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Yes, and annoyingly it only goes back 20,000 years. Going back 400,000 years would tell a much more interesting story.


Is anyone aware of a good/fast single threaded allocator for cases where you don't need/want to pay for thread safety?


Mutexes in Linux are implemented on top of futex, and on Windows on top of WaitForAddress. Uncontested futex (as well as WaitForAddress) never goes to kernel, pure userspace code and in hot path it is quite fast

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170601-00/?p=96...


If you're single threaded then you'll never have mutex contention so they'll always be fast-path. I'd suggest you actually prove that the memory barriers are actually a problem for you via profiling, since it's somewhat unlikely it is.


> If you're single threaded then you'll never have mutex contention so they'll always be fast-path.

Concurrent algorithms (to which multi-thread capable allocators belong) typically necessitate design and performance compromises which aren't nullified by creating only a single thread.

> I'd suggest you actually prove that the memory barriers are actually a problem for you via profiling, since it's somewhat unlikely it is.

civility's reply to your post is somewhat rude, but they're right. It's rather arrogant to assume that the poster doesn't know what they're doing, without knowing anything about their specific problem. Modern allocators are complex pieces of software, typically with a lot of knobs and dials, and it is entirely plausible that an allocator tuned for single-threaded programs is more performant for a specific use case than a generic multi-thread allocator.


You can get large gains tuning an allocator for a specific use case, yes, but that's very different from tuning it for thread safety. Particularly since most major allocators use a first-level allocator that's thread-local and is therefore not paying any thread-safety tax in the first place.

> It's rather arrogant to assume that the poster doesn't know what they're doing

Given the question they asked I don't believe it was arrogant at all to assume they don't really know what they were doing. Their response seems to justify the push to start from the basics as well.


Nice job - you've succeeded in being just another condescending asshole.


It's true that shallow comments are frustrating, but aggressive ones are worse. If you keep breaking the site guidelines like you did repeatedly in this thread, we're going to have to ban you. Can I persuade you, instead, to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended? It sounds like you know a lot, and we want knowledgeable users. It's just that we want not to have a tirefire wreck of a website more—so we have no choice but to put out flamewars.


Dan, go fuck yourself. By letting people get away with snarky condescending tones and banning people who call them out on it, you're encouraging shitty behavior. "Don't be snarky" is right up top in the comments section of the guidelines, but it's easier for you to chastise me because I called the snarky guy an asshole. That's just lazy on your part.

Aggressive comments aren't worse, they're just easier for you to recognize.


You're right that "Don't be snarky" is high up in the comment guidelines, but even before that comes "Be kind." Being unkind is worse than being snarky. I don't mean morally worse, but worse in the long-term effect it has on the forum. The guidelines aren't moral edicts, they're heuristics designed to prevent the system from burning out. Snark is bad, but aggression is worse: it leads to flamewar and eventually, as people keep upping the ante, to scorched earth. It's in that sense that what you did was worse than what you were reacting to. Snark is like vandalism—it eventually wrecks a neighborhood. But aggression is like arson, or gun battles in the streets.

We care as much as you do about snarky and condescending comments. I personally share your feeling of being even more averse to those than to the cruder abuses. But for a bunch of reasons, they're harder to moderate. Here's one: people's interpretations of what counts as snark or condescension vary widely. There is little community consensus around this, and moderation can never get too far ahead of the community view. We have to choose our battles wisely if we don't want to spark backlashes, protests, and off-topic distractions that render the cure worse than the disease.

I can't moderate based on my personal views. That's the reason why your advice wouldn't work. We couldn't moderate based on your personal views either. It isn't laziness—it's that you can't impose an individual interpretation set on the community as a whole. People assume we do, but that's only because they haven't learned about moderation the hard way. Moderation is extremely different from extrapolating one's likes and dislikes into site rules and then using power to enforce them.

Does that mean doing nothing about snarky and condescending comments? Hardly, and if you read my comment history (not that I recommend it), you'll find plenty of examples of asking people not to do that. But they're ad hoc and I try to be careful not to demand too big a leap from the reader.

The plan is, over time, to raise the bar for comments so that gradually the snark and shallow dismissals stand out more prominently as abusive, the way that "you're an asshole" comments do now. Then it will be possible for moderators to do more about them. But this needs to happen slowly— frog-boilingly slowly. If we push too hard, the community balks and moderation loses power. We can only do what the community will support. We can lead—but only a bit at a time. Even if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252539 was trite and unhelpful, I guarantee you that the hivemind is not yet ready to support moderator intervention at that level. It needs to get more refined before that is possible. That's the long-term hope, but it will take years if not decades to get there.


I appreciate your reply, but I don't believe the vandalism and arson metaphor fits. There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't. His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar, and he succeeded. My goal was to antagonize him in retribution, and I failed.

