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I would rather have an anal probe with a cactus than ever be a landlord again. Vacancy, slow payers, maintenance, evictions that take forever, etc.

Being a distant landlord is even worse. Yes you can get a property manager. But, then you have to pay them.


The average size of a new build in the US is almost 2600 square feet.

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2022/03/new-single-family-home-siz...

The smallest home my builder was building when we were looking was 3100 square feet. It was $335K in 2016.

As far as what a family did with a 5 bedroom 3.5 bath house. Bedroom for me and my wife, bedroom for my son, guest bedroom with a bath, office, and gym. There was another room that was converted to a dance studio for my wife.

We did downsize late last year and now we stay in a 1300 square foot condo.


I don’t understand why anyone needs 3000sf unless they have 3+ kids. That’s a lot of maintenance on space you don’t use


What “maintenance” do you think is more for a 3000 square foot house than a 1500 square foot house?

I just mentioned it.

1. Master bedroom

2. Son’s bedroom

3. Gym with three pieces of cardio equipment and weights

4. Office

5. Guest bedroom

The 6th room was a dance studio for my wife. She taught online fitness classes during Covid.

It’s not like we paid millions of dollars. I qualified for it when I was only making $115K and put 3.5% down - less than $12K. In 2016.

It’s now worth twice that (we rent it out to our son and two of his friends at a discount).

My wife and I have since moved to a condo in a resort area where one fee ($650) pays all utilities, access to a decent gym, 3 pools, a running trail, three restaurants on site and a lake. It’s the same price that our house was in 2016.


Do you pay someone from cleaning or do you clean it yourself?

That looks like a lot of work, probably 1 full day per week (probably more) to:

- vacuum everything (including the skirting boards)

- mop the floors

- dust everything else

- clean all the windows

- change/wash/dry the linens/towels

- clean the kitchen

- clean the toilets


> vacuum everything (including the skirting boards)

My house is mostly wood floors but I maybe Swiffer and vacuum once a week (probably a lot less) for about 15-20 minutes. I run Roomba once or twice a week to take care of the rest.

> mop the floors

I can count on one hand how many times I mop floors per year in any size house.

> dust everything else

I definitely don't do the blinds/baseboards/etc enough. Wife usually does the furniture once a week and the rest is on demand.

> clean all the windows

Only when I get a wild hair.

> change/wash/dry the linens/towels

Size of house doesn't change this. See above.

> clean the kitchen

Still only one kitchen.

> clean the toilets

Same number of people


- most of the carpet is covered by “stuff” and doesn’t get vacuumed,

- it took maybe an hour to take care of the hardwood.

- having a larger house doesn’t mean you have more to wash. How much you have to wash is a function of how many people live there.

- you would have a kitchen either way

- one bathroom only got used when guests come, one was our sons (and his responsibility). That left only two - the one in attached to our room and the half bath.

The gym got sanitized with everything being wiped down and air freshener after every use.


> - you would have a kitchen either way

I'm fairly sure your kitchen in the 360sqm house is bigger than my kitchen in the 90 sqm apartment :-)


It’s a kitchen with a stove, a sink, a microwave and a dishwasher. What does the size of the kitchen have to do with how hard is to clean? That’s a function of how much you cook and what you use to cook.


> Most people I know could not afford their house if they were buying it today

How is that true if you moved to a place with an equivalent cost of living?

I had my house built in the suburbs of Atlanta for $350K in metro Atlanta. It’s now worth $650K. If I wanted to buy another house for $650K, I would sell my house. Get $300K in cash, use it for a down payment, and still have a $350K mortgage.

Of course I’m ignoring selling costs, interest rate differences etc.

I have a friend who located from Seattle to Atlanta. He also had a home in Seattle, he had $600K in equity that he was able to use to get a $900K house in Atlanta and have a $300K mortgage.


I find it hilarious when HN threads go deep, and commenters forget the actual point.

This post and thread are talking about moving due to losing a job. Not about a calculated move done for financial gain.


That’s just it. My friend from Seattle did move for a job.

The other poster said that because of rising home prices, someone who owned a home couldn’t afford an equivalent home. My argument is that their current home probably also went up in value and they could use the equity to pay a large down payment to make a new home affordable.

Alternatively, pocket the equity and rent instead of making a commitment to buy.


That is what is commonly called an anecdote.

Most people who are fired do not end up winning the housing profit lottery.


Yes and we should also have EU regulators at every design meeting for every company. They did such a good job with the GDPR making the user experience better on the web


Yes, alas they didn't leave room for a 'cookie preferences' cookie, so that whenever I choose the option 'reject all', it's of course going to ask me again, every time I visit the website.

saying that, their intentions were good, I'm always horrifically amazed at the number of cookies used whenever I see the preferences popup. I honestly had no idea how many tracking cookies were used by the average website.


