skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
blaming the "rich" techies for the over priced rental market in SF and the rest of the Bay Area is terrible. The real reason rent is sky high in my opinion is because SF is acting like a small city when it's not. Real estate development is pretty much kept flat. Yes they are adding units but if you look at the expected growth, we will stay flat at best. This results in bidding wars for rentals and real estate purchases, because frankly there isn't enough for everyone. Builders would like to buy up more space and crank out energy efficient/modern housing, but no sir, no permit for you.
Are going?

It already did. What will change is how many of them we will have to live with. I, for one, have already welcomed our robot overlords.
Well for HN, the website has poor design (tiny font, flowing text) in the first place which makes it very hard to read on native iOS.
Mine makes you find and press a "cook time" button before you can enter a time, then a start button to actually start the cooking.

This button is hidden so well that years later, I still have to look for it. Grrr.
thank you, I'm glad you liked it!
Hacker News is usable on mobile Safari, but it's not as good as it could be. Try using Alien Blue to browse reddit on an iPhone (and especially an iPad). It is a superior experience to using the plain web site (even m.reddit.com). I very much wish there was an equivalent for Hacker News.
I like to use http://blitz.io for load testing.
I was recently contemplating moving to the bay area from Midwest. 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. I don't know how much of this is true but he was telling me that some dingy studio apartments have 10-15 people in line to sign contract. Landlords are reluctant to negotiate mainly because the next person in line is a Googler who will pay $1000/month above the asking price without thinking twice.

A couple of months later, an acquaintance of mine got a gig as a software engineer at Apple. When i got in touch with him, he told me that he's dishing out $5K/month to pay rent for the house his family lives in. My jaw dropped.
After the first couple I thought these were jokey, a la Viz's "top tips". I read on for the humour and by the end wasn't sure any more. I think it's a mix of mostly gags but with a couple of serious-sounding ones thrown in for contrast.
Sorry, yes, I was thinking of Fetchmail - must've lost that between brain and keyboard :)
I use ihackernews.com, works pretty well.
I do it all the time. I'm so OCD about it, I even do it before other people's food is about to beep.
> You spend the time and money developing an app, and you want your visitors to know about the app

The problem is that you're thinking about what you want, not what your users want. Your users want to view whatever content they came to your webpage to view. stop getting in the way of that with your wants. the answer really is that all such things suck, your position just seems to be that you don't care how much they suck because you have an agenda to push.
Why is SF (I assume you mean local government?) anti-height? Are there downsides to building upwards (environmental? taxation?) or is it just a refusal to allow the landscape to change?
Rape in the world's largest democracy
Fun read :)

I'm not sure if this is correct:

> By elements we mean the size of the type of the array. If an array holds elements of type int which each occupy four bytes, then integer_array[5000] is the same as

*(integer_array + (5000 * 4)).

And that directly contradicts the earlier statement

>with subscripts e.g. my_array[271] would give us the 270th element. This by the way, would do exactly the same thing as

*(my_array + 271).

(which also may be incorrect: my_array[271] would give you the 272nd element if you count my_array[0] as the "first" and 271st element if you count my_array[0] as the "0th".)

I dug up the relevant part in the C standard just to be sure:

> The definition of the subscript operator [] is that E1[E2] is identical to

(*((E1)+(E2))).
This is one of the reasons why I'm an advocate of good public universal health care. Too bad it's not available everywhere.
But this is a discussion for another thread/post.
How are current residents being priced out? If they rent, then rent increases are limited by law and no-fault evictions are nearly impossible to get honestly. If they own, the no one can force them to move short of the city invoking eminent domain.
> That's why native apps are still important. Once the above is figured out, I highly doubt companies will want to pay to develop on 2-3 different codebases in different programming languages than their website, to support native apps.

But that's the thing: we're talking about forums and news sites here. Mobile browsers are perfectly capable of rendering news, blogs and forums as fast as you'd ever need. Companies aren't building these kinds of native apps for the performance.
Move to Portland, friends! CoL-wise, you can't beat our home on the price/quality curve.

For those hiring, the your odds are better up here (but as they say in engineering school, the goods can be odd...).

For those seeking work, your options are similarly good (but not as good as the beer...).
I like the faucet one. That's clever.
Is your friend renting in Cupertino? That place has some other dynamics, such as excellent school district, so families compete price-wise to get there.
If your stock symbol can't be found? I'd guess negative, hard to put a positive on that somehow.
if you don't have a not-invented-here symptom, you could also consider re-using the excellent stb stretchy buffers by the excellent Sean Barrett:

http://nothings.org/stb/stretchy_buffer.txt
Azure Storage is for blob storage (like S3), non-relational table storage (like SimpleDB), and queues (like SQS).
Has anyone else tried the wine tip? Seems worth potentially losing an inexpensive bottle over to see if it works.
From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure.

