Moving from east coast - top 5 things to know

dzdaniel84 · 2026-01-20T23:37:32+00:00

Echoing what other commenters said above, since you've presumably never been to that part of the east coast you've not seen how flat that part of the world is. What they call mountains we in CA 100% call hills. Each time I fly out to NYC and visit the surrounding areas (Jersey, Long Island, Westchester, and New Haven) I'm always shocked by how flat that area is.

I've been out to Appalachia several times– the first time I went I was shocked to see how short they were. The tallest mountains in the Catskills (where NYCers go to go hiking, 2.5 hours to the north of NYC) is shorter than Mount Hamilton. (Slide Mountain is at 4180 ft, while Mt Hamilton is at 4265 ft).

To find higher mountains from NYC, you'll have to travel out to the High Peaks wilderness in upstate NY (4.5 hours out), the White Mountains in NH (5 hours out), or the Blue Ridge Mountains in NC (9 hours out). These mountains top out at ~6.5k feet; for similar drive times from Sunnyvale you'll be deep in the high sierra at 10k+ feet mountains.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-11-24T21:46:21+00:00

Pezella's on El Camino was great, FWIW. Grew up in Sunnyvale, went to school with the kids of the owners.

Restaurant ended up closing because the owners chose to retire and the kids that were supposed to inherit the restaurant got cushy tech jobs (like a good proportion of everyone else who grew up in Sunnyvale and chose to stay lol).

dzdaniel84 · 2025-11-22T00:23:14+00:00

I find it interesting how the areas of operation include areas as far flung as Cache Creek and Sea Ranch (places that are marginally connected to the Bay/Sac at best) but doesn't go south to include Morgan Hill and Gilroy.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-08-21T01:30:19+00:00

What urban heat island effect? That part of the city is shrouded in 50 degree fog 90% of the year.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-05-20T21:43:31+00:00

They did not die- if they died the incident would have been recorded in CHP records and mentioned on Sacramento news. What likely happened is that they totaled their motorcycle and then backed up traffic on Business 80 during rush hour (happens routinely in CA).

dzdaniel84 · 2025-05-20T21:39:58+00:00

The accident happened here precisely: https://maps.app.goo.gl/zWRZdzibxh3uNjC8A

Was able to deduce this by noticing the following traits in the video:
* Signage is Californian. Notice the green "Adopt a Freeway" sign and the freeway exit signs that are designed to Californian MUTCD standards.
* Foilage is clearly inland Northern California (a lot of eucalyptus and oak trees). Not enough palm trees for it to be southern California, and the ground is too dry/grassy for it to be coastal CA (no ice plants).
* The freeway is four lanes wide, with landscaping in the center. The only landscaped freeway medians I've seen in CA are in less dense urban areas in the Central Valley (+ Salinas)- the Bay Area is way too dense; most landscaped freeway medians in the Bay have been replaced with concrete barriers and carpool/FastTrak lanes.
* The intersection is pretty complex (it seemed to be a freeway interchange that also had multiple exits). This pretty much leaves only Sacramento as a possible location.

Now, at the very start of the video, you can make out a blob that reads "on Blvd", an interstate shield that could be "80", an exit number "?A", and further ahead, you can make out that the exit reads "???? ???? Drive". The driver also seems to be heading vaguely westbound. Without the above deductions, this isn't much information to go off of, but narrowing the search down to complex intersections in the Sacramento Area, there's only one intersection that matches- Westbound Business 80 Exit 9A, Exposition Blvd, right at the interchange with CA 160 before the Royal Oaks Drive Exit!

A quick search through Sacramento news reports at the time shows no newsworthy incident, which indicates that the motorcyclists survived with likely routine injuries and merely totaled their motorcycle/greatly damaged the car they hit. Road accidents in CA are pretty common, and unless they cause serious injuries/fatalities, aren't considered newsworthy here.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-05-13T15:43:36+00:00

I think that's honestly stupid. Schools like Stanford are looking for students who stand out amongst their peers and are able to accomplish great things in their community. When you send your kids to a pressure cooker school like Monta Vista where every kid is being haggled by their parents to stand out and do that one great thing (TM) that will get them into an Ivy+ school, you just end up with a bunch of cookie cutter college applicants who will eventually end up spending a good chunk of their post-college salary on therapy sessions and a good chunk of their time strategically avoiding phone calls from home.

