Hacker News: xvedejas

New comment by xvedejas in "RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters"

xvedejas — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 07:26:06 +0000

If it's causally linked to higher prices, I agree. My question is whether we certainly know it's causally linked. In my mind right now it's similarly plausible that these things are just snake oil sold to landlords. There are a ton of conspiracy theories that would be a real problem, if true.

New comment by xvedejas in "RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters"

xvedejas — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 05:21:41 +0000

Is there an actual issue? I've seen compelling arguments that places that banned the practice of algorithmic rent setting did not see any appreciable drop in rents. I'm almost convinced the problem is entirely supply side.

New comment by xvedejas in "Lula wins election after final votes tallied"

xvedejas — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 01:42:09 +0000

Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.

New comment by xvedejas in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

xvedejas — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:20:36 +0000

Empirically, according to Doucet, a land value tax would only raise average tax rates if you're living on a parking lot, or vacant lot. Aging homeowners would mostly see a slight decline in their property taxes ( California excluded ).

New comment by xvedejas in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

xvedejas — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:50:17 +0000

Neither. The US has a problem with incompetency in policing. Part of that stems from the prevalence of far-right ideology that is common among US police but not common in peer developed countries. Far-right officers are ideologically disposed to not being effective, either because they prefer punishment to procedure, or because it's in their interest to keep crime high.

Fix those two issues and the same number of officers will catch many more criminals.

New comment by xvedejas in "North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes"

xvedejas — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:29:11 +0000

At least naturally, faults release almost all their energy in the few largest events. You never see enough small earthquakes that you would "release slowly" that amount of energy. It would really need to be several orders of magnitude of more energy being released slowly.

New comment by xvedejas in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

xvedejas — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:10:41 +0000

Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?

New comment by xvedejas in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

xvedejas — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 05:39:11 +0000

It has been interesting to me how AI has for many years given people a way to justify any worst case scenario. Nothing is too far-fetched if at any step you tell yourself the AI will be smarter than you, and thus be able to solve any conceivable obstacle. Oh, if only intelligence were the only bottleneck to power.

New comment by xvedejas in "Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU"

xvedejas — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 16:25:59 +0000

Montenegro unilaterally uses the euro and it doesn't seem to otherwise be a failed state. Besides this being a "marker", what do you think are the actual problems caused? Like why does a small country need its own capital controls when there is a very stable currency available nearby?

New comment by xvedejas in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

xvedejas — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:05:36 +0000

Where would one ever read that Go is not memory safe? That's just a false claim, and anyone believing it would have probably gone out of business regardless of choice of programming language.

New comment by xvedejas in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

xvedejas — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:32:53 +0000

And how would you control for the causal possibility that those who will eventually develop Alzheimer's early on might tend to have undetectable memory issues that prevent them from becoming taxi drivers in the first place? You can't control for profession, since that's behind the very claim itself.

New comment by xvedejas in "Modernizing Property Tax Assessments in Allegheny County"

xvedejas — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:18:20 +0000

Property taxes have a component that redistributes wealth from landlords to the working people, but it also has a component that penalizes making better use of the land. The former is usually called "land value tax" and the latter is the part of the tax that is proportional to the improved value of the land. The latter part incentivizes some uncertain amount more towards mcmansions and away from multi-unit buildings.

New comment by xvedejas in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

xvedejas — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:08:32 +0000

Reading between the lines, it sounds like it was probably one of "tip"/"point"/"head" and "shaft", or similar

New comment by xvedejas in "Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k"

xvedejas — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:20:34 +0000

Not simply "don't want to live here", usually also "can't, there are no opportunities for income here". I know lots of people optimistic that remote work would upend this, but even the few still-fully-remote workers I know need to live in areas where they or their family can find non-remote jobs if ever necessary.

New comment by xvedejas in "The "Bizarre Headgear" exhibit at the Sam Noble museum"

xvedejas — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:20:56 +0000

I thought we were moving toward depicting dinosaurs as having feathers? Or is there just too little evidence around what exactly that would look like to add it to visualizations?

New comment by xvedejas in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

xvedejas — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:49:34 +0000

Sounds like a slam-dunk case for SELC?

New comment by xvedejas in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

xvedejas — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:16:32 +0000

Isn't most new capacity solar these days?

New comment by xvedejas in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

xvedejas — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:05:38 +0000

In a working economy, an increase in demand for electricity would be met with an increase in investment and capacity, and (at least in the long-term) would benefit all electricity buyers. I'm sure there are market failures going on here in many places but it's not necessarily the case that you and the companies be on opposing sides. There are positive-sum solutions to a lot of these problems, if people are willing to consider them.

New comment by xvedejas in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

xvedejas — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:44:17 +0000

moto g 2026; yes it's Android. Main downside is the relative lack of RAM honestly.

New comment by xvedejas in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

xvedejas — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 04:43:46 +0000

I've gone through about 5 USB-C adapters which eventually broke inexplicably. They also have extra noise in the audio when the volume is low for some reason.