skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got a possibly great job offer on the table from SF/SV, but may turn it down. I'd love the city I'm sure, but after glancing around I've come to the conclusion that home ownership is unthinkable to anyone who hasn't had a cash-out event. The real estate market is certifiably, utterly bat-dookie insane.

NYC is often considered more expensive, and Manhattan is certainly... well... Manhattan. But taken collectively the NYC metro area is actually much more affordable. You can find places to live that are nice, friendly to someone older than 25-30, and at least sanely priced. They might not be in the closest or most fashionable neighborhoods, but they'll be reachable by NYC's excellent transit system.

In SF you have nowhere good to go unless you want an absurd commute, and its transit is horrible compared to NYC. So you're either rich or you're in a crummy apartment or with roommates. That doesn't work for people who aren't kids in their 20s.

My suspicion is that it's part policy choice -- a lot of protectionism from existing property owners who want to keep riding the property bubble and a lot of NIMBYism -- and part irresponsibility on the part of homebuyers. I suspect that many homebuyers in SF are doing the irresponsible thing of squeezing into a home by spending upwards of 40%, even 50+% of their income on mortgage payments instead of the usually fiscally responsible number of ~30%. And this is punishing everyone and sucking the soul from the city.

In the long term, Silicon Valley and SF is eating its young. It's a city built on young entrepreneurs coming there and doing new stuff, but if nobody who hasn't already made it can afford to live there what happens then? The other problem is that these high costs soak up everyone's spare time and money, leaving them with the requirement to work like crazy for other people to afford to live instead of on their own innovative projects. It sucks away the marginal "play time" when innovation really happens.

If this isn't remedied, SF/SV will become an echo chamber of already-made-its and already-know-it-alls. Then it will stagnate and be left behind.

Edit: real estate hyperinflation in general is a social ill that deserves to be tackled directly as such. It seems as if real estate has mutated into this hungry sponge that sucks up all surplus economic vitality from any region that experiences success. Imagine what all that money in SV could be doing if it weren't all sucked up by real estate.

It's like beyond a certain point, people no longer get wealthier. Their houses do. The home -- the "American dream" -- has become a tool of indentured servitude and bank fiefdom.
Roamer’s free app helps you save upto 90% on international roaming charges
I didn't know NX! Thanks for suggesting it Ivan! I will try it !
Well, I just disagree. My experience is that recovering your bank account after fraud is trivial. Fixing fraudulently obtained credit takes longer, but basically just involves going through a formal process with credit reference agencies and lenders. If you want to protect against this, you can get a credit record protection service from any of the major credit agencies, where they alert you if there is any activity on your credit record s you can fix it.

edit: nobody should be so unaware of their own credit record that they lose a house sale because of undiscovered fraud. Keeping on top of it is very cheap and as simple as registering on a website (UK example: https://www.creditexpert.co.uk)
I'm not seeing the keyword stats, either. Could be a premium feature?
Congrats on the big move! Hopefully it works out well for you.

I used to live in Seattle. And there was much griping about people from California (usually half-whispered) ruining everything. Between the influx of California-types running up the housing market, to just general growth it was a background thread up there.

Portland is a pretty small city with a moderate cost of living. With your new salary and income, aren't you distorting the market in the same way as in San Francisco? Only even more so, due to the small market size?
Cannot agree more -- I actually moved to Palo Alto :)
I think I get where you're going with this, in that, the burden to run this and review the source is too high, that it almost seems like a waste of time. If that is your point, then I agree with you.

I don't know much about docker, but doing a "curl | sh" peeks my interest, then downloading additional binaries into /usr/local/bin, I'd want to take a closer look. Obviously, this is a case by case review, till it sits well with me. If I was going to run this in production, I'd want to have a really good idea of what this was doing and what to expect, so I'd probably take a closer look at the source if it was not clear from the documentation.
Not really the same situation in that massive amounts of people fled Detroit because all the jobs disappeared (company failures combined with widescale automation in the ones that didn't fail).

There are tons of tech jobs available in SF. Arguably, there are too many jobs available there which is causing at least some of the cost of living pressure. These jobs are unlikely to vanish en masse like they did in Detroit (at least not any time soon), so even if a bunch of tech people leave SF, many will stay and it'll just move the city towards a natural equilibrium.
That sarcasm feels unnecessary.
X2Go[1] is under active development and to my understanding it's based on NX libraries. It might be a good alternative. I have only tried it briefly and not over WAN, but it worked quite good over WLAN at least.