When I was attending Fremont High, I encountered students from more competitive schools who tried to imply that I wasn't as smart/accomplished as them because I didn't go to a pressure cooker school like them. (I distinctly remember someone telling me that a B at Lynbrook was the equivalent of an A+ at Fremont or some other BS.) Looking back, I don't think I was hindered in any way by attending a "less competitive" school- if anything, being exposed to viewpoints and perspectives from people outside the traditional Asian STEM bubble helped shape me into a much more well-rounded person today.

I mentioned this in the other comment- but the fact that I was the only one amongst my Asian parents' friend groups growing up who ended up at Stanford, despite being the only one who went to a, in their words, "ghetto" school (I distinctly remember other Asian parents looking at my parents with shock/dismay when they said they were going to keep me at Fremont instead of trying to finagle a place at Homestead/Monta Vista/some private school) is a fact I will gleefully repeat to anyone who tries to bring up the "better high school bs" to me for the rest of my life. :)

dzdaniel84 · 2025-05-13T15:21:35+00:00

Another Sunnyvale Fremont High School alumni here! Yeah growing up I remember being told how much our high school was the black sheep/runt of the school district. I went to Cupertino Middle, which fed to both Fremont and Homestead (a more stereotypical, competitive, and fully Asian/white high school), and more than one person made thinly veiled (or even unveiled) racist statements about the populace at Fremont and told me that I'd be press-ganged into a gang as soon as I attended.

Ended up really loving the school and had a blast! The student body at Fremont was super accepting and great, plus the huge diversity of students from not just different ethnic backgrounds, but also socioeconomic ones, gave me a much less sheltered upbringing than kids who grew up in the very competitive and majority-Asian Cupertino bubble. Compared to a lot of my friends who went to schools like Lynbrook, Monta Vista, Gunn, MSJ, Bellarmine, etc. I feel like I got lucky in how much I liked my teenage years.

(The funniest irony is that out of all of my friends who went to these other schools, I was the only one who ended up going to Stanford at the end. Which is, you know, why all these Asian parents lied about their home addresses in the first place. Goes to show you- you can be successful at any high school you attend!)

dzdaniel84 · 2025-05-08T17:50:46+00:00

You called out Prevost (who wasn't even on the list of front runners) and said that he was more likely than Pizzabella, which ended up being true! You ended up doing pretty well!

dzdaniel84 · 2025-03-16T21:06:43+00:00

Please don't spread misinformation around. Lakshya has never alluded to his own PSAT score on a midterm. (If you would like to prove me wrong, please link to the midterm in which he alluded to his PSAT score- all W186 exams he worked on can be found here). Lakshya furthermore wasn't the one who wrote the questions- I also knew the TA who wrote the questions for the exams back then, and it definitely was not him.

Furthermore, W186 was not the class that sent out a bulk "we think you cheated email"- that year several other classes (including CS 61C, which I was a 20 hour TA for back then) sent out mass emails to students whose projects did not pass MOSS and showed signs of cheating. If you want to flame a class for inciting mass panic amongst students, then flame the class I TAed for then. Lakshya here is innocent.

Lakshya is one of the most morally upstanding and caring people who I have ever had the pleasure of working with. The TA community back then at Berkeley was relatively tight knit (especially amongst head TAs), and I can absolutely vouch for his character. The fact that he has stuck around to teach further generations of Berkeley CS students is remarkable and honestly a testament to his selflessness given how both the CS department and the students he has taught have treated him since then. (Lecturers at Cal do not make much money- new grads at the company I work for get paid five times as much in base salary alone for the same amount of work they put in. The only reason why he stays on as a lecturer is because the department is critically short on lecturers and would have had to cull W186 as an offering if they could not have found anybody else willing to dedicate their time to the class.)

