This is awesome! StreetEasy is how many New Yorkers find apartments. In the past few years, it has been flooded with AI-staged apartments. The AI stagings warp the room to fit furniture that would 100% certainly not fit there. It’s deceptive, and I’m glad it at least requires disclosure now (although I wish it were fully banned)
Not going to lie, I wish they also added a square footage as a legal requirement too.
It is entirely baffling to me as to why, but NYC is the only major city in the US I've ever lived in where it is genuinely a problem. In all other cities, I had no issues with that, pretty much every single posting online had square footage.
Meanwhile, on StreetEasy (and other platforms listing NYC rental units), looking for apartments is a major pain, because majority have zero square footage info. And then it turns into a pure guessing game that becomes super annoying, because an apartment I might be interested in is listed only as "1 bedroom", but just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft. Knowing that info would have made it much easier for renters, and I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
There is square footage on many NYC listings, but it’s wrong. They often have the square footage of the total area occupied by the apartment, including all the interior walls and columns that can take 20% of the area away.
Wild. In Netherlands (and I assume other European countries as well) there’s a regulatory norm for how spaces should be measured - what counts as liveable, non-liveable, etc. It’s so much fairer and clearer for everyone involved.
Back in the third world I remember my parents looked up the reference price per m^2 in the area and would divide the price by that to estimate the size.
Advertised amounts would be off by 20-25%. When you confronted them about it realtors would just give you the real number, I guess most people wouldn't go through the trouble so it was worth trying for them.
We largely have these regulations in the US too (at the state level), we just don't reuse them. Naturally there are rules about what is livable versus what is not. A balcony is not. A room with no windows isn't even a bedroom. That kind of stuff.
It would be truly trivial to then just transform that to calculating square footage, and many states do just that. But not all. It's a problem of motivation, not necessarily ability or cost.
In some countries, like a poster mentioned, they include the “built” size, not the actual liveable size. Sometimes the balconies are included in that, and it is misleading. Two bedrooms in 900sqf liveable is one thing vs 3 bedrooms in 900sqf built area including balconies.
... Huh. This actually explains something I'd been confused about before; people on this site claiming that a 1000sqft apartment was small. Which, I suppose, if you include the entire footprint of the apartment including balconies, sure. It would never have occurred to me to do it like that.
Until you measure the apartment later and find out that a) it's much smaller and b) it doesn't matter because you rent the apartment as seen, not as advertised.
Well, in Germany at least - if the living space differs drastically, that is at least 10%, you can lower the rent accordingly and make a demand for a refund of the entire rent you overpaid since you moved in - and you probably should also make a second case for damages due to purposeful deception.
A consumer doesn't buy anything from a business "as seen", that is not a thing over here. There are binding rules to protect consumers from malevolent sellers or landlords, and legal obligations you can't subvert by tricking customers into purchasing something different from what was advertised.
Maybe it’s different for rentals but you’d think the banks would also want accurate data on the properties they’re mortgaging…and cities for tax revenue…so strange!
For big commercial rental properties they probably don’t care because it doesn’t really push the property value.
I don’t think it really changes the property value because those interior walls are usually cosmetic and not load bearing. If the bank has to foreclose, the next buyer will be well aware they can strip those walls out for nothing relative to the cost of buying the building.
I’m doubtful it pushes the tax revenue for the same reason, everyone is already evaluating based on what it could be.
Smaller units are probably just not worth the effort to manage. It’s a lot of over head to start auditing old duplexes where the owner has a property or two and isn’t a giant company with a whole compliance department.
Why? Banks and cities only care about the price. They also want price to be under and over estimated respectively, neither would want the accurate price, even less so the accurate area.
There are property taxes in the US, they are levied on the appraisal price of the property, not on the living area. You know the price is reasonable from the comps. As you're overestimating or the appraisal is already at the legal cap (in case of taxes) you don't really care about the living area.
