skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was driven by a "this is cool" at the very foundation. They wanted to do a thing and details were largely irrelevant. What GP is describing is adding things to a service which ultimately serve no use and aren't cool either. They're just there to say "there, look, we have it too now!" Which feels cold and loveless to the users.
I said, "if that's representative of the day to day work, I'm probably not a great fit for the position," and got up to walk out. They asked me stay and talk about some of my github projects, so we had a nice talk for a few minutes and then I left.

I'd gotten an offer earlier that morning, so I was a little more self-assured than I would have been otherwise.
Probably a carryover from the time where upscale coffee was relatively new to the urban cores and developed some social status, but before you could buy decent coffee almost anywhere in the country (90's to early 2000's?) It was a clearly frivolous pleasure. Neee caffeine? Folgers is cheap.
Desert ants use the geomagnetic field (and many other things) as a compass
I think this is a fair criticism.

Gates is exceptionally rich in the purest sense of exceptional. He's been the richest person on earth almost every year for over a decade.

When you're at that level you have to wonder what is really left to do but cultivate your legacy? Gates had developed a persona in the business world that did not bode well for a positive obituary. The Gates Foundation doesn't strike me so much as admirable as logical.
>> If you want pharma companies to make cures, inventivize them to do so.

You stopped just short of a breakthrough. The institution of for-profit healthcare is something we could do without. No one should suffer or die because they couldn't get rich enough before facing a life-limiting illness or injury.
Off on a tangent here but if your ever in Toronto, Canada and you like bread, visit Dimpflmeier http://www.dimpflmeierbakery.com/ or Future Bakery https://www.futurebakery.com/ down the street. Both are Factory Bakeries open to the public and make some of the best Sourdough Rye and bread I've ever had.

Wish we had something like this in TX...
>There is no justification for the new "chargeback culture" that exists in our society.

Customer protection. A lot of those "friendly indie sellers" are selling substandard goods, failing to ship products or engaged in outright fraud. Chargebacks exist as a dispute resolution mechanism of last resort.

If you can't eat those costs, you don't have a business. If your chargeback rate is over 1%, you're doing something seriously wrong and your merchant will eventually close your account. If you can't comfortably absorb the shrinkage from a chargeback rate of below 1%, your margins are far too small.

There's nothing stopping you from running a mail-order business that only accepts cash, but customers will quite reasonably baulk at the risk and inconvenience. If you don't trust your customers enough to accept credit cards, why should they trust you enough to send you an envelope full of greenbacks?
> 22-year-old kids

Kids are getting older every year it seems.
I'd like to try that... but everybody would need to have a very good connection. Not always an option.
Hey, how do I clone source code? All I get are some Markdown files :( I'd like to compile and execute it quickly as I am hungry! Thanks!
Interesting writeup. I think it's an often overlooked point that shilling motivated by bounty programs harms end users who mistake it for expertise. There is a real problem being tackled here will be watching with interest.
I think the key here was costal living in economic hubs. I was looking a little while back to see if I should move closer to work to reduce my super commute. For the same price as a stucco 1000sqft house with near zero yard, bars on the windows, graffiti on the building with a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk, and being right next to the freeway, you can pick up a house literally 3 to 6x larger on 10 acres in Montana that looks like it is out of a story book. It costs much, much more to live close to the economic-hub costal cities.
$250/mo/person is about $2.70 per meal, which is not

It's plenty. I just looked at my mint. I've averaged $678/month on groceries for my 3 person family over the last year. One of those 3 people is a toddler so I'm obviously saving some money there. We eat out occasionally (so not part of this budget item) but rarely more than once a week. And I'm not in a position where I have to scrimp. My wife and I had lobster last night.

2.70 doesn't sound like much if by "meal" you think of "dinner" but it's a ton if you're eating eggs or cereal for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch.
Deaf and Blind: Being Me Heather [video]
I think taking about financials in general terms for a place as large and as diverse as the US is a mood exercise. As the article describes the same amount of money means very different things in different parts of the US. Defining middle class by looking at the median household income is entirely meaningless for all the reasons the article describes.
Many people here also have the instinct to immediately suggest to move to a place that's meant to be flown over because cost of living is lower there. The issue is that both cost and income scale to a large degree proportionally to each other.
This article likely could have been titled "why middle class life now cost $40k" and be about personal finance in Baton Rouge. The real news is that $300k on one place are the equivalent of $40k in another.
Living in the Bay Area is not just about access to tippy top tech companies. It's about limiting risk.

