skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, the article starts with the claim that 90% of programmers are "angry programmers," so I don't think you can claim he's only talking about himself.
I think this article is coastal centric. If you don't want to live on either coast the cities are affordable by the middle class. Certain neighborhoods might not be.

I see millennials just a few years out of college buying houses in Detroit for example. Just not downtown or in Corktown. Similarly I've got friends with houses in Chicago, Cleveland and Minneapolis. I've got upper middle class friends who can't afford to buy a house anywhere in Silicon Valley.
That logic clearly fails, though. You will never do everything to prevent a failure. (As an example, there are almost always stronger materials. Cost is a requirement,)

Though, your point here is interesting. Using curlies probably could have stopped that bug. Using static analysis that saw dead code definitely would have stopped it.

In this case, mechanisms (automatic checking for dead code) are vastly superior to good intentions (always using curlies).
There's always the L-1B visa option: work for a company that has offices both in the US and somewhere you can already work. After one year, apply to transfer to the US offices.
I realize this is a stupid argument, but as long as someone else is reading it, I don't feel like I have to. I'm not recommending everyone stop reading the news, just me.
You are magically ignoring the "19,000 kilometers of high-speed tracks" and will have 30,000 kilometers while we have 0.
This is nothing special. We all do this already. We don't watch or read news from certain sources already, and stick to other ones we come to trust, and this is all the author is doing. I honestly don't see the big deal.
> Man, you have a very vauable asset for a tech career - a US Citizenship

This isn't really that important at all. I don't really recognise this as a specific asset in any way.

> The tech career opportunities outside of US are really not that diverse and are heavily scattered across the world

That's an extremely biased and, in my opinion, incorrect view. Even if you just take the big tech capitals in Europe - London, Berlin, Paris etc - you have hugh tech opportunities in each. The opportunities in London alone rival those in New York. Sure there's not really a specific place similar to Silicon Valley - but that's really the only thing missing.
I concur with the author. I've also found that turning off any notifications on popular apps and putting them "out of reach" has also helped tremendously. I removed Instagram from my sorted folders on the front screen of my phone - and I find that I open it much less now - and its for the better. I can only deal with so many stupid memes and mindless rantings and ravings about banal and mediocre things around us.

The key question to ask yourself is "Does this improve my life at all?" The answer is mostly no. Maybe one could argue there is some small "entertainment" value. In this case, I would opt for quality over quantity. For example, watching a quality movie for 2 hours rather than spending 2 hours clicking through useless articles and videos.
We don't seem to hear much about 0xdata on hn.
Ok, interesting analysis. I will look more on Rust and maybe try something myself. But by reading your other posts about optimizing Rust to do search, it seems to require a lot of experience to tune Rust code.
There ya go - should have started out your previous comment with this text. This one sounds much more honest and thoughtful.

Again, not questioning your ethics. Just trying help make your argument more impactful.
The entry level houses aren't even being built in the first place.
do you have "strong political views"?
Your numbers are entirely unreasonable unless they're after tax. Maybe in Arizona and not saving 5k for retirement. But even there $150/week for food is like Ramen, Beans, and Rice, you're not accounting for transportation or medical costs, etc. You can live on 35k for sure, but saving 10k of it every year is pretty optimistic.
Is that infrastructure going to still be standing in decades?
I live in NYC. I live a reasonably fancy pants lifestyle—have an apartment in a nice neighborhood with a doorman, eat out a few times a week, go to bars a few times a month, etc. I spent under $34,000 in 2016. $24,000 of that was for my rent, which is admittedly ridiculous. But I think with a little financial awareness, NYC can be affordable to the middle class.
I think your boss wants result from you, not any random metrics like 24 h/on the job

In my experience, the evidence indicates this is not the case. They may say they want results, but results are really hard to measure, so they end up actually wanting hours and often various other easy-to-measure metrics.
Some people just like to play armchair CEO I guess. Much respect to both of you though for pulling the wool back on this stuff.

Question about consultancy stuff... In your opinion is it easier or harder to scale one vs a product business, and do you think one type is inherently easier to scale earlier on?
Depends where you are. You'll probably make way more in Switzerland than in the US for equivalent positions.
> In SF housing prices have grown at a compound growth rate of 6% for over 50 years.

When a good chunk of those years had interest rates in the 10%+ range, and when the years that were lower than 10% ended with "The Housing Bubble Pop" and "Great Recession", that 6% compounded growth is actually kinda awful.

In any case, compound growth is the center of most economies. Being the owner of things entitles you to profits, be it in stocks, bonds, or real estate.

The "buying on debt" depends on the rate that you got in at. If you're complaining that people in the 1970s were able to get 15% mortgages to earn lol 6% on Real Estate, then I don't think you fully appreciate the history of Stagflation and the 80s bond market.