So where are we now? I'll go back to reading the headlines instead of the comments because I'm not clever enough to keep people like that from getting under my skin, and he'll go on to piss off someone else the next chance that comes up.

Anyways, I regret snapping at you. Take care.


> There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't.

It's really a comment-by-comment thing rather than a people thing. If you're seeing cases where we're failing to moderate a post that cries out for it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We'd appreciate links, because we can't come close to seeing everything here. Or of course you can flag the comment (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). In egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is best because then we're guaranteed to see it sooner.

> His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar

Really, are you sure? Can you point to the comment that demonstrates this? Because either I missed something obvious or you're reading perhaps a bit too much into what was posted. Intent is notoriously difficult to read accurately in these posts, as I'm sure you know.


> Really, are you sure?

Pretty sure, and user adwn commented on it too. It's a pretty common pattern to not answer the question and then indicate it was a dumb question in the first place. Then he doubled down on the acceptable insults in the follow-on response.

I'm sure I'm oversensitive to crap like this, but I don't think I'm wrong to notice it.

I wonder if HN would ever add a feature to block/hide users others don't want to see, something per reader. I don't see a browser addon for it, and while I'm sure it could be done purely client-side, you might find stats about who is being blocked and how often interesting if it was done on the server. Heh, I'm sure I would end up on a few people's list, but it doesn't seem likely that we're all just going to get along anytime soon.

Anyways, thank you again for the polite reply.


You're welcome! and likewise.

I feel like we probably shouldn't add a block/hide/killfile feature because it would be a step back into the siloed style of forum (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). That would feel easier in the short term but would perhaps be a retreat from the hard problem of building a community site that actually works. The thing about that task is that it's always deeply unsatisfying and frustrating. One can only fall short. Yet it seems like the right task to be working on. Perhaps in the end, as Bob Dylan put it, we win the war after losing every battle. Or perhaps it just falls back into the swamp. The ambition of HN has always been to maybe stave off doom a while longer (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), or as pg put it years ago, "make a conscious effort to resist decline" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html).


> civility's reply to your post is somewhat rude

Not as rude as I wanted to be. I expect answers like that from Stack Overflow or Reddit - just another condescending ego play without actually addressing the question.

Regardless, thank you for your reply.

I don't suppose you know a good single-threaded (or share-nothing across threads) allocator worth looking at?


Your answer is trite and unhelpful.



> [...] or we're all doomed!

When are we all doomed? Can you put a date (year) on it?


I'm going to assume you're joking here, this definitely made me chuckle :)


No joke. Is it 10 years from now, 100 years, or something else?


Kinda bummed that you weren't joking. The tone of these threads is pretty depressing and I could have used a little pick-me-up.

Anyway, I'm not a climatologist, but from what I understand we will be seeing significant global ramifications in the next 2-3 decades. In other words, it's not just the next generation that's going to suffer, it's going to be a great deal many of us who are alive today.


Not OP but if you're posting here on HN, you're probably not going to find too much trouble parsing the actual academic papers vs. press releases and IPCC summaries

When you do, you may find that while there's virtually no question human activities are having effect(s) on climate (very likely negative) there's a LOT of uncertainty on what and how much the effect(s) are.


Did you though the same when we were told that in 20 year the Earth would be unhabitable due to the holes in the ozone layer and that it would take hundreds of not thousands of years to heal (that was 25 years ago btw)?

How about when Al Gore told your that inconvenient truth that the sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade (that was 15 years ago btw)?


> holes in the ozone layer

Funny you mention that. No one needed to panic, 1980s politicians appeared to remember what some of their job was. Two rather right leaning free-market monetarist politicians - Thatcher and Reagan - championed international action to phase out freon and other CFCs. Very successfully. The ozone hole closed.

At the exact same time Thatcher was making speeches - to the UN and many others about the need for strong international action on climate. That was less successful. Had anyone bothered to listen we might have sorted emissions by now. Here's one snippet from her 1989 UN speech[1]:

"We should work through this great organisation and its agencies to secure world-wide agreements on ways to cope with the effects of climate change, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, and the loss of precious species.

We need a realistic programme of action and an equally realistic timetable.

Each country has to contribute, and those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not."

How prescient.

> sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade

He did not say that.

[1] https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817


I wish more of the comments here were like this. Most of my comments are rubbish troll-bait, I'm glad people like NeedMoreTea exist. Someone who can calmly and rationally make a series of excellent points grounded in fact and history :)


:)


The thing is, those Thatcher speeches (and of course all the movement in Europe) worked, we reduced our emissions by almost 30% in 30 years. Which makes it specially bad when a bunch of people from the comfort of their life in here, now decide they can go around with their extremist views of environmentalism causing havoc in no less than in an European country: i.e. the only set of industrialized countries that actually addressed the problem.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/

And my post was not about not taking measures, but about the catastrophic scenarios we keep being presented.

> The ozone hole closed.

