Well, there is the botanical pov and the culinary pov. From a culinary pov, corn is mostly a veg. but there are exceptions like the grain (dry fruit) for popcorn.
That's not really accurate. If one insists on living in a new building with amenities, or in an ultra-yuppified neighborhood (e.g. Marina), then yes, the sky is the limit on rental costs and there are no bargains. If you're more flexible, then you can go a lot lower. My last 1BR (in SOMA, on a rough block but the apartment was perfectly nice) was $1100, and another 125 for parking. I have friends who have 1BR and studios in Tendernob, Panhandle, and other decent but less-popular places for around the same cost. Mainly it just takes patience and persistence to nab the deals when they become available.
That said, living in SF on a total budget of 1500/month is going to take some compromises.
"My last 1BR (in SOMA, on a rough block but the apartment was perfectly nice) was $1100, and another 125 for parking."
I haven't seen a rent like that in SOMA since 2008...at least, not anywhere that I'd consider safe. There are some bedbug-ridden firetraps in down near 6th, but there's a limit to what I'm willing to sacrifice for cheap rent. And I'm saying this as a guy who lives in a not-so-great part of SOMA....
Rents have gone up. Decent 1BR rents land at around $2,000, even in inconvenient/less-than-great locations. There seems to be this general delusion/denial trend regarding San Francisco rents, when they're easily verified by going to craigslist. It's an expensive place to live, and that's the greater point -- $70,000 isn't making anyone wealthy in San Francisco. It's enough to have a comfortable single-20-something lifestyle, and maybe put a bit of cash away for retirement if you live frugally.
Link-bait title conflates "ghetto" with "high crime areas". It's disrespectful to the millions of individuals of various groups who have been forced to live in ghettos.
That is the common meaning of the term nowadays. Many people are actually surprised when they first encounter the original usage as the name for a place where Jews were forced to live. I'm sorry if you consider it disrespectful, but I don't think we should blame the editor for using words as they are commonly understood. The modern usage does derive from the traditional meaning, though — the idea is that certain groups are forced there by socioeconomic conditions over which they have very little control.
I think the parent's underlying point is that, while the title's usage is perfectly comprehensible, the word is unsavory as part of a headline on a news websie. To go through the well-worn analysis: "ghetto" has strong connotations of specifically black poverty and crime, and is often used as somewhat comic shorthand for these issues, which is arguably offensive to people for whom these problems are their lived reality (leave alone its extensions in phrases such as "ghetto fabulous" and "ghetto queen"). I'm not black but I am a racial minority and I've always been attuned to words with valences like these, and I do micro-wince whenever friends or acquaintance use the term flippantly in conversation. So it's usage in this context is worthy of comment and pushing back against it legitimization, especially when its usage adds absolutely zero value above substituting "high crime area."'
I disagree. The respectable "modern" variant of ghetto is still to refer to people or things of a group that are constrained to a limited area. There is the "gourmet ghetto" in North Berkeley, for example.
It seems like you're referring to the slang usage of the term, which is mainly used by upper middle class youth when referring to things outside their economic class and daily reality, is pejorative, and is often tinged with racism.
the "gourmet ghetto" in North Berkeley, for example.
I also spent 4 years calling <5 floor dorm buildings "BuildingName Tower". It even caught on with other people, but that didn't change the definition of a tower.
It seems like you're referring to the slang usage of the term
I certainly think so too, seeing as how it is nothing but a slang term.
which is mainly used by upper middle class youth
How rich, the guy who uses North Berkeley as a counter example is calling people out for a limited world view.
Hey man, no need to get personal. For what it's worth, I live in a rural, very low income area. We all have limits on our world views. I simply object to the casual usage of a neutral but racially-sensitive term as a blanket adjective for criminality and wretchedness.
Ghetto, in its appropriate usage, isn't a slang term. It's been a part of standard English for a long time.
Word meanings are by nature fuzzy, democratic, fluid, subjective, regional and varied. So you may be fighting a losing battle to want "ghetto" to have a fixed "proper" meaning that people should use.
No doubt, but the converse is not necessarily true. There are many high crime areas that are not ghettos, in that they have no particular ethnic make-up. There are even relatively high crime areas that are neither ghettos, nor low-income communities.
The converse doesn't need to be true. If ghetto ⊂ high-crime area, then an algorithm that avoids high crime areas avoids ghettos, regardless of whether high-crime area = or ⊂ ghetto. The converse only affects whether it would be accurate to say that a ghetto-avoiding algorithm avoids high-crime areas.
