1,837 karma · joined December 28, 2020
But some sites that you would want to use this service for explicitly block it (e.g, Bloomberg seems to do this). There's also a small number of other sites that I've had problems with.
Sometimes the customer support is mediocre.
All markets are overvalued by virtually any historical metric. At least if you take the -6% real hit, at least you can know and predict what the hit is.
The problem with H1B visas (at least when I was a manager) was that there was a quota and it was about 3x oversubscribed: so most applicants won't get the visa. (There is a separate queue for people with an MS degree from a US university, but it sounds like that doesn't apply for you).
Have you considered just using a TN-1 visa to get started and then trying to switch to a H1B every year until you pass the lottery? That should make you eligible for employment right away. I think the downside to TN-1 is that it's not considered an immigrant visa, so you can't transition to permanent residency, which is why you would want to continue to transition to H1B once you've gotten employed.
(Interested in what others have to say: maybe my opinion is out-of-date. IANAL.)
Regarding states: the best salaries are in Silicon Valley, obviously, but the taxes and living expenses there are high. If I were looking for work, I'd go to Austin, Texas. The salaries aren't as high but there are still a lot of tech employers and there is no state income tax. You might also consider the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina.
At one point, the phone line I used with my modem would have a long delay between the time I picked up and the time I got a dial tone, and the connection afterward would be weak, noisy and attenuated. I'd even get bad packets over the Ymodem file transfer protocol.
I asked some of my hacker friends if my phone was being tapped by the companies I was stealing long distance service from. One of them knew the number of a department of a department at Pacific Bell (my local phone provider) that handled investigating illegal taps. These companies would tap the lines of people that they suspected were stealing service without getting the required warrant just because they had the capability to do s.
So I called that number and asked them to see if my phone was being illegally tapped. One of the first things they asked me was, "are you calling from the line you think is tapped?" I told them I was, and they explained that in doing so I revealed my hand to whoever was tapping me.
The very next phone call my modem made was back to normal without the noise, delay and attenuation.
I estimate that I made $50,000 to $100,000 in illegal phone charges. I was calling other computers all over the world. This was back when calling Europe or Oz from the USA could cost $10 per minute or something insane.
I never got busted. But I knew some people who had. I think I was getting close to getting busted but it never happened.
I went on to have a very successful career in Silicon Valley.
Similarly, the situation in Kazakhstan is stable because they are a vassal state of Russia. Watch what happened when there was the beginning of a color revolution there earlier this year: Russian quickly sent troops to assist the Kazakh government in violently putting it down. If a successful color revolution was to happen in Kazakhstan (unlikely), Russia would be playing the same military games with them that they are now doing with Ukraine.
I remember one guy who would always show up in a Porsche 914 with racing tires, and he would run circles around us amateurs.
A similar effort by Kazakhstan a few years ago was shot down by the major browsers.
My worst day of retirement was better than my best day of working or education.
But integrating crypto makes me nervous. It seems like they are likely to come under regulatory attack from regimes that don't like crypto. Signal's actions here seem kind of tone-deaf to the needs of their userbase.
I always hope that Threema will get more attention, but since it's not free I guess it has no chance.
That would be the most painful part of all this for me. If I were forming a startup, I don't think I would consider pairing with someone non-technical. My personal idea of hell is having a bunch of marketing people spew buzzwords while I write and debug all the code.
The banks know where the commercial mailing/forwarding services are. They somehow keep a database of them. They're fine with you using a mail forwarding service as a mailing address, but they will want to see a residential address where you live. If you can't show a residential address in the United States, banks and brokers can and will freeze or close your account.
I've learned my lesson. Pro tip: never tell the banks that you're living abroad. You're always taking an extended vacation. And always have a trusted friend or family member whose residential address you can use in the United States even if all your physical mail gets sent to your mail forwarding service.
https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/043091431_202006_990_...
[1] https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/043091431_202006_990_...
But there are great subreddits. (pro tip: none of them are the default subreddits.)
If you want to go discuss controversial topics, reddit is like being in a room of screaming and raving lunatics.
If you go a subreddit about 3D printers, or a particular city, or some niche hobby, there are awesome, well-moderated subreddits where the participants are civil and constructive.
But at the moment, the whole thing is down! I've been trying to read this page for twenty minutes and I keep getting a 503 error.
Perhaps WSJ is hosting on AWS, which is partially down:
https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/console/home
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29473630
EDIT: seems to be back up now after an hour or so
Like the parent comment, I was also surprised that LA was considered more expensive than SF.
I got an engineering degree but I rarely hung out with the other STEM majors. I hung out with English, philosophy, and other non-STEM people. I also got involved in some other non-STEM related campus organizations. They were way more fun and threw interesting parties. I had way more interesting discussions with them.
tl;dr: man with straw man argument knocks down straw man
Blockchains are a great idea but some problems are better solved by the brick-and-mortar legal system.
If you have any talent at all, reaching out through your professional network is the way to go.
The problem with it is that there is no easy way for anyone who is willing to pay a thousandth of a cent to send an email to someone to pay it. Despite how much the internet has boomed in the last thirty years, there is still no good way for individual consumers to send and receive micropayments worldwide.