Well, the thing is my point is exactly the exaggeration of those catastrophic scenarios:

1: we kept being told the hole would take hundreds of years to close even if we completely shuted down all CFC emissions at the time.

2: China continues to emit CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952


Sure Europe took more action than most, but those actions are clearly now seen to be a) insufficient, and b) limited to a small proportion of the world's emissions. China and the US more than cancel out any improvements the EU made. They might have been sufficient if everyone had played, though I doubt it. They didn't, so the goal posts have moved significantly. There's still only one planet.

Apologies for my shorthand purely for brevity, I thought the real progress was quite well known. The ozone hole is not actually closed yet. The trend is very much in the right direction thanks to those international treaties on CFCs. There's also huge hysteresis in the system so change follows very slowly indeed. The trend of improvement has indeed slowed, apparently courtesy of China breaching the treaty they signed - they have form here, not just the recent breach of Hong Kong treaties. Sadly the UN and international community doesn't seem willing to sanction China for breaches of anything much.

At current progress - depending on China - a century or a little over looks to be right on the money. The clock is at about 50 years. Nonetheless it looks like we found the right cause and remedy, and acted in appropriate time.

Less exaggerated catastrophe, more bloody accurate estimate I'd say. As your BBC link confirms. Here's a link with some trend graphs - see for yourself.

Where's the exaggeration? The odd piece reporting badly doesn't make the case - the media is often terrible reporting science. Any science. :)

https://theconversation.com/ozone-hole-closing-for-the-year-...


Sorry but those actions where clearly sufficient. If all countries had reduced their CO2 emissions like the EU block did, we would be in an excellent state. The reduction needs to keep happening in a steady pace, not have a sudden shift like these extremist environmentalist are calling for.

My issue with those analysis is that they are political, not environmentalist. For instance, if you look at India in those same analysis, you see they are doing great (although having increased they CO2 emissions in 300% and set to soon become the 2nd biggest polluter by a long margin).

In fact that's my issue with this all movement: It seems to take roots in contesting Western Society by using the climate crisis to force major political change in the West by disrupting the all economic output (because this will be what happens if you suddenly break the energy consumption by several %), and then build a society according to the political views of a minority that thinks they know best.

At the same time, that won't stop global warming at all, since the emissions on the West are already the minor part of the global emissions (due to china) and soon will become an even smaller part (due to India).


No, they weren't. They were meant to be a first step of many as part of a sustained programme of international action. We mostly didn't bother, so it's rather academic anyway. We lost the luxury of 30 years of steady incremental managed and subsidised change and now need to apply the emergency brake.

I'm not sure which environmental extremists you are thinking of. Environmental extremists like the UN IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose current chair is an economist - are contesting Western society by disrupting all economic output? There was me thinking they are working to try and keep the possibility of some economic output by avoiding civilisation crash.

This is not some cliche hair-shirt 70s environmental hippies going overboard on the ganja at peace camp. This is chemists, meteorologists, climatologists and economists, etc appointed by the world's governments. Governments that are, I assume, mostly not seeking a rerun of 1917.

XR want to achieve the IPCC's aims. Nothing more. I see regular people from a diverse mix of very normal backgrounds with regular jobs. I see no reds under the bed.


The EU reduced their emissions by close to 30% in 30 years. These actions were obviously sufficient. Problem is that only the EU (what what are now the EU members) took the effort. The EU should be praised as an example and instead we have a bunch of environmentalist extremists shutting down airports here with drones.


You made a similar point about China in one of the other siblings. But now you've expanded it to the point where you're contradicting yourself.

On the one hand, you're saying that trying to tackle climate change in the UK is pointless because China is contributing the lion's share of CO2. But then on the other hand you're equating the climate change crisis to crises that have come before and were proven to be exaggerated scenarios.

It might be worth you stating where you stand on climate change, otherwise I'm not really sure what points you're actually trying to make.


No there is nothing contradictory, the points are simple:

1: These catastrophic scenarios have historically been great exaggerations of reality.

2: The major culprit at the moment, by a long margin, is China, while the EU has actually a very good track in reducing CO2 emissions.


Okay, thanks for restating.

1. Yep, I somewhat agree. So can you please clarify your stance as to whether the current climate change situation is another example?

2. Yep, and I sincerely hope China also pulls their heads out of their collective asses. However, the UK is also not out of the woods yet [1]. Just because China has a long way to go doesn't mean any other country should be easing off the gas pedal (terrible pun, hope you'll forgive me).

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/9779945/8-08...


My stance on the current global warming is that it is real and that it is serious, but not nearly as catastrophic as the media and these more extremist environmentalists, present it.

i.e. If all other countries would go on a steady course of diminishing their emissions for about 1%/year like the EU has been doing for the past 3 decades, the problem will be addressed.


> Did you though the same when we were told that in 20 year the Earth would be unhabitable due to the holes in the ozone layer

Yeah, it's really strange that a planetary risk doesn't come to pass when society reacts swiftly and does what science recommends them to do (i.e. banning CFCs, which the world did in the Montreal treaty).


