Oakland is like any other city. There are safe neighborhoods and dangerous neighborhoods. Some of the safer ones are: Temescal, Adam's Point, Grand Lake/Cleveland Heights, Piedmont & Rockridge (not technically Oakland).
Absolutely true. For an intern without a car, the critical factor is probably BART access. The best non-ghetto + BART at a low price is probably around 19th street, so "Uptown", toward Adams Point. There are apartments in the $1200 1BR range, vs. 2-3x that for short term in SF (!!!). I'd still probably suggest trying to find a roommate, sublet, or company sponsored thing, even if it's tiny or sketchy, nearer work and social stuff, in SF or PA/MV, though. Temescal (which is farther up, near MacArthur BART) is also a good choice. There's a weird auto-dealer wasteland in between, which was a horrible zoning choice by Oakland, but they're working on redeveloping that, so it should be a continuous area of interesting stuff from ~16th to ~40th at some point.
OTOH, I live in Oakland and drive. I've never gone to anything in Oakland except Amazon locker pickup, Whole Foods (but prefer Berkeley places), and the 580/880 onramps. I step into my car in an underground garage and essentially don't get out until I'm in the civilized/Promised Land (Peninsula).
Berkeley is also maybe more fun as an intern, even if you work in SF, and has BART. I'm not sure what summer housing is like there -- I'd assume there are vacancies in places rented to students during the year over the summer.
Nitpicking: Piedmont is an enclave contained within Oakland (but independent), but Rockridge is part of Oakland. (it's also "Adams Point", not Adam's Point)
Rockridge is definitely part of Oakland, but Piedmont is a separate city. Piedmont seceded from Oakland in 1907 and is completely surrounded by Oakland. I've never heard of any other city engulfed within another.
This property of Piedmont is not even unique within the Bay Area! Fremont (the fourth-largest city in the Bay Area) has an enclave of its own, Newark, which is its own city yet completely surrounded by Fremont.
Just for fun.. The Vatican City is surrounded by Rome, though it's not only a city but a nation state. If you want California, though, Los Angeles has several enclaved cities, such as San Fernando.
Agreed. But more than pretentious, it's downright inaccurate. I work in SOMA and live in Grand Lake (Oakland), and I have a shorter commute than most of my San Francisco-dwelling colleagues.
Agreed. If the US legalized the production and distribution of all drugs (a la Portugal http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog/time-to-end-the-w...), a good bit of the american money funding these folks could be taxed and redirected to schools and healthcare in the US. Unfortunately, there's a large swath of americans who would see that as another Obama step towards a communist apocalypse. So it would never get through the Republican House.
Production and distribution of drugs is as illegal (and a crime) as it always was here in Portugal, and we have busts regularly. We only decriminalized (not legalized) the possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use.
The Federal government would be insane to legalize drugs at the federal level even if they wanted to do that. Better to try a test out and see how it goes before doing it across the US. But, with this last election we are going to see if this experiment works by proxy of legalization in several of the states.
love the stark contrasting colors in your design. wonder how the login/vote buttons would look if they were flat like the rest of the design. too bad i already have an awesome gf (with a very similar sense of humor), i would definitely use this.
This is very good feedback. We're actually working on some Machine-Learning technology that takes all of Wikipedia's content, builds a topic model, and applies it to the 10k pieces of content that we've written over the past couple months. It will allow us to rank writers by their expertise in very granular fields (so for instance we'll be able to tell you who our best "outdoor recreational equipment" writer is). We'll provide a deeper explanation of this technology in a (hopefully less controversial) blog post in the next couple of weeks.
If you go to scripted.com the first thing you'll see is "Standard Blog Post for $49". If you click on that dropdown, you'll see pricing for every format...
From the last paragraph: "a couple writers" -> "a couple of writers"
"its completion" -> "it's completion"
It seems really important to me, that you get these sorts of things right in all your posts, even if you yourself won't be writing your prospective clients' blog posts.
It is really important. You are right. In my haste to get this product out the door this morning, I forgot to send the post to our copy-editors. I screwed up. Sorry :( I certainly won't be making that mistake again.
Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship another feature again. So I don't. I write a post like this every couple of weeks. But if we only posted every couple of weeks, a prospective client might show up to our blog, see that we hadn't posted anything recently, and think "I wonder whether they'll be as lackadaisical about customer service as they are about their blog". So we fill the gaps in our 'technical, corporate blog' with simple but engaging outsourced content. We allow you to 'set it and forget it', so that you only have to think about your blog when some crazy new topic pops into your head, and you can't control the urge to fervently hammer away at your typewriter.
I definitely understand that blogs can be ignored in favour of shipping. But I think a service like this would make me write to my blog even less, because it wouldn't feel urgent. Someone else has got it, and even if I write something brilliant, it'll get pushed off the front page in a couple days.
What would be more interesting to me is a proofing service where the content is entirely the actual owner's, but the voice and style are tuned by a professional writer. This would smooth out some idiosyncrasies (for better or worse) and make a corporate blog more approachable for customers, without compromising on quality. I imagine most people let their blog posts ferment for a few days, maybe weeks, before releasing them. Outsourcing the polishing and reflecting period would speed things up without cheapening the whole thing.
Having a small, paid audience of writers who also have a technical background to assess posts before they go out would be another way to take it.
Regardless, I suspect you guys will still kill it because there is a need for this in places where they would normally hire an intern to write the blog. Good luck!
Hey Nate. Agreed, you definitely need a bit of context regarding what exactly Scripted does in order to understand this feature. The assumption was that if someone navigated their way to our weekly offering, they probably did so after grasping the basics of our business. But by announcing this as a standalone, I can see how we introduced tons of confusion. Sorry! For what it's worth, we have many clients that give byline to their writers, and a couple of them are HN regulars!
