I guess three-pronged, cause it says if they turn it into a rental that it's exempt from the taxes, which means someone is still at least living in it rather than just being used as a speculative asset.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245318

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.

What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47987450

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Also why on earth would I want the gov't paying fucking Google for their robotaxis, rather than having them put that money into public transport which serves everyone else and not just the pockets of some silicone valley douchebags?

No it can't, because cars aren't allowed on the streets around my house, with the exception of emergency vehicles and logistical vehicles like moving or delivery vans. The closest spot where a taxi could stop to drop me off is a lot further than where the bus or trains are. The closest parking space is actually a good 200-300m away from my door, reserved for residents so also always full, whereas I have a bus stop literally in front of my door and a train station 20 steps from it. I can also rent a bicycle 24/7 from the train station if all other modes of transport fail me (and I didn't have access to my bike for whatever reason).

Same in the center of the city, you cannot get to many places by car. A deliberate choice, for example when we dug out the hideous polluting highway and replaced it with a canal instead (which funnily enough was a canal in the first place before they made it into a highway). Utrecht is a perfect example of gov't realizing a mistake it made with car-centric design, doubling back and correcting it in a way that increases the QoL of every single resident of Utrecht.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...

This isn't even to say that the Netherlands is some kind of dystopia for drivers, if anything drivers here tend to be happier since they don't need to contend with a bunch of other people on the road, and more than half the country drives anyways.

> Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.

My point was that building out the highway system was a deliberate policy choice made in lieu of a strong passenger rail/public transport network. Had they focused on making passenger rail more viable, then we'd be talking about the opposite world here, where building highly space-inefficient and expensive highways would be a ludicrous proposition.

> China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.

We're talking about cross-country lines here, if anything it's even more absurd that the Chinese can have such a strong rail network when the majority of the country has no use for the lines serving the far-west of the country where there aren't that many people. Whether the cities are shit to live in or not is a separate discussion altogether.

You're saying all this as if this exact scenario isn't solved in plenty of places across the world? You take the bus or tram or metro or cycle or just walk if it's close enough. If the city is actually built with public transport in mind, not just a single bus line that runs every 2 hours bolted on as an afterthought, those options can be easier and faster than finding a parking spot, unless you feel entitled to park your vehicle anywhere you please to the detriment of everyone who isn't you.

Where I live in the Netherlands it's faster to bike most places than driving, because we don't solely cater to drivers and don't devote half the city to letting people store their cars. Even up North in the villages you can still get around by bike, since cycling lanes are dead cheap to build and maintain and can go down in the middle of a swamp if you needed to.

> When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there.

Sure, and when I cycle to Somewhere, I've still got my bike. Same logic, except I can lock it to a post and forget about it rather than needing to find a dedicated slab of real estate specifically reserved for my vehicle's existence. And if I took the train, I can rent a bike when I get there, which is a thing that exists in basically every city that actually invested in making it work.

> I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose

That only holds true because decades of car-centric design have made it so. In the Netherlands you couldn't just go anywhere you wanted by car, because there are plenty of streets and whole areas where cars flat out aren't allowed, because we actually prioritize the people who have to live with those infrastructural choices over random passersby who don't want to be "inconvenienced" by having to walk 5 minutes or share the road with someone who isn't also in a car.

If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.

What happens in your scenario if you can't find parking anywhere near your destination and the only option is lugging your bags along roads that weren't built for pedestrians? I know I've been in similar situations in the past where I had to drive around for fucking ages trying to find a single spot, I definitely would've preferred walking than that whole circus.

> I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.

Right, in a country that gutted its public transit and zoned everything to be car-dependent, a train station by itself isn't a complete solution. That's a policy failure, not an argument against trains.

I'm even planning a Eurotrip by train this summer with some mates, I'd say the distances here are comparable to get from NL to PL for example.

And besides, how is it that the US is "too wide" for trains to work, but apparently building an equivalent highway system is perfectly possible? China is also a massive country, yet they have incredible passenger train options to get cross country.

Every statement they make, hell even the models themselves are going to be doing this theater of "Ooooh scary uber h4xx0r AI, you can only beat it if you use our Super Giga Pro 40x Plan!!". In a month or two they'll move onto some other thing as they always do.

What? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.

As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.

> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck

How? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.

They're really investing heavily into this image that their newest models will be the death knell of all cybersecurity huh?

The marketing and sensationalism is getting so boring to listen to