skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A reasonable notice period plus lump-sum fee would be an interesting angle to overcome the transaction-cost issue. Wonder if that's been tried anywhere?

I'm not familiar with the history of SF's rent-control laws, but in Copenhagen another motivation is stability, though. Beyond simply the hassle of moving, there was a decision some decades ago (probably about a century at this point) that it should be possible for people to choose to live somewhere long-term, organize their life around that assumption, customize the space within reason, etc., and not worry that they will be forced to move constantly because of fickle landlords and markets. Rent-control laws and anti-eviction laws (which aren't quite the same, since a landlord might want to evict for reasons unrelated to rental prices) aimed at that stability, so a tenant who has lived in a place for at least 3 years generally has something like "tenure" in the place, protected against both rent increases and eviction.

Now you might say: if you want that kind of stability, you should buy rather than rent. But at least here, the concept of individually owned condos didn't exist until recently. Real-estate was a system of land ownership, along with any improvements on the land. So you could own some land with a house on it, or some land with a 5-story apartment building on it, but you couldn't own only the left half of the 4th floor of a building. You could rent use of that portion of the building, but you couldn't own a floating piece of the building. (Condo ownership now exists, but it really is an odd kind of real estate, since it comes with no land, and your unit is so heavily structurally coupled to neighboring units, that normal decisions regarding real estate, like choosing to build or demolish structures, can't really be exercised.)

Obviously your average worker couldn't buy an entire apartment building, so almost all of the urban working class rented. This system of rental stability was then developed to provide housing stability for them. (There are alternatives also in use, which arguably work better. The two main ones are cooperatively-structured housing, where residents jointly own their own building through a system of shares; and association-owned housing, where an organization such as a union or philanthropic society owns housing and rents it to their members, or to the public, on generally favorable terms.)
Interestingly, the idea that it's your property and you can do what you want with it was often the justification not to rent to people of color, the disabled, and other disadvantaged groups.

The counter argument is, that the governments of regions, (cities, counties, states, etc) have to account for externalities that businesses don't consider or care about.

Governments see benefits in keeping housing affordable. Do you like having restaurants with waiters, stores with clerks, streets that are swept, trash collected, and so on? then those people need places to live too.
If it's sitting unoccupied and the owner has no plans to do anything with it, the owner is being irrational. If the owner does have plans to do something with it, they have to kick the tenant out, meaning that any additional supply as a result of renting out these houses is short-term, thus just pushing the problem back a bit. You'd still have to deal with the problem in the future.
Is there any sources you get those numbers? They seem very wrong from when I last researched this.
Disagree. I think they abused Twitter and made twitter feeds noticeably worse. All their tweets are essentially useless after a few moments and just litter feds. I may be naive but I think if Meerkat was closer to following the rules and respecting user feeds it wouldn't have been cutoff (i.e., Twitter's supposed competitor was not the reason).
In many countries it's quite difficult for an employer to fire a worker, and if they do, they have to provide some financial support to help them, as you say, move and find new life patterns. I do not live in one of those countries, so I cannot vouch for the advantages and disadvantages of this system, but it's hardly unthinkable.
1) Maybe they don't have plans to do anything with it today, but they don't want to get locked into renting to a tenant for decades. That's not irrational.

2) No, that's not just pushing the problem back a bit. That is wrong. There will always be owners who want do do something with their property somewhere down the road. If you allow them to rent it out in the meantime (without getting locked into a forever contract) you can permanently increase the total rental stock in a community.
Is the weather, food/beer/wine, and landscape really that much better than Santa Cruz? Is it that much better than Raleigh? Or Austin? Or any other city that isn't San Francisco?

Besides the benefits you might get from SF, let's be realistic: the city doesn't want you. It doesn't want any of you. The only benefit you're getting is the people who moved there just like you, and the city doesn't want them, either. If they wanted you, they would let you build houses, or let you run buses without getting rocks thrown at you. They would welcome you and do what it takes to make your stay pleasant.

I don't live in SF, but I frequent HN so I hear all the stories. If half of what I hear here is true, you're a bunch of people living in a city where you have massively overstayed your welcome. And it seems like no one has realized it yet.

