skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please don't conflate the market calamity of 2008 with this issue. The lesson we should have learned from the housing crisis, and all the financial derivative wizardry therein, is not "more government regulations NOW" - it's sensible regulation when necessary. Rent control is neither.
What makes you think that the landlord wouldn't find a "reason" to keep the deposit?
The nature of violence has not changed. The class warfare you speak of has existed since the dawn of man. It just has been brought to the forefront of our issues now because there are no longer evil tyrants skinning people alive (outside of North Korea). To say otherwise is incredibly ignorant of history. You could take Ancient Rome, for example, as a place where class warfare was entrenched and a major force of change. Marx, of course, thought of the same kind of struggle. People try to portray the Nazis as the cartoonishly evil to explain what they did to the Jewish people but they forget that the 1920s-30s was a ruinous time for everyone except the mostly Jewish banker class who were able to transfer their currency out of the German marks before the hyperinflation. You had a situation where Jewish families were traveling around in carriages while people on the streets were starving to death. Conspiracy theories sprouted up. The National Socialist party (Nazis) were supposed to remedy such differences of wealth, and they did it in the most destructive way possible. The atrocities during the WWII were largely due to class warfare taken to an extreme level. That's why I think you should be very weary when you refer to the situation that presents itself now as "war". Most of violence in history has been moralistic violence, don't fall for it. In any case, no, the nature of violence has not changed, though the costs have increased, which is for the better.
If it's profitable to hire a 1x engineer it should be profitable to hire a 10x engineer at 10x pay.

Suppose the earning/engineer multiplier is 4x: if you make 4x for each 1x engineer, you should make 40x from a 10x engineer.

And, currently the earnings/engineer multiplier in most well known bay area tech companies is enormous.
I just moved out of a non-rent-controlled 1 bedroom in NYC, where my landlord wanted to raise the rent from $2550 to $3100 per month. I've spoken with the new tenant, who moved in at a rate of $2400 per month. I turned in my keys on Friday, they painted the apartment on Saturday, and the new tenant moved in on Sunday. Despite this being February, they rented the place so fast that the second half of the month was paid for twice.

The dollar and timeline figures here tells me one of two things:

1) they wanted to get rid of me, particularly, or...

2) they took a calculated risk based on their experience managing a great number of units

I'd bet heavily on #2, since this is a pretty typical story in NYC.

They tried to raise the rent 22% to something 29% above market rate. They weren't able to get anything close to that rate for a new tenant. They will pull the same crap on this tenant next year too.

> More importantly, people who rent probably do not expect to stay in the same house or apartment for many years.

This is patently false.
I don't know how I feel about this. I worked my butt off to pay for my own schooling, while others got loan after loan. I think it cheapens my sacrifices (and the sacrifices of many others) to nullify student loans for those that were unwise in their "educational" pursuits.
This has already been discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136408

It's been in guava for a few years now.
I wonder if economics could in some way factor in emotions besides greed.
I interviewed with Google last year and the interviewer did two of the four things listed in killface's post. I actually do not agree with killface that those four things are necessarily bad (programmers should at least be able to make really good guesses at complexity, and know about trees), but at any rate, Google definitely had no fucking idea what my capabilities are as a developer after that interview, so incompetent was the interviewer.

It was actually one of the more terrible interviews I've been a part of, and I was not disappointed by the negative result. Google certainly believes they have interviewing down to a science, but I suspect that belief is itself not scientific, and instead just the usual bullshit and collective delusion.
"Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, 'In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.'"

Rent control is one of the small number of policies that economists on the left and right are essentially unanimous (93% in a survey of US economists; 95% in a survey of Canadian ones) in agreeing are always harmful, because they reduce both the quality and quantity of housing available.

It's not even some vague hypothetical either: In the linked story, the rent control laws have resulted in the conversion of a multi-tenant building into a single-family dwelling, which is a reduction in the number of housing units in the city. A reduction in the quantity supplied will, of course, lead to an increase in the equalibrium price. And the high equilibrium price is both why Follingstad's eviction is so painful, and why they were (effectively) evicted in the first place.

It's a textbook example of Why Rent Control Hurts Everyone, in one compact little story.
Well, like all good things, HN has passed Eternal September. Or more quaintly:

http://imgur.com/L00Fn2t
> Tear something away from a person and you can absolutely traumatize them. It can be a teddy bear for a little kid, a car for an adolescent, your laptop, you get the idea.

I don't understand the point: none of those things are being torn away from people due to market forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_farm_bill The US Farm Bill establishes agricultural subsidies.
It's useful in the field of consistent-hashing: mapping items over shards where the number of shards varies over time. (Only some systems do this, and most hash algorithms are used in other fields.)

