civility

Yes, and annoyingly it only goes back 20,000 years. Going back 400,000 years would tell a much more interesting story.

Really, are you sure?

Pretty sure, and user adwn commented on it too. It's a pretty common pattern to not answer the question and then indicate it was a dumb question in the first place. Then he doubled down on the acceptable insults in the follow-on response.

I'm sure I'm oversensitive to crap like this, but I don't think I'm wrong to notice it.

I wonder if HN would ever add a feature to block/hide users others don't want to see, something per reader. I don't see a browser addon for it, and while I'm sure it could be done purely client-side, you might find stats about who is being blocked and how often interesting if it was done on the server. Heh, I'm sure I would end up on a few people's list, but it doesn't seem likely that we're all just going to get along anytime soon.

Anyways, thank you again for the polite reply.

I appreciate your reply, but I don't believe the vandalism and arson metaphor fits. There are just people you let get away with crap and ones you don't. His goal was to antagonize me while flying under the radar, and he succeeded. My goal was to antagonize him in retribution, and I failed.

So where are we now? I'll go back to reading the headlines instead of the comments because I'm not clever enough to keep people like that from getting under my skin, and he'll go on to piss off someone else the next chance that comes up.

Anyways, I regret snapping at you. Take care.

Dan, go fuck yourself. By letting people get away with snarky condescending tones and banning people who call them out on it, you're encouraging shitty behavior. "Don't be snarky" is right up top in the comments section of the guidelines, but it's easier for you to chastise me because I called the snarky guy an asshole. That's just lazy on your part.

Aggressive comments aren't worse, they're just easier for you to recognize.

Nice job - you've succeeded in being just another condescending asshole.

civility's reply to your post is somewhat rude

Not as rude as I wanted to be. I expect answers like that from Stack Overflow or Reddit - just another condescending ego play without actually addressing the question.

Regardless, thank you for your reply.

I don't suppose you know a good single-threaded (or share-nothing across threads) allocator worth looking at?

Your answer is trite and unhelpful.

Is anyone aware of a good/fast single threaded allocator for cases where you don't need/want to pay for thread safety?

And here I was, worried I might be tedious or pedantic, trying to argue that floating point is just not that simple. You've really outdone me in that regard.

So umm, more than a "difference in the realm of 6-8 significant digits"?

Ugh, you're preaching to the choir. I wasn't trying to make a point about the equality operator, I was trying to make a point about x and y being completely different. I must be really bad at communicating with people.

No joke. Is it 10 years from now, 100 years, or something else?

[...] or we're all doomed!

When are we all doomed? Can you put a date (year) on it?

Call it a contrivance if you want, my point was just that you can get very surprising results even for "real life" sized numbers.

Not sure why you changed it from "1.0 % 0.2" to "0.1 % 0.2". The error on the one I showed was near 0.2, not 1e-17. Did I miss your point?

I didn't see anything in your message above indicating you were restricting yourself to integers.

I think I see where you're hung up. If I change it to:

    x = 1e20 + 1 - 1e20
    y = 1e20 - 1e20 + 1
    assert x == y

JavaScript is precise for 2^53 range

What does this mean to you? It's very easy to get horrible rounding error with real-life sized things. For instance

    document.writeln(1.0 % 0.2);

btw: I think IEEE-754 is really great, but it's also important to understand your tools.

The person I replied to claims to have looked at large* data sets and never seen a discrepancy in 6-8 significant digits. I thought I'd show them a small data set with 3 samples that retains no significant digits.

* Never mind that "millions" isn't large by current standards...

    x = 1e-20 + 1e20 - 1e20
    y = 1e20 - 1e20 + 1e-20
    assert x == y

Really, it's just part of the scam. Most people actually believe the seller is paying the realtors. It's how the buyer's agent can say, "Don't worry about my rate, the seller pays it!", as though you're sticking it to the seller. I've already seen three people repeat/believe that lie in this thread.

