robertnealan

Build more housing where driving a car isn't the default mode of getting around and people will naturally start to demand better public transportation services and local spots they can get to via bike or walking. This housing won't suit everyone's needs but there's a significant part of the population who wouldn't mind being carless even in southern California.

Changing LA's car mentality isn't going to happen overnight but it has to start somewhere.

Zoning restrictions are far more restrictive in the United States than in a city like Tokyo, where the government has largely only enacted laws preventing specific cases that would be considered very harmful (opening a heavy industrial businesses in a residential neighborhood for instance).

In most of the US most land in smaller cities are zoned for single family housing only. This often means you can only build a house for one family (no duplexes) with arbitrary restrictions on a variety of other things (minimum lot sizes, maximum house sizes relative to lot size, required setbacks from property lines to the house, etc).

In the event you are able to build a du/triplex it's rare you'd be able to convert any part of it for business use unless the land was already zoned for multi-use, where they allow mixing of residential and commercial uses.

Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700/month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45/mile).

It seems like most people don't account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I'm not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you're going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn't matter.

Even worse we see this with numerous Uber/Lyft/delivery "contractors" who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.

Before buying my car I test drove a Mercedes that had what I assumed was a touchscreen. Upon trying to tap it the person working at the dealership said none of their cars have touchscreens because they don't make sense to operate when driving, and instead had a easily reached dial in the center console that controlled everything on the screen. Seems to be the case with any other German car I've been in.

Takes some getting used to compared to just old fashioned knobs & buttons, but far and above better than all the cars we test drove with touchscreens.

I'm only 6'0" but feel your pain. I highly recommend checking your flight on https://www.seatguru.com/ to get a better idea of the seat pitch and whether there's any seats that might be slightly roomier (and ideally not right next to a bathroom).

Seems environmentally unfriendly to rely 100% on electricity in one of the sunnier places in the country — you'd think there'd be a way to pipe in daylight via fiber optic cords during the day, and transition to LEDs as the sun begins to set and during the night.

That said I'm really excited to see vertical farming grow as a market, ideally in denser cities like SF or NYC where proximity to the nearest farms can be a few hours away depending on what you want to buy.

Aha! I remembered seeing something a year or so back but thought it was just a proof of concept by an individual, not officially baked into Google Maps. Just took a look and it's definitely there, though unless you know where to look it's a bit buried in the interface.

http://www.oldsf.org/ is the closest thing I've seen — designer and developer mapped photos to their relatively accurate location, filterable by year. I've actually been able to find photos of two of the houses/blocks where I've lived (Mission and Lower Haight neighborhoods) dating back 50-100 years.

The optimist in me hopes that Google (or other companies) will archive old streetview data and make it available as a true visual timeline over the next few decades.

That's actually from the Bay Bridge heading into San Francisco — tower on the right is 1 Rincon (there's already a few more next to it going up now). Curious if this was a case of "just throw up something that looks halfway decent" or if they're intentionally trying to appeal with the US car culture?

As someone currently using (aka fighting) the web audio API, there's definitely a market for better, clearer information out there, but I'm curious how successful targeting a such a niche market has been?

Wrote on this topic a bit at the beginning of the year.[1]

I think for most people it really just comes down to a mix of Medium's beautiful design, a strong existing community there, and laziness. You'd be surprised how many times I've been told by friend's to cross-post my stuff to Medium for exposure, but so far I've done my best to hold off.

[1] https://robertnealan.com/is-self-hosted-blogging-dead/

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Currently based in San Francisco)

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for designing and building clean, responsive websites and web applications. I most often work with clients from concept through shipping the product, but can also integrate into specific roles where needed.

Currently working extensively with a combination of SCSS/Less, Backbone, and MarionetteJS. Most recently have started working with React/React Native on a side project and loving it.

Portfolio - http://atomidesign.com

Founder of Designers Who Code - http://dwc.io

More recent work can be sent by email upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco or Remote

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for designing and building clean, responsive websites and web applications. I most often work with clients from concept through shipping the product, but can also integrate into specific roles where needed.

Currently working extensively with a combination of SCSS/Less, Backbone, and MarionetteJS. Most recently have started working with React/React Native on a side project and loving it.

Portfolio - http://atomidesign.com

Founder of Designers Who Code - http://dwc.io

More recent work can be sent by email upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

Hosting at Github with Jekyll is essentially self-hosting. Github Pages has automated deployment, but at the end of the day it's just another hosting option with no (current) ulterior business motives other than to increase exposure of their GH Pages product.

This. Current static site generators aren't good for non-engineers, but I'd be willing to bet that doesn't need to be the case. Every instance I've seen requires some sort of technical know-how, or integration with Dropbox/Drive/etc (which many non-technical/older people won't necessarily be familiar with).

Has anyone ever tried building a standalone desktop writing app that handles everything for you? I'm just imaging an app where I can buy a domain/hosting, give it my user creds if needed, and it automatically sets everything up for me in a clean interface without needing to know anything about servers/DNS/etc.

I was referring less to general blogging companies like Typepad/Blogger - IMO those are pretty similar to Medium in functionality but minus the community aspect (blogs only linked to one-another by intentional choice, versus Medium where everything is aggregated and quasi-curated by the application).

When Svbtle first came out it seemed to cater to almost purely tech audiences and allowed new authors on a limited basis - this might have been coincidence due to the creator's roots or connections, but it created a sense of community and credibility within that social sphere (similar to Hacker News in the tech world). Unfortunately, since they've opened signups to everyone it seems like its lost that sense of community and become just-another-blogging-platform.

