Nicaragua, but all of Central America's a great place to live ridiculously cheap and hack away. Plus they're beautiful countries and latinas are so hot.
The internet's not fantastic (a crappy 1 megabit, and outages happen at least once a week), half of the TV is in Spanish, and you have to be careful sometimes since white guys are usually cashed up tourists and ripe for a mugging.
But when push comes to shove it beats trying to make $1000 rent + living expenses and trying to balance a startup around that.
Thanks for the details. This is getting a bit off-topic, but can you describe how a foreigner should go about finding a place to live in Central America? Did you just fly there and look for "For Rent" signs or did you line something up beforehand?
I constantly travel to Latin America, speaking at conferences and recruiting talent. I've lived/worked in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Peru Colombia and traveled to Honduras and Guatemala.
If you want to go to central america let me know. I can introduce you to the tech/startup community there. They can hook you up with the best/safest placest to live, work areas, and the whole thing.
My personal experience is with Guatemala and Honduras, though I know top notch developers and entrepreneurs (all bilingual) throughout the whole region.
If I were you, I'd pick costa rica to live in if you want to live in Central America. Bigger expat community, great nearshoring tech talent. Though Chile will give you $40k to startup in Chile.
When I go live/work at a LATAM country my process is usually:
1. Stay in a hostal for two days, those two days I check out places to rent
2. In south america, you can find great stuff on craigslist, furnished rooms or studios from $200-$500/mo
3. Meet local entrepreneurs, and find coworking spaces/become an office guest.
If you need more tips/intros for living in LATAM, my email is in my profile, or @andresbarreto
If you are instrested in coming to a country in Latin America im from Uruguay (little country between Argentina and Brazil) and I can help you to accommodate you here. We are one of the safest countries of the continente, we are a loooooot cheaper than US or Europe and the main advantage of Uruguay compared to the rest of LA is that most people speak English and you will find a lot of engineers, computer developers, desingers and more usefull people to hire to set up your new start up (the computer-related careers are very popular here)
They really aren't into things like Craigslist or real estate listing sites. Houses/apartments for rent is literally done by a sign on the place combined with word of mouth, and often purely word of mouth.
Probably your best bet would be going to a backpackers hostel and finding one while you stay there - they'll set you back as little as $10ish a night, have internet and interesting people to talk to, and the people working there might know of a place and/or you can walk around looking for somewhere.
You'll probably forfeit your one month bond (aka $200 - $400) if you leave that soon.
Staying safe is pretty simple - be smart. An iPhone is a month's salary down here so don't wander around talking into it or wearing those pretty white earphones. Don't carry a satchel around that says Dell, and generally don't take more than you need when you hit the street ... if you're getting a carton of milk you don't need your wallet or the credit cards and $500 in it.
In contrast don't do this in Panama. It's freaking expensive in comparison. Renting a room in a decent part of town can cost you around 700 dollars. And that's just a smallish room. A decent studio will cost you 1 ~ 1.2k. If you go down with 2 friends you can get a room in not so decent but really not that bad area for 1.2 ~ 2k with 2 or 3 rooms. Gotta pay for your ow internet though.
Thanks for the reality check. I threw this up on a whim after skimming this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745133. It was fun, regardless, because I suspected I was competing with others to get it done first. I spent about 20 minutes getting it functional and another 15 making it prettier.
I do not dismiss this research: it is amazing. But, I also think you are underestimating the skill and sophistication of RC helicopter hobbyists. There are international competitions involving very complex, but well-defined and precise maneuvers.
For example, there is a maneuver named "chaos" in which the pilot continuously pirouettes while continuously flipping while continuously rotating the axis of the flip while holding the aircraft in a single position a few feet off the ground. It is tremendously difficult to even visualize this fully.
There was a stunt at the end of the Italian Job (the new one, of course) where a stunt pilot actually flew a full-size helicopter around inside a parking garage. Can't find the clip right now, probably DMCA'd :-/
An event that trigged it for me: visiting break.com (after previously logging into facebook) resulted in a Break application being added without consent.
I think that is the rub here.. Somehow they are showing as "recently used" which is completely different from "Authorized". The app does not get a session key from you and has no additional permissions or access to your account.
The friends thing mentioned in the article has always been that way. Every connect site is an app, go to an app you can see friends who have installed it, as it always has
I've been pretty anal-retentive about blocking apps, setting app access, etc. for some time now and educating my "friends" on how to do this. I'm very aware of when I authorize an application and have used FB Connect twice a long time ago on sites that did not show up as unsolicited apps. Sites I visited this morning, however, are showing up. I never logged in to those sites (or have any kind of account, made a comment etc). This unauthorized "installation" is very much happening.
