skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Schools actually aren't bad in SF, they're uneven. Take a look at greatschools.net and filter by public school. SF has an unusually large number of schools rated "10" - keep in mind, anything over 7 is good by California standards (not exactly a great standard, but that is the basis for comparison to the wealthy burbs). This is based on adjusted API (test) scores, which don't tell the whole story about a school, of course.

In SF, school assignment is by lottery rather than by residence, which drives wealthy people nuts. I get it, if you live in a nice neighborhood across the street from a good school, and the city tells you you have to drive somewhere else, that'll piss you off - and if you can convert a high mortgage payment into access to a public school that the poor don't get in the suburbs, you may very well up and leave. Of course, if you live in a crappy neighborhood across the street from a failing school, you might not mind the lottery so much.

SFUSD is moving to a more district residence model, though it won't be the overwhelming factor.
> The gist of the DOJ's argument is sound.

That's a matter of opinion. If one is in favor of government power over the Constitutional rights of individual citizens, then I guess it makes some kind of sense.

If one is more partial to individual rights over the power of government, this law just looks draconian.

This is all beside the fact that the NSA has always considered itself beyond the law anyway:

> "NSA does not have a statutory charter; its operational responsibilities are set forth exclusively in executive directives first issued in the 1950s. One of the questions which the Senate asked the Committee to consider was the "need for specific legislative authority to govern the operations of...the National Security Agency."

> According to NSA's General Counsel, no existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of NSA. Further, the General Counsel asserts that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to NSA's interception of Americans' international communications for foreign intelligence purposes."

> http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/C...
Ask HN: About "RESTless?" post on HN frontpage now
Why there is no author? Why no up/down vote arrow? Why can't comment? I think it's a post to advertise their company.. but why and how exactly has it been made into unrateable post and kind of an unavoidable unwanted advertisement? Has it happened before on HN or maybe it's just default for startups being boosted by Y Combinator?
Just wondering...
How the Internet Ruined San Francisco.

http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/internet_2/

Check the date! Ha.
I just really like this idea of standardizing on a low-level subset of Js for use by intermediate language representations such as this. So in other words, the former.
Unfortunately these laws are made for vintage cameras, which require (expensive) film. These cameras of yonder years were large bulky devices with exactly one purpose. So you knew if you were being filmed. By contrast already with an iPhone, you do not know if you are filmed, or if the guy with the phone is just looking at a map. It gets worse with Google glass, with them it is easy to film just everything, and decide later if you want to store the video. ( And to make matters worse, there are perfectly legitimate non privacy invading uses for a Google glass camera, like an AR route planner.) So I think that these laws are not much more useful than anti piracy laws.
Also if you want to go home now, or go to the store now and it's rented out by some one: you're basically fucked.

You can program a range limit and certain hours (be no farther than 30 miles away by 4pm and not in use) sure but when anything unexpected comes up (on either end) you don't have a car for X period of time.

Even just sharing the car has this problem, oh it can drive back home empty, but the logistics of making sure it can drop Bob off drive home get Alice drive her some were pick Bob back up up drop him at home in time to go get Alice are only barely more convenient than "sorry I need the car today" for twice the mileage cost natch.
Eh, it probably couldn't hurt to kick over a desk or two on your way out.
If declining prices-- as what happened from 2007-2010-- don't indicate overbuilding, what does? Anything?
Historically Nintendo has sold consoles off their first party titles. They have released a total of 1 so far. Judging their sales off 1 title is probably a bit premature.
Maybe they can, BUT they won't.

You see, as The President of The United States of America pledged: if he gets elected, he will create the most transparent administration in the history of the USA!

So long story short, they will not redact anything.
SmartyStreets [1] is another provider, not free though. It seems they can do a lot more than verify, like their autocomplete (client side) -- pretty slick. [2]

[1] http://smartystreets.com/products/liveaddress-api/pricing#qu...

[2] http://smartystreets.com/products/liveaddress-api/demo

Have not had a chance yet to use this in a project.
"There was a huge housing crash 20 years ago, and large swaths of the city were extremely affordable"

IIRC that was caused by the 1989 earthquake - all the transplants got scared and moved and rent got affordable as a result.
Sounds like a great application of Docker, come to think of it. I'm sure it's quite possible to spin up a new docker VM from a shell script and do exactly that.

Hm, the only problem is installing Docker in the first place ...
Bring on the exodus.

