skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you understand that demand is finite? You cannot go on building apartments for new tech employees forever. If you allow widespread construction of new housing, then at least some of that housing must target lower income people.

Moreover, I don't agree with the restrictions on high rises to SoMa. Why not allow them to be built elsewhere? And who says that you have a right to live in SoMa anyway? If it were allowed, high rises would go up in other parts of the city, and you could live there instead.
I don't understand how that can take more than two hours of someone who's a college senior (presuming you're a CS student). This is just a handful of lines of very simple python using one of the most documented and oldest web protocols. There's also a ton if similar examples online using php, java, etc. that should have taken more like ten minutes to write.
My apologies. Should have phrased it otherwise, to mean what cschmidt said below! :)
Robots.txt is a suicide note.

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt

My personal server returns a 410 to robots.txt requests.
>Then a few months ago i shared a hostel room in Edinburgh with a guy from Portland. When we got to talking he told me that he is originally from San Francisco but decided to ran away to Portland to escape nearly insane cost of living.

This article: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_71.htm appeared on HN the other day and explains why and how California as a whole is losing native-born residents; housing costs are a huge component of the problem.
This just in: economics applies to San Francisco.

If demand rises faster than supply, prices go up.

Demand is rising fast. Supply is being held down. Prices go up.

I come from Darwin, a wonderful little city clinging to the northern edge of the Australian continent. About 10 years ago a confluence of factors (expanded Defence presence and the early stirrings of the resources boom) meant that property prices took off.

At the same time, the hyper-local nature of politics in that part of the country (each member of parliament in the state-level government represents about 2500-3000 voters) means that infill doesn't happen because the margin of victory is easily less than two or three streets getting angry at you for authorising a new block of flats.

So: demand shot up, supply did not. Unsurprisingly, Darwin is now one of the most expensive places in Australia to live. If you can find an unoccupied flat, good luck renting a nice one for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income. And good luck finding a house for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income.

Supply and demand. It's the same everywhere for everyone. There are no exceptions. If SF wants to keep its middle class, it needs to make more housing available.

Especially high density housing for the wealthy, not the poor. Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Every rich person who moves into a $2 million dollar apartment is a rich person who isn't bidding the price of an older building up and driving out the middle class, who in turn will drive out the poor.

Another dumb policy: giving money for deposits or loans. It just drives up effective demand. Every seller knows you can get the $X thousand dollars and then, surprise, surprise! The price of every house just rose but ~$X thousand dollars. Everything that gets given to the middle and poorer classes to subsidise housing is in fact a wealth transfer to the landlords, via good old-fashioned populist policy making.
> How about a Boycott of computer devices that you cannot install an alternative OS on like Linux?

You couldn't get most of HN to do something like this, let alone the general public.
+1 for Cuban Council!
Windows 8/Metro: A PC solution looking for a problem
That sounds like a very narrow-minded interpretation to me.
I don't know. How does New York deal with people in finance and artists in the same place? Do all the artists just live in Brooklyn now, instead of Manhattan?
Upvoting you, though I commented on this thread.

Maybe when people submit articles to HN they should be asked to select a category (Tech, News, Science etc). The app could restrict the number of non-hacker news.
Voting isn't about getting the best candidates into office, its about being able to get the worst ones out.
> Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power.

Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housing increases demand in the immediate vicinity by more than the new building's own supply provides, assuming the area (like Manhattan or SF) is rather desirable in general terms to begin with. That may be good if you want to raise the housing values in an area (each building provides a multiplier effect that raises the prices of neighboring ones, making the whole area more desirable). But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area? E.g. when new condo towers open in Manhattan, does it produce an observable downward move in prices?

(The main point I'm getting at is that demand and supply aren't independent variables: demand for living in an area depends quite strongly on the housing stock in that area, so building more housing stock affects both supply and demand, in possibly complex ways, which need empirical data to tease out.)
Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.
@era86 Do you write software for a living right now ?
Or simply use GLib's GArray:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/tree/glib/garray.c
Where do you think investors get the money they invest?
What on earth are you on about?

Okay, hypothetical from someone with an advanced degree in Economics, not because I'm bragging, but to save you the snark and insults:

Developer gets the green light to demolish 30 unit building and build a large high rise at say, 6th and Howard. Many of these people are on the lowest end of the income spectrum.

So you demolish the units and build a 150 unit, 15 story luxury apartment building, because you know Square is a block away and their employees can afford to pay ridiculous rents. As the owner of the building, how many units are you building to occupy the old, lower income tenants, and how many are you building to occupy the Square tenants, who will often be able to afford 3x the price?

