I don't have any insightful macroeconomic explanation to offer. Just my $0.02: if you are complaining about earning $80,000 to sit behind a computer screen and type all day, you are one entitled SOB. There are 10 million people in China and India who would probably cut off their right arm if it meant they could work for a well-funded startup in the Bay Area for $40,000 a year. They'd make it work even if they had to live in RV's in Fremont.
So what? By your logic we should all feel fortunate we have a toilet that flushes or fresh water out the tap because not everyone has those and maybe we should but that wasn't what he asked was it.
He asked why is there such a big apparent difference between similar roles in different places, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to ask and could have done without the holier than thou spiel.
> if you are complaining about earning $80,000 to sit behind a computer screen and type all day, you are one entitled SOB.
What does that make the LP's, and VC's, and angels, and accelerators, who do no work, and sit on their yachts whining how much money that the workers who do all the work are making?
I do all the work and I create all the wealth. If I am being paid $80k, then on average I am creating $100k, or $120k etc. for the company. It's a joke that the parasites who live on my sweat, and their toadies like yourself would use the word entitled. Yes, I am entitled to the wealth I create, in fact I am entitled to more than that.
If the wealth I create does not go to me who worked to create it, who is it going to? To the lazy heir LP. You advocate more going to these parasites which just reflects how you think - like a parasite.
OMFG this reads exactly like some communist screed with one difference. If you own a single laptop you own 100% of the means of production, you do not NEED LP's, VC's, Angels, or a paycheck. If you want to keep 100% of it, then go, code up your own damn site like any number of people here did, don't take a dime from anyone and go produce some value and keep all of it. There are basically zero costs involved with launching a web startup. do it then. you're acting like this is the nineteenth century and you're working in some factory owned by a VC. you own the tools. what exactly are you missing? Go build something and put it up. right now. tonight. go go go go go go.
you have a moral duty to quit your job and code a site you own 100% of, using your laptop which is the means of production. how can you support the unjust social structure you're a part of today? The people working in your office as support staff are letting you generate value neither you nor they keep.
You have a moral duty to resign today and code a site on your own laptop, from home, owning and keeping 100% of the wealth/value.
or to update your philosophy to be practical, sane, and not hypocritical. either way you cannot continue as you have written. it is unjust.
</sarc>
In case it isn't obvious I say this tongue-in-cheek, and expect you to update your philosophy and not your work conditions.
but the choice is yours. Today, you are the factory owner. Go home and turn it on. or stop complaining. here HN literally supports both options.
"Sit behind computer screen and type all day" is the worst thing I have heard about my job and "cut off their right arm if it meant they could work for a well-funded startup" the worst about my country.
It requires great skill to build a company or be the part of first 10 employees. You cant just pick up a person on the street who knows how to type and expect them to build a Google. And as far as the India/China situation is concerned, you get to brag only because of the currency conversion rates. Lookup the number of Indian and Chineese employees in top US copmanies and startups and also do some research about the startups in these countries, if you know how to type into a search engine.
If I ever strike it rich, I swear to god I'm donating $5,000,000 to the cause of reaching total feature parity between the best of R's packages and NumPy/SciPy.
you are underestimating the price of that by at least an order of magnitude. That is one of the biggest reasons people like R. R also has the notion of NA, which is different than NaN, built into the language.
The other huge reason for R adoption is it makes running stat analyses very simple, so for all the people who aren't programmers, and don't wish to be programmers, R is an awesome choice. The ability to, in 3 simple lines of R, load data from a csv, run a glm, and get a sophisticated report on the model is awesome.
The battle between R and NumPy reminds me of the competition between American and Japanese auto manufacturers. Did American car companies successfully play QA catchup in the past 10 years? Probably, and God knows they needed to. Meanwhile, Japanese car manufacturers were building on 35 years of QA excellence the whole time.
I would be far more excited about the possibilities created by a cornucopia of new stats/dataviz functionality built into Python than I would be about some packages that make R a bit less terrible to write.
The whole R sucks as a language thing is getting pretty old. There is some things that R is really good at, there are some things that Python is really good at. Just because R comes from a somewhat unusual ancestry (firmly rooted in functional programming with immutable data structures and generic function style OO) doesn't make it bad.
As recently as a few months ago, R used a form of "reference counting" which only allowed three values in the counter: 0, 1, and 2 [1]. This might be caused by unusual ancestry or it might not, but it's hard to stop saying R sucks when it does that in 2014.
Keep in mind that a couple weeks from now, the Western outcry about this news will die down, but their air will still suck! When I was in Beijing, I felt so terrible for the infants I saw on the streets. My lungs felt worse than ever for the 3 days I was there, but they will likely breathe that air for their entire lives! When are Chinese people going to realize that they can't live in a giant cloud of smog?
