skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it is just a scary way of stating that you must have $12,500 deposited with the owner for the entire month you are leasing. It just rolls over each month.
<waves from Austin>
Sadly, trying to explain simple economic facts to people on HN is a good way to get down voted if it involves criticism of government regulation.
A nice sentiment but it would make infinitely more sense to build more apartment buildings.
Transaction costs. Moving is not free: at a minimum, there are search costs to find a new apartment and moving costs to pack all your stuff up and move it around. Very often, there are also storage needs, and if you move non-locally, there are jobsearch and job termination costs, recruiting costs by their employers, relocation costs, etc.

Many of these are externalities - they're born by people who are not party to the transaction itself. For example, if one of your best employees is priced out of the city where your office is, then you need to find a replacement in a hurry. Replacing a key employee can sometimes cost as much as their yearly salary (this is why the recruiting industry exists, and why startups can get "acquihired" for a million or so per engineer). If the employee has a long tenure and lots of domain knowledge, they may actually be irreplaceable, and their loss could permanently damage the business.

The cynic in me wonders if the reason we have rent control isn't to protect tenants, it's because one powerful constituency (employers) is pitted against another (landlords) and the former is currently more powerful.
Numbers less than 2^-53 aren't denormals. Denormals occur when the exponent is all zeros, i.e. less than 2^-1022, the floating point representation of a double (ignoring sign) is normally:

1.mantissa * 2^(exponent - 1023)

A denormal occurs when the exponent is all zeros, and the representation switches to

0.mantissa * 2^(1 - 1023)
Rails 4 Best Practices
If the majority of owners don't wish to personally utilize their property and instead choose to extract rent from it, what exactly are the renters supposed to buy?

Owners can apparently force renters to bleed ever more money, but renters can't force a squatting owner to sell, they just have to accept it or, as this letter exemplifies, GTFO.
The Logic of Failure (2011)
This is a perfect example of why rent control is a terrible system that leads to market inefficiencies and worse outcomes for a community. The law has made it more profitable for this landlord to remove housing stock and charge market rate for the remaining unit than to rent out both units in the building under rent control laws. Cities with low vacancy rates like SF need to rethink their approach to housing if they want to remain attractive places to live.
If you are looking for sci-fi/fantasy/horror, would definitely recommend the Escapepod (http://escapepod.org/), podcastle (http://podcastle.org/), pseudopod (http://pseudopod.org/) trio. Their webpages also link to some other good fiction podcasts of the same genre. Podcastle's Paper Menagerie (http://escapepod.org/2012/05/17/ep345-the-paper-menagerie/) made me cry.
As a tenent myself, I think it's perfectly fair. I signed a contract saying it's mine for the next year. The landlord cannot take it back before then.

A few months before the year ends, we decide if we will renew the contract for another year. If not, I have a month or two to find a new place.
i like the idea of integrating the real and virtual worlds.. michael abrash has said that what gets him really excited isn't so much pure virtual reality but rather augmented reality - which is sort of what you're talking about, in terms of having the tactile feedback of actual objects etc. in your room..
> life does seem to be getting better, and I think his argument there is valid.

I think anyone who's protested or supports the #BlackLivesMatter movement might quibble with that conclusion. Making conclusions like that based off crime data is specious if violence is in anyway systemic. Violence doesn't have to be murders, assaults and robberies...incarceration is its own form of violence and incarceration rates are as high as ever. Poverty is its own form of violence and income inequality is as high as ever. And civil asset forfeiture is basically legalized robbery, so if you included those statistics along with reported robbery statistics, you'd probably find that robberies have actually increased.

What I see happening is that some (rich) people have realized that nationalistic bonds no longer tie us together as strongly as they used to. They've been replaced by economic and religious bonds. So yes, the leaders of the largest countries in the world have largely avoided war against each other. But the top stratum of these countries has been very active in colluding against the bottom strata (G8, WTO, TPP, etc). They've largely waged war against the lower classes in all countries for many years now without most people realizing it. Just because the violence is perpetrated under the guise of law enforcement does not change the fact that it's still violence. And we still have "official" (not declared, but acknowledged) wars against religious extremist groups (Al Qaeda, Isis, etc), so there's that too.

In short, the nature of violence has changed, not the prevalence of it. That you don't realize it only reflects that you're not (yet) a target.
This person should be grateful they were able to live in a place in such high demand so cheaply due to unfair rent control laws. If a 4x increase in rent is bearable by the market then it's not a sign of landlord greed, it's a sign of a broken system. I'm sure if this person was offered the opportunity to make an extra 5k a month with little to no change in effort on their part they would do so and be offended if people labelled them as "greedy." I support some form of rent control but if you are in a situation where there is that large of a gap between market rates and tenant rent then things are fucked -- you are basically creating a privileged class: those who managed to lock up rent controlled space as tenants.
> Should they be uprooted every year (or more often) because someone wants to make a bit more money?

