skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I surely can't speak for him, but I can offer my own experiences. I was born in Chicago, but moved to Puerto Rico when I was a kid and lived there for 20 years. Puerto Rico is much, much cheaper than anywhere in the United States (My rent for the two-bedroom apartment I was living in was $250 per month). But after being stuck in a meaningless PHP gig (where I was more of the company sysadmin than a developer) and having a difficult time getting a programming job, I started looking to the U.S. for a better opportunity.

I landed a job in New York City, where I'm currently living at. The city is awesome and my job is fun. But in reality, the Bay Area was my first choice, and it's still dream of mine to be able to land a job over there. I'm in the process of getting more information to further my skills so I can begin actively searching for work over there.

I was doing well in Puerto Rico (earning more money than most people I knew, living close to beach with constantly great weather, all my friends and family living there, etc.) and I'm certainly doing well in New York City. But if I had the chance to move to San Francisco, I wouldn't think twice about it. Maybe I'm wrong, but the Bay Area is kind of like the Mecca for developers and aspiring entrepreneurs like myself.

Like I said, I certainly can't speak for mannicken. I'm sure he has his own reasons, perhaps even similar to my own reasons. But if he's really willing to do it, that should be reason enough, regardless of where he is now.
(Background: I came from grad school in Seattle to SF for my job.)

(a) Freelance work is heavily dependent on contacts. If you don't have contacts then it's a crapshoot. Maybe you'll luck into something, maybe you won't.

(b) For housing, scan http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/ ; $700 is not impossible, but you'll be living in a spare room of someone's house, and even then that's the low end & you should expect compromises. SF housing is much more expensive than Seattle, as in 2x the cost for equivalent space. I don't know where you got the idea that the costs are comparable (are you mistakenly including East Bay or South Bay prices instead of SF city prices only?). $100 for food is doable if you know how to buy cheap food in bulk and cook it yourself. As for "everything else", heat/electric/broadband can easily consume close to $200 if you're living alone. In a share it should be less, but you should ask about utility costs in your housing situation. On that budget, you should not count on spending any money on entertainment. There's some free entertainment to be had if you're scrappy, but expect to get most of your entertainment from walking around the city or riding your bike through the parks.

(c) Summer SF weather is colder than summer Seattle weather. Bring sweaters.

(d) [you skipped (d)]

(e) SF is an expensive place to live. If this is your 2.5 months of adventure before college, then you just have to weigh whether you're willing to pay $3k for that experience. (Not a bad way to spend it actually.) If you're really trying to bootstrap into a sustainable living situation, SF isn't the best place to go with as little savings as you have; there's too much danger of burning through your seed capital before you get revenue-positive ;). I get the sense that for you it's more the former than the latter --- that is, there's not much downside if you fail --- so what the hell, go for it.
One thing that is left out of this analysis is the impact of inflation. While the inflation that is being introduced by the Fed buying Treasuries won't necessarily involve wage increases intially, it eventually will distort the price gains again. It's a blunt instrument to reduce the value of these massive debts that the US homeowners have incurred and the negative equity positions that people are in.
You know, might be able to help. I've been developing a "how to gain the ability to visualize" program, and could use some beta testers. Message me or send email to amax @@@ hilomath.com if you're interested; it's going to be a for-sale product, but you can have it for free if you're willing to tell me what you think. (This goes not just for you, palish, but anyone else reading this in the next week or so.)
Even though the actual speech content is great, the delivery was very poor, IMO.
I live in SF, it's a great city, and if "living in SF/bay-area" is your dream, go for it.

But that's not quite the same dream as "reach ramen profitability on my web project". In fact, the two dreams may conflict. Moving to and learning a new area takes a bunch of time and money, and the bay area (especially SF proper) is expensive -- compared to Seattle or living with family.

For a young techie, the biggest benefit I could imagine being in the bay area versus Seattle is a larger job market and scene of potential collaborators. But are those what you need to make your project ramen-profitable -- or do those opportunities represent other paths entirely?
I’d do it if I were you.

I won’t lie. In my opinion the chances of success are slim to none. But this is the best time of your life to take a chance. The more adult you get the less able you are to take huge chances. So as long as you hang on to enough money to get yourself home should things go bad I don’t see a down side (where as if you don't you could end up regretting it for the rest of your life)

That said, two pieces of advice....

First, get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Moon-Get-Percy-Ross/dp/0722529465/...

Percy Ross went from nothing to being a millionare and he attributes most of that to getting help from the right people. In that book he gives his 10 rules on how to ask for people's help and get it. The most important thing to remember if you do this is that 90% of the people in the bay area tech scene have been where you are (aka chasing a dream). If you need help and you ask right I suspect most will do what they can to help you succeed.

