I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734979

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48666067

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I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.

Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6

I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

A university endowment or a city's tax revenue is legally and structurally earmarked. They can't just liquidate those assets to buy for local real estate. For the non-profits and community land trusts actually doing this work, securing patient, low-cost capital is absolutely the primary bottleneck.

The high leverage of private landlords actually makes them more vulnerable to systemic shocks. Meanwhile, non-market housing models (like land trusts) don't over-leverage their properties, which is exactly why they historically have much lower default rates during crises.

Given the option of landlords making bank for their risk and then getting a government bailout when there's an economic shock or having more housing decommoddified I'd take the latter. There's very little housing in the US that is under these alternative structures so at the very least I'd encourage more experimentation with them.

Like if a landlord wants to sell their building and someone comes along with an offer for $500k then the current tenants have an option to buy it at that price.

Certainly would be annoying for investors looking to buy quickly but potentially life changing for long term tenants about to get a new landlord.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/06/17/san-francisco-marina-landl...

The problem is always financing. If you're going to own a place you need a lot of upfront capital. If you own a place and plan to maximize rent increases it's easy to leverage your new asset to buy more properties. But if you just want to keep it near cost then you need a new infusion of capital for each new property. So, by their nature such endeavors don't grow as fast as rent maximizing landlord can grow.

I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.

It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mostly via LLMs). From there, I generate both a nice digital PDF and a print-ready PDF using Typst, and then use Pandoc again to convert the Typst into what ultimately becomes an EPUB.

It all works quite beautifully. Most of the challenges I've run into are related to Typst features that don't map cleanly to Pandoc, so I end up adding a few funky conditionals so those features aren't hit when converting via Pandoc. sys.inputs makes that very easy https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/11588

The books in question: https://thelabofthought.co/shop

It's far from ideal and that's why I'm splitting it out soon.

Do you work on urbanism related things?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544422

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I've also recently setup Hermes to be a bit of a project manager for my side projects and it's worked quite well. Gave it a little CLI to see my todos, projects, and "areas" (ongoing long term things). Then it bugs me once in a while when a project is going stale. One of the nicest things is being able to add stuff to the past so if I did work on something but it wasn't associated with a todo I just let it know and then it'll backdate that.