Based on the Dharma Initiative, let's have The Coda Initiative: Let's build a new Silicon Valley where there is plenty of space to grow and where startups will flourish.
Prss is trying to design the iPad publishing app that Apple never built
"If you’re using JSON and your JSON is a mix of types, goooooood luck. You’ll have to create a custom struct that matches the format of your JSON blob, and then Unmarshall the raw json into an instance of your custom struct. Much more work than just obj = json.loads(json_blob) like we’re used to in Python land."

Could just load it into a map[string]interface{} and then just make sure he does type assertion on the value before using it.
Some of us value permanence. I own my house, and I have zero intention of ever selling it. It's mine, mine, mine, mine.

There is an incredible feeling in owning a home that you love and plan to spend your life in. We get to plan the changes we'll make over the next decade. We can plant a tree and watch it grow. We can truly unpack our stuff AND our lives… which it's hard to ever do when you rent; most people I know move every 1 to 3 years. At that rate, a lot of things feel like they're never worth it. You don't hang curtains because you think "I won't be here that long" then you wake up and it's been 4 years and you never had curtains and you wasted all that time. (Actual curtains… and metaphorical curtains, too.)

Granted, you don't get that feeling if you just buy whatever's available. (And probably nigh impossible to manage in a place like SF.)

Our house is a special place. It's historic; we feel obliged to take good care of it, because it will outlast us. It's an indescribable source of joy. And yes, there's angst, too -- that always comes with loving anything, be they people, animals, organizations, or things. It's worth it.

The money is the absolutely last concern.
Live in "NOBE" now (or Longfellow, or Gaskill, or Golden Gate, whatever it's really called), but I regularly see car windows smashed in when I head over to Temescal's 50th/Telegraph area for dinners out. Loving my own apartment, but wishing more and more I had searched harder for a place near the walkable parts of Grand Ave or Piedmont Ave.
It's sad how bad the (physical and IT) security is at most law firms (and how high the return would be from breaking in -- especially firms handling public-company M&A transactions).
It's a feature granted to companies involved with Y Combinator.
in the same window though?
I think it's possible to criticize someone or debate with them, without being uncivil. What scenario do you envision, where that wouldn't be true?
My Continued Exploration of Javascript with Codecademy
I have been researching this topic and it seems to me that many countries use varying depths of administrative division levels in their postal systems. Your api seems to stick to a single "state". Do you just assume that the first major division under country, and will you ever support more granular divisions?
Upstream posters aren't very imaginative :-)

The original smart was 2.5m long. That is surprisingly spacious if you replace the petrol engine with electrical ones in the wheels, the petrol tank by 10 cm of batteries in the floor and give up the back trunk (you wouldn't really need one for commuting)

I also don't see why all people would start using smaller cars. If these driverless ones make economic sense, they can't be more expensive than current ones, and currently there are plenty of people driving cars larger than smarts.

But yes, it probably wasn't the best example.
yea, as I suspected :) Thanks.
Three Reasons Why William Lynch Is Gone At Barnes & Noble And What's Next
I think the redactions are actually done using a narrow painter's tape, then a photocopy of the originals. The painter's tape won't stick to the paper, but shows up as black on the photocopy.
I choose to believe the US system of checks and balances isn't broken.
Josef Seibel makes great office appropriate comfortable footware for men. Take a look.
It's possible to be critical without being harsh or uncivil.

e.g. your example can be shortened to "X is bad, Y doesn't work. We already have Z." And the opinion "bad" could be replaced with its factual/reasoned basis.

Of course, praise is sweet and criticism bitter. Let's not sugar-coat it - but let us not poison it either.
As someone who commuted from Santa Cruz to Mountain View and San Francisco to Palo Alto, I certainly understand this. However, walking to Bart, being one of the first on, sitting down and reading/working is vastly different than driving. Depends just as much on HOW you commute.
The specific paragraph, for reference:

After assessing the surveillance footage, Schulman said he believed the motivations were likely political, but did not suspect department involvement. "It wasn't professional enough," he said. "It is possible that an Obama or Hillary supporter feels that I am unfairly going after them. And the timing of this is right after several weeks of very public media attention so it seems to me most likely that the information sought is related to that case. I don't know for sure and I want the police to do their work."
No offense, but that's not common sense, it's naivete. Strong anti-dilution rights causes many problems. Most commonly, it makes it very difficult to attract new investors.

Also, your math ("just multiply their shares to reflect any new shares that are issued") doesn't work. Try it on paper and you'll see why :-)
Well go on, make your point.

