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> Normally landlords are so loathe to reduce rents

What's the reasoning here? I've tried to talk landlords down by less than a month's rent when taken over the course of a typical year lease, been told to shove off, only to watch the unit go unrented for months until they finally drop the price.

I’d say smaller than that. Working in Pittsburgh there are plenty of folks netting Bay Area comp packages (180K+ base salaries, 100K+ stock grants, big bonuses, etc). I don’t think the point of opening a Midwest office is cheaper engineers, but the ability to tap into local expertise cocentrations (robotics and AI/ML in the case of PGH).

In PA the 2016 presidential elections went Trump by roughly 1% of the pop (~50K votes). That is roughly the number of employees Amazon was floating during their HQ2 search. Some minor demographic shifts could easily account for a 50K swing. As another example, NC elected a democratic governor by 10K votes. These are slim margins that can drastically tip the balance of power in local and federal politics!

I think the point is that in NYC, you don’t have to be over an hour from the hot spots if you aren’t making lots of money. It is totally possible to live in Manhattan on 30 grand a year (hell, I’ve done it). To do so in San Francisco or the Penninsula would be much harder.

> But the drivers in Minneapolis are straight up entitled, aggressive, and dangerous in high foot traffic areas.

I’ve had a similar experience since moving to Pittsburgh, I see drivers lose it and freak out at pedestrians in high foot traffic areas. Midwest drivers need to chill!

NYC outlaws rights on red unless otherwise posted and it makes life as a pedestrian so much better.

> because its transport connections are so poor.

In what sense? I used to work in LIC and it was pretty easy to get to. Lots of lines go though Queensboro Plaza.

LIC has some amazing parks. Stop by Socrates Sculpture Park sometime — really cool art installations, great waterfront views of Manhattan, across the street from a cool museum (Noguchi of the coffee table fame), and you are quick walk down Broadway to some great restaurants in Astoria.

> or chooses to leave game dev and go get a job writing CRUD apps somewhere

There are tons of gigs I can see game dev credentials working well with beyond just CRUD (and there is nothing wrong with CRUD). AR/VR (Apple, Facebook, Google have been hiring like crazy here), autonomous vehicles, finance. I’m hopeful all the talented folks can land running out of these layoffs.

U.S. Steel is such a horrible company. Their coke plant in Clairton, PA (the setting of Deer Hunter if you haven't seen it, great movie...) continues to pump out pollution in violation of governmental environmental standards, including massive amounts of SO2, contributing to an astronomical asthma rate among children in Allegheny County (home of Pittsburgh). Unfortunately the city of Pittsburgh, the county, and Pennsylvania seem completely unwilling to take any action.

> Apart from the state/city taxes

That’s a pretty big difference though! I suppose with NYC you don’t have the cost of owning and operating a car, though.

> FAANG in bay area pays 200-300 for senior total comp

FAANG pays 200-300 total comp for new grads, these days. My new grad friends who land at Facebook and Google are getting 140-160 base salary, 70 or 80 in bonus, and around 80 to 100 in RSU vesting in the first year. Pay is bonkers right now!

95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!

> But what this “native” Bay Area kid won’t do is start blaming the guy from North Carolina or Wisconsin or Boston—basically every other person in the bar—for propelling the rents into the sky and inadvertently forcing the “locals” to flee.

The author hasn’t been to a Berkeley (or San Francisco, or a Penninsula town) city council meeting... there is a lot of very blatant resentment in the Bay Area directed (mostly unfairly) at transplants.

Well, given that Autodesk shifted Maya ownership to their life support division and fired most of the Maya R&D team, this isn’t too surprising. Good news for SideFX I suppose!

> By default, Blender now uses the left mouse button for selection.

This is probably the biggest feature in 2.8! The super non-standard select behavior was a (probably unfairly, but still real) turn off to people trying Blender for the first time. The more Blender can bring its UI in line with industry standards the better for Blender adoption.

I recall reading somewhere that two days before shipping the game was crashing in release mode builds, so the binary that shipped was in debug! Apparently a big part of the performance increase in BG2 came from fixing this bug.

> On the one hand, I suspect this type of crime is more the realm of opportunists rather than hard-core criminals who would exact revenge.

Eh, somewhere in between. Back when I lived in Oakland (where there was/is a serious package theft problem) everyone in the neighborhood knew who stole folks’ deliveries (camera systems are basically free these days). It happened daily and the cops were too busy fending off corruption and sex trafficking scandals to give a damn. 20% of the time it was some high schooler and you would yell at their parents and get your shit back. 80% of the time it was semi-organized teams of people from a few towns over who would roll up to the end of the street in plate-less cars and drop a couple dudes off on foot. Dudes on foot would walk down the street and grab packages off people’s porches while the car would drive up to the next intersection. Dudes hop in the car, car hits the freeway and is in another city (and soon County) in no time.

Definitely intentional crimes (these things take planning, including networks to fence the stolen goods), but if you yell at them they just move on the next house without retailiating. The second you start harrasing people and causing a ruckus the police have fewer excuses to ignore the issue, and your easy source of cash is gone.

Yea but transit in the Bay shuts down hella early. Getting to Park Slope at 2am from Manhattan is significantly easier (and safer) than Millbrae (or Oakland or wherever) from San Francisco.

Hell, I managed Manhattan for three years on <30K during grad school with money leftover to take trips here and there and party a bit on the weekends. I wasn’t living like a king, but it’s 100% doable. Get a roommate in Washington heights near the A, be smart about your grocery purchases, get an unlimited metro card and don’t take cabs or Uber.

I read it as they are using a molecular dynamics package to define a function (potential energy of the protein structure) and are using gradient descent to (slowly) reach stable extrema (static configurations of the protein).

Rad, I'll have to dig into the source for this! Does PhysX mainly implement PBD like all the papers from Mueller they publish?

> And let’s be honest “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.

I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.

> Not sure if that's still true, but at the time it seems Fortran was a more restrictive language which permitted stronger optimization.

There is no aliasing in Fortran. In C (and using compiler extensions in C++) you manually use restrict to give the same information to the compiler, but it is a trickier process than in Fortran. Rust inherits this benefit from Fortran, but last I checked they had all related optimizations disabled (and most numerical computing friendly features in Rust tend to be on the back burner).

Tons of linear algebra and optimization code is still actively developed in Fortran. The most accurate solver I've found for small quadratic programs is a Fortran code maintained by a grumpy German math professor.

Trains don't get you and your overseas goods across oceans (yet).

> I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it.

What up, Astoria native (then Stuyvesant then Columbia) checking in. The current level of (visible) homelessness in NYC is nothing compared to NYC in the early 2000s, let alone the 90s. Even in the late 90s the parts of upper Manhattan I frequented had burned out car husks and people shooting up in the streets. Hell, when I was in school you couldn't walk through Morningside or Riverside park without tripping over homeless people. Manhattan is downright bucolic compared to they way it used to be. The state of things isn't perfect, now, but it is orders of magnitude better than it used to be.

Or Ultima!

> But the actual Bay Area is boring.

There is lots of fun stuff in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco. I always have a blast going to shows, openings, etc in Oakland and Berkeley.

The Triangle has a number of good schools: Duke and UNC are both in the top 25 CS programs in the US. I've worked with some NCSU CS grads in the past and they've also been great.