I want to address one of your points, I work here in the US under a work visa for a FAANG company. I disagree with your idea that it's somehow unfair/evil that I was "stolen" from my home country.
I decided to come work to the US, no one "stole me" from nowhere, and I don't think it's somewhat unfair to my home country that I decided to do so, just as the many immigrants I met and worked with back in my home country in the tech sector.
I feel that hard to believe, if anything, I would say foreign workers are more expensive than local talent, in big tech firms they are paid just the same as Americans, but they come with added expenses due to international relocation, visa feeds, etc.
* I might be biased thou, since I work on the US under a work Visa.
Most of them can, but few would, I for one feel it's outrageous to expect candidates to work 3 full days as a recruitment process, I'm sure I can find something better without having to take half a week off.
GDL has a thriving technical community and getting bigger every day, the founder of the startup for which i work for has an special interest on making Guadalajara Mexico's technological hub and wants to create success stories to bring more inversion and companies to the city.
I think a big advantage of Guadalajara over Mexico City is that it's a big enough city without the downsides of a huge metropolis, and is very affordable for engineers to live on pretty good areas, i bike about 10 minutes to work every day and love it.
Drop me a line at my username @gmail.com if he would consider working for a startup based on SF but with its engineering team based on Guadalajara, México. We mostly do django, flask and angularjs and are not worried on getting someone with his experience on our team.
My vote goes for native, i've built a series of wrapped html applications and the experience always is awful, as soon as you try to target something other than an iOS device you get tons of hard to fix bugs, awful performance and a bunch of weird glitches.
Going native takes only some more time at the beginning, but as every technology you can only get better at it with time, I would totally recommend avoiding wasting your time with hybrid solutions (Cordova) and go straight native (I know i wish i had).
That's weird, I'm on Mexico and we've had those features for several weeks now. While you are watching a film you can choose to not share a specific title. I've seen the feature both on the PC and on the PS3.
Maybe they did their test drive with the non-us version?
EDIT: Nevermind, i read further down on the comments how that feature was removed previously from the us version due to legal reasons.
I was involved on a project which were actually two very similar applications.
What we did was create one gem for each specific special behavior of the app, were we declared some methods as extension points which the base app should call, in that scenario prepending methods would be useful, we could declare dummy empty methods to be overwritten later on by a module.
What we needed to do because of the lack of prepending modules was that each module implementation should implement all of the extensions points even when it was not needed, so, some times we had some dummy empty methods on one of the specific modules, i would have preferred to have those dummy methods on the main project itself.
Sencha Touch + Phonegap, as it turns out it's not very pleasant to try to make a good looking responsive multiplatform app, specially with android browser weirdness and bugs.
Lesson learn, if you care about the user experience there is no other way than native.
I loved to read Joel, I was surprised when he announced he would not be writing again, same thing with Yegge. Obviously they get to choose what to do on they spare time, but damn, i miss those long blog posts.
I decided to come work to the US, no one "stole me" from nowhere, and I don't think it's somewhat unfair to my home country that I decided to do so, just as the many immigrants I met and worked with back in my home country in the tech sector.