I never tire of correcting someone, even correcting myself or allowing others to correct me. So go ahead and convince me of something.
The history of the word "relevant" is key to understanding that passage. The Supreme Court in 1991 said things are "relevant" if there is a "reasonable possibility" that they will produce information related to the subject of the investigation. In criminal cases, courts previously have found that very large sets of information didn't meet the relevance standard because significant portions—innocent people's information—wouldn't be pertinent. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, FISC, has developed separate precedents, centered on the idea that investigations to prevent national-security threats are different from ordinary criminal cases.

It is completely absurd to suppose that even the most serious terror attacks in history (like the 9/11 attack) pose any threat to the continued existence and authority of the US government. But that is exactly what this line of reasoning assumes. That's what "national security threat" means.

We see this deliberate and erroneous conflation of "terrorism" and "national security" again and again in government statements and policies, and the media parrots it uncritically. Even if we believe that preventing terrorism is extremely important, terror plots and acts of terror do not generally rise to the level of "national security." Even if we accept the (extremely troubling) legal principle that the constitution may be weakened or ignored in the case of national security threats, that doesn't mean we should accept such weakening in the quest to prevent terrorism.
HOAs do exist, and can be intrusive, but OP's final line still applies: "Your argument is done in by basic research into the neighborhood."

Anyone buying a home knows if the home their looking at has an HOA or is a condo. I know many people who would never consider buying a home covered by an HOA, and many other people who like knowing that their neighbor can't paint their house pink and do car repair in the front yard with death metal playing. Caveat emptor.

Finally, many of these risks are reduced by actually being a part of the community. Don't want a factory built 0.5 miles from your home? Go to the planning meetings, talk to your city planning staff/council members. Join the HOA board. Being a homeowner means that you have an incentive to invest in your community and make it the community you want it to be. If you just disconnect and let others make decisions for you, yes you can be screwed. However, if you participate, get to know your neighbors, and become a part of the community, you can make it everything you want it to be, and more.
The only thing keeping me from using this is that video normally includes audio (and,indeed, it's somewhat important for context), but I'm not sure whether California's wiretapping laws (or some other?) would get me in hot water if I recorded someone else's conversation. I'm pretty sure this is a both-sides-must-consent state for audio recording, and I'd not want to have to go to court to claim that things said in public (e.g., when an officer of the law is detaining you, or someone else) aren't private.
> That's a matter of opinion

Well, whether or not an argument is sound (is never|shouldn't be) a matter of opinion. Soundness has nothing to do with whether the premises are true or not, it just means that if the premises are true, the conclusions necessarily follow. Whether the argument is _valid_ or not is a different matter.

I'm not commenting on the article or anything, I just thought I'd point that out.
Building a Product: Part 1
> Should we disbelieve when the US government says Snowden aided the enemy, just because he predicted it? I had to really struggle to get that interpretation out of what you said.

To be more clear (as I had very little time when I was writing the original), the title of the article implies that Snowden is prophesying; that he is predicting some future event based on something that he, and those of us waiting on his every word, alone are able to foresee.

This is a fairly normal propaganda ploy to build up our heroes: We see that future! He saw it too! My hero, thank $DEITY he too can unmask the Man Behind the Curtain!

Instead I'm saying that what he really predicted is of the same degree of difficulty as predicting the sun will rise tomorrow (especially given that he knew before the government what he would be leaking). Even Miss Cleo's antics are more impressive than that.

Unfortunately I never did get to see the video in the time I had thanks to the 'third world' Internet that my branch of the government gets to work with, so it's possible Snowden himself was insightful and prescient. But the title wasn't, IMHO.
If you honestly think that urban sprawl is anything other than an inefficient allocation of fixed resources, you aren't looking at the big picture.

Having a backyard is not needed if you have lots and parks to play in and walk dogs; the American suburb idea of a little villa for each person is stupid and wasteful and wouldn't confer any advantages if you fixed the underlying insecurities people had about the hospitality of their own community.
I agree. I was approaching from the angle of being amused that they obviously put a lot of work into making C++ compile reasonably fast when they created a language that, amongst other things, addresses that issue by addressing the actual causes of slowness (as opposed to some giant cluster). I agree that for very few people compilation speed is "their" winning Go feature. (Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run)
I completely agree with your point, but that's not a problem of renters, per se.

If the city of San Francisco (where my wife and I live) made a committed effort to build a stable stock of rental property that allowed families of 3-5 to rent for less than $3k a month, I guarantee you'd see more families sticking around instead of fleeing to points north or east. Instead, you get mostly young, single (your "bowling alone" category, less likely to show up at those city council meetings) splitting 3 bedrooms four ways and paying $4k for the privilege of all sharing one kitchen and one bathroom.