Please, tell me I'm wrong. Take a look at your rent, at your city policies, your Senator, and at the people around you (not the tech workers, but the other residents of SF), take a look at them and tell me I'm wrong. I don't want to be right, but that's the only impression I can get from stories like this.
Probably should have just sent a notice to security@github.com rather than exploiting it in production.
Ask HN: Typing test for software interviews?
I've found that a simple typing speed test can reveal a lot of things that algorithms or engineering questions leave out. You find candidates with amazing resumes who top out around 50 words per minute. Then there are candidates who don't know keyboard shortcuts in an IDE (when asked to copy some code in their favorite language+IDE). This got me thinking... are there other mechanical interview questions that actually have a good deal of correlation with software engineering prowess?
Pinker largely sticks to looking at the percentage of the population killed in war as all the arguments about which class is nasty to another are too subjective to get decent numbers on. On the deaths per capita measure things have been getting better. And if you think the powerful screwing over the poor is bad now things were way worse in fairly recent history - slavery, tens of millions staved by Mao & Stalin etc...
I really really don't want a push notification from meerkat telling me about everyone i follow on twitter doing something. That would be really really awful. I'm glad I didn't in fact sign up for meerkat.
Wow, what a dump. And I thought I was getting ripped off in NY...
Except that's useless. Realistically you'd need a legal patent clause, because right now Google can change its stance on patenting it at any moment, and make your code violate the patent.
I couldn't agree more. Rent control originally proposed for these on fixed salary growth (teachers, firemen, etc.) is turned upside down when the inhabitants are not constrained by these caps. That being said the rules of the game are clear and defined on signing of the lease ( by both parties), and property owners are constrained (and game) these rules as much as the tenants. Having an updated provision that allows both parties to win from a conversion makes for amicable relations. I love my rent controlled apartment,but let's face the facts the contract and governance is clear and I could end up with the same situation. I would be more inclined to be bought out of my position giving up my under market rent giving the landlord the option to try for greater revenue. Win win
From the records on Zillow, assuming they owned the unit free and clear, the landlord was likely losing money at the current rent: it's less than the current taxes on the unit.

Should they have been forced to continue to rent the unit out at a loss?
I still haven't managed to click on a stream that was still going on. (somehow even clicking on the streams that are happening in X minutes but didn't)
A vector belongs to a vector space, which implies certain algebraic rules relating it to other vectors in the space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space is probably enough reference). A multidimensional scalar is a more general data type, as any or all of the vector axioms can be relaxed or eliminated.
I like the idea of an random number generator that exploits the full precision of the floats. However, the issue with the naive method is loss of accuracy, not bias. When the article states

If k is 64, a natural choice for the source of bits, then because the set {0, 1, ..., 2^53 - 1} is represented exactly, whereas many subsets of {2^53, 2^53 + 1, ..., 2^64 - 1} are rounded to common floating-point numbers, outputs in [0, 2^-11) are underrepresented.

this is very misleading, because the points that are "underrepresented" are closer together. The discrete probability density created by the naive method is a perfectly good approximation to the uniform distribution.

Furthermore, although as the article shows, we can do better, this can, and must, come at a cost. Since the small numbers occur with much lower probability, the only way to generate them (without importance sampling) is by generating much more randomness (1088 bits in the article). Generating random bits is expensive, and this uses 17 times more randomness than the naive method.

EDIT: it would be possible to avoid generating all the extra bits in most cases, and so an efficient average time algorithm should be possible, but the worst case still requires 1088 bits to be generated.
If you use neoclassical assumptions like you did, his claims are absurd. However, we live in the real world, not some magic fantasy of perfect markets, perfect competition and zero transaction costs.
This is the real problem. SF is loathe to build out skyscrapers even though it's been proven that dense urban areas are the most efficient way to live. The earthquake argument isn't really a sound one in this day and age so the only thing left is "we don't like change."
Landlord finds loophole to end rent control on a unit. Shocker.

To those who say it's unfair to the landlord to force rent control on them I say two things:

1. Yes it is. There are cases when legally allowed rents are below the taxes the landlord needs to pay. If the government really thinks affordable housing is a public good, let the government build or buy apartment buildings and offer it rather than having forced income distribution essentially; and

2. To the landlords: it's not so funny when the shoe's on the other foot is it? I'm talking of course about Prop 13. This allows long term owners to pay basically nothing in property taxes with those taxes only resetting when the property is sold.

So the state of California screwed up in creating rent control and Prop 13. Great. Repeal them both.

The problem with massive rent control is it creates a dysfunctional market and a huge disincentive to rent out or build new housing supply [1].

New York City ended issuing new rent control leases in 1973. There are very few left. NYC has a functional housing market (in comparison). There are affordable places to live 30 minutes from Manhattan thanks to pretty good infrastructure.

SF specifically and South Bay in general are basically an object lesson in NIMBYism gone insane.

Honestly, the sooner the startup figures out that the only thing the Valley has got going for it is the weather because everything else sucks, the better.

[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/San-Francisc...
You're living with mono-culture blinders on, but okay.
Well, this assumes that renting out a house has no costs; if income is less than costs over the course of the lease, it's rational to keep a property off the market.
>any rational landlord

That's a large assumption.

