23%, and given that this is only a sales tax this would mean the federal government is taxing at maybe 10-15% of GDP. If I remember correctly, federal government expenditures are around 30% of GDP.

I honestly think this is no longer correct. Construction costs exceed the future value of the rental income stream for multifamily developments in most markets. Apparently the only projects that pencil out now are massive developments, which are hard to build in places where people work as they are already somewhat dense and don't have many empty fields. The cost of materials are going back to normal (with some exceptions) but the labor costs are increasing due to a shortage of workers. Construction costs could be slightly lowered by reducing the required quality of construction, but not by much.