Viewing profile — tallowen

Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case. Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) h…

A person who drives 12k miles per year in an small vehicle will need about 4000 kWh of electricity or about 600 gallons of gas. Australians are able to buy solar panels that will g…

AC has higher losses over a transmission wire because of the changing magnetic field that it induces which creates losses.

To me this feels a little like saying "the federal government doesn't know when people are born because births are registered with local governments". In practice this is all a mat…

A car sale is an activity that is already registered with the government. It doesn't seem impossible for the data about an electric vehicle sale and it's purchase price to make its…

My lessons from working on IRS direct file lead me to believe there are a couple reasons: 1) How the welfare state is administered - as an example, the US does a child tax credit a…

It's nice to see an open sourced implementation of the US tax code! This was part of the IRS Direct File codebase that allowed people to file their taxes for free, directly with th…

> Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion? I did some math and you're clearly right. I think I imagined that with driver-less vehicles leaving much more frequentl…

Thanks for sharing this, I had understood prior to this video that the combo of self driving tech + dedicated tunnels might have capacity that rival a light rail system like Seattl…

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks throug…

Although these systems are similar in goals, they are pretty different in terms of how they're structured: - Direct File: Was built by the US government to make tax filing easier -…

The US tax code isn't created to work like this. Direct file asked many questions about things like dependent children, whether you're blind and whether you have an HSA - all thing…

In fact it did do that! Direct File imported W2s, 1099-INTs and other data during the filing season that ended in April. https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-…

There is a bunch of code to import w2s from the SSA in this codebase - this did happen this year for direct file. That being said, big issues remain: - Employers don't tell the fed…

I think this is great to think about however I think many of the same lessons may still apply and can and should be applied now in a forward looking way: From the article: > Wherea…

There are a bunch of things that still are language or language architecture specific. How you do manage web servers and starting / stopping processes Traditionally, PHP/Ruby/Pytho…

Portland's trams don't move anywhere close to 35mph as the OP mentioned. Portland's trams are quite capacity constrained due to needing to navigate the short blocks and many inters…

Plain hybrids currently do sell better than PHEVs or EVs. I'm not sure in which "best of both worlds" a standard hybrid is better than a PHEV - a PHEV allows for cheaper fuel (grid…

The current salary cap for any programmer (or any non executive level roll) that is a federal employee is currently $191,900. I’m glad the hiring requirements are being updated but…

This news feels in stark contrast to apples announcements this week. The price of tech hardware is not keeping up with the target 2-3% inflation. Will higher pricing for software m…

As someone who has lived in the southwest, it can't be understated how important the issue of water is. One thing to keep in mind is that most estimates place human consumption of …

I agree that it could be worse! Facebook has significant (if not more) time spent and I found adding features to news feed a heck of a lot easier than adding features that interact…

I think I have heard similar things from other googlers and I think there might be two factors on why I think this: - I worked on Google Assistant which was responsible for integra…

I always find these comments about interesting, having worked at Facebook and Google, I never quite felt this way about Google's Monorepo. Facebook had many of the features you lis…

From the recreational perspective (summer hiking / back-country skiing) - the forests are night and day difference. Having a map of what has been logged and what has not often is t…