Hacker News Reader

k_shon 'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned

> how much has "too" varied over time though?

Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs the Southeast).

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...

k_shon 'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned

> too expensive or its in remote location

This is generally how land values work...

k_shon Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues

Yes, refusing to testify to the grand jury... in the WikiLeaks case.

k_shon U.S. regulators approve the Long-Term Stock Exchange

I've always taken "public ownership" to imply "publicly-traded company", which means John Q. Public can call up his broker and buy some shares in the company.

This in contrast to privately-held companies, which can and do have many owners, but whose owners are acquired through partnership, investment, key employees within the company, and M&A - but not through the sale of securities.

k_shon 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

> It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest

Not in a direct sense - but civil asset forfeiture and arrest/citation quotas do incentivize individual officers to take actions that benefit their department's budget and their annual review, respectively.

> It's not like we [...] pay the prison $500/night per inmate

In the case of private prisons (which house 8% of the US prison population[0]), a per-prisoner stipend is the most popular[1] business model.

The government quite literally pays the prison company a fixed dollar amount per inmate-night, which the company then turns a profit on.

[0]: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/comparing_correc...

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062215/busin...

k_shon Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords in plain text

Sure, but the Mueller report was widely reported[0][1][2] to be released Thursday morning days ago.

[0]: https://deadline.com/2019/04/redacted-robert-mueller-report-...

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/muell...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/15/mueller-report-expected-to-b...

k_shon Ketamine: From Party Drug to Prescription Medicine

AI doesn't solve the underlying issue that made ketamine depression treatment expensive: intellectual property rights on a particular molecule.

If a company achieved AI that can identify effective alternatives, why wouldn't they just acquire the patents for all of those alternatives and prop up all the prices?

k_shon DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System

You're right, but that doesn't mean it's a waste of time to design systems more resilient to the human element.

k_shon Boeing 737 Max pilots complained to feds for months about suspected safety flaw

Airplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...

k_shon Amazon to Shut All U.S. Pop-Up Stores as It Rethinks Physical Retail Strategy

Follow-through.

Google is infamous for this sequence of events, time and time again:

1. We made this great new thing that's gonna change the way you verb! Hope you enjoy it!

2. (1-5 years of product stagnation)

3. Hey, thanks for the all the good times. We're closing the thing at the end of the year.

Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs.

k_shon Square Inc. Co-Founder Tristan O’Tierney Dies at 35

If you feel like you're having allergic episodes when drinking, you may have some sinus issues lurking!

k_shon Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

I'm glad we're waking up to this fact.

It's not enough to hold a belief... in our system, action is required. I think this is why young people are so frequently screwed by political decisions and policy - we are, uncoincidentally, the age group that votes least often.

k_shon Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

Paratransit is recognized in North America as special transportation services for people with disabilities, often provided as a supplement to fixed-route bus and rail systems by public transit agencies.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit

k_shon BuzzFeed to Cut 15% of Its Workforce

"BuzzFeed launches a new website for its real journalism": https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/18/buzzfeed-news/

"Buzzfeed News adds a Pulitzer winner and top Pentagon correspondent to its staff": http://www.niemanlab.org/reading/buzzfeed-news-adds-a-pulitz...

k_shon An Open Source UI Builder for React

Babel (specifically, babel-preset-env, which I assume you're referring to) only ensures that your code's syntax can run within a given browser. It doesn't make sure all the web APIs and browser features you take advantage of are compatible, or that they produce the same result.

k_shon Munchery Shuts Down

I could've sworn that they closed down a year or two ago. Are you sure you just got this?

Edit: yeah, looks like this happened 8 months ago (https://munchery.com/blog/a-letter-to-the-munchery-community...)

Edit 2: oops, that was only NYC and Seattle - looks like I remembered incorrectly!

k_shon Paris Will Make Public Transportation Free for Kids

> most of the US government is designed to self-sabotage things like publicly run transit anyway

What level of US government is sabotaging transit? The federal government doles out at least $2.3B every year for transit projects[0], meanwhile state and local governments throughout the US are approving tax increases for more transit.

[0]: https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grant-programs/capital-i...

k_shon Tesla laid off my disabled veteran husband then cancelled his sign on bonus

> Giving someone 0-day notice and physically escorting them out of the company is simply unacceptable.

This is a pretty common practice, especially when dismissing employees that work with sensitive information (e.g. architecting trade secrets), or work in public-facing positions (e.g. spokesperson or PR). It avoids the risks found in the question of "what will this person do when they know they're on their way out?".

k_shon DOJ: Hackers broke into an SEC database and made millions from inside info

supposed !== possible

k_shon EFF Responds to Bird's Legal Threats to Boing Boing

You're describing theft. Bird didn't abandon their scooter, they know where it is and intended for it to be there.

As noted in another thread here, something being left on the street doesn't mean it's legally abandoned, whether it's a car, a wallet, or an electric scooter.

Most jurisdictions require the (former) owner to intentionally relinquish ownership in order for something to be considered abandoned.

k_shon Chariot is shutting down

It's probably on the front page because Chariot was part of YC W15, and later acquired by Ford.

k_shon Sobriety startups shaking up the 12-step model

Wellbutrin (bupropion hcl) is FDA approved as a smoking-cessation aid.

I took it for a year or so (though not for smoking cessation), if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them! Email in profile.

k_shon Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

If roads were 20x wider, 68% of LA County would be streets.

Sure, turning two-thirds of a city into roads will cut down on traffic - but within realistic restraints on road construction, induced demand is real.

(There are 140mi^2 of roads now[0], and 4,058mi^2 of land mass[1].)

[0]: https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/30/9895842/how-much-parking-lo... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California

k_shon The Titanic Was on Fire for Days Before the Iceberg Hit

I got my figure from this part of the entry:

> AC759 reached a minimum altitude of 59 feet (18 m) above ground level, comparable to the 55 ft 10 in (17.02 m) tail height of a Boeing 787-9, two of which were on Taxiway C

k_shon The Titanic Was on Fire for Days Before the Iceberg Hit

This almost happened last July[0] at SFO - an inbound Air Canada flight lined up against a taxiway (with five full flights on it, over 1000 people actually) instead of a runway, and missed the planes on the ground by about five vertical feet.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759#Incident

k_shon I quit Instagram and Facebook and it made me happier

> site is also intentionally crippled so you need the app to do some things

I don't have a citation for this, but it's pretty clear that they do this to make automation harder.

k_shon It took seven miles to pull over a Tesla with a seemingly asleep driver

A "law enforcement has requested that your car pull over automatically, press here if you don't want this to happen" dialog would serve the need here while also protecting passengers from bad actors.

k_shon Companies struggling to fill jobs 'should try paying more,' Fed's Kashkari says

This would be illegal in some (most?) places - labor laws ban employers from clawing back pay for almost any reasons.

In California, for example, you can't even dock someone's final paycheck if they fail to return a uniform - if someone worked the time to earn a wage and you don't pay them in full, you're going to find yourself in court.

k_shon Uber launches rider loyalty rewards like credits

Insurance companies?

I'm not sure I've ever seen an insurance company gamify anything.