pheug

School is free in the US. For university, why not send them to the EU? So you can have both tons of bay area cash and a (nearly) free university for your kids.

Strangely though, this kind of education arbitrage doesn't seem popular among americans, i wonder why... it makes perfect economic sense in light of current US college prices.

The swiss right in the center of europe can very well imagine

https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/2500-franken-fuer-62-kilomet...

Working for tech in the Bay Area you have a pretty reasonable and predictable path to financial independence in maybe a decade or so of work (so, early 30s if you start right after school). After which you can have any wlb you want for the rest of your life. You don't even have to work at absolute top companies like FAANG to achieve that, although it helps (FAANG & hitting L6+ you have a decent shot even at FatFIRE)

This is nearly impossible in Europe except by extreme luck. Enjoy your 40+ years of sub 40h/w work ahead of you with slightly longer vacations. While I can have a life long vacation after my 30s. Perhaps even spending it in Europe.

Big tech companies like Google and Facebook avoid touching AGPL software with a ten foot pole.

Choosing AGPL is a great way to isolate yourself from any collaboration with that community

I'd actually consider browser pdf viewers safer than a standalone native app. Firefox uses pdfjs, a pure javascript pdf implementation running inside a battle-tested browser javascript sandbox. No unsafe native pdf code with countless holes.

It is actually plausible that there could be billions of pages with apple on the internet.

The 447 results you paged through are just the most relevant docs for your particular query ("apple" + country) and Google doesn't bother retrieving any further. Your use case of finding all the pages with the term "apple" is simply too rare and too expensive to support and they don't optimize for it.

If you try different query variants apple + something with different locales (&hl=) you'd get very different top NNN results.

Google like all other web search engines never scan their whole index when searching, it's way too expensive. All sorts of tricks are used to aggressively prune matching results at every opportunity during retrieval until maybe a few hundred best scoring docs are left and that's what you're paging through.

But yeah, estimated result count is still a big lie either way

Bonus is not guaranteed so why take that into account?

Bonus is not guaranteed only if you're about to get fired. Even lowest ok performance grade at google (CME) will get you 15+% bonus. But it's not a whole lot of money anyway. Stock is where you make bank.

Stock maybe but you can't pay the bills with that

Only at private companies. FAANGs are all public and their stock is as good as cash. You can trade it for raw cash any moment the stock market is open (except during trading blackout windows before earnings) and pay your bills with it

Sorry for stating the obvious, but money is a pretty big reason to continue doing leetcode style interviews. Most high paying employers ask them. Out of curiosity, how much does your no-leetcode job pay? Is it at least $200k?

If it comes down to it, maybe I’ll move into hardware design.

Hardware jobs generally pay less than SWE, you'll lose even further on the monetary aspect.

https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/pricing.html

You need your own domain and set up GSuite Business account on it or a subdomain. Included in the offer: Google Drive - Unlimited cloud storage. The "or 1TB per user if fewer than 5 users" bit is not technically enforced. Even if it were, I think $60/month is still very competitive if you need to store dozens of terabytes.

Sticker price currently $12/month but there are also discounted offers available if you look for them

There's https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/

Actually for 10 bucks a month you get unlimited google drive via gsuite. 10TB over here and counting. Unbeatable value proposition for hoarders

On the thread's subject, I use rclone to access it - works great.

rclone uses google drive's APIs to talk to them

Also Hungary and Myanmar if wikipedia to be trusted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation

And there are talks in the air that other countries might follow the suit to buff up their state coffers - https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/05/12/citizenship-based-tax...

You can make money any time

But big SV money? I wouldn't be so sure. Ageism is rampant in tech. FAANGs love their coders young, in 20's-30's. Also the dollar saved earlier in life is worth exponentially more later thanks to compound interest

There's no better place to solve your financial problems than in SV in your 20's.

Tried HP z27q for a month under Linux with Cinnamon, didn't like it. Being a DP 1.2 monitor, 5K resolution is implemented as an ugly hack using MST and two displayport connections. The system views it essentially as two independent monitors. Stuff like maximizing windows just plain doesn't work, you always work on half the screen, window panels are half sized, etc. Some work went into fixing user experience on GNOME, but for Cinnamon the maintainers are not interested in proper support for MST and I'm not interested in switching DEs. The situation is a better in newer monitors with DisplayPort 1.4 though, which gets rid of MST. But these are only Planar and Iiyama which you say you have problems sourcing. My monitor examplar also every so often would randomly flicker for a few minutes on a cold start, which also contributed to my decision to get rid of it.

My recommendation is to just get a 4K 27". Much more options and similar enough PPI, you would hardly tell the difference. Well, you won't have the perfect 2x scaling without stuff looking too big, but most desktop environments today support fractional scaling and/or you can play with your font sizes. I have 2x scaling now on 4K 27" with smaller font sizes, stuff looks about as good as what I had on 5K.

yes, but he wouldn't find a lot of clients interested in paying him 2 & 20 for such a simple strategy

Also, just so little companies is very risky. E.g. if Tesla flopped you'd probably underperform

Yeah, what happened to all those 3d optical storage startups that promised us petabyte sized things by now?