Second, look into hostels: http://www.hostels.com/us.ca.sf.html

Hostels are basically cheap dorms for anyone to stay in. They’re not very popular in the U.S. but in Europe there are tons of them and they serve young people with little money very well. The bay area has more than just about any U.S. city so you should be able to find a cheap place to sleep (and most have free wifi)

Anyway, hope it helps.
Flash is only as good or as bad (in terms of UX) as the developer(s) make it.
This is cool and a good foundation for what we need, but it poses no significant threat to Flash right now. I'm on a Core 2 Duo E6600 and using Firefox 3.5 nightlies and all of the real demos peg my processor between 50%-100%. This isn't a brand new machine, but it's much better than what most people have, and even TraceMonkey can't handle it smoothly (granted, I'm running at 1920x1080 resolution). There is no hope that something like this will see larger deployments than small animations anytime soon; it's just not accessible enough, and most computers will choke to an awful death on it.

I am desperately anticipating a legitimate replacement for Flash, but _everyone's_ JavaScript VM is just so slow. There's no way it's practical to see significant deployments of this anytime in the near future.
you still have few time, if you are capable work hard on sites like rent a coder and make some extra cash..
but I'm against going with $3,000 it's way too little and no one knows what may happen
Don't know if it's still the case, but Charles Schwab had the same problem. It really increased my confidence in the safety of their website.
I think your argument is pretty one-sided. This is clearly a decision people have to make for themselves.
We are sorry to hear this, although we are not surprised by the tone and slanderous nature of this post.

This "tester" is really an angry customer who is on our abuse list, residing in the Los Angeles area. His account has been suspended several times due to non-payment, as he will continually create new accounts, use free service, and then not pay. We finally tracked him down to multiple IP addresses and have banned him from creating new accounts. He also attempted to use another customer's email address and a fake credit card number, and we have contacted the FBI regarding his behavior, and a lawsuit is pending.

It is in our terms of service to keep accounts private, however we are pending hearing form the FBI and our credit card provider, as we will release the name of this person to protect other companies, as we have heard from multiple CDNs they are having an issue with this individual, creating accounts (some companies have offered credit), and then non-payment and collection issues.

SimpleCDN maintains an excellent industry reputation and excellent service, and I suggest if anyone has any questions to please contact support@simplecdn.com right away.

Thanks,

Robyn
SimpleCDN Support
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What is the value of homeownership? Why does the government give people incentives to buy homes in the form of tax breaks, etc?

Is this to create more debt and therefore more currency in circulation or is it to benefit the homeowner in some way?

It is failed government policy that set all this in motion, the question is: Why were those policies put in place? Are they for the people or for the government or what?
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Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera. IE, but only with a special canvas plugin - not quite as fast.

Comparing performance is always difficult, and specific to a particular application.
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> In fact, it seems dangerously close to, "well, men evolved to be stronger, therefore, only men should be able to be ['soldiers', 'policemen', 'construction workers', 'etc...'].

Funnily enough, everytime someone tries to say that male ascendancy in society isn't a conspiracy by evil men to put down women, there is always someone who construes this as a moral validation of male dominance, or even as an imperative for it.

That cultural, historical and legal issues might have been side-products of gender differences rather than their cause seems to be unthinkable for the typical feminist kool-aid drinker.

The feminist ideology requires us males to be villains, because otherwise there is no war (because males aren't fighting it, and probably never have), and they become obsolete. Which is of course exactly what they are. Gender-gap in pay, academic and economic achievements, or even domestic violence have little or no cultural basis nowadays, so feminists are about as useful as slavery abolitionists would be today in western societies.
Ask HN: Legal issues in enabling video support on your app using FFMPEG
If you were to make a webapp enabling video uploading and playing facility, how would you do it? I know that the standard approach is using ffmpeg to convert to FLV and then using a frontend player to play it.

However the issue that is bothering me is that many of the codecs appear to be under software patents; their binaries for ffmpeg are not available and different sites ask you to "compile and run them at your own risk considering the laws of your land".

Is it big of an issue? How do other startups overcome this problem and support vast variety of formats?
http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

This, and "I-really-want-to-try-to-live-Cali-and-get-out-of-my-parents'-bedroom" reason. I think this is enough to spend $3000.

Basically, I'm making myself a little YC experience :)
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... and http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... discuss some of these questions:

"Governments subsidise home ownership because they think it encourages stable, more law-abiding neighbourhoods. The children of homeowners do better at school than the children of renters do. Homeowners are more engaged in local democracy. And, because homeowners must pay off their mortgages, housing supposedly encourages people to save more than they otherwise would."
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That is very interesting. I am sure both companies break their teams into smaller units of 5-20 people. But the structure of that environment might be quite telling.

