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starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

Just a comment about where to live...

If you work until midnight every night and you've got the dough, it's probably worth paying extra to live near work. Commuting from Queens to Wall Street would totally suck, especially if you're putting in long hours.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

I felt the same way and I moved (back) to NYC after 10 years in SF. The city has changed a bit. There are a lot of things to do outside the tech sector. However, I'm not sure I would say "art and literature and culture matter" as much as they seemed to in the past. Manhattan is nearly 100% yuppified now. this is good and bad. It's good in that the whole left coast of Manhattan is now a giant urban park. There are bike lanes everywhere. There are parks everywhere. There's a farmer's market in Union Square every (other?) day. There are free things like movies on the pier, concerts in the park, etc. I saw Dinosaur Jr. for free in central park last summer (?!). It's probably easier to eat healthy food in NYC than anywhere else in the world.

The bad things (IMHO) is that there aren't as many interestingly weird music or arts things as there were even 10, 15 years ago. There are no nightclubs. There are no weird music venues in Manhattan. The most avante-garde you are going to get is a band like Grizzly Bear... which is kind of avante-garde but is also a huge national act at the same time. Artists have to live way out in Bushwick, or even further away. I don't really know where interesting art shows go up. I honestly think the number of actual practicing artists and musicians is probably the smallest it has ever been. The indie gallery scene isn't a lot better than SF. There are probably more bookstores in either Seattle or Portland than there are in all of the NYC area, which says something... I'm not sure what.

So I won't lie... I was disappointed in the state of artsy-fartsy music and culture when I returned to NYC. But I do like all this other urban parkland paradise stuff. So it's a tradeoff. I don't really know where people are doing interesting art and music stuff... maybe berlin or beijing? I know a lot of artists who moved to LA simply because it's easier to get a lot of space. Even Jeff Dietch moved there.

If you're looking for something like Andy Warhol's factory scene, I don't think it's happening here. If you're looking for a girlfriend who is a graphic designer for Kate Spade's website - it's your best bet.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

No idea. Personally, I hate DUMBO and find it very inconvenient (from elsewhere in Brooklyn), but I know maybe a dozen hacker types who live over there.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

It makes NYC sound like a scene from Gossip Girl meets American Psycho.

Wow, that comment really nailed it.

starkfiston This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

Considering they were born between 1901 and 1924, the Greatest Generation is mostly dead.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

The greater "tech scene" (if you can call it that) in Brooklyn is in and around Dumbo and Downtown.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

I also live over there and pay $1500 for a big place (by NYC standards) two people could easily split.

starkfiston This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

Interesting, I guess I wasn't aware that was question anyone cared about. Keeping in character with the 2nd greatest generation (X), I certainly don't.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

Everyone in NYC besides bankers have been getting their apartments from craigslist since 1998. And, you can get a 500sq foot 1bdrm in battery park city for $1800.

starkfiston New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what the VCs say

He's right about a lot of things. The cafe scene in NYC isn't as good as the west coast. Apartments are very expensive. Debutantes from Bryn Mawr want to date successful traders. And the startup scene in SF/SV is slowly but surely turning into a bunch of ex-banker foodie cocks from NYC.

starkfiston This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

"The Greatest Generation" refers to the parents of the baby boomers.

starkfiston Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students

I looked into teaching math at a California community college and the pay was just under $2000 per course. A course was either 3 or 4 credits. $8K for 15 credit-hours worth of teaching in Indiana sounds about right. When my sister was an adjunct faculty at a big state school she made $17K a year.

starkfiston Rethinking 'Fuck You' money

I can't figure out his math, either. In his second example, if you put $4M in a bank account that gets 2%, and can still save $10K a year you'll have $7.6 mil in 30 years. If you can get 8% (which I think you can, all arguments to the contrary) you will have $41M. Maybe he just means once you get the cash, you quit your job, put the money under the mattress and spend it all?

starkfiston “Good On Video” Is The New “Good On Paper” With HireHive (YC S10)

What are the key attributes that come across on video?

starkfiston “Good On Video” Is The New “Good On Paper” With HireHive (YC S10)

it's actually, for me, the most important part of the application while reviewing it.

why?

starkfiston Ask HN: Best Startup City - Outside the USA?

Along with the "young" startuppy atmosphere and skillset is the commensurate payscale. It's cheaper than other cities and provinces to hire people, especially programmers. From everything I've read so far about the city, I think starting out is around 45k, then sr. positions is 60, and tops right out at around 70k for level IV guru coders. So, it's definitely not the Valley in terms of developer salaries.

The corollary is that the great programmers in Vancouver all move to the USA so that they can get paid effectively double what they would make in Vancouver. If you're good, it's also very easy on a TN-1. (I've worked with a couple dozen programmers from BC (Vancouver, Victoria) throughout my career)

starkfiston Ask HN: What technologies do you use in your startup?

Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale?

yeah - friendster.

starkfiston Your Code Sucks

It's a great marketing strategy for the second-opinion consultant, though. I actually have been in this exact position. I entered into an ill-concieved "startup" project with someone who I considered a friend. It was a specialized e-commerce app that involved interfacing with some proprietary mainframe systems I had never worked with before. He thought I was taking too long so he hired some random guy from the internet to review my code. The guy said my code sucked... then turned around and said he would fix it, for about triple what I was charging. This sort of ended the business relationship (and friendship) between myself and the other founder. My old partner ended up hiring the other guy and paying the 3x rate, and the guy didn't even work on the hard part, interfacing with the mainframe! It ended poorly for me, but I learned a lot about how to market yourself as a consultant from the other guy: charge a lot, say the working code sucks and needs to be rewritten, avoid doing anything with a large technical risk, etc.

starkfiston College Grads, Here’s How to Become Millionaires

I am in the same position. I lived like a pauper for 5 years, saving all my money. Then most of it got wiped out by a medical emergency. Now I just maximize my income and quality of life. I spend way more money than I used to, yet have also saved up about twice as much as I previously had. I do not recommend the "scrimp and save" approach. As always, YMMV.

starkfiston Stop abusing tabs. Love, Firefox

I have nothing to add to this conversation. However, I have to say that the comments about having tabs open for years, or hundreds of tabs open at once, make me a bit nervous. Like when I use someone else's computer and they have thousands of files on the desktop. I usually just slowly back away.

starkfiston Krugman's take on high frequency trading

I don't know. People on HN talk about this dichotomy between the value producing Silicon Valley startups, and the valueless of activities like HFT stock trading. In my mind, in most cases, it's not so clear.

I worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years. Many of the projects I worked on had negative financial value - they never made any money. So essentially I was just wasting some rich person's money. The projects that were successful in terms of users and "eyeballs" often had negative social value. The whole point was to induce users to spend more and more time on our sites. Finally, some of the things going on right now in startup-land are quite frankly, creepy. The last project I did in Silicon Valley involved working with all these vendors who essentially are building up dossiers of every human who uses the internet and shopping it around as "market data." When I realized I was basically contributing to a surveillance state, I quit and moved to Manhattan, where at least I'm only fucking around with rich people's money, instead of fucking around with people's lives.

starkfiston High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

Thanks for the insight.

I have an interview at one of the NYC prop shops, but it's for something more back office-y. Would it be a mistake to take this job, thinking I could move into something closer to the trading later? I've got mixed advice. Some people say it isn't too hard to shift, others say it's impossible.

starkfiston High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay

If you're a good C++ programmer with a mathematics degree, what else do you need to know to get into work like this?

Is it worth taking "MFE" style classes, like the ones offered at Baruch and NYU? Are the systems Windows or Unix? How much "advanced" math do you need to know? How much high performance infrastructure do you need to know? (networking, specialized storage & I/O, etc.) Is there a way to go directly to a startup firm, rather than first working at a bank or larger hedge fund? Are languages other than C++ used? Is it easier to do this in New York or Chicago? What bars should I hang out at in order to bullshit my way into an interview or partnership?

starkfiston Ask HN: is it better to have work experience before starting a startup?

If only I could turn back time...

starkfiston What's Wrong With the American University System

I found this article interesting, and agree with many of his points, but I disagree with the premise, that there is anything wrong with the american university system. There are so many options and so much variety in higher education that you can get almost any college experience you want in America. And if you think it's all too expensive or nothing is really up your alley, you don't have to go at all. If anything needs to be fixed it is high school, but that's so broken I wouldn't even know where to begin.

starkfiston Ask HN: is it better to have work experience before starting a startup?

I'm late to this. But in my experience you should start up your company while you can live with your parents. Don't bother with working for someone else's startup. Also, the 120-150 person mark is a really bad time. You have all the chaos and long hours of a startup, but all the weird political lameness of a big company at the same time.

starkfiston IPhone to Droid X: Impressions of a Data Pig

I don't think it is widely used by anyone in that context. The guy I know who said it was joking around.

starkfiston What's Wrong With the American University System

I went to one of the small liberal arts schools the authors of the book favor.

Many of them have a 3-2 arrangement with an engineering school. You take the more general science and math courses at the liberal arts school, then 2 years of engineering classes at the engineering school.

starkfiston Do Good Kindergarten Teachers Really Raise their Pupils’ Wages?

An extra 20 bucks an hour is $120K instead of $80K, which is kind of a big deal. The last line of the article is actually:

"Even if the new study is right on the ball, it’s only an extra twenty bucks a week."

starkfiston IPhone to Droid X: Impressions of a Data Pig

The only person I've ever heard use the word "niggle" to describe an african american baby was an african american adult. In fact the "n bomb" itself is now mostly used by black people, with guidos and rednecks following far behind.