skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Growing populations help mask the underlying issues with pensions, which are mainly, 1) they are almost always underfunded, and 2) they have unrealistic expectations for growth.

I doubt we will every see pensions come back because they become less appealing the more realistic they have to be. Of course pensions sound awesome if you're a firefighter that receives $97,000 a year for life after 25 years of service. Such a person may have received only $1.7MM in total compensation over 25 years, yet, because of how public pensions are calculated (and a bit of graft), they earn an income that would take investments worth $2.4MM to maintain. This is not including health insurance, which is likely another significant amount.

When I take the same firefighter's wages over the years, and calculate the return of a 12% of earnings contribution annually, and a 12% annual return on investments, that same person has only contributed a little over $1MM.

Meaning their sustainable pension withdraw is roughly $41,000/yr.

\* I made these numbers up in an excel spreadsheet, assuming they made $38k in 95 with a 3% raise each year, and a 10% promotion raise every 10 years, along with the typical inflated wages in the last 3 years to maximize pension benefits. So they ended making $107k/yr.

Edit: After some playing around, I've determined that pension contributions would need to be roughly 30% of wages in order to be properly funded with a 12% annual return. Using S&P500 rates of return, contributions need to be closer to 50% of wages.
In the US, "pension" typically means a defined benefit pension.
Dust and gas surrounding the galactic center blocks almost all visible light. Sadly most events simple wouldn't be visible.
Yes, you can feel a bit guilty. But there are definitely some other factors.

I did the jobs you described part time while I was studying. Yes the jobs you listed are more physical, but you gain a flexible schedule and the chance to combine it with different things, art, writing studying etc.

I remember a conversation with a barber. I told her I was a programmer, she immediately reacted with, "I would never be able to do that, I need to do something more creative and social". That was a bit shortsighted from her side. But it also gave me a bit of insight that not everyone wants to sit in an office all day. People are really different, some might do it because they cannot do anything else. Other probably talk about you as you are talking about them right now.

Finally, remember that not all countries have the same social/tax system. I'm not sure where you are from, but when your coin is very strong versus the country you are visiting, it is already very skewed. Next to that countries like the US you get allot more "liquid" money. Money you can easily spend. Some countries actually tax more, giving you a more stable foundation, but it will mean you have less money after taxes.

Just treat everyone like they are human.
Communication can only happen when the people involved get the same internal mental model on what a given sequence of sounds/letters mean.

To that end dialects need to die. They harm communication. Even when they are close enough to each other for understanding they slow down the speed of communication.

I don't care if we need 100 characters in the language, one sound per character would greatly aid English. Enough of this to/too/two nonsense: one pronunciation, one and only one spelling. (if we could reform word definitions to get rid of those issues so much the better)
Some people are. There are people who intentionally use the wrong pronoun, exactly because they reject someone's transgender identity. We cis-gendered people may not notice this, but to transgender people, it is every-day reality to be confronted with someone who insists on denying their identity. Consider the stupid bathroom bills in a couple of US states for example.

So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address the original hatred that it's reacting to.
Well, art is iterative. It would be weird to create music with no ties to the past. It's hard to imagine what that would sound like because there would be no precedent!

The closest thing I can think of to that though is the album Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective. The song Bonefish is a good representative sample. My brain couldn't process it at first... It made no sense until after a few listens and a hit of weed.
As a simple example, please consider live and live.
We started just doing our daily "standups" via slack. The whole point (imo) of the meeting is to identify blockers and/or slowdowns for what you're working on, and getting help if necessary. Reporting this status async over slack is great because it fulfills these needs without wasting anyone's time.

If you need help or are block, you report that. Otherwise, no need for a "status update". It also helps that we do this in our eng-only channel, where no product/upper management are in, so only our team is privy to the information.

The one downside is that it can be a bit more difficult to get help on something highly important if everyone is tunnel-visioned. Luckily, we have a great engineering manager who helps orchestrate help in those situations or steps in personally if someone is blocked.
Personal 401k’s don’t offer much over saving directly.

I beg to differ. My IRA doesn't offer a 6% match.
At least in the US, what you describe is reality. Pensions are regulated heavily (you may disagree with the few legal flexibilities though).

And they are at least partially insured:

https://www.pbgc.gov/

Maybe the PBGC will go under? Who knows.
If we want to select a common language, we should do so based on the criteria that said language is, first and foremost, easy to learn regardless of which language is the student's native language. I contend that no naturally evolved language has this property, which is to be expected since languages are living things with long and complicated histories.

