On one hand, you have people earning six figures fighting for the dwindling, ever inflated supply of conventional housing options, and on the other, you have people like Nadia Eghbal who display the utmost resourcefulness and manage to live in SF for $20k a year (http://helloimnadia.com/post/52242701025/how-to-live-in-san-...). Really goes back to what pg says about being relentlessly resourceful.
In the end, if you really want to get settled in SF, all it takes is some persistence and a healthy network. (I moved here when I knew next to no one and managed to find home at a coliving space called Startuphouse for most of last year; not only was my stay free but it gave me a fantastic network on which to jumpstart life here.)
Haha, yeah, I stayed at the StartupHouse a bit too. It was great being right in the middle of the city and being able to walk a block for groceries or tech meetups. Got a lot of coding done too! Too bad someone filed a complaint and got it shut down.
I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling. The most I've ever paid for that is $2000/month in the center of SF. Dropped down to $1000/month in the southern hills, which was still an easy BART/bus ride into downtown. East Palo Alto was $600 a month, but you had to take a bus to the Caltrain to get anywhere. Currently staying in Walnut Creek on the BART for $1000/month. I only ever rent month to month, so could get way cheaper buying longer too.
> I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling.
That's fair enough, and describes me when I moved to SF straight out of college. It's probably also fine (even necessary) if you're a student or bootstrapping your own startup. But I've only been here two years, and it didn't take long for me to get sick of having a home situation that's in many ways worse than when I lived in my college's dormitory and significantly worse than my last two years of college living in a one bedroom apartment. With no lack of great and lucrative career opportunities in the area, I wish I didn't have to either live like a starving college kid in a house packed full of starving college kids or spend 20 hours a week searching for an affordable studio apartment in a tolerable location. Although I've actually been hearing good things about Oakland...
Like the commenter above, I stayed at StartupHouse for awhile, actually until they got shut down. It was pretty awesome to have my own bed, good WiFi, and be in the middle of SOMA for ~$1,000/month. I also interned at a startup in SF and lived pretty happily during that time. I was being paid $40k/year, but it was a 6-month internship so really only $20K. But I lived pretty well. I had a bed to sleep on in the city, I went out with friends on the weekends, and had a great time. I guess it all depends on your priorities and the standard of living you're looking for.
You don't have to live like a college student. Move to the south bay and you can get a 2BR place for half of what you're paying now. We have dishwashers, washing machines, garages, and storage rooms here too, oh my!
I stayed at StartupHouse until they got shut down and I have felt the same way. While I interned at a startup I was making $40k/year (it was a 6-month internship, so really only $20K), and I was able to live perfectly happy. I wasn't able to go out and spend money lavishly all the time, but I ate well, went out with friends on weekends, and overall had a good time.
The person in your link had a room in SF for $575 per month. She also does not have student loans, and the spreadsheet has no list item for health insurance. It's a nice story but not really an option for many/most people living here.
Well what to you know, mere minutes before I saw this submission on HN I received an email from Kickstarter saying that funding for the project has been suspended. I feel like an idiot for backing the project, but I guess it comes to show that even careful curation on Kickstarter's part isn't always foolproof.
Does anyone know if other crowdsourcing sites with less stringent requirements (e.g., Indiegogo) have problems with scam like this?
True, but if I saw a bag of 7 oz. Kobe jerky in the store for 7$, I would a) question the legitimacy of it and b) buy it anyway just to see what jerky with that much fat actually tastes like. Just because something sounds like a bad idea doesn't mean it isn't worth trying just to see what happens.
Yeah, this project was apparently reported to Kickstarter weeks ago by multiple people and they didn't give a fuck until it blew up into a huge PR shitstorm after the makers of Kickstarted found out about it. I mean, the company doesn't exist, their photos are stolen, their tastings provably didn't happen, the product probably isn't even possible let alone feasable at that price...
Do we really need another music app? How many of us are (or planning to) use Twitter for music discovery? For the average consumer, Spotify has just about everything for anyone. For the avid listener, there are hundreds of quality music blogs dedicated every niche out there. It seems like Twitter decided they wanted a slice of the pie- I fail to see how this could possibly fit into my use case for Twitter (if it's even part of the core product at all). That being said, I hope they prove me wrong.
There is no software in the world that can curate music like that based on predictive modeling that I've seen.
I've been trying to make one for years that can span decades, nations, and genres like that.
I've found that if I aggregate a selective circle of people than I can get there. But that's the only way I've found so far.
Ok, USE CASE 2.
What's Justin Bieber or Keith Richards currently listening to? What about a talent scout at BMI? What if you could follow and tap into those people's personal playlists like twitter allows you to tap into what's on their plates for dinner and other personal things?
And I mean right now. Shania Twain hits play and it sends that to the server. Thousands of users world-wide tapping into her personal radio station immediately get a non-time-shifted instant feedback.
I think it would be compelling and addictive.
It's the classic celeb allure that's been twitter's mainstream pot of gold.
Pandora is the best of a bad lot. They have an interesting approach, but any lengthy listen will reveal a lot of repetition; not because there's a tiny universe of music to recommend, but rather because they can't afford to troll the long tail (downloading stuff from Bandcamp, for instance). What works for Pandora is their curation, and the marginal cost of increasing inputs is more than they are willing to spend.