I would think that a multi-level/hierarchical/mixed GLM would be an interesting approach to their data. Multilevel modeling assumes that there is correlation between observations that are inside the same "level". This is in stark comparison to regular GLM (even one with dummy variables to represent categories), which assumes that all observations are 100% independent.
E.g. in a model that predicts students' GPA, you could divide your data into a hierarchy consisting of, at the highest level, geographic area, followed by high school, maybe followed by teacher. In that model, the correlation between students who are in the same state, the same school or in the same classroom would be accounted for. You could even go as deep as at an individual level if you have >1 observation per student.
In addition to regular predictive variables, judg.me could probably use their weblogs to group people's judgement scores by country of origin and by individuals, among other possibilities.
Before I moved internationally for school, I was concerned I would need a secondary computing device that would have a lot of functionality, a lot of portability, and be cheap enough not to worry about if it, say, dropped out of my backpack while riding my bike across town.
I looked at all kinds of tablets, but then I realized I could get more functionality, roughly equal portability and battery life, for a much cheaper price.
My ASUS netbook was the best money I've ever spent.
For $250, I got:
-A 10.1 inch screen
-9-10 honest hours of battery life if you're conservative
-A 1.5GHz dual core processor fast enough to watch 360p videos while running Visual Studio and Eclipse
-2GB of DDR3 RAM
-A 250GB HD
-3 USB 2.0 ports
-Ability to dual boot Win7 Pro and Linux
-A keyboard
-A webcam
-All in a device that weighs less than 3 pounds and fits easily in any small bag.
It blows my mind that people would want to spend $300+ on a device with slightly more portability and far, far less functionality.
Really? do you want mine? I got a netbook and it was the WORST money I ever spent. Looks like very similar specs, but my experience was that it was slow. Too slow to run more than a half dozen tabs in Chrome, too slow to play flash videos smoothly, and a dinky little keyboard that my fingers would be all cramped together and I'd fat-finger everything.
Maybe if I had Linux, things would have turned out better. On the upside, it's still kicking around. The odd time I need to use IE, it's got my back.
Then you were doing something very, very wrong, because I have a positively ancient laptop with 1 GB of DDR RAM and over a dozen tabs or Flash video is no issue at all.
Although I am not trying to argue against your overall position, my experience with a Core-Duo Macbook and an iPad 2 leads me to the firm conclusion that an iPad is going to feel a lot faster than the above set-up until you add an SDD.
I've used an iPad before and I am totally willing to admit that it is a sexy device. It felt fast and was able to do a lot of useful things.
What really convinced me to buy my netbook was the ability to not worry about my computing device.
Carrying around a $500 thin piece of hardware that is constantly in danger of breaking in half or getting stolen in an unfamiliar European city was just not appealing to me.
I've used an iPad 2 extensively and (like most people reading this) I've owned a clamshell-format device, and although I do not hold myself out as an expert on such things, I would have guessed that the iPad is the more durable device because there are fewer moving parts and no moving parts as complex or as prone to getting gummed up as the clamshell's hinge or a trackpad. Do not get me wrong: I am perfectly willing to believe that a netbook is better for you than a tablet; I am just finding it a little hard to believe that durability concerns tip the balance in favor of the netbook.
P.S. The iPad's back and sides are machined from a single piece of aluminum; do iPad's really break in half?
They might not actually break in half (I was exaggerating), but my point is, when something inevitably happens to any such computing device that sees so much travel tome, there goes at least $150 for a new screen, or worse, $500 + personal data when some dude in a pub sees that Apple logo and makes a grab for it when I'm concentrating on my beer.
Specs don't capture everything. An iPad is way better for browsing/reading/watching movies. Instant on is awesome. And I have to charge my iPad once every two weeks or so. Laptops don't have much for standby time. The App store is way nicer for installing software.
Of course I spend much more time on my laptop. I'm sure not going to code on the iPad.
If you run Linux on your netbook and don't turn it off (e.g. only go to sleep) then you can both have "instant-on" and an even better way to install software.
It's an ASUS eeePC 1015PEM. Unfortunately I don't think they sell them anymore. They've since upgraded the processor to an 1.66GHz N550 which performs better on youtube, but I've heard it gets 25% less battery life.
I have a similarly pleased experience with my Asus 1215N (1366×768 screen), which I got for around $300 new (good bargain).
It has basically two drawbacks for me: battery life isn't amazing (roughly 4 hours of active use), and I'm sure a dedicated reader would be better for reading high-res PDFs.
Oh well, I can write code in vim on my eeePC, and you can't say that about an iPad.
