go1979

I did see someone pooping once. The train car cleared out pretty fast. I also got threatened twice during rush hour. When I first moved to NY, I tried talking to the good people at the counter ... never made that mistake again. After a bit, I just started taking cabs. I did encounter traffic jams periodically but felt a better experience overall. Btw .. I also have respect for NYC cabbies. They are the opposite of Bay area cabbies. I try to not use Uber when I am in NY. Anyways ... the NYC subway sucks when compared to international standards. If you travel a bit internationally, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I was at SOSP until earlier today. During the Q&A of the Chaos graph processing system, there was discussion of a previous exchange between Frank McSherry and the authors of the work ... what was REALLY cool was that parts of the original exchange happened on Twitter and via blog posts and we were hearing about it at the conference some time later :)

Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?

I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.

I had to look this up so pasting what I found here:

AOT = head of time compilation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahead-of-time_compilation

Erlang's HiPE compiler is apparently AOT. The challenge seems to be dynamic typing. At points, it has to guess types. I assume compiled Python would have similar issues.

I got a USB dongle that seems to work under 1GhZ. I was really interested in analyzing zigbee. I think that's in the 2.4GhZ ISM. Any suggestions?

I'm also curious ... are these cheap USB dongles just receivers? Or do they have ones that can transmit as well (i.e. transceivers).

The recent run up in property prices in most major western cities makes me think the home owning class isn't in too bad of a shape. If you own a house in Vancouver, the Bay area, Toronto, London etc. you basically won the lottery. If you are a young adult, well ... hope your parents help you out?

My parents were immigrants and not savvy enough to buy a house. I'm wondering how I can ever afford a 200K down payment on a million dollar house, and if that is in any way a reasonable idea. Taxing income is the wrong approach since people getting income are contributing to society. The lottery winners who happened to own houses in the right place .. I'm not sure what they contributed.

Very much a personal opinion from someone coding for 15 years+. I'm new to Elixir but I found it to be a joyful language to work with so far. Java is a language you code in to pay the bills. Go is not bad at all but while I've heard people remark Go is fun, it hasn't been that fun for me. A bit of ugly syntax here and there. Python is awesome but I'm tired of the v2/v3 crap and frankly don't think it is the right tool for large, multi-person code bases (e.g. Openstack). Elixir has been truly enjoyable for me. If you are a jaded dev who used to love languages, give Elixir a try. I hope you get the same joy that I am getting from it because it has an ineffable quality about it.

[edited]

Thanks. Another point is that in Erlang/Elixir, if you have many actors, you will have less garbage per actor. Which means faster GC overall.

The best known example for Erlang/Beam "http throughput" is WhatsApp's 3 million+ concurrent connections per host. I don't think you get anywhere close in Akka. Maybe max out at 50K per server? Is even that possible?

Also, I'm not aware of good examples that use Akka with Java. Everyone I know using Akka seems to also be using Scala (not sure if it is just some kind of self-selection). I really can't stand Scala's syntax. I tried two or three times but I find it too easy to encounter Perl like unreadable code. Just my opinion though.

I've coded in Python and Go (which has compile time type safety and does inference to avoid verbosity) code professionally, and am loving Elixir. I build distributed systems and I while I love Python, I don't think it is the right language for that. Frankly, I prefer nodeJS's single thread to Python's GIL because you are under no illusions wrt concurrency. Go is better but I don't understand why channel communication across machines doesn't exist (I think it was there as an experimental feature early on but maybe I am mistaken). I'm very impressed by the capabilities of the Beam VM and hope that Elixir will let me build better distributed systems (despite the lack of type safety).

I'm trying to convince people at work to use Elixir but people seem to have language fatigue. The lack of a major company/product using Elixir is making me worried as well. But hey .. someone had to be first, right? :)

I'm surprised about the drug trial bit. I thought generics didn't need to have new trials .. they just need to have the exact same formulation. The oddness is that they need to "reverse engineer" the formulation themselves. The pill's color, shape and markings couldn't be copied though.

Can anyone knowledgeable on this critique what I wrote? I got my info during a tour of a generic drug manufacturer's plant a looooong time ago.

I think so too. Guess real-estate prices will keep going up, up, up :( Not sure how this craziness will play out.

Top echelon PhDs don't get paid as much as lawyers or doctors of similar caliber btw.

Toronto != Downtown Toronto. Part of the reason everyone wants to live in the core is the horrible public transit system. I used to live uptown but near the TTC - almost every weekend in the summer, we had to use shuttle buses because of track maintenance.

When I look at the GTA, prices make no sense to me. Million dollar homes in Markham, 600K townhomes in Mississauga? What incomes justify this?

I do agree with you on the "low interest rates or else" theory. Even a few points increase will cause people at the fringes to exit the market. And that has potential to topple everything over.

Britain is hardly alone in this. Prices in Vancouver and Toronto are absolutely insane when one considers incomes in the region. Sensible minds have been claiming a crash for years but property prices continue to go up. Funny thing is that the crazy housing in Britain/Canada make Bay area housing appear like a good deal :-p

If anyone has a book/documentary suggestion on understanding what is going on, would appreciate it.