No, they shouldn't be, but that's not really the issue. The issue is: should landlords be legally allowed to uproot them?

My answer is a decisive yes. For whatever the reason, they should be able to not renew a contract once it expires.

I don't see why laws should be in place to restrict how much someone makes. Nobody has to have that particular apartment, or live in that particular place, etc. There's always options.
> Couldn't the owner just ask the person who is renting the unit to move out in a reasonable amount of time?

Assuming the original $2145 is below market, the answer would be no, wouldn't it? Or, rather, they could ask, but the tenant would never willingly leave, as they are paying below market.
If they were bringing in entrepreneurs, what does that have to do with academics?
I've never experienced that, although I once had someone give feedback that I didn't get hired because I didn't bring a notebook and a pen to take notes during the interview. I did bring a few extra copies of my resume, mind you. Just not a notebook.

I actually laughed.
They converted the other unit in the building to storage (after hassling that tenant out).

I don't think it's anything like 'isn't getting on', the landlord wants to convert the building to some other use and simply doesn't care about the tenants, which isn't the same as finding them disagreeable or whatever (one imagines they might want to do something like sell it as a private home).
</waves from Austin>

<thumbsup city="Austin"/>

<thumbsup city="Seattle"/>
The editor on makemake.io is very impressive.

You just picked a tough crowd to show this to... everyone here cares about the semantic web and has nothing but contempt for the "all-flash" websites from 15 years ago. You should really try making a CSS3 version that just puts z-indexed img and div tags in an relative positioned container and animates the x/y. Then people could insert their semantic HTML and animate it however they want.

If you go that route you could even allow people to create small widgets/components. Say you want a crazy/animated sidebar but don't want to break the rest of your page... you could just open up your editor and work on just the widget and export code to drop that widget into your page.

Overall I think this is an awesome project. I'm also coding a huge HTML5 editor project you should check out when it launches... http://www.superanimo.com

It's more of a competitor to GoAnimate/PowToons than your startup. I think HTML5 canvas is underutilized in the startup community so I hope both of our projects take off.
Part of the outrage is that the owner is apparently being dishonest and provides no justification (and it's hard to imagine any reasonable justification) for suddenly demanding a 3x and security deposit increase.

What additional value has the owner provided the tenant to justify such a large increase?

If the owner wants the tenant out, the owner should say so, not hide behind some ridiculous attorney letter and extortionist rent increase.
>Should they be uprooted every year (or more often) because someone wants to make a bit more money?

If they are living on someone else's property, and that person wishes to sell the property, and the lease and any other contractual or statutory guarantees have lapsed, then yes? This is really not a new thing. You can't do away with property ownership as a concept just because San Francisco is ridiculous.
Maybe I'm a bit ignorant here, but I don't always know the laws about things I'm doing before I do them.

If I wanted to rent my apartment out I wouldn't go searching for laws--I'd go searching for tenants (and a basic lease agreement I could modify).

If there's a required course or something, I guess it would make sense then.
That sounds more like a Buzzfeed headline than TED.
Yeah, it's thinner. The dimensions are on the Microsoft Store site: 0.45 inches vs 1.2 inches.

Still doesn't qualify as "reinventing the keyboard" IMHO.
Here is the home: http://www.trulia.com/homes/California/San_Francisco/sold/71...

Taxes are 11,043 with a value of 904,085. $2145 looks like an EXTREMELY low rent for a house of this size in San Francisco. (half of the rent is just property taxes.) The landlord was likely losing money keeping it rented at $2145 even if he owned it free and clear.
"Not entirely killing off the rental market" is a pretty low bar to clear :-P
For at least the past thousand years, the bedrock principal of law has been "restraints on alienation of property are generally considered invalid".

That is, property owners are free to do what they want with their property.

Another is: Your rights cannot exceed those of who you got them from
(IE tenants cannot have greater rights to land than landlords)

Tenants are tenants for a reason.

The whole point of ownership is to have exactly the ability to have these rights.

Why should somebody who has no title to the land, be able to control what happens to the land?

The fact that someone lives somewhere doesn't give them magical rights to the place, and it shouldn't.

(Most landlord/tenant law exists to ensure everyone plays fair and doesn't flat out abuse each other, but doing something within your rights, tough shit)
What part of a month-to-month rental contract do you not understand?
GitBook: A modern publishing toolchain
heh, if my hackerspace had emails like that, most of us would have stuff like post.master@ and web.master@ within minutes... and high five anyone that actually managed to use that to convince someone they were actually high level email addresses for the site.
How about Darwin Streaming Server?
yes, of course it's always the "creative types" -- they can't work in a team, they can't work anywhere except their own sound isolation booth, and they demand 22 continuous hours for 1 hour of flow, but they're somehow more productive...