When counteracting what I said, you conveniently left aside:

1: The part where we, at the time, were told that the hole would take hundreds of years to close: It didn't. (Pear Reviewed article from 1996: https://www.nap.edu/read/9042/chapter/1#6)

2: China is still producing those CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952


So what you're saying is, the fact we were wrong about how long it would take to recover proves that the whole thing was a farce? Your data says nothing to counter whether the ozone hole was actually a major problem (spoiler: it was).

The fact that China is flaunting the rules the international community agreed on means what, exactly? The undeniable fact is the ozone hole did NOT continue to grow, because the majority of the world halted their use of CFCs. And wouldn't you know it, when we stopped using CFCs we stopped fucking up our ozone!


> So what you're saying is, the fact we were wrong about how long it would take to recover proves that the whole thing was a farce?

It proves the all thing was an exaggeration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf


Sure, there's been plenty of scares in the past. Many of them even seemed extremely legitimate and had plenty of esteemed voices behind them.

But let's not talk in the abstract here. We're talking about climate change now. In 2019. And I believe very strongly that our planet is going through unprecedented changes that are caused by human activity. Those changes will result in suffering for a huge number of fellow members of my beloved species.

If you don't believe the same things I do, that's cool. I truly hope I'm wrong and you're right.


> JavaScript is precise for 2^53 range

What does this mean to you? It's very easy to get horrible rounding error with real-life sized things. For instance

    document.writeln(1.0 % 0.2);
The right answer is 0.0, and the most it can be wrong is 0.2. It's nearly as wrong as possible. These are real-life sized numbers.

btw: I think IEEE-754 is really great, but it's also important to understand your tools.


> document.writeln(1.0 % 0.2);

> The right answer is 0.0, and the most it can be wrong is 0.2. It's nearly as wrong as possible.

Just to clarify for others, you're implicitly contriving that to mean: you care about the error being positive. The numerical error in 0.1 % 0.2 is actually fairly ordinarily tiny (on the order of x10^-17), but using modulo may create sensitivity to these tiny errors by introducing discontinuity where it matters.


Call it a contrivance if you want, my point was just that you can get very surprising results even for "real life" sized numbers.

Not sure why you changed it from "1.0 % 0.2" to "0.1 % 0.2". The error on the one I showed was near 0.2, not 1e-17. Did I miss your point?


I mistakenly used 0.1 instead of 1.0 but the _numerical_ error is still x10-17, the modulo is further introducing a discontinuity that creates sensitivity to that tiny numerical error, whether that is a problem depends on what you are doing with the result... 0.19999999999999996 is very close to 0 as far as modulo is concerned.

I'm not arguing against you just clarifying the difference between propagation of error into significant numerical error through something like compounding; and being sensitive to very tiny errors by to depending on discontinuities such as those introduced by modulo.


I'm talking about integer numbers. 2^53 = 9007199254740992. You can do any arithmetic operations with any integer number from -9007199254740992 to 9007199254740992 and results will be correct. E.g. 9007199254740991 + 1 = 9007199254740992. But outside of that range there will be errors, e.g. 9007199254740992 + 1 = 9007199254740992


You are are describing only one of the types of numerical error that can occur, and it is not commonly a problem: this is only an edge case that occurs at the significand limit where the exponent alone must be used to approximate larger magnitudes at which point integers become non-contiguous.

The types of errors being discussed by others are all in the realm of non-integer rationals where limitations in either precision or representation introduce error and then compound in operations no matter the order of magnitude... and btw _real_ life tends to contain _real_ numbers, that commonly includes rationals in use of IEEE 754.


I didn't see anything in your message above indicating you were restricting yourself to integers.


    x = 1e-20 + 1e20 - 1e20
    y = 1e20 - 1e20 + 1e-20
    assert x == y


That's like the first rule of floating point numbers though: don't do that


The person I replied to claims to have looked at large* data sets and never seen a discrepancy in 6-8 significant digits. I thought I'd show them a small data set with 3 samples that retains no significant digits.

* Never mind that "millions" isn't large by current standards...


But you are observing all the digits, not just 6-8. It's implicit in the semantics of the operation, and that's something everyone who works with floating point should know.


I think I see where you're hung up. If I change it to:

    x = 1e20 + 1 - 1e20
    y = 1e20 - 1e20 + 1
    assert x == y
There is only 1 digit, and it's wrong. You don't even need 6-8. I probably should've used this as my example in the first place.


You're making the same mistake but now it's less obvious because the change of scale. When you compare floating point numbers, simple == is not usually what you want; you need to compare them with a tolerance. Choosing the tolerance can be difficult, but in general when working with small numbers you need a small value and with large numbers you need a large value. This dataset involves datapoint(s) at 1e20; at that magnitude, whatever you're measuring, the error in your measurements is going to be way more than 1, so a choice of tolerance ≤ 1 is a mistake.


