danssig

>Entrepreneurship is a classic "high risk, high return" venture.

Sure, for the ones investing capital. For the workers, I can't imagine startup's mean pay being anywhere near as high as a "normal" job. A mean will cut out the Zuckerbergs, Serg, Brin, etc. Also, remember you can't compare mean startup salary to mean "normal" job salary since the bulk of startups are in the valley. To get a closer estimate you'd need to give the same weight to "normal" jobs in a given area as number of starups they have there (e.g. lots in SV, some in NYC, etc.).

I wouldn't be so sure. It hasn't worked out well in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Yea, my first thought when I saw this title: "who on earth would pay to have AT&T involved in their home security. May as well just hook up a web cam pointed to your shower and be done with it.

I would say the stupidity here is any modern OS still having case sensitive file systems.

Pretty much no. There are exceptions but they fit the term "exception" nicely.

But we could try. What good does it do to lock them in a cage?

Personally, I think "deterrence" has an incredibly awful success rate. I also think that, if prisons should even exist, they should only be for physically dangerous people. Never for "money" crimes. Being locked away from society for years, your life destroyed and likely abused or even raped seems beyond "cruel and unusual" to me.

Personally I think the whole concept of prison is primitive and should be done away with. If someone is violent then they have something wrong in their head and should be treated. I know that currently asylums can be worse places than even prisons, but once we move away from this draconian "people must suffer so I can feel better about wrong in the world" strategy we can move much more focus on getting treatment and detection right.

Like Hilary Clinton getting shot at. I'm still shocked that she was let off after "well... I have those memories". That would have been the end of my political career.

I think you've clicked on the wrong site. Digg/Myspace is --------------> that way.

You're not clearing any misconceptions, you're making them. It would take a lot of research and work to discover what a "good district" is, while in western Europe you can just send your kids to school and not worry about it. Lots of states don't have any good districts at all.

Healthcare paid for by the company is the stupidest thing ever. The company is trying to save money and having them pay for health care means (a) you have little or no choice of what provider they choose and (b) you cannot be without a job ever due to the insane exposure that would put you and your family under and keeping the insurance plan you had with your employer will usually be prohibitively expensive.

Many employers just give you "catastrophic" coverage which will leave you with something like a $10k deductible (I'm serious) and if you do manage to go over that expect to take the company to court for not paying. Anecdotal but I only know two people who tested this (I'm one of them) and in both cases the insurance companies refused to pay. I sued them to get my bills paid. The other guy wasn't so lucky. Shame, he would have retired by 40 if it weren't for a surprise illness.

You can't "always" take non paid vacation. In many companies if you do that make sure you take all your stuff with you and polish your resume before you leave.

2x the salary? Not where I live. I'm above all but a Facebook/Google salary (but those are within view) and I don't know what 3/4 the social benefits you're talking about are. The US has worse roads, hostile public services (e.g. DMV, police, etc.), a horrible health care system and poor worker protections (compared to Europe). Could you break down your social benefits because I literally cannot imagine what you could possibly mean with this.

I grew up in the US and now live in Europe so I'm at least as qualified as you.

Education: Yea, get ready to pay insane prices to get in these so-called "good districts" because there are so few and everyone wants in. Realistically, you're going to have to send your kids to private school if you don't want to worry about violence and them learning anything useful. But you'll still pay for the near useless public system.

Healthcare: this is a bold faced lie. Two separate independent reports compared health care around the world and found that the US was the most expensive in the world and did not provide the best care. Where do you get your metrics? Some talking head like Hanity?

Vacation: I don't know where you work but a lot of companies seriously frown on taking unpaid leave. There is a lot of culture in the US that feels that 2 weeks is all anyone should want. When I was telling my friends about how excited I was to come to Europe and get 5 weeks vacation, one of them told me he thought that was immoral!

I worked the majority of my life in the US and I'll never go back unless it's to do a startup.

If you raise the salaries enough, people from other locations will move to take advantage of the opportunity.

More money may not get you good programmers but below market rate will absolutely get you crappy ones.

I disagree. Why do we have this idea that one needs to be at a company for 20 years? I'd love to see some company pay a million dollars a year to all employees and have a limit of, say, 5 years for working there. It would be interesting to see what effect that would have when every employee knew after 5 years of working there they never had to enter the rat race again if they didn't want to.

Oh how I wish this would be considered more! I'd be willing to take quite a beating on the rate for even a 4 day work week (4 8 hour days, not dressed up 40 hour weeks).

>and still only want to pay them 75%, then hiring will be almost impossible.

Oh hiring will still be possible, you're just going to get really crap people.

It's probably easier to rob a bank with a pencil sharpener.

In Germany they have to get a picture of the driver and the license plate. There was a famous case where a UK driver was speeding and putting a dummy in the passenger seat [1]. He couldn't be ticketed for speeding because a dummy appeared to be driving his car.

[1] Germany has Napoleon compliant highways while the UK was much more interested in resisting anything from Napoleon.

It doesn't matter. You should signal errors with exceptions, not by returning undefined no matter how much slower it is. After all, it's supposed to be an exceptional case.

The market is notoriously inefficient in hiring/working because companies work so hard to keep prices (salaries) hidden so one has a really difficult time knowing what the market value of a given skill is.

Most of western Europe, if not all, gets at least 4 weeks vacation. 40 hours is a bit more demanding but 42 is pretty common.

My experience in the midwest was that they generally have very low estimates of what anything they pay for is worth (probably because they get this idea from the lower cost of living).

He said 40 hours a week, not 8 hours a day. For example, he could end up working 20 hours for two days in a row. Or he could mean as an average. This is what I do. I may put in a 60 hour week, but I'll be taking time off where I can until I get back to a 40 hour average.

But on the other hand, you've created customers that are practically guaranteed to produce repeat business dollars.

Oops, you just projected. He said "mate" and "dorky programmers". Both of those stereotypes could mean female programmers as well so you assuming he could only mean males means that part is coming from you.

>Better half doesn't necessarily equate to girlfriend.

The original post was talking about girlfriends, so contextually it sounded like you meant girlfriend by "better half". You're a terrible spokesman for ending sexism as you seem to replace one form of ignorance for another combined with hypersensitivity (having said that, yes the original "joke" was a lame one).

Ideally companies would be making it harder or impossible to comply with sealed warrants.

Sorry that wasn't clear. Mainstream programming is what I meant (e.g. Haskell).

Yes, like a proper VM that we can compile our preferred language to. It is ridiculous that the "language of the web" is something that is forced upon us instead of chosen. The number of languages that compile to JS illustrate the point nicely.

Windows is pretty much always going to be a second class citizen once you take a half-step outside the mainstream. I would just try to "get used to it" (i.e. run Linux/Mac).

Yes, absolutely. There's a lot of money on the line, right?