tomkarlo

27 ms·

181.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Generally, the taxes and tolls levied on drivers only pay for ~50% of US road spending - the balance comes out of the general tax pool on both drivers and non-drivers, so it's (arguably) heavily subsidized. (But one could argue that no
182.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
I was thinking the same thing, but for sets of images where the occluding items are a relatively small percentage of the image area (and are moving around enough between frames), taking the median pixel value is effectively the same thing a
183.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
It's like hollywood and their summer tentpole blockbusters. The need to make a huge movie that appeals worldwide discourages studios from straying from the most formulaic pattern available, because anything new is unlikely to have the
184.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
It doesn't seem like that necessarily conflicts with native apps dominating smartphone usage - there's a significant number of use cases where a user wouldn't use an app, such as reading news articles linked from an app like
185.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
SF isn't in Silicon Valley. San Jose is one of 10 largest cities in the county and Oakland's pretty big too. I'm guessing that "San Francisco metro area" probably can't include either of those two larger cities
186.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
It's not that different, depending how far north you get in Manhattan. The distribution of housing types might be different, but things get pretty residential in the northern end of Manhattan, and you're as far away from "mid
187.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
In SF, some of the immediately adjacent areas (connected by subway) are drastically cheaper, like South SF, Oakland and Alameda. Like 50% of the cost if you look at the median sales prices. There are definitely some expensive suburbs, but
188.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Sure - it's like having a stopover at SFO and saying you've "been to San Francisco"... or at CDG and saying you "visited Paris." They're both 15 minutes from the city, too.
189.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
I kind of doubt anyone visits Oakland or San Jose (both of which are huge destinations in "the Bay Area" but have their own international airports) and says they "went to SF." I sure hope not. It's pretty clear cut
190.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Given that something like 60% of US households have two incomes, you'd have to expect that home pricing is at least somewhat tied to what you make on two incomes, not one. (And that's why you usually see these ratios in terms of m
191.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
This says more about the arbitrary nature of using city boundaries for studying home pricing than anything else. San Francisco certainly has high prices, but it also has one of the smallest footprints of any major city, and has lots of near
192.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Everyone else besides the selected students. You won't have created any kind of scalable / repeatable model that would work at the regional or national level; nobody is going to raise taxes enough to fund that and most people aren
193.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
That's a fairly common anti-fraud pattern for lots of systems: if a particular account's performance exceeds its long-term trend by a large amount (say 100% or more), it gets flagged for manual review. Once a payment goes out, it&
194.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
The scraper bots are exactly why they're making the full information available to non-logged in users, so it shows up in Google's index. I believe it's considered a no-no to show the bot a different page from a non-logged-in
195.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Yeah, that piece. It was great, but it also seemed like they're all doing business the same as in the 60's, at least from an operations standpoint.
196.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
I think this is closer to OrderAhead, which is an app that (at least in SF) a lot of restaurants use to allow you to place an order and pay for it, then just pick it up without having to wait on a register/checkout process. (My one com
197.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Car dealerships are apparently still pretty primitive in terms of inventory management - which I guess is unsurprising given that they're mostly small businesses. NPR recently did a piece on one of the top Jeep dealerships on Long Isla
198.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
You want transaction volume, not total value outstanding, to help a market absorb larger transactions. The impact of a particular trade on a market is determined by the amount of trading going on (in particular, the size of the unfilled bid
199.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truc
200.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the America
201.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
The fact that it started to roll through the terminal 2 drop-off (with me in the back) would indicate otherwise.
202.
by tomkarlo 12y ago
Yeah, but it's still added into the charge, right? I don't really worry about the components of my cab fare (including the tip), just the total.
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by tomkarlo 12y ago
The amount really isn't minimal when you consider it's a 8-12% surcharge on the typical UberX fare. Weren't they just doing a bunch of marketing about how they reduced their UberX fares 10% in SF?
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by tomkarlo 12y ago
The last time I took an Uber to SFO, the driver stepped out of the Prius without pressing the "Park" button. Maybe I would have gotten my $1 back.
205.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
Phones and small consumer electronics (even routers) have a relatively short operating life. It's a much bigger problem with systems that have a much longer expected service life and higher replacement costs, like cars, refrigerators,
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
It's one thing to express and/or support a political view that others may disagree with, within the accepted bounds of our democratic process. (You can disagree with the viewpoint, but the act of making the donatio itself isn&#x27
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
There's still an expectation that a skilled navigator can work out position and movement by hand, using charts, speed and compass headings ("dead reckoning") and have those results reasonably match/confirm the informatio
208.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
Depending on whether a fund is still in its reinvestment period, they may also not be able to put that money to work - it may automatically go back to the LPs, who aren't generally very happy to just get their money back when they&#x27
209.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
Here's a question: when you return the computer, will they review its condition for damage / mileage, the way a car dealer would for a lease return? And if not, what's the incentive to take care of it?
210.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
You'll pay for a shorter lease term with a much higher monthly payment. Depreciation isn't linear; both a car and a computer will lose value much faster during the first 6 months than during the second 6 months (much less months 1

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