Opendoor (https://www.opendoor.com) | In Person | San Francisco, CA | Full-time We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you.
yan at [our domain].com :D
Opendoor (https://www.opendoor.com) | San Francisco, CA | Full-time
We're hiring engineers across the stack at Opendoor. We're building technology to simplify residential real estate - making it easier to buy and sell homes. Our engineering challenges span everything from marketplace dynamics and pricing models to complex operational workflows and integrations with industry systems. If you're interested in applying technology to modernize a massive, traditional industry, we'd love to hear from you.
The fundamental piece you are missing with your logic is that the negative externalities of driving a car are massive and not borne by those making the choice to drive. This leads to people choosing to drive a car at a rate that is much higher than the optimal balance for society. The best way to control for these negative externalities (risks to pedestrians, noise, pollution, congestion) is with a tax. In the US, we subsidize car usage in an eye watering and incredibly unfair way, which results in overuse of cars. If public policy were to better reflect the actual costs of driving a car, few would be able to afford it or choose it over other options
How are these externalities not borne by drivers? People with cars in nyc presumably park them on their local street that is clogged up with other neighbors cars. They drive them on nearby roads like the various expressways that cut up their own boroughs. They are very much bearing these external costs and taking advantage of their affordances. Its not like bronx drivers are protesting the various expressways that cut up their bronx neighborhood, parking cars to block the ramps or cut off access, no, they use those expressways all the same as any other driver and do benefit from the convenience and job access they bring.
Even in the first few sentances of that article I don't understand the situation they build about who pays for what. They say auto exaust is an example of an externality since car users presumably aren't affected by its ills. Here I am thinking they certainly pay for it in terms of a tradeoff between worse local air quality and convenience. Maybe some people believe things must only be paid in cash and not through time or experience.
The cognitive dissonance people have around this issue is astonishing. We are willing to ground the 737MAX fleet when a few people get a (surely terrifying) open air flying experience; but 44,000 people are killed on the road in the US _every_ year (and rising!) and very few people seem to care. In most age cohorts, death by car is the largest killer. In the US you have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in a car crash in your lifetime. Even simple and completely reasonable measures to reduce these insane numbers are seen as some kind of tyrannical affront to ones freedom (see the current CA measure to add speed limiters).
The car industry, car culture, and car centric thinking in the US and much of the world is totally out of control.
I too have thought a lot about this cognitive dissonance. I think that there are several differences to the two issues, and so, in people's attitude towards it too.
One, I think, is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different. Something bad happening while being passive is much more horrifying because of the powerlessness.
The other is that cars and driving environments differ a lot, while planes are much more similar to each other. What I mean by this is that it's easier to dissociate the car deaths, because that happens to some other people over there, nothing like me, but plane badness happens to everyday folk in a big winged tube, like me.
I think that if we drove the planes ourselves, the issues would be much more similar. And similarly, if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes.
> is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different.
Correct. An all-too-popular viewpoint is, "I'm a good driver, unlike everybody else on the road!".
> if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes
I believe this is the case already. A train or bus kills a few hundred a year, it makes national news for a week. Don't get me wrong, it's a tragedy and needs to be fixed. But then, those 44k car-related deaths are continually brushed aside.
The illusion of control. Most humans are instinctual predisposed to it, and it generally has to be unlearned. It's why blackjack is much more popular than roulette in a casino, even though there is much more room to play blackjack sub-optimally, but effectively zero chance of playing roulette in a way that hurts your chances of winning.
Even if you know you aren't a good driver, you would still carry around the idea that it was your own fault for not being a better driver. Its really the level of personal agency involved (and the sense of that agency being taken away) that causes the brushing aside.
I think the dissonance is surely curbed when sitting in a plane at cruising altitude realising that I am much more worried if these engines break down as opposed to my car, as I am likely to fall out of the sky.
Planes if broken down fall from the sky. Cars that breakdown don't. The people operating the plane are well trained, any tom dick and harry can drive a car without any check on their mental and physical state before they hop behind the wheel.
It's wild to me how much Youtube TV costs and yet they still serve you tons of ads. Coming from youtube premium where occasionally I have to skip through a preroll ad, I forget how much you are bombarded with ads while watching traditional TV. The fact that you have to pay the princely sum of $73/month on top of that boggles my mind. I canceled when they raised the price from $35/month and I'll never go back at these prices...
