markonthewall

Good man.

It's actually trivial to dodge US taxes. The most basic and effective way to accomplish that is to establish fiscal residency in a friendly european country. It becomes /really/ easy when you have dual citizenship.

Same applies for crypto gains, if you avoid using US based crypto-exchanges you are probably OK for the foreseeable future.

I have found that many americans overestimate the reach, competence, and sheer willpower of the IRS.

You would be surprised at what /doesn't/ happen if you stop filing taxes.

Yes, salaries in SV are high. But, you can bet your ass that that sample set is made of students who for the most part come from a handful top-notch schools.

Drumpf

Are you 12?

That's my experience as well. Considered opening an office in Bangalore as I was thoroughly impressed by some candidates I had interviewed. Performance on the job was significantly different... like by several orders of magnitude.

Taught me a lesson. Interviews can be gamed!

You link a Wikipedia article about a highly contentious issue among economists and expect to be taken seriously?

It is almost universally the case that when someone says "economists think X" they actually refer to a group of academics belonging to a specific school of thought which defends that particular position. Not that scholarly consensus does not matter, just a reminder that in certain fields those questions become so highly ideological that you simply cannot treat them as a math question on which you can definitely rule one thesis or another.

Because those companies are US companies, their very existence is a byproduct of this political community's stability, of the infrastructure that was paid with taxpayer money, sometimes of the direct subsidies of the US states and their federal government and generally speaking by the direct or indirect economic activity that US citizens generates.

Simple as that. There is a social contract that exists and that holds together the civic tissue of this country. Of course, some companies are going to try cheating it. That's fine, it is the reason we also have law enforcement agencies.

In the case of UCSF, a public University that almost exclusively relies on public funding to survive. I think people have an overwhelming amount of reasons to be pissed off.

I always enjoy a leppo after a good workout!

Sometimes I wonder if software engineers are half as smart as they think they are. I can't think of any precedent or similar situation: a corps of highly skilled workers pro-actively sabotaging themselves in order to share the fate of their country's dying middle class: longer hours, shrinking salaries and cut-throat competition for employment.

I am glad that I have some fuck-you money now. Because the prospects as software engineer seem, frankly, rather poor now.

The first step is to stop thinking that this industry - somehow - matters more than any other or that herein lies the future of humanity. Half of that is marketing garbage and the other results from free kool-aid parties that were held after a few of us either built successful companies or made good exit deals with bigger ones. There is an alarming amount of people who are not only drunk, but blind too.

I might be the bearer of bad news, but hear me out: this industry is just like any other. In other words, you are subject to the same dynamics that fuel workers - shareholders dualism everywhere. Basic game theory: you are going to get screwed and that's not funny.

A remarkable mind and a keen and joyful lad, I hope Peter finds rest at last.

Your assumption is that it is a problem, it isn't.

The success of many companies, and probably all of the unicorns, has nothing to do with technology.

Most of the unicorns are founded with engineering talent coming straight from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, UCB, Waterloo etc. you name it.

Making a company successful is as much about economics of scale than raw engineering and of course, both are closely related in this day and age. Engineering shapes what and how your products feels like in real-time (= understand very short code-to-production lifecycle).

It might not be politically correct to say but I am not here to make you feel better. Anyone who has actually been in a team at a company that has exponentially grown will tell you the same: your chances to ever survive that "first wave" of users is directly proportional to your ability to hire the best, which of course is a lot easier when they are your current or former classmates.

That's not to say there aren't companies founded by people not going to the schools mentioned above or that engineering talent is only available at these places. It is obviously not the case.

However, the density of talent at top-schools is absurdly high. And this is a game changer for most early stage companies and even more so for soon-to-be-unicorns.

Stealth startup | San Francisco, Waterloo, Hong-Kong| Full time, REMOTE, INTERNS, VISA

- Stealth startup w/ founded by two former early employees at large tech companies and and a MIT PhD; we all have success exits under our belts and we all have a strong engineering background.

- High salaries and high options: we want engineers to have a vested interest in the success of the company.

- Exciting technologies: we work with the cutting edge and toward capturing full value of our target market

- We are looking to hire the best and brightest - if you are an over-achiever in your domain (we are mostly looking for engineers) then shoot us an email.

- VC backed - we are VC backed and each found has a strong personal network of people both in Washington DC and SV.