>If you offer to pay at least as much for the building as the landlord would expect to make from renting it out

Over what time period?

>Landlords have nothing to gain by gouging tenants who will only move across the street to keep paying what they are now,

Where in SF is that possible? Do you know of any documented cases?

>is completely reasonable and natural.

Exactly the justification used for so many horrors.
I genuinely wish there was an alternative that could gain enough traction to reach critical mass and hopefully start shipping with operating systems. I've never bothered to learn bash because it was always so damned confusing, and I just couldn't get over the idiosyncrasies when playing around with it. I wouldn't mind putting in time to learn something new and actually user-friendly.
Ooh! Thanks to both you and jnsaff2. Those towers are pretty nifty.
That Italian villa/castle thing looks delicious. I wonder what's wrong with it?
The concept of home is far older than 1000 years, and is deeply important to humans.
But how is this different to that person firing off a Tweet?
hehe, you mean zsh ?
TED ruined their brand with Eric X. Li's talk.
Dude you need to get something for your soreness. I don't take everything seriously and comments on the internet are definitely one of those things. You are like a loser klingon captain whose ship is about to blow up because the Enterprise is firing its photon torpedoes at him. And no I don't care about you downvoting either.
Indeed.

Though I think Stonebraker's VoltDB supports SQL as well.. ;)
Gojomo, that was the point of using MD5 in the example. If this system had been deployed in 1995, it would have been used MD5, and thus the problem of broken/obsolete links that the comment outlined would have applied to it after a few years. Who's to say the same thing wont happen to this system in 5 years?
Those traditions and societies specifically named The Law (translated from the local language) as what you are describing as holy law.

You still haven't described what moral is, or how one has an obligation to it.
.. That is, provided you refactor again afterward to put things into the correct abstractions.

I call this pulling out into helper code function "blowing up" the code, because it usually results in an order of magnitude larger amount of lines of code.

This refactoring technique certainly helps make the core logic of the (usually) over complicated program visibly easier to see / grok from a distance.

From there its just a matter of reducing / refactoring / simplifying things down to more correct (at least I hope) abstractions that don't overcomplicate the solution.

This is most useful when you're given something like a 5k line script that does far too many things for far too many different reasons, all with very little if any documentation. (ie, bottom up refactoring, don't really know what the solution is but you know the current solution isn't the way to go)
Your age has negative value, not your experience. If that new grad were the same age as you, that wouldn't apply.
So, there's no mention of the tenant's salary in this story. Does rent control in SF or the US in general not stipulate that rent control is also a function of the tenant's ability to pay? Here, in The Netherlands, this is an important criterion in determining what the maximum increase is in rent for a given property [1].

My general understanding of the law in The Netherlands based on having rented once during university is that it heavily favours tenants. The bottomline is that no one is allowed to end up on the street, with the main exception being if the landlord is in dire financial straits. Apart from that, the law sides with the tenant. This even goes to the extent that fixed-term contracts are more or less useless, because if a tenant doesn't want to leave, they don't have to.

Is it considered reasonable in SF that the tenant will be able to find alternative accommodation within 60 days?

[1] http://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/huurwoning/huurverho... (Laws on rental increase in The Netherlands in Dutch)

[2] https://www.jurofoon.nl/huren/huurovereenkomst-voor-bepaalde... (Fixed-term contract rules for housing in Dutch)
I find it interesting that we can, with almost 95%+ success, determine who on these threads owns Real Estate in San Francisco, versus those who don't.

There are admittedly some comments that are in the margins, but the number of false positives/negatives is probably pretty close to zero.

In particular, those who rant about the evils of uncontrolled rental markets are 99% likely to not own real estate in San Francisco.

Therefore, those commentors aren't commenting on the objective good or bad of such issues, so much as they are just explaining what their personal situation is. As soon as those people who cried the evils of uncontrolled rental markets came into possession of San Francisco property, they would immediately change their tune.

Should we place any value in ethical principles which are so immediately seen to be self-serving?
rent increases are almost always less than prop 13 increases. prop 13 increases are capped at 2%. In the last decade, only once was rent control greater than 2% and once it was 2%. The other 8 years, it has been less, including 0.1% one year.

http://sfrb.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1939
It is the market's prerogative to do whatever it wishes, including demanding more information before transacting.
This looks very cool. At-least once semantics are the way to go because most tasks require idempotence anyway and that helps in dealing with multiple delivery. Strict FIFO ordering is not always needed either as long as you avoid starvation - most of the time you need "reliable" deferred execution ("durable threads").

