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Call your fire department on their non emergency line and report this.


Called the fire department's non-emergency line. Got a bot. The bot sent out someone who said the noise isn't a safety issue, and left.

Called the police department's non-emergency line. Got a bot that told me it's a civil problem and that there's nothing they can do.

Scouted out the fire department and chatted up the fire chief in person while he was walking back in after lunch. He was very concerned about all of this (finally, progress!) and called the management company while we stood there, but his call was answered by a bot that said someone would be out in less than 24 hours to silence the noise again.

[...]


Great stuff. Would make Kafka blush.


There should be a unit of dystopia called Kafka, these days. Renting an apartment from a management company should be like 3-4 Kafkas. Go from there.


1 Orwell = 1.1 Zamyatin = 1.3 Huxley = 1.7 Kafka = 2.3 Lem (yes, these units are pretty close together).


Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!


Because one of the facets of the New World Order is treating mere mortals as guilty by default.


Might be time for "public-facing" bank accounts in the same way that people have public-facing social media accounts.

(I'd say "refuse" but I recognise you're not in a strong bargaining position here and you have to choose your battles).


This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.


What region is this in?


You've got to follow incentives. It's almost certainly a code violation, which comes with escalating fines until it's corrected. The local building, zoning, or whoever-enforces-codes authority will be interested in collecting that if they can, and the owner will want to avoid them, so that's where I'd start.


Called legal aid. The bot that answered the phone submitted a complaint to the court and the management company which cited the correct historic documents and demanded compliance with them.

The management company bot responded to the court declaring that they're doing all they're required to do to correct the noise, and concluded with "the issue is not ripe for adjudication" -- whatever that means.

The court's bot agreed and binned the complaint "with prejudice" -- again, whatever that means, and sent me a fine for wasting their time.

Every day, the noise still happens.

And every day, the man from the management company still shows up to silence the noise.

I've come to know him fairly well.

It turns out that his name is William, although everyone calls him Bill. Bill is a nice guy who once studied computer programming, but the best-paying job he ever managed to get was slinging packages for Amazon back when that was still a thing that people did.

Most Thursday nights, if we don't have anything else going on, Bill and I go bowling at the AMF that's not too far down the road. It was his idea. We've been doing this about every week for long enough that I've learned to become a pretty proficient bowler. And while I still enjoy that part, we spend most of our time having a few beers and solving the world's problems.

A few months ago, we started talking about pinsetters and Bill mentioned that he read once that this was once a job that people did manually -- that rather than having a machine at the end of the alley, there were people behind the wall who would collect the scattered pins and put them back onto the painted dots on the floor. That sounded pretty archaic compared to the machines that I've seen doing this work for my entire life, but it seemed likely enough.

I started thinking about some other things about bowling: These days, we just walk in and our shoes are ready for us by the time we make it up to the front. We pick our own lane and just start bowling. After that, the machine sets the pins, keeps the score, and returns the ball. Pretty normal stuff.

And then, Bill pointed out the other people: There were a couple of small groups of people who were bowling, and one grizzled old fellah nursing what looked like a White Russian at the bar, but that was it. Nobody else was present; nobody actually worked there at all.

How long had it been since I asked for a pair of size 11 shoes, I wondered? When was the last time I talked to a bartender to order another beer? I hadn't paid for a thing using a card, or even carried anything like that with me for what seemed like eons. The self-cleaning bathrooms were certainly a welcome change, but how long ago were those put in and what happened to the person who used to clean them?

Neither of us could pick an exact timeframe for when these things changed. We both agreed that it wasn't important at the time, and that it seemed like a natural-enough progression.

Anyway, it was getting late again. After we put our shoes onto the mat for the sanitizer bot to deal with and started to walk out, the screens by the door told us what our tabs were, debited our accounts, and told us that it would see us next week.

I'm sure that Bill will stop by tomorrow afternoon to push the button and silence the noise from the electrical panel for another 24 hours, just like he always has.


So deliberately set the alarm off. Guaranteed to provoke a response.


The faster you can iterate the more they will change their mind.


Once it's out, they can file a ticket, for triage.


