I never liked the O'Reilly approach. At one point I had read 20 of their books and never felt like I learned anything. Some people can learn from references, but I really prefer Zed's "hard way" method which feels a lot like the Programmed Learning methodlogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning).
Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.
Downtown Oakland was sadly ignored. The nice side of Lake Merritt, as well as downtown and Jack London Square are generally overlooked. Maybe that's a good thing for my rent. I pay $1900 for an 1100 ft^2 2br/2bath right next to jack london square, with a pool, a hot tub, and soon with a 100mbps synchronous connection that will cost $45/month. BART is 4 blocks away and door to door I'm downtown in 30 minutes. I'm looking at downtown office space now and it's incredibly cheap, plus the business taxes are a lot cheaper.
The food scene isn't as great as Berkeley, but rent is 30% cheaper, and there are far fewer yuppy moms walking around with kids in strollers, which makes me happy. There has been a pretty solid core of hackers moving here in the past two years, generally people like me in our early '30s who have been in SF for a decade+ and have finally stopped drinking
the "San Francisco is worth $4k for a 750 ft^2 apartment" koolaid.
It's hearsay, but a friend of mine who was there last year told me a pretty frightening story about how one of their engineers harassed and stalked my friend's co-worker for the duration of the conference. (word to the wise, women should never put their cell phone number on the business cards they hand out at conference filled with drunk, horny nerds)
Apples an oranges here. Linode kind of sucks, their performance is good but their pricing is whack and they're not really elastic .. a 1/2 month credit when you power down an instance is pretty lame. I won't do business with those guys after their behavior at hostingcon this year.
As to RackSpace I don't trust any tech company who has a 7:1 sales rep to engineer ratio. They are overpriced in all of their services, especially their managed dedicated servers (seriously, why does it take a week to have a server installed? it takes a week because they literally have a guy go out and image servers by hand. do you really want to wage your company's future on that sort of incompetence? I don't)
The main reason to advertise on Yelp is extortion. If you don't pay Yelp their extortion fees, they only allow a small number of reviews for your business, and even worse, their algorithms pushes the negative reviews to the top. One of my friends' businesses currently has 200 "filtered" reviews and 19 posted reviews which in itself makes his business look incredibly shady (sure, he runs a dispensary, so he might be shady, but that's besides the point).
The video of this is often linked when people use the term "Meat Cloud" to describe tech companies who throw bodies at problems instead of process and automation.
Want to Be in Battle School?
Open Casting Call for Extras in New Orleans This Weekend
Ender's Game open casting call being held at the Hilton Garden Inn located in the Warehouse District of New Orleans on Saturday, January 14th from 11am to 3pm.
Alexis Allen, along with Batherson Casting, are seeking bright and talented kids and teens ages 10-17 of varying ethnic background for the feature film production of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"; based on one of the most famous science fiction novels of the last 40 years.
The film stars Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin. Oscar-winning Director Gavin Hood will be filming Ender's Game in New Orleans from February until June 2012, providing those selected with up to 8 weeks of work.
To be considered, please come to the open call this weekend, located at the address below between 10am and 2pm
Hilton Garden Inn
1001 South Peters St
New Orleans 70130
Please also bring a recent snapshot of yourself. Homeschooled students are especially encouraged, because of the work during school hours.
Yes because a lot of wealthy people visit Hacker News. Angels, VCs, startup founders, hackers who had good exits, etc. If politics are owned by wealthy corporations and individuals, then let's throw some money against SOPA.
I had a pair of nail clippers confiscated entering IAD a few years ago. Just inside the security terminal was the convenience store where i had purchased that set of nail clippers, so I purchased a new set and took them on the plane.
I've spent the past 4 months obsessively browsing craigslist. This summer I moved out of an apartment (non rent-controlled) because my rent was increased from $2850 to $4,150. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sfc?query=&srchTy... is a search of 2br apartments in the city of san francisco, all neighborhoods. It returns 253 listings. Raising that to 3000 -> 4000 gives you 265 listings.
If I exclude the neighborhoods where I wouldn't live due to distance, safety, or a dislike of feeling like I'm in the burbs (bayview, excelsior, ingleside, north beach (fuck tourists), portola, richmond/seacliff, sunset, tenderloin) treasure island) then those searches (http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sfc?query=&srchTy...) drop down to 106 and 184 apartments, respectively.
The competition for apartments is fierce right now due to a combination lack of credit keeping people leasing rather than owning, and the current tech bubble having imported 10s of thousands of new dot-commies happy to spend 50% of their salaries on housing, because they're young and stupid.
If you make under $150k, are fiscally conservative and don't want to live with roommates, then you're priced out of San Francisco.
Perhaps culture is changing, ancient religious customs are failing, and those of us who are inclined towards monogamy are eschewing marriage while still committing to our life partners? Also, perhaps homosexuality has hit the point culturally where those who otherwise would have lived an unhappy false life of heterosexuality are now free enough to be gay, and gay marriage is mostly illegal in this country.
Whenever somebody pitches me on "We're the facebook for N" or "We're a groupon for N" I tune them out and find something more interesting to focus on, like the cracks in the sidewalk or that edge on the brown paper wrapper they add to a coffee cup to make sure that you don't burn yourself and sue them. What's that thing called?
U kind of see the point of objection if someone drops his pants in a picture that everyone can see.
This logic always confounds me. We are born naked, our natural state is to be without clothes. Worse still we are born into a society whose rules are based on a religion we may or may not subscribe to, but we still have to follow these rules under penalty of enslavement (prison) or physical harm to our bodies. Those naked bodies we were born with which offends some sense of religious propriety.