Hacker News Reader

jcnnghmon Launch HN: BuildFlow (YC W23) – The FastAPI of data pipelines

Is there an underlying stream processor (e.g. Flink)? How many messages per second can it process?

Sanders plan will adversely impact the bay area, and home prices in particular. If you're making over $250k, the social security phase out goes away, you have 2.2% of extra income tax, and 6.4% of new payroll taxes. Add in 11% for CA, and you could easily be losing 70% to tax all-in at the margin. It'll be tough to get employers to pay an extra $100k a year to cover a $30k rent differential. Considering that you can already afford much higher quality housing with a higher standard of living outside of the bay area on half the money, why stay out here? San Francisco is gross anyway.

This plan will push the bay area in particular far to the right on the laffer curve. What'll happen to US GDP growth if the tech industry starts imploding and moving out? It's possible to make more in the bay area than in the rest of the country, but if you're only retaining 30% of that excess, all of which is soaked up by long-time landowners and the insane cost of living, why bother.

jcnnghmon San Francisco Should Always Have a Subway Under Construction

Where do you think the people that would live in new luxury condos go if there are no new luxury condos? Any chance they may buy up existing rental properties and evict long-time residents?

jcnnghmon San Francisco Should Always Have a Subway Under Construction

Washington DC saw a drop in rents with substantial new supply - http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_area_rents_drop_3_a....

jcnnghmon The US digital service

There's a big difference between not liking something, and it not functioning.

jcnnghmon The US digital service

Did the people that charged $200 million to build healthcare.gov get to keep the money after the project failed? What about the people that allocated that money, do they still have their jobs?

It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.

jcnnghmon Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?

If the people that can afford $3,000/month for rent don't have a place to spend it, they'll just bid up the price of the other housing. Nobody is going to build hovels out of the gate, affordable housing is luxury housing that was built 50 years ago.

jcnnghmon Is San Francisco losing its soul? (2014)

San Franciscans have no one to blame other than San Franciscans for the housing policies that are pricing people out of the market. Well meaning but ultimately deeply misguided liberals are still insisting that housing supply doesn't affect pricing (http://truth-out.org/news/item/26656-developers-aren-t-going...), while others are are calling for a moratorium on building (http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...).

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, rents are falling because of the increase in supply, while both the population and number of jobs in increasing. DC also has a unique character that they've been able to preserve despite growth; San Francisco needs to do the same, and fast.

San Franciscans need to start pushing the city for a lot of new housing units, probably 100,000, with expedited planning, approvals, and building if they don't want to get completely priced out of the market.

More on DC:

* http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/11/dc-rents-ar...

* http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/falling-rents-in-dc-a-product-o...

* http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-23/washington...

* http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2014/08/01/did-you-know-d-c-s-re...

* http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc_area_rents_drop_3_a...

jcnnghmon Uber plays hardball with early shareholders

I think that anything more aggressive that the right-of-first-refusal at the third-party offer price is unconscionable.

jcnnghmon How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

Goldman Sachs 2011 net income was $162,913 per employee. Average pay was $367,057. It's harder to get data on Google, but it looks like the mid-career median salary is $141,000. Google's Gross Profit (Total Revenue less Cost of Revenue) was $24.7B in 2011, and GS's was $24.5B. At the same time, Google had 32,467 employees to GS's 35,700. Yet, the Google net income was $9.7B compared to $4.4B on the GS side. The difference seems to be made up entirely by the difference in employee compensation.

It's the money, stupid.

jcnnghmon Ask HN: What under $100 item would you recommend everyone buy?