This technique also requires the shards be assigned contiguous integer ID starting at 0, and appears to work best if all shard entry/exit is intentional and at the end of the ID range. (That is: if you have 15 shards, they're named #0-#14. If you decide you need one less, you turn off shard #14.)

It doesn't appear to work well for systems with more chaotic entry/exit. (Shard #4 just crashed, and you don't need it anymore? You'd still want to restart/fill one shard as #4, then shut-down/drain shard #14. Other consistent-hashes could just map #4's old duties among the remaining nodes, albeit with their higher space/time costs.)
Yes, I understood what you were saying, and I was observing that even on a message board the question in the abstract was already a battle of wills.

I've done a lot of job interviews. It's not as simple as "candidate gave wrong answer, ding them and move on". If you're taking your job seriously, you're somewhat nervous too, and have to ask yourself if the answer they're giving is better than the one you're looking for. So now it's a debate, and now you're influenced by more than something you can look up in a book for the right answer.
So what if they fail?

I had an programmer that didn't know that. I went to the whiteboard, explained it, and now she is perfectly competent at it (and the rest of her job). What's the problem?

Where do we get the idea that if someone doesn't know some arbitrary fact that they are incapable of learning it? Hire people that are smart, have good work ethics, and play nicely with others, and everything else will take care of itself.
Clever solution to a unique problem!

> So how does this help with queue oscillation? Simple: We generate a few extra "spare" combination packets, so that we now have more equations than variables. This means we can afford to lose a few combination packets in overflowing queues or elsewhere – and still get all of our original packets back.

If I understand correctly, this would also work with a more traditional coding scheme (block coding or convolutional coding). I'm curious if there are plans to take advantage of the properties of network codes in the future.
> Are you aware that you just defined turning a profit as an asshole move? Perhaps you want to rethink your definition.

Nowhere did I say that, and I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth.

Actually, interestingly, you've now also defined profit as a zero-sum game across society. For some to be enriched, others must falter and be brought lower. If that's what profit is, then yes, I do believe profit is an asshole move. (But I don't think that's what profit is!)

It's entirely possible for landlords to raise rents in such a way that continues to cover their costs, continues to provide a tidy profit margin, but does not displace tenants. That's why I said it's possible to maintain your current profit (which you could consider a fixed dollar amount or a percentage, and my argument still holds) and did NOT say maintain your current rent.
The Hacker Who Drank Ayahuasca
> Let's just assume that most renters and most landlords are fair actors.

That's an insane assumption. Most landlords are companies which, if human, would be considered sociopaths.
Not many people can work that much in raw hours, and be as productive for each of those hours as someone who works normally are during each business hour.
Ruby on Rails Screencast – Upload Images to Amazon S3 Using CarrierWave Gem
Well, you've got to tear a bunch of stuff down first. And I've read before that the city doesn't want to build up too much because they want to retain some of their character or something.
Economics is not value-free. Actually, economics already has a way of dealing with exactly the problem GP cites: externalities.

Taking away someone's home involves potentially massive negative externalities (emotional and otherwise). Therefore, if you want to maintain the political theater that says capitalism is designed to benefit everyone, you have to accept that it may be preferable, optimal in fact, to incur some deadweight loss. Rent control is one strategy that does just that: as long as a person lives in a place, the rent can't go up.

Is it naively optimal? Nope. But it is (or can be, if you get the implementation right) actually optimal. It is a guarantee that a house can be a home, if the tenant so chooses, and it could be used to balance the aforementioned negative externalities.

Does it? Who knows, maybe, I'm not familiar enough with San Francisco's housing laws. Just because they implemented it poorly doesn't mean the concept is unsound or irrational and it doesn't mean that anyone in favor of the concept is "silly" or deserves to be condescended.
It does. When you choose to pay a price or not, every emotion you feel is factored in.

Is a place "home" to you? You're probably willing to pay for it. Don't like a place much? You'll be less willing to spend.

This runs out after a point, though. Warm fuzzies are great, but I can't eat them, wear them, or sleep under them. I also can't trade warm fuzzies for any things I can do those with.
Oddly enough, I have two Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers for anyone interested in the Fort Collins, Colorado area. They have been sitting on a bread rack for a while now and could use a good home.
NSQ writes messages sent to a topic onto all channels subscribing to the topic which can be used as a form of replication in a way that meshes well with its at-least-once semantics.
Still sounds like a win to me. Think of The Mythical Man-Month.

Do you want a kitchen with 10 chefs and the coordination that demands, or a kitchen with 1 chef that is just as productive as the raw sum of the 10 chefs? Assuming that the productivity of each chef was tested in isolation.
Wonder how this rental mechanism works
Here's something similar which you can take for a test drive: http://auduno.github.io/clmtrackr/examples/facesubstitution....

