skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HOAs hate is a fascinating topic to me. Not because I care/don't care about HOAs themselves, but because it really shows how loud a vocal minority can be.

The usual narrative is the evil HOA trustees who enforce their selfish greedy wants on everyone else and rule with an iron fist. The reality though is that in most HOAs, they have very little discretionary power beyond what's in the bylaws. What's in the bylaws is agreed upon by the owners. If "everyone hates being told what to do", it's pretty simple to get the rules changed or to vote out the trustees. But it doesn't happen. Why?

Generally one of three things

A) The inhabitants aren't the owners and thus can't change the rules. Ok, fair enough if that's the situation, that's going to suck.

B) People hate the rules, but they don't hate them ENOUGH to go through the trouble of changing them, and some people who likes the rules are enforcing them. IMO ignoring rules you don't like shouldn't be an option (and is why we have so many bad laws at all levels of governments. If everyone who hates them got together to change them, not even the super rich could prevent it from happening).

C) The most common one from my experience: turns out a whole lot of people actually agree with the rules. All the talk of freedom, but that includes the right of consenting adults to come into a legal agreement about...stuff. As long as nothing they agree on is illegal to put in your contract, why shouldn't they be allowed? If a bunch of people want to sign an agreement to reach a global maximum instead of a bunch of local maxima that make everyone miserable, why not?

Turns out not everyone is cool with the "I do whatever I want and you do whatever you want", and "let's get together and make a compromise so we can both be a little happier" is actually fairly popular too. And thus HOAs are a thing.

But I hear the reply already: "In X area everything's governed by HOAs! We have no choice!". Well, either change the rules (after all, if they're THAT damn, it shouldn't be too hard to get enough votes to get them changed), or buy elsewhere. We're talking about buying here, so it implies a certain level of privilege, after all.
Sort of. They function just like another layer of government, but the problem is that they're not actually part of the government, so they don't have checks and balances and they're not held to the same standards.
This is one the things that it's surprising that it wasn't available before.

As far as I can tell this architecture was possible at least starting from the introduction of DX11 hardware more than 10 years ago, and it seems to be the most straightforward way of rendering a realistic 3D scene.
What's prudent about it?

My argument is that treating housing as an investment drives costs up over time and that at a policy level we should not seek to do that, we should seek to lower the cost of housing
(while maintaining quality and so on).
Yea, it really all comes down to what you define "harm" as.

If I haven't updated my house in 60 years, paint falling off, lawn completely dead, park my rusted out 1983 honda civic with flat tires on my front lawn, and have a pile of garbage 10 feet high in the driveway...

Does that cause harm to you, or do you just define that as "chill"?

It's going to entirely depend on who you're asking, at what stage of life they are in, etc.

I'm glad HOA neighborhoods exist for people who are at a position in their life (generally financially well off) to enjoy one. On the other hand, I'm glad not all neighborhoods are that way and you can find some where being a bit behind on maintenance isn't a crime.
A lot of things can raise the property value too. New metro station opens, pushing your value up 300k? Do people say “hey that’s not right, here you take the money mr metro man”?
Can you just be HOA president and route all emails about it to the Trash?

Postpone all HOA meetings indefinitely... Let all requests go to voicemail, etc...

If anyone accosts you about HOA matters in the street say "I think that's best bought up after the next HOA presidential election"
There’s a thing called a Parish council and that strikes me as similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parish_councils_in_England

There was a recent event gained notoriety in the UK for the pettiness these bodies sometimes have https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jB3P_0GAi0I
What is your definition of value / worth, as used above?

I can see that it is not market capitalization.
do you do the diversification trick ? smoking less and finding something else to absorb / massage your mind instead ? so you can find another switch to flick
VR also requires 100% task dedication

You can't alt-tab over to HN to browse during loading screens

Even assuming everyone had the hardware, the barrier to use is magnitudes larger than using a mobile device

Personally, I think VR has already plateaued
Fire tablets still are pretty garbage. I really wish I could love them because of the price but anything beyond basic (and I mean basic) web browsing or as an ereader, it shows it's flaws fast. It's what keeps me tied to strictly iOS or premium android phones.
Those fees are for a lot more than gym membership. Take a large building - have you ever looked at the maintenance costs for something like that? If you haven't the good news is that annual budgets and statements for the past x number of years are publicly available for these associations (at least where I live that is true). Before you buy a place, a good realtor will walk you through the association's finances and give you an idea of how well the property is managed.
> We all want to be allowed to do whatever we want

Ehh, not everyone's that selfish.

I for one am perfectly happy with compromising so that my neighbors are happier with what I do, but only if they return the favor. At a small scale we can have a handshake agreement, but for something more long term or with a lot more people, it's great to be able to put it on paper.
Ok that makes sense. You can almost say the same for the difference in the way each drives.
> If I ran a Space Agency I would say something like: "Soz, we are going to make some cracking firework displays first and then we will know what to avoid."