There are no US-wide property taxes. However, almost every home in the US has to pay property taxes to at least one level of government. That's what pandaman was referring to when they said the city (which would be levying the taxes) would want the footprint overstated so they could get more tax revenue
I didn’t know the square footage of my apartment until I had built an app that utilizes LiDAR to actually measure it. Broker told me 650 square feet - it’s precisely 505 square feet.
(Won’t advertise my app, but you can find many on the iOS App Store).
Would be nice for StreetEasy to have some kind of third party verification about apartment size claims.
If you are hesitant to mention it in the comments, please consider at least putting it in your profile bio. This sounds like a genuinely useful tool that I would personally want to use myself.
Louis Rossmann has a number of videos from the period when he was searching for retail space in Manhattan. He would take a laser measure and verify listing info himself. The sf on listings was almost universally not just wrong, but audaciously wrong. "Whatcha gonna do about it?" wrong.
They mean the apartment building hallways and elevators. As in, if you summed the square footage of all the apartments on a floor, you'd get a number greater than the actual dimensions of the floor, because the common areas are counted multiple times.
That shouldn’t be the case. In some cases it would also be ridiculous, when the common areas are larger than the apartments themselves (corridors, elevators, technical rooms, etc.). They do include the proportional square footage corresponding to each apartment. But this is still very misleading because some buildings have a lot of common areas that can double the advertised size of the very small apartments.
If it had a “good” square footage, it would be touted front and center. Because it’s not, you know it doesn’t.
I see this all the time with motorcycle PPE. If something was CE A, AA, or AAA rated, it’d be at the top of the description/specs. When it’s not, I know it’s not so I just move on.
Where it gets tricky is when the good people and bad people start working together because they both sell bad products. What I mean is: purposefully not advertising your good traits front and center, so that your worse product then "shine" more. And then everyone catches on and all your signals are gone. It happens sometimes.
I wish that e-bike ads had the classification. The bike classes are well-defined AFAIK - it's the class legality that's regional, if any. Right now, they're actively helping riders skirt/evade the laws.
I'm pretty sure if they stopped skirting the laws, it'd eliminate a decent cohort of their customer base. Watching someone come through a pedestrian area at 45 mph on a "bicycle" that clearly is an electric motorcycle is pretty interesting.
Very slowly. Stopping is not as a big of an issue as cornering though - not only they don't have adequate traction for the speed and mass but they also don't use the front brake. Which is great as the trails which are fun to ride because of all the bends are also e-bike free other than old people riding their pedal-assist bikes at 15 mph.
> just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft
Those are not good pics. Probably* for the same reason, to hide size and maybe something else.
*Depends on culture and I don't know about NYC. I've seen another landlord's market where quite a few landlords just post one or two useless photos — and even heard advice to pay attention to such postings as they're definitely not prepared by a professional agent.
Wouldn’t it be easier for streeteasy to simply stop allowing 0 sq ft listings/innacurate listings? Maybe allowing people to report listings that are inaccurate and banning repeat offenders? If the market feels that strongly, the pressure on the company would be easy to achieve?
> I cannot think of a logical reason to not provide that information.
Because it's to an extreme degree a landlord's market and thus none of them have any incentive to do more than the bare minimum?
Even if it was listed everyone would "stretch" things by including closets and the like. The only way it would work is if the city did the measurements and maintained a database...but then you'd have people bribing the inspectors. they already do it over fire code.
Renting an apartment should require at a minimum registration, inspection (fire code - window/egress, detectors, and ideally an extinguisher and fire blanket), proof of insurance, and some sort of bond per unit that the city holds onto and uses for emergency code compliance repairs.
It's a landlord's market because there are not enough properties, if there was a larger supply the tenants would be able to make choices and defacto reject bad options.
In Europe we've used regulations. There's standardised ways to measure area of an apartment/house, and it has to be included in any ads and contract of sale/rent. If the actual area doesn't match what's in the ads/contract the landlord/seller will be in trouble. I saw a news article once where the landlord,iirc, had to return all rent money to the tenant. The tenant had lived there for a while(memory is fuzzy, I think it was years, but don't quote me on that) and in the end only paid for electricity.
