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I live in SF and I absolutely love so much about it, but here and especially in Oakland where I also lived for years, I'd welcome bringing back caning if it meant we could live as safely and securely as in Singapore

Caning is absolutely against basic human rights, so no. It won't make Oakland and SF safer, it will only make society more divided and worse off.

Go ask and minorities like Indian slave workers how safe and secure they feel in Singapore...


> Caning is absolutely against basic human rights

I wish people would also care about human rights like sanitation, clean clothes, accomodation. But hey, people wearing shit-and-piss-stained rags shitting on the sidewalk?


Not really.

Ask them that vs in the UAE.


When did this happen? I remember judges at hackathons used to be very forgiving about lackluster UIs as long as the idea was cool and at least functional by the presentation time

It depends a lot on the hackathon/what the judges are looking for. A few are run by technical people who pick the coolest technical architectures, a few are run by casual users who pick the best looking result.

The majority of the ones I’ve been in have tended to be run by people who judge based on their notion of how useful the app will be societally, with the tie breaking factor being the UI/architectural design.


10+ years ago, when most "grassroots" (and some of the better startup) hackathons were displaced by enterprise-sponsored hackathons. I can mostly talk about the Berlin hackathon scene, but as far as I understand it the same thing happened in SF/London as well around the same time.

Presentation-first judging has been a thing for a long time, and unless there is a organizing party that explicitly makes code reviews a part of the scoring, and the organizers ensure attendance quotas for different personas (engineer vs. product vs. designer) it will always drift that way.


Reminds me of the inconsistency of take home interview tests where you have no idea if the person reviewing cares that the UI is shiny or not or if they want you to write a novel in the readme and make it look like a real project.

It's more about unconscious bias. The slick smoke and mirror will simply show better.

I'm sorry you think $200k/yr to sling Python for a 26 year old is too low?

Come on man be real right now


$200k is very middle of the pack for a salary offer in the bay area, and most places will push total comp up with stock and such, whereas OP mentioned that 200 was the UPPER bound, meaning they wouldn't be offering it to a junior developer.

I may have also misread the degree requirement as being higher than it was, but I think my point (prior to the edit) stands- for the posted requirements, the offered salary is low compared to other available jobs.


I'm sorry you all have lost your minds. I live and work in the bay area. $200k for someone who is 26 is far more than enough and should absolutely be able to get you a qualified person for the job description given above.

It's a middle of the pack/low salary offer in FAANG but the vast minority of developers here work at a company like that. It's hard to remember that sometimes.


We had a STEM education boom in the last decade in the US

The bay area's existing talent pool is hugely immigrant in nature. It's totally within expectations to put a job post for an analyst of some kind there and only get immigrant visa holders applying. They also make a lot more than many Americans who wouldn't be qualified but still live in the area.

Yep, H1B visa abuse exists and should be clamped down on, but it's also extremely vital to our sustained economic growth and frankly our biggest growth industry: tech

No, it’s clear that H1Bs have destroyed the American software industry as evidenced by the fact that the American software industry saw the largest growth in wages relative to any other field in the U.S. over the past 2 decades while also seeing a massive growth in the numbers of employees over the same period, also outpacing every other industry here as well.

Clearly the H1B has been devastating to American workers unlike all those other industries which haven’t seen an influx of a capped number of H1B workers every year.

And that’s even before we get to how the U.S. software industry remains one of a handful of industries where the U.S. is the leader in the world and has generated trillions in wealth, and is largely responsible for the US’s continuing dominance in the world today.


2 main reasons

1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own

2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it


All the butthurt people are going to come in here with screeds trying to upend a basic economic tenet that a growing population translates to economic growth if you can employ that growing population gainfully

> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.

It's also one of the worst developed nation economies and has a massive old, shrinking population problem and is well associated with people having no kids, having no prospects for a better life, and having huge amounts of its population live alone shuttered from the outside world.

A good economy has many benefits and skilled immigration can significantly improve developed nation economies.


You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.

I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.


Instead of those things, Japan has extremely high suicide rates, extremely low rates of coupling, extremely low rates of family formation, extremely high rates of loneliness, etc.

It's a place with no economic growth prospects, where you have to work far longer than people in other developed nations, and where your chance of companionship and having your own family is the lowest it can possibly be in the world.

But at least it's clean


    > extremely high suicide rates
This is no longer true. Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Sort by "All" and you will see Japan is #30, far below many other highly developed nations.


Okay, fair enough. The rest is still true.

They're also very unhappy on average: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...


To be clear, the economic performance of Japan is pretty similar to Italy. They have incredibly low population growth (or shrinking), but their GDP per capita continues to increase year-over-year. Surprisingly, quality of life is pretty good in Japan and Italy (the second will be a bit controversial here). As long as you have a middle class job, your life will be pretty good.

People are incredibly unhappy with their lives in Japan. Why do people continue to believe otherwise?

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20250410/p2a/00m/0na/01...


I am going to make a wild claim: "Happiness" is a stupid metric for quality of life. So many of the answers are tainted by local culture. Most Japanese people would feel like they are bragging to say they are somewhat or very happy. The very question is flawed. And I guarantee the survey was created by people with mostly Western European culture. To be clear: I said "quality of life" not happiness. There is a big difference. Let me tell you what "works" in Japan: health care, education (primary, secondary, and tertiary), home buying/building (wildly cheap by world standards), labor protections, national pension, mass transit, personal safety, taxation... I could go on and on. Quality of life is objectively extremely highly in Japan when compared to other nations.

I wish you had actually read the article.

> Among Japanese respondents who said they were not happy, the most common reason was their "economic situation," cited by 64%

> Only 15% of Japanese respondents said "overall quality of life will be much better in five years," the lowest among all nations surveyed. In contrast, the highest optimism for the future was seen in Colombia at 79%, followed by India at 78% and 76% each in Argentina, Indonesia and Mexico.

> Only 13% of Japanese pollees answered that their current quality of life is "good" -- the lowest among all 30 countries. This was less than half the average of 42% and notably lower than Hungary (22%), the second lowest, and South Korea (24%), the third lowest.


> Too much if you ask me

Good thing no one asked you. Why should you have a say in how someone else uses their land if all they are doing is building more housing units?


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