To protect my anonymity on HN, please address your emails (resume + optional cover letter) to markonthewall.hn@gmail.com - I will reply with my professional account.

Shoot us an email.

Note: I expect a high volume of application so please forgive me if your email do not get answered right away. It might take a week or two.

Except the diversity quotas, or EEOs as they call it now, almost never allow for truly norm-bending individuals to access those roles. Having a different skin colour does not make or break group thinking.

It's a mirage, at best, and a sad state of affairs for racial perception at worst. That trendy cult of diversity is only contributing to kick-start racial consciousness among white people and that fragmented society is going to blow-up in your face, down the road.

Those are candy-bars to make you happy, just like the EHRC is keeping the leftists in line while we slowly shift toward an ordoliberal paradigm at the european level. For countries like France, Italy and even Germany, that means social regression and harmonisation by the bottom.

Yes, I would rather have decisions made by people in Brussels that understand what they're doing.

Yay structural unemployment in the eurozone! The folks at the commission and at the ECB sure know as hell what they are doing since the EU is a sui generis structure and the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment absolutely did not hurt western economies and destroyed the industrial tissue of those countries. I am being sarcastic.

Now, without any offense, you sound like someone who has red a wikipedia page about the European Union and who nows consider everyone having dissenting opinion to be a stinky redneck who does not deserve a voice.

Maybe that's not what you wanted to convey, in that case I apologise, but to be honest, at this point, I have met so many pseudo-smartass people who think they understand everything that I have very little hope you don't fall into that category of people. Thinking technocracy will magically solves all your problems is lazy, at best.

Another thing Rousseau "predicted":

"Défiez-vous de ces cosmopolites qui vont chercher loin dans leurs livres des devoirs qu’ils dédaignent de remplir autour d’eux. Tel philosophe aime les Tartares, pour être dispensé d’aimer ses voisins."

"Beware of those cosmopolites who go find in their books duties that they fail to uphold around themselves. Those philosophers love the Tartares to exonerate themselves from loving their neighbors (their nation)."

Maybe you will understand why Trump has such a strong support among the classes which aren't trendy to defend and advocate for. As much as I disagree with the rhetoric, Trump has a point: a country with no borders is not a country.

Afaik the folks at F8 started the trend, I heard them use that idiom back in 2009 (F8 didn't exist yet)

I tend to ignore any comment that starts with "you misunderstand basic economics". That's not so much the arrogant tone but rather the crass dogmatism that pervade those comments.

Change the set of axioms and the initial parameters and you end-up with invalid definition and properties of market dynamics. I guess OP probably believes that markets reach equilibrium by themselves.

Most professions you are referring to are unionized and defend their interests as a group, if you wait for C-execs to increase salaries of its information workers you might wait a long... long time. They have a board of shareholders to respond to and that is just not in their interest.

I am actually quite surprised at the devotion of some people here for their masters. It does provide a beautiful illustration of La Boetie's speech on "Voluntary servitude".

I mean, c'mon, this isn't the McCarthy era anymore... people should not get thrown off because you pronounce the word unions. Ordoliberalism like applied in Germany where I worked a couple years provides a quite elegant framework to allow a local form of union so the workers' right can be defended while not impending innovation and regular market dynamics.

Sorry but the above poster does not handle parallel operations yet, come back for v2.

I love the US and California, the tech scene is amazing and I was lucky to met such talented and friendly people in about every place I worked... from very large tech cos to "garage" startups.

Which is why it pains me to see that so many engineers get stuck with such ridiculous salaries (relative to the value and wealth they provide and create). Problem is that some salaries are seemingly high compared to what the average worker does in the country but ridiculously to what they would look like if engineers were allowed to capture a greater (that is a >0.01%) percentage of the added value they CREATE.

Most, from the freshly out-of-school to the senior engineer with glowing reviews are getting scammed because they get paid just enough to live a comfortable life but not nearly enough to what they are worth and what they would need to consolidate their place in the upper middle class.

I had one company acquired by a large tech co. Probably going to start another one soon, I won't commit the same mistake twice... engineers need their fair share. They are the one creating things, they are the one on the front line and we should not get satiated by the crumbles we are left with.