A Leatherman Multitool

I recommend the New Wave, though I also have a Charge TTi. I find myself using them all the time, and they last a really long time. I still have, and use regularly, the Leatherman Super Tool that I got in the mid 90's. I keep one in my office, one in my care, my girlfriends car, and one in the utility room. Really nice to have a solid multitool nearby whenever you need one.

jcnnghmon Facebook acquires Oculus VR

Diversification at the corporate level isn't a good idea. Investors typically demand a discount (the conglomerate discount) for diversified corporations because they can easily diversify themselves by holding a variety of securities. Imagine an investor that values social networks highly, but who doesn't care for VR. They'll view this as a distraction from the core business, leading to a discount of the core business and an even greater discount of the VR portion. Diversification makes companies harder to analyze and reduces management focus, and has the tendency to depress both earnings and value.

There are some exceptions around market inefficiency, for example in the case of emerging markets where companies are difficult to manage and finance, but those are becoming less common, not more. I think there may be an argument that the market inefficiency caused by the extra reporting requirements imposed by SOX is causing more companies to go public by way of acquisition instead of IPO, but I haven't really seen clear data on that point.

jcnnghmon Secret Raises $10M At A $50M Valuation

In retrospect, I think this is the result of Facebook transitioning from a "private" social network to a public network, when they decided to accept anyone over the age of 13. When Facebook was college-only, I think one of the major appeals was the ability to widely share information, with the one restriction being that it was kept to your peer group. I think there is a whole host of things that young people are willing to share openly with their peers that they also don't want to share with their parents or other authority figures. Further, in many cases, that desire for privacy is not misguided; protecting controversial beliefs from people that have power over you is actually kind of wise.

jcnnghmon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (March 2014)

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco, CA (preferably the Peninsula) or Remote

I'm a full stack Ruby/Rails developer. I started working with Rails in 2006, and I've been writing software for over a decade. Outside of Rails, I've been working with Python at my day-job for the last six months. I am finishing a Master's with a Finance concentration now, and I have a BS in CS, in case you might be interested in someone with some specialized knowledge.

I am particularly interested in working with startups, working on data issues (I process data for a site with > 100M Uniques at my day job), or working on anything marketing-related. I've got a lot of experience running A/B tests and offsite marketing.

Email: justin@bulletprooftiger.com https://github.com/jcnnghm

jcnnghmon Stupid Simple Things SF Techies Could Do To Stop Being Hated

1.85% of GDP is US private charitable giving, 38% higher than any other nation. Your assertion that America needs to catch up with the rest of the world is, at best, xenophobic.

jcnnghmon Stupid Simple Things SF Techies Could Do To Stop Being Hated

The US gives about 1.85% of GDP, the highest in the world. Second is Israel at 1.34%. The US also volunteers more than all but two other nations, the Netherlands and Sweden. In 2010, the US spent almost 3 times as much on foreign aid as any other developed nation (US at $38b v. Germany at $13.5b). Don't let the facts stand in the way though.

jcnnghmon Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

The global economy isn't zero-sum.

jcnnghmon Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts

That's not evidence of a decline, see http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+real+GDP+over+time. That would seem to indicate that other countries are catching up, not that the US is declining. Also, in real terms, it doesn't look like the narrowing of the gap is accelerating (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+minus+China%2C+US+mi...).

jcnnghmon Are STEM Workers Overpaid?

The Soviet Union put humans in space. And you have to be able to compete at all before you can lose a multi-decade arms race between superpowers.

At what cost? How many Ukrainians did they starve to death in the process, how many "political opponents" were purged, how many people died in the gulags because they didn't tow the line?

Unfortunately, what you want has been tried, and it didn't work very well. What you'll end up with is many people not working at all because its not worth paying them, and a bunch of others forced to work at gunpoint to make up for the people that can't produce. It's pretty shitty to be in either group.

jcnnghmon Are STEM Workers Overpaid?

The backwater pre-industrial, post-war torn nation that beat the US to space? No, I don't think that was why they couldn't compete

Pretty amazing what you can do when you're willing to spend your country into insolvency and collapse.

So if you give people interesting challenges and make sure they can meet their basic needs, people are likely to preform.