This is the problem the article is pointing out. No matter how you build "more housing", it very certainly will be first built for the highest income people, thus pushing the lower income teachers, firefighters and policemen, out of San Francisco proper.
I can't disclose exactly. Roughly a junior developer's salary.

It was owned by someone who's name is actually Gengo, and had a business predicated on the name. So he was reluctant to sell.

The broker got between 10-15%.
> just because of your incessant, annoying spam on every god damn

sent from my iphone. sent from my ipad.

yeah, because I care what device you sent me an email from.

sent from my desktop computer using firefox.
Can you talk about the age range of the students of your Hacker School and your understanding of the age range of the students at other Hacker Schools?

The pictures all show a bunch of well, young and attractive people. Regardless, coming out of the downturn, there are many experienced engineers struggling to shift from a diminishing part of the industry into web development.

Do you support such training/retraining and what would be the best thing such a candidate could do to get in?
If it's suppose to help you find a job then in 25 words or less you should tell me why I should hire you, i.e. an elevator pitch. It doesn't have to be over the top, but it should tell me at a casual glance where you want to go. If your personal content is interesting that's great, but you need something to anchor my eye. And yes your icon is a part of that too, and if that takes hiring a professional photographer then it's a good investment.
HTML5 port puts 'Dune II' in your browser
Sad but true.

On the other hand, the average customer doesn't even want to go through the trouble of buying a device and then having to load the OS on it. Arguably it's a red herring to worry about the Surface. Let it succeed or fail. But you can be sure I won't buy one.
Weird implementation. If you want an magical 'append' function, use a stack, or a linked list.

There's no reason you'd want to 'append' to an array.

(Imagine the situation you remove an item in the middle; what is append supposed to do now? What is remove supposed to do? The append function in this example is basically just 'make_me_bigger')

Still, if you did want to, I'd be doing this to reduce verbosity:

#define _V(a) ((int *) &a)
struct Vec {
int *data;
int size;
int offset;
}

struct v;
_V(v)[5] = 10;
int value = _V(v)[5];

You only need two special calls; append() (aka. make this array longer) and free().
If the broker gets 10-15% how are your interests aligned? They couldn't possibly be motivated to get you the best deal on the domain.

(I've been doing this since 1996...)
> Did you even read the article?

Yes, but the article is terrible. And the comment you replied to is probably a lot closer to the truth.
I wrote a very similar script several months ago, and it also took me longer than it should have. What kept me from doing it quickly was this nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that there must be a better way to send a message through Gmail. (Or that I was somehow violating Gmail's TOS.)
I get the impression that in the future I'll be the old UNIX beard guy telling youngin-s and interns that one time I could just throw Gnu/Linux or BSD on just about whatever hardware.
I, as an Indian, am deeply ashamed by what has happened. But what saddens me even more is that while our culture teaches us to respect women, we worship several goddesses, refer to our country as "Mother" India; we rank highest among the nations where women are the worst abused.

This has nothing to do with democracy, I believe it is a pure case of rising economic inequality and decreasing sex ratio in India.

The protests that we are seeing in the country are just a sign of how frustrated are people with the current political environment in the country. Rather than focusing on development in the country and taking care of law and order, our current politicians are way busy arguing over trivial things.

Its even sadder that this case represents the current mentality of an Indian male. And I am not sure how to change that. I am sure new and tougher laws will be made, but how do you teach respect and compassion that our country seems to be missing so badly now.

It seems we as a nation are making progress but sadly at the cost of our values.
You mean "Variable-Length array", also referred to as VLA, not "flexible array member".
> Ads, ads, glorious ads

Is there something wrong with that? Total US advertising expenditures for 2011 were $144 billion[0]. UGC is of course quite difficult to monetize, but it's not impossible.

[0] http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising-e...
I realize that "data" and "thinking" are shorthands for something more fleshed out, but doesn't the title read as somewhat obtuse? Like calling an article "why facts will never replace understanding" or "why Wikipedia will never replace people who know about what Wikipedia pages are about."
Protip: add a .compact at the end of your reddit URL. I've stopped using reddit apps since I discovered that
> No matter how you build "more housing", it very certainly will be first built for the highest income people, thus pushing the lower income teachers, firefighters and policemen, out of San Francisco proper.

Clearly your "advanced degree in Economics" hasn't taught you any common sense.