Ugh, you're preaching to the choir. I wasn't trying to make a point about the equality operator, I was trying to make a point about x and y being completely different. I must be really bad at communicating with people.


That's the thing: x and y are not "completely different"; they are within the tolerance one would use to compare them correctly.


So umm, more than a "difference in the realm of 6-8 significant digits"?


That construction can turn any residual N digits out into a first digit difference. It wouldn't matter without making comparisons with tolerance way under the noise floor of the dataset. But yes, you have technically invented a situation that differs from that real-world anecdote in regard to that property, in an extremely literal interpretation.


And here I was, worried I might be tedious or pedantic, trying to argue that floating point is just not that simple. You've really outdone me in that regard.


I wonder if Amazon would ever dive into the home real estate market. With modern day search, realtors provide very little value above doing the paper work, and that seems very automatable. There's just no reason to pay 6% of every house sale to middle men, but that's the way it currently works. A large company like Amazon or Google could make a ton of money at a much lower rate. I think this makes a lot more sense than going into the restaurant delivery business.


They already have trucks and people used to moving things around. They could sell you a house and have your stuff moved in 2 days. I even have the branding figured out for the moving service: Amazon Prime Movers.


There's already lots of healthy competition in moving companies. Imagine if the movers wanted a percentage of your home price instead of few hundred for the day's work.

The problem with realtors is that they've got a lock on the bureaucratic side, and the existing realty sites (Zillow, Trulia, etc...) are aligned with them. There are upstarts in some cities, but the existing realtors in those places collude to keep the process inefficient. It'll take a behemoth to crack it open, but there'll be a lot of reward for someone big enough to pull it off.


How does the collusion work? Just curious since it seems like such an inefficient market (our realtor was a good friend of ours, he /did/ have good local market knowledge and things to say, but no way did he have to do more than 4 or 5 hours of work total for us...)


As an example, buyer's agents will not show, or disparage, homes where the agent's get less than their approx 3%. For instance, Trelora in Denver offers a discount to the seller, but they'll offer full rate to the buyer's agent because they know they'll get more traffic that way. You can kind of read that between the lines in their FAQ:

https://corporate.trelora.com/faq

Even if the buyer finds one of these homes on their own, all the buyer's agent needs to say is something scary like, "I've seen deals like this fall apart, and I wouldn't risk tying up your money if you're not dealing with a responsible realtor".

Then they'll say something like, "besides, the seller pays the closing costs!" ... which is a huge lie if you consider that the buyer is the only person bringing any money to closing.


I thought about this a lot during our home buying process. Our agent, too, wasn't asked to do much... because we found the house we wanted online, and had our financing, so the agent didn't have to show us any houses or help us along in any way. She just submitted our offer and that was that.

I have heard that realtors, like for instance car dealers, simply have a vested interest in middleman-ing the inventory by way of commission and there are powerful lobbies that protect that interest. I've heard that there is cartel-like control over the MLS listing service, which requires you to be a member of the Realtors Association for access, and is a shared venture between all the major real estate companies -- which, if you aren't a part of, basically means you can't even know what house is for sale. I don't know if any of that's true.

In this day in age, it's hard for me to fully trust a process like buying property that is just so opaque. Purely for conversation purposes, an anecdote of mine: we bought a house and we were willing to pay a certain amount over, no more, because we had a hard budget. So we told our agent, we want this house for list price. The agent says, we can do that, but "the seller is expecting multiple offers and they are reviewing them tomorrow". Okay, fine, whatever. So we put in our offer, with an escalation clause going up another $15k to our theoretical max. Lo and behold, we have two offers on the table that beat ours. "But they really liked your letter, so is there any way you could make your offer better? Borrow money from your family? Take an employer loan from your 401k?" So I say no, absolutely not, I won't be doing that. We'll just wait til next year when we have more money and do this again. Thanks.

So a week later, we get a phone call. Oops! Guess what? The top offer bailed unexpectedly, and the 2nd best offer wants time to reconsider. "If you resubmit your offer tonight, I'm sure the seller will accept". Okay, fine, resubmit it. Thirty minutes later, the offer was accepted and we closed in about 20 days from then. It was a crazy ride! And we are definitely happy with the house we got for the price we paid. But at the same time, I'm left to wonder... how do I know those other offers existed? How do I know they weren't just trying to get more money out of us? I suppose I could ask for proof, but even those types of documents have been faked before. I trusted our people and the process seemed above board, but it's one of those things that is so convoluted and human that I felt weird about it then, and I still do to some extent. Perhaps I'm just cynical. It really doesn't keep me up at night, though. Like I said, I'm happy with the place.

But the reality was clear: in that industry, it seems so clear that collusion COULD easily exist... and if that's the reality, I'm sure it does exist in at least some instances.


