throwaway729

But for not much more (and with a higher salary) you can get a decent suburban house in any number of western or eastern cities. Maybe a tad less land here or there.

And the cities are still expensive with bad schools.

And left less than 3 years ago. Not much had changed. In some ways, it got a lot worse. My perceptions aren't stuck in the past.

Again, don't believe me? Go person-by-person down your general assembly and send an email to each asking how they feel about allowing business owners the freedom to not serve LGBT people, or whether they will sponsor a bill to ban conversion therapy.

Or for that matter, ask if they support legislation to outlaw incrimination against LGBT individuals in hiring! Most midwestern states don't have such a law on the book.

And not just your representative -- all of them. Or even just yours and all from surrounding counties. After all, we wouldn't want to generalize.

> And you should feel guilty for continually shitting on a place you have no association with anymore.

Why?

I don't think the midwest is, on balance, a nice place to live. I think the cultural downsides of the region eventually bleed into your life, even if you try to cloister yourself in one of the urban liberal islands. My opinion may not be fair (I think it is, but allow the possibility that a lifetime of bad experiences was somehow unrepresentative). But it sure as hell isn't uninformed.

I think people who are considering moving to the midwest from a coastal area -- or especially from abroad -- should hear this perspective.

Also not true. Try again.

> That's not well-informed, it's just an anecdote about a crappy time spent somewhere in the country.

Multiple decades across several states. Both in cities and in non-city areas.

The argument here basically amounts to: "But hey, the densest 20% County-Containing-Major-City, ST isn't so bad, and my college educated software engineering co-workers are all pretty decent..."

And I'M the one making inaccurate generalizations about the region?!

Come off it. Take a week off work on go two counties in any direction. Or hell, to that other suburb where 30% of the metro population but none of the folks you hang out with live. Come back and tell me you still think I'm wildly out of touch.

This isn't even close to an Apples-to-Apples comparison. You should at least include Clay, Lafayette, Johnson if you're going to look at the entire Bay area.

And then looks at who's Actually In Charge of the state! The people with the power are the ones who make an actual difference, on a political level. Greitens is downright liberal compared to a lot of the general assembly.

> So in a room filled with a random ~10 people will have 2 Trump supporters in the Bay and 5 in Kansas City.

But you and I both know that's not how it actually works basically anywhere. Except maybe the DMV.

> On your visit to the Midwest

I spent decades there, in cities, burbs, and rural areas.

My experiences are representative. Perhaps, I venture to guess, much more representative than someone who never leaves Jackson County.

Spend some time in the bootheel. Or even the comparatively flaming liberal city of Springfield.

If only that were true, I'd move back to the midwest in a heart beat.

> This is not to discount any personal experience you may have had, just my opinion on the sentiment in general.

Name a "that doesn't happen here" scenario -- from blatant racial discrimination/brutality in policing to "bobby's parents sent him to pray-the-gay-away camp" -- and I experienced or directly witnessed a friend experience it before coming of age.

Whenever people shame me for being overly harsh on midwestern culture, I stop and feel guilty for a split second. Then I think back to these victims of its excesses and the guilt quickly subsides.

I firmly believe there are decent communities in the midwest. Especially in its cities. I don't doubt your or anyone else when you say you've had good experiences.

Unfortunately, that doesn't change anything about the fundamental cultural trade-winds of the aggregate region. Or the effect they have on people caught in the zip code one over.

* Chicago has a pretty decent public transit systems.

* MSP and St. Louis both have decent light rail systems for their size. Still pitiful compared to most of western Europe or Wellington (the latter due to the comparably poor bus systems in msp and stl), but also cheaper on the tax base of course. And not too shabby compared to Portland for example.

This is certainly true! To each his own. My point was that the midwest probably isn't a great place to be if you're looking for "cheaper California".

Sounds like we agree on that.

> When I lived in the Midwest, we had not only multiple gay people, but multiple gay teachers living in our neighborhood... these teachers were able to go about their business just fine and spent many years teaching at the schools

1. "Not being fired for being gay" is literally the lowest bar I can think of other that "not being imprisoned for being gay".

2. A school I attended explicitly discriminated against trans people in hiring. And those are the public schools. So, YMMV. I'm sure things have gotten better across the entire country since then, including the midwest.

3. Even without "lose your job/house" levels of hate, the world can still be a nasty place. E.g. imagine driving by this billboard every day: http://www.medina-gazette.com/news/2013/02/22/Passers-by-on-...

And of course most of the people you interact with disagree with the sign, but attend churches that teach the exact same thing. Those "midwestern nice" interactions don't feel so "nice" anymore.

> If you live in a big city like NYC or SF, you probably get exposed to more "intolerance" from contrarians/extremists who also live in big cities than someone who lives in the Midwest.

Sure. The difference is who's in charge! And that's the difference that makes a difference.

> The Midwest is a great place to be. It's extremely unfair to cast such aspersions on it.

For you. I hated it.

I think that claim is both true and demonstrable. I even suggested one empirical test.

At the very least, it's not a generalization. Saying "box a has more red gumballs than box b, so if you don't like red, choose box b" isn't the same as saying "all the gumballs in that box are red".

