I don't live in New York and don't know who Paladino is, but based on this quote (from a link in the comment currently right above yours), she is an idiot
"She believes the bill will force housing units to go unadvertised, limiting transparency and opportunities for tenants"
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.
A landlord can't just raise the rent to make up for the loss of this one time payment unless the market will accommodate the higher rent. The idea that it must "end up somewhere" doesn't hold water since the fee offered no value to begin with.
You are right that the landlord can't just raise the rent to make up for the loss of this one time payment unless the market will accommodate it.
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.
Tenants have more money, and there are more tenants who now qualify who might not have already saved up for a broker fee. I'm sure landlords have factored this in.
In very expensive cities like NYC, Boston, SF it'll be $4k+ for 1 to 2 bedrooms, $5k+ for 2 to 3 bedrooms.
If you have 2 buddies and going on a $5500 3 bedroom in Boston, you'll likely be requested first rent + last rent + deposit + broker fee (=1 rent) = 4 * rent = $22k just to get the keys. That's $7300 per person. This is only to get the key, the next month you pay rent #2.
If you're going on a $4k 1 bedroom by yourself (or with your partner) you'll be hit with 4 * 4=$16k upfront cost, or $8k if you're lucky and have a partner.
Renting is extraordinarily expensive in big cities in the US right now. I'm sometimes surprised people can survive this market. I make ~$150k a year in a lucrative software engineering role, and rent is still too expensive for me. It's very difficult for e.g. teachers, researchers etc making ~$70k a year etc.
Some cities will be cheaper, some will be more expensive. E.g. I know that Philadelphia is particularly cheap when it comes to cost of living. Chicago is expensive, but seems to be slightly cheaper than NYC/Boston etc...
That's a bit outdated. NYC and the entire state of California have banned landlords from requiring both last months rent in addition to a security deposit, and the security deposit can be no more than 1 months rent.
I imagine some other cities have done the same.
Where I live, in a desirable Manhattan neighborhood with an old building stock, you can find a decent 1-bedroom for around $3500/mo and move in for a total of $7k. If you hunt for a deal and can make a few sacrifices, you can bring that down to $6k.
Oh that's very good to know, I stand corrected. I last moved late 2023 (Boston) and I was interested in market in a few cities around that times. It's always great to hear local governments can make progress for the people.
Why is it so expensive to rent in Boston? I am surprised to see it in your list. The economy isn't nearly as large as NYC or SF(+nearby cities). The only explanation I can think of: NIMBY/BANANA: It is almost impossible to add new units (housing stock).
> "I have a dream" doesn't derive its power from any law King helped pass, but from how it reorganized our relationship with possibility.
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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.
MLK was able to actually organize large, potent, real-life networks of people from all walks of life, a plurality of whom actually took on substantial physical, legal, social, and monetary risks. People today have been convinced that activism revolves around Twitter feeds, Facebook Likes, declarations of sentiment & affiliations, and similarly vapid activities, much of which is anonymous or impersonal (even when in-person). On the rare occasions that they actually put themselves at real-life risk (e.g. arrest), the moment they pay the price the group collapses (e.g. Jan 6 insurrectionists, Gaza college campus protests, etc). MLK succeeded because large groups of activists paid the price over... and over... and over... until most Americans were convinced of the righteousness of their cause even when they were unable to relinquish their personal prejudices. (Notably, I don't think MLK ever expected most people to relinquish their personal prejudices, only that they soften their hearts enough to permit meaningful political changes that, in turn, might allow for some of those prejudices to diminish through the passage of time.)
So, yes, sadly activism today is largely symbolic, and I'd agree that most "activists" are symbols made manifest through media personalities. There are certainly old school activists around, and the fervor behind activism still burns within people, but the society has changed tremendously. All that energy just radiates into space, resulting in frustration and impotence.
The only significant risk taking you still see today at any meaningful scale is spending money. That's not nothing, but it'll never have the power that other forms of activism could have (when they're well organized), and it's blunted by opposing interests also throwing large sums of money into advocacy.
Also, I don't mean to discount the value of the army of people who are still involved in politics, doing things like canvassing, volunteering, etc. That kind of activity is just as if not more important than directed political and social activism. But general civic participation also seems diminished as compared to 50+ years ago, replaced by large sums of money, largely from mega donors (the "good" and "evil" kind), funding paid work.