I hear you guys like suing eachother in the states, seems like this kind of regulation would suit you just fine!
The parent was talking about it being a "landlords market" and wanting that to be changed. I asked how that might be possible.
Improving advertisements to make them accurate, detailed, and directly-comparable is obviously a good thing. But does not change the market in favour of the tenants; the status-quo exists because of a lack of properties. That means no matter how bad the advert(s) tenants have to choose one available. If there were a surplus of properties then it would be a tenant's market.
…and define rules for the measurement taken, like no stairs, count areas below roof sloping or outside on balconies etc. with a lower factor, exclude shared areas and cellars/attics, and so on.
Not measuring correctly, not publishing the measurements, or publishing incorrect measurements outside an error margin gets counted as deception. Offer a simple reporting contact point to citizens to report landlords or offers that violate this regulation without a lawsuit.
Advertising is already a pretty strict domain by necessity. We used to allow just about every lie under the sun in advertising, and it was universally bad. We systematically broke that down one by one over many decades, and we're still doing it! I mean, these days you can't even sell tobacco without saying "hey we're trying to kill you btw".
During the press conference he finished with a light joke that was something like “after all it’s meant to be Street Easy not Street Hard”. I assumed that was an app, your post unintentionally closed the loop for me!
Agree AI modified listing make no sense to allow; regulation here is making up for platform failure.
Apartment hunting is an unpleasant chore I haven’t had to do since 2022. It hadn’t even occurred to me that AI slop would be the norm. I really have lived to see man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.
So all the landlords will just disclose it and everyone will continue to be deceived. Just like every other picture on Meta platforms these days says it is AI-edited. That didn't make the feed any better; it's still a feed full of disclosed AI crap.
Why is this mayor so fucking chicken to just BAN AI-altered listings altogether? Have jail time and $1M fines for it. Fines big enough that you would risk losing your property altogether. We need more real leaders.
Choice of tone can communicate the same thing as 3-4 paragraphs of calmer discourse. Should we ban the use of tone? Personally I appreciated it and the frustration was palpable.
I'm just tired of regulators realizing the right things to regulate but not implementing them correctly.
Job postings must include a salary range? Who the fuck thought of that? Did they even ask a mathematician whether providing the min() and max() would be useful rather than mean(), median(), and std(), which is what the law really should require?
How many people who are considering hiring their first few employees have an idea of what the minimum they’d likely pay and the maximum they’d likely pay for those new positions? Almost all.
Now how many could even tell you the rough definition of standard deviation, let alone be able to give a value for it? Almost none.
As an applicant for a single opening, it’s not obvious that standard deviation is helpful either.
For normal people, I think that min and max are the two most practical and understandable measures.
You're nitpicking at details. I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out how to write it so that this isn't an issue, but it seems you're more interested in "taking the other side" rather than thinking together about how to increase job compensation transparency.
Here's the problem with minimums: Companies posting ranges of $100K-$900K. Yes, I've seen them.
Here's a hint for everyone else: For small companies and single openings they can just aggregate mean/median/std by job level (E5 average, M1 average), or aggregate horizontally by team (HR average, ops average), whatever. Anything to increase transparency. If you're criticizing the math instead of building on the math, you're clearly against job transparency.
I’m in favor of transparency (and consistently argue for that and act accordingly inside my own company). I’m against adding information that will confuse far more people than it will help.
A company listing $100k-$900k per year for a role that’s not commissioned sales is exhibiting malicious compliance and should be dealt with directly as such rather than adding an additional nearly useless measure to somehow help smoke that out or avoid it.
Yes, this is extremely Netflix. The "fix" for this is to mandate that they can no longer post an ad for engineers, but rather they have to post separate ads for each engineering role. Maybe this is better, maybe not. If a person applies to L4, are they allowed to be hired at L3 pay? Will that confuse people?
> For small companies and single openings
levels.fyi chooses not to publish some comp datapoints because there's too little data, which means publishing the data is tantamount to publishing an individual's compensation.
I hear you on the goal, but the details are tough.
For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison to be meaningful.
