Hacker News: tidbits

New comment by tidbits in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

tidbits — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:24:02 +0000

Do you have a link to the previous comment?

New comment by tidbits in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

tidbits — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:44:33 +0000

Except regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.

New comment by tidbits in "The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market"

tidbits — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:58:47 +0000

Immigrants still do this. Except now they fill apartments and houses with bunkbeds. I know because my dad did this in the early 2000's and is still in contact with the local immigrant community.

New comment by tidbits in "Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region"

tidbits — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 23:47:51 +0000

It's very team/org dependent and I would say that's generally not the case. In 6 years I have only had 1 team out of 3 where that was true. The other two teams I was expected to juggle feature work with oncall work. Same for most teams I interacted with.

New comment by tidbits in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

tidbits — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:37:36 +0000

City Nerd made a good video on how crime statistics often incorrectly compare to a cities overall safety: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jG1i7jHSM

New comment by tidbits in "Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently"

tidbits — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:32:09 +0000

You don't pay for the externalities of using a car. Nobody does. That's why people are hostile towards cars.

New comment by tidbits in "Why our waistlines expand in middle age: aging stem cells shift into overdrive"

tidbits — Fri, 02 May 2025 18:10:02 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

New comment by tidbits in "Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated"

tidbits — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:56:11 +0000

Take a look at the voting data for Prop 1A. It is very likely HSR would not have been approved in the first place if the central valley had been excluded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_...

New comment by tidbits in "On loyalty to your employer (2018)"

tidbits — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:07:57 +0000

Differentiating between them is impossible until things go wrong. They can treat you as family 99% of the time, but when the options are: take a pay cut or fire some employees, in my experience everyone goes with the latter.

New comment by tidbits in "A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils"

tidbits — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:36:20 +0000

Seasoning doesnt matter. In all 3 cases, the key factor is temperature control. I can make eggs in all three types of pans with no sticking and no seasoning. Seasoning is only to protect the metal from rust.

New comment by tidbits in "A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils"

tidbits — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:30:37 +0000

I have found seasoning doesn't affect the stickiness of the pan. My MIL left my carbon steel pan sitting in water, so I had to grind it to the bone to remove the rust. But even with no seasoning, I was able to cook eggs no problem. The key is temperature control. However, the pan started getting rusty from just sitting out, so I ended up re-seasoning it anyway.

New comment by tidbits in "In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them"

tidbits — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 21:11:38 +0000

Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: https://youtu.be/za56H2BGamQ

New comment by tidbits in "MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan"

tidbits — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 03:09:24 +0000

Gas tax doesn't even begin to cover the externalities of burning that gas. Vehicle taxes go entirely towards the administrative costs of vehicles (i.e. DMV) and also don't cover externalities. Sure the road is already built but it was funded by all tax payers, not all of which drive cars. And roads require maintenance, also tax payer funded. Society at large subsidizes cars and drivers, giving them huge chunks of land while making most cities inhospitable to pedestrians, causing almost as many deaths as guns in the US. A giant, heavy, extremely dangerous machine is just about the worst way to transport people. Maybe we should stop subsidizing it entirely and taxing it to lower use like we did with cigarettes?

New comment by tidbits in "Unpowered cargo gliders on tow ropes promise 65% cheaper air freight"

tidbits — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 04:02:26 +0000

And if the car is not ICE then you still have the problem of tire particle pollution. Trains are better.

New comment by tidbits in "Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions"

tidbits — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 21:10:30 +0000

I worked at such a place right out of college. Always claiming we were family and that they would take care of their workers. Then covid happened, they lost some money, and laid off 25% of their employees, including people who had been there 10+ years. Now I work at a big company and make 3x as much with similar workloads. Glad I learned early on that no company is actually a family and will put your needs above the needs of the company!

New comment by tidbits in "Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life"

tidbits — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:23:45 +0000

Or extremes are bad?

New comment by tidbits in "Apple must pay a man $1,000 for not including a power adapter with new iPhone"

tidbits — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 17:57:14 +0000

"Because almost all people have more wall warts and cables than phones." Do you have a source to verify this claim? Anecdotally, I know 3 people that switched from old Androids to iPhones who could not charge their phones. You're on a tech forum, so I assume you keep up with the tech news. But, at least in my circle, most people don't. They buy phones and expect them to ship with the required accessories to operate them.

New comment by tidbits in "Ask HN: Please Give Me Advice"

tidbits — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 06:44:16 +0000

I read this whole thread and your responses remind me of myself earlier this year. I dont have anything new to add, but I would like to repeat what others have said that worked for me: see a therapist, change up your environment, and come up with some long term goals. Seeing a therapist helped me identify cognitive distortions (look it up) that were problematic for me. Therapist taught me how to identify negative thoughts and behaviors through various journaling methods. Turns out negative thoughts and behaviors lead to negative emotions. I was also fortunate enough to be able to crash at my parents for a month. The change in environment was monumental in helping me break out of the negative spiral. It also helped me realize how much I love my family and gave me a long term goal to help my parents finish paying off their house. That goal drives me every day to work hard on my career and my health so that I'm around to see it achieved. I think most people see children the same way. I talked to my dad a lot about life during that month and he confirmed that was the case for him. Which is impressive considering he grew up poor, one of 12 kids, to an alcoholic father and uneducated mother in Mexico. Personally, kids arent for me, but it just highlights the human need for purpose, whatever that may be. I hope you find some meaning for your life, it's hard. Really hard. But it gets easier, just gotta keep at it :)

New comment by tidbits in "Why didn’t auto-braking stop these crashes?"

tidbits — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 22:02:56 +0000

Toyota's safety sense system has saved me from minor accidents a few times. It has never auto applied the brakes, but the alarms and brake assist have been really helpful on freeways during abrupt stops. My girlfriend, on the other hand, hates her Honda's auto braking system, as it triggers too easily, even on the lowest setting. I've seen it regularly trigger when pulling up to sensor controlled gates.

New comment by tidbits in "Ask HN: Those who work at Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, etc. Do you feel guilt?"

tidbits — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 21:32:16 +0000

FAANG definitely has a high bar, but there are many factors that affect interviews. However, I think a big part of it is that they were willing to take a risk on hiring me since I had 3 years of experience and did solidly on the interviews. In contrast with the non-FAANG companies I applied to, they probably saw the obscure company I had been working at as a negative and decided to play it safe and pass on me. What further supports this theory of mine is that, around the 6 month mark at FAANG, recruiters started flooding my email, even though the difference in experience between 3 years of programming and 3.5 years is minor.