Blog AF

• How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)
  Kim Mai Cutler - TechCrunch
  

  A deep dive into the history (and disaster) of the San Francisco housing crisis.

• In Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to Build, Baby, Build
  Conor Dougherty - New York Times
  

  Politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area are getting pulled in every direction, this NYT article tries to explain some of the complexities involved. In a strange coincidence, this article came out roughly a week after I read Kim-Mai’s article, linked above.

• School Is To Submit
  Overcoming Bias - Robin Hanson
  
• Machine Learning Meets Economics
  Nicolas Kruchten - Datacratic MLDB
  
• Growing a Nation Won't Always Grow Its Economy
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  When I tweeted at him asking for resources to understand the math behind this research, Noah recommended reading this pdf. To be honest, I haven’t had time for it yet.

• Domino's: Pizza and Payments
  Paul Price
  
• The Sacrificial Pancake
  Neal Sales-Griffin
  

  A great analogy that prompts us to get started, knowing that, most likely, we’ll fail at first.

• Cellmates
  Radiolab (Podcast)
  

  Recommended mostly for its first half, which talks about energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. Another book to add to the list.

• Richard Jones on Transhumanism
  EconTalk (Podcast)
  

Two weekends, one post. Mostly shot with my new 24mm 2.8f lens :) More...

• Broken Promises: The Housing Market in SF (And Ten Ideas to Fix It)
  Zac Townsend
  

  A clear economic analysis of the housing market in San Francisco, its history, its distortions, and its intricacies. Zac makes good arguments, proposes attainable solutions, and brings examples of other cities arount the U.S. that have solved similar housing crises before.

• The Weird Redemption of SF's Most Reviled Tech Bro
  Lauren Smiley - Backchannel
  

  While the city officials’ skepticism is understandable, their stubbornness to work with a capable person due to his background is not. Two very unexpected things I learned from this piece: 1) San Francisco’s homeless population has been around 6000 for over 25 years. 2) between nonprofits and city departments, $241M/year are spent on supporting San Francisco’s homeless population. That is, roughly $40k per person.

• Declining Mobility and Restrictions on Land Use
  Alex Tabarrok - Marginal Revolution
  
• A 26-Story History of San Francisco
  Alexis Madrigal - The Atlantic
  

  I went to a meetup at 140 New Montgomery this week. The event was unremarkable, but the venue was odd. This essay tells its story.

• On your marks. Get set. Go. The fourth Facebook goldrush just started.
  Jeremy Liew - Lightspeed Venture Partners
  

  Everyone is talking about bots.

• Why Kik Thinks Chatbots Will Kill Webpages
  Cliff Kuang - Fast Company
  
• What the iPhone has done to cameras is completely insane
  Roberto A. Ferdman - The Washington Post
  
• Stop Voter Suppression
  Robert Reich
  
• What Bernie Sanders Gets Right
  Mark Thoma - The Fiscal Times
  

  As usual, Thoma asks the right questions. I am particularly interested in the “how is the social interest is defined?” aspect of his article. When companies, and identities, span across the world, our definitions of society change too.

• Losing Money
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  
• Film Dialogue
  Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels - Polygraph
  

Between researching camera lenses and teaching myself machine learning, there hasn’t been much reading lately.

• How to Hack an Election
  Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis - Bloomberg
  
• Cities for Everyone
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• The time that Tony Fadell sold me a container of hummus.
  Arlo Gilbert - Medium
  
• The Lamborghini and The Dingbat
  Let's Go LA
  

  As the source name implies, this is not about San Francisco, but Los Angeles. “…we can’t solve society’s mobility problems by trying to ensure that everyone gets a $250,000 car. We don’t need subsidized Lamborghinis, we need Honda Civics.”

• Mathematicians mapped out every "Game of Thrones" relationship to find the main character
  Adam Epstein - Quartz
  

  Unsurprisingly, its Tyrion.

• Apple at 40: The forgotten founder who gave it all away
  Dave Lee - BBC News
  
• Agility Requires Safety
  Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman - The Macro
  
• The Future of Capital Mobility
  Samuel Hammond - Plain Text — Medium
  
• Techies
  Helena Price
  

I have been thinking of buying a new 24mm lens, so this weekend I challenged myself to only take pictures with that focal distance. Not zooming is hard, especially when taking photos of strangers you don’t want to get too close to. Here is the outcome: More...