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JamesBarney

11,106 karma · joined July 16, 2014

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JamesBarney··on New Italian Law Threatens ISPs with Prison over Piracy Reporting Failures
I think you might have some misconceptions. The difference in take home pay for devs is quite large between the US and Europe and you can still get insurance with pre-existing conditions in the US with an out of pocket maximum much smaller than the difference in pay.
JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Yes health care is very different in every country in the world. There are a 1000 ways to do it well but the US is unique in having insane healthcare costs. Having non profit insurance companies isn't the difference, having mandatory health insurance isn't the difference. It's not that easy to fix.
JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Israel, Switzerland, and the Netherlands all rely on private insurance as well and still have vastly better systems than our own.
JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Measuring burdensomeness of regulation by number of laws is an incredibly poor measure. Though I'd still be surprised if many countries healthcare laws were as complex as our own.

For example

All doctors require 1 year of schooling 2 year 5 years 10 years 20 years.

Each is 1 law but has each also has very different level of burdensomeness.

JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
I think the causality runs the other direction. Europe has an efficient system so they can easily afford to give everyone health care. We have a very expensive system so we don't.

Medicare costs do not look like the rest of the world. Medicare has slightly lower costs than private insurance but that's mostly bargaining power not any increases in efficiency. They free ride a little off money made off private insurance.

JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Everyone knows the US healthcare system sucks. But the United states medical system is not uniquely under regulated compared to the rest of the world. It's uniquely poorly regulated.
JamesBarney··on The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
> It would be more efficient to pay for it using taxes, both income and sales taxes, rather than letting some groups—the poor and the elderly—off the hook arbitrarily.

I don't think this is true. Some countries with public healthcare are far more efficient than our system.

But there are countries that have systems similar to ours that are far more efficient as well.

We just have a really shitty system, and who pays for it isn't going to change that. It's a hard technocratic problem that doesn't have any easy answers. (Besides increasing the number of residency slots, removing the bachelor degree requirements and allowing foreign physicians to practice which are basically freebies.)

JamesBarney··on Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity (2018)
> Dancing compared to conventional fitness activity led to larger volume increases in more brain areas, including the cingulate cortex, insula, corpus callosum and sensorimotor cortex. Only dancing was associated with an increase in plasma BDNF levels. Regarding cognition, both groups improved in attention and spatial memory, but no significant group differences emerged casual.
JamesBarney··on OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B
> I wouldn't even be surprised if they were losing money on paying ChatGPT users on inference compute alone

I'd be surprised it that was the case. How many tokens is the average user going through? I'd be surprised if the avg user even hit a 1m tokens much less 20m.

JamesBarney··on VC Fund gives money back, says the market for mature startups is too weak
Yeah eminently domain isn't great. But also it's better than the alternative which is having a country without roads.
JamesBarney··on VC Fund gives money back, says the market for mature startups is too weak
> If I were tax policymaker, I would force all assets to have a valuation every year, and published in a register, and allow anyone else to buy any of those assets for the declared value.

You and your dad run a plumbing business. Every year you have to pay someone 10k to get a valuation. Then strangers can buy a piece. Do you have an operating agreement? If not he can force a sale if the company.

I don't think this is a great policy.

JamesBarney··on VC Fund gives money back, says the market for mature startups is too weak
A combination of interest rates and cap tables being all messed up from 2021.

If you have a company that raised a 100m of preferred at a 500m valuation, are you going to take an offer for 150m? Most founders are just going to keep grinding hope things get better.

JamesBarney··on The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia
Serious economists almost universally agree that slavery makes a country poorer not richer because free people are far more productive than slaves.
JamesBarney··on OpenAI DevDay 2024 live blog
AI is actually better here.

1. AI instructions are legible. There is no record asking John to sell the customer things they don't need. There is a record if the AI does it.

2. AI interactions are legible. If a sales guy tells you something false on a zoom call, there is no record of it. If the AI does, there is a record.

JamesBarney··on Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
Landlords are not keeping units off the market to drive up prices. There are no landlords who have the pricing power to make that work. There is no landlord that can keep 10% of his inventory off the market to drive up rental prices 11%.
JamesBarney··on Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
It's really hard to get a mortgage for multiple people that aren't married.

Basically if you and 3 friends want to buy a 4-plex for 400k you would assume the bank would just make sure each person could afford 100k, they don't. Instead the bank will ensure each person individually has sufficient financial resources to afford a 400k home.

That and converting a 4 plex into condos doesn't make financial sense when you could just demolish it and build townhomes.

JamesBarney··on Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
I've always heard owner occupied apartments called condos. Is there a difference I'm not aware of?

You're paying the landlord for the cost of capital and the property management. And a 400k house in the stock market would on average generate 40k a year in appreciation. Most apartments in functional markets aren't anywhere near that appreciative.

JamesBarney··on Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-family and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into SFH, or sold off as condos.

And everyone would have to live with parents or friends until they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a worse world than the one we live in.