I've used it before, it's great to start, but here's what happened to me:
1. Connected it to my production postgres (which was fine when I didn't have many users)
2. Spun up a replica postgres on GCP to connect it to instead
3. I wanted Stripe and CRM data in the reports, but I can't sync those to the replica and I didn't want to load them to prod
4. Signed up for Snowflake ($$$) and set up Fivetran ($$$) to sync all the data there
5. Queries were timing out against Snowflake in Blazer (never figured out the problem here, maybe the ruby gem for Snowflake was buggy?)
6. Set up Metabase instead, which worked fine, but non-technical people could never really use it.
(note: I'm a founder, shameless plug below)
This felt like a lot of work. I just wanted a place to dump all my data and easily create reports. Bonus points if non-technical people could do the same. That's what we're going for with Definite (https://www.definite.app/)
1. Built-in data warehouse - We spin up a duckdb database for you
2. 500+ connectors (e.g. Postgres, Stripe, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc.) - You don't need to buy a separate ETL, it's also built-in
3. Semantic layer - Define dimensions, measures, and joins using SQL in one place. We have pre-built models for all the sources we support (e.g. the Stripe model already has measures for MRR, churn, etc.)
4. Simple BI - Build a table with the data you want and generate visuals off that table. Works like a pivot table, if you can use a spreadsheet, you can use Definite.
I'm mike@definite.app if anyone wants help getting set up.
This is one of the better landing pages for a product I’ve seen, it’s so succinct. Nicely done. I’m going to actually evaluate your product today as a result
I know the market you are targeting with your product plug and the problems you point out are real challenges that businesses have.
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.
Wow wasn't aware of such connectors exist. Thought you must pay for something like that. CDATA (https://www.cdata.com/connect/connectors/) charges a fortune for connectors.
Can it handle loading data from let's say 100 pg databases (of the same schema but different tenants) and query them as if all the data was in a single database?
I think that's my main issue with tools like this.
I've been trying to retire metabase but our non technical people love it too much. everyone from marketing to finance has dashboards and alerts and reports.
Did they create the dashboards though? The problem I had is every time they wanted some small change, they needed to bother someone that knew SQL and they couldn't create one from scratch.
Was very bummed out when Heroku started charging for Hobby Tier as I had to sunset a few of my hobby apps
- Heroku was my first experience deploying a website: `git push heroku master`
- Dataclips was my first experience writing SQL
Writing code was markedly better than building dashboards in Tableau, which inspired Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - an open-source SSG for creating data websites using SQL and markdown, which I'm now working on
We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as a business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme. There is no customizability at all.
After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: additional data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. It has 'models' as sources of truth to build other queries in - eg a single definition of an 'active user'.
In short, moving from Blazer to Metabase was a huge win for us. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.
I use Blazer every day, just as a convenient way to run SQL against a read-only instance of our production database.
We also use Tableu for more sophisticated reports for non-technical users, but since blazer is just a Ruby gem, there’s almost no reason not to have it set up in a rails app.
Love the callout to Dataclips. It was easily my favorite least used feature by Heroku customers. Blazer and PgHero both got a bunch of inspiration from some of the early things we built at Heroku and its amazing having Andrew crank out so many high quality projects to make some of the tooling more broadly available.
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.
* 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.
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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.
Just chiming in here on behalf of SingleSprout -- I know the two founders, David and Natan, and have recruited through them multiple times at Harry's when they and we were both fledgling companies in NYC. I have also been in touch with them on behalf of clients since.
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.
Thank you for clarifying - I tried to be careful in my wording here to be about candidates and not make any claims about entities involved apart from the pattern recognition I've noticed.
I'm happy to edit my post to add any needed language to properly represent anyone mentioned.
I’m really curious about this. Are you able to share a bit about your use case and how you use roaring bitmaps outright (vs. through search infra like Solr or ElasticSearch)?
Well the replacement of this code base uses Solr. But when legacy started we where on lucene 1x that over the years upgraded to lucene 9x. So one of the things we used our bitmaps for was for a number extensions to pure lucene. So like facets, but also inter index joins. And then preserving résultats for fast faceting that remained part of the query.
E.g. a thing that legacy can but the new www (Solr) currently can't is allow downloads in a streaming fashion of more than 5million documents. As maintaing a roaringbitmap cost very little memory but depends on docid to key/value store mapping. Our extensions allowed this and gave us a very easy to use rest API.
- 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...
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