Doing what Siri is doing is not rocket science. It’s a simple intent based system where you give it patterns to understand intents and you trigger some API based on it.

Once you have the intents parsing, it should be just a matter of throwing man power at it and giving it better intents.

Yes, I have experience with building on top of such a system.


But the group managing Siri has probably been gutted in the past 10 years, and while the core is always simple the integrations and the QA testing to make sure it all keeps working is probably brittle and time consuming, and the core code is likely highly-patched spaghetti at this point.

It would be easy to write Siri again and make it a hundred times better, if you could start all over and only write the core features, and not have to validate against the whole product/feature matrix.

The problem with the rewrite of course would be that you won't be able to deliver that minimal viable product any more and you will have 10 years worth of product requirements and user expectations that you MUST hit for the 1.0 release (which must be a 1.0 and not an 0.1).

I've worked on lots of "simple" and "not rocket science" systems that were 10-years old, and it is always incredibly difficult due to the state of the code, the lack of resources, and the organizational inertia.


> i wanted anyone and everyone to make whatever use of it they could.

> didn't foresee this use

So you really didn’t want any use. You just wanted the use you found acceptable? So you didn’t really want it to be “open”


I didn't foresee it, i do not object to it, and probably would not have had i known beforehand.

Code i dont want others to use I dont publish.


I only work on open source code that I either am getting paid for or that I have gotten paid for in the past, I genericized and gone through my employer’s very straightforward open source process.

By default the license we use is MIT. If I ever did for some reason choose to open source my own work, it would be a similar license.

I don’t like the idea of claiming something is “open” and then placing restrictions on it.


it’s really not that hard to

git clone

git set origin…

It’s much harder to copy Google’s index.


You think it's practical to do this with almost all the public repos on Github?


That's not Github's fault or Github's problem, from an antitrust perspective. If they went out of their way to make it difficult, you might have an argument but, as far as I know, they aren't. It's just practically difficult by the nature of the problem.


They rate limit, so they do make it difficult though


They rate limit to protect their infrastructure, not to make it difficult. This is not anticompetitive.


So they still have an advantage then ?

Microsoft can continually train on the majority open source and or public code with zero limitations while others can’t ?


Yes, they have an advantage but that's not anticompetitive. That's just the reality of the world.

> It's just practically difficult by the nature of the problem.

What I said here is why. It's not easy to allow external parties to "just download the entirety of Github." It's not unreasonable to rate limit your infrastructure, especially if the person using it isn't paying you money.

The fact MS can train on the code more easily is irrelevant here. It's possible for a third party to download the code, it'll just take longer.


Yup,

Well anyway, it's enough to inspire me to look for a new home for my projects.

Cheers.


Yeah, I think so.


Before Covid, if someone was constantly being interrupted in meetings because of child care responsibilities when they were allowed to work from home, it was seen as a bad thing. WFH did not mean you didn’t pay for childcare.


Easy, in todays market, there are plenty of experienced developers who are being laid off so you don’t have to hire juniors.

There is no statistic longevity in tech. It’s well known that the quickest method to make more money especially when starting out is to change jobs after two or three years.

Salary compression and inversion is real.

Yes I know it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors. It’s a local maximization problem


It’s not like sitting in one place makes someone a more “senior” dev in anything but tenure. Juniors who stay at one company tend not to be developers with 10 years of experience at the end, but instead developers with 1 year of experience 10 times.


And that’s good enough for that company. It’s a problem when they get ready to get a new job.


Exactly: all this bullshit about job hopping benefits only low grade employers who want fungible employees. Screw them all: hop away!


> If no one is willing to hire juniors, then how do you get a pool of seniors

It's self-correcting: the fewer seniors there are, the more they cost. Eventually hiring a junior becomes the more economical option. The market gets exactly as many seniors as it deserves :)


Companies generally offload the expensive resources first requiring the cheaper, juniors to step up and take on more responsibilities. This is good of course, but if the junior cannot get support to learn their new responsibilities, they'll just be stressed, we'll get lower quality code and overall the morale goes down.


Junior developers do “negative work” almost by definition. They can’t work independently without guidance. If they can, they are inappropriately leveled and should be at least mid level developers.


You mean all of the “remote first” companies that are profitable and not struggling?


Most employment is from small businesses, by the numbers. Most small businesses are struggling-to-fragile at best as most fail. The "not paying for office space is a sizable plus" contingent alone would give a substantial number of WFH jobs Counterintuitively there are loads of jobs from the companies who are struggling.


And how many employees at Dell would risk working for a small struggling employee in this market? Would that small employee pay as much?

This is my third time seeing this type of job market (2000, 2008 being the other two). This is the time where there is a “flight to quality”.


> And how many employees at Dell would risk working for a small struggling employee in this market?

The laid off ones.


In that case, they by definition aren’t “employees at Dell”.


No, I don't mean that.


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