There's also a large number of folks moving to management as they age. Yes, the tech industry tends to skew young for engineering, but management doesn't. There's also a relatively decent chunk of people retiring in their early 50s (I plan to). There's also a decent number of them leaving to create their own companies, or to join friends at their early stage startups.

I don't think it makes sense to say they're the exception. I'm also mid-40s and have no issues finding employment. Most of my friends are mid 40s/50s and also have no issues. The vast majority of them have switched into management, though. Myself and the other older engineers I know are staff+, though, which helps a lot. I can't imagine being this age as a senior engineer trying to fight an army of equally qualified people in their 20s (who are also having issues finding employment right now).

The HN bubble is real. Most developers are boring old enterprise developers who toil away at writing LOB apps spending their entire career in corp dev if they don’t move onto management.

They live in second tier cities and retire at the same time everyone else retires.

If you are 40 years old and still competing with 20 something’s based on your ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, you have made some poor life choices.

Jimmy Wales isn't Wikimedia. He's the co-founder of Wikipedia, and an honorary board member. He doesn't serve any official capacity.

I'm not saying Jimmy Wales is Wikimedia.

This promotional website is created by the Wikimedia Foundation (it says so in the About page), and "has no qualms with omitting information" (GGP's claim), as it fails to mention that Jimmy Wales is co-founder of Wikipedia alongside Larry Sanger. By contrast, Wikipedia does not omit this fact.

> Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps?

Who left extremely early on in the project, went to create a poorly conceived and failed competitor, then spent the next 23ish years shitting on Wikipedia? Why does he deserve any credit?

Because he co-founded it, duh. Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

This website purports to tell us how Wikipedia came to be, 25 years ago. Why not tell it honestly?

> Even if your father abandons your family on your second birthday, to start another family, he's still your dad, no matter how much you hate him.

I think if you asked anyone in that situation, they probably wouldn't call them their dad, so yeah, this is indeed a good example.

Larry Sanger is effectively an abusive parent who did their best to try to ensure Wikipedia didn't survive. Him being there for the birth doesn't mean much.

Indeed, but no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad, which was also my point.

Without Sanger, Wikipedia:

- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"

- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account

- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy

In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.

The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.

I think this deserves more than a nitpick. WMF also doesn't dictate the actions of the volunteer community, and neither does the board. The content of Wikipedia is fully volunteer created and maintained, and admin actions are also handled by the volunteer community.

The foundation is there to provide technical, legal, and community support. In some cases this is funding for community events, in other cases, this includes funding towards making the editor community more diverse. In most cases, though, it's keeping a staff of folks that maintain and improve the software, and defend the project legally.

So, no Wikipedia isn't a corporation. It's more of a commune.

I think I should have used the word 'entity', but commune is better since the body of editors are so diverse. But they sure have oligarchies.

I think it would be hard to say it's an oligarchy. There's 450 or so active admins (and around 900 total), and really, they don't truly have that much power. The vast majority of decisions on Wikipedia are made by editors, and on occasion admins get involved.

This isn't a country with some ruling class. 450 people aren't in cahoots to stop you from editing.

>But they sure have oligarchies.

Then name one of the relevant oligarchs

> Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?

New York, as expensive as it is, is still considerably cheaper than cities like SF. Part of this is that they build more, part of it is that they have a usable train system, which allows people to live more spread out across the city, but part of it as well, is that they've banned airbnb. It would be ideal to also see empty unit taxes on units >$10m (inflation adjusted). It would also be good to see high taxes on sales of units >$10m (inflation adjusted).

> Minimum contract length of 5 years.

This is good, assuming it's one sided (the tenant can choose to move out, but the landlord can't break the lease). People need stability in housing more than landlords need to be able to end leases.

> Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years)

Sure, it should be generally tied to inflation, but what other investment exists where you're guaranteed yearly increases? Why are people so adamant that landlords need to be guaranteed minimal increases in their profits?

Housing is a natural monopoly, and allowing businesses to maximize their profits, unchecked, isn't capitalism.

> It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.

This is often brought out as a massive negative of regulations, but let's be honest, this is an outlier. Without tenant protections, however, it's common for landlords to evict tenants to increase rents. Even with protections, landlords still take illegal measures to try to evict tenants to increase rents, like doing constant construction at night, or refusing to do maintenance.

This is basically the same complaint about welfare programs. We have to accept some percentage of fraud to serve the greater good.

It's completely normal for most businesses to take a risk based approach to fraud, to maximize profits. Retail businesses, for example, will try to maximize their credit card auth rates, even though that may increase their fraud rate, if the increases in auth rate outweigh the cost of the fraud.