Therefore the obvious solution would be to construct a language with the properties we desire. The difficulty would be in keeping it from evolving on its own and just becoming as complicated as the rest of them.
...it's also somehow offensive to either avoid using pronouns as well as inquiring about them.

The only solution is apparently magic.
An Opinionated Guide to Python Tooling
> Force property taxes to cover the costs of roads in the suburbs

That's what excise taxes are for. For example, in my town, we spend $1.2m on highway maintenance, and $450k in snow removal, while collecting $2.4m in vehicle excise taxes.

There is also about $60k in fines income, but it doesn't break down exactly how much of that is vehicular.
Do people not understand this is how pensions work.

If your company isn't there when you retire, you don't get a pension.

I find it incredibly risky to rely on pensions. I don't quite understand why employees are so excited about non cash benefits.
> The relevant time is from whatever the transport hub is to the destination

It seems like the Heathrow Express comparison is fair then; Paddington's a transport hub (surface trains and several tube lines pass through it), and it takes 15 mins to Heathrow.
That's true.

Though of the purposes of having password manager is managing with large numbers of disparate systems.

Whereas an SSH is simply the authentication mechanism, and may or may not be shared across large numbers of systems.
Waze can't even get the traffic conditions right ON TIME. Every time I've ever used the app it tells me either way too late (as in that accident up ahead doesn't even exist and hasn't for two hours) or not at all. I'm curious as to how they honestly think Waze can be helpful when it's this slow.
Didn't they just get a massive tax cut?
I had the exact same feeling when we started having daily standups about 4 years ago for a green field project. Now that most of the original developers are no longer in the company I feel glad that I actually paid attention. It turns out that I have a very good knowledge about how and what every micro-service in our stack does. What's discussed in those standups might not be relevant for day-to-day work, but on a higher level it can help developers understand the architecture of a complex system better.
Malware will pull updates and commands from the internet, if they didn’t allow network access it would be near useless of a service. Attackers can make the binary pre-update look as innocent as they want.
You don't need a developer license to write software on OS X.
The writer ends with

>My long term hope is that soon or later different accents could converge into a standard easy-to-understand one that the English speaking population could use as a lingua franca.

I suspect the opposite has happened and will happen.

When populations become fluent in English they decide that their accent is a valid way of speaking English, so stay hard to understand to other populations.
You raise a good point about solvable completion, and one that I agree with. However, automatic completion support doesn't have to cover every use case. It only needs to be good enough. Complex applications can fall back to providing their own completion scripts.

One point I'm not clear on is why you think such a scheme wouldn't be feasible for a large number of commands. Completion wouldn't be invoked until the fist argument (the command's name) is complete just like how bash doesn't scan the system's completion directory until it knows what command is being invoked.

And as for completion for the command's arguments, the command is only ran once to generate the list of completion candidates.

Note that there are projects that already do exactly this like [1] .

[1]:https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete
And six or so years ago IBM changed their 401k match to only provide the matching funds if you were still employed on December 15th instead of every pay period.

They really are the worst.
I'm someone who's experienced the reverse issue--I'm a native English speaker who's moved to a non-English speaking country. Interestingly, in the tech scene here anything written is still done in English, to the point where people will give lectures in the local language using English slides.

I'd echo a lot of the sentiment antirez has; it's harder for me to be my extroverted self here, and reading complicated documents is hard enough that I often ask someone else to translate them to English. But I expect those issues to go away after a while of living here.

I think that the key to solving these language problems is exposure. Many Scandinavians that I've met attribute their countries' strong grasp of English to not having dubbed movies--they have to watch it in English with subtitles.
It's always there in every Linux distribution. And Oracle seems to like it as they include lots of perl scripts with their products.
Ah, I see what you're getting at. Well, there's better ways of achieving that, other than just banning non-compliant apps. Like, similar to HTTPS, we could add "ticks" into the app toolbar (or something similar) to indicate "verified" apps. Currently, there's nothing preventing websites from impersonating other websites, except consumer vigilance and green ticks in the adderss bar.
'The best business man serves the communal good.'

I'd be curious to see a survey of founders of FOSS and hear their take.
> each password could be individually reset in each website.

Usually.