That strategy results in large populations where poverty is highly concentrated. This leads to those areas becoming breeding grounds for crime and hopelessness. Over and over again in the US, large scale projects have exhibited this pattern of failure.

That's not to say that building affordable housing shouldn't be a priority. Indeed it should. But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather than large scale ghettoes.

Also, rent control should be more widespread, instead of relentlessly fought against. This way, the housing that's created will have a chance to remain affordable, instead of constantly being at risk of gentrification.
I can verify that most apartments have a line. I visited one a half hour after there open house started. The realtor at the entrance said they already had 20 applications and 7 deposit checks so they didn't need mine but that I could look at the apartment if I wanted.

It wasn't a good apartment IMO. 14th and Dolores

That said, people do manage to find apartments. But yes, they are over priced. You can live in SF without a car so I suppose compared to most cities you could add the cost of a car minus the cost of public transportation to your rent.
No, Linux won't be easy to run on a Microsoft Surface
I hope I won't be the guy drunk enough to try cutting the pizza with scissors at the company christmas party.
How many consumer systems have been the victim of evil maid attacks in practice? How many have been infected via browser (or other client) vulnerabilities that never touch the kernel nor interact with a "secure" boot implementation?

Secure boot exists primarily because it provides a "feel good" answer to content providers about the feasibility of DRM. It's not an answer to real world security issues and never has been.
If you can't engineer your way around downtime, the fault is yours.
I've never used ABC BSD for any significant length of time, but here's what I know. ABC BSD is for X, DEF BSD is for Y and GHI BSD is for Z.

Although I don't use ABC BSD, read their code or particpate in making contributions, here's how ABC BSD works ... and here's the lowdown on their code ...

Oh, and the history of ABC BSD is .... I know because I've always been a user of Clickity Click OS and I've been watching ABC BSD.

Take it from me, I speak with authority.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-...

"f you look at San Francisco’s zoning map, you’ll see height and density restrictions everywhere. There are also citywide building caps — restrictions on the number of new buildings that can be started every year. And finally there are labyrinthine regulatory procedures. Here, for your amusement, is a flowchart put together by the San Francisco Planning Department that outlines the steps a developer needs to go through to obtain a building permit. Despite the department’s use of Comic Sans, this is not meant to be a joke."
I suspect that if Selestra actually thinks it was a problem, they'll deal with it with lawyers. I find it hard to worry myself over it.
That's not my experience at all. I get that "Install our app" popup on Android when loading many forum/discussion-type sites.

And it's really goddamn annoying.
"people who were behaving as though they were fine with that tradeoff"

I'm not sure who is to blame at this point -- is it the fault of the individual for not understanding uptime? is it the fault of the service for not articulating clearly what it means? Is it the fault of the industry for inculcating an unjustified sense of entitlement?
The op said nothing of poor people.

There are plenty of cities in the world that have built up without becoming ghettos. Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York to name a few. High rise housing != ghetto
After a building boom in the 70s-80s the city passed anti-Manhattanization laws.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanization
Why a new shirt with the same pants counts as a new outfit
"Don't call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and don't waste your time on anybody who does."

I don't think I've ever come across a "cyberpunk" , is this some long dead internet subculture?

P.S , can somebody repost "sex tips for geeks" some karma in there for sure.
On Android, my personal pet peeve are apps that don't bother to handle their own links. Fine. You've made a special mobile app for your site and "convinced" (i.e. nagged) me to download it. If your app is so gosh-darn wonderful, why the fsck can't I use it whenever I'm using your site? Third-party app Twitter apps can figure this out. Why not you? Hint: The answer probably is that your app isn't nearly as wonderful as you think it is.
SoMa is the only neighborhood with any 20+ story residential buildings going up. It's hard to say why so many of the other neighborhoods are against building up. The geography of SF lends to some beautiful views from atop the hills. Residents living on those hills are unlikely to welcome tall buildings to crop up and block their view.

SoMa probably ends up being the big-city, tall building part of SF in the future. It would take a big mind-set change for many other neighborhoods to build up anytime soon.
They also get unique identifiers for users. Yes the GUID is banned, but developers just use the devices MAC address instead.
> // set a value at an arbitrary index

> // this will expand and zero-fill the vector to fit

> vector_set(&vector, 4452, 21312984);

Love to see a C article where we get some insight on how dynamic arrays might work behind the scenes. But sparse arrays are best implemented as linked lists or hash tables.
Did you read the first paragraph? If I were in ESR's position as described, I probably would have written something like this too.
Even better, hit 1-3-3. Or 1-1-1.
Want to learn great infrastructure management tips? Read and digest these post-mortems.... Regardless of who the provider is.