[1]: http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/start
It is a custom application.
The site uses an ender.js build:
bean,bonzo,domready,qwery,reqwest,underscore,ender-overlay
What It's Like to Leave the City of Your Dreams
(VIDEO) App of the Day: Roamer
it will feed into gentrification and push people out because they can no longer afford to live in SF

Ah, I see, because it is so affordable to live in SF now?
Just what I was looking for! Greta post. This is a much more elegant solution than others I have seen.
I am not very good at unix command line, but maybe it could be done like this:
curl http://get.docker.io > /tmp/docker-install && sh /tmp/docker-install && rm /tmp/docker-install
that gives quick and easy way to inspect by executing only first command and then inspecting the source, i.e.,
1) copy just first part
curl http://get.docker.io > /tmp/docker-install
2) then inspect, e.g. cat /tmp/docker-install
3) run the install
sh /tmp/docker-install && rm /tmp/docker-install
or, if not reviewing run whole at once

p.s. I know, that there should not be direct copy-paste from browser to console and this method leaves a file in /tmp on installation failure
They're not despicable. Just piteous, and angry, and at the guys who really screwed shit up for them - that's the US right now - used to be the USSR. The militants were borne out of these historic conflicts, and were largely armed by such. They will not go away through force. They cannot. It is ridiculous to think that one can resolve something through yet more of the very thing which instigated it. They can and will go away if their root cause, Imperialism, is no longer an issue. Currently, they seek to do this by force, and they're winning; the US I see today compared to that I knew and loved and lived in some 15 years ago bears precious little semblance. This could be resolved diplomatically, but only through tripartite talks between the Afghani government, the Taliban and the US.

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
I imagine wall street conversations being something like "Coder: I make 200k. Trader: Oh me too. Per day"
Socialicious: a Social Media icons font (including social sign-in buttons)
Nodebox vs Processing
I feel exactly the same way except that I'm in another city, Vancouver BC. There is an odd assortment of people in Vancouver consisting of the obscenely rich, wannabe rich, obscenely poor, and singles/couples with no children. Once you have children, you are pushed out of the Vancouver area and into the suburbs due to cost of adequate living conditions [1]. But people say, "oh, it's just the suburbs, it's not that far to drive" and not realize that we have the 2nd worst traffic in North America [2].

I really shudder to think what 10-20 years will do to a city where the middle class (whatever that word means nowadays) has been completely hollowed out.

[1] http://www.vancouversun.com/news/East+Families+leave+Vancouv...

[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/01...
Are you in San Francisco?
Yes, it is a lot of money. Those professions make a lot of money too.

I feel a little guilty because I have friends who are doing things which are way better for society (teachers, for instance) and are damn good at what they do, but making only a fraction of what I make. I feel good about what my company does, but I don't think we (or especially other companies that are adding so little value to people who actually need it, rather than essentially just the tech elite in SF/NYC/etc) are adding so much more that it justifies the huge disparity in salary.
A little of both. If you maintain a certain number of miles per week, you will become stronger. If you actually work out, somewhere in among those weekly miles, you will become a lot stronger. "Work out" means some type of running workout. That could be track work, or that could mean simply running a bit faster than your normal, comfortable distance pace, such as a tempo workout or a threshold run.
$10/month is an absurdly cheap amount to pay for a professional service.
Thank you! And yes, that's right.
Probably referring to state taxes which are a smaller % of your total tax burden.
I'm working on a personal project that uses Python for most of the page rendering and Go for the heavy lifting (receiving a large stream of data that I have to process quickly and efficiently).

The ecosystem has a long way to go (compared to Python), but goroutines and channels are a pleasure to work with. It's nice being statically typed again, and I really like object composition versus Python's inheritance. Resource usage for my cases is much lower, latency is much lower, throughput is much higher, and my deploy/provisioning scripts are a lot more simple due to Go's static compilation.

At my day job, we may start mixing in Go for background tasks that are a bit too slow/inefficient in our current Python stack. I could also see it being a good fit for some of our more high traffic HTTP APIs.
There's a certain amount of irony in someone complaining about how rich techies ruined SF, and then gloat about how you move to another city to do the very same thing. In 10 years, people will be complaining about how people like the author "ruined" Portland (and Austin). Actually, this already happens.
It was linked from the article posted in Tom Dale's blog post.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Report-Basic-cost-of-livi...
Am I the only one who don't like this new trend when every second website now is designed with the low contrast and native OS antialiasing disabled? I'm 24 and I just can't read the summaries on this site. Just compare the two versions on this screenshot [1]: default on the top, and native antialiasing on the bottom with the slightly darker text (#67707c)

1.http://monosnap.com/image/OgCT8YKqEoHTAxAmgofKDxDNb.png
I can't help but feel like criticisms along the lines of "you have to be more precise with what you want, because unlike python it won't let you get away with blah" and praise like "it seems to run correctly as soon as it compiles" are two sides of the same coin.
Talking about encrypting metadata doesn't really make a whole bunch of sense - at least not by itself. The metadata is, more or less, who you're sending the thing to. It's like saying you encrypted the address on an envelope - you know? The postman's not going to take that anywhere if it's got gibberish printed on the front of the envelope. If I'm your ISP, then I can read who you're sending it too right off of your packets, and if that information's not there, then I can't send the packets on - the message doesn't go anywhere.

