OP didn't specify whether that includes bonus or not. Regardless, for 2 YoE, this has to be a huge outlier. I'm inclined to think that this more an exception to the rule - I have a bunch of friends working in London finance tech, none of them making even close to that figure.
This is an old article (22/2). Ever since, he has several times refused to back the EU on sanctions and instead adopted a very selfish/nationalist stance. He went as far as to declare Zelensky an opponent after winning the election[0].
Hungary is on the wrong side of the conflict at this point in history.
Hungary has backed all sanctions against Russia except oil, which Hungary relies too heavily on. So far, Hungary has accepted 700,000 refugees from Ukraine. There's really no evidence that he supports Russia's invasion, or that he would veto Finland and Sweden's application to NATO. It really seems like some people here don't like him due to unrelated policy reasons and just want to drum up negative sentiment.
At the same time, Hungary did not allow transfer of military aid to Ukraine thorough or over its territory. Not speaking of providing any military aid of its own.
The two MIT-like schools in Switzerland, EPFL Lausanne and ETH Zürich are big tech hubs.
Also Google has a huge hub in Zürich, and most of the other big tech companies have offices there or in Zug. And as someone mentioned, there’s a lot of crypto-stuff going on in Zug.
Oh and before I forget, Bern has a bunch of OpenData/government IT stuff going on, and Basel is a hub for medical companies (Novartis and friends), and thus has a lot of med-tech companies.
No. But you can stay only 3 months without a job, and up to 5 years with a job. After having worked for 5 consecutive years you can apply for permanent residency.
- You can only stay 3 months to look for a job. You can stay indefinitely without a job if you can prove you have the means to support yourself.
- You can stay in Switzerland indefinitely with a job, you just need to renew your permit every 5 years, which is essentially a rubber stamp because of freedom of movement agreements.
- You're only able to get a permanent residence permit after 5 years if you're a national of a subset of EU countries (list at [0]) or you're able to demonstrate that you're well integrated (the most burdensome criterion for that is speaking one of the canton's languages at B1 or better). Nationals of other countries who don't go for the exceptional integration pathway have to wait 10 years like most other countries.
This isn't quite accurate either. You can stay as a tourist, but otherwise it's a good old Catch 22:
- no one will allow you to rent an apartment (and therefore get a permanent address / residency) without a job contract and without a residence permit
- you won't get a residence permit without a job contract.
- but if you don't have a permanent address and a residence permit, you could just as well apply for jobs from your own country, because what's the difference?
I guess it is easier to go to job interviews if you are staying at an AirBnb, but otherwise no point in staying in Switzerland, unless you are a millionaire, in which case you can support yourself anyways, so the above does not apply to you.
This is actually one noteable difference to EU countries, where you can just move to as you want, you most probably need to register but don't need to apply for a work permit separately.
PS. There is another way. Many people live in Germany, close to the Swiss border, and commute to Switzerland. But if you are a German you already knew that, and if you are not, it's probably not much easier for you to get a job this way :)
> This isn't quite accurate either. You can stay as a tourist
Unfortunately you're not accurate either.
What you're referring to (staying as a tourist) is the same 3 month limit I was talking about. An EU national can come to Switzerland for up to 3 months without doing anything special at all. After 3 months, you can apply for a short-term visa to search for work for a further 3 months [0] or you can apply for residence without gainful employment [1].
I've actually heard this the case for most immigrants, regardless of race. Would you say it's the case in the entire country, or more so the rural areas?
There are somewhat separate issues here: racism/xenophobia and standoffishness.
Regarding the first: Yes, I'm sure it exists, including, to some extent, in government representatives. It can express itself in more stark ways in rural areas (If you want to get naturalized and live in a rural village, the village gets to vote on your application; it larger places, the process purely bureaucratic). OTOH Switzerland is not a particularly violent country, so generally the racism does not express itself in physical violence.
The standoffishness is a big cultural thing. When we moved back to Switzerland after 8+ years in California, this was something we had to get used to again. OTOH, as others said, 25% of the population is foreign born, so you can always socialize with those… and, who knows, maybe over time you'll develop a taste yourself for keeping your distance and playing your cards close to your vest ;-)
Very helpful, thanks. In London, health insurance is normally provided by the company that you work for (at least all the companies I've worked for). And I can sign up my partner for an additional monthly fee as well.
