econner

Why did you quit to freelance?

Having a place to live is one of the primary needs people have. Why shouldn't you be able to make an income off of that? Everyone lives off of other people's labor...unless you're subsistence farming or something.

I'll give you the banker one though.

Why do you need gross of $240K?

Are you saying you pay $95K in tax?

If you have a 401K you can save a significant amount pretax. You're also not factoring in portfolio growth over the 15 years you're saving.

I take pause when I see anything from Larry Summers. From his wikipedia page:

Summers's role in the deregulation of derivatives contracts

On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace."[21] On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before the U.S. Congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." At the time Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need."[22] In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying "With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century."[23]

When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous."

At the 2005 Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Raghuram Rajan presented a paper called "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?". Rajan pointed to a number of potential problems with the financial developments of the past thirty years.[24] The problems that Rajan considered include skewed incentives of managers, herding behavior among traders, investment bankers, and hedge fund operators who suffer withdrawals if they under-perform the market. Rajan also discussed the problems associated with firms that "goose up returns" by taking risky positions that yield a "positive carry."[25] Justin Lahart, writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 2009 about the response to Rajan's paper at the conference recounts that "former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, famous among economists for his blistering attacks, told the audience he found 'the basic, slightly lead-eyed premise of [Mr. Rajan's] paper to be largely misguided.'"[26]

In February 2009, Summers quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout.[27] On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's "This Week" program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.

Why the .io domains for everything?

In a promotion review, being able to say my project drove $X in revenue wins almost every time against any other metric. It's easy to state and directly relates to the companies business goals.

Go help NGOs internationally.

Is it possible that your experience is not representative?

Hah. This is why I hate all comparisons in percentages. You can't have 110% of something.

Or the old "give it 110%"... no I can only give 100%. Nothing more.

That's a good point. Presumably the funds that invested were raised around 2007 and also have a 10 year window.

Hm.. I wonder if this is because they have option grants expiring in 2017 (10 year mark) and are trying to get some liquidity for early employees.

I always liked jwz's take:

> But in 1999 I took my leave of that whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry. Now I'm in a more honest line of work: now I sell beer.

I assume he's in Menlo Park now at Oculus. I wonder if he still feels the same way.

The amount you work is one of the few variables in your control. I'm still a believer that luck plays a bigger role than most will give credit.

Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.

Seems pretty similar to me. There either needs to be more affordable housing where the jobs are, or more jobs where the housing is. You need both to have viable housing.

Yea, good ideas definitely. I try this but I end up reading the twitter home page, lol. Maybe I will try blocking them using /etc/hosts

Thanks these are great ideas.

Regarding #3 do you have designated times that you read, etc? I find that I end up spending a lot of little chunks on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and HN when something is compiling or deploying or starting to run. I keep saying I'm going to stop checking all of these inane things, but I always fall back into it with these 5 min chunks where it would be hard to do something else.

This is a good point. So I looked up some Twitter financials.

In 2015 they posted a Net Income of -$521.03M and EBITDA of -$137.21M.

I don't exactly understand how those two numbers can differ so much, but either way they're pretttty bad.

but, but, this is the internet where everything is free and the money comes from advertising

How is Twitter not a good business? It's still worth $11 billion.

What a sweeping generalization. Can you provide any justification that the valley has "lost the ability to push the needle?"

This is a good point, but in my mind all of these changes come about because of the app. Suddenly you have a medium that allows you to do these things you couldn't before.

There will continue to be many app-based solutions that are successful. It's now just another business medium and less like a gold rush. There is still lots of value to be created in making apps.

Uhhh?

Let me point you to http://fortune.com/unicorns/.

> From Google description, "Bored Panda is a leading art, design and photography community for creative people. Our submission platform helps artists and creators turn their stories into."

into what? :-)

Average is such a misleading metric to use here.

It's probably in the privacy policy / terms of service that you don't read when signing up (no one does...). It's actually nice of Reddit to announce these sorts of changes and not just say "we updated our privacy policy"

A clarification on your point: specifically socialist economic policies (gov control of enterprise) are to blame. It's not as if the government decided to tax the rich to provide social welfare and then the country went into a downward spiral.

The main issues I think have been rampant government corruption under Chavez's cult of personality and the papering over of economic problems with oil money. There are many stories of Chavez basically buying votes with oil revenues. Having a huge source of essentially free money let the government operate like a sports star fresh out of college, buying expensive houses and cars, until the money dries up and they promptly go broke.

The Google Python style guide might be a good start: https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html

I've also heard that at Google they require assert isinstance for every parameter of every function.

New Relic has very good tools for profiling python code if you're running a service.