This is the modus operandi of SpaceX - they just keep tweaking their rockets and launching experimental tweaks as much as they possibly can without risking bankrupcy, as failures teach them more than successes.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/?searchQuer...

I found some dirt cheap ones.
Its an intense simulation of what I'm sure having brain damage or a stroke must feel like.
I gave up just over three years ago. It was bloody hard. I came up with a couple of things to say to myself if I wanted a fag. I used them as mantras as soon as I wanted a drag.

I came up with "I don't want to die" and "I don't want to smell".

I also made targets - 1 day, 2, 4, week. Fortnight. Month. etc (I will never go back ...)

If you want to give up you can but it is bloody hard
Exactly. If your pile of tires starts lowering my property’s value, are you doing me harm?
It's important for the condo to build up a substantial amount of cash in case there is a necessary high capital outlay needed. Sit on a condo board for a while and look at all of the expenses, and then also imagine saving up enough because, at a minimum, you will need a new roof in 20 years, etc...

Also, deferred maintenance will destroy a condo, and the ability for any owners to sell. If the board has to recover from previous years of deferred maintenance while also building a fund for the future, people will simply have to face the reality and pay until the problem is fixed.
I think some are misinterpreting my post as being in favor of HOAs, but actually I am saying that if someone is not doing something outright illegal I’m generally in favor of them being able to do it.
It becomes a small government. A lot of small governments are dysfunctional, but quite a lot more work for their community members.
DailyGammon
> Soul crushing to me are people who don't take care of their property and enjoy living in neglect.

Why is it soul crushing to you that others enjoy their lives without worrying about their property?
Yeah, imagine!

I sure would. Where I live, you do you, I do me, they do them.

It is great!

Sometimes we have a chat. Berry vines out of control, or maybe someone needs something. Whatever. That gets done and people are pretty happy.

Want to pick the shutter and trim colors? Several people here would be happy to entertain that so long as the ones wanting to pick are paying.

Me? Nope. And the bonus is nobody will hear from me about the colors, unless it is complementary. Who doesn't like that sort of thing?

Crazy cat lady down the street has a whole garden growing in the easement in front of her house. Passersby will pick and eat some of it. Pretty sure that makes her happy.

I could go on, but the place is very human, at times vibrant and has soul.

Yeah, bent right out of shape. There is just not enough time and energy to deal with all the meta associated with the more strongly regulated neighborhoods.

I basically have every other possible thing to do before worrying about what the other people are doing and so forth. Mutual respect and consideration are lean, easy, human, and definitely the way I want to play it.

All that said, yeah! Some people seem to need all that meta mess. Great! We have places for them to get it, thankfully.
I personally chose to live in an incorporated city but not an HOA. There are city ordinances with actual real government representation and force of law behind them for serious health and safety concerns but we can paint our houses whatever color we want and build sheds under a certain size any way we like etc. The important thing with choosing a place to live is to honestly assess what you want and how much you want your neighbors to be able to do. There are plusses and minuses under any living arrangement. Personally I would never live under a HOA but in exchange I have to put up with the stuff that is under the level of city enforcement, things like boom cars and a few unkept lawns. In exchange I can work on my truck in my driveway without some busybody stopping me.
Probably just the fact that pedestrians and other cars can hear you coming if you have loud pipes.

Motorcycles in particular have the danger that if a driver in a vehicle doesn't see them, they can get ran over. Being smaller, they have a tendency to easily hide in blind spots or just not be noticed at all because the driver is expecting another large vehicle.

So many motorcycle riders use flashing headlights and loud pipes to announce their presence.
This is a lot less exotic than expected.
Some good peer links. There are several ways to value things

- economic value (how much money it produces or how much money it saves by having it), both current and projected/speculative.

- emotional value (this is my grandfathers house, I wouldn’t part with it for anything)! Or FOMO, or ‘being established’. How much is it worth to feel that way?

- scarcity value. You need x or something terrible will happen, it’s in a bidding war, how much can you spend to win? This can also be current or projected.

The signal you’re seeing is that for people eligible to buy the property, it is near zero value on all these axis.
> if all parties involved agreed to this "contract"

Imagine that your grandfather bought a house in an HOA, then he died and you inherited it. You're now bound by a "contract" that you never signed or agreed to. Actual contracts can't bind next of kin, only those who actually signed them.
No it's almost impossible within the current political framework. Controlling European countries through espionage and other dark means was initiated from the late 40s (Operation Gladio) and there is none, I mean literally none who could get away from it.

