lansing's comments

Corn is a grain, not a fruit or a vegetable.

Take a look at the test they added in the patch for an example of how the exploit would go down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Looks like an impressive, cool project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Non-experience is not the only "failure mode" possible in meditation. Most practitioners find that, as with many spiritual or psychological practices, things get more difficult before they improve. Having partial insight into the nature of reality, without the non-identification that comes with awakening, can make one's suffering a lot more apparent and "real" feeling.

For more in depth discussion of the kind of insights I'm referring to, consider the Theravada tradition's map of the progress of insight, specifically stages 5-9.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mahasi/progress.h...

Those familiar with Christian mysticism will see the parallels with St John of the Cross's "dark night of the soul."

Personally, I believe that issues I mention above apply to psychedelic use as well, i.e., it's possible to stumble into early stages of insight via drug use. This can be even trickier than when it happens via meditation, because typically drug users are not equipped with a framework to make sense of what's happening.

Does meditation on its own ever lead to things like psychosis? Well, I've practiced at a number of meditation centers in the U.S. and Asia, and I've certainly heard plenty of stories of what happens when psychologically unstable people come to do an intense period of practice...

In fact, deactivating/"quitting" your FB account is not enough, either.

I deactivated my FB account several weeks ago, not so much for privacy issues directly but out of concern of the overall psychological effect of so much sharing and the emphasis on superficial identity (something I don't see discussed much).

Anyway, I checked my cookies after reading this piece and, not surprisingly, FB didn't remove my old auth cookie (the one keyed 'datr') when I quit their site. I should have known better, but I still think it's shameful to some degree to track people after they've very clearly disengaged from the site and their FB "identity".