Each apartment complex (by law) has a percentage of units leased only to people making less than a certain amount.

"[California] State law requires that 15% of residential development occurring in Redevelopment Project Areas adopted after January 1, 1976 be subject to long-term affordability restrictions, to be fulfilled on a cumulative basis every 10 years."

That doesn't mean they just make units available at $1200/month anybody can lease -- it means the $1200/month units are only available to people making under a percentage-off-median wage for the area.

As an anecdote, while I was poor, I didn't turn the heat on because I couldn't afford it. Do you believe the law should have forced me to turn the heat on? If not, why not?

I think this is a discussion that would quickly devolve into a debate over the tenement reform movement. I'd just say that the codes and statutes covering apartments were a reaction to a time where housing was so cramped and substandard that it caused cholera outbreaks, riots, and a 10% infant mortality rate among tenement dwellers.

So then the idea behind the codes is simply: it's good that people buy property and convert into rental dwellings, because a huge number of people need rental housing. But nobody should be allowed to profit from housing that falls below a minimum standard. Without than minimum standard, the financial incentive would exist to race properties to the bottom, and while some renters clearly would benefit from the increased choice in living expenses, many more renters would be harmed either by (a) being locked by the market into substandard housing, (b) being dragged by their parents or spouses into substandard housing, (c) losing their homes when property ownership changed hands and more profit was wrung out of their current houses.

As for you and your heat: you had the choice not to turn on the heat. If your landlord wasn't required to provide heat, you might not have.

You'll note that I asked specifically about cases like heating/min size requirements which have nothing to do with externalities (such as disease outbreaks or fire spreading). So why bring them up?

Without than minimum standard, the financial incentive would exist to race properties to the bottom, and while some renters clearly would benefit from the increased choice in living expenses, many more renters would be harmed either by (a) being locked by the market into substandard housing,

This claim is not observed in reality. In virtually every market segment including housing, you see a race to meet demand in all market segments, from the top to the bottom.

The only way there would be a race to the bottom is if virtually everyone wanted something cheaper than what is currently available and were willing to sacrifice quality to get it. I.e., if the minimum size requirements are hurting almost everyone. Do you believe this is the case?

(b) being dragged by their parents or spouses into substandard housing

This seems like an extremely roundabout way of imposing minimum parenting standards. An extremely obvious way and far simpler way would simply be to forbid parents to bring their children into dorm-sized apartments.

(c) losing their homes when property ownership changed hands and more profit was wrung out of their current houses.

Um, this usually happens when landlords want to turn cheaper housing into more expensive housing. I.e., upgrade the projects to luxury apts. Should we also impose quality ceilings on housing? If not, why not?

The rest, I think we're getting ourselves mixed up. I understand your question: absent externalities, which perhaps could be addressed more effectively with targeted regulations rather than market-restricting housing codes, what's the purpose of having housing codes?

I tried to make two points in my response: first, the reason we have housing codes to begin with --- the observation that the externalities you alluded to in fact were a major social problem around the turn of the last century --- and second, that the reason absent "cholera outbreaks" to impose a minimum standard on urban housing is that a minimum standard for urban housing is an intrinsic good thing that will improve welfare more than greater choice in housing will.

Regarding forbidding children in dorm-sized apartments: sure. Of course, we're countering what you see as an overly broad and market-harming set of laws with a far more intrusive set of laws. Also, if we relax minimum standard housing and that sets off a race to the bottom, we can be in an unattractive position later on of having to recognize that while we don't want kids raised in dorm apartments, the market is such that we no longer have the option to forbid it.

As you know, we're very unlikely to come to agreement here, you and I having polar opposite worldviews on subjects like this, but I do appreciate the challenge. :)

As far as I can tell, "gentrification" means people like me--who make a decent white collar living and don't cause trouble--moving into poor neighborhoods, often crime-filled ones. Why should I be unhappy about having a nice place to live?

And hey: I lived in a loft in SOMA. I'm not an anti-gentrification crusader.

Example: I have a friend who lives at Divisadero & Hayes, and passed on an article that attacked him (personally, but anonymously) as a gentrifier: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020412420457715...

The writer complains about the loss of the "culture"...but the only meaningful change we can see here was the disappearance of drug dealers and violence.

Counterexample: I moved from Houston, where almost every apartment has good air conditioning, but it's not required by law (http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/consumer&...). Market forces are sufficient to prevent landlords from offering units without AC, because nobody would pay for them.

Perhaps the market quality floor for housing is in part a product of the minimum standard housing allowed by the state. Perhaps there's low marginal cost of adding an AC if you're required by law to keep apartments at some minimum level of quality; you might as well spend a small amount of money to compete on quality, because you can't compete on price.

In any case, a law mandating the minimum a person can sell is economically equivalent to a law mandating the minimum a person can buy. If I'd rather have more money but wear sweaters (at one point in my life this was my preference), I'm not allowed to make that choice.

* Between the hours of 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, if the temperature outside falls below 40 degrees, the inside temperature is required to be at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

55 degrees! Do you honestly want an apartment which is 45, 40, 35 degrees at night? Hell, it's probably not even sane to keep an apartment under 55 degrees in the winter, for fear of the pipes freezing.

You can test this out by adding something like this...

(time (+ 1 1))

...and start typing in a comment on a new line and seeing how the elapsed time that is outputted changes on every single key press. Performance optimizations are probably not as important right now, but that's something that can be improved.

Still, as a basic test of the concept, it looks pretty interesting overall and I can see myself using this. As long as the idea is sound, everything else can be improved over time. Keep it up!

It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company.

Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge.

If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.

I think that there's a market for this type of product for larger companies who receive too many resumes to easily sort through and want to hire a lot of developers that meet some minimum standard. However, I think that this is much less useful to startups who just want the best possible small team initially.

Given the makeup of HN, I think that most people here would not look at your product too favorably. I think that you should be looking at finding ways to reach out to companies that have an actual HR department and increasing your price dramatically for them.

Do you want to learn a new language for the sake of knowledge? To travel the world? For business?

I would figure that out first and then make a choice on what to do.

I might be a bit biased, but I'd go with Mandarin Chinese! A lot of people speak this language :)

I'm also the founder of a company called Native Tongue which creates vocabulary apps. It's one of the most simple ways to learn and fun to, so I'd invite you to try out our apps. Go to nativetongue.com and check out our mobile apps. If you have any questions, email me on hello at nativetongue dot com.

Thanks,

Matt

IMO, the issue here is that labor laws prevent companies from offering unpaid internships that involve something that a business can actually benefit from or that can conceivably displace a paid employee. Ostensibly created to prevent exploitation, these labor laws actually create exploitation by effectively forcing an unpaid internship to be an exercise in busy work for any company that actually follows the law.

* Asking somebody for access to their email/social network account is actually a great question to ask in a job interview. If somebody is so careless about their private data to easily give away access to it upon request, that would easily disqualify them in my book.

But asking for email addresses without explaining what the site is about is really lame and is a huge turnoff.

But please don't dismiss somebody for being a bit focused on how your business will make money over the short or long-term. If a co-founder wants to join up with you and doesn't ask you some really tough questions about your plans to make real money, you shouldn't be happy about this: you should question his experience, competence, and judgement.

Any decent developer has already been approached by many startups: most of which claim to have ideas that change the world and most of which have no real business plan and are destined to fail. Somebody who has been through this before is likely going to grill you hard about money and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.