Say I'm living in Nowhereville, USA, and working for the tech company there. If anything goes wrong, for example, an overall tech downturn, this company hits hard times, or I have a job-ending disagreement with my boss, then getting a new job likely means a 6+ month job search, uprooting my family and moving. I know this is true because I have lived in several towns like this. It sucks.

In the Bay Area, if things don't work out with a particular company, I can apply to hundreds of others next door. I'm in for a 3-6 month job search, and at the end of the day I don't have the hassle of moving to a different city.
It absolutely was not the first smartphone; Nokia E-series predated by several years.

Nor was it the first keyboardless touch-screen phone, that was the LG Prada.

The iPhone was a clever subset of well-polished features very well marketed. The usual Apple approach.
Sure, (I live in ultra-expensive NYC because of economic opportunity) but you can still a) compromise on the type/size/cost of housing you choose within the city; b) carpool or commute by bike or transit if you're concerned about the environment; and c) cut back on the other expenses that the hypothetical family in the article is being anything but frugal about.
Are you saying $700 per month per person is reasonable? That’s pretty insane if you are, we’re a family of 4 who live a pretty sweet upper middle class life and spend maybe that much each month on our entire family...
"Upper middle class"?
Do one thing
It started from the "Latte Factor": https://davidbach.com/latte-factor/

I do find it absurd to pay $5+ for a few ounces of hot water poured over ground beans or chopped leaves and placed into a cup with a mermaid on it, so I don't do it.

I also don't think it's the root of people's money problems. However it, combined with 19 other small frivolities, is one branch of their problem in a lot of cases. (The branch being "unexamined, frequent, persistent leaks in the bucket".)
Politics - DC

Media - New York

Tech for a BigCo - Seattle/Bay Area.

You can of course move to Europe (Visa permitting) but you will find your salary gets much lower too.
Are mirror neurons really a thing? Why can't the neurons which govern my arm be used to help predict the actions of other people's arms?
Ask HN: If you had access to a dataset of your choosing, which one?
why are people still trying to live in manhattan? yes the trains are starting to really suck i guess but a couple of years ago (when people were still saying this) it took me 30 minutes to get door to door from brooklyn.
People need to find a way to blame financial problems on the individuals involved without thinking too hard
You could also sell the booze at a loss out the back door and then launder THAT money :)
> $250/mo/person is about $2.70 per meal, which is not

Are you eating out literally every meal? Because otherwise that's not bad at all. I eat on about $5/day and I'm not even trying to be frugal about it.
There is a huge gap between "this does X in a petri dish" and a drug that works in the clinic.
I use Hacker News Daily [0] to get daily top stories and Ask Hacker News Weekly [1] to get weekly top questions from Hacker News. I found this very useful because you can subscribe to the mailing list or add the RSS feed. So, you don't need to visit HN frequently (others have already told about this).

Another site I rare to visit is n-gate.com [2]. It gives you brief summary of the story. This site also has RSS that you can subscribe.

[0]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

[1]: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/

[2]: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
This post has a bad title. HN should change it to reflect that OP is specifically talking about living in SF or NYC.

(I still have criticisms of the piece, but it's at least kiiinda understandable when talking about those two cities.)
You sewed it up! Excellent comment.

Statbait blogging is so irritating, and I see it all the time, where some seemingly interesting observation is twisted by someone's pet data mining project to support a crappy blog article.
Where do you get this idea that Twitter has near zero interaction? There is tons of interaction on Twitter. Obviously if you follow a bunch of celebrity accounts you will personally not see a lot of interaction. I mostly follow friends and/or people who post about hobbies I enjoy and interact with them frequently.
My family of 4 does quite well on 800/month in coastal southern California. We only eat organic and eat the RDA of fresh fruit, veggies nuts, meats etc.

The only people I know that spend in the 700 / person are eating out 3-4 times a week at 20+/plate restaurants. Doesn't sound middle class to me.
Second "Flour Water Salt Yeast". I've been baking bread for a few years now following his techniques with great success. He also has a 2nd book called "The Elements of Pizza" that I highly recommend.

I had a similar experience when starting. The process seemed time consuming and complicated, but now I can bake a couple loaves any day of the week with a small amount of planning and little effort/thought.

In both books he provides techniques and recipes for being able to start baking bread and pizzas with little or no upfront investment (some containers, a couple bannetons for bread and a peel + stone for pizzas). The best part of the process is experimenting with your own recipes. Here's a couple shots of some recent loaves and pizzas I've baked recently:

https://i.imgur.com/0cKI4ad.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/iMkzJJB.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZEIlGy9.png

https://i.imgur.com/gr0qO2t.png
Im sad that he got jail time, but this guy was distributing end-of-life vulnerable operating systems. These are very dangerous and no longer updated. Forcing old machines to run closed-source outdated operating systems, which put the user at a real risk of compromise -- maybe we should look at regulations here.
Windows XP is not suitable or safe to use today. This isn't about recycling, its no longer fit for purpose online.