Just because lots of people seem to be getting confused, "pre-roll ad" isn't the right term for this. Pre-roll is one of those ads YouTube forces you to watch 5-30 seconds of before you can skip it, and when they play before the video starts. Mid-roll ads are the same thing, but interrupting the middle of the video. And Post-roll are ones that play after the video is over.
What you're referring to are usually called sponsored segments. They're ads, but they're just a part of the video file you're being served. They're not dynamically targeted or cycled out. So if a LTT video is sponsored by ASUS, every viewer will see the same sponsored bit about ASUS because as far as youtube knows, it's a genuine part of your video, not a slot for an ad bid.
They're still annoying, but it's not a pre-roll ad. You don't get those with Premium.
Thanks for clarifying. I was worried that the parent was actually seeing real pre-roll ads with the subscription that would eventually get rolled out to everyone.
Doesn’t matter how the pre-roll ad is served or who is serving it. The customer wants to pay for no ads, and that includes removing ads otherwise embedded into the video. The fact that ads people see this as out-of-scope demonstrates how little ads people want to make a product that users want. It’s all about burning the dumb money of advertisers and abusing the users along the way.
If you had just said ad, I would agree with you. But a pre-roll ad is a specific type of youtube that many people are familiar with but don't know the proper name of. That's my point. The OP comment does not get pre-roll ads with premium. But they still get sponsor segment ads.
That's an implementation detail leak: for the end user it's just an advertisement. Call it as you want, but when I pay premium and you write "no ads" I want no ads. That's it.
I don't care that the content provider found a way to show ads. I have a contract with you - you have to figure it out.
Youtube doesn't get any money from sponsored segments. It's a direct deal between the channel owner and the sponsor.
The only way it gets YouTube additional money is because it lets those channels put out more frequent or higher budget videos, which usually leads to more views.
When I said "they" I meant: content providers, service providers and so on.
I frankly don't care at all, I will never buy Youtube TV. However, justifying this behavior is ludicrous, even if YouTube doesn't monetize on such content.
It's just unfair - you pay for no ads, and ...well you do get them because "the file..."
I am more of the opinion that things were actually simpler before, even with analog TV. You knew what to expect. Now you pay 70$ per month, but hey, the file (?) you are streaming (?) contains an advertisement. Who cares?
I just want to watch a show. Without ads, because I paid to have no ads.
But hey we're a young generation, so we understand that it's not Youtube's fault... (?). Sorry, but no way! You are the service provider - you choose what goes through your platform. When I pay, you can't treat me like "you're (still) the product, sorry". That's for me unacceptable.
Movie trailers are a bit different than coca cola ads, come on...
Plus, offer the chance to choose: with the amount of metadata flying through our networks, they are even able to guess what I ate for lunch, ... can't they really offer a checkbox like "show/don't show movie trailers"?
They are Youtube, not random startup run by a guy working on it over the weekends...
Where it gets really confusing is podcast networks (like Spotify exclusives, but also others) offer the ability to cycle out the sponsored segment. So you may be listening to a Conan O'Briend podcast episode from 2016 and hear an ad break of Conan recommending you check out some tv show airing this Saturday, October 16 2023.
But YouTube doesn't let video makes swap out parts of a video without re-uploading the whole thing and losing your viewcount. From what I've heard they have let some very big channels swap out things without it being considered a new video. But that's for the sake of avoiding copyright or fixing a dangerous error. Not for sponsorships.
Will get more and more difficult. This morning Youtube kicked me out because I was using adblock origin. And update fixed it, but if they start putting DRM...
I really appreciate creators who add chapters to their YouTube videos, especially their sponsorship advertisements, since you can easily skip over them.
While I like Nebula on premise, it seems creators on it are getting 'lazier' and some of the people on the site are downright questionable ("TL;DR News" and "Therapist Reacts" being the biggest offenders for me)
Is that really Nebula's fault? YouTube, TikTok, etc. are full of garbage too.
I don't really know their arrangement with creators (one would hope creators get a bigger cut there, otherwise why leave YouTube?), but my favorite creators* have the same videos on both, just a little earlier on Nebula usually.