My strong suggestion is never false report anything. It is a rabbit hole that you don't want to go into. I think the odds that you will get fired for taking too long on tasks is EXTREMELY low. When you are young, you think everyone has got their shit together. In reality, there are probably developers out there who can't code for shit. In one of my first job, I had a "peer" who kept asking me basic questions until I figured out I pretty much coded up what they had to do. I didn't mind that ... what shocked me was that this person had an entry level programming job and no ability to code. I felt bad for that person.

Anyways ... long story short ... reduce your commute big time. No more than an hour for sanity. Also, if you are not highly paid in tech and are feeling burned out, may I suggest you change your field for a bit. Life is too short to do stuff you hate. And it doesn't seem like you are making a lot of money/saving up.

Best of luck and stay sane!

Hmm ... I am very skeptical when people report numbers of 350-400K. Apart from Netflix, which claims it pays at the top of the market, I didn't think other companies paid this much in base salary to mid-level tech employees. Glassdoor, etc. suggest the numbers for base salary are closer to 150-170K.

I am so confused ... don't the Chinese want a devalued Yuan? It helps their economy, right?

Did they shift course in the past week???

I got a new job in SV in 2008 as well. People were congratulating me that I managed to get "an" offer. Lots of places had hiring freezes back then. When did things change in the valley? Was it Q4 2010? Q1 2011? I'm genuinely curious and trying to refresh my memory. I feel like I was in a funk and then woke up one day with all this Unicorn talk. Today, housing prices in MV "seem to be" 100% more than what they were in 2010. What the heck happened? Does "Unicorns" explain all of that? Forign investors? Ultra low interest rates??

I sat on cash since 2008 and don't feel particularly smart.

I am pretty certain the median home owner in the desirable Bay area cities could not afford their homes at their income level. The rise in home prices relative to incomes is pervasive in almost every city with good jobs. We live in crazy times. You can't blame low interest rates or "foreign investors". But don't hate on the people whining because they have a valid point :)

Housing prices and student loans are the bane of my generation (mid 30s atm). I just moved to the Bay area .. feel like I'll always be a renter. While a lender will give me money to buy a million dollar condo, I'd be one misfortune (losing my job) away from having to declare bankruptcy. I don't have the stomach for that.

I'm starting to develop a theory that the tax rate at upper middle class incomes could be to blame.

Consider Toronto as a counter example. That city tore down parks to build condos. That didn't rein in prices. Now, the affluent foreigners have 3-4 condos to go along with that Maserati.

I fully believe the capital outflow link to the rise in western real estate prices. As someone unlucky enough to be caught without any property, I am perplexed by the reasonable response. Friends have responded by taking insane loans (since property prices went up after said loans, these were really prudent financial decisions). I am at a loss. Will I be buying at the top? :(

Last time I was in the Bay area, I took cabs. Oh what horrible experiences!! I finally took the plunge and used Uber. I was very satisfied until I encountered "surge pricing" when going to the airport at 5am. I'm still a fan but am a bit mixed about relying on it.

For long distance trips from the airport (hour long), I still think Uber is pricey. On my last trip from an airport, a black car would have costed 120-150, with a driver in a suit or an Uber (90ish). Since surge pricing is not predictable (by me), I would go for the black car option since it is certain.

The whole discussion makes me realize there are multiple markets for cabs. Uber definitely rocks the "hail a random cab for an impromptu ride" market. The "planned trip to the airport, etc." is a different market that has yet to be cracked.

What about the person(s) who invented the Page rank algorithm?

Motorola had J2ME-based programmable phones around the year 2000. I believe that was the first smartphone in the US. Back in the day, I developed a few apps and tried to release them for free. I was asked a few grand for the apps to be "certified" for release. The nerve! I moved onto other things in life but it was interesting how it played out and here we are today.

As someone who doesn't eat pork or drink beer, I almost starved in Germany. I survived on Doner and Chinese food the whole time I was there. But hey .. to each their own :D

There are quite a few lurkers on HN who don't post or who have multiple accounts with varying karma. Having some kind of arbitrary karma threshold would be a turnoff IMHO.

After the Glass fiasco, I'll be thinking twice before buying/taking Google's variant of FUD seriously. That was a waste of over 1.5K for me. Too bad there is no accountability (oh wait ... all the Google fans would just say I should have known it was unproven tech and I was an explorer .. blah blah blah).

I haven't been dissuaded from buying all unproven tech gear thankfully! Preordered the Apple Watch (as I have had wonderful experiences with the iPad on launch day and the iPhone) ... very satisfied with it.

I'm on the fence about HoloLens. While I have full faith in Apple and zero in Google, Microsoft is in the middle. The tech is extremely compelling but I Microsoft is known for incremental improvements .. I'd rather not get stuck with gen 1/demo hardware when a lot better stuff may be around the corner.