I would say give them 50k and free access to Rockstar games for life.


This is just clickbait to drive traffic to this site. OP is definitely affliated to career karma . com Their history consists of 5 posts 4 of which are from this same site.


Hi. Yes, I am affiliated with Career Karma.

As far as I can see in the posting guidelines, I am not prohibited from posting links to content that I am affiliated with.

Clickbait? Maybe—if by clickbait you mean something I think people might like to click if they are interested in the topic.

I admit, I am new to Hacker News, and if I have violated any guidelines, it was not my intent.

I was proud of the work our team did on this post, so I decided to share it—much like the other links I’ve posted in the past.

Again, I honestly want to know if I have violated any rules, and if so, I will absolutely refrain from doing so in the future.

I’m sorry this one link was so offensive to some.


How did you create the list? It looks more like a list of popular languages than easy to learn languages


One of my old eployers did the same and so I resorted to using one of those convert url to pdf sites to read the such blogs.


It is the law of diminishing returns, after 1001 races they have probably exhausted all of such simple but ingenious performance solutions. It is still a shame shame that the other teams were able to get this banned, McLaren might have been a different team today had they kept this competitive advantage.


there is still an amazing amount of intrigue around exploring the edges of F1 rules. from just the past 10 years, competitive advantages include double diffusers, exhaust blown diffusers, F-duct, flexible front wings, split turbocharger, tubulent jet injection, 3D printed pistons, blown wheel nuts, microdrilled brake disc vents, Y250 vortex generators, grapefruit juice smelling fuel, MGU-H/MGU-K tricks, and plenty of stuff that we don't know about yet..


True, but all these changes cost a lot of money and time.


I think it's more likely that the next season, everyone else would be doing the extra pedal thing too. That's kinda how F1 works. Someone comes up with an innovation, and the next season it's either banned or universally adopted.


There are plenty of ideas left but usually they get made illegal quickly.


Finally I can have it run in a size that does not take up 3/4th of my screen by default.


I know everyone has a different step but I would welcome two usb C ports over a regular port just because the I can get a powered usb c dock that is connected to all my peripherals. That way all I have to plug in when I get in to work is one cable.


This was the #1 use case for Type C development BTW. I have friends who were working on silicon this for over a decade.

I anticipate that 2019 will be the year when we'll get monitors that are the "dock", so in practice most users will use at most a single port.


I already do this, and it's wonderful. I had to get a monitor that was way too big though to find one that had all the ports I want and which could supply enough power back to the laptop, but I assume smaller monitors are getting it by now too. Still though, it's well worth it if you need a new monitor to wait for one that has all your preferred specs and also does USB-C, I don't think I could go back.

I plug in my laptop and the monitor comes on, my keyboard and mouse start working over USB, my speakers start working because I turned the builtin soundbar off and enabled the in USB-C/3.55mm DAC that's also built into some Dell monitors, and even my printer and a synthesizer that I use as a practice (piano-)keyboard are are ready to go.


They are already pretty widespread, but expensive for now. I have to regularly use at work a Dell XPS 13, a macbook and a Lenogo Yoga. The monitor I use is an HP Z27 with a built in dock, where I have a keyboard and mouse connected. Whenever I have to switch a laptop, I just unplug the usb-c cable of the monitor from the laptop I am using and plug it to the new one. It takes a couple of seconds and I have my full setup usable again. The best thing is that it also provides power to the laptops, so I do not have to plug them.

In the past, when I was connecting a laptop to a monitor I had two options:

1) Use a proprietary dock. This is as convenient as the usb-c cable, but you can use it with a single brand of devices. Also, in the case of the usb-c cable you are free to move the laptop around the desk. Not so easy with a dock.

2) Plug the monitor and the peripherals directly the ports of the laptop. When you have to switch laptops frequently, it feels like this process is taking ages. It also looks ugly to have an octopus laptop on the desk.

Having said that the dedicated usb-c docks are notoriously problematic. I have tried a lot to find a single one with more than 3 star reviews, but it seems impossible. At least, I have not heard complains about the built-in docks inside monitors. In this case though, you have to make some sacrifices in the number and variety of ports. For example, in my case, I do not have ethernet.


