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    Devon Zuegel

    devonzuegel.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2018

    Devon Zuegel writes essays on cities, zoning, housing, urbanism, economics and software, often drawing on travel and field notes.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    Culture & SocietyEconomicsWriting & Thinking
    What HN says

    HN links it for housing and zoning pieces such as North American versus Japanese zoning, and for reposted essays like Shirky's Situated Software.

    Stats for nerds
    57HN people shared it
    54linked in comments
    2.8Kstory points
    Aug 2026last shared
    2018people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      The Silence Is Deafening
      3 people · 554 points · first shared 2020 · 225 comments on HN
    2. 2
      We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)
      4 people · 386 points · first shared 2018 · 335 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Remote work will break the US monopoly on global talent
      1 person · 308 points · first shared 2021 · 513 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Inflation propagates unevenly
      2 people · 247 points · first shared 2022 · 278 comments on HN
    5. 5
      North American vs. Japanese zoning
      9 people · 227 points · first shared 2018 · 320 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Field notes: London, England (2018)
      1 person · 205 points · first shared 2019 · 355 comments on HN
    7. 7
      Travel photos are underrated (2019)
      3 people · 177 points · first shared 2019 · 118 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Continuous urbanization in Japan
      1 person · 117 points · first shared 2018 · 49 comments on HN
    9. 9
      Argentina's currency exchange black markets
      2 people · 99 points · first shared 2022 · 143 comments on HN
    10. 10
      The road to hell is paved with asphalt
      2 people · 97 points · first shared 2024 · 100 comments on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • KagerjayAug 2018

      I use an app called dynalist, I use it to keep track of all my sprint notes

      I wrote this sometime last year, but its a general gist of how I do things

      http://vincentmtang.com/2017/11/03/making-an-annual-work-summary-with-dynalist/

      This is how I generally organize myself

      http://vincentmtang.com/2018/08/03/how-i-organize-myself/

      I quadruple gif scrubbed this here so you can see the big picture. I have some personal information that I didn't really want to share

      https://i.imgur.com/KXPjNLr.gif

      Each of those little red dots = one week's worth of notes. The notes above the first little red dot is today's notes.

      When I expand the list item, those are all my daily sprint logs of things I achieved and major notable things that happened during the day. There all organized with the latest date appearing up top.

      I organized my weekly logs (those red dots) the same way. The farther you scroll down the page, the more older weekly snapshots you see

      What you see on my left side are all my notes, some are courses, some are project documents. What your seeing on the right is just my journal notes only

      some of my notes are journal notes is just what people do with rubber duckies. I talk to myself asking myself things I need to do. Today, this is what my journal notes looked like:

      ------------------------------------------------------------------

      3PM @codepen

      - [screenshot] of work done with a frontend component I made on codepen

      1PM @vendor-tag

      - Meeting with {{XYZ}} vendor

      -…

    • dredmorbiusJul 2020

      I could (and arguably should) have added "gatekeeping" as another function of the higher-education system, a role that manifests in multiple ways: admissions, graduation, faculty, curricula, publications. Whilst fixing a few typos I thought of adding that but enough time had already lapsed that it felt like a stealth change of excess magnitude. Consider it added here.

      What you call a racketeering scam ... is an argument with merits, but it also reflects another persistent pragmatic informational reality: assessment costs of complex informational goods, such as highly-trained higher-education graduates, are high. Universities effectively play two simultaneous roles: both shaping and measuring (and certifying) educational accomplishment. The flipside of this which you note, is a perennial HN favourite topic: how broken the tech hiring process is from both sides. For the employee and for the employer. At another level, it's the problem faced by both VC and founders in startup launches, and for users and marketers in product. Branding, reviews, resumes, certifications, and other shibboleths serve as information-simplifying mechanisms. See Akerlof's "Market for Lemons". Discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895171 and in context of hiring here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12671290

      The resulting process remains ... highly frustrating and unsatisfying. For me as much as anyone else. But it's another of those persistent behaviours that…

    • mudrockbestgirlSep 2022

      I don't really agree with the original post and I don't buy into the "purely digital world" argument. I'm excited about crypto for different reasons. But a few thoughts:

      > So then the question becomes, what is the value of <insert coin here>. Some will talk about energy, or efficiency. Some will talk about scarcity. Some will talk tech merits. But nobody to date has been able to convince me that it has any real value. There are no armies or economies validating it.

      Why are stocks without dividends worth anything? Companies have earnings. Many protocols have earnings as well, and they are built on top of Ethereum, which provides the security layer. What do you mean by "real value"?

      > Said another way, if someone gives me 10k in cash, I have faith it will still be worth 10k in a year(ignoring our awful inflation)

      10k denominated in what? I think ignoring inflation is an example of why people care. You only trust your cash because you trust the US government, which may be reasonable, but people in other parts of the world don't trust their government with monetary policies, e.g. [0]. Imagine inflation gets worse, the EU needs bailout, or we have WW3, and the the US government says "Sorry, you're no longer allow to buy gold or move your assets abroad, you need to buy our bad government bonds" - stuff like this has happened before, in many countries. And you can't do anything about it other than watching your savings crumble. Crypto gives you optionality. A…

    • np32Oct 2021

      Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects ->

      On Urbanism:

      Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple

      Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures)

      Metamuse interview on cities [2]

      and a lot more on her blog

      On tech :

      She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-source friendly projects), great interview of her by the changelog [4]

      The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod), favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5]

      [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-design-how-markets-shape-cities/id1509606453

      [1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami

      [2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/

      [3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370

      [4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers

    • gsf_emergency_2Sep 2025

      After steeping in Fischel's tract on the proximate cause of housing inflation (linked to from Klein)..

      I gather that the main (meta-)issue, as you are kind of insinuating here, is that, for healthcare, there is a conflation of inflationary and deflationary processes..

      (Sorry to go on what might seem to be a reductive tangent here, as I often do when pressed. I have further takes on Klein vs Shapiro for later)

      My roughshod framing of (one) solution is that there has to be sustained deflationary pockets in a mildly inflationary phase

      Probably mirrored by such proposals for housing as

      https://devonzuegel.com/for-the-greater-good-the-game-theory-of-zoning

    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FFFeb 2024

      "The road to hell is paved with asphalt" saw this here on HN not long ago - https://devonzuegel.com/the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-asphalt

      They mention less heat as one of the multiple benefits of pavers / bricks.

      I used to dislike them by default - "They're bumpy". They're not bumpy. There's a shopping center in my town, and even a new Taco Bell, that use pavers for their parking lot, and I can't even notice.

      We could probably do pavers for new parking lots and keep asphalt / concrete for heavy-duty stuff like interstates and roads over 30 MPH and not lose much except the up-front cost of pavers. (But hey if Taco Bell thinks they're worth it...)

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