Costco groceries are expensive because you're forced to buy in bulk. You can leave HEB with 1 tube of toothpaste or a single potato. You can't leave Costco with fewer than 5 tubes of toothpaste or several pounds of potatoes. I love Costco and imo they win in a few areas like the butcher, but HEB crushes them in the variety of desirable groceries hands down.

I'm not trying to convince anyone who will agree on a data-driven premise without actually seeing the data. The article states that a record number of cities have $1m+ starter homes, but there's no easily accessible list of those cities. I couldn't find it, where did you see it? I gave up after clicking about 10 different links and only landing on another vague article or advertiser's product.

It varies, but mostly yes. I think they're limiting the definition of a "city" to as small as possible to inflate the prices for a scary headline. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area in TX. Fire up zillow if you can access it, search for Austin, TX with a $600k limit and it'll automatically put the city boundary on the results. You'll find plenty of listings, over 1900 standalone homes for me as of right now. Including townhomes and condos it's over 2800.

Anyway, my point is that it comes across as deceptive by providing ambiguous information with no easily accessible data to reference and loading the article with as many advertising links as possible.

That's exactly what they're doing and I even put a snippet from the article in my comment. Here it is again

> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.

Doubt. They don't define what constitutes a city and seem to be purposely be hiding the data. There's only a count of the cities per state with no mention their names. I followed link after link and couldn't find them and gave up. Texas supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area, and there are plenty of < $600k homes in centrally located areas. Venture out to the suburbs like Pflugerville, Cedar Park or Buda and you'll have plenty of options with $400k to spend. There are only a handful of small pockets around the city where $1m won't buy you a starter home like Zilker and Tarrytown.

> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.

> For those who decide renting is the right call, Zillow Rentals® lists options across every price point and property type — including single-family homes, apartments and individual room listings. Renters can also use CreditClimb to report on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, building the credit history that will put them in a stronger position when they're ready to buy.

This is just fear driven advertising. BUY NOW OR YOU'LL NEVER OWN A HOME!!

> The younger programmers I work with who had no exposure to the GoF book.....and they communicate amongst themselves just as efficiently as my generation

> The generation that learned to program after design patterns had faded as an idea learned just as quickly and communicates just as well as the generation that studied them assiduously as junior programmers like I did.

I've never read GOF so I don't know if they emphasize communication, but I have read and studied many other programming pattern books and communication is low on the list of reasons to learn them in my opinion. Their only purpose for me is to organize code in a way that has been proven to "scale" along with a codebase so that you don't end up with a plate of spaghetti.

int() and float() behave like type casting, bool() does not. It's a truthiness check that would be more aptly named istruthy(). In python non-empty strings are truthy, so providing any string except for "" to bool() will return True, including "False".

The comment I responded to didn't seem to realize that because they asked why it behaves the way it does, so I explained.

> I'd honestly much prefer bool() threw an exception on receiving a string, rather than act the way it does now.

They serve fundamentally different purposes. bool() is a truthiness check and not a type cast like int() and float(). It seems like a lot of people take issue with the name, because it was called something like istruthy() the discussion about it wouldn't be happening.

I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy, but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if it led to a hire.

GM does. Their engineers have set multiple track records[1] and vehicle-specific lap records[2].

[1] https://gmauthority.com/blog/2025/02/c8-corvette-zr1-sets-fi...

[2] https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/a10206481/the-chevrole...

You won't notice them if you're not interested in cars, but there are tons of them and Lexus/Toyota are responsible for quite a few. The RC-F, IS500 and LC500 sound amazing, as did the GS-F and IS-F. Toyota also made some iconic engines such as the 2JZ-GTE in the MKIV Supra and the 2GR engine that Lotus used in the Evora.

Loud isn't the goal, the tone is. The Lexus LFA is a perfect example of this[1]. It's not extremely loud for a car of that caliber, but it's lauded as one of the best sounding cars ever made. Poorly designed exhaust (or no exhaust in the case of your broken muffler) on an otherwise great sounding engine almost always ruins the tone and makes it unbearable to listen to. Bad exhaust on a bad sounding engine is just miserable.

[1] https://www.hotcars.com/heres-why-the-lexus-lfas-screaming-v...