I don't understand why lansing's being down-voted here. He's absolutely right. It's pejorative when used as a way to reference a place where black people live now, and it's historically inaccurate. The "modern" usage is all since the late '80s; and it came from a term based on enforced ethnic divisions. The fact that a lot of readers here live in parts of the country or the world that don't enforce ethnic divisions along geographical boundaries does nothing to change the fact that those still exist, even in the US, and they are still enforced by white-on-black violence in many cases. The first question that comes to mind is who puts the boundaries of these ghetto into the database? What's Fairfax south of Olympic? What's 120th and Broadway? And the second question is, would stores and businesses within those areas suffer as a result of decreased traffic; what recourse would they have; and what hope would blighted areas have of economic improvement if everyone followed a GPS that steered them around the zone?
This is a disgusting concept and an insult to human dignity. It will turn "ghettos" in the slang sense into more genuine ghettos in the historical sense. And lansing is right to take issue with the term as it's used now, because it's become a light, casual, racist and derogatory way to talk about a certain area, which is definitely used by the white middle class as a stand in for other racist words they don't feel comfortable saying anymore.
[Edit: The fact this was downvoted in less time than it would take a speed reader to finish what I wrote is pretty much proof that either someone's got it in for lansing, or someone's a fuckin racist dipshit. Either way, fuck you.]
[Re-edit: Not only do I stand by my comment, I think the people who downvoted me are cowards. Respond if you have a response, and you speak enough English to communicate it.]
Your comment, even with the edit, takes me about 15 seconds to speed-read (I timed it), and it's short enough to skim-read in about five seconds. And I'm not a particularly good speed-reader. And a lot of people will downvote without reading the whole thing if they feel they've got the gist, though I hope not too many. I think you need to calm down and treat people who disagree with you more respectfully. Your reply is extremely heavy on negative emotion, fairly accusatory and low on solid reason, and that kind of thing does tend to get downvoted here. Hacker News tends to value knowledgeable, factual commentary and reasoning on relevant topics over outrage.
Also, now you're complaining about getting downvoted, which is generally against the rules here and will often lead to further downvotes (because you getting downvoted is always off-topic).
Personally, I think I would find some of what you're saying interesting if you presented it in a way that's more informative and actionable and less angry or defensive. Could this have a negative impact on those neighborhoods? That's an interesting question. I'm not sure if it would (most of the people who travel in the area frequently will already be avoiding them), but it's an interesting question. Unfortunately, rather than exploring this interesting topic, you decided you'd rather hunt racists, which might make you feel all high and mighty but doesn't really advance the conversation.
Perhaps the downvotes are coming from people who find this whole discussion off-topic. Or perhaps you are getting downvoted for your rigid tone or hyperbole.
I dont know why you were downvoted, because that's what I was wondering when I read this. But unfortunately, poor areas are often "high crime areas". Lets forgo the semantics for a second and consider the implications. I wonder if this is just a first step towards "Out of sight, out of mind" approach. Lets not forget that all the 99% are not equal and if we apply Pareto principle, there is a minority that is living in dire circumstances. And considering the flow of wealth this pool will keep growing. I wonder if steps like these will contribute to the escalation of problem. I'm certainly not suggesting that people risk their safety, but 'Eloi' and 'Morlocks' keep popping in my head when I assume that steps like these will only intensify in the foreseeable future..
It is funny that you mention Eloi and Morlocks. Just last night I caught a few taped television commercials and was wondering who their target audience could possibly be. I brought up the concepts of Eloi and Morlocks and a cultural, intelligence, and eventual genetic divide.
I don't intend to sound elitist, but some of the TV commercials were so ridiculous and predatory that I figured they must be aimed at a group of people with low intelligence. This immediately made me think of the Eloi and Morlocks from Time Machine.
I found the concept quite sad. I wondered if that was how the homo sapiens felt about neanderthals? It seems a situation that is ripe for predation. Perhaps we are headed down the same path.
The fact that there's so much downvoting is a nasty sign of the kind of society you're talking about taking shape right here and now. I'm appalled by it. Seems like the Klan's out in force on HN tonight.
That's great that Facebook "opened your eyes" in a seemingly healthy way. Seriously.
The world was full of ways to compare ourselves with others before social media came around. It isn't going away. Facebook is just the latest iteration, and also happens to be the most surface-level, un-holistic, and competitive channel yet conceived for this kind of behavior.
Once people get competitive about "happiness" and "self esteem", there's a way that they lose sight of the original "goal" in the attempt to outdo each other.
We should all explore the different available paths in life and strive to gain from others' perspective and experience, but the Facebook news feed is not a particularly good way to do it.