Also would be extremely curious as to the stats on historical blogging data.

1017kb on my end.

IMO a large majority of those images would be better off replaced by the Taft image (or not included at all).

I coincidentally sat in on a pitch to Zimmer's new company zTailors about a year ago over at their office in Oakland. Having visited numerous startups in the Bay Area over the years, zTailors was one of the few that walking into their office you instantly knew it was being run like a real business rather than your typical VC funded runaway train.

Also, I almost walked straight into Zimmer on my way out — definitely as impressive in person as in his commercials.

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - San Francisco or Remote

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for designing and building clean, responsive layouts using a mix of HTML/SCSS + Compass, and JS. Also have varying experience working with Rails, backbone/marionette, nodeJS + Express, and devops for AWS/Linux server environments.

Founder of Designers Who Code - http://dwc.io

Personal blog - http://robertnealan.com

Company portfolio - http://atomidesign.com

More recent projects are non-publishable/public by contract and available upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

Has nobody created an open-source, non-tamperable e-voting platform yet (could give the blockchain a solid purpose)? It seems like something that would make for a great project - a voting system for the people by the people.

Anybody have any idea what animation library they're using? Doesn't look to be CSS transitions and all their JS is compressed (rightfully so).

I haven't personally been to one of their events but met the founder (Ankit) by chance a few months back through a mutual friend who has been to a few. Definitely seems like a genuine guy who's passionate about the idea and being rightfully cautious about expanding at a pace that ensures all their events are of high enough quality with good hosts to guide good conversation.

If they're in your area definitely be sure to try an attend an event, I know I will be assuming I ever beat the waitlist in San Francisco.

Hamburg's mentioned plan reminds me of Daniel Burnham's 1905 plan for San Francsico, which would have created Panhandle-like parks running all over the city as well as diagonal avenues connecting major points of interest a-la Paris or Washington DC. The 1906 earthquake would've been the perfect opportunity to make it a reality, but unfortunately it never went anywhere.

Map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Burnham_San_Fr...

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - San Francisco or Remote

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for designing and building clean, responsive layouts using a mix of HTML/SCSS + Compass, and JS. Also have varying experience finding my way around Rails, nodeJS + Express, and setting up AWS/Linux server environments.

Founder of Designers Who Code - http://dwc.io

Personal blog - http://robertnealan.com

Company portfolio - http://atomidesign.com

More recent projects are non-publishable/public by contract and available upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

It's an interesting concept, but I think this would open the door for the argument, "We added POI recognition so why not add feature Y?" Messages is supposed to be about communicating via short, concise text-style messages — adding additional features on top of that will eventually convolute and weigh down the original intent.

@jreed91's suggestion of having them turn into links that then connect to your review app of choice seems like an appropriate and minimalist enhancement to the app (Yelp or otherwise - ideally a configurable option).

To anyone who has had extensive issues with MBP's, I managed to get my 2007 replaced for free back in college with a new version by Apple after several unreasonable repairs (2x logic board, 3x LCD, 1x left IO board, 1x top case, 1x touchpad, 1x DVD drive).

Granted, it took a lot of "let me speak to your manager" and I believe needs to still be under Applecare in most instances, but it's always an option to pursue if you have the time and patience.

Thankfully the 2010 I received lasted until this year with no issues, and I finally replaced it after beating it to hell with a 2014 retina MBP that's been running smoothly so far.

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - San Francisco or Remote

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for designing and building clean, responsive layouts using a mix of HTML/SCSS + Compass, and JS. Also have varying experience with Coffeescript, Ruby/Rails, nodeJS/Express, and setting up and/or optimizing AWS/Linux server environments.

Company portfolio at http://atomidesign.com - more recent projects are non-publishable/public by contract and available upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

While I think Jon made it seem a little easier than in reality, as someone who uses and designs for both mobile/desktop I have to agree that when done right it's not that much more of a time investment - generally ~10% extra on a full design/build project. There's a real argument that in a hackathon 10% extra time isn't worth it, but in the real world where you don't always have 48 hour time limits I've always been in the opinion that the initial time investment is far outweighed by the benefits and the additional cost that you would incur by making it mobile-ready later (which usually requires either rebuilding the frontend templates from scratch or hacking away at the existing codebase in a way that is far less organized/sustainable).

As far as the long standing argument of whether building mobile-first or desktop-first, I honestly think that's up to developer preference so long as the whole team is building with the same mindset. Building responsive, mobile-ready sites/applications isn't free, but a lot of web developers/startups seem to make it out to be much more difficult than it actually is when done consistently and right.

SEEKING WORK - San Francisco - Remote or Travel

UI/UX Designer & Frontend Developer with a penchant for clean, responsive layouts. Experience with HTML5, CSS3, SCSS + Compass, LESS, javascript, jQuery, AWS, and currently working with nodeJS/Express.

Company portfolio at http://atomidesign.com, more recent work includes http://californianaturel.com and http://mainlandskateandsurf.com.

Additional work available upon request.

Contact: rob@atomidesign.com

First few queries worked, but when I told it "Show me tacos" and it honestly responded with "Searching for porn...".

Either way, interesting idea - I'm curious how this might be used not only for interacting with websites in novel ways but for ADA purposes where the user has difficulty controlling a physical input device but can still speak.