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It should be sponsored by a model provider.

I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?

Why are you acting like there isn't a definition of inefficient. I think "underutilized" is a pretty good definition.

The fact that every single person has a small private park in their front and backyards that's enjoyed maybe a couple hours per day at most is pretty wasteful - if it was shared the utilization would go way up and space used would be way down. Same goes for all the parking lots needed to facilitate car traffic - if we used more efficient/shared options like buses or trams then the parking lots that sit empty most of the day could be replaced with more businesses or houses that allow people to live closer to the services that they need every day.

Meanwhile, we have big bottlenecks in our city downtowns where all the density is packed. Spread that out and things get a lot more efficient - your commute probably goes down too because you can live closer to work. Suburbs don't work without a productive city near them - otherwise they're just rural areas.


There's a really great way to think about this that doesn't get enough attention: land rents.

Some plots of land are very valuable due to their location, what you can access, etc. It's pretty straightforward to find out what the monthly cost of land is in any area, either from simple regressions on property values, or empty lot sales, etc.

When the land rent starts to excessively exceed average income of number of households allowed to live on that plot of land, that's pretty inefficient.

Owning land is society letting you say to other people: you're not allowed here. When we restrict land us so that people can not figure out their best use of it, eg 4 families building townhouses together, we start to restrict access to opportunity and basic economic freedom.


this is the same fallacy of saying there's no point getting a 10x faster server because you'll just have 10x more load and your site will still be slow.

If you're really interested: as density increases, population growth decreases. High density places become a sink for populations from elsewhere. You end up reaching a regional equilibrium, where some of the lowest density places start emptying out entirely. Japan is a great example of this, small towns there disappear regularly, as Tokyo grows. Suburban life around Tokyo remains very stable as the center increases and edges decrease.

Yes, dense cities are more efficient in every way compared to sprawl. Can you articulate what is confusing about this?

They're asking if there's an end game. If the single family homes get rezoned to three storey blocks, does that just become 10-storey towers and then arcologies, each more efficient than the other.

Maybe the answer is that the current single family home is an arbitrary point on the scale too, and should just be evaluated on merits for current and future needs.


I remember talking to a person who worked in marketing Kingsford, which at the time had like over 90% of the marketshare for USA charcoal. They had a marketing budget that was willing to spend money on any ol' stupid idea because they had already won & just wanted to stay on top by getting their name out there.

I only have one minor complaint about Fastmail after 5 years. I can’t do a full-page screenshot of a long email on my iPhone.


Have you tried requesting it? As a former developer there, I would expect you to get a response of “sorry, we didn’t know about that because none of us use it and no one has requested it before, fix incoming” or “yeah, unfortunately in our current architecture it’s not possible to do this because of [some specific reason]”.


I had not, good idea though. It hadn't come up enough to make me think of requesting it.


What energy sources do we have that don't ultimately derive from either solar of radioactive decay? Residual heat from object formation perhaps.


> solar of radioactive decay

We can do fusion, but given the only large sources of that are fusion bombs and nobody wants a bomb-based power plant… :P


> nobody

[citation needed]. Project Pacer might be controversial and uneconomical, but still interesting.


OK, not *literally* nobody at the human level, just *metaphorically* nobody at the human level (or literally at the level of nations) given that even normal boring fission plants make voters stick their tongues out and complain.


Gravity, just ask Jupiters' Moons.


So tidal power, basically?


Yep


Post was flagged, likely because the ratio of comments. Single word contributions like this do not help.


The post being flagged has nothing to do with my comment, please don't sensationalise


Quit my job in May. Been working on a hiring platform that I’ve always wanted. I wanted it so bad I quit recruiting, taught myself to code, worked as a developer for 12 years, and now I’m building it :)


As a founder in the same space I am curious what problem are you solving?

And good luck on the journey.


Nothing sexy. Just automating all the little recruiting tasks that suck up my time. Mainly MVP will just reduce, not totally eliminate, applications from people who aren’t serious or are clearly or a fit. A lot of nice to have features that are hard to bolt onto someone else’s ATS.

Here’s an example:

A client wanted me to post a job without compensation listed. They also didn’t want the interview team to know how much the position paid. So it was a pain to keep that information out of communication that everyone could see, I’d have to manually ask candidates outside of the ATS. So I’m addressing stuff like that. It’s not my job as the recruiter insist they make my job easier by divulging that info. I can only tell them it’s a time suck for me, and if they wanna pay me to do the work, then it’d be nice to free up my time by automating an easier way to get handle keeping compensation information as private as is reasonably possible.


Personally I find AI simultaneously powerful and fatiguing. Hiring someone else to use AI is honestly pretty great.


Buying stable coins is a mild pain because so many banks think crypto is radioactive. Then you have to wait for your deposited funds to completely settle before you can withdraw the crypto from your account and send it elsewhere. Doable, sure. Easy & convenient, not so much. I wouldn't call it a solved problem in the same way you can hand someone cash, tap to pay with your phone, or pay by scanning a QR Code.


Not anymore! Most places allow this very easily now.


Exactly. Revolut is a bank that allows cryptocurrencies.

HN really is living in their own bubble.


For those who can’t use Revolut: WealthSimple in Canada and Chase in the US offer custodial cryptocurrency accounts.


Revolut does not have a banking license in the US. At the moment they are a front for another bank. Don't be gullible and believe blindly what the marketing departments tell you.


> Revolut does not have a banking license in the US.

The US is not the entire world.

Revolut has major banking licenses in Europe, UK and Mexico. That doesn't mean it is not bank.

Wells Fargo does not operate in the UK, but it is still a major bank in the US and it is still a bank.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is a bank in the UK. Just because it doesn't operate in the US, does not mean it isn't a bank.

> Don't be gullible and believe blindly what the marketing departments tell you.

Revolut is still a major bank even if they don't operate in the US (yet).


It works in Europe, which is one of the few advantages we have over the US.


No it doesn't. You can gamble with it, but it doesn't let you own or send it.


> No it doesn't.

Yes it does.

> You can gamble with it, but it doesn't let you own or send it.

You can deposit (receive) and withdraw (send) cryptocurrencies there.

"Owning" is a matter at the private key level which of course you use a self-hosted wallet for "true" ownership. But no argument was made on ownership.

My point still stands that Revolut is a bank that allows cryptocurrencies.


It doesn't let me, it says says sending crypto is temporarily blocked. Maybe they just blocked me.


Highly country specific


"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."


It's fine to make a project that will only be interesting if people choose to contribute, and it's fine if people want to contribute.


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