The last record I bought (a single by The Greys) I listened to on recommendation of a coworker, who's in a band that I like, who had played with some people who are playing a show with The Greys. I also like going to a local record store (Soundscapes) and just buying what the people who work there recommend. Nobody is currently capturing these signals; Facebook is obviously the one company that has access to perhaps a sufficiency of this data, but music recommendations are seemingly pretty small beer in the Zuckerbergian scheme of things.
The lack of a decent music (or film/TV) recommendation system looks a lot like a business opportunity, but I think that it's fundamentally not a business. Recommendations can drive business to a retail operation, but how do you sell recommendations qua recommendations?
I am not sure if I would say algorithmic music discovery have failed but yes, I would pick curation over algorithms any day. It just gives me more context.
>I fail to see how this could possibly fit into my use case for Twitter
obviously no product is going to fit everybody's use case. but if you look at the number of links to music videos on youtube that are passed around every day, it's pretty clear that music on twitter fits a lot of people's use case.
I use Spotify as my primary music listening service and their music discovery is terrible. I'll gladly listen to Spotify through Twitter if it means better charts of new music, popular music, etc.
Last time I checked, Pandora's catalog was far too limited to be valuable to me for discovery. It was easy to come up with a half a dozen artists I like that Pandora had no clue about.
To me the word "discovery" means finding unknown works, not simply another way to listen to an artist who is already well established.
Pandora for discovery is a nonstarter, at least for me.
My dream wish is if someone could make a Pandora-like app ( both of in terms of functionality and quality) built on top of Spotify. I know spotify offers some API but don't know if this would be possible.
IIRC Pandora has a catalog size of about 1 million vs ~20 million for Spotify and yet they have been able to do a superb job in song recommendations. I find Spotify radio to be pretty terrible at this.
Hey everyone. I made the site http://www.redditunes.com. I'll be honest, there are some major flaws but you should check it out sometime if you want to try something different!
Can't agree more. All the breakpoints are placed so thoughtfully without sacrificing content for flair, certainly one of the most well-executed responsive sites I've come across. I'll most likely be poring through the reviews for hours to come.
I think it's important to keep in mind that Elon Musk got to where he is today (especially financially) because of a consumer web service he helped found. I'm sure (perhaps on the more optimistic end) that more entrepreneurs would jump on his bandwagon if they had ready/easier access to the amount of capital Musk had at his disposal to invest in his "cool sci-fi shit" ventures.
What he was working on is a financial service, not just a consumer web app. He changed the world by making payment and ecommerce easier. It may not be sci-fi or anything like, but what he was doing was of importance.
Right, but he didn't jump right into future-tech industries; he had a huge pool of personal capital to draw on, and only himself to answer to in using it. The point the parent is trying to make is that there are probably a lot of people working in less glamorous businesses who would love to jump to working on the cutting-edge, but they don't have access to hundreds of millions in personal funds.
Its initial concept of beaming money with Palm Pilots certainly was. What it eventually pivoted and grew into was less so, but I do agree that PayPal played an important role in the evolution of web technologies.
My point remains that we shouldn't be so quick to judge the altruistic intentions of entrepreneurs based on their first ventures; it may be a means to a more noble end. I'm sure many, if not most, aspire to contribute more to society beyond photo sharing apps. In fact, PayPal was voted one of the worst companies when it debuted, so I'm willing to give everyone the benefit of doubt.
Zapier has become one of my favorites web services. I've always lamented that IFTTT doesn't cater to the productivity/project management crowd by offering a very limited set of channels to work with. Then Zapier came along and blew me away.
One of my favorite bits of Zapier happens when you want to wire up services they don't support: they actually ask you for an email address to notify you when they do support it. And yet almost nobody else does.
More impressive (although this is, to be fair, a low bar): they do not try to stick you on a mailing list or anything like that.
The source reveals that the video mast is actually an animated gif (or cinemagraph, as these tasteful creations are also known as). The stutter in the beginning kind of gives it away, but still quite impressive they included such a long edit and got it to load relatively fast (coming from reddit where uncompressed gifs run amok).
> or cinemagraph, as these tasteful creations are also known as
Just so you know, this is not a cinemagraph. A cinemagraph is not just a synonym for "high-quality animated gif". A cinemagraph isolates one moving part from an otherwise static picture (and the assumption is that at least some motion is frozen - ie, not everything that could be moving is moving).
Facebook is calling it a cinemegraph (see the HTML snippet in sibling commment) as part of their comprehensive war to redefine every word in the English language to be something of theirs.
Well, on second look it seems like the mast is using <video> for me as well- I originally looked too far and thought the id "fbhome-cinemagraph-canary" led to an animated gif. Apologies on making the wrong call!
Also, as a previous reply pointed out, what they're doing really doesn't count as a cinemagraph- FB needs to stop butchering words.
I have my doubts about the launcher and would much rather have Twitter take on the endeavor given I derive much more utility from its network (highlighting stories on my Twitter feed seem a lot more relevant in practice when it comes to things I care about having on my phone's lock screen), but Facebook did one hell of a job with this product landing page. Props to their design team. (Ah! The video header! It's so pretty! And not a single man in sight!)
In the end, if you really want to get settled in SF, all it takes is some persistence and a healthy network. (I moved here when I knew next to no one and managed to find home at a coliving space called Startuphouse for most of last year; not only was my stay free but it gave me a fantastic network on which to jumpstart life here.)