JamesBarney··on Up to a Quarter of Rental Inflation Is Due to Price-Fixing
The middle case is that we are paying 2.6% higher rent due to RealPage.

I don't think the aggressive piece is realistic. And if we break up RealPage I highly doubt we'll see an significant drop in rent prices.

An interesting analysis would be looking at vacancy rate across different cities over time. If we saw a large increase in cities with a high penetration of RealPage I'd be more inclined to believe it's having a significant impact.

For California and Text at least it looks like the price increase is classical supply and demand driven. We're not building enough multifamily or apartments. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TXRVAC https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CARVAC

JamesBarney··on Study shows 'alarming' level of trust in AI for life and death decisions
This is a silly study. Replace AI with "Expert opinion", show the opposite result and see the headline "Study shows alarming levels of distrust in expert opinion".

People made the assumption the AI worked. The lesson here is don't deploy an AI recommendation engine that doesn't work which is a pretty banal takeaway.

In practice what will happen with life or death decision making is the vast majority of AI's won't be deployed until they're super human. Some will die because an AI made a wrong decision when a human would have made the right one, but far more will die from a person making a wrong decision when an AI would have made the right one.

JamesBarney··on Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care
I also think leave for father's should be as long as leave for mothers so families can decide how they divy up the childcare in a way that works for them.

> Regardless, whether women want to enter motherhood or not should be irrelevant when determining employee compensation.

Whether a women wants to enter motherhood is irrelevant to her compensation. But how much time, effort, and experience she brings to the job is relevant to her compensation. And despite there being plenty of mothers who bring more of those things to their job than their childless counter parts, most people cannot bring as much time and energy to bare on work as they could if they were childless given how we currently divide up childcare. If you're on partner track at a lawyer, you're expected to bill 2000 hrs a year which means working 3000. It's very hard to continue to work 3000 hrs a year while raising a kid and the lack of billable hours will effect bonuses and promotions. How could it not?

JamesBarney··on Tell HN: Burnout is bad to your brain, take care
Most of the research actually supports what op says. When you adjust for industry and such the vast majority of the remaining gap is due to motherhood. So much so that many researchers in the field call it the motherhood pay gap as opposed to the gender pay gap. Childless women make about the same as men (within 2-3%, some show higher, some lower).

Now is the fact women take over the majority of the childcare and are more likely to take off to raise their children misogyny? Depends on your definition and perspective.

JamesBarney··on 48% of NYC riders do not pay the bus fare
The government is also to blame for this. If you look at well regarded public transportation construction companies that have bid out contracts in the US they say it's more dysfunctional than a 3rd world country.
JamesBarney··on Artificial intelligence is losing hype
If the SQL took you an hour to just clean up and you're an expert that is some pretty complex SQL. I could understand how it could get it wrong.
JamesBarney··on Fine-tuning now available for GPT-4o
It's with an asterisk. Here's their comment from cosine's website.

Note SWE-Bench has recently modified their submission requirements, now asking for the full working process of our AI model in addition to the final results -their condition to have us appear on the offical leaderboard. This change poses a significant challenge for us, as our proprietary methodology is evident in these internal processes. Publicly sharing this information would essentially open-source our approach, undermining the competitive advantage we’ve worked hard to develop. For now, we’ve decided to keep our model’s internal workings confidential. However we’ve made the model’s final outputs publicly available on GitHub for independent verification. These outputs clearly demonstrate our model’s 30% success rate on the SWE-Bench tasks.

JamesBarney··on Sourcegraph went dark
He took the time to write out a detailed explanation of why they made a decision they did. Giving us more transparency than 99% of CEOs or companies. There is a whiff of spin there, but come on compare it to every other product decision ever made and we're getting so much more transparency.

Behavior like this means the next time a CEO will be marginally less motivated to do this. You're shitting in the commons.

JamesBarney··on Startup CEO Says VC Firm Punished Her for Reporting Sex Assault
2% seemed low so I looked it up and that's the amount that goes to exclusively female founding teams. 20% goes to founders with a female cofounder on the team. Just clarification for anyone else who got confused by that.
JamesBarney··on Official proposal for Type Unions in C#
The reason c# has such a weak open source system is two fold. Supply and demand. From a supply stand point source enthusiasts have historically hated Microsoft.

From a demand standpoint everyone uses the Microsoft variant because it's easy to use and hire for. There's a ton of documentation. Lots of issues are at the seems of different libraries, applications or frameworks you use. And in the Microsoft world it's frequently all the same. Everyone uses the same identity library, the same webserver, the same cloud, the same database, the same orm.

If you're into learning technology it's not for you. But if you're into learning about domains and business instead of tech or like having free time it's a great stack. Doesn't work well for b2c because of the cost, but works really well for b2b.

JamesBarney··on Official proposal for Type Unions in C#
What makes intellij so much better than visual studio or vscode?
JamesBarney··on Open source AI is the path forward
https://llama.meta.com/llama3_1/use-policy/

The acceptable use policy is seems fine. Don't use it to break the law, solicit sex, kill people, or lie.

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