+1, but I strongly disagree with you. I learn that: my friends have dragged themselves out of bed to enjoy some new and fascinating experience; after a long and severe effort, they have succeeded at their dissertation/weight loss/exercise program; that after a lot of duds on OKCupid, they have met somebody amazing; etc. There's plenty of surface-level stuff on FB too, but whenever FB has made me "miserable" it has always been over something important and meaningful.
A lot of things strike me as vastly more surface-level and un-holistic: what kind of car you drive, how big your house is, how rich your neighbors are, how immaculate your lawn is, etc.
What if you just decided to "not play the game" and pursue a life that was meaningful to you, on your own terms, instead of waiting for somebody else's Facebook post to make feel you "miserable" and inadequate?
Regarding your final point, as it happens, a pretty sizable chunk of Facebook feed items tend to revolve things like the cars people drive, their house, and their farmville "lawn". At least that's how it was when I was using it. The more things change...
so whenever your friends succeed in something meaningful, you always feel miserable? You never ever feel good for them? (don't be afraid to say yes, because I'm like that.. wondering if I'm alone..)
No, far from always, and not miserable exactly. By "miserable", I mean that I ask myself, "Bob drove to Yosemite National Park and hiked Half Dome this weekend, while I hung around my apartment and surfed the net and watched TV. Why didn't I do something like Bob?"
Comparing is built-in perceptual functionality, but the meaning we associate with what we see are not. I'm not sure what culture you're embedded in, but where I live, in America, we are taught to take pride in material success, and to judge ourselves negatively or positively in comparison to others' material success. There are examples of countries that are quite different, e.g. Bhutan. In some cultures, people are taught early on that they should be happy for others' success, instead of envious and depressed.
Regardless of where it comes from, if one has concluded that such comparing and one-upmanship is not helpful and probably deleterious to well being, doesn't it make sense to opt out of things that encourage it?
This piece was spot on, except for one thing-- the suggestion that "quitting facebook" is unrealistic.
Why?
Maybe the author was trying to avoid being labeled "too extreme". And granted, there are probably a few people out there who are dependent on it for their livelihood somehow. For everyone else, "quitting facebook" is a very realistic alternative. I've done it, so have many of my friends, and life goes on, with improved well being.
Once you realize you're being used and abused, it's time to move on.
Agreed. It's like someone writing a whole article about all the harms of smoking, and then ending the article with "Now of course I'm not saying quit smoking, just cut down to a pack a day."
The justification for why it matters seems a bit "off" to me:
For perspective on why this matters, consider that many Facebook engineers
spend their days developing PHP code in an endless edit-reload-debug cycle.
The difference between 8-second and 5-second reloads due to switching from
hphpi to the hhvm interpreter makes a big difference to productivity,
and this improvement will be even more dramatic once we enable the translator.
Big leap of intuition follows, bear with me:
Clearly there are some very talented engineers working at Facebook, as evident by this project. On the other hand, apparently a large number of Facebook engineers are spending all their time in a run-debug cycle, trying to "make this darn thing work," and the engineers with talent are being used to incrementally improve the mediocre coders' lackluster productivity.
Guys, if three seconds in compile overhead makes such a difference in your productivity, maybe you should think for a few seconds about code correctness before you hit the compile button.
All engineers, those who work on HHVM like me included, spend their lives in a run-debug cycle trying to "make this darned thing work," whether "this darned thing" is a language runtime or the new photo uploader. The tighter you can make that loop, the more productive the engineer is, because she has less time to keep all the items she's mentally juggling pinned in volatile short-term memory.
Sure, we all go through life via a form of trial and error, learning from our mistakes.
Personally, I think the fewer times you have to go around that wheel, the better.
I don't want to diminish the technical excellence of the achievements touted, and as a coder of primarily compiled languages, I would welcome any such improvements in the compilers I use.
However, my larger point stands-- which is that if a few seconds shaved on the run-debug loop is really a big deal for your total productivity, it means you're looping too much.
Trial and error is a fine way to learn a language, or to debug truly mysterious issues, such as those that exist outside of the abstraction layer you're working in. But in my opinion it's a poor way to work. It means that you don't understand the code you're writing.
One of the other annoyances we had (I think its addressed in the note?) is that until now the interpreter (on our dev machines) and the compiler (hphpc in production) occasionally differ in small, occasionally painful ways. Unifying our development and production environments will eliminate another potential source of bugs.
Also: Tight loops don't imply a lack of understanding. Often times when you're trying to get the CSS on a page just right (across all browsers) it requires quick iteration, even if you do understand CSS well.