If he had shipped it with say, a supported Ubuntu, there would be no issue and the users would be protected.
exhausterbated

Please tell me you used this word on purpose.
One would pay $100k for an account with the username "fitness" because it's artificially scarce, like a domain name. There's plenty of people searching for "fitness" on IG.

A list of usernames and passwords it's useful if you use a program to manage them - automatically. Spam detection is super good nowadays, so it's super hard to create many accounts and keep them alive. Actually, keeping them alive it's the harder segment of it.

Fake followers = fake accounts. They're worthless. But some people don't care and just like to inflate their followers number because people think its cool to have many followers. Aslong as they can't tell they're fake tho.

Real followers = real persons following you because they like you. They're valuable. Why? Like any other advertising model where you're the publisher, you get paid per impression/post/sale/click/whatever. E.g you can share a photo where you're holding a certain brand of whisky and you get paid by said brand (to get brand to pay you, they either contact you directly or you partner with some agency) or you can promote your own company as well obviously. . You can also share a link in the bio.
Hawt.io/jolokia exposes JMX as JSON. JMX is sorta like snmp but for jvms and you can easily write your own JMX beans for the jvm to monitor your apps, then hawt.io can be used to make those available as restful resources. Incredibly useful piece of software
Same here. Family of 4 and we rarely cross $1k/mo for our entire family.
Show HN: Netcore-webapi-angularjs template
https://github.com/alinciuca/netcore-webapi-angularjs
A template repository with:

dotnetcore webapi
swagger for api documentation
angularjs
restangular
jQuery
lodash
boostrap
webpack

This template uses yarn as package manager.

Please check package.json for the versions of the packages used in this template.

Hack away!
Show HN: Jupyterlab python linter using flake8
Probably. I asked myself the same question, as this is where I live at the moment.

So if not Guadeloupe, it surely is somewhere in the Caribbean
>>> Finance can get very interesting when it comes to derivatives and investment strategies, but you're never going to learn this without having a strong applied math background.

A colleague of mine is breezing through an MBA program right now. He's a very bright engineer. Another friend, a nuclear engineer, got an MBA several years ago.

They both told me that the finance classes were hard for their classmates because they don't understand calculus, so the features of the models they are studying are a complete surprise to them, and can only be internalized by memorization.

My friend described the statistics class as being a series of lessons in p-hacking.
Good start, but we need more (and deeper) initiatives like this.
I found the "well vetted" expense itemization to be non-reflective of my situation. I am (I think) middle class, though thanks to some crap in my recent past I had a significant issue with food/housing anxiety (very long painful story).

2100/month for a family of 3 for food. No. Not even close. If I bought the best of the best stuff from the high end grocer in my town (burbs between Ann Arbor and Detroit), I'd be hard pressed to break 1k/month for 3.

Car ... volvo? No. 1-3 year old used vehicles for me. And soon I am buying another one so I can give my daughter my 9 year old car.

Child care? She's in college now, so lets call that tuition and room/board. This works out to $30k/year in state. If I take an out of state offer, that shoots up to about $100k/year. We looked this up last night as it turns out. Tuition + room/board goes from $14k/semester to $46k/semester.

Most of the rest of the expenses are not relevant.

This all said, the point the article is making is fair and correct, maybe not quantitatively for everyone, but I'd argue the order of magnitude is correct. Some multiple of $100k is needed to raise a family in a middle class scenario while saving for retirement and servicing large debt.

One of the huge turnoffs for the left coast is the real estate issue. This forces me to ask for salary adjustments to make sure I am not impoverishing myself by taking a "better paying" job in CA. I've helped recruiters through the math, similar to this, in my last year job search. The cost of living delta, just from that aspect, was huge. I explained to them that they could leave me where I was, and not deal with that.

It is so bad right now, I could sell my $220k house, and not have enough money for a down payment on a modest similar sized house/property in a reasonable, not upscale, neighborhood in CA. Much less of an issue in NY area, though you have to deal with the traffic getting to/from the trains.