Of course, unless you choose to revolutionize and destroy the old political framework.
I see some analogues in Sandstorm.io, for the web: they’re self-hosted web apps, where instead of the app being the atomic unit, each document (“grain”) is separately managed by sandstorm, and there’s a separate instance of the app running for each document. It pulls things like security and access control up a level, and will have even more benefits as sandstorm grain management matures.
> Whenever I read articles like this, I get more and more horrified.

> Makes me very wary even of dumbphones

If you care about it, consider GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, which run FLOSS and have hardware kill switches for microphone and other things.
It always seems to miss the same crucial point: that prefix notation won't get muddled in bugs related to the Order of Operations.

You simply can't misinterpret the kinds of math questions that often end up in YouTube challenge videos when they are written in prefix notation.
A couple of stories about one notorious Florida HOA

Man jailed over brown sod: https://jonathanturley.org/2008/10/12/putting-the-prude-back...

EMTs finish heart attack victim's sod job so he'll go to the ER: http://www.ccfj.net/HOAFLFirefFinLawnw.html
He's not saying clients can create their own ids. The applications can.

The concepts he's talking about are required for cqrs. Which is a popular concept applied with mostly DDD or microservices.
https://volta.sh too
I stopped smoking over 10 years ago and still want to smoke regularly. Often in situations where there are no cigarettes available
???

You build people movers, and wonder about safety factor???

WTF!!!

There's also service factor. Protip: Multiply them both please.
M1 is barely 20-25w at the wall. Actual chip peak TDP is more like 14-18w. (EDIT: this is measured from a Mac mini by Anandtech -- a laptop likely has slightly lower TDP due to better binning)

Intel chips have much higher peak and sustained actual power usage than their TDP indicates. At the wall, those “15w” systems are actually much closer to 40-60w on sustained loads.
AmazonBasics is very hit and miss. Some of it is cheap crap. Some of it is made by best-in-class manufacturers and just labelled as “AmazonBasics” and sold more cheaply.
I've actually used this concept at an old job. When I was given a new project the business people always wanted it done at a particular date, but it was always an unrealistic timeframe. I'd then spend sometime thinking about how long I thought it would take me, but I would always add 2 weeks or 25% to the estimated time, which ever was larger, just to deal with the human element.

This could include changing requirements, poor communication, illness, being blocked by other changes, etc.

I learned that you can get away with giving people extended deadlines as long as you hit them.
I dont see why this option should exist in the first place. Let alone being the system default.

edit: Is there an option now in the MacOS Big Sur to enable this? I have a 3rd party app to achieve so.
It still might be doing something. Mail, for instance, is sitting there occasionally checking for new mail even if you have zero windows open.

And I dunno about you, but my 2017 Macbook Pro still takes a significant amount of time to launch Big Serious Apps with a ton of plugins. I like being able to tab over to Illustrator and hit command-n and be fucking around in a new canvas with absolutely no waiting. We have virtual memory, open apps in the background doing nothing but waiting around to be used will get frozen to disc, then get restored a lot faster than they boot up. I generally hate it when apps auto-close themselves without asking when I close the last document like Windows tends to.
I thought the assumption was the the US attack subs would clear the area before a carrier would get there.
Had a fun little exercise with our HOA recently. Seven member board, and each year half the seats are open for election.

Over the years, two rules have come into tension. First, in order for a new candidate to be elected, they have to get a majority (not just a plurality) of the votes - 50% + 1. I think the original thought was that if a large number of candidates ran and no one got over 30% of the votes or something, they shouldn't be eligible for the board. If not enough new candidates get 50% support, then the incumbent can keep their seat, in order of votes.

The second rule is that you can only vote for a number of candidates matching the number of openings. So if there are only three openings, and seven people are running, you can only vote for three of them. If you vote for more, your ballot gets thrown out.

The board has had problems lately so we had a lot of candidates in a recent election. I remember liking five of them, but I could only vote for three. There were roughly 1000 votes, and the most popular "reform" candidates got around 490, 460, 450, 420 votes, so none of them made it in (they clearly had split the vote). The incumbents that retained their seats got vote totals like 350, 275 - one incumbent got the second lowest of all running candidates, but got to keep his seat.

Obviously anti-democratic - as interest increases in replacing board members, it becomes less possible to do so. There are remedies such as Instant Runoff voting, but the way we vote and count is that you get your ballot in the mail, put a checkmark next to the names you want, and then counting teams count up the checkmarks (discarding the ballots with "too many" checkmarks). Manually counting IRV was deemed too onerous for our process.

Another, and my favored solution for this sort of scenario, is Approval Voting, where you simply put a checkmark next to all the candidates you approve of, and then all the checkmarks are counted by the same counting teams, without discarding the ballots with "too many" checkmarks, since it's no longer possible for there to be "too many" checkmarks on a ballot.

