Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | CBLT's commentslogin

People are quick to point out that induced demand exists - especially people that aren't fond of change.

Very broadly speaking, people mis-estimate effect sizes in economics by orders of magnitude. Induced demand is just their foothold to claim an effect exists, before they go about claiming the effect size they want to see.


How would induced demand work for housing? I understand it for say transit use or car travel or like Facebook visits, but when there's twice as much housing do I... buy another home? Buying extra houses as "an investment" in a culture that is hell bent on depreciating my investment by building more housing is one of those "r/WallStBets" crazy plays, if I'm wrong I will lose my shirt and everybody will laugh at me.

Also, even if that were a problem, which seems dubious, you can regulate it. Massive tax hikes for second and subsequent homes are a thing in some places.


I love induced demand. I'm going to use it to get rich - buy up some abandoned town somewhere, and then pay to run a 100 lane superhighway to it; induced demand means the town will fill up instantly and be hugely valuable!

It doesn’t work unless there is currently repressed demand for living in that abandoned town because not enough housing or other factors.

No one is complaining about a housing shortage today in buffalo which used to have twice as much housing stock as it does today, because the demand simply isn’t there now.


Exactly - induced demand is just a misnomer/misunderstanding. "Pent-up demand" would be a much better way to explain it - but that would reveal that at some point the demand ceases; even SF has some limit - once all 12 billion people live there, demand will level off.

Good analogy. I've always considered induced demand a bit of a fantasy.

New businesses the sprout up that market themselves certainly induce a bit of demand, but more lanes and stoplights doesn't exactly motivate people to want to go somewhere.


I use a PR notifier chrome extension, so I have a badge on the toolbar whenever a PR is waiting on me. I get to them in typically <2 minutes during work hours because I tab over to chrome whenever AI is thinking. Sometimes I even get to browse HN if not enough PRs are coming and not too many parallel work sessions.

I've had great experiences being managed twice by very humble engineers who've made the transition to EM. Both were sacked within the year by their boss because they didn't play the corporate politics game.


It's so disheartening to learn that one works for a manager who doesn't care about having the most skilled team, or best product, but rather someone who has selected for "Who will kiss up to me no matter what? Who will never tell me anything I don't want to hear?"


If you're following a pipe (such as `kubectl logs | less +F`), <C-c> is sent to all processes in a pipeline, so it stops less from following and it stops the other process entirely. Then you can't start following again with F, or load more data in with G.

Less provides an alternative of <C-x> to stop following, but that is intercepted by most shells.


> Less provides an alternative of <C-x> to stop following, but that is intercepted by most shells.

WoW, thanks a lot! That was my pain for many years. C-x works in Gnome Console just fine.


Funnily enough, it literally tells you right there on the bottom line: “Waiting for data... (^X or interrupt to abort)”. No shame in not noticing, just another case of blindness to long-familliar messages I guess.


By the shell or by the kernel’s terminal discipline or by the terminal emulator? AFAIU the shell is basically out of the picture while `less` is running.


I can <C-z> while less is running to background that process using the shell, so the shell is clearly not completely gone.

I might be misremembering, but I think I just had to rebind <C-x> in zsh to get less working.


> I can <C-z> while less is running to background that process using the shell, so the shell is clearly not completely gone.

The shell isn’t gone, but it isn’t active either from what I understand. The function of converting the user’s typing ^Z on a terminal (or a ^Z arriving on the master end of a pseudoterminal) into a SIGTSTP signal to the terminal’s foreground process group is[1] a built-in function of the kernel, much like for ^C and SIGINT or ^\ and SIGQUIT. (The use of ^Z resp. ^C or ^\ specifically, as well as the function being active at all, is configurable via a TTY ioctl wrapped by termios wrapped in turn by `stty susp` resp. `stty intr` or `stty quit`.) So is the default signal action of stopping (i.e. suspending) the process in response to that signal. The shell just sees its waitpid() syscall return and handles the possibility of that having happened due to the process stopping rather than dying (by updating its job bookkeeping, making itself the foreground process group again, and reëntering the REPL).

