jeffFrom18F

The advertised battery life appeals to me, if it does indeed work as advertised. I have a 3-year-old Oryx Pro, which I probably over-indexed on performance on. Everything about it is great with the exception of the battery life which is usually < 1 hour (surfing the net or programming, nothing crazy). I would have gone with a different offering if I had known this.

Probably being wildly naive here, but wouldn't it be better if there were an open-source solution for this sort of thing that could be used by both parties?

It really comes down to the money.

I don't want to live in the Bay Area, I find almost nothing I like about it--with one exception: 2-5x what you are going to make in most other cities for work that is often easier.

Almost any city in the Northeast and large parts of the Midwest have better transportation and housing.

Somewhat related: The Youtube algorithm also recently lead me to this Japanese musician I wasn't familiar with: (Ryo Fukui - A letter from slowboat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVV_z1lBNLo

Sounds like it would go really well with winter.

If SO was just about maintaining the community and running a useful Q&A site then it would be very strange that Sara Chipps still has a job right now.

I can only guess it's because there is something else going on with SO the business and she is executing exactly according to plan.

I hope Stripe and similar companies that are mostly SF-based plan on more expansion to San Jose. There is an article practically every day in the Mercury News about some new office or residential site that is coming soon.

They can't move their HQ at this point for reasons others have mentioned.

It does seem like they are taking a balanced strategy, however. I remember a story a few months ago about how their latest team is all-remote. They might have better incentives to open more offices in lower-cost locales after going public (see Uber's new Dallas plans for example).

> decent public transportation

Nope

For me, it's the somewhat selfish but defensible idea that open source is a good way to get experience with technologies that I don't get to use in my day job. I get some amount of pride in seeing my name in release notes etc but that is about it, I don't do Twitter, don't have followers, and am not high-profile in any way.

I realize a university is not going to pay in-line with a FAANG company, but I am surprised somewhere like Columbia which is definitely not hurting for money doesn't pay at least a little bit more than this, like 110-130.

I have noticed that LinkedIn added a lot of addiction-forming "hooks" in the last year (maybe a little longer?), similar to other social networks. The most prominent among these that "liking" will repost to your connections' timeline.

I don't have a problem with this necessarily; after you have worked a while and have several hundred connections+ it is a great way to keep up with what people are doing, so long as they are posting something substantial (new job, press release, etc) and not reposts of empty quotes about innovation from Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Vishnepolsky, etc.

I usually unfollow rather than disconnect. Disconnecting means I don't want to have anything to do with this person professionally, and you never know when a connection to someone might be useful.

I was going to make a reference to "Hardcore Visual Basic" but you beat me to it. Fantastic book, it's hard to find a tech book that is that useful and fun at the same time.

My first job started out with mostly Visual Basic 6. One of the modules written in VC++ by a bunch of guys who were looking to get that on their resume (they had since departed). It probably should have just been in VB as well and was always a nightmare to debug and enhance.

Once .net was prominent we mostly moved to C#. There didn't seem to be much of a reason to go with VB.Net, C# seemed more "legitimate" and without the hassles of Visual C++/MFC.

Decades later and I still find myself writing an Excel macro in VBA now and then but I've largely moved on.

Lunch/beer are certainly above nat'l average, but they do not cost that much in the bay area. It's mostly the housing (Childcare also up there).

I've had a lot of similar thoughts. If VCs here want to tell their startups they have to be here, that's one thing, but I don't see why some of the tech mega-corps don't open more offices with a few hundred positions in places across the country. A few MBA-types I've talked to told me that just won't work but they didn't offer much of an explanation beyond some mumblings about looking for "only the best talent".

This is why I'm looking with anticipation at the plans to develop downtown San Jose. Nothing is "sacred" there, so you avoid all these discussions and get on with building.

Hard to say what the peak is? I arrived here in 2015 and things seem overheated, but prices have just continued to climb. The tax changes seem like they should have dampened things but they haven't too much.

The last two bullet points resonated with me. Every now and then I have some free time I try to answer some questions. You can actually learn new things by doing this, even if it's just by observing the "weird" way someone tried to solve something and where it went wrong.

However, most of the time is spent just finding a good question to answer. A lot of the bad questions are people asking you to do their homework or something hopelessly vague ("How can I create my own games?" or something like that).