If what the realtors said was true, there would be a conflict of interest. However, there isn't really a conflict here because the buyer and seller are both splitting the loss. One is paying too much, and the other isn't getting paid enough.

The real conflict comes because both agents want you to compromise your price for an easy sale. If you sell your $500k house for $20k less than it could, they only lose a few hundred dollars. That agent will play various tricks to try and talk you into losing $20k so they can get a quick sale and be done with you. Similarly, they don't care if your loan is a bit larger when you're buying. They're not looking out for your best interests.

If the middlemen/parasites were out of the loop, the buyer could pay 3% less, the seller would get 3% more, and some reasonable agency could get a fixed fee for doing the paperwork. Hell, the title agency could do the work trivially, but I'm guessing they don't want to risk rocking the boat. Maybe the current system was reasonable when all you had was newspaper listings and for sale signs, but it's corrupt now.

You're right, of course. However in this case, I'd like to see someone fix the problem instead of just making it more palatable. To me FlyHomes looks like just another realtor who screws you for too much money, but they give you flowers before they start and candy when they're done.

The buyer pays everyone - no one else brings any money to the transaction.

In Arizona, every stick-and-stucco house has (or will have) termites. The inspector already knows the answer before he shows up. You pay for "treatment" each time the places changes owners.

When I sold my first house, The buyer's inspector "discovered" termites which would need treatment. However, I had preemptively paid a professional to do treatment just two weeks earlier. When I told the new inspector this, he called the previous inspector. After talking on the phone for 2 minutes, they agreed that I was termite free!

As long as someone got paid for treatment, they were happy. I doubt the buyer knew it went down that way.

I just found their quote:

Flyhomes makes money through the commission paid by the home’s seller.

This is the same lie all realtors love to throw out. "You don't pay - the seller does!". Never mind the buyer is the only person who brings money to the transaction.

Unless that commission is much smaller than a traditional realtor, I hope they fail.

What rate do they charge? It looks like they provide a cash offer and then find financing so you can buy it from them. I didn't see anything about how this eliminates middle-men and egregious fees.

I'm not sure though, because I got a "Oops, something went wrong" popup when I tried to use their site.

Access to MLS? Driving people around? You think any of that should cost the $25,000 the buyer and I paid agents for the house I sold last year? We could've bought a new car for those commissions! Are you an agent, or related to one? I can't see any other way you could defend that nonsense.

Someday one of the big companies is going to figure out how to put the parasites out of business. Amazon could pull it off, so could Google.

A good conman leaves you feeling that you weren't cheated.

But considering that in the US it's the seller who pays both agents, there are no immediate savings for potential buyers [...]

This is all part of the scam, and I'm surprised more people can't see through it. Five people walk into a room at closing. There are two agents, a title agent, the seller, and the buyer. Only the buyer brings any money - so it's pretty clear who is paying.

Put it another way - if the seller goes with a lower percentage agent, then the buyer keeps more of the offer price, and should therefore accept a slightly lower offer. This saves the buyer money too.

Among some not so obvious valuable tidbits that the buyer's agent can provide: [...]

And you think that's worth 6% of a house that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? I think that's insane.

This all sounds like a pitch from a realtor.

Yes, not everyone can read or use a computer. And yet almost everyone pays for all those realtor services they don't need or even use.

I've bought 3 homes now and sold 2. There was no "house hunting" process. I went online, looked at photos, and made an offer - same as you.

On my second home, I told the realtor exactly what I wanted and where. She failed to find it in her search (she did a zip code search instead of looking at the map), so I showed her the listing I wanted to see. There was no extra value to justify 3% of a sale for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As for the seller's agent? They put the listing on MLS and have a token "open house" for a couple hours on one day. If you're lucky, they get a professional photographer and print a few brochures for the walk throughs.

People seeking to disrupt the “fill out the final transactional paperwork” part of real estate need to figure out how to disrupt the whole value chain, not just the part that looks outrageously overpriced.

Why is that? Why not focus on fixing the worst part of the problem?