2,609 karma · joined May 14, 2010
And FYI, technology was not a significant factor in the economy of the City of San Francisco at that time.
Recessions, while painful, are much less extreme than bubble-bursts, and can (and should) be planned for.
http://www.bayrailalliance.org/question/why-is-the-caltrain-...
In retrospect, an Airtrain connection to Millbrae would probably have been a better choice, but the person who pushed through the SFO BART station, Sen. Quentin Kopp, was hostile to Caltrain and had no interest in making a Caltrain<->SFO connection efficient.
http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...
I'm guessing you're not black.
Rather, I'm sure Caesar used the appropriate conjugation of the Latin verb "decimō".
Two separate, but related, words. With two separate, but related, meanings.
>The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.
Interesting contrast to the common belief here on HN that historic preservation is just unimportant NIMBYism and should be opposed in the name of bringing down housing costs.
Prior to 2012, that was probably true:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/09/opensecrets-battle-k...
But since then, the Koch brothers really ramped it up. The Koch brothers spent an estimated $412MM in the 2012 election alone, about an order of magnitude more than the amount Soros spent in the entire previous decade:
http://www.thenation.com/article/koch-brothers-spent-twice-m...
Combine the $412MM they spent in 2012 with the $900MM they want to spend in 2016, and that's ~$1.3 billion this decade, compared to Soros's ~$40 million in the last. That's not even close to the same level. And I haven't found any evidence that Soros is spending at the same level as the Koch brothers this decade.
This is out of date, and has been for a while. The voters of Mountain View responded to the housing crisis by voting in a much more pro-housing city council. There are now over 10,000 units planned for North Bayshore (the area around the Google and LinkedIn campuses):
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...
As a long-time resident and voter in Mountain View, it's exasperating to have people so fixated on the NIMBY narrative that they ignore the significant steps the city and voters have and are taking to address the housing crisis. Regardless of what Matt Yglesias said, or that article from the Washington Post said, the votes of the Mountain View citizenry, and the resulting choices of the City Council, should make it clear that we're not a bunch of anti-density NIMBYs.
On a broader note, while I understand the frustration with NIMBYism, a lot of these discussions about housing here on HN cross the line from anti-NIMBYism to anti-democracy. The United States is not China. The solution to the housing crisis in the US is not and never will be for governments (at any level) to impose solutions contrary to the general will of the American voting public. Any government that tries to do so will find itself replaced. Quickly. And quite rightly so.
>Lesson: Bake your culture into your DNA, or when the good King era ends, the bad king era will begin...
What I see at the fundamental problem with the Dojo is that, baked into its DNA, is the belief that legal compliance and good management are not really important. The Dojo had to leave its old space because they were so in violation of Mountain View building codes that it would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring them into compliance. A problem that could have been easily avoided if they had bothered to talk to the City about code compliance before moving into that space.
And now they've demonstrated a lack of interest in basic financial governance.
I wish Ghufran, and the new board, the best in terms of turning the Dojo around. But I worry that the disinterest in compliance and management is so integral to Dojo culture that it will have another (completely avoidable) crisis in 3-4 years.
Marie Knox has been suspended, so I suspect the web description of her being in charge is merely out of date.
FYI, membership is $195/month. And yes, with TechShop at $125, and Founders Floor in downtown San Jose at $200/month, $195 seems far too high for what you get at Hacker Dojo.
True. But also, the hardware barely advanced for a long time. Commodore didn't even start to architect a next generation graphics chipset until 1988, and didn't release a significant upgrade until the AGA in the Amiga 4000, in 1992. Seven years after the original Amiga! In retrospect they should have been far more aggressive with their hardware upgrades. Their inability to do so let the rest of the market catch up.
The H-1B visa was created in 1990. Khosla started working in the U.S. in 1980 after graduating from Stanford, and founded Sun in 1982. It seems doubtful he was ever on an H-1B.
It's not 2008 anymore. Things have changed substantially. Banks became much more risk-adverse in the wake of the burst of the housing bubble and subsequent economic crisis. The era in which loan officers are incentivized to skip risk evaluation has passed.
My point was not that there's some grand conspiracy among banks. Merely that any loan that uses real estate as collateral will be riskier if real estate prices are declining, than if real estate prices are increasing. That means that construction loans are going to be harder to get when prices are decreasing. Which suggests that the ability to use construction loans to lower the absolute price of housing is self-limiting.
Generalize that to building prices, and if true, that's going to make it very difficult to use construction to lower housing prices. Banks aren't going to lend for construction if they think making loans is going to threaten the bank's own soundness.
Or to put it another way, if falling housing prices add unacceptable risk to construction loans, then the banks efforts to mitigate that risk might include not lending if housing prices are in decline. Which means you could sweep away all zoning and NIMBY impediments, and you still wouldn't be able to use construction as a way to lower housing costs, because the banks wouldn't let that happen.
What would be the advantage of BART over electrified, grade-separated Caltrain? I'm hard-pressed to think of one, and there's definitely one major disadvantage: the nonstandard rail gauge.
These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.
The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.