A stable society is worth a small percentage of fraud.

> If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.

Good. I don't see how this is a downside.

> Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.

Again, this is good. If there's a housing crunch, then residents should be prioritized over tourists.

We do agree. The desired objective of the regulations I mentioned is good. It's a good thing to have some stability as a renter, to not be kicked out and on the streets if you have children and cannot pay the rent, or that yearly rent increases are small enough that renters don't feel asfixiated.

However, we should not only consider the stated objective of the law but the real consequences of them. My point is, housing and rents are quite regulated in Spain. More regulation is being added every year as it serves the political and electoral objectives of our leaders, yet the situation is getting worse. Regulation detached from practical realities will fail to reach the desired objectives.

Because the government builds that much housing, and subsidizes the cost, to ensure their citizens (and PRs) have affordable housing.

It's special because they made it that way.

The rest of the market was allowed to maximally increase rent to the point this person can't afford rent anywhere except for where they live, and the problem is rent control (which NYC has relatively little of)?

Why not complain about the high-rises full of empty apartments bought by oligarchs for money laundering? Why not complain about the tens of thousands of airbnb units?

NYC is actually quite good in terms of building supply, but the demand is also extremely high. Some of that demand is completely artificial due to money laundering and short-term rentals, and without fixing those issues, how can we expect people to live without limiting maximally increasing rents?

The problem is he has such a sweet deal, he needs to use the apartment even though he would rather someone else have the apartment. I don't think the goal of rent control is to trap people in a city so they can't leave.

There aren't really that many high rises full of empty apartments bought by oligarchs for money laundering in NY. And even when there are - how much land does it actually take up? At the Central Park Tower for example, 180 oligarchs can launder their money in a 200'x200' plot of land. You'll walk by it in less than a minute without really clocking it.

I do also complain about airbnb units :)

> 180 oligarchs can launder their money in a 200'x200'

The vertical size of that, however, could be used to house at least a thousand (or more) people.

This is mostly a manhattan problem, but there's a quite large volume of the market there (due to the valuations) that are ultra-high-end, which tends to be vacant units used for money laundering. Same issue in a lot of the larger cities.

Luxury taxes (on both the sale, and ongoing yearly costs) can help reduce the problem as well as provide tax income for the cities. It's easily a win/win.

> There are often no hotel rooms with 3+ beds and kitchenette

There are very few hotels with kitchenettes. Most people don't cook (and don't want to cook) on vacation. Most hotels also don't cater to the low-income, and folks who cook on travel tend to be low-income. There's business rentals that offer this, but they're often not bookable for short-terms (usually 2+ weeks minimum).

Most hotels can accommodate 5+ people in a room, if you call them. Though no rooms (except suites) will have more than 2 beds, hotels will provide cots. In general, though, rooms aren't expected to host any more than that, and if you have more people than that, the expectation is that you'd book more than one room. Plenty of hotels have adjoining rooms for this purpose.

Again, though, hotels aren't really targeting low-income folks. Airbnbs can be cheaper in this regard, but most rentals on Airbnb charge by the person, so in some cases can be as expensive or more expensive than getting 2 rooms.

In either case, I think the issue is your needs are uncommon for vacation travel.

It's not about low-income people. Those needs are actually quite common among upper-middle class American vacation travelers with children so I assume you don't know many of them. Regardless of expense it's a huge hassle to drag multiple small children to a restaurant for three meals per day for a week. For at least some meals it ends up just being a lot easier to heat up something in the hotel room.

I am well aware that hotels will provide cots. Cots are torture. No one wants to sleep on a hotel cot. And even if hotels have adjoining rooms they often won't guarantee to give them to you when you make a reservation. It makes no sense at all.

Two adults with two children is doable with 2 beds. That's higher than the average number of children for a family in the US at this point. I know plenty of people with children (and I have children myself).

Airbnb probably serves you quite well, but you're a bit of a niche market for the travel industry, so it makes sense why your need isn't generally addressed. Hotels have to maximize their space, and the vast majority of people don't need kitchenettes.

> What does this mean or are you just communist coding your speech?

What they were saying is simply common sense. If an airbnb host is buying a local unit and renting it out for high prices to tourists, they're going to buy it for a higher price than someone who's simply there to live, and that's stealing the opportunity for someone to live somewhere within their means.

You don't need to be a communist to understand that it's bad for everyone to prioritize entertainment travel over the ability to afford housing in the city that you live.

But that then applies to any transaction where someone pays higher price. Gentrification? Subdivision? Commercial development? Rezoning? Auction? There's always a chance someone could've lived there for less.

I'd argue Airbnb owner is going to pay far more in taxes than resident.