I am not saying that doing job control by filtering the child’s input would be a bad design in the abstract, and it is how terminal multiplexers work for instance. I admit the idea of kernel-side support for shell job control is pretty silly, it’s just how it’s traditionally done in a Unix system.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Concepts-...


Whew! Advanced Unix system programming level stuff. I've dabbled a bit in that field, in C, on Unix, some older versions on PCs. It was fun. Any recommendation for a tutorial style book or site or blog on the subject, other than man pages and the Kerrisk book (TLPI, which is more of a reference), for Linux?


I think by "out of the picture" PP meant that the shell is not processing the input, not that it has exited.

C-z is not processed by the shell but by the terminal "infrastructure".

You can disable it, or change the key binding, and a lot more, with stty(1).


Is my adblocker blocking them? I only saw the stack of tars in a coat. Didn't break the article's flow for me.


I also only saw that, but the text feels a bit fluffed out by AI as well, if I’m not mistaken.


It’s not. It’s been through several editing rounds. (I was one of the editors.) In theory, we don’t have a problem with AI generated content if it meets our high editorial requirements, but all Tweag technical blogs go through a rigorous, manual review and editing process to keep standards high.


As I've read through the post, seeing phrases like "Why this matters for performance", usage of em-dashes and lists/bullet points, screams AI written to me. I appreciate you saying it wasn't, but such is the fate of who wrote this to write like LLMs do nowadays. I also liked to use em-dashes and bullet lists but am consciously avoiding them now.


I interviewed a guy from Microsoft who was working on AI, and he literally speaks like this.

Like, using the words "leverage", "matters for...", "as for", and so on. And you could almost hear him doing the bullet points.

When you work with AI a lot, it changes your vocabulary.


That's absurd emdash I work with AI constantly and have noticed no such durable lexical shift.


My current company started on AWS/GCP for the credits. Right now we're on Lambda for the GPU prices and GKE for some webservers that we cba to move. We dual-upload data to s3 and gcs still (which isn't too expensive, it's effectively write-only and the auto-archive features work for us). Cloud SQL database but pgBackRest to the other cloud.

We're not HA across clouds; we decided to chase RPO over RTO.


About once a week I see someone cut in even though the person is literally tailgating. The driver at the back has to brake+swerve to not cause a high speed collision. There's actually nothing you can do to prevent these people from getting ahead of you. Don't worry about what they'll do, it's insane anyways. Just try not to die.


I'm there right now at my current job. It's always the same engineer, and they always get a pass because (for some reason) they don't have to do design reviews for anything they do, but they go concern-troll everyone else's designs.

Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve this particular component. This engineer got invited, and spent thr entire allocated meeting time spreading FUD about all the options we gathered. Management decided on inaction.


People think management sucks at hiring good talent (which is sometimes true, but I have worked with some truly incredible people), but one of the most consistent and costly mistakes I’ve observed over my career has been management's poor ability to identify and fire nuisance employees.

I don’t mean people who “aren't rockstars” or people for whom some things take too long, or people who get things wrong occasionally (we all do).

I mean people who, like you describe, systemically undermine the rest of the team’s work.

I’ve been on teams where a single person managed to derail an entire team’s delivery for the better part of a year, despite the rest of the team screaming at management that this person was taking huge shortcuts, trying to undermine other people’s designs in bad faith, bypassing agreed-upon practices and rules and then lying about it, pushing stuff to production without understanding it, etc.

Management continued to deflect and defer until the team lead and another senior engineer ragequit over management’s inaction and we missed multiple deadlines at which point they started to realize we weren’t just making this up for fun.


Google's monorepo is in fact terabytes with no binaries. It does stretch the definition of source code though - a lot of that is configuration files (at worst, text protos) which are automatically generated.


Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: