skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on who you ask, Seattle is adding between 18,000 to 30,000 new people a year.

If somehow 100k new houses appeared on the market, prices would plummet. Sure the dropping prices would cause more people to move here, but not 70k more.

And even if 70k more did move here, add another 100k houses and at that point prices will go down.

Right now Seattle adds less housing per year than the # of people who move here. Of course housing prices are shooting up.

In regards to only high end housing being built, this is due to three factors:

1. The price of land, speculation has made land incredibly valuable, partially because

2. The only market being served is the high end, until that market has been saturated with housing, housing developers will continue to target it. 100k new high end housing units and that market will have been rung dry and land prices will start to come down.

3. Building regulations encourage high end housing to be built. This is starting to change, but low price housing isn't really buildable now days, though I imagine if #2 is solved, builders will start lobbying and this will get fixed. (If that is the route that is taken, society may not enjoy the long term repercussions but that isn't new! Best to have the building codes amended now in a reasonable forward thinking way)
Even if what you say was true (it isn't) that's not the Southern Strategy of Nixon. You can't just redefine the term.
I find using the "RACI" terminology (slide 16) consistently, both during project planning and execution, helps cut through ambiguity and misunderstanding of who is going to do what. The "Responsible" and "Accountable" roles are a little confusing because the words often synonyms. I remember them as "R" are the people doing the "Real work" and "A" is the manager whose "Ass is on the line" if the project fails. :)
> The real problem is that housing cannot be both affordable and a financial instrument.

Could you expand on this?
Solid: Data ownership as well as improved privacy (2017)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure 9/11 was a contributing factor. Not sure it was the thing, but then again, there probably wasn't just one "thing" that caused all this. It seems like more of a sequence of things, some big, some little, spread out over time, and gradually skewing the zeitgeist to a more negative, pessimistic, unpleasant outlook.

In regards to tech and the Internet in particular, I think the Snowden revelations and the PRISM stuff was a key moment, in terms of changing the perception of the Internet. After broad public awareness of ubiquitous online surveillance became a thing, the Internet lost some of it luster and became more threatening and less welcoming.

More recently, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, along with all the major data breaches over the past few years, probably contributed to that sensation as well.
Demographically, we are almost out of the bubble. Currently the children of the Boomers have been buying houses, hence the serge in price. But most have now settled in, the market is starting to slow in most 'hot' cities, across N.American and Europe.
With the cloud came a lot of data, so 'big data' was a wave in which Engineers had to deal with ti, and 'data science' was the wave in which we tried to leverage it.

The reality is that most insight from 'big data' are optimizations. They're not going to move the needle on the business as perhaps we would have hoped.

Data Science focused on ad targeting - now that might move the needled.

And of course, maybe some Data Science working along side AI engineers make a breakthrough which could move the needle.

But from a high level, CEO's view, all of these things have trendy undercurrents, the trick is to figure out how much of it really matters to the business.

The 'wins' for consumers will be slow: maybe better product search, better ads. Maybe they figure out how to send flights around ugly weather or how to slot landing times for an x% decrease in flight delays. Or slot road fixing/lights for an x% decrease in traffic delays.
That’s not really a fair comparison, though. $75 per month didn’t buy you access to tons of on-demand movies back in the day.
I'd say housing can't be both affordable and a good investment. By that, I mean that good investments (by definition) go up in value by more (often a multiple of) than inflation. If houses start out affordable and consistently outpace inflation, they will eventually, often quite quickly, cease to be affordable.
I am with you. Housing must be forcefully de-commodified and it must no longer be considered an investment.

I am currently trying to buy my first house and every single place I look at has "Ideal for a first time buyer or as an investment opportunity" in the description so I am in direct competition with these parasites. Frustrating to say the least.
Most new housing I see around me (Seattle Area) is apartments for rent. Various legal reasons in WA state for it, but I'm of the opinion that having everyone rent is worse long term for society than having people become part of the local community.

Of course time will tell.
A very interesting write-up and I mostly agree with the insights presented. But not every ideology is equal and we should not be so quick to dismantle and dismiss processes that have been with us for ages.
Yep, also most of us don't need access to everything simultaneously. I rotate subscriptions and typically only have one streaming service active at a time.
Here in Melbourne vast numbers of skyscraper apartment towers have been built by greedy, short term developers aimed at making a quick buck.

Now we have apartment towers every full of too-tiny-to-be liveable apartments built to shoddy standards - many of them constructed using fire risk cladding which has made them effectively worthless.

That's what a house price boom buys you.

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/hundreds-of-b...
Find people to team up with. Build a squad. Practice self-defense, in whatever medium you find practical. Recruit.
Ways to break your systems code using volatile (2010)
Should be more fragmented, until it gets to the point where I don't have to have ads kicking in my teeth daily.
>> How would it be possible for building more housing to /not/ work is the real question.

Buildings full of giant luxury condos. That would soften the higher end of the market but not address the real affordability crisis. Similarly, mcmansions have very high maintenance costs. Vast tracks of six-bedroom single-family suburban homes wouldn't work either if the people who need housing cannot afford to maintain them. And at a more basic level, creating new owner-occupied housing opportunities only helps those with the credit+capital to purchase them. What is needed to get rents down is more rental properties on the market.

Vancouver is seeing this. The boom over the last few years has created oversupply at the very high end of the market. Houses over $5million aren't selling like they once did. That doesn't do anything for working people looking to rent apartments.
I'm no economist but it seems blindingly obvious. To be an interesting financial investment, a house must appreciate faster than other means of savings. If that happens, houses will inevitably be unaffordable, because they rise in value faster than people can save to buy them.
If you cared about the environment you would watch alternative carbon.
A good financial instrument is a good investment, and likely to have the price rise faster than inflation with time.

Affordable housing would be likely to have the price rise no faster than inflation, or it will eventually be out of the price range of people whose incomes are only rising with inflation.
> Are you sure you only pay if you lose?

Yes. Each party paying their own fees is a uniquely American thing.

> I don't see why this changes anything. Lawyers still cost a lot of money.

Prohibitively high lawyer fees are a uniquely American thing. The ECHR guarantees practical and effective access to the courts.

> One of the grievances people have against GDPR is that they don't like how GDPR's enforcement depends so much on the individual person at DPAs. You'll still have to deal with the person afterwards that you sued.

That Americans have against the GDPR. Given that the people who actually have experience with European authorities and law don't see these issues, it's very likely they don't exist.

You don't necessarily have to deal with the same person. Even if a DPA always assigns the same person to you, there is no oversight, that person is petty and cares more about harming you than about their job: We have rule of law and a functioning court system. And I can't help but find these continuing insinuations that we don't pretty insulting.
In Houston, the property tax rate is 3%, and inflation is roughly 2%,so for property to be a net gain, it has to increase in value at over 5%, which is faster than the overall economy, and hence gets less affordable over time
tents are housing.
Is that a typo on the table or do those CPUs really cost the same whether they have an integrated GPU or not?
> Right now Seattle adds less housing per year than the # of people who move here. Of course housing prices are shooting up.

Surely the average number of people per household is greater than unity. Wouldn't the comparison of new housing units to new households be the right figures to compare?
You are giving a government body the power of total Internet censorship and trusting in their opaque process to determine whether each request is warranted or not.

I can understand many arguments for censorship for the greater good. This is censorship as an individual right enabled by a closed review process.

I believe it will have far reaching implications and it will be fertile grounds for corruption. A massively powerful governance tool is created and all its stated goals are of limited public good.
The "data scientist" where I recently contracted struggles with generating basic reports. I saw a full page SQL query with the caption "yeah, data science is hard" posted to slack. Terrifying.

I think the term "data science" is often misused. It seems to make management feel like they are on the cutting edge. They were talking about AI and a R&D department the other day. They aren't even making use of simple heuristics yet! I guess that talk helps with fundraising though.
Yeah, I still think the focus on 10 thing is odd as I explain in the sibling comment. What would be nice to hear from you is some acknowledgement that you understand you pushed a button after I attempted to communicate that this particular button made me uncomfortable. Not ascribing ill intent or asking for an apology, but I'm always looking for allies in my attempt to increase emotional intelligence amongst all these geniuses on HN.
Just wanted to add that you as a developer put the work up-front so there absolutely should be no expectation that the donation is for future work but instead for the work that has already been done.
I assume the premise is that if we approach a home as something that has an investment value than it means we have an economy of people rent seeking and speculatively buying and investing in property to make money. I guess the alternative would be to make it illegal to own housing you don't live in, which would definitely drive down prices but also possibly have other unforseen effects. In a world full of homelessness and ridiculous housing prices, I consider it worth exploring.
> Ten years ago I'd go to robotics conferences and it would not be unusual for me to be the only person in the room who knew that control theory was a thing.

This is mind-blowing to me. When I thought I might have a reason to develop some robotics technology, the very first thing I did was to get a control theory book, on the off chance that I was really going to do this in the future. In fact, I think this explains why the product I think could be made does not exist yet.
I couldn't agree more. In Berlin, where I live, there are re-occurring public protests around this very topic.

In order to curb housing as an investment in Berlin, there is a two-tier tax system for money gained from selling an apartment for example.

- The profits from the sale of apartment that you've lived in less than 2(?) years will be taxed at 50%

- The profits from the sale of apartment that you've owned for less than 10 years (but haven't lived in) will be taxed at 50%.

That being said, housing is still a problem, especially since it is relatively cheap in comparison to other EU capitals. Which means lots of people move here, and sometimes displace locals.
I believe the argument is supply and demand. Housing as an investment works if demand out paces supply or supply lowers. If you don't have some reasonable assurance of housing prices increasing over time then why buy?
Nobody was offended by the other. I think people are downvoting you and gameswithgo because you appear to be applying your own personal notions to an entire segment with little to no evidence.

'PC enthusiast' is such a blanket term to start with, so applying a blanket statement to such a group is obviously doomed to failure from the very start.
You say that but there's mounting research that we get more susceptible to financial scams as we age, especially in retirement years when we have the most money and make the juiciest targets.

NPR ran a series last week on the topic that was fascinating and deeply concerning [0]. It's not something you should just dismiss out of hand when we're just now starting to learn why your intuition might be wrong.

[0] https://www.marketplace.org/collection/brains-losses-aging-f...
They own fox now as well.
ok. but it might be a path to profitability. i mean, what is all this rhetorical heat and drama really about? it's about making money. it's not truly about ethics. US business is not exactly a lofty ethical model to hold up for global admiration. if accusing a big company of theft and security breaches can get them locked out of your market, that's one less competitor.
Here in Melbourne vast numbers of skyscraper apartment towers have been built by greedy, short term developers aimed at making a quick buck.

Right, and back in the day housing was built by non-greedy, long-term developers aimed at making a long buck.

Something must have happened to housing developers to turn them from being very kind to very rapacious.

Yeah, that must be it.
For everyone who was renting and decides to buy a dense condo surely opens up a rental unit for someone who can't afford or chooses not to buy.
CVE-2019-11815: The missinformation around this vuln and a brief analysis
I doubt this has anything to do with Netflix being "smart".

If anything it looks like Disney may be trying to execute this exact strategy in the future. Look at how they refused to participate in UltraViolet and eventually got most of the other major movie companies to quit supporting UV and join the Disney-owned Movies Anywhere service instead.

I doubt they would play ball with such an attempt by Netflix.
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/bsja7c/a_brief_anal...
History of Electronic Music at BBC
I have come to expect bad articles about housing but I have to say this one was fairly on point and succinct.

The trend towards urbanization is obviously a factor so it's not just a question of building houses, it's a matter of building up enough to soak up demand and then some.

I see three big problems:

1. Many cities incentivize building the wrong kind of housing. Look at Manhattan where most new housing below 125th street is not the least bit affordable, some exceeding $5000/sq ft.

2. Capital is essentially global. Real estate in urban centers has become the de facto way to park money. This is a problem.

3. Tax structures encourage this. I like the Swiss system that punitively taxes short term capital gains and property (and makes owning property in Switzerland reasonably restrictive). You need people to own housing units they don't live in. Who do you think you're renting that apartment from? But residential real estate has moved away from being an income-generating asset to being a speculative asset. Low capital gains tax rates encourage this. Also, for some reason, real estate assets tend to be exempt from AML type reporting like FATCA, FBAR, etc. No idea why. But this needs to end.

I think you could go a long way to fixing this by saying that if you own property in a given city you are a resident of that city, state and country and your worldwide income is taxable. This needs to be coupled with stopping the hiding of ownership through corporate shells.
We have a lot of subscriptions as well, although probably not $75 per month... however the cost is spread across four households (parents and siblings all share accounts). In cable days, including premium channels, that would have been $100 each instead of the current ~$20 each.
WTF??!?! - It's not "a right"

Every site you type something into and press 'submit' has a complete choice as to what happens with your submission.

My take is that our current 'problems' are down to everybody wanting to record your interaction and take no responsibility for it.
I don’t understand why so many people think this is a bad thing. Content distribution has become a commodity, thanks to AWS and the like. The codecs and whatnot are all standardized. And it turns out that consumers don’t really care about recommendation systems and similar accouterments. So the competition has shifted to the thing that people care about: content. When the market is competing over the thing people care about, that’s a good thing.

