1,077 karma · joined October 20, 2008
About: https://cody.ebberson.com/
The government's motive is oil, money, growth in scope, etc.
The government's justification is terrorism. So this conversation is absolutely related to terrorism.
Awareness of that difference is important. Articles like this are key to promoting awareness.
The problems start simple, which is perfect for the "learn the syntax" / "learn the tools" phase.
Then the problems get harder, which is perfect for the "learn the advanced features" / "learn about the community" phase.
However, your specific example (printers) is outdated. Both Linux and OSX use CUPS, which was acquired by Apple in 2007. Linux printer support is pretty spectacular these days.
I'm from a modest background in the Midwest. My first tech job was in Seattle (better than SV, but still not "cheap"). I then lived in Beijing, Boston, and Manila before coming to SV. I spent 1 year in Palo Alto, and now 2 years in San Francisco.
I was originally VERY against it. My wife basically dragged me here kicking and screaming. I've always thought of Silicon Valley as this giant bug zapper, where people are lured in by the promise of extreme success, and then get zapped by a culture of 95% failure at startups.
Now I'm a huge fan. Here are the main two reasons:
1) First, a mitigating factor. The salaries are actually pretty well adjusted for cost of living. You're getting a fair deal compared to other tech cities. Market forces are doing just fine.
2) The number of people in tech here is simply unparalleled. Head and shoulders better than any other city on the planet. That might not seem important, but it is surprisingly powerful. You have access to a huge network of people. Whether you're trying to get a job at big co, or doing a startup, access to a network of people turns out to be a significant contributor to success.
PG's essay on SV is spot on. I scoffed when I first read it, but he is right. (http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)
The main problems as mentioned by the original article:
1) Homelessness – IMO, this is due to lack of proper institutions for mental illness and substance abuse, not housing. SF is a ridiculously liberal city, and there is plenty of low income housing.
2) Real estate prices – If you are buying a home today, it is very painful. However, due to CA's limited growth property taxes, it is quite affordable for the majority of residents who have been living here for life. That results in a clever form of progressive taxation.
For any recreational/social purpose, what's the point of requiring legal name? How many "John Smith"s are there in the world?
I have contributed to open source before. I often have time/energy to write the original patch, but not enough to write tests and whatnot. Rather than feeling good about my contribution, I typically feel guilty about not supporting the change as much as I should. That feeling of guilt leads to hesitation every time I see an opportunity to contribute.
tl;dr: laziness
Pros:
* Cheap -- You can make it as cheap as you want. You can get down to $100-$200 per month if you're aggressive. But understand that you won't have the western lifestyle that you're used to. If you want a nice western kitchen, bathroom, consistent electricity, consistent bandwidth, then you're going to pay more and more. I found a sweetspot of about $1k/month total expenses.
* Quality of living -- this is related to cost. You can have a full time maid, driver, etc. It's totally normal, totally acceptable, and improves mental health significantly.
* Tropical weather, access to many travel destinations
Cons:
* Far from family and friends
* Lots of business travel -- If you have customers in the U.S. or Europe, inevitably you're going to end up traveling there frequently. This bothers some people more than others. It really wore me down.
* Difficult hiring environment -- It can be really hard to find top tier talent. Either be patient, or be willing to pay above market rates.
* Weak legal system -- As you achieve success, you will unfortunately become target of occasional shady behavior. For example, an accountant who skims petty cash, or a server admin who locks you out of your own servers. In the U.S., those risks are mitigated by a good legal system (and background checks, credit agencies, reliable postal system, etc). In developing countries, you are largely on your own. That can lead to a feeling of helplessness. Toughen up. Hire lawyers.
Non-cons:
* Taxes -- Yes, international taxes are complicated; however, you can easily afford local legal services to handle everything.
* Foreign bank accounts -- Not as scary as FACTA sounds. Hire a good U.S. accountant to do your taxes.
We had a U.S. LLC and local entity in the Philippines. Doing business as a U.S. entity is 1000x easier (think about payments, collections, legal services, etc). Have a local entinty for all local staff and your office.
The Philippines, like many developing countries, has many special government programs to encourage entrepreneurship. For example, we were in a program that granted a 5-year tax holiday and special visas for "job creators".
It kills me that Google, owner of Youtube, would not directly integrate Youtube and Google Music. I can only assume this is once again a limitation imposed by the RIAA. Sigh.
If you have a completely plain vanilla document -- no formatting, no line breaks, no headers, no footers, no tables, nothing -- then OpenOffice/LibreOffice's tracking is good enough. But documents are rarely that simple. And, unfortunately, your lawyer or VC or potential acquirer really isn't interested in discussions about document formats. They have better things to do, and they expect you to be able to communicate with them.
I'm not quite as pessimistic. These are solvable problems. It's just taking a really long time.
Put another way... Which would you view as the better engineering investment: refactoring/rewriting code with these new models of C++ --or-- investing in porting to a managed environment such as C# or Python or <insert language here>?
I confess I'm a purist. I miss Good Old Fashioned C++. This feels like lipstick on a pig. Actually, it's worse than that. It feels like my 60 year old mother trying to dress up in skimpy clothes intended for teenage girls. I just wish she would accept who she is.
Most simplified characters can be explained with a handful of strokes. Furthermore, many of them can be broken down into "radicals" which are commonly repeated patterns.
Most of us hate this kind of stuff. I know I do. It's super annoying. Furthermore, as a game developer, it would kill me a little bit to "sell out" like that.
However, this is why Zynga is worth a bazillion dollars. They understand the power of "virals". Have you ever talked to a Zynga employee? "Virals virals virals". They are one of the few companies who really understand the power of converting social pressure into profit.
If you want to pay for a higher end option, Avaya is a common choice. They power many companies (including huge call centers) all over the world.
Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is all nonsense.
Instead, Nokia wants to control the stack. That means having an integrated hardware + software solution. That creates real competitive advantage, which creates real profits. Apple has 25% margins. Dell has single digit margins.
Why Can’t the I.R.S. Help Fill in the Blanks? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/business/24digi.html?_r=1
Intuit's end-run http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/21/opinion/la-oe-ventry...
I do love my N900. Coincidentally, I just started getting into app development the past few weeks. No SDK for Windows or OSX? Seriously? The SDK only works on specific versions of Ubuntu? Really? It all makes sense now why the platform has been a failure.
For each function, you should have a handful of unit tests. Test the normal/expected values. Test edge cases (zero, infinity, negative infinity). Test possible error cases (null values, uninitialized data, etc). Basically, you want to test all the possible "buckets" of possible inputs.
"Correctness" is typically assumed. If your code isn't correct, then fix it.
"Robust" is the ideal. Most seasoned devs will have their toolbox of classes, snippets, and nuggets that they have incrementally tweaked and improved. Over time, they become ridiculously stable, full of years of bug fixes and all sorts of edge cases. They'll then use those snippets in project after project.
Testing becomes a lot more challenging when the function is less deterministic. If it's a heuristic based function, you will constantly be balancing the tradeoffs of accuracy vs. performance. For example, I used to work on a driving directions algorithm. Our team had a library of ~30k routes. After every code change, we would compare "accuracy" (average driving time) vs. "performance" (routes calculated per minute).
Testing becomes even more challenging when you're playing at the system level. Then you have load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, etc. That's when you need full time testers.
This is all amplified when you have virtual teams. Those more complex conversations are more manageable when you are face to face. People can express how busy they are and how focused they are. IM doesn't have that luxury.
"Can I ask you a question?", in my personal experience, is usually a trap. If it was an easy question, the other person would have just asked it. Therefore, it's probably going to be a complex question that will take time and focus.