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lbarrow

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lionelbarrow.com

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lionelbarrow.substack.com 10mo ago

Don't even consider starting with Microsoft

lbarrow
13pts6
blog.drewolson.org 4y ago

Adventures in Looping

lbarrow
17pts7
lionelbarrow.com 6y ago

Predicting success in pair programming interviews

lbarrow
1pts0
www.wsj.com 7y ago

Venmo Looks to New Leader to Overcome 'Growing Pains'

lbarrow
1pts0
www.bizjournals.com 7y ago

Amazon Joins the DC Chamber of Commerce

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2pts0
blog.drewolson.org 9y ago

Another perspective on promises

lbarrow
1pts0
lionelbarrow.com 9y ago

Mistakes people make when hiring

lbarrow
2pts0
lionelbarrow.com 9y ago

Services. Because we're all mediocre

lbarrow
1pts0
lionelbarrow.com 10y ago

I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff

lbarrow
238pts123
lionelbarrow.com 10y ago

Inheritance is terrible in the same way C is terrible

lbarrow
9pts2
blog.drewolson.org 10y ago

Extensible Design with Elixir Protocols

lbarrow
7pts0
lionelbarrow.com 10y ago

Inheritance Is Terrible

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73pts94
lionelbarrow.com 11y ago

Technical interview advice for new and aspiring engineers

lbarrow
1pts0
www.paypal-community.com 11y ago

PayPal acquires Paydiant

lbarrow
3pts0
lionelbarrow.com 11y ago

Who is your type system for?

lbarrow
6pts0
lionelbarrow.com 12y ago

How To Talk About Programming Languages

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6pts2
www.chicagomag.com 12y ago

Chicago Crime Rates

lbarrow
2pts0
lionelbarrow.com 12y ago

Programming lessons from studying mathematics

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lionelbarrow.com 12y ago

Comfort with tradeoffs and ambiguity

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2pts0
lionelbarrow.com 12y ago

Introducing Examples, a behavioral testing library for Go

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2pts0
lionelbarrow.com 12y ago

Why is YAGNI a good rule?

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29pts54
medium.com 12y ago

The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things

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13pts2
venturebeat.com 13y ago

Braintree partners with online bank Simple to expand reach of one-touch payments

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1pts0
github.com 13y ago

Show HN: Braintree-Go, a Go package for processing payments with Braintree

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2pts0
www.braintreepayments.com 13y ago

Gotchas, Irritants and Warts in Go Web Development

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102pts78
www.lionelbarrow.com 13y ago

Good Reads on Software

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1pts0
www.braintreepayments.com 13y ago

7 Ways to Reduce Chargebacks

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1pts2
www.braintreepayments.com 13y ago

Code quality is the least important reason to pair program

lbarrow
47pts52
www.grouponworks.com 13y ago

Groupon to compete with Square -- launches Groupon Payments

lbarrow
4pts0
recessionprediction.com 14y ago

Show HN: Get advance warning of future US recessions

lbarrow
3pts0

I don't think that's what the attacker did here. Vercel is a PaaS product where other developers run apps. The enumerated environment variables were the env vars of Vercel's customers, which Vercel likely stores in a long-term data store. Rather than running `env` on a Linux box somewhere, the attacker may have just accessed that data store.

For people who support this kind of ban, I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills -- and their construction can have local environmental impacts. Data centers have a reputation for not providing too many local jobs, but modern factories are often highly automated and also don't provide too many local jobs.

If, given all that, you'd support factory construction but not data center construction, I'd be curious as to why.

Carefeed | Senior Software Engineer and Senior Data Engineer | Chicago, IL

Carefeed makes software that makes it easier to operate senior centers. Our mission is to help make residents, family members and staff happier. Thousands of communities across the US and Canada already use our tools, and we're growing quickly.

We're looking for a Software Engineer and a first Data Engineer to join our Chicago office. Our engineering team is small -- less than 20 people -- so there's a huge opportunity to have an impact. These roles are in person 3-4 days a week in our office at Wacker and Wells in downtown Chicago.

Senior SWE: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/carefeed/jobs/4972304008 Senior Data Engineer: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/carefeed/jobs/4961308008

My point is that with Google I don't have to learn any of this, it just works logically out of the box. Compare that to Microsoft, where I have to understand the history of their on-prem vs cloud products in order to know the right way to make a distribution list. Forcing this complexity onto users when it's irrelevant to the task they're trying to accomplish is bad design.

Without commenting on the larger issue the article brings up, this specific point doesn't survive scrutiny to me:

  Some of the company’s tactics post-merger were garden-variety ruthless, like eliminating 87 series from its streaming platform Max, so that they won’t have to pay union-mandated residuals to the talent that created already-existing programs or pony up funds to produce more seasons of existing ones (such as “Our Flag Means Death,” one of the company’s most popular and critically acclaimed comedies—canceled after just two seasons).
In the streaming era, it's very easy for the revenue created by hosting an older piece of content to be dwarfed by residuals. Streaming services get customers largely by releasing popular new titles; it's entirely predictable that pushing for higher residuals would drive services to sunset series faster, and it's entirely reasonable for services to stop hosting titles that lose them money.

I think you might be missing the context. The scenario we're discussing is a parking lot surrounded by skyscrapers in the middle of a major city. Under a property tax regime, the owner pays little taxes because the structures on the lot are not valuable. Under an LVT, the owner pays the same (high) taxes as the skyscrapers next to it, which would be obvious uneconomical.

