lansing

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.