Congrats to ZenPayroll. We've been using them at Swiftype since early this year and they really do provide an excellent service. We love the fact that it's easy to use and inexpensive, but more than anything else, they've saved us countless hours by automating so many of the tedious details required to process our payroll. As a young company that is already time constrained, that has been huge for us.
Luke was also kind enough to send us some feedback on our API documentation that was right on. Keep an eye out for a big update and some new features coming shortly. Thanks, Luke!
I'd heard of Swiftype before but it never really clicked until this video. It's perfect for my current project and I got a basic setup integrated pretty fast.
The Mission has a pretty high concentration of young people, and a lot of the startup people I know live around there. Rent in the area may be more reasonable than elsewhere but not by much, given its popularity. If you aren't here permanently you might try the Sublets/Temporary Housing section of Craigslist - I had good luck there, and you should be able to find something for less than $500/wk.
I was referring to the price he stated in his original post (he said he didn't want to pay more than $500/wk). I'm living in the mission now and paying much less than $500/wk (but I have 4 roommates).
My point is that the major factor in the pricing of San Francisco housing is that it is one of the most desirable housing markets in the USA. With or without rent control, prices would be high because it is a relatively small city where a whole lot of people want to live.
SF has a land area of 121 km², and a population density of 6,324.4/km². (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco)
Here is a list of cities with higher population densities:
Delhi 26,276
Kolkata 24,760
Chennai 24,418
Mumbai 22,658
Bangalore 22,426
Hyderabad 21,293
Ahmedabad 19,979
Seoul 17,213
Tokyo 13,682
Wuhan 12,868
Jakarta 12,738
New York City 10,452
Tehran 10,260
Moscow 9,644
Lima 8,544
Yokohama 8,182
Lagos 7,938
São Paulo 7,148
With or without rent control, prices would be high because
If not because of rent-control laws, why does San Francisco supply not follow San Francisco demand? Did you read the William Tucker paper, linked above, that explains why?
I suspect there was a decent amount of overlap between techcrunch readers and news.yc readers prior to the article. I wonder what the spike numbers are for the yc startups that have articles written about them when they first release.
For me, this concept seems sort of at odds with the way I cook and grocery shop. I don't often find myself with a wide array of ingredients that I don't know what to do with, but I do find myself spending too much at the grocery store because I can't easily plan a week's worth of meals using some base set of ingredients. I would love a site that gave me 5 meals based around approximately the same ingredients, told me how much of each to buy, and provided information about how to store leftover ingredients and how long they will last. Of course, I know very little about cooking, so maybe I'm the one who's backwards... just my 2 cents.
I can see this idea applied to drink recipes, though. I often have 3 or 4 half-empty bottles of different types of liquor- it would be great to get a list of 10 different drinks I could make with friends. On second thought, $10 says there's already a Facebook App that does exactly that...
I'll second this recommendation - I bought the printed copy, and I'm constantly going to it for reference. The fact that it's available for free is just an added bonus.