Caveat: I am pro more transparency in compensation data. But it's hard to do right.
> mean(), median(), and std()
play this out a bit, and you'll quickly realize that there are infinite ways to game this. Something like levels.fyi only works because levels are a thing, and they are consistent across a relative handful of companies (most tech workers do not work at those companies).
And even levels.fyi won't publish salary data until there are enough data points at a company to prevent such publication from inadvertently publishing how much an individual person makes. This makes it less useful for (say) a senior looking for a job at a non-tech or small firm.
I wish there would be a similar thing for food as well. In my country (Brazil), food apps such as iFood are FULL of AI images. Worse is that iFood don't allow reviews to post pictures, so you get very blind asking it.
Now Didi came (99) and Keeta, and they at least allow users to post reviews with pictures.
The Mayor is not a dictator and can't just make up laws or regulations.
He can probably get DCWP to engage in the normal rule making process, but at most this is probably going to get some AI disclosure somewhere, which is what we had for "virtually staged" lies.
Right, which is why all we're going to get it a label saying that AI was used (or maybe landlords will try to fly through on the label of "virtually staged" that they've been using).
Existing law doesn't have the authority to ban all AI images as inherently deceptive, and DCWP isn't going to be spending a bunch of time prosecuting individual images.
I agree with Mamdani that these images are often deceptive and misleading and sifting through the bullshit is annoying (and was annoying with virtually staged images too). It's just not going to go anywhere. The energy would be better spent on zoning and building code reform.
No, merely analyzing or discussing the law generally does not constitute the practice of law. If it did, plenty of newspaper articles, law review journals (often written by law students), non-attorney legal aid, and legal pamphlets would be prohibited.
If you want something more concrete, I googled it, and in New York, there appears to have been a case New York County Lawyers’ Association v. Dacey, in which Dacey wrote a book "How to Avoid Probate!", and the NYCA accepted a dissent in a lower court, stating in part:
Does the writing, publication, advertising, sale and distribution of "How To Avoid Probate!" constitute the unauthorized practice of law within the meaning of subdivision B of section 750? It cannot be claimed that the publication of a legal text which purports to say what the law is amounts to legal practice. And the mere fact that the principles or rules stated in the text may be accepted by a particular reader as a solution to his problem does not affect this.
and later humorously quoting:
"[I]t is a prized American privilege to speak one's mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions" (Bridges v. California, 314 U. S. 252, 270)
I am honestly so surprised that everyone on HN is so naive that they take political statements like this at face value.
Politicians routinely say they will do things they do not have the authority to do, and it's often very important to understanding what will actually happen to have some understanding of what authorities are available to them, or at the very least ask Google/LLMs about it.
Idk, what happens when you do that? Does it apply traditional color filters and tweaks, or does it process the photo thru generative ai potentially altering it in ways beyond what you intended?
I agree, we're going to get a little warning label, just like the "virtually staged" labels that are already there and nothing of consequence will actually change. That is why I say this is a nothing burger.
I strongly disagree. This is just the Politician's Fallacy.
I keep harping on about the "virtual staging" that real estate agents have been doing for a decade that is equally deceptive and annoying and already gets labeled, and the labels don't actually help because you're still left trying to decipher what is real yourself.
If they wanted to actually do something useful, they'd get together with the legislature and pass a law saying that real estate listings need to come with floor plans that are accurate within X% under the penalty of some sort of fine with a private right of action. But passing laws is hard and faces opposition.
Why are you so certain of this? Oh it was a problem before so we should just keep doing nothing even though it will almost certainly become exponentially worse with AI? Love this plan.
I am so certain of this because I was not born yesterday and this is not my first time paying attention to (NYC) politics.
Politician makes a grand statement they do not have the authority to meaningfully act on to get headlines, DCWP issues a weak sauce disclosure rule and the news cycle moves on because this is not actually anybody's priority.
plug to my blog post where I did something similar a few years back! https://willbeckman.com/wordle.html :). Not sure if this is an identical solution, but it was a fun little project.