HN passwords are not always recoverable. (Only if you have entered an email address).
I used to write perl 20 years ago and haven't touched it in 15 years. I thought it already was dead, then alas I got a job where it still exists in massive undisturbed quantities of thousand line functions and scripts with no structure.

It feels the same as the anthropologists must have felt when finding an Amazonian tribe completely untouched by the modern world.
did you evaluate the 'imagehash' [1] library prior to working on this-- any limitations/concerns? the additional CNN seems to be the difference between the two libraries

[1] https://github.com/JohannesBuchner/imagehash
Web Graphics Done Right
I don't need to memorize table is female. I need to memorize it is "mesa" and I always use la with words than end in a. Spanish needs to fix el mapa and a small number other words that break the rule.

There is no reason for two different words for the depending on how the noun ends, but since the rule is easy and there are only two I'm fine with it - it is exceptions and complex rules I'm against, not rules.
It is cool. Its actually close unlike every other vr claim since I was a kid in the 80s,but IMO we aren't there yet. It is useful and it is incredibly fun, but we're just scratching the surface.

I can't wait for hardware to catch up in terms of performance and price.

I actually want to learn vr dev and transition from my netsec gig into doing something cool with VR that helps people. Got a long way to go though.
>I don't quite understand why employees are so excited about non cash benefits.

They might not be aware that automation has done away with the role of pension fund managers. In the old days, you couldn't just go out and buy a total stock market or bond market ETF. Nowadays, you don't even have to think about asset allocation with target date funds. And since all investments are going towards the fewer and fewer remaining companies, a bailout for one is a bailout for all.
Some of the turnarounds are utterly baffling.

I would understand to a certain extent if the national intelligence briefing informs the politician of a dozen programs that are reliant on the premise and have prevented x number of attacks and so on.

But I've seen politicians flip completely after a single 20mins meeting. From fiercely against to fiercely for. For those cases, I've held my judgement, because I don't have a non-insane answer for why this happened, but everyone involved is presumably a somewhat-logical human being, and people don't let go of beliefs easily.
Building Products in the Dark
The problem of course, is that you have to be familiar with it. If you're facing this problem and don't already know Perl, you'll just use whatever your regular scripting language of choice already is.

Perl may be efficient at some tasks, but having to learn it to take advantage of that efficiency is basically never going to pay off.

Or put another way: https://xkcd.com/1205/ and https://xkcd.com/1319/
Giving it a spin. Thank you!
I picked up a hobby about a year ago that has distinct regional differences around the world with people in different regions doing things quite differently and communicating almost exclusively in their own languages.

There's enough commonality that you can follow things, but it's pretty hard to understand the specifics if you don't speak the same language.

I've been using Google Translate to bridge the gap and while the translations miss all kinds of things, it's close enough that I can understand the important things and am able to even participate, though not at the level I can in English.

There are people saying that there are essentially multiple Internets, split by language barriers. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that argument, other than it kinda made sense to me, but my personal experience through my hobby definitely made me realize it's most definitely true.
Not all governments can just print more money, which is why many state and local pension programs are in major trouble.
Dieticians of Canada released a website and mobile app that does this. I use it from time-to-time: https://www.cookspiration.com/

Edit: the site seems to work differently than the app. You can search by ingredient in the app.
I don't quite see how an IT nightmare follows. Where do you work that people are downloading and installing software on work computers every day?

> Most consumer laptops and PCs I've seen (and I've seen a lot) don't even have a non-admin user account setup.

Have you ever used macOS or are you basing this on Windows laptops?
Nobody wants to hear about Iraq? Did you miss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21140801 ?
Related: Recent podcast: Why We Age - And Why We Don't Have To > https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/492-david-sinclair/
I used to work in the physics industry (cryogenics specifically). There was/is practically zero regulation at the scale we were at & lots of room for innovation. The market is pretty small though so you have to be at a company that is good at selling to academia.
Harry and Meghan could face “the privacy trial of the century”
How much time do westerners spend on the Chinese internet? How much relevance does either set of sites have to someone living in the other hemisphere?

I find myself barely-remembering most western sites while I'm in China for even a couple of weeks, and language issues (mostly) keep me from spending much time on Chinese sites while I'm in the USA.

Based on my experience as a Westerner making trips to China, I find this VPN anecdote unsurprising.
Stop Using Sticky Navigation on Mobile
For those who are thinking "the Model 3 isn't a luxury car", the model 3 is selling at about half the rate of the Camry or Civic.

http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/honda/honda-civic/

Pretty impressive, IMO.
Sadly companies never really have contributed much to employee 401ks which was one of the main selling points when being offered as an alternative to pensions.

