rb2k_

The chats are end-to-end encrypted, so there is no plain text anyone could "mine"

Another interesting compression project is "Zstandard"

Open source, high performance, decent compression and a "dictionary mode" that's especially fun when it comes to compressing a lot of small data.

http://www.zstd.net

Previous discussion over at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8941955

Huge props to the team working on this.

I once maintained something similar in Ruby (https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb), and the amount of changes necessary just to keep a hand full of plugins up-to-date is crazy.

At least in my personal case, I think it helped accelerate things a bit.

I'm originally from Germany, so my professional network I developed while being a student turned almost useless after moving to the US.

I could have probably tried to establish a bit of an online presence through e.g. open-source work, but that tends to be a lot more time-intensive compared to just adding a few keywords about what I like and can do and a bit waiting :)

I personally got contacted by Facebook, Google and LinkedIn themselves on LinkedIn with job opportunities.

I worked for LinkedIn for a bit and am now working at Facebook.

While I visit the site/app only every other week, I still think it's very valuable to connect to people I talked to at meetups and that I would like to stay connected with somehow. Some of the people I'd like to stay in touch with, don't have at twitter account or are so low frequency that I'd miss things I care about. I probably wouldn't connect with them on Facebook since to me it still feels a bit too "personal".

Considering that LinkedIn was instrumental in the two biggest "moves" in my career and fills a good niche for me, I personally like them as a network.

I agree that the UI is a bit annoying at times, but they're way better than they used to be in that regard. I don't even mind recruiter emails. I have a bit less than 5 years of experience, so I still think it's a bit flattering to receive them :)

80k/year probably includes the 28-ish% "Lohnnebenkosten" (incidental wage costs)

So the actual paycheck would be around 60k. I think that's pretty ok for Berlin?

Having worked in both, Germany and Silicon Valley, I'd say that the middle management hiring is certainly a bigger problem in Germany than I've seen on either the east or west coast in the US.

She's also the daughter of a priest, so we basically have all bases covered :)

Usually those providers don't "buy" it from you.

They do fun things like giving you a loan with the options as a collateral. You would then default on the loan at the point of IPO.

So theoretically you don't sell them anything.

At least for one of my previous employers, the secondary market was not interested. I personally wouldn't count on it unless one is working for a highly visible startup ;)

If you ever wanted to filter by IP so you don't end up with tons of duplicates, it would be a nice usecase for the native hyperloglog support in Redis:

http://antirez.com/news/75

http://redis.io/commands/pfadd

http://redis.io/commands/pfcount

It's not that "being European" matters with the GC, the part that matters is "not from India or China", the waiting times for those two is crazy long :)

And to spare some people the search:

Usually $20 for the Philips vs $15 for the GE Link at 800 vs 750 Lumen :)

I only have the colored Hue lights and the white GE Link so far. I might buy a Lux just to see how it works.

> got me from nothing to L1 to Green Card in about 13 months

European citizen + EB2?

> I am far from being a Go expert but you can see this has been written by Java developers.

The same was true of their Ruby libraries. Thanks to the auto-generation, super annoying to debug when things went sideways :)

The H1B chances are kinda slim. I'd personally recommend finding more than 1 employer willing to sponsor. Alternatively there is always the non-profit ones that are cap exempt.

> nice to earn $120k in Silicon Valley > $3500/m rent for a 1br apt

I think you are a bit off on both :)

Salary:

As a Software Engineer, chances are you can a bit more (especially including bonus + RSU). If you're "senior" you can earn quite a bit more.

Also: There are tons of other small perks that add up (phone/internet reimbursement, free food, public transport pass, free electric car charging, ...)

Rent:

You can currently get a 2 BR, 2 BR in Mountain View for about $3500 (managed newish building 2 minutes from Castro)

(Source: moved to Valley from Europe via Boston)

> it literally can make you waste years of your life

Not sure why you would consider those years "wasted". You're working, gaining experience and making money. Since the job market is great, an H-1B isn't really something that would keep you back from negotiating your salary or anything else.