There is always one takeaway from these that I can use to better my own infrastructure management activities - even when most of my infrastructure runs on AWS. :)
This C code is bad for the following reasons:

1. No alloc checks
2. This module is limited to storing integers.
3. The type Vector is exposed to the user.

An alternative approach for contiguous dynamically sized array is to use mmap/madvise.
I can assure you, these trends are not reflected at my school.

Why is her assertion of trends more valuable than mine or anyone else's? Why does her school better exemplify our cohort than mine or anyone else's?

One conversation does not constitute a definitive explanation for the social media use of a generation. Use changes based on location, income, race and gender balance, ect. in schools.

This is a complex topic. One anecdote can't offer any real insight.
My "family" of roommates pays $1625 for a 1,408 ft2 3-br (from the 1880s) in Goose Hollow, one of the residential neighborhoods in downtown Portland. Gas can runs as high as ~150/mo in the winter, but that's not a bad deal for being able to:

- chain bikes to the front porch without fear of theft (indefinitely).

- leave our back door unlocked every day, and the front door most as well.

- walk to some of the best coffee shops in the best coffee town in America (Public Domain, for instance).

- walk to Powell's.

- walk to network with ANY tech company in the downtown area.

- eat amazing food for at most (95th percentile) 20 bucks/entree.

- order fancy cocktails for ~9/ea.

- order amazing beers for 4.50/pt. (max).

- meet brilliant people (MBar's a good place to start).

- breathe clean air.

- not have to live in samey-samey suburban hell.

- surround yourself with nature, wander through the nation's largest in-city park and visit natural wonders like the Columbia Gorge and Mt. Hood.

The benefits are not completely enumerable online. Build your dream life here!
Curing a headache: iffy.

Measuring fluids with seconds: I, for one, live in a house with water pressure that's not totally consistent from day to day. So much for accuracy.

Coffee: Is this ethical? All for a few more ounces of coffee? Brew your own if you're that desperate...

Some of the others I think are solutions in search of a problem, but I admit that's subjective and won't discuss it here.

------

Also, from the HN Guidelines:

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous
adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate
"10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys."

If only it was named "14 Amazing Hacks"...
This is like 100 level C-S stuff, why is this on hacker news?
> From what I understand, efforts in other cities to build upwards to house poor people have been a failure.

You could always build upward to house the rich people instead. I'm sure a lot of the incoming startup-types are young and would be happy to live in a high-rise (The correlation between youth and high-rise-living coming, in my experience, from the fact that people with kids often want more space. But that's not a hard-and-fast rule, obviously.).

> But it might make more sense to build lots of small scale housing, with a focus on building viable community spaces rather large scale ghettoes.

I'm not sure if SF has the land space to build lots of small-scale housing. I totally agree about building nice community spaces, though, and I think high-rise building is compatible with that (e.g., Manhattan's pocket parks).
Its called 'hyper decanting' - check out this video on it: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/12/18/hyperdecanti...
> The concave shape of the bowl will amplify the sound by about 13 decibels.

Iff you keep your ear on top of the bowl maybe. (Or just buy earphones.) Your guests will rather appreciate external-powered speakers.
The Delta iPhone app saved my ass and let me check in right before the cut-off for flight I needed to make, while I was stuck in traffic in a cab outside the airport. However, downloading the app was preceded by ten minutes of trying desperately to check in using the Delta web site on my iPhone. I was stymied by a combination of strangely sized fonts (which forced me to zoom way in on a huge page in order to locate and click on tiny menu titles at the bottom of the page), mysteriously placed menu pop-ups (as in I clicked a button to open a menu, and then had to pan around the page trying to find where the menu had appeared), and other problems that I never figured out.

I downloaded the app out of sheer desperation to check in on time for my flight. In any other circumstance, I would have given up, gone to a competitor, and filed the company and brand name in my brain under "fuck you." (Actually, I did that last part anyway.)

Nagging me to download an app is bad enough. If you took the time to build an iOS or Android app but didn't put any effort into mobile usability for your web site, then you presumed you could make me install your app. You presumed too much.
The layout of this blog is a little busted on ios. When I zoom in on my iPad the left hand nav occludes parts of the article.
Though technically correct, this (seemingly) common response to highlighted dates belies the fact that no, 12:24 12/24 is in fact more rare than an arbitrary other minute because of the pattern in it's configuration.

Sometimes pedantry gets in the way of appreciating something as small as this.
this is work in progress, you can make a request if you'd like , I'm sure the devs will listen to your heart-felt outcries :P
I recently put all my apps into the cloud. I now access them through a single app I call a "browser."
The gentrification that's happening in SF and that's described in the original article is happening because the rich are pushing out the original residents -- who were indeed poor.

From the article:

Again and again, you hear of teachers, nurses, firefighters, police
officers, artists, hotel and restaurant workers, and others with no
stake in the new digital gold rush being squeezed out of the city.