It's open-sourced and carries the MIT license.
I feel like it's making light of it, as if suicide weren't anything serious. When Louis CK jokes about, say, racism, he's not acting like racism isn't a big deal.
Thanks for the response. I definitely know about Numpy, it's currently what I use instead of lisp / scheme, mostly because it's currently the least painful way to do numerical computing (in my opinion, that is). Unfortunately, Python is not a lisp (and yes, I know of Hy) which does bring forth it's own limitations.

The biggest concern I have with re-implementing Numpy in Scheme / Lisp is that it's very object oriented. Certainly, many of the ufunc methods in Numpy can be composed or chained in a very functional style, but at its core Numpy is Pythonic, and Pythonic code means using OOP for abstraction. Mainly, I'm concerned with how one actually transfers this over into Lisp like languages. Sure, CHICKEN has coops, Guile has goops, which are basically Common Lisps' CLOS, but taking the concept of Numpy and expressing it in a CLOS-like system sometimes just feels wrong.

That said, I think the guys behind clojure.core.matrix have done some work facing similar challenges, but I don't really know enough to evaluate if they've done the right thing. Moreover, Clojure itself almost makes this job easier, because it has interfaces / protocols from the get-go, whereas Scheme and CL don't quite share the same properties.

In any case, thanks again for your reply. If you ever write anything regarding those 4 rewrites, or if you have written anything regarding your decisions on refactoring and improving an API, I'd love to read it. I know a lot of people hold Numpy up as a gold standard, but I still find it very hard to put in explicit terms what makes programming with Numpy arrays more pleasant than using MATLAB arrays, Eigen (C++) matrices / vectors, or other similar systems.
VC investment is very power law, and SV dwarfs other places: http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/06/americas-top-metros-vent... , especially controlled for population.

See also pg's "Cities and Ambition" http://paulgraham.com/cities.html. People move to SV to do startups because everyone else moves to SV to do startups. The field of economic geography studies this phenomenon.
So how would you compromise on the points I raised? What would you advocate for instead? Stating these openly might help clarify the issue.
"The rest profit handsomely from increased home prices due to high demand."

The irony is, they would probably profit even more, if they allowed the city to grow naturally. New York City had a population of 800k (like San Francisco has now) some time in the 1850's. Do you think a piece of land in NYC would be more valuable now, if they had decided to stop the city's population to 800k back then?
I believe the person you were replying to was referring to land when he said property (which is a normal term to use, if someone asked me "are you interested in looking at a property?" it would pretty unambiguously mean land / physical building).

Not that it means his stance was correct, but your argument isn't addressing his point.
> Actually, interestingly, you've now also defined profit as a zero-sum game across society. For some to be enriched, others must falter and be brought lower.

OK. What nuance of your stated position did I mistake? In what way do you make a profit and enrich yourself without it coming at the expense of another? Bear in mind that trading something of yours for money from someone else is very literally a trade taking place at their expense - they are spending money.

> It's entirely possible for landlords to raise rents in such a way that continues to cover their costs, continues to provide a tidy profit margin, but does not displace tenants.

Not when prop 13 caps are generally higher than rent control caps. Over time, a property-owner will lose ground and their margin will shrink as their costs increase faster than their incomes.

In practice, this manifests as landlords deciding not to invest in the upkeep and maintenance so they can preserve their profit margins.
The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers
This is very cool. Thank you for working on it.

I do know a team whom you should work with: keybase.io

Keybase.io have an early-level product which would help with your keyserver issue. It has a CORS-enabled API, a commandline tool, an online interface for encrypting, signing, verifying, etc. and a "ring of trust" tool that follows the modern social network model (where, you can "track" somebody and it auto-signs their keys each time they upgrade.
RPGs to Expect on Linux in 2015
Incidentally the technical term for what you describe is the:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

Most famously described by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls
That would be an insane decision on the part of the landlord though. An increase in price is either tolerable or intolerable. If the tenant is willing to pay an additional $1,000 a month, that's the new market price. If the tenant is willing to move, the landlord loses out on $500-2,000 as it takes time to bring in a new renter in even the hottest market.

The total loss of income is enough incentive for the landlord to keep rent increases reasonable. If your example held true, there would be violence in the streets across the globe but there aren't. The incentives keep increases in check in markets less insane than those in San Francisco and California at large. The policies of that city and state are the largest differentiator between them and areas with healthy markets/ Maybe we should be looking at policy beyond the veil of partisan rhetoric?
Most people don't have $12,500 sitting around in the bank, or often even enough to rent a truck for the weekend. Some people work multiple jobs and can't even carve out a full day to move houses. Some people aren't in the best physical health (due to age or disability) and cannot actually move their own stuff.