I disagree. My anecdotal evidence as a person who prefers to meditate on code is that many times the person who does quick iterations even beats people that understand the language. A deep understanding of the language, in fact, can sometimes be a hinderance to getting things done. I realize thats anecdotal, but if you have an organization (say 1000 people or whatever facebook has) and they are doing these iterations all day and you can shave 5 minutes more out of each persons day, that 5000 mins per day :)
As much as I enjoy developing in dynamic, interpreted languages with a repl, I think this is a perfectly valid perspective. If a few seconds savings per compile is really multiplying out to a significant chunk of time, maybe it wouldn't hurt to take a more meditative approach to the code.
Note that in many dynamic languages (and I think that includes PHP), syntax checking is done right before you try to run it, and type checking is performed at runtime. When you're programming in a Java IDE, these kinds of errors (and related ones, like typos in variable names, etc.) all get resolved while you're typing. In PHP or JavaScript you only find out once you run the program, so saving 3 seconds can be a huge win.
Of course, you can do static analysis to some degree which would cut down that time even further, but you may also get false alerts or miss some issues.
You claim that this class of people won't work for a "big company" for "any amount of money," yet in the next breath you admit that they will work for those companies in the context of a "talent acquisition."
What is a "talent acquisition" if not an alternate mode of compensation to persuade individuals to "take a corporate job" who previously considered themselves above such positions? Yeah, it sounds more impressive to tell people "we got bought by X" instead of "I took a job with X," but either way they've "gone corporate." You're still dealing with the same endless HR meetings, PHBs, "culture," etc, as all the other "drones."
Yes, a good number of such "acquisition hires" leave after earn-out is complete, typically two to four years. This is actually a fairly lengthy of time for any high-value employee to hold any position in the valley these days, startup or not.
Exiting a company as soon as you can after a talent acquisition to go on and become an entrepreneur again is very very very common. Most recently I can think of Arrington, Levchin, Nguyen.
I would even guess that the majority of founders who are acquired by Google, Yahoo etc. leave in the first 12 months.
It is either to get the first run on the board, or to give a startup that would otherwise fail a graceful exit - but these people are entrepreneurs and do not fit into large companies.
Sean Parker should be asking what is Facebook doing to attract these types of people, not bitch about these people not wanting to join and blaming free-market funding, of all things.
> I would even guess that the majority of founders who are acquired by Google, Yahoo etc. leave in the first 12 months.
That is absolutely not the case.
You often don't even hear about most Google acquisitions, or you don't know what they were even working on until they get released as Google Egg Timer or something. And even after vesting a lot of acquired employees still stick around. Some of them have families by then.
Yahoo tries hard to make them quit in disgust, but even they hang on to founders longer than that.
That is still ignoring the fact that these individuals were in fact willing to take a corporate job, when their price was met. Maybe that price included the ego boost that comes with being part of an acquisition ("they really wanted me!"), or the "pedigree" that one plans to parlay into future opportunities.
Regarding the latter point, it seems that "key players" at "prominent companies" don't have too much trouble getting funding for startups when they move on, regardless of whether they were "talent acquisitions" or not.
Speaking from experience, when my previous employer got acquired by a megacorp, nobody was saying "I really don't want to work for megacorp, but maybe I will have an easier time getting funding later." No. It all came down to dollars and cents in the here and now, and the only people who turned down the earn-out offers (less than 10%) were those who had better options available.
The author claims that you can hire devs with either ten or 3-5 years of experience "in a particular area." I've never been to Bulgaria, but I know it's hard to find folks with ten years of iOS/Android development experience in California, so this is pretty impressive. Must be a magical country.
The point is you can hire devs with 10 years of experience in varying programing languages. Maybe I wasn't really clear on that. Also programing for iPhone is done in objective-c and android devs work with Java. Both of these have been around long before iOS and Android.
To the latter point-- fair enough. There are some significant differences between Mac and iOS development, for example, but it seems that experienced Mac devs generally flourish in the iOS world. Are you saying that such people are readily available in Bulgaria? As in, you are confident that with some legwork, I could hire a guy with 10 years combined of Mac/iOS programming experience for 40k? If so, that's very interesting to me (no sarcasm).
Regarding the former, I would be extremely wary of paying a demonstrably "competent engineer" to do work in a platform they were not already immersed in. Total years programming, even on seemingly similar platforms, doesn't translate into ability to deliver a high quality, robust product on the target platform in a timely manner.
To give a specific example, successful iOS development requires a combination of UX design intuition and finesse, similar to what you'd need in web development, along with the memory management and performance tuning skills more typically seen in the embedded and C++ game development world. The reason competent iOS devs are expensive in America is because it's hard to find people with these combined skills, who don't want to just make their own stuff. There are many examples of lackluster apps in the iTunes Store where the developers clearly came up short in one of those areas.