(As already said, no, you will have to choose your own insurance and pay for it)
And you are required to have basic health insurance but can't get rejected if you have prior conditions. There is also a market for additonal insurances or higher tier ones (so you get your choice of doctor and single bed rooms in hospitals).
There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least.
What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.
Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?
You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment.
This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.
I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.
> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done.
I think part of making this distinction comes down to whether the creator thinks the product will ever be 'done'. A lot of products are run with the assumption (implicit or explicit) that they'll keep getting updated as long as they remain viable as a business. Either approach is a valid but they're both choices. Though you may have to choose right from the start, as for some products only one of the two is viable.
I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year.
The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)
The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.
> The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.
I was under the impression that most private trackers run without a profit, at least the reputable ones. Are you telling me PTP/BTN/HDB sysops are loaded?
I would guess so. It might be harder to take payments now than it was then, though, which would add friction and lower your revenues. I bet hosting is cheaper now, though.
Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.
We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.
Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.
The site made $13m. I stated in my comment above that I was only making about $150,000. Which I frittered away on bullshit toys. I had no savings at all.
That is impressive. How much time do you think you spent on non-coding activities? I imagine that running a torrent tracker probably took a good chunk of your time.
Really? Practically zero. We would just promote users to be staff and let them get on with it. When we had enough complaints against a staff member (they would all become Hitler eventually), then we would fire them and upgrade another member.
Cool, I used to run a service where I break into peoples' homes, take everything I can carry and sell them on. With this business, I was able to make $35 million in 2014. Non-taxable income, obviously.
Yes, our site was ethically wrong, but I'll add that the studio holding the copyright to most of the items on our site used our site to download their own material and it was brought up in board meetings. The studio staff would occasionally send me PMs on the tracker when we got something that was pre-release and ask us to take it down until it had aired on TV.
After we closed down the studio borrowed the name of our site and set up their own legal streaming service, finally.
If you want a deeper point, here it is: are all "microstartups" sleazy, almost illegal scams that generally make the world a worse place? Based on this thread, it seems so.
I mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time.
If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.
10 % of their work time is not a very well defined amount of time, though. If this is their only occupation, then it's 100 % of their work time. If they have a different primary occupation, then 10 % of that depends entirely on how much they spend on that!
I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.
I’m a solo dev running a few large, profitable websites, and the one running Rails has simply not been feasible to update recently with all the breakage it brings. Especially Webpacker is a major pain and I regret going down that path. Active storage has been another (lesser) pain point.
I’ve made a living online from a bunch of different things, and there’s always something in the world that changes in a way that forces you to change your thing as well. Sometimes quickly, when an API changes, sometimes more slowly as you get more competition for example.
And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.
I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.
You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.
The story is this, to the extent of my understanding: US citizens are free to sell such manuals within the US. The seller refused to send the manual to Oleg on his russian address, so some american guy on a game forum agreed to buy it and resend it to Russia. And in doing so the US espionage law was broken. Dura lex, etc. Had he just scanned the manual and put it anonymously online, all would be ok, I guess.
The Arms Export Control Act is a US law, and his friend was neither American nor in America. As a non-American myself, I don't like it one bit when I see US law reach into what should be sovereign countries. And then have that dismissed as "there's nothing stopping Georgia from doing a favor for the US", when that favor involves taking away the freedom of one of their citizens. A US citizen getting extradited to Russia as a favor would not be treated so casually.
I think most people are unaware of details of international law and agreements. The down voted sibling poster has a great clarifying example - if you are citizen of country A, living in A, but robbed a bank in B, which has extradition agreement and good relationships with A, do you feel you have some magic get out of jail free card? That the crime doesn't count? That you are immune because your crime was international in nature?
I'm in Canada and resenting Americans is our national past time :-), but still most comments here about evil tendrils of American empire are besides the point. Interpol, extradition, etc are a thing outside of America.
The key difference with the bank robbing example is that that is a crime in both countries A and B, and it didn't take any pressure of country B onto A to make it a crime in A as well.
Do you think/know Georgian law doesn't recognize the concept of secrecy requirements/trade-restrictions around material relating to military equipment?
Very theoretically example. Bank robberies are illegal virtually everywhere. At least that's my assumption.