You've described the typical SF tech worker and decided that everyone is like that. Might want to broaden your horizons a bit.

Regardless, you don't get the security deposit back until a few weeks after you've moved out. Never seen a truck rental or moving company who is all like "sure, you can pay us in a month". A bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, there.
This is great, spent a lot of time reading about this kind of stuff (from books like this: http://www.amazon.com/Satellite-Technology-Principles-Applic... ) before I went to work on a ship with the task of maintaining the satellite connection. Turned out I didn't have much control over our traffic on the satellite side, but it was interesting nonetheless to think of what was happening to our traffic once it reached there.
Rent control wouldn't be such a problem in SF if it didn't also lead to NIMBY-ism preventing the addition of more housing.

I didn't call anyone silly. I said the idea that economics cease to apply because strong emotions and italic fonts are involved is silly.
I don't like agricultural subsidies, but they don't make it illegal for Whole Foods to sell a carrot for $4.
I'm sorry you're offended, maybe that's part of your lingo, too, but "crazy sht" is ghetto talk. Indeed. A self-respected and honorable engineer pays attention to detail - not only in their work, but in their language as well and especially in the meticulous choice of words. English is not my native tongue, but I respect it very much, and the language I respect does not include phrases such as "crazy sht" - it's a rich and very expressive language and only the severely incapacitated include those in their written communication.
So, unless I'm in it to only make as little money as possible for me to have a reasonably comfortable existence (by some standard you have set), I'm a greedy asshole. I disagree. I want to be rich someday. I want to retire at 50 and travel the world, eating at overpriced restaurants along the way. I want to leave some wealth to my children.

That's why I bust my hump working a day job as well as building assets in my spare time; so that someday my investments pay my way with little effort on my end. I am indeed in it to make money; I have no interest in running self-subsidized housing. There's nothing morally wrong with charging market value. It's not that I have no empathy for these people, but circumstances change for a variety of reasons and we all have to adapt. Neighborhoods change over time; rent control won't stop that. My investment finally paid off and you want me to run a charity.

I'm sorry that doesn't jive with your political/world outlook, but that doesn't make me a bad person. There are pros and cons to any economic system, but apparently capitalism is not for you. That's fine, just drop the holier than thou attitude.
"Why does a police force and firefighters exist to protect that property?"

Because the landlord wants to protect their property and pays the property tax towards that goal unlike the renter? (yes it is built into the cost of rent but it's also built into the cost of every business transaction and people don't criticize that point)
> If the tenant is willing to pay an additional $1,000 a month, that's the new market price.

That is incorrect. That is the new price of that unit for that tenant, as if it were a market of size 1. A similar unit on the market would rent for a different rate paid by similar tenants in the market.
Owners may evict a tenant in an owner move in. There are a variety of regulations that you can get caught up in, designed to protect from abuse by commercial landlords, but practically speaking, if you own a single building and wish to evict rent controlled tenants live in one of the units, you'll be able to. Your objections continue to demonstrate an unfamiliarity with rent control in sf.

@harryh: your complaint is rent control prevents owners from renting out their property (while doing something in the meantime) without getting locking into a forever rental. For small landlords, it does not, at least not in this enumerated (most likely the most important) instance. As a small landlord, most importantly of a single unit, you may rent it out as you wish and move back in later, evicting a rent controlled tenant if necessary.
> But then, in America, you guys don't trust the government to do anything like house, educate and heal people.

Or fight wars or manage finances. Because there is strong precedence that the government is pretty bad at these things.
That's how any sensible rent control ordinance would work, but that's not how it works in San Francisco. Units remain under rent control even if a tenant voluntarily moves out, dies, etc.
I'd expect you, an expert lawyer , to know better. There are many laws that grant rights to people just for living somewhere long enough. Zoning laws exist. And eminent domain privileges are enshrined in the USA. Usury laws go back centuries. Law is a social contract, there is no inherent natural right of one person obeer another when multiple individuals live together in society.
The typical false-wise answer to the housing crisis is something like "build more housing, supply & demand, read an Econ 101 textbook, DUH."

The reality is more complex.

The real Economics 101 answer is: You can't know the effect of more supply on prices without knowing the demand curve. No one truly knows that, but consider this. The current market price is basically what a startup employee can support on their salary without kids, much savings, etc. If there's a large supply of people willing to move into SF for jobs like this and pay that price, but unable to pay more, then that whole worldwide supply needs to be exhausted before the market price comes down. That could take years or even decades depending on how the startup boom goes.

In the meantime, the macroeconomic effects of widespread losses in housing for blue collar, service industry workers, the middle class, artists, etc. can have very undesirable long term effects on a city. There is good reason for city governments to consider managing this growth.