lingoberry

This is a case where policy will have to lead public opinion and culture. It has been done successfully in many countries, though less traditional than Japan to begin with. Subsidise childcare, make maternity leave longer, ear mark some leave for fathers etc. Then you'll see change eventually.

Yikes, I'm sorry for your experience. I think highly skilled foreigners coming to Sweden to work is such a recent that society is lagging behind. I've heard many stories of people changing their last names to their husband/wife's in order to get job interviews etc. I hope as time goes on people will be more accepting.

No, I didn't mean it takes months to get your loan approved for most people. It did for us though, since we moved from abroad, having no work history in Sweden and no jobs at that point. That means you have to get two job offers first (for a couple) and that takes time. During this time you are looking at apartments but can't bid since you haven't secured a loan. Then comes the looking part, which for us took maybe 2 months. There was a lull in availability (and extreme competition between bidders), and we were outbid for everything. When we finally found one, and outbid another couple (price rose 700SEK btw), we had to wait another 3 months to move in.

Everybody's experience is different, but I think we can agree this is madness and not good for our economy. I rarely have much positive to say about the US, but one thing is that you can literally go to almost any city (except maybe SF and NYC), live in a hotel, and within a week you have found some place to live. Might not be the highest standard of living, but you can always trade up.

This is the biggest problem. There really is no rental market to speak of, so talking about rental queues being 10 years long is not really relevant. If you want to live in Stockholm for a longer time you need to buy. This also means it takes months and months getting your loan approved, finding an apartment and waiting to move in. Only the waiting to move in part can take more than 3 months.

The flip side is, once you've bought a place, it can be really really cheap to live in with the current interest rates. We pay less than $1000 for a two bedroom in central Stockholm for instance, all included (interest, fees, electricity, water, heating, tv, broadband). This also means absolute prices are insanely high, and will probably continue to rise since there's still room for it to grow.

I'm talking about continental Europe and Scandinavia (including Stockholm where I live). UK is very different in terms of apartment condition. I've seen many carpeted floors, and even carpeted bathrooms of all things, really not acceptable here. Older buildings are very well renovated, and are generally better built than most new buildings.

As for the rest of Europe, the demand speaks for itself, even if you don't personally like the style and high ceilings, most people do.

Not really, part of the reason people want to live centrally in the first place is the density and the high quality turn-of-the-century housing. Tall ceilings, nice wooden floors, large windows. It sounds like you've never actually been inside one.

After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn't work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I'd zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It's doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.

I don't know why they all make the same mistake of hiring literally a thousand people after their one big hit. Only Mojang seems to have kept small enough to sustain themselves in the long term.

I'm late to the party, but I want to share an insight I've had regarding game development and UI applications. It baffled me for a long time why building UIs were such a pain, and doubly so in a web app. Why could I, and others, create such seemingly advanced graphics and interactions in a video game, but try to make a UI and you're stuck with thousands of difficult to discover bugs. After I started using react, I realised games are "easy" for the same reason react is a huge productivity multiplier: you re-render the game every single frame. You have the data that represents your game state, there's a game loop, and you render every single little damn thing, every damn frame. It's a one-way flow of information from your explicit state to the presentation layer. React works the same way, only it re-renders only if the state changed. That's it. Super simple, but it's a mind shift.

Regarding 30. wasn't it recently concluded here on HN that obese people actually end up costing less to society since they tend not to survive into their 80s/90s? Not that his thought is good even if this was not true.

Sweden and Russia don't pose any direct threat to each other, but even though Sweden's military has been defunded in the past few decades after the cold war, it's still one of the biggest weapon exporters in the world.

Meteor doesn't require tight coupling between data access and presentation layers. Personally I use meteor with react.

I'm using Meteor and React for a side project, and compared to a previous project where I used Backbone and node.js it really is a 10x productivity boost. Since this is a side project I can spend at most an hour a day on, it really is the difference between being able to finish or not.