What are the cross-sections that the dev teams work under? Who reports to what sections, what does this group feel their job is vs. that group? etc. etc.
From what I gather, the 'YC Experience' includes easy access to lots of people, a big network of founders, pg & company's advice, and a lot of other stuff - that's why so many people are keen to get in. I honestly don't know how much of that you can recreate on your own in a short period of time, but my guess is 'not too much'.

One thing might be to consider a shorter trip down there to see if you can connect with some people in the course of a couple weeks, scout out places to live, and so on, and then do a more permanent move at a later date.

BTW, Berkeley might be a better option in some ways - with students leaving for the summer, maybe you could swing some cheaper housing there. It's not a bad place, either.
Been fixed for ages.
Inflation only occurs when the sum of money and credit increases. So far lenders have been reducing credit faster than the Fed has been increasing the money supply. Perhaps that will turn around some day, but there is reason to think that we have already passed "peak credit" and such levels will not be seen again in our lifetimes.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/06/peak-cred...
There seems to be an isomorphism here :-)

The function he showed _is_ an isomorphism, but those 4 properties he showed above don't have anything to do with that (and they are also not used to prove that that function is an iso).

EDIT: Very stupid mistake, it is not a isomorphism because it is not onto. For example the matrix (a)ij = 1 for i=j={1,2} can not be obtained.
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In what way is suggesting that the level of security used is probably more than sufficient for the value of the data its meant to protect irrelevant?
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I reject your "out of hand" rejection of this idea.

If not 50 years, than how many years is the proper number? If the people fighting the conflict were not even born when it started, what exactly are they clinging to?

I assume that you would say 200 years is too long for something like this to go on. Pick a number, however ridiculously huge, that you would be comfortable with. Make it 200 years, I don't care. At that point, we can begin a logical discussion of your number. Perhaps after that occurred, I could get you down to 100 years, and you would feel vindicated. Yes?

He's picking 50 years. Don't like it? Would you agree to a compromise between 50 and 100? 75 years is rapidly approaching.
Thanks for your input. I don't know exactly what point the author wanted to make, but IMHO his goal was to show that one can do complex arithmetic using matrices, not to show what is and what is not an isomorphism.

I mean, other than mathematicians, no one cares what an isomorphism is, right? But doing complex arithmetic with matrices sounds cool because one can code stuff like Fourier transforms without a library that implements complex numbers. I found that refreshing and interesting and that is why I submitted this article.
Unless there's a joke that I'm not getting with this link, how did this article end up on the front page?
Pre requisites:
1. Type without watching on the keyboard.
2. Use IDE with autocomplete (Zend Studio in your case)
3. Use Zend Framework of CodeIgnite
4. Read a lot how to do it before you do it.

After some time you will have enough experience not to think how to implement this or that - this is most important.

Follow http://gettingreal.37signals.com

PS. Don't give up PHP
Being somewhere in person helps a lot. I think it is worth moving just for the better network. Networking is exactly how you can maintain a steady stream of projects.
I am a slicehost customer, and a programmer without much sysadmin experience. To me, the documentation and support community at slicehost is invaluable - something this article touches on but doesn't put as much importance into as raw performance. Of course, depending on your level of Linux admin experience, saving $12/mo. may be worth it to you.
I think having two incredibly popular cult-like blogs probably had much more to do with it than the "9 building blocks" or whatever that every other site on the internet now has.
I've been making the same points for a decade. The Bank of England was given the task of keeping inflation low, and their means of doing this was interest rates. When inflation was getting close to the acceptable ceiling, they increased interest rates.

Technically we had an inflation rate below 3%, but only because house prices were excluded from the inflation figures. Mortgage payments were probably most working people's single biggest payment, yet the huge rises in those costs (as house prices increased) didn't go into the inflation figures. If they had, then inflation would have been well above 3% and interest rates would have had to rise, dampening the housing market. I can't help but believe that governments were happy to exploit the electorate's belief that they were doing well financially, when in fact it was an illusion.

House prices will have to fall by about 50% (the figures for the UK look pretty similar to that USAToday presentation). People were prepared to take on ridiculous loans when the bubble was being inflated, because they thought they would be unable to afford property if they waited.

In fact, the situation in the UK sounds like it might have been worse than in the US. There were significant numbers of 110% mortgages available in the UK until a couple of years ago.