Let's not forget the associated scams like 'title search/insurance', 'appraisal', and 'home inspection'.


I'm hesitant to concur with you on the home inspection. The home inspector I've used several times has discovered termites, and other massive problems that would have cost me upwards of $40,000 on one specific house I was interested in buying. I paid a few hundred bucks to save myself from that headache.... The realtor on the other hand did almost zero


In Arizona, every stick-and-stucco house has (or will have) termites. The inspector already knows the answer before he shows up. You pay for "treatment" each time the places changes owners.

When I sold my first house, The buyer's inspector "discovered" termites which would need treatment. However, I had preemptively paid a professional to do treatment just two weeks earlier. When I told the new inspector this, he called the previous inspector. After talking on the phone for 2 minutes, they agreed that I was termite free!

As long as someone got paid for treatment, they were happy. I doubt the buyer knew it went down that way.


> so the agent didn't have to show us any houses or help us along in any way. She just submitted our offer and that was that.

Why didn’t you submit it yourself and save all that money?


Offering without an agent doesn't necessarily save money. It depends on the details of the seller's listing agreement. It could require dual agency or even without dual agency the listing agent could retain the full commission if there isn't an agent representing the buyer. The commission amount and split details are set in that agreement and the laws vary per state.


If the seller had a real estate agent then the seller already signed a contract to pay a fixed commission to the buyer's agent when the house is listed. Depending on the contract the seller signed, if there's no buyer's agent, usually the seller's agent's gets both the buyers agent's commission and the seller's agent's commission.

So you don't usually save money by not having a buyer's agent.


The buyer doesn't pay the agent, both agents' commission comes from the seller. Also, the agent we ended up with was a direct recommendation from the selling agent, and we figured this would give us a little extra "boost" with her by using her friend.


> the agent we ended up with was a direct recommendation from the selling agent, and we figured this would give us a little extra "boost" with her by using her friend

Huh what? So what incentive does your agent have to negotiate a good deal on your behalf if she’s earning a price commission, and she’s friends with the selling agent?


> So what incentive does your agent have to negotiate a good deal on your behalf if she’s earning a price commission

That's a great question, but it's not unique to my situation... it's standard that agents split the commission. You could say that any agent or salesperson is never incentivized to give any buyer a deal on anything as long as they collect commission.

Secondly, we paid what we thought the house was worth. We're in a competetive market and had a hard budget. The house price came in below budget. As far as I'm concerned, we got a fine deal.


The buyer pays everyone - no one else brings any money to the transaction.


Well, yeah, sure. Money goes from me, into the "middle of the table", and then everyone takes their share. It's important to say, though, that with or without my agent my buying price was going to be the same regardless... however, the seller may receive slightly less. I think in practice you'll find it difficult to approach the process with a mindset of "if I don't use an agent, the owner will give me a 3% discount".


The person selling to you pays the person who represents your interests? How is this not a conflict of interest?


Really, it's just part of the scam. Most people actually believe the seller is paying the realtors. It's how the buyer's agent can say, "Don't worry about my rate, the seller pays it!", as though you're sticking it to the seller. I've already seen three people repeat/believe that lie in this thread.

If what the realtors said was true, there would be a conflict of interest. However, there isn't really a conflict here because the buyer and seller are both splitting the loss. One is paying too much, and the other isn't getting paid enough.

The real conflict comes because both agents want you to compromise your price for an easy sale. If you sell your $500k house for $20k less than it could, they only lose a few hundred dollars. That agent will play various tricks to try and talk you into losing $20k so they can get a quick sale and be done with you. Similarly, they don't care if your loan is a bit larger when you're buying. They're not looking out for your best interests.

If the middlemen/parasites were out of the loop, the buyer could pay 3% less, the seller would get 3% more, and some reasonable agency could get a fixed fee for doing the paperwork. Hell, the title agency could do the work trivially, but I'm guessing they don't want to risk rocking the boat. Maybe the current system was reasonable when all you had was newspaper listings and for sale signs, but it's corrupt now.


give you a discount on furniture/moving/house if you sign up for prime

then onboard your entire life into amazons ecosystem, get great exclusive prime deals on the echo/whatever smart shit they want to dump on you


Redfin is already in that market and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. I'm actually fairly surprised how slow redfin is able to grow and expand their market. Their website felt second to none in terms of usability.


Redfin looks like they're trying to be a "discount agent". Here is a quote from their front page:

> We're full-service, local agents who get to know you over coffee and on home tours, and we use online tools to make you smarter and faster.

This isn't what I had in mind at all, and I'm not surprised they have trouble getting traction with that approach. If they save you 1.5% on your half, but the other agent still gets their 3%, you'd only save 25% of the thousands you spent in middle man costs. Meanwhile, all the 3% agents out there are applying pressure to see it fail.

In the ideal case where they get both sides, Redfin is only saving you 50%. There is no reason home sale paperwork should cost thousands of dollars to process. Someone like Amazon could eliminate agents altogether.