> You don't know what you're talking about at all.

With all due respect, I lived in the midwest long enough to have an informed opinion. Maybe our experiences differ, but mine are PERFECTLY well-informed.

I believe that you know what you're talking about. I also don't believe your experiences are perfectly representative.

I feel strongly about the midwest. I hated living there. There are serious down-sides, and if people move to Tulsa thinking it's "NZ in the USA", they're going to be in for a rough surprise.

Do you disagree?

> First, commuting refers specifically to the to-and-from of your journey to work

My point was that you're probably going to end up driving in either case, and if you have to drive anyways, your commute will suck no matter where you live.

OR, if you don't end up driving, you're actually not saving much on cost of housing. And you probably have a lower salary with which to purchase that prime real estate. Basically, little net benefit over California or other coastal states.

> You can complain about the weather and that's valid, but the whole planet isn't California and we can't all live there for one reason or another. If a bunch of people like me moved out there from the frozen/scorching wasteland of places like NYC, then you'd be priced out of the state. Be thankful that for some people weather isn't that big of a deal.

First, I don't live in California.

I agree with everything else. It's really all beside the point, though.

> Just because your family is stupid doesn't make everybody else's family stupid... So you can stop with the drive-by generalizations here - especially these undeserved "casually racist" ones.

My family isn't stupid. Pretty smart by any objective measure aside from willingness to believe confirmational bullshit, actually. Which is kind of my point. They're embedded in a terrible culture.

Look, I lived in the midwest for decades. I know what I'm talking about.

The politics of the region is dominated by this sort of stuff. It's a LOT more common and MUCH more difficult to avoid in the midwest. The composition of state houses speaks for itself. Name a midwestern state and I'll go member-by-member through its General Assembly to demonstrate to you the obscene popularity of blatant intolerance. Seriously, shoot.

It bleeds over into every aspect of life.

If you're lucky enough to be white male and straight, you can just avoid talking to people all-together, or silo yourself off from your community, and mostly ignore the terrible culture of the region. Which is what I did. But if you like living in a community where you know and respect your neighbors, the midwest can be a tough place to be.

Really only the cost of living.

> Commuting is less wearying

Not really.

There's a near zero percent chance your commute involves anything other than driving. The walkable areas of midwestern cities are certainly cheaper than SF, but they're also not exactly cheap. You're still looking at half a million for a decent house, 200k for a decent condo, and that's on a midwestern salary. Not to mention the weather.

And if you're driving, well, driving is driving.

> And American politics, “Brexit” and the Islamic State are on the other side of the world... [can be avoided] Especially if you stay off Facebook.

I mean, I guess you can just avoid talking to people altogether, but avoiding Facebook is no way to avoid the nastier parts of American populist politics in the midwest, which is decidedly Trump's America. On my last visit I learned that there are still people who very strongly believe that Obama is a Muslim and Clinton is a witch (literally, as in worships satan. I'm not exaggerating and they weren't being coy with language). And I wasn't even seeking them out, they were just the people I was obligated to spend time with.

So no, the midwest isn't some cheaper version of California. There's a reason why people like me leave after a few decades and never look back. The weather sucks, the cities are either unlivable or not appreciably cheaper, and there's a high concentration of extremely unpleasant people.

At some point you'll be able to say your Calculus lecturer was the Queen's father. Just think how different his life would've been if his daughter didn't meet the Prince at the Slip Inn bar (you can't make this stuff up).

As an aside, he put an \inf on his coat of arms.

#1 and #2 (CICD) are fair additions to Joel's list, but I'd argue are already encapsulated by "do you make daily builds?". In most shops, if you make daily builds, then you CICD.

#3 = Joel's #4

#4,#5,#8,#10,#11,#12,#14,#15 are all "Do you SCRUM/TDD?". If that's the kind of place you're looking for, great. But there are many competent code-oriented organizations that do not SCRUM. So these don't really belong on a Joel List. (Also, "We don’t know the better way to make sure that code does what it’s supposed to, then to have another code [author means unit tests] that runs it and check results" just isn't true. We know better ways, and sometimes they're even relevant to a list like this. "Do you use any form of static or dynamic analysis (e.g., types, valgrind, quick-check style tools, linters, etc.)" is on my personal "Joel Test".)

That leaves "do you have a library?". IMO work-place libraries are close to useless as signals (everyone has one), and rarely useful in practice (unless you're curious how PHP code was written in 2003 or really want to brush up on complexity theory).

As an aside, it's kind of depressing to me that we still make these lists. Back in the 90's, software engineering was still a relatively young craft with relatively few experts. Joel was part of a surprisingly small group of people who: 1) had a career's worth of experience developing software for micro-computers in high level languages; and 2) had deep and successful experiences across several organization roles in different types of organizations (coder, manager at MSFT, CEO at Fog Creek). The existence of managers who were in charge of software engineers but had no engineering experience wasn't surprising at all, given the youth of the field. Hence the Joel Test.

The world is a very different place today. There are a lot of people with this level of experience. Joel Tests aren't ubiquitous in other engineering domains, and hopefully they'll eventually die out in software as well. Not because the items on them aren't important, but because experienced Engineers manage Engineers.