Employees are very lucky if employers contribute 50% of their contributions (which would would be a max possible of $9500 match this year). And usually it’s significantly less.

In 2019 employers are allowed to contribute up to $36000. No company I have heard of provides anyway near that. The 401k has unfortunately allowed employers to care very little about employees retirement.
The account you choose to use does not change the fact that you are the de facto admin.
> English is perfect for tech stuff. Short, concise and clear.

As a Spaniard who's also fluent in French, I agree that it's the best of technical lingua franca of the three. Like the article says, the most convoluted part about English is its pronunciation ("lead" as in leading a team vs. "lead" as in the metal - WTF?), but otherwise I'd say it's easier than Romance languages.

A very interesting conversation has ensued in the comments of the article, where some Esperanto speakers claim that it would be the best lingua franca. I don't have trouble believing that a well-engineered artificial language might solve many of the problems that natural languages present, but in the latter category perhaps English is one of the least difficult.
Exactly the same for me. Had never spent more than 22K on a car in 20 years of driving. The model 3 changed all that and just feels like the car of the future. So much fun to drive. Like the first time using an iphone.
I had to check the unit conversion but I think that 1000square feet is almost the same as 92 square meters. If that is correct it's the regular size of a flat in Spain for a family. The flat where I was raised was 80 square meters and there where my parents, my sister and my. 3 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and a bathroom. Thats the usual here.
What's your suggested alternative?
> The other topics there have been rehashed many times before and are little more than extrapolations and exaggerations - how could a language ever go extinct ...

COMIT, TRAC, JOSS, FOCAL, and a few dozen assembly languages all would wave, but they're a bit dead at the moment.
Your insurer would definitely be very interested in such data aggregation.
AWK has been and will forever been under appreciated. It is a fantastic tool. I always preferred it to Perl myself.
How would you propose organizing society such that it is environmentally sustainable?
I hate to be this guy, but Ruby on Rails is not a language, and Ruby the language was first release in 1995.
Oh, I do that too. Completely different purpose though.
I don't know. I wouldn't use any book as a guidebook for life, either if it was written 2000 years ago or yesterday. Actually most religious people I know have a bond to a community, being The Book kind of an identity "totem" of such community.
It's not xenophobia, just the sad reality. I've seen rhetoric against China amp up from almost 0 to 100 real quick in the political discourse, to the point where any accusation are generally held as verdict, and in turn generates more hate. But we've seen it before and I'm kind of glad that even though the hate is universal majority does not intend to invoke MAD, so there's not much chance of an armed conflict (In comparison to Iraq/Libya)
I read it that way too, at first, mostly because of GM's recent strike & health benefit cut headlines.
...how exactly is right-clicking (once) to run an app approaching strangulation, again?
In my recent trip down the i5 corridor the M3 was the most common vehicle after the Camry.
Good point. I'll amend my statement with "or raise taxes!"
Not any more... "The percentage of workers in the private sector whose only retirement account is a defined benefit pension plan is now 4%, down from 60% in the early 1980s. About 14% of companies offer a combination of both types." [1]

[1] https://money.cnn.com/retirement/guide/pensions_basics.money...
I'm shocked you love a 50,000 dollar car when your last car was 8 years old budget car.

Reminds me of comparing this year's iPhone to a no name Android.

Op, did you realize you did this?
Kind of stupid article. Perl will be dead because there are less searches on it and Apple is deprecating all script interpreters (not singling out Perl) and RedHat has announced that python is not setup out-of-the-box. Bold predication - in 2024 there will still be plenty of Perl running.
I wouldn’t even agree to getting a defined benefit pension these days - why wouldn’t you want to invest your own money instead of letting one company you happened to work for control your pension?

I have a defined benefit pension from a previous employer and frankly I count it as zero in my financial planning since I have no idea if it’s actually coming or not.
CapitalOne is quite exuberant about their NIH (rebranded as InnerSource) but most of the stuff they churn out isn't useful as a real open source product.
Non taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions are regulated.

Taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions have zero regulation. Because they have the power to tax.

And there is a bill currently worming it's way through congress to bailout PBGC (although they don't say it directly):

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/hr397

https://burypensions.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/butch-lewis-ac...
Show HN: The Civic Press – Why I Built a Hyperlocal News App