So under property taxes, the parking lot owner can afford to wait and have the lot sit empty; under an LVT, they have an incentive to develop.

And right now they can afford to wait forever! But with an LVT they have a big incentive to either develop it immediately or sell to someone else who will.

It's no coincidence that people who support LVTs are typically YIMBYs -- we want to reform urban planning and land use to make it easier to build things.

When you tax something, you get less of it. By reducing the supply of a good, taxes deter otherwise mutually beneficial transactions from happening; the loss of mutual benefit from a tax (or other policy) is called "deadweight loss".

Land value taxes have a special property in that land owners cannot respond to the tax by producing less land; the supply of land is fixed. This means LVTs do not generate deadweight loss, which makes them very efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Efficiency

The responses here are all assuming your grandmothers taxes would go up. But bear in mind LVTs are intend to replace the existing property tax regime (at least in the US). If your grandmother lives in a quiet suburb or rural area, it's likely that her taxes would decrease under an LVT if the LVT was trying to extract roughly the same amount of overall money as a property taxes regime.

If she lives in the middle of a city, then yes her taxes may increase.

Yes, that's exactly the idea. In Chicago, where I live, there are surface parking lots in the middle of the downtown surrounded by skyscrapers. In a logical system, the owner of those parking lots would have to pay just as much in land taxes as the skyscraper owners next to them -- and since they couldn't possibly afford to do so, they'd be forced to sell to someone who would develop the land and put it to more productive use. Under the current system, though, the parking lot owner pays peanuts while the skyscraper owner is effectively penalized for putting the land to use.

The gentrification situation is similar: if someone is living in a single-family home in an area that is filling up with apartments, they're using the land much less efficiently than a replacement structure would. As land values slowly increase, the owner would be prompted to eventually sell to someone who would put it to higher value use. You could have some speed bumps in the policy to make sure this doesn't happen too fast, but if you stop it entirely you're just giving up on productive land use.

It's worth noting that property taxes have the same dynamic, since they also incorporate land value in them. The difference though is that _property taxes discourage development_, which contributes to higher rents. Land value taxes do not have this problem; a world where we suddenly swap to LVTs is a world with many more buildings and much lower average rents.

I appreciate this guy taking the time to test this stuff out, but... 2.5 minutes per application seems really reasonable and short? Even the Post Office application that took 10 minutes seems fine. I get that you might have to apply to a lot of different jobs, but at that rate in 2-3 hours of focused work, you could apply to nearly a hundred different jobs.

The fact that it's that easy to apply belies the tone the article takes, which generally bemoans how hard job applications are. But they didn't demonstrate that it's hard at all! Moreover, the author even says in the beginning that they didn't use any of the products that help you, like LinkedIn Easy Apply.

Anyway seems interesting but this mostly just confirmed my perception that applying to jobs is pretty easy. Interviews, on the other hand...

I think it's a fair point that bots should strive to be useful and not just mock people's mistakes, but in the 8 years since this was written the whole "punch up, not down" idea in comedy has gotten a lot of criticism and is kind of passe at this point, at least in my experience.

Human beings simply do not exist on a single monolith spectrum of power; who is "up" or "down" often depends quite a lot on context. If an underemployed white male comedian makes a joke about Kamala Harris, is that punching up or down? _Parasite_ is a movie that mocks a rich family even as it portrays their poorer help as scheming and untrustworthy - is that up, or down? To steal an example from this excellent Freddie de Boer post on the topic, if an adjunct professor runs afoul of a student, are they really the ones in the position of power?

Anyway Freddie sums the whole thing up much better than I could: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/punching-up-and-punchin...

Kill Siri (2022) 3 years ago

Yea, I just stopped reading when that started up. I don't understand why people intentionally make their websites annoying to read.

No, that kinda is right - under special relativity, as your apparent velocity from a fixed reference frame increases, it takes more and more energy to accelerate closer to light speed, so _moving_ faster than light is disallowed.

Another way of putting this is: we know because of special relativity that you can't just strap a lot of rocket boosters on a spaceship and expect to go faster than light. That won't work; if you want to _travel_ faster than light, you have to do it another way.

It's bizarre. I live in Chicago and don't have to deal with anything like this. The West coast has a really strange set of blinkers on about these problems.

This is pretty straightforward to explain without any nefarious things going on:

  * You don't need to take out a loan to exercise your options until you vest some options, which would typically take a least a year
  * Bolt grew really quickly and so had a high % of employees with low tenure
  * The layoffs disproportionally affected newer employees, which is extremely common and reasonable
If the people laid off were mostly people hired within the last year who had no reason to take out the loan yet, then you'd get a result like what we saw.

(All that said -- these loans are an absolutely terrible idea and I think offering them is irresponsible.)

This is exactly right. You have to disclose risks to your business and if a really big part of your growth is coming from a new, volatile customer base, that's a big risk and you should disclose it. It has nothing to do with a specific requirement for GPUs or something; publicly traded companies _in general_ have a responsibility to understand where their revenue comes from and disclose that understanding to the public.

This is very run-of-the-mill stuff for the SEC. I think the only reason it's getting play on HN is that, if you aren't familiar with this sort of thing, it looks like the SEC is picking on Nvidia for doing business with crypto miners. But that isn't what the complaint is actually about.