First, let's dispel the absurdity that "ICE official with a critical Twitter account" == "impersonate a law enforcement officer/agency".

There's no impersonation. Everybody knows that @ALT_* is not an official channel. The entire account namespace was created specifically as a protest mechanism.

Government's claims regarding IMPERSONATION are baseless as a pure and simple matter of fact.

> They actually claim to be subversive workers within the agency.

Could the federal government have cause to fire these employees for their political speech? Perhaps.

Should we, the people, grant the government have right to infringe upon private company's property rights in order to settle petty shop politics? NO.

Government can be as petty an employer as it wants. But this ISN'T impersonation, and we SHOULDN'T sacrifice OUR liberties and property rights for the sake of fucking petty shop politics.

If law enforcement wants to track down and fire people who disagree with the chief executive, they're free to waste my tax dollars doing so. But unless they can show substantive evidence of ACTUAL impersonation, they can conduct their witch hunt without barging into our homes and offices.

Ah, makes a lot more sense. I was assuming some time in the early naughts given the school's timeline, and was disappointed I couldn't find a detailed account.

> The false resume and the firing are the parts of the story that I have personal knowledge of. The financial allegations are third hand, but I believe them to be true.

To clarify, I don't doubt this happened :)

> I've occasionally wondered whether this might be because someone took matters into their own hands, and he's dead and buried in the woods somewhere.

What a wild world we live in. Who needs television when you can read about the intrigues of failed liberal arts colleges.

I call people with doctoral degrees "Dr." unless I'm invited otherwise or we're in a non-professional setting. Doctoral degrees usually aren't mere pieces of paper; going out of one's way to diminish the work and sacrifice involved is kind of rude.

But I also think it's kind of snooty and ill-mannered to explicitly demand to be called Dr.

Like with table manners. It's rude to not be decent to other people at the table. But equally rude to snap at another guest for eating with his mouth open.

This example is kind of an in-between on the teacher's part, because socialization is part of education. Only parent knows whether the teacher was motivated by socializing skills or ego.

> Edit: It seems like a lot of HN users have a severe aversion to authority, so I guess I've learned something new today

As always, the aversion is slightly more nuanced than just authority. You'll find lots of respect for certain other positions of authority (eg CEO). Also, aversion to the hierarchy of schools is nothing unique to HN.

To this day, it's nearly impossible to find any account of these events. It's really hard to imagine that someone could commit such outright blatant theft and get away without so much as a hit on Google.

Was the con artist ever tracked down?

Math is huge. If he does have a Ph.D., he has probably forgotten more named theorems than either of us know. Banach-Tarski is one of those results that, for a pragmatic mathematician who doesn't know it's a meme-y theorem, could go in one ear and out the other.

I'd bet the average avid HN comment reader knows more about Goedel's incompleteness theorems than a big percentage of math phds.

> Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance.

That's not surprising at all. Why would a math Ph.D. have any clue what-so-ever about how to build quantitative finance software?

I'm addressing parent's concrete hypothetical -- where the person accused of theft is the ceo of the company.

> that would be his time to enter in a plea of not guilty.

I think I'm wrong here, actually :)

dragonwriter provides a compelling explanation, elsewhere in this thread, for why entering a "not guilty" plea is very different from stating "I'm not guilty" outside the context of entering a plea.

Not self driving, but ACC

I am considering GP's situation directly -- leaving a company to create a start up and then being sued.

If he didn't steal, he should say so to save his business. If he doesn't say so, he risks his business. That's the downside.

Of course, if he did steal, he should shut up and lesson #2 explicitly doesn't apply.

The present situation is different -- Levandowski's fate probably isn't tied to Uber's and certainly vice versa.

> I would hold off on taking any lessons at all until it's had a few years to work its way through the courts

I stand by the "don't steal" lesson :-)

It's super unclear to me how you would accidentally retain a copy digital documents...?

Like I said, it's hard to imagine this scenario actually happening. But for good measure:

Lesson #3: Leave work at work and startup at home.

But I have a hard time imagining a specific scenario where you're accused of IP theft and a lawyer can't find a way to say "my client is not guilty of IP theft" without compromising their client.

At the very least, at some point, the client is going to have to enter that "not guilty" plea.

In any case, I stand by my lesson: avoid actions that lead to situations where these distinctions matter.

Avoiding an injunction against your business.

I'm not a lawyer, but Alsup is, and he states as much in an abundantly clear tongue lashing of Uber's lawyers:

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3533784-Waymo-Uber-3-...

Sorry, but I don't buy it. Of course you should talk to lawyers first, just as Levandowski did.

But at some point, if you're truly innocent, I'm sure the best lawyers in the business could find a way for you to say "I'm not guilty" without hurting yourself.

Which is exactly what Levandowski did. And then, under advice from his lawyer, he plead the fifth.

> Pleading the fifth is expressly not an admission of guilt

In criminal cases.

In civil cases, you can still plead the fifth without facing contempt. But the jury is free to draw its own conclusions. As is the judge. If you don't believe me, see the transcription of Alsup's tounge lashing.