Here is another analogy - imagine TurboTax charged you a percentage of your yearly income instead of a hundred dollars for the "Deluxe" version. That would be insane.


> There is no reason home sale paperwork should cost thousands of dollars to process. Someone like Amazon could eliminate agents altogether.

It’s a mistake to think that the real estate commission is primarily for paperwork or executing transactions that would have happened anyway.

I brought my house to our agent and pushed the sale through. That’s probably a rarity when I think about all the time friends of mine have spent with agents “house hunting”. That time costs money and to a great extent, the fat commissions are paying for a lot of “no commissions”.

People seeking to disrupt the “fill out the final transactional paperwork” part of real estate need to figure out how to disrupt the whole value chain, not just the part that looks outrageously overpriced.


I've bought 3 homes now and sold 2. There was no "house hunting" process. I went online, looked at photos, and made an offer - same as you.

On my second home, I told the realtor exactly what I wanted and where. She failed to find it in her search (she did a zip code search instead of looking at the map), so I showed her the listing I wanted to see. There was no extra value to justify 3% of a sale for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As for the seller's agent? They put the listing on MLS and have a token "open house" for a couple hours on one day. If you're lucky, they get a professional photographer and print a few brochures for the walk throughs.

> People seeking to disrupt the “fill out the final transactional paperwork” part of real estate need to figure out how to disrupt the whole value chain, not just the part that looks outrageously overpriced.

Why is that? Why not focus on fixing the worst part of the problem?


Because the transactional paperwork can already be filled out, even by real estate lawyers, for a couple grand today. No one is paying 5% for that, even though would-be disrupters talk about it that way. Think about what it would take to transfer your house to a family member, assuming it was paid off. That paperwork would be ~$500 per lawyer involved. Anything more that you're paying for an arms-length sale transaction isn't related to the paperwork processing part of it, IMO.

What's really being paid for is access to MLS, advertising, labor to drive people around, maintaining the brokers office, people on both sides who talk crazy people off the ledge and keep deals together when someone is flipping out over a $1000 repair one way or the other.

Even when you "went online", I bet you found the house via a paid insertion into MLS (most likely) or a real estate advertising site. Why did you go there? Because that's where the houses for sale are. Why do people pay so much to put their house in MLS? Because that's where the buyers go to search to come up with their short-list of houses to go visit. Why should MLS listings be so expensive? Because they've built the marketplace. Same as why Amazon or Ebay can charge so much.


Access to MLS? Driving people around? You think any of that should cost the $25,000 the buyer and I paid agents for the house I sold last year? We could've bought a new car for those commissions! Are you an agent, or related to one? I can't see any other way you could defend that nonsense.

Someday one of the big companies is going to figure out how to put the parasites out of business. Amazon could pull it off, so could Google.


I'm not involved in real estate and agree that the services are over-priced relative to the value. (I have a friend who's an agent; he and I pretty regularly get into it.)

I don't think it's defending the nonsense, but rather explaining that there is some value there and it's not predominantly in filling out paperwork. It's a sales job, selling people the most expensive and leveraged thing they'll ever purchase and the place they're going to live/raise a family, with all the good and bad that comes along with that.


In Sweden agents that help with house hunting basically don't exist outside the very very top end of the market. Everybody finds their own houses via ads, book their own viewings with the sellers agent and handles the bidding process themselves. When it comes to paper work the buyer and seller "shares" the same agent who has a fiduciary duty to both parties (even though they're paid by the sellers). With the internet being what it is people should be able to "hunt" their own houses and set up their own viewings.


Not everyone is internet savvy. Not everyone knows what they want. Not everyone knows what they can afford. Not everyone comes from a history of property ownership. Some people need assistance on things that others can self-serve.


Real estate agents, even the so-called "buyer's agent," are the house equivalent of "used car salesman."

Just like you shouldn't trust a used car salesman to tell you what car would fit your needs and you can afford, you shouldn't trust a real estate agent to tell you what house would fit your needs and you can afford.


Yes, not everyone can read or use a computer. And yet almost everyone pays for all those realtor services they don't need or even use.


FlyHomes is doing something interesting by actually buying and selling houses, not just facilitating transactions. It takes a lot of the risk and uncertainty out of the process. I hope they can succeed at scale.


What rate do they charge? It looks like they provide a cash offer and then find financing so you can buy it from them. I didn't see anything about how this eliminates middle-men and egregious fees.

I'm not sure though, because I got a "Oops, something went wrong" popup when I tried to use their site.


I just found their quote:

> Flyhomes makes money through the commission paid by the home’s seller.

This is the same lie all realtors love to throw out. "You don't pay - the seller does!". Never mind the buyer is the only person who brings money to the transaction.

Unless that commission is much smaller than a traditional realtor, I hope they fail.