I'm so sick of everybody trying to cater to these crybabies. They can go work for the government or something.
And up to 10,000 units in San Francisco are vacant because they think it's unfair. http://kalw.org/post/growing-number-san-francisco-landlords-...
Seems fair to me... when it's not your property.
I think that despite the strong correlation & overlap, yes, law has "always been" distinct from morality, at least where the law wasn't whimsical.

If it's not illegal, you can still do it, morals be damned, without being punished.

It's pretty much the point of law--to give warning & right to punish. That's not the same as morals.
You can do much more sophisticated operations than simple point-in-polygon queries.

The geospatial implementation in SpaceCurve is quite sophisticated and in some aspects the state-of-the-art. Complex geometry types and operators are obviously supported, and the implementation is fully geodetic and very high precision by default. Complex polygon constraints, aggregates, joins, intersections, etc on data models that also contain complex geometries are supported and massively parallelized. There is nothing else comparable for big data in this regard that I know of.

It is useful to understand that the entire platform, database engine on up, is fundamentally spatially organized even for plain old SQL "text and numbers" data. The SQL implementation is a thin layer that is translated into the underlying spatial algebra. You can use it for non-geospatial things, it just lends itself uniquely well to geospatial data models because it can properly represent complex spatial relationships at scale.
I have two friends with felonies that work in SV Tech, they each make over $200k a year for the last 5 years at reputable venture backed companies.
I wrote what amounts to this for scala/JVM. The API is definitely hard. I found numpy to be the best to follow in terms of API. It's what most people understand.
> No, they shouldn't be, but that's not really the issue.

Yes, it really is. Which does the most harm - uprooting people and families every year, forcing them to deal with the stress of moving and finding new life patterns which match wherever they live now, or disallowing landlords from making a bit more money?

EDIT: s/allowing/disallowing/
I was wondering if they tasted different. good to know.
I wonder if you would enjoy other kinds of community tech events more, ones that are closer to the technical side rather than the business side. Things like robot cup come to mind. If you are interested in social/environmental projects and meeting other similar people, you should check out the solar decathlon. I never did it but it looked fun.
yeah the problem is you want to somehow augment physical actions. no game is going to take off if all you do is move around at walking speed..

as palmer luckey has said a guy playing COD is not actually capable of doing all the stuff a real marine does, so then the question is how far do you take it?? like if i'm playing an nba game it seems fairly plausible that my 1 foot vertical could become a 3 foot vertical, or that my poor mechanics shooting a basketball where in real life i only sink the 3 pointer 10% of the time, when i'm playing as stephen curry the game interprets as 50% of the time..

i think one of the problems is that what makes video games so compelling and addictive is that they are an order of magnitude easier to get really good at then real life... e.g. sword fighting in a game versus sword fighting in real life.. if games become too realistic in their mechanics e.g. i actually have to master good footwork and how to swing a sword properly the game because too difficult
Property owners took a risk by purchasing property, just as anyone does purchasing shares of a public company for instance. The value of your asset can go up and you find yourself in an advantageous position (a seller's market as you put it), or prices can fall and recurring buyers (like renters) are at the advantage. Rent control only distorts the market and is unfair to everyone.
I dispute your second claim, based on personal experience, as well as the Mythbusters episode on same.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...

Perhaps you can find the segment online somewhere, Discovery has the after show online but not the segment itself.
You're right, that's probably not a fair summary.

Maybe go ahead and write a more fair one (I think you can probably see well enough what I'm getting at) and address that?
Regardless of legality, this is obviously wrong. The owner of the property clearly has no understanding of reality; they're going to be financially destroyed by this move, so no additional action necessary on that front. Glad to see someone so evil fall on hard times; pity they won't suffer more.

As for the tenant(s); if you want to relocate, I'll put you up in Minneapolis for free for a couple months if you want. No conditions, just let me know.
Why can't they tell the tennet to move out? In Australia residential leases have a fixed term (usually 12 months) and after that become month-to-month, and the owner can ask you to leave with 90 days notice when you're not under a contract.
Legally, it's all under the same umbrella. I never said this was scrupulous. Just legal, and perfectly commonplace. Not news.

It's being used as a rallying cry by people who were perfectly content with capitalism until it started being applied to them.
If those landlords don't have clear plans to use the property, that is decidedly irrational.
Exactly. Current homeowners don't want more housing because it will lower the value of their homes. They also vote against property tax increases for the same reason.
>Transaction costs.