Is anyone saying that the housing that is built first has to go to lower income people? Is anyone saying that you cannot just build more housing? Do you understand that there is not an infinite supply of tech workers looking to move into expensive apartments?
When I visit the Call of Duty Elite website there's a smart banner telling me to download the app. I went to the website because their iOS app is limited. When I click on the "x" to close it it takes me to the iOS app instead of removing the banner. I lose real estate like you mentioned. Real annoying.
I don't know how to make a bookmark on the "desktop" of my phone, and I'd rather use an app than look it up.
That is pretty funny and ironic!
This is one business decision I fail to fully comprehend.

First of all, the number of people interested in dual-boot or otherwise are likely to be small. But even so, why drive away potential customers and business? If the hardware is what people want, isn't it your goal, as a business, to give them the hardware; and to give your shareholders the profits from the sale of said hardware?

I don't see the win in a decision like this. It's a lose lose situation that could be a win win.
Nitpicks:

* Typo in the header file (SIZE versus CAPACITY).

* No error checking on malloc() or realloc() return.

* Out of bounds access is a programmer error, so you should call abort() and not exit(). Alternatively, assert() is fine too.

* Potential integer overflow for capacity field (size field can't overflow because capacity overflows first). On a 64-bit non-ILP64 system, resizing to a capacity of 2^31 elements will request a buffer of 0xfffffffe00000000 bytes, assuming sizeof(int) is 4.

* A 32-bit version could theoretically get an overflow, but only if a 2^31 byte allocation is successful... the next larger allocation will be for 0 bytes.

Edit: As someone pointed out in the comments, arr[271] is the 272nd element, whereas the article claims it is the 270th element.

Further notes:

If you end up implementing a lot of these, invest in a consistent naming scheme for the fields. For example, map, mapsz, mapalloc; then data, datasz, dataalloc.

You can also try writing generics in C but I strongly recommend just switching to C++ (or some other language) if the boilerplate code bothers you. I believe that std::vector was the biggest reason for GCC's switch to C++ internally.
If the headache is caused by sinus blockage, capsaicin is generally pretty good at getting those flowing. Hangover headaches, I have no idea.
Memory pools, dynamic arrays, custom vector implementations, etc. Pretty sure most have been done to death. Find the one that meets your usage and move along.
Danger meets discovery: Top science stories of 2012
Magnetrons don't work that way sadly - you can't easily change their design power. This is why the microwave power setting is fractional time based.
I did that this year. Still look at Facebook on the browser but it cut down time on Facebook by a huge amount.
Many people do care. It gives context to short emails or emails with errors.
> But probably not good if you want to lower the prices.

The thing I'm thinking of is the city-wide market, rather than in a particular locale. One way or the other, though, the wealthy will get to live where they want. The best thing you can do is to try and save the furniture by putting them into golden ghettos, rather than having them fan out and drive off people in multiple districts.

> Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area?

Good on you for calling me out on numbers. I'd be interested to see that too.

NYC is a poor case study; you have the confounding factor of widespread rent control. It both creates an artificial limit on housing supply and distorts your official statistics because people have a strong incentive to behave deceptively.
Reddit's user made bots are an awesome addition and I'm very glad they are not opt-in.

I think there is room in every community for automated users, if the tools for managing misbehaving users is strong enough. Github however has been known to not have strong moderation tools, so perhaps a temporary opt-in policy could be used until those tools improve?
What's sad about it? I can't replace the OS in my car after all. I can replace the OS on my cell phone now, but it used to be the case that you couldn't and that was just peachy.
I don't think it'd be that inaccurate to model the supply of tech workers looking to live in SF as "very large" relative to demand, i.e. not likely to be meaningfully diminished by a dozen or two condo towers. Plus, demand itself depends on housing stock, and good new housing stock tends to produce more demand: people's friends move to SF, they hear about a new condo tower, the whole area gets more desirable. If you modeled Manhattan redevelopment that way, you'd have good results: the construction of new condos in Manhattan has not appreciably diminished the remaining outstanding supply of people wanting to move to Manhattan. If anything, the opposite: the "cleaning up" of Manhattan from redevelopment has increased the demand to live there by more than the new apartments have provided, so the supply/demand imbalance is actually worse than before! Now that might still be good for other reasons, but not if your goal is to lower prices.