Getting the green card is a bit different, but there have been some reforms over the last few years.

I'd personally recommend it (having been on L-1B and H-1B).

I steal the content of all of our conversations to gather more internet points.

> you're hired to write specs for external companies and verify that the results are conferment

Sounds like a hilarious game of chinese whispers / telephone. :)

Maybe only partially related, but one of the things that surprised me the most when moving to the US from Germany, was seeing the large Mercedes star on one of the buildings while driving through Sunnyvale [0].

A few days later, I found myself at a BBQ filled with other fellow German ex-pats and basically all of them were working for Mercedes [1], VW, Bosch [3] ... As it turns out, all of the big German car companies are conducting research out here.

It seems like a lot of the interesting UI and Autonomous Vehicle research is being done out here. From what I gather, they seem to think that the mechanical engineering going into these cars can be done in Germany at a level that they are happy with, but anything to do with the UI/UX and Software that controls the vehicle would be a better fit over here.

I am originally from Stuttgart, which is where Bosch, Porsche and Mercedes were founded and have their headquarters and I tend to agree. Germany is a great place to optimize an existing technology or come up with interesting mechanical changes, but dealing with something as fluent and user-centric like on-screen interfaces or the Software running e.g. the Navigation, doesn't particularly play to the slow moving German company mindset. I think that as long as there's a problem that can be measured exactly (torque, gas milage, ability to withstand mechanical pressure, ...) a German company will do a great job. For the "softer" qualities, I can see a good symbiosis with the culture out here in the valley.

That being said, meeting all of these people and seeing the companies within a 20 minute drive was an entertaining turn of events.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3866231,-122.0357596,3a,15y,...

[1] http://www.mbrdna.com/

[2] http://www.vwerl.com/

[3] http://www.bosch.us/content/language1/html/rtc.htm

I think that might be the main difference.

I worked in Germany and in the US. The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies. By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...

In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized. Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.

Same for me when I was moving to Germany.

The only question I got was: "Is there a roommate or somebody else that could take over the account?"

And another one if you are in the top x% of your study

Another interesting part of the equation is BAföG.

From Wikipedia:

> The Bundesausbildungsförderungsgesetz (mostly known as BAföG, its abbreviation) is the Federal Training Assistance Act for students at secondary schools and universities in Germany. The law, which regulates student loans in the country, is often referred to by students who simply say they receive "BAföG".

Especially if a student's parents aren't well off, there's a good chance he/she can get a 0% loan from the government (and 50% of that loan is given as a gift).

Same here, even got one of the last years of the draft :)

In the end, the money I paid is barely anything compared to the salary it resulted in. Especially considering that I was able to get BAföG which basically paid for itself in the end.

You can't easily attend university unless you went to the "Gymnasium". There are ways for those who didn't, but it's a lot harder.

> People unable to attend college end up partially subsidizing those who can.

How? The people that did attend college will more taxes over their lifetime, so you could argue that the college people are subsidising the other college people.

That's on of the biggest upsides of Airport lounges. They are usually not noisy and actually have seats that people can sit on for a prolonged period of time.

For Americans, just having a credit card with a "priority pass select" membership (Citi Prestige, Amex Platinum) will make stays at larger airports a LOT more pleasant.

> because IBM's tools & tech could greatly aid Compose in developing their stuff faster, more robustly, etc.

Could you give an example for that?

At my current employer, we run about 10k+ EC2 instances 24/7.

DO / Linode will mostly be cheaper and proooobably offer a better price/performance ratio. You will however get a lot less options (especially GPU wise)

I still love the UI of instapaper a lot more than the one pocket has on their iOS version.

The main reason I switched to pocket was that Instapaper doesn't seem to have support for PDFs.

I don't need any of the "position syncing" and other stuff. I just want to be able to download the PDF and view it offline in the same app that helps me do this to blogposts.