There are more ways to innovate than just offer the same thing for less money. You can offer more things for the same money, which is what FlyHomes is doing. That is actually the more common and more financially viable form of innovation.


You're right, of course. However in this case, I'd like to see someone fix the problem instead of just making it more palatable. To me FlyHomes looks like just another realtor who screws you for too much money, but they give you flowers before they start and candy when they're done.


It's expensive to have boots on the ground in every zip code. RedFin hires their own agents full time. OpenListings and Zillow refer online buyers to their affiliated agents who cut them a deal on commission in exchange for leads. You can always list a place with photos and all on Zillow or CraigsList and mention that seller will not pay an agent's commission. End of the day there's a "For Sale by Owner" sign for those driving or walking by.

But considering that in the US it's the seller who pays both agents, there are no immediate savings for potential buyers, and some, being new to the home-buying process in general or new to that zip code, would prefer some hand-holding and chit-chatting provided by their agent at no cost to them.

Among some not so obvious valuable tidbits that the buyer's agent can provide:

* general feel about the neighborhood, whether it's on the rise or in decline

* previous scandals and issues, like contaminated water, city attempting to pass an additional levy or tax, house being on the airport path, etc.

* potential future improvements, like a light rail station planned nearby

* referrals to various local professionals, like inspectors, surveyors, painters, or movers

* any other new developments in town or neighborhoods that the buyer might not have considered, especially when shopping remotely


> But considering that in the US it's the seller who pays both agents, there are no immediate savings for potential buyers [...]

This is all part of the scam, and I'm surprised more people can't see through it. Five people walk into a room at closing. There are two agents, a title agent, the seller, and the buyer. Only the buyer brings any money - so it's pretty clear who is paying.

Put it another way - if the seller goes with a lower percentage agent, then the buyer keeps more of the offer price, and should therefore accept a slightly lower offer. This saves the buyer money too.

> Among some not so obvious valuable tidbits that the buyer's agent can provide: [...]

And you think that's worth 6% of a house that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? I think that's insane.

This all sounds like a pitch from a realtor.


Fair enough. Those commissions do compress as the house prices climb into 7- or 8-digit ranges, and there are always discount agents. The one in my area buys billboards that promise selling the house for 3% flat.

I was hoping perhaps someone from the industry could comment on why those agents haven't overtaken the market by storm.


Theoretically agents could do these things, but most don't. They want deals to close. Giving you reasons not to buy doesn't close deals. If it turns out you don't like the house they'll be happy to sell it for you later.


It probably varies by the agent, but I have had good experience with a real estate agent being on the buying side. His reasoning was that the seller's agent was on the clock to close the deal on that one property he got assigned, whereas the buyer's agent would make roughly same amount of money on any property I would end up purchasing, so he had no reason to pressure me into closing.


A good conman leaves you feeling that you weren't cheated.


Has an agent ever told a potential buyer that a neighborhood is in decline?


When they feel they can nudge the buyer into a more expensive neighborhood.


No reason to start on all zip codes at the same time.


That bothered me for a while until I figured it out. After a while, I learned that underspent projects are your opportunity to learn new things, mentor junior people, and provide cushion to people waiting for their next projects.

The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.


Newer versions of Chrome OS are able to run Linux in a container. You can install Firefox with the "firefox-esr" package in that Linux. Unfortunately, audio doesn't work yet (at least not on my PixelBook), so it's not really a complete solution, but for (quiet) browsing it does work with uBlock Origin. Apparently Linux audio under Chrome OS is coming soon.


You can say how you wish comments were done, but in practice a section of code with a lot of comments tends to indicate unresolved complexity. The worst is when you can tell the original author used comments to indicate how they wished the code worked, but it doesn't. Sometimes the comments are from the next maintainer trying to figure out what the hell is going on because there is a bug in there somewhere.

The other problem with comments is multiple maintenance. It's very common for a change to be made to the code but not the comment. Now you've got lies misleading the next poor developer who dives in there.

Documentation comments can be useful, but I cringe when I see lots of comments per block or statement.

> Humans aren't good at reading code.

That's something you can get better at, but it requires discipline and effort. Programmers who have no intention of getting better at it think the comments will save them.


> That's something you can get better at, but it requires discipline and effort.

Find me one programmer who's as fluent in C as in any natural language.


If you think I said anything like that, then you're not as good at natural language as you think. Why would I defend an argument I didn't make?


> That's something you can get better at, but it requires discipline and effort. Programmers who have no intention of getting better at it think the comments will save them.

Yeah. And people who make memory errors in C are just bad programmers. At some point people will have to accept that their preconceived notions are just that and not some mythical rule that others have to discover to find enlightenment.


I guess something requiring discipline and effort makes you defensive. You can't really think all programmers are equal. How do you think the good ones got better?


About 1 in 4000 people has problems with blue and yellow. If you try to accommodate everyone, you just can't use color for information. I think using blue and yellow is a reasonable compromise.


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