Very useful for storing medium/large-scale crawls. Common Crawl is 200TB+ per month (http://commoncrawl.org/connect/blog/). Uncompressed, if compressed it'd probably go through one such disk every 1-2 months. My own crawling operations consume about half a TB each month.

Storing high resolution (1080p/4K) videos is another big spacehog

Helps only until a certain point and then becomes counterproductive if they don't really like the work but can't quit due to these golden handcuffs you put them in. It could even make them disgruntled, the opposite of what you wanted. Or another possibility at an extreme end, they might even consider early retirement - happened at waymo apparently.

I ran the numbers and I don't think it's as amazing as you describe:

From what I could quickly find online (correct me if I'm wrong), the theoretical maximum pension you can get today is 3034 EUR/month, starting from the age of 67. With current life expectancy you're going to enjoy it for only about 15 years on average. To get it, you need to work for 45 years straight earning at least 82800 EUR each year and paying whopping 18.6% of that (incl. employer part) for the privilege to be part of this amazing system.

Let's look at net present value as of retirement age of both sides of the equation:

  for r in [1.07, 1.05, 1.012]:  # discount factor
    for y in [15, 30]:  # years to live
      print('%.3f %d %.0f %.0f' % (r, y, 
            sum(82800*0.186*r**i for i in range(45)),
            sum(3034*12/r**i for i in range(y))))

  #discount factor, years to live, NPV contributions, NPV payout
  1.070 15 4400768 354813
  1.070 30 4400768 483414
  1.050 15 2459510 396798
  1.050 30 2459510 587664
  1.012 15 911856 503038
  1.012 30 911856 923662

1. our retirement systems is based on a generational contract, not capital

You mean that people pop kids so that those kids would feel obliged to take care of them when they're old? Yeah, that's one legitimate retirement strategy. It's very popular in poor countries e.g. ex-USSR where I'm from.

Personally I'm more of a fan of US-style self-made retirement. It's easily possibly working in tech in the US, a 10 year career basically guarantees you financial independence here barring any major set back (like divorce). But not so in Germany and much of Europe.

2. home ownership is very low

Isn't that roughly same as saying people aren't wealthy enough to afford one? So if you "control" for this factor, you're just selecting the richer subset of people.

You get 401k match and health insurance at any good employer in the US too. As well as much lower taxes. German taxes are just batshit crazy, second only to Belgium. How people can afford to FI/RE with these taxes and pay is beyond me. Oh wait they don't! One of the lowest median wealth per adult in western Europe!

The spirit of the legislation may have been that L1B is for a temporary stay, but in practice today it's one of the major paths for high skilled foreign workers to permanently immigrate into the US, since H1B got extremely crowded lately. AFAIK most big tech companies wouldn't even try to bring anyone from overseas on H1B anymore - too much hassle, too little chance.

Instead they'd offer people to work for a year in Canada or Europe and then import them on L1. Advantages: it's not subject to quotas and lottery like H1B, and (a plus from employer perspective:) ties the person to the employer, so they ain't job hopping anywhere for a while.

DDG is not in the index-all-the-web business. For the most part they are just serving Bing's results, that's the only reason why they operate with so little funding - it doesn't take much to operate a glorified proxy. Microsoft's footing the bills for the actual web search operation and I'm sure it's way above 13M.

They already dropped by 20% from peak. Are you saying they should drop by all 50%? That doesn't make sense. Market is forward looking. Assuming a fast recovery, a couple bad quarters would even hardly matter in the long term. You can model that mathematically using tools like DCF valuation.

Another thing, Google has an exceptionally strong balance sheet and can weather this recession for many years if need be. They're not going bankrupt any time soon. You don't go and just short such companies when there's still plenty of leveraged junk out there.

What about the massive increase in views from people being stuck at home ? wouldn't that lead to a higher ROI when people eventually spend ?

That would lead to lower ROI as operating costs are increased to serve those extra users. Sure, with more users they'll serve more ads, but as total spend by advertisers is shrinking those ads will go off at bargain prices, it's simple math.

Security through obscurity. Pretty sure Blind did this just to piss off scrapers. I mean I've been scraping them for some time until they pulled this encryption trick about a year ago. I didn't have time to reverse engineer their js and keep my scraper up to date, that'd take way more time than it took me to write some 100 lines to scrape them originally. So score 1 for them.

Most big companies that I know with equity-based compensation typically forbid any hedging of their stock, especially through puts. But assuming hypothetically this is not an issue, you could sell short your company's stock to reduce exposure to your RSUs vested in the future.

Put options writers need to post cash collateral to cover their obligations or go on equivalent margin (which will be monitored and enforced by their broker) in order to sell you a put.

If this fails, there's still Options Clearing Corporation managing $120B+ collateral and acting as ultimate guarantor for option contracts.