You can, perhaps, obfuscate it with onion routing - provided a significant percentage of the network hasn't been compromised - but .... Well, I don't think Onion routing is really secure in the long-term because:

A ) ISPs taken as a group will have a look-down/shoot-down sort of perspective on the whole thing. If I know who you talk to and all the people who you talk to talk to (and so on) then I can follow you through the system fairly easily. You can insert dummy packets to try to obfuscate the message but -

1. I don't think Tor or any of the other mainstream progs currently do that. It's a bandwidth-expensive move.

2. Anything that contacts a person of interest can be prioritised for and even with some low level obfuscation in place, you'll appear on a list of a few tens or hundreds of people who might have sent something to them, which can then be combined with other data, (i.e. you still give up a great many bits of information even if you attempt to obfuscate at a low level.)

B ) I think that it probably makes sense as a cost exercise for nation states to become significant parts of the network which will give them a decent chance of having the entire message chain through to your endpoint.

I think you really need the system to pass on messages through the endpoint with a semi-random number of jumps to make things worthwhile and for the person you're sending to to be part of that network and pass on regular coms for a significant time before anyone tries to contact them with something non-regular.

Someone asked me on here, a while back, how many terrorists I wanted to talk to. And it really is that sort of problem, I think.
It's really hard to answer this question when Backbone is lumped together with Angular and Ember. What Backbone offers is a light layer of structure over your code. Yes, it doesn't give you much, but I believe its sole purpose is to avoid the jQuery spaghetti that forms once you start writing more than 100-200 lines of JavaScript. Backbone doesn't give you many opinions, but I personally agree with you in that Backbone gives you a few opinions (not many), but not enough meat to justify those few opinions. It's basically a guideline as to how to structure different components of your app and how to communicate and share data between components. That being said, as far as I'm aware, you can more or less do anything you want to the DOM in Backbone Views. And Backbone certainly does offer some features: routing, an event system, and a data syncing system.

Backbone is probably several times less restrictive and controlling than something like, say, Ember or Angular. I've only used Angular, so let me comment on that. I think Angular definitely offers some powerful features that justify its structure. Two-way data binding, a system for reusable components (directives), a structure for organizing animations, a system for managing data from RESTful APIs, a full testing scaffold/system, etc. It's not uncommon for jQuery and even Backbone apps that are rewritten in Angular to cut their codebase >2x.

I've heard that Ember is even more restrictive/opinionated than Angular, and perhaps it is more powerful as a result - I don't know. I've been satisfied with Angular.

That being said, there are tradeoffs for using frameworks. For example, you should only do DOM manipulation inside Angular directives. Honestly I think this is a positive, due to various powerful structural features of directives (reusability, modularity, customizability), but for some this can be a negative.

Moreover, because these frameworks are just contained in JavaScript files, you can selectively apply these frameworks, where necessary, to different parts of your web sites.

Ultimately, I think frameworks like Angular or Ember are as restrictive and as powerful as frameworks like Rails and Django. Backbone would be like Flask or Sinatra.
NSFW: Show HN: Vintage Porn [video]
Makes sense, because SF is currently a low-rent, high-quality place for poor people to live.
As an Ohio home owner who is thinking about moving to California and renting I agree. The dream of home ownership often overlooks the costs and insane amount of work involved in owning home and keeping it nice. I love having a 4 acre yard, but it takes me 7 hours to cut grass.
Resources for learning Ruby on Rails
If you add supply, prices do not, all else being equal, go up.

And add to that any actual residential development in SF will have affordable housing mandates regulated into it.

I don't think that there's anything that will really stop gentrification and price rises in San Francisco real estate short of the current tech boom going away. But if you're interested in mitigating it, you want new development. What feeds the short supply of housing is a large number of single-family-detached houses, especially ones that are uninhabitable in their present form, and so reward extremely wealthy all-cash buyers who can afford to pay a premium for a house, tear it down, and build anew (without the aforementioned affordable housing mandates).
Here's a Metafilter discussion of it from January 2003, fwiw: http://www.metafilter.com/23068/Nothing-like-this-will-be-bu...
Increasing supply will raise prices? Huh?
Why do you feel that it is okay to dismiss someone's opinion outright? He's not suggesting that home ownership is a right, but merely that it would be nice to be able to have the possibility to own a home. Those are two very different things.
> Thus the real battle to be fought is not in the technical sphere but in the human political sphere