But in principle you're correct.
If Bob commits a crime in country Ypso and flies home to country Zorg then Zorg will only extradite him if the crime he committed is also a crime in Zorg.
As a more practical example: Switzerland makes a distinction between tax evasion (which is not a crime, but a misdemeanor) and tax fraud, which is a crime. The difference is that when you "forget" to declare income this is tax evasion (to a degree), while if you cook the books that's tax fraud. Most countries don't make this distinction.
Switzerland got a lot of heat for neither providing information, nor extraditing people accused of tax evasion to another country. The reason being that it's not a crime in Switzerland.
Practically, that doesn't really matter much any more due to the whole information exchange on tax issues, which the country is also part of.
There are other reasons for not extraditing a person. For example if such a person is a citizen in a country that doesn't extradite its citizens then any extradition request from another country will be denied.
I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited.
People often have irrational emotions about teh evil Amerika, so forget them. Say you're an Argentinian in Argentina and commit a ransomware attack against an Irish bank, but somehow give yourself away. Do you not expect trouble upon landing in a country with which they have an extradition treaty, merely because your crime was committed from Buenos Aires?
> I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited
Well when it concerns their own citizens, this bizarre notion comes at least from the USA who even threaten judges working at the International Court of Justice, and their families... So maybe sometimes the emotions about "evil" USA are not completely irrational.
> I don't understand where this bizarre notion comes from that if you commit a crime while not physically being in the country and not being that country's citizen, this somehow nullifies the crime and means you shouldn't be extradited.
Should we extradite Americans living in America to China if they mock Xi or dishonor Chinese heroes?
Every nation decides which charges are included in the extradition treaties, and which aren't. So no, we should not.
However, in this scenario, depending on your importance/visibility, you should absolutely read up on extradition treaties when visiting China-friendly nations.
Any American who visibly supported the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests should definitely think twice about ever visiting China and (again depending on visibility/importance) any friendly nations with extradition treaties and the numerous countries around the world without rule of law.
First to correct some factual errors. The importer was a Russian citizen, who happened to be visiting Georgia. His conspirator was an American citizen living in Texas, that being a critical element to him being able to purchase the manuals and forward them to Russia.
Furthermore, it wasn’t that long ago when Russia invaded Georgia and essentially annexed portions of its territory. It’s clearly in their national interest to cooperate with laws that seek to prevent technology transfers to Russia.
However, if you defraud a little old lady living in England of her money over the internet, you may very well be extradited to the UK despite being from the US. Would that be the UK riding rough shot over US sovereignty?
The American legal system (for all its faults) is independent and has strong safe guards for the rights of defendants. The Russian legal system is not independent and routinely uses as a tool to suppress descent and prevent potential challengers from standing for election as observed in the many cases against Navalny.
So what happened to the Texan guy? Was this the outcome of some legal construction shifting all blame to the absentee, a legal construction that was entirely well-meant because on paper they'd have treat him like some cold war area spy but didn't find that appropriate wrt the documents in question? With nobody expecting that construction to affect the absentee like it eventually did?
Imagine some US citizen had bought "can't leave the country" documents about some British military things via a London middle-man (very hypothetical because I'd assume secrecy to work very differently in the UK). Would one expect the UK to skip that middle-man wrt consequences?
>The Texas man was indicted along with Tishchenko, but District Judge Dale Kimball in 2017 signed an 18-month deferral-of-prosecution agreement. Then, on Wednesday, all charges against the Texan were dismissed.
> However, if you defraud a little old lady living in England of her money over the internet, you may very well be extradited to the UK despite being from the US.
You reckon? It's only crimes that happen on the USA's side of the road that don't count?
>> I don't like it one bit when I see US law reach into what should be sovereign countries.
The US govt also does not like it when people attempt to use US arms to kill US people, military or civilian.
So, yes, your nationality or location are irrelevant. If you are actively exporting US military goods or information without a license, you should expect that the US will do whatever it can, including asking favors of other nations, to find and imprison you.
In Other Words - do not f'n do that - or get a proper license and do it right (or make sure your smuggling is sufficiently profitable and you are sufficiently clever that you can live the rest of your live always positioned out of their reach - good luck).
It is not that hard to avoid shipping US Arms information & goods without a license.
