1,979 karma · joined September 5, 2007
Do startups generally pay below market? Yes. Is finance even more lucrative? Yes. But you certainly won't be "unemployed", as you suggested, if you don't work in finance.
If you refuse to work for finance in, say, NYC, then
you'll be unemployed often because that's a lot of what's
out there.
List of tech companies in NYC: http://nytm.org/made-in-nyc/grid
Map of tech companies in NYC: http://mappedinny.com/
Further, I don't know what you mean by "easy living", but Spain was more fiscally responsible than even Germany before the crisis. Spain's deficits are not the result of irresponsible borrowing and spending (as in Greece), but rather of a collapsed economy because the investment money (mostly German, etc) that flooded the country before the crisis evaporated just as quickly after the crisis.
I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with your Euro rant, bu Krugman has been calling the Euro a bad idea since at least 1998. http://www.pkarchive.org/global/tag.html
Section 3 forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.
Section 2 says states are not required to recognize the same-sex marriages of other states.
The full-faith-and-credit clause of the Constitution gives Congress the power to "prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof", so it's very unlikely that Section 2 will be ruled unconstitutional.
If you ask someone coming from ML or Haskell, Scala is more "FP" than Clojure.
If you ask someone coming from Lisp, Clojure is more "FP" than Scala.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you call it. Pick your tools based on what they do, not on what other people call them.
I moved to the U.S. in the Fall of 2003 (nine and a half years ago!), to enroll as an undergraduate at Stanford University. I graduated in 2007, and have since worked as a software engineer at several high-profile tech companies. I was an instructor for a class at Stanford. I've spoken at many technical conferences and meetups. I've been asked to review technical books and have received inquiries from publishers about authoring technical books (but declined). I've created and contributed to many open source projects. I've never been convicted of a crime. I make a six figure salary. I pay my rent, my bills, and my taxes. Thankfully, I've been able to get student visas and work visas to allow me to do all this.
However, even after nine-and-a-half years of this, I am not a single day closer to having a permanent legal status in the U.S. than I was the day I arrived for college. In fact, if I applied for a green card today, I could get deported. and denied entry to the U.S. for the next ten years[1]. Why? Because my current visa status is a "non-immigrant visa", and showing "immigrant intent" (such as applying for a green card) would be a violation of my visa status.
I'm even in a long-term committed relationship with a U.S. citizen (4.5 years now), but disclosing this to an immigration official could also get me deported. Why? Because it's a same-sex relationship, which the federal government is forbidden from recognizing for immigration purposes by the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), so my partner cannot sponsor me for a green card. Yet the mere existence of such a long relationship could be construed by an immigration officer as "immigrant intent" and a violation of my visa status.
But I have a great, well-paying job with an employer that appreciates me and wishes for my continued stay in the country, surely I should be able to get an employer-sponsored green card? Well...
First, I would have to change my visa status, because my current visa status doesn't allow me to apply for a green card.
Second, the green card process is expensive. Tens of thousands of dollars in government fees and lawyers' fees. I would gladly pay the money (it's worth it), but that would be illegal. My employer has to pay. They can't deduct it from my wages, that would be illegal. They can't pay me a lower salary than my fair market salary, that would be illegal.
Third, the green card process is complicated. My employer has to post a job opening and advertise it widely. (Like, in newspapers. Yes, newspapers.) They would have to interview candidates to fill this opening who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents. They would have to find that all these candidates are unsuitable for the job opening. They would have to thoroughly document this process.
Fourth, the green card process takes a long time. Even after all this, there's a lot more waiting. As a Mexican national, software engineer, with a bachelor's degree from Stanford, assuming everything I described above went swimmingly and I've managed not to get deported, it would probably take me another ten years of waiting before being granted that green card.
Oh, and in the mean time... I can't quit my job. If I do, I get to start all over again. (When was the last time you spent 10 years at a single employer?) Every time I cross the border I'm treated like cattle (if I'm lucky) or a terrorist (if I'm not). Every time I renew a visa I'm treated like I'm trying to defraud the U.S. government. Every time I renew a visa I have to deal with the worst bureaucratic nightmare you've ever imagined. You can be given an appointment at a consulate for a specific time (9:10am), and yet have to wait outside in line for hours. I've waited in 120F heat. I've waited in rain. You're not allowed to bring cellphones, car keys, or even wallets into the consulate. (But how do I get home? They don't care. How do I let someone know to pick me up? They don't care. How long will it take? They don't know, and they don't care.) Each individual immigration or consular officer has total discretion to deal with my case. If that individual is having a bad day and doesn't like the look of me, they can deny me a visa or entry into the U.S. and make it basically impossible for me to ever get a visa or be allowed entry in the future. If that happened, I would have no ability to appeal to the U.S. judicial system. (There are separate "immigration courts" set up under the executive branch, where due process is laughable.)
And yet I'm among the lucky ones. I've been privileged to study at great schools, work in great companies, in a growing field that is in high demand. Most people don't get it this easy.
[1] Denied entry under _any_ visa. I couldn't work in the U.S., I couldn't study in the U.S., I couldn't visit family in the U.S., I couldn't vacation in the U.S., I couldn't even wait in a U.S. airport for an hour before getting on a connecting flight.
http://allthingsd.com/20130125/keith-rabois-long-statement-o...
Nate Silver's model gave Obama a 79% chance to win Virginia, and predicted that the vote share would be Obama 50.7% - 48.7% Romney. He predicted that the election would be close, but with high confidence would favor Obama.
The actual vote share was Obama 50.8% - 47.8% Romney, so if anything Silver's model predicted a narrower outcome than actually happened. Given the available evidence, the model might have underestimated Obama's probability of winning.
Yeah, our SoHo office had no power for almost all of last week. We managed to find temporary office space in Midtown to work out of.
Most of the work for venue ratings was done before the storm though. We've been testing the product internally for a few weeks now. That said, a lot of people were getting work done even from our displaced office space.
(That said, the venue ratings product we announced today is globally consistent: everyone will see the same rating for a given place. Our Explore product, however, does make personalized recommendations.)
There is currently no way to explicitly rate a venue on Foursquare.
And there's definitely manual rules for offices, homes, airports, and other categories that receive disproportionate numbers of check-ins.
The iOS background location APIs are so restrictive precisely so that you can't drain the battery. The OS, which is running anyway, can listen for major changes in location and start your app only if the location change is relevant to your application.
On Android, your app has to be running in the background always, to constantly check for such changes itself, which significantly drains the battery. If several such apps are running...
(As an aside, said ecosystem is going through something of a renaissance. The quickly growing need for server-side software (where choice of tools need not impact the end user), the increased availability of low-level infrastructure such as the JVM and LLVM, and the ever-more-important challenges of concurrent and distributed programming have all contributed to this renewed interest in new programming languages.)
If Alex is going to spend his time working on things related to programming languages and developer tools, then I, for one, can't wait.
Re decac, I had been periodically checking the bitbucket repo, but now I see that development is happening on Google Code. And it looks like this has a working compiler again, which is quite exciting. Can't wait to play with this again.
Also, does this mean you're resuming work on decac?
You live, you learn.