I started prototyping something along these lines on top of riak (it is incomplete - missing leases etc but that should be straightforward to add):
https://github.com/isbo/carousel
It is a durable and loosely FIFO queue. It is AP because of Riak+CRDTs. It is a proof of concept - would be nice to build it on top of riak_core instead of as a client library.
> ability to instinctively and intuitively design elegant and correct solutions to a given problem while introducing minimal bugs.

That is very important. Code that is not written is just as important importat (maybe more important) than code that is written. What I mean is good programmers will find way to solve something using less code. That is very imporant for understandability, maintenance, and long term support.

That is hard to convey to an outsider. Say a manager who has never programed that is in charge of evaluating programmers they are managing. They will usually value more code, more nights spent at the office and more churn fixing bugs vs less code, less nights spent at the office, no churn or "putting out fires". Heck to them it looks like the 10x programmers is a 0.1x programmer compared to others.
> The landlord was likely losing money keeping it rented at $2145 even if he owned it free and clear.

This conveniently omits the fact that there used to be two units in that house, so the actual rent would certainly have been closer to double that amount.
By definition, profit is extracting more than the 'worth' of something.
I believe they did it _prior_ to SXSW. That's the type of event that could 10x awareness for Merkat and thus complaints when they cut it off. I have no inside knowledge but have heard it said by others they jumped on it due to SXSW.
Given that twitter is a stream of a whole bunch of tweets each one of which you can read really really fast, I've always been a bit confused by complaints about useless tweets. Some fairly big % of your stream is always going to be useless tweets. Has Meerkat really increased that percentage all that much?

I can see why people might disagree with me here though.
Rental housing can't be particularly efficient because neither renters nor landlords are fungible, and there's loads of information asymmetry.

IME (London) what typically happens is you get a bit gouged for rent when you first move in to a place, then, as the landlord gains trust in you as a tenant, the rent is "sticky" - it doesn't go up very quickly. You can use the risk of a new tenant as a negotiation lever to keep rent down.
In San Francisco, only residential units constructed prior to 1979 are subject to the local rent control law. This is for market housing, government subsided housing follows different (and differing) regulations, which often do take income into account.
http://www.sftu.org/rentcontrol.html
Heard this quip somewhere:

If, on appropriate occasions, the members tell, enjoy,
trade, and/or devise transgressively funny jokes about
their denomination, it’s a church.

If such jokes reliably meet with stifling social
disapproval, it’s a cult.

This works for TED as well. I find some TED talks to be really useful. Others not so much. Just like every other group gathering whether it be a conference, educational institution, club, or whatever.

Think critically about everything.
This is cool! Thanks for sharing.
Well in all fairness it seems like they're growing their business like crazy but pre and post access.
Not really. The property quoted in the article was purchased in 1974 and California brought in strict limits on property tax increases in 1978.

So the property taxes are probably trivial. The house acts as an investment with high returns and favorable tax status. They can sell it or take out a mortgage if they ever need money.

Given that burning down the property to avoid a long eviction struggle isn't unheard of, the owner is perfectly rational to decide not to rent it out.
If feels like Meerkat could be an order of magnitude more powerful if streams were saved for at least some amount of time. That's gotta be on their roadmap somewhere.
> Shitty interviewers ask:

Google does none of what you prescribe for "good interviews" and they have interviewing down to a science. Yes they've admitted they err on false negatives, but that is acceptable because they have little to no false positives.

From what I gather you want an easy interview. What you wrote is impractical (though I agree gotcha questions can be a bit much).

As a candidate, I get 1-hour with you and I need to accomplish the following:

1. Does your resume reflect your experience?

2. Can you code?

3. What is it like to work with you to solve a challenge?

4. Sell you on joining us.

Real life problems may fit in an hour, but may not.

There are so many resources on programming interviews that spending an hour or two during the week prior would pay off dividends in a candidates success rate.
Judging by the series of downvoted comments in this thread, are you surprised? Apparently circumventing rent control is OK amongst the HN crowd.
I agree with this. I struggled at first (with my daughter's performance in a recent science fair), but realized that my experience was a gift I could give to her in the form of a better-than-average ability to explain seemingly complicated ideas to an 8 year old. And to provide somewhat expert guidance on the scientific method itself.

To a certain extent, this happens in many other ways at schools as well. I mean, those kids with very athletic, or sports oriented, parents, may be more driven or have better guidance in athletic endeavors that would my kids. But we seem not to care about that (until the parents are screaming during a game).

And likewise with music, or art, and so on. So I think I've decided not to get too concerned about how others might view my daughter's work on her project. It would be unfair (to her) if I decided not to give her explanations that were the benefit of my own experience.