*Just engineering channels though, which is probably why they're not as spammy/shock-reaction-y.
The way they're marketing themselves I didn't think I would have to curate their content myself. How much do I need do I need to pay to not have to sift through brain-numbing clickbait diarrhea?
At that point you might as well just kill your time on YouTube. Plenty of good channels there too - if you can stand the stench of the heap of trash they're buried under.
Oh, I never thought of Nebula as a curation service, just a hosting service that the creators I like seem to prefer (who knows why, maybe they get paid more there or have some promotion with them?). But I eventually moved back to YouTube too, for unrelated reasons (auto captions etc.)
I don't think any video site these days can be easily "browsed" if you want to avoid the garbage :( It's all about picking and choosing specific channels/creators to follow and ignoring the crap... sadly.
Are you unfamiliar with Little Joel? Big Joel has actual deep analysis if you like, but Little Joel is just a silly side channel of his. You're paying for this, plus also multi-hour-long analysis of, say, media analysis contrasting with the role of Jewish people who were coerced to cooperate with the Nazis in concentration camps.
Nebula is meant to serve a variety of videos. I'd probably feel the same of "I have to watch ads for this crap?" for YouTube, y'know?
You may be paying Nebula, but like all UGC platforms, it can't show you what it doesn't have. Social media video is heavy on lazy "TLDR", and light on substance.
If you dislike them, check out the SponsorBlock extension, which will skip in-video ads. While you're at it, also get DeArrow, which chooses a random frame as the thumbnail and allows community written titles that accurately describe the videos.
I think you and the comment you replied to are talking about different things. The comment you replied to IS talking about skipping these inline ads without paying (SponsorBlock). If you aren't using it and are watching the same videos, you're also seeing these ads.
xdennis is asking why bother paying for premium if you still need to use sponsorblock. Why not just use sponsorblock + (uBlock Origin, or yt-dl, or etc) to remove both forms of ads for free.
I was a Google Music All Access member since day 1 or whatever, they grandfathered me into YouTube Premium ('Red' at the time) and I was okay with that. Then my card expired, they cancelled my Music All Access, and when I re-enabled it, I no longer had YouTube Premium, I had to all of a sudden go out of my way to pay an extra $9 a month for it. I went with Apple Music as soon as I went iPhone and have not bothered to pay Google anymore. All Music Access was amazing, forcing me to YouTube is a poor choice that had they not gone that route I would still be on All Music Access. Apple One is superior in many ways anyway. I rather not be with a company that re-brands existing services then axes them when there's zero need to do so.
My significant other watches sports, so the comparison to YT Premium doesn't count for us. It was either be subjected to ads and pay a lot of money or be subjected to ads and pay a medium-small amount of money.
But as someone who has never paid for cable TV before, I agree that it's jarring. Our trick is to only watch things we've marked to be recorded, which allows ad skipping. (On demand and live don't allow skipping. Starting a sportsball game an hour late gives plenty of buffer.)
Plus they always seem to be taking away channels too. Here in NY, they removed SNY. It’s like ok if you’re raising prices, make sure you aren’t taking things away!
There are a number of reasons why battery swapping is not feasible in the real world, among them:
- Batteries age differently from one another, so swapping would only be fair if you had a similarly aged battery that had a similar number of miles & charge cycles on it
- Batteries need to be taken care of (like not using the last 10% at each limit of the battery). some people take really good care of their batteries, others don't. I would never want some random battery swapped into my car, as I've taken really good care of my car's battery
- Batteries are structurally built into the vehicle, and making them easily removable would make a lot of the engineering more difficult
- Batteries could become commoditized so that they fit in any car, but right now there are tons of different shaped & sized batteries, so it would be really hard to build the tooling to support all these different cars & battery types
3blue1brown gives me hope that there are a few Michael Jordan level teachers out there, and youtube/the internet will allow us to find those people and reward them appropriately
> 3blue1brown gives me hope that there are a few Michael Jordan level teachers out there…
The basketball player (Michael Jeffrey Jordan) or machine learning professor (Michael Irwin Jordan at Cal Berkeley)?
If the former, surely we have better role models for teaching than a basketball player. Apologies for the prodding, but cross-domain idolatry gets me riled up.