We gave presentations to the board, explained it as thoroughly as possible, made the case that what the elections were doing (due to the 50% rule) was measuring the level of support for each candidate, and that only Approval Voting was capable of measuring that accurately, subject to our other restrictions.

It failed on a 4-3 vote. Of the votes against, one was "it's been working fine the way it is", another was "It sounds funny", one gave no explanation, and one indicated the lawyers were of the opinion it wasn't allowable. In the next election, the three "yes" votes chose not to run for re-election and were replaced.
Throwing a late house party is barbarism?
> It's not always willingly, there are plenty of times I've been forced into moving into an HOA because of lack of choice and availability, or them being the only option in a given area,

This is exactly the reason we're in our current HOA home. It was the only viable option at that time.

It's been a fairly terrible experience w/ the HOA inventing absurd crap some times (non-existent shed on thimble-sized front lawn) and selectively enforcing other times (reporting my kid's grad sign & residents' Biden signs but not Trump signs).
Are there any GNU/Linux distros for mobile that are actually worth using? I'm not aware of any but I'd love to be proven wrong.
On the contrary, especially old towns in Europe have HOAs, as they want to preserve the old town look as to keep attracting tourists (and preserve history, although I think the income from tourism is generally their highest priority).
Obscure tech and proprietary tools do translate… if you can translate them.

Programming languages are all the same, so learn 3 or 4 new ones and discover that you can probably write in any language for an interview (then do some in relatively unfamiliar languages for kicks and giggles to practice).

Tech is all the same. Take data in, poop data out. That’s the whole job. The formats and protocols change, but once you starting thinking about your stacks as data-in, data-out, they all start looking the same.

Make video games or hardware drivers from scratch, those are the hardest things to make. Video games from complexity overload, and hardware drivers from interface complexity.
Rethinking is fine, if it leads to action. If the desktop isn't working for the vast majority of users, then it's certainly the prerogative of anyone in the world to code up something which is guaranteed to make every one of those users happy.
Yes, it is--at least to those of us who respect our neighbors and do not think we have the right to impair their enjoyment of peace and quiet within the four corners of their residences.
> over the allotted "2 guest maximum"

How is it even possible that something like that exists...
Is the city going to build a swimming pool and a set of tennis courts that can be walked to in every neighborhood or are they going to build one or two large ones in a central location that almost everyone will need to drive to? Also not everyone wants a pool and tennis courts so they can choose a neighborhood without them. Some neighborhoods where I used to live had soccer pitches instead of tennis court because that's what was popular with the people who lived there. It was much easier for the neighborhood to be responsive to what the people in the neighborhood wanted than it would have been to convince someone at city hall to build less tennis courts at the municipal park complex and build more soccer fields, which once again, would only be in walking distance of a small number of city residents. Letting residents decide for themselves what amenities they want in their neighborhoods instead of begging for permission from bureaucrats meant they were able to get what best suited that neighborhood and in a timely manner.
> We already have a system (the courts) for redressing material harms.

Laws are a baseline. People can build on top of that. Just like there are laws that define what should happen when a couple divorce, many people will sign a prenup to add extra rules they mutually agree to that not EVERYONE would agree to, for each other's benefits. You or I certainly don't get to decide what's reasonable or what's silly in someone else's prenup. HOA bylaws are just a bigger version of that.
This has been my thought process all along. "Democracy" in the US is anything but.
and waves

remember electric vehicles predates ICE ones
What competitive Bay Area markets are you referring to? We've bought here a couple times, and although we looked at a few properties that were part of a 3-5 unit "HOA", most of the homes we saw (and both of the ones we bought) were not anywhere near HOAs. In fact, we currently live on a street that is not a public road, but which is apparently maintained by neighbors without resorting to an official HOA.

Where are the HOAs around here?
>If a system doesn't work for vast majority of users, then it does deserve rethinking.

No, if a commercial for profit system doesn't work for the vast majority of users, then it does deserve rethinking. Linux is a great example of an operating system that was not written for the highest profitable denominator until recently.
Yes, I know that. But knife kills weren't uncommon in Vietnam. They are now. I think partly because rifles are more reliable.
Good sir, I regret to inform you that your assessment of my situation contains incorrect assertions based upon false premises, as I've made no such statement about my relative strength or equipment. I further regret to inform you that I've since been in the presence of smokers and cigarettes, through which no cravings arose.

Sir, I further regret to inform you that I've accidentally inhaled tobacco in recent years when being passed a (REDACTED BASED ON FEDERAL CANNABIS LAWS) that, unknown to me, had tobacco mixed in. I coughed, was disgusted, and had zero cravings for tobacco thereafter.

As such, there is no risk of relapse.

I do believe that my short stint consuming Chantix may have permanently rewired my brain's reaction to cigarettes.