While nobody should be treated with disrespect, I wish people would keep these issues in mind when mods act with a heavy hand in closing questions.

I've enjoyed the keyboard on my System76 laptop. Granted that's a special case since they're not for everyone (Linux-focused).

I've found most laptop keyboards at least adequate, the MacBook that I'm forced to use for work is the first one that is objectively terrible. I've been told the ones <= 2015 were better in the keyboard department.

> Coming to the bay to live far from SF? What's the point?

1. Most of the BigCos are in the south bay and riding a bus an hour+ gets old after a while. 2. I'm guessing you don't have kids?

It's too bad the author started the article with that line.. I almost stopped reading right there. "Smart" people move here because it's relatively easy to get hired at a job that pays six figures even for the relatively inexperienced. The closing line about "lovely houses" was also a stretch. More like million dollar tract housing.

In between though, the article had a lot of interesting points.

Maybe a little off topic, but I find it funny how big a deal people make about going to tech conferences. I never got it.

For context, I'm 37. I watch conference topics on topics I find interesting but they're often just mildly informative, definitely not the type of thing I'm going to travel halfway across the planet to see live. A lot of the time it seems to be more about making a name for the person or the company they work for. It seems the number and prominence of tech conferences has exploded in the past few years, I don't even remember hearing about these at all when I started out (mid-00s).

I've been using Linux in some form for about 20 years (starting with Slackware), and use it as my default at home for the last few years now. I also just mostly run stock Ubuntu these days. I had some issues running a "headless" system that I only logged into remotely a few years back which required tinkering with config files that I would have rather avoided, but even that seems to have mostly ironed itself out now. I mostly just use Super+left and Super+right for laying out windows, nothing fancy there. Makes it very easy to have your "input" (editor/IDE) on left and "output" (browser or terminal) on right.

Google Inbox? I'm a paying user of corporate Gmail/GSuite and this is a pending disaster for me. They keep asserting that the "new improved" Gmail offers all the needed functionality but it simply does not.

I used Excel for several years, mostly doing development work for financial services companies. I now work at a small/medium-size tech company that uses Google Sheets. Sheets is fine for most of the things we need to do, but our needs are modest. Sheets' overall functionality pales in comparison to Excel, and it often feels laggy even on a good network.

The finance companies I mention above also had data warehouses, but that's a completely different use case and not what Excel is used for. It would not work as a replacement even if everyone knew SQL.

Overall it's a sprawly mess (like most of the rest of the area), but there are a few cool hidden gems, like Alum Rock park or the rose garden. Good museums for kids.

Sorry.. my mistake I meant to write The Fifth Season. I probably won't read the rest of the trilogy. I've edited my original post.

Best:

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

The Great Alone - Kristin Hannah

Disappointments:

The Fifth Season - NK Jemisin - gimmicky nonsense. I realize I'm in the minority.

Autonomous - Annalee Newitz - This guy falls in love with a robot that is basically being described as in the shape of a refrigerator, among other things. I couldn't get over how stupid it all was.

Some I haven't seen mentioned yet:

The Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers; This seems to have been mostly under the radar but it was immensely entertaining and gives a look inside Yemen that is hard to come by. Probably my favorite book of the year.

Tailspin - Steven Brill; A look at how the split and interaction between business and government became so dysfunctional over the last 50 years. This topic has been covered elsewhere but I thought was done well.

Behemoth - Joshua B. Freeman; A history of (very large) factories.

Live Work Work Work Die - Corey Pein; A very cynical but funny look at life/work in Silicon Valley.

Two Sisters - Asne Seierstad; A story about 2 young Somalian immigrants to Norway who move to Syria to join ISIS.

Also: Bad Blood

Read in 2018 but published earlier: Black Edge - Sheelah Kolhatkar; The Solace of Open Spaces - Gretel Ehrlich; American Cornball - Christopher Miller

I'd say far from perfectly feasible. I looked at the prospect of commuting from South Bay into San Francisco. In isolation a "Baby Bullet" sounds feasible, (45-60 mins), but there are only so many of those, and they of course don't drop you at the door of your office. So the end result looked something like showing up to the station at 7 AM to get on a standing room only train, then needing to cobble together the rest of your commute via bike/rent-a-scooter/Uber whatever to show up anywhere reasonably close to 9. Then doing the reverse on the way back!