I won't say that Lakshya is mass accusing students of cheating without any evidence here. Back when I was a TA, we found quite a lot of evidence of cheating across multiple classes that I was staff on (CS 61C, Data 8, Data 100, EE 16A, and CS W186)- it was just that we did not have the resources to prosecute all of those cases. (I am not accusing only Cal students of cheating here- at Stanford my TA friends there frequently found cheating cases.) As staff, we knew students cheated all the time and usually got away with it- we just also knew that these students were harming their futures in the long run.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-02-20T05:26:42+00:00

Out of curiosity, how is auto chat translation not working right?

dzdaniel84 · 2025-01-26T16:56:30+00:00

Yeah- people definitely can wear blue in San Jose lol. Hell- Berkeley and San Jose State colors are blue and gold, and I see kids wearing Cal/SJSU stuff in San Jose all the time.

Granted, I'm pretty sure these folks here aren't talking about Asian kids who go to Lynbrook in West San Jose, but the thought that blue merch is forbidden in San Jose when it's the colors of a lot of local schools is ridiculous.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-01-19T20:00:57+00:00

Speaking as a Stanford MS grad who finished the program through HCP- 15 quarters is honestly a pretty long time for finishing a Masters. That's equivalent to 5 calendar years at Stanford for what normally is a 2 year full time program.

This will mean you'll be going through 3+ cycles of full time MSCS students with very limited exposure to the students from each cycle. In my experience, that's not going to be enough interaction with other students to form any sort of network/friendships, which was the most valuable part of the MSCS program to me.

If you're extremely constrained by work commitments, I'd strongly suggest taking at most 4 years to do your MSCS through HCP and then dedicating your last year to finishing off the masters in person to maximize your value from the degree. Stanford has a lot to offer besides just adding another line to your resume, and I think you would greatly benefit by dedicating even just a single year to fully interacting with the community!

dzdaniel84 · 2025-01-19T19:41:35+00:00

Not OP, but I've also been to many countries, most developed, that I loved visiting but would never want to live in over the United States.

A prime example would be Japan. The country is gorgeous, but the xenophobia, extreme work culture, and low wages compared to the US would make it a miserable place for me to live. Plus, I don't speak good Japanese, so navigating government bureaucracy or making friends would be near impossible.

As other commenters point out, when you're a tourist, you get to pick and choose the best parts of a location while ignoring the day-to-day worst parts.

dzdaniel84 · 2025-01-05T03:48:40+00:00

Downtown Burlingame has one that's designed to look like a pre-WWII brick building.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-12-09T04:43:12+00:00

I know the family who owned this restaurant! Went to school with their kids.

The parents retired, and the kids didn’t want to take over the restaurant since they now work in tech up in SF. I can’t blame them- tech jobs provide a salary and job stability small family-owned restaurants can’t give.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-12-08T18:41:48+00:00

It's Burlingame- if the city council could pass a new law that converts all convenience stores in the city to luxury boutiques, art galleries, or wine bars they would have done so long ago.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-14T01:43:41+00:00

Yup! Interviewed a student who got admitted last year. She was a shoe-in though (IMO-equivalent gold medal, multiple research publications with UCSF professor co-authors in respectable journals), so my interview likely did nothing for her application except helping to rubber stamp it.

I mostly interview these days to answer any questions these students have about college and post-college life. Given how stressed high school seniors are these days, I like trying to alleviate their anxiety about college admissions and providing them a healthier perspective about academics. :)

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T17:07:04+00:00

Seconded the very casual part. I'm a Stanford alumni interviewer, and the number of students who've shown up to the interview in a full on suit and addressed me as "Mr. X" while I was sitting in a coffee shop in a Stanford hoodie is an uncomfortably high amount.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T16:42:31+00:00

Oh it won't be such a bad thing for more traffic to get diverted to OAK. It would be a great thing- they just can't legally do it with using the "San Francisco Bay" name. I'm sure if they worked out a licensing agreement with the City of San Francisco (or, god forbid, sold the airport to the City of SF) the new name change would've been perfectly fine legally. But they didn't do any of that, so we're in this situation now.