There are already screens like that, and I like the idea in principle.

I'm more hesitant in practice because the USB3 hub in my current Dell display didn't get along with my computer and would cause blue screens when used. Easy to avoid, I just don't have the USB hub plugged in.

As things get more and more integrated, a problem anywhere in the system means the whole thing doesn't work and you can't avoid the busted parts.


> As things get more and more integrated, a problem anywhere in the system means the whole thing doesn't work and you can't avoid the busted parts.

That's a general issue: laptops are pretty integrated and even in your tower it's pretty hard to patch the mobo (and let's not get into the issue of upgrading your L1 cache.

I started computing on a machine (PDP-6) on which you could add instructions with a wire wrap pencil. That's clearly impossible today, but with modern manufacturing, increased integration typically means increased overall reliability.


All true, but the benefits of integrating those things are more obvious to me than "you don't have a separate USB and power cable."

On the plus side, issues like mine ought to become less common with an integrated device, since it would become impossible for Dell to not test their USB hub when they plug in the display cable.

And I suppose I've considered a thunderbolt hub for the convenience and decided against it just because of what they cost. If that sort of integration were "free" with displays, yeah I'd probably take it.


I have a Dell monitor which does video, audio, power, and a couple of USB ports over USB-C. It’s easily the best setup I’ve ever had just for the convineance in being able to plug in one cable and immediately have everything I need working.


Such monitors are pretty common now, at the higher end of the market, but most of them cannot charge larger laptops like 15-inchers that need more than 80 watts.


This is my primary concern with the whole "charge your laptop through peripherals" trend promoting usb-c. My laptop ships with a ~200W PSU, so anything that wants to reasonably charge my it needs that amount in excess power. I just don't see it being economical to stuff that king of power into everything. Not to mention I can't even find a 200W usb-c wall charger...


> Not to mention I can't even find a 200W usb-c wall charger...

I wouldn’t recommend buying one if you saw one — the power delivery spec only goes up to 100 W!


Some of those monitors already exist such as the Dell 38" (depending on your definition of dock; it doesn't have Ethernet).


I've had this setup for a couple of years. Back when I started out on it, with a Dell XPS 15 (9550) and Dell docks, reliability was pretty iffy; unusable for their TB dock and kind of flaky for their USB-C dock. The latter is the only one that has proven in the long run to be a decent implementation; when I switched to a Thinkpad (P52s) a year ago the USB-C dock ended up working just fine, and the TB dock was recalled and replaced and now is just flaky.

I'd either go with a hardware combination that you or a trusted reviewer has tested, or wait another year or so for the bugs to get worked out.

EDIT: Or just avoid Dell, they seem to be behind the curve on figuring out Thunderbolt 3.


Even well reviewed devices aren't guaranteed to work. At work I had a TB3 dock from Belkin, that was one of the top sellers on Amazon. Everything worked on the MBP, but when I tried connecting my ThinkPad (T470s) all the peripherals and displays worked, however it wouldn't deliver any power. On the other hand the cheap Chinese TB3 dock (UGREEN branded) I have at home works fine with the ThinkPad.


Same here. My work laptop is a HP Zbook workstation. My favorite thing is my USB C doc. 4 USB ports, 2 display ports, Ethernet, USB c port, power, and a VGA port.


I agree, once they have done it for one country they don't have a moral standing to reject another country's request to do the same for them. At times it might not even be a request they might just say do it our way or you don't get to do business here. This is how free speech dies. Instead of hoping that sometime in future China would lift censorship for good we now have to hope other countries won't follow suite.



Thanks..I don't understand why people continue linking WSJ even due the fact that not everybody has a subscription with them


Probably be cause they found an interesting article there and didn’t realize it was available elsewhere (and sometimes it actually isn’t).


[flagged]


That's a very unlikely explanation.

Newspapers do have a rather wide reach, especially compared with primary sources like the grandparent provided. This is because their content is not only designed to be shared, it's also promoted by the respective brands content platform.

That way they get more views and, by extension, get posted on HN/reddit/etc. with a higher frequency.



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