For me and thousands of others, Grant Sanderson, creator of 3b1b, is the archetype of an internet-era world class educator. Thanks Grant.
> … and youtube/the internet will allow us to find those people and reward them appropriately
Yes, there are many others across various fields. While profits can be a useful motivator, we don’t want that to be the only mechanism. Education isn’t only about the most profitable topics or the students already best situated to learn.
Coffee friend here! This is the way!
When people get me coffee or coffee paraphernalia as a gift, they tend to fall into a number of traps:
- Not understanding my nuanced preferences and getting me something I know about and don't like
- Not appreciating how to choose a good product (for example, with beans, an old roast date of more than 30 days means sad & stale coffee)
- Getting me something I like but I already have
In many cases I of course smile and am polite, and of course I am truly grateful for the thought, _but_ there is a level of disappointment which I have to hide because it saddens me to be wasteful, and I don't like putting on a performance. There are very few if any coffee things that I like but don't have, and are at a gift level price point (<$100). For consumables like filters and beans I have nuanced preference and it's unlikely that you'll happen to choose something that I like, but very likely that you'll choose something I know I don't like.
From this experience as a recipient, I have learned to be very careful about the gifts I give to others. I steer clear of things in the realm of someones passions, and try to share something I know and love. For example, I don't give whiskey lovers whiskey, or whiskey glasses, because I don't know what kind of whiskey they like, and I'm likely to give them something they know and don't like! So often times I'll use my superpower of knowing a lot about coffee to give the whiskey lover a high quality coffee that they would probably have more difficulty finding or choosing themselves. A great conversation can ensue where I can share why I think that coffee is great and interesting, and why I think they'll enjoy it.
Conversely, when Whiskey person wants to get me a gift, I would much prefer they give me a whiskey they like and think is great, and explain it's merits to me. I don't know much about whiskey, so it's easy to wow me and I love learning about it from friends who do!
One of the funnier problems I ran into recently was when a friend who actually understood my coffee preferences pretty well (though I don't think he actually grasps my preferences fully) got me coffee that was actually not bad, except that I already had way too much (and more preferable) coffee in the freezer.
Fortunately, even if I don't end up brewing all of it, I don't let it go to waste. In the past, I combined all of this throwaway coffee to season some new fancy burrs.
The car has done so much damage to our world and most people are completely blind to it. Obesity, climate change, isolation/loneliness, excess deaths/injuries from collisions, out of control housing costs, can all be tied back in a major way to car centric society. And yet people will defend their car and the "convenience" of it like their life depends on it, and force it down the throats of everyone around them. Boggles the mind.
If it helps, it's the result of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign. I usually point to "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM for the story.
We can see what traffic was like just as motorized carriages began to mix with pedestrians and horses. Here is "San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906" upscaled and colorized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
You can see that, at low speeds and modest density, carriages and pedestrians flow together just fine. Although I'm sure there were still lots of accidents, everyone is more-or-less sharing the space. You can already see the problem brewing: horseless carriages can accelerate much faster than horse-drawn carriages.
The modern human sits for 95% of the day. We evolved to forage out in the environment for resources, not to wake up just to sit at breakfast then sit in the car then sit at work then sit in the car then sit in front of the tv or computer then sleep. It's no wonder so many people have issues with maintaining a healthy weight when they literally aren't moving in a given day.
Car-oriented development seems to scale efficiently - bringing in a lot of new, cheap land - up until you hit the level of traffic that people will tolerate. Then it's done. New neighborhoods take too long to commute from. Densifying existing neighborhoods threatens parking, which people who live there still need, because they still live in an overall car-dependent metro. Overlaying public transit doesn't do much either, since people's origins and destinations are evenly dispersed instead of clustering around stations like they would in a real public transit city. Without transportation capacity there's no growth, and without growth it's a zero sum competition for existing homes.
You can get a whole hell of a lot further before you hit the physical limits of public transit network architectures.
Housing density becomes a problem above a certain level if everyone expects to use a car. Parking and traffic become annoying if not crippling, so communities widely support and enact bans on denser residential development.
Restricting supply like this can be fine if demand doesn't grow, but it can be a huge problem for housing affordability if your local economy is booming.
Easy, supply and demand. Before cars, dense housing was the norm, but cars popularized spreading everything out as much as possible so you have room for wide roads and lots of parking.