---------

All in all, housing prices have rose because interest rates have fallen. More people can afford a house when mortgages are at 4% instead of at 15%, and the price of homes go up to compensate.
Low millions to a max of 1b or so (excluding special cases like "Outrageously large neural networks" paper). The recent Google Translate RNN was in the neighborhood of 50m parameters, IIRC. It can be a little difficult to calculate since you have a lot of weight-sharing and tied-weights going on in CNNs and other architectures.
Very good example in fact. Seems roughly the same.
> Staying educated on what's going on feels very important to me

When people randomly talk about random news that they don't even remember the next day or some celebrity news that have no impact on him/her whatsoever, I'd feel that the person isn't really focused on his/her life.

I've ditched TV for 10 years but do read headlines on national news site daily at least to catch what's going on generally but otherwise spending time for myself that's supposed to matter more than "following" the world which is very unproductive.
Many others have expressed similar sentiments; here’s one very good explanation:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informatio...
i think trump's win had a lot less to do with trump himself than other factors.
Boost growth, boost growth, boost growth...have to keep growing more, and faster, otherwise the whole thing breaks down, no?

Seems sustainable.
This is just complete rubbish. Sorry, it looks like you have extremely limited experience of tech jobs outside of the US, and/or are purposefully trolling.
> To all fellow software engineers out there: STOP reading company emails after work ALREADY! I don't care what your boss has told you or what your co-workers do. Just don't do it.

Don't tell people what to do. You don't understand another person's situation or values.

I voluntarily pay attention to work matters on my own time in a reasonable and controlled way. I like my work and at times (not always) it's as fun and rewarding as whatever hobby I might spend time on instead.

I've also been rewarded in various ways, both tangible and intangible, by demonstrating above-average "discretionary" attention to work. Totally within the bounds of keeping a sane balance between home and work life. And absent of pressure to do it in order to keep my job.

I can understand why people who disagree feel strongly that no one else should put in extra time to get ahead either. Sometimes the rewards are zero sum. But there's a time and place for serious investment in a job or company, and other times it's only about a paycheck. Make sure you choose one or the other consciously, but don't pretend there's one right answer.
Anyone whose website is responsible for $5 million an hour can afford to pay someone in the proper timezone to keep the thing monitored.

There should never be a reason to wake someone up at 3am to fix a "we're losing 5 million dollars an hour" website problem.
I can't really start or contribute to a little side-project when I'm standing in a tram, sitting in a train for 15min, or waiting at the gate / before liftoff during a flight. I can read my company email from my phone during that time.
Unless you're a citizen of a EU country you need a residence permit (people call this "visa", but technically they are 2 different things) to work in a EU country. As a US citizen, you can visit for 90 days without a visa, but after that you'd need something.

AFAIK if you have a grandparent who is an Irish citizen and was born there, you can get an Irish citizenship. That is automatically an EU citizenship, and if you have that you can live and work anywhere in the EU without needing any sort of permit.

But even if you have this Irish grandparent, you can't just move into a EU country and live there BEFORE getting an official document saying you are now an Irish citizen.
>I don't get this at all. I've been at this over 20 years and the only times I get "angry" (or more realistically, frustrated), is when the powers that be are adamant that the team spend months building a feature that no one wants or has no justification or is the feature we removed two years ago or there is no vision for what we are collectively trying to do.

Constantly amazed at how often this has happened to me. The worst is the fake "agile" terminology when you're doing the opposite. MVPs that are neither minimal nor viable nor a product. Two week sprints that stick to the Gantt chart we made 6 months ago no matter what the customers/target audience tell us. Spending more time talking about the work we've done and plan to do than actually doing any.

The empire-building as well drives me nuts. We need more people! Don't know what projects they will specifically do, communication and collaboration overhead is already slowing the pace down to a crawl, but we need more people. That way I can say I "led" a large team of engineers on LinkedIn. Wish these people obsessed with "leading" people could all be replaced by people obsessed with leading products.

Always amazed me that I could make $8 an hour serving pizza in high school,, but clearly delivering economic value to people, then find so many people in the world who can raise so much money money or headcount and pay me ten times as much so I can deliver absolutely no value to anyone.

I know we were talking about how most stuff doesn't make us angry though :)

I think I was always above-average intelligence (top 20%) but I don't think I'm close to a genius. Sure, people pay me money to do things and of course many of them could do it themselves if they learned how, that much is obvious to me. I pay a lawyer money but I'm pretty sure I could have become a lawyer, it's not an insult to their intelligence, we all specialized, that's how economics works.