Where is your data on Chinese not being "that" hard? According to US Military studies it's about 10 times as hard to learn as another Germanic language. In my experience, being fluent in two languages and learning Chinese, it's crazy difficult. Everybody has difficulty with different aspects of the language, for me pronunciation and tones are easy, but the ambiguity and "same soundedness" of the words really makes it difficult for me to remember anything. I know that if I put as much effort into learning German as I have Chinese, I would be pretty fluent by now. Instead I'm a still complete newb.

I have to agree. Just spent 6 weeks in China. Just booked the flight there and back in advance. No hotels, not much research, not flights or trains within the country. Very liberating. The only difficult part was deciding on a general route, which took some research.

You actually know someone who bought a phone on credit?

Removing social services will not make society more productive. Not having to constantly worry for your life and family works wonders for creativity, productivity and overall happiness. It's not about entitlement, it's about enabling the people to do great things.

I don't know if it works like this in all of EU, but if you have a job offer you will get a work permit, no lottery required.

Wow, that really sucks (there's no other word for it). Makes me realise how lucky I was to get an H1B during the recession when no lottery was needed. Since then I've moved back to Europe though, in some small part for the insecurity of the whole situation. I wish you could have had my "spot", seems like you were a lot more deserving.

A little bit more likely than it first would seem. The balloon didn't land on Laura Buxton, but on a farmer who knew someone named Laura Buxton, which depending on how common that name is and how many people the farmer knew is not extremely unlikely. After the girls met they were already primed for looking for resemblances because of the identical name. All in all, it's a very unlikely event but not as unlikely as you might think.

Every country has its problems, but among western nations it's an outlier in many ways: the police state, militarisation, surveillance, car dependence, obesity, love of guns, poverty, crime, absolute zero trust in government, culture of suing, lobbying, "democracy", horrendous health-care system etc. For me it was just too much, I couldn't take it so I moved back. It's not that my life was bad or directly affected by most of these things except in a few instances. As a healthy, young, childless engineer I was truly privileged in this kind of society, but I realised I don't want to live in a society where almost everybody else suffers. I always enjoyed American culture, that's one of the reasons why I tried living there in the first place, but I think I can enjoy it better from afar.

Interesting... I would also like to add that even if you're in a state of flow you are still more likely than not working on the wrong thing/problem or taking the wrong approach. Prolonged flow without any reflection on what you're doing will likely take you very far down a path to nowhere. I've observed this in myself many times.

Sometimes it's just an investment. Many $80-100k entry level jobs do require very specific education. I bet those high-paying entry level jobs are fairly impossible to get without the right degree.

Unfortunately you don't just "go and work" in the US, it doesn't work like the EU. Unless you're a hot commodity and you can convince Google et al to pay for your visa ($tens of thousands) and then winning the H-1B visa lottery, you will have a tough time.

Very interesting, I'm surprised to see that Ouya is still alive. This is sort of what I want in a console today. I don't have time to play lengthy AAA games and prefer social games, but there are few alternatives for that type of gaming.

Or, don't be so afraid of strangers? People should be allowed to rent out their own property.

For me, it's work meetings. Whenever I'm in a meeting and something non-technical is being discussed my minds starts to wander, usually thinking about algorithms. This is quite dangerous in case you get called out on it, but I just can't help it.

Governments in most other developed countries have managed to develop better systems, why do you assume US government is so much more inept?

Just moved back to Sweden from the US and was surprised to see my income tax go down by 4-5%. I feared I had to take a pay cut by 25-30%, but with the lower income tax and 25% pension, I'm actually slightly better off now. The levelling difference is the 25% sales tax on pretty much everything except food and books.

I just want to say that you're correct, I've had this problem as well. As a non-native speaker for some reason it also didn't occur to me that the "shade" in shader has anything to do with color. It's just one of those things you can misunderstand. The way you explain it is much easier to understand.

I think all the people defending the term are all quite invested in the area already, so it's obvious to them.