It's not like 50% of workers in the USSR admitted to drinking on the job, or 40% held second jobs to make more money, right? I guess if you're not motivated by a strong aense of community and bullshit pay, the gulags and purges might help.

jcnnghmon Are STEM Workers Overpaid?

That's mean individual wage, not household. Per capita GDP isn't a good indicator here. I'd be careful about suggesting naïveté while advocating for a minimum wage higher than the mean wage.

jcnnghmon Are STEM Workers Overpaid?

Given that the mean wage was only $43,460 in 2009, in order to raise minimum wage to $60,000 per year, your pay cut would be to minimum wage. The government would have to confiscate all income, supplement it with printed money, then redistribute it evenly across the population. In that kind of scenario, why would anybody do anything but the absolute minimum? Isn't that largely why the Soviet Union wasn't competitive? If there was no economic incentive for hard work, I'd wager many of the presently most productive people would optimize for work minimization.

jcnnghmon The Tech Community Must Invest More In San Francisco

San Francisco has double the budget of some states for 600,000 people, do you really think money is the problem? 40% of the city revenue goes to non-profits as it is. The problems the city has is due entirely to mismanagement, incompetence, and a misguided do-gooder populace.

jcnnghmon The Tech Community Must Invest More In San Francisco

The cities problem isn't revenue, there are plenty of much better managed places that are nicer than San Francisco, without the massive tax base that the city enjoys. The people should be embarrassed at the state of the city. There are pretty clearly major systematic issues.

The city is trying to address a bunch of societal issues, while failing at the basics. There is a reason it's considered the worst run big city in the US [1]. Why should people that are already paying very high taxes pay even more, or address other peoples problems directly? I don't really see how this problem somehow belongs to the tech industry.

1: http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...

jcnnghmon The Tech Community Must Invest More In San Francisco

I'd agree with that, with the qualification that $80-100k may actually be a bit low. In the United States overall, the upper quintile of income starts at about $102k [1], so an income between $80 and $100k would place you in the upper-middle class.

However, it's important to keep in mind that the cost of living in San Francisco or New York is much higher than average. Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,795 [2] in San Francisco, that alone is over $33k a year. The SF cost of living index is 161.3 and the Manhattan cost of living index is 223.9. In other words, $100k in Manhattan is equivalent to about $45k in an average place in the US, firmly in the middle quintile. The Living Wage Project suggests it takes at least $100k to be effectively middle class in New York [3].

It's really not a perception thing, it's reality.

1: US Census 2011 Household Income Table HINC-05

2: http://priceonomics.com/the-san-francisco-rent-explosion/

3: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/cities-high-cost-of...

jcnnghmon The 1975 Buffett memo that saved the Washington Post's pension

The market is definitely not strong-form efficient. If it were, you wouldn't have any price movement attributable to earnings surprises, because the private information would already be priced in. More importantly, markets are only efficient because some people are researching and trading to the true underlying value. The whole reason markets are supposed to be efficient is because if they are not, there is an opportunity to make riskless arbitrage profit, which someone will exploit.

jcnnghmon The myth of America's missing software engineers

They aren't unemployed, they entered industries other than engineering, like finance, medicine, or law, because they expected higher pay there.

jcnnghmon The myth of America's missing software engineers

Quant engineers are exactly the people that all this clamoring is about. They are the star programmers that don't exist. Tech pay could go up a bit, and start attracting them with better working conditions, which would solve this bullshit crisis which is largely an excuse to import a bunch of cheap labor.

jcnnghmon The myth of America's missing software engineers

If they're willing to do the job for that and they're not appreciably worse than you at that particular job, maybe that's what you're worth for that role, too?

Or there could be a collection of people that decide to enter different industries because of this, causing a labor shortage?

jcnnghmon The myth of America's missing software engineers

Do the majority of staffers make normalish wages?

Anecdotal, but I have had a few friends working in support roles at investment banks making about double what they would make elsewhere.