I mean, assuming we're not talking about putting in 500,000 new units or something, Stalinist-apartment-blocks style: that would really produce enough supply to soak up any excess demand (which was precisely the point of Stalin's building programme). And their unattractiveness might reduce demand, too...
Joel being exceedingly candid as usual and it's great to be able to relate to stuff like this as someone who still has a lot of learning to do and going through so many unknowns. Big respect to what him and his team at Buffer are doing.
For the longest time I honestly thought many iPhone users were just complete tools until I found out it was actually a default.
You made the front page of reddit today, I look forward to reading about how this converts into clients in next years summary ;-)

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/15n9x3/being_a_bit_op...
Because they're subsidizing the cost of the hardware with the intention of creating lifetime or long term Windows users.
Even if you got Linux to boot, would you have drivers for the hardware?
I do not know if it is still the case, but when I worked at Amazon in the late 1990s, one of the aspects of the "frugal" culture involved all of us working in the Seattle DC during the run-up to the xmas holidays.

You could be standing next to Jeff Bezos, putting books in boxes. The irony for me was that it was one of the few times I could expect to see him, despite my (small slice of an) office being two doors down from his.

Now that there are multiple, largely automated, DCs, I'm not sure if this still happens. Amazon isn't really "the little guy" anymore, at least not in the retail sense.
Have you actually applied to Hacker School?
The major linux distros boot out of the box on these non-ARM PCs, SecureBoot can enroll your own keys and/or can be disabled. So, what type of user is going to be prevented from trying or installing linux?
> You actually didn't mention your age. I gather from the rest of your comment, you're in high school?

Yes.

Honestly, every time I use a tablet the first thing on my mind is the firmware invading my privacy. The next thing though is input devices. (I'll probably end up flashing cyanogen mod.)

Input devices, for most users, and even most developers, are something assumed. For desktop it's keyboard and mouse, for laptop it's keyboard and some kind of mouse-like input device. For tablets it's touch or buttons. For phones it's touch or buttons. (I don't think most tablets that use buttons, like e-readers, are open for development. Correct me if I'm wrong though.)

I'm going to reiterate what I've already said before, touch sucks as a universal interface. [0] So my question ends up being "What peripherals make sense for a mobile device?". Recently I received a tiny bluetooth keyboard to type on my Nexus 7. That's a step in the right direction, as typing things out with the on-screen keyboard is painful and awkward. (And since a stylus is too slow, smudges up the display...)

For a pointer device I am using a capacitive stylus. My current hypothesis is that the dominant paradigm for tablets will be keyboard and pen. Though for delicate tasks such as drawing, a capacitive stylus leaves much to be desired. IMO touch should be, in the majority of cases, a fallback interface for people without peripherals. For most applications it doesn't beat traditional input devices such as pens keyboards and mice of one sort or another.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606002
I'm sure they understand that, but they understand 'elections' and their constituencies even better.

Allowing building upwards would be seen as 'pandering' to 'special interests' by lots of locals --specially people who like to call themselves Xth-generation Franciscan.

SF is always about the short-term but made to look long-term so as to seem forward looking and progressive. The only thing SF is progressive about two things, sex, and some minority causes (both of which are good things but hardly encompassing of the term 'progressive'.)
yes, and i bet all none of the AAPL shareholders found the stock by searching "sell" on Google finance.
This is definitely a cultural thing. In discussions with the folks I'm working with (in London), failure is still the big fear. In Europe it seems, one failure marks you for life. In fact I had this exact discussion, I (Bay Area based), have definitely felt much more the fear of success. My take is that when you are afraid of success, you are probably picturing a much different version of what success is than someone who is more afraid of failure.

At the end of the day, fear is fear, we all have it, you either keep going or you let it stop you.
My brain is having trouble parsing this as something other than "1:2 or 1/2".

And no, those are not the odds.
Having recently had the immense displeasure of using Ford' SYNC, I very, very much wish that I could replace the OS in [my] car.

Actually, no, I'd rather just wait for Google to bring out their car. Self driving, knows where I want to go based on my calendar/plane tickets/etc (things that Google Now already does), etc.
As someone in the back I resent the comment above
I don't think they are re-bundling the Glyphicons set... a lot of the icons look different. What makes you think so?
> It's reasonably accurate to model the supply of tech workers looking to live in SF as not likely to be meaningfully diminished by new construction, i.e. demand >> condo_size.

Based on what exactly? I don't think you can compare Manhattan to SF in this regard. Manhattan has general appeal and is well-known worldwide, whereas this issue with SF is specifically due to tech workers.

And I am not convinced that there are so many tech workers that you cannot accommodate everyone else as well. They definitely aren't going to be "pushed out of SF" if you allow high rise construction in all parts of the city.
Hi, college student here...what's that do?