Hacker News Reader

abaloneon Welcome Home, Garry Tan

I’m old enough to remember when the Square CEO campaigned for the gross receipts tax. It was the tech industry’s idea.[1]

Bonus points for saying “hobo”!

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...

abaloneon Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

So the question was “what value crypto offers that can’t be done with more energy efficient mechanisms,” and your answer is.. you can transact in crypto. This is trivially circular reasoning.

abaloneon Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire

What like a policy that bans extremely energy intensive things that offer no value other than to construct Ponzi schemes at rapid clip? Yeah we need that policy.

(Happy to hear what value crypto offers that can’t be done with more energy efficient mechanisms.)

abaloneon Why did Heroku fail?

Two reasons:

* expensive to scale

* developer limitations

This limited it to smaller scale projects, MVPs, proof of concepts where paying a little more for a certain range of developer productivity makes sense. Such is the case with rapid development platforms in general. When you grow you shift to wholesale-priced primitives that give you more control.

abaloneon Software projects need heroes? lessons learned from 1100 projects

The study only looked at open source which could bias it. It is possible that open source thrives on rare individuals whose heroism is simply having the time to donate significantly to free projects.

abaloneon Fire breaks out at Tesla Big Battery

Strong words, but you didn’t cite any sources. What are the “scientific first principles” that support your claim? Lead acid batteries are entirely different materials and chemistry, e.g. lead retains its quality through secondary smelting.[1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/092134...

abaloneon 300 Megawatt Tesla battery catches fire

This actually reinforces my point. The first part releases “lots of fumes” into a poorly ventilated underground space, which then requires firefighters to remain for “a very long period.” Your claim that the later part is less dangerous assumes that fumes have dissipated.

abaloneon Daniel Hale Receives 45-Month Sentence for Releasing Drone Documents

Then your question about “bystanders” is irrelevant to the topic at hand. The article claims people were selected to be killed on very flimsy evidence, yet always classified as enemies killed in action. These are not “bystanders.”

You will now perhaps attempt to argue that this does not constitute “intentional” killing of innocents, which has a similar problem with relevance. Indiscriminate killing is highly immoral.

abaloneon Fire breaks out at Tesla Big Battery

What’s your source on recyclability optimism? Otherwise it sounds hand-wavy. Recyclability is very bad right now.

abaloneon 300 Megawatt Tesla battery catches fire

If your concern us protecting the rest of the garage, putting 28,000 gallons of water in a basement may well flood it anyway.

It may protect the structure but the issue here sounds more like firefighter safety.

abaloneon 300 Megawatt Tesla battery catches fire

The difference is not the toxicity of the fumes, it’s the duration of the fire. A respirator will not fully protect you from a seven hour underground fire.

abaloneon Daniel Hale Receives 45-Month Sentence for Releasing Drone Documents

You’re assuming the innocents killed were bystanders, not targets.

abaloneon I've got a broken combine harvester – manufacturer won't give me software key

One point about smartphones that doesn’t necessarily apply to combine harvesters is that gluing everything together enables more compact, durable designs. There are plenty of arguments against this but there is a big one for it: consumers like compact, durable products.

I actually read the FTC report and it doesn’t actually offer a good argument on this point, concluding only that “further research is required” to see if consumers would be willing to make trade offs for better repairability.[1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/nixing-fi...

abaloneon San Francisco residents are fed up with city inaction on open-air drug use

So “scores” means two now. Cool.

abaloneon San Francisco residents are fed up with city inaction on open-air drug use

Not to mention Miami, which was putting ads up around SF, actually has a higher violent crime rate than SF. It just has more segregation.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Literally have all those things in the heart of SF. Some people just like living in more segregated communities.

> And yes, San Francisco in 2020 in terms of crime.

Again, no data cited! Even after being called out on it.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Because the claim is that SF violent crime got worse, which is false. You are resorting to comparing the general disparity in crime rates between major cities and small towns, which is not unique to SF. Therefore it is an illogical argument.