I think a lot of programmers get angry because they're young and poorly socialized, my past included. Getting motivated to improve that which can be improved is good. Looking out for yourself and not being a doormat to the sociopaths that VC and management tends to attract is good. Doing the above without getting angry about what is usually trivial in the big picture is best.
I stopped watching the news for similar reasons. I got tired of the polarization, spin, editorializing, and vilification. I got tired of politics too, since most people simply play team-sports, and couldn't care less what the facts are.

Having said that, I can speak to your comment on global warming. People reject it because:

1. Many of us lived through the 1960s and 1970s, when the government and scientists claimed we were heading into an ice age. Didn't happen.

2. Many of us lived through the late 1970s and 1980s when the media and environmentalists claimed that Earth would be a lifeless rock by the end of the century due to deforestation. Didn't happen.

3. In 2005, climate scientists predicted that by 2010, global warming would cause oceans to rise to the point that populations would be decimated, and we would have 50 million "climate refugees" fleeing these flooded areas of the globe. Didn't happen.

4. NASA, CRU, NOAA, and other government and scientific organizations have been caught falsifying data.

5. There are claims that federal funding is biasing climate research; that the federal government isn't just funding research, but are buying science that promotes specific agendas.

Sure, if you only look at scientific climate data, it may look like climate change is an issue. However, if you look at government behavior, scientific scandals, evidences of falsified data, historical climate facts, and even current temperatures, there is more than enough evidence to cast a serious doubt on the accuracy and even legitimacy of climate change data, don't you think?
Even the concept of "improved voting decision" is all but impossible to evaluate. But on the other hand, studies have shown that people vote according to things like the state of the economy, I'd be interested to know how someone evaluated that (or if they care) without ever seeing/reading any news about it. Presumably just by looking at their own experience only.
The first thing you'll need to decide is where you'd like - and if you can go to those places. Most of the time, you'll either need to go to school, work, or marry someone to live there. Some countries have visas for job searching, but it might be difficult without a degree.

For the countries you have relatives in, you'll have to check their immigration policies. Generally only close relatives are eligible for family immigration, but there might be exceptions. You might check schooling in those countries as well.

Good luck!
And it's not searchable!

When I search a page I'm looking for a description and a bit of context. You might be able to search a video thanks to autotranscripts. Then you have to scrub to be sure the keyword is in the correct context.
I agree with you, unfortunately people can't buy property based on what we believe middle class should be. The reality is property is cities is not affordable for the middle class. How to solve that is another problem.
ARM is pretty well known
Re: point 2 - having a sole member of the team be the only person who can answer an urgent question is a failing, and a fairly obvious and large one, of the company, for reasons beyond just working overtime.

Think about it - were you in the managers shoes in this position, you're forcing someone who is the only holder of critical knowledge of your business to work extra without compensation, and against his will - don't you think there's a pretty big risk there?

Regarding metrics, I think any manager who has even a tiny bit of empathy for his employees would realize that "time spent at work" (or more accurately - time spent not at work) is an incredibly critical metric for his employees' well being, and any discussion should look at what's important for the business as well as the employee.
How is very lightly used? There were 1.1 billion trips made on High Speed Rail in China in 2015.
It is true that people can squeeze by in a place like NYC with the right moves (as you have), but a configuration like this one may not be sustainable for those who want to raise a family.
> Do you have plans to actually respond with some kind of positive action?

Spot on. Activism changes the world. Watching "awful and depressing" news kills your motivation and makes you cynical.

If you want to learn about a political topic read big books. The ones written by experts, well known writers, academics, not journalists.
>stop storing Top Secret material on your home server.

None of the emails on Clinton's email servers were ever compromised, or at least we have no reason to believe they were because no one leaked them.

>Russia putting a targeted hit only on the DNC to swing the election specifically in favor of one candidate is an extraordinary claim and this report doesn't clear the bar IMHO.

This report wasn't meant to provide any evidence of anything.
That's a really simplistic way of thinking about language differences. Saying that Smalltalk prioritized OOP is saying nothing about how Smalltalk is different in all sorts of ways from Java, or how Self and IO are different from both by doing away with classes, but closer to Smalltalk than C++. An important addition with Smalltalk and Self are the environments they live in, which are very different from most programming environments. Smalltalk was designed to be part of an image-based GUI, with modification of live objects, which includes the entire image, instead of text in files and folders, which are separate from whatever editor is being used. That's a huge difference (whether one prefers it or not).

And with APL, you leave it the not-so insignificant ability to use any character one wishes, which is again very different from most programming languages (whether one prefers it or not). It's not insignificant that an APL program looks nothing like a program in most mainstream programming languages.
>"Salaries are not what you expect coming from the US, your $200k rated job is no more than 80k€"

Is that a good rule of thumb then? $200k is fairly top end in the US. Obviously there are people at the big SV companies that make more but 200K is pretty close to top end for senior people. So you are saying that that 80K Euros is the general top end for EU tech companies? Given that there is more or less dollar to Euro parity now that is substantially less.

