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The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/magazine/the-big-city-save-the-flophouses.html
30•ChadNauseam•3d ago

Comments

mfro•3h ago
https://archive.is/ggxry
johnnylambada•2h ago
I imagine they’re all gone now. A great example of the free market creating a niche product that was useful and affordable to its customers and the government regulating it out of existence. I’m sure there were abuses by owners but the system worked for the majority.
delichon•2h ago
If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? If you can't land a job at minimum wage, better for you to be unemployed? I wish that these were reductio ad absurdems rather than common place luxury beliefs.
user3939382•1h ago
It’s a lose lose. If you remove the wage floor many people with “livable” wages now would have theirs cut, it’s a problem of adversarial incentives a la nash.
HDThoreaun•47m ago
Less than 1% of workers make minimum wage. There are effectively zero opportunities to increase employment by offering wages below the minimum. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.
delichon•24m ago
> Less than 1% of workers make minimum wage.

So minimum wage helps less than 1% of workers, at the expense of people who don't have skills valued at the minimum wage? Why are you confident that's a net positive trade off?

> If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.

That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage. It's better than the true minimum wage of zero. It's not like the value of labor is discontinuous, such that it is worth zero if is worth less than a minimum.

HDThoreaun•14m ago
> That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage.

No. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because employers think they would be a net negative at a $0 wage. There are a couple counter examples like walmart no longer being open overnight, but even then thats more because of theft than paying the employees. It is not hard to find a minimum wage job in the vast majority of the country. If you cant its because employers think you will do an exceptionally bad job. Every single adult has skills valued at minimum wage in the US, the question is just if they have a drug problem or mental illness or something like that. Those people wouldnt be helpful at $0 wage either

delichon•3m ago
> If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because employers think they would be a net negative at a $0 wage.

Strong disagree, no foundation.

A minimum wage raises the bottom wrung of the economic ladder and declares victory for the workers.

jhbadger•39m ago
Yeah, the main flophouse discussed in the article (White House) closed in 2014 and is now a "boutique" hotel serving a very different set of clients
xxr•2h ago
A few years after this, a documentary was made about some of the men still living at the Sunshine (mentioned in the first paragraph): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0m2FaC8GUs

Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
383•Kerrick•1h ago•40 comments

Classical statues were not painted horribly

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/
303•bensouthwood•4h ago•164 comments

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/
219•simonw•2h ago•189 comments

Virtualizing Nvidia HGX B200 GPUs with Open Source

https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/virtualizing-nvidia-hgx-b200-gpus-with-open-source
63•ben_s•3h ago•15 comments

Launch HN: Pulse (YC S24) – Production-grade unstructured document extraction

19•sidmanchkanti21•1h ago•5 comments

Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/17/are-apple-gift-cards-safe-to-redeem
235•tosh•2h ago•184 comments

Using TypeScript to Obtain One of the Rarest License Plates

https://www.jack.bio/blog/licenseplate
81•lafond•2h ago•65 comments

Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puz...
209•furcyd•6d ago•271 comments

Please Just Try Htmx

http://pleasejusttryhtmx.com/
170•iNic•2h ago•167 comments

Creating apps like Signal could be 'hostile activity' claims UK watchdog

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/creating-apps-like-signal-or-whatsapp-could-be...
298•donohoe•5h ago•200 comments

RCE via ND6 Router Advertisements in FreeBSD

https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-25:12.rtsold.asc
101•weeha•8h ago•55 comments

Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adu8009
5•XzetaU8•4d ago•0 comments

Dogalog: A realtime Prolog-based livecoding music environment

https://github.com/danja/dogalog
17•triska•4d ago•3 comments

Slowness is a virtue

https://blog.jakobschwichtenberg.com/p/slowness-is-a-virtue
177•jakobgreenfeld•6h ago•68 comments

Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/
1072•meetpateltech•1d ago•564 comments

Hightouch (YC S19) Is Hiring

https://hightouch.com/careers
1•joshwget•5h ago

Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1

https://www.egyptianhieroglyphs.net/egyptian-hieroglyphs/lesson-1/
128•jameslk•11h ago•51 comments

I got hacked: My Hetzner server started mining Monero

https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/my-server-started-mining-monero-this-morning/
533•jakelsaunders94•19h ago•327 comments

Show HN: A local-first memory store for LLM agents (SQLite)

https://github.com/CaviraOSS/OpenMemory
28•nullure•4d ago•14 comments

What is an elliptic curve? (2019)

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/02/21/what-is-an-elliptic-curve/
118•tzury•10h ago•12 comments

After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up

https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanats
264•YaleE360•6h ago•214 comments

It's all about momentum

https://combo.cc/posts/its-all-about-momentum-innit/
93•sph•7h ago•32 comments

systemd v259 Released

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v259
39•voxadam•2h ago•16 comments

Heart and Kidney Diseases and Type 2 Diabetes May Be One Ailment

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heart-and-kidney-diseases-plus-type-2-diabetes-may-be-...
30•Brajeshwar•1h ago•8 comments

From profiling to kernel patch: the journey to an eBPF performance fix

https://rovarma.com/articles/from-profiling-to-kernel-patch-the-journey-to-an-ebpf-performance-fix/
23•todsacerdoti•4d ago•1 comments

Most parked domains now serving malicious content

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/12/most-parked-domains-now-serving-malicious-content/
94•bookofjoe•4h ago•28 comments

The Big City; Save the Flophouses (1996)

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/magazine/the-big-city-save-the-flophouses.html
30•ChadNauseam•3d ago•10 comments

AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs

https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report
98•birdculture•4h ago•110 comments

Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
231•bschne•3d ago•110 comments

Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2025/12/15/spain-fines-airbnb-65-million-why-the-government-is-cr...
88•robtherobber•2h ago•85 comments