Wow, thanks. I’m even coming up with 500K chatGPT queries for the amount of energy consumed as a KG of beef, though I might have moved a decimal place somewhere - feel free to check my math :)
“average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy” - or 0.00034MWH
Using this calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... - in my zip, 0.0002KG of CO2 per MWH. (Though, I suppose it depends more on the zip where they’re doing inference, however this translation didn’t seem to vary much when I tried other zips)
Then, 99.48KG/0.0002KG= 497,400 chatGPT queries worth of CO2 per KG of beef?
This is really neat! I work in machine learning but still feel imposter syndrome with my foundations with math (specifically linear algebra and matrix/tensor operations). Does anyone have any more good resources for problem sets with an emphasis on deep learning foundational skills? I find I learn best if I do a bit of hands-on work every day (and if I can learn things from multiple teachers’ perspectives)
They know what you like, but that doesn't mean they will show you those profiles. Their goal is to maximize revenue, not maximize users finding good matches.
And at some places like Hinge, they'll identify your type so well that your "standouts" page (the one you have to pay to message people on) will be composed of 100% people you would probably like to speak to while your free feed will just be composed of people you have no interest in talking to!
I disagree. "The algorithm" is understood by everyone in 2025 to be a more-or-less perfect attention hoarder. TikTok, Insta, YouTube, etc. have proven they can definitely surface the content that users will like. I see no reason why profiles would be different.
They know what you like, but remember they want to make money. You finding success means you are probably less likely to get desperate and pay for premium options on their app. They drip feed you as little success as possible to still keep you on the app, but make you desperate.
It sucks, but a dating app doesn't want you successful, they want you to use their app for as long as possible.
I also had that reaction, but I kept reading and it was worth it. They mean it in a very narrow sense, and talk about the nuances and challenges of practical recommendation for much of the rest of the article.
This is great. Found myself on 5/30/22. Looking forward to catching up with photos of people I hiked with. Also love the pics from ‘79 - total time capsule! Short-shorts never went out of style in the hiking community.
I'm an AT hiker but I hate the short-shorts. I prefer the length to be just above the knee. If you've ever walked through a tall patch of poison ivy before you noticed what it was, you'll understand.
I’m in the shortest-shorts camp too. Less about the UL-value of the shorts, more about the mobility to lift my leg as high as I can (specifically to reduce friction going uphill). When you take literally millions of steps on a thru-hike, even the smallest things start to add up.
I’ll bite. I worked at a very large Fortune 500 company for a few years. Through some twist of fate, I ended up on an overfunded ML organization that was under no pressure to produce anything of business value. The executive in charge of this operation let this fly for about a year before they realized they weren’t getting anything valuable out of it. They put pressure on the VP of the org to start producing business value or else.
Fast forward another month or so and there are six hastily thrown together initiatives in which our organization is contracted to other organizations to “help them out”. The team dynamics were atrocious - our team was met with skepticism as to why we were helping out (was the other team not doing their job well enough?), and people on our team were often clueless on the business subject matter that we were supposed to be consulting on.
I was assigned to one of these initiatives, and upon digging into the business problem, our team realized that the feature importance was completely contained within a single categorical feature in the model. All other features in the model were comparable to uniformly randomly generated features. In the selfish interest of being able to claim that they “solved their problem with ML”, it was clear that either the model developer or the team at large had obscured this fact.
In an effort to save face, the VP kept us on the project, despite the poor relations and lack of useful features to improve the model. We didn’t improve the model and eventually, the VP ended up being “pushed out”. Last I checked, this VP is currently the CEO of a startup that recently raised a $100M seed round.
I imagine that’s just about the starkest within-US move you could make with regard to bike friendliness. I once made the mistake of visiting Houston without a rental car, and it was bleak. Welcome to NYC!
This is such a good idea, I wish I’d thought of it. I have trouble maintaining consistency in journaling, but this makes it a heck of a lot easier. I just signed up - good luck!
This is great. I remember finding another really good resource on the Bernoulli bandit that was interactive. Putting feelers out there to see if anyone knows what I’m talking about off the top of their heads.