I understand the article was aimed at the left and right coast folks. And the numbers may be more accurate for young families there. For the rest of us in fly over country, this delta means that the larger salaries still generate an often (much) lower quality of life in those locations. It is far worse in CA than NY area. Definitely a disincentive to give those locations significant consideration without dealing with the massive delta in costs. Which most companies are loathe to do.
The point of Bostrom's story was to get people to even consider aging as a solvable problem. Someone else can (and should) write the "Life in post-dragon world" essay.
So we need space exploration because someone made a depressing SimCity city?
Using Metrics to Find Out If Your Code Base Will Stand the Test of Time (2010)
I think she means help in the final steps of drug approval and production.
How to Restore/Backup SQL Database From/To Remote Server
Saturday Night Stay
How are you supposed to get rid of a CFL if it doesn't break? I'd happily do it if there were a reasonable option.
> Wealth redistribution

You mean, theft?
Even if you can stay in your career you will earn less as well. All you are doing is moving both numbers the cost and the income down. The article guess into this as well. What's the point of that? There is always someone lucky who can Jeep their job and salary and now work remotely. That's rare though and comes with great anxiety about finding a new, comparable job if your existing one evaporates.
Sure - but you're confusing what people are actually paying for when they buy a Starbucks.

When people buy Starbucks, they're buying 15 minutes of time to sit in a warm cafe with friends, free WiFi, a space to work, and the labour involved in having to make the coffee for themselves.

I'm still not sure it amounts to an argument why the $150 a month people would save on coffee are the root of people's money problems, or why they should give up that 19 other small frivolities just so they can afford somewhere to live.
Not sure where you got the idea we don’t spray pesticides for mosquitoes anymore. There are large vector control districts all over the country that do exactly that. You may be interested in the NPIC page.

http://npic.orst.edu/pest/mosquito/mosqcides.html
I don't think anyone "blames the coffee", but rather identifies the coffee as something that could easily be downsized (by simply not drinking it, making it at home, or switching to a cheaper preparation). When you add in tips for the baristas a year not drinking coffee could be worth a month's rent, which is not insignificant.
> * cyber crimes ([...], child porn, ...)

I find that a disturbing classification.
Which becomes a bit of a chicken and egg problem if you lack discipline.
Nah, I lived through the entire period. Human nature is the reason we had a Microsoft monopoly. Apple didn’t care enough. The Linux people wanted lots of distributions, and couldn’t build a consumer business model with a gun to their heads.

Open Office was, and is, a piece of garbage.

I wasted a lot of time explaining to people that if we all bought our cars from GM, they would suck. That’s what Microsoft was.

Just let it go.

Although, it sure would have been nice if the Amiga carved out 10% market share.
The article listed several BART workers who earn $200+k. Do you really think their financial situation will be better if they move to St Louis?
A pound of ground beef is like 800 kcal and roughly $3, and more than you'd eat in one sitting. $2.70/meal is more than reasonable, you're just largely cooking stuff yourself.
Parts of Queens and Brooklyn (c.f the parts where it is easy to get the E into Manhattan) are now approaching what rents were in Manhattan a couple of years ago.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to implement it, but there’s a greater time cost, and if the performance gains aren’t worth the effort, then there’s no reason to make the improvement
You're right - I fully agree with you, but I actually think that's kind of an entirely separate issue.

If it took your team an 18 month death march sprint just to get to the "red button" stage, I have a hard time imagining many people who wouldn't toss it all in without some kind of company recognition and were instead told "lol JK welcome to level 2 - hope you're ready to work harder now".

I'm not sure even the videogames industry could get away with not pandering to morale that badly without mass exodus.
Product configuration with fast algorithm
Ah, more elitism from the Valley folk. If you were to leave your bubble for a bit, you’d find any significant urban area offers the same benefit: Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc.
I don't know how to spend that little on food. We have a family of five (and sometimes cousins or neighborhood kids are over and playing and snacking on fruit and such) and $2k+ a month for groceries is normal. Practically every meal is home cooked. We might get take out once every couple weeks or go out to eat once a month, which is on top of that $2k. We could cut that cost in half with processed foods and a pasta heavy diet maybe, but we want to eat healthy.
Why a middle-class lifestyle now costs you over $300,000 a year
Economic death by a hundred lattes per month.
I think the demand side for single family housing will increase in Seattle over the near future. There has been a recent boom in tech company positions and equity (especially Amazon and Microsoft, but others as well such as Tableau, Facebook, etc.). There is a relatively (compared to SF) nascent startup and VC scene developing, and more tech companies are opening or expanding branch offices here as they observe the talent pool that's now well above critical mass. And many employees of these companies are young (in their 20s), recent transplants from around the country, or on temporary work visas and in the process of getting green cards / citizenship. Seattle is also a place people tend to want to plant roots (for the great career options, the natural beauty, and the culture).

As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up.

It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.