Hacker News Reader

harryhon The myth of excess vacant housing distracts from solutions

To be more precise: The city has outlawed the construction of new housing to economically support the demand.

harryhon The myth of excess vacant housing distracts from solutions

It seems strange to have a tax that is based on the subjective motivations of a property owner. How would you even know why someone wasn't renting out a given property at a given moment in time?

harryhon Why in the world would you own bonds?

One of my answers for "Best scene about a meeting in film" (a super fun question).

harryhon Why in the world would you own bonds?

Too Big To Fail is also quite good and the third leg of my personal "Great Recession Trifecta."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Big_to_Fail_(film)

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

It's certainly true that calculating imputed rent can be tricky and is probably subject to some error. However that does not make is meaningless.

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

It's important to understand that while mortgages are not part of CPI, imputed rent is. So the consumption costs of living in a home one owns are taken into account.

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

CPI takes into account the cost of shelter.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

Yes, but with a larger cake, it makes sense to have more slices.

There are other reasons that inflation is good too, having to do with sticky wages and recessions. I'm not sure how to work that into the cake analogy though.

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

The size of the cake is not constant. It grows over time. We are much richer now than we were in the past.

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

The traditional definition? What?

"In economics, inflation (or less frequently, price inflation) is a general rise in the price level in an economy over a period of time."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

Anyone who argues this is a conspiracy theorist making statements not based on actual evidence.

harryhon Why inflation is not a threat

> A normal household has to pay rent or make mortgage payments. To arbitrarily exclude the biggest expense to consumers from CPI is pretty misleading.

Housings costs are included as part of the CPI. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-an...

harryhon Nuclear power looks to regain its footing 10 years after Fukushima

Solar power is becoming so cheap and plentiful that it is cheaper than free. At certain times you can literally be paid to consume it. All kinds of possibilities from that.

harryhon The Kilobyte’s Gambit

Looks like it's rated around 1225:

https://ccrl.chessdom.com/ccrl/404/cgi/engine_details.cgi?pr...

harryhon We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s

Total land devoted to forrest in the US has been basically stable since the early 1900s and has actually increased a bit in the last 20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States

harryhon How this Ends

you can count the 'missed out on income' as a loss against your company

This is not true. At least in the US.

harryhon California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one

175k to 660k in 32 years is only a 4.25% increase per year. That's really not much at all.

harryhon Metals with Scala 3

This is super interesting. I was a pretty early adopter of Scala, but our org grew fairly frustrated with in in 2013/14 due to the slow compiler. We invested a ton of effort into building tools to mitigate this problem (effort we'd rather have spent on our actual business).

I haven't really touched it beyond tiny toy projects since 2015 though. Really glad to hear that compilation speed has gotten so much better.

harryhon How Billionaire Robert Smith Avoided Indictment in Multimillion-Dollar Tax Case

Your assertion is not correct. The IRS is surprisingly reasonable about things. There are penalties and interest for failing to pay your taxes correctly, but they are also willing to cut deals to make things work.

Criminal prosecution is rare and reserved for the egregious and uncooperative. It's something like 2,000 cases per year total.

harryhon Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist (2005)

You can't issues dividends to different shareholders differently (unless they have different classes of stock). All shares have identical rights.

harryhon Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist (2005)

Saving money requires keeping cash (sometimes a lot of it) in the bank that could otherwise be put to productive use. Options contracts allow offloading of risk without keeping this excess cash sitting there doing nothing.

It can be much more capital efficient.

harryhon Naked shorting: The curious incident of the shares that didn't exist (2005)

I'm pretty sure that's how the stock market is actually intended to work. This should be obvious if you consider things like dividends. There needs to be a fixed number of shares, each with a clear owner for that to work.

This isn't really true. Let's say a company has 100 shares and they decide to issue a $1 dividend. If there is no shorting, the company just pays out $100 and everything is done.

But let's say there is shorting. Someone loans out 10 shares to a short who then sells them to someone else. All of a sudden there are 110 shares out there. So when the company pays out the $100 it's $10 short of what is required for each stockholder to get the dividend.

So where does the required $10 come from? From the party shorting the stock of course! Anyone short a stock is required to pay out, in cash, any dividends issues while they hold a short position. So it all works out.

harryhon u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

Yes indeed. The stock market has dropped to levels not seen since...early January. The economy is truly crippled!

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

Retail investors (and any other investors) submit orders before the new security begins to trade. The first thing that happens on open is an auction.

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

Why would you put 200 shares at $50 and 100 shares at $100 if you only had a $10,000 budget? That's misrepresenting your actual demand curve.

Are you saying that an auction of this kind is a bit complicated, and it's possible to make a mistake? I suppose that might be true, but that is a very different assertion from your original position:

"since people had to enter a single point on their demand curve as a price and quantity of shares (instead of their entire demand curve)"

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

If you are willing to by 100 shares at $100 or, say, 200 shares at $50 you can enter the following two bids:

100 shares at $100

100 shares at $50

This will satisfy your demand curve.

In a direct listing, the initially listed shares will all transact at the same price (the clearing price).

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

No, this is not how it works.

All the shares in the auction are sold at the same price. If the market clears at 60, a person entering the bids I described would buy 300 shares at 60.

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

If you're willing to buy 300 shares at 60, but only 100 shares at $100 you can enter two bids:

100 shares at $100

200 shares at $60

This will satisfy your demand position.

harryhon Coinbase announces proposed direct listing

Not with a direct listing.

Coinbase shares would be subject to an auction and the market for them will open at the price where supply meets demand.

harryhon Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

It's not a Gish Gallop because you've presented "a large number of evidence". It's a Gish Gallop because you've presented a large number of claims (you called out 4 specifically) each of which has extremely thin evidence and, in fact, when someone takes the time to investigate it, it's fairly easily debunked.

I already did #2.

For #1 this is information on Wikipedia about how the underlying data used by the professor was not sufficient to support his conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_J._Miller#2020_Election

For #3 here is a reuters post debunking the assertion:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-oklahoma/fact-c...

For #4 here is a post from some Georgia press (the assertion was about fraud in Georgia) debunking the assertions:

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/elections/fact...