Now that the whole world is my neighbor, my immediate Internet neighbor, do I make any concessions at all, or do I uphold the ancient tradition of satire at all costs? And again, is a culture that takes mortal offense when an image it holds sacred is mocked a second-rate culture that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, my twenty-first-century that is?

The answer to this question is quite simple: France is a nation-state, if you wish to be part of the French nation you need to fulfill its two most fundamental clauses:

- the desire to adopt a common history, in its glory and its shame

- the desire to live and thrive together: "to have achieved great things and achieve more, together"

France is an assimilationist country and the French state takes its sovereignty from the Nation i.e the People. If you wish to come here, if you wish to be part of it, then you need to uphold its principles and traditions.

And of course, it should be needless to say that no one is forced to come here and that on the contrary, they are urged to leave as soon as possible if they find out that they have a burning desire to murder journalists- cartoonists when those draw their prophet the wrong way. That is non-negotiable.

I find it remarkable that the "multicultural crowd" fails to adjust their views so they can be sound with their moral principles when switching their country-wide frame of reference to a global one. If you sincerely believe that cultural minorities have a right to govern themselves and that moral monism is "oppressive" then how come haven't you figured that the French are an underwhelming minority at the world-scale and that their conception of the good life (eudaimon) - not only differs than yours - but includes protecting their public space from religious interference.

So to reply to your question and playing to your rules, dear author:

And again, is a culture that takes mortal offense when an image it holds sacred is mocked a second-rate culture that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, my twenty-first-century that is?

Mutatis mutandis, this apply exactly to your disdain for the French tradition of satire that you hold in perspective with your globalised view of the world.

Quora is down for me. Pretty surprising given their impressive uptime statistics.

I suggest you take a look at Elixir, it's an incredibly well designed and powerful languages. FWIW, I am pretty sure that it will take off exponentially in the coming years... the support for concurrency is amazing, and it also allows for simpler software to be developed easily.

Definitely worth taking a look at it.

the lack of passion from the cleaners

I doubt cleaning other people's shit is anyone's passion.

I believe the parent comment was referring to the numerous hospitals or other critical services who rely on these infrastructures.

Meh.

I am a bit disappointed, there is potential, but I think you could do a better job.

For example, it sounds like you are really just trying to demonize Fixpoint and their members, it's not very original. Note that I am not saying that there is or isn't truth in what you describe, I have no idea, but I wish you tackled this subject differently.

For example, instead of focusing on the big picture, and immediately let the reader know about Stan's personality, why don't you immerse the reader into Stan's mind. Letting him know of each and every thought going through his mind, no matter how confusing (without context) or banal those thoughts are.

Just food for thought, I think it could be way better than that, the subject has potential and you have good intentions. Only, the current execution is very poor and unoriginal.

I am not sure how you could possibly tolerate that military entity broke the law and made biological experiments on humans, especially when the said experiments resulted in a tragic loss of lives.

This is pure evil.

To be honest, I have a hard finding value in this news, but I realize people may have different interests. Thank you for sharing your reasons with me.

I find your desire to improve very impressive, but I think you will be better off finding a paid opportunity, as counter intuitive as it sounds.

Most of the time, the only technical skill you will develop by doing an unpaid internship is how to simultaneously make coffee and photocopies. This is not what you want.

When a company commits financially, the stakes are much higher and not training you properly will actually result in a waste of money. It will be hard with no prior programming experience but we fortunately, are a field where what you can do overweight where you come from.

This is only true to a certain extent of course, and you need first and foremost to be able to do things. It will take years and thousand of hours before you become a decent programmer.

For companies to invest in you, you need to demonstrate that you are sweating to get better and that you will actually get better.

It means reading, writing and studying code, programming methodologies and paradigms. Overwhelm yourself, learn passionately and ruthlessly. It may sound like a platitude but there is actually very little else you can do.

Start doing that now, yes now. Focus on that, take a job as a waiter and learn, learn, learn on your free time. When you start feeling a little less inept, it will be the right time to send a couple emails, calls and posts on HN.

This will also act as a test, you might be a little delusional and drank a little too much koolaid. Working all day and studying at night will let you truly assess whether it is the case or not, whether you are chasing a mirage or a vocation.

Technical internships, jobs should be viewed as opportunities to get better, professional and familiar with new problems and technologies. if you want people to invest you, start investing in yourself.