I have no disagreement with you in your general point or personal preference for small exclusive bedroom communities where poor people cannot afford to live, but the same could be said in comparison for Miami, Austin, Dallas or any other major city.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Not a significant space issue at the beginning. Still not a good theory.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Quite simply crime rates in SF came down around 2010. It was high in the 90s but even then the first dot com boom had some startups in SF and some in SV. Notably Salesforce. But by the second Web 2.0 boom (as it was called) SF was a very attractive place for young workers.

The earliest SV companies wanted to be physically located near Stanford and Moffett for the govt subsidies/contracts. Still happens (read The Entrepreneurial State) but physical location is not as important in the internet age.

Frankly I would not give this Sf.citi lobbyist piece much credence. “Migration” could simply be a temporary effect of the pandemic. We may very well see young people come rushing back into SF for the same reasons as before.

And crime? You wouldn’t know it from HN threads but SF violent crime is again at all time lows.[1]

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Not a good theory. Before AWS startups would colocate. On premise was rare.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

Silicon Valley happened because of proximity to Stanford University and Moffett Field and the copious amounts of government / military funding and contracts that came through them (DARPA, etc).

This is a very basic fact of the history of SV that many in the VC scene are reluctant to acknowledge.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

> And yet compared to New York, Chicago…

Chicago has massively higher violent crime rate than SF. By your own citation.

> It is clear that even within the Bay Area SF is disproportionately bad

You claim with no data.

This is what I mean — the facts just don’t support the “SF has gotten less safe” argument.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

“pretty badly screwed” = growing to a $90B company.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

You’re comparing SF, a major city, to Lafayette, a suburb. That is objectively a ridiculous comparison. You will see similar disparities in most comparisons of that nature.

Your only SF specific crime stat is about property crime (shoplifting). Consistent with what I wrote.

Your second stat on murders is regional, not specific to SF, which overall remains near all time lows in violent crime. You then blame the regional Bay Area rise on SF’s district attorney which makes no sense.

This is all consistent with what I’m saying: the “safety” claims are not supported by data. Some folks in the tech community just keep saying it over and over within a specific sphere but I’m calling B.S. SF is safer than it’s been for most of our lives.

abaloneon Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus

> Gone very light on crime - super light. At some point folks just get tired of dealing / seeing consequence free crime right in front of them. I think families with kids being impacted there particularly.

I challenge that statement. Do you have any data support it? It is a myth repeated over and over by certain people and it’s never supported by data.

Violent crime in SF is near all time lows. That’s just the facts.[1]

My neighborhood I’ve lived in for 15 years has gotten so much safer and we are raising kids and loving it.

The crazy thing is the conservative tech activists who moved to Miami.. moved to a city with higher crime! Miami is higher crime than SF. So is Dallas (that was another profile in the local paper).

It’s insane that no one is challenging them on the facts. I think this is all because a bunch of progressive supervisors got elected who are critical of certain elements of the tech industry, and the tech guys don’t have a good response and so they are doing the usual conservative tough-on-crime political ploy to try to get rid of them.

[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/san-fran...

abaloneon Coinbase from YC to DPO

If this were actually true, Coinbase would not need to exist with a market cap of $100B.

abaloneon Coinbase from YC to DPO

This is a poorly reasoned comparison. The .6% figure was in reference to .5% of wealth; presumably much more energy would be required to store closer to 100% of wealth with crypto.

Given that we are nearing the irreversible destruction of our climate and that existing electronic systems offer all the benefits you mention, but with massively lower energy cost, your claim that energy “seems less important” is unsupported.

abaloneon Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

> considering Stripe has enormous negotiating leverage

What negotiation are you referring to? Interchange pricing is fixed; they are not negotiating discounts on that.

If you mean Stripe has VC funding to be a loss leader then, correct, but that’s not a moat. Moats are what protect profitable businesses. The resultant scale could be a moat but Stripe is still a small slice of the payment processing market.

Their play here is to upsell premium services. Developer friendliness and moderate pricing (it’s actually not that low) are hooks to get in the door of startups.

abaloneon Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

You’re assuming the low pricing is profitable and in this case it probably is not (and it’s not that low). Stripe’s play here is to upsell premium services.

abaloneon Stripe valuation soars to $95B after latest fundraising

Prime was and is a genuine moat.