Less density -> less housing overall -> decreased supply -> increased prices
Not to mention the increased cost of maintaining the infrastructure for all of that suburban sprawl. The farther apart things are the more asphalt, water and sewage pipes, fire department coverage, school buses and drivers, street lamps, etc. are required. That money has to come from somewhere.
I'm working on a team to make alternative YouTube recommendations. Here is our list of similar channels for Not Just Bikes which includes dozens of urban design and transit channels like Oh the Urbanity! and Shifter:
Less density doesn't imply less housing, especially when empty land is cheap, as it typically is in the USA. You just use more space.
I hate cars, and I hate how expensive housing is, but as far as I can tell, housing is even more expensive in places (in the USA anyway) where cars are less necessary.
This is mostly due to supply and demand. Disregarding market forces, low density housing is some of the most expensive out there. This is due to higher per-unit construction, utility, transportation, and infrastructure costs.
Unfortunately, low density construction is the default in the USA. High density housing gets bogged down in reviews and permitting, and medium density housing is effectively illegal in most cities in the country.
If we had actually been building medium and high density housing over the past century, the housing problems we're experiencing today wouldn't be nearly as bad. But that housing is sadly rare, and we now have to play catch-up.
Do you have a citation for this? My intuition is that the construction of low density track housing would have far less regulatory burden than high density housing. It also has a (more) robust labor force in the US especially compared with high density construction, a framing carpenter does not a steel fitter make.
> High density housing gets bogged down in reviews and permitting,
Yes, because it's more high stakes and should be subject to a greater level of scrutiny than a 1-2 story single family dwelling. Check out the Millennium tower debacle or that apartment building that collapsed in Florida if you think otherwise.
I don't have a citation for construction costs, and I will concede that there are many factors that may make some low density developments cheaper per unit then some higher density development.
However, construction is only part of the picture. Low density development imposes terrible financial costs for cities that contain them. That's because the taxable value per square mile is much lower, but infrastructure (sewer, roads, etc) has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs. The infrastructure maintenance costs in many low density developments is often greater then the amount of tax revenue the development generates.
For more information on the hidden costs of low density development, I can't recommend this video [1] by Not Just Bikes enough.
> has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs.
No it doesn't, the cost to tear up a street in a high density area is much higher than it is in a low density area, especially if we are looking at hidden economic costs.
The problem is that the supply/demand argument is that the demand largely isn't from people, it's from investment firms. And investment firms don't give two hoots about neighborhoods, density, cars, or anything other than the property's value appreciating over time (which it will, since we can't (without spending gobs of money) create more land).
Also, my personal opinion: I never want to live in a dense, or even semi-dense population center again. Living in a single family detached home with a small yard is fantastic. I can use speakers.
Condos are much worse speculation vehicles compared to houses, since most of what you own is (depreciating) structure compared to (appreciating) land. To the extent that you want housing for people vs. speculators, you want multifamily.
You're comparing only the densest places (i.e. expensive places with mostly apartments) to only the least dense places, giant houses on big lots. Look at a pre-1950s / railroad neighborhood of basically any smaller/older city in the US, you'll often find a walkable, affordable neighborhood of single family homes.
Also - cheap land does not mean that it's cheap to build and maintain. Almost all of the infrastructure required to build (sewer, power, roads, etc) scale up with area, not density.
You should spend some time and look at what housing prior to cars was really like as you are very wrong that "dense housing was the norm".
Prior to cars, there were large "estate" houses with separate carriage houses for the horses. These homes often sat on very large plots of land. Prior to that, was old farm houses, where a neighbour could be a KM away?
You seem to be thinking of "row housing" which at least in north america was more a post-WWII design?
A developer can only build if they can achieve a 5-6% return on total costs
So 5% of $50k = $2,500 of income, or assuming 30% expenses, $2,500 / 70% margin = $3,500 of income needed per stall per year, or almost $300 per month per stall of underground parking provided
Surface parking is less expensive, like $10-20k/stall but you get the point.
Where do the surface parking costs ($10-20k/stall) come from? That's astonishing to me -- I would guess that a dirt driveway can be almost free, a gravel driveway can be close to free, and a paved driveway costs a few hundred per car space.