I'm optimistic that all of the new housing being put up in SOMA will help alleviate this but there needs to be some complementary regulatory structure to help keep those community types (which are often what the young singles become in 5-10 years) around. Otherwise, SF is quickly on a path towards being a place where only the rich, the young, the single, and the poor (via subsidized housing) can afford to live. The middle gets squeezed.
Curriculum changes 'to catch up with world's best'
> I'm not saying there is any bait and switch going on (I think they're above petty revenge killing), but are there any previous instances where the USG charged someone for a "parking violation" style minor crime to facilitate extradition?

I can't remember the exact case but the U.S. has done this before, IIRC, to Canada. Something about a state extraditing someone for trial in a state court (with a firm agreement to leave off the death penalty) and then the Federal prosecutor swoops in out of nowhere to bring Federal charges that do carry the death penalty.

Edit: Take the above with a grain of salt though, I've spent some time searching for this case (which should be quite famous) and have come up with nothing. The closest was the Söring case where the U.K. has to obtain assurances from both Virginia and the U.S. that the death penalty would not be applied... and it wasn't.
Without being combative, who, exactly needs the financing that badly? Certainly not the large percentage of social startups, right?

And also, if they need the capital to enable/manage growth, a reasonable business model should get them SOMEWHERE close to sustainability. What I mean to say is that if people are falling themselves to use your creation (so much so that you must expand infrastructure significantly -- keep this in mind that many of the open source software that is available these days "scales" to thousands if not millions of users without much more than one guy sitting behind a computer) it should not be difficult to get some portion of people to PAY for the service.

Now, of course, this is very different when it comes to something like a manufacturing-based startup, in which someone is looking to achieve mass-production from the get go (which I don't even think is a reasonable approach) -- or break into some sort of heavily "regulated" area and needs money for patents/licenses/whatever. But even to that, I'd say more introspection is needed -- VCs are not just looking to hand out money without prototypes, and if you have prototypes that are good, and work, and show that you know what you're doing, even regular banks can give loans with a good enough business plan (especially with all that internet money everyone's been trying to get a hold of recently.

Also, I think that maybe this ultra-transient mentality to startups might be wrong, unless you are in the business of incubating. You don't often enter relationships with the mindset of gathering experience for the next one right? Most people would like to think that people enter relationships with the intention to make them successful. I think startups are the same way, especially given how people think about them on sites like these and others.

Also, keep in mind that building something you love and making money from it instead of taking VC cash doesn't mean you'll be poor by a long shot, it's very possible (and I'd like to say probable, but I don't have a link to an article posted on here last week about non-VC exits being generally worth more to the founder). If your idea really is good, then it will make you a LOT of cash, even if you collect $10 from 1000 people on a yearly basis, you'd only need 3000 people to think your app is useful to make somewhere close to min wage in the US (which is higher than many around the world are paid)

But anyway, that's just my opinion

[EDIT] - Also, another point worth thinking about here -- what about your users? These are the people that subscribed to you, your methodology, your culture. I think there's more than enough proof out there to show that users don't get quite treated the same after acquisitions (to put it mildly)
"Now downvote, hate", etc.. always reminds me of young girls who would always post photos with captions like "Ugly" and "Gross" phishing for compliments.

P.S. It doesn't have to do with hating GUIs for most people, it has to do with using a terminal efficiently, which often times means avoiding the mouse when possible.
All legal rulings are merely the opinions of fallible people. Some of those fallible people are more authoritarian, some are more libertarian.

"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948
Wow. Why that? You could build around Bootstrap anyways without any harm. I got tired of doing a new framework each time I start a project.
Looks like SmartyStreets is limited to just the US and charges $1000 for unlimited lookups. Lob also autocompletes addresses if not entered fully as well and is FREE for unlimited lookups. I'll also add their data set from the USPS is the same that everyone uses (including Lob) for the US. The real challenge with address verification is international which Lob is able to provide.
It seems that the reason for the ACLU's request being declined is jurisprudence, which is a weak argument. The court did not directly explain why it is unreasonable to request such information (claiming national security doesn't necessarily mean it is so). Since 2007 and 2008 many things have come to light, including how deep their operations go and which companies (in part) are being used for surveillance. Therefore more evidence has come to light and the ACLU is pretty much just being dismissed in my opinion without justification or at least without a valid reason (even if it is justified).

Legally, I think the court is "sound," but that does not mean they could not throw the ACLU a bone by just releasing the most basic of their law interpretations (since we already know them).
BitBucket.org down
It looks like BitBucket is having a global outage.