Hacker News Reader

ryanjlon Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

It's the other way in California: compared to elsewhere, excessive amounts of retail and non-residential development because of prop 13. Local governments are very dependent on sales tax since the aggregate property tax rate can't support local services, and retail throws off that sales tax revenue.

ryanjlon Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock

Jython uses the JNI and IronPython does it through C++/CLI, neither of them support the CPython extension interface, meaning the C modules aren't compatible. Because of this, Jython and IronPython inherit the interface properties of their respective VMs and they can remain thread safe without the GIL.

ryanjlon Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock

Jython and Iron Python lack the GIL. It's just an implementation detail of the underlying VM. There's nothing in the language itself which requires a GIL.

ryanjlon Bob Taylor Has Died

I saw him interviewed in a documentary on Fandor called, 'The Net.' The interview took place in his home about 15 years ago. There were a number of topics, but I particularly remember how he spoke of how fear is borne out of ignorance. Well worth checking it.

ryanjlon Staples Agrees to Buy Office Depot for About $6.3 Billion

This is smart for Staples, but the industry is still in trouble. They're going to get eaten alive by Walmart on the retail side and Amazon on the online side.

Staples and all the other office suppliers do best in two areas: printing services and consumables. Printing services have massive margins. And consumables, particularly remanufactured toner, are big cash cows. Business machines are low margin or loss leaders.

The stores are money losers. They would close them all if they could. They're used as feeders for their print business, value add for their contract customers, and sources of toner cartridges to be remanufactured.

Walmart, with its school supply aisle, is the largest office supply retailer in the world. Their supply chain is far superior to anything in the traditional office supply world, and in retail pricing, it shows.

Same goes for Amazon. They have massive economies of scale and a very well tuned supply chain.

Walmart has been aggressively putting the hurt on the retailers, particularly in Back-to-School season (Christmas for office supply retailers) in the form of advertising and moving the supplies towards the front of their stores.

Amazon dipped it's toe in the water with Amazon Supply. I'm surprised they haven't built an on-the-ground sales force to really expand it. I suspect that when they do, they'll take a big bite out of Staples.