iterminate

A bunch of people will come out of the woodwork drawn to the idea of being able to immediately walk into managing a popular project, but it'll end poorly. If your project has outgrown you, or you've outgrown your project, then you can either shut it down gracefully or transition into community ownership (by finding people who have a demonstrable pre-existing interest in the project itself and allowing them to take over).

Shutting the project down gracefully doesn't mean it has to end, and it doesn't mean failure: shutting down the project gives invested community members the chance to fork it and demonstrate that they want to put the work in to run a natural successor to your project, and people will naturally gravitate towards the best fork over time. Afterall, without people with a vision leading it, it's just code.

Handing over ownership feels cleanest but it's rarely the best outcome (unless you're handing it over to a natural successor).

> The irony? High end home sales require much less work/effort than low end. Far fewer showings. No open houses, ever.

That's true of most work. Software engineering is much less work/effort than a minimum wage job. The higher you go, the easier it is.

Mass murder is not the natural conclusion of minor (or even major) untreated mental health issues.

edit: not the place to discuss this.

> Then, the next day, I can listen to the call, pause, increase speed 2x,3x, take notes for myself, write minutes, write summaries for internal use (casual slack message), notice inconsistencies in our thinking, or run an AI note taker all on my own schedule.

The necessity of re-watching to identify inconsistencies in a meeting is a problem with the medium. An inconsistency in thinking early in a meeting can invalidate the whole meeting but because a meeting has to move at pace it's much more likely for an inconsistency to slip in. Team meetings also bias the conversation towards whoever is most confident in speaking up, this is especially disadvantageous towards people new to a team or those where the dominant language is not their own.

I'm not against meetings outright as some people much prefer communicating using their voice instead of in writing, and a good team is one that is able to accommodate each member's preferred style of working... but if a team meeting is taking place that is both important and also stretches the capabilities of participants, it should not be a meeting. A meeting should only happen when every participant has decided that it's the best medium for that specific conversation.

A meeting is like sitting in front of a hose: details will be missed.

> How do ownership costs get driven up by profit-making?

The cost of owning a home for the average person is primarily reflected in the amount they pay for their mortgage. The cost of a mortgage is based on the value of the property as mortgages are secured against the property. The value of a property is determined by demand which is driven up when the market is filled with players who have easy access to capital to turn properties into profit-generating tools.

> Historically, renting has existed for thousands of years. That wouldn't make any sense if owning was (until recently) always a more desirable prospect than renting.

Renting is a very useful tool that many people (including myself) value highly: I rent out of choice. However, renting as a necessity (because it is the only option to live) is the position most renters find themselves in. If you poll the people in your life who are earning an average income you'll find most would much prefer to own their home because it provides much more security and it's typically more cost effective over the long term.

If there's 10 families and 10 houses for sale, each family can own their own home. The most desirable houses will cost more but at the end of the day, every family will own their home at a price dictated by the amount that they can afford.

If there's 10 families and 10 houses but only 5 are for sale with the other 5 owned by a landlord, the price of the houses for sale is pushed up not just based on desirability but also based on necessity, up to the price that 5 of the families cannot afford. At that point, the remaining 5 families need somewhere to live and so they are forced to rent from the landlord who can set their own price. Everyone (including those who were lucky enough to buy their homes) is paying more all because a landlord is involved.

Home ownership isn't the perfect option and so landlords provide some value, however, that value could still be realised without interfering with the ownership market. Most property is built to be occupied by the owner, it's only later that it gets taken out of the ownership pool by landlords with access to capital. Landlords purchasing owner-occupied property are much like cats let outside: they kill everything around them.

A mortgage. The cost of ownership only exceeds the cost of renting because ownership costs have been driven up by profit making: historically (and still today in some countries) it was cheaper to buy a home than it was to rent. If landlords were restricted from buying homes then the costs of ownership would become affordable for the majority of people who rent. A Hacker News comment isn't the place to propose radical policy change but just for fun, consider a world in which the only way to become a landlord was by building property specifically to rent it out. The majority of rental properties were previously owner-occupier, landlords have decimated the amount of property available for owner-occupiers which has driven up costs (pushing more and more people into renting).

Most insurance is invalidated by operating outside of the very narrow boundaries. For example, car insurance is often invalidated by driving for uber. If you're generating revenue from your property (home, car) then you need specialist insurance which is much more expensive for this very reason. Presumably the author of this story chose to believe the most convenient version of reality: that Airbnb's "AirCover" was a suitable replacement for landlord's insurance -- but it is not reality, oops.

If the world wasn't full of landlords, people wouldn't need to use your stuff.

>1,000 employees means a burn rate in the hundreds of millions per year just on the costs of having employees, $260m burned in a year sounds about right for a company of that size.