Our website/app is a lot more than just a shim on top of our database, so Django is not of particular use to us. I'd actually argue that it's been a major hindrance.

We process a ****load of workouts and other measurements (imports from fitness bands, wifi scales, sleep monitors, etc). They all need some work done on them, processing, storage, etc. I work in the client services group, so we are basically always doing custom work for clients, and we also do MMFs "challenges", which are a major source of our income. The challenges infrastructure is fed the stream of workout/fitness metrics and uses it to generate "scores" for the various challenges running. The actual web part of it is not very significant.

LA has far less jobs than Austin, and even so,t he perks promoted out here are much more SF-like than LA by a long shot.

I think LA is sort of a dead zone of programming jobs. Out there, I'd be lucky to get one phone interview a week. Here I can get 3 or more with less effort.

I think that's a bit too harsh - there's a lot going on in LA:

http://la.curbed.com/2016/2/1/109428...ce-playa-vista

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Beach

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...118-story.html

http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/...to-playa-vista

LA should get better over time and diverse megacities are generally safe bets for talented technologists. Austin is more of a tech startup city than LA right now but I'd be much more reluctant to settle down there because the economy is not that diversified compared to megacities.

I guess I'm thinking through this from my personal perspective as a family guy who would rather not uproot a whole family because of changes in economic circumstances and wants to buy into a place that is sure to have a lot of options over the next few decades regardless of how things shape up economically. If you can just move when things go south, you can optimize more for immediate job availability and don't have to worry about how diversified local economies are more resilient during downturns.

There's been a lot of press lately on how taking out a mortgage in the US is still less economical than renting even if you intend to live in the same city all the time, so yeah, having a family is the most decisive factor

I wasn't really suggesting you move to Austin. I was just comparing what I see in the tech scene. I think the start-up culture more closely reflects SF in Austin than LA.

The big issue with LA is the size. If you don't live within peeing distance of the ocean, you'll never get called in to Playa Vista or Santa Monica. I know this is "illegal," but no one seems to care or notice.

LA doesn't really have a lot of diversity. It is either the movie industry or imports. If either of those take a tumble (they won't), the whole city would collapse.

I'd never ponder raising a kid in SF or LA. Heck no.

Ouch, that's brutal

Edit: idk what the transport situation is in LA, though; the metro network looks rather sparse to me, and if it's indeed necessary to go by bus or car to reach most places, then it's logical that employers are unwilling to accept workers who either are prone to being late (stuck in traffic) or have to get up early (which reduces productivity dramatically).

I get what you're saying, I was just talking about how my viewpoint may be biased.

That's interesting and makes the effective metro area smaller but isn't the area that's reasonably close to these places still bigger (in terms of people/jobs) than all of Austin metro area?

That's well-diversified enough for me. Maybe diversity is the wrong word but more about size and density - larger economies that attract people of all kinds are inherently more resilient than smaller economies that attract specific types of people.

I'm getting off-topic but why do you say that? Obviously we're in NYC and not moving but Bay Area and LA would both rank relatively high on our list if we were to contemplate moving. As would Boston and Seattle.

Consider downtown rent costs, though.

Again, totally off-topic but you would have to be fairly pessimistic on the housing market to come to that conclusion - generally buying trumps renting by a fairly large margin as long as you're not buying at the top of the market and have a reasonably long-term horizon. It's much more tax-efficient and cuts out the middleman. Thinking of buying as becoming a landlord and a tenant at the same time - you pay market rent, your transaction costs are low both as a landlord and as a tenant, your mortgage interest rate is lower because of government programs, you get tax breaks on your mortgage interest, you don't pay taxes on your rental income and you're guaranteed to have a good tenant. Landlords generally have much higher costs than homeowners because they have to deal with higher interest rate, taxes, transaction costs, possibility of bad tenants, etc and are forced to pass on these costs to tenants.

Are there really no cheap places still close enough to commute easily to Santa Monica and Playa Vista? That's pretty hard to believe though I haven't lived in Southern California in a really long time.

Huh, we have to wait for an LA resident to comment.

I've had a quick look at how often LA buses and trains are late and the phrase
has shown me how nice it is to live in the States. The fact that buses on the worst line are typically late only for 5 minutes merely a quarter of the time sounds like science fiction in this ****ed up country of Russia

Ugh, no idea how things are in Russia but public transportation in the US is pretty awful outside of NYC and maybe DC. Quality of service is also worse than most other first-world countries but the main thing is that coverage is so poor (or maybe it's just urban planning) that to get to most places you need a car anyway. NYC is probably the only major location in the US where you can have middle-class lifestyle without a car. I have no idea how this compares to Eastern Europe or BRIC.

Especially with things like Uber and Zipcar becoming popular, it's not that uncommon to live in SF without a car now.

The problem with Uber and Zipcar is that they offer full-sized cars that get stuck in traffic the same way as personal cars.

The ultimate solution to the traffic issue is riding a (motor)bike, as risky as it is, because lane splitting is still legal in CA.

Along those lines, there's also Scoot (basically Zipcar for scooters), which I've been seeing more lately.

Yeah, Scoot is much more effective at getting around the city

Edit: Uber looks like a luxurious option, at least here in Moscow. A 52-mile uberX ride traversing the city costs ****ing $22, whereas a ride by urban train between the same points costs $1.70 and is not much slower (takes a bit more than 2 hours).

uberX is not the same as uber. uberX is more like hiring a car, regular uber is like getting a taxi. Also, wtf who takes uber 52 miles?

Heh, indeed, taking it for the entire route is too expensive... but it's sometimes useful to identify a bottleneck in a multimodal public transport route and use uberX only for that trouble segment! Thanks for the idea that can potentially save me half an hour for 'bout $3.50!

Last fourth of July I took an uber to/from a location in downtown redwood city. The guy the did the return trip had apparently had a fare take him from Sacramento to San Jose and he was just trying to pick up fares on his way back

You're somewhat out of your depth and making most of this up. Do the math first. You should probably note that the "pessimistic" view of housing is standard. All structures are obviously depreciating assets.

This is as true for the landlord as it is for the homeowner so you still have to justify how the landlord is able to charge you any less, despite having to account for tons of costs that you don't have to deal with as an owner (vacancy, eviction, credit loss, broker fees, incentives, collection, damage, etc) and having a considerably higher cost of capital, both due to investment properties having high mortgage interest rates and landlord types having more opportunities and lower costs for investment than random people. Having a landlord and a tenant be separate people necessarily creates considerably higher costs, which means, in the absence of transaction costs for buying and selling, for renting to come out ahead, being a landlord has to be a massive losing proposition. I guess if you're the worst tenant in the world, you could come out ahead as a renter at the cost of major damage to your credit.

Aside from major declines in housing price and moving frequently, the only other major win for renting comes from simply consuming less housing than you would as an owner. In the US at least, the options are generally offered such that buyers pay more for better housing than renters. I guess if you're an extraordinarily good investor, that could make your personal cost of capital so high as to make the down payment uneconomical, but in that case you're probably loaded and don't want to live in a rental anyway.

oh noes this is turning into BFI

Rusty are you doing ETL or something? We have a separate big data group that uses an entirely different stack (redshift, cassandra)

Mihkel is back!

Time for a sweet derail!