The BBC did an expose in 2003 showing that major banks were encouraging customers to lie about their income in order to be able to buy property. Yet this expose has been buried, never to be mentioned. The government and the financial regulators did not want to know.

The median salary for a graduate in London is £24,000; the median price for property is £335,000.

I have friends who came from working-class families who were still able to buy houses when they were students back in the 1970s.
I'm a SF res about to graduate university. If you make it down here I'd be happy to help you survive/show you where locals have fun.

That being said, another student programmer and myself are working on a startup in Ruby. Interested angel, that kind of thing. If you think you can contribute, I'd be willing to pad your ramen budget. Added bonus: one of our early target markets is Seattle, maybe something will come of that.

email is dp4man@gmail.com
Friction saves the medium
The Panama palindrome
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What I don't like about the average Linux tutorial is that they hardly ever explain anything. They are all "go to file /ehh/dsf/dsfjlfdsjjk.grbl and edit the line saying 'fkfjfhjg%%&' to say '%%%fjj887744', then reboot the system and your sound card will work". I guess it is better than nothing, but ultimately it feels a bit like wasted time. If it is complicated to make something work, at least I want to learn something while making it work.

Also, a lot of these cryptic tutorials seem to be outdated, because modern distributions offer easier ways to do the same thing.
He showed that it's a homomorphism. An isomorphism is just a bijective homomorphism, no?

Of course, his function isn't even close to bijective (it's not onto), so it's just a homomorphism, not an isomorphism.
In response to b, c and e, I have one word. Oakland.
This speech was far better than the one I had to listen to 2 days ago.

I just graduated from the University of Florida and had to listen to Harris Lance, the CEO of Harris talk about how great he was. At one point he recommended the engineering students to put their dreams on hold, get a job, save the economy, and wait to take that backpacking trip across Europe you've been thinking about until you've made your first million.
Are you from India? I am not and I don't know it, but I can only imagine that cultural differences make people not worry about child support. Perhaps it is a given that the extended family will take care of children, or people don't mind much if children starve in the street if things don't work out (I don't think so, just saying - things might be very different). In any case I am pretty sure people only have children if it makes sense for them to do so, even in India.
A) Extend your runway – heh you may just find a reason to never leave, happens often there.

B) I don't know what your transit costs are going to be,
SF has wonderful transit. You could make the investment in a Muni pass and be able to explore one of North America's most beautiful cities.

Many SF apartments include some of the utilities in the rent, just be savvy. SF, being an incredibly choosy market often forces 6-month or 12-month leases: this doesn't apply to you. You probably need to plan on getting a room in a house with some like-minded hackers

C) As Mark Twain said: The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Think LAYERS.

D) Where's D go?

E) Absolutely not. Take a risk, work hard, and meet dangerous fun people. You can live a lot of fun in SF on the cheap because, well, not everyone can be rich as Lergei.
Headline should read: "Androids web browser market share compares well to the 2G iPhone when it had been out for five months"

Which isn't unimpressive, but isn't headline material imho. The demographic who is early adopters of the android phones are pretty likely to be heavier tech/web users than the iPhone folks.
I'd say it would be 10x easier to do it in SF/bay area. You'll find 10x more entrepreneurs and hacker types. This will help you learn a lot more in a lot shorter period of time. And probably have more fun.

I've found job and contract opportunities are 3-4x more plentiful so you could probably earn a decent income on the side.

I don't think you can live on $1,000/month in SF. The absolute lowest I was able to live on for 1 month was $1,500. I think $2,000/month would be a much better min to shoot for. If you're here for 2.5 months, then you only need to make $2k on the side to have that.

I would recommend trying to get a job or internship and working on your project at night. If it's a website, it will take time to get users and crystallize anyway, and you really can't speed that up by spending 60-100 hours a week on it. So why not spend ~20 hours a week on the site and spend the rest getting paid for things people need right now?

my 2 cents.
Actually, they didn't - one of the 9 "building blocks" they mention was critical mass - knowing they'd have a large initial audience because of their existing blogs.
This is about 10 years too late. Odd.
Interest rates (such as for mortgages) are often in three decimals e.g. 4.875%
Actually, that was one of the 9 building blocks.
Thank you, rjurney! BTW, what is up with all of the irrelevant pics and videos in those sections of the website? For example, most of the videos seem to be about repenting (?!) and MLM...
But then you link right to his site to give him more ad revenue. That wasn't the best idea considering the problem.
Compared to the one Steve Jobs gave at Stanford, Page's speech is uninspiring.
I highly recommend the Hostelling International hostel at 312 Mason St. It's like $25/night, super-clean, and they feed you breakfast, too! I've stayed there a few times while going to WWDC.