On the other hand you will work a lot of hours for that 200K in the US. Is that also true of the EU for similar? I think that proper work life balance should always be considered in addition to actual compensation.
> That's funny. Most people who are working in a place where they would be pressured to continue doing work after hours are not paid hourly

Whether or not they are paid hourly, as long as they are not classified as exempt, they are entitled to overtime pay. (Tech workers are classified as exempt in California, which is indeed a problem and IMHO a mistake, but that's a much smaller issue)

> And then there is those long term contractors that are hourly but basically on a fixed number of hours per week...

Well, that's a bad way to write a contract, but even so, that's a totally different situation because they're not even an employee. And the French law referenced in the original article wouldn't apply in that situation either.
>Young people typically move to London and then when they want to settle down, they leave.

This has long been a dynamic in many large cities though and only in part because of housing costs. Of the significant number of classmates in my MBA program who moved to Manhattan for jobs after graduation, only a handful remained in the city once they got married and had children. Many of those could have remained in Manhattan if they made the inevitable compromises--and there will always be trade-offs city vs. suburbs--but didn't choose to do so.
Maybe. But then it's not that simple for everyone to break out of such a vicious cycle and find friends when you don't have friends to help already.
I would guess it is an introvert trait. I believe introverts are emotionally drained by activities that involve other people, and are energized by activities that don't.
While I partially agree, some of these people will also actively ignore information when presented and do not have a skeptical mind. Many people do not change their mind after they first form an opinion on a subject or it takes a lot of effort to change it afterwords. Forming opinions quickly and never revisiting the underlying assumptions, I would argue can be dangerous as well and is probably more normal that either of us care to acknowledge.

Some people are in very high positions of power and can make decisions that impact peoples lives. Ignoring them and letting them do whatever they want may not always lead to good outcomes. But I will agree that purely ruminating on it does not improve one's situation.
It's not entirely inconceivable that the middle class is 6% of the population, or less.

Perhaps another way of thinking about the situation, is not that the middle class can't afford traditional middle class amenities, but that the proportion of people who can afford those amenities is shrinking.
Scott Adams has an excellent explanation of this today in his blog "The Illusion of Knowledge" http://blog.dilbert.com/post/155121836641/the-illusion-of-kn...

A snippet:
"no non-scientist can evaluate the claims of climate science because BOTH sides look 100% convincing to the under-informed.

So how did the public respond to my claim that BOTH sides of the debate look convincing? They berated me for not sufficiently researching materials from ONE side of the debate that happens to be their side. Many people suggested that I could simply do some homework, on my own, and get to the bottom of climate science.

That is a massive public illusion."
That doesn't describe the vast majority of employees of a company. People are paid for time spent (with some degree of flexibility), whether you're salaried or hourly.

If you don't think that's true, try fulfilling your duties through a marathon session on Monday one week and don't come in the rest of the week. Even employers who claim to be "results-driven" will view that as evidence of you being under-utilized and increase your workload.
My thoughts:

UK News: Getting worse each year, though usually high quality, they go so into murder details these days it makes you sick if you aren't already desensitized.

US News: these channels are all a joke, honestly Fox and CNN? I turn to these channels when I want to have a laugh.

Reddit/HN: Aggregated news, actually pretty good. Though of course very western focused, Russia is the 'bad guy' etc.
I actually enjoy being able to break supposedly complicated tasks or projects down into something that anyone I'm talking to about it can understand.

Basically I don't think I'm better than everyone else, and so I don't get upset or depressed when it's proven that I'm not.
Countering Terrorism in the Age of Social Media: Views from Washington
In what part of LA? What part of LA would you move to if your rent/income became untenable?
Ask HN: Are hackerspaces viable businesses?
I've been in and out of involvement with hackerspaces for 5 years now. It seems like hackerspaces still have not reached any sort sustained viability yet. Most need to operate as non-profit organizations that are barely hanging on. Even Techshop and other large makerspaces seem to be doing an awful lot of work for a hardly self-sustaining amount of revenue.

Is there a killer business model that hackerspaces are missing out on? Recruitment and training for businesses? Providing or referring services that are useful to entrepreneurs?

What can make this sort of space a growing business rather than one that builds a little, then just fades over time.
No legal framework for this here in Germany, but most companies tend to keep this stuff to a minimum, yes.
Isn't this just another way of saying social issues are hard?

Which isn't to say you should drain yourself daily with them. But, collectively, we should.