Agreed, the tenant likely has many bases for recovering any and all costs associated with a move.

When did the owner provide notice that they would attempt to evade rent-control? The tenant has a reasonable assumption that a rent-controlled lease will remain rent-controlled indefinitely.
I, on the other hand would say that things are better than before. And moreover, the no of credit card frauds is one of the lowest as compared to other countries.

It would be a bit more naive to say that RBI's policies are the worst, because these are the same policies which were much appreciated by the financial world during the 2008/2009 financial meltdown.

Yes, the policies are a lot difficult and sometimes does not makes sense. But it has been designed and implemented to be one of the robust financial systems in the world.
Do you have any programming background?

I don't have a degree either, but having dropped out from a computer engineering university department (where I did pass most of the programming courses) and having maintained my own free software project, gave me a head start when I decided to take the web-dev route as a career.

At that point, I studied php/mysql,js/jquery and html5/css.

These were enough to land a job as a frontend Dev, but the amount of studying that I did afterwards I began working, was orders of magnitude more than before.

So I think your list is very complete for a start but prepare for lots of reading related to the specifics of the jobs you land.

Also, why limit yourself to local gigs? Even if you don't like remote work from your home, you can't ignore that it opens a huge market to you.
I do not know if you have been in SF lately, but the city is downright full of under construction apartment towers.
Not really, in those tribes usually an elder was a leader.
There was a study about it few weeks ago I have seen but I dont remember where it was.

The thing to understand is that flat management is step backwards.
Every unit in community should utilize their skills.
Management IS a skill.
So natural leaders should be leaders.
Natural organizers should be organizers and so on.

Problems are starting when artificial system is created where people are being valuated based on some idiotic scoring system instead of individual skill review.
Since when do people that own things have a moral obligation to justify their prices?
Thanks for the pointer. Agreed about the breath of fresh air. I installed it a couple weeks ago to play with my kids and we had a fun time with it.
I am aware of PostGIS, the author specifically said PostGIS was unable to keep up. I was wondering about the types of operations that SpaceCurve could do, and keep up, that PostGIS cannot.
I never get tired of reading your stuff, man. Will you run for office?

Nah, scratch that. You're too honest for politics.
Property ownership is an abstract concept enforced by law in the first place. There are theoretical economic models which do away with it to varying extents, or implement alternative ownership models. Why is it so mind-boggling to modify how it works in one specific instance?

Actually, almost everywhere, when you have a tenant, you lose some ownership rights already, by law. For example, except in an emergency, you generally can't enter the building without prior notice.
Completely agree with you. However, I think SF has already ceased to be an attractive place to live.

I don't live there, so maybe it's not a fair comment, but I would not want to live there for the same reason I don't like flushing money down the toilet.
Does California have income tax?
There are multiple units in the house.
Facebook, Oculus, and the Future of Virtual Reality
They did, in a hostile way. Then again, maybe the tenant refused to move out.
The market might correct itself, but are you really sure that gentrification is good for the community and people in general? This is basically what is happening.

Not everyone can easily pack up and just move. People are social beings, they have commitments, children and probably a place where they have some sort of personal connection.
Nope, no sponsored ads, and we're trying to keep things simple. The API is part of our long term plans, we're not currently developing it though.
You mentioned using similar services before, any positive/negative thoughts on what made you a happy/not so happy customer?
And just...thank you. For your feedback so far, it really made a difference :)
Great, I was actually wondering if you have like an API manual online somewhere? It sounds like it is more than just a performant PostGIS (no disrespect in that, PostGIS is quite slow) but beyond the basic stuff near here, how is the spatial algebra expressed from the client to the underlying database?
In San Francisco, the rent increase is also capped, oftentimes less than the amount that property taxes are increased under prop 13.
Liberalized zoning laws would go a long way to making this less of a problem
You are totally correct that landlords have this option.

People who are opposed to rent control argue, quite convincingly, that things like the situation you describe lead to bad outcomes for the community at large. A dwelling sitting unoccupied because an owner doesn't want to subject themselves to rent control laws decreases supply and increases rents for everyone.
if it's a killer idea why don't you just do it? Technically you can't patent "ideas"

And once it's done, there's no reason someone else won't execute it another way.
I guess you mean "disallowing landlords to make more money."

Again I think that's a red herring. There are plenty of reasons an owner might want to remove a tenant outside of profit. But again, it's not the issue--this is really straight to the heart of property rights.

Someone owns a property, and by and large, should be able to do what they want with that property.

Living on someone else's property is part of the risk of renting. Similar to working for someone else--would you also argue an employer should have to keep paying a worker who is underperforming (or any of a litany of legitimate reasons), because if they didn't that worker might have to deal with the stress of moving & finding new life patterns?