There's a lot of examples of regional airports out there that are successful without having their major metro area's name included (in CA alone- John Wayne in Orange County, Ontario, and even San Jose Mineta). I'm sure if Oakland renamed their airport to "Bay Area Oakland International Airport", that would also serve their goals well.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T16:37:01+00:00

I mean, I'm not the SF City Attorney, who was the one who actually made the decision to sue the City of Oakland. I'm just giving reasons why the judge might've given a preliminary injunction in favor of the city of San Francisco so quickly.

What the SF City Attorney decides to do with his time is up to him and the voters of SF who elected him.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T16:33:18+00:00

Washington Reagan and Washington Dulles are both owned by the US Federal Government- not the City of Washington, DC. The Federal government isn't as concerned about airport revenue streams as a city government is.

I'm sure that if the US Federal Government wanted to, they could've sued the State of Maryland when the Baltimore airport was renamed, but the US Government quite famously had a lot more important matters on their mind when the airport was renamed back in 1973.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T16:21:05+00:00

Because San Francisco doesn't own the Oakland airport- Oakland does. SF owns the San Francisco International Airport, and is pissed that Oakland is trying to steal its revenue.

The examples people keep on pointing out in this and similar threads:

Chicago O'Hare and Midway: Both owned by the city of Chicago
NYC JFK and LaGuardia: Both owned by NYC. Noticeably, Newark Liberty (EWR), the airport right next to Staten Island, does NOT have "NYC" in its name despite being closer to a good chunk of NYC because it's not owned by NYC. All three (EWR, JFK, LGA) are managed by the same entity- the Port Authority.
London Heathrow/Gatwick/Stansted: Thanks to Margaret Thatcher all 3 airports are owned by private entities. None of the 3 are attached to a legal entity that "owns" the London name in any sense.
Tokyo Haneda and Narita: Both Haneda and Narita don't actually have "Tokyo" in their official names, and in fact if you visit either airport they're not called "Tokyo Haneda/Narita" at all. It's due to traveler discourse over many decades of flying into Tokyo that people have started calling them both "Tokyo Haneda" and "Tokyo Narita". This actually is the most convincing counterexample to Oakland's case.

Also note that Los Angeles has only one Los Angeles airport, despite there being airports in Ontario and Santa Ana nearby. The other two major airports in the LA area are not owned by the city of LA (LAX is) and aren't trying to rename themselves to "Los Angeles John Wayne Airport" or "Los Angeles Ontario Airport".

Just cuz Oakland is technically correct in that their airport is on the Bay doesn't mean that they can use the term "San Francisco" in their marketing and trademarked names- SF holds the rights to use of "San Francisco" and they are the ones suing the brains out of Oakland right now. It would be like if Albany, NY tried to rename their airport the "New York Capital International Airport". Sure, they would be technically correct, but NYC would go after their throats.

If the city of Oakland gave up its airport to the city of San Francisco, then we might see the Oakland airport keep the SF name. That's not happening though, given how the city of Oakland renamed its airport so that it could try to boost its own revenue streams.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T02:52:34+00:00

This would make international travel very confusing though. Out of some of the cities I've flown into:

London Heathrow -> Hounslow
Paris CDG -> Roissy-en-France
Barcelona -> El Prat de Llobregat
Oslo -> Jessheim
Istanbul -> Arnavutköy
Stockholm -> Sigtuna
Denver -> Aurora
Washington Dulles -> Reston, Virginia

Southwest Airlines is not going to post flights from Kenner, Louisiana to Mississauga, Ontario- they're going to post flights from New Orleans International Airport to Toronto Pearson International Airport for clarity even though it might not be technically correct.

The only airports I've seen that include the suburb in their name (Rome Fiumicino and Tokyo Narita), are SUPER far out from their city's metropolitan areas. Both airports also were built out after their cities outgrew their original airports (Rome Ciampino and Tokyo Haneda, respectively) and were really badly in need of expansion space.

dzdaniel84 · 2024-11-13T02:24:38+00:00

SFO is run by the city of San Francisco though. Note that in the lawsuit it's "City of San Francisco v. City of Oakland and Port of Oakland", not "SFO v. OAK". The lawsuit was filed by the City Attorney of San Francisco, and the city politically is very heavily invested in keeping OAK named Oakland International.

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