electricslpnsld

Also the Noguchi Museum (can't escape that man's coffee tables!) and the Socrates Sculpture park.

> Realistically it's the densely overcrowded 7 train

The N is a 10 minute walk to most of Long Island City (source: used to take the N to Manhattan every day while living in LIC).

The new trains are sooo much better. I've been getting them once a week or so on the Richmond line and they are way quieter. They've also started running them transbay, so stay tuned!

> Many of the 25k being high-paid white collar professionals.

Which is already a big chunk of NYC. Adding 25K tech folks into the current mass of financiers, hedge fund managers, and tech peeps in a city of 8.5 million isn't going to change much.

> Am I missing something there that makes it... unique?

I would almost live in San Jose for La Victoria Taqueria... almost. Their orange burritos are so damn good.

> One of the obnoxious things about Google's NY campus is that it's on the west side of Manhattan, which means that to get a cheapish rent and a 40-60 minute commute, you have to live on the expensive edges of BK or Jersey.

Inwood, Washington Heights, and the western half of Harlem are still pretty reasonable, and on super convenient train lines to Google.

The parts of LIC immediately adjacent to Astoria and Queensboro plaza aren't too bad, but the closer you get to the river and further north you get the more of a pain in the ass LIC can be. I used to live adjacent to the sculpture park and that hike to the N was a serious workout in the winter (especially with groceries!). Great view of Manhattan, though.

> I bet that is much easier to pull off than switching to programming from say, sociology.

Sociology curricula are getting quite quantitative these days — the jump from sociology student to data scientist isn’t that far. I used to live with a bunch of sociologists back in grad school, and they lived and breathed R, Python, and SAS.

No Agile and no meetings sounds like a plus, to me!

I'd love to see a 'where are they now' type feature on all of the Sierra Games folks. A lot of the original Origin people pop up from time to time (Star Citizen, Garriot, etc), but the Sierra people seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth!

Looks like this is mainly QtQuick? Has anyone had success getting platform native-(ish) looking and behaving Desktop applications working in QtQuick? I have a few applications running on QWidgets which I'd like to port over for performance reasons (QWidgets has known performance problems on high-DPI Apple platforms they probably won't ever fix), but QtQuick apps tend to behave like off-brand tablet apps, out of the box.

> These are people who vote blue, champion diversity, and have generally progressive views. But when push comes to shove they circle the wagons to defend their interests just like the billionaires do.

My favorite example in the Bay Area is the San Francisco Sierra Club fighting to preserve a parking garage [1], which is, by and large, the exact opposite of environmental advocacy.

[1] https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...

Will it be terribly different than how US states that have legalized marijuana interface with federal governmental entities? Plenty of folks in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, some of the New England States, and California work for the federal government and have to tell them that they do not use marijuana. Similar with airline pilots, etc based out of these States.

Most background checks verify graduation dates with the institutions you have degrees from, so this would almost certainly come up.

It was interesting to see the breakdown of country of origin for students at my alma mater. The undergrad program was by and large Americans, the masters program mostly students from China and India, while the PhD program was roughly 50/50 students from China and the US. Sorting by price, the masters degree was by far the most expensive, undergrad was fairly pricey but with tons of financial aid available, while the Ph.D. students were all paid a stipend of 30K a year. At ~50K a year in tuition for the masters program, the CS department was making bank by inflating the size of masters cohort. Seemed kind of unfair to the masters students, from my perspective.

> Housing is extremely affordable.

Is there data for this? I spent a good chunk of my life in a mid-sized college town in the south, and last I checked the average home values there are eclipsing $400K.

Just some data points, pulling median home values in some college towns across the US off the top of my head:

Davis, CA: $641,500

Charlottesville, VA: $412,700

Chapel Hill, NC: $449,980

State College, PA: $316,600

Williamsburg, VA: $303,400

Berkeley, CA: $1,281,900

Wellesley, MA: $1,267,600

Davidson, NC: $360,000

Ann Arbor, MI: $360,300

Some of these aren't too bad, but I don't think they fall into the category of extremely affordable. Professors and doctors and all the folks associated with Colleges and Universities make enough money to drive up home prices!

Why does Japanese print design look so freaking cool?

> If you are looking to live in the US from abroad, you really only consider moving to NYC or SF, maybe LA or DC.

Interestingly enough, Houston Texas now ranks as the US city with the most international diversity. This is leading to all sorts of interesting things, like the development of new 'creole' cuisines (see the recent and rapid development 'Viet-Cajun' food).

I'd hardly call the Bay Area itself a monoculture. Palo Alto is very different than Oakland which is very different than San Francisco. Hell, even in San Francisco the Mission, North Beach, and the Outer Sunset are totally different worlds.

> I wonder how many folks in SV grew up in the south

A reasonable number, actually. Hell, Apple is run by southerners (Tim Cook is from Alabama). I happen to work with a number of folks from North Carolina and Virginia.

Trading anecdotes, I have a number of friends at Facebook (both at Menlo Park and the NYC office), and they complain about the opposite: lots of people just coasting and doing the minimum needed to get by, really hard to fire people, etc.

> $70k in Atlanta is not close to $235k in San Francisco (both typical new grad starting salaries)

Say what? Not even Google starts people at a 235K salary. Total comp package sure (so starting bonus, bonus, RSU grants). In the last year or so, the new grads I'm friends with are averaging around ~150K a year starting base salary from the big companies in the bay.

Why are there no shots of Columbia? The rest of Mo Heights looks exactly the same as it did in the 80s, though (I think the building I lived in a couple years ago still had the same scaffolding up, ha).

Also, I can't believe that McDonald's on 125th and Broadway has been there since the 80s!

I've had multiple people throw stuff at me from cars, I've had a teenager take a swing at me with a baseball bat from the curb, I've had a car stalk me for eight blocks driving inches from my back tire late at night. This is mostly West Oakland and the parts of of North Oakland along Adeline that gets you up to Berkeley -- I can't really comment on East Oakland or the hills. YMMV, of course.

> Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.

I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc.

Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)

New Moore's Law: Every year Facebook's iOS app doubles in size.

> it's a few hours from Vegas

Many would consider proximity to Vegas as a downside

> the lack of historical counterculture having any meaningful impact amongst the old world elitists

Hm? In want sense? New York City has spawned numerous countercultural movements. The beats, punk rock, hip hop, all originated in NYC.

> What programming language tech stack do you use ?

CUDA, C++14, Python.

> Is it a better gig than previous one ?

It is! The office conditions are terrible, but my coworkers are freaking amazing, and I am genuinely excited about the work we do, which is the main reason I'm still there.

> Can you hear people farting and shitting in the bathroom ?

Only if the door is open and my headphones are off. :O

> How do you decompress after work

I hit the gym.

> are you currently searching for another job?

Actively, although the office conditions are mainly a symptom of utterly terrible management, which is my main reason for job hunting.

Sure but how many are on Instagram? If so Facebook (the company) has still got 'em!