Most people only analyze immediate effects - they don't go out of their way to think in abstract models and worst-case scenarios. If they're being told that the panopticon is necessary for catching scary bad guys and see no immediate negative effects for them or their tribe, they're going to believe it. Only by becoming acquainted with privacy-preserving technology will they ever come to expect communications privacy, realize the government is working against them, and organize to preserve their autonomy.
Stay fit while travelling from England -- Antarctica
If you feel guilty you could always go do those other things that benefit society more or even do some volunteer work so you feel less guilty about making a decent living.
But communism was not what happened in the USSR.
I'm not sure why you are asking me about this.
I think it's because more tech workers in the Bay Area enjoy their jobs than investment bankers in New York do. When you enjoy your work, you don't feel guilty, but perhaps a little sheepish when you realize how much you're being paid to do it.
Hong Kong is one of the wealthiest, most space-constrained places on the planet, and remains far cheaper than areas of similar population density and economic role. Compare Hong Kong to Manhattan, Tokyo, London.
I think the more worrying thing is the timing of the discussion.

We're now in a position where the government is asking for forgiven instead of permission and that tends to result in the victim (us) being more permissive.

If they had publicly asked us (the people) to define "relevant" years ago when this question was originally on the table, then we would have struck a very different balance.
So basically you are suggesting that it would be best for twitter to concentrate data and traffic into a couple servers. Let's say it's possible (better, lets imagine), so how would you handle a crash on a $200k server? Get two other $200k server backing it up? But what if your data and traffic needs not just ONE $200k server, but instead, a $200.000k server? You see that's not even close at how big twitter probably is.
> To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by delivering other packages or acting as deliverymen for physical goods?

Because they won't most of the time? Let's say that during peak rush hour, N people + M packages need to be transported. That means that in order to satisfy peak demand efficiently, we need N+M cars and road capacity. During off-peak hours, lets say that only 20% of the population needs to travel. That means you've got the other 80% of the cars sitting around doing nothing just like they are today. If the average distance to nearby parking is say 2 miles, then we have 80% of the cars just driving empty 2 extra miles to prevent themselves from taking up road capacity (while today we trade off by creating parking lots).

Despite that, I do think there will be some improvement in terms of car use. Namely:

* the average car size will shrink to probably that of a smart car (2 seats, little cargo room)
* parking lots will shrink (but not disappear) due to effective stacked parking
* vehicle efficiency will increase (human drivers are inherently bad at maintaining fuel/energy efficiency with acceleration/deceleration)

The danger is that this once again will make car use "cheap" and like the article suggests, extends sprawl yet again. So we'll just have another half a century of poor land use just it might be slightly more efficient this time around.
Specifically on the subject of transportation, many wealthy tech companies have deployed private buses that benefit only their employees and not the community. I don't think it's evil by any means, merely rational (at least in the short-term), but also still a missed opportunity to strengthen the community by covering employees' public transit passes, encouraging employees to live closer to work, or moving work closer to where employees want to live (some companies have done this, but the big, well-known ones have not). The net effect is private buses for tech, and crappy public transit for the rest, breeding resentment toward tech.
As an actual native to San Francisco, I think I can put a few things into perspective.

Its always been expensive to live here, it doesn't have much to do with tech, it has more to do with SF being a center for finance AND technology. That said, having a mortgage lower than your rent is true for many people who bought at "the right time" rather than at the peak of demand. Demand is outstripping supply due to the insane people who get elected to the city government, which is largely driven by fresh but naive stream of tech workers and the radicalized longterm residents. The only way to fix this is to oust people who do not support fiscal security and personal freedoms (Leeland Yee is at the top of my list) and replace them with people who eschew cronyism and support a balanced approach (Sean Elsbernd comes to mind).

The so called BART divide is really more about greed and institutionalized mediocracy. Station agents should make minimum wage, the people who make BART actually run are the maintenance staff and the conductors. The conductors shouldn't be people in trains, they should be people in offices as the technology for having fully automated trains has existed for decades. The safety issue is a red herring, as the issue as posed is not for more transit police, but for more lighting. Management is also not blameless as they should be putting less money towards bureaucratic salaries and returning it to the ridership in the form of lower fares and upgrades to cars.

If you feel guilt about living and working in SF, stop it.
Spending money is what keeps the economy of SF moving, and what keeps people who don't work in the tech industry employed.
Social Network Mapping with NodeXL
For those interested in the MIT Immersion project that analyzes and graphs your gmail social network, this is a great excel plugin I have used in the past to map and explore my personal networks in Facebook and Twitter.
By that logic. All makers of bread knifes and hammers are responsible for murders being done with them.