Hacker News: pzone

New comment by pzone in "The case for single-stair multifamily"

pzone — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 14:03:42 +0000

If you have mobility issues that prevent you from exiting your building easily then you can move somewhere else. We don’t need to make every apartment building in the country more expensive for this extremely specific scenario.

New comment by pzone in "The WHO is about to declare aspartame can cause cancer"

pzone — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:00:50 +0000

This puts aspartame in the same category as aloe vera. It is classified as less risky than drinking hot beverages or eating red meat.

New comment by pzone in "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (2021) [video]"

pzone — Fri, 19 May 2023 17:44:00 +0000

The problem is that horns and sirens typically provide little practical benefit. Even in an emergency situation like a heart attack, arriving an extra minute or two faster rarely improves patient outcomes. Essentially, these noises are put on for show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/sirens-noise-ambulance...

New comment by pzone in "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud (2021) [video]"

pzone — Fri, 19 May 2023 17:43:08 +0000

The worst part is that horns and sirens often little practical use. Even in an emergency situation like a heart attack, an extra minute or two rarely improves patient outcomes. Essentially, these noises are put on for show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/us/sirens-noise-ambulance...

New comment by pzone in "Krita: A professional free and open source painting program"

pzone — Mon, 01 May 2023 20:26:03 +0000

Adobe halted development of painting and illustration features in Photoshop a number of years ago. Their goal seems to be to get people to use Illustrator for illustrations and Fresco for painting.

New comment by pzone in "What De-Dollarization? The Dollar Rules the World"

pzone — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 20:33:12 +0000

They are not a sign of a strong American dollar. They are a roadblock that limits the yuan's usefulness for anyone outside of China.

New comment by pzone in "What De-Dollarization? The Dollar Rules the World"

pzone — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 20:31:21 +0000

To continue your analogy: the two major competitors also have serious flaws. The Euro is like Mastodon. Its decentralized leadership prevents it from offering the features and convenience of Twitter. The Chinese Yuan is like Truth Social. Tight restrictions on what you can do there mean it is not a useful alternative for most people.

New comment by pzone in "$52B Chipmaking Plan Is Racing Toward Failure"

pzone — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 12:15:56 +0000

“One can debate the merits of any of these objectives. But larding already-uncompetitive businesses with crippling new costs to advance completely unrelated social goals is simply at odds with the stated purpose of this law.”

New comment by pzone in "Britain Is Broken"

pzone — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 06:13:10 +0000

How about funding vocational training, building more housing, rejoining the EU and courting the tech industry by any means necessary?

New comment by pzone in "Nearly 20% Adults May Have Misophonia – Significant Negative Responses to Sounds"

pzone — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 20:03:47 +0000

I find ASMR videos about as pleasant as nails on a blackboard.

New comment by pzone in "Which city builds skyscrapers the fastest?"

pzone — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 21:18:52 +0000

Living in the middle of a dense city does improve quality of life for many people via access to amenities and jobs with a very short commute. A hypothetical 50 story skyscraper can provide these benefits to 50 times as many people as a single story building could.

You're right that light and sky visibility are finite resources that require more land. 100+ story buildings can feel oppressive to people. The question to ask then is why we allocate so little land to mid-rise development and force it all into Manhattan and small downtowns. That's the biggest reason we have such tall buildings there.

New comment by pzone in "When did New York start building slowly?"

pzone — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:39:39 +0000

It’s one of the safest places to live in the US, period.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

New comment by pzone in "When did New York start building slowly?"

pzone — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:21:00 +0000

From the same Substack:

"Homebuilders don’t seem to think the burdens of OSHA and other safety regulations are all that high. Complying with OSHA is the second lowest category of perceived jobsite regulatory costs."

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/how-much-safer-ha...

New comment by pzone in "Epic’s new motion-capture animation tech"

pzone — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:01:59 +0000

A few differences compared to other commercial iPhone-based capture techniques:

- Whole-clip solve instead of noisy frame-by-frame streaming - Automatically generating a face model to calibrate the rig - Solving from raw sensor data instead of Apple ARKit pose data

VFX studios typically develop proprietary solutions a few years in advance, so it can be hard to say what is truly "new and different."

New comment by pzone in "When did New York start building slowly?"

pzone — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 02:17:55 +0000

Because it’s the best city in the United States

New comment by pzone in "People had to be convinced of the usefulness of electricity"

pzone — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 14:46:23 +0000

If it costs an extra $20k to set up a new farm then we let food prices rise slightly to cover the costs. Why does the government have to step in?

New comment by pzone in "‘Forever chemicals’ deserve more EPA scrutiny"

pzone — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 11:34:01 +0000

Today we lose immeasurably more lives through unnecessary delays of important new medicines. There is no cost benefit calculation whatsoever.

New comment by pzone in "RustPython – A Python-3 (CPython >= 3.11.0) Interpreter written in Rust"

pzone — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 17:03:53 +0000

Exactly this. One of the reasons Maya remains favored in studio environments is its strong API stability guarantees. Python is excellent for automation when performance is less of a concern.

New comment by pzone in "Maybe treating housing as an investment was a mistake"

pzone — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 22:14:12 +0000

The Chinese situation is caused by government rather than by their culture. Chinese corporations are forced into inefficient state-mandated investments and provide meager rates of returns for shareholders. They get tons of shiny public infrastructure while savers are given nothing, and are not allowed to invest internationally. In other words, it is pure financial repression.

New comment by pzone in "Maybe treating housing as an investment was a mistake"

pzone — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 22:09:11 +0000

Incentivizing people to own their primary residence tax-free kills almost 90% of the Georgist incentive structure. The only justification for doing that is if you consider homes an investment asset. Almost all homeowners own only one home and would have the exact same incentives to advocate development restrictions. Governments would forego almost all of the land value tax and be forced to continue with high levels of other less efficient taxes.