...

Bernal Heights in those years was a glorious urban mix of deeply
rooted blue-collar families, underground artists, radical activists,
and lesbian settlers

In general, the people described above would be considered poor.

As for high rise apartments not necessarily being ghettoes. That's obviously true. High priced apartment complexes and skyscrapers housing businesses are what constitute much of the "building up" in the cities you mention. It's only when building up is combined with low-cost housing that problems begin. But building up isn't the problem per se, but rather it's the high concentration of poverty that such projects encourage.
Good work from Amazon putting together the post-mortem. Whether you agree or not with their remediation plans, they hit the important parts of a public post-mortem very well:

1. Demonstrate understanding of the event.

2. Communicate what steps are being taken to reduce the likelihood a similar event in the future.

3. Apologize.

Not necessarily in that order. Well done.
By far the funniest part of this is the image points "non-tech workers" straight towards SOMA:

http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/s...

Geography fail.
Most of the projects in this vein are defunct, including the Tux Droid, the original Furby, the original Teddy Ruxpin, and the Nabaztag rabbit.

I always felt the story of Felix Gallo's "Poppet" project at Data General was interesting: http://metatalk.metafilter.com/13606/#384503

An original Teddy Ruxpin doll would probably have been the easiest to hack, replacing the cassette tape with a stereo audio input and generating the pulses necessary to animate him at your discretion: http://www.illiop.org/workings.html

The Nabaztag rabbit has been resurrected a few times, it looks like you can buy a new "Karotz" model for US$130, needing only a plush exterior: http://store.karotz.com/product/22/karotz

You could stuff another sort of mechanical toy, like a RoboSapien RC robot, into a stuffed animal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_WJ23Zg1Rg

There's also a new startup named ToyTalk, which seems to be doing something in this vein: http://www.toytalk.com/

You might find it easier to start making something that's not quite as complicated as an animatronic toy. Soft electronics projects and startups have been around for years, with shirts that hug you back and pillows that light up:

Pillow Talk: http://www.joannamontgomery.co.uk/littleriot/?q=node/11

Chatter Pillow: http://sternlab.org/2006/11/chatter-pillow/

For making one yourself, books on soft electronics might be useful.

Making Things Talk: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510510.do

Fashioning Technology: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514372.do

Instead of regular Arduinos, you can use sewable electronics specifically designed for this, like the Lilypad, which you can get at SparkFun, in their e-textiles category: https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/204

Adafruit also has their own line, just launched, called FLORA: http://www.adafruit.com/category/92

There are lots of "robots lite" projects you could wrap in fuzzy fabric, too, like this animatronic head: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffkessler/tj-an-animat...

It really just depends on how complicated you want to get with it. Depending on your experience, it might be best to start small, working through the projects in those books.
> I'm not sure who is to blame at this point -- is it the fault of the individual for not understanding uptime? is it the fault of the service for not articulating clearly what it means? Is it the fault of the industry for inculcating an unjustified sense of entitlement?

I'm inclined to lean towards the third option. It ought to be obvious that there is no such thing as a perfect host, that in the limit your probability of being down at some point goes to 100% as your time hosted with a company increases.

There's just a lot of entitlement and sloppy thinking out there. People believe that their $30 a month hosting ought to be magically invulnerable in ways it by the simple laws of physics cannot be. If you didn't explicitly choose to have multiple geographically separate hosts with a fail-over plan between them, then you were at the very least implicitly accepting that you were going to be down some of the time when (not if) your only host goes down. That's a fine and ok thing to choose, but I don't think you get to be mad at your host because you didn't clue in to the choice you were making.
I know that hating on patents for being the cause of all the world's ills is hip these days... but this is about the worst submission I've ever seen on the HN front page.

1. The author has lumped a bunch of utility and design patents together without apparently realizing that they aren't at all the same.

2. Many of these patents have expired.

3. There's no discussion whatsoever of why he thinks patents are to blame here. Just "I wonder why this is... I BET IT'S PATENTS."

4. Given the other painfully obvious issues with this post, I hesitate to mention it, but... come on, people. Look at the fucking claims. If you can't be bothered to even mention the claims, you have no business making wild assertions about patents. It just looks ridiculous and ignorant.
Sounds like you've got about 2 years of 'runway' in the bank - with no income and stable expenses, you could go for 2 years.

This is where true freedom comes from.

With a runway like that, one can afford both psychologically and literally to double down and crank out a lot more products or businesses to get oneself up to a 5 or 10 year runway (or even "financial independence" if one is very lucky).

I think the best thing to do once a little momentum is gained is to grab onto the pendulum and get it swinging big so one can travel, buy a house, and all those sorts of things in 3-5 years. (This is not a direct advice to you since it seems you are already thinking this way :-))