lingoberry

12년 전discuss

This is a case where policy will have to lead public opinion and culture. It has been done successfully in many countries, though less traditional than Japan to begin with. Subsidise childcare, make maternity leave longer, ear mark some leave for fathers etc. Then you'll see change eventually.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Yikes, I'm sorry for your experience. I think highly skilled foreigners coming to Sweden to work is such a recent that society is lagging behind. I've heard many stories of people changing their last names to their husband/wife's in order to get job interviews etc. I hope as time goes on people will be more accepting.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

No, I didn't mean it takes months to get your loan approved for most people. It did for us though, since we moved from abroad, having no work history in Sweden and no jobs at that point. That means you have to get two job offers first (for a couple) and that takes time. During this time you are looking at apartments but can't bid since you haven't secured a loan. Then comes the looking part, which for us took maybe 2 months. There was a lull in availability (and extreme competition between bidders), and we were outbid for everything. When we finally found one, and outbid another couple (price rose 700SEK btw), we had to wait another 3 months to move in.

Everybody's experience is different, but I think we can agree this is madness and not good for our economy. I rarely have much positive to say about the US, but one thing is that you can literally go to almost any city (except maybe SF and NYC), live in a hotel, and within a week you have found some place to live. Might not be the highest standard of living, but you can always trade up.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

This is the biggest problem. There really is no rental market to speak of, so talking about rental queues being 10 years long is not really relevant. If you want to live in Stockholm for a longer time you need to buy. This also means it takes months and months getting your loan approved, finding an apartment and waiting to move in. Only the waiting to move in part can take more than 3 months.

The flip side is, once you've bought a place, it can be really really cheap to live in with the current interest rates. We pay less than $1000 for a two bedroom in central Stockholm for instance, all included (interest, fees, electricity, water, heating, tv, broadband). This also means absolute prices are insanely high, and will probably continue to rise since there's still room for it to grow.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I'm talking about continental Europe and Scandinavia (including Stockholm where I live). UK is very different in terms of apartment condition. I've seen many carpeted floors, and even carpeted bathrooms of all things, really not acceptable here. Older buildings are very well renovated, and are generally better built than most new buildings.

As for the rest of Europe, the demand speaks for itself, even if you don't personally like the style and high ceilings, most people do.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Not really, part of the reason people want to live centrally in the first place is the density and the high quality turn-of-the-century housing. Tall ceilings, nice wooden floors, large windows. It sounds like you've never actually been inside one.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

After relying on Google Maps a lot for many years living in the US, I have (maybe unsurprisingly) noticed that it doesn't work nearly as well in Europe. As in, I'd zoom in on central Stockholm and search for something common, like the name of a restaurant, and Maps would promptly swoosh me to Nicaragua where it found a place with that name. It's doing stuff like this so often that I rarely use it anymore.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I don't know why they all make the same mistake of hiring literally a thousand people after their one big hit. Only Mojang seems to have kept small enough to sustain themselves in the long term.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I'm late to the party, but I want to share an insight I've had regarding game development and UI applications. It baffled me for a long time why building UIs were such a pain, and doubly so in a web app. Why could I, and others, create such seemingly advanced graphics and interactions in a video game, but try to make a UI and you're stuck with thousands of difficult to discover bugs. After I started using react, I realised games are "easy" for the same reason react is a huge productivity multiplier: you re-render the game every single frame. You have the data that represents your game state, there's a game loop, and you render every single little damn thing, every damn frame. It's a one-way flow of information from your explicit state to the presentation layer. React works the same way, only it re-renders only if the state changed. That's it. Super simple, but it's a mind shift.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Regarding 30. wasn't it recently concluded here on HN that obese people actually end up costing less to society since they tend not to survive into their 80s/90s? Not that his thought is good even if this was not true.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Sweden and Russia don't pose any direct threat to each other, but even though Sweden's military has been defunded in the past few decades after the cold war, it's still one of the biggest weapon exporters in the world.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Meteor doesn't require tight coupling between data access and presentation layers. Personally I use meteor with react.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I'm using Meteor and React for a side project, and compared to a previous project where I used Backbone and node.js it really is a 10x productivity boost. Since this is a side project I can spend at most an hour a day on, it really is the difference between being able to finish or not.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Where is your data on Chinese not being "that" hard? According to US Military studies it's about 10 times as hard to learn as another Germanic language. In my experience, being fluent in two languages and learning Chinese, it's crazy difficult. Everybody has difficulty with different aspects of the language, for me pronunciation and tones are easy, but the ambiguity and "same soundedness" of the words really makes it difficult for me to remember anything. I know that if I put as much effort into learning German as I have Chinese, I would be pretty fluent by now. Instead I'm a still complete newb.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I have to agree. Just spent 6 weeks in China. Just booked the flight there and back in advance. No hotels, not much research, not flights or trains within the country. Very liberating. The only difficult part was deciding on a general route, which took some research.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

You actually know someone who bought a phone on credit?

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Removing social services will not make society more productive. Not having to constantly worry for your life and family works wonders for creativity, productivity and overall happiness. It's not about entitlement, it's about enabling the people to do great things.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

I don't know if it works like this in all of EU, but if you have a job offer you will get a work permit, no lottery required.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

Wow, that really sucks (there's no other word for it). Makes me realise how lucky I was to get an H1B during the recession when no lottery was needed. Since then I've moved back to Europe though, in some small part for the insecurity of the whole situation. I wish you could have had my "spot", seems like you were a lot more deserving.

lingoberry

12년 전discuss

A little bit more likely than it first would seem. The balloon didn't land on Laura Buxton, but on a farmer who knew someone named Laura Buxton, which depending on how common that name is and how many people the farmer knew is not extremely unlikely. After the girls met they were already primed for looking for resemblances because of the identical name. All in all, it's a very unlikely event but not as unlikely as you might think.

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