voberoi

I am not arguing that it will end up in the rent. I was only arguing that, if it did, that would still be a better arrangement.

However, you are wrong that the service provided by the fee offers no value, and that the fee will not end up somewhere (even in a diminished way).

- To landlords it offers upfront vetting, no required face time with prospects, and less work to land a tenant. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in NYC -- apartments on the market will have hundreds of interested people and multiple applications. Landlords basically manage none of this.

- To prospective renters who actively hire a broker -- and these do exist, I did this once -- it offers zero time on the prospect's part to look for, schedule, and research units. You tell the broker your parameters, they will do the research, and then set up a multi-hour tour of apartments.

(Unless you are only looking at no-fee apartments, you are better off just hiring a broker so you get at least some value from it if you rent a fee-ful apartment)

The value the fee provides to the people who care about it, will end up somewhere. This work doesn't go away. Many landlords and prospective renters will take on the work themselves, but many won't.

These people will pay for the broker fee. Those broker fees end up with the landlord or the prospective renter.

It is not my conclusion that eliminating the broker fee will result in higher rent. I think what will happen is:

- The broker market will shrink.

- Some landlords or renters will pay for it.

In a nutty housing market like NYC's, there is actual value provided by brokers, to some people.

Finally -- to be clear, I'm not arguing against the FARE Act. I am fully supportive of it and wish this happened years ago.

- The Speaker, Adrienne Adams, talks about the bill here: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...

- The prime sponsor, Chi Ossé's, comments on the bill: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...

- A vocal opposing voice, Vickie Paladino's, comments on the bill: https://citymeetings.nyc/city-council/2024-11-13-0130-pm-sta...

If it's in the rent, it's better to amortize the cost of the broker fee over a year vs. pay upfront.

Between the fee + first month's rent + security deposit (+ sometimes an additional month's rent) it is common to have to front 10K - 20K just to get into an apartment here.

---

MLK was an incredible organizer whose work helped get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts passed.

That isn't a "facade". They're real policy and that is his legacy. His words don't take on mythical status without those significant accomplishments.

Not only is this article poorly-written and hard to parse with pointless sentences like "We are all legislators in the parliament of consciousness", the author's entire premise is wrong.

I hope people don't actually think this way. Activists, organizers, and politicians aren't just Jungian symbols or "cultural vibes".

The policies they fight for, organize around, and enact actually cause things to happen -- for better or worse.

But the lack of all of these features is what I absolutely love about Heroku Dataclips and products inspired by it. It does "run SQL on my DB and give me a shareable chart" more easily and effectively than any BI tool I've ever used.

It's such an incredible mini-product that made Heroku Postgres a joy to use (when I used to use Heroku), and what makes me excited about something like Blazer.

I haven't used Blazer, but I have followed and love the idea behind this project.

If folks have used it here, I'd love to hear from them.

I started writing publicly late last year. It's been tons of effort but it's been tremendously fun and fruitful.

Some of my more-visited or favorite posts:

* A primer on Roaring bitmaps: what they are and how they work -- https://vikramoberoi.com/a-primer-on-roaring-bitmaps-what-th.... This one ended up on the front page of HN and gets hundreds of visits monthly. I wrote it because it's the post I would have liked to read instead of reading the papers themselves.

* An internship working on "Customers who bought this also bought" at Amazon 16 years ago -- https://vikramoberoi.com/an-internship-working-on-customers-.... I wrote this one as an addendum to throwaway tweet I posted that went viral.

* How I made atariemailarchive.org -- https://vikramoberoi.com/how-i-made-atariemailarchive-org/. I wrote this one when I open-sourced the dataset behind atariemailarchive.org. The dataset got featured in Data is Plural and in a podcast interview I did with Jeremy Singer-Vine.

---

My favorite personal blog to read this past year is Phil Eaton's (eatonphil on HN): https://notes.eatonphil.com/.

I enjoy the subject matter he posts about (a lot of systems work and research, primarily), but his other posts are great too.

His post, "Is it worth writing about?" is a nice inspirational one for folks who want to/have been thinking about writing: https://notes.eatonphil.com/is-it-worth-writing-about.html.

https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-building-a-spellchec...

It's a game of problem whack-a-mole in this email thread!

The whole project was fun, but I think the story behind it is neat too.

SingleSprout is much bigger today so maybe things could fall through. But it is unlikely that they would be willingly or knowingly shepherding this process. I'll point them to this thread so they're aware of what's going on and can chime in if they'd like.

There's a massive performance benefit to doing this at the cost of implementation complexity. I haven't studied the implementations or tried my hand one, but I get the impression that these are tough to implement correctly in a way that takes full advantage of the hardware.

(In that sense, it's awesome that the researchers also did the legwork to implement and maintain a library!)

I think Jed's messages are probably archived -- text files linked to at the bottom here too: https://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

See: https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-claiming-that-video-...

This is a quote from an Erma Bombeck article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erma_Bombeck).

[Shameless plug: I made Atari Email Archive and it's fun to peruse if you are interested in primary source material from this era. The emails all come from Jed Margolin (jmargolin.com), with his permission.]

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