This is the healthiest the television industry has ever been. There are no “big 4 networks” controlling distribution. There’s no monopolies—if you want to launch a competitor, start a studio, pay Amazon a bunch of money, and boom. Disney, Netflix, CBS, etc., have just become umbrella organizations for studios producing content. They can compete directly with each other, and consumers and pick and choose what they want to spend their dollars on.
That assumes an "interesting" financial investment has to appreciate faster than all other investments that exist and that nobody would ever trade returns for less risk.

People buy bonds, so I don't think that maximizing ROI is always necessarily the criteria for a desirable investment.
There's lots of good advice here, but one thing I see mentioned often is "get them on to operating system X." Age plays a factor in this - much as I love macOS I wish I hadn't switched my mother (88 now, around 80 when she switched) from Windows. She'd learned personal computing with Windows, and there are still things that trip her up with macOS, including basic things like differences between Windows Explorer and Finder. There are trade-offs - I've been on macOS for a long time so fixing issues is easy, remote desktop is seamless, and the risk of viruses is lower - but overall I think the costs have outweighed the benefits. Setting her up with a password manager would be even more discombobulating, but thankfully she doesn't use online (or even telephone) banking, or social media, otherwise I'd insist. She also knows that she can phone me or forward emails if she's not sure about something, and so far has been canny about spotting things like "your PayPal account needs re-authorisation" scams.
> Solar is cheaper, so why not cover 100% during the day

Because you still need something to cover the night, but if the thing that covers the night also generates during the day with minimal incremental cost, there is no cost benefit in unnecessarily duplicating that capacity again.

> wind is cheaper, that starts covering the night time

Except when it doesn't, and that's the problem. You have a huge wind farm that generates 50GW when the wind is blowing but only 5GW when it's still, and you have 25GW of minimum load at all times. On the night when you average 5GW generation for twelve hours, where does the other 240GWh of power come from? Your options are "build a peak 250GW wind farm instead so it never generates less than 25GW" (completely hopeless) and "build 240GWh of energy storage" (ouch) which then prices wind out because it's cheaper to use the batteries you need for a still night on every night and charge them with solar instead, and cheaper still to build 25GW in nuclear capacity.

> And while you're spending the decades getting that power station built you're also having to explain why you aren't building out solar and wind to cover demand

Because you are building them too. We can do two things at the same time.
But weren't there Intel 10nm chips sold for revenue in 2017? [0] Granted, it was an OEM-only part for some China specific education laptops...

0: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-...
Tesla will limit charging to 80 percent at some Supercharger stations
On the other hand if everyone is bound to a mortgage then they are handcuffed to an area.
what is CoW?
Building more supply may not work when you're dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars of money laundering from China

In BC, we have at least $5B of money laundering in real estate per year, and an absurd number of empty apartments / houses. They will pay obscene amounts to park their money here

We added a vacancy tax and foreign buyer tax to combat this, which has helped to an extent
Borderless [video]
Even if all new construction was luxury apartments and condos it would still help. Right now if you make $120,000/yr in SF as an entry level software developer you might pay $2500/mo for an old one bedroom. If new luxury buildings go up, you might be able to upgrade to a nicer one bedroom for $2500 and now the old one bedroom will be available for someone making $90k/yr and so on.
I loved the end to S2 of The OA. Marling/Batmangli are may be the most creative and innovative writing duo in TV today. Amazingly thought-provoking stuff.
This is only a problem in a few cities. The median house price in Cleveland, OH, is $53,000.
It is using a Component; it's subtle but in the example "Drawing" is a Function Component that is declared using an arrow function. Hooks don't replace Components, but are a way to have state in what were previously known as Stateless Somponents (now Function Components), as well as encapsulating other React features. I personally prefer good old Pure Components.
Stocks, bonds, commodities, and other income generating assets are financial instruments.

The price of stocks, bonds, commodities and other income generating assets can fluctuate for many reasons, one of which is an increase in supply.

Housing is a financial instrument. And like any financial instrument, there is a risk of over supply. If the risk goes up, the new price would reflect the risk.

When legislation tries to fix pricing, black markets pop up.

No legislation that does not increase supply will reduce the cost of housing in real terms.
The farmer who makes 'ethical' foie gras
I've read all of your comments now and I did miss your position on this. Sorry about that.
It is both. You have the right to post, but they have the right to decide what is being done with the data being received (e.g. to save it, discard it, queue for moderation, treat it as a SQL query (